- No. Their squad is small - Thomas hardened. - They have old technology. But it is built on sacrifice and love.
- How many of them? - asked someone of the audience.
- Twenty five thousand people.
Thomas stared straight into the eyes of the President.
- And maher’s people are a lot. However, they are managed by a man and his hunger.
- So do you want to say that we can lose the fight? - asked the general with a tight grin.
Everybody felt uneasy.
- At any second. Maybe even now! - said Thomas.
- I mean ... But, if to take a man away? - someone from the suite squeakily bleated.
Thomas looked at the military very seriously.
- You do not have time.
*
At the bottom of the charred greyed funnel there was a lifeless body of Colonel. In unfathomable way his soul saw as they drank tea and as those who loved him, thought about him. A young lady came again, and she called again to the palaces of the huge white-blue clouds.
Incredibly, but he clearly saw as opponents were hiding behind the rocks on both sides. He read their thoughts, and he laughed. In the depths, under the stones he saw the fine structure of greenish black soil.
Dux was happy. It was easily rising above the warm white luminous ether, lost affections with pleasure. He knew he was dying young. And he was really happy.
But at the abyss he was stopped. Three men have been already waiting for him. His father looked at his friend.
- It is early.
The three of them consulted. And his father with a heavy hand was again dropped straight from heaven to earth.
*
Pain which has never let him go, tied him firmly to the ground with the very first wound when he was twenty. Then, like two Earth's crust slabs, appeared a deep crack, breaking into pieces his naive childhood, his dreams and belief in eternal beautiful life. Instead of it, it gave him a permanent result of the ongoing pain and hardly prevailed artificial smile. Being in hospitals, he reached the edge of despair. But there was one who later pulled him out of the abyss.
And he got his first unequal battle. While his peers statistically successful were watching a multi-colored film of vanity, he learned with incredible efforts to keep pain and smile in spite of everything.
But that time the pain was such that happens only in the intermediate state between life and death. Two angels came from far away and persistently hovered in the neighborhood. He knew if he falls asleep, he will die.
He told himself: "Do not sleep." He has an affair. And he must do it!
*
His mother cried with infinite sleep. She was the youngest of nine brothers and sisters. Her father was shot at the bottom of a deep black ravine. Young beautiful guards with drawn lower jaws into, taking away her toys, made with her father’s hands, her notebook with her first poems, tattered books, transmitted by inheritance. A new tricky word: "Confiscation. Full confiscation". At first, everyone thought it was some kind of mistake, and it was about to dissipate. At first, many joked, when every day the family were taken away for a transit prison and then to brown rusty barges. But especially merry fellows and clever ones were taking in the evening by a special troika "to the proper place ". Those people had never been seen again. The whole generation of "public enemy’s" children got rid forever of smiles.
In early October, the barge came up to the bank of the widest river.
The rest of the family was divided again. Men, her brothers were sent to one taiga. Women and her mother were sent to another taiga. In the morning, a glittering mirror of the first thin ice divinely shone in a storm, drew intricate patterns and fans of the great river and flying away bright colorful leaves, languishing in fresh air. They have been digging together dugouts for days, trying to escape from hunger and cold of immense Vasyugan marshes.
Her mother knew that with the coming winter anyone hardly could survive. She was able to ask the mate, giving the last thing, to hide a fifteen years old daughter under the cover of darkness in the belly of the huge barge.
But it turned out all wrong.
The same night, a drunken young redhead guard tried to rape the girl. By a miracle, she jumped out of the barge.
That night she changed her status of a special deportee enemy’s daughter for a state of a deportee enemy’s runaway daughter, in short DERD.
The unconscious man’s memory can suffer the things, which can not be either suffered or forgotten. Unconscious attempts to calm down and to inspire you. But in the depth of the soul there are wounds which can not be healed by simple means: nor wooden indifference, nor complete indifference, nor conscious tiredness. And to reconcile this unconscious in you with an incompatible torn fate blanket patches, probably, can be possible only through the most profound repentance and redemption.
Rarely there appear great souls. You can become one of them.
*
The night was coming to an end. Colonel’s body, covered a little with dust and sand, was motionless. But his eye sockets were filled with tears and brook flowed in dark stripes on his cheeks.
*
She ran madly away from Parabel, from broken paths, roads and hid in the very storm infinity. The girl learned to nap under the snags, in the hollows of holes, trying to get warm, eat frozen berries, nuts, bark and crow eggs. She has never been able to sleep quietly, waiting for the arrest, fearing the most people, and then wild animals.
Some time later fluffy snow and crackling Siberian frosts have locked the taiga. She moved by night stars along Siberian highways to the south, hiding from a man sleights and cars in haystacks, in squatting, in bathhouses, barns and stables. The girl has been waiting for hours until some late passer-by was walking down the street, and all the dogs began avidly compete in a grand loud barking. At that moment, she tried to enter some shelter, gaining local yard dogs. Sometimes there she found short happy moments of warmth and slumber, find eggs, drank cow's milk or gnawed bones. But at cockcrow she had to leave into a deep thicket, meeting the sunset, filling with music.
Having built some "snowshoes", the girl was picking frozen red arrow wood, and at the sight of the rare hunters she ran faster than a winding fox.
In early April the girl reached her village, passing thousand kilometers and thousands of years. Her older sister, who had previously managed to get married and was saved from arrest, refused to shelter her.
- Did you? Did you? Did you run away? No I can not ...
Heaven and earth changed their places for her and came down. Bursting into tears, she has been crying for the whole night, wailing, howling and screaming bate an invisible wall of alienation. In the gloomy morning, she stood still looking at glades of melting snow and first black pools of a troubled icy spilling river.
Other older sister found her lying motionless near the pool. She was hid underground, has been rubbing with vodka and moonshine for a long time, giving infusions and chicken broth until she regained consciousness.
For many years, she has been living in a dugout in the garden, as if she did not exist.
*
Strong warm rain which rarely falls in a stony desert of Nevada, flushed Colonel’s tears. He ordered himself: "Live and get up!" Colonel moved unnaturally with lifted up leg. His leg was intact. He got up and was sick.
"It was just a severe concussion," - he realized. - "I experienced different things. Before death, I must fulfill my destiny! ".
He sat up. The battle was in full swing. Zone-51was burning with blue Hellfire huge hemisphere with burning everywhere dotted lines. Colonel sniffed. He thought that after his first injury during the fight in Angola, he learned to feel smells like bloodhounds coached.
There was a bouquet of smells in the air: a new modern amine odor of plastids from the oxtogen derivatives, native flower gasoline smell of napalm since his youth, grandfather's tops of TNT, great-grandfather’s gunpowder and stench of solid rocket natural musk fuel. Colonel got on all his fours, like a black Labrador retriever. He kept in memory suffocating sweet fragrance of “bird cherry”, remembered a strange bunch of lights of St. Elmo with the smell of sulfur and ozone, and even smelled the hard taste of half-decay of uranium. But new heavy spirit punched him to the ground. It was some terrible cocktail of instantly burning meat, covered with kerosene.