“Any other men?” Feteror asked in Pashto, the language of the mujahideen, which surprised the elder.
“No.”
“Order everyone into the street. You have ten seconds. I will kill anyone who hides or runs.”
Ignoring his pain, the elder yelled at the top of his lungs, ordering all into the street.
There was a burst of automatic fire as the middle son of the elder’s brother ran out, firing an old rifle, and was cut down in a hail of bullets from the Russians, his body tumbling down the street like a rag doll. The old man’s black eyes watched this, but he said nothing, nor did he show any sign of the pain radiating up from his leg.
Slowly the rest of the villagers came out until there were seventeen women, twenty-two children, and four other old men standing under the watchful guns of the invaders.
“Is that everyone?” Feteror asked.
“Yes.”
“The men are all away fighting.” Feteror made it a statement, not a question. “You thought yourself safe here, high in the mountains, didn’t you?”
The elder remained quiet, feeling the deep throb of pain from the wound on his leg.
“My name is Major Feteror.” He was a slight man, his body lean like a blade under the robes he wore. But it was his face that the elder focused on. There were scars running down the left side, and he had ice-blue eyes under straight blond hair. Those eyes worried the elder. Feteror reached up and touched the beret. “We are Spetsnatz. Special Forces. Your fighters call us the ‘black soldiers.’ You would do well to— ”
Feteror paused as there was a sudden consternation among the Russian soldiers. One of them came forward carrying a dirty burlap sack. He laid it at the feet of Feteror and opened it. Inside lay the battered heads of the eight Russian soldiers from the helicopter.
The elder closed his eyes, waiting for the bullet, but seconds passed and he slowly opened them, to look into Feteror’s. The major’s face was expressionless, only the glint of the eyes showing his anger. He reached down and picked up one of the heads. The face was contorted, but it was easy to see that it had been a young man who had not yet reached his twentieth birthday. The elder had heard that the Soviets were sending younger and younger men to fight the war. He felt nothing about that. His brother’s middle son had been only eleven. A man was a warrior when he was big enough to pick up a rifle.
“It will not be that easy, old man.” Feteror barked some commands in Russian as he placed the head back onto the bag. His men lined the villagers against the mud wall of the elder’s house, then stepped back on the other side of the street. They put their weapons to their shoulder and aimed, waiting.
The elder was proud that his people stood still, glaring back. There was no crying, no pleading. One woman spit, then the rest did the same, while also putting their children behind them. The four old men walked to the very front.
Feteror yelled some more orders. The muzzles of the seven AK-74s moved back and forth, sighting in on one person, then moving to another. And another. But still no bullets came.
“Tell me when, old man,” Feteror said.
The elder couldn’t keep track of all seven weapons. He looked at his wife, whom he had been married to for thirty-two years. His four grandchildren. His two daughters.
“Tell me when, old man, or they fire on full automatic. As it is now, they will each shoot only once at your command.”
The elder ran his tongue along his lips, feeling the dryness. He knew that in the long run it would not matter. “Now.”
Feteror yelled a single word and seven rifles fired in one sharp volley. Seven bodies slammed back under the impact of the bullets. The elder saw that one of the seven was his wife, and in a way he was grateful that she would be spared whatever else was to come.
“You play well,” Feteror noted.
The Russian fired as the old man swung the knife he had slid out from under his robe. The round caught the elder in his upper right shoulder, knocking him back onto the ground, the knife falling harmlessly to the dirt.
“But you don’t fight so well.” Feteror kicked the knife away. “So we will have to keep playing and not fight.” Feteror leaned and smiled, revealing even teeth. “You are a disgrace and a coward. ” As the elder struggled to rise up, he kicked him down with a heavy boot. “Watch my men play, old man. It was what you were going to do with them,” he said, pointing toward the heads. “You have your games, we have ours.”
While four of the Russians stood guard, the others dragged the women into one of the huts. The elder listened to the screams and curses of the women for several hours as the soldiers raped and sodomized them. When they were done with a woman, they slit her throat, throwing the body out the back onto the refuse pile. Halfway through, they simply killed the women, no longer able to force themselves on them. The old man noted Feteror took no part in that sport. While that was going on, Feteror had each of the children tied with a blue cord cinched tightly around their necks and made to stand in the center of the street under the bright sun, ignoring their cries for water.
It was early afternoon by the time all the women were dead. Feteror had the old men executed, a bullet to the back of each head, and then only the children were left. The elder had watched the sun slowly climb across the horizon with a growing feeling of contentment.
Feteror attached a small green plastic tube to the end of one of the blue cords and walked over to the elder, who was now weak and dizzy from the loss of blood.
“I am being merciful, old man,” Feteror said as he handed the green tube to him. The elder slowly followed the cord; it was tied around the neck of his six-year-old grandson. He looked to the Russian in confusion.
“Pull the ring,” Feteror ordered.
Still not comprehending the elder did as he was told. The detonating cord ignited instantly, and with a flash and small pop, the elders grandson’s head lay in the street, the body still standing for a few seconds before slowly toppling over.
“I think sometimes that the heads can see their own bodies if they fall in the right direction, ” Feteror commented as he inserted the next length of blue cord into the green tube.
“No!” the elder protested as Feteror held the tube out to him. “I will not!”
“Ah, then I will not be so merciful.” Feteror gestured to the guards. While two kept their rifles ready, the others drew knives out of scabbards and approached the closest child.
“I will peel them alive if you do not play,” Feteror warned.
The elder took the green tube and pulled the ring. A second head lay in the street. The Soviet slid another end of blue cord in. The elder closed his ears to the cries of the children who were left. His hands worked automatically, taking the ignitor each time the Soviet gave it to him and quickly pulling the ring. He lost count, but mercifully there were no more lengths of blue cord.
The elder turned to the Russian leader. “Kill me.”
“I would,” Feteror said, “but then who would tell the others what I have done here?” Feteror grabbed the old man’s chin. “This was a warning. You take heads, we take heads. I think I have made that perfectly clear.”
“Kill me,” the elder insisted.
“No. I will have my medic bandage you and tie you so that you cannot hurt yourself. When the men come back, you will tell them how you failed the village and what I have done. Then they will kill you. And the war will go on, but there will be that many less”— Feteror gestured at the heads lying in the street— “ to grow up and fight us and that many less women to bear more spawn to grow up and fight us.”
“You are the devil!” The elder tried to work up spit in his mouth, but it was dry. He had expected to die now. The thought of facing the men in the midst of this was unbearable.
Feteror smiled. “The devil-Chyort. I like that.” He suddenly straightened and looked to the north, toward the mountains. Then he glared down at the elder. “You kept me here. You knew they were coming. That is why you didn ’t fight
me when I first came.”
The elder smiled as Feteror slammed the stock of his weapon into the old man’s head, knocking him out. Yelling orders, Feteror turned and ran for the southern end of the village, his men falling in line behind him. The radio man ran next to Feteror, proffering the handset. From the north there came a sound like thunder, hundreds of horses’ hooves striking the hard-packed ground and closing on the village.
Feteror took the handset and began calling for extraction when the earth exploded in front of him.
When Feteror regained consciousness, he was greeted by the stare of a line of lifeless eyes. The heads of all the children he had had killed were arranged around him in a circle. He slowly took an inventory of his body. He could feel pain in his chest, from both the ropes wrapped around it and several broken ribs. He could sense something hard and straight against his back and realized he was tied upright to a thick pole. He was naked, the cool night air brushing against his skin.
Carefully he tested, but the stake was set deep into the earth and solid. The ropes were thick and well tied.
It was dark outside the circle of heads, the only light coming from a lantern set on the ground three feet in front of him. But Feteror could sense the people lurking there, watching, the hate washing over him in waves. Feteror smiled.
A whip snapped out of the dark, the leather knots on the edge slashing into his skin, peeling back a long slice on his chest.
Feteror’s only response was a sharp intake of breath, the smile still on his face. The whip came again. And again. The smile disappeared only when he slid into unconsciousness, the skin flayed from waist to neck.
When he came to, it felt as if his upper body were on fire. Just taking a breath caused his wounds to reopen and agony to surge into his brain. He looked about. Night still blanketed the countryside and the heads were still watching him. He leaned his head back and looked up to the stars. He remembered seeing those same stars as a child while riding on the open steppes. His grandfather telling him the stories of the animals the various stars represented. He also remembered seeing that same sky often while in the field during training. He had traveled by those stars many times on operations all over the world, but he knew tonight he would be taking his last journey.
Movement drew his attention back to earth. A woman came out of the shadows. She was small, wrapped in robes, only her dark eyes showing through a slit in her turban. In her hand she held a short curved knife, the firelight glinting off the highly polished surface. She was one of the women who accompanied the men when they went to war.
Feteror knew what to expect. The woman reached and grabbed him between the legs, pulling none too gently. The knife flashed. Surprisingly, Feteror felt little. Despite the pain he was able to think quite clearly with a part of his mind. He figured that any pain from below his waist would have trouble overriding the tide of agony from his flayed skin. The woman held up his severed penis in her hand and, with a shrill scream, carried it back into the darkness to throw it to the dogs. Another woman came out with a dirty rag and a piece of rope. She pressed the rag up against the new wound, tying it in place with the rope. Feteror knew they weren’t concerned with infection but they didn’t want him to bleed to death. Not yet.
A man appeared, large, as tall as Feteror’s six and a half feet. He carried something long in his hand. Feteror forced himself to focus. It was a sledgehammer. He could even see the Cyrillic writing on the side as the man came closer. It must have been taken off of a Russian tank that the mujahideen had destroyed. Forged in a factory back in the motherland. Feteror found that strangely amusing. That he and this sledgehammer, both forged far to the north and west, would end up here at the same place at the same time in this godforsaken land.
The man gestured and the same woman who had tied the crude bandage in place came up, carrying another piece of cloth. She folded it over several times, then knelt, pressing it up against the front of Feteror’s right knee.
Feteror’s thoughts on fate and his newly developed theory on pain below the waist were both gone in an instant as the man swung the sledgehammer into Feteror’s right kneecap, smashing it against the thick stake he was tied to, the sound of the bone underneath the cloth being crushed as devastating as the pain.
Feteror screamed for the first time.
The sledgehammer went back once more. And again. And again.
Feteror, the essence of him, retreated from the pain, climbing into the recesses of his mind, praying for death or at least unconsciousness, but each time the latter came, the mujahideen would bring him alert with pain to a previously undamaged part of his body. And they kept death at bay by searing shut any bleeding wound with a hot knife, although the use of the cloth kept the hammer from opening too many wounds. Feteror’s only hope lay in the possibility that they would run out of things to do to him or that they would grow bored and kill him.
But as dawn touched the eastern sky, neither appeared to be close.
He could now see past the circle of severed heads. He was at the edge of the village. A crowd of mujahideen watched him silently, the hate in their eyes not abated in the least. Feteror was now in some other place, someplace removed even from his own mind, floating above, able to look down on his own body tied to the stake. He wondered if he was dead, but the body— his body— still twitched with life.
The old man, the village elder, was tied to a stake on the other side of the circle of heads. A leather band was stretched around his forehead, forcing him to look directly ahead. His eyelids had been sliced off. A man stood next to the elder, speaking in a low voice that Feteror could not make out. The elder was also naked. Several leather bands were wrapped around his body and limbs.
A woman came up, several similar strips of wet leather in her hand. From above, Feteror dully felt her tying bands around his arms and legs, a most strange experience.
The man who had been speaking to the elder came over. “The leather shrinks as it dries. It will take a few hours.” He pointed at the elder. “We put the bands on him two hours ago. It is beginning to dry. The sun will quicken this. You think you know pain now. Watch.”
As the sun came up, the elder began screaming, begging. The leather tightened down on his flesh, compressing all beneath. Something gave way in the old man’s legs and he gave forth an undulating cry that didn’t stop. For fifteen minutes it went on. A young man talked to the man who had spoken to Feteror. The man reluctantly nodded. The young man went over to the elder and slit his throat, stopping the cry.
“You will not be so lucky,” the man informed Feteror.
Feteror could tell that the straps were tightening. The pain was drawing him back to his body, something he fought with all his will.
Feteror began praying for death, calling on a God he knew only from the stories Opa had told him many years ago. He was back in his body as the agony reached levels he had never thought possible.
Through the pain, he heard something. Very distant. His eyes flickered up, his mouth wide open as he took careful breaths. Yes. He could hear it. He wondered why the mujahideen didn’t. The sound of helicopter blades cutting through the thin air.
One of the mujahideen was coming close, holding the red-hot knife just pulled out of the fire. But this time it was not to close a wound. Feteror pushed his head back against the stake as the man brought the knifepoint toward his face. Feteror ripped muscles in his neck, trying to avoid the knife. The man called for help in dealing with the Chyort, the devil man.
Two others ran up, grabbing his head and holding it still with all their strength as Feteror fought them with every once of energy he had left. The night had been too long, the damage too great. It was a lost battle.
The knife came forward. Feteror felt it touch his eyeball, and pain, far beyond anything he had felt so far, hit his brain like a spear splitting it straight through. He screamed, his battered and sliced body straining against the ropes, which brought even more pain and deepened the primeval essence to the sh
ivering cry he let loose.
But still he could hear the sound of the helicopters so close, and machine-gun fire. And screams coming from others. And then there was only blessed darkness.
* * *
The village was gone. They were back in the glade. Opa was crying, tears flowing down his weathered cheeks.
“Do you see now?” Feteror asked. “Why I must do this thing?”
Opa opened his mouth to say something, when the sky and glade disappeared along with the old man.
“Time to work.” General Rurik’s voice was harsh. There was a bright glaring light in Feteror’s face. He knew that was a construct the programmers used to get his attention, feeding the input directly into his occipital lobe.
“What is it?” Feteror was disconcerted.
“We have lost contact with one of our surveillance units,” Rurik said. “We want you to see what has happened.”
“Why don’t you send a plane?”
“Because it is very far from the closest plane,” Rurik said. “And more importantly, the surveillance team was watching where we used to be headquartered.”
Feteror waited.
“We are inputting the coordinates.”
Feteror read them as they came in. Information about the history of Department Eight had always been strictly withheld from him by Zivon on General Rurik’s order, under the theory that knowledge was power and the less Feteror knew, the weaker he would be.
Feteror could have gotten this information from Oma, after she had received the papers and CD from Colonel Seogky, but he had not wanted her to know that he wasn’t aware of the information contained in them. It had taken him four years to simply find out that the phased-displacement generator had been built, and that had only been because of a most fortunate meeting. The location of the generator had been something for which he had needed Oma and her organization. He had pointed her to the man in GRU records who would know that information. He could have taken it out of Vasilev, but the added fact that they would need the CD-ROM to program the computers to work the phased-displacement generator— and Vasilev himself the only survivor among those who had invented the machine, to properly operate the computers— had precluded Feteror from pushing the old man too far, too soon. Vasilev would pay, but only after he made penance.
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