Death on the Silk Road

by Russell Miller

  Charlie shouted “Sammie!” guessing it to be him. “Stop I am taking you back.” Startled by the mentioning of the name, the man paused and began to advance slashing the long-bladed knife in front of him like the grim reaper brandishing his scythe. The blade glistened ominously as he ploughed forward through the deep snow.

  “Stop!” Charlie shouted once more. The man did not. Charlie raised the gun, cradling the butt of the small Beretta in the palm of his shivering hand.

  “You‘re afraid to shoot,” the man shouted mockingly, beginning to duck and weave his way closer toward Charlie, slicing the air with each forward step.

  The small .22 caliber roared like a cannon in the cold night air. The man clutched his chest before crumpling to his knees. Charlie paused before firing a second time at the kneeling figure. The second shot caused the man to topple face-forward in the snow. The blood drained from his chest, and formed a crimson rivulet on the white ground.

  Charlie walked cautiously toward him, prepared to shoot again at the slightest movement. There was none. He stared down at the black-clad body outlined like a menacing scarecrow in the snow. An outstretched hand still clutched the knife. Charley’s hands trembled, and his body shook from the freezing cold, intensified by his fear.

  Bending over the body, he turned the man on his back, and tugged the black balaclava over his head. It was sticky with blood from the first shot in the hotel room. It finally came off, and Charlie felt an enormous pang of remorse when he confirmed that he had indeed killed Sammie Wang. The amusing Sammie of the drive over the Silk Road to Tekeli. The friendly helpful gopher, obtaining records from the miners and their clerks the project required, but found difficult to obtain.

  A moral revulsion flooded over him, but rapidly subsided when he realized that it was also the same Sammie Wang who had killed five miners, and his two friends Andre and Henry. To say nothing of the Sammie who had just tried his best to strangle the life out of him with a leather cord.

  Charlie kicked the knife from the outstretched hand, and turned to leave. He stopped abruptly, returning to find it buried in the snow. The knife had a highly ornamented curved blade with a patterned bone handle. Perhaps it would somehow provide a clue to why Sammie had resorted to such lengths to close the mine and stop the project.

  A thread of light creased the eastern sky as Charlie stumbled toward the breaking dawn, and the warming shelter of the hotel.

  Once inside, he leaned against the wall trying to catch his breath. Feeling better, he kicked the spare room door fully open. He hesitated, scanning the inside with his pistol pointed forward. He was unsure what or whom he might find.

  The room was empty, the floor littered with piles of discarded clothes, and stacks of dirty dishes. Sammie had eaten well while he was in hiding, and someone had taken very good care of him.

  Nadia and Elaina were waiting for him at the top of the stairs, shocked by the long knife he clutched in one hand and the gun in the other.

  “What happened?” Nadia asked. “What was all the shooting about? Are you—are you all right?” she added hesitatingly, shocked by the grim look on Charley’s face.

  “Later, now go into the dining room,” he replied.

  Reaching the top of the stairs he had to pause once more to catch his breath. The chase through the woods, and the fight had taken its toll on him. He was exhausted, but he knew there was still much to be done.

  Dave Dieter sat at the table, idly stirring his coffee. He had been sound asleep when he heard a gunshot, followed by the sound of men racing down the hallway. It took him a few minutes to get some clothes on before seeing if it was safe to leave his room. In the hall, he could see Charley’s door standing wide open so he knew that he was involved, but had no idea where he might have gone. He found Nadia and Elaina huddled together in Nadia’s room, staring out the window, and decided to join them.

  Dave had originally thought about running outside, but always the cautious man, he did not. He didn’t know where to run. Obviously, someone had a gun, and he did not. Dave decided that prudence was the best part of valor, and had waited to see what might develop.

  Riana and her helper were setting the table. The smell of burnt toast came from the kitchen. They had forgotten about it, wondering what was going on outside. When Charlie entered the dining room, they stopped what they were doing and stared at him. His expression was uncharacteristically grim.

  “Do you recognize this?” he asked, tossing the knife on the table. It slid across the polished wood surface towards Riana. She immediately recognized the ornamental blade, and muffled a deeply evolving guttural scream, covering her mouth with both hands. She began to shake, her legs became weak, and she started to collapse.

  Dave leapt from his chair in time to catch the crumpling figure, before guiding her, ironically enough, to Henry’s vacant chair.

  “Whose knife is this Riana?” Charlie demanded.

  Nadia and Elaina looked at him appalled by his coldness.

  “Charlie don’t,” Nadia told him. “Not so harsh. Look at her. She’s frightened to death.”

  He ignored her. “Tell us Riana, if you would be so kind,” he demanded mockingly. “Please tell us who owns such a fancy knife?”

  “Sammie Wang” she shouted angrily. “He is my nephew. Where is he? You have to tell me what has happened to him.”

  Everyone, except Charlie, was shocked by her answer. Even he, however, was surprised at the relationship between Riana and Sammie.

  “He is in the woods, laying face down in the snow where I shot him. He was the one that killed the miners, as well as Andre and Henry. You knew that damn you. Now I want you to tell us why he was doing it, and who was working with him. I can’t imagine that one day he just woke up and decided he would start killing people.”

  “I am not going to tell you,” she screamed beginning to sob once again. “You can’t make me.”

  “Perhaps not,” Charlie replied coolly. “However, if I can’t, I am sure the miners over in the brewery will be able to find a way--probably one at a time on top of the table. They will not be too happy when I tell them that it was you and Sammy that killed their friends. Either you talk to us, or you talk to them. Make your choice and it had better be pretty damn fast.”

  “If I tell you, will you help me?”

  “I can’t promise you anything if you do, but I sure as hell can promise you what will happen if you don’t.”

  Riana rose to her feet, and paced back and forth before facing the group. “All right where do you want me to start?”

  “Start with Sammie,” Charlie directed. “What in the hell was he doing. What caused him to attack us?”

  Riana hesitated; a nervous tick had taken command of her right eye. “It’s hard to explain to people like you coming from rich powerful countries, but I will try. Sammie is—was a Uighur,” she cleared her throat before resuming her explanation.

  Dave interrupted. “Uighur--Uighur—what in the hell is a Uighur?” He had been riding in the second car and missed Sammie’s explanation during the trip to Tekeli.

  Charlie shook his head trying to get Dave to shut up, but he knew it was too late. “We pronounce it—or it sounds like Wegers. I’ll tell you about it later. In the meantime think Gitmo and Bermuda.”

  A glimmer of recognition crossed Dave’s face, but now Riana was badly confused.

  ”Anyway,” she began again, ignoring the interruption. “Our heritage has become terribly muddled over the ages. I am Kazakh and Chinese, and raised under Russian rule. My husband, when he was alive, was a Turkic Muslim-a Uighur. Sammie was his brother’s only son (she had now unconsciously adapted the past tense when referring to her nephew) -- and raised a Uighur. He grew up in the city of Urumqi. It’s the capital of Xinjiang Province. “Over there,” she pointed, “on the other side of the mountains.

  “Being Muslims in a Han Chinese province, they were always under the heel of the dragon. The area is rich in mineral resources. China’s other Tibet
it is sometimes called.”

  At first Riana’s words had come haltingly, but as her story progressed she became almost defiant.

  “This allows China to rule the Muslim Province with an iron hand. They refer to it as the peaceful liberation. The Hans impose all kinds of oppressive taxes and regulations. At the same time they are stealing the output from the factories and controlling the production from the mines.

  “The Chinese keep flooding the area with people from other provinces, who are impregnating the Uighur women in order to dilute the race and abolish their religion.

  The Uighurs have been trying to resist. As the Hans grew more oppressive the Uighurs have become more aggressive.”

  Charlie could tell that Riana was striking a responsive chord with Elaina and Nadia, who were listening sympathetically. Even he was becoming receptive to her story, but caught himself by recalling Henry’s bloated face.

  “Since the Russians were forced by the Taliban to withdraw from Afghanistan, and the Central Asian Republics won their independence from them, the Uighurs decided to increase their own resistance to the Chinese. When they acted before, it was mostly in the western areas close to the Kazakhstan border, but lately they have been attacking even in Beijing.

  “Ok--Ok,” Charlie interrupted. “We get the picture, but what about Sammie?”

  “Ah yes, poor little Sammie. He was everyone’s friend growing up. But, he was a small boy who grew into a little man. Everyone picked on him. When he went to college, he fell in with a group of revolutionaries who were intent on fighting China, and establish an independent Muslim state. Most of them were all talk, like college boys are, but there were some who were very hard-core revolutionaries.”

  Dave rose to his feet, and went to the kitchen, retuning with a pot of coffee. He filled everyone’s cup. When he came back a second time he placed a cup in front of Riana. She smiled appreciatively, and took a sip before resuming her story.

  “A small group of them somehow made contact, through the Muslim world, with al Qaeda. They traveled to Tangiers and from there to Damascus. From there they were smuggled into Afghanistan, and eventually to a training camp hidden away in the mountain area of Waziristan.

  “They learned to kill with their hands—Sammie was particularly good at that, he was so small. They also trained them to shoot and plant explosives, anyway they could kill without the use of large weapons. They pledged a fealty to Osama bin Laden before they left, and they eventually got back to Urumqi dedicated to fighting their Chinese oppressors.”

  The kitchen helper began serving plates of eggs to those assembled around the table. She had difficulty understanding English, and was in a hurry to finish up and go to her room.

  “But how did he end up here?” Elaina asked. She was beginning to lose sympathy with Riana after learning Sammie’s association with al Qaeda.

  “I am getting to that,” Riana told her. She paused, took a sip of her coffee and resumed her story. It was important for the foreigners to know what it is like in Central Asia and what motivated her nephew to take the action that he did.

  “Sammie finally got a job with Global Bank. He needed money. His English was good, and he was very helpful to them. They started sending him up here to collect information for a project they had with the Kazakh Government. That was how he learned about the mine—what it produced—and how important its production was.

  “Later he learned, from his people in Urumqi, that the Chinese wanted to get control of Tekeli for its deposits in order to keep their own mineral prices high. The Uighurs set out to keep the mine out of the hands of the Chinese to defy them. They thought, for awhile, that somehow they might get control, but later they didn’t care who had it, as long as it wasn’t the Hans.”

  “So Sammie started killing the miners to keep the local people from operating the mine until someone other than the Chinese was able to get control,” Charlie asked incredulously. “That’s not rational.”

  “At those al Qaeda training camps you are trained to hate and kill, not to think and evaluate,” Riana replied bitterly.

  “At first I didn’t know that was what he was doing,” Riana continued. “Then I came to realize that each time he visited here another miner would disappear. I told him I knew, and asked him to stop. It just wasn’t right, I told him.” Tears began to well-up in her eyes. “He said he would. He promised he would—but he never did.”

  “Alright,” Dave interrupted, “granted he wanted to do away with the miners to close the pit down—it seems like pretty distorted thinking—but given that, why kill poor old Andre then Henry? Why in the name of God would he do that?”

  “He knew that you people would find that the mine could be worked profitably, and would recommend that the Government either work it or sell it. He was afraid that the Chinese would get a chance buy it. He knew they were buying up mineral resources all around the world. He wanted to prevent that from happening to Tekeli.”

  “Did he say anything to you about rare-earth?” Charlie asked.

  “There were some Uighur miners that worked part time at the mine. Sammie told me once they thought there was something in there that was more valuable than just lead and zinc. I didn’t understand what he was talking about. And I really didn’t care. I just wanted the killing to stop.”

  Charlie was about to ask Riana if she felt like that, why she continued to hide him. Before he got a chance to ask her, Dave broke in.

  “How in the hell did you ever figure out that it was Sammie?” he asked staring at Charlie.

  “Yes Mr. Connelly,” Nadia chimed-in. “We all thought that Sammie had left Tekeli a week ago.”

  The interruption irritated Charlie. He had wanted Riana to continue, but he felt that he needed to explain.

  “I didn’t really know,” he began as he rose from the table and stretched. He was still cold and wanted to take a hot shower, but he felt obligated to explain.

  “I drew up a flow chart of events, like we would do in a corporation. Then I made a list of all the possible people that could be involved. I compared the list to the flowchart and began eliminating those that I believed would have been unable to commit the killings. This time when I finished, I had eliminated all of them except Sammie. I decided that wasn’t possible, so I threw the damn thing away.

  “Yesterday I tried doing it again,” he continued, walking into the kitchen for another cup of coffee. There was a tray of burnt toast on the shelf, and he picked up a piece and ate it. He coughed, but struggled to continue.

  “As I said, yesterday I tried it again, with the same results. Before I fell asleep, I decided it must be our old friend Sammie. When I chased him down the stairs and out in the night, I noticed the door to the room at the bottom of the stairs was partly open and the light was on. I decided that Sammie must have sneaked back and had been hiding there all along.

  “Isn’t that right Riana? Isn’t that what you did for your nephew?"

  “Yes,” she sobbed. ”He hid there, and I took care of him. He was my relation after all, and he was doing it for the Uighurs. After he left, his people sneaked him back in here. They have learned to live in the night, and this is a familiar area to them. They come and go as they please.

  “Now what are you going to do with me?”

  Charlie and Dave, Nadia and Elaina looked at each other. None of them had the answer. Suddenly they heard a sound in the distance that distracted their attention.

  27

  Whop-whop-whop-whop-whop- The sound grew louder and louder until it was shaking the rafters of the old hotel. The light fixture over the table began to sway back and forth, and the dishes rattled in the kitchen sink. None of the others recognized the sound. Charlie did. It had been many years before, but it was a sound he would never forget. He leapt to his feet, heading for the stairs.

  Half way down he turned to shout back at the others, “pack your things, and gather your papers, we are getting the hell out of here.” They all stared at each other in amaze
ment. He bolted down the remaining stairs and out into the still bitter air.

  A large helicopter, with long slender skids, hovered over the clearing below the hotel. He watched it settle slowly to the ground. A door on the side slid open, and Roger Pembroke leaped out.

  “I’m damn glad to see you,” Charlie greeted him. “I was afraid no one would come.”

  “It wasn’t easy. It’s on loan, so to speak, and I have to get it back before anyone knows it’s gone. Hurry-up and get your group on board. Quick! Quick! Quick!” he shouted, above the sound of the engines.