by Victor Milán
"Very well," Arbatov said, with ursine dignity, "we have made the appropriate noises. As I shouted, so you echoed. Now we must talk."
Crunch. "So talk."
"You must kill Timur."
"Horsecrap."
"It has become vitally important. It was always your mission—"
"It was never my mission. Just how fucking stupid do you think I am? You wanted me to help Timor, and you wanted me in place to feed you information so you could help him. You wanted him to fry Al Capone, not that that's any hair off my balls. Why? Was Karponin getting too big? Did you figure he was going to lead the armed forces in a Putsch against your precious League, maybe just put you State Security buttholes out of business for good?"
Across the drifted sand that floored the yellow stone bowl, Arbatov locked eyes with Eddie. He must not have liked what he saw. He dropped his gaze to stare at the toes of his cardboard shoes. No Giorgio Armanis for him; he was an anachronism, and Eddie guessed he knew it.
The huge man sighed. Even over twenty meters of wind Eddie heard the gust. "We wanted Timur to win. Karponin's death was incidental; he did not worry us. He was a fool."
"You got that right. But what the fuck, over? You boys are supposed to help keep the League together."
"We are Russians first of all—the leadership of the committee, as well as I—and you."
"What's that got to do with the price of poontang in Peshawar?"
"You are not really a Westerner, though your time in America has affected your habits of thought and speech, and hardly for the better. You know we supported Mikhayl Gorbachev to the end. How could we not, when he was the hand-picked successor of the great Andropov, who brought the Committee for State Security for the first time to a position of dominance in the affairs of Rodina Mat'? But it was more than simply loyalty to the political line of Yuriy Vladimirovich Andropov. We—most of us—truly believed reform was necessary. Truly a comic irony, is it not, that the dreaded KGB should favor reform over repression?"
"My sides are splitting."
"It was not from cosmopolitanism that we believed in reform. We knew, better than any, how horribly the engine was strained. We knew it would break down unless something was done. We had to sacrifice some power, or lose all."
"That's ancient history. Where's your point?"
"So American you have become. So impatient, so uncaring for history—"
"That's a load of crap, but that's beside the point. What the hell does any of this have to do with Timur?"
"We recognized the League for a good thing. Let us speak openly as Great Russians: it was a means by which Russia could maintain herself as a virtual empire, without having to pay the concomitant costs. This is not without precedent; in classical times there was—"
"The Delian League," Eddie finished. "The old Athenian scam. It was supposed to protect the Aegean Greek cities from the Persians. Ali the city-states paid their dues to Athens, which spent the loot any damn way it pleased— mostly on monuments and the Athenian fleet. When anybody tried to back out of this snug little arrangement—" He shrugged. "Well, what else you gonna use your fleet for?"
He laughed. "You know, deep down I always wondered if that's what the Kremlin was up to. Gorbachev, Yel'tsin— they planned it all along."
Arbatov hung his head. "I underestimated you Americans. I see that now."
"Don't reason beyond the evidence, old man. You underestimated me."
Arbatov grimaced. He dabbed at the sweat dripping from his eyebrows. "The League was a success. Everyone admits that. The European Community honestly believes we structured ourselves in emulation of them, more fools they. But we did not make the rage and resentment go away. We only made them vanish from view, like painting over rust. Even before the Red Sands revolt broke out in Tashkent, it was apparent to us that the League could not hold."
"Maybe I'm slow, but how does that add up to giving a helping hand to the rebels?"
"You know the armed forces would never consent to letting the League peacefully dissolve. But if it does not dissolve, it will explode."
"So you set the dynamite. You were gonna destroy the League in order to save it? Say, you bozos really didn't learn anything from Vietnam either, did you?"
"We saw it more as venting steam to save the boiler. The Muslim republics were the most unmanageable. Their religious and nationalist aspirations were too intractable, and their population increasing too rapidly—in a few years, there would be more Muslims in the League than Europeans of any sort. Holding on to Central Asia was the most obviously self-defeating course—although, ultimately, we were prepared to let all the republics go, if we must."
"But why? What's left?"
"Russia. The Motherland. Our nation."
"But what about Great Russia's 'messianic rights,' and all that other happy horseshit those Rad-Trad fruitcakes are always going on about? I mean, you're still talking about blowing off your big, bad empire."
"I have one word to answer that: Siberia."
"Why do I have this impression that the more you say, the less you tell me?"
"You are very impertinent for a senior lieutenant."
"Yeah, but I'm about spot-on for a field marshal, even a Third World one. Since you bring it up, you're taking a pretty lofty tone for somebody with an unknown quantity of firepower aimed at the middle button of his burlap blazer."
"You would not dare harm me."
Eddie let the wind, singing along the fluted white and yellow walls, provide his answer.
Arbatov wiped his face some more. "Very well; I know where the crayfish hibernate. You wonder why we are now willing to let the League be stripped down to the bare Russian Republic, and I gave you the answer. Siberia. The greatest repository of raw materials remaining on the surface of the earth. With those resources, properly exploited, Russia herself, the Motherland, could be as great a superpower as the League or Union ever were. Greater. Without them—" He spread his hamhock hands. "We are a Third World country. Black-asses in whiteface."
"I remember, back when devolution was going down, there was some noise about Siberia splitting off. Came to big nothing, though."
"Not then. And of course, the Siberian populace is predominantly Great Russian. There is affinity between her and Russia west of the Urals."
"There was a lot of affinity between England and her American colonies too."
"You have hit the eye and not the brow. You speak in terms of explosions; let us change metaphors. We—the Komitet—felt that the League was grown gangreiious. Better to cut off the leg before the mortification got too near the heart."
"Only you decided to let the leg amputate itself," Eddie said, "with covert guidance from all you master surgeons at KGB Central."
"Precisely."
Eddie snorted. "So why the sudden change in plans? The operation's a success, Doc. Where's the problem?"
"Now we are caught between hammer and anvil. Karponin's death gave the moderates a winter's grace. They accomplished nothing; the non-Russian republics are in turmoil, on the verge of outright rebellion."
"So what? That's what you wanted. Kiss 'em good-bye, and get on with your life."
"We would like nothing better. Unfortunately, hard-liners have seized the upper hand in the armed forces—both of the League and of the Russian Republic. They aren't willing to let the League break apart."
"Tough."
"It could be tougher than you imagine, Senior Lieutenant Gorsunov. On you and me and everyone in the world. A faction within the regime has already sent a message to the Americans: if the League falls apart, the League will launch its missiles at Germany and China and America. These madmen would rather burn the world than see it run by their rivals."
"Bullshit. And the name is Randolph, Edwin A. Gorsunov is dead."
Arbatov rolled hands into fists as big as Eddie's head. "I swear to you. Before God, it is the truth. You must kill Timur. Or billions will die."
"Fuck that noise. Fuck it. You think y
our problems will dry up and blow away, just because one man dies? Wake up and smell the coffee, Chief Director. The League's had it, it's dead as the Union, and if the crazy bastards in the Kremlin don't realize it, then there's not one damn thing you or I can do."
"The symbolic impact—"
"Would make him a martyr. You're just seeing a little brushfire. Waste Timur, and it's a firestorm."
"There will be many firestorms, if the reactionaries start World War III."
"Then there's nothing we can do about it. Face it, Arkasha: if we're living in a world where crazies can get their fingers on the button, then it's all only a matter of time before they push it, isn't it? If we all go together when we go, I'd just as soon get it the fuck over with."
"Please—"
"At least we'll die free. I don't know that I want to live in the world that's coming around, the world as it'll be if this rebellion goes down. A New World Order where we're all the property of the secret police and the social scientists and the military and the bureaucrats, where who we fuck and what we smoke and when we take a crap is all regulated by five different agencies, all of whom contradict each other. That's no way to live. But I'm not making that choice for anybody else. If the fucks in Moscow blow up the world, they're making the choice."
For a moment Arbatov just stood there and blew like a racehorse coming off a furlong. "If you have no loyalty to the Motherland—"
Eddie went white. "Don't hit me with that crap!" he screamed. "Who sent me out here to help the rebels? Who ordered me to kill the Motherland's fucking sons?"
Up there among the rocks, out of sight, fingers took up trigger slack at the orlok's obvious fury. Arbatov sensed it, took it like a blow, but he was a brave old bastard. He held his head up and drove on.
"The American Federal Police are feeling triumphant from their victory over the CIA, and savage over the collapse of their precious Clean Sweep. That is a volatile combination. Your father—"
"I don't have a father. There was a Party hack the Party gave me who called himself that. He was like everything else the Party issued: a lump of shit."
"So you turn your back on your oath, and your people, and even on your own flesh and blood?"
"I turn my face toward the light, Jack. We will be free."
"You seek to crush water in a mortar."
"I'm not your errand boy anymore. This marionette snipped his own damn strings. I won't kill Timur. I won't do anything for you. Make that a notch in your nose, you aphoristic son of a bitch."
Arbatov exhaled through flared nostrils. "You should not think that I did not know that by coming here, I would put myself in your power," he said.
"You want the last word?" Eddie laughed. "You asked for it, you got it. Liga." He threw down the apple core, gave Arbatov his back, and walked away.
"You think you've cleared away all your illusions, stripped away all masks," Arbatov yelled after him. "What of the mask Timur hides behind?"
Slowly Eddie turned back to him. "Say a word against Timur and I'll have my men shoot you to pieces. Slow-ly."
Arbatov swallowed. He thought about it. Then he said, "As you wish. But seek the truth for yourself, if you think you can face it."
Eddie held up a warning hand. "Seek the Land of Flowers," Arbatov said. "You'll find the answer there to a question you don't have the guts to ask."
"Never talk to me again," Eddie said. He climbed up over the lip of the sandstone bowl, and the endless desert swallowed him up.
The Uragan reentered League airspace over the yellow poison flats on the Aral's eastern edge. As it did, a slim Sukhoi-27 interceptor, painted a delicate robin's-egg blue, rolled in eleven klicks behind it.
The MiG/Mitsu was a radical design, with two pusher-prop engines in the rear, a delta wing, a bone-in-the-nose canard. Its engines gave off little heat, its polymerized graphite fuselage produced a poor radar return. It was hard to see, and hard to track.
The interceptor pilot knew where to look. He saw it, a tiny dart of white, rapidly growing larger as the SlJ-27 overtook it. And what he saw, the television eye of the AA-13 missile under his right wing saw also.
A buzzer in his ear announced that the Japanese microchip in the missile's nose had memorized and fixated upon the Uragan & shape. It was a point-and-shoot missile, and now it would follow the aircraft relentlessly.
A bulky-gloved thumb depressed a button. The Sukhoi rocked gently as the missile hissed away. The pilot watched the white plume stretch out before him, as a second chime told him that the missile was guiding true.
He pulled the Sukhoi's needle nose up level; he was several hundred meters higher than the Uragan, and had entered a gentle dive during target acquisition. He kept the plane on course until he saw a flash of yellow light.
He was over the Uragan, then. It looked as though a great white shark had bitten off the rear of the craft: the twin engines had vanished, and much of the wing. The airplane was beginning to fall like a leaf.
The pilot smiled and chinned his radio. "The target is destroyed," he said, and banked his aircraft right, toward his home airfield on the fringe of the great Baykonur Space Complex.
Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN
At a little after noon, Marina Kuliyeva left the small private clinic near the Skifovskiy Surgical Institute on Moscow's Sadovaya, where she worked as a drug and alcohol counselor, to walk the six blocks to the apartment she shared with her parents, her daughters, and her husband—if God and Timur ever let him come home again. Today was ostensibly a school day, but all classes had been canceled; something to do with the civil disturbances. She welcomed the chance for a lunch at home with her children. It helped distract her from the nagging, unanswerable question: When is Daddy coming home?
As she went down the cement steps, pitted by ice and the salt scattered to combat it, two men in long overcoats approached, one from either side. She stopped, watching them with open wariness. She was a tall, willowy, darkly beautiful woman, who kept herself in rigorous shape. Shape to ran, to fight if necessary.
"Marina Mikhaylovna Kuliyeva?" asked the younger of the two. His breath smoked; winter in Moscow had more staying power this year than in the Tien Shans.
She nodded cautiously, "That's me."
"You must come with us. You are under arrest."
She recoiled. Ferret quick, the man seized her wrist. As her eyes filled with angry, surprised tears, she looked past her captor and his partner. For the first time she realized she faced a firing squad of video cameras.
"What's going on here?" she demanded. "Take me to my daughters!"
"Have no fear," the older man said. "We will."
Beside the unmetaled road a small stone marker read LIGKHOZ 23, Inside the wire, a large wooden sign read, WELCOME TO GULISTAN. It had a bunch of roses painted on it, red, faded brownish like bloodstains by weather and sun. Gulistan literally meant "land of roses" or "rose garden." By extension it meant "the Land of Flowers." Synecdoche they called that, unless it was metonymy.
The tape strip across the gate said KARANTIN. Quarantine. It had those little trefoils of interlocked circles like short-handed Olympic symbols on it, that stood for biohazard.
The tape was faded translucent and cross-linked brittle by the sun. Eddie stepped over it and walked on toward the building. Whatever hazard had been here was unlikely still to be viable. He thought he knew what it was.
The farm had that indefinable air of abandonment. Nothing really overt; this wasn't the inner city, where the walls of derelict dwellings were paint-sticked with graffiti by punks and displaced Central Asian toughs, and the windows shot out by para gangs of angry VDV vets out looking for some hapless lone militsioner to tie to a lamppost and garrote, and the hallways stank of the piss of the homeless who had begun to throng Soviet cities after Amnesty International made the government quit putting them in concentration camps. All was intact, except for maybe a couple of panes of glass blown out by the wind.
But the stucco had flaked a little bit
too much off the main building's adobe walls, and the henhouse had fallen down, and the tractor parked beside a toolshed had turned into a tractor-shaped lump of rust. People had cared for this place, kept it up better than most cooperative farmers did. Then they stopped.
Eddie rounded a corner, almost tripped over a red tricycle lying on its side. He stood on tiptoe to peer through a window, feeling absurdly like a Peeping Tom. Inside was a dormitory-style room. The bed still needed to be made. A good Sony TV with a videoflip player sitting on top of it rested on a wooden crate. It was as if all the occupants had been called away at once and had somehow neglected to return.
They had been carried out, if Eddie's guess was right. By health workers in bulky protective suits, working hastily and afraid to touch anything they didn't absolutely have to. Whether to set matters right or loot.
Eddie's lips twisted. It was ironic that they'd been so afraid. Had they been at risk, they would have already been dead.
He walked on. The buildings gave out and he stood looking out on a vast rose garden, row upon once-meticulous row, the bushes now overgrown and winter-barren. The best roses in all the Fergana Valley came from there, the Kirghiz waiter with the retro-Chinese pigtail had told him. That's why they called it Gulistan.
Then he shivered and made a complicated hand gesture. To avert evil, like.
Eddie stooped, picked up a rock, threw it as far as he could. Carrion crows rose squawking in indignation from among the bushes, and flew away southwest on the wind like damned souls.
"So who wants to watch the Nashville Satellite Network?" the big man demanded. He took a hit of coffee, wiped his red handlebar mustache with the back of a freckled hand, and slammed his mug down on the mess hall tabletop. "Don't everybody speak up at once."
The off-duty boys from Bravo and Delta sections of Jagun 23 laughed in a desultory way. Though they were under explicit instructions from Eddic-khan and Senior Lieutenant Aliyev not to forget the Russian was a prisoner, they thought he was a pretty good guy to hang out with. He was never going to be accepted completely; he had caused the deaths of comrades, after all, though nobody's blood relation— which was fortunate, because if he had, not even the threat of execution would have kept him alive. But he knew how to live, and he knew how to laugh, and when he laughed, others did too. That translated to a wary popularity.
