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  "General!" Wollstonecraft exclaimed, scandalized.

  "Other opinions?" Mohn asked.

  "Like Henry said," Wofford said, "KGB thinks differently. In-house assessment say it'll take a major push, probably by the League Army with major commitment of republican forces."

  "League has half a million men in Turkmenia," der Hagen said. "That's Central Asia, isn't it?"

  "They're going to stay there too, Ernie. That's the border with Iran. The Shi'ites have been giving the Russian fits for years, and if the Russians take their eye off them they're liable to come swarming in to liberate their Muslim brothers themselves."

  Chamorro was trying to scour his philtrum with his tongue. "They have forty divisions on the Chinese frontier too, General. And they, uh, they're stuck too."

  "But the League has settled its differences with the People's Republic," Wollstonecraft objected.

  "They've been doing that for years," Wofford said. "And they're still shooting at each other across the Amur."

  "And let's not forget Germany," Archer said. "The League doesn't. As the Soviets did, it imagines itself to be surrounded by enemies." He chuckled. "Of course, it is."

  He turned the polished wood bowl of his pipe around as if he'd just unearthed it on an archaeological dig. "General der Hagen does make one telling point: we do seem to be in the habit of forgetting to ask questions. In 1990, nobody thought to ask what reason we had to believe a reunited Germany—without the Soviet threat to bind her to us— would be our friend. Now here they are, eying Danzig and Silesia and licking their chops. In 1992, we forgot to ask why a non-Soviet Russia would be our friend. The League took our money and treats us as a rival."

  Henry Chamorro touched the bone-conduction phone taped to the mastoid process behind his right ear and cleared his throat apologetically.

  "Excuse, ah, excuse me, but we have information coming in now. A weather satellite out of Kiribati is showing explosions inside the perimeter at the military base outside Tashkent."

  "And what does all this imply for American policy?" Mohn asked. She made herself sit with her customary ramrod erectness. This was a test of the skill with which she'd stacked this deck. She had a definite answer in mind. But it took points off if she supplied it.

  Pentagon shifted in his chair, grunting softly. "Maybe it shows what a damned old dinosaur I am," he said, "but say this revolt thing is for real, just for grins. I think that gives us a perfect opportunity to stick it to the bastards."

  Wollstonecrafit gasped. Chamarro blinked like a semaphorist on speed.

  "You're talking covert involvement?"

  "Sure. I'm not crazy enough to propose direct confrontation with the League. They still have all those ICBMs— hell, Russia still has a few of her own, if you believe Ward and Henry and their little gnomes. But like it or not, it's still us and them. And this is an ideal opportunity to put some points on our side of the board." He patted his high forehead with a handkerchief. "They sure made us look like monkeys over that aid thing."

  Chamorro scraped lower lip with upper teeth. "We're stretched pretty thin right now. The U.S. has its own military situation right now in Central and South America, don't forget, and the boys—and girls, to be sure—need all the intelligence we can feed them. Plus we're keeping our fingers on brush fire conflicts all over the world. It's, ah, it's tough keeping up with the Europeans these days."

  Archer took his pipe out and produced a colorless smile. "We have one of your boys working for us now. We could lend him back to you, if you were nice enough to us."

  "I don't believe what I'm hearing," Wollstonecraft said. "The League is committed to peace and coexistence. We and they are growing together, and my department is unalterably opposed to taking any action which might prejudice the process. Also—" She hesitated. Outrage was practically choking her, Mohn was pleased to note. "Also, it is an affront to the concept of unity. Communities aren't made to be split up on the—the whim of a bunch of malcontents!"

  "Enforcement Affairs concurs," Serafin said. "Hardly wise to promote ideas like secession. We're just holding our own in the fight for community as it is."

  "I thought Clean Sweep was going to put an end to anticommunitarianism, Justin," Wofford said sweetly, "along with crime, masturbation, and tooth decay."

  "I think sentiment's running against you, Justin," Mohn said. "We have an unprecedented opportunity to enhance our position vis-a-vis the League—which like it or not is a superpower, and like it or not is our rival—with virtually zero downside."

  "I don't know, Madam Adviser," Wofford said. "This game is complicated, and the stakes could be pretty high. I don't think we should jump in without knowing all the ground rules. And I'm not sure we can."

  "Isolationism, General?" Mohn raised an eyebrow. The National Security Adviser's raised eyebrow was internationally famous. "I wouldn't have thought you would advise us to stick our heads in the sand."

  Before Wofford could say more, Mohn rose. "Well. We have our consensus, I believe: we keep open the option of low-level intervention to work this situation for what leverage we can without risking dangerous exposure. I shall so inform the President."

  Nobody contradicted her, though Francine and Serafin looked sulky, in markedly different ways, and Wofford grumpily dubious. Mohn had spent a good deal of time studying Japanese management techniques—including how their consensus system actually worked.

  "Just a minute, Madam Adviser," der Hagen said. "Do you actually think this revolt is going to succeed?"

  Mohn allowed herself to laugh. "Not a chance in hell."

  Chapter SIX

  Beside the great fortified hill called the Ark that rises from the center of Bukhara, behind the Kalyan Mosque with its turqouise-covered dome and the glazed ocher brick minaret from whose top malefactors—meaning anyone who irritated the emir, who was unusually easy to irritate—used to be thrown, the streets are a hopelessly tangled skein. Narrow, potholed, and irrational, squeezed tight by one-story adobe houses from whose flat roofs spring a gleaming forest of television aerials, they look just like the streets of any barrio in northern Mexico.

  The skein was knotted with rioters. This street, clear of the not so civilly disobedient, had looked like an attractive route to the center of trouble for the Uzbek Republic MVD—Internal Security—platoon. And unfortunately it was.

  They had almost reached a bazaar, deserted in the stunning midday heat, when a mud-brick wall slumped into the street in front of the lead BTR-80 armored car. As its brakes keened, a Molotov cocktail burst on the front glacis with a crack, a tinkle, and a whomp.

  The MVD lieutenant catapulted from his cupola with the sleeve of his camouflaged tunic alight. Beating at the flames with one hand, he dropped to the pothole-pitted street.

  "Zasada!" he screamed in Russian. "Ambush! Out of the cars, now, now!"

  The bright reek of gasoline joined the smells of stale cooking oil, garlic, and hot mud. Gunfire popped full-automatic. Tears of fury mingling with the sweat that glazed his young Slavic face, the lieutenant drew his sidearm. "Those traitors in KGB! They said the rebels had no arms!"

  A man stood up from behind the low parapet of the house behind him and fired a burst from an AKS-74 into his back. The boy screamed, more in the frustration of duty unfulfilled than pain or fear, and fell.

  The second vehicle's commander fired the 14.5mm gun in the cupola. The weapon would not elevate high enough to rake the rooftop. In frustration he blasted the house to the left, raising clouds of dust from the foot-thick adobe brick, shattering a faded blue-painted door, exploding windows into a glittering snowstorm of glass powder. The muzzle flare set cheap yellowed curtains alight.

  A single shot hit him in the back of the neck, below his padded helmet. He slumped behind the gun, blood gushing from his throat.

  Uzbeks in doorways and on the rooflines were slaughtering troopers frantically trying to bail out of the burning lead car before it exploded. Thinking fast, the commander of the last car
had already ordered his driver to reverse. A wooden telephone pole toppled, bounced on the rear deck. He breathed thanks to the tengri that the rebels hadn't thought to drop a live power line on them.

  The telephone pole slid off with a screeching of wood on metal. Bullets struck sparks off armor around the sergeant commanding the second car. He crouched as low as he could in the cupola and waited.

  Thirty meters back down the street and his machine-cannon would finally train. He triggered a burst. The upper torso of the man who had butchered the young lieutenant vanished in a black and scarlet spray.

  "Withdraw!" the sergeant shouted over the vehicle's loudspeaker—fortunately the MVD vehicles were outfitted for crowd control.

  Ambushers dove away from his fire as he lashed both sides of the street. With the surviving occupants of the lead car clinging like baby opossums to its armored back, the second BTR began backing out of the killing ground.

  "—understand the sacrifices Russia has made in the name of civilization," said the man on the big screen in the wall of the Marrons' den. The camera switched to show the woman interviewing him, dressed all in white and leaning forward like a pointing dog. "For centuries we shielded Western civilization from the onslaughts of the East. More recently we have brought the benefits of the modern era to much of the East itself, in the process ending the bloody and arbitrary rule of the native emirs."

  He steepled his hands before him. "This confers upon the Russian people certain messianic rights."

  The woman turned toward the camera. "I'm Leslee Howe, and I'm speaking with noted Russian novelist and Radical-Traditionalist activist Yevgeniy Glazunov about the current crisis in Central Asia. We'll return after these words from your local stations."

  A wan young woman with lank blond hair, in her teens or early twenties, appeared in front of the Advertising Council logo. "I want someone to make decisions for me," she said, big-eyed. "Free to choose, free to lose."

  "Fw-uck," Richard Torrance said. He clicked the remote control as if command-detonating a claymore.

  This time it was a male ingenue in a woolly sweater, wandering in front of generic public service announcement trees with hands in pockets: "I used to feel access to information should be open and free. Then I found out how often it's abused—how some people encourage others to do things that aren't right for their community or themselves, or actively pass along knowledge of how to disobey the law. I found out that researchers might accidentally or even on purpose create some new life-form capable of wiping out all life on earth in hours. I didn't used to believe 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.' Now I know better."

  Click. "—not since Saddam Hussein has an upstart Islamic tyrant produced such a profound impact—"

  Click. "—Miracle Network report: 'Millennium's End: Getting Ready for the Rapture.' "

  Click. "When we come back, our Eye-of-the-Lord Investigative Team will show us shocking evidence of how local and federal police authority turn blind eyes to the Satanic activities of illegal role-playing gaming groups, but first, let Brother Jimmy—"

  "Jesus," Torrance said. "Jesus. Fuck this. Aren't you on the Net?"

  Elinor had left before dinner, pleading an early meeting of her regional Greenpeace executive committee and taking a balky Rebecca with her; she disapproved of Torrance. Richard insisted on fixing dinner, whipping up a fast stir-fry from ingredients on hand. It was excellent. He was vain about his cooking, and not without reason. Since then he and Marron had been male bonding, with alcohol for adhesive.

  Marron raised his head from his chest. He was sunk well down in his favorite leather chair, his legs propped on a footstool from about the lower thighs down.

  "No," he said muzzily. "Just cable." His old friend of Agency days had brought more than one bottle. Like the earlier Prohibition, current alcohol control laws failed to proscribe possession of liquor, just manufacture, sale, or transportation. "Just don't ask where it came from," Torrance had said with a grin.

  Now Torrance glowered at his host. "Don't be a weenie. You can trust me. We're comrades-in-arms, aren't we?"

  "No. Seriously. I don't have a satellite link. Ellie wouldn't hear of it, even if I was into that sort of thing."

  "Yeah, you were always Captain fucking America, weren't you? Gave up smoking in the seventies, wore condoms in the eighties, and now you don't eat meat. What are you going to give up when the end of the Double Cross rolls around? Air?"

  "I have my heart to think about," Marron said. "I'm not a kid anymore." Dick Torrance had always had a nasty streak, and it didn't only show when he had a load on. It was one of the reasons they had drifted apart, after Marron switched from CIA to NSA. You just had to be ready to ride it out.

  "Maybe your show will be on soon," Marron said placatingly.

  Torrance snorted. "No such luck. Not tonight." Federal Police was the most popular show on the air. Since a congressional compromise had defined violence as pornographic, leading to passage of a comprehensive bipartisan anti-porn package, television ran to carefully edited current events, nature shows, end-of-the-world evangelism, and white-bread sitcoms. On TV as in the courts and in the streets, the FedPols got to play by their own rules; Federal Police showed more skin and gunplay than all other legal shows rolled together.

  Or maybe, as Enforcement Secretary Doyle claimed, it reflected all-but-unanimous public approval of its subject.

  Marron gazed at his friend. "So, what brings you out here to the Front Range, anyway?"

  "The Biz. What else?"

  "I figured you'd be back in Washington, hip deep in planning for Operation Clean Sweep."

  Torrance jutted his chin and nodded. Clean Sweep was Department of Enforcement's and the FedPols' ambitious plan to carry out a systematic search of every dwelling and workplace in America. Approaching kickoff, it was all over the media— at least, had been until this Central Asian thing hit.

  "I am well and truly involved in the Big Broom, and it shall be righteous, have no fear," Torrance said. "But this is an iron I've been keeping hot, lo these many months." He gave Marron a lopsided grin. "Understand you had a little run-in with our boys this afternoon."

  "News travels fast."

  "We know everything. It's our fucking job." He took a deliberate pull and laughed out loud. "Wish I'd been there to see your face. You've faced down Sandinista patrols and death squads in Guatemala, and Amal militiamen in fucking Beirut. And there you were, sweating bullets with nothing to say in practically your own backyard."

  "I knew it wouldn't do any good."

  Torrance laughed again, visibly swelling with pleasure. "Fucking-A, fucking-A. We are incorruptible, indestructible, and we can do no wrong." He tipped the bottle up and killed it while TV light danced on the glass.

  "So you had something to do with that?" Marron had his head up and was watching his old friend very closely.

  "Been following the case for months, just say. Kind of a pet project, in fact."

  "You must be disappointed with the way things turned out. i "No trial."

  Torrance shrugged. "Hey. Street justice, you know?" He laughed softly to himself.

  He met Marron's eyes. "I could tell you some stories, my man. But you aren't on-line, if you know what I mean. Need to know, all like that."

  Marron sipped at his own bottle with suddenly diminished interest.

  "You really should have come over with us instead of going to No Such Agency," Torrance said softly. "We're where the action is. We're remaking this fucking country; we are stone what's happening."

  On the screen the Russian tipped his huge round head to one side. "Be perfectly clear about this one thing, Ms. Howe," he said. "We will never surrender so much as one square centimeter of Russian soil."

  "I like it where I am, Richard," Marron said.

  Chapter SEVEN

  Nikolay Stepanovich Kuliyev watched the heliostat flash of muzzle blasts winking at them from the small boat. He showed teeth beneath the sweep of his magnificent red mustac
he.

  "Do you believe these guys?" he asked, and banked the chopper right.

  He was back in Hinds again. That was the NATO name for them; Russians called them Gorbach, hunchback, or sometimes drew the obvious pun and called them Gorbachev, after the man who betrayed the army in Afghanistan. Actually, Kolya and most of his squad mates just called it "Hind," as often as not.

  As he saw it, your Hind series of attack helicopters had three big advantages:

  A. They were fast.

  B. They were well armored.

  C. They were the baddestAookmg aircraft in the history of man. Or at least since the German Stuka.

  They were also huge. And loud. In modern combat, to be detected was to die, and the dragonfly-on-steroids Hind was hard to miss. It could not hope to survive either a high-tech Western air-defense environment or an old-fashioned Warsaw Pact—a name that was starting to be whispered again, with the Germans acting like that—lead sky.

  In short, the Hind was designed to impress the natives. Like the Stuka, or the Americans' vaunted missile-magnet battleships.

  And the Hind had impressed in Afghanistan: the rebels— Kolya was never complacent enough to think of them as "bandits," which was indicative of why he was back in goddam Hinds—were afraid of the Mi-24, which they called the "flying tank," and of Spetsnaz. The rest of the Soviet/Afghan fraternal forces they regarded the way Geronimo felt about the Mexican Army: "We only need cartridges for Americans," the Apache leader said, at least according to a book Kolya had read. "Mexicans we kill with rocks."

  But the Afghans did have cartridges, including the immense 12.7mm ones digested by what they called the Dashaka. That is, the Soviet DShK heavy machine gun. The Russians provided these to their noble socialist allies in the DRA Army. Their noble socialist allies took them along with them when they deserted, so the mujahidin wouldn't kill them.

  The Mi-24 and its kin, the M-25 and Mi-35, really were armored, and their titanium plate was supposed to be invulnerable to Dashaka—a claim young Warrant Officer Kuliyev had been intensely skeptical of, even if he was a Komsomol brown-nose in those days. On the other hand, if they got above you, and fired down into your fuck-your-mother rotors as you made an attack run, they could dump your white ass right into the Panjsher, armor or no.