ASSASSINS

by Mike Bond

  “Levi, where are we in all this?”

  “Nowhere. We don’t exist.”

  “We’re trading opium for guns. We’re drug dealers.”

  “That’s not how your Dad would see it. We’re taking down the world’s dirtiest empire. The one that killed him... We’re freeing a billion people from Communism –”

  “To give them what? Heroin?”

  “Think of it as a necessary evil.” One-handed, Ackerman took out more pencils and began to sharpen them one by one. “Because, as this new guy Timothy will explain tomorrow, you’re the one who has to run it.”

  Can’t Get No

  THE CAFÉ DEAFENED her with the din of soldiers’ laughter and the Rolling Stones out of a JVC tape deck, the air acrid with cigarette smoke and the floor sticky with spilt vodka and Georgian champagne. Her head was spinning with the vodka and noise and the way Leo kept twirling her around and handing her off from one friend to the next. “Life may be short!” he laughed, “but it’s joyous.”

  “Stop!” she yelled. “I’m getting too dizzy.”

  “You’re the only girl here,” he twirled her again. “You have to dance with everyone!”

  “I have, I have,” she giggled as he spun her off to another officer.

  “Ne xorosho govaryu pa-russki,” she said to the grayhaired man, who held her carefully at arms’ length as if she might explode. I don’t good speak Russian.

  “That’s fine, my dear,” he said in perfect French, “Your friend Leo’s not the only civilized one here... He shouldn’t monopolize you.”

  They went round again, the room seeming to go slower than they did. “He’s not!” She rushed to defend him. “He wants me to dance with everyone –”

  “And you only want to dance with him.”

  She smiled, warming to him. “Of course.”

  He tucked back a strand of her hair over her shoulder, a grandfatherly gesture. “And I’m sure he only wants to dance with you.”

  “It’s hard for all these men, being out here, so far from home.”

  “And you too, so far from France...”

  She felt she could confide in him. It’s just the vodka, she told herself. “Afghanistan ruins everything – you hate it, but it leaves you nothing to go home to.”

  “You’ll get over this place, my dear.” He squeezed her arm. “We all will.”

  She turned away. Except those who die.

  Leo handed her champagne that spilled down her wrist. “You like General Volnev?”

  “You had me dance with a general?” She downed the champagne and kissed him, his moustache soft and exciting, making her ache for him. “What if I’d said something bad?”

  “As a teenager he fought the Germans all the way from the Volga to Berlin. There’s nothing you could imagine he hasn’t seen.” He clasped his big thick hands behind her neck, holding her sweaty hair away from her skin, and kissed her hard, and she felt her body go soft against him.

  “We can’t do this,” she shivered. “In front of these poor guys.”

  His fingers rose up her spine, each hand gripping half the width of her back. “We can leave now.”

  “We’ve got nowhere to go... I don’t want to go home. I want to be with you.”

  He took her hand. “Have you ever seen the inside of a Vosporonetz?”

  They went out of the cigarette smoke and laughter into the night. “Spring is here,” he said, his arm round her waist. “Even Afghanistan is beautiful in springtime.”

  “You shouldn’t be drinking so much. You’re not completely healed.”

  “Stop being my doctor.”

  She reached her arm round his hard back. “What’s a Vospro-whatsis?”

  “Here it is. A wonder of Soviet engineering –”

  “It’s a little tank?”

  “An armored car.” The rear door squealed as he opened it.

  She slipped fingers between his shirt buttons. “You want me to go in there?”

  “You are beautiful and I love you.” If you love her, don’t ask about existence and non-existence... “There’s nowhere in Kabul – I can’t take you to my quarters, where can we go?”

  “We can find our own little house.” She bent to step into the armored car. “Even Kabul has houses.” Inside smelled of grease and sweat. She squeezed into a stiff bucket seat banging her knee. “Ouch!” she said. “Damn!”

  He climbed in beside her shoving her over. “Move!”

  “I am, I am.”

  He kissed her, a steel medal against her breast. “I’m a little drunk,” she said. “You’re taking advantage of me.”

  “I’m a little drunk and you’re taking advantage of me!”

  “Yes,” she mumbled through his kiss. “You should be in the barracks studying Lenin.”

  He kissed her harder, faster, his hand circling her waist, his arm tickling her nipple and making her bite his lips, her tongue hard against his as she moved her mouth up and down against his and her breast up and down his arm and her body up and down against him and already he had her skirt up around her thighs and the cool air felt good between them and his hand filling the space...

  “Ow, damn!” she yelped. “My eye!”

  “That’s a gun mount. Sorry!”

  “Here!” she slipped a long thigh around him. “We’re going to have to do it this way.” She squirmed sideways. “Quick come inside me! Damn! What’s this?”

  He groped for it in the dark. “Machine gun cartridge –”

  “What if it goes off?”

  He slid her to him. “Already fired.”

  “Hurry! Hurry!”

  “The seat,” he grunted. “Ouch.”

  “Oh God,” she pulled herself against him. “Just come in me fast.”

  She kept opening to him as if she’d been made for him, a tightly perfect fit. “I’ve wanted you so long,” he said, driving deeper. “So much –”

  “And I’ve wanted you so much. Oh God you feel good...”

  “Let’s do this all the time. Can you come soon –”

  “I’m coming Oh God I love you.”

  “I love you too. I love you. Thank God we’re finally saying this. I love you so...”

  THE CANDLE on the floor of the girl’s hut guttered in the wind through cracks in the rush wall. Rawalpindi’s like Kabul, Jack thought. Too hot in the day, too cold at night.

  “Why do you carry that gun?” She was short and slender, a mole on the side of her nose and another on her neck, her hair full and silky and black as coal.

  “How old are you?” he answered.

  “Twenty.”

  “No you’re not. Sixteen, maybe.”

  When she smiled her teeth were bright against her dark lips. Making love she’d been exciting, and the months without a woman had been a wave that drowned his senses. But now he wanted to be anywhere but here, disgusted with himself and repulsed by her small upturned breasts and their large umber nipples, her odors of sex and curry. The cotton sheet on the mattress felt dirty; he wondered how many other men had stained it. “Where are you from?”

  “Ghazni. When the Russian helicopters killed my family I escaped to the camps in Pakistan. But there was no food. I had to work.” She shrugged. “There was this.”

  “Someday maybe you can go back to Afghanistan.”

  “We had a house with a garden. A stone-walled garden.”

  “Maybe it’s still there –”

  “For my tenth birthday I got blue jeans – can you imagine? And I had a radio, it was pink... I could listen to Elvis...” She looked at Bandit. “I even had a puppy. One night he didn’t come home.”

  “When I was a boy one night my dog didn’t come home. A guy had poisoned him.”

  She bit her lip, said nothing, then, “You have a wife in America?”

  “If I did I wouldn’t be with you.”

  “So while you’re in Rawalpindi I can keep your house and cook your food and take care of you every night.”

  This made him smil
e and no longer mind the smells and dirt and meaningless of it. “I’m just here a few days.”

  “You can stay all night. I won’t ask more money. Didn’t I do good for you?”

  He slid on his shirt. “You did fine.”

  She watched him buckle the Makarov into its holster under his left armpit. “What’s it like,” she said, “to kill a man?”

  “What’s it like to sleep with a man?”

  “Everybody knows you Americans are sending many guns and bombs across the Khyber Pass to kill Russians. You are killing lots of them?”

  “How many men have you slept with?”

  Her smile sparkled in the candlelight. “See, you’re just like me – we both have secrets. We would be good together.”

  The wind down from Karakoram had driven the stench of diesel, sewers and charcoal smoke out of Rawalpindi. Bandit at his side, Jack walked the empty streets. Once the dog dashed ahead; there was a squeal in the darkness and he returned and dropped a rat in front of Jack. The rat convulsed and lay still, a female with full nipples.

  “You shouldn’t do that.” Jack thought of the baby rats starving, waiting for their mother who would never come home. “Don’t kill except to defend yourself. Or eat.”

  Khief

  “WE MUST KILL this Massoud guy,” Timothy Cormac said. He glanced around the New Asia warehouse like a king brought down to live with peasants.

  Jack stared into Timothy’s bluish eyes. “Because of his truce?”

  Timothy sucked at a tooth. “Tell Wahid make it happen.”

  “Massoud controls most of the Panjshir. If he could convince the other warlords to make peace... wouldn’t Afghanistan be better off than in endless war with the Soviets?”

  “Your mission’s to help them ruin the Soviets. Not kiss their ass.” In his late thirties, Timothy already looked older: thinning sandy hair, purple bags under the eyes, a smoker’s yellow teeth, the opulent belly and saggy cheeks from too many Beltway dinners. What had Ackerman said? He’s on the way up.

  “A lot of folks in Home Office,” Timothy added, “still aren’t on board with your mission.”

  “What exactly don’t they like?”

  “Too much exposure. If the Russians find out... State’s very concerned.”

  “Christ, Timothy!” Levi Ackerman said. “You told fucking State?”

  “Not I. But other people in Home Office keep the lines open.”

  Jack sensed that Timothy would tell anybody anything if it was an angle that might help him. “Did you know Gustafson?”

  “Gustafson – he’s with the Swedish Foreign Office, no?”

  “He fell thirty thousand feet into a mountain. As part of this mission.”

  “No need to get huffy.” Timothy thrust a pale hand across the table to pat Jack’s wrist. “I hear your Dad was First Cav in Nam? Mine was the Marines. Korea.”

  “Really? What were you?”

  “Jack!” Ackerman snapped. “For Chrissake.”

  “Hey,” Timothy smiled but his eyes didn’t, “there’s more than one way to serve our country.”

  “That’s what the folks say who drive Cadillacs and don’t pay taxes.”

  “Jack!” Ackerman snarled.

  “Sorry. I’ve been out killing people. Had a friend die. Tends to piss one off.”

  “Don’t like your job?” Timothy smiled yellow teeth. “Leave any time you like.”

  “I like the job. It’s just some of the people I have to deal with.”

  “Like me,” Loxley said. “I’m a pain in the ass.”

  Jack watched Timothy knead pale pulpy hands. “So you’re on board,” Jack said, “with our dealing heroin for missiles?”

  “Anyone using heroin deserves what he gets. But I don’t do details.” Timothy dropped flaccid fingers over Ackerman’s sinewy wrist. “That’s my friend Levi’s job.”

  “And all this is C.O.D.?” Jack said.

  “Wahid’s men send the stuff,” Ackerman said. “Same as ever, from Chitral over to Gilgit into China. We send the hardware back with you, over the Hindu Kush.”

  “You knew about this all along,” Jack said. “Didn’t you?”

  “Listen to Levi,” Timothy said. “It’s compartmentalized. You do your job, we do ours.”

  Bandit growled. “That’s a nasty dog,” Timothy said.

  “He’s got a great sense about people.”

  “You’ve had two months in Afghanistan: I’ll give you three more. Levi will decide on the missiles and launchers. But I want results. Not just a couple of Russian helicopters – Christ, bad weather could do that! And get Wahid to solve this Massoud thing.” Timothy’s tongue moved back and forth under his lips.

  Sticky teeth, Jack thought. He stood. “You’re welcome, any time you want, to join us up in the hills, shitting blood and ducking bullets. A fine time can be had by all –”

  “If and when I see you,” Timothy smirked, “it’s on my terms.”

  LATE THE LAST NIGHT Jack knocked on the girl’s door. There was no answer and he walked with Bandit a while and came back just as a gray-haired man with a cane was leaving.

  “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said.

  “Who was that, just here?”

  “He’s a teacher. His wife’s crippled. He comes once a month. All he can afford.” She slipped out of her cotton robe and stood naked before him, a little bronze statue.

  “I don’t want to,” Jack said, thinking with disgust of the old teacher.

  “You’re a funny man.” She knelt in the corner, by the bed, brought out a small leather bag and an ornamental brass pipe with a lapis lazuli bowl. “Give me your knife.”

  Without thinking he slipped his combat knife out of the ankle sheath and handed it to her. Outside the door Bandit growled once, softly. “You have someone coming?” Jack said.

  “It’s just rats.”

  She put a chunk of khief on the table, cut a slice with his knife and put it in the bowl. “I don’t smoke that,” he started to say, then thought What harm can it do? Maybe if he got high he’d want to screw her. Why isn’t she cold, he wondered, naked like that.

  “I wish I could go with you,” she said.

  He smiled, suddenly liking her. “In a way I do too. In another life.”

  She kissed him. “The Assassins, they smoked this, before they went to kill.”

  “No, the name comes from Hassan-i-Sabah. The Old Man of the Mountain.”

  “No, they smoked this to make them fearless.” She lit the pipe holding it sideways so he could suck the flame down into the bowl, smiling at him over the bowl in which the khief glowed like an amber sun. It was strong, tasted like the opium and horse manure mixture he had smelled so many times when the Afghanis smoked before riding buzkashi.

  “The new opium from Afghanistan...” She inhaled deeply, “. . . and the hashish of Chitral. You American businessmen are very good for opium business too.”

  It came fast to his head, the room warm and the candlelight golden. There was a far-off thud of a drum, slow and steady, that he realized was his heart. He took off his clothes, careful to keep the gun and knife under them next to his head. She lay down beside him and his skin caught fire at her touch. He could feel the cells in her body like his own; inside her was part of himself, her cries like some voice within him that had too long been silent.

  She went outside to pee in the ditch. Bandit stood in the door giving Jack an irritated look. She came back in and took a wooden bowl from a table by the door. “The last bitterberries from the Indus valley.”

  They tasted like her, pungent and tart. Thoughts cascaded through his mind. There was no barrier between her body and his and he wondered can I think her thoughts too?

  They made love again and again, her silken skin and lithe arching body merging with his, and he understood that making love was exactly that, and that sex was life and nothing less, its purpose and end.

  Finally he lay still, breathing softly, the intricate weave of thatch
in the ceiling a metaphor for all he’d ever known, the lovely half-moon of her fingernail and each cell of her body a separate world.

  Why am I fighting? he wondered. Each time I kill I die too. Is that what I want?

  There were no boundaries between her and him, between them and this simple room, this teeming filthy city, this world. He thought of Wahid, of a Longfellow saying he’d long ago learned in school, that those who seem most evil have just suffered the most pain.

  He’d quit Home Office. After this trip back into Afghanistan with the new Strelas he’d return to the States and start a new life. Reach out to people instead of hardening himself against them. Life isn’t war...

  Bandit was whining, the candle flickering like the last star in a dying universe, cracks of purple dawn slipping through the window. He scrambled into his clothes and ran back to New Asia Paradise. “Jesus Christ, Jack!” Ackerman screamed.

  “Sorry, Sir. Three months of fucking to catch up on.”

  “You’re fucking lucky I don’t shoot you! You and Loxley were supposed to leave six hours ago! You have to meet McPhee in Darband at eleven hundred! What’s got into you?”

  Jack glanced at Loxley, who looked away. “Don’t know, Sir.”

  “If you don’t get to Darband on time you won’t get over the pass by dark.” Ackerman walked away, came back, rubbing the back of his head in fury. “We have diversions set up to keep the Russians away from that goddamn pass. And you won’t even be there!”

  “We’ll hurry, Sir.”

  “The ten new mujihadeen will be in a second truck.”

  “What do we do with them, Sir?”

  “Train them, goddammit! Make sure they don’t bomb us.” One-handed, Ackerman shook him. “I want you to watch over these missiles like they’re your fucking babies. There’s Paki guards in the cars ahead and behind you, and two more in the back of your truck. But if something fucks up, you’re the guy I come after.”

  AT 16:00 they passed through Chitral, and reached the pine grove at dusk. “Where the fuck you guys been?” McPhee yelled.