The Chrishanger

The Official Website of Christopher G. Nuttall

Bloodstained Sand

Some long time ago I got dared to write my vision of just how bad the War on Terror could become.  I ended up with a total moral inversion, with Civilization (us) becoming the Barbarians...and the Barbarians becoming dead, or worse.

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The helicopters appeared first, Lamprey-class assault helicopters, their blades spinning silently in the warm desert air. The inhabitants of the village below looked up at them as they passed overhead, their curiosity turning to alarm as the helicopters split up and circled around the village, their cold unfeeling eyes staring down, right into the heart of the dusty settlement. The older men of the village rushed to hide their wives and daughters from the eyes of the hovering infidels; the younger men stared up at the black helicopters, some of them envious of such power, others curdled with hate. Hands clutched ancient and outdated weapons, wondering if they dared take a shot at the craft; cooler heads plucked weapons from hands and ordered the boys to stand back.

It was a wise decision.

The helicopters drifted closer. A voice boomed down in perfect, if oddly accented, Arabic. “RETURN TO YOUR HOMES,” it boomed, shaking the buildings like the Hand of God. “STAY OFF THE STREETS. OBEY ALL ORDERS AND DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OFFER RESISTANCE.”

The vehicles appeared next, a line of hummers and converted IFVs, guided across the sands by GPS from all points of the compass. Had someone tried to flee the village, the helicopters would have vectored the ground force towards him and a young terrorist’s life would have come to a sudden brutal end. There was no resistance and the vehicles met up, tired soldiers exchanging salutes and brief status reports as they spread out and surrounded the village. After four years in the country, attitudes had hardened and rules of engagement had changed; if anyone in the village offered resistance, the entire village would pay for it.

The colonel surveyed the village though his sunglasses, unimpressed. He had seen countless other villages like it in his time; a handful of shack-like houses, a mosque or two and a small number of other buildings. This part of the land had received almost none of the largess from the central government, or even support from the provisional government; they lived in a strange mixture of the old world and the new, governed by attitudes that pre-dated the Prophet himself. Those attitudes would cost them today, the Colonel knew; his soldiers were in no mood to respect the rights of the villagers.

He waited until his forces had surrounded the village and taken up position, and then he gave the order. The helicopter voice boomed out again. “ALL MEN WILL PROCEED AT ONCE TO THE MOSQUE, REMOVE ALL OF THEIR CLOTHES AND PROCEED OUT OF THE VILLAGE TO THE NORTH,” it thundered. The concept of granting basic human dignity to the inhabitants had vanished after the wave of suicide bombings. “ALL WOMEN AND MALE CHILDREN YOUNGER THAN TEN WILL PROCEED AT ONCE TO THE BARN, REMOVE ALL OF THEIR CLOTHES AND PROCEED OUT OF THE VILLAGE TO THE SOUTH.”

The voice hardened. “ANYONE FOUND IN THE VILLAGE AFTER THIS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT,” it said. “YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!”

The Colonel watched as the villagers slowly, reluctantly, obeyed. He would have spared the women if he could have, but some of them, too, had been infected by the virus. The enemy’s complete lack of concern for human life had prompted a complete lack of concern for human dignity; as the women, some of them sobbing hysterically, advanced out of the village, they were rounded up, biometric readings were taken, and then told to sit behind the soldiers and wait. His men were gentle, but firm; for some of the women, it would be the kindest treatment they had ever received from men. Here, they were nothing more than chattel…

He caught the eye of one of the female infantry soldiers. Her face was tightly composed, but he knew her well enough to read her disdain for her sisters, the women who had allowed themselves to be forever caught in a poisonous web of ignorance, fear and patriarchy. Maybe one of the women of the village – the fat headman’s wife, the young girl who had hints of a more mature beauty to come – would have been the one to have found a cure for cancer, or maybe become a diplomat and ended the endless war, if she had been born anywhere else. Here, they had no rights, no dignity, nothing; the only thing they had were their children, and even those were taken away. He watched as one of the younger boys pushed his sister, unconcerned about any rights she had, and his sister just cried. She knew her place. He was well on his way to being infected by the virus.

The men were no better. The soldiers were harsher with them and some of the younger ones had been shot for offering resistance, as puny and hopeless as it had been. Their blood stained the sand where they had fallen; perhaps, in the future, the villagers would be allowed to bury them. A handful of the men were trying to see where the women were, others were cowering with shock when they realised that their captors included women; the Colonel felt nothing for them at all. Perhaps they could have been caught young enough to make worthwhile human beings out of them, or perhaps the Colonel was simply deluding himself; if they had harboured enemies of the world, they would all suffer.

“All biometrics completed, sir,” a soldier said, finally. “The suspects are not among their number, but we have seven of their relatives here and nine with the bitches.”

“Good,” the Colonel said. He glanced over at one of his teams and keyed his radio. “Search the village.”

The team had searched countless villages in the past few years and went about it with brutal skill. One by one, the houses were searched and examined for signs of a hiding place, somewhere where one of the suspects might be hiding. The villagers hadn’t known, couldn’t have known, that the suspects had been tracked right across the desert; they had broken the rules on harbouring enemies. A burst of gunfire echoed out, then another, and another, as seven bodies were shoved out into the open. They might once had been pretty girls – it was hard to tell under the dark enveloping outfits – but now they were just more bodies, lying on the sand. The teams checked them just as a final burst of gunfire rang out, revealing the presence of one of the suspects, hidden away in a hidden basement.

The Colonel followed two of his men into the shack and saw the prisoner. The other two were dead; they were all minor-league terrorists, useful only for the object lesson they represented, both to the villagers and to the rest of the population. The man was kneeling on the ground, pleading in Arabic so fast that the Colonel could barely follow him, offering everything from sheep and goats to his daughter, if only they would let him go.

“No,” the Colonel said, in flawless Arabic. They dragged him out of the house and dropped him in front of the watching men. A moment later, the male and female relatives of the wanted man, bound by blood to aid him rather than calling the authorities to capture him, were unceremoniously dumped beside him. “By the power vested in me, you have been found guilty of carrying out crimes against civilisation and aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice. The sentence is death.”

He ignored the cries, pleas of ignorance, and begging for mercy. “Fire,” he said. There was a brief burst of gunfire and the bodies fell onto the sand, empty of life; blood spilled out on the sand. He looked at the remainder of the village’s population, cowed, subdued, and yet dreaming of revenge. “Remember, we know who you are; if one of you commits an attack against us, we will locate and destroy his family. Your future is in your hands.”

The soldier stepped back and watched, carefully, as the lesson sank in. Some villagers had charged the soldiers and had been slaughtered; others had waited, bided their time, and attacked another group of soldiers later. The village had been stripped of its weapons, but there were so many floating around the country that the Colonel would have been very surprised if the village wasn't armed again within a week. The nomads sometimes traded weapons, or perhaps they would raid the now-defenceless village and carry off the remainder of the women.

The Colonel shrugged. It wasn't his problem.

The women of the village were dressing again, a handful listening to a speech made by one of the civil affairs officers, inviting them to come with the soldiers to a better life. The older women shuffled off, either too used to their current life to seek a chance, or very aware of what could happen to some girls who left the village, but some of the younger women chose to come with them. The Colonel was amused to note that they included the mother of the bullying boy and her daughter; her son ran back over to his father, perhaps knowing nothing else. Those who had chosen to stay headed back to their shacks, not daring to show a single foot wrong after the men had been humiliated in such a manner, but the Colonel didn’t care. They had made their choice.

One of the helicopters fired a single missile into the ground and blew open a large hole; a moment later, one of the hummers pushed the bodies into the hole, burying them all under the sand. It was something to test the community; maybe they would dig them up and give them a proper burial, or maybe they would just leave them to rot. One way or the other, it hardly mattered; his men were falling back, abandoning the naked men, and boarding the remainder of their vehicles. A moment later, they were racing across the desert, heading back to the base camp for some well-earned rest. The women who had come with them were cheering and hollering; it was their first time on any vehicle.

Once, the Colonel knew, he would have wanted to help. There was so much that could have been done to help the villagers; hell, they could have fixed chunks of the village just then. There wouldn’t have been any need to humiliate them, or to show them just how little their lives meant to the occupiers, but that had been before the city had died. Step by step, the families that supported the terrorist chains were being broken open and exterminated, an endless task that mandated that anyone related to a terrorist had to die, regardless of their own personal guilt. The mood of the country required nothing less; all thought of helping had died in the mushroom cloud that had enveloped San Francisco. The Colonel relaxed and lit a cigarette; his personal conscience was clear.

Behind them, blood stained the sand.

The End

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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