Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  "I thank you for your concern for our fate. Good night." He turned away with finality and marched back toward the blacked-out tents. Marron stood looking after him, fists balled and mouth open, breathing deeply.

  If that's the way you want to play it, he thought, then the blood is on your hands. His knees trembled with outrage. Timur wasn't just a fool, he was a murderer, who was going to sacrifice his own life and the lives of thousands if not tens of thousands of his followers to his crazy pride. Addicted to his outmoded, dangerous notions of freedom and autonomy, he was going to put a match to everything he claimed to be fighting for.

  It made it that much easier to do what was necessary.

  Sondra Mohn caught the telephone before the second ring. She was fully awake and alert by the time she pressed it to her ear.

  "Yes."

  "We're getting a satlink communication from Turkestan. Our CIA boy with the rebels."

  "Marron."

  "That's the one."

  Some of the younger men at State were becoming informal to the edge of impertinence. She made a mental note to squash this one at the first convenient moment.

  "We've got him on-line now, if you want to talk to him."

  "No." The man did not mean literally talk, he meant that she could get on her terminal and connect to State, from which she could be patched on in order that she and Marron could type at each other. But to career women of Mohn's generation the secretarial pool was much like La Brea Tar Pits to a saber-toothed tiger: once it caught you, it never let you go. In a computer-dominated age Sondra Mohn refused to so much as touch a keyboard, lest her fingers stick to the keys.

  There was voice-recognition software, now, so you didn't have to type to talk to computers, and Mohn made use of computers in their place. But she had nothing to say to Mr. Marron. She presumed he knew his business, because NSA and CIA alike were aware of the consequences of palming an incompetent off on her come appropriations time—especially with Enforcement Affairs insisting that the old intelligence agencies were redundant, inefficient, and unnecessary.

  Also, she had no wish to prolong the contact. It was fairly safe; Timur was really enough of a radical idiot not to restrict access to the Net, and a low-power satellite link was inherently hard to detect and trace. There were "smart" software routines that could be turned loose in the Net to keep watch for spies, but even in the unlikely event Third World rebels had access to such tools, they were so painfully ingenuous she honestly doubted they'd think of using them. On the other hand, if something did go wrong, she did not want the blame for keeping the spook on-line for too long. Her philosophy of power was to avoid incurring gratuitous ill will. Her methodology of power incurred a great deal of it necessarily.

  "I have a printer in my bedroom," she told the telephone. "Feed it through."

  "You've got it." The duty man at State rang off, leaving Mohn determined to put him in his place good and hard.

  She forgot her resolve when Marron's report whispered out of her laserprinter. After no more than a glance, she had the telephone clamped between the old-fashioned hairnet she wore at night and her heavy flannel nightgown, pressing a preprogrammed button—single buttons posed no threat.

  "Alio," a muzzy voice said at the other end.

  "Ambassador Kapushtin? Mohn. Listen, Ivan, I have a little information that might be useful to you ...."

  Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

  The three BMP-2s of the advance guard's combat recon patrol resolved out of the desert between two low sawback ridges in a shimmer of heat. Fast Eddie tried to whistle, but his lips were too dry. He sucked them, trying to bring moisture to relieve his dry mouth. His gum had all melted in the Red Sands heat. He had left even his precious Glock behind so he could carry an extra liter of water, but today he didn't have a drop to waste.

  "Jagun 23, this is Six," he said for the benefit of the hands-free mike on the headset he wore over his Yankees cap. "Three Bravo Mike Papas, twenty-five hundred meters north, headed our way. We're going to cross them: Bravo, engage eastern target, Charlie, middle target, Delta the one on the west end. Alfa will reserve for a follow-up; we want these bad boys rattled good. Wait for my command, and remember, Khudaga tanklar bering."

  "Your pronunciation improves, Eddie-janaap," came the dry voice of Shy Bunny, back from his compassionate leave and seemingly in high spirits—maybe too high, as if he were planning to take his grief out on the enemy. Eddie still read his reliability as high, for an indige anyway. "Allaaga shukur—that means, 'thank God.'"

  "Yeah, Roger that. Wait for my command." He avoided the use of the word fire. You never said fire to indigenous forces unless that's what you wanted them to do. He was pleased with the way 23 had pulled together, but he could never let himself forget what they were.

  If only it were a little clearer what I'm supposed to be.

  He hit the squelch and said "Steady" to Asraar, the missileer for Alfa, his own section. The young electrician's apprentice from Samarkand sat next to him behind a camel-prickle bush, peering through the computerized sight of a tripod-mounted TQW-missile.

  Because this was the only time they were going to be able to prepare, the launcher was emplaced in a fair approximation of a by-the-manual TOW fighting position, a hole dug two feet deep in the tough khaki-colored syerozem soil, shaded by a canopy made from a desert-pattern camouflage tent from a sporting goods store in Bukhara, held up by four tubular aluminum tent poles from the same source. To foil overhead reconnaissance—including satellites, in case the League was picking over the entire Qizil Qum square meter by square meter, which he guessed would take a couple years minimum—clumps of tough feather grass had been piled on top. Even if remote infrared sensing had enough resolution to pick up a variation that small, he guessed the feather grass, each clump of which held a big fist of dry soil in its roots, looked no more dead up there than it did on the ground. If they left the stuff up there, it would probably thrive; it was perverse and mean as everything that lived in this desert, including humans.

  Asraar's fingers tapped lightly on the sighting unit's plastic housing. "I am steady," he said. "What about you, qimmatlik amerikalikT'

  Eddie wiped sweat from his eyes, glanced sideways at Asraar, looked away fast. After all his time in the Muslim East he was still a little dubious about the fact that a man could call another "dear" without trying to be fresh. Of course, in the Muslim East, he likely was trying to be fresh, but it wasn't the necessary case.

  "I'm cool," he said. "Only thing that spooks me is this shit." He tapped the earphone of the lightweight headset. "Squad-level satlink communications, and the damned thing weighs less than the old AN/PRC-70s we used in basic." Headset, electronics, milliwatt power supply, and the half-meter-long half-moon-shaped phased-microarray smart antenna resting beside the TOW pit altogether weighed fifteen kilos. And Sertikan, hidden with Asraar's mount in a little gravelly draw behind them, got to hump it most of the time.

  "We don't have this stuff outside Special Forces, and neither do the, ah, neither does the League," Eddie said in a leading tone. Time for a little intelligence-gathering, here. Anyway he really wanted to know how these ragged-ass rebels got gear like that.

  Asraar laughed. "They could buy it from the Japanese, just as we did. These are consumer electronics, and very reasonably priced. I cannot speak for you Americans, but I think the Nikolays do not trust their soldiers with communications tools this powerful."

  Hmm. He wondered if the Americans felt the same way.

  One thing was damned sure: Timur's little elves hadn't trolled in all this neat poop in only eight weeks. Jagun 23's four TOW-2 launchers were outmoded, though still effective, as were the simpler but shorter-ranged and less-powerful MILAN launchers Alfa and Charlie sections carried. Because they had been superseded by smarter weapons systems, they were fairly cheap these days, and the various marks of Soviet/League RPG anti-tank rockets the unit carried for close-in work had been falling off trucks and walking out of dumps for years.
And as far as Eddie knew, any hobbyist could pick up the parts to make a satlink walkie-talkie at Radio Shack, more or less as Asraar said. But his missile men had photocopied manuals for their weapons in hand long before he arrived, and knew how to use their pieces.

  Something had been seriously wrong in Central Asia for months in advance of the uprising, if not years. In Soviet times, Asian troops seldom got weapons training of any sort, and never in Western weapons. Timur had been training and prepping the hard core of his army for a hell of a long time, right under the nose of the KGB.

  The Chekists fuck up again, he thought with savage satisfaction. It was going to be fun calling attention to that fact in his next sitrep to Arbatov.

  If he ever got to make it.

  From Bukhara in the south, in the green Zeravshan valley above the confluence with the Amu, to Ak Mechet on the Syr is about five hundred and seventy-five kilometers by air. What lies between is the Red Sands.

  From Samarkand to Bukhara the Zeravshan runs mostly west in a north-bent arc. The valley's northern boundary is a writhe of ridges and mountains that runs on west across Qizil Qum almost to the Amu and the desolate Zaunguzk Plateau before zagging back to the northeast like a cobra rearing to strike. About midway between Bukhara and the White Fortress, the cobra's hood is a bowl of hard-crusted sand a hundred kilometers across, dotted with weird alkaline deposits and patchy clay pans called takyr.

  Fast Eddie had Jagun 23 strung out over nearly a kilometer, in pairs, mostly to keep his troopies from getting lonely. When soldiers—indiges in particular, but everybody—started feeling abandoned or feeling that they were the last living thing on earth was when they bugged out, especially when the shitstorm of an artillery barrage began to thunder in their ears and squash the air right out of their chests.

  It was an enormous front for a company of just shy a hundred men to cover. But they weren't talking holding off an infantry assault here; if they were still on hand when the Motor Rifle boys de-assed their BMPs, it was definitively game over.

  Away to the west a column of smoke rose into a sky whose blue stung the eye. They had been watching tiny sun-glinting arrowheads darting about in that direction for the past hour, as League attack planes worked somebody over. Eddie hoped Frontal Aviation stayed infatuated with that set of victims. He had his Strelas and his ersatz Stingers, but Jagun 23's best defense was that the Red Sands were huge and it was small and spread out.

  He raised his binoculars again. The BMPs were coming hard and fast and arrogant, as befit Al Capone's fair-haired sons of bitches. The only thing keeping the pedal from the metal was fear of throwing a tread on the uncertain ground or nosing into a hidden wadi; they were going to smash through these black-ass rebels by the sheer size of their cocks alone. It was as if man-portable anti-armor weapons had never been heard of.

  "Stupid fucks," Eddie said. It was idiots like Karponin who had cost them the war in Afghanistan, at least as much as Gorbachev and his reformers.

  It didn't mean it was going to be easy to kill his comrades. His countrymen.

  Fast Eddie—Aleksandr Pavlovich Gorsunov—had always come the bad boy, smart-mouthed, rebellious, prone to dart off in his own direction. But at crunch time he had always done what he was told, whether it was abandoning his mother and his country as a small boy, or joining the American Army as a bigger boy, or joining Spetsnaz when he was as big as he was likely to get.

  That fat bald fuck Arbatov had told him to go to Turkestan and become a rebel, and the fat bald truth was that he hadn't needed Lt. Shadrin's hamfisted threats against his father to make him go. Fast Eddie/Little Alex did what he was told because that was what he did. That was what he was.

  Arbatov had ordered him to do his absolute best in Timur's service until he was told otherwise. That was what Eddie planned to do, no matter how it made him feel. He didn't let himself feel, not now, nothing except the methe-drine brew of fear/exhilaration/anticipation that preceded the first shock of battle.

  Besides, this would be an extremely poor time to do anything but his best. This was what he was trained for, and if he held anything back, he would wind up expeditiously dead... if he were lucky. If he got captured, it was going to be a die-roll as to whether he went down as an American spy, a League traitor, or a KGB spy, depending on how alert his buddies in GRU were. However the call went, they would fry him in his own grease, and Mr. Chief Director Arbatov would not lift one blunt-instrument finger to save him.

  Two klicks' range. Fuck it.

  "Bravo, Charlie, Delta TOW crews, fire now."

  Three TOWs whooshed away in clouds of white smoke and tan dust. Eddie felt his scrotum contract. His professional pride was in this now, even if self-preservation hadn't quite kicked in. He ached for his boys to ring up all three, even if they were just indiges, and on the wrong side.

  White light splashed the lead BMP's western flank. That was the nice thing about crossing fire with your anti-tank missiles. Like most Soviet-designed AFVs, the "armored infantry machine" was hard to hit, sharp-nosed and low to the ground. Crossfiring attacked their side armor, thinner, flatter, and more vulnerable than the frontal glacis.

  He panned his glasses left. A gush of flame flipped the turret off the westernmost vehicle like a poker chip. The third vehicle was slewing off to one side, spilling black smoke.

  "Yeah!" Eddie exulted, pumping the air with his fist. "Three for three."

  "Khop," Asraar said, great. He sounded subdued. He wanted to shoot a rocket too.

  "Bravo, Charlie, Delta TOW crews, cease tracking, out of action. Boogie now." The backblast of a TOW could fry a man if he stood too close, and threw all kinds of crap into the air. An alert enemy could spot it and try to make the missileer duck by throwing a lot of lead in his direction, or even dodge the operator-guided projectiles—possible if your timing was perfect. That hadn't happened; no doubt these crews had not remotely anticipated a sudden smashing attack like this. But any survivors—and Eddie had been up against it enough to know there are always survivors, no matter what it looks like—knew exactly where the rockets that had damaged their vehicles had come from.

  "Machine gunners, commence firing. Be ready for my signal to pull out, and run like hell when I give it." The Blue Sky Riders had an assortment of light MGs, mostly Kalashnikovs in conventional and bullpup designs that looked like AK assault rifles on steroids, but also several antique Degtyarevs with wooden stocks and funky drum magazines. Even firing from rests, they had the chance of a televangelist entering into the kingdom of heaven of hitting anything at this range. That wasn't the point; Eddie just wanted them to ring some nice loud hits off hull metal, kick up some dust, convince the Leaguers that the desert was crawling with rebels like crabs on a Krasnoyarsk whore, all intent on lifting white skins to bind their Korans with. Green troops whose invulnerable armored fighting machine has just been blasted into flaming junk don't take much convincing.

  Eddie punched up the stopwatch of his fancy Seiko digital watch, which was one of the few functions he'd figured out, and divided attention between it and the battle. The norm for the bulk of the advance guard, following in column maybe ten klicks back, to come up to support its stricken patrol was twenty minutes. Like the Soviet economy of old, the League Army ran on norms. Since these were Karponin's troops, and A! Capone was a maximum hardass where drill was concerned, they would probably come in about on schedule. If they tried too hard to beat the norms, they were going to have some vehicles go down from shedding tracks in this rough country, which was fine with Eddie. Jagun 23's mission was to slow down the Leaguers and piss them off, inflicting as much damage as possible on their transport.

  Squaddies were bailing out of the lead and eastern BMPs. Nobody had gotten out of the west-end vehicle, and the way flame was gushing out the top, he didn't figure anybody would.

  He tasted bile at the back of his mouth. Well, at least / didn't pull the trigger on them. He was much too sophisticated to buy that, of course. But he was also too smart to was
te much worry on it now.

  The lead carrier didn't seem to be on fire at all, in fact. Neither did it seem to be going anywhere. That and the place it had been hit made it likely the track had been cut. Which made it a paperweight until somebody with the proper equipment came out and bent a new one on, a completely arduous task even when it wasn't fifty C and you weren't being shot at by wicked rebel terrorists under the guidance—of course!—of soul-bought American mercenaries. As good as a kill, by his mission profile.

  The BMP was still a dangerous paperweight. As he watched, the muzzle flare of one of the quick-firing 23mm cannon that the tracks had been retrofitted with in emulation of the American Bradley began to wink from the turret. From the turret angle and the dust puffs he saw when he looked left, it was shooting in the direction of the Alfa section launcher.

  "Alfa, this is Six. Anybody hit?"

  "No, Eddie," Shy Bunny said. "They're not yet close."

  "Don't let 'em get closer. Go ahead and pull out, and don't stick your heads up."

  "But—"

  "Now, dammit!"

  Asraar was peering at him out of his shallow firing pit with huge beseeching eyes. "I can knock him out, please," he said. "He isn't even moving."

  "Forget it. Once we're out of range, he's out of the fight. We don't have missiles to waste on cripples."

  He glanced at his stopwatch. Almost five minutes had passed. Screw it. The lead vehicle in any League unit was the one with the radio link back to HQ, and this one had probably spent the last five minutes screaming for an air strike.

  In contrast to Western doctrine it was iron-shod League policy to deny air and artillery support to units in trouble. Inheritors of the Soviet military tradition refused to reinforce failure, preferring to use their big guns to secure or expand victory, in support of elements on the advance. On the other hand, in this target-poor environment the recon leader might just get his airplanes anyway. League strike jocks had to be frustrated and hungering to dump on somebody.