Dog Country

by Malcolm F. Cross

  Calm.

  And when the helicopter rattled, gunfire pouring off its side-mounted gunpods, thundering down to the dust?

  Calm.

  Rushing out of the helicopter, teeth grit together because of the pain in his leg but trusting to the integrity of the splint Eversen had forced a doctor to print for him, moving in a swaggering run led by his good knee?

  Calm.

  Cold smoothness in every motion, hacking his hand down towards a target and watching two of his team move while Mark Antony’s brethren spread out around the hospital, watching for targets. A sweet chill in his gut as the second and third helicopters gently eased down to earth on the nearby seabed, where the Caspian sea had dried away, more brothers disembarking. The fourth backup chopper circled overhead, a black, armored star fixed in the sky.

  Not waiting for the choppers, Eversen ran. Breaking into the barracks behind Erath and killing the first of General Abbasov’s men to lift a firearm in his direction. The second of them Eversen chased out of the steel-shack barracks and into the dust around Bautino. Blood thundered in him — yet remained somehow silent in his ears — as the man turned, lifting a pistol from his waist. Eversen shot him in the shoulder with a double-tap, and the target’s arm split where the bone broke, the limb flailing back down against his chest like an empty shirt-sleeve, his body collapsing to the earth.

  Gunfire everywhere. Drones buzzing overhead, smoking vehicles, twisted masses of steel he could no longer recognize. The area was secure, and the pulsing in his ears faded until he was gasping down clean breaths of air, a strange kind of lucidity taking him as the hostages, twenty-seven humans and three black-furred shapes, were brought out and led towards the helicopters, escorted along by his brothers.

  The moments-long firefight was still fresh for Eversen, still real, but it existed in a dream-like state, an emotionally foggy trance despite the razor clarity in his head of what he’d seen, what he’d done.

  The fog, if that’s what it had been, lifted. And Eversen moved to join his brothers gathering the enemy survivors and prisoners outside Abbasov’s interrogation room.

  *

  “Here’s the deal,” Eversen said, slowly, the vest-translator purring it out again in Azeri. “If you tell me what I want to know, I will pay you five hundred thousand Manat and give you safe passage to Baku, or a plane ticket and a ten year residency visa in the MACP, depending on your preference. A whole new life, think about it.”

  The whites of the man’s eyes shuddered, his eyelids trembling as he frowned up at Eversen, lips stiffly locked together, listening to the translator in desperate silence.

  Motes of dust hung in the air between he and Eversen, caught in the slashes of light penetrating the improvised steel walls of the cell. He hadn’t been chained up to the rings welded into the walls — Eversen didn’t work the way Abbasov’s interrogators did.

  He said something. “And?” the translator buzzed. “Where is the threat?”

  “If you lie to me,” Eversen replied, voice low, “I will kill you.”

  “You can’t do that. It’s murder. You’re mercenaries. You have laws to uphold to maintain your registrations. I’m not afraid.”

  “I’m not being paid to do this as a military combatant — this is a hostage recovery job. Do you know what that means?”

  Abbasov’s man didn’t answer, glaring up, lip clamped tight between his teeth.

  “It means,” Eversen explained patiently, “that I’m operating as a private security consultant. I can kill whoever I want, for whatever reason I want, and the only thing that can stop me is if a lawyer sues me or the kidnapping insurance company I’m consulting for. That’s how it works in the MACP. Do you have a lawyer registered with the Tri-Corporate Constitutional Bar Association? Norec-Naroi Insurance has some of the best.”

  The man listened to the translator, eyes glazing over with fear.

  “No?” Eversen asked. “No lawyers? Then you better not lie to me.”

  The man’s head fell forward, shoulders hunched, shivering — not just with bloodloss and pain. Fear could do that to a man, too. “And if I don’t talk? You’ll kill me also?”

  “No. If you don’t talk I hand you over to the Kazakh police service and they charge you for kidnapping.” Eversen smiled thinly — no teeth. “All I care about is making sure you don’t fucking lie to me. Now. Do you want the money, or not?”

  Four officers, four currency transfers after cross-referencing everything they said with Lindiwe, and one dead man later, they had their answers.

  “Was that interrogation, bribery, torture, or execution?” Elwood, one of the subcontractors from Mark Antony, asked, while looking back at the lone corpse outside the interrogation chamber, and the neat rows of seated men in the square beside it.

  No women — not one. Eversen didn’t understand that. He’d never heard of an all-male military force, even the Liberation Fund had members of the older female production run integrated into it. Why would anyone bother with that kind of gender segregation? It’d cut available manpower too much.

  Eversen shrugged, walking back towards the chopper. “I don’t really care which it is.”

  “And?” Elwood asked. “Was it worth it?”

  He turned around, shrugged again. “I don’t fucking know. Apparently one of the former regime’s kids — the Aliyev bunch — paid off Abbasov for weapons. And Abbasov sold them to the Aliyevs for peanuts. Like he was doing ‘em a favor.”

  “So? You know who organized the ambush. Why don’t you sound happy about that?”

  “These Aliyevs are also bankrolling the fucking Citizen’s Democracy Party.”

  Elwood paced after him, blinking in astonishment. “The party everybody thinks is going to run the next government? Malik Najafov? That CDP?”

  “Yeah.” Eversen pushed his earbuds back in, ducking his head against the chopper’s rotor-wash as he moved to mount up. “Turns out that Malik is the kid of one of the Aliyev daughters. And it looks like Abbasov’s trying to fucking get him elected.”

  22. Packing Up.

  ::/ Baku, Azerbaijan

  ::/ May, 2106.

  ::/ Edane Estian.

  Edane sat on his assigned bunk — the bed in the hotel room he’d been given — and packed his possessions into a new duffle. A spare shirt. A set of underwear. An unopened deodorant sprayer he’d picked up to use after the flight landed back home — he couldn’t read the label, but it had flowery pictures and those were the kinds of smells Janine liked, and it’d be better than unwashed dog after a round-the-world flight.

  He checked the interior of the shopping bag he’d gotten from the street vendor.

  He didn’t own anything else, other than his wallet and passport.

  He’d wanted a rug. He’d missed out on getting one in Tajikistan, and the few market vendors who’d been willing to talk to him back then had all said rugs made fine gifts, but Baku didn’t seem to have rugs.

  Rubble, knock-off designer clothing, jewelry, novelty tea-sets and dusty old pre-war Chinese overproduced mass manufactured landfill — kid’s toys and ornaments? Baku had plenty of all that. Not so much by way of rugs. He’d asked the desk manager, a man named Jabbar who’d been kept on mainly to open the doors for the handymen who shuffled in and out during the day to repair the hotel’s battle-damage and get the water running on the upper floors again, but Jabbar didn’t have any answers about where Edane could go to find keepsakes for his mothers.

  His armor, his uniform, his equipment, his LAMW, that was all rented or being sold on. He couldn’t take it back with him. He’d thrown away his MilSim scope after it’d been HERFed, and hadn’t even saved any expended shell-casings from the fighting.

  All of his personal possessions had been bought for less than ten New Dollars in the marketplace that morning. He’d almost have been better off waiting for the night markets at home, but he needed something to wear on the flight back.

  He geared up, just with his pistol shoved into its
oversized holster over his thigh, and headed out. Registered on the tactical network, but with no objectives to follow.

  “Going out on patrol, yes?” Jabbar asked, looking up from his pad with a briefly-flashed smile.

  Edane briefly consulted the phrase-guide he’d loaded into his goggles, and nodded, replying carefully — “Just taking a walk.”

  “Ah, you are learning Azeri? Going to stay on?”

  Edane shook his head slightly. “It’s good to, ah—” He gaze-flicked through the loaded phrases. Settled on, “It’s good to try something new.” He’d have been lost, without the goggles subtitling Jabbar live.

  Thorne had maintained that learning the local language was part of integrating with the local population, back in Tajikistan. That to make any progress they had to connect with the people they were fighting for.

  Edane didn’t feel connected to the people of Azerbaijan. Just like how he didn’t feel connected to the displaced Colombians he knew back home, the local peoples swept aside by the economic powerhouse of the MACP. They called it imperialism and capitalism-colonialism, but really, it was just that he had his own life to lead. Other things mattered to him.

  The streets were safe, now — for a given level of safe. On the tactical network there were frequent calls for drone strikes, but that was outside of Baku proper. Complaints about looting weren’t uncommon, nor were assaults — which Edane had taken awhile to figure out was meant in legal terms, someone giving someone else a black eye, instead of in the context of armed forces attacking. But the police weren’t attacking their own civilians now — most of them were either under arrest or discharged and left unemployed while Ryder-Pryce’s trainers worked on getting a whole new PMC-led, locally-recruited paramilitary civil defense unit trained to the standards of European Union peacekeeping policy guidelines.

  The job was done, the old regime had been shattered, but the new job of getting Azerbaijan rebuilt into a nation had barely begun. And Edane didn’t care about that.

  The shattered glass was still being swept off the streets in some places, local men and women watching him warily as he walked by, alone. They were Azeris and refugees who were no longer confined to ghettoes outside of the city, and Edane didn’t think they wanted him there.

  Why would anyone want him? He was just another capitalist-imperialist intervening in their lives, he hadn’t fought because he liked them, or had some connection to the country. The only reason for him to be there was to do what they couldn’t — fight back against a better armed and ruthlessly violent government. That had been done, and now there wasn’t anything he could do that they couldn’t.

  Edane wandered through shattered alleyways, retracing his steps. He knew this street, but it was cleaner now. Rubble had been raked out of the road, smoke long ago blown away by the wind. He could make out the gaping wounds in the buildings’ roofs to either side, where mortar rounds had slammed down, automated systems triangulating the sound and hunting him in the mad seconds after the thunder of a LAMW shot rocked through the city.

  He stepped into a still empty apartment building, the brickwork shattered by machine gun rounds. Red caution tape blocked all the doors, but he simply ducked under it, looking up at the exposed steel frame where the floors had collapsed, at the open sky over the rubble of the fallen ceilings, and searched through the dusty corridors for a way up into the attics where he’d taken the shot.

  Where he’d killed a soldier simply to terrify all his friends. To punish him for being part of the regime’s military, for having received orders to take civilians hostage. Where Edane had done with a LAMW shell what had been done to him with a mortar round.

  The torn away arm wasn’t there anymore — Edane remembered seeing it slapping down on top of one of the armored vehicles, and the square was empty now, but through his uniform’s lenses he could barely see the fuzzy brown mark covering the plaza stones, where the soldier had bled and died.

  Edane pushed aside a shattered beam with his boot, amidst the fallen roof tiles, and bent down to pick up the glinting brass of a LAMW casing. It was dusty, dented in the center from when the roof had caved in on the attic, but it was one of his shells. How many shots had he taken? One, two? Edane thought it was only one.

  It had been a long time ago, now.

  Was there still a murky black-brown stain on the stones of the Tous Marketplace, in Dushanbe? Or had Tajikistan forgotten all about him?

  Tajikistan had been somewhere he’d fit in, for a time. While the people had hated him there, he’d done his best to defend them from the belligerents bullying them around. Now Azerbaijan was the same way, except Edane had pushed Azerbaijan’s bully down by being a bigger, stronger bully.

  Edane turned the cold metal around and around on the tip of his finger, staring at the shell casing thoughtfully. It was almost big enough to drink soda out of, if he wanted to. He didn’t want to do that, though.

  He wanted to go home.

  23. Lifting Corners.

  ::/ San Iadras, Middle American Corporate Preserve.

  ::/ May, 2106.

  ::/ Edane Estian.

  Marianna flicked two extended fingers forward, her fist held at an angle, then chopped them up in a rising sweep. Two quick jerks of her hand. Person of interest — J — Location?

  Edane slouched back into their foxhole, the match timer ticking down in the corner of his vision, the air sweet and wet through the cooling mesh in his mask. A glance towards the spy-eye spiked into the dirt over the top, to get its feed in his goggles, and he gaze-flicked through its interface until the spy-eye turned. The field was clear. Behind them, past the big orange mesh border fence, the field’s rest area… There. Standing with a pad in one hand, and a soda in the other. He lifted his hand. Person of interest — J — off-field — bearing one-three-five.

  Marianna looked up at the spy-eye, no doubt using her goggles to pull a feed from it too. She hauled her facemask down off her muzzle, and checked her wristwatch display, thumbing it over to a set of timers and countdowns. “She been here the whole match?”

  “Think so.” Another gaze-flick to get the spy-eye’s focal lens pointed back downrange.

  “You got off the plane, you got your ass here — she drive down with you?”

  “No. Phoned her, though. Saw her for five minutes pre-match.”

  “And she’s been standing around waiting for you for eight fucking hours?”

  Edane shrugged, hugging his MilSim LAMW to his chest. The weight was comforting, even if he’d had to readjust to its balance. “She said she wanted to meet up after the game.”

  “The fuck happened in Azerbaijan, Kid?” Marianna cleared her goggles, blinking at him. “Hell. The fuck happened in the five minutes you saw her for? What’d they teach you about treating a woman over there?”

  “We talked. In the five minutes.” He perked his ears quizzically. “Is that a joke? I think it might have been but I don’t know if I should laugh.”

  Marianna clamped her hand over the bridge of her muzzle, shaking her head. “Well at least I know they didn’t issue you a sense of humor in that clusterfuck. They sent you back in one piece, even if you came back stupider.”

  “Ma’am, yes ma’am.”

  “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  He grinned. Marianna made a snorting noise — could’ve been laughter. Was close enough, anyway.

  Last game of the season. He hadn’t really thought about it until he’d gotten onto the flight back and spotted Eissen by his dog tags.

  Eissen hadn’t wanted to talk about what he’d been up to, since splitting up with Edane. Said only that after thinking about it, he couldn’t blame Edane for the whole thing about killing soldiers just to scare them. Admitted that maybe the need to punish them had seemed rational in the moment.

  Edane got the impression that a lot of things that had seemed rational in the moment turned out to be downright ugly, later, for the both of them. But Eissen wasn’t talking about his ugly feelings, just said he
’d be glad to go back to MilSim. But he wasn’t on the field — apparently he needed time to put his head back together. And there hadn’t been much time in the headlong dash from the airport to the playing field.

  Marianna, bless her, still had all of their gear in one of the trunks in the van. Waiting for them. Edane had untangled his stuff from Eissen’s armor and equipment, setting it in place neatly to wait until Eissen felt ready to return.

  The season hadn’t gone as well as operations in Azerbaijan had. The team were hanging onto tenth place, barely enough to go pro with Hallman’s sponsorship, but it didn’t look like they’d be able to rank higher than that. Kacey, their old friend and EMWAR specialist, had been covering for Edane, while Eissen’s cover was a skinny dude named Dahl. They were good players, but trying to integrate good players into a team mid-season was a tough ask on anybody.

  All the same, Edane’s presence wouldn’t pull their performance up or down all that much in just one match, even if he was out of sync now. But it felt good to be shooting again, and not at people.

  “Okay,” Marianna said. “Empty these out and leave the field.” She hauled the last two spare magazines of LAMW shells off her webbing and flung them at him, one after the other.

  He caught them both — one in his left hand, one in his right. No trembles, no fumbles. But Edane was worried anyway. “I do something wrong?”

  “What? No,” Marianna groaned. “Goddamn knucklehead. You seriously want to waste your time on-field when your girl’s been waiting there the whole goddamn day?”