by Victor Milán
"Dr. Shih," Timur said in Uzbek, rising from his cross-legged carpet squat as a sullen Sky-Blue Wolf escorted the woman into his receiving chamber. Flowers flashed on all sides like frozen explosions. "A pleasure to see you. Please, sit down. Will you take tea?"
The prevailing local conception of tea ran to bland Japanese imports and a Xinjiang blend that tasted to the refined Beijing palate like boiled ditchweed. Perhaps as a gesture at old-nomad solidarity, the half-Mongol Shih perversely liked the stuff. Or had done a good job convincing herself she did. She sat on a maroon and black Bukhara rag and nodded.
An earthenware teapot sat on a tray at Timur's side. He poured Shih a piyaala full and brought it to her.
"Thank you, sir." She sipped. "For a powerful man, you seem oddly uncomfortable with the perquisites of power. I hope it gives no offense to say so."
Halfway back down, Timur checked himself momentarily, looking intently at her from the folds of his headcloth. ' 'No offense given, Doctor; I am not easy to offend. Tell me more, if you will."
She gestured around the tent. "Your surroundings are not luxurious. You have these beautiful flowers, tulips and orchids and the little purple ones that look like lilacs—"
"Turkestan lilies," Timur said. "Some of these are spring wildflowers, others hothouse grown."
"Am I correct that they are freely given by the people, sir?"
Timur nodded. "Truckloads arrive daily at all my encampments. I keep some, give the rest to whomever wishes to share the beauty."
"Why are there no roses? Turkestan is famous for them."
To her surprise she saw him shudder. "No roses. I.. .cannot abide them."
"Your flowers are gifts, and you pour your guests tea by hand. Yet you are one of the most powerful men in the world."
"That's hardly true," he murmured.
"Forgive me, sir, but it is. You have torn your land from the living flesh of the world's last great empire. Your people worship you. You are a focus, an inspiration, to the aspirations of people all over the world who feel themselves oppressed by foregin conquerors, especially in the non-aligned nations. Is that not power?"
The eyes closed briefly. "The U.N. has condemned me as a reactionary."
"Sir, that only increases your cachet among those who wish they could secede. You saw the satellite coverage from New Guinea. The Bougainvillean strikers waved your portraits at the Panguna mine."
"As the Australians shot them down." The pain in his voice sounded authentic. "Is that one of the perquisites of power you find me uncomfortable with, the ability to cause pain and death?"
Shih's silence showed that she had understood the question to be rhetorical. After a moment, he said, "My own people riot against me in Bukhara and Termez."
"They are in the minority. Your followers would crush them in a moment, if you gave the word."
He nodded, agreeing without evincing pleasure. His black eyes bored into hers.
"You are correct. But I will not give the word." He laughed, a sound quiet and bitter as the wind across the alkali pans that surrounded the dying Aral. "It is because of my insistence on toleration that they riot against me. They wish me to crash the enemies of God."
"You really believe in freedom and toleration? When the rest of the world rejects them as reaction or sentiment or folly?"
"I do."
"You seem too good to be true, sir."
He stared at her. Her face was beautiful, oval, with high slanting cheekbones. Her eyes were large and bright. In neither face nor eyes did he read dissembling or concealed sarcasm. Perhaps he was becoming too accustomed to their presence. Or maybe she was a skilled actress.
He held out the bottom of his facecloth to sip his tea. Lowering his cup, he looked at her. "Just what are you doing here, Doctor?"
She smiled shyly. "I'm a spy."
She had told him that, quite bluntly, when to her surprise she was instantly ushered into his presence on arrival at the tent city. She had received endless hours of briefings from her government, but they were of a decidedly Delphic nature, either contradictory or flat incomprehensible. The only thing successfully made clear was that she was supposed to observe what went on in Timur's camp and report back to Beijing.
Why they sent her instead of a trained agent or diplomat she had no clue. One thing she was sure of was that she had no chance of maintaining her cover when her superiors themselves would not or could not make clear exactly what it was supposed to be. She guessed the old men of the Politburo had no real idea of how to read or respond to the Red Sands rising, and that her mission was a manifestation of (hat ambivalence.
Perhaps it was the sense of borrowed time, of playing on after the recess whistle had blown, that she like so many black-hand dissidents had lived with through the years since Tienanmen Spring, that made her risk everything on a single cast. Or maybe she was just tired. Timur's response had been to laugh hugely. Since then he had treated her as a valued friend, ignoring the occasional dark look or verbal jab from his tall orange-haired companion—currently back in Tashkent, thank heaven.
"I know why you were sent here, Doctor," Timur said. "I want to know what you are really doing here. What is your personal agenda?"
She sipped brackish tea and decided to gamble on truth again. "I want to see how long it takes before the power you hold corrupts you."
The harsh afganets wind blew out of the southwest. The setting sun skimmed orange light along the ground and turned the desert beyond the outskirts of the tent city and the faces of Eddie's men to flame.
Holding his newly received assault rifle vertical beside him, muzzle up and buttstock snugged inside his left elbow, Eddie paced off ground from the armored department-store mannequin. The survivors and replacements of Jagun 23 trailed along, smoking and joking like spring break at Daytona Beach.
At first glance the weapon looked like a standard bullpup rifle, black, with the magazine fitted behind the pistol grip. Up close it was plain weird. Instead of a long receiver to take a reciprocating bolt, it had a short, fat cylindrical housing, mounted along the long axis. A well for the box magazine let into the underside.
The rifle was a radical new design by an American emigre firm based in Mexico. It took the concept of caseless ammunition—the coming trend in military procurement, except in the United States and the League, who seemed wedded to their brass-—several steps beyond the usual kludgy derivatives of the original, oversold Heckler & Koch G11.
Conventional "cased" ammunition has cases made of extruded metal, which add cost, weight, and environmental burden, and impose the mechanical problem of getting rid of the damned things once they're fired. The MRS "rotary" fired bullets glued to small tiangular-section blocks of propellant. Inside the housing rotated a cylinder with three evenly spaced longitudinal channels cut into it—like chambers of a revolver's cylinder, but open, and triangular in section. Turning, each chamber stripped a caseless round off the magazine and carried it up to align with the barrel, where an electric charge fired it. A fraction of the rapidly expanding propellant gas was vented to spin the cylinder and keep the weapon firing. It was compact, high-tech, and mechanically simple.
Eddie was aware of the snags implicit in a unit's using too many different types of ammunition. It complicated resupply, and if in the heat of action you grabbed the wrong box, you could be well and truly fucked. On the other hand, the regular League forces issued three calibers of small-arms ammo: the big old 7.62 X 54mm rimmed round used by machine guns and sniper's rifles; the shorter 7.62 Lite used by the classic AK-47; and 5.45mm, used in latter-day AKs and light MGs.
Eddie wanted his men armed to the max. On-line scuttle-
butt said the rotary beat the ass off conventional assault rilles. Besides, he loved fancy war toys. Always had.
At twenty-five paces he stopped, turned. His squad leaders shooed their men out of his line of fire while old Uncle Lucky handed over a loaded magazine. Even with a little battery for the electrical initiator inside-
—there was another pair inside the rifle itself, just to make sure—the fifty-round box was barely over eight inches long. The triangular rounds used space more economically than ones that were actually round. The ammo units were so short the magazine looked as if it were meant for a handgun.
He clicked the box into the well, made sure it was seated, worked the charging lever at the front of the cylinder housing to rotate a round into firing position. He adjusted his earphones over his Yankees cap, seated his extremely cool yellow shooting shades more comfortably on his nose, and leveled the weapon. At this range he disdained to take a shoulder weld and use the integral optical sight; he just lucked the thing under his arm in the midpoint position and ripped a quick burst at the dummy.
The mannequin was wearing a timeless creation in Kevlar and steel/ceramic inserts, the Hard Corps IV vest by Second Chance. It was still the world standard for personal protection, though the new polygraph—polymerized graphite— ballistic cloth armor might give it a run. The inventor used to put on a vest and let pepole plunk him in the chest with an old .30-06 from about ten feet, a convincing demonstration of his armor's effectiveness, if not his sanity.
Eddie's burst hit the dummy. Stuffing and bits of plastic flew everywhere.
The rotary fired ammunition designated 7/4mm—seven slash four. That meant the bullets were 7mm wide; the lesser overall bulk and weight of caseless offered an alternative to the worldwide trend toward ever slimmer projectiles. They had silver-gray polymer nose caps which, on impact, pushed back into the hollowed nose of the jacketed lead slug, causing it to expand. The vest ate those without difficulty.
The nasty little sharpened 4mm tool-steel penetrator rods inside the lead sabots just kept going.
Eddie's finger came off the trigger. In sudden ringing silence the crowd held its breath as the upper half of the mannequin kind of caved in on its lower torso. Then everybody erupted in applause and hooting laughter.
Eddie looked at the rifle, made a vaudeville not bad face, tucked the weapon under his arm, and strolled forward to check out the damage.
"Allaa agbar," Maqsut breathed at Eddie's side. "That thing's a real shaytaan." Which meant, it kicked ass.
That 7/4 caseless ammo cost the world. But it sure ripped the shit out of the dummy, armor and all.
"Well, damn," Eddie said. "Timur's Own Personal Life Guards and Marching Band could seriously use this shit."
Leaving the men to take turns shooting the marvelous new weapon, and Maqsut and Shy Bunny to make sure they didn't shoot each other with it, Eddie went off to the side and cracked his notebook comp. He was not a man who deferred gratification well, perhaps because he'd done too much of it already, during two years in solitary—and before. He wanted to see how soon he could lay hands on some more of the things.
A flashing message on the screen when it lit told him he had priority electronic mail waiting. Reflexively he punched it up.
His heart almost seized when he saw the first page. It wasn't what the text said; it was some innocuous crap from an old bulletin-board pen pal... apparently. What electrified him was what it meant. Code words identified it as a front for a communication from his puppet masters, League KGB, from whom he hadn't heard since before the Red Sands battle.
He glanced around hurriedly to see if anyone was in position to read over his shoulder—what that phony front page was for. He hit the hot key to bring up the real message.
It read, "Terminate Timur immediately."
Chapter THIRTY-FOUR
"Ooh, baby! Let me feel it! Let me feel all your big hard cock!"
The two teenaged Sky-Blue Wolves may or may not have understood English. There was something about that deep-throat moaning that was universal. They looked at each other, faces comical in the starlight, and then rabbited almost out from under their blue tyubeteyka to investigate the source of the sounds, somewhere beyond the nearest tents.
Fast Eddie Randolph watched them go. Dickheads, he thought dispassionately. Their devotion was unquestionable, hut he'd never had any faith in the judgment of Timur's adolescent paramilitary groupies. As part of Timur's pre-revolutionary core, they had sacred-cow status; even as field marshal in charge of guarding Timur's body Eddie had not been able to dislodge them.
Until he recorded some soundtrack off a hard-core satcast out of Belo Horizonte and dropped off a cheap GoldStar flip player behind some tents to run it back for them. That got them going. He slipped into Timur's tent.
The darkness inside was almost physical. The still, thick air smelled of flowers and synthetic cloth and tobacco and the sweat of petitioners. Light shone faint around the edges of the flap that covered the doorway to Timur's audience room.
Eddie drew a knife. It was even bigger than a Rambo-style big knife, with a heavy, tapering, single-edged blade. A Khyber knife, common as camel dung in that part of the world. Untraceable. Quiet.
He moved forward soundlessly. Tendrils of darkness seemed to brush his face. The audience room was unlit and untenanted. The light he had seen was bleed-through from Timur's sleeping chamber.
Eddie ghosted to the next opening, held his ear near the fabric flap. Dialed high, his hearing detected the calm but not quite rhythmic breathing of an adult male, awake and engaged in no strenuous activity, and the small unconscious noises everyone makes unless they're trying not to. Eddie could smell him now, the slight masculine scent, a whiff of soap and talcum powder. There was perfume too, definitely feminine, but definitely background. Timur's companion, the lanky TV-reporter bimbo who always eyed Eddie like a piece of spoiled meat, was in Tashkent playing Woodward and Bernstein.
Eddie already knew Timur was alone. As head bodyguard he monitored everyone who went in and out of the great man's presence. He was a very conscientious bodyguard.
He was a very conscientious spy too; a very conscientious killer. He had killed his own comrades at the behest of the Chekists. He had gotten next to the rebel leader—literally so, now. And after echoing months of silence, the summons had come.
He could do it now, quiet and quick, be well on his way to some border by the time the alarm was raised. Or not. He had laid no careful plans for escape. The act was all, and after...
He lowered his knife hand, so that the blade was concealed by his hip. Then he stepped through.
Timur knelt like a man at prayer, reading a book. He raised his shrouded face at the soft rustle of the door flap. Eddie read his smile at the comers of his eyes.
"Ah, Eddie-bahadur," he said. "At last you've come."
The fiat space on the roof between the blue dome and the parapet of the madrasa—built by some risen steppe dweller bent on demonstrating that the effete poets and scholars of great Bukhara had nothing on a man whose idea of "one for the road" was to open up a vein in his mare's leg and drink his fill—felt as if it had been heated with a blowtorch. Trying to ignore the burning sensation in the soles of his sneakers and the seat of his pants, Fast Eddie panned the rifle scope's magnifying and particular eye along the broad thronged avenue.
Another coming trend in military hardware was modularity. The demo rotary had a long, heavy sniper barrel you could drop in, and a fancy electronic scope to snap on in place of the plain-vanilla assault-rifle optics. Eddie was a good rifle shot but no sniper. On the other hand, the handful among Jagun 23 who were expert marksmen, scattered across the flat hot roofs before the hill of the fortified Ark, all had appropriate if less high-tech weapons. This was his toy, and he intended to hang on to it.
"They're moving now," said Shy Bunny's voice in his car. Eddie acknowledged absently as the people in the street llowed through his circumscribed vision like debris bobbing on a stream, faces slightly blurred by motion.
The cross hairs painted on the glass before his eye by a inicrolaser array centered on a medium-sized man surrounded by a mob. Eddie stopped tracking the weapon. As if feeling the pressure of Eddie's vision, the man lifted his head. His features were obscured by a fold of his green turban. The cross hairs
turned from yellow to red as the scope's microprocessor decided it had a mortal lock on him.
"Timur," Eddie said under his breath. All alone in that sea of hate. It made Eddie's sphincter knot. There wasn't a sky-blue skullcap to be seen; Christ knew how he'd manage to ditch his pet Wolves. The problem was, the crazier the things Timur tried, the better they worked. Or this would still just be the plain old Uzbek Republic. And Eddie wouldn't be a traitor.
For the benefit of the mike taped to his Adam's apple Eddie said, "All right, this is Six to all units, everybody listen up. Timur's started for the mosque. Everything in hand there, Singer?"
"Well enough," the old Kirghiz answered back. The Russian EPW he had press-ganged as his apprentice manas singer was up and around on crutches and doing PT on an outpatient basis, so Aliyev had got him transferred out to Timur's tent city where he could keep up his lessons. The big bushy-lipped son of a bitch still loudly had no use for Eddie, but Eddie was relieved all the same. Though Aliyev didn't have Shy Bunny's charisma or Maqsut's calculating strategist's brain, he might have been the most valuable of Eddie's lieutenants, for the steadiness he brought Delta section and the legitimacy his unwavering support lent Eddie. Eddie wanted to give the old guy all the leeway he could, but he'd been spending an awful lot of time in Tashkent with his pet bear.
"The crowd here is sullen, but calm," Aliyev reported. The Kaiyan mosque, with its minaret that dominated the Bukhara skyline, was one of Central Asia's most revered. Eddie had his biggest contingent there, but he couldn't command it in person. This was not a good day for infidel dogs, even ones who happened to be orloks, to be getting fey with the holy jim-jams.
"Stay awake," Eddie said, then grimaced. That was the kind of pep-talk bullshit he always hated to get from his own COs. There were a hundred thousand people in the narrow streets, and most of them were minded for some serious ass-kicking. His boys weren't going to be playing with themselves. "Six out."
He moved the scope. A face on a poster leaped at him, many times the size of life but no more attractive. A face he'd seen but briefly, though he would remember it a long time. The face of the terrorist in the doorway to Timur's audience room, before Eddie put two bullets through it. Your usual raghead martyr's poster. Swell.
