Caliphate полностью

"If I had the dinar, I could bribe the men at the ammunition dump at Garmsch to give me extra, beyond what my colonel authorizes. It wouldn't be too suspicious, really. We have to bribe to get much of anything done in the Caliphate. I'll claim I need them for training and ask for an extra two dozen. Halfway between here and Garmsch we transfer over one dozen. Have you a vehicle that can hold a dozen?"

"Yes," Bernie agreed. "Barely. But what about the driver of the truck?"

"What driver? Driving is a manly thing here and I would drive. Loading would be done by the slaves at the ammunition dump and unloading by the soldiers here at the castle. I only need security if I claim I need security."

"That would work," Bernie agreed. "We can meet you halfway and transfer the mines to the sedan. How do we get them set up?"

"A couple of days before, John and I will go to the road and find an ambush position, set it up, camouflage them, and bury the detonator nearby. Then we bring Petra there, hook everything up and leave her to set them off if she sees a column of trucks coming. Or I can drop them off myself and hide them."

"I don't like that," Bernie said. "How's she to know it's really the right column, when she's out of communications?"

"I should have had myself chipped, after all," Hamilton said.

"That wouldn't fix the problem," Matheson disagreed, "because one of us two has to go into the castle and the other has to grab the airship. No, the girl's going to be on her own anyway."

"I could get us five tactical communications systems," Hans offered. "They're probably as good as what you are used to, since both the Empire and the Caliphate buy from China. Since I'm getting the weapons those would be little more trouble."

"That might help," Bernie conceded. "But we'll have to modify the frequency so that Caliphate forces don't pick it up."

You can do that, said the small voice in Ling's head. She said as much, aloud.

"Okay," agreed Bernie. "Now what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak."

"A what?"

"Never mind. It's an inside joke, an old inside joke. And we still haven't figured out what to do at the castle. Or how to pick up and extract Petra, since she's going to be separate."

af-Fridhav, Province of Baya, 13 Muharram,

1538 AH (24 October, 2113)

The amazing thing to Hamilton was that there were pleasure boats to rent, right there on the tightly guarded, watery border between Switzerland and the Caliphate. Military boats he'd expected. Fishing boats he'd expected. He'd come there, Petra in tow, looking for a way to steal one or the other.

But pleasure boats?

"Still," he said to Petra, as the two of them put-putted across the water on the Caliphate side, "they're awfully slow. And it isn't just a governor; they've got tiny little underpowered engines. We'd be out on the water for . . . "—he did some quick calculations—"ummm . . . nearly an hour. I could almost swim the lake as fast."

"I can't swim," Petra gulped. "There were streams and lakes near home but . . . well, you can't swim in a burka."

Hamilton nodded. "It's not too late for you to learn but it is too late to learn to do it well enough to make it across this lake. It's got to be a boat. But these are just too slow. We'd never make it, not once the janissaries were alerted."

He reached down to feel the water. "Brrrr. Cold. We couldn't swim this without wet suits."

"What are those?" she asked.

"Never mind. I'll show you once we're back home." He said that last with more confidence than he felt.

That was the first time he'd so much as suggested he'd want to have anything to do with Petra—miserable houri that I am—since they'd met. She held onto that thought, that hope, very tightly. Maybe I might mean something more to him than just a body to use.

Hamilton didn't notice any flash of emotion or expression on Petra's face. Instead, he was looking to the south, generally. There, two patrol boats passed within a few hundred meters of each other. One was Swiss, he gathered, the other from the Caliphate. The two boats trained guns on each other as they passed. Though it was too far— about a kilometer away—for Hamilton to make out the faces, every line in the pose of the bodies exuded menace, hate, and outright eagerness to open fire.

Life was hard in Switzerland, Hamilton had heard more than once, and food was always rationed. But the million men and women of the Swiss Army took their turns on the border and rebuffed any threat from the Caliphate, usually with much fall of blood and with few or no prisoners taken on either side. In a sense, the country was in a continuous low-level war that for level of sacrifice per capita matched the endless war to maintain and expand the Empire.

"I'm an idiot," he announced.

"Why? How?"