Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  "Your namesake never balked at that," Ali said.

  "I am not my namesake, Colonel. As I was saying, these weapons are most impressive in their numbers, but they are also sadly out of date. Can they truly be of help to us?"

  Ali smiled. "More than you can imagine, Timur."

  The tent was full of small nervous rustling, clearings of throats, diesel fumes, sweaty uniforms, and the reek of vast fetid Aral'skoye More slogging pollutedly nearby. From beyond the low hills came the rumble of a test-bed firing of a new rocket engine. Scraps of tinny music from bivouacked troops and arc-welder sputters from the armories and vehicle parks in the false noon of floodlight towers rolled by like tumbleweeds on the heavy breeze.

  Colonel General Anatoliy Karponin stood at the head of the tent, facing the commanders of Operation Desert Wind. Central Asia was a "Front" by sole virtue of the fact that STAVKA said it was. A Front comprised on paper at least four land armies, two combined-arms and two tank, plus a tactical air army. Desert Wind was more a single reinforced combined-arms army at this stage: six motor-rifle divisions, six tank; call it an army and a half. As air assets he had a weak fighter/ground attack division, no dedicated fighters— which made sense, admittedly, inasmuch as the rebels had no airplanes for them to fight—a strike regiment of Sukhois that had been flown until the wings were about to come off, and assorted recon and transport units.

  The League held out small hope for more. There were borders to be held. Worse, though the republics of the League had unanimously condemned the uprising—including naturally the governments-in-exile of the Uzbek, Kirghiz, and Tadzhik republics—malcontents were beginning to stir. League and republican reserves could not be overcommitted to Turkestan.

  Anatoliy Karponin concurred. What he had was more than sufficient to the task at hand.

  He gazed about the tent, knowing the kerosene lanterns would throw dramatic highlights across the heavy handsome face. That was why he didn't use generators to light the briefing tent—for theatrical effect. Morale was as important a factor in battle as tactics and logistics—more so, in fact; he felt it deserved its own place with the three accepted elements of military art: strategy, operations, and tactics. As holder of a rare and coveted doctorate of military art, he was entitled to such radical views.

  "Gentlemen," he said. "The time has come. Tomorrow we move."

  The applause was loud and prolonged. It was a pity the foreign news crews could not be on hand for this, but security and his own sense of propriety forbade. Besides, League Armed Forces archive and publicity units were out in force, camcorders whirring. All the newsnets would get a suitably edited version of this, after the fact.

  He rode the response, half smiling, until it began to subside. Then he nodded. The portable two-meter screen beside him glowed to life with a map of the Turanian Lowlands of Kazakhstan east of the Aral and north of the Syr Darya. It was a self-luminous color-LCD unit. Karponin was a believer in modernization with discipline, and it influenced his taste in stage design.

  "We will be making a preliminary strike here," he said, and as he spoke, a dot expanded to fill the screen. "This is a fortified bandit village. Taking it will give our young men i chance to blood themselves in an easy victory. It will also serve to send a message to the world."

  He raised his head. Lantern fire danced in his dark eyes.

  "Let there be no mistake here." His voice rang like a long-rod penetrator striking a turret. He was speaking to history now. "This is a fight for the values of civilization against those of barbarism. Against the new Mongol hordes.

  "As of this moment, the initiative passes to the hand of civilization."

  "Damn," Kolya said, easing off the collective. "It makes my dick hard, the way this babe just leaps into the air."

  No response from the gunner's seat, stepped before and below the pilot's spot. Young Yefreytor Popel' could only cope with the complexities of combat flying in a volatile little racing-shell Havoc by hiding from the rest of reality behind a wall of existential denial. On the ground, only incessant browbeating by senior NCOs got him to involve himself to the extent of showering and brushing his teeth. There was no way he was going to attempt to deal with the mad whims of his pilot. He didn't communicate with Kolya at all except for what duty required.

  Given what an introverted little spud he was, that suited Kolya fine. He was his own best audience anyway—he and Marina. But seeing Vanya and Viktor again reminded him how he missed the easy camaraderie of Black Sea days. Ivan was an uptight little prick, but there was a real human in there somewhere, trying to burrow through the Youth league bullshit to daylight.

  The eastern sky was muzzy gray with false dawn. Kolya loved getting up early, loved flying early; that was one reason he was widely considered crazy. There was a purity to the predawn hours. The feel of the chopper, the whippet tremble and muted snarl of power held barely under control, only augmented the sensation. Serenity and hysteria at once: the ancient samurai must have felt this way, the morning of battle.

  He chuckled. Adrenaline was getting to him. As a pup he'd had his nose rubbed in reality too damned hard to stay wrapped in that warrior-mystic robe too long. War wasn't a game, and it sure as Satan wasn't transcendental meditation.

  But it was still the one thing he was truly consummate at.

  "It's the real thing, kid," he said, for his own benefit, really. "Stay awake."

  "Yes, Junior Lieutenant." The boy gave literal-minded a bad name.

  Kolya nudged the hypersensitive joystick controlling the cyclic rate, banking the helicopter left, then shooting it forward, above the heads of the cheering ground crew, to join on the stub wing of the squadron leader.

  "Cowboy present and accounted for," he said, nodding through the tough polymer canopy. "What's the destination, Krasnaya MolniyaT'

  A gloved finger touched the crimson lightning bolt painted on the front of the other pilot's flight helmet. Captain Derevyanko was neither as big a fire-eater nor as fevered a Rad-Trad as the "Red Lightning" handle might indicate. He was a shrewd, decent leader. He wasn't as proficient as the Cowboy, though, and he knew it.

  "Listen up, everybody," Red Lightning said, leading the flight northwest. "We're going to be overflying the Tyuratam missile farm, so don't accidentally jettison any munitions or we'll all be having breakfast with the Holy Mother of Kazan."

  Well disciplined, the pilots kept their laughter off the air. If there was any. After all the years of talking peace, the ICBMs, held in stewardship by the League, still drowsed in their silos beneath the bitter Central Asian soil, each tipped with miniature suns.

  "I'm transmitting the sequence to release flight profiles ...now."

  Kolya's navigational display lit. Kolya studied it with eyebrows lowered in concentration. As he studied it, they got closer together, like two red caterpillars bumping heads.

  "Our target is a rebel strongpoint in a collective—strike that, cooperative—farm called Ak Tepe. It's approximately—"

  "Red Lightning, I don't copy."

  "It's on your screen, Cowboy, how can you not copy?"

  "I have a negative on that rebel strongpoint. Ak Tepe shows negative rebel activity. I repeat, Ak Tepe's no more a rebel opornyy punkt than the Volgograd Garden Club."

  "That's not what our briefing from General Karponin's intelligence officer said, Cowboy. Ak Tepe is a major mustering point and supply dump—"

  "Sod Al Capone and his S-2! Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms. Ak Tepe's in my area of responsibility, Red Lightning. I've been over there every night for two weeks, watching on IR and low-light TV, not to mention my own bloodshot eyes. The place is drowsier than a study hall full of students reading Marx."

  "Negative on that, Cowboy." Pause. "Besides, our orders are clear."

  "God damn it, we're attacking a peaceful village. These people are ours."

  "We have our orders, Cowboy."

  Kolya stared at the leader's ship. Red Lightning kept his helmet faced fo
rward. Kolya felt a strange, sour humming in his veins, like a come-down from a high.

  "So did the Germans," he said softly.

  "Say again, Cowboy."

  "I'm calling an abort, Red Lightning." He spun the little ship on its rotor shaft and accelerated back to the flight line.

  "What? Cowboy, I didn't—Cowboy? Where the hell are you going?"

  "Is everything in order, Junior Lieutenant?" the ruminant voice of Popei' asked in his headset.

  "No."

  "Cowboy, wait! Come back! Jesus, Nikolay Stepanovich, they'll shoot you for this!"

  "Then I'll see you in hell, Red Lightning. Cowboy out."

  Chapter SIXTEEN

  Dr. Karolina Ivanovna Rossopovskiy was not a revolutionary. She regretted that, sometimes.

  "Ya, Kalima!" The sun had not yet cleared the sea-swell hills of this southern reach of the Kazakh Folded Land, but the doctor from the League Health Service was already out doing her jogging along the irrigation canals. Little Horde Kazakh women with their long braids and brightly colored vests were already coming down the alkali slope of the hill that gave their little village its name to begin the daily work in the fields.

  She grinned and waved back; Kalima was the closest they could come to her name, or cared to. Some of them turned aside among the small plots surrounding the hill's base. They knew she would not inform on them for spending the day working their private vegetable patches instead of the cooperative's fields.

  She pulled lightweight stereo headphones over her ears and punched on the flip player on the elastic band around her narrow waist. She had just downloaded a recording of the League's latest musical prodigy, twenty-year-old Stepan Porotov, son of Nganasan seal hunters from the frigid Taymyr Peninsula, conducting the Rio de Janeiro orchestra in his own Millennium Symphony.

  As the music filled her head, she turned west along one of the main canals, way from the sixty-house village and koopkhoz called Ak Tepe, "white hill." She wanted to get in her six kilometers before the garmsil wind blew up out of the Red Sands, sucking the water from the canals and the moisture through the very pores of your skin. Despite the dawn chill, she wore russet shorts and a pale blue sleeveless top; the heat would be thunderous by the time she got back.

  She had started off being very circumspect and body-modest. The cultural briefing the League Health gave her before packing her off to spend the final year of her residency bringing modern health and hygiene to the Central Asians had emphasized that these were Muslims, and radical Shi'ite missionaries out of Iran were known to have penetrated much farther north than this. But the Kazakhs, while modest themselves, were Muslims of recent vintage; they had been converted to Islam by the Tsarist government during the nineteenth century, an eccentric move even by the standards of Russian colonialism. A lot of the old Mongol animism survived.

  And while women were subordinate, they enjoyed considerably more status among the steppe people than they did, say, in mountainous and puritanical Tadzhikstan, say, where last year a Health Ministry worker got chased and severely beaten by a mob for appearing dressed the way Karolina was now.

  The men of White Hill were rather overt in their admiration of her height and long, slim legs; the Kazakhs were on the short side. Instead of resenting the glamorous Great Russian, with her auburn hair and long, fine features, the Kazakh women had made a pet of her. She was there to help them, after all.

  She began to wind it out a little, pushing herself. To her right wind played like invisible imps in a field of wheat. To her left the cotton plants grew, with their heavy leaves and swelling green bolls.

  She hated them. Tsar Khlopok, "King Cotton." The reason for it all: for the overirrigation that was drying the Aral and wasting the entire Turkestani watershed of the Bam-i-Dunya, for the promiscuous use of pesticides that turned the soil yellow and left swirls of thick scum on the canals. For the servitude of the people, her friends and charges in Ak Tepe.

  They didn't call them kolkhozy, for "collective farms," anymore. The new tag was koopkhoz: "cooperative farm." Odd how hard the difference was to see.

  Odd how it had worked that way with so many of the reforms with which the millennium's last decade began. That was why the privileged daughter of a high government economist, a certified member of the nomenklatura, often wished she were a revolutionary.

  She had been a glasnost' baby, sent to the Sorbonne in the first hot flush of "openness." Soviet disdain for foreign poseurs steered her away from the hard-left students; her circle of friends were true EuroModerns, devout social democrats. She had been sent to the West because the West was kulturnyy, and Paris was the theoretic optimum of kulturnyy, so it was natural she absorbed the political and economic views of her friends.

  Karolina had hit the streets of Moscow with a hundred thousand others to cheer on Boris Yel'tsin and defy the hard-liners. She had spoken out—and voted—to steer republic and League away from the harsh dictates of free-market capitalism and onto the kinder, gentler course of social democracy.

  Still the League was locked in perpetual depression. Still a Third World country. The League blamed covert hard-line obstruction and the black market, still booming after all these years.

  Except she didn't buy it. It wasn't the fault of Rad-Trads and what the government, American-fashion, liked to call pushers. It was hers.

  Her role models had gone haggard and vicious. In Sweden, the Promised Land of social democracy, mobs of white youths attacked Iraqi guest workers imported to do scutwork jobs they would not do themselves, for wanting to go on the dole too, for wanting to date pure Swedish women. The nations of the EuroCom fought each other constantly and covertly for domination, even as they sank together into a far pit of strikes, shortages, and stagnation under the weight of grand social programs. Meanwhile, young men from Oslo fought young men from the polderlands of Holland in East Timor, Portuguese boys killed Bristol lads in Zimbabwe, Poles exhorted the Quechua to fall upon the Guaranf and their French advisers, all because the sole commodity a heavily socialized economy can consistently export that people will willingly pay for is war.

  In America, the greatest role mode! of all, you could not change jobs without government permission. You had to carry an internal passport; travel was forbidden without government permission. The police could detain you indefinitely without pressing charges. Just as it was in the preperestroika USSR.

  Union was transformed to League, despite the hard-liners' efforts. Social consciousness prevailed. She prevailed.

  Large corporations were inherently soulless and exploitative; had they not proven this in America and the European Community? So while the farms of Central Asia were no longer state collectives, they were owned by a cartel of giant corporations in each of which republic and League were majority shareholders. Activist, progressive government demanded that everyone contribute his share—and so half the people of Ak Tepe lost the private plots communism had permitted them, seized for taxes. Regulations were needed to keep the sharp practices of a market economy in check, licenses must be applied for. Poor people—farmers trying to wring subsistence from the fringes of a desert, for example— could not afford the effort to keep the paperwork current.

  So they lived as virtual serfs of the cooperative. In the big cities, editorial writers inveighed against the coldness that "capitalism" had brought to Russia.

  She had helped bring these conditions on, with her naive Euroldealism. Worse, she was helping perpetuate them.

  She ran a general medicine clinic out of the one-room adobe house the villagers had lent her, but her specialization was gynecology. She knew that her work was truly helping these people, but she also knew that the real reason she was here was to help stem the tide of black-asses that threatened to swamp the League's Great Russian masters. The Motherland would not let go of their land—nor their cotton, nor their coal, nor their oil, nor their labor. But God forbid there should be too many of them.

  She could almost sympathize with the Turkestani rebel
s— almost. She remembered the nationalist excesses of devolution's early days, and especially feared what a fanatical Islamic regime would do to its people. She was glad Ak Tepe's folk were apolitical, concerned with tending their own gardens and raising their own brown children—the ones they could choose to have, now, thanks to her, instead of getting by nature and default.

  She reached the end of the wheat field. Funny how quickly the roadwork goes when I'm off on one of my internal tirades, she thought with a wry smile. She turned south, between the wheat and another field of green-boll tyrants.

  The music was by turns bittersweet and brash, jubilant now, then oddly wistful, and finally apprehensive. It was the young composer's farewell to the century about to end, with its unprecedented achievements and unprecedented crimes, and of greeting the new millennium—confident it would bring great things, uncertain whether they would be good or ill.

  She did not hear death approaching on a warm desert wind.

  The first she knew was when shadows flashed across the ditchbank before her; first one, so quick she thought it was illusion, a trick of wind and vision. Then another, a pulse of shade.

  As she looked up she felt them, the heat and pressure of their passing: two squat shapes, light below, mottled above, a flash of the new sun on canopies. Knowing nothing of war, she knew at once they were warplanes. She stopped and stared after them, frowning through a haze of fuel fumes. Should they fly so low? They'll break all the glass in the village.

  Something fell from the belly of the left-hand plane. Yellow flame unfolded on the flank of the White Hill itself, like a monstrous cotton boll breaking open in the Kazakhstan sun. An instant later another flameflower bloomed on the village's far side.

  Napalm! My God, there's been some horrible mistake! She could not see if any of the villagers had been splashed with the sticky burning mixture. Some of the Kazakh men and women were running away from the village, others toward it. Others just stood and gaped.