>>>Monday February 25 1991

>>>Rhodesia


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“Kirkorov, the fuck is up with you?”


The officer looked down at the M9 in his hand, the smoke coming from the barrel, and the stricken man at his feet put out of his misery.  


“I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Lieutenant.”

“You’re wasting the Fatherland’s time, pack up.”

“Yes Sir.”

Kirkorov considered mouthing off some smart talk about the fact the Lieutenant should have been speaking in English, but he decided not to push his luck. He had been in the KGB for almost a decade and in the Spetsnaz unit for around half of this service. He had done clandestine work many times before, and this was not the first time he had ended the life of those that deserved to live on. But this was different. 

The man looked down at the star and striped patch on his shoulder, then at the shoelace on his boot that had fallen in a pool of blood. A whiff of smoke from the burning house beside him entered a nostril, competing with the scent of his own sweat. A comrade tapped him on the shoulder and he fell out of his stupor, running forward to hop onto the jeep they had used to get to the village. 

Ekatini. Weird name for a village. It didn't matter, really. It had made the mistake of supporting the forces that in turn served American interests. The Fatherland had objected to this and decided to make an example of it, and the ploy of a false flag was sprinkled on top of the atrocity. He knew that journalists from abroad would soon be called in to witness this, and to be quite frank this sort of crime wasn't out of character for the Americans. There was an argument to be made that these few died so many would live. But Kirkorov wouldn't be the one to make it. If there was a God, he would know it was a lot of horseshit. 

He knew there was great operational secrecy in these things, and though he had no proof it was probably not the only village that was suffering this fate. But it was the only one he was responsible for. Kirkorov wondered if he would have been happier as an ordinary soldier. He would still thus be serving the Soviet Union, and if he got deployed here he would still face some smoke and mirrors not fighting under the laurelled sickle and hammer. But he’d stare in the face the Americans and their serfs that he would be killing rather than ending these poor bastards to make them do it for him. 

If not God, he wondered how other people would react. What would it look like if he was put before a United Nations war crime investigation authority. Of course knowing his government this would never happen. Trials were something inflicted upon other nations, he had once heard a General say. It was true enough. The Soviets were all to happy to condemn other nation’s criminality whilst denying either the wrongdoing or simply speaking against the wrongfulness of anything that they did. But what about his name in history books? If not in the Soviet Union, what would people elsewhere say. Would children in Europe look down in a history book in the twenty second century, see his face, and write notes about the villain? Would history describe the extenuating circumstances of order, and the greater threat of the United States?


The man decided it didn’t matter. It was done and considering the matter further served no purpose. All that was left to do was to make a mental note to drop a few coins in the sobor when he was back home in Leningrad.