by Victor Milán
League Air had suddenly gotten very circumspect, after the rebels finally got pissed off about the desultory nuisance bombing and blew the tail assembly off a Myasishchev-4 strat bomber with an old Armiya-PVO SA-5 missile over Eski-Tashkent. That Desert Wind should be forced to press a bomber design that was coming on half a century old into service went a long way toward explaining why over three weeks had passed without any decisive thrusts against the rebellion.
All the red had drained from the horizon now, leaving the sky in shades of bruise. A young Uzbek stood next to a pair of gaunt men in what seemed in the less than half-light to be patchwork robes. His Kalashnikov was pointed studiously away from them, and he kept what Eddie took for a respectful distance.
Have to have a word with the boy about that, he thought grimly. Ali laid a hand on his arm. "With your permission, Lieutenant. I will deal with them."
Eddie frowned, but he said, "Sure, go for it." The Arab seemed to know what was going on here.
Ali walked down the slope, making some hand gesture masked by his body and incipient dark. "Ishq," he called softly.
The two men looked at him. "Baraka, ya Shahim," one replied. Eddie got the odd impression he had no hair on his head, not even eyebrows.
The three of them moved away, drawing no response from the sentry who was supposedly covering the outsiders. Eddie crossed his arms. Since Ali was a major wheel—he still thought this was like having an Undersecretary of Defense along for the ride—this was by definition not a breach of security, like it or not. Eddie didn't.
"Will somebody tell me what the fuck is going on here?" he nattered.
An Uzbek named Maqsut squatted nearby, a solid man in his early thirties who wore a labor battalion walking-out tunic and didn't inevitably spit and mutter "kaafir" when Eddie walked past. He pointed his round chin at the strangers. "Kalandariya."
"Say what?"
"Sufi adepts. They belong to a tariqa, an order whose center is Bukhara. Of all the orders, theirs is the most mysterious. They wander alone through the desert, and the desert belongs to them, Red Sands or Black."
"Great." Though the League charter mandated freedom of religion, especially if you were white and Russian Orthodox—in contrast to Communist days, when atheism was encouraged, unless you were white and Russian Orthodox— Sufi tariqa were outlawed. The League was terrified of them, believing they constituted an underground cell structure irredeemably hostile to Russian domination. Eddie had seen secret studies where GRU went so far as to blame the inriqa for the defeat in Afghanistan, along with the Americans, the Iranians, the Chinese, and of course the last refuge of losers from Ludendorff to Westmoreland, the Stab in the Hack by wicked civilians.
So what are they hanging around for? He noticed some of the Tadzhiks were muttering and making evil-eye protection signs. Maybe the Sufis weren't so bad after all, if the Shi'ites didn't like them.
Ali nodded, turned, and began walking back toward Rddie. The Kalandariya went the other way. They were absorbed almost at once into the gathering dark, without a peep from the supposed sentry.
"I see your fuse is smoldering," Ali said as he approached. "Forgive me for seeming to trespass on your command. We have our own resources, eyes, and ears that you are not... how might one say? Tuned in to."
He slapped Eddie on the arm. "Our Kalandariya and our computers say the same thing about our objective. It is a good omen."
Chapter EIGHTEEN
"This is the forward dump," Eddie said to his three section leaders, who stood or squatted in a cluster around the boulder on which he had his computer spread open. The cover/screen showed an enhanced overhead photo of the dump, which he could transform to a standard contour map with a keystroke. Where the rebels had gotten the aerial he had no clue, but KGB confirmed its accuracy. "Who wants to tell me something about it, just from this?"
"It is badly sited," old Aliyev the manaschi said, in the precise Russian he used when he wasn't singing. In spite of Aliyev's age—he had fought as an underage volunteer in the Great Patriotic War—Eddie had made him head of Delta section. These people respected age, and anyway he could outlast any man in the jagun—the hundred-man training company—in the saddle. He was also willing to give Eddie a chance.
"It is dominated by these hills here, to the north and northwest. Riflemen can sweep it at will, or observe for mortar fire."
Eddie glanced aside, to where Colonel Ali sat apart, trying literally not to look over Eddie's shoulder. Damn, I shouldn't do that. I don't have to check with him.
"Spot-on," he said. "You'll also notice the hills are in easy range of rockets and launched grenades, both of which we have. And which we're not going to use, at least directly."
"Why not?" demanded Shoreh, Charlie section's leader. He was a waspish, bespectacled perpetual student type from Dushanbe. He'd gotten the job because he was the spokesmen for the Tadzhiks who made up Charlie anyway: He seemed to be one of the bigger Khomeini fans. He definitely made no secrets of hating Eddie's sigmoid colon. "Isn't our goal to kill enemies of the revolution?"
Eddie could tell he'd wanted to say enemies of the True God so bad he could taste it. But that would not have gone over, and not just with their infidel-in-chief. To Eddie's surprise, he'd discovered that not much more than half his men were professed Muslims, and only a third or quarter observed the five daily prayers.
He smiled. It was time to cut lad Shoreh off at the knees. But he lost points if he did it.
"Any reactions to that?"
"Our objective is mainly to get supplies, isn't it?" asked Bravo's leader, pushing his own round eyeglasses up his nose—this was a nearsighted bunch, and no mistake. He was a gigantic Uzbek kid, an engineering student from Samarkand, cover-boy handsome in a copper-skinned, Plains Indian kind of way. He spoke English with a flawless American accent from spending his adolescence watching MTV on sat. "There's supposed to be ammunition stored here. We don't get it if we blow it up."
"There we go, Shy Bunny." Shaybaaniy was the actual name, but the kid lit up. He seemed to get a huge charge out of Eddie's spin on it. "Glad to see someone's thinking. Maybe I should remind everybody that Timur has said he wants to keep the bloodshed to a minimum. When Desert Wind blows in, we fight, but we're not out here to slaughter bank clerks from Aral'sk whose only offense is to've been called up for reserve duty."
He keyed in instructions. The compound expanded to fill the screen.
"Okay, what we got is basically bunkered storage for ammo and whatnot, plus a few cement buildings above ground for the guard detail. This is the barracks, right in here next to the bunkers—what kind of shape they'd be in if anything actually blew I don't even want to know, but that's the League for you. According to our information, the detail itself's ten men, two of whom are down with the running shits."
"So naturally we must have a plan to deal with them," Shoreh said, as nastily as he could.
Eddie looked at him. "You got a problem with that, section leader?"
"We are seventy," Shoreh said, looking around at the others and visibly pumping himself up into orator mode. "They are eight. Why not simply sweep down and overwhelm them?"
"Don't you people remember how you got conquered in the first place? These may be fat fortyish guys who'd rather be home in front of the tube slamming vodka and watching the St. Pete Defenders kick ass in the pennant race. But they have machine guns. You go sweeping down on them, you get quickly dead."
"You are afraid? Better a dead lion than a live jackal."
"Give me a break. If you're dead you aren't a lion or a jackal. All you are is trash, swelling up in the sun. Food for fucking flies. If you'd ever seen a stiff, Shoreh, maybe you wouldn't be in such a hurry to be one."
He scratched his ear. "I tell you what. If we're gonna be hung on heroic metaphors, lagun 23 of the Turkestani Defense Force is gonna be a live leopard. Leopards are cunning bastards. They lie invisibly in wait until they're sure of their prey. Lions just lie in the sun licking their genital
s and let the babes do ali the work—or is that what you're driving at?"
The others laughed. Shoreh turned red and gave him one of those wish your skin was drying on a rock looks. Eddie knew it was risky to ply his tongue's well-stropped edge in the hypersensitive East, but he could only use the tools he had, and that was one of the sharpest. Ever since he was a child he'd realized the only style that suited him was if-this-doesn't-work-it's-gonna-kill-me. His troopies would play him some slack because he was amerikalik, and therefore brash, and also because Timur said to obey him. But basically it was a race to see if he could win them over before they decided to just slit his throat.
"So now that we know why we have to have a plan, let's ali find out what it is, shall we?" he said.
"Of course it is part of the plan that our brave leader stays well hidden among rocks," Shoreh said, "since it is so important to Timur to preserve the lives of all ferenghi.''
You just don't give up, do you? Eddie gave him a big smile.
"Wrong again," he said.
"We did it!" the old man sang, dancing in circles brandishing a freshly liberated RPG-16 over his head with stick arms. "We really showed the basmachiV
"Grandfather," Shy Bunny said, emerging from the bunker with a crate of 5.45 ammunition on his shoulder, "we are the basmachi."
"Oh." Yefreytor Bakhtiyaar—Uncle Lucky—blinked rheumatic eyes in puzzlement. He wasn't old, he was old. He claimed to be a hundred and three, and Eddie suspected he was shaving some so as not to seem superannuated. He looked as if he'd weigh seventy soaking wet—-pounds, not kilos—and sported the most impressive assortment of wrinkles Eddie had seen since he quit doing his own laundry.
"You mean we're not the Red Sticks?" he asked plaintively.
"That was the twenties, Grandfather," Shy Bunny said. "Also the other side."
Grinding up the grade from the river valley half a klick away, the convoy's lead truck flashed its headlights in a preset pattern, to get Shoreh's boys, out among the rocks, to ease off the triggers of their own RPG launchers. The approaching column had already Sashed a satlink message to Eddie, confirming they were in fact the rest of his own Alfa section with the heavy transport to haul away the loot.
Eddie stood at the gate, nodding with satisfaction. Only half an hour late. By Third World guerrilla standards, that was way ahead of schedule. If they highballed it down the Syr Dar'ya highway they could be almost back at their staging base in Turkestan town by sunup, just in case Frontal Av got more vengeful than prudent.
It had gone off more or less as planned. Eddie had simply walked out of the desert and up to the wire, megaphone in hand, and called for surrender in his best your-worst-nightmare American-accented Russian. No one had so much as challenged him; as he'd been gambling, they were all asleep or preoccupied. If they hadn't been, he was additionally gambling they'd miss with their opening fusillade— panic-firing into the dark, full-auto at the air in general. He gambled a lot. He remembered the Duke of Montrose's toast, even if that old fuck Arbatov thought he was a typical American vacuum brain.
To ice the operation, as soon as he was sure he had the tiny garrison's attention, he waved a hand. A spotter up on one of those controversial hills saw the motion through a starlight scope—a Ukrainian pirate of an American design, with entrails from Japan—and passed the word to the helpful Colonel Ali, manning an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher. Ali dropped a perfect three-round burst of thirty-millimeter high-explosive through the old, outsized satellite up/downlink dish that was the dump's lifeline to the Dar al-Harb, the "World of Hurt." And that was another battle in the books.
Along with Texas Team's hit in Georgia, this was two strikes on isolated posts that had gone flawlessly for Eddie in the past several weeks. It was enough to make him superstitious; the first axiom of real war is that nothing ever goes according to plan. But hey, neither place had exactly been manned by Delta Force. Another axiom is that successful commanders tend to be lucky in their opponents.
"Good," Shy Bunny said, pausing beside him. "They brought the bus and the livestock trailers. We don't have to ride back." Eddie grinned at him. The would-be engineer was a no more enthusiastic horseman than Eddie was, though he didn't fall off near as much.
He walked forward as the lead semi pulled up. "Glad you boys could make it. We were beginning to wonder whether Al Capone might beat you—"
He stopped, dropped his foot off the step up to the cab. The Uzbek driver's eyes were withdrawn way back in his head in the purest look of hate he'd ever seen.
The passenger door banged and Tashmat Kagorovich, Eddie's designated second in command within Alfa, walked around the tractor's coffin snout. The driver spat carefully in the gravel next to Eddie's right boot.
"What the fuck?" Eddie asked.
Kagarovich was a kumli, a sand dweller from somewhere in the Qizil Qum. He was pure Mongol mongrel, Kypchak and Turkmen and Tatar and whatnot wound up in one wiry bandy-legged package. He had stiff red hair, one eye, and a face that was scuffed, creased, and expressionless as an old boot.
He stared at Eddie. "You didn't hear?" "We didn't hear anything. We've been on a raid, Kagarovich, not back in Turkestan town with our feet propped up watching Fucking for Cruzeiros on satellite and eating microwave popcorn."
From a back pocket Kagorovich took a black Sony Satman the size of a deck of cards and held it up to Eddie. The whole face became picture: black-tab League tank officers leaning over a table loaded down with guns, rocket grenades, and poiymere bags of white powder.
"—inspecting a cache of weapons and drugs they say was unearthed by Desert Wind ground forces following their successful attack on the southern Kazakhstan village of Ak Tepe almost forty-eight hours ago," squeaked from the ininiscule speaker. "Elsewhere, violent demonstrations protesting the attack continue within ethnically Asian regions of the League as well as rebel Turkestan. Free Turkestan leader Timur is rumored to be flying at this hour to the Tadzhikstan capital of Dushanbe in an attempt to stem rioting which has led to reports of savage attacks and atrocities on ethnic Europeans—"
The driver spat again. This time he dropped a shiny yellow bail on the toe of Eddie's boot. "Kaafir," he said.
Chapter NINETEEN
"We die now," said Eric the driver, quite matter-of-factly, considering. He was hunched down behind the wheel of the horrible lime-green Moskvich, as if that would protect him from the firepower of the vast evil-looking Gorbach squatted in the road not thirty meters ahead, its Russian blue-saltire-on-white insignia wavering in the rising south Kazakhstan heat.
"What you did expect?" Tewfik said. "To just simply do this mazurka across no-man's-land from rebel territory?"
"You have a charming way of lapsing into Third World speech patterns in times of stress, darling," Jacqui Gendron said. "Now shut up."
An officer emerged from the helicopter, bending low to avoid the sweeping rotor even though it was mounted high up. Four troopies in lumpy battle armor trotted after, Advanced Kalashnikovs at port arms.
"Red trim for army," she murmured, "not Border Guards green. Good. This is just what I expected."
She opened the door. The officer's young face and resolve seemed to dent as she marched to meet him midpoint. The soles of her desert boots wanted to stick to the semi-molten asphalt.
"What is the meaning of this?" she demanded in English.
He opened his mouth, shut it, then pulled invisibly pale brows down into a frownlike state. "You cross in—inter— forbidden land," he said in English.
Inside she grinned. She'd pulled him off balance into a foreign language. That gave her a lock on initiative. She needed no more. "Is this not the area of operations for Desert Wind—the Central Asian Front?"
His lips moved as he sorted that out. "Yes."
"Then it is of course not forbidden to me! I have here—" she slapped his broad chest with a plastic laminated packet of credentials, "papers. See? I am accredited to cover the staff of General Colonel Anatoliy Karponin. I have
his clearance to travel anywhere within his command."
He was blinking at the stiff, scuffed sheaf. She stayed in his face like a little yap-dog, giving him time to focus on nothing but Al Capone's distinctive signature scrawl: "Do you see? Do you?"
"Yes, ah, madame—"
"Ms.! It's ms., you male chauvinist. Why do you still insist on delaying me? The General Colonel has in the past been careful to maintain only the best relations with the world press!"
It was the exclamation "marks that did it. The young officer jabbed the packet back at her as if it was impregnated with white retrovirus. "You may go. Please, be careful, you are outside area in which we can guarantee your safety from the rebels."
She turned and marched back to the car. "Have nice day," the Russian called after her.
She shut the door with a triumphant slam. "There's that out of the way. I told you we'd have no trouble with these fools, Tewfik."
"What if they find out your papers are outdated?" he asked sulkily, slumped against the side of the cramped box of heat that was their transport. "Karponin wasn't even a General Colonel when he signed them."
"And why, O my clever cameraman, do you think I gave him no peace to scrutinize my papers? Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, will you?"
She slapped her hand on the back of Eric's seat, making him jump. "Now. Let's go visit that village your mother's cousin told you about, and see if their visitor is still on hand."
The plane seemed to plummet away beneath him. Francis Marron's stomach seemed to swoop in sympathy. He bit his lip, rose, and made his way back along the clattering aisle of the venerable high-wing two-engine DeHavilland Twin Otter Air Tashkent had bought off the milk run between Los Alamos and Albuquerque. He tried not to notice the high Pamirs that formed a bowl around Dushanbe. The snow-glazed peaks put him unpleasantly in mind of the weapons of the mob in Lost Horizons, and they hadn't even gotten to the riots yet.
