LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Too bad he doesn’t have a full marching band playing behind him,” Ricia observed. “‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ … or maybe the ‘Luna Marine March.’”

      “Ooh-rah!” But he couldn’t completely share her sarcasm. It was a moving moment for him. “The Corps is going to the stars, Ricia,” Ramsey said. “It’ll sure as hell count for something come time for the next military appropriations, right? Semper fi!”

      “Yeah,” his exec said, dark and bitter. “Semper fucking fi.”

       Giza Complex

       Kingdom of Allah, Earth

       1615 hours Zulu

      Captain Martin Warhurst pulled himself up and onto the final tier of stone blocks, grateful that he was in good enough shape to have made the climb, irritated that some of the Marines made the trek look easy. Sergeant Maria Karelin watched him with wry amusement as he paused to catch his breath, then stood up and walked over to the sniper’s nest where she and Lance Corporal Lambeski, her spotter, had constructed their perch.

      And perch it was, an eagle’s eyrie. They were halfway up the eastern face of the Great Pyramid, some seventy meters above the desert floor. Their vantage point, in the pyramid’s afternoon shadow and behind a low, sandbag wall erected on one of the two-and-a-half-ton stone blocks that made up most of the mountainous structure, gave them a magnificent view out over the desert and the tumultuous sprawl of the city Cairo. Ramshackle stone buildings shouldered one another in cluttered confusion on both sides of the Nile, tumbling across the silver-blue sheen of the river to the very edge of the Giza excavations. The hundreds of bodies that had fallen on the sand during the battle three days ago were gone.

      Right now it looked as though the entire civilian population of Cairo had spilled out across the bridges over the Nile and begun gathering at the edge of the Giza complex two kilometers away, a vast, seething throng of humanity carrying banners and chanting slogans. Warhurst stepped up his helmet’s magnification to study the angry, upturned faces in the crowd.

      “We’ve got one of the high muckety-mucks tagged, Captain,” Karelin told him. She stroked the butt of the massive MD-30 gauss sniper rifle propped up on the sandbags by its bipod. “Want us to pop him?”

      “Let me see.” He slaved his helmet display to her rifle. She leaned into the stock and swung the muzzle slightly. The image shifted left and magnified some more, coming to rest with red crosshairs centered on a bearded, angry-looking man in a turban and caftan, gesticulating savagely from the hood of a military hovertruck as he harangued the crowd. Warhurst queried his suit’s computer, uplinking the image to Mission G-2. An ID came back seconds later, the words scrolling down the side of Warhurst’s helmet display. “Abrahim ibn-Khadir,” Warhurst said, reading it. “One of the Mahdi’s number-one mullahs.”

      “Say the word, Captain,” Karelin said, “and he’ll be one of the Mahdi’s former mullahs.”

      “That’s a negative,” Warhurst replied. “We shoot in self-defense. No provocative acts. You know the drill.”

      “Yes, sir,” she said slowly. “But we don’t have to like it. I’m in favor of proactive self-defense. Nail the bastard before he nails you.”

      “Yeah, or before he stirs up his pet fanatics, gets ’em to launch a suicide charge,” Lambeski added.

      “Orders is orders,” Warhurst said lightly. He’d been concerned about just such a possibility, though the op commanders didn’t seem to be at all worried. A suitable demonstration of superior force and firepower, they’d told him, would be enough to hold the Islamic forces at bay.

      The Marines had provided that demonstration of force and firepower … but Warhurst wasn’t at all sure the lesson had been learned.

      “Shit,” Karelin said. “You think the fat asses back in Washington know what they’re doing? We were supposed to be relieved two days ago, as I recall!”

      “Affirmative,” Warhurst replied. He continued to study ibn-Khadir’s face on his helmet display. “And the political situation has changed. You’ll recall that. So we will sit right where we are, defend our perimeter, and wait for the relief … which will be deployed soon. You have a problem with that, Sergeant?”

      “No … sir,” she replied, but he heard the bitterness in her voice, and the touch of sarcasm.

      The situation, he thought, was rapidly getting out of hand.

      The original op plan had called for the assault force to seize the Giza Plateau and establish a perimeter, then hold it until a detachment of Confederation peacekeepers arrived to relieve them. That deployment was to have taken place at dawn on June 3.

      Late on the second, however, while the Marines fought off the counterattack by the Mahdi’s forces, the Chinese delegation had called a special meeting of the Confederation Security Directorate. The CSD, successor of the long defunct UN, provided a legal arena for the world’s nation-states, including those, like China, that were not Confederation members. China had declared the deployment of American troops to Egypt to be an act of aggression as defined under Article II of the Confederation Charter and demanded a withdrawal. The issue was now being fought not in the desert outside of Cairo, but in the council chambers and meeting rooms of the CSD headquarters in Geneva.

      The Confederation Joint Military Command had elected to hold back the relief expedition until America’s legal standing on the issue was better defined. And, after all, so long as the Marines were not under direct attack …

      Unfortunately, Warhurst knew, that left Marines in a precarious position, holding a perimeter far larger than tactical doctrine allowed, growing short on sleep as they stood watch and watch, with supplies of food and especially water tightly rationed. The water supply to the Giza complex had been cut at the pumping stations on the Nile and not restored. Every indication suggested that another attack was imminent. The Pentagon had promised that reinforcements were only thirty minutes away, should the Marines’ position grow too precarious.

      But a hell of a lot could happen in thirty minutes.

      “Let’s see what he’s telling them,” Warhurst said.

      Uplinking again to Brigade Intelligence, he requested a consecutive translation. The wildly shouting mullah was too distant for the Marines to pick up his words through their armor sensor suites, but the AI he connected with had been programmed both for Arabic and for lip-reading. Within another few seconds, a flat, atonal voice began speaking over his helmet headset, the emotionless quality of the words oddly contrasting with their evident content.

      “The Western satans think to deprive us of our heritage,” ibn-Khadir was saying. “They poke and dig among our monuments, desecrate our grave sites and holy places, then tell us that these symbols of our people, these holy testaments to the power of Allah, were constructed by another people, by foreigners … with the aid of demons from another star. They corrupt these holy places and defile the name of Allah!” Ibn-Khadir turned his head, and the AI lost the next few lines of his speech.

      It sounded like the standard propaganda line, though. Archeological discoveries over the course of the past two centuries had proven that the principal structures on the Giza Plateau—the three Great Pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, and the Sphinx—all had been raised, at least in preliminary form, eight thousand years before the traditionally accepted dates of their building, long before the Neolithic tribes who would later be known as Egyptians had migrated to the Nile Valley. The Egyptian government and, later, after the Mahdi had unified the far-flung Kingdom of Allah, the Principiate of Cairo, had insisted that the Sphinx and Great Pyramids were an expression of the soul of the Egyptian people and not of alien invaders who’d established colonies on Earth over ten thousand years ago.

      That battle was not new. Variants of it had been ongoing since the last decade of the twentieth century, when American archeologists and geologists had first noted that erosion patterns in the flanks of the Sphinx were characteristic

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