Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 21:33:17 -0700 (PDT)
From: Pete Brown <petebrownuk@yahoo.com>
Subject: The Spoils Of War, Part 34 (Concludes)

THE SPOILS OF WAR  by Pete Brown.  petebrownuk @ yahoo.com

Read all of Pete's stories in
groups.yahoo.com/group/petebrownseroticstories

Part  34

I found myself on the horns of a terrible dilemma.  As
I re-read my account of those times I see that I am
constantly referring to "our army", "our country",
"our people", when I mean the gallant fighters and
people of Ali's country.  I was - am - an American,
and you will remember that this history began with my
cruel and totally unjust enslavement by the rebel
South when it began the "second civil war".

It's hard to give up your country, and everything that
you have learned and know about it, knowledge that
oozes into you by osmosis almost, as you grow and
mature in that society.  I was a true, loyal,
red-blooded American, with good parents, a nice home,
and all the other things that form part of "The
American way of life."  I was even patriotic - I knew
our country sometimes did wrong, but, on the whole,
compared to the other sink-hole places in the world,
we did pretty good and generally acted on the side of
right.  That probably conditioned my thinking when I
decided to join the marines, rather than go to college
as my parents had wanted:  I thought it was important
to defend America, our way of life, and the values we
stood for.

But then the second civil war changed everything, and
I found myself part of the spoils of that war,
enslaved by the victorious South.  Hey, these were
Americans, too!  And they simply took their fellow
citizens and turned them into slaves.  What now of the
American way of life, and American values?  Even so, I
guess I'd have remained basically "loyal to the
ideals", even though I would accept that the South had
failed to implement them!  But  it was the behaviour
of my fellow Americans that really was wrong:
Prexmire's government may have reintroduced slavery
and enslaved us, but it was thousands of my fellow
Americans who acted as guards, overseers, auctioneers,
and performed all the other duties that a slave-based
economy needed to keep running.  And Americans were
not slow to buy and use slaves, and to enjoy the
southern lifestyle that slavery enabled.   I am
irresistibly reminded of the situation in World War II
-  as you read it in the history books, supposedly it
was this small group, "the Nazis", who ran and
controlled the war and the concentration camps.  But
it was millions of ordinary Germans who acted as
soldiers and guards, and who did jobs such as driving
the trains to the death camps.  History tends to brush
out this responsibility of the ordinary citizen for
the crimes that his government commits in his name,
preferring to blame it all on the leadership, and I
see that there is now a tendency for the South to
start being referred to as "The Prexmirists", as if
all those millions of ordinary Americans had no part
to play in it!  I had anyway therefore become somewhat
disillusioned by the way that many millions of
Americans had failed to stand up for the ideals in
which I had previously thought we all believed.

So I was in a dilemma - was I still an American?  Or,
having served three years on a coffle with Ali and my
coffle mates, been instrumental in winning the war
through my guidance and advice to Ali, probably having
fathered sons by Ali's wives, and being totally fluent
in the Arabic dialect we all spoke, was I now indeed a
citizen of our country?  It's hard, as I said, to give
up your former life totally.  And Americans find it
especially hard to renounce their birthright.  Part of
me wanted to go back "home", as I still thought of it,
to help with the reconstruction. But part of me knew
that I must stay to continue to help Ali guide and
rule our people.

I seemed incapable of making a decision - something
that is rare for me, as normally I am not one to
vacillate and find it easy to consider the facts, and
make an instant decision.  But this one seemed
incapable of resolution - I found myself waking in the
middle of the night, not to enjoy Ali's body, but to
lie there next to him, feeling the warmth of his body
against mine and smelling his male scent.  His
presence inflamed my senses and made it even more
difficult to think rationally, and I tossed and
turned, as  my mind endlessly rehashed all the
elements of the decision I needed to make.

My lack of sleep caused me to be irritable and
fractious during the day, and my general mood of
uncertainty seemed to be affecting Ali, too - he
became sharper with me, less tolerant of my presence,
and became more inclined to listen to his other
advisors rather than to me.  Of course I should have
done something about it - I should have sat down with
him, quietly and calmly, and explained what was
troubling me.  But we don't always do the rational
thing, do we? Especially when our brain is churning on
a problem that it can't solve, it seems incapable of
discussing  that very problem with others.
Relations with Ali got worse and worse, and one night
they reached a head:  We were in bed and he stretched
out luxuriously, moving his long limbs sensuously
against the stark white linen sheets.  He looked so
completely desirable that I wanted desperately to fuck
him, and pushed his legs apart and knelt there,
massaging his hole ready for my entry.  Then something
happened that had never troubled me before - as the
tip of my dick touched the sensuous softness of his
hole, I lost my erection!  I pulled away slightly and
started to jerk at my dick to try to revive it, but it
was no good.  I began to experience that shame that I
had read about in others when their erections fail at
the crucial moment.

Ali is not a person who tolerates failure in others
well.  He had been moaning and sighing as I massaged
his hole, and was all primed and ready for our usual
bout of totally enjoyable sex.  Finding himself
deprived of it, he rounded on me and began to list all
my many failings that he had observed in the past
weeks.  I know it's stupid - when a lover has a
failure to perform, as happens to even the most virile
of us occasionally, you are meant to be understanding
and concerned, not angry and abusive.  But that is not
Ali's way - his has always been hot tempered and
intolerant of failure, and this occasion was no
exception..

He accused me of being bad tempered (I had been
fractious, I admit, due to my lack of sleep), of
failing to support him properly in the Council by not
volunteering proper advice (yes, I had been tired, and
not thinking straight), and then, worse of all, of
"falling out of  love with him."  I should have simply
listened to him, then told him what was the root cause
of my difficulty.  But I am indeed hot tempered, too,
and when that cruel accusation of being out of love
with him was made, it was more than I could bear!  I
flew at him, accusing him of huge ingratitude for all
that I had done for him, and of failing to understand
that I too had problems.  And he in turn reminded me
that he was the Leader....   And so it went on -
before a few minutes were out, we were screaming and
shouting accusations at each other and making the
situation far, far worse.  Finally, we were standing
by the side of the bed, our faces red, our voices
hoarse, and then he struck out at me!

Well, that was it.  You know I was a marine, I was a
trained fighter, and my time at Gleeson's Gladiators
had honed my fighting skills even more.  Even as Ali's
hand struck my cheek, my body reacted and soon we were
savagely fighting each other, rolling around the huge
bedroom like two wild animals, desperate to hurt each
other.    It was no real contest, of course - Ali had
been a hardworking slave whose body had been hardened
and strengthened by his labours, and then a leader of
our troops in the guerilla war, so he was nominally a
"fighter".  But I was  a real fighter, skilled in
hand-to-hand combat.  He really could not hope to win
in a fight against me, but this display of sheer
physical violence seems to have been good for both of
us as it moved our intellectual shouting argument onto
a different plane - we were now doing what men had
been doing since primeval times,  working out our
differences in the way that males do, by fighting.

A you might expect, the fight ended in the way that I
had learned - my tiny erectile dysfunction disappeared
in the excitement of fighting and dominating another
man, and I  soon had Ali on his belly, pried open his
butt cheeks, and thrust my dick home into his ass.
This was no vigorous but exciting fuck where both of
us enjoyed it - I was in the heat of passion from
winning, from utterly vanquishing my opponent, and all
I wanted to do was cement my victory by brutally
fucking him until my animal lust was satisfied.  I
gave no thought to the discomfort - no, the pain -
that Ali was in as my dick rammed home repeatedly, my
pubic bone slamming into his firm butt muscle on each
stroke.  In the background I vaguely heard his cries
of anguish, but  I was totally unconcerned - he was
just a loser, a man who had lost out in that perpetual
struggle for dominance that goes on between men.  And
a victor has no need to consider the needs of a loser,
as evolution has taught us:  all I wanted was to
satisfy my own needs for sex, and to demonstrate my
utter and complete domination of this piece of flesh
that was there only to serve me.

It took only an incredibly brief time, of course - my
passions were so inflamed that it needed only a few
strokes for my dick to fire and for my seed to once
again be pumped up into Ali.  Then I lay there on top
of him, feeling his hot sweaty skin sliding under
mine.  And all at once the "real world" snapped back
into focus - I heard his whimpering as my body
continued to crush his, and I realised that I'd hurt
him - hurt him terribly, not only physically, but by
showing him that he was not the man he thought he was.
 He might be the Leader, in charge of millions of
people and a major economy, but now he was just a
powerless piece of meat, skewered on the dick of a
real conquering man.

As my own anger subsided and I realised what I'd done,
and how Ali probably felt, I pulled out of him,
gently, sat beside him on the luxurious carpet, pulled
him to a sitting position and wrapped my arms around
him.  I tried to kiss him, but at first he refused,
keeping his lips clamped tightly shut.  I had to start
to tease at his nips and even give then gentle tweaks
to make him open up, and then, our tongues beating
together, I let one of my hands slip down and begin to
play with his dick.  As soon as he was erect, I knew
what I had to do - I pushed him gently back to lie on
the floor, then knelt over him and began to suck his
dick hungrily. And then, as his passion mounted, I
would occasionally let it slide over my face as I
murmured "Oh, I want this, I need a dick like this, I
need a big strong dick like this inside me....".

I was able to engineer my body under his, and Ali
responded as he often wanted to, but was never allowed
to, by poking his dick at my hole.  I knew it was
going to be tough as I was not lubed or stretched, but
it had to be done - I just had to take it as Ali
pushed himself through my sphincter, and began to fuck
me.  I cried out, just a he had done, as it really
hurt. And I remember feeling my hands beating up and
down on the carpet as his fucking continued, as if in
some strange way this would help to take away the
agony I was experiencing.  But it's  a funny thing
about sex, isn't it - the line between pain and
pleasure is so finely drawn, that even though my body
was telling me that it was suffering, my brain was
going into that special place it does when it's in
ecstasy.  I think I could have tolerated the force of
Ali's fucking for ever, and of course as it went on it
got easier for me as my own ass juices slimed his dick
and acted as some sort of lubricant.  But he shot
relatively quickly, and we were soon once again locked
in each others arms.

"Ali, I'm sorry....", I began.

"You're a good fuck, Steve!  I'll do that more often,
I think."

"Don't be so sure - I took you out first, remember?"

We both began to smile, smiles that turned into
laughter, and as we carried on just enjoying being
close together, touching each other and sliding our
bodies over each other in that comfortable way you do
after sex.

"Steve, my friend, what has been troubling you?" Ali
began.  Although he could be hot-headed, he could also
be incredibly wise on occasions.

It was almost as if I'd been given "permission" to
talk about all those things that had been troubling
me, all those doubts and concerns I'd had, and as the
flood gates opened I poured out my feelings to Ali -
my love for him, but my duty to my country.   Finally,
when I'd gone around and around the dilemma for about
the fourth time, Ali said, quietly, but using his
usual way of commanding and expecting total obedience,
"Stop!  Enough, Steve.  I wish to hear no more of
this."

"But Ali, you know I love you, but I think I ought to
go back to the USA, to...."

"I said 'Enough'!  There is no question of you going
back.  You are needed here, to continue to advise and
counsel me.  You are a soldier in my army, and I have
given you an order, and I wish to hear no more of it.
You are always a wild one, Steve, who wants to
disobey, but this time I want no further argument:
you will stay here, and that is the end of it."

"But..."

"Oh Steve, that's why I love you!  You never let it
rest, do you?  Now, just this once, do as I say,
without question or further comment."

A huge silence fell in the room  I'd heard that word
from his lips that he had never used before.  We
"knew" we loved each other, and, physically, we were
of course lovers.  But sometimes in a relationship
"knowing" isn't enough - you need the reinforcement of
hearing it.  But had he just used it as a casual
vernacular expression, or did he mean it in the way
that my whole being hoped he did?  Should  I remain
silent, or should I risk it?  Dare I ask?  If I
didn't, I could probably fool myself into believing
that he meant it in the "right" way.  But, as you
know, I like to push the boundaries, to live on the
edge.  And I suppose that somewhere deep inside me I
did need that ultimate reassurance - I didn't want to
be still asking myself that question years later.

My body began to tremble and I knew I was asking the
most important question of my life.  I could barely
control my voice as I whispered "What did you
say....?"

There's a thing between lovers, isn't there, when you
know that there's one of those pivotal moments in the
relationship.  Ali sensed this, looked me squarely in
the eyes, and whispered  "I said 'I love you', Steve.
You may not leave me.  You are the love of my life,
not just the lover in my bed, and without you I am
less of a man, and you may not leave me."

I couldn't help it.  Tears welled up in my eyes, and I
felt them running hotly down my cheeks.

"Steve, you are shedding tears for me.... Now I know
that you feel the same.  A fighter like you would not
shed tears, or be seen to shed tears, unless he was
moved to the depths of his being."

Tears began to flow from Ali, too, and we clung
together in a joy and passion such as we had never
known before, and which has continued with us since.

And so, my sons, no - our sons - that is the history
of Ali and me.  I needed to write this for you as you
will not otherwise understand why we are doing as we
are:  no simple explanation that we could give you
verbally would convince you that what we are doing is
right!  But perhaps, in later years, as you re-read
this story you will understand how those events that
even now seem to be so long ago in the distant past
shaped the world in which we live, and the
relationships we have.

All of you have repeatedly asked us why we meet in
such secrecy with your six "uncles" each month, and
now I will tell you.   Our time as coffle slaves
brought not only Ali and me together, but formed other
unbreakable ties between all eight of us.  You know
that we all fought in the war to liberate our country,
even though the others could easily have returned to
their families once they had been returned here and
freed by Ali's father.  They risked their lives to
remain with us, and our "brotherhood of the coffle"
was at first the only resources that Ali and I had to
combat the invaders.  Men do not live and work naked,
chained together for three years, and then do not risk
their all for each other, without forming bonds that
cannot be broken by time.  But, like chains that can
weaken and rust if they are left exposed to the earth,
so we were all concerned that our bonds might be
weakened if we did not take action to keep them clean
and bright.

So once a month, without fail, for all the intervening
fifteen years since our country was liberated, we have
all met.  Nothing prevents this - you may recall the
outcry in the world's press when  at one time Ali flew
back from the United Nations where he was part of the
reconstruction task force at what was perceived to be
a crucial moment.  But for us, this meeting, this
maintenance of our bonds, is the supreme duty we have
to each other, and it takes precedence over everything
else.

We meet and remove our clothes, so we are once again
all as we were when we were slaves:  in our naked
flesh we are all the same, and one cannot tell the
difference between Ali, our ruler, and your uncle
Kali, who returned to being a peasant, tending his
meagre date crop.  We have glorious, uninhibited sex,
as is only possible between men who have known each
other intimately for so long.  It serves to remind all
of us about what it means to be a man, what it is that
truly binds men together.  As we slither and slide our
bodies over each other, there are no rulers, no
peasants:  we are once again just men, ordinary men,
doing as we did when we were all slaves.  Truly it
reminds us all that we are the same.  And that the
love we learned for each other is the most important
thing in all our lives.

Of course there are some differences - although Ali
and I work out and are reasonably fit and muscular
still (well, it's one of those unspoken little
"competitions" that even the closest of lovers have
between each other!), and some of us are as thin and
wiry as they ever were, like Kali, others have
"matured"!  Faisel, for example, has lived a life of
luxury and indulgence, and it shows in his bloated
belly and the rolls of flesh that hang from his frame.
 But it doesn't matter- we know that the love we have
between us transcends these mere physical
characteristics.

About three years ago as we all lay in that
pleasurable state when we were satiated from our
sexual endeavours and were talking over the goings on
in the world, we all started to voice concern about
our sons.  You four have grown up in the Palace and
are used to the life of ease and luxury as the sons of
some of the most wealthy men on the face of the
planet, but even Kali's sons, in their mud brick house
out at the oasis, were beginning to cause him concern
as he knew one day they would inherit his wealth (yes,
he lives as a peasant, but that is his choice:  all
the Brotherhood Of The Coffle shared in the spoils of
war when beat the South, and all are rich beyond any
reasonable comprehension).

To all of us, the Brotherhood is the defining
influence in our lives, and we believe that it is a
precious gift that we ought to bestow on all of our
sons:  mere wealth you will have of course, but in
this world it is hard for rich men to know who their
true friends are, as opposed to those who hover around
appearing to be friends but who are merely looking for
opportunities to exploit the relationship.    So we
debated for many sessions how we could achieve this,
how we could pass on to you, our sons, that thing that
we hold most dear in the world.

All eight of us are in total agreement.  We all have
two sons (well, Ali and I have four between us!), and
we have decided that the only way you can understand
and learn what it is to be truly men, experiencing the
heights of male to male bonding that so few men ever
truly enjoy, is to repeat the experiences that we had.
 You are all sixteen now, and as I write these last
paragraphs our police are rounding you up from your
schools and bringing you to the Palace.  The
Brotherhood will strip you, shave you, collar you,
brand you, and then take your virginity (although we
suspect that some of you have already lost it!).  For
the next three years you will live as naked coffle
slaves, as we did.  You will receive no special
treatment, and we will auction you off as two coffles
of eight to buyers who do not know your origins - we
want you to be worked hard, beaten, whipped and used
as slaves just as we were, so that when we buy you
back after three years you will have that lifelong
commitment to each other that we all share.

So do not treat us harshly, my sons, when you look
back on your sixteenth year and those that follow.
Read this history, and understand why we did this to
you.  I always complained that people did things for
me that were "in your best interests" even though
those things seemed cruel and harsh to me at the time.
  Now I find myself in the same position, and I hope
that you will understand when you read this testament.


THE END
Pete Brown,  January to April, 2005.  London and
France.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

That is the end of this story, that went on for much
longer than I had planned at the beginning.  I was
inspired to write it by reading a couple of chapters
of "The Second Civil War" (no reader has yet told me
if there is more of that story), and had planned on
only a few chapters.  But the story of Steve and Ali
got a hold of me, and although I got bored somewhere
around the chapters in the earl twenties, my interest
quickened again and the last few chapters fairly flew
onto the screen.

I rarely write sequels, so please do not write and ask
me to recount "what happened next" to Steve and Ali,
or to describe what happened to the two coffles of
sixteen year olds!  Use your own imaginations - I'm
not going to churn out more pages describing their
feelings of humiliation as their "western" style
clothes are stripped off them, how they feel as their
"uncles" and fathers, the members of The Brotherhood
Of The Coffle who they have known all their lives,
rape them, or of the agonies they experience as the
white-hot branding irons sear their youthful butts!  I
am sure they will have interesting adventures as,
chained in their coffle, they are whipped and beaten
as they perform menial manual tasks - tasks that will
harden and toughen their bodies, turning them into
desirable pieces of man flesh, as their fathers were.
And of course they will bond with each others, as
their fathers did, as eight virile naked men will. All
of this you can imagine as easily as I can!

Two readers have however sent me notes which arose
after chapter 32 of the story had appeared, posing
questions that I had not addressed in the story as the
circumstances they ask about were not "in the main
line" of the plot, and so had not been considered by
me.  Thinking of what else might have gone on in the
story universe was a mildly interesting intellectual
challenge for me, and so I am answering those
questions for the two readers here.

FIRST QUESTION:
"One of the things I don't see in your story is what
happens to the returning Southern slaves. Are they
accepted into Southern slavery or released as free
men. If they are taken as slaves then they could be
returned to the East as slave soldiers. Does this
happen?"
ANSWER:
As Steve is told somewhere in the story, "slavery is
for life".  Once a slave, always a slave.  Steve and
Ali remain the property of Ali's father in law, if not
in practice, and as we see in chapter 33, the Leader
uses this as the excuse for seizing Ali without the
necessity of a further trial.    This practice was
that adopted by the South, and so the returning
Southern soldiers are in fact slaves - they have been
"bought" by their families or communities, using as
currency coffles of Ali's countrymen.

The South was by now deeply committed to slavery, and
Prexmire arrogantly would not change the laws to make
exception for these men for fear of weakening the
whole edifice of slavery.  After all, if the enslaved
Southern soldiers could be freed, what about the
enslaved Northern soldiers on whom the South now
relied?

Many families did not want their sons as slaves, and
were deeply upset by the idea that they owned their
sons, some of whom were of course married with sons of
their own!  It has to be said, though,  that some
parents who had been worried about their sons
drinking, or driving fast cars, or contracting
"unsuitable" marriages did not on the whole think it a
bad idea that they now had total control over their
sons' lives and could order the sons to desist.

Similarly where the families were too poor to buy
their sons and a huge community effort went on in
small towns to raise the money to buy a coffle to
trade, the whole town was proud of its returning
soldiers and earnestly wished them once more to be
free.  There were of course a small number of
returning soldiers who were widely regarded in their
communities as "rotten apples", and where the town
thought that keeping them in slavery, acting as street
cleaners and the like, would be the best thing for
everyone.  Those towns probably only bought the slaves
as they conceived it as a patriotic duty, and one in
which they had to be seen to play a part.

There was therefore a huge degree of confusion - at
one level, many "free" soldiers could not do simple
things like write cheques or get credit cards without
their parents' or their towns' permission, and this
was seen as both irksome and degrading.   It caused
annoyance at gymnasiums and public swimming pools and
similar places where it became unclear whether the guy
changing next to you and swinging his dick around was
a "free" man who still bore the brand on his butt from
his experiences as an enslaved soldier, or was
genuinely a slave, one of the Northerners, perhaps,
who was using the facility illicitly.  And for those
"free" soldiers who had themselves got families, what
was the status of the children? - were they free, and
had to bear the shame of having a slave as a parent,
or were they too slaves:  the American Civil Liberties
Union protested vigorously that it was manifestly
contrary to those children's rights that their liberty
should be taken away just because their father had
been sent off to war and got enslaved.

In an effort to resolve this situation, some states,
like Southern California, pleaded "states' rights" and
passed new laws that redefined these returned slaves
as being "indentured", and as such, after a suitable
time they could be freed as their indentured period
was over.  As no specific times were specified in the
law for the period of indenture, parents who wanted to
free their sons immediately could do so by setting a
short indenture term, and those that wanted to retain
control could equally easily do so by naming  a period
of many years.  Of course this actually solved
nothing:  in addition to making it even harder in
California to justify what was happening, there were
consequent problems when Californian families with an
indentured son had to relocate to other states as a
result of a change in job, or when a freed indentured
person moved to another state that did not recognise
the Californian system and he found himself once more
a slave, and so on.

I have only touched on some of the difficulties that
having the returning soldiers as slaves caused, and
organisations such as the ACLU were engaged on taking
some hundreds of individual cases through the courts,
a process which threatened to further slow the South's
legal processes and which caused even more dissent
amongst the population as a whole.  The Californian
experience also meant that many issues could not be
resolved in one state's supreme court alone, and so
there were starting to be appeals to the Supreme Court
of the South.

The matter was never satisfactorily resolved, as the
collapse of the South at the end of the third Civil
War overtook it.  The North decreed that in the newly
reunified USA, slavery would henceforth be confined to
criminals, and so enslaved soldiers from both the
North and the South were at that point freed (unless
of course the slaves had committed crimes, in which
case they could be quickly be re-enslaved, but under
the simpler criminal code).

In relation to the last part of the question, there
never was any suggestion that there could be "soldier
slaves",  though.  The returned Southerners could not
be redeployed as soldiers again.  It remained a
fundamental tenet of US society that the army is a
"citizen's army", composed of the people, fighting on
behalf of the people.  As such it was inconceivable
that slaves could form part of it.

SECOND QUESTION

Further interesting twists to this story... but why
did the Southern troops not just re-arrest the slaves
who were exported back to Arabia, why did they let the
newly enslaved soldiers be sent to the South, and how
did the freedom-fighters effect the exchange of the
newly enslaved soldiers and the freed slaves without
interference from the Southern occupiers...???
Especially at first, there were few freedom fighters
and many more Southern troops to disrupt the first
handover of "freed" slaves

ANSWER

"Why did the (occupying) Southern troops not just
re-arrest the salves who were being exported back to
Arabia ...... Especially at first, there were few
freedom fighters and many more Southern troops to
disrupt the handover of "freed" slaves."?
Well, for the first few coffles who arrived back home,
it was simply not realised how important this was to
become!  When Steve and Ali traded their first coffle
of Southern enslaved soldiers for sixty four of their
freed fighters, the authorities deemed it wiser to
stand back and simply let it happen.  There seemed to
be few enough men involved, and it was believed that
the freed slaves would in any event return to their
homes and families and pose no further threat - having
seen life as a coffle slave, it was believed that they
would not wish to risk being captured again if they
joined Steve and Ali's army.

By the time it was realised that this was a wrong
assumption, and that returned slaves flocked to the
cause to continue the struggle and free their fellows,
it was too late as the "feedback effect" alluded to in
the story was really rolling.  The constant
skirmishes, ambushes, captures, and general sabotage
of the oil facilities that Steve and Ali's troops were
doing was tying up so many of the Southern occupiers
that there was simply no available resource to attempt
to track down and arrest the returning slaves.

The slaves could not be arrested before they left the
South, as Steve and Ali cannily insisted that the
slaves were en route for home before the Southern
slaves being used to pay for them were allowed to
leave the country.

".... how did the freedom-fighters effect the exchange
of the newly enslaved soldiers and the freed slaves
without interference..."

Steve and Ali used the time-honoured means that
opposing armies have always used when negotiating
terms and conditions relating to prisoners and the
like:  they involved the Red Cross.   Steve and Ali
proposed a settlement to the Red Cross and offered
Southern slaves, and in turn the Red Cross received
the coffles of Arabs.  As has always been the case,
neither side attempted to "double cross" the Red Cross
who acted as honest brokers throughout.

The physical transfer was easy - slaves moving in both
directions were easily transferred as cargo on the
many oil tankers criss-crossing between the Gulf and
the South.

THE END