“Come, kid. We’re almost finished.”
Thinking wild, perverted thoughts, Pete walks up to the couple.
“Good God!” he exclaims upon seeing what Nooria is doing. “Did you get that from Sancho’s men?”
Tarasov looks at the wound on his chest Nooria is treating.
“No petty thug could inflict such a cut on me. How did you sleep?”
“Restlessly.”
“No wonder. The Top told me you have a sleepwalking problem. Outch!” Tarasov scowls. “That wound hurts enough without you biting my nipple.”
“Sorry, I’m just playing a little.”
Nooria leans closer to the wound she is sewing up and bites off the yarn protruding from the stitch. “Here you go—done. You behaved very bravely.”
Tarasov gives a long sigh of relief and kisses Nooria’s hand as she stays. She giggles, nonchalantly adjusts the jeans on her hip and wipes off a short piece of yarn from her red sweater. In Pete’s eyes, the strange couple looks as if they’d be way beyond niceties like saying thank you to each other.
“Tea or coffee?” she asks, making her way to the kitchenette.
“Coffee. Pete?”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Little brother will get herbal tea,” comes her reply from the kitchenette. “I prepared it myself.”
“You better don’t contradict her,” Tarasov says with a smirk, seeing the disappointment on Pete’s face. “Sit down. Let’s have a chat.”
“Tell me first—is she really my stepsister?”
“Yes, she is—”
“She looks hot in those jeans and with all that long hair.”
“—and Nooria being my wife makes me your stepbrother-in-law. That’s our proper degree of kinship. We found it out last night with the Top over a bottle of whiskey.”
“Geez. Could this family get any queerer than that?”
“Let’s forget the in-law part. Just listen to me, as your stepbrother—”
“I want to know more about her. Who is she, actually? And what happened to her face?”
“To answer your questions I need to tell you your father’s story in a nutshell, although a cartridge shell would be more appropriate.”
“Tell me one reason why I should be listening to that.”
“You think I came to see Disney World, huh?” Tarasov asks with a hint of anger in his voice. “Your father saved many good people to put me in debt. Finding and telling you what I got to say is what I have to do in exchange. Better listen up, Pete.”
“I already know his story,” Pete says with a shrug but sits down. “First he went on a killing spree with his Marines, then mutinied. Sorry if I’m not too proud of him.”
Tarasov sighs and drums his fingers on the armrest of his chair. “First things first—you’ve been a Marine yourself and know how the drill goes about being the most badass fighting machines in the world.”
“I call it brainwashing.”
“During the Bush war, he struggled with the idea of fighting with one of his hands tied to his back. He believed that a brutal enemy can only be beaten by displaying the same brutality.”
“I know where the story goes. He lost it and massacred a whole village. It’s been all over the news back then.”
“Did you ever reflect on why it was on the news?”
“Why should I have?”
“Because that ambush was to provoke your father’s Marines into fighting back with full force, and staged such way that a news crew could record it from a perfect angle. It started with setting a nurse school on fire and… let’s say, abusing a girl who stood up against them. It was that girl who warned your father’s men about the bad guys. The village was destroyed in the fight. Once your troops left, the bad guys came back and littered the ruins with bodies of civilians they had killed themselves, arranged in a way to look even more disturbing on TV. That news crew paid them well—and then paid with their life too when they fell out with the terrorists over money. All that was witnessed by a shepherdess who managed to escape. It wasn’t easy, but with her help I found proof of all this.”
“That may be so, but then they revolted. Marines! You get that? Jesus, what a fucked up war. Marines never ever revolted. They are the semper fidelis, for chrissakes! It makes me sick to think of my father being part of that! Afghanistan—fuck that place.”
“Your father was between hammer and anvil, so to say. On one hand, he was faithful to his country and on the other, he knew that his country demanded an impossible victory from him. In his eyes, achieving victory for America was impossible because America itself prevented him from dealing with the enemy the proper way.”
“This doesn’t give me anything.”
“In his opinion, the war could have been won only by being fearsome and brutal because that’s the only language they understand. But he saw that whenever your soldiers behaved like that they got punished—for painting obscenities on bombs, pissing on the bodies of killed enemies, burning their bodies and ’holy’ books… As he said, to be invincible one must be feared—kill one man, terrorize a thousand. But in that war, whenever his country killed one man she apologized to ten thousand. He said, America is more afraid of judgment than her enemies and that war proved him right—in the end it was judgment that defeated his country. I’m not saying that subscribe to his point of view entirely but merely repeat his words.”
“You Russians were less squeamish during your own war there but still got your ass kicked. How about that, huh?”
“First, I’m not Russian but Ukrainian. Second, our ass wasn’t kicked. We were on the brink of victory when you Americans, in all your naivety, thought that anyone fighting the USSR must be a good guy and delivered Stinger missiles to the dushmans. It compromised our airborne operations which proved very, very effective until then and—” Tarasov waves. “Oh never mind, I got carried away. Shortly after that incident, your father’s unit was sent to clean up a place called the City of Screams. It’s a ruin in the middle of nothing, called that because the Mongols massacred there a whole town several hundred years ago—”
Nooria enters with two mugs of steaming coffee and tea, then leaves without a word. Pete sniffs at the beverage that has a dark brown color and smells of herbs. Even the vapor carries a calming effect.
“But what’s really dreadful is what lies below the ruins,” Tarasov carries on after sipping on his coffee. “It’s a node of the Noosphere or so I believe, something that we have in our own Exclusion Zone, but this one is about pure evil.”
“The—Noosphere?” Pete asks and wrinkles his forehead.
Tarasov reflects for a moment. “It’s something to all humanity like a signal is to cell phones. We don’t understand its nature. Just like an ordinary user wouldn’t know much about cell phone signals. Anyway, in the New Zone, it reduces people and animals alike to their primordial instinct of aggression and mutates their souls and bodies into mere tools of such destructive instinct. It was bound by an ancient power that the bad guys destroyed in 2001. The rest is history. Your father and his best men were exposed to this evil but it did only partly overcome them. It pushed them over the edge though and they revolted, but were too disciplined and too loyal to each other to start killing each other.”
Tarasov’s face darkens as he recalls his own experiences in the catacombs.
”Anyway, what they ultimately did was the only way to win a war in Afghanistan. Picking a loyal ally, giving it its own little land and ruling over the rest together. It doesn’t go without going native, and that’s what happened to your father and his men. It seems they’ve found a new homeland there and consider it the only place in the world where they can live with their honor intact. In the Tribe’s understanding, loyalty to a corrupted country run by self-righteous bureaucrats, lawyers and activists was corrupting their honor to which they had pledged.”