Counterplay

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Only if you want to survive,” Yvgeny countered. “For one thing, those citizens are probably not so innocent if they are lending support, recruits, and a base of operations to your enemies. You cannot fight this war the way you are going about it, not if you want to win it. You are simply not killing them fast enough, or enough of them, to discourage the rest, even in Iraq. But you are reluctant to bring the full force of your military power down on their heads because it would look like you are the bully, and Americans hate bullies.”

  Yvgeny shook his head. “Once again, you will wait until you are pushed to the brink, before you will act as you did against the Japanese and Germans in World War Two, brutally, ruthlessly, and accepting nothing except unconditional surrender or death. The problem is that when you wait too long, you start at a disadvantage, which will cost more lives than it otherwise might have—innocent lives as the terrorists kill until finally you say ‘enough’ and do what it takes to put a stop to it. But this time, if you wait too long, you might not win at all, your culture—all Western culture—could be wiped out except what is allowed according to the whims of a despotic religious leader, a Caliph. Even now it will be difficult to turn the tide. I know these people; I fought them in Chechnya and Afghanistan. It is nothing for them to lose their lives.”

  Karp’s eyes had widened at the mention of the Caliph and again at Chechnya. He would have liked his cousin’s take on the issue, but Yvgeny reached out and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Come, let us go eat,” Yvgeny said. “This is not the time for political discussions. I am sorry to have climbed up onto my soap stand.”

  “Box…soapbox,” Karp said. “It’s an expression.”

  “Yes, soapbox—an interesting concept; you’ll have to tell me the derivation of it sometime,” Yvgeny said. “But I shouldn’t have given such a speech. Besides, what effect can an American district attorney and a Russian…ah…businessman have on such enormous affairs of state?”

  “You never know,” Karp said. “It’s why we have a First Amendment protecting free speech and a free press. Without discussion and debate—whether between two people or among two million—we will indeed be lost.”

  “Well said, cousin,” Yvgeny laughed. “Spoken like a true American.”

  Dinner was soon served in the formal dining room, a collection of dark teak, leather, brass, and crystal that could have been brought piecemeal out of Tsarist Russia with its portraits of ancient nobility, tapestries, and Greek Orthodox icons of varying sizes on the walls. Even the meal was Russian—several courses consisting mainly of pelmeni, which were small balls of minced meat covered with pastry, shashlik, a seasoned and broiled lamb dish, potato vareniki and mushrooms in sour cream sauce, all of it accompanied by a powerful red rkatsiteli wine from Anapa. “That’s a famous wine-producing resort area on the Black Sea,” said Vladimir, who had enjoyed pointing out where each dish and wine had come from in Russia, as well as giving a bit of the history of either the course or the region. His tales were accented by a young man playing the balalaika in the background.

  The wine kept flowing and none of them were feeling any pain by the time they rose from the dinner table and retired to the library. The room was another tribute to Russian dramatics with its enormous fireplace in which a roaring blaze had been laid, and row upon row of books from floor to ceiling, some of which could be reached only by rolling ladders. Again Marlene sat down on a couch next to Vladimir, while Karp sank into an overstuffed leather chair next to her.

  Yvgeny poured a round of cognac for each and then passed his cigar box. Karp was going to turn him down again, but saw that Marlene had already cut the tip off of another and was happily puffing away with Vladimir, so he decided what the hell and followed suit.

  “Thank you for your wonderful company this evening,” Vladimir said, toasting the others. “Still, I realize that it comes at some danger for your political aspirations. I apologize for asking you to come here, but I cannot travel to Manhattan to see you—there are too many people watching you and your family, not all of them well intentioned, but I’m sure you know that. We made sure that you were not followed here; my men were waiting when you came over the bridge and would have intercepted any intruders. The cab driver was also one of my people, and he will take you home.”

  Karp, who was feeling a little light-headed after just two puffs and a sip of cognac, waved off the apology. “We should have done this sooner, Uncle Vladimir,” he said. “Marlene’s right: families need to touch base.”

  The old man smiled. “Yes, Karchovski or Karp, we are the same blood. Which is why I felt the need to talk to you tonight, but mostly have you listen to my son, Yvgeny. It involves Andrew Kane, which is why I thought it important enough to discuss it face-to-face and away from prying eyes and ears…. Anyway, the first part of this, I can fill you in on. Quite simply, you have probably noticed a large influx of money into your opponent’s campaign coffers. This sooka—pardon my Russian, Marlene—this Rachman has…what is the expression?…hitched her wagon to a dark star. The money behind her campaign is coming from people and businesses with ties to Mr. Kane.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Karp asked, sitting up and trying to clear his head.

  “Yes,” the old man replied. “I confess to have taken some amateurish interest in your campaign—not to interfere, mind you—and was perusing the campaign contribution public records on the computer and noticed first the influx of money, and then a trend of who it was coming from. Some of it is from members of the social elite, as well as law firms and businesses who had ties to Kane’s former election campaign; some is being generated among a more secretive group of people whose names you might not recognize unless you travel in certain ‘less desirable’ circles more attuned to Mr. Kane’s illegal activities.”

  Vladimir leaned forward and pushed a sheaf of papers that had been lying on the coffee table toward Marlene, who picked them up and began looking through them. “I’ve highlighted some of the more interesting contributors,” he said.

  Marlene whistled. “There are some heavy hitters on this list. Millionaires, lawyers, doctors, politicians…and a few who, if I’m not mistaken, are in prison. It would appear that Mr. Kane’s influence is still being felt in Gotham’s public and private sectors.”

  As his wife ticked off some of the names, Karp’s mind was whirling from the cognac, cigar smoke, and possibility that his campaign opponent was being subsidized through the efforts of a man sworn to kill him and his family. He searched for another explanation. “They may just be people upset that we spoiled his bid for mayor,” he pointed out. “It could be that they’d support anybody, so long as it wasn’t me.”

  Vladimir shrugged. “Maybe so, but I doubt it. This money poured in almost overnight; there was a sudden push that had to come from somewhere. Rachman had nothing—not so much as a tissue to wipe her…well, I won’t say with a woman present—but now she has what the newspapers are calling ‘one of the best-financed campaigns for district attorney since Garrahy’…I am thinking that if this information got out to the press, it would pretty much sink her airplane.”

  “Boat,” Karp corrected. “Sink her boat. But I’d prefer to keep this quiet, at least for now. I don’t want to run a campaign based on innuendo against my opponent. It would be hard to prove that Kane is behind this influx of cash and might even come off looking like I was getting desperate and afraid to run on my record. I’ve got enough accusations of playing ‘dirty politics’ because of the Stavros case. Besides, I’d like to figure out what Kane is up to with this. Why should he care whether I win or lose the election if his aim is to kill me? It doesn’t make sense to call in all those ‘favors,’ if that’s what he’s done, unless he has something to gain by supporting Rachman.”

  “It is a good question,” Vladimir agreed. “I will give it some thought as well. And the information stays here for now…. So let us move on to Yvgeny.”

  All eyes turned to Vladimir’s son, who wa
s standing in front of the fire, holding his snifter of cognac, watching the flames. Without turning, Yvgeny said, “Forgive me if this is all rather melodramatic. Blame the cognac, good food, good company, and the fact that Russians must turn even the smallest gathering into an occasion to tell a story full of dark moods, tragedy, and impending doom.”

  Yvgeny walked over to one of the bookcases and, reaching up, pulled down a map of the world. He pointed to a spot in southern Russia and looked back at his guests. “Chechnya,” he said. “Russia’s pathway to the Caspian Sea, as well as vital oil lines. It is part of a region that has known little peace throughout its history and a succession of invaders from Mongols to Cossacks to Bolsheviks to Soviets to Russians.”

  He turned away from the map and faced his audience. “In the late forties, Stalin ordered the Chechen people—mostly Muslim, as well as native Muslim peoples in the neighboring regions—to be ‘relocated’ to camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia. A quarter to perhaps half of these populations—hundreds of thousands of people—died under the brutal conditions of the deportation and the camps. The reason they were removed was twofold. One was to replace them with Russians. The other was Stalin did not want any Muslims, who might have had questionable allegiances, living in the contemplated invasion routes to Turkey, which he coveted for its oil and warm water ports.

  “In the fifties, the ‘reeducated’ Chechen—which is a Russian word, they call themselves Nokhchi—were allowed to return to their homelands, only to find that they had been given to Russians and others. They had to buy back their homes and fields, if they could afford it, and many could not. They were second-class citizens in their own lands.

  “In 1991, Chechen nationalists declared independence rather than join the new Russian federation. They even held an election and voted for a president. But it was a government plagued by corruption and men looking out for themselves rather than their new country. However, I have come to believe that some of the failings of this government were actually a planned sabotage by the Russians, who used the instability to send in troops and establish their own puppet government. It was the start of a long and bloody civil war with the illegitimate puppet government—a collection of criminals and gangsters, some of them actually released from prison by their masters—and Russians on one side, Chechen nationalists on the other. I personally have seen the results as an officer with the Russian army—before I was sent to fight Muslims in Afghanistan, I was fighting them in Chechnya.”

  Yvgeny walked over to the desk and poured himself another cognac and then offered it to his father, Karp, and Marlene, all of whom held up their glasses. “Am I boring you yet? No? Good,” he said. “I promise the point of all this will become clear in a moment. Continuing…this puppet government, which in truth is controlled by gangsters in Moscow, is allowed to prey upon its own people so long as payments are made to their masters and the oil flows into Russia undisturbed. In the meantime, the Russians get to keep their troops in this vital region, supposedly by ‘invitation’ of this illegitimate government, although a lot of what has occurred since 1991 falls more under the description of ‘ethnic cleansing’ than warfare.

  “Fortunately, most of the worst atrocities committed by Russians are done by the ‘special purpose detachments’ of the Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Security Service, OSNAZ, which used to be the KGB. These are paramilitary units created to deal with internal conflicts and terrorism, although they are certainly quite capable of terrorism themselves. They call it bespredel, which translates literally to ‘no limits.’ It means acting outside the rules, violently and with impunity. Women and children are raped, tortured, and killed. Prisoners are maimed and executed. The barbarity of this war—out of sight of most of the Western media—is unimaginable.

  “Meanwhile, Chechnya has become a quagmire for the Russian army, which is taking significant losses—sort of like your Vietnam and Iraq, and our Afghanistan. Meanwhile, young, half-trained Russian soldiers are being sent to fight and die there, but for what? There has been no effort to bring peace to the region, either by winning this war or by negotiated settlement with the nationalists. It is more like the Russian government would rather keep the region inflamed so as to explain the presence of their troops and legitimize the present government to the outside world. Russian officers who question these things and try to rein in the excesses of the troops are sent home or on dangerous assignments from which they often do not return. Some of my friends and former fellow officers have been among these.”

  Yvgeny paused long enough to throw back his cognac and pour another. “One of the effects of this civil war, especially in the past five years or so, has been to attract other groups to the fighting. The worst of these are the Muslim extremists, many of them influenced and supported by al Qaeda and other groups from the Middle East. Their purported goals are the same as the nationalists: to kick the Russians out of Chechnya. However, they do not want to see the formation of a secular democratic republic, but rather an Islamic theocracy that would eventually be melded into a single Islamic state, the caliphate I mentioned earlier that would stretch from North Africa to the Far East. Imagine such resources all brought under the control of a single religious fanatic whose rule would be based upon a hatred for Western culture. Such a man might be impossible for even the great United States to stop.”

  Yvgeny let the image sink in for a moment. “The Muslim extremists brought a new form of fighting to the battle. While the Chechen nationalists are fierce fighters and would slit the throat of any Russian soldier for fun, their targets have always been primarily military. But these new Islamic hard-liners favored the terrorist acts aimed at the civilian population of Russia—”

  “The nationalists don’t commit acts of terror?” Karp asked, thinking of Ellis’s description of the nationalists as murderers and thugs.

  Yvgeny pursed his lips and nodded. “Sure, there are some in the nationalist movement who, either through frustration or because it fits their personality, welcomed the new tactics. But they are not the mainstream of the secular independence movement, which has been trying to negotiate a peace settlement so long as it includes an independent state of Ichkeria. The moderates in the nationalist movement struggle to disavow the acts of terror against civilians and being aligned with Islamic extremism. But there is an interesting marriage occurring: the Islamic extremists and certain powerful people within the Russian government seem determined to link the nationalists to the more fanatical groups, especially al Qaeda, which almost guarantees that whatever the Russians do to suppress the nationalists will be accepted here.”

  Karp put his cigar down, it was making him queasy. “You fought these Chechen nationalists, but now you sound more like you’re on their side. Why is that?”

  “Why?” Yvgeny repeated, looking over at his father who had seemed to be nodding off but suddenly perked up. “Because I am a Russian patriot. I do not like what has been done and what is being done in the name of the Russian republic to a people who want only independence. What’s more, I am a former Russian officer who led good, young men into battle and watched them get killed. But it is one thing to die for your country, and another to die for a lie. Myself and some like-minded others think that the Russian government is actually in…how is the expression? In cahoots?…with the Islamic extremists to prevent the Chechen nationalists from forming a legitimately elected democratic republic. They want chaos and instability, even if it costs Russian lives.”

  “But why?” Marlene asked.

  “From the Russian government’s point of view, it’s easy,” Yvgeny replied. “If there was a stable, independent Chechnya, they would no longer have an excuse to station troops there to ensure that the oil pipelines kept delivering. Access to the warm water ports is also important. And, not unimportantly, if the corrupt government in Chechnya was replaced, the graft and bribes, as well as the proceeds from criminal enterprises, would stop coming to Moscow to line the pockets of government officials and gangsters.
”

  “But why would Islamic extremists cooperate with the Russian government?” Karp asked, feeling a bit slow. “Don’t they want the Russians out of Chechnya, too, so that they can establish their caliphate?”

  “Yes and no,” Yvgeny replied. “Eventually, they want the Russians to leave. However, there are several reasons they are willing to delay that fight. One, every time they strike a blow at infidels, in this case Russian civilians and soldiers, it is a wonderful recruiting and money-raising event. Without Russians to attack in Chechnya, they’d be left to fight other Muslims, the Chechen nationalists, which wouldn’t go over as well in other parts of the Muslim world, which is part of why the hard-liners publicly are careful to align themselves with their ‘Muslim brothers’ within the nationalist movement.

  “Another reason is that a foreign infidel government is not nearly the threat to the Islamic caliphate as a single Islamic democracy. Once even Muslims taste freedom and get used to the concept of self-determination, they are not going to want to turn everything over to a single man to make decisions for all the rest. And if there is one such democracy, there will be more—the concept of a caliphate would be shattered by the formation of separate states based on national and even ethnic, but not religious, identities. Why else do you think they are fighting so desperately in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing Muslims by the thousands in direct violation of the Quran, to prevent the establishment of stable democracies? It is the democracies, not you Americans, which are the real threat to their plans. So in Chechnya, they are willing to work in an unholy alliance with their enemies the Russians to first defeat the nationalists.”

  Karp cleared his throat, privately swearing off cigars and booze. “I don’t mean to be dense,” he said, “but what has this got to do with Kane? If it still does.”

  Yvgeny looked at Karp quizzically, as if to tell him that he was on to him. “I am taking it that by now you have heard that a woman called Samira Azzam was instrumental in Kane’s escape and that she is a member of al Qaeda,” he said. When Karp didn’t answer, he nodded and said, “I understand you have probably been sworn to secrecy, so let me tell you what you already know and, perhaps, add a little to it.”