Free Combat Alley (2007) by Jack - Seals 06 Terral

a minor riot broke out in the rush to get a share of the goodies.
    Now forgotten in the melee, the SEALs wheeled their horses and began the ride back to the bivouac.
    .
    KHORUGH, TAJIKISTAN
    THIS city of a bit more than 33,000 is located to the northeast of the Kangal Mountains almost on the Afghanistan border. The nearest other municipalities of any size were in Pakistan and Uzbekistan. While the official language of Tajikistan was Tajik, the large number of Russian expatriates in Khorugh meant that their mother tongue was also prominent in the area. There was also a strong criminal connection between the underworld of that city and the Russian Mafia in Moscow.
    Aleksander Akloschenko was a former Soviet bureaucrat who had been stationed in Khorugh during the glory days of Communism. Like all prosperous Russians, or those in cushy jobs, he had put on a lot of weight and his facial features had softened from his life of ease. Now in his late forties, he had ended up a corpulent, short, balding man with an extremely large stomach.
    During his career in Tajikistan, Akloschenko was chief of government property, buildings, and land, and the long distance between his office and that of his immediate supervisor back in the USSR meant he was a virtual potentate without superintendence. His only obligations were a series of monthly activity reports and inventories he dispatched back to Russia. Once a year, when inspectors were sent out for examination and audits, they were always so nervous and physically shook up after the frightening Aeroflot flight on ancient, creaking aircraft that all they wanted to do was consume vodka to both soothe their nerves from the nervewracking journey as well as fortify themselves for the hazardous return. Their inspections of property books and budget outlays were superficial at best, done with quick halfdrunken scans of the documents that Akloschenko trotted out for them to peruse. Most embezzlers keep two sets of books, but the inefficiency of the Soviet system did not make that necessary in Akloschenko's case.
    Consequently, with this blessed independence, the bureaucrat was able to gleefully sell government vehicles and equipment on the black market that serviced not only Tajikistan but Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan as well. Additionally he hired out convicts from the military prison as laborers to private construction contractors who were also using government-owned building materials purchased from Akloschenko. These arrangements included furnishing tough guys for anyone who needed some physical pressure applied to debtors and/or business rivals.
    All this brought in beaucoup shekels for Akloschenko's private coffers. It was true he had to lay out bribes and kickbacks among several branches of Soviet agencies within the local government net, but the men running those organizations had as much self-sufficiency as Akloschenko, thus these arrangements were mutually beneficial. When the USSR collapsed, he could have returned to the new Russia and that had been his preliminary intention. But when several colleagues were assassinated by the emerging crime syndicates in the home country, he decided to stay put. And just to really play it safe, he used ex-convicts who had recently been freed from the prison as bodyguards. He established himself on the top floor of a poorly constructed downtown four-story building Khorugh's equivalent of a skyscraper and switched from being a crooked bureaucrat to being a crooked businessman. This latter endeavor eventually evolved into his being the head of his own crime syndicate that emerged out of the situation.
    Akloschenko's latest and pet project was a scheme to take over the opium poppy harvest and smuggling on the Pranistay Steppes in Afghanistan with Luka Yarkov. He supplied the brains and money to get things rolling while Yarkov and his gang contributed the muscle. He had made secret arrangements for sales known only to him and his closest associate,