Dux, reeling, was walking along Pančevo bridge, dashed aside from cars, jumped over the barriers separating road from the railway. He was walking to the only bridge over the Danube. Finally, in the east, he saw what he wanted.
*
He was scared. Around its essence ran, an immeasurable and indescribable force, having begun talking and showing something unthinkable, transforming its mind. Having kneeled, he prostated himself.
“Be there! It will be your place. You are near, next to the door, where everybody comes, from the front and back doors. You will be called and they will be near". The picture of the world scattered like a dream with inconceivable touches. “Colonel stood on the narrow rickety bridge railing, feeling everywhere a powerful vibration. His eyes were filled with tears of awe.
*
Colonel heard behind a smooth voice.
- Doha ovamo. Heide!
He turned and saw the patrol. He hardly tried to brace himself and to smile, but instead of it, he just grinned. A stout officer with matt grey 9mm gun M57, and a portable radio transmitter was slowly approaching Dux.
- Do not be afraid, ali do not be afraid.
Lights showed sweat on his big face. Two soldiers were holding, for security, short-Serb tommy guns M92, with the caliber 7.62.
- You have good reaction, sir! – Colonel said in English.
"Oh, what a wonderful evening there was" - he thought.
With a sad smile on his lips Dux jumped into the abyss of Danube’s black mist. Toy soldiers and the officer shot down, just in case, and excitedly reported to the commander's office about the incident. They were running along the bridge, waving torches, and shouting something inarticulate, hoping to find a corpse. The gendarmerie duty reported to the BIA about the incident, ordered the traffic police to comb the coast and to examine bridge’s piers. A greenhorn came down the pier’s cramps, illuminating water with his torch and waving his gun. At the bottom he saw a gunman.
His face was covered with blood, and it was peaceful. Their eyes met. He was wounded. The boy being excited could not aim the tommy gun and was shooting at random. The patrol started shooting with clearly and long salvos.
Colonel was saved by the straw, a thick long bar tube in the pocket of his service jacket. In his childhood he heard about ancient warriors who spend hours hiding in swamps, lakes and rivers, exposing on the surface a straw through which they were breathing.
And Dux floated over night cold waters of the Danube. He was happy to read good books and was still alive. Shots calmed down.
Everything would be good, but he was injured. The bullet affected his left body side. He lay on his back motionless, sometimes sticking out his face, observing thousands of southern night stars.
He got used to extract with his teeth the shrapnel and splinters from the wound, to keep silent patiently during the unbearable pain, change bandages from improvised means during fights. Specificity of his job was such that all wounds he got in full swing of the task.
The hubbub of the bridge and noise of the police cars the and along the river calmed down. Colonel went out near Wisznice in the outskirts and where there was written uneven "At World's End." Dux unsuccessfully tried to warm. He felt shivery in the whole body. Having twisted around his wound, in which somewhere in depth was a bullet, reeling he moved desperately to the east. Sometimes consciousness left him. Instead of an earth dusty dirt road there appeared a moon one, sparkling with unbearable anthracite from his twenty years dream. And then, reeling, appeared his friend, clinging to Colonel and supporting him with a torn thread of the elected. Which had beginning but it did not have end.
Along the Danube passed a heavy morning sigh. Dux passed two kilometers, but the road was neither time nor space. His whole life went in on a needle tip. The needle was piercing the fabric of the universe, broke someone's fate and left small bundles of memory and drew a line of destiny.
That line didn’t have either beginning or end. And this line was divine.
"Thank you friend," - mad, said Colonel. "You showed me not only the place. Thank you, my friend! "
*
It was quickly dawning from the northeast.
"The day will be hot" - thought Colonel. - "It’s a blessed place". Rare toy houses were buried in a variety of lush plants. With the first morning light stirred up birds, hurrying loudly to report to the luminary about their existence.
In such a delightful place, a prison, a cement plant and all the more Maher’s residence seemed not to be. By hardly perceptible signs Dux realized that he was in the right place, which was discerned by the general layout, powerful hollow automatic gates, a high thorough fence stretching into the distance, cameras set at every fifteen meters, and a figure in black, known from Hong Kong.
Not far from the residence there was a deep from the rut of a track-type tractor. Having passed a couple of hundred meters, Colonel found the Russian DT-75. It was an old deterrent bulldozer which one could not see in toy Europe. Dux hardly started that machine. He felt like a significant and important farmer at the plowing up of virgin lands. Approaching as close as possible to the residence, he aimed the tractor straight at the gate in all the bulldozer horsepower and hid in the green thicket.
Shooting at crawler bulldozer sections remembered a little bit Zava city capture. The guards were shooting at the iron mountain from weapons of different calibers. But the caterpillar did not give up and, at the end, punched out a hole in the fence. Probably, the tractor would have continued its victorious march, smashing walls, but mahers surrounded him and with the hate began to pull the brass tubes and multicolored wires out. Bulldozer heavily breathed and calmed down.
In the bustle mahers did not immediately noticed a parliamentarian with raised hands and holding a white flag. Forty guns simultaneously aimed at Dux.
*
- The same person - laughed Colonel, recognizing the same boss who once arrested him in Hong Kong. - Everything repeats and in this whirl one can’t escape himself.
The officer grinned.
- We have also learned how to correct mistakes, throwing out old drafts.
- Do you have anything new? Sulfuric acid, hot handcuffs, maksubi?
- No, the worse! It will be something new and fun, - clenching his teeth, said the chief.
Forty guards brought Dux into a large building down-to-earth approach. They passed to the newly arrived terrible guard, a little bit similar to the three-headed Cerberus from Dante's first hell circle.
Pointed quadrangular lamps which he has already seen somewhere, and moderated cemetery music tuned to a cheerless festive mood. He couldn’t see the word "exit" anywhere. A white wide opened wall from where no one has ever returned. Colonel looked curiously around the large room. Bright high walls of new composites with a lot of built into lamps, were flooding the hall with unbearable light.
Hundreds of novices were sadly expecting for their fate. Some of them showed signs of beating, that’s why they looked intimidated. Somehow, probably trough the walls, were coming the employees of the organization, looking quite imposingly, a mixture of the white overall, a uniform and bulk airy capes. Importantly, proudly and intently they were bustling about and disappearing in white walls.
Dux, with invisible small steps came closer to the stout sanguine merry fellow.
- Who is that?
There were standing in the distance a few hundred people. They crowded, their look was so terrible that Colonel’s hair stood on end. Sometimes they shouted something unintelligible, like deaf-and-dumbs’ sounds.
- These are from the other world.
- What do you mean?
- In a literal sense. They are just from the refrigeration chambers.