Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  Long legs flashing, the doctor ran desperately for Ak Tepe. She had to reach her people, help them however she could. There was a satlink in her clinic; she could somehow get in touch with the military, make them call off this insane attack.... The bandanna slipped off the heavy auburn hair that she refused to cut despite the summer heat.

  Two more shadows, low. She screamed in fury and frustration. Noise smashed through her symphony, staccato cracks like a string of firecrackers at a Chinese festival, horribly magnified. Clouds of tan earth pelted her from lines of small explosions marching down the fields to either side. Pebbles and dirt stung bare cheeks and legs. She put her head between her hands, staggered sideways, overcome by sensory overload and fear.

  I should lie down, an oddly rational part of her thought. She rejected it. She had to get to the satlink. She had no time to waste groveling in the dust. She ran.

  She felt a strange percussion on her skin. The orchestra yammered in her ears like idiot children. She tore the headphones off and let them datngle; their sounds made no sense to her now.

  Drumming surrounded her. She glanced aside. A helicopter was sliding past, a hideous thing, huge, striped black and yellow like the locusts who ravaged the fields year after year. Its mate swept by on her other hand. As it flew by the white hill, the gun slung beneath its chin swiveled, spat yellow flame. Dust puffed where the shells hit home.

  The helicopters vanished beyond the hill. She had the sense they were landing, for what purpose she had no idea. She could hear screaming now, the ragged edge of agony on the voices. She saw a stout woman sitting between two furrows staring at the blood pumping from her leg, which ended at the knee. She could not tell who it was.

  For a moment she slowed, puffing as though she'd run a marathon. The Kazakh woman was bleeding to death. Should she try to help her?

  But the children were in the village. The children. And the satellite communicator. The woman was probably past help; please God, the children weren't.

  It occurred to her Ak Tepe wasn't the safest place in the Motherland to be. It didn't matter. She ran.

  Borne on a whistling scream, the first rockets reached Ak Tepe the same instant she did.

  Frontal Aviation and the boys from Special Designation thought Al Capone was a dick, but to his tankers he was God. Tanks were the shield of the Motherland—and her mailed fist. The other elements of the air/land battle had their places, to be sure. But the true glory belonged to the men in the black coveralls.

  The lead company of the motorized rifle battalion attacked from the west in a classic wedge formation, tanks to the fore, Bronyirovannaya Mashina Pekhoty tracked personnel carriers bringing up the rear. The armored vehicles kept the minimum allowed interval of twenty-five meters to maximize impact, and they drove full-out. Concentration was the force multiplier, Karponin liked to say in professorial mode, what made speed and mass— Soviet shibboleths inherited by the League—into a truly irresistible onslaught.

  Of course, it helped that Karponin knew the objective's occupants possessed neither the anti-tank rockets to punish excessive speed nor the artillery that could make concentra-lion fatal.

  While BM-22 multiple-rocket launchers pummeled the village, obscuring the hilltop in a cloud of alkaline dust, the BMP-2s stopped a klick away. Desert-camouflaged fire teams spilled out. At a signal from the lead company commander, the battalion's towed and tracked artillery began a rolling barrage, moving across the field toward the hilltop. Stumbling a little across the furrows, the motorized infantrymen began to push through the wheat and cotton—hugging the barrage, as their general insisted.

  All in all, it was a textbook exercise.

  "What are you doing?" she screamed at the well-armed boy.

  He turned to stare at her, bringing up the can in his hand like one of the weapons hung from his harness. His uniform and camouflaged-covered helmet seemed two sizes too large for him.

  His mouth dropped open at what he saw: a tall woman, hair awry, face blackened but undeniably European beneath ash and grime. He shook the can once or twice as if to accompany words that did not actually emerge. Finally he said, "Painting 'ura pobyeda' on the wall," as if that should have been self-evident. He had a city-kid accent, Moscow street-tough.

  "Why?" she demanded.

  "Well—'hail victory,' you know. We—we won, didn't we?"

  At the look in her eye he fell back a step, hand moving to the pistolgrip of his slung Kalashnikov.

  Comrades' voices, from up the street. Looking relieved, he turned and ran, vaulting a sprawled body without a glance.

  She stared after him, wondering if the remote possibility occurred to him that the sad bag of meat, leaking now and surrounded by a pulsing cloud of flies, had been the grandmother of half a dozen, including a boy about his own age serving with a labor battalion in the Ukraine. When the Motor Rifle troops had hauled Karolina roughly from the ruins of the clinic, the elderly woman thought they were attacking the doctor, and threw herself at them tooth and claw. They had shot her down, casually, as if she were a gopher in a koopkhoz truck garden.

  Altynjan, her name had been: "Golden Soul."

  The doctor wandered. The invaders hadn't known what to do with her, a League official and Great Russian, to boot. Eventually she was shoved to one side and told to stand there under the eye of a pair of teenaged sentries. But they had been exalted, taking pictures of the glorious desolation they'd wrought, with camera that reduced the scene to data on a floppy chip, and had themselves drifted away.

  The stench swaddled her like blankets: fuel and burned styrofoam and roasted meat and dust and the smell of death, thick and sweet and stale. Too bad they couldn't capture that smell, release it in the theaters when they showed movies of the glorious war.

  She trailed a finger along a wall. Amazing how much abuse a cluster of dirt huts could take. Low walls of brick, thick mud stabilized with straw, directed the forces of explosions around them. Unless one took a direct hit, of course. The way her clinic had, just before she'd gotten there.

  On the theory that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, she had sheltered in the gutted hut with half a dozen villagers. During the bombardment she'd had plenty of time to recall reading that lightning in fact strikes repeatedly in the same spot, but by idiot luck she'd survived.

  The sound of a helicopter caught the hem of her attention. Swiping absently at a burn on her face, then shaking her fingers to rid them of napalm-residue strings from her hair, she moved toward the village edge.

  She knew the man walking up the white shell-chumed slope. That handsome face crossed by that scar was familiar to every TV viewer in the League, if not the world. General < olonel Anatoliy Karponin courted publicity as Third World tycoons courted Western film stars.

  She blinked at him as he walked by, oblivious to her existence. Maybe I'm invisible, she thought. Maybe I died in the attack, and I'm just a wraith.

  She had left her dilettante/debutante life-style, the dacha near Sochi, the apartments in Moscow and Paris, because at core she really did want to help people; she wanted to heal. She was a person who had gotten everything she really wanted, first through her daddy's influence, later through her own talent and unstinting effort.

  Now she wanted something she had never wanted before. Something she never thought she could want.

  She wanted to kill someone.

  The videocams followed Karponin through the village like acolytes. The doctor turned and walked into the desert.

  Chapter SEVENTEEN

  Day died hard in the desert. The land had long gone dark, but the sky was a weird luminous white-yellow-blue, except for just above the horizon. There it looked as if somebody had dipped two fingers in blood and drawn them across the sky.

  From thirty meters along the hip of the escarpment came the reedy just-post-adolescent voice of the apprentice cantor, or whatever the fuck he was. Poor kid, Eddie thought, shaking his head to drive away the swarming no-see-'ems who seemed to ooze o
ut of the sandstone. He'd rather be out cruising, listening to some tunes, and trying to dip his wick. Instead he's got to learn a quarter million lines of poetry about some guy who's always getting his ass hauled out of cracks by his horse. He wondered how the Kirghiz kid had gotten roped into the apprenticeship in the first place. Probably was doing it to please his dad. God alone knew what had gotten him and the old guy, Aliyev, mixed up with rebellion.

  And speaking of horses. .. horse troopers, for Christ's sake. Here we are on the bubble of the twenty-first century, a new millennium, no less, and I'm in the by God cavalry. What'll these rebels think up next, the crossbow?

  Fast Eddie turned up the volume on the tune he was humming to drown out the droning and shook sweat from his eyes. In a mere couple of hours, he knew, they'd all be grateful for the residual heat baking up out of the hardpan and sand. The humidity in the broad valley of Syr Dar'ya trapped heat, but the weather reports said that around midnight it was going to get cold. By that time they should just be settling into position for their attack on the Operation Desert Wind forward supply dump, one of many dotted along Karponin's projected line of advance upriver.

  The slab boulder was hot on Eddie's butt. He was sitting in the open, out from under the tough sandstone overhang where they'd passed the day, in a groove wind had worn in the softer stone below the caprock, and human hands had deepened. This was away from the track usually beaten by caravans, and while the odds were astronomical against anybody monitoring real-time satellite imaging of precisely this stretch of escarpment between the Muyun Qum—the "Camel's Neck Sands"—and the river at a scale that would even show them, they were not going to beat the League Army by taking avoidable risks.

  Eddie smiled humorlessly for his own benefit. They weren't going to beat the League Army, in the long run. In the short run, they had to; there was the mission, and the incidental matter of his own personal ass.

  Immediately speaking, they were damned well going to. The fix was in.

  He tapped at the keyboard of his notebook-sized satlink computer, being amused at just how easy espionage was in (lie modern world. The rebels weren't just permitting him to haul the computer with him, they ordered him to. Timur had very high-tech ideas about how to run a Third World revolution.

  Actually, what Eddie had seen of the rebel commo/ intelligence setup impressed him. Leaguers had gotten sophisticated about computers since the days when Soviet chess champ Kasparov practically had to smuggle PCs in to kids, though Eddie suspected some of Timur's tech elves had gotten training in the U.S. or Japan. Maybe he even had some American whiz-kid volunteers—though if the sampling of wanna-be warriors was an indicator, they'd all be goofballs except the spies. However it came about, the rebels had a damned sophisticated touch for exploiting the world-girdling and infinitely controversial Net.

  Eddie's commands turned a little software robot loose, out among the satellites. The Net was amoral. More to the point, unless you did something major ballsy or major dumb, like trying to crack the Dai-Nihon insurance group's data base, what you did in it was intrinsically untraceable. That was what made the world's governments so nuts.

  It was also the beauty of the Net for spying—hell, for the whole C-cubed-I panorama; command, control, communications, and intelligence.

  The robot homed to the address it had been programmed to seek. Then it sent back a message, indistinguishable among the trillion or so flashing along the Net at any given instant. Eddie's screen lit 'Are you ready, Eddie?"

  He grinned. KGB had let him dictate his own recognition codes. They hadn't come within light-years of spotting the rock 'n' roll references. Then again, GRU had used the chunk they'd bought of the Cuckoo's Egg to build him an alter ego named for his three idols: Eddie van Halen, Willie Randolph, and Paul Newman's character from The Hustler.

  He typed, "Ready to rock and roll." It was all mickey mouse anyway; his robot and their guard dog routines had established all the bona fides that mattered in a couple nanoseconds.

  The screen flashed into today's post returns for the dump they were about to hit, complete with reference strings he could pull to bring up complete personnel and State Security records on the tiny guard detail, relief schedules, check-in times, everything. Courtesy of KGB, who fished most of it right out of the army's own net. They wanted their boy to make a good impression on his boss.

  "How goes it, my friend?"

  Taking his time, he tapped the hot key. The screen switched instantly to the feed from the rebel downlink. He noted in passing it bore a disturbingly close resemblance to what he was getting from KGB. It gave him a chill; armed forces' net had been penetrated big-time. He hated the ramifications. He could do nothing about them.

  Then he looked up at the compact man in the League uniform coat who had spoken and laughed out loud. "Well, considering the fact that I'm trying to train a unit with twelfth-century transport to take on a twentieth-century army, and about half my boys know as much about horseback riding as I do, which is jack, and I'm working with a mondo bizarro Mongol Horde grab bag including an ethnic Korean, humongous ethnic Gypsy twins who are in constant danger of getting lynched by their buddies for filching, and the oldest PFC in the Turkestani Defense Forces, things couldn't possibly be goddam better." Oh, and one ethnic-Arab Azerbaijani spy from HQ. Can't forget about him.

  Ali al-'Ajawi squatted next to him. "Are you unhappy?" He sounded genuinely concerned. Eddie believed that, uh-huh. He also believed he'd collect Social Security one day.

  He shrugged, grinned. "Not at all. I'm a can't-resist-a-challenge kind of guy." That really was true. Although this was maybe kind of a large challenge ....

  "Has anything changed?" The Arab gestured at Eddie's computer.

  "Not that I can see, Colonel," he said. "Maybe I'm being a mother hen about this, checking every four minutes."

  "No such thing. We have these resources, such as no warrior ever has before. Why not make use of them? Like djinn from a bottle, eh?"

  The reference hit too damned close to what Eddie had just uncorked from his computer, courtesy of KGB. He turned his grimace into a grin. "I wouldn't mind a little gin from a bottle, right now." Jeez, was that weak, or what?

  "I wouldn't take you for a gin drinker, Lieutenant." Eddie raised an eyebrow. "Don't be surprised that I know my liquors. I'm not a practicing Muslim. Many Central Asians aren't; Turkestan is famed for its cognac, did you know?"

  "No, I didn't. I'm still learning a lot about this part of the world." ,

  He felt the Arab's eyes on him, felt the next question on its way: "Just what brings you to our desolate corner of the earth, Lieutenant?" It came casual, just passing the time, smoking and joking with a fellow troop. Sure.

  You son of a bitch. What's one of Timur's major butt boys doing chaperoning a milk-run raid by a training company anyway?

  "You know how it goes," he said, shrugging. "It's not just the job, it's the adventure. Not much of that left, back in the world."

  He snapped the computer shut. "Can't stay on too long. Don't want the men to think I'm linking down some fuck show from Rio. They damn near lynched me when I told them they couldn't bring radios or flip players on this joyride."

  Radio frequency detection did concern him—electronic emissions had a way of standing out way out here in the desert, even the very weak ones of radio receivers or satlinks. He was more worried about noise discipline; he wasn't about to have some recent poli-sci major from Tashkent U settle into position for the coming raid and decide to pass the time by cranking up 3 Mustaphas 3 or the latest Serious cut from Freedom Kills! or Duty.

  Though he joked about lynching, it wasn't all that funny. He was still a long way from popular with this crew, especially among the Tadzhiks, some of whom carried lockets with photos of the late Ayatollah Khomeni on the chains with their dog tags. Fragging officers was the fastest-growing sport among all the world's armies.

  Ali wasn't going to be deflected. Of course. "Still, I'm curious, my friend. You went t
hrough long and arduous training. Why not stay in the profession you worked so hard to master?"

  "Challenge wasn't there," he said, a little surprised at how smoothly the lie flowed. He'd spent half his life as a spy, but lying had formed small part of it; it had been more a constant game of I've Got a Secret. "The developed nations keep up their balance of trade exporting military advisers to the developing ones. Brass told me / had to stay home as an instructor. A real crock. I was too good for my own good, you know?"

  "Are you really so avid for adventure? You seem a turbulent soul. Yet I should think you'd seek the opposite of excitement."

  Eddie looked at him. Ali shrugged, quietly laughed. "And I suppose you were eager to strike a blow for freedom," the Arab said wryly.

  From down the rubble slope came a soft hooting, a burrowing-owl call. The sentries were bringing somebody in. Indiges loved that sort of B-movie Beau Geste business, and Eddie did too, for that matter. Since they were into controlling their emissions, it did make more sense than shouting, "Hey, infidel dog, sir, we got company."

  Eddie stood, feeling relieved despite the pain it caused him. President Fyodorin himself with his personal battalion of black-beret MVD guards would be a relief after this amiable inquisition. "Freedom. Sure. De opreso liber, and all like that." He started down the hill.

  He moved gingerly. Hell; he moved like Uncle Lucky alter tying one on. After two days' hard riding, he wasn't falling off his horse more than once every couple hours, which to his mind vindicated the notion of progress. But his inner thighs trembled like the branches of the poplars down by the Syr in the never-ending wind, and most of his parts hurt.

  It was a cold camp he picked his painful way through, without the usual fragrant fires of kiziak, dried sheep shit, the fuel oil of your desert nomad. That was fine with Eddie; the stuff made his allergies act up. A kiziak fire didn't give off a lot of light, and they could mask the heat well enough among or under all these jumbled red rocks. But they were in Indian country now—cavalry country, if you thought about it, but Eddie was trying not to—and there was always a chance of a helicopter cruising downwind towing a particle sampler, a "people sniffer," that could detect the pungent smell of a dung fire put out in profusion.