Still, some of the dogs did die. One fell victim to an out-of-control machine-gun burst of fire. Another three died. Gnyaarhf! they uttered as they went down. Hhuunn, they whined as they died. The other forty-six decided, at this point, that the battle had progressed to the second stage, and started barking messages back and forth. Finally the Boss understood. Dogs? he asked himself. Finally he realized that the town wasn’t abandoned, because there were dogs. He began to grasp what was happening. Are the dogs attacking my boys? Is that it? Taking down the young guns? Whatwhatwhatwhatwhatthefuckisgoingon—dogs? Why dogs? I’m looking for the client! What is this? Meanwhile, the dogs had moved into the “mopping up” stage. They had been conscious from the start that THIS IS NOT PRACTICE, but the loss of their comrades—they had communicated the fact of their deaths to one another by warning barks—made the forty-six dogs wildly, fiercely calm. They cornered people. They chased two yakuza into a four-story building, killed one on the stairs, on the landing, drove the other off the roof. THERE’S NOWHERE TO RUN, THIS IS OUR TOWN, OUR TERRITORY! YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT, THIS IS THE DEAD TOWN! TOWN OF THE DEAD! TOWN OF DEATH! Not surprisingly, some unfortunate mistakes were made in this, the first real battle they had fought. These dogs were absolute pros when it came to fighting, but they weren’t invincible. Another two died. Another one. But the yakuza were being weeded out even faster. The twenty-second died. The twenty-third bit the dust. The Boss had a sense of what was happening. He suspected the horrible turn things had taken; he saw the evidence, heard it, felt it in his spine. A kind of sixth sense told him, a quaking in his vertebrae. You fucks! Whatareyouwhatareyouwhatareyoufuckingdoing…what are you…to my boys? Risking their lives for the organization! Whenever a dog came into view, he immediately fired at it. He glared furiously around him, his eyes practically emitting death rays. You fucking assholes! he screamed, and killed more dogs.
The two young yakuza at his side were still alive.
Protected by the Boss’s intuition, that quaking in his vertebrae.
Someone’s going to die. Now.
A large dog leapt out of his blind spot, tore into the throat of the man on the Boss’s right, then, camouflaged by the spraying blood, wriggled across the ground and took aim at the man on the Boss’s left, his leg. He attacked. Took him down. Rolled, bit, killed him. This dog was not a member of the posse. Not a dog in active service, not a current fighter. But before age took its toll, he had been perfect. Even now he had a dignified aura that told you he was not a dog to be trifled with. Gravitas. He had a terrifying sense of gravitas. You could feel it now that he had reared himself to his full height. The Boss, standing face to face with him, could feel it.
Face to face. That wasn’t a blind spot.
The dog opened his blood-smeared mouth and barked.
Bang.
The Boss watched the dog tumble, dead, to the ground. He lowered the barrel of his new-model Kalashnikov, but he stayed there, motionless. He didn’t take a single step. He hardly even shifted his gaze. He was looking, now, at the first non-dog resident of this town unmarked on any map. The first human. Here, to this field of battle, his darling had come.
You killed Belka, she said.
In Japanese.
Hey there, hostage, the Boss said. Haven’t lost any weight, I see.
You killed Belka, his darling said again.
The Boss called her by her name. Her Japanese name. The name he had given his darling. The name he had given her because he was her father. She didn’t reply. She continued glaring at him. Ah, the Boss thought, just like in the videos. So, he asked, ready to break jail?
“Think again,” he said without waiting for her answer. “I came to end this,” he said.
“I’m talking about you,” the Boss continued.
“You’re a pain in my ass. Fucking brat,” her father continued.
He had raised the barrel of his new-model Kalashnikov.
His daughter didn’t flinch, didn’t avert her eyes for a second, not even as she spoke. Said something. Issued a command. In Russian. Instantly the shadows sprang into motion, darting from a cluster of trees along a road, from behind a building, from a second-floor window. Dogs. Seven dogs. Still too young to be called adults. KILL, his darling was saying in Russian. ATTACK. ALL OF YOU. AND YOU, FORTY-SEVEN, FINISH HIM. Six dogs in a cluster. First one of them snatched the Kalashnikov in its mouth, flung it away. The weapon clattered as it hit the ground. The target’s arms and legs were splayed, as if he were being crucified—the dogs were tugging on his felt boots, biting into his bare palms and the sleeves of his coat, pulling. He stood there, almost upright. And then one more dog, number 47, came running. Thirty-eight miles an hour. He leapt. Bared his fangs. Sank them into the soft, fleshy throat. Twisted. Took him. Finished him.
He was finished.
He tumbled forward, spouting blood.
The Boss. The man they called the Boss. Her father.
And there was his daughter.
There was the girl, seven dogs, already done with their prey, gathering at her feet.
For a few minutes, none of them moved.
They stayed there, perfectly still. The girl and the dogs.
Then the girl turned around.
She had noticed that someone was there.
The old man.
She said only a few words to him. In Japanese. “Hey, Old Fuck, I just earned the name. I’m Strelka now.”
Her voice was shaking. Tears brimmed in her eyes.
1963–1989
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
Everywhere. You scattered. You increased without limit. Naturally, some of you bore puppies and some didn’t. Bloodlines extended, ended, became intricately intertwined. Thus were you born, one dog at a time, and thus did you die. One dog at a time. Your lives had limits. Your family trees, however, kept growing.
It had begun on the western tip of the Aleutian Islands, and it continued.
All across the globe.
You would never go extinct.
But you were toyed with, exploited. Why? Because this was the twentieth century. A century of war. A century, too, of military dogs.
Two great wars were fought during the twentieth century on the chessboard of the world. In the first half of the century, that is. In the second half, two more wars were fought, both alike in many respects. Both were limited wars. Both were offshoots of the Cold War, and both were played out in Asian nations. In the first, American soldiers shed their blood; in the second, Soviet soldiers shed theirs. The first unfolded in Southeast Asia; the second in Central Asia.
One war on the Indochinese peninsula, one war in Afghanistan.
Each lasted a decade.
America first sent combat forces into Vietnam on March 8, 1965. The Vietnam War lasted until 1975.
The Soviet Union sent its forces across the border into Afghanistan on December 25, 1979. The Soviet-Afghan War lasted until 1989.
The Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. A quagmire for each nation. Each a product of the Cold War, each a decade long from the point of direct intervention to the end. Similar indeed. Dogs, dogs, how you were toyed with, exploited, in the name of these two catastrophes! And it wasn’t only the United States and the USSR that left their mark on your family trees. It wasn’t only these two nations that pruned and spliced, made your destiny grow.
There was also China.
Red China, the third player.
1963. Mao Zedong despised Khrushchev.
At that time, in that year, every dog in the PLA Military Dog Platoon was descended from Jubilee. The platoon was not permanently stationed in any military region; it was assigned instead to the highly mobile field army—the army’s main force, which went wherever strategy demanded.
1963. Ameri
ca was operating under a misapprehension. In its eyes, the globe was still a page in a coloring book that two ideologies were rushing to fill in. It was, so to speak, a geographical contest. Needless to say, communist states were red. This much of the American interpretation was correct. Even America wasn’t always wrong. And yet…and yet…it had it wrong. America had failed to understand that the red patches in the book were by no means all the same tint of red. Or perhaps the Americans understood that fact but decided to ignore it, intentionally chose to be color blind and narrow-minded. America’s political decisions were all based in a sweeping, simplistic judgment that red is red, even when the crayons were, in reality, of quite different hue.
1963. The USSR and China were both red, but those two reds were nothing at all alike in brightness or saturation. America’s decision to overlook that distinction would prove politically fatal.
But America clung to that fatal vision.
What were the roots of this altogether inflexible approach? It began in February 1950, with the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance. At this point, America decided that Red China was essentially a satellite of the Soviet Union, and it adhered steadfastly to this view. As part of its anticommunist stance, it continued to treat Chiang Kai-shek–led Taiwan—which is to say the Kuomintang and the Republic of China—as China’s true representative. The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance had been signed, however, by Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. Mao had trusted Stalin. But Mao did not trust Khrushchev, who had taken over after Stalin and criticized Stalin at the Party Congress in 1956.
Here, in a nutshell, were the dynamics of the Sino-Soviet opposition. America didn’t recognize this, though. America failed to see that it all hinged on the personal relationship between Mao and Khrushchev. This was the season of Mao’s hatred of Khrushchev. Khrushchev, for his part, was wary of Mao. History is moved, rolled this way and that, so simply. The twentieth century was a pawn. As were the dogs.
America had succumbed to narrow-mindedness. America was color blind. In 1963, China was anything but a satellite of the Soviet Union, but America didn’t see that.
Perhaps it would have, had it lowered its gaze to the level of the dogs. Yes, the dogs. The PLA Military Dog Platoon. If America had paid attention to that platoon, it would have seen that China and the Soviet Union were gradually drifting apart.
It was unmistakable.
First there was the Korean War. China dispatched the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. This was in October 1950, eight months after the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance. Chinese forces had some military backing from the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the poverty of their munitions, and during the Fourth and Fifth Campaigns they were repeatedly overwhelmed by the superior power of the UN forces, which had largely been provided by the American military. The UN forces’ “superior power” came from the fact that they had modern weaponry, modern military strategy. Up to this point, the Chinese had relied on human-wave tactics and had been trained to fight guerrilla wars; now they had to confront the inadequacy of these techniques for an army dedicated to national defense. It took five million soldiers deployed to the Korean Peninsula to learn this lesson. Then, in July 1953, a truce was called. Predictably, the Chinese military took advantage of this opportunity to shift its strategy, to begin preparing its troops to fight a modern war.
And the dogs?
Three had been captured and incorporated into the PLA. Jubilee was the only bitch. The two males were News News (aka E Venture) and Ogre. All three had formerly been American dogs, but now they were Chinese. Purebred German shepherds. When Mao announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the military had no military dogs. Now, in the wake of the Korean War, it had become focused on “modernization.” Twentieth-century war. War in a century of war. The modern military dog was the symbol of it all.
Dogs on the front lines.
So China created its Military Dog Platoon. First the American dogs were taken as prisoner-dogs-of-war on the battlefields of the Korean Peninsula. Then, after the fighting ended, these three elite supporting combatants were given Chinese citizenship, as it were. They were incorporated into the PLA’s first military dog platoon, right from the get-go. All three: Jubilee, News News (E Venture), and Ogre. Making a platoon of thirty-two dogs. At that time, in 1953, China was still on good terms with the USSR, so the platoon was based largely on the Soviet model. Most of the dogs were Russian laikas. Modern military dogs had first entered Soviet military history, incidentally, as early as the 1920s. The military had dogs, that is, even before the USSR itself existed. By the time the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany started on June 22, 1941—a Sunday—ten thousand military dogs had been trained. And so the PLA decided to follow the Soviet model. Military officials contacted the Central Military School of Working Dogs in Moscow and received a gift of twenty-nine Russian laikas. This was one of the many ways in which the Soviet Union provided China with military support.
In this sense, the composition of China’s first military dog platoon, with its heavy slant to the East—twenty-nine Russian laikas and only three German shepherds—symbolized the Sino-Soviet honeymoon. Alternatively, you might say the symbolism lay in the special weight China’s military placed on Russian history. The three German shepherds, Jubilee, News News (E Venture), and Ogre, were valued as extraordinarily capable dogs—the most modern of the modern—but they were excluded from the breeding program.
What happened, as a result, to the dogs?
In the winter of 1953, the males were castrated. The bitch was carefully kept away from any lusty males in the platoon.
The bitch. That means you, Jubilee.
You were kept away from the males, but still you harbored the potential for growth. There were times when you hungered for a male. But you weren’t allowed to mate. When you let your eagerness show too long, they whipped you. No sex for you, Yankee dog!
This situation continued until 1956. Then, in February, first secretary of the Communist Party Khrushchev delivered his speech “The Personality Cult and its Consequences” in a closed session at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was a “secret speech” in which he presented a thorough critique of Stalin. He had given no indication that anything like this was in the wings. The other communist nations could have been consulted, but they were not. China, above all, had been ignored. The content of the speech became public almost immediately, and when Mao learned the details, he was dumbstruck. What! Stalin…a despot?
What are we Chinese supposed to do when Khrushchev takes a stance like that, when we’ve been working so hard to realize an ideal state modeled on Stalin’s USSR?
Hey, Khrushchev! Hey, Nikita…Nikita Sergeyevich!
We’ve got everyone worshiping Chairman Mao over here! Do you realize the mess you’re causing?
And so, starting in 1956, signs of a mutual antagonism between Mao and Khrushchev began to appear. The effects of this friction were reflected on the Chinese side in two areas of its military strategy: its nuclear policy and its dogs. First, the dogs. That means you, Jubilee. At last you were released from the prohibition on mating. Sex was fine now, you were told that summer. No longer, it was decided, would the PLA Military Dog Platoon be based exclusively on the Eastern model, in terms of its structure or future breeding plans.
It was German shepherd season now.
Twenty-two males were purchased, all purebred German shepherds, all bursting with youth, and you, the only bitch in the platoon, became the object of their affection. On the grounds of the camp. They had decided to make the most of your lineage as an American elite.
And you, Jubilee—you were hungry.
Who were you, after all? Do you remember? Do you recall, for instance, your s
ister? Sumer was her name. You were separated six months after you were born. Sumer hadn’t made it as a military dog; she was recognized, instead, for the perfect beauty of her form and bought by a breeder. She entered the dog-show world. She remained in America, on the mainland. She gave birth to any number of puppies and was eventually subjected to a peculiar fate. She suckled seven pups that were not her own. And what about you?
ME?
You were across the Pacific. You had not participated in planned breeding. You yearned to mate but weren’t allowed. You wanted to get pregnant, but that was forbidden. You understand what that means? You were starved for a male. You: Jubilee.
ME?
Yes, you.
Woof! you barked.
You didn’t get pregnant in 1956. You didn’t go into heat in spring 1957. You were getting old, so they fed you specially prepared food. Your coat regained its youthful shine. But still you didn’t get pregnant. They prepared traditional Chinese medicines to make you go into heat. They even fed you human milk. Multiply, multiply! But summer came, and still there was no sign that you were pregnant. Then it was autumn. November. Early in the month, something happened. You raised your head to the heavens. You didn’t know why, it was just an impulse that came over you. SOMEONE’S LOOKING AT ME, FROM ABOVE. IT’S A DOG, A DOG’S GAZE. You lifted your head and peered up into the vastness of the sky.
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 18
