The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  I told Askar everything—everything—Ze had told us.

  He listened impassively, then said, “You trust this Han?”

  “Do I have a choice? If I assume he’s lying and do nothing, Zarah’s father and grandmother and uncle—your relatives just as much as they are hers and mine—are gone forever.”

  “You’re sure you are their only hope?”

  I handed Ze’s digital camera it to Askar. He knew exactly how to work it—more than I could say—and he scrolled expertly through the stored images. When he saw the shot of Tarik wearing the lumber collar, his face darkened with family feeling— exactly what I had hoped to see.

  I said, “Is that not Tarik?”

  “Yes. And the old woman is Kerzira.”

  I showed Askar the map. He examined it carefully, measuring distances with his knuckles.

  “This is close to the mountains, but more than one night’s march from the frontier,” he said. “The ground is flat, open. There are no trees, no cover of any kind. Even if we got them out we’d be found by helicopters as soon as the sun came up.”

  “There are no caves, nothing like that?”

  “No big caves,” Askar said. “Tombs. Sometimes they have mummies in them, people who look like us, not Han. The Han blow the tombs up whenever they find them because the mummies prove that our ancestors were in Xinjiang before theirs, so the land is ours, not theirs.”

  “These tombs are large?”

  “Sometimes. But they’re underground, hard to find. These mummies were entombed thousands of years ago.”

  “But you know where to find them, if I remember correctly.”

  “Perhaps. We used them in the old days, but the Han have surely destroyed many of the ones we knew, perhaps all. My men and I haven’t been near them for years.”

  “But you could find them again.”

  “If they still exist.”

  If they did not still exist, we were out of luck. There was no time to scout them out before we started. We would have to find one on our way in.

  We had quite a lot of gold left. Askar knew this, having handled the ingots during the negotiations for the Saker falcon. He did not ask for all the gold. Instead he suggested an honorarium of $2,500 for each of the four Kyrgyz fighters he thought he would need, plus a contribution of $5,000 to the treasury of the revolution, meaning Askar. Equipment and supplies would cost another $5,000.

  I did not bargain. “Fine,” I said. “When can we start?”

  “On the night of the second day from now,” Askar replied. “We will drive from Karokol into Kazakhstan and cross the border into Xinjiang beyond the mountains, south of the Dzungarian Gate. It’s empty country on both sides of the frontier, with some hills for cover. There are Han patrols but they’re not as alert as they used to be. We’ll travel at night, hide during daylight. The Han won’t see us.”

  I hoped he was right about that. “How long from the frontier to the camp?”

  “We’ll arrive at the camp on the second night.”

  Five days. This was cutting it fine.

  7

  While Askar was making his arrangements I got on the phone to Charley Hornblower and gave him a shopping list. Thirty-six hours later, a large package arrived in Karakol by FedEx. Inside, cushioned by several pecks of Styrofoam popcorn, were a notebook computer with a solar battery, a Global Positioning System locator and some other useful items. The most interesting of these were enlarged satellite photographs of the labor camp and the country surrounding it in a radius of fifty miles. The images were remarkably clear. Camp and desert looked as they might appear from the gondola of a balloon suspended at an altitude of fifty feet. You couldn’t read license plates or recognize faces, but human figures were clearly visible to the unaided eye. Charley provided an Internet address in case we needed more images. By hooking up the computer to the satellite phone we could connect to NASA’s Web site from wherever we happened to be, choose the images we wanted and pay for them with a credit card. It was all perfectly legal and proper, God bless America.

  Two nights later we crossed the frontier into Xinjiang and, following Askar’s instructions, walked straight east in blackness for an hour until we smelled horses. Eleven shaggy ponies awaited us—one for each rider plus three spare animals for Paul and Lori and Tarik. Askar’s men—happily not the same moody fellows who had guided us to the Bedel Pass—quickly packed our gear onto the riderless mounts. Askar led the largest pony to me and gave me a leg up. If a horse can groan, this poor beast groaned when it felt my weight.

  Although darkness was complete, it was only seven in the evening when we started off. We had twelve hours or a little less until sunrise. Askar, in the lead, kicked his mount into a trot. Up ahead I could make out the silhouettes of the other riders pistoning up and down in the saddle. Despite riding lessons in childhood, I had never gotten the hang of this. I bounced up and down on the horse’s kidneys, jarred guts lingering behind as my pelvis hit leather, then sloshing about as gravity caught up with them. After an hour we began to canter, a much more comfortable way to travel. By now it was apparent that my horse hated me. It bucked, kicked and twisted its neck, trying to bite my leg. I sympathized. The animal, used to carrying lean, dashing Kyrgyz horsemen, almost certainly had never before been cursed with such a grossly incompetent rider, or such a heavy one.

  After the canter we dismounted and walked for an hour. The stars came out. At our present rate of progress we should be at least fifty miles inside China by dawn, or halfway to the camp. The Kyrgyz did not stop to rest the horses or themselves. You could hear the horses making water and smell their manure. Once or twice I smelled carnivorous human urine; the Kyrgyz were emptying their bladders from the saddle. Remembering my Greek sniper, all this ordure worried me. An experienced tracker could follow it even in the dark. I wondered, too, if we were leaving tracks that could be seen after sunrise from the air. How could twelve horses fail to do so?

  It was pointless to fret. I concentrated instead on the rescue, visualizing it as best I could on the basis of what Ze had told me about the camp, trying to foresee difficulties and avoid capture or untimely death. The biggest problem apart from the guards was Tarik’s lumber collar. He could hardly run with a thing like that around his neck. I went over the plan to remove it. We’d have about ten minutes to do the job. Even though we had a couple of battery-operated screwdrivers, part of the care package Charley had sent, I didn’t see how we could unscrew the thing in the time available. I should have asked for more power screwdrivers, for a saw, for divine guidance.

  About an hour before dawn the horses’ hooves began to ring on stony ground. By first light we could see mountains all around us. We dismounted and walked in single file down a narrow defile between low cliffs. The light strengthened. The horses, smelling of lather, drooped with fatigue. Mine was so tired it had given up trying to bite and kick me. I strained my eyes in the uncertain light and saw a horse disappear as if swallowed by the earth. Then another and another until I was at the head of the line, standing on the rim of a hole in the ground.

  One of the Kyrgyz fighters clambered out of the hole, blindfolded my horse, took its reins, and whipped it into the pit. I followed and found myself in pitch darkness, walking down an earthen ramp. The horse whinnied in fear and balked and kicked and was lashed onward by its handler. After twists and turns I found myself in an inner chamber whose candlelit recumbent figures might have been painted by a Pre-Raphaelite on opium. They were mummies, still dressed in the shreds of the clothes in which they had been buried thousands of years before. Two men, a woman, a young girl. They were eyeless and lipless and shrunken and tanned by their long repose in the total absence of moisture. And yet they were lifelike. They seemed to slumber, even to dream. As in Ze’s photograph of Lori, you saw the faces they used to have. Two of them had hair as golden as Zarah’s. They seemed to be smiling, teeth gleaming in the candlelight. Oddly, there was no sense of having violated the mummies’ privacy. Their smil
es seemed to suggest they had been waiting for us to drop in. I smiled back at them quite affectionately, and looking around the circle of faces, saw that everyone else was doing the same.

  While two of the Kyrgyz put the horses to bed, watering them from plastic jerricans and feeding them grain, the other two made a meal, heating tea over a camp stove and unpacking cold mutton and bread from cloth sacks. One of them spoke to us. David translated.

  “He says there’s a latrine bucket in the room with the horses. Don’t go outside. Use the bucket, not the floor.”

  We had not been told the names of the Kyrgyz traveling with us. All were picturesque types with mustaches and bandoliers and submachine guns slung over their shoulders and pistols and knives thrust into their belts. They were perfectly at home in the tomb, respectful but unself-consciously certain they were welcome among these silent ancestors. It was cool in the tomb, stony and dry. The candles in the burial chamber had been moved so that the mummies now lay in darkness. The silence was deep. My eyelids drooped. I was dead tired and terminally saddle worn and would have traded all the gold we had left for a hot bath. That was my last thought before I fell asleep.

  Andrew Marvell was right. The grave’s a fine and private place. It is not, however, the ideal place to wake up. The blackness, the silence, the timeless smell of dust, the scalp-tingling realization of where you are and in what company add up to a moment of panic. Mummies by candlelight are one thing. Mummies in the dark are quite another. Their invisibility made their presence more noticeable, and as we all know, palpability is far more troubling to the mind than mere reality. I found my flashlight and switched it on. Zarah was sitting cross-legged on her sleeping rug, combing her hair in the dark. David was still asleep. There were no Kyrgyz to be seen.

  Zarah said, “It’s ten in the morning. I think the others are outside, standing watch.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “The horses are all present and accounted for.”

  As if to vouch for her, a horse snorted offstage. I was stiffer after a good night’s sleep than when climbing off my unhappy horse the night before. I unfolded myself hinge by reluctant hinge into something like the full upright position and limped off to the bucket. Equine eyes rolled whitely in the beam of my flashlight, hooves flew. Evidently I didn’t smell any better to the horses than they smelled to me.

  By the time I returned, David was awake. Zarah had lit some of the candles, revealing the mummies. Our living shadows mingled with theirs. The scene was less beautiful, less composed somehow and less mysterious, than it had seemed the night before. Zarah produced granola bars and handed them out. We washed them down with water from big plastic bottles with garish labels. We were all careful not to scatter crumbs: the mummies again, silently teaching us etiquette.

  I had packed Ze’s maps, the Landsat images, the GPS thingamabob and other navigational aids in an indestructible canvas briefcase with shoulder strap that I had bought thirty years before at Eddie Bauer. It also contained, in an outside compartment designed to hold books, a loaded Makarov pistol and a fearsome big commando knife. David had gone shopping in Karakol and bought these items, along with some Russian stun- and tear gas grenades. David was a crack shot and I assumed that Zarah was, too, but I hadn’t fired a pistol in years or stabbed anybody since I got out of the Marine Corps. These skills, once learned, were like riding a bicycle, or so I hoped. They’d come back when and if I needed them.

  With the briefcase slung over my shoulder and every muscle and joint protesting, I walked to the top of the ramp. The entrance was sealed with a large flat stone. I slid it aside. The sun exploded in my eyes, momentarily blinding me. Had hunters been waiting for me to stick my head out of my den I would have been dead. I saw no one—nor any trace of human passage. All sign of the horses’ hooves and our own footsteps had been removed. The scalped landscape was empty. Even the sky was empty—not a cloud to be seen, not a bird, nothing but the bluewhite sun directly overhead. I felt no heat from it. We were in a deep canyon, in deep shadow. The surrounding bluffs that I had sensed the night before were now fully visible. They were pockmarked with the mouths of caves, but only a human fly could have climbed into one of them. I stood up and beckoned to Zarah and David to follow me. There was no point in crawling or creeping. Anyone watching the ravine would already have seen us. I hoped that this included our Kyrgyz traveling companions, but looking around this sterile void and listening to the silence, I wondered.

  Suddenly Askar’s voice, issuing from the earth just behind me, said something in Kyrgyz. David, who was at my elbow, translated: “He says to be sure to replace the rock and sweep your footprints behind you.”

  Askar was lying under a sheet of burlap about five paces away. The burlap was the same color as the ground for the good reason that it was permeated with dirt. The dirt was pulverized and so loose, because so dehydrated, that the grains of it did not stick together. When you stepped in it, you kicked up a tiny sandstorm that took a long time to come back together. All of us were powdered with this flourlike grime from head to toe. Askar stood up and strode off toward the bluff. We followed. Zarah picked up the burlap and walking backward, obliterated our footprints.

  We were soon inside a low cave, sitting in a circle. The other Kyrgyz were standing watch, presumably under burlaps of their own. Askar pointed vaguely up and down the ravine and to the tops of the bluffs. His submachine gun was wrapped in a plastic trash bag to protect it from the dust. I spread out the Landsat image of this area and took a GPS reading. I pointed to our exact position on the map. Askar made a polite face. He knew where he was and where he was going. No need for all this outlandish fuss and complication.

  He began to talk. As Askar saw it, the rescue was a simple operation—walk in, find our friends, walk out with them in tow, evade pursuit, hide during daylight, run for the border by night. Make no noise, make no fuss, leave ’em snoozing. All this made good sense. Operations always sound tidy on the day before they happen.

  Zarah said, “What about Tarik?”

  “He comes with us.”

  “Wearing that collar? What if we have to run?”

  “Then we leave him,” Askar said.

  “Impossible,” Zarah said.

  Askar shrugged. Zarah gave him a long cold look, then moved away and sat with her back turned.

  8

  We started out as soon as it was dark. To my great relief, Askar ordered us to lead the horses rather than ride them in order to keep the animals as fresh as possible for our getaway. We were in a labyrinth of ravines, gullies and escarpments. Askar, in the lead, turned left here, right there, or marched straight ahead with the confidence of a New Yorker walking to work in a geometric city. According to the radium dial of my old compass, we were headed east and north, right for the prison camp. Dust stirred up by the horses’ hooves muffled the senses—taste, smell, touch, even hearing and sight. I counted footsteps, following the leader in a daze of dumb trust. Time did not fly.

  By ten o’clock we could see the glow of the camp against the sky. Askar called a halt. One of his nameless men took my horse’s reins from my hands and led it away. He and the other fighters hobbled the animals. Askar issued orders to his fighters and to us, who would do what on what signal. We would rest for an hour, then go in. At midnight, as arranged, David would call Ze’s satellite phone and leave a message in Mandarin. Meanwhile we would sleep.

  “Zarah will remain with the horses,” Askar said.

  Zarah said, “No.”

  “Someone must stay,” Askar said. “Otherwise the horses will scatter.”

  “Then leave one of your people,” Zarah said, looking him straight in the eye.

  “All the men are needed,” Askar said. “There’s going to be a wind. The horses will be afraid. They’ll scatter.”

  As if on signal, a breeze stirred up a few dust dervishes. Zarah walked away into the darkness. Askar shrugged. This woman preferred discovery and maybe death to obedience? So be it. He
lay down on the ground and went to sleep. I was beginning to feel the excitement of the thing we were about to do. Nevertheless, I soon fell asleep, but twitchily, dreaming of bad moments in the past. When I roused I realized that Zarah was missing. This startled me so that I hardly noticed that the wind was stronger—so strong, in fact, that the glow of the camp had been obscured by a cloud of dust. The temperature had dropped many degrees. A cold front was arriving on the west wind. We were all masked now, scarves drawn across our faces against the wind and sand. Maybe Zarah was hidden by the blowing dust. I bumbled about looking for her but found no trace of her except for one very bad sign. The rucksack in which she carried her gear was missing. So was one of Charley’s power screwdrivers. No one had seen her leave. There was only one place she could have gone—into the camp.

  David made his phone call to Ze. Askar signaled his men to move out and led off, with David and me on either side of him. The wind blew harder every minute. We could hardly see the horses. Askar spoke a short sentence in Kyrgyz.

  David translated: “Askar says it’s a night within the night. Perfect for us.”

  Askar was in his element, happy and bloodthirsty. Allah was in charge. Despite the presence of unbelievers he had sent us these ideal weather conditions. We would be invisible to the guards at the camp. Our tracks would be blown away.

  We seemed to be alone, just the three of us. Then Askar’s men emerged from the whirlwind of dust, leading the horses. There was no reason, now, not to bring them. No one inside the camp would be able to see or smell them in this pall of dust or hear them over the howling wind. I’m no Bedouin, but it was obvious, too, that no one, not even Askar, would have been able to find the animals again if we left them behind. That meant that Zarah would not find them either if we missed her in the storm and she followed Kalash’s rule for those lost in the desert and went back to the place where she had started.