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Estamos en un buen momento porque esto se ha roto. Esto es fundamental porque no hay problema que se pueda solucionar sin primero reconocer que el problema existe.
Hay una brecha muy clara entre los que nacimos antes de las computadoras y las redes y ustedes que han nacido con eso como parte de su entorno natural. La primera gran ola migratoria producto de la crisis del agro tradicional serrano se da a mediados del siglo XX. Ya la chicha no es lo suyo. Entonces son huachafos, feos, indios, sucios… Todo un conjunto de prejuicios para marcar la diferencia. Pierre Bourdieu ha trabajado mucho este tema. Soy yo quien marca la pauta, quien expresa lo que es correcto, incorrecto, bonito, deseable. Entonces hay mucho de eso en las relaciones en contra de los amixers en las redes sociales.
Ahora bien, que esto pueda llegar a convertirse en una identidad auto atribuida, puede ser. Pero creo que no hemos llegado a ese punto. El amixer sigue siendo visto como una amenaza individual que uno percibe contra uno mismo. Algo que se extiende, que se difunde y penetra. Ahora, yo no conozco cultura que haya existido o se haya desarrollado sin el Una identidad se construye en transacciones e intercambios. Creo que el intercambio es enriquecedor cuando se hace en horizontalidad, en democracia.
Te abre una nueva perspectiva y puedes enriquecer a otros con lo tuyo. Y eso es empobrecedor tanto para el colonizado como para el colonizador. Creo que en el mundo andino tenemos muchos ejemplos. Global por una parte y al mismo tiempo con lo local como algo de gran importancia. No hay ninguna cultura pura, esa es una tontera. A veces encuentras discursos racistas y de racismo inverso. Due to copyright limitations, this text is only available in the print version. For more information on how to get a print version, please visit our website: Benito del Pliego Benito del Pliego Madrid has published the following poetry books: He has also written critical pieces about contemporary Spanish exiled writers in the Americas, and Latin American poets migrated to Spain within the last decades.
Calla para que el decir diga. Habla para que no lo ocupe todo nada, para que no te enucbra el silencio. Be quiet so the saying says. Surrender and lose yourself, or refuse to surrender and be fooled. No se consume el dilema en el que ardes, el fuego y el dolor te dan la vida. She has published four volumes of poetry in bilingual form Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish. De la mesa rayada con gubias: Table I was left alone beside a crab covered in red ants that later turned to dust to make paint with nopal juice.
Engravings plowed the silence of a table scratched by gouges, on their brown, bilingual skin. There was distance back then: Beneath Tiger Hill I searched for a treasure to scare away my fear. A fiery liquid erased all the flowers I had seen in May from my left eye. Lo que soy, lo que recuerdo Una libertad que retoza y no se ha hecho fea. Soy una nariz que huele el adobe de la casa de enfrente un patio y todas sus casas.
Una flor para el agua, para otras flores y no de las personas. A talking parrot with goose bumps, the girl who drops her coconut sweets, too late to pick them up. I put my nose to the adobe of the house across the street, all the family houses share a patio. The photograph of a girl, punishment on her face, a thin figure in the middle of the wilderness. I am the resin cried by St. Vincent, the curlew whose song was drowned in another language. Enrique Bernales Albites Lima, He holds a B.
He was a member of the Peruvian poetry group Inmanencia during the nineties. The group edited two poetry collections: Inmanencia and Inmanencia: He published his first book of poetry in In he published an anthology of poetry, Los relojes se han roto: His novel Los territorios ocupados appeared in The poems presented in this issue of Hiedra are part of the unpublished book Poemas Yankees. I will never swallow monoxide by myself repita doc: Satan, But shit makes me sick I will wear a mask of flowers and almonds Ann, repeat: I will never swallow monoxide by myself the stewed cabbage is ready, we will eat out, it is sunny, my little son, please, throw the salt for the streetcars and ravens Ann, repeat: I will never swallow monoxide by myself doc, repeat: I will be back, ancient bitch, astral vagina, I will be back to rip your horn, to throw you into the sea, next to the boxes of tea, with my massachusetts Indian costume, Doctor Bostonia.
I, Robot When the scene ends, you are worthless the killer doll is back again, Eve me llaman mis ciberamantes, L. Eve, the city in twenty nails, L. Eve was born in Bismarck, North Dakota, there she grew among bison made of plastic and alcoholic Apache chiefs also made of plastic, Every day she is born anew on a webcam, a downloadable preview of barely thirty seconds, she has a super body made of plastic, her boobs are as big as the Hindenburg flying over Manhattan, her body is born without hysteria in the lens of a camera that monitors her steps, the eyes that watch her carefully get more excited because they know that everything is fake, Ya se han mudado.
David, el landlord de mi casa, dice They are going to get mad. David dice, las avispas are going to get mad, pero no, Las avispas no van a molestarse, they are already dead, te bajaste su nido del alfeizar de la ventana. El afuera de la ventana es tu adentro. I warn you Repent or live in Hell for the Eternity San Juan de Patmos, ese pastrulo En el afuera, una vez, hicieron su casa los conejos.
They are going to get mad. No, David, no se van a molestar, they are fucking dead. Sixth Yankee Poem Are you like your dad or like you? So, who are you? I am the inhaler. The only thing I know is that we are what we sacrifice in life and never we are what we said, we are only what we are willing to sacrifice Odin sacrificed one of his eyes and he became God.
And you, what are willing to sacrifice to be you? I ask you again with other words, And you, what are you leaving behind to be you, a divine one-eyed? Once upon a time, J. In a few weeks he will cut down the trees to build two houses instead. Now I write outside, regardless the bites of the mosquitoes, That is the meaning of writing: This is my place on earth, the exterior of the house, here, I feel more me, more real, homeless, lonely… Summer is life and fucking hot, Listen, without a pause, to the music of the crickets and other creatures, D.
Outside the window are your guts. My beginning is my ending T. I warn you Repent or live in Hell for the Eternity John of Patmos, the junkie In the backyard, once, the rabbits built their burrow. You have surrounded your kingdom with angry corpses of many kinds. Whereas the violent rearrangement of large-scale natural disasters often occurs away from the centers of the industrialized world, I am interested in exposing their reverberations elsewhere. Safety becomes an illusion, separation from catastrophe an ontological fallacy.
Awareness of the interconnectedness of our global political economy unleashes fear and melancholy. Rich colors swirl and moments of representational clarity become wrapped into a non-representational mesh. Yet, as horrifying as life may be in the Anthropocene, I am driven to expose its beauty, to make a space for aesthetic experience even as we plummet to our end. I was thinking about the way a simple, possibly accidental drop of paint can transform the entire composition of a glass of fresh water.
This event is visually breathtaking while simultaneously frightening when the glass of water implies the local water supply, and the paint becomes industrial runoff. I wanted both, the process and aesthetic in the piece, to take on this transformation and let one visual language contaminate the other as it moves from a mechanical and photographic mark into painterly brushstrokes, mimicking the genetic alteration of the now ubiquitous atrazine.
A mano, en una serie de cuadernos. Creo que el signo de identidad de la nueva escritura hispanoamericana es esa desconfianza. Yo vivo como pirata: Ese puerto, a veces, es una universidad.
He ran his fingers over the words and the cold, hard stone, as if afraid to discover that .. Not a one of them looked much like a fucking park to Eddie Mohr, though. . He was a Mexican, in what had been a new Auxilliary Forces uniform, until it got all torn I shall help clean up, and then I shall study my Gorky some more. Danger Close Closer, Shop, Books, Magazines, Journals, Libros, Shophouse, Extent: Binding: PB ISBN: Price: Colonel Stuart Tootal is t Attack State Red Books, Magazines, Journals, Libros, Book, Libri OPM - digital edition. Gorky Park: A Novel (Mortalis) I Love Books, Great Books, Books.
No creo que los escritores que dan clases en universidades de Estados Unidos sean representativos de nada. Triste por donde lo veas: Son procesos que no tienen nada que ver. Me da lo mismo. The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.
At the same time, language is a social construct that is shaped through communication in the ever-changing world in which it is used. Without language, our means of expression, interaction, and knowledge transmission would be drastically different, if not impossible. Our species is unique in its ability to communicate through socio-culturally agreed upon symbols, which serve to draw attention to mental states and events in the outside world.
While certain properties of language reflect our similarities, others are manifestations of our differences. In part, these differences are responsible for the fact that we do not all speak the same language. In this essay, I examine how external forces, such as geo-political boundaries, population demographics, and world economies, lead to linguistic diversity and change. The thousands of languages of the world share certain complex features. Children are capable of acquiring any of these languages, provided that they are exposed to the conventionalized linguistic symbols of their environment within a specific window of opportunity the critical period.
Moreover, children do this rapidly without explicit explanation. Children ultimately acquire the ability to use language in novel ways and express an infinite number of ideas. Given the striking uniformity in completing this task, it is hard to argue against an underlying biological architecture for human language.
The ability to However, it is undeniable that communication with other members of society is essential for language development.
This conflict of theories highlights the role that our external environment has in the formation of language. The reasons why languages change are numerous. To begin with, all languages display some degree of variation. As no two people are exact copies of one another, neither are any two languages identical. Our language is constantly changing as we evolve throughout the lifespan. While two people may speak the same language, their use of grammatical structures and their pronunciation will be slightly different.
Our individual language system is known as an idiolect. Speakers, and the linguistic knowledge that they possess, are part of a larger taxonomy. This taxonomy is known as the speech community, which includes all the individual idiolects of a certain group of speakers. The speech community when viewed as a whole, shares a specific set of social norms and linguistic knowledge. In a given speech community, there exist different ways of communicating a similar message. Speakers alter their linguistic choices based on their own ideologies, attitudes, social status, and their desire to accommodate or differentiate themselves from their interlocutors.
Speakers in a community regularly become isolated from other members, thereby creating subpopulations of speakers. Over time, speakers in these subpopulations create new linguistic conventions to represent their shared socio-cultural realities. Depending on the situation, different dialects of the same language may emerge. If these subpopulations become completely isolated, they may form distinct languages.
An example of this process is the evolution, or division, of Latin into what is presently known as the Romance languages. This change is continual; what we call the Romance languages today will be different in the future. However, Clancy Clements suggests that enough significant differences between these varieties exist to call this classification into question The linguistic legacy Thus, it is We currently live in a globalized world where everything from culture to climate is undergoing rapid transformation.
The number of languages spoken today is greatly less than that of a few hundred years ago. While there is no such thing as a superior language there are dominant i. Dominant languages are attributed a certain level of prestige by speakers, due to their prevalence in the media, adoption in the formal educational system, and their means of serving as a vehicle to achieving greater economic capital.
Nothing is inferior about these less prestigious dialects and language varieties, only that they differ in arbitrary, yet identifiable and systematic, ways from the socially accepted standard variety. Languages that do not factor heavily into the educational, political, or business roles of a society are typically marginalized and threatened Hinton 3. Estimates put the number of languages spoken in the world today between 6, and 7, Languages change due to contact with other languages.
Linguistic innovation and the transmission of new features are greatly augmented by speakers and speech communities operating with multiple linguistic systems. Among bilingual or second-language speakers, it is common for a specific form or structure in one language to be replaced by, simplified, or reinterpreted in the other language. If two languages are spoken by the same individuals in a society societal bilingualism for an extended period of time and used in all spheres stable bilingualism , such as Guarani and Spanish in Paraguay, the structures of both languages may be altered.
In other contexts, there is temporary and unstable bilingualism, which may result in language shift—the gradual or rapid abandonment of one language in. This is historically and presently the situation of many immigrant communities in the United States of America USA who stop transmitting the language of their country of origin and shift to the dominant societal language. Equally as important for language transmission, particularly when it relates to minority languages, are the linguistic and educational policies adopted by each state or nation.
A case in point is 20th and 21st century Spain. Since the constitutional reform of , all languages recognized by the Statues of their regional autonomies share co-official status with Spanish. The tableau on the station concourse began to move again as a furious buzz of conversation started up and spiraled out and away from the confrontation. The kid, a newly minted private, still lay where he'd been taken down.
Violent shudders ran through his body as he struggled to choke off sobs and whimpers that wanted to turn into full-blown howling. Mohr willed the kid to keep it together as he bent down under the hostile eyes of the UP cops and gripped him by the arm. Mohr turned to confront the guy. His partner hadn't spoken, and to judge by how he was shrinking away, Mohr didn't think he would now. The tendons all along Mohr's jawline stood out as he ground his teeth together. He freighted the question with about as much contempt as it could carry, which was a fair fucking load.
When he'd transferred into the Auxiliaries, he'd expected to take a lot of shit from his old buddies-and he did. But it was basically good-natured. Some of the guys he'd served with on the Astoria were even thinking about making the jump, too. They'd seen the time travelers' weapons up close, and that was a powerful enticement to swap uniforms. In the end, though, most didn't.
They couldn't come at learning a whole new set of rules in the Zone. Mohr regarded the UP cops with cold scorn. It seemed they weren't so keen on learning the new rules either. It was becoming a real problem all over the city. Is that what you're telling me? Mohr was this close to hauling off and decking the big ape when a new voice shorted out the dark current that was building up between the two men.
His teeth were stained fire-engine red with his own blood, and when he spoke, it was in a stuttering, apologetic voice. The sunglasses, which had been damaged beyond repair, dangled from one shaking hand. He could t-tell you. The railway cop dismissed the suggestion with a look that just verged on becoming a sneer.
Whatever he intended to say was cut off when Eddie Mohr's hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of shirt. Several onlookers gasped and backed away. Mohr leaned in close and ground out his next words through gritted teeth. As the cop squirmed in Mohr's grip, his partner moved toward them, but a murderous look from the navy chief stopped him dead. Eddie Mohr didn't relax his grip, but he swung around fractionally to take in the speaker.
When he saw the commander's uniform and the man wearing it, he did let go. But he didn't back down. Two other figures Mohr recalled seeing at the table in the Harvey House restaurant came jogging over at a fast clip. Not that I can see," answered Mohr, triggering a brief but muted demonstration of outrage by the two cops. You carrying a spare uniform with you? Private Jose Diaz, who looked like he'd just witnessed a vision of the Blessed Virgin materialize in a pool of his own blood, nodded quickly.
In a locker, sir. If you're waiting for the trolley out to Fifty-one, perhaps he should wait with you. It's a big city. I wouldn't want him to get into any more trouble. Black smiled at the crestfallen railroad officers, but his eyes remained cold. I'm sure Union Pacific will have a procedure for making good the losses. Is that right, Officer? The twenty-three-inch flatscreen looked incongruous sitting on the old wooden desk. Admiral Phillip Kolhammer wondered if he'd ever get used to the collision of past and present that now surrounded him. Mil-grade flexipads and crank-handle telephones.
Quantum processors and slide rules. Holoporn and Norman Rockwell. He was a good deal older than most of the men and women in his command, more than twice the age of many of them, and he was way past going with the flow. When the pressure of his work abated for a short time at the end of each day, he still ached for his wife and his home and even, surprisingly, for his own war-as savage and stupid as it had been. He had no real home to retire to at day's end. There was a bungalow he'd rented in Oak Knoll, but he rarely made it back there.
Most nights he just bunked down "on campus," the hastily erected complex of low-rise plywood-and-particle-board offices just off the , where Panorama City would have been laid out in It was pleasant enough at this time of year, a mild autumn without anything like the smog of his era to suffocate the entire basin. But he found driving through the baking farmland and emerging gridiron of future suburbs to be depressing. It wasn't how an admiral should spend his days. The big screen beeped discreetly as his PA ushered out the labor delegates. Multiple tones, telling him that the message-holding command had been removed and dozens of urgent new e-mails had arrived.
One vidmail had come in, too. That was less common. They just didn't have the bandwidth to support it anymore. He knew he'd never get used to that. In his day, California had been bathed in an invisible electronic mist, Nobody even thought about bandwidth. It just wasn't an issue. Now, the ramshackle comm system they'd clipped together from scavenged Fleetnet equipment just about did a half-assed job of nearly meeting their needs in the greater Los Angeles area. But that was all. There was no such thing as full-spectrum access to the National Command Authority in Washington, and there wouldn't be until the cable came online, God only knew when.
He didn't get anything like the vidmail traffic he'd once had to wade through, which was a blessing in some ways. So the distinctive ping of a new message arriving caught his attention. He had a few minutes before the engineers from Douglas Aircraft turned up, and the small avatar of his liaison chief, the newly promoted Commander Black, floated in virtual 3-D right in front of him, demanding attention.
Kolhammer clicked on the icon, and Black's image came to life. It was a recorded message, captured by the small lens in the officer's flexipad. There was enough depth of vision for the admiral to recognize Union Station in the background. I saw it myself. That's over two dozen so far this week for the wider city. We may want to pull our guys back to Fifty-one and talk to the locals again.
I just got a feeling things are about to light up here. Thought you'd want to know ASAP. Kolhammer indulged himself in a smile at the arcane terminology. Dan Black tried hard, but he still seemed to have as much trouble dragging himself uptime as Kolhammer did shifting down. The smile faded, though, as he thought about the message. This was a hell of a business, messing with history the way they had. He knew there was no such thing as a grandfather paradox, but Einstein had spoken to him about something he called "deep echoes. But the Nobel winner had waved that away with a flourish of his pipe stem.
It was more like history trying to right itself, having been knocked off its axis by the Transition, if that made sense. It was sociology, not physics. None of it made sense. Not the accident that had brought them here, or the seemingly infinite number of consequences that had since flowed on. It was barely four months since they'd arrived, and far from kicking fascist butt, the Multinational Force seemed to have fucked everything six ways from Sunday. There was a whole Japanese Army Group fighting in Australia now, three German Army Groups massing in France to attempt an invasion of England, and old Joe Stalin had proved himself to be a worse ally than the fucking Malays that Kolhammer had escaped back up in twenty-one.
The old bastard had signed a cease-fire with Hitler and withdrawn from any hostilities against the Axis powers, suddenly freeing up the Nazi war machine to have another try at Great Britain. Christ only knew what was going through his mind.
He may well have doomed the whole world. Kolhammer shook his head clear. Other people were getting paid to worry about Stalin. He had more than enough to keep him up nights right here. He made a brief note to do something about Black's vidmail, and brushed the flatscreen with a fingertip, touching an icon that told Lieutenant Liao that he was ready for his next visitors, the design team from Douglas.
Without having to be asked, the young officer sent him a set of schematics for the Skyraider ground-attack aircraft, which wouldn't have been built in this time line for another four years. In the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, another window, surrounded by a flashing red border, outlined his schedule for the rest of the day.
With a few keystrokes, he flick-passed about a dozen minor tasks, sending them to his production chief, Lieutenant Colonel Viviani. She could deal with the usual FAQs on steerable parachutes, body armor, MREs, penicillin, grenade launchers, claymores, and the rest. He was due to have a serious talk with General George Patton about the wonders of reactive armor and the need to make some drastic changes to the thirty-one-ton mobile crematorium known hereabouts as the Sherman tank. A delegation from the navy was scheduled to politely ignore him while he told them to fix the torpedoes on their submarines.
And another group from the army would soon arrive to rudely ignore him while he tried to convince them of the benefits of issuing a basic assault rifle. He really wished Jones could have been around for that one, but the last time Kolhammer had checked, the commander of the Eighty-second was all tied up getting swarmed by a couple of Japanese divisions. And anyway, Colonel Jones wasn't the sort of officer who inspired confidence in your s army types. He was a marine, and he was black. About the best that could be said of his visitors today was that they were equally prejudiced against both.
This meant dealing with everyone from disenfranchised citrus farmers to L. Labor unions, land developers, minority rights activists, Hollywood moguls, industrial combines, and local home owners all hammered at his door without respite. And at the very end of the day, he had a deniable back-channel meeting with William Stephenson, the Brits' top intelligence man in the U.
Yet another fruitless attempt to deal with the ugliest pain in the butt he'd ever had to endure-a pain so severe, it surpassed even the nationally televised three-day cornholing he'd taken from Senators Springer and O'Reilly at the Armed Services Committee hearing regarding the Yemen fiasco. That occurred just after he'd first made admiral, and Kolhammer had been secretly grateful for the experience.
He'd figured that nothing outside of close combat could ever be that bad again. But of course, at that point in his life he'd never had to contend with a vengeful and paranoid cross-dressing closet-case like the legendary FBI director, J. The express trolley carrying Dan Black out to the Zone took its own sweet time covering the distance to the city's newest center of power. And people did, by the thousands. Tourists and rubberneckers passed through, wanting to catch a glimpse of the future-even though at the moment it was mostly just half-dug foundations and unfinished factories.
Volunteers and recruits poured into the barracks of the Auxilliary Forces, which were growing like topsy around the core of the original Multinational Force. Representatives from the "old" armed forces came to learn what they could as fast as possible, and not always with good grace. Engineers and scientists traveled there from all over the free world. Students bussed in from across the country. Factory workers and their families streamed in to fill the plants and production facilities, which were starting to sprawl across the Valley floor, chewing up thousands of acres of orange groves and ranchland.
They filled the constellation of fast-growing, prefab suburbs known collectively as Andersonville so quickly that they threatened to outpace the contractors who were building the vast tracts of cheap housing.
Indeed, most were still living in tents, like itinerant workers during the Depression. Still, they came whether or not there was a bed or a job waiting for them. Riding the overcrowded trolley back to the Zone with about a hundred new arrivals, Commander Black wondered how Kolhammer could possibly hope to manage the explosive growth of his strange new world.
It reminded him a little of the California he'd known in the thirties, when waves of nomads from the dust bowl states had fetched up on the western shore of the continent. Glancing up from his flexipad, he could see that about half the passengers fit his recollection of those days. Families clung tightly together around rotting cardboard suitcases held together with twine. They swayed back and forth as the tracks carried them eastward, forcing them to retrace some of the last steps they had taken on their long trek to the coast.
To Black, they didn't look any less desperate than the thousands of Okies and chancers who'd poured into the state during the Depression, but for one small difference: Even now, months after the world had adjusted to the fact of the Transition, the newswires still hummed with developments taking place in California, be they dry stories in the business pages about new manufacturing techniques, or yellow press hysteria about the "perversions" and "moral sickness" that were widely believed to be rampant within the confines of the San Fernando Valley.
Some days it seemed to Black as if half the country wanted to drive the time travelers back into the sea from which they'd appeared, while the other half would sell everything they owned just to purchase a ticket west, and into the future. Eddie Mohr and that Mexican kid Diaz were a good example of the latter. Black had no idea about why the chief petty officer had opted to transfer from the old navy to the AF, but he wasn't alone.
The applications list ran to tens of thousands of men and women, all wanting to get out of their original units and into new Auxilliary Force outfits that, for the most part, existed only on paper-or data stick, he corrected himself. Sometimes, Dan knew, they were simply drawn by the lure of flying rocket planes-which hadn't yet been built-or sailing in missile boats-ditto.
Diaz, on the other hand, was like any number of hopefuls who had been seduced by a single promise. When they set foot on that relatively small patch of turf, which had been established by a narrow vote of Congress as the Special Administrative Zone California , their skin color, gender, religion and-most controversially-what they did in their own bedrooms, ceased to be a factor in determining the path their lives would take.
Once inside the Zone, they became subject to the laws of the United States of America, and the provisions of her Uniform Code of Military Justice, exactly as they existed on the morning of January 15, , the day of the Transition. It meant, for instance, that nobody could call Diaz a wetback or a greaser, at least not without incurring significant legal penalties. It also meant, however, that they couldn't drive without a seat belt, smoke in public spaces, or "cross a public roadway while immersed in a virtual reality.
Black couldn't help but smile a little smugly at the warm self-regard the uptimers had for themselves and their many personal liberties. To him, they looked like people who'd been freed from heavy iron shackles-only to bind themselves just as tightly in a million threads of silk. As the trolley line swung up through Cahuenga Pass, the old wooden series interurban slowed noticeably.
Pacific Electric had recommissioned dozens of the cars to handle the extra traffic flowing into and out of the Valley. They seemed to wheeze and groan beside the sleek red-and-cream series "Hollywood" trams, which fairly zipped along the new track, laid at breakneck speed by the company that had a lucrative contract to provide mass transit services into the Zone.
Glancing out the window, Black noted that as quickly as the PE engineers could lay track, the road gangs still seemed to be outpacing them, adding another lane to the Hollywood Freeway. There had to be two thousand men out there working on the link that would stretch between the Valley and Santa Monica. Personally, he didn't have a view about it, but he'd seen fistfights break out among the uptimers when talk turned to the new freeways.
It was a hell of a strange thing to start throwing punches over, if you asked him. And anyway, he'd learned to keep his opinions to himself. Julia had smacked that much sense into him, at least. He was tempted to close the file he had up on the flexipad screen and sneak a peek at the home movie Jules had shot for him the last time they'd stayed together in New York. But he could tell that about half the carriage was still staring at the device in his hands, and they really didn't need to see his fiancee do her pole-dancing routine on a four-poster bed at the Plaza.
So instead, he tried to concentrate on an epic dissertation from a Captain Chris Prather about building a better Sherman tank. You'd have thought, being a navy man, he'd be safe from the likes of Prather. But General Patton was set to come calling today, and Black would have to shepherd him through the visit. He knew from recent experience that Patton would cut him no slack at all. Navy or not, he was Kolhammer's chief liaison to the old forces, and so he was about to become an instant expert on the care and feeding of Shermans.
Before he could help himself, he wondered idly what Julia was up to. He shut down the thought before it could go any further.
The last mortar round nearly fucked her video rig, but Julia got the little Sonycam back online by slamming the data stick into its port a couple of times. It wasn't a recommended fix, but it'd worked before. A small window in her battered Oakley combat goggles flickered into life again, the scene around her in the foxhole emerging from a blur of white noise. Five men lay in the shell crater, protected from most of the Japanese fire by a huge granite outcrop halfway up the slope of Hill Two of them were dead.
Unable to directly target the rest, the Japanese had been dropping mortars all around, but the rock formation would provide just enough overhead cover to protect them for a few minutes-until the odds caught up with them. One of the men had died when a nearby eucalyptus tree had been shattered by the blast of a small mountain gun; a foot-long splinter of wood had speared into his throat.
The other guy, they had no idea. He was just dead, and he didn't have a hole in him. Julia let her gaze slide down the slope, the Sonycam zooming in and out, taking in the wreckage of the shattered company. Less than two minutes earlier, over a hundred marines had been creeping up through the darkened scrub, toward the Japanese positions just below the crest of the hill. They had moved silently and with a speed that had surprised her, calling to mind a platoon of Gurkhas she'd once covered in Timor.
These marines were 'temps, fighting without body armor, remote sensors, or tac net. Three rifle platoons of older prewar volunteers. She'd interviewed many of them over the past few days, and now, in the space between two ragged breaths, their lives passed before her eyes. At least a third of them were dead, and near as many so badly torn apart by the Japanese claymores as made no difference.
She breathed out against a wave of overpressure as another packet of high-explosive bombs bracketed their hideout. Shrapnel rattled against the granite overhang, and the familiar scramble to check for wounds mechanically repeated itself, with each man who was able to instinctively patting himself down where a superheated shard of metal might have tugged at a sleeve or sliced so cleanly through living tissue that no pain or shock had yet registered.
Cocooned in her titanium-weave reactive matrix armor, her own responses deadened by ten years of this bullshit, Julia Duffy logged the screams of the dying for recall as she checked her machine pistol. The best part of a full clip jacked in, alternating penetrators and dumdums with a single tracer round three from the bottom to warn her when it was time to reload. She'd taped two clips together, for grease. A little trick some of the marines had quietly copied from her.
She sucked a mouthful of chilled Gatorade through a rubber tube that emerged from the padded collar of her coveralls. Something heavy fell into their midst, and Julia nearly jumped out of her skin. It was a koala, its fur burned to black tar and weeping red skin. It keened pitiably as smoke curled from its charred body. The marines regarded it, and her, with horror as she drew her sidearm, a SIG Sauer P, and put one round of Nytrilium fragmentable hollow point into the animal. It blew apart like an overripe tomato. She looked at the men and essayed the faintest of shrugs as a furious eruption of small-arms fire broke over them.
In the distance on the slope above them, someone gave a shrill shout. Julia glanced quickly in the direction of the sergeant who'd just cursed, measuring his likely response to what was coming. She didn't know him. The chaos and madness of the ambush had thrown them together. The man looked to be a good deal older than his two buddies. She couldn't guess at his actual age, though, through the gore and dirt, but his eyes looked like pools of dead water. She didn't reply, but moved her selector to three-round bursts, unsafed the weapon, and drew her knife from its scabbard. Satisfied that she could get to it in a hurry, Julia sheathed the evil-looking blade.
The crescendo of Japanese rifle fire seemed to build in an infinite curve that merged with the kiai-scream of the charge and the cries of the shattered marine company on the hillside below. It was a vision drawn straight out of Hell. Small groups of men huddled around blasted tree stumps, the momentum of their advance completely spent. The false promise of safety offered by the scraps of cover was enough to fix them to the spot where they were soon to die. The dead lay everywhere, closely entwined, their bodies grotesquely violated by blast effect and speeding metal.
One man still moved. He tried to drag the top half of his body back down the slope, clawing at the scorched earth to heave his torso away from the red smear of rag and bone that had been his legs. Julia's eyes took in the information, the shreds and tendrils and obscene tailings that dragged from the stump where he now ended-but no part of her connected it to the humanity of the dying creature. She wondered if she knew him. He was shaking like a frightened dog, and what little color had been in his face drained away now.
He stripped four grenades from his belt, primed them, and pitched them into the descending horde. The grenades detonated in a condensed drum solo, ripping a thirty-meter hole in the Japanese line, which staggered almost to a halt. Julia smacked one of the other two marines on the shoulder and gestured for him to turn around and cover their rear, before training her Sonycam back on the sergeant just in time to see him scramble from the shell hole and rush at the enemy. He fired long bursts from a Thompson submachine gun, and plucking still more grenades from his webbing, he threw them into the ranks of Japanese, bizarrely reminding Julia of a rioting anarchist outside a Starbucks.
Julia was struck by the scene of this one, aged, slightly potbellied white man, surrounded by dozens of stunned Nipponese soldiers. It could have lasted only half a second, but it looked like something out of an old movie, as if the enemy were standing completely still, just waiting to be mowed down. Then she realized her own weapon was up and pouring fire into them, as well. Shouts reached her from below, but of a different pitch and timbre to the sounds of terror that had come from there before.
Rallying cries gathered more survivors than she thought possible as the light of more grenade explosions glinted off the steel of at least two dozen American bayonets, suddenly moving at speed again toward their targets. Julia stayed hidden behind the rock so she could remain fixed on the vision of the sergeant, who had run out of ammunition and was swinging his machine gun like a club, staving in the heads of two enemy soldiers just before his left knee disintegrated in a dramatic spray of blood.
He dropped with a strangled scream, and instantly two more Japanese were on him, their improbably long rifles raised like farm tools, the bayonets aimed at his body. Julia zoomed in on the attackers. Her goggles read the microlight targeting dot square in the center of the nearest man's T, and she squeezed the trigger.
The gun coughed three times in rapid fire, the recoil dragging the muzzle up slightly, as she knew it would. All three rounds hit. Two dumdums and a penetrator. Enormous gouts of lumpy red mist exploded from the soldier's back, spraying his comrade, who was also hit and was spinning around under the impact. The penetrator had passed clear though the rib cage, lungs, and spinal cord of the first man, beginning a supersonic tumble as it exited, before striking the left shoulder of the second. As the second attacker fell away, Julia flipped the selector back to single shot and drilled another round through his head.
The body jumped in that heavy, lifeless way she knew all too well. The shouts came from close behind and were almost consumed in the roar of rifle fire. Duffy spun around, losing sight of her subject, some deeply buried instinct causing her to flip the selector to full auto. The other two marines were emptying their magazines into a platoon of Japanese that had appeared on the far side of the giant rock. The muzzle of her gun swung up and began to spit long tongues of fire.
A dozen men shuddered under the impact of the augmented ammunition. A streak of yellow light shot out, the tracer, thumping into the chest of an officer who had been racing at them, brandishing a samurai sword. He effected a near-perfect backwards somersault, a little Catherine wheel of smoke tracing his path through the air. Julia popped the dry clip, flipped it, and snapped home the loaded magazine.
Her heart beat like a jackhammer. It seemed impossible to draw breath. She fired at the swarm of their attackers again, her arms aching from the tension in her rigid muscles. The attack faltered and broke, and then dozens of marines slammed into the survivors.
Their full-throated roars mingled with her own snarls and the kiai of the enemy. She distinctly heard the wet, ripping thud of a long knife spearing into human flesh, but could not place it anywhere in the mandala of blood and savagery that swirled all around her. A cry, a scream with a familiar tone. A Jap was in the hole with them, scrambling on top of one of the marines. They wrestled like large, awkward children in the dirt. The other American thrashed beside them, trying to reattach his mangled jaw. Julia was on top of the intruder without knowing how she'd crossed the distance, the knife already in her hand, her thick gloves gouging at the eyes of their would-be killer.
Wrenching back his head to expose the throat. She stabbed the blade in to the hilt, and her world disappeared in a red wave as hot blood jetted out onto the goggles, leaving her just one small window in the upper right-hand quadrant of her visual field-the feed from the Sonycam, on which she watched herself slaughter the man who struggled in her hands like a wild animal. Two thousand meters away, Colonel J. Lonesome Jones was crouched over in his command bunker, a cramped dugout with a roof of logs and rammed earth, the interior lit by glo-tubes and two dozen computer screens feeding tac data from the drones circling high above.
The battalion was stretched thin, covering an area of low hills and light scrub at the western base of a soaring tabletop plateau with sheer granite sides. Forward observers for the Crusader guns had been choppered up there along with a small security detail. Between the 'temp forces, the Eighty-second's ground combat element, and the Australian Second Cavalry Regiment to the northwest, Jones had bottled up the advance of three Japanese divisions on MacArthur's headquarters in Brisbane.
It had been a turkey shoot at first. Thousands of enemy soldiers had ridden down the thin two-lane "highway" on bicycles. They'd done something similar in Malaysia, if he recalled his history correctly. But in Malaysia they hadn't had to contend with a battery of computer-controlled howitzers firing time-on-target along their precise line of advance.
After losing the better part of two regiments to the Crusaders, the Japanese had got off their bikes and begun to press forward on foot through the bush. They had died in there, too. Surveillance drones picked them out of the background clutter, and a fearsome nighttime barrage by three hundred antique howitzers-American, New Zealand, and Australian guns under MacArthur's command-chewed them over.
It was a vindication, said MacArthur, of his Brisbane Line strategy. Jones's men and women were paying for it now, though. Thirty-seven KIA so far, some from hand-to-hand, but mostly through the inevitable fuckups. Two days ago, a squadron of Liberators had bombed them by mistake, wiping out the better part of a platoon at the edge of his base area. That had finally and irrevocably poisoned an already strained relationship with MacArthur's command.
In response, Jones could only say his prayers to thank the good Lord that the 'temps-as they called the contemporary forces-missed most of what they aimed for, although he did tell MacArthur, off the record, that in future any contemporary air assets that came within five thousand meters of the Eighty-second without clearance would be target-locked by his air defenses as a precautionary measure. His intelligence chief, Major Annie Coulthard, broke into the memory. I make it a regimental force, advancing on a direct line toward the New Zealanders on Hill One-forty-nine.
Jones could see the advance on a bank of flatscreens, some carrying real-time drone footage, others displaying schematic CGI with tags identifying the disposition of friendly and enemy forces. The S2 worked her touch screen, zooming out, dragging the focus box to either side of the red column that was advancing on the small hill held by the depleted Kiwi battalion. Jones could see the place in his mind, a shattered landscape of gray ash and blackened tree stumps where everybody was coated in a layer of dark charcoal that gave both the Maori and white pakeha soldiers the appearance of black ghosts crouching in their gun pits.
They were going to have a hell of a time holding off a frontal assault by a Japanese regiment. Five-hundred-and-fifty-meter frontage, give or take. Battalion-sized force, moving on the double. Probably hoping to infiltrate through that blind valley along the creek bed. I think we took them all out. But it's a laydown that they'll set up those dinky little mortars as they get closer. Maybe even one of their mountain guns. Give 'em a heads-up over on One-forty-nine.
The bush has already been burned out over there, so we can hit 'em about… here," he said, tapping the screen at a couple of natural choke points. And stay sharp, Major. These fuckers just will not stay ass-whupped. Could be they're shooting for a divisional envelopment. If they knew the limits of our coverage, they'd go for it.
The tempo in the dugout picked up, background chatter rising, the snap of fingers on keyboards quickening as the effects of Jones's orders spread out through the command post. On a screen to Coulthard's left, he could watch a video feed of ground crew around his own attack helicopters as they suddenly picked up their pace. A virtually identical scene repeated itself over at 2 Cav, except that the gunships were Arruntas, not Comanches. There was no cam coverage of the aerodrome at Brisbane, but he knew that as soon as word passed down the landline, the same burst of frenetic activity would take place there, except this time the aircraft would be old Kittyhawks and sad little Wirraways, refitted for ground attack using napalm; just one more ghastly development that had arrived before its time.
Jones turned away from the small drama that was about to play itself around Hill and took in the theater-wide view. It was nothing like he'd been used to back in Drone coverage was minimal, and there was no satellite feed, of course. A couple of long-range SAS patrols and Marine Recon were buried deep behind the Japanese front line and reporting by microburst.
But that was about it. He felt naked, even though he knew, or at least he hoped, that his own view of the battle was godlike compared with that of his opponent, General Homma. He could never really be certain what technology had leaked across to the enemy, but they were running a full ECM suite, and Homma didn't seem to be packing much beyond a few flexipads used for communications. The encryption software seemed to be commercial and dated, at least by his standards; some Microsoft piece of crap that had been hacked to death about ten years beforehand, subjectively speaking.
The pads had probably been used for games or VR porn on the Sutanto. Still, even without the war-fighting technology that Jones had at his disposal, the Japanese were still here, weren't they? As Lenin once said, quantity has a quality all of its own, and three months ago they'd poured enormous quantities of men and material first into New Guinea and then into northern Australia, using MacArthur's island-hopping tactic before he had a chance to use it himself.
Jones doubted that they could have been stopped were it not the rapid deployment of the Multinational Force's ground combat element to bolster MacArthur's defenses. As soon as the first reports sorted themselves out, it was obvious the enemy had finally decided on how to respond to the strategic shock of the Transition. They were going to try to swarm the Allies with sheer weight of numbers. The Germans looked to be preparing for something similar in Europe, having shifted the bulk of their forces west after agreeing to terms with Stalin. Jones had more immediate problems to deal with, however.
High strategy could wait. Six large flatscreens had been linked to provide a workable video wall that displayed theater-wide data, and it wasn't family-friendly viewing. There were seven divisions of Imperial Japanese troops infesting the eastern coast of the Australian continent, four of them pressing down on MacArthur's much-vaunted Brisbane Line. Jones didn't think they'd break through, and the Havoc had cut off any chance they had of reinforcement, but when the killing was done with, he didn't imagine he'd have much of a force left, either.
Both his guys and 2 Cav were starting to run uncomfortably low on war stocks, and although they brought other strengths to the field, when you ran out of bullets, you weren't much of a soldier anymore. Jones had been hoarding materiel for weeks now, farming out tactical and even strategic strikes to the 'temps, who'd been strengthened by a long list of quick fixes and catch-ups, such as those napalm tanks now slung beneath the local ground-attack aircraft.
It was a two-way street, though. He'd just read a report of a marine company cut to ribbons by a string of claymores a few hours earlier. They'd have been completely wiped out if one of their sergeants hadn't rallied the survivors and charged right into the enemy force, which was racing downhill to finish them off. The command bunker had gone very quiet for a minute when the microburst packet from that reporter's Sonycam had filled one of the screens on the video wall. Every marine in his Battalion HQ had at least four years' combat experience.
Most of them had a lot more. There'd been some unkind talk about what a bunch of pussies and amateurs the 'temps had turned out to be, and Jones was certain he could feel some embarrassment in the room as the footage of that unholy, disorganized blood swarm filled the screen. It was every bit as bad as anything he'd known in Damascus or Yemen. And these guys, with the exception of the embed from the Times, were fighting old school.
No body armor, medevac, spinal inserts, or tacnet. It was like something out of the Dark Ages. As he watched now, the thunder of massed artillery rolled over them; that was the barrage he had initiated just a minute earlier. Hundreds of old-fashioned high-explosive shells screamed through the air, their firing sequence controlled by an old laptop computer and designed to drop the entire load simultaneously.
Hearing that rumble, he nodded in satisfaction. Air control had three dozen planes stacked up, ready to drop on the Japanese like hawks as soon as the artillery was done fucking with them. Hopefully, the New Zealanders wouldn't have much to do beyond picking off the survivors. They'd given up investing much energy in trying to grab live prisoners. These guys had turned out to be worse than Hamas jihadi. It was like every one of them kept a grenade in his loincloth, just to avoid capture and to take a few gaijin with him. Jones stifled a sigh as a bone-deep lassitude swept over him.
It had nothing to do with sleeplessness and fatigue. Not a fatigue of the body, at any rate. He was tired in his soul. As the first flight of Kittyhawks dived away to unload their shiny new tanks of napalm on the unseen, screaming survivors of General Homma's shattered envelopment, Jones fought an urge to just walk away.
For the briefest moment, the only thing keeping him at his post was a replay of Julia Duffy's video package on a small screen at an untended station. Jones couldn't help but stare at the sergeant who had saved his entire company from annihilation. The commander of the Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Unit was certain the man would earn a high honor for his actions. The evidence of the video was irrefutable. He had turned that small battle from a disaster into a most unlikely victory. But that wasn't what caught Colonel Jones's attention. He knew that man from somewhere.
He just couldn't place it. A quick scan of the theater-wide threat boards informed him that nothing was about to go pear-shaped in the next few minutes. He pulled out his flexipad and called up the brief report from the action on that hill about two clicks away. He grabbed his G4 and helmet and called over Sergeant Major Harrison, his senior enlisted man.
They were due to tour the perimeter, but the image of that 'temp sergeant, swinging his old Thompson machine gun like a baseball bat, just would not leave him alone. He'd lay money on the barrelhead that they'd met before. Christ knew where, though. Aub Harrison was nearly as enthusiastic about ass-chewing as his battalion commander, which made the Eighty-second a very dangerous place to walk around with your ass hanging out for no good reason.
He threw a glance back at the screen as they left. The sequence was replaying, and the marine was heaving a couple of grenades up the hill again, firing his machine gun from the hip with his other hand. He looked angry, and Jones had that infuriating feeling that he was this close to remembering where they'd met. But then he was out the door and into the light of the day. There would be a terrible drought in the s. And another at the turn of the century. El Nino they called it, although why you'd name a drought was beyond understanding for the Australian prime minister.
Paul Robertson, the former banker who'd been recruited to the PM's staff, thought the old man looked very ill, as bad as he'd been when he'd recalled the Sixth and Seventh Divisions from the Middle East back in March. They knew now that he would die in July of or at least he would have in the normal run of events. A doctor from the Australian component of the Multinational Force had run all sorts of gizmos over the PM, and had even inserted some kind of pellet under the skin of his right elbow that was supposed to help him cope with the stress of his office.
But to Robertson, John Curtin looked like he might not make it through the night. No matter what wonder drugs they gave him, he was being eaten alive by the war. You know that," said Robertson. Driven back through the islands. And burned alive in their own cities. Probably a lot quicker than would have happened originally. We had that uranium dug up and shipped off to the Yanks double-quick. They're working twenty-five hours a day on this A-bomb of theirs.
And they're not going to waste time running up blind alleys like they did-or would have-the first time. They have a room full of computers now. It could be less than a year before they test the first warhead. The prime minister, a former journalist, sketched a thin, humorless smile. I don't imagine for a second that Hitler and Tojo haven't stripped all the computers off the ships they found. And I think the Japs are here partly because they covet our uranium-". They're going hell-for-leather to deny the Americans a launchpad for their counterattack in the Pacific.
They can get uranium from the Russians now, anyway. Neither they nor the Germans can hope to compete with the Yanks in the end. They just don't have the industrial base needed to win a race to the bomb-" Curtin rubbed at his red eyes with a shaky hand. But we're not beating them yet. They're not in retreat from MacArthur's bloody Brisbane Line.
They're dying on it. But there's a hell of a lot of people trapped behind that line, and I'll wager pennies to pounds that they're dying a lot harder than Homma's men. It's not even propaganda that the Japs treat their captives worse than animals. Robertson couldn't argue with him on that. It had proved impossible to suppress the knowledge that had come through the Transition, and after a couple of futile attempts by the Commonwealth censors, they hadn't bothered trying any longer. For once they hadn't had to invent stories of the bestial nature of their enemies. The Nazis and Imperial Japan already stood condemned by history, and even by the testimony of their own descendants.
He had seen newsreels of some of the English-speaking German and Japanese personnel who'd arrived with Kolhammer. They were touring the U. The Germans in particular, as he recalled, attacked the Third Reich with almost messianic zeal. The two Japanese sailors were a little more restrained, but no less emphatic that the militarist government of their homeland had to be defeated and replaced with a modern democracy. It made Robertson's head spin every time he thought about it, and he was grateful to be so busy.
He wasn't responsible for giving Curtin military advice. Originally he'd been assigned to the PM's office to help smooth the transition from a state-based to a federal taxation system. But that had been temporary, and now he'd agreed to a permanent appointment, helping the government deal with the economic implications of the Transition. His brief covered everything from planning for future droughts, through to simple trademark issues. Before joining the PM in his surprisingly small, dark office, he'd been on the phone to the American ambassador, trying to convince their cousins across the Pacific to prosecute some five-star grifter by the name of Davidson who'd lodged patents for more than half a dozen inventions that would have been developed by local businesses.
It was a hell of a job, dealing with the monetary implications of an invasion one moment, and with a crook who was trying to steal the plans for a self-chilling can of beer the next. But when nobody was watching, Robertson had to admit to himself that he was, just occasionally-well, not having fun exactly, but he'd never been as excited by the challenge of his old job in the bank.
There he'd made money. Here he made history. They lost half their troops just getting ashore, a disaster by anyone's measure. And yes, they've rolled over dozens of small towns, but as soon as they hit MacArthur's defensive line, they stopped dead-literally. They have no chance of reaching our main population or production centers. They're terrified to the point of impotence of engaging with Spruance's fleet because of the Havoc and the Kandahar's battle group.
Curtin's tired, watery eyes glared defiantly up at him over the rims of his glasses. The killer was well known, at least to his most important victims. Blokhin was the man's name. He had served under the Tsar in the Great War, but had switched his loyalties to Lenin's Bolsheviks by the early s. He had been a secret policeman ever since, rising to head the Kommandatura Branch of the Administrative Executive Department, a rather bloodless title for the lord high executioner of the Soviet Union.
Nikita Khrushchev, who would now never become the Communist Party leader, groaned as the heavy iron door swung open and Blokhin entered the room. Through the sweat and blood that clouded the vision in his one good eye, he could make out the hem of the leather butcher's apron that was nearly as legendary as the ogre who wore it.
It was said to be so heavily stained with the blood of the thousands of Polish officers Blokhin had personally executed at Katyn that it could never be cleaned. There was probably more life in that filthy tunic than remained in Khrushchev's entire broken body. The pair stomped over to where Khrushchev lay on the cold concrete floor and pinned him beneath their boots. The agony of their hobnails grinding into his already tortured flesh and broken bones summoned up screams the former Politburo magnate had not thought he would be able to voice.
His throat was already raw from what seemed like a lifetime of screaming. He was dimly aware of Blokhin's heavyset form as it advanced on him, and for one irrational moment he wondered if he might have lived had Stalin agreed to liquidate the executioner, as Beria-the head of the NKVD-had once desired.
After all, Yezhov-that poison dwarf-had tortured and killed unknowable numbers of enemies, only to be killed in turn by Beria. He had died begging and screaming and thrashing against his fate, and all Khrushchev had left was a determination that he would not go out like that.
He knew there was no return from this very special section of Lubianka. Best then to consign his shattered carcass to the release of death with what little dignity he could muster. Naked, covered in his own filth, nearly toothless, his face a bruised ruin, one eye gouged out, nubs of broken bone poking through torn flesh at half a dozen places on his body-the very concept of dignity was ludicrous. But he would not beg for his life.
A small sting in his neck. He wouldn't have noticed it amid the blizzard of pain, were it not for the fact that Blokhin had grabbed one of his torn ears just before he jabbed the needle in. It was not standard. A trickle of soft, indescribably sweet pleasure. No, it wasn't that, either. It was… an absence of pain. It spread from the site of the small sting, flowing down his spine and out along his thin, scabrous arms and legs. It was like slipping into a warm bath. Even his mind, which had been as badly abused as his body, found itself floating on a summer breeze, drifting away from the horrors of his torture.
The beatings remained in his memory, but now he felt so disconnected from them that they were as easily endured as the thousands of beatings and murders he himself had ordered over the years. Other people's misery, he'd learned, was a much lighter burden than one's own. Even when the guard flipped him over roughly, so that his skull hit the floor with a crack and the glare of the cell's naked lightbulb shone into his dying eye, he did not care. The regimen here agrees with you, da? Khrushchev blinked the tears from his eye. He tried to wipe them away, forgetting his broken fingers, but the guards still pinned him to the cold floor.
Each crushed a wrist beneath one boot, and they held long rubber truncheons in their hands. They could do as they pleased. It's a free country. The thought made him chuckle in spite of himself. Khrushchev coughed up clots of dark blood and a few broken pieces of his teeth as he regarded his latest visitor across a gulf he could not fathom. Beria stood there like a snake in human form. He had stepped from behind Blokhin, appearing without warning. His former friend, now chief tormentor, wore a general's uniform and carried a small cosh. Khrushchev recognized it from previous beatings.
Early on, in this new phase of their relationship, he had repeatedly wet himself when it had appeared in Beria's thin, white hands. Now it was just a curious artifact. He didn't even flinch when the NKVD boss took three long strides toward him and bent down to smash him across the jaw with it.
An awareness of blinding pain flashed through his thoughts, but at no stage did it connect with his concerns. Then the pain faded, and he did not care that it had been visited upon him. Nikita Khrushchev, despite the fact that he was teetering on the edge of mortal existence, found himself fascinated. What on earth were they doing to him? But before I can satisfy your curiosity, I wonder, would you mind signing this confession for me? I know it has been a matter of some difficulty between us.
But I thought I might seek your indulgence one last time. The Vozhd is pressing me for a resolution. You understand, my friend. After all, they had known each other for years. A few years anyway, which counted for something in the charnel house known as the Soviet Union. It was Beria who had warned him off his friendship with Yezhov, just before the perverted little monster had been snatched up and fed into the meat grinder.
Why, that made him closer to the NKVD chief than poor Blokhin over there, who had once served loyally under Yezhov, and nearly died for it. As Beria squatted beside him and motioned for one of the guards to step off Khrushchev's arm, the fallen Communist felt something that was akin to love well up within his breast.
It was suddenly very important that he make a gesture of good faith for his old friend. What did it matter what had passed between them? He didn't care that he had been made to lie in his own excrement while Blokhin and Beria beat him on the soles of his feet with iron bars. He did not care that they had tied him to a chair and beaten his legs until they were black masses, then returned to beat the bruises so that it felt like boiled water had been poured over them. It was no longer even a concern that Beria had gouged out his eye with a gloved thumb, and then crushed the ruined eyeball as it hung on his cheek.
He didn't shudder as he recalled the memory. He had seen worse, and had ordered worse things done. That you worked as a German agent to undermine the defense of the Southwestern Front. Khrushchev's thoughts moved as slowly through his mind as a child's balloon in the air of a hot summer's day. He recalled the rout and encirclement at Kharkov only dimly. It was from his past life. Beria smiled, a gesture that fell on Khrushchev like a shaft of spring sunlight. Will you do me this favor anyway? Will you sign this for me?
Sinking deeper into narcotic lassitude, Khrushchev was ashamed of himself for quibbling. With a great effort he took the confession in the broken claw of his free hand. The weight suddenly came off his other arm, and a fountain pen appeared. He could not concentrate sufficiently to read the document, but he had seen enough of them over the years. He knew it mattered not. Khrushchev felt himself forever tottering on the edge of blessed sleep, but he never quite tumbled over.
With a great effort he managed to rouse himself to speak. The NKVD chief stopped and turned, regarded Khrushchev with the flat curiosity of a viper sizing up a small meal. Blokhin moved to bar the door, and the two guards hoisted Khrushchev up by the arms. He knew without being told what was about to happen.
He would be taken from the cell and placed in a Black Crow, driven a short distance to the killing house in Varsonofyevsky Lane and into the courtyard where stood a low, square building. The floor was concrete, just like his cell. It sloped down slightly toward one wall constructed of thick wooden logs. Taps and hoses were provided to wash away the blood. He would be placed against the wall and shot in the back of the head by Blokhin, who personally undertook the most important executions.
Then his body would be placed in a metal box and driven to a nearby crematorium. Most likely his ashes would later be dumped in the mass grave at the Donskoi Cemetery. Nothing mattered any longer. Certainly not the Party or the revolution, or the tens of thousands he had sent to be killed by men like Blokhin. As they dragged him down the narrow, damp corridor he could raise neither self-pity nor hope, anger nor terror.