The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [33]
The American agents inside Chechnya were rapidly improving their disguises. The Americans would never seem at home in the Caucasus, though. They didn’t have lice, nor did they stink.
The Colonel was sharing a rocky, blasted ledge with the American agent called Kickoff. The two of them were very close, so close as to be quite intimate. Kickoff wore a black fur hat and crumpled Soviet combat fatigues. To that extent, Kickoff looked normal for Chechnya. Yet his teeth were white and perfect beneath his salt-and-pepper beard, and his skin was uncannily clean. Silky mountain-climbing underwear kept his precious American body toasty from wrist to ankles. Kickoff wore strong, beautifully knitted socks. He even wore sock liners. Thin, magical membranes that kept the painful rot of trench foot away. They were like condoms for his feet.
The Colonel himself stank badly of sweat, fear, boredom, vodka, and strong cigarettes. But his personal reek was lost in the awesome stench from a dead donkey’s rotting haunch and fetlock. Endless skirmishes had been fought over this vulnerable run of the Chechnyan pipeline. The shallow little cave the Colonel shared with Kickoff was a well-known bandit lair. It was routinely scourged by passing federal helicopters. Every once in a while the lightning-sticks would blow a smuggler’s donkey apart.
Tonight he and Kickoff would be killing bandits. Not all of them, of course. Just enough to prove a concept to Kickoff’s employers. There were not enough soldiers in all the world to guard all the world’s pipelines from all the world’s thieves, saboteurs, and vandals. That task would have to be automated somehow, for those pipelines were the arteries of all the world’s machines. Like clouding mosquitoes, human bandits had learned to pierce those pipes and drink deep. So, in return, the threatened machines would have to learn to seek, hunt, and kill.
Kickoff handed the Colonel his heavy, brick-shaped satellite phone.
“Hello again, Alexei,” said the phone in Russian.
“Hi sexy,” said the Colonel, his morale improving at once. It no longer seemed odd to the Colonel that he talked on a satellite telephone to a distant woman in Bethesda, Maryland, merely in order to communicate with Kickoff. Kickoff knew no more than a dozen words of Russian. Yet Kickoff was a practical man. If he couldn’t haul his translator into a killing zone, he would simply phone her.
“We’ve grown so intimate in such a short time, my dear,” the Colonel said into the phone. “Yet I understand we’ll be parting soon.”
“I’m sad about that, too. But it’s the nature of their business, dear Alexei.”
Kickoff zippered open his dappled weapons bag. He produced a marvelous, long-barreled sniper rifle, made of carbon fiber, polished fiberglass, and dense white plastic. He then seized the phone and barked into it.
The Colonel accepted the phone once again.
“That was a whole lot of stupid technical crap about his big gun,” the woman said. “Are you interested in that? Should I bother?”
Kickoff was ex-American military—he had a soldier’s eyes—but he was officially a civilian consultant. This was the first time the Colonel had ever seen Kickoff handle a weapon. Kickoff’s lethal machine was a Western .50-caliber rifle, privately produced. Pampered special-ops gangs carried toys of that sort when, unlike Russian troops in Chechnya, they were not killing Moslem terrorists in the mud and blood every single day.
“Darling, I’m interested if you’re interested. You tell me all about it. Just how wonderful is Kickoff’s big gun?”
“Oh, in bed, I suppose you mean. Well, he’s wonderful in bed,” said the woman coolly. She was an American, and completely lost to modesty. The Colonel liked her very much for this. It was so refreshing.
“He’s in good condition, with a handsome face,” the Colonel told her. “Such good teeth Kickoff has.”
“His name is not ‘Kickoff.’ His name is Michael Hickok.”
The Colonel mulled over this correction. “Hickok, Kickoff.” For the life of him, he couldn’t hear any difference there. And why would that matter anyway, when they never