Dog Country

by Malcolm F. Cross

  The two men? They hadn’t really come to kill Edane. Sure they’d tried, though it was a lousy attempt, but they weren’t part of a larger effort.

  They were angry men, attacking Edane because of what he represented to them, not because he was a dog and Muslims hated dogs — Edane hadn’t been treated like that yet in Azerbaijan. No, it was because he was the closest they could get to the political authority now towering over them.

  Edane and his brothers had stolen their revolution. Ignored their passion and their hatred and their need to be free, their years of struggle, and pulled their government apart in a way they could never hope to. Now Edane and his brothers were putting in place systems of power and authority that wouldn’t enfranchise them the way they hoped to be — no young activists in the limelight, just a new crop of the same old politicians as before, discussing the laws they’d put into play when the new government was formed.

  They weren’t trying to kill Edane. They were angry, because what he represented was between them and the political power they wanted — they’d wanted to bring down Nesimi’s regime, become Azerbaijan’s heroes.

  There were no heroes, just a bunch of dogs on the streets.

  “I guess I understand where they’re coming from,” Edane said, checking the skinbonding across his palm for tears or leaks. He wiped it down again with disinfectant, sitting in the new barracks — a dirty old hotel, still full of mouseholes in the walls and rubble in the corridors, being rented at cut rate after the battles. “They care about who runs this country. I don’t. I never did.”

  Janine, the world away, sat, hands under her chin, gazing seriously at him out of his new phone, propped on a cracked ply-plastic dresser. “No,” she agreed. “It’s like you with me. Isn’t it? Being part of something. You’re not a part of them.”

  Edane sat, regarding the wounds on his palm, which would now be just another set of scars on his body, mapping out his life. “Yeah. I’m not part of this,” he said. “I don’t care who runs this country next, so long as they don’t kill people.”

  She watched him, levelly, quite still.

  He dipped his ears, looking back at the phone. “It’s different. Fighting. That’s for when there isn’t another option. You’re not supposed to kill people unless there isn’t any other way to keep everybody safe.”

  “I know, Sweetie.”

  Edane gazed at her. Wondered if he could dare try and explain to her how blowing soldiers to pieces to terrify their friends was keeping people safe. Or describe that moment when Sokolai was about to coup-de-grace someone they’d wounded.

  Or explain any of it.

  “Like the guys who tried stabbing me,” he said. “They’re in lock-up. There’s a set fine, they can communicate with friends and family and legal representation, nobody died.” He ducked his head, stretching out his palm, and switched to dabbing liquid skinplast over it. It stung, a little. The doctor who had done the internal stitches for his tendons had said he needed to keep the skinplast fresh. “The point is making sure nobody dies.”

  “And people aren’t dying now — not like that.” Janine tapped her chin gently. “It’s… what did the news call it? Low intensity conflict?”

  Edane nodded. “That’s one of the terms.” It got labelled low intensity conflict when people set up mortars to kill civilians — though none of the splintering factions grabbing at power, or the remains of the Azeri army, had done any of that yet. It was all blockades and prisoners of war and convoy ambushes, very little targeting civilians.

  “So,” she said. “When do you think you’re coming home?”

  Edane flexed his palm, waiting for the skinplast to finish drying.

  “Sweetie?”

  He ducked his head. “I’m not ready, yet.”

  “When will you be?”

  “When I found what I’m looking for, I guess.” He perked his ears, trying to listen for the distant rumble of gunfire.

  On the phone, Janine shifted her chin from palm to palm, head tilted. “And what are you looking for, Edane?”

  There wasn’t any gunfire, no matter how high he lifted his ears.

  He crumpled in on himself, shoulders sagging forward, spine bending under his weight until his fingertips brushed the floor between his boots. His hand hurt. His ankle was better, but still tender. The constant ache in his body over the first few days of operations had faded to a dull heat by the time he went to bed.

  For a little while, in bits and pieces, it had all felt good. But now…

  “Some place I fit in,” he told her, at last.

  21. Reasonable Cause.

  ::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.

  ::/ May, 2106.

  ::/ Eversen Estian.

  “I’d like a second medical opinion,” Eversen muttered.

  “No, Mister Estian, what you want is to find a doctor who’ll agree with you. And you’ll find one if you look extensively enough.” The teleoperation rig’s manipulators twiddled the air, as the doctor in their office fiddled with a stylus. “You were shot in the leg. It was healing nicely, then you put pressure on it and it stopped healing nicely. It’s healing nicely again.” The manipulators clicked on the empty air, as the doctor turned the stylus around. “Give it another four days.”

  “How many hours a day can I spend on my feet?” He gestured restlessly. “The nurse said it was okay for me to get myself in and out of the bathroom, showered and all.”

  “That’s fine, if you bathe sitting down — I wouldn’t suggest standing in a shower. But you shouldn’t be exerting yourself, putting any kind of load on it. And if you do, you risk more bleeding problems. Every time you flex the damaged muscle tissues, they’re liable to tear. You understand?”

  Eversen grit his teeth. This was why people didn’t listen to doctors. Why they said ‘screw it’ and soldiered on anyway. Because it was easier to grind yourself to mush on the march with a bum knee than responsibly admit you were weak and needed to recover.

  “I understand,” he muttered.

  “Now. Let me see you get in the chair.” The manipulator waggled at it.

  He braced himself on his arms, yanking the wheelchair up to the bed with a protesting squeal of its motors, and he levered himself into it, grimacing briefly as he pushed his wounded thigh down and into place, doing his best to keep it limp and unmoving as ordered.

  “Are you in pain? Pain is one of the most distressing symptoms and the most easily treated, I can give you a dispensary script right now. Don’t be stupid about this.”

  Eversen turned his snarl onto the doctor’s screen. “Pain is your friend, sir. It lets you know you’re ay-live, as the drill instructors yelled at me.”

  “Pain is unnecessary.”

  “Ultimately, so is being alive, but I’m not a philosophy major, sir.”

  “You don’t need to call me sir,” the doctor replied, calmly.

  Eversen shook his head, wheeling the chair around instead of just telling it where he wanted to go. “You’re giving me orders, that makes you a sir, sir.”

  A chuckle. “My colleague across the hall, here, tells me your brothers say that to her, too. Call her sir. Why is that?”

  “The drill instructors taught me that pain was my friend, sir, but not that there was more than just men in the world. You can imagine my surprise when I was informed it didn’t just stop with just two genders.”

  Outright laughter, and that, at least, made Eversen feel good. The good kind of laughter, anyway. It was like knowing how to smile at humans while exposing teeth and still making it friendly — the good kind of laughter meant people liked him.

  It was good keeping things simple. People either liked Eversen, or they didn’t.

  Wheeling out of the underground parking lot that was still seeing use as an operating base, Eversen left behind the people who liked him, and went off to go and talk with off-site intelligence about the people who disliked him enough to kill his brother and put a hole through his thigh.

  *

&n
bsp; “As you can see, the social net is limited,” the hired Intel officer said. She’d introduced herself as Lindiwe. Lindiwe threw a three dimensional network onto Eversen’s screen — each axis on the network a set of linked points tagged with names and photographs — and then switched between various points of view, the lines thickening or changing color as she swept between options. “Microblogging links, instant messaging we picked up, sales and commerce, e-mail, voice calls… we have only two significant threads of background history that match all the attackers. They’re former members of, or descended from members of, the Azeri armed forces circa twenty-sixty.”

  “So there’s a link with the former regime?” Eversen asked, laid out on top of a cot. Maybe, he hoped, being good about resting would mean he got to stop resting.

  “It’s a tempting conclusion, but running a meta-analysis of thirty random Azeri citizens of the same gender and age demographic gave twenty-three similar linkages — it turns out that the former Aliyev regime resorted to widespread forced conscription before collapsing. For a majority sampling, a large proportion of a random group, their social links look typical. However, something this specific — that all of the attackers fit the army background profile — is atypical enough to be statistically significant, which led me to investigate the firearms used in the attack more closely.”

  “And?”

  “All of them are from armed forces stocks which were either marked down as destroyed or sold on when the army reorganized in the eighties, post-war. As near as I can figure out, ‘destroyed or sold on’ seems to be a polite cover-up for the possibility that these weapons were in the hands of the exiled soldiers who splintered out of Azerbaijan’s armed forces during the war and went rogue as Eurasian warlords. Specifically, this implicates four highly placed officers who fled Azerbaijan during Nesimi’s coup. Two are currently active in Northern Persia — Generals Gayibov and Valiyev — but they can be disregarded, as both are settled in with autonomous states in the area. One was killed during the Tajik revolution, a Colonel Magsudov, and his armed forces shattered. I don’t see his forces giving up their materiel to support the efforts of others right now.

  “The fourth is the most likely candidate — General Abbasov, last seen in Uzbekistan four years ago. Abbasov was known as the liberator of Baku, having briefly retaken the capitol he held it for a period of three months during the Twenty-Sixty-Four in-fighting. Rumor indicates he was spirited away by supporters before Nesimi’s coup. He’s one of the few remaining hardcore Aliyev loyalists from the old regime’s military cabinet — Nesimi executed the ones he could get his hands on.”

  Eversen picked up the spare smart-paper he’d set aside as a secondary display for the pad, glancing over the dossier on Abbasov and comparing it to the ambushers’ social network. “What level of intelligence resource qualifies as ‘rumor’, Lindiwe?”

  “Discussions on microblogging services at the time. That was the most popular speculation as to Abbasov’s fate, seemingly based on ‘friend of a friend’ sourcing, but it fits with later sightings and the kind of people he associated with. It’s probable he and his men are behind ransom kidnappings in the Karakalpakstan area.”

  “Karakalpakstan?”

  “Western half of Uzbekistan. It’s been its own country since Twenty-Seventy-Four. I’d never heard of it either. Just over the Caspian sea from Azerbaijan and inland, behind Kazakhstan.” She highlighted it on the pad.

  “Don’t suppose that provides a motivation for the ambush, does it?”

  “Not clearly. We just don’t have the information, but if you want, I can speculate.”

  “Affirmative. Do it.”

  “The only possibility that makes sense to me is that there’s concern about the Transitionary Authority favoring some local factions at the exclusion of others. Panah Karimov leads what amounts to the most democracy-friendly militant faction in-country. If you and your brothers had armed his forces as an interim police force, as had been planned, this would have given him and his people a number of opportunities to stake a claim to leading the political discourse, even without abusing power.”

  That sounded probable. After the ambush Eversen had been forced to halt Ereli’s plan — and it had been a good plan — to arm Karimov’s people with non-lethals and use them for policing. As it was, they were bleeding money paying for additional European peacekeeping contractors from Ryder-Pryce. Thankfully, Ryder-Pryce were handling the streets well. But it didn’t stop constant calls for them to be replaced by an Azeri police force — even though the only trained Azeri officers available were complicit in the brutal oppression of its own people, not a month past.

  “I suspect it was hoped the Transitionary Authority would have enacted reprisals in the wake of the ambush — vendetta has a particular place in local political discourse — but even without doing so, removing Karimov from the field of play has changed the political landscape considerably, giving others the opportunity to make their own power-grabs unhindered.

  “But, I must emphasize, this is speculation. It could just as easily have been disaffected elements of the militant protest groups, there have been a few minor attacks on patrols and your brothers. Regardless of the true motive behind the ambush, the best place to look for answers is with Abbasov and his men. The arms used during the attack are the only concrete link, and if they’re not directly responsible for arming the ambushers, it’s possible they know who were. Unfortunately, questioning them might be difficult. They’re living off-grid, and it’s hard to tell one gang of Eurasian warlords’ bandits from another by satellite imaging.

  “That’s all I’ve got for you right now.”

  Lindiwe had a lot for him. The documentation she’d sent was more than he could reasonably read through himself. The summary he was getting now was the real thing he was paying for — signing off maybe a little more of the discretionary funds than he should have in getting the briefing prepared for him.

  He wanted revenge. Vendetta. Sure. But the ambush was a military attack, with goals that had to make sense on either a tactical or strategic level. That’s how he had to respond.

  Eversen tapped the dossiers off. “Thanks, Lindiwe. Are you available if I have another job for you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Please draw up a list of suitable questions for an interrogation.”

  A pause. Uncertainly, she asked, “You have one of Abbasov’s men?”

  Eversen switched over to the tactical network. “Not yet, but I’m already looking for an excuse to go and grab one.”

  “You might want to check Andercom West’s subsidiary listings, in that case. I saw a kidnapping insurance policy backed by the D&D Array’s human resources team get pinged for a rescue and recovery in Karakalpakstan.”

  Eversen squinted. “The D&D Array? You mean those domes off-coast from San Iadras that keep the ocean clean?”

  “The Defense and Decontamination Array does a little more than that, and it’s the entire MACP coastline, but yes. It seems one of their employees has a spouse or family member missing. Would you like to know more?”

  *

  ::/ Bautino, Kazakhstan.

  ::/ Eversen Estian.

  The assault began when Mark-Antony-Oversight One shot the closest two guards, seconds after they and the hostages made their move, bolting away from the hospital storage shacks. The guards had been lifting their weapons, potentially threatening the hostages, which meant they had to die.

  With Mark Antony clearing the way, destroying any guards who could potentially execute the hostages, the job became both easier and a little more difficult. Mark Antony’s infiltration team could bunker down in the center of the hospital — the only substantial building in the antique ruin of what had once been a mining town of some kind — and the drones could rise over the horizon with no fear that the hostages were in direct danger. The tricky part was that now half the guards in the compound were running towards the hostages, shooting.

  What that translat
ed to, in practice, was a dynamic response by Mark Antony, shooting down every living thing outside of the hospital. A much more achievable goal than fighting through the town of Bautino with every last hostage in tow.

  “Could you reconfirm the headcount, please?” Eversen asked the chopper pilot, through the internal intercom.

  “Thirty in and thirty out. Facial recognition confirms twenty-seven of the missing parties and three partial matches on our clones.” The pilot, huddled in the cockpit nook of the passenger cabin, his head swathed in high resolution imagers giving him the outside view, briefly lifted a thumbs up. “Hostages secure, just need to clear the town.”

  Thank God for the earbuds. Eversen could feel the pulsing of the vehicle’s engine in his bones, the mesh fabric safety barriers across the open passenger bay’s exits let every jolt of noise in, wind roaring as the chopper’s companion drones flicked up and overhead with a scream of jets — which had to have been loud as artillery fire to get through the buds.

  The helicopter tilted forward, and the g-force of sudden acceleration pushed Eversen down against his bench. In the shadowy space, he and seven more of his brothers waited, their camouflage gear displaying warped and distorted patterns of the metal plates beneath their feet. All indistinguishable from one another — the same gear, the same cut down rifles. Eidlitz was one of Eversen and Ereli’s housemates, back home, though. He understood why this mission was important, why they were doing what they were doing. Exermont, Stelborn — to them it was just another mission. But through the narrow slit of their goggles they all had the same driven, intense gaze. The same emotionally detached glare.

  The one Eversen wore. Or thought he might. A lot went on in his heart that never reached his face.

  There wasn’t any point in giving last minute instructions, even though Eversen burned to give them. Say some inspiring bullshit, give the fireteam that ‘Yeehaw and Huzzah’ pep talk out of the movies, but it was pointless. Morale wasn’t in smiles and bravado and an impulse to yell swear words and pithy one-liners — morale was a measure of willingness to perform as required. The willingness was there. Cultural conditioning by years of action movies had fouled up his thinking on the matter, this was how it was supposed to be. Quiet and determined was his natural state of being.