Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

I was too surprised to react, but Kursan reached over and forced Saltanat’s hand backwards, twisting the gun out of her fingers with a single swift motion.

‘What the fuck was that about?’ he asked, slipping the gun into his pocket. Saltanat looked as unruffled as ever. Crazy bitch she might have been, but I couldn’t help wondering if she ever felt anything, or whether she was ice queen all through.

‘You believed that stuff about a family chat over a few beers? He’ll have spilt everything he knew for a backhander,’ she said. ‘Illya told someone where Gulbara was, and this is the result. And if we don’t leave now, we’re in the frame for her murder, and now his. You think her butchers aren’t coming back?’

I listened, suddenly attentive, for a car engine approaching, the stamp of feet outside. Nothing but a silence made ominous by the stink of fresh blood.

‘We have a joke in Uzbekistan,’ Saltanat said. ‘We send Security forces out in threes: one who can read, one who can write, and one to watch the dangerous intellectuals. We don’t even trust ourselves, let alone each other. I knew Illya would be reporting back on me; I just don’t know who else he was whispering to.’

Even as she spoke, she stepped over Illya’s corpse and headed for the door. Kursan and I looked at each other. He shrugged, and I followed her. Kursan gestured for me to carry on, before heading back into the kitchen. Saltanat got behind the wheel, and I slid into the back of the car, just as Kursan emerged and clambered into the passenger seat. We moved off back down the rutted track, the village as deserted as when we arrived.

‘Nobody heard the shots?’ I asked.

‘No one who’ll do anything about it,’ Saltanat said, and the look on her face discouraged me from asking any more stupid questions.

‘Where now?’

‘Back to Osh, to the airport,’ she replied. ‘Better we get out of here before they find the bodies.’

‘I took care of that,’ Kursan announced, and didn’t even flinch as the dull crump of an exploding gas cylinder boomed behind us. ‘Hard to tell what’s what when everything’s been cooked to a crisp.’

Behind us, a watery spiral of smoke twisted upwards. I told myself it was my imagination, but I wondered if the roast meat I could smell on the air came from the bodies we’d left back there. I felt like an amateur in the company of two hardened criminals, but I told myself to focus on what really mattered. The dead women, the dead children, snowflakes settling on cold faces, bellies ripped into a confusion. Saltanat could take care of the politics, the intrigue, the corruption; I simply wanted to stop seeing Yekaterina Tynalieva’s eyes staring into the dark.

Just for a fucking change, it was starting to snow; light at first, but I’d been caught in too many blizzards to expect it to stay that way. Sure enough, the weather got worse until, by the time we reached the outskirts of Osh, it was hard to see more than the length of the car bonnet ahead. There weren’t going to be any flights out that day.

Saltanat’s mobile rang, and she pulled over to the nearest snowdrift. I watched as she nodded, her face grim, listening, not answering. She rang off, and put the car into gear.

‘Problems?’ I asked, expecting and getting no reply, watching her profile as she stared ahead into the falling snow.

I consoled myself with the thought that anyone following us had to put up with the same whiteout, and the traffic boys were all safely tucked up in the station house counting their breakfast money. I figured we’d head back to the guesthouse off Ak-Burinskya Street, so I was surprised when Saltanat took the road that leads out to the airport. The car skittered and slid across the ice, but that didn’t stop her putting the metal to the floor.

‘There won’t be any flights out, not in this,’ I said, but she ignored me, and took a slip road away from the main terminal.

‘You’ve missed the turn-off. The terminal’s back there,’ I added, not sure whether I wanted to be helpful or irritating. From the look on her face, I had a pretty good idea which one she’d settled for.

She sighed, as if dealing with a slightly dim child.

‘We’re not taking a commercial flight,’ she said, spinning the wheel hard right and into the lee of a low building with a corrugated roof.

My heart sank; if there is one thing worse than trusting body and soul to an airline pilot, it is being flown in some rusting heap by an exile from the Kazakh air force over some of the highest mountains in Central Asia during the winter’s most ferocious blizzard.

I looked over at Kursan for moral support, but he was slumped in his seat, eyes closed.

The snow battered against me as I got out of the car, and followed the others towards the hangar. I wasn’t happy with what I found inside.

‘We’re going up in that?’ I asked, shouting above the noise of the wind.

In front of me, pilot already in place, was a krokodil . Not a dead junkie, but a Mil Mi-24, an old Russian helicopter gunship, known as a krokodil because of its camouflage patterning. The Soviets used to call the gunship ‘the flying tank’, not because of its protection but because of its wallowing lack of manoeuvrability. As we clambered aboard, I couldn’t help noticing that the metal of the door was scarred and torn, pocked and pitted with what looked like small-arms fire. Maybe the beast was a veteran of Afghanistan, one that had ended up being pensioned off cheaply to us. Or, more likely, at considerable expense, once the necessary viziatka had been slipped into the appropriate hands.

We sat down against the bare metal sides of the gunship, clutching at webbing straps as the pilot edged us forward out of the hangar and into the storm. The helicopter rocked from side to side as the winds started to buffet it, almost managing to drown out the belch and snarl of the engine. In weather like this, it was going to be a good four hours before we got back to Bishkek, and I needed a believable story to tell the Chief. Unapproved leave of absence was probably the least of my crimes, and the Torugart Pass looked ever more likely as my final posting.

The weather and the screams of the engine made it impossible to talk, even at the volume Kursan operated at, so we concentrated on getting as warm and comfortable as we could in a flying fridge. Kursan staggered to his feet and rummaged at the back, dragging out some canvas sheets and throwing one to each of us. I wrapped myself up, ignoring the smell of sweat and oil, and shut my eyes. And despite the noise and the endless shaking, I managed to doze off.

And dream.

Chinara’s last few days were a flood of despair on my part and pain on hers. Morphine kept her asleep for most of the time, and when she was awake she often didn’t recognise me. All her energies were concentrated on breathing, on hauling in the last few cubic centimetres of air, that final flailing to keep the flame alight. At times, her struggles would knock her embroidered cushion to the floor, and her hand would scrabble for it, her eyes frantic until she felt the familiar material under her fingertips.

Our hospitals aren’t the best equipped, to say the least. Unwashed floors, broken windows, filthy bathrooms, even dirty operating theatres. Most families bring in a more comfortable mattress, favourite meals, home remedies to supplement the out-of-date fake medicines that the administrators buy from China. It’s not always negligence or corruption; more often than not, it’s just lack of money.

I took a month’s unpaid leave of absence, although I knew I wouldn’t need that long. Or rather, Chinara wouldn’t. I spent all my time by her bedside, catnapping in the chair I’d bullied out of a ward attendant by flashing my police card, going home only to shower, shave and change when the stink of me got too much.