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 was 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
“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
“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
