Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  The sleepy look was pure dezinformatsiya—now a good American word, if illegal for Americans to use. Delgado was always alert.

  Alex scoped the compound one last time with a folded-optics ambient-light enhancer—starlight scope—the size of a pair of opera glasses. Nothing stirring but the three sentry pairs, drifting like sleepy green ghosts inside the wire.

  He let himself peel back the Cordura flap that hid his watch, with a slight Velcro rasp. Everyone in Texas Team wore old-fashioned dial jobs. The hands were easier to read in a quick Gestalt flicker than LCDs.

  Time. He popped a stick of gum, looked at Delgado. Delgado nodded, raised his CAR-15 with the thick-barreled M203 grenade launcher slung underneath it like an elephant cock. He held up a magazine, showing Alex the open end to confirm it was empty, then slid it home in the CAR's well with only the faintest click as it caught.

  Little Alex slid an empty magazine into his own unadorned CAR. He flowed to his feet. The time had come to express the dancing energy within as action. This was what he lived for, pushing it to the edge—testing the envelope, as the fighter jocks said.

  Even if it was just coitus interruptus. It was their first in months, and he planned to enjoy it.

  Enough time had elapsed for the four who had gone in ahead—Pete with Tex, Georgie, and Buddy—to neutralize the four sentries close enough to interfere. If they hadn't...

  Alex shrugged and grinned into the darkness. They carried communicators small enough to button into the breast pockets of their cammie battle dress, with smart phased-array antennas that enabled them to link directly to low-orbit communications satellites with a minute expenditure of power. Virtually undetectable—but virtually wasn't good enough, here in the shadow of a few million rubles of radio direction finding gear. RDF was one area where League high-tech, still well behind the West, actually delivered as advertised. Texas Team was moving in complete radio silence.

  Their first clue that they'd failed would be the shit hitting the fan.

  Fyodor Vasiliyevich knew what was happening right away. His mother had raised no fools. When he felt that hard cold pressure on the side of his neck and swiveled his eyes down to see the glint of starlight on a huge tapered blade, he knew: Rambo had his chunky ass.

  The Rambo character was hopelessly passe in the sensitive, caring West, but Cold War habits died hard, and anyway the League tended to ran about twenty years behind the rest of the world. The old Sly Stallone films hadn't exactly been shown to troops in indoctrination during the Soviet years, but everyone saw them. Even more than an earlier generation's John Wayne, Rambo continued to personalize the Threat: arrogant, psychopathetic, invisible killers in green berets. And they all had big knives.

  "I surrender," Fyodor squeaked. He cursed himself for not having paid more attention in English class. But at the moment it was all he could do to remember to speak in Russian.

  Pressing his Arkansas toothpick tight up under the sentry's jaw, Georgie relieved him of his AKS-74. The rifle was slung— slovenly, but that was the way of sentries, God bless 'em.

  "Hands behind you," he hissed, using the worst Amerikanskiy accent he could muster. Emphasizing your alienness emphasized your menace; it was all part of the psywar game. Just like the big knives.

  Drawing the sentry's wrists's together behind his back, Georgie wrapped them tightly with West German Bundespolizei nylon restraints. He took a rolled pair of cheap Polish athletic ankle socks—unused; there were supposed to be no atrocities on this mission—and stuffed them in the sentry's mouth, thee took a turn of Taiwanese duct tape around his head to hold the socks in.

  Texas Team's equipment was vintage global village. Their battle dress was made by Basques, boots in Croatia, and their racks hailed from New Zealand. All stuff that could be bought at any K-mart from Beijing to Budapest. Of course, their knives and CAR-15s would mark them as U.S. Special Forces in the minds of anyone they encountered, despite the fact their short assault rifles were mounted with British-made SUSAT night-and-day optical sights instead of American issue. But maintaining deniability was intrinsic to the "work," even when futile.

  For good measure Georgie taped over the sentry's eyes, just to keep him disoriented. Then with the muzzle brake of his CAR he urged the man to his knees and on down to his belly.

  Then he noticed that Buddy was still dangling the other sentry by the neck.

  "What the hell do you think you're doing, you idiot?" he hissed.

  Buddy showed him a grin, shocking white teeth set in the midst of a great dark-mottled jack-o'lantern face hovering over the sentry, whose struggles were gradually diminishing.

  "For God's sake, put him down." Georgie's eyes darted like small caged animals. His knuckles were white on the grips of his carbine.

  Buddy let the Border Guard collapse into a little pool of humanity on the hardpan at his feet. He unlooped his garrote and held it up wordlessly. A two-centimeter-wide leather strap dangled from ivory handles polished by skin oil and friction, in place of the usual fine wire. The strap sufficed to choke a man into unconsciousness. The wire, tightened by a twist of Buddy's massive wrist, would have severed the neck to the spine.

  "Just havin' me a little fun," Buddy said sotto voce. It was supposed to be less detectable than a whisper.

  Georgie grimaced and squatted down to watch the distant guard shack while Buddy secured his victim.

  Alex slid over the lip and down the meter and a half cut into the arroyo. Delgado flowed after him. Here they were hidden from view of the buildings.

  Civilians were required to keep their distance from military installations, even ones far less sensitive than this. But the local Georgian hillmen, surly and semiliterate, figured the laws only applied if you got caught. They ran their sheep where they damned well pleased; if the border pigs caught them, that was just the Black Mother's will. The penalty was usually just a beating anyway, though occasionally the Komitet got a hair up its butt and capped a few offenders to encourage the rest.

  During the three days the team had spent scoping out the place, Alex and Pete had come up with an excellent little skit to put on for the Border Guards. Before they began bellycrawling around to test the motion sensors, they'd swiped a few sheep. When the lights went on, they'd chase the sheep into the illuminated zone. If the security boys got itchy and opened up, they had a spare sheep hog-tied in another gully that they could shoot and leave for the Border Guards to find. The scheme would show them just how comprehensive sensor coverage was, and with luck would irritate the guards into disregarding or even turning off the gear with repeated false alarms.

  It hadn't been necessary. The first probe brought guards running to the wire to yell and wave at the spotlit sheep.

  The second brought nothing at all.

  Weeds and trash had gathered at the base of the wire, where it extended down into the arroyo. The first infiltrators had carefully replaced it; Alex and Delgado scooped it aside again. At the bottom the mesh was pulled loose.

  Alex lay on his back, pulled the wire out, slid through the half-meter gap between fence and sandy bottom. He drew his rifle after him and crouched to cover while Delgado followed.

  They duck walked up the arroyo. Their objective was the CO's trailer. The stars overhead were as bright as glass nail heads. Alex kept making faces at the night; he'd gotten sand inside his cammie blouse. He hated the way it sloshed around and coated his skin. At Fort Bragg they said he was too fastidious for SE Then again, they'd also said he was too short. He made them eat that too.

  As they crept up past the barracks, a dark figure scrambled over the edge of the arroyo and dropped to the bed. He took a step and stopped dead, his face an elongate moon with a dark astonished crater in the center of it.

  Alex pounced. He locked his hand over the man's mouth and drove the CAR-15's barrel into his solar plexus, doubling him over and turning any nascent cry for help into a grunt.

  Three more forms dropped into the arroyo with sandbag sounds.

&nbs
p; Delgado sidestepped, covering the newcomers with his CAR-203. Alex slammed his man against the bank with enough force to knock what breath he'd collected out of him again. He screwed the muzzle brake under the man's chin.

  For a moment they held that tableau. Alex could read the Border Guards' minds: They were trying to decide whether they were more afraid of the dreaded Green Berets or their own superiors. If the facility was captured, maybe the brass would overlook the fact that they'd been caught sneaking out to score some booze or dope or a little local talent through the hole they'd carefully left in the sensor screen.

  On the other hand, if they could give the alarm and somehow survive, they'd be heroes....

  Motion behind the dithering squaddies. The rearmost started to turn.

  "Enough."

  The voice was quiet, but cracked like a near miss. It spoke Russian. Its tone spoke of counting trees or mining gold, or getting shot in the back of your head. It was a tone every Russian was schooled from birth to obey.

  "Put your hands behind your necks and drop to your knees. Now."

  The Border Guards complied. With a quietness that belied his enormous bulk, Buddy's identical twin Tex dropped into the arroyo and quickly secured them with nylon restraints.

  Alex pushed the one he'd caught at Delgado. The interloper stood casually covering the prisoners with his CAR. The floppy downbrim boonie hat all the world's Special Forces wore when their butts were actually on the firing line shadowed his poster-boy features. His name was Pete, but behind his back most of Texas Team called him Mr. P: P for Perfect.

  Heart in his throat, Alex moved to the bank. The hardpacked earth was cool and fragrant. He risked a three-second look over."

  Nothing showed from the bunkhouse. He let himself feel a moderated rush of relief. The brief scuffle hadn't given them away.

  He jerked his head at Delgado and moved silently up the

  arroyo.

  "Glad we could help," Pete murmured to his back.

  "All right, damn you," the major shouted, sitting on the edge of the bed while his feet scrabbled in search of his slippers. As cold as it got up here in the heights at night, even in high summer, he wasn't about to put his bare feet on the linoleum floor. "No need to pound the door down."

  He found the slippers, slid his feet into them, got up and pulled a robe around him. For a moment he paused, contemplating the Makarov in its holster lying on the nightstand.

  No. No alarm had been given. And if as he suspected it was some manner of bungle that had dragged him from sound sleep, he did not need a pistol to make whoever was responsible regret that his parents hadn't aborted him. These Georgians were flighty and irresponsible as so many teenage girls. But he was Great Russian as well as KGB. He knew how to keep their kind in line.

  He opened the door. For a moment he wondered how a journalist had managed to penetrate a secured facility. A shocking degree of license permeated the League; the nationalists had claimed that devolution of the Union would lead to decadence, and they had been right. Still, anyone, League or foreign, who got into such a secret installation without permission had bought himself a one-way ticket to a room with soundproofed walls and drains in the floor.

  Almost, he smiled. Some things hadn't changed.

  ... He realized that the cylindrical object in his face didn't have the rounded foam contours of a microphone after all, but the hard edges of blackened metal. A suppressor. Of the sort screwed onto... handguns.

  "Trick or treat, motherfucker," a voice said in English.

  The door to the commandant's trailer opened. A tech from the black van slouched in at the point of Georgie's CAR.

  "This one seemed to be in charge," Georgie said, subconsciously smoothing his mustache with his thumb.

  The technician wore a food-stained white T-shirt pouched out at the waist to hold a goodly roll of flab, rumpled pants, outrageously bogus Hong Kong Reebok rip-offs. He seemed to have made a gesture at sweeping his curly black hair up I and back in approved Old Bolshevik style. Mostly it looked as if somebody had been at his head with a Garden Weasel.

  With a lazy wave of his Glock 23, Alex gestured him over next to the bunk, where the major and his morale officer sat stiffly. Georgie slipped out the door in a hurry, as if the tech's sloppiness might be catching.

  The technician sized Alex up through Coke bottle glasses and nodded.

  "Good," he said, "Amerikanyets. Maybe they'll have; some decent cigarettes."

  "Fool," the morale officer said. "Americans can't possess cigarettes."

  The tech sneered. "They're Spetsnaz. Of course they have cigarettes. They can have anything they want, and they're stationed in Turkey, for the Black Mother's sweet fucking sake."

  Delgado's eyes widened infinitesimally at the mention of Spetsnaz. Alex flicked him lightly with his own. The tech had used the word in the archaic, Soviet Military Encyclopedia sense, that no one ever used anymore: Spetsnaz originally meant Western "bandit" formations, like SAS and Special Forces. The American media had latched on to it to signify Soviet commando types, and that usage had come filtering back into the Motherland with all the other Western corruption the Rad-Trads were so pissed off about.

  With the CO secured, the rest went swiftly. Pete, Georgia, and the twins caught the two off-duty squads asleep— the ones who hadn't tried sneaking out for the night—secured (hem without any fuss, and locked them in their barracks. League barracks were designed for locking troops in, even prefab ones in the boondocks. A field-phone call from the commandant himself woke up the pair in the gun tower and brought them blinking in to join their comrades.

  A shit-scared NCO was sent off with Tex to troll in the final pair of perimeter guards and the two on duty at the gate. They went into the barracks too.

  The facility belonged to Texas Team.

  "Not a bad little gig," Alex said to Delgado.

  The major, who had been sitting there turning red, abruptly found his voice. "You won't get away with this."

  "Show a little originality," Alex said.

  The commandant was just getting rolling. He sputtered something about bandits. The morale officer quelled him with a look.

  Little Alex laughed and unscrewed the suppressor from his Glock. If there was trouble now a little noise more or less would make no difference.

  As the major watched with cocktail-onion eyes, Alex unbuttoned a breast pocket of his cammie blouse, pulled out a magazine. He glanced at it quickly to confirm that the numbered holes on the left side of the staggered magazine showed .40-caliber silvertips, the right the rubbery blue tips of Glaser-type "safety slugs." Unlike the rest of Texas Team he didn't have much faith in knives, however big.

  Beside him Delgado dropped the empty magazine from his CAR, stuffed it into a back pocket of his pants, then drove a full box into the well with the heel of his hand. He worked the bolt and grinned.

  "What on earth are you doing?" the major asked.

  "Making sure you don't go anywhere," Little Alex said in Russian. "You and your men are under arrest, my very fine Chekist. For negligence of such a nature as to endanger League and Motherland."

  The captives stared at him as if he'd stepped out of a flying saucer.

  "Isn't it fortunate," he went on, "that we are Spetsnaz— Diversionary Troops of the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the League General Staff, instead of real American Special Forces?"

  He rammed the magazine home.

  "I guess that means no cigarettes," the technician said.

  Chapter TWO

  The sun was falling into the Rockies. To the north Pikes Peak had taken on a red glow, like an iron pyramid heated in a forge. The light on the treeless finger of ridge the two horses and three riders were following was golden, lending the scene an unreal, cinematographic quality. It was warm, and warmth beat up from the sun-warmed ground, but the restless wind had a cool undertone.

  "It's going to be dark soon," Elinor Marron said. "We should have headed back earlier."

  Fr
ancis Marron glanced back over his shoulder at his wife. "Probably. But Becky seemed to be having such a good time."

  His bay gelding tossed its head up and down. "Look, Daddy!" five-year-old Rebecca chirped. She was mounted in front of her father, and didn't seem to mind at all being whipped by the horse's long black mane. "Lindsay's nodding. He had a good time too."

  Marron steadied her with his free hand. "No, honey. He just knows we're headed home."

  "He's hungry and tired, that's all," Elinor said. Her tone suggested the beast wasn't the only one who was eager to get back to the barn at the Broadmoor after a day in Bear Creek Canyon Park.

  The trail led into a grove of aspen whose leaves rattled with a cicada sound in the breeze, then wound down among I'onderosa pines, the horses' hooves churning up dark soil and long three-needle clusters.

  The path crossed Gold Camp Road before leading into Cheyenne Mountain Park. Despite the fact that there wasn't much traffic up here these days—anymore, as they said in the Colorado vernacular Marron had grown up with—they sat and waited, watching, for a full thirty seconds before crossing the road.

  A few tendrils of the formaldehyde-rich smog, emitted by the methanol-burning auto engines state and federal law mandated, that overlay Colorado Springs had just begun to sting Marron's eyes when they hit the picnic area. It was no more than a widening at the end of a little cul-de-sac that led off Gold Camp, with some cement picnic tables and a good view out over the Springs.

  There was a surprising amount of activity, Marron noted, at least a dozen men moving around. The gravel-covered parking area was dominated by a giant white RV, streamlined in a whale sort of way, that everybody of Marron's generation—the tag end of the Baby Boom—knew automatically as a land barge. Though she was riding behind and to his right, outside the periphery of his vision, Marron could see in his mind the way his wife's mouth and eyes tightened in disapproval.