Water had seeped through the walls, and mud sucked at their shoes as they continued along the dark, dank tunnel. It was now clear to Charlie why the miner of the statue wore knee-high rubber boots.
He had to stop momentarily to scrape the soles of his loafers against a rock he had stumbled over. He leaned against the tunnel’s side to support himself—it would not do to fall over here he thought. Straightening up, his gaze focused on a narrow fissure in the tunnel’s wall he had not seen before. He moved his head back and forth, making his lamp shine down a narrow tributary leading to even greater darkness.
“Hey hold-up a minute,” he shouted at the backs of his companions as they began to disappear in the gloom. At the sound of his voice, the two of them turned immediately, and were soon standing at his side.
“Look here,” Charlie pointed. “I could have walked right past, and never known this opening ever existed.
“We already had done that,” Nadia told him, re-examining the diagram. It was hard to read in the dim light. The poorly drawn lines were confusing enough, but the weird symbols had become even more difficult to interpret in the murky light.
“Do you think Andre….?” she asked letting the sentence trail off.
“Hell, I don’t know.”
All three of them studied the map. There was something drawn across the line they had been following.
“Screw it,” Charlie told them. “We have come this far not knowing what we were doing, we might as well keep at it a while longer.
“Just one thing Andre, are you certain you can find your way out? I am miserably lost.”
“The miners tell you to keep the wind at your back, and when you want out, keep it in your face. Only problem is we left the wind a way back. But, don’t worry, laddie. I always get out. Or I have so far,” Andre added less convincingly.
Their path plunged deeper, and then turned sharply to the right. It became narrower, so that Charlie’s shoulders sometimes brushed against the sides.
His Burberry was filthy. He had worn it on many trips to over a hundred countries. The old coat may have to be retired after this one he thought, as they moved more slowly along the path. There were no tub rails along this route, so the seam probably had not been worked enough to warrant them. I should have kept my mouth shut he decided, beginning to gasp for breath in the stale dust filled air.
Occasionally, they would stop at the sound of an abandoned timber brace creaking under the pressure of its load. “Don’t worry,” Andre assured them. “The sound gets much louder if it is about to collapse. It’s one of the reasons that miners prefer wood braces to steel.”
“Phewie,” Nadia exclaimed, clutching a handkerchief to her nose. “What is that odor—smell—stink? “she asked, attempting to find the right English word for the noxious odor that was filling the narrow passage.
“Damned if I know,” Andre replied. “I think it’s coming from here,” pointing to a break in the wall.
Andre directed his light to the opening, then began to squeeze through.
“Oh my god! Oh my dear god! Come in here Charlie.”
Connelly squeezed through the narrow opening, followed closely by Nadia. Inside a crypt-like room were the remains of five bodies, in varying forms of decomposition. They were laid out in manner resembling the coarse lines drawn on the diagram they were following.
Charlie bent down, shining his lamp on the bodies. Their sightless eyes looked back at him. “Look here Andre, look at their necks.” Around each man’s neck was a small leather cord.
“It’s a garrote. I saw this once before in South America. It is a leather thong that permits a man to sneak up behind someone and quietly strangle his victim by surprise.
“Down there they refer to it as the great equalizer, because it enables a smaller man to attack a much larger one and choke him to death before he can shout, turn, or do anything to defend himself. It’s lethal as a gunshot, and a hell of a lot quieter. No wonder the miners thought this hole was haunted.”
“We can’t just leave them here,” Nadia whispered, trying to regain her composure.
Charlie was bending over closing the men’s eyes, and searching for identification. There was none. He had seen death before, but it was in combat. Somehow, this was different. Regardless of the cause or manner of death he had never become hardened to the passage of a man’s soul into the hands of God.
Standing up, Charlie turned toward her, “Yes we can Nadia,” he told her softly. “There is no way we can get them out. We might be able to roll one of the tubs in here, but it would be impossible to get them to the lift. Besides, I am not sure we want it known that we have found them. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to hide these bodies, and they might not take too kindly to whoever finds them.
“What do you think Andre?”
“Absolutely, and I’m too damn old to push a tub full of rotting bodies up to the lift. They must be miners, so let the miners take care of them. Meet Jack Black?” he asked holding out a silver flask to Nadia.
She took it gratefully, and swallowed thirstily. “Ahh!” she choked. “I thought it would be wine.”
Charlie took as deep a swallow as he could from the small flask. Wiping his lips on his sleeve he returned it to Andre.
“It’s Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch,”Andre explained to Nadia who was still making a face and clearing her throat. “It has a taste you have to cultivate,” he explained.
She tilted her head and looked at him quizzically. “Really?”
“Let’s get our a…let’s leave here now,” Andre directed, beginning to squeeze through the narrow opening once more.
“Wait a minute,” he told them retuning to the enclosure. Once inside he took out a large Swiss Army knife he carried and scraped-off some of the stone wall. “This stuff looks different from what I took out yesterday,” he replied depositing the sample in a large handkerchief before returning it to his pocket.
“Stuff?” Charlie asked.
“It’s a technical term we miners use,” Andre replied. ” You city boys wouldn’t understand.”
The three of them moved along the dark underground pathways, progressing faster going back than they had going in. Their breath came in gasps, and their faces were coated with dust.
The lift that earlier in the day had seemed so menacing to Charlie now appeared as a form of salvation, transporting them from an underground hell to a welcoming heaven.
Once on top, they gasped the fresh air like drowning people. The sky had never looked so good to Charlie and Nadia. Even Andre seemed relieved to be on top once again.
On the way back to the village, they discussed how best to approach the problem of the dead bodies they had left behind. While the question of who killed the miners was in all of their minds, the most immediate problem was “how to get the poor bastards out” as Andre so poetically phrased it.
“Easy enough,” Charlie told them. “Let their friends do it. after-all isn’t that what friends are for,” he joked lamely.
“It is?” Nadia asked seriously.
“Well not exactly Nadia, It was a bad joke. But, how do we get in touch with the men?” Charlie wondered, thinking aloud. “They obviously make every effort to keep out of our way.”
“That’s easy,” Andre told them. “Look in the brewery. If I know miners---and believe me, I know miners--they will be in the tavern this time of day.”
Andre was right. Inside the brewery, the three of them looked around the smoke-filled room until they found a face they recognized. They actually found two faces. One was the mine manager and the other man seated close by him was the man Charlie believed stuck the diagram in his pocket.
The miners sat at wooden picnic-like tables. Before the mine was abandoned, the brewery served as the company cafeteria, and a place where beer was both made and sold. Charlie, Nadia, and Andre squeezed in across from the mine manager. Andre began to explain to the dour Russian what they had found (as Nadia translated) without relating how
they had stumbled on the dead bodies. They had agreed beforehand to not reveal anything about the diagram, only to say they were exploring the mine to get a better idea what was involved in their project.
At first, the Russian manager glowered at the intrusion into his cloistered retreat. The alcohol he had already consumed seemed to have fogged his comprehension and required considerable repetition.
Nadia nervously flicked a wisp of red hair from her face as she was forced to cope with the complex and unfamiliar technical jargon of the mines, directed to a highly unresponsive audience.
As she soldiered on, it soon became clear her effort was unnecessary. Andre knew how to speak the universal language of the miners. Gradually the words began to pierce their alcoholic fog. The manager’s frown turned into a look of increasing comprehension, and then considerable shock.
While Andre related their experiences, Charlie focused his attention on the man to his right. The man whom he thought had passed him the diagram. If he was the one, it certainly was not apparent from his reaction. It mirrored the expressions of his boss.
Perhaps, Charlie thought that is the role of the assistant. If so, the man with the watery gaze accomplished it superbly. Charlie acquired no clue from his reaction, and was no clearer as to the man’s motive than he was before. If indeed, he actually was the one who slipped the note into his pocket the day of the disastrous presentation.
The miners conferred amongst themselves, and decided to go down the shaft and bring up the bodies. Andre would lead the way. At first he thought that Nadia should come with them but noticing her reluctance he reconsidered.
“I will go with you…..if you need me. That is my job,” she told him. But…. her voice trailed off.
Charlie certainly didn‘t blame her. He would also have gone with Andre, but they obviously didn’t need him, and he wanted to get in touch with Trevor to tell him what they had found at Tekeli.
It was decided then that Andre would go back with the miners, and Charlie and Nadia would return to the hotel.
As the group of miners was about to leave, Andre turned to Charlie, pulling his handkerchief from his hip pocket. “Give this to Dieter,” he winked. “He will know what to do with it.”
15
By the time Nadia and Charlie left the brewery, the sun had begun its daily descent in the western sky. It was late October, but the chill in the air heralded the beginning of the transition from autumn to the long and bitter Kazakh winter.
The two of them were almost unrecognizable from the well-groomed couple who passed through town earlier in the day. Dust from the mine covered their coats, and would take considerable effort to remove. Never the less, they both pulled their soiled collars up around their necks in partial protection from the late afternoon chill.
The old babushka who was cleaning her garden, earlier in the day, had long ago abandoned her effort and gone inside to the warmth of her hearth.
The window curtains in the small houses were back in their ordinary arrangement, as the self-appointed monitors of the street diverted their attention from a possible passersby to the more productive preparation of the family’s supper. The statuesque lead miner looked on impassively at the two passing strangers, unaware of the fate that had befallen his working comrades.
Once back in his room, Charlie experienced considerable difficulty placing a call to Almaty. After the third attempt, he was relieved when he heard “Trevor Gunn here,” at the other end of the line. Charlie began to describe what they had found in the mine.
“Five men? Oh my God. How did they get there? Who killed them? Garrote you said. I have never heard of that.”
These were the same questions Charlie had asked himself countless times during the day. While he was sympathetic to Trevor’s concern, he wasn’t much help in providing answers. He did, however, tell him about how he had found the note.
“It fluttered to the floor when you took off your shirt?”
“Yes, it must have been placed there by one of the assistant managers who wanted me to find it, and follow the diagram to the bodies.”
“Why on earth would he have done that?” Trevor asked for a second time, in a slightly different way than before.
Charlie repeated what he had said earlier. “I can’t imagine. Perhaps he had been close to one or more of the men and wanted them found, without letting any of the others know he knew.”
“Why would he do that?”
“For fear of ending up the same way the others did. And, he might not have any idea who killed them, and didn’t’ want any of the others to know he knew. He chose me because I was new on the scene, and he could be relatively certain that I had no hand in it.”
“Makes sense, but you are still left with who did it, or as your countrymen might say who done it?”
“Precisely.”
“Let me see,” Trevor pressed, “if I have this right. One of our consultants had a breakdown—yesterday was it? Then someone slipped the map of the mine secretly into your shirt pocket. Right?” Trevor continued before Charlie had a chance to answer. “Now today you follow the map and find five dead bodies.
“Ah well old boy, one thing is abundantly clear.”
“Which is?”
“You cannot let this little puzzle distract you from our main objective. You cannot let the wheels fall off our wagon now. You have to finish the project on time with cogent and concrete recommendations.”
Always the good soldier, Charlie thought. We could all be strangled in our sleep, and old Trevor would be primarily concerned about the impact on his project. What the hell, he decided, he might very well be the same way under similar conditions.
“We are still on schedule and forging ahead,” Charlie assured him. “Andre is down in the mine now with some of the Russian managers in order to show them where the bodies are hidden. He has, however, already extracted some samples he wants Dave Dieter to analyze. Andre believes this operation can still be productive.
“It looks like the miners thought the shafts were haunted because their friends were turning-up missing. Maybe they were turning up missing so the miners would be afraid to work in the mine,” Charlie thought aloud, his mind working in circles.
“But who and why,” Trevor interjected. “For what reason?”
They both paused in their conversation. The discussion had led them back to the beginning, and now that they were there they had nowhere else to go.
“Anyway,” Trevor started on a new subject. “I was going to call you. You are about to have a visitor.”
“Who? Why?” Charlie asked. The last thing he needed now was someone else to interrupt his work. In his experience, visitors were always trouble, or at the very least an unwanted distraction.
Trevor ignored his concern. “Not to worry old man. This one is one of your own. A yank by the name of Roger Pembroke. We got a call from your embassy last night. He is a new cultural attaché, and they want him to visit the mine.”
“What for?” Charlie asked, surprised at the request. “We ain’t got no culture hereabouts.”
Trevor paused for a moment, and then chuckled. “That’s what I told them. I may have used somewhat better phrasing, but we always want to keep on good relations with our American associates. Sammie is driving him up tomorrow. He will stay with you, and Roger will drive the car back tomorrow night, or the day after.”
“Whatever you say Trevor. Ours is not to reason why. Ours is just to …….”
“Yes, yes I know old sport. I will be sure and make a note of that in your permanent record. Have a good night.” The line went dead.
Before going to find Dave and Henry to alert them to what had happened that day, Charlie decided he should first advise Emmett Valentine what was happening at Tekili. Perhaps he could figure out what was going on. The old man certainly had more experience at these types of things than anyone else he knew.
Opening his laptop, he recalled the encrypted address that led him into a secure line, and tapped o
ut a brief summary of the day’s events. He re-read what he had just written to make sure it was clear before hitting Send. Instantaneously a series of obscure numbers and letters scrolled rapidly across the screen, destroying the ability for anyone to intercept the automatically encoded message, or trace it back to the originator. The screen then immediately faded to black.
Charlie stared for a moment at the blank screen, in hopes it might somehow provide an answer. Of course it did not. He quickly shut down the laptop, and headed for the lounge.
Death on the Silk Road Page 13
