by Victor Milán
Karponin looked to his video crews. "We're ready, General."
The spots came on, sandblasting the scene with white light. Karponin nodded and marched forward with forthright stride. Head lifted and turned to a precise angle to express his best three-quarters profile to the camera, he read the inscription.
It was in Russian, with Arabic script below. It read: ANATOLIY KARPONIN DIES BENEATH THIS TREE.
So the nigger has read his Sun Tzu. He didn't say it aloud. In today's climate there were some sentiments it was improvident to express, even in the presence of the loyal League Army press and archivists corps. And maybe this lovely scene would help bring about a climatic change.
In the original, which Karponin knew by heart, a rival of Sun Tzu's disciple Sun Pin had been lured to a great tree on which was inscribed, P'ANG CHUAN DIES BENEATH THIS TREE. As P'ang Chuan read it, ten thousand crossbowmen concealed in a defile shot him to pieces.
In his paranoid delusional way, Timur had obviously thought to re-create that legendary event. But it had all gone wrong for him, as his whole nigger-foolish revolution had. There were no ten thousand rebel crossbowmen in these hills, only a cordon of Karponin's toughest troops.
It was a moment of the most exquisite irony, the most perfect symbolism. Even Karponin's genius for self-promotion could not have contrived a more perfect climax to Operation Desert Wind.
He set back his head and began to laugh.
The living core of the Russian olive had been hollowed out from above by patient hands. As Al Capone's laughter reverberated across the oasis, his image was perceived by a fiber-optic video pickup threaded from the heart of the tree to the surface of the shiny bark. Ni-cad batteries fed a tiny current to the satlink antenna concealed within a thick branch.
Al Capone was still laughing when a return signal pulsed downward from the great unseen satellite-based Net overhead.
The ten kilograms of League Armed Forces—issue plastic explosives that had been sealed in the tree's bole by the gardeners of Fergana exploded. The wood of the trunk splintered into shrapnel, riding the Shockwave.
Before they could raise him up and bear him to his waiting helicopter, Anatoliy Karponin died beneath the tree.
Chapter TWENTY-NINE
Out in that hot night, the tribes begin to move. Kypchak and kumli; Uzbek, Tadzhik, Turkmen, Tatar; Kazakh, Karakalpak, Kirghiz; the Great Horde, the Middle Horde, the Little Horde, the Golden Horde: the sons and daughters of the Sky-Blue Wolf. They move.
The survivors of Jagun 23 had worked their haggard way to the northeast rim of the great cobra's-hood bowl, hoping to slip away southeast and lose themselves in the most desolate part of the Red Sands. One of the kumli knew a route through the middle of it that he claimed Chingis Khan himself had used when he pulled his epic end-run on Ali-ed-Din II Muhammad of Khwarizm. Fast Eddie believed that route must lie farther west, nearer the Aral. The really significant thing about the desert man's road was that it didn't run through the middle of Desert Wind.
At midnight they were still on the move when they heard engine sounds. Eddie deployed three sections into ambush with their remaining AT launchers. Telling Aliyev to keep a particular eye on the captive, he took Alfa and a kumli from Charlie forward to investigate.
It was a truck of magnificent age, grinding up a track that was scarcely more than imaginary. Its bed was surmounted by a high tarp cover. A whip antenna had been fastened to the hood, and a tiny flag that looked suspiciously like the multicolored banner of Free Turkestan fluttered from it.
"What the fuck, over?" Eddie started to rise.
Maqsut laid a hand on his arm. "Let me," he said. "If they are ours, the sight of a foreigner might set them off."
"Good idea." Eddie got ready to rock and roll on his AK, just in case.
Maqsut walked slowly down the hill, waving his hands over his head. The truck stopped. Several men climbed out of the back and covered him -with Kalashnikovs. He exchanged a few words with them and then with the driver, then signaled Eddie to come down.
Eddie did. "What's this? You boys must have balls bigger than your brains to be headed north after the last two days."
Once he said it, he realized it hadn't exactly been diplomatic. The newcomers looked at each other and laughed as if he were the funniest stand-up turn on sat.
Eddie looked at Maqsut. The Uzbek shrugged.
"We're the Free Turkestan artillery," a chicken-neck kid in a Tashkent tyubeteyka announced. "We're going on the offensive."
Even heroes need sleep, thought Polkovnik Efremov, commanding the Russian lead regiment leading the League thrust into the Red Sands. Screw Al Capone if he doesn't like it.
Around him his men were digging gratefully in for a few hours' rest. They had fought a stiff battle today against the so-called ghazi. Men and machines were in no condition to proceed.
He carefully scanned their surroundings with night-vision binoculars. He was not really happy with their disposition; this was dune country, the first they had come into—rather to his surprise, for he had imagined the Red Sands Desert to be full of the famous crescent dunes of Central Asia, the barkhan. It wasn't practical to encamp a "daring thrust" armored regiment on sand dunes, so he had been compelled to pick a spot more or less surrounded by high ground.
He doubted the bandits were going to move against him. Today's fighting had produced a decisive League victory; and the rebels his men had sent running before them showed no sign of slowing down shy of the Iranian border. But he took nothing for granted, as a matter of principle, and so he would plant patrols and observation posts on the surrounding dunes.
He lowered his glasses. He had done what he could; his men had done what they could. Division was calling for him to press on, quoting bales of armed forces aphorisms about warding off inaction and warding off passivity. He'd told them they could shoot him if they wanted, but his immediate concern was warding off the collapse of his command.
Entering the door of his personal trailer, he heard an outcry behind. He stopped and looked back.
The southern sky was alive with climbing streaks of light.
Standing in the headquarters tent, watching the monitors from which Ali al-'Ajawi coordinated the hamstringing of Al Capone's army, Jacqui Gendron got the story Timur had promised her.
The Indonesian smart rounds Timur had bought for the BM-13s Khaalis provided him had boosters that increased their range dramatically. From all sides of the vast depression rockets reached out for the concentrations the satellites overhead showed their human operators. So refined was the sats' real-time surveillance capability that rebel rocketeers could pick their targets according to priorities that had been drilled into them in advance.
Least important were the tanks: khudaga tanklar bering. Seeker-heads would sense their mass and guide rockets into them if they were in an impact zone, but they were incidental to the secondary targets, the APCs that bore the troops.
Highest priority was resupply. No modern army lives off the land, and in this desperate land every gram the army consumed had to be replaced by freight hauled overland: fuel, lubricants, ammunition, replacement parts, treads for the tanks and APCs—and of course, food and water. As they were used up—and war consumes stocks at a terrifying rate—the army would become first immobile, and then impotent, and finally dead.
In the north, more of Khaalis's BM-13s had been left behind on either side of Karponin's axis of advance, dug in, concealed under tarps, with clumps of hardy bunchgrass on top to fool aerial and satellite eyes. They began flaying the convoys rushing to feed the voracious army with miniature cluster-bomb dispenser rounds. The bomblets would do no harm to tanks, and little to BMPs, but tore hell out of soft targets like lorries and tanker trucks. The hidden Stalin Organs also launched Brazilian-made rounds that sowed mines along the supply line, both anti-armor and anti-personnel.
Enemy artillery was excellent, and its counterbattery capability had been steadily improving as the League creaked and lurched
its way into the computer age. But the League gunners had a problem. They could sometimes backtrack the incoming rockets to their source. But by the time they fired a comeback mission, the launch trucks would have simply driven away, to find a new location in which to reload, fire, and move again. The rebel artillerists had only to stay in range, and their laptop computers and cheap satlink antennas would tell them where to shoot.
With his skirmishers and his ghazi, Timur had drawn the advancing army into an apparently victorious charge into the heart of wasteland. Then he cut off its head, and cut its lifeline. It was a trick not unfamiliar to that destroyer and progenitor of Central Asia, Chingis Khan.
As dawn begin to seep up out of the eastern sand, carefully orchestrated mobs spilled onto runways throughout League-held Kazakhstan and the Turkmen Republic. They would be cleared away, eventually, by tear gas and machine gun fire. But they would prevent air support or resupply of the beleaguered army for crucial hours of daylight.
Reports were still flooding Timur's command center when the sun arrived, but the outcome was already clear. Rebel rockets had caused few casualties. But they had done what they were meant to do.
Desert Wind had blown itself out.
Timur returned to his own tent. What could be done, he had done. He had no taste for the celebration that had broken out in the command center. He needed rest to face the future squarely.
In Tashkent he lived like a prince. In the field he lived more like an anchorite, with a small wardrobe, a low portable desk with a satlinked notebook computer on it, and a cheap modern Bukharan rug to sit and sleep on.
He was hanging up his jacket when he heard the tent flap rustle. He turned, wondering if one of the League infiltrators he knew his camp must harbor had come to repay the favor he had done Anatoliy Karponin.
It was Jacqui Gendron. With her hair hanging unbound around her shoulders, taking fire from the light of the kerosene lantern hung from the center post, her features seemed softer, younger.
"You've won," she said.
He watched as she unbuttoned her blouse, let it slip over her shoulders. Her breasts were small and pointed. The nipples stood erect in the dawn chill. She kicked her boots off, skinned her khaki slacks down her slim shanks, and came to him, naked.
Colonel Efremov stood inside the door of his trailer, fully dressed with service sidearm in hand, feeling foolish. If the tiring outside, that had burst out and then faded away as quickly as a spring rain squall on the Caspian, signaled a rebel attack, then a mere pistol wasn't going to do him much good. But he could not stand the thought of waiting for death empty-handed.
A knock on the door. "Colonel Efremov, it's safe to come out now. They're all dead."
He emerged into milky dawn light spilling over the dune tops. Bodies sprawled on the ground, the nearest not ten meters from his trailer.
He walked to it. It wore a robe that seemed made all of patches. A hood had fallen back to reveal the thrusting Persian features of a totally hairless man. No eyebrows, no beard, no hair on the scalp.
Efremov shuddered. Fanatics. The army had been briefed on the Sufi cults, the tariqa of Central Asia. The dead man belonged to the most mysterious and most fanatical, the Kalandars.
An Advanced AK with a submachine-gun-style barrel lay by the dead man's outflung hand.
"They were coming for you, Colonel," the head of his security unit said. "God knows how the devil-worshiping bastards made it this far before we cut 'em down." He crossed himself, Orthodox-style, and spat.
An explosion shattered the eerie post-coital silence that followed a firefight. Efremov whirled to see a dirty brown ball of smoke rolling into the sky on the west side of camp. He heard more blasts, shouting.
He ran, his security boss racing after, trying to catch up to his superior and keep him out of danger but hampered by his battle dress.
A pair of ragged figures were racing for the dunes. Efremov arrived in time to see them knocked down by a horizontal storm of gunfire.
They had done their damage. Efremov watched as water bled into the sand from a thousand holes in the fat flanks of a big tank truck. The saboteurs had used claymore mines.
"A feint," he said, lips curling back from his teeth. "The attack on my trailer was a feint. They were after our water."
The security officer clutched his arm. "Colonel—up there."
A man on horseback had appeared on top of a dune, alone in the eye of the rising sun. He wore a triangular Mongol hat. A long straightened-sperm RPG-16 lay across his saddlebow. In the binoculars someone pressed into his hands the colonel saw that his broad flat face was largely obscured by mirror shades.
The man held up something: a canteen. Deliberately, as if a thousand edgy soldiers did not have him zeroed in their Kalashnikov sights, he unscrewed the cap. He put the canteen to his lips, tipped his head back and drank, wiped his mouth, and carefully replaced the lid.
Then he cocked his arm and threw the canteen.
It landed halfway down the dune's flank and roiled almost to the hastily strung perimeter wire. Every eye in camp followed it.
The Battle of the Red Sands was over.
PART III
The Land Of Flowers
Leave the Turks in peace, so long as they leave you in peace.
—hadith [saying of Muhammad]
Chapter THIRTY
Hands clasped behind his back, League Undersecretary of State Pavel Valentinovich Vorov'yev stood gazing out the dacha window into pinewoods that stood black in the shin-deep snows northeast of Moscow. As it always did when he stood in such a position, the long white glass-fragment scar stretched taut across his right cheekbone itched.
His visitor was a fit light-skinned black man in his early fifties, with a square honest face and a dignity-adding frosting of gray in his hair and mustache. He was photogenic enough to be a TV news anchor and had been, before American press restrictions forced CNN overseas. Like so many modern Americans, Talbot White had gotten along by going along.
"Mr. Undersecretary," the American emissary said, "I don't know how to say it any more strongly: we are not helping Timur. I admit it was considered, maybe even tried. But he wasn't having any of it."
"I don't disbelieve you, Talbot," Vorov'yev said, turning with a smile the same temperature as the hoarfrost clinging to the windowpane.
He spoke so quietly that the American goggled slightly behind his square wire-frame glasses and said, "What?"
"I believe you—speaking unofficially. But it doesn't matter."
"What are you talking about?"
"The League is in turmoil since that idiot Al Capone led his Operation Desert Wind to such a cinematic defeat."
Despite the tension pressing in on his skin like Jupiter's atmospheric pressure, White had to suppress a smile. He had seen much of Operation Desert Storm from firsthand, in his reportorial capacity. Having invited the comparison, Karponin deserved the posthumous ridicule heaped on him; his PR ploy made his defeat seem that much more comprehensive.
On the other hand, White thought, if Desert Wind produced the same lack of political consequences Desert Storm did, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
"The republics are upset by their losses—hypocritical swine that they are; the bulk of casualties were Great Russians, in the League and Russian Republic armies. The Baits, who have been scanting their commitments since the day Operation Sukhovey commenced, are threatening to pull out of the League Armed Forces altogether. The other republics blame the Baits for not doing their parts. Georgia and Armenia, meanwhile, are in a state of terror that the Mongol Yoke will descend upon them at any moment. Popular militias are forming on a scale not seen since the virtual civil wars of the early nineties, and the governments of those republics are handing out arms to them. And on our borders, our traditional enemies sit fingering their knives and smiling. Do not deny that this is true, Mr. White."
White shook his head—not No: it isn't true, but No, I won't deny it. Last week he had been in
Germany, pleading off the record for the Bundeswehr to call olf large-scale maneuvers scheduled along the Polish frontier; Central Europe and the Balkans were having hysterics, and the Germans had already announced they would defy a European Council vote condemning the exercise. He felt something near admiration for the way a German general officer could tell him Fuck off and die, nigger with no more than a flick of ice-blue eyes.
"The Central Asian rebellion threatens to destroy the I .eague. At the center we understand the danger inherent in that, as the fools in the republics do not."
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold, White mentally quoted to himself. But he said, "I understand your concern, as both an official of the League and a citizen of the Russian Republic. But even shorn of the republics, Russia is a superpower."
"The wolves are gathering, Mr. White, and not all of iliem wear sky-blue hats. You cannot understand the implications this crisis holds for us, and I am not permitted to enlighten you. I would not if I could; they are our concern, not yours. What you need to know—and your President Callendar, and his ever-so-clever National Security Adviser, is that we will not go down alone."
He dropped his voice back to the quivering edge of audibility. "And we still have the means to ensure that we do not."
Like the missiles of Tyuratam, just a stone's throw away from rebel Uzbekistan. "Are you threatening us?" White said, more in disbelief than outrage.
"I am stating fact. Whether or not you had a hand in setting loose this monster in Central Asia is irrelevant. It must be stopped up before it pulls the League apart.
"Or the world will be left with no superpowers at all. Good day."
The blood had long since been scrubbed from the cement beneath the old men's black-slippered feet. They cast no shadows; the north China sun was an unemphatic disk behind a scrim of white gauzy cloud, giving little light and less heat. As the two men in their quilted blue coats walked, they kept their round, close-cropped heads down, and their breath smoked as they spoke.
