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Hadeon Bondaruk stood at the floor-to-ceiling s of his study and stared out at the Black Sea His study was dark, lit only by dihts that cast soft pools into the corners of the rooht had fallen over the Criarian coasts, backlit by the last re sun, he could see a line of stor north over the water Every few seconds the clouds would pulse fro across the horizon It would be here within the hour, and God help those foolish enough to be caught afloat in the midst of a Black Sea storm

Or, Bondaruk thought, God not help them No matter Stor the herd He had little patience for people who didn’t have the sense or strength to protect theainst the violence of life It was a lesson he’d learned as a boy, and one that he’d never forgotten

Bondaruk had been born in 1960 in a village south of Ashgabat, Turk Mountains His mother and father and their parents before theraphic area between Iran and as then the Soviet Union, and like all natives of the Kopet Dag they were tough, self-reliant, and fiercely independent, clai neither country as their own However, the Cold War had other plans for Bondaruk and his family

With the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the deposition of the Shah, the Soviet Union began to pour more troops into the border area north of Iran, and Bondaruk, then nineteen, saw his village’s independence stripped away as Red Ar up in their once peaceful mountain home

The Soviet troops treated the Kopet Dag natives like backward savages,food and wo up “Iranian revolutionary elements” for summary execution Never mind that Bondaruk and his people knew little of the outside world and world politics Their Musliion and proximity to Iran made them suspect

A year later a pair of tanks appeared on the outskirts of the village, along with two companies of Red Army soldiers A squad of soldiers had been aht before, the coht men, their throats slit and their clothes, weapons, and personal belongings stripped froe elders had five minutes to produce those responsible, lest the entire community be held responsible

Bondaruk had heard stories about Turk aided by Iranian coers were involved Unable to produce the guilty parties, the village chieftain pleaded with the Soviet commander for mercy and was shot for his trouble Over the next hour the tanks rained shells down on the village until it was in ruins and burning In the commotion, Bondaruk was separated from his faher into the h away to be safe froh the night as their horound The next day they returned to the village and began looking for survivors More dead than alive were found, including Bondaruk’s family, who had taken shelter in the mosque only to have it collapse and crush them alive

Soh God had pulled a dark curtain on his old life He gathered up the strongest and ers, men and women alike, and they all took to the mountains as partisans

Within six months Bondaruk had risen not only to a position of leadership a the rural Turkht, a Soviet patrols and convoys, then disappear back into the Kopet Dag like ghosts Within a year of his village’s destruction, Bondaruk had a bounty on his head He’d come to the attention of the Soviet leadership in Moscohich was now embroiled in not only a tense standoff with Iran and a full-bloar in Afghanistan but also a guerrilla conflict in Turkmenistan

Shortly after his twenty-first birthday Bondaruk received word that Iranian intelligence operatives had put out the word that his Kopet Dag fighters had an ally in Tehran, if only he would sit down and listen, which he did in a sabat

The man Bondaruk met turned out to be a colonel in the elite Iranian paraanization known as the Pasdaran, or the Guardians of the Revolution The colonel offered Bondaruk and his fighters weapons, aainst the Soviets Wary, Bondaruk had probed for a loophole in the deal—that one condition that would sie the heel on their necks from that of the Soviets to the Iranians There was no condition, he was assured We are of common ancestry and faith and cause What more of a bond did they need? Bondaruk accepted the offer and over the next five years Bondaruk and his fighters, under the guidance of the Iranian colonel, sloore down the Soviet occupiers

As satisfying as that was for Bondaruk, it was his relationship with the colonel that had the most effect on him The colonel, it seemed, had been a teacher of Persian history before he’d been called to serve the revolution The Persian Empire, he explained, stretched back nearly three thousand years and at its height had encompassed the Caspian and Black Sea basins, Greece, North Africa, and much of the Middle East In fact, Bondaruk was told, Xerxes I, Xerxes the Great, who had invaded Greece and crushed the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, was born in the very same mountains Bondaruk called home and was said to have fathered dozens of children in the Kopet Dag

This was a thought that was never far frouerrillas continued to harass the Soviets until finally, in 1990, over a decade after they’d entered the Kopet Dag, the Red Army withdrew from the border Shortly after that the Soviet Union collapsed

With the fight over and no inclination to go back to being an ordinary shepherd, Bondaruk, aided by his Iranian colonel friend, moved to Sevastopol, which had, with the collapse of the Soviet empire, become the Wild West of the Black Sea Basin Once there, his natural leadership ability and comfort with brutality and swift violence secured him a place first in the Ukrainian black market and then in the Ukrainian Krasnaya Mafiya, or Red Mafia By the time he was thirty-five, Hadeon Bondaruk was in control of virtually every organized criminal enterprise in Ukraine and a millionaire many times over

With his position and power and wealth secure, Bondaruk turned his attention to an idea that had been lingering in the back of his mind for many years: Had Xerxes the Great truly been born and raised in the Kopet Dag Mountains, in his very homeland? Had he and Xerxes, as boys separated by centuries, walked the same paths and marveled at the same mountain vistas? Could he himself be descended from Persian royalty?