by Victor Milán
"All my needs have been most graciously provided for, great Timur." The fixer shifted his weight for the third time in less than a minute.
"Would you like a chair? I understand that, from your years as a devoted Marxist, you are unaccustomed to going on your knees five times a day to face Mecca in prayer."
"You misunderstand, Timur Agbar. It's merely that my arthritis is acting up. It's the air-conditioning—"
Timur held up a hand. "Be at ease. And please, don't call me 'great Timur.' It makes me sound like some huge unwieldy statue, like the five-hundred-foot reclining Bud-dhas they pray to in Sri Lanka."
Khaalis's mouth writhed under his mustache. As Timur well knew, his lack of religious observance sprang from laziness, not old-days Party piety. He retained a fundamentalist Muslim's reflexive horror of idolatry.
The functionary covered quickly enough, bowing his head to the parquetry floor of what had been the ballroom of the Russian Colonial house. His tyubeteyka was pale green, with violet flowers embroidered on it. "I await your pleasure... Timur-j'aan," he said, lighting after the briefest hesitation on the polite form "dear Timur."
"I wish to know if you will continue to serve the people of the republic as selflessly as in the past."
Khaalis froze in his genuflection. Only his eyes moved, rolling up like obsidian marbles to stare at the rebel leader.
"I understood you intended to dismantle the political structure."
"And so I do, Khaalis-jaan." Inflected that way, jaan could also signify either extreme affection or casual contempt. "I also know that you—or rather, your yurt—control most of the essential services for the city and much of Uzbekistan."
"You give me too much credit."
"I give you precisely enough. You have a hand in all republic-provided services: water, power, sewage, garbage collection. Your brother-in-law is head of the Transit Workers' Union. Your second cousin controls the issuance of all business licenses. Your uncle is highly placed in housing allocation. Little happens in Tashkent without your extended family having a share in it. Will you take tea?"
Naturally Khaalis would. A youth in sky-blue skullcap attended them, a grin of pleasure at being able to serve Timur himself threatening at any moment to crack his severe composure. Timur was not yet used to being waited on. He hoped he never got too used to it.
The tea was just right, thickened almost to the point of syrup with sugar and dosed with so much mint that the steam rising off the wide piyaala, the handleless Uzbek cups, brought tears to their eyes. Timur held his cup up under the facecloth of his turban to drink.
"I will dismantle that system, as I have promised, and permit the market to provide what the people need. I understand quite well that your yurt could bring the city and much of the republic to a stop if they wished to obstruct, in a way the Nikolays could never do. I don't want that to happen." Which is why you've been under house arrest since the revolt began. A brigand band like your clan understands hostage-taking in their bones.
"Stipulating that my yurt possesses such power—and I would suffer my tongue to be tom out before I would contradict the Father of Turkestan—why would it consent to cooperate in the diminution of that power? Speaking hypo-thetically, of course."
"Of course." Timur sipped. "First of all, there would be compensation. For example, no inconvenient questions would be asked about the wealth your family has already amassed. And while you would lose your monopoly status, you would still be well placed to compete in the open market in a number of areas. You come of resourceful stock, Khaalis-jaan. There is no reason your yurt could not do as well as before, or even better."
He drained his piyaala and set it on the geometrically figured carpet before him with scrupulous care.
"Also, we are Fighting a revolution to free our people of the official depredations of the state, which we will treat as the banditry it is. Should anyone whom we permit to continue in office think to abuse his position—" He shrugged. ' Are we Turkestanis not called Sarts, merchants? I'm sure a progressive yurt—your own, for example—could see its way clear to accepting a reasonable blood-price for such a malefactor.
"Dear Khaalis, I bid you good day."
"Kolya," the voice cried, rousing him from his fuzzed fugue state. "Nick/"
He sighed. Reba McEntire was singing her little heart out from his box, trying to compete with the throb of helicopter engines on the flight line right behind his folding chaise longue. He really needed earphones, but he refused to cut himself off from the world so completely this close to the firing line. They weren't right up against it, of course; they were in the midst of Operation Desert Wind, Anatoliy Karponin commanding. They also had the well-defended expanse of the giant Baykonur Cosmodrome—so near they could practically feel the heat on their faces when the huge yellow boosters hurled themselves into orbit—between them and the rebels. But they were still on the rebel side of the Aral, north of Syr Darya, and that meant taking nothing for granted. At least to Kolya Kuliyev. Afghanistan was thirteen years behind him, but he hadn't forgotten the lessons learned there.
"Look!" a younger voice cried. "It's him! Cowboy!"
"Warrant Officer Kuliyev," a second young voice corrected.
The fishy reek of the flats, which had been Aral Sea floor until irrigation of the vast Uzbekistan cotton plantations shrank the inland sea, surrounded him in an oddly comforting embrace, insulating him from the pulsing noise and diesel stink and hot hard metal of the flight line. Time to leave that dubious shelter. He adjusted the mirrorized mylar-over-cardboard reflector he'd improvised beneath his chin.
"That's Junior Lieutenant Kuliyev to you," he said. "And probably the oldest junior lieutenant in Frontal Av."
Reluctantly he opened his eyes. Yuriy, chief of his ground crew, was standing there with the wind off the Red Sands Desert ruffling the sparse white bristles of his hair, grinning an old-fashioned Soviet steel grin.
"These two young bastards were driving everyone crazy trying to find you. At last I relented and brought them, so we might keep our ships in the air and keep the rebels from sneaking in and slitting our throats. Did I do right, or should I have taken them on a flight to Kandahar?"
Kolya winced. A "flight to Kandahar" was about a thousand meters up, then out of the ship without a parachute, a lesson the Soviets in Afghanistan had gotten from the Americans in Vietnam—maybe the only one, on the evidence. Good old Yuriy had very different memories of his Afghan experience than Kolya, had drawn different conclusions.
"That would be too good for them. They must be made to live and face the beast Timur." He slid his sunglasses down his squashed pugilist's nose. "Where did you two drop from?"
"We've been transferred to Desert Wind too," Viktor said eagerly. His square jaw and American-style aviator glasses made him look like an underfed Marlon Brando. Russian Republic TV-Moscow had been showing The Wild Ones twice a month late-night since roughly the beginning of time. Apparently some Cold War recidivist had an idea about showing how bad and khuligan-rAA&n America was. Obviously nobody'd gotten around to clueing him that the modern reality was much worse.
"At last we'll see some real action," Ivan added. Kolya's former electronics operator still reminded him vaguely of a celery stalk. "Isn't it exciting? They say General Karponin really knows how to make things happen."
"Al Capone's a prize horse's ass," Kuliyev said.
"He's not so bad," Yuriy said hurriedly. The grizzled NCO lifer so common in Western armed forces was a rarity yet in League or republican armies. You didn't get to be one without certain awarenesses heightened. Yuriy had instantly sized up Ivan as a Youth League hero with a ramrod up his butt, a potential informer.
Kolya waved him off. "Karponin thinks the sun rises and sets on League Army armor. He's not big on the vertical battle and desant-type penetrations and the other things that worked for us in Afghanistan, to the extent anything did. We're here for recon and flying artillery.
"The good news is, I'm out of Hinds, an
yway. I get to fly Hokums now, which is fun, although flying an anti-helicopter ship would make more sense if the rebels had helicopters."
He rubbed his cheeks. "You still flying Hunchbacks?"
The two looked at each other and nodded. "Sergeant Portynagin is our pilot now," Ivan said. "He's very proficient."
"He's not as good as you," Viktor said at almost the same time.
Kolya laughed and shut off the flip player with his big toe, then settled back in his folding chaise longue. "Care for some fruit juice? I've got a couple different kinds in the cooler."
Viktor looked crestfallen. "No vodka? Not even beer?"
"Not even beer. I'm not the party ape I was at your age. I take care of myself for Marina, now."
Yuriy shook his head in mock reproof. "I can't believe you're talking that way." He looked at the two younger men, who were rooting in the red plastic cooler. "You should have seen him back in Jalalabad in the old days! The rebels had two prices on his head, one for his prowess in the sky, one for his prowess with their women! The Pushtuns don't have much use for women, you see, but they're mighty jealous of them, and our Kolya was always ready to lend them more than fraternal assistance."
He clucked as Ivan diffidently handed him a bottle of orange juice. "Kolya Kola we called him then: Nick the Prick. Hard to believe such a lusty cock confines himself to treading a single hen these days. Gah, this stuff isn't fit to drink without good vodka in it."
Kolya shut his eyes and clung to his homemade reflector as a pair of Mi-28s swept low overhead on a recon sweep to the southeast.
"If my attention did stray, Marina wouldn't care. She'd hope I had a good time," he said absently. "That's one of the reasons I never stray. Also, she's all I can handle."
"You are a lucky man, Kolya," Yuriy said.
"I am that."
"You shouldn't be out here in the sun," Ivan said reprovingly, brushing sand from his brief blond hair and taking a sip of apple juice.
"I need to get a bit of a tan if I'm going to work this damned desert. With my redhead's complexion, it's the best protection against a burn."
"Youth League On-line just carried a reminder that direct exposure to sunlight brings risk of cancer," Ivan said primly. "You should wear sunscreen at all times, and not lie out like this."
"Nikolai Stepanovich is a Leningrader," Yuriy said. "Leningraders know the value of a little sun."
"St. Petersburg," Kolya corrected. "If I get cancer, the bastards can cure it. The purpose of medicine is to cure, not to tell us how to live our lives." He pulled out a big cigar and stuck it beneath his mustache, wagging his red eyebrows Groucho-style at Ivan's look of disgust. "Besides, I want my hide an attractive shade in case I auger in and the rebels lift it for me."
"Does Timur really skin his prisoners?" Viktor asked, half scandalized, half titillated.
"Probably not."
"The Youth League BBS—"
"Give your bulletin board a rest, Vanya," Kuliyev said. "You pay too much attention to it. You want the squadron M&D counselor to think you're a Nethead?" They didn't have political officers in the army anymore. They had morale and development counselors, which was worse.
Ivan stood to attention. "There are well-documented reports of atrocities in rebel-held areas."
"No damned doubt about it. Every group's got its complement of detached assholes. But I think our friend Timur's more the idealistic dreamer type; probably means it when he says he doesn't go in for playing rough."
"The Shi'ites are idealists too," Viktor said.
Kolya laughed, licked a fingertip, and held it up in the poisoned breeze off the sea: score one. He popped the top on a bottle of juice. He pulled the tab a little too hard and a seam split, leaking melon/grapefruit all over his hand. "Shit. Fuck the Greens anyway, for talking the government into making this damned quick-degrading plastic crap mandatory. If they want to do something for the environment, let them first do a better job cleaning up poor old Aral." He licked his hand, then slammed the ruptured bottle's contents.
He gazed off across the sea. ."Idealists or not, we've got to fight them," he said. With the hard sun glinting off it, the water looked almost blue. Hovercraft milled around raising yellowish wakes, preparing, rumor had it, for a possible advance up the Syr Darya. "It's our job. Besides, the League's worth fighting for."
"Those conscripts," the red-faced Russian captain said, pouring vodka. "Dogs, the lot of them."
"Too gentle," a Ukrainian major said, biting into a cucumber. "Swine. Hopeless. Completely hopeless."
Anatoliy Karponin gazed over his staff with half a smile. A colorful flock, these popinjays, plumed in all the hues of the League and the sundry republican armed forces. A man who generally deplored waste in any form, he didn't know in all truth what half these people did.
But he was a vain man, who knew how to use his vanity as a tool, as his idol Patton did. STAVKA, the press, the public were all impressed by the size and magnificence of Al Capone's retinue. If only a handful of the lurid hangers-on punishing the lunch buffet in the artificial chill of the command trailer actually had useful jobs, and knew how to perform them—well, Anatoliy Karponin knew which ones they were. The rest were but peacocks, a potentate's display.
And potentate he was. Let the black-assed rebel bastard parade about under the name Timur. Anatoliy Karponin would show him a real Tamerlane.
He sipped coffee tart with lemon. "They are precisely what I wanted."
The air-conditioning made the sudden silence remind Karponin of that stillness that lies between low clouds and new-fallen snows of an early December morning. Only the wooden-legged polka thumping of the little two-stroke alky-fired generator disturbed the quiet. Karponin enjoyed the effect.
"The League General Staff in its wisdom was less generous with seasoned troops than one would wish, even though most of our 'veterans' have known no combat more intense than border skirmishes with the Iranians or the Chinese. So I requested the most recent drafts from large urban areas."
"But sir, those are the most disaffected of our conscripts," protested Captain Rybalko, Karponin's operations officer, who was young and looked younger. An officer in the Russian Republican Guard, Rybalko was not among the peacocks. "The proletarians resent their lives; the, uh, the sons of administrators resent being taken from theirs."
"Precisely." Karponin sipped. "They have anger. We will give them someone to vent it on."
He set down the fine china cup. "Now, gentlemen, let me urge you to drink and eat but lightly."
They stared at him. "The treatment I prescribed that young man today set me thinking. We all could use what the Americans term an 'attitude adjustment.' Therefore, as soon as luncheon is over, we're all going for an invigorating run down to the railroad line."
Chapter FIFTEEN
"Astakhfirullaa," Timur breathed. "By God!"
The functionary let the tarp's corner drop. "By God, certainly. And also by Khaalis, my Khan."
His words raced like squirrels between the rows of big, boxy, canvas-muffled shapes and up to the steel rafters of the giant warehouse on the outskirts of Eski-Tashkent, Tashkent Old Town. Timur was so startled he forgot to take the man to task for using the title.
The man in the League artillery officer's uniform put his neat head back and laughed. "BM-13s," he roared. "Stalin Organs, almost sixty years old if they're a day! Truly, the Nikolays never throw anything away."
"Their habits of thrift serve us well," Timur said. "How many?"
"In this warehouse alone? Allaa knows. In all of Tashkent, to my knowledge—one thousand."
"One thousand?" The giant Afghan's eyes bulged on either side of his eagle-beak nose. "One thousand multiple rocket-launcher trucks? God is truly to be praised."
"Naturally and always, my Lord Tiger," said Khaalis smugly. It was always prudent to show these southern hillbillies that you and God were like that.
The smaller one, the Arab, smoothed his Arab Legion-style mustache and looked a
t Khaalis altogether too intently. "What are they doing here?"
"It is even as you said, Colonel Ali: the Nikolays throw nothing away. These were assembled from all over the Union back during the war of lib—that is, the intervention in Afghanistan. Tashkent was a major mustering point, you know. Did you know it, in 1979 when Babrak Karmal broadcast his appeal for Russian aid, he was really here in the city? My maternal cousin Mahmud was a technician in the studio at the time."
The Pushtun's crack-nailed hand brushed the hilt of his Khyber knife. "You sound proud, little man."
"Do I? An infinity of pardons, Sher Khan! It is a shame upon my yurt—one which I hope my little revelation will do much to erase."
"That seems likely," Timur said. "Please proceed with your tale."
"Ha, well. It's really quite simple. The Nikolays brought the Stalin Organs here to send on to the army of the Democratic Republic. Then the war ended. What then to do with them? It was certainly not worth the effort sending them back where they came from. The Russians could never bring themselves to break them up for scrap. The only thing to do was drive them into warehouses, throw tarps over them, and lose them from the inventories."
"How do you come to know about them?" Ali asked. Suspicious bastard.
"As the great Timur knows, my yurt is spread wide. My kinfolk include drivers and warehousemen."
"Why didn't you find some way to sell them to the DRA yourself?" Sher Khan growled.
Khaalis shrugged. "Dr. Najib did not want them; they were too outmoded, and he was a man who cared only for (lie best, may the devils turn his spit slowly in hell. So they remained untouched until this day, and I joyfully present tliem, a present from my yurt to my Khan."
"Enough of the traditional obsequies, Khaalis," Timur said. He hesitated. "I have no wish to count the teeth of a tribute mare—"
