Don DeLillo - Underworld

"You go airport?" he says.

We get in the back and Brian goes to sleep on a collapsible gurney.

About twenty minutes later, out the glass panel on the rear door, I see a huge billboard advertising a strip club.

INTERACTIVE SONYA Nude Dancing on the Information Highway

We get to Sheremetyevo and the driver wants dollars of course. I wake up Brian and we go into the terminal and manage to find the man from the trading company. He tells us there's no particular hurry because we're at the wrong airport anyway. "Where should we be, Viktor?" "No problem. I have arranged. You went to club?" "The club was very interesting," I tell him. "Lenin was there." "There is Marx and Trotsky too," he says. "Very crazy thing."

This is what I thought after we arrived at the military airfield and boarded a converted cargo plane that went bucking down the runway and lifted swayingly into the mist. And after the plane reached cruising altitude and I got up and found a window slit in an emergency exit behind the port wing and pressed my face to the glass to gather a sense of the great eastern reaches, endless belts of longitude, the map-projection arcs beyond the Urals and across the Siberian Lowland-a sense mainly of my own imagining, of course, a glimpse through falling dusk of whatever landmass was visible in the limited window space.

And this is what I thought after I sat down again.

I thought leaders of nations used to dream of vast land empires- expansion, annexation, troop movements, armored units driving in dusty juggernauts over the plains, the forced march of language and appetite, the digging of mass graves. They wanted to extend their shadows across the territories.

Now they want-

I explain my thinking to Brian Classic, who sits on the opposite side of the aircraft facing me. We're on parallel benches like paratroops waiting to reach the drop zone.

Brian says, "Now they want computer chips."

"Exactly. Thank you."

And Viktor Maltsev says, "Yes, it's true that geography has moved inward and smallward. But we still have mass graves, I think."

Viktor sits near Brian, a slim figure in a leather coat. We have to shout at each other to converse above the noise that drones and rattles through the hollowed-out interior of the massive transport. He tells us the plane was originally designed for mixed loads of cargo and troops. There are dangling wires, fixtures jutting from the bulkhead. The aircraft is all cylinder, all ribs and slats and shaking parts.

"It's a company plane, Viktor?"

"I buy it this morning," he says.

"And you will use it to ship material."

"We fix it up good."

His trading company is called Tchaika and they want to invite our participation in a business scheme. We are flying to a remote site in Kazakhstan to witness an underground nuclear explosion. This is the commodity that Tchaika trades in. They sell nuclear explosions for ready cash. They want us to supply the most dangerous waste we can find and they will destroy it for us. Depending on degree of danger, they will charge their customers-the corporation or government or municipality-between three hundred dollars and twelve hundred dollars per kilo. Tchaika is connected to the commonwealth arms complex, to bomb-design laboratories and the shipping industry. They will pick up waste anywhere in the world, ship it to Kazakhstan, put it in the ground and vaporize it. We will get a broker's fee.

The plane comes into heavy weather.

"There's some concern in Phoenix," I tell him, "about the extent of your operating capital. The kind of safety equipment we're talking about to move highly sensitive material can result, Viktor, in expenditures that are quite dizzying."

"Yes yes yes yes. We have the expertise." He unzippers this word with a certain defensive zest as if it sums up all the insufficiencies that have mocked him until this point. 'And we have the stacks of rubles that are also quite, I may say, dizzying. You didn't read Financial Times? I will send you."

Brian is lying on his side wearing his coat and gloves.

"I forget," he says. "Where are we going exactly?"

I call across the heaving body of the plane. "The Kazakh Test Site."

"Yeah but where's that?"

I shout. "Where are we going, Viktor?"

"Very important place that's not on the map. Near Semipalatinsk. White space on map. No problem. They will meet us."

"No problem," I call across to Brian.

"Thank you both. Wake me when we land," he says.

I look at him carefully. It's cold and we're dead tired and I look at Brian. The knowledge of what he's been doing, the calculated breach of trust-I want to stay awake while he sleeps so I can watch him and fine-edge my feelings and wait for my moment.

Viktor takes a bottle of Chivas Regal out of his overnight bag. I do a mime of polite applause. He goes to the flight deck to get some glasses but they don't have any or won't share them. I go through my bag and come up with a bottle of mouthwash and take off the cap and lurch across the aircraft shaking out the grooved plastic piece as I go. Viktor pours some scotch into the cap and I return to my seat.

We have no seat belts and the passage is growing rougher. I have the bottle of mouthwash wedged upright in my bag so the stuff won't spill. We are the three of us alone except for the person or persons flying the aircraft and I think we feel a little forlorn in the huge tubed space, more like people in a shabby terminal late at night than lucky travelers aboard their plane. I sip my Chivas from the cap, listening to the shaking structure around us, the minimum ribbing, a sort of endoskeletal arch that makes every groaning noise in the hymnal of manned flight. The scotch tastes faintly of gargled mint.

"What did you do before you joined Tchaika?"

"I teach history twenty years. Then no more. I look for a new life."

"There are men like you in many American cities now. Russians, Ukrainians. Do you know what they do?"

"Drive taxi," he says.

I notice the way his eyes leap to catch mine, slyly, a brief merged moment that allows him to mark my awareness of his superior status.

He is drinking from the bottle.

I see the plane as if from some protected position in the sky. It is a swift shape hurtling through the dark-I felt sure it was dark by now. It is a mass of dark metal racing through the rain and wind as if in a swift scene from an old black-and-white movie, scored with urgent music.

Viktor asks me if IVe ever witnessed a nuclear explosion. No. It is interesting, he says, how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. The Soviets always wanted bigger yield, bigger stockpiles. They had to convince themselves they were a superpower. Throw-weight. What is throw-weight? We don't know exactly but we agree it sounds like hurled bulk, the hurled will of the collective. Soviet long-range missiles had greater throw-weight. They had to convince themselves with numbers and bulk and mass.

"And the U.S.?" I say

Eyes flicking my way, happy as carnival lights. It was the U.S., Viktor says, that designed the neutron bomb. Many buzzing neutrons, very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property

I watch Brian sleep.

"ibu have your own capitalist tools now. Don't you, Viktor?"

" You mean my company?"

"A small private army, I hear."

"Also intelligence unit. To protect our assets."

"And scare the hell out of the competition."

He tells me that the name of the company was his idea. Tchaika means seagull and refers poetically to the fact that the company's basic business is waste. He likes the way seagulls swoop down on garbage mounds and trail after ships waiting for the glint of jettison at the bow. It is a nicer name, besides, than Rat or Pig.

I look at Brian. It's better than sleeping. I don't want to sleep until I'm finished looking. Traveling with the man from Arizona to Russia, side by side through all those time zones, sharing magazines and trading food items from the little peel-off receptacles, my dessert for his radishes because I'm fit and he's not, Sky Harbor to Sheremetyevo, all those hours and oceans and pales of plotted land, the houses and lives below-maybe it was just the seating arrangement that made me want to wait before I confronted him. It's much too clumsy to accuse a man who's sitting next to you. I wanted a quiet face-to-face in a cozy room somewhere.