Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  Like a figure out of dream, the white goshawk exploded from the old man's hand. It sprinted forward, wingtips almost brushing the straight white boles of the closely set birches.

  The apprentice could barely follow its flight through the green morning, busy as he was trying to keep his startled horse from dumping him into the underbrush. Not for the first time he wondered why he had apprenticed himself as a manaschi, a singer of the great Kirghiz epic poem of a quarter million lines.

  The master singer sat his chestnut mare and watched the bird weave in and out among the trees, serene in his gabardine suit and skullcap with the rolled-up brim. At the last moment a hare darted out from beneath a fallen log. The goshawk dropped. With a sudden impact it was done.

  The apprentice felt his stomach turn over.

  He must have moaned. "How can one of such a tender stomach hope to do justice to a song of heroes?" the master singer asked mildly. "To concentrate your mind, recite to me, from the Third Song, the battle between Manas and Er Kokcho the Kalmyk."

  He nudged his horse forward, to get to the prey before the goshawk had a chance to begin to eat.

  Tashkent, Uzbek Republic The late 1990s As long as he could remember these high narrow hallways, they had smelled of varnish. Now they smelled of | burned powder and lubricant, and fresh-spilled blood.

  In an office to his right he saw a skinny, bearded youth in an embroidered skullcap, white shirt, and loose duck trousers playing the white breath of a fire extinguisher into a green metal wastebasket. Almost, the man smiled behind his turban; unlikely that any important documents were being destroyed there. Still, it was good to see the youth, his AKS-74 slung jauntily over one shoulder, following instructions so assiduously.

  The men who had seized the Uzbek Republic headquarters of League internal security—still known by the initials KGB—an hour before dawn all had detailed instructions, and they had all been carefully chosen. That was what made this day different from a typical civil disturbance in the vast commonwealth which had succeeded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  The glass had been shattered from the front doors and windows. It lay on the scuffed linoleum floor like crystal snow. The mob noise came rushing in like a flood. He paused. Without being aware of it he breathed a single word: Gulistan.

  He raised his hands, reassuring himself by feel that the tail of his plain gray turban hid all of his face except the eyes; a safety pin discreetly tucked inside a fold ensured it held. He allowed himself a flicker of amusement: Allow us messianic leaders our little parlor tricks.

  He glanced left and right at his two escorts. They gripped » their Advanced Kalashnikovs and looked grim.

  They disapprove of my exposing myself, he thought. If j only they knew how little I was risking. '

  And how much.

  "How can I lead, if I fear to show myself to our people?" he asked. He drew a short breath, surrendered himself to fate, or Allah, or random chance, and stepped outside.

  It was still cool and umbral; the sun had not clambered over the rugged wall of the Tien Shan Mountains. His first thought was how much the scene resembled an early-morning meadow in the lush Fergana Valley that ran into the Tien Shans east of Tashkent. Thousands of men and women filled Navaaiy Prospekt and Teatralnaya Square and the broad steps of the Opera beyond, their tyubeteyka skullcaps bright and various as summer flowers, their body motions stirring the white dust that overlay all Tashkent so that it flowed among them like the mists of dawn.

  Someone stepped up to him, reaching for the lapel of his ill-fitting suit coat. His guards didn't react; this was the technician Yilderim the Tadzhik, pimpled, earnest, and scarcely twenty, who made sure the small microphone was clipped securely in place. He nodded, smiled shyly, and faded back into the crowd, blinking rapidly behind the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles.

  The man cleared his throat. Thunder answered. It was time.

  "People of Turkestan," he said, "I am Timur. I have been a prisoner of the League, As you have all been prisoners."

  He paused. "Today we are free."

  The crowd screamed until its voice began to fail. Wolf howls rose above the roar, orchestrated by youths wearing pale blue tyubeteyka, symbolizing Kok-Bori, "the Sky-Blue Wolf," legendary progenitor of the Turks and Mongols. The man who named himself after the greatest of all Turkic conquerors was grateful that his turban hid any reaction. They strengthen us today, he thought, but will their fanaticism get out of hand?

  He raised his hands. The crowd quieted. Dotted here and there he could see video cameras trained on him by foreign telejournalists—yes, and Leaguers too, Great Russians and Baits.

  So much the better—let alt the peoples of the League see that we bear them no ill will, that all we desire is our freedom—though censorship was likely due to rear up again, so that only those citizens who owned satellite receivers would hear his words unedited.

  That mattered little. Later—if there was a later—he would address the world. Today he was speaking to his people, captive remnants of the great Turko-Iranian-Mongol Millet that had once ruled a sixth of the world. Speakers borrowed from the Alisher Navaaiy Opera and Ballet Theater carried his words to the multitude gathered in the Tashkent's dusty heart.

  From the roar of the crowd, turbulence caught his eye. People were running into the square from Pravda Vostoka. Running as if away from something. Screaming.

  Dar ul-Harb, they called it, "the World of War." It meant, strictly, the non-Muslim world—but when a Central Asian used it, he or she meant the USSR or, now, the League. And either, of course, meant Russia, when the masks were stripped away. As English permeated Turkestan with the advent of satellite TV, the fad was to translate the phrase as "the World of Hurt." In truth, that caught the spirit better.

  The Dar ul-Harb came out of Eastern Truth Street incarnated as a T-72, twelve diesel cylinders growling, its fat smoothbore cannon elevated like the trunk of an angry elephant bull, the tricolor of the League snapping from its whip antenna. It skidded, treads tearing chunks from pavement, and crumpled a faded blue Daewoo subcompact with its portside mudguards.

  For a moment it hunkered there, low and wide and ominous. The crowd flowed away from it like mercury from a fingertip. Its engine farted. The treads sucked the trunk lid and fender panel off the Daewoo and wadded them like Kleenex as it lunged ahead.

  Timur's guards seized his arms to drag him back inside. He shrugged them off with a glare so furious they backed away despite themselves. The tank shouldered aside a young plane tree with a splintering crack. The mob started to fray, come apart before the tank, people trampling one another in their frenzy to get away from the mottle-painted monster. It elevated its coaxial machine gun and fired.

  7.62mm bullets jackhammered the front of the KGB building. Flecks of grit stung the back of Timur's neck, and for a moment he was hidden in billows of cement dust like smoke.

  The dust cleared. Timur stood there, erect, unmoving. One guard lay decapitated, blood spurting in diminuendoing pulses from his stump of neck, making red mud of the white dust. The other crouched beside Timur, aiming his Kalashnikov with bared-teeth defiance at the steel beast.

  The tank lowered its main gun to bear on the lonely figure. Two teenage boys in light blue skullcaps raced from the steps of the opera house and scaled the rear of the tank like monkeys. A third ran after them, tossed up two small metal cylinders, and darted back into the crowd like a minnow into its school.

  The videocams turned, zoomed in to show the viewers back home what marvels of high-tech weaponscrafit emboldened mere boys to challenge the forty-ton monster. The boys shook the devices vigorously as one scrambled over the top of the low turret and the other worked his way around its side.

  Then they began to spray over the ar
mored-glass vision blocks with black paint.

  With a furious mechanical whine the turret cast left and right, trying to dislodge these impertinent insects. Yipping shrilly, more coyote than wolf, the boy in front ducked under the 125mm cannon and went on spraying over the driver's periscope.

  The tank was a killing machine of awesome power. It could shrug off shells that would level a house. Its sophisticated night-vision and laser sighting devices enabled it to detect and destroy rival behemoths at two kilometers and beyond.

  Blind, it was a paperweight. Worse, it was a target. A giant can stuffed with thousands of kilograms of fuel and high explosives.

  A Pepsi bottle rose from the crowd in a tumbling arc to smash on the tank's rear deck. It was empty, as was the next, and the next. But there was no way for the tankers within to know that. They could only crouch helplessly behind their weapons and levers and instruments and wait for the first telltale whoomp of a gasoline bomb.

  The T-72 was supposed to be proof against chemical and biological attack and radioactive fallout. Its metal plate wouldn't burn; its air intakes were baffled and filtered. But enough Molotov cocktails would exhaust its air; a protracted enough bonfire would heat the metric tons of metal until the occupants inexorably roasted—unless the ammunition cooked off first.

  With vision obscured, it couldn't even escape. The buildings of Teatralnaya Square were either Russian colonial, dating from after the conquest in 1865, or had been built after the 1966 quake. In either case they were massive, and overbuilt. Powerful as it was, the T-72 had no hope of bulling its way blindly through them. It would get stuck or throw a tread. Then it would be blind and immobile.

  The driver broke first. He came rearing out of the overhead escape hatch like a sounding whale. The youth on the front glacis, who was performing a sort of hunkered-down arm-waving victory dance and ignoring the glass shrapnel bursting around him, howled and sprayed the tanker in the face with his paint can.

  The tanker screamed as stinging paint filled his eyes. He threw his hands to his face and rolled off onto the cracked cement of the square. The commander and gunner emerged from the top of the turret, arms upraised in surrender.

  The mob bellowed like a soccer crowd greeting a tie-breaking goal, came surging forward to engulf the tank. Commander and gunner were roughly dragged down. The driver, still groveling, convinced some hideous acid was eating away his face, was kicked and pummeled to his feet.

  An ugly, animal moan rose from the crowd. Timur heard voices crying for the League soldiers' heads.

  He held up his hands. In response to the gesture—or to the urgings of the blue-cap cadre salted among them—the crowd thrust the tankers forward.

  Timur looked down upon the captives. The commander faced him with head raised, defiant and scared white. The gunner just looked glum. The driver, eyes staring red-rimmed from his raccoon mask of spray paint, was turning foolishly this way and that, touching his comrades and captors on the arm and muttering in Russian, "I can see, I can see," like a man who'd just been faith-healed on some American TV revival.

  Though less than half the crowd packed in between the /awx-European buildings around the square were likely to be practicing Muslims the blood-feud tradition still ran strong as Tien Shan runoff. Timur felt the hatred boiling within the crowd.

  The same hatred surged up suddenly within him: They have much to answer for, these Nikolays. The blood of a hundred years. The blood of innocents. The blood of—

  He moistened lips, which were dry as the desolate heart of Qizil Qum, "the Red Sands." From the comer of his eye he glimpsed Yilderim, eyeglasses askew, gamely bellycrawling toward him, unsure that the danger was past but suspecting he might be needed.

  Miraculously the microphone still worked. "Release them," Timur said.

  The square was silent but for the wind off the Tien Shan, the Heavenly Mountains. A moment blew away in that wind. A youth in a blue skullcap threw down the tank commander's arm as if tossing a piece of spoiled fruit in the street before a vendor's stall. He stepped back.

  One by one the others who gripped the Russians followed his example. The tank commander stared up at Timur as if unsure what manner of being this was. The Russian was young—a child, really—blond and snub-nosed, an angry bruise already spreading across one cheek. With unthinking reflex he slowly brushed the white dust of Tashkent from his black uniform.

  The gunner pulled the driver's arm over his shoulder. After a last glance at Timur, the young commander took the other arm. The crowd parted noiselessly to permit them to pass, and so they made their way unhindered up Navaaiy— once Lenin Prospekt—until they passed out of sight.

  "Let the people of the League of Affiliated Republics see," he called, as if calling after the stumbling tankers, "that we bear them no ill will. It is the League itself, which claims to be voluntary but which sends its tanks to crush those who wish to claim true sovereignty, that we fight!"

  A voice soared high: "Temir, haqiqatcm Turkestaan aatasi-siz!"—"Timur, truly you are the father of Turkestan." The crowd began to chant his name: "Te-mir, Te-mir!"

  The Red Sands Rebellion had begun.

  PART I

  The World of Hurt

  There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and, thus, free ourselves from responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. Both the strong and the weak grasp at this alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the virtue of obedience. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves the chosen instruments of a higher power—God, history, fate, nation or humanity.

  —Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do

  Chapter ONE

  Oh-dark-thirty. Jesus, isn't it time to move?

  Little Alex let go of the pistol grip of his CAR-15, made himself scratch his nose instead of checking his watch again. He glanced to the side, where Delgado hunched over his own weapon behind a tuft of feather-dry grass. Texas Team's light weapons specialist gave no sign of noticing. Alex had a tendency to overamp before action, to the point that the nerves seemed to stand through his skin like wires. Controlled frenzy had served him well in the past, but right now he needed optimal cool.

  An old GAZ-69 truck, marooned on a concrete slab to serve as a generator, pounded the night like a garage-band bass, monotonous but not entirely regular. He let it throb up into him out of the ground, concentrated on it, on breathing crisp Caucasus air that smelled of soil and summer-dry vegetation. / refuse to fidget, dammit. / can trust my internal clock.

  Inside the wire the League SIGINT station slept: a malformed circle about two hundred meters across slapped down on a comparatively flat patch of mountainside. A shallow arroyo cut a chord across the western perimeter near where Alex and Delgado lay belly-down in the scrub. Beyond it were prefab barracks for the thirty-man security platoon, and just downslope the mess tent and kitchen, a latrine and shower block. Alex smelled soapy water, grease, and spices. Further confirmation that most of the security detachment was ethnically Georgian—Great Russians would get the running shits from hot local fare. It also confirmed a fringe benefit of being a KGB Border Guard instead of a League Army grunt: better food. Or at least livelier.

  Upslope of the barracks lay the CO's trailer. A commo van was parked next door. The water tower loomed right behind like a quiescent Martian death machine. In the compound's center stood a watchtower equipped with a powerful searchlight, a PKM machine gun whose full-sized 7.62mm ammunition gave it a lot more range and authority than the current generation of 5.45mm support weapons, and two sentries who, if the last three nights were any indication, were stone asleep.

  Beyond the watchtower lay the reason everybody was out playing in this godforsaken spur of the Caucasus Range: a huge white parabolic antenna aimed at Turkey. The generator bebopped away behind it.

  Except for red glints filtering from the black van where the graveyard shift technician monitored the big dish ear
, and yellow light spilling out the windows and door of the on-duty squad's ready shack by the solitary gate across the compound, the camp was dark. Apparently the commandant disliked the idea of spotlighting the facility to the NATO troops it was spying on, southwest across the line in the black mountains near Ardahan.

  The League seemed to be trying to keep the station seriously unobtrusive: just a single course of fence, three meters high and topped with razor tape coils; no minefield; no cleared kill zone around the perimeter, though the scrubby mountainside offered damned little cover to intruders less skilled at snooping and pooping than Texas Team. Lights were spaced around the perimeter, but they were unlit, keyed to motion sensors sown outside the wire.

  Alex was unimpressed. The Georgian-weighted ethnic mix was too risky. Georgia was perpetually pissed off at the League for preventing it from liquidating its Muslim Azeri minority, and made constant noises about pulling out of the League, as it had from the old Soviet Union. That was noise; Georgia could no more get by without the League than a horse could run without one of its legs, any more than any republic—except maybe Russia herself, central and eternal. But truculence didn't make the Georgians reliable troops for the Leagues' internal security apparat.

  Also, I'd light the place so bright the lizards would be out trying to sun themselves. Did the Greenstripers of the Border Guard think the Turks and their American allies didn't know they were there?

  The sorry truth was, anybody who gave a good goddamn knew about the station. Forget military satellites; the SIGINT post was big enough to be seen by the private and quasiprivate weather satellites that blanketed the whole damn planet, to the endless annoyance of the superpowers. Like the French SPOT weather satellite that discovered back in 1986 that the big radioactive plume that was giving Western Europe the fits pointed like a finger to a place called Chernobyl—only the new ones were a lot more sophisticated.

  He sensed Delgado stirring. It was a subliminal sensation; yon didn't actually hear the Cat, unless he wanted you to. He glanced over. Deigado had his face turned toward Alex. Alex was so dialed in to the darkness that by starlight alone he could see the bored expression on Delgado's handsome face, the heavy eyelids at half mast, even through the coating of black and dark grey camo stick.