Christopher Nuttall - A Learning Experience

She looked up. All along the line, insurgents had fallen, their captives pulling themselves free. It was a miracle, as if the hand of Allah had swept down from the heavens and wiped out the infidels who were holding them prisoner, the infidels who would have forced the girls into loveless marriages for their own pleasure. Moments later, she heard the first explosions in the distance and scrambled for a place to hide. Maybe the infidels were coming anyway, but it no longer mattered. They could hardly be worse than the insurgents.

Finding a hole, she crawled into it and closed her eyes to wait.

Steve heard a faint whine as the drones moved forward, searching for IEDs. The quickest way to get rid of one was simply to detonate it in place, so the drones were vibrating the ground to trigger the weapons. Those that refused to detonate were marked down for later attention, while the advancing troops were steered around them. Inch by inch, the troops moved closer to the occupied town.

It looked fairly typical for the region, he noted, as they closed in on the edge of the defences. A large number of primitive huts and hovels, a handful of more modern buildings in the centre and a single stone mosque, rising above the buildings and gleaming in the sunlight. It had been used as an Observation Point by the Taliban, Steve knew, trusting that the American infidels wouldn’t fire on the mosque. But the ROE hadn’t saved the men inside. The drones had killed them the moment the command was given, leaving their lifeless bodies on the ground.

A chill fell over him as he realised what was missing. No one fired at them as they entered the town, not even a single shot. Most of the human shields looked to be in shock as they stared down at their former captors, others had probably grabbed weapons and fled for their lives. The Taliban had told them, Steve guessed, that the American troops would kill the men, then rape the women and children. They’d told the same story everywhere, hoping to encourage the locals not to cooperate with the Coalition. And, given the behaviour of some local policemen, the bastards might even have a point.

The chill grew stronger as he looked down at one of the bodies. There was a tiny hole in the side of his head, smoking slightly. His AK-47 lay beside him, abandoned and useless against an attack they hadn’t even seen coming. Kevin had been right, Steve told himself, as he looked up towards the mosque. The world had changed and he could no longer be the person he had been, when he had nothing to worry about but the ranch.

“Dear God,” Henderson said. “What have you done?”

Steve shook his head as he looked back at the body. “Opened a whole new world,” he said. “And a whole can of worms too.”

“You never spoke a truer word,” Henderson said. “Have you grown up a little now?”

Steve shrugged.

The afternoon was almost surreal. Normally, evicting the Taliban from a mid-sized town would take days of hard fighting, particularly if the ROE refused to allow close fire support for the advancing troops. But now, all that remained was carting out the bodies and then clearing out a handful of homes that had been turned into massive IEDs. The locals looked to have been reduced sharply by the insurgents; civil affairs teams spoke to the handful of male survivors and discovered that most of the men had been butchered as soon as the siege had begun. Steve wasn’t too surprised. The insurgents had only had a limited supply of food and the town’s menfolk, watching their wives and children starve, might have turned against the Taliban.

He watched a platoon of Royal Marines transporting bodies towards the mass graves, then looked up at the sun setting in the sky. Life in the village would never be the same again, even if the ones who had fled in time to escape being taken captive managed to return. The whole district had been traumatised, first by the Taliban and then by the Coalition’s counter-attack. Maybe they should just offer to take the women and children with them, maybe offering them a place to live on the moon. But it would be a problem when there were no quarters available for them.

“You’d better make yourself scarce,” Henderson warned. “The media is on the way.”

Steve sighed. At his request, the media had been kept away from the front lines, in hopes of keeping the secret a little longer. But they’d finally broken through the bureaucratic cordon and convinced the officials to allow them to move up to the town. Hell, with resistance crumbling so quickly, it was quite possible that they thought the Taliban was finally on the verge of breaking and wanted to be there when it did.

And it will break , Steve thought, bitterly.

But most of the men who’d died today weren’t the true monsters. They’d been pushed into fighting, either out of religious conviction or because they simply didn’t have anywhere else to go. As always, the true brains behind the terrorists and fanatics had remained out of battle, hiding on the other side of the Pakistani border. But not any longer, Steve told himself. The network of drones was already picking its way through the networks, isolating the true monsters at the heart of the Taliban. They were all doomed. They just didn’t know it.

He caught sight of a young girl, staring at him from the darkened entrance to a tiny hovel, her face no longer hidden behind a veil. It was hard to guess her age; in America, he would have confidently guessed that she was still preteen, perhaps ten at the most. But in Afghanistan, where so many children were malnourished and treated badly, she might well be old enough to marry by local standards. Her face was bitterly pale, her eyes fixed on his face. Steve felt a wave of pity, tinged with bitter helplessness. It was girls like her who had borne the brunt of the war, massively oppressed by the Taliban and then caught in the middle of savage fighting as the Coalition fought to shatter a grassroots insurgency. Somehow, he doubted she would survive the coming winter.

I could take her , he thought. It would be simple enough; walk over to her, take her arm and teleport them both to orbit. But what would happen then? But I couldn’t take them all.

He keyed his communicator. The girl vanished into the shadows as soon as she saw it, perhaps assuming it was a weapon. They’d recorded footage of the Taliban shooting their weapons randomly, purely for giggles. Or perhaps it had been intended to convince their prisoners that they were too irrational to be negotiated with.

“Kevin,” he said. “Round up a few volunteers for medical services, if you can find them, and send them down here. There are people who need help.”

“Understood,” Kevin said. There was an odd note in his voice. “Do you think that any of them are likely recruits? We could find space for a few dozen, if necessary.”

Steve swallowed, understanding — finally — the guilt he’d dismissed as a liberal delusion. He had so much and the locals had so little. He lived in peace; the locals lived in permanent war. His wife and daughter were safe; the women and children here might be married off against their will or simply raped, if the town fell to the wrong occupation party. And the American government, despite its flaws, was far better than anything the locals had produced or had designed for them. It was hard not to feel guilty.

“I believe some of them might be suitable,” he said. It was hard to know when everyone in the town had almost no practical schooling at all. “But others… others are unlikely to fit in.”

He sent a command to the interface. The teleporter activated and the world faded away in silver light.

Gunter Dawlish had had enough run-ins with the military bureaucracy to know when he was being fed a line of bullshit. As one of the veterans of freelance journalism — it was a point of pride that he didn’t take any regular pay from any newspaper or TV broadcaster — he’d heard enough spin to have a nose for it. And where someone was trying to sugar-coat a shit sandwich, it generally meant that someone had something to hide.