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and terror promised eventual cardiac arrest. All this the two men suffered until, finally, the Sumeri's skinny neck gave way. His legs thrashed once, twice, and then he went still except for the unconscious rippling of dying muscles and the steady drip, drip, drip of piss and liquefied shit off still wriggling toes.

    The choking and gagging Balboan legionary had a tougher time of it. With his much more muscular neck there was no chance of breakage. Nor did the rope cut off blood to the brain or induce cardiac arrest. Instead, his thrashing and his weight gradually tightened the noose until there was no more passage for air. Only then, and even then not for some time, did he lose consciousness and, finally, die.

    * * *

    All this Carrera watched, unwilling that he should not witness what he himself ordered, however horrible. Only when it was over, when the doctor in attendance placed his stethoscope to the victims' chests and made the signal that they were dead, did the Dux step away from the window.

    Even as he did, he could still hear a Sumeri mother wailing.

8/3/463 AC, Ninewa, Sumer

    An ambulance siren wailed in the distance, racing to the scene of the latest bombing in the provincial capital. They weren't as common here as they were some other places in the country; yet they were far too common still.

    Carrera, Sada, and their respective military formations did what they could to aid the local police and even to search vehicles themselves. It helped . . . somewhat . . . sometimes . . . in some places.
    * * *

    They'd tried both high-tech and low-tech solutions, from explosive sniffing machines to explosive sniffing dogs. Both methods had faltered under the simple terrorist expedient of sending forth small boys with spray bottles to spray underchassis and wheel wells, signposts and curbs with a solution containing various explosive compounds in low dilution. To the machines and the dogs, explosive was explosive. They were soon alerting on nearly everything. When everything smells like explosive nothing does. The machines were retired and the dogs sent to other duties.

    There had been some successes of course. Early on in the campaign aircraft equipped to spit out every imaginable cell phone number and every possible radio frequency had overflown likely areas for bomb construction. This had blasted a goodly number of bomb manufacturers into the next world over a short period of time.

    Those who lived had reverted to using infrared garage door openers to detonate their bombs. The Legion had not yet figured out a way to prematurely detonate those until they were already emplaced, which was all too often all too late.

    * * *

    The bomb which had just gone off in a market had been detonated in just that way. Fortunately, something had warned the civilians nearby who had, for the most part, gone scurrying. Casualties were remarkably low and for those there were there was a catch all phrase, il hamdu l'illah , to God be the praise.

    Now, to either side of that attack site and the few bodies it held, other groups waited for some special targets to show up to detonate their own little gateways to Hell.

    * * *

    It had been a hell of an argument really. After the assassination of their three local leaders by men purporting to be from the news media, the first assumption had been that it was the foreign mercenaries' doing. As one of the remaining terrorist chiefs, Faisal ibn Bahir, pointed out, though, "Really not their style. They never even searched the place for files. And they only took personal arms when they left and not all of those. No, I think it was a personal hit, maybe even because of that pressie that was blown up."

    "But the infidel press has shown it's been on our side from the beginning," objected another of the leading terrorists, this one a representative of the Salafi Ikhwan .

    "That's very true," agreed Bahir, with a serious nod. "And yet, does it not strike you as suspicious, my brother,