The man who emerged from the first gher reminded David Brentwood of Eskimos he’d seen — the same broad-boned, tanned face, clear, almond-shaped eyes, and a smile of teeth white as ice. The man’s thick sheepskin del reinforced the impression, for the sun was still not fully up and the deep, creeping-up cold of the semidesert had yet to be driven off, nor had the wind whistling down from the Hentiyn Nuruu abated, the air gritty with the dust and infused with the pungent odor of burning camel dung, its smoke escaping from the gher’s roof vent, causing Salvini’s eyes to water uncontrollably so that he appeared to be weeping.
According to the ancient custom, the Mongolian opened the wooden door of the gher and welcomed them into the round canvas-and-felt house. As they’d been briefed at headquarters, the four men were careful not to walk on the door’s low board frame but to step over it so as not to bring the gher bad luck.
Inside the gher it was an island of sheepskin and other hide rugs on the floor, the walls of canvas and felt supported by wooden poles no more than five feet six inches high, spars of wood leading from these to the center where the stove pipe from the stone-based oven met the vent. Again as was customary the four guests were bidden to sit on the westward side, their backs to Nalayh, their faces to the east, the door directly to the right of them, their feet pointing to the stove where camel and cow dung kept smoldering, providing heat not only against the cold but to warm the arkhi, an alcoholic drink of fermented mare’s milk.
The head man of the gher, careful to sit opposite the four SAS/D troopers, waited until all had partaken of the light orange cheese his wife had passed around. This was the best insurance the troopers could have, for by custom once the cheese had been shared there could be no conflict between host and guest. But as Aussie braced himself for another sip of the arkhi — a small streak of melted yak butter giving it a taste like sour milk — he was ready to reach for the nine millimeter if anything went wrong.
A wide-eyed child watched him from atop one of the two metal-spring beds, a dark red and Persian blue carpet of silk and wool draped behind the beds on the gher’s wall. Adhering to custom once more, David Brentwood, consulting his phrase book, knew he should avoid “disputatious” subjects — politics especially — and wondered how he might confine himself to generalities about the weather and such. At first this had struck him as being as peculiar to the Mongolians until he realized how during his own childhood he, his two brothers — Robert, the oldest, an SSN commander, and Ray — and his sister, Lana, had been told by their father never to talk about politics or religion. It was no different with the Mongolians’ headman, he decided, except he knew that perestroika and glasnost had worked some magic here, too, and that the party was finding it tougher these days to control the herdsmen or what they spoke about.
But whatever the customs Brentwood also knew he didn’t have time to pussyfoot around, and so started with the weather, using it to come at the main point from an oblique angle. What he wanted to know was whether they could seek shelter here from the sun till nightfall.
Whether it was the heat from the vodka-spiced arkhi or from the stove itself, the cold was being driven off, and he felt sweaty about the neck as he finished his question, trusting he had used the correct Mongolian phrase. The headman smiled and, pointing to himself, said, “Little English, me.”
“Struth!” Aussie said. “That’s good news, mate.”
“ ‘Struth’!” The headman didn’t understand, but he knew what David Brentwood meant about “bad weather.”
“Not to be moving—” the old man said, “in bad weather.”
“Right, mate!” Aussie put in, relieved. “No bloody good at all.”
“Shut up, Aussie!” David said in an intentionally stern tone. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
“No friggin’ woods here, mate,” Aussie said, then saw the child. “Sorry.”
The painfully slow conversation between David and the headman was really not necessary, however, for the Mongolian had understood the moment he had seen them come in from the plain that they were on the run from authority. It was all he had needed.
“You rest,” he told them.
“We’ll move tonight,” David Brentwood promised.
The old man nodded, his hand pointing to the sheepskin rugs on the bed as he talked to his wife.
“Just till tonight,” David promised again. David took a chance and gestured back toward Nalayh. “Communists.” He knew enough already to know that the herdsmen didn’t like the Communists — they told the herdsmen where to go and when, striking at the very heart of the nomad’s life: his freedom to move when and where he wanted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
In New York, Alex Miro, a tall, thin man, pulled up the fur-lined collar of his brown suede topcoat as he made his way past the Plaza Hotel toward the Columbus Circle entrance on Central Park’s southwest corner. He liked the park — it had brought him luck, and he was as convinced of his purpose as he had been on the very first day those years before when, as a bearded young man, his future before him, he had arrived as one of the thousands of Russian minorities allowed to emigrate to America in the heady days following Gorbachev’s and then Yeltsin’s perestroika.
The reception committee in those days consisted mostly of older émigrés who had managed to flee the Soviet Union before Gorbachev, and Alex could still recall the day when, as one of about thirty new arrivals, he had been taken on a tour of the city by one of these older émigrés. The group had paused for a moment across from the Plaza near the horse-drawn cabriolets.
The wealth of the people entering and leaving the famous hotel overwhelmed the new arrivals almost as much as their first sight of a supermarket. One babushka, from the Ukraine, had kept clicking her tongue and shaking her head beneath the black head scarf at the sight of such opulence. After going north on Fifth Avenue, seeing the stately stone townhouses on the East Side and being told by the guide that only one family lived in each house, Alex had seen the woman’s disbelief, her tongue clicking again as she gazed at the stately buildings, her husband, however, skeptically informing several of the group that the guide was as bad as the old Pravda— “lozh”—”all lies.” It was probably just a Potemkin “village,” he said — made exclusively to impress visitors just as the fake Potemkin village had been for the czarina — why, any fool could see there was enough room for six families in any one of the townhouses.
One of the émigrés asked the guide to take them to Harlem—insisted they see Harlem, the place of the gigantskie basketbolisty. Alex’s beard was so full in those days it had hidden the tight-lipped grimace of satisfaction he’d allowed himself on seeing that what the party had said was true — here was the grinding poverty, the rampant disorder, the half-naked black children, the awful, discordant noise of democracy, the look of hatred and despair in the eyes of me blacks who stared resentfully at the bus of tourists like caged animals, the putrid smell of garbage overpowering.