The humans had it all wrong.
The city was full of dogs loitering, hanging around. So they thought.
They allowed the dogs to remain invisible. Even the dogs who had been trained, thoroughly trained, in the deadly art of street fighting.
All morning, the barking continued back and forth in the distance. Echoing. The dogs were on their way. The dogs were coming. The dogs were getting closer. From the taiga beyond the city, from enclaves in the mountains dozens of miles away, from across the Amur River, from the lands where Russian aristocrats were exiled in the nineteenth century. Gradually, little by little, their numbers increased as they converged on the city. In reality, however, three planes contributed the most to the great migration. Three planes owned by private companies that took off one after the other from Moscow, then landed together in the city. Dogs obeyed their own instincts. When a dog barked somewhere far off, they responded. And humans too… mafia members, too, acted in accordance with instincts they could not disobey. When an organization began to lose its grip on an area, competitors moved in to gobble it up. The three planes brought in 220 members of the most powerful criminal organization in Russia: a far-reaching international gang whose operations extended as far as the old Eastern Bloc, come now to overwhelm the city by force of numbers. The organization could display its power by taking control. We don’t need you little guys diddling around—we control the Russian underworld. That was the message. The mass media had been waiting, they were ready to spread the news across the Eurasian continent. They had been primed for two days now.
The timing was perfect.
That afternoon, there were two hours of hell. Hell for the mafia. Then an hour of rest. Rest for the dogs. Intermittent gunshots continued into the evening, but that was all—it was a scene, peaceful in a way, of ordinary mafia warfare. Then, suddenly, the situation changed. First there were Strelka, Belka, and six other dogs; ten minutes later there were Strelka and Belka and five other dogs. Number 114, a bitch, had died. Belka’s sister. So there were Strelka and Belka and five other dogs, and then, two minutes later, there were Strelka and Belka and three other dogs. Number 46 and number 113 had died. Belka’s brother and sister. Strelka barked. The old lady was yelling frantically in Russian. Pull back! Pull back! One minute later Strelka and Belka and three other dogs had become Strelka and Belka and one other dog. Number 44 and number 45 had died, been killed, and Strelka was still barking, and Belka was watching.
The enemy had changed.
The enemy had noticed the canine rebellion.
The dogs in this city were no longer invisible.
All of a sudden, the humans began shooting them.
Belka stared. At the equipment of a group of a dozen men who had joined the fray. They were not mafia. They wore bulletproof helmets that fighter pilots wear and camouflage uniforms, and they had assault rifles with folding stock. They looked nothing like gangsters. Belka stared as number 48 was shot, yelping; Belka heard the yelp, he had to protect Strelka, the dogs are visible, and so Strelka is visible; the enemy will not hesitate to eliminate her. Belka recognized their smell. Not their biological, animal scent, but the smell of their group. Belka felt it. And he was right. The enemy was a special unit belonging to the Russian Federal Security Service, the new Russian secret police, successor to the Soviet KGB. The unit was in charge of domestic security. It was in charge of fighting terrorism. The unit would destroy. The dogs. Their revolution. Officials at the highest levels of the Federal Security Service had realized, during a committee meeting with KGB veterans, that many of the dogs that had turned up in the city were using the same combat techniques “S” had cultivated. The special forces unit was briefed, and arriving on the scene, they killed the dogs very quickly. In fewer than fourteen minutes, Strelka and Belka found themselves alone, with zero other dogs.
At the same moment, in another part of town, a second special forces unit leapt out of an eight-wheel-drive armored truck and started firing at dogs, killing them. None of these extraordinarily talented dogs were allowed to survive. They brought in the truck, jumped out, did their work quickly. Another human ran into the crowd of special forces. Humming as he ran. Opera had bombs strapped to his stomach. He put his finger on the switch.
Singing, now, at the top of his voice, he pressed the switch.
Two hours earlier. The old man said: These are my terms.
An hour earlier.
All right, the old man said, I have just injected two different chemicals into you: the first is a truth serum, and the second—you may be surprised to hear—is a rabies virus. It is a biological weapon, actually, he explained kindly, developed during Soviet times. I have got to say it again and again to make the hypnosis work, so I will keep repeating it as often as you like: now that I have captured you, I have finally got what I was after. Now that you have come to this city with 220 of your soldiers, you have finally given me the card I need to negotiate successfully. You volunteered to take charge of this raid because you wanted to put yourself forward. You wanted to be noticed. What are you, number three? Or is it number four? You are the treasurer, right? Yes, it is very nice to rely on your mafia instincts, the old man said to the hostage. I know, you wanted to do something big, he went on. I have been waiting for you, you know, stupid thugs colluding with the government. Here, look, this is a serum that kills the rabies virus, see? The incubation period for rabies may last thirty days, but when you get sick, you will get sick, there is no escape: you will feel uneasy, then terrified, you will have delusions, hallucinations, and then your whole body will go numb and you will die, the old man told the hostage kindly. All I want are the documents that show how the money moves, that is all I ask for, the old man said. All I want to do is stir up a little scandal in the office of the president. That is all, the old man said.
Ten minutes earlier.
That is all I need, that is enough to topple the eight leading figures in the government. With this information I could do it tomorrow, the old man said. I have prepared channels to pass the information along to the Western media—a little international pressure is all it takes in these cases, am I right? Then the whole system will collapse. This is a real revolution, my friend, not like that stuff they pulled in Moscow in the summer of 1991, that was no revolution. Not bad, this, huh? A revolution carried out entirely by dogs, the old man said. The problem is, dogs cannot disappear in Moscow, it is too urban, too much of a national capital, you know what I mean? But out here in the Far East! A kak zhe? I am sure you have guessed this already, my friend, but I have totally lost my mind.
One minute earlier.
The old man had trapped his prey in a room in a thirteen-story hotel. The commander of a force of 220 mafia fighters in a room on the twelfth floor. The room had windows, but the shades were drawn. You could hear things, though, from outside. Even through the thick soundproofed glass he could hear the roar of military helicopters hovering over the city. He stood up.