The Old Boys (44 page)

I had packed Ze’s maps, the Landsat images, the GPS thingamabob and other navigational aids in an indestructible canvas briefcase with shoulder strap that I had bought thirty years before at Eddie Bauer. It also contained, in an outside compartment designed to hold books, a loaded Makarov pistol and a fearsome big commando knife. David had gone shopping in Karakol and bought these items, along with some Russian stun- and tear gas grenades. David was a crack shot and I assumed that Zarah was, too, but I hadn’t fired a pistol in years or stabbed anybody since I got out of the Marine Corps. These skills, once learned, were like riding a bicycle, or so I hoped. They’d come back when and if I needed them.

With the briefcase slung over my shoulder and every muscle and joint protesting, I walked to the top of the ramp. The entrance was sealed with a large flat stone. I slid it aside. The sun exploded in my eyes, momentarily blinding me. Had hunters been waiting for me to stick my head out of my den I would have been dead. I saw no one—nor any trace of human passage. All sign of the horses’ hooves and our own footsteps had been removed. The scalped landscape was empty. Even the sky was empty—not a cloud to be seen, not a bird, nothing but the bluewhite sun directly overhead. I felt no heat from it. We were in a
deep canyon, in deep shadow. The surrounding bluffs that I had sensed the night before were now fully visible. They were pockmarked with the mouths of caves, but only a human fly could have climbed into one of them. I stood up and beckoned to Zarah and David to follow me. There was no point in crawling or creeping. Anyone watching the ravine would already have seen us. I hoped that this included our Kyrgyz traveling companions, but looking around this sterile void and listening to the silence, I wondered.

Suddenly Askar’s voice, issuing from the earth just behind me, said something in Kyrgyz. David, who was at my elbow, translated: “He says to be sure to replace the rock and sweep your footprints behind you.”

Askar was lying under a sheet of burlap about five paces away. The burlap was the same color as the ground for the good reason that it was permeated with dirt. The dirt was pulverized and so loose, because so dehydrated, that the grains of it did not stick together. When you stepped in it, you kicked up a tiny sandstorm that took a long time to come back together. All of us were powdered with this flourlike grime from head to toe. Askar stood up and strode off toward the bluff. We followed. Zarah picked up the burlap and walking backward, obliterated our footprints.

We were soon inside a low cave, sitting in a circle. The other Kyrgyz were standing watch, presumably under burlaps of their own. Askar pointed vaguely up and down the ravine and to the tops of the bluffs. His submachine gun was wrapped in a plastic trash bag to protect it from the dust. I spread out the Landsat image of this area and took a GPS reading. I pointed to our exact position on the map. Askar made a polite face. He knew where he was and where he was going. No need for all this outlandish fuss and complication.

He began to talk. As Askar saw it, the rescue was a simple operation—walk in, find our friends, walk out with them in tow, evade pursuit, hide during daylight, run for the border by night. Make no noise, make no fuss, leave ’em snoozing. All this made
good sense. Operations always sound tidy on the day before they happen.

Zarah said, “What about Tarik?”

“He comes with us.”

“Wearing that collar? What if we have to run?”

“Then we leave him,” Askar said.

“Impossible,” Zarah said.

Askar shrugged. Zarah gave him a long cold look, then moved away and sat with her back turned.

We started out as soon as it was dark. To my great relief, Askar ordered us to lead the horses rather than ride them in order to keep the animals as fresh as possible for our getaway. We were in a labyrinth of ravines, gullies and escarpments. Askar, in the lead, turned left here, right there, or marched straight ahead with the confidence of a New Yorker walking to work in a geometric city. According to the radium dial of my old compass, we were headed east and north, right for the prison camp. Dust stirred up by the horses’ hooves muffled the senses—taste, smell, touch, even hearing and sight. I counted footsteps, following the leader in a daze of dumb trust. Time did not fly.

By ten o’clock we could see the glow of the camp against the sky. Askar called a halt. One of his nameless men took my horse’s reins from my hands and led it away. He and the other fighters hobbled the animals. Askar issued orders to his fighters and to us, who would do what on what signal. We would rest for an hour, then go in. At midnight, as arranged, David would call Ze’s satellite phone and leave a message in Mandarin. Meanwhile we would sleep.

“Zarah will remain with the horses,” Askar said.

Zarah said, “No.”

“Someone must stay,” Askar said. “Otherwise the horses will scatter.”

“Then
leave one of your people,” Zarah said, looking him straight in the eye.

“All the men are needed,” Askar said. “There’s going to be a wind. The horses will be afraid. They’ll scatter.”

As if on signal, a breeze stirred up a few dust dervishes. Zarah walked away into the darkness. Askar shrugged. This woman preferred discovery and maybe death to obedience? So be it. He lay down on the ground and went to sleep. I was beginning to feel the excitement of the thing we were about to do. Nevertheless, I soon fell asleep, but twitchily, dreaming of bad moments in the past. When I roused I realized that Zarah was missing. This startled me so that I hardly noticed that the wind was stronger—so strong, in fact, that the glow of the camp had been obscured by a cloud of dust. The temperature had dropped many degrees. A cold front was arriving on the west wind. We were all masked now, scarves drawn across our faces against the wind and sand. Maybe Zarah was hidden by the blowing dust. I bumbled about looking for her but found no trace of her except for one very bad sign. The rucksack in which she carried her gear was missing. So was one of Charley’s power screwdrivers. No one had seen her leave. There was only one place she could have gone—into the camp.

David made his phone call to Ze. Askar signaled his men to move out and led off, with David and me on either side of him. The wind blew harder every minute. We could hardly see the horses. Askar spoke a short sentence in Kyrgyz.

David translated: “Askar says it’s a night within the night. Perfect for us.”

Askar was in his element, happy and bloodthirsty. Allah was in charge. Despite the presence of unbelievers he had sent us these ideal weather conditions. We would be invisible to the guards at the camp. Our tracks would be blown away.

We seemed to be alone, just the three of us. Then Askar’s men emerged from the whirlwind of dust, leading the horses. There was no reason, now, not to bring them. No one inside the camp would be able to see or smell them in this pall of dust or hear them over
the howling wind. I’m no Bedouin, but it was obvious, too, that no one, not even Askar, would have been able to find the animals again if we left them behind. That meant that Zarah would not find them either if we missed her in the storm and she followed Kalash’s rule for those lost in the desert and went back to the place where she had started.

Quite soon we were within sight of the camp. The weak perimeter lights were gauzy points of reference. Beyond these were other, even dimmer lights outside the buildings. Askar came close and shouted into my ear. Where, he wanted to know, was the homing device that Ze had given me? It was a good thing (Allah again?) we had brought the horses, because in my anxiety over Zarah I had completely forgotten the homing device. It was hanging from my saddle, inside my canvas briefcase. Without technological assistance in this night within the night, we wouldn’t have had a prayer of finding the building where Ze and his prisoners awaited us. I retrieved the transponder and switched it on. It was equipped with earphones, like a Walkman. I clapped these on and followed the signal. It stuttered and faded if you strayed right or left but was loud and steady as long as you stayed on track. Askar and the others stumbled along behind me, blind and trusting. I dug the commando knife out of the briefcase and held it in my free hand, in case the homing beam walked us right into a guard. I liked the heft of the knife. My blood was up. Not for many years had I had this feeling. I was enjoying it more now, as my whole life passed before my eyes, than I remembered doing as a second lieutenant on night patrol with my whole life before me.

In the event, it was not a guard but an entire guardhouse I blundered into. Following the homing signal meant walking in a straight line. Obstacles did not register on the transponder, and it was a tribute to my lack of imagination that I nearly got us captured or shot or both by not realizing that before it was almost too late. The building in question was a shack, brightly lighted inside and out. Through the window, only inches from my nose by the
time I halted, I could see uniformed men lounging about. They were listening to the radio, which was tuned very loud.

I skirted the building, picked up the homing beam again, then bobbed and weaved among structures, some lighted and some not. I hoped that Askar could find his way back through this maze, because there would be no homing signal on the way out and I knew that I would be lost without it. As I walked along the beam of sound, it increased in volume. The building dead ahead was outlined by a dim glow. I walked around the structure, looking for a window. When I reached the front, the noise in the earphones was so loud that I took them off. Immediately I heard a faint electrical whirring sound. It seemed to come from the front of the building. There was no need for concealment, obviously, but I dropped on all fours anyway and crawled to the corner of the building. Peeking around it, I saw something that I recognized. It was Cousin Tarik with the great wooden square of his collar around his neck. His head looked very small, jutting above the collar. He was kneeling, gripping his knees, the only things he could reach, in an attempt to hold himself upright despite the weight of the thing.

Zarah knelt in front of Tarik, her back to me. I realized what the whirring sound was. It was the power screwdriver. Zarah was using this tool to remove the screws and bolts from Tarik’s collar. She had come on ahead of the rest of us to give herself more time to do this job. The collar was enormous, far bigger than it had seemed in Ze’s snapshot. Just as Ze had suggested, its very size sent a nonstop message to the man who wore it. He was going to die wearing it and mummify or rot with it still around his neck afterward. Zarah worked methodically, without hurrying, unscrewing the screws and dropping them into the sand.

I was about to whisper hello when Askar and two of his men appeared beyond Zarah, submachine guns pointed at her head. Without pausing in her work, Zarah looked up at them and calmly pointed with her thumb at the door just behind her. Weapons at the ready, the Kyrgyz burst through the door like the half-crazy
killers they were. I followed, knife in hand, adrenaline pumping. Askar and his men had come here to kill. They wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to blow Ze’s head off—or for that matter, Paul’s or Lori’s.

In English, a language these killers did not understand, I shouted, “Hold it!”

They ignored me. Lori, seated on a stool in the middle of the room, smiled at the desperadoes and said something in Kyrgyz. One of them knelt beside her and took her hand. A nephew? The look on his face, murderous just a moment before, can only be called tender.

Paul said, “Hello, Horace.”

He was standing behind Lori, a hand on her shoulder. She reached up with her free hand—the fond young desperado was still holding onto the other one—and patted Paul’s hand.

I said, “Hello yourself.”

Lori smiled at me in grandmotherly silence, as if we did not speak a common language. After all these years perhaps we didn’t. I smiled back—horribly, no doubt. Once again manners came to the rescue. I held out my hand and said, “Aunt Lori, I wonder if you know about me. I’m Horace Hubbard, Elliott’s son.”

Her expression was pleasant, detached, ladylike.

She gripped my hand and shook it like the Prussian she used to be, up, down, quick release. Her palm was callused, her grip firm, her skin warm.

Ze Keli said, “Perhaps someone should help Zarah. The guards make their rounds every half hour.”