“Translation?”
“The orders have all come from Bangladesh, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.”
“The hell you say!” All four countries were rice consumers; when they were starving, which was most of the time, they wouldn’t touch wheat, even for free.
“I thought that would fetch you.” Mansour chuckled. “Any idea what it means?”
Forte had an idea, and it wasn’t reassuring. The pipeline system he’d been inspecting just the day before would begin significant water deliveries within months. As a result, the season’s harvest would be by far the best in years. Accordingly, wheat prices, now at record highs, would tumble. Wheat futures would tumble along with prevailing prices.
“Joe,” said Forte, trying to keep his voice steady, “what does the wheat futures picture look like?”
“That was the other point I was going to mention. Despite Nullarbor wheat soon coming into production, and a bumper crop this season in traditional growing areas of Australia, prices for October delivery, while still relatively low, are going up, not down. I can’t understand it.”
Forte understood it, all right. Somebody was gambling that, come October, the price of wheat would rise. They were gambling on a catastrophe that would ruin the fall harvest-blight, tornados, drought, unseasonal rains, fire, or locusts. But these calamities were all acts of God, and speculators in wheat futures seldom put their faith in the Lord. Yet it was entirely conceivable that they’d put their faith in a couple of truckloads of dynamite that, strategically placed, would destroy the pumping stations on which the pipelines depended, creating a manmade drought. If that happened, the economic recovery of the Republic of Texas would be stillborn, there’d be food riots, a quick plunge from gray recession to black depression, and the very existence of the country would be at risk.
Malaysia and the Philippines had long since become satellites of the Imperial Soviet Union. Citizens of free countries were free to travel there, providing they brought plenty of dollars to exchange at the ruinous legal rates, but they were followed wherever they went.
Though they lived hand to mouth on American aid, Bangladesh and Indonesia were theoretically independent. Forte didn’t know a single word of Indonesian, but the official languages of Bangladesh were Bengali and English, and Forte could get along in one of them.
That night Forte boarded a jet at Dallas-Fort Worth for Honolulu and Tokyo. At Haneda, he was transferring to a flight for Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, when the radio message from President Horatio Francis Turnbull caught up with him. He caught the next flight back to Washington, D.C.
13. SHISHLIN
25 JUNE 2009
Valentin Shishlin wasn’t very bright, nor was he very honest, but he was extremely lucky.
He cheated on his examinations whenever he could, advanced with his class, and graduated without having learned anything useful except that deceit, diligently applied, was the road to preferment in the Soviet Union. After his compulsory two years in the army, he applied for flight training, for he had discovered that the relative freedom of movement accorded pilots enabled them to get away with a little discreet smuggling, thus capitalizing on the shortages that always afflicted one part of the country or the other. The proceeds of the traffic allowed pilots to live well above their nominal salaries.
Shishlin wasn’t a very good pilot, but again, his guardian angel was looking out for him. Failing proficiency tests for fighter pilots, he was relegated to flying support and liaison aircraft, in which service he built up quite a nice little trade in American cigarettes, vodka, caviar, nylon stockings, hard currency, and other articles of small bulk and high profits. By the time he attained the rank of captain, he was making more and living better than most colonels. His friends envied him, and more than one jealous subordinate had reported his delinquencies, but lightning had never struck. This surprised no one: corruption was customary in all branches of Soviet society, and it was taken for granted that Shishlin had bought immunity by sharing his spoils with his superiors.
Shishlin was too preoccupied with his own comfort to worry about abstractions such as political theory and the withering away of the state. So long as he had a steady supply of vodka to help the young women around his base in Novosibirsk forget that his hair was thinning and his waist a bit flabby, he was content. When he thought about the future at all, he saw himself as Lt. Col. (ret.), living happily on his pension plus whatever he managed to put aside from his speculations. He might have done so had it not been for a sudden and unexpected transfer, assigned to pilot the KGB courier plane, whose usual circuit between Novosibirsk, Tashkent, Zyryanovsk, Irkutsk, and Krasnoyarsk vastly expanded his sphere of operations.
Though not a member of the KGB itself, his position deflected questions and criticism. His standard of living went up a notch, and his promotion to major in 2007, while still in his early thirties, gave him hope that he would become at least a full colonel. When the vodka flowed freely, he dreamed of the day when he would be General Valentin Shishlin.
The dream ended abruptly in the first week of June 2009, and a nightmare took its place. He had been doing better-than-usual business in gold coins and in fact had just received a consignment of old Ottoman and Iranian coins from his contact in Balkhash to unload on his semiannual trip to Kiev. En route back to his base in Omsk, he kept the coins in cloth strips wrapped around his ankles, concealed from view by his flying boots. He was carrying them when his copilot Ivan Dubinin, as they were landing on the evening of 4 July at Alma Ata, remarked having heard a rumor that the Politburo was cracking down in one of its periodic attempts to eradicate corruption, drunkenness, dealings in foreign currency, and other crimes of social parasitism.
“In fact,” Dubinin said as he depressed the gear lever, and the Yak-237 two-engine turboprop shuddered and pitched nose down on its approach, “they say they’re going to impose penalties of five to ten years for even minor offenses.”
“Is that right?” Shishlin’s heart was beating hard.
“So they say. And as for ‘economic crimes’…” Dubinin made a chopping motion with his hand across his throat.
Economic crimes included such offenses as possession of foreign currency and trafficking in gold.
Shishlin had survived such sweeps before, but they had taken a toll on his nerves. Just then the timing couldn’t have been worse. If the police or KGB chose to shake him down before he had a chance to hide his loot in the hollow beam in his quarters, they would find not only the 400-odd grams of gold wrapped around his ankle but the wad of 14,300 yen he had concealed in the bottom of his flight bag.
“They’ve added a nice capitalistic touch this time,” Dubinin went on casually. “The word is that whoever turns in one of these rotten dogs gets to keep five percent of whatever the gebeshniki turn up.” He looked at Shishlin and smiled blandly.
The landing was bumpy, and Shishlin nearly put the Yak-237 in the mud on the rollout. Unaccustomed to thinking fast, he tried to recollect whether Dubinin, who had been his copilot only two weeks, had somehow seen the lumpy cloth that adorned his ankles. Or had Dubinin seen him transfer the wad of yen from his inside jacket pocket to his flight bag on their last stop, at Frunze, where Shishlin had picked up the money from the line boss while they were refueling? Everybody knew Shishlin was running contraband. Who wasn’t? But this five-percent bounty for turning in an “economic criminal”-that was new and very disquieting. It destroyed the atmosphere of live-and-let-live that allowed private enterprise to support the fantasy of the socialist state.
Shishlin turned the Yak-237 onto the taxiway, eased back the twin throttles, and considered the problem. If routine were followed, the courier would open the five-tumbler safe welded to the frame in the rear of the eight-passenger plane, remove the files requested by the KGB committee holding its monthly meeting in Alma Ata, and take them to the conference room at the military base adjoining the airport. As darkness had already fallen, he and Dubinin would remain overnight, and be ready at daybreak to fly the general to his next meeting at Zyryanovsk.
Now, if Dubinin knew he was carrying contraband and were going to turn him in, it would be insanity to accompany him back to the operations shack, where a word from Dubinin would place him under instant arrest. The best plan was to send Dubinin ahead and do the ground checks himself. As soon as Dubinin was gone he’d somehow ditch the gold and the smuggled yen in the darkness, then make his appearance.
With the props still windmilling, for Shishlin would have to taxi the aircraft to the hangar for the night, Dubinin and the general’s aide climbed out in front of the operations shack and went inside. Shishlin released the brakes and let the plane roll forward toward the hangar two hundred meters away. In front of the open doors, he swung the craft around, cut the lights, throttled the engines back to idle, and picked up his binoculars.