Fire
On
The
Mountain
(In four ACTS)
Act 43
[The Work of]:
Adler S Walt
Dedicated to: Daria Andreavna Skorbogatova
& Yelizaveta Kotlyarova,
And Elena Antolievna Komarova
ACT THREE: Loyal’nost
Set in Breuklyn Soviet MicroRepublik,
2083-2084ce, 7-8 A.R.
Prelude
Inner Moscow, 2083ce
The snow fall was exceptional. It was as if god had pulled a vast white blanket upon us to tuck Russia to bed, and then the devil and a host of petty bureaucrats did not take the time to keep the power running, and so this winter was the winter that tens of thousands across the country, were tucked in without heat into a long kiss goodnight.
Blat.
But I have a very supple and extraordinary woman lying naked in my arms and below a great burgundy comforter she slumbers gently as I prepare to read her epic verses of Amerikanski poems written in her name while I caress her soft blond lioness mane.
“Where did you find that?” she asks like a pouty German baroness.
I am paging through a leather bound compilation written in what she recognizes with a dismissive glance to be English. The room is dimly lit with the flickering flames of candles and a dim glow from the night stand casts a thrilling ambiance. The flat itself is on a fourth floor walkup just fifteen minutes strolling on the prospect up to the Arbat. And of course so close to the center of everything our heat is on just fine and the room burns with reverberations of a passionate exchange. But yesterday a general curfew was issued and the capital placed under martial law. Everything has been locked down and there are tanks in the street. So we bolted the door turned down the lights and made love in the only three ways we knew how.
Waiting for the government to lift the curfew.
Having given her every bit of me, my life included several times via deed and also a contract she humors me sometimes when after love making I read her old poems from past lives we led long ago.
To remind us that while the great uprising is not yet over, we are free because we have finally found a quiet little place to love each other roughly and via our previous assignments, absolved ourselves of our past crimes. Thus our hard work has allowed us now to have a simple life where we can carry out the only justifying and partially redeeming characteristic of the species; expressive and wanton love. To do so we must now hide in plain sight.
In a well-fortified safe house buried in the heart of the Russian capital.
I lock eyes with a woman who in another life broke me down and sold me as a slave. Her eyes, her eyes! Even the bluest day on the Caspian contains no such expansive shimmer; there is no comparison for this level of captivation. All things we have done, or did or may even still have to do are only so that we might never have to bear again the painful agony of our tumultuous separation.
“Read then my little bleak one, my Mayakovsky,” she says disarming me.
And thus smiling I read:
Life of the slave show!
I will remove you from your castle and make you watch the way we live in the wilderness below.
And she slips off her high heels into a star-crossed stare down,
She always calls the shots,
Gun shots to blood soaked makeshift cots.
The shots she calls are complicated.
She must find me highly dedicated.
She mostly deals with the haves, and I am the have nots.
The rules are anything goes, but no know one “knows”.
If she’s been known to steal the weapon from my over coat,
I’ve been quick to remove my clothes.
I spill_ for the thrill of those invited, I can kill on compunction, I still have the will;
To activate the full facilities,
Of word play, and use of allegory_
To execute deliverance of a blue-blood-bleeding testimony_
A Former Soviet love story.
Involving a Chechen peasant and a woman once of Penza now mostly of night.
It will be of little glory, the way I tell the story.
It’s based upon real people. Real blood_ and real bleeding_
Of taking-of wanting-of feeding the need.
Of fucking and fighting and the will to survive in a City of glass, steel, and greed.
Real emotional explosions_ her eyes are always so bright,
She has long since urged me to put down the weapon and give up the fight.
But I have a last name that is easy to place,
I could buy some new papers, but not a new face.
They can spot us on site!
It’s the ongoing struggle of those who lead:
A tragic_ unyielding life of night.
We’ll sell a sordid tale.
I wish I had found her back when she was nineteen or twenty_
Before she had to do what she did,
And does what she still do,
To keep from starving in the shadow of plenty.
My objective and travail_ is to recruit the members of this audience into a clandestine apparatus_ And harness our collective clandestino_
To force a mighty train to prematurely jump the rail.
I wear suspenders with buttons, a Mayakovsky cap, and iron plated under shirts.
I dreamed up a plan to get revenge on a man, or a series of men, hit them in their pockets,
Hit them where it hurts.
I called her late at night_ bleeding all over the place.
She said don’t get your bleeding heart on my red carpet,
And her mother fixed me midnight supper.
Herring, Beets, Palemni.
And she wiped the cake of crimson off my bloody Chechen face.
(Small talk)
“And the snow fall is phenomenal this year”_
She retorts”
“Don’t get French with me my dear.”
_They really punched yer ticket_ did a number on you in the district, this time.
(She loves the way I make the Amerikanski noire lingo mix out eloquently with a touch of old Fenian rhyme.)
The pay phone call cannot be traced_
The weapons hidden in the drywall_
In the space your men replaced_
The ice cold taste of 9 proof Baltika is refreshing, albeit haram_
Those good patriot informers_ those zombies_ those follow-follow men.
They beat me for a fortnight,
Demand I sign a grim confession,
Attesting to the building and/or placement of some near but unexploded bomb.
“Why can’t you be like normal men?”
I told her: “I’m hungry for my freedom and I’m never going hungry again!” (Sung)
And she says;
“I cannot love you if you’re dead.”
Please put the house in order,
Use the lithium,
Use Russian Standard Vodka; use my lips if necessary,
To rectify the madness as it expands inside your head.
I’m not saying that I love you now or later,
Simply I refuse to cater_
To all the “incidents generated lately” when you do not behave_
Explain how you plan to court me_
From a black-bag-disappearance.
In frosty, shallow, unmarked open grave.
If you’re going to dedicate, in your exacerbation,
Resistance efforts to a woman (me) who can only love you out of pity,
In this bleak and foreign city_
Even if the words sound epic, also pretty_
Fuck it man! You’re doing it again!
I sigh and then reply:
“Did I tell you lately you’re my dorogaia and if not for loving you_I’d surely be dead a thousand times at the hands of ten thousand lesser men?”
Oh, when last we wrote I spoke of devouring her, for hours.
To tease her- to please her_to want her to need her- amid a bed of hand-picked, Peonies; or provincial-wild-flowers.
She isn’t one for single serving dancehall roses, she moves too fast for poses.
Her bright eyes beckon as they dart about the room filled with bluff and imitating glee_
“Accelerate your tempo of evacuation_
The checkpoints separate the have everything’s_
From the people who are dressed like you_
And carry paper work like me.”
I suppose you and only you_ the woman that I trust and choose_
Can entrap these men of business with their whoring,
With their thirst for further treasure_
With long lines of china white running from the mouse trap to their nose.
How many slaves does it take to keep this neon play ground running?_
I know via your profession you can undertake a series of transactions_
Blonde dynamite distractions_
Before any know exactly what’s in store.
Reduce the need for automatic weapons,
Acquire us the proper routes and channels_
And guide us through a tunnel to the vile trading floor.
She looks at me and rolls her eyes and says in Russian “Lord have mercy.”
I said “I don’t have imaginary friends; there ain’t no need to curse me._
Where we met is unimportant.
Did I mean to enlist her?
I couldn’t resist her.
I had causes and struggle and vengeance and plan.
I shouldn’t have kissed her
And longed for her touch,
For surely she lays nightly in the arms of some husband, some man.
We have become a most curious spectacle, lately.
You hate me? Push further,
Took you home from the bar stool,
Bite me_
Kick me_
Bait me.
She could have killed me that first night, just with things that she said:
I looked at her once.
And the wheel was turning quickly but the hamster was dead.
The wheel was her cold rationale,
The hamster was the morals that once governed the wheel.
And there were bright lights, that up lit her eyes_ and whatever that implies.
Separating what she does_
From that which she’s still willing feel.
“You take up so much clock!
Blood from a rock!
I must return to District work which begins at moon rise.
And the steel trap will slam shut_
And bind me behind those District walls.
And the men of that vile district,
Will use their credit cards_
To try and pay for my flesh and access to between my thighs.”
She said “root for me.”
I’m going voodoo out tonight_
To earn my money the City.
If you truly are my friend,
Understand that I’ve been hungry and I’m never going hungry again.” _(Sung)
I am looking down the barrel at my pin striped enemy.
And the columns we’ve been shaking
And lives we’re always taking,
I was seeking sweet surrender and I sought it at her feet.
You think you’re not a target? You pay your taxes don’t you?
Are you blind to their transgressions?
A cavalcade of charging bulls rampaging down the street.
Everything from here out, it’s true,
My bones rust, from your star dust, your fairy eyes_
I loose myself to you.
She says, “Oh the things you might do,”
Our harsh and untenable positions have emboldened us_ as we know no one cares or pays attention, or even has a clue.
If we want it bad enough we can get it:
“For the rest of our lives_
_we do.”
Even if that life, she says, will last no longer than another a day or two.
Kiss me _fight beside me Dorogaia,
Even if to you my name and words are sometimes strange,
For what they do to your body and mind,
And what they did to my family,
Help us create a major crisis at the Moscow Stock Exchange.
You’re crazy she said,
You’re crazy won’t get me dead.
We’ll talk about your ridiculous plan in the morning.
It’s all a slave show, and if you didn’t know:
Russians who help rebels aren’t even given a funeral, much less a warning.
“Davai,” I exclaim, which means ‘enough’.
“Poem #038: Moscow Hostage Crisis Part One.”
“Dedicated to me, Natasha Andreavna,” she exclaims right back.
Her hands pantomime the ghost of quotations for that name is certainly not the one she was born with.
“Are you blushing yet?” I ask her in jest.
“We know not how,” she is all she replies.
She then claps with excitement, kisses me wild eyed then retreats under the covers.
“Did you like it?” I ask following her under the vast red folds of the heavy blanket.
“I like very much it when you try and talk so dirty to me in American,” she says in Aramaic with a devilish little smile.
I wonder when she learned to speak like that.
“I am capable of just about anything when you believe in me,” I remind her.
She laughs at that. Though knows the full extent of it.
“I believe, that you believe in Breuklyn Soviet,” she says softly and kisses my lips.
“You whisper always of dangerous things,” I tell her slyly.
“Story time tovarish lover. I challenge you now. One for one. Two for two,” she purrs.
“The trouble sweetness with your stories is that not a single one of them are true,” I say to her. She feigns a pout.
“The greatest fun with your stories is that so many of them are!” she retorts.
“Natasha, what will be the prize for the partisan with the premium story?”
“The usual my daring Vasa,” she says with a smile.
And licks her lips at my obvious arousal.
Her amusement and our perpetual survival had gotten us in quite a yarn of danger. She’s been worth every bullet. As well as dirty things I dare not reveal at this juncture that I do to women as well shaped as she. Or worse the tender things I do to balance those out and then so let my guard fall, completely.
Under the folds of the burgundy comforter we languish in the sensual embrace of each other’s longing as our pillow fort assumes new dimensions. A vastness will unfold with the power of words and the only distraction from the yarn of escapade will be the fortified lusts we will unleash when a parable wears thin. She will draw on fairy tales and I will spin from the ghosts of my dead friends and the darkness still in me. Somewhere in between that space hope will float perhaps. We expect and encourage each other’s full participation.
“Ladies always go first, for this is the code of the Haitian gentleman” she declares and launches right into her opening tale.
Let the mind games begin.
Chapter 1
Fadeeva 6 Safe house, 2083ce
Moscow
Natasha thus exclaims;
“If I am woman, and he attempts to be man then we are easy prey.”
For the gods, the spirits, lesser demons and also human devils! Sin and general winter are historically undefeated. That’s a fact. Above all those forces seeking to make us base slaves, we are bound most to our own wild passions!
I am creature ruled almost selfishly by my passion, and so is he. Inevitable really that so much did burn.
I do not make any remembering when we had this conversation. Only that it occurred.
It was sometime after our very first meeting.
Sometime before I found myself handcuffed to a chandelier fixture in the Empire Hotel awaiting my deadly snuff and torture! Sometime after blue moons of their Bohemian festival.
Sometime before that murderous uprising called “the Great Disorder”.
Before I sold soul to devil without making ask of questions!
Certainly after I realize I love him as I have never loved a man before in this life or the next, or one after that.
Before I realized that I had loved him several times before. And that we are both so dangerous when in love. To each other. Also world at large.
I will now make careful my choice of my words.
Speaking his American language with my Russian thoughts is to attempt placement of entire Caspian Sea into hip flask. My English when spoken without any intoxications hints that I will speak more clearly with my actions.
Were he sober then when we found each other on that roof top, instead of passion punch drunk he’d not have ignored the threat our lusty adventures soon presented. We would have walked away. Despite his fascination with me. Despite my overwhelming beauty.
But that is not how the story was to write itself!
He could deny me nothing. But no one dare should point the finger to me that I did not give warning!
Perhaps we were blinded by the vodka lullabies, the bright lights of the towers and the good night moon.
“I’m going to use you,” I announced on the roof of the district. And he didn’t care.
“Completely and utterly so that I may get from point A to point B.”
Did I say that to him, or did he say that to me?
“I consent to such use, use away,” he immediately retorted, “we will see how far in the alphabet we can climb with you on my shoulders!”
“The Russian alphabet, it has more letters. The letters also can take different meaning based on where they are placed. The sounds, they will completely change.”
“Place yourself besides me for now,” is all he said to that.
“I shall, but tomorrow this will be finished. How long can you make more of your favorite poetic noises, your rhymes in English as you devote your life to something hopeless that cannot ever be?”
He looked at me with big bright hazel eyes.
“I like the way that all sounds, he claimed, “I like way the way the word ‘hopeless’ rolls off your lips. I am an Amerikanski, as you accuse me. Hopeless is just a call to arms.”
What could I say in the face of mad idealism! His passion did touch me.
My eyes flashed blue silver back.
“I’m going to devastate you, you know,” I casually mentioned and I took his hand and thrust it against my heart so he could know that I was flesh and blood like him. No angel. Or Devil. Or ghost.
“Well we shall not later claim I wasn’t given a fair warning,” he whispered but for some reason did not try to kiss me.
“Had we met in another time, were I a different person wearing a different life; I would still know you,” he declared, “I cannot put the emotions that I wear like cufflinks to my funeral to bed as easily as you.”
In the darkness of the district night. In the wilderness of North America I repeatedly told him nothing but white lies. I did what needed to be done.
“It is sad that it all has to end,” I remarked.
These were the first words uttered in acceptance of a risk and a warning between myself Natasha Andreavna and the mad idealist named Vasa Adon. Our love and the totality of our affair will be thing of Postsoviet lore and Amerikanski voyeuristic fascination. There have been many doomed loves before. Captured artistically in bright theatre lights of both empires. There have been tales of hard hearts which remain unbreakable. And wild bohemian longings that conquered heroically the conventions of their day.
Often Vasa, whose American name was Sebastian would ask me, whose Russian name is Natasha; “Is the story of our love to be more like Russian literature or more like American cinema, mere Paramount Pictures?”
I would cryptically respond,
“General Winter has never been defeated, not once ever.”
So we performed miracles. In the wilderness to remain together a variety of strange longings took shape and bore most irregular fruit.
That much is clear.
The first miraculous act was turning his tragic tears into vodka. This was my happy gift to him. To turn an unusual and storied past into a heroic song and dance. And make his dead mechanical heart beat like a war drum as the waves of the uprising crashed upon the nation we shared or really I should say, co-inhabited.
The second miracle was the theft of the blue moon itself. Such a task was just a starting point for him to please me, also my ransom.
He took to heart that the materialism of a Russian woman is but an ante up to play a most choice and high stakes game of loyalty.
The third miracle was for us to put bullets in the devil himself. In retaliation for crimes of the past committed against us, and our love, and humanity in general.
The fourth miracle act was that I could truly come to love him. And forgive him for what he had to do in my name. In the name of his long dead wife.
It took several lives and a solid contact between us to accomplish these four acts. They will make wild tale and epic song.
Mine I did with ambition first and then secretly, begrudgingly with love. His he did to please and save me and avenge his fallen tortured soul. Via my company and our secret series of kisses we made war on the devil and his entourage. And we painted together a portrait that in the end makes Russian literature look like tame romantic comedy, and Amerikanski Cinema, just flickering soma on telescreen.
To beat back brutal hunger and or feed those dependent upon them; to meet the benchmark called survival; human body and mind capable of any number of general sins.
At times grossly unpalatable to human soul. If you believe in such things! It is not just question of what we all must to do to preserve our own selves. The shifting of alliances in pursuit of securing our deliverance from the wilds of worldly living is exhausting. Strange bed fellows make and break even the strongest of hearts.
The wilderness at night is vast and treacherous place that to some is source of fearful panic. To others bevy of potential opportunity!
In darkness of night fallen angels appear as demons at times. Most treacherous are our human misjudgments. The nuances of intention are lost to perceptions of trickery. Violations of trust. Devils can look angelic for a time and humans with host of mixed motives can see best kept secrets revealed like so much dirty laundry blowing in the cold winds of night.
Not here to talk to you about night! Or about all the devils that thrive in its long shadow.
This just story about when feeling returns to the heart when the body has been dead for many days. So many that the world of the living is but a restored memory. Also about the selling of souls and the banding together of destinies. Also about whether poems can feed anything more than hope in the face of hopelessness.
And whether more reckless and brazen hope, is indeed the only cure something so called hopelessness invites.
So it’s Haitian love story, also a Vodka Lullaby staring brave Russian angel from Penza me! And devilish American paramedic born in New York. If that’s how like look at it. Little like the Christ Story, has less violence and more nudity and good deal more vodka from tears in place of water into wine.
And it also about trying to steal away another man’s wife.
Which is whole category of sin onto itself.
It’s about old souls coming back for each other, even if just for a fall.
This yarn is play with words based on true Breuklyn noire based on two people not “being in love” or “missing each other” or “being tortured by our supposed fate”, but instead some wide range of prophesized events which we set in motion via of our high impact knowing of each other. Maybe like in a biblical sense.
But with more carnality! And gun play.
Set not in heaven or hell like the Bible but in the Holy Land of Breuklyn and the Wilderness of the Financial District in the City of New York, mostly to glow of blue moon light at night and structure fires by day.
In Moscow! In Haiti! In the heart of Haiti! In places that were and also soon could be!
This not just the story of Sebastian Vasili Adon and I, Natasha Andreavna Skorbogatova; it is also a tale of forbidden-impossible love in the age of anarchist trials; of great train robberies in the former Soviet Union, and of a tavern in the wilderness where lost souls find short but wholly tumultuous company in post Capitalist America on the eve of a global human rights revolution.
And so begins the tale of Natasha and Vasa, a Russian me and a most irregular Amerikanski he and the partisans we led into a vile battle. Star crossed lovers with the moon as our witness, fuck and vodka as our means of cross interrogation and higher ground beyond the waves of hopelessness and fate as our primary objective.
He begins with a murder and a war. I with a warning but a promise of deliverance via passionate love, once adequately demonstrated.
And yet,
“We begin our tale with a double funeral!”
Chapter 2
Wakefield District, 2013ce
Bronx Soviet
Natasha Andreavna continues her grim parable.
Somewhere in the Bronx a sea of red brick high rise tenements hits a long highway bed and then the dead place of poverty becomes a green and hilly oasis. This juxtaposition is striking.
They all found their way north along that endless highway to a place called Wakefield.
Victoria Christiana Contreras was dressed in all black, a lace vale covering a pretty albeit heavily make upped face and contacts which turned her eyes vaguely feline brown blue. Her husband, Ernesto Rafael Contreras was in denim jeans and black shirt as he owned no funeral appropriate suit and had only sobered himself up long enough to attend the two funerals. He was unshaven; his baby face was markedly hard for the first time in many years.
The weather was poorly.
It was nearly New York Winter, but it had refused to snow this year. They were in a crowd of several hundred mourners anonymously performing mass mourning while numerous people did so more dramatically.
The first Funeral was for Sebastian. It was very well attended considering all the bridges he had burned that year. But very few people believed he was really dead.
Everyone was speaking of “seeing it coming.” Also of his epic potential now buried just as many had suspected before his 30th year.
It was rather like a circus actually. There were way too many people speechifying, justifying and explaining, and there was an overabundance of booze flask flowing. And many of the mourners were black, and many were wearing blue ambulance Class A uniforms which was striking too. His parents were kind and bourgeoisie. They didn’t break down or cry. They just quietly held court and whispered on the sidelines, his mother in particular with select old friends paying their respects over whisper.
It was a closed casket. Sebastian had shot himself twice in the head with pistol and then toppled seventeen stories off a roof. There was very little left of his face.
It was theoretically a Hebrew funeral. But the only thing Yiddish about it was that it was done on the cheap. He went in the ground less than 24 hours after his alleged suicide.
There not being a note was the most un-nerving aspect of the whole thing.
Sebastian was amongst other things a prolific writer. Not leaving a suicide note was highly suspect, vaguely anticlimactic. But, the inner circle knew exactly why he’d gone and done what he did, what he thought he had to do.
“Over a woman that didn’t love him,” explained his best friend Nikholai Trikhovitch. And then he spat.
“I want to see the body,” demanded a woman named Anya Drovtich with thick black dreads and the blue FDNY uniform that many are wearing illegally out of respect for the fact that Sebastian had once been an EMT with that organization until they fired him.
She said what many were thinking, but few other than the parents, Trikhovitch or Mickhi Dbrisk had the cred with the dead to declare.
Victoria and Ernesto quietly stood in the background of the mob of sorrows. They recognized many of Sebastian’s associates and former lovers and comrades from the Z.O.B., his gang, clique, club, and ‘cult’ (which many have and did call it), whatever it had been, or still secretly was.
Victoria knows the female faces slightly better than the male ones. Ernesto was more involved peripherally in the internal club politics.
“The casket stays closed sister,” declares Mickhi Dbrisk, a tall Jamaican in a black pea coat. His grey-blue-black armband and the small silver pin on his left lapel indicating him as a person of authority here.
“I won’t believe he’s dead until I see the body,” Anya repeats.
The mob mills about in the brick house cold, the mother of the dead man nods to Mickhi Dbrisk. Sebastian’s mother has circular, red wizard spectacles. His father is portly and normally jovial, albeit not really such as his first son’s last first funeral.
Dbrisk opens the casket.
And there lies the body of the poet, paramedic and rebel hooligan Sebastian Adon. He appears to be wearing a pair of bootleg designer Ray Band dark sun glasses. A Haitian flag is tucked in his left lapel.
Four hours, three shots of vicious Rakia, two Coronas and a car service ride later.
Somewhere on the coast of Brooklyn,
The second funeral is quite small and fancy. It’s on the other side of town. Ernesto and Victoria take a black town car hired out from the Mexican Express. Sebastian’s funeral was in the Bronx and Natasha’s is in Southern Brooklyn.
There are fewer than two dozen people there. No speaks anything but Russian and no one cries. Natasha looks as beautiful dead as she did alive, like a gently sleeping doll. The funeral was nominally Russian Orthodox, as that was her husband’s religion. And although Natasha was technically Ivoryish, the husband has spared no expense. Her mother had been flown in from Penza, on the husband’s insistence she was to be buried here and not brought back to Russian.
There were a couple lady friends that Victoria knew without knowing. There was an assortment of men, looking suspiciously at each other.
Ernesto’s Russian was much stronger than Victoria’s though it was his third language. He made out vaguely hushed interaction. Scene size ups.
Victoria knew very little about the nightlife of Natasha outside of Mehanta. Only that there was husband named Maccluskey and a boyfriend named Surge, and also a corporate lawyer named Dmitry. She had a best friend named Tanya.
She could basically only guess at who everyone else was besides the husband. Maybe.
Allegedly Natasha’s heart had stopped roughly 24 hours ago. The medical examiner inconclusively blamed a hazardous midnight cocktail of red bulls, vodka shots and cocaine, but Natasha wasn’t really known to play with that stuff, anymore.
The paramedics found her body at the Stillwell Station. She was pronounced dead at Coney Island Hospital.
She had in her purse, amongst other things a small book of poems written to her by Sebastian Adon. He allegedly killed himself just a day after confirming she was gone.
“Allegedly, blat” was the only word in English being bandied about this funeral.
“Who is to blame for the death of my daughter?” her mother asked Victoria in broken English when no one seemed to be paying attention, “which one of these men?”
“I don’t know.”
“Natasha told me that there was some crazy ambulance poet in love with her. She hinted that this man had been trying to steal her away for about a year. Who killed my daughter’s heart?”
“I don’t know,” repeats Victoria.
“Is that man here now, this Sebastian?”
“No. He’s dead. He shot himself twice after seeing your daughter’s corpse. We just came from his funeral,” says Ernesto quietly.
Ernesto looks like he might cry looking down at Natasha’s body buried in Peony flowers and fancy white casket. He had loved her too, while still loving his wife of course. Everyone had loved Natasha Andreavna, without knowing very much about here because she was young and free and exotic and beautiful and impossible to tame.
Many men here had tried, her husband included.
“Who is to blame for this catastrophe?” asks the mother again.
And nobody really knew. Allegedly a lot of fucking things had happened over the course of the year 2013, in the wilderness of New York City.
“A senseless tragedy. A senseless goddamn waste of…,” the very well-dressed man in the custom cut black suit whose name is Dmitry, who had almost said ‘talent’ aloud, but instead, said “…of perfection.”
Natasha’s mother began to quietly sob which is permissible for a woman and mother to do at a Russian funeral. Her daughter had come a very long way to die for absolutely nothing.
Ernesto grabs Victoria by the arm, “It’s time to leave.”
And his eyes say he means it.
Ernesto looks as though the hard defenses of his man code machismo will crumple any minute now. They wait in the cold outside the funeral hall for another Mexican Express cab to take them home. Ernesto finally begins to weep heavily without sobs for Natasha whom he once very much loved and Sebastian who was one of his closest friends. He had introduced them and thus felt now more than any other moment in the year responsible for what had happened. In both Peruvian and Russian culture, real men do not by any stretch of imagination cry in front of mixed company. Wives included.
But cry he does wiping away the tears as they form. Victoria is an American, the children of Fenian Catholics. Fenian Catholics cry in front of whomever they want.
The cold wind blows deathly. The Mexican Express is nowhere in sight.
Victoria Lynch takes out a leather bound volume of Sebastian’s poetry on the subject of Natasha Andreavna. There were three copies only. She finds some solace in having the only copy that will survive the ordeal. He had always told her he hoped his poems would absolve him of the calamity caused by loving that woman.
Rafaela Ernesto mourns.
Victoria Christiana reads on.
There are 99 poems in total. Sebastian had loved her something endless. And when she died there was nothing on this cold earth left for him to love.
Himself included.
Natushka,
I want dark-sunglasses.
I want them good enough to block out hope.
I once wanted it too bright.
Now I want to wear them until someone tears my eyes out.
I want them fearless and blacked out.
These glasses, so no one has to guess what’s underneath.
I want them glasses bad.
I want them to confirm
your worst fears about me:
To show you how much I care about you
And everything except what I’m supposed to want.
When I find them;
I’ll pull them spectacles from their shelf
Like I’m choosing new eyes to see the world properly;
Through the hate-cries and the love-cries too;
And I’ll wear them like armor.
Like a bullet proof vest.
Lest I lay my eyes on another thing of such profound beauty
That lies in another’s arms.
It’ll be the goddamned glasses they bury me in.
Cause she hates more than anything;
Than to see a grown man cry!
Her tragic tale then concluded, I, Vasa also called Sebastian think to myself; ‘we could blush at the pain we’ve caused others in the name of good causes. But, we do not.’
“We surely pulled that job off, albeit most traumatically,” I testify to her and the bugs in the wall of the safe house.
“Never send a man to do a woman’s job,” Natasha replies.
“Highly dramatic, I applaud you. A grand and deceptive opening. Though not the double funeral I was thinking of. Certainly that was indeed a most tragic day,” I tell her.
“We were only parted for a lunar month,” she reminds me.
“Well if my memory serves me correctly, prior to that month I had to wait 28 years to find you. I was speaking more to those we may have briefly traumatized with our out of body elopement.”
She gives me a stern stone face.
“You’re completely whipped. Is that the right word? Whipped?”
“It is dorogaia. And perhaps I am. Whipped like a planation slave until I can no longer feel pain or fear. Such was needed to love you as I did.”
“And to love me as you do?!”
Her face again feigns a pout.
“Possessing you has only intensified it I must confess.”
Then suddenly a mad woman’s devilish happy grin.
“Do you remember the games I used to play?” she asks.
“Used to, ha. Or, still do?” I say tracing a figure eight with my finger about her navel. When you used to make me prove how much I loved you with epic impossible feats?”
“I loved those games!”
“And I would deliver on them each time with a larger ante.”
“That was something. The moon! You shouldn’t have,” she smiles.
“My first story then to counter your opening reminder of our sad funeral will be about the only woman I’ve ever encountered who has more wild machinations in her head than you and the emancipatory mission to retrieve the man who made me the zealous partisan I am today.”
“Maya and Andrew,” she whispers her eyes now ready to devour detail.
“Emma and Avinadav,” I say using their truer names.
“My story begins in a seedy hotel on the outskirts of Addis Abba, Ethiopia. The only nation never brought under the iron heel of the white man and his oligarchy. Not even one.”
Chapter 4
Hotel Waka-Flaka-Flame,
Addis Abba, 2012ce
Ethiopia
Laurence Simon, PhD is the recently discredited director of a non-governmental organization called the American Ivoryish World Service, which he founded. He used to lecture idealistically at several places where ivy grows thick to ivory idealists, with soft hands. He filed over ten thousand reports over his career. Violations committed in every square corner of inhabited earth. But now, he has a sholem of medium-caliber in his mouth with the hammer cocked back. He’s been drinking a shit ton of fire water burn, but the pistol still tastes salty. And a pistol in the gob of the Gulliver well that always just tastes like self-righteous death quickly closing in.
The lights in the room are flickering in and out along with the city’s most questionable power supply.
He’s been holed up in small hotel (the Waka Flaka Flame) in Addis Abba, Ethiopia since he got news of the horrific murder of his wife and daughter. Sometimes he stays lucid long enough to remember the pictures he was shown of their faces beaten beyond recognition. Or the one of his daughter with her breasts cut off. Mostly he drinks to die. He’s coming to crescendo.
There was greater, more sadistic violence, which surely came before their demise. Laurence Simon’s written over a dozen books on Africa; on the Western sack of Eden and mass collective movement away from the norms of civilized behavior. The virus of slavery and the bacterium of colonialism
And after his immediate banishment from professional circles for as of lately urging support for the long running armed struggle against the Haitian Government, he has remained there in his own hell and quasi-lucid liquid oblivion for one month’s time.
The Maccoute marauders raided the village of Cange about six weeks ago.
They killed the whole town of somewhere under a thousand unarmed men, women and children. Bayoneted a whole orphanage of skinny, half starving little girls after sexually assaulting them. Hearing things like that makes good people want to vomit, but most just tune it out by not reading valid news sources, or just looking in a different direction. This particular attack was actually on the cover of the New York Times. So no one could really be in denial about the true depravity of the regime. And dead, white raped aid workers sure did sell papers too.
This was sort of the Maccoute way.
Well documented. Preying on the defenseless, as the world looks the other way.
Degradation and utter violations of those abstract things called “Human Rights” take place every single day. In every nation on earth if you come right down to it. Albeit in varying degrees of what-the-fuckery.
These Maccoute marauders then stormed a monitoring outpost just outside of the village after the African Union peacekeepers fled without firing a shot. As they always almost do when not selling off their weapons to whatever faction pays top dollar and-or fucking around with local underage prostitutes. And there the Maccoute militia got their hands on the Haiti regional staff of the Human Rights Watch. Including the wife and daughter of Laurence Simon and wrote everyone in the book of grisly slaughter.
Even in Chechnya, at the height of the conflict the Russian military didn’t go as far as killing the entire foreign national field staff of the Service. Well they did make Fred Cuny disappear. They were periodically abused, beaten and arrested, interrogated then deported, but this was the first time they were singled out of murder alongside those they were observing. Generally the group has its members picked off one by one, not slaughtered in the middle of conflict zones openly, deliberately and with the militia men obscenely taking so many pictures.
There hasn’t been a sober moment since for the ghost of now broken Laurence Simon.
Maya Sorieya Solomon is a woman with two names. She can also gamble with a gun even with two bullets inside it. Her nom de guerre is Maya Rose. Her favorite color is purple. She has been in the dimly red lit hotel lobby for a three-quarters-an-hour sipping on a short glass of Knuckle Acre Blue label, mixed with something local. The world is still a nasty, terrible place where one often needs a series of stiff drinks anywhere they can be found to arrive at fleeting moments of inner tranquility.
There is a very real genocide going on in the land of Haiti, a wild madhouse of an ethnic bloodletting. These atrocities in Haiti have been going on high and low for over three decades, particularly in the Southland and Haiti the regions where under the sands lay so many oceans of black gold.
The intensity of the genocide is enough to barely bother those besides an Amerikanski neo-liberal or a university student looking for something to believe in, but thanks to some pop singers and occasional rapper, with this particular genocide one can at least attach a name to an African destination, provided you begin with the intellectual understanding that Africa is a continent, not a country. It has various parts. Africa is just so large and so full of such mass torment even the highly educated lose touch and tune out.
A heart of darkness, a broken Zion, a bad man place full of gun toting highway men and people with communicable diseases that have long been eradicated in the West. And plague: lots and lots of it. The pharmaceutical giants won’t magic Johnson 24 million people if they can’t pay up.
A clandestine apparatus based in the newly liberated micro republic of Breuklyn has recently vowed to make a stand there and answer Laurence Simon’s late call as it were, though they’ve had their eye on Haiti for some time. Maya Solomon was the undisputed leader of that band; a stunning mix of idealists and wild dagger merchants, until she was confirmed dead in a tragic series of events dubbed “the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis”, just three years prior.
“Neo-Jacobins!” once declared their Wall Street and Beltway detractors, back when anything of importance was happening in those respective places. Detractors and nemeses alike were always quick to bandy about the words “vile anarchists”, but there are no black flags flown here and the club now administers social services to 80,000 people in its seven district zones of control. These were women and men of the Breuklyn coast who like many across this planet in the turn of the millennium found the notion of a so-called hopeless battle for the good cause of human freedom more than just a thing to write a miserable French play about. They held a belief in their inevitable victory. A willingness to fight coupled with a duty to act.
Seven years after issuing the “Declaration of a State of Emergency in the City of New York” they are a hard proud people’s army of Human Rights oriented “Westies”. Called “the Breuklyn Otriad” in some circles. Referred to as “the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club” by friends and nemeses alike. Bound closely by a secretive cohort, its name spray paint stenciled on all their zones of control: Z.O.B.
No one has yet to explain what that acronym stands for, or who is at the core of this radical club allegedly founded in Jerusalem at the turn of the millennium.
They are people with guns in hand who believe in high minded ideals and die for them regularly, loudly speaking of something called “real change”, utilizing “conscious thinking”. Very glamorous when one signs up, but rather inglorious long before you get your pension. The Israeli Mossad conservatively places their true military capability at approximately 780 combat tested fighters. The Russian Federal Security Services, the F.S.B. places them at 4,000 by counting all their foreign medical workers, engineers and teachers as “potential combatants” and the American Joint Special Operations Command (J.S.O.C.) even via the N.S.A. still has a great deal of trouble differentiating the club’s “enemy combatants” from “domestic terrorists”, its factions from its caucuses, its working groups from its wide sympathizer base on the East Coast of the formerly United States of America and throughout the Wild West Indies. But since the armistice, all three million citizens of Breuklyn Soviet have officially been declared “stateless people”.
Maya has been in the game for a very long time, but she doesn’t appear to be quite aged by the politics or hazards of it. You’d think by appearances she is in mid-late-twenties, and she would laugh at you for it and not even pretend to be vaguely flattered. Tell you about the wonders of yoga and the tantric arts! “The Club” is democratically run. It is led by an Executive of thirteen officers elected once a year. She was a founder of the club’s Israeli Branch. And was Chief of Staff of its American Branch for three years leading up the conclusion of the revolt. Now she does not hold an official title. Three years ago she was killed in the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis and confirmed dead having given her life to liberate the people of Breuklyn.
She leads now from the field and from beyond the grave. When you die in this Club you often end up back in Africa. The old voodoo legends were in fact mostly true. As were radical advances in science long kept from the general knowledge of the people.
She finishes her stiff drink and the glass lands hard on the table.
She casually saunters ups four flights of piss soaked stairs. The power is once again out and the generators at the hotel have shut back to only the most necessary components, like supplying the crimson neon lights of the hotel bar, which flicker and flash “Live Girls” in both Amharic and Tigriti. It’s an inside joke. There are no girls working here. She swipes the pass key to Laurence Simon’s room, which sympathizers have supplied her with. Though the wall paper of the hallway is peeling after being nearly a decade out of fashion; the electronic card reader works just fine even with no power. She walks in right as he’s finally about to pull the trigger.
“Please hold that thought just another ten minutes Laurence Simon.”
He almost shoots himself in stupid shock seeing the elegant Yid, blood descendant of King Saul skillfully wrest the burner away from him in a Breuklyn swipe. She has star qualities and long flowing auburn hair. Her skin is dark for a blan without being olive. The faded fatigues of her blue uniform do little to hide the voluptuous curvatures of her body. She’s stunning but even more lethal. A red sash is tied about her waste. But, she’s not a pinko these days. Her medium caliber burner is loaded with non-lethal Afula specials is only vaguely concealed on her left outer hip holster making just a small bulge over the leg of her uniform pants. The Pin of Palmares, the universal badge of safe passage for the blan in most liberated zones of noire Africa and Gran Columbia is fastened to her right epaulette. On her right shoulder is a button peel away, which if exposed would reveal her to be an internationally licensed Cuban paramedic. And her hands themselves are shrouded in the thinnest possible black polymer gloves to conceal the intricate tattoos that cover both her hands and wind their calligraphy up her forearms.
One marked as such is left alone or overtly aided these days in the Free City of Addis Abba. But this is not her outdoor attire. When not in an air-conditioned, window tinted vehicle she moves about in public a light weight grey synthetic fiber burka which was designed by the Japanese to keep the wearer remarkably cool, it leg covers tear off into a mini skirt; although such a practical joke has not found time to play itself out since she bought the thing.
To cut right to the chase, being a highly attractive white woman in the middle of East Africa is not very problematic. But, being an international martyr of the human right movement believed dead by the all of the security and intelligence arms of the various major oligarchies and then turning up alive, well that’s very bad for business.
There’s an international war, a multi-lateral bloodbath going on between the world’s populations and the world’s oligarchies. It’s really not clear yet who’s going to win. But when leaders of the resistance are confirmed dead and elaborate tricks were played to even produce their bodies, well let’s just say Maya doesn’t do soap box oration anymore or casual heartfelt spoken word like she used to.
“I plead sorrow for the horrific murders of your wife and daughter, as well as many of your many comrades. I am an avid reader of your research, longtime admirer of your work and addicted reader of your WikiLeaks contributions. If you wish to take your own life, that is a choice between you and the black baby Jesus, but I still require roughly five more minutes of your time.”
Baffled and sobbing, the foolishly inebriated Laurence Simon, whose brave activism brought original attention to the genocide in Haiti before the rock stars made songs and t-shirt slogans about it, has lost everything a man on this earth needs to live a happy life.
And he’s just too old to craft his own vengeance.
Laurence Simon sputters, “Those sick, evil bastards have taken everything from me,” he looks both jaundiced and indemnified. Ready soon to die.
“And in five minutes before you decide to take your own life, know we plan to take from them.”
“Who, are you?” he demands.
“My name is Maya Sorieya Solomon. I am an Old Soul like you. I represent a faction of concerned individuals always prepared to act quickly and with near certain international impunity. We need something from you so we can avenge both the people of Haiti and your murdered family. Just as your blue print calls for.”
The 77-year old, once fearless human rights crusader, a two time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and one time recipient, looks quite pathetic, as do most who are truly about to carry out an act of sincere suicide. The former director falls to his knees still ready to die.
“Give. Me. Back the gun so I can end this.”
It’s about to get endless.
He curls up in a pleading ball at her feet. Sobs and the stink of ethanol. In the part of the world that Maya came to age, which is to say the Middle East, it is viewed as completely dishonorable to let a group of men rape your wife and daughter, torture them, then murder them, and the only person you kill is yourself. If you don’t even take out at least one of them, then your claims at manhood went right out the window, no matter how old or young you are. And you will have a highly questionable place in the world to come. She puts her hand on his brow. Via such a sympathetic gesture she listens to his head with her vast powers. He did write quite a lot of good books though, she thinks, even if he happens to be something now of a broken self-murder coveting coward.
She quotes from his ubiquitous manifesto:
“There are many evils in this world that are made far worse by the great distracted, faceless mob which does nothing but fixate on their own shallow existence, for the great enabler of our oppression is our narrow self-interest.”
“As I don’t surely need to tell you, there are far more potential villains than heroes in the ranks of men. But my compatriots are cut of very different cloth. We will hunt every single one of these Maccoute brigands down and we will bring massacre upon them.”
“The fighters we command are all called zealots by all who know the word. The Maccoute and those that shield them are cowards and swine. They will fall to our irons in legion. We will reduce their encampments to ash. In the three minutes before you decide to leave this world if you wish to tell me something, it will greatly facilitate our wrath to be brought upon them.”
“Please, why are you mocking me. I have nothing useful to offer you or the dead! I beg you to just let me come to an end.”
“My dear, dear Pieter, I am an avid student of your life’s work. It was all noble and via it’s non-violence rather touching. Suicide is never a victimless crime, but I will kill you myself without sentimentality if that is your wish. I need you to tell me where I can find a recently disappeared man. I need you to tell me the exact location of imprisoned rebel commander Avinadav DeBuitléir. And I need you to turn over to me the login codes to the virtual Underground Railroad that is the international human right movement database.”
“To what end,” he asks.
“So that all those violations you’ve had to witness don’t ever happen again without punishment,” she responds.
A bullet quietly finds its way into the chamber.
Five minutes later, as Maya Solomon sometimes called Maya Rose steps into a waiting electric Lincoln Town Car a gunshot rings out in the hotel room above the messy cobble street.
BRAKA! Goes the gun. And his brains blew out over the hotel wall.
She hums a somber Kaddish for a great albeit now self-murdered man. The Yid prayer for the dead is too long to really do the whole thing so she hums just a bit of it, time being short and life, unfortunately being rather cheap.
She picks up her bulky iridium satellite phone to call her sometimes favorite partner. A damn fine dagger man. Truly a bi-winning character. A legend in his own mind at the very least. A dead man in the eyes of his former nation. But when he died for some reason he awoke in Russia. Because she had much work for him still to do.
Three years and war path later, he was again in Moscow and his work was almost complete.
“Peace be on to you,” she tells him.
“And also on to you that same peace,” he offers in customary reply.
“Our long disappeared comrade associate Avinadav DeBuitléir is being held by the Department of Homeland Security at a prison camp called Angola 42 near Greed Lake. I will uplink with you later and hopefully convince you of my plan to liberate him. Carry out your last job and head home to Breuklyn.”
“Ain Davar,” that’s all Sebastian Adon ever says these days.
That means “it is nothing to worry about”, or “never mind”, or “fuggettaboutit”. Depending what you do with your hands and body language. It’s a phone call so she can’t see his hands obviously. But she knows his hands and his handy work about as well as anyone can. They’ve been legally married in the State of Ivory since they were eighteen.
“Five minutes to nation time Zamni Cherie,” she responds in Haitian Creole.
My “dear partner”, that’s all it means.
Most members of the “Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club”, especially those in the Trinidadian Special Forces (ZOB) seem to speak Hebrew when whispering code on the iridium satellite phones or, Creole when making love. The revolution began in Haiti after all. Though, it was in a place called New York City where the tide began to turn and after four thousand years of servitude the forces of human emancipation began to prevail in earnest aided by parapsychology, black magic and the fighting prowess of the Fenians.
Chapter 5
The safe house has fine wood work and dark red walls. Its floors are beige red Jerusalem tile. It resembles something of a cross between the old world and the new. On an old school record player in the next room comes over the soothing beats of a Tribe called Quest. The emergency radio we use to digitally stream the Interweb is set to the Fire Station; the Pan-Caribbean pirate satellite radio, “to tell da masses no fire ‘til day see de white in dem dutty man eyes o’da oligarchy!”
“Fire! More fire!”
There are only two sources I trust completely for my news.
The People’s Television Network that was founded by my old friend Nicky Mapfre which Livestreams efforts of our international movement. And; the pirate radio broadcasts of The Fire Station stoking the rebellion with dancehall, with Reggae, with Zouk, with Kompa, Calypso and Wild West Indian rebel music songs. Interspersed amid its songs it serves as the global public address system of the “Militant Human Rights Movement”.
Everything else comes over Sky Pager.
“Your turn,” I say.
“Let my plots be made thicker than the blood you shed for them,” she says using an Old Russian idiom that barely even translates.
Whatever that means to her.
“It was understood by all involved that the take would be vast. Idea itself dripped of currency. Huge, as in a leviathan level steal. ‘Unprecedented theft.’ Complexity of job vast. But architects of robbery had worked out their neurological muscles so that each of the stakeholders would be thoroughly invested,” she explains me.
“And anonymously capable of carrying out parts without need of centralized control.”
And again her yarn then assumes the grim narration.
Ultimately, they’d be emptying several hundred banks in 48 cities, across 18 countries in a 24 hour period. Visigoth, Arabian and Mongol hordes working in confederation could not carry off so much treasure from vaults of West.
“And by they; I mean we.”
Natasha lays down her yarn.
In an accent thicker than that which she ever uses around me she explains:
“Job took nine years to orchestrate. Planned in its grandiose entirety in Bulgarian tavern on Lower East Side of the Isle of Man. Place called Mehanata Social Club.”
Man who planned job was Bulgarian dentist named Alexandr Dmitrievich Perchevney, called “Sasho” by his closest confederates. Also wife.
In Gregorian calendar year 1999, because of technical glitch in computerized monetary systems sensationalistic-ally depicted on proletarian media as “Y2K”, many system analysts were worried about system wide failure of internet. And electronic military defense complex systems more generally to experience temporary shut down on New Year’s Eve’ December 31st, 1999.
In order to protect critical defense and money changing infrastructure, major digitalized commerce, and all sort of civilian surveillance databases; governments and major corporations had begun scrambling to back up data on fixed servers, secure from the effects of the Y2K glitch which many big brained computer engineers believed would wipe out digital control of commerce via internet.
Enter Perchevney Bratva.
At time of plot, really just consist of newly immigrated Alexandr Perchevney and his scheming, but quiet brother strong man Slavi, a Krepki Mushik.
Along with wife Magda, and also three quite shady grinning characters named “James White”, “James Brown”, and “Justin Toomey O’Azzello” who all worked part time at “Bulgarian Cultural Center” on Canal and Broadway. Cultural front for a “cash for marriage agency”, an extralegal dental coverage program, and also planning center for lucrative racket called “no-fault-insurance”.
Also premium place to drink underage and dance naked, do cocaine; no questions asked.
Alexandr and Slavi, alongside millions of newly admitted “Soviet Ivory” began immigration to Brooklyn immediately after the Berlin wall came down and United States of America “defensively” begin total rape of former Soviet Union, Post-Cold War victory.
They came to coast of Breuklyn with advanced degrees, speaking multiple languages, and instilled with a profound skill in “extralegal entrepreneurship”; cultivated in a Communist society where graft and bribes was way of life. When informed by Amerikanski immigration officers that these degrees not worth the paper they were printed on, well perhaps this is how it all began. In former Soviet Union, Alexandr Perchevney was dentist, which there was really more like doctor specializing in dentistry. His wife, Magda, was “engineer”.
That really could mean almost anything in former Soviet Union where almost everyone was some kind of engineer.
But, Magda was computer engineer. And Slavi, well Slavi was good with machines and breaking man’s faces also with fists.
Alexandr, Magda, Slavi and infant progeny of Magda and Alex: four year old daughter Yelizaveta all moved from Brighton coastal ghetto to high ground of Washington Heights shortly after their arrival in winter of 1991.
It not take Alex and Magda long to realize that not only would they be treated like fourth class citizens of vanquished enemy nation, but that as immigrants their own people would arrive not just with advanced degrees and “dubious moral code”, but accompanied by violent thieves and Voorhis with links to privatization under way transforming KGB, into large and ruthless mafia, or in Russian parlance a Bratva.
It was shortly after his first brutal run in with a New Russian Voorhi seeking an overtly grand percentage slice for protection of black market dentistry clinic run out of Alex’s basement in Brighton, that Alex realized that one; his daughter would be raised outside the clutches of new Russian ghetto, so called Little Odessa. And two; to operate anything mega lucrative in this new soft country he’d need the help of the natives.
So Alex embraced Judaism and made friends with some ambitious Fenian tough guys. And before long he, his brother his wife and daughter were humming away Kiddishes in good times and Kaddishes in bad times with congregation Bet Shalom on Fort Washington Ave. And this was how Alex met first met young Misha Kishbivalli, a young Bulgarian pretend Ivory like himself though much wealthier having gotten to America three years earlier and begun actively trafficking in uncut conflict diamonds traffic out of Liberia.
Over a round of Astika beers Misha and Alexandr envisioned an establishment “where criminality and philanthropy, stealing and borrowing, culture and crime could all intertwine, “volumptously” and thus the Mehanata Social Club was born.
This was no word in English, Russian or Bulgarian.
By winter of 1992 Alex and Slavi had rented out second floor loft space on the corner of Canal and Broadway and registered it as “Bulgarian Cultural Center”. Despite having no liquor license or paying any taxes to internal revenue service Alex hired a large menagerie of former Soviet women to work as “cultural hostesses”, and bartenders and “cultural attaches”.
Also to dance the go-go.
In the entire sixteen year run of Mehanata at its Canal Street location much was exchanged, culturally and financially.
The enterprise itself was careful gamble that under guise of “multi-culture and diversity”, just about anything could follow.
Alexandr used the Russian language internet to recruit a wide range of medical professionals of former Soviet extraction to offer black market healthcare to other new arrivals, and long stayed arrivals without paper work. Next, Misha and Alex worked out a technicality called “no fault” where by accidents could be staged arranged all over Breuklyn and insurance companies could be divested of millions upon millions. And they reached out directly to the Jamaican Mafia to help them. They were recruiting veritable Gypsy underground army all fueled by greed, music of Balkans and Astika beer.
But the greatest expropriation was yet to come.
Chapter 6
The safe house has fine aged wood work and dark red old school wallpaper. Its floors are beige red Jerusalem tile. It resembles something of a cross between the old world and the new. There’s some smooth jazz soul now playing in the next room.
Fortified for the events of dystopia, we hold ground and keep telling tales.
She tastes like Cherries, cinnamon and cigarettes.
As her story reaches cliffhanger she lays out to absorb the life impacts of the previous yarn. In her past depiction of our demise and our initial interaction at times her fingers traced out words or images over the contours of my scar covered chest. Though at various moments she might make the dedicated pantimimocry of Hebraic hand sign for effect, falling in an out of Russian to English she carried the discourse most fruitfully with her glowing blue eyes.
It’s unusual for her to sit still. I have also never seen her sleep successfully until she is incapable of exacting further commotion. Or, has put down enough vodka to pacify those wilding inner demons’ urges to fight furious and wreak dance hall havoc upon those who aim to fondle or just gawk and watch her gyrate.
“What’s a Shtarker,” Natasha asks me curtly.
“A tough guy in low Yiddish.”
“What then is a Shatah?” she then asks.
“A rough guy in island slang, a guy who pops off.”
“What are Fenians?”
“Fenian patriotic freedom fighters.”
“Gender neutral?”
“Yes sweetness.”
“Growing up I read the Ivories were extinct, the Fenian a recessive genetic trait, and the blacks a race of violent monkeys being exterminated in a controlled manner via the Bretton Woods Association.”
Those are the kind of half-truths I’d expect from a State school in rural Russia, which I’m unsure if she even completed.
The Fenian are not a recessive trait, red hair is. As for the Ivories, yes they are mostly extinct and blacks, well don’t call them monkeys that’s actually quite overtly racist.”
“Are you really an Fenian Ivory in the employ of black internationalists?”
“No baby. I’m a Chechen peasant.”
“Suka blat.”
“You say real surely shit,” I say in a brogue and she smiles.
“Fenians! Tell me of them then. About your dear old comrade Hubert O’Domhnaill who you always manage to slip into your old yarns but is a character I’ve yet to ever meet while he was alive. Do it in your best Fenian brogue,” she demands.
“Hubert O’Domhnaill didn’t have a brogue in real life. And of course that wasn’t his true last name,” I tell her.
“What in two fucks do I give about real life?! Amuse me man. This will be a very long siege.”
I clear my throat.
Chapter 7
Allow me to introduce myself correctly and without subterfuge, my name is Hubert O’Domhnaill. Judge me not by me freckles and flaming red hair. If you do I will have to fight you!
I once saw a man beating a young prostitute in an alley across from the pub where I had my first real job, slapping the poor girl silly. And not knowing how to mind my business, being raised to always fight for something, always protect the poor, and never strike a woman; well me and my best droog Philly Hartman, well we jumped right in. We beat that pimp until he couldn’t remember his fucking name. Broke his goddamn ribs, his fuck face and his jaw. I don’t normally curse so much. But I hate pimps and I hate people who ignore violence right in front of them.
This was me first activist act.
Beating a pimp half to death. I’m a Catholic, but more importantly I’m a good human being and my father says that Jesus the Zealot used to beat the shit out of pimps too. They just can’t talk about that side of his life at church.
Cause of the kids.
Eight generations ago, or maybe nine, my descendants fled a famine engineered by the British to starve my people into oblivion and a bleak-black, hungry death. They killed over two million of us this way. Another two million fled on famine ships to the coast of Breuklyn. I mean we didn’t all go there. Some went to Australia, Boston, New Zealand, South Africa and other places in that poufy proper empire. But the great ones, the great ones went to Breuklyn. And I am descended from them. The best of the best, I can only assure you. We are the fearless firefighting, whiskey drinking, trade union loving, Catholic God fearing sons and daughters of those starving heroes.
Look at all that snow!
It hasn’t snowed like this in a decade since when a combination of global warming, the wrath of god and Department of Sanitation on strike made the roads of Breuklyn damn near impassible. The world has gotten hotter some reckon since then. This is the first hard Ruus blizzard in quite some time. Everything’s ground to halt. Sheets of pummeling sleet and fairy dust obstruct your windows and make all driving a tedious process. The Breuklyn Soviet doesn’t maintain a green collar aristocracy to shovel streets. Local commune committees do it out of civic duty. Or at times conscription. And only the main roads get cleared so ambulances can get in and kids can go to school. In the end a government really just only needs to provide roads, schools and the semblance of public safety. People can pretty much organize the rest of it themselves.
Since the Great Disorder, when the Separatist Wars began, well we’ve needed a lot of ambulances. Luckily we all belong to a revolutionary social club founded primarily by EMTs and paramedics.
The Sandooney Bathhouse is half an Avenue block long, one story tall and eight stories subterranean, ever tunneling, ever excavating underground. Its front windows are tinted black and are supposedly bullet resistant. A yellow-gold neon sign in Cyrillic advertises it as a banya, but it is also the headquarters of the “Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club”, a prominent local Otriad, or “irregular military detachment established for mutual aid and collective security”. Tonight the snow falls hard and it’s a packed house, but no one is bathing. The parking lot is over flowing, and deliberately some city buses, ambulances and wrangler jeeps have been arranged to barricade Mila Ave on either side of the banya.
The snow is really falling now. As if the sky itself is collapsing in brilliant bombardment of white crystal. But a trained eye can pick out several sentries, some Noire some Postsoviet, in long grey coats walking the barricade lines with thermal scanners and automatic rifles. Now and again the laser trip wire shimmers through the storm.
One of the chornay, mutters, “It’s brik as shit out here.”
That’s Noire Ebonics for, it’s “very cold out”. And chornay is Russian for “blacks”.
Now, some of you may be saying how did that crimson haired, freckled, six foot Fenian volunteer fire fighter like me come to speak Russian!? That’s because we drill endlessly in parapsychology and all of the best books on the subject are in Russian and my brother Shane is a huge, huge communist. I’ll have you know too I’m a Bronx Science graduate. Learning other languages is vital! What’s parapsychology you ask?
Well that’s how we won the first round of the Separatist War and began to really turn the tide in the global struggle for universal human rights. With freeness of mind!
There are several things that are not always in place unless a Congress is in session. Like the crew that has set up on the train track running above the grand bathhouse on what used to be called the F Orange line. The train car with the surface to air missile batteries stands out in the storm. The presence of Noire and Postsoviet Russian sentries amicably sharing Newport cigarettes is not uncommon, but only really seen in this particular Otriad. That the Ruus sentries are sober is also an anomaly.
For those people don’t really do anything all that sober.
In case, just in case the security forces of the United American States (U.A.S.) or certain other rival clubs or neighboring factions “feel like getting crazy” while our Congress is in session that train can light up the borough of Manhattan on our behalf.
Seven floors below street level Congress has been underway for the past several days. We’re now watching a film. It features my dead friend Sebastian. Former Planning Section Chief of the 15th Congress, a founding member of this Otriad who was gassed and shot dead during an ugly siege three years ago of a theatre on Times Square called the Millennium. Along with his wife Emma Solomon, twenty two other fighters, and the eight hundred and eight civilians they were holding as their hostages.
Adon and Solomon are now martyrs to the human rights resistance. Two names and faces crossed off a vast list of over two million active domestic radicals, separatists and subversive terrorists; in the N.S.A. PRISM database at the Department of Homeland Security; the intelligence arm of the American Joint Special Operations Command (J.S.O.C.); one of the two bodies which currently makes most decisions in what’s left of the United States.
We are watching Sebastian from beyond the grave because before he perished he recorded thousands of short micro briefings to accompany various stratagems coming out of the Planning Section which he led for two years before his death. The micro brief we are now watching at this 18th Congress accompanies a proposal called “Operation Gold Lion” which our delegates are deliberating on the merits of ratification, and potential execution.
And its detractors are pejoratively calling “Operation Marcus Garvey.”
“Orientate yourselves brethren for soon we will be off again to bring this long game to conclusion,” utters a man whose name was Sebastian, but who most call “Adon”.
There had been few men in recent American history who from such a young age were gleefully planning their martyrdom.
In the film he wears a brown pleather skally cap-beret. His eyes on screen are hazel-green; if they were any other color it had meant he was losing his mind from sleep deprivation.
Oh, I’ve seen it, not a pretty site. Green into grey on grey! As they were the day he died. His face is almost former Soviet. We call our municipality a “Soviet” because it is a three million citizen, democratic worker’s state organized largely around trade unions, district communes and direct democracy via a General Assembly. If you hear me or someone else call something “former Soviet”, we’re referring to Russia or the Eastern European states that fell under Russian hegemony between 1917 and 1989.
Basically a tainted, dystopian version of the life we enjoy in our new micro-republic.
Sometimes Mr. Adon was ethnically profiled as a Croatian or an Italian. He told people periodically, almost systematically that he was an Ivory, but that my friend is called a big white lie. I know for a near biological fact that his mother is of Fenian stock like me. Ivories pass the linage on the mother’s side, which means that Adon was at least half a Mic, which means he may well one day get a street named after him in Dublin. But, all that legacy aside he was born a racially ambiguous white guy from an upper middle class American family. His father was a dentist, his mother was an arts lobbyist, and his brother was a shuttle trader. And it was that privilege that allowed him such gross and unyielding impunity when he and I first enlisted in the anti- globalization resistance movement at age 15.
On the left side of his face, right below the eye was a peculiar red birth mark that looked not unlike he was struck in the face, although it gave him character said his parents, and his lovers. No one else noticed it, or if it switched sides of the face. Perhaps the state security forces noticed.
In civilian life people just asked, “Did you get in a new fight?” Implying that most New Yorker knew him from the papers, by his infamy and also boldness. A hero or a hooligan, well that part was never clear.
I knew this man since we were but 14. I believe I genuinely knew him. Not in a biblical sense, but in a heart-to-soul Fenian sense. I saw him get in a lot of fights over the years that he was not predicted to win. I’ve jumped in on a lot of his fights. I still do, am. My shattered bones, and nose, and much of my treasure I invested behind the ideas of this tragic man.
The hall of our Club is filled with women and men who might appear at first to an outsider to be strange bed fellows. The Club’s “Hall of Unsung Heroes” is below the Sandooney Bathhouse located within the Midwood Commune, a district of at the heart of Breuklyn Soviet.
Breuklyn Soviet is home to roughly three million people occupying the entire traditional municipality as well as some large swaths of what were once the Borough of Queens and all of Long Island.
Queens is now called Goddess Soviet; Flushing-Metropolitan Avenue is the border zone. It’s in the ever shifting hands of Latin Street gangs, Chinese Mobsters, and Orthodox Ivories which seem to own everything no matter who’s in power, yeah those people. Long Island, which we often now call “Strong Island” after the terrible battles of Fire Island, Block Island, Huntington and Farmingdale, is a highly militarized zone on its northern coast since the last ceasefire with the Federals, which was three years ago and still holding. Six months ago, the “Mile High Wall” went up cutting Manhattan off from the Bronx, Breuklyn, and what was once Queens. It’s not a mile high, but it’s still a rather sturdy apartheid barrier constructed along the Long Island Sound to hinder smuggling and human traffic in and out of the U.A.S. interior. Consult the maps in the map room if that sounds confusing. The ceasefire has held for just under three years.
Mostly. Discluding last month’s major atrocity, still hidden.
A sick provocation by our enemies where two families; twelve blacks and twelve Ivories were viciously killed and hung from a tall tree in Prospect Park overlooking the Grand Army Plaza.
The weather is brutally cold this time of year, but only really noticeably unbearable in January, February and early March. Speaking of and complaining about weather extremes is something of long standing local culture. Ice storms fall and make the streets outside difficult to traverse. It’s a real shit show. The women and men assembled are largely West Indian, Fenian Fenian, Russian Postsoviets and a good number of uncapped Yids. Those are some of the major ethnic demographics on the Breuklyn Soviet, but there are dozens of other clubs, otriads, and paramilitary formations that are larger than this club, but by no means organized to our degree of solidarity and sophistication.
We all look up at an enormous telescreen set upon the wall above the wooden crescent of the command table where our current standing elected leadership is seated; the 17th Executive.
We have been called to this 18th Congress to take a vote on an invasion.
Some in the Club’s leadership have advanced a proposal for an armed intervention into a war torn African country. The name of that country is Haiti. It is the tenth largest country on earth. Briefly it was two countries then after renewed epoch of civil war, one country again. The bunker’s hall is packed to capacity as a vote will be taken this very evening on a rigorous and costly venture. Seated at the long table with the large screen hanging behind them is the club’s elected leadership presiding over the delivery of the Planning Section’s general briefing. There are thirteen officers, three female, ten male. Most will likely be reelected to the Executive.
On screen Sebastian Adon clears his throat and reads from the micro-briefing. Here was a man who held the attention of crowds with his words and no microphone. His articulations were top rate. Cheers to you old friend. I hope heaven has a suitable bathhouse. I hope every night until the world to come you bury your face in the chest of that woman you so loved!
“Haiti, officially the Republic of Haiti, is a long suffering nation that occupies the western third of the mountainous isle called Hispaniola. It is the second largest island in the Caribbean and the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Dominican Republic to the east over a mountain range, Cuba to the northwest by sea and Jamaica to the immediate west by sea.”
The several hundred club delegates each represent various Commune level Section Committees, interagency Working Groups within the Soviet in the seven districts that our Club provides the Parastate infrastructure to, and the elected delegates of our various battalions deployed abroad. For a Club best known for our bathing and shooting, we do a great deal of effective Parastate development work. That’s a fancy way to say that we: keep criminals off our streets; we put out the fires; we run a large network of schools; we keep the water running; the lights on; we operate the ambulances; we run the hospital clinics; and also manage a system of courts, libraries, and a large credit union. There is theoretically a General Assembly or something that the three million citizens can elect people to. But, they can’t seem to tax anyone or hold orderly mass meetings; so really, it’s mostly up to the gangs, otriads, mafias, religious factions, trade unions and ethnic clubs to keep life going and the black market economy running.
Seven years ago during the Separatist Wars that we call “The Great Revolt” things got rather dicey. To say the fucking least; a blood bath of man on man crime. The Federals bombed the city for many weeks straight and then occupied all five boroughs with over sixty thousand National Guards.
And along with the Guards; the Homeland Security Secret Police; the American gestapo titled the Department of Homeland Security in their blue and black finest.
Thousands were rounded up and tortured in Barclay, Mets and Yankee Stadiums before our highly divided factions managed to acquire enough will and weapons to mount any effective resistance. Atrocities were committed on both sides. The exact body count is impossible to know. After two years of direct iron heel occupation, we finally drove the Regular Military and National Guard out of Breuklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
The manufacture of weapons grade uranium at Stonybrook University and the technical know how to build several small atomic weapons was in the end the second most effective piece of leverage to secure our independence.
Now, life is quite like Breuklyn in the early 1980’s, albeit with occasional ration lines, a very libertarian political processes and a different legal system almost Commune by Commune. That’s our word for neighborhood by the way, there are sixty four Communes in Breuklyn Soviet and we administer services to the largest and safest seven. Basically everything’s legal now accept slavery and just about everyone has a fire arm, so people try to walk with respect. I mean some say “crime is way up” and “a wide range of criminals have exploited this conflict to basically turn our borough into an international transshipment hub for drugs, women, weapons and terrorism into the U.A.S.”.
I can only speak with certainty for the Communes we directly administer: Crown Heights, Brighton and Manhattan Beach, Bedford Stuyvesant, Greater Midwood, Greater Flatbush, Star City, and Coney Island excluding the Seagate Garrison and “the Green Light Zone”. But, I think we mostly export reverse engineered pharmaceuticals, vat grown human organs, micro brewed reverse engineered alcoholic products, Chinese knock off every things, and various high tech hardware and also development technology; and business as they say is booming.
Citizens of the Breuklyn Soviet wear blue uniforms if they serve in the elite Citizen’s Army as emergency medical workers, fire fighters or peace officers; grey uniforms if they are from the security battalions, black uniforms if they are in parapsychological or negotiations units, and unmarked smart civilian dress attire if in the Information and Intelligence (I &I) Sections. Someone will have to explain that later, but basically we won the war for our freedom not just with a few home built nuclear weapons, a hostage crisis and truly epic New York grit, but also mind games and the powers of suggestion, precognition, and a lot of other stuff beyond my pension and pay grade.
It’s a tad neo-Marxist leaning towards Islamic fascist at times if you ask me. The uniforms I mean. I don’t choose to wear one. No one says anything about it to me. But, I’m just the equivalent of a staff sergeant when it comes to the overall chain of command. My soft power is my social circle and my microbrewery.
The Breuklyn Soviet, one of many break away American territories is not socialist in the slightest, but everyone has work if they want it, everyone has free healthcare when they need it and people mostly wear uniforms to work unless they’re out binge drinking their troubles away. And troubles don’t go away no matter what regime you live under. I heard yesterday that Shar’iah was declared in some sub-commune of Bayridge, but I doubt that will last.
Drinking is really not any more or less of problem than it was when we were part of the capitalist mega hyper-power called the United American States. Which is still being led by the Democratic Party and Barak Obama in his now fourth term in office, but it is as per before the revolt the U.A.S. is actually led by the bankers, corporate oligarchs and elite who front the cash for campaigns.
For now the Ivoryish media conspiracy has sided with we separatists.
It is the dead of Breuklyn winter so many wear heavy scarves and thick layers of Japanese polysynthetic fibers below their jackets and have skally caps pulled over their brows. A skally cap looks like a news boy cap crossed with beret. They were and still are worn by many leaders and field commanders of the early resistance efforts, like my friend Sebastian Adon and I, but after this rapper started wearing one, well just about anyone who wants to wears one now. Partisan caps, that’s also what we call them.
The ghost of Sebastian Adon continues:
“We submit to this Congress a policy and operations package designed to safeguard our own hard fought independence and restore the national sovereignty of the nation which gave birth to the Great Revolt. To aid our comrades there to assert full control over their resources, ports and airspace, and forge a pathway whereby the citizens of their nation will know dignity, human rights, hope and opportunity. The aim of our proposed policies are to dismantle the ‘Republic of NGOs’ and restore in its place an empowered, socially, environmentally and economically sustainable Republic of Haiti.”
“A series of human and environmental catastrophes have befallen the Republic of Haiti since the moment of her independence. It has repeatedly been stated that Haiti bears a certain ‘uniqueness’. We assert that this ‘uniqueness’ is artificially enforced to the detriment of all her citizens and must be corrected by political and popular action. She is the most disaster casualty prone nation in the Americas. She is the absolute poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and second only to India the highest perceived ratio of NGOs/to population on earth. Perhaps more striking is that her income inequality is seventh most unequal on earth with a calculated GINI score of 0.61. She is also the only nation on earth with a peacekeeping operation presiding over her military jurisdiction without a ceasefire in place between warring factions.”
“There are now 13 million citizens now living in that Republic and they are living with daily existential threats to their welfare. Currently her HDI is 168, the bottom billion outlier of the hemisphere. Haiti has an adult life expectancy of 63.1. A full 50.16 % of her population is living in multidimensional poverty. A 2012 World Bank survey places 6 million Haitians (59%) living below $2 (90 HTG) a day while 2.5 million (24%) are living below $1. Therefore 83% are below their own domestic poverty line. Adult literacy is at 48.7%. Only 5% of the population can functionally comprehend French their official language of education and administration.”
“This proposal will recommend policies in the following strategic arenas; direct military intervention via the People’s Army 99th Detachment, direct aid supporting the Famni Lavalas Party and long term mass capacity initiates and the consolidation of Hispaniola into the Federation of Autonomous and Soviet States.”
“The people of Haiti have a long and bloody history extending from antiquity when in 1492 Henri Christopher Columbus invaded the island and within a mere forty years eradicated its indigenous population. This population was soon replaced by French and Spanish colonials with several million captured African slaves. The French called the western colony St. Domingue, the Spanish called the eastern colony Santo Domingo. By the late 17th century the slave driven harvest of sugar was killing these slaves at a rate of 40,000 a year. Intertwined with the history of Haiti is the parallel and equally brutal history of Dominican Republic, the Spanish eastern 2/3 of the island, though brutal in a later and longer stage. The island of Hispaniola, which was united politically over several periods became a unified American colony from 1915-1934. Two murderous dictators took over and divided the island into modern Haiti and Dominica Republic; Francois Duvalier in Haiti; the infamous “Papa Doc” and Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina in DR; called “El Jefe” allegedly responsible for personally the raping of 1 in 20 women on his side of the island, killing 50,000 of his people and ordering the genocide of 20-37,000 Haitians in the Parsley border Massacre of 1937. Thriving on racial antagonism between noire and mulatto; they colluded to sell Haitians into virtual slavery at American owned sugar plantation from 1957 until 1988. Haiti’s history has been plagued by endless coups and civil wars stemming from ethnic, religious, and economic conflicts between the Mulatto and Noire Haitian elites.”
“The Mulattos make up around 5-10% of the population of the total 10 million control the drug transshipment infrastructure and dominate in actual land holding. The Noire Elite composing an additional 5-10% grew out of the father and son Duvalier regimes. They control most of the existing business infrastructure and visible political posts as well as the links to commodity transfer in DR and the largest groupings of right wing paramilitaries; the Haitians of Middle Eastern descent who number less than 10,000 people own most of the telecommunications and legitimate service commerce such as super markets, gas stations and retail. Further complicating the picture is a standing neo-colonial population of an estimated 46,000 mostly white development workers and missionaries operating with 10,800 formations are scatted virtually everywhere in the Republic.”
“Say the recent Schwartz White Paper: “The NGO sector in Haiti is best described as an uncoordinated mass of organizations de facto unaccountable to any governing or regulatory institution, i.e. no accountants, no auditors, no reviews, and no publication of poor or dishonest performance.”
“If these statistics are even remotely accurate; that would mean 83% or more of 10 million people, which is to say around 6 million are living in grinding poverty at less than $2 a day and mostly dying by age 64. To make things even more complicated, there is raging Cholera epidemic that has killed over 10,000 people, a long running CIA bioweapons testing program, a variety of narco-war lords in both DR and Haiti with private armies, tens of thousands of child Restoviks slaves and over 200,000 stateless people; Dominicans of Haitian descent trapped on the central mountain range by the MINUSTAH authorities and army of the DR. And, a low intensity left right civil war daily escalating with targeted killings.”
And then after some brave words the film flickers off and lights go gracefully on.
With that introductory data a man named Mickhi Dbrisk rises from the command table. That’s pronounced “MA-KAI” in case you were wondering. Mickhi is tall with thick well-kept dreadlocks and is always wearing a black pea coat when winter falls. His eyes are “kind but piercing” woman say. He doesn’t wear uniforms or a skally caps, but he is quite well known in many circles. He is one of the club’s founders and throughout the revolt a front line fighter in some of the most perilous operations against the National Guard and Federal armed forces which occupied our city. It was Mickhi Dbrisk that negotiated the absorption of Breuklyn’s major Crip Sets as well as the Orthodox Ivoryish Shomriim Auxiliary Police into the armed wing of the resistance. The influx of these several thousand trained women and men certainly helped the war effort at a critical juncture. Most notably Dbrisk lead the defense of the Battle of Brownsville.
Mickhi Dbrisk is currently our elected Chief of Operations of the 17th Executive. He is expected to be reelected. There are no term limits. With an extendible pointer, not unlike a long thin asp he identifies the major cities in Haiti which include:
“The entire country is covered in mostly deforested mountains on the Haitian side and thick lush jungle mountains on the Dominican side. Upwards of 93% of the tree cover has been cut down for harvest for producing charcoal. The country is divided into ten departments, 42 Arrondissements and 140 communes. Let us concentrate now on the Haitian western 1/3 of Hispaniola.”
“Port-Au-Prince is the capital, home to over 3 million; the only major Eastern coastal port in the country and the center of political power for the Mulatto & Noire Elite as well as Haitian’s of Middle Easterner descent. It is the point of exit for the nation’s gold mines in the North. It has the highest concentration of NGO anywhere besides India.”
“Major cities in the North moving from the west peninsula to the eastern border with the Dominican Republic include; Mole Saint Nicolas, Port-de-Paix, Le Borgne, Cap-Haitian: the second largest city in the country, and Fort Liberte. An island off the north coast called Ile de la Tortue is a major submarine staging point for drug runs into the U.S.”
“The departments of the Artibonite river valley include the large coastal city of Gonaives, and to the eastern interior there is Hinche and Pettit Riviere de L’Artibinite and Desarmes.”
“Cities in the Central Districts when traveling east toward the border with Dominican Republic are the Capital Port-Au-Prince, to the immediate east Croix-des-Bouquets, as well as Mirebalais to the central north and St. Marc on the central coast. The sprawling internal displacement camp complex called Penn-Mershing Central housing the 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent expelled from DR in 2016 can be found on the border near Quanaminthe.”
“The three northern administrative departments of Haiti hold some of the richest gold deposits on earth worth an estimated 20 billion and the site of an active genocide which has so far claimed the lives of over 460,000 Haitian citizens,” explains Mickhi Dbrisk, “his genocide is linked to the conscription of mining labor and repression of Lavalas had been uncovered by most of the liberal or rightist media.”
“There are no major cities or good roads in the badlands bordering DR on the eastern border. Haiti and DR have been formally at war for nearly a decade since the Dominican Republic denationalized and deported over 200,000 Haitians in 2012.
“In the Southern departments moving west to east along the peninsula are Jeremie, Port Salud on the South coast, La Cayes the major tourist center and Jacmel the largest city in the south. And Marigot and then the tiny, but immensely defensible Anse-A-Pitre moving east to the border.”
“Geography is so vitally important. Most of our former American countrymen cannot even find Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen and Afghanistan on a map and their government has been sending young men to die and robots to raze over there for nearly twenty five years. Next to history and perhaps the ability to speak soothingly in other languages is the vital skill of cartography. Without maps we’d lose our way. Without signs, without direction; well I suppose we’d forget we were all in this together, and promptly begin eating each other. Like they currently do in Sub-Saharan Africa now that the pale nations are done eating the continent and pulled out finding their bellies full,” says the tall Jamaican named Mickhi who most here who have fought alongside him call Captain Dbrisk, although his rank is now that of Operations Section Chief.
We don’t really have a lot of pretensions around here.
Just a tight but responsibly democratic chain of command.
Dbrisk is wearing his black pea coat with a blue and grey armband and has his thick well-kept dreadlocks concealed below a large black tam. Clipped to his collar is the Pin of Palmares with its cannons and flags abutting the Tree of Life. Those that wear that pin fought not only in the Separatist Wars on the East Coast but had the distinction of serving in the early battles of the war for liberation in Haiti, now sometimes called “Palmares Island”, renamed so after the epic maroon of bygone years when it merges officially with the Dominican Republic, one day in possibility. While numerous internal and foreign components had battled on the island, the island and her people remain in the hands of the various oligarchs there.
A maroon was a base of operations and resistance deep in the mountains founded by runaway slaves. Like the Breuklyn Soviet, like several dozen other micro republics that fought their way to independence in the past few year. Though we do not have many mountains in Breuklyn Soviet we do have one of the world’s tallest trees!
More on that strangeness later.
Mickhi Dbrisk is capable of a great deal of gangster on very short notice. His powers of improvisation are vast. He has commanded fighters in both the fabled siege of the Brownsville Ghetto and the earlier epic battle for Port-Au-Prince. He is regarded by all factions in the Soviet as an undisputed leader of the human rights résistance, a don as you’d say in Patois, Jamaican vernacular. There is not a single move or operation since the early days of the rising that does not have his hand or command in its execution.
“Cuba is the only regional nation to not fall under the heel of Western Imperialism now or ever. It also has fully resisted China’s developmental colonialism and now leads the non-aligned movement. It lies to the North East of Haiti. As you know, in 2083 commandos from the Breuklyn Soviet, still then under siege stormed the Guantanamo base in Eastern Cuba to rescue numerous family member hostages of the resistance alliance. Since that time Guantanamo Bay base now reconstituted with the Republic of Cuban is our forward base. The nation of Jamaica also lies to the east by sea and remains a Narco-Garrison state, numerous dons there sympathetic to the Resistance Alliance and broader J1 Movement.”
“This will be no kid’s play. The gloves come completely on for this job. We will be fighting not only the predominantly Brazilian MINUSTAH army, a variety of right wing paramilitary armies under the control of Narco-Warlords and the Dominican army; but an American intervention is an undeniable high probability. To make things more complicated, we will be fighting the entire war with non-lethal weapons via Peacefare. Via the ways of the late Gene Sharpe. And to accomplish it many of us will have to be willing to lay down our lives. As per usual, and I speak for only myself and also our Chief Logistics Officer Mr. Nikholai Trikhovitch. This will be highly perilous. And both he and I are the first two volunteers stepping forward to carry out this operation if approved by you esteemed delegates of the 18th Congress,” he concludes with the predicable anticipated clamor of a quiet riot.
After four more hours of smoke and mirror clogged deliberation all the vile data is delivered and the club adjourns with a vote still not taken. This is not wholly new information to most of them for Adon wrote of such things at length and many knew his work. For several weeks the delegates have been reporting that a new mobilization is scheduled to occur. Many of these men and women fought or commanded fighters in the Great Revolt. Many are veterans of the successful mostly non-violent uprisings along the coast, especially those in Atlanta, Boston and Miami in the eight years ago which preceded it. The motion to delay the vote is but a formality. Certainly by tomorrow a plurality of delegates will vote to go to war. While the Breuklyn Soviet is nominally a people’s democracy lead by the General Assembly; the Combined Otriad is not, it is a Chinese style of decision making. Consultation with the general cadre but ultimate decisions made by a tightly elected central committee.
Anything can be done with enough green dollars or RMB. But you cannot purchase the kind of zeal this club can marshal when it fully mobilizes its forces.
The nucleus of our contingent in the greater rebel army of Breuklyn Soviet is composed of three differing, but overlapping factions that coalesced around something our enemies pejoratively dub the “Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club”. Our “Club” is a sprawling underground association of former city university students, gangsters, active municipal emergency workers, public school teachers, civil rights lawyers; as well as businessmen of the clandestine economy and young professionals that enjoy the use of fire arms, the relaxation of the Banya, and also the full attainment of our United Nations promised universal human rights.
By the time of the “Great Disorder”, the mob riots which lead shortly after their violent suppression led to a wild international revolt; our three factions had several thousand of our members all reasonably proficient with fire arms and organized into flying columns.
Mutual aid, collective security and something we call Loyalnost rapidly evolved into a higher calling. The keeping of our asses alive in an urban war zone and wider civil war.
The three major factions that for some time had irregularly coordinated via this club as a means to drill for their respective ventures merged under fire into what many to consider the tipping point of the revolt in its New York theatre. One was the black revolutionist group Uhuru associated with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The second was the New York Branch of the Fenian Brotherhood, which I am affiliated with, which is composed of Fenian Nationalists left of center and trade unionists. The third faction is the predominantly former & Postsoviet, black cap Yiddish and West Indian Caribe outfit, known either as the Banshee Association, Banshee Otriad or by its clandestine special operations arm: “the Z.O.B.”
I have no idea what that stands for and I’ve technically been a member since I was fourteen. These factions had very little in common except that we all distrusted the machinations of the Bush then Obama led Federal Government and seek a world more firmly founded universal human rights. We also all ran-run extensive trafficking-smuggling operations to and from the island of Hispaniola to a variety of ports of call.
In white collar finance you might call that the “import-export business.”
The leaderships of these three respective factions rarely ever spoke back then except via the informal alliances crafted by a group of childhood friends which all met in Bronx Science in 1998. That’s largely because the general membership of Uhuru didn’t trust or wish to associate with the blan or Ivory Caucasians which made up roughly half of the Banshee Otriad. West Indians making up the bulk of the other half of the faction are also generally antipathetic to African American blacks, Uluru’s core constituency. Fenian Nationalists and Black Nationalists have almost nothing in common except the wanting of our own countries to be built on our land stolen long ago by some devilish white man Protestants. The brothers always get along with me and my best droog Philly Hartman just fine though. We teach our Dougie for free.
There was also some underling discord then because the Banshee Otriad during the years leading up to the “Great Disorder” and the subsequent “Great Revolt” was engaged in every manner of disruption against the war machine and was under constant surveillance by the eyes and agents of the state. Especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), the N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the American secret police squarely coordinated via the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) all reporting to the National Security Agency (N.S.A.) and of course the J.S.O.C. Their underground paper and their ambulance worker labor struggles with the hospitals and Fire Department didn’t make life easy then either. Banshee, mostly composed of emergency medical workers also provided tactical support and funding to the Occupy Movement before its evictions after its resurgence. This was something also that Uhuru scoffed at.
At least until the sonic pacification of Zuccotti Park that left scores of mostly young white affluent demonstrators brain dead? And the second anniversary assault on the District Financial that left the temples of the money changers in flames and lead to massacre of over ten thousand disappeared ones. And a rocket attack in Midtown Manhattan. Need I say more?
The Otriad’s members periodically accused Uhuru of being far too ethno-centric and Uhuru’s members viewed the members of the Otriad as “reckless adventurist blans with too little “skin in the game to worry about losing”. And of course we Fenians were mostly concerned with the conflict escalating then in Erin dubbed the “Latest Troubles.”
But, during “the Great Disorder”, when legions of National Guardsmen razed Central Breuklyn Ghettos, it was the intervention of Banshee and Fenian flying columns that saved many of the beleaguered fighters of Uhuru during the Brownsville Ghetto siege, and many black citizens from certain murder and eventual execution. For years our three outfits had trained and traded side by side in the Crown and Washington Heights despite having little more than a perceived common enemy and tactic. Acquire guns and use them against the Oligarchs.
Uhuru’s leadership and support base were all but decimated during the Great Disorder and the group found itself partially indebted to us, their at least half-pale allies.
Scapegoated in the current history of events by both the Eastern Confederacy of Autonomous Soviets (E.C.A.S.) and the United American States (U.A.S.) for initiating the “Great Disorder”, which certainly they did not, Netic Djbriel Okonkwo, the tall sometimes grinning sometimes glowering militant Chairman of Uhuru took an offer from then Captains Dbrisk and Adon to fully merge the New York Uhuru faction into a “Combined Otriad” of our three groups. As the iron heel of the National Guard swept down upon Breuklyn, Ysiad Ferraris a dubious ally of the resistance, arranged the first of his many promised exoduses via container ship of highly wanted rebel families and began his ever expanding traffic in first and second line rebel arms.
And we Fenians of course sided with these mostly Black and Ivoryish rebels because the U.S. Military was shelling our city and our homes and the rest as they say is the prelude to epic history.
We have finally secured our independence from the United States of America, now called the United American States (U.A.S.), after nearly four long bloody years of street fighting, occupation, and attrition, a bombing campaign across the country’s interior, a series of hostage crises and finally; threat of improvised nuclear force, which did in fact to our knowledge make Washington DC uninhabitable for the next 100 years. Suffice to say, much of the Eastern seaboard is now a series of confederated Free State territories running from Canada down to Miami, called Soviets.
The real border is often hard to define.
As of lately we as a combined Otriad of three factions field abroad several hundred parapsychologists training the various “Emergency Groups” as we call them; underground militant human rights detachments. We support nine large battalions of development and medical workers; three in Haiti, one in Dominican Republic, two in Jamaica, one in Syria, one in Gaza and one in Eastern Ukraine. A battalion is roughly 1,200 women and men. And everyone with internet access knows about our infamous “dagger men”; the Sicarri of the Z.O.B. In collaboration with hundreds of other left, progressive, Islamist, and human rights militant groups internationally who are currently working their way through a several thousand person database to kill and or capture wanted war criminals; enemies of the people and general scum of the earth affiliated with innumerous networks of pimps, traffickers and black collar criminals. Our Club’s commitment was to help capture or execute 104 targets off that list. By the last count I saw, the Sicarri units and the dozens of other factions they coordinated with online have polished off 103 war criminals over the past three years since the beginning of the ceasefire with the U.A.S. Federals. They find themselves in Europe a lot I hear on the Fire Station.
That’s where those kinds of people gravitate to.
Where the flashiest toys and choicest, perkiest prostitutes generally are.
This Haiti operation will be a horse of a completely different color. Likely, it will ignite a far broader conflict. Haiti was over two hundred years in the making. Breuklyn was our turf and that took four years of bloody struggle to win. Hitting mafia targets and whacking oligarch war criminals is sort of just a transcontinental contact sport coordinated by “the Anonymous”, the worldwide guerrilla hacker network.
No one cared enough about Haiti and Dominican Republic to bother and suppress that series of events. No one in the U.A.S. Oligarchy dares to reconquer the breakaway city states on the East Coast because we have atomic weapons. We will shortly be taking the fight for the fate of humanity to an entirely new level.
The fight that my childhood friend Sebastian Adon gave his life for.
Gave his life for twice!
Chapter 8
The darkness and the cold of night briskly greet Mr. Trikhovitch.
He has a long grey coat and black sweater made of Japanese polysynthetic. He has very short black hair and he looks foreboding until he smiles at you. He keeps his gun strapped to his chest and his hip flask over his heart. A solid gold zippo comes out to light up a Newport Standard. A puff ends the night.
The more friends he has to bury the less charming he gets year by year.
Nikholai Trikhovitch steps out of the Congress into the 5am snow. He loses the throngs of compatriots propelled by his own need for solitude. He fires up the stoag and blinks a few times. From sleep deprivation and methyl xanthine capsules and too much coffee and certainly too many goddamn meetings.
And knowing that tonight’s near declaration of war will change everything.
He’s been running the Breuklyn Otriad’s logistics section for seven years. That’s a lot of moving parts. That keep moving faster.
And now they’re finally going on the bold offensive.
The snow blows hard down the alley way out side Sandooney Bathhouse which sits on the intersection of Avenue I and Macdonald; renamed Mila Street three years ago because nobody could remember who the fuck Macdonald was or what significance he had to the future. This renaming had happened all over Breuklyn, and it kept happening so it was very hard to find streets sometimes.
Nicolai’s black Tanto-52 jeep is in the parking lot, but he likes the cold so he stays out in it. He knows his girlfriend Krissy with her Jessica-Rabbit red hair and tight body is asleep at home and will grasp him tender when he gets back there.
A woman he knows quite well is now heading toward him out the main entrance.
Anya Drovtich, with her long black dreads wrapped below a gray hijab, plated down in bike armor approaches him out of their bath house headquarters as the main doors are drawn closed and storm shudders bolted down behind her. The clang of the barrier gates sound out as the metal barricades are rolled. She salutes the sentries up on the rail line. And also the Muslim Brotherhood couriers heading back to District Bayridge to report on our midnight developments. She salutes the Russian sentries, the dagger men getting on their bikes, and also the crew up on the train.
“How now, Anya Drovtich,” is all he says.
“Was there something you wanted to tell me,” she asks him coldly, reading him.
“Nothing that can’t wait for tomorrow.”
“Shut the fuck up with your nothingy-nothings, brother. You have the forty yard stare of zombie or some traumatized civilian.”
“Fuck off, sister.”
“Tell me what you’re toying with. We’re too far up in the chain of command to have secrets anymore.”
He blows carcinogens into the night. But her words have a different provocation of death behind them and the cold of night turns all utterances into the wafting plumes of verbal gun powder.
“Every time I hear his voice I am reminded that had I not encouraged him, had I not told him I’d fight beside him to the end there would not have been any of this. He might well have walked away. We might have,” Nikh mentions.
“Or just have died more quietly,” she sharply replies.
“Very little was ever quiet in his head.”
“You give credit to a man who is made of the same parts you and I are,” says Anya Drovtich as the falling snow strikes both of them.
“He gave us all something to believe in. And then he was gone.”
“No. He put words to paper and set small fires with very old ideas that we all had held deep in our hearts and would have acted on had he called us to that first congress or not.”
Nikholai stops short of speaking his mind and then says:
“Is Sebastian Adon truly dead?” asks Nikholai Trikhovitch, “I have always heard it said that he was a very difficult man to kill.”
“I saw the bullets strike his body. I saw the gas overwhelm him and before we evacuated out that tunnel, I made sure he was really dead. If you’re looking to make a martyr out of him well he was. As you and I will be when our time comes. I know you loved him and I loved him too and had we all not been sitting in that tavern seven year ago when this truly began I doubt we would have found ourselves here at the center of this uprising. But I assure you. Our friend Sebastian is quite dead and what we are about to do will bring him a smile in the world to come.”
Their sky pagers both go off at the same time.
The sky pager developed by Daniel Fried the martyr modifying on the Iridium sat phone, bouncing radio waves between low flying satellites and then encoding transmissions into text bursts in Hebrew-Creole, Gamatria code. Defeating the smartest snoop hackers and follow-follow men of the National Security Agency via a low to medium tech approach.
The page was sent by Oleg Leondovich Medved, Anya’s primary deputy. A hard Russian bear. A thorough and complete Postsoviet gangster. He had missed the last evening of the 18th Congress to hammer out a final trade agreement with that house of thieves the Perchevney Bratva over tariffs in the new Port Coney.
The pagers read:
(!) Orange Alert. Report to Cadman Plaza Staging area immediately.
There has been another massacre.
64+ civilians have been slaughtered. (!)
Anya immediately gets on her Ducati and Nikholai jumps in his jeep and what they are wondering is what in the world will keep the ceasefire in check come dawn. Just one month ago there had been a slaughter.
A family of Blacks and a family of Ivories.
Exactly a month ago. Twenty four dead. Ripped apart and hung from the tallest tree in Prospect Park for all to see.
And now this blarney and blatnoy.
There are allegedly some sixty four men, women and children hanging in the snow storm, strung up on the rafters of the Breuklyn Bridge.
Chapter 9
Fadeeva Street 6, Building 1,
Apt. 67, 2083ce
Moscow
The safe house has wall to wall books in one room, illustrated versions of the Arabian Nights. The Jerusalem tile is always warm. The storm shutters are bolted down and sealed electronically. I only know about the rumbling tanks and the curfew because it was announced on the Fire Station. We’ve been hiding here for what seems like a fort night, but could be more.
She has a way with taking up time.
“What a sneaky little geography lesson that was!” Natasha exclaims, “While you chose to give your life, most others amongst species had such circumstances thrust upon them and left to own devices would have been relatively happy just to give far less freely and live far more selfishly.”
“I don’t refute that point for even a second.”
“So don’t attempt to,” she declares.
“Some people; like you Russians,” I retort, “or children of the petty bourgeoisie who for whatever reason study philosophy; also people that work in finance; or base criminals; these people don’t always believe in objective standards of good and evil.”
“Certainly not,” she says, “a useless binary analysis.”
“But, whether you do or you do not, whether you sip red borsht or eat the biggest mac, even if god forbid you are a student of philosophy, and even if you don’t believe in international law, well no one, at least no one I’ve encountered so far of rational mind likes the idea of a band of men on horseback riding into town and raping their wife; then their mother; then their daughters; then killing everyone they care about, mutilating the bodies, burning homes and then getting away with it. Over and over again. Like the Maccoute do,” I conclude.
“Before you begin anew I will quote some Shteyngart,” she says.
Russians, Postsoviets in particular have little use for Philosophy when black comedy makes a far more biting critique of the brave new world in which we exist; “live” being too banal a term for what we are really doing here.
“Go on then dorogaia.”
“I quote,
‘Let us be certain: the Cold War was won by one side and lost by another. And the losing side, like any other in history, had its country-side scorched, its gold plundered, its men forced to dig ditches in far-away capital cities, its women conscripted to service the victorious army’.”
“What would you have me learn from your curious quotation?”
“We Russians are wholly familiar what happens to those who lose their wars. But that familiarity breeds contempt for weak, not solidarity with latest victims. But, tell me of your favorite long abused Chornay; attempts inspire me with your so-called, beliefs.”
She will have me telling my tallest tales of war and blackest history all night so it seems.
Chapter 10
65 Schenectady Ave, 2083ce
Crown heights
Mickhi Dbrisk’s alarm wakes him up out of Rosa’s arms and he heads out into the cold of night. His sky pager is switched off. His mobile has its battery popped. He’s on scheduled leave until Monday morning. He clocked out the minute the Congress broke session so he didn’t have to deal with that bloody mess up on the bridge that he’s to hear about in the papers later that day.
She kisses him hard before he goes.
He leaves an hour before day break. To avoid the traffic. He takes off south down Utica toward the coast in his Kumusabi-6, a black Japanese muscle car made in Detroit. It runs on diesel. It can get through the snow with eight cylinders and treads.
He kissed his ten year old son Malachi J. on the forehead and his two year old second son Liam T.O. And then Rosa kissed him one more time like she did through the prison bars the several times they took him.
He was sentenced to seven years upstate at the young age of fourteen. He served two for stealing some bread and not giving up a friend caught with a gun. And again at age twenty four he was sentenced ten years, reduced to one for a concealed weapon planted on him and Sebastian Adon at a political rally the police stormed on. And the last time Rosa kissed him through the bars was when he was rounded up and sent to the filtration camp at Barclays at the age of twenty six when the Great Revolt began. That was the shortest incarceration of the three since shortly after the camp was over run and liberated by the Bolivarian Hotshots of the Brigade Cinqo de Mayo; led by the Peruvian General Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras.
This past 12 October, Mickhi Dbrisk turned thirty.
Mickhi Dbrisk has four children by three women and he has never missed a child support payment in or out of prison. In or out of country. He has four kids. Two by Rosa the St. Lucian a nurse and child hood sweetheart that he met as a youngster, right before he did his longest stint of time upstate. Malachi, age ten and Liam age two. And Two by Roxanna, a wild moody fickle Iytai. With big old things and a wild temper. She lives in Staten Island.
And he never misses a kid’s birthday party either, but that’s a logistical nightmare any way ya wanna cut it these days.
Because to the Department of Homeland Security; the most ruthless of America’s 17 intelligence agencies; he is not public enemy number one. He is public enemy number four. In front of him are Anya Drovtich, Erza Pula and Nikholai Trikhovitch. Which after the capture of Avinadav DeBuitléir, the deaths of the twenty four martyrs and the deaths of Maya Rose and Sebastian Adon; he is still just a “nigger” and a “perpetrator subversive”, albeit “Chief Nigger subversive”, the most wanted black man in rebel Babylon.
His parents and children are proud.
According to I & I Section inside sources there are 4.4 million “domestic and foreign radicals” under varying levels of surveillance in the break away free state territories and abroad. There are 44,000 secondary targets on the latest U.A.S. Obama kill list, technically on standby because of the ceasefire. And Mickhi Dbrisk, Chief of Operations of the Breuklyn Otriad is target 4 of 104 on the D.H.S. Primary Kill List.
His second baby’s mother lives in Staten Island as said; which is still a part of the United American States. His two daughters live with her. One is four, cute little Brook-Lynne and one is eight months, Sheila-Jade.
His baby’s mother Roxanne lives in a suburban garrison settlement called Camp Comfort on the North side of the island.
Mickhi Dbrisk can’t just go visit his girls in Camp Comfort. This is just about the largest US Military concentration on Earth these days, anywhere other than the Korean border.
Everyone calls it “the garrison town.”
Paying child support is getting harder and harder given the political situation. For one thing, not only does Breuklyn Soviet use the bitcoin not the dollar, there are no diplomatic relations between Breuklyn Soviet and the main land U.A.S. Federal Government. Right after they cut off our water and power the very day of independence they blacked out all of our ability to transfer money to and from the mainland. We began printing twenty dollar bills.
But Mickhi Dbrisk has always been a rubber band bank kind of guy.
Magnus Goldbar Allamby, the first richest man in the Breuklyn Soviet, some claim, is the Bajan entrepreneur who runs the Finance Section of the Breuklyn Otriad. The amount of money he has lent to Mickhi Dbrisk on and off the books to pay bribes getting him in and across the border is astounding.
They remember when they used to complain about the, “fifteen dollar bridge toll bridge.”
Just the fuel and pilot fee for the submarine alone costs 15 Grand Americans.
But for a man like Mickhi Dbrisk, snow storms, high tide flood waters, hostage crises and even the threat of nuclear missile exchanges have not kept him from one of his four babies’ birthdays.
Chapter 11
Cange Village, 1994ce
Haiti
The Maccoute are not a singular, unified military formation. The phrase refers to the holistic identity of nomadic gun men on horseback and pickup truck contracted by the Basher Al-Talleyrand regime to ethnically, albeit over perhaps five hundred years cleanse the island of Hispaniola of its Afro-Haitian inhabitants. They wear very large white turbans and don’t seem to have very many qualms when it comes to indiscriminate brutality. They find it fun. One could liken them to the Cossacks of Sub-Saharan Africa, but there is something far viler about their work, frankly because it’s so well documented.
And smacks so highly of choreographed sadism.
They have a loose chain of command and zero accountability to anyone not paying them up front, which the Al-Talleyrand government has done without question for many years. It has given them modern Chinese hardware. And air support. And that right there is why the International Criminal Court has designated Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Talleyrand , President for life of Haiti a war criminal.
And they issued a warrant for his arrest.
In the year 2002ce on the old Gregorian calendar, the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) was established in the Hague which is in the Netherlands and the Rome Statute provided for the I.C.C. to have jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The definition of what is a “crime against humanity” for I.C.C. proceedings has significantly broadened from its original legal definition or that used by the United Nations, and Article 7 of the treaty states that for the purpose of this Statute, “crime against humanity” means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
(a) Murder;
(b) Extermination;
(c) Enslavement;
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
(f) Torture;
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender basis or basis of sexual orientation;
(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;
(j) The crime of apartheid;
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
War criminals are sometimes also called heads of state. Vile genocidal heads of state are often opposed by fearless freedom fighters; who are accused by the oligarchs they oppose time after time of being “terrorists”. Sometimes the old adage is true about one mans this or that. And sometimes freedom fighters genuinely must resort to terrorism plane and true to bring such tyrants down. It’s a tactic not a belief system.
Since heads of state with large standing armies certainly cause more bloodshed and terror than any other faction on earth; and civilians are massacred virtually anytime an armed conflict begins. Really, the only legal differentiation between soldier and terrorist, combatant and civilian is whether they have on uniforms, and whether they have a chain of command.
When Avinadav DeBuitléir, first Chief-of-Staff of the Haitian Emergency Group (S.E.G.) began his long career of freedom fighting in the name of his family, his people and the militant human rights generally; he was just fifteen years old. His uniform then consisted of denim jeans and a dirty grey t-shirt. His chain of command back then was that he was absolutely in charge and every other person that could fire a weapon, throw a rock, swing a machete or set off an improvised explosive device was his “Otriad”.
Had you seen the killing fields with your own eyes; had the victims been your family could you ever look yourself in the mirror again and say you did nothing to resist?
Avinadav DeBuitléir has very dark skin and is of modest build and rarely has been ever seen to smile. He has grey eyes, which are remarkable to rural villagers and equated with sorcery. He is extremely eloquent. Brief in his utilization of words to articulate his points and visions he speaks a good deal with his actions alone. His estimated age according to his U.A.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) case file is 43, but that is not his real age. The Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation places him at 39 and the Israeli Mossad is closest at 33. He speaks nine languages and can communicate in two dozen of the Haitian regional dialects. He is the first among equals in the realm of Haitian resistance commanders acting independently of foreign interests. He looks as though he is in his early thirties, but his age is anyone’s guess.
He was born in Central Haiti, in the village of Cange. At some point her traveled to Liberia, then Sudan, then Ethiopia before crossing from Egypt into Israel. He was higher educated in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv. He took refuge in the nation of Israel shortly after the genocide began but was deported back to Haiti after just five years living in that country after being arrested in a series of mass protests on the status of east African refugees in Israel. That was a good many moons ago and much gun fire and injustice has erupted since.
When the Maccoute militia first came to his village it was the nearly winter of his fifteenth year, but in the Caribbean that certainly does not mean it was cold. The villagers had heard that a marauding convoy of Maccoutes with the blessing of the Al-Talleyrand government was pillaging their way across the Southern peninsula. They had heard several dozen villages had already been emptied; their women were savagely raped and mutilated and their men after being forced to witness were lined up and shot. They heard of hands being cut off, heads being rolled down the streets like a Mongol-Cossack invasion, with no need to hide it. No need to bury anyone or cover anything up or purchase quicklime. In fact the New York Times was taking a lot of pictures and was writing about it the whole time, for years. That sure sold papers.
This was the fate that awaited the Village of Cange, close as it was to newly discovered petroleum reserve.
The village of young Avinadav DeBuitléir had only forty families. Some of the families were nominally Catholic. A few were actual followers of the man Jesus, but most were animist honoring the old spirits and ways of the world before the arrival of blan. Blan means white, or the whites, when Avinadav DeBuitléir uses this word now though, he’s not ever referring to Fenians, Ruus, or Ivories. Like most Afro-Haitians, the great suffering majority were practitioners of Voudoun.
Religion was really less important than the Kombits (work collectives) and blood intertwined loyalties. Anthropologists love to try and explain the Haiti in regards to “how African” or “how Arabized” or how “Mulatto” a participant faction in the conflict is. The elite in Port Au Prince are nominally all referred to in the internationalist neo-liberal media such like New York Times as “Muhammadian, Arabized technocrats, Mulattos or Noire Elites ”, but that really doesn’t do justice to how diverse Haiti is theologically and also the root causes behind the current rounds of genocide. If our typical Haitian civilian is an African “Voudoun syncretized, Noire (or Neg) agrarian peasant” and the Maccoute Militia is largely composed of “former Haitian military and secret police of the old dictatorship” then religion certainly has no place here. But interestingly, if you’re a student of either history, or a freelance social-anthropologist, or even just read the paper every day, well then you’d begin to see a phenomenon occurring in not just the Haiti Genocide and even the later stages of the American Separatist Wars, but in largely every nation of man in the past hundred years.
In the end, these atrocities, even the one amongst the blan in the 1940’s that we call World War Two and the Holocaust, have absolutely nothing to do with race and religion. They are about identifying a group that is powerless to defend itself, blaming that group for the strife of the nation, and then moving to exterminate them to shore up power in the nation in question.
In Haiti what is so striking is that this gone on without any real outside intervention since sometime in the 1950’s. The elite in the mountains above Port Au Prince have at one point or another pitted the various major ethnicities at their periphery into constant wars whereby they can control one of the largest swathes of oil, gold and natural gas on the island; largely unexploited until 2010.
Cange village sat on the bank of a wadi, or river bed valley.
A wadi is a dry riverbed that contains water only during times of heavy rain. As a village it possessed little besides livestock and an oral history. It was a black ‘x’ on map of several thousand little black ‘x’s, places Maccoute commanders with their pickup trucks, Kalashnikov rifles and sharp knives were asked to eradicate so Chinese engineers might assist the government at extracting the black gold below deforested mountain ranges.
When they arrived at his village, Avinadav perched atop the highest point in the town, the bell tower of a dusty and abandoned colonizer mission, once a seminary for agriculture now derelict. Avinadav DeBuitléir began to fire at the advancing Maccoute-column. He was a crack shot apparently. He hit seven of them before he had to reload. The mission had been built in rundown monastery as if neither religion nor progress could do much to affect the character of this place in a lasting way. He’d climbed six stories into the bell tower.
He then began picking several of them off from the highest point in miles.
The Maccoute column was less than thirty men, certainly better armed than Avinadav with his dead father’s hidden rifle, the heartiest gun and only’iest in the village. And they had nowhere to run for cover. Nowhere besides their pickup trucks to gain cover. The sun was rising behind Avinadav’s position, rising into their yellow Maccoute-eyes. They could tell they were being shot at, and return fire then did, but Kalashnikovs are not known for great accuracy.
Maccoute-men are also not known for their bravery. They are not normally fired upon while they do their filthy, evil work. Fifteen year old Avinadav DeBuitléir, the hero of Haiti kept firing. Firing well after he ran out of ammunition. Then, using a single red flare fired into the air as a signal, the remaining young people of Cange Village, for only the young are quick to mount resistance to anything; several dozen boys in their early and late teens charged the small Maccoute convoy with knives, shovels and pelted the militia men with rocks and lit them ablaze with petrol bombs.
The Maccoute-column retreated in panic large white turbans blowing in the wind, but the ambush was well staged and the remainder were quickly overwhelmed and pulled from their horses and trucks.
When the dust settled, Avinadav DeBuitléir had personally killed nine, wounded five. His band of teenage partisans finished off another fifteen Maccoute only taking four casualties themselves. The surviving wounded had been left bleeding in the sand by their fiend-compatriots who attempted to flee. Avinadav and his friends finished them off with picks and shovels. Then they burned their bodies and hung the dismembered corpses from the poplar trees.
And that was how the latest round of human rights résistance in Haiti began anew. With an ideology of simple strike back, hit and run survivalism. This, historically in its zeal can match any ideological conviction toe for toe, claw for claw.
Even rock for tank.
We remind you that Haiti is one of the most ethnically heterogeneous of the world’s nations wide over 400 distinct African ethnic groups brought there as salves and over 2,000 recorded dialects forged into what is called Mother Tongue, or Haitian Creole by the Blan. That must be said a second and perhaps third time lest the privileged elites of foreign capitals glaze over Africa’s complexity and attempt to disassociate the fullness of African diversity behind the word; “black.” Reduce Haiti to buzzwords like “resilient poverty”.
That makes resistance to a powerful foreign backed oil regime such as President Omar Talleyrand ’s a little hard to get effectively underway. The war in Haiti has on gone without much interruption since the various colonizers left over two hundred and fifteen years ago. The military dictatorship and oligarchy based in the capital has generally always managed to pit one ethnicity against another utilizing an intricate system of imagined racial-religious hatreds. Fighting in the nation’s periphery secures the resources interests of those in the capital. Which until 2010; was exploiting the people of Haiti for their blood and sweat. Keeping these low intensity genocides going is the basis of the Al-Talleyrand regimes control. Baby Doc; the President for life Francois Duvalier was toppled in 1988 by liberation theologian priests and students with flaming tires. If as of lately a full blown ethnic extermination is underway, well that’s because the eleven primary factions of the Lavalas peasant resistance movement are becoming fiercer and the Port Au Prince elites far more panicked. Since the People’s Republic of China, the most populous and resource hungry nation on earth covets the oil there under the brown craggy mountain sand, well let’s just say the killing fields have exploded in earnest. The Chinese in their thirst for resources have zero qualms to speak of selling the new Haitian Military it’s fully modern first line armed hardware. And these tools are put at the disposal of the Maccoute, often these forces overlap.
After his boyhood battle at his now long obliterated home village, the slaughter of his friends and all of his extended family, following his several years in the State of Ivory, Avinadav grew up into one of the most fearless leaders of the Haitian-Emergency-Group (H.E.G.), the largest and most poly-ethnic of the sixteen major armed and unarmed opposition factions united under the banner of Famni Lavalas.
The fearless, largely un armed peasant underground that brought down Duvalier in 1988; Haiti’s largest political party banned since the coup of 2004; still lead by the liberation theologist Bertrand Aristede, the only person ever democratically elected in the history of Haiti, elected and toppled twice. Current in solitary confinement in the Canadian built maximum security prison in Croix des Bouquets on trial for corruption and treason, soon they say extricated to France and then The Hague for another black/brown/Balkans despot show trial.
If Talleyrand executes him, the whole island will burn.
That first battle took place long ago and much as occurred sense. Blood in the eye!
Seeking to raise money and build greater awareness for their struggle and the wholesale murder of his people, Avinadav DeBuitléir flew to the Western coast of the United American States just days before it ceased to be known as the United States of America.
He arrived just one day before the outbreak of the Great Disorder.
The interesting thing is that while President Talleyrand and several dozen coordinators and military leaders of the Maccoute, along with several thousand other I.C.C. war criminals have gone largely unmolested over a decade after these warrants were issued. Interesting that not a single I.C.C. indicted war criminal is an American, Russian or Chinese citizen?
Avinadav DeBuitléir while lecturing was dragged off the stage of Oakland University, body bagged, black hooded, chemically sedated and then shackled in chains. Initially the corporate media ran articles accusing him of “war crimes” in East Africa and linked him to various “Islamist terror networks.” And then several bombs went off mysteriously at the Boston marathon and he disappeared from the public discussion. And just after that the general uprising began and he was lost in the tumult of slaughter and mass round ups that followed.
He thereafter mysteriously disappeared into a vast and secret prison camp system never presumably to be heard from again. And to most of the people of America it was as if he and his little country, the largest on in Africa; had not ever really existed at all.
And then for the next seven years he was ceaselessly tortured for everything they suspected he might know but was so hard thorough all the torture never ever revealed.
Chapter 12
Fadeeva Street 6, Building 1,
Apt. 67, 2083ce
Moscow
The rumbling, crunching, the steel plate grinding, the gritty auditory intrusion and rumbling of the foundations from a convoy passing outside means that tanks and half trucks and fearsome marching mechanical terra-drones are crossing through the district quite near to where we are hiding.
I smell tea tree leaves, tiger balm and aftershave on me. I smell her designer perfume but can’t remember what she uses. I guess. Its peony blossoms. The smell of sarsaparilla; its cherry, its frankincense and myrrh.
I want to tear all her clothes off and act like an animal.
She crosses her long legs and lights cigarette.
“No telling,” she says.
And I don’t respond. I just take her in.
“Very interesting,” Natasha notes, “very easy to make Americans forget things. Short attention span as nation. No history of anything.”
“We’re working on it I tell her.”
“Work harder man.”
“History then, give me some history,” I say.
“Your history is far livelier than my history.”
“Well I’ve never heard a story of yours that I didn’t hope might be true. Even the darkest ones. But no dragonfly tales tonight dorogaia.”
“Hmm,” she utters over-thinking, “I will tell you my favorite dragon tale.”
“Like the night we met?”
“Well, then night we met in America was a very different night then the night ten years before it when I watched you; and Emma called Maya and Avinadav called Andrew meet without you knowing I was there,” she grins.
“Intriguing!” I say, “I know for a fact you weren’t there. I met you right before the disorder.”
“But fourth dimensionally speaking, yet I was, and I will tell you the scene I saw out your eyes as you first met your new handlers, and eventual grand conspirators.”
“Out my eyes!” I exclaim, “Delightful, yalla then.”
Which means let’s go in Arabic.
She begins; “The year was 2001 of common era. The month was 2nd July on the Gregorian calendar. You were seventeen years old; Emma was eighteen and calling herself by her Canadian stripper name Maya Rose and Andrew DeBuitléir taken in by the Black Ivorites after fleeing from Haiti was then twenty six and you were all about to hatch a rather zealous and evidently far reaching plot. It was the summertime and Tel Aviv was hot with war fever and intifada.”
And here is how it went:
Her Russian accent disappears completely.
It was incredibly hot in Tel Aviv that summer. Humid and hot, not just desert person hot. And the sea offers no relief. I have moved into a room at the Mugrabi Hostel on Allenby Street five blocks from the Opera Towers.
I am renting a cot for 33 sheks a night, which is manageable.
I closed early on Thursday night so I could make it to the club at some reasonable hour. For me closing early is closing any time before 11pm. No one even hits the clubs until around midnight in Israel. In New York you’ve done three bars already by this time. It’s the heat that keeps the nightlife hard, cool and strictly nocturnal.
The Deep is located in the heart of Tel Aviv near the monolithic white tower of the Mitzrad Hapaniim; the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry is the near tallest building in the city, and right below it two streets down is an underground hotspot nestled on a dark side alley below gas lights and red rope. It is known for its wild after hour’s parties. It is run and operated by Black Ivorites. Emma works as a promoter and a partner. For every twenty five people she brings to the club, her boss Andrew puts five hundred shekels in her pocket, which is about $125 American. Apparently Maya is the top promoter. She is able to bring in roughly two hundred people every Thursday and twice that many on the weekend proper.
A well-dressed Israeli Ashkenazi stands at the door with the guest list. Groups of drunken long legged Yemeni frekhot are trying to get into the club without paying. They argue in Hebrew, as I wait behind them to get in. The street is empty besides the girls, the gatekeeper and me. A Black male with a diamond earring in his left ear emerges from behind the red curtain. I assume he is Ethiopian, until I hear him talk.
“What the hell are your trifling bitches goin’ on about?”
It is the first time I have heard a trace of the Ebonics language in over a year.
“Excuse me,” I interject.
“Can I help you, cracka jack?” says a young black thug with the enormous diamond earring probably but not necessarily from the land of Zirconium.
I haven’t heard that since New York.
“I’m looking for Maya Rose. She said I was on your list.”
Like some fabulous ghetto St. Peter, this Middle Eastern gangster looks at his list scornfully. He shakes his head looking bored and tired. And then Maya emerges from behind the curtain in a red and white dress, hot and fabulous, tan olive skin.
“Dizzy, this one’s with me,” she says to him and takes my hand.
We walk past the black velvet rope down into a catacomb below the streets into a place that was once a blast shelter. The cavernous basement is packed wall to wall with Israelis who are black and brown. This bunker is dimly lit with red lights and strobes flashing to the beat of the music. There are huge black couches against the walls and white swings installed at the edge of the dance floor. The DJ is spinning Old School American hip-hop music; Tribe called Quest.
I take a seat at the bar with Maya. Other than her I’m the only Caucasian in the place.
“What are you drinking?” she asks me.
“Gold Star.”
“Gone pretty native I see,” she smiles.
She waves down the bartender and whispers something in his ear. I try to pass her some NIS shekel ten spot coins but she looks at me like I’m crazy.
“Drinks are on Andrew,” she says.
“Andrew is the guy who runs this place?”
“Indeed.”
“American?”
“Haitian. Well, Ivorite now. He used to be from Haiti, but his whole family got wiped out in the genocide and he snuck over the border to get here and got adopted by the Black Ivorites. Andrew and half the other people who work for this club are Black Ivorites from a little city in the Negev named Demona where the government keeps the nuclear weapons.”
She worked that in there is fluidly.
“You mean, the Ethiopian Ivories.”
“No, there’s a huge difference between an Ethiopian and a Black Ivorite. One’s humble and from Africa and one will call you a cracker and has a nasty jump shot.”
“Where did they come from?”
“Chicago and New York mostly. That was about forty years ago. There are maybe a couple thousand of them living in Israel now. Many like Andrew and other African refugees that end up here don’t have any citizenship. The State of Ivory still doesn’t believe they’re Ivories.’
“State of Ivory doesn’t believe a lot of people are Ivories.”
“It deports them whenever it can. Andrew built up the Deep’s rep for the past year or so a haven for Israeli Blacks who want to rock out. Ethiopians don’t have too many of their own places and I’m sure you’ve seen what happens when a Black guy dances with a White or Russian girl.”
A motherfucking zoot suit riot.
We drink more and we dance a bit, her much better than me. The hip hop turns into jazz soul and I call her Maya even though she introduced herself originally a week ago as Emma. Use Maya in front of everybody except Andrew she said quietly. I get introduced to a few dozen ‘Black Ivorites’. She introduces me to everyone as Zachariah. I am thrilled to see something like this here. I’ve seen some pretty raw racist shit in the past few weeks of Tel Aviv nightlife. As the night goes on I realize that all of Israel’s minorities are rocking out down here. No one’s white except Maya and I.
I finally meet Andrew the Hustler, as some of the Ivorites call him, the man behind this little operation who introduces himself as Avinadav. In a manic little rant about names while rolling up a spliff, he tells me ‘everyone calls him Andrew, but he’s been thinking, dreaming really, that it’s better to use his ‘Hebrew name’ and not his ‘Babylon slave name.’ He is related via adoption to a good many people here. He is the big brother who came to the desert to the big city and made good for the rest of them. He comes across as generous, maybe to a fault.
It is really after hours now, like 5 am.
Maya, Andrew called Avinadav, and I are hanging out in the courtyard across from the club as Andrew rolls up another spliff. It is the first time I’ve seen weed being smoked in Israel.
“I mean, I’m not saying that a Black guy can’t go to the G-SPOT or the Gat Ramon or any other jump off rave psyche trance party. It happens, it do. But, if they wanna kick game to some Ashkenazi or Russia sister then its problems nine through ten. I mean shit; this Eretz isn’t South Africa or Southside bad. I mean it’s not legislated. I’m just sayin’ all my girlfriends not from the community in Demona are Yemeni girls. They knew about being Black before the Ethiopians and other African refugees got here. Shit, they think of themselves as Black. I think of um like Puerto Ricans actually. I mean the Black man will always be everybody’s favorite nigger. But the Canaanites are givin’ us a run. I mean racism ain’t shit next to holy war. I want chu’ to know I’m not fucked up and high. I’m just wired a bit ‘cause I couldn’t sleep last night. I mean I talk, talk, talk but I feel like you got some shit to say kid.”
Both Andrew and Maya call me kid or kiddo, but neither is much older than me. Maya is 18 and Andrew is 26.
“There’s hate based on race and a hate based on religion. Those are just pretexts for political leaders to consolidate powers. Likud and the governing coalition can play ball for years by keeping everybody divided. I mean the Russians, Yemenis and Ethiopians all live in the same shit neighborhoods and go to same run down hospitals, but they can’t wait to fight each other over any stupid thing. The Canaanite Christians, Canaanites in Gaza, Canaanites in the West Bank and the so-called ‘Arab Israelis’ are not even different peoples and they can’t even work together on the uprising. Bedouins and Druze are Arabs but have more in common with the Likud coalition government than with each other. For a nation of eight million there’s quite a bit of disunity.”
“We unified over beating’ back the other Arab states. Even Canaanites hate the other Arabs. The Jordanians butchered um in ’71. The Lebanese butchered um in ’83, and any person with an open mind knows they aren’t gonna give the Canaanites a country once the Ivories get ‘driven into the sea’. Egypt would take the Negev and the Coast until Ashkelon. Jordan would take the West Bank to the Sea, and Syria would swallow up what was left. Like a football those Canaanites get thrown around to be a thorn in our side. Fools of prophesy.”
“So you consider yourself an Israeli then?” I ask him.
“Even if they don’t consider me one. I mean I ain’t even got Haitian citizenship, I was never registered. I grew up in Demona. I was reborn in Demona and I ain’t even got a valid todat zeeoot. I’m a resident alien. Don’t even get me started on our troubles back in Haiti. It was worse before. The state has at least somewhat accepted we ain’t goin’ back to Chicago or Africa.”
Maya barely says a word. We both just listen. I guess she is sizing things up too. Andrew is both articulate and wildly knowledgeable about theology and political science. Maya hasn’t gotten drunk even though she never seems to stop drinking.
Finally, when everybody is gone except the three of us; the weed runs out. And Maya says, “Alright Andrew, Avinadav. Drop the fucking ghetto act and let’s take this one to breakfast.”
And dawn breaks soon after and Andrew called Avinadav, and Emma called Maya, and I traveling under the name of dead Warsaw ghetto fighter named Zachariah Artstien are now having breakfast at a lonely outdoor café on lower Allenby Street.
Avinadav starts right back up.
“So, you a change maker then? That’s a damn good thing ‘cause I’m a change maker too. Something has to give or break because it can’t be like this much longer. To fathom one day one of us bringing a family up in this Balagan. Unthinkable. I mean the three of us, we ain’t gonna see no small change. We’ll soon see a great fight; see a lot of death, but nothing’ we can believe in is ready. We all gotta lay a foundation for the future generations, gotta give our children a higher ground to fight from.”
“Andrew” chuckles.
“But really now, both of you need to try and call me Avinadav even if the others won’t.”
I nod and light one of Emma’s cigarettes. Was I to call her Maya in front of Avinadav even when he called her Emma? Like me she responds quickly enough to both.
She’s looking into me. I don’t know how to describe it any other way.
“So what brought you to Israel, Maya?” I ask her.
“I’m not sure I’ll tell you the really. People are obsessed with this notion that God has the power to dole out property rights,” says Maya, “but I’m mostly here for the beaches.”
“Sure as a pillar of salt once was a woman, God willed this land to us,” interjects Avinadav, “If you ask some Israelis, they’ll tell you that God promised us this land. Ask a Muslim they’ll say they’ve always been here and it is Allah’s will that they remain. Christians wanna take the whole planet anyway. Muslims too, but mark my words, God gave us this stretch to be for the Hebrews.”
“Hebrews?” I ask.
“The title of our thirteen tribes collectively.”
“You mean the Ivories?” questions Maya.
“I think its twelve tribes,” I mention.
“That’s not the proper way we’re called,” he retorts.
“It’s semantics. Ivories, Ivorites, Hebrews. What’s the difference? Weren’t you born Muslim in Haiti” Maya says with a laugh.
“When the tribes came back from exile in Babylon in the 5th century BCE there were only three tribes left, Judah, Simeon, Benjamin, and the Levites. The nine others, there were thirteen sister, were lost in Babylon, which means they intermarried, got inter-raped, converted or just never came back. Judah, which is also the tribe that Yeshua the messiah and King David come from, rose to prominence. Levi was the priestly tribe and Benjamin, they all had red hair and now they look Ethiopian. The Romans clashed repeatedly with the Hebrews in 66 CE during the first of three Roman Ivoryish Wars. Which led to rivers of blood, the leveling of the Second Temple and all of Jerusalem to its foundations, diaspora, rape and slavery. In 132 CE during the Bar Kokhba Revolt our people wiped out four Roman legions, the Romans knew these weren’t a people to fuck around with. Judah was the largest tribe so when Masada and later Betar finally fell and the full decimation and Diaspora all began, they derogatorily called our proud Hebrew people the ‘Yahuds’ or Ivories. It was like nigger, a slur imposed in bondage. Now think about the etymology. ‘ISH,” is kind of like. ChildISH, kind of like a child. IvoryISH, kind of like a IVORY. I’m a Hebrew. Even if I was raised Muslim, even if I grew up my whole like being told I was from a place called Haiti. I’m Hebrew. You two are Hebrew. Not only is Ivoryish a watered-down degrading title, it implies that we are all from the tribe of Yehuda. But we could be from Gad, or Manasseh, or Ephraim or Asher or any of ‘um. It’s like the Nigerians. Or the whole country of Niger. Sure sounds like Nigger to me. Where did they come up with that name I wonder,” he says sarcastically.
“I don’t really care whose land Hashem says it is as long as the violence eventually ends,” says Maya.
“Do you believe in Hashem, Maya?” Avinadav asks her point blank.
“Every other Friday.”
“Pardon my candor, but what has HaShem done lately for us?” I mutter.
“That’s a loaded question if I ever heard one,” she says.
“Yeah, but let’s answer it anyway,” Avinadav says.
“Well Zach, I suppose not a whole lot. But if there is actually is HaShem, who are we to interpret her actions?” Maya puts in.
“Her?” I ask.
“Hey, if you guys wanna rename whole religious ethnic groups, I feel free to de-masculinize the so-called almighty.”
“That’s fine, fuck the dumb shit” smiles Avinadav.
“Look, to me HaShem isn’t like a be-all-end-all safety net. You don’t get blessed by just believing in her; It. You have to trust It works through the actions of good people more than miracles,” Maya responds.
“And there will be more miracles,” states Avinadav banging on the table.
“I’m not ruling out the existence of HaShem. All I’m saying is that maybe Its given up on us,” says Maya
“How do you figure?” Avinadav demands again attracting the attention of other people in the café more for being Black and loud than for just being loud.
“What if HaShem decided humanity just isn’t worth all the grief we cause. What if it looks at us as a failed experiment and stopped devoting time to divine interventions and the like?” Maya says.
“I’m with that opinion,” I say, “I don’t find it so hard to believe.”
“So you think HaShem has bailed on us?” Avinadav asks us.
“Completely,” she smirks.
“Don’t blaspheme and sound ridiculous at the same time,” Avinadav mumbles in a grin.
“Well let’s not hold our breath on that one. I’m just doing my part working on that miracle in case HaShem holds out,” I answer.
“What kind of miracle, kid?” Avinadav asks.
“The miracle of resistance done right.”
“I like that. The boy’s articulate and totally insane,” Avinadav weighs in.
“I like that about Zach, too,” she says.
“Most people do I bet. Do you ever wonder the purpose of it all, Maya?” Avinadav asks.
“The purpose of what?”
“The purpose of Hashem sending this kid our way?”
“Folks, I’m really not that much younger than either of you.”
“It’s totally random. He just wants to nail me,” she smiles, “There’s no purpose, Andrew.”
“Avinadav.”
“Sorry.”
“Folks, I’m sitting right here.”
“If there is no purpose and there’s no greater meaning to it all, it is pretty pointless to be alive. I mean the things he says are the things this country needs to hear right now,” Avinadav says to Maya.
“He’s just young and you believe in HaShem too strongly. I’m a cynic. I like watching you two talk though.”
“Cynics are fallen idealists frustrated with the failure of their original ideals,” I interject.
“Excuse me?” she utters, “I would like to say I still believe in the potential for a better world, but lately I’ve begun to doubt whether humans would actually tolerate a better world.”
“Our kind is often very-very fucked,” Avinadav reflects openly.
“Only mostly fucked. There’s always high potential for eleventh hour change making,” I say.
“I’m not discounting the fact that there are many good people out there, but certainly not the majority. And less than four dozen in the country that would join what you are talking about. Most people just want to go about their lives and not have to think big thoughts about brave new worlds and the governing factors behind the human nature and if HaShem taps people to participate in history or a higher plan. You’re making demands that never get answered, Zach. Sure people come up with relatively comprehensible concepts explaining certain things about our existence, but even Socrates was working bound the shadows of the cave,” Maya responds.
“What’s your point?” I ask.
“It’s hard to keep the attention of the masses. There is something wrong with the world, but the good people, the heroes you hope to find aren’t interested employing the right tactics for change. Everyone’s trying to survive underground,” Maya tells us.
“What tactics would you employ?” Avinadav asks me.
“The most zealous ones I could find,” I retort.
“Such as?” Maya asks.
“You know. Something that tells the people of this country that we rebels aren’t fucking around. Like targeting members of the Oligarchy in Israel and Palestine; the war profiteers, the demagogues, the criminals and the collaborators and executing them one by one on national television. Clearing out our own house first.”
They stare at me for a second. Then at each other and then they go on.
“Spoken like a true zealot,” Avinadav states.
“And what the high fuck would that accomplish,” Maya asks us.
“It would tell the world that no one is impervious to God’s justice,” Avinadav responds for me.
“It would tell the people that the oligarchy is not invulnerable. That we can hit our violators in the face and the pocket,” I say for myself.
Maya takes off her dark glasses and gives us both a ‘you’re both talking like murderous terrorists’ look as she lights another cigarette.
“And then for your second round of organized anarchic calamity?” she inquires under her breath.
“Occupy the temple mount with a few hundred fighters then proceed to blow up the Kotel, Dome of the Rock, and Church of the Holy Sepulchre so no one had any misconceptions about how unholy this war was gonna get,” I say coldly.
“That one I like more,” Maya says, “And for a grand finale black female Jesus could come back with a fleet of gold plated tanks to relieve our hunted and abandoned fighters with the force of her miracles?” she laughs.
“A black Jesus and a female Mahdi,” Avinadav corrects her stone faced.
“There would be a mass retreat into the Negev then over the border into the deep desert of Sinai to regroup. We will unite with the million Bedouin partisans already in insurgency with the Mubarak military regime and capture the major coastal cities with the aid of Iran, a natural ally against the Arab military dictators and the Israeli State. Then we’d capture everything south of Be’er Sheva. Via a coordinated general strike and massive defection within the army, we’d take the central districts and cut the country in half before closing in on Jerusalem.”
“Ah, well. What would you do about the Canaanites and other Arab states that would love to annihilate us while we civil war amongst ourselves,” she says cold and sarcastic, “aided by our new friends in the Islamic Republic of Iran, of course,” is her snide inquisition.
“Well it won’t ever work unless the Canaanites are involved from the beginning within the rebel leadership. We will have to help invalidate Fatah and their Al’Aksa Martyrs Brigade because they’re secular, corrupt puppets. We will have to eliminate Islamic Jihad completely because they’re too nihilistic about their fundamentalism or at least drive them into merging with Hamas.”
They are both staring at me vaguely speechless by my choice of allies no doubt.
“Our obvious ally is Hamas, who will soon emerge as the premiere representative of the Canaanite Intifada and will have to be brought to the bargaining table by pressure from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hamas, ironically enough, will be our closest ally, the only Canaanite player to fully mobilize their people for this endgame.
“Then we just have to defeat the I.D.F., Shin Bet, Mossad, political machinations of the Knesset and American forces, of course,” sarcastically interjects Maya.
“As I said. After the south and the Sinai are in the hands of the rebel alliance, much of the I.D.F. will join the confederated rebels after the general strike begins if we have properly done or organizing with due diligence. The Knesset and their American supporters will order the I.D.F. to end the strike, and open fire on their own people. Which will seal the fate of the Ivoryish State, America’s 51st. And light the fire a global uprising.”
“How in hell could you even dream of allying with Hamas?! They want to murder us all. I think you have not been in country long enough to know your people’s will well enough,” Maya scoffs.
“They’re led by Muslim fundamentalists. That means they won’t be co-opted by the secular Arab dictatorships that are American proxies. They hate the leaders of Iraq, Egypt, Syria and the Emirates more than they hate the Israelis,” Avinadav interjects.
“And that’s sort of my point. We want to unite a lot of people who are pretty fundamentalist about everything they believe in,” I say.
She looks at me like I am a mad man.
“Then like magic, and a lot of miracle magic is involved in your plan, these groups fall in line into a united confederacy and then later a governing body of some strange pan-middle eastern free state called called Pal’ Israel?” Maya scowls in disbelief.
“Well actually it would be the “Pal’Israelian Free State” if you wanted to be more unified in the national title,” states Avinadav. “But everyone knows that’s just called Zion anyway. That will never fly with the Arabs though, calling it Zion.”
“What’s in a name?” Maya smirks, “when we have such wild imaginations and so much untested magic.”
“Whatever you build on the Hebrew side you gotta build in Gaza and the West Bank as well. Anywhere with a large Canaanite or Hebrew Diaspora you need to send delegates to address. In New York; in Baghdad; Paris, Deerborn and also Tehran. When the uprising begins it will begin with direct action, proceed to a general strike, and then open revolt in the defense forces and then a rapid move to realign the new nation with the third world, the non-aligned movement and human rights.”
“So like Beirut in 1982?” she says, “Or more like Iran in 1979, but replace Shi’a fundamentalism with populist nationalism founded in human rights and democracy?”
“More like Haiti in 1791,” I tell her.
“Does he think it’s quite sexy when he says violent radical shit to strangers?” Emma says to Avinadav.
“Real sexy,” Avinadav says.
“Andrew the Hustler” is thinking hard watching a younger, whiter version of himself talk dangerously. He decides not to tell the kid anything about his teenage years in Haiti. His personal motivations for a holy war.
Maya put her huge black sunglasses back on and is sipping on her coffee while smoking a Marlboro menthol cigarette. A waiter brings out a large platter of hardboiled eggs, a pitcher of orange juice, another of Turkish coffee and something sort of like hash browns and Israeli salad, which consists of diced cucumbers, avocado, tomatoes, Zetar spice and onions.
We’re all eating from the same plate.
“What’s the blue print then, boys? You’ve fallen in love. I can see it in your eyes,” Emma says to us.
“Well then, Zachariah. You got some big crazy fucking ideas. HaShem sent you to us. That I know. I got the means. She’s got the will when she’s willing. We can talk all morning but fuck the dumb shit, as I like to say, what you playin’ with here?”
I am smoking deeply from one of Emma’s Marlboro Lights.
“I’ve been dreaming for a long time about making a stand, about a small group of people showing the world that we need not live our lives like slaves lashed to a rolling engine of war. I know this in my heart. If we can rally the wretched of this broken land behind a banner of unity, then the land of tears and blood will yield the milk and honey promised,” I tell them.
“Bottom line. What’s the very first step?” Avinadav asks.
“I did not come here to lead. I came here to serve my people as a front line fighter and lend my voice to this cause,” I tell him.
“Well what’s the first course of action that might bind us together,” Maya asks me, “And what’s our final objective?” she asks, “how far would you like to take this little uprising?”
“What do you want long-term, Zachariah? What are we conspiring to really do? I want you to say it a simple sentence so we three can digest the severity of what we plan to set in motion,” Maya says.
“Say it once and never again ‘til it’s real,” Andrew says.
I smother my cigarette butt in the cheap grey plastic ash tray.
“Our aim is to topple the government of Israel and use this Promised Land as a base to export a global uprising to secure universal human rights,” I tell them.
It’s finally dawn. July, 3rd 2001.
“I’m with it,” Avinadav says his eyes never blinking, “like a nuclear armed Middle Eastern Cuba.”
He looks to Emma for her stance and approval.
“And of course I am too,” says Maya, “somebody’s gonna have to make sure women don’t get cut out as usual when the freedom starts getting handed out,” Emma grins darkly. “I hope you got some real good magic, kid.”
“Or hope someone is on our side that is good with those miracles,” I respond.
“You bring the New York magic, Avinadav will worry about the miracles and we will find the zealots together,” says Maya Solomon.
Natasha Andreavna drops back into Russian.
“And with dawn broken, your intentions made plain and your basic plot articulated you all then set yourself on a war path. And within one year both you and Avinadav would be deported back to Africa and America respectively, all your followers would be imprisoned or killed and Maya herself would be crucified and then disappear into thin air,” she says as if testifying to something she was a part of.
“And that is story of how the modern Z.O.B. was born or reborn if you over-stand me. In near perfect detail, if I am not mistaken,” says Natasha Andreavna as if she was there.
“How did you know all that I,” I say, or really exclaim.
“Because Maya Solomon the Tzadikk ha Dror told me right after she met you. She told me everything and let me see it from her eyes, from your eyes and from his.”
‘Zounds,’ says my silence.
“Now put me in your mouth,” she says.
Chapter 13
Fadeeva Street 6, Building 1,
Apt. 67, 2083ce
Moscow
The light flickers.
She’s really been letting me have it.
It’s on some kind of timer to conserve power. It isn’t connected to Moscow’s central power grid. The Fire Station informs us that there are nationwide black outs and that the civil unrest has spread to St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Nizhy, and Rostov-on-Don! We have a telescreen somewhere in the house, but frankly once the carnality and the drinking and the story telling got under way, current events have been the least of my concerns.
As Orwell once famously said, “we who remember the past will also control the future” or something like that.
When her story comes to conclusion, she jumps up, erupting in some new manic burst of energy. I love her gyrations; her naked glory. I had taken in the story ponderously quiet. The two tales spun of my mentors and dear departed friends Maya and Avinadav were quite comeuppance by the revelation that she knew every word of the first failed plot.
And now reanimated it is my turn.
Her foot presses down upon my chest. In her hands she holds the leather bound poetic volume I gave her right before my death.
“Do you want war stories or love poems?” she asks me.
She presses down harder bearing her weight upon me naked as the day she was so gloriously brought into the world. And I wish to fall upon her and tenderly kiss every aspect of her body, lay my lips to work upon the insides of her thighs.
But, she stares down at me like a stern and glorious Valkyrie.
“You plan to compose or simply read what I’ve written in your name?” I ask her.
Several times on the Brighton Boardwalk she’d read to me the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Before I spoke Russian and I had to follow along in English from a version that laid out his poems in the two antagonistic languages page by page.
She just presses her weight on me and leers.
“Well dammit man pick for me!”
“Read me Mayakovsky again then if you won’t compose a story.”
I do not flinch and relentlessly she steps upon my heart.
“Which one?” she asks.
“Backbone Flute.”
She shakes her head.
Her blond locks sweeping about.
“Cloud in Trousers,” she counters.
It is I who shake my head in negation.
“Breuklyn Bridge,” she asks peering into me applying her voluptuous pressure.
She makes herself weightless. Retracts her offensive. Blows me a coy kiss.
“As you like. You are stunning too stunning for much resistance,” I stammer.
“I am. What did you do to deserve so much of me?”
In my mind’s eye I see myself fighting through a whole carload of gangsters on a speeding train with a brief case and a ball pin hammer; I see myself jumping out of plane over Moscow a red and blue parachute erupting behind me. I see the hail of gun fire that cut me down at the Millennium Theatre. I see the armies of Caesar and Napoleon. I see the ghetto on fire. I see myself beaten within an inch of my life forced on my shattered knees to watch soldiers gang raping my wife, and then two shots to my head.
“Everything I could think of.”
“I am your total muse.”
“And the only reminder of my humanity,” I tell her and she seizes my hand to squeeze.
She then pounces beside me and thrusts the volume back to me.
“Declare it again! Read me a poem that without any rhyming declares how I own your mechanical heart completely. And after that I will give you Mayakovsky or anyone else, I will sing you songs; I will even make your war stories sound tame with mine. Tell me again that you will love me forever!”
“Of course. Until I have no words left at all.”
I rise to my feet sturdy upon the Jerusalem tile of safe house floor, and outside the snow continues to drape us under its unending glory. The tanks rolling through the streets and bugs in the wall are all upended in attention by the glorious woman in front of me.
Dashutka,
I interrogated you with Newport cigarettes pursed at my lips.
And you sized me up like a slave on the market block.
Emergently my covered wagon has been jettisoned and set ablaze by a blonde haired savage,
A mercenary in clad multicolored finery,
With war paint under both blue eyes.
Brandishing a spear and also a bottle of Russian Standard.
She’s since infused my life with her Red Bull risings and cynical parables on the subject of snow ball fighting with General Winter.
“Drink!” she whispers out her demands.
“Until in naked oblivion you can pronounce my name in full glory!
Take in all its parts and thus know my demons and also my saints.
Extoll me as your eternal choicest muse. Make me your goddess and savior, secretly.”
And thus I went to work.
My pen and pipes, belting out prose, parable and promises to fight for her to the death.
And she beat me half to tears with the venyike.
In a wild Peony Ambush,
She put herself upon me,
Robbed me bandit blind.
Of my heart, and second soul as I made art to celebrate the coming of she into me.
Penniless as a proverb.
I marshaled all remaining vagabond tendencies into the rigorous use of my baller ball point pen.
Woman, you are a golden locked lioness.
Boxing with me, you strike incite and nerves unnerving furious fascination.
Womb to tomb!
You Caspian blue terrorist!
Thing of profoundest beauty!
Drag me down the Brighton Boardwalk and set me as an effigy of hopeless romanticism on the Sands of Sea Gate!
Sky high on fire.
Take me to pyre.
When our correspondence first began in September it was like a report on a Cherokee Indian massacre.
Communicated via the passing of notes.
We conducted then a lively human traffic in roses and poems and also in promises.
A triangle trade.
You dripped wax on me shortly after.
I wrote you a play.
“I will try to believe any stories I tell you and you will make me immortal!”
In words and in dreams.
Pull!
I produced on demand and she shot each product down.
Exploding clay pigeons with poems tied to paw, and smoke signals playing out on the prairie skies, steppes and later the chalk marks made on the promenade off Banner Ave were the guarded displays of my awe.
More fire!
She proclaimed, by not proclaiming.
You tied me to a post and blind folded me so that in a mirror I’d not see my manly limitations, my grinning devils leering.
I, the artist would then yell fire!
And poems would be fired off, absconding into night with you as their target; their words would roll out the barrel of my wit without even seeking to dress themselves in the fine garments of rhyme.
The essential quality of a muse is that she will be perfect.
While at the same time being deeply flawed.
At times she will desire to taste you and be fueled on your fluids, intoxicate herself on your writhing talents taking the form of depiction and futurist words.
She is thrilled to test my will, taking me into the shadows of some late night smoke inundated poorly lit alley way.
Kissing me to tears under gas lit wind swept boulevards.
At other times, she teases out my rough savant best by ignoring me completely.
Make me create in some wilderness cave like a mad Hebrew prophet,
In some Warsaw ghetto tenement, create brave new worlds, burn apart in the steams of the bath house old dead tragic pasts until the proper 13th hour when she calculates just when I will be ready to perform.
Then dripping I emerge!
The greatest show; the highest form of art is after all the private performance you give her,
While these are not immortal, their audience of one is the source, the very foundation and subject of all the war effort!
The muse is not there to please you.
She is there to drag you uphill, in an assault on the profane glory of false gods and the smallness of men who plot in listless towers.
Oh yes!
Only an artist can challenge the gods and the shackles of mortality they put upon us.
The essential quality of the artist is that he, or she, will possess some skill and some embattled implements that when rendering her muse perfections, and converting her human flaws into deeply troubling, yet inspiring cautionary apropos that;
This bi-pole, this anomaly of the creative process will then allow the artist the widest canvas to cast her into the form of goddess, a celestial being, a savior, a seductress, or an angel.
The artist regardless of his weaponry will be fighting his way up Bunker Hill.
When he gets there he will declare:
“Love me until your love overwhelms the white gates of heaven. Ravish me blind until I only see myself in the blue ocean of your eyes!”
Her greatest strength as a subject is her ability to assume the form of desire but also to unleash a savage and indiscriminate rejection of the artist unless each piece produced is an improvement on her immortalization.
For were the muse to be a submissive Siberian doll.
An inanimate beauty. Well that is just an act of painterly masturbation.
Useless to me.
Please excuse for,
My Muse makes art a contact sport!
And in the steams of the Banya I assume the form of Krepki Mushik,
Strong man making fearless art.
She’s a most capable gypsy partisan.
A hooligan seductress.
A wild eyed savage, she holds herself up as a virtuous courtesan, lady at heart, source of great and the granddaughter of Ivoryish Baroness.
Under her folds I do utter when the steams clear and no one occupies the coffin ship but we:
I’ll Lick your tits and drink Borjomi!
And then compose a body of Amerikanski poems that will put all previous to shame.
Poem #012: Muse of the Brighton Bathhouse.
Dedicated to Natasha Andreavna.
In loving awe,
Vasa
Quietly, she puts a finger to her lips; points to herself and then traces with her free hand an upside down heart. Then points to me with bright blue eyes glowing. And perhaps it is only moments like these in which I do not mind the idea of living forever.
She gives me this look, it’s a wonderful look and I can tell that she’s waiting for a new compliment of some kind, though it is I who has performed all the labor of latest storytelling and poem reading. It is a look well known by all men who well appreciate the company of women, though Slavic women possess in particular a complete speechless vocabulary of body language and ocular “communicative” designated for the invitation of flattery. Verbal flattery being the least evocative. She could listen to me praise her for years, but only via deeds could she accept it as real. She revels in my awe sometimes. But she wants me to acknowledge her loyalnost.
Her participation in the uprising was hardly an act of idealism.
She also wants to see me acknowledge just how far she’s come in accepting “the blacks” from her more youthful days when we met last at the Mehanata Social Club in New York and she declared them all a “race of criminal barbarians incapable of civilized behavior, much less of guarding the bloodlines of prophets and potential messiahs.”
“Foreshadowing?” Natasha asks, “Is that the right word?”
“Da,” I reply. This means yes.
“You love me a lot, this certain. I want another kind of story. Less about rebel chornay, more about we Russians in your next round,” she declares.
“As you wish,” I smile.
“Don’t princess bride me man, I know I’m breaking turn, but I want a story about the great infamous hit list. About the conspiracy hatched on the dawn of Breuklyn’s liberation where to secure human right a band of killers were sent out wild to violate them in their fullest. ”
“No more small talk?”
“Big talks from here on out. Big specific talks! With me and metal insects in the wall as our witness.”
“The retribution list or the purge list?” I ask. Another way to say; our crimes or those of the oligarchy.
“The purge list first.”
“The ante upped so early in the game!”
“Oh we have time. I suspect the curfew will not end with anything short of a brutalizing knock on our safe house door. But in the meantime. More fire. More tales. If I become bored I can always put you to work lying on my back.”
I stick my tongue out at her, which I know she despises unless it is between her legs. I kiss her on her cheek and then retreat quickly.
“They made a list and they checked it twice. It was a list of one hundred and four men who had to pay with their lives for a series of crimes against humanity,” I explain with glee.
“They coordinated it all online via ‘the Anonymous’.”
“Who are these anonymous ones?” she asks with a smug little grin.
I go right into the story knowing full well just how savvy via server she truly is.
“It began and it ended in this very city where we so sumptuously now hide.”
“Moscow!” she exclaims.
A true Russian patriot.
Chapter 14
Sandooney Bathhouse, 2082ce
Moscow
Aqua pebbles drip down the almond colored marble walls of the cavernous steam bath house. One can feel ones waters escape them. The white sheets of winter falling outside have no effect on them here. It’s the day before Yom-Kippur so everyone with two souls is trying to get their house in order on a tight time budget. Ysiad Ferraris, a Dominikani convert to the Yid-prayer-ways meets an old friend in the Sandooney Bathhouse in the capital city of the Russian Federation:
Moscow!
He is there to pledge money and first line armaments toward an irregular invasion of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He does so begrudgingly and not before terse deliberation is carried out systematically.
Ysiad is in the Russian Federation carrying out his perpetually shady and often aggrandized, although admittedly highly lucrative business deals and a man named Sebastian Adon, traveling under the paper work of “Vasili Pveada” is in Moscow doing wet work. Both kinds. With both hands and no hands. Take that to mean whatever you will. His Otriad, an irregular paramilitary brigade holding seven districts of rebel Breuklyn, periodically executes a number of high level human traffickers and assorted war criminals before the high holidays and it’s been a black bag, grey mask kind of weekend. The long arms of the Breuklyn Otriad stretch wide around the world, and on the killing moon daggers are known to fall upon slavers, splayed in public to make an example of their crimes against humanity.
It began as a retribution act, had progressed to a global demonstration of will and reach, now it was just a bloody hobby sport, on his end at least. A man has to stay busy in his death and exile. The inter-web says 103 targets have been killed over the past three years, but certainly his squad is responsible for only a part of that bloody accomplishment.
In case one was keeping track of such things there are an estimated 47 million humans living in various forms of chattel slavery and it’s a growth industry. History will prove the great African extraction and serfdom itself far more benign. It will shortly beat out the transshipment of narcotics and street pharmaceuticals in profitability. Executing functional middle men on the supply end of the chain is not nearly as effective as killing the brokers on the demand side. Unfortunately the variable of most importance is men in first world nations purchasing sex and pornography. And that is so widespread retributive action would be completely confused with indiscriminate killings.
Sebastian and his Unit 808 for the past three years have been hunting down and liquidating targets all over Europe, Latin America and the former Soviet Union. Supported by an anonymous network of hackers and devoted Information & Intelligence Case Officers back in Breuklyn Soviet. They’ve left a very bloody trail of terror doing their part in the global purge of the corporate oligarchy’s worst henchmen and profiteers.
Sebastian’s regular partner on such messy assignments is the light skinned Haitian Watson Entwissle. He has dagger sharp eyes and freckles. He dresses completely in blacks and grey tones except when the two of them make light attempts at leave and leisure. Mr. Entwissle is seated in the lobby waiting area above the steam baths. He has a burner strapped to his inner left torso and a concealed Sicarri blade affixed to his left wrist.
A Sicarri blade is like a long extending pin which extends from the size of a pen to the length of a forearm. Were you so inclined you could plunge the blade into a person’s heart from behind, insert it into their ear, or use it to administer heart stopping or clot forming drugs.
Typically, the kills are made in crowded public places like nightclubs, sporting events and markets. Generally by jamming the Sicarri blade into the base of the skull or through the ear of the target. But that kind of flourish is not what their infamous Unit 808 is known for.
They are now experts at making bad people die seemingly natural deaths. The blade can also far more subtly inject medication or radioactive isotope intramuscularly.
Getting away with murder has a lot to do with hiding in plain sight. And to cover bases, having a virtually unlimited expense account, a wide network of spies and sympathizers, as well as a flicker mask goes along way too. A flicker mask makes the face indistinguishable on closed circuit television cameras. It can also be programed via its Nano-chips to project other faces. It has the texture of skin tight grey colored form fitting cloth.
“The Anonymous” drew up a long, long list of women and men guilty of crimes against humanity responding by the first directive issued by the so-called militant human rights movement to “draw up a black list of the violators”. It then circulated their photographs and their addresses if available. It circulated their locations via GPS if their sim card numbers or IP addresses became available. It froze their bank accounts when possible. It detailed their crimes and invited anyone with a weapon to carry out justice. The Sicarri dagger men of the Z.O.B. were but one group broken into four units of three killers taking part of this international scavenger hunt that would be known historically as “The Purge.”
“Neutralize the war criminals. Punish the profiteers. Disrupt the global plantation system at its primary, secondary and tertiary supply side manufacturing and transshipment points,” so states the website http://www.FRIENDSOFTHEPEOPLE.com.
“We have suggestions,” so the website claims.
Like many part-Noires Watson distrusts the very concept of the Banya. One is completely exposed. Sebastian Adon has been “dead” for three years. Watson has been entrusted by a variety of high ranking Club leaders, and Haitian politicians to follow this man past his grave and through the heavens and hells of Eurasia carrying out the operation assigned down to the very last kill.
Now, three years in, most of their task force has been “re-called”. Those that were not killed in the process of carrying out the club’s commitment to the purge. Properly killed after being thoroughly and brutally tortured. Every single execution, every job was authorized from the Executive in Breuklyn Soviet. A priority list of war criminals, profiteers, and agents of the oligarchy to be rubbed out were selected by the I & I Section off the greater purge list and the dagger men were sent to carry out the death sentences one by one.
Tonight is the last scheduled assignment. One last job and they can get on the flight back to Palmares Island; reach the sandy beaches of Haiti-DR.
Watson has his fingers perpetually crossed. Retirement never looked so fucking sweet.
Maya Solomon has given him very explicit orders about the carnage to be carried out in the capital tonight. The Russian Federation is rather close to acknowledging the status of Breuklyn Soviet as a “free state”. Having a bloody crisis in their capital is highly embarrassing to the F.S.B. and is to be avoided all costs. Since you can’t ever have Putin as your friend, you try not to have him as an enemy. If you are in the business of exporting a human rights revolution you have to know it’s a long game, and the best deal you can make with a devil is not have him believe you can soon turn your guns on the gates of hell.
There are certainly two devils in the body of Sebastian Adon.
At least two.
There was the man he was before the uprising and there is the man he has become since.
The first devil was easily tempered by the lifesaving interventions he carried out as a paramedic, also by angels whispering noble causes into his ears. This second devil is far more savage. Watson remembers the man who helped found the militant human rights movement delivering a baby in the Rich Man Tower Projects, his care and love for strangers; his willingness to assume great risk for those he doesn’t even know. He has lately seen Adon cut men apart. Blow men to pieces. Carry out kill after kill so that European streets would run red with the blood of those that serve the oligarchy at the price of humanity. Watson Entwissle has helped him every step of the way on this high minded killing spree.
They are all that’s left of a twelve person task force. All that’s left of Unit 808.
Watson is upstairs watching comings and goings. Sebastian is having a long palaver with an old friend and associate. A man who doesn’t believe in anything except high stakes gambling where even his only real friend is but a wild card to hedge a bet.
Ysiad Ferraris is shaved bald by choice and muscular from years of Bikram yoga. Sebastian Adon is a brunette with a hard body covered in small, largely self-inflicted burns and scars. He does not permit himself tattoos, so these edge or fire marks suffice to remind him of vicious battles won for the girl that was taken away. Depends who is asking. He’s been known to tell elaborate yarns to cover a trail or justify his latest murders. His history like others with old souls is long. His yarn is far beyond the level of any casual parapsychologist, certainly more story that for a Sunday confessional. He’s half Yid, half Mic too if anyone’s ever asking. But he can make himself look like a Russian when he has to. And a flicker mask can make him look like anybody. And a clone of his corpse left at mass casualty incident can make him look pretty dead.
He has a tragic penchant for lost causes and Postsoviet women.
Rumors speculate that in some past life his true love was taken from him violently. It’s anyone’s guess about how true any of his back stories are. He’s fond of the phrase, “life is balance.” His interpretation of that is that if he spent ten years saving the lives of the wretched and poor, he can spend ten more brutally killing the perpetrators of gross human rights violations. Sometimes he claims he prays, but he’s just talking to himself or Maya Solomon. Watson has not seen him bed a woman in three years. If there is some clandestine courtship or fuckery occurring under his nose it would be hard to discern who it truly was that so possessed him. His marriage to Maya Sorieya Solomon was as much a charade as his cold corpse laying in the D.H.S. mortuary still the subject of negotiations for recovery.
Watson suspects that he still corresponds, and dreams of the Russian.
The bathhouse or Banya as called in Cyrillic is perhaps the most famous Banya in all of the Postsoviet Union. It’s a veritable palace of hot steam, marble and voluptuous working women always on beck, bend and call. Enough to make a dead Cosmonaut or the still unburied corpse of Lenin blush, or rise back to attention.
It has been nearly a year since they’d last seen each other.
“I heard a man once say that if you know history you can gauge his next move. I assure you that zealots don’t follow that rule on any individual level,” says Ysiad Ferraris.
Ysiad grew up within the sprawling slums of the Bronx in New York City. In a housing project in the District Morrisania he cut his teeth before the fall of the old regime in a red brick tenement shit hole whose elevators always stunk of piss and rot and feces. He seldom recounts this story. He doesn’t trust most people. Only his wife, a Yiddish named Daviyya and sometimes his friend the infamous Mr. Adon. Ysiad makes a lot of people nervous with the work he does. He now runs hedge funds for black collar criminals. Think development graft in Central Asia. Think large scale black bag real estate deals in the Saudi Peninsula. Business advising and tech support for men who take crude oil bathes. Think about creative uses for container ships and also social security numbers. The very worst connotations of the “import-export business”. Adon on the other hand is an avenging zealot, posing as an ambulance man. You’d think they had little in common, besides appreciation of bath houses and for mouthfuls and handfuls of big well formed Ruus-Soviet tits.
Adon has closed files with a few very serious intelligence bodies. A body is lying in a morgue somewhere that matches his DNA enough for the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security to have declared him “neutralized file closed”. The F.S.B. has its doubts as to his death. The Mossad knows him very well to be an asset as long as he is kept out of the Middle East. He’s only still alive because he’s proficient, works night shift and is officially dead. And bribes are punctually paid on his behalf and he is efficient at the returning of high level favors.
He often travels with an intricately forged Greek passport declaring his name to be “Zacharias”. He is currently travelling as a Cuban citizen named “Vasili”.
Maybe Bon-Dieu “the Good God” smiles on those who organize the murder of sex traffickers. Maybe the spirits like that Captain Entwissle and he for three years have been hanging violators swinging from trees and rafters, leaving blood messes in broad nightlight hits; quietly delivering evil men to the grave with radiation, blood clots and heart stopping pharmaceuticals. Men always need to think god or a woman is cheering for them.
They’re mostly always wrong when it comes to their killing.
Watson and Sebastian began this operation with ten other operatives and a blank check for mayhem. No one walked away unscathed. As designed the job was a scaled up version of the Israeli post-Munich Olympics reprisals. Scaled up quite considerably. The very first use of the internet to outsource extrajudicial targeted killings of human rights violators!
One survivor is back in Breuklyn Soviet. She is the current Information & Intelligence Section Chief, a woman named Anya Drovtich. Four are rehabilitating psychologically in Haiti-DR and the other six were killed over the course of the assignment. The higher profile the target the more subtle were the kills, at least on this units end. The former dictator of Zimbabwe and the exiled Syrian Minister of Information died of chemically induced cardiac arrests. The head of Russian owned energy firm Gazprom died in his sleep from a pulmonary embolus. They spent entirely too much time in the Former Soviet Union. Bosnian concentration camp commanders died of asthma attacks. As compared to the owners of Amsterdam’s nine largest brothels which all were dismembered and dumped onto the streets. Or the Albanian traffickers executed in Kosovo in the middle of packed night clubs. Or the expatriate leadership of the Haitian Tonton Maccoute (Boogie Men with Sacs) all decapitated in France, Algeria and Morocco.
What allowed the longest threshold of assassination was:
- a) That there was not a discernible pattern to the deaths.
- b) That the very latest in life saving technologies were used in the reverse direction.
- c) That “Anonymous” paid out lump cash rewards for data and confirmed captures or kills. And that kills paid more than captures.
- d) That the internet allowed civilians all over the world to send in data.
- e) That the crimes these men and women had been sentenced to die for were rather well corroborated.
- f) And, that no executions were to be carried out in Russia, China, or the U.A.S.
High-end bioterrorism met with full moon bouts of medieval barbarism. What let the body count climb so high so quickly with so little collateral civilian damage was that “the Anonymous” put the power of vengeance in the hands of the everyday people.
The Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club just did its part in the effort.
Ysiad looks over his old friend and says:
“More people know you to be alive than you realize. And dangerous ones at that.”
“You came to me once and said you had “a complex plan.” I always told you all your plans are overly complex, and that’s just thinly veiled code for fucking insane. They often fly in the face of what I know to be human nature, or reasonable doubt. Your guerrilla medical apparatus in Haiti was an inspired piece of work however. This is a prerequisite for an Adon style plan. Your inspiration I mean. You came to me first because I’m probably the richest person you can trust. You obviously have some strong patrons in your extended family and general war camp, but a trusted inside backer is so vital when seeking to accomplish the nearly impossible, your obvious distaste for all governments aside, even the seemingly happily leftist regime of your new little Breuklyn based micro republic. You have many times sought to suck me into the mechanics of your Otriad, and always failed due the outlandishness of your schemes. I have so little use for a buck wild revolutionist, and when you ceased to be a purely loud one it was easier to be friends with you. Suffice to say by dying and then ending the separatist wars and related secessionist troubles and in pulling off a now six year lasting defensible union of Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island the Bronx, well it’s been very good for my business. And of course your club’s position in that anarchic little micro-republic is very good for business too. Cheers to the pirate bays of Coney Island!”
They schvitz away.
The room is hotter than an elopement with a Ruus hoodlum’s lady property or a burner with cop bodies scattered across a district. The air is thick with Eucalyptus-Birch vapors and man sweat. Ysiad hopes hell has a halfway decent Banya, “cause that’s where we may end up going if you Yids are wrong about the whole there not being a punitive afterlife”.
“So planning the invasion of all Africa this time?” he finally asks Sebastian.
“Such was their vote,” Adon says referring to the 18th Congress of the Breuklyn Otriad.
“And your whole apparatus is now behind you on this?”
“Most of our people are behind us on this. Some think it too ambitious at a heightened cost in treasure and blood. Some feel we ought to be content with consolidation here and throughout the Confederacy. Others believe we ought to be turning our attentions to the home front. I’m in the go big or go home camp. The vote is on my side of this argument as of last week.”
“Solomon obviously is still calling the biggest shots?”
“Solomon obviously would like me think this was our collective plan, but yes. She leads the consensus via her powers of precognition.”
“For zombies in exile, you two have great amounts of pull. But, this goes against the grain a little tactically. Your home team, this isn’t exactly what you first enlisted them for. Para-state work and irregular warfare in Africa are horses not of nearly the same color. And you and she are supposed to be low profile and quite dead. The armistice holds, but this will complicate everything surely. And what the fuck are you doing in Moscow?”
“Well, I think a Trojan horse goes where the water is most cold.”
“What the fuck does that even mean man?”
“An old Russian saying.”
“Fuck them hard in every hole and compensate them for it, but don’t ever quote them. That’s what I always say.”
“Or fall for them hopelessly over and over,” Sebastian mutters eyes drifting to past lives and vanquished affairs.
“I only hope these days you’re staying away from all that. The world has no use at all for a serial killing revolutionist visionary who is also as hopeless romantic poetry writing puppy dog. No use at all.”
“Touché as always old sport. The general membership has voted in favor and when this is put in proper perspective the invasion will certainly occur. Now, it is just a question of the scope of accomplishment attached to our actions, just how much take we can take.” Adon smirks, “so what-cha say Easy?”
Smoothing this out by using his high school nickname.
“Prove to me in two-quarters you’ve got enough men to make a lasting historical impact and I’ll provide you the container ships and charter planes to move them into position with weapons in hand.”
“How much is enough men to make such impact in your mind?”
“Like three hundred, that worked for the Greeks right? If three hundred Yids and Blans get killed fighting those Maccoute, on a slow news week maybe you’d make cover of the New York Times.”
“We want the full attention of the world at large. We’re going to need shit tons of global populism to make all this work. And, you’d better have that capital ready old sport because we already got more muscle than that lined up.”
“Don’t get all Great Gatsby on me son,” Ysiad says with a grin.
“You’re gonna need a lot of rifles,” he then notes.
“As any as we can lay our hands on,” Adon responds, “and a few massive favors from the Cubans, Trinidadians, Haitians & Dominican diaspora, Persians and also the Israelis as well as the full support and approval of the G.A.I.”
“What’s that an acronym for again?”
“Gwoup Ayisyen Pou Ijans, the Haitian Emergency Group.”
“Ah! Tiputti Capois’s outfit. Planning to do some saving and some killing while in Haiti are you? Weekend in Port-Au-Prince then soon?”
“Soon as tonight’s job is done.”
“About that. I’ve heard a few rumors flying around that who you’re after isn’t going to be easy to reach. He’s not even a high priority hit. You’re just wrapping up a list.”
“I’m just finishing off that list.”
“Well just know that people know; certain well connected super violent former Soviet people know that you’re going after the guard colonel, tonight. I’d just be cautious and decide if it’s really worth it. You and your Haitian are valuable players. This guy Putin would love to embarrass the U.A.S. authorities by taking you alive.”
“Well good thing no one knows I’m alive.”
“Well Alexandr Perchevney sure does. He’s going to be my silent partner in rearming your club. And if he knows then that information is for sale.”
“Sasho,” mutters Adon.
He is referring to one of the most prominent Russian oligarchs on the playing field. In reality; a Bulgarian-Ukrainian Ivory. But these days who’s counting.
“I once knew his daughter Hachi rather well. She’s married to my associate Mr. King.”
“Oh that I’m all too aware of. It’s good you’re almost done. You couldn’t really hope to keep killing people with power much longer before they got hold of you. Yelizaveta is in Havana is she not?”
Ysiad is referring to Alexandr’s first daughter.
All he gets in return is some version of the forty yard stare.
“Your war of letters isn’t nearly as captivating as your war of deeds Mr. Adon. I suspect she will always come around again to your neo-Jacobin advances.”
“Well that’s hardly what Haiti has proved Mr. Ferraris.”
“Haiti in the end just proved there is truly no such thing as a free black republic without a Yid keeping the lights on.”
“Give us four more years’ tovarish.”
“Never forget I am your friend, but my no stretch of imagination your comrade. You have two quarters. Get your house I order and I’ll make sure you have exactly what you need for the usual price of souls, glory and treasure. Hachi Yu is running a restaurant supper club in Las Vegas she will be the point person for coordinating arms purchases via the Perchevney Bratva. I’d forget about the Guards Colonel and fly to the Caribbean tonight. The moon is full and the FSB knows that your club has a unit in Moscow. If they don’t know it’s you, they at least know who you’re after.”
“That bastard is going to die tonight. And then we’re closing the book.”
“Are you still in touch with little Yelizaveta?” Ysiad asks.
He gets no response.
“I suppose the procedure worked just fine then,” he declares.
“So you’ll work out the logistics with the Israelis and the club can make procurements via Ms. Hachi Yu Perchevney?
“That’s right old friend. As soon as you’re ready and the contracts are drawn up about oil concessions and port access and pipe lines. We run a business after all. We don’t just help you people out of loyalty.”
“There is one last piece to the equation that must be squared away. Once it is then you will be the first person alerted via sky pager to the flashing green light for attack.”
“Avinadav DeBuitléir?”
“Exactly.”
“Well don’t get killed tonight and I’ll see you in Santo Domingo for Champagne and a fuck fest.”
“I don’t drink,” Adon says.
“You still fuck don’t you?”
“I mostly just save or kill when I must.”
“The poor martyr he says,” playing the world’s smallest violin.
“Don’t bullshit me! I know the little bitch ripped your heart out good and you’ve gone on a bit of a bender. But the reality it is that it’s not healthy for man to abstain from life’s best pleasures. All to be found on the eastern two thirds of Palmares Island!”
Ysiad can tell the procedure worked because the old Adon might have well struck him in the face for calling his Yelizaveta “a bitch”.
“Forget about Guards Colonel Yuri Dmitrievich Budanov,” says Ysiad Ferris, “you ain’t gonna get near him. Now let’s shake and toast to the liberation of Haiti.”
“Salud,” Sebastian says.
Ysiad clinks a shot of Russian Standard to Sebastian’s bottle of Borjomi.
Wouldn’t be the first or the last time Sebastian has made a deal with the devil for a noble cause. Upstairs Watson Entwissle looks down impatiently at his gold watch and wonders how soon they can get out of this cold, bleak lawless empire. He prefers his gangsters residing in the tropics. Easier to bury and then hit the beach. And without flicker mask he stands out like sore thumb in this country.
The snow has dropped a blanket of desolation over Moscow and no roof or high wall will keep its worst thieves safe tonight. Guards Colonel Yuri Dmitrievich Budanov of the 160th Guards Tank Regiment is finally going to pay for his crimes.
Chapter 16
East New York, 2083ce
Breuklyn Soviet
The candle light flickers.
The world outside might well be on fire and the sky may be falling but the Nina Simone playing on the record player in the next room, and our telling of tall to order tales takes our minds off the quickly spreading flames of the greatest revolution history has ever known. In our lusts of solitude, we hear Nina moaning heartbreak and 808’s over the old school sound system in the next room.
“Tak. Switch narrator!” I declare.
Natasha looks truly upset.
“Unfair! It was just getting exciting! I have long wondered how it was that they got to the guards colonel and out of Moscow with their heads still on,” she says.
“Well I will only finish the story if you present me with a proper report from the Breuklyn Soviet.”
“Hmm, amid tournament trade of our most highly coveted data? I suppose.”
“These are but stories and fairy tales my dorogaia.”
She winks.
“Of course they are. What is it you’re looking to have whispered in your inquisitive Western ear on behalf of your beleaguered coastal city state, the mind of the general rising if Haiti is the heart and Israel the soul?”
“I will finish the yarn on what led to the demise of that infamous guard colonel if you tell me a cautionary tale of the so-called Cult in Grey.”
“What about said cult?” she asks me cautiously.
“Oh, how they almost caused a war between the Ivories and Blacks of Breuklyn. Who sent them? And how they were dealt with; a short story.”
“Enough foreplay then,” she grins at me. Then like a crazed animal Natasha bites my shoulder as hard as she can drawing blood.
“Blood begets only more blood,” she spite out in Aramaic.
And then she assumes the role of grim narrator:
How many Zionist agents does it take to change a light bulb?
Night falls on a third Breuklyn blood bath. Another atrocity has occurred. This time at the Broadway Junction. You’d think these blacks were animals by just reading foreign papers about them. Blacks and Ivories hung from the great tree in Prospect. A month later in the rafters of the bridge. This time a far more subtle slaughter.
It’s a big full moon, a killing just like it was the last two times this happened.
“Something has gone terribly wrong,” mutters Anya Drovtich, the Polish Islamic paramedic who leads via coldness and example. A most un-closeted anarchist. The only known survivor of the very unit sent to help capture, but mostly to extra judicially kill one hundred and four war profiteers and war criminals in the three years following the Great Revolt in an operation dubbed “the purge”.
The Chief of I & I has dread locks and a lightning fast Ducati, like a big black cat.
“A real bad bitch,” as the chornay would say. To them that’s a term of endearment.
It came in as a double homicide on the Shomriim scanners. Shomriim is Yiddish for “the Watchmen”. But, double homicide was just a cover for the utter butchery of a family of Jamaicans, and the public inverted crucifixion of the son of a rabbi, along with his two sisters. Shit like this isn’t supposed to go down in our districts. It’s a hot mess to clean up. And when the local press gets hold of it; things are gonna pop off quick. One killing happened in our Zone of Control in a small park off Empire and Schenectady in District Crown Heights. That’s where the Watchmen found the three dead Yids. The second killing happened in in lawless District East New York, which isn’t really controlled by anyone.
People are gonna say, “It’s not safe to travel to the Breuklyn Soviet.”
Nikholai Trikhovitch got there first sealed off the area and then headed over to East New York. The Shomriim made a discrete phone call directly to him. Within an hour the four adjacent blocks off Schenectady and Empire were sealed off. The dead Ivories were found in a small park. Within an hour every trace of them was gone.
The second crime scene is on the third floor of a red brick multi-dwelling one block from the Broadway Junction in District East New York.
The place looks like a slaughter house. A killer, or large group of killers exsanguinated a thirteen person family, five little kids including two babies. Bled them dry. Hung um upside down. And soon as this incident leaks out it’s going to be hard to hold down the truce. When that falls apart, so does the soul of the Soviet. The blood pact between the West Indians and the Ivories is at the heart of things. Breuklyn Soviet has a population of three million. According to the last census that’s nearly one million Yids, one million Karibes and one million other; that other being highly diverse, but with the Gaels making up the next biggest ethnic block; followed by what we call “the Russians”, who are mostly every other kind of former Soviet besides actual Slavic Russians, followed by Poles, Arabs, Puerto Ricans, Chinese and also the Italians.
The Ivories and the West Indians went ham two times before as they say. “Hard as a motherfucker” on each other once in 1993 during the Crown Heights Riots, and again more recently during the “Borough Park Blood Libel”.
The Otriad, was suddenly again on the called “Orange Alert”. A Red Alert being that they were going to fire a nuclear missile at a UAS megalopolis on the mainland, so just a bit less alert than that.
Nikholai woke Anya Drovtich and Mickhi DBrisk as soon as he visually confirmed both sites of the slaughter.
“The body count so far is thirteen Caribes and three more Ivories. Just like last time but with far less dead,” sky pages Nikholai in sky code.
“That brings the total body count to 104, confirm,” sky pages back Dbrisk.
“Confirmed,” he replies.
Last time was one lunar month ago, the last night of the 18th Congress. Sixty four people from two families found the same way on the Bridge. Two months before that the same bloody mess but with twenty two dangled by their necks from the tallest tree in Prospect Park for all to see and speculate on. The killers were not only ruthless they were out to provoke war.
This time was the lowest body count and least public display of the crime but the dead were of the two most prominent families in the Soviet. Thirteen dead Jamaicans, the children of a famous babashanti; a Rastafarian priestess married to a famous Haitian Ougan. And three more Sephardic Ivories from the house of Rabbi Akiva Tatz, including his son.
Anya Drovtich looks very good in dancehall red, also in a dark emergency blue multiform. Her long black dread locks when not tied up in a hijab dangle like bountiful black snakes wrapping down her shoulders. Anya is the Chief of I and I; the Information and Intelligence Section. She is the highest ranking woman in the entire Otriad, responsible not only for our networks of “whisperers” within the Soviet, but a vast array of clandestine sympathizers still in the U.A.S., other liberated Free States of the Confederacy and also abroad. The primary duty of her Section is to identify security threats to the Breuklyn Soviet, its secondary prerogative is to hunt, identify and arrange the extrajudicial killings of war criminals in collaboration with “the Anonymous”. The tertiary duty is to use her oracle powers and see ten moves ahead.
More on that later.
Anya started with the club nine years ago distributing the underground newspaper out of the Fire Department’s Eighth Battalion. Her second assignment was with the unit sent to train medical guerrillas for the Syrian Free Army. When most of the unit and most of the Free Syrian Army was obliterated in Aleppo, she and Sebastian joined the PKK and YPG fighters in Rojava.
Her third major assignment was to join the crew that by the end of that very same weekend was about to reach its 104th target, a Russian Guards Colonel who had brutally raped and murdered a young Chechen girl during the first Chechen war and was set to soon become a minor politician in Putin’s United Russia Party. Anya had been reassigned after the first year and now she is an Otriad underboss.
“We have another seemingly serious problem,” Nikholai informs Anya.
So, Anya throws on her blue multiform and black leather jacket and jumps on her Ducati and takes off from her two bed room flat in the South Slope toward Broadway Junction. The site of far too many incidents before and after the revolt. The only reasonable explanation is that the junction is built on an Indian burial ground.
“A block most often hot.”
Mickhi Dbrisk rolls out of bed with his babies mother Rosa; throws on jeans and a grey button down; his tam; his chain, a burner, a shooter, a flip dagger, a thick stack, and two smart phones; also a scanner and a belt radio; and he walks up the street. In his inner pocket are a black bandana, a blue bandana, a grey bandana, and the yellow Lebvature Rebi Messiah Flag. Its 02:03am. The blue street lights are running on low power lithium batteries from solar power stored over the course of the day. He lives just a block from the crime scene. None of the rebel leaders have significantly upgraded their pre Revolt lodgings.
It would be against the code.
Well except for Magnus Goldbar Allamby, who lives by no man’s code.
They all agree to meet in their own turf, because passing into District East New York will require advance notice and an armored convoy.
The fourth person called in is the burly Russian-Israeli Oleg Medved; Deputy Chief of Internal Security, our secret police, who was born in Ukraine and educated in Israel. Or, more euphemistically referred to as the “Public Safety Branch of the Security Section” or “the Whisper Network”. In a General Operating Procedures Guide sense he serves as the primary deputy officer right under a woman named Erza Pula; the 18th Executive’s elected Security Section Chief. One tough, pale and lovely hard Albanian. It is rumored he quietly seduced and bedded his immediate superior thus muddling the chain of command with his constant womanizing. In reality, he now reports directly to Anya Drovtich as a major officer of the club.
He was also once in the employ of the Perchevney Bratva, the major Russian crime syndicate that has invested so much money into the new ports and reconstruction on Coney Island. He is loyal to the Club because of Loyalnost and his core Zionist ideology. He is still well compensated by the Bratva to insure that port stays open to everything except traffic in people. And he moonlights for the Israelis periodically as a fixer of fixers.
He has a lot of the citizens on his payroll.
When Anya Drovtich pulls up on her black Ducati, Mickhi DBrisk is outside smoking a Newport standard cigarette with Nikholai and Oleg Medved has just parked his black bullet proof Escalade and is looking over some data on his smart phone.
“We have two flying columns on standby ready to enter District East New York. The Shomriim is already preparing for crowd control. I’ve got four ambulances parked up the street ready to move the bodies. The Ivories have already taken away their own dead,” Oleg the Bear says.
“Call for suppression,” Anya declares.
Oleg interjects, “If I may, this is a total violation of the ceasefire. We shouldn’t suppress it. We should document it and rally the people behind it. The other free states will rally behind us.”
“What we’re going to do is burn the bodies and cover it up, again. Yes, that’s exactly what I was going for,” snaps Anya.
Oleg is a dirty blond bearded bear of a man and off duty quite famous for his wild orgy parties and gregarious ways. In civilian life he is a fashion photographer of note and local celebrity. In his capacity as head of the Otriad’s secret police he keeps on payroll no less than four thousand “whisperers” largely modals, escorts, other fashion photographers, hackers, and urban outdoorsmen, a nice word for the homeless. This is the third time now they’ve all kept such late night company over gruesome particulars.
“This is the third group killing in three months,” states Dbrisk.
“It’s the same formula,” he continues, “a large dead family and some crucified children of clergy. They’re trying to spark a war here. So we can’t let that happen. So we’re gonna have to handle this the same way. With suppression.”
That’s two major votes without voting. “Suppression” is a euphemism for having the Fire Department burn something down to cover something up.
“How many people know this time?” Anya asks.
“The four of us, a few Yiddish detectives from Shomriim and the marijuana distribution agent who found the three dead Ivories in the park. And the one surviving family member of the Jamaicans; a thirteen year old hood, he came home to the height of slaughter,” says Trikhovitch.
“That’s a lot of people to pay quiet. This is going to get out,” warns Oleg.
“The Shomriim won’t talk. It’s the dealer and the young hood that might.”
“Dealer’s a hood or a hipster?” Anya asks.
“Hipster,” says Nikholai. There still are a few left.
“I vote to call a press conference and go public with the killings. It’s obviously a U.A.S. provocation using loyalists and Blackwater mercenaries sent to sew panic and discord in our ranks.”
“This is not up for vote boys. We’re going to suppress this and deal with it ourselves,” Anya informs them.
“Is the task force ready to enter District East New York?” she asks.
“Yes. The apartment is sealed off and we already have the surviving family member in custody. We can have fire engines in position in fifteen minutes,” says Nikholai Trikhovitch.
“Comrade Oleg Medved please take the hipster and the young hood to one of your safe houses and wipe out their memories. Please see to it that they wake up in the Caribbean by tomorrow evening. Trikhovitch and I will set up the incendiary devices and wait for the fire trucks. Dbrisk, if you’d be so kind; please call in Suppression the minute I sky page you that we are in position. I despise that part of town.”
“All I’m saying is that we can’t let this continue,” Oleg says.
“I have no intention of letting it continue. But we can’t have the population think a blood libel has occurred again.”
“Who did this? It’s pretty gruesome even for Blackwater,” Trikhovitch declares.
“It’s the Cult in Grey. They’re obviously back,” states Oleg Medved.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” says Anya, “Let’s mop this up. I want to see everyone at a closed staff meeting this evening at District bunker 004 under Café Hadar on Avenue N no later than 18:00, Haitian time. By that she means, don’t be followed, don’t be early, don’t be late. The code of the Haitian gentleman is that it is one should never ever be late, but it is an egregious and inexcusable breach of proper conduct to be early.
And with that the four officers of the Club prepare to enter the gangland of the district to the east and guide fire trucks toward an atrocity that needs to be turned into ashes.
The high level subversive characters part ways and plan to regroup in the next day.
Chapter 17
1375 Ocean Ave, 2083ce
Breuklyn Soviet
The sun is now rising on Breuklyn. Nikholai Trikhovitch, the freelance detective, the former cop, the part time drunk and; the Chief of the Otriad Logistics Section has been left alone to his own thoughts.
Sip to ponder.
“I don’t like the responsibility that comes with this much power,” thinks Nikholai Trikhovitch. He has 5am shadow; he doesn’t remember when he last shaved. It was all so much easier when attendance at the meetings and the frustrations of never having enough loot in the war chest were the biggest concerns. Like it or not we are governing now. We are invading countries and carrying out extrajudicial killings left and right. We take our votes and people lose their lives. And as of the January census we are administering social services for over 80,000 citizens of the Soviet! It’s good I don’t sleep, he thinks.
Sip to forget.
Our cell of the Z.O.B. has had only had between eight and ten active members any given time. I am often unsure whether ‘the organization’ is quite large and has its hand in everything, or, if exists in one man’s mind alone. As well as I think I know Sebastian I really know nothing. Especially of the things he saw when he was in the Promised Land burning before the towers fell. All other titles and incarnations spin loosely around that core eight. The nucleus of the Otriad. With Adon officially deceased and out bounty hunting in Eurasia; and Solomon officially deceased and organizing out in the Horn of Africa; and DeBuitléir in prison; we are down to only three of the original members including myself serving on the 18th Executive. The other surviving two still alive being Hubert O’Domhnaill and Mickhi Dbrisk, but Hubert refuses to join the Executive. The others were killed horribly over the course of the War Years, the Disorder and the Revolt. But, never underestimate what you can accomplish with even just a couple good zealous people on your team.
In the immortal words of my best friend Sebastian Adon, “One person has an idea, two have a conspiracy and three; an Otriad.” An irregular paramilitary detachment for mutual aid and collective security. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
All that was needed was a three character meaningless acronym. And course he’d needed Anya and I to tell him that the first job could be done. But I digress.
I’m sitting on my seventh story rooftop, three months since the congress in the month of March. The seventh floor of my building has a good view of district Midwood and district Flatbush; the cradle of the insurgency once claimed the New York Times. With a bottle of Baboncourt Haitian Premium Smoked Silver Rum and some Noblisse heavywiders watching the dawn get ready to break through the haze of my indulgences, I wait for dawn.
I hope third times the charm.
We torched the crime scenes. We interrogated everyone. We inundated the Crown Heights and East New York Districts with Crip enforcers, Shomriim, and about two hundred plain clothes on watch and deescalate duty. And we took the dealer and the family member into protective custody. They’ll end up in the Caribbean for a while until things clam down. No arrests have been made. And they won’t be. No one gets arrested anymore. More like accosted. I’d love to tell you that all the fighting and dying bought us a better freer life. We just traded an oligarchy for some mob rule.
The only thing keeping this place together is that it was pretty well organized to begin with. I’d love to say we’ve brought Human Rights to Breuklyn. We’ve mostly just traded an authoritarian government posing as a democracy for a gangster’s paradise posing as a rebel free state. Sure we arrest people. Sure they get trials. Except sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we just do things because they have to be done and we were elected to lead.
Like grab a suspect off the street, throw a hood over their head and hand them over to the New Russians to torture in the former psyche ward of Coney Island Hospital.
Oleg Medved has his network trying to track down the killers, see who saw anything. But no one did. No one ever does in East New York. Anya ordered sixteen more retributive killings to be carried out on the U.A.S. mainland. Nothing horror show, just an eye for an eye. It never ends. There’s always some latest big mess. Some threat of attack or some rumor to address. This borough was an ethnic powder keg before the revolt. It hasn’t gotten much better.
From my roof or just about anywhere else in the Soviet I can see the Tree of Life which arose miraculously out of the ground shortly after liberation three years ago. At first it was something of a curiosity; then it just kept growing. It’s easily forty stories tall now. Along with a number of other things its sureality incorporated around here in the past few years. The rabbits for instance; where the fuck did they come from? There never used to be large wild rabbits jumping around the Coney Peninsula. I’ve stopped sleeping entirely as I aid earlier. I’ve stopped asking about things that are “weird” and stick with things that are dangerous.
I was a Club founder by association alone. I did no heavy lifting until the Haiti job. I met Sebastian when I was fourteen when he formed the first Z.O.B. incarnation called Youth United For Equality; the YUFE. It wasn’t until after the September 11th Attacks that I attended some meetings. It wasn’t until Haiti when I took on a leadership role. Apparently I have some talent in getting things in and out of third world countries. I’ve been helping them move things ever since. My pay comes from detective work, investigating disappeared people, strange occurrences, cheating husbands and the like. I was elected to head the Logistics Section shortly after the armistice was declared.
Sip to not remember. I take my Baboncourt on the rocks and flowing freely off duty.
Half the bottle is gone before the sun breaks the horizon. Did I mention I have a bit of problem with not drinking? I’m never wilding drunk except at a good funeral. Or series of funerals. Like at Adon’s first and second one. Like at Rahula Mccaffeys’ or at Paul Mark’s. Like at David Sasha Dualde’s or those where we couldn’t retrieve the bodies like in the cases of Zander Apple, Mateo Lyons, Gene Dissentious, and Daniel Fried. Horrific cases like those of Yovanna Koracab. Fighters lost in the various engagements like Jeffery Hermanksy, Annabell Lewis or Justin & Jesse Thomas.
And I will never forget the way Hali Vik was executed. Not ever.
The martyrs.
They went after all of our families too in the immediate years of the revolt. Just to hurt us, try and break out will to fight.
Like my two little brothers Colin and Rafael. Or, my parents. Or the Mapfres, Or, the O’Domhnaills. Or, Sebastian’s entire family even distant cousins he never knew that never even aided the uprising, murdered everyone but his brother. The skinned his fucking father alive. The Oligarchy never forgets those who raised the children of the Great Revolt. The children of believers, as the Hasidim call us.
I don’t tip the bottle to the ground like the black man does. I don’t waste my Fenian whiskey or my Haitian rescue rum. We have prayed for the dead and we fight like hell for the living.
I keep thinking about my Krissy. I keep missing her. That’s my ex-wife. There’s too much loss in the freedom fighting game if you ask me. Way too many funerals. Way too much stripping of a person down to an animal. A wild savage fighting wolf. I keep thinking that I’m not cut out to be affiliated with this outfit anymore. Maybe I’ll ask to be swapped out into one of the higher risk international battalions. Maybe I’ll just take leave until I can finally sleep. Maybe I’ll hang out with Oleg Medved in the “Green Light District” and fuck Ukrainian girls until my cock falls off. Fuck. Sip. Sip. Sip.
Maybe I’ll put on the iron vest and go make a loud statement somewhere. Or join a mine clearing unit on the Eastern front.
The roof top vista is completely unremarkable. For all “the freedom” we’ve won, much of what we govern is a red brick, low rise sprawl. Most of the building has gone on subterranean. Except in Coney Island where the Russians have built a series of steel and glass towers and a fully modern port facility near what we commonly call the “Green Light District”, where “anything goes”. Much of the old red brick sprawl was reduced to rubble during the war. Our districts did better than those held by the Uhuru fighters and the various other unions, factions and street gangs less prepared for a protracted urban siege. Brownsville has ceased to exist as a District. It was outright reduced to rebar pilings and ash. Twice now. Eventually it will be a lovely park with field of Peonies and Tom Ottorness sculptures memorializing the dead. Only half the rubble has been cleared. The Park’s Department isn’t exactly what it used to be after most of its best employees enlisted in the development battalions or were executed in the filtration camp massacres at the two stadiums during the revolt.
A whole lot of American citizens died to secure this red brick sprawl, the free ports on the Southern Coast, the Strong Island, and outpost Block Island where one of the three nuclear launch batteries is hidden.
Our best grad rockets can hit Chicago, where the new capital of the U.A.S. is. Now that Washington D.C. is irradiated and gone.
Sip.
What a huge fucking tree! As if the blood of the martyrs, the blood of the estimated 140,000 dead all watered the grandest act of botany ever. I climbed it one night with Anya Drovtich. We installed a fire station transmission boaster in it. But the electronics never work no matter what we tinker with. It’s only the most obvious example of the strange voodoo creeping into out micro republic.
We had to climb it three months ago to get all those bodies down.
The “Tree of Life” as we call it is the third tallest landmark only dwarfed by the High Tower in the Downtown District near what used to be called “Barclay Stadium” and the eighty four story Drake Hotel on Banner Avenue in District Brighton. The General Assembly convenes there three times daily now. There are still concerts. The Nets still play. What a draining cluster fuck of a talk fest populist democracy can be. No one can tax us. So the “legislative body of the people” is largely just a showcase for our total disunity. And no other faction trusts our little Club these days because we won’t share access codes to the hidden atomic arsenal deployed across Strong Island. This is in the end the only thing keepings us free.
Like Israel, North Korea, and Iran once we test fired, they had no choice but to freeze frame completely. Israel’s gonna be a Ivoryish apartheid state, Iran a Shi’a fundamentalist Shar’iah State and North Korea a brandy guzzling, twenty dollar bill printing, Stalinist big brother Disney land; well, indefinitely. To say the very least.
Sip, sip sip sip.
My Baboncourt on the rocks does the trick. But what the trick is I’m not sure. My eyes are grey on grey orbs, a symptom of the insomnia. I have to wear contacts to hide them. Insomnia has become something of an epidemic here. Also children being born with complete knowledge of their past lives. That too is major source of my income. Brining little toddlers, normally West Indians or Chasidics to verify claims that the child remembers “where he used to live” or “what he used to do”. There have been numerous reports of these phenomena in the Druse Villages of Israel and Syria. Now it’s becoming common occurrence here too.
I can see Breuklyn College where I nearly completed university for a degree in journalism. I would have been a senior when “the Great Disorder” began. I can see drones making their early morning perimeter sweeps between us and “the City”. They trace the border but never fly over as that would violate the armistice.
Eventually I’ll go back down to my flat and I’ll watch the History Channel or I’ll stare at a picture of Krissy until I’m enough in the past that the now hurts much less. I’m depressed that she’s gone. I’m depressed I was suckered into a revolution I can’t control. As if you ever can. I’m depressed because I’m not really sure how the story is going to unfold.
Some people but their faith in God, but I’m a religious atheist. All of the blood of the martyrs, all the miracles and tragedies of the revolt, all of the hope for human rights and end of the long game; all that has made me quite tired. I don’t believe that a just god could preside over such a pack of self-interested violent monkeys.
The Chasidics are whispering that the Dror Ha Tzadikk, the generation’s candidate for Messiah has returned. There is a forty story tree growing in Prospect Park. There are rabbits of enormous size hopping about and drones darting across the skyline. We have smuggling tunnels under the East River and we have nuclear weapons aimed at major American cities and the rebel confederacy has no clear picture in the slightest what do with their new liberty.
There are a lot of strange things happening in the Breuklyn Soviet. But, personally I have no idea what I’m fighting for anymore. Or really more importantly, for whom?
Vengeance, love, ideals; this doesn’t sustain me for long. I haven’t even committed those so called Universal rights to memory. I’ve just been here since the beginning so there is little way out as I see it. But besides from Hubert O’Domhnaill, all the original members are dead.
I forgot to mention something to myself. Three months ago before the killings began I got a call from Krissy in the wee hours of morning or night. Or someone who sounded just like her. The voice claiming to be my ex-wife told me that Sebastian Adon was very much alive. And that they were going to have a train load of soldiers rape her in every hole in her body her for weeks on end; film the whole thing and send it to me, unless I shoot Sebastian in the head the first chance I get.
“But he’s dead, “I told the voice on the phone claiming to be my ex-wife. Love of my life.
That was a tall order. She left me fair and square. Walked out on me and broke my heart. Then got herself somehow abducted. And he’s been dead for three years. Can’t betray your dead best friend for a woman who left you for a richer man who couldn’t even protect her.
“He’s gonna turn up real soon,” she told me. Then the line went dead.
This was the night before the 18th Congress, two months ago. The night some vile war criminals hung those two families worth of blacks and Ivories off the Breuklyn Bridge. Killed sixty four men, women and children. A month before that twenty four were left hanging in that very tall tree for all to see on third anniversary of our independence. We couldn’t completely cover up the first two massacres and now all the factions are looking at each other.
If we don’t find out who did this there’s gonna be a big old Black on Ivory war.
Chapter 18
Drake Hotel, 2082ce
Breuklyn SOviet
Oleg the Bear, at his room in the Drake Hotel drinks vodka straight in a bath robe watching the sun rise over the Green Light District he’s helped build.
When he’s this drunk and he’s done with the second woman he turns to American poetry.
#24: Sometimes_the_Vodka drinks me
Sometimes,
I get drunk.
And I drive my car
In figure eight circles around the Adon Loop in coop city,
The only street which bears my name.
And from the wheel of my Lincoln I survey my high rise brick kingdom, All I can see!
Sometimes I drink to remember, sometimes I drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks me.
It’s a bevy of victimless crimes.
Most of the times,
There are no children playing at these midnight hours,
Or those that are carry various calibers or carbines as they carry on trade in nickels and dimes.
With each kiss of Stolichnaya I get further from all the accusing faces of friends lost,
And lubricated by the demons still waters I am forgiven for my broken promises. And that which such promises cost.
I sip and shoot shot and bottle tip. And the ghosts of past make clever cheers,
Nazdrovia!
They say as I sip. More shots.
To the last drop, a fast viscosity,
A deadly drip.
Cheers to little Malka who’s daddy abused her, and who’s foreign baby’s father used her like a Siberian doll and fled leaving a teenage mother with child in the slums of Shahoun Daled!
Shot to the head.
Cheers to Maya captured and bonded to brothels at the age of sixteen, pale white tits all the gawk of Montreal’s flying flesh carnival scene. Long white lines of supine mortgage, traumas of the slave trade never fully known, what they made her do.
Time supine, also prone.
Third shot for Ocasio,
Long behind bars for his cannabis dealing,
Also his class and his skin and later his new found political feelings. Three years breaking rocks,
And felling trees and chain gang walkathons.
A nigger like me.
Fourth shot for Rahula, also called Jeremy McGaffey, a soldier now dead and the dark things he saw before like Adon putting two rounds in the thick of his head.
For all that they went through these four in particular abused an accosted,
I empty the bottle to my useless gestures exhausted,
Having arrived too late to have saved them and too weak to have healed them, and play pretend knights making promises into an empathetic mockery.
Sometimes I drink to remember, sometimes I drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks me.
What does a half Ivory know about the Ghosts of Christmas past? Arrogance vast,
If sirens of suffering call free for all then have your crew insert wax in their ears and bind your bleeding heart to the mast!
Look at your most tragic failures look at your past,
Your sister, your brother, your comrade, the love of your life: raped and abused, self-murdered imprisoned and her young body used: you toast to their fortitude: who put the world on your shoulders man?! Whoever asked!
Labriut!
There was nothing one person ever asked you to be, nothing they asked you to do.
No one expected a miracle. You battled demons in their name, and when it was done the world was exactly the same, man it’s too true:
Sometimes you drink to remember, sometimes you drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks you.
And with that poem she concludes her round of tale.
The Nina Simone fades into some soft, sensuous Kompa track, it’s quite lovely but the artist escapes me. I hate that poem she says, it makes you cry.
Natasha winks at me.
She looks so goddamn lovely, when she’s loving me.
She lights up a Newport standard cigarette and the smoke she exhales swiftly takes the form of a dragon fly. It sails across the room. Maliciously perhaps. Just one of her many colorful magic tricks. Her breasts are round and magnificent and she makes no effort to conceal her naked body. A pace, a pout and she cats off more dragon flies.
“You always make Nikholai sound more unstable than he was in real life,” I tell her.
“It’s because I never really liked him very much. And because he was quite unstable indeed. He’d have fucked me you know, you living or dead.”
I conceal my slight anger at such an accusation.
“Well he made a subtle art out of melancholy that I will say. You denigrating him as motif is vaguely low brow in my honest opinion. What with how he ended.”
“Ha. Low brow? You always seem to work a pair of enormous breasts into your little stories. I’m on to you,” she smiles vaguely biting her lower lip. She is always smiling until it is way too late to stop her demons from speaking their mind. I want to taste her immediately.
“I hope several more times within this very hour. But, that didn’t answer any of my questions about said cult, not even in the slightest. It was a wonderful portrayal of the mood though, back then. Although I experienced it quite vicariously.”
“Isn’t grey the secret color of the fighting faction called Z.O.B.?” she coyly asks.
I look her dead in the eyes.
“How would I know?”
“Yes, how would you know Vasa, how would you know?” she gives me the infamous Postsoviet look of ‘don’t play fucking stupid with me’. All women utilize this look meticulously.
“Well then perhaps you don’t really know who controls this cult anyway.”
“I know always more than I will easily tell for free my little bard tovarish. Even to the man I…” she pauses. I let her. She’ll never say it.
“I was certain you already knew what happened to the Guard Colonel,” I interject.
“The official story only. That Chechen gun men shot him on a lonely Moscow street.”
“Preposterous logic. Surely just a United Russia cautionary fairy tale.”
“Well then, entice me with your un-muddied version of the events. Is it true you corresponded at length with the journalist Anna Politkovskaya before she was assassinated?”
“She was the one who urged us to go after Yuri Budanov.”
“One might get the impression lover that all it takes for you to make a terror of yourself is to have a Russian woman whisper in your ear.”
“And yet what’s a whisper to a song?” I ask her and she knows just what I mean.
“Was your safe house this elegant the night you rubbed out the Guard’s Cornel,” she bluntly asks.
“Well you weren’t there, so evidently not.”
“Go on then, your turn two for two.”
And so I proceed.
Chapter 19
Safe House 16z, Zelenogradsky, 2082ce
Outer Moscow
Out the safe house window they can see the glowing hyperboloid Shabolovka Tower through the falling snow. A Cinderella steel spire lit up like a New Year’s Tree. Over thirteen million people currently reside in the greater Moscow area. Its layout is a series of concentric rings of hyper highway and major boulevards called Prospects.
The Moscow Automobile Ring Road (MKAD) has been Moscow’s unofficial internal class boundary since 1960 and there are absolutely no poor people living inside its circus. Not a single one.
The city of Moscow is subdivided into twelve administrative Okrugs and 123 districts. In the year 2008, the year of the global recession; Moscow had 74 billionaires with an average wealth of $5.9 billion, which placed it above New York’s 71 billionaires. However, as of 2009, there were only 27 billionaires in Moscow compared with New York’s 55 billionaires. Overall, Russia lost 52 billionaires during the first year of the recession. Now, according to financial analysts; there are over 403 Russian billionaires in Moscow averaging roughly $6.1 billion a piece, and only three are left in New York at the conclusion of the Great Revolt’s armistice concluded 72 hours after the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis which took the lives of exactly twenty four of those previously tallied billionaires.
The four who still remain in Greater New York:
A Bulgarian expatiate named Alexandr Dmitrievich Perchevney who resides part of the time in the enhanced Oceana Tower Complex of District Brighton Beach and is one of the most feared Voorhees alive in country. Ysiad Ferraris who owns multiple large commercial properties throughout the Bronx and Goddess Soviets; a tech empire, a venture capital firm and a fleet of container ships. And the son of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michael Bloom II. All the other billionaires have since fled inland or abroad, or had their assets vigorously expropriated.
Ex’ed is what it is called in the jargon of guerillas.
Also in the form of a circle is the main Moscow subway line; the Ring Line. And, the so-called Third Automobile Ring completed in Gregorian year 2005. The characteristic radial-circle planning continues to define Moscow’s further development. Contemporary Moscow has also engulfed a number of territories outside the Ring Road, such as Solntsevo, Butovo, and the formerly outlying town of Zelenograd.
It is in the Zelenogradsky Okrug where our lonely rebels have set up their shop.
After the rendezvous at the Bathhouse Watson and Sebastian sit for supper. Herring, beets, Palemni and some kind of fried potato based goulash. They wash it down with a frothy cold berry Kompot. And some iced black coffee.
Its 17:00pm and it hasn’t stopped snowing, not one bit.
Ivories always got a guy for everything. What that means is they don’t pay for services somebody didn’t vouch for first in their network. But they didn’t use their Chechen contacts or their friends at Human Rights Memorial for this time around. The Moscow Human Rights movement is very underground, and rightfully so because their orators and organizers keep being shot in the head. You don’t buy a gun if you can get away with using a dagger. You don’t use a dagger if you can buy a poisonous pill. You don’t ask a large possibly infiltrated underground to help what you can rely on the families of the dead and disappeared to render for currency, Loyalnost and just purely for revenge. The more elaborate a plan the more likely for something to go wrong.
But, Adon still wants to hang the guard colonel from the Shukhov Radio Tower on 37 Shabolovskaya Street. Real fucking subtle. Not.
“What does the code of the Haitian gentleman ultimately say about revenge?” Sebastian asks.
Watson looks up from his meal and sets the silverware down on the table. He wipes his freckled mouth with a red napkin.
“Revenge is the diametric of courtship, as true hate is the diametric opposite of true love. If one is to truly love, the patience and care of courtship is an indefinite process, and by that reasoning so is the proper execution of vengeance if one’s hate is also true.”
“Ysiad suggested we walk away from the job tonight. That we close the book and get a flight out back to Hispaniola. He suggested that the colonel is highly protected and they anticipate our attack.”
“Well anything that Dominikani says, he says with his own pockets in mind. On a long enough timeline even angels of death begin to draw notice. I think we should walk away then. This is Russia frère. And the Dominikani wouldn’t have mentioned it unless it was a realistic threat.”
“You definitely need to know when to walk away.”
If Sebastian Adon could only do that then the world would be quite different. Once many years ago while living in the slums of south London a seventeen year old Sebastian declared himself the “one who fights the losing battle” and for a time he thought to tattoo that as a personalized crest over his heart atop an eagle, two flaming towers, a bone and a rose. Before the Grand Rabbi Akiva Tatz convinced him fully against tattoos. Before he picked a couple battles he could win, and learned to like the taste of impossible victory.
“The honor of the underdog is not the same as betting on the Hindenburg. Old Russian saying. I don’t know if it fully translates,” states Adon.
Watson Entwissle by now knows full well that almost nothing Sebastian Adon describes as an “Old Russian saying”, is really ever an Old Russian saying.
One late night many years later after London just prior to “the Great Disorder”, over mint tea and jasmine rose hookah at the Footprints Café in Coney Island, a Russian woman named Natasha would tell him that there was nothing wrong with being a communist. Nothing wrong with believing in the cleansing fires of the revolution. But, to believe he could take on the oligarchy with a band of eight was simple foolish suicide. And he deserved to be tortured just for being so foolish. So she strung him up and tortured him. And that’s how he learned that lesson.
“Fight from a position of resources,” she told him. Shortly before drugging him. Stripping him naked and jarring him with stacked shocks of electrical current. “I believe in you even if I don’t always believe in your methods. But, don’t give your life for such bullshit, and don’t pick a battle you know you won’t ever win,” she had said. And then she tortured him for roughly six straight weeks. But, she did it against her own will.
“These Russians are a highly dangerous breed,” Watson states the known and obvious.
They’re having supper in a Moscow safe house owned by the extended family of a dead journalist. The only proven way to circumvent the web of spies, informants, dirty snitches and surveillance society is to rely on the time honored loyalties of family and blood oath. The thing you need to know about doing business in Russia is that virtually no one is loyal to anything besides the right price. And every single Russian has a pretty high price when it comes to being loyal to an Amerikanski, a Ivory or a chornay. But, in the end if a faceless institution murders your children, the enemy of that institution is your friend. They crossed the border three nights ago from the East. They both speak fluent Russian and the flicker masks completely distort their identities. They acquired automatic weapons at a country dascha to the southwest of Moscow and drove directly to the safe house in an electric Lincoln town car.
“When were you last here?” Watson asks.
“I don’t remember.”
“I have trouble believing you mon ami. You’re navigation was uncanny.”
“I don’t like being tortured,” he smugly replies.
“Well who does,” Watson laughs.
“Your thoughts then on doing this job?”
“Colonel Yuri Dmitrievich Budanov is not, in my mind, a high profile enough hit worth us falling into the hands of the FSB, but obviously you seem obsessed with this. This isn’t exactly some oligarch or some key player. This is a disgraced former military officer who raped and strangled a young girl. He did five years’ light time. Memorial lawyers even got his rank stripped and now he is just a token symbol of the total corruption here. ”
Sebastian Adon takes out a pack of Noblisse cigarettes in their crumpled green soft pack. He fires one up with a small gold zippo lighter. Watson had thought he had quit several months ago. Sneaky Ivory bastard.
“You’re welcome to walk away, brother,” Sebastian says in Haitian Creole.
`
“I feel as though laughing in your face would not even begin to drive my point home. The code says that what you begin you will always finish or die trying. Though, I just suspect we’re not in Moscow for Yuri Budanov alone,” Watson relies.
“Look. I didn’t compose that list. Some of the people we killed were outright I.C.C. indicted war criminals. Others were various mobsters that just needed to be rubbed out because what they were doing was a human right violation, and poor human form. Others we hit because they made money on the backs of exploited workers. Others still because they profited off others misery. You, me, Anya, and the others who died in our unit we were not killing because it made any real difference. We didn’t even do it because those people needed to be punished. Otherwise we would have arrested them and set up some kind of tribunal. These 103 kills happened because a message needed to be sent across that world that if you violate human rights we can get you. And that message has come across loud and clear.”
“So why push on? There are now hundreds of little cells carrying out these killings independently. Every week the Anonymous is posting new confirmations on “the friends of the people” website. Look at the list frère, there are thousands of other targets to pick from. Dozens in this city alone. Why him. Why tonight? Why Moscow? My skin crawls from the cold, knowing just how wide open we are out here. And let me remind you that if we make a kill on Russian territory we are breaking one of the rules of engagement.”
“They’re not going to make him into a politician. But, he is symbol of new Russia’s defiance. He raped and strangled little Elza Kungaev. He broke into her home, he wrapped her in a blanket, through her in the back of his ATV, he then raped the shit out of her for hours, and then he sodomized her as he strangled her to death and quite nearly got away with it. It took the full efforts of Human Rights Memorial and the lawyer for the Kungayeva family, Stanislav Markelov, as well as the support of the opposition Newspaper Novaya Gazeta to even get what little justice they got. And they let him out after just five years in. My mentor Anna Politkovskaya was found dead in the lift of her block of flats in central Moscow on 7 October 2006. She had been shot twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and once in the head at point-blank range. She had reported extensively on the war crimes in Chechnya and this trial. Stanislav attempted a last-minute appeal against the release of Budanov and was shot dead in Moscow on 19 January 2009 along with Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old journalist for Novaya Gazeta, an anarchist and friend of ours. Budanov has been free since paroled in 2008. To many on the Russian right he’s a “war hero” unfairly victimized by liberal and foreign journalists conspiring to undermine Russian security. So, for Elza, Anna, Stanislav, and Anastasia, and who knows how many others. We’re going to finish the job.”
And then he puffs the cigarette.
“I’m still unconvinced,” states Watson, “There are so many sins in this world to punish. Just last week some dagger men caught up with the Serbian concentration camp commandant accused of presiding over the rape and torture of some untold number of women during the war in Bosnia. The last big hit was the Rwandan millionaire who helped finance the genocide there. This is not the cold dark hill to die on I feel. Especially with what is soon coming.”
“This colonel is a pig! A murdering savage who directed his men to loot, burn, shell and murder civilians in the first Chechen war. Are there better targets? Who are we to truly prioritize! I’ve long thought very few living inside the Ring Road don’t have some culpability to what was done in Ichkeria, but that is not my call either. We could go after any number of other people here in the Russian capital. War criminals and profiteers abound here. The President himself is one of the world’s biggest war criminals in my mind. So, why end our tour with a disgraced military leader who did a puny five year stint when no one thought you could even try a war criminal in Federal Russia?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because they kill journalists and they disappear dissidents out here left and right and no one can do anything about it. Killing an oligarch frankly is just too bad for business right now. We’d need months of planning and a big crew to get near one the worst billionaires. So, we’re going to take out a vile piece of low hanging fruit, hang him off the radio tower and get the fuck out of dodge. Trust me we’ll be back here.”
“You’re not being straight with me. Why is this target so important to you?”
Sebastian looks out the window and snuffs out the cigarette.
“He means nothing to me.”
Watson does not believe him at all.
“Just as long as there’s no hint of sentimentality. Then we shall proceed.”
“Not a smidgeon.”
“Then no theatrics. No hanging this man from a radio tower. No explosions. No games. Two shots in his head and we go home.”
Sebastian pauses, and then says, “There’s no art to that.”
“This is about attrition. Not justice, not art.”
“Salud then,” says Sebastian raising his glass, “To the many deaths of cruel tyrants, in commemoration of the martyrs and to the many long lives of the peoples’ heroes,” he toasts Watson with compot.
“Salud.”
“Nazdrovia!”
They clink.
“According to the code of Haitian gentleman, no one gets called a hero until they are cold dead and fully buried, and their people are fully free.”
“But I, my friend, was born a Ivory,” says Sebastian with a grin.
And into the cold, cold lonely night they depart to make their final bloody hit.
The streets are packed for this hour and the weather conditions by 23:01pm are unchanged. It is preposterous that there be so much snow in the month of June! They drive deeper into the city in a black jeep with tinted windows. They didn’t have to work too hard tonight because a man like this has made a lot of enemies. What you can always predict about corruption is that everyone is eventually for sale and that sale is acceptable. They have had a young woman watching him for some time and it was already clear that hitting him at his house was completely out of the question. Ultimately, they had to get him out of his house on to a street to carry out a drive by and jettison. First, we had to get an accurate CCTV placement run down. All angles where we could be caught on film and thus plan out route of approach and escape. That they purchased long ago for but 250,000 Rubles. We then had to ascertain the level of security protecting him. That was supplied by his shadow, the young woman hired to watch him. Three yellow code dry runs had been made already via our associates in Memorial to gauge the rapid response level times. He has two personal bodyguards and two cars of paramilitaries from the FSB stationed on his block, but tonight there were apparently four. His building was newly renovated but everything in the central district is accessible by an automated grid. Power, water, phone lines, and heat controls are all accessible to turn on an off via computerized control based on payment or the right tight hack. But they’re going to do this the old fashioned way.
“Under no circumstances are you to get in a gun battle on the streets of Moscow,” were the direct orders of Maya Solomon to Watson Entwissle earlier in the day via sky pager.
Before they reach the Central District we leave the jeep in a subterranean parking garage and exit into the elements on foot wrapped in multilayer pea coats with new faces before switching into a faster car left for them on the street which we will use for the drive by. There are road blocks in to the Central District but they have a satellite map to guide us to the several side streets which are less likely to be fully staffed. The streets are noticeably unobstructed the closer we get to the city center where in total defiance of the elements the Muscovites have enlisted a full time battalion of mechanized snow removal technicians to keep traffic in and out flowing.
At 22:05pm a man we paid 250,000 New Rubles through a fifth party cuts off the heat to the apartment of Yuri Budanov and then vacates the building via its lower parking garage. A 22:35 an automated dialer begins calling his flat over and over again posing as a series of incomprehensible Chinese telemarketers. At 22:45 all the street lights on his block are cut off. This is what enough installments of 250,000 rubles can buy. It’s very, very cold in Russia. And it shouldn’t really be snowing like this, in June.
Watson does the driving and Sebastian does the shooting. A sky page from our contact informs us that he’s just stepped outside his apartment block with his wife on to the street. They drive up Komsomolskaya Prospect at a gentleman’s pace. Sebastian crosses himself. So fucking odd that a part Ivoryish convert to Shi’a Islam will cross himself before a kill. The window comes down and Sebastian lines up, “for Elza,” he says.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Six silent shots go off, four into the thick of Yuri Budanov’s bearded face and the blood and the brains checker splatter and spread in the white snow. And then it happens. The entire street draws weapons on us. Men, women, children, Dvotchka even Babushkas! Everybody takes out machine pistols and levels them at our position. And tires all go flat, and several black vans open up and FSB storm troopers run out, dozens of them and they point machine guns at us. It happens so fast. So well-coordinated! Budanov’s wife is screaming hysterically and his body is face down in the snow in a pool of blood. We are completely surrounded.
Sebastian gives Watson a look. He takes his pistol and presses it to his own head.
“Inadvisable,” Watson says in French.
Click.
The gun jams.
Watson places his hands on the dashboard.
“Bze platnay seer ve mishalovka,” says Sebastian Adon as he drops the pistol out the car window into the snow setting his hands also down upon the dash.
The only free cheese is in a mousetrap.
Shortly after thinking that a truncheon strikes his head.
Chapter 20
Coney Island, 2083ce
Breuklyn Soviet
Anya Drovtich is flying. Literally rocketing down the Belt Parkway at 240 kilometers per hour. We use the metric system in Breuklyn Soviet now. She rips tarmac down the coastal highway.
The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that,
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
Anya thinks at lightning speed:
I’d like to tell you that we live by that. I’d like to tell you how much I’d like to assure you that the work our men and women do is building towards that first article. But, I’d be completely lying. As my Ducati rips down the Belt Parkway toward my next meeting in the Green Light District, I know that while we are all born equal, very few of us were born free.
The Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, that over two million of our Breuklyn Soviet citizens still pray to says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
I rocket past a crew of ambulance workers attending to the collateral damage of abolishing the speed limit. I salute at 255 KPH.
The code of the school yard says, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
So who does one even believe these days?
There was once a very large strip club called “Flashpumpers” that used to be on Surf Ave, then it was called Squared, then called Foxy’s. The strip club itself was the target of a particularly grisly mass shooting a couple days prior when it was discovered that the girls had no union and were being pimped out on the side. A group of flicker hooded masked men executed every male employee and patron in the place, surviving witnesses claimed the attackers came out a tunnel under the kitchen floor. You can get just about anything on earth in the Green Light District, you can fuck animals, you can role play, you can acquire any conceivable cocktail of illicit pharmaceutics, you can engage in some pretty ancient Roman, Japanese hardcore, roaring 20’s shit; but you can’t make people your slaves. Or dittle fuck little kids. Age of consent is still very much a universal 18 years of age throughout the Breuklyn Soviet.
Innocuously enough, just four blocks down is a small “Muslim Exclusive”, no alcohol on premises hookah café called Arabian Knights.
That’s where I’m off to.
I’ll have you know that I did not vote for the class order to have those mobsters gunned down. That was the death sentence of Erza Pula, the Albanian Chief of the Safety Section, or what Oleg jokingly calls; the Committee for Public Safety.
Erza Pula has never been one flinch at killing slavers. My days of dealing in death are over. For the most part.
I park my black Ducati in front of Arabian Knights.
It was here, under the averted eyes of its elderly Chechen owner Sam “Ouju” Saladin that rebel engineers from the Breukland Soviet have built a smuggling tunnel complete with a functional subway three car Q train out an old maintenance tunnel all the way under the East River bed into the catacombs below the District Financial. Via this route Ysiad Ferraris will later this evening cross into the U.A.S. after his debauch at Drake Hotel with the Ivorite spy Toba Hadaad, not my favorite person.
I check my bike out front with the underage Canaanite valet Tariq. I nod to the door guards, members of the Party of God, I give them the A salaam Alekuum. They give me the courteous salute and Islamic reply. Then seal and bolt the doors behind me.
The entire place is an interlocking weave of curtained booths which bear an innocuous aroma of some unknown fruit, perhaps grape melon? Saladin, born a very long time ago in a Chechen town called Shali City cures his own shisha, or fruit molasses infused tobacco.
In the backroom of the Oasis Hade Bade, behind steel buttressed emergency doors, seated around a long table close to the ground are several partisans, some quite infamous at this stage for the desperate deeds they did to secure Breuklyn’s independence, others accomplices of lower profile. Though the audacity required for us to hold court on Russian Bratva district territory in uniform no less while recently having ordered the shutdown of several major brothels and gambling houses speaks to the brazen way Oleg Medved and I lead the Otriad these days.
Fair warning was given. The Green Light District went “union” six months prior and port tariffs were to be now collected at Port Coney and taxes were to be paid directly to the General Assembly. The Port may be owned by Perchevney and his people, but the District Coney Island was established long ago as Breuklyn Otriad turf.
Article twenty three clearly states that everyone has the right to “a fair wage, in a safe environment and to join a trade union.”
I am clad in my dark blue fatigues and along with burly well-dressed Oleg Medved and am briefing our assembled associates. My associates at this particular palaver are Kaveh Ali Shariati Atatable, a Persian Revolutionary Guardsmen cross affiliated with the Z.O.B. and the Party of God, the Indian-Yid televisionary Nicholas Mapfre; the recently elected Chief Communications Officer of the 18th Congress, and Hassan Askeri, Bangladeshi millionaire business man and Vice President of BRAC; the world’s largest NGO. Along with seven newly arrived commanders from the Party of God, the Persian backed Shi’a paramilitary organization that is one of the Z.O.B.’s closest allies. I am entreating them to produce a “Goebbels quality inter-web marketing campaign.”
We are about to let the cat out of the bag quite publically.
Oleg Medved is smoking a Cuban cigar. He has little taste for hookahs. And even less for shifty endless political negotiations, especially when they involve the Brotherhood of Muhammadian and the so called Party of God. His thinly veiled contempt for meetings is only subsumed at times for his respect for me. Anya Drovtich.
Kaveh is a heavy set and muscular Persian with a well-groomed mustache.
Nicholas Mapfre has long black hair. He smiles mischievously when asked questions that make him uncomfortable, like how many wives he has. Hassan Askeri has a boyish, preppy look to him as though he has stepped out of a Bollywood film, befriended some red radicals and fearlessly supports us even if just for the sake of danger, prestige and the sex. The seven revolutionary guardsmen present are all clean shaven and olive skinned.
Nicholas Mapfre went to Bronx Science and was a founding member of the original Club, albeit more of silent partner until four years ago when most of his childhood friends were martyred before and during the rising. Kaveh has been a card carrying Banshee for years before he returned to his beleaguered nation Iran to enlist in the Revolutionary Guards after a brief career in yellow journalism. Hassan encountered Sebastian Adon on the Q train mêlée in 2008 and their lives were shortly ever after bound together via thought crime and punishment.
I am standing, leaned against the wall; hand on my hip, hand holding open a micro brief. My lips painted are up in red lip stick and my dreads are covered in a red Hijab. Oleg Medved is intermittently reading a Russian poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky on his smart phone, while scrolling between the quasi erotic pictures of his last fashion shoot, while then sky paging one of his modals to meet him later at the Drake Hotel.
He looks vaguely tired.
Yet always stalwart. Ready to do what must be done.
Quite a stalwart droog.
As per usual I brief them multilingually and using Spectra Point; the 3d graphics system designed by Google right before they succeeded in fully turning over control of the internet to the Obama regime’s N.S.A. It projects holographic displays and is far more engaging than the data delivery systems preceding it.
Before he was brutally tortured on national television Dan Fried the martyr had open course improved on it. Right before he successful hacked into and eliminated the entire big data holding of the NSA two years before the Great Disorder.
“Brothers, let me begin by positing two variables which must be brought to bear immediately. We are as you know about to move ahead with these latest clandestine machinations. First, if the camera isn’t rolling the whole goddamn time, if people cannot tune constantly into our revolution rolling live stream on the inter-web; see with their own eyes not just hear about it on the Fire Station; if they cannot identify clear protagonists, clear protagonists that they at times get to see partially naked; take in the veritable laundry lists of resistance faction acronyms and see this whole bloody, bloody show down as an epic battle between “Good” and “evil”; human freedom v. oligarchic collectivism well then I suspect that we will all die in shallow sandy graves as the true blue “international cohort of Islamists, subversives, anarchists, commies, and nigger loving terrorists” the U.A.S. media already proclaims us to be,” I, Anya Drovtich, Section Chief of Information and Intelligence of the Breuklyn Otriad’s 18th Congress inform them.
I clearly have a way with my words.
But, I did not always.
“We are asking you as some of our most obviously capable cinematographers and media experts to develop the capability of live streaming the entire guerilla invasion of a major African country to take place approximately six months from now. We are also requesting Persian support in training the local people of that country in the finer arts of guerrilla war. And all this needs to be accomplished within the next six months. Understood?” she asked them.
“Five by five,” responded Kaveh Ali Shariati in Farsi.
Switch perspective.
Oleg Medved is watching Nicholas Mapfre, Hassan, Kaveh and the seven Guardsmen pass the Nagillah, the big blue water pipe filled with Grape-Mint tobacco back and forth. His girlfriend slash modal slash concubine texts him back that she can be at the Drake at 23:00. He doesn’t need to tell her to bring the cuffs and Stolichnaya Premium. Anya always has everyone’s undivided attention except his.
But he’s her left hand man. Her best asset. Especially since his erotic tiff with Erza Pula Pound, the Albanian Safety-Security Chief. Another lesson of don’t fuck where you eat. Don’t ravish a woman who has her own army if she might fall for you when you don’t believe in such things as monogamy.
Oi.
What a headache.
Nicholas Mapfre, guerilla film maker of the People’s Television Network, long time club member is certain that without the proper utilization of information technology it will be impossible to get good data out of the war zone and utilize it as propaganda to trigger the chain reaction of uprisings so critical to the victory of the militant human rights movement.
Anya fills the room with her vibrations.
“A quick parable before my second point,” she says.
“Years ago, in the Cinema Rex fire, the Cinema Rex in Abadan, Iran, was set ablaze, killing over 400 individuals, horrifically burning them alive while trapped inside.”
“The then ruling shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, said that Muhammadian insurgents set the fire, while many blamed the country’s intelligence service, Savak. There is speculation over the actual number of casualties incurred during the fire. Various sources draw their own conclusions concerning the death toll. A 1980 Amnesty-International report states that there were 438 victims, including individuals who were tried and wrongfully executed after the fire itself.
“The fire itself was “the third-deadliest terror attack in modern history,” after only the 11 September debacle. And a certain subsequent recent event called the Millennium Theatre Hostage crisis with which you are all now surely familiar with.”
Oleg Medved even hearing that phrases like “11 September” or “Millennium Hostage Crisis” gets a bad taste in his mouth. Since his unit organized both of those attacks.
“There have been many unfounded allegations regarding the circumstances which led to the Cinema Rex fire, but it is certain that it was a key event that triggered the Persian revolution. One such allegation claims that Mossad-trained Savak agents were in pursuit of individuals who ran into the movie theatre and used it as an opportunity to hide in a large crowd at the cinema. Later, either the fugitives, or the Savak agents chasing them decided to lock the doors of the cinema, and a fire was started in the theatre presumably by the fugitives. Unable to escape from the building, everyone inside the cinema died as a result of the conflagration. Another speculation is that the Savak simply bolted the doors and burned the place down themselves hoping to stoke local anger against the resistance to the Shah.”
She pauses and then says, “Second point. Not only do we require People’s Television and the Persian Revolutionary Guard to design, bank roll and administer the sophisticated media logistics for the world’s first live streamed international guerrilla war; we need you to produce a very, very moving film. And quickly. Something to make your Kony 2012 piece look like Saturday morning cartoons. I am asking you on behalf of the 18th Congress of the Club’s Executive to produce such a film juxtaposing the Cinema Rex fire in Abadan; the September 11th martyr operation; and with the Millennium Theatre fire of three years prior. They are not really all that similar in technicality, but the purpose of this film is to win international hearts and minds to cause of our micro-republic. We want a film that makes foreign nationals and their leaders want to help us. Because if we’re going to simultaneously keep the U.A.S. Federal government off our backs, keep things moving along plan, and attempt to liberate a certain country in the Caribbean, well were going to need the help of the Persian Revolutionary Guard Corps. And movies, as you three gentlemen know are the way into all human hearts and minds.”
She sold them before they walked in.
Three years ago, 808 American civilian hostages and 24 rebel fighters were killed in the Millennium Theatre in a 72 hour hostage crisis on the eve of the ceasefire which led to the Breuklyn Soviet Microrepublik’s establishment. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had pumped some designer paralytic gas into the besieged theatre to supposedly incapacitate the hostage takers. At some point either the rebels or the Federals storming the theatre triggered an explosion in the ensuing exchange of gun fire. Blame went both ways obviously. As 800 plus 8 people lay in various degrees of incapacitation a fire swept the theatre. Virtually everyone perished.
The few civilian hostages that the FDNY rescue medics managed to pull from that inferno were dead shortly after from the incapacitating gas. It was virtually impossible for either the media or the DHS to differentiate hostage from “terrorist”, but 832 bodies were recovered from the smoking rubble of Broadways most prestigious new play house.
In reality 808 American hostages did indeed perish mostly from the gas used by the U.A.S. Federals and subsequent exchanges of gun fire. Of the 24 Otriad rebels that took over the theatre for 72 hours, none of them allegedly made it out alive. And two that were confirmed killed by the national press and DHS were none other than Maya Solomon and Sebastian Adon. The principle founders of the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club’s New York and Middle Eastern Branches.
The partially burned remains of the two famous “master terrorists” were confirmed by genetic matching the corpses and dental records. 832 bodies were recovered. Many riddled with bullets, many partially burned. Thus leading the FBI-DHLS to believe they had killed two major leaders of the national uprising called “The Great Revolt” which by that time had been bleeding the nation or three years.
But, the coroners of the DHS were tricked and mistaken. These were body doubles. Flesh bot clones of the 24 operatives taking the theatre by storm. Husks grown with no souls used primarily as replacement parts or sex toys for rich lonely sickos.
Adon, Solomon and 22 others made it out through the sewers shortly after the gas came
rushing in. These were students of history. They remembered what had happened in Moscow in 2003. They brought respirator masks with them. They left bodies, flesh husks for the authorities to find. History only repeats itself when allowed to.
Nicholas Mapfre, Kaveh and their cocky, vaguely charming playboy partner Ryder Haske did terrific work throughout the battle for Haiti, the great revolt and their unrelated tear jerker KONY 2012 on the subject of the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda raised 37 million dollars for the club from unsuspecting liberal American college students. Given unrestricted access to Iran and its national archives during an unusually scary year of nuclear saber rattling between Iran, Israel and the UAS their movie had finished and screened as “humanizing tour de force” during a period of “globe shaking ethno-religious jingoism” right before the partisan invasion of Haiti was to commence.
The message was to juxtapose the pre-revolutionary excesses of the Shah with the sinister Project for a New American Century-Mossad 9/11 Martyr Operation along with the brutal conduct of the U.A.S. Federal government during Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Great Revolt, exemplified by the Millennium Hostage Crisis a showcase of “state sponsored acts of terror”.
The film was beyond risky.
It was to be well-researched and also be sexy, fun and available for free on YouTube. And it was a polished piece of populist propaganda. It would be obviously firewalled in the U.A.S., Russian Federation, and People’s Republic of China, but by that time almost everyone on earth besides those living in North Korea still had unrestricted clandestine access to “the inter-web”; the people’s last free open source conduit of information now that the oligarchy had Silicon Valley in its war pocket and controlled completely every log in, every search, and every correspondence on the internet.
Even a U.A.S. citizen in the Midwest couldn’t help but sympathize with the people of Breuklyn bombed into the ground for months, killed by the tens of thousands, living in bunkers fighting in ghettos, and trenches and then the sheer audacity of us mounting four sophisticated hostage take overs in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington D.C. that all resulted in the seizure of some the nation’s wealthiest citizens, celebrities and politicians.
“Especially since that same vile clique of Bohemian Grove American oligarchs had just over a decade ago organized a massive terrorist attack on their own citizens on the 11th of September 2001 to send the country to permanent war and strip the nation of the last vestiges of its civil liberties,” notes Anya Drovtich.
The deadly martyrdom of Adon and Solomon, confirmed dead in the Millennium inferno caused by U.A.S. heavy handedness would now be exposed as a clever charade to conceal two of the top architects of the human rights resistance movement.
This was to be an epic film.
The blackest cat is now out of the bag.
“If we hadn’t all seen it coming and already had so much data to choose from I’d tell you this couldn’t be done in the time frame you’re suggesting. However, I think we all saw this coming,” states Nicholas Mapfre.
One of the nameless Persian guardsmen chimes in, “it is always said they were very, very hard people to truly kill.”
“That 808 American citizens died in a crisis we initiated is obviously still a major open sore for the U.A.S. pundits, politicians and right wing. Even if most of them were upper east side elites,” notes Kaveh Ali Shariati, “that it resulted in rapid succession of sixty four eastern free state territories, several of which with nuclear weapons is a real talking point too.”
Everyone was still getting over the September 11th Attack that launched the rather limitless and global war pitting the United States against the entire Muslim world. But this was the Post-Snowden IT AGE, so unlike in Moscow in 2003 when the F.S.B. pumped gas into the Budanov Theatre and killed several hundred of their citizens, or when China blacked out over one billion internet users from knowing what was going on outside of China, well they can get away with less now, cameras will always be rolling and we have the inter-web to ourselves. No paid advertisements allowed.
“The film will blame the oligarchy for ultimately forcing civilians to become terrorists and revolutionaries. It will profile Cinema Rex in Iran, the Budanov Theatre Hostage Crisis in 2003 of Moscow, and expose the details of September 11th, 2001 and the events of the Millennium. It will finally stress just how “not quite dead” Adon and Solomon are and set up the interest for the third wave; our irregular invasion of Haiti,” explains Anya.
Interestingly enough, it was not the deaths of 808 rich, very rich New Yorkers at the Millennium, or the threat of setting off a very real nuclear device in Washington DC, or even that President Obama’s family was amongst the hostages seized there. The working group that took over the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was holding upwards of 8,000 hostages. That wasn’t the issue.
What finally led to the pressure to bear to end the crisis didn’t even come from Los Angeles. By taking over the Academy Awards the rebels were in a position to murder most of the nation’s Hollywood celebrities.
Or the nuclear test detonation in the Ocean outside Washington D.C. irradiating the city for the next eighty years half-life.
In the end, shortly after the full scope of the plot came to the attention of the nation’s security and intelligence community. A high level bureaucrat from the Department of Homeland Security called the wealthiest men in the country to brief them on the developments. Of course the media had been having a feeding frenzy already, but not everyone knew about the bomb in the capital.
In the end, not the military, not the security state, not the President, but instead the richest man in the nation, an anonymous man whose name you would never even recognize, he weighed the stakes, conferred with a few business tycoons and theirs lawyers in a thatched hut of the Bohemian Grove and they called Obama back an hour later.
“Give them all the sovereignty they can swallow,” was the message of the elite at least in the beginning.
The President was informed that the intelligence community and the military would be unable to stop the three working groups in Chicago, D.C. and L.A. from carrying out their directives. It was thoroughly advised that the President declare an official ceasefire with the separatists, end the siege and deal with the rebels decisively in “his third term in office.”
The ceasefire came 72 hours after the blood bath at the Millennium. The rebels along with a choice batch of some celebrity, athlete and political hostages as well as three atomic weapons built in the University of Stonybrook all took trains back to Breuklyn. Three years had passed without so much as a shot fired between the U.A.S. and the Breuklyn Soviet. The purge had occurred abroad, and it was almost complete.
103 dead war criminals according to the last reports. One more to die in Moscow before the evening is over.
And then three months ago the mysterious killings began. In just three months howling lunatics had slaughtered as many innocent people as our Sicarri had tracked down in three years.
“We will have the film ready to premier in six months,” states Kaveh, “as for the Guard supporting your so called ‘Operation Marcus Garvey’; we will have to wait and hear from the supreme leadership in Tehran.
“We will bring your proposal to our leadership this evening,” states Sayyid Ghaffarian leader amongst the Guardsmen secretly deployed in Breuklyn Soviet, “I suppose a serious question to ask is who exactly will pay for this risky venture?”
“Everyone’s gonna end up paying for it,” mutters Oleg Medved.
But he isn’t talking about the money.
Chapter 21
Fadeeva 6, 2082ce
Moscow
| |
|
| |
Thinks Sebastian Adon, his head throbbing; |
Something is odd about the lightning in here. But I fail to know what to say or think it worth speaking on.
What makes a safe house safe?
I have no idea.
Only the people in it ready to hold ground.
She’s a dangerous woman, all can agree.
“Well of course they were captured,” she says, “Moscow is locked down. Tight as a drum as you like to say. Nothing happens here without the full choreography of the authorities.”
“Including us?”
“Including the weather. I’d imagine what comes next will be very painful,” she says.
“It’s always been thrilling to observe the drastic change in energies and aura via the shift in a paradigm when one looks upon a complicated thing with new eyes.”
“What does that mean?” she asks, “don’t talk that Kundalini bullshit to me.”
“The most important lesson I ever learned in Haiti was that you have to always separate fact from emotion; the brain from the heart, and the fakeness from the real. Would you recognize Alexandr Perchevney if you saw him in a photograph?” I ask her.
“Of course not,” she says, “nor would I recognize you. No matter what was done to me. Only by your wide eyes and kiss do I know it’s ever you.”
“Your round,” I say examining her Chornay cigarettes. Wondering why she still smokes.
“Smoking kills,” I mention.
“Your people know how to grow new bodies don’t they? If you truly love me you’ll get me new lungs. We can leave these bodies at will!” she pauses then begins to sing, “What’s one more cigarette she said? What’s the use of your lungs when you’re riddled with sixty four holes?”
That’s a line from a famous song.
“There is only one proven way to get information out of a woman like you,” I declare!
“Oh, do tell,” she says.
“The tickle method,” I tell her.
“Get on your fucking back man,” she declares.
“I’m going to tickle you until you can no longer stand.”
“Tickle better be your bullshit American code word for a violent hard fuck.”
“Well it might be.”
Chapter 23
Coney Island, Green Zone, 2083ce
Breuklyn Soviet
Spooning leads to forking, that’s what they always say.
Summer in the Breuklyn Soviet means that the boardwalk and beaches are virtually inundated with gyrating flesh; short-short skirts, loud dancehall, dub step or field music blaring over vehicle sound systems driven right to the water’s edge. All night sex parties. Endless overtime for the veritable army of push cart hustlers and hawkers and their civil servant protectors. The parachute drop tower is lit up at night for base jumping, but the wild lights of the Green Light District, Luna Park, Steeplechase Casino and over a thousand hot spot debaucheries; night clubs, spas and outdoor restaurants keep out citizens and adventure tourists from around the world quite busy.
But it hasn’t been summer for years.
The Boardwalk is now fully desolate.
Breuklyn Soviet is still in the full clutches of General Winter.
My god your tits are fucking huge, he thinks, respectfully.
Even your coat can’t hide ‘um.
Ysiad Ferraris is vaguely jet lagged. His suit however is well tailored and shows no signs of travel duress. You can’t fly direct from Moscow to what was once called JFK, obviously. All three of the New York’s major airstrips are now in the rebel zones of control. All major carriers refuse to fly there because it would mean losing lucrative contracts with the U.A.S. Since no nation officially recognizes the Free State territories except Iran, Cuba and a hand full of Caribbean Islands in the Wild West Indian Federation; the only way to fly to Breuklyn Soviet is on your own plane and land at Idlewild, Malcolm X (LaGuardia) or MLK (JFK). There is a theoretical no fly zone over Bronx Soviet and the Long Island Sound. Most extralegal commercial trade thus must utilize container ships, tunnel drums, subs and short planes to move goods and people into liberated Strong Island, or the pockets of rebel territory scattered along the coast between Maine and Miami.
“He’s supposed to play dead!” exclaims Toba Hadaad.
And Ysiad just shrugs.
Ysiad Ferraris meets Toba Hadaad, an agent of the Mossad for a brunch and Bloody Mary’s at the Yafa Café on the Manhattan Beach Boardwalk, just outside the Green Light District. It is decorated with red lights that adorn the walls like Christmas decorations. It had been a far seedier place when they were younger. The coffee was once a little more expensive then. People used to fornicate in the narrow enclosures of their rest rooms while coffee house philosophers would pontific ate all night about the existence of God and or Karl Marx. The food is vaguely Mediterranean. The owners are vaguely Israeli. The Yafa Café and its sister the Sunflower Café on Kings Highway are both known places of temporary employ for Hebrew speaking “new arrivals” to the Breuklyn Soviet getting acclimated in the numerous changes happening here.
They have history and quite a lot of it. A bit of the old in-out, in-out pound the shit out. A history built on deeds and deals between Sodom and Gomorrah. The Mossad, the premier Israeli foreign intelligence arm has a history of doing whatever it has to do anywhere and to anyone it has to on earth to safeguard the Israeli state. Including biting the hand that feeds it. Israel still has an 80 billion dollar weapons deal with the United American States and refuses to acknowledge the Breuklyn Soviet as a sovereign nation. But with one eighth of world Ivoryry living there, well under the table deals get made left, right and center.
“I just got back from Moscow! Guess who I ran into at the bathhouse?” exclaims Ysiad.
“What’s that Benzona up to now,” Toba asks Ysiad with a scowl.
“A whole problematic lot of things,” he grins.
“He’s supposed to be dead! The gate keepers should have ordered him liquidated years ago. I’m still just a tad sentimental because he’s your only friend.”
“What you should have done was let him in your fucking country and recruited him back in the day, before he ended up first in Haiti and turned into such a majorly effective zealot on behalf of the blacks.”
“Whatever. A person like him has no idea how to play well in a chain of command. He thinks he’s so smart. So evolved! And thus he ignores every time honored understanding of what humans are and are not capable of. We’ve done more than ok without him,” scoffs Toba.
“He thinks the world of you Toba.”
“As he should, he owes me still for that escapade on the subway.”
“That’s not really how he sees it. He feels like you cut him off and sold him out to the agency and got him thrown out of your country for good.”
“Him being a subversive, can’t pick a side-fuck is what did that.”
“Regardless. You look well. You’re still an evil opinionated bitch with huge tits though.”
“And you a soulless, paper chasing lackey to a series of demagogues. How’s the wife?”
“Barefoot and pregnant. She sends her love. How goes the war on Palestine?”
“Status quo. As we like it. So, why the fuck am I here again you sarcastic shit for brains? Oh, yes, to remind you that the agency is very nervous about conflicting reports that Adon and Solomon are out of retirement after just three years of being confirmed dead. And both allegedly soon enroot to Tehran. You could see how that worries us.”
Ysiad cocks a cocky eyebrow.
“Ah, that. Well, Sebastian and Co. are about to invade a certain gold and oil rich developing, perhaps long unraveling nation and they were curious how the Israeli intelligence community would feel. You know, like if they took over the DR and Haiti.”
Her jaw drops only slightly. A tiny little bit revealing some last vestige of sentimentality. Her jaw never fully drops. It drops to reveal what Ysiad can’t possibly know which is that she never expected this plot to get this far.
It was a very impressive subterfuge that the club had pulled via its scientists ability to replicate bodies. Not only was the Breuklyn Otriad able to grow viable organs to sell to fund its efforts, they could grow entire soulless bodies. And that was how they planted twenty four corpses including two of their primary leadership at the site of secessionist ground zero during the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis. To the best of her knowledge only the Mossad and the Perchevney Bratva were still convinced Adon and Solomon were still alive.
“He’s was supposed to play dead for five years minimum,” Toba mutters, “That was the deal. Last time I checked.”
“Well obviously there was a change of plans on their end. I know your people have informants in their circle, but I suspect not their inner circle. They can play democracy in front of just about everyone else but we all know, elected or not, dead or alive the same circle of people has been guiding that club since 2000,” Ysiad suggests.
“Well actually it’s really only eight. And out of that eight really only three key original players are still alive. One in Angola prison camp, two in death or exile. ”
“Look we can waste time small taking about the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle club until the rabbits hop home, but bottom line, Adon and Solomon are moving about recruiting and laying down a conduit into the Republic of Haiti. They’re training over in Cuba with the blessing of the new Lavalas government; they have a forward bases secured on the Isle of Youth.”
“Obviously we were aware of all that. It’s our back yard. But how many?”
“Now, that you don’t get to know, I don’t even really know. Suffice to say enough for a real state of emergency. Maybe not a true topple or a near over throw, but a big messy dent.”
“And why in the world are they orchestrating this?”
“He claims it’s to rescue the people of Haiti from genocide, but you know, it’s anyone’s guess. He runs quite a spectacle generating club these days.”
“He or she?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Have you ever seen Maya Solomon with your own eyes?”
“Well no, but I have seen Adon at a bathhouse without clothes just seventy two hours ago and I know he’s a…”
“Not what I’m suggesting. I’m saying she’s the boss, not him.”
“Well who cares, the American media says they’re two very dead master terrorists. The problem is that they’re gonna invade Haiti in less than six months to a year and they need air support. Unlike the smaller operation they ignited, there are numerous armed groups already killing each other in Haiti. And all that gold & oil to win.”
“Well this all sounds insane. Say hi to your wonderful wife for me.”
“Ah, he said you’d blow it off like that. Except here is the part where I say over 1,000 of their fighters are practicing Yids. If they do succeed in bringing the Maccoute to their knees, forcing a U.N. intervention in Haiti and by default toppling President Omar al-Talleyrand then Israel might stand to have one less regional enemy armed to the teeth with Chinese weapons. And of course the real tipping point, but you have to sit down for this one.”
She doesn’t sit down.
He looks her over with her Arab features, thick hips and her black curly hair and a rack that, well anyway, not to objectify such a powerful and deadly woman, but they are quite big.
“They’re gonna break the leader of the Haitian Emergency Group out of U.A.S. custody and return to Haiti with the one man that can unite the major factions of the resistance against President al-Talleyrand .”
“They’re going to break Avinadav DeBuitléir out from camp Angola 42? How?”
“Fairly soon I suspect if they aren’t all killed trying.”
She pauses, wondering if it’s about high time for the Mossad to put more West Indians on payroll this week.
“This is all quite fine and good, but what pray tell does the questionably sane Mr. supposedly dead master terrorist Sebastian Adon, excuse me, “former Chief Planning Officer Adon want from Israel this time around?”
This was her little way of impressing on Ysiad that yes, the Mossad is quite aware of the inner mechanics of the Breuklyn Otriad, since one eighth of world Ivoryry lives in that three year old anarchic little micro republic.
“They’re asking for a onetime deal on a Berlin style airlift from Sinai into Haiti in exchange for Avinadav DeBuitléir’s guarantee on the future Haitian recognition of Israel after the cessation of hostilities, which presumably they expect to win, as well as DeBuitléir’s promise of extensive trade and resource concessions between your two countries. They want a guarantee that if they manage to secure Hispaniola the I.A.F. will secure a no fly zone to prevent a northern retaliatory strike by the Chinamen.”
“Yeah, well if they win. Big effing if. And where is it we’d even have a base to fly sorties from?”
“What about your friends in Trinidad?”
“Well it’s a onetime gamble. It isn’t as if getting caught doing this could possibly make Israeli-World relations any worse.”
“It’s a negligible commitment of resources because they can’t possibly field more than 1,000 fighters on such short notice with the commitments they’ve already made. You are of course aware that we’ve already penetrated their Jacmel, Cange Outpost and Sinai training bases and have several case officers embedded in the detachments drilling there.”
“They probably have less than that committed actually. But, Toba you know what these people are capable of even with just eight members. Suffice to say, they have a lot more than eight members now.”
“Why are you betting on this foolish blood bath Mr. Ferraris?”
“He’s my dearest old friend.”
“That’s never, ever a good enough reason.”
“Well, one does like making a little history to absolve themselves of past, present and likely future war crimes, do they not? And who’s gonna lie? If that country sits on a sea of oil and gold then this war is incredibly profitable. But I am doing this more as a friend than a business man. And surely they won’t stop at Haiti. They’ll take D.R. too, my motherland.”
“Indeed, you’re just all such a bunch of true believers.”
“Well we weren’t always. Miracles are lucrative these days. Anyhow, just pass the offer along is all they’re asking and let me know if anyone is receptive to this project on your end of the camel.”
“We’re following this rather closely.”
“The invasion will happen within the year. They want assurances now.”
“Tell them to go talk to Ruth,” says Toba Hadaad.
He passes her across the table a micro USB card taped into a book of matches from the KBG Bar in Manhattan; a den of drunken writers and also quite a few spies. It’s a love letter to the State of Ivory chock full of coded logistical particulars. Makes and models of planes and hardware they want to lend lease.
“Magneav,” she declares. (Magnificent).
“Oh yes, what I came here to give to you,” she says.
She hands him a business card of a new restaurant called The Third Rasputin, which just went up on Avenue Z, it was called Second Romanoff in its last incarnation..
On the boardwalk a grey rabbit that is roughly the size of a hog hops by. Some Japanese adventure tourists try and take its picture.
“The new Mehanata,” Ysiad says.
“A certain cargo cased coffin just arrived there today from Moscow. I would suggest you tell your confederates that what is in that box will be worth the whole rebellions weight in gold.”
“I’ll be sure they send someone knocking.”
She smiles at him.
“Tell them to knock hard,” she says.
There is an accusation in her eyes that he is uncomfortable with.
“I didn’t betray Adon,” Ysiad informs her, “we all just needed to do some house cleaning before the coming storm.”
“Purge, counter purge,” she suggests.
“Death to traitors and spies,” he counters.
“You’ve always been one big traitor. And I’ve always been one hell of a spy.”
“I’m staying at the Drake Hotel,” Toba mentions to Ysiad Ferraris.
Chapter 24
The Drake Hotel,
Coney Island, Green Zone, 2083ce
Breuklyn Soviet
Oleg doesn’t have to say one word to the valet at the Drake Hotel about what will happen if anyone so much as looks in the general direction of his black bullet proof Mercedes.
He gregariously takes a picture of the attendant with the vintage Leica camera he so adoringly carries about.
As if to say; if anyone goes even close to that car your death will be an entire gory photo shoot.
Since the total G42 embargo which has lasted now for three long years there has been no way to get certain luxury items into the nation easily.
To be the driver of a brand fucking new armored Mercedes Bends means only one of two things. You are a vicious, cut throat likely Postsoviet affiliated associate of the Perchevney Bratva, or you are Magnus Goldbar Allamby.
It would be unheard of for anyone else to have a designer car in the Soviet.
And since Oleg Medved is certainly not the Otriads famous Bajan money man. He must therefore work for the feared Bratva that owns both the Drake Hotel, the Free Port and most of the Green Light District.
They are now seated in place of conspicuous opulence.
A suite in the highly acclaimed, highly luxurious Drake Hotel which rises in an eighty four story spire off of Banner Avenue and Brighton 6th Street. It was built before the Great Disorder by a Russian business man named Dmitry Khulushin. He built a very tall tower to house a very important woman, but lost both the woman and shortly after the rights to the tower in a card game.
There are adornments made of marble, and things that shine. There is the veneer of exclusivity, but that exclusivity is only limited by how much you spend.
Thinking back a whole year before deployment, Anya and Oleg worked the network for a way to communicate with all the African tribes they’d be dying to save.
Ysiad Ferraris owns several dozen assorted businesses, but the crown Ivoryels of his empire are largely high tech in nature or shipping companies. He plans to supply credentials for shipping the weapons and equipment into the Sinai Peninsula. He also has a very happy, happy Hanukah present he insists Oleg Medved and Anya must meet him at his penthouse suite 74 stories over the Brighton Bay to see a “flash new toy”.
Ysiad is a Harvard graduate and amongst many other things the majority shareholder of Caravaggio-Gould Electronic Group: a small start-up out of college now transnational corporation holding patents in rescue and maintenance robotics, solar energy harvesting, and most importantly military contracts for fun filled killing tools like the Niche 06-47 surface-to-air fighter drone and the Oksana 62-12 terra-drone which can march into a village and machine gun everything that moves and is over three feet tall or has a weapon. Also selling like hotcakes were stasis chambers in which the sick or wounded could be put to sleep for years at a time hovering in a dreamlike state while they recuperated surgically grafting cloned flesh back to them.
All of which were ever in demand with the ever escalating wars in Eurasia, East Asia and the disputed territories bordering Oceana.
Ysiad certainly isn’t the richest man in Babylon, nor has he moved out of his townhouse on the 53rd floor of Olympia Tower Complex on 53rd and Fifth Avenue although not as spacious as his wealth might indicate, but surely he had just bought his new summer home on Madeira Island with cash up front, which was something to really be proud of. He officially holds U.A.S. citizenship but he sure seems to own a great number of properties in the new free sates of the Eastern coast.
“So you’ve come for the high China tech shit, have you?” he laughs as they enter his suite at the Drake Hotel.
“I just started taking language classes on one of the new Parasimulator my company is about to release. It’s wonderful stuff,” he tells them. More announces.
Toba is fixing her hair and makeup in the women’s closet.
A Parasimulator is an electronic device designed by the Israelis and then vastly improved by the Chinese to generate neurological stimulation to in effect fool your five senses into believing the images, smells and sensations produced. Designed by the Israelis for combat simulation and torture, the Caravaggio Gould Group popularized them for elite entertainment. They are currently only available to the most wealthy and powerful, and military intelligence groups of the first world, Russian and China.
He passes Oleg Medved a head set that locks over his eyes and ears and connects wirelessly to tiny black box clipped to my hip.
“Why not just make it as one unit,” Oleg asks.
“Well the factory that makes the software is in Israel, but the audio-visual simulator we can build cheaper in Vietnam. And anyway with the Boycott Divest and Sanction campaign in full swing and so many of my shareholders being Yids I couldn’t make the whole thing in East Asia, but I can’t risk all the fines for doing it all in Israel. You know the game.”
Anya is highly unimpressed with just about everything this schemer does.
A war profiteer is how she describes him.
Oleg dons the head set and a husky female voice whispers to verbally select language interface for translation.
“Haitian Creole.”
Select dialect the device whispers seductively.
“Jacmel Region.”
Select audio-visual translation output it says.
“Americano.”
“Select audio-visual translation output dialect.”
“Breuklyn Soviet.”
He can see Ysiad and his wonderfully minimalistic apartment through the glasses of the headset. This movie Southland tales once stated that “the future was going to be far more futuristic than originally expected.” They sure were right.
“Watch the words that appear in the left side of the screen,” Ysiad says to Oleg. As he talks his words are whispered to him in Creole and like sub titles appear phonetically across his line of site.
Ysiad now says something in Spanish, the device whispers soothingly to Oleg, “The client can upload tens of thousands of language groups.”
He continues in Spanish, “you will hear what the device hears in Breuklyn Americano and whatever you say will be put on the screen to repeat phonetically in the dialect you have selected for translation. As you can see, even other languages will be repeated to you back in the language you selected so it isn’t terribly hard to carry on with numerous primitives speaking numerous dialects. ”
“I think we call them ‘people of an underdeveloped’ country now.”
“Yeah, undeveloped people who don’t speak Chinese, Spanish or Americano: unfortunate primitives.”
“Well how much for a unit?” asks Anya Drovtich.
Ysiad looks at her like she just asked to face fuck his mother.
“How much green dollars?” Oleg repeats for her, but has already gauged the man’s intention.
“The usual price scumbag.”
“What’s the usual price again?”
“The opportunity cost of falling off the back of a transport truck, minus whatever cost-benefit I engage in over the years somehow convinced you and your zealots are on to something.”
“And the favor and access your curry with Perchevney when it comes time for us to re-arm?” Anya interjects.
“Thank you Ysiad for helping us all the years so selflessly,” says Oleg with a shit eating grin.
“Remember the first time?” Ysiad asks.
“You always remember the first time somebody helps you,” says Oleg, “but I was not with the club then.”
“It was always my assumption you were just in this for the money,” confides Anya.
“Why the fuck-are you doing it again?” Oleg asks.
“’Cause it never sit right with me that little bitty fucking African and East-Asian children were slaving away to make my dam khakis, and Bono says poverty is wrong!”
Anya scowls at him and makes the sign for the world’s smallest violin.
“You’re a man of great principle. Adon surely grins from the grave. Surely for it someone will kill you eventually,” Oleg says.
“Grins or winks,” Ysiad says.
“What was that?” Oleg asks.
“Surely hell has a good place for those of great principle and hopefully an exceptional bath house. But, I remain a truly hard man to kill,” Ysiad says quoting Adon.
Ysiad makes a half-hearted sigh.
“A lot of boxes falling off a lot of trucks this week,” notes Oleg Medved.
“Just how your crew prefers it,” notes Ysiad.
“If it’s free, it’s for we,” says Anya Drovtich quoting an old ambulance idiom.
You sly slimy fuck she now almost mentions.
Oleg Medved gives Ysiad a curt hand shake; where by Ysiad palms him the business card to Third Rasputin. On the back in Hebrew he’s written; “Investigate major cargo.”
Anya gives him a perfunctory salute and helps Oleg Medved wheel out the four enormous roller valises containing sixteen modified Parasimulators.
On their way out Anya and Oleg bump into a second Toba Hadaad as she gets out of the elevator. Oleg winks at Toba in a most scandalous way. Toba glowers at Anya. Anya almost reaches for her gun and shoot Toba clone in the heart. But has the self-control to not. The women scowl secretly wondering when is the most appropriate time to ask for the other’s evisceration orders.
But no one is going to break ceasefire in the Green Light District a second time in a fort night.
Oleg, Anya and Toba 1 and 2 have not been in the same room since the night before of the Millennium Theatre job. And by the end of the weekend they will all quite probably be dead.
Chapter 25
Barclay Stadium General Assembly, 2083ce
Breuklyn Soviet
About the same time later when Ysiad was emptying his hairless balls on the chest of Toba Hadaad after she fucked and fondled stroked and gagged and put him roughly inside every hole in her dirty minded Ivorite spying busty body in a room in the Drake Hotel; where bye then using hallucinogenic designer drugs they left their bodies behind and fucked each other apart as spirit animals chasing across the Brighton skies and towers of the Green Light District; Hubert O’Domhnaill and Mickhi Dbrisk were engaged in various efforts of containment. Clad in unmarked black battle dress uniforms with their HS Stars of David they sat across from two representatives of the Party of God, a major Shi’a Islamist faction running the show in Commune Bayridge; an early ally of the résistance and the biggest of the Islamist factions within the Soviet.
Mickhi Dbrisk’s sky pager goes off.
“R3. Ave. Z.”
It’s a coded message from Anya Drovtich. Typed in Gamatria base code:
“Major cargo has arrived. Confirm candidate name with Brotherhood. R3. Ave. Z.”
Under the iron dome deliberations are getting underway. Beginning every Friday morning at 08:00am in the People’s Grand Assembly within what used to be Barclay Stadium; all factions are asked to send delegates to various mediation and negotiation sessions held before the morning General Assembly session to sort out sensitive intercommunal business. Haggle out legal issues before they become dangerous. A tasteful web of movable wooden dividers allow for all configurations of negotiation in this veritable souk of political barter hundreds of whispers deep.
“We’re tired of the Ivories secretly running things around here,” the bearded negotiator from the Party of God declares. His name is Musa the Furious.
“We don’t need anyone’s permission to declare Shar’iah law in Bayridge! Our fighters do their part in the rebel army and we have always cooperated with the Breuklyn Otriad. But we are not tolerating booze, drugs, liberalism, short skirts and feminism in our district beginning next Friday.”
“Duly noted,” says Dbrisk.
“Can we come to some arrangement on mixed sub-districts?” ask Hubert.
“No negotiations.”
Then we’ll cut off your water and power, thinks Dbrisk.
“Look, we’re not Ivories. We don’t care whether the lights go out on Friday, or if you want to pray five times three times or once every third Sunday. But, as delegates from the Breuklyn Otriad we should make it clear that the executive won’t tolerate an imposition of religious law on even sub-districts with a Muslim majority,” explains Hubert.
“We were sent by the Shura Council of the Party of God with direct instructions to not negotiate with you. We were told deliver our proclamation and leave,” states their second representative, an Afghani lawyer named Anahita Noor. She has purple eyes.
We’re gonna wait until Ramadan when you’re all hypoglycemic and tired and then we’re gonna blockade your neighborhood and seize all your Hilal Meat packing plants and agro cooperatives in Strong Island, thinks Dbrisk.
“We all have our orders,” says Hubert, “but maybe we could work something out in the meantime.”
“They said you’d all say that,” says Anahita Noor.
“What about going ahead and declaring Shar’iah law in your Bayridge sub-districts and passing along the quiet agreement that as long as no executions, maiming’s, stoning’s, or harassment of non-Muslims occurs; we will assist in shutting down all alcohol vendership in the entire Bayridge District.”
“Not enough,” says Musa the Furious.
“We will also help financially support the expansion efforts for the Great Mosque and we will sell additional lands in Strong Island to your agro-cooperatives.”
“What do you want in return?” asks Anahita.
“A written covenant with your Shura Council that the Shar’iah law codes will not be applied to anyone who voluntarily opts out of them, Muslim or non-Muslim.”
“Unacceptable. These are the laws of God, we cannot selectively apply them,” says Musa.
“Then tell the Shura council we wish to apply for a twenty year hudna where bye your militia will not enforce the code on nonbelievers or Muslims by force, but may proactively bring various Muslim citizens in compliance as long as they abide by the universal rights codes of the greater Soviet.”
You basically offered the same thing twice, notes Dbrisk.
“Officially we will protest and denounce your godless collaboration with the Ivoryish communists and anarchists. Unofficially, I’m sure a twenty year ceasefire is acceptable, as long as we can do what we wish in the districts we administer.”
“As long as there are no misunderstanding about enforcement,” interjects Mickhi Dbrisk, “if we hear reports that women are being forced out of working, women being harassed into wearing chadors, if we have the usual clashes over virtue and vice, then you know what we will have to do.”
“We will denounce you publically, but privately we will preach moderation, in mixed districts we will respect non believer heresy, in majority sub districts you must begin dismantling institutions that…well are not virtuous.”
“Look, obviously we have to prevent internal fighting and we have to work slowly when it comes to social policy being carried out so radically differently. So, tell the Shura Council that we will help dismantle all alcohol vendership in a Bayridge sub district of your choosing and we will proceed piecemeal from there implementing Sharia law in compliance with human rights. But, prior to that a negotiating team must be put together in good faith to demonstrate to us that this is compliant with the universal code. Any deviation from that obvious will not be acceptable to our Executive and we will have to, you know. What we do when the talking comes to an end,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.
The second representative from the Party of the God doesn’t blink over the thinly veiled threat. She tugs twice slightly to adjust her hijab.
“It has been whispered that another horrific mass murder occurred in Commune Crown Heights yesterday and that tensions are rising between the Ivories and the West Indians.”
“We have no idea what you’re talking about, brother,” flatly states Mickhi Dbrisk.
“Everything in our various corner of this Soviet is locked down tight as a drum,” says Hubert O’Domhnaill.
The negotiator nick named Musa the Furious from the Party of God stares at Mickhi Dbrisk. They’re seeing who will blink first perhaps.
“Salaam alekuum,” says Dbrisk.
“Walaikum as salaam,” says Anahita Noor, Chief Litigator for the Party of God.
And through her chador, she winks at her old friend Mickhi Dbrisk.
As Musa stands and turns to leave Ms. Noor palms Mickhi Dbrisk a book of matches from the soon to open Third Rasputin Supper Club, R3 on Ocean and Avenue Z. Written on the inner flap is the name of the candidate, printed in Hebrew. In exchange for the confirmation of that name, the eye witnessed proof that she is still alive, the Z.O.B. is going to let the Party of God do pretty much whatever it wants in District Bayridge.
Mickhi opens the book of matches.
Natasha Andreavna S.M.
Says the matchbook in Neo-Amharic.
Holy shit, he thinks. If it’s true. We finally found her. So, he sends a coded message back to Anya Drovtich and Oleg Medved.
“R3. Avenue Z. Confirmed. It’s her.”
Chapter 26
Bila Tserkva, 1987ce
Ukraine
Yelizaveta Alexandrenova Perechenova was born in the Ukrainian City of Bila Tserkva on July 2nd of the year 1987ce on the old Gregorian calendar used before the Great Revolt. The miraculous particulars surrounding her birth were manifest and many fold. Firstly, her mother Magda seemed to have reversed age by ten years over the course of the pregnancy such that when she finally gave birth to her first child she bore the resemblance to a girl in her late teens, not a woman approaching thirty four. Of course Alexandr’s closest men patted him on the shoulder and said in Russian, “well played.”
The second miracle occurred shortly after her birth. All the animals in all of the forests surrounding Bielid Circov began to show up at the city hospital. So congested with various fauna wandering about the city that a whole task force of Red Guardsmen from Kiev were needed to attempt removal of this glut of birds and bears and deer as well as animals that the authorities in the Ministry of Ecology had long thought were rendered extinct. These animals seemed drawn to the hospital and for a whole lunar month after little Yelizaveta’s birth they were drawn to family dascha of the Perchevney family to the south a day’s journey from the city.
The third miracle was that infant Yelizaveta called “Zivia” by her mother and “Yelizaveta” by her father was not only able to speak Russian within the third month of her alive hood, but by the third year English, Spanish, Hebrew and a bizarre dialect of French called Haitian creole. So marvelous was this behavior an infant which spoke four complex languages that Alexandr and Magda agreed to conceal this from the world and hide the girl on the dascha as long as possible so no knowledge of this genius might alert the proper authorities to auspicious comings and goings which might result in the borrowing of their prodigious infant. Although the phenomenon of animals and birds flooding the forests and airspace of the dascha made a clandestine upbringing quite hard to arrange.
The fourth miracle occurred at Yelizaveta’s fourth birthday when she turned to her mother and said that as long as the family stayed happily in Bila Tserkva; no one in that city would ever die. And so it was.
As the Soviet Union began to unravel that very same year and life as they understood it in relation to the dictatorship of the proletariat came to an end; there was not one instance of a reported death in an hundred mile radius of Bila Tserkva. During this time Alexandr was away from the family for extended periods of time. As the only Ivory left in Bila Tserkva his admittance to the Party was highly unorthodox. Also, his admittance to Medical College and his marriage to Maria Magdalena who came from a Soviet prosperous family of Slavic Russian intellectuals close to the local seats of communist power in Kiev. To win and even court Maria Magdalena had been a complicated and costly venture. Men lined up longer than the breadlines for the chance to date the daughter of the local Party boss. And Alexandr was not only a Ivory by paperwork but from a family that had devolved slowly from yeshiva benchers to smugglers and then back into lazy migrant Rabbis.
By forging a passport and bribing several dozen people Alexandr was able to change his ethnic designation from “Ivory” to “Bulgarian” and then later with more bribes to “Russian”. And thus was able to arrive in Kiev at age 18 to begin his medical training. It was there in university that he encountered the affluent and ravishing daughter of a party boss; Ms. Maria Magdalena who was studying nursing in the same college.
After a lengthy and tumultuous courtship he gave her a tiny watch incased in a gold heart, and said that if she ran away with him to Sakhalin Soviet upon completion of their studies, an island to Russia’s far east past Siberia, north of Japan then they would one day escape to Israel and then America as soon as the Cold War ended in capitalist victory. This was the eighties and the writing was written clearly on the Berlin wall. One night she secretly packed her bags and joined him in a waiting car and they finally eloped in 1984.
He told her that by the time the watch stopped running they would be in America and by the time it started up again they’d never want for anything again. They barely made it as far as the city limits. Goons in black caps in the employ of her father Ivan Ivanovitch’s stopped them at a check point. They beat Alexandr rather badly; returned a crying distraught Maria to her father and threw the covert Ivoryish doctor Alexandr Perchevney into a jail for special prisoners who committed crimes that were handled in the cold and quiet.
The night of this attempted elopement and calamity the father of Magda, Ivan Ivanovitch had a terrible dream. He dreamt an army of many of thousands of four-foot Mexicans were parachuting out of the sky and attacking Bila Tserkva in an effort to save young Alexandr. He dreamt of the strange days of nightmare and plague about to wreak havoc on all of Kiev and the whole Soviet Socialist world if necessary should the detention of his daughters lover go on. In the dream his daughter Maria fell into some inexplicable coma and for each day of Alexandr’s captivity ten men disappeared without a trace. And then twenty men. And so on. Until by the end of the dream month of Alexandr’s imprisonment, there were virtually no Russian men left alive Kiev. The strange wave of disappearances swept through the local Party apparatus and military and leaders of state owned business cooperatives and even the secret police and soon like a strange and miraculous and ghostly purge had been carried out. Finally, finally Alexandr was not just the only secret Ivory in Kiev, but conspicuously the only person left alive with a passport that said “Russian”. And finally, after the third lunar dream month, it began to snow. To snow with such determination that obstruction and paralysis took hold. Throughout the eerie disappearances, the drop in temperature, the sky falling out, Ivan Ivanovitch’s daughter Magda hovered in a mesmerized trance. Alexandr languished in prison although there was no one left to guard him besides Ivan though he did not even three months into the nightmare connect his interference with the love of his daughter for this Ivoryish medical student to anything so, other worldly. Yes, people did disappear from time to time, but not often the entire Inner Party Cadre of a major soviet capital city. Yes it did snow but not with the endless and unceasing siege of white deluge they were experiencing, or in June!
Finally, in the dream the sun itself ceased to rise. And without party leaders, bureaucrats, draped in over forty feet of snow, Kiev underwent forty days of night. During this time Ivan never left the dream police garrison where he and Alexandr Perchevney would bond intermittently over Chess and Vodka. Bonding begrudgingly, for Ivan spoke no Ukrainian and by the fourth month of these phenomena no one was willing to speak any Russian anymore under the superstitious belief that it would bring death. So Alexandr the Ivory and Ivan, party boss of Bila Tserkva spoke for the first time. First, on the subject of god, then on the subject of the devil. And then also a bit on women which both agreed were stronger in will than either gods or devils.
“You love my daughter, but what do I care? Love is bullshit and chemicals. You offer nothing,” Ivan informed young Alex.
“As I have never loved or even thought to love another woman so do I love your Magda Maria!”
“You will never be accepted here as a Ivory. Even a party Ivory is suspect. Even with a new name and a medical certificate. Your Ivoryish horns and tail cannot hide.”
“You could adopt me. You can sponsor me to the Inner Party and allow me to marry her.”
“I’m not frightened by the Ivory magic outside. I know these are only cruel vodka lullabies, whispers in the ear of a man made hard and hateful by life. I will awake in my bed tomorrow! There will be no Mexican para-invaders, no disappearing apparatchiks, no endless snow or black endless night. You will be sent to Siberia for some infraction. Magda will wake up and marry a Russian Calvary officer. Or someone from the foreign bureau.”
“How can you be sure?” Asked Alexandr Perchevney, “How can you know if your dreams are real or if some dark power has unleashed itself against your house for obstructing our love?”
“Because there is no love or magic allowed here. Those are of course bourgeoisie inventions. I will wake up soon, I feel it. And order you shot.”
And for nearly two fortnights General Winter took full hold of Bila Tserkva. It did not stop snowing. It did not become day again. And by third fortnight of his imprisonment and Magda’s mysterious coma there were no Russian anything left in the darkness. Ivan in his solitude became like a prisoner too. The snow cut Bielid Circov off from all of the rest of the soviet world and the wake field Ivan hoped would come; nearly a year later still had not transpired, nor had he ever slept.
“You cursed Ivory! What kind of magic have you unleashed?”
“This is not my doing,” muttered Alexandr defensively.
“When will I wake from this perverse nightmare of upsidedownhood, of idiotic dragfootery?! You cannot marry my Magda. You are not a whole man and you will never give my daughter a good secure life.”
“This is not my doing. You’ve brought this nightmare upon yourself.”
“A typical Ivoryish response.”
Lost and asleep an endless nightmare Ivan Ivanovitch turned to mankind’s oldest imaginary friend. He implored the Russian Orthodox God to end this plague of darkness, deprivation and Ivoryish parasitic blight!
But as we all know, if there is a god, it is a long game if not vaguely soviet god, a go without understandable morals or temporal reward for the seemingly righteous. Whatever lesson it wishes us to learn is like algebra to an ant farm. It has been lost on us completely in it magnitude and scale.
The sun never rose and Ivan Ivanovitch never yielded. At the beginning of the spring of his imprisonment there dropped from the sky blue and red parachutists of four foot stature, one a day. Grinning bandoleered Peruvian Pararescuemen each gliding down into the outskirts of town and taking up position in the woods. One a day. With all the Russians gone, the Ukrainians began hiring these men as day laborers and yard workers. And Ivan Ivanovitch began to suspect that there was a growing secret army of these Peruvian Pararescuemen waiting in the shadows awaiting the right moment to break young Alexandr out of prison and spirit him into the wilderness.
While Alexandr Sasho Perchevney sat two years in confinement punished for his love and his Semitic race; the young aspiring dentist; future founder of the fearsome Bratva that would bear his family name and that would so loot the banks of the West; he sat in his own thoughts and laid a most elaborate plan.
Awaiting rescue and reunion with his beloved Magda Ivanovna Magdalena, a most auspicious woman to be sure.
Chapter 27
Fadeeva 6, 2082ce
Moscow
I fill two wine glasses with cold Borjomi mineral water and bring them to the bed where she lies having wrapped up her round of the most seditious story. A reoccurring theme for her is the complexity of him. But using a sureality to tell a take she has yet again left out what it was that he did that made him so many enemies.
“My, my. By the time the story is over she may well be walking on water,” I say with greatest snark I can muster.
“The way you once talked about her, your dear little Yelizaveta Lubov, I’m not sure my little yarn did the woman enough true poetic justice! AS your chornay say.”
The horrific photographs are tucked away inside the writer’s desk used more for carnal leverage than for any sort of writing lately.
“I thought her birth auspicious enough without all those miracles you interjected. And the story of Alexandr and Magda was quite a nice flourish too.”
“Fakeness, realness, openness and closeness have no usefulness to you anyway!”
“Well there is a truth to some stories and a labyrinth of fairy magic used as cloak to pull parlor trick parables over the eyes of your quarry. There are curious unseen bugs still in the wall listening for god only knows whom!”
“What’s the score?” she asks changing tone.
“I’m winning,” I declare.
“Bi-winning or regular winning?”
“You can win too if you want.”
“I just came off my back darling,” she says, “you’re always so utterly silly when you’re feigning happiness while hiding your tears. When you’re sad you’re easier to predict.”
I will do anything but to talk of Yelizaveta anymore dead or alive.
“You once predicted we’d never see each other ever again,” I mention.
“It was a realist expectation not a prediction. I’m not a sorcerous or some Kundalini like you and your gangsters.”
“As a skilled parapsychologist none the less you could have seen ahead to know I’d not stop loving you in the face of impossible.”
“Or husbands.” “Is your husband real?”
“Was that little bitch Yelizaveta so perfect?”
“Certainly not perfect.”
“My husband’s existence is therefore perfectly uncertain.”
“I care as much as the first day I came upon you.”
“Your philanderous nature is evident throughout. That’s the right word?”
“No.
“Multi-amorous is not philanderous.”
“Loving early and loving often is so abjectly American!”
“It isn’t that I don’t respect marriage or that my lusts are uncontained. It was that your marriage, if it was indeed such a thing, smacked readily of variables indicating both your total unhappiness and it’s, shall we say, slightly compulsive nature.”
“Well, you will never know.”
“One day perhaps I will.”
“In the game of mouse and cat which one do you think you are my roguish partisan lover?”
“I am the mouse of course but you are not the cat you are the maze itself. Your challenges have only but enhanced me.”
“Is that so? I was obviously not put to the earth this time for wealth, security and leisure, so then being loved so thoroughly by you must be compensation enough until I have the other three.”
“As you have always somehow known.”
“Actually I’d imagined you a dashing princeling cavalry officer in training until you first opened your mouth on that roof exposing your hearts ideals. Be realistic about your love Sebastian for it is an anarchic as your politics or your work, which I suppose just the manifest of your love in some strange way. Tell me again why we cannot stop fighting. Right now. Forever.”
“We have not won yet.”
“It isn’t up to you to win this war! No one said go fight, go struggle forever! Go die a hundred times for this miserable species. They surely wouldn’t die for you. Look at all the violence so far! For what! For some stupid lawless islands where the standard of living is worse than before and the freedom just as unfree. Nothing has changed. All you did was get all your friends and family killed. You took the lives of men that didn’t even matter. So stop. For the love of god just stop! You have elected to assault human nature and hell itself but no one asked you to. So just give in.”
“That’s a very nice Yelizaveta impression,” I say.
“It’s voice of any sensible woman, or Russian woman.”
“I’ve never accused you of being sensible. You want me to stop?”
“Were we regular people not old souls in changing vessels I’d say yes thinking we live and love but once! I don’t know why a man born with everything should lose that everything for an idea alone. I know things happened to you. I know you are now insatiable. But if you love me as you say you do, if you desire me so wantonly; what about surrender?”
“But to whom do I surrender?”
“You will surrender to me.”
“I have already. Multiple times, over and over again. This is your oldest and favorite game is it not? To try and induce a man to abandon what he believes in. Impossible when all I believe in is you.”
“Well it doesn’t seem to work on you anymore. You obviously never went to business school and gave up on your unseemly notions of freedom, human condition, and American mentality. You don’t even seem so upset about your old love’s demise. And I pride myself at reading you well.”
“They always say don’t say dead ‘til you see the body, but what’s a body these days to an old soul still on the market?”
“Enchante,” she exclaims.
“So what I want to know is what it was that Alexandr and his crew organized at the turn of the century that made that house, that Bratva so wildly rich. And made him the kind of enemies that would hunt him down and do what in the end made him to this day so indomitable”
“The take was just too big. Truly unlimited. There was no way they were going to be able to get away with it,” she says.
“So tell it then. Finish the story of his vast infamy.”
“There are more important things we will do first. I tire of this tirade on crime and punishment.”
“I enjoy kissing you. I also enjoy being ravaged like a petulant whore. I want a total ceasefire on the story right now. I want you to physically give me everything I could ask for as a woman if you are worth more than the warbles. Right now my Amerikanski. Right fucking now,” and she throws the book of my poetry at the wall.
We fuck like we’ll both be dead by morning.
Panting, I entered balls deep.
She pounds me apart. Rides me ragged. She writhes and rides and bucks on top of me. I suck on her supple white breasts and she arches back sending me even deeper inside her.
She gets close and licks my chest. She bites my neck and clutches my brown hair her blond main draping over me.
The sheets are covered in my sweat. Her hips they grind and bob and gyrate until I can feel my cock wrapped tight in her flesh. I’ve already came twice inside her. I grab on to her hips and rock with her. She fucks the life out of me. I’ve lost myself all over again.
The harder she goes, rocking the back board back and forth the more I need her. I can feel her red painted nails tear my shoulder she is pulling my hair with her left hand as she kisses my neck then chest and then brings herself erect so I can hold grab her beautiful ass and watch her big Russian tits bounce in my face, watch her moan, watch her use me to cum for the third time in two hours.
Before she cums again she leans in and kisses my lips and bites my lower lip drawing blood.
I watch her face as it builds into a blissful climax. Up and down, I watch her glide on sweat and semen.
When she’s done I throw her off me, I drag her off the bed onto the floor. Pin her down.
I’m like an animal with her. We savage each other. I yell her name over and over again fucking her blindly with all my dirty might.
I yank her up by the wrists to her feet and pull my belt from the crumbled pile of clothing by the bed. I force her over the writer’s desk next to the bed and slap her big ass.
The belt goes around her neck and I enter her from behind. I drive my cock as far as the limits of my manhood and her femininity do allow and tighten the belt as I fuck.
She yells out wildly as I buck behind her driving her frame over the table. The first round was puppy dogs and caresses. The second was our wide ranging arts of Tantra. The third was anything she wanted me to do with my cock lips tongue and fingers for all the life left in me and the fourth?
I’m just an animal.
A wild eyed runaway slave.
Everything stops for a while.
She’s lying in my arms still and gently panting.
“What is it that you dream of, besides me,” Natasha asks me finally saying something.
“Sometimes I go for a walk in the city of Tel Aviv, but it’s not in Israel, it’s in the Caribbean. As if the whole damn nation broke off and floated south west. And it’s like Tel Aviv is New York City and Brighton is the tiyeled and time and space are intermingled, as though every pleasurable exchange, every old friendship in a few dozen wonderful lives is entwined. All happy places of my life are like one. And I’m walking home around dusk.”
“And what do you do in these dreams?”
“I walk around and run into old friends that I haven’t seen in forever. And we sit and have drinks or exchange numbers and time is endless even though it’s getting darker I can make time for anything. And all these inspiring women and men that I lost along the way have turned up in this calm and vibrant city, and I’m so happy. I’m on my way home to my wife and three little children.”
“And who is your wife in this happy world of nostalgia?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never made it home.”
“Story of your life my comrade lover.”
With her hand she wipes away tears that no longer are able to form.
Tears she used to so judge me for producing in front of her.
And for the first time in a long time I let my guard down completely and fall asleep in her arms. Unfolding the blackness of sleep.
When I awake the music is no longer playing and most of the lights are out.
Suddenly a strange sensation grips me. How long have I been in this safe house?
A day?
A fort night!
A year?!
Or two?
Three years!!!
And what about its safety am I even so sure about! I’ve been enjoying myself with these stories too much. I didn’t bother to remember that she and I have been dead for years.
What’s time to a ghost?
Nothing.
There’s a loud triple knock on the primary safe house door four floors down past a laser grid that cam cut you apart.
“Calm yourself tovarish lover,” she purrs. She gets up and slips on a grey bath robe. She opens the wooden drawer next to the bed and takes out an eight millimeter repeater revolver. Cocks it, slips it in her robe.
“The back stories are all bullshit, but the extracted lessons are mostly true,” she notes.
I remain where I am.
As if this has happened before.
It was as if in telling the story of Alexandr Perchevney I dredged up something. What year is this? And why of all places am I still in Moscow?
She slides open a side panel by the door and viddies the small telescreen by the portal which lets her scroll between the halls, the elevators, and the barrier walls outside.
“Ghosts like us,” she says in Russian.
She returns with a small envelope that somebody slipped under the door. She pulls up a stool and also the wooden sketch table over which just a story before I had bent her over and thrust myself inside her pounding her flesh balls deep.
She sits and opens the envelope.
Examines the contents.
She drops two photos on to the table.
One is of a pretty young woman in a green military cap. One is of a naked mutilated corpse.
“Your old partner Yelizaveta Kay has evidently been forgotten, captured and put slowly to death,” she states without any emotion.
I should feel a lot more than I do if that story is true. Maybe it’s the mineral water, maybe the wonderful fucking I just been receiving or the story about that very old school bad man Perchevney.
“Some things are now coming to light,” I say.
“Shortly, very shortly, everything about this dark plot against you will be fully illuminated,” she informs me, “in bright, white lights.”
Chapter 29
Fadeeva 6, 2082ce
Moscow
Natasha’s chest is heaving.
“I am not like you,” she begins, “there is not one speck of thing that in my life came easily.”
If I am to reveal how powerful man made great array of enemies. Built himself from impoverished, disfranchised and penniless expatriate to first among kings of thieves; well be you warned, you still will not know his motives until later. Or mine for that matter, or my fleeting moments of love and honesty.
Alexandr Perchevney spent two years in Russian prison. Then spent two years in Russian medical school and then little Yelizaveta turned four, Soviet Union imploded and whole family of Magda, Yelizaveta, Alexandr and strong man brother Slavi arrive in New York as before explained.
They moved to Washington Heights. They befriended shifty diamond Ivory Misha Kishbivalli. And soon they opened Bulgarian Culture center on Canal and Broadway to make marriage contracts, plan no fault insurance schemes, provide illicit healthcare services, and plot biggest heist in 20th or 21st century, at least so far.
Alexandr never forgot his ambitious plan laid out in totality within his mind in the two years he spent in solitary confinement for loving the daughter of a Party boss, the cold hearted anti-Semite Ivan Ivanovitch.
He made new international friends in New York. Including two precocious youngsters that he took immediately under his former Soviet wing. Georgie Rabanca, a twenty two year old Romanian immigrant, winner of an international scholarship in computer science and young American with a big ass and curly hair named Feline Hall.
He took them in, he soon hired them both and soon Georgie was hiding his money in Dominican Republic, and Ms. Hall was tutoring his three daughters, and first son as well as instructing him on which investments to wash his no fault money.
And then the year was 1997 CE;
Georgie Rabanca the young Romanian computer scientist writes an algorithm that will allow the Bratva to generate an ATM card code that will not only appear in the system as being backed by unlimited credit, but it will also then deduct the credit one thousand fold from the wealthiest depositors of all of the major western banks.
And then they figured out how to scare the banks into uploading the backend software to facilitate the heist by hack.
Feline Hall, the young woman they recruited as a patron and then as a tutor and then as a financial consultant was by that time working at a lobby for a Swiss banking firm. It was she who helped them upload this algorithm, this brilliant heist code disguised as Y2K protective software into the Credit Suisse mainframe a year before the so called Y2K virus was to begin crashing all the world’s computers.
That “virus” was in fact another code generated by Mrs. Magda Perchevney and charming George Rabanca to trick computer systems into resetting on December 31st, 1999 as the computer switched into 01.01.00.
While Americans were just becoming familiar with cell phones, ATM cards and AOL instant messenger; the Perchevney Bratva used a prototype of what we now call the Interweb, a closed communication wireless network to sell the world’s criminal underground the key code and the blue print for the heist.
Thus, by New Year’s Eve, December 31st, 1999;
Coordinating crews in 48 cities to begin withdrawing cash from ATMS using the code on the eve of the millennium, these coded strips would not only let the thieves take out as much cash as they wanted, but would then also deduct the balance against the accounts of the foremost depositors in each bank involved, some of the richest men in the West.
Bait and switch and switch again. While police agencies would spend the next decade chasing after all the disparate crews who walked away with $187 million in cash; each swipe they made transferred electronic tender into Alexandr Perchevney’s accounts in the Dominican Republic, while wiping out the savings of the richest men on earth.
And then the secondary program kicked in. Exactly five seconds into the new millennium, for every dollar pulled out of an ATM machine in those 48 cities, came out one million on the dollar transferred from linked accounts into the Bratva war chest.
By January 1st, 2000, Alexandr Perchevney was the richest man on earth. More liquid than any order before it.
And then she stops.
I notice that the safe house floor doesn’t have Jerusalem tile anymore. How curious. It’s sterile and white. I notice that the room which once seemed spacious is diminishing rapidly in size. I look at Natasha Andreavna.
“Darling have you betrayed me?” I ask her.
“No my love you are only betraying yourself.”
“I don’t believe it is so,” I tell her.
“Darling, do you remember what I said to you after they wiped out your mind in the hospital? Of course you don’t. They wiped your mind too many times for you to keep track of everything.”
“I have ways to remember things!”
She sings to me:
“Poor darling! Poor tovarish lover. What have they done to me and done to you?”
“I know that song!”
She kisses me.
She keeps singing, “Where are you now my companero? I have been travelled from town to town!”
“The song,” I say in wonder, “you’re skipping whole parts, but I remember the memory you were asking me for, just sing a little longer then!”
She changes octave, “Temptress and seductress we, tapped and played on mine fields every day! In volatile slaves! You can love me less. You can love me more, tomorrow. But if given a choice. You will always be that man!”
“I remember everything!” I claim, but really only that very specific conversation over hookah on the floor of Oasis Hade Bade, alone as the night swallowed us seven years ago in the Isle of Man.
“What is it that I told you lover?”
“We had just watched Ana Karenna and I told you I was nothing like a Calvary officer and you said I was a peasant, and worse a communist one. And you said you could never run away from your husband with a peasant communist with a very poorly thought out plan.”
“Get to the crux. We were sitting alone in the dark in that dim Middle Eastern smoke brothel, not even Sam Saladin in the next room could have heard what I said to you the night before the uprising began.”
“You told me that if I wanted to be a partisan that didn’t scare you. That you didn’t judge me for being crazy, for gambling my privilege, or even being a communist. But you said I was a mad man to thing I could lead a group of eight people against the oligarchy and hope to win. You told me fight from a position of resources.”
“Ah-men. Cheers to the power of song.”
“They punished Sasho three times hard man. He was for ten years the richest man on earth. You bumped his shoulder, you drank under his roof, but you had no idea the scale of his ambitions.”
“What’s going to happen next?” I ask her.
“If they can do what they did to Alexandr Perchevney, do you have any idea what they can, or should perhaps I say have done to you and I?”
“I recall you warned be about this several time before.”
“First someone punished Alexandr for loving. Two years of his life. He took all that money not out of greed but to shore himself up to fortify himself and his family and friends against anything ever happening again For ten years he lived the American life he had dreamed of. Then in 2010 someone punished him for stealing. He stole from the oligarchy, but only by accident. He stole more material than anyone ever has or will without firing a shot or taking a life. But Rabanca and Hall had set it all up so that he’d not be taking from the pots of the princelings, only the elites. The fact that he stole from Kahn was accidental.”
“Kahn,” I say, “the economist.”
“Darling I could sing all night so you remember, but we don’t have much more time together. So I will kiss you again.”
She does and reality, it shakes.
“Listen closely. You are in a mouse trap that you were tricked into building. I don’t know how much you will remember when you wake up from this dream, but please remember three things.”
“Natasha, please don’t tell me that we will be separated yet again!”
“Darling. They killed me and they killed you. They tortured and killed everyone we loved. They built a string of ghettos dressed up as rebel ‘soviets’ and put all the free minds inside them. And the trap is about to slam shut. If you and your friends don’t wake up, they are going to kill everybody.”
“Tell me lover. The three things.”
“When you wake up, if your friends can get to you and wake you up in time; you will not remember very much. There is a song. You know the whole song, it’s a wonderful and powerful and most excellent song and when you hear it you will remember all the best things that you did in my name and also for your people.”
“Go on about the things then,” I say. And I feel the de ja vu of knowing this happened a good many times before.
“One. Good will always triumph over evil. Never forget that. Two, DeBuitléir has the list and Emma holds the blueprint. And three I do love you. I love you I love you I love you and when it is done I will love you again and it will be I who you come home to on that boardwalk, it will be me who with you as my only partner raises our children and we will know peace. And the oligarchy will fall.”
“A most lovely dream,” I say.
She sits across from me on the floor with a candle between us and for the first time in a long time I am fully comfortable with my flaccid nakedness.
“Good luck,” she whispers, “when you wake, don’t forget the words to the partisan song.”
She kisses me and like that! She disappears. She crumbles immediately into thin air.
And the safe house room contracts in on itself and now I’m alone bolted to a chair, in blue ho chi min pajamas in a blaring white bright light.
A prisoner chained tight to big torture chair; naked, toothless and hardly grinning in a bright white interrogation cell.
I have already forgotten the three things! And my cause! And worse: her face!
The only name I remember is Alexandr Perchevney.
And my debt to the devil I know.
Chapter 30
Dubai, 2083ce
House of Perchevney
Waking from a beautiful dream into an uncomfortable reality is a jarring experience. And I’ve learned to hate it every single time.
Deep breath. Sing the lyrics you know. Partial recall. Deep breathe. Be good. DeBuitléir. He values your work. Solomon. She loves you.
Behold, it’s the devil we know.
“Ask me how much hard currency I paid for both your heads sans platter or guillotine,” asks Alexandr Perchevney.
His accent is remarkably rich, flavored via international extralegal trade and peppered with superior cadence for this man is fluent in English, Spanish, French, Bulgarian, Russian, Hebrew, some Yiddish, and also basic Mandarin Chinese.
The word you are looking for is savant.
The bright lights are completely blinding, and then they go dim. Waking up in hand cuffs is never, ever a sign of successful evening. Or a job done right. But, waking up in hand cuffs tends to be better than waking up without hands.
Adon and Watson Entwissle are both seated in black chairs ratcheted into the floor and a rather serious set of manacles are set to both their hands and feet, bolted and taut. Watson has some cyber contraption box affixed completely around his head. I believe the word I’m looking for is Parasimulator. He appears to be out cold, but then he pulsates periodically, like a minor tonic-clonic tick.
The room comes into focus, the sensation of Benzo-sedatives relieved with flumazenil antidote.
They are in the clutches of an oligarch. When Sebastian recognizes which one it brings neither trepidation nor real fear. Better to belong to a devil you know.
And there he sits not on a thrown or behind some big mahogany desk, but in library of wall to wall books mostly on the subjects of God, Philosophy and High Finance. He’s reading the Torah, of all things. He still does his stock trading based partly on Gamatria, the character symbol into number code of the Kabbalists.
He has thick black glasses and black to silver hair and he is in rather very good physical shape for a man his age whatever that age is. Suffice to say he was trained as dentist physician before the fall of the Soviet Union and it fell some time ago in 1991. And generally he would never meet a prospective business partner in person but he needs to look Sebastian Adon in the eyes and ask him a simple question; and then have his best men interrogate Adon and the chornay Watson Entwissle while he poisons them both with vodka, Polonium, whores and or Nanobots. And then proceeds to leverage what he knows for more American pie and more Postsoviet power. And the thing he wants more than anything else on earth. The best answers to the biggest questions aside. A simple thing, if this man Adon will get it for him. And if he won’t he will sell them both to the highest bidder.
“What’s the last thing you remember Tovarish Adon? What is your exact precise last memory? Time to wake up from your long sad dream.”
“I remember the tree of death,” says Adon wishing he might go back to sleep.
Alexandr takes off his glasses and looks Adon dead in the eyes.
“I know your Otriad has figured out how to do a number of sophisticated things using science, but how far you’ve gotten with parapsychology is of far more interest to me,” he states flatly.
“I remember the last time we met your English wasn’t nearly this strong,” Adon says.
“And when was that, remind me?”
“In the Scientologist command bunker below Fort Washington Avenue. One year after the great blizzard. Yelizaveta had just been sent to university in Havana. I had just been terminated in lieu of resignation from the New York Fire Department. The Disorder had just begun.”
“Who is she to me?”
Sebastian pauses.
“She’s your youngest daughter.”
“And what is she to you?”
Sebastian pauses for a moment digesting the full range of emotions even the utterance of that name brings on; Yelizaveta. There is a pleasure even in hearing it said aloud. But he cannot recognize a face, or formulate a real record of knowing-hood.
“Absolutely nothing now.”
“Good. So you remember less than she does evidently.”
“She doesn’t remember anything before Havana if my data is worth the money I paid for it,” says Adon.
“She requested this you know. She asked me, begged me to help erase you.”
“I could really sing you some sad Amerikanski songs about the film eternal sunshine of a spotless mind, and how at some point every single woman I’ve ever had tell me she loved me brings up said cinema eventually, but, I did not come here to ask for Yelizaveta’s hand in marriage. I came to kill Yuri Budanov, who is nothing to you. I am also here to carry out the orders of my commanding officers in asking you for what we need.”
“I don’t think you answer to anyone Sebastian. Do you know what the price could be on your head if it were discovered you were alive?”
“Do you know what you stand to gain by getting us back to our turf and agreeing to the proposition Mr. Ysiad Ferraris is currently soliciting support for?”
Alexandr smiles. “You still have your hands yes? Obviously I do. Arms and access for concessions and ports. Peanuts. But I want what’s in your head the very most.”
“What is it you think is in my head?”
“Quite a lot. But still, your head is less interesting to me than the head of Avinadav DeBuitléir. If only I could get both.”
“How’s your eldest daughter,” Sebastian asks.
“She doesn’t even know she’s my daughter anymore. And you can’t have her. I don’t think that it’s not healthy for anyone involved. Especially after the incident.”
“Which incident, remind me.”
There had indeed been a long list of incidents.
“Well good that you didn’t recall everything. It’s quite better that way. I doubt you even really remember meeting me. I think you were just briefed on your past. Were I a gambling man, and I am certainly not, but I would wager that the last thing you really remember is waking up shortly after the hostage crisis at the Millennium Theatre, and someone put a Parasimulator on your head and did a return briefing where even you cannot honestly corroborate what you did or didn’t do prior to the evening you and your partner Emma carried out that suicide strike against Manhattan’s richest citizens. Maya or Emma?”
“Well, I wish I knew,” smiles Adon, “our neuroscientists are easily a hundred years ahead of everyone else’s. Names upon names! What are even in names?”
“Would you like some vodka?”
“No. But I’ll take an ice cold mineral water if you have it.”
“I’m going to have Yelizaveta screen you herself, so you can see how little of an eye brow she will even raise in recognition.”
“You seem to think I’m capable of sentimentality.”
“Oh, I know for a fact that this trait is the only way your associates keep you in line.”
“Well it seems they’ve cut it out of me this time. Good riddance.”
“That remains to be seen.”
“I don’t believe that bullshit for a second,” says a Slavic man in a grey European business suit who has just entered the master office, or interrogation room, or whatever this library with torture chairs happens to really be. His overall sharp and immaculate dress is threatening. And an expensive watch guilds his left hand. His dirty blonde hair is neatly trimmed. He enters suddenly bearing a frosty cold glass of water and a shot of vodka and he grins and feigns handing it to Adon who obviously cannot move his hands.
“Do you recognize this man,” Perchevney asks him.
Adon looks him over with an expressionless countenance of hidden hate.
“Not at all,” Adon lies.
“Your water, sir,” says this businesslike Slav with clear control of his emotional projections.
“I’m no ‘sir’ cousin, I work for my money.”
“However you claim,” the grey suited Slav declares.
Alexandr raises a subtle toast and drinks back the vodka shot brought to him. The grey suited accomplice assists Adon in tipping the glass to his lips and thereby allowing him to swallow it down whole, and the Slav grins.
“Was it refreshing?” asks Alexandr.
“Indeed.”
“And this man raises no recognition, not even from a return briefing?”
“Absent he remains,” the lie goes on.
Dmitry Khulushin is appalled. But he doesn’t even hint at it. He simply takes the empty glasses and exits the chamber.
“Well enough fun and games,” declares Perchevney.
“Had no idea we were playing.”
“You are about to see her yourself and she will evaluate you. Tonight you will challenge my best man Dmitry in a three round game. If Sunday comes and you and your partner are still alive, then you will receive our fullest assistance in your upcoming operation in the dark continent of the chornay.”
“And she will be included in the contract.”
“She is off the table.”
“We do need your help to liberate Avinadav DeBuitléir and we certainly do need a steady supply of first line weapons for the fight in Haiti. She means nothing to me. I’ll simply tell Solomon that all we want from you is the precise hour when they move our prisoner. I would wager that she would pay several million for that data alone and then everything else we will buy at market price no games or privileges at a later date.”
“Your ransom will be worth more than all that. But your money isn’t worth the hacker’s time to steal or the print maker’s time to print the bills you people roll out. And what’s money to the richest man alive. Which I was before and now after my troubles am again. Do you know what I’m really after Sebastian Adon?”
“I know next week when we regulate our coastal ports that you will be taxed to move imports just like everyone else under the authority of the Breuklyn Soviet’s General Assembly. I know that freeing our man deep in U.A.S. isn’t going to be easy and if we have to do it without the precision tools we need, when we succeed, however messy it might turn out; we will owe you nothing. I know that you know we can both print foreign currencies flawlessly, and run programs that give us limitless amounts of capital to spend. But Maya Solomon said we want your daughter included in the bid.”
“You speak like a man who has forgotten every single clue he was given in a dream,” says Alexandr Perchevney in Russian.
“If you do what Dmitry Khulushin wants. Is manipulating you to do. If you trade me to the Americans for Avinadav. Then you’re never gonna get what you’re really after.”
“So what am I after then, what’s my bottom line? Why help your Otriad do anything at all?”
“Pure, unflinching loyalnost.”
“Ha. Your gang is really not so large. There are only eight of you left, and I have verified the identity of seven. I have both American and Russian politicians on my payroll. I have spies in your camp and your kitchen. And why is it that I’d help you spread a revolution that radically goes against my own understandings of business and the human mentality?”
“Because of what I did for your family during the blizzard when you were at your most vulnerable and your enemies swarmed your position.”
“That’s not enough!” he bellows pounding his fists on the desk, “that obviously is not enough!”
“You’re the richest men on earth. You have power and influence that few come close to without being an Eastern head of state. But remember what happened during the blizzard. And you know that we are the only outfit that can get into that bleak desert country, penetrate the tightest fortress the oligarchy has and get the one thing more valuable to you than that the oil underneath it.”
Alexandr’s eyes shimmer with untold hate. His fingers drum on the desk in front of him.
“I want you to assure me that you’ll take that rat bastard alive so I can attempt to inflict upon him what he did put on me that cold winter.”
“I will personally guarantee you your revenge. But only with your daughter as part of the deal. I give you my word she will be nowhere near the major fighting.”
Perchevney weighs all the data.
“Swear to me that when the smoke clears you will deliver to me my nemesis on his knees.”
“On my word.”
“What’s the word of dead man worth these days? Swear on the life of the woman you love above all other loves.”
Sebastian attaches a name to that word, but somehow no face. Her name is the embodiment of all qualities those utilizing the English language might attach to that utterance. All aspects and dimensions.
“I swear on the life of Natasha Andreavna.”
Alexandr hearing those words understands then that the memory wipes; the rumors of mental reincarnation. It is a cheap facade.
He’s dealing with a mind as dangerous as his own.
“All right then. So you can swear it again a third time if you’re still standing come Sunday. Remind me again, the exact last memory you have of the night we last met?”
“I remember leasing the devil my soul at the Mehanata Social Club and agreeing to kill a large number of people so I might protect the woman I love. You want me to fight. I’ll fight. I’m very good at it. You want a comprehensive medical to get your hands on my material, I’ll submit to one. But your daughter is now to me a vague and hazy memory, that even photographs and letters do nothing to remind me of the past.”
“Why ask for her then? Why did Solomon include that in the contract?”
“Leverage I’d imagine. And because of your daughter’s fabled powers of healing.”
“Interesting to me that a man who seems completely unable to stay dead should be so interested and in need of the only woman who can heal everyone she touches.”
“I’m a pathological creature.”
“But terrorism is a surgical disease.”
They look at each other and though he is bound tight, but Adon’s eyes have fire power. They are finally looking eye to eye.
“I have one more demand,” Adon says.
“Speak comrade terrorist!”
“When you put that devil Dmitry Khulushin in the ring. Try and make sure it’s the real Dmitry, this time.”
Chapter 31
88 Fulton Street, 2012ce
Isle of man
“I’ll use your cunt as a urinal! Your legs are my epaulettes of violent fucking!” yells Theodore Breria, Director of the D.H.S. the U.A.S. National Secret Police.
There are quite literally woman hanging from the ceiling of the subterranean Manhattan supper club 88 Bathtub Gym.
Located below the busy streets of the nearly abandoned District Financial it can be hard to find, harder to get your way in even with a black card. Since the lifting of the last call in all U.A.S. territories, the de-criminalization of prostitution and the subsidization of the three day weekend, the business of leisure is clearly booming.
Most of the rubble has been cleared on the east side since the summer offensive five years prior where the Fourth Citizen Army of Breuklyn Soviet’s crack artillery brigades and the insert proper us artillery unit had a six day missile exchange over the east river. In the process reducing most of the Breuklyn’s water front to rubble and rendering the midtown and Financial District skyline a pock marked ravine of debris and rubble. Three years since the ceasefire and all the Manhattan towers are back up. The trench works and bunker complexes running from Long Island City to Dumbo look like the German Seawall; a Bar Lev line of the 21st century; a web of unmanned missile batteries designed to fire payloads of Persian rockets into the Manhattan skyline.
The city is a ghost of its former self, but still a playground for service men on leave from Staten Island and other neighboring garrisons and of mostly young men of the lower echelon of the elite having a go at frontier lawlessness, their pick of tower apartments and servants and fancy cars.
The Eastern traders. The profiteers. The cream of the carpet baggers. The contractors. The petty elite sons of the oligarchy on holiday. But, the real money changers are gone. Wall Street is a red light district, the canyons of the world’s capital are now just a freewheeling circus of anything goes. The wild-west never allowed such depravity. Anyone of class left long ago for the West Coast or New England.
Back to the women on the ceiling.
Bathtub Gym is located three stories below 88 Fulton Street. It was once a Russian bathhouse. It still has Russians. It still has baths. It still is nominally referred to as “the water brothel”. What’s changed? Well you can kill the girls and still come back. That’s all that’s changed!
Dmitry Khulushin is an economist by Harvard graduate training. His U.A.S. Department of Homeland Security issued National Identity card designates him “White Clearance”, which means he can travel state to state without a visa, board commercial airlines, and leave the country without prior authorization. He was born in the city of Tashkent though both parents were Slavic Russians and inner party members prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and their immigration to the United States.
Dmitry Khulushin was a face that is sly and Slavic, a boyish arrogance and a ruthless entitlement typical of all former Soviets who went from power to poverty then back to power. And no morals, not even one. A patter of fruits and a chilled bottle of Russian standard and a variety of untouched delicacies are spread before him in one of the very important person’s suites of the club where he lounges in a white bathrobe seated across from three associates powerful and affluent in their own ways; Michael Bloom II, the fat and repugnant Theodore Breria and none other than Ysiad Ferraris. A slender and thoroughly well-proportioned young woman hangs pale, blonde and naked as the day she was born from the chandelier above them ensuring their Champaign glasses never empty. Her feet are quite literally locked into the fixture, and periodically she arches her supple frame down to fill their cups.
Breria is hideous as usual and completely drunk. He spent several hours in the fun and games room and by his usual tendencies; Dmitry knows his bill will be considerable. But when one is entertaining the head of the modern gestapo; the Department of Homeland Securities Secret Police, and the two remaining billionaires left in this city; one doesn’t concern themselves with cost. You can’t take Breria anywhere. But he goes where he wants with his endless depravities.
A truly sick fucker.
Ysiad has just gotten back from “the other side”.
“What are they living like over there these days? Cannibalism I read in the Daily News!” exclaims Mr. Bloom.
“I didn’t observe any myself,” states Ysiad.
“Fuck those whores,” mutters Breria.
All that man thinks of and far worse. Quietly logs Dmitry Khulushin Koch.
“Is it true that the Islamiacs are gaining ground?” Inquires Bloom, “from what I understand they may have possession of the entire District Bayridge.”
“The Daily say they are instituting Shar’iah law next week. Cutting off hands and heads.”
“You own the Daily. Surely you more than me,” says Ysiad business casually.
“Well anyhow I don’t tell them what to print that’s Breria’s job surely!”
“Sons of whores and social scum!” he bellows.
Dmitry Khulushin sips his champagne and listens. Anything Breria says you just feign agreement with. Michael Bloom owns half the city’s lucrative industries, four major daily newspapers, eighty social clubs, the lighting grids, the water works, Broadway; everything but the boardwalk really. He’s the son of the mayor. Some people say the mayor lives through him vicariously. He’s a debaucher certainly. But not a totally sick fuck like the head of the secret police, king of rape and roses.
“You were in Moscow just last week were you not,” interjects Dmitry in Russian. Which Breria speaks but not Michael Bloom.
“I was. I was investing in absolutely everything,” cautiously replies Ysiad.
“A good investment, the Russian I mean, being a Russian once myself I know. I was thinking of acquiring more assets there. I too was in the capital just last week on some light business as well.”
In his mind Dmitry Khulushin Koch sees himself striking the husk body of Sebastian Adon with a studded black onyx baseball bat. The dull cracks of his human piñata not eliciting the response he prefers getting out of Adon, screams of pain and horror, the kind he elicits from the man sometimes when he dreams, but somehow never when he kills all the people Adon loves, how amazingly unsentimental.
Ysiad knows that Dmitry is playing a game with Perchevney, and Dmitry knows that Ysiad is thick as thieves with the rebels, and who cares as long as no one steps on big money toes. Bloom and Breria are the exact kind of people you have to bath with once and a while to lubricate the right channels of commerce. Politics is just a rich kid’s game for those not smart enough to have gone into economics. Once you get a person’s bottom line clearly established, everything else is just a fireworks show for the hoi polloi.
The nubile young beauty lowers herself to pour more champagne.
“I heard a rumor in Moscow,” says Dmitry Khulushin.
Ysiad’ raises an eye brow.
“I heard that a certain very wanted corpse is very much alive and up to obvious no good.”
“This man you speak of, tell me, when did you see him last,” says Ysiad.
“Oh, right after you did sir.”
Ysiad remains business casual, a deadpan face.
“What are you two going on about,” asks Michael Bloom.
“Night life in Moscow is limitless,” claims Dmitry.
“Agreed,” Ysiad nods.
Michael Bloom Trump gets up to tinkle. Or brutalize a whore, either one or both. Breria’s eyes they roll back and he appears to be having some kind of absence seizure.
“Well then,” notes Ysiad.
“I have a message speaking as if I were Alexandr Perchevney,” calmly says Dmitry Khulushin, his blue eyes turning grey on grey.
“Go on,” says Ysiad.
“We have Sebastian Adon and we’re gonna turn him over to the U.A.S. for DeBuitléir and a tall finder’s fee. And then we’re gonna kill all your rebel friends in Brooklyn, spelled correctly on its tombstone.”
“Well what you are really getting out of it?” asks Ysiad, “what’s the ROI?”
“The Department of Homeland Security wants that Haiti operation to go forward. It will give them a natural excuse to roll over the border wall, put down the sixty some autonomous zones and burn that Breuklyn Soviet to the ground with gas and fire. We definitely want to trade Adon for DeBuitléir, but not for that exact same end.”
“Why then, why risk all the gun play?”
“Sebastian Adon is a corpse. A zombie. He doesn’t have what we want. Believe me, in Moscow we looked. She looked for us.”
Ysiad knows who.
“DeBuitléir does then?”
“Oh yes. Certainly. They in the DHS gulag archipelago just didn’t have to right tools to extract it out of him. Despite seven years of non-stop torture down in Angola 42.”
“So you’re searching for Solomon like everyone else then?”
Dmitry Khulushin grins ear to ear.
“Blat, want to see a fun little trick, an exercise in living vicariously?”
“I’m sure I don’t,” says Ysiad.
Breria jumps out of his seat and stands fat and naked at attention.
“Sons of black sluts!!” screams the regional Director of the Homeland Security forces.
He reaches up and grabs their Champaign pouring suspended hostess by the throat. He starts beating himself off as he strangles her. She struggles and he grips her throat more forcefully.
“We’ve been here for such long time, notes Dmitry Khulushin, “what in the world could make you believe in these violent monkeys, these fleshy husks and their rebel ilk? Do you have any idea how much power are playing with?”
The young woman tries to scream, she flails and struggles. Breria keeps choking her
Michael Bloom Trump II, the richest man in New York comes back from the bathroom. He’s holding a long steak knife. He stabs the young woman several times in the chest vigorously and then he slits the girl’s throat. Blood gushes everywhere. All over the bath house floor. Breria starts laughing hysterically beating himself off. Michel Bloom starts jumping up and down like a monkey painting his face with the dead girl’s blood.
Dmitry Khulushin takes a Champaign glass and fills it with her gushing sanguine fluids.
“Why don’t you get the fuck out of here you pathetic chornay profiteer,” says Dmitry Khulushin , “go run and tell your Ivorite friends just what you think you know!” he sneers.
Ysiad doesn’t budge.
“What is it exactly you think that DeBuitléir has?” Ysiad asks.
“He has the Retribution List.”
The list of all women of child bearing age with the bloodline of the Tzadikk ha Dror.
“I mean all the ones we didn’t skin, rape, eat or taint beyond recognition already,” Dmitry grins.
For the first time in a while Ysiad’ face shows some raw horror, groks the big of it all, the mass and girth of the plot.
“We’re gonna snuff out the whole rebellion and the blood line with one mighty stone. Now get the fuck off my personal island. You have one hour before I send the dogs and zombies after you. ”
Dmitry Khulushin spits blood on the face of Ysiad Ferraris.
“Just kidding. This isn’t Paramount pictures. I’m gonna grind your bones right now and feed you like a meat pie to the Ivories.”
And then Dmitry grabs his wrist, yanks him clear across the table and cuts his entire right hand off with a meat cleaver spraying his gore all over.
Chapter 32
Bay 65th Street, 2012ce
Masjid Saint Sophina
Inside Majid St. Sophina on Bay 65 with its glittering green domes and gold minaret and tank barrier defenses Anahita Noor and Erza Pula watch as 8,000 Shi’a and Alawiite men who have just finished salat come to attention and salute a mosaic portrait of the Mahdi Emmina Saulomina Khadija and her two new born infants one black as night a male and one a ghostly albino. They are both in black fatigues like the men and wear chadors. They look nervous.
Erza Pula Pound, deputy minister of Public Safety has just ordered over 94,300 families below ground into the bunker vaults of the old, old sub-subway to newly Chinese built the gas bunker shelters.
The Oligarchy has leaked over the interweb it will hit Breuklyn Soviet tomorrow with Sarin rockets.
The First, Second, Third and Ninth Citizens Armies have been called up but only half have been issued gas masks. Some 32 thousand fighters.
Erza hopes Allah is as merciful tomorrow as she is beneficent.
‘Death to these Kafirs,’ yells Kaveh Ali Shariati, “long live the Prophetess, Mother of the Messiah and the Madhi, Allu Akbar!.
More
Chapter 34
Drake Hotel, 2012ce
Coney Island
Oleg looks at his sky pager.
Before Dmitry’s goons grabbed Ysiad Ferraris at the water’s edge and prepared to grind him part into mincemeat for so called kosher hotdogs, zeal over took the wily Dominican. He flailed his way lose and still bleeding all over the place wrestled a pistol off one of the gangsters belts and put two in everyone around him until the gun jammed.
BANG. BANG.
And still bleeding and mostly naked he charged out the front of the on 88 Fulton Street club, with a makeshift tourniquet; into an alley way on Gold Street and dashed hemorrhaging everywhere toward the water front.
And before he threw himself into East River he fired off a voice call to Sky Page Central from a mobsters taken device. His dying voice would be low atmosphere bounced between satellites, rendered into a Gamatria code and delivered to Oleg’s pager.
“Adon and DeBuitléir are alive! DHS and the Bratva are exchanging them as prisoners. Attack on the Soviet is inevitable. Bratva and Otriad inner circles compromised. Secure the candidates by any means necessary!”
And the phone went dead.
Oleg nearly bashes his sky pager against the wall of the parking garage below the Drake Hotel.
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! It was all a trap. A huge set up. Blat.
We thought we were ten steps ahead but all we were doing was playing a long game for the other side! It was moments like this that Oleg remembered clearly his skepticism when several years before Adon had told him the Oligarchy has technology 200 years ahead of our own.
A deep breath. He composes himself.
Well then, he thinks as he clenches his bear fists. Time to do what has to be done.
He leaves car in the Hotel subbasement and takes a special elevator right to the restaurant on the roof.
It’s a very premium view of everything from eighty four stories above the Soviet at Tatiana Purples on the roof of the Drake Hotel.
“Ysiad Ferraris is dead,” says Anya, “his body washed up on the coast an hour ago. They cut off his arms and his legs.”
“Show me the body I say,” he laughs.
Oleg Medved sits across from her at the table on the roof of the Drake Hotel, at Tatiana Purples, not to be confused with Tatiana Blue to the West of Brighton 6 or Tatiana Green to the East of Brighton 6, both on the new Navalny Boardwalk.
This one is eighty stories above the coast. And serves “Slavo-Asiatic Fusion Cuisines”. Or, Russian food with a wide menu of Sushi.
The place is completely empty.
Back in wind swept Breuklyn Soviet. Anya and Oleg Medved have light supper on the roof of the Drake Hotel with its wide winding wrap around view of the Coney Peninsula, the steel towers of Seagate, the casinos of the Green Light District, and expanded boardwalk, the hundreds of freighters in the port, and of course in the distance to the North a forty story tree of enormous size.
The Drake Hotel is so tall one can even see the ramparts of the Northern Mile High Wall. You can see the high tower in Manhattan. And the fortress of the City.
“I do not have very positive news to report,” he says.
“Well what’s fucking new,” Is all she responds.
“It has been a most tumultuous week.”
“I expect the heat to rise exponentially this weekend.”
“Tell me, why is it that they pulled you out of Unit 88 and sent you back home two years ago,” he asks her.
“I wasn’t any good at killing people,” is all she responds.
“Well the enemy doesn’t flinch about it.”
“Well the trouble with an eye for eye is that the enemy always has more eyes than we do,” she coldly says, “Now make your fucking report Oleg Medved.”
The Kompot is cold and fresh boysenberry, black berry currant. She sips it. If he lies she will have him shot. If he is in fact the traitor she will pick him up herself and throw him off the eightieth story to a splat of a death on the boardwalk below.
“This morning Ysiad Ferraris reported to me that that the Ivorite spy ring here in the Soviet is about to pull absolutely everyone out of town and is also preparing to evacuate tens of thousands of Ivories, and quite quickly. That’s ominous. Every time the Israelis pull out somewhere quickly things go up in flames shortly after.”
“Well you know those Zionist dogs better than I would ever like to. Did Mr. Ferraris give the spy ring the mutual aid agreement?”
“Yes, and they told him to tell us to go talk to Ruth Vered for final authorization.”
“And what did the spy ring back to pass us?”
“They confirmed that the Perchevney Bratva has betrayed you, us. Last week they captured Sebastian and Watson in Moscow. ”
Her face drops for one second.
“Who else knows Sebastian is alive?”
“Well, Ysiad does because he was the last person to see Adon the night of his capture last Friday. Right before they took out target 104.”
Budanov.
“Did Ferraris sell us out,” she asks.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Who else?”
“Toba Hadaad knows he’s alive and therefore so does the Ivorite spy ring.”
“Considering that Unit 669 helped us fabricate his and Emma Solomon’s deaths that comes as no shock at all. Who else?”
“Well, since the Bratva has him, but no one has said anything to me, I would assume that Justin O’Azzello is in the dark too and rest of the thieves in law as well. There’s more though.”
“Speak quickly and quietly man and know I have a sniper ready to splatter you so pick your words well.
“I’m being accused now of being the traitor?”
“Well Oleg I suppose its high time you picked a side more specifically.”
“Anya. That’s hurtful.”
“Come on Oleg, finish the fucking report.”
Oleg wonders how up so eighty stories high in a completely empty restaurant, emptied because they reserved every other table; from what position her Sicarri assassin has a good bead on him.
The wind blows and he picks his words well.
“As you know when the group killings began three months ago our greatest concern was that they would trigger a civil war here between the Ivories and the Caribbean’s. And judging from last night’s attack, the assassins have now butchered 104 of our citizens just a fortnight after we finished killing 104 of their war criminals and profiteers. It took us three years. It took them just three nights over three months.”
“Oleg Medved, if you don’t speed up your revelation of reporting I will blink twice and my best sniper, she will empty your brains on the floor of the roof and that will be all she wrote.”
“I find your threats highly erotic,” is all he responds.
“When it began three months ago you asked me to convince Alexandr Perchevney it was in everyone’s interest to clamp down on this immediately. We sat down with the Party of God representative Anahita Noor, with Netic Djbriel Okonkwo from Uhuru-BLM, and James White and James Brown from the Bratva and we all agreed to pool resources and go after everyone responsible for the atrocities. For the sake of the Soviet, for the sake of business and because we all knew what might happen if we had another Crown Heights.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Check,” says Anya Drovtich,
“And so we all kidnapped, crippled and mind tortured a lot of people until we rounded it down in the very eleventh hour to forty confirmed horses. Bodies being used; programed in advance to orchestrate these horrific murders. And so as you know, right after the last killing. Right after we burned the bodies out in East New York our Sicarri, the Party of God’s revolutionary guardsmen, the Shomriim and the Bratva’s most hard hitting goon squads rounded up the remaining killers in a sweep and put them all in the bathes under Third Rasputin.”
“Oleg Leondovich. You are one of my most favorite people to work with over the years, but speed it up. I’m going to order your death in two minutes if I’m not fully convinced you didn’t betray us to the enemy.”
“We carried the horses, the 40 civilian proxies selected by your enemies. Our enemies. We brought them down into the memory vat and ran the Parasimulators. But time wasn’t on our side so I asked Alexandr to send his best mambo to break their minds quickly.”
“And so he sent Hella?”
“Yes. But not only her. She arrived with Dmitry Khulushin and a very large back box.”
“What was in the box?”
“Not what, who.” He says.
“Who was in the box?”
“The Ivorite Spy ring told Ysiad this morning to tell us that in that box was something more important than solving the killings, more important than why it was that they were all planning to evacuate their beloved Ivories. In that box was the missing candidate.”
“Natasha is dead. They disappeared her seven years ago.”
“She was there the night of the Millennium Hostage Crisis.”
“You just saw a Ghost. While Ysiad was meeting that whore Ivorite spy Toba Hadaad we were trading with the Party of God, and Anahita Noor gave us that exact name. It’s a lie.”
“Natasha Andreavna Skorobogatova is very much alive. They’ve kept her asleep as a hostage since she and Adon asked Perchevney to fake their deaths seven years ago. I didn’t know the truth until the Millennium Hostage Crisis when she briefly was allowed to wake up. Adon said to keep her alive by any means necessary. These were his last word to me. And I knew then what I knew seven years ago which is that she would only be kept alive if she was of use. And now they’ve brought her from Russia with love to run the interrogations. Or god only knows what else.”
“So plot counter plot. You are the traitor,” she says.
“No woman I’m not. I protected Adon from the Bratva. I protected Natasha from the Oligarchy. And until Dmitry Khulushin made his power play this week no one was attacking the Breuklyn Soviet or any of the other Free states. Does the Brotherhood or the Mossad even really know Adon is alive? Niet. Does anyone else in our own Otriad even know! Niet. Because we kept everyone at bay! Kept this war in the shadows while we strengthened our position. No one knows where Emma is. And no one knows about the twins. And that’s the only important thing isn’t it!” he demands knowing his time is coming up close.
“Now. Only me and you.”
“Well what now? You truly believe that I have sold this Otriad out to Perchevney or worse the Oligarchy itself?”
“You were the last person to see Adon and Emma Solomon alive other than me. How could you not have known they still had Natasha?”
“They told me she died after the events at Millennium.”
“Who told you that?”
“Dmitry Khulushin.”
“The world’s biggest snake he whispered that to you and you believed it?”
She blinks once.
“Anya. My loyalnost is to you personally as well as Sebastian. And to this rebellion supersedes my connections of blood. My thirst for treasure and any affiliations I have to the Ivorites or even the Pervechnvny Bratva.”
He says this all quite calmly for a man about to die.
“If I blink one more time you will die traitor so pick your last words well,” she coldly says, “If the Ivorites are pulling a mass exodus with their black freighter submarines on our shores. If they brought that witch woman here. If they have Adon and they know what to trade with the oligarchy to get DeBuitléir. Then I would say that an attack of the Soviet and to other free states is impending. I would say that you helped them set us up for slaughter.
“Damn you woman. Hold your eye’s desire to fire.”
“Good bye Oleg.”
“Wait.”
“For what?”
“I’m the only person that can get into the baths below Third Rasputin and walk away with their mambo Natasha in a bag. And only from what she knows can I prove my loyalty to you and this rebellion. Can we stop fighting?”
“Natasha works for Perchevney now, or always has. Why would she tell us anything?”
“Because she’s a prisoner. She’s in their debt not in their pocket. Other than when they woke her up to participate in the raid on the Millennium, she’s been under since the night of the Great Disorder. If she can see into the minds of these killers; these horses if she can pick out who organized this then we can figure out what if anything we can do to stop it.”
“Perchevney will have your whole killed for betraying him.”
“You’ll have my whole family killed for betraying you.”
“No. I’ll just have you killed. We don’t kill civilians without cause around here.”
“They have a man amongst the forty prisoners below Third Rasputin who helped found your club. Our Otriad. I wouldn’t know his name or face because I didn’t join your cause until the middle of the revolt, but you’d know him and you’d know then just how much we, I say we because I am your deputy I am your man, I worked for you and for Adon and for Solomon! My loyalnost is only to the Z.O.B.”
“Tell me why I shouldn’t just order the entire 4th Citizens Army to arrest everyone inside Third Rasputin. Right now.”
“Firstly, because you’ll never get into the caverns below by force. Secondly, because if there is an impending Federal raid on the Soviet, what we don’t want is to have a street war between the Bratva, the Breuklyn Otriad, the Party of God and all other major player in the Citizen’s Army fucking up access to the port; our only way of getting civilians out of the country. Trapping everyone here over the weekend in the middle of a gas assault, and making us look easy prey to the U.A.S. is a stupid, stupid stratagem. Lastly, because if Dmitry Khulushin in New York City. Which everyone seems to think he is. Well then Justin Toomey O’Azzello is no longer Voorhi in law, no longer the biggest local boss in charge. And Dmitry will kill all of the hostages, kill all of the Brava’s regional operators, and kill all of the horses and sure Natasha Andreavna too to keep what he’s doing, what he’s plotting from us.”
She stares at him without blinking.
“Prove it then Oleg. Go get pretty, lost lonely and lethal Ms. Natasha and go get me a traitor she can identify.”
“Anya.”
“Oleg.”
“Watch me prove my loyalty to you with blood and fire, yet again.”
Eighty stories above the Coast of Breuklyn, on the roof deck of the Drake Hotel Oleg Leondovich Medved finally picks his bloody side. He heads out to knock real hard on the door of shit ton of trouble.
Chapter 35
1375 Ocean Ave, 2012ce
Midwood
MORE MORE
It’s quite late. Late sometime Friday into early Saturday night.
The land line rings. No one has this number. It’s the same voice on the line.
It’s Krissy’s voice, a little strained by cigarettes maybe.
“If you love me please baby please don’t follow them to Las Vegas.”
“Krissy is that you?”
“Yeah Big Nicky it’s me.”
“Where are you babe,” pleads out into the night.
“That doesn’t matter, they’re gonna hurt me real bad unless you do what they say.”
He goes dead inside.
“When you get to Las Vegas you need to put eight rounds in the head of Sebastian Adon,” the voice says.
“Or you have no idea how much they plan to make me suffer.”
Chapter 36
Third Rasputin, 2012ce
Brighton beach
Oleg Medved bangs his fist on the front door of the Third Rasputin Supper Club Restaurant. The enormous blue purple cube which occupies the entire block of Avenue Z and Ocean Avenue is seven stories tall and composed of various grafting’s of blue and gold metals interlocking to produce the effect of hypermodern futurism.
A giant wave of metal concealing the soon to open seven day a week showcase of Postsoviet debauches. Several incarnations of Rasputin have been mysteriously burned down over the years. This is the latest incarnation built within the past six months.
Its owner is Alexandr Dmitrievich Perchevney.
“Suka Blat, open the fucking door!” Oleg the bear bellows.
Eventually skinny wild eyed young man named Maxim opens the gate. Maxim has the look of a happy zombie, a dead man with a smile dancing around the room as everyone’s best friend. He gives Oleg a friendly hand shake and beckons him inside the dimly lit entrance way.
They walk through the passage way and past the ballroom and the dance floor and exclusive areas and then down a series of ramps into the basement, and then sub-basement. Finally he arrives at Mermaid Spa; the new bathhouse below the club.
It’s here that Oleg and the secondary command of the Bratva has been interrogating the suspect prisoners associated with the group killings, three such in the past three months.
There are two burly men in black multiform carrying on a loud deliberation when Oleg arrives. One is tall and wild eyed, long haired wild man Justin Toomey O’Azzello and the other is the burly enforcer James Parisi White, not to be confused with his Boriquen partner James Behemoth Pérezes Brown. James and Justin are both handsome in a defiant Fenian sort of way, Justin is a devious and sarcastic dirty blonde, James; a former cop is stocky and brunette. These are two of Alexandr’s Perchevney’s closest men in country. Justin is his New York General Manager and James his Chief of Internal Security. Along with Puerto Rican tough guy “James Brown”, these three are the only Amerikanski on his inner circle. The Russian call girls who work at and frequent the restaurant call the James’s “white” and “brown” basically only because James Pérezes is Hispanic and James White is a Fenian.
They came up with Perchevney years ago when his fortunes were quite revered an all he really owned was shitty Bulgarian dancehall on the lower east side specializing in Latin Music and arranged marriages. Both Justin and James are practicing Fenians.
“Howdy,” says James White.
“You’re not gonna believe what’s coming out of these people’s memories,” says Justin O’Azzello.
“Oh, believe me how I can believe almost anything these days,” says Oleg Medved.
Submerged in the main pool are forty human beings. Mostly men but nine women too. They are submerged symmetrically in the water by a make shift scaffolding rig, respirator tubing attached to head set cylinders enclosing their heads in metal orbs. IV central lines are sutured into their torsos.
“These are the forty horses we suspect participated in the messy business of those Ivoryish and Jamaican group killings. A couple might be low hanging fruit circumstantially, but all of them were linked to cars, flats or IP addresses or new entries in the nights before the three group killings. So, we threw them in the bath and ran the Parasimulator full blast with the Bratva’s best mambo doing her thing for twenty four hours,” explains Justin.
“What simulation?” Oleg asks him.
“Sleep No More,” says James, “then the Bulgarian Tavern, of course.”
He’s referring to the preferred disorientation simulations the Bratva’s interrogators run before they go digging around in people’s heads. One involves a massive hotel game of hide and go seek with intermittent bouts of mob violence and orgiastic rituals. The second mimics a three floor translational drinking game to separate people from their memories and information. The process in involves incapacitating a person with sedatives, submerging them in a warm water bath and uploading whole worlds of fictitious data right into their cerebral cortex. Once they get the subject’s mind to believe what they are experiencing is real a skilled male technician is called an Ougan and-or a skilled female technician called a Mambo can then do a great deal of data collection or memory replacement.
In industry terms, and a person reprogrammed via this medium is called “a horse”.
An unconscientious technician or an overly traumatizing episode will wipe out all memory and in industry terms produce a zombie.
“Who’s the mambo,” Oleg asks, but he already knows.
“You’ll never guess,” grins Justin O’Azzello.
“More importantly what did you record?” asks Oleg Medved.
“Well for one thing almost none of these horses remember a single thing before arriving in Breuklyn Soviet three months ago, as if they didn’t exist. They were wiped and programmed and sent over here to swarm, slaughter kill. Finally after ascertaining that we were dealing mostly with zombies we narrowed down via optic nerve playback to two handlers in the cohort. The only two that didn’t have their clocks punched before,” says Justin.
“You did full neural play backs?” asks Oleg referring to the process of playing back the images taken in via the optic nerve of the past ninety days.
“Well one bottomed out while our mambo went digging late last night. Highly trained. He punched his own clock. He’s a fucking palsy vegetable now,” notes Justin.
“The other one, the Muslim Brotherhood grabbed from the City and then we took him off them. Our mambo was pretty close to getting him wide open and then he went into neurological arrest. We sent him over to Coney Island Hospital, he’s shored up in Alexandr’s personal life support suite,” James Burns White explains.
James Behemoth Brown takes over the briefing, “They all came into the Soviet in a variety of different ways. They all checked in different places all over town. Full moon came each time and they converged on their targets like clockwork. They butchered all three groups the same way. Everybody was gang raped one by one in front of each other and then everybody was drained dry and hung up from the rafters after their sex organs were consumed. And then the attackers washed up and checked out. And they say the Russian-Albanian-Bulgarian mafias are the real animals? Even MS 15 doesn’t rock like this!”
Oleg the Bear weighs all the latest data.
“But the surviving handler what’s in his head? Who did they all ultimately serve?”
“Well we won’t know until we get him back from Coney Island Hospital,” states James White.
James Behemoth Brown spits in disgust at an unknown and abysmal evil they are now unearthing.
“We have another, complication,” says James White.
“The fellow we just sent over to Coney was a founder of your little Breuklyn Otriad. A club fucking founder that you all assumed was dead and taken during last year’s battle for Babylon, Strong Island.”
“Well then?” asks Oleg Medved.
Oleg the bear knows who that man is, but cannot speak his real name for he ever knew it.
“We suspect that whoever they are, they’ve infiltrated both the Bratva and the Breuklyn Otriad with their sleepers. If that’s correct we are most likely dealing with the Cult in Grey.”
Everyone shuts up when that name gets mentioned.
And that says a little something when the men in the room are hard bad man gangsters, one of which who can transform into a black cat of enormous size with titanium claws.
“Who can we trust these days, even in our own houses,” mutters James Behemoth Brown.
“All right, let’s get these horses out of the water and string um up,” declares Medved
“It used to be that you had to buy off someone’s loyalties! Or threaten the ones that they love! Now you can just pay to look into their minds and write things there for them to do,” exclaims James White.
“Takes all the fun out of interrogations if you ask me,” states Justin Toomey O’Azzello playing with a dagger of enormous size, his right index finger balancing the blade.
“I heard from a trusted source Alexandr sent his best mambo from Moscow to work on these pawns,” mentions Oleg Medved.
“He did indeed,” said James White.
“Dmitry Khulushin flew her in two nights ago,” states Justin O’Azzello.
“Little miss fucking trouble herself,” laughs James Behemoth Brown, “we’d all thought she was red dead disappeared! It took her just under a night to crack all thirty nine targets. Obviously she hasn’t lost her touch.”
“Although she left a few brain dead,” notes James Behemoth Brown.
“Is Dmitry in New York?” Oleg asks, a little too casually.
“Good question,” says James White.
“Which Dmitry?” mutters James Brown.
“The real Dmitry Khulushin, not his double, not his twin or his clone,” says Oleg .
“You think even Sasho himself knows that blonde devil face from his twins? Even Sasho can’t tame that fucking vicious rising demagogue,” says James White.
“He’d better if he knows what’s good for the business,” says Justin O’Azzello.
“Well I hope he’s not in New York, because it’s always a blood bath whenever he shows up,” says Justin.
“Take me to her then so I can taste the merchadise,” says Oleg.
Oleg Medved is about to make a bed and finally sleep in it.
And so they go deep below the streets of Breuklyn Soviet heading to the deepest crypt below the baths, below the ice cage, where they keep their most previous cargo.
Burly Oleg Medved knocks out Justin O’Azzello first with a crack to the head. He’s the most dangerous one. Since Dmitry Khulushin doesn’t appear to be on the premises.
He pile drives his way through the sturdy old enforcer James Burns White and a few other Postsoviet hooligans. James almost gets off a shot but Oleg bashes him in the face with a fire extinguisher, and then empty’s the entire chemical contents out on James Brown who is transmogrifying into the terrifying black beast with claws and a tail that science and magic engineered for him
And then there was a big black cat of enormous size coming right at him claws bared!
And then there was James Burns White calling him a “fucking double traitor” and firing his repeater at him, metal mosquitos zipping about the passage ways.
And it seemed then like Justin O’Azzello who he’s hit so fucking hard he’d though he’d killed him drew up that knife of his and ran across the ceiling and plunged in twice in his back!
“SUKA BLAT!” Oleg bellowed and then with that big dagger still in his gut he head butts Justin, and takes out his blaster and empties it in the General Manager chest.
BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. Click.
And Justin just spits blood at him!
And so Oleg swings the extinguisher into the thick of his skull and knocks him back into James White and James Brown and whole pack of dangerous others.
Oleg the Bear had to fuck up a lot of his closest associates to get clear of that shit show. But he did what he needed to do.
A few doors and tunnels down below the supper club.
There she lay.
Naked as the day she was born in fluid bath, eyes flickering.
Oleg had not seen this woman since seven years before on the eve of the great disorder.
Those criminal associates that are chasing him and howling for his blood are banging on the blast door.
“Natasha. It’s time to wake up,” is all he thinks to say in Russian.
Oleg Medved lifts her out of the bath, and places her in a big black duffle bag.
He then had to carry this full figured buxom blonde haired young woman out of the memory vat and charge through the facility with her in the bag. While bleeding out of back and chest with a fragment of a small caliber round in his shoulder.
They don’t make man like this after the fall of the Soviet Union!
With everyone in there trying to kill him it all got a little Zen. He couldn’t keep track of how many men he’d killed on the way out. And in doing so he’d burned his final bridge with the Perchevney Bratva.
He was shot at repeatedly, but only one connected low caliber thankfully. And he was stabbed twice in the back and once in the gut. But he had enough gut for glory.
He even had to bash poor Maxim’s face with heavy hammer blow and jump in his black armored Escalade with the girl still dripping wet from the vat.
He’d just stolen the most important link in the Perchevney Bratva’s chain of parapsychological war fare. He’d carried off their best mambo.
Tires screech.
He drives like hell out of the Green Light District rubber burning. He taps the blue ray in his ear.
“Dbrisk, I have her! I have the second candidate! Meet me at Safe House 07 in half an hour or immediately! And activate the Underground Railroad. We don’t have much time. You all have to leave for Las Vegas tonight. They have Adon and DeBuitléir. It’s confirmed. We’ve all been betrayed and set up for a great big fat kill.”
He tears asphalt up Ocean Avenue north toward District Midwood, then further into District Crown Heights.
In the back seat, a struggling kicking fighting bagged up woman his cursing his mother, his father and his unborn children in thick Russian!
But he’s sure that she’ll thank him with her eyes in about five minutes, if not her mouth.
Chapter 37
Ms. Lily’s Barber Shop, 2012ce
Crown Heights
Bumbaclot! There is nothing worse on earth than a traitor in the ranks of one’s own leadership!
Of the many serious differences that are real, as opposed to rakishly imagined between Noires and the Blan is that a Noire will compliment another man on his attire.
Mickhi Dbrisk is getting a shape up in his father’s barber shop on Utica and Empire. His father’s shop is well known and as it is customary in the noire tradition it is as much a small social club for gossip and business networking as it is a place to shape and style ones hair. Mickhi keeps his dreads in pristine condition. He began to grow them like this seven years ago when he gave up drinking and smoking. Things are calm and casual even though everybody knows what’s coming. His father keeps shaving away.
A black windowless van rolls up and parks outside. Two men jump out the back off load a steel drum marked “T.N.T Shipping”. They use a hand truck to roll the thing inside the barber shop. Right next to Dbrisk. His father motions in Yardy hand sign to the young men and old men seated inside to get gone.
“Y don y’all com bak ina du pas hour,” forcefully suggests Mickhi Dbrisk in patois.
Nobody has to even be told twice best believe.
Pretty soon Dbrisk, his father and two of Dbrisk’s inner crew; his cousin Magnus Allamby and his lifelong associate Big Man Matthew are left inside. Matthew rolls down the external storm shutters and then activates the internal bullet proof barrier which slides down over the display windows and the door.
Dbrisk doesn’t get up nor does his father stop cutting his hair.
Magnus Allamby is in a blue pin stripe suit. He’s a boss like Dbrisk, but lives more like one. A little flashier. He’s the Finance Section Chief of the Otriad. He’s been running the books for nearly thirteen years. He’s a Bajan money man too. Educated at CUNY Staten Island and then later Columbia University Business School. He takes off his suit top and puts it on a rack. He isn’t carrying, he’s never carrying. He’s well covered. Big Man Matthew gets ready to pop open the steel drum. Matthew is a big guy, used to be chauffeur. Got a degree in urban planning from Medgar Evers. Matthew is here in an official capacity while Allamby was just hanging out, but sometimes business comes up on the fly.
They pop the drum. Mathew and Magnus Allamby hoist a sniveling broken young man out of it with a bag on his head. Already apparently worked over in Coney Island hospital. Bleeding out his eyes, a permaport in his left AC.
They throw him in the barber chair next to Dbrisk and cuff his hands and legs to the chair. He’s already been benzohyped.
The utilization of these drums was Michael’s idea years ago. The first business acquisition of the club was “Trinidad and Tobago Shipping”, a small outfit in District East New York that bulk mailed merchandise to and from the Wild West Indies. Michael had devised an elaborate system of logistics and supply where by these drums were not only used to efficiently smuggle things and people in and out of the Caribbean, but supply the various bodega routes more efficiently. And sometimes, when Oleg or Anya or Erza’s people were done interrogating a suspect we drummed them up and put them in storage. There were always TNT drums being moved around the Soviet. Some with fruit and perishables, some with weapons and people, some with art, some with everything and anything else. They were classically very hard to open, they have global positioning systems, and they are all covered under our trans-Soviet search and seizure laws.
Magnus Allamby had figured out how to cut every two bit cop, hustler and border agent out of a cut.
“Emerge the wily traitor,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.
The man is wearing a black hood. And it appears someone has long ago surgically removed his tongue. Article Eight of the universal rights declaration forbids torture or cruel and unusual punishment. Beating a man, drugging a man into a dream state, tearing through his head like a DHS raiding party, and then sealing him in a steel drum isn’t standard operating procedure for the Otriad, but the Bratva found him first
.
It’s just been a long hot tepid weekend with a lot on the line.
“I know you man, though I will not say your name. The hate I have for you is nearly limitless. I would like to cut out your traitor heart for what you’ve done.”
“But, let me start by saying that I like your shoes. They’re pretty ok,” states Dbrisk.
“You can get shoes that look like that in the Soviet, but those are the genuine European articles. That’s how I know you’re coming from the City.”
“Look here,” says Dbrisk. I know you can’t talk; you don’t even still have your traitor tongue. But I know you saw things and did things we are gonna get them off your retinal imaging one way or another. And then we’re gonna box you up and bury you alive like the traitor that you are like that fellow in that short Poe story Casque of Amantioado. I know you were there when they slaughtered those all people. I know you gave us all over to the enemy. I’m not here to carrot you or stick you. I’m just in need to get the data you hold state of mind. We will now get it right? For even after they tortured you they still did not know what was behind your eyes or by your face what we know you know. The satisfaction they got down in Third Rasputin, or in Coney Island hospital working you over is beyond me. But best believe we will get what we are looking for and then you will be sent to grave. Matthew. Plug him in Big Man.”
Big Man Matthew puts a metal device over his head called a parasimulator and sets up the IV line pharmaceuticals into the right AC to sedate the traitorous prisoner, this time for good.
The Bratva and the Otriad have science and magic to match, but the Otriad used its powers for more good than for evil.
The device then overloads him immediately with chemical electrical stimuli, then generates a constructed world for him to be deceived into thinking reality is subjective.
“Gold lion’s gonna show me where the light is,” hums Mickhi Dbrisk.
“Take my hands out of control.”
Dbrisk hums an old classic while the parasimulator projects the man’s thought on the drop screen attached to the barber shop wall, “Tell me what you saw, tell me what you saw, I had the strangest dream. Inside, outside we must have done a thousand each!”
The way a parasimulator works is a long scientific lecture that even the inventor of the device and its pharmacological adjuncts Dr. Michelle Kaku-Tagomi-Goldberg of the University of Stonybrook feels is lost on even those with advanced degrees in Neurology and Phantom physics. The device can simulate whole worlds for those that are asleep, fourth dimensional simulations as it is called on the street. They can also be used to extract visual logs of real world experiences.
It can trick the mind into thinking it has left its body behind. It can download the soul into a new body.
On the wall of the barber shop the last three months of the traitor’s life and operations will shortly play out on screen. He only has three months of memory still in his mind. Though from the face they cannot yet see under the mask, he has been with the rebellion for the very beginning.
He has no tongue to speak his deeds or memories. But his retina will reveal who gave him his final orders. And who lured him from the table of the rebel leadership into the den of the oligarchy. And hopefully confirm the worst reports are true.
Only new European designer sneakers and a recorded log now playing on screen will tell of his spree. Even Judas had asked a higher price for his loyalty.
Dbrisk’s sky pager goes off.
“He’s close,” says Dbrisk.
Oleg pages Mickhi five minutes before he arrives on Utica Avenue and Matthew brings him in the side alley entrance. He’s carrying a woman in bag. Like back in the old country.
“Talk to me,” says Mickhi Dbrisk in fluent Russian.
“Talk to her,” Oleg Medved responds.
He unzips the body bag and there is the ravishing albeit completely disheveled, dripping wet Natasha Andreavna Skorobogatova. Looking angry as fuck. She’s glaring at them.
“Give me a fucking Newport man,” is all she demands.
“Michael go get that thing handled. Matt, proper clothes please. This is the woman from the books.” he pauses, “sister, a multiform please for now,” requests Dbrisk averting his eyes from her dripping luscious nakedness. He hands her a bathrobe and then a Newport standard cigarette.
“And a fucking stiff drink too. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been under!”
“Where is he now?” demands Oleg .
She lights up her cigarette and pulls on her robe in a huff.
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean you’re not sure weren’t you in the vat plugged into his head on behalf of Perchevney!” demands Oleg.
“Get me my drink.”
Dbrisk motions and Big Man Matthew comes back with an ice cold bottle of Russian Standard Vodka Premium, some Chinese synthesized red bulls and some iced glasses.
“Everyone’s in Moscow soon gonna be enroot to Las Vegas,” she says.
“Who’s everyone to you, sister,” says Dbrisk.
“I’m not your sister, black mister,” she responds.
He gives her a look.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’ve always been treated very well by you Mickhi Dbrisk.”
“Where is Sebastian Adon right now?” demands Magnus Goldbar Allamby.
“Sasho has Adon and his Haitian partner Watson strung up somewhere in Moscow. Someone, probably Ysiad or the Ivorites sold them both out to the Bratva. The DHS has DeBuitléir as now you know. They’ve been working on him for seven fucking years in Angola 42. Both factions are trying to break into their respective heads and get the remainder of the list.”
“What list,” asks, almost sneers Allamby.
“Fuck you man. You know the fucking list,” is all she says in return. Though only Oleg Medved and Dbrisk are on that level. Allamby is a money changer.
“Tak, and what else?” demands Oleg.
“They’re going to shut down your nuclear defense grid and storm the Breuklyn Soviet in two days’ time. They’re going to kill almost everyone using gas and blame it all on the Muslims. Like the 9-11. The crackdown is finally coming. With or without Haiti as a pretext the Oligarchy wishes to bring this rebellion under heel,” Natasha explains.
“You were in his head?” asks Mickhi Dbrisk who hasn’t seen Adon since the night he left three years ago to raid the Millennium Theater.
“I’m always in his head,” she declares.
“You were in his head for Perchevney or for Solomon? Who?” demands Magnus Allamby
“Tak. I can’t always remember what side of the bed I wake up on each morning. But man you know my blood.”
“I know every time this Russian witch shows up and shakes her ass we put all our best men in the fucking ground,” yells Michael Allamby.
Natasha Andreavna just grins.
“Enough,” interrupts Oleg Medved, “we never know what side anyone’s on these days, and it hardly ever matters. They love each other. Whatever that means. Now pull the traitors hood and run the play back and let’s see if she knows the devils by their faces.”
“Woman I want your word that when you see him you will be calm,” says Dbrisk.
“I promise nothing to you black man,” she snarls.
And Oleg doesn’t know if the him referred to is Adon or the masked traitor in the barber chair. Oleg joined up with these people seven years ago. He joined the uprising almost by accident. He used to work for the Israelis. Then the Bratva keeping track of the Otriad, now he was a one team player for sure. He hoped he’d bet on the right horse.
Sebastian Adon’s last words to Oleg Medved, the night they stormed together Millennium were, “get her out alive.”
He hadn’t specified under what and into what conditions.
“We already know what you’re gonna do when you see his face. But first we need you to watch what he saw for the last three months and figure out just how much trouble we all are in.”
“Alright, let’s begin,” she says, “you have oysters and popcorn?”
They all know she is completely serious and so Mr. Magnus Allamby orders out for them. What’s the use of running your own micro republic if you can’t get oysters and popcorn in the midnight hours for a beautiful and vital woman in your chain of command?
The first image is of four men seated naked in a bathhouse. Three faces are coming into focus and one has their back to the view of the traitor. Three months ago.
“That’s Khulushin, Breria, and Berlusconi,” she says, “You know who they are surely.”
“Who do you think the fourth man is?” Oleg asks.
She shutters on the inside.
“Kahn,” she says.
“We have to confirm it,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.
Images fly in reverse. The first ones are of wild orgies and of consumption and of playing games of sex and violence and chance in the Bathtub Gym on 88 Fulton in the City. The next are of the traitor crossing under the river via a tunnel running from what used to be Police Plaza One to what used to be the Watchtower
.
The man had made great distances easy over a three month period. But he had the most powerful oligarchs on earth helping him as he went.
She sees the first slaughter three months ago.
Howling packs of zombies ripping into two families of blacks and Ivories. Rape, ripped flesh slaughter. Dangle, drizzle bleed and die.
Strangers programed to kill watching the telescreen feasting on sex organs.
She sees Dmitry Khulushin hitting a dangling Sebastian Adon with a studded black bat. Over and over and over again laughing hysterically. Now strangling him. Pissing and spitting and kicking his face. She sees Khulushin pin one dollar pills to Adon’s chest and crack him like human piñata.
She sees her own unconscious body being used like a rag doll in a gang bang as Sebastian is forced to watch. She doesn’t even shudder.
They watch the second slaughter, shot with traitor eyes two months ago.
Same carnage, but with way more victims.
On the screen they see three young tattooed hipster women taking turns swinging little babies heads against the wall giggling. They see a motely mix of zombies sent to pell-mell kill. Of all colors and creeds participating gleefully. All programmed via telescreen and Nanobots in pork or the soda. A pack of young men are raping a pretty young Ivoryish girl over a barrel.
Big Man Matthew asks for cigarette. Pours himself a stiff drink of bourbon whiskey. When they are done the zombies cut her Ivoryess limbs off. The traitor watched everything.
The second killing in three parts was a blood bacchanalia like the first. Bringing the body count up to eighty eight victims by the full moon of month two. Four entire families wiped out.
All the female family members were candidates.
Even Oleg Medved and Magnus Allamby pick up the pack of Newport standards and light two up.
The morbid tale flickers on.
More torture of Sebastian Adon, more rape of Natasha Andreavna.
Oleg puts a hand on her shoulder, but she just says, “don’t fucking touch me.”
Alexandr Perchevney grinning on the screen as he shakes hands with Dmitry Khulushin. The traitor introducing Alexandr to a holograph of Director Breria, head of homeland security. The traitor agreeing to sell Adon and Watson to Perchevney. A deal being made. DeBuitléir for Adon, let them try and work on each other’s’ prisoners.
Natasha boxed up and sent from Italy to Moscow to keep Adon calm, mentally speaking. Them using her over the years to find candidates. Using her for all kinds of things. Natasha boxed up and sent to Breuklyn Soviet to wipe out the minds of the zombies and keep them under control.
“How long were you under?” Dbrisk asks her.
“I’ve been under for nearly seven years,” she responds in Russian.
The traitor had sold out the entire rebel leadership for little more than some gold and pager. They hadn’t needed to threaten his family. They hadn’t needed to lean too hard. To betray his loyalnost and turn over the whole rebel nuclear defense system, the roster of major organizers in the Breuklyn Soviet and all twelve names of the surviving members of the Z.O.B., they just had to promise him they’d let him live in the highest tower.
And like all traitors before him once they got what they needed they took his memories and his tongue and cast him off like a European designer shoe at a bread riot.
The screen depicts the grisly last killing, which occurred just 72 hours ago.
The traitor’s very last memory before the Otriad’s whisper network found his location out and the Muslim Brotherhood helped snatch him, he was standing on Steeplechase pier, whistling a song though he had no tongue to make the words. Everyone in the room knows that song. To the tune of the song he wrote down a series of codes, codes to the nuclear defense grid, locations of command bunkers, access numbers to our server vaults.
The traitor handed those codes over to the enemy. For permission to leave the Breuklyn Soviet for good. Last scene in the memory bank, sitting in Bathtub Gym Banya.
Dmitry Khulushin again on screen pats him on the back and finally we see the face of the fourth man. His beady old soul eyes. His French hook nose. His body caught between this world and the next.
Dmitry looks too happy with himself. The old French man says something in French.
Then the French croon too begins whistling that song. He twitches, eyes go black and he spits blood.
The traitor departs from the company of the two vile oligarchs. He then sits down at Tatiana Blue’s for last supper. He almost immediately gets clorophomed and has bag pulled over his head by the Muslim bus boys.
Everyone in the room knows the words to the Partisan song.
The projector cuts off with a Muslim brother chloroforming the traitor from behind and throwing a bag over his head.
A bag which has not yet come off.
The room is thick with tobacco smoke, and heavy from that horror show of hate.
Mickhi Dbrisk takes out a gun and shoots the man in the head in total violation of international law. BLAM!
“Thank you,” says Natasha Andreavna, “you beat me to it.”
There was no use but to kill him.
Everyone simmers. The hooded traitor who everyone would have recognized as a founding member of the resistance bleeds out from his bag masked face wet and dead. All his secrets made plain.
“They organized the Great Revolt so they could isolate you all into little ghettos, identify as many candidates as they could, neutralize us one by one, then bring down the heel,” she informs them.
“He’d been with us from the very beginning,” Allamby states the obvious. He spits on the dead traitor.
“The deadliest sting in history,” mutters Dbrisk.
“Who was that fourth man?” Oleg asks her.
“The fourth man was Dominick Strauss Kahn, or anyhow that’s the vessel that devil is using.”
“So, they have Adon, DeBuitléir and the codes to the grid,” mutters Big Man Matthew.
“Well then. I suppose there isn’t any time left to lose,” says Natasha. “I do trust you saved me gas mask boys?”
“What’s the plan?” asks Magnus Allamby.
Mickhi Dbrisk gets to his feet.
“A save the world plan surely!” Natasha suggests.
“We’re going to assemble a crack team of our very best Pararescuemen. We’re gonna get over the border wall into the U.A.S., move across the country via the Underground Railroad and link up the crew in Las Vegas. We’re going to break Avinadav DeBuitléir out of federal custody by absolutely any means necessary, preferably through subterfuge but via anarchy and bloody mayhem if we must. And then we’re going to rescue our brother Sebastian Adon before Perchevney hands him over. And defenses walls come tumbling down.”
“Technically speaking it’s just a save the afternoon early evening plan. The world is still pending a good deal of deliverance hence all the bleeding and dying to keep you candidates alive,” says Oleg Medved.
“It’s nice to see you all again,” Natasha says to them begrudgingly, “your desperate hope for us has never ceased to fascinate me.”
“Welcome back to the land of free living,” responds Mickhi Dbrisk.
“Enchante,” is all she replies with a slight if not contemptuous micro curtesy.
Chapter 38
A Secret Prison, 2012ce
DUBAI
“Do you know where you are Sebastian?” a female voice asks.
It sounded through the dystonia, the extrapyramidal haze that she has asked him if he knew when he was Sebastian
.
“On Tuesdays,” he responds with a slight lithiated, trypryamidal slur.
She wears a crisp white lab coat and a green former soviet officer’s cap. Dr. Yelizaveta Alexandreavna Perechenova has been flown out to Dubai to examine Sebastian and she doesn’t remember him at all.
And the rest of the scene is in the perspective of out much abused protagonist:
I’m seated in sterile white examination room although the diagnostic equipment is of the developing world. Nothing is electronic. I’m no longer in any restraints. When she enters it doesn’t register as anything special.
Just a demure raven haired physician in a white lab coat and a green Soviet officer’s cap. Sewn to the coat in cold gold thread it says: Perechenova.
And she doesn’t seem to recognize me either.
“My name is Doctor Yelizaveta Perechenova, I need you to go through a few diagnostic tests and give me some samples. Some may involve me stroking your phallus erotically but I assure you this is just a medical procedure. He just imagines that she says that of course. All very straight forward to you I’m sure Mr. Adon. I understand you’re a paramedic and a skilled parapsychologist.”
I look at her trying to remember something that I should feel. Some sense of wanting? No a sense of remembering. Nothing comes. She is a photograph.
“Of course, comrade doctor.”
I disrobe what robe I am wearing and the Depakote nearly makes me fall over. She takes my blood pressure; 120 over 70 and my heart rate 58 strong and regular.
“You are aware that the Cold War is over and communism has sense been completely discredited except perhaps in Syria and Cuba,” she asks. Notes.
She looks in my pupils. She examines my mouth and my ears. She palpates my neck and then listens to my lungs in six different places and my heart in two.
Here hands press my abdomen. She’s going through the medical motions.
When she’s done she says;
“You need to take these salt pills. If you don’t take them you will die.”
“Your employer,” I almost say, father, “is far too tricky for me. He went to so much trouble.”
“Do you know what free radicals do to the body?”
“You can tell me if you’d like to.”
“Well you probably won’t understand.”
“Certainly I won’t. But I like when you lecture me, it reminds me of; no, I can’t remember what, but I like you teaching me my science.”
She explains using terms she learned in Stonybrook and later in University of Havana Medical School exactly what are free radicals.
“Well then I suppose free radicals must be brought under control or the very system and all its components are in jeopardy!” I exclaim, and she takes a step back.
“Precisely my employers point of view.”
“So I’m poisoned am I,” says Adon.
“Quite poisoned. Dbrisk and Trikhovitch and all the others too. What does Z.O.B. stand for? Polish isn’t it? Something about Ivory fighting?”
“No idea.”
“I think it stands for ‘everyone dead when we say so’, in some old language you no longer remember how to speak.”
“Cynical. Interesting. And what is the mechanism of action then to do us all in?”
“Nanobots.”
“Haven’t the faintest fucking idea what that means. Excuse my language.”
“My employer’s people can kill all of you with a switch. These microscopic robots will release neurotransmitters that will form emboli and will shut off blood flow to your brains.”
“Very sophisticated stuff.”
“Developed by your favorite people, the Israelis. Well anyway they’re in me too; they’re in my father and mother. All of Perchevney’s people. He leaves nothing to chance.”
“I think Solomon will consider this a serious breach of contract.”
Sebastian has watched post and former Soviet women fake a good number of things but there are two things they don’t fake well.
Actual fear or an orgasm.
“Well your boots are going to be on the ground rather now soon if they don’t sell you o the Americans that is and my employer,” she almost says father, “has every willingness to out-supply anyone else who wishes to arm you. The weapons you’re currently holding are third line. Eventually you’ll run out of bullets and want to upgrade. Your Domikani businessman can’t keep up with us, well with Alexandr I mean; I’m just a serf too.”
“I think I’ll be refusing your employers pills regardless, I really think poisoning is rather shameful behavior.”
“Well medically speaking you’re not poisoned yet.”
“How am I to know he won’t just kill us all when the worst work is done? Anyway we are looking at a rather protracted fight be in Breuklyn, be it in Haiti-DR or be it in the heart of Africa.”
“Well the pills will not do anything but fight potential cancers caused by what fuels the Nanobots. It is you who sought out my employer; he did not go looking for you and your Otriad.”
“So who’s been implanted then?”
“Everyone who drank your Kool-Aid soldier. The toast at the last salon supper. New Year’s 5773 at the Mehanata Social Club, the report says you were all given the cocktail by a traitor in your midst.”
“That fucking traitor,” Adon says darkly.
“Just because they caught you coming doesn’t mean they have to catch you going too.”
“Tell me his name.”
“His or hers? Ha. I don’t know the real name. I just know that you and your crew were used to such an extent it is fully mind blowing.”
“And apparently I still have use for the using.”
“Indeed, as you like to say.”
“How do you know what I like to say?”
“I’ve watched a few of your movies,” she Postsoviet half giggles.
“Indeed.”
“But do you know me?” she asks him.
“Not from the hole in my hand,” he replies in Russian.
“That’s quite crude tovarish Adon. The reports then are true. You are a scoundrel not a gentleman of any kind at all.”
Chapter 39
XXX, 2012ce
DUBAI
Everything changed for us on 1st September, 2012, escalated during the atrocities the Department of Homeland Security committed on 17 September shortly after and I’d say as much for the world as well as did our revolution build exponentially toward 1 January, 2015. It was on that day our American barricades went up and we held the streets for many years at great costs.
I am back! Hubert O’Domhnaill. For a time as your humble narrator. For I did love that man as my brother so dearly! And what a price my family paid to serve Solomon, to fight for her cause. Well we all lost a lot as they say.
But I know that there is nothing we gave that Adon, his family and the others did not give as well. My parents before they were taken from me never met his parents who were taken from him, but I’m sure they would have seen eye to eye.
I will tell you now the day that the world changed forever. The day that marked the shift. When we gained turf and held territory inside the mountain fortress of empire called the United American States! When rebel fighters with union and 2.5 million West Indians behind them marched over the bridges and stormed government buildings across the city.
Death to the Oligarchy that so gleefully thins the ranks of the rebels!
The Great Revolt in the United States began on Labor Day of 2012.
They asked me three times to betray my friend Adon. And then they killed my family, all male O’Domhnaills except my eldest brothers Shane and Cormac.
“How do you win a war without any lethal weapons?” once asked Sebastian Adon to his mother Barbara Adon O’Nunnelly, which were one to understand true Gaelic patronymics; means ‘Son of Nunnelly’, when in fact it should have been Ni’Nunnelly, but they were born in American exile.
This had been a reoccurring problem for the house of Adon for some many years.
The answer was always the same year after year.
“No you cannot stockpile nuclear armaments in a subbasement under our home in East Hampton. No, not even a few,” she told him and her husband, his father surely agreed.
Ivories are funny like that. They give to causes all the time, a very generous people despite the collaboration of their ancient leadership with the Roman oligarchy that tortured and executed the family of god as we understand her to have been.
I’ll get to that theory another time.
The Ivories and revolt was what I was on about.
You see, my family being a good Fenian family has had arms in our subbasement for years. It was always rather intuitive that we’d never get the British out of Erin and then later the six counties, well except by shooting at them. And blowing them up.
What’s funny to me about the Adon family is that with all the money they’ve put into the foundations of the revolt, and the human rights movement generally they still never seemed to grasp that violence was completely inevitable. Perhaps the patriarch of the family Avram did as his younger brother Benjamin, but his mother up until the disorder itself did everything in her power to keep weapons out of the hands of a club that was founded with intent to acquire them.
When “the Great Disorder” began during the second year of the Swine Flu hysteria, when the rioting exploded in earnest over the discovery that the vaccine to the “hizzy nizzy” was making more people sick than better; the Adon family was divided between four boroughs. Benjamin, the youngest son, an orange belt in Krav Maga and importer of Basque Wine was in the Financial District when the disorder began. That was one of the only places along with Riverdale and the Upper East Side which escaped almost all of the violence and destruction which broke out. All Benjamin had to do was stay put at 140 Nassau Street, where he kept his New York residence in a loft adjacent to his aging parents.
Dr. Avram Adon who by age 84 was still working three twelve hour shifts a week at his practice, was at his clinic on Staten Island, which is home to half the city’s police force and thus by mostly staying put he too avoided the mayhem.
Barbara Adon with a client in the South Bronx. Unlike her husband and youngest son, she was well aware of the impending riots and was also relatively plugged into the networks that the club had established for such emergencies.
And Sebastian Adon was at EMS Station 39 in Breuklyn, district East New York distributing the underground newspaper of the club to the EMS workers there.
The riots began on Grand Army Plaza when the police attempted to disperse the West Indian Day/ Labor Day parade and shots were fired. 2.5 million then stormed the Grand Army Plaza police checkpoints and a riot rolled North down Flatbush Ave and toward the City. Soon spread via social media and word of text to all the major ghettos the tristate area. Some supposedly ‘rouge’ scientist at MIT had dropped a big old white elephant in the healthcare room. The h1N1 Vaccine was spreading the h1n1, and it was targeting the genetic codes found in Noires, excuse me, the black people.
And then the Noires started reliably burning-shit-down, because that’s what they do when they’re angry, every single time. Except this time it wasn’t their own neighborhoods like the last uprisings in 1992 and 1993. Nope, this time they burned the rich white, gentrified neighborhoods down too. And the anarchists in the Occupy Movement started putting up barricades and shortly after setting off bombs. And then the major Unions called a General Strike. And the Autonomous Movement was born in the first seventy two hours of the conflict.
And history calls this moment the beginning of the “Great Revolt” in the Unites States.
The swine flu vaccine was of course just the spark. There were and still are many long standing grievance in a nation where 1 in 6 people live in poverty and 1 in 350 people are at any time held in prison camps.
“The Great Disorder” which history now refers to as the first three months of the subsequent “Great Revolt” claimed more lives than the September11th attack on the World Trade and burned more property than the Fenian v. Noire Draft Riots of 1862. Pre-arranged logistical packages are so vital when the cell phone network goes down, the inter-web gets cut of, the lights black out, the firemen begin stealing blue jeans and the Federal government starts shelling your city.
Sebastian Adon wasn’t stealing blue jeans, or stealing apparatus for Otriad use as per one of the ready made plans. He, although no longer a member of the FDNY ambulance was ordered by the club to assist in life saving efforts as member of the flying medical column sent into Downtown Breuklyn where a great mob was attempting to light fire to all of Downtown Breuklyn. Razing Central Bookings ‘brick by hypocritical brick’ in particular. The reason he was still on that ambulance, and not attempting to steal it was because he had been told the fires and riots were still limited enough in scope to issue a command order for the ‘O’Domhnaill Plan’ and not the ‘Hadaad Doctrine’. Which is to say all members of the association were mobilized and sent to fortify and safe guard regional commands, safe houses, and critical properties the Otriad controlled. Several hundred club members and support personnel were to set up shop in the five regional command centers, also called safe houses and protect the some odd 7,250 men, women and children supported by the Otriad.
The reason Adon was allowed on a municipal ambulance unit was because the club is roughly half composed of professional emts and paramedics.
Luckily the leadership had scheduled a drill just one month earlier, so it didn’t all go as fuckery as it could have. While Adon, Dbrisk, Trikhovitch, myself and others battled blazes and provided medical attention to the casualties of raging angry mobs; eight flying columns, four medical and four security mobilized to usher family members to fortified urban strong points to do a quick security census in case the order for an exodus came.
And it eventually did, but not until the Great Revolt which was yet to come.
Logistically speaking “the O’Domhnaill Plan”, named after me of course, involved reporting without issued order within “two hours of a cataclysmic event’” to a safe house in the borough you were in without attempting to reach friends or family.
I was named after me because at a very early meeting back when the club was less than a two dozen strong I suggested that we’d always be safer making a stand in our own city then putting ourselves at the mercy of the heavily armed typically right wing, typically Ivory, Fenian, Black adverse of the rural interiors population.
As per later reports, a full majority of the Otriad’s family members, supporters, and members of service were able to reach the safe house strong points within the first six hours. With the exception of the Isle of Man’s primary safe house in Fort George which had to defend its position with hard will, fire bombs and small arms, all other safe points remained secured for the week of rioting and arson that was the dubbed Great Disorder.
Of the roughly 7,252 women, men and children in network only fourteen perished.
Four who were trampled by a mob trying to reach Grand Central Station; three died due to indiscriminant mob violence, and seven perished when the shelling of Harlem began on the eve of the fourth day. Those who never reached the higher ground of Yeshiva University and peripheral bases in Fort George sat out the Disorder largely secure at Seagate, Rich Man Tower Complex, Fort Totten, and the Staten Island Mall. These five places had been largely via hording and social engineering converted into safe havens for the clubs network and civilian supporters.
By the time the dust settled, suffice to say, the Adon family and many other skeptics were thoroughly convinced that the Otriad organizationally and militarily was able to do the things it claimed. Most importantly those things in regards to taking care of the security of its members. And that there were thousands of independent citywide clubs, gangs, associations, religious groups, networks, and Otriad’s of many-many other stripes and colors thinking just about the same think with their own general operating guides. The madness was mitigated by just how well New York was already organized for mayhem.
The worst of the mass riots for lasted seventeen days. “Rioting” is exactly what the corporate media kept calling this, but by day three the riots were taking on the form of a semi-coordinated revolts. Especially when a Breuklyn General Assembly established a command center in the Breuklyn Public Library.
Staten Island, where the rioting was limited to the North coast was pacified by the second evening. Magnus Allamby, the Bajan entrepreneur responsible for the clubs finances coordinated with Dr. Avram and is large informal network of cops and sanitation workers keep a lid on things. Most of the Otriad members on Staten Island showed up at the Costco at the mall, and locked themselves in until the end of Martial Law was declared five days later. Queens was pacified in most places by day fourteen. The Bronx burned well into the second or third week, but was re-occupied on day fifteen. Isle of Man was declared pacified by the first day, but Harlem and the Heights remained liberated zones, although much of East Harlem was completely destroyed in the subsequent shelling. Breuklyn was brought under control on the seventieth day after the shelling and tear gas bombing and street melees of East New York, Brownsville and Bedford Stuyvesant which reduced all three districts to rubble.
It took U.A.S. Federals, National Guards, and the Police forces seven days to put down a spontaneous rising that few had seen coming.
This event would go down in history as “The Great Disorder”, a precursor to the subsequent “Great Revolt”.
The municipals sure as shit earned their overtime that week. The National Guard had to be called in from Upstate, New Jersey and Pennsylvania as there were few active duty troops to send with ongoing wars in Eurasia, East Asia and the disputed territories. There were quite a few atrocities carried out in the re-occupation of the City.
The siege of East & Central Breuklyn in particular. Some of those good old boys from Virginian and the Adirondacks ran amuck. Enough to trigger the chemical electrical signal in the minds of millions in the major cities of the East Coast: Ya Basta!
Which in Iytai jib-jab means “enough.”
What we all now call “the Great Disorder” which began on the Labor Day weekend of 2012 went on for seventeen bloody days. “The Great Revolt” which followed lasted seven months of firefight though lasted three years before we drove the government off our lands. Although many would attest it is still going. The Détente has lasted for over a year. Soon after the population realized the full extent of the atrocities committed in Breuklyn and the other ghettos. Soon after the h1n1 spread to the blans, the white people as we call them now. Coordinated on the internet by the trade unions, street gangs, the libertarians, the Occupiers, various Communist & Socialist factions as well as numerous Left Clubs of the Democratic Party; the Great Revolt broke off the Eastern coast of the U.A.S. and aligned it politically to Canada and the West Indian Federation. And so was born both the Autonomous Movement (AM) and then the Eastern Soviet Confederation (ESC).
We hold now a patchwork of autonomous zones running from Maine to Miami.
Starting with hard battered Breuklyn, whole communities decided they were just better off alone, or in heavily armed loose confederation with neighbors.
The Breuklyn Otriad grew throughout this period.
As did thousands of other such clubs, the revolt was designed to be very, very decentralized and very very diverse.
These were long partnerships many years in the making. These were women and men whose minds and interests were so intertwined it became possible to predict each other’s moves, a drastic synergy had developed over time, more than a decade had the wed the abilities and interest of these men together such that one’s failings were made into another’s strengths. They could never betray each other’s ideals, for so long had they walked along that road together.
Mr. Adon with his stalwart friends and fellow comrades hadn’t had to pick a side of the ocean after all to stage their grand little revolution.
Such were forces beyond plot or orchestration of human control on any level.
Chapter 40
Vered Gallery, 2083ce
EAST HAMPTON
Behind her the triple decker armored train rumbles east toward Montauk, now a quasi-autonomous city state held by former Manhattan elites and their paramilitaries.
The Hamptons seems to have weathered the Revolt nicely, notes Anya Drovtich.
It’s Friday near the end of your world do you know where your Ivories are?
Your Ivories are plotting, cousin. It is what they do the best.
Three submersibles of enormous size have surfaced in Port Coney Island and they are called the Black Freighters, named for various Hebrew prophets. Or “Coffin Evacuation Ships”, as in when you need to get your masses out immediately because flying fortresses or African militias with machetes are going to kill absolutely everybody they can.
Her legs are long and she’s business casual in red and her back wavy hair in dreads bounces off her shoulders as she strolls briskly from the train station.
Anya Drovtich walks briskly down quaint Hampton streets thinking how completely and utterly unaffected by world events this haven has been. A civil war and separatist movement and the world at war for a decade haven’t really altered the quaint bourgeois calm of this place at all.
She hasn’t been here for over a decade, when long ago Sebastian brought her to Montauk and asked her to be his partner for the first time in this lifetime.
At the Rose Gallery in East Hampton a party is going on without interruption. It has spilled over from the Hampton art crown Jewel, goods-hip friend of Ivoreal art world fascination onto the street, bottles and all. And this time no one will be putting Ms. Vered in handcuffs because she has paid for all of the East Hampton Police Department to attend a “sporting event” in Las Vegas.
Ruth Vered the gallery owner and possible Ivorite sleeper agent is pleased with herself.
She had not so much been sent from the fertile-crescent to the Hamptons to separate plump rich Yids from their money as she had been partially self-exiled there. After a prestigious tour of service in the Israeli Defense Forces, three years instead of the mandated 1 and ½ for a woman she basically bought a plane ticket to the New York City, told her father and mother from a pay phone in the airport she had had enough of thankless war and flew to Idlewild International to make a new life in America never to return. That was no long in the past. She had kept mostly true to her word.
Her art gallery named after herself brought in some several millions and hundred thousand change each year as per the Regional Station of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence arm. The realty was that she kept quite a lot off the books and on the side made more. She deals in Viks, Pollacks, DeKoonings, forged Picassos, and every other eccentric, wild Hampton shut in of note in the last hundred years. Once a year Vered hosted a Gala fundraiser for relief in Israel selling off paintings at record high bidding costs to notable Hampton socialites and Yids holding high denomination master cards.
Despite the heart of sedition, succession and rebellion being just three hours away by light rail, East Hampton remained firmly a part of the United American States where private property was still legal.
Like the Russell Simmons White Party, the Gala for Israel was a must do event for any person of standing or station who could tolerate Yids, which was most of the Hamptons at that point.
And it was to that party that Ms. Anya Drovtich was not often a regular. Ryder Haske had gotten her onto the fancy guest list and invited to the after party.
Yelizaveta is quite impressed with the art of Ruth Vered’s new protégée, oft compared to ‘a new Arab-Basquait, but more dashing’, a one Mr. Ahmed ‘Ah!’ Azeal. He is a handsome Canaanite who’d never even dreamed of going home and painted similar to if one mixed the subject matter of Dali and the brushmanship of say, Caravaggio, then enameled photo-shopped images of his own penis, as well as massive replications of Aramaic gospel, Hindi mantras and hip hop. He was made even more ‘hot’ by the fact that he grew up in the Louis Pink Houses, which meant not only was he about as down and out in his upbringing as humanly possible, but he was totally self-taught.
“I need something from you in the way of a reference. We have a mutual friend with new cause,” says Anya to Vered in between social sets.
“I do not like new causes. There are plenty of expensive old ones. Who is this mutual friend?”
“An allegedly dead ambulance man.”
“The biggest trouble maker ever you mean whether dead or alive. Anything he touches becomes balagan.”
Balagan is am Ivory word which means “nothing but big fucking problems”.
“My associate feels you may think well on this latest venture given recent developments about your country of origin in the press.”
She is referring to an Israeli missile strike two days prior on Rosh Hashanah, the Yid New Year. A missile strike intended to kill the Canaanite resistance leader Khalid Mashaal for the fifteenth time. The latest one which hadn’t killed him but obliterated and collapsed the Gaza General Hospital killing sixty nine Canaanites, largely children, largely under the age of nine.
“They say the Ivs control the media. How can we control media if Ivorreal never looks good in the press?”
“I mean birth control in the water supply? Did you people really think you’d get away with that?”
Anya was referring to the recent debacle where it was uncovered all the drinkable water being routed into Gaza contained epic quantities of preemptive baby killer and no one had gotten knocked up in half a year.
“I think that was perhaps the funniest thing I’d ever read,” Vered giggles in her head while face dead pan.
Anya giggles too, but aloud. In her head she’d like to slap this cold Iv bitch.
“It was definitely, far more funny then hell-fire-rocketing a hospital of sick kids.”
“Ok, so things are really much worse now. What is there to do? Leave? I think not. Strong Island is not the Promised Land and Breuklyn Soviet has too many people already.”
“This ambulancing friend of mine thinks he can deliver Israel the biggest public relations coup since the Six Day War.”
“Even bigger than fighting off a train full of Iytais with his humble brown belt Muhammadian side kick?”
“Don’t mock me Vered. With all honesty you people need this.”
“You people?” She smirks, “just kidding I make with you.”
“They’ve contacted an old friend in the agency. She tried, but the brass torpedoed the whole thing.”
“Hadaad?”
“I’m not at the liberty.”
“No one likes that little batzona back in the home offices. She looks like a sand gypsy.”
“They called in another friend in the Services. Then she got shut down by Beebee himself.”
Batzona is Hebrew for “daughter of a whore”.
“He’ll be out of office in two months. They are indicting him for all those Soviet hotel concessions, the alleged rape charge, embezzlement, other things with Strauss-Kahn and the numerous dead call girls.”
Dr. Kay shutters a little inside.
“What is it with your fucking government Ruth?” mumbles Anya.
“Ain davar! Look, if you’re coming to me you must think I’m somebody. I’m nobody. I’m an aging art dealer on Strong Island. I make them some money. I help pay for the star wars laser grid above Sderiot, but I’m not working for them. I’m just a nostalgic exile now.”
“Don’t bullshit us around Vered. Sebastian told me all about who you are.”
“And what the hell does this can’t seem to stay dead zealot ambulancer whatever know about anything. He was, is a shiftless agitator. He’ll say anything to set people off.”
“Sebastian Adon was a very good man.”
Is or was is the real question right now.
“Oh? A romantic revolutionary that with his words get many killed. I know already about his undertaking. It is a mad fool’s mission, pure machuga.”
Which means “crazy”.
“So you won’t help?”
“I will not help him. I don’t even work for the people you think might help him.”
Anya looks away and waves to Ahmed ‘Ah!’ Azeal who is attempting to juggle four bottles of Bubblefizaire half-naked on the street to the great amusement of his guests. It is moments like this that sending the East Hampton PD to Las Vegas pays for itself. He smiles at her and sends 5,000 Presidents worth of designer liquor sailing into the air then mostly crashing upon the pavement.
“Send my regards to your bipolar-mad man of a partner,” says Ruth Vered warmly embracing Anya Drovtich.
And then she whispers in perfect high Hebrew,
“Prove your Otriad is ready at the gates and help from above will be quite forthcoming. You have my word that the agency will deliver whatever is needed to get you all on the road to Port-Au-Prince.”
The whole country is on red alert and all of the U.A.S. guard units have all been activated.
“Remember how there were no Ivories in the towers or at work the morning they came down?” Vered asks.
“What about it?”
“I’d get your ass back to rebel Breuklyn.”
“Why is that?”
“Because by dawn tomorrow, there aren’t going to be any real Ivories left in Breuklyn Soviet either by hook, crook, lottery bribery or Uzi point everybody Ivoryish or Ivoryish’ish, Hebrew, Israeli maybe even a few hundred Canaanites are getting on those three submarines and holy landing home.”
“What is it that you know that makes you so sure we are gonna lose?”
“We traded the right to leave for the codes to the nuclear grid. The final crackdown and total reoccupation begins in three days at midnight. Pretty soon there really and officially won’t be any Ivories left in the United American States.”
As if all according to plan.
Chapter 41
XXX, 2012ce
DUBAI
The lights are low and there is saw dust all over the floors.
A small three piece live jazz band is playing in the speakeasy called Dutch Kills near the border where they have a last round before the road at a joint owned by Richie Bocotto. The drinks are strong. And made with real booze nothing Chinese.
And Mickhi Dbrisk knows they gonna kill his family by the end of the week if his 40 thieves a mega Crip Set armed with Uzis cant grab everybody and get them out and over to Jam Rock. Garrison out for the duration of hostilities.
They all share iced glasses of “Border Run Rum” with the actor, bar tender Siegfried Sassoon and the owner Richard. Mickhi Dbrisk drinks Jamaican coffee, rum with coffee. Hubert O’Domhnaill has a Guinness with a splash of Rum. And Nikholai Trikhovitch, a Baboncourt on the rocks. Straight Haitian premium rescue rum.
It didn’t take long to bury the traitor in a shallow grave of an acid bath and mobilize for a war path and a double rescue. In nine more hours nearly one million citizen soldiers would be in position in the Bronx, Goddess and Breuklyn for counter strike if the gas came down.
Nuclear defense grid was still fucking down. ATL, Detroit, Newark and Boston were armed up now too.
Their lives in the Breuklyn Soviet were a ruthless juggle of part time responsibilities and full time revolt and part time child support. Towards the last desperate days of the revolt the Department of Homeland Security had rounded up as many extended family members of the resistance as they could and put them in a type of sanitized concentration camp in Staten Island. Included among those taken were Mickhi Dbrisk’s daughter Brook and his baby’s mother Vanessa McCloud. Also all of his brothers and sisters. And their children his nieces and nephews.
When Mickhi was younger, a little wilder maybe, less friendly with the Yids, he’d been locked up at Spofford Correctional[1] in Hunts Point, Bronx then later brought upstate way for a small part he played in an armed robbery and allegedly in a certain high profile murder. He was only thirteen then. He did two years full time for not naming names. Eventually beat both charges while he sat tight and got hard.
Not naming names is really one of the most important lessons a young hood can ever learn in Breuklyn before or after the revolt.
He he’d fathered a child before he went inside with his then boo Rosa, little Jayden was born by the time he came out. Then he had a second child, a daughter Brook, when Jayden was eight with Vanessa. Vanessa was suing for him not to be the father and she’d taken off to Staten Island which was rather behind enemy lines these days.
The blood was often very bad.
And it gave him a lot more of a reason to get out of that way of old life, to make something of himself more than a revolutionary hustler or a Shatah, gave him a reason to think about others fondly. Spend less time hearing Adon talk. Spend less time a gangsta. A bit less time in the religion called “the great revolt”.
Once you make two children the world asks you for more, to rise to the occasion as if by making a life you are responsible for your own conduct in a more certain way.
Malachi, Liam, Brooke and Sheila fortified Mickhi Dbrisk on a newer path he had now to depart from. Made him keep out of a shallow grave. Sent him back to school where he learned to save lives in league with Mr. Adon then higher in training to P.A. Kept him off shift work differential. No life’s night shift until now.
He’d done his trench time hard.
The boy was bigger now, but not a full little man. That pained Mickhi, he’d have to leave his son and daughter behind in all this without having raised them fully as he had meant to. Vanessa would write him out of the picture for sure in any court in Staten Island.
He was the exception to the “no one married or with kids serves abroad rule”. He was a don in the Otriad after all.
Good Don’s don’t send young men to die.
He was the boy’s hero, his devoted father. Brooke was too little to speak out yet on things. Gurgles and coos. They’d want for nothing if in Nevada Mickhi met with death. But he’d want for everything too, not having himself alive to raise his offspring.
“You don’t have to go through with this,” begged his wife Rosa on the night before the border crossing, before his perilous trip to liberate Avinadav DeBuitléir.
“You’re a pig,” once yelled Vanessa in Iytai, but he hadn’t seen her in three years.
“So exciting,” said Natasha.
“No, I do have to do it,” Dbrisk responds, “I have to do it ‘cause no one else will do it as well as I can. I have a duty to act as one of the leadership surely, but also as a friend to Adon.”
“I won’t wait around for you!” Rosa curses him now in patois she wasn’t even raised with.
“Brooke will be dead to you,” shrieked Vanessa over the phone.
“This is so exciting. So much danger,” said Natalie the fashion student. She always seemed to understand him.
“I gotta do it anyway,” he responded.
“And your son?!” yells Rosa.
“And your daughter!?” yells Vanessa.
“You have a son and daughter, with different women? So interesting,” says you know who.
“They will all want for nothing and will be told by someone officially what I did this for,” he states in a video.
“DO YOU EVEN KNOW?! THAT ISNT YOUR COUNTRY! AFRICA IS NOT WHERE WE ARE FROM! THEY’RE GONNA KILL YOU AND YOUR SONA AREN’T GONNA CARE WHY!” yelled Rosa from St. Lucia.
“FUCK YOU AND YOUR NEO-JACOBIN CULT!” yelled Vanessa Tomay.
“FUCK ME!” yelled Natasha who always seemed to keep calm and carry the relationship on asking only for regular post cards.
“I’m doing this for you, I’m doing it for my parents, I’m doing it for my kids. We’re gonna make a stand in that country. It’s not about anything I didn’t learn in Church, it’s about doing right by others, strangers even cause nobody else gonna fight for ‘um,” he tells his father and also the video.
“You will lose everything! Think of your children!” cries Rosa.
“You are just lost,” cries Vanessa.
“You are such a man of danger,” cries Natalie.
No more hysterics now on the Island. Mickhi got dressed and got his black pea coat on, strapped on his irons, his tam, his wallet, his passport. He kissed the boy age 8. Kissed a photograph of Brooke new born. Had wild sex with Natalie a couple hours before boarding.
“I love you all. I’m sorry I gotta go.”
“It’s okay Daddy,” Malachi mumbles half asleep.
“You gotta go fight the bad, bad men.’
“I love you all as I always will. I’ll come home as soon as it’s done.”
But no one really forgives him besides Jayden. Maybe Natalie too. The eight year old is highly ware of his father’s role as a rebel saint. The FIT gal orders him to upload a lot of desert war pictures to her Instagram. Jayden probably forgives him because he’s still too young to know what dying is.
Real dying, where your body rots and souls leave the body. Real death. Not like his close friend Sebastian Adon and their voluptuous preconscious associate Maya Solomon who are just about the highest profile dead people he’s ever heard of other than maybe Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ herself.
That very evening after wishing good byes to those they were most intimate with, under the cover of darkness, Mickhi Dbrisk, Nikholai Trikhovitch and Hubert O’Domhnaill advance unit of the 99th Special Operations Task Force were loaded into T.N.T. “Steal Drums”, placed on a high speed underground train, and smuggled into the Bronx destined for Las Vegas.
The very hour they left forty Crips lead by Big Man Matthew Allamby blew their way through Camp Comfort and shot up a whole hand full of follow men DHS.
They had every Dbrisk and near associated relative out country and safe in Jamaica in under sixteen hours.
Chapter 42
Dubai, 2083ce
United Arab Emirates
Each drum is about twice the size of a normal sized human being.
There are many ways to run the U.A.E. border.
And some are a lot more subtle than others. Getting people over and under or across the East River is actually a lot more complicated than it looks. Crossing the rebel territories by convoy it is possible to make it from Breuklyn to Goddess Soviet in under a day’s bribes and haggles. Under the cover of darkness two hundred selected Pararescuemen from the Bolivarian Hot Shots of the May 5th Brigade, led by Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras, will by land, sea, tunnel, and air infiltrate the United Arab Emirates from Iran to rescue Avinadav DeBuitléir and Sebastian Adon from the clutches of the Oligarchy.
There is Cumbia music playing over the small sound system in Hanger 5 of Idlewild airbase where greenery peaks through the tarmac and derelict buildings litter the facility which is largely below the surface, like most installation of importance throughout the Soviet.
They are checking and rechecking their drop shoots, braiding out the long chords and packing then repacking. They are gathering a lifetime of memories into small strap on compartment bags.
“Companeros! it is a fact that once we get over or under the mile high wall some 33 percent of us will be killed or captured within just hours of crossing the border,” explains Rafael Contreras Lynch dramatically banging his fist on the table. He is the Peruvian elected commander of this crack team of predominantly equal parts Mexican and Ecuadorian Pararescuemen backing up the advance Special Operations Task Force 99.
“We have been asked to embark on a secret mission to liberate our dear compatriots Avinadav DeBuitléir and Sebastian Adon, who are quite alive my eager friends! Oh yes. These two long thought dead leaders of our resistance are in the clutches of our sniveling gringo enemies and we are going to bring them back to Breuklyn! Or die trying!”
“For that very reason all of us will be broken into two man units with the hopes that some of us will get through the enemy lines! For one thing, we will be crossing several thousand miles through U.A.S. loyal Saudi territory via an underground railroad of sympathetic safe houses many of which may well be compromised already. Second, although you will all have fabricated national identity cards, it remains to be seen if these will hold up past casual scrutiny. The final evil variable my Companeros is that whoever out of this detachment manages to arrive safely in that decadent Petro Colony Dubai, we will all be at the mercy of the Perchevney Bratva who has yet to formally sign any treaty on the extrajudicial extrication of Mr. DeBuitléir or agreed to the broader aims of operation Marcus Garvey, and may well be deliberating handing over out comrade Adon right to the U.A.S. gringo secret police! Anyhow, we will be running the border from one hundred different approaches hoping some portion of our task force will arrive in Dubai in one weeks’ time. Any preguntas?”
No one had any questions.
These hermanos never did. From the earliest days of the revolt the Bolivarian Hot Shots of the May 5th Brigade had furnished some of the finest Pararescuemen in the entire rebel army. Four foot tall heroes who could climb; drill; tunnel; swim; skydive; cross night and day; open battlefields; rocky desserts; cross high seas on make shift rescue rafts! These men “Mexi-could.”
The Brigade Cinqo De Mayo was utilized periodically to extract families seeking immediate political asylum out of hostile nations and back to Breuklyn Soviet or the liberated states of the Wild West Indies.
Dbrisk, Trikhovitch, and O’Domhnaill had evidently managed to slip across the border the evening before inside some TNT “steal drums” just the night before.
“Most people who try are killed getting over that wall, but we are not like normal men!” bellows Raphael Contreras, “we are elite Pararescuemen! We are true Bolvarians!”
This group of Mexican-Ecuadorian-Peruvian Pararescuemen fears nothing. They will get over that wall or under it by any means necessary, cross a howling sea of slightly overweight, well-armed mad dog gringos and support the previously deployed special operations trio of O’Domhnaill Trikhovitch and Dbrisk emancipate the two men most responsible for launching this revolt.
“And so help the Old Mayan Gods; we will liberate the two men who founded this movement or die trying! Victory or death my brothers.”
“Hasta la Victoria siempre!” shouts the Brigade Cinqo de Mayo.
“AND HELP COMES NOW FROM ABOVE!”
And then, in Spanish, breaks out the tragic ‘song of the Pararescuemen’, which loosely followed in an English language translation composed by Sebastian Adon goes something like this:
I was flying!
She said:
“That’s what dead men
On magic carpets do.”
The cold coast and leaden casket,
Of the Breuklyn Soviet departed;
And now I’m just a brightly colored parachute
Draped over a handsome smiling corpse;
A memory to you!
And a paratrooper leaps out over ten thousand free fall landings!
Falling for you hard and ever forwards is what I trained in all my other lives to do.
Have you no nostalgia for that place that made you?
She once asked me.
I said that’s the only clue,
To the place that I am from!
We remember trials to hold the simple two feet of crimson earth on which we’re standing;
I declare!
I remember working you for hours.
I remember passing notes across an Ocean!
Begging you to come.
Do you have any idea how miles I fell to forget my gods my darling?
Look upwards!
There are many more of us to surely come.
“And you’ll return to me the minute I demand it,” she declares.
“I know how hard you worked to steal that fire,
And I know that just to keep me warm forever you will surely bring me some.”
But put simply,
I was so long trapped in hell!
“Inside your head two different breeds of competing demon dwell!”
And it is not my place to dance or fuck for both of them, she said.
When our peerless passion eyes are changing color from a host of sleepless evil nights,
That means the devils peering out you, and I know the devil well!
Look out, Old Soul!
It’s true.
I asked for her the fullest of forgiveness.
As ashen eyes of silver overtake the oldness of our pastiness sorrows with the fires of the new!
I stare into the inkwell of mother night and ask for mercy.
“You will be ignored,” she said.
You must stare down your indifferent maker,
And fight battle after battle against a million savage evils as contained within the universe of tragedies playing out like motion pictures inside you fearsome princely head.
The conviction that divine forces root for you is but amusement.
No, the gods they spit on us and pass grapes as we in darkness losing die.
We are but speck; is all she knows to cry.
“For the love of god man, lay down that fight and fight to lie besides me,”
“If help is coming it will not be from above!”
Unless those are the paratroopers of Breuklyn Soviet, I remind her.
Don’t look back! Look up and see that help is coming and the paratroopers will risk everything not for the gods but for the women that they love.
#015: Pararescuemen of the Breuklyn Soviet.
Dedicated to Natasha Andreavna.
Natasha Andreavna watches these brave micro chornay prep for the predawn jump drill.
Raphael Ernesto, when he saw her and found out she was alive, he wept in her arms and clasped her hard with joy and attempted in Spanish, then kisses, then Russian, then more kisses and finally then English, then briefly in Hebrew to praise her for her steadfast defiant endurance and mourn loudly for the seven years of her torture at the hands of the enemy.
“We thought you were both dead,” he kept repeating his eyes big and alcoholic yellow with tears.
He had loved her too; no woman other than his wife Victoria had Raphael ever loved that intensely, except for this one Thai hooker in Bangkok, the things she was able to do!
“Avenge me best by putting him back in the arms of someone who loves him,” Natasha told him. But that is not what she knows is about to happen, nor even what she wants.
And Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras gave his Bolivarian word as a man; as a son of the Arequipa Province that he would sooner die a hundred painful deaths and be tortured in all the worlds to come; tossed in solitary within the Angola 42 fortresses for one hundred years than fail to return Sebastian to her by the end of a fort night.
She quietly thanks him. She kisses both his Peruvian cheeks. And passes a hand drawn sketch of a pomegranate and short letter to be delivered to Adon the minute he is rescued written in Russian.
She bids the one hundred companeros good night, and good luck suspecting that most of them will not make it make to Breuklyn alive.
And the border raiders take off just before dawn. And all of the blood is arterial red and all of the cleavage is quite pumpinly real.
It’s gonna get choppy, but prepare for be a bang haul hell of a ride.
Some of this tome is culturally antagonistic, some an attempt at wax philosophical. Some is vain erotica some part is also epic love.
This part unfolding now is but a very long gun battle on dopamine and speed.
The Steel Drums are all placed on a fast train that will travel under the countryside between New Jersey and Nevada along the deep underground monorails the government utilizes in the event of land war in the Americas expands.
Their conversation centers on what each had been offered to flip.
“Look here. No matter what happens back in Breuklyn. Gas rockets. Death from above… No matter what anybody offers us or threatens us with in Vegas. No matter what. We stick to the goddamn plan,” states Mickhi Dbrisk over the radio.
The fearless triumvirate of O’Domhnaill, Dbrisk and Trikhovitch arrives in and around Dubai via the Persian Underground Railroad about two weeks later. One hundred Bolivarian Hotshots are right behind them above and below the borderlines of the endless desert.
Chapter 43
XXX, 2083ce
DUBAI
Flashing red and blue lights of wild magnitude blind you as you make your way down the packed streets of Dubai. Endless black town cars with fully tinted windows shuttle creatures of the night point to point. Glass and steel towers house the world’s most complete collection of flesh for sale and games of trickery to separate a person from their savings. This whole complex once arose out the sands of the blood oil badlands. It’s a place of slaves and lesser Oligarchs on parade and acting badly.
The sands will swallow it only when money to spend on sinning runs dry.
That isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
Vanessa Rainwater who everyone knows better as Birdy, sings Jazz-Gypsy-Soul-Afro Funk in a speakeasy-cum-lately in a half-way hipster part of Las Vegas known as the Bondalla District. It’s a place of sin, sand and endless neon lights that can be seen from space. Its brothels are clean and efficient. Its games of chance are limitless. It has very well-funded public school districts for stripper moms and black jack domino dads.
Vanessa has curly brown hair, freckled pale skin. And stage 3 brain cancer, though she looks great. She hits all the notes in a tight gold sequined dress, far too curvy to really be a white girl thinks Mickhi Dbrisk, a Jamaican paramedic. Her presence takes over the whole damn room. Makes them all forget themselves watching her. She’s a place in France where the naked girls dance.
What a show to watch.
“She’s objectifying you with her eyes,” notes Nikolai Trikhovitch, a private detective by trade and a gun man for the Otriad when needed or called.
“Whatever her mama feeds her, she gotta keep sippin’ on it,” says Mickhi to Trikhovitch.
Nikholai just nods. He is wearing a black suit with the thin tie opened. He’s chain smoking, loving that one can do that in doors here. His brooding former Soviet complexion is made easier on the eyes by his Yid smirk. He’s two days from a goodnight sleep and a shave. But he always kind of looks that way. They’re three days now in Las Vegas waiting for Adon to get into town.
Birdy Rainwater and Sebastian Adon have quite a lot of history of the old in out in out as it were, as she is one of his biggest fans and the holder of one of the most extensive collection of his art, poetry and song.
People once upon a time called Natasha “the New Birdy.” And then there was a bloody revolution.
“He’s an artist too! People never remember that,” she often reminds his detractors.
She’s singing a song he wrote her back in the day, when he thought of little besides her. Some women have had that effect on him. Three in this life at least. He has had no shortage of muses to his madness. She sings it with husky bootlegger-gilded age candor. She’s a Taino looker, Pocahontas as Nina Simone. She’s a stand in for a poster girl from the old wars. She’s broken Adon’s heart no less than three times. Back when he had one.
“I’m sure he still does!” she sings hitting a provocative crescendo.
A bombshell in a gold dress.
She sings for him still. In between one of these balmy, epic songs a part-Persian man in lethal leisure suit brings still more drinks to the table of Mr. Trikhovitch and Mr. Dbrisk. On a folded piece of manila card stock with a ruby red kiss upon it, Ms. Rainwater is passing notes:
Hey-ya boys. Wait for the lights to go out then just follow our lead to the tallest tower in Las Vegas. Just past midnight at the Voodoo Lounge. Ask for Hachi. Best of luck in your terrorist escapades, remember to tip the staff unless you want the house to win.
It’s not just gawk and wax ragtime, Ms. Rainwater is a sympathizer, part of the vast whisper network of the Breuklyn Otriad and they are being instructed how to elude U.A.S. follow-follow men from the Department of Homeland Security and reach the most high profile rendezvous point in town follow-clean.
Birdy sings and struts and wiggles and every inch of her is a distraction. And as the song cuts, so do the lights. And the lights stay out amid a cacophony of applause. And the part-Persian man in the lethal leisure suit quickly leads Mr. Trikhovitch and Mr. Dbrisk to the kitchen and the Mexican weight staff directs them toward a hatch, into a tunnel and out of the Bondalla District underground. Their follow-follow men are evaded.
Less than an hour later, Nikholai Trikhovitch and Mickhi Dbrisk, enter the fourth sub-basement of the one hundred and four story mega hotel called La Fantasia. They are greeted by two massive Noires and four Mexicanos all in smooth black suits, don’t ask how this many Mexicans ended up in Dubai. They are ushered into a private elevator and shot into space. Atop this behemoth is the tri-level rooftop pleasure bar known as the Voodoo Lounge and they get there a little after midnight.
They step into what appears to be a festive pansexual sex party.
Girly boys in gold flapper attire act out like they were drunk in the tower of Babel itself. Ass to ass is happening gleefully on every other table.
They ask a towering security man for Hachi.
They are ushered into a private chamber by a mullato girl with big not at all fake tits wrapped in more black sequins. The chamber has a view of the valley of earthly delights. They are presented with a bottle of Israeli wine, also a bottle of bubblefizaire, also offered a menu. The menu is in Cyrillic, Han Chinese and Americano. It is Hachi’s pleasure to have them, everything is taken care of: so they are informed by their voluptuous new friend.
Mickhi orders strong black coffee which he knows will not be as good as one from Breuklyn. Nikh orders a whiskey Jamison on the rocks. The booth is completely private black box with an amazing view of all that flashing neon sin peddling below them.
“She’ll be with you momentarily.”
“Who is this Hachi?” asks Nikholai Trikhovitch.
“She’s the half Soviet-half Han lady friend of the famous actor Siegfried Sassoon, a friend of ours from the club. She’s a woman who begrudgingly peddles in low grade sin and is amicable to arming us properly for our trip to liberate Mr. DeBuitléir so deep behind enemy lines.”
Ah, the reason they are in Dubai. It is pretext and prelude to an epic rescue mission. They are under covenant to liberate a so-called terrorist, a great Haitian patriot. A man cut of their very cloth so to speak. They are also under strict orders. Orders being a funny word for free men such as themselves with power and a vested vote. Yet, these were orders. The leadership had voted that Operation Marcus Garvey was green light go. And it couldn’t just be a bunch of high minded armed Yids and Noire Karibes leading the charge after all. They’d need a truly inside man whose boots would be recognized on the ground.
Recognized as official.
Hachi is brutally elegant and her smile is radiant as she enters the booth in a gold dress.
She had met Mr. Adon years before through her talented rising star of a husband, Mr. Sassoon, the lead of the latest Martin McDonough Broadroad blockbuster. Sebastian and Siggy’s mutual friend Ysiad Ferraris is a partner in trade with her father. One needs a couple references these days to do business with the corporate oligarchy of any reputable mob, former Soviet or Ruus institutional.
Siegfried Sassoon is currently starring in a play about the Noires which fought in the “Le Great Revolt”, the uprising which liberated the West Indies and much of the Eastern seaboard from the United American States. It is rumored he may be a card carrying volunteer in the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club. At the very least he and Adon are regular Banya buddies.
Adon and anything he touches turns to agitprop via the Breuklyn Otriad. One of the leading social clubs responsible for the pitched battles of the uprising fought in what was once called New York City, and Haiti.
Hachi is wearing a gold DVF wrap, the new line cut for figure, not the old one to disguise it, or the ones before that where it all hung out to ogle over. Patrician women always liked to brag about DVF dresses being one of kind, made just for the wearer, even given as presents by Mr. W himself. Hachi won hers in a card game. But the real prize was what the girl in the dress had to do when she lost it.
Hachi King Perchevney is the manager of both Fantasia and the Voodoo Lounge her father the owner of the building. The building is private property, which means it’s within the territories of the United American States although all its shareholders reside in the Ruus Federation. She runs the place with a staff of mostly Mexicanos, Mulats and Noires. They work harder than the Blan, a proven fact. The Voodoo Lounge boasts the world’s highest outdoor dance floor and cage dancing fire spectacles, also bare knuckle boxing. Its elevated viewing deck gives one a view of the entire sinful city. The blue glass tower which houses it was the tallest and largest thing built before the economy imploded and recessed indefinitely right after the war years in the beginning of the century.
Hachi’s father is nominally a former Soviet although more a transnational biz-ness-man of the clandestine economy as far as a point of identity. Her mother is also in the biz, albeit the Han one. It was as if in her birth the two most ruthless forces of strong arm venture capitalism produced a single vision of invisible handed, ruthless thirst for money. With gun running, drug dealing and prostitution so vigorously engaged in throughout the planet, the Perchevney Bratva focuses mostly on sophisticated real estate acquisitions, regime change and sometimes the reinstitution of serfdom in non-aligned states via debt peonage.
Hachi isn’t too invested in all the evil around her though. No wife of the altruistic and enlightened Siegfried Sassoon could be. She compartmentalizes her life you see. After the revolt in the Eastern territories it became important to own your own plane. She does her business in the Southwest desert then flies back to the City of Many-Many-Lights four days a month to be near the radiating goodness of her man who prefers life in the Breuklyn Soviet. She just sometimes plays fixer to her father, who no one ever gets to meet.
The Voodoo Lounge has strange powers absolving its guests of sin by way of anonymity. “Sojourners into darkness do need company,” she says slyly taking a seat with Mr. Dbrisk and Mr. Trikhovitch in the private viewing booth called the Papa Legbe Terrace.
“Thank you for seeing us Ms. Sassoon on such short notice.”
“Well the sky is about to fall out above Breuklyn Soviet darlings. We are all a little pressed for time. Also, please call me Hachi as you’re both close friends of my husband’s close friend. And we are all friends of the great revolution after all,” she says with the sly smile of a Postsoviet woman and the cunning diplomacy of the daughter of a Han.
“Cheers to that very notion,” says Mickhi.
“Nazdrovia,” says Nikholai.
“This is a wonderful place you have here,” Mickhi remarks.
She gives him a funny look with a smile as if to say: of course it fucking is. My father is one of the richest, most dangerous oligarchs in the entire former Soviet world. But they all have at least a little ESP, so it is unnecessary to say that aloud.
“So, my father gives your whole take over Hispaniola operation his black blessing. Obviously without a little bit of sentimentality he supports the notion that your backers pay very, very well and that the prospecting concessions he has been promised if you succeed will make even him crack a tiny former Soviet half smile. So, while I love my husband, and am a big fan of your compatriot Mr. Adon, and am obviously not going to stand in your way; but, I have but several questions before we release our three hostages to you.”
It gets serious quick around here.
“Ask away Ms. Hachi,” Mickhi says. Mickhi takes a green pack of Newport cigarettes from out the inner pocket of the black pea coat he is wearing. For a six foot two Jamaican with thick polished dreads he is soft spoken to the point of incredible charm.
“You’re all really, really fucking insane,” she tells them.
“That isn’t a question Ms. Hachi,” Mickhi notes lighting his delicious Newport.
“You’re right. That was a statement of fact,” she replies with a smile.
“So what’s the second question then,” asks Nikholai.
“I think she’s still on her first question,” says Mickhi.
“We’re in the crazy shit business. You’re in the flesh, cocaine, arms and supper business. Your father well he’s into almost everybody’s business where a dollar gets made illicitly. We need some equipment surely but we need permission to take back three people your father currently owns,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.
At that moment Mickhi Dbrisk was quite unaware that his associates Mr. Entwissle and Mr. Adon were handcuffed to the interrogation chairs of well-lit questioning room on the outskirts of Moscow. So technically the Perchevney Bratva owned four people they needed back.
“So let’s make a deal shall we. How much will you pay for DeBuitléir?” she asks.
Trikhovitch looks at Dbrisk. They were told not to haggle.
“He’s priceless. But we were told to offer you 187,000,000 RMB.”
“Cute. That could buy your very own large harem of mostly white women and some sports cars for the weekend, but I’m afraid the cost of getting a man out of the deep gulag who is suspected of being a high placed terrorist might cost you, something more.”
“Maybe we should haggle about the equipment first,” says Trikhovitch.
“You’re not supposed to haggle,” Hachi says.
“How do you,” starts Nikholai, “never mind.”
“So let’s get to that then. How many irons you need?” she asks.
“Just two,” replies Mickhi.
“Just two? I had heard this was a big job.”
“Well technically, Ms. Hachi, we haven’t figured out exactly how to extract him yet. So we figured we’d just take hostages of our own all over the country tonight.” Trikhovitch says.
“He’s being held in the Angola 42 Penal Colony near the border with Abu Dhabi. In a fortnight they move him to a facility abroad,” Hachi says, “this is your last shot before he disappears into some black bag foreign torture camp complex.”
“Two? Really only two?” she repeats.
“We only are going to need two burners for the ambush. I just failed to mention the caliber of these said Irons we’ll need.”
Mickhi passes her a slip of paper. She unfolds it. Gives them ‘you have to be fucking crazy’ eyes and shakes her head.
Mickhi shrugs back with his cold eyes.
“I mean, if you think we don’t know how to get regular blasters in Las Vegas, what kind of bad men ganstas do you take us for?” asks Mr. Dbrisk.
Hachi sips her bubblefizaire passive aggressively.
“I wish you to remember that portable laser guided surface to air missile launchers with anti-drone capabilities are very hard to come by this time of year, in this part of the world especially. You are aware this is the age of global gun control. But as I’m a very, very big fan of Mr. Sebastian Adon; and a fan as well of the work you boys do as both municipal employees and bad man freedom fighters; surely I can do my best to acquire them.”
“For how much?”
“Make us an offer.”
“Black diamonds and pearls,” says Dbrisk with a smirk.
“For a gang allegedly led by the Ivories you all really don’t know the price of anything.”
“We ain’t led by Ivories,” states Dbrisk.
“My father would surely ask you to attempt to keep from knocking government choppers out of the sky as part of your rescue plan. You know, lest yer actions reignite the civil war a day early and what not. That’s not good for anyone’s business.”
“Well if you just sell us the prisoner for the price offered I’m sure we wouldn’t have to resort to such strong armed tactics such as an elaborate raid riddled in gun play,” says Trikhovitch.
The boys grin slightly at her.
“I mean he isn’t our prisoner. He’s in U.A.S. Federal custody, as you know this colony facilitates all kinds of things for all three core power blocs. Your price is too low because to get him we’re gonna have to lend you a small army of contractors and bribe a small network of bureaucrats to time this properly. And that can’t even assure us that a) you can even breach the defenses of Angola 42, and b) not trigger a new round of world war holocaust by doing so, a day early.”
“We’re not paying for man power. We’re paying you bribe the bureaucrats already on your payroll. We have a very valid plan drawn up. We can do this job better with a smaller team,” explains Dbrisk.
“My sources tell me you may have moved as many as eighty eight Mexican Pararescuemen over the border in the past week to support this raid,” she says.
“Not at liberty to say,” notes Trikhovitch.
“Well how do we know it won’t be an embarrassing little blood bath on the border?” she asks.
“We can’t really promise anything. But, we’ll try hard to just snatch and run,” says Nikholai, “we also want to buy another Bratva asset for the same price. A two for one.”
She sips her non-synthetic Champagne.
“Let’s talk crazy, sure,” she says.
“250,000,000 RMB for the bribes and the necessary hardware. And your house physician, the lovely little Ukrainian Dr. Kay on standby in case something goes wrong ready to work.”
“You certainly can’t have our little doctor. Adon asked already,” she laughs.
She gives them a funny look.
“Something is off about all this. First your prices are wild. Second the weapons you’re requesting are absurdly hard to get these day. Finally, why do you want our doctor? You have doctors. Isn’t one of you a doctor?” she laughs.
“I’m a paramedic,” says Dbrisk.
“I find dead kids for money,” says Nikholai.
“I guess I was wrong. Something’s funny though about this though.”
Trikhovitch takes out a photograph of a slim and beautiful young lady in green military cap with a white lab coat and a stethoscope and a second picture of the shoulder mounted anti-drone grad launcher and a third picture of a presumably younger Avinadav DeBuitléir.”
“187,000,000 for all four purchases and in writing the Perchevney Bratva will get a contract explicitly giving trade rights and port access in Breuklyn Soviet on the eve we all your competitors get strong armed out. You will get carte blanche to traffic anything but people.”
“You know we don’t traffic people anymore,” she says.
“More importantly Avinadav DeBuitléir will agree to drilling concessions and first access to the vast array of natural resources under Haiti when we seize the country.”
“I presume you’ll need some really fast cars, also maybe a long range capable plane to get your imprisoned friends and anyone who survives the raid back to your base in Haiti?” she laughs, “and a magic carpet maybe or some fifty foot mechanized robots?”
“Wow, Hachi, yer accommodating as hell,” smiles Nikholai.
“No. All we need is the right people bribed so we know where and when to hit that pick up convoy and take back our man. And to do that we need those fancy hard to get weapons and your sexy Ukrainian doctor in case someone in our crew takes a bullet,” says Dbrisk.
“But yeah, we’ll absolute take a plated Mustang Lancer, four type two ambulances and we will need a fast plane ready on nearby airstrip, preferably with anti-drone capabilities capable of reaching Port Au Prince without refueling as soon as the lights go out,” says Nikholai.
“For just $187 RMB?” asks Hachi Yu.
But that is real chump change compared to what these rebels are offering out long term.
“Are you going to need extra serfs?” she asks.
“No, we never like to outsource person power,” explains Mickhi.
“I’d forgotten about your secret Mexican army. You have a less than minimalistic plan I take it?”
“You might say that,” says Mickhi Dbrisk who looks real sharp in his dark, dark black pea coat as he fills the booth with smoke.
“We like to maintain a true monopoly on violence,” says Mr. Nikholai Trikhovitch.
“You all have yourselves a deal then.”
“And Madame it is the deal of the millennium!” exclaims Dbrisk.
And they all clink glasses.
“Ah yes, one thing though,” she says.
“My father has explicitly put a clause in the deal.”
“Our leadership has made it clear that we will not haggle or take sneaky last minute addendums,” says Mickhi
“Hm. Well this one is rather straight forward.”
“Go on,” Trikhovitch says.
“My father wished to have definitive proof that Mr. Adon is quite alive. And a real man, not a robot or some superior alien military fuckery. So when he was arrested in Moscow last week rubbing out one of your listed lesser oligarchy war criminals we took him off the hands of the FSB for the good price of 300,000,000.00 USD, him and his mullato partner.”
They glance at each other.
“We just wanted a bit more collateral. Something we could trade to intelligence services if say, it becomes complicated associating with you. What better than him, isn’t he one of your leaders and an old chum?”
They now give her man hard eyes.
“Where is he now?” Dbrisk growls.
“My father requires three things from everyone he owns. He wants a full medical evaluation conducted by our house physician. Dental, blood, bone marrow, and DNA. He requires sperm samples, for growing more serfs. And finally. He wants Sebastian to box our best guy in ring. If we don’t get those things. You don’t all that hardware you need. You don’t get the right people bribed. And you sure as shit don’t get to walk out of our territory, our fucking American pie occupied petro field with that very auspicious prisoner, and our highly talented young Ukrainian doctor to boot. And very little would stop us from just selling him to the Department of Homeland Security at that point. I mean just so we have you by the balls to make it clear we’re not gonna let you fuck us in the ass, at least not without a condom.”
“So really we’re talking about more than I thought we were talking about,” says Dbrisk.
“Sebastian and is partner Watson will arrive in Dubai in two days. So that’s when the fight will be scheduled for.”
“He isn’t really much of a boxer,” Dbrisk says.
“That’s not what we hear,” Hachi says.
“Wouldn’t you say this negotiation is getting a little uncivilized,” Nikholai asks DBrisk.
“What’s a little uncivilized between oligarchs, gangsters and terrorists?’ she asks with a smile.
“We prefer the phrase ‘freedom fighters’,” Dbrisk notes.
“We prefer the phrase ‘big league extralegal black market entrepreneurs’.”
“Duly noted,” Dbrisk says.
“See you at the ringside then,” she says.
“Fair game,” says Nikh.
She hands them a glossy gold flyer inviting them to the 50th Annual Police & Fire Games of Dubai, known also as the Battle of the Badges.
Chapter 44
XXX, 2083ce
DUBAI
“There sounds like there might be a lot of money to be made each time he gets hit in the head,” Alexandr Perchevney remarks in flawless Mandarin although he thinks in Russian and Ivoryish algorithathematics too.
“I have a man of influence from the Dominican Republic on the phone here willing to put it in writing that some very specific oil drilling contracts are to be signed with our family Bratva if the invasion is made successful,” Hachi informs him.
She’s referring to Ysiad Ferraris and General Obenson Etienne who has led the Lavalas underground for the ten years since Avinadav DeBuitléir’s disappearance.
“We like oil concessions daughter, we truly do. But it’s not yet in our interest to trade with these free radicals until we can get confirmation that DeBuitléir is in fact alive. These DHS use a lot more than a water board these days to get what they’re looking for.”
“The Breuklyn Otriad is offering us unrestricted access to their port facilities in Coney Island, Jacmel, and Santo Domingo as an opening confidence builder. Also a fifty year no-tax lease of facilities as long as no slaves come through those facilities,” Hachi states referring to the contract provided by Dbrisk and Trikhovitch.
Wink.
This was particularly relevant because three years now since the signing of the armistice and the granting of regional autonomy it was becoming very clear that the Breuklyn Soviet was not to remain a lawless trader frontier forever.
“Tell the Department of Homeland Secure that we wish to trade Adon for DeBuitléir. Once they agree to move him out of Angola 42, help the rebels assault the convoy. Obviously they’ll also take a bunch of fat Amerikanski hostage. We will keep our bases covered. Inform whoever is or is not leading that wild Otriad that they need not worry about where to get guns and keep them in the dark as long as possible that we are dealing the DHS. I will arrive in Las Vegas in two days with Adon. If he survives the tournament, and if the rebel price for DeBuitléir is higher than the U.A.S. price for Adon, then we win regardless, but you know where my priorities lie.”
“With enough American dollar bills papa,” states Hachi, though she knows that what he wants will ultimately rely on Adon, DeBuitléir and the phantom Emma Solomon unleashing their war of liberation in Haiti and the colonies.
And so with the stroke of a few men and a phone call Alexandr Perchevney ordered his Somali pirate sub-contractors to seize the hulking cargo ship the Bialystok and its vast payload of Chinese long guns and rockets. They were ambitious these pirates and seized not one but two ships traveling reroute from East Asia that day. The first with Mr. Perchevney’s “decommissioned” arsenal and the second, an NGO supply ship, the Viceroy which was carrying sixty four armored ambulances, crates of medical supplies and vast unending drums of Spiruleena algae compound and the equipment necessary to set up farms of it.
The Somalis gave him a two for one special. Both vessels were traded with an Israeli-based middleman for a staggeringly low rate of just 4.4 million dollars. Their contents were offloaded onto trucks in the Sinai Peninsula. It was then just a question of securing trucks and pretext to move them southwest toward the forward based in Isle of Man.
Hachi King’s father Alexandr Sasho Perchevney has three daughters. One is missing. One is happily married to a Cuban-Amerikanski actor named Siegfried Sassoon and appears relatively happy. The third is quite dead to him.
There are actually some things money can’t buy. But for nearly everything else big favors and other people’s money work just fine. He has subcontracted some Somali pirates to capture a U.N. chartered container ship as though he might order out for sushi or for a man to be disappeared long term.
Quickly and without a sentimental second thought.
There is of course an international industry in unloading surplus products of the first and second world off on the third and fourth for internal subsidy. Sometimes grain, sometimes guns. Often both, often whatever needs unloading and subsidizing.
Several weeks earlier a shell company of his called “Pveada International” had brokered the decommissioning of fourth generation Chinese small arms and their eventual sale and transfer to the government of Kenya. A neutral country in theory who’s elite sometimes is attempting to become a U.A.S. client state, but whose middle class would often rather align with the People’s Republic of China. This containership arsenal load of U.N. decommissioned long guns, rocket propelled grenades, truck mounted battling guns, shoulder mounted rocket launchers, and assorted missiles only made it half way to its destination.
Off the Somali coast the massive craft was captured by a pirate named Musa Mohammed and his band of forty thieves on small watercraft. They so intricately knew of the vessels coordinates and movements it seemed almost an inside job. Which it certainly was. Mr. Perchevney had only finished brokering this illegal weapon’s swap between China and Kenya when he received four subsequent offers for their redirection. Various credible sources informed him that the same brigade of Amerikanski that helped topple the U.A.S. forces and ignited the second civil war was outfitting a new army.
And they needed weapons and their money was green.
The Perchevney Bratva had prospered incredibly from the developments of the Separatist wars. Dozens of urban areas across the Eastern Coast were now veritable shuttle trading station for his group to sell any number of previously illegal things to the interior. In addition, there came into effect dozens of new micro republics which required any number of goods and services previously available from being part of the United States of America, but were now rouge states and under embargo.
Opportunities to enrich oneself were exponentially increasing.
If this little brigade seemed rather zealous, rather quick to murder many of his competitors operators over human trafficking, all the better. This wasn’t his trade anyway.
The first offer came eight days prior to the transfer of these coveted arms. It came from his own daughter Hachi. The second offer was via a well accredited Islamic middle person with vast untraceable portfolios in Bangladesh. A third was linked to the Fenians mob in Boston and a fourth to some wild gangsters in Kingston, Jamaica. He had called his daughter directly and asked her what all this “rapidly re-arming the fourth world” was all about.
In fact all four brokers were looking to have these arms end up in the exact same hands and were making e exact same big figure bid.
There are so many places to get a gun in this world, but bids on a hot arsenal however are less frequent. Mr. Alexandr Perchevney being a man of cautious curiosity, with no sentimentality or respect for rule of law was updated by his daughter regularly about the irregular invasion being planned in Breuklyn Soviet with an eye toward the land of Haiti.
Chapter 45
XXX, 2083ce
DUBAI
Three rounds with four fighters is a Russian bare knuckled boxing match gone berserker.
Sebastian is wearing a Captain America mask smuggled into the POLICE FIRE GAMES.
In a Las Vegas boxing match has just begun between Sebastian Adon and Josepi “the Stallion” Vespasian in a stadium filled civil servants. After the “Great Revolt” a good number of Catholics and whites most generally were absorbed into the interior rather than stay in the “liberated territories”.
“Hot beds of Ivory Commy-Mic-Nigger sedition.”
Suffice to say the betting odds against Sebastian are 343 to 1.
“That Yid is gonna get his ass handed to him,” a cop from Mississippi smugly told the local press.
But there is a good bit of money on this fight. Middle America was less than amused at the inclusion of fighters from the Confederated breakaway territories.
The Boxing Bravest was once the premier Firefighter boxing team in the nation so less than year after hostilities ended the earliest peace gestures of the detente began with sports. President-elect Barak Obama, then in his fourth term in office was attempting to extend an olive branch to the Soviet Confederation. While it was difficult to negotiate with no less than forty three break away territories running down the east coast from Maine to Miami, bloody-bloody fighting and rumors that the Breuklyn Soviet had purchased several nuclear warheads from North Korea convinced the U.A.S. Congress and Executive to embrace a temporary ceasefire.
The FDNY, which on the eve of the Great Revolt had less than 400 black firemen out of 12,000 total dedicated to fire suppression. It had an emergency medical service corps of roughly 4,000 EMTs and Paramedics which was highly diverse in demography and still is. Now, roughly a year since the riots and the rising; since the breaking of the five boroughs into three Soviets, a confederated territory, and one UAS occupied strip called Satin Island; after many of the white FDNY firefighters fled the City of Many-Many Lights worried about a genocide or forced socialism that never came; well now FDNY Fire Suppression and the FDNY Boxing Bravest, is as diverse as EMS always was.
And they were invited back to fight in Las Luna Stadium albeit this time with a mostly black team since few of the original FDNY Caucasian firefighters remained in the Breuklyn, Goddess, or Bronx Soviet. Nor could they afford to live in the Isle of Man now technically non-aligned zone, albeit largely a bourgeoisie micro-state with the NYPD as an army. And Satin Island, still a part of the UAS has been mostly emptied of civilians and is military fortress 94 clicks behind Confederate lines.
Sebastian had joined the Boxing Bravest long ago as a Yid and an as an EMT, in those circles still something of an oddity. At one point the FDNY had forced him to resign shortly after the disorder, but he was rehired after the revolt.
Now he was squaring off in a stadium of angry UAS colonial gentiles and foreign and domestic firemen and cops, howling for his blood.
Dave Briscoe and Hugh O’Domhnaill have a lot of money doubled down that he’s going to win. Even with the odds never in good favor. Because they know something these gentiles don’t.
In the first round Sebastian dances around grinning, feigning attack, the Stallion lunches but never connects. Around they go, the Catholic mobs howling. In the ten seconds of the first round the Stallion lands a punch dead on, knocks Sebastian on his ass bleeding.
As the bell rings there’s blood on the mat, blood in his eyes.
Round two, he gets clobbered. Dull wet cracking noises, flashing lights, the room spinning howling shaking, stomping for Yiddish blood.
Briscoe and O’Domhnaill keep making bets with the bookie. The odds jump each round. Sebastian is all fucked up. THWAK, his jaw looks broken. THWWAK.
Another badly swollen eye.
CRACK and the bell rings for this deadly dance drags on into Round three. Still Sebastian hasn’t landed a good punch.
He splashes water on his face. He looks into the bleachers, waves to Hugh and Dave. Spits blood. He says the only prayer he knows.
Then, amid cries of ‘KILL THE IV’, ‘KILL THE IV’ he draws inside himself, tunes out the world. Seven years ago Hassan Askeri posing then as a local bus boy, brown belt and the Prince of Dhaka told him what to do.
Hassan is with him now, in a fourth dimensional kind of way.
“Hold out, hold out. Let him weaken himself. Let him grow arrogant by tasting your blood. Wait for it, wait more then don’t strike ‘til you see the whites of his eyes, the paleness of his very soul exposed before you strike him.”
Sebastian explodes on the Stallion. Beats his face, knocks him down with his Koah power swing. The Stallion tries to get up. Everything slows down to timeless bellowing, stale air of the stadium, and the taste of his own copper-almond blood. The Stallion, Henri Christopher Vespasian thinks quietly ‘never seen a man move that fast.’
It’s the last thing he thinks. One hook punch breaks his ribs; the jab opens up his face. Sebastian sees his whites. CRACK. A hammer blow breaks the stallions jaw.
A fireman on cop zoot-suit-riot breaks out; bludgeons, blood, broken bottles and tear gas, a bi-national debacle on late night news. The heroes of the divided nation involved in an indiscriminate hate crime, cluster fuck of a brawl. A Mexican weight staff sneaking Sebastian out the back into a tunnel and out to a garage. Hugh and Dave getting half rich. Hundreds of arrests. Firemen over turning a cop car setting it ablaze.
After a good deal of saber rattling and arrests for disorderly conduct, the Battle of the Badges had almost become a way to call off the Détente.
Finally they got clear of it all. An electric Lincoln town car is taking them back to the hotel. Sebastian has a swollen bloody face. He’s nursing it with a cold-pack and bottle of Sweet Surrender.
“You lost your teeth yet again brother,” notes O’Domhnaill.
Sebastian spits up some red blood.
Two more fucking rounds.
How Sebastian lost his three front teeth is one story very few know except the three women he’s thought he was in love with and of course his best friend Nikholai Trikhovitch, also known as Nick Taylor, or Tricky Nicky by some.
Nikholai is waiting for his friends after field stripping and oiling their weapons. He lights up a Noblisse cigarette with a gold zippo lighter and tells his audience of well-oiled weapons what he knows:
“It was the summer, the setting, occupied Palestine, called by some Israel. A slightly younger Sebastian Adon and his partner in crime Emma Solomon, a tough cookie, and sometimes Yid had journeyed to the Sin Peninsula to rendezvous with a man named Anil of Aqaba who was willing to smuggle them across the security wall into the Balata Refugee Camp near the West Flank City of Nablus. This was during the “Second-off-Shaking’. The Israelis had erected a mighty mile high wall between them and the Canaanites and Sebastian wanted to see the other side, as well as build a gun tunnel under it. Solomon, near devoid of political loyalties was following him along, because possessed by her own hate, her own plans.”
Nikholai Trikhovitch is about five foot nine inches of tall dark and handsome. He’s wearing a black leisure suit. He has a sholem strapped to his side. It’s loaded with Afula Specials, like most of their weapons. Israeli made non-lethal ammunition. They try and keep the body count within a 3 % margin of “motherfucker-you-deserve-to-die”. His tobacco smoke fills the dimly lit room. On the bed are four 8mm pistols, four shrink wrapped dark grey flicker-masks and uniforms, a box of white phosphorous smoke grenades, a box of 8mm pistol clips with very live American made ammunition, a carton of Noblisse, the keys to a black Mustang, and the keys to a single engine Givati-Tesla G8 airplane. On the bedside is an ECG monitor, a red combat medic kit, and a large silver box which contains Lithium Carbonate, topically applied tiger balm, assorted injectable anesthetics, grey berry smart phones and roof of mouth mounted dentures for Sebastian’s three front teeth. It’s a medical kit accounting for their unit’s propensity for bipolar operatives with high likelihood of mental and physical injury.
How Sebastian lost his teeth in its shortest most objective form continues something like this. Dahab City is a town of under 3,000 mostly Muhammadian souls located on the Eastern shore of the Sin Peninsula, the wasteland that separates the State of Ivory from its often belligerent neighbor the Muhammadian Republic of Cleopatra. It is one of the most acclaimed scuba diving locations on the planet and a long time staging point for the sand-gypsy insurgency against the Egyptian government. It is also the key transshipment point for gun running into Gaza, the quarantined hot bed of the Canaanite insurrection against the Israelis, their real and perceived occupiers.
The tourism industry of Dahab had seen better days.
The night before a young Sebastian Adon and the lovely young “Ms. Violent Dangerous Thing” who is also known as “Maya Rose” by some and Emma Solomon by others, depending on what you’re paying to know, arrived in Dahab; a rowdy band of Caucasians painted the town red, acted the fool and offended the honor of the Sheik-of-the-Mezzina tribe’s daughter. The night after negotiations, Sebastian was laid out intoxicated at a table in a night club called the Black Prince; a band of some fifty fellaheen attacked the place with Molotov cocktails, rocks and their sand-gypsy fists.
Young Sebastian, quite near unconscious from drinking a Sweet Surrender caught a flying chair to his face. He was taken to the village hospital in quite a lot of pain via Donkey Ambulance.
The Egyptian police then arrested every sand-gypsy male in Dahab; which they had wanted to do for some time anyway. And then, they beat and tortured as many of them as they could get to before lunch the next day. Egyptian police are no fans of the sand-gypsies, no fans of seeing Americanos get hurt, and no fans of once popular tourist location maintaining a reputation for civil unrest.”
Long story short, a Sheik’s son was accused of striking Sebastian with the chair. The boy’s “uncle” came to the Nirvana hotel where Sebastian was nursing his face with more whiskey and pled with young Sebastian to pardon the boy.
Sebastian took a hammer to the prison, when informed Anil of Aqaba that “this is Cleopatra, eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth country.” But, upon seeing the thirteen year old son of the sheik, his alleged assailant, he decided not to bribe the guards to smash the young boy’s grill, because he wasn’t “a savage fuck like the sand-gypsies who assaulted him.”
So he signed a pardon and the boy went free. As the boy was being explained in the Muhammadian dialect what had transpired, he mustered all his Americano, spat in Sebastian’s face and flatly told him:
“Your people are weak.”
But Anil of Aqaba didn’t think so, and invited Sebastian to be his guest any time the kid was in Sinai ever again. To this day Sebastian swears this was all far less traumatic than the later loss of his dearest partner over Operation Marcus Garvey and general heartbreak. The loss of his family due to his own negligence. And the loss of his soul through a deal with the devil herself. Loss, loss and more loss until a man becomes a zealot.
But in certain parts of the world you can trade three teeth for a very large favor.
Later in the day they get back to the Voodoo Lounge for the Second Round on the Roof. The wind is blowing.
“What kind of fuckery is this,” utters Mickhi Dbrisk.
The man was easily twice or four times Sebastian’s size. On one day’s notice they had assembled a rather intimate local run down of Voorhees big shots, just a couple, who wanted to bet on this fight. It was also to be videotaped. It stood to reason that if the Otriad either failed to deliver on its open port promises, or if its adventurous little battalion was wiped out not having liberated an inch of Haitian turf, or if the Federals came knocking, then proof Adon was alive would be established.
But having him fight was only a matter of sport. He was the face of this thing figured Alexandr Perchevney. If he was the kind of man up for the job, then surely he could beat in a ring their biggest fighter, and a bear.
Fun and games.
As per the terms if he submitted to the medical exams and won the fight they would sign the deal and turn over exactly what was needed to get the job done. And if he died, oh well. These radicals were unpredictable.
But Alexandr Perchevney has been watching them work a good long time.
Insert fight, blat.
Sebastian is again all bloody and panting and spitting some blood and missing his three front teeth after killing his way through an enhanced clone of Dmitry Khulushin four times his build.
And then they roll out a big metal box and out of it emerges of growling black bear and Alexandr giggles ferociously. And Mickhi’s eyes get wide, and he grabs his sholem out of his inner pocket strap.
“Not part of the arrangement,” Nikholai declares.
“There is not first among equals when people are not equal,” says Alexandr.
Now that’s a real Old Russian saying.
“He’s fighting the bear.”
“He’s not fighting your fucking bear.” And the bear howls and charges out toward Adon.
Adon throws up his dukes.
Pop. Pop. And Mickhi shoots the bear twice in the head.
But it doesn’t die yet.
“The fucking chornay shot the bear!” A voorhi yells and various attendants and strong pen pull out their shooters and start yelling at Dbrisk in Russian, and Mickhi takes out a second pistol, and now Nikholai is yelling for everybody to be cool in Russian:
“Be cool! Be cool!”
“You shot my fucking bear,” notes Alexandr.
And the big ferocious creature lands on top of Adon who upper cuts but that doesn’t stop the thing at all.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Now Nikholai is firing also.
And then three more until click.
Dbrisk gets off the rest of his clip into the dome of the bear.
And it finally seems to die.
In his head Nikholai hears Krissy scream.
“Everyone put down their fucking shooters down immediately blat!” Commands Alexandr Sasho Perchevney standing now.
Adon covered in his blood and bear blood staggers to a stand.
“Perchevney!” He yells.
And everyone gets quiet.
“Tak!” Adon yells.
Alexandr is grinning.
“Keep your chornay cowboys at bay,” he shouts back in guttural Aramaic.
“No more games. Sign the goddamn contract you shtarker fuck. You King of Oligarchs,” Sebastian bellows in Hebrew.
“Three ports. Monopoly on Coney Island Importing. Guaranteed rights on 5 percent revenues on outgoing gas and crude. Rights on Port Haiti pipeline. I want this in writing signed by you, Solomon and the prisoner Avinadav DeBuitléir as soon as you have him,” states Perchevney.
“Vehicles, hardware, bribes in place, exact movement times of prisoner convoy, a landing strip for our plane, and the physician you own by the name of Dr. Yelizaveta Perechenova, and you’re going to get us all the first and second line armaments we can pay for. And any third line you lay your hands on.”
“Get me my pen,” Perchevney smiles. Get this man a towel and some vodka and his teeth,” laughs Perchevney.
“Dmitry get the latest contract we drew up.”
The real one? Who ever knew! You could kill a hundred Dmitry Khulushin s’ and the evil in the world would never die. Yet another Dmitry Khulushin emerges from the bowels of that Lounge alongside Watson Entwissle in some hand cuffs and a blind fold.
Dmitry Khulushin and Sebastian Adon glower fiercely and each other and Sebastian spits out a glob of blood in his direction.
“Peasant,” spits back Dmitry in Russian.
“Epic times for all you baby faced fuck,” Adon replies.
“Alright, I think we’ve done enough damage here,” states Mickhi DBrisk.
He takes out a radio.
“Hotshots do you copy?”
“Copiar alto y claro.”
“Take the collateral, companeros.”
Chapter 47
XXX, 2083ce
DUBAI
It was nearly dawn in the deep Arabian Desert and the cracked rocky earth was a dead place, thirsty for the waters of the living.
There are no good deserts there are only vaguely scenic deserts and empty deserts but all deserts are good to bury things you don’t want found. Or do things you want less seen.
Now the card Perchevney was holding was Adon. And he suspected that the Department of Homeland security would pay or trade just about anything to get their hands on him. And Avinadav DeBuitléir, if you didn’t really know what he was capable of, or holding in his mind was to the DHS Directorate, “low hanging fruit”, valuable mainly because he and Adon had allegedly worked together a decade ago on some jobs in Israel. So, at a lonely airstrip in the deep desert Perchevney would supposedly exchange Adon for DeBuitléir.
Now, what Perchevney knew because his daughter Hachi-Yu had been briefed on it by operatives Mickhi Dbrisk and Nikholai Trikhovitch it was that a crack team of several dozen Mexican and Peruvian Pararescuemen were going to bushwhack the prisoner exchange.
Add a slightly bigger crew.
Sometime a little after dusk Mickhi Dbrisk, Sebastian Adon, Watson Entwissle, Hubert O’Domhnaill, Nikholai Trikhovitch and a crack team of eighty Mexican, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Hotshots backed up by the infiltration of the infamous Zapatista rebels head off to break Avinadav DeBuitléir out of his captivity with pistols, parachutes, fast cars, rocket launchers and flicker hoods.
Or even more specifically strong arm the government of the United American States, in the middle of one of their Arab petro-colonies. Mucho grande in a five stage plan.
PHASE 1:
Lure the U.A.S. diplomat in Dubai to a promised swap of Adon for DeBuitléir many miles away from the camp he was being held.
PHASE 2:
Mostly Non-violently bushwhack a separate prison transport convoy on the red-brown wasteland of a desert road between Angola 42 and the secret UAS airstrip near Lake Greed heading to move Avinadav DeBuitléir to the exchange.
PHASE 3:
Seize four major casino brothel supper clubs in Dubai and hold hostage the patrons as collateral and as a secondary diversion to the real raid.
PHASE 4:
Kill everyone at the prisoner exchange, quietly raid the maximum security torture camp Angola 42 and leave with General Avinadav DeBuitléir alive. Kill all the hostages if there are any serious complications to the raid.
PHASE 5:
Flee over the border into Iran and board fast planes for the Wild West Indian Federation. Get DeBuitléir to the Hotel Olofsen in Haiti and negotiate his consolidation of leadership of the rebel armies in Hispaniola, supported by the Cubans, Iranians, Israelis and Trinidadian Special Forces of course.
And the music of the Monsters to Men begins to play.
So they piled into eight black and grey armored vehicles, four Type 2 Ambulances, three Golden Touch Splinter Vans the last a black Mustang Lancer. From his blackberry smartphone Nikholai activates the tracker a paid sympathizer has planted on the undercarriage of the prisoner transport. Enrooted to acquire DeBuitléir at Prison Fortress Angola 42.
The narrow, craggy desert road they drive down is highly susceptible to avalanches caused by stinger missiles. Periodic sandstorms make drone activity hard to coordinate.
The same networks that were good for getting people out of the country were still good for getting people in, and the same types of jobs where people employed the paperless and the undocumented, were still much the same before and after the great revolt. The yards and gardens, the dishwashers, the fruit pickers, and the migrant workers; the nannies, the maids, and the unskilled day laborers. So there were and always were places to hide in plain site from the Department of Homeland Security, there were jobs whites just wouldn’t do no matter what the state of emergency.
They arrived at safe houses scattered across the south west from a number of routes across the hinterland. Of the eighty dispatched, sixty four made it through. And once the Perchevney Bratva agreed to terms the Pararescuemen took position.
This couldn’t be a snatch grab load and go job. For one thing it was still quite unclear where Avinadav DeBuitléir even was precisely. There were no less than four hundred prison camps known to the resistance, and probably twice as many hidden abroad. That he was still in the country and in the state of Nevada was all that could be confirmed beyond the pale, though money was placed on the recently self-murdered man’s good data.
That was extracted from now quite cold and dead Laurence Simon.
Regardless, with the help of the Perchevney Bratva to grease the right wheels and serve as an intermediary, the plan b through z was for these brave Pararescuemen to infiltrate four major casino-brothel-supper clubs across Vegas and take hostages which would serve as the collateral for the swap ideally with a couple celebrity athletes and politicians patronizing them.
They would seize these “establishments of ill repute” simultaneously just as a swap was taking place, as insurance. Just in case the DHS had tricks, or the Bratva decided to sell off Adon.
“I’m not saying they come from a culture of rampant hostage takers and Chechen cowboys, but they do,” claimed Hachi and then she put the phone down.
A one-for-one prisoner exchange was the fruit she dangled. Adon for DeBuitléir. But the department of homeland security contact had for some reason declined. Officially. Because Adon was dead they claimed, but she insisted that he wasn’t. She had a courier bring them his bio samples, his lab work and a short film of him fighting a black bear. Waited a day. And still no remarks or offers.
A classic bait before switch rejected off hand. But her sources said that the department would come around.
So one elite combat team led by Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras was quietly integrated into the staff of the Bunga Bunga Club, named after the former Italian Prime Minister’s hooker and pool parties. And three more were set up on standby.
Once activated, each group would seize as many hostages as possible, barricade and fortify the restaurant doors and announce that if Avinadav DeBuitléir was not released they would execute all of everybody inside.
“It’s all going down right now as we speak,” Hachi told her father over the iridium and then put down the phone.
“I love watching all the quickly moving parts,” Perchevney states to his empty office.
The earth was ragged and the tarmac cracked. There was a white surrender flag idiosyncratically flying half-mast.
The valley was choked and barren and then gave way to a small airbase off the cross roads where there were twelve vehicles parked in some aggressive formation: eight black SUVs and four black jeeps and a dark blue windowless prison bus.
These were storm troopers without their usual costumes, bulky men with itchy trigger fingers partly melting, the ones with the DHS had on dark blue shirts and sub machine guns, the ones contracted from the Bratva; Postsoviet business casual, shorts with the latest banana clip Uzis.
They all onsy and twosy.
They stare each other down. There are eight black SUVs, the kind of rugged gas guzzling bullet proof apparatus the DHS generally prefers driving even amidst the OPEC total embargo, and the Bratva offered up just four wranglers and filled them with the kind of low rent hired contractors they can order online from the Russian equivalent of black water. And Adon was led out blind folded and in cuffs, and the government storm troopers led out a burly black man, also blind folded, also in cuffs.
And the deal was one for one.
The DHS Director Breria didn’t really care why exactly this particular African revolutionist was so interesting to the Perchevney Bratva, but they sure wanted Sebastian Adon and the codes to black out the eastern nuclear defense grid.
At the cost of almost anything. Because if he was indeed alive, he was one step higher on the chain than DeBuitléir. And with the defense grid down General Petreaus could storm the Soviet and put down the revolt once and for all.
Hachi had deliberately selected the hottest part of the day, when the visibility was the worst because a sand storm was blowing and the sun made everyone exhausted and quick to shoot. And she selected her entire entourage based on who didn’t speak a word of English or have any data about the stakes of this trade.
She also deliberately miscommunicated the particulars of the exchange, as per her father’s last written instructions.
One of Hachi’s big fellers set up a fold out titanium table and there he laid out a laminated head shot of Sebastian Adon and one of Avinadav DeBuitléir, and slid them over. So nothing could really be lost in lack of translation.
The DHS point man, some mid westerner took out a device and spoke into it turning his words into seamless Russian.
“Take off the hood,” the device says in low street Russian.
The Bratva goon killers amused at the device take out one of their own.
“You first, my nigger,” their device says back in low street English.
“Adon” is seated at one side of the table and “DeBuitléir” at the other. The hood of the DHS prisoner is pulled, but the man revealed is hardly the man matched in the photograph.
For one thing he’s Caucasian; Ah ha.
A standard operating procedure, but neither underling had been previously informed of the ploy. Fingers point guns are leveled.
Both point men carry red lines.
Phones that go off if last minute serious problems emerge. Like showing up to a prisoner exchange with fake prisoners.
The Russian red line rang first.
The DHS one shortly after.
The hooded body double engaged gamely nods.
“A heavily armed group of Mexicano gunmen just took over a Brazilian themed steak house-casino-brothel in District 4, Senator Bago is amongst the hostages. Their single demand is the release of Avinadav DeBuitléir and Sebastian Adon.”
“Inform the point person from the DHS that we will trade only real Adon for a real DeBuitléir and that we cannot negotiate the release of the hostages or stop what will shortly follow. We have zero relations with the wild terrorists that run Breuklyn Soviet.”
That was communicated via the devices.
And soon everyone was on edge, a bit of low grade yelling began. As the DHS men start pointing at hooded Adon, telling them to pull the hood. And the strong men, her least literate krepki mushik began yelling for them to pull DeBuitléirs hood, though the likelihood of genuine identification for a Russian to pick out a chornay even with a recent photo would be low.
Finally, the Russian strong man pulls the hood.
But alas, tricksters all. That was by no means Adon below that hood, nor was the black man in custody apparently Avinadav DeBuitléir. The sand storm was building in intensity. It stung them all across the face. It rushed and rippled sands through the valley, intruding on the airbase. And the confusion seemed to be growing indeed over who was to give over whom first.
The DHS red line rang again.
“Separatist gun men have taken over two more night clubs in Dubai and fourth one in INSERT. All demands are coming in the same. DeBuitléir and Adon walk.
“Please patch me through to Deputy Director of Homeland Security Theodore Breria, if you’d please,” says Hachi to her Mexican lady secretary.
Chapter 48
XXX, 2083ce
Above Breuklyn
Tak.
A floating fortress look something like a sports stadium and a vast drone bomber. There are five now hovering above Breuklyn and the Bronx.
Lesser Ariel Drones dart everywhere.
Rebel airmen in Idle Wild are arming up planes with whatever is left.
Gas is expected.
Back in Breuklyn Soviet the remaining high leadership Anya, Gold Bar Allamby, Pula, Medved and Mapfre are worried about this fleet of flying fortresses now hovering over the city state and rumors that a full mobilization of the UAS nation’s entire National Guard has occurred.
Disinformation is flying everywhere.
Also the corporate media keeps on repeat the:
“FOUR RESTAURANT CLUBS OF HOSTAGES TAKEN BY SEPARATISTS IN THE HEART OF DUBAI”.
Erza Pula goes over the Fire Station and calls up the First through the Tenth Citizens Armies to get ready to shell Manhattan into the ground and defend Bronx, Goddess and Breuklyn. In the Masjid St. Sophina under the Green Dome 8,000 Party of God Mujahedeen beat their chests. There are 20,000 more being called up and armed. The youth brigades of course.
Ysiad returns, swimming over the river with only one arm, thanks to yoga!
He offers to get everyone big time out of the Soviet before the major U.A.S gas attack begins via the enormous Ivorite submarines called black freighters which are loading up with Ivoryish refugees.
Some are running and hiding on these three mega bunker boats bound for Israel called Black Freighters. Some are staying fighting. The Ivories are always like this. Two Ivories, five organizations. Sky falls. Some pray some fight. Most run.
On the corporate news U.A.S. politicians are screaming about the hostage crisis in Dubai. Especially Senator Bago being one of the hostages. He’s next in line they say for Republican Speaker of the House.
In the middle of the crisis, a public housing complex in Los Angeles is blown up by the D.H.S. All four “restaurants” erupt in a fire fight as the DHS simultaneously storm them.
Obama shortly after orders the U.A.S. Armed Forces to retake the entire east coast and put an end to the general uprising based in in Breuklyn Soviet.
The Adon body double has a bomb in his chest which maims one Dmitry Khulushin and maims several dozen men from the department of homeland security.
It is revealed that Perchevney knows what Dmitry was plotting.
Tak.
Chapter 49
XXX, 2083ce
DUBAI
Four supper clubs had been taken over rapidly and with brute force.
The mostly gringo, Arab and Chinese colonist’s men and women and also children alike were spread eagle on the floor and booby trapped with explosives.
When the DHS black jacket commandos stormed everyone got hit with everything they were holding. No one was innocent of anything.
Watson, Trikhovitch, O’Domhnaill, Dbrisk, and Adon had boarded their captured prison bus and scoped up DeBuitléir under everyone’s noses dressed like DHS black jackets.
In the meantime, the six male hero antagonist-protagonists are pulled over for speeding and being suspicious by terra drones and cops, a shootout breaks out and Adon is shot eight times in the chest.
BLAM.BALEM.BLLLAAM.BLAM.BALAM.BALAM. Blam!! Blam again.
Fire fights enlarge and break out at all four “restaurants”. Raphael and several dozen others escape into the sewers holding people still hostage.
Hachi organizes escape routes via trucks sewers and town cars, and brings Yelizaveta to treat Adon.
The assault on Breuklyn begins with a full exchange of rockets over the East River. A small armada takes off from airbases all over town to attack the flying fortresses and drone squadrons buzz about.
Bam! Bam! Bam! BAM!
Bleed, bleed, and bleed all over the goddamn place for a woman or a cause, he thinks as he dies.
Cut to the wild car chase across a lost highway, the song called “Mr. Brightside” blaring in the back ground. Trikhovitch is driving the ambulance like bat out of hell while firing non-lethal ammunition from his hand gun out the window at three police cars and the Federal meta-chopper pursuing them.
The local border police, DHS irregulars, paramilitaries and regulars as well as U.A.S. Federals are firing perfectly real lethal ammunition back.
Sebastian Adon who has been shot multiple times in the chest is bleeding all over Mickhi Dbrisk who is attempting to stabilize him on the stretcher in the back.
O’Domhnaill who was clipped in the shoulder is for now bleeding controlled.
A vaguely bewildered, hooded and handcuffed Avinadav DeBuitléir is basically trying to figure out what is going on as it has all happened so quickly. He’s seat belted into the technical chair.
Nikholai Trikhovitch is speeding, while Mickhi is yelling for him to “change the fucking sound track!” and mentally preparing to pull over and load a grad rocket into the surface to air shoulder mounted missile launcher.
The raid had mostly gone according to plan.
But, mostly meant that Sebastian was bleeding to death from eight shots to the chest and abdomen.
And mostly meant that a missile induced avalanche had killed several carloads of Federals.
And mostly meant that all four restaurant takeovers had erupted in bloody, bloody gun battles into the streets of Dubai.
Mostly also meant that deadly force was now going to have to be used against representatives of the U.A.E. and U.A.S. governments who couldn’t all objectively be verified as the fabled 3 % who deserve to be killed in combat.
Mostly meant a serious violation of a ceasefire in a long running civil war and the quite possible displeasure of massive Postsoviet crime family.
These things, they happen quickly. Things fall apart.
“What a fucking mess Boichik!” yells Trikhovitch while turning on the Ambulance sirens while firing up a Newport standard.
“We’re making a stand brothers!” yells Trikhovitch.
Nikholai swerves the ambulance ninety degrees eliciting a screech from the brake lines and burst of dust cloud. Sebastian bangs his already bruised face into the equipment bin coughing up more red frothy death.
Nikholai is a veteran of the major conflicts in Breuklyn and Haiti and is a crack shot with the hardware.
He aims the grad launcher at the meta-chopper and it explodes in ring of fire.
He aims the remaining rockets at the law man fast cars bearing down on them.
Three fly cars and six UAS federals explode and horribly die.
Nikh may once have been a cop by vocation, but no one likes being shot at, even by your brothers in former trade. And he hadn’t been an officer half as long as he’d been a highway man.
Sebastian is dying, but slowly. He’s historically rather hard to kill. Dbrisk has two lines worth of Colloids flowing into him wide bore and the bleeding controlled with quick clot and multi-trauma dressings. Nikh surveys the carnage and tosses the grad launcher into the back of the bus and dials a number from his grey berry smart phone.
“Yeah, it’s done. We need you have your doctor meet us at the runway for extraction. Yeah, someone got clipped. O-Positive tovarish.”
Dbrisk pulls the hood off Avinadav DeBuitléir. Sebastian coughs up more blood. O’Domhnaill helps them back into the truck. DeBuitléir stares down the bandits.
He, once-overs um, twice or three times even.
He’d not seen this escapade coming. Had figured he’d be a far longer in Angola 42 camp captivity indefinitely.
A hard fast drive later, they’re all in the back of a small silver airplane getting ready to “fly towards a foreign”. After the ambush, the great escape in the back of the ambulance with Mr. Adon near death bleeding about like a stuck pig, they were met at the airport by several of Hachi’s men and a slim, blonde former Soviet woman. A Cuban trained surgeon named Dr. Yelizaveta Kay. She’s wearing a white lab coat and a green soldier’s cap. She doesn’t look amused. Not in the slightest.
She’s a registered U.A.S. veterinarian, but also a Cuban trained MD of tropical medicine and infectious disease.
On a make shift operating table set up in one of the hangers of this desolate retired airbase, Dr. Kay goes fishing for the bullets in Sebastian’s abdomen, having caused cavitation and damage well up into his gut. This is not the first bullet the young Ukrainian had pulled out of some wounded outlaw.
Not that she thinks Sebastian is a shtarker.
She knows he’s something far worse. She knows him to be a zealot not to fuck with; figuratively, tantrically, also medically. Capable of true blue terrorism written off in the rhetoric of some idealistic promise of human rights.
But kills are still kills to a healer like her.
She knows this because they were pen pals nearly ten years running allegedly based on the bale of letters she was handed last night by Ms. Yu.
The second she lays a hand on him she knows she’s breaking the terms of her contract yet again.
She’s touched his chest before once but it was all a dream. Even though ordered not to. Serfs fall in love. The name of the plane is the “Flicking Flame”. It was once registered to quasi-famous Bollywood film maker Nicholas Mapfre. Now it’s a ghost ship ready for exodus.
Adon wrenches in pain, she has Dbrisk sedate him with 100 mcgs of Fentanyl to keep him still. He’d lost a lot of blood in the rapid transit of their high speed getaway.
And they want everybody on that plane for an exodus in fifteen minutes.
“He’s going to die if he isn’t properly attended to,” she tells them cold and flat. She has no accent to speak of. Being shot is after a surgical disease when it all comes down to it.
One of Hachi’s former Soviet bag men points a burner casually at Dr. Yelizaveta Kay.
“Then you go with them blat,” he bark-commands in Ruus authoritatively.
The pretty young doctor doesn’t argue.
She puts a PICC line into Sebastian’s feral artery to compensate further for blood volume lost. She’s giving him back his own O-Positive blood, which the boys graciously provided her in sealed packets. But he’s in terrible shape, should be in a Hebrew themed hospital. The men load Sebastian onto the plane in a gurney and she goes with them, because she is essence is under contract with Hachi’s very dangerous father to do exactly whatever the fuck she is ordered to do, and has what one might call a special relationship with Mr. Adon long standing. There are several complicated loyalties being juggled about in this exchange that are certainly worth examining later.
The line is often blurred on what she owes Maya verses what she owes Perchevney and those things often overlap. In just four years her contract will be over and her father’s health secured.
Adon has a good deal of special relationships as he must, being so completely and utterly focused on the little war he’s spent about a decade waging, positioning pieces, making speeches with his hands and hazel eyes.
The Flickering Flame takes off under cover of sand storms and fading darkness around 04:03 am.
They’re flying to a Kurdish base in the Rojava, then taking an Israeli escorted cargo plane to Sinai where they can rendezvous with a black freighter nuclear submarine. Nikholai Trikhovitch tells the sexy blonde Soviet taking care of his friend. She looks unconcerned, unsurprised by their tricky zealot subterfuges.
She’s never been a big fan of Sebastian’s close friends and they’ve never really liked her either.
“Why have you rescued me sir?” asks DeBuitléir to Dbrisk.
“No need for sir, we all work for our money brother,” says Dbrisk.
This is a highly common colloquialism in the Breuklyn Soviet.
“It is our ambition to be of service to the people of Haiti and we’ve got a highly serious venture we aim to convince you to the take leadership of,” Dbrisk responds.
“Emma Solomon sends her fullest regard,” interjects Watson Entwissle.
Mickhi passes him a thick light grey leather binder containing the blueprint for Operation Marcus Garvey.
“Where are we ending up tomorrow tonight boys?” Dr. Yelizaveta Kay asks.
“We’re all going back to Africa eventually,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.
In the cockpit Nikholai Trikhovitch is lighting up yet another Newport.
Dr. Yelizaveta Perechenova shrugs. She is after all under a long term contract and has in the last hour violated a principal sub clause. The close quarters of the cabin fill with tobacco smoke, the men remain mostly quiet while Mr. Avinadav DeBuitléir reads through an operations guide positing the logistics necessary to topple the government of Haiti and liberate his long violated native land. The heart monitor beeps and an automated blood pressure cuff inflates and indicates that Adon is still alive. This is good, given the amount of data he’s carrying around in his head, and his place in the chain of command.
“For fuck sake, blat; put the fucking cigarette out Trikhovitch. I’m working here!” yells Dr. Yelizaveta Perechenova.
He obliges her. Only because his best friend Sebastian Adon once put a gun in his face and said, “my dying wish is that you follow that woman’s orders on my deathbed.” And it was shortly after that moment of relative calm when some loud computerized beeping indicates that a squadron of fully weaponized predator drones unleashed their payload of rockets directed against the airship Flickering Flame.
Chapter 50
XXX, 2083ce
Breuklyn Soviet
Back in Breuklyn Soviet the end seemed nigh. Sky Drone raids had begun and terra drones were massing for deployment via huge airships and landing choppers.
“The missle defense grid remains down,” Anya states devoid of sentimentality.
“They can just roll right in and kill everybody then,” Natasha explains to her mother nervously watching on Skype from Russian Federation.
“Hold on to your asses,” says Oleg Leondovich Medved to his commandos departing into the vast web of tunnels and bunkers systems built in preparation of the re-occupation.
Yet fatalistically no one high placed bought a seat on the Black Freighters. Not a single person except a couple hundred scared Ivoryish reform families and a couple thousand Russians with papers claiming to be Ivories. None of the Ultra-Orthodox budged.
They loaded out rifles and gas masks through.
And the air raid alarms went off shortly after. Gas was rolling through the streets. And people began choking and dying in their won fluids and filth, even ones that had attended the Sarin drills.
At Midnight the U.A.S Join Special Forces Operations Command orders the inevitable Attack on Breuklyn Soviet first with drones, then with incendiary bombs and finally with the gas. The nuclear defense grid is cut off and all fighting back must be done now by hand and on our turf alone.
Tens of thousands die in their homes from the Sarin type gas. A simultaneous attack takes place on all free eastern states.
Tens of thousands hide in make shift bunkers as mechanical drones and resistance fighters from all factions armed with assault weapons and homemade bombs cat and mouse tooth and nail; eye for microchip all of over town, position by position, district by district. Rocket crews begin firing fire bombs back over the water at Manhattan.
But almost everyone has been evacuated except a few sickos watching the repopulation called a “re-occupation”, from their high tower multiplexes.
Chapter 48
XXX, 2083ce
DUBAI
The low grade sputtering of air and space and moisture striking the hull makes an erythematic distraction from the moans of this dying rebel in front of me. At least he is no longer bleeding all over the place. I am already quite stained by him. I am sewing the port of the second arterial line into his right thigh when they yell back for me to secure myself; with quickness and immediacy.
“Incoming!” yells the pilot, the man who had introduced himself as Nikholai back at the derelict airstrip.
I buckle myself in adjacent to my critically injured patient. Sebastian Adon the famous Eastern-Western Rebel. Or, the cold blooded indiscriminate killer of woman and children. Sexual deviant and practitioner of black magic. Depending on whom you believe. I don’t have beliefs. I have a contract that explicitly prevents those.
And then something explodes right beside the plane and it pulsates and brutally shakes the whole cabin asunder.
Suddenly my blood pressure skyrockets from catecholamine release and it feels like we are falling. Like the pilot has totally lost control, and if I vaguely remember the past, which I mostly try not to anymore; then these men are better trained at driving ambulances than airships of any kind, and my ears; they go pop.
I smell smoke, but its tobacco smoke and I start cursing in Russian. And I’m annoyed that Nikholai the pilot is smoking again. Even in a shit show I’m working back here! As if there weren’t already enough good ways to die today.
SUKA BLAT!
Although now buckled in three ways adjacent from my patient who is tied four ways to a red long board barely lucid, we all are viciously rocked about. There are periodic shock waves which send shudders through the plane, and the pressure bursts behind us rattle through the hull each time the plane ejects sensor flack detonating the rockets fired at us midair before they hit us.
Each time a rocket explodes it rattles the airship which is making my work harder, the work of keeping this subversive alive.
Adon. His name means very little to me sentimentally, now.
I met him again two days ago, but I knew him when we were younger allegedly. And so says a large bale of letters given to me last night by my boss’s daughter Hachi. Alexandr Perchevney told me that he’s connected to one of the radical separatist movements back east and that he’s now entered into some agreement with them. Alexandr Perchevney r told me that he’s worth a good deal to us alive, but I don’t need to know so much about him. Alexandr Perchevney says save and I save he says heal and I heal, he says fly and I get on the plane. And it will be that way for at least eight more years until I pay off my debt to the Bratva.
I was briefed only partly as to who he is and was informed only ten minutes prior to their tumultuous arrival that he had been shot several times in the chest performing a messy little job for my employer. Some kind of prisoner exchange. My medical opinion had been that if they cared for his outcome it would have done us all well not to be flying anywhere, and then of course the federal authorities stormed our base shot just about everybody and it was all very much out of my hands from that point out.
The three other men on the flight are in various states of hiding panic. The two in the cockpit are yelling at each other about the drones that are firing on us. That there are three of them bearing down us, or so claimed the muscular black copilot with ted red locks wrapped up in a black cap tam.
The prisoner with dark black skin and black eyes is strapped in the cabin with me. He’s reading a document in a leather binder, periodically he looks up to see what I’m doing.
Lifesaving interventions.
The bullets are still deep inside Adon so there isn’t anything we can do outside an O.R. definitively. Except hemorrhage control and reperfusion with his own blood via the central line in his femoral artery. And maintaining the chest tube keeping the air and blood from collapsing his lungs. And digging out the bullets with a Cuban magnografter. All that fine science put to work.
“Put the cigarette out tovarish pilot!” I yell. And they ignore me.
BLAT! The plane is flying rather fucking low. I can see out the window in their efforts to evade the drones we must be only several dozen meters above the desert floor. From what I know about aviation and the Mexican border, which is only a little; but that once we fly nine clicks south all manned craft will break off pursuit because the Chicano Narco-gangs have acquired SAM systems to take them down.
Presumably us too. But the drones will keep coming until we go down. But who knows. From that I gather someone wants this chornay prisoner pretty bad. Because otherwise they’d just have shot our plane down and not be attempting to disable it.
“They must want you back pretty bad black man,” I tell him in between running my protocols.
“Me or your patient,” he says with a smirk.
“I’m nobody,” he says.
“Nobody’s nobody to somebody,” I say. But that Russian idiom doesn’t translate.
Another several shock waves hit the compartment. The prisoner doesn’t seem alarmed, or stop reading. And then there’s what sounds like hard rain hitting us, the rattattat of burst machine gun fire and it rips apart the left wing.
And the plane begins to fall.
As the plane goes down, I don’t think so much about it. I will not say I am unafraid, but I am certain that this is not how we are meant to die. Although knowing what I know of both physics and biology, there is reason to suspect death is quite quickly encroaching.
The drones finally took the plane down.
And we careen out of control in a wild plummet of smoke and flame falling toward the red desert floor on the Mexican side of the border. There is all this shouting the men are doing. It is needless yelling. They hadn’t properly gauged the full capability of their adversaries.
You can’t just steal a political prisoner these days and hope to fly off over the border to freedom. This is the future after all!
Pause. The men keep yelling. My blonde hair is tied up under my green military cap and there is blood on my white medical coat and it’s the blood of my patient, who was also once my longstanding lover, fine I’ll admit it, who is also the accused terrorist named Sebastian Adon. Who many think are dead and soon might be again. This time with more permanence. And less than an hour ago he was shot four times in the chest and stomach and I’m not sure I can save him. And this plane is going down fast.
Observing my actions and reaction to our collective doom is the rescued prisoner. Still quit calm through all the smoke and flashing and fire and yelling.
As we free fall toward the desert and all these impending signals of death are lighting up and beeping and I feel as though if they had only listened to me earlier on, we’d all not be in this situation.
And I was trained in Cuba so I have my life saving interventions far beyond the level of Western medicine and in all this chaos, all this fubar muck and the men in the pilot seats are loudly deliberating whether to jump and jettison, or try and land this wreck in the rocky desert sands. I was almost certain I could save Sebastian Adon and then the plane began to come apart when hit innumerable times with machine gun fire from those mechanized drones in pursuit.
I begin to recall a bit about these men I will perhaps soon share a flaming meteorite coffin ship demise with. Not via a micro briefing, but a Purim dinner party years ago in Breuklyn did I meet them. Not sure how that escaped me. The things you remember as death approaches.
And the former police man Nikholai Trikhovitch with his dark complexion and black suit is saying he’s going to try and emergency land the damaged airship and Mickhi Dbrisk the muscular dreadlocked Jamaican with his dreads tied up in a black Tam cap is saying we all need to parajump and the dark skinned political prisoner they just broke out an hour ago in a fire fight high way man ambush has black on black eyes and he doesn’t argue, but he urges them to pick quick. And I yell in Russian which I know the Jamaican and the former cop speak.
“I’m not trained for this and Sebastian is highly unstable!”
And it was a mostly good plan to steal this man in the middle of a prisoner exchange. It was well thought out and well-funded and these four men I’m flying with all possess exceptional abilities to survive nearly anything. And the prisoner had disappeared years ago and no one knew if he was even still alive, and according to the national press Adon had been confirmed dead three years ago. Confirmed dead and body recovered in that hostage crisis near Time Square. And this former cop has nothing to live for since he lost his wife, and me, well I’m someone’s property. I belong to the Russian Crime family that paid for my education. A house doctor for the Perchevney Bratva.
So if this plane goes down it’s a skeleton crew of the already and dead and disappeared.
But Mickhi Dbrisk, the bad man Jamaican paramedic has a rapid change of heart.
He tells Nikholai, “I’m taking control.”
“Dr. Perechenova please make sure Adon is completely secured,” he yells back at me.
Because he has two kids and a third on the way and he isn’t ready to die. And even if we’re all hard to kill, even if on this plane are four of most wanted human rights activists, or hardened terrorists depending on who’s side you’re on or what briefings you’ve read. Even if all of us have some mental training that lets us see further ahead and much further behind.
Mickhi and I have something to live for. He’s the father of three. And I have an old man that needs me to stay working so he gets the care and help he needs.
So I stay strapped in holding the hand of Sebastian Adon who’s not in very good shape. And Mickhi Dbrisk sets up the airship controls, and Trikhovitch watches the desert floor get closer and closer and beeping of sensors and smell of smoke increases. And the prisoner looks at me with black on black eyes.
And as death closes in on us all I achieve total recall of the past ten years. And I place my hand on Sebastian’s chest and the bullets pop out and his abdomen closes and bleeding stops. And the prisoner with black eyes grins at me.
And in the face of death, I wink. It’s been a wild ride.
Chapter 51
XXX, 2083ce
DUBAI
Flames and smoke and carnage. The hull is a crumpled metal skeleton.
“We don’t have to try walk to Haiti, but we cannot stay here,” says Mickhi Dbrisk. And the survivors quickly pick each other up and grab what is left and portable.
I look over the hull mangled massacre of steel and siding that once was Mr. Haske’s private plane. I look over Sebastian Adon unconscious and wrapped up in blankets on a carry stretcher that these three men will soon have to schlep several clicks to the east where we will wait in some gully until someone can come get us.
The drones are the least of my concern and that is not because we have a means to knock them out the sky, it is because I am more concerned about various thing I remember.
Amongst them that this famous terrorist is my husband under Ivoryish law. Freedom fight rather since he’s never killed anyone. Or has he. The fog over my past didn’t lift in one burst. It came back right before I…and I throw the bullets I’m clutching into the red sands.
And then in the sky the red and blue parachutes appear and we know we are rescued. In the skies above us are nearly forty four parachutists descending upon our position from the Brigade Cinqo de Mayo all 44 Bolvarians Hachi had helped smuggle out of town and over the border and back into the skies.
Columbian fast planes are right behind them. And over the radio we here that the Cubans are flying in low with Med-EVAC choppers and all of us will be Haiti by nightfall.
Atrocity, resistance and historic defense of the free eastern states goes on all night and into the day break of morning.
The Bronx Bombers bring down a flying fortress by ramming 747’s into it from Idlewild Airbase. A second flying fortress goes down the same way over Breuklyn shortly after.
In vast bunkers below the Masjid St. Sophina mujahedeen guard a pregnant woman in her late teens in a plush and supportive suite. She has been in a coma for 1,001 nights, the duration of the three grouped killings and four full strange moons.
The name of this woman is Candidate One, an identical twin of Emma Solomon.
News arrives via People’s Television satellite communications and the Fire Station that the survivors of the “99th Special Operations Task Force”, that is to say Dbrisk, O’Domhnaill, and Trikhovitch, have successfully shot their way out of Las Vegas with Adon, DeBuitléir, Entwissle and a Ukrainian physician; crash landed in Mexico; hoofed it thirty miles under cover of darkness to an extraction point; and were retrieved by the survivors of the elite Pararescuemen detachment the Bolivarian Hot Shots of the Cinqo de Mayo Brigade, led by Raphael Ernesto Contreras. And now sixty four Pararescuemen, six rebels and the Ukrainian doctor are on Cuban fast copters headed straight for Haiti.
But, Detroit Soviet no longer exists and hand full of others took major-major bloody hits.
And that despite heavy hits and overwhelming casualties. The Free States of Boston, Newark, ATL, Miami, Bronx, Goddess and Breuklyn along with virtually all of the others have held out against the many armies of General Lance Petreaus. We all tip the bottle for the Detroit Soviet, where over a million citizens perished.
At dawn it was confirmed by Rabbi Akiva Tatz, Imam Muhammad Bahallulah, and Babashanti Allistone that the mother of the messiah in the sub bunkers below Masjid St. Sophina has given birth to two bouncing auspicious babies, twins. A girl and a boy, one noire one blan.
And now the escapees are less than one hours estimated flight time out from Cange Outpost says the Fire Station. With them alive and well is the liberated Commander of the Haitian–Emergency-Group. None other than Mr. Avinadav DeBuitléir. With them, and bleeding internally shot eight times and just barely alive is Sebastian Adon.
One certainly tense wrenching and fairly bloody hour later.
Amid a thunder of chopper blades, the mountain forest shudders. There are shouts from the night watch that the Commandos have arrived! Flying out of Mexico a convoy of three Cuban Medevac choppers zipped across the Southwestern desert just four hours prior and have touched down at the make shift airbase four kilometers from Mirabelles Medical Outpost.
They radioed ahead and said a member of the rebel leadership had been critically injured in the fire fight.
Paramedics from the Haitian-Emergency-Group accompanied by a physician from Zamni Lasante medevac Sebastian Adon back to Cange Medical Outpost along with Dr. Yelizaveta Kay. He is by then suffering from hemorrhagic shock the etiology being eight small round penetrating wounds to Left lower abdomen. For two nerve wracking hours Dr. Yelizaveta Kay has performed a range of medical interventions to keep him alive including using a snatched side arm to attempt to convince Commander Nikholai Trikhovitch to land the plane.
She clutched his bloody hand after all that could be done bio-medically seemed to only buy time; bags of colloids, the shock position, quick-clot packed into his open wound. He was bleeding inside himself. She was never helpless on the flying fortress crossing the Gulf she employed Cuban tricks, eastern tricks and Voodoo magic and biomedicine to keep him alive.
At some point Adon whispered something to her. She had turned Soviet winter pale and wiped out memories flooded back to her. Trading away ten years of life to forget him.
Dr. Emile Cange the chief physician of the Haitian-Emergency-Group and a founder of Zamni Lasante met the dying Mr. Adon at landing field. For eight more nerve wracking hours, Dr. Cange assisted by Dr. Yelizaveta Kay, elite Cuban trauma surgeons and their Haitian paramedic staff worked to save the pale officer’s life.
She finally wanders out of the medical bunker to find Adon’s tovarish and closest comrade puffing away on a menthol cigarette. She’s never forgotten just how hot it gets down here. She lived in Cuba for three years studying medicine.
“So you love him again do you?” Nikholai asks Yelizaveta.
She shrugs indifferently.
“He’s been through lot. Birdy, you, and then Natasha.”
“But so have we all. He’s a troublesome man to have love you.”
“What did he whisper to you back there on the plane,” asks Trikhovitch.
She thinks about how to phrase her white lie.
“He begged my forgiveness and asked me to remember him,” says Dr. Kay.
“Sebastian never asks forgiveness for things he cannot control.”
“Believe what you want. I’ll have you know I’ve seen him beg on his knees more than twice. He was sorry I’m being hustled off to Africa when I have a sick father in Switzerland to worry about.”
Nikholai wonders how much Yelizaveta remembers. Or if Sebastian knows Natasha is very much alive back in Breuklyn Soviet. There hadn’t been time to talk heart shop.
“All he said was forgive me.”
That wasn’t true at all. He’d said another foolish thing about their past and completely failed attempts at their past love.
“Africa? You aren’t going in there. Standing Orders say no women in the war zone.” That was passed in close vote of the general membership at the last Club Congress. A hard vote and contentious issue since most of the leadership and many of the best fighters the Club has are women.
Yelizaveta just smirks, blood on her white lab coat, her hair a bit of a mess. She’s tells him to go fuck himself as her eyes flash grey, then back to gold.
Dr. Kay of course has the option to return to the U.A.S., but will chose to stay with her old friends and estranged associates for reasons not yet to be known. The contract is transferable. Once Adon is stabilized and once DeBuitléir is sold on the plan and committed they will board a massive black freighter in the city of Port-au-Rebel, once called Port Au Prince and arrive several weeks later in the Persian Gulf.
And Adon will break and bend rules for her like usual.
Yelizaveta knows this because Maya has told her it would come to pass as it was written in the New Social Gospel.
It will take a month to get Sebastian back to relative health and ready for travel to Sinai Peninsula. He’s in good hands on the Island nation who’s slave revolt two hundred years prior gave birth to the militant human rights ideology that the club came to fully embrace.
In the meantime. Sixty three rebel Free States resist union. A new ceasefire holds. And the nuclear option has been restored.
Most importantly. The candidate is in her third trimester.
Alexandr Perchevney informs his third daughter Hachi by 5am Las Vegas time, eight days after the single engine TELSA-Galati Airship named the Flickering Flame arrived safely in Haiti, that the arms and ‘assorted other collateral’ would be making its way by convoy to the Basis-Wadi-Faran as per plan sometime the following week.
“And where is Dr. Perechenova currently?” he asks.
“She is attending to Sebastian Adon who was shot several times during the liberation of Mr. DeBuitléir. They are in Haiti.”
“Well then. They can keep her.”
“She’s been dead to you a long time father.”
“Well I doubt she even remembers.”
“Well you can always wake her up if it seems strategic.”
“Of course. Wake her up right next to that sleeping hero who so loves her.”
“He is incredibly hard to kill.”
“He’s more interesting and useful alive really.”
“Why are we doing this again? Helping these people I mean” asks Perchevney to his daughter Hachi in Bulgarian.
“For the money papa,” she responds.
But Perchevney is one of the richest men on earth. And it isn’t about the money at all because sometimes, just sometimes you can’t buy revenge. You have to work hard for it just like everyone else.
That wasn’t just a doctor for hire after all that they borrowed. That was his first daughter Yelizaveta. Quite literally he now had skin, flesh? In the game, even if she is dead to him already emotionally.
Even if she doesn’t quite viscerally remember a day of her life before Cuba.
Whatever money cannot buy spiritually, it sure can buy enough sex, weapons or the high science to accomplish nearly anything else.
Chapter 52
XXX, 2083ce
Haiti
In early XXX, once called the month of September, after just a month recuperating in the nation of Cuba; Adon, Dr. Kay, Dr. Emile Cange, and Watson Entwissle travel by jeep to Port-Au-Prince under the invitation and protection of Health Minister Geraldine Capois of the Lavalas Party; Haiti’s predominant political organization. Minister Geraldine Capois and her younger brother the Minister of Public Emergency Tiputti Capois are now serving on the Cabinet of current government led by the ageing rebel leader elected now for the fourth time Jean Bertrand Aristide. Tiputti and Geraldine are dear old friends of Sebastian and Yelizaveta having served with them both five years prior in the Haitian-Emergency-Group guerrilla medical column before, during and after the Great Revolt.
It has been rumored before and now clamor confirmed in the U.A.S. Corporate Press that he is in fact not dead, at all.
Sebastian is now a very, very wanted man in the U.A.S. But he couldn’t have picked a safer island to hide on. The Breuklyn Soviet and other sixty two entities in the eastern confederacy are riddled with assassins, snitches and spies. In Haiti he and she might be the only blans in a hundred miles, but having bled for the Haitian people in innumerous ways, both bear the Pin of Palmares which lets all know on whose side they stand.
Shortly after watching a beautiful Caribe sunset from a sprawling balcony at the Haitian People’s Medical College in the mountain heights above the city in an area once called Kenscoff, now called Commune Ami-de-Peuble; Watson, Sebastian, Yelizaveta and Dr. Emile Cange drive their black open side Jeep down Rue De Toussaint L’Ouvature, the newly built modern highway into the Capital with its solar powered street lamps, shade embankments, and fluttering flag canopies of blue and red.
This is Sebastian’s first night out since he was shot in the exodus. He is wearing a white linen suit which matches Yelizaveta’s white linen dress. Paramedic Watson Entwissle, who is an officer of high rank in the Haitian Defense Forces on top of his affiliation with the Breuklyn Otriad, is wearing the olive green uniform of the national service with a simple pin of his rank, that of a Captain on the left lapel, the flag of Palmares on his right arm, the palm tree surrounded by cannons and flags and the tree of life. Dr. Emile Cange is in business causal having met so many world leaders over the past four decades it is rarely any cause for fancy.
Dr. Cange who painstakingly helped vastly expand the vast multi-national Parastate medical apparatus known as “Partners in Health” is never tired or will ever be retired. What a great man named Paul Farmer once began in the village of Cange so many years ago with the martyrs Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, Thomas J. White, and Dr. Jim Yong Kim is now providing a “preferential option for the poor in Healthcare” in over sixty four nations worldwide.
He is a dear old comrade to Adon though abhors violence of all kinds. Yelizaveta Kay did her residency alongside him at the HUEH, Port-Au-Prince General Hospital at the height of the Great Revolt. Even when former Present a Second time for Life Jean-Claude Duvalier ordered the massacre of all blan on the island as final desperate measure, even after the second quake, the hunger strikes, and the flooding she stayed with Emile serving the medical needs of the Haitian people. That’s how she earned her pin.
The jeep’s headlights cut through night, but it isn’t as bad as the old days. There are street lights now, also electricity and sanitation. Watson is driving, though Farmer knows the roads best, most of Watson’s live was spent in the Breuklyn Soviet until he and Adon returned five years ago to enlist in the ranks of the uprising led by Aristede, Lavalas, and the Haitian peasantry against the Dictator Jean Claude Duvalier; the Brazilians, U.A.S., and Nepalese Occupational Authorities, as well as the paramilitary forces of the Ruus, Columbian, Mexican, Dominikani drug cartels. The incomplete disorder they are here to finish and bring to level.
They arrive at the fortified gates of newly renovated Hotel Olofsen at 8pm on the dot. Its white wooden gingerbread spires, its walkways draped with voodoo flags, its epic deck with view of half the city; this is where the uprising essentially began. Armed guards in black suits look them over and quickly salute Captain Entwissle, though they recognize Farmer’s face immediately and Kay shortly after and salute them too. Adon holds the rank of Staff Sargent in the Otriad, but abhors wearing uniforms unless he has to.
They all salute back; such a silly ritual thinks Dr. Emile Cange.
From the table they are seated at one can take in the full majesty of the island capital, see what has been accomplished in the years since the temblor killed 300,000 and reduced the place to its very foundations.
They can see Independence Day preparations underway across the city.
“What you’re proposing is not possible to accomplish so fast if you do not allow the use of lethal force against the enemy,” states DeBuitléir.
They all meditate on that, each thinking of the many thousands slain so far in the previous seven years of the revolt.
“Maya proclaims that it is,” Adon finally counters.
“It is,” she declares, “but of course not without incredible courage and risk.”
He looks into the ginger bread horizon.
“And why should I feel alright signing off my nation’s resources to Russian mobsters, and northern radicals, put myself in the debt of the Israelis and Persians, and allow thousands of armed men to run lose in my country? I feel as though you already know what I will say about your contract and operation Marcus Garvey as you call it.”
“Don’t forget about the Cubans and the Dominicans, they want their pieces too,” says Maya Sorieya Emma Solomon.
The real fucking Maya. Not the candidate brought back and protected because she was shot so many times in the Millennium raid she could never bear the promised ones again.
“Blessing to you on the birth of your children by proxy in Breuklyn Soviet,” says Dr. Emile Cange bowing his head to the two foremost leaders of the revolution; DeBuitléir and Solomon.
“Thank you brother,” Avinadav says, “peace be unto you.”
“Let us read together the communique,” states Maya, “as we used to in the days before.”
Communique 02
[Observances of the January 1st Movement]
Please remove the battery from your phone and read this pamphlet aloud with a small group.
Distributed 1 January, 2015, 5775
- We all have a duty to act.
- In our hearts,
- We know that people should not live as they do.
- Humanity was born free and equal,
- Yet, across this earth lies broken,
- Dying hungry and in chains.
- It is our duty to act that unites us.
- To act in association for these promised rights.
- Medicine, Education, and Emancipatory Development;
- Are our primary tools against injustice.
- We promise to wield these tools on the front lines of suffering
- We will build the world we wish to see.
- Seed by Seed.
- Brick by Brick.
- We carry the torches of the change makers who fell before us.
- Fighting boldly for an idea.
- That we were born free woman and men.
- That we will never surrender.
- That we will never accept anything short of full freedom.
- Our numbers are man and each day multiply.
- In the face of mounting injustices.
- For while fighting isolated and in darkness,
- We have become resourceful.
- As realization spreads that this is not how we must live.
- We stand ready to defend
- The Impoverished.
- The Wretched.
- The Victimized.
- The Enslaved.
- We are prepared to struggle as long as we must.
- Generation by Generation.
- Until every last man, woman and child is also free.
- In unity there is great strength.
- Because I love my brothers and my sisters,
- My mother and my father,
- My children, my friends, my comrades
- And also the suffering stranger
- This is why I have joined the Association
- And it’s Partisans,
- Placed myself on the side of humanity,
- And enlisted in the Resistance.
- Now that my eyes are open,
- I will leave no person behind the lines of war and poverty.
- I will live my life as friend of the people.
- I will never look away from the truth.
Resistance, Development, Consciousness and Emancipation in the 21st Century begins with our boldness. Our complete rejection of the atrocities and structural violence forced upon us by the world system.
- Respect your body and mind. We respect the fundamental power of teaching and learning, popular education as a means to advance the condition of our collective human people. Conscious, critical thinking is the most powerful weapon we have. Our minds and our ability to utilize them in the process of the liberation struggle and beyond is the opening through which emancipation takes the form of mass awakening.
We can only be kept as slaves if we allow our consciousness to be subsumed by lies, stress, brutality and oppression forced upon us to keep us divided, working and weak.
We don’t put poison in our body. We don’t eat disgusting and unhealthy things. We don’t take drugs that don’t have an overt medical purpose for a chronic condition. We abstain from alcohol and cigarettes whenever possible. Alcohol depresses your central nervous system and lowers your consciousness for thirty days. Tobacco smoke is one of the most holistically unhealthy things you can put in your body. Avoid over consumption. We engage in regular physical activity and meditation. We dance, run, play, sing and enjoy our lives. Above all we avoid television; as well as violent pornography and video games by every means necessary. These things pollute us and prevent us from seeing the world as it really is.
- Don’t believe the lies about false consciousness and identity. Other than biological function, sexual orientation and the physical presence of your sex organs all other aspects of identity; gender, race, class, caste and especially your proscribed religion and your assigned nationality were constructed specifically to divide and exploit you. We continuously urge all people to refrain from acts of organized violence driven by imaginary, unseen entities they cannot see or invisible lines across territories put there to control your movements, harvest your taxes and complete exploit you.
All free thinking, good people are welcome in this movement. There is no discrimination to involvement as long as the observances are strictly upheld. No identity politics. No identity based organizing, this is a movement for achieving human rights and needs; securing environmental sustainability on this earth and achieving economic equity. Securing for all people Maslow’s needs & the United Nation’s codified Human Rights via the 3 pillars of human development; these are our movement’s ends.
We respect and enhance the power of indigenous knowledge and do our work on the basis of indigenous need. We need to keep engaging the people in their own liberation. We need to make the raising of consciousness and the enhancement of capability the most integral aspect both the resistance and the Great Revolt.
- We lead with our deeds. We have no centralized leadership. We have no titles or chains of command, except when necessary to designate operational function. It is better to enter the movement with your own reorganized group, party association, union, religious or social group, chapter, detachment, otriad or cell. It is best to come to the table alongside your family and friends.
- We save lives, we don’t ever take them. No killing, no harming or injuring people; no weapons, no violence, no vandalism no destruction of property. Any who kill or any who destroy property [that is ours by having been paid for it with our work and taxes] is immediately disqualified from this social movement. Nothing on earth pleases then oligarchy more than violence for it lowers human consciousness to the most animal level. They have and always will attempt to provoke a violent response from the resistance.
- We don’t ever underestimate our enemy. Our enemies means of surveillance and widespread application of torture and violence in particular. Their control of linguistics, history, and science. Their vast resources and their willingness to kill to protect them. No cell phones at meetings, batteries out. No transmission of sensitive materials over computers. No rosters or taking attendance. Don’t say loud and unnecessary things in cars, homes or public places. We believe in unity and only trust what we see with our own eyes. We submit every activity or endeavor to randomized control trials, we advocate and replicate things proven to work in three or more places. Do not allow the oligarchy to define the aims and aspirations of the movement. Do not allow traitors, spies and government agitators to breach your security. Do not make it easy for them to kill, imprison, harass and disappear members and sympathizers of the movement.
- [Besides killing people or destroying property]; EVERY AND ANY OTHER tactic may be actively deployed against the 206 national oligarchic collectives and their exploitative agents.
Members of the J1 Movement are strictly committed to militant nonviolence. Violence is counter to human rights. Counter to consciousness and proven to escalate all violations of rights when implemented. Members are completely prohibited from taking human lives or destroying property. Those we fight are monsters and we must refuse to degrade our noble struggle by succumbing to their vile methods.
Via sustained and strategic militant nonviolence and supply side resistance we shall hit them in their pockets. It is the only thing they care about. Hit their assets; their financial architecture; their banking systems; their media communications; their elite institutions; their leisure assets; their advertising and control systems; their supply chains; their work sites, the commercial centers of major cities; especially anything that encourages labor exploitation, slavery and human rights violations at the periphery. Prevent goods, commodities and energy resources to be easily carried back to the 26 nations of the global economic core.
- 7. Control over the means of development is the pathway to our freedom. The Resistance is founded on the world we build in front of us not upon the ashes of the Oligarchy. We are a movement founded on life and vibrancy. We are a teaching movement. We are a healing movement. A school and hospital building movement. A movement that places emancipatory development as the highest priority to activities and operations. We are therefore a teach 3.5 billion people how to fish movement. We are based among the people in all 206 national plantations that suffer most under the iron heel of oligarchy. The J1 Movement and those that support it believe the best offensive against corrupt rule is to demonstrate viable functional alternatives. The duty of each state is provide for needs, rights and human development. The illegitimacy of our oppressors is based upon the notion they protect us.
Vast abuses in all 206 plantation states demonstrate that these governments are wholly illegitimate. Rather than fight states we shall construct parallel ones and give our people true alternatives to bondage.
- Solidarity forever. Every single other human is your sister and your brother, as an injury to one is an injury to all; this movement and all its sympathizers, brigades, detachments, party groups, cells and affiliated sister groupings must keep the resistance disciplined and in the field until all 206 national oligarchies are completely defeated. Generation by generation; as long as this war must continue. Not one woman, man or child is to be left behind the lines.
If you sympathize with and seek to actively support the general aims & objectives of the J1 Movement; endorse this pamphlet and pass it along to another group. Do not await reinforcements or look for further direction. Engage in critical consciousness building, emancipatory development and [or] resistance planning operations in your immediate community.
You, your working group and your partisans must sustain the struggle as long as necessary until reinforcements are available. Do not take lives, do not take prisoners. We salute you in advance for your heroism.
“That very well written, who wrote it?” Emile Cange asks.
Emma Solomon smiles and turns to Avinadav and says, “Yalla.”
Arabic or Hebrew for, let’s go. With General Obenson Etienne, Anya Drovtich and Hachi Perchevney on the holo-phone; Adon witnessed DeBuitléir and Solomon sign the declaration of war on the government and occupational forces of Haiti on behalf of Breuklyn Soviet.
It was immediately via Tiputti Capois, Watson Entwissle and Dr. Emile Cange endorsed by the Free Republican Forces of Ayiti-D.R and shortly after all of the Wild West Indian Federation, submitted to BRICS, ALBA and CARICOM.
It had looked like rain before but right now over Port Au Prince now, it looks beautiful and clear. But that can change in the blink of an eye.
Chapter 53
XXX, 2083ce
Haiti
A year before the infamous jail break they had once sought out a man in fading years who wished to perform one more glorious act. The Commandant was a well-traveled salesman of death, when they finally caught up to him he was well within the wilderness of place called Chain de la Sella.
He’d been running from himself again. They found him using satellite tracking, but still needed to hire a native to hunt him into the Island’s desolate mountain heights of mountains beyond mountains. Now they were up on the slopes of Pic de Macaya, the highest point on the southern seaboard.
Watson Entwissle and Sebastian Adon, humping Israeli military frame packs led by a native boy on their goude coin named Adme, a fearless young Haitian.
They walk up on his ‘89’ around twilight. He draws his iron on them.
“Who the fuck are you? Sand Gypsy bandits?” asks the Commandant Mikhail Mastrovitch, a Chechen War Vet and Special Forces Pararescueman with a fully loaded sholem.
And then he recognizes Adon, his old student whom he has not seen in seven whole years. Believed to be dead by all.
He’s got salt and pepper hair that was once according to photographs curly blonde.
“We are here to buy you, and cook dinner,” states Adon.
“Buy me dinner where exactly? This is Desert ducking Island.”
“Buying you is the objective, the dinner is complementary,” says Watson.
Adme in his native language Haitian Créole says something unintelligible.
“I don’t speak yer native language cousin,” bellows the Commandant.
“I said these are not white men to trifle with,” the boy responds.
“He’s quite right,” explains Watson, even though he isn’t all that white.
There is a desperate silence in the cold, northern air of this place. No light besides the setting sun on the outskirts of civilization.
As Sebastian Adon prepares a kosher dinner for the four of them of marinated lamb, yams and pilaf, Mikhail Mastrovitch gazes off into the abyss looking for a way to absolve himself of a highly militant and at least partially wasted life. Watson Entwissle in a dark black thermal pea coat explains the particulars. Of which there were many. Mikhail stares off into the wilderness taking it in so it seems. Watson notes that the mountains here remind him of his home Black Mountain back on Haitian Island, but certainly much colder. He also deliberates internally why his partner Adon trusts this wild aging mercenary or that Dominikani bagman that told them where he was hiding.
“Well how much combat experience to these men have?” Mikhail asks.
“Irregular amounts,” states Sebastian.
“Almost none,” purposefully lies Watson Entwissle.
“Cousin, these days no one has none,” Mikhail Mastrovitch retorts.
Watson remembers the three day battle for Kenscoff where the Lavalas peasant militia battled the Brazilian and Nepalese forces to a near standstill. And the epic mechanized surprise attack the Haitian-Emergency-Group engaged in aided by an airborne regiment of the Breuklyn Otriad. The world hadn’t seen asymmetrical warfare like that since the Israeli land grabs of 48, ‘56, and ’67. Also ‘82, ’05, ’12 and also ’13 on behalf of the Canaanites fighting back.
“Well I’d say we’re light on our feet,” says Adon.
Sebastian Adon thinks briefly of the amount of times he and Watson have cut open sex traffickers and slavers in the fortified places they thought they could hide over the past few years.
“Well I’m glad he’s so optimistic,” smirks Watson.
“How many men did you say?” inquired Mikhail Mastrovitch.
“Right now just fewer than 2,000 committed.”
“All with guns and equipment?”
“About that pending. Actually all they have at this point is strong will and green money,” lies Watson.
“So you don’t yet have a means to even wage yer war?”
“Let me interject,” states Watson Entwissle, “our money is very, very green money. We’ll pay you handsomely to train this little battalion. And they don’t have to be able to win a land war in East Asia neither. They’re off to neutralize a marauding band of rapist brigands with pickup trucks and Kalashnikovs that won’t be but three times their number.”
“So says yer intell.”
“So says the Israeli & Cuban intell too. And that cousin is damn good intell,” cuts in Sebastian.
“You can outfit a force this size quickly?” Mikhail Mastrovitch says munching, noshing really on a cigar.
“We can have the whole battalion on the Isle of Youth by the end of the year, outfitted and armed.”
“Isle of Youth? In Cuba?”
“We’ve been offered a bunker facility by the Cubans and possible air support pending survival by the Israelis. And the administration of our own government has pledged a small sum in a round-about way.”
“Are you guys U.A.S. or Confederates?” Mikhail Mastrovitch asks.
This is serious question these days as the Second Civil War looks so inevitable, much of the ex-pat population is in general sympathy with the Autonomous Movement and the Soviet Confederation, but Mr. Mastrovitch holds several colors of passport.
“Let’s just say we all voted Obama only in the last two elections,” says Sebastian Adon.
The little Indian has his hand out for green backs. Watson Entwissle pays him. Communicates in hand-sign the boy can stay for dinner if he’d like. And everyone’s hungry who climbs mountains so the boy expediently digs in.
“How long do you expect your battalion to drill for?”
“Three to six months. Then three columns organized by ethnicity will proceed to invade the North, South and Central Haiti by land, sea and air respectively,” explains Adon.
“Why are you dividing your men by ethnicity?”
“He’s not at liberty to say,” cuts in Watson.
“What kind of ordinance will be at your disposal once deployed?”
“Kalashnikovs, Han replications, Israeli high-tech, irregular small arms all with non-lethal ammunition and a couple dozen bullet proof ambulances,” says Adon.
“Well, I guess a bullet proof ambulance is a little better than a pickup truck,” notes Mastrovitch.
“I know who you are working for,” Mastrovitch suddenly says to Adon.
“Well I doubt you know their real names,” Adon responds.
“You’re that noire-Yid human rights mafia from the Breuklyn Soviet aren’t you?”
Adme laughs. Says something in his native.
“What was that frère?” Watson asks.
“He said, you get what you pay for,” says Mastrovitch who speaks the native language after all.
“What’s in a name?” Watson pontificates.
“So you’ll help train our people?” asks Adon.
Mikhail Mastrovitch doesn’t say anything hasty.
Watson takes a briefcase clipped onto his rucksack and opens it in front of Mikhail Mastrovitch, the brief case sneaks open with a piercing click.
“In case your civic duty fails you, here’s half a million up front, as per contract, one million more at completion of training, and four million more in the event of successful ground operations at culmination of invasion. It’s a merit based outfit.”
Mastrovitch is staring at what’s sitting on top of the money. Laminated photographs of his wife, three sons, their grandkids, and a spread sheet of every friend he has with home addresses and contact numbers. He’d thought he was a more secretive man.
“Everyone says you’re quite good at bombs and murder and to be trusted at the arts of war, and we’re bad people sometimes too, but we’re not hard criminals,” explains Sebastian Adon, “But, since we’re about to do serious work and we need you to be cognizant that we are not to be fucked with.”
“The point I think has been made before introduction. You are after all two of the founding members of the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club,” Mastrovitch mutters, “I’ll need three weeks to round up a suitable training crew, about a dozen men. I’ll include in my contract their salaries of course but I will need your leadership to procure some basic training equipment as per a list I’ll submit.”
“I think you’ll find our Isle of Youth facility quite amicable to the needs of your training potential team.”
“So one year from now, for a year straight after than in Isle of Youth as per contract?” has asks.
“Any questions?” Watson asks.
“Well the only one that matters. Who do you all work for ultimately?”
“For G-d and Breuklyn cousin, that’s all you got to know,” says Adon.
Commandant Mikhail Mastrovitch had trained the mujahidin who started Al-Qai’da in the Reagan-Bush years, the Anti-Contras of Gran Columbia now responsible for South to North trade in Women and Cocaine, and had built up the brutal right hand men of dictators on three continents. He’d never trained actual freedom fighters before. It would be a good last mission. A reason to come out of extended exile and early retirement. Maybe even go to heaven.
“You sure I’m the man for this job?” Mastrovitch asks.
“After all the murder you’ve created in the world to secure the white man this is the last chance you’ll ever have to cross over to the other side,” Adme retorts in flawless Americano before anyone can respond.
Adon grins. Breathes out cold air which looks a lot like smoke.
“What the little Haitian said,” says Watson Entwissle.
“Just teach us all how to dougie,” says Sebastian Adon.
Chapter 54
Jacmel, 2083ce
Occupied Haiti
In Jacmel on the Southern coat of Haiti it is almost time for another Carnival. Masques, revelry and paper machete abound. Sebastian is up and about three months into recuperation walking on the main rue with Dr. Perechenova by his side.
There’s was an amour obscure.
All Natasha Andreavna’s brutally short letter, handed to him in the hospital against commandant Rafael Ernesto Contreras’ better judgment told him was that she had gone back to her “husband” in Breuklyn Soviet. That she might be killed in the coming attack and real world life was too short to squander on any long distance relationship. And, that their life time was timeless, there was room for the old and the new. She wished him luck though. They just didn’t share any of the same afterlife goals.
He broke open his hand bunching a flood barrier.
And then the woman that saved him, the woman that he’d once saved. The first daughter of Alexandr ‘Sasho’ Perchevney who he’d saved from an upper Oligarch named Kahn and the blizzard of 2010 kissed him.
To keep his stitches from coming open.
Look blan kissing! Every Haitian smiled and yelled and began taking camera pictures. He had her in a cab an hour later. It was just that congested with voyeurs.
The first time he put it in her it hurt. She ripped him down to size first emotionally, humbling him in nine months of letters directed to expose the arrogance of his ways. She asked him, well he begged asking, questions about all his plots, schemes motives and dreams.
That was almost ten years ago. Before the Revolt. Before the Great Disorder. Before the trial and before he first arrived in Haiti on the eve of tremors and carnage.
They had tried to make their letter writing not turn into anything invasive. She tried rather hard not to let him kiss her too often, or to let him become an interference in her highly Soviet individualist life. But, on the last night of Hanukah and nearly seven months into their highly old school hand pressed courtship from the back of his ambulance to the University in Stonybrook by mail, well he’d won her, for a least awhile.
And soon after she let him have her. At least for a time.
He had been so dashing then, so polite and impressive in his blue uniform driving out to her university to visit on his pass days. He was an escape into a world of grand plots and mystery and foreign adventure and he saved lives for a living then. Even the idea of letter writing had been wonderful she used to lecture him on scientific advancement, marine mammals and also had tutored him in Russian and he exposed her to the wide world of the human right movement. Together between her classes and many rounds of naked showers and make out sessions where she’d deny him any gratification but to caress her, they designed the first blueprint. The operations guide used to train Haitian emts and mass smuggle equipment and trainers into that nation. It was the only semester in in university she got Cs.
She made him wait three months before she sucked his cock and four months before she let him get take her completely. She had reveled in the control she had over him even going so far as to make him produce medical documentation that he had no diseases of the bedroom. She had only let five men sleep with her up until then and he was a carnal animal, and even though he would refuse to specify how many women he’d had, she delighted in making him work especially hard for her.
There had been some high minded thoughts about love making. But when she gave into him he ravaged her like a little whore. He pulled her blonde hair, he pushed her to her knees, he pressed her roughly against the bed, and the floor and staircase and he fucked her hard as she ordered him to. She loved it, it went on all night. It was nice to have a man make her cum with his own cock. She wanted him for quite longer then she’d cared to admit, but her powers over him were addictive. The waiting was vital. And he sure could enthusiastically fuck. There was a truly dark side of her that craved this kind of hard handed affection. But he was unaware of how to truly love then even if he thought otherwise. He had to be taught. And there were a lot of issues of course with his condition that complicated everything. But the carnal side of them both kept the relationship going far longer than she might have normally allowed a man who lived so lawlessly. And he was always getting arrested. Or faking his own death. Most importantly her mother did not approve.
And he was a terrorist! She could never forget that. But most importantly the daughter of bipolar doctor carried away long ago to the mental hospital gulag by ambulance men, could never have a life with a bipolar ambulance man, terrorist or not.
But she loved being fucked by him. He could go for hours and hours and he’d do what she told him to and he’d love her and then brutally take control of her. But it ended outside the bedroom. He was a puppy to her when they got off a bed. Foolishly devoted and she could get anything out of him she wanted.
And then their prolonged separation at her insistence helped nothing. He erased her for some time to orchestrate the next stretch of the war. First they took Breuklyn, then all of Haiti. And then she allowed the letters to resume, but would not entertain even the thought of a public visitation or a private one.
And all his words since Haiti had been so sweet, so longing. But it was rough and prolonged violent sex, nine months’ worth the first time. Her naked body ravaged sometimes for several days when time allowed. He’d cuff her hands sometimes. He’d bite her tits and slap her big Russian ass as he entered her ferociously from behind with a belt around her neck. Sometimes he could really cross a line, but she was dirty and he was bipolar, which meant he could go from very degrading hard sex to playtime and pillow forts, almost on command.
Now this was different. On a soft huge grey blanket on the ridge of XXXX, on the eve of invasion he channeled ten years of sadness, failure and longing into rounds of pleasure worthy of her for the first time.
Sometimes long ago after their violent fucking she caught him smiling, beaming really at her like a love drunk school boy and they took each other again sometimes, sometimes with remarkable attention to depth of their passion. Not just fucking slowly as she had always assumed was the only way to teach a man from America to make love.
But tonight his rough ambulance-man hands grip her thighs as he thrusts inside her and he tells her he loves her and kisses her over and over again delighted and writhing in pleasure from the full scope of her attentions. She pushes him on his back. She bites her lip and pulls his brown hair, groaning in delight. Sweat drips across them as they slide into and thorough each other and he calls out her again into the desert night.
“Yelizaveta!” he yells out in ecstasy. If there was another name he had yelled wasn’t it just the name of ghost who had inevitably betrayed him?
What happened in Haiti during the earthquake was a subject of some great debate.
They’d near been inseparable lovers up until his third expedition there, but that collapsed in madness too. They’d been day to night, letter to letter saving in the killing fields of Port-Au-Prince, but why-why so long apart each time?
That is because the first time was rife with tragedy and violence.
The night before deployment when Yelizaveta truly loved Sebastian within an inch of his half-Hebrew life, she swears one cannot love a dead man if you yourself fear death, but a man setting himself up to die for cause needs a good witness and partner. But this was a bit untrue. He’d have tried to do it all alone if he could have willed it. And anyway he’s very hard to kill. Supposedly so he claimed several times in pillow talk that he dreamed he’d live until age 88 and die in fire fight in the Bronx. Crazy talk from a love drunk crazy man. She loves him sometimes because he is so ready to rise to the occasion. She hates him for so many things he can’t even remember.
He has same condition that ultimately did her father in and drove the whole family into huge debt that she is still paying off with her work for Perchevney.
“You’re not a bad lover for a man shot just three month ago.”
“You’re not a bad lover for a woman who swore I was dog and that she could never lay eyes or hands on me again.”
“I’m coming with you to Haiti you must realize Neshama,” she declares.
She’s hasn’t called him that in years. My Soul. It’s what he always has called her.
“Maya says you’re wide open after saving me.”
“I told Maya you haven’t killed anyone, lately.”
“I haven’t,” he lies instinctively.
“You’re full of complete shit as usual.”
“What does your contract say you can’t do?”
“I don’t really care anymore. Who is even working for whom! My contract with the Perchevney Bratva is a little less specific than my contract with your, shall we say, your partner in high thought crimes.”
“Solomon’s a great trickster.”
“Solomon’s the boss. A goddess amongst insects. Queen King.”
“What’s a god to a non-believer?” he asks.
“You don’t believe in anything,” retorts knowing he’s sometimes called an anarchist.
“I believe in the messiah, in the Mahdi and the blue print called the New Social Gospel written by their mother father. I believe also in love. And in limiting my killing. I didn’t kill anyone who didn’t deserve it. Even all those people held hostage shot blown up in the four so called restaurants of Vegas were buying sex and rolling dice.”
“Well you shouldn’t kill anyone anyway. It’s a war crime. Your rescue escapade certainly provoked them into attacking Breuklyn. Tens of thousands lost their lives in every Soviet.”
“We’re in the middle of a huge war in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Well stop killing people, or I can’t love you anymore like I used to. Fucking you is phenomenal. You give too much of shit.”
“I’ll try, but I think we will have to kill a few more people here and there. We’re about to, you know, invade a whole war torn genocidal country. I haven’t killed anyone lately like in the past month.”
“But you soon you will again?”
“Well only people that deserve it.”
“Fuck man!”
“Can you still love?”
“Yes, but I won’t be able to treat you. I have a real sick old man. I signed a long contract. That you do remember.”
“I know. Perchevney is paying for your father’s care in Switzerland,” he says sarcastically. Not like he’s your father.
“And my mother’s newfound life of leisure, don’t forget my loyalties.”
“And Solomon?”
“Sold her my soul. Perchevney only owns my body. So don’t get yourself shot again. I’ll treat the suffering strangers as you provide the appearance of more New Social Gospel type miracles. I can’t believe I’m following a dead man into his own hell, yet again, but it’s a ten year contract and you aren’t supposedly supposed to dying anytime soon.”
“I’d say don’t come, but you’re real a tough woman to argue with. So I’d be honored if you were watching my back again. And it’s been said I can’t die until the age of 88, so you have a good long time if you claim it. To come as many times as you see fit.”
“All I’m going to do is watch,” smiles Yelizaveta Kay. He imagines she’s blushing, but Post Soviets don’t blush.
“I like it when you watch. It makes me work harder,” he responds.
She presses a hand written note into his palm, looking at him with guarded thanks and near certain longing.
The note says: “If you want it you can get it for the rest of your life.”
They head back to Isle of Youth to rejoin the Cuban detachment and prepare to fly out to Haiti the very next day.
Chapter 55
XXX, 2010ce
Odessa
Dr. Yelizaveta Kay has there golden eyes that fluctuate between hazel, green and stunning. She has never met an Amerikanski that can properly pronounce her last name, and it doesn’t properly fit on her identity card, so she had it shortened down to ‘Kay’.
Her eyes pierce you and judge you at the same time and that judgment is normally rather harsh.
They often mean to say “go fuck-you”, but they still seem to drive all the boys wild. In the summer she’s a natural blonde, in the winter a red head. She can have any man she wants, but has a very sick father and this places upon her a number of obligations. A man who in another place called the former Soviet Union was a physician, a man of power and a puller of teeth. Then, something broke in him just after they arrived in the United American States. He was quite brilliant once, perhaps still is under all the salt in the wounds. He languished for a time in and out of psychiatric facilities and the family accrued increasing debt. So Yelizaveta became Zivia Kay, and put aside other men as well ideals for cold ambition to keep her mother out of poverty and her father from the hands and needles of the hospitaliers.
And that is her story and she is sticking to it.
She was a premed Postsoviet Beauty.
The breeze is blowing on a beautiful black sea. Two women of alarming, head turning disposition sit across from each other. One has brown flowing hair and a leather jacket. The other once a blonde, now her hair has been died former Soviet crimson.
On the table is rather substantial contract. They are seated on a veranda looking out upon on the Port of Odessa. In the next room a unit of Haitian medical officers and their Ukrainian counter parts are setting up a makeshift O.R. in the living room of the safe house. She fully intends to sign the contract in front of her.
It will affect her whole life. It comes with a scripted back story. She must never waver from it. And she was just eighteen years old when that happened. Shortly after a certain incident which drove she and family to the very edge. That was almost a decade ago. But she remembers the conversation she had before she signed her life away. In a playback that she rehashes periodically, it occurs as if in present terms.
Conducted in hushed low Russian:
“Who do you work for exactly Ms. Solomon,” she asks a buxom brunette with a brown leather jacket a red bandana tucked in the left pocket.
“Certain mighty factions that prefer three letters to a name-nameless, but nothing particularly likely to worry a god fearing, human loving person like yourself Ms. Yelizaveta Kay. I prefer, as does your potential employer your former Soviet name. It has far greater connotations of your true hadar.”
“What does that mean again?”
“A lot of things. In this case; your utter strength of will power.”
“You can call me Natasha Andreavna for all I care if my father gets better, the debt goes away and I end up with a valid western medical license.”
“Did you read the whole thing?”
“Of course, I read the whole thing.”
“The ‘patients, prisoners and students’ clause?”
“Yes. I can only treat certain people.”
“Who can’t you treat?”
“People that kill the innocents. Or kill at all.”
“Do you speak passible Spanish?”
“Yes. I used to date a passible gentleman who put me on to it.” Or bellowed it while he fucked the life out of me in hand cuffs, she notes mentally.
“Do you get along well with Noires?”
“They’re ok. Not like Adon does.”
“Fair enough. Sign and date right there, there and there. Also behind page seven, eighty six and three hundred and forty two; at the green line margin.”
“I don’t get a copy of the contract it says.”
“No, but I’ll let you read it for another twenty-five minutes if you think you missed something really, really important.”
“What happens again if I treat a killer?”
“Baby girl, you lose your second soul. Man is evil not because of his nature, but history and a dark socialization. I find the best way to program a man is to deny the validity of his history, case in point Sebastian Adon,” explains Maya Solomon to Yelizaveta Kay.
An awkward moment.
“He still loves you?” Yelizaveta inquires.
“No. He surely only writes to and about you these days.”
“My contract said nothing of what to do about Adon.”
“You’re thinking sweetly of him still are you not?”
“I wish to train to treat the body, not be distracted by yet another sick and angry mind.”
“He’s a prisoner and a student so you can treat his brains out for now my little sister.”
“What are you all plotting Emma?”
“Man is evil, is he not capable of little else but war, rape and some genocide?”
“Yes, that is mostly true.”
“Who are Dbrisk, O’Domhnaill and Trikhovitch?”
“Sebastian’s closest friends.”
“They’ve all signed contracts too you know. Why did you sign your contract?”
“To help my father and to get my mother made a hotel wage slave out of debt’s bondage. I owe you ten years and then I’m a doctor of infectious disease.”
“And such is your story and you will stick to it.”
“Humanity has caught an infectious disease when it comes to morality. Men fear neither law nor god. Your contract is to treat certain men, not others remember.”
“You are not to treat to any of the friends of Adon should they end up as your patients. They fall outside your jurisdiction. Even if he asks you to treat them you cannot.”
“What about him. I have various feelings for him that need an ocean in between us not to act on the passion they sometimes, mind you only sometimes; illicit.”
“We invested in Adon the seeds of a dream and mission. He signed a blood oath once that’s term will never expire within our camp. Come the time you are free to go: We own Adon, for him nothing is ever written, but on his shoulders quite a lot rides.”
“If I had to hedge a bet I’d say you’re setting him up for martyrdom again.”
“Don’t let his brave words allow you to absolve his ignoble past.”
“I don’t remember the past well anymore Ms. Solomon.”
“That my little tovarish is probably for the best. You won his black heart fair and square, but in the now I own both his first and second soul.”
She then signed the yellow contract with a red ink plume. There were a wide range of motivations behind it.
She undressed herself quietly, as all but one of the three male Haitian paramedics avert their eyes. She was handed a light grey latex thin body suit. Maya kissed her forehead. Once garbed she lowered herself into the big steel bath basin. The water was warm and thick with salt.
The last thing she remembered before waking up in Havana for her first day of medical school were the Haitian technicians preparing a series of medications as Maya Solomon inserted an IV line in to her left external jugular.
A doctor from the Ukrainian-Emergency-Group (U.E.G.) then dimmed the lights and put her to sleep in the bath. Away went the world, into a land of dreams and forgotten pasts swallowed by the waters of the bath and voodoo salts which entered her blood stream.
Chapter 56
Masada Citadel, 66ce
Palestine
In a dream as Adon, Yelizaveta and eighty-two Cuban combat medics cross the Caribbean Sea, Mickhi Dbrisk and Sebastian Adon look down upon the eight Roman legions that have encircled their position and are building a slave labor ramp up one side of the cliff. The aim of these legions is to torture, foul and snuff the surviving leadership of the insurgency against Caesar.
Against all of Rome.
“I fear that this thing will again destroy you,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.
Sebastian tosses a lit cigarette and hopes it lands on a Roman not a slave.
“I doubt it will be a fait accompli. They say I’m very hard to kill.”
“The Rabbis say there are no secrets between brothers.”
“The rabbis say all kinds of things. Sounds like the words of someone who wants to know a secret.”
“I know that you die every time you watch them die, and that when you are crying you are imitating a grief that you explicitly do not know how to feel. But do you cry ever for yourself?”
Sebastian flexes his arms into the warrior pose and then says.
“When no one is looking except she who I so love.”
“If you love her so much why don’t you stop fighting? Like she sometimes pauses to ask. You’ve done so much already and here we are having the same conversation we had four thousand years ago, allegedly. Four hundred years ago. That we will be having again and again we wage war epoch to epoch, husk to husk!”
“Do you remember the first job we ever did together?”
“The first job we didn’t do right really.”
“You always remember your first job.”
“When you leave your body where do you go?” asks Mickhi Dbrisk.
“I go back to Zion.”
“And what are you doing there.”
“I’m walking around on a long boardwalk. I’m running into old friends. I’m with my wife and my family.”
“How many times do you remember dying?”
Sebastian Adon looks up into the eyes of Mickhi Dbrisk.
“The body is a vessel for the soul. The flesh is a vehicle by which the soul carries out the work of Gods in the world of man.”
“Don’t recite the N.S.G. to me old friend. Don’t put on your mask when you speak to your brother.”
“Sometimes I look at my face in the mirror and I don’t recognize myself. I cannot always be clear about what I did in this life or the last that cut me so deeply or burned me so asunder. I have memories that I cannot say match records of objective reality. I would not recognize god from the devil except by the conduct of the vessels they occupy. Tell me brother when you leave your body where do you go?”
“I go back to Jamaica. I’m on the boardwalk. Running into old friends. On my way home to see my wife and my family.”
“What happened at the Millennium theatre?”
“You, Emma and twenty two fighters went in and for three days the held the elites of the city hostage. They pumped in gas. Everybody was killed.”
“I don’t remember anything about it.”
“So maybe you’re not really you.”
“How many times have you been to my funeral?”
“Twice. Right before the revolt when you and Natasha eloped into time. And right before the revolt ended, when you and Emma Solomon led the raid on the Millennium Theatre. ”
“And I died on the night of the great blizzard. And I died in Haiti during the revolution also right after the quake. And I died on the trains. And, other times.”
“The other times I cannot speak to. You were taken to the hospital numerous times. I have no idea. But I saw your corpse. I saw your cold dead grinning mangled body with two shots in it when we buried you the first time. I saw your corpse on national television nearly four years ago when the department of homeland security announced all of the terrorists at the millennium were dead.”
“Well here I am. How now brown cow?”
“Tell me what’s happened to you. Tell me about how you come back with all your memories intact. And so quickly. I know its all disinformation about the cloning programs and the neural uploading and the parapsychology program. I know that neither we nor the Israelis have the science exact and we will never have the science to save a man’s soul and transfer his energy with all its memory in the span of a human lifetime.”
“Do you know me Mickhi Dbrisk?”
“In a biblical sense? No homo.”
“No homo.”
“What’s your earliest memory of me?”
“You were the baddest thief and I was the goodest thief and they nailed our bodies to the tree of life alongside the promised messiah. And her name was unpronounceable by men, so we called her Emma Rose Maya Sorieya; the mother of the changes. I remember before my body died I looked out on Jerusalem and I saw ten thousand of our people hanging from the trees. And then I woke up in Africa one hundred years later and the real killing began.”
“And when the body dies the energy of the soul is reborn in another living vessel. Old souls find each other so it seems.”
“Have you no understanding of what it might be like to be like normal men?! I know I do. I know that I enjoy the caress of a woman more than a god I have never seen. I know what it’s like to see myself in my offspring and want for them to grow into proud and free beings. I don’t live in the past Sebastian, I live for now. In several lives I found you and I aided you each time. We fought wars and launched bloody revolutions, we drafted documents articulating freedom, we protected the bloodline of the chosen ones faithfully for the past 2,000 years! You tell me brother why you and I can’t just stop. And walk away. ”
Sebastian Adon says nothing.
“Every human is loved by God and that love is exhibited in the compassion and solidarity extended by the righteous to the suffering masses trampled on by cruel devils.”
“I know what the book says. I helped write it. Don’t quote low think prophesy to me. If you please.”
“What are we doing?” Asks Mickhi Dbrisk.
“We’re sticking to the goddamn plan.”
“You’re plan or God’s plan? Emma’s plan or Avinadav’s. The Cuban plan? The Blue Lodge? The Grey Cult? What about the Scientologists, the Chassids, the Baha’i, the Muslims the Buddhists’? Who’s plan? You are my oldest friend, you my brother by blood and by deed, but let me tell you one thing before we set the sky on fire yet again. I’ve seen you die. I’ve seen you be tortured. I’ve seen the oligarchs lay waste to our best laid plans. Over and over and over and over. I’ve seen man burn our people and our prophets each time we rise. Right now we are precariously holding seven districts on a war torn micro republic and the island of Hispaniola. Every single organized government on earth is fixing to break out backs. I need to look you in the eyes, and ask you, are we going to win this time?”
“I just don’t yet know.”
Dbrisk pulls off his tam and lets his thick lion locks drop out. He shakes them more a shudder than any kind of battle roar, and then he says;
“Well that’s very discomforting. To say the very least.”
“Ha Halom Sheli Likhiot Hofshee,” Adon thinks, my dream is to be free. Adon wakes up on a ferry full of Cubans drifting toward the Isle of Youth. Yelizaveta in her green Soviet commandant hat, pinches him. And Mickhi Dbrisk, well he just makes a mental note, an estimate of the size of the payroll and army he’s gonna have to bill to protect his family in Breuklyn Soviet & Jamaica once the war begins.
And everybody dreams about their vengeance, their redemption, dreams about their baby’s face; what it used to look like. We dream about the world to come; about all the things we sacrificed to get here. We dream about the loose change multiplying in the world, about rubber band banks. We dream about the constant grind, when it will end, hopefully on a beach. And we also dream about our freedom.
[1] A notorious youth prison in the South Bronx, NY until 1999 when it was renamed Bridges Juvenile Center and 2011 when it was closed for a history of poor conditions and brutality against children of color.
