Gone Tomorrow

beat. Her eyes showed the same kind of fast response as John Sansom’s had, back in his room in the O. Henry Hotel. Rethink, redeploy, reorganize, all in a brief couple of seconds.
    She said, “It’s very complicated.”
    I didn’t answer.
    She said, “But it’s entirely innocent.”
    I said, “Tell that to Susan Mark.”
    She inclined her head. The same gesture I had seen before. Courteous, delicate, and a little contrite. She said, “I asked Susan for help. She agreed, quite willingly. Clearly her actions created difficulties for her with other parties. So, yes, I suppose I was the indirect cause of her troubles. But not the direct cause. And I regret what happened, very, very much. Please believe me, if I had known beforehand, I would have said no to my mother.”
    Svetlana Hoth nodded and smiled.
    I said, “What other parties?”
    Lila Hoth said, “Her own government, I think. Your government.”
    “Why? What did your mother really want?”
    Lila said she needed to explain the background first.

Chapter 36
    Lila Hoth had been just seven years old when the Soviet Union had fallen apart, so she spoke with a kind of historical detachment. She had the same kind of distance from former realities that I had from the Jim Crow years in America. She told me that the Red Army had deployed political commissars very widely. Every infantry company had one. She said that command and discipline were shared uneasily between the commissar and a field officer. She said that rivalry was common and bitter, not necessarily between the two as individuals, but between tactical common sense and ideological purity. She made sure I understood the general background, and then she moved on to specifics.
    Svetlana Hoth had been a political commissar assigned to an infantry company. Her company had gone to Afghanistan soon after the Soviet invasion of 1979. Initial combat operations had been satisfactory for the infantry. Then they had turned disastrous. Attritional losses had become heavy and constant. At first there had been denial. Then Moscow had reacted, belatedly. The order of battle had been reorganized. Companies had been merged. Tactical common sense had suggested retrenchment. Ideology had required renewed offensives. Morale had required unity of ethnicity and geographical origin. Companies had been reconstituted to include sniper teams. Expert marksmen were brought in, with their companion spotters. Thus pairs of ragged men used to living off the land had arrived.
    Svetlana’s sniper was her husband.
    His spotter was Svetlana’s younger brother.
    The situation had improved, both in military and in personal terms. Svetlana’s and other family and regional groupings had spent down time together very happily. Companies had dug in and settled down and achieved acceptable safety and security. Offensive requirements were satisfied by regular nighttime sniper operations. The results were excellent. Soviet snipers had long been the best in the world. The Afghan mujahideen had no answer to them. Late in 1981 Moscow had reinforced a winning hand by shipping new weapons. A new-model rifle had been issued. It was recently developed and still top secret. It was called the VAL Silent Sniper.
    I nodded. Said, “I saw one once.”
    Lila Hoth smiled, briefly, with a hint of shyness. And with a hint of national pride, perhaps, for a country that no longer existed. Probably just a shadow of the pride her mother had felt, way back when. Because the VAL was a great weapon. It was a very accurate silenced semi-automatic rifle. It fired a heavy nine-millimeter bullet at a subsonic velocity, and could defeat all types of contemporary body armor and thin-skinned military vehicles at ranges out to about four hundred yards. It came with a choice of powerful day telescopes or electronic night scopes. It was a nightmare, from an opponent’s point of view. You could be killed with no warning at all, silently, suddenly, and randomly, asleep in bed in a tent, in the latrines, eating, dressing, walking around, in the light, in the dark.
    I said, “It was a fine piece.”
    Lila Hoth smiled again. But then the smile faded. The bad news started. The stable situation lasted a year, and then it ended. The Soviet infantry’s inevitable military reward for good performance was to be handed ever more dangerous tasks. The same the world over, the same throughout history. You don’t get a pat on the back and a ride home. You get a map instead.