very cold without losing the least of its spiritual intensity. Babryshkin had never imagined himself as the sort of man who would develop a taste for killing, who would ache not only to kill his enemies but to kill them as painfully, as miserably as possible. Yet, he had unquestionably become such a man. The joy he felt when he saw an enemy vehicle explode was certainly different from, but matched in intensity, his best, early nights with Valya. After a time, after he had witnessed enough atrocities, the act of killing attained a sort of purity that would have been unimaginable to the man he once had been.
Babryshkin's brigade had been one of the ethnic Slav organizations garrisoned in Kazakhstan beside local 'brother' units, each representing a distinct part of the regional population. Now the blood Russians made up these long columns of refugees, fleeing from the soil that had been their home for generations, that they had struggled to plough and make prosperous, fleeing from the wrath of people they had long imagined or pretended were their brothers in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Certainly, there had been problems before — the old enmity between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis, between dozens of other ethnic groups whose fates had brought them to the same watering trough. But the Soviet Union seemed to have worked beyond the time of troubles that followed the end of the Gorbachev period, the phases of reaction, counter-reaction, and uneasy compromise. A period of somnolence, of dreary but thankfully unmenacing mediocrity seemed to have settled back down upon tundra and desert, steppe and marshland. The clumsy, ultimately unsuccessful repressions, the anarchic impulses, the unsatisfied needs, both spiritual and rawly physical, seemed to drowse off under the cobbled-together solution of dramatically increased federalism, with far more authority devolved upon the individual republics. Racial tensions sputtered now and again, but always settled back down into the prevailing lethargy.
Marx had been right, though. Economics were fundamental. And economics had ultimately exacerbated the smoldering ethnic tensions. As the Soviet Union had struggled to find herself, first under Gorbachev, then under the troika of decayed conservative nonentities who attempted to rule after the blunt end of the
Now, as so often throughout history, the Russian people and their ethnic brethren stood alone against the Asian onslaught. Even the East Europeans, who had long since slipped their tether, looked on with a sense of amusement, almost a black joy, as the mighty Russians got their comeuppance. Thankfully, China slept. The Chinese were lost in another of their long cycles of introspection, occasionally raising an eyelid to check on the Japanese, then closing it again, content that their carefully delineated sphere of influence had not been annoyed. The developing — or hopelessly underdeveloped — world supported the right of the Central Asian republics to complete independence, lashing out at a bankrupt Soviet Union that had sent them neither goods nor weapons for a generation. The Russians stood alone, again, with a fatalistic sense of history repeating itself. Mongols, Tartars, Turks, and now these steel horsemen out of the Asian darkness. Even the possibility of a brisk nuclear response, such as the one that had saved the Americans in Africa, had been stolen away by a world too ready to take the Soviet Union at its word in the aftermath of the American blow against Pretoria and the suicidal exchanges in the Middle East that had taken only three days to gut a circle of nations. The Soviets had bellowed loudly, glad for one last chance to strut upon the world stage, insisting on complete nuclear disarmament. And, indeed, the nuclear arsenals had finally, foolishly been dismantled. Babryshkin's handful of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles were all that remained.
'Comrade Commander?' Two helmeted figures approached Babryshkin in the starlit darkness. He recognized Major Gurevich, the brigade's deputy commander for political affairs, by his voice. The position had been abolished back in the nineties, only to be revived again in the conservative retrenchment, with its archaic language and grim nostalgia. Babryshkin was not certain exactly what the political officer still believed in at this point, but he knew that it was not hard work. Gurevich's fitful attempts at making a contribution were far more self-important than helpful, but thankfully they did not take long to sputter out. None of the men would listen to the political officer anymore, and when Gurevich had complained to Babryshkin, the latter had brushed him off with the observation that the men were too busy for lectures and, besides, what was left to say? The men were fighting. There were no deserters. What did Gurevich expect? The political officer had answered that it was not enough to take the correct action, if it was taken for the wrong reasons. The men had to be made to see the theoretical imperative, the political propriety of their actions. But Gurevich had not pressed the issue further, and Babryshkin suspected that the man was simply lost, trying to find some point to his continued service with the unit, to his continued existence. With the collapse of the empire, Gurevich's world had begun to crumble, as well.
'Comrade Commander,' the political officer said now, enunciating the antique title in his eternally officious voice, 'I've brought the chief of signals. We're picking up a broadcast from headquarters.'
Babryshkin turned directly to Lazarsky. He had not recognized the communications officer in the darkness, away from his bank of radios.
'What do they say? What's happening? I thought the secure nets were all being jammed off the air?'
'Comrade Commander,' Lazarsky said, 'the message is coming in code groups over the unencrypted net. I believe they're broadcasting from an airborne platform. They're repeating it over and over.'
Babryshkin stared at the two silhouettes before him. 'Well, for God's sake, what does it say?'
'We're to withdraw to the north,' Gurevich cut in. 'Immediately. It's a blanket message for all units and subunits that have been out of contact with their superior staffs. All units are to withdraw to a line just south of Petropavlovsk.'
Babryshkin was stunned. That couldn't be right. 'My God, that's over a hundred kilometers from here. At least.' He shifted his eyes from one shadow to the other. 'There must be some mistake.'
'I checked the code groups myself,' Gurevich said. Lazarsky shrugged. 'We've been out of contact. The war's been moving on without us.'
The only thing Babryshkin could detect in the signal officer's voice was weariness, resignation. But he suspected that Gurevich, despite all of his political demagoguery, did not mind resuming the withdrawal in the least. Instinctively, Babryshkin glanced back at the human river flowing along the road.
The order was impossible. It would leave countless thousands of refugees undefended. In any case, the road was so completely blocked up that the brigade would have to move across country, at a creeping pace. It was a journey beyond the capability of much of the unit's battered equipment. Besides, he was not even certain all of the vehicles had sufficient fuel to cover the distance.
Babryshkin could not believe that anyone who really understood the situation would issue such an order.
'Can we reach headquarters?' Babryshkin demanded. 'Can we talk back to whoever's broadcasting?'
Gurevich cut off the commo officer's response, saying, 'We can only receive — and that's faint. As soon as we try to call anyone, we're jammed off the air. If we continue with these vain attempts, we risk revealing our position. Such actions are irresponsible. And an order is an order.'
'But, damnit,' Babryshkin said, raising his voice, waving his right hand toward the road, 'what about
'Orders…' Gurevich stuttered.
Babryshkin's anger continued to rise. It was a sharp, general anger, aimed not only at the fool who had issued such an order but at all of his comrades and countrymen who had brought things to such a pass.
'How do we know it isn't a ruse?' he said, his voice changing pitch with excitement, with bitter vigor. 'If we can't call back to verify the order, how do we know it isn't a trick, some sort of imitative deception? It could be the enemy ordering us to pull back. How the hell do we know?'
'The code groups…' the political officer said, '… it was all in code.'
