The Gods' Gambit (35 page)

“That’s great. I don’t understand why you’re unhappy,
Rinpoche,” said Irina.

“For me to know that Sonam will guide you there is big
relief too. What worries me is Sonam himself. His motives are self-destructive.
Sonam is full of hatred towards those people. He craves revenge for his father
and friends who lost their lives in that mine.” There was a note of sadness in
his tone.

“I can understand him,” said James.

Lama Tenzin shook his head and passed James a slip of paper.
“Here is his phone number. He’ll be waiting for your call.”

“Thank you for everything. We have to go now,” said James.

“I also leave today to return to my monastery. If there is
something I could be of assistance with, give me a call,” said lama Tenzin. “I
must tell you, Sonam doesn’t know who James is. He’s a good Buddhist friend,
but he doesn’t belong to our order.”

James lifted his eyebrows and moved in the chair as though
it was uncomfortable. “It seems I’ll need time to assimilate to who I am.”

* * *

James pulled into the closest lay-by off the alley that led
to his house to make way for the approaching taxicab and the taxi driver waved
as he passed by.

Irina lowered her jacket’s zip and settled the gun she
carried in a suitable position for quick drawing. “Do you expect someone?” she
asked James.

“No.”

James accelerated and turned the car behind the trimmed
bushes concealing the house. He stopped near the edge of the porch.

There were two big suitcases by the front door. One of them
shielded a squatting male figure who was doing up his shoelaces. The man rose.
It was Lino.

The three of them got out of the car. Lino walked towards
them, a wide smile on his face.

“Hi,” he shook their hands vigorously.

“Lino, what are you doing here?” James asked.

“Isn’t it clear? I am here to help you. I know you are going
to do something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have left Florence in such a hurry.”

James hesitated for a moment on how best to answer him. “You
… would be much more helpful at your place. Right now is not the best time for
you to come here.”

Lino’s smile disappeared and he looked sad. “This is my
fight too. I know I turned for a short while. I am ashamed of that. But I’ve
put it behind me. I am here now. Ready to do anything, which would help to stop
them. I’ve been preparing for this for quite some time. You can’t send me
back,” he spoke with a low, emotional voice.

James looked at Lao and Irina, and then tapped Lino’s shoulder.
“Welcome on board. Let’s go inside. We have a lot to talk about.”

“I hope you brought winter clothes with you. You’ll need
them in the place we’re going,” said Irina.

Kabul and Khandut in the province of Badakhshan,

Afghanistan

and

Pamir Mountain, Tajikistan

Kabir, their Afghan guide, together with two of his
associates, and Sonam, who had arrived in Kabul a day earlier, met James, Lino,
Lao and Irina at the airport. From there all of them got into Kabir’s old van
and travelled northeast towards the town of Khandut in the Badakhshan Province
where the guide lived. On the way, they were stopped at a number of army
checkpoints. Kabir managed these situations with the Afghan soldiers by waving
some kind of a government stamped permit, and slipping money into their
pockets.

The van arrived at Kabir’s residence before lunch time. He
lived in a small village, several kilometers from Khandut. It resembled a
barracks. Three ugly concrete double-storey buildings with windows like
embrasures, fenced by a high wall topped with spiral barbed wire. In the
courtyard, an armed man was pacing back and forth. Another man with a machine
gun stood on the flat roof of the highest building.

After they ate, Irina told Kabir that he had been
recommended to her as the man who could supply them with the best weapons in
the area. Without saying a word, Kabir took them to a large cellar that was
full of all sorts of weaponry piled on the floor or stored on shelves. There
were pistols, rifles, semi-automatics, machine guns, hand grenades, grenade
detonators, mine-throwers, even knives and sabers. James, Irina, and Lino took
an M-18 each, Sonam and Lao, Kalashnikovs. Irina insisted that everybody took a
pistol with a silencer and three hand grenades. Kabir separated their arsenal
out on different piles. Irina added one battered green metal suitcase
containing plastic explosives and digital detonators. Kabir asked for fourteen
thousand US dollars for everything. James, who was paying with his own money,
disagreed and offered eight thousand. Finally, they met at ten thousand.

While counting the money, James noticed Kabir’s eyes lit up
by greed.
We’ve got to very careful with these people,
he thought. The
good thing was that Irina had hired Kabir and his assistants as guides and
transporters only. Kabir was also pilot and owner of the helicopter with which
they were going to travel to the Pamir Mountains. The three men were going to
stay and guard the helicopter at the landing spot until they had completed
their mission and come back. The Afghan mercenaries didn’t know anything about
their intention, nor the exact location James and his friends were heading to.

* * *

Irina had hired Kabir through the intermediation of a friend
of hers who worked for the Afghan-American Agency for Regional Development and
Humanitarian Aid in North Afghanistan. Despite its peaceful name, the agency
was a cover-up enterprise for CIA field operations in the area. Kabir’s service
was secured after James transferred seventy-five thousand pounds, which was
half of the whole negotiated amount, in an offshore account of Irina’s American
acquaintance. The rest of the money had to be paid after their return.

Irina had warned James and the rest of the party not to ask
questions regarding the jobs or personal situations of Kabir and his two
associates – Atash and Fahran. The three men were involved in the most
profitable business in that part of the world – opium trafficking. At the same
time they readily sold their services to westerners. Irina had shared
information that Kabir ran errands for the CIA and British Intelligence. A
portion of the money he received from western customers Kabir handed over to
the local elders and Taliban ringleaders. That is how he could serve two
masters undisturbed. It happened that money coming from the CIA and MI6
financed the Taliban insurgency, and the Taliban, on the other hand, closed
their eyes when Kabir and his people did work for their blood enemies. Such a
paradox was a sign that in this part of the world the dollar had already won
the war, although the people still continued fighting.

It took four days for Irina to organize the whole operation.
This included the quick issuing of Afghan visas for the four, and one for Sonam
from the Afghan Consulate in Delhi. During all this time, there was no sign of
the cult. Probably the losses they suffered in the night-fight in Devon had
disorganized them. No doubt, they were preparing their next move but after two
defeats they were going to be more careful. The nature of the task Irina had to
cope with needed her to spend most of that time in London. James, Lao, and Lino
were in the house in Woodsman Green. They used the time to get themselves
acquainted with the climate and living conditions in Afghanistan and
Tajikistan, in buying necessary clothes and equipment, and in carrying out
physical exercises. Lao gave Lino some lessons on self-defense, and shooting
with his hunting rifle. Meanwhile, they had several video conversations with
Sonam who lived in India. James offered him money for flight tickets and travel
expenses but he categorically refused. He said that he would give his last
penny for a cause, which would lead to the destruction of those people and
their base. Lama Tenzin had judged Sonam correctly. The man bore a great deal
of hatred towards the cult. It hadn’t diminished at all through the years that
had passed.

Sonam told them horrible details about the outrages he and
the other Tibetan refugees were submitted to from the ‘sneak people’ as he
called his captors: working to full exhaustion, torture, and unending
humiliation. Once, one Tibetan man reacted by grabbing the arm of the guard who
was beating him. His punishment was dreadful. He was publicly castrated, burned
by hot iron bars and shot dead. Sonam showed them burn marks on his chest from
the time of his imprisonment. One day Sonam and his father seized an opportune
moment and slipped unnoticed by the guards into an uncharted part of the
labyrinth of the caves. They didn’t believe that this way would lead to
freedom, but death in the darkness was preferable than slavery to ‘sneak
people’. They were lucky to find a natural cave that led them out of the
labyrinth. A month after that, Sonam’s father died from the abuse. The beatings
he often had taken in the mine had affected his internal organs. He had started
vomiting blood and died a few days after they reached their village.

Sonam told them that he had recently dreamt about his
father. In this dream his father showed Sonam a crystal similar to the crystals
mined in the Russian mine in Pamir. The next day he received the first call
from lama Tenzin. Sonam considered that dream as an omen that he had to join
the people who intended to bring down the evil from the mine in the Pamir
Mountains

* * *

The helicopter, a Russian transport model Mi-8, painted in a
white and grey camouflage outfit, was flying low between the snowy summits.

Kabir, in his broken English, came through the headphones.
“We’re already above Tajikistan.” James looked through a bull’s eye window.
Beneath were the same ranges of mountains he had been seeing under them since
they had taken off from Afghanistan. The difference now was that they could
breathe easier without expectation of become a target of Taliban surface-to-air
fire. Kabir had assured them that once they started flying over Tajikistan they
would have much less to worry about in that sense.

James saw Irina, who sat in the co-pilot seat, showing
something to Kabir on an unfolded map.
We are close,
he thought. James
realized that Irina was giving Kabir the exact landing coordinates. She turned
toward the back of the helicopter and spread the fingers of her hands. That
meant ten minutes to arrival.

The helicopter landed on a flat stony plateau. The altitude
was three thousand eight hundred and forty meters. Many other plateaus and
mountain chains formed the scenery.  The snow in the surroundings had
melted and there were icy stretches left here and there. Far away in the
northeast, tall peaks with white tops towered in the air. The sky was clear.
The temperature was close to zero in spite of the glaring afternoon sun.

Right after they got out of the helicopter, Irina asked them
to put on the backpacks and start walking. There was no time to lose.

Kabir shouted something to his associates, which prompted
them to unload a long roll of camouflage netting and to begin covering the
helicopter with it.

“Try to stay here unnoticed,” Irina addressed Kabir. “Be
ready to take off at any moment as we don’t exactly know what time we’ll be
back.”

“You have it as you want … for the next twenty-four hours.
That’s our deal. Make sure you are back before the time expires.”

The four said goodbye to the mercenaries and walked away
heading east. Irina led the group. They crossed over the plateau and began
climbing the slope of the hill where they had arrived. On the summit, they
stopped for a short break. From here, the camouflage net blended with the
brown-greyish colours of the plateau. The covered helicopter looked like an odd
small knoll. Ahead and as far as they could see, there were a multitude of
similar hills resembling giant waves of a petrified sea.

Irina pointed. “We must climb the next two hills. They are
taller than this one so our friends will see us crossing them. After the second
one there’s a gorge which we’ll continue through,” she said.

“This distance looked shorter when I studied it on the map,”
said Lino. His breath was agitated and his cheeks blushing. “I’ve trouble
breathing. I have to breathe in more air to get the normal feed into my lungs.
It’s an interesting sensation.”

“As time passes we’ll adapt to the thinner air,” said James.

“Yup. We cross over these hills and there will be no more
climbing. It’ll be easier,” Lino said sarcastically.

Their plan was to move east at first in order to create
confusion for the mercenaries. Kabir and his people shouldn’t know where they
were heading to. Rodnov’s mine was located south from the landing spot. The
diversionary walk was going to end once they got behind the second hill. From
there they had to turn south-west and follow a narrow valley that meandered
between two mountain ranges for about six kilometers. At the valley’s far end
there was a small oval-shaped plateau and next was the mine.

Two and half hours later, they lay over the edge of the
plateau overlooking a flat area of ground surrounded on the other three sides
by rocky peaks. Two-thirds of this area was an abandoned open mining site. It
cascaded down amphitheatrically reaching a depth of about one hundred meters.
There were many natural apertures in the surrounding mountain range, which
indicated the existence of a labyrinth of caves. The biggest opening had an
artificial arch-like shape. That was the main entrance of the underground mine.
From it an asphalt road stretched straight to a distant narrow pass cut
naturally into the surrounding rocky ring. On the road, before the mine, there
was a solid hydraulic barrier, a sentry box and an armed man standing next to
it. At one side of the mine entrance there was a site with a dozen different
construction machines, including diggers, empty dumpsters, and several
four-wheelers parked. At the other side there were four wooden outhouses and a
long tanker. People with work-helmets and some men in dark green uniforms
carrying machine guns walked among the outhouses and in and out through the
mine entrance.