The Old Boys (49 page)

I went to sleep on a hilltop that night thinking that I still had time to mull things over, work things out, make plans. The next thing I knew I was lying on my back looking straight up at the belly of a jet airplane. It passed directly overhead, landing lights ablaze, wheels down, spewing the stink of burnt kerosene. It was headed for the landing strip in the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands, and though the sky was black, its aluminum skin flashed like a heliograph in the rays of the rising sun, which stood just below the horizon.

Ibn Awad’s advance party had arrived early.

The sun popped up in the east. As if a switch had been thrown, its stinging light flooded the hilltop and I saw something else I had not expected to see—Kevin. Still dressed as an Uzbek, he sat crosslegged in the sand beside me, his assault rifle in his lap. He whispered in some sort of military gibberish into the mouthpiece of the miniaturized headset that he wore. I was still half-deafened by the noise of the airplane and I could not hear Kevin well enough to make out his words. Half a dozen previously invisible men suddenly rose out of the ground. All wore headsets just like his and all were costumed and armed and accoutered like him. Charley Hornblower was propped up on one elbow, befuddled, looking like somebody else without his glasses. Tarik was a study in stillness as he gazed upward toward the crest of the mountain.
I followed his gaze and saw two more of Kevin’s men, posted as lookouts on high ground.

Kevin said, “Sorry about the rude awakening.”

“You knew they were coming today?”

“I hoped so,” he said. “Our guys in Turkmenistan radioed that they had loaded up and taken off. I left a heads-up on your voice mail. You didn’t get it?”

“I haven’t checked for messages lately.”

“Ah.”

Kevin was completely at ease, in his element, in command of all the necessary facts and of the means to deal with them. Military procedure had the situation in hand. Except for the lookouts, his men were crouched now, weapons slung, fussing with foil packets that I recognized as U.S. military field rations. I got to my feet, not quite so nimbly as I might have wished in the presence of all these supple young witnesses, and gave Charley a hand up. We stumbled together behind a convenient rock to relieve ourselves. Charley said nothing about the airplane that had just shocked him awake, nothing about finding himself surrounded by commandos when he opened his eyes. He took his several morning pills.

Charley looked over his shoulder. “How much are you going to tell this fellow?” he whispered.

The habit of a lifetime dies hard. Charley was a Headquarters man. An airplane full of killers had just flown over our heads and their leader, a homicidal maniac we had been chasing for months, would be on the next flight, but the important thing to Charley was keeping secrets.

I said, “What parts would you leave out, Charley?”

“What we found out yesterday, for starters,” he replied.

“That might be difficult.”

I pointed to the desert floor, a few hundred feet below. The tracks we had left while driving in circles had left a huge targetlike pattern at least a mile in diameter. It could have been seen from outer space.

I
said, “Charley, this thing is almost over. Kevin knows what we’re after; he’s always known. What do we have to hide?”

“Nothing, if Kevin really is on our side. But what if he isn’t?”

“In that case,” I said, “he’s got us surrounded, hasn’t he?”

“My point exactly,” Charley said.

Tarik was conversing with one of Kevin’s men in what seemed to be Kyrgyz. None of the men said a word to Charley or me. They were crouched in their baggy native dress like genuine men of the desert, breakfasting on U. S. Army Meals-Ready-to-Eat. Kevin handed each of us a steaming foil envelope full of food and a plastic spoon. I got beef stew, Charley macaroni and cheese. Charley ate pickily and in silence, his usual good fellowship buttoned down. Holding his spoon in his fist instead of his fingers, Kevin gulped down his utilitarian meal with utilitarian speed. He then produced a toothbrush and toothpaste and brushed his teeth, rinsing from a canteen and spitting on the ground, then rubbing the white streaks into the dirt.

From where we stood we could see the pattern left by our wheel tracks. Kevin pointed to it and said, “By the way, what was all that about? We saw the dust cloud from ten miles away.”

I told him. At first Kevin was politely skeptical, like a farmer listening to a city fellow predict the weather. A cavern dug by a nuclear explosion? An underground lake of liquefied gas?

“
Radioactive
natural gas.”

“Isn’t that hazardous to the gonads?” Kevin said. “We’ve been walking across that ground for a week.”

“According to Charley it’s not quite Chernobyl, but it’s hot.”

Kevin said, “And you think the bombs are hidden somewhere in this cubic mile of nuclear soup?”

“I think it’s possible,” I said. “It would make sense to hide them in a radioactive site. The background radiation would mask their presence, and nobody would go near the place.”

“Mikhail said he checked every such site in the Soviet Union.”

“Except maybe the one he didn’t tell us about.”

Kevin said, “Poor Mikhail, nobody trusts him. Suppose you’re
right and this is the mother lode. How do we get the bombs out without melting ourselves down?”

That was the problem, all right. Unless you were a suicide bomber.

At noon the plane took off and disappeared to the south. An hour or so after that, three of Ibn Awad’s men, robes and head cloths billowing, Kalashnikovs slung across their backs, arrived on motorbikes. They rode right across the bull’s-eye of tire tracks that Charley and Tarik and I had left without seeing them. Meanwhile Kevin’s advance scouts, posted on yet another hilltop overlooking the airstrip thirty miles away, reported in by radio. The plane had been offloaded. Tents were going up, water pipe was being laid from a spring, the generator was up and running, sentries had been posted, and as we had just seen, patrols sent out. It was a pious camp. Everyone had rushed off the plane as soon as it landed, spread prayer rugs on the runway, faced Mecca, and said the dawn prayer. At noon they had done the same—even the sentries.

Presumably they would pray three more times before they went to bed. Kevin liked this picture. Everybody in Ibn Awad’s camp would be down on elbows and knees and vulnerable five times a day, providing five opportunities for infiltration or attack. I found it difficult to share his enthusiasm. I knew that I should be smelling blood, eager for the kill, happy to be in position to finish the job my aging friends and I, all alone in the world, had set out to do. But I was tired. Also exasperated. Although I devoted most of my life to them, secret operations always exasperated
me—the wasted motion, the misspent energy, the pointless anxiety, the trivial results that remind you how little good you’ve done for all your trouble and how foolishly you are wasting your life. It’s a young man’s game, of course, and by the time you realize all of the foregoing you’re too old to change careers. Not to mention having a résumé that would frighten any personnel director in the world out of his wits. I was tempted to walk off the hilltop and let Kevin do the rest. I had mixed feelings about saving the world, or whatever portion of it Ibn Awad was threatening to consume by fire. In the great scheme of things, what was the point of stopping him? Maybe Ibn Awad was some sort of Tarot card that was fated to be turned over. Who was I to trifle with destiny? Besides, I had already killed the old maniac once, only to discover that he was only pretending to be dead, so was it also in the cards that I should murder him, or fail to murder him again? So much depended on chance, on luck, on the adversary making the necessary mistakes, on everything falling into place, on the happenstance of being in the right place at the right moment. I had spent six months getting into position on this hilltop in a far corner of Uzbekistan and now all I could do was wait.

But not for long. Just before sunset the airplane returned and landed again on the airstrip in the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands. Ibn Awad stepped off. I did not see this with my own eyes, of course, but listened over a headset as one of Kevin’s scouts reported the landing. In a sort of play-by-play commentary, the lookout described Ibn Awad’s every move. The old man was upright, moving under his own power. He wore his usual white robes. He was weaponless, not even a ceremonial dagger in his belt. He wore an oxygen mask, his male nurse following along behind bearing the tank. The sun was touching the western horizon and as soon as Ibn Awad reached the bottom of the ramp he fell onto a prayer rug that had been spread for him and performed the sunset prayer. After that he walked unassisted to his tent with firm step, but slowly. He was surrounded by the bodyguards who had arrived with him—a dozen fighters, armed to the teeth. Added to the ones already on
hand, these new arrivals brought the number of battle-ready holy warriors to about twenty. Kevin took this head count as good news. He had been expecting fifty, but now he was only outnumbered three to one, a ratio he seemed to regard as ideal odds.

As soon as darkness fell Kevin and his men moved out. Their destination was the hills overlooking the airstrip. They had gone so thoroughly native in matters of dress—even Tarik had taken them for Uzbeks on first sight—that I half expected them to produce a string of camels and climb aboard. However, they traveled on foot.

We watched through binoculars as they moved across the moonlit plain, double-timing for a few hundred yards, then walking, then double-timing again. At this pace they should reach Ibn Awad’s camp in the small hours of the morning, about the time the moon set.

While Kevin’s men were still in sight, David and Harley and Jack arrived in another car. They brought with them food and water and a collection of equipment that would have been astonishing if anyone besides David had put it together—assault rifles, grenades, blocks of explosive, and of all things, a heavy mortar with a crate of shells. All of these weapons were Russian.

“The market’s flooded with this stuff since they stopped paying the Russian army,” David said. “Army officers sell it for peanuts.”

I said, “What are we going to do with it?”

“You never know,” David said, “but it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I don’t know about you, but I felt a little naked in Xinjiang.”

Harley gazed pensively at the scars we had left on the desert floor. He said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, Charley, but the way I remember it, the Soviets made three of these underground reservoirs that we know about, all north of the Caspian Sea. Drilled a shaft, dropped an H-bomb down it, plugged the shaft, and let ’er rip. When it went off it made this great big cavern. The idea was to store oil and gas as a strategic reserve, like we do back home in salt domes.”

This much I had already figured out for myself, but it was nice
to have confirmation from Harley, who in his palmy days as a master spy was usually the first to know about such things.

“Other thing is, there’s no natural gas around here, so they must have liquefied it elsewhere and hauled it in tank cars,” Harley said. “That’s what the railroad was for.”

“So what does that mean?” Jack said.

“It means, Jack, that all we have to do is find the place where they dumped the gas in,” Harley said. “There must have been some kind of pumpin’ station, maybe more than one, and pipelines. That means steel and concrete hidin’ places. Find that and you’ve found the bombs.”

“If they’re here,” Jack said. “And if we can locate them without a whole lot of equipment we don’t have.”

“When it comes to lookin’ underground there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” Harley said.

“Do you have a method in mind?”

“Well,” Harley said, “usually you use a forked stick you cut off an apple tree. They call it a witchin’ stick. There’re no apple orchards around here, so maybe a coat hanger will do.”

He just happened to have one. He produced it, untwisted it, straightened it out, and then retwisted it into the shape of a Y. I may have been a summer kid but I had spent enough time around Yankee farmers to know what Harley had in mind. None of the city boys present had the faintest notion, as the look on Jack Philindros’s face testified.

Harley said, “David, you’ve got a lot of scrap metal available. Why don’t you go off in the dark and bury somethin’?”

“Why?”

“Want to test this out. Not sure it’ll work. Bury the stuff about two foot deep.”

I went along with David and helped with the shoveling. We buried the base plate of the mortar, an AK-47, and a couple of hand grenades in separate holes. The ground was stony, so this took a while. We didn’t mark the holes and the moonlight was not strong enough to reveal signs of digging.

“We
can kiss this stuff good-bye,” David said. “We’ll never find it again.”

I wasn’t so sure of that.

“Now blindfold me,” Harley said, when we got back to him. “Don’t want to be accused of cheatin’.”

Jack handled this chore. We led Harley to the vicinity of the buried metal, but not too close. He gripped his coat hanger by the arms of the Y.