Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  Eddie's every instinct screamed at him to throw the awful burning thing away. Instead he drew a deep breath, let half of it go, and squeezed.

  The first bullet struck Mr. Perfect a couple of centimeters left and above his navel. The armor stopped it. The second hit just inboard his right nipple. The vest sucked that too. He kept grinning and shooting.

  The impact of a .40-caliber bullet is much less than that of even a 5.45. But Pete didn't have Tex's gross strength and body mass. The bullet strikes knocked him back a couple of steps, threw off his aim just as he was ready to nail that little yid cocksucker.

  That gave Eddie a second-splinter more to aim his third shot. It met Mr. P right where his nose used to be. It was a safety slug. It exploded, penetrating the skull, and turned everything inside to pulp.

  Pete fell into a burning bush.

  Eddie kept firing, hitting Pete in the head once more as he went down, cranking shots into his torso. They brought out little puffs of dust.

  The weapon emptied. Fast Eddie put his head on his arms and started to cry.

  Miraculously, Sher Khan was still alive when they found him. He lay on his back with Tex sprawled across him, Sher Khan's Khyber knife buried beneath his jaw and most of his blood already soaked into the sand.

  He smiled when Eddie knelt to take his hand—with his right. Eddie's left hand had a field dressing from Mr. P's belt wrapped around it, and Eddie hoped he'd never be reminded of its existence again.

  "I die with my claws in the enemy," the old Pushtun bandit said. His voice was thready, almost lost beneath the wind. "Is that not a fitting end for the Lord of the Tigers?"

  And having delivered the exit line that was all he'd been holding on for, Sher Khan of the Yusufzai let himself go and slipped over to wherever it was you went when you weren't anymore. Eddie hoped there were plenty of babes there, like the Book promised.

  The American pilot and his bandaged Brit copilot surrendered readily. This wasn't their fight, and they found the late Mr. P and his late little friends more alarming than the rebels.

  Eight Blue-Sky Riders survived, including two stretcher cases and Rahman, with his right arm strapped down and one of those pinned-up grins on his face. Eddie stood by the verti and watched them load the thirteen bodies of their less fortunate comrades and Sher Khan into Kolya's craft, trying not to feel sick that so many lives had been spent to save his.

  Kolya's verti leaped into the air and began a slow watchful circling as the survivors filed aboard the other aircraft, where lost Timur lay in dry-ice and plastic state. Eddie was the last one on.

  There was still one person standing on the ground. He shot out an arm and barred the door when she tried to climb in.

  "What do you think you are doing?" Jacqui Gendron demanded. Her right cheek was an angry red mess where a WP flake had scorched her before she could swat it away.

  "Leaving your attractive ass in the sand," Eddie said.

  She reared back, for the moment too outraged to speak. "Jacqui Gendron, speechless," he said. "Now this is a World-Historical moment."

  Shih Tai-Yu laid a hand on his arm. She was doing better now. She was through with the dry heaves, and hardly trembled at all.

  "Back at the tent, when... when those men came in,"

  she said softly. "She told them to let me go. She saved me.

  "Was that because she wanted to help you," Eddie asked evenly, "or because she thought you were too damned insignificant to screw around with?"

  Shih looked at Jacqui. The Frenchwoman elevated her head a fraction, and her nostrils flared.

  "I'll get canteens," Shih said. "We must at least leave her water."

  "Fine. Go for it."

  Jacqui suddenly jumped at him. He stiff-armed her between her breasts.

  "Try that again and I'll kill you, babe," he said softly.

  She shook her head wildly. "But you can't leave me—I'll die."

  Eddie turned to accept a pair of one-liter bottles from Shih, threw them to the ground at Jacqui's feet. "No way. No matter how desolate this place looks, a lot of people live around here. When the smoke dies down, they'll be around looking to see what happened. They won't leave you to the lizards.

  "Besides—" A corner of his mouth quirked up in a nasty grin, "your kind always manages to survive."

  She looked at him, blank. "My kind—?"

  He jutted his chin past her. She turned to see two vultures—high, black crosses wheeling against the Central Asian sun.

  EPILOGUE

  How l Like a Dog

  I will have no agreement with you,

  I will have no reconciliation,

  I will have no equal division,

  Nothing will I give back to you.

  Come and take them—well and good!

  If you cannot—then howl for them like a dog!

  —The Manas The T-72s were rolling across what looked like a dry lakebed, raising clouds of white dust. Horsetails whipped from their antennas. In the background, faint with distance, the distinctive inverted-leek shape of a League Energiya heavy-lift booster with a Progress orbital-supply craft attached stood silhouetted at the gantry against a faded blue sky.

  "Inspired with fanatical purpose by the martyr's death of their leader, Timur, the rebel armies continue their sweep west," the voice of Jacqui Gendron said from the Satman's speaker. "Here, elements of the Karakoram Brigade, composed of foreign volunteers driving League tanks captured in last year's victory in the Red Sands,' smash the perimeter of the enormous Baykonur Space Complex near the Aral Sea."

  The scene switched to Teatralnaya Square—now renamed Timur Square—in downtown Tashkent. A skinny young man with a straggling beard stood on a dais in front of the rabbled-out KGB headquarters, wrapped in a green flag, accepting the adulation of the mob. The crowd was prevented from loving its idol to death by a cordon of youths one or two years younger than he, lean and arrogant in sky-blue skullcaps.

  "It is less than twenty-four hours since Free Turkestan was declared an Islamic Revolutionary Republic. Whether or not that means it will be dominated by adherents of the militant Shi'ite wing of Islam, and what role Iran will play, remains unclear. In fact, few Turkestanis, Shi'ite or Sunni, seem to care. Their only thought is to unfurl the sky-blue banner of the New Mongol Horde over the republics of the disintegrating League.

  "And perhaps beyond, under the leadership of the youth acclaimed as Timur's successor. Youngest of the orloks or field marshals who served the Khan, Yilderim was the only orlok native to Turkestan, and the only one to survive the upheavals surrounding the death of the great man...."

  Yilderim the Tadzhik techie, Eddie thought. Jesus. Yilderim Khan, Nerd of All Men. What's the world coming to?

  Well, all luck to the kid. He'll need it.

  'Astakhfirullaa!" The horses tossed their heads and sidestepped as Uncle Lucky's exclamation came bouncing back at them from the Tien Shans that surrounded the high valley, looking too immense for earthly mountains. "That's wrong! The Raging Torrent Daoud the Jew survived, and he's a Sart born, as sure as I."

  "Another orlok pulled through too," Eddie said from Sertikan's saddle. "But cut the babe some slack; one out of three ain't bad for a reporter. You can telejournalist, but you can't tell her much."

  "Ed-die! That is awful." Dr. Shih Tai-Yu aimed a playful swipe at him from the saddle of her white-nosed Fergana pony.

  Laughing Eddie leaned away from the blow. "Well, enough of this." He punched off the tiny television and tossed it over his shoulder.

  No con lasts forever. However beautiful.

  Finances, resentful awareness on the part of the tributary city-states that they'd been had, and mean-ass outsiders— the Macedonians—busted up Athens' Delian League scam. A similar combination did for Russia's.

  The league had absorbed the debts outstanding to the USSR, along with most of its other assets. When jihad-maddened rebels blasted westward out of the Red Sands like a volcano's glowing cloud, Vietnam renounced all debts to th
e League. Since the socialist republic had fought its entire war with America on Soviet credit, that came to substantial coin. The other former members of the Communist Economic Community promptly defaulted too. The Japanese and the Germans, biggest lenders to the League since devolution, called in their notes. It was economic Armageddon.

  Armenia and Georgia jointly invaded Azerbaijan—to forestall its joining the jihad, they said. The treacherous Caucasus range, with its terrible Soviet-era roads, slowed the advance more than the fierce but disorganized Azeri resistance. When the columns broke through and converged on the city of Kirovabad, they fell upon one another in a savage battle of outmoded tanks. That melee was in turn interrupted by the arrival of Iranian Su-25s—formerly the property of Saddam Hussein—rolling in hot with full combat loads. The Frogfeet were fronting a joint Pasdaran/Azeri Hezbollah offensive that had just pinched off the Armenian Kafan Corridor running through Azerbaijan to the border with Iran.

  In Moscow the military junta, having liquidated the dearly hated KGB, fractured into open warfare as the Russian Republican Armed Forces turned on their League comuti-neers. This was no perfunctory threat display followed by abject collapse, as in 1991. It was Stalingrad, Part II: both sides wanted the whole pie.

  If anything was left.

  That was unlikely, because the late Arkady Arbatov's nightmare came true: Siberia blew. Russian Republican garrisons in Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, and the vast naval base of Vladivostok mutinied. The bulk of the League's Far Eastern Military District forces were pinned on the frontier by a gigantic Chinese mobilization and could not intervene even if they were minded to. The Buryat Autonomous Republic declared its independence from Siberia; the Chukchi Nationality Okrug applied for annexation by its big neighbor across the Bering Strait. Showed what they knew.

  Vladivostok woke to find itself under siege by a PRC army out of Manchuria. Its rebellious garrison squealed for rescue by the League. But the League's Army of the Ussuri stayed where it was, frozen by the enormity of the Chinese end run and uncertainty as to whom they were supposed to fight against—and whom they were supposed to be fighting for.

  The League shattered like a block of rubber dipped in liquid oxygen and hit with a hammer. It was Hunipty Dumpty time.

  In the midst of chaos, the commander of a train transporting political detainees to Siberia's Magadan Oblast didn't think twice about obeying orders that sent his train way the hell down south along an old spur of the Trans-Siberian line to Karaganda in Kazahkstan. Rival League and Russian Republic Armed Forces death squads were out a-roving, holding drum's-head courts-martial for those who questioned orders. Besides, Karaganda was still in League hands: the League said so.

  Unfortunately, outside Karaganda bandits blocked the track with an old semitrailer piled with rocks, and attacked the stalled train on horseback. The brave OMON security detachment either fought to the last man or took a few token casualties and ran like bunnies into the Kazakh Steppe, depending on whose version you bought. It wasn't liable to make the history books anyway.

  Victorious, the raiders swept back across the hills and returned their mounts to the enthusiastic local tribesfolk who had lent them. They also distributed a large quantity of arms and ammunition by way of a hostess gift. Then they fled south in three tilt-rotor aircraft of advanced design. Not important enough to register a blip on history's big scope.

  Neither was the fact that among the escaped deportees were the wife of a helicopter pilot captured at the Red Sands and suspected of defecting to the rebels, and their ten-year old daughter. History couldn't be bothered.

  History—declared DOA just a decade before—was having a busy day.

  Catching the motion in her peripheral vision, Sertikan tossed her head. Her black mane whipped in the cool breeze that blew down the valley. Eddie leaned forward in the saddle to pat her neck with his right hand. The caress had an edge, hinting of the slap the mare was going to get if she got out of line.

  "It looks bad, Eddie-bahadur," said a worried Yoldash, holding up the Salman, which he had neatly fielded from horseback. All that goat polo did wonders for your coordination. "The ferenghi commentators say World War III may come at any minute."

  "Then we'll ride the goddam storm out," Eddie said. "Christ, now I'm living an old REO Speedwagon song."

  "But what about the fallout?" Shih asked quietly.

  "Oh, you know the song too? Never mind. The League or the Russians, fucks that they both are, may drop a few nice, dirty groundpounders along the Yangtze and the Yellow so the fallout will waste the maximum number of people. But we can stay up here in the Bam-i-Dunya a few weeks until it dies to background."

  "But the accident at Chernobyl proved how widely fallout can disperse."

  Eddie shrugged. "So? We catch a plume up here, maybe we die of leukemia in twenty, thirty years. And nuclear winter was bullshit all along. I'm not gonna put a bullet in my ear, hon. Not yet anyway."

  She raised her head. Her pointed little chin was firm. "Nor I either."

  "That's a babe."

  He pointed down the valley with his right arm. His left was still in a black silk sling. "Check this out, everybody," he said, raising his voice so the whole caravan could hear him. "The coast is clear. What'd I tell you?"

  On foot, on horseback, holding the lead ropes of shaggy-humped Bactrian camels, the men of Eddie's minghan and their families hung back, staring down the valley. Somewhere an invisible line crossed the shallow green depression. On the other side lay China.

  "Nobody can get trucks up to this pass," Eddie said, "much less tanks. So the PRC doesn't waste much energy watching for an invasion to come this way."

  Mounted on a chestnut mare not far from his khan's side, dignified and beautiful in his Western suit coat and turned-up black and white skullcap, the master singer raised his arm. His white goshawk stirred its wings, glaring angrily at the humans all around.

  His apprentice eyed it warily from a litter slung between two horses. His bad back wouldn't let him ride. "I don't see any damned rabbits," he growled.

  "Perhaps I fly him for the beauty of watching him fly," the old Kirghiz said. "Now, attend: today we sing of the wedding of Manas to the beauteous Kanykai."

  Nikolay Kuliyev rolled his eyes at his wife, who sat a horse next to his litter with Anya mounted before her. "I sure hope you can adjust to this new line of work I'm in."

  Marina laughed.

  Still they all hung there, on the downslope of the Celestial Mountains, as if reluctant to take the final step.

  Shih sighed. "My father taught me a saying—a prophecy.

  He said the... the wild Mongols still quote it, out on the steppe."

  "So let's hear it, hon," Eddie said.

  She raised her head to the wind. " 'When that which is harder than the rock and stronger than the storm shall fail,' " she said, " 'when the White Tsar is no more and the Son of Heaven has vanished, then the campfires of Chingis Khan will be seen again, and his empire will stretch over the earth.' " >

  "Christ, I hope not," Eddie said.

  She looked at him. "It won't be easy. My country is even more repressive than yours. Either of yours."

  "Then we'll have to goddam liberate Chinese Turkestan."

  "Xinjiang," Shih corrected.

  "Gesundheit," Eddie said.

  He raised his head and drew a deep breath of the cold sweet air of freedom. And danger, sure. But the two always went together, that much he'd learned. And what the fuck, over? You're safe when you're dead. Not before.

  He closed his eyes. "Good-bye, Dad," he whispered to the wind.

  Then he opened his eyes wide and sat up straight in the saddle. "Let's ride!"

  He circled his right hand above his head and put his heels into Sertikan's sides. She pinned her ears in token protest and broke into a trot. Behind her the motley, hopeful procession began to move.

  Like a figure out of dream, the white goshawk exploded from the old man's hand. It drove down the valley with quick b
eats of its wings, glided, then flapped again, and flew into China.

  Table of Contents

  PART I

  Chapter ONE

  Chapter TWO

  Chapter THREE

  Chapter FOUR

  Chapter FIVE

  Chapter SIX

  Chapter SEVEN

  Chapter EIGHT

  Chapter NINE

  Chapter TEN

  Chapter ELEVEN

  PART II

  Chapter TWELVE

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  Chapter SIXTEEN

  Chapter SEVENTEEN

  Chapter EIGHTEEN

  Chapter NINETEEN

  Chapter TWENTY

  Chapter TWENTY-ONE

  Chapter TWENTY-TWO

  Chapter TWENTY-THREE

  Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

  Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

  Chapter TWENTY-SIX

  Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

  Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

  Chapter TWENTY-NINE

  PART III

  Chapter THIRTY

  Chapter THIRTY- ONE

  Chapter THIRTY-TWO

  Chapter THIRTY-THREE

  Chapter THIRTY-FOUR

  Chapter THIRTY-FIVE

  Chapter THIRTY-SIX

  Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN

  Chapter THIRTY-EIGHT

  Chapter THIRTY-NINE

  Chapter FORTY