Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  "In college the boy was a good student, able at both the humanities and mathematical subjects. He could have been many things: a scientist, an economist, a lawyer. What he became was an analyst for the Committee for State Security. How better to secure a place in the nomenklatura and fulfill his father's dream?"

  He shook his head and sighed. "Our Ivan Yakovovich worked hard for his new masters. The Komitet was just beginning to notice computers then. It picked our young man to be among the first to learn to work with them, in spite of his ethnic background. He was sure his father's spirit saw him and was proud, though as a good Communist he was properly ashamed of such beliefs.

  "The young man met a young half-Kirghiz woman from Fergana, from a farm where they grew the world's finest roses. Shaaira, she was named, "poetess," and she was, she was—along with many other things. She made the young man happy, happier than he ever thought he could be.

  "As a poet she was a student of the language and cultural traditions of the Central Asian millet, and sometimes in private she spoke critically of the Soviet state. A serious crime, but these were the seventies, you see, when the Red Star was in its ascendancy. The Union was destined to lead the world into a glorious Communist dawn, and how could the views of a brilliant but unworldly woman impede the historical process? So the young man neglected his duty to report her.

  "Despite their occasional differences, they were happy, those two. Not even the fact that they could not seem to have children came between them. Soviet doctors gave them conflicting information as to why. In the end it didn't matter, because after eight years of marriage Shaaira conceived and bore a daughter, and two years later she bore a second."

  "No sons?" Eddie asked.

  "No. Two daughters only. Most Turkestanis would have been disappointed, I grant, but this young man—no longer quite so young—was so well assimilated that he didn't mind the lack of sons. For all her love of tradition, Shaaira was in her own way quite modern. So all of them were happy.

  "Then when the girls were six and eight—some thirty-one months and seven days ago—Shaaira took them for a month's stay at the farm where she had been born, and where her own parents still lived."

  Eddie tried to moisten dry lips. "Gulistan."

  Timur nodded. "League Farm 23. You know it?"

  "I've been there."

  "You are very clever to have learned so much. You must know what happened then."

  "Given what I saw, and the time frame, I'd say white."

  Timur lowered his head. A tear dripped on the back of his hand. "Is it any wonder that I cannot abide roses?"

  Eddie opened his mouth, was for once too wise to let any sound out. His curiosity had come back strong, was building up within him like pressure in his bladder. But he sat several agonizing minutes in silence, waiting for Timur's self-control to return.

  "A hundred million people died of white in four weeks around the world," Eddie said. "It's terrible that it took your family—God, I'm sorry, and I wish I could think of something to say that wasn't lame. But—why! How did that cause you to do... what you did?"

  "To betray my country, you mean? To betray my father?" Timur rubbed his eyes with the fingers of one hand, the gesture used to close a dead man's eyes. "White came late to the Fergana Valley. It is isolated, and little traffic goes in and out, even today. The American contravirus that stopped white was already available, had already arrived in Tashkent. But as was so often the case with white, within twenty-four hours of its first appearance no one at the farm remained alive. The official explanation was that the health authorities only learned of the outbreak after it was too late. I grieved, but I accepted. I died with my family, but I believed.

  "Then, three weeks later, I was reading a digest of communications to and from our provisional military government—martial law had been declared. I chanced upon a reference to Ligkhoz 23 in a report from the commander of the Turkestan Military District himself. He had known of the outbreak in plenty of time, it seemed. But the Land of Flowers was thought by military intelligence to nurture sedition as well as roses. The military governor had simply availed himself of the opportunity to get some unruly black-asses out of his hair. He was really quite forthright.

  "From the moment I saw that, I was the enemy of everything I had stood for before. I make no excuses—not for that. As for where my anger has led me..." He shook his head and spoke no more.

  Eddie sat and tried to assimilate it all. It was as if his whole world was spinning inside his skull on maglev bearings.

  "So that's why you were able to do all that with just a bunch of raggedy-ass indige followers," he said. "You had it all, didn't you? Every goddam thing KGB had, you had in the palm of your hand."

  "Of course." Timur held up a finger. "Do not deprecate the 'raggedy indiges,' please; they did the fighting and the dying, not I. But yes. I was a hacker—cracker, more correctly—of the most insidious sort. I held the keys to the whole KGB computer system in my hand. I helped create that system. Passwords, structure, everything. That's what I had to offer Timur. If KGB operatives were closing in on underground members, I could steer them away. I could discredit informers. I framed most of the competent officers in General Vorontsov's command in Tashkent. I could do many things."

  "Now, hold on a minute. All during the war, you knew ... exactly what Al Capone was up to. And the tactical information you fed us, the targeting info you gave your rocket launchers—"

  "We used League tactical sensing satellites. What the KGB knew, / knew. What they had, I had." He smiled. "How do you think I knew your real name, Aleksandr Pavlovich?"

  Eddie shuddered. "Don't call me that again. Please."

  Timur made an easy gesture. "As you will."

  "Something else... how come you didn't stop them busting the, uh ... the original Timur?"

  "I let that happen. It is so amazing how it goes. How arrogant you become. You experience a moment of epiphany, of blinding clarity. And then you feel as if you have all truth packed within your head. I had such a revelation when I saw the report on the Land of Flowers.

  "But it's just another illusion. I acted as if I had godlike knowledge when I permitted KGB-Samarkand to arrest the real Timur—and it turned into a bungle. He spurned me and died. That was not at all according to plan." He closed his eyes. "If only I had learned that lesson..."

  Eddie sighed. This was all very interesting, but it was time to bite the reality sandwich.

  "So what happens now?" he asked. "Are you going to kill me?"

  "It would reflect very badly on my judgment to make a man orlok one week, and execute him the next," Timur said. "Especially since I knew all along that he was a KGB plant."

  Eddie sat there and felt deflated, somehow. As if not getting killed was anticlimactic. Life's a bitch, and then you don't die.

  He felt Timur's gaze and looked up into it. "Will you kill me?" Timur asked.

  "No. I had the chance once before and didn't take it. I guess you know that already."

  "But why won't you kill me?" Timur asked plaintively.

  "Because you're the only real thing I know."

  Timur made an explosive, exasperated sound. "That's not true. I'm a liar. I've lied to you. I've lied to everybody. I'm not Timur; I am Ivan Mukhtaari."

  "You're Timur," Eddie said flatly. "What you were before means nothing."

  Timur dropped his face into his hands. "What kind of KGB assassin are you?"

  "A piss-poor one, I guess. An unwilling one. I just resigned anyway."

  "Then what are you?"

  Eddie shrugged. "Head of your bodyguards. One of your orloks, if you still want me to be. If you don't, then I guess I'm just a grant in the ranks. However it goes, I'm your man. Now and forever."

  "With enemies like these," Timur said with a moan, "who needs friends? Eddie-bahadur, I love and honor you, but you drive me crazy. Go."

  Eddie stood. "One thing, before I go. What am I to you? Please. I... have to know where I stand."

>   Timur sighed. "You are my chief bodyguard. If you won't honor my request to kill me, who better to keep me alive? Now please, go away."

  Chapter FORTY

  She came awake with a start. Someone's outside the tent! She sat up, blankets falling away, her hands reaching out in the darkness.

  For what? She had no weapons. She didn't know how to use them if she did. For ail her bravado with the amusing American Eddie, she had been all but petrified with fear that day in Timur's tent. She least of all understood how she had been able to bring herself to drive an elbow into the gunman's stomach. It had been some neural fluke, she knew; she could never duplicate the act.

  If the terrorists have found me, / hope they kill me quickly. Unconsciously in the darkness she raised her head, simultaneously showing defiance and her throat.

  "Tai-Yu? Dr. Shih? It's me. Eddie."

  "Eddie?" As always, she split the d's scrupulously: Ed-die, as if it were two words. He always claimed to find that charming, but she was sure he was only making fun of her.

  "Yeah, babe. It's me. Can I come in?"

  She looked down at herself. She was wearing an Indiana University sweatshirt given to her while she was guest lecturer at the school's Uralic and Altaic Studies Program. She was covered, but it was still highly improper for an unmarried female comrade to permit a man into her sleeping quarters. Not that anybody back in the People's Republic thought there was anything proper about Shih Tai-Yu. Still, the grip of socialization was strong, even though she recognized it for the sham it was.

  But Eddie had always been a gentleman, in his own uncouth way. And there was something in his voice—

  "Come in."

  He stumbled inside in such a rush that she drew back with a small mouse shriek, fearing her trust had been misplaced. Instead he collapsed in a heap at the foot of her mound of blankets.

  "I need to talk to you," he said, hanging his head between his knees like a man about to pass out. "I need to talk to somebody."

  She sat up. Her hand reached out to touch his shoulder in the dark, then stopped, as if of its own volition. She ached to touch him, to soothe him, but she could not.

  "What happened, Ed-die?"

  He blew out a long breath. "I talked to Timur. It's... strange." He shook his head. "He isn't what he seems to be."

  He looked at her, and the ghost of a grin shaped his lips. "Then again, babe, neither am I."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Do you really want to know?"

  She nodded.

  He told her. From the time his father came in to wake him and tell him that his mother was going away, to right now.

  Everything but Timur asking him to kill him. It didn't seem right to talk about that. It was just an aberration anyhow; Timur didn't really feel that way. It had been a test of some sort—

  It seemed to him that he talked forever, that his story was too big for one night to hold.

  But when he finished, it was still dark and his cheek was laid in the hollow of her neck. Her hand stroked his head, in a tentative way, the way you'd stroke someone else's pet.

  "So now you probably hate me," he said, his voice muffled by her shoulder.

  "No. I am not sure what I feel. You don't know who you are; for all your life, others have systematically taken away everything that might help you know." She shook her head. "I feel sorry for you."

  He reared up. "Don't! Don't dare feel sorry for me, goddam it!"

  She refused to flinch. She looked into his eyes as best she could in the dark.

  He took hold of her again, hugged her hard. "Well, okay. Maybe you can feel sorry for me. Just a little bit."

  She laughed. "Ed-die, you are just like little boy. A bad boy."

  He peered up at her from beneath his eyebrows, making her laugh all over again. "You're not afraid of me?"

  "Why ever should I be?"

  "I'm a KGB spy. An assassin, sent to kill Timur."

  "But you quit, didn't you?"

  "You bet your sweet little— ah, yes."

  "You tell me Timur started out being a KGB agent, before he was Timur. I don't fear him. I think he is a very good man."

  Eddie nodded fervently. "He's the best man I've ever known. The best in the world, probably."

  She grabbed him, held him at arm's length. "You should not think that. It is not good for you. It is not gocd for him."

  He shook his head, smiling ruefully. "I guess maybe there are some things only men understand. The way we're brought up—"

  "Don't you start that! We are not that different. It is only an excuse."

  The art of difference-between-the-sexes debate was one of the few cultivated to a higher degree in the West than in China. But Shih Tai-Yu had been in enough of them to know she didn't have the energy to get embroiled in one now. In her limited experience there was little enough debate and almost no communication to them, just attitudinizing and self-justification. To block that conversational path, she drew him close again.

  He kissed her neck. There beside her throat at the base, above the little bowl within the clavicle.

  Refiexively she grabbed the hair at the nape of his neck to pull him away. She realized the tingle running through her body was not at all unpleasant.

  More gently than she had first intended, she drew his head up. When he faced her, she put her hands on his cheeks. They were stubbled with half a day's growth of beard, not silky like an Asian man's, but spiky and harsh.

  Still, his face was not unattractive, if you like the drawn and pointed Western features. She liked his. He was quite handsome, in an exotic way. It was part of her flawed nature, that she failed to share the belief of the community in which she had been raised, that different equated to ugly. Maybe it was her Mongol genes that made her so anti-communitarian. Maybe it was her father.

  She kissed him. He looked as if he were about to start talking again. That was really why.

  He pressed her to him, kissing her so hard he seemed to be trying to pressure-weld their faces together. She couldn't breathe, and started to squirm, wondering if this perhaps was a bad idea.

  His hands were pulling up her Indiana sweatshirt. Her breasts were round and high, and full without being big. Her nipples were dark.

  He bent to circle one, lightly, teasingly with his lips, flicked it with the tip of his tongue. She cradled his strange blond shaggy Western head and wondered what on earth she was doing.

  Acting like a schoolgirl who's escaped her chaperone for the very first time, an internal voice told her. After a mere thirty-four years.

  Her previous lovers—the unlamented De, for example— she had only accepted after long acquaintance. Their liaisons had been fumbling, perfunctory, stunted by the puritanical weight of the People's Republic's disapproval. The lovers themselves seemed unreal to her now, transparent almost, like paper dragon kites faded by the sun. They were drones and mayflies, she knew, as she always had known, the usual camp-followers of academe; true solid Chinese men would have nothing to do with a scandalous half-Mongol bitch like her, who didn't know her place and didn't want to. Her former lovers were both drabber and less fully adult than this wild Americanized Russian she was opening herself to.

  She smiled, then bit her lip with sudden pleasure. If I've waited so long to let myself go, at least I've gained enough wisdom to make the most of it.

  After two hours, during which Marron's mind had been elsewhere while his cock just sort of stood there and took it, Jacqui finally raised herself off him and collapsed, sweaty and happy and replete. She hadn't had such a workout in years.

  Confirmed socialist though she was, she was not without some concept of value-for-value. Also, the challenge of making him come had begun to pique her; she was agile, skillful, and incredibly fit, and neither her most passionate exertions nor her most professional had made perceptible impression on him. She laid her hand on his chest for three long, shuddering breaths, then slithered down to envelop the head of his cock with her mouth.

 
He shuddered. A slight moan spilled from his lips, along with a trickle of drool. Jacqui smiled around his cock. She was finally getting through to him.

  She clamped her lips firmly over his glans, worrying the top of the shaft just below the notch on its underside where it joined with the head, the most sensitive spot, with the tip of her tongue. Her fingers jacked lightly up and down his rigid penis.

  Within two minutes he cried out, clutched her shoulders, bucked, and came. She took in all his yield, and wondered how long it had been for him.

  Then she snuggled up beside him and fell promptly asleep with her shoulder in his armpit, satisfied that she had conquered her conqueror.

  He raised his forearm and let the fingertips of his right hand dangle on her upper back like the leaves of a Russian olive trailing in the Syr Dar'ya. He continued to stare at the tent ceiling, lost in darkness, with the same lack of expression as he had for the last few hours.

  Dick Torrance tried to speak to him from the screen. He managed not to listen.

  Chapter FORTY- ONE

  The wind had risen with the false dawn. It whipped Timur's headcloth as he strode through the gloom toward the vehicle park. Eddie trotted behind, clutching his Yankees cap to his head. Though Timur was a couple centimeters taller than Eddie, his legs were no longer, but it always seemed Eddie had trouble keeping pace with him.

  "You sure you don't want to just fly back to Tashkent?" Eddie yelled. "It's a pretty long haul by road." The highway wound well up the Syr Valley, before swooping back over the tag end of the Chatkal spur of the Tien Shans to Tashkent.

  "We will take the road that follows the rail line through the desert," Timur said.

  "That's more direct, but the road's a shitload worse."

  "It will be well. I need to feel the desert wind in my face."

  "You picked the right day for it."