Quite soon we were within sight of the camp. The weak perimeter lights were gauzy points of reference. Beyond these were other, even dimmer lights outside the buildings. Askar came close and shouted into my ear. Where, he wanted to know, was the homing device that Ze had given me? It was a good thing (Allah again?) we had brought the horses, because in my anxiety over Zarah I had completely forgotten the homing device. It was hanging from my saddle, inside my canvas briefcase. Without technological assistance in this night within the night, we wouldn’t have had a prayer of finding the building where Ze and his prisoners awaited us. I retrieved the transponder and switched it on. It was equipped with earphones, like a Walkman. I clapped these on and followed the signal. It stuttered and faded if you strayed right or left but was loud and steady as long as you stayed on track. Askar and the others stumbled along behind me, blind and trusting. I dug the commando knife out of the briefcase and held it in my free hand, in case the homing beam walked us right into a guard. I liked the heft of the knife. My blood was up. Not for many years had I had this feeling. I was enjoying it more now, as my whole life passed before my eyes, than I remembered doing as a second lieutenant on night patrol with my whole life before me.
In the event, it was not a guard but an entire guardhouse I blundered into. Following the homing signal meant walking in a straight line. Obstacles did not register on the transponder, and it was a tribute to my lack of imagination that I nearly got us captured or shot or both by not realizing that before it was almost too late. The building in question was a shack, brightly lighted inside and out. Through the window, only inches from my nose by the time I halted, I could see uniformed men lounging about. They were listening to the radio, which was tuned very loud.
I skirted the building, picked up the homing beam again, then bobbed and weaved among structures, some lighted and some not. I hoped that Askar could find his way back through this maze, because there would be no homing signal on the way out and I knew that I would be lost without it. As I walked along the beam of sound, it increased in volume. The building dead ahead was outlined by a dim glow. I walked around the structure, looking for a window. When I reached the front, the noise in the earphones was so loud that I took them off. Immediately I heard a faint electrical whirring sound. It seemed to come from the front of the building. There was no need for concealment, obviously, but I dropped on all fours anyway and crawled to the corner of the building. Peeking around it, I saw something that I recognized. It was Cousin Tarik with the great wooden square of his collar around his neck. His head looked very small, jutting above the collar. He was kneeling, gripping his knees, the only things he could reach, in an attempt to hold himself upright despite the weight of the thing.
Zarah knelt in front of Tarik, her back to me. I realized what the whirring sound was. It was the power screwdriver. Zarah was using this tool to remove the screws and bolts from Tarik’s collar. She had come on ahead of the rest of us to give herself more time to do this job. The collar was enormous, far bigger than it had seemed in Ze’s snapshot. Just as Ze had suggested, its very size sent a nonstop message to the man who wore it. He was going to die wearing it and mummify or rot with it still around his neck afterward. Zarah worked methodically, without hurrying, unscrewing the screws and dropping them into the sand.
I was about to whisper hello when Askar and two of his men appeared beyond Zarah, submachine guns pointed at her head. Without pausing in her work, Zarah looked up at them and calmly pointed with her thumb at the door just behind her. Weapons at the ready, the Kyrgyz burst through the door like the half-crazy killers they were. I followed, knife in hand, adrenaline pumping. Askar and his men had come here to kill. They wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to blow Ze’s head off—or for that matter, Paul’s or Lori’s.
In English, a language these killers did not understand, I shouted, “Hold it!”
They ignored me. Lori, seated on a stool in the middle of the room, smiled at the desperadoes and said something in Kyrgyz. One of them knelt beside her and took her hand. A nephew? The look on his face, murderous just a moment before, can only be called tender.
Paul said, “Hello, Horace.”
He was standing behind Lori, a hand on her shoulder. She reached up with her free hand—the fond young desperado was still holding onto the other one—and patted Paul’s hand.
I said, “Hello yourself.”
Lori smiled at me in grandmotherly silence, as if we did not speak a common language. After all these years perhaps we didn’t. I smiled back—horribly, no doubt. Once again manners came to the rescue. I held out my hand and said, “Aunt Lori, I wonder if you know about me. I’m Horace Hubbard, Elliott’s son.”
Her expression was pleasant, detached, ladylike.
She gripped my hand and shook it like the Prussian she used to be, up, down, quick release. Her palm was callused, her grip firm, her skin warm.
Ze Keli said, “Perhaps someone should help Zarah. The guards make their rounds every half hour.”
9
Outside, Zarah was still at work on Tarik’s collar. He trembled with the effort of remaining still under its weight.
Zarah said, “I think we have about ten minutes before the guards come by. There’s no way to hide him.”
She had so far removed two rows of screws and bolts. Many remained, set an inch or two apart. She had been working along a seam in the structure, so now the boards were loosened.
Askar had followed me outside. He dropped to his knees, rolled over onto his back, and examined the underside of the collar.
I tried to pry the boards apart with the commando knife and broke the blade.
Askar said something to Tarik in Kyrgyz. Tarik nodded his head.
In Mandarin Askar said, “We’re going to break this thing without breaking Tarik’s neck. Pull straight toward yourself. Do not twist it. Understand?”
I nodded.
Askar said, “Take hold of your side.”
I did as he ordered. Askar seized the other side.
Askar said, “On the count of three. Use all your strength, cousin.”
He counted off in Mandarin. When he got to three, the two of us pulled in opposite directions. The collar resisted, Tarik made a strangling noise. The boards groaned, budged, then screeched and splintered and came apart in our hands. Tarik shouted loudly in pain.
At this moment two guards, wearing the padded uniforms and floppy caps I remembered from days gone by, dashed out of the storm. They stopped in dumb-show astonishment when they saw us. They began to level their rifles. One of them opened his mouth to shout. Then, wondrously, their feet left the ground and their rifles fell from their hands. They made gurgling sounds. The two Kyrgyz fighters who had cut their throats lowered their twitching bodies to the ground and wiped their bloody knives on the dead men’s clothes.
10
Inside the hut, Paul and Lori were on their feet, dressed for travel in Kyrgyz garments.
Ze said, “You should go now. The guards will be missed when they don’t relieve the men at the next post.”
“We’re on our way,” I said. “What can we do for you before we go?”
“Shoot me,” Ze said. He pointed to his left shoulder, just below the collar bone. “Please don’t hit the bone or the lung. The medical facilities here are primitive.”
Ze might have just asked me for a cigarette for all the concern he was showing.
“Are you sure?” I asked, producing the Makarov.
Ze gazed thoughtfully at the large blue pistol in my hand and from his waistband produced a smaller caliber handgun of his own, a genuine made-in-Germany Walther PPK.
“Use this one, then,” he said, jacking a round into the chamber and handing it to me butt-first. “But take it with you when you go.”
I took Ze’s gun but I still didn’t trust myself. What if I hit an artery?
Ze said, “Wait. Take this, too.”
He handed me the transmitter for the homing beacon. It was surprisingl
y small. I put it in my pocket and pointed the pistol at Ze. I really did not want to do this. My hand didn’t shake but I had no confidence that I could hit a spot smaller than a twentyfive cent piece, even from a range of six inches.
Zarah came in from outdoors. I lowered the pistol. She took in the scene at a glance.
Ze explained the situation to her.
“Why me?” she said.
“Better you than the Kyrgyz,” he replied. “And as you see, Horace is not enthusiastic.”
Expressionless, Zarah held out her hand for the pistol. I gave it to her. Without further question or hesitation she lifted it and fired. The report was deafening. The round exited from the back of Ze’s shoulder, pulling a skein of blood behind it, and kept right on going through the matchwood wall of the shack.
Askar, who hadn’t understood a word of this conversation conducted entirely in English, must have thought that Zarah had missed. He lifted his submachine gun as if to finish Ze off. Lori stopped him with one sharp word in Kyrgyz.
Ze looked surprised, as people who have just been shot almost always do. He swayed, as if to faint. Paul was beside him instantly. He put his arms around Ze and lowered him to the floor. Zarah crouched beside Ze, lifted his bloody shirt at the collar, and peered inside. She touched the bruised flesh around the neat circular wound with a fingertip and examined the collarbone.
“Nothing broken,” she said to Ze. “It’s a clean wound.”
Ze nodded politely. He was in shock, conscious but speechless and unmoving, as if his entire nervous system had been disconnected. He was pale anyway for a Chinese, but now his skin was utterly drained of color. Paul said nothing, but I knew as well as I knew that the sun was shining on the other side of the planet that he would have stayed behind to take care of Ze if he thought that his friend was in danger of his life.
Ze, who knew better than most people what made Paul tick, sensed this, too. He said, “Christopher, go.” His voice was surprisingly strong.
Paul stood up. The whole family, Tarik included, headed for the open door. Lori went down the steps on tiptoe like a girl of seventeen, and it was she who led us out of the camp, familiar ground to her.
As soon as the horses were unhobbled and everyone was in the saddle, Askar took off at the gallop. Lori and Zarah followed, riding like Kyrgyz. I held on as best I could, and I assure you there is nothing, absolutely nothing, like clinging to the back of a galloping horse in a raging sandstorm over broken country knowing that you are apt to ride over a precipice at any moment.
This time Askar’s destination was not a tomb but an empty cave inside a glacier. We reached it just before dawn, or so my watch said. The storm was still in progress, though the wind was not quite so strong. The sunrise, refracting from billions of dust particles, created a strange shimmering pastel rainbow in this bone-dry desert. As soon as we were inside the cave Zarah tended to Tarik’s neck. It was raw. Dozens of splinters were embedded in his oozing flesh. While Lori held a flashlight, Zarah removed the slivers. Then the two women bathed his wounds with vodka from David Wong’s portable minibar.
The cave was cool and quiet. Lori built a dung fire—apparently the Kyrgyz carried an emergency supply of dried dung when they traveled. Zarah chipped ice from the wall and melted it in a pot over the flames to make tea. Zarah worked with her grandmother just as Lori had worked with her on the first aid, as if they were old familiars who knew each other’s every move and thought in advance. Anyone could see that they were happy to be together— beyond happy. Attuned.
The cave, really just a long narrow passage through a huge deposit of compressed ice, was very chilly and except for the feeble glow of a candle or two, black as pitch. A dung fire leaves no embers, only a lingering scent, so it lacked even the dull light of a dying campfire. The Kyrgyz, lying on sheepskins and wrapped in felt, slept soundly. One of them talked in his sleep, spitting out what sounded like peremptory orders in a clear tenor voice. After several sleepless hours I switched on my flashlight to look at my watch. Eleven o’clock. Hours to go before the others woke. I shone the flashlight’s beam on the walls and ceilings of the cave. The ice was dirty blue.
Paul’s voice said, “Looks like rock salt, doesn’t it?”
“Does it? I’ve never been in a salt mine.”
“Don’t give up hope.”
Paul, joking? I shone the light on him. He was sitting upright with a felt blanket wrapped around his shoulders. The flashlight beam shook. I was shivering.
He said, “Let’s go outside.”
We picked our way among the Kyrgyz, each one of whom woke up with wild eyes and a weapon in his hands as we stepped over or around their supine bodies.
The wind had slackened to a strong breeze, but dust still blew. Visibility might have been ten feet, not more. Paul had brought a bottle of water with him. We had a drink, then gazed into the roiling dust, backlit by the invisible sun, as if it were some unearthly new art form. In a sense it was: eddying colors and pinholes of blue light. Paul had never been prone to break a silence unnecessarily. For the moment I myself was not disposed to chatter. Nothing makes talking less useful than achieving your heart’s desire, and I had done that by finding the lost Christophers. To my surprise my chief emotion was disappointment. Not that I wasn’t glad to see Paul or wasn’t filled with curiosity over what he’d been up to. The problem was, how to begin again with someone freshly back from the dead.
I said, “You’re officially dead, you know. Buried at Arlington.”
“So Zarah said.”
Paul seemed to find nothing remarkable in this. After all, this wasn’t the first time he’d been given up for dead. Nevertheless I filled him in on the details of his funeral and interment. He listened with his usual concentration, wryly smiling now and then, but made no comment.
Finally he said, “I wonder whose ashes those were.”
I told him about the stranger in his grave in Ulugqat and began to fill him in on the rest of my odyssey. We were not yet in Paris when Paul held up a hand for silence. The dust had thinned somewhat, enough so that you could see into it as if into a wispy fog. Something was moving inside it. Neither of us was armed, not that either of us would have been likely to start shooting.
The figure became more distinct as it came nearer and when it was five or six paces away, turned into Askar. He was accompanied by one of his men and by two exhausted horses, and he carried a package wrapped in a green plastic trash bag. This he handed to Paul.
Speaking Mandarin, Paul said, “You found it without trouble?”
“It was where your mother left it,” Askar said. “If you’re going to stay out here you should have weapons.”
“You’ve seen Han?”
“Heard them,” Askar said. “They’re in vehicles, shouting to each other, crashing into rocks. They’re lost but they might find us by accident. Take these.”
Askar handed Paul his submachine gun and gestured for the other Kyrgyz to give me his, along with a sack of spare ammunition. Both weapons were also wrapped in plastic garbage bags as protection against the sand.
“You’re the lookouts,” Askar said. “Use your ears. Don’t fire unless you absolutely have to. We need sleep.”
Askar and his man—probably another nephew or cousin or son—went into the cave.
Paul laid his weapon across his lap and carefully unwrapped the package Askar had delivered. He drew the Amphora Scroll from the bag and handed it to me. It was still in its glass tube, and through the glass I could see Septimus Arcanus’s handwriting—or more likely, the handwriting of the slave who had been his clerk. The scroll was smaller, lighter and more ordinary than I had pictured it. I half-expected a voice to issue from it, speaking in Aramaic. Some of this must have shown on my face.
“Bizarre, isn’t it?” Paul said.
“In what way?”
“The way it makes you wonder if you’re a believer after all.”
I laughed out loud. If the supremely rational Paul Christopher
, of all people, was as spooked as I was by this relic, agnosticism had no future whatsoever.
Just then we heard diesel engines and the whine of gearboxes and rough voices shouting in a dialect I did not understand except to recognize it as Chinese. These sounds seemed to be quite far away, but maybe the dust had the same effect on sound as on light, bending and transforming it.
Paul said, “I’ll wake Askar.”
He disappeared into the cave, taking the Amphora Scroll with him but leaving the green plastic garbage bag on the ground. A gust of wind took it; it skittered away into the dust cloud. I almost dashed after it but I knew I had a better chance of finding a squad of troops than of retrieving it.
11
The wind rose and with it, the dust. I couldn’t see a thing. If I could trust my hearing, and in these conditions I wasn’t sure that I could, the Han vehicles were headed straight for the mouth of the cave. I thought it might be useful to take up a flanking position, so I picked up one of Askar’s submachine guns and the ammo bag and ran about a hundred paces to the right and took shelter behind a large rock. The Han were driving blind and would have to fire blind, but a lucky shot is always a possibility. I could hear our visitors quite clearly now, not just their noisy vehicles but the men too as they shouted to each other.
The noise seemed to be headed straight for me. I glimpsed the first vehicle when an errant breeze opened a peephole. The car was a Chinese version of the Soviet Jeep, painted in sand-colored camouflage. The driver wore goggles and a white surgical mask. So did the man standing upright in the front seat beside him and two or three riflemen deployed in front of the vehicle in a skirmish line. I ran another hundred paces to my right and took up a new position behind another rock. This time I lay down to make a smaller target of myself. My intention was to keep moving to the right until I was behind the Han and then, if I heard firing, to close in until I could see them and open fire.
The Old Boys Page 32