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.
“Nighty-Night, Vor.”
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.