Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  The youth looked quickly around. "It's about my master, old Aliyev—"

  "What about him?"

  "He—I—I don't want to do it anymore."

  "Do what?"

  "I don't want to be his apprentice anymore. I don't want to spend my days and nights droning the Manas song. Do you know how long it is? Do you? It's a quarter of a million lines. The Encyclopedia Brittanica is not a quarter of a million lines long!"

  His voice had risen to a penetrating bat squeak. "Hey, now, turn it down," Eddie said. "Al Capone will hear you if you keep that shit up."

  He pulled at his chin, heard a rasp of stubble. "Quarter million lines, huh?"

  "Yes." Eddie glared. "Yes," the boy repeated in a whisper.

  "That's really longer than the Encyclopedia, huh?"

  "Surely it must be."

  "Surely it must."

  It was a real Kodak Moment, one of those things they didn't prepare you for at Bragg. You couldn't just shake your head and say, Sounds like a personal problem, talk to the chaplain. Not to an adolescent indige with LA Gear basketball shoes and a bullpup AK slung across his bony back.

  "Look," he begun, not really sure where he was going. "I can sympathize. I mean, a kid your age, you want to be hanging out, scoping some babes—" Fast Eddie Randolph, Youth Counselor. "You want to have a regular life."

  The boy's eyes lit. "That means I can quit?"

  "No. Give me a minute, here. Just think. This has got to be your basic dying art. How many people are running around the Pamirs with a quarter-million lines of poetry in their heads?"

  Shamsiyev stared down at the hard-packed dirt between his toes. "My master is one of the last."

  "Be a real shame to let a tradition like that die out, wouldn't it? Sometimes we do things we don't like to do, because they're the right things to do." Now I sound like a public service announcement on late night TV. Why did I ever want this job, anyway?

  "But why can't somebody else do it?" the youth blurted.

  "Because you're the one who said he would," Eddie said, looking at him steadily.

  Shamsiyev hung his head. Across the fire one of the city Sarts raised his skullcapped head.

  "Bu haqiqatan qiziq," he said. "This is really odd."

  Eddie picked up his own Kalashnikov. He was sensing something wrong too. Just an edge in the air, like a knife drawn softly over skin.

  "That sound. Like a giant horsefly—"

  "Airplane!" Eddie yelled. He kicked over the fife. "All right, everybody, you know the drill. Spread out and get ready to move fast"

  His internal alarm system had already cycled down from red alert to yellow. The sound was still no more than skirting the subliminal fringe, but he could tell it was the drone of a propeller plane, not the whistling roar of a fast mover.

  The League had no prop-driven attack planes. Most of the world's nations had reintroduced propeller strike aircraft, far superior to jets in the counterinsurgency role. Neither League nor republics cared to admit they needed COIN craft, preferring to rely on the tank-busting Shtormovik—the Su-25 Frogfoot—which while slow for a jet was too fast to menace irregular troops strewn across broken country; and on helicopters, which Afghanistan had shown were vulnerable to rebels armed with an earlier generation of backpack SAMs. Supposedly the shiny new Kamov verti had a modular COIN tray that could be slid in, but it was still barely operational. Al Capone, if he had any at all, would surely not have enough to risk one three hundred klicks into rebel territory.

  No. The sound, rising slowly to full audibility in the southwest, didn't have the sharpness of high-speed graphite-polymer blades in the Kamov's ducted fans. Nor did it have the low harmonic beat of multiple props in chorus. It was & single engine, with maybe a bit of asthmatic catch, and as Eddie listened, crouched on the felt-soft sand of a wadi bottom with his rifle in his hands, he felt the muscles of his face slacken in surprised recognition.

  "Allah be praised," a voice said from the darkness. "What's a crop-duster doing out here in the middle of the night?"

  "Crop-duster? Khuda ozing meni asragin, you Kazakh country cousin!" exclaimed a trooper from Bukhara, remembering his DOSAAF paramilitary training. "That's a paratroop plane! We're under attack!"

  Eddie laughed out loud. "At ease," he called. "Pass the word, people. Keep your fingers on the trigger, but keep your linen dry. I don't think VDV's coming to call."

  Al Capone wouldn't do that to Spetsnaz, even if he does hate us as badly as mujahidin, Eddie thought. There was no question his two citizen-soldiers and he were all hearing the same thing: the most commonly produced airplane of the post World War II world, the Antonov An-2, called by NATO the Colt.

  The last military biplane in history.

  It was like a Certs commercial from his early-eighties adolescence: Colt is a crop-duster, Colt is a paratroop drop-ship, two, two, two Colts in one. It wasn't an operational drop ship, though, please God; it was a trainer, old, slow, fat. and arthritic.

  Eddie remembered his first VDV training drop at Ryazan', he was used to jumping from the massive C-130 Hercules, its four Allison engines throbbing with high-tech power. When he found out they expected him to climb in an antique box kite with fabric wings, he'd almost had an asthma attack. The fact that the Colt reeked of chemicals didn't help. Sure enough, it had turned some recent tricks as a toxic avenger.

  It had never been so easy to jump out of an airplane, before or since.

  Here came Maqsut, duckwalking to keep below the lip of the shallow arroyo. "What is it, Havaa Rang?"

  Eddie grimaced at the nickname. "I'm not sure, but I am willing to bet my life it's not a quick desant raid."

  The sound was almost overhead. Eddie stared up, straining to catch a flash of blunt wings occulting diamond-drill desert stars.

  "It is so low and slow," the Uzbek marveled. "Surely we could bring it down with rifle fire."

  "Harder than you think, Maqsut. Let him go. He's not going to bother us, and we don't need to tell him we're down here."

  The sound began to dwindle as the Antonov made its majestic way to the northeast. "Son of a bitch!" Eddie exclaimed. "I know what that sucker's doing. He's towing a particle-sampler array."

  He could feel Maqsut's raised-eyebrow expression without having to see it. "A people-sniffer. He's trying to smell us nasty rebels. And that fucking kiziak's given him a noseful."

  He stood up and raised his voice. "Saddle the ponies, people. It's time to hone those old night-marching skills."

  "Do you think he'll call an attack on us?"

  "Not on your life. Karponin hasn't been dropping air attacks; the council's yanking his chain, afraid of bad press or losing expensive air crew." Expensive air frames, anyway; human components had always been expendable in the heroic Soviet Armed Forces. The League wasn't much different.

  "Besides, that's not Al Capone's style. He doesn't want us scattered all over hell's half acre. He wants us all in a bunch so his tanks can roll us out into a nice red Bukhara carpet."

  "Then why do we run?" Maqsut's tone was questioning, not challenging. Like most of Eddie's desert warrior wannabe's, he was painfully eager to learn.

  Eddie rose deliberately, feeling twinges from his bruised tailbone and raw-rubbed inner thighs. "Because if you want to play in the big leagues, you play to what the other guy can do, not what you think he's going to do."

  Two hours later, ten klicks to the southwest, the two sections of Jagun 23 were roughly backtracking the biplane when a kumli outrider from Charlie called out that he'd seen a streak of light low in the northern sky.

  Eddie called a halt but didn't order the column to disperse or dismount. He felt Sertikan gathering herself below him to try bucking him off, slapped her hard on the side of the neck to show he was still paying attention.

  He had about decided that the Sand Person was seeing UFOs when the horizon pulsed with a yellow flash. It settled quickly to a false-dawn hint of glow, truncated by a line of sawtooth hills.

  "
Somebody got tired of being sniffed," Eddie said. "Time to de-ass the four-legged BMPs, everybody. We'll take two hours down time and then go see if we can find the wreckage."

  Beneath the same clear sky, on the desert west of the ancient city of Samarkand, half a dozen men huddled around a boy who sat on the sand with his beardless face bathed in the glow of a plasma screen.

  "Truly, God is great," said a bearded Turkmen who looked like a grizzled chow dog in a turban. "This weanling communes with the angels of Khuda on high, and we leap (o do his bidding. And this very machine is itself old enough to be his grandfather. Indeed, your Timur is a wonderful man, to entrust so much to the young."

  "He's your Timur too," snapped a youth not much older than the boy who sat cross-legged with the notebook computer unfolded on his lap. Until two weeks ago he had been a student of mirasist literature at the great university in Samarkand. Now he was an artillerist, serving a BM-13 launcher with its tubes angled skyward like a giant's closely held fingers. "Unless you don't consider yourself a turkestani."

  "Salaam, muslimlar jaan," said the old Uzbek who drove the launcher truck. He had driven tractors for a eooperative farm along the Karakum Canal, until the land Hot too poisoned to use. "Peace, dear Muslims."

  The chow dog wouldn't let it go. "The boy takes divination from the letters dancing on his screen and tells us where to fire our rockets. It smacks of black magic! How can we trust one too young to've even topped his first ewe?"

  "I bet ewes are what you top too, back home in Turkemenia," said another youngster, a Samarkand Tadzhik sitting with his back against the empty ammo crate on which the satlink antenna rested. Samarkand Tadzhiks were notable smart-asses. "You know what Zohair says: An old fool is worse than a young one; for the young may always grow wise.'" The lettering on the crate was Roman, and read IvIiPUBLIK INDONESIA.

  "Smait-assed Samarkand Tadzhik," the chow dog muttered in his own dialect of Turkic.

  The youngest boy had never looked up from his keyboard. The light on his face turned red.

  "Fire," he said.

  The fallow cotton field north of Samarkand was littered with the hulks of trucks too clapped-out even to serve as transport in the Turkestani Defense Forces. In the midst of them a BMP armored personnel carrier, knocked out during the fighting in the city, bulked like a rhino among water buffalo.

  Because the Soviets made a lot of military materiel over the years and never threw any of it away, and because war toys were still the only exports the League could reliably sell, the world was full of Soviet weapons, from new to ancient. By the middle of the eighties the manufacture of ammunition, replacement parts, and after-market upgrades to Soviet equipment was a thriving industry worldwide. The nations of the ostensible European community pulled in almost as much hard cash from replenishing Third World stocks of formerly Soviet hardware as they did selling their own armaments.

  The growing Muslim superpower Indonesia was a lot closer to Central Asia than EuroCom was, and more immediately interested in the fate of the rebel state. Also, its wares were cheaper.

  The BM-13's launch tubes may have been welded before Stalin murdered his last million, but the rockets they fired at coordinates fed by satlink to half a dozen launchers dispersed at random over two hundred square kilometers were cutting-edge. The warheads were not especially smart by contemporary standards. That was why the rebels—whose income from cotton and Liga economy cars only stretched so far—could afford them. They were smart enough to sense the greater mass of the BMP magnetically, and make minute adjustments to their steering vanes.

  Blue-white lightning flickered as shaped charges clawed open the BMP's thin top armor.

  "Direct hit," reported Ali al-Ajawi, watching through binoculars from the top of a hill.

  Yilderim the Tadzhik let out a whoop of triumph and danced around in a circle with his hands clasped over his head. "Allah be praised," breathed Sher Khan, the giant I'ushtun with the hennaed beard. He thought the whole thing smacked of demonomancy too.

  Timur let a slow breath billow his facecloth. "Allah and the youth of Turkestan, who trained themselves to use computers despite the Nikolays' discouragement. You've done me proud, Yilderim."

  Ali lowered his glasses. "We can sheave artillery. That doesn't mean much. We taught the Palestinians to do that in '82, park their launchers in a vacant lot, fire at a map reference, and drive away before the Israeli Skyhawks could find them."

  Yilderim stopped dancing and started to pout, his eyes swimming behind his thick glasses. "This is a bit more sophisticated, Alijaan," Timur said gently.

  "True. But it's one thing to fire to coordinates fed to you via a satellite link, and quite another to use the remote-sensing data for targeting yourself."

  "We can't test that without tipping our hand," Yilderim said sulkily.

  Timur laid a hand on the techie's shoulder. "Peace. We've succeeded in what we set out to do here. The time has come for the Butcher Karponin to make his move."

  He turned away from the others, then looked out at the black line of poplar and willow that traced the course of the /cravshan River, several klicks beyond where the glow of the stricken armored carrier was dying back to darkness.

  "And the time has come for us to goad him into making

  Chapter TWENTY-TWO

  Finding the downed aircraft was not much challenge. A pillar of black smoke led them, just like in the Bible. It was two hours after dawn, with the heat already pressing down like a sheet of lead and the smell of burning aviation fuel and fabric dope like burrs up in their sinuses, when the two sections of Jagun 23 reached a ridgetop and looked down on the wreck.

  It was a Colt, all right. A few furtive flames still gnawed at the broken carcass like rats. Beside the furrow it had plowed augering in, a metal pole had been stuck upright in the sand. It was the sort you might carry along to hold up one end of a volleyball net on the beach.

  "Uh-oh," Eddie said. From the pole flapped a green banner. Eddie's team wasn't first on the scene.

  The green banner meant ghazi. They were down on the flat near the wreckage in a circle of laughing, bearded faces surrounding a man in torn khaki coveralls. He staggered blindly from captor to captor, from blow to blow. Eddie saw the heliograph wink of desert sun on blade, and the man fell, a red arc hosing from his neck.

  "Well, shit," Eddie said. "Bravo, disperse into firing line along the ridge and dismount. Cover our asses. Delta, follow me." Without waiting to see if he was obeyed, he spurred Sertikan down the steep slope.

  The man who had gone down stayed. The ghazi seemed to lose interest in him, clustering instead around two more survivors in flight suits. They forced them to their knees with the flash suppressors of the AKs, then backed off into a wide circle.

  A pair of aspiring heroes in green tyubeteyka rushed forward to splash colorless liquid on the kneeling pair. One stood up, screaming and struggling with his hands behind his hack. A ghazi smashed him in the face with the buttstock/ receiver of his bullpup assault rifle and he fell back down.

  Eddie was among the ghazi then, shouting, "Back off, you sons of camels!" in Persian. They scattered away from Sertikan's hooves in surprise. He swung down from the mare's back, let her reins drop in the sand, and hoped like hell she didn't bite him in the ass when he turned his back. It would spoil hell out of his entrance.

  A Tadzhik with a Moldavan extended-service NCO's (unic open over a black-striped tanker T-shirt confronted him with a sneer. "So the Blue Sky Riders have come to grab a share of our glory."

  Eddie's jaw muscles contracted. The apparent top ghazi was not much taller than he was, with a soft rounded face and wire-rim glasses. Eddie had bumped into him before— his original unit had been part of the same minghan or regiment as Jagun 23 before he transferred to the ghazi. His name was Abdulsattah, and he was hard. Mean, anyway.

  Blue-Sky Riders was the minghan''s nickname for Jagun 23. Given the traditional Turk and Mongol veneration of the Blue Sky, Eddie had taken the soubriquet
as an extreme compliment until a chagrined Shaibaaniy pulled him aside to explain that it was a sardonic reference to the place where the unit's commander spent more time than actually on the back of his mount.

  Eddie keenly felt the lack of Shy Bunny. The outsize Uzbek was back home in Bukhara on compassionate leave. I lis mother had been killed in a car accident. Though he'd done his time in cadre, it still struck Fast Eddie as strange, sometimes, how life—and death—went on in the midst of war.

  "If there's any glory, here Abdulsattah, you're welcome to n," he said, sidling nearer to the captives. "What's that smell?"

  Abdulsattah laughed. "Petrol. We were just preparing our sport with the kaafir dogs when you arrived." His old second-in-command Samirov, a pock-faced giant from Termez, was still with him, Eddie noted. Samirov's huge face leered at him over Abdulsattah's shoulder like the full moon setting.

  Eddie broke the circle. The prisoner still on his knees stared at him with eyes blue and wild and empty as the Turkestan sky. Gasoline shone on his cheeks like tears.

  "This is a bad thing," Eddie said, aware that the hostility pressing in from all sides was directed at him as much as at the Russian captives. "Mistreatment of prisoners is forbidden."

  Abdulsattah sneered. "You kaafir lar stick together, eh? Your heart cries out for their plight."

  "Timur himself has ordered—"

  "Timur is not here. Only us, and these kaafirlar. Maybe you should join them, amerikalik ?

  He smiled and struck a match. His teeth were perfect.

  Eddie acted without thought, without intention. Abruptly the three fat white sighting dots were forming a line before Abdulsattah's face, the two on either side in sharp focus, the central one blurred. Just as they should be.

  The Glock had no external hammer and no safety; it came up ready to roll. For some reason the piece had been returned to Eddie during his confinement for "debriefing"—he wasn't really a prisoner, after all. He had practiced drawing and dry-firing it with the stolid zeal of a Zen swordmaster. It was something to do.