Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  Timur sat at the back of the tiny cabin, turban-swathed head bowed. Maybe it's a good sign that he's letting me make my sales pitch as frequently as I want. Marron smiled mirthlessly. Or maybe he just wants me where he can keep an eye on me.

  His stomach writhed a bit. Maybe it was the turbulence, and the razor proximity of the mountains. Or maybe it was the way the Acevedo affair still haunted him, the unfairness of it....

  Young gunslingers in powder-blue tyubeteyka occupied seats either side of the aisle, two places in front of their leader. They tracked Marron with hot trigger-happy eyes as he picked his way past. The worn-carpeted deck bucked and yawed beneath his feet the way he imagined a skateboard would—he had never actually been on a skateboard, as he had never done anything a surgeon general disapproved.

  Timur closed the book he was reading as Marron sat in the seat across from him. "Mr. Marron."

  The hard boys kept staring holes in the American until Timur made a slight hand gesture. Then they turned and faced sullenly forward.

  "Why do you put up with them?" Marron asked quietly.

  Any expression Timur wore was hidden by his facecloth. Marron was glad the rebel chieftain hadn't asked him to play cards.

  "Are you familiar with the history of Khmer Rouge, Mr. Marron?" The American nodded. "Any movement attracts such youths, filled with the conviction and happy cruelty of the young. If I permit them to serve as my bodyguards, it gives them a fairly benign channel for their energies—energies which otherwise might be expressed the way they are being expressed now in the streets of Dushanbe. Also, it keeps them where I can keep an eye on them."

  Marron nodded. Timur was not entirely without leadership skills—far from it. Marron had to give him that.

  "I thought I'd take the opportunity to urge you again to reconsider,janaap.'" Janaap was Uzbek for "sir;" it was as much of an honorific as you could use with Timur without him getting curt. "Please, accept what we have to offer." lie was not talking about investment capital.

  "I will happily accept advice from you, Mr. Marron, though I cannot promise to follow it, of course."

  Marron moistened his lips. "The United States stands poised to provide assistance far more substantial than advice."

  "Indeed. You would supply 'advisers,' and materiel, but not for payment. Not in gold. This, truly, is what makes me hesitate to accept your kind offer of aid, Mr. Marron. Price. We are a mercantile folk. If terms of repayment are not made clear, we fear; who knows what the other party will demand before our obligation is fulfilled? Who knows if it even can be?

  "Consider why the Sufis do not refuse payment for their teachings. A man who takes money might be greedy or he might not, so the story goes. But one who takes nothing is suspected of wishing to steal your soul."

  Marron glanced aside, out the smeared window on his side. He could see a spill of suburb down the side of Dushanbe's mixing bowl valley below. You had to expect that of Third World leaders; they might at any moment dart from the path of rational discussion down some superstitious blind alley. Talk of price made Marron uncomfortable enough. To drag mystics in . . .

  He turned. Timur's eyes bored into him like obsidian augers.

  "If we accept anything from America, Mr. Marron, it will be paid for under terms agreed upon in advance. But we will stand or fall on our own. Understand this. We are prepared to pay any price, any price whatsoever, to force the League to acknowledge our independence."

  He settled back and closed his eyes.

  "And then, Mr. Marron, it shall not matter what the rest of the worlii does."

  * * *

  ' 'The Defense Forces have fired tear gas grenades.''

  Drawing squiggly trails of smoke, the grenades fell back among the crowd. That was a tactical mistake. It angered the mob, and also provided physical impetus to move, breaking up the concrete inertia that held the mob short of the cordon.

  The crowd surged forward. Some people held handkerchiefs over their mouths, soaked with water from plastic jerricans brought along for just this purpose. It was still shy of a concerted rush at the militia lines. It was a back and forth thing, a hesitation dance, one group thrusting up almost to club's reach of the cordon, stopping short, and falling back with cries and grimaces as another knot of rioters lunged as far as angry bravado would take them. It had the seesaw syncopated rhythm of a street fight in a film by Kurosawa, who understood these matters better than any other filmmaker: no one is ever actually eager to get his head cracked open. It's why armies drill.

  Jacqui let the peristaltic crowd action propel her forward. She wore a mask made by the Groupement; with a subvoke mike taped to her larynx, the quality of the sound bite was not at risk. Besides, what she was saying now was going into memory, not out live. She had a reputation for going live only when big news was breaking.

  She had a feeling she was going to be hitting the Net quite soon.

  The crowd parted to flow around a Moskvich on its back, burning. Although it was lime green, it was not the Moskvich, sadly; the car they'd rented in Tashkent was lying dead in a road washout somewhere in northern Chimkent Oblast. By great good fortune it had carried them as far as the rebel-held portion of Kazakhstan before miring in soft sand and expiring. Gendron credited her personal fate with seeing to it that the subcompact breathed its last within five kilometers of a cooperative farm that possessed an airfield and a light plane that could speed her, Eric, Tewfik, and their precious cargo the rest of the way to their destination. She put great faith in her personal destiny. She was an Aries, after all, and Aries were lucky.

  She didn't bother to glance back at her cameraman, knowing he was burning some good footage into memory; In- was superb at what he did, even if he was a bitch. As she passed the flaming car, she craned to make sure there was no one in it. Burning people made good telejournalism. ICIeFrance wouldn't show it, of course, but they could sell feeds to less-inhibited markets in the developing world and I lie Pacific Rim.

  A hand gripped her shoulder. She snapped an elbow up to break the hold. With an Arabic curse Tewfik leaped back, steadied the cam on his shoulder, and pointed. "Jacqui, look. Ow, that hurt."

  The militia line had parted. A man stepped through. He wore a dark Western suit with no tie. His face was obscured by a fold of his white turban.

  "Timur." Gendron was actually unsure whether she or the crowd around her breathed the name. "Can it be? He's moving forward, showing no fear at all of the crowd—Paris, can we go live now, this is crucial—"

  She scanned for the Sons of the Sky-Blue Wolf. The boys in the blue skullcaps always clung to their man like remoras to a shark. Surely they wouldn't let him walk into this maddened mob alone....

  But he was alone. Several militiamen, faces working as concern for their leader struggled with self-preservation, started after him. He stopped them with an upraised hand, not glancing back, and walked into the heart of the mob.

  They fell away from him like mercury from a fingertip, he raised his hands.

  "People of Free Turkestan," he said, his voice booming Irom PVDF balloon speakers that had floated up from somewhere behind the cordon, "peace."

  Hard brown hands brandished a placard, a blown-up photo from satellite news: a row of sad, bedraggled bodies lying before a bullet-pocked wall, being ignored by a League soldier in battle dress with a cigarette in his mouth and his bullpup Kalashnikov beneath one arm.

  "There can be no peace with those who did this to our people!" A gangly bespectacled boy with an uneven beard straggling around his chin thrust from the crowd, long coattails flapping around his calves. Jacqui had seen him a few blocks back, up on top of a van crying death to foreigners through a Radio Shack megaphone. He had a tropism for the videocams, that one.

  "I agree," Timur said mildly. He spoke the local brand of Farsi. Jacqui was glad Iran had been a major news ticket for twenty years for World Beat reporters such as herself; she understood the language. And while there was still no real-time translation software that
didn't sound like Down's kids on helium, TeleFrance had Farsi-speaking human translators standing by, like operators for an outlaw telemarketing service in Mexico.

  Timur gestured around him at the glass and steel World Urb boxes that thrust up from among the willows and plane trees lining the grid of aryk canals to define downtown Dushanbe. A lot of pallid high-mountain sky showed overhead; even foreigners hesitated to build higher than three stories, for fear of earthquakes. "But do you think to find Anatoliy Karponin here? Do you think perhaps President Fyodorin and his council are staying at the Dushanbe?"

  "It is the foreigners we seek!" another student hissed. He was shorter than his rival rabble-rouser, stockier, with thinning hair and a Western-style coat hanging open over his paunch. Not telegenic; he'd never make the replays, unless he showed some real fiendish class. "The Westerners who seek to destroy Islam with decadence and guns."

  "The Nikolays!" the mob screamed on cue. "Give us the Nikolays!"

  "Go home," Timur said. "The only people here are Turkestanis and their guests. Or have you, in your fervor to strike down modernism, forgotten the ancient laws of hospitality?"

  "They are foreigners!" the bald boy screeched. The first speaker from the crowd glared at him, jealous of the telejournalists' spots illuminating the bald boy like divine Grace. "Nikolays, Armenians, Jews the lot of them! They stink in the nostrils of Allah!"

  Timur faced him. "Who am I?"

  "You are Timur," the first spokesman said quickly, reasserting himself.

  "And what am I?"

  The youth frowned, and before he could think better of it, "You are one of us" spilled from his lips.

  "I am." He touched the fold of cloth that hid all his face but the bright-dark eyes. "Bui what am I? Am I Tadzhik? Uzbek? Am I Kazakh or Kirghiz or Kypchak? A Turkmen, perhaps? Or could I be myself a Nikolay with a broad strain of Kalmyka in him, that shows in the eyes?"

  I can't believe he's doing this, Jacqui thought. He's practically begging them to renounce him. To tear him limb from limb.

  "I wear the facecloth so that people will not trouble themselves with such questions. I am a Turkestani, and that is all that matters. And understand, he who lifts a hand against any Tbrkestani—Sart or Nikolay, Muslim, Christian, or Jew—raises his hand to strike at me."

  "But what of Ak Tepe?" the second spokesman demanded.

  "What, indeed? The League and its military have committed a great crime, and tell lies to the world to cover it. Does turning your hand against your brother bring the killers justice? If we act like savages, we play only into the murderers' bloodstained hands."

  He beckoned. "Come here. Face me."

  The bald rabble-rouser hung back. "Why should I trust you?"

  Timur laughed. Jacqui felt ice water sluice down her spine. Is he mad, or is he a genius?

  "You're afraid." He turned dismissively away. "Who is not afraid?"

  "I'm not afraid."

  Timur swung about to face the tall bearded youth, the first speaker, who stalked onto what he knew was the center stage of History, trying not to smirk at the rival who had popped his nerve and blown it.

  "What is your name?" Timur asked.

  "Mozaffar."

  The shrouded head nodded. "'The Winner.' It is a good name. So hear me, young Winner. I hereby decree a special band of fighters: the ghazi, the champions. Those of you who join shall be granted amnesty, and shall bear the honor of the fiercest fighting for God and the millet. Those who refuse are the enemies of Turkestan no less surely than the Butcher of Ak Tepe.

  "Which shall it be, O Winner? Be the first to join, and I shall make you a noyan, in command of a minghan of one thousand."

  The boy fell to his knees on the glittering broken glass that covered the intersection like snow. "In the name of Allah, I am your man, O Timur."

  "Then arise, and let me embrace you as a brother."

  Chapter TWENTY

  "Okay," she murmured for her throat mike, "roll the satellite feed now."

  She broke into something faster than a trot but not quick enough to tweak the trigger fingers of the > oung men in blue skullcaps clouding around Timur like space junk around u shuttle as he walked slowly back to his hotel. With broken-field skill born of long experience, she dodged through the lean and hot-eyed escort and fell into pace at Timur's side.

  He glanced at her with his Chinese eyes. "That was magnificent, the way you dispersed that mob," she said. "The most courageous act I have ever seen." Or the craziest, she thought. She had seen enough of craziness and courage to understand how fine the differential was.

  "Thank you. But it was merely what had to be done."

  "I'm Jacqui Gendron, Tel6France Global News. I'd like to do an interview with you—"

  He flicked fingers in dismissal. "You must make arrangements through my press secretary," he said. "I warn you, I have little time to publicize myself."

  She danced in front of him. "I ask this as a favor, Timur. I know that in Turkestan one does not approach a great man without bringing gifts. I bring you this."

  She held up a hand. The Wolves growled and started to bring up their AKs. Timur held them off with an upraised hand.

  She was holding a Sony Satman palm TV. The playing-card-sized screen showed the face of an auburn-haired woman in close-up. Fatigue and strain furrowed her fine European features.

  "—medical officer for Ak Tepe, who witnessed the League assault," Gendron's voice was saying in English. "Can you tell us in your own words what happened, Dr. Rossopovskiy?"

  "Ak Tepe was attacked without warning, without provocation," the doctor said. She stored straight into the camera. ' 'Anatoliy Karponin is no hero. He is a murderer. The world must know."

  "But Central Asian Frontal Command showed video of caches of arms and drugs it said was found in Ak Tepe, Doctor," the on-screen head said. "How do you account for that?"

  Dr. Rossopovskiy looked at the interviewer with eyes like black lasers. "The Frontal Command can show films of anything they want," she said, her Russian-accented English crisply precise, like breaking glass. "They can show zebras and marching bands too. None of these was to be found in Ak Tepe. The people of the village were loyal to republic and League, to the extent they thought about it at all. And except for an old shotgun and two rifles to control the pests, they were entirely unarmed. What the General Colonel Karponin showed was a fraud."

  The duty officer in the Media Compliance Monitoring Facility pursed his lips in a silent-flute whistle.

  "Bullshit," Justin Serafin said, dribbling crumbs from his sandwich down the front of his suit. The watch officer had run a risk disturbing him during the ten minutes he allowed himself for lunch, but the undersecretary was in town to monitor the newsbreak on Central Asia, after all. "She's an actress. Has to be. Has to."

  Studying a readout on the big board, a young tech shook his head. "No, sir. The Psychiatric Stress Evaluation's clear as a bell. Her voice stress indicates she's pissed off to the red line, but sincere."

  Brushing his mouth, Serafin gave the tech a sharp look. These technical personnel were getting awfully familiar. You had to watch these nerds like a hawk, lest their mastery of technological arcana go to their heads.

  The duty officer produced a defusing chuckle. "Shit, sir, we do hands-across-the-water with the Big K all the time. They know the standard scams as well as we do. This time they just got caught."

  The undersecretary turned his hot look on the shift boss. The older man met it without a twitch. I got my twenty in, bun boy, the shift boss thought. Desaparecido this. In the real corridors of power, informed word had it that the only thing more to be feared than the Federal Police was the FedPol union.

  Serafin's fine mobile mouth writhed. "I suppose."

  "Do we let it go out, sir? The networks will be drooling in their collars over this scoop."

  The undersecretary thought. Policy was to use the Central Asian mess to make the League sweat, to remind them that while the geopolitical all^y figh
t was a lot more crowded than a decade before, America was still top dog. Still...

  "Clear it," he said sourly. "I just hate showing anything that makes a government look bad. Any government."

  For an Oriental potentate, Jacqui Gendron thought, this Timur hasn't much sense of style.

  The personal quarters of the ruler of rebel Central Asia comprised a suite on an upper floor of the Hotel Dushanbe. Even with the inroads economic reform had made, for an individual to possess that much living space was an extravagance in its own right. But, like a solitary dinner by candlelight with a Western reporter who had provided the rebellion with its greatest propaganda coup to date, it was a minor extravagance, the sort that could be written off as virtual necessity.

  ' 'When you announced the creation of your special ghazi squads today," she said, sipping the dry white wine she had not been particularly surprised to have been served, "was that a spur-of-the-moment thing, or the result of a decision you had been weighing and evaluating for quite some time?"

  Timur paused in the act of holding up his checked facecloth with one hand to insert a forkful of food in his mouth. He drank no wine himself. "Is this off the record?"

  He laughed softly and lowered his fork to his plate. The meal was a spicy rice palov with lamb and American-style tossed salad. Despite the fact that the hotel was majority-owned and largely managed by the French, the meal had a touch of tackiness, like everything in the League that wasn't Tsarist in opulence. She kept half expecting to see a bottle of catsup off to the side, by the salt and pepper.

  "Though the interview proper has not yet begun," he said, "I suspect nothing said in your presence is entirely off the record."

  She smiled at him. She wore an open-necked blouse and her khaki globetrotter pants, and her orange-russet hair was drawn into a ponytail. She was a strikingly handsome woman, and knew it. Wearing her hair pulled back from her face gave her fine predator's features a severe, professional cast, while the little-girl ponytail and the candlelight softened her. it gave her room to maneuver, which she always liked and was good at obtaining.