Riders of the Pale Horse

by T. Davis Bunn

  © 1994, 2002 by T. Davis Bunn

  This edition is a revision of the 1994 edition of the book by the same title.

  This story is entirely a creation of the author’s imagination. No parallel between any persons, living or dead, is intended.

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-7083-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version ®. NIV ®. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.© Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society. www.zondervan.com

  Cover design by Lookout Design Group, Inc.

  If one allows the infidels to continue playing their role of corrupters on earth, their eventual moral punishment will be all the stronger. Thus, if we kill the infidels in order to put a stop to their activities, we have indeed done them a service.... To kill them is a surgical operation commanded by Allah the Creator.... Those who follow the rules of the Koran are aware that we have to apply the laws of retribution and that we have to kill.... War is a blessing for the world and for every nation. It is Allah himself who commands men to wage war and to kill. The Koran commands: “Wage war until all corruption and all disobedience are wiped out!”

  Ayatolla Khomeni

  What worries me is this: One would have thought that the rapidity with which the FBI cracked the World Trade Center bombing case would have sent a powerful message to terrorists that the United States is a tough place to operate in. Rather, it has done the opposite. The people arrested last week used it as an excuse to carry out an even more audacious terrorist campaign. They have gone from killing a handful of people at the World Trade Center to contemplating mass wanton murder, such as the destruction of two tunnels. One can only shudder to think what the next group is going to contemplate.

  Interview with Bruce Hoffman

  Director of Strategy, Rand Institute

  International Herald Tribune

  June 28, 1993

  We must reject democracy in favor of Islam, which is the unique political system worked out by the Almighty.... Our march has just begun and Islam will end up conquering Europe and America.... For Islam is the only salvation left for this world in despair.

  Sheikh Saeed Sha’ban

  Leader of the Sunni majority in Tripoli, Lebanon

  This book is dedicated to

  Cyril Price

  with heartfelt thanks for the

  wisdom and humor which helped me

  learn and survive in the Arab world.

  And to his wife, Nancy,

  for the splendid gatherings

  through which we keep these memories alive.

  Blessed are the peacemakers,

  for they will be called sons of God.

  MATTHEW 5:9

  Prologue

  It was the quietest argument in the history of Russian nuclear science.

  They were quarreling softly not for fear that people in the other labs might hear them. There was no chance of that. Despite the exterior walls being over two feet thick, the wind had such force that the entire central lab building rumbled like a huge bass drum. No, they were quiet because they did not want to wake their sleeping child. The wind did not bother her, for she was a true child of the Russian steppes. But she always cried when her parents argued. Their impending departure was hard enough without her wails.

  They crouched behind the particle analyzer, which like most of the other lab machinery did not work. Their cramped alcove was carpeted with litter and dust. The cleaners had not ventured back there since the downfall of the Soviet Empire. Why should they, when their pay had slipped to twelve dollars a month and their families were slowly starving? At least the scientists were still fairly well fed.

  “I am not leaving without you,” the woman quietly declared.

  The scientist still wore his lab coat and cloth-soled shoes. His lank blond hair framed a face that looked perpetually hungry. Months of fear and worry had turned his cheeks cavernous and drawn his eyes back in their dark-ringed sockets. He hugged the sleeping child closer to his chest and softly replied, “If they find me, they shoot me. Is that what you want?”

  “I want our daughter to have a father,” the woman replied, her voice a faint wail. “I want a future together with my husband.”

  “This also do I want,” the scientist replied. “It is for this and only this that we risk all.”

  “But together, Alexis,” she pleaded, the words so often spoken they had long since become a litany.

  “We shall be together,” he replied, all force drained from his voice. He droned the words, his attention as much on the slumbering girl as on what he said. His daughter was three days from her fourth birthday and shared her mother’s dark coloring and almost Oriental features. Her blood carried the heritage of ten generations of Mongol raiders. “It is all planned,” Alexis told his wife. “You know this as well as I.”

  “Yes? So you force us to travel four thousand kilometers alone, hoping against hope that you will send for us?”

  Alexis searched his wife’s face. Despite the harsh demands of the past two years, her dark features still sparked with youth and passion and beauty. He eased his finger from the child’s clutches, reached over and stroked her cheek. “You have been my life’s only love, Alena.”

  Angrily she shook her head, casting his hand away. “And down South? They do not shoot escaped scientists in the South?”

  The lab’s outer door squeaked on rusting hinges, and they froze into terrified stillness. Footsteps scrunched across the grimy floor, and when the guard’s battered cap came into view they heaved vast sighs of relief. “You are ready?”

  “We are.”

  “Loading has commenced. I will come for you in five minutes. You must move swiftly.”

  “Thank you, Ivan Ivanovichu. You are a good friend.”

  “I am a man with four starving children, and for ten rubles more would flee with you.” He inspected them nervously, then withdrew, saying, “Be on guard. They are a strange lot, these gypsies of the road.”

  When the door had creaked closed, Alena grasped his arm. “Answer me,” she hissed. “You will answer me or I will return to our quarters.”

  “And do what?” he replied calmly. He could not return her anger. Not now. His entire world began and ended with these two precious ones. “Wait for our daughter to starve?”

  “Things might improve.”

  “We have been living on that myth for over two years now. It is time to face facts. The life here is meaningless. The situation here is beyond hopeless. To stay is to accept death.”

  “Then come with us,” she pleaded, her fingers digging into the flesh of his arm. “Without you I am nothing, have nothing. I beg you, come!”
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  “What can I tell you that I have not already said?” He brushed a feather of dark hair from his daughter’s sleeping face and felt his heart squeezed by the impossible beauty of her. “To the south there is war. War upon war. There are no controls on the southern borders.”

  “Then take us with you!”

  “I cannot,” he replied softly, yet as unbending as the Siberian soil locked in winter. “I will not. It is too dangerous.”

  “Too dangerous for us and not for you?”

  “Too dangerous for you and our daughter. From Grozny I travel with Ilya and Yuri. This you know. The guides have instructed us to travel without our families. It is not a route for children. This you also know. Each additional person adds to the risk.” He looked up, willing her to see the love in his gaze. “I must go alone, Alena. For us.”

  The door creaked open once more. The guard called quietly over the wind’s deep drone, “It is time.”

  “We come,” Alexis called back.

  “Tell me again,” she pleaded desperately, rising with him. “Let me know your hope since I have none of my own.”

  “Tbilisi,” he repeated, the words a soothing chant. “We escape over the Caucasus into Georgia. From the capital Tbilisi we fly to Jordan. Amman, Aqaba, then a boat to Iraq. Then work and money, Alena. Enough money for a life. Enough money for hope.”

  She searched his face with a feverish gaze, her defiance slipping away to the agony he knew it covered. A tear escaped from the side of her eye and trickled down the face he had come to know and love so well, so very well. She whispered shakily, “And us?”

  “Graz,” he soothed, saying the word as he would an intimacy. “You travel to the detention camp in Austria. Processing takes six weeks. This is well known. By then I will send for you.” With both arms now supporting his daughter, he leaned forward and stroked Alena’s cheek with his own. He drank in the scent of her, willing himself to etch the memory deep. “Go. Await my word. I will contact you. I will.”

  “Come now or they go without you,” hissed the guard.

  “Take the satchels,” Alexis said, and slipped out from behind the machine, giving silent thanks that his daughter still slept. “We are ready.”

  As with all personnel in these days of want and misery, the guard’s uniform was little more than rags. His cap was battered and sweat-stained, his coat lacked buttons, his trousers were so worn they had been washed of their color. His shoes flip-flapped as he walked out and scanned the corridor, then returned to wave them forward. “All clear.”

  The three of them hustled down the long central hall. Mildew and ancient spider webs clustered in the ceiling corners. Their footsteps rang overloud as they hurried past what once had been the centerpiece of Soviet scientific achievement, now as desolate as a forgotten mausoleum.

  They turned the final corner, and the wind grew so loud that it covered the sounds of Alena’s weeping. They pushed through the inner doors, and instantly the noise became a ferocious howl.

  His daughter stirred sleepily in his arms. “Papa?”

  “Shh, little one, all is well. We must go outside.” He turned to his wife’s tear-streaked face. “The towel, Alena.”

  His daughter was indeed a child of the steppes. At four years she knew enough to remain still as the dampened towel was tucked in around her eyes and nose and mouth and ears. Alexis gripped her more firmly, then nodded to the guard. “Let us go.”

  As soon as they opened the outer doors, the wind sought to rip them apart.

  Russians called their steppes the earthen sea. There in the Siberian borderlands it lay flat and featureless from the Arctic forests to the southern mountains, three thousand kilometers of aching emptiness. In such autumn days as these, Arctic winds came shrieking down from the north, with nothing to slow their fierce blasts until they struck the Caucasus Mountains another thousand kilometers farther south. The soil was dry and bare of snow to hold it in place. The wind plucked up giant fistfuls and flung it with such ferocity that paint could be stripped from a car in a matter of hours. It was a maddening wind, a blinding force that could lift entire trees and send them whipping unseen onto houses and trucks and people.

  Arms interlocked for added strength, together they fought their way across the laboratory compound to the outer loading platforms. There was no way for them to check their progress visually. Around them swirled impenetrable clouds of yellow-black dust. They walked by memory alone.

  Suddenly above the wind’s blast came the roar of great diesel engines, and Alena wailed in her husband’s ear. He forced her forward until the first great dark beast appeared in front of them. The guard shouted words that were lost in the wind, but his signals were clear—this was Alena’s truck.

  Alexis felt the child in his arms stiffen with fear from the strange roaring shape in front of them. He bent over and buried his face in the towel that protected his daughter, then straightened and allowed his sobbing wife to clasp his neck. He placed his lips upon her ear and shouted as loud as he was able, “I am ever with you, Alena!”

  Together with the guard he forced his wife up into the truck’s open door, then lifted his daughter up to her. The satchels came next. He climbed up the step, and in the cabin’s relative calm he embraced them once again. Then he stepped back and slammed the door, searching through the yellow storm for a final glimpse of his world beyond the grimy window.

  His daughter pulled the towel free and instantly realized that she was on the inside and her father on the outside. She flung herself at the closed window and screamed at the top of her voice, “Papa!”

  He stepped down from the truck and watched his daughter claw at the glass, shrieking the single word over and over. “Papa!”

  The truck roared its defiance of the storm and pulled away. Alexis stood and faced the tumult until his daughter’s screams had faded to meld with the wind’s shrill blast.

  The guard gripped Alexis’s arm and pulled him to the next truck. They embraced in the way of friends in the Orient, a swift hug to either shoulder, and Alexis was surprised to find tears streaking the guard’s seamed features. In order to keep the moment untainted, Alexis did not place the final payment into his hand, but rather shoved it deep into the man’s pocket, then gripped him by the neck. He shouted, “You are indeed a friend, Ivan Ivanovichu.”

  “My world collapses and sweeps away all of value, even friends,” the guard replied, then shoved him brusquely toward the truck. “Go while the portal is open. And when your way is clear, remember me.”

  Alexis climbed aboard, slammed the cabin door, and looked down at his friend. The man stood defiantly against a wind so fierce it threatened to blast him from the earth’s surface, and shouted up a single word of farewell.

  Remember.

  The new United States Embassy in Amman was a cross between an Arabian Nights palace and a functional American office building. The exterior was covered in desert stone, with rose-tinted borders around numerous windows. The structure dominated an entire hilltop in a newer suburb of town, and afforded a wonderful view over Amman’s old quarter.

  Judith Armstead had held her current position for almost four years, and still had not tired of the panorama.

  There was no such view from the room they now occupied, however. The windowless conference room had the deadened feel of a bomb shelter. Which was not surprising, given that the chamber was located in the embassy’s subbasement and surrounded by two feet of steel-reinforced concrete. The Americans had learned from the Moscow embassy debacle, where the structure had been so riddled with listening devices that they had been forced to tear it down and start again. When the Jordanians had insisted upon the Americans using local labor, the Americans had worked out a fitting compromise; vetted construction workers had been flown in to lay the basements and foundation, where all the sensitive operations were housed. The Jordanians were then allowed to construct the public rooms on top of this, but never permitted to enter what lay beneath. Although Judith Armstead had sp
ent as much time here as her office, she had never grown accustomed to the subbasement’s tomblike spaces.

  This room still made her skin crawl.

  Judith Armstead pushed the file across the conference table. “I’ve received Washington’s permission to share this with you.”

  Cyril Price, liaison between Her Majesty’s Government and local operations, looked at the closed file before him, but made no move to open it. “And about time as well.”

  “Don’t be so snide. It’s not like your side has had the welcome mat out.” Judith Armstead was a stern, no-nonsense woman with clear gray eyes and a very direct gaze. She wore a navy-blue skirt and jacket of severe lines, no jewelry, and little makeup. Her gray hair was cut short and worn straight. Her expression was as determined as her tone. Her title of cultural attach;aae meant as little as the stated purpose behind Cyril’s current visit. “Aren’t you going to read it?”

  “Afraid I don’t need to.”

  She smirked. “You’re not going to try and tell me you’ve got a mole.”

  “Nothing of the sort. I simply think that our meeting here, in your embassy’s most secure chamber, is sufficient to confirm what our side has recently suspected.”

  Judith leaned back and crossed her arms. “Which is?”

  “That Aqaba has become a major staging area,” Cyril replied. “For both goods and scientists.”

  She studied him a moment before admitting, “All right. I’m impressed.”

  Cyril Price accepted the accolade with a slight nod. He was a tall, slender man whose glossy silver mane and tailored suit granted him a sleek elegance. He carried his polish with that astonishing ability of the English upper class to be courtly without the slightest hint of effeminacy. His reputation had awed Judith from the outset, and only recently had she found herself able to speak with him as an equal. Cyril went on, “I think it is time for a bit more openness on both sides. We intercepted yet another consignment in Munich two nights ago.”

  “Using the overland bus route?”