Big Trouble by Dave Barry Page A

Russians. They had met in 1986, when they’d both served as maintenance technicians in a Soviet army division whose mission was to protect and defend—which meant occupy and, if necessary, stomp on—the Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan.
    This was not a plum assignment. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan was a remote, harsh, mountainous, extremely tribal nation whose economy was based primarily on revenge. The Grzkjistanis spent their adult lives thinking up and carrying out elaborate plots to kill and main each other in connection with bitter, centuries-old grudges, many of them involving goats.
    The only group that the Grzkjistanis hated more than each other was outsiders, which meant that the Russian soldiers were as popular as ringworm. Fraternization between the two cultures was officially banned, but every now and then a soldier would try to hook up with one of the Grzkjistani women. This required a breathtaking level of horniness, because after centuries of inbreeding, the average Grzkjistani was, in terms of physical attractiveness, on a par with the average Grzkjistani goat.
    Nevertheless, such liaisons did occasionally take place, and when they were discovered, as they inevitably were, the army had learned that it was wise to get the soldier involved out of the country immediately, because otherwise, sooner or later, he would be found tied naked to a rock with his genitals nowhere near the rest of his body.
    And thus most of the soldiers assigned to protect the Republic of Grzkjistan wisely elected to perform their mission by staying in their barracks and getting as drunk as humanly possible. Ivan and Leonid were in an excellent position to facilitate this mission, because, as maintenance technicians, they had access to large metal drums full of solvents and fluids that could, taken internally, put a real buzz in a person’s brain. Unfortunately, some of these chemicals could also permanently shut down a person’s central nervous system; the trick was to know exactly what was safe to consume, and in what quantities. Ivan and Leonid had developed considerable expertise in this branch of maintenance, and pretty soon they built up a nice little franchise, supplying recreational beverages to their comrades in exchange for money, cigarettes, Debbie Does Dallas videos, et cetera. Ivan was the brains, good at organizing and negotiating; Leonid was the muscle, good at keeping customers in line, if necessary by fracturing their skulls. As their business grew, word got around that if you needed something—and not just something to drink—Ivan and Leonid were the guys to see.
    One day in 1989, a man came all the way from Moscow to visit Ivan and Leonid. He wore nice clothes that actually fit, and he identified himself as a businessman, which Ivan and Leonid correctly understood to mean that he was a criminal. The man had an attractive proposition: He was willing to give Ivan and Leonid cash American dollars, and all he wanted in return was some machine guns that—while not technically the property of Ivan and Leonid—were basically just sitting around.
    And thus Ivan and Leonid moved up the career ladder from bootleggers to arms merchants. The timing was perfect: The Soviet Union was imploding, and Moscow was having trouble feeding, let alone paying, its far-flung troops. At remote outposts such as Grzkjistan, discipline and morale—not to mention inventory controls—were virtually nonexistent. Ivan and Leonid found that if you were paying American dollars, you could have just about any piece of military hardware you wanted. You need machine guns? Right over here! A tank? Pick one out, comrade!
    Ivan and Leonid had a knack for procuring and selling army property, and their new business grew rapidly. When their terms of enlistment expired, they left the army, but they maintained their network of contacts throughout the vast and increasingly chaotic Soviet military