Asian Front

directly to the right of them, their feet pointing to the stove where camel and cow dung kept smoldering, providing heat not only against the cold but to warm the arkhi, an alcoholic drink of fermented mare’s milk.

The head man of the gher, careful to sit opposite the four SAS/D troopers, waited until all had partaken of the light orange cheese his wife had passed around. This was the best insurance the troopers could have, for by custom once the cheese had been shared there could be no conflict between host and guest. But as Aussie braced himself for another sip of the arkhi — a small streak of melted yak butter giving it a taste like sour milk — he was ready to reach for the nine millimeter if anything went wrong.

A wide-eyed child watched him from atop one of the two metal-spring beds, a dark red and Persian blue carpet of silk and wool draped behind the beds on the gher’s wall. Adhering to custom once more, David Brentwood, consulting his phrase book, knew he should avoid “disputatious” subjects — politics especially — and wondered how he might confine himself to generalities about the weather and such. At first this had struck him as being as peculiar to the Mongolians until he realized how during his own childhood he, his two brothers — Robert, the oldest, an SSN commander, and Ray — and his sister, Lana, had been told by their father never to talk about politics or religion. It was no different with the Mongolians’ headman, he decided, except he knew that perestroika and glasnost had worked some magic here, too, and that the party was finding it tougher these days to control the herdsmen or what they spoke about.

But whatever the customs Brentwood also knew he didn’t have time to pussyfoot around, and so started with the weather, using it to come at the main point from an oblique angle. What he wanted to know was whether they could seek shelter here from the sun till nightfall.

Whether it was the heat from the vodka-spiced arkhi or from the stove itself, the cold was being driven off, and he felt sweaty about the neck as he finished his question, trusting he had used the correct Mongolian phrase. The headman smiled and, pointing to himself, said, “Little English, me.”

“Struth!” Aussie said. “That’s good news, mate.”

“ ‘Struth’!” The headman didn’t understand, but he knew what David Brentwood meant about “bad weather.”

“Not to be moving—” the old man said, “in bad weather.”

“Right, mate!” Aussie put in, relieved. “No bloody good at all.”

“Shut up, Aussie!” David said in an intentionally stern tone. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

“No friggin’ woods here, mate,” Aussie said, then saw the child. “Sorry.”

The painfully slow conversation between David and the headman was really not necessary, however, for the Mongolian had understood the moment he had seen them come in from the plain that they were on the run from authority. It was all he had needed.

“You rest,” he told them.

“We’ll move tonight,” David Brentwood promised.

The old man nodded, his hand pointing to the sheepskin rugs on the bed as he talked to his wife.

“Just till tonight,” David promised again. David took a chance and gestured back toward Nalayh. “Communists.” He knew enough already to know that the herdsmen didn’t like the Communists — they told the herdsmen where to go and when, striking at the very heart of the nomad’s life: his freedom to move when and where he wanted.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

In New York, Alex Miro, a tall, thin man, pulled up the fur-lined collar of his brown suede topcoat as he made his way past the Plaza Hotel toward the Columbus Circle entrance on Central Park’s southwest corner. He liked the park — it had brought him luck, and he was as convinced of his purpose as he had been on the very first day those years before when, as a bearded young man, his future before him, he had arrived as one of the thousands of Russian minorities allowed to emigrate to America in the heady days following Gorbachev’s and then Yeltsin’s perestroika.

The reception committee in those days consisted mostly of older emigres who had managed to flee the Soviet Union before Gorbachev, and Alex could still recall the day when, as one of about thirty new arrivals, he had been taken on a tour of the city by one of these older emigres. The group had paused for a moment across from the Plaza near the horse-drawn cabriolets.

The wealth of the people entering and leaving the famous hotel overwhelmed the new arrivals almost as much as their first sight of a supermarket. One babushka, from the Ukraine, had kept clicking her tongue and shaking her head beneath the black head scarf at the sight of such opulence. After going north on Fifth Avenue, seeing the stately stone townhouses on the East Side and being told by the guide that only one family lived in each house, Alex had seen the woman’s disbelief, her tongue clicking again as she gazed at the stately buildings, her husband, however, skeptically informing several of the group that the guide was as bad as the old Pravda— “lozh”—”all lies.” It was probably just a Potemkin “village,” he said — made exclusively to impress visitors just as the fake Potemkin village had been for the czarina — why, any fool could see there was enough room for six families in any one of the townhouses.

One of the emigres asked the guide to take them to Harlem—insisted they see Harlem, the place of the gigantskie basketbolisty. Alex’s beard was so full in those days it had hidden the tight-lipped grimace of satisfaction he’d allowed himself on seeing that what the party had said was true — here was the grinding poverty, the rampant disorder, the half-naked black children, the awful, discordant noise of democracy, the look of hatred and despair in the eyes of me blacks who stared resentfully at the bus of tourists like caged animals, the putrid smell of garbage overpowering.

It was still so vivid in his mind, particularly the loss of dignity he had seen in these faces — a poverty that was horrible to Nikolai Ryzhkov, Ryzhkov being his Russian name before he had taken the oath of allegiance to his newly adopted country and changed Ryzhkov to Miro. It was the lack of dignity in the blacks’ eyes that struck him as being more crushing than any he had known in his youth in Russia. For there, though people had been poorer in material things than their American counterparts, there hadn’t been the burning rage and spiritual deprivation that he saw in these faces.

The memory of this, his first experience of the vast disparity in wealth between rich and poor in America, not only stayed with him but all his life had acted as a spur to his single-minded goal, the memory of Harlem as troubling and as clearly etched on his mind as was that of the immigrants’ first visit to Central Park. There, in the green, ordered world that accepted everybody, it had been completely different, surely what the great Abraham Lincoln had in his mind — a place that did not depend on whom you knew, on special party shops accessible only to the powerful, but was a refuge for the common people. He hated the zoo, though — hating anything being put in a cage — anything that was hemmed in.

As a boy he had loved the Moscow Circus, which he had seen illegally, sneaking beneath the tent flaps of the traveling troupe when it had visited his town. But when they had brought on the bears, the huge, muzzled beasts reduced to playing big babies for the amusement of rude peasants like his father, Alex had felt immeasurably sad — not only for the bears but for those like his father whose sensitivities had been so brutalized by poverty in old Russia, in Siberia to be exact, that they could find the sight of the leashed bears only amusing.

As Alex had grown older, he learned that to liberate such people from such brutality no effective appeal could be made to sensibilities deadened by the constant crush of circumstance. Throughout history, he was convinced, there had been only one way. One had to fight indifference and prejudice, as Lenin had said, not submit to it. But Gorbachev had warned that you would get no thanks for trying to improve the lot of the people — those in chains did not always thank those who set them free. Look at what had happened to Gorbachev himself, and how vividly Alex remembered the Muscovites demonstrating in Red Square, telling the American announcer Mike Wallace, who was doing his open-mouthed “surprise” act, that they’d had enough of perestroika, of glasnost—of how they pined for the order, the comfort of predictability that Stalin’s postwar years had given them.