And here’s another character for my seventh contribution to the A to Z Blogging challenge. Gyorgi is Andrei’s best friend, and the pair of them are assigned to Anne and Igor as helicopter pilots doing a bit of not-quite-government-sanctioned side-work.
This small storyline was inspired by actual news coverage I had read many years ago. (I just found the archival reference in the Christian Science Monitor Historic Archive from a January 1993 article that is quoted in the Google results as saying: “The Russian military shows signs of internal anarchy. Corruption and the freelance sale of weapons have become extensive.”)
The regime’s instability and the level of lawlessness introduced because the government couldn’t pay its military is assumed knowledge in Dust to Blood, and allows me to speculate on how exactly military expertise is shopped out in practice. In the case of my story, it’s a benign contribution that allows for the characters’ free movement within a large area over a short time frame. But I still worry about how the dogged pursuit of hard currency during that time of massive political upheaval could have leaked other military hardware to those with not-so-altruistic motives.