BABUSHKA: The Warrior's Angel

Chapter I. The Generalissimo

I. THE GENERALISSIMO

Over the past few months the girl had taken to the habit of spending Sunday afternoons down in her grandfather's concrete bunker of a study, watching as he worked, heavily hunched over his vast desk, its battleship-gray superstructure lost on an ocean of blueprints, all log-jammed with rolled-up maps and mysterious documents marked 'CONFIDENTIAL'.

            All breeches and gabardine, a chiseled monolith under siege, he would occasionally rise, as he did now, his footsteps across the stone floor accompanied by the smell of freshly polished leather – his hunters and holster and cartridge belt all burnished the same deep brown of calabash husk – to slide aside his favorite Thessalian stallion portrait and remove a few fresh sheets of paper from the top shelf of his wall-safe, the hardwired turn on his heels heading him back toward his desk to scratch away at his secret instructions.

          The irony had not escaped the Generalissimo how the communications system built to track the activities of the enemy had, in fact, become its primary source of intelligence. Suffice it to say, he was no fan of newfangled technology, preferring instead to handwrite the most sensitive missions and pass them to his inferiors in person. Technically, of course, the conduct was against all protocol but nobody was going to tell this war-horse how to do his job: what counted was results and he delivered not just in spades but in sprawling mass-graves. He was a father figure not just to the girl but to every last human soul on the island – his island – or at least that's what he liked to tell himself. It was, he had decided, his destiny to protect them all; a divine calling that necessitated the grinding of every last rebel back into the dirt like the cockroaches they were.

            All-engulfing, suddenly, the wave of nostalgia came as no surprise to him: this was the way it always arrived – as if it were possible for a monsoon to burst from an empty sky, driving down, heavy and hard; drenching him to the very marrow of his being; leaving him overwhelmed. Defenseless. Impotent...

            Abandoning his scribblings to swim for their own lives across the paper, his focus drifted along the flotsam-strewn desk as far as the teak-framed photo of his younger self with his younger wife, a small bronze star glowing proudly on the lapel of his smart new uniform and a smile on her face that may or may not have been plastic: How the hell could you ever tell with women?

            All he asked for himself was a little one-on-one time with the head roach.

            Just the thought of his adversary's name made his jaw jut like a baited mastiff, tamed only by the chapel's timely bell, its toll muted by the house's thick granite walls. Eighteen-hundred hours: the field-junkers would be handing their machetes – their facāos – back to the foreman about now. Where they were working today, they had at least a ninety-minute walk back before lock-down – it would be sweaty and the mosquitoes would be out in force. Their rags would offer them little protection.

            With some satisfaction, he grunted across a stack of aerial recon photos for the conveniently close brandy decanter and poured a generous measure into his large tumbler, its lead-crystal showing its appreciation with an expensive clink. Reaching for the water carafe, he changed his mind, choosing instead to take his jamoon liqueur neat, as if doing otherwise might dilute the hatred in his veins. It was a hatred no less sincere than that of a cuckoldee for his cuckolder; precisely because that was precisely what it was.

            He remembered how he had sat there at the time, the morning after his discovery (had it really been that many years ago?), munching on his cereals, staring vacantly at the racing results, making his sixth or sixteenth attempt to read a short article on some or other fixing scandal – while all the time the bloated cow in the far field at the back of his mind slowly ruminated on the cud of four short words.