Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  Which was why he wore a weight lifter's belt to this very day when flying. And why he wore a Ruger Super Redhawk .44 Magnum with a 75mm barrel in a sweat-stained holster beneath his left armpit.

  In a way it was also why he was still in Hinds. And still a warrant officer, for that matter. Ever since that choking hot red-dust afternoon in 1986, he'd had an attitude.

  Morale officers hated him. But they couldn't dislodge him. He was as good a rotary-wing jock as Frontal Aviation had. And he was that rarity of rarities in the League armed forces: a man who'd reenlisted after time on civilian street.

  He belonged in modern high-performance choppers, Hokums or the sexy, savage little Havocs. Actually, he should have been helping develop tilt-rotor attack vertis, hybrids of fixed and rotary-wing aircraft, that combined the speed and endurance of airplanes with the hover and maneuver capability of helicopters. They had already proven successful as utility and assault transports. The new racing-shell breed promised to be primo tank and chopper killers. The kind of work the Cowboy had been born for.

  But no. Hunchbacks it was. And doing the Azerbaijani National Guard's job for it. Cooperating with LeagueFleet out of Baku, worst of all, unappreciative bastards that they were.

  "Call in on these nutcakes, Ivan," Kolya said to the flight-systems and communication man beside him. Ivan nodded his helmeted head. He was busy craning out, trying to see the funny people who were impertinent enough to be shooting at them. He was a young, impressionable sort, who believed everything his superiors and the design bureaus told him about the superiority of modern League matertiel. The thought that even a little 5.45 or 5.56mm round might conceivably get lucky and drop them into the Caspian would have shocked him to the bone.

  "Viktor," Kolya said, leveling out to increase separation and set up his run.

  "Yo, Cowboy."

  Kolya the Cowboy winced. Ivan secretly disapproved of his pilot-commander and his call sign. The gunner hero-worshipped him, and tried to emulate him, which was probably worse. He was even trying to grow a handlebar like Kolya's. He wasn't succeeding.

  "Did the ground crew remember to load bullets for your Gatling this morning?" He bantered, but there were things you didn't take for granted in this man's air force.

  "I'm ready to come on command," Viktor answered. He'd checked all the systems in the "greenhouse" cockpit up front himself before lift-off, as Kolya insisted. The Cowboy was short on formality and Party pietisms, but he ran a tight damn ship.

  Kolya banked again, heard a high-pitched hail clatter hard by his head.

  "What was that, sir?" Ivan asked.

  "One of the ragheads got lucky and bounced a couple rounds off the canopy. Nothing serious."

  Ivan paled. You felt very naked when somebody shot at you for real for the very first itme. Somehow all that armor didn't seem so invincible.

  The dinghy was veering for an inlet now, churning up a white vee of foam in a futile effort to beat the speeding Hind.

  "Wh-what do you think they are?" Ivan asked, obviously trying to show he wasn't rattled. "Terrorists?"

  "Can't tell." Kolya grunted. "More likely they're just smugglers. But they might be both, running guns or explosives in to Azeri separatists."

  The big chopper was crossing a bare gray stone knuckle that jutted into the greenish water. "Would they shoot at us if they were only smugglers?" Viktor asked.

  "Who can tell? They're Shi'ites. Even other Muslims think they're nuts. I mean, these boys are Turks who want to be part of Iran. What does that tell you?"

  "We should teach the Iranians a sharp lesson," Ivan said through gritted teeth.

  "Shall I fire a warning shot?" Viktor asked.

  "Nope. They fired us up first. Fuck 'em."

  The first burst from the 12.7mm Gatling gouged a raw white gash in the water ten meters beyond the boat, which was running almost perpendicular to the Hind's approach. The boat rocked wildly and turned as one occupant, more timid or realistic than the rest, stood up and dove over the gunwales.

  Viktor fired again. The boat vanished in a splash of spray, shattered planks, and assorted sundered parts. A moment later yellow flame fountained as the gas tank went.

  "We should just invade," Ivan said. Spots of color glowed on his cheeks, right beneath his tinted visor. "Teach the black-assed barbarians to trifle with us."

  Kolya worked his tongue around the inside of his stubbled cheeks as he orbited the chopper widdershins around the wreck. "Tried that before. It was called Afghanistan.' "

  "I didn't mean that. I meant Iran. We could defeat them easily, and the West would never dare intervene."

  "They said that about Afghanistan too," Viktor said. His voice sounded funny, constricted, as if he was having trouble holding in his breakfast. He'd never used his shiny multibarreled gun on humans before.

  Ivan started to sputter.

  "Leave that sort of thing to me, boy," Kolya told the gunner. "You've still got a career ahead of you. Don't damage it running your mouth."

  Kolya glanced sidelong at his youthful instrument man. There was a time for even the Cowboy to hold his tongue. As far as things had come in the League, you could still take for granted that, out of a three-man air crew, one would be an informer. The League had to keep up with the rest of the world, after all.

  Still, Viktor had it right. League and republic were running fairly regular air strikes and KDB—punitive airmobile—missions across the border against Azeri Party of God guerrilla bases and the Pasdaran—''Revolutionary Guard" —units that covertly trained and supported them. The Iranian government just blandly denied involvement with Hezbollah terrorism and filed another protest with the U.N. A lot of the League Army's more vocal traditionalists were screaming for more decisive action.

  But as Kolya knew, the USSR had sent troops into Iran on a 1,300-kilometer sweep through Seistan back in 1981. A retributive raid for Iranian revolutionary support of their rebellious upland cousins, a warning, or a reconnaissance for a future strike to the Persian Gulf—depending on whom you believed—it had been claimed as a success by Group of Soviet Forces, Afghanistan. But they're never gone back for anything more ambitious than in-and-out border crossings. And the Iranians kept backing the muj.

  Ivan tapped the side of his helmet. "Base says to try to take them prisoner. KGB wants to interrogate."

  Kolya glanced down. A few smoldering planks were all that remained visible of boat or crew.

  "Oh, well," he said, and plugged a tape into the player he'd illicitly installed beside his seat. Time for some good Hank Williams.

  Shih Tai-Yu froze with her hand on the knob of her apartment door. Thoughts of the essays weighing down her backpack evaporated. There are voices inside!

  The hallway was like a greenhouse from a day of intense Beijing summer. The smell of paint seemed to beat off the sickly green walls like heat from a stove. The fumes cramped her, crowded her, made her feel claustrophobic.

  Tai-Yu felt her legs turn the consistency of boiled squid. Her heart seemed to beat right behind her solar plexus as she shuffled possibilities rapid-fire through her mind—haste making her spill cards, or flash them by without being able to assimilate them.

  Who it could be had many potential answers: the Ministry of Public Security's secret police, the Party Discipline Inspecting Committee, army internal security; the players in the game changed from week to week, like the policies of the government of the People's Republic. Like the rules of the game.

  That man eyeing me at the market? she wondered. Could he have been following me? It was an open-air market near the university, where peasants were allowed to come and offer produce grown on the small private plots some of them were allowed. She preferred them to the supermarkets, Western-style but state-owned, dotted around Beijing. In the open-air markets fresh fruits and vegetables were more likely to be available, and of better quality when they were.

  The man had been pretending to peruse a bin of stumpy dead-white daikon radishes with the earth st
ill on them, but he kept looking at her. It did not occur to her that he might have had other motives for staring than surveillance.

  Or could the block cadre have called the authorities down on me? Her apartment block was maintained by the university for its middle ranks, lesser administrators and instructors, like herself, of no great tenure. The block leader was an old woman, a former custodian who ran sullen and shrill by turns. She disapproved of the young professor of Altaic Studies, thought her too unconventional, intellectual, and foreign. She was an ethnic Mongol, after all. Any good Han knew they weren't to be trusted.

  Perhaps it was nothing; perhaps after all it was De, her lover, the disheveled poet and university hanger-on. He had a key... but then who might he be talking to?

  Do they know? she wondered, a big black ball of fear rolling up into her throat. She remembered the father she hadn't known till she was seven, recalled his tales of arrest, abuse, and years of imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. She recalled the terror of the Beijing spring, shots and screams and bodies falling as if in slow motion through air thick with heat and the smell of filth, as this neat hallway was filled with the stink of layer upon layer of paint.

  She recalled her childhood friend Hua, always optimistic and pretty as a spring flower, who had fallen sick and not been present that terrible day in Gate of Heavenly Peace Square, but who nonetheless had been called from the elementary school class she was teaching just two months ago. She had not been seen since. Her friends and relatives had heard nothing of her. Her husband had been arrested for growing demonstrative when he went to the police to ask after her, had been systematically beaten and released—all without acknowledgment that the authorities had any knowledge of what had happened to his wife.

  Such disappearances still befell the Tiananmen "criminals." Some of Tai-Yu's friends theorized that the government knew who all of them were, but trolled them in gradually, rationing the arrests, as it were, in order to maximize the effect.

  / should turn, she thought. I should simply walk away.

  Instantly she derided herself for the notion: Where would you go? You're a cloistered academic, not a revolutionary. Helpless. They'd pick you up within hours, days at the most. And even if they didn't, you'd only starve.

  She took a breath: Best, then, to seek a quick resolution. She flipped her single glossy black braid back over the shoulder of her blue proletarian tunic and opened the door.

  The television set was on. The screen showed a map of Russian Turkestan, shaped like a dentist's chair, with Kirghizstan and Tadzhikstan as the back, Uzbekistan and Turkemenia the seat, and the Kazakh Republic as the bloated headless occupant. One of the voices she had heard was saying, "—continues at this hour in Alma-Ata. An air of tension still prevails in the Turkmen Republic, though no outbreaks are reported—"

  She sagged against the doorframe of her tiny apartment. She should have felt relief. Instead she was nauseous.

  When she felt reasonably confident she wouldn't throw up, she pushed off and carried her bundle of vegetables the few steps into the kitchen. As she put them away, she noticed that De had eaten the last of her eggs before leaving this morning—not to mention leaving the TV on. She made a small, irritable sound.

  Perhaps it's time I threw him out for good, she thought, stripping off a stalk of celery and washing it in the sink. She thought about how easily the notion that he was a police informer had fit itself into her mind. The state didn't approve of those on the fringe, of those without a visible and steady means of support. Perhaps he provided services in return for indulgence of his Bohemian life-style.

  "I should be honest," she said aloud. "I'm getting bored with him anyway."

  Gobi Desert sand crunched between the floorboards and the soles of her black slippers—the desert was creeping closer, year by year, like her ancestors' final revenge. She took her celery into the other room and sat in the one cheap chair with the upholstery that was beginning to rupture terminally despite her dogged efforts at repair. It was seldom that anything on television interested her. And here was her specialty erupting all over the news.

  The Turkestanis want to go it alone, she thought. Don't they know that the world will never let them?

  Chapter EIGHT

  "Timing is everything, my children," Sher Khan said. "Timing and the love of Allah."

  He glanced around at the students clustered around him in the meadow overlooking the deep gorge. Sunken-chested city youths, pale in their Western street clothes and tyubeteyka. They did not, praise Allah, look like much.

  They looked like librarians, convenience store clerks, and the sort of students who belong to clubs devoted to some esoteric hobby, like stamp collecting, science fiction, or home electronics. Pushtuns thought all Tadzhiks were librarians, clerks, and besotted hobbyists. But Sher Khan was bound by the three precepts of Pushtunwali, the hillman's iron code: hospitality, safe conduct, and "exchange."

  "Exchange" had the Old Testament sense: an eye for an eye. The Nikolays still owed Afghans a lot of eyes. Sher Khan knew it was not God's responsibility to make collecting easy for him. It was Allah's way to cast obstructions in the path of His chosen people. Tadzhiks, for example.

  In the distance a train's air horn sounded. One of his listeners jumped as if a bee had stung him. Trying not to shake his head, he bent once again over the transmitter he had carefully propped on a sandbag.

  "When we fought the Nikolays," he said, "one might detonate a charge with a burning fuse, or with a well-placed shot from an inglisi rifle. Do not look dubious, O beardless ones; I did this thing myself.

  "But in His compassion and His mercy, Allah has seen fit that my eyes should no longer be as keen as once they were, to rival a mountain eagle's. So now I make use of this."

  "So all we need to be mujahidin is Western technology?" one of his pupils asked.

  "By my beard!" Sher Khan roared. The Tadzhik youngsters quailed. Almost two meters tall in his baggy dust-colored kameez pajamas, hook-nosed and bearded like an ill-trimmed hedge, Sher Khan looked the perfect image of an Afghan mujahid hillman right off the CBS Evening News. "To be a straggler one needs the heart of a lion and the wisdom of a Sufi sage, not toys! Ten years we fought the Rus, and only at the end did we have any of this technology you speak of."

  He fixed one of the youths with ferocious gray-green eyes. The boy tried to retract his head inside his Satanta T-shirt like a turtle.

  "If Western technology was all it took, you would be the mightiest of warriors, with your video games and television cartoons! Do you then think yourself the better of Sher Khan, the Tiger Lord?"

  No, now, old fool, keep a tighter rein on your tongue. His charges looked as if they were about to take flight down the mountainside. As it happened, he had a powerful taste for video games himself, but this didn't seem a propitious time to mention it.

  The train's horn sounded again. "Behold, it comes 'round the mountain now. Watch in silence, that you may learn wisdom."

  Air horns bellowing like a frightened calf, the lead engine charged off the broken track, pulling the other two engines and the first ten cars of the hundred-car train off with it. The Tadzhik youths stared in openmouthed amazement, half ecstatic, half horrified at what they'd helped to do.

  "Observe," Sher Khan said with only a trace of smugness. "The train was just coming off a curve, and momentum was still drawing it outward, ensuring it would jump the track where our explosive cut it. And it had slowed for the curve—very important when ambushing a munitions train, leSt your valuable prize vanish before your eyes in a single brilliant flash."

  Small figures had appeared among the bases of the tall pines perched above the railroad cut. The popcorn sound of distant small-arms fire drifted across the valley. Sher Khan picked up his ancient Lee Enfield sniper's rifle from the rock on which he'd leaned it.

  "Come," he said, "we must hurry. The Sukhois will soon be on their way, and the flying tanks not far behind."

  He set off down the h
illside at a gangly run, tails of the coat he wore over his kameez flapping, lending him the appearance of a great ungainly crane. The Tadzhik youths exchanged glances and followed. The three fortunate enough to have Kalashnikovs moved self-importantly into the lead.

  League labor-formation Starshina Bulgachev staggered along the metaled right-of-way with smoke in his nostrils and blood streaming into his eyes. Men were screaming, guns were shooting.

  "Basmachi!" somebody yelled: bandits.

  His youthful charges clustered around him. "Senior Sergeant! We're under attack! The train will blow up! What can we do?"

  He wiped his eyes. Some of the understrength League MVD platoon guarding the train had thrown their weapons away and started bounding down toward the stream that ran along the valley below, probably more afraid of the train's blowing up than the attackers. Others were crouching on this side of the train, leaning around the cars to snap shots upslope. Even as Bulgachev glanced toward them, he saw one crumple and the others turn in horror as they were taken under fire from behind, across the narrow valley.

  "What are we going to do?" asked a burr-headed boy with tears streaming down his face. He was holding his arm; a white spear of bone jutted through the blood-soaked sleeve of his tunic. In his panic he spoke his native Uzbek.

  "The only thing we can do." Senior Sergeant Bulgachev tore the red, white, and blue League patch from his sleeve, tossed it down, and ground it into the dust with his bootheel.

  "We've been pack animals for the Rusyalar for too long. Now it's time to live or die as men. As Ozbeklar.'" He ripped open his tunic and began to tear a strip from his undershirt to serve as a surrender flag.

  There were advantages to being old, Sher Khan decided as he threaded his way up the slope between pines, the astringent smell of their sap burning in his flared nostrils. Well, senior, and serving as teacher to these eager but naive Tadzhiks. Even his bare-cheeked young cadre of would-be saboteurs were bent under the weight of boxes of rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, or hauling on the tethers of horses made nervous and balky by the smells of burned powder and spilled blood.