The KGB Border Guard had set up its breeding grounds in these grasslands.
The facility, administered by the Committee for the Purchase and Rearing of Guard/War Dogs, was the largest anywhere in the USSR. It was outfitted with equipment for training inexperienced dogs before they were assigned to their units. During the past two years everything had been updated. Because there was a new man in charge. And because the five remaining children of those two dog heroes, Belka and Strelka, had been welcomed to the camp. They were no longer puppies. They were fully mature. Already they were creating the next generation. Getting pregnant, making others pregnant. The puppies were Russian laika, of course, but the facility head decided to mate them with different breeds. For the future—to create a corps of dogs loyal to the homeland. They would draw on these bloodlines, on the bloodlines of those five puppies’ parents, to establish a corps of the mightiest dogs on the planet. They had gathered magnificent males, magnificent bitches. These dogs contributed the use of their wombs, their sperm. A third generation of heroes was being brought into the world, litter after litter.
The space dogs’ grandchildren.
Woof! you barked.
I’VE ARRIVED! you announced.
Inside the breeding grounds, 213 dogs froze in their tracks. Dogs with standing ears raised their heads; dogs with floppy ears raised their tails. WHO HAS ARRIVED? they were saying. LISTEN TO HOW STRONG THAT VOICE IS! WHO IS IT WHO IS IT WHO IS IT? Each dog felt that the other dog, the one that barked, had been calling to her, or to him. YOU, YES YOU.
I’LL HAVE MY WAY WITH YOU! you barked.
I’LL MAKE YOU PREGNANT! you barked. You, Anubis, you barked.
TO LIVE!
And the dogs were afraid. Each time you barked in the breeding grounds, the dogs broke into a commotion. Some were struck with terror. Some suddenly went into heat. The bitches got wet between their legs, while the males leapt at their handlers’ legs and waists, at nearby poles, and simulated intercourse. People hurried this way and that, unsure what was happening. Woof! you barked again. And again: Woof! At last, you were almost there! But you weren’t yet inside. You were outside the fence. You stood three feet away. The fence was electrified. You had sensed that, of course. You were clever. You saw danger before it struck. You had made it this far, after all, from the Arctic Ocean. You had come, what’s more, by way of Alaska. And you had another strength too: you could read the workings of destiny before it became manifest.
So you waited.
For something… SOMETHING.
Barking all the while.
Barking. And it came.
Riding a horse.
A human.
“So you’re the one barking,” he said in Russian.
Woof! you answered.
“You want to go inside?” he asked. “Caught the scent of our bitches?”
Woof! you answered.
“You’re male?” he said, appraising you. “And I see you’re erect,” the young man who was in charge of the facility said, still atop his horse, impressed.
OF COURSE, you said.
The young man lowered his Kalashnikov automatic rifle, took aim.
But no gun was going to scare you off.
I’VE ARRIVED! you barked.
“You seem,” the young man continued in Russian, speaking entirely seriously even though you were a dog, somehow maintaining his dignity as a commissioned officer, “to be saying that you’re the dog, the breeder male, I’ve been waiting for. What confidence!”
I’VE ARRIVED! you barked.
“Is it true? Have you really come?”
IT’S TRUE! you barked.
“You’re built a bit like a wolf,” the young commissioned officer said. He had dismounted by now. You stood facing each other through the fence, which buzzed with electric current. “You’ve got wolf blood in you? Is that it? Did you know how close wolves are to German shepherds? You know about German shepherds? A breed created just sixty years ago, specifically to fight in war? They’re war dogs through and through. People wanted the perfect build for war, and they made it. That’s what a German shepherd is.”
Woof!
“Are you a natural… ideal?”
Woof! you answered.
“If you want a bitch, I’ll let you have one. She’s good. Young animal from a good line. But she’s not complete. She’s missing something. She’s not a soldier. You understand what I’m saying? I want a dog with a soldier’s pride. I’m waiting for puppies that have that. How about it? I’ll let you have her, see what happens. Shoot your sperm into her. I can see you’re special. I see that erection of yours. All right.”
The young commissioned officer had given you his permission.
It had happened.
“My passion brought you here. It’s true, I can see that. Take them. The second generation of heroes, and the third. If the puppies you sire are as good as I expect, I’ll name them as the true successors. The males will all be Belka, the bitches will be Strelka. That will be the mark of their legitimacy. The sign that I approved of them. The proof.”
Woof!
“Come!”
You understood that command. You leapt the fence. Jumped right over. Just like that. And you became a Soviet dog.
“Woof!”
The Boss began by sending three “bullets.” He shipped them off from Toyama Port on a fishing boat late one night, and from there they transferred mid-ocean to the cargo vessel that carried them to a port in the Primorsky Krai. After that, he sent seven more bullets. Trained assassins. Up to this point, they were all new recruits, youngsters. Show us what you can fucking do for the organization, boys, he’d told the new recruits, all barely in their twenties. Think of it as a sort of hustle. Go pop a few of them fuckhead Ruskies for me.
He had done well, he thought, put some fear into them. Can’t have ’em fucking besmirching the old escutcheon now, can we? And in fact, the young guns had brought in a whopping sum. A cool forty million yen per head. Japanese yen. Even when you factored in “transport fees” for illegal entry and the various other little presents they had to distribute, and even if you offered the bullets—or their families, in some cases—a reward for seeing their jobs through to a successful conclusion, the profits that came streaming into the organization were still unfuckingbelievable. And of course, the Boss mused, it wasn’t just that nice cash reward; I also set it up so they could spend the eve of the attack whooping it up with beautiful white chicks. Sexy Slavic sisters. Blond-haired blue-eyed supermodel-class hotties, fuck yeah. Some harem. Bet they knocked themselves out, lucky pricks. Then I had ’em batten the hatches with vodka and caviar. Very nice indeed. Shows what a fucking tenderhearted yakuza daddy I’ve been.
The man—the Boss as they called him—cast his thoughts back, agony written all over his face. The thing was, the bullets were just that. Bullets. They went out and didn’t come back. In the beginning, they’d had better than a fifty percent survival rate, but now it had sagged below twenty percent. Only one in five made it back alive, in other words. If that. But what choice did he have? He had to keep sending the poor fuckers in. Stormtroopers. He hunted around for hit men who wouldn’t just follow the money, going through one of his “brothers” from his time in the clink. He located four, trained ’em to do their work as bullets, and sent ’em off on a Russian transport vessel, this time from Niigata Port. He snuck ’em in without dicking around, no stupid paperwork. Next he picked up some fucking traitors. Dickheads who’d betrayed their gang and were lying low under aliases, trying to keep from getting caught in the wide net their old bosses cast. He sent off eight of them, one after another. Gave ’em good tools. A nice cache of pistols: Tokarevs; Makarovs; Italian-made automatics; M-16s that had found their way out of American bases, now equipped with 40mm grenade launchers; Uzis; and last but not least twenty-three hand grenades and seventeen sticks of dynamite. Plus some other stuff.