A Good Old-Fashioned Future (13 page)

They passed the bizarre polychrome facade of a
Finnish-Mexican restaurant. “Listen, ace,” Starlitz said. “If it’s the soul thing that’s got you down, this guy won’t help you there. It was a serious mistake to break him out of mothballs. You should have left him nodding-out in some bar in Baghdad listening to Bee Gees on vinyl. I don’t know what you’ll do about him now. You might try to bribe him with some kind of major ransom money, and hope he gets too drunk to move. But I don’t think he’ll do that for you. Bribes just flatter him.”

“Okay,” Khoklov said. “I agree. He’s too dangerous, and he has too much past. After the coup, we kill him. I owe that much to Ilya and Lev, anyway.”

“I appreciate that sentiment, but it’s kinda late now, ace. You should have iced him when we knew where he was staying.”

There was a distant hollow thump.

The Russian cocked his head. “Was that mortar fire?”

“Car bomb, maybe?” In the blue and lucid distance, filthy smoke began to rise.

Raf claimed that the abortive Israeli hit had been the twelfth attempt on his life. This might have been stretching the truth. It was only the second time that a Mossad hit-team had shot the wrong man in a neutral Scandinavian country.

Russians hated to commit themselves fully to a project. Seventy years of totalitarianism had left them with a terrific appetite for back-tracking, doublespeak, and doublecross. Raf, however, delighted in providing quick results.

Granted, his Ålands liberation campaign had had a few tactical setbacks. He’d had to abandon most of his favorite guns with the loss of his first safehouse. The Mossad team had escaped apprehension by the dumbfounded Finnish police. The car-bombing at the FinnAir office had cost Raf his yellow Fiat.

The Suomi Anti-Imperialist Cells excelled at spraying
radical political graffiti, but their homemade petrol bombs at the Jyväskylä police station had done only minor damage. The outspoken Helsinki newspaper editor had survived his kneecapping and would probably walk again.

Nevertheless, Raf’s ex-KGB sponsors back in Petersburg were impressed with the veteran’s initiative and cando spirit. They’d supplied another payoff.

With a brimming war-chest of mafia-supplied Euro-yen, Raf was on a roll. Raf had successfully infiltrated six Yankee mercs from the little-known but extremely violent American anarcho-rightist underground. Thanks to relaxed cross-border inspections in Europe and the dazed preoccupations of America’s ninja tobacco inspectors, these Yankee gun-runners had boldly brought Raf an up-to-date and very lethal arsenal of NATO’s remaindered best.

Raf also had ten Russian thugs on call. These men were combat-hardened mercenaries from the large contingent of thirty thousand ex-military professionals who guarded Russia’s bankers. Russian bankers who were not mafia-affiliated were shot down in droves by the black marketeers. Russian bankers who were mafia-affiliated were generally killed by one another. These bankers’ bodyguards were enjoying a booming trade. Being bodyguards, they naturally excelled at assassination.

These dangerous cliques of armed alien agitators would have been near-useless in Finland without the protection of locals on the ground. Raf had the Suomi Anti-Imperialist Cells to cover that front. The Suomi Anti-Imperialist Cells consisted of five hard-core undergraduates, plus a loose group of young fellow-travelers who would probably offer aid and shelter if pressed. The Cells also had an ideological guru, a radical Finnish nationalist professor and poet who had no real idea what his teachings had wrought among his nation’s postmodern youth.

So Raf had twenty or so people ready to use guns and bombs at his direction. To the uninitiated, this might not have seemed an impressive force. However, by the conventional
standards of European terrorism, Raf was doing splendidly. National movements such as ETA, IRA, and PLO tended to be somewhat larger, due to their extensive labor-pool of the embittered and oppressed, but Raf the Jackal was a creature of a different breed: a true revolutionary internationalist, a freelance with a dozen passports. His Åland Island Liberation Front was big. It was bigger than Germany’s Baader-Meinhof. It was bigger than France’s Action Directe. It was about as big as the Japanese Red Army, and considerably better financed. A group of this sort could change history. A far more primitive conspiracy had murdered Abraham Lincoln.

Starlitz was listening to international Finland Radio on the shortwave. It was tough to find decent English-language coverage of the ongoing terror campaign. Despite their continued selfless service in the UN blue-helmet contingent, neutral Finland didn’t have a lot of foreign friends. The internal troubles of a neutral country didn’t compel much general interest.

This would likely change, however, now that Raf had brought in outside experts. Raf was giving his Yankee new-hires an extensive rundown on the theory and practice of detonating acetylene bottles.

Aino had rented the state-supported handicrafts center through the good offices of her student activist group. The walls of the terrorist hideaway were covered with weird woolly hangings, massive hand-saws, pine-tar soaps, and eldritch Finnish glassware.

Aino was fully up-to-speed on improvised demolitions, so she had been appointed a look-out. She sat near a second-floor window overlooking the driveway, with a monster Finnish elk-rifle at hand. The job was tedious. Aino was leafing through a stack of English-language Flüüvin books which Starlitz had picked up at a Helsinki bookstore. Helsinki boasted bookstores half the size of
aircraft hangars. The book thing was something to do during those long dark winters.

“How many of these did she write?” Aino said.

“Twenty-five. The hottest sellers are
Froofies Go to Sea
and
Papa Froofy and the Mushroom Tigers.”

“They seem even stranger in English. It’s strange that she cares so much about her little blue creatures. She worries about them so much, and gets so emotionally touched about them, and they don’t even really exist.” Aino flipped through the pages. “Look, here the Flüüvins are walking through the fire-mists on big stilts. That’s a good picture. And look! There’s that cave creature that carries the harmonica and complains all the time.”

“That would be Speffy the Nerkulen.”

“Speffy the Nerkulen.” Aino frowned. “That isn’t a proper Finnish name. It isn’t Swedish, either. Not even Åland Swedish.”

Starlitz turned off the shortwave, which was detailing Finnish agricultural production. “She imagined Speffy, that’s all. Speffy the Nerkulen just popped out of her little gray head. But Speffy the Nerkulen sure moves major product in Hokkaido.”

Aino riffled the pages of the paperback. “I could make a book like this. She wrote this book fifty years ago. She was my age when she wrote and drew this book. I could do this myself.”

“Why do you say that?”

She looked up. “Because I could, I know I could. I can draw. I can tell stories. I’m always telling stories to people at the bar. Once I did a band poster.”

“That’s swell. How’d you like to come along with me and brace up the little old lady? I need a Finnish translator, and a former Froofy fan would be great. Besides, she can give you helpful tips on kid-lit.”

Aino looked at him, surprised. Slowly, she frowned. “What are you saying? I’m a revolutionary soldier. You should respect my political commitment. You wouldn’t talk to me that way if I was a twenty-year-old boy.”

“If you were a twenty-year-old boy, you’d fuckin’ spit on Speffy the Nerkulen.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Yes you would. Young soldier boys are cheaper than dirt. They’re a fuckin’ commodity. Who needs ’em? But a young female Froofy fan could be a very useful cut-out in some dicey negotiations.”

“You’re still lying to me. You should stop. I’m not fooled.”

Starlitz sighed. “Look. It’s the truth. Try and get it straight. You think the Åland Islands are important, right? Important enough to blow up trains for. Well, Speffy the Nerkulen is the most important thing that ever came out of the Åland Islands. Froofies are the only Ålands product that you can’t obtain anywhere else. Twenty-five thousand hick fishermen in the Baltic are doing
great
to produce a major worldwide pop hit like Speffy the Nerkulen. If the Ålands were Jamaica, he’d be Bob Marley.”

One of Raf’s new recruits entered the room. He was bearded and muscular, maybe thirty. He wore a Confederate flag T-shirt and carried a Colt automatic in a belt holster. “Hey,” he said. “Y’all speak English?”

“Yo,” said Starlitz.

“Where’s the can?”

Starlitz pointed.

“Hey, babe,” said the American, pausing. “That’s a lady’s rifle. You say the word, I’ll give you something serious to shoot with.”

Aino said nothing. Her grip tightened on the rifle’s polished walnut stock.

The American grinned at Starlitz. “She’s got no English, huh? She’s a Russian, right? I heard there’d be lots of Russian chicks in this operation. Man. What a dollar’ll do these days.” He rubbed his hands.

“Posse Comitatus?” Starlitz hazarded.

“Aw hell no. We’re not militia. Those militia boys, they’re all in a sweat over UN black helicopters and the New World Order.… That’s bullshit! We
know
the
New World Order. We got contacts. We’re gonna be
inside
the goddamn black helicopters. Shoulder to shoulder with Ivan, this time!”

Finland had the most expensive booze in the world. This was Finnish social democratic policy, part and parcel with the world’s lowest infant mortality rate. Nevertheless, Finns were truly fabulous drunks. The little Kasarmikatu bar was jammed with Finns methodically transiting from modest self-effacement to chest-pounding no-brakes bravado. A television barked above the shining racks of vodka and koskenkorva, showing broadcast news from across the Baltic. Another parliamentary crisis in Moscow. A furious Russian delegate was pounding the podium in a blue vinyl jacket and a Megadeth T-shirt.

The Japanese financier set down his apple juice and adjusted his sunglasses. “His Holiness the Master does not approve of drunkenness. Alcohol clouds the vision and occludes the flow of ki.”

“I can’t believe we found a Japanese who won’t drink after a business deal,” Khoklov bitched in Russian. The Japanese money-man didn’t speak or understand Russian. The three of them were clustered in the darkest corner of the Helsinki bar.

Starlitz spoke in Russian. “Our star depositor here has got a very severe case of that Pacific Rim New Age thing. These Supreme Truth guys are completely nuts. However, they’re richer than God.”

Starlitz silently toasted the money-man with a shot of Finnish cranberry vodka. He’d convinced their backer that this pulverizing liquor was cranberry juice. He switched to fluent gutter Japanese. “Khoklov-san tells me that he admires your electric skullcap very much. He wants to try one for himself. He is seeking health benefits and increased peace of mind.”

“Saaaaa …” riposted Mr. Inoue, patting the plasticized top of his shaven head. “The electroneural stabilizers
of His Holiness the Master. They will soon be in mass production at our Fuji fortress.”

“You got like a kids’ version of those, right?” said Starlitz.

“Of course. His Holiness the Master has many children.”

“So have you ever considered, like, a pop commercial version of those gizmos? Like with maybe a fully licensed cartoon character?”

Mr. Inoue blinked. “I was led to understand that Mister Khoklov’s associates could supply us with military helicopters.”

“The son of a bitch is on about the helicopters again,” Starlitz explained in Russian.

Khoklov grunted. “Tell him we have a special on T-72 main battle tanks. Twenty million yen apiece. Just for him, though. No resales.”

Starlitz conferred at length with Mr. Inoue. “He’s not interested in tanks. He wants at least six Mil-17 choppers with poison gas dispensers. Also some Spetsnaz Ranger vets to train the cult’s judo commando unit on their sacred island of Ishigakijima.”

“Spetsnaz veterans? Very well. We’ve got plenty. Tell him he’ll have to find them visas and put up earnest money. Those black berets aren’t your average goons.”

Starlitz conferred again. “He wants to know if you know anything about laser ablation uranium-enrichment techniques.”

“Nyet. And I’m getting pretty tired of that question.”

“He wants to know if you’re interested in learning how they do that sort of thing at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.”

Khoklov groaned. “Tell him I appreciate the lead on industrial atomic espionage, but that crap went out with Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs.”

Starlitz sighed. “Let’s give Inoue-san a little face here, Pulat Romanevich. His Holiness the Master predicts the world will end in 1997. We play along with the cult’s
loony apocalypse myths, and we can lock in their deposits all the way through winter ninety-six.”

“Why do we need this plastic-headed lunatic?” Khoklov said. “He’s a crooked exploiter of the gullible masses. He’s running dummy companies inside Russia and recruiting Russian suckers for his ridiculous yoga cult. He needs us more than we need him. He’s a long way from home. Put the strong-arm on him.”

“Listen, ace. We need the cult’s deposit money, because we need that yen disparity to cover the flow of black capital. Besides, I’m the Tokyo liaison for this gig! It’s true the mafia could break his knees inside Russia, but back in Japan, his pals are building big stainless-steel bunkers full of giant microwaves.”

“There are limits to my credulity, you know,” Khoklov said testily. “Botulism breweries? Nerve gas factories? Hundreds of brainwashed New Age robots building computer chips for a half-blind master criminal in white pajamas? It’s completely absurd, it’s like something out of James Bond. Please inform this clown that he’s dealing with real-life professionals.”

Starlitz raised his hand and signaled. “Check please.”

“Here you are sir,” said Aino. “I hope you and your foreign friends are enjoying your stay in hospitable Helsinki.”

After the Helsinki disco bombing, Raf moved his center of operations to the Ålands proper. The hardworking youngsters of the S.A-I.C. had found him another bolthole—a sauna retreat in the dense woods of Kökar Island. This posh resort belonged to a Swedish arms corporation who had once used it to entertain members of various Third World defense departments. Handy day-trips into the Ålands had assured them privacy and avoided potential political embarrassments on Swedish soil. This Swedish company had fallen on hard times due to the massive Russian bargain-basement armaments sales. They were happy
to sublet their resort to Khoklov’s well-heeled shell company.