The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,104
down under a heavy blanket. The others talked in low voices, drinking coffee from a thermos that Jeremy, the British intelligence officer, had brought along. Occasionally one of them would make a joke and the others, in the decompression after the mission, would join in the laughter.
As dawn broke, the boat made for a fishing village about ten kilometers north of Hasan Kuli. It was a barren spot, the town bleached as white as the Caspian sand. A jeep was waiting for them; it drove them several miles inland, where a helicopter was cranking its rotor. The markings on the side identified it as belonging to GasPort Ltd. A crewman from the helicopter handed dry clothes to Molavi and led him to a shed near the landing site, where he could change and use the toilet. The rest of the team changed clothes in the open air. The black wet suits were stowed in a carry-all, and replaced with street clothes that might have been worn by a group of adventure tourists on a Central Asian holiday.
When they boarded the helicopter, Molavi had trouble attaching the four-way straps of his safety harness, so Marwan and Hakim on either side clicked the buckles. Jackie handed him earplugs to dull the roar of the helicopter engine. When they were all buckled and plugged, the helicopter levitated from the ground in an easy upward float that felt like the suspension of gravity. When the chopper was several hundred feet up, it lowered its nose and banked east toward Ashgabat.
The helicopter flew over the desert plains of southwest Turkmenistan, passing near trading towns with unpronounceable names—Kizyl Atrek, Gumdag, Gyzylarbat. To the south were the Kopet Mountains, a sharp ridge of peaks that guarded the frontier between Turkmenistan and Iran. Through the helicopter window you could make out the dry riverbeds and goat trails of this rugged, empty land. Molavi tried to stay awake and see the sights, but he couldn’t manage it. Escape was a kind of narcoleptic drug. He enjoyed the sleep of a condemned prisoner, released.
Harry Pappas and Adrian Winkler landed at the Ashgabat airport, the plane coming to rest in a distant corner away from the commercial terminal. A powder blue Mercedes was parked on the jetway, a local security man in plain clothes standing beside it. When the two men descended the gangway, the Turkman greeted them stiffly and led them to the car. He rode in front with the driver, the two Westerners in back. The car peeled off the tarmac, avoiding customs, passport control, and the Ashgabat VIP lounge.
It was early morning, and the city was just waking up. It was a capital that appeared to have been built overnight. The new section of town was all white marble palaces, ceremonial state buildings, and grand apartment blocks. It was like a toy city. The buildings were stately and well built—designed in a sort of Turkic neoclassical style that was all noble pillars and gold domes. It conveyed the sort of permanence that a nomadic people would want in their capital, when they realized that they were sitting on the world’s fifth-largest gas reserves and could afford to build whatever they wanted.
The nation’s previous leader, who had modestly called himself Turkmenbaschi, or “leader of the Turkmen,” had named nearly every one of these grand edifices after himself. He had even crafted a golden statue of himself atop a massive pillar at the center of town. It was motorized so that at every daylight hour the baschi’s body was facing the sun.
“Is this place for real?” asked Harry. “It looks like a Turkish Disney World.”
“Beats me, old boy. Never been here. Not likely to come back, either.”
“It’s beautiful, in an ugly sort of way.”
“Shhh,” said Adrian, nodding toward the security man in front. “Remember, we are guests in the house of the baschi.”
The powder blue Mercedes drove them south through the capital. They passed eccentric buildings designed to please the former leader’s iron whim: the state publishing company, whose façade was built to look like the open pages of a book; the Ministry of Health, a skyscraper formed to resemble the caduceus—the rod entwined by two snakes that is the symbol of the medical profession. Ahead of them a dozen miles distant stood the Kopet range, rising sharply out of the high plain. The buildings here offered an unobstructed view of the mountains. They passed the President Hotel, open only to guests of the baschi, and then the presidential palace