[h3]"Desperta Ferro!" - Part IV[/h3]
 
1,300 kilometres to the South, as the Spanish fist tightened on Algiers and the blood around a ditch south of Constantine began to vanish beneath the sand, three men in biohazard suits walked toward the Village of Chenachene. Two of them carried sub-machine guns and their bulk betrayed them to be soldiers while the third man, walking with a slight stoop in the middle, was Doctor Santiago Ramón y Caja.
 
Caja was not well known outside of Spain, indeed, even inside of Spain he was a virtual nobody. His career had been a normal one. A Doctorate obtained in Madrid, some time spent as the night manager of the pharmacy at the Royal Madrid Hospital where he began dabbling in experiments around chemicals, particularly gas, to dull pain. This was when he had hit his stride, quite by accident.
 
The three drew closer to the small crumbling cluster of buildings that marked the edge of Chenachene. The sand around them burned with the unrelenting heat of the day and the little shade offered by the central oasis and village houses looking welcoming despite the nature of their visit. Caja could feel the excitement building in his chest. The recent aerial reconnaissance had reported no signs of life. That meant none in the past forty eight hours. It was enough time.
 
The first building they reached was nothing more than a hut. It was empty as one of the soldiers swept his flashlight around the small space. A burnt out fire, a few pitiful possessions wrapped in sleeping mats, a neatly swept dirt floor and a pair of monitor lizards hung from the rafters. He felt a surge of disappointment he had no expected. His mind had been building for him visions of huts choked with the dead and dying.
 
"Doctor." One of the soldiers interrupted his thought process as he was tapped on the shoulder, eyes following the rubber clad finger that pointed at a shell casing glinting in the sand a few yards away. That might explain it, the wind had been blowing Southward so anything North of the shell would have been, in theory, unaffected.
 
They progressed slowly further into the tangle of houses and Caja felt a wash of relief as he saw the first body sprawled in the sand. It was a man, not more than twenty, face down, his fingers and arms out in front of him as if he had been trying to drag himself across the ground. Caja moved forward excitedly until he was stopped by one of the soldiers who pushed him back. Caja sighed to himself as the soldier nudged the body with his boot. The man was quite dead.
 
"I don't think he will hurt me, he’s dead. May I examine him now?" Caja said with a trace of sarcasm to the soldier, regretting it almost immediately as the mans gaze hardened behind his face shield. The two soldiers had volunteered to escort him. "I am sorry my friend. I am just very excited to see the effect! You understand of course."
 
"Of course." Came a terse reply as the soldier turned away to scan the village. More bodies were nearby, some clustered near another shell, others to the South as if they had been trying to run. One was a small child who had collapsed right next to the shell. Interesting. Maybe he had been the first to inhale the gas and died at once? There was no sign of her trying to crawl away.
 
Caja knelt to examine the first body. From behind the man appeared as though he had simply gone to sleep in the sand, not a mark could be seen on him, and other than the out stretched finger and arms, it was an almost natural pose. Caja could feel his pulse began to race. It had worked!
 
He carefully turned the body over to stare into the face of his first subject. The mans eyes were blood shot and wide open, staring up at nothing. His face was a mottled purple, his tongue half bitten through which had allowed blood to pool in the sand. Caja pried open the teeth to find the rest of the tongue horribly swollen and the throat itself almost completely closed off.
 
"It worked!" He jumped up with a shout of enthusiasm that turned to a shriek of terror as both soldier spun, weapons trained on him. For a brief moment he was certain they would shoot him, then they shook their heads and went back to scanning the village. He made a mental note to contain his enthusiasm.  He took another minute to look the body over but all was as he had expected. The gas itself, he had called it [i]Aliento de Dios[/i], killed quite quickly. When inhaled it clung to the lung tissue, preventing it from processing oxygen.
 
Satisfied, he pulled a green flare from a leg pocket of his suit, aimed it skyward, and pulled the tab. There was brief hiss and then the rocket shot into the blue sky, arcing above him to drift in the sky for a moment before dropping back to earth somewhere beyond the sand dunes.
 
Immediately the sound of heavy engines reached him and three vehicles drew into view. One was a large ten tonne army truck, its bed crammed with more hazmat encased soldiers. Another was a command jeep with officers wearing the same garb while the third vehicle had two men in the back wearing nothing but white cotton pants, shirts, and a pair of sandals. Both were Algerians tied hand and foot, unable to move. They would be his canaries.
 
The vehicles stopped at the edge of the village in a cloud of sand and their occupants clambered out, the soldiers fanning out and moving through the village while the two Algerians were dragged by their arms toward Caja by a pair of soldiers. The terror in their eyes meant nothing to Caja. They were less than human, Muslims, the enemy of all Christendom. They were part of the reason he had been so enthusiastic about the project when he had been approached about it. A new Crusade. Gods work they had said. He had jumped at the chance.
 
"Take them into the village and tie them down. They will serve to warn us if the gas is still potent." Caja issued his orders quickly and concisely. With a few kicks, screams, and a punch or two, the men were dragged through the village centre, their eyes bulging at the dead who lay scattered about, and to the south end where heavy metal spikes were driven into the sand before they were secured to them. This would place them downwind of the original gas shells, the most lethal area of the village should any gas remain. Nobody would care if they died, but caja would certainly never live if one of the soldiers died.
 
The village was swept from one end to the other and the soldiers began to bring the dead back to Caja who had begun setting up a camera for photographs and a table on which he spread a number of notebooks. Other vehicles were arriving now and more soldiers spread out to create a perimeter around the village. Caja privately thought the precautions were a bit bizarre given how far they were from anywhere, but the military didn’t tell him how to make gas, so he didn’t tell them how to be soldiers.
 
As the dead were brought to him, about fifty-three in all, he began to photograph them and make notes. He started with the children and worked his way up to the bigger adults, carefully noting the soldiers reports on where a body had been found, in what position, and if the deceased appeared to have tried to crawl away.
 
An hour passed and he found he was sweating ferociously in his hazmat suit despite the tent that had now been erected over top of his work station. The soldiers had all sought the shade of buildings, or their vehicles, and we watching him from a distance. He looked at the Algerians who were trying to fight their bonds a short distance away. They were moaning in terror every time a body was carried past but Caja was quite certain they were not suffering any ill effects of the gas.
 
There was nothing for it. His research all said the gas only lasted twenty-four hours at the most in a dry climate like this, far less if it was rainy or damp. He shrugged, and pulled off his helmet much to the astonishment of several nearby officers who lunged toward him, stopping only when he waved them back.
 
The desert wind had never felt so good in his life and he took a moment to enjoy the feeling as it played across his skin. He half expected to feel his breath begin to shorten, his air ways to close, and eventually, death. But no such thing happened. This was good, it meant he had not been wrong about the life of the gas.
 
“I think it is quite safe to remove your own equipment gentlemen. You will recall I said it would last no more than twenty-four hours and it has been well over forty-eight now.” He said with exaggerated ease, as though he himself hadn’t been concerned moments ago about horrible death.
 
Following his lead, the others quickly stripped out of their hot suits and downed a considerable amount of water. One of the bound Algerians held out a pleading hand to a soldier who casually shot him in the chest rather than share a canteen with a heathen. The other man screamed and was likewise shot. No one even seemed to notice as they went about their task of arranging the dead for the photographs. Caja smiled to himself as he noticed that none of the soldier gave up their rubber gloves.
 
It was dark, his table illuminated with the head lights of the vehicles, when Caja was at last satisfied with their work. One male, one female, and one child had been packed into cooler like boxes and would be transported back to his lab in Morocco. There he would prepare more shells. They had to be done ever so carefully and slowly. The five shells that had been used to purify Chenachene had been almost a third of the finished product he had. The rest, he knew, were bound for Algiers and would be used once he made his report.
 
“I think that about does it, thank you gentlemen. You may destroy the village and we can be on our way.”
 
Shouted orders echoed his words and in a moment the two light tanks that had been sent along with them were racing each other through the shoddy brick town, smashing through buildings until nothing more than a few feet high remained. The remaining bodies were dumped down the well but the oasis itself, its gently burbling waters so silver beneath the rising moon, was left untouched. Even the great Spanish army might need water some day.
 
When the last of the vehicles had finally turned and climbed the long low dune, vanishing into the night, the cry a desert fox cut through the silence as it crept into the edge of town. It took only a few minutes to find food beneath the rubble of one of the houses, a monitor lizard, that it quickly dragged away. The desert would soon reclaim the town.