Ascendancies (42 page)

From within the ZIL's cramped little khaki-colored cab came the crisp beeping of a digital watch.

The driver yanked back the shoddy sleeve of his secondhand Red Army jacket and pressed a watch stud. A dial light glowed, showing thirty seconds from midnight. The driver grinned and mashed more little buttons with his blunt, precise fingers. The watch emitted a twittering Japanese folk tune.

The driver, hanging on to the ZIL's no-power, gut-busting steering wheel, leaned far out the open door and squinted at the horizon. A phantom silhouette slid across the southern stars—a plane without running lights, painted black for night flight.

The driver gulped from a Stolichnaya bottle and lit a Marlboro.

The flare of his Cricket lighter briefly threw his blurred yellow reflection against the ZIL's windshield. He was unshaven, pumpkin-faced, bristle-headed. His eyes were slitted, yet somehow malignantly radiant with preternatural survival instincts. The driver's name was Leggy Starlitz. The locals, who knew no better, called him “Lekhi Starlits.”

Starlitz kicked the cab's rusty door open and climbed down the ZIL's iron rungs.

The black plane hit tarmac, bounced drunkenly down the potholed strip, and taxied up. It was a twin-engine Soviet military turboprop, an Ilyushin-14.

Starlitz beckoned at the spyplane with a pair of orange semaphore paddles. He waved it along brusquely. He was not a big fan of the Ilyushin-14.

The IL-14 was already obsolete in the high-tech Soviet Air Force. So the aging planes had been consigned to the puppet Air Force of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan: the DRAAF. This plane had a big Afghan logo clumsily painted over its Soviet red star. The DRAAF logo was a smaller, fatter, maroon-colored star, ringed in an inviting target circle of red, green and black. It looked a lot like a Texaco sign.

Still, the IL-14 was the best spyplane that the DRAAF had to offer. It had fine range and speed; it could fly smuggling runs under the Iranian radar, all the way from Kabul to Soviet Azerbaijan.

Starlitz much preferred the DRAAF's antique “Badger” medium bombers. Badgers had good range and superb cargo capacity. You could haul anything in a Badger. Trucks, refugees, chemical feedstocks…the works.

It was too bad that the Badger was such a hog to fly. The smugglers had given the Badger up. For months they'd been embezzling tons of aviation kerosene from the Afghan Air Force fuel dumps. The thievery was becoming too obvious, even for the utterly corrupt Afghan military.

Starlitz guided the creeping, storm-colored plane into the makeshift airstrip's hangar. The hangar was a tin-roofed livestock barn, built to the colossal proportions of a Soviet collective farm. The morale of the collectivized peasants had been lousy, though, and all the cattle had starved to death during the Brezhnev era. Now the barn was free for new restructured uses: something with a lot more initiative, a lot more up-to-date.

The plane's engines died, their eighteen cylinders coughing into echoing silence. Starlitz heaved concrete parking blocks under the nosewheels. He propped a paint-stained wooden ladder against the cockpit.

The aircraft's bulletproof canopy creaked up and open. A pilot in an earflapped leather helmet leaned out on one elbow, an oxygen mask dangling from his neck.

“How's it going, ace?” Starlitz said in his foully accented dog-Russian.

“Where are the disembarkation stairs?” demanded the pilot. He was Captain Pulat R. Khoklov, a Soviet “adviser” to the DRAAF.

“Huh?” Starlitz said.

Khoklov frowned. “You know very well, Comrade Starlits. The device that rolls here on wheels, with the proper sturdy metal steps, for my descending.”

“Oh.
That,”
Starlitz said. “I dunno, man. I guess somebody sold it.”

“Where is the rest of your ground crew?” said Captain Khoklov. The handsome young pilot's eyelids were reddened and his tapered fingertips were corpse-pale from Dexedrine. It had been a long flight. The IL-14 was a two-man plane, but Khoklov flew it alone.

Khoklov and his pals didn't trust the DRAAF's native pilots. In 1985 the Afghans had mutinied and torched twenty of their best MiG fighters on the ground at Shindand Air Base. Since that incident, most DRAAF missions had been flown by Russian pilots, “unofficially.” Pakistani border violations, civilian bombings, a little gas work…the sort of mission where DRAAF cover came in handy.

Some DRAAF missions, though, were far more “unofficial” than others.

Starlitz grinned up at the pilot. “The ground crew's on strike, comrade,” he said. “Politics. ‘The nationalities problem.' You know how it is here in Azerbaijan.”

Khoklov was scandalized. “They can't strike against
smugglers!
We're not the government! We are a criminal private-enterprise operation!”

“They
know
that, man,” Starlitz said. “But they wanted to show solidarity. With their fellow Armenian Christians. Against the Moslem Azerbaijanis.”

“You should not have let your Armenian workers go,” Khoklov said. “They can't be allowed to run riot just as they please!”

“What the hey,” Starlitz said. “Can't
make
'em work.”

“Of course you can,” Khoklov said, surprised.

Starlitz shrugged. “Tell it to Gorbachev…Forget the stairs. Use the paint ladder, ace. Nobody's looking.”

With reluctance, Khoklov abandoned his dignity. He shrugged out of his harness, set his mask and helmet aside, and clambered down.

Khoklov's DRAAF flight jacket was gaudy with mission patches. Beneath it he sported a civilian Afghan blouse of hand-embroidered paisley, and a white silk ascot. Walkman earphones bracketed his neck. The antique wailing of the Jefferson Airplane rang faintly from the Walkman's foam-padded speakers.

Khoklov stretched and twisted, his spine popping loudly. He walked to the edge of the hangar and peered warily into the darkness, as if suspecting ambush from local unfriendlies. Nothing whatever happened. Khoklov sighed and shook himself. He tiptoed into darkness to relieve himself on the tarmac.

Starlitz coupled the plane's nosewheel to the drawbar of a small diesel tractor.

Khoklov returned. He looked at Starlitz gravely, his poet's face anemic in the hangar's naked overhead lights. “You remained here faithfully, all alone, Comrade Starlits?”

“Yeah.”

“How unusual. You yourself are not Armenian?”

“I'm not religious,” Starlitz said. He offered Khoklov a Marlboro.

Khoklov examined the cigarette's brand name, nodded, and accepted a light. “What is your ethnic nationality, Comrade Starlits? I have often wondered.”

“I'm an Uzbek,” Starlitz said.

Khoklov thought it over, breathing smoke through his nose. “An Uzbek,” he said at last. “I suppose I could believe that, if I really tried.”

“My mom was a Kirghiz,” Starlitz said glibly. “What's in the plane this time, ace? Good cargo?”

“Excellent cargo,” Khoklov said. “But you have no crew to unload it!”

“I can handle it all myself.” Starlitz pointed overhead. “I rigged some pulleys. And I just tuned up the forklift. I can improvise, ace, no problem.”

“But that isn't permitted,” Khoklov said. “One individual can't replace a team, through some private whim of his own! The entire work team is at fault. They must all be disciplined. Otherwise there will be recurrences of this irresponsible behavior.”

“Big deal,” Starlitz said, setting to work. “The job gets done anyway. The system is functional, ace. So who cares?”

“With such an incorrect attitude from their team leader, no wonder things have come to grief here,” Khoklov observed. “You had better work like a Hero of Labor, comrade. Otherwise it will delay my return to base.” Khoklov scowled. “And that would be hard to explain.”

“Can't have that,” Starlitz said lazily. “You might get transferred to Siberia or something. Not much fun, ace.”

“I've already been to Siberia, and there is plenty of fun,” Khoklov said. “We scrambled every day against Yankee spyplanes…And Korean airliners. If there's a difference.” He shrugged.

Starlitz moved the ladder down the plane's fuselage, past a long, spiky row of embedded ELINT antennas. He propped the ladder beside a radome blister, climbed up, and opened the plane's bay.

The Ilyushin's electronic spygear had been partially stripped, replaced with tarped-down heaps and stacks of contraband. Starlitz bonked his head on the plane's low bulkhead. “Damn,” he said. “I sure miss those Badgers.”

“Be grateful we have aircraft at all!” Khoklov said. He climbed the ladder and peered in curiously. “Think how many mule-loads of treasure have flown in my plane tonight. Romantic secret caravans, creeping slowly over the Khyber Pass…And this is just a fraction of the secret trade. Many mules die in the minefields.”

“Toss me that pulley hook, ace.” Starlitz swung out a strapped-up stack of Hitachi videocassette recorders.

Starlitz, with methodic efficiency, drove forklift-loads of loot from the hangar out to the truck. Korean “Gold Star” tape players. Compact discs of re-mixed jazz classics. Fifty-kilo bricks of fudge-soft black Afghani hashish. Ten crates of J&B Scotch. A box of foil-sealed lubricated condoms, items of avid and fabulous rarity. Two hundred red cartons of Dunhills, still in their cellophane. Black nylon panty hose.

And gold. Gold czarist rubles, the lifeblood of the Soviet black economy. The original slim supply of nineteenth-century imperial rubles couldn't meet the frenzied modern demand, so they were counterfeited especially for the Soviet market, by goldsmiths in Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan. The rubles came sealed in long strips of transparent plastic, for use in money belts.

Khoklov was fidgeting. “We have re-created the Arabian Nights,” he said, running a flat ribbon of plasticized bullion over his sleeve. He leaned against a dusty concrete feeding trough. “It is Ali Baba and the forty
shabashniki
… We meant to ‘smash the last vestiges of feudalism.' We meant to ‘defend the socialist revolution.' All we have really done is create a thieves' market worthy of legend! With ourselves as the eager customers.”

Khoklov lit a fresh Dunhill from the stub of the last. “You should see Kabul today, Comrade Starlits. It's still a vile medieval dump, but every alleyway is full of whores and thieves, every breed of petty capitalist! They tug our sleeves and offer us smuggled Western luxuries we could never find at home. Even the mujihadeen bandits drop their Yankee rifles to sell us soap and aspirin. Now that we're leaving, no one thinks of anything but backdoor hustling. We are all desperate for one last tasty drink of Coca-Cola, before our Afghan adventure is over.”

“You sound a little wired, ace,” Starlitz said. “You could lend me a hand, you know. Might get the kinks out.”

“Not my assignment,” Khoklov sniffed. “You can take your share of all this, comrade. Be content.”

“What with the trouble it took, you'd think this junk would have more class,” Starlitz said. He slid down the ladder with a cardboard box.

“Ah!” said Khoklov. “So it's glamour you want, my grimy Uzbek friend? You have it there in your hands. A wonderful Hollywood movie! Give me that box.”

Starlitz tossed it to him. Khoklov ripped it open. “I must take a few cassettes for my fellows at DRAAF. They love this film.
Top Gun!
Yankee pilots kill Moslems in it. They strafe with F-16s, in many excellent flying-combat scenes!”

“Hollywood,” Starlitz said. “A bunch of crap.”

Khoklov shook his head carefully. “The Yankees will have to kill the Moslems, now that we're giving it up! Libya, that Persian Gulf business…It's only a matter of time.” Khoklov began stuffing videocassettes into his flight jacket. He took a handgun from within the jacket and set it on the edge of the trough.

“Cool!” Starlitz said, staring at it. “What model is that?”

“It's a war trophy,” Khoklov said. “A luck charm, is all.”

“Lemme look, ace.”

Khoklov showed him the gun.

“Looks like a Czech ‘Skorpion' 5.66 millimeter,” Starlitz said. “Something really weird about it, though…”

“It's homemade,” Khoklov said. “An Afghan village blacksmith copied it. They are clever as monkeys with their hands.” He shook his head. “It's pig-iron, hand-drilled…You can see where he engraved some little flowers into the pistol butt.”

“Wow!” Starlitz exulted. “How much?”

“It's not for sale, comrade.”

Starlitz reached into a pocket of his tattered Levi's and pulled out a fat roll of dollars, held with a twist of wire. “Say when, ace.” He began peeling off bills and slapping them down: one hundred, two hundred…

“That's enough,” Khoklov said after a moment. He examined the bills carefully, his pale hands shaking a little. “These are real American dollars! Where did you get all this?”

“Found it in a turnip patch,” Starlitz said. He crammed the wad carelessly back into his jeans, then lifted the gun with reverence, and sniffed its barrel. “You ever fire this thing?”

“No. But its first owner did. At the people's fraternal forces.”

“Huh. It'd be better if it were mint. It's beautiful anyway, though.” Starlitz twirled the pistol on one finger, grinning triumphantly. “Too bad there's no safety catch.”

“The Afghans never bother with them.”

“Neither do I,” Starlitz said. He stuffed the gun in the back of his jeans.

There were odds and ends in the plane, and one big item left: a Whirlpool clothes washer in bright lemon-yellow enamel. Starlitz manhandled it into the back of the ZIL with the other loot, and carefully laced the truck's canvas, hiding everything from view.

“Well, that's about it,” Starlitz said, dusting his callused hands. “Now we'll get you gassed up and out of here, ace.”