The Old Boys (48 page)

I said, “What made you trust him, Tarik?”

I spoke English. Tarik replied in the same language. “I knew all about him, Mother had told me about her other son,” he said. “Besides, he looks like our mother. I knew that. Now I saw it. We went back for her together. We knew where to look. She thought the scroll would be safe in the labor camp.”

“And you were caught by the Chinese?”

“No.”

I said, “You just walked through the gates of a labor camp of your own free will?”

Paul shrugged. “I’d come a long way to find her. I felt as she did, that a Chinese labor camp was as good a place as any to end my days, and no worse than the camp she and my father and I would have been sent to in 1940 if she hadn’t saved our lives on the train at Aachen. And then, I’d been looking for her all my life.”

At this point I thought that I had heard all that I had any business to know. Why the Chinese had sent fake ashes to Washington when they knew that Paul Christopher was alive and well in Xinjiang was simply beyond my power to understand. I left the Christophers together, seated in a circle in the center of a vast empty quarter of the Earth. They murmured to one another. Soon I couldn’t hear their faint voices. A few steps after that I could not see them by the light of stars.

To my mild surprise, all of the Christophers were still with me in the morning. Kevin appeared just after first light, right on schedule. He arrived on horseback. This time he was wearing Uzbek dress, assault rifle slung across his back, knife in his belt, pistol in a shoulder holster, grenades, binoculars, satellite telephone— everything but war paint. He and some of his men had set up camp about thirty miles away in the hills near the Jomon-Kŭm Sands. Another team was posted at the airstrip in Turkmenistan. Each team had a satellite phone and a backup radio.

“The guys in Turkmenistan are waiting for Ibn Awad’s party to arrive and set up camp,” Kevin said. “When that happens, our guys will study the target, watch the pattern of activity, count heads, identify weaknesses.”

“And hope they’re not discovered.”

“Not much chance of that because no one expects them to be there and they’ll stay hidden and study Ibn Awad’s security routine. The idea is to get the information that will make the job of capturing the old man feasible instead of merely possible. And in the end, overcome the security, extract the target, and get everybody out alive and all in one piece.”

“How many people will you need to carry out this extraction?”

“A minimum of eight,” Kevin said.

“Ibn
Awad has at least fifty bodyguards.”

“Eight will be enough,” Kevin said.

“I hope you’re right,” I said. “However, let’s say you make the snatch and somehow kill or immobilize all of Ibn Awad’s holy warriors. You’ll still be in the middle of a desert with hundreds of miles of empty country between you and the nearest town and thousands of miles between that town and safety. Not to mention that everybody in the town in question will be a Muslim eager to save Ibn Awad from the infidels. How exactly are you going to extract your prisoner?”

“Improvise,” Kevin said.

“Improvise? You’re an interesting fellow.”

Kevin smiled his inimitable smile. “We’ll be in touch,” he said.

He mounted his horse and rode away.

That afternoon, the rest of the Old Boys arrived. We sat in a circle on Lori’s rug, drinking tea and watching as Tarik worked the Saker falcon against the cloudless sky. And then Charley Hornblower reminded us that life is full of surprises. While the rest of us had been watching the falcon, he had been emptying one of his large manila envelopes and arranging its contents onto the rug before him—text, maps, photographs, each held down by a small rock. A photocopy of Kalash’s map was spread out as the centerpiece. The map was much annotated with yellow Post-its and highlighter inks in various colors.

“I think I’ve found something interesting,” Charley said. “The migratory path of the houbara bustard passes right over every airstrip on Kalash’s map. Except one.”

Charley’s blunt forefinger traced the flyway, marked on the map as a thick line of pale blue ink. Just as Charley had said, the birds flew right over the airstrips in Sudan, Balochistan, Iran and Turkmenistan, where Kevin’s scouts were at this moment keeping watch over Ibn Awad’s advance party.

After Turkmenistan, the bustards’ migratory path turned east, missing the airstrip in the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands by a couple of hundred miles. This was unsettling news. Kevin had concentrated his forces at the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands airstrip, less than fifty
miles from where the Old Boys were now sipping tea. Kevin believed—I believed, we had all believed—that the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands airstrip was the best place to make our move on Ibn Awad. I didn’t ask if Charley was sure of his facts. Of course he was.

I said, “I’m somewhat surprised.”

“It surprised me, too,” Charley said. “But every bit of data I could find and all the expert opinion suggests that the airstrip in Uzbekistan is no place to find the houbara bustard at this time of the year. Or any other time.”

“So where is the bird’s next stop?” Jack asked.

“The Sardara Steppe in Kazakhstan,” Charley said.

Jack said, “Can Kevin fall back to that location?”

“I’d have to ask Kevin,” I said. “He and I talked about the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands and only about the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands as the point of attack.”

Jack nodded amiably, suddenly calm and agreeable, as if this problem was perfectly manageable. But the message in his voice, his gaze, his body language was written in a personal Braille that everyone present could read:
Kiss the operation good-bye, boys.

I said, “Any thoughts?”

Silence. Then Paul said, “If there are no houbara bustards at the Uzbekistan airstrip, then why is it on the map?”

That was the question, all right. One possible answer was that there was no such airstrip. Except that Kevin said there was. Another was that it was a trap. I looked around the circle of faces and saw no sign that anyone wanted to make a guess. The question remained. Why would Ibn Awad build an airstrip to hunt the houbara bustard in the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands if there are no houbara bustards there?

It was Paul who broke the lengthy silence. “Maybe Ibn Awad stops in the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands for some other reason,” he said.

“Such as?”

“Such as paying a visit to his bombs.”

“Now that,” Harley said, “is what I’d call an interestin’ idea.”

We
ate a cold supper and went to bed early. I tossed and turned until shortly before dawn, then went outside. There was better visibility in this desert than there had been in Xinjiang. Even as a sliver, the moon produced a sort of warped daylight. Distant objects, such as the Z˘ etimtov Hills, wrapped in blue shadow, were quite visible.

“It all looks primeval, doesn’t it?” Zarah said. Her voice was hoarse, another trait she shared with her grandmother, but strong and distinct.

I jumped. I hadn’t seen her and despite everything I’ve just said about the revealing light of the moon, I couldn’t locate her. Then she sat up and I saw that she had been sleeping on the rug where we had taken tea earlier in the day.

“However, it is not so untouched as it seems,” Lori said. “Tarik and I were talking about it during the night. He was here as a child with his father, and one night while everybody was sleeping the earth moved.”

“An earthquake?”

“That’s what they thought at the time even though it didn’t feel exactly like an earthquake.”

I said, “Did it happen on this spot, where we’re camped?”

“Further west and north,” Lori replied. “They were camped near the well at Sarim, about two days’ journey from here on foot. The well at Sarim is miles and miles from anything else, which is interesting, because according to the map it lies between two highways that seem to go nowhere, and it’s only twenty miles or so from the end of a railroad that begins in Samarkand and also goes nowhere.”

That
was
funny. I said, “Anything else?”

“Tarik says the railroad and the roads were brand-new back then. The Russians built them after the war with Gulag labor. They were always doing things like that. Nobody paid attention, just steered clear.”

“So there was this shaking of the earth,” I said. “Then what?”

“After the shock they saw headlights, lots of them, converging
on a single point. In the morning, there were many, many Russians in uniform running hither and yon.”

At long last we had our stroke of luck.

After breakfast Tarik and Charley and I piled into a vehicle and headed for the well at Sarim. It was a wild ride. Only Tarik knew exactly where we were going, so he drove. His Kyrgyz genes were in full command of him and he was in command of the bucking, rattling machine. Charley, notebook computer open in his lap, bounced around in the back seat. How he could type under these conditions was a mystery but somehow he managed. The computer was hooked up to the satellite phone.

At last he shouted, “I think I’ve got something. Stop the car.”

Standing on solid ground, Charley showered us with facts. There had been 596 underground nuclear tests in the Soviet Union between 1949 and 1985. Nearly all were conducted in Kazakhstan or on the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Arctic.

“However,” Charley said. “There were two underground tests in Uzbekistan. One of these occurred around the time Tarik is talking about.”

“Where?”

“Here, if Tarik’s recollection is correct.”

I said, “For what purpose?”

“It was classified as ‘peaceful,’ meaning not for military purposes,” Charley said. “A lot of these peaceful underground tests were designed to study seismic waves. The Russians also mined for oil and gas with nuclear explosions. Or created underground storage chambers for liquefied natural gas.”

“Underground storage chambers?”

“Yep,” said Charley.

We got back into the car. When we reached the site, or what Tarik believed was the site of the underground explosion, Charley was first out of the car. Naturally he had brought along a Geiger counter—essential equipment, after all, if you’re looking for stolen
A-bombs—and he whipped this out. When he switched it on, it chattered. Charley read the gauge and whistled.

“You think it’s an underground chamber?”

“If Tarik saw what he thinks he saw,” Charley replied, “it’s likely to be, isn’t it?”

For the next couple of hours, we drove in concentric circles while Charley took readings with his clattering Geiger counter and I noted the numbers on the odometer. In the end, this gave us a rough idea of the size of the cavity in the earth. It was many acres in extent. We had no idea how deep it was. One thing was sure: It was an ideal place to store a dozen small nuclear bombs. The background radiation would mask the radiation leaking from the bombs themselves. They could be dispersed underground, so that a thief or a spy might find one bomb but would have no idea where in the darkness the others might be hidden.

The frontier with Turkmenistan, home of Darvaza-76, the secret Soviet installation from which Mikhail had told us the bombs had been stolen, was a short distance away, and the country in between was virtually empty. We had no time left for skepticism. If luck had brought us here, then we’d better trust our luck.

The sun was falling. This was not the best place to spend the night. A mile or two away stood a range of bald mountains, higher and more rugged than the Z˘ etimtov Hills. Horizontal rays of the sun blistered the mountainside with intense light, banishing shadows. I saw something move, squinted my eyes, saw something else move—soar, actually.

“Eagles,” Tarik said.

If Kalash was right about the eyesight of birds, these saw us eight times better than we saw them.

We drove toward the hills.