Give this one a shot...

The story is rather grim, so if that's not
your cup-of-tea, just do a search on

This was nothing compared to Tea and Shadows (thank god).

    Beauty in Darkness

Title suggested, to me, the Japanese aesthetic described
by Junichiro Tanizaki in "In Praise of Shadows".  Given
what the story turned out to be, I'm not sure what the
title means.

     "Please sir, we need water." 

     Vassili Sashenko looked sharply at the frail
lookingfourteen old, then at the sea of blond haired
children layinglimply on the truck bed. Cursing he
yanked one of the sitting guard to his feet. 

missing a few spaces; "one of the sitting guards"

Given that we later learn this is either Laos, or
close to its border, where did the blond-haired
children come from?

      Vassili smiled. "Well Sothea, we'll get you back
to your sister a quickly as possible. In the meantime,
just take care of those children."

"as quickly as possible"

     *Because alive, they're worth ten million USD..
Even the local girls  'recruited' as babysitters would
bring a few thousand.* 

While a compelling detail, the "ten million" is never
explained.

     Vassili dove to the ground as a wild-eyed guard
hosed the muzzle of his AK-47 in an arc, almost
cutting him in two. 

Nice, realistic detail to convey the panic.

     The BMP's main gun fired, then froze with a
scream as the auto-loader tried to stuff the gunner
into the breach.

..because of the gunner's incompetence?  Not clear.

     *What a cluster fuck.* A howler-monkey barked in
agreement, and Vassili wondered if he wouldn't be
better off teaching the monkeys how to drive. He began
a quick inventory of vehicles and wounded, making a
rough calculation of munitions expended.

Aren't howler monkeys native to South America?

     "The Doctor wishes to know what is holding up our
progress." The caravan leader, Pol asked.

This whole thing seems more like something The Master
might be up to than The Doctor.

a wait of a few minutes or several hours. Trailing a
hand along an ermine covered wall he caught a glimpse
of his rather ordinary face  reflected in some
sterling silver trim he looked like a Russian turnip
farmer, and totally out of place surrounded by such
luxury.

Need some punctuation somewhere, suggest period either
after "face" or after "trim" (better).

grimace of distaste. A moment later Sebastian Arnie,
MD, PhD, DDL entered from his private apartments,
pealing off the snowy white gloves he habitually wore,
dropping them in an Italian marble trash-can. The
butter-soft leather was almost transparently thin,
fragile as butterfly's wing and he often went through
thirty pair in a day. 

Okay, the chief bad guy is an MD and PhD but very,
very, very rich.  Suggests he's selling whatever he
gets from the blond children?

"Thoughts are only ghosts until hands give them
life." He smoothed on a fresh pair of gloves. 

Doctor-ish thing to say, I think; good line.

     "Treacherous, weak, disgusting in their personal
habits and morals." Arnie lowered himself into a
chair. "Yet they also have curative properties."
Steepling his fingers he looked meditatively at the
faintly bloody bundle. "For the first six
months of life the female has the ability to
rejuvenate and reinvigorate the male by acting as a
receptacle for excessive phlegm." Arnie looked at
Vassili thoughtfully."Perhaps you could take care
this?"

The base concept here I think compelling; it reminds
me of something Tiptree wrote, about the slaughter
of beautiful winged aliens.

The details seem to need working out, however.  Is
the baddie extracting something from the blond babies,
then selling the elixer?  That would make sense, but
his own description suggests otherwise:  "acting as
a receptacle for excessive phlegm" suggests live
babies being used as spitoons.  On the whole, suggest
the former.  Baddie extracts some essence related to
cell or organ regeneration (aka a long prolongation
medicine) from the babies, then sells it to rich
Chinese men (same guys who buy the rhino horns).

Still not clear why the babies blond.  Wouldn't it
be easier/cheaper to buy darker-skinned or -haired
children, possibly war orphans, especially if he's
in SE Asia?

     "Are you squeamish?" Spetsnaz Sargent Kokh roared
as Vassili flinched back from the drowned corpse of
his
friend. You will kill your mother and fuck the corpse
if ordered!"

Second spoken sentence needs opening quote.

     Vassili stood, swaying in the sun,  apart from
the rest of his company surrounded by four grinning
Turjikistan privates.  They kept him from killing

Assume that's a deliberate mingling of "Turkmenistan"
and "Tajikistan", so that you're not singling out any
particular nationality?

Side note:  I think Muslims are very particular about
burying bodies within twenty-four hours of death.

effort was worth it. "Explain these delays."  Arnie
said as Pol left the trailer, "Our cargo is
perishable." 

Aren't the children still alive?

      "We're less than a week's travel from the Laos
border." He met his employer's eyes squarely. "But
we're low on food, fuel and ammunition."

So presumably could be in:  Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia,
Vietnam, or China.  Ending, with international,
presumably peace-keeping force, suggests Cambodia.
Still, "a week's travel" is not very specific:  that
might not be very far in solid rainforest, but is the
entire length of Cambodia given a paved road of any
sort.  Suggest you cut to "less than four hours' travel".

     "Being forced to take this circuitous route is
intolerable." Arnie complained pettishly. "I've always
had a good working relationship with the local
officials. Why are they suddenly against me?" 

     *Because you managed to get even the Khmer Rouge
to condemn you in the UN for human rights violations,
you fucking idiot.*

When is this set?  Vassili strikes me as not one to
be hyperbolic on something like that, meaning that
the Khmer Rouge would have had to still be the official
government of Cambodia, meaning... late Seventies?

 
     "Politicians have no understanding of objective
reality as men of the world do."  Vassili replied
soothingly

     "Impossible! I need you to watch this rabble.
Send
someone else"

missing some periods

     "I don't have anyone trained in jungle fighting."
He didn't add that if he let them go into the jungle,
they'd run for home.

Implying that his men are native to the jungle, implying
that they need less training than the average American
would to be competent jungle fighters.

     "Could they be government troops? Slowing us down
until the main body arrives?"

     Vassili shook his head. "Helicopter  troops could
have hit us weeks ago.

Wasn't Arnie just saying that he had good relations
with the "local officials"?

And the "weeks ago" puzzles me; from where to where
are they moving?

banged off the truck windscreen with a sound like
glass pencils breaking

Interesting simile.  _Sounds_ compelling, until
you read it carefully and realize you've never heard
a glass pencil break.

     Hot wind, harbinger of the coming monsoon, blew a

Given who this is, and what her name means, I assume
the "hot wind" is deliberate?

     "This is your group of poachers?" Arnie asked
sardonically.

     "It would seem so." Vassili looked at the bound
figure laying in the dirt. About ten or twelve he
guessed, right side horribly scarred and right foot
replaced with a crude prosthetic  probably a
butterfly-mine or she would be dead, he thought.

Presumably this was going to be Akane in your original
conception of this as a fanfic?  That seems a Yonge
thing to do... ;)

     Vassili turned away from the muffled scream,
wondering if he should point out the girl probably
didn't speak English.

Wouldn't the Doctor have tried French first, if they're
in Cambodia (or Laos or Vietnam)?

     Even as he yelled a warning, an enraged band of
farmers erupted from all sides of the jungle. His
guard force, watching Arnie instead of their flanks,
were caught completely by surprise.  Firing his weapon
as fast as he could pull the trigger, Vassili dashed
into the jungle. Sprinting hard, he listened to the
sounds of fighting fade behind him. 

Hmmm... Vassili makes it out alive.  Sequel?

      He had millions in hidden accounts, and money
would buy anything in this part of the world.

Or many other parts of the world.  Sure you want a simple
"millions"?  Going through thirty pairs of $1000-a-pair
gloves a day seems a tad expensive for a simple millionaire.
OTOH, that small an amount makes it plausible that he's
not earning money from selling something to rich Chinese;
that's within range of the savings potential, plus canny
investments, of many U.S. doctors.

He'd rebuild his organization, bigger than ever.

The use of "organization" kind of implies more money,
though, and that he's selling something clandestine.

him like a lance. She hit him at almost twenty miles
an hour and the impact folded him around the end of
the shovel, lifting him off his feet. He was
unconscious before he hit the ground.

Shouldn't he be dead?  That's a sharpened shovel, right?
It _IS_ a lance.

feebly like a beetle turned on it's back. "It's Dr.
Death."

     "The bastard who killed all those children and
put drawings of it on the internet!"

"Drawings"?  Not "videos" or "photographs"?

"Internet" implies that this is NOT set in the late
seventies, as does the presence of international
peacekeepers.  If so, however, what is the Khmer
Rouge doing putting in an appearance at the U.N.?

Putting anything on the Internet doesn't sound like
something the clandestine seller of life-prolongation
medicines would do; is he just a nut after all?
That would fit, sort of, with his nutso explanation
to Vassili about phlegm, but where did the "organization"
come from?  And why would anyone think Laos safer
than Cambodia for internationally-wanted criminals,
if this is set in present-day?

     "Even accused criminals have rights." McIntosh
looked sternly at Anderson. "Her Majesty wants me to
deal with this  personally."

Thought McIntosh was RCMP?  If so, what's the
"personally"?

     "I need someone honest and reliable."
     
     Veata handed him a piece of heavy parchment.

     There was no denying the British crown seal,
though it was a bit unusual to have a citation for
littering appended to a letter of recommendation. 

"no denying"?  This guy's ever seen one before?
He can read English?

     "That is not a problem," Veata's scared face lit
up as she reverently caressed the titanium frame of
her new mountain bike. "On my bicycle, I am fast."

"new"?  implies a monetary reward in addition.


As a fragment of a story, or a scene from a story,
IMO this has potential.  As a standalone story, I
think it raises too many unanswered questions, and
doesn't really end effectively.

I _think_ you intended the doctor to be a doctor-level-rich,
retired nutcase, who somehow got a large quantity
of blond babies into Cambodia.  However, I think it
would work better if he was NOT a nutcase, but an
amoral guy extracting some life-prolonger or super-viagra
from human children, and selling it to rich men who
didn't know (or hid the knowledge from themselves) where
the stuff came from.  And I suspect you want to drop the
"blond" and just use local SE Asian orphans.

Vassili seems pretty well realized to me, much better
than the doctor.  I can see how he came to be capable
of wringing a baby's neck without showing remorse,
though I'm still not sure what he thinks about the act.
Wrong, but he has a good enough reason?  Doesn't care?

Veata herself seems very interesting; I'd try to let
us know more about her.  Could have her younger sister
flashback, or tell a story or two about her.

Geography seems vague.  Why are they trying to reach
Laos?  The trucks imply roads, I'd think; given which,
your timeframes seem very long to me.  (These countries
aren't that big, even at ten miles per hour.)

Country of operation:  Cambodia seems likely enough for
the retired nutcase on a one-shot operation, whatever
it is, but Myanmar is probably better for the ongoing
clandestine operation.  The Khmer, for all their own
nastiness, _were_ pretty judgemental about other people,
while the regime in Myanmar is quite noted for their
lack of scruples (I believe the guy who used to run
the world's largest heroin ring lives peacefully in
Rangoon these days.)  Plus, until quite recently the
regime in Rangoon didn't really control a good bit of
the country.

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