Donaldson exhaled, but wouldn’t get the chance to inhale: he saw her turn her good hand from her hair to a dark green ovoid object resting on the remote control equipment. She picked it up, dangling it in midair. Donaldson instantly recognized it as a gas bomb, sized small for use on armed helicopters. It was triggered by a laser proximity signal and would explode twice at half a meter aboveground, first to disperse a gaseous explosive, second to trigger the vapor. He couldn’t escape its range now if he were an arrow in flight.
He extended a placating hand. “Calm down, Major, calm down. Let’s not get too hasty here.” He gestured around him, and the marines lowered their guns. “Listen, things aren’t as serious as you might think. You’ll get the finest medical care. You’ll be sent to the best hospitals in Germany and return in the first POW exchange.”
The major smiled at him again, which encouraged him somewhat. “You don’t have to do something so barbaric. This is a civilized war, you know. It would go like clockwork, I could tell already when we crossed the Russian border twenty days ago. Most of your firepower had been destroyed by then. That remaining little scatter of gunfire was just the perfect confetti to greet this glorious expedition. Everything will go like clockwork, you see? There’s no need—”
“I know of an even more beautiful beginning,” the major said in unaccented English. Her soft voice could have come from heaven, could have made flames extinguish and iron yield. “On a lovely beach, with palm trees, and welcome banners hanging overhead. There were beautiful girls with long, waist-length hair and silk trousers that rustled as they moved among the young soldiers and adorned them with red-and-pink leis, smiling shyly at the gawking boys…. Do you know of this landing?”
Donaldson shook his head, confused.
“March eighth, 1965, at nine A.M. It was the scene awaiting the first American marine forces landing at China Beach, the start of the Vietnam War.”
Donaldson felt as if he’d been plunged into ice. His momentary calm vanished; his breathing sped and his voice started to shake. “No, Major, don’t do this to us! We’ve hardly killed anyone, they’re the ones who do all the killing,” he said, pointing out the window to the helicopters hovering in midair. “Those pilots there, and the computer missile guidance gentlemen in the mother ships out in space. But they’re all good people too. All their targets are just colored icons on their screen. They press a button or click a mouse, wait a bit, and the icon goes away. They’re all civilized folks. They don’t enjoy hurting people or anything, honest, they’re not evil—are you listening?”
The major nodded, smiling. Who ever said that the god of death would be ugly and terrible?
“I have a girlfriend. She’s working on her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. She’s beautiful like you, honest, and she attended the anti-war rally…” I should have listened to her, Donaldson thought. “Are you listening to me? Say something! Please, say something.”
The major gave her foe one last radiant smile. “Captain, I do my duty.”
A unit from the reinforcing Russian 104th Motorized Infantry Division was half a kilometer from the Flood operation station. They first heard a low explosion and saw the little storehouse in the broad, empty fields disappear in a cloud of white mist. Immediately after, a terrible cacophony a hundred times louder shook the ground. An enormous fireball emerged where the storehouse had been, the flames embroiled in black smoke rising high, transforming into a towering mushroom cloud, like a flower of lifeblood blooming in the expanse between heaven and earth.
“I know what you want. Don’t waste words, spit it out!” Marshal Levchenko said to the commander of the Caucasus Army.
“I want the electromagnetic conditions on the battlefield for the last two days to last another four days.”
“Surely you’re aware that seventy percent of our battlefield jamming teams have been destroyed? I can’t even give you another four hours!”
“In that case, our army won’t be able to arrive in position on time. NATO airstrikes have greatly slowed the rate at which our forces can assemble.”
“In that case, you might as well put a bullet in your head. The enemy is approaching Moscow. They’ve reached the position Guderian held seventy years ago.”
As he exited the war room, the commander of the Caucasus Army said in his heart, Moscow, endure!
Major General Felitov of the Taman Division was fully aware that his line could endure at most one more assault.
The enemy’s airstrikes and long-range strikes were slowly growing in intensity, while the Russian air cover was diminishing. The division had few tanks and armed helicopters left; this last stand would be borne on blood and flesh and little else.
The major general, dragging a leg broken by shrapnel, came out of the shelter using a rifle as a crutch. He saw that the new trenches were still shallow, unsurprising given that the majority of the soldiers here had been wounded in some way. But to his astonishment, neat breastworks about a half meter tall stood in front of the trenches.
What material could they have used to build a breastwork so quickly? He saw that a few branch-like shapes stuck out from the snow-covered breastwork. He came closer. They were pale, frozen human arms.
Rage boiled through him. He seized a colonel by the collar. “You bastard! Who told you to use the soldiers’ corpses as building materials?”
“I did,” the divisional chief of staff said evenly behind him. “We entered this new zone too quickly last night, and this is a crop field. We truly had nothing else to build with.”
They looked at each other silently. The chief of staff’s face was covered in rivulets of frozen blood, leaked from the bandage on his forehead.
A time passed. The two of them began to walk slowly along the trenches, along the breastworks made from youth, vitality, life. The general’s left hand held the rifle he used as a crutch; his right hand straightened his helmet, then saluted the breastworks. They were inspecting their troops for the last time.
They passed by a private with both legs blown off. The blood from his leg stumps had mixed with the snow and dirt into a reddish black mud, and the mud was now crusted over with ice. He lay with an anti-tank grenade in his arms. Raising his bloodless face, he grinned at the general. “I’m gonna stuff this into an Abrams’s treads.”
The cold winds stirred up gusts of snow mist, howling like an ancient battle paean.
“If I die first, please use me in this wall too. There’s no better place for me to end, truly,” the general said.
“We won’t be too long apart,” said the chief of staff, with his characteristic calm.
A staff officer came to inform Marshal Levchenko that the general director of the Russian Space Agency wanted to see him—the matter was urgent, involving Misha and the electronic battle.
Marshal Levchenko started at the sound of his son’s name. He’d already heard that Kalina had been killed in action, but aside from that, he couldn’t imagine what Misha had to do with the electronic battle a hundred million miles away. He couldn’t imagine what Misha had to do with any part of Earth now.
The general director came in with his people behind him. Without preamble, he gave a three-inch laser disc to Marshal Levchenko. “Marshal, this is the reply we received from the Vechnyy Buran an hour ago. He added afterward that this isn’t a private message, and that he hopes you’ll play it in front of all relevant personnel.”