Private Wars

grenades.”

“How many trucks made it?”

“One.”

“And how many were coming?”

“Three.”

Zahidov felt his frustration well. This was the fourth time the heroin had been hijacked before reaching the border. Twice in May, once in July, and then again this morning. Four times, and there could be no doubt in his mind any longer. He was being persecuted, he was being targeted specifically.

When it first happened, he’d been angry, but willing to accept the loss. The north of Afghanistan was populated by warlords and drug lords, each leading a private army of Pathan soldiers eager for nothing more than a chance to fight. The Pathans’ favorite sports, the saying went, were dog racing, horse racing, and fighting each other, not in that order. If Zahidov’s heroin was lost in this cross fire, it wasn’t ideal, but it was survivable, it was the cost of doing business with the Afghanis.

But when it happened again, less than two weeks later, and the replacement shipment had also been lost, he had become immediately suspicious, and just as quickly considered the possibility that it was Ruslan Malikov behind it all. No proof, of course, except for the fact that the man had escaped him in February, and when he thought back to that, all of his rage returned. He’d been a fool, so filled with hatred for the bitch spy he’d ordered the Sikorsky in immediate pursuit of her, instead of commanding the pilot to set down first, to allow him to finish what they had begun with Ruslan.

The fact was, he’d been so eager to catch and kill the spy that he hadn’t even considered the possibility that Ruslan wasn’t dead. It had been almost two hours later, after he’d brought Stepan to Sevara and was making his way back to the Ministry to begin the interrogation, that he’d received the call. Ruslan had vanished, there was no sign of him.

And there had been no true sign of him since then, Zahidov’s suspicions notwithstanding. But there was logic to the idea that the President’s son had gone south. His support had always been strongest there, in Bukhara, Samarkand, Qashka Darya, and Surkhan Darya provinces. He would have been able to find some aid, some shelter, at least enough to provide for his immediate needs. It was even possible he had jumped aboard a UN relief shipment, either hiding in one of the train cars or riding in one of the trucks that traveled the thousand meters across the river alongside the tracks.

Why he’d gone to Afghanistan was the question, and it wasn’t a terribly difficult one to answer. There were few places better in the world for a man to hide, the terrain placed by God, it seemed, only for that purpose and no other. Add to that the central government’s lack of actual power in the outlying regions, the scores of bickering warlords and tribesmen, all of them bound by their peculiar code of honor, what they called Pashtunwali, the Law of the Pathan. And first among the laws was the demand that they provide sanctuary and hospitality to any and all who request it. It was how bin Laden’s people had survived when the Coalition had come for their blood.

Sanctuary was given to any and all who asked for it. The Pathans would shelter Ruslan, if the bastard asked. They would have to: their culture allowed them no other choice.

So Zahidov had become convinced it was Ruslan persecuting him, stealing his heroin. And it wasn’t simply to hurt him or Sevara, no, though that was certainly an added benefit. Zahidov was certain Ruslan was selling it, perhaps to the same Moscow buyers that Sevara and he dealt with. Ruslan was selling it, and making a lot of money. Money he could use to pay the warlords and their men, money he could use to raise an army.

It wasn’t far-fetched. In 2000, taleban-backed extremists had poured over the border from Afghanistan in an attempt to overthrow the country. They had closed to within one hundred kilometers of Tashkent before they’d been stopped by Uzbek forces. If Ruslan tried to do the same, he stood an even better chance. He knew the land, and if his support in Uzbekistan still held, if those in the military rose to join him, it would be either a coup or a civil war.

These were Zahidov’s fears, and watching as the rising sun turned the already red hills of Afghanistan bloody, he gave them their due. A coup, or worse, a civil war, would destroy Uzbekistan, and at the end of the day, despite everything he did or had done—or perhaps because of it—Ahtam Zahidov was a patriot. He saw no conflict in wishing to do himself well in the process of serving his county, he saw no fault in the viciousness he showed his enemies. He wanted what was best for his nation, and he did what he did to ensure it. All his love for Sevara notwithstanding, it was why he had supported her as President in the first place. It was why he continued to serve her, despite their troubles.

It was why he was in Termez now.

The problem was—or had been, until that morning—there was no proof at all it was Ruslan behind these attacks.

Then Andrei had woken him before dawn, rousing Zahidov from a lonely, fitful sleep. He’d told Zahidov that the Ministry had received a call from Captain Oleg Arkitov in Termez, that the captain had in his custody a Pathan who swore he’d seen Ruslan Malikov to the south of Mazar-i-Sharif, enjoying the hospitality of General Ahmad Mohammad Kostum, an ex–Northern Alliance commander and one of the more notorious warlords of the region. That the Pathan in question, a man using the name Hazza, had successfully identified Ruslan Malikov from a set of photographs.

Proof, at long last, but Zahidov needed to hear it for himself.

He turned to Arkitov, saying, “I want to speak to Hazza.”

They went by armored personnel carrier from the bridge to the barracks, Zahidov riding with Arkitov and four of his rangers. The soldiers sat on their benches, their automatic rifles in hand, bored. After the extremists had tried to overthrow the country in 2000, the Uzbek Army had been redeployed and remodeled, breaking away somewhat from its Soviet antecedents. Now the soldiers here in the south, the rangers, imitated the Americans, in training, unit composition, and tactics.

Zahidov looked back at the bridge, the only ground route joining Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Friendship Bridge, the Soviets had called it, although the Americans had tried to rechristen it “Freedom Bridge” once their war against the taleban began. It was the Soviets who had built the bridge, who had established this sole land crossing of the 130-mile-long border between the two countries, formed by the Amu Darya. It was over this bridge the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and it was over this same bridge that they had limped back ten years later, defeated. It was a refugee bridge, had seen thousands of Afghanis cross it, fleeing both the taleban and the Coalition. It was a terrorist’s bridge, one of the ways al-Qaeda foot soldiers used to infiltrate his country.

When the Americans had secured the rights to use Karshi-Khanabad, they’d argued for the bridge to be reopened. The UN kept offices in Termez, both for UNICEF and UNESCO, and the organization continued to use the city as a staging point for distribution of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. The International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, resided in Termez as well, its efforts more focused on the military than the humanitarian. Staffed by the Germans, Airlift Detachment 3 had supported Operation Enduring Freedom since the war’s start. The Germans had renovated the old Soviet airfield, built their own infrastructure, pouring millions of euros into Uzbekistan in the process.

The APC jostled Zahidov as it made its way back into town. He was sweating already, could feel beads of it trickling down from his hair along his spine, inside his cotton shirt. Nowhere in Uzbekistan got hotter in the summer; the temperature today was liable to hit 49 Celsius, over 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and that was cooler than it had been for a week.

Just another of the thousand reasons that Zahidov hated Termez.

They disembarked at the Border Watch HQ, a cluster of Soviet-era buildings that had served as command post, once upon a time, for the ground soldiers being deployed into Afghanistan. Now it was staffed by Arkitov and his rangers.

The captain led him from the garage into the air-conditioning of the dormitories, entering a common room with television and tables. The television was on, broadcasting the news, but the room itself was unoccupied. They