Past the livestock, the market, such as it was, began in earnest, where the gulley grew wider and more shallow. Chace experienced a painful deja vu, because she had been here before, not here, but almost here, in Saudi Arabia, a place called the Wadi-as-Sirhan. It had been night then, and Tom had died there, and for a moment the memory assailed her, and she had to stop to fight it off.
A large tent anchored the center of the bazaar, Soviet Army surplus, and framing the approach to its entrance, along both sides, stood pitted and bent metal folding tables, with companion benches. Three separate cooking fires burned nearby, meat sizzling over the flames, fat spitting on the grills. A ragged mutt prowled between the tables, looking for scraps. Music from three separate boom boxes competed with each other, crackling from burst speakers, country-and-western and Europop.
Spreading out, filling the rest of the gulley around the tent, were the vendors, most of them with their wares displayed on dirty blankets or rugs, a few having gone so far as to raise canopies of one sort or another on sticks, to provide shelter and an illusion of privacy. Chace saw bootleg cassettes and CDs, old magazines, bits and pieces of machinery salvaged from who knew what, and piles upon piles of army surplus equipment. There were flashlights and entrenching tools and MREs and radios that she suspected would never be made to transmit or receive again. Most of the surplus was Soviet-era, but among them she spied bits and pieces of more modern equipment, materiel either bought or stolen from Coalition forces, even what appeared to be a set of NVGs. Three separate vendors were selling drugs, pot and hash and opium and their big brother, heroin.
And there were weapons, so many weapons. Not counting the ones being carried by the vendors and the shoppers, stacked precariously in makeshift displays, arrayed on their blankets, piled one upon the other. The collections spanned the ages, it seemed, weapons that had migrated throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia over the last sixty-plus years. From the Second World War through Korea and Vietnam, the tools of war that had survived and been passed on from one set of hands to another, with varying degrees of care. There were pistols from Vietnam and rifles from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, revolvers from Korea and knives from the Second World War. There were swords and spears and axes of indeterminate origin and provenance, and a wide selection of knives that at first glance seemed to be of local manufacture, and fairly high quality. Ammunition boxes formed makeshift barriers between stalls, labeled in Cyrillic and Mandarin and Uzbek and English. She saw grenades, she saw flak jackets, she saw collapsible batons, she saw submachine guns.
She stopped again, this time to orient herself, aware that she was drawing eyes. It didn’t alarm her; it was expected. There were perhaps some thirty to forty people around, either selling or buying. Almost all of them looked to be ethnic Uzbeks, though there were no doubt Kazakhs and Kyrgyzs among them.
And all were men, to the last of them, with the exception of the only other woman Chace could discern, standing at the closed flap of the tent. The men ranged in age from late teens to perhaps mid-fifties, most dressed in the traditional mix of cloaks and boots, a few in the post-Soviet work fashion, the majority with their heads covered. The woman—or girl—looked to be fifteen at the oldest, wearing a filthy robe. Her legs were bare, and Chace suspected that, beneath the robe, she wore nothing else. If she was cold, she did a good job of hiding it.
While Chace watched, the tent flap parted, and a squat man emerged, bearded, pulling up his trousers. Past him, inside, Chace could see two other girls, each naked, moving to cover themselves. The squat man exchanged words with another, seated at the table near the entrance, then stopped, looking her way. Another man, seated at one of the tables, rose and headed into the tent.
Chace heard movement behind her, ignored it for the moment. They still didn’t know what to make of her. No one would try anything, not yet.
She tried to put a cap on what she was feeling, forced herself to look away from the tent and back to the vendors, began walking around the circle, looking at the items on each blanket as she passed. She stopped briefly at a display of knives, seeing a bone-handled blade that caught her fancy, thinking that she would need one of her own. In her periphery, she counted three men following her as a group, staying perhaps fifteen feet back. Two of them carried Kalashnikovs on straps at the shoulders. The third, the eldest of the three, wore a pistol in a holster around his waist.
Chace continued working her way around the market, finally completing her counterclockwise circuit at the largest collection of weapons for sale, to the left of the tent entrance. A grumpy-looking Uzbek in overalls and a work shirt watched over the wares, eyeing her with an expression that seemed caught between suspicion and amusement, yet undecided. Chace passed his wares, which seemed to be grouped without rhyme or reason, then stopped and doubled back, her eye snagging on a pistol half buried in a stack near the back of the makeshift stall. It was a semiauto, what looked to be a Smith & Wesson Mk 39, but at this distance, she couldn’t be sure. The men following her stopped when she did.
Chace pointed. “Can I see that?” she asked in Russian.
“You’re not Russian,” the vendor said. It wasn’t quite accusatory, but it came close.
“That one,” Chace said, indicating the pistol again. “The Smith and Wesson.”
“You have money?”
She smiled.
“You come here alone?”
She let her smile grow a fraction.
The man smiled in return, revealing the fact that he was missing his upper two front teeth. “You should not come alone.”
“That one,” Chace repeated.
The man hesitated, and Chace saw his eyes flick past her, to her left, to the three men who had been following, and she knew what was coming, and she knew what the cue would be.
The vendor nodded, shrugged, and started to turn away from her, toward the indicated stack of weapons. As he did, she heard the movement, caught the motion in her periphery, the Kalashnikovs coming off of the shoulders of both men. There was no haste in their movement, and it gave her all the time she needed. Chace swept her right hand up, over her belly, and brought out the pistol Javlon had bought for her. She struck down the safety with her thumb as she freed the weapon, had her finger settled well on the trigger by the time she put her sights on the vendor’s back.
Everyone stopped, the men with the rifles and the ones shuffling at their blankets and the ones eating their meals.
“Alone,” Chace said. “Not stupid.”
The vendor turned around to face her slowly, and when he saw the pistol pointed at him, raised his hands, showing her his palms.
“They lower the guns,” Chace told him. “Or I shoot.”
The vendor nodded and spoke in Uzbek. Chace risked turning her head enough to see the three, and to confirm that they had complied.
“Have to try,” the vendor said by way of explanation, still showing her his hands, and working in a shrug for added effect.
She looked back at him. “I understand.”
“If you want, we can do business now.” He smiled hopefully, again revealing his missing teeth.
“Yes, please,” Chace agreed, and with her free hand, she pointed to the stack once more, and added, “It’s the one sticking out at the bottom.”
The vendor nodded, turning to retrieve the gun in question, and as he did, Chace threw the safety back into place on the pistol, and slid it once more into the front of her trousers. She felt as much as heard the tension lift from the market then, and by the time the vendor was showing her the Smith & Wesson, conversations were resuming.
It took the better part of two hours to buy everything she thought she would need, or at least, to buy everything that they had that she thought she would need. When she was finished, the three men who had stalked her helped to carry her purchases back to the Range Rover, where she loaded them into the back. She’d bought three blankets off one of the vendors, and used them to cover the weapons, ammunition, and other equipment. Once everything was squared away, Chace walked back to the vendor with the missing teeth, and paid, in cash. No one bothered her, no one followed her as she returned to the car, poorer, but certainly better
