The Old Boys (50 page)

“Point me in the right direction, boys,” he said, and stepped off.

He walked about twenty paces. When he was on top of the hole in which the mortar base plate was buried, the coat hanger dipped.

“Right here,” he said. “Good-sized chunk of somethin’.”

“There are more,” David said.

“Don’t tell me how many,” Harley said. “Just tell me when I’m done.”

He missed the AK-47, which was off to the right, but found the grenades a few paces further on.

“Small,” he said.

“One more behind you,” David said.

Harley turned around and began pacing back and forth in straight lines. Finally he was close enough to the AK-47 to pick up its emanations, or whatever they were, and the coat hanger dipped.

“Medium-sized,” he said. “Long piece of iron. Any more?”

“That’s it.”

Harley removed the blindfold. We uncovered his finds. As a boy I’d watched one of our neighbors in the Berkshires find a spring with a forked branch cut from an apple tree. He’d done it in broad daylight without a blindfold, but his stick had bobbed just like Harley’s, as if tugged by an invisible troll pulling on a string. The spring he found (fee: $2) was still providing icy cold water to anyone who wanted to dip a tin cup into it and take a drink.

I
said, “Harley, I never knew you were a dowser.”

“Half forgot it myself until earlier today when Charley told me what the problem was over the telephone,” Harley said.

“I thought you could only find water by this method.”

“Not true,” Harley said, “you can find anything. “A hundred years ago my grandfather found oil in Pennsylvania with a cherry switch.
Thought
it was water till he dug down a ways.”

“How does it work?”

“Dunno. It’s a mystery, but it works. Runs in the family. Skips a generation usually.”

Jack was nonplussed, wondering perhaps why, when it had had Harley, the Outfit had spent all that money on space satellites that peered down on the Evil Empire. But more likely not believing what his own eyes had just seen. Harley was smiling, eyes only, head turned away to hide this sign of the sin of pride. All of a sudden I felt much better about our prospects. Optimistic, even.

Tarik was not a babbler. He spoke Kyrgyz and English and Mandarin, and considering the time his energetic mother must have had on her hands while he was growing up, he may have been taught German and classical Greek and who knows what other tongues. For a while I thought his reticence had something to do with that half-door the Chinese had hung around his neck. Maybe it had given him a sore throat or an unsettled mind. But no. Like his half brother Paul, he just wasn’t talkative. Somehow silence fit his character, even his appearance. With his coppery complexion, high cheekbones, steady eyes and silent deeps he resembled another Central Asian, James Fenimore’s Cooper’s Chingachgook, stalwart and silent and no longer young (Tarik must have been about fifty), but still a warrior.

Tarik had observed Harley’s demonstration of witching with close interest. After it was over, while we were still standing in an admiring circle around Harley, skeptics and believers together, Tarik startled us by speaking.

“You can see what the Russians tried to hide quite plainly in the moonlight,” he said.

I said, “What do you mean by that, Tarik?”

“Come,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

He
led us uphill for a few meters to a spot where we could overlook the valley. He pointed a finger.

“I don’t see it,” I said.

“I only saw it myself for the first time tonight,” Tarik said. “You’re looking for traces of an old highway and a railroad roadbed.”

Now that Tarik had told me what to look for they leaped to the eye. Two long parallel cuts were visible on the desert floor below. The fainter of the two must have been the highway. The railway roadbed was easier to detect because it had once been a raised embankment and now it was scattered over a much wider strip of land. It was obvious that the highway and the railroad had been bulldozed. And it was just as obvious why this had been done. The Russians had wanted to hide what they had done here—not because they were ashamed of themselves for having despoiled yet another untouched natural fastness, but because it was one of their innumerable Cold War secrets.

Just before the end of the line, the railroad had made a sweeping left turn, buttonhooking in that direction for a mile or so before it curved right again. From where we stood on the hilltop, the traces of this unusual track looked like a backward question mark.

“That must’ve been where they offloaded the gas from the tank cars,” Harley said. “That buttonhook must be two, three miles long. They could move up their tank cars in a half circle, park ’em on the track, and pump ’em out one by one as slick as you please. Wish I’d known about that when they were doin’ it. Where were you when I needed you, Tarik?”

It was obvious where the pumping station was likely to be— at the tip of the hook of the question mark. The moon, now waxing toward the half, provided all the light we need. We drove down the hill and paced off the distance to the center. This was rough measurement indeed but the best we could do without a surveyor’s transit. Harley commenced pacing back and forth, his coat hanger held before him. Meanwhile Charley, feeling no
doubt like the forgotten man, went prospecting with his Geiger counter—ancient wisdom versus twentieth-century science. It was surprising how far the Geiger counter’s clicking, or any mechanical noise, carried in a place so lifeless that there were no natural sounds except when the wind blew.

A couple of hours before dawn, Harley’s coat hanger dipped. “Pretty strong dip,” he said. “Must be somethin’ down there.”

He stood where he was, marking the spot, until the rest of us got there with shovels. The dirt here was far looser than it had been on the hilltop and with Tarik and David and me taking turns with the shovel, we made steady progress. When the hole was about hip deep, we struck concrete.

“Problem is, it’s just concrete,” Harley said. “Now we know there’s somethin’ there. But what we got to do is find the way in.”

We dug again. Despite the nip in the air—at four in the morning it couldn’t have been more than forty degrees Fahrenheit—we were all sweating. I had always imagined that ditch-digging left the mind free for long trains of poetic thought, as it had for Paul Christopher during his first prison term in China. However, I found that I had to concentrate every minute on what my body was doing. Also I was beginning to get blisters on my hands and if I thought at all, it was about them.

Fortunately, Tarik had lived in a world of toil and sweat all his life, so he could wield a shovel and keep his wits about him at the same time. It was he who spotted the headlights approaching from the south, the direction in which Ibn Awad’s camp lay. I counted fifteen, moving slowly, and so did Tarik. Nobody else could see well enough to run a total.

“Fifteen’s an odd number,” Harley said. “Guess that means there’s at least one motorcycle. Or a one-eyed car.”

Charley’s Geiger counter chattered. He said, “Very hot spot here.”

We all knew what the headlights meant: we’d better get out of there as quickly as possible. On the other hand we could all hear Charley’s Geiger counter and we knew what that very possibly
meant: We’d found Ibn Awad’s bombs minutes before Ibn Awad’s men were going to arrive, shoot us all dead, and take possession of them.

I said, “Tarik, how long before they get here?”

“Half an hour, maybe less.”

David said, “Dig we must, don’t you think?”

Jack said, “I have a question. Suppose we’ve found the bombs. What are we going to do with them even if we dig them up? If we take them with us, we die of radiation poisoning. If we leave them here, a lot of people may die in other places.”

“That pretty well sums up the choices, Jack,” Harley said. “So why don’t we just dig the durn things up now and think about what to do with ’em later?”

He grabbed the shovel and attacked the ground, making dirt fly. After thirty seconds of all-out effort he handed the shovel off to me and staggered away, clutching his chest and gasping for breath. The hole was three feet deep when Tarik took over from me. Soon the shovel rang as it struck an obstruction. Tarik bent over and touched it.

“Metal,” he said. “I think it’s a hatch.”

Five minutes more and he uncovered the wheel that unlocked the hatch. Charley handed him the Geiger counter. It went wild.

Charley said, “I don’t think you should open that thing. Radiation will come out like smoke up a chimney.”

This was wise counsel, but if we did not open the hatch how would we know what we had found? Tarik apparently had the same thought. He spun the wheel until we heard the latches click, then tugged. The hatch did not open. I got down on my stomach, reached into the hole, and took hold of the wheel. David did the same. We heaved. The hatch came open with a whoosh. Charley’s Geiger counter chattered again, more rapidly than before.

Someone handed me a flashlight. I shone it inside and there in their tomb were the Uncle Joes, all twelve of them side by side. They seemed to be in mint condition. According to my watch,
digging down to the hatch and opening it had taken about fifteen minutes. The headlights, though still distant, were about the size of baseballs now. We had maybe another fifteen minutes.

David had backed his vehicle up to the hole. The cargo area was a jumble of gear—vodka, food, guns, ammunition. I assumed he meant to load the bombs aboard and try to make a getaway, but then I saw that he had another idea. While Tarik and I were shoveling, he had kneaded together several blocks of Red Army surplus explosive and was screwing a fuse into the putty-gray blob that resulted. The blob was about the size of a soccer ball—big enough to destroy almost anything in an enclosed space.

By now insect intelligence had taken over. We were all thinking the same thought in the same moment—even Jack. This thought was,
Blow the damn things up
. Nobody asked if we had time to get clear, or what the effect would be on the atmosphere or the people downwind from this site. The headlights were closer.

“We drop the explosive down the hatch and cover the hole,” David said. “We set up a remote detonator, jump in the cars, and drive fast. When we’re a couple of miles away, we throw the switch on the transmitter and up it goes.”

Jack said, “This is a
Russian
radio detonator we’re talking about?”

“What can I say?” David asked. “It’s what we have and it’s all we have. We can use two, in case one fails.”

David handed me the blob. I lowered it through the hatch. It was attached by wires to an antenna and a radio receiver. David set this up some distance away. The approaching vehicles were so close now that we could make out the sound of their engines, though we could not yet see anything but yellow headlights. They were traveling abreast. I squinted, trying to make out more details. One by one our own vehicles departed, all except the one driven by David Wong. He stood beside it, shouting at me to hurry up.

He jumped out of the car and ran back to me.

“What’s the matter?” he shouted.

“What if it’s Kevin?”

“Then
he should have told us he was coming. Come on, Horace, we’ve got to go.”

Three men on motorbikes shot out of the dust cloud and accelerated toward us. I felt wind on my cheek and heard the snap of bullets passing by. We sprinted to the vehicle and jumped inside. David put it into motion before the door closed and drove at breakneck speed across the desert. I stuck my head out of the window and looked back. Within the dust cloud I could see muzzle flashes as the motorcyclists fired at us with automatic weapons. The back window of our vehicle was shattered by a round that zipped between David’s head and mine and blew out the windshield.

When you stopped to think about it, as I now had the leisure to do, this was strange behavior. Why were these people shooting at us? So far we had done them no harm. We had found the bombs, yes, but how could they know that for sure? How could they even know who we were? Did the answers to all these thoughtful questions really matter? These guys were trying to kill us no matter who we were or what our intentions.

David had grasped this reality right away. He opened the roof and handed me a loaded Kalashnikov. It was no easy trick to fit myself and the weapon through the small opening in the roof, but I managed to do so just in time to see the motorcyclists pulling abreast of our car. They wore wind-filled burnooses and, incongruously, bulbous, shiny white crash helmets with black face shields. The one on the left was leveling his rifle at David’s head from a range of about ten feet. A split second later his weapon flew out of his hand and he shot off his bike, propelled backward as if lassoed. I smelled gunsmoke, saw a flash, looked behind me, and saw a gun barrel protruding from the rear side window. Tarik had shot the man. Up to that point I had not even noticed that Tarik was with us.

The motorcyclist on the left, either oblivious to the fate of his friend or in love with death, was now aiming his weapon at me. Before I could raise my own rifle—knowing all the while that I
hadn’t time to do so before the other man fired—David swerved the vehicle and sideswiped the motorcycle.