The Target

by Saul Herzog

  Their footage would be distributed globally before any Latvian news crews were allowed on the scene. But even when the local crews arrived, they would only be able to report what the Russians had already broadcast. That hundreds of ethnic Russians had been massacred by men in Latvian uniforms.

  By then, Russia would be in possession of the capital, and the president would have demonstrated to the world that he was reconstituting the USSR.

  It would be the biggest fuck you to the West since 9/11.

  The West was accostomed to victory. The defeat of Nazi Germany. The surrender of the Japanese Empire. The collapse of the Soviet Union on the day after Christmas in 1991.

  The West didn’t really know what defeat tasted like.

  This would be their first bitter taste.

  And it would be only the beginning.

  Russia was rising.

  China was rising.

  NATO was in its twilight.

  Even Americans were ready for it. They were tired of footing the bill, of providing for the security of the entire globe.

  A factory working in Michigan, a farmer in Oklahoma, what did he care about the security of Latvia, a place he would never see and couldn’t find on a map?

  NATO, by propping up weaker states, was an aberration against the laws of nature.

  The future belonged to the strong.

  The time had come for the weak to wither and die.

  74

  Zhukovsky and his men met Prochnow east of the village.

  Zhukovsky strode up to him and saluted. The German made a half-hearted attempt at a salute back, then sucked from his cigarette.

  “Everything ready?” Zhukovsky said.

  The German nodded. “The only cop in town is dead,” he said in Russian.

  Zhukovsky nodded and turned to his men. This was the moment he’d been waiting for. The moment when he would find out what they were made of.

  “There are a lot of people,” Zhukovsky said, “who say our nation is on the decline. They say we’ve been sapped of our power. They say the fire has been knocked out of our bellies.”

  He looked at them, he looked at their eyes, and saw nothing.

  He’d spent months wearing them down.

  They’d been tortured.

  They’d been brutalized.

  And when this mission was done, they’d be slaughtered like cattle.

  They’d heard enough of his words.

  The time had come to issue the order.

  “All right, men,” he said. “I want a thousand dead bodies in the streets of this village. Men, women, children. No quarter. Do you understand me?”

  They saluted, but gave no clue as to their state of mind.

  “I don’t care who you kill,” he said. “Just rack them up. A thousand corpses.”

  He looked at Prochnow, and realized that, now that the time had come, even he looked pale. A massacre was no simple thing. Tactically, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, but psychologically, it played games on men’s minds.

  Prochnow looked like he’d just seen a ghost, and the cigarette that had been hanging from his lips fell to the ground unfinished.

  “Surround the town,” Zhukovsky said. “Start at the outskirts and work your way toward the center. There’ll be a crowd in the square by the time you get there.”

  He looked at the men and tried to assess their thoughts.

  Would they obey the order?

  Would they do it?

  “Bravo, you go around the village and approach from the west. Block off the road to Liepna. No vehicles gets out. Do you hear me? Use the grenade launchers to block the road if you have to. Charlie, split up and take the north and south. I want Plešova and the forestry track cut off.”

  He looked at the German.

  “Prochnow, you and I will walk in from the east. Treat it like a sport. It will go easier on you.”

  Prochnow nodded weakly.

  “No one move in until you hear my gunfire,” he said.

  The team leaders waited, ashen-faced, unflinching.

  “Go,” Zhukovsky said.

  The men turned and began making their way down the hill toward the village on foot.

  They were operating under complete radio silence, but the operation was so simple it didn’t matter.

  Zhukovsky watched them leave then turned back to Prochnow.

  “Prochnow,” Zhukovsky said, “are you all right?”

  Prochnow looked at him blankly.

  “I’d have thought a German would have a stronger belly.”

  “It’s a lot of people,” Prochnow said. “I wasn’t prepared.”

  “It’s nothing,” Zhukovsky said. “A drop in the bucket. In your grandfather’s day, they’d have done this ten times without batting an eye.”

  “I guess this isn’t my grandfather’s day,” Prochnow said.

  “Nonsense,” Zhukovsky said. “Every day is every other day. It makes no difference. Same sky. Same sun and moon. Same devils in the hearts of men.”

  “I don’t know,” Prochnow said. “I thought I knew, but now, this, I don’t know.”

  “Nonsense,” Zhukovsky said. “Stick with me. I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  Prochnow said nothing.

  The sun was breaking over the tops of the trees, and Zhukovsky could see the village coming to life. He lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Prochnow.

  Prochnow took one and Zhukovsky lit it.

  They smoked in silence.

  It didn’t take long for the other teams to get in position. Zhukovsky finished his cigarette and began walking down the hill toward the nearest farm house.

  He would be the first to open fire, and his gunfire would be the signal for the killing to commence.

  The whole thing wouldn’t take more than thirty minutes. It was surprisingly easy to kill a thousand people when they were laid out bare for you like this.

  He looked back over his shoulder and saw that Prochnow wasn’t following.

  “Hey, German,” he shouted back.

  Prochnow said nothing.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  75

  Prochnow felt as if his feet were welded to the ground. He knew he should follow Zhukovsky. He knew that he would regret it forever if he didn’t.

  He wasn’t some soldier of fortune, a mere mercenary who fought for the highest bidder.

  He was a true believer.

  He believed in what was being done here this day, and he knew that it was necessary.

  He believed, if it all went according to plan, that it would change the world. Like the first uprisings of the Communist Revolution.

  Nothing ever changed without the spilling of blood. The blood of the innocent was what watered the soil of history.

  And yet, he couldn’t move.

  “Come on,” Zhukovsky called. “I never took you for a German coward.”

  Even that didn’t get Prochnow to move. He was a man who’d killed more people than he could count, but when the sounds of the first shots broke out, he winced.

  His eyes filled.

  And it wasn’t from the cold.

  He watched what there was to watch. The men from the other teams entering the village, entering houses.

  The lights had already started coming on inside the houses. The people were rising. Thin lines of smoke came out of their chimneys and up into the still sky.

  Some people were already out on the roads, in the fields, or at the square at the center of town.

  The gunfire began as a stacatto pulse, like the sound of an old motorcycle engine being fired up.

  One gun.

  Zhukovsky’s.

  He was using the submachine gun. It sprayed nine milimeter bullets like a garden hose spraying water.

  And then the other guns started up.

  And then a grenade.

  And then the screaming.

  At first, he heard just one lady scream. From her voice, he could tell she was older. She was in the
nearest of the farmhouses, the one Zhukovsky had gone into.

  And no sooner had she started then she stopped.

  Her scream marked the beginning, a herald, and in a matter of seconds, hundreds more could be heard rising up from every quarter of the village. The screams and submachine gun fire were punctuated by the occasional explosion, caused by a grenade launcher or, once, a Carl Gustav which was fired at a vehicle that was trying to flee. The shell cut through the side of the car like a knife, and the occupants crawled out like napalm victims.

  Between the two squads, they would have no difficulty reaching Zhukovsky’s grizzly quota of a thousand corpses. People ran into the streets, into the paths of the soldiers, as if they thought they would save them. They couldn’t have made it simpler if they’d wanted to be shot.

  Prochnow never would have guessed that such modest houses contained so many people.

  He saw an entire family, man, woman, four children, go down in a single spray of fire.

  He saw three men rush at one of the teams from behind. They were ten feet from the nearest soldier when he turned, almost languidly, and cut them down.

  As the soldiers proceeded along the main thoroughfare, it became clear that a concentration effect was taking place. Anyone who wasn’t shot instantly, instinctively ran for the square at the center of the village, where they thought somehow that the gathering crowd would protect them.

  It did not.

  That became clear as the square filled and the people realized that all routes of escape were blocked.

  There were a few villagers who fought back. Some had hunting rifles, some pistols, a few shotguns, but they were no match for Zhukovsky’s men.

  Their ammo wasn’t up to the task.

  Neither was their aim.

  Any resistance was quickly subdued.

  By the time the squads converged on the square, most of the village was in it, cowering like sheep in a pen. Many were only partially dressed, and as they huddled together, for warmth and protection, their breaths rose above them in the cold air like mist from a lake.

  Prochnow watched in a rapt mix of awe and horror as Zhukovsky and his men began working through the crowd with the ruthlessness and efficiency of an Einsatzgruppe.

  They were like reapers sheafing corn.

  Like some monsters from another time, another war.

  They fired at the outer edge of the crowd, and the people in their terror began to claw and fight at each other to get toward the middle. Those on the periphery fell to the ground, and the rest, like cornered animals, realized that whatever direction they fled was as hopeless as every other.

  Prochnow watched for as long as he could, then, eventually, turned his back on the butchery of it.

  It confirmed what he’d always known.

  That nothing had changed since the time of his grandfathers.

  Men were as easy to butcher today as they’d been in 1940.

  They could be mowed down like beasts in a field.

  76

  Lance left the embassy in a State Department Bell UH-1 Iroquois chopper with diplomatic clearance. An hour later was closing in on the village of Ziguri. Even before he got there, he knew something wasn’t right. The first thing he saw was a red glow in the sky, and as he closed in, the smell of smoke mingled with the morning mist.

  He did a single pass over the village and could scarcely believe what he saw.

  He was a man who’d seen it all. He’d seen Russian Double Tap sites in Syria that deliberately targetted rescue workers. He’d seen a civilian convoy of four hundred people blown to dust.

  But this was different.

  It wasn’t the numbers.

  He’d seen this many people killed before in air strikes and artillery bombardments.

  That was not what he was looking at.

  As he landed in a clearing close to the central square, he could see that this had been murder at close range. This had been butchery.

  There were bodies everywhere. Women, children, the elderly.

  He got out of the helicopter and there was so much smoke in the air he had to rub his eyes.

  He knew what he was looking at.

  Someone had gone out of their way to make this massacre as bloody, as barbaric, as possible.

  Gore was strewn everywhere.

  Bodies were piled up in the square like a scene from a zombie movie. There were hundreds of them. Maybe a thousand. And nothing at all had been done to hide the atrocity. In fact, it had been staged to highlight the gruesomeness of it. After the bodies had been piled up, someone had shot the pile with a grenade launcher.

  Lance looked at the scene and felt a weakness in his knees. He had to reach out for a lamppost just to keep himself up. And then he retched.

  Europe had seen this before.

  But not in a long time.

  Of course the world was still full of massacres and bloodshed. Conflicts everywhere smoldered.

  Atrocities happened every day. Just because they weren’t on the news didn’t mean they didn’t happen.

  Man was a beast, and as Lance had seen in countless countries, a beast cannot change its nature.

  But this?

  This was different.

  And as the helicopters began to fly in, civilian helicopters bearing the names and logos of television networks, Lance realized what he was looking at.

  This was a showpiece.

  A set up.

  The news networks were Russian, all of them, and as they landed, a Russian military helicopter approached from the east.

  Lance stood and watched as the first news crew unpacked its things and began to set up a camera in front of the pile of bodies.

  “They’re not even cold,” Lance said to one of the cameramen in Russian. “The blood hasn’t even dried.”

  “Please,” the cameraman said. “We’re just following orders.”

  “What does that mean?” Lance said, but the truth was, he already knew.

  He didn’t need a cameraman to tell him how the world worked. He didn’t need a news crew to explain to him that this was a maneuver on the part of Russia that would have global geopolitical repercussions.

  This was the beginning of a resurgence that would pull the world back into a new Cold War.

  The tanks, the invasion force, was already on its way.

  The news reporters, slim, attractive Russian women in neatly-tailored blazers and fur-lined leather gloves, began reporting as if they’d actually witnessed the massacre happen. They were reading from preprepared scripts, each with their own, individualized copy, and one fact was constant.

  The Latvian army was responsible.

  Lance stood by one of the newscasters and listened to her report.

  At dawn this morning, and in response to growing protests across the country, the Latvian government cracked down in a manner that has not been seen in these lands for eighty years. They sent a small contingent of soldiers into an ethnically Russian village close to the border, and committed atrocities that can only be described as something out of a nightmare. Behind me, the flames of the village of Ziguri still smolder, and the bodies of over a thousand ethnic Russians lie dead, their blood painting the snow with the color of a flag that once shone proudly over this land.

  The Red Banner of the USSR.

  Lance was about to leave when he heard crying coming from one of the farm houses. He walked up to the door and pushed it open. The house was a wreck, the windows shattered, the wooden table and chairs in the kitchen kicked over.

  He entered and waited.

  Then he heard it again.

  The sound of a child crying.

  It was coming from upstairs and he quietly made his way toward it.

  The stairs creaked under his weight and the crying stopped.

  He reached the top and in Latvian said, “It’s over. They’re going to help you now.”

  There was no sound.

  “The nurses. They’re coming to help the children.”

&
nbsp; He walked into the first of the bedrooms. There was a large double bed, and on the bed were the bodies of a man and woman. Their blood had seeped through the sheets like crimson dye.

  Lance went to the next room, which he could tell from the size of the bed and a porcelain doll in a pink dress, belonged to a child.

  “It’s all right,” he said softly, sitting on the bed.

  There was no sound.

  “This doll needs a friend,” he said, picking it up.

  He heard the sound of movement under the bed and bent down. There was a little girl, about five or six years old, and he passed her the doll.

  “The bad men are gone,” he said to her.

  77

  As Lance made his way back to his helicopter he saw that three Russian soldiers were standing in front of it. One of the men was an officer.

  “Stop right there,” the officer said, raising his weapon.

  Lance kept walking toward them.

  “What’s going on?” he said. “What are Russian soldiers doing on Latvian territory? You can’t be here. You’re going to cause an incident.”

  “I think it’s a bit late for that,” the officer said.

  Lance acted casual. “Well, what do you want?” he said.

  “Whose helicopter is this?”

  “It belongs to the US State Department and is protected by diplomatic credentials.”

  The officer looked at the two soldiers and then said to Lance, “And who are you?”

  “I’m a US State Department observer,” he said. “I’m here to find out what the hell’s going on.”

  “How did you get here so quickly.”

  “I could ask the same of you,” Lance said. “I count six separate news crews too. It’s almost as if they’d been told to be ready.”

  “You need to come with us,” the officer said, drawing his sidearm.

  Lance made like he was going to let them take him into custody, then ducked and jabbed the officer with a quick punch to the groin. The officer doubled over and Lance heaved up under him, lifting him onto his shoulders.

  As the other two soldiers tried to grab him, he spun around and threw the officer on top of them.