Foreign Enemies and Traitors (46 page)

“Tomorrow is too late, Colonel.  I want it all covered by tonight.”

“I will try, I will—”

“Colonel Burgut, you will do more than try!  You will personally see to it that this job is finished today.  I’ll have the parts flown down to fix the truck right away.  One way or the other, this ravine—this small valley—it will be covered with dirt today.  Covered with dirt, and planted with trees like a forest.”

“I have factory number of parts from truck motor.  If we obtain correct parts, we can repair truck very quickly, and bring earthmover today to here.”

“That’s good, that’s very important.  And no more jobs like this one, all right?  Make people leave, frighten them.  Shoot a few of them if they don’t obey, burn their houses…  Do what you have to do to make them run away.  But no more ‘small valleys’ like this one.  Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand.  As soon as Caterpillar can bring here on special truck, valley will be covering with much earth, and many small fir trees.”

“Notify me as soon as it’s done.”

“I shall call to you with secure radio.  But to be sure, this…this was complete idea of Major Zinovsky.”  Colonel Burgut swept his right hand toward the corpse-filled chasm, and let it drop to his side.  “From words of Major Zinovsky, we thought operation was also idea from you.”

“Okay.  What’s done is done.  And Major Zinovsky is dead in the fire, right?”

“Yes, very dead.  Very dead.”  Burgut slumped his shoulders and sighed.  “General Blair, I am wanting to finish job in Tennessee.  When Kazaks are leaving Tennessee?  When we are leaving, to go to Montana and Wyoming, as was said before?”

“I don’t know.  June, I think.  When we’re completely finished here in Tennessee.”

“Good.  Good.”  Colonel Burgut slowly shook his head.  “Kazaks not so much loving Tennessee.  Very too many small farms.  Very too many small forest.  Very too many rifles, very too many snipers.  Truth, General Blair.  I am not thinking is possible to, as you say,
pacify
Tennessee to one hundred percent.  Only with many small valleys, like here today, can we pacify Tennessee to one hundred percent.  If no more small valleys possible, then best if Kazaks are to leaving Tennessee.  Montana, I think better is for Kazaks.  Big wide country, like Kazakhstan.”

****

Boone was on his knees crouching between frozen bodies,
looking in purses, patting for wallets.  Even today, with no credit cards or ATM machines, and with paper money damn near useless, people still carried wallets and identification cards.  At least the adults did.  Between collecting IDs, he snapped pictures with his own digital camera, and with the dead American traitor’s camera for insurance.  He snapped wide-angle shots of the entire ravine, as well as close-ups of individual victims.  Most had been shot through their torsos, but there were also many limb and head wounds.  As a soldier, he was used to seeing the many ways that rifle bullets could destroy a human body.  At least in this cold weather the bodies did not smell, and they had not even begun to bloat or blacken.  They were blue-gray against the white snow, but otherwise perfectly preserved.  He gently brushed a little snow away when he needed to take a face shot for positive identification.

                The bodies were frozen in place, locked together like a 3-D puzzle.  He estimated that they were piled five or six deep at the center of the ravine, with more on the western side, where they had tumbled down the steep bank.  The zone of death was perhaps twenty feet wide by a hundred long, running up the length of the gorge.  He thought he could climb up the left side of the ravine, to where the shootings had taken place.  He could collect spent brass shells for forensic identification, and take some better pictures of the entire scene from a downward angle.  He was considering a route up the steep slope of frozen earth and snow when he heard the distant whine of a turbine and the faint beating of rotors.  The sound was not that of any military model that he was familiar with, but it was growing in strength, rapidly flying closer.

                He was fifteen feet up into the zone of death, and he had to make a decision.  Infrared detection was an ever-present fear.  If the helicopter made a direct overflight and it was equipped with an infrared camera, his warm body would glow like a burning torch against the frozen bodies.  Perhaps they would think he was a wounded massacre victim, who had been shot but not killed.  He stepped as carefully as he could, his feet slipping between bodies and limbs.  He was nearly at the bottom edge of the field of corpses when the chopper appeared among the leafless tree branches, scattering crows before its approach.  Now visual detection by the aircrew was the greatest danger.  Motion would give him away, so he could only drop between bodies and play possum, hoping they were not using infrared at all in the daylight.

                Boone turned on his left side, facing uphill.  Most of his body was below the level of two male corpses.  He had not recognized them.  Their swollen, blackened hands were tied behind their backs.  The helo continued on a direct course, came to a hover, and landed just out of sight above him.  Snow being blown over the top of the ravine indicated the nearness of the helicopter.  The blades wound down as the turbine engine slowed.  He didn’t move, trying to blend in among the bodies, feeling conspicuously uncovered by snow.  He wondered if his footprints in the slushy snow were obvious.

                The morning temperature was just above freezing, a light drizzle was falling.  Once the helicopter had shut down, the ravine and the surrounding country were perfectly quiet.  The remaining snow dampened any sound.  Boone lay absolutely still, relying on his position between two bodies to conceal him.

                Then he heard the voices, two male voices.  He could not make out what was being said, but he could tell that they were speaking English.  One voice was plainly American, the other unmistakably foreign.  But not Spanish, so he was not from the North American Legion.  Perhaps a Kazak, as Jenny McClure had said.  Boone slowly raised his head, just enough to observe the top of the western slope with one eye.  He was no more than a hundred feet from where two men were talking.  His camera was already in his left hand, open and ready.  Did he dare to risk it?  The wide-angle lens could be pointed in their general direction and it might capture the outlines of the two men, from the shoulders up.  The high-resolution camera image could be blown up and cropped, and might even reveal something about these two morning-after visitors.  Their uniforms at least, and perhaps some identifying insignia.

Boone gradually raised his forearm at the elbow, and slowly turned the camera.  He depressed the shutter button with his thumb.  The camera seemed ridiculously loud as it clicked and readied itself for another picture.  He took another photo, and a third.  The voices stopped, the men disappeared.  After a minute he could hear the helicopter engine spinning, the blades coming up to speed.  Then it lifted into the sky, briefly crossing the ravine as it departed.  He snapped another picture, hopefully freezing the blue executive helicopter in mid-flight above him.

He waited ten minutes before moving, and then he very slowly sat up and looked around him.  The big ravens had returned.  They were now making exploratory flights into the ravine, flapping and hopping among the corpses with wings outstretched.  He checked the camera.  It was hard to be certain judging by the miniature digital images, but he might have captured usable pictures of the two men, and their helicopter.  This was enough; there was no point in continuing his inspection tour of dead bodies.  He had collected more than twenty driver’s licenses and other ID cards, and he had an even greater number of photos stored on the two cameras.  It was enough to prove that the massacre had taken place.  Boone was at the point of preparing to stand and depart, to backtrack down out of the ravine, when he heard voices again, louder this time. 

They sounded foreign, that was certain.  They were definitely not speaking English, so they were not Americans.  He dropped back into his slot between the two male corpses, in time to see more visitors peering down upon the little valley of death, their heads clearly skylighted.  They were loud, boisterous, making no effort at all to be stealthy or tactical.  He would have to wait until these gawking troops left before he could continue his exfiltration. 

Then he saw the rope flung out, uncoiling in midair.  Green rope, military rope.  It came to rest not a hundred feet away up the ravine, hanging down from the lip of the steep western slope.  Oh, crap—a rope could mean only one thing: they were coming down!  Boone watched the first soldier descend.  He wrapped the line around his back and over his shoulder, a field-expedient method for rappelling short distances.  From the lip of the ravine to the first bodies was maybe thirty feet, at a fifty- or sixty-degree angle.  He had a Kalashnikov rifle slung barrel down across his back, and was wearing the Russian camouflage pattern uniform, brown body armor, and a brown beret.  Cossack mercenaries: the worst, just as Jenny McClure had described them.  The soldier leaned back over the edge, slid and walked down the icy slope, then unwound the rope from his body and called up to the others. 

Snow and ice covered the ravine’s sides in patches and streaks.  The second soldier used just his gloved hands, without wrapping the rope behind his back.  This one wore a fur hat like Jenny’s instead of a beret.  He quickly scrambled down the cliff, and then both men called up to the third Cossack soldier.  Boone couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the two soldiers at the bottom seemed to be challenging the last man to hurry down into the ravine.  The third man also wore a brown fur cap, the flaps tied up on the sides and front.  This soldier descended hesitantly.  He had wrapped the rope around his body incorrectly, and halfway down the line became twisted.  This clumsy rappeller attempted to unbind himself, but he fell against the slope and then spun upside down, the rope between his legs.  Then without warning, he came free and slid the last ten feet to the bottom headfirst.  The waiting soldiers laughed, shouted, and threw snow on their comrade, who had landed in a heap among the corpses at their feet.  Boone thought that it would have been funny, except for the fact that they were standing upon the bodies of murdered Americans.

The last man righted himself and stood up, brushing snow and mud off his uniform and rearranging the rifle slung on his back.  The soldier wearing the beret pulled a clear bottle out of an ammo magazine pouch and took a long drink.  His grimace and cough indicated that it was full of some kind of high-octane liquor, probably local moonshine.  He passed the pint-sized flask to his buddies, and the three took turns slugging it down until it was empty.  The soldier wearing the beret then threw the bottle up the side of the ravine at a tree, causing a pair of crows to take wing, protesting with loud caws.  Most Kazaks were nominally Muslim, thought Boone.  When it suited them.  At other times, liquor suited them even better.  God love Tennessee: in good times or bad, there was never a shortage of fine corn whisky.  Maybe these were Russianized Cossacks, who had been raised outside the Islamic faith.  Not that it mattered, not when they were taking part in the foreign occupation of his state.

The three soldiers continued to laugh and push one another, but shortly they quieted down and went to work.  The snow was rapidly melting; the temperature was already well above freezing and getting warmer.  They turned and rolled bodies, twisting limbs to gain leverage, looking for wallets and purses, extracting paper money and dropping the rest.  Watches and bracelets went into the pockets of their parkas and trousers.  Peering over the shoulder of a frozen man’s dead body, it was obvious to Boone that the three soldiers knew exactly what they would find in the ravine.  They were not here by happenstance; they were here because they
knew
.  And they knew—because they were the killers.

The soldier wearing the beret pulled a long fighting knife from a sheath on his belt, crouched in the snow, and lifted a woman’s bare arm, her long fingers extending skyward.  Boone clenched his teeth as the soldier grasped her frozen hand and prepared to remove several rings in the most grisly manner possible.  Boone’s right hand slowly pulled aside the bottom of his parka, and went to his holster.  With his left hand, he extracted the pistol’s suppressor from its compartment on his combat vest, after gently peeling back the velcro flap.  He moved as quickly as he dared, afraid to attract the attention of the three-man looting party, who were busy only fifty feet upslope from his partially concealed position. 

One fur-hatted soldier vomited loudly, and his mates yelled abuse at him.  They began arguing, then pushing and shoving, and one of them fell down.  The disgusting job was proving to be a stressful ordeal even for this crew of ghouls.  At least the frozen bodies had no odor, Boone thought.  Come back in a few days, it won’t be so pleasant…  The three soldiers continued to search bodies, not going much deeper than the first layer.  They hastily removed rings, watches, silver coins and paper money, occasionally kneeling or even lying prone to reach deeper into the mass of corpses.  Sometimes they slipped among the thawing jumble of intertwined torsos and limbs, and fell down between them.

The soldier wearing the brown beret, the first to descend into the ravine, was working his way down toward Boone’s position.  His two comrades were about thirty feet away from the beret wearer, upslope from him.  These two were working as a team now, taking turns at snipping off rings with a pair of wire cutters.  The beret-wearing soldier was only twenty feet away from Boone, efficiently removing rings with the blade of his combat knife, and then casually dropping the bloodless severed digits into the snow.  The serrated edge of his knife was audible as it sawed through their finger bones.  He was approaching the area that Boone had recently searched for IDs.  The soldier stood erect and looked at the bodies around him, a quizzical look on his face, the gory knife gripped in his right hand.  He seemed to be considering the snow, the corpses, and their somewhat different appearance from those above, the ones that he had already looted.