by Victor Milán
The holes of Abdulsattah's face opened wide, eyes and mouth and nostrils, and its color fell away. In those eyes Eddie saw a flash of surprise, of terror, as they stared into the barrel of the Glock, four-tenths of an inch wide, an infinity deep. But nothing of doubt. Self-delusion had predeceased Abdulsattah by fractional seconds.
The safety slug exploded on impact with the flat bone of Abdulsattah's cheek. The three hundred tiny shot within had enough cohesion and kinetic energy to punch through the zygomatic process half a centimeter below the right eye and mig loose hell in the brain behind.
The right side of Abdulsattah's face collapsed. His head snapped back, blood squirting from the corners of his eyes. Eddie took little for granted, but somehow he knew there was no call for a follow-up round, the second benediction of the classic anti-terrorist double-tap.
The match fell into the sand along with Abdulsattah's Hopping body. Flickered. Died.
Eddie pivoted with ballet precision. His body snapped into the Weaver stance, left arm extended, right hand cupping pistol hand and pistol, pulling tension to lock body and arms in a rigid triangle. The three dots floated before the front of Samirov's tunic.
"Call off your wolves, Samirov," he told Abdulsattah's second-in-command. Inside he felt turbulence like boiling water, but without heat. He had fired at human targets before and was confident some of his targets died. But there had always been distance. He had never killed anybody like this, close enough to feel their fluids drying on his face in the angry sun.
"Do it now, Samirov. Have 'em drop their weapons. They might shoot me to pieces, but no power on this earth will prevent me pumping one in your belly. You know what a Glaser is, asshole? You'll be hours dying, and it'll hurt like one mother fucker. Takes a lot longer than burning, brother."
The ghazi second-in-command was staring at him. Samirov's jaw had dropped. A rope of saliva fell out over his hanging underlip, unreeled toward the ground. A mewing escaped him, then, turned into a strange gobbling, choking sound. He doubled, eyes impaled on the Glock's black muzzle, and then he sat down hard and began pumping at the sand with both legs, looking for all the world as if he were working out on a leg machine at Nautilus, sculling himself backward, away from Eddie, away from his pistol. The fat warm smell of fresh shit filled Eddie's nostrils.
Well, Brother Samirov's departed controlled flight, Eddie thought. Swell. Behind him he heard the cYick-slam of a Kalashnikov bolt being thrown.
The last time he'd dived right in amid things in the vague expectation of being backed up... if it hadn't been for the handy little Glock, the four dudes from Naval Infantry Spetzsnaz would probably still be dancing on his face in that fucking bar in Georgia. The Glock wasn't going to be enough this time. If the Blue Sky Riders decided it was time for all good Central Asians to show solidarity, he would in short order be spritzing from so many holes he'd look like one of those hoses the goyim used to water their nice suburban lawns. ...
"Drop your weapons," he heard someone say behind him. Maqsut.
A ghazi stared past Eddie in disbelief. "But are we not all Turkestani?"
"Gapirmang!" another Blue Sky Rider snapped. "Shut up. Only those who follow the will of Timur may call themselves that. Now do as Ley tenant Eddie khaan says, or we'll trickle your blood in the sand."
League Undersecretary of State Pavel Valentinovich Vorov'yev stood at the dacha's great south-facing windows, gazing out at the Ural pine forests near Kuybyshev and contemplating decadence.
Behind him council members punished the buffet and clattered to each other about the intractable Red Sands crisis. He swirled wine in the cut glass goblet, gazed moodily down into it. A California sauvignon, supposedly laid down before the American ban on domestic wine production. To serve it at a council meeting, even an informal one, was something of a slap at the Americans, with whom the League took pains to maintain a wary rapprochement since the Americans' sullen realization that their aid had financed not rehabilitation but rearmament.
He sipped the wine. It was very good. There was fine vodka at the buffet. But when one is surrounded by decadence and cannot materially affect it, one would be a fool not to partake. That was decadent thinking, he knew.
The medals on the chest of his Western-style suit, dark blue, severe, and immaculately tailored to his marathon-runner's frame, were another form of decadence. Mere ostentation. Empty display.
The damage the fool Gorbachev had done ran too deep. There was too much to undo. The League was still saddled with press freedoms and traces of the market economy, which could be squeezed but not entirely done away with. Worst of all was this pretense of autonomy.
It had gone off in their faces. Now the black-asses were in open rebellion, and the achievements of the glorious armed forces rang as tinnily and emptily as the service medals on a youthful undersecretary's chest. Vorov'yev had served his country with distinction fighting the savages in Afghanistan, had earned the rank podpolkovnik, lieutenant colonel. And what of that? All of them bore military rank, the thick-bodied balding men grazing at the buffet behind him, and they seemed to have as little substance as their reflections that flitted ghostly in the glass before him.
"So pensive, Pasha."
Vorov'yev turned. Marshal Burdeinyi, chief of STAVKA, looked every millimeter the elder military hero, with his astonishing white eyebrows and shiny dome of skull, innocent of hair as a dolphin's, his oil-dram chest lit up with medals like the exploding scoreboard at the Moscow Sports Palace. Yet he had never heard a shot fired in anger.
"I find myself momentarily overcome with luxury, Marshal."
The marshal produced a laugh like pebbles in a tumbler. The hand he laid on Vorov'yev's shoulder was soft as a brick. "You sound like a damned perestroikachik. The grave responsibility we bear demands compensation. Surely you don't begrudge us our simple dachas, do you, Pavel Valentinovich?"
Vorov'yev held up his goblet. "Like you, I enjoy the wine, Marshal." Burdeinyi laughed again and patted him on the shoulder.
The lodge had been built after the League's formation, as one of the incoming regime's rewards to itself. It was sunk into the side of a mountain, all gleaming glass and hardwood, passive and active solar for the sake of being kulturnyy in the world of the nineties. Not thirty kilometers away the country's biggest emergency command post, the bolt hole for the president, his council, and STAVKA in of the oh-so-remote case of war with the League's friendly rivals of the West—or the less-remote case of war with those smooth-faced barbarians the Chinese—lay buried beneath a massive slab of living rock at Zhiguli.
The rulers of the Liga had done themselves proud in more than just comfort. An entire SAM battalion surrounded the estate, and a regiment of picked OMON troops patrolled the perimeter, though their jackbooted feet were not permitted to sully the immaculately manicured grounds short of actual emergency. Less than ten kilometers back in the hills lay a League D-Spetsnaz training camp for mountain and forest warfare. The dacha lacked Zhiguli's cement and stone, but was comfortably safe from assault.
"It's beautiful, is it not?" the marshal said, looking out across the deck and the rose garden right below the window at the broad green lawn.
"Very beautiful."
"The president was wise to convene us here. I find the mountain air quite stimulating, Pasha. And the gardens—do you know that roses grown here have won prizes all over the world?"
"Is that so?"
The marshall glowed with pride at being so kulturnyy. "Indeed it is. Our roses are the best in all the world."
The best roses come from Fergana. The best in the League; some say in the world.
The best gardeners likewise come from Fergana.
The dacha's master gardener was old. He had served the masters of the state for almost half a century, since shortly after Stalin's death. When the lodge was built, it had gone without saying that he and his staff—the youngest of whom was a grandfather—should be installed here. The rulers of Russia deserved the best, it was tr
aditional, and the master gardener and his staff were the best.
The old man parked his wheelbarrow laden with tools covered by a burlap sack and looked up. A story above him the lodge's southern windows shimmered like a glacier wall. In the thin hot midday sun he could see a tall young man and a stout older man standing behind them. Their eyes looked at him without seeing.
Half a dozen of his assistants trudged after him, two bent low beneath the weight of a ladder. They weren't charged with tending the roses alone, but all the estate's greenery. Sometimes the trees needed pruning. Today there was much pruning to be done.
He remembered the blue high Pamirs looming like guardian giants above the valley where he was born. He had not seen those mountains in fifty years.
He would not see them again.
His assistants gathered around him. They were all Kirghiz too. He knelt beside his barrow, threw back the rough burlap.
Inside were stacked Yugoslav MGV-176 machine pistols. They were manufactured by the Gorenje company, which at one time made household appliances. They were stubby and short and very handy, with folding stocks and M88 noise/ flash suppressors built onto the barrels. Clear plastic drums holding one hundred seventy-six rounds of .22 Long Rifle each were mounted on top, after the fashion of the old Lewis machine gun.
The stooped old men were used to handling gardeners' tools, not weapons. The MGV-176 had been designed with men like them in mind.
* * *
Drifting back to the buffet to fortify himself for the afternoon council session with another glass of wine, Pavel Vorov'yev heard a sound like a bird tapping at the window. Frowning, he turned back.
The huge sheet of glass starred along a line from lower right to upper left. The window fell in, jagged sheets of glass and a flurry of powdered-glass snow.
Marshal Burdeinyi spun around. His blue eyes stared at Vorov'yev through a mask of blood and terminal surprise. The front of his tunic was stitched in brilliant crimson.
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
General Colonel Anatoliy Karponin took a sip from his plastic cup of vodka and set it to hold down the bottom edge of the map he had unrolled on the table in his personal trailer. He liked maps—real maps, not computer displays. He resolutely refused to turn his personal sanctum into a bizarre technocratic wonderland of flashing, beeping displays.
Someone knocked. "Advance," he called, and turned in his chair to see a sentry in battle dress, his face a bizarre mask of green and black combat paint, hold the door open for Captain Rybalko.
The young officer's republican guard still held most of its crispness, showing little effect from the muggy Syr Dar'ya night. Karponin nodded millimetric approval. Soldiers responded well to officers who were willing to share danger with them, but they only respected those who continued to look like officers.
"What's happened, Captain?" the general asked. Rybalko was one of the few privileged to disturb him here when he was snatching a few minutes' rest. One reason he extended such privilege to an officer so junior was his confidence it would not be abused.
The captain hesitated. Karponin felt surprise; hesitation was as small a part of Rybaiko's nature as his own.
"General Colonel, there are no new developments to report. But there is a situation which continues to develop ...." His voice tailed off. He cleared his throat.
"General Colonel, please rebuke me if I overstep. But as we advance along the Syr, the rebels are massing in the Qizil Qum desert, to the south and west of us. These satellite photos—" He drew a manila envelope from beneath his arm.
"I've seen the satellite photos," Karponin said quietly.
"The rebels have no tanks or planes, and what artillery they have is scattered about. Their positions tend to be dispersed. While our satellites can show us the activities of even an individual enemy soldier in real time, the Red Sands are too vast for us to learn much by canvassing them square meter by square meter."
"I understand the limitations of our wonderful technological toys, Captain. Our coverage is also interrupted by sandstorms this time of year."
"Yes, sir. But the rebels do have trucks. And they are streaming into the desert on our flank."
"Which I am exposing." A whisper. Rybalko snapped to attention.
Karponin leaned back in his leather-covered chair. "Captain, you are correct. But understand: we're not fighting the German Irredentists here. We are fighting an undisciplined, badly organized, ill-equipped rabble with little chance to beat us in an open fight. They don't have the mobility to attack us by surprise, even with all the tracks in Central Asia.
"The enemy that concerns me more is our own government. The men in the field face the same vacillation, the same ridiculous concern for world opinion, that betrayed us in Afghanistan. That permitted the nationalities to humble the Union, and force this charade of a League upon us."
Rybalko was practically vibrating with tension now, uncertain whether his general was about to level him with a mighty blast or start babbling treason. A little fear will do the boy good. Complacent, he's useless to me.
"I can take Tashkent within the week, as I have sworn to do. But Tashkent's just a city. Timur won't throw his army away defending it; he knows I can take it from him."
He joined hands before his face, forefingers extended. His hands were large and surprisingly soft for a man of his reputation. "A protracted war is a rebel victory. Our esteemed leadership will lose what resolve the assassinations instilled in it. They will make terms, and the League will become a joke. I need the rebels to concentrate against me, so that I may use my speed, mass, and concentration to destroy them. They'll never do that unless they think they have a chance to win.
"And so"—He spread his hands—"I expose my flank."
Timur walked alone between the desert and the stars, head down. "Timur-yaan," Francis Marron called, walking toward him from the encampment purposefully, but not fast. The Sons of the Sky-Blue Wolf were never far.
Timur stopped, raised his head. Marron caught a glint of starlight in the black eyes. He shivered. He couldn't see Timur well, but somehow he had never seen anyone look more desolate.
"You should be more careful," Marron said, coming up to Timur. "An assassin could get right up next to you, and bang."
"I'm not unprotected." An easy gesture toward his escorts. Timur met Marron's gaze, and whatever the American had seen there was gone. Perhaps it was just a trick of the light.
Marron shook his head. "Sorry, sir, but that just won't cut it. A resolute man could easily get as close as I've gotten, if he didn't care about coming back."
"I certainly respect your opinions in these matters, Mr. Marron; I know you have a good deal of experience in the field."
Marron turned his head aside, just in case it was light enough for Timur to see the way his mouth twisted.
Timur walked on. "In any event, that which I have set in motion will not stop simply because I am removed. An assassin would spend his life in vain."
That's what you always think, you Third World charismatic types, Marron thought. And how wrong you always are. He almost spoke the thought aloud; Timur's crazy tolerance-fixation encouraged those around him to speak their minds. But Marron was too cautious, too worldwise. Even the best-intentioned fool had a temper, and with his tcenaged Wolves prowling nearby, Timur's most transient whim could be deadly.
"I feel duty-bound to tell you, sir, you're putting yourself in a highly risky position."
"Do you say this as a friend of Turkestan, or as a representative of your government?"
"I—I'd have to say both. I'm here to observe your revolution at first hand, but in so doing I have developed the highest respect for you, sir." To his surprise, it was true. Timur was a fool. But he was a man on horseback, a visionary. Marron had been a child during Kennedy's Camelot. His parents had believed and always taught him that JFK was a pure leader, and he had grown up searching for a man of the kind his parents had described. Timur was perhaps the closest he had come.
>
A magnificent fool, he decided. He found it mattered to him, the outcome of this final shot at dissuading him from folly.
"Timur, the world is an interdependent place. Nobody goes it alone. I apologize for lecturing you about it, but it's true." He surprised himself again by apologizing. In the course of Marron's professional life America's proconsuls had not often apologized for patronizing their clients.
"I am hardly alone, my friend. We are tens of millions strong."
"I mean countries. No native resistance movement has ever succeeded without external help. You have none."
"I've heard that theory. I find it debatable, myself—but I decline to debate it with you, Mr. Marron. I've too much on my mind."
"I understand fully, sir. I'm grateful to you for giving me this time, you know I am. But, even at this late hour, it's not too late to accept American assistance—"
Marron was trotting after Timur like a dog, torn between anger and frustrated tears. "You can have me shot for saying so. but without our help you don't stand a chance!"
Timur halted, faced him. "Mr. Marron, I have oftentimes feared I would become the sort of man who would order another killed for speaking what he felt to be the truth; you are so concerned in your country with substances you think are dangerous, but never will you admit the truth, which is that power is the deadliest drug of all. If power makes me into such a being, I pray that an assassin may strike me down.
"But I think we can win with what we have. Even now our forces gather in the Red Sands Desert, to strike at the flank the butcher Karponin has left open in his arrogance. He had made a mistake in this single-minded drive for Tashkent, and it gives us an opportunity to smash his army, better armed and better trained though they are."
Marron opened his mouth, but there was really nothing to say. Timur wasn't finished anyway.
"I appreciate your offer, Mr. Matron. But there are strings attached to American aid. I fear that if I touch what you offer, those strings will adhere to the backs of my hands.