I stared at her bare breast and my passion rose. “You're pretty proud of yourself for getting rid of my clothing, aren't you?"
“I think it was a good idea, yes." Her eyes dropped and she blushed as she raised them again. "It has its drawbacks, though. I do wish that under the circumstances, you'd try to control yourself, Mr. Victor. Or at least take one of my garments and cover yourself."
“Sorry. You're an exciting girl, Vickie. And, under the circumstances, I wish you'd stop calling me ‘Mr. Victor’ in that formal English way of yours. My name is Steve -- particularly when I'm naked."
“All right, Steve. What do you think you're going to do now?" she asked with a smugness that was downright annoying.
“I’m not going to do anything for a little while," I told her. “You are. You’re going to do just what I tell you. Vickie, you're about to find out that two can play at your little game of strip poker. Open the window." I waved the Luger at her.
She opened the window.
“Now throw out your suitcase.”
She threw her suitcase out the window.
“Now your clothes."
She gathered up her clothes and tossed them from the window.
“Underwear too."
Her bra and panties followed, despite her obvious reluctance.
"Now take off your nightgown."
She pulled it off.
“Out the window."
She threw it out.
I sat back and chuckled. “Now we’re even," I told her.
"It’s cold." She hugged herself with her arms.
“I'll keep you warm." I sat down next to her and put my arms around her.
She raised her lips to be kissed.
I kissed her.
She made a grab for the gun.
I slapped her hand hard and went back to my bunk. “Some other time, honey, when Little Johnny Luger isn't standing between us.” I looked outside. The sky was turning to gray dawn. I leaned briefly out the window, still keeping a careful eye on Vickie. We were running parallel to the river all right. And up ahead I could see the tracks curving to cross it. I perched on the sill, getting ready to jump when we crossed the trestle. “I’ll be leaving in a minute," I told Vickie. "I do hope we meet again in similarly naked circumstances."
"You're going to jump out the window and leave me alone here without any clothes? What will I do?"
“That's your problem, sweetie. Unless you'd care to join me for a swim, that is."
“I don't know how to swim."
"In that case, farewell my love." I poised and dived from the train, careful to clear the side of the trestle. Luckily, the river wasn't frozen over. But there were chunks of ice in the water. The shock of hitting it was indescribable. It was like a glacial knife slicing through my body. I fought my way to the surface and began swimming for the shore before the numbness sweeping from my brain to my limbs sent me to the bottom again. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? I don't know how long that harrowing swim took. But finally I felt solid ground under my feet and began to wade from the river.
As the freezing air hit my skin, I was overcome by a fit of shivering. I felt like the proverbial brass monkey and as I emerged from the water the cold hit me in the same place. I literally fell onto the shore, and to this day I don't know whether I would have been capable of any further movement or not.
Luckily, I didn't have to find out. Just as I collapsed, a figure emerged from the snow-covered bushes along the riverbank and ran toward me. A moment later my head was resting in a lap and my eyes were looking up at the doll-face of an Afghan girl.
She was chattering away and I gathered she was trying to tell me it was very foolish indeed to go skindiving at this time of year. Well, I agreed with that. But while I got her meaning, I couldn't really understand the dialect she was speaking. Later I found out it was Pushtu, a sort of mixture of pidgin Persian and Mongolian Chinese.
This lingo gives some indication of the origins of the people who live in the Koh-i-Baba Mountains. Called Hazaras, they are tall, broad-headed and yellow-skinned, akin in features to the Mongols. They are said to be the descendants of the armies of Jenghiz Khan, which once conquered Afghanistan. In my own field, the Hazaras are known for the sadism they bring to sex and for their practice of sharing one woman among as many as half a dozen men. Goat-herders, they are looked down on by the other Afghans and frequently discriminated against when they leave their native mountains. For this reason, they usually stay put. In the hills of the Koh-i-Baba they are kings of the land and frequently hostile to strangers.
The girl, however, did not have the characteristics of the Hazaras. She was small, her features were delicate and her skin was pale and tinged with pink, rather than golden. I guessed that she wasn't really a Hazaras at all, but probably a Tajik maiden stolen perhaps while still an infant from her village on the Pakistan border. The Tajiks are Caucasians, of Semitic descent, which is true of most Afghans. The rather vague history of Afghanistan dates its settlement from the time of Nebuchadnezzar, an Arab conqueror who carried away whole tribes from Palestine and settled them as agrarian slave laborers in Afghanistan.
Her probable Tajik background was fortunate for me. A Hazaras maiden would most likely have left me to freeze to death. This girl opened her thick, fur cloak—it was like an opera cape, voluminous and sleeveless -- and wrapped it around my naked body.
We huddled together and my chills subsided as I felt the warmth of her flesh against my own. She urged me over to an outcropping of rocks and we wedged ourselves into a narrow niche out of the wind. There was a rock shelf over us, and this too was lucky, for it began to snow.
Even through the thick fur robe, I could feel the cold. She could too, for she was trembling in my arms. The storm was growing too strong to allow us to move from our haven, but if we didn't manage some sort of movement, we would surely fall victim to frostbite. The girl's eyes, looking at me with a liquid sort of fatalistic pleading, told me that she too was aware of this.
Then her hands moving over my body told me that she too had come to the conclusion that there was only one thing we could do about it. It wasn't a matter of sex; it was a matter of survival. And yet, in a strange way, that made it all the more thrilling.
I could feel my body warming to her caresses. And my lips felt the heat of her small, uptilted breasts as I kissed them. She was much shorter than I and managed to get her feet between my legs. They were very cold. I rubbed my calves together to warm them.
Oddly, this seemed to excite her greatly. Her nails dug into my shoulders and her tongue was a flame flickering over my ears and neck. Then her hands slid down to my naked buttocks and she squeezed them rhythmically, grinding her hips so that our flesh would bump together in the same tempo. Finally she raised one of her legs quite high and dug her nails deep in the cleft between my cheeks so that I was jolted forward and we were locked together.
Momentarily, I was disappointed. She was quite large and there was no sensation of being gripped by her sex. Later I was to learn the reason for this. Now, however, I quickly forgot it as she made up in expert circular movements for what she lacked in tightness. It was like a ritual dance, spurred on by the now-blazing heat of her body. She ground against me with movements that more than anything else were like swallowing. I could feel her sensitive flesh spreading over me, enveloping me. And then she began to bounce, slowly, than faster, then in a frenzy as though she were striking blows. I struck back and a cry of excitement tore from her lips.