Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  "Now, here's a delightful pair. Gleb Lynko, American born, American given name Gavin. Given the choice of the army or jail after beating a student from a rival high school almost to death after a football game. After basic training, he joined the Rangers.

  "His brother Boris, a marine guard at the American Embassy here in Moscow. Caught by GRU in a simple honey trap and turned. Detected by his own side and arrested. Strangled his armed escort in a men's room at Domedovo Airport while awaiting a flight to New York and escaped. When word of his exploit reached the American media, his brother also deserted and defected."

  Arbatov shook his head. "A colorful set of khuligany, to be sure. Cowboys indeed. This agent detachment is well named, don't you think?"

  Alex said nothing. He was fighting not to fidget.

  "Ah, dossiers. They are more vivid than any novel, to those who know how to read them. They encompass a man's life: the beginning, the meat of the middle, and, in time, the end.

  "But here—here we have the most fascinating story of all. A young son, only child of a minor Party official in Smolensk. An extraordinary boy, the tests revealed, a natural gymnast with a talent for languages, though sadly deficient in mathematics. What to do with such a one? His physical gifts are not of Olympic caliber, but in combination with his mental abilities still make him a potential treasure to the Motherland.

  "Our esteemed colleagues in GRU have an idea. The father is loyal to the point of folly, a man who sent away his very beautiful wife when their son was seven, because it was unfitting that an ambitious servant of the Party should be married to a Jew."

  He looked out beneath his eyebrows at Alex, whose hands were fisted so tight his knuckles cracked.

  "Or perhaps he is merely expedient. But a willing tool, withal. So the clever GRU will wait until our boy is ten, and had plenty of time to learn to be a Russian. Then arrange for his father to 'defect,' during the great exodus of the late seventies. The Americans welcome them with open arms, as they welcomed all the fools and traitors and weaklings we pawned off on them. Father and son become good Americans.

  "In due course the boy grows up. He graduates high school with honors. An adventurous lad, he joins the army. He applies for training in the Special Forces. Of course, they snap him up; he is mentally and physically superb, being of strong Russian fiber. And he can think like a Russian, speak like a Russian, because he is a Russian. Who better to infiltrate the Rodina and carry out acts of sabotage and terrorism? Is he not a fugitive from oppression? Who could be a more loyal American?"

  Arbatov shut the dossier. "And so we have the ideal sleeper, the perfect mole, in place in the heart of the American covert-warfare machine. What went wrong, Aleksandr Pavlovich?"

  Alex's teeth peeled back from his lips. "I don't know. I made it through training without a hitch, got sent to Germany for an advanced course." It occurred to him that Arbatov did not know the beginning of this story without knowing how it ended, but it was coming out in a lanced-boil rush of bitterness. "The CID bastards made me. Somehow." And I was a good troop, dammit. I earned my beret.

  "So you forced a window in a second-story bathroom in Bad Tolzburg, jumped down eight meters to the ground, and managed to make your way to the frontier of the Democratic Republic. It appears that sanitary facilities have served the men of Agent Detachment Texas well."

  He spent the next twenty-seven months in solitary, reading, perfecting his Arabic and Persian, practicing tae kwon do kata, dry-firing his Glock, and watching Desert Storm on satellite TV while GRU debated whether to trust him, whether he'd been tainted by his protracted taste of Western life, or whether he might already have been caught and redoubled. Toward the end, his gut began to tell him they were fixing to say fuck it and just shoot him in the head.

  Then KGB-run agents provocateurs sprang the phony coup, to smoke anti-reform reactionaries out of Gorbachev's charmed circle. In the ensuing purges of suspected hardliners, Alex's keepers decided the most survival-positive course was to let him go, just to show what liberal guys they were.

  Arbatov removed something from the dossier, slid it to Alex. It was a small packet covered in green leather. He picked it up with fingertips that had already started to go numb.

  He opened it. His stomach did a slow somersault. His own face was staring back at him through a stamp on the Great Seal of the United States. RANDOLPH, the passport read, EDWIN ARTHUR.

  He looked at Arbatov. This was a State secret. If the K has this—

  "Are you truly surprised, Alyosha? Lenin himself provided that the Chief Intelligence' Directorate of the General Staff should be a separate entity from the Committee for State Security. Yet he also provided that the Komitet should retain the ultimate say in the doings of Military Intelligence. It is our right to claim you, and we have."

  "What do you want of me?"

  "It has become clear that the rebellion will not be suppressed until the League mounts a major offensive. To do this without fatally weakening our frontiers will take time. During that time, adventurers from around the world will flock to Central Asia to offer their services to the traitors.

  "One of them will be the American mercenary who calls himself Fast Eddie."

  Arkady Arbatov sat slumped in his chair, staring unseeing at the door through a screen of makhorka smoke.

  It opened. His assistant entered, a gaunt gray man, tall, though shorter than the chief director.

  "Ah, Leosha," Arbatov greeted him. "Things were so much simpler in the old days, when all we had to do was arrange that political rivals of Yuriy Vladimirovich should drive off icy roads and break their necks."

  Leonid Leosha sat in the chair recently vacated by the young lieutenant. "Do you really wish those days back, Arkasha?"

  Arbatov sighed explosively. "If wishes were gruel, none should go hungry. But no, I do not." He reached in a drawer. "Vodka?"

  "Arkady Semyonovich, you forget my ulcer."

  "Your health again," Arbatov grumbled. "You're as bad as an American." He poured himself a glass and tossed it off as his old friend watched.

  "Do you think he bought it?" Leonid asked.

  Arbatov set the glass down and wiped his mouth with the hairy back of his hand. "He must, Leosha. Or the Motherland is lost."

  Chapter ELEVEN

  Keeping his head elevated while Yilderim the Tadzhik made fussy final adjustments to the special microphone clipped to the lapel of the Western-style jacket he wore under a striped Uzbek robe, Timur waved away a flock of overzealous studio techs.

  "My turban obscures my face," he said. "Why then do I need makeup?"

  It was festival time in the studios of Television Tashkent, crowded with warriors and youths in blue caps and townspeople who had attached themselves to the celebration. The uprising was succeeding far beyond anyone's expectations. Even his.

  League military might was structured and deployed primarily to defend against outside aggression. The KGB's anti-intolerance campaign had been a convenient pretext for squashing such separatist sentiment as devolution had not co-opted. The League had grown complacent.

  The League maintained three enormous peacekeeping— coercive—-mechanisms: the army, the KGB, and the Interior Ministry's MVD. Each of the republics had its own army or National Guard, and most had MVD and/or State Security agencies as well. They all came with their own command structure, bureaucracy, and hostile attitudes toward other services. When the hammer came down, CI—command, control, communications, and intelligence, not to mention coordination—simply fell apart.

  ' 'Bukhaara! Samarqan! Dushambe! Aalma-Aata!'' In the background voices were chanting the Uzbek names of great Central Asian cities where the revolt had succeeded. Tadzhikstan and Kirghizia were almost entirely in rebellion, as was Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan from the mountains to the Aral Sea, except for the vast and well-defended Baykonur Space Complex north of the Red Sands and east of the Aral. Of all of ancient Turkestan, only the Turkmen Republic—occupied by ninety percent of the Centr
al Asian Military District's forty-division strength—remained firmly under League control.

  "Quiet! Enough! In the name of Allah, gapirmang, don't speak!" Timur's bodyguards and the television techs were trying to hush the jubilant mob. A few of his men began to raise rifle butts to club the recalcitrant into submission.

  He raised a hand. The Kalashnikovs were lowered. The noise ceased. He took his place on the stool set in a flood of light, white and mean-souled. Facing the glass video eyes, he began to speak in English.

  "People of the world, of the League, and of Free Turkestan, I greet you. I am Timur."

  "Jesus fucking Roosevelt Christ," said the tech at the console deep in the guts of the Federal Police Agency's Media Compliance Monitoring Facility in downtown Washington, D.C. "The guy's declaring independence from the League? I thought those damned countries were independent. What the fuck, over?"

  He glanced up at Justin Serafin. The youthful undersecretary for Enforcement Affairs was wearing black tails, but the bib front of his shirt hung unbuttoned and his white tie was wadded in a pocket. Officially he had been called out of a banquet his department was sponsoring for the U.S. Conference of Mayors to help launch Operation Clean Sweep. Since it was two in the morning Washington time, most of the night shift assumed he'd been summoned by beeper from some hotel room to which he'd lured a young mayoral wife.

  Now he had a headset pressed to his ear beneath the slicked-back hair. He nodded curtly; the transmission was still okay to go out over America's legal airwaves.

  In Sochi it was ten in the morning. The Ponderosa Saloon never closed. The blonde waitress leaned her elbows on the bar and gazed into space. She was thinking about the young VDV trooper—Special Designation, though of course you weren't supposed to know that—who'd gotten in the scrape with the Naval Infantry night before last. He was quite handsome, with an acrobat's build and green eyes and blond hair and a devilish grin when he looked at her. She wished he'd stayed long enough to ask her out. It didn't matter that he was shorter than her. It didn't even matter if he was really Jewish, as those horrible Morskaya Pekhota bullies said when they were picking on him. He didn't look Jewish. And she loved the way he had dealt with them.

  A couple of early birds down the bar were staring at the TV set with fumes coming out their ears. Budushcheye was showing a press conference. A man with a cloth wrapped around his head, a turban or something. He had nice eyes, brown and a bit Asiatic. Maybe he was Jewish too. Idly, she tuned in to what he was saying:

  "—no desire to conquer. We wish only what is ours, and to live at peace with our neighbors— '

  "Bullshit!" exploded the older of the two men at the end of the bar, spraying sunflower-seed shrapnel from his lips. "It's the Mongol yoke all over again. It goes to show how useless the Russians are: they take our youths as conscripts and all our money as taxes, and still their League cannot keep the black-asses in line!"

  His friend shook his head. "These Tatar animals will never rest until we're all their slaves once more."

  "But all he wants is to be left alone," she heard herself saying. "Is there anything so wrong with that?"

  They both turned and glared at her so fiercely she pulled away and looked around for the sawed-off baseball bat the night shift bartender kept under the counter.

  The older one shrugged. "What does she know? She's only a waitress."

  "Though we are predominantly Muslim, we adhere to the ancient and honorable Islamic tradition of sufferance. It is not to impose our ways on others that we have taken up arms, it is only to prevent others' imposing on us. We shall respect the rights of our nonbelieving brothers and sisters, as we shall respect the rights of women, and all those not of Turkic or Iranian blood who dwell among us."

  The words fell like drops of lead from the speaker mounted on the wall of the anechoic chamber beneath KGB Central. An operator tore his headset off and threw it to the floor.

  "Yob tvoyu mat'! The damned nigger's running his voice through a speech synthesizer. We haven't got one hope in hell of identifying him!"

  The water greeted her like old friends—it embraced her immediately, eagerly even, but it was cold as ice.

  She swam a pool length underwater, feeling the silk caress of water on her naked skin, feeling the blood begin to flow again through her travel-fatigued body. This is better than sleep, after a night on that wretched airplane.

  She reached the far end. Then, though it felt as if steel straps were tightening around her chest, she made herself do a racer's flip-turn, swam the return lap with strong confident strokes, never breaking the surface. Just to show that she was in control.

  She returned to the world of air just under the diving board, clung there to the cold cement. The sky before dawn was banded in lavender and honey. The sun hadn't cleared the Mont Alban headland in nearby Nice yet, hadn't truly touched the villa. The villa did not belong to her; she disdained wealth, and bragged that she owned little but an admittedly extensive wardrobe. Still, the villa was hers on extended loan, from an old friend, as she put it.

  The "old friend" was the government-owned Dassault/

  Groupement Industriel des Armementes Terrestres arms manufacturing combine. After all, her relationship with it had lasted longer on cordial terms than her relations with any individual.

  She ducked her head under briefly, shook back her hair, relished the way it felt cascading wet and icy down her back. It was vivid. That was the way she liked life.

  She breast-stroked to the side of the pool where coffee and a basket full of chunks of steaming fresh bread awaited. Marcel, her huge, gay Senegalese caretaker, had propped a flatscreen plasma LCD television the size and shape of a breadboard on an easel next to the pool. She could not stand to linger long away from a set; being in touch, keyed in to the constant electric flux of events around the world, was her drug.

  In America she'd have been called a Nethead, an access addict, although she lacked the interest in computers per se that that implied: she cared only for video. Pictures, images, bright and mordant as fragments of broken stained glass. Members of EuroCom had considerable leeway as to what they could allow their citizens to view—or at least France insisted she had such latitude, and permitted her people to see anything. Not, of course, that that mattered to Jacqui Gendron.

  The image that met her as she propped herself on pool's edge with her elbows and reached for the beaten-silver coffeepot was a face intriguingly concealed behind the tail of a turban. What skin showed was a bit brown for a Chinese or Southeast Asian, and the eyes displayed only a hint of epicanthic fold. A Pakistani, perhaps, or a Turk of some type. From the skin around the eyes and subtle clues in the way his head moved as he spoke, she guessed he was middle aged.

  Text at the lower left-hand corner of the screen informed her he was Timur, leader of the Central Asian rebels, speaking from Tashkent.

  "—left alone, we shall not attack. Attacked, we shall not surrender.''

  She eeled out of the water, twisted lithely to rest her bare rump on the lip of the pool. She crammed a piece of bread in her mouth without being aware she was doing so.

  Merde, she thought. She wondered briefly and maliciously what her proud League general made of this. Like many great men, he was ahead of his time. Unfortunately that also applied in bed.

  "Marcel," she called, still chewing her bread.

  "Madame." He appeared from the sliding glass doors, a mountain of gleaming black muscle in his customary striped sailor's T-shirt and white duck trousers. It was a waste, really, and she liked to titillate herself with the notion of getting him drunk sometime and seducing him—-that sort of thing was feasible again, thanks to gene-tailored contraviruses. Unfortunately, he was a Muslim, which complicated the project.

  "Don't call me that," she said, as she inevitably did. "It makes me sound like a dowager or a whorehouse proprietor."

  She jumped up and began vigorously toweling off, before the delicious edge of morning cool turned to chill. She was vain
about the racing-lean lines of her body, the firmness of her small breasts. She was forty, and while you couldn't say she looked younger, she knew she looked damned good.

  As always, Marcel failed to rise to the bait. That was why he survived in her employ. "You wished something?"

  "Yes. I must go to Tashkent at once. Call TeleFrance and tell them to begin making arrangements."

  She began to walk toward the house, whose pitched red-tile roof was beginning to catch fire from the rays of the sun breaking like surf over the knob of Mont Alban. Her bare feet slapped terra-cotta tiles liberated from a Roman villa recently excavated nearby. Accords of the early nineties forbidding traffic in such antiquities had of course increased demand for them tenfold.

  "What we believe has already been well expressed, two centuries ago, in what may be the most revolutionary document ever written. With your kind indulgence, I shall in closing quote it:

  '' 'When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another..."'

  "Shit," she said, speaking to the air, as she frequently did when a microphone wasn't handy. "Back to Russia."

  Still, she reflected, it was better than the trip she had planned, to Belgrade to cover the Shining Path terrorist international, now centered there. Serbia was so dreary this time of year.

  "Answer, damn you," Sondra Mohn said to the telephone clipped between one cheek and a nightgowned shoulder. On the TV inset in her bedroom wall, the man who called himself Timur was saying, "'—among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among men—"'