Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

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.

The window exploded. A spray of bullets shattered the glass, shredded the curtains. Quick work, the old man thought. They are fast, faster than I thought, if only by a… he thought. But he never finished his thought.

Now.

The old man’s body danced as the bullets pounded it.

Dogs, dogs, where are you now?

Early in 1990, you lay sprawled on the ground at an execution site. You lay in a sea of blood. You had been part of the unit before, part of “S,” but now, with one exception, you had been eradicated. The one survivor was looking up, devotion in his eyes. Peering up at the man who stood at the top of the chain of command. At the man known as the Director, the General, and by various other names.

The man had aged.

Our own homeland, he said. To the dog. The Soviet issued the command, he said. That we be eliminated. They ordered it. We are the evidence, they say, that must never be discovered. And so we must be destroyed.

The old man raised his gun, aimed it at the dog.

The dog did not flinch. He listened.

All around the man and the dog a terrible stench hung in the air. The smell of countless deaths, of so much spilled blood.

The old man gazed at the dog.

The dog’s name, this dog’s name, was Belka.

The unit has disbanded, the old man said. Do you understand that?

Belka listened. He heard. And he answered: Woof!

Tears spilled from the old man’s eyes. His right hand, gripping the pistol, trembled. I just, he said, I just… I just, I just…

Woof! the old man cried.

“I am going to lose my mind,” he told Belka. “And you, you are going to live.”

Dogs, dogs, here you are.

You penetrated the military’s encirclement of the city. Strelka, Belka, the old lady, WO and WT, and a dozen dogs managed to escape. By the next morning, however, WO, WT, and their motorcycle were blown to smithereens. Orders were issued in cities throughout the Russian Far East that dogs were to be hunted down and killed, and as a consequence four thousand dogs died, including many unrelated to the rebellion. Three days after they fled, Strelka’s band was reduced to Strelka, who would disguise herself, depending on the situation, as a Chinese-Russian, a Korean-Russian, or a Mongolian-Russian; Belka, who disguised himself as an ordinary pet; and the old lady. It was easier this way; they had greater freedom of movement. Though they did have one bulky bit of luggage. They had the globe. The old lady had presented it to Strelka in an abandoned cabin, in a region midway between the taiga and the wetlands. Strelka accepted it, she pondered its meaning. She decided the old lady was asking her where they should go. She spun the globe.