Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  He caught the eye of the stocky Uzbek Starshina who had come over to the rebels. He rode a horse bareback, at the insistence of his troops—Lord Tiger had seldom seen Nikolays so solicitous of one of their noncoms. But then, these weren't exactly Nikolays, though what they truly were remained to be seen.

  The Starshina grinned and nodded, seeming happy as if he were going off to a goat-polo game with all his friends. Sher Khan was slow to trust a Turk, a city man, or a man who had worn the greenish brown coat of the League, and the senior sergeant was at least two of those three. But the Tiger Lord had seen enough defections in his time to feel this one was probably sincere.

  There was always the chance he was a KGB or GRU plant. Sher Khan shrugged. What would be, would be. Certainly the Uzbek had already served the young rebellion well: his labor company had at least doubled the amount of loot Sher Khan and his group were able to carry off, the infinitely valuable arms, ammunition, and explosives. Even as it was, they had barely made a dent in the train's cargo.

  One of his students caught sight of him and waved enthusiastically. "Shabash, Sher Khan, bravo! Are we not now truly mujahidin?'

  The horse the boy was leading shied from his waving arm, dragging him off his feet and making its hastily secured burden slip alarmingly to the side.

  "You pup!" Sher Khan roared as the boy's comrades broke up laughing. "You are young fools, barely badmashi, bandits. You may laugh in Nikolay's face when you've heard the thunder of his guns!"

  The valley filled with a whistling roar.

  Scurry like ants, you black-assed bastards! the flight leader exulted. There were dozens of the traitors swarming around the derailed train, many of them carrying crates of loot on their heads—very much like ants, in point of fact.

  At the sound of the approaching Su-25 attack planes, many of them threw away their burdens and began to run.

  He glanced to the side. His wingman was out of sight, behind and to the right. The valley was too narrow for them to maintain much lateral separation, especially since the leader was bringing his four-plane flight in low to make sure they got the best possible run on the bandits.

  "Flight Udarnik, this is Udarnik One," he called. "We'll make the first pass with cluster bombs, then come back and finish this with rockets and cannons." As acknowledgments crackled in his ears he triggered two cluster bomb pods. They fell away from his squatty attack plane, spinning slowly, then breaking apart to scatter dozens of one-kilogram bombs like so many lethal eggs.

  When the first strike plane appeared, the Tadzhiks started to scatter. "Wait!" Sher Khan shouted, his voice rising above the scream of jet engines. "They're not after us! It's the train they'll strike."

  The Tadzhik youths stared back down into the valley in horror. Several score of the ambushers were still down there looting. Their cousins, their brothers, their friends.

  Sher Khan had time to think, So now you learn the bitterest lesson of war. Then he saw the two 500-kilogram CBUs drop from the Su-25's belly.

  "Down!" he screamed, and threw himself flat.

  The train went up in a giant white flash.

  The flight leader's wingman and the lead ship of the second element simply vanished. Udarnik Four came wobbling out of the black mushroom cloud rolling up into the sky, but it had been FOD'd: foreign object damage, debris thrown up by the blast, had crippled it. Within five hundred meters its pilot punched out.

  As the rebels raised faces streaked with tears of terror and grief and triumph, the Sukhoi drove into a mountainside at five hundred knots. The chute on the zero-altitude ejection seat never deployed.

  Chapter NINE

  Ah, civilization, Little Alex thought, in parody of an O'Neill play he'd never read but whose title had always intrigued him. The humid warehouse district air was full of the smells of diesel fuel and the salt waters of the Black Sea, stinking polluted despite the League's shamefaced efforts to clean it up. That was ail fine with Alex. He was a city boy at heart, content to leave the mountains to the goats and eagles.

  It had been a tense wait for the choppers. If they pulled off the SIG1NT grab, Texas Team was bulletproof: they would have the bulk of GRU between them and Komitet payback. If not... ;

  Alex grinned. Fuck that shit, he thought. They came. We're golden. It's time to party.

  Dusk was falling onto Sochi like dusty theatrical curtains, settling between tokens of the League's fitfully increasing prosperity, stripped and abandoned cars parked to either side of the narrow, rutted street. Somewhere a radio tuned to the Georgian state channel was playing mariachi music.

  Georgie stopped on the curb with his hands in the pockets of his fashionably baggy trousers and took a deep breath. 'Ah. Vicente Fernandez. The good stuff." He bounced up and down on his toes a few times.

  "Gesundheit," Alex said, a little sourly. Mariachi was too close to the salsa music he'd hated so much as a teenager in New York. The Georgians had been hooked on the stuff since the mid-seventies.

  Georgie gave him a reproachful look. He owed his nickname to the republic of his birth, and the perverse whim of his unit leader. His real name was Vissarion Vitaliyevich Mzhavanadze. His father had taken him to America as a child, then brought him back to the USSR, as the song had it, as a teenager when Mzhavanadze, Sr., finally decided he couldn't handle living in a society he found anarchic and confusing.

  Texas Team, minus Pete but including Simms—Simonov, the thin and nervous Canadian who'd come to the Soyuz as a student in search of his Dukhobor roots—was on the prowl for nightlife. That was a commodity Georgia had more of than even Moscow, province or not.

  They weren't interested in the usual attractions of the League's largest resort town, the sanatoria and the promenade down tree-lined Kurortniy Prospekt. Tourist fare was too thin for Spetsnaz blood, unless you counted some of the more recent, less licit attractions. The underground nightclub known as the Western World had all by itself brought Sochi a reputation as the Hamburg of the Black Sea, without a bit of help from Intourist.

  From somewhere to the north came a series of quick pops, like a finger being tapped on a tabletop hard. Another set responded, faster and higher pitched, like somebody touch-typing on an old-style manual typewriter. Texas Team stiffened in unison. You didn't have to be Spetsnaz to identify that sound: somebody using modern-issue weapons was slugging it out with parties armed with old 7.62mm pieces, AKMs or even ancient AK-47s. It was a sound that had been increasingly familiar in the Black Sea ports for twenty years—and was gradually becoming known all across the country.

  "Street gangs versus militsiya," Georgie guessed, relaxing as much as he ever did. The shooting was too far away to involve them.

  "Yeah." Buddy snickered. "And three guesses who's got the muzzle-loaders." The police had a reputation for being poorly armed, poorly trained, and generally fucked.

  Tex cranked his white straw Stetson back on his head—it would have fetched a month's pay from any self-respecting worker on the "left" or black market—and punched his brother in the biceps hard enough to send him lurching off the buckled sidewalk and into a pool of water left by a late afternoon shower.

  "Let's get a move on," he said, fending off Buddy's efforts to retaliate by knocking his hat off. "We spent too damn much time bellycrawlin' around them mountains, and I'm half-past ready to howl."

  The Ponderosa was another triumph of League modernization. There was no air-conditioning, and not much air period coming in the saloon-style doors, as the afternoon breezes died with the sunset. Mucky dampish sand crunched underfoot and drifted around the peeling veneer at the base of the bar. Fat blue flies hung suspended in the heavy air as if it were amber.

  By Western standards it was too dim to be a restaurant and too bright to be a bar, but it in fact was a hell of an improvement over drinking establishments in the classic Russian mode, which were mainly places you stood while blotting up as much vodka as it took to get you blind in a hell of a hurry. It wasn't really legal, what with the League in the throe
s of yet another anti-alcohol campaign, but that had never been of much concern to anybody. Especially here in Georgia, where they specialized in getting by by getting by.

  First through the swinging doors was Alex. For this stand-down sortie he wore high paramilitary drag: Russian republican gray and white camo paratroop trousers, a U.S. Army tunic with GORSUNOV stenciled in black over the breast pocket, open after the fashion of League walking-out dress, but worn over a black T with a Green Beret clad skull and the legend Living by Chance, Loving by Choice, Killing by Profession. Topping it all was his own Green Beanie, complete with Fifth Group insignia, worn American-style, lopped to the side instead of standing up the way the Russians did it. After him came Georgie in his baggies and black bolero jacket, an elaborate earring hanging from his pierced right lobe, Delgado in black shirt and white jacket and pants, and finally the Lynko brothers in regulation walking-out VDV dress, if you overlooked the cowboy hats and the stiletto-toe sharkskin goat-roper boots.

  The bartender sized them up with sleepy eyes and a slow nod. They were either a particularly nasty street gang or Special Operations. Either was welcome, as long as they paid.

  The bar was not yet crowded. It wasn't a proletarian hangout, and the night people who were its normal clientele were just crawling out of bed. Alex picked a round table not too near the bar, and as far as possible from both the jukebox, which was blaring out a George Strait song, or the big-screen TV, where a local with stains on the lapels of his lime-green leisure suit was staring with slack blue jaws at the end of Dallas.

  A couple of nondescripts, after eying the new arrivals surreptitiously for a moment, went back to a heated discussion in Georgian, with lots of hand motions. Alex glanced at Georgie, who showed no reaction, meaning the two weren't saying anything controversial.

  Alex caught the word chornyiyzhopa, "black ass," which was the standard Russian slur for Central Asians. Georgians hated ragheads worse than the Rad-Trads. Alex gathered the Asian nationalities were up to something. Again. It wasn't his problem.

  The waitress had peroxide hair and coal-black roots, and Alex couldn't tell if the dark around her eyes was makeup or contusions. She wore a cowboy hat, blue bare-midriff top and short skirt, fringed white vest and cowboy boots. Alex took note that she had nice legs, and had eaten garlic for lunch.

  The waitress swayed away. Tex leaned over the table and flicked Georgie's earring with a stubby forefinger.

  "Who-ee. You gonna get some tonight for sure. Got your old Mepps trout lure and ever'thing."

  Georgie's eyes flared, but he only winced and pulled away without batting at Tex's hand. You didn't get physical with either of the Texas-born twins without being ready to carry through. In all of the full twelve-man agent detachment, only Little Alex and Pete were generally willing to take it that far.

  Delgado grinned and jerked his head after the waitress. "Hey, maybe you hook her. She sure smells right, you know?" He waved a hand in front of his nose, in case anyone hadn't gotten it.

  Tex slammed a slab hand down on the table. "Hey, now, I think the greaseball just made a pussy joke. Shit, all you Cubans know about eatin' pussy is when you catch cats in coon traps up on the roofs of your huts and stew 'em up for dinner."

  Buddy bobbed his head and laughed his hur-hur laugh. He had trouble keeping up with this 6ind of repartee, but he liked to show he was following right along.

  Alex sank down in his own wood-backed chair, sipping his apple juice. He neither smoked nor drank. In fact, except for one small detail, he was almost as perfect a League man as Mr. P the poster boy.

  The after-action let-downs had him. He was subject to mood swings anyway, and he didn't have any taste for the kind of thigh-slapping jock releases the others were indulging in. He wouldn't have come at all, except as unit leader he had to at least show the flag when it came to carousing. But when he returned from a mission, he was filled with energy, even if he was drained of purpose; he couldn't stand to hang around the detachment's barracks, although by League Armed Forces standards—or anybody's, for that matter—they were fine quarters indeed.

  He watched the waitress go by with her fringe swinging. A little mouthwash and she'd be quite acceptable. As soon as the rest of the team got a load on, they'd undoubtedly want to sail off looking for professional companionship, and that was always when he got off the boat. There was something about paying for it that made him feel funny. Of course, with his silver tongue, he generally didn't have to.

  He leaned back, trying to shift emotional gears to start sweet-talking the waitress. The flying doors opened. Tex lifted his head, sniffed, and said, "Who farted?"

  The four men standing in the doorway wore beards, dark blue berets, and jumpsuits with indigo-striped T-shirts underneath: Morskaya Pekhota, naval infantry from LeagueFleet/ Black Sea. Elite enough to rate leave—unlike, say, the green-stripe squaddies from the Araks, who had to crawl through the wire for a night on what passed for a town—and elite enough not to give a good fuck-your-mother that the Ponderosa was off-limits even to them. The fact they were marines was enough to make them instant enemies of Texas Team, who all had trained as VDV—paratroops.

  But the ill will ran deeper than that. These boys belonged to Black Sea Fleet's attached Spetsnaz brigade. Like Texas Team, with whom they sometimes carried out maneuvers, they were vysotniki, the cream of special ops. Officers and extended-service NCOs instead of the conscripts that made up most of Spetsnaz, vysotniki were trained along the lines of U.S. Special Forces to undertake sensitive small-unit missions, true snoop-and-poop stuff. This bunch was deployed on anti-smuggling duty on the Black Sea, a job akin to trying to hold back the tide.

  Their leader was a petty officer named Derezhov, who had a head shaped like a cinder block. He stood, arms akimbo, scanning the dubious types who'd begun to fill up the bar. His eye lit when it hit Texas Team. "Well, if it isn't Moscow's own sweet bun boys."

  Alex smiled sweetly. "In your dreams, Popeye."

  "Have a good day?" Georgie asked. "You catch anybody trying to smuggle in nonbiodegradable laundry soap?"

  "If anybody's running short on dope," Alex said, "the Black Sea sales force is here."

  "Got any samples?" Delgado asked, drawing spilled-vodka circles on the scarred tabletop.

  Berzin, the biggest naval infantryman—to Alex he looked just like Bluto from the old Popeye cartoons—growled and started for their table. His two nameless buddies held him back, looking like dogs baiting a bear. Derezhov sneered again and shook his head. He said something sidelong, and Berzin allowed himself to be pacified and led to one of the stools that had suddenly become available at the bar.

  Tex cracked his knuckles loudly. Berzin made a guttural sound and started to turn. The bartender hastily slammed an open bottle of export-grade Stolichnaya in front of him, distracting him.

  Bored with the byplay, Alex glanced at the television. A blondinka only slightly more convincing than the plastic-buckskin-vested waitress was seated in front of a giant logo for Budushcheye, the Russian Republic's leading private TV network, reading the news.

  He focused, trying to hear her over "Six Days on the Road," for God's sake. He wondered why all the music he'd really hated in America had to follow him back to the Motherland. Worst of all, Serious and Dutyrock were making big inroads in Moscow. Why can't they play some Santanta? He was a committed airhead, hard outlaw rocker to the core.

  "—racial incident involving Yusuf 'Pat' Baraka, the first American high school athlete to sign with Moscow University's athletic program," the blonde was saying. The viewpoint switched to a scene of a lot of pale-skinned youths who obviously ate a lot of starch jostling a skinny black kid who towered over them like a radio mast. A hatless militsioner waded in with his nightstick, not looking too pleased at having to go to bat for a black, but painfully conscious that racist outbursts made the Motherland look uncultured, and withal always happy to bust khuligany heads.

  "The latest incident arose over Baraka's alleged relat
ionship with top Bolshoi School student ballerina Irina Pavlova."

  The scene returned to the anchorwoman, then pulled back and panned as she turned to a freckled little man in a red vest and immense bow tie who looked like a drunk cartoonist's caricature of a leprechaun.

  "And speaking of sports, here's Dzhonniy Davidov to tell us about the Moscow Stars coming home to face the St. Petersburg Defenders in a showdown series for the All-League Baseball Federation's Northern Division pennant...."

  One of the naval infantryman turned and spat on the stained linoleum. '"Dzhonniy,"' he repeated. "Johnny. What kind of name is that for a Russian?"

  Derezhov looked deliberately back at Little Alex before replying. "Better you should ask, ' What kind of name is Davidov?'"

  Berzin thought that was funny. He snorted vodka through his nose and all over the bartender.

  "Who do we know who is one of them, Lieutenant?" asked another naval infantryman, catching the game.

  "No one we can trust. Even though they might affect to be brothers in arms. You know the old saying: 'no matter how well you feed a wolf, it keeps looking back toward the woods.'"

  "You mean Americans?" the fourth one asked ingenuously, though he knew perfectly well what the saying meant, and to whom "they," emphasized in that particular way, invariably referred.

  "Not even those imperialist swine. After all, just because our comrades were exposed to the disease of decadence doesn't mean they were infected. But when the sickness runs in the blood ..."

  It was quiet in the bar. Suddenly Dzhonniy Davidov's voice seemed to be coming from far away, another planet maybe. Alex pushed back his chair and looked at his teammates. None of them met his eye.