The Gods' Gambit

by David Lee Marriner

“Hi,” he shook their hands vigorously.

  “Lino, what are you doing here?” James asked.

  “Isn’t it clear? I am here to help you. I know you are going to do something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have left Florence in such a hurry.”

  James hesitated for a moment on how best to answer him. “You … would be much more helpful at your place. Right now is not the best time for you to come here.”

  Lino’s smile disappeared and he looked sad. “This is my fight too. I know I turned for a short while. I am ashamed of that. But I’ve put it behind me. I am here now. Ready to do anything, which would help to stop them. I’ve been preparing for this for quite some time. You can’t send me back,” he spoke with a low, emotional voice.

  James looked at Lao and Irina, and then tapped Lino’s shoulder. “Welcome on board. Let’s go inside. We have a lot to talk about.”

  “I hope you brought winter clothes with you. You’ll need them in the place we’re going,” said Irina.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Kabul and Khandut in the province of Badakhshan,

  Afghanistan

  and

  Pamir Mountain, Tajikistan

  Kabir, their Afghan guide, together with two of his associates, and Sonam, who had arrived in Kabul a day earlier, met James, Lino, Lao and Irina at the airport. From there all of them got into Kabir’s old van and travelled northeast towards the town of Khandut in the Badakhshan Province where the guide lived. On the way, they were stopped at a number of army checkpoints. Kabir managed these situations with the Afghan soldiers by waving some kind of a government stamped permit, and slipping money into their pockets.

  The van arrived at Kabir’s residence before lunch time. He lived in a small village, several kilometers from Khandut. It resembled a barracks. Three ugly concrete double-storey buildings with windows like embrasures, fenced by a high wall topped with spiral barbed wire. In the courtyard, an armed man was pacing back and forth. Another man with a machine gun stood on the flat roof of the highest building.

  After they ate, Irina told Kabir that he had been recommended to her as the man who could supply them with the best weapons in the area. Without saying a word, Kabir took them to a large cellar that was full of all sorts of weaponry piled on the floor or stored on shelves. There were pistols, rifles, semi-automatics, machine guns, hand grenades, grenade detonators, mine-throwers, even knives and sabers. James, Irina, and Lino took an M-18 each, Sonam and Lao, Kalashnikovs. Irina insisted that everybody took a pistol with a silencer and three hand grenades. Kabir separated their arsenal out on different piles. Irina added one battered green metal suitcase containing plastic explosives and digital detonators. Kabir asked for fourteen thousand US dollars for everything. James, who was paying with his own money, disagreed and offered eight thousand. Finally, they met at ten thousand.

  While counting the money, James noticed Kabir’s eyes lit up by greed. We’ve got to very careful with these people, he thought. The good thing was that Irina had hired Kabir and his assistants as guides and transporters only. Kabir was also pilot and owner of the helicopter with which they were going to travel to the Pamir Mountains. The three men were going to stay and guard the helicopter at the landing spot until they had completed their mission and come back. The Afghan mercenaries didn’t know anything about their intention, nor the exact location James and his friends were heading to.

  * * *

  Irina had hired Kabir through the intermediation of a friend of hers who worked for the Afghan-American Agency for Regional Development and Humanitarian Aid in North Afghanistan. Despite its peaceful name, the agency was a cover-up enterprise for CIA field operations in the area. Kabir’s service was secured after James transferred seventy-five thousand pounds, which was half of the whole negotiated amount, in an offshore account of Irina’s American acquaintance. The rest of the money had to be paid after their return.

  Irina had warned James and the rest of the party not to ask questions regarding the jobs or personal situations of Kabir and his two associates – Atash and Fahran. The three men were involved in the most profitable business in that part of the world – opium trafficking. At the same time they readily sold their services to westerners. Irina had shared information that Kabir ran errands for the CIA and British Intelligence. A portion of the money he received from western customers Kabir handed over to the local elders and Taliban ringleaders. That is how he could serve two masters undisturbed. It happened that money coming from the CIA and MI6 financed the Taliban insurgency, and the Taliban, on the other hand, closed their eyes when Kabir and his people did work for their blood enemies. Such a paradox was a sign that in this part of the world the dollar had already won the war, although the people still continued fighting.

  It took four days for Irina to organize the whole operation. This included the quick issuing of Afghan visas for the four, and one for Sonam from the Afghan Consulate in Delhi. During all this time, there was no sign of the cult. Probably the losses they suffered in the night-fight in Devon had disorganized them. No doubt, they were preparing their next move but after two defeats they were going to be more careful. The nature of the task Irina had to cope with needed her to spend most of that time in London. James, Lao, and Lino were in the house in Woodsman Green. They used the time to get themselves acquainted with the climate and living conditions in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, in buying necessary clothes and equipment, and in carrying out physical exercises. Lao gave Lino some lessons on self-defense, and shooting with his hunting rifle. Meanwhile, they had several video conversations with Sonam who lived in India. James offered him money for flight tickets and travel expenses but he categorically refused. He said that he would give his last penny for a cause, which would lead to the destruction of those people and their base. Lama Tenzin had judged Sonam correctly. The man bore a great deal of hatred towards the cult. It hadn’t diminished at all through the years that had passed.

  Sonam told them horrible details about the outrages he and the other Tibetan refugees were submitted to from the ‘sneak people’ as he called his captors: working to full exhaustion, torture, and unending humiliation. Once, one Tibetan man reacted by grabbing the arm of the guard who was beating him. His punishment was dreadful. He was publicly castrated, burned by hot iron bars and shot dead. Sonam showed them burn marks on his chest from the time of his imprisonment. One day Sonam and his father seized an opportune moment and slipped unnoticed by the guards into an uncharted part of the labyrinth of the caves. They didn’t believe that this way would lead to freedom, but death in the darkness was preferable than slavery to ‘sneak people’. They were lucky to find a natural cave that led them out of the labyrinth. A month after that, Sonam’s father died from the abuse. The beatings he often had taken in the mine had affected his internal organs. He had started vomiting blood and died a few days after they reached their village.

  Sonam told them that he had recently dreamt about his father. In this dream his father showed Sonam a crystal similar to the crystals mined in the Russian mine in Pamir. The next day he received the first call from lama Tenzin. Sonam considered that dream as an omen that he had to join the people who intended to bring down the evil from the mine in the Pamir Mountains

  * * *

  The helicopter, a Russian transport model Mi-8, painted in a white and grey camouflage outfit, was flying low between the snowy summits.

  Kabir, in his broken English, came through the headphones. “We’re already above Tajikistan.” James looked through a bull’s eye window. Beneath were the same ranges of mountains he had been seeing under them since they had taken off from Afghanistan. The difference now was that they could breathe easier without expectation of become a target of Taliban surface-to-air fire. Kabir had assured them that once they started flying over Tajikistan they would have much less to worry about in that sense.

  James saw Irina, who sat in the co-pilot seat, showing something to Kabir on an unfolded map. We are close, he thought. James realiz
ed that Irina was giving Kabir the exact landing coordinates. She turned toward the back of the helicopter and spread the fingers of her hands. That meant ten minutes to arrival.

  The helicopter landed on a flat stony plateau. The altitude was three thousand eight hundred and forty meters. Many other plateaus and mountain chains formed the scenery. The snow in the surroundings had melted and there were icy stretches left here and there. Far away in the northeast, tall peaks with white tops towered in the air. The sky was clear. The temperature was close to zero in spite of the glaring afternoon sun.

  Right after they got out of the helicopter, Irina asked them to put on the backpacks and start walking. There was no time to lose.

  Kabir shouted something to his associates, which prompted them to unload a long roll of camouflage netting and to begin covering the helicopter with it.

  “Try to stay here unnoticed,” Irina addressed Kabir. “Be ready to take off at any moment as we don’t exactly know what time we’ll be back.”

  “You have it as you want … for the next twenty-four hours. That’s our deal. Make sure you are back before the time expires.”

  The four said goodbye to the mercenaries and walked away heading east. Irina led the group. They crossed over the plateau and began climbing the slope of the hill where they had arrived. On the summit, they stopped for a short break. From here, the camouflage net blended with the brown-greyish colours of the plateau. The covered helicopter looked like an odd small knoll. Ahead and as far as they could see, there were a multitude of similar hills resembling giant waves of a petrified sea.

  Irina pointed. “We must climb the next two hills. They are taller than this one so our friends will see us crossing them. After the second one there’s a gorge which we’ll continue through,” she said.

  “This distance looked shorter when I studied it on the map,” said Lino. His breath was agitated and his cheeks blushing. “I’ve trouble breathing. I have to breathe in more air to get the normal feed into my lungs. It’s an interesting sensation.”

  “As time passes we’ll adapt to the thinner air,” said James.

  “Yup. We cross over these hills and there will be no more climbing. It’ll be easier,” Lino said sarcastically.

  Their plan was to move east at first in order to create confusion for the mercenaries. Kabir and his people shouldn’t know where they were heading to. Rodnov’s mine was located south from the landing spot. The diversionary walk was going to end once they got behind the second hill. From there they had to turn south-west and follow a narrow valley that meandered between two mountain ranges for about six kilometers. At the valley’s far end there was a small oval-shaped plateau and next was the mine.

  Two and half hours later, they lay over the edge of the plateau overlooking a flat area of ground surrounded on the other three sides by rocky peaks. Two-thirds of this area was an abandoned open mining site. It cascaded down amphitheatrically reaching a depth of about one hundred meters. There were many natural apertures in the surrounding mountain range, which indicated the existence of a labyrinth of caves. The biggest opening had an artificial arch-like shape. That was the main entrance of the underground mine. From it an asphalt road stretched straight to a distant narrow pass cut naturally into the surrounding rocky ring. On the road, before the mine, there was a solid hydraulic barrier, a sentry box and an armed man standing next to it. At one side of the mine entrance there was a site with a dozen different construction machines, including diggers, empty dumpsters, and several four-wheelers parked. At the other side there were four wooden outhouses and a long tanker. People with work-helmets and some men in dark green uniforms carrying machine guns walked among the outhouses and in and out through the mine entrance.

  There it is, the lair of the beast, James thought.

  “Getting through that entrance would be a hopeless task,” said Irina.

  “We could position ourselves above one of the cave openings and climb down to it. It would probably lead us into the mine,” said Lao looking at Sonam.

  Sonam shook his head in disapproval. “We could get lost. Apart from that, this is the real mine. The subterranean compound I worked in is far away. To get there we’d need to cross many tunnels.”

  “That means a lot of security checkpoints,” said Irina. She passed James her binoculars. “Look at those heavy-duty vehicles.”

  James pointed the binoculars. Several seconds later he put them down.

  “They’re rusty. The dumpster’s tires are flat. They’ve been out of use for a long time. That may be a sign that the mine hasn’t been operational for a while,” he said.

  “Two of the four-wheelers and the tanker are brand new. And there are quite a few people hanging around,” said Irina.

  “They’d have stopped mining when they made the mine their base and brought the Eye here. A working mine means outsiders coming and going. That’s the last thing they would want,” James reasoned.

  “Rodnov may keep the mine operational on paper in order to justify his presence here,” said Irina.

  “Remember what was written in that Inca legend,” Lino interrupted. “The gods kept the Eye in the bowels of the Island Mountain where there was complete darkness. That means that the artifact functions deep underground. The base must be deep underground.”

  “Right. We can see the situation. Let’s not waste any more time,” Irina urged.

  Everybody turned to Sonam.

  “We have to go round that hill,” he pointed out. “The cave entrance through which I and my father escaped is beyond it.”

  They needed an hour to get to the supposed location of the cave. Sonam was confident that he was going to find it despite the fact that twenty years had passed. He mentioned that the rocks above the place had a strange shape and the image had imprinted itself in his mind.

  Sonam was right about one thing. With its comb-shaped dents, the hill range beneath which the cult’s base was supposed to be, stood out among the scenery. After half an hour walking he suddenly stopped. His face was pale. His confidence had been replaced by irritation and disappointment.

  “Relax. We’ll find the cave,” James tried to calm him.

  “I don’t know where to look any more,” said Sonam with desperation in his voice. “Even now I see the image that I saw the first moment we came out of the tunnel. In front of us was that lone peak. On our right, there was a big rock. I remember climbing up it to take a look round the vicinity. We’ve already checked all the similar rock around.”

  “Memories often differ from what they truly represent. Let’s split up and look around. James and I will go up that hill, you go back. Whoever finds the cave, calls,” said Irina and patted the portable wireless on her belt.

  “Look for the underground stream which I told you about. It pops up right at the cave’s entrance. That’s the distinguishing mark of our cave,” Sonam reminded.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The ‘Fatherland’ cave labyrinth, Pamir Mountains,

  Tajikistan

  The rock close to the cave was much smaller than Sonam had described it, which confirmed what Irina had said about the memories. They found it about quarter of an hour after splitting up.

  The bubbling of the underground stream could be heard from outside. James called the others and then he and Irina entered the cave. The water was flowing out of the ground about twenty meters ahead forming a pond. The cave seemed to end there but Sonam’s instruction was that they could dive into the pond, swim, and then come up on the other side. The tunnel continued sloping down until it reached the heart of the cult’s base.

  “I’m going in. We need to stretch a rope under the water. It’ll help the others to pass through,” said Irina.

  James intended to object to this but she was already taking off her clothes. He turned aside, overtaken by sudden embarrassment.

  “Hold this end of the rope,” said Irina a minute later. She was dressed in a neoprene wetsuit – every one of them carried the same type.


  He took the rope that she handed him and Irina quickly packed her clothes in the waterproof backpack. She waded in the water, walked to the deep end, and then dived in. The rope started unfolding until about seven or eight meters of it had disappeared. The wireless in James’ pocket began ringing.

  “It’s not difficult to pass through. The passage narrows coming out the other side. You’ll have to take off your backpacks,” said Irina.

  James crossed last. On the other side, the stream appeared out of the ground at the near end of an elongated chamber. The tunnel they had to walk through was about fifteen meters ahead at the other end of the chamber.

  “I’ll go ahead to have a look around,” said Irina and set out toward the tunnel. She left them alone to change out of their neoprene suits.

  While putting on his clothes, Lino stepped on something that crunched.

  “Damn it!” he cursed and pointed his flashlight. Beneath his foot was the rusty wreckage of a rectangular electric torch.

  On seeing it Sonam got emotional. He said that thanks to this old electric torch he and his father had managed to find a way out of the darkness.

  * * *

  They advanced slowly, descending all the time. The tunnel was only wide enough for them to walk single file. In some areas, the ground was covered with loose stones, which made walking difficult.

  “We’ve been walking through here for less than thirty minutes but it seems hours to me,” Lino complained. His height made him feel quite uncomfortable in the tunnel.

  Irina, who was walking second behind Sonam, cut him off, “Quiet!”

  In the silence, the sound of a distant rumble came to them.

  “Let’s be more careful. Point the lights low as you move,” said Irina.

  The rumble continued for a few minutes and then stopped.

  The tunnel widened. Now, three people could walk shoulder to shoulder. The rumbling re-started and then stopped. Ahead they saw a wider, slightly brighter area. When they came close to it they saw that the tunnel ended, partitioned off by a metal grating.