a…he thought. But he never finished his thought.
Now.
The old man’s body danced as the bullets pounded it.
1990
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
Early in 1990, you lay sprawled on the ground at an execution site. You lay in a sea of blood. You had been part of the unit before, part of “S,” but now, with one exception, you had been eradicated. The one survivor was looking up, devotion in his eyes. Peering up at the man who stood at the top of the chain of command. At the man known as the Director, the General, and by various other names.
The man had aged.
Our own homeland, he said. To the dog. The Soviet issued the command, he said. That we be eliminated. They ordered it. We are the evidence, they say, that must never be discovered. And so we must be destroyed.
The old man raised his gun, aimed it at the dog.
The dog did not flinch. He listened.
All around the man and the dog a terrible stench hung in the air. The smell of countless deaths, of so much spilled blood.
The old man gazed at the dog.
The dog’s name, this dog’s name, was Belka.
The unit has disbanded, the old man said. Do you understand that?
Belka listened. He heard. And he answered: Woof!
Tears spilled from the old man’s eyes. His right hand, gripping the pistol, trembled. I just, he said, I just…I just, I just…
Woof! the old man cried.
“I am going to lose my mind,” he told Belka. “And you, you are going to live.”
“Belka, why don’t you bark?”
Dogs, dogs, here you are.
You penetrated the military’s encirclement of the city. Strelka, Belka, the old lady, WO and WT, and a dozen dogs managed to escape. By the next morning, however, WO, WT, and their motorcycle were blown to smithereens. Orders were issued in cities throughout the Russian Far East that dogs were to be hunted down and killed, and as a consequence four thousand dogs died, including many unrelated to the rebellion. Three days after they fled, Strelka’s band was reduced to Strelka, who would disguise herself, depending on the situation, as a Chinese-Russian, a Korean-Russian, or a Mongolian-Russian; Belka, who disguised himself as an ordinary pet; and the old lady. It was easier this way; they had greater freedom of movement. Though they did have one bulky bit of luggage. They had the globe. The old lady had presented it to Strelka in an abandoned cabin, in a region midway between the taiga and the wetlands. Strelka accepted it, she pondered its meaning. She decided the old lady was asking her where they should go. She spun the globe.
They had to get out of Russia.
Out, off the Eurasian continent altogether.
For a moment she thought to point at Japan, but then she reconsidered. Like I’d fucking go back there. She moved the tip of her finger up to Sakhalin, then up over the Sea of Okhotsk to the Kamchatka Peninsula. East. They’d keep heading east, off the continent, beyond. But not as far as North America—too fucking worldly to go to a fucking English-speaking country, she decided. She jabbed her finger down randomly to the east of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
On an archipelago sandwiched between the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The old lady understood.
She got them on a train, which took them to the ocean. They crossed the ocean. The old man’s bank account hadn’t been frozen yet, so funds were not a problem. They flew in an eight-seat charter plane from Sakhalin to the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Three weeks later, they crossed to another island in the Pacific, though they still hadn’t left Russian territory. The crossing took twenty or thirty minutes on a fishing boat that set out from a small coastal village on the southeast edge of the peninsula. They got off the boat, went ashore. The island was unpopulated, but there were a few old wooden buildings. A factory that had all but rotted away. A seafood processing plant run by Japanese capital in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War; it had, apparently, produced canned crab and salmon and had been the base of the North Atlantic fishing industry. You stayed there, preparing, for three months.
You. Three of you. First: Strelka. You watched as the old lady did this and that, working toward the goal. You watched, trusting her. You obtained fake identities, fake pasts, and still you remained there, on the uninhabited island, biding your time. The old lady made trips to the village on the peninsula to buy