Globalhead

by Bruce Sterling

  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 engrave
d 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.”

  “About time,” Khoklov said. He dry-swallowed a pair of white tablets from a gunmetal pillbox. “Next time be sure your worthless crew of Armenian ethnics is fully prepared for my arrival.”

  Starlitz jammed a big tin funnel into the Ilyushin’s starboard wing tank. Against the hangar wall were two long rows of oily jerry cans, full of aviation kerosene. Starlitz hoisted a can one-handed to his shoulder and began decanting fuel, humming to himself. It was a slow process. As the pills came on, impatience struck Khoklov. He lugged jerry cans two-handed to the port wing tank, waddling with the weight.

  The first row of cans was emptied. Khoklov started on the second. He heaved at a can and stumbled backward. “This one is empty!” he said. He tried the next. “This one, too.”

  The entire second row of cans had been drained. Khoklov kicked the final can across the hangar with a hollow bonging. “We’ve been robbed!”

  “Looks that way,” Starlitz admitted.

  “Your thieving Armenians!” Khoklov shouted. “They have embezzled the fuel! For a few lousy black-market rubles, they have stranded me here! My God, I’m finished!”

  “Coulda been worse,” Starlitz offered. “They coulda filled the cans with water instead. Flying low and fast, you’da pranged for sure.” He thought it over. “Or bailed out over Iran. That woulda been hairy, ace.”

  “But they’ve ruined me! Ruined the whole operation! How could they be such meatheads?”

  “Beats me,” Starlitz said. “Times are tough here; fuel’s in short supply … But be cool. We’ll find you some go-juice somehow. The Boss must have some. The Boss may be mean, and ruthless, and greedy, and totally corrupt, but he’s not stupid, y’know. He’s probably got kerosene hoarded just in case.”

  “He’d better!” Khoklov said.

  “We’ll go to the Estate and ask around,” Starlitz told him. “I’ll give you a lift in the truck.”

  Khoklov’s panic faded. He tagged after Starlitz and climbed up into the cab of the ZIL. Starlitz steered the truck down the airstrip, mashing the runway flares into embers under the ZIL’s giant wheels. He flicked on the ZIL’s headlights and turned onto a dirt road.

  “Such a big truck and such a nasty little cab,” Khoklov griped. He killed what was left of the vodka. Then he stared moodily out the windshield, at tall weeds ghost-pale by the roadside. “This situation’s an outrage. The whole nation has lost its bearings, if you ask me. Especially in the provinces. It’s getting very bad here, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, this used to be good cropland,” Starlitz said.

  “Never mind the mere physical landscape,” Khoklov scoffed. “I mean politically, comrade. Even lousy black marketeers openly defy Party authority.”

  “The Party is the black marketeers, ace. It couldn’t work any other way.”

  The headquarters of the local agricultural complex had an official name, something with a long Cyrillic acronym. To those who knew about the place, it was just the Estate. It was the country seat of the Party chairman of the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic. The chairman had a proper name, too, but no one used it. He was generally known as “the Boss.”

  Starlitz took the back entrance through the high, wire-topped walls. It was late, and he didn’t want to wake the armed guards in their marble kiosks in the front. He thoughtfully parked the monster truck by the racehorse stables, where its booming diesel would not disturb the slumber of the staff.

  Starlitz and Khoklov walked across a groomed lawn, slick with peacock droppings. Massive sprinklers, purloined from a farm project, clanked and hissed above the croquet grounds. Starlitz paused to tie his shoe under the giant concrete statue of Lenin. Khoklov chased some monster goldfish away in the fountain, and drank from his hands.

  Starlitz yanked a bell-pull at one of the back doors. There was no response. Starlitz kicked the door heartily with his tattered Keds high-top sneaker. Lights came on inside, and a butler showed, in pants and undershirt.

  This man was not officially a “butler,” but a production-team brigade leader for the collective farm. The distinction didn’t mean much. The butler’s name was Yan “Cross-Eyes” Rakotov. Rakotov, who was corpulent and scarred, favored the two of them with his eerie gaze. “Now what?” he said.

  “Need some kerosene,” Starlitz said.

  “How much?”

  “Maybe five hundred liters?” Starlitz said.

  Rakotov showed no surprise. “Would gasoline do?” he said. Khoklov shook his head. Rakotov thought about it. “How about pure alcohol? I think we have enough to fill an airplane. Ever since the Kremlin’s sobriety campaign started, we’ve been bringing it in by the truckload.”

  Rakotov’s wife showed up, squint-eyed and clutching her houserobe. “You bastard drunks!” she hissed. “Shabashniki! Buying booze at this time of night! Go home and let good Communists sleep in peace!”

  “Shut up, woman,” Rakotov said. “Look, this is pilot here.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Rakotov, startled. “Sorry, Comrade Pilot! Would you like some nice tea? Did you bring any nylons?”

  “Life is hard,” Rakotov muttered. “I know the Boss keeps kerosene, but I think it’s stored in town. He’s in town now, you know. Political problems.”

  “Too bad,” Starlitz said.

  “Yes, he left this morning. Took the limousine, the kitchen bus, the cooks, his personal staff, even the live baby lamb for his lunch. He said not to expect him back for at least a week.” Rakotov straightened. “So you two can regard me as the Boss here, for the time being.”

  “My people expect me back by morning!” Khoklov shouted. “There’s going to be big trouble when I fail to show at the Kabul air base!”

  Rakotov’s giddy eyes narrowed. “Really? Why’s that?”

  “A military plane is not like one of your rural buses, comrade! There’s no excuse for a failure to show up! And if I return too late, they’ll know I have landed somewhere, illegally! The whole business here will be exposed!”

  “That would be a terrible tragedy for a great many people,” Rakotov said slowly. He cleared his throat. “Say … I just remembered something. We have an underground fuel cistern, in the east wing. Why don’t you come with me, Comrade Pilot? We can inspect it.”

  “Good idea!” Starlitz broke in. “There’s some empty jerry cans in the truck. Me and the ace here will fetch ’em. We’ll be right back.” He grabbed Khoklov’s sleeve.

  Khoklov came reluctantly across the darkened lawn. “Can�
��t you wake up some local peasants, and have them do this haulage labor? They ought to do something; God knows they’re not growing any food here.”

  Starlitz lowered his voice. “Wise up, ace. The east wing is a dungeon, man, a big underground bunker.”

  “But …” Khoklov hesitated. “You really think …? But I’m a Red Army officer!”

  “So what? The Boss has already got a State Farm chief in there, a personnel director, a couple of busybody snoops from Internal Affairs … He bottles up anybody he likes, and there’s no appeal, no recourse—the guy runs everything. He’s a top Party Moslem, man, the closest thing to Genghis Khan.” Starlitz urged Khoklov up into the truck. “Think it over from their angle, ace. If you just vanish here, DRAAF will think you’ve been killed on duty. Hit by ack-ack, down somewhere in rough terrain. Nothing to tie you to the Boss, or Azerbaijan, or the black market.”

  “They’d put me in a dungeon?”

  “They can’t let you run around loose here—you’re AWOL, with no residence passport. And you’re Russian, too—you could never pass for a local.”

  “My God!” Khoklov put his head in his hands. “I’m done for!”

  Starlitz threw the truck into gear. “How long have you been in the military, man? Show some initiative, for Christ’s sake.”

  “What are you doing?” Khoklov said.

  “Winging it,” Starlitz said, driving off. “After all, there’s a lotta possibilities.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “We got a truckload of very heavy capital back there.” He shifted his denim-clad butt on the busted springs of the truck seat. “And pretty soon you’ll be officially dead, ace. That’s kind of a neat thing to be, actually …”

  “What’s the point of this? What can we possibly accomplish, all by ourselves, out here?”

  “Well, lemme think out loud,” Starlitz said cheerily, taking a corner with a squeal. “We do have half a load of fuel in your plane; that’s something, at least … Kabul’s definitely out of range, but you could make Turkey, easy. There’s a big NATO base in Kars, just over the border from Tbilisi. Maybe you could land there. The West would love to have an Ilyushin-14. It’d be the biggest haul for ’em since Lieutenant Belenko flew his MiG-25 to Japan.”