Ralph Peters (10 page)

"
Machine guns,
"
Vargas shouted.
"
Use the fucking machine guns
.
"

But he knew it was already too late. He fired twice in the general direction of the horsemen, while beside him one of his men fell to a sniper's bullet.

The fucking gringos had used the noise of the helicopters to cover the approach of their goddamned horses. Right up the damned trail. And they had infiltrated snipers into the village. The machine guns had never had a chance to speak.

A fucking horse cavalry charge. Who would ever have thought of such a crazy idea?

Down the street, men in U.S. Army uniforms began to swing from their saddles, smashing and shooting their way into the buildings. Others rode onward, shrieking at the top of their lungs and laying down suppressive fire in their path.

Suddenly, Vargas knew exactly who had thought of such a crazy idea. He felt his shooting hand waver. The one of whom the scout had spoken. This fucking El Diablo.

Vargas could see the details of the riders' helmets and flak jackets in the pure mountain light. He could see their jouncing hand grenades and the drab cloth bandoliers. He could see their faces. And the flaring nostrils and huge eyes of the horses.

He ran back for the cover of the cantina, careening off Morita in his haste. Instantly, the Japanese threw up his hands at the morning and tumbled back through the blanketed doorway, exploding with blood.

The bullet had been intended for Vargas.

There were times when you were beaten. All you could do was survive to take your revenge another day.

With the enemy's horses pounding in the street behind him, Vargas raced through the front room of the cantina, sweeping chairs out of his way with a crazy hand. He pushed through the living quarters of the bartender and his family. A woman screamed in the body-scented dusk, and Vargas banged his knee against a jut of furniture.

Cursing, he ripped open the flimsy back door and was about to dash for the nearest animal shed when he saw that the gringos had already beaten him to it.

They were everywhere.

He jerked inside the cantina building just as a splash of bullets struck the nearby wall.

Behind his back, the bartender's wife shrieked and prayed, while her man cursed her and told her to shut up. Annoyed at his helplessness, Vargas turned around and shot them both.

Back in the barroom, he hurriedly smashed out the storm lantern with the butt of his pistol. But it was already light enough for him to see Morita's wondering stare. The man's corpse continued to discharge blood over the splintering planks.

Outside the shooting dwindled. Vargas heard Anglo voices calling out commands in elementary Spanish. Officers to prisoners.

He crouched behind the bar. There was a broken-out the window across the room, but he knew instinctively that it offered no safety. He considered surrendering. But his fear of punishment held him back. He had done things that he did not believe the gringos were ready to forgive.

With shaking fingers, he stripped off the precious gunbelt he had taken from the American general and stuffed it into a cabinet, hiding it behind dusty bottles of beer.

He was very much afraid. And he was aware of his fear. He had not believed that he, of all men, could ever be this afraid.

Now there was only the occasional snort of a horse, a resting hoof. The world had become an astonishingly quiet place. The silence was bigger in his ears than the sound of the helicopters had been.

He heard the faint jangle of spurs.

His shooting hand felt as wet as if he had dipped it in a bucket. He checked the slippery pistol, making sure that he had a round chambered.

The music of the spurs grew louder. He could hear booted footsteps.

Someone began to whistle.

It was morbid. Terrible. The melody was far too light and joyful. The notes cascaded through the morning, swooping like a small bird in flight. The tune was almost something to make a man dance.

The boots approached the cantina. Then everything stopped. No more metal tangle of spurs. No footsteps. The whistling, too, ceased abruptly.

Vargas hunkered lower. Unwilling to look, unwilling to risk being seen. He felt himself shaking. It was unthinkable that he might die here, in such dusty unimportance. He was not ready.

He realized that he was weeping. And praying. It had be
gun
automatically, and he could not stop himself.
M
other of God
. . .

He heard the soft rustle of cloth, and he knew it was the blanket being drawn away from the doorframe. It was
the perfect time to rise and fire. But he could not will himself to move.

The melody of the spurs began again. But the tempo was slower now, like the music at a funeral. Vargas followed each next footfall across the room. There was a heavier note
as
the intruder stepped over Morita's body. The spurs became unbelievably, unbearably loud.

Somewhere in the middle of the room, his opponent stopped.

Silence.

Vargas made himself ready. Hurriedly he crossed himself with the pistol in his hand. He seemed unable to fill his lungs with the breath he needed.

"
Don't move, gringo,
"
he shouted. But he could not move himself. He remained crouched in his hiding place, staring up from the canyon behind the bar, able to see only the blistered paint on the ceiling.

He
clutched
his gun, tightening his bowels. Imagining the
other
man somewhere out in the vast freedom of the room.

"
I
know your fucking rules, man,
"
Vargas called out.
"
You can't kill me. I'm a prisoner of war, man.
"

Silence. It went on so long that dust seemed to settle and stale on a man's ears. Then a slow voice spoke in perfect Spanish.

"
Throw your weapons over the bar. Then raise your hands. Keep the palms open and turned toward me. Get up slowly.
"

"
All right
,
man,
"
Vargas shouted, his voice hitting its highest pitch. He was already rising. He still held the gun in his hand, swinging it around toward the other man's voice. He squeezed the trigger too soon.

The last thing Vargas saw was the face of a devil.

4

Moscow

2020

The real veterans, the women who had been here
so many times they had lost count, said it was nothing. Less of a bother than having a tooth pulled. But the slow cramping deep inside made Valya want to draw her knees as close to her chin as bones and sinews allowed. Yet she did not move. She felt as though all of the energy had been bled out of her, and the comforting movement of her knees remained a vision, a futile dream. Her legs lay still, extended. Dead things. Only her head had turned out of the corpselike position in which the assistants had left her. She faced the wall at the end of the ward, facing away from herself, away from her life, away from everything. Staring at chipped pipes and plaster that had not been painted or even scrubbed down for decades.

She focused casually on a spray of brown droplets that trailed along the gray wall. Old stains, the beads and speckles seemed to have grown into the surface, and it was impossible to tell now whether their substance was old blood or the residue of waste. The business had been hard on her before. But Valya did not remember it as being quite this hard. Yes, it had seemed like a punishment then too. But not such a blunt punishment. Windows painted over, discoloring the cold daylight. The iron of the bedstead. She was conscious of a sharp, metallic clattering and
terse voices in the open ward. But her humiliating inability to move, the dead weight of sickness in her belly, seemed to insulate her from practical concerns. If they could not help her, she would settle for being left alone on this bed whose sheets had not been changed under the day's succession of women.

Behind the masking smell of disinfectant, a morbid odor brewed. Valya sensed that she knew its identity very well, I but each time she almost named it, the label dissolved on her tongue, teasing her, prickling her ruined nerves. And her failure to find the word, to anchor reality with the hard specificity of language, left her somehow more alone than she had been in the emptiness of the previous moment. She thought of the lies she had needed to tell, another use of words, to escape from the routine of the school for a day. Wondering how much they knew or divined. Superiors sour with small authority. And the children with no color in their faces. The usage of definite and indefinite articles in the English language....

No. She would not think of that now. Especially not of the children. Nor of Yuri. And where was he now? God, the war. How could there be a war? It was impossible to imagine. There was no sound of war. Only the sameness; of the evening news. Yuri was fighting in a war. She knew it to be a fact. Yet, it held no meaningful reality for her. And it was unclean to think of Yuri now.

She wished she could clear her mind of all thought. To purge herself of present knowing like some mystic. But the harder she tried to empty her mind, the more insistently the images of her life tumbled out of their mental graves. Beds, lies, betrayals. The worst thieveries. And the feel of a new man's whiskers scrubbing her chin. The distinctiveness of the breath.

More than anything else, she hated the weakness. She hated any kind of weakness in herself, struggling against it. Only to grow weaker still, a greater fool. And now this dull physical weakness tethering her to this bed. And the faint, constant nausea.

Most of the other women in the ward remained silent. There was no desire to make new friends here, or to be known even by sight. Like a dirty train station, the clinic was a place through which to pass as quickly and anonymously as possible.

A girl became hysterical. Valya tried to keep her total focus on the plaster desert of the wall. But the voice, young and stupid with pain, would not relent. Valya thought that, if only she could find the strength to rise, she would slap the girl. Hard.

"
First-timer,
"
a woman's voice announced to anonymous neighbors. The remark was answered by cackling laughter and snickers.

Footsteps came down the ward.

An unwilling alertness in Valya isolated the sound. Heavy. Mannish. Cheap shoes on broken tile. Valya closed her eyes. She felt as though she would give anything she owned to lie undisturbed just a few minutes longer. Her best dress, the red perfect dress from America. The jacket from France that Naritsky had given her to wear to the party with the foreigners. The few precious shreds of her life. Take them.

"
Patient!
"
The word was dreary from years of repetition.
"
Patient. Your time is up.
"

Reluctantly, Valya opened her eyes, turning her head slightly.

"
Patient. Time to go.
"

"
I...
feel ill,
"
Valya said, and, as she listened to herself, she despised the cowardice, the subservience in her voice. Yet she went on.
"
I need to lie here for a few more minutes. Please.
"

"
This isn't your private apartment. Your time is up. And you're not bleeding.
"

Valya looked up at the shapeless creature beside the bed. Barely recognizable as a woman. The attendant's gray uniform smock looked as though it had been last washed long ago, in dirty dishwater, and her fallen bosom strained at a plastic button that did not match the others holding the cloth stretched over a lifetime of poor diet. When the attendant spoke, no anger animated her voice. There was no real emotion at all. Merely the unfeeling voice of duty, tired of repeating itself. The lack of emotion rendered the voice unassailable.

For a moment, Valya looked up into the woman's face, trying to find her eyes. But there was no spirit in them. Bits of chipped glass in a mask of broken veins, divided by a drunkard's nose.

Will that be me? Valya thought in sudden terror. Is a creature like this waiting inside of me, just waiting to appear? The thought seemed worse than dying.

In a last, uncontrolled attempt at fending off the attendant, Valya shook her head.

The older woman's expression did not seem to alter, but, then, in the instant before the woman spoke, Valya realized that the face had, indeed, changed, hardening into a mask of professional armor, refusing to regard Valya as anything more than a number.

"
The bed is needed. Get up.
"

Valya surprised herself with her ability to rise unassisted. She imagined a real, well-defined cavity inside herself, a place of vacancy and coldness, and the ability to bring her legs so easily together and then to force them over the side of the bed astonished her.

"
I think I'm bleeding,
"
Valya said.

"
No, you're not,
"
the attendant said.
"
I'd see it.
"
But she let her eyes trail down below Valya's waist. A flicker of doubt.
"
Finish dressing and report to the desk.
"

The woman left. And even before Valya could draw on her litter of clothing, another young woman appeared. Guided impatiently by a thickset woman in uniform who might have been a sister to the one who had roused Valya.

The new girl was a colorless blonde, whose hair and complexion struck Valya as much less vivid than her own, possessed of less of the tones men wanted. Yet, some man had wanted her. As the girl approached the bed her eyes looked through Valya, fumbling with reality. Her skin was white to the point of translucence, as though she had lost far too much blood. Steered by the attendant, she collapsed onto the soiled bed just as Valya herself had recently done, without regard for Valya or anyone else on earth. She stared at the ceiling.

Valya steadied herself against the wall, drawing on a stocking. The attendant marched away. And the girl touched herself timidly, as if expecting to discover some terrible change. Then her lower lip began to flutter. At first Valya thought the girl would speak, perhaps asking for help. Instead, she simply began to cry, a lanky child smashed by an adult world.

Valya averted her eyes, refusing to make a gesture toward the girl. But as she looked away she found herself trapped by the gaze of a solid little woman dangling darkhaired calves over the edge of a bed. Somewhere in her thirties, the woman had coal-black hair and a bit of a mustache. Georgian, perhaps. Her face bore the scars of disease, but otherwise she looked as robust as if she'd merely been on an outing. She grinned at Valya as though she had only been in to have her temperature taken.

"
If they can't take the consequences, they shouldn't be so quick to spread their legs,
"
the woman said with a slight accent, nodding proudly to the sickened girl who had taken possession of Valya's bed.
"
They all want to have their fun, then they don't want to pay the price.
"

Valya broke away from the woman's stare and worked unsteadily down between the rows of beds toward the exit. But the harder she tried to avert her eyes, the more she seemed to see. She tried to force her eyes down to the floor, to simply scan her next steps, but the sight of old stains and splashes, chips and scuffs, only aggravated her feeling of hopelessness. Why couldn't they take a bucket of water to it? It certainly was not sanitary. Weak-legged, she suddenly saw her future with perfect clairvoyance. Another nondescript clinic. Another bed not quite dirty enough to force a change of sheets. Another . . .

What kind of a life was this?

Trailing her little bag of essentials, Valya stood in line before the desk. She breathed deeply, fighting the nausea, but the effort only poisoned her with bad air. She felt sweat prickling under her clothing, polishing her forehead. She thought that she would collapse at any moment, that she would be terribly sick. Then they would see. Then they would understand. . . .

But nothing occurred beyond the slow falling away of the queue ahead of her, until she stood before the clerk at the desk. The woman's hair was drawn back into a strict
bun, and the skin stretched over her lean features with no hint of softness or resilience. She did not look up from her paperwork.

"
Patient's name?
"

"
Babryshkina. Valentina Ivanovna.
"

"
Difficulties?
"

For an instant, Valya imagined herself telling this woman how sick she felt, how badly she needed to lie down just a little longer.

"
No.
"

"
Sign here, Comrade.
"

Valya bent down over the emptiness that seemed to grow larger in her with each new thought or action. She almost wished she would discover some terrible wetness on her legs that would make them let her rest a little while.

She signed the form.

"
And
here, Comrade. In two places.
"

Valya made no effort to read the forms. She signed where she had been told to sign, wanting now to be gone from the place.

Without a discernible gesture of completion, the woman behind the desk said,
"
Next.
"