by P. B. Kerr
“A huge underground mausoleum was excavated by slaves who were then slaughtered to a man; the soldiers who had killed these slaves were themselves executed in their turn. A large part of the mausoleum was taken up with their corpses.
“Finally, when the grave was ready, the funeral cortege set off and, leaving nothing to chance, everyone it met on the way was also murdered. It’s said that twenty thousand people died in order that the whereabouts of the grave of Genghis Khan could be kept a secret.
“Of course, the sons and brothers of Genghis Khan wished to be able to find his grave again, in order that they might come and do his memory homage. And this presented them with a difficulty. For if the grave was unmarked, how would they remember where it was? There were no accurate maps, no latitude and longitude, no satellite navigation aids to help them. What made things worse was that Mongolia, as you’ll see for yourselves, is a land of immense plains called steppes, with very little in the way of geographical features like mountains and valleys to help them out.
“When a solution finally presented itself, it appeared to have been under their noses all along. Smell holds a significant place in Mongol culture. In fact, human body scent was assumed to be an important part of a person’s soul. And, considering they never took baths, human souls must have been very smelly indeed. As a result, while other people were in the habit of kissing or shaking hands, Mongols were in the habit of sniffing each other like dogs. Anyway, they decided that the best aide-mémoire for finding the grave of Genghis Khan again was smell — but not his smell, although that would have been ripe enough. No, it was the smell of something else they decided to use.
“Being nomadic tribesmen, they knew a lot about animals — horses, goats, and camels in particular. They knew that camels have an excellent sense of smell, not to mention equally excellent memories. Camels are able to find water in the desert because they are able to detect the smell of something called geosmin, which is produced by bacteria in freshly turned earth. But they are even more adept at remembering and smelling their own offspring.”
“I don’t like the way this story is shaping up,” said Philippa.
“Then brace yourself, Philippa,” said Nimrod. “The Mongols took a female camel and its newborn baby to which it was giving milk and buried the baby camel alongside the body of Genghis Khan. Alive. They knew that the mother camel would always remember the spot. And that in the years to come they would only have to release and follow the mother camel for it to lead them to where the calf — that’s what we call a baby camel — was buried.” “No!”
Philippa let out a wail, which, in the darkness, sounded much as a baby camel would have sounded as it was buried alive, and which made everyone jump, including Nimrod.
“That is awful,” she exclaimed. “How could anyone do such a terrible thing? How could people be so cruel?”
John let out a loud guffaw.
“Typical girl,” he said. “She says nothing when she hears about how twenty-thousand people were slaughtered in order to keep their mouths shut about the secret place where Genghis Khan is buried. And then she goes all gooey when some baby animal is killed.”
“That is the saddest story I ever heard,” insisted Philippa, ignoring her twin brother, which she was in the habit of doing.
“Perhaps it is,” admitted the professor. “But all of this happened almost eight hundred years ago. But even you, Nimrod, cannot seriously be suggesting that this mother camel is still alive. I know, I’ve seen some remarkable things today that persuade me that there is more in the world than I ever dreamed was possible. But an eight-hundred-year-old camel? No, surely not.”
“I haven’t finished my story,” said Nimrod. “You see, the Mongols thought they’d been very clever. Every spring the descendants of Genghis Khan, intent on honoring his memory, would release the mother camel and, without fail, it would always return to the exact spot where the calf was buried. The camel, of course, was treated very well. It was named Dunbelchin —”
“Good name for a camel,” said John.
“After one of the Khan’s wives. It was fed with the best oats and grass and it was adorned with a jeweled bridle and a beautiful saddle, which of course made it a most valuable camel in the eyes of men. Too valuable, for one day it was stolen.”
“Serves ’em right,” said Philippa.
“The Mongols were beside themselves with anger and frustration,” continued Nimrod. “For without the mother camel, how could they ever hope to find his secret burial place again? They searched high and low for the camel. And suspicion fell upon a notorious camel thief called Hotak, who came from a town called Parwan, north of Kabul in Afghanistan, and that today is known as Charikar. But Hotak eluded capture and fled with his camels to Kandahar.
“Meanwhile, a special clan of Mongols called the Darkhats was created in order to find the tomb, and to prevent anyone else from finding the tomb. The clan continues to this day, although it remains uncertain if the Darkhats ever found the tomb themselves.”
“I’m getting confused now,” said the professor. “What is any of this to do with Sidi Mubarak Bombay and John Hanning Speke?”
“Good question,” said Nimrod. “They may not have succeeded in finding the grave of Genghis Khan but, according to Bombay’s book, they certainly managed to see a beautifully tooled camel saddle and bridle, probably Mongolian, that belonged to a camel trader in Kandahar by the name of Ali Bilharzia. They themselves were convinced that the saddle and the bridle were more than five hundred years old and had once adorned Dunbelchin, the mother camel that was possessed of the knowledge of how to find the tomb of Genghis Khan.”
“I’m beginning to see where you’re going with this,” said Philippa.
“I’m glad you are,” said Axel. “I’m still in the dark.” He blinked hard against the all-enveloping black night sky, as if he hoped he might see something that would help illuminate his understanding of their mission, but he remained wrapped in literal and metaphorical darkness.
“Me, too,” admitted the professor. “Bombay and Speke made this discovery almost one hundred and fifty years ago. I don’t have to tell you that things have changed a lot in Afghanistan since they were there. Four wars will do that.”
“Four?” John sounded surprised.
“Two Anglo-Afghan wars in the nineteenth century,” said the professor, “after which there was peace for a hundred years. Then the Russian invasion of 1979, which preceded a war that lasted ten years, and lately, the Americans have been fighting there, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.”
“And yet some things in Afghanistan never change,” said Nimrod. “That’s one of the things people never understand about Afghanistan. Trying to make that country change is always a mistake. It’s just as much of a mistake now as it was a mistake at the beginning of the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1839.”
“I take it you’ve been to Afghanistan before,” said Axel.
“Oh, yes. When I was a student, it was a very popular place to visit.”
“Let me get this straight,” said the professor. “You’re proposing that we go to Afghanistan to look for a camel that’s been dead for almost eight hundred years. Is that correct?”
“All will be revealed,” promised Nimrod. “In good time.”
CHAPTER 16
WISH UPON A STAR
When the Shebelle left the Italian port of Civitavecchia early the morning after Decebal’s coming aboard, it was shadowed by an Italian Navy submarine, the Rodolfo Graziani. For some time now, NATO had been keeping the ship under surveillance in the hope that it could track the pirates back to their secret lair in Somalia to destroy them for good.
To this end the submarine followed the ship as far as the Suez Canal where a U.S. military space KH satellite kept the Shebelle under surveillance until it reached the Red Sea.
A KH satellite is really just a gigantic orbiting digital camera with an imaging resolution of one inch, which means that it can see something one inch
, or larger on the ground. In this way, the CIA had already managed to photograph Captain Sharkey and his entire crew of cutthroats while they were sunbathing on the deck of the ship. But back at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they were surprised to discover a new man walking up and down the deck of the ship and concluded that he must have joined the crew in Civitavecchia.
Whenever he appeared on deck — which was always at the same time in the morning and in the afternoon — he was accompanied by his own armed bodyguard.
All the same, he was hardly like any of the other pirates in that he was rather fat and pink. He wore a white shirt and a black tie, a waistcoat, and pin-striped trousers; he also wore a bowler hat. In short, he looked like an Egyptian bank manager.
This new man closely matched the description of someone long sought by police forces and security services all over the world. A high-level meeting of CIA intelligence analysts and agents was convened at which it was concluded that this new, unidentified man might just be the Egyptian “Mr. Big” behind all piracy in the Gulf of Aden, the almost legendary Sheikh Dubeluemmdhi. This caused great excitement in Washington and plans were put in place to kidnap the man as soon as the Shebelle reached the Strait of Hormuz that led into the Arabian Sea.
Here, an unmanned aerial vehicle from the USS Wisconsin took over the task of watching the pirate ship from afar. The important thing was to keep the pirates under surveillance without them knowing they were being surveilled.
This was easy since the noise of the ship’s old engines was more than loud enough to drown out the drone of the UAV’s single engine. And the UAV stayed at the kind of height that made it all but invisible to the human eye.
Besides, most of the pirates were too busy watching television or Mr. Groanin to pay much attention to what was happening in the sky eighteen thousand feet above their heads.
Having given his word as a gentleman to Captain Sharkey that he would behave himself and not try to escape, Groanin was permitted the freedom of the deck; it seemed better than being locked up in the hold; all the same he was kept under the gimlet eye of a pirate armed with an AK-47.
When he wasn’t taking exercise on deck, Groanin was kept busy in the galley. And unlike Decebal and his Romanian gang, the Somali pirates seemed to appreciate Groanin’s home cooking, which, it has to be said, was without equal in that part of the world.
Of course, this was hardly enough to make Groanin feel good about his situation. And he spent most of his time on deck reproaching himself for his own failure to appreciate just how well off he had been working as Nimrod’s butler.
“ ‘You never really know what you’ve got until it’s gone,’ right enough,” said Groanin. “And to think I used to complain about being in old Nimrod’s service.” He wiped a tear from his rheumy eye. “First-class travel, the finest food and wines known to humanity, linen sheets, my own flat, a Rolls-Royce to drive, everything a man could ever wish for, and more.”
He shook his head and glanced up at the sky, wondering exactly where Nimrod and the twins were at that precise moment. Surely, they would have left Italy by now. Nimrod wasn’t the kind of person to let a little thing like the closure of European airspace, or a rail strike, stop him from traveling where he wanted to go.
“They’re all back in London probably,” he said. “What I wouldn’t give to be back in London.”
As he searched the sky, he saw what he assumed to be a star but was, in fact, the reflection off the American UAV’s fuselage in the high-altitude sunshine.
“Wish upon a star,” he muttered. “Why not?”
He thought for a moment and thinking that, perhaps, if only he wished hard enough and often enough, Nimrod, John, or perhaps Philippa might — if he believed they could — just feel or even hear his wish and make it come true.
“I wish I was back in London,” he said. “I wish I was back in London. I wish I was back in London.”
CHAPTER 17
SPY IN THE SKY
Daylight arrived with the flying carpet somewhere in the sky over Egypt. At that particular place and moment in time, the ancient city of Kandahar lay almost two thousand miles to the east.
As the crow flies this would have been an eight-hour flight on the carpet. But for safety reasons, Nimrod decided to avoid overflying several countries including Israel, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, none of which care for unidentified traffic over their airspace.
“This is another great disadvantage of the flying carpet as opposed to a whirlwind,” explained Nimrod as they traveled farther south over the Arabian Peninsula to avoid these belligerent countries. “Being a solid object and about the same size as a decent-sized plane, the carpet shows up on radar. It’s not much fun having to take evasive action when some fool of a general decides that you’re unfriendly and sends up a military jet to shoot you down.”
“That’s something I’m glad I didn’t know until now,” said the professor.
“I’d have been glad not to know about it at all,” said Axel.
“Can they fly these jets with so much ash around?” asked John. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“I rather suspect that military jets will fly when a lot of commercial ones stay grounded,” observed Nimrod. “But, honestly. There’s really not much to worry about. Even if we can’t always outrun an F-15 or a MiG-17, their pilots are usually too nonplussed by the sight of people sitting on a flying carpet to shoot us down. More often than not, they report us as UFOs and that’s the end of it.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Philippa.
“No, it’s the surface-to-air missiles that we have to worry about,” added Nimrod. “They sort of arrive from nowhere and with no warning. So, from here on in we’d best start keeping a lookout. Even the Saudis are inclined to be a bit trigger-happy these days.”
“Keeping a lookout?” John frowned. “How does that work?”
“The same as on a whaling ship,” said Nimrod. “You and Philippa have keen eyes. Each of you, sit at one edge of the carpet and sing out if you see the spout of something coming our way. Better still, if either of you sees so much as a firecracker coming our way, you’d better use a little indjinnuity to deflect it.”
John winced at his uncle’s terrible joke.
“Like what?” asked Philippa. “What would you suggest to deflect a surface-to-air missile?” “I don’t know. A flock of wild ducks, perhaps. A sheet of hot corrugated iron. A piano. Use your imagination.”
The twins did as they were bid and crawled to opposite sides of the carpet, where each of them looked very carefully over the side.
It was a long way down.
Philippa hugged Moby to her chest, feeling quite certain that the last thing she would use to deflect a surface-to-air missile would be a flock of wild ducks. Besides, making one living thing was hard enough, let alone a whole bunch of them.
John had his doubts about the whole idea. Being reasonably well informed about things military — in his time he’d watched a lot of action movies — he believed that surface-to-air missiles were attracted to the heat of a jet engine and since the flying carpet had no engine he wondered how it could home in on them at all. Then again, if it was aimed well enough, any rocket might just get lucky. And John concluded that Nimrod was probably right to be cautious about such things.
At one point, they actually saw the tiny pirate ship carrying their old friend Groanin as it steamed south on the Red Sea. And simultaneously, for just a few minutes, each twin thought fondly of him and wondered what he was doing, which was, of course, the immediate effect of all Groanin’s hard wishing directly beneath them.
I expect he’s back in London by now, thought John. Or perhaps Manchester. Assuming he managed to get out of Italy before they closed the airspace. Gosh, I miss that guy. He may have groaned and moaned a lot but he was a loyal friend. This whole adventure’s not really the same without Groanin.
Philippa was thinking much the same. But because her djinn power was a little stronge
r than her brother’s, she almost felt his presence and had to remind herself that he was not with them on their latest and perhaps last adventure.
Which is curious, she thought as she looked around just to check that Groanin was not actually seated beside Nimrod. I’ve grown so used to Groanin being around it’s hard to persuade myself he isn’t. I expect that’s what I was feeling just now. Yes, that must be the explanation. But why should I suppose that this might be our last adventure? That’s harder to explain. Could it be what Nimrod said back on Vesuvius? Something about volcanoes being linked with the destiny of our djinn tribe, the Marid? Or perhaps it was just the portentous way he said it, as if he had always expected something like this would happen. Yes, that’s probably it. At least, I hope so. I wouldn’t like this to be our last adventure.
Alone with their thoughts, the twins kept watch in this way for a couple of hours until they were over the Arabian Sea when they entered a bank of thick cloud and lost sight of what was below.
John returned to the center of the flying carpet. “No point looking out for anything,” he said, “in all this cloud.”
“Is it ordinary cloud, do you think?” asked Philippa. “Or cloud that’s made of ash?”
“There’s not much volcanic activity in this particular part of the world,” said the professor. “The nearest volcano is probably Taftan, in southeastern Iran, which must be almost a thousand miles northeast of our position.” He sniffed the air loudly and, behind the mask, he licked his lips. “Besides, the cloud doesn’t taste or smell volcanic.”
“Nevertheless,” said Philippa, “I can sort of hear a kind of rumbling from within the cloud.”
John listened carefully. “She’s right,” he said. “There is something. And it seems to be getting nearer.”
Everyone except Nimrod stood up and looked anxiously into the cloud.
“That’s not a volcano,” said Axel after a minute. “That sounds more like a motor.”
