The Company We Keep (6 page)

Still, things are pretty calm these days. The occasional tank rumbling down Dushanbe’s main street is about the only reminder that Tajikistan is in the middle of a civil war. Russia’s 201st Motorized Rifle Division is gradually retaking ground, one village at a time, moving up into the rebel sanctuaries high in the Pamir mountains. But the rebels keep moving up higher and higher. Now it would take a three-day climb just to reach them, too high even for Russian helicopters.

The Russian soldiers call the rebels the
dukhi
—the ghosts, the same word the Soviets used for the Afghan Mujahidin, who also had a knack of disappearing into thin air. The Russians can’t even tell me who the rebels’ commander is. You know it’s a messy war when you don’t even know who the king of the barbarians is.

When I first got to Tajikistan, “Central Asia” for me was shorthand for “exotic.” All I had to do was close my eyes, and I could conjure up the steppe empires, the Silk Road, Alexander the Great’s marches up and down the Pamirs. It was here that Alexander found a wife, Roxanne, one of history’s great beauties. Bucephalus, Alexander’s horse, died not far north of Dushanbe, and the myth is that at midnight, if you’re lucky, you will see its ghost running around a certain mountain lake.

I needed only a day walking around the capital to figure out that I got the “exotic” wrong. There is no old Dushanbe. There’s no trace of the Silk Route, or of Alexander the Great and the other ancient empires that once rivaled Greece and Rome. I drove up to the lake where Alexander’s horse supposedly died. But there wasn’t an epigraph or anything else to mark it. History deleted Central Asia’s empires, and no one more efficiently than the Soviets.

That’s what I’ve really learned here: what great haters Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were. They hated Central Asian culture, its babel of languages, its religions, and in particular Islam. No doubt they hated the mysterious East itself. The Marxists believed that before they could build their delusional utopia they had to efface from the earth every trace of ancient Central Asia. Over the years, Soviet proconsuls flattened the old Mogul forts, the mosques, the bazaars, and the caravanserai, and turned the ancient cities of Samarkand and Bokhara into cheap theme parks.

Now the Soviets are gone, but the ex-Communists have kept their grip on Dushanbe. Like the old Soviet apparatchiks, they race around in their Zils and Volgas, tailed by police chase cars with flashing blue lights on the top. They all live in a party compound. In their dull, somber suits they remind me of Brezhnev. I once sat next to the Tajik president at a state dinner. A taciturn, colorless man, he said maybe two words the entire time. I caught
him pouring his vodka into the planted palm behind him so he wouldn’t get drunk like everyone else.

I’m starting to have my own idea why Dushanbe’s water shuts off, and it has nothing to do with the government’s explanation about routine cleaning and flushing. I suspect deeper machinations at play. In Central Asia, he who controls the water is he who rules. That once meant the ancient irrigation canals, but now it’s a city’s water supply. My theory is that the rebels sabotage Dushanbe’s water to undermine the legitimacy of the ex-Communists. If they can turn it off permanently, the city falls.

Granted, it’s a theory easier to believe than to prove, but I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants ever since I got here. The fact is, I have only the haziest understanding of Central Asia, or even of Tajikistan and its civil war. The place is a spy’s nightmare; American baseline knowledge is zero.

As an example, we’re not even sure who the important political players are in Tajikistan. We know who the president is, of course, the man I sat next to at dinner, and the ministers. But there’s a small, secretive clique that really runs the country. A Central Asian scholar at Harvard, Richard Frye, calls these cliques “charismatic clans”—tight-knit extended families who ruthlessly look to their own for survival. Nationalism and ideology come into play only when it serves the interest of the clan.

So far, so good, but all we know about the charismatic clan that runs Tajikistan is that it can be traced to Kulyab Province, or, to be precise, a village called Baljuan. The president is only the clan’s face, while a handful of members in the shadows run the army and the security services. Kulyab was the site of a former Tsarist penal colony, and today many Tajiks look at the Kulyabis as a band of unreconstructed criminals.

From time to time I stop by the door of the Russian political
officer, hoping he can clear up the question of the Kulyabis for me. After all, the Russians have been here for more than a century, while I’m still short of year one. But all I get out of my visits is a cup of tea and a cookie.

The fortunate side of it all is that Washington doesn’t really care whether I understand the place or not. I don’t have a shred of evidence for it, but my hunch is that James Baker, George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, opened our embassy in Dushanbe solely to remind the Russians that Tajikistan is no longer a piece of their empire. An embassy here is an act of pure defiance. The fact that the Russian 201st is all that keeps the peace and prevents our plucky embassy from being sacked and burned to the ground is a detail Washington doesn’t like to consider.

Northern Virginia:
DAYNA

I
t’s still dark when a white van with government plates drives under the Marriott’s portico and pulls up next to me. The driver’s window slides down a couple of inches. “You Dayna?” It’s dark, and all I can see of him is the Oakley wraparound sunglasses cocked on his forehead. He doesn’t wait for my answer. “Get in. We’re late.”

I walk around and open the panel door to find nine guys asleep, backpacks and duffel bags piled everywhere. The only place free is occupied by a leg. The guy it belongs to wakes up and looks at me
blankly. He doesn’t move, and I look at the driver for help. Finally the guy grumbles and moves his leg. I squeeze in, but there’s no place for my duffel bag, and I hold it on my lap.

As we drive away from the Marriott, someone in the back tells a crude joke. I don’t laugh, and no one else does, either. I can only think it was meant for me. I close my eyes; this is going to be a very long one-and-a-half-hour drive, and I don’t even want to think about the coming months. I try to occupy my mind by going through the list of things they told me to bring, from a web belt to polarized shooting glasses. I also brought one of those all-in-one pocket tools, a Leatherman. I’m definitely my father’s daughter, the civil engineer who never went far from home without some sort of tool.

We drive west on Route 50 in silence until the driver starts flipping through radio stations, probably more to keep awake than anything else. Just as it turns light, he stops in front of a grim little McDonald’s in a mini-mall. I let the guys go ahead, watching them stretch and walk across the parking lot. Their patched and sun-bleached fatigues and scuffed desert boots make them look like stragglers from some defeated army heading home. In fact, many of them were in the Gulf War.

I wince when I catch one of the guys studying my laced Timberlands. I bought them the day before at the Tysons Corner mall, and there’s not a scratch on them. I’m already self-conscious about my hair pulled back in a ponytail, my new black military-chic rollneck sweater, and my tan cargo pants. The darts I sewed in the butt to hold them up make it look like I’m auditioning for a slightly more rugged J. Crew catalog.

After another thirty-minute drive, the van turns off Route 50 onto a two-lane rural road. We pass a few white clapboard houses with enclosed porches and American flags out front. It’s late October, the trees are bare, and piles of copper leaves blow across the road. The van startles a deer that bolts into the underbrush.
We turn down a gravel road where there’s a neatly painted sign that says simply
PRIVATE
. A mile farther down, the van comes to a guard blockhouse with a ten-foot drop barrier, a spinning yellow light on top. On either side of the blockhouse runs a chain-link fence with razor wire on the top. You can’t mistake the place for anything other than a government base.

A guard in a camouflage uniform opens the van’s panel door, and we hold up our blue badges for him to see. He first checks to make sure the badge numbers match the numbers on the paper on his clipboard. (There are no names on CIA badges.) Then he matches the pictures on our badges with our faces. From somewhere on the base I hear a slow, throaty
dah-dah-dah
. A heavy machine gun.

We drive into some pine woods and stop in front of a rickety wooden building with dirt floors. A wooden overhang serves as a roof for an outdoor classroom set with high metal chairs and waist-high tables.

There’s a clump of students out front talking, Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands. In the middle of them is a girl in faded camies, her boots as scuffed as the guys, with a pair of yellow range glasses on top of her head. The only thing that sets her off is a pair of pearl earrings. It’s the first familiar thing I’ve seen all morning, and my nerves ease up a bit.

I walk over, and she sticks out her hand to me. “Hi, Sunshine, I’m Cheri.”

I must look at her a little funny. “Oh, sorry,” she says. “I got ‘Walking on Sunshine’ stuck in my head. So, where’d you learn to shoot?”

She walks over to the coffee urn to get me a cup of coffee, and I follow her.

“I have no idea what I’m doing here,” I say, in a voice only Cheri can hear.

Cheri puts her hand on my shoulder. “If you need help, just ask.”

Cheri tells me she’s here only for a refresher. For the last three years she’s been overseas, training foreigners to shoot. This course is like a vacation for her.

Jeff, the head instructor, looks up and down at our tables to make sure we each have a holster and a Glock 9-mm semiautomatic pistol. He’s about forty, with a receding hairline, hollow cheeks, and a pair of cold, silver blue eyes. He has a briskness that tells you he’s run this course more times than he cares to remember.

“Small-town cops wear their weapons on their hips,” he says. “It’s not the way we do it here. You holster your weapon on the small of your back.”

I watch the others as they undo their web belts and thread their holsters through them to the back. I do the same. I remember my Leatherman, take it off, and thread it back on my belt on the left side.

I wait until everyone else grabs his Glock off the table before I pick up mine. I follow suit as they pop out the magazine, rack back the slide, and hold the weapon up to show that the chamber is clear.

“It’s a hot range,” Jeff says. “Get your ammo.”

We line up in front of a table set with boxes of ammunition, and cram fistfuls of rounds into our cargo pockets. Walking to the range, we load fifteen rounds into each of our magazines. Jeff takes us to a ten-foot-high berm with twenty-five black-and-white silhouette paper targets lined up in a row. It’s quiet except for the wind whistling through the metal frames. We spread out to pick a target. I take the last one at the end.