S1 E9: An Endgame in Karakalpakstan (Part 1)

Mr. van Jaarsveld, please, I don’t remember sending you invitation.

Autumn 2012

Colonel Konstantin Gavrilovich Ivanov stared out the window of his office at the headquarters of the Uzbek State Security Service in Tashkent.

The rain in Spain, he once heard, fell mainly on the plain. In Uzbekistan, it fell mainly on the ill-fated, the downtrodden, the unchosen. Not people of Ivanov’s ilk, in other words. He, by virtue of lineage, had spent much of his life under a golden umbrella. Problem was, proverbial umbrellas had a way of disappearing every time he made his way to Karakalpakstan, the thorny region in the northwest of the country.

Last time he was there was when this whole mess had started. After years of détente with his archrival from the Soviet KGB days, Amir had fired an opening salvo in the form of a South African industrial espionage agent.

Ivanov had immediately recognized it for what it was. And surprised though he was that Amir would use some cut-rate agency to do his dirty work, he couldn’t help but play along.

There’s an oft-quoted maxim in the espionage business that says your best asset is your unwitting asset. Useful idiots, the KGB used to call them. A useful idiot was exactly what he’d seen in Gerhardt van Jaarsveld.

It didn’t take long to figure out what the South African was up to. The leader of the Karakalpakstani independence movement was well known to Ivanov. So much so, that they had placed spies and informants throughout the region to keep an eye on him. One of which happened to be the woman operating the sauna in Moynak.

Ruslan conducted most of his business in the sauna, so it was no surprise to hear that he had shepherded van Jaarsveld there after making contact. Ivanov had instructed the woman to search both sets of clothes. When she found the USB stick stitched into van Jaarsveld’s lapel, she’d taken it and given a fake one to Ruslan. Then all Ivanov had to do was convince everyone that none of this ever happened.

He’d naively hoped that that was the end of it. But then Amir reached out through an intermediary to say that he would offer the perpetrator of the information theft to Ivanov as a peace offering. The only catch: Ivanov had to travel to Khujand in Tajikistan to accept the gift. How duplicitous of Amir, he remembered thinking at the time.

The “peace offering” turned out to be Hans Bergman. Not so much a useful idiot, but rather a useless idiot. Literal canon fodder. The guy didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Always complaining about this and that, talking about his mother far more than any grown man should. So, Ivanov had sent Bergman to Kyrgyzstan on some no-chance mission without worrying too much about the German’s fate.

Ivan Drago had said it best in the American movie Rocky IV: “If he dies, he dies.”

Ivanov’s attitude had softened considerably after getting a call from Bill Hines, one of the many foreigners who owed their freedom to him. Old Bill had reminded him just how catastrophic it would be if something happened to Bergman. The German needed to be kept alive at all costs.

For that, Ivanov had reached out to a couple of German BND agents he hadn’t seen since a party at his Tashkent villa in the late 90s. The pair had spent most of the time in the pool flopping about like a couple of seals. Coincidentally, they had their own interest in Bergman, and had already made contact. For a favour, Ivanov suggested, he would continue to keep quiet about the unfortunate incident in the pool involving the British ambassador. The BND agents had been more than happy to oblige.

A ringing phone startled him.

“Allo, this is Colonel Ivanov, Uzbek State Security Service.”

Wolfgang: “Why hello there, Colonel. I’m calling to inform you that your package is ready. To where shall it be delivered?”

Ivanov gave Wolfgang an address.

Wolfgang: “Very well. Expect delivery in two days.”

“Good. Make sure the package is not damaged, please.”

Wolfgang: “Don’t worry so much, Colonel. It’s not good for your blood pressure. We are taking good care of the package.”

From the terrace of his dacha outside Dushanbe, Amir was momentarily captivated by a buzzard circling his end of the valley. He imagined a wounded Hans Bergman somewhere below fighting for his last breath. In reality, it was more likely that his own body would soon be laid waste to by a wake of buzzards.

The reason was because the rain in Tajikistan fell mainly on the unfamilial. Familial ties, through blood or marriage, was the almighty guarantor of success. Amir had been an exception for years because he knew how to get things done. Dictatorships, for all their pomp, were notorious for being woefully uncompetitive in global markets. The corruption, the nepotism, the lack of competition — it all resulted in shit even failed states didn’t want.

Ever since Hans Bergman had been spirited out of Tajikistan under his nose by none other than Colonel Konstantin Gavrilovich Ivanov, the pressure on him from the country’s incestuous elite had steadily increased. He was now, for example, followed everywhere he went by a couple of cretins from state security, and his phone calls were surely being monitored.

In hindsight, his decision to sacrifice Hans was turning out to be a painful miscalculation, albeit one borne out of his own short-sightedness. Why had he not run a more thorough background check on Firuze, the woman he had chosen to seduce Hans? Had he done so, he would’ve realized that she was an asset of the Internal Affairs ministry. All the pillow-talk she no doubt endured ended up on the desk of someone much higher up the food chain than Amir.

When he’d found out, his first instinct had been to put Hans on the next flight back to Stuttgart. But that, he soon realized, would set alarm bells ringing in places where he didn’t want them to ring. The sacrifice gambit, on the contrary, seemed perfect. German goes to Khujand for a business meeting and disappears without a trace. It happened all the time.

He’d come up with the idea because of another gambit. Earlier in the year, the situation in Karakalpakstan had seemed ripe for exploitation. Sensing an opportunity to curry favour with his president, he had hired a hacking group to unearth some sensitive information that could help Karakalpakstan’s cause. When the group delivered, he’d contracted a South African firm to make the delivery because he didn’t trust transmitting the file over the internet. That he’d also been able to get one over on Ivanov was simply a bonus.

But it was that bonus that gave Amir the idea for how to deal with Hans. He’d played chess with Ivanov a number of times in their KGB days. The Uzbek would surely appreciate the sacrifice. What Amir hadn’t foreseen, although he should have, was Ivanov’s double-cross. Not that he had been all that worried. He had more than enough connections to blunt Ivanov’s attempts to use Hans to whittle away his influence.

It also didn’t stop Amir from engaging the South African firm once again to track Hans down and return him to Tajikistan. Things had been looking good on that front, until the agent sent to do the work had inexplicably lost his prey.

In mere months, Amir’s plan for a Central Asia dominated by a Tajikistan he controlled now had about as much hope as a Latvian gambit.

When his phone rang, he stared at it for a few seconds. A South African number.

“Hello. This is Amir. With whom am I speaking?”

He listened carefully to the heavy accent.

“Are you telling me you found Hans?”

Finally, a positive development. If Hans was there, Ivanov must be too. It would take some doing to get into Uzbekistan, but he would find a way.

It was time to settle the score with Ivanov once and for all.

Gerhardt van Jaarsveld wasn’t so much concerned with where the rain fell as he was with figuring out how to drive an Ural motorcycle with a sidecar.

He’d emerged ten minutes ago from the dark abyss in a deserted building on the Uzbek side of the border. If he was honest, he was shocked the BND snakes hadn’t locked the trap door on their way out or hadn’t simply waited for him with a taser or another one of Arne’s right hooks.

Rather quite inexplicably, when Gerry had peeked through the building’s only window, he’d seen a car about half a kilometre away across a vast field. It had to be them, he’d figured.

Running outside, he’d ambled along the rutted dirt road that led away from the building until he’d reached a dwelling with smoke curling skywards from the chimney. An old Ural motorcycle, replete with a sidecar, was parked on the road, keys still in the ignition. He’d given it a long look before deciding that it was the only way to keep up with Hans. Before driving off, he’d left some money for the owner to replace it.

Actually driving the motorcycle, however, had turned out to be quite the adventure, especially on an uneven road. At first, he’d kept going around in a circle until he learned how to use his upper body strength to keep the bike going in a straight line. By the time he’d reached a paved road, he was exhausted. The car carrying Hans had still been visible in the distance.

Now he was cruising the Uzbek countryside without a helmet, getting confused stares from every local he passed. On the whole, his situation wasn’t great. That much he could admit. He was starving, for one, but couldn’t do anything about it as long as the BND snakes were on the move. The things he would do for a steak.

What do you have to say about your bloody juice fast now, huh, son?

As far as he knew, he was in the famed Fergana Valley. Fertile and oh so culturally diverse, it had been divided up between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan in the most Machiavellian way possible by Stalin and his band of geocultural sadists. If there was ever an argument against national borders, the Fergana Valley was exhibit A.

For starters, it was like a big cul-de-sac surrounded by high mountains to the north, east, and south. The only way out that didn’t require superhuman feats of road engineering was to the west.

It also happened to be the most fertile region in all of Central Asia, thanks to the Syr Darya river and its tributaries flowing in from Kyrgyzstan. Never one to miss an opportunity for ecocide, the Soviets had made the Valley the beating heart of its ill-fated cotton industry. So ill-fated it was that the ecological accountants had a saying: for every additional cotton bud in Fergana there was one less fish in the Aral Sea.

Now here’s where things got interesting.

The Uzbek SSR controlled a vast majority of the Valley and its arable land. In exchange for that privilege, the Soviets gave control of the Valley’s only natural egress to Tajikistan. A geographical middle finger, if ever there was one. And to ensure eternal strife between the Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, the Soviets decided to make the Kyrgyz-majority city of Andijan part of Uzbekistan and Uzbek-majority Osh part of Kyrgyzstan.

All of this was manageable during Soviet times. After the collapse, the Valley devolved into a sort of geopolitical game of tit-for-tat. Uzbekistan would open and close its borders at will, Kyrgyzstan would restrict the water supply, and Tajikistan would make border checks so arduous that Uzbek truckers had no choice but to take the circuitous northern route to reach Samarkand and Bukhara.

If there was ever a setting for a geopolitical thriller, this was it.

After what felt like hours maneuvering a malcontented horse, the car carrying Hans had turned into the parking lot of a private airfield just outside some big city. Gerry watched the car come to a stop, the BND snakes haul Hans onto a waiting plane, and then the plane take off in a westerly direction.

He drove the Ural through the gate of the airfield and asked the only person he could find where the plane was heading. The answer gave him the chills. It was the one place he never wanted to go back. Ever.

Karakalpakstan.

The plane carrying Wolfgang, Arne, and Hans began its descent. It was yet another sunny day in Karakalpakstan, but Hans was feeling rather under the weather. He was still trying to process the last twenty-four hours and what it meant for his future on earth — an exercise made a lot more difficult by the absence of his anxiety medication.

Wolfgang and Arne, in contrast, were rather pleased with themselves. They’d plucked Hans from the jaws of politically motivated murder with a savvy bit of driving and one of Arne’s mean right hooks. A job well done, and only a few more hours until they could get back to toppling regimes on behalf of the German government.

Arne: “Don’t look so sad, Herr Bergman.”

“But why shouldn’t I? I am not a free man.”

Arne: “Sure you are. Colonel Ivanov doesn’t keep prisoners.”

Wolfgang: “Look at it this way, Herr Bergman. You’re like the schoolboy who lives in the basement but isn’t allowed out of the house.”

“I do not understand. How is that good?”

Wolfgang: “Because you could not be allowed out of the basement.”

A car was waiting for them at an old military airstrip outside Nukus. Old tanks and anti-aircraft batteries littered the desolate landscape.

They passed the drive into the city in silence. Hans didn’t want to hear any more about basement captivity. He actually found himself preferring Arne’s brusque, blue-collar way of dealing with the world. At least he knew what he was getting with Arne. Wolfgang was a two-faced weasel who relied on others to execute his sadistic whims.

They were put in a single hotel room with a view to an abandoned factory. Two twin beds took up most of the space. Arne occupied the rest.

“Now what will happen? I would like to know.”

Wolfgang: “It won’t be long now. The Colonel will arrive in Nukus shortly.”

Colonel Ivanov was waiting for them in a private room at the back of a cavernous riverside restaurant in the centre of town. The amount of food on the table suggested that an army would be joining, but Hans knew better.

Ivanov: “Welcome to Karakalpakstan, Mr. Bergman.”

Hans: “Ja, hi. Tell me what you will do to me. I’m tired and want to sleep.”

Ivanov: “Patience, Mr. Bergman. Please, first enjoy my hospitality.”

Ivanov called for the bottle of vodka that had been on ice. He poured four glasses and handed them out.

Ivanov: “A toast.”

Wolfgang: “To what do we owe this toast, Colonel?””

Ivanov considered the question.

Ivanov: “To international friendship.”

Arne nodded eagerly.

Arne: “To the long-lasting friendship of the German and Uzbek peoples.”

Hans stared at his glass. He wanted vodka about as much as he wanted a date with Amir.

Wolfgang: “Come on, Hans. Join us in this toast.”

The opening of the door to the private room made all of them look up. Hans couldn’t believe his eyes.

Amir: “Hello, Konstantin. Hello, Hans.”

Ivanov allowed himself a grudging nod.

Ivanov: “Amir. To what do we owe this pleasure?”

Amir: “I came as my own liaison. You have caused me so many problems, Konstantin.”

The door opened once again. Amir turned.

Gerry: “Bloody hell, you’re all here already. Am I late or something?”

Ivanov’s eyes narrowed.

Ivanov: “Mr. van Jaarsveld, please, I don’t remember sending you invitation.”

Gerry: “Don’t sweat it, ja. I had no trouble finding my way. So, what are we talking about?”

Ivanov grudgingly poured two more glasses.

Ivanov: “You see, Amir, it is not me who has caused you problems, but rather you who has caused me problems.”

Amir: “If that’s what you believe, then there’s only one way to settle this, Konstantin.”

Ivanov: “Yes, I suspect you are right.”

Gerry: “What, are you two going to fight it out in the ring?”

Ivanov: “Quiet, Mr. van Jaarsveld. You and your mercenary father have such simple minds.”

Amir: “Then it’s agreed. Tomorrow, we play chess for the future of Central Asia.”

Accidental Intrigue is an audio drama featuring tales of travel and mystery written by Kent Babin and narrated by Remington Cooney.