Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  "Water, please."

  The interrogator offered her the glass of stale tea. She sipped from it, then remembered why she had refused to drink any more. Her kidneys burned.

  She tried to raise herself. But the officer's hand on her shoulder held her firmly in place.

  "Please," Valya said. "Let me go to the toilet."

  "All in good time." The hand pushed down ever so slightly. "It's not so urgent, is it? Just when we've almost resolved the issue of your involvement in all this."

  She needed to go to the toilet. She tightened her loins, closing her thighs in a deadlock.

  "So, let me see if I understand all of this," the interrogator said. "You had no idea that your husband was a traitor? That he was shot for collaborating with the enemy?"

  Valya understood nothing. He was talking to someone else now. These words bore no relation to her life whatsoever.

  "Of course, you realize that the penalty for such betrayals is always death?"

  Betrayals? Nothing but betrayals. But which sort of betrayals was he speaking of now? None of it made any sense. It was all madness, and it had begun when they came for her at the school. After all of her efforts at maintaining a positive image before her superiors, they had come for her right in front of the students, unceremoniously hustling her out of the classroom. She had felt sick, realizing that she would never be able to explain this away.

  What was he talking about now? Espionage? Yuri? And he said that Yuri was dead. But it was impossible for Yuri to be dead. She had only been thinking of him the night before.

  "Please," she said, "I have to go to the toilet."

  An enormous hand smashed into the side of her face. She flew to the ground, leaving the toppled chair behind her. She felt her body slipping out of her control. Then a foot kicked her very hard in the small of the back.

  She moaned. A heel ground her into the concrete floor. Then her tormentor kicked her in the rump. The force slid her across the cement. But the boot followed her. The officer kicked her again. And again. In the spine. In the meager fat of her buttocks. Kicking through the fabric. Wet fabric. The hard toes hunted at her sex.

  Above her, the officer grunted. She recognized the sound. She had heard it before. Under the weight of so many men.

  "Slut," the officer said. He was so short of breath he could barely produce single syllables. "Tramp. Whore."

  Yes, Valya thought dreamily, waiting for the next blow. Yes. I'm a whore. And Yuri. Where was Yuri?

  Her American was going to take her away.

  She was late for dinner.

  Suddenly, a big hand gathered her hair and yanked her upward. She thought her neck would break, almost wishing it would. The interrogator dragged her across the floor like a dead game animal, hurting her badly. His other hand grasped her, briefly passing over her breast. Then he had her from behind, by the hair and and upper arm.

  He dragged her back to the table where the photographs lay. He ground her face into them, then lifted her by the hair, just far enough so that her eyes might focus. He released her arm so that he would have a free hand to peel away the layers of snapshots.

  "Look," he gasped. "Look. At this one. And this one. Look at yourself."

  Valya began to cry. It was not he weeping of a grown woman. Nor even tears of physical pain. It was the helpless crying of a child. She sensed what was coming now. She sensed it in his hand.

  "Please," she moaned. "Please. Please, don't."

  The interrogator tossed her back on the floor as though discarding and empty wrapper.

  "You piece of filth," he said. "Is that all you ever think of?" He strode over to her and spit on the side of her face. She had curled up like and infant, and she wept.

  "I wouldn't dream of dirtying myself with a creature like you," the officer said.

  "I'm sorry for my comrade's excesses," the beautifully groomed young officer told her. He reached across the table toward her face. She shied. But he was quick. He ran his fingertips along her cheek. "Here. Just let me have a look."

  Valya whimpered.

  "Now, that doesn't look to bad. Nothing to mar our girls beauty," the officer continued. He was handsome, obviously atretic, and Valya sat before him in great shame. She felt destroyed. As though she belonged in a heap of garbage.

  "He's been overworked lately," the young man explained. "What with the war and all. Moscow hasn't been a quiet place. I'm sorry if he hurt you." The young man withdrew his easy fingertips. "I’m sorry things got out of hand."

  Valya sobbed into the lateness of the hour.

  "We’re not fools," the young officer said brightly. "We know you’re not a spy. It was ridiculous for my comrade to imply anything to the contrary. Valya, would you like a cup of tea? Or anything at all?"

  "No."

  "All right. I just want you to try to understand. It’s a very complex situation. To the careless observer, some of your actions might take on an ambiguous meaning. And I think you’ll admit that, now and then, you’ve been indiscreet."

  Valya stared down into her sorrow. She was contrite. No Magdalene had ever felt so deep and genuine a contrition.

  "If anything," the polished young man continued, "we want to help you. Now, obviously, the fact that you were married to an officer who betrayed his trust to the People— obviously, that complicates things. And then there’s the brief encounter with this American spy. Well, he’s not exactly a spy. That’s a slight exaggeration. And he’s gone now, anyway—left the hotel right after you did. Off to the wars," he said blithely. "But it’s still a difficult situation. And, of course, there’s the matter of simple criminal law. Some of your adventures with Citizen Naritsky, for example. I’m afraid that, even without the slightest hint of espionage or the like, well, I’m afraid the law demands a certain level of satisfaction."

  The young man stared at Valya as though waiting for her to help him out. She sat there trying to feel a better, truer sorrow at the news of Yuri’s death. But it would not come. Yuri had been nothing but a tool to her. She recognized that now. She had been bad. But she was sorry. She was sorry for all of the things she had done. She was sorry for every scrap of joy she had ever felt. But she could not feel sufficiently sorry for Yuri.

  "Valya," the young man said almost tenderly, "I simply can’t bear the thought of sending you to prison."

  Valya looked up.

  "Simply couldn't bear it," the officer went on. "Why, by the time you were done sitting out your sentence, those lovely looks would be gone. Long gone, I'm afraid. And it would be a shame to waste them on the sort of women one encounters in our prison system. I'm afraid we're a bit behind the West in prison reform. Are you sure you wouldn't like a cup of tea?"

  Valya shook her head. Infinitely fatigued.

  Prison?

  "But don't worry," the young man continued. "I think I see a way out of this. Valya," he said gently, flattering her with his eyes, "you really are a lovely woman. Even now, like this. I'm certain that you could be very helpful to us."

  Valya looked up into the young officer's eyes. They were deep and glittering. The sort of eyes with which she would have been delighted to flirt once upon a time. Now they filled her with a horror she could not confine in words.

  "I just... I just wanted to have some sort of life," she said meekly.

  The young man smiled warmly.

  "You do want to help us, don't you?"

  21

  3 November 2020

  NOBURU SHUT HIS EYES AND LISTENED. EVEN THROUGH the bunkered thickness of the walls and bulletproof glass, he could hear them out there in the night. The people. Gathering in defiance of the outbreak of plague that had begun to haunt the city. Tens of thousands of them, there was no way of counting them with precision. Inside the headquarters complex, his staff continued to celebrate the success of the Scramblers, undeterred. While, out in the darkness, men who answered to another god chanted their fates in an opaque desert language.

  Noburu looked at his aide's neat
ly uniformed back. Akiro sat dutifully at the command information console, sifting, sifting. Noburu had unsettled the younger man with a remark made an hour before. He knew that Akiro was still trying to find an innocent interpretation for his general's words. But Noburu also knew that the aide would not look in the right places.

  The rhythmic chanting echoed relentlessly through the walls.

  "Death to Japan," they cried.

  Noburu had not understood the words at first. That had required a translator. But he had understood the situation immediately. He had been waiting for it.

  The demonstrators had begun to gather even as the Scramblers did their work. His staff counterintelligence officer reported that the rally began in the old quarter, in the shadow of the Virgin's Tower. A flash outbreak of Runciman's disease had begun to gnaw its way in through the city's windows and doors. Yet, the Azeris had gathered by the thousands. They came as if called by animal instinct, by scent. How would Tokyo explain it? Marginally literate roustabouts had known of the vast scale of the Iranian and rebel defeat almost as swiftly as Noburu himself. In response, they materialized out of alleyways, or descended from the tainted heights of apartment blocks where the elevator shafts were useful only for the disposal of garbage, where bad water trickled in the taps, when water came at all. The faithful came in from the vast belt of slums that ringed the official city, from homes made of pasteboard and tin, from quarters in abandoned railcars that were already in the possession of a third generation of the same family. They came under banners green and black, the colors of Allah, the colors of death. In the heart of the headquarters building, their voices had been audible before they halfway climbed the hill, and now, as they formed a great crescent around the front of the military complex, their voices reached down into the stone depths of the mountainside. To the buried operations center, where Noburu's officers were drinking victory toasts in confident oblivion.

  Noburu had gone out into the dying afternoon to have a look for himself, brushing off the protests of his subordinates and the local national guards, all of whom insisted that the situation was too dangerous.

  "What are they saying?" he had demanded of his escorts as they braved the pollution-scented air. "What do the words mean?"

  The light had the texture of gauze. The men who spoke the local language averted their eyes in shame.

  "What is it?" Noburu insisted. "What does the chanting mean?"

  A local national officer in charge of security looked at Noburu like a bad child caught out. "They say, 'Death to Japan.' "

  Death to Japan. Ah, yes.

  Death. To Japan.

  He had expected the process to take a little longer. But then he had been wrong about so many things.

  Death to Japan.

  Couldn't they feel it? How could they all remain so smug? Didn't they understand? The end was coming, Scramblers or not.

  Death to Japan. The crowd did not speak with a human voice. The articulated passions had nothing to do with the reasoning of the individual conscience. All were subsumed in a hugeness that no extant terms could explain. The crowd had swarmed into an entity that was vast, deaf, and blind. No single element could make a difference. No counsel of logic would move them. It was as if a god had closed his mighty hands over their ears. The crowd raged, and knew no fear.

  Noburu imagined the clinical language with which a Tokyo staff officer would master the event.

  "Please," the local man pleaded with Noburu, "you are to go no closer."

  Noburu walked onward toward the big steel gates that shut the mob out of the compound.

  "Mr. General, please not to go there."

  Noburu walked on. In the last weak sun. Drawn by the single voice of the crowd, as if a woman had spoken his name in the dark.

  "Please."

  The headquarters building was shaped like a U with short sides, forming a courtyard that opened out onto a broader space that functioned alternately as a parking area for military vehicles or as a parade ground. It was bare now, with the austerity of wartime. Beyond the cobbled and cemented space, the wall rose, defining the perimeter of the compound. The wall was built to a height greater than the tallest man and unruly coils of concertina wire stretched along its top, connecting intermittent guard towers from which automatic weapons scanned silently over the excluded crowds.

  Noburu headed straight for the central gate. Closed now, the two oversize steel doors were crowned with spikes, a number of which had been bent or broken off. Noburu had no clear plan of action. He just wanted to see the beginning of the end with his own eyes.

  The first twilight mellowed in the wall's shadow. The mob called out to him, begging him to hurry.

  The security chief caught up with Noburu and tugged at his sleeve, pleading.

  Both men stopped.

  Before their eyes, men had begun to fly through the air. Soaring above the wall. Men with invisible wings.

  The first few did not fly high enough. They caught in the curls of wire atop the wall, then hung limply. One sailed out of the low sky only to land gruesomely atop the spikes of the gate, impaling himself without a sound.

  Noburu was baffled. Was this some new mystery of the East?

  In a matter of seconds, half a dozen of the enchanted men had snared themselves in their attempt to soar over the wall and join Noburu in the enclave. They accepted the pain of their failures with remarkable stoicism. Wordlessly entangling themselves in the midst of the razor-sharp loops, the men sprawled their arms and legs across the barrier. They did not even flinch when the wire caught at their necks and heads. They appeared immune to pain. They flew through the sky, landed short, and took their uncomfortable rest. The man whose torso had been skewered atop the gate did not make a sound.

  More and more of the odd angels rose from the crowd beyond the wall. Noburu could not understand the bizarre acrobatics. His mind filled with decades of old news film. Moslem fanatics lashing themselves mercilessly for the love of God. Riots, revolutions. Burning cities. The Arabian nights—and the tormented days. Endless calls for blood. Once, he knew, the Azeris had gathered to call for death to the Armenians, later for death to the Russians. Before that, their brethren to the south had howled, "Death to America."

  Now it was "Death to Japan." As he had known it would be.

  Oh, pride of man, he thought, and his heart filled with sorrow for his people.

  At last one of the dervishes cleared the height of the gate. He arced just above his impaled brother, twisting in his flight, and dropped with a careless thud just a few feet from Noburu and his sole remaining escort.

  The security officer had his pistol at the ready. He hustled toward the intruder, barking orders.

  The visitor did not stir.

  Suddenly, the security officer arched backward, away from the body. It was an exaggerated gesture, and it reminded Noburu of the way a startled cat could stop abruptly, pulling back its snout from evident trouble.

  The security officer turned and bolted unceremoniously past Noburu. The man gibbered, and Noburu could make out only a single word:

  "Plague."

  Noburu walked forward until his toes had almost touched the body. The two men stared at each other. The dead citizen of Baku gazed up at the immaculate Japanese general, and the general peered back down in still curiosity.

  Runciman's disease. It was unmistakable. The marbled discoloration of the skin. The look of pain that lasted beyond death. The corpse lay broken on the ground, in a fitting posture of agony.

  Tokyo needed to see this, Noburu thought, raising his eyes back up to the bodies strung along the wire. Tokyo expected gratitude, treaties, observed legalities, interest on investments. Tokyo expected the world to make sense.

  Another body cleared the wall and hit the ground with a thud.

  Tokyo wanted thanks. And here it was.

  Wondrous gifts flew through the air in this country. The people generously gave up their dead. Such a beautiful gift. Expressive. Noburu would have li
ked to have wrapped up at least one of the bodies and sent it to the Tokyo General Staff.

  Noburu let his attention sink back to the corpse at his feet. You were lucky, he told the dead man. You were one of our friends. Had you been one of Japan's enemies, had you passed your years in the city of Orsk, or had you been one of those American soldiers, your suffering would only be beginning.

  The crowd beyond the wall erupted in a scream that had the force of a great storm compacted into a single moment. It pierced Noburu. It was impossible to assign a cataloged emotion to the scream. The common words used to define the heart did not suffice.

  We are worse than any other animal, Noburu thought. And he bent down to close the corpse's eyes.

  He turned back into the parade ground's lengthening shadows, to the small group of officers awaiting him in horror.

  "It's all right," Noburu assured them. "My shots are up-to-date. Tokyo has taken care of everything."

  He gave an order to the effect that the guards were to hold their fire unless there was an attempt to penetrate the facility. After that, he did not look back. But he continued to see everything. The dream warrior saw. The faces of the vengeful dead, the population of Orsk, quivering in wonder, and the hallucinatory Americans from Africa, who came to Noburu even in the lightest doze now. Those dead dream-Americans were the worst of all, far worse than the reality of a diseased corpse hurled over a wall. Each time they came to him they grew larger and more clear. They came ever closer. Soon they would touch him. The dream warrior knew that it was finished.

  In the controlled coolness of Noburu's office, Akiro assured the general that the disturbance was an aberration, inspired by false reports and likely provoked by the Americans as part of a devious plan.

  Noburu looked at the younger man in wonder.

  "Do you really believe," Noburu asked, "that the people out there would listen to the Americans?"

  "Tokyo says—"

  "Tokyo is far away, Akiro."

  "The intelligence officer says—"

  "He's lying, Akiro. He doesn't know."