Red Sands Page 3

  They rode skirting the artificial clearing. Something tugged at the corner of Marron's eye; he looked more closely at the land barge, noticed a discreet logo painted on its gleaming flank: a stylized eagle head and white star in a badge-shaped shield, surrounded by the words DEPARTMENT OF ENFORCEMENT AFFAIRS/FEDERAL POLICE AGENCY. Beneath that in block capitals was painted the legend PIU 92.

  He was just beginning to feel his heart dropping in his chest when Elinor screamed.

  He tore his eyes from the vehicle, saw what had made her scream. A man lay sprawled across one of the weathered gray railroad ties that edged the gravel. The front of his T-shirt was soaked black with blood. Beyond lay other bodies, fallen in that rag-doll way death has with you when it comes quick and violent. He'd seen that look often enough before, in Central America and the Middle East. He'd hoped never to see it in America—and not because he was squeamish.

  A man had been squatting over the body, dropping something beside it. He straightened, staring gape-mouthed at Matron. Marron's instinct was to turn the horse's head to the trees and dig his heels in hard. He quelled it. It was too late already: somebody shouted, and then there were men running toward them. Men bulky in white jumpsuits. Men with guns in gauntleted hands.

  "Frank," Elinor said, voice shrill. "Frank, what's happening?"

  He didn't say anything. He was busy holding one hand over his squirming daughter's eyes and fighting to keep control of the sidestepping, eye-rolling gelding with the other. Horses feared the scent of fresh-spilled blood. They weren't as stupid as everyone thought.

  A white-gloved hand grabbed Lindsay's reins. Fat suppressors screwed on the muzzles of stubby machine pistols ringed Marron in.

  "Who are these men?" Elinor demanded.

  "Federal Police, ma'am," one of the jumpsuits said. "Public Information Unit."

  In the background someone was yelling, "You fucking call that keeping a lookout?" Rough hands grabbed Rebecca, dragged her out of Marron's arms.

  "Daddy!" she screamed, kicking and clawing for him.

  He started out of the saddle after her. The machine pistols held him back.

  "Yeah," one of his captors said, "come down off of there. But slowly, motherfucker."

  Deliberately Marron swung down. A Public Information Unit man was helping Elinor off her mare Stevie's back, gingerly but none too gently.

  Two flanking, one behind, a trio of agents prodded Marron forward toward the RV. He was ultraconscious of his surroundings: a few clouds rushing overhead, seemingly just out of reach of the talon trees; the gravel squeaking beneath the soles of his cowboy boots; the manic chatter of a mountain jay; the shadows clustering, ominous and cool; the smell of blood, raw copper, and that staling of the air that comes with the nearness of death.

  The object the man had been dropping next to the body—replacing, Marron dutiful corrected himself—was an ungainly little firearm, handgun-sized, with the box magazine placed in front of the grip. He recognized it at once: a "zipper" machine pistol in .22 short or long rifle, a homebrewed knockoff of the 9mm Scorpions the FedPols had trained on him. American ingenuity at work.

  "Frank," he heard Elinor call, "Frank, tell them who you are!"

  One of his flank escorts glanced sidelong at the other as they herded him around the vehicle. Both chuckled.

  They stopped him near the vents toward the rear. Elinor was on the other side, out of sight. Rebecca had been carried inside. If she was still protesting, the vehicle's soundproofing masked the sound.

  One FedPol patted him down expertly while the other two covered, relieving him of his wallet and the Buck knife at his belt. Then he swept Marron with the wand of a metal detector.

  All day long Marron had been nagged by guilt at not wearing a pistol. It was a violation of procedure, and Marron was a man who believed in the book. But Elinor hated and feared firearms. And she could always tell, even when he was carrying a tiny Walther TPH concealed in an inside-the-belt holster.

  Now he was glad for Elinor's sensibilities. If the FedPols had found a piece on him, at the very least he would have been battered semiconscious. Owning a gun was a serious offense. Carrying one opened season on you.

  The agent disappeared into the RV with Marron's billfold. The other two stood nearby, apparently ignoring him.

  Marron looked around. He could see eight bodies strewn around the picnic area: four men, two women, two he couldn't tell. Or maybe boys and girls would be more accurate. Of those in condition to identify, none seemed older than twenty. Some of their jeans had the holes in the knee that were obligatory for trend-conscious youths who didn't buy into the future-Puritan Serious look, but their clothes looked well kept. They had all been shot.

  The deaths were obviously recent. He wondered why he and his family hadn't heard anything. Zippers were fairly noisy, and sound carried in the mountains.

  There were perhaps a dozen agents in the Public Information Unit, stalking among the bodies, examining them, taking samples. It was their job to get to a site where a potentially controversial event had taken place, ensure that nothing on hand would damage national security or the public before clearing the press to cover it. Decontam squads, they were called within the Federal Police Agency, or containment teams. They were young, tall, athletic, crop-haired. One of the two standing guard on him now was a black; his was the only non-white face Marron had seen in the unit.

  A folded piece of paper skittered past Marron's foot: a leaflet, with a prominent block L in a circle displayed on the front. It was the symbol of the Libertas terrorist underground.

  A couple of jumpsuited agents with slung Scorpions stood near the front of the RV, chatting and laughing, occasionally glancing Marron's way. A word drifted down a gust of breeze to him: desparecido.

  His blood turned to liquid helium. A civilian who used that word could be arrested and fined or even sent to a work camp for slandering the government's war on crime. And these men didn't seem to care whether he heard them use it or not.

  "Frank?" Elinor's voice came from the far side of the beached-whale machine. "Frank, what's happening? What are they going to do with us?"

  He heard something harsh said—what, he couldn't make out. He hoped they wouldn't strike her. Ellie wasn't used to that sort of treatment.

  Dear God, he thought. He wasn't a religious man, but he prayed now: Don't let them do anything hasty.

  An agent emerged from the van. He was shorter than average for this crew, stocky, his blond hair cut short enough to show a silvery plush sheen. He shouldered past the two who were standing and telling dangerous jokes and marched straight to Marron. The pair glared after him, then quickly away.

  He handed Marron his billfold with his photographic SmartCard ID clipped to it with his thumb. "My apologies for the inconvenience, Mr. Marron," he said. "You should have told us you were with the National Security Agency."

  The two escorts exchanged looks and fell back. The black let a long breath escape through flared nostrils. Marron moistened his lips, nodded, then slipped the ID back into the billfold and returned it to his hip pocket. Another agent brought Rebecca down the metal steps. She broke away from his grip as soon as her running shoes hit gravel, raced to her daddy. He knelt to gather her in his arms.

  Two agents brought Elinor around the rear of the RV. She was maintaining a look of patrician calm, but spots of pink glowed on her high cheekbones, and her blue eyes had a hunted animal light. A strand of dark blond hair had pulled free from her pony tail and hung unnoticed across her face.

  "Ms. Marron," the stocky agent said with a nod. "We regret having alarmed you. But we have a youth-gang incident on our hands here, and it's very serious, as you can see. We couldn't take any chances."

  She said nothing, only compressed her lips. Her husband handed Becky off to her. The girl tearfully wrapped her arms around her neck.

  The short agent looked at the agents standing nearby. "You all have jobs to do, am I right?" They turned away and started looking busy.<
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  "We're not sure exactly what went down here," he explained as he walked the Marrons over to where their horses stood under guard with their reins tied to tree boles. "It might have been some kind of a faction fight—these middle-class revolutionary wanna-be's breed splinter groups like rabbits. Or it might have been a deal that went bad with some other gang. Drugs, guns, porno, illicit data—people who deal in that stuff play heavy." Fat, shiny brass 9mm casings crunched into the gravel beneath his combat boots.

  Marron helped Elinor into her saddle. Her mouth tightened slightly when Rebecca refused to climb up with her, choosing to ride with her father instead.

  "You understand the need to be discreet about this, of course, sir," the agent in charge said as he handed Becky up. For the first time he showed something other than complete self-confidence.

  Marron nodded and, after a moment, found his voice. "Of course." He settled his daughter in before him and hugged her close.

  "And one more thing, sir," the agent said. He gestured at the bodies cooling beneath the high blue sky. "You should always wear your sidearm. Crime isn't staying in the streets anymore."

  Chapter THREE

  "The point of power is to exercise it," the handsome young general said as the videocam zoomed in on his face. He turned his head subtly to present his best angle, emphasizing the shell-splinter scar that ran from hairline to chin. Many of his fellow veterans of the Afghan War were shy about the marks the conflict had left on them—ashamed, even; not him. That scar was his trademark. It had helped him become the contemporary poster boy for Homo sovieticus, "the New Soviet Man," back when there were Soviet men. It had likewise helped make him the most famous officer in the League Armed Forces. "We are the executive; we are the League's strong right arm."

  A pair of Su-25s swept by, so low over the sparsely covered steppe that their cockpits, glinting in the harsh sun of the Russian Republic's Rostov Oblast east of Novocherkassk, were on almost the same level as the hilltop regimental command group.

  "It's rare to encounter a man so forthright," the reporter breathed when the surf-roar of their passage had dwindled enough for speech. "Even among military leaders."

  "The concept of decadence is overdue to be rehabilitated, don't you think?" he asked, and reached for a microphone.

  At his command came a sound as if strips were being torn from the cloudless blue sky. The ridgeline half a kilometer away flashed into flame.

  The reporter gasped, clasped her lower lip in her teeth. But she didn't flinch. As the two BRDM-2 scout cars streaked forward in advance of the dun cloud raised by the T-80s spearheading the assault, and the armored personnel carriers behind to give it mass, the general studied her with frank interest. The maneuver was developing nicely and for a moment or two would not require his attention. He was not a sidelong man by nature.

  He liked what he saw. Her straight hair was pageboy short, a striking orange shade of auburn he'd never seen before, but which appeared natural. Her face was feline, flat and wide, almost as if she were Central Asian herself. Her nose was snubbed. Her eyes were invisible behind flamboyant domed mirror shades. She was above average height for a modern Western woman, 176 centimeters or so. By traditional Russian standards she was skinny.

  But General Major Anatoliy Karponin had cosmopolitan tastes. That was not necessarily a compliment in the society he had sprung from; for years "cosmopolitanism" meant decadent Western tastes. Yet Karponin was a vocal exponent of a return to classic Russian values of discipline and duty. It was just such contradictions—like an acknowledged Great Russian chauvinist bandying fluent French with a woman telejournalist, to show he was kulturnyy—that made the Radical-Traditionalists such a magnet for the world media. And that made the charismatic Afghan War hero an ideal symbol and spokesman for that movement. Point man, as he liked to think of it.

  He held the scrutiny long enough to note a pink flush blossoming on those wide cheekbones, beneath the sunscreen. Then he turned his attention back to the exercise.

  Explosions drew a solid chestnut curtain of dirt across the ridgeline. Helicopters hovered in dead ground to either flank, out of the flight path of shells and 122mm rockets. The four-wheeled BRDMs turned back shy of the crest, thirty meters from the flame-shot earth curtain.

  "So close," the reporter murmured. "So bold. Magnificent."

  But Karponin's face had gone white, except for the scar: That burned bright red.

  He grabbed the microphone from a subordinate who had begun to quiver like a poplar leaf. "Ceasefire!" he bellowed in Russian. "Stop the assault."

  The storm of noise was subsumed by ringing in the ears; the dust cloud settled in heavy folds. Out on the flats, tanks and APCs began to mill around aimlessly as the orders were passed down.

  "General, what's going on?" the reporter asked. "What's wrong?"

  He waved her off. "Return to the assembly point. Anyone who's not in jump-off position in one hour's time will be mining gold within the week."

  As the vehicles began to stream back toward their original positions, he turned back to the reporter, all calm personality again.

  "The League is a world power," he said in a voice like the well-tuned turbine engines of his forty-two-ton tanks. "But much remains to be done."

  "What went wrong with the assault, General Karponin?"

  He smiled. "Wait a few minutes. Will you have tea? You can tell me what you think of this new opera by Nguyen that opened in Paris last week, the one I've heard such controversy about."

  When the regiment was back at its starting line, he had himself, the reporter, and her videocam crew driven down in his command car. It was a camouflage-painted Liga four-wheel drive, which meant it was actually a Toyota, assembled at the giant license-built plant outside of Tashkent to avoid American and EuroCom restrictions on Japanese imports. Cashing in on the raging trade war was a very Russian scam.

  Seasoned though she was, the reporter had visibly had difficulty containing her anticipation during the hour's wait for the regiment to reassemble. League military maneuvers were as exquisitely rehearsed as any Bolshoi ballet—and consequently bore about as much resemblance to real war. In the rigidly hierarchical Soviet scheme of command, which the League had inherited along with most of the Soviet armed forces, an officer was absolutely answerable for the performance of his men. A career was far too important to entrust to the whims of chance.

  But not for General Major Karponin. He was on the golden road to a marshal's baton, a fighting soldier in a peacetime army, and regarded obstacles as something to be overcome, not wished away.

  She sat beside him, one hip pressed not disagreeably to his, whispering to herself. Actually she was subvocalizing for the benefit of the flesh-tone microphone taped over her larynx. He caught the words "Desert Fox" and "Scarface." He smiled.

  Being mentioned in the same breath as Rommel, Guderian, and, most glorious of all, George Patton, did not bother Anatoliy Karponin in the least. Any serious student of history knew they were the best, not their Soviet rivals, who relied on mass alone. That was what being a Rad-Trad was all about: taking the best of what was foreign and making it Russian. Assimilating it, like those clever little monkeys, the Japanese.

  As for the other name... Anatoliy Karponin was a man who was consciously building—and living—his own legend. The Afghan resistance had given him the nickname "Al Capone" after one of their mortars laid his face open in the Zhawar assault in 1986. He had to pretend disapproval of his men calling him that or Scarface. But he was far too self-directed to be sensitive in fact about anything that was such splendid media.

  His driver stopped the car facing the front rank of vehicles. Karponin stepped down on hot dry ground which had already been churned up and denuded by hundreds of treads and cleated wheels. Drivers and commanders stood up in open hatches, catching a breath of hot, diesel-fouled air that was still fresher than inside their cramped armored cans.

  For a moment Karponin studied them, hands on hips. He was a tall ma
n, athletic, with the kind of presence that drew attention.

  "In modern war, he who sees first, kills first," he said. A mike discreetly clipped to his battle-dress lapel picked up (he words and ran them through a loudspeaker in his command car. Since it also broadcast them to the armored vehicles' radios, that was merely a gesture—only the first lew rows were in position to hear him anyway. But it was gestures of that kind that made him what he was.

  "Do the dushmans not have cannon-launched guided projectiles to kill our tanks from kilometers away, if we cede (heir spotters the high ground for even a moment?" There were some grins at that, only halfheartedly hidden. DushmcW was an Afghan word that meant, literally, "enemy" though (he connotation was "bandit." It was what the Afghan Army and Group of Soviet Forces, Afghanistan, had called (he Resistance. Its subtext here implied that the mujahidin had only managed to hold out by a massive influx of high-tech from the U.S. and People's Republic of China.

  "We have helicopters, General, sir," someone called out.

  The reporter tensed, as if waiting for an explosion. Karponin smiled thinly. He accepted, even encouraged, input from his officers and NCOs. As long as it stayed within bounds. Old and new: flexibility within a steel framework of discipline.

  "Have the Threat forces broken their own helicopters down to make riding lawn mowers out of, then? Do they not have antiaircraft artillery and backpack SAMs? Our helicopters can help us, comrades, but only if we help them. Tanks and infantry, working in combination with artillery: that's the real battle. The war on the ground. We need our spotters in place first, to mark down targets for our comrades in Frontal Aviation and the artillery.*'

  "But to drive right into the shellfire—" began a youthful sergeant-commander of a BRDM, who had taken off his helmet to let the air cool his plush of white-blond hair.

  Karponin frowned. He recognized the lead vehicle that had turned back first from the barrage. "Sergeant, what is your name?"