by Victor Milán
"Peters, sir."
He scowled. "What kind of a name is that?"
"R-russian, sir."
It wasn't, of course; it was German. Karponin notoriously disdained non-Russians. But he commanded a League division, not a Russian Republican one. Besides, many ethnic Germans lived in Russia and played at assimilation.
"Well, now, my good Russian sergeant, we rely upon the initial artillery barrage to suppress both enemy observers and missile infantry, allowing our tanks to charge ahead, as tanks ought do. You are familiar with this doctrine, at least?" His voice was silken with menace.
"Yes, sir!" The boy was stiff and quivering like an arrow in a target now.
"How long do you expect them to cower in their holes?" Karponin thundered. "We shall be fighting men, not marmots! Every second you delay costs the Russian blood of your comrades!"
Peters swayed as if about to pass out. "Great stuff," murmured the reporter's Moroccan videocam man, as he zoomed in on the youth's face.
"The artillery bombardment is precisely timed. We must trust our comrades to know when to lift it. Now we will try again, and we will do it right," Karponin said. He gazed at the ranks for half a minute.
"And I shall lead."
Through startled silence he strode to the other BRDM, the one not commanded by Peters, clambered aboard using the handholds welded to the hull in front of the side firing port. From the top he glanced back. Without awaiting permission, the Frenchwoman was climbing up after him. Her cameraman waited for her to get out of the way, visibly unhappy with the prospect of riding into an artillery barrage in a lightly armored vehicle.
Karponin smiled and signaled for the assault to begin.
Again came the tearing cloth sound of incoming artillery. Havoc assault choppers lifted off in a swirl of khaki dust, to jitter a meter or two above the ground, waiting to sweep forward to engage targets beyond the ridge. As the crestline erupted, the regiment began to move.
Karponin rode in the open in the cupola behind the 14.5mm gun. He disdained a helmet. The hot wind ruffled his short dark hair.
He glanced back. The reporter rode half out of one of the rear hatches, hanging on against the violent jolting with practiced aplomb. In the other rear hatch rode her Arab cameraman, doggedly recording the whole scene in digitized images.
The car lunged for the crest, fishtailing as the tires skidded in the arid dust. Karponin felt his pulse quicken. At any moment a shell fragment might slice the top from his skull. He felt fear, but it was a wild, pulsing fear, not a small, cold thing to turn the guts to water. It exhilarated.
Again he looked at the reporter. Her lips were peeled back in what seemed a grimace of sheer terror. Then he realized she was laughing, the sound completely masked by the bone-shaking noise of the shells.
Shell bursts buffeted him with dragon's breath. Overpressure threatened to implode his eardrums. The telejournalist pointed, lips moving in a soundless shout.
A car roared past them, wheels tearing chunks from the short tough grass. It was Peters's BRDM. Riding like his general with his head and upper torso sticking up from the cupola, the young ethnic German plunged into the maelstrom of explosions. He beat Karponin's car to the crest by thirty meters, then started over it.
A 152mm shell landed directly on top of it, just aft of the cupola. The entire top of the armored car erupted in a yellow and black ball of flame.
The barrage lifted, a heartbeat late. The telejournalist screamed. Karponin still couldn't hear her.
The assault went with textbook perfection. The spotters deployed from the scout cars, illuminated dummy tanks with their laser flashlights. The Havocs popped up and blew them to pieces with rockets guiding on the dots, invisible to human eyes. The attacking tanks took position hull-down behind the crest, and the infantry spilled from their BMPs as the tracked carriers raked the steppe with their light automatic cannon. Karponin watched with satisfaction.
He stood up and signaled that the exercise was at an end. The telejournalist was right beside him.
"Those men—everyone in that car—they were killed." She pointed to the BRDM, still burning fiercely. The stink of burned flesh and rubber and diesel fuel overpowered even the reek of spent explosives.
"We strive for realism in our exercises. Those men died regrettably, but heroically, in carrying out their orders. Though the Motherland is not now at war, they died to defend her and will be recognized."
"Do you realize what the media would do to you if you were an American officer who had men killed on an exercise like this? They'd crucify you!"
He snorted and turned away. "Perhaps America is no longer fit for world leadership. The League is young, and vigorous."
She took off her insect-eye glasses. Her eyes were hazel, luminous and large.
It seems I've conquered more than a barren patch of steppe this afternoon, he thought. It was no great surprise.
Chapter FOUR
"Daddy, are we almost home?"
Francis Marron glanced across the top of his daughter's head, caught his wife's eye. The three of them were sitting in the front seat of the Ford station wagon, huddled together like animals seeking warmth, though the evening wasn't particularly cool.
Elinor tousled Becky's hair. "Sure, honey." She leaned her head on her daughter's. Marron slipped his right arm around them.
Down in the Springs the lights were coming on, by law. In this privileged suburb on the flank of Cheyenne Mountain, you still got to have night, without being required to fill the yard with artificial daylight.
Francis Marron was looking forward to an evening sitting on his redwood deck, watching night come down. He had sweated, had risked his life to earn the privileges his family enjoyed. This was among the ones he cherished most.
He particularly needed it tonight.
"Maybe we should have another child," Marron said. "Would you like that, Rebecca, honey? Your own little brother or sister?"
Becky started bouncing up and down as enthusiastically as her seat belt would allow. Instantly Elinor drew away from him, straightening, stiffening.
"Don't get started on that Norman Rockwell two-point-five-children-a-family routine again, Frank." She pulled down the sun visor and checked her hair in the mirror on its backside.
"No, it's not that. It's—I just think we'd find it so rewarding, you and I. And Becky...."
He was floundering, and knew it. Some shadow diplomat you are. You can't have a conversation with your wife without some misunderstanding.
Though he kept fit, ate lots of fiber, and kept his serum cholesterol low, he was at an age when the foreshocks of mortality came more frequently, more intensely. The incident at the picnic ground had intensified them.
Am I really so conventional, to grasp at such a banal and obvious life-affirming straw? He didn't like to think of himself that way. He was a mover, a shaker. A take-charge guy-
Elinor didn't notice his bemusement; she had her own agenda. "Sometimes I think barefoot and pregnant would just about fit your image of me. Somehow I never did manage to follow my career, did I?" A brittle little laugh. "I know how it goes with a he-man type like you: 'No wife of mine is going to work for a living.' "
His mouth compressed. "Ellie, that simply isn't true. Nothing would have made me happier than for you to pursue your studies."
"But it was always your career first, wasn't it? And then Rebecca came along, and you were gone all the time on your mysterious missions."
They had been married three years before Rebecca was conceived, but he did not remind her. Odd to think that their original goal in having a child was to draw them together. And it had, in that both of them felt the same fierce, exhilarating love for their daughter. But otherwise...
"You have your work," he reminded his wife. He had almost said causes, but she would have accused him of patronizing her.
She leaned against the door with her elbow propped on the windowsill, "You've never been exactly supportive of my activism, now, hav
e you? You've always thought I was something of a bleeding heart."
He shook his head, feeling futile, feeling helpless. He knew this was her way of coping with the horror they'd seen, coping with the brush with the containment team. Still, this wasn't what he needed.
"I respect what you do," he said weakly. Fortuitously the turn onto their street came up. That enabled him to pretend making the corner took a great deal of concentration. At least it broke the argument's rhythm.
He turned into a driveway covered in red lava gravel. Their house was a passive solar design, south-facing, glass fronting an adobe Tromb wall. Two stories high in front, the roofline swept back and down to a single story.
Before Elinor was all the way out, Becky popped out the door, dashed up the gravel path edged with railroad ties that ran between the flower and cactus gardens to the door. The crowded blossoms, red and gold and blue, that usually filled the yard had mostly closed up shop for the night. Marron's rank rated a water allotment for a lawn, but he and Ellie both preferred playing in the garden. And having a garden, ostensibly less ecologically burdensome than a lawn, did make them look properly communitarian.
While Ellie was watching their daughter, he snagged his compact Walther from the holster beneath the driver's seat and tucked it in a back pocket of his jeans.
When he straightened, Elinor was leaning with her arms on the car roof, a knowing look in her eye. When she was like this—no makeup, cheeks pink with wind and the sun that inevitably managed to get through the blocker, the strand of honey and ash hair escaped again and trailing across her face like seaweed—she looked in truth rather plain. Yet somehow she never looked more beautiful to him.
"Frank," she said, and her tone was different than before: softer, almost cajoling. "That—that stuff this afternoon. It had to do with your work, didn't it?"
He started to laugh it off: Hey, I'm just a money manager. What he saw in her eyes stopped him.
"No," he said. My work is what got us away from there, made it end where it did, rather than..."No dear. It didn't."
If they'd listened to me, League General Vorontsov thought, this never would have happened.
On-screen heads covered with embroidered skullcaps bobbed up and down and fists struck the air. It was a French satcast of rioting in Tashkent city center, twenty kilometers away. It was getting near time to call his divisional intelligence chief in for a magisterial ass-chewing. He understood perfectly well that his intelligence officer could have done little more than he had: GRU had given him nothing, and KGB permitted him no assets of his own, claiming domestic surveillance was their bailiwick, no amateurs allowed. But League doctrine held that somebody had to be to blame, and the intelligence officer was convenient.
Actually, the League General Staff was to blame. Or rather, the self-obsessed politicians who gave them their orders; STAVKA was comprised of army officers selflessly serving the state just as he himself was, shackled and betrayed at every turn by their civilian masters. That was a better way to think of it.
Tashkent had once been a major military nerve center. Headquarters for the Turkestan Military District, it had served as the main mustering point for men and materiel fighting the imperialist and Zionist-backed bandits in Afghanistan.
Then the Politburo betrayed the army and treacherously ordered withdrawal, though Soviet forces were clearly seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Union gave way to Commonwealth, Commonwealth to League; the Iranian threat heated up. With the shift in policy from prosecuting the Great Game to discouraging an unruly neighbor from exporting disorder along with radical Islam, Turkestan District HQ moved to Ashkabad, capital of the Turkmen Republic. In army terms, Tashkent was a hollow shell, its once great bases now military ghost towns.
And so the black-asses are free to riot against the civilization we've brought them. I must rely for my intelligence on the capitalist news media—and I have a bare regiment of Class B troops to deal with the problem.
When Andropov seized power from the dotard Brezhnev—to all intents and purposes in the late seventies, though his titular accession had to wait until the 1980s—his KGB seized power with him. In the League the Komitet still held great power, though patriots and traitors alike had chipped away at it. KGB was riddled with Jews, mongrelizers, those whose only concern was their own power and influence. The Rad-Trads had it right.
Vorontsov was not a Rad-Trad. STAVKA discouraged officers from taking sides politically. The army stood for the League.
But Vorontsov knew the cost of a pound of evil. The Rad-Trads were gaining influence by means of the very elections they despised. Someday soon, it might be hoped, real discipline would be restored to the Motherland—and the League.
Vorontsov frowned. The voice was Lithuanian, as were most of his troops. The Lithuanians were every bit as turbulent and ungrateful as the black-asses, but it was assumed that in case of trouble the Baits would feel no kinship with the locals, who were at least as alien to them as to Great Russians. Vorontsov never liked that either. The Lithuanians were lax. Even their accents were lax.
That Turkestan District had had the League Army championship basketball team the last three years running was small consolation. With Patrice Lumumba University openly recruiting Africans for its athletic programs, military teams were scarcely competitive anymore. For his part, Vorontsov wished the Baltic states had never been cajoled into joining the League.
The telephone rang. "General Vorontsov? Command Center. We've lost touch with Colonel Klyavin. Perhaps you should come down here."
He clicked off the TV by remote control, rose, and set off down the corridor for his Command Communications Center. When the cry for help came from the Tashkent civil authorities he had dispatched a motorized rifle battalion and a tank platoon under Klyavin. He'd held back his artillery. God knew what the media would make of him shelling a city of three million people. President Fyodorin would have his nuts if he made the Motherland look nyekulturnyy by overreacting in full view of the TV cameras. Those traitors at Buduscheye had it in for the army. They'd blow everything out of proportion.
Terrible to know just how the Americans felt.
Maybe I should have stayed in Command Center right along, he thought. Current doctrine was to permit subordinates to carry out orders without jogging their elbows, to maintain some degree of flexibility, the academicians said: bah. To Vorontsov it was just another example of the laxity creeping into society at every level in every republic.
The problem was, Klyavin was a nitwit. He would have been over his head commanding a labor-formation platoon on a particularly challenging roadside trash-clearing project; as a young company commander in the Ukraine, he'd fucked up bringing in the harvest, for God's sake. His only visible talent lay in cataloging the plants of the desert-mountain transition zone, his main interest in life. But his father-in-law was a wheel in Ryazan' Oblast who'd just been appointed a Russian Republic junior secretary for Mining, and you couldn't dislodge the clown with plastic explosives.
That didn't necessarily mean Vorontsov had to give him a field command. In the last decade, first the Soviet and then the League Army had attempted to bring promotion and responsibility more in line with ability and less with klass and influence, one of the few reforms Vorontsov was in sympathy with. But enter the fucking KGB again. In the last three months they had purged every officer above the rank of captain in the entire Turkestan District who had the sense to pour piss out of a boot with instructions printed on the heel. He had been left with dolts, Baits, and political appointees. The only man left with any talent was a shifty little brown man in charge of his artillery regiment, almost a black-ass himself, though neither Turk nor Tadzhik. Vorontsov never really trusted him, though he had the most impressive collection of medals of any man on base. At least he wasn't lax.
Dim unshielded bulbs swept over Vorontsov's bald head like spirits of the impenitent dead in a Spielberg scene. He turned and entered the red-shot womb dimness of Command.
> "What's going on?" he barked.
"Colonel Klyavin's communications operator reported running into heavy small arms fire near Teatralnaya Square, General. Then he went off the air."
Small arms? Where did the black-asses get small arms? From the Uzbek Republican Army, no doubt. He felt as if he'd swallowed a lump of anthracite. If the Uzbek Army was in on a plot to bolt the League, he was well and truly fucked.
He could not let himself contemplate the possibility. Introspection led to inaction, a cardinal military sin. So the fool Klyavin got himself ambushed. I should have led the attack myself. But no, his place was here—
"General," another operator said, turning from his console with two fingers pressed to his headset. "Moscow. General Staff wants to know if you have authorized calling up the republican reserves."
Vorontsov laughed out loud. "Arm more black-asses? Does Staff have its head firmly wedged—''
A third man said, "Sir, Divisional Artillery respectfully requests your surrender."
"I— What?" He turned to the man. A vein beat on the side of his forehead. He couldn't have heard that correctly. This lax Bait swine had to know that if he was making a joke, Vorontsov would have him beaten to death with rifle butts, and hang every journalist in Turkestan if Budushcheye complained.
"What did you say?"
"I. have a call from the officer commanding Divisional Artillery," the operator said, enunciating very carefully, as if to a deaf person or particularly slow child. "He asks that we surrender in the name of Free Turkestan, or he will be compelled to fire on us."
"Yob tvoyu mat'," Vorontsov breathed.
"He says to fuck your mother," the commo man relayed.
"Wait, you idiot, that was an expression—"
The rising whistle of 122mm rockets in flight cut through the soundproofing like a knife.
The house felt wrong. Nothing he could put his finger on—a strange touch of scent, an air current out of place. Something that woke up all his field instincts. Something that screamed intrusion!
