“No, sir!”
“Can you repair equipment like an RQ-11 Raven small unmanned air vehicle?”
“No, sir!”
“Then how the hell did you get into my recruiting hall?”
“I… it was a mistake, sir! I want to go home!”
“Let me see your hand!”
The Top pulls a bank note from his pocket and puts it into the recruit’s palm.
“Here’s ten bucks, go and get yourself a discount video game. We are going to war and war is not about entertaining bored adolescents! Right door!”
The Top steps to the next recruit, a young black man with a thousand yards stare. He apparently makes a better impression on Hartman because he doesn’t start addressing him with an abuse.
“I loved the way you stood at attention. Tell me you practiced it in your mother’s dress room mirror and I’ll cry in disappointment! Do you want to make me cry?”
“Sir! No, sir!”
“What’s your story?”
“I was with 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Infantry Regiment, sir! Honorably discharged after Operation Whiskey Hotel, sir!”
“Never heard of it. What was it about? Bringing democracy to Belgium or what?”
“Sir! Not at liberty to say, sir!”
“Are you at liberty to tell me the ranger motto?”
“Sir! Rangers lead the way, sir!”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“I… We all have lost the way, sir!”
“Outstanding! You have a good take on how things are going in this country. Name?”
“Foley, sir!”
“Rank held?”
“Sergeant, sir!”
“What do you think of becoming a meaningless green private in boot camp once more?”
“Sir! In the Tribe — yes, sir! Proudly, sir!”
“You’re aboard, Foley. Haul ass to the left door!”
The sergeant major seems to be in his element as he rants at the hapless recruits. Tarasov soon gives Nooria and Pete a sign to follow him out.
“Guess this might still take a while,” he tells the female officer outside.
“Is there something we can do around here till he’s finished abusing those who were stupid enough to volunteer for it?” Pete asks.
Second Lieutenant Stone gives him a disapproving glance. “Yes. You are free to move around in the base. And it’s an honor to meet you, uh, sir, but watch your tongue. Even if you are the Colonel’s son. We don’t like being insulted.”
“But, I mean…”
Tarasov gives a mental nod to the Second Lieutenant for reprimanding the cynical kid. “Is there a restroom where the kid and Nooria can have a chat?”
“You must mean the recreation room,” Stone says with a little smile. ”It’s signposted. Follow that corridor to the left.”
“And what’s behind that blast door?” Tarasov curiously asks pointing at the massive door that had caught his attention earlier.
“Care to see?” Stone asks and turns the iron handles to unlock the door. It opens surprisingly softly. Following the wave of Stone’s hand, Tarasov enters the room beyond.
He recoils. A sudden sense of dizziness comes over him as he looks down into the circular, deep shaft gaping ahead.
“Once a Minuteman-II intercontinental ballistic missile was standing here, always ready to deliver a nuclear warhead to Moscow. Maybe Kiev or Leningrad, whatever.”
“A W56 warhead with a yield of 1.2 megatons of TNT, to be exact,” Tarasov says under his breath. “Sixty times Hiroshima.”
“Yeah. A real whizbang! This silo stood abandoned for decades. It’s listed as dismantled and filled up with concrete in official papers. We’ve made a few tech upgrades to the silo and the bunker complex around it and moved in. Ain’t nuclear disarmament great?”
“One of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind.”
“Agree. Imagine if it would go on…”
“That would be truly great.”
“Yes. All those missile silos in the States becoming abandoned!… We could take over a few more and then have the whole country covered by a network of bases!”
“That would be… outstanding. Thanks for the tour, but let’s now get out of here. I feel kind of dizzy.”
Stone closes the door. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”
Tarasov nods agreement. “How do you finance all this?”
She reflects for a moment. “See… since the Top is vouching for you, probably there’s no harm in telling you that from time to time we receive a shipment of swags from the Alamo.”
“Must be big artifacts… I mean, swags. At least big shipments if you can afford all this.”
“The last shipment weighed more than fifteen tons.”
Tarasov almost jumps hearing this. “What? Fifteen tons of artifacts?”
“Yes, that was a big shipment. Usually, we receive only about ten-eleven tons of various swags every three weeks or so.”
“And you spend the incredible wealth you make from artifacts on buying weapons, hiding in this missile bunker here and in your fortress in the New Zone?”
“Yes,” Stone says with a smile. “For the time being.”
“I’ve seen all kinds of desperate men wanting to join your ranks, but with all due respect — what does a charming, intelligent, young woman like you do here?”
“Sir — I might be young, charming and intelligent but not the kind of woman you take me for. I am a Second Lieutenant in the Tribe and privileged to keep up our Code of Honor, Courage and Commitment against all odds in the world. And if all my wealth were a dime, I’d gladly give it away to support our cause and follow the Colonel’s call!”
Although Tarasov can only guess what a dime means, he is well impressed by the Second Lieutenant’s dedication to the Tribe, even though she was obviously not among the Colonel’s Marines who turned into fanatic warriors after being exposed to the evil beneath the City of Screams. Not for the first time, he wonders whether his own defection had also been induced by that evil. Being used for bait to expose a general gone traitor, implicitly sacrificing him and his men, would have tested the loyalty of any officer; but what he really feels he betrayed is not Ukraine, even less so its army. It is the Exclusion Zone. Nooria, who appears to him as if she were holding all the mysteries of the New Zone in her dark green eyes, always had been a reasonable justification for his decision. Yet something keeps nagging at his conscience and now stirs up a sudden wave of homesickness.
“I have a PDA on me. Is there a facility where I could download messages?”
“Staff Sergeant No-Go can help you with that.”
“Staff Sergeant—who?”
“Not Hu. Ng, but we call him No-Go. He should be at his terminal over there. Only leaves his computers alone when he needs going to the restroom.”
“His name is… what?”
“Hiu Ng. Joined us all the way from Taiwan.”
“I see. Thanks for the tour, Second Lieutenant.”
The female officer nods and gives Tarasov a respectful glance but gives him no salute when she hurries off.
He walks to a horseshoe-shaped workstation with large computer screens, several laptops and desktop PCs. A short Chinese man is sitting behind them on a huge chair. Despite his thin eyeglasses, No-Go doesn’t look at all like Tarasov would imagine a computer freak—the lean face and sinewy, tattoed arms rather remind him to a kung-fu fighter. With all the screens and computers around his workstation, he appears like a Bruce Lee who by some mistake wandered into the set of a science-fiction movie.
“Staff Sergeant… uhm, No-Go, I need logging on to a special server in Ukraine through my PDA,” Tarasov says.
“What does it have apart from a router and firewall?” No-Go replies barely looking up from a disemboweled PC he is mending. “VPN, IPS?”