by Victor Milán
When he came out of it League soldiers were still wandering out of the Red Sands to surrender.
He was a traitor to the Motherland. Or a hero, silently serving. He didn't know which. For months Arbatov had answered his repeated and frantic requests for information, for clarification—for some kind, any kind, of response— with echoing sepulcher silence. He was isolated. He was alone.
What had he done? He didn't know. He preferred to stay numb, to put his mind on hold through relentless work, drilling and studying and practicing and working out, and when that ran dry by the exercise of sheer will, rather than have the question tolling in his skull like the bells that made old Edgar Allan so nuts. He went through the motions, whether it was grab-assing with the squaddies to keep morale up or staring full into the bearded face of a League commando and not seeing his wide eyes die as he whipped a builpup RPK light machine gun out from under its mylar wraps and firing it between the hairy humps of a Bactrian camel, point-blank into the man's chest.
At least he hadn't known any of the caravan hunter faces he had looked into that winter. The three teams he had zatzed were all BON, special-ops units organic to the paratroops, whom VDV jealously maintained in competition with Spetsnaz, GRU-controlled and not so discreetly overseen by the KGB. Many of them had cycled through the same para schools at Ryazan' and elsewhere as he had, but VDV was large, not an exclusive club like Special Designation.
He had not made many friends in training anyway. His classmates regarded him as an outsider, a rival, a threat. He had responded by outperforming all comers at any task set before him in a cold fury, and laying serious hurt on anyone who crossed over the line from verbal abuse to physical.
Still, if he was to look into a familiar face as his finger closed on the trigger, he wasn't sure what he'd do... No. That was a lie. The problem was, he knew too well what he would do, with his life stretched out like a chicken on a Singapore counter, waiting for the cleaver. He'd shoot a friend as dead as any stranger.
He did a stutter step and a little sideways dance, to avoid tripping over the guy rope of a hemicylindrical blue tent. You're thinking again, he told himself. Nasty habit. Everybody always told you not thinking was what would get you in trouble. Whole lot they knew. Maybe he should try getting drunk again.
He turned a comer to see a bearded man in a black pullover sweater slip up behind a man with a slung AK and slash his throat with a quick swipe of a knife.
"Mr. Timur," the woman in the sage-colored skirt suit was saying, ' 'the Nature Conservancy, International has sent me here to issue the strongest possible protest against your program of privatizing former League and republic lands. Precious little is left of the various riparian and Tien Shan watershed environments as it is. To expose them to commercial exploitation—"
Though there was still snow on the ground a few kilometers away, the day was quite warm. A small fan swiveled its head left and right with idiot fixity of purpose, stirring air turned taupe by afternoon sunlight filtering through the roof and walls of the multichambered tent. Seated Western-style on a folding chair behind a camp table, Timur waited politely until it became apparent the woman's word flow had sputtered out in indignation. Though she carried a British passport, she was American. The Nature Conservancy was another operation that had been driven out of North America.
"Ms. Longchamps," he said in his fine English, "it was my understanding that the purpose of your organization was to buy up lands for the purpose of preserving or restoring natural environments. Implicit in that policy, I should think, is the understanding that governments make poor stewards of such resources, as they do of all things. Has your own government administered the lands it seized from your organization well?"
Longchamps's face flushed. She was an extremely attractive woman with dark blond hair and pale eyes. Angry color ornamented her. "No. They've made them into test ranges and labor camps."
"And did the Soviets care for the land well? Has the League?"
"For God's sake, no. I've seen what they did to the Aral and the Syr."
"Why are you so concerned that I am removing the land from such a careless proprietor?"
"Because giving it over to capitalist exploitation is just as bad, and because you're so caught up in encouraging individual enterprise and this whole laissez-faire thing."
"You have traveled widely. Surely you must know that the worst environmental excesses of the capitalists pale before what socialism did to the former East Germany? Or my own land, for that matter."
She sat down, exasperated. "The earth is more than a resource to be used up. In the name of capitalism or communism. "
"I could not agree with you more. Understand, when we fought for our land, it was for our land, the parched and poisoned soil of Turkestan. We were sickened by what the Nikolays did to our earth for their cotton. Sick of having babies born deformed and adults dying young from exposure to pesticides and fertilizers no Western country would permit. The beauty of nature is a value too."
"Human values aren't the real reason—" Longchamps began.
Timor held up his hand. "Please. I have no desire to debate you. Instead I wish to make a proposition."
She settled back suspiciously. "What's that?"
Timur nodded his shrouded head toward the third person in the room, a dark man in a dark suit who sat quietly to one side, sweating.
"This is Senhor Joao Soares of Rio. Sys."
She raised her narrow Anglo-Saxon nose. "A Brazilian."
"My company has always opposed the destruction of the rain forest," Soares said in that same flat defensive tone that non-White Tribe South African businessmen used to have to cultivate.
"His company," Timur said, "wishes to buy the Chatkal I'orest Management Zone south of Tashkent and give it to your organization."
"Naturally, we would wish that you consider yourselves to be administering it in trust for the people of Turkestan," Soares said.
"But. .. why?"
"Public relations," Soares said. "My company manufactures consumer electronics. We would like a share of the emerging Turkestan market. Given the lead possessed by the Americans and Japanese, and even the Europeans, we want to do something to make an impact. Government mismanagement has made conserving the environment a popular issue here."
"A publicity ploy."
Soares took out a handkerchief and swiped at his forehead. "It would benefit you, it Would benefit us, it would benefit the Chatkal. It would please the Turkestanis. My company has a long-standing commitment to improving the environment."
Longchamps moistened her lips. She visibly longed to say something scathing, but somehow it wasn't coming.
Just as she found her voice, three shots cracked behind the tent.
Eddie was running, his Glock 23 out of the concealment holster inside the back of his cammie pants where the tail of his bombardier's jacket covered it. The scene turned into one of those slow-motion tunnel-vision dream things, where your whole being is focused on one thing and you run and run and can't seem to get any closer to it. At vision's end was the stricken sentry, the blood just rushing out of him like people from a burning theater, and his murderer, clinging to him like a lover.
The knifeman was paying no attention to anything but holding on to his victim. No matter what the movies show, a human with his throat slit doesn't just silently fold his cards and float off into the white light. You splash and thrash and, given the opportunity, can emit a whole lot of noise, even if it's only a panicky gurgling whistle.
Eddie had an adrenaline-stretched instant to be amused that only a few heartbeats before he'd been ragging himself for thinking too much, and here he was reverting to the Indiana Jones School of Action Without Thought. It also gave him time to recognize and really hate what he was going to do next.
One thing he'd never picked up on the streets of New York—along with AIDS or a serious drug habit—had been the white New Yorker's hatred/fear of firearms. Maybe he came from too low a stratum of soci
ety. He'd always liked the things, and had a feel for them, handguns particularly. He was still better with a pistol than any other form of firearm known, and God knew he'd checked out on them all.
He respected firearms. One thing a good firearm is not is a club. Yet when he got within reach of the knifeman—just beginning to lower his now limp but twitching victim to the ground—he gave him a hard crack with the Glock's square receiver, right behind the ear.
When he was a kid, Eddie saw a movie where somebody tried the time- or at least fiction-honored expedient of removing a sentry by clocking him on the head with the butt of a gun. And the sentry, quite realistically, grabbed his head with both hands and screamed, "Aiiieee!"
But Eddie had no intention of knocking anybody out. His gut had realized that one man skulking about camp slitting people's throats in broad daylight was liable to have little friends, armed—as the knifeman himself was—with nasty little AKR Krinkov submachine guns slung across their backs. Eddie wanted to be quiet, but he also wanted to mash the fucker's skull in.
Also contrary to the movies, a Glock is not all plastic. Knife boy fell across his victim. A quick check left, toward the front of the tent. Big tent, no one else in sight. Important tent, too, if it was worth putting armed guards over.. . or cutting their throats to get inside.
Eddie had no time to follow up that speculation or even see if he had put the knife wielder down to stay because his peripheral vision caught a second man backing into view around the other rear corner of the tent, locked in a butt-to-crotch two-step with another slashed sentry. Eddie sprinted toward him.
He saw Eddie in his own vision's fringe, released his victim, who was beyond the point of making trouble. He squared off facing Eddie in a crouch, holding his knife low and point up, making come-to-me gestures with his free hand. He was not in a deep enough crouch. Eddie did a quick tae kwon do skip step and raised the guy's Reeboks a couple inches off the hard-packed dirt with a front thrust kick to the balls.
That is a good way to keep someone from making noise. All the breath came out of the killer in a single voiceless rush, like a particularly bad consonant in some unprounceable Third World tongue. He did make a tiny dry rat-squeak, unsuccessfully trying to inhale on his way to his knees and on down to the ground in a fetus ball.
So far, so good... but along this side of the tent, the third member of the team with his Krinkov in his hands, a serious assassin about his business, was walking right toward Eddie.
He opened his bearded mouth—they all three had beards, so far, not that that was remarkable in this part of the world. Since he was going to make noise anyway, Eddie shot him three times in the chest.
The battle computer in his head was clicking away. Two sentries, two attackers to take them out—plus a third man. Probably the trigger mars. This was the killing team.
That meant a second unit out in front of the tent, to pull discreet security, to make sure the quarry didn't escape, and to give backup in case something went wrong. Something like an intruder stumbling across the break-in attempt and firing shots....
He dropped to the ground at the rear of the tent. Fortunately this was not one of those seamless-whole affairs where the roof and walls and floor are ail one piece. He ripped loose several metal stakes holding down the bottom and slithered underneath.
The chamber of the partitioned tent was half-lit and stuffy. It was also unoccupied. He noticed rolled-up bedding to the side—a futon, for Christ's sake?-—an open notebook computer with a smart satlink rig beside it, some books. Whoever lived here certainly spared every expense when it came to lush living. Holding the Glock in both hands, he rose, crossed swiftly to the hanging-flap interior door, took a breath, pirouetted through.
Three people sat at a table. A man in a turban had his back to Eddie, close enough to touch. A second man in a business suit poised half out of a chair to one side, uncertain which way to bolt.
Across the table from Eddie and the turbaned man sat a great-looking Western woman in a lady executive suit. She was looking at Eddie and opening her mouth to scream.
He pushed his Glock at her into Weaver stance and fired twice. She fell on her side, shrieking as if she had a compressed-air bottle in her aerobics-flattened stomach, unaware that she hadn't been hit. The man who had loomed up in the doorway behind her made no noise. Eddie's two rounds had taken him full in the face. He dropped his AKR
and fell.
Over the ringing in his ears Eddie heard a muffled exclamation from the tent's third section, beyond the door. He dodged past the table, vaulted the screaming woman's chair, and went through in a low dive.
Another terrorist was in the antechamber, sure enough, along with yet another foreign woman, Far East Asian from the Gestalt flash Eddie took in of her before concentrating wholly on the tall, bearded man with the muzzle of a Krinkov jammed up under her right ear.
Slowly Eddie stood up, keeping his arms extended and his pistol trained on gunman and hostage. He was glad he kept in shape. Holding down on the terrorist while rising wasn't as easy as it sounded.
"Death to Westemizers and infidels!" the man shouted in Persian. "Death to enemies of the True God! Death to cowardly dogs who spurn the banner of jihad!"
He spoke not the Turkic-flavored Tadzhik dialect but pure middle-class Tehran*. Behind the hostage's ear Eddie could see a gold locket hanging from the gunman's neck by a chain. He was willing to bet it contained a picture of a dead Asian religious and political leader, and not Ma-hatma Gandhi either. He bet all the gunman's little friends had them too. An Iranian? What the fuck, over?
"Give it up," Eddie replied in the same language. "You don't have a chance."
"I'll kill her," he man said in a less declamatory voice. "I'm willing to die, American.""
Eddie had been trained in counterterrorist tactics by U.S. Special Forces, SAS instructors on loan, and Spetsnaz. "Okay," he said.
The woman put one hand over the other and drove her elbow hard into the pit of the gunman's stomach. He gasped and doubled, easing his death grip on her. She dropped flat on the Bukhara rug floor.
Eddie had ten rounds left. He gave the Iranian two in the chest and blasted three more into him on the way down, just to discourage him from using his submachine gun. Then he raised the Glock to cover the front door in case the man had buddies outside.
"Get the gun away from him," Eddie said in English. Then he said it again in Russian and—you never know— Persian too. One of them took, because she picked herself up, took a step forward, and gingerly kicked the Krinkov to the side of the tent, out of the dying man's reach.
Still covering the entrance, he gave her quick sidelong scrutiny. She looked Chinese, with a pointed-oval face, heavy black hair in bangs, jeans, and a dark blouse. She was holding herself together quite well for somebody who had just been taken hostage and seen a man killed. She only showed it in the width of her black eyes and the spots of color flaming high on her cheekbones. She was even more striking than the round-eye woman in the other room.
"It's okay," he muttered, as much to himself as her. "You don't have to thank me for saving you. It's ali part of my job description."
"Saving me?" she demanded, in English with an accent like fine porcelain. "Save met I saved myself, thank you very much."
A man with a leveled Kalashnikov burst in the door. He pointed the assault rifle at Eddie. Eddie took up slack on the trigger.
The woman dodged between them and shouted "Wait!" in Uzbek.
Eddie eased off the trigger. The five assassins he had seen all wore standard Pasdaran drag, beards, black pullovers, dark pants. The getup wasn't all that unusual in the Turkestani Defense Forces, but that much uniformity was. Take the man—boy—staring at him over the sight-shroud of his old AKS. He had on MVD cammie pants, a Satanta T—and a sky-blue skullcap.
Come to think of it, the two sentries Eddie had seen go down outside had blue tyubeteyka on too. Tumblers began to click into place in his head.
At the same
time the Son of the Sky-Blue Wolf was visibly deciding that since this intruder pointing a gun at him was blond, it stood to reason he was Russian and so he should just forget about the woman and shoot him. Someone came into the room behind Eddie and said, "Enough. This man saved my life."
Eddie saw a look of dumb devotion smear itself over the youngster's face. The Kalashnikov quit staring him in the eye.
Deliberately he lowered his own weapon. When he straightened and turned he was not at all surprised to see that the turban worn by the man who had sat at the table covered all of his face except his eyes.
They were black eyes, intense, with slight epicanthic folds. Eddie met them and felt a shock go through him like an iron bar.
"Timur," he said.
The eyes turned to crescent slits. After a beat Eddie realized the man was smiling. "Ah, I remember you! The turbulent American from the schoolyard, who was so ready to defy the odds to take up the cause of the oppressed. You've done it again today, though I daresay this time the beneficiary of your daring was not perhaps so blameless."
Eddie's head began to spin. He tasted vomit. He'd almost died. He had killed three men, maybe four. Now, for the second time, he had the chance to kill Timur.
But Arbatov's orders... fuck Arbatov. Eddie went slowly to his knees, laid his sidearm down at Timur's feet, and bent forward to touch his forehead to the blood-soaked carpet.
Chapter THIRTY-TWO
Wet from her shower, Jacqueline Gendron emerged into Timur's sleeping chamber from the portable unit in the corner. The high points of her naked body glistened in the low lamplight, as though the point of her shoulder and her ribs and smooth flare of hip were molded from polished bronze. It was a fine body, long-waisted, long-legged, firm. Her pubic hair was a discreet dark vertical band tucked beneath her slight belly; it required little maintenance to be suitable for the latest Eurothong bikini fashions.
