Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

He was shaking his head. “We don’t covet our neighbors, Drummond. We simply tell them what we want and force them to provide it. If they get rambunctious, like the Chechens and Georgians and Armenians, we make examples of them. But why would we want Uzbeks or Tadzhiks or Kazakhs back as part of our country? They’d all go right back to sucking off the tits of the Russian people. We simply want their oil and cotton at prices we set. You see how much better this is?”

He was asking rhetorically, of course. He knew damn well what I thought. In fact, he was chuckling, enjoying the amazement on my face, which was when I realized the only reason he’d explained all this to me. The old man was sadistically letting me know he’d pulled off the biggest scam in world history, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. It was his little victory dance, his way of saying, “Okay, so you stole Alexi from me, but don’t kid yourself that it was any big thing, because in the scheme of everything you’re hearing it’s a pimple on a gnat’s ass. You sacrificed yourself for nothing, Drummond.”

It was creative cruelty at its best. And the very fact that he was explaining all this in the first place was also a sly way of informing me he intended to embalm me in Russia’s deepest, darkest corner, and never let me smell anything close to freedom again.

He suddenly turned to his goons and barked something in Russian. Then he turned and gave me that sweet, grandfatherly smile. “Well, Drummond, we will not be meeting again.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I growled, and he gave me a curious look.

Then he turned around and walked out the door, leaving me to ponder a future that was going to really, really suck.

You’d think that by the twentieth of April there’d be a hint of warmth in the air. I mean, April is a few weeks into spring-the ground should’ve been thawed, the trees should’ve been budding, and maybe even a few wildflowers should’ve had enough chutzpah to poke their stems out of the ground. Siberia’s different.

I blew hard on my hands and tried to warm them up before I spotted Igor heading in my direction. I quickly picked up my shovel and started doggedly hacking at the frozen earth. Igor had a thing for me, and I didn’t want to exacerbate it. He hit me once or twice a day just on general principle, and if I gave him more than general principle to go on, he beat me silly. I don’t know if Igor was even his real name. He was just so damned ugly that he had to be an Igor.

The other prisoners all kept their distance, I guess because they sensed there was something special about me, and they didn’t want any of that specialness to rub off. I didn’t blame them. I didn’t speak their language, so we had nothing to talk about, nor did we have anything in common since they were mostly thieves, murderers, and Mafiya scum, whereas I was an American Bar Association member who’d seriously underestimated his own limitations. But it was more than that. The guards had instructions to treat me differently, to hurt me on a regular basis, although nothing too serious, because I was supposed to survive. I was supposed to live to a ripe old age in this frozen hellhole with nothing to look forward to except beatings and constant pain, until I either went stone-cold mad or killed myself.

I had thought December in Siberia was bitterly frosty, but by January I realized I didn’t know the meaning of cold. And February was even worse. My piss froze before it hit the ground. I’m not kidding. These yellow icicles were striking the permafrost and shattering into tiny crystals.

I’ve never been particularly big on Russian cuisine, but you wouldn’t believe all the things you can make with cabbage. There are cabbage broths and soups and salads, or just plain raw cabbage itself. Raw fish heads were the big treat, but they only threw those on our plates on Fridays. I tried to make friends by giving mine away, but for some odd reason that never seemed to work.

Anyway, Igor continued to head toward me, so I chipped away at the icy ground even more furiously. I whispered a prayer that he was heading toward somebody else. That’s the thing about Siberian prisons. After a while, you get pretty damned selfish. They’re pretty much dog-eat-dog places.

Every morning the guards came through the barracks and dragged out the corpses of poor buggers who had died of disease, or malnutrition, or had frozen to death in their sleep. And this being a prison, there were a few murders every week as well. We were each issued a single, threadbare wool blanket that had been used by generations of other prisoners. The trick was to try to collect two or three of them, so the multiple layers could protect you from the cold. The barracks were unheated, so in the morning you’d awaken covered by a layer of frost, so damned stiff you could barely climb out of bed. Your blanket would be gone, and you’d have to go through the rest of the barracks and find the culprit, and then you’d have to fight to get it back, because without it, you wouldn’t last long. The training I’d had in the outfit was the only thing that saved me. After I beat up four or five of the biggest badasses in the barracks, nobody wanted to go near my blanket.

Suddenly Igor was right behind me, and I tensed for the inevitable assault. What would it be? A rifle butt in the kidneys or the kick on my backside that would send me flying? Nothing happened. I slowly turned around and faced him. He hooked a finger. I put down my shovel and followed him like an obedient puppy, coughing and hacking the whole way, because I seemed to have caught a very nasty cold.

We ended up at the headquarters, one of only two buildings at Camp 18 that had wood-burning stoves. The second we walked inside I felt like my skin had caught on fire. I hadn’t been near heat in months, and the sudden sensation burned.

Three or four senior guards were huddled around a stove in the corner, and they all looked up when I entered. One got a pissed-off look and climbed off his stool.

“You are Drummond, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised to hear English. None of the other guards spoke English.

He pointed a hand toward a doorway. “You will go in there and take shower.”

I didn’t ask him why, because I’d been trained to comply immediately with every instruction. Given that it was me, it had taken a bit longer than normal to learn that lesson, and I had the scars to prove it.

I nearly passed out in the shower, my first in over five months. There was a small bar of coarse, sandy soap, and it took a lot of hard scrubbing to get all the dirt and grime off my body. I was actually bleeding in a few places, but what did I care?

I slipped back into my ratty, smelly clothes and walked out ten minutes later. The guards were all huddled around the stove again. The same guard got up, snapped cuffs on my wrists, then led me outside to a small truck with big tires. We climbed in the back and left. After about an hour, the truck stopped and we climbed out at an airfield, the same one I’d landed at five months earlier. Was it really only five months before? A big military Tupelov airplane was idling on the tarmac, and the guard led me stumbling toward the plane.

We took off a few minutes later, and while it was a long flight, I don’t remember much of it, because I was floating in and out of la-la land. I’d wake up every few minutes hacking and coughing, and it dawned on me that it wasn’t a cold but pneumonia. I hadn’t recognized the chills and fever before because I was always chilly and shivering anyway.

We landed at a military airport I didn’t recognize and left the plane for a military sedan. I had no idea what was going on nor did I ask. Russian prisons teach you that, too. Don’t ask questions: You might not like the way the answer’s delivered.