LITMIR.BIZ

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of fear, anxiety and excitement, heard his lieutenants of Command Red Lightning barking for the conscripts and the science detail beyond the steel door to move faster for the transport helicopters. This was his command, his protectorate in this remote and desolate abyss of Tajikistan, after all, the responsibility heaped square on his shoulders to get to the bottom of what had traveled from deep space to previously land in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgystan. And what was now breaching Earth’s atmosphere was neither comet, falling star, meteor shower nor any other space phenomenon identified by Man. If it played true to prior and—what, supernatural?—form, it would not only swamp roughly a dozen square acres, as it had in each of the former Soviet republics, thus forcing a military quarantine, but chances were the event would sear yet another terrifying memory at the sight of human beings…

      He shuddered, shoved away the frightening images, cursing the young soldier who allowed the door to thud shut, near smashing his scowl to pulp. Forget the angry albeit sorry fact Moscow had dumped him in hostile country that made his former Chechen post look a Black Sea resort by comparison, the Minister of Defense wanted answers to mysteries that came from another galaxy, perhaps another world, even another dimension, if he believed what his astronomers told him about black holes, shrinking mass and evolving protostars.

      Tajikistan, he knew, was marked off by the political and military barons of Moscow as a buffer zone between the Muslim extremists of Afghanistan and Russia, but another image easily leaped to mind when he thought about his woeful post. As Moscow’s man in-country, braving the cold, fighting drug traffickers, often engaged in pitched battles with both rebels and narcothugs—and often both were one and the same—he saw Tajikistan as a vast moat between Afghanistan and Russia, teeming with crocodiles—hungry and poised to devour those who would further erode the moral fiber of his country with the slow white death or outright attacking Mother Russia through terrorism and sabotage.

      Prepared to tackle the night’s grim business, whatever the case, Kolinko used a bootheel to thunder open the door, barely breaking stride as he swept onto the sprawling helipads.

      “Move, move, move!”

      He took in the controlled frenzy of soldiers, urged on by his officers as they rushed to board three Mi-26 transports, then spotted the gaggle of spacesuits lumbering for the high-tech cocoon of the custom-built black Mi-14 search-and-rescue chopper at the deep north end. There, a squad of his black-clad Red Lightning commandos lugged the tubular lead containers with fastened vacuum hoses, muled various and sundry metal crates that housed detection and sampling verification ordnance.

      As if, he thought, what was streaking for Earth could be understood by finite puny Man.

      And Kolinko looked to the heavens, stood his ground, some two thousand feet high on the western edge of the Pamir Range. The scudding gray cloud banks seemed low enough to reach up and grab. Where the billows broke in roiling tendrils, he made out the faint sheen of moonlight, then stared at countless stars twinkling from galaxies both known and yet to be named.

      After another few moments of stargazing, aware he was stalling, Kolinko looked back at the compound, briefly wondered if he would return to see its foreboding steel walls, see through to fruition the prototypes of future secret weapons being engineered in its labyrinth. Panning the mammoth complex, north to south, he almost envied the soldiers and science crews remaining behind, nestled as they were, safe from potential lethal doses of radiation or the terrifying clutches of antigravity, deep in the rock-hewn bowels.

      Safe, yes, unless the celestial storm changed course and…

      At least half the base was burrowed deep into the mountain range that rose from the plateau, the imposing peaks jutting higher, it seemed, forming a natural barrier the farther south they stretched to meet the northern edge of the Fedchenko Glacier, one of the world’s longest continental ice river. A final sweep, spying the concrete dome of the observatory looming dead center from the roof where its telescopes—Russian versions of the American Hubble, he knew—monitored the coming tempest, and Kolinko fastened the com link over his black beret.

      His team of astrophysicists, he recalled, believed they had pinpointed the core source of the space ore. Give or take a thousand light-years, they claimed its origins in something called the Eagle Nebula, recent but evolving star formations about 6,500 light-years away in a stellar region called Serpens, near the Star Gamma Scuti. Whatever its genesis, for a moment Kolinko wished the observatory a silo, imagined the scope magically morphing into a nuclear warhead, a time-delay fuse that would erupt a thermonuclear blanket, all but vaporizing the extraterrestrial stew.

      Kolinko swept back to reality as he felt the icy touch of rotor wash slashing his face. All set and ready, but for what? he wondered, grunting as he bent his head, forging toward the lead transport chopper.

      Watching the first two transports lifting off, he suddenly found something both fearsome and absurd that a simple soldier should be forced to confront, much less explain the improbable and the preposterous. Boarding the Mi-26, he realized he was touching the emblem on the front of his beret and wishing what they were going to encounter was as simple to explain as lightning.

      FAYSUD DOZMUJ WAS ashamed of his comrades.

      As he cradled the AK-47, watching the caravan of mules and horses from the rearguard, he began to consider how much different he was than his fellow clansmen. One disturbing for instance, he wasn’t a terrorist, much less a cold-blooded killer, as many of them had proved themselves to be. The fact he didn’t carry a heart pumping with murderous wrath round-the-clock like his cousins for any human being other than Tajik—especially Russians and westerners—left him wondering if he was better than the others, or simply weak. Granted, circumstance dictated the road many of them had chosen, but the circumstance of the desperate poor or the oppressed—as they saw themselves—was a sad and sorry eternal plight the world over.

      Always had been, always would be.

      The blood of the innocent, he knew, was on many hands here in the Grbukt Pass. Be it Israel, Iraq or Kabul, and as family men themselves, did it not prey on their minds that they had shattered the lives of lambs who only wished to live in peace, perhaps slaughtering children and thus extinguishing future bloodlines? Did they not see that their violence and brutality made them an abomination in the eyes of God? Was there not one even half-righteous man among their lot?

      And how did they see him? As a coward, always making himself scarce when an ambush was in the wings, having never fired a shot in anger against their hated Russian oppressors?

      Shucking the heavy wool coat higher up his shoulders, he shivered against the icy wind that howled like a thousand banshees, or the giant hairy almasty, he thought, the man-thing rarely seen but often heard baying from the black depths of mountain forests. He sidestepped another pile of dung steaming in the snow, thinking this was the last time he would follow his cousins when they hired themselves out as drug mules for men, he knew, who clearly had no regard who suffered, directly or indirectly, from the evil they peddled, as long as they lived on, rich-fattened swine indulging their every vile transgression.

      It wasn’t the long and dangerous drive by truck to the border, picking up something like two to three tons of heroin from Afghan warlords and their corrupt Russian counterparts each trip. The consignments were paid for in advance, their tribal leader, Ghazin, having won the trust of Russian gangsters long ago to deliver the cargo to designated rendezvous points in the Pamirs. Nor did the grueling three- or four-day march on foot when they were forced to abandon their vehicles in exchange for pack animals to trudge out the final leg of the journey bother him. Hardship was an accepted way of life for the Tajik.

      Rather, it was his fear of God and the dreaded loss of eternal Paradise that disturbed him to no end, his heart and soul burdened by the weight of guilt, far exceeding, he imagined, the combined load of burlap sacks now being hauled out of the gorge. Way beyond the earthly consideration of a few paltry American dollars, by which he could feed a family of seven during the coming months, his conscience admonished him that what he did was wrong in the eyes of his Maker.

      No more.

      This was his last journey for the Devil, aware that what he did only enabled the spawning of evil, that was gain of illicit

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