Warshot wi-5

by Ian Slater

  She kissed the lobe of his ear, bit it. She hated him, his sour breath now reeking with nicotine and sweat.

  He smelled like the OMON thugs, and she felt a rush of panic. She knew they wouldn’t give up looking for her. Of all the prisoners who had escaped Baikal, she knew she had earned the OMON’s special hatred. As well as being instrumental in helping the Americans to uncover the secret of the vast, frozen lake — the midget ship-to-surface-armed missile submarines that had almost turned the tide against the Americans, until the spectacular joint British SAS/ American Delta commando raid on Baikal — she and other Jewish saboteurs from the JAO had wrecked part of the Trans-Siberian, in trying to stop the military support trains heading east from Novosibirsk.

  The commandos had completely wrecked the sub base at Baikal. If Ilya even suspected who she really was, she knew she’d be shot — and most likely he, too, for having given her shelter from the OMON bloodhounds, albeit unknowingly. She heard him grunting, his body heavy, suffocating, his belly sliding in perspiration on hers, his arms, barely able to support his weight, shaking. She was still a prisoner. In order to get the necessary travel papers she so desperately needed, the very sex she was giving him as the price might well induce him to take his own good time issuing the papers. Why should he hurry? He might even refuse, just to keep her on tap.

  He was covering her in wet kisses, the cloying mixture of vodka and stale breath flooding over her, his rutting rough and hard, confident he was exciting her. She sighed and gasped to maintain his illusion, and to take her mind off the sheer horror of it, wondered how she could possibly end the liaison she’d started when she had determined to “accidentally” bump into him in Zhaolin Park. And now she had more reason to get out of Harbin — to get north with the vital information of the massive Chinese buildup that was streaming over the Yangtze across the Nanking Bridge. The American satellites wouldn’t pick it up through Harbin’s souplike pollution, even if there was a satellite passing over Harbin.

  Suddenly she had the answer. “Alexsandra — Alex—” cried Ilya. “I love you — I—”

  Seized by inspiration, she pulled harder, slipped her shawl between them to stop the sucking noise of his sweat-slicked paunch slithering reptile-like against her, and pulled him harder into her, kissing him, her nails digging hard into his back, his mouth now moving quickly away from hers, kissing, slobbering over her breasts. “Harder!” she told him, and she could see them raping her in the jail at Baikal, her hatred of them so intense she feared she might never again be capable of genuine sexual love. She was crying, he mistaking it for passion, his thrusting becoming more violent. Through the maelstrom, she turned her head to the rime-covered window that looked out on the blurry pink glow of Zhaolin Park.

  His rutting took on a manic quality, and, snorting frantically now like a pig, he drove her back against the headboard of the bed with such force that she heard a bone click in her neck, the pain shooting down her spine — then suddenly she felt lighter as the blubber rolled off her. It was panting, trying to talk, but unable — grunting incomprehensibly. Finally, gathering his spittle, he asked, “Was it good?”

  “Prekrasno,” wonderful, she said in the darkness, the room permeated now and then by the crimson light of swinging lanterns outside. The east was red. So was Ilya’s back. When Mrs. Latov got through eating her grilled bear paw or stewed moose nose — the Chinese believed that eating animal parts imparted the animal’s strength — and she returned to the consulate to find her darling Ilya’s back so badly scratched, it would all be over for him. What would he tell her — that the Chinese comrades he’d been working late with had suddenly turned passionate? Then, Alexsandra knew, he’d have to issue her travel papers — as quickly as possible. She’d have her papers within hours. Why, he’d probably have the consulate limousine drive her to the outskirts, he’d be in such a hurry to bundle her off. Even so, it’d take him months to make it up with Madame Latov. Despite her soreness, feeling as if a red-hot poker had been shoved up inside her, Alexsandra smiled deliciously at Latov’s predicament. And how could he possibly blame her? He’d probably boast for years about the woman who was driven so uncontrollable by his passion that she’d near skinned him alive.

  The fat pig!

  As he lit his cigarette, he saw her smiling. “It was that good, eh?”

  “Yes,” she said, without betraying her contempt, genuinely relaxing now. “It shouldn’t be better!” she added, invoking an old Russian proverb that meant when things were going so well, one had no right to ask for anything more.

  “Alexsandra…” he began as he started to dress.

  “Yes?” It was becoming windy outside, fine snow striking the window like sand, the room pierced by flashes of red light from the wildly swinging lanterns. “What?” she said.

  “It was nice,” and with that he walked over and opened the door. The two Black Berets, their faces covered by the usual black balaclavas, walked in unhurriedly but moved purposefully, one standing to the side of the open door, the other coming over, handing Alexsandra her coat and shawl.

  “And this time,” said Ilya, as he was zipping up outside the door, looking back at them, “don’t let her escape. Find out who her contacts are in the city — what other Jewish bastards are in the area — before you get rid of her. Understand?”

  This angered the Black Beret closest to her. “Hell,” he told his comrade when Latov was gone. “We weren’t the bastards who blew the jail apart!”

  The other Black Beret, still looking down at her, wasn’t listening. Alexsandra stared at the balaclavas, the mark of their obsession with anonymity. Then, as if reading her thoughts, the one nearest — she could smell him — pulled up his mask and grinned. They knew it didn’t matter whether she could identify them or not — it would do her no good now. She was finished. An interrogation session, maybe with help from their Chinese hosts — after all, she would be in a Chinese jail — and then execution as a spy. In China that meant a bullet into the neck, or would they insist on the OMON way and garrote her?

  “Too bad the Americans won’t know,” one of them said to her. She was speechless with fright, shivering so violently she could hear her teeth chattering. “… about the Nanking Bridge,” he continued. He glanced back at the other OMON by the door. “You think the Americans are in for a surprise, comrade?”

  “I think so, comrade,” the other answered. “I think so,” and they both laughed. “I’ll have a bit of that,” the unmasked one said, watching her breasts rising and falling quickly in her panic.

  “Left tit for me,” said the other man.

  “Picky bastard,” joked his companion with mock severity. “You’ll take what’s left, comrade.”

  The unmasked one walked toward her. He had the crude, gold-capped teeth that had given Soviet dentistry a bad name, and when he smiled, it made him look even more malevolent.

  “Marshal Yesov,” he told her, bending down on his haunches so close she could smell a strong, cheesy odor pervading the dark room. “Marshal Yesov, my lovely, wants some information from you. All right?” He was unbuttoning his fly. “We want to know all about your yid underground. Its contacts with the Americans, understand?” She wasn’t looking at him, but could smell him. Slowly he wound her hair about his wrists, forcing her to look up at him, her lips parted in pain. “You have contacts with Freeman’s HQ, eh?” He now pushed her head down between his legs. “Tell Niki what you know.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Khabarovsk

  Already a legend in his time, for his part in America’s sweeping, outflanking armored movements of the Iraqi War and in the battles since, General Douglas Freeman, a tall, silver-gray-haired officer whose clear blue eyes belied the weather-beaten exterior of middle age, was, for all his toughness, an optimistic man — a smile more his armor in Second Army than a frown. But when he scowled, as he was this late afternoon, striding as briskly as deep snow would allow and pulling his gloves on tightly against the bitter Siberian cold,
his troops said he was a dead ringer for George C. Scott as Patton.

  There was a swish of snow nearby.

  “ ‘Scuse me, General?”

  Freeman and his aide, Colonel Dick Norton, saw it was a reporter. Some of the press corps, particularly the Europeans, imitating Second Army’s first-battalion alpine troops out of the winter training center high in the Sierra Nevadas, were finding it easier to get about on skis. The newsman’s ID clip signified he was from one of the general’s least liked papers, the National Investigator, one of the American La Roche tabloid chain. “Only thing they investigate,” Freeman had once told Norton, “is tit and ass. That’s it and that’s all of it!”

  “ ‘Scuse me, General?”

  “Yes?” He knew the reporter was probably sniffing around for info about one of the men near the Baikal DMZ hundreds of miles to the east, who the night before had come in after four hours of guard duty and shot himself.

  “You think Private Bronowski would have committed suicide, General, if he’d been back in the States when he got the news from his wife?”

  Freeman kept walking, the squeak of his boots against the dry packed powder not letting up.

  “No one likes being over here,” said Freeman, not bothering to break his stride for the reporter or to look at him. “But we were sent here by the U.N. to do a job — to maintain the peace and to ensure that Siberia’s annexation of Outer Mongolia doesn’t spread any farther.”

  “Farther where?”

  “Inner Mongolia,” said Freeman, almost adding, you fool, his breath stabbing the air in short bursts of warmth. “Men are bound to get homesick. ‘Course, I don’t expect your story of his wife being screwed by a Pentagon pen pusher while he’s stuck over here keeping the cease-fire helped any.”

  “We just report the news, General.”

  At that Freeman stopped and wheeled on the reporter, Dick Norton alarmed, the general looking as if he was within a couple of seconds of punching out the muckraker. The National Investigator reporter stood his ground. “General, you said no one likes being over here. Are you saying the president should recall—”

  Freeman turned away and kept walking, Dick Norton informing the reporter, “We’re here to keep the cease-fire. Period. If you’d like to ask any more questions, you should put them at the scheduled press conference — Khabarovsk HQ. Sixteen hundred hours.”

  The reporter moved off on his skis, still scribbling.

  “By God!” muttered Freeman, pulling one glove so tight that the Gore-Tex looked grafted to his hand. “Can’t stand that vermin.”

  “The blonde’s a bit better-looking, I must admit,” said Norton, trying to laugh it off.

  “Rats!” said Freeman. “All of those La Roche reporters are rats.” He looked across at Norton. “You see that boy’s body? God damn, I’ve seen some horrible wounds in my time, but sticking a barrel in your mouth like that. Still, I haven’t got much time for anyone who shoots himself over beaver. But you can understand, I suppose.” His right fist hit the palm of his left. “Damn! Washington should have let me press Yesov’s army when we had ‘em on the run, Dick. Now they’re safe as church mice west of Baikal. All those damned politicians back home. That’s what it is.” They were approaching the general’s Quonset hut, the pillowed snow following the roofs half-moon bluish contour in the late afternoon light, the general pausing, watching the long trails of steam from the Quonset’s vents snaking high up into the pristine air. “But, no,” added Freeman bitterly. “Washington in its wisdom stopped us — just as they did Schwarzkopf. ‘Course,” Freeman conceded, “if Norman had gone farther west to run the Republican Guard to ground, our armor over there would’ve bogged down in the wet plains round Basra. But here, Dick, here we could’ve finished Yesov’s bastards off before they got halfway across that — that damned ice rink.” The rink Freeman was referring to was the four-hundred-mile-long Lake Baikal, now frozen solid. Norton spotted a covey of reporters approaching them, hungry on the scent of the suicide and bent, he warned Freeman, on making an issue of poor morale throughout Second Army.

  They’d given Freeman good headlines for fighting Yesov’s Siberians to a standstill then pushing them back across Baikal, but now, with the suicide of one soldier, there was blood in the air, and the less scrupulous among the press corps had left their hosannas back in the bars of Khabarovsk. It was hooting time.

  Freeman was smiling at the oncoming pack, most of them on skis, telling Norton, “Not that blond bitch from the Investigator. Leave her till last. First question for the brunette from CBS. By God, I’d like to reconnoiter her, Dick.”

  “Cool it, General.”

  Freeman nodded as pleasantly as he could in minus forty. “Ladies, gentlemen.” Norton gave CBS the nod.

  “General,” began the brunette, flicking away strands of nut-brown hair that just for a moment turned gold in the dying rays of the sun. “Is it true that morale in Second Army is at its lowest ebb since the signing of the ceasefire?”

  “Not at all. We’re talking here — I presume you are talking about the self-inflicted—”

  “The suicide!”

  “One soldier’s tragedy hardly extends to a whole army,” said Freeman.

  “General?” interjected a French reporter from Paris Match in a loud tone. “We’ve had rumors that the Siberian Interior Ministry is out to punish — is actively searching for collaborators who helped the British and American forces before the cease-fire.”

  Freeman was struck by the man’s use of the phrase “actively searching for.” He wondered what “passively searching for” would be. “We’ve had no such reports,” Freeman told him truthfully. “What they do in the zone west of Baikal I can’t say, but there’ll be no tracking down of collaborators in our zone — that is, east of Baikal. We’re not here to exact vengeance. We’re here to keep the peace.”

  “You don’t think any OMONs are after you personally, do you, General?”

  “Hell, no!” Freeman laughed, looking down at the crowd which he always thought of as an audience. “Any of those black-bonneted bastards come to get me, I’ll give them a Second Army welcome.” He patted his waistband, beneath which he carried the Sig Sauer P-220, always loaded with a fifteen-round magazine of nine-millimeter Parabellum. “And if that isn’t enough for ‘em, I’ll introduce them to my friend Charles Winchester.” There were a few laughs from those who had been on the Second Army beat longest, who knew he was referring to the twelve-gauge riot gun, loaded with 00, that he kept by his bed. “Hell,” continued the general, “the Winchester twelve hundred’ll stop…” He paused, searching for an apt analogy.

  “Amtrak!” suggested one of the reporters.

  “Hell,” the general joked, “anything’ll stop Amtrak.”

  That was the headline in the next morning’s National Investigator, Stateside: GENERAL SLAMS AMTRAK!

  Marshal Yesov’s aides delivered the headline and story to the Siberian commander. They had been instructed by him to monitor everything said by and about the general. They’d had a special file on him ever since he had fought so brilliantly in the Iraqi War.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Irkutsk

  Marshal Yesov and the other Siberian generals had been delighted by the Iraqi War. It had been the real’noe vremya—”real-time”—testing range that told them which of the old Russian, now CIS, weapons needed to be junked. A case in point was the Scud. Moscow had said they’d updated it after the Iraqi War, but in Siberia, in Novosibirsk’s satellite city, Akademgorodok, home of the republic’s most eminent scientists, the joke amid the Siberians— who hated Moscow as much as they did the Americans— was that firing a Scud was like drinking a glass of cheap Moscow vodka: you never knew where you’d land!

  Through front companies in Brussels, the world’s arms capital, Yesov ordered shipments of the new Israeli Arrow antimissile missile in lieu of the American Patriot. It wasn’t only that the American Patriot was unobtainable, even through third-party arms dealers, but
that the Siberians had long suspected, even before The New York Times reporters, that the Patriot, highly lauded as it had been through media hype, was a missile with more of a reputation than it deserved. The Siberians’ concern was that while the Patriot had brought down so many Scuds over Israel, it had not always destroyed the warhead, sometimes merely exploding the Scud’s fuel tanks. Such hits were spectacular, especially to the millions of TV viewers — but they still left the warhead intact to fall and explode somewhere else. If you were aiming your missile at a large target — a city — this didn’t matter so much. But Marshal Yesov had expressed concern that if Novosibirsk decided on a preemptive strike against the Americans, then a very specific targeting capability would be needed, together with an integrated in-depth, antiaircraft and antimissile-missile defense ring around Lake Baikal’s western shore — which would be provided by the Mach-breaking Israeli Arrow. For Yesov, the new long-range 203mm howitzers operating within the deep AA defensive ring about west Baikal were the answer.

  One of Yesov’s younger generals, Minsky, commander of the Siberians’ Far Eastern Military District’s elite udarnaya—shock troops of the Tenth Guards Cavalry Division — was pressing for just such a strike, pontificating aloud about the vulnerability of the Americans. Minsky was an Afghanistan veteran, recently appointed CO of the Tenth Guards Division — its honorific of “Slutsk” earned by his forebears in the Battle in Byelorussia in the Great Patriotic War of 1942-45. As its commander, Minsky was keen to prove his worth against the Americans.

  “To hell with the cease-fire!” he proclaimed defiantly in the Siberians’ Irkutsk HQ. No general would have dared spoken in the marshal’s presence like this in the old days. But since Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and now Chernko, the up-and-coming young “Turks,” as Minsky’s ilk were called, could get away with it — if they showed results, as Minsky had in suppressing breakaway minorities farther north in the Yakutsk region. “I say push the bastards back to the sea!” he enjoined his colleagues. “We outnumber them five to one at least.”