Pink Fairies Page 2

and about them atrocities were committed daily. Homes were burned, cities were bombed, women and children were raped and left for dead. France sent a nuke towards Moscow but it was brought down on Cracow where its fail-safes failed and the city was obliterated. The retaliation was a single nuke detonated in Strasbourg. The device had been put together in the city many years before, during the old Cold War, and its use effectively stopped any Allied nuclear retaliation. But it didn’t stop the use of tactical nukes by Russia, which launched them at the least sign of resistance.

  Nuclear weapons weren’t being used here, and this caused Uglov to think. There was nothing strategic about Füssen. It could be considered to be on the way to Austria, but that didn’t make it special. The Pink Fairies were used when close combat was the best way, and that happened when a city had to be preserved more or less intact. So what was there in Füssen that should not be destroyed?

  It was that time in the evening when the vodka was brought out. Desserts and German cheeses replaced the remnants of the main course. Buttons were undone, stomachs eased. The bombardment only two miles away was a continuous rumble now. A country’s youth were being blown to powder, and Khloponin was stroking Uglov’s neck. It did not seem, Uglov thought, belatedly, appropriate. He shook his Commander’s hand away and attacked the vodka. Khloponin tossed his head, glancing at the ceiling. It was going to be one of those nights.

  Uglov slept alone later, his head spinning and his mind ticking like a bomb. Khloponin slept with the medical orderly.

  The next morning the Pink Fairies’ IFVs rumbled down autobahn 17 without meeting significant resistance. Their target, it appeared, was a group of buildings on a campus belonging to the Technical University of Munich. They drove through the smoke of modern long-distance war. Buildings were crumbled like cake all around them. Where the road had suffered they had to slow down, and it was here that ambushes had been set. Machine guns chattered at them, and anti-tank missiles took out two vehicles at one particularly difficult spot. PF riflemen circled around and filtered back in towards the column, using RPGs to ferret out the resistance. By one o’clock they were back in their IFVs and on the road again.

  Three-thirty saw them on the campus. The cruise missiles had been well directed; the place was untouched. Germans were dug in all around the area and snipers hid in the windows of the upper floors. Three OPs on the roofs directed fire. Khloponin spat on his hands and allocated tasks to his staff. Uglov was given three rifle platoons and told to secure the High-Energy Physics building, which seemed to him to be a snub. Nevertheless he took it on without complaint, and disposed his men.

  The HEP building was set apart from the other Engineering facilities. It was more modern, only a few years old, and ringed with sickly-looking saplings with little green-painted metal fences around them. Sunset was not far off, and judging by the resistance he was going to need more support. Uglov called in some mortars and two IFVs to punch shells into the sandbagged dugouts that surrounded the building. In the meantime German air power had appeared in the form of three Tiger helicopters, and the battalion’s MANPADs started coughing into the sky.

  Uglov and his men reached the building in twilight and bashed stun grenades through the ground-floor windows. Then it was a matter of man-to-man action in near-perfect darkness through a three-story building the size of a respectable shopping mall. During this Khloponin reassigned another platoon, which helped considerably, and that, coupled with the surveillance robots, put, as they said, the tin hat on it.

  Uglov sat on his haunches against a wall somewhere inside the building, smoking. Squawks came through his helmet headset, which was beside him on the floor. The bodies of two Germans were huddled beneath a window. One of them, in life a beautiful young man of about nineteen, was looking at him. His eye glittered as missiles fell to the south, opening the road to Austria. There is love, thought Uglov, in a world without love. How can that be? Uglov could have been that boy. That boy could have been Uglov. In a world where huge and alien fish jumped for the sheer joy of life, why, how could humans deal such death?

  Russia had shown the world. Russia had its pride back. Putin had a bigger prick than some other guys in grey suits. Whoopee.

  Someone brought Uglov a mess tin full of stew. After he had eaten, Uglov slept.

  In the morning Khloponin and his staff made a tour of the campus. Some German soldiers were discovered and, unusually, spared. They were escorted to the smoking ruins of Füssen and given a five-minute head start; they stumbled off and their escorts had a smoke, shared some stolen schnapps and returned to their posts. University staff were rounded up and put under guard pending the arrival of an intelligence officer who might be able to make some sense of them. There was no obvious excuse for the deployment of the Pink Fairies in this situation. Khloponin declared it to be a mystery and ordered a stand-down at readiness and a rare steak. His only orders, having taken the site, were to hold it pending the arrival of a group of technicians and intelligence kids from Moscow.

  Uglov went back to the High Energy Physics building. In the room where he had slept the two bodies had been removed. Something caught his eye, but it was only a glint from a five-Euro piece that was stuck to the floor with blood.

  He wandered around aimlessly, carefully trying not to think. He felt that thinking was not going to help his mood. Most of the doors were either open or smashed from their hinges. Most opened into offices where books and papers were stacked and spilled, where formulae and diagrams were scrawled on whiteboards with ‘DO NOT WIPE’ stickers on the frames. Favourite wall posters were Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg, although Amy Winehouse seemed also to be popular.

  There was a door which was shut. It had a partner on the other side of the building core, also shut. Uglov hoped that whatever was behind it had been searched during the evening’s action. Beside both doors were big lights with radiation symbols under them. The lights were out.

  Uglov tugged at the long lever handle until he found that it worked by pulling before turning. He opened the door and belatedly groped for his pistol, and went into the light.

  The core of the building was just a massive pit full of machinery, reaching from the third story right down into the sub-basement levels. It was lit by fluorescents, which puzzled him for a while until he remembered that the ‘leccy was off; that’s why it was puzzling. There must be an alternative source of power, a generator or...

  Maybe turning off the electricity was not the safest thing to do in a place like this.

  He made his way down green-painted steel staircases, right down to the floor of the pit, and towards a steel cylinder twice his height that sat there in the centre of the floor. It was covered in cables like vines covering a Mayan pyramid. It was studded with sensors like barnacles on a long-sunk wreck. It did not hum or vibrate. It just sat there. Other things around it hummed and vibrated, but its silence dominated the huge room.

  Uglov looked around and spotted a row of windows halfway up a wall. He made for a staircase and entered the control room. It was dusty and had been empty for quite some time, he thought. Something had been started, but nothing was being done with it. Was it the long vacation? No, still only Spring.

  He examined switches and dials. Many were protected by locked plastic boxes. Some were covered with armoured glass plates set in bright red metal. Many of the labels were cryptic, some were obvious, but nothing gave him a clue.

  He spotted a bookshelf and pulled down a bunch of ring binders. His German was rusty but the words, when he found them, were obvious.

  Schwarzes Loch. They had built a Black Hole. They had built a Black Hole, maybe only a few millimetres in diameter, and then they didn’t know what to do with it. What could they do with it? Maybe it was the source of power in this facility, powering the magnets or whatever that contained it. Uglov did not know whether that was possible, but it didn’t really matter.

  His headset crackled and Khloponin’s voice skidded into his ear.

  “
Where are you?” He sounded petulant. Uglov ignored him and started pulling off plastic covers. For the better-protected switches he had a short pry-bar in a side pocket of his pink battledress trousers.

  The fishes would die in flight. They would have died anyway. How long will it take to eat the world, he thought. Days? Years? Uglov thought he should be weeping, for himself, for Russia’s willingness to follow fools, for the West’s worship of money, for Man’s willingness to believe that some other group of men or women were the enemy, that all ills could be solved by destroying them, but really it all in the end came down to a gleam of light in a dead eye. He pulled switches until all at once all of the lights went out, and then the big steel cylinder beneath him began to groan.