The First Casualty (14 page)

“Is yours. I come to return.”

Jason examined the piece of tin in the dim light from the street, not believing what he was seeing. “From Afghanistan? You came all the way here to return ten cents' worth of U.S. Army dog tags?”

The figure in front of him stamped his feet, knocking muddy snow onto the mat. “
Da
. Is cold.”

Jason stepped aside. “If you've come this far, may as well come inside.”

Fifteen minutes and two drinks later (vodka for the Russian, single-­malt scotch for the American), Jason learned his visitor had actually­ come from no farther than Wisconsin Avenue and the Russian embassy where he had been assigned to the military attaché. Although he declined to say how, he had traced Jason through his dog tags.

Jason tinkled the ice in his glass. “You've learned English since we last met.”

The man nodded. “Required for posting to the United States. I do it good, no?”

“Hell of a lot better than my Russian.”

“You speak Russian?”

“Not a word.”

The two drank in companionable silence for a few minutes before Jason observed, “You didn't come here just to return the dog tags.”

Viktor shook his head. “No. I come to have great capitalist enemy of peace-loving Soviet people show me Washington, DC.”

“On a Sunday night?”

“Is small favor, nothing like what you do in Afghanistan.”

Jason wasn't quite sure of the logic of that, how a great favor begat a smaller one. “Anything in particular you want to see, the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building?”

“Tonight, supermarket. Tomorrow or next week, Aerospace Museum.”

Jason was unsure he had heard the man. “Supermarket, as in a grocery store?”

“Supermarket tonight. Aerospace Museum closed for night. American film show hectare after hectare of food to sell. Is propaganda, no?”

Jason took his coat from the sofa where he had thrown it earlier. “Maybe not hectares. But big enough. You can't see one by yourself?”

“Is thinking is only propaganda.”

Jason sighed, trying to remember the nearest. “Come on; we'll find one.”

They had been in Jason's secondhand Jeep Cherokee only a few minutes when Jason noticed a car behind them.

“You wouldn't happen to know who is following us?”

The Russian nodded. “Embassy KGB.”

“But why . . . ?”

Viktor turned in his seat to look directly at Jason. “They worry I detect.”

“Defect?”

“
Da,
defect. Last military attaché in Washington disappear, leave wife in Russia. I have no wife.”

Swell.

Here he was, driving along Rock Creek Parkway in his nation's capital, to prove that grocery stores really existed to a man he had met only once while being shadowed by one of the world's nastier intelligence agencies.

What next, encountering Dorothy and Toto at the store?

His attention was diverted by bright lights ahead.

He waited to make a turn. “Here we are, big as life: Food Lion.”

The car behind, a dark four-door Ford, pulled to the far end of the lot. Apparently, they were there for observation purposes only.

Viktor got out of the car and stared at the cars scattered about. “One must have automobile to be allowed into this store?”

“One must have automobile to
get
to this store.”

“Ha! Store is exclusive province of proletariat-oppressing bourgeois!”

Jason was beginning to detect what might, just might, be a touch of sarcasm in his new friend's use of Marxist-Communist dogma. At least, he hoped it was sarcasm.

He took the Russian by the arm. “C'mon. It's cold out here.”

For a full twenty minutes, he and Viktor prowled each aisle of the store, scrutinizing labels and prices. The Russian was clearly shaken by what he saw.

“Like GUM?” Jason asked.

The Russian shook his head at the reference to the high-end, for-tourist-and-ranking-party-members-only Moscow store where only foreign currency was accepted. “GUM never have eight brands of canned beans, four types frozen. No toilet paper claim softness. In Russia, toilet paper, how you say, rare?”

“A luxury?” Jason supplied.

“Luxury. Many people choose between
Pravda
and
Isvestia
based on softness.”

“We have a lot of newspapers best used that way, too.”

The Russian shook his head sadly. “A nation that can provide its people with eight types of canned beans, ceiling-high stack of soft toilet paper . . .”

“It's called the capitalist system, free enterprise. Everyone is free to produce what he thinks will sell rather than what government tells him to.”

Viktor sighed deeply. “Berlin Wall come down, Soviet army ready to leave Bulgaria, Yugoslavia. All because of canned beans and toilet paper.”

It took Jason a moment to understand what he meant. “You mean the freedom to produce them.”

“Is same thing.”

Outside, the two headed for the Cherokee when three young black men blocked their path. Each wore the uniform of pants barely above buttocks and baseball caps either backward or askew. One of them held a small automatic pistol.

He extended the other hand. “Yo' wallet, give it up, mu'fucker.”

“Is capitalist-type hooligan?” Viktor was more amused than frightened. “He not speak American?”

“My friend does not understand . . .” Jason was about to say “English” but realized that was not what the youth was speaking.

“Gimme yo' watches, too.” The kid motioned with the gun as he glanced around nervously.

Jason had rather face an armed professional than a skittish kid with a Saturday-night special.

He and Viktor exchanged glances. The Russian's nod was almost imperceptible.

Jason was reaching for his hip pocket. “Your money and your watch, he wants your money and watch.”

Viktor feigned comprehension, his hand going to his own pocket.

In anticipation of receiving what he had demanded, the kid with the gun stepped forward, hand outstretched.

The Russian moved almost too fast for the eye to follow. His hand came up not with money but a knife. His other hand grabbed the gun and swung the arm holding it upward as the blade sank into the would-be robber's throat.

Snatching the pistol as the kid collapsed, Viktor pivoted and fired a single shot. The parking lot's lights showed the neat, round hole in the forehead of one mugger.

The remaining thief had had enough. Feet slipping, he turned to run. Viktor took a standard two-handed target-range stance and let the kid take a couple of full steps before firing. There was a whine as the bullet ricocheted from a lamppost. From somewhere, a woman screamed.

Taking his time, the Russian fired another, and then another round. The last sent the young criminal sprawling.

As though only out for a stroll, Viktor walked over to the form facedown on the asphalt and extended the pistol.

“Drop it!”

The voice was mechanical, one transmitted through a bullhorn.

Spinning around, Jason saw two police cars, blue lights flashing. Behind one of them, two uniformed men had shotguns trained on the big Russian.

Viktor saw them at the same time. Dropping his weapon, he slowly raised his hands.

The final line: Viktor was released on diplomatic immunity grounds. Jason spent an uncomfortable night in the DC jail before being released. In Jason's mind, the big Russian owed him once again.

“All you had to do,” Jason said with mild reprove, “was to show your ID as a foreign diplomat and you walked. I spent the night in the DC slammer on D Street before we got it sorted out.”

Air-conditioning made the room cold enough to be uncomfortable. Why Viktor fled the Russian winter only to re-create it in the tropics was incomprehensible. The two men had been sitting in cane-back rockers looking through a picture window at verdant hills tumbling into an azure sea. The view made Jason's hands itch to get hold of paint palette and brush.

Two of the men from the beach bracketed the room's entrance like sentries until Viktor shooed them away and closed the door. Jason supposed he should be flattered that Viktor trusted him enough to dismiss his bodyguards.

Viktor went to a refrigerator built into the rear wall. Next to it was a sofa upholstered in a garish Hawaiian pattern of palm trees. The motif was repeated in tropical-themed artwork that had its place among images of Elvis on black satin, coconut shell lamps, and glass bowls filled with seashells. The place could have been furnished by Daytona Beach street vendors.

Viktor was pouring from a frosty bottle of vodka. He held up the bottle in invitation.

“No thanks,” Jason declined. “But if you have a beer, I'd love it.”

There was a sibilant hiss as the Russian popped the top of a can of Carib and sat back beside Jason. “You did not come here to drink a beer, I think. Nor are you here into remind me I left you in church in Washington shopping mall.”

The beer stopped halfway to Jason's lips. “Church?”

“Is not what Americans say? You leave someone in trouble, you leave in church, no?”

Jason had to think that one over while he took his first sip from the icy can. “Lurch. You leave them in the lurch.”

“Where is this ‘lurch'?”

Jason thought that over, too. “You're right: I didn't come here just to bust your chops about ancient history. But before we talk about why I'm here, give me an update. Last time I saw you, you were with the Russian military attaché in the Washington embassy. Now you have an estate of some of the world's most expensive real estate here in Saint Barts—”

“Also in Aspen for skiing,” Viktor interrupted, adding proudly, “Also on Ibiza and on Fifth Avenue in New York.”

“You didn't come by that on a soldier's pay.”

Viktor emptied his glass and got up to refill it. “Not on soldier's pay, no. Yekaterinburg big city, produce much steel like Pittsburgh. Or like Pittsburgh before Japanese make cheaper steel. Soviet Union collapse, no one run steel mills, workers not paid. My
drook
and I hire soldiers out of work also. We open steel mills, pay workers.”

The Soviet government had not just fallen; it had shattered. Even so, this was a stretch. “You mean you and your friend, you just walked in and took over the government steel mills?” Jason snapped his fingers. “Just like that?”

Viktor took a sip from his glass, icy-cold vodka straight up, and nodded as though admitting to something as trivial as possession of an overdue library book. “
Da!
Soldiers in town not paid, either. They help.”

“But what about the administrators, mid-level managers? Surely they didn't just walk away?”

Viktor tossed his glass back, gulping the rest of the vodka. “Some not walk, carried. Most no longer needed. Was exciting. Now not so much.”

Jason was having a hard time getting his mind around the fact that this man had simply mustered a small army and taken over the city's steel mills. But, then, in those chaotic days following Christmas Day, 1991, anything could have happened and frequently had. Who would have opposed him? The government had ceased to exist as a functioning body, the unpaid army refusing orders. The events had proven to be the perfect breeding ground for the economic oligarchy that had budded and flowered with the death of Russian Communism. By the time some semblance of order had been restored, possession of a number of the peoples' assets were in private hands, hands in a much better position to keep them than to take them back.

Privatization had been swift and irreversible; capitalism on steroids.

The door cracked open and a woman in a swimsuit quite modest by Saint Barts' standards stood there, looking surprised when she saw Jason. She quickly covered her already adequate bathing suit with a beach towel. Somewhere in her mid-forties, she was plump, if not fat, plain, though not quite unattractive. Her eyes moved from Jason to Viktor as she said something in Russian. The tone of his reply in the same language sounded annoyed, if not rude.

The door shut soundlessly.

“The woman knows better than to interrupt business,” Viktor growled.

“I doubt she knew I was here,” Jason replied, feeling an inexplicable need to defend the person he guessed was Viktor's wife.

Filling his glass again, Viktor returned to the pair of rockers, this time bringing the frosted bottle. He held it out toward Jason.

“Is, how you say, breakfast of champions.”

Jason shook his head. “More like a nightcap if I started drinking vodka shooters in the middle of the day.”

“Shooters?”

This conversation wasn't going anywhere, at least not anywhere that would accomplish Jason's purpose in coming to Saint Barts. At this time of year, the small planes that could negotiate the island's diminutive runway to ferry passengers to and from the major international airport at Saint Martin were booked months, if not years, in advance. If he missed his late-afternoon flight, Jason could be stuck here for days while he tried to find a boat not already employed, a craft to take him across the twenty miles to the larger island. Or he would have to admit his mistake to Momma by requesting a chartered helicopter that would draw unwanted attention

No, Jason did not have time for an etymological discussion.

“You were right: As much as I'm enjoying renewing our acquaintance and the beer, neither were my reason for being here.”

He had Viktor's attention.

“I'm here because I'm in need of your talent.”

Viktor forgot his newly filled glass. “I do not think you wish me to operate a steel mill.”

“Correct. I'm referring to your handiness with explosives.”

The Russian grinned, again exposing a steel incisor. “You have someone you wish to be exploded?”

“Perhaps. Are you interested?”