by Gwynn White
Anton ran back to the depot to fetch a stretcher. He wasn’t worried about Peters. The Holy Nobody would heal him. The Holy Nobody was a personal possession of Reyes’s and one very good reason for wanting to be on his team. They thought it must be one of Reyes’s ancestors—Spanish nobility, maybe even royalty. It could cure more or less anything, a rarity these days.
They left the beetle fey where they lay. No one was interested in knowing any more about them.
Erskine, Brickbolt, and Nunziata came back from a circuit of the perimeter and reported that the gang firing rockets at the front gate had, true to form, melted away into the desert.
Anton lit a much-needed cigarette and strolled over to the drivers. He dumped the Sahari’s relics on the floor in front of them. Hands, head, and heart. Moritz had taken them neatly, leaving few scraps of tissue even around the heart. A nice healthy-looking heart it was too, in contrast to the Sahari’s ugly, lined face. But that said nothing about its worth. To know whether you’d got a saint or not, you needed an assayer, born with the gift of sniffing out miraculous relics.
And if you didn’t have an assayer, you ran field tests.
“Any volunteers? Cuts, sprains, bruises?”
Men besieged him, claiming chronic illness. He rejected most of them—you needed visible ailments for a field test—and parceled out the relics to a black eye, a broken toe, and a rash. The men grabbed the gory objects, unconcerned about getting blood on their hands and clothes, and lay down on the floor.
Everyone waited.
After five minutes, the driver with a broken toe opened his eyes. “No good,” he said. Anton sighed. If the Sahari had been a saint, Anton had been looking forward to spending the rest of the night with him. The puncture wounds in his neck were throbbing painfully with every beat of his heart.
“I could have told you not to bother,” Deuce said, wandering over. “He was probably a magician. Hence, not a saint.”
“My thinking was that magicians don’t usually get into fights.”
“Ouch,” Deuce said. “But there’s a good reason for that.”
“Abject cowardice?”
“Because if we do get in fights, we tend to wind up dead.” Deuce pressed a fingertip against the deceased magician’s nose. “So much for the notorious Sahari, huh? That was hardly worth getting out of bed for.”
“It went straight for Reyes,” Anton said, thoughtfully.
“Makes sense; he’s the only one that knows how to use a sword.”
“Deuce? Go away before I deck you.”
“Can I have his relics, then? I can always use more bits and pieces.”
The pain in Anton’s neck kept him awake. He resorted to the poor man’s miracle: vodka, the one great invention ever to come out of Russia.
The Next Morning. May 12th, 1989
They couldn’t get out of the front gate. Unexploded vintage rockets lay all over the highway, on the road inside the depot, on the roof of the office building.
Anton had a hangover and his neck still hurt. In fact it had got worse: the puncture wounds were now swollen and hot to the touch.
The drivers stood around picking breakfast out of their teeth.
Anton took a closer look at one of the rockets. As far as he could see, it was just the propellant tube, missing its warhead.
He exchanged a look with Reyes, who shrugged. Anton kicked the rocket out of the front gate. The noise rang hollowly across the depot. “You can take that one and dump it in the desert,” he called to the Wehrmacht platoon, who were hanging around outside. They didn’t move. “Oh, well.”
The Tactical Outcomes team cleared the depot and the road outside. Reyes said, “Peters is awake.”
“All cured? Great.”
“Your turn, Anton.”
“I’m fine.”
“Fey bites are potentially fatal. Take the Holy Nobody and lie down in the back seat. That’s an order.”
He slept the healing sleep for most of the day, and woke up in a different world. The convoy had reached the foothills of the Tlang Mountains. The tankers wobbled around hairpin bends flanked by sheer drops. Far below, waterfalls stitched a maze of green valleys.
Once, it was said, the whole subcontinent had looked like this—green and fertile. But thousands of years of magicians fighting each other had ravaged the land. By the time the Russians came along in the seventeenth century, there had been little left to conquer. They’d got a few rivers flowing again, built quickstone highrises for their garrisons, and left it at that.
Up here, an older way of life survived. Women in bright red dresses hauled water up to villages so old they looked as if they’d grown out of the rock. The desert dust was just a memory. So were the wounds in Anton’s neck. The pain had gone, and he had a couple of new scars to add his collection.
The town of Thanchi perched in the mountains, athwart a muddy river. Snow-capped peaks gnawed away half the sky. A huge Wehrmacht base dwarfed the city itself, guarded by a triple perimeter of barbed wire, quickstone, and concrete topped with more barbed wire. The folk up here were more peaceable than the wretches of Bangadesh. Thanchi base bristled with artillery for a different reason. This was the end of the Eastern Administrative Zone. On the other side of the Tlang Mountains lay Khmeria, a possession of the British.
Two years from now, the Germans would be handing over the Eastern Administrative Zone to their puppet Tsar in Moscow. But the British had announced that Khmeria was now part of Britain, and they weren’t going anywhere.
Anton wondered what would happen when Thanchi base had been dismantled and trucked away.
Reyes took three of the 4x4s and escorted the tankers out to the base. Anton and Nunziata drove the remaining 4x4 into the city, through a haze of upland dust –stickier than the desert variety—and some of the worst traffic in the world. Much of it was horse-drawn, which didn’t make the place any more fragrant. Motor-trikes carried entire families, milk churns, and bales of fodder. Tinsmiths and cigarette lighter repairmen wandered around with all their gear. Bread-sellers swayed through the crowd, balancing ten-foot metal poles draped with soft discs of bread. Anton got lost only twice before they found the Vakhrushev Haulage Corporation office.
It was a single-storey building at the end of a dirt track meandering between mud-brick compounds, set back within a solid but unobtrusive perimeter wall. House Vakhrushev understood security. They were Remainder Russians—survivors of the genocide that had ended the Second World War, as opposed to émigrés like Anton’s family. The Vakhrushevs had flourished under the Occupation. They now operated a haulage business spanning the continent, and employed private security outfits like Tactical Outcomes to escort their convoys.
Anton and Nunziata drank bitter, milkless tea with the office manager while waiting for Yegor Vakhrushev, the big boss, to show. Inwardly, Anton sweated. They had to get their money out of Vakhrushev before the Wehrmacht found out about the missing tankers, got on the phone to the haulage company, and convinced Vakhrushev not to pay them at all.
Yegor Vakhrushev breezed in while the last of the evening prayer gongs were echoing in the air. He was five feet tall and almost as wide around, clad in a black quilt that gave him a spurious clerical air. He apologized for keeping them waiting. “Come in, come in, we’ll talk in my office. More tea? Something stronger? Su Su, if you wouldn’t mind, my dear…”
They sat on leather couches in a dusty office furnished with a low table, the obligatory portrait of the Kaiser, and a display cabinet of geolites.
“Quiet trip, lads?”
“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Anton said. “Reyes’s taken the tankers out to the base.”
“Ah, Reyes. I admire that man greatly. I hope he’ll find time to pay me a visit while you’re in town.” Yegor sounded a touch offended that Reyes was not here now. The fact was, after their last contract negotiation, Reyes had told Anton that he was going to avoid Yegor in future, lest he punch his fat face in. Anton was supposed to have more patience and self-rest
raint. Besides, he was Russian, like Yegor. That was why he’d been assigned to deal with the man.
Not even Reyes understood the depth of the mutual hatred between the Remainder, who had supported Rasputin II’s war, and émigrés like Anton’s family, who had fled to Europe in 1919 when the Romanov dynasty fell.
Anton smiled at Yegor. “Well, I doubt we’ll be in town long. There’s another fuel convoy heading north to Assam this week, isn’t there?”
“Yes.” Yegor contemplated the sight of his office manager, a dark-skinned Burmese woman, pouring toddy juice—a drink locally fermented from sugar cane—into small cups. “Yes, there may be. I wouldn’t know for certain. We didn’t bid for the haulage contract.”
Nunziata grunted. Anton fought to keep his smile in place. You mean they didn’t give you the contract; finally got wise to your cost-cutting tricks, you cheapskate. This was very bad news. Tactical Outcomes had been counting on Vakhrushev to hire them for the rest of the triangular run up to Assam and then back west to Tashkent.
“Speaking of contracts,” he said encouragingly.
“Of course,” Yegor said, relieved to change the subject. He counted out 100-Eastmark notes as soft as a newly dead man’s skin. Anton signed the receipt, inked it with the Tactical Outcomes seal, and handed the money to Nunziata.
“Any interesting developments since we were here last?” He fished for potential job leads.
Yegor swilled toddy juice around his mouth. Strangely, paying them seemed to have put him in a better mood. He spoke of local feuds and a rash of duelling deaths among Burmese youngsters. “Not that they aren’t always dueling. But usually they don’t manage to kill each other.”
“Shouldn’t let them have firearms if they’re not going to use them responsibly,” Nunziata said. “Give a peasant a gun and you’re asking for what you get.” Nunziata was a highborn Spaniard, his family now as poorly off as Anton’s, it went without saying. He got up and went to look at the geolites in the display case.
Anton said, “Let the natives knock each other off, huh? Fewer troublemakers to destabilize things after the handover.”
Yegor shuddered at the very mention of the handover. The Remainder did not anticipate the coming restoration of the Romanov dynasty with joy. “Two years to go. I’m afraid some of our local troublemakers are already getting bold. For instance, have you heard about the uranium trade? They smuggle it in across the mountains from Khmeria. Illegally, of course.”
Anton hadn’t the foggiest what uranium was. “It’s a shambles over there,” he agreed.
“A scandal. Since the Khmerian Emergency started seven years ago, Wessex Eastmines’ production of uranium has halved. Copper production is down to a sixth of what it was. Tin, cobalt, gold, diamonds… The Khmer Rouge have wrecked millions of marks’ worth of plant and equipment. Of course, the prospect of all those deposits lying fallow has brought in the speculators.” Yegor shook his head, deploring the very notion of speculation. “There’s one crew trying to run the Sagaing tin mine on diesel. A perfectly good hydroelectric plant a few miles away—it would be perfectly good, that is, with a few minor repairs—and instead, they’re trucking thousands of gallons of diesel over the mountains ...”
Anton felt like a fish, watching a juicy worm trailed expertly through the water. Trouble was, he could also see the hook. “Is that how the guns are coming in, too?”
“Guns?”
“That the Burmese kids are killing each other with.”
“Possibly.”
Nunziata turned away from the display cabinet. “How are they getting past customs?”
“Secret border crossings known only to the rebels,” Yegor said fluently. “More toddy juice?”
Anton said they had to be going.
“Do tell Reyes to come and see me,” Yegor said, not bothering to get up.
They drove back through the alleys. The headlights of the 4x4 picked out armed sentries at the gates of the compounds. Thanchi did seem to be tooling up. Not a good sign.
“Better not say anything to Reyes,” Anton said, breaking the silence.
“You figure Fuckface wants us to escort the diesel convoys out to the mines?”
“I’d say he’s put money into the mines themselves. Notice how distraught he was about all those terrible speculators? He probably wants to make a show of force to scare off the competition.”
Nunziata nodded thoughtfully. “In that cabinet. There was a lump of pitchblende. Uranium ore.”
“There you go, then. He’s either mining the stuff himself, or importing it. What is uranium, anyway?”
“They use it in solid cores for ammunition. And luminous paint.” Nunziata pointed at the dashboard dials.
“How do you know that?”
“Back home in Spain, my family used to own a nickel mine. You often get pitchblende and nickel in the same stratum.”
“Bottom’s fallen out of the nickel market, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah. But uranium’s different. Not much of it around.” Nunziata’s voice got dreamy. “That lump of rock was riddled with ore. It must be like picking money up off the ground.”
“Forget it. It’d be illegal, man.” Anton knew this was a weak argument. It wasn’t like Tactical Outcomes had never got their hands dirty before.
“It’d be a change from the desert.” Nunziata pulled their money out of his belt pouch and counted it again. Suddenly he bounded up straight in his seat. “Fuckface stiffed us,” he yelped.
“What? You’re shitting me. It’s all there, isn’t it?”
With a shaking hand, Nunziata pointed out of the vehicle. They were crawling down the main drag now. The street was congested with more or less every automobile in town, all caparisoned with bells and pennants, Burmese mandalas airbrushed on the hoods, girls in the back seats affecting the stony expressions of whores. Rows of colored lightbulbs twinkled on and off around the doors of bars and restaurants. Fear had not yet shut down the business of separating the Wehrmacht grunts from their money. “The official exchange rate, man,” Nunziata groaned. “I just saw it posted back there.”
“Don’t tell me it’s gone up.”
“It’s fucking doubled. Three point something Eastmarks to the German mark.”
Anton swore. The Eastmark was the sole legal currency of the Eastern Administrative Zone. Army contractors like House Vakhrushev had no choice but to use it. But all real buying and selling was done in German marks. The shift in the exchange rate had effectively cut their fee in half. “I thought he was too eager to pay us. Damn.”
Nunziata laughed bitterly. “We were desperate to get the money out of him before he found out about the missing tankers. And he was desperate to pay us before we looked up the new exchange rate.”
“Comedy gold,” Anton sighed. “Oh well, the black market rate has to be better than that.”
Nunziata was still laughing. “You can’t get away from it, can you? No matter what you do, you end up going illegal. Staying alive is illegal. You can’t keep on the right side of the law even if you try.”
Three Days Later. May 15th, 1989
The manager of the Happy Thanchi Inn caught Anton on the stairs and demanded that Tactical Outcomes pay their bar tab. Anton put him off, escaped to the main drag, and scored a fifth of vodka in a reused bottle. He wandered back to the inn and watched Reyes kill time by blowing out the air filters of the 4x4s.
“It’s worth considering,” he said.
Yesterday, Yegor Vakhrushev had sent his son to approach Tactical Outcomes again about the Khmeria job. Half-Burmese, the lad had twiddled a ponytail dyed in streaks, picked his nose, and said that the Vakhrushevs were in a spot. They were onto a good thing with the uranium import business. There was a chance that their Burmese partners might soon start exporting diamonds, too. The problem wasn’t transporting the stuff over the mountains to Thanchi. The Burmese had that covered. It was security at the mines themselves. With the Khmer Rouge active in the region, no one wanted to wo
rk there.
“Nor do we,” Reyes had said to young Vakhrushev. “Tell your dad Tactical Outcomes hasn’t sunk that low yet.”
In the twenty-four hours since then, their other job leads had fallen through. They now had two choices: pay their own way up to Assam, or accept Vakhrushev’s bait. Anton knew which option he was for. He could almost feel the hook working in his throat. He would not be able to rest until he swallowed it.
The pay was fantastic—500 Eastmarks per head, per day. Anton knew they wouldn’t see half of that. But he did trust Nunziata, who’d tracked down some geological surveys and come back with his eyes starting out of his head at the sheer scale of Khmeria’s mineral resources. If Vakhrushev didn’t pay them, they could just fill their pockets with rocks.
So why was Reyes balking?
Not because of the danger. The Khmer Rouge were just tribesmen with guns.
Anton sat down on the nudge bar of his own 4x4 and swigged vodka out of his brown-bagged bottle.
Reyes finished blowing out the engine filters of the third 4x4 and moved onto his own vehicle. The high-powered air hose roared and farted. The sky was the woolly grey of old underwear. Out in the street, horses neighed and the water-sellers warbled.
“So what’ve you got against Khmeria, Nick?”
Reyes straightened up from checking the tyres. “It’s not Khmeria,” he said. “It’s the British. Surely you understand the concept of exile.”
Sitting on the low wall of the courtyard, Dee turned a page of her fashion magazine and rolled her eyes. She was Reyes’s woman, not his wife, and that was all anyone knew about her. British—probably. Expensive tastes—for damn sure. It was the opinion of most of Tactical Outcomes that Reyes had pinched her off some other man, and that was why he couldn’t go back to Britain.
Anton had no such entanglements. “I’ll go home someday.” Berlin wasn’t home, but it was where his family was, and that’s what he meant. “When I’ve made enough money.”
Dee put down her magazine and gazed vacantly at the tyre pressure gauge. She was older than Reyes, doing her best with hair dye and makeup, but definitely no blushing maiden. She’d stayed in Thanchi during their most recent run, ostensibly collecting job leads. In reality, Anton suspected she’d been spending Reyes’s hard-earned on mare’s milk baths and massages.
