Sean removed a cold false mask from his face. He threw out the Magnum. They began to laugh at this absurd and beautiful world.

- I have killed you - choking with joy said Sean. - But it is impossible?!

- You know, there is love. Even death is powerless in comparison with it.

*

Transformed and completely another Сolonel stopped. Sean bowed before him as before an icon. Dux was going up from the hell through tangled corridors, tunnels and mines. Sean, having drunk a flask of straight Scotch whiskey, was following him like a latter-day Sancho Panza. He wanted again very much to smoke.

Piercing with their inner eye the thickness of hundreds of concrete floors, the two were waiting for each other, Сolonel and Maher. They both knew that they would meet.

They both knew that the bunker had been surrounded.

It was a day when hundreds of airports have been completely blocked for one thousand miles. The air force of dozens of countries has been raised to the air. Hundreds of different types of missiles were aimed at a small suburb of Belgrade. The city was tightly surrounded by the army, the police, the secret services.

In light of recent events there have been created special units of military psychologists. They tested both civilians and the military. Black gloomy troops of cleaners with a chevron of the plague nib exterminated infected patients, sending them to special areas surrounded by the military equipment. However, the whole units of cleaners suddenly fell ill with the silver plague and fresh units were fiercely fighting with new patients. A heavy smell of a new universal holocaust was spreading for tens of kilometers.

There was active evacuation of people. The city was quickly becoming deserted. The curfew was enlarged. Anyone who was outdoors at an inopportune time was subjected to shooting.

Maher’s residence was surrounded by hordes of tanks, armored troop carriers, guns, guided grenade launchers, missiles and drones. The institute of human military thought struck imagination by its diversity. From the side of the Danube there came a few ill-assorted squadrons filled with various submarine instruments. There were snipers everywhere. The sappers were undermining everywhere.

For the first time in the modern history all potential opponents gathered in the face of terrible danger. In Inđija, twenty-five miles away from Belgrade, there was quartered the international General Staff. Eternal enemies faced with each other, trying to work out a common line. The representatives of the "rogue" countries were walking with stone-faced in dense groups. The representatives of Latin America were waving long frightening carbines, sometimes they touched each other discreetly, sometimes expressed emotionally everything they were thinking about. Variegated Africans were walking around the city, holding AK-47 in their hands. Singaporeans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thais, Burmese, Cambodians patrolled in regular lines. Everybody was spick and span. Modern samurais moved forward in a special detachment. A large army of Indians marched. As always, the Chinese prevail over everybody, one of whom sometimes raised a sign with hieroglyphs.

Officers wearing sand-colored uniforms and headed by the Muslim leader in white clothes moved forward. Tired from the wars of many years, they, with the millennial wisdom, looked at the Europeans, the Americans, also the Israeli military, who seemed to smile invisibly.

*

The eternal sweet and vicious war of the peoples always differ from that one it had been born, it gives the highest triumph of victory and bitterness of defeat with the humiliation, suffering and death. Nobody could do over the whole mankind for five thousand years. It seemed that, for an instant, the whole humanity fetched up at the sinking ark. All family hardened peoples’ squabbles must have retreated to the background in the face of the common threat. Intrigues and frictions must calm down like disturbed bee hives. Coalitions must to hide behind the fig leaves of decency.

However, in any large and small isolated community, there almost immediately appears an energetic monad, which often gives atypical roles. No doubt that the monad plugs easily and quickly into the fabric of the unity of the world. Suddenly, one person has to play the role of the chief, another one has to play the traitor, the third one plays an informer, the fourth one plays the jovial fellow and the fifth one plays the hero, the savior of everybody. Like romping puppies which are now playing, now painfully biting, they continue to tie intricate beautiful knots of fates, swapping peace and war, enemies and friends.

Sometimes they replay, they have universal hatred, the lust of murders, betraying the repentance and praying for forgiveness of the fate. After the massacre, freedom often turns upside down, and then inevitably appears the army Tonton Macoutes, similar to the fighters of the organized crime groups. The war, destroying the whole richness of creation, passes like a painful fever. There are built on the corpses and ruins of crippled destinies new empires. Often, they are doomed to desolation and lose their initial supply sources of self-identification and turn into black crocodiles of greed.

In the colonial outskirts there are collapsed worlds with invisible secret cities which continue to coexist, like building blocks of the eternal time, in which there changes only eras and the scenery. Do you think that if someone once, probably long ago, had crushed another’s beautiful world, erased memory by his obstinacy, spirits and justification of mass delusion and you can live happily in the absolute amnesia? Oh, you are naive! Your previous worlds will forever catch up you. But with the naked eye, you will see something: desolation of graves, expensive houses with the smell of alcohol and drugs, pointless hunt for a beautiful elusive doe. It would seem that after the last shot aborigine there deceptively established peace and quiet? But no. A great crime, even if it is not personal, will be fully fulfilled and there will be rendered the punishment and a heavy burden will be dispersed in many generations. At the outskirts of indifference will be forever past atrocities. You will eradicate or rehabilitate yourself. Someone’s desperate pain, young stupidity will subside, the euphoria of a cook, admitted to solve the question of life and death, will be over. People’s fates will gather by rivers and brooks in huge streams. You would gladly throw away from your pockets extra unnecessary stones which pull you to the bottom, all the more, you have almost forgotten about their purpose. But they are in your heart, soul and flesh. And a great human chute loses the diversity, enters the black tunnel, takes a single form of thought, kills the last seal-monk to get fat for greasing the mechanisms. And you walk along deserted cities, breathing icy solitude, sadly realize that the lady had died forever and invent worlds which were blown away.

That’s why, the only way is to stop for a moment, to be taken up with and swim against the current. To forgive and to understand, to light the spark of the repentance and to move forward all conceivable and inconceivable black barriers. And in empty halls your soul will see, in the face of the Eternal, beautiful princesses and kings who will appear like a miracle. Constantly losing real material inhabitants in front of the entrance to the great wonderful kingdom, you can enter the kingdom of heaven through pain, suffering and penance. And, in the end, you will suddenly hear a guttural singing among the grey everyday life, and the world, which your miss, will blossom.

*

At the age of thirteen-fourteen, Maher, is walking in the foggy haze of Hudson, saw obscure outlines of his Empire.

Due to his eminent intellect he could, for a night, greedily devour thick library tomes in a big dusty aunt’s apartment, sometimes going out to a small garden to have a breath of fresh air.