Vasillisa replied in English. “But, Papa, it is no more naked than my friends…”
A tirade of Russian followed, making Vasillisa blush. She did not reply. With the hint of a tear in her eye, she made a dash for the house.
Viktor snorted. “The young! Wants to parade about without decent clothing because her friends do.”
“Didn’t look to me like her swimsuit was any smaller than the others,” Jason observed mildly.
“I have no control, really, what her friends do, but I will not have my daughter parading about like some… some French… French… What do you say, like a pastry?”
“Tart?”
“Tart, yes. Those French tarts on the beach. I bring Vasillisa and a few of her friends here each winter. Winter in Yekaterinburg miserable, snow, wind blow off Urals. No sun for weeks. Anyway, I bring to sun, warm, along with teacher so school, it not missed. Only thing they learn is to show tits.”
Jason was trying to stifle a smile. This was serious to a Russian parent. “What does her mother have to say?”
Viktor looked at him as though he had not heard correctly. “Mother?”
Jason had forgotten that in the Russian peasant class from which Viktor had come, the man’s word was more than law: It was an edict from heaven. “Nevermind. Where can we talk?”
Silently, Jason followed Viktor into the dark coolness of the house, his mind racing backward.
It had been April 1989. Near Bagram, Afghanistan. Jason’s first overseas assignment, the U.S. not-so-covert aid program to the mujahideen, those largely unorganized tribal guerrilla fighters who had opposed the Soviet puppet regime whose call for help had provided an excuse for Russian invasion ten years earlier.
The Russians had had it. Not only was their army tired, hungry, and ill equipped, the economy back in the mother country was rapidly collapsing. Intel reports were full of desertions, both by the Russians and the Afghan Communists. The Reds were beat and they knew it. So beat, they had become sloppy in their duties, including guard duty. That had caused a problem.
In the early morning darkness of that day, Jason’s patrol of freedom fighters had slipped past a slumbering sentry, not even pausing to slit his throat. The urgency had come from word by the increasing number of Afghan defectors to the mujahideen that a specific Russian was encamped here, a Viktor Karavich. What made Karavich so special was his talent with explosives. Not only roadside bombs (improvised explosive devices had not yet found their way into the lexicon of war), but cleverly designed and hidden remote explosives. Karavich boasted he had once blown a man’s head off with a bomb concealed in a pair of stereo earphones without getting a splatter of blood on the victim’s shirt. Rumor had it Karavich occasionally wore the garment in question. He was a prestidigitator of plastique, conjurer of combustion, and necromancer of nitramine.
Rumor or truth, the sleepy Russian had been drugged and dragged out of his tent and smuggled past inattentive sentries in the darkness.
That caused the problem Jason faced. Aarash, the leader of Jason’s group and the only member who spoke a smattering of English, wanted to turn the Russian over to Mullah Osman, the local leader of the Taliban, the fundamentalist religious militia that Jason suspected was going to cause problems long after both the Russians and the Americans were gone. The problem with Mullah Osman was his habit of slowly removing body parts from infidels, frequently making video recordings.
Atrocities had been common on both sides. Flaying skin from living bodies and burying alive were only a couple of the quaint local customs Jason had seen. But it was over. Karavich had made his last bomb, at least there. His agonizing death would accomplish no end Jason could see other than an evening’s entertainment for Mullah Osman and his demented followers.
Jason left camp for a short scouting mission, or so he told Aarash. Instead, he had doubled back, entering the tent from ther rear, where the Russian bomber lay awaiting interrogation, hands and feet tied like a hog prepared for slaughter. Karavich’s eyes doubled in size as he wordlessly watched Jason slide a long knife from his boot.
“No sweat, Viktor, old buddy,” Jason whispered, using the blade to pry knots apart. Cutting them would be too obvious to Aarash and his men.
Moments later, Viktor Karavich stood, rubbing arms and legs. Jason listened carefully. There was no sound of anyone nearby. Lifting the canvas at the rear of the tent, he motioned to the Russian, who looked confused, to say the least.
“C’mon,” Jason urged. “I’m not standing here, risking my ass all day.”
The Russian understood the tone of urgency, if not the English. He stooped to slide under the canvas, paused, stood, and embraced Jason. Then he was gone.
It was sometime later Jason noticed his dog tags were missing from around his neck.
Cut to a miserable, blustery December night a year later. It was a Sunday night. Second Lieutenant Jason Peters was in the small efficiency he rented in the basement of a Georgetown townhouse. He was packing his gear for a joint training exercise with select Marines at Paris Island that would begin the next day when the doorbell of his apartment rang.
Certain someone had the wrong address, he trudged to the door and swung it open. He didn’t recognize the big man with the fur coat and hat standing in the swirling snow until a hand came out of a pocket and dangled a military dog tag on a chain.
“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?”