Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  He rose and walked deliberately to the bar, leaned on it, almost brushing Derezhov's sleeve, but not looking at him.

  "You interest me. What is this blood sickness you are talking about? It isn't white, is it?"

  Derezhov showed teeth stained brown by tobacco and tea. He wasn't big, but he had a good ten centimeters on Alex, and maybe ten kilos. "What would it say under nationality on your internal passport, if your father had not pulled strings in the Party?" he asked.

  Alex turned to him, smiled, and said, "Yevrey." Then he kicked the stool out from under him.

  The back of Derezhov's head hit the hardwood edge of the bar with a sound like a gunshot. The naval infantry lieutenant landed fiat on his back, with his head rolling from side to side like a boat rocked by ocean swells and strange creaking sounds coming out of his mouth.

  Alex was astride him, hauling him up by a fistful of undershirt. "It would saw 'Jew,' you shit, you bastard. And what would it say on yours if you weren't spreading your cheeks for all of Black Sea Fleet?"

  Derezhov groaned. Alex heard the scrape of barstool legs as the other naval infantry boys pushed back and cleared for action.

  Another fine mess you've gotten us into, a voice said somewhere in the cheap seats of Alex's mind. He was going to have to do something about his temper.

  He risked a quick glance back at his table. His heroic comrades were just sitting there.

  No backing down now. "Well? What would it say, you sow?"

  A semblance of intelligence was coming back into Derezhov's eyes, which was about as much as he could muster anyway. Alex became aware of the redwood trunks of Berzin's legs rising up out of the linoleum right in front of him. He heard a crash, and glass and clear pungent fluid cascaded over him as the giant broke a Stoli bottle on the bar.

  Alex's hand dove under the skirt of his U.S. Army jacket, snaked his Glock out of the inside-the-pants holster at the small of his back, and jammed its blunt muzzle into Berzin's nuts.

  "I'll tell you what it would read," he yelled into Derezhov's face without ever taking eyes off him. "It would read nyekulturnyy. Am I right? Am 1?"

  Nyekulturnyy was the worst there was. It meant "uncultured," but what it really meant was you were an ignorant sheep-fucking, booger-eating, vodka-swilling, illiterate gap-toothed cross-eyed hillbilly with lice in your hair and pig shit between your toes. It would've meant you spent all your time at bear-baiting and tractor pulls, if they had tractor pulls in the higa yet, and if there were any bears left. Peter the Great killed all kinds of people in the seventeenth century to make Russia quit being nyekulturnyy, and they still loved him for it.

  Derezhov mouthed something. Still keeping his pistol shoved into Berzin's crotch, Alex grabbed the lieutenant by the face and slammed his head against the floor. "Say it!" he screamed, "Say, I'm a nyekulturnyy motherfucker.'"

  I could use some backup, guys, he sent telepathically to his teammates.

  "Mrm mm nrmfy mrf'rnr," Derezhov said.

  "I can't hear you." Crack! "What are you?" He banged Derezhov's head a third time for good measure. Meanwhile he sensed his buddies doing lots of nothing. He'd never had any faith in ESP anyway.

  "I-I'm a nyekulturnyy motherfucker," Derezhov enunciated very clearly, trying to burn holes in Alex with his eyes.

  Alex snapped off him and upright in half a heartbeat, thankful once again for high-school gymnastics.

  "There," he said, covering the four with his pistol and backing toward the door, "don't you feel better? Confession's good for the soul."

  "—turn you over to Mikhayl Sergeiyevich Rakov for a half-hour special report on the crisis in Uzbekistan. For those who missed our top story of the hour, communications have been cut between Tashkent and the rest of the League in the wake of two days of rioting in the capital of the Uzbek Republic—"

  His butt hit the swinging doors. The rest of Texas Team rose and slid shame-faced past him as he kept his Glock on the naval infantrymen.

  "Hey," he said from the side of his mouth, "thanks for the help."

  "Anytime, little partner," Tex said.

  The light pinned his head to the pillow, right through his eyes. He started to reach for his Glock, wedged between the mattress and the cold stucco wall, realized it was way too late.

  "Senior Lieutenant Aleksandr Pavlovich Gorsunov?" a voice asked from somewhere behind the light.

  He tore his head loose from the light and made himself sit up, rubbing at his hair. "Yeah. That's me."

  The light switched off. "Lieutenant Shadrin, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. Come with me, please. You are summoned to Moscow immediately."

  Chapter TEN

  Feeling eerie, Little Alex leafed through last week's Time. The cover story was WHILE AMERICA SLEPT, about something called sleep abuse, for God's sake: "It's incredible that an activity which takes up so much of our lives—as much as a third—has gone unregulated for so long." After a decade in the U.S. he'd come home during the upheavals of glasnost' and perestroika, and it felt as if he were entering a country he'd never visited before. Now, after nearly another decade, his second homeland seemed from a distance almost unrecognizable. He felt as if he were in the Twilight Zone.

  Or maybe the overbright, jittery fluorescent overheads were conspiring with stress and travel to disorient him. They certainly made it impossible to relax. On the other hand, relaxation wasn't something you expected to do in a waiting room in the nerve center of the KGB.

  "Come on," he muttered. "Let's get it over with." It was all he could do to keep from jumping to his feet and marching up and down the waiting room. But he wouldn't give the Chekists at their hidden-camera monitors the satisfaction of seeing him pace like a caged beast.

  He popped a stale half stick of Doublemint into his mouth; he didn't remember having spit one out two minutes before. He knew when he was well off. He hadn't been escorted to the cellars—yet. And while the sterile chrome and vinyl and pale olive walls were more reminiscent of a dentist's waiting rooms than the gloomy, grimy hallways of the legendary KGB redoubt on 2 Dzerzhinskiy Square—now headquarters for the Russian Republic's secret police—at least they were reminiscent of a Western dentist's office.

  He had good reason for the nerves. The KGB had undergone a serious image upgrade since the Union fell apart. There had even been a movie, a joint American/ Russian production, glorifying the K's campaign against persecution of minority groups in the republics and drawing parallels with the FBI's war against the KKK in the 1960s South. What the movie never mentioned was that that particular Good War was fought by shots in the neck, running dissidents' cars off icy roads, and wiring people's dicks to electric train transformers from Toys 'r' Us—Toys Ya Us, the way it read to the Russians.

  That was no skin off any part of Alex's anatomy; he'd been brought up a New York Jewboy, and he didn't have much use for crackers from either Georgia. But Military Intelligence and State Security had hated each other like owls and crows since the surrealistic thirties, when their death squads hunted each other across the world at Stalin's behest. Their names had changed, and even the country they served, but the grudge endured. Alex was one of GRU's fairest-haired boys, and he had peed in the K's pool big-time. And he knew for a fact that KGB didn't stand for "Kinder, Gentler Boys."

  Just about the time the sun should be coming up out of the woods of the Moscow Oblast, the door opened. A receptionist stood there, leggy and lean in a medium gray suit, with a shock of ice-blond hair and meltwater eyes.

  "Senior Lieutenant Gorsunov? Follow me, please." She looked as fresh as midmorning. The Big K liked to give the impression, like the old Pinkertons, that they were an eye that never slept.

  Here's another thing they didn't have at Dzerzhinskiy Square. He flashed a grin as she held a heavy oak door for him—putting something on it, ninety-five miles per hour with plenty of movement. Those no-color eyes looked right through him. Tight-assed Slav bitch.

  A lot had changed in the almost thirty years of Alex's
life, in the Rodina, in the army, even in the KGB. But some things never changed. The man behind the desk was clearly one of them.

  A Western executive would no doubt have received a visitor while seated behind the enormous gleaming oaken desk, a modern monarch enthroned in his dark hardwood and green baize audience chamber. This man clearly preferred to stand, beating down visitors by sheer bulk in the classic Russian manner.

  He had a lot of bulk to beat with: he looked like a shaved bear, and an indifferently shaved one at that. His vast body was stuffed into one of those lumpy awful Soviet-style suits that no self-respecting member of the nomenklatura had had to settle for since the seventies. The tie knotted around what neck he had was askew. He had a pugilist's nose with a thumbtip-sized mole beside it, hairy ears that stuck out, a few gray hairs combed straight back from his liver-spotted forehead. Despite the sparseness of his hair, his eyebrows were like two wolf tails, magnificent disheveled plumes. He looked as if he owed his position less to the Central Committee than to Central Casting.

  Alex clicked his heels and came to a beautiful attention. Having qualified for membership in two of the world's most elite military formations, he was an expert in attention. He could hold it buck naked in Arctic weather while a fire hose played icy salt water over him. He had, during the hazing he'd gotten from instructors during his early Spetsnaz training days, when they still through of him as a product of a hated rival system who had to be broken down for honor's sake.

  He didn't salute. The huge man wore civilian clothes.

  The big man nodded, in that glacial Russian way that could connote either deliberation or genuine slow-wittedness. Either was a real possibility, Alex reminded himself. Intellectuals who flashed their wit on the upper slopes of the Soviet power pyramid tended to wind up, like Trotsky, in some flyblown Third World hospital with ice axes buried in their egg heads. On the other hand, true dimwits like poor Kostya Chernyenko, who poured the mineral water at Helsinki in '76 and got to pretend to be General Secretary for a few months in the eighties before he dropped dead, could sometimes rise to the top simply by being gopher to the right man.

  But people who had gone all the way by seeming to be nothing more than sirnpleminded drudges, bumpkins, or glad-handing yes-men had names like Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev. From where Alex stood, there was no way to judge which category his host fell into.

  "Senior Lieutenant Aleksandr Pavlovich Gorsunov," the bear said in a voice which had achieved the texture of the average Russian road through lifelong intake of makhorka and raw alcohol.

  "That is correct, sir." Alex kept eyes-front.

  The man paused to draw on a cigarette. "Do you know who I am?"

  "No, sir." Alex lied. No matter what GRU liked to believe, the League's KGB was not the Cheka. Its higher officials were public figures, though most of them tried to keep their profiles low. Alex had seen this man caricatured in Ogonyok—still not the brightest thing in the world to do, but Ogonyok was like that—not two months ago. He was determined to concede not one damned thing.

  "I am Arkady Arbatov. I am head of the Fifth Chief Directorate of the League State Security Committee."

  Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, Alex thought, whatever that means.

  "I am surprised, Chief Director. I should think it would be the Chief Director of Border Guards who wished to conduct this interview."

  Arbatov dropped a scarred hand to his tabletop and stared at Alex through a cloud of smoke. His brows almost hid his tiny boar's eyes.

  "What in God's name are you talking about?" he demanded.

  "The seizure of your SIGINT station in the Arak Mountains by a half complement of Agent Detachment Tekhas, GRU Diversionary Troops, under my command."

  Arbatov went the color of boiled beets. "You insolent young pup!" he roared. "The world is falling into ruin, and you think we're concerned with your silly Young Pioneer games?"

  Alex tucked his head back on his neck and blinked. What the fuck, over?

  The director lowered himself into his chair, slowly, as if arthritis was chewing at his joints with sharp rat teeth.

  "Enough of these dominance games," he said. "Sit. You are a sufficiently worldly young man to realize that, should it be my design, I could snuff your life like a candle flame, with a pinch of my fingers." He made the appropriate gesture.

  Alex started to answer back. He sat instead. At close range, the director smelled of cheap soap and sweat as well as smoke.

  "Are you aware of what has gone on in the last twenty-four hours?"

  Alex shook his head.

  Arbatov's fingers fell like bludgeons on a thick folder on the desk before him. "Six weeks ago, KGB-Samarkand arrested an agitator known only as Timur." He raised his eyebrows. "Does that name suggest anything to you, Senior Lieutenant?"

  "No, sir."

  The big man sighed. "The American influence. And not just you, nor is it indeed the time you have spent in America. It affects all our youth: in looking heedlessly toward tomorrow, they forget the past."

  Where Alex had spent the second ten years of his life was classified a League secret. But if naval-infantry Spetsnaz lieutenants were aware of his background, Alex couldn't very well be surprised that a top man in the K knew.

  "It is a Turkic word meaning 'iron.' It was borne by a fourteenth-century conqueror who claimed to be the grandson of Chingis Khan and made pyramids of his enemies' skulls. A man whose armies twice occupied Moscow."

  "Oh, Tamerlane," Alex said.

  "The man the West calls Tamerlane. Of course, Americanized as you are, you've never heard of him."

  Alex commenced a slow burn. Arbatov went on. "Much of Central Asia is in revolt."

  "I did hear something about that on the news," Alex admitted.

  "We have reason to believe this Timur is at the heart of the rebellion."

  A knot was slowly unwinding in Alex's belly. He had finally caught on that if Arbatov didn't have him here to strangle him on a meat hook, he must need young Alex very badly indeed—though for what, Alex had no clue. Heads of Chief Directorates of the mighty Komitet did not pass their dawns chewing the fat with snot-nosed Special Designation lieutenants, no matter how elite they thought they were.

  Which gave him at least a measure of the privilege the GRU walk-on-water passports conferred on Texas Team, the ones that allowed them to go crawling through all kinds of off-limits dives without the militsiya, Georgian Republic MPs, or even low-level KGB types daring to fuck with them.

  "So the rebels are trying to grab for a little faded barbarian glory, calling their main man after the Iron Limper." So there, you fat old fuck, I even know what Tamerlane's name means.

  Arbatov glowered at him through the hedges of his brows. "Young man, you talk like a beer commercial. But you are correct."

  "So what's this got to do with me?"

  "Young man!" Arbatov thundered. Alex snapped like a spring out of the chair to full attention. "You have obviously ascertained that your Motherland has dire need of you. Being Russian, you are eager to make use of the advantage this confers. But remember: however badly I may need you, I know many ways of making your life miserable while making use of you! Understood?"

  "Yes, sir!"

  "Then sit, and show respect."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Yesterday a mob seized KGB headquarters in Tashkent and freed Timur. They acclaimed him their leader. Intelligence indicates the rebels are doing likewise all across Turkestan."

  "What about the army, sir?", Alex burst out. He knew Arbatov could carry out his threat if he took exception to the young man's daring to ask a question. He couldn't help himseif. There was nothing he hated worse than not knowing.

  "The army has the responsibility, as they never tire of reminding us, of securing the League's boundaries against the savages and irredentists who ring us in on every side."

  Irredentists was current Kremlin-speak for the Gentians. "While the armed forces claim great successes, it is apparent
that they have been unable to suppress the bandits."

  There was a real obvious question here, and Alex's jaw ached with the effort it took not to ask it.

  "I see you trying to hold your tongue, young man," Arbatov said. "Yes. It was in all tmth the KGB's responsibility to foresee and prevent the outbreak—and the Fifth Chief Directorate's. Something has gone very wrong in Turkestan."

  He pushed the thick dossier across to Alex. Alex hesitated, then picked it up. It was thick gray-green card stock. He paged quickly through the printouts. They were mostly fragmentary accounts of specific incidents—the surrender of the League base at Tashkent, the ambush of a munitions train outside Dushanbe, fighting in Bukhara's narrow streets.

  "There's not much here about Timur."

  "Indeed. We first learned of him during the troubles between the Meskhetians and the Uzbeks, ten years back. He was urging tolerance for the Meskhetians, who are a Turkish group deported by Stalin from the very part of Georgia in which you played your little prank upon the Border Guards. At the time, we dismissed him as what your American friends would term a 'bleeding heart.' It appears instead that his idea was to promote Turkish unity. He envisions nothing less grandiose than a Turko-Iranian nation-state, a 'liberated' Turkestan."

  "He's crazy," Alex said.

  "He is paranoid, at least, and cunning as the biack devil himself. In all this time we have not managed to obtain even a single undisputable photograph of the man. He is a man of almost total mystery." Arbatov looked at Alex. "The mystery that interests us most at the moment, however, is how he managed to orchestrate what appears to have been a carefully planned and precisely timed uprising while captive in the most secure cell beneath KGB -Tashkent."

  Alex pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. Somebody screwed the pooch big time, he thought. His GRU soul rejoiced. But what the hell does this have to do with me?

  Arbatov picked up a second folder, thinner than the first. He perched a ridiculously tiny pair of reading glasses on his nose and began leafing through it. "Agent Detachment Tekhas,' " he read. "What do we see? The son of a Georgian defector who changed his mind. An idealistic Canadian in search of his roots, in emulation of American Negroes, of all things. And the Old Bolsheviks thought jazz was decadent. A Cuban. The son of a scientist whose family Gorbachev permitted to live abroad with him." The last referred to Pyotr Yermakov. Mr. R