by Victor Milán
Without a lot of luck, it wouldn't be enough.
"You can't hit a flying helicopter with that!" exclaimed Maqsut, clinging to the unyielding wall behind Eddie.
"I don't have to," Eddie said. "Not dead-on, anyway."
The column was strung out for half a kilometer. The Hunchback's momentum carried it beyond the column's tail before it climbed and banked to come back for a second run. It slid down smoothly between the sandstone walls. Eddie knelt, aimed, and almost at once fired.
"Missile launch!" Viktor sang.
"Yob tvoyu mat'!" Kolya said. It didn't look like a SAM launch, not enough smoke. So it would probably not track him—but the same smooth walls that trapped his quarry held him too.
He put the big ship's nose down. Too low and he'd splinter his rotor tips against the rock faces to either side, but if he could get under the missile...
And then memory kicked in, and he knew what had been done to him. His bellow of outrage was subsumed in the piercing crack of the rocket-propelled grenade exploding almost over his head.
RPG rounds are designed to self-destruct at the limit of their flight range, which for Eddie's was eight hundred meters. The Pushtuns of Afghanistan, for millennia the perfect spiritual masters of improvisation at war, had figured out a way to use the Nikolays' own safety feature against them.
The Mi-24—Gorbach, Hunchback, Hind, whatever—was a huge target. In flight, it was still virtually impossible to hit with an unguided AT rocket. But Eddie could get the small but potent warhead within its destructive radius of the chopper when it biew, if his timing was dead-on.
It was.
The blast sheared two of the Hind's five rotor blades off clean. Only the skill of one of the League's top rotary-wing pilots could keep it from dashing itself to flaming wreckage against the gorge walls or floor.
Not even Kolya the Cowboy could make the landing soft.
Kolya groaned and stirred. He'd banged his forehead against the instrument panel when the ship angled in. He hadn't blacked out—if a blow to the head did that to you, it generally broke something—but for a while his attention had sort of freewheeled.
He felt tugging on his right arm. "Lieutenant Kuliyev! Lieutenant? Kolya, for the love of God, come on!"
He looked around. It was Ivan, leaning over him, trying to pull him out of his seat. "Viktor—?" he asked.
The visor had popped off his instrument man's flight helmet, and the boy was unable to repress a sidewise flicker of his eyes. Kolya looked out the starred windscreen and groaned. The aircraft's nose had struck an outcrop, and its ten-metric-ton weight had collapsed the gunner's compartment.
"Shit," Kolya said. "Oh, no."
He tried to get up. Pain lanced through his back, and that weird loopy unbalanced feeling he knew so well, as if the upper part of his spine had slid off the lower.
"Vanya, my back," he said. "Get out of here. Save yourself. I can't move."
"Come on, Kolya. We've got to get out of here. The ship could blow—"
He screamed, wheeled around, clumsy in his flight suit. Blood from a gash across his back sprayed Kolya's face. Craning in his seat despite the agony in his back, Kolya saw a long-bladed knife slash at Ivan's face and futile upflung hands.
The boy fell across his seat. Behind him a man stood in the passenger space with muted light from the sprung side door falling across him. His face was young, younger maybe than Ivan's, but with Asians it was hard to tell. His black eyes were wide, uncomprehending, as if he were as much a victim as the boy he had just hacked to death.
Nikolay Kuliyev never believed in making excuses for his enemies. He took out his American revolver and blew apart the Asian boy's head.
"Stop! Goddam it, don't go in there! Eddie did a Pony Express flying dismount off Sertikan as she was braking, that in other circumstances he would have been purely proud of. When they saw the attack chopper go down, what was left of the Jagun had gone howling forward at full gallop. Shamsiyev, the disaffected apprentice manas singer, had reached it first.
Eddie's command had been too late to stop the Kirghiz boy, but it brought the other squaddies up shy of the door. Eddie shouldered through them. Their bearded faces snarled. He was losing them; the sudden savage attack when they thought they were safe was turning them feral and ugly.
From inside the helicopter, shots, booming loud. Eddie pushed the two men nearest him into the others and dove through the door.
Even after the late-day gloom it seemed pitch-dark inside the craft. He hit the deck in a paratroop tuck, somersaulted to the far wall.
The smell of gunsmoke and spilled bowels filled his head. His eyes adjusted enough for him to see the pilot was still in the seat right ahead of him, waving a by-God humongous Dirty Harry six-shooter in the air. He was trying to swing it back to bear on the new intruder, but for some reason couldn't.
Eddie lunged forward between the seats, grabbed the gun hand's wrist. It seemed as big around as his thigh; this was one big mother, for a chopper jock.
"Will you knock it off!" he grunted, wrestling the gun hand with both of his. "A quick surrender is your one and only chance of getting out of this with all your parts attached."
The big red-mustached man had gotten a look at him now. "An American!" he bellowed, despite the fact Eddie had addressed him in Russian which he frankly thought was better than the pilot's. "A goddam American! This is just what we need, you sticking your long Yank noses in our business!"
Eddie gave a kiai grunt and whipped the back of the man's hand against the panel. Numbed, the fingers released the pistol. It dropped with a clunk on the rubberized metal deck.
Eddie let the wrist go and slumped back against what he immediately realized was a lifeless body already slumped across the instrument operator's seat. Fuck it. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was an infinitely weary sigh.
The chopper driver hit his safety harness release, started to get out of his seat, then settled back with a groan. "If my back wasn't fucked up, I'd tear you in two, you meddling little fuck."
"Hey, buddy, anytime. Any fucking time. You and me're going round and round—after you get out of traction. Right now, you're gonna help me get your fat ass out of here."
With grumbling bad grace the red-mustached giant put his oak-trunk arm over Eddie's shoulder and let him help him to his feet. The two worked their way around the instrument operator's seat and turned around.
Turghun Aliyev stood in the doorway. His Kalashnikov was leveled from the hip.
Once again Eddie was acutely conscious that his ass was waving in the breeze. Why does this always happen to me?
"This man's a prisoner, Aliyev," he said wamingly.
The aged head nodded slowly. "Our duty to Timur demands we guard his life as our own."
"That's the way to talk."
The old man looked at the body of his apprentice, sprawled practically at his feet. A tear welled from each eye, and made snail tracks through the red dust that caked his wrinkled cheeks.
"But this man has taken much from me. He must repay that debt."
Eddie shook his head. "Whoa, wait a minute, here. Remember what you said just a minute ago, about duty and prisoners—"
"You misunderstand me, Leytenant. I warrant his life and safety with my own. No harm shall come to him, except from his own kind."
"Fine. I'm real glad to hear you say that. Now help me get him the hell out of here before the gas tank goes."
The casualties Kolya's attack had inflicted broke the back of Jagun 23 as a fighting force. The survivors were so subdued they didn't even gripe when Eddie made them fashion a crude stretcher out of a tent and tent poles and lash the captured pilot to it. He didn't kid himself; he had been blooded beside his men, but without the presence of Aliyev at his side, dusty yet immeasurably dignified in his brimmed skullcap and Western-style suit, he would have been twisting in the wind for true.
They reached the top of the buttes, where they could take cover under sand
stone overhangs overlooking the central bowl of the Qizil Qum, and dug in.
They spent a sleepless night tending wounds, maintaining weapons, and watching the light show as Al Capone kicked the crap out of the ghazi.
Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
"The mood is subdued here at the headquarters of the Turkestani Defense Force as the second day of the Battle of
the Red Sands winds to a close," the young woman said into the glare of TV floods. "Troops of the defeated rebel army have been streaming south past Timur's tent city since midafternoon. Already observers from nations around the world have begun an exodus from the camp, as the magnitude of the catastrophe has grown clearer with every hour.''
"Jacqui," Tewfik whined in her ear. "Jacqui, why aren't you filing? For heaven's sake, everyone in the world is scooping you on this!"
She brushed at her ear as if trying to drive away a gnat. Certainly it looked as if the story was breaking. Likewise the rebellion.
The ghazi had awaited the League armored columns in positions dug into the sand of the great cobra-head bowl in the midst of Red Sands. They fought with fanatical courage, and they inflicted savage losses on Anatoliy Karponin's troops, launching anti-tank missiles at thin rear armor from concealed firing pits, throwing themselves bodily against main battle tanks with shaped-charge mines strapped to their chests.
But they did not fight a battle of dispersal and constant movement, as the irregular Jagun before them had done. They stood and slugged it out. That gave Karponin the opportunity to use his artillery and his strike aircraft and his darting desant units, as well as his beloved tanks. Inevitably, the superior weight of League metal and League manpower told.
"TDF command has at last confirmed what our colleagues with Desert Wind have been telling us: Timur's elite ghazi formations are broken, bypassed, inflight, or destroyed. The bulk of the Turkestani Defense Forces, massed behind the ghazi line, are fleeing south toward the Amu. Meanwhile League Frontal Aviation is claiming over a thousand trucks of various sizes destroyed, despite ferocious opposition from SAMs...."
Jacqui turned and began to walk away between the tents, away from the satisfied drone of her rival telejournalist. Tewfik trotted by her shoulder.
"If you're not going to get the story you came here for," he said, "can't we at least get out of here?"
"Twefik, there's something wrong."
"Of course there's something wrong. The Russian Army is on the way!"
"No. That's not it. Something's wrong here. What's happening now ... I don't how, but I feel it, I know it: it's not the story."
"Not since Desert Storm, whose name this whirlwind assault echoes, has the world seen a multinational force of such size—nor, apparently, a victory so one-sided. ..."
"You're crazy," Tewfik said.
She stopped, faced him, smiled. "Of course I am. I've always been crazy. That's why I'm the best, and not the bitch back there with the plastic tits."
Timur and his orloks—an ancient Mongol term, literally "raging torrents," which meant field marshals—were gathered around a table with their heads bent over an old-fashioned paper map when Francis Marron burst into the room. His collar was open, his hair disarrayed.
He pointed a finger at Timur. "You."
Timur raised his shrouded head. "Mr. Marron," he said mildly, "you're distraught."
"Your army's been destroyed," Marron said. "The ones who aren't dead are only alive until the league can hunt them down. The dream is over, Timur, The revolution is dead, and you killed it."
Blue-skullcapped guards seized the American's arm. Timur waved them olf.
"If that is the case, I accept full responsibility."
"That won't wash, Timur. We're talking about people's lives here. You held them in your hands. You had a chance to preserve them, safeguard them. But you threw them all away. Because of pride, and some crazy anachronistic idea of freedoml" He spat the last word out like shit.
Sher Khan, the huge Afghan, growled deep in his throat. The small, slim raghead, Ali, smiled grimly.
"Freedom is something we think worth dying for, Mr. Marron," he said. "In this backward corner of the world."
Marron shook his head. "You're nuts. You're all nuts. Karponin will bulldoze your precious ancient cities and send your people to rot in camps. And the rest of the world won't make a peep.
"You could have had help. You could have had a sponsor. If not us, somebody. But no. You had to go your own way. And your own way led right to hell!"
Timur stood upright, unflinching. "Are you finished, Mr. Marron?"
Marron hung his head. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm finished." "Then I beg that you excuse us. We have much work to do."
Marron allowed the Sons of the Sky-Blue Wolf to lead him away. "Mr. Marron," Timur called.
It seemed to take all Matron's willpower to roll his head around on slack muscles.
"Thank you for your concern," Timur said.
A few minutes later Timur excused himself for a walk in the nighttime air. He stood on the northern edge of the encampment, gazing north across the sand. He heard steps behind him. "Timur." "Ms. Gendron. I'm surprised to find you still here." Her laugh was brittle. "If you are, you don't know me. I'm a bitter-end kind of woman."
"So you believe you are going to witness the bitter end of the Red Sands rebellion."
"No," she said quietly. "I don't know why, but I don't." They stood for a while in silence. Wisps of Middle Eastern rock drifted by on a slow heavy breeze.
"Ms. Gendron," Timur finally said, "I owe you a substantial debt for the coverage you gave our revolution at a crucial moment."
She thrust her head forward. Her eyes were bright and feral. "Does that mean there's something going on? Can I have an interview?"
"I won't tell you. What I will do is promise you that, if you remain patient a very little time longer, you will have all the story you could desire. And it will be yours exclusively."
"Does that mean you win," she asked, "or does that mean you lose?"
When he turned his head to her, his eyes were bright with what she was startled to recognize as mirth. "Either way," he said, "it's a great story, don't you think?"
Rotor wash raised spiky wavelets on the surface of the small brackish pool as the Gorbach settled out of the starry sky. Tall and confident, General Colonel Anatoliy Karponin stepped onto the hard-packed soil before the engine whine died.
The colonel of the Ukrainian Republic regiment bivouacked by the pool came to meet him. "General, this is a most delightful surprise."
Karponin laughed. Two separate League Army videocam teams scrambled from the chopper, almost jostling each other into the pond in their zeal to ensure that the great man's every word, his every gesture, was recorded in his hour of triumph.
"You don't think I'd miss something like this, do you Polkovnik Novikov?" he asked. "Where is it?"
The colonel nodded over his shoulder at a tree that stood by itself about fifty meters above the pond. Karponin strode toward it.
The center of the bowl in the midst of Red Sands is an arid place. But the higher ground surrounding it does provide a watershed of sorts. At the lowest point, a few pools accumulate, giving sustenance to clumps of habitation too tiny and depressing to be called koopkhoz, like the one, now deserted, through which the officers walked with their entourages trailing behind.
"One of our chemical-warfare platoons found it, when they were checking to make sure that the rebels had not poisoned the pond," the colonel said.
"I see," Karponin said, halting to inspect the tree from a few meters away. It was the kind known in the West as Russian olive or oleaster, with drooping willowy branches whose leaves, darker above than below, were gray with a silver sheen like fine field-mouse fur in the light of the crescent moon.
"These trees are native to the Amu and Syr basins," Colonel Novikov said. "This one may be an accidental tourist." He reached out to pluck one of the tiny pale-green fruits from among leaves and needlelike thorns. "These are
a popular food for birds; one might have dropped a seed here in its feces. Or it may have been planted deliberately, as a windbreak or just to relieve all this desolation—''
"I know all that," Karponin interrupted. "I am a Russian, not an American; I have not forsaken nature. Now, where is this controversial plaque?"
Novikov nodded. An aide stepped forward and shyly proffered an oblong tablet about twenty-five centimeters by twenty, wrapped in plastic.
One of Karponin's half-dozen bodyguards thrust forward, a short, broad man with a face far less picturesquely scarred than his master's. He wore tanker insignia, and around his thick neck wore an Israeli-style sling from which hung an Advanced Kalashnikov with a short submachine-gun-style barrel dropped in.
"Is it safe?" he demanded.
Novikov laughed, somewhat nervously. "More than safe. We've even run it through a mobile medical X-ray unit. It's just a bronze plaque, with a most remarkable inscription. "
"General, this whole area is completely secure. The soil around the tree is packed solid; there've been no mines buried here. As for snipers"—he stepped back and encompassed the low surrounding hills with a wave—"the perimeter is secured by an entire VDV battalion. Your man's concern is entirely unwarranted, General Colonel."
He gestured at the plastic package. "Aren't you going to open it?"
Karponin eyed it as if it were a fresh goat turd. "This won't do. Put it back on the tree where you found it, so I can discover it."
The colonel frowned. He obviously didn't understand. That was part of the reason he was a colonel while Karponin— several years younger, by appearance—was about to accept his marshal's baton from a grateful League. Karponin had always been an admirer of Douglas MacArthur, and he had taken especially to heart the example of the great American commander in wading ashore through the Philippine surf again and again until he had the footage he wanted in the can.
At a nod from the still-bemused Novikov the young aide unwrapped the plaque and gave it to a soldier, who stepped up and hung it from a nail driven into the tree trunk.
