Riders of the Pale Horse

by T. Davis Bunn

“What do you mean?”

  “We struggle against corrupt governments. They very strong, but we don’t defeat at all. Real power is in Allah, not where they think, in official power. Our goal is to serve Allah. To do as Allah commands. We push them. We get power, and then we turn power over to Allah.”

  “Ah, I see Ali has decided to keep you company.” Ben Shannon said as he appeared in the doorway. “Unfortunately, it is time for my rounds in the villages, and I thought perhaps you would care to join me.”

  Allison finished her Pepsi and stood. “Thank you for the lunch, Ali.”

  “You good lady,” Ali decided, taking the tray. “We talk more.”

  When they were alone, Allison said, “I think I just passed inspection.”

  “It would appear so,” Ben agreed. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” She answered, excitement an electric shiver through her nerves.

  It had begun.

  “It’s not too late to turn back,” Robards reminded Wade the next morning. “Even if the money does sound attractive.”

  “It’s not the money. I don’t like the idea of leaving anybody trapped like that,” Wade replied. “But I’m worried about taking on anything else until I finish with this assignment.”

  “In the first place,” Robards said, “you did what you were supposed to do. Far as I see it, whatever happens next is going to be a seat-of-the-pants deal anyway. In the second place, the money’s always important. Always.”

  “Then why are you so interested in helping out somebody who might not even be able to pay you?” Wade retorted. “They’re in this fix right now because their guide did not arrive with the money.”

  Rogue nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “And?”

  “And I think maybe we’d be in better shape to collect if we acted as guides as well as helped them escape.”

  “You mean take them to Tbilisi?”

  “Like I said,” Robards replied, “it’s your show.”

  Wade thought it over. “There’s no reason not to take them along, since we’re going in that direction already.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “But what makes you think you’ll be paid then?”

  “We,” Rogue corrected. “We’ll be paid. Those boys were supposed to be met by a guide here for the rest of their trip—somebody who from the looks of things decided to skip town with these other guides’ payment in his own pocket. That means they have to have a contact at that end—somebody with dough. So we deliver them to their destination, collect for both jobs, then we’re through with the guide-dog business. Simple.”

  “It sounds okay,” Wade said slowly. “Who do you think those Russians are?”

  Rogue busied himself with another mug of coffee.

  “You know, don’t you,” Wade pressed. “Or you think you do.”

  “Just a hunch. Nothing that can’t wait until we’re safe and all have a little chat,” Robards replied. “So what’s it gonna be?”

  “How do we get them out?”

  “Is that a yes or not?” It was Rogue’s turn to push. “No need to get into details until the go-ahead’s been given.”

  “Does that mean you think we can do it?”

  “Wouldn’t be wasting time talking about a target like this if I didn’t.”

  “And we can get out of this alive?”

  “Those are the only targets that count.”

  “We can’t just leave them, then. Not if you really think we can help.”

  Rogue waited in catlike stillness, only his eyes showing the faintest glimmer of interest.

  Wade took a breath, fought to still a sudden flutter of nerves. “You’ve got to promise me that nobody is going to get hurt from this.”

  “I’ve got no desire to be on the receiving end of a vendetta,” Robards answered. “I’ve met guys like these before; they’re the kind that’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.”

  “Okay, then,” Wade said. “I guess we should go ahead and do it.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Robards said, rising to full height. “I’m going to write a note that you’ve got to translate and somehow get into their hands.”

  Wade found his Russian patient much improved and able to take a few spoonfuls of stew. “I think he is going to survive.”

  The guard showed no reaction, but one of the other Russians gave a feeble smile. “This is good news.”

  “I brought enough food for all of you,” Wade said, indicating the covered pot. “Try and see if he will eat some more later. And give him as much to drink as he will take.”

  “I will do this,” the Russian agreed. “Thank you.”

  “He is your friend?”

  “No questions,” the guard snapped.

  Wade busied himself with his satchel. He gave the sick man another pair of injections, then brought out two boxes of medicine. “He needs to take one of these antibiotics three times a day for seven days. It will help protect him from secondary infection.”

  “Your Russian is very good,” the man responded.

  Wade handed over the second box. “These tablets should help ease him when the sickness is upon him. Give him one every two hours for as long as necessary.” He resisted the urge to glance toward the guard. Instead he looked directly at the Russian and said, “You must carefully read the directions on the box. This is very important.”

  “I understand,” the Russian said, his eyes suddenly filled with the same appeal as the night before.

  “Tonight I shall return for a final check.” Wade stood. “Until then.”

  By dusk all was prepared.

  Wade walked toward the prisoners’ hut on legs that threatened to give way at any moment. The scarred warden grunted his customary greeting and prodded open the door with his boot. “This is your last time,” he declared. “The man is well enough, and I will not pay for visits and medicines which he does not require.”

  Wade stood his ground and spoke as Robards had instructed. “You must give him boiled water and green vegetables. He remains very weak, and if you are not careful, he could still die.”

  The guard’s customary suspicion weakened for a moment. Sullenly he agreed, “It will be as you say. Come.”

  Wade forced himself forward. He found the same lantern-lit tableau as the night before. The two relatively healthy men squatted in their corner, while the third sprawled on his filthy matting. But three pairs of eyes fastened upon him with singular intensity as soon as he came into view, and Wade knew the morning’s note had been read.

  The same man crawled over to help as Wade inserted the thermometer. His back to the watchful guard, he looked Wade square in the eye and nodded. Once.

  Wade lifted the thermometer and squinted at numbers his nerves would not let him read. “You are doing better,” he said loudly and for the guard’s benefit. “If you rest and are careful, you will be well.”

  “Thank you,” the sick man said, speaking for the first time. His voice was barely above a whisper, but it held surprising strength.

  “I must give you one final injection,” Wade said. “You are continuing with the tablets?”

  “Just as you said,” the helper replied. “Three times this day, one of each, taken with twice-boiled water.”

  Wade swallowed and resisted the urge to glance at his watch. Time seemed to be dragging by in milliseconds. “You must—”

  At that point the promised diversion arrived.

  A group of extremely drunken men, Ossetians all, staggered by the front of the hut. Some sang, some argued, others pushed and laughed and milled about and created a vastly noisy confusion.

  The scarred lookout snarled a curse and turned to the door. The men staked out on the porch shouted threats and received a chorus of oaths in reply. The yelling became louder still, and the guard took a half-step outside the door.

  It was the moment Wade had been waiting for. His heart in his throat, he whispered, “In three hours there will be another div
ersion. You must break through the back wall, the tent part. Someone will be there waiting for you.”

  The Russian helper glanced toward the guard, who gesticulated at the drunken crowd with upraised weapon. The helper hissed, “I have leaned on the wall by the chamber pot. It is not just cloth, there is wood beyond. But it gave when I leaned. With luck we can make an opening.”

  “May luck be with us all,” Wade agreed. With hands trembling so badly he could scarcely force a grip, he reached into his bag and extracted a hammer, a short crowbar wrapped in cloth to keep it from clanking, and a long-bladed knife. “Once the opening is seen, others will be there to assist.”

  The helper stuffed the three implements under the bedding. The sick man lay and watched with a burning gaze. The noise outside mounted in crescendo, then subsided as the drunks began to disperse. The helper asked, “When shall we know to act?”

  The guard chose that moment to shift his bulk around. Wade tensed his muscles to still the trembling, lifted the syringe and ampule, and after two tries managed to fit the needle into the opening. He plunged the needle into the man’s thigh, released the placebo injection of vitamins, and swabbed the place with alcohol, all the while fearing that at any minute the guard would notice the thundering beat of his heart.

  But no alarm was sounded. Wade collected his articles, forced his legs to carry him aloft, and steeled himself to meet the guard’s hostile gaze. “You must take great care that he eats only food that is fresh and cleanly prepared and drinks only twice-boiled water from a clean cup. He cannot survive a second illness.”

  The guard nodded. “And for payment?”

  “Come and see me at the truck compound tomorrow,” Wade replied as Robards had directed. “I have not yet calculated the cost of the medicines used.”

  As Rogue had predicted, the guard’s gaze turned contemptuous. Here was a Westerner who cared so little for money that he put off payment, and thus could be easily taken. “It will be as you say.”

  The blast, when it came, lit the entire northern sky.

  Following Robards’ directions, Wade had remained on guard duty by the trucks. The compound rocked to its typical night-time revelry. A band of Gypsy musicians played beside a great fire, their music rising into the chill night air along with sparks and shouts and drunken laughter.

  From his post atop the truck cabin, Wade looked down over the heads of the gathered throng to where two lambs roasted on slowly revolving spits. The meat glistened golden brown in the flickering light, the tantalizing aroma drifting up past the smell of diesel fumes and road dirt.

  But Wade’s nerves left no room in his belly for food.

  Occasionally men and women whom Wade had helped approached, offered the formal greetings of highlanders, and invited him to join them. Wade declined with quiet thanks. They did not press. There was understanding among such as these for people tending watch. And even more for people who sought the solitude of night.

  Then the first flames leapt toward the distant heavens, and all revelry ceased with a series of shouts and cries.

  The explosion was not loud, yet even from that distance it pushed at Wade with a powerful whoof. Then a great orange ball rose with deceptive slowness, illuminating the entire northern end of town before gradually dying out.

  Before the light had faded, a second explosion followed. Shots rang out, sporadic at first, then a long automatic ripping sound. Then a third explosion. A fourth. And a final, larger than all the others combined. The shots continued, and Wade worried for the man who preferred to take such risks alone.

  By then the entire compound was moving. People leapt from trucks, grabbed for weapons, pointed, shouted orders, scooped up children and hustled them to safety, took up guard positions, or scrambled toward the slowly fading explosion.

  Wade stayed where he was and doubted seriously that his heart rate could manage a single beat faster.

  After what seemed an eternity, yet by his watch was only forty-five minutes, Robards came trotting into view. Wade resisted the urge to race up, grab his arm, and ask what happened. The big man stopped in front of Wade’s truck, turned, and pointed back toward the darkened distance. “You see the fireworks?”

  “How did it go?” Wade demanded quietly.

  “Let’s pretend,” Rogue replied, his arm still pointing into the distance. “I’ll play like I’m filling you in on the light show, and you play like it’s all great fun.”

  Wade stood on the massive front fender and shielded his eyes as he searched the invisible distance. “I feel like a hood ornament.”

  “Better to play the fool than arouse suspicion,” Robards said. “Never can tell when there are watching eyes.”

  “So how did it go?”

  “Without a hitch,” Rogue answered. “Long as I can wash off the smell of gasoline before anybody gets too close.”

  “Can I get down now?”

  “Sure. How did it all look?”

  “Like that whole side of town was being fire-bombed.”

  “Biggest Molotov cocktails I ever made,” Rogue said with a satisfied grin. “Like to have singed my eyebrows with that last one, though. Didn’t make the rag long enough, and the bang was bigger than I expected.”

  “You smell like a filling station.”

  “Yeah, gotta wash this off. Come on around back.” Behind the truck Robards peeled off his shirt. “Your Ossetian buddies sure know how to follow directions. The gasoline canisters and the rags were right there at the back of the empty corral, which ain’t no more, in case you’re interested. I set the canisters about thirty yards apart in a sort of semicircle around the front of the hut. Good thing that house was set out there by itself.”

  He poured soap and water into a basin, used his shirt to wash off his upper body, then stripped and doused all his clothes. “After lighting the last rag I skirted around back and watched the guards go blazing away at the night.”

  “I was worried when I heard the shots,” Wade confessed.

  “Aw, they were just shooting at smoke,” Rogue said, slipping into his dry clothes, “and so blinded by looking straight at those exploding canisters they couldn’t have seen me even if I’d walked up and shook their hands. I placed the second and third to either side of the porch. The bombs did just what they were supposed to—sort of invited the guards out into the night before they had a chance to think what was going on.”

  “The Russians got out all right?”

  “Yeah,” Rogue said and allowed the satisfied smile to emerge again. “When I made my way round to the back of the hut, those Ossetians stood there like great bearded giants, lifting out these three scrawny dudes, then pushing the wall back inward, making it look like all the work was done from inside.”

  “Just like you said,” Wade offered.

  Rogue nodded. “Might help us make a getaway in one piece, having it appear like they made it out on their own.”

  “So where are they now?”

  “Somewhere safer than they were before, I expect,” Rogue replied, rubbing his hair dry. “Where don’t matter, long as they’re at the pickup point tomorrow.”

  9

  The weather was still with them the next day. Barely. By the time the light solidified enough to be truly called another day, it revealed a sky blanketed by heavily laden clouds. The temperature did not rise as it had in mornings past; instead, the air held a biting, metallic feel. Neighboring peaks were lost beneath coverings that threatened to release their dangerous white loads at any moment.

  Now there was a different quality to the compound’s growing activity. Talk was muted. Men gathered and searched the sky with worried expressions. Children stayed close to their camps. There was none of the casual banter or easy loitering over breakfast fires. Gear was packed and stowed. Movements were purposeful, swift, pressured by what was clearly coming.

  The scarred soldier and three of his fellows arrived soon after the dawn. They wore crossed bandoliers and fierce expressions. Two of the men stopped
in front of the trucks, arms at the ready. The other pair walked back to where Rogue, Wade, and Mikhail were finishing a breakfast of bread and tea.

  Wade stood to greet them. “You will take tea?”

  “We will take what is ours,” the man snarled in reply.

  The old man rose in carefully rehearsed offense at the threat in the man’s voice. “My friend has done you a service, and this is how you reply?”

  A whistle from the front pair swung the scarred man around. Wade followed his gaze and was surprised to find a delegation of perhaps a dozen armed men walking toward them. An elder whose child Wade had treated two days before for a strep infection called out, “All is well with you this dawn?”

  “Thank you, Uncle,” Wade called back. “All is well.”

  “The clouds herald a change for the worse,” the elder went on, drawing closer. “Which way does your course take you?”

  “Over the pass and down to Tbilisi,” Wade replied.

  “Then a swift departure is advised,” the elder counseled. “Even a dusting of snow is enough to turn the cursed road ahead to something from your worst nightmare.”

  “I am grateful for your advice,” Wade said.

  The elder nodded and turned to face the scarred man square on. In an even voice, he announced simply, “These men are friends.”

  The scarred man faltered. “I came only to pay for the healer’s services.”

  “Strange that it takes four armed men for such an errand,” the elder replied.

  “We...” The man hesitated, then continued. “We are missing something of great value. The healer was the only man who approached our house.”

  “And what might this thing of value be?”

  The scarred man gestured toward Wade. “He knows.”

  Wade turned to Robards and forced his voice to remain even. “He is accusing us of having stolen something from him.”

  Rogue made an issue of carefully searching the sky before shrugging his unconcern and saying, “They can search the trucks if it’ll speed things up any.”

  Wade turned to the scarred man and said, “The weather presses us. Even so, you are welcome to search our trucks if it will ease our departure.”