Malika's Revenge: A Powerful Mix for a Complex Noir Novel. An Organized Crime Thriller - not for the faint-hearted

by Phillip Strang

  ‘And keep quiet unless it’s necessary. Don’t get drunk down here and start singing Russian patriotic war songs. They’ll have you strung up before you get to the first chorus – with me alongside if they think I’m with you.’

  ‘I’ll come as a teetotal mute, is that okay with you?’ Oleg responded, although this time with not so much humour. He didn’t appreciate being lectured by an upstart such as Farrukh, whose only claim to fame was that he had gone native and was stuck out in the desert, being friendly with Islamic fundamentalists.

  ***

  At the nominated time and with the Toyota left in the compound of a local farmer, the trip to the camp commenced. An old Russian jeep had picked him up; the driver an unpleasant, unfriendly individual, who did not want to communicate and only spoke the local Tajik language.

  After forty kilometres on tracks suitable for a goat, he had transferred to the back of a motorcycle. The village, forty minutes further, came into view as the daylight was fading. It was certainly remote and barren.

  Village did not seem an apt title to Oleg. It was purely a place where a disparate group of individuals had gathered to conduct business, drink some alcohol ‒ whisky mainly, vodka sometimes ‒ and screw the whores hawking their wares. There were plenty of them ‒ not that any appealed to him. Those he saw from the back of the motorcycle looked to be a very poor quality and their finger gesturing, provocative lifting of skirts and pulling down of the tops of their blouses, showed that they retained none of the class of the women in the capital.

  ‘You’ve made it,’ Farrukh said, as they met in the centre of the village. Oleg assumed it to be the centre as the village had no structure to it. There appeared to be no Mosque, no police ‒ at least, none that he could see ‒ and barely a shop, apart from one that seemed to be selling some basic food items – wheat, corn and some dead chickens strung from a piece of rope. He hoped he was not staying long. He was used to fine dining, not eating in a shack that called itself a restaurant.

  ‘It’s a beautiful place you have here,’ Oleg said, somewhat sarcastically.

  ‘You know it’s not. It’s the arsehole of the world; you don’t want to be here any more than I do. Oleg noted that Farrukh’s appearance, as bad as it had been when they had met several days previous at the border town, had taken a turn for the worse.

  ‘It’s necessary down here,’ Farrukh said, again noting Oleg’s disparaging casting of his eyes over him and the twitching of his nose as he attempted to ascertain where the smell was coming from.

  ‘Yes, you’ve certainly changed tailors since I last saw you,’ said Oleg. ‘And the smell… what’s that?’

  ‘If you want to do business down here, you’ve got to look the part,’ said Farrukh. ‘If you think I look and smell bad, wait until you meet up with some of the Afghans. How the whores can take them is beyond me, but they’re so spaced out and desperate they probably barely notice.’

  ‘I saw some on the way in. They looked really rough.’

  ‘You’ll be glad of their company in a few weeks.’

  ‘Thankfully, I’m only here for a few days. I’ll hold out until I get back to Dushanbe and then I’ll treat myself to one of those beautiful whores Yusup has on call.’

  ‘You better hope it’s only a few days. Get on the wrong side of Yusup and you’ll be down here on a long-term assignment.’

  ‘Is that what happened to you?’

  ‘In part,’ Farrukh said. ‘I met up with one of his women, not as client and customer, just as friends. He didn’t like it, never said anything, but then I’m down here and no way out.’

  ‘You could just leave,’ Oleg suggested.

  ‘And go where?’

  ‘Back to the capital, anywhere you want.’

  ‘Yusup does not forgive or forget. He would regard that as disloyalty, dereliction of duty.’

  ‘But you’re a free agent. Do what you like as long as you don’t angle in on his territory.’

  ‘Yusup’s territory? How big do you think his territory is?’

  ‘Drugs running and peddling, keep clear of that at least.’

  ‘Oleg, get real. The man has half the politicians in Tajikistan in his back pocket, the other half are too scared to do anything. And the police ‒ there can’t be more than a handful that aren’t on the take.’

  ‘He can’t be that powerful,’ said Oleg. ‘You’ve just got a sense of the overdramatic from being too long in this arsehole of a place.’

  ‘Do you know how long a man can live when he’s looking at his balls dangling below him with the termites clambering up them?’

  ‘No idea. A few hours I suppose?’

  ‘Ten, fifteen hours, with the blood rushing to the brain, keeping him alive, conscious while the termites enter every orifice of his body, eating him from the inside out. I’ll stay here until he forgives me, or finds someone else to send down to serve out their punishment. This is a paradise compared to the alternative.’

  ‘Okay,’ Oleg resigned himself to Farrukh’s explanation. ‘What do we have here? How does it work?’

  ‘Nothing complicated. The Afghans will come over most nights with some sacks of heroin. We strike a deal, pay the money over to them, although most of the time they don’t want money, just guns.’

  ‘Why guns?’

  ‘Taliban, Islamic fundamentalists, and you ask why they want guns! They are raving mad. All they want to do is kill people, whether they agree with their distorted view of the world or not.’

  ‘But money’s easy to transport. They could buy guns when they get back over their side of the border.’

  ‘You don’t get it,’ said Farrukh, astounded by the Russian’s ignorance. ‘Let me give a more detailed synopsis of the operation we’re running down here.’

  ‘Don’t be patronising. I’m no dummy,’ replied Oleg.

  ‘Apologies. The smugglers buy a kilo of heroin in Afghanistan for about six hundred American. We then pay close to two thousand.’

  ‘That seems a high markup for them just to smuggle it across.’

  ‘It’s high, but a number get caught. The border guards, local military and local police have to be paid off. It costs money, and everyone wants their fair share. It is only a fraction of what it will cost on the street in Moscow.’

  ‘Moscow’s not our concern. Let’s focus on what we have here.’

  ‘Why do they want a gun? That’s your question?’

  ‘Guns, yes,’ Oleg replied.

  ‘Yet again, it’s simple. For each kilo they give to us, we provide them with an agreed number of weapons, usually AK-47s. A kilo is worth to us about two thousand dollars. We can sell an AK-47 to the Afghans for about sixty American dollars, so we will exchange thirty, maybe thirty-two, guns for a kilo.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘The Afghan goes back over the border to his side and sells the guns for twice what he paid here. At least, that’s the rate in the north, although by the time they get to the south they’ve doubled yet again in value.’

  ‘So they’re smuggling in both directions and making decent money?’

  ‘There are some Afghans over there making fortunes, although we don’t see them, don’t even know who they are. And the donkeys they send over here have no idea, either.’

  ‘The most the Afghans we see in the village are paid is probably no more than a hundred dollars American each trip. But if it’s compared to what they’d get working in their own country, legit or otherwise, it’s a fortune.’

  ‘So they think they’re doing great,’ Oleg said. ‘But in reality, they’re just the fools risking their neck for the fat cat, living in his fancy house, counting all his money.’

  ‘What’s the difference here?’ Farrukh asked.

  Farrukh had found himself a small hut, relatively clean, where Oleg bunked down for the night. The food at a so-called restaurant, no more than a lean-to run by a Tajik peasant, was moderately clean ‒ the beans and rice edible.

  Lighting at night was
by candles and gaslight, changing the appearance of the village entirely. The only place where there was any activity appeared to be on the outskirts of the village, where the whores were entertaining. It was as he had been told, degenerate, and the women would commit to any activity, any perversion if it scored them some heroin.

  Farrukh went to partake. Oleg decided if he were there tomorrow night he would go and see what all the fuss was about. He was still satisfied after the women at Yusup’s mansion, but tomorrow he’d be in need.

  ***

  Next day, Farrukh was up early, and Oleg had to admit the peace and tranquillity had ensured him a pleasant sleep, the best since he had left St. Petersburg.

  Farrukh was all business. ‘We need to go and strike some deals. Remember, play down the Russian. They’d kill you if they caught you on your own outside the camp.’

  ‘I’ll keep a low profile.’

  They walked the two hundred metres to an open compound, which had obviously been a pen for keeping cattle or goats in the past. The fences, no more than collected rocks piled on top of each other, were falling down in several places.

  Farrukh explained that the village had only come into existence a few months previous; in the next few months, it would move again. They were only there for as long as they could keep paying the bribes to keep the authorities out. Once the village’s presence became known in the capital, the local authorities would be forced to close it down to show that Tajikistan was a law-abiding country, determined to stamp out the scourge of drug addiction and drug smuggling.

  He also explained that those who would come to close it down would be the same people who had accepted their bribes and the village would get at least a few days’ notice.

  As they spoke, an Afghan tribesman approached, dirty and dusty from a long overnight trip from the porous border near to Kunduz, in the north of Afghanistan. He eyed Oleg suspiciously.

  ‘Who’s the person with you?’ he asked Farrukh.

  ‘He’s a colleague. He can be trusted.’

  ‘He doesn’t look local. You know that I do not like dealing with people I do not know or trust.’

  ‘Najibullah, he is from the north of our country. They mainly speak Russian up there, but he is a Tajik.’ Farrukh thought it a reasonable statement and he assumed that an Afghan tribesman of limited education would not know that, in Tajikistan, the only people who spoke Russian were Russian.

  ‘He looks Russian to me.’

  ‘His mother was raped by a Russian soldier,’ Farrukh said. Another lie, but he felt it was more acceptable to the Afghan than his previous statement.

  ‘Then he has my apologies and please express my sorrows to his mother,’ said the Afghan. ‘We have had our share of Russians seeding their bastard children in our women.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Oleg said after Farrukh had translated for him.

  ‘I have five kilos, the same rate as last week, is that agreed?’ the Afghan asked.

  He was a man in his late forties with dull, lifeless eyes, as though he had seen a lifetime of misery and despair, which Oleg assumed he had. His skin looked prematurely aged, yet he held his head high and firm. He seemed to Oleg a seasoned fighter, and no doubt would have been a young man fighting with his fellow citizens in the Russian people’s Vietnam.

  Oleg knew the history of his country, even if the history books in Russia tended to gloss over the facts ‒ the retreat from Afghanistan had been far from honourable. The initial entry by the Russian military, a request from the Afghan government for support against the threat of Mujahideen rebels, no more than a misnomer before the initial assistance became a full invasion.

  Not many people in Russia believed what the books said, but the books were never revised. He could only assume that, in another fifty or one hundred years, the truth would be forgotten.

  The Russian retreat from Afghanistan had been a bloodbath, with atrocities committed on both sides. It was anything but noble, and ultimately it led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Oleg did not concern himself with politics or history. The Afghan standing in front of him was not a person to like or hate, although his own father had died unpleasantly at the hands of the Afghans during the retreat. But then, he could never be sure how much of that was true, either.

  ‘Guns?’ Farrukh asked of the Afghan.

  ‘One hundred and fifty AK-47s in exchange for the heroin,’ the Afghan replied.

  ‘They’ll be ready tomorrow. Will you stay the night?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ***

  It was apparent to Oleg that Farrukh was able to maintain a cordial relationship with the Afghan, even though they were both from different worlds. Farrukh was educated, the Afghan was not. Farrukh was without any strong religious beliefs, whereas the Afghan would have been full of it, although it was not going to stop him from enjoying the women and sampling their wares. He’ll pray for forgiveness at a later date, Oleg thought cynically.

  With the negotiations concluded, Oleg, Farrukh and Najibullah retired to a corner of the compound to drink tea and to discuss life in general.

  Najibullah spoke about his children, Farrukh about life in Dushanbe. Oleg, for the most part, kept quiet, except for when Najibullah pressed for Farrukh to translate.

  Oleg maintained his cover as the son of a raped mother, which continued to satisfy the Afghan. He resolved to intensify his study of the local language.

  The Russian language ‒ whereas many understood it, especially in the capital ‒ did separate him from large sections of society. There were still plenty of people who could not forgive the Russians for the iron grip they had held on Tajikistan at the height of the Soviet Union. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, of which Tajikistan had once been a part, had not been consulted as to whether they wanted to join such an august grouping. If asked, they would have clearly said no, but they weren’t and the Russian Army had merely come in with force and crushed any dissent violently and without hesitation. Not that Oleg had anything to do with it, but he was assumed guilty by association.

  He was not sure how long he was staying in the village, but Yusup had been firm. Oleg was not to return until he had found out what was going on down at the border. This presented a dilemma. He had to rely on someone, namely Farrukh, to tell him the truth, but could he trust him? He may well have been involved with the person or persons muscling in on Yusup’s virtual monopoly, although somehow Oleg thought he was not. Farrukh seemed a weaker person than him, almost placid in some respects, and he could not imagine him willingly incurring the wrath of their boss back in Dushanbe.

  Oleg thought someone tough in character, firm in voice and overbearing in nature would have been best to handle the Afghans, but maybe Yusup had been correct in his choice of Farrukh. How do you deal with an Afghan tribesman? Do you send someone tough to browbeat or someone with charm and wit to soothe?

  The price for a kilo was set, more or less, and the variance from one week to the next was relatively constant. A poor harvest and the price of the raw ingredient, opium, went up. A good crop and it went down. However, as Farrukh had said when pressed, the prices were changing. Someone was buying heavy, and the quantities coming across at night were reducing. Farrukh said he did not know what was going on, but assumed it was only temporary.

  There was only one way to ascertain the truth, Oleg decided. He would have to ask him directly, threaten retribution if he procrastinated or aimed to change the subject.

  It was late in the afternoon when they both retired to where the whores were located. Oleg had felt the need badly the previous night. He was going to choose one, the least diseased hopefully, although they all looked worn and haggard. But first, Farrukh needed to open up.

  ‘Yusup knows something is going on down here, but you clearly state that all is fine,’ said Oleg.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about,’ protested Farrukh. ‘You’ve seen the last couple of days that business is progressing well. I can’t see that he has any re
ason to complain.’

  ‘He’s not complaining, but he’s aware that there is some competition down here. It must be affecting the quantity and the price?’

  ‘There’s always competition, but we’re still responsible for about eighty per cent of the drugs coming across. The others are small fry compared to us.’

  ‘But your percentages are going down?’ Oleg said.

  ‘That’s true, but it’s not severe. I don’t see it as anything to worry about yet. If the situation changes, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘I can’t go back to Yusup with that. If you’re playing for time, then you’re playing a dangerous game. You’ll only lose.’ Oleg’s tone had become more threatening.

  ‘Oleg, I’ll give it to you straight. Only rumours, but I believe the Russian mafia are trying to angle in on the action. They’re not here in the village, but I’ve heard they’ve been seen. Even crossed over into Afghanistan, and for them to do that there must be something serious going on. They’d only go if a warlord, or someone influential over there, guaranteed them his personal assurances on security, and only then if there were some serious numbers mentioned about money.’

  ‘So, why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Oleg still maintained his threatening manner. Farrukh’s statement had a degree of plausibility about it; however, before he returned to Dushanbe, he had to find out if the Russians were sniffing around, though it certainly sounded like their style. Oleg had reasoned that they took control of the drugs once Yusup’s people had transported them north to the border with Russia, although there was still the transportation through Uzbekistan to be considered.

  ‘It’s only rumours,’ added Farrukh, ‘and if I mentioned it before, it would have been left up to me to find the proof, and I just don’t know how to go about it. I’m a good organiser, but chasing after the Russian mafia... That’s not my forte. They scare me.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll accept your explanation for now,’ replied Oleg. ‘But you and I are going to have to work together to find out whether the rumours are true or not.’