“I won’t hurt you my love,” he whispered.
It was only when he picked her up in his arms in one movement that Nara started to realize that he was no longer angry with her.
Nevertheless, still gripped by fear she carefully placed her arms around his neck while he carried into the bedroom.
In effort to please him, just had she once done with Oleg all those years ago, she kissed him on his lips.
“I am sorry my love,” she repeated again, earning another. “Shhh,” in return from Thomas.
“I am the one at fault,” he stated.
“I should know better!” he admonished himself.
Reaching the bed, Thomas gently placed Nara on it, stroked her face again and lightly as a feather brushed her long hair away to the sides while never losing eye contact with her.
“Tell me my darling. What was it?” Thomas had guessed that his raising of his hand and slapping her had released something terrible from her past in Turkmenistan.
She nodded, wiping her face with her arm while releasing a little sniffle. Wanting to please him so his terrible beast would not return Nara looked up him once more then started to tell him what had happened to her the afternoon Allah had sent him to save her.
By the time she finished, with tears in his eyes, he swore he would never raise his hand again.
3
Ashgabat, 1998
In 1998 Ashgabat the capital of Turkmenistan, unlike the semi-modern self-gloried city it is today, then could only be described as a typical city of the former Soviet Union with it rows upon rows of low-rise soviet style buildings and a population of approximately one million souls.
Led by Saparmurat Niyazov, an old style communist and his bunch of cronies, the country was a very necessary, if somewhat corrupt, supplier of natural gas to the world.
One such crony of the President was Oleg Mälikgulyýewiç Rejejow. Hailing from Gipchak, the hometown of the President, through his mother’s side and the son of a former Turkman General in the Soviet Union, he came from the privileged set that had ruled through the Communist Party of Turkmenistan since the twenties.
A bright child who graduated as expected from Moscow University in the mid-1980s in Foreign Affairs, Oleg had then joined the KGB. Rising to the rank of Major, before returning home to Turkmenistan in the early 1990s because of the failure of the KGB led coup in Moscow.
Ambitious and determined to secure a job in the new government, he joined the local KGB. Spotted by Niyazov, who having started his purge of Russians in the State Intelligence Services wanted Turkmen in the senior officer positions to cement his power, the President had quickly promoted Oleg to the rank of Munbashi with a unique responsibility for International Relations.
In reality, that title was merely a cover to allow Oleg to put his talents into the setting up of money laundering operations in Turkey and Germany for US$3 billion the President had skimmed from the financial exploitation of the natural resources of his country, while allowing him at the same time to set up his drug smuggling and prostitution rings. This was something he did with great effect by the use of violence amongst the tribes and through killing and torturing at will those who didn’t fall into line and his use of the President’s name to expand his empire. As a direct result, he was considered one of the most powerful members of the President’s entourage.
Possessing a stocky build and a rounded face with closed puffy eyes that made him look as if he were a nasty, aggressive temple dog guarding its territory—It was a look that only reinforced his legend.
Although debt collection was considered an Onbashi task, Oleg somewhat perversely rather enjoyed it and as such he took great delight performing this chore himself.
On the night he had entered Nara’s life, he was planning to torture her father, but when the bloodied, desperate man had offered up his daughter as security for his debt by showing and giving him a blood stained photograph of her, the brutal enforcer had changed his mind and instead accepted the beautiful angelic looking child instead.
From that moment on Nara’s, who was just thirteen at the time, remaining childhood turned into a hellish nightmare that often returned to haunt her at night in the following years.
To survive, she quickly developed street smarts: teaching herself English by watching movies from America, learning to mask her emotions and keeping herself in shape by staying off the drugs, while throughout constantly telling Oleg she loved him when pleasuring him to ensure she remained one of his favorite concubines.
In order to survive this continuing torment over years, the pretty teenager created a private place in her mind where she would escape to, that place was “an ocean of tranquility—blue clear water under a cloudless sky” and had been so ever since her parents took her to the Caspian Sea when she was a child.
Although Nara had never seen a real ocean, as Oleg would never allow his favorite concubine to leave Turkmenistan, it had remained her dream to reach it. Today she hoped that it would finally come true by the repayment of her father’s debt so allowing her to escape to Dubai!
When Nara had told her mother of her plan to repay him the twenty thousand U.S. dollars of her father’s debt, the total sum she had managed to squirrel away from the tips of the men and women who used her body, her mother had insisted as per their tribal law that she should go with her as the family representative. She had reasoned that there would be a need for a witness as her father had drunk himself to death on cheap “jet-fuel” vodka over the guilt of what he forced his daughter into. Despite arguing heavily with her and against her better judgment, Nara had allowed her mother to come with her.
Arriving at his office next door to the newly built Sheraton Grand Hotel, neither Nara nor her mother had any idea of how the next forty-five minutes would mold, change, and shape their family’s destiny forever.
Walking into the office they were met at the door by his best man and enforcer who was wearing a cheap green suit, shirt, and white tie made by a Pakistani tailor from Lahore, a pair of cheap black shoes, and his pistol showing under his jacket. He smelled of the strong perfume that men from the Middle East often wore to mask their body odor known as Yuri Karajaýewiç Gorbunow.
A typical looking Turkman with a Chinese look to his face, dark thick hair with obsidian dead eyes, stocky in build, around 5’8” and had a body of 210 pounds of rock hard muscle. A veteran of Afghanistan, where as a member with the 105th Guard’s airborne division, he had earned a fearsome reputation as a sadistic, brutal killer who took enjoyment in celebrating his kills by removing the ears of the Mujahideen with his hunting knife. He had always desired Nara ever since Oleg had once, as a reward for a particular job well done, given him access to her young body.
The beautiful teenager felt her entire body shiver, a reaction she always felt when he looked upon her with his leering smile. Today this terror was even worse, for Nara could have sworn she saw him lick his lips the second he set eyes on her mama.
“The Boss will see you in five minutes; he is just finishing with an important client,” he stated as he continued to leer at her and her mother. Forcing her troubled mind to acknowledge him, Nara did so with a polite “thank you,” followed by a forced smile, her only weapon in an attempt to disarm him.
An attractive looking forty year-old woman, Tania, possessed looks that would be best be described as similar to that of her daughter. Her face had the same high naturally puffed up cheeks, extremely thinly plucked eyebrows, deep brown eyes with one or two laughter lines surrounded by dark eyelashes and her natural pout smile and luscious lips framed with long jet black hair gave an observer a direct link to Nara. Yet because she was 5’4” in height and had a naturally bronzed, fuller, curvy figure, something that was reinforced by her ample breasts and larger rounded bottom compared to that of her daughter who was six inches taller than her, she was considered curvy rather than statuesque.