Dave’s Mill

Chapter I

Kabul, Afghanistan - June 1984

I awoke with a startle, full drenched in sweat, and screamed, “By the infidel’s limp qadib, my groin is on fire!”

Except for Kabul’s usual nightly symphony of sporadic gunfire and an occasional detonated suicide bomb or two, the normal quietude found in Mansur’s neighborhood and the rest of the city, suddenly erupted with a chaotic cacophony from countless screeching emergency vehicle sirens and pulsating staccato from air raid warning towers. Due to the overpowering clamor, it seemed my pleas and screams for help were drowned out—no one was responding to my cries.  

Following my arrival yesterday afternoon at Mansur’s home, situated within the elite Afghan restricted residential compound, everything went off with the prospects of a promising late afternoon session with little Lita, Mansur’s sweet young wife. Mansur and I had two full hours to frolic before leaving on my jet to fly to Moscow.

Lounging starkers in the dimly lit bedroom eagerly posturing on the pallet to begin lube prepping of her nethers, I took a final sip from my tumbler of sweet mint tea and set it aside as a placid lusciously naked Lita, without uttering a sound or casting a glance to my face, entered the room and obediently slid onto the satin sheeted playpen. Suddenly, my vision went fuzzy and I was overcome with dizziness.

                                       ***

Now thrashing on the mattress, I could recall nothing beyond the sensation of uncontrollable spinning in darkness, plagued by strobe type light flashes. Presently, my head and aches between my legs were intolerably throbbing with searing pain. Peering below the sheets, aided with faint nightlight illumination, the sight I beheld rendered a sweeping surge of gut-wrenching nausea—uncontrollably, I barfed.  Everything underneath the sheets was blood soaked, coupled with coagulated red-black crust covering my naked stomach and thighs, and urine, with intermittent founts, spurt from between my legs.  By Allah’s mercy, some pervert crudely hacked off my penis and testicle sack, haphazardly cauterizing the wound as if he were a numb-nuts idiot recklessly wielding a blow torch. Whoever was responsible for this vile act had the intent to see me experience extended misery before an eventual death.

Since neither Mansur nor anyone else responded to my screams for help, while attempting unsuccessfully to ignore the intense pain, I clambered to grasp the bed post and fumbled around to find the night stand telephone. Then it dawned on me, there wasn’t one—I was in little Lita’s room.  Looking down at the floor, to my shock and utter horror a coagulated red-black crusted penis and scrotum sack was laying before me atop a blood-soaked satin sheet; but the paltry size and presence of several canker sore scars told me it wasn’t mine. Confused and disoriented, I jammed Lita’s lube smeared prep towel against my gaping groin wound and hobbled down the hall into Mansur’s specially furnished activity room.

Now slightly more coherent, I thought, where in the blazes was everyone else.  Scanning Mansur’s room, I first glanced at his digital alarm clock which displayed three-thirty A.M. Dropping my gaze to the bed, there lay Mansur, stone-dead, mouth wide agape, with my severed blood crusted penis rammed and thrust deep into his throat by a grill kabob skewer. His cadaverous pasty yellow-gray coloring told me his breathing obviously had stopped hours ago, and I could tell that our castrations had been done with a serrated meat knife—that bloody tool now impaled my testicle sack, spiked into the wall, dangling just above Mansur’s forehead.

 This atrocity smacked of a mujahedeen raid.  For whatever reason, one of those miscreants had intentionally switched our parts, bent on causing confusion, but I was not mistaken—again, size being the clue. Repeatedly in frantic desperation, I hollered for help, even trying to rouse that lazy ignoramus servant, Mohammed. By Mansur’s night stand I saw his telephone cable had been yanked from the wall.  In an almost full-panic mode, I struggled once more to move my feet, forcing a painful limp forward, intent on accessing the front door by traipsing through the well illuminated foyer. Thinking if I could reach the portico, I hopefully could summon those retarded kiosk security guards to call for an ambulance. Instead, I tripped over a fold in Mansur’s cluttered collection of rolled and stacked oriental rugs extending into the hall access, causing my body to collide against the sideboard. While flailing my arms to stabilize balance, I accidently dropped Lita’s jelly smeared towel and haphazardly grasped and yanked the sideboard doily upon which set full framed enlarged photo portraits of Mansur’s collection of four wives. These huge ornate frames cascaded to the floor, spreading broken glass all over my path, as my full naked torso met bare, shard encrusted hardwood.

When I tried to break the impact, my palm heels were cut to shreds and I haplessly landed full chest, face and open groin wound flat on the glittering fragments with my bleeding nose stuck between two of the askew photos, curling out from their broken frames. I never noticed these before, but little Lita looked resplendent in her bridal attire, as did the photo of Zaiuba, his most recent wife of less than six months. She was a much older woman and had also been shaved bald to suit Mansur’s preference—strikingly beautiful, nevertheless, even for being well past her best scwuddeling days.

 Slightly dazed and bleeding from my fall, I looked again at that shattered frame of the older woman and froze rigid.  This photo was the bridal portrait of his new wife, Zaiuba, whom I never personally met—or so I previously thought. According to Mansur, she was a half-breed Pashtu bastard sired by a senior Soviet Diplomat. Being his favorite illegitimate offspring, she was spared an early customary marriage, preferring instead, to routinely serve her beloved father's needs while living within the Soviet Diplomatic Compound.  With his untimely death by a suicide bomber assassination this past January, Mansur agreed to take her on as a fourth wife, motivated with the notion that by doing so, he would promote his profile amongst the influential network within Kabul’s entrenched elite Soviet Occupation Apparatus.

Like myself, old Mansur had preference for young preteen girls, and despite his persistent offers to avail this recent wife for sport during my bimonthly visits, I politely declined his hospitality. From my father’s advice and my own personal experiences, young tender premenstrual girls are easily intimidated and obedient without the necessity of resorting to frequent beatings.

I suddenly realized this Zaiuba bimbette was well known to me and was not some pathetic Pashtu-infidel polyglot mix, but the very being of Renée Marie Moulin, that bisexual French witch, whom Gunter had me hire as Belle Époque’s personnel and resource manager.  Only later after the KGB located and snatched me from my Syrian hideout for a hostile interrogation, did I learn indirectly by inquisitor inferences that she served as their Belle Époque mole. By her incompetence and derelictions, she completely ruined my plans for establishing a caliphate. I never took her on for sex, but that poof-headed engineer, Gunter, poked her regularly—probably out of desperation.  Twenty-three was just too old by any reasonable standards, but obviously she had an underlying motive—she was keeping-book on all of us.

I gleaned from the direction of the KGB's aggressive questioning that they were looking for a scapegoat, Soviet style, and in order to save my ass it would be necessary to convince them it was her disregard for my rules, which resulted in the debacle of Belle Époque’s June 1981 destruction.

She was hired under recommendations from Gunter, who characterized her as an administrative wiz with strong Marxist principles devoid of any conventional moral scruples. As a native Parisian, fluent in numerous European languages, she was known to him from their exchange student days in Moscow—the perfect hire to organize and manage my soon to be expanded staff.  Neither Gunter nor I had any suspicions that she was a full blooded ethnic Russian KGB agent inserted into a covert Parisian role as a sleeper who remained alert for mission potential roles.

I truthfully didn’t know and never did learn who clued the Americans in, regarding Belle Époque’s ancient power phenomena, but initially only the three of us were privy.  Even that Kraut minder twit, Thekla, didn’t have a clue.  Since Renée was the only employee given a waiver to leave Belle Époque for personal reasons before termination of the five-year contract, applying derivative reasoning, that brief period of leave was probably when she first made contact with her KGB Principal. This phony Parisian slut had bisexual preferences and was always cavorting and scwuddeling with the support staff, including even those disgusting Meinhof and Weathermen pigs, probably to elicit more detailed information about our setup. No doubt she was given some means of transmitting timely data.  She had almost free run of the place and no one questioned her activities, which from my infrequent observations, seemed fixated on preening around in fashionable wardrobes looking for ego stimulating complements from our cadre of recent hires. There were at least four other employees who requested early termination of contracts and were allowed to leave. But secretly, my insidious preestablished plans demanded all employee terminations to be directed otherwise.  By a ruse they were drugged while in flight and dumped at high altitude into the Sahara—not to be missed.

At the time, despite the hostile mood during my involuntary stay within the oubliette of Moscow’s infamous Lubyanskaya Ploshchad’, posturing as a diehard brain washed commie, I vociferously demanded that my KGB abductors see to her suffering a painful death, for causing the collapse of our plans to achieve the greater good.

Now three years hence, in this entirely different Afghanistan venue, it became clear this very instant, unbeknownst to me, she had cleverly been inserted as a KGB plant, under the legend of a recent wife purportedly aging in her early twenties, to keep a watchful eye on that squirrely Prime Minister, Babrak Karmal, by virtue of his close relationship with Mansur. Despite the Komitet’s knowledge of my contempt for this Renée twit, they were obviously comfortable with her covert placement as a wife to Mansur, because my brief bimonthly visits were focused on entertaining only the young girls. Anyway, he totally ignored her presence with the demand that she must wear her burka when in the presence of guests outside the bedrooms. It was also obvious that the Russians manipulated my association with Mansur to monitor my promised efforts to reverse-engineer Belle Époque’s advanced technology, destroyed during that June seventh ’81 debacle.

 Perhaps things did go amuck and the Mujahedeen did execute last night’s hit—standard for this shit-hole of a nation—but in my mind that damnable cunt was a strong suspect as the instigator, because she would obviously recognize me, and be acutely aware of my voiced contempt concerning her blithe disregard for Belle Époque’s security procedures. One way or the other, it didn’t matter, be she responsible or not, I intended to eventually see her with a freshly circumcised pudendum slipping down a greased impalement pole.

***

It seemed like hours, but by six A.M. an ambulance did arrive and take me to the nearby Akabar Khan Hospital.  I was wheeled by gurney into the triage hall and shoved against the clutter of at least ten others, visibly revealing various states of their occupant’s terminal wounds accompanied with a cacophony of moans and screams. All the hospital pallets and operating rooms, I learned, were full, due to a bloody eight p.m. raid last night at the airport, which killed over thirty ANA soldiers and countless Afghani collaterals.

The triage medic, when he finally appeared, laughed as he lifted the bloody sheet to peek at my gaping wound. To my horror and screams to stop, he unceremoniously heaved the bowl containing my ice packed penis and scrotum into the biowaste dumpster, muttering that I was sure to die anyway. Like me, the others in the hall, he said, were culled from the wounded as inevitable terminal cases. He snorted with ill-concealed levity that there would be no possibility of reattachment.  This insensitive goat humper even mirthfully commented that had I behaved honorably against the heathen foe, once settled in paradise, Allah would see to body parts regeneration when he presented me with the promised seventy-two. I wept in agony when he announced the policy of withholding antibiotics for nonessential personnel—they were reserved exclusively for the Russians. A painful death by eventual infection was this jerk’s prognosis and there was no available doctor’s visit for even a first opinion.