Over the centuries many invading armies had come to grief on the Frontier, which one imperial administrator had called that “prickly and untrimmed hedge.” Even now, the authority of the mighty British Empire extended not much further than the roads; elsewhere the law derived only from the tribe and the gun.
And today the Frontier was again a cockpit of international intrigue. Once more an envious empire had its hungry eyes on India: this time the Tsar’s Russia. Britain’s interests were very clear. On no account must Russia, or a Russian-backed Persia, be allowed to establish itself in Afghanistan. To this end, for decades the British had been trying to ensure that Afghanistan was ruled by an Amir well disposed to British interests—or, failing that, it had been prepared to wage war on Afghanistan itself. The slow-burning confrontation seemed to be coming to a boil, at last. This very month the Russians had been steadily inching forward through Turkistan, and were now approaching Pandjeh, the last oasis before the Afghan frontier, an obscure caravanserythat was suddenly the subject of the world’s attention.
Josh found this international chess game rather dismaying. Because of simple geographic logic this was a place where great empires brushed against each other, and, for all the Pashtuns’ defiance, that terrible friction crushed the people unlucky enough to be born here. He sometimes wondered if it would be this way in the future, if this blighted place was destined forever to be an arena of war—and what unimaginable treasures men might fight over here.
“Or perhaps one day,” he had said once to Ruddy, “men will put aside war as a growing child sets aside the toys of his nursery.”
But Ruddy snorted through his mustache. “Pah! And do what—play cricket all day? Josh, men will always go to war, because men will always be men, and war will always be fun .” Josh was naive, a blinkered American far from home, who needed to have “the youth burned out of him,” said nineteen-year-old Ruddy.
After less than half an hour Ruddy had finished his vignette. He sat back, gazing out of the window at the reddening light, near-sighted eyes locked on vistas Josh couldn’t share.
“Ruddy—if it is serious trouble—do you think we’ll be sent back to Peshawar?”
Ruddy snorted. “I should hope not! This is what we’re here for.” He read from his manuscript. “‘Think of it! Far away, beyond the Hindu Kush, they are on the move—in their green coats or gray, marching beneath the double eagle of the Tsar. Soon they will come striding down the Khyber Pass. But to the south more columns will mass, men from Dublin and Delhi, Calcutta and Colchester, drawn together in common discipline and purpose, ready to give their lives for the Widow of Windsor …’ The batsmen are on the pavilion steps, the umpires are ready, the bails are set on the stumps. And here we are right on the boundary rope! What do you think of that—eh, Josh? …”
“You really can be annoying, Ruddy.”
But before Ruddy could respond, Cecil de Morgan burst in. The factor was red-faced, panting and his clothes were dusty. “You must come, you chaps—oh, come and see what they’ve found!”
With a sigh Josh clambered off his bed. Would there be no end to the strangeness of this day?
***
It was a chimpanzee: that was Josh’s first thought. A chimpanzee, caught in a bit of camouflage netting, lying passively on the floor. A smaller bundle nearby contained another animal, perhaps an infant. The captive animals had been brought back to the camp on poles stuck through the netting. A couple of sepoys were unwrapping the larger bundle.
De Morgan was here, hovering, as if staking a claim. “They caught it to the north—a couple of privates on patrol—only a mile or so away.”
“It’s just a chimp,” Josh said.
Ruddy was pulling at his moustache. “But I never heard of a chimp in this part of the world. Do they have a zoo in Kabul?”
“This is from no zoo,” de Morgan panted. “And it’s no chimpanzee. Careful, lads …”
The sepoys got the net off the animal. Its fur was soaked with its own blood. It was curled into a ball, its legs drawn up to its chest, and its long arms wrapped over its head. The men held sticks that they wielded like clubs, and Josh saw weals on the animal’s back.
The animal seemed to realize that the netting had been taken away. It lowered its hands, and with a sudden, fluid movement it rolled and came up to a squatting position, its knuckles resting lightly on the ground. The men backed off warily, and the animal peered at them.
“It’s a female, by God,” Ruddy breathed.
De Morgan pointed to a sepoy. “Make it stand up.”
Reluctantly the sepoy, a burly man, came forward. He reached out with his stick and prodded at the creature’s rump. She growled and snapped her large teeth. But the sepoy kept at it. At last, with grace—and a certain dignity, Josh thought—the creature unfolded her legs, and stood upright .
Josh heard Ruddy gasp.
She had the body of a chimp, there was no doubt about that, with slack dugs and swollen pudenda and pink buttocks; her limbs had an ape’s proportions too. But she stood straight on long legs, which articulated from her pelvis, Josh saw clearly, like any human’s.
“My God,” Ruddy said. “She is like a caricature of a woman—a monstrosity!”
“Not a monstrosity,” Josh said. “Half human, half ape; I have read that the new biologists talk of such things, of the creatures that lie between us and the animals.”
“You see?” De Morgan was glancing from one to another of them with greed and calculation. “Have you ever, ever seen anything like this?” He walked around the creature.
The burly sepoy said, his accent thick, “Have a care, sahib. She’s only four feet high but she can scratch and kick, I can tell you.”
“Not an ape, but a man-ape … We have to get her back to Peshawar, then to Bombay, and to England. Think what a sensation she will be in the zoos! Or perhaps even the theaters … Nothing like this—even in Africa! Quite the sensation.”
The smaller animal, still in its netting, seemed to wake. It rolled and mumbled, its voice feeble. Immediately the female reacted, as if she had not realized the little one was here. She leapt toward the infant, reaching.
The sepoys clubbed her at once. She whirled and kicked, but she was battered to the ground.
Ruddy waded into the melee, eyebrows bristling.
“For God’s sake, don’t strike her like that! Can’t you see? She’s a mother. And look in her eyes—look! Won’t that expression haunt you forever? …”
But still the man-ape struggled, still the sepoys threw their clubs at her, still de Morgan yelled, fearful of his treasure escaping—or, worse, being killed.
Josh was the first to hear the clattering noise. He turned to the east, to see clouds of dust thrown into the air. “There it is again—I heard it before …”
Ruddy, distracted by the violence, muttered, “What the devil now?”
4. RPG
Casey called, “We’re nearly on station. Going to low cap.”
The chopper dropped like a high-speed elevator. Despite all her training, Bisesa’s stomach clenched.
They were passing close to a village now. Trees, rusty tin roofs, cars, heaps of tires fled through her field of view. The chopper tilted and began circling counterclockwise. “Low cap” meant a sweeping surveillance circle. But given the way Bisesa was crammed onto her little bench, she could now see nothing but sky. More irony, she thought. She sighed, and checked over the small control panel fixed to the wall beside her. Sensors, from cameras to Geigers, heat sensors, radars and even chemical-sensitive “noses,” were trained on the ground from a pod suspended under the chopper’s body.
The Bird was embedded in the world-spanning communi-cations infrastructure of a modern army. Somewhere above Bisesa’s head was a big C2 chopper—C2 for command-and-control—but that was only the tip of a huge inverted pyramid of technology, including high-flying surveillance drones, reconnaissance and patrol planes, even photographic and radar satellites, all their electro
nic senses focused on this region. The data streams Bisesa gathered were analyzed in real time by smart systems onboard the Bird and on the higher-level vehicles, and in operations control back at the base. Any anomalies would quickly be flagged back to Bisesa for her confirmation by the link she maintained with her control, separate from the pilots’ link to the air commander via the command net.
It was all very sophisticated, but, like the piloting of the chopper itself, the data-gathering side of the mission was mostly automated. With low cap locked in, the mission quickly settled down to routine, and the pilots’ bored banter resumed.
Bisesa knew how they felt. She had been trained as a CCT, a Combat Control Technician, a specialist on coordinating ground-to-air communications during a conflict. Her basic mission was to be dropped into dangerous places and to direct pinpoint air and missile strikes from the ground. She had never yet needed to use that training in anger. Her skills made her ideal for this kind of observational role, but she couldn’t forget that it wasn’t what she was trained for.
She had only been attached to this forward UN observation and peacekeeping post for a week, but it seemed a lot longer. The troops were lodged in barracks that had been converted from aircraft hangars. High, bare, always stinking of jet fuel and oil, too hot during the day and too cold during the night, there was something crushing about those soulless boxes of corrugated metal and plastic. No wonder its occupants mockingly called it Clavius, after the big multinational outpost on the Moon.
The troops had a regime of daily PT, and had to pull guard duty, equipment maintenance, and other mundane details. But that was not enough to fill their time, or satisfy their needs. In their echoing hangars they would play volleyball or table tennis, and there were schools running apparently endless games of poker and rummy. And, though the ratio of women to men was about fifty-fifty, the place was a raging sexual hotbed. Some of the men seemed to be running a competition to achieve a climax in the most unusual or difficult situation possible—such as “knocking one out” when hanging from a parachute harness.
In such an atmosphere, no wonder that men like Casey Othic went slightly crazy, she thought.
Bisesa herself kept out of the fray. She could cope with the likes of Casey easily enough—even now, the British army was hardly a haven of sexual equality and decorum. She had even deflected the polite interest of Abdikadir. After all, she had her daughter: Myra, eight years old, a quiet, serious, very loving little girl, thousands of klicks away under the care of a nanny in Bisesa’s London flat. Bisesa wasn’t interested in games or complicated sexual politics to keep herself sane; she had Myra to do that for her.
Anyhow the importance of the mission here kept her motivated.
In the year 2037, the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan was a center of tension, as it had been for centuries. For one thing the place was a focus of the continuing worldwide standoff between Christianity and Islam. To the relief of everybody but the hotheads and agitators on both sides, the final “war of civilizations” had never quite come to pass. But still, in a place like this, where troops from mostly Christian nations policed a mostly Muslim area, there was always somebody ready to call a crusade, or a jihad.
There were lethal local tensions too. The standoff between India and Pakistan had not been eased by the war of 2020 that had resulted in the nuclear destruction of the city of Lahore, even though the parties involved, and their international backers, had pulled back from the brink of more widespread devastation. And added to that complicated mix, of course, were the passions, aspirations and plight of the local people: the proud Pashtuns who, although they had been drawn into the civilized discourse of the world, still clung to their traditions, and would still defend their homeland to the last drop of blood.
In addition to such ancient disputes, now there was oil, which kept the rest of the world drawn into this combustible place. Although the long-term possibilities offered by cold fusion, the most promising of the new technologies, were startling, its industrial-scale practicality was still unproven—and the world’s store of rich hydrocarbons continued to be burned as fast as they could be dug out of the ground. So, where once the British Empire and Tsarist Russia had faced each other here over the wealth of India, now the United States, China, the African Alliance, and the Eurasian Union, all crucially dependent on the oil reserves of Central Asia, were locked in a tense, mutually dependent standoff.
The UN’s mission here was to keep the peace by surveillance and policing. The area was said to be the most heavily scrutinized of any territory on Earth. The peacekeeping mission was an imperfect, heavy-handed regime that, Bisesa sometimes thought, created as much tension and resentment as it resolved. But it worked after a fashion, and had done so for decades. Perhaps it was the best mere human beings, and the complicated, flawed but enduring political lash-up of the UN, could do.
Everybody at Clavius knew the importance of the job. But there were few things more boring for a young soldier than peacekeeping.
Suddenly the ride got a lot more bumpy. Bisesa felt her pulse rate rise; maybe this mission wasn’t quite so routine after all.
***
As the chopper continued to circle, despite the turbulence, Casey and Abdikadir were both working, both talking at once. Abdikadir was trying to raise the base. “Alpha Four Three, this is Primo Five One, over. Alpha Four Three …” Casey was swearing, something to do with losing the positioning satellite contact, and Bisesa surmised he was flying the chopper by hand through the unexpected turbulence.
“Ouch,” said her phone plaintively.
She raised it to her face. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I lost signal.” Its screen showed various diagnostics. “It never happened to me before,” it said. “It feels—odd.”
Abdikadir glanced back at her. “Our comms is on the fritz too. We have lost the command net.”
Belatedly Bisesa checked her own gear. She had lost contact with her own command center, both uplink and downlink. “Looks like we lost the intel net too.”
“So,” Abdikadir said. “Military and civilian networks, both out.”
“What do you think—electric storm?”
Casey growled, “Not according to what those assholes in meteorology predicted. Anyhow, I’ve flown in storms, and none of them had an effect like this.”
“Then what could it be?”
For a couple of seconds they were all silent. This was, after all, an area where a nuclear weapon had been used in anger only a couple of hundred kilometers away, and the center of a city had been turned to a plain of melted glass. Communications knocked out, winds out of nowhere; it was hard not to assume the worst.
“At the very least,” Abdikadir said, “we have to assume this is jamming.”
“ Ow ,” said the phone insistently.
She cradled the phone, concerned. She had had it since she was a child: it was a standard UN issue, supplied free to every twelve-year-old on the planet, in that creaky old organization’s most significant effort to date to unite the world with communications. Most people dumped these uncool government-issue gadgets, but Bisesa had understood the motive behind the gift, and had always kept hers. She couldn’t help but think of it as a friend. “Take it easy,” Bisesa told it now. “My mother told me that when she was young phones lost their signal all the time.”
“It’s okay for you to talk,” the phone said. “I’ve been lobotomized.”
Abdikadir grimaced. “How do you put up with that? I always turn off the sentience circuits. So irritating.”
Bisesa shrugged. “I know. But that way you lose half the diagnostic functionality.”
“And you lose a friend for life,” the phone pointed out.
Abdikadir snorted. “Just don’t start feeling sorry for it. Phones are like Catholic mothers—connoisseurs of guilt.”
The chopper was buffeted again. The Bird tipped and flew level, over bare ground; they sailed away from the village. “I’m out of l
ow cap,” Casey called. “Too damn difficult to hold.”
Abdikadir enjoyed a grin of triumph. “Nice to know we’re exploring the outer limits of your competence, Case.”
“Shove it up your ass,” Casey growled. “This wind’s coming from every which way. And look at the fluctuations in our groundspeed—hey. What’s that? ” He pointed out of the bubble window at the ground.
Bisesa leaned forward and peered. Loose vegetation was being scattered by the rotors’ downdraft, revealing something on the ground. She made out a human figure in a hole, holding something—a long black tube— a weapon.
They all shouted at once.
And the sun shifted, like a dipping searchlight, distracting her.
***
The chopper had stopped its orbiting and was heading directly toward him, its bubble face dipped slightly, its tail raised. Moallim grinned and tightened his grasp on the RPG. But his heart was thumping, he found, his fingers slippery with sweat, and the dust was getting into his eyes, making him blink. This would be the first important act of his life. If he brought down the chopper he would be an immediate hero, and everybody would applaud him, the fighting men, his mother. And there was a certain girl … He must not think of that now, for he still had to do the deed .
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