Stanislav Kandinsky (スタニスラフ・カンディンスキー Sutanisurafu Kandinsukī), commonly shortened to Stan (スタン Sutan) and known by his nickname Devil's Wind (Persian: شيطان بادى; Japanese: シェイターネ・バーディ Sheitāne Bādi), was an ex-Soviet paratrooper and the titular character and antagonist of the first Black Lagoon light novel Shaitane Badi.
Appearance[]
Stanislav was an adult man of Sámi descent[1] with long blond hair and a sickly face.[2] In his youth and during his service in the Soviet-Afghan War, he had much shorter hair and wore a Soviet Airborne Forces (VDV) uniform. His sickly face was caused by his usage of heroin.
Personality[]
Stanislav had a very calm demeanor about him in part due to his heroin usage. He was very adamant in completing his missions, and he felt great guilt about his actions during the war.
Shaitane Badi history[]
Stan had excellent sniping skills distinguished by the fact that he could make accurate shots in windy conditions through a supernatural sensation. He was from the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, growing up in a more rural area compared to his fellow Vysotniki who grew up in cities. Additionally, his grandfather was a Nenets man.[1] In his youth, his uncle taught him how to hunt and particularly how to utilize the wind. Stan's uncle had always called him Simonovich, which was his father's name.[3] In the 1980s, he served in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with Balalaika, then known as Sofia Pavlovna, as his unit's leader.[4] In one winter in Afghanistan hanging out with his comrades in their tents, Stan's comrade Master Sergeant Tiganov remarked that it had been three years since he was back home and asked Stan if he agreed that being back home would be better. Stan, being of Sámi descent and from a much colder area, remarked that Afghanistan was barely better than Russia due to the lack of ice, causing Tiganov to disagree with him and berating his opinion.
Stanislav, a junior sergeant then, had been in Afghanistan for two years at that point. As Lieutenant Pavlovna was fixing Stanislav's Dragunov rifle, Private First Class Sakharov asked him if other Sámi had the same sharpshooting skills as he did. Stanislav replied that his father was quite bad whereas his uncle was able to smell the wind and determine the number of wolves in a pack, making Tiganov joke that his skills were just part of Sámi life. At that moment, Lieutenant Pavlovna berated Stanislav for not taking care of his rifle, and then she turned her focus to Tiganov, telling him not to use people's backgrounds and homes as a source of humor. Accordingly, Tiganov personally apologized to Stanislav while the latter man made sure to take care of his scope from then on.[1]
In the war, he gained great sniping skills, earning him the nickname "Shaitane Badi" or "Devil's Wind" from the Afghan Mujahideen due to killing many enemy soldiers as well as having great accuracy even in windy conditions that he could exploit to his advantage. At some point after Pavlovna returned to the USSR due to her injuries from being tortured by the Mujahideen, Stan was high on heroin and got captured, with the Mujahideen torturing him and discovering that he was a heroin user. Exploiting the fact that Stan had withdrawal symptoms of begging for more heroin, the interrogator decided to use his desire for more heroin to make him confess his unit, rank, and where he fought, making the Mujahideen soldiers realize that he was "Shaitane Badi." Making Stan a new and coerced fighter for them, the Mujahideen had Stan obey them and kill for them like a leashed dog, receiving heroin injections in return for killing Soviet troops.
Stanislav on the right, Balalaika extending her hand to him
During one mission, Stan went to the rendezvous point, but no one showed up to get him, and he wondered when the next heroin dose would come. The Hazara man who gave Stan the drugs spit at him and glared, remarking that Stan killed his younger brother and wanted him to make up for his fallen comrades by stealing the souls of Soviet soldiers. During that time, Stan and other Soviet troops did not know the USSR's excuse for continuing the war since the excuse of supporting the Kamal administration had long passed. On his trip where he got lost, Stan had no food, water, or weapon, and he was thinking about killing himself since he knew that he was running away, be it from the Mujahideen or from the moral burden of the many lives which he took.
Nonetheless, he collapsed and a Mujahideen scouting party found him. In that July of 1987, although he thought he was going to die, Sofia Pavlovna, then a VDV captain, arrived to rescue him with the Soviet 318th rear distraction brigade's 11th squadron known as the Vysotniki. Balalaika recognized her comrade, telling him that he could go home. While he told her he would go home, he was too ashamed of the many people (including women and children) that he killed, as well as feeling that he could not return to the USSR, so Stan ran away from it all, disappearing into the desert and killing any men in his way.[4]
Chapter 1[]
Rock finding Stan on the deck
Much later around the end of 1995, a redheaded woman named Jane hired Stan to lead other mercenaries, including Jake, Shadow Falcon, and Caroline Morgan and her pirate crew, to board the Black Lagoon to raid the Hong Kong Triad Zaltzman tanker and assassinate Mister Chang. The night of boarding Dutch's boat, all the mercenaries stayed in the hold, whereas Stan decided to sit solo on the deck. Before the boat embarked, Rock told Stan to come inside the cabin to review his plan with Dutch. Inside, Dutch had skepticism of the plan, but Stan only nodded to his summary and iterated to Dutch that the boat would go in front of the tanker as a distraction while he and the mercenaries left on a smaller Zodiac boat to travel to the tanker's back and blind spot to attack. Sighing, Dutch told him that he had 10 minutes to finish his attack upon arriving or the Black Lagoon would have to leave. Casually speaking, Stan agreed and told him that he would be waiting on deck.
Once the boat arrived to the Zaltzman, Rock went to Revy to inform her and the other mercenaries that they arrived, adding that Stan was waiting for them. Accordingly, Stan and his mercenaries got onto the Zodiac boat and steered toward the tanker's back while Rock calmly threatened the tanker using his megaphone. A minute later, a helicopter arrived and landed on the Zaltzman, causing Dutch to radio to Stan to ask about the helicopter's certainty of changing their plan. Stan radioed back that it was still part of the plan, revealing that their target, Mister Chang, was on the helicopter, surprising the captain. Nonetheless, Dutch and his crew agreed to distract the Zaltzman, and they soon heard Chang's voice on the tanker's loudspeaker, shocking them. On the Zaltzman's forward mast, Stan positioned himself with his Dragunov rifle, preparing his scope's night vision.
Of the six shots he fired, four were kills, but the first and most important shot missed since Mister Chang dodged it as if it were a survival instinct. Using a different frequency, Stan radioed to the other assassins that they could storm the bridge, ordering them to bring the enemy into his sights. When Dutch tried to call him, Stan replied that they did not need to interfere, but when Dutch did not respond back, Stan told his team about the change in plan since the Lagoon Company decided to switch sides. While Jake agreed to the plan change, he request Stan not to kill Revy since he wanted to take her out. Although he had Revy in his crosshairs and could have absolutely killed her, Stan took her out of his sights and approved Jake's request, pleasing him. The Sámi leader then told Shadow Falcon to go through with his plan (sabotaging Dutch's boat), and the ninja began his role. Lastly, Stan fired a flare into the sky to alert the other members about the plan change.
In the chaos, Revy managed to kill several enemies with Chang's help, so Jake called for Stan to abort the attack since Chang and Revy were dwindling their assault team's forces. Not bothered, Stan told Jake that he would cover the latter's escape to their getaway boat, the Nefrit, and he would be behind as the ship left. Chang advised Revy not to go out on the deck due to the sniper, but she did not care and climbed up, and Stan shot a bullet that barely grazed Revy's soldier, making her hide behind some plumbing for cover. Standing up and feeling the wind's direction, Stan pulled the ripcord on his parachute, letting the wind carry him off the ship and successfully landing on the Nefrit, escaping Chang and Revy while aborting the mission.[2]
Chapter 2[]
At the Sankan Palace Hotel in Roanapur, the four survivors, including Stanislav, Jake, and Alonzo and Pedro, returned to the hotel after the failed attempt to assassinate Mister Chang. In the lobby where Jake was waiting for Jane to arrive with a car, he used his laptop to transfer cell phone files to his computer. Meanwhile, a couple of bodyguards, Koslov and David, from Hotel Moscow recognized Stanislav and came up to him and spoke in Russian. Stanislav was surprised just as they were since they thought that he was dead, and they told Stanislav that his former captain Pavlovna set up business in Roanapur, recognizing Balalaika's surname as the leader of his unit in Afghanistan. Although Stanislav coldly denied familiarity with them, the Russian-speaking men gave him a Bougainvillea Trade Company business card if he wanted to contact them. After the men left the hotel lobby, Jake recognized the company name, telling Stanislav that the company was the Russian mafia's front in Roanapur, discomforting Stan and in disbelief that his captain was a mafia leader.[5]
Chapter 3[]
Now at Jake's abandoned factory hideout, with Stan wanting to inject more heroin into his own arm, Jake asked him if he had already used some recently. Not concerned with Jake's concern, Stan injected a needle into his veins, feeling that the pleasure to him was better than anything. Falling out of consciousness, he had flashbacks to the Afghan Mujahideen torturing him and discovering that he was a heroin user, also recalling how his beloved captain saved him and how he ran away. While still in his doped state, Revy and Shenhua began their attack on the factory to kill the assassins inside. Upon learning that Revy was leading the attack, Jake tried to wake up Stan from his induced state to no avail, so Pedro took Stan's Dragunov rifle to use against Revy. As the gunfight began with Revy having to take cover, Shadow Falcon told Stan to escape through the backdoor, with the ninja giving Stan a little push to the exit to wake him up, and he tiredly exited the building as Falcon also rescued Jake. Running away to Roanapur's outskirts, Stan had finally gained sobriety, free of his hallucinations for the time being.
Balalaika confronts Stan after he fled the factory
He was determined to finish his job of killing Chang and continued stumbling on the ground, but two Mercedes-Benz cars parked in front of him. Balalaika herself exited one of the cars, with Stan surprised to see his former comrades of the Vysotniki. Although Stan was surprised and knelt on the ground before her, he tearfully yelled and asked if she had truly become a mafia woman who abandoned her military pride. Balalaika felt that she did not need to explain herself seeing his realization, so she gave him an ultimatum: agree to leave the city since he attempted to kill Chang and he would be escorted out of the city, or not meet her at the harbor the next morning and she would have to kill him herself.
With that, she and the Hotel Moscow members began to leave, but not before Stan asked her why she abandoned her pride as a soldier. The Russian leader laughed and told Stan that he would not understand given that he did return to their motherland. Balalaika finally stated that as a veteran who was forsaken by the USSR, she had only lived for war and did not die in combat, continuing to live for the purpose of finding battle and the smell of blood, leaving the strength-less Stan in his tracks.[4]
Chapter 4[]
Waking up in room 509 of the Lafette Roanapur Hotel on a mattress from his flashback of being with his Vysotnik comrades in the winter, his contractor Jane asked him why he did not go to the docks to meet Balalaika, and he merely responded that he wanted to continue his mission, pleasing Jane. He then fell asleep again, and Jake and Shadow Falcon entered room 509 where he was. After a quick back-and-forth retort, Jake told Jane that he quit while Falcon decided to go his own way in killing Chang, leaving Stan as the only assassin left for Jane's job, albeit passed out. She then called Vasili Laptev to confirm that she would go with a different plan involving Stan killing Chang at noon outside the latter's nightclub. After the call, Jane took off her wig, revealing that she was Tatiana Yakovleva, a Hotel Moscow mafia woman who despised Balalaika.[1]
Chapter 5[]
The subsequent afternoon, then having a replacement Dragunov, Stan prepared to kill Chang as he exited his vehicle to enter his nightclub. Knowing that he only had a ten-second window to fire a bullet at him, Stan prepared his rifle and could still aim despite being on heroin. 800 meters away from Hamipong Street where Chang would be, Stan thought that he heard Balalaika's voice but ignored his hallucinations. As he tried listening to the wind and recalled his grandfather's grandfather's abilities as a shaman, he felt someone from the southwest direction, instantly rolling to the side and avoiding a headshot at the cost of his right trapezius muscle receiving a bullet. Ignoring the pain, he then aimed for the sniper who shot him from a transmission tower 600 meters away. He fired a shot, but doing so opened his shoulder wound, greatly injuring him.
Crawling to the emergency stairs, he angrily wanted to face Balalaika and was still adamant in his desire to murder Chang. Exiting the building's first floor and staggering around from his wound, Stan eventually got to Hamipong Street, but a Mercedes-Benz pulled up in front of him. Balalaika emerged from the car, enraging Stan and making him pull out his Makarov pistol, but the Russian woman pulled out her Stechkin pistol faster, shooting Stanislav once to the ground. In blurry vision, Stan thought he saw his Captain Pavlovna instead of the gangster Balalaika, and she told him that his mission was over. He asked for a toast, with Balalaika nonchalantly agreeing that she would bring vodka. As Stan laid on his back, Balalaika answered his question about the wind and told him the wind came from the north, reminding him of the pine trees in his homeland. He finally stopped breathing, with Balalaika giving him a silent salute before leaving.[3]