Laine shook his head and answered: “No, no, no. That is too much. My offer is eight ounces, and I want you to include these magazines.”
“This is an insult to my family. Shall my children starve and beg in the street? I am not a fool. But for you, as good and honorable officer, I will make a price of twenty ounces, with those extra magazines including.”
“No, make it twelve.”
Ali shook his head. “Eighteen ounces.”
Andy countered, “Nope. Fifteen.”
“Sixteen,” Ali snapped back.
Andy replied firmly, “Done!” They shook hands. Andy counted out sixteen of the American eagles, all still packaged in two-coin “flip” plastic sleeves. Ali took the time to scrutinize the pairs of coins closely, removing several of them from their sleeves. He looked satisfied.
“You are needing of amma-unitions?”
“No, thanks, I’ve got plenty. Nine-mil is standard for the Army.”
Andy spent a few more minutes rummaging through the suitcases, selecting a pair of magazine pouches that had obviously been made for different double-column pistol magazines but fit the standard SIG magazines-a tight fit, but they would do. Each pouch held a pair of magazines. The two pouches cost $220 in the increasingly worthless greenbacks.
Starting with the holstered pistol at the bottom, Andy filled the duffel bag with his purchases and again shook hands with Ali.
It was nearing sunset, and the temperature outside was down to 80 degrees. Ali unbarred the door, and they exchanged
2. Stocking Up
“What people did not realize was that war had started. By 1 p.m., a few minutes after Molotov’s speech, queues, especially in the food stores, began to grow. The women shoppers in the gastronoms or grocery stores started to buy indiscriminately-canned goods (which Russians do not like very much), butter, sugar, lard, flour, groats, sausage, matches, salt. In twenty years of Soviet power Leningraders had learned by bitter experience what to expect in time of crisis. They rushed to the stores to buy what they could. They gave preference to foods which would keep. But they were not particular. One shopper bought five kilos of caviar, another ten.
“At the savings banks the people clutched worn and greasy passbooks in their hands. They were drawing out every ruble that stood to their accounts. Many headed straight for the commission shops. There they turned over fat packets of paper money for diamond rings, gold watches, emerald earrings, oriental rugs, brass samovars.
“The crowds outside the savings banks quickly became disorderly. No one wanted to wait. They demanded their money seichas immediately. Police detachments appeared. By 3 p.m. the banks had closed, having exhausted their supply of currency. They did not reopen again until Tuesday (Monday was their closed day). When they opened again, the government had imposed a limit on withdrawals of two hundred rubles per person per month.”
At that same time that Andy Laine was at the Haji-mart in Afghanistan, his brother Lars was 11,500 miles away, rolling a cart into a Sam’s Club store in Farmington, New Mexico. It was 6:52 a.m. in New Mexico and 5:22 p.m. in Zabul province, Afghanistan. Both men had the same thing on their minds: stocking up, in quantity and immediately. The Laine brothers shared a sense of urgency, realizing that there would likely be very few opportunities to stock up on things before mass currency inflation destroyed the value of their savings. The news outlets made it clear that things were falling apart quickly-
The Sam’s Club store in Farmington, New Mexico, was about to open for the day. There was a large crowd of perhaps a hundred anxious shoppers, many waiting with their membership cards in hand, standing behind oversize shopping carts and flat cargo carts. Lars Laine eyed his wife, Lisbeth, who was seated on their cart, next to their six-year-old daughter Grace. Beth was thirty-four, with curly brown hair and hazel eyes. She was slightly overweight and had struggled all through their marriage to maintain her figure. As Grace was doodling in her coloring book, Beth was adding items to an already long shopping list. She stood up, leaned close to Lars, and spoke directly at the hearing aid in his good ear, “We’d better hit the canned-food section first, hon,” she suggested. He nodded and answered, “Roger that.” Beth smiled, gave him a peck on the cheek, and again sat on the cart to wait.
Lars glanced around, sizing up the crowd. The middle-aged woman standing next to him was staring at his left hand. Lars hated that. It was hurtful to him that people stared so much at the flesh-colored rubber prosthetic. They always seemed transfixed, as if the hand were some alien creature that had just landed on Earth. They stared at his left hand, or at the left side of his face, or alternated between them, staring at both, and it made him feel like a circus freak.
The reconstructive surgery on his left cheekbone-which had used a piece of one of his ribs-was less than perfect. Sometimes people he hadn’t met before or who hadn’t seen him in many years would approach him from the right side, smiling, and then he’d turn his head toward them and they’d suddenly look repulsed. “The Quasimodo effect” is what Lars called it.
One month earlier, on a street corner in Durango, Colorado-the nearest city with large department stores where Lars was shopping for a new refrigerator-a man who appeared to be in his seventies walked up to Lars, and asked simply, “Iraq?”
Lars answered, “Yes, sir.”
“I was in that little Dominican thing, and then I did a tour in Vietnam. I came back without a scratch.” The old man looked Lars in the eye and said firmly, “Thanks for your service, and for what it cost you. Welcome home.” He shook his hand and strode away. Laine’s eyes welled up a bit, but he didn’t cry. That one encounter made up for a whole lot of previous Quasimodo moments.
Finally, the roll-up door opened, and the crowd rushed in. Lars and Beth headed for the canned-food section and started stacking full cases on the cart. That was just the first cartload. They stacked the cart high on three successive trips into the store that morning.
The television news anchors had recently started calling the intensifying economic crisis “the Crunch.” The term soon stuck with the general public, becoming part of the general lexicon. Government spending was out of control. The credit market was in continuous turmoil. Meanwhile, bank runs and huge federal bailouts had become commonplace.
The debt and budget deficit had spiraled to stratospheric numbers. A Congressional Budget Office report stated that to pay
The official national debt was over $6 trillion. The unofficial debt-which included “out-year” unfunded obligations such as entitlements, long-term bonds, and military pensions-topped $53 trillion. The debt accumulated at the rate of $9 billion a day, or $15,000 per second. The official national debt had ballooned to 120 percent of the gross domestic product and was compounding at the rate of 18 percent per year. The federal government was borrowing 193 percent of revenue for the year.
The president was nearing the end of his term in office. The stagnant economy, rising interest rates, and creeping inflation troubled him. Publicly, he beamed about having “beat the deficit.” Privately, he admitted that the low deficit figures came from moving increasingly large portions of federal funding “off budget.” Behind the accounting smoke and mirrors game, the real deficit was growing. Government spending at all levels equated to 45 percent of the gross domestic product.
In July, the recently appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve Board had a private meeting with the
