The Old Boys (43 page)

The descent from the pass was a slippery business. As dusk fell, it began to rain. The rain froze. Our clothing crackled as we moved across thin ice that crunched beneath our feet. Dark was falling. We couldn’t see one another but kept in touch by sound. I was second from the last in the line of march. One of Askar’s men brought up the rear, leading the single pony we had brought with us to the pass. Suddenly the man behind me shouted into the darkness. A curse, a warning? An instant later the pony went slithering by me, tobogganing down the slick ice-covered path, hooves thrashing. Into the darkness I shouted a pointless warning in English—pointless because the people below me could do nothing but stand still and hope that the pony somehow missed them. It was impossible to get out of its way without falling and skidding down the mountain yourself. Then, abruptly, the shouting stopped. Had the pony sailed over a precipice, hit something and broken its neck? There was no way of knowing. I shouted to Zarah and David. They answered, apparently still on their feet. We continued to inch our way downslope.

When we arrived at the yurt, four or five hours later, we humans were all present and accounted for. No one mentioned the pony, which was not present. We ate cold food and fell asleep. At dawn we broke camp. It was snowing again. Through
falling snow we glimpsed lightning in the distance, and then heard thunder, as if we had somehow awakened on a planet with a weather system different from Earth’s. Two of the Kyrgyz headed back up the mountain, presumably to find the pony and salvage whatever it had been carrying. The rest, including Askar, marched in silence and treated us as if we were invisible.

“They think we’re bad luck,” David said.

I was not surprised.

I waited until we were back in the village with full stomachs before discussing the situation with Askar. The conversation was strained. He listened impassively. I tried very hard to resuscitate the original happy warrior version of Askar. The rescue mission was not something David and Zarah and I could do without help. I didn’t want Kevin’s involvement at this point even if he and his team had been near enough to leap into action at a moment’s notice. He had too many reasons of his own to want possession of the Amphora Scroll. What we required was someone who knew nothing about the scroll but knew the ground, had a reason to damage the Chinese, and could be induced to help.

I told Askar everything—everything—Ze had told us.

He listened impassively, then said, “You trust this Han?”

“Do I have a choice? If I assume he’s lying and do nothing, Zarah’s father and grandmother and uncle—your relatives just as much as they are hers and mine—are gone forever.”

“You’re sure you are their only hope?”

I handed Ze’s digital camera it to Askar. He knew exactly how to work it—more than I could say—and he scrolled expertly through the stored images. When he saw the shot of Tarik wearing the lumber collar, his face darkened with family feeling— exactly what I had hoped to see.

I said, “Is that not Tarik?”

“Yes. And the old woman is Kerzira.”

I showed Askar the map. He examined it carefully, measuring distances with his knuckles.

“This
is close to the mountains, but more than one night’s march from the frontier,” he said. “The ground is flat, open. There are no trees, no cover of any kind. Even if we got them out we’d be found by helicopters as soon as the sun came up.”

“There are no caves, nothing like that?”

“No big caves,” Askar said. “Tombs. Sometimes they have mummies in them, people who look like us, not Han. The Han blow the tombs up whenever they find them because the mummies prove that our ancestors were in Xinjiang before theirs, so the land is ours, not theirs.”

“These tombs are large?”

“Sometimes. But they’re underground, hard to find. These mummies were entombed thousands of years ago.”

“But you know where to find them, if I remember correctly.”

“Perhaps. We used them in the old days, but the Han have surely destroyed many of the ones we knew, perhaps all. My men and I haven’t been near them for years.”

“But you could find them again.”

“If they still exist.”

If they did not still exist, we were out of luck. There was no time to scout them out before we started. We would have to find one on our way in.

We had quite a lot of gold left. Askar knew this, having handled the ingots during the negotiations for the Saker falcon. He did not ask for all the gold. Instead he suggested an honorarium of $2,500 for each of the four Kyrgyz fighters he thought he would need, plus a contribution of $5,000 to the treasury of the revolution, meaning Askar. Equipment and supplies would cost another $5,000.

I did not bargain. “Fine,” I said. “When can we start?”

“On the night of the second day from now,” Askar replied. “We will drive from Karokol into Kazakhstan and cross the border into Xinjiang beyond the mountains, south of the Dzungarian Gate. It’s empty country on both sides of the frontier, with some hills for cover. There are Han patrols but they’re not as alert as they
used to be. We’ll travel at night, hide during daylight. The Han won’t see us.”

I hoped he was right about that. “How long from the frontier to the camp?”

“We’ll arrive at the camp on the second night.”

Five days. This was cutting it fine.

While Askar was making his arrangements I got on the phone to Charley Hornblower and gave him a shopping list. Thirty-six hours later, a large package arrived in Karakol by FedEx. Inside, cushioned by several pecks of Styrofoam popcorn, were a notebook computer with a solar battery, a Global Positioning System locator and some other useful items. The most interesting of these were enlarged satellite photographs of the labor camp and the country surrounding it in a radius of fifty miles. The images were remarkably clear. Camp and desert looked as they might appear from the gondola of a balloon suspended at an altitude of fifty feet. You couldn’t read license plates or recognize faces, but human figures were clearly visible to the unaided eye. Charley provided an Internet address in case we needed more images. By hooking up the computer to the satellite phone we could connect to NASA’s Web site from wherever we happened to be, choose the images we wanted and pay for them with a credit card. It was all perfectly legal and proper, God bless America.

Two nights later we crossed the frontier into Xinjiang and, following Askar’s instructions, walked straight east in blackness for an hour until we smelled horses. Eleven shaggy ponies awaited us—one for each rider plus three spare animals for Paul and Lori and Tarik. Askar’s men—happily not the same moody fellows who
had guided us to the Bedel Pass—quickly packed our gear onto the riderless mounts. Askar led the largest pony to me and gave me a leg up. If a horse can groan, this poor beast groaned when it felt my weight.

Although darkness was complete, it was only seven in the evening when we started off. We had twelve hours or a little less until sunrise. Askar, in the lead, kicked his mount into a trot. Up ahead I could make out the silhouettes of the other riders pistoning up and down in the saddle. Despite riding lessons in childhood, I had never gotten the hang of this. I bounced up and down on the horse’s kidneys, jarred guts lingering behind as my pelvis hit leather, then sloshing about as gravity caught up with them. After an hour we began to canter, a much more comfortable way to travel. By now it was apparent that my horse hated me. It bucked, kicked and twisted its neck, trying to bite my leg. I sympathized. The animal, used to carrying lean, dashing Kyrgyz horsemen, almost certainly had never before been cursed with such a grossly incompetent rider, or such a heavy one.

After the canter we dismounted and walked for an hour. The stars came out. At our present rate of progress we should be at least fifty miles inside China by dawn, or halfway to the camp. The Kyrgyz did not stop to rest the horses or themselves. You could hear the horses making water and smell their manure. Once or twice I smelled carnivorous human urine; the Kyrgyz were emptying their bladders from the saddle. Remembering my Greek sniper, all this ordure worried me. An experienced tracker could follow it even in the dark. I wondered, too, if we were leaving tracks that could be seen after sunrise from the air. How could twelve horses fail to do so?

It was pointless to fret. I concentrated instead on the rescue, visualizing it as best I could on the basis of what Ze had told me about the camp, trying to foresee difficulties and avoid capture or untimely death. The biggest problem apart from the guards was Tarik’s lumber collar. He could hardly run with a thing like that
around his neck. I went over the plan to remove it. We’d have about ten minutes to do the job. Even though we had a couple of battery-operated screwdrivers, part of the care package Charley had sent, I didn’t see how we could unscrew the thing in the time available. I should have asked for more power screwdrivers, for a saw, for divine guidance.

About an hour before dawn the horses’ hooves began to ring on stony ground. By first light we could see mountains all around us. We dismounted and walked in single file down a narrow defile between low cliffs. The light strengthened. The horses, smelling of lather, drooped with fatigue. Mine was so tired it had given up trying to bite and kick me. I strained my eyes in the uncertain light and saw a horse disappear as if swallowed by the earth. Then another and another until I was at the head of the line, standing on the rim of a hole in the ground.

One of the Kyrgyz fighters clambered out of the hole, blindfolded my horse, took its reins, and whipped it into the pit. I followed and found myself in pitch darkness, walking down an earthen ramp. The horse whinnied in fear and balked and kicked and was lashed onward by its handler. After twists and turns I found myself in an inner chamber whose candlelit recumbent figures might have been painted by a Pre-Raphaelite on opium. They were mummies, still dressed in the shreds of the clothes in which they had been buried thousands of years before. Two men, a woman, a young girl. They were eyeless and lipless and shrunken and tanned by their long repose in the total absence of moisture. And yet they were lifelike. They seemed to slumber, even to dream. As in Ze’s photograph of Lori, you saw the faces they used to have. Two of them had hair as golden as Zarah’s. They seemed to be smiling, teeth gleaming in the candlelight. Oddly, there was no sense of having violated the mummies’ privacy. Their smiles seemed to suggest they had been waiting for us to drop in. I smiled back at them quite affectionately, and looking around the circle of faces, saw that everyone else was doing the same.

While
two of the Kyrgyz put the horses to bed, watering them from plastic jerricans and feeding them grain, the other two made a meal, heating tea over a camp stove and unpacking cold mutton and bread from cloth sacks. One of them spoke to us. David translated.

“He says there’s a latrine bucket in the room with the horses. Don’t go outside. Use the bucket, not the floor.”

We had not been told the names of the Kyrgyz traveling with us. All were picturesque types with mustaches and bandoliers and submachine guns slung over their shoulders and pistols and knives thrust into their belts. They were perfectly at home in the tomb, respectful but unself-consciously certain they were welcome among these silent ancestors. It was cool in the tomb, stony and dry. The candles in the burial chamber had been moved so that the mummies now lay in darkness. The silence was deep. My eyelids drooped. I was dead tired and terminally saddle worn and would have traded all the gold we had left for a hot bath. That was my last thought before I fell asleep.

Andrew Marvell was right. The grave’s a fine and private place. It is not, however, the ideal place to wake up. The blackness, the silence, the timeless smell of dust, the scalp-tingling realization of where you are and in what company add up to a moment of panic. Mummies by candlelight are one thing. Mummies in the dark are quite another. Their invisibility made their presence more noticeable, and as we all know, palpability is far more troubling to the mind than mere reality. I found my flashlight and switched it on. Zarah was sitting cross-legged on her sleeping rug, combing her hair in the dark. David was still asleep. There were no Kyrgyz to be seen.

Zarah said, “It’s ten in the morning. I think the others are outside, standing watch.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“The horses are all present and accounted for.”

As if to vouch for her, a horse snorted offstage. I was stiffer after a good night’s sleep than when climbing off my unhappy horse the
night before. I unfolded myself hinge by reluctant hinge into something like the full upright position and limped off to the bucket. Equine eyes rolled whitely in the beam of my flashlight, hooves flew. Evidently I didn’t smell any better to the horses than they smelled to me.

By the time I returned, David was awake. Zarah had lit some of the candles, revealing the mummies. Our living shadows mingled with theirs. The scene was less beautiful, less composed somehow and less mysterious, than it had seemed the night before. Zarah produced granola bars and handed them out. We washed them down with water from big plastic bottles with garish labels. We were all careful not to scatter crumbs: the mummies again, silently teaching us etiquette.