CALIPHATE(112)

And Besma? She'll never be able to strike on her own, now. I owe it to her to . . .

Petra picked up a detonator in her left hand, wrapping her delicate fingers around it. With her right she flicked off the thick wire safety that would keep the squeeze lever from closing. Her right then took control of the other detonator. With her right thumb she flicked off the safety on that one.

"Wait . . . wait . . . wait," she whispered to herself as the column of trucks grew closer to the point she was supposed to set off the mines.

"Wait . . . wait . . . wait . . ." Petra scrunched down into her hole with just the top of her head and her eyes showing.

She misjudged it, just slightly. Or perhaps Hans had misjudged the proper spot to mark where she should squeeze the levers of the blasting machines. Whichever was the case, the mines detonated splendidly, all twelve of them, sending roughly eleven thousand half- ounce steel cylinders skipping gleefully along and across the road.

Men who had been sitting or standing up in the backs of trucks were scythed down with a collective moan, their organs and blood spilling across the truck beds and the road. Drivers and co-drivers, sitting up front, fared no better. As for the trucks, tires were blasted out, gas tanks were ruptured, lights and windscreens smashed. One truck, its front tires blasted off, went nose down to the roadbed, twisted to the right, and began a body-spilling roll that ended only went it struck a tree, broadside. Still another exploded in a fireball as the steel fragments not only spilled its liquid fuel but struck a spark off of the frame. Another of the five trucks struck went slightly off road until running head on into a tree. One, too close to a mine, was blown on its side. The last truck, with no living driver at the wheel, plowed into the truck before it.

Though there were men left alive in the kill zone, and even men left unhurt, there was no one left unshocked. It was a massacre.

Except, unfortunately for the lead truck. It had gotten just out of Hans' preplanned kill zone a quarter of a second before Petra finished squeezing the handle on the blasting machine.

The corbasi cursed himself even as he cursed at the driver to "Move, move, move, you fool!"

Of course the filthy infidels had someone out to block the roads. I was an idiot. Idiot, idiot, IDIOT! And I've lost more than eighty percent of the men I brought with me. Shit. Should I go back and try to save any survivors? No . . . no. The important thing is still up ahead. And that ambush was thorough. There'll be a team of men there.

"Faster, dolt!"

It was the worst sound she'd ever heard. Men screamed, wept, and begged for aid. And most of them, she suspected, were as blond- haired and blue-eyed as she was.

Petra covered her ears with her hands against the sound. In the process, a small device, no bigger than a hearing aid, was knocked to the dirt below.

She'd expected to take some satisfaction in striking a blow against the Caliphate. All she felt was a desire to vomit. Their only fault was that someone took them young, just the way that someone took me. Poor boys. And yet, there's nothing I can do to help. Worse, if I don't get out of here John and Hans will finally come to the sedan I'm supposed to hide in, find that I'm not there, and come looking for me.

I'm sorry, boys, she thought at the stricken men out on and around the smoky roadway. I'm so sorry. But I can't help you.

With that, Petra crawled out of the hole onto her belly, her submachine gun clutched tightly in one hand. She kept crawling, skinning hands, elbows and knees, and getting a little mud in the submachine gun, until the light from the burning truck was dim. Then she got up to a crouch, glanced all around like a hunted animal, turned to her right and ran.

She never noticed that she'd left her radio, ground by her own feet into the mud and dirt of the hole, behind.





Flight Seven Nine Three, 24 Muharram,

1538 AH (4 November, 2113)


Perhaps a hundred people lived in the village below, crowded in behind a rickety and crude wooden fence. As the airship settled down just outside that fence, Matheson's voice came over the public address system.

"Infidels," he said. "Infidels, assemble to be counted and assessed."

Lee/Ling looked at Matheson as if to ask, What the fuck does that mean?

Matheson's answering glare said, Who cares, so long as it sounds suitably impressive and threatening?

Fearfully, the doors to the little shacks opened up and people began to step out.

"That's our cue," Matheson said to the newly armed and just liberated cargo slaves. "Follow me."

Each man, Matheson and the two slaves, had wrapped themselves in bed linen to simulate robes. On their heads they wore checked tablecloths held in place by short pieces of rope, tied in the back.

Matheson had his pistol strapped to the outside of the robes. The slaves carried his and Ling's submachine guns authoritatively.