Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Read Online Free Page A

alive. He had killed the adults,
     but not the puppies.
    They were barking. Their young voices. The old man stared at them through the chain-link
     doors.
    He watched them for half a minute, then nodded to himself, opened a door, stepped
     inside. He scooped up an armful of puppies.
    The attack on the mansion was all over the media the next day. The first reports were
     vague, mere repetitions of statements issued by the government. That weekend, a fringe
     newspaper ran a sensational version of the story on its front page. The provocative
     headline announced OPPOSITION GROUP RESPONSIBLE . The article said an organization “specializing in bomb attacks” had targeted the
     residence of a “Vor,” the head of a major criminal organization that operated two
     banks, three hotel chains, and numerous restaurants. The article commented provocatively
     on the group, which, it said, had sold weapons pilfered from army warehouses. It continued
     with a lengthy profile of the criminals who were presumed to have killed the Vor,
     who had, by and large, taken control of this city in the Russian Far East. The article
     concluded: “At last, the epic battle has arrived on our doorstep, here at the edge
     of Siberia—a war between the two great forces of the underworld, old and new: the
     Russian mafia and the Chechen mafia.”

1944–1947
    Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
    For the first forty days of 1944, they remained on Kiska. There were only seven of
     them now. On January 2, one dog died. Explosion. This female German shepherd had been
     too weak, after the surgically aided birth she had undergone, to survive the brutal
     Aleutian winter. During the first six or seven weeks, while the five puppies born
     alive were still suckling, she tried her best to raise them. But when the time came
     to wean them, she lost strength. Finally, shortly before dawn on the second day of
     the new year, she died.
    The Americans had already figured out who she was. The previous year, when the Japanese
     military launched the second stage of its Ke-gō Operation, evacuating its forces en masse from Kiska/Narukami, it had blown up the factories, garages, ammunition, and other
     munitions that had to be left on the island. But they hadn’t gotten everything. They
     ran out of time. More than fifty-two hundred members of the island’s garrison had
     to be loaded into the rescue fleet’s ships in just fifty-five minutes. The troops
     could take only the most essential personal belongings, so any number of notebooks,
     diaries, and other papers remained in the camps. Important classified documents were
     burned, of course, but they couldn’t dispose of the rest.
    As soon as the Americans had retaken the island, they had the landing force’s intelligence
     officers translate what they found. Several documents indicated that Explosion had
     originally been an American military dog until she was captured by the Japanese on
     Kiska. “We seized a dog from a US Navy private (a prisoner) at the wireless station,”
     one reference explained. “Her name is Explosion.” The Alaska Defense Command conducted
     an inquiry into her provenance under the jurisdiction of the Navy Flotilla 13.
    And so, once again, Explosion was an American.
    What about the others? They all belonged to the Americans, of course. They were fed by the Americans, cared for by the Americans.
     But in the end, they hadn’t actually become American military dogs. The five puppies
     were treated as pets by the garrisoned forces, not as fighters, and since the two
     adults—the German shepherd Masao and the Hokkaido Kita—were military dogs, the Americans
     considered them Japanese, and prisoners.
    Not that this was a bad thing.
    The dogs weren’t overly concerned with the instructions war minister Tōjō Hideki had
     laid down in the Field Army Service Code : “Do not live to endure the prisoner’s humiliation.” Neither Masao nor Kita felt
     particularly humiliated. They saw how