Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

by Hideo Furukawa

  ONE MAN DOWN!

  You saw it.

  ANOTHER MAN DOWN!

  You saw it.

  BUT…BUT…BUT!

  You barked. And then your alter ego barked. The Hellhound was shouting. He realized what was happening, saw it unfolding in slow motion before him. Saw who had stepped up to protect him. He understood. He understood her bravery as she flew in the face of all those guns. He was watching it happen. She flew at the Afghan government’s troop of assassins, she threw herself at them, she leapt at them, she was shot. A lurid spray of red blood burst from one of her shoulders, she was thrown almost two feet, she crumpled to the ground. She got up. Once again, she leapt. Once again, she was shot. But she didn’t stop. And then one of the assassins shot another of the assassins. And then…and then.

  The Hellhound was shouting.

  And you were shouting.

  Aaaaah! you both shouted.

  Your mother died, and the commandant of the mujahideen organization didn’t die, and neither did the Hellhound. The Kalashnikov attackers’ surprise attack had failed. Because there was a dog, and the dog had confused them, gotten the better of them—they had missed their chance at carrying out the assassination. Finally, the commandant’s men responded. Seven minutes later the men with the Kalashnikovs had been killed. Every last one. But…but your mother was gone and wouldn’t be coming back.

  She had died.

  Even her corpse had dignity.

  This, Guitar, was the second to last turning point in your destiny. Yes, because things were changing. Even before you realized it, Guitar, your alter ego—your second self—was switching from one track to another, changing the course of destiny. The Hellhound was kneeling before Goodnight’s corpse. Kneeling low, almost bowing, crossing himself. You’d seen him do this once before. The Hellhound was moaning. Oooaaoo, aaoooooh. I swear…I swear I’ll never forget this…the second time you’ve risked your life…I’ll never forget! he cried. I swear on my life, I’ll get them for this!

  A bolt of spiritual lightning slammed through the Hellhound’s body.

  1980. The Hellhound would get his revenge. What did that mean? It meant he had declared war on the Afghan government’s army and on the new Afghan government that supported the army, and on the Soviet Union that stood behind them both. The Hellhound was himself a mujahideen now. He abandoned his Catholic faith and recited the Shahada before witnesses, thereby officially converting to Islam. The choice came naturally. He had been given a sign. My dog lay down her life to protect me—how could I not honor her by…how could I…how could I! So he pressed the switch, changed course. He gave up being a luchador. He was too old now anyway. It was too much of a drain now, getting up there in the ring. But he still needed a second face, needed to serve the people somehow, or he couldn’t deal with the moral dilemma that faced him. And so, with absolutely perfect timing, ever so easily, the Hellhound converted. He was reborn. Devoting himself to jihad as a member of the mujahideen was good. That was it: for the benefit of the Afghan people, he would “Destroy the Soviet Union!” as he cried in his Mexican Spanish–accented Pashto, and this would make up for the negative effect of his immoral activities. This would balance out the evil of his work as a criminal. An outer face and an inner face. And so, even as he managed the cartel, he trafficked drugs from Afghanistan on a global scale and used the profits to support mujahideen organizations and often went out onto the battlefields himself.

  As did you, Guitar.

  Just as your alter ego’s destiny had changed, so had yours. Naturally, you accompanied the Hellhound onto the battlefields. You yourself desired this. You had seen it—seen your mother, Goodnight, doing her stuff as a military dog, putting up a fight. Fighting to the death. The sight of her valiance was seared into your mind: how she had hurled herself at the attackers without flinching and struggled against them, bitten them, killed them. The image was there, indelible. SHE SHOWED ME WHAT TO DO! you thought. MY MOTHER DIED TO SHOW ME!

  I’LL FIGHT!

  And so, in 1980, you lived a new life, acted out a new role, as a mujahideen military dog. You went into battle in Afghanistan. Like your alter ego, you possessed two faces. An outer face and an inner face. You were a drug-sniffing dog and a military dog.

  It was a huge transformation.

  But this was still only the second to the last.

  You, dogs, dogs whose bloodlines were channeled by the twentieth century, by a century of war, a century of military dogs, you who were scattered over the face of the earth, increasing your numbers, where, in the end, would the branches of your great family tree converge?

  What was your destiny?

  The Afghan War devolved into a quagmire. For the USSR. All sorts of miscalculations were made, right from the start. Kabul had immediately been brought under control, and yet people refused to recognize the Soviet-backed puppet government. Any number of rebellions and riots broke out. The situation remained grave. Far from being worn down, the mujahideen organizations grew stronger by the day, month after month, year after year. New anti-Soviet factions kept popping up, and by spring 1981 the USSR had surpassed what was supposed to be the upper limit of one hundred thousand soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. This was all a miscalculation, of course. They still couldn’t crush the rebellions. They had bungled it.

  In 1981, efforts to suppress the jihad made no headway.

  No headway was made in 1982, either.

  Afghanistan could not be kept stable. The country was being destroyed. The miscalculations continued.

  Clearly this war (this “conflict,” from the Soviet perspective) was going to be long. Clearly it was going to be a quagmire.

  As the Afghan War continued, the Soviet Union itself began undergoing changes. The most obvious was the drama that surrounded the change in leadership. It wasn’t a coup. On November 10, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet) died. He was seventy-six and died of illness. He was succeeded as general secretary by Yuri Andropov, who had previously served for fifteen years as the director of the KGB. Andropov was sixty-eight. He called on the resources of his old haunt in order to solidify his grasp on power. He named the chairman of the KGB, a confidant, as interior minister and named the Azerbaijan KGB chief as deputy premier. He tried, in other words, to remove everyone in the Brezhnev faction from government. And his reliance on the KGB didn’t stop with personnel matters of this sort—he realized its potential usefulness in bringing all sorts of problems under control. If General Secretary Andropov said “Do it!” every bureau in the KGB snapped into action. For instance, it was occasionally possible to dilute the criticisms that were being leveled against the USSR and that had been growing shrill in the wake of its invasion of Afghanistan, by spreading information about arms reductions and the abolition of nuclear weapons, and it was the job of the KGB First Chief Directorate, which handled everything relating to foreign operations and intelligence, to spread (quietly) this information (or misinformation). The First Chief Directorate was made up of ten departments that handled espionage operations in various geographical regions. The third department, for instance, was in charge of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia; the sixth department was in charge of China, Vietnam, and North Korea; and so on. Andropov fully exploited the potential of these ten departments and did so by granting himself vast authority of a sort that would never have been permitted when Brezhnev was general secretary. Naturally, he also decided to use the KGB to improve—from the Soviet perspective—the situation in Afghanistan. And so it came about that they were sent in. It happened in summer 1983: the most highly classified unit under the administration of KGB Border Guard Headquarters set foot on Afghan soil. It was known by the code name “S,” or sometimes “Department S.” On June 16, Andropov had bee
n chosen as the new Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, so he now had control over everything—the party, the KBG, and the army. He had climbed his way to the top both in name and in fact, and was both the leader of and the most powerful person in the entire Soviet Union. This was how “S” got permission to carry out independent operations, free from army supervision—an unprecedented level of authority. “S” had no need to be in contact with the Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, despite the fact that the GRU oversaw all the special forces in the USSR.

  “S” was in charge of all special operations within the KGB. The KGB Border Guards as a whole had more combat experience than any of the Soviet Union’s other military organizations, having been active since the Great Patriotic War (World War II). And within the Border Guards, “S” was special. It specialized in unconventional warfare.

  “S” rapidly adapted itself to the battle against the mujahideen.

  Its fighters made use of the difficult, hilly terrain. They learned how to counter the special tactics of the Afghan jihadists.

  Even then “S” hadn’t realized its full potential. The Soviet Union itself was still changing. The drama surrounding its leadership continued. On February 9, 1984, General Secretary Andropov suddenly passed away after fifteen months in office. His successor was Konstantin Chernenko, a man who had been born, astonishingly enough, in 1911. He was way too old to be doing this. The only reason he could take over from Andropov was that he had been a loyal follower and right-hand man to Brezhnev. The old faction Andropov had struggled to crush was back. General Secretary Chernenko died on March 10, 1985, however, also of sickness.

  Too old.

  “S” found its fortunes changing, then changing again. If Andropov had remained general secretary, “S” might have managed to turn the quagmire of the Afghan War into something closer to a pond, at least, with relatively clear waters. “S” probably could have calmed the situation. But that wasn’t what happened. Because the Soviet leaders kept popping in and out so fast, one after the other. General Secretary Brezhnev was replaced by General Secretary Andropov, General Secretary Andropov was replaced by General Secretary Chernenko. Three deaths from sickness, one sudden. But these three men weren’t the only ones to have an effect on the fortunes of “S.” The unit—the most highly guarded secret at KGB Border Guard Headquarters—had been created by the man who preceded General Secretary Brezhnev. The previous general secretary…except that he wasn’t general secretary. Until April 1966, the party had put a moratorium on the use of this title, going instead with “first secretary”—a title that Brezhnev had used for his first year and a half in the position. First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Why had “general secretary” been abandoned? Because that was the title Stalin had used. And who had decided to abandon the title? Which forces? Forces critical of Stalin, obviously. Who was first secretary before First Secretary Brezhnev? The man who had declared that Stalin was a despot. The man who had delivered a searing critique of Stalin in 1956 in a closed session at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party. Nikita Khrushchev.

  The man Red China’s leader, Mao Zedong, hated.

  Khrushchev had had a dream. He dreamed of a day—sometime, somewhere—when the Cold War would turn hot. Perhaps the magma would come spurting up in the form of a proxy war somewhere in the Third World. And just imagine how cool it would be if, when that day came, the USSR could dispatch to the front lines of that regional conflict a unit so unlike any other that it would take people’s breath away—imagine the value that would have as propaganda! Incomparable! He had that dream. And so he gave the order, almost as a joke. And when it reached the end of the long chain of command, having made its way through that rigid bureaucratic system, the order was rigorously enacted. All the romance of the dream died, and it was turned into something utterly pragmatic and real. Two former communist space dogs were the raw material from which the new reality was fashioned. Two Soviet heroes. A male dog named Belka and a bitch named Strelka.

  It had all started with them.

  And it was continuing with them.

  In 1982. A dog and a bitch, heirs to the same names.

  And in 1983.

  And in 1984.

  And in 1985.

  Their line continued, unbroken.

  A unit of killers who would fight the anticapitalist war, training in the very real Arctic.

  In short, “S” had its origins in Khrushchev’s dream. Years later, reality had chipped its way through the shell of that dream, picked at the edges of the hole, and then shaken the last pieces off so that it stood fully revealed, a monstrous “unit” with a life of its own. But Brezhnev had a memory. He had been part of the group that brought Khrushchev down. He himself had pushed Khrushchev out in October 1964 and taken his place as first secretary. He wanted to expunge all trace of Khrushchev’s administration. And so he offered a reappraisal of Stalin’s legacy and changed his title from “first secretary” to “general secretary.” And so, in April 1966, General Secretary Brezhnev was born. And so, years later, when the situation in Afghanistan became impossible, Brezhnev chose not to call on “S” to make things right. The KGB suggested bringing “S” in, but Brezhnev refused. The whole idea…it sort of had that Khrushchev smell to it.

  Then Andropov became general secretary, and he used “S.”

  But he died.

  Then Chernenko became general secretary, and as an old geezer who had once been the late Brezhnev’s right-hand man, he thought this whole “S” thing stank of Khrushchev. He couldn’t pinpoint the source of the effluvium because he was so old, his sense of smell going. But he intuited it. Brezhnev had always made a point of that, back when he’d been boss. Don’t give Khrushchev anything. Not a thimbleful of cat food.

  Chernenko steered clear of “S.”

  In the end, “S” only had seven months to show what it could do. It never had a chance to play a significant role in the first half of the Afghan War.

  Only a little more than seven months. A very short time.

  And yet, even so, something happened.

  An epoch-making event. For dogs.

  In the second week of December 1983, “S” was in a valley amidst the hills of northeastern Afghanistan, having been led there by a general known as the Director—the Director of Department S. In this area the main road to the capital was subject to frequent targeted attacks from a mujahideen organization hoping to steal Soviet supplies. “S” launched a targeted attack of its own against the mujahideen organization, which excelled in guerrilla techniques. “S” used the same sort of guerrilla techniques. But while the jihadists really were guerrilla fighters—in the sense that they were “irregulars”—“S” was a regular army unit. The difference between the two was enormous in terms of their structures for communicating orders, their discipline, and the refinement of their land war tactics. “S” was a regular guerrilla unit, so to speak. Its fighters were consummate professionals, but they conducted only surprise and sneak attacks. The mujahideen had no idea the Soviet army had units like this, so “S” had no trouble penetrating their defenses. “S” didn’t rely on MiG fighters, after all, and didn’t ride in on T-64 tanks, and didn’t even send in attack helicopters. It had some auto-cannons to intimidate the enemy, but heavy firearms were not its main weapons. It used another kind of weapon.

  Military dogs.

  The unit’s special nature allowed it to catch the mujahideen off guard.

  Ever so easily. From behind.

  And then it happened.

  The scene was set. Ninety-one men lying on the ground. Ninety-one bodies, that is. Dead. Eighty-eight were mujahideen. Former jihadists. Their weapons had not been particularly up-to-date. They had a rocket launcher, but that was their only heavy firearm. Other than that it was all automatic rifles and pistols for self-prot
ection. A few of the men had even had matchlocks. Most of the mujahideen were Pashtuns. Farther north there were armed groups made up largely of Tajiks, but in this more rugged region the bands tended to be composed of Pashtuns, and of Pashtuns known for their Islamic fundamentalism. There was one casualty among the mujahideen who was not a Pashtun, however. One among eighty-eight. He was a Mexican. He had a beard, and his blondish mestizo hair had been dyed black. His once-brawny physique had no strength in it now, all his life having flowed out onto the sand around him.

  The wind sighed pointlessly over the desolate valley.

  Apart from that, it was quiet.

  And then you growled.

  You, Guitar. The Mexican lay at your feet, two cartridge belts slung across his chest, dressed in the manner of the Muslims of this particular region. He was your master. He was dead. Your master, your alter ego, your second self, the Hellhound. He was dead.

  You were alive.

  The single survivor on the mujahideen side.

  You were surrounded.

  By countless dogs. Military dogs belonging to “S.” Four strategic divisions, subset of “S,” were operating together that day, in that place. Each one was composed of four humans and twelve dogs. So there were, in fact, forty-eight dogs in all. That was the exact number, though you couldn’t count them. There should have been sixteen people, but in fact there were only thirteen. The other three were bodies. Corpses. You had killed them.