The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [34]
“Does he love you at all?” the Colonel asked. “Does that matter to him?”
“Not one bit does he love me.” She was bitter. “He doesn’t even know what that means. ‘Have a nice day,’ that is what he tells me. Oh, and he buys me cheap, sexy underwear.”
“My dear, how is it that we human beings forgot how to love? How did the world even come to such a state?” said the Colonel, warming to his theme. “Since this may be my last chance to ask you, may I seek your customary good advice in an intimate matter? I must decide what to do about Natalya.”
“You shouldn’t even ask me about that, Alexei. I never have any luck.”
“If I leave Natalya here, the bandits kill her for being my mistress. If I take her home to Petersburg, the mafia kills her because she is dark. If we stay here in the Caucasus, then they kill both of us, eventually. And then there’s my wife, of course. What on earth is to be done?”
“All right, I’ll tell you. Get some money and leave Russia. My mother emigrated to New York in 1978. So my dear mother is finally free of Russia, and I, her only beloved daughter, now I have hopeless affairs with crazy American mercenaries.”
The woman sighed in pain from the far side of the world. “At least ‘Executive Solutions’ got me this great translator job. They’ve got medical, dental, everything. I could get liposuction.”
Kickoff brusquely seized the phone again.
“Now he wants you to look through his big rifle’s telescope,” the woman reported. “He’s also angry that you spend so much time talking to me, while you hardly say one single word to him.”
“That’s because you are so wise and charming, while he is merely a professional killer. Can we discuss something truly important now? My Natalya is the only happy woman in Chechnya. That is the truth. There is something so profoundly erotic about surrendering yourself to a deadly enemy . . . Natalya has a holy, abject quality, very feminine . . . It’s as if she absorbs me . . . I’m bewildered by it, it’s a spiritual calamity . . . I used to rage at her, helplessly, confusedly . . . I love her so much that I can’t even drink anymore . . .”
Kickoff gestured impatiently at the enormous rifle. Wearied by his duty, the Colonel lowered himself to his elbows and obediently gazed through the black rubber-cupped eyepiece.
He had seen night-vision goggles before. Alfa troops had them. But never a device like this. This was fantastic. The rifle’s scope opened up the Chechen evening like the eye of an owl.
Now Kickoff was growling into the phone at the embittered woman in America. The American’s corporate sponsors had sent Kickoff here with a huge stack of war toys and no language skills. Kickoff had ventured into the wilds of Chechnya with three little toy robot airplanes, six videocameras, a hundred delicate wind gauges, satellite phones, solar panels, a shatterproof military computer in a camouflaged gunmetal case . . . Kickoff bore a stack of cash, and many discreet documents issued by various oligarchs and moguls. Tyumen Oil and ConocoPhilips, LUKoil and ExxonMobil, Sibneft, Halliburton and ChevronTexaco. The signature of Igor Yusufov of the Energy Ministry was much in evidence in Kickoff’s papers. Alexei Kuznetsov, Thomas DeFanti, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. There was even an importation permit signed by no less a man than Vladimir Putin.
It was not that Kickoff knew these important men personally, or that they would ever need to know him. However, they seemed to feel some need for the services Kickoff provided. When Kickoff declared that was he not a spy, but an American working legally on contract from civilian companies, he was probably telling the truth.
The Colonel shifted Kickoff’s weapon on its bipod and trailed the eerie scope across the wrecked and glowing landscape. Repeated bombings had reduced the local storage tanks to fragments of riveted steel. Spindly trees, ten years old, grew from the tortured heaps of black tarmac and bad concrete. The hotter surfaces glowed vividly in the scope’s computer lens. It