The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  Tarik and I armed ourselves from David’s bomb and gun shop in the back of the vehicle and set off on foot. The idea was that David and the others would wait by the car and follow on foot if I called on the satellite phone and told them they were needed. Tarik had spent his life climbing up and down mountains and he seemed to have unlimited breath and endurance. He moved too fast for me, but I only had to take two steps to his three, so I managed to keep up after a fashion. By the time the yurt came in sight I was gasping. My hands shook violently. Had an enemy popped up out of the ground, as I was expecting one to do at any second, I probably would not have been able to hit him with a shotgun, and I didn’t have a shotgun.

  The yurt had been burned. Only its charred poles were still standing. Apart from this dismal sight it was impossible to guess what had already happened or see what was happening now. A lot of shooting was still going on but the shooters all seemed to be in the prone position. The ground where we lay was so flat and so utterly lacking in cover that they couldn’t stand up or even crawl without being shot. Each side was sending out fire inches above the ground to keep the other flat on its collective face. At the rate at which ammunition was being expended I didn’t see how the fight could go on much longer, but who knew? If we were spotted, either side would fire on us as a precaution.

  So far we hadn’t been seen, but this could change at any moment. Tarik took charge. He pointed to the hills and set off at a run without bothering to see if I followed. By now I had gotten my breath back, or enough of it at least to keep him in sight. I had not had a stitch in my side since school days, but I had one now. After a few more minutes I was reminded of another thing that every teenage runner knows about—the second wind. The stitch went away. I breathed easier, I stopped hearing the hammering of my own heart. My hands steadied, my knees stopped trembling.

  A few hundred feet up the flank of the hill, Tarik found a vantage point. I flopped down beside him. We saw men in robes and red-checkered Arab head scarves on one side, men in Uzbek dress on the other. There were many more Arabs than Uzbeks, so many more that I wondered where they had all come from. They couldn’t possibly have fitted aboard the small executive jet parked on the tarmac at Ibn Awad’s camp. In the distance, sun flashed on glass. Through binoculars I counted ten pickup trucks parked in the distance. Ibn Awad had brought in reinforcements overland.

  There were seven Uzbeks, one of whom was dead or soon would be, judging by the splotch of blood on the back of his shirt and the disjointed way in which he was sprawled on the ground. I could see their weapons—the Belgian assault rifles Kevin and his men carried. But where were the Christophers? There was no sign of Lori or Paul or Zarah.

  The impulse not to interfere was strong. As long as the two sides were firing at each other, we had relative freedom of movement. Freedom of movement was exactly what we needed if we were to have a prayer of finding the missing Christophers. On the other hand, Kevin’s team was on our side at least in theory, whereas Ibn Awad’s men were irrevocably our deadly enemies. If they won this skirmish, our life expectancy would shrink dramatically. But how to help the good guys? Tarik and I could hardly open fire from our aerie. We were at least half a mile from the battlefield. We could move off to the side and open enfilading fire, except that we’d have to stand up or at least kneel to do this and we’d almost certainly be filled with lead by both sides before we squeezed off a shot. I called David on the satellite phone and told him what was going on and what I thought he could do about it.

  He said, “You’ll be the observer?”

  “That’s right. Just stay on the phone. Do you remember how to do this?”

  “I’ve got a vague recollection. And no doubt I’ll have a lot of advice.”

  Minutes later the Old Boys’ vehicle came into view. Through the glasses I saw David jump out, run around to the rear, and start rummaging in the cargo compartment. Moments after that our lads were hustling forward, carrying heavy objects. They fitted these together as if they were an infantry squad that practiced this sort of thing every day instead of once every fifty years. Before I knew it they were ready to fire the Soviet mortar that I had ridiculed when David showed up with it the day before.

  David’s voice came over the phone. He was panting. “What’s the range?”

  “Call it four hundred meters,” I said. “Fire for effect.”

  Seconds later a mortar round exploded a few yards behind Ibn Awad’s men. David adjusted his fire a couple of degrees to the right. The next shell landed between two sprawled Arab fighters, putting them both out of action.

  “You’re right on them,” I said. “Now walk your fire forward. They’re lying abreast about a meter apart.”

  Through the binoculars I could see Ben—who else?—sighting the mortar while David dropped shells down the tube and Charley and Jack fed them ammunition. Harley cheered. So did the others; I could hear their voices in the silence after each mortar round detonated. They sounded like the sideline at a prep school football game in which the players are the only spectators. The effect may have owed more to good luck than good planning, but the bombardment devastated the terrorists. After the fourth or fifth explosion the fellows in red-checkered kaiffiyehs jumped to their feet and retreated, firing wildly as they ran backward. One or two of them were shot or tripped on the hems of their robes. Kevin’s men cut them down with rifle fire. In seconds the field was scattered with the bodies of Arabs wrapped in white robes that now looked like blood-soaked shrouds.

  I spoke into the phone. “Cease firing.”

  “Roger,” said David.

  This military jargon fell strangely from my tongue and into my ear, but it was a language we all understood even though none of us had spoken it for a long, long time.

  I said, “Get out of there before they come looking for you.” Tarik and I watched as the Old Boys departed, jouncing north at a speed that made Tarik’s driving style look tentative. Meanwhile on the dusty plain below, Kevin’s team continued its mopping-up operation. The fleeing Arabs did not have a chance. The team moved with the speed and certainty of highly trained men who were in peak physical condition and, having found themselves alive against all expectation, were glad to have this opportunity to kill their enemies without mercy. Little did they know that they had just been extricated from the mess they had gotten themselves into by a bunch of arthritic, pill-taking old men who last saw combat before these kids’ fathers were born. This was not, perhaps, the moment for such thoughts, but as I have mentioned, life is fraught with irony. We had ended up rescuing the people we’d hired to rescue us.

  10

  Now that they were standing up I could see the faces of the men in Kevin’s team. Kevin was not among them. The headset he had loaned me was still hanging around my neck. I adjusted it and switched it on. The instrument immediately picked up radio chatter among the team. They were speaking Russian to each other. The reason why was as obvious as if they had all smiled at once, revealing mouthfuls of the finest aluminum teeth Soviet dentistry could provide. Kevin’s men in Budapest had been silent and most of his people in Russia had been as mute as statues, too. Until this moment I had never asked myself the reason why. First impressions are the best, as we all find out when it is too late, and it was now obvious I should have paid more attention to my initial feeling that Kevin was too good to be true.

  I made another phone call. This time Harley answered. I told him what I had just heard over the headset.

  “We’ll be comin’ round the mountain,” he said.

  Tarik and I scrambled to the summit. He moved just as fast uphill as on the level, so keeping up to him was out of the question. When I got to the ridge he was waiting for me. We could see for miles. We saw nothing that moved except the Old Boys’ vehicle, approaching from the west, dragging the usual wake of dust behind it. I stood up so that they could see me. Their headlights blinked.

  Tarik plunged down the other side of the mountain and ran with long strides straight down the trea
cherous crumbling slope. His idea, I guessed, was to intercept the Old Boys’ vehicle at the bottom, with the mountain between it and Kevin’s men. I followed as best I could, legs trembling, blood pounding, balance somewhere between lost and gone forever, inner voice telling me what a fool I was to be taking such chances. If I broke a bone—a hip! I thought, suddenly remembering my age—I was a goner. Self-taught stuntman though he appeared to be, Tarik would never be able to carry a hulk like me down the mountain. Not that he was likely to try. His mind was on his mother and half brother and niece. So was mine, for that matter, but for the moment I had all I could do to keep my bones unbroken.

  The Old Boys awaited us at the bottom. I was too winded— and too surprised to be all in one piece—to take much part in the ensuing conversation.

  Harley said, “Can you talk yet?”

  The best I could do was to lift a hand and point at Tarik. He knew everything I knew. More, probably.

  Harley said, “Sorry to ask this, Tarik. But you didn’t see any sign of their dead bodies, did you?”

  Tarik said, “No. But Horace had the binoculars.”

  I shook my head No.

  “That could mean they’ve been carried away,” Harley said, “and the only reason that would happen is they didn’t have the Amphora Scroll. If they’d had it with ’em, the bandits would’ve killed ’em and taken it. Ibn Awad or Kevin or whoever wants to talk to ’em at leisure.”

  For once Ben could think of no better explanation of the Christophers’ absence. “Let’s assume they got away,” he said. “When and which way did they go are the questions.”

  “Anybody’s guess,” Harley said.

  My own guess, informed by blood and many years of disappearance and reunion, was that our lost sheep were not lost at all, but had done what Christophers do in a case like this one, i.e., the opposite of whatever conventional wisdom dictates.

  By now I had recovered enough of my voice to say, “They wouldn’t run away. They’d run toward us.”

  Jack said, “But the sky was on fire in that direction.”

  “They’d run to it because it was on fire.”

  “But why?”

  I shrugged. This was not the moment to compose a psychological profile of the Christophers even if such a thing were possible. Their plan and their whereabouts, as usual, were anybody’s guess. If there was an expert among us on Lori and on this countryside, it was Tarik. Naturally no one asked his opinion. He sat silent in the front seat between David and me while the words and theories flew over his head.

  It was David, who had also kept his peace, who asked the question. “Tarik, what do you think?”

  “If they’re alive,” Tarik said, “they will give us a sign. We have to get close enough to see it.”

  And with that he closed his eyes and seemed to go to sleep. I didn’t understand how such a thing could be possible until my own eyes closed. Despite the bone-rattling progress of the car, despite the dust blowing in all four windows, despite the heat, despite my old friend nausea, I fell asleep too.

  The whine of the transmission woke me. David had shifted into low gear. The tilted vehicle was climbing a steep hill, its gearbox shrieking in protest. I stuck my head out of the window and looked back. In the distance I saw plumes of dust moving toward us across the desert floor—Kevin’s men, I assumed, driving fast in their commandeered pickup trucks, or maybe on captured motorbikes. David parked in the lee of the hill, just below the top. Tarik immediately headed for the summit. I followed him as if the two of us were joined by a cord. From the hilltop we had a clear view of the airstrip and Ibn Awad’s camp a thousand feet below. The airplane was still parked on the tarmac, the empty tents filled with wind and expelled it. There was absolutely no sign of life except for a pair of eagles soaring in the distance.

  “They will come,” Tarik said.

  But where were they now? The sun was already sinking. I looked behind us. The distant vehicles were closer now but could not reach these hills before the sun set. This was comforting in a way, but the prospect of being hunted in the dark by Kevin and his men or even by what remained of Ibn Awad’s bodyguard was not a happy one. About two miles to the west, beyond the airstrip, was another set of hills, slightly higher than these.

  I got out my satellite phone and punched in Zarah’s number. It rang once, the receiver clicked. It went dead. I tried again. Same result. Zarah’s phone had caller ID like all other satellite phones I had ever seen, so if she was the one who was answering and immediately hanging up she knew who was calling but had some reason not to speak. Unless somebody else had taken possession of her phone. Tarik’s eyes were fixed on the hills opposite. The eagles still circled, no doubt looking for a place to spend the night now that their old aerie was bathed in the poisonous fumes of the burning gas.

  And then, seeming even whiter and swifter than usual in contrast to the bruised hues of the discolored sky, the Saker falcon was flying. Its great wings propelled it upward in a near vertical climb and soon it was hundreds of feet above the eagles. Then it dove. I had seen this before, of course, but the speed and verticality of the descent took my breath away. It hit one of the eagles. The eagle seemed to explode, dark feathers and blood flying. The eagle shrieked, or I imagined that it did, as the two great birds, striking at each other, tumbling toward earth.

  “That’s the signal,” Tarik said. “They’re in those hills.”

  As he spoke the Saker falcon labored upward, the eagle’s limp carcass gripped in its talons. With a slow beating of wings it rose to a great height and then, unable to keep its grip, dropped the eagle. The Saker falcon circled a few times as if contemplating an attack on the second eagle, then swept down to the hilltop where we now knew the Christophers were waiting for us.

  Ah, the symmetry. Zarah had conceived the Saker falcon as a signal to Ibn Awad, something that would intrigue him and draw him to us. No doubt that is exactly what would now happen. We had intended to capture him. Now we were the ones in danger of capture.

  The others had seen the Saker falcon’s kill and knew what it meant. There was no need for an elaborate plan. Tarik and I would try to find the Christophers in the dark and bring them back. The others would stay behind and look out for themselves as best they could. If we made it through the night we’d call each other up in the morning and decide what to do next. David’s cornucopia of lethal devices—AK-47s, grenades, what little remained of his supply of plastic explosive—were spread out on a blanket. Tarik helped himself to a formidable knife, pulling a hair from his head and slicing it in half to test its sharpness.

  As soon as it was dark Tarik and I set off. I half-expected Tarik to make another devil-may-care run down the mountain, this time in the dark, but he proceeded with caution. Once down, we walked boldly across the airstrip. There was no cover of any kind on the desert floor, so it was pointless to behave as if there were. Besides, our friends were watching from the ridgeline behind us, satellite telephone in hand. If they saw anyone stalking us, they would call. The incongruity of the thing was enough to make you laugh— Tarik and I plodding in moonlight across this wasteland like a couple of bloodthirsty hunter-gatherers while keeping in touch with the home cave, just a mile or so away, via earth satellite.

  We reached the other hills and began to climb. Big rocks cast pools of shadow. We paused in one of these. I was breathing hard. Tarik had been moving uphill at a rapid pace. Now he crawled to the edge of the shadow and for a long while looked upward, studying the ridge. He came back, sat down beside me, and took my hand. I was oddly pleased by this brotherly gesture.

  He said, “If there are enemies here, they’ll head for the place where they saw the falcon come down.”

  “You think Paul and the others will still be there?”

  “No, but with luck I will be, so he’ll know where to find me. We should split up, you and I. Try to get behind them.”

  “And when I’m behind them, then what?”

  Still holding my hand as if he
might never see me again—a distinct possibility, it seemed to me—Tarik just smiled and then was gone. Truly gone, invisible as a ghost. I stared into the darkness for some sign of him, knowing that he was there. But this time all my birder’s tricks availed me nothing. He had blended into the sand and rocks, not making a sound or even casting a shadow.

  In my own climb up the mountain, accomplished mostly on all fours, I created considerably more disturbance, stirring up miniature avalanches, grunting loudly when I fell. However, luck was with me. No one leaped out from behind a rock with weapon in hand. As far as I could tell, I had attracted no attention whatsoever.

  On the valley floor, the aluminum skin of Ibn Awad’s airplane glinted in the moonlight. The camp was dark, apparently still deserted. Across the way in the other range of hills, the Old Boys were watching, or so I hoped. Though not quite sure where I was going, I stumbled off in the direction of the place where the Saker falcon had come to earth. Two meters farther on I stumbled across a corpse. It was still warm. The man lay on his back, eyes staring, white shirtfront soaked with blood. He had thick black eyebrows and a flowing black beard. There was no visible wound. I kneeled, lifted the beard, and saw that his throat had been cut. How, I wondered, had Tarik managed this without slicing off part of the beard?

  For all he noice I heard I might as well have been inside a soundproof room. I crept from shadow to shadow. The question was, What lurked in the shadows? As far as I could tell, nothing, even though the evidence suggested that this could not be the case. I reached the place where I thought the Saker falcon had landed. I found footprints, just visible by moonglow, and followed them for a time, concentrating so deeply as I stared at the ground that I could have walked into the arms of an assassin and never known it until I felt the blade or the bullet.