by Lee Stone
Tyler had been looking for a GPS signal from the bales of cash since he arrived at the boneyard. There were occasional bleeps, but nothing concrete. His hunch was that Fearless was a smokescreen that Barr had invented to gain some time while he made off with the money himself. But he did what Lang told him and headed north of Herat and over the border. Now as he waited in the hollow near the isolated house, the journey seemed worth it. Tyler had found the yellow bus and was waiting until nightfall to get some answers.
*
Inside the house, Rosalina was introducing Lockhart to her son.
“His name is Nazar” she said, and she looked at the stranger enquiringly. She had introduced her entire family, but he had not mentioned his name yet. His quick actions had saved her son’s life, and he had reacted calmly and fairly. He had a thoughtful face and his eyes were alert but kind. She had been studying him closely as she attended to his cut and he seemed like a good man.
The stranger looked straight at her, and their eyes were so close that she felt that their souls connected. He spoke simply and honestly.
“It is best for you and for your family that I don’t tell you my name. I am traveling from Afghanistan and I don’t want to be followed.”
Rosalina lived in a country where the state insisted on conformity. She had traveled through places which frowned at educated, liberated women. She understood the need for discretion and was pleased that the stranger had been as honest as he could.
“Sometimes things have to remain hidden,” she said, understanding. “Sometimes even our words have to remain hidden.”
Her last comment was wistful and had been mostly to herself, but Lockhart was better traveled than Rosalina had imagined, and he understood what she meant. Ever since Baghdad Lockhart had kept a copy of The Hidden Words in his rucksack.
“Especially when you are traveling through the seven valleys?” Lockhart offered. Rosalina looked at him, and he held her gaze. After a moment she glanced at her husband and her son, and then she turned back to Lockhart.
“Yes, you are right. We are traveling through the Seven Valleys. We are a Bahá'í family, but they do not tolerate our religion here. It has to stay secret.”
“Hidden?” said Lockhart as he reached into his rucksack. The woman smiled and nodded. When Lockhart pulled his well-traveled copy of The Hidden Words from his bag, she looked astonished.
Although Bahá'í taught its followers about the oneness of humanity and even encouraged mixed marriages, Rosalina had never met a western follower before.
“I’m not Bahá'í,” the stranger told her, as if he had read her thoughts. “But I have been to Baghdad just like you, and I was given this book as a gift. I have been reading it while I have been on my journey.”
Baghdad was the place where Bahá'í began in the nineteenth century, when Baha’u’llah wrote the Hidden Words and the Seven Valleys. It was a boiled down essence of a religion, in which the voice of God handed down pearls of wisdom in Twitter sized sound bites. There were seventy-two verses in Arabic and a few more in Persian, and they spoke simple but profound truths. Lockhart liked them.
Before he had set out on the road that very morning, Lockhart had read the sixty eighth verse. It spoke of people around the world being made from the same clay so that nobody was better than anyone else. He guessed from their names and their general appearance that Jeyhun was Turkmen and Rosalina was Russian. Lockhart wondered how long they had been Bahá'í.
As Rosalina finished attending to the cut that Lockhart has sustained in the crash, she spoke to Jeyhun and Nazar over her shoulder. Her husband headed off to the kitchen and the boy began lighting candles around the room.
“We should show signs of unity through our deeds and our words and our actions,” she said softly to Lockhart. “We walk with the same feet and we eat with the same mouth.”
Lockhart was impressed. He could recall the verse that he had read earlier in the day, but Rosalina was evidently a true believer and knew all the Hidden Words by heart.
She took the book from Lockhart and ran her finger along the spine, feeling its texture. She had never seen a translation into English before and the foreign type on the weathered pages made her marvel at the way the word had spread. She spoke to the stranger about the valleys of love and contentment and wonderment, and all the others which made up her journey towards God. His face looked warm and friendly in the candlelight and she found him easy to talk to.
The smell of pumpkin dumplings started to waft in from the kitchen, and the house felt warm and cozy. Lockhart thought this was the best thing about traveling, the way strangers could become instant friends, and the warmth of a night in their homes.
Soon Jeyhun returned with dishes full of Manty dumplings and Plov; a simple dish of meat and carrots and rice. It was the first time that Lockhart had eaten food cooked with cotton oil, and he didn’t think it added much to the flavor. But the fields were full of cotton, so it was sensible to use its oil for cooking.
The food was simple, but the company was nourishing, and soon enough the fire became embers and Jeyhun put Nazar to bed. He returned to the room with another Bahá’í scripture. Their church had no clergy or priests, but once every nineteen days they would come together to celebrate their religion. Other times they would share prayers together, and in Turkmenistan that meant meeting in secret.
Rosalina asked Lockhart if he would join them in a prayer before bed, and she began to read from the book in words that Lockhart didn’t understand. It didn’t matter though. Her tone was low and honeyed, and the glow of the embers and the shortening candles began to make him sleepy. After a few minutes, Rosalina closed the book and Jeyhun found some rugs for the stranger under their roof. His quick reactions had saved their son, and in return they had fed him and given him shelter. The doctor knew that the stranger would leave first thing in the morning; she could tell that he had a good heart but a restless soul.
The couple were soon gone, and Lockhart settled down in front of the dying fire. He was far from home and unsure of what tomorrow would bring, but the food and the fire and the talking had calmed him. He fell into a deep and happy sleep which would have lasted until dawn, if he hadn’t been woken by the gunshot.
Tyler’s mood improved as he walked outside through the dark. Everything that he and Lang had done over the last few months had gone perfectly to plan, right until the last moment. Now it was time to get things back on track. The sun had set behind the ramshackle house, and he had begun to move towards it. He was cautious because he had shot all of his ammo in anger in the boneyard, and would have to rely on other methods when he reached the house.
He was only halfway across the field when a bright light illuminated the road behind him. Instinctively, Tyler hit the deck. He watched the vehicle slow down to a crawl. Then whoever was driving pulled the four by four off the road and killed the lights. A tall woman in a dark burka and a veil got out of the driver’s side and started running stealthily towards the house.
As she disappeared around the back of the buildings, Tyler edged closer to see what was going on. The woman was trying to open the door of a yellow bus, which was parked just out of sight of the road. She was having trouble with the door and eventually threw her head back in frustration. She removed her headscarf and ran her hands through her hair, cursing. She had a beard. Tyler had seen some strange things, but he didn’t know what to make of it.
The bearded man thumped at the door of the coach, far too noisily in Tyler’s opinion. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes another guy emerged at the door of the house. He saw the bearded man and started shouting. The intruder took fright and hitched his burka around his waist and began running through the field. The man in the doorway had a rifle of some description and it suddenly rang out in the night.
There was no town for miles in any direction, so the night was the darkest black and the silence was stifling, and when the shot rang out Lockhart snapped awake instantly. The noise was still ring
ing as his wits came about him.
For a moment he was disorientated, but he quickly remembered his bearings. He was sure the shot had come from outside, so he headed for where he remembered the front door to be, and he called out. Lockhart scoured the yard but could see nothing under the stars. Then there was a commotion at the back of the house, and Jeyhun came through the room behind him. He was holding an ancient rifle.
“A man in your auto-bus” he breathed, his eyes wide and bright in the starlight. Full of adrenalin. His brow furrowed as he scanned the horizon for any sign of movement. As Lockhart watched, a silhouette broke from behind a nearby tree and ran across the open field. Jeyhun was trying to train the barrel of the rifle onto the moving target.
His finger twitched, and a shot rang out into the silent air. Jeyhun was not a natural marksman, and the bullet ricocheted off a wall and rung around the courtyard. The man kept running, but the quiet was ripped apart by a scream from the donkey. Either a bullet or some shrapnel had given him the fright of his life.
The intruder kept running back towards the road as Jeyhun fired off another shot. By now he was a hundred yards away, and the shot was more in frustration than anything. Even so, the man cried out and fell to the ground, but quickly he got to his feet and limped on to the road. Lockhart thought it was more likely that he had fallen and twisted his ankle than been hit.
Soon enough, there was the sound of an engine roaring to life and a pair of high beam lights dazzled the two men standing in the porch. The stranger swung his vehicle round; it looked like a meaty four by four, but before they could get a good look at it, the car and its driver were gone.
Tyler watched as the man with the beard drove away, figuring that he was probably Fearless, coming to reclaim the bus he’d hidden earlier. Being as he didn’t have a weapon and the man in the house was armed, Tyler followed the beard. He could come back for the bus later now that he knew where it was hidden.
The guy in the burka started his jeep and hit his main beams. Tyler followed behind in his own vehicle, driving on night goggles and no headlights. Within two miles Tyler had gained on the car in front and was close enough to be less cautious. The guy wouldn’t get away from him now. Tyler hit the lights and pushed the gas so that his bumper touched the one in front, planning to run the ghost driver off the road. Just then though his phone bleeped.
It was General Lang with news that David Barr was in Turkmenistan. Lang had reported him missing and as a matter of procedure his name had been flagged with civilian airlines. A call had come in to Lang five minutes ago. David Barr was booked to fly out of Ashgabat first thing in the morning, en route for Bangkok.
“He’s paid someone to pull us onto some dusty Turkmenistan trails while he gets out by plane overnight,” he told Tyler over the phone.
Tyler looked at his watch. It would take him four hours to get back to Ashgabat, and the flight left in six. It would be tight. He told Lang that he wanted to check out the hidden coach before he left, but the General insisted that he get back to Ashgabat at once to reach Barr before he checked in.
“Things will be much harder if he banks the money, and once he finds a way back to American soil” Lang said. “While he is in Turkmenistan, we have a window of opportunity - and we should take it.”
Tyler hit the gas again and ran the bearded guy off the road in a fit of anger more than anything else. Then he turned his own car back towards Ashgabat as he watched the jeep roll onto its roof. As he drove back past Rosalina and Jeyhun’s house, he wondered what was inside the yellow bus, but he sped on towards the airport. Orders were orders, and Tyler trusted Lang’s judgment. Besides, he didn’t have time to get embroiled with an armed man tonight.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Road to Turkmenbasy
“A voice inside my head said don't look back,
you can never look back.”
- Don Henley, Boys of Summer
The donkey had not made it through the night. Jeyhun’s bullet had torn through its back and it had bled to death. Lockhart had helped Jeyhun to deal with the animal’s carcass before Nazar woke up.
When they returned to the house, the men were dusty and sweaty, and Rosalina had already prepared bread and tea for breakfast. The men took time washing their hands and then joined the woman and her son to eat. Apparently, Nazar had slept through the excitement and seemed not to have noticed the missing donkey.
As they broke and shared the bread, Lockhart suddenly remembered the boy shouting at him in the road the previous day.
“What is sixty-three?” he asked.
After the shooting in the night, Lockhart couldn’t sleep and had lain awake chewing over the events of the previous day; the passengers on the bus, the strange journalist dressed as a woman, the girl who gave birth, and eventually the boy playing football in the middle of the road. He remembered the boy shouting the number at him, and he wondered if the boy might have been referring to verse sixty-three of the Hidden Words. So, in the middle of the night, Lockhart had reached into his backpack, found a tiny torch, and pulled out his book of The Hidden Words.
VERSE 63: O YE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD! Know verily that an unforeseen calamity followeth you, and a grievous retribution awaiteth you.
It seemed unlikely that the kid was pointing him to that. All the same, after the gunshot in the night and the stranger trying to break into his bus, the verse hit home. Lockhart felt like calamity had been following him, and he planned to stay one step ahead. Lockhart watched the boy chewing at his bread.
“Why did you shout out sixty-three yesterday, Pele?”
Nazar smiled, he liked the man calling him that name. Rosalina translated the question, and he answered her quickly and earnestly.
“Sixty-three?” she said, and she smiled too. “Very good, Nazar.”
The boy looked even more pleased, and Rosalina explained that he was juggling with the football and counting his keep-ups.
“He wants to be a footballer, and I want him to learn your language,” she said. “I let him play as long as he calls out his score in English. Sixty-three was his world record, so he was angry that you and your bus interrupted him!”
After breakfast, Lockhart thanked the family and packed his rucksack into the coach. All the blue bales were safely stowed away in their suitcases in the luggage compartment, except for the one under his seat. Rosalina gave him a sheet of paper with her name and address printed on it, and then he set off back up to the road. The windscreen was a mess, but he had little choice but to keep going forward until he reached somewhere big enough to swap vehicles.
The morning passed easily enough with straight roads and very little traffic. The road had moved away from the river, and the land had become dry and cracked. As the sun rose higher, Lockhart passed a natural spring jetting into the air at the side of the road. It was surrounded by mud and lorry drivers cooling off in the water.
The thought of spending a few minutes in the cold water was appealing, but the words of Verse Sixty-Three were on his mind. Were calamity and retribution following him? It couldn’t be a coincidence that someone had been creeping around the back of the remote house in the middle of the night. But who had it been? Had someone been watching as he had hidden his bus behind the building?
He was sure that the journalist in the burka had seen the money under the coach seat. Maybe it was him. That wouldn’t be so bad. He only knew about the money under the driver’s seat, and Lockhart could probably lose him without too much trouble. The good thing about traveling light was he wouldn’t be easy to track.
A flock of birds flew across the clear sky in front of the coach, the first Lockhart had seen for days. He had been traveling the world for a long time, and he felt tuned in to changes along the way. He felt like he could smell the salt on the air coming through the bus’s smashed windscreen. He would reach the Caspian Sea by the evening.
As he drove along, Lockhart thought about the other possibility; that it might not have been the jou
rnalist who had found him at Rosalina’s farm last night. Maybe the man who had followed him from Afghanistan had found him again. Maybe retribution was breathing down his neck.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Kandahar Airfield.
“Leading you down into my core where I've become so numb.”
– Evanescence, Bring Me to Life
General Ben Lang was sweating more than usual as he made plans to leave Kandahar Air Field. He and Tyler had been building up their millions by skimming the aid and reconstruction money that flowed through Kandahar for redistribution for the last year. Sometimes they renegotiated contracts with local firms and pocketed the saving; other times they simply stole what they could get away with.
Last summer, Lang and Tyler had done a deal with the company that supplied bottled water to the camp. They had used their business skills plus a bit of coercion, threatening contractors’ families, but the net result was a fifty million dollar saving each year. They passed on a five million saving to the US Army which kept their superiors happy, and they stored the rest in a hanger in a remote part of the base. It was a full-blown industry, and the two men were ruthlessly making money.
Until they smuggled the money out of the camp and out of the country though, it was nothing more than a pile of paper in a hanger in a desert. So, they planned for months, ready to ship one big load out of the camp and into a Swiss account. At the last count, Tyler would make about one hundred million dollars, and the General would have double that. Even in corruption, rank counted.
Four days ago, the Mastiff was loaded with the bales of cash and the two men had made their plans to disappear. Lang deployed Tyler on a fictitious job in Herat, ready to meet the cargo. Once the cargo was delivered to Tyler north of Herat, the plan was to shoot the driver and drive the Mastiff to Ashgabat where a private plane would be waiting to take him to Zurich.
Lang had been in the flight ops room when things had fallen apart. The men in the room were on edge, knowing that they had a general in their midst. They diligently monitored the air traffic in the skies overhead, each performing his duties by the book. One of them suddenly spoke up.