Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  In a dim, distant part of his consciousness Eddie was very glad he was in combat mode—pure Zen, no thought, no intention. He waded through carnage toward the platform, sidling around bodies, stepping over them only when he had to, peripheral vision steering his Asics clear of blood-soaked swatches that could turn to slick mud beneath them.

  A body lay facedown on the dais. A pool of blood surrounded its head like a halo, dark red turning black. Eddie's soul dropped to his shoe soles. It was small to be Timur, but death makes you small, just as death makes you heavy.

  Right in front of the platform Francis Marron lay on his back with his arms outspread. He had been dressed all in white like a televangelist gone before the flock to explain just what he'd been doing in that motel room with the boy scout, the goat, and the faux-fat butter. Marron's outfit was mostly scarlet now; he'd been shot all to shit. His face, though, remained untouched. The half-closed eyes held a bemused, dreamy look, the lips a smile's ghost.

  Eddie jumped lithely onto the podium, held the Glock up in his left hand while his right reached for the prone man's neck. The gummy Jell-O feel of skin and flesh beneath told him he didn't need to spend a lot of time probing for a pulse.

  He took the body of the cast-off-suit-coat shoulder and rolled it over.

  Ali al-Ajawi, erstwhile major of artillery in the League Armed Forces, stared past Eddie's knee with jellyfish eyes. The blood that had poured from his slashed neck was congealing, hardening his coat and shirt into a rusty red cuirass.

  Eddie's lips curled back from his teeth. He put his fingertips to the dead man's cheek, pushed gently. The head moved freely. Ali had been nearly decapitated.

  As best Eddie could see for the blood, the cut looked clean. It was possible to cut a man's throat that comprehensively at a stroke, but rare. Eddie guessed he'd been garroted with a fine wire loop.

  His hyperextended senses caught a footstep. He dove over the body, rolled, came around in prone firing position with his Glock out in front.

  "Lieutenant Randolph, I presume," an unmistakably American voice said in English. "I've heard a lot about you."

  Expert combat shooter that he was, Eddie was focused on the fat white dot of his front sight. As his eyes shifted focus, the attenuated figure that had come into the tent behind him resolved into a tall, loose man with a shock of black hair hanging almost in his eyes, wearing a white duster over a pale yellow shirt and mauve slacks. Pastel hell was back in style for those who couldn't handle Serious launch-tech jumpsuit white.

  Deliberately Eddie rose to a Weaver stance. At no point during the process would his first shot have missed the center of the intruder's sternum by as much as a centimeter.

  "Hey, I'm impressed," the stranger said. His lips smiled. His pale eyes did not. He held his hands up to the sides, palms out. "But hey, you don't need that for me. I'm not packing. I'm Torrance, Richard...."

  Eddie sized up the intruder, the way he moved, the way he held himself. Eddie knew two things: the man wasn't Special Designation, not anybody's; and he thought he was hot shit.

  There was one more thing he knew. Eddie had been through interrogation and interrogation-survival classes run by both sides, been leaned on by the dreaded KGB, and with Texas Team had worked cadre in several of the Third World's perennial atrocity pits: Iran, Syria, Iraq. He knew the eyes of a man for whom inflicting hurt was always pleasure first, then business.

  "What's a FedPol snotsucker doing here?" Eddie demanded.

  Anger whipped across Torrance's face. Then it was gone, leaving only a sharp-toothed smile.

  "Just doing my job, Eddie, old pal. Which right now means saying, you're under arrest."

  Eddie had never shot an unarmed man, but if he was going to start, this looked like an ideal candidate. His left forefinger began to pull.

  "Well done, Agent Torrance," a voice said from behind Eddie. It spoke American-accented English and rang like a great gold bell. If the figure on the Nazi recruiting poster could talk, it would sound just like that. "But please keep in mind, the prisoner is ours."

  Eddie turned his head slowly, still holding down on Torrance. If the figure stepped off that Nazi poster, it would look just like that, too. Though it probably wouldn't be wearing American cammies.

  "Hello, Alex," Pete Yermakov said. "You've been a busy boy, haven't you?"

  Chapter FORTY-THREE

  Upside down, the ridge crest came rushing at Eddie's face at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. He screamed and jackknifed. The ridge swept by. He felt the heat wash from its sunbaked rocks, could swear fronds of camel's-hair stung his face. Or maybe that was just a random swirl of sand caught in the blast from the verti's curved black props.

  I never thought I'd regret my eyes didn't swell shut from getting the crap kicked out of me.

  He hung back down again, making strangling sounds: "Ah. Arragh." Vomit had dried on his cheek like ropes of rubber cement. At least gravity and the wind had carried the puke away from him, and his stomach was vacant now.

  Over the muted snarl of the engines and the wind of his own demented passage, he heard gigantic laughter. "Did you see 'im? See how he jumped?"

  "Yep. Brother Buddy, you surely are one sick individual."

  He twisted to look back at the verti. Buddy Lynko filled the open hatchway, holding Eddie by his ankles. Invisible behind him, his brother was holding him. Eddie was secured to the craft by upwards of seven hundred pounds of Texas beef. It didn't calm his stomach.

  He started thrashing violently, trying to break the hold on his ankles—or better, Tex's grip on his brother's web gear. If we both go, I'll have a nice wad of blubber to land on. In hell, anyway.

  "Whoa!" Buddy sang. "The little fish is floppin'. He's tryin' to get away. How 'bout it, Tex? Should I oughta let him go?"

  "Naw. That way's quick. Too good for a traitor like him. We're gonna take him home and skin and fillet him proper. Best you haul him in now, boy."

  "Here! Don't photograph this." Inside the tilt-rotor craft Mr. Perfect was trying to hold his hand in front of the late Tewfik's videocam, as Buddy laid Eddie on the deck red-faced and gasping like a trout beneath the mask of dried blood and vomit. Buddy made sure to give his head a good crack as he did so.

  Stray-round circumstance was compelling Jacqui Gendron to run the cam herself. She batted Pete's hand away. He sat back gaping at her, shocked rather than angry.

  "Aw, lay off her." Swinging Richard was leaning back on one of the longitudinal paratroop-style benches with his legs crossed, looking cool. "I don't know about your people, but mine will want a full report. The video will play iike a motherfucker at the debriefing."

  Georgie rubbed his prominent nose and scowled. "But wait, we can't let the Americans see us—"

  "Don't be stupid, man," Cat Delgado said. He was sitting on the end of the white-plastic box that held what used to be Timur. "We're blown already. But after this score—shit, GRU'll have to make us generals. We're set for life."

  "Yeah," said Torrance. "We be cool. Give me five, my man." He and Delgado slapped hands. They understood each other perfectly.

  Pete smiled thinly at Jacqui, made himself appear to relax. His blue eyes watched Torrance and Delgado closely, then slipped shut.

  It had all gone splendidly. Mr. P knew his former CO well. Gorsunov was an odious little yid who thought he was smarter than everybody else. He was not a coward. Nor was he stupid. He was damned near as good as he thought he was.

  It was just that Pete was better.

  They had lost their dedicated fuel carrier and the second security squad's verti, overrun on the LZ outside the tent city—who knew the niggers could react so quickly? But that didn't matter. The mission was an overwhelming success; they had two traitors on board, one on ice, one trussed for roasting. All that remained was to loaf home to loyal Kazakhstan at 250 kilometers an hour to save fuel and the pilots' nerves, the hatches open to let the wind blow away the baking Central Asian heat.

  Bored, Buddy took out his
garrote and stared, making cat's cradles in air with the fine wire he'd slipped between the ivory handles.. "Did you see the way I did that little raghead? Did you?" He made a loop, started to tighten it on Ali's remembered neck. "Tightened it up just enough so he could feel, so he'd know what was fixing to happen to him. And then—bang! i cut him. I cut him."

  "Yeah," said the Cat, Delgado, "we know, man. We were all there. So what?"

  "Yeah," Georgie said. "Put that thing back in your pants. Don't play with it here—there's a lady present."

  Pete half opened his eyes. Across the cabin the Frenchwoman, Gendron, was sitting next to Torrance, talking fervently. She was leaning forward conspicuously, and her blouse was unbuttoned way down. The American wasn't even trying to keep his eyes from straying.

  Pete's Sips twitched in disgust. Decadent animals. But he refused to let himself be drawn into anger. If they became obnoxious, a flight to Kandahar for two could be arranged. Texas Team were due to be the heroes of the hour; no one would ask too many questions if foreign nationals turned up missing from their ostensible care.

  Tex turned from watching the desert slide past the open hatch and gave Eddie a kick. "Can't we get out of this here armor, Pete? It's real damn hot!"

  Texas Team was all bulked up in American Second Chance assault vests, steel/ceramic inserts and ail. They were real damned hot. Kevlar doesn't breathe too well.

  "Negative, Lynko. We're still in Indian country, and as long as we are, the armor stays on. And get the prisoner away from that open hatch. If he falls out of the airplane, I'm responsible. I promise I will not be the only one to suffer."

  Tex hooked two fingers into one of the quiescent Eddie's sneakers and grudgingly dragged him farther into the aircraft. Letting him go, he sat down on the bench and picked up his M60E3, began examining it. Though he looked like a compleat gross slob, he was a perfectionist where the tools of his trade were concerned. Otherwise he would never have survived in the unit under Little Alex—or Mr. P.

  Simms hurried to Eddie's side and bent anxiously over him. The prisoner was still breathing, but that was the most you could say for him.

  "We shouldn't be doing this," the Canadian said. "We— we're supposed to be upholding the rule of law."

  Everyone ignored him.

  Eddie lay in a halfway state that combined the worst features of being out cold and being awake. He couldn't move, couldn't focus, and kept slipping beneath the surface of subconsciousness' cesspool where bad things lurked. Every so often the vivid memory of a boot in the face brought him to full consciousness with a whimper, and then he was in the World of Hurt for true, his whole body an oscilloscope of pain, the sine wave of aches that throbbed to his heartbeat spiking intermittently with agony intense as a tooth snapping. When he was awake, he could dwell on what was waiting for him in obsessive detail, and he still couldn't move, couldn't focus.

  "Hey. Hey, are you in there, bunky? Wakey-wakey." A pinch and light slap on his cheek brought him back from a place where faces surrounded him, huge gibbous faces that might have been painted on hot-air balloons, illuminated from within.

  He was rolled onto his back. His arms were fastened with nylon passive restraints, fingertip-to-elbow behind his back. Lying on them strained his shoulders painfully. He was in too much pain for it to make much difference. Lucky for me, huh?

  He opened his eyes as far as they'd go. The tall American was squatting over him, his hands on his thighs and black hair hanging in his eyes.- "So. You're the amazing Fast Eddie."

  He grinned and shook his head in disbelief. He was a lot less easily amazed than Francis Marron, he clearly wanted Eddie to understand.

  "Who—the fuck—are you?" Eddie had lost a couple of teeth, and his mouth was gummy with congealing blood.

  "Dick Torrance. The Swinging Richard to my friends. You can call me Federal Police Agent Torrance."

  "FedPol pussy. Fuckin'... figures."

  Torrance slapped him again, not lightly. "You have a smart mouth, pal. Just because you're well and truly fucked doesn't mean things can't get worse. Lots worse. Know what I mean?"

  Eddie spat blood at him. He missed.

  Torrance laughed. "Francis said you'd kill me." He put on a parody scared-kiddie voice: "Are 'oo gonna kiww poor me?"

  "Yes."

  Torrance stared at him. That wasn't the answer he expected.

  Eddie snapped his legs up, wrapped them around Torrance's neck. Hunkered down as he was, Torrance was badly balanced, unable to brace. Before anyone could react, the former gymnast threw his wiry body in a hard right roll.

  The motion whipped Torrance diagonally across his body and out the open hatch.

  Dick Torrance, the original Swinging Richard, fell like a comet, but with only a scream for a tail, no glory.

  "Adios, Scheherazade," said Eddie in the plane. Moving fast for a fat man, Tex had just snagged him by the back of his shirt in time to keep him frdm following Torrance in a suicide glide.

  Tex flung him toward the rear of the aircraft. He landed hard enough to momentarily loosen him from consciousness. When he flashed back, he was surrounded by blank cow looks. If they've never read Don Westlake, fuck 'em.

  Tex's meaty fist crashed his face like a rich kid's party. He went out again.

  "Jesus Christ," the British copilot exclaimed, his long rubbery face going pale. The tilt-rotor aircraft carrying the BON security squad was trailing Texas Team's to portside, half a klick back. "Did you see that! My God, they threw that poor man out of the aircraft!"

  "Yeah," the American pilot said. He was a contract man who had flown overseas work for the FedPols before. The half of his Black face his polychrome wraparound shades left visible was not impressed. "Sometimes you get two suspects, see, and you want one of them to talk."

  The deplaned man struck a lion-colored outcrop of rocks on the flank of a ridge slanting across their flight path. He bounced upward, did a sort of cartwheel, landed in a rag-doll sprawl across a hunchbacked boulder. The Brit imagined he saw a scarlet smear across the rocks. His mouth worked, as he thought it might outmaneuver the sour vomit that was trying to escape.

  The verti bucked downward. "What the fuck?" the American demanded, fighting his controls as the cockpit filled with a whistling roar.

  The windscreen filled with the blunt broad nose of an identical craft right there, impossibly close. The American screamed. He had never in his life imagined anything like this.

  Reflex took over. He slammed his aircraft's nose downward to avoid the head-on collision milliseconds away.

  The verti drove into the same ridge that the falling man had struck.

  Chapter FORTY-FOUR

  "Da!" Nikolay Kuliyev exulted. He wanted to pump his black-gloved fist in the air, but he needed both hands on the joysticks if he didn't want to produce another tsunami of debris and yellow flame like the one rolling across the desert below. The verti wasn't actually designed for maneuvers like this.

  At the moment they were flying backward. Keeping the engines rotated up to the hover position in which the craft more or less emulated a helicopter, Kolya let remnant momentum spin them around their vertical axis.

  Cheers and wolf calls erupted from the twenty Blue-Sky Riders in the cabin behind, picking themselves up from where the violent maneuver had flung them. This was great. They wanted to see it again.

  "See?" he said when he had the ship flying the proper direction again. "I told you there's nothing to flying these."

  He glanced to the side. Dr. Shih Tai-Yu was sitting extremely still. She looked as if, had she not been belted securely to the copilot's seat, she would have been up clinging to the back of it like a frightened cat.

  Sher Khan the Pushtun thrust his great bearded face between them. "Well done, Nikolay," he said—Nikolai as in "Russian," not the pilot's given name. Waging "bad war" on the orders of Mikhayl Gorbachev—sainted in the West—Soviet soldiers had doused the Pushtun's favorite niece's eight-year-old son with gasoline and burned him before
his mother's eyes. To the Tiger Lord, Russians didn't have names. Even the good ones.

  He pointed to the lead aircraft, which was flying ahead and to their left, completely oblivious. This model of verti had poor rearward visibility, which was why Kolya had just ■ scored his first career air-to-air victory in an unarmed aircraft. "There's more work to be done."

  His lips set in a tight smile beneath his red handlebar, Kolya nodded. He glanced left; the burning wreckage had passed from view.

  "That's one for you, Marina," he muttered, and gave the ship more throttle.

  At a nod from Pete, Tex left his fist cocked and let Eddie's head thump back to the rubberized decking. As he stood up, a smile spread itself across his vast face like the moon coming out of earth's eclipse shadow. "That was a pretty good one the little fuck pulled. Can you imagine the look on that skinny son of a bitch's face!"

  Always eager to second his even bigger brother, Buddy produced a series of straining, grunting laughs. Tex screwed up his face.

  "Kee-rist, Buddy, when you laugh like that, it makes you sound like you're, trying to pinch a redwood log."

  That made Texas Team how! even louder with laughter. "Did—did you have your camera going for that one, Ms. Frenchy?" Buddy asked Jacqui. "Maybe we can catch his expression on the instant replay."

  She was still sitting where Torrance had left her to go taunt Eddie. She was used to fast-breaking events, but this break still had her a little winded.

  Instinctively she rose to move to the unit leader's side. Despite his exertions in the flatiron heat, he smelled of soap on clean male skin. She liked that. It was the kind of smell a man touched by destiny should have.

  He had the hard-edged look of a man who knew how to kill and to survive. Maybe he would last longer than the last one she thought Destiny might anoint. Not Marron. Marron was a poor pathetic fool, never truly touched with greatness;

  sometimes it's necessary to delude the spear carriers in the world historical drama a little bit as to their importance in the script, to get them to do their spear carrier thing and die. But Torrance... she liked his fire. She had thought he had potential.