“Polostan!” Owen dubbed it, a few moments after he’d climbed out of the car that had brought him and a couple of other Brits down from Moscow. He kept turning his head from side to side trying to estimate the distance separating the goals, which seemed almost to sink beneath the curvature of the Earth. The witticism went untranslated by his interpreter. But the joke was the same in any language. His hosts, mostly high-ranking cavalry officers, didn’t get it. Oh, they understood that he’d slapped the Central Asian suffix “-stan” onto “polo”—that much was obvious—but the whole concept of clever
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