rotgut.
“Hey, man!” It was a white male, transvestite, early thirties, cadaverous, unshaven, wild-eyed. “Where’s your warrant?”
“Hey!” said another. “That’s right, brother. You ain’t got no right to bust in—”
“You know,” said Phil, standing up, resting his .38 on the white one’s nose, “I think this one’s a saboteur, Lieutenant.”
“Armed as well,” said Marty, extracting a switchblade from the man’s handbag.
“What the—”
“Shut your face, Greta!” Phil said. “Now all of you against the wall — move!” He and the lieutenant started kicking legs apart. The alley team came in looking disappointed. “You bastards have all the fun,” said Drabinsky. “All we got was tiddly-dick — some crackhead trying to hide in a friggin’ garbage can.”
“Well,” said Phil, clicking the cuffs on the last of the addicts, “I wouldn’t sweat it, Drab. Downtown says we can put in for all the overtime we need.” Drabinsky followed Phil out, helping to steer the last cracker down the spotlighted stairs past the other cops, the high, spitting crackle of walkie-talkies calling in the meat wagons through the hysteria of the crackers screaming, an arm shooter smiling, eyes glazed, not caring.
“Drabinsky,” said Phil, “for the first time in this country we’re gonna clean house.”
Drabinsky shifted the weight of the shotgun to the other hand. “Is it true? We can bring ‘em in, lock ‘em up for three months without—”
“No,” said Phil. “Six.”
“Six weeks or six months?”
“Christ,” said Drabinsky, the full implications washing over him. “What I wouldn’t give to be in Miami.”
“Greedy!” Phil said, smacking him on the shoulder. “That’s your trouble.”
“Damn right!”
When they got back to the precinct, they thought there was a party on. Bobby “Bad-Ass” Duguid, the tall black man in flamingo-pink suit, hat, and white mink coat, was in the cage with his lawyer and assorted entourage.
“His hair’s all wet,” said Phil. Duguid’s eyes were afire with rage, his lawyer, pale white, beside him.
“Yeah,” agreed the sergeant. “I’m very worried about that, Phil, because if Mr. Duguid gets a cold, we could be sued.”
“You motherfuckers aren’t gonna get away with this. You hear me, whitey?”
Another policeman, his Puerto Rican accent cutting through the hubbub, handed Phil a wax-paper package. “Guess what we found him doin’?”
“In his Jacuzzi,” said Phil, “wanking himself off?”
“No,” said another cop.
“Where’s
“Downstairs,” said the Puerto Rican cop. “But lookee here. Have a look at the package.”
“My, my,” said Phil. “Sarge, you see what we have here? Plastique.”
“You mother!” yelled Duguid, a hand coming out of his mink through the bars. “That’s a plant and you know it.”
“Well then, Mr. Duguid,” said the sergeant, “we’ll have to put this aside for evidence.” It joined another two plastic bags, large ones, heavy-duty, each bag containing firearms, including two Uzis, four AK-47s, and a grenade launcher.
Under the Emergency Powers Act, Mr. Duguid was confined for six months, pending “further investigations,” including intensive audit by the IRS and investigation into the illegal importation of prohibited semiautomatic and automatic weapons.
Asked about reports of widespread persecution on ‘Good Morning America,’ the FBI spokesperson, Jennifer Lean, replied, “Sir, we’ve known for years that ever since the lessening of tensions between Premier Gorbachev and President Bush, a large number of ‘illegals’—spies and potential saboteurs — have been placed in strategic areas for just such a situation. We also know that these people did not come with large amounts of money. This would, of course, have immediately raised suspicion, or at least alerted the immigration officials. The question, then—”
“You mean,” interjected the interviewer, “that the money used to purchase such weapons was drug related— that ‘illegals’ are or were involved with using drug money to finance their clandestine war efforts?”
“The money had to come from somewhere,” said the FBI spokesperson, “incredibilized,” as she later put it to her colleagues, that the TV host could be so dumb. It was pointed out to her, however, that a good interviewer isn’t afraid to appear naive so they can get the guest to give them answers they want.
Privately, most of the FBI agents believed the “illegals” had brought in all the money they needed by diplomatic pouch years before, and that drug money wasn’t involved.
While Duguid was being photographed, scowling, to update his file, twelve miles south of Port Baikal, Jason Thomis of Charlie Company — or the “forgotten company,” as they were calling themselves — from III Corps’ Second Infantry Battalion, was digging in with the rest of his platoon along the rail line that ran parallel to the cliffs from between Baikal and Kultuk at the southernmost end of the lake. Thomis’s company had high, precipitous ice- sheathed cliffs behind them, the surface of the frozen lake hundreds of feet below. It allowed them to look down on the blizzard-covered lake as far north as Baikal, the thick whiteness about Baikal trembling and flashing crimson with the thunder of war. Occasionally they could spot A-10 Thunderbolts coming from the far eastern side of the lake after protective F-15 Strike Eagles had penetrated the screen of MiG-29 Fulcrums that had come screaming eastward out of Irkutsk, led by the Siberian ace, Sergei Marchenko. But for the American Eagles, having won the furball with the MiGs and driving the Fulcrums off, it was all in vain. For though the A-10 Thunderbolts were now free to dive beneath the blizzard to engage the enemy ground targets, they reappeared only seconds later without having fired a shot, their pilots confounded by the zero visibility, Minsky’s forward Siberian armored spearheads being so close to the fleeing Americans that it was near impossible to tell friend from foe.
The U.S. M-60 and M-1 tanks were so close in most cases to the Siberian armor that the A- 10s were forced to rise and circle like frustrated birds of prey waiting for the weather to clear, which it didn’t. And all the while the A-10s continued to burn up their precious Avgas as the battle raged beneath them. Now and then an A-10 would make another attempt, only to reemerge, frustrated from being unable to differentiate between the American and Siberian tanks. Many of the American and the pursuing Siberian units were so near one another that even accurate fire from the A-10s’ thirty-millimeter nose cannons, while it would have no doubt set Siberian tanks ablaze, would, through the resultant explosions, have done as much or even more injury to the American ground troops.
Now and then Thomis could see a bulge of dull orange light in the cotton-wool-like cover of the blizzard, the backflash of Siberian-acquired Aerospatiale, MILAN 2,500-yard and HOT 5,000-yard-range antitank missiles. The few that didn’t hit the American targets failed not because they had encountered the kind of thick, anti-infrared smoke that Minsky’s troops were using as cover, but because the armored U.S. target had crashed through the splitting ice opened up by the pounding of Minsky’s eighteen-gun batteries of amphibious M-1974 122mm howitzers.
In addition to hearing the howitzers’ distant thumps, Thomis and his buddies could see contrails of the Siberians’ Multiple Rocket launches arcing momentarily above the blizzard. Unleashed in ripple fire sequence, the fifteen-foot-long, three-hundred-kilogram, twenty-four-mile-range HE and fragmentation rockets were being fired from scores of twenty-ton ZIL-135 trucks which, with sixteen missiles apiece, created
In addition to this, Yesov’s northern arm, each of his battalions equipped with eighteen mobile trailers of forty B-M21 rocket tube launchers, was unleashing 720-round salvos of the 122mm projectiles screaming down into the American positions. The scarlet trails of the rockets, momentarily visible in the swirling fog and snow, appeared to Thomis and the rest of Charlie Company like hundreds of ribbons before disappearing, the rockets crashing in thunderous unison, momentarily swelling the blizzard in huge blisters of flame.
