Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (2 page)

It was forgotten.

People forgot, for instance, that a foreign power had, in fact, seized American territory
during the course of the twentieth century. In an entire century, it happened only
once. In the North Pacific, Japanese forces occupied two of the Aleutian Islands.
The first was Attu, at the westernmost tip of the archipelago; the second was Kiska,
farther to the east. The Japanese army raised the Rising Sun over the islands in June
1942 and gave each a new Japanese name. Henceforth Attu would be called Atsuta; Kiska
would be known as Narukami.

The occupation of the two islands was part of a broader strategy to divert American
attention from the Japanese offensive on Midway Atoll, in the Central Pacific. On
June 4, air attacks were launched against Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island, in the
heart of the Aleutians; the Battle of Midway began the next day. Japanese forces conducted
surprise landings on Attu and Kiska from the night of June 7 to the morning of June
8.

The islands fell easily. America lost land to the enemy.

The Japanese had no intention of holding the islands indefinitely, however. The Aleutian
campaign had originally been devised as a diversion, and it was far from clear that
the islands offered any strategic value. The military planned to hold them for the
short term, until winter, then consider how to proceed. This plan was revised when
surveys conducted in the wake of the occupation revealed that the islands would remain
habitable through the winter; toward the end of June, it was decided to hold them
for the long term.

Habitable the islands were, but the climate was extraordinarily harsh. The Aleutian
chain as a whole was often said to have the worst weather in the world. The frigid
waters of the Bering Sea ran up against the warmer waters of the Pacific along the
archipelago’s length, leaving its islands shrouded in fog that never lifted. Only
rarely did the sun peek out. Ferocious winds whipped the rocks; torrential rains battered
the earth. And then, of course, there was the snow.

Soon the bitter winter set in.

Things were bad on the islands in 1942, but true disaster had yet to strike. The Japanese
lost air superiority, enabling the Americans to pound the islands from the skies,
and there were delays in establishing ground defenses. And the worst was still to
come. The full-blown tragedy would not occur until the following year.

May 1943. The garrison on Atsuta/Attu was wiped out.

As eleven thousand American soldiers rushed ashore under cover of naval bombardment,
the twenty-five hundred Japanese troops stationed on the island charged into a hopeless
battle, ready to meet their deaths. It was a so-called banzai attack. Not a single
soldier was taken. Every last man among their number died for the Emperor.

Kiska Island.

Or now that it was Japanese territory, Narukami.

Kiska/Narukami was occupied by a force twice as large as the force on Attu/Atsuta.
Some way had to be found to avoid a second tragedy. And so, though the Japanese had
effectively already lost naval superiority, it was suggested that the entire force
be evacuated in a plan called the “Ke-gō Operation.” The first stage, involving the
evacuation by submarine of sick and injured soldiers and civilian contractors, concluded
in June. The second stage, in which a naval fleet was dispatched to collect the remaining
units, was carried out in July, on “Zero day.” Z-Day had first been set for July 11
but had to be postponed repeatedly owing to inclement weather. Then at last, on July
29, a rescue fleet consisting of two light cruisers and nine destroyers sailed into
Kiska/Narukami Harbor and safely evacuated the island’s entire fifty-two-hundred-man
garrison.

The Ke-gō Operation was a success. A heavy fog kept the Americans from noticing what
they were doing.

Everyone on the island escaped. Or rather: every
human
.

The Japanese army abandoned the rest.

They left the military dogs. Four dogs in all. Each came from a different line. One
was a Hokkaido dog—or an Ainu dog, as they were once called—a breed known for its
musculature and its ability to withstand the cold. His name was Kita, and he belonged
to the navy. His job was to show which of the wild plants on the island were edible:
he was a taster. The second and third dogs, both German shepherds, belonged to the
army. One was named Masao, the other Katsu. The fourth, also a German shepherd, was
neither a navy nor an army dog; she was a bitch and had been taken from an American
prisoner. Her name was Explosion.

Prior to the invasion the previous year, ten men had been operating a wireless telegraph
and aerological station on the island under the aegis of the US Navy. When the Japanese
military landed, eight of these soldiers escaped; the other two were taken prisoner.
Explosion had been captured along with them.

The United States was deploying vast numbers of highly trained military dogs all around
the world in those days, dispatching them to the front lines. It had established its
first training center in 1935 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the Marine Corps main
base, and the next decade saw the creation of an additional five centers. By the end
of World War II, some forty thousand dogs had been raised in these facilities. Explosion
was one of these. After June 1942, however, she was no longer an American. Now she
belonged to the Japanese.

Japan, as it happened, had a three-decade lead on America in military dog combat.
The first time Japanese dogs ever took to the field of battle was in 1904, during
the Russo-Japanese War. Japanese breeds were used, but they were trained in Germany.
Eventually the military began importing German shepherds, and a research institute
at an infantry school in Chiba launched Japan’s first serious effort to breed military
dogs. Following the Manchurian Incident in 1931, the army ministry helped oversee
the creation of a civilian-run Imperial Military Dog Society, and the Independent
Garrison Unit’s War Dog Platoon began conducting experimental canine maneuvers in
Manchukuo.

Not surprisingly, Germany had led the way in world military dog history. Systematic
efforts to train German shepherds commenced in 1899 with the establishment of the
German Shepherd Society. As early as the Great War (otherwise known as World War I),
Germany was already deploying large numbers of
modern
military dogs. Indeed, the figure had climbed as high as twenty thousand by the time
hostilities ended. And the dogs had performed incredibly well.

Germany’s success was a revelation to other nations.
We can let dogs fight our wars!

Two catastrophic wars were fought during the twentieth century. The twentieth century
was, it is often said, a century of war. It was also the century of military dogs.

Hundreds of thousands of dogs were sent into battle.

In July 1943, four such dogs were abandoned on an island. A certain island.

The island no longer had a name. The Japanese forces had retreated, taking the Rising
Sun flags and the rest of their paraphernalia with them. The island wasn’t called
Narukami anymore. As far as the Americans knew, though, it was still occupied by Japan,
and until it was reclaimed it would remain an illegitimate Japanese territory. So
the island was no longer Narukami, but neither had it gone back to being the American
territory known as Kiska Island.

It was a nameless place, owned by four abandoned dogs.

The island was about half the size of Tokyo. A dense fog hung over it and the surrounding
waters, never clearing, isolating it from the mainland and its tundra. It was an island
of white. But not the white of snow, which lingered only on the peaks. Clear springs
burbled through the valleys. Grasses covered the land, their blades glistened with
dew that never dried.
EVERYONE
’
S GONE
, the dogs thought.
THERE
’
S NO ONE LEFT
. They knew the Japanese had gone, that they had been forsaken. Kita, Masao, Katsu,
Explosion. Yes. They understood.

It was all over.

Each dealt differently with this new reality.

The nameless island had been set adrift in zero time. It was like the end of the world,
or the cradle of the world’s imminent creation. Ferocious downpours daily spattered
the earth. The howling wind never let up, and yet the fog never dispersed. Yellow
flowers blooming among the grasses were the only flecks of brightness. The Japanese
had left enough food for the dogs to last a few weeks. During squalls, the dogs hid
in the trenches. On the white island.

On the foggy island.

Reddish-purple thistles bloomed.

Bouts of heavy shelling seemed to proclaim that the world had ended. Day in and day
out the Americans persevered in their pointless raids, unaware that the Japanese were
already gone. The flying corps showered the island with leaflets urging surrender.
In all, one hundred thousand of these scraps of paper were dropped. The dogs raised
their heads to watch as they rained from the sky.

Rain, leaflets, bombs. Slicing through fog.

Bombs dropped, blasted the earth.

And in the midst of it all, the world was beginning. A new world hatching from the
egg of zero time.
This world
. Some of the dogs sensed its coming. They had no human keepers now—they had their
liberty. Four muscular dogs with exceptionally keen senses, trained to withstand the
cold, living on a nameless island. Free.

Explosion was a bitch. Kita, Masao, and Katsu were male. Explosion and Masao mated.
Ordinarily military dogs’ reproductive activities were rigorously controlled, but
here they were unsupervised. Explosion acquiesced to Masao’s advances, let him straddle
her. They were both purebred German shepherds—perhaps that sparked their romance.
Kita, the Hokkaido, often romped with Explosion and Masao, but he never approached
Explosion.

The other German shepherd, Katsu, kept to himself. He didn’t relish his freedom. He
realized that he had been abandoned on the island, that his masters would never return,
but still he stayed close to the antiaircraft guns his army unit had operated, making
the area his home and spending the better part of every day there.

He knew it was all over, but he refused to accept it.

Explosion, Masao, and Kita ran wild through the fields.

Frolicking, barking.

Finally the Americans decided to stage a large-scale offensive. They stopped this
zero time. The island was to be given its old name back: Kiska. Their forces landed
on August 15, 1943. Some fifty-three hundred Canadian troops joined the operation,
forming a combined force of thirty-five thousand men. Soldiers entered the Japanese
camp. There was no one there. From August 18 to 22, as many as thirty-five thousand
troops combed the island in search of the enemy.

They captured three dogs.

Explosion understood. For the first time in more than a year, the soldiers she saw
walking toward her were her old masters—Americans! “C’mon, boy!” someone yelled, and
she dashed off ecstatically in his direction. Masao and Kita followed. They replied
to the American soldiers’ calls with wagging tails. True, these were the very men
they had been warned to be cautious of, trained to attack. Battle targets. But they
had been released from these notions. What did they care? The men were beckoning to
them, why not go? The dogs knew their days on the nameless island were over. This
was Kiska again. And apparently they were going to be taken in.

They had been abandoned, freed from time. Now they were being welcomed back.

Three dogs, together, whimpered at the troops.
FINALLY
, they said.
YOU
’
VE RETURNED
.

The fourth dog, too, was ecstatic in his own way. Katsu lay in wait for the landing
forces in his den. His masters might not have returned, but the enemy had come. He
was overjoyed. He waited for the Americans by the antiaircraft guns, where he belonged,
and counterattacked.
NO REASON TO LOSE HOPE
!
I STILL HAVE WORK TO DO
! When one of the Americans wandered obliviously into range, Katsu sank his teeth
into his leg, then ran into a clearing that had been sewn with land mines. A few soldiers
gave chase, determined to “grab that Japanese dog,” and triggered the mines. Katsu,
too, had carried out a banzai attack. Katsu, like the Japanese soldiers who were his
masters, sacrificed his life for the cause.

Explosion, Masao, and Kita, however, didn’t die.

They were fed, cared for. All three were American dogs now. They belonged to the American
military. And their numbers increased. After nine weeks’ gestation, Explosion gave
birth. It was October on Kiska Island. As a rule dogs give birth easily, but the harshness
of the environment made this birth unexpectedly difficult. The soldiers called in
a military surgeon to operate, and the mother and several of her pups were saved.
Of nine puppies, five lived.

There were eight dogs in 1943, including Explosion’s puppies.

Eight dogs, still on Kiska Island.

The mansion was surrounded by a wall. The wall itself was perhaps two and a half meters
high, but it was topped by loops of wire. The wire wasn’t barbed. It was electrified.
Security cameras had been installed at intervals, approximately eight meters apart.
They were aimed outward, naturally. Out over the wall.

One of the lenses had been shattered.

The compound lay under a thick silence. It seemed, somehow, unnaturally still, as
though something that should have been there wasn’t.

Patches of snow dotted the garden, and there was a drift in the corner where two walls
met, blown higher by the wind, untouched. Here and there small footprints scarred
the mud. No, not footprints: paw prints. Four or five pads. Animal tracks. Traces.

It was twilight now, but the compound was bathed in light. Lamps glared high overhead,
carefully positioned to eliminate all shadows. The darkness lay beyond the walls.
There were a few lit windows in the high-rise apartment buildings off to the left,
if you were facing the compound’s main entrance to the northeast. Those buildings,
the “projects,” had gone up in the 1970s. The buildings to the right of the compound
were mere silhouettes. Rooflines. They had once housed factories. Once upon a time,
those factories had operated late into the night. But that was years ago, back when
this was still the USSR. The factories filled orders from the Ministry of Defense,
churning out tanks and automatic rifles—not that anyone had known. It wasn’t public
information. Mechanical plants whirring at full capacity, amassing huge stockpiles
of munitions. There was no demand for that stuff anymore. The new Russian capitalism
had not been good for this sector.

It favored a different sort of market.

The black market.

Money poured in
here
, for instance. Inside these walls, into this compound.

The owner of the mansion was coming home after sunset. His two cars drew up outside
the front gate. A Volvo and a BMW. The BMW had tinted windows. The man in the guardhouse
glanced at the cars, then pushed a button. The gate lurched into motion.

When it had opened all the way, the two cars entered. The gate glided closed.

The cars rolled slowly up the cobblestone drive toward the roundabout and the front
door. After twenty seconds one of the Volvo’s front wheels hit something. Something
that stuck up from the drive. A clank. The device had been planted right out in the
open, disguised so that it looked like just another cobblestone. Very bold. It had
been tripped. The driver of the Volvo felt it. It felt like he had driven full speed
onto a road full of potholes or…maybe he’d run up against—

That was the end of the thought. The driver was blown up, straight up into the air,
still in his seat. The hood of the car, flying.

The BMW slammed to a halt.

Three men sprang from the car: one from the front passenger seat, two from the back.
Kicking open the doors, they jumped out, dispersing. One wore a
shapka
with the earflaps raised, the others were bareheaded and had crew cuts. The first
wore a fur coat; the other two had on expensive dark suits. Neither the coat nor the
suit jackets were buttoned. They never were. The men had their hands thrust under
their lapels. The fur coat took out a submachine gun, the suits whipped their pistols
from their holsters, and they stood still, ready to fire.

Two men tumbled out of the Volvo’s unexploded back seat, alive. Bloody, screaming.
They crawled away from the car.

The BMW’s driver seemed to have come to his senses, because all of a sudden he threw
the car into reverse. He had to get the hell out of here, to get his boss, sitting
there in the back seat, in the middle, away from this vision of hell in the mansion’s
front garden.

Suddenly, all the lights in the building crashed.

As if a fuse had blown. The building, visible a second ago, was gone.

There had been a small pop inside, but it wasn’t audible out front.

The darkness unnerved the men even more.

One of the men from the BMW broke into a run, though he had no idea whom he ought
to be attacking. It was just a reflex. He jumped off the drive, zigzagging as he ran,
heading for the porch, searching for an assailant. His left foot felt something. He
had been a wrestler and had an impressive physique—that’s how he ended up in this
job, working as a bodyguard. Shit, it’s a feint, he thought, recalling the single
worst blunder he had made as a wrestler. His hair stood on end. Just then, his left
ankle was pulling the wire. About ten centimeters above the ground. A booby trap.
The wire had tripped it. Something flew at him from one side. Searing pain.

Not just in one place. Everywhere on his body.

The submachine gun in his hand fired at random, senselessly, as his muscles contracted.
He was in agony. An agonizing death.

One of the men crawling on the driveway took a bullet.

The BMW reached the gate, backward. The driver lowered his window, yelled at the guard,
“Open up! Open the fuck up!” But the guard didn’t answer. He was prostrate on the
floor of the guardhouse. A line drawn across his throat.

One clean horizontal line.

It looked to the driver as if the guard wasn’t there. He considered getting out and
opening the gate himself, but at the sound of gunfire he instinctively hit the gas.
He rammed the bumper back into the gate, then shifted gears and screeched forward.

The lamps illuminating the garden were going out now, one after another. Each time
one went out, there was a crash. Somehow they were being smashed. The rest of the
compound joined the mansion in its darkened invisibility. There was hardly light at
all, anywhere.

A single, precise gunshot.

A second.

A third. A fourth…a seventh.

The sound of a new magazine snapping into place. Someone tossing aside the old magazine,
even though it still had a few bullets left, swapping it out for another. A fresh,
full cartridge. The BMW swerved wildly, searching for a way out. The gunman watched
the car go, then sprang into action. He was fast, yes. But he was also a step ahead
of them. He saw where things were going.

Another series of gunshots. One bullet shattered the BMW’s windshield and lodged itself
in the driver’s forehead; another buried itself in the hip of the man who tumbled
out of the car’s back seat as it hit a tree. Soon after, a third bullet entered his
head.

Silence.

Only one man moving. A pistol in each hand. The BMW’s headlights were still burning,
and their faint light revealed his face. His profile. His hair was pure white. White
the way an old man’s hair is white, when it has lost its color. Two weeks ago, he
had been holed up deep in the forest. Living in a hunter’s shack like a hermit. The
guns in his gloved hands weren’t hunting rifles, though. They were army weapons: 9mm
machine pistols.

The old man strode over to the body.

The body of the last man he killed. The body of the owner of the mansion. He worked
the shirt down over the corpse’s shoulders, exposing its chest. He inspected each
shoulder. The large cross tattooed on the left, the skull on the right.

The locations of the designs showed that he was indeed a Russian mafia kingpin, that
he had been acknowledged as a leader by his fellows.

He was a boss. The tattoos proved that. Not in one of the new organizations, however.
He belonged to the old mafia; he was a product of the Soviet system.

Having found the proof he wanted, the old man let slip a smile. A smile so subtle
his face remained all but expressionless. “Nighty-night, Vor,” he murmured.

The old man wasted no time. A minute later, he was inside. Not a light in the entire
building. Two buff corpses sprawled in the parlor, shot dead in the middle of a card
game; on the sofa behind them, the body of a carefully made-up young woman in a flashy
dress. These bodies had been there for an hour or so.

Another body in the hall.

The old man stepped into the half-hidden security room behind the parlor.

A young man was waiting inside. Alive. Terrified. Drenched in sweat. Drops fell periodically
from his face, his neck. He was sitting on a chair, his posture oddly strained, straight
as a rod.

“If you are hot, why not take off your sweater?” the old man said.

“I can’t move,” the young man replied.

“Sure you can, just take it off,” the old man repeated.

Desperation in his eyes, the young man nodded and stiffly, tensely, stripped the sweater
off. Underneath the sweater he had on a paratrooper shirt with horizontal blue stripes.

The wall behind the young man was completely taken up by ten television monitors.
Images from the security cameras were projected on their screens. Or not. Some were
blank. From where he sat, the young man could operate the recorder, and he had a microphone
that let him respond to communications from outside.

“You give them the all-clear, like I said?” the old man said.

“I did exactly as you told me to,” the young man said. “Everything.”

“Good job,” the old man replied. “You did well.”

“Don’t kill me!” the young man pleaded. He was perched oddly on his chair. Sort of.
There was an object between his butt and the seat, like a little pillow. It was a
hand grenade. The pin had been pulled. The young man’s butt was holding the safety
lever down. If he shifted his body the slightest bit, if the grenade happened to slip
out from under him, it would explode.

The old man turned to the monitors. He spent a few moments checking the screens, or
their blankness. The young man was still sweating. The old man was right beside him,
but the young man couldn’t turn to face him. There was a sound by the recorder, like
duct tape coming off.

“Look at all this crap,” the old man muttered. “With all this, you would think…”

With all this, you would think…what?
the young man wondered, terrified.

“…you could do better.” The old man answered the boy’s unspoken question, his tone
crisp. “Amateurs. That is what you are. A bunch of amateurs.”

A sound the young man had heard once before: a pin being drawn.

It came again, then a third time.

Huh?
he thought.

The old man left the security room. On his way out he turned and fired a 9mm bullet
into the young man’s head, just like that. The young man jerked backwards, then fell,
causing the grenade he was sitting on to explode. A second later the three grenades
on the video recorder were going off, one after the next, destroying all evidence.

Two minutes later, the old man was in the back garden.

He stood before a low, gray, concrete enclosure. A row of cages with chain-link doors,
some open, some closed. He had passed four dead Doberman pinschers on his way here.
They had been poisoned. He himself had carefully stirred the poison into their food.
There were still some dogs in the kennels, though, alive. He had killed the adults,
but not the puppies.

They were barking. Their young voices. The old man stared at them through the chain-link
doors.

He watched them for half a minute, then nodded to himself, opened a door, stepped
inside. He scooped up an armful of puppies.

The attack on the mansion was all over the media the next day. The first reports were
vague, mere repetitions of statements issued by the government. That weekend, a fringe
newspaper ran a sensational version of the story on its front page. The provocative
headline announced
OPPOSITION GROUP RESPONSIBLE
. The article said an organization “specializing in bomb attacks” had targeted the
residence of a “Vor,” the head of a major criminal organization that operated two
banks, three hotel chains, and numerous restaurants. The article commented provocatively
on the group, which, it said, had sold weapons pilfered from army warehouses. It continued
with a lengthy profile of the criminals who were presumed to have killed the Vor,
who had, by and large, taken control of this city in the Russian Far East. The article
concluded: “At last, the epic battle has arrived on our doorstep, here at the edge
of Siberia—a war between the two great forces of the underworld, old and new: the
Russian mafia and the Chechen mafia.”