Ralph Peters (64 page)

"
You
do
want to help us, don't you
?
"

21

3
November 2020

Noburu shut his eyes and
listened. Even
through
the bunkered thickness
of
the walls
and bulletproof glass,
he
could hear
them out there in
the night.
The people. Gathering in defiance of the
outbreak of
plague
that had
begun to haunt the city.
Tens of thousands of them, there
was no way of counting
them with precision. Inside the
headquarters complex,
his
staff
continued to celebrate the
success of the Scramblers,
undeterred. While, out in the
darkness, men
who
answered
to
another
god chanted their
fates in an opaque desert
language.

Noburu looked at his
aide's neatly uniformed back.
Akiro sat dutifully
at
the command
information console, sifting,
sifting.
Noburu
had
unsettled the younger man with
a remark made an hour
before.
He
knew that Akiro was
still trying to find an innocent
interpretation for his general's
words. But Noburu
also knew that the aide would
not
look
in the right
places.

The rhythmic chanting
echoed relentlessly through the
walls.

"
Death
to Japan,
"
they
cried.

Noburu
had not
understood the words at first. That had
required a translator. But he had
understood the situation
immediately. He
had been waiting for it.

The demonstrators had begun to gather even as the Scramblers did their work. His staff counterintelligence officer reported that the rally began in the old quarter, in the shadow of the Virgin's Tower. A flash outbreak of Runciman's disease had begun to gnaw its way in through the city's windows and doors. Yet, the Azeris had gathered by the thousands. They came as if called by animal instinct, by scent. How would Tokyo explain it? Marginally literate roustabouts had known of the vast scale of the Iranian and rebel defeat almost as swiftly as Noburu himself. In response, they materialized out of alleyways, or descended from the tainted heights of apartment blocks where the elevator shafts were useful only for the disposal of garbage, where bad water trickled in the taps, when water came at all. The faithful came in from the vast belt of slums that ringed the official city, from homes made of pasteboard and tin, from quarters in abandoned railcars that were already in the possession of a third generation of the same family. They came under banners green and black, the colors of Allah, the colors of death. In the heart of the headquarters building, their voices had been audible before they halfway climbed the hill, and now, as they formed a great crescent around the front of the military complex, their voices reached down into the stone depths of the mountainside. To the buried operations center, where Noburu's officers were drinking victory toasts in confident oblivion.

Noburu had gone out into the dying afternoon to have a look for himself, brushing off the protests of his subordinates and the local national guards, all of whom insisted that the situation was too dangerous.

"
What are they saying?
"
he had demanded of his escorts as they braved the pollution-scented air.
"
What do the words mean?
"

The light had the texture of gauze. The men who spoke the local language averted their eyes in shame.

"
What is it?
"
Noburu insisted.
"
What does the chanting mean?
"

A local national officer in charge of security looked at Noburu like a bad child caught out.
"
They say,
'Death
to Japan.'
"

Death to Japan. Ah, yes.

Death. To Japan.

He had expected the process to take a little longer. But then he had been wrong about so many things.

Death to Japan.

Couldn't they feel it? How could they all remain so smug? Didn't they understand? The end was coming, Scramblers or not.

Death to Japan. The crowd did not speak with a human voice. The articulated passions had nothing to do with the reasoning of the individual conscience. All were subsumed in a hugeness that no extant terms could explain. The crowd had swarmed into an entity that was vast, deaf, and blind. No single element could make a difference. No counsel of logic would move them. It was as if a god had closed his mighty hands over their ears. The crowd raged, and knew no fear.

Noburu imagined the clinical language with which a Tokyo staff officer would master the event.

"
Please,
"
the local man pleaded with Noburu,
"
you are to go no closer.
"

Noburu walked onward toward the big steel gates that shut the mob out of the compound.

"
Mr. General, please not to go there.
"

Noburu walked on. In the last weak sun. Drawn by the single voice of the crowd, as if a woman had spoken his name in the dark.

"
Please
.
"

The headquarters building was shaped like a U with short sides, forming a courtyard that opened out onto a broader space that functioned alternately as a parking area for military vehicles or as a parade ground. It was bare now, with the austerity of wartime. Beyond the cobbled and cemented space, the wall rose, defining the perimeter of the compound. The wall was built to a height greater than the tallest man and unruly coils of concertina wire stretched along its top, connecting intermittent guard towers from which automatic weapons scanned silently over the excluded crowds.

Noburu headed straight for the central gate. Closed now, the two oversize steel doors were crowned with spikes, a number of which had been bent or broken off. Noburu had no clear plan of action. He just wanted to see the beginning of the end with his own eyes.

The first twilight mellowed in the wall's shadow. The mob called out to him, begging him to hurry.

The security chief caught up with Noburu and tugged at his sleeve, pleading.

Both men stopped.

Before their eyes, men had begun to fly through the air. Soaring above the wall. Men with invisible wings.

The first few did not fly high enough. They caught in the curls of wire atop the wall, then hung limply. One sailed out of the low sky only to land gruesomely atop the spikes of the gate, impaling himself without a sound.

Noburu was baffled. Was this some new mystery of the East?

In a matter of seconds, half a dozen of the enchanted men had snared themselves in their attempt to soar over the wall and join Noburu in the enclave. They accepted the pain of their failures with remarkable stoicism. Wordlessly entangling themselves in the midst of the razor-sharp loops, the men sprawled their arms and legs across the barrier. They did not even flinch when the wire caught at their necks and heads. They appeared immune to pain. They flew through the sky, landed short, and took their uncomfortable rest. The man whose torso had been skewered atop the gate did not make a sound.

More and more of the odd angels rose from the crowd beyond the wall. Noburu could not understand the bizarre acrobatics. His mind filled with decades of old news film. Moslem fanatics lashing themselves mercilessly for the love of God. Riots, revolutions. Burning cities. The Arabian nights—and the tormented days. Endless calls for blood. Once, he knew, the Azeris had gathered to call for death to the Armenians, later for death to the Russians. Before that, their brethren to the south had howled,
"
Death to America.
"

Now it was
"
Death to Japan.
"
As he had known it would
be.

Oh, pride of man, he thought, and his heart filled with
sorrow for his people.

At last one of the dervishes cleared the height of the gate. He arced just above his impaled brother, twisting in his flight, and dropped with a careless thud just a few feet from Noburu and his sole remaining escort.

The security officer had his pistol at the ready. He hustled toward the intruder, barking orders.

The visitor did not stir.

Suddenly, the security officer arched backward, away from the body. It was an exaggerated gesture, and it reminded Noburu of the way a startled cat could stop abruptly, pulling back its snout from evident trouble.

The security officer turned and bolted unceremoniously past Noburu. The man gibbered, and Noburu could make out only a single word:

"
Plague.
"

Noburu walked forward until his toes had almost touched the body. The two men stared at each other. The dead citizen of Baku gazed up at the immaculate Japanese general, and the general peered back down in still curiosity.

Runciman's disease. It was unmistakable. The marbled discoloration of the skin. The look of pain that lasted beyond death. The corpse lay broken on the ground, in a fitting posture of agony.

Tokyo needed to see this, Noburu thought, raising his eyes back up to the bodies strung along the wire. Tokyo expected gratitude, treaties, observed legalities, interest on investments. Tokyo expected the world to make sense.

Another body cleared the wall and hit the ground with a thud.

Tokyo wanted thanks. And here it was.

Wondrous gifts flew through the air in this country. The people generously gave up their dead. Such a beautiful gift. Expressive. Noburu would have liked to have wrapped up at least one of the bodies and sent it to the Tokyo General Staff.

Noburu let his attention sink back to the corpse at his feet. You were lucky, he told the dead man. You were
one of our friends. Had you been one of Japan's enemies, had you passed your years in the city of Orsk, or had you been one of those American soldiers, your suffering would only be beginning.

The crowd beyond the wall erupted in a scream that had the force of a great storm compacted into a single moment. It pierced Noburu. It was impossible to assign a cataloged emotion to the scream. The common words used to define the heart did not suffice.

We are worse than any other animal, Noburu thought. And he bent down to close the corpse's eyes.

He turned back into the parade ground's lengthening shadows, to the small group of officers awaiting him in horror.

"
It's all right,
"
Noburu assured them.
"
My shots are up-to-date. Tokyo has taken care of everything.
"

He gave an order to the effect that the guards were to hold their fire unless there was an attempt to penetrate the facility. After that, he did not look back. But he continued to see everything. The dream warrior saw. The faces of the vengeful dead, the population of Orsk, quivering in wonder, and the hallucinatory Americans from Africa, who came to Noburu even in the lightest doze now. Those dead dream-Americans were the worst of all, far worse than the reality of a diseased corpse hurled over a wall. Each time they came to him they grew larger and more clear. They came ever closer. Soon they would touch him. The dream warrior knew that it was finished.

In the controlled coolness of Noburu's office, Akiro assured the general that the disturbance was an aberration, inspired by false reports and likely provoked by the Americans as part of a devious plan.

Noburu looked at the younger man in wonder.

"
Do you really believe,
"
Noburu asked,
"
that the people out there would listen to the Americans?
"

"
Tokyo says—
"

"
Tokyo is far away, Akiro.
"

"
The intelligence officer says—
"

"
He's lying, Akiro. He doesn't know.
"

It was the turn of the aide to look shocked. It was im
possible for a Japanese general to say outright that another officer, however junior, had lied.

"
He's afraid,
"
Noburu went on, trying to explain to the younger man, to reach him.
"
He doesn't understand what's happening. His spirit is in Tokyo.
"

"
Sir,
"
the aide said,
"
it is impossible to believe that these people would turn against us without provocation. First of all, we have given them everything, and, secondly, they need us. Without us—
"