21st Century Bogatyr: Like Two Drops of Rain

"Keep your bowels open, your mouth shut and never volunteer for anything."

Sage advice from an old soldier.

[This is a fictional work in progress. Links to the rest of this tale are at the bottom of the page.]

by Zvi Baranoff

I followed Zuhrah about and she gave me an overview of the security parameters. I didn't exactly meet all the troops. Actually, I am not even exactly sure of how many were in that crew. I know I never saw all of them, but I do believe that I saw most of them and most of them did get a look at me.

This was also the first time that I had any view of the No Tell Motel that wasn't in the dark with me dead tired. The place really was an out of the way dump.

As we were heading out we passed Spider on his way back to the bungalow. He was holding what looked like a hubcap piled high with the pre-packaged mystery food that he had managed to clear out of the vending machines. He seemed to have a plan.

Now, in addition to my car, we had two trucks, a van and another car. They were all parked by the bungalow. There were a couple of tall trees standing by our vehicles.

We stood under those trees and Zuhrah whistled. From each of those trees I heard a counter-sign similar to a hoot and I noted a rustling of leaves. She had a sniper placed in each of those trees that were invisible from my perspective. How they got up there, I do not know. She returned a second whistle of a different pitch and tone and gave something akin to a salute before we walked on.

The security crew was truly an international force, although mostly Sub-Sahara African. There were a couple of Vietnamese women, a few Serbs and a young fellow with a strong Southern accent who told me that he was from LA - that is, Lower Alabama. Somehow, they all managed to communicate and they seemed to work well as a team.

It all, however, seemed to me at that moment to be more extravagant than what was called for. I wondered what all of this was costing me and if I was getting my money's worth. After all, we just needed to move this load of books from the No Tell Motel to a safe house and I never before needed a fucking army. I figured, though, that more than enough was better than not enough. Still, all this manpower was going to cut into profit margins.

We approached two young men - teenagers, actually - that were busying themselves with a fire, meat grilling on a spit. One of these fellows had a large lizard sitting on his shoulder and his counterpart was feeding the lizard grapes. They spoke to each other in a language of their own full of chirping and clicking and sounds of a tropical jungle.

Zuhrah called these young men Dibble Dibble and Dop Dop. Why? She told me "Dey the same. Same-same as two drops of rain. Dibble Dibble, Dop Dop." She fluttered her fingers and moved her hands in a downward motion, pantomiming rain.

I had never seen, before or since, any two people that looked so much alike. I assumed that they must be twins and asked Zuhrah if that were the case. She told me that they were brothers and "almost twins". I thought something might have been lost in translation. I asked Zuhrah what she meant and she told me about these boys.

The boys' mothers were cousins and their father's two wives. They both became pregnant at the same time and the boys were born within a few hours of each other. The mothers cared for each of the boys, taking turns breastfeeding and perhaps the mothers themselves, after a while, couldn't tell the boys apart. They were never far apart from each other from the day of their birthing.

There was no jealousy between these two women. There was, for a while, domestic tranquility. One day however, when these women came home from working their garden, they saw through the window their husband making love to a neighbor in their matrimonial bed. That they could not tolerate. Although they did not raise a fuss at the moment, between them they hatched a plan and exerted revenge.

Days went by and the husband was unaware that the wives knew of his indiscretion. The women behaved outwardly as if nothing had changed. They cooked meals, cleaned the house and took turns bedding their husband.

When he was offered a warm herbal beverage, he suspected nothing and when he was led to bed by his beautiful wives he was a content man.

The herbs began to take effect and his body was close to immobilized. He laid in bed and one of the women brought his penis to full erection. Then, he felt the sharp knife at his neck but he was unable to react as his second wife made an incision in his throat and through the larynx. He was both paralyzed and unable to shout out for help.

The women proceeded to castrate their husband. He stared helplessly and screamed silently. They fed his member to the household dog. Then they sat quietly, breastfeeding their children, who were toddlers by then, while their husband slowly bled to death. That is how the neighbors found them the next day. The father was dead in a pool of blood and the two young boys were blissfully sleeping at their mothers' breasts.

The village was shaken by this and the villagers responded by tearing the youngsters from their mothers' arms and dragging the women to the village square. There, the women were beaten, stoned to death and then set on fire while the terrified toddlers gazed on in horror.

The children were sold to a wealthy family in a neighboring village. The purchaser hoped to train them as domestic servants but the boys showed little likelihood of being domesticated. They clung to each other and spoke a "language" that only they understood. They seemed to not understand anything spoken to them. They broke things and made messes. They peed in the corners.

The wealthy family soon regretted their purchase. After a few years, the brothers were sold to a farmer. They didn't prove themselves to be a whole lot better at farm work then they were at household tasks in spite of the regular beatings they received as encouragement. They continued to speak to each other in their private tongue.

So, the adolescents were once again on the market when Zuhrah was passing through that region and she purchased the boys at a bargain price. She informed me that she has fed them and clothed them and has been teaching them the mercenary trade. They are also beginning to communicate somewhat with others in something akin to English or at least the Pidgin that was the common language of this crew.

I asked the boys what they were cooking and in unison, with broad smiles, they answered "Meat!" and I guess that was about the answer I expected. From the size of the roast I had no way of telling if it was a goat, a deer or a dog. It was, however, beginning to smell like lunch. I left Zuhrah with her troops and went back into the bungalow.

Frank was back at looking over the crates. He was still sizing up the merchandise. He was trying to visualize the most optimal markets for this diverse load.

Spider had all that vending machine products out of the wrappers. He had a knife in hand and was busy chopping things up and mixing things together. Using a bottle of hot sauce and the No Tell Motel microwave, he was putting together something that might just resemble food. It looked like the next meal would be a choice between barbecued or microwaved mystery meat.

Frank was just beginning to pry the next crate open when Spider's knife flew across the room and plunged into the crate a few inches from Frank's outstretched hand. Frank froze in that position as Spider followed the trajectory of his knife at a somewhat slower pace, waving his arms and his cane and yelling somewhat incoherently.

When Spider reached the spot where Frank was standing, he put his hand on Frank's shoulder and somewhere between a rasp and a whisper he said "Watch out" before pulling his knife from the place where it had stuck.

Holding the knife in one hand, Spider moved his other hand slowly over the outer edge of that crate, simultaneously looking and feeling for something that no one else in the world could likely see or feel.

We all watched as Spider examined that crate. Then, he pulled back ever so slightly on the upper edge where Frank had almost used his crowbar. Spider pointed with the tip of his knife at what had somehow caught his attention from across the room. "It's a tracer," he said. "We have a problem."

I asked Spider what we were facing and this is how he broke it down. "The tracer means that likely someone knows where this load is and likely will be showing up for it soon. It could be mobsters or could be the Federales. No way of knowing."

My day was just getting better and better. We needed to do something and whatever that something was, we didn't have much time to figure it out.

So, we kicked around all the variables and the possibilities concerning what we were facing. They ran from the possibility that no one was monitoring the tracer at all to a scenario where some really horrible and heavily armed people would be on us like white on rice within minutes.

We had to assume, on the one hand, that likely someone was monitoring that thing and, on the other hand that Zuhrah and her troops would be able to repel an imminent attack. What we had to consider was a strategy that answered all the other possibilities, which covered a plethora of unknowns and unknowables.

"What if," I suggested, "we ship that tracer off somewhere? They will go follow the tracer…"

"Sure," Spider said. "But…as soon as they catch up with it, they will be back here."

Yeah. That had already crossed my mind. So, we all stared at each other for a while, but we eventually hashed out a plan, of sorts.

We would take one of the trucks back to Philly and load it up with piles of broken and nearly worthless books. We would add the crate with the tracer to that load and someone would drive it off to some out of the way place such as Georgia.

Best case? The mobsters would follow the decoy long enough for us to get ourselves and our purloined cargo safely stashed beyond their sights and out of their reach.

Of course, if they caught up with the driver before he could dump the truck...well, you know. Again, the best case would be that the driver could dump the truck and set it aflame and the mobsters would believe it to be the cargo that they were looking for and write it all off as a loss. Humm...I guess anything is possible. Realistically, this might buy us enough time to give them the slip.

Spider carefully examined the rest of the crates to see if there were any other hidden electronic devices that should concern us. Meanwhile, Frank and I went looking for Zuhrah and found her with the Boys and the lizard attending to the mystery meat on the spit. We took her aside and brought her up to date with the situation.

Without showing any emotion, Zuhrah said what the rest of us had probably been thinking but none of us had yet uttered. "Whoever drive dat truck, he gonna die."

"Most likely," Frank answered. Zuhrah nodded, solemnly. I looked away.

Frank took one of the trucks to rendezvous with Haj. Zuhrah was speaking with the "twins" in hushed tones. I lit an Ersatz Cigar, inhaled deeply and paced about, pretending to think, or trying to clear my head or something like that.

Zuhrah led Dibble Dibble and Dop Dop to a clearing amongst the trees. They laid a blanket out in the clearing and I saw the three of them sitting closely together and playing with the lizard. I continued to smoke and pace about and fret over the general state of affairs.

I wasn't paying any attention to what Zuhrah and her boys were up to. I was absorbed in my own thoughts.

When I casually looked in that direction, I saw the lizard perched on a low hanging branch, seemingly guarding its people. Those people were all naked.

I couldn't help but to notice Zuhrah's beauty and found myself gazing at her and her young lads. As I watched from afar, the brothers stood near each other and Zuhrah held one erect member in her hand and brought the other deeply into her mouth. I shook off my gazing and averted my eyes. I went back to the bungalow to eat some of Spider's mystery food and await Frank's return.

Spider had carefully inspected all of the crates and had determined that there was only one tracer. Frank made short work of that short run to Philly and had returned with the truck loaded with dreck. We added the case of books with the tracer to our decoy truck.

While we readied the truck, the brothers spoke to each other in their private language, sitting side by side. They ate barbecued meat from a single plate with their fingers and each gave an occasional bit of meat to the pet lizard.

When they had eaten their fill, one of the brothers climbed into the cab of the vehicle. Zuhrah gave him a handgun and a Napalm Pineapple which is sort of a high-tech Molotov Cocktail. She carefully explained where he was to dump the truck, how to use the incendiary device to set the vehicle aflame and how to get back to the crew if, Inshallah, he should somehow survive.

A coastal fog rolled in as we worked silently loading the purloined cargo into the second truck. The remaining brother wandered about, speaking to himself in a language that he alone understood. The lizard sat contentedly on his shoulder.