The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  At last we arrived at the bottom, and as we rode through the outskirts of Ulugqat, our chief minder finally made contact with his headquarters. First the polytonal burst of his report, then silence while he waited for instructions, then the instructions, then the Mandarin equivalent of a very enthusiastic ja wohl!

  He clicked off the phone and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. “You are under arrest,” he said.

  In any other country I would have smiled at the wondrous absurdity of being manacled by what appeared to be Siamese twins wearing the same baggy sweater. Not so in Xinjiang, whose prisons had swallowed so many people alive. We were loaded into a government car and driven straight to Captain Zhang’s office in Urümqui. This time, the captain was not alone. Two muscular cops stood behind us with drawn truncheons. Nor was Zhang the relaxed customer I had met the last time I was in this office. He wore his jacket and military cap and did not smoke a single cigarette. He asked us no questions and issued no recriminations. We were meant to take this as a signal that he knew all he needed to know about our nefarious purposes, and more than we could ever guess.

  “Passports and air tickets,” he said peremptorily.

  We handed them over. Despite the manacles, we had not been relieved of our personal belongings or even searched.

  Zhang examined the passports page by page as if seeing them for the first time, then wrote something in each of them and stamped them. He handed them back, but kept our air tickets.

  “I have made a note in your passports that you are never again to be admitted to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region,” Zhang said. “Do you understand?”

  We nodded and kept quiet. This was a serious matter—especially for David because it meant losing some of his extra income, among other unforeseeable complications—but not so serious as awaiting trial in a prison camp in the forbidden zone for twenty or thirty years or however long it took a man to die.

  Zhang said, “A plane leaves for Alma Ata in two hours.” He handed two new air tickets to one of his thugs. “These men will accompany you to the airport and see you safely aboard your flight,” he said. “I advise you to be cooperative.”

  We followed his advice religiously. But our banishment complicated matters tremendously. We had been tantalized in Xinjiang, but not enlightened, and now we could never come back to follow up our suspicions.

  In theory.

  9

  David Wong waited until we were on the ground in Alma Ata, safe from Chinese ears, before he told me that his friend Askar had mentioned the Amphora Scroll.

  “According to Askar,” David said, “an all-points bulletin has gone out to every Islamist terrorist group in the world to find the scroll. A reward of five million euros has been posted for its delivery.”

  “Deliver the scroll where?” I said. “To whom?”

  “Askar doesn’t know. He says nobody knows, but the word is that the reward is being offered by a rich holy man living somewhere in Islam.”

  Who could this holy man be but Ibn Awad? If this was the fact, then this was our first confirmation that the old lunatic really was alive and on track to obliterate the cities of the crusaders. And Askar, a neutralized Islamist terrorist who wanted to get back in business, had the scroll within his grasp.

  I said, “Does Askar know what’s in Auntie’s glass cylinder?”

  “I don’t think so,” David said. “But he has a problem.”

  “What? Family feeling?”

  “That may be part of it. But the real problem is that she and her glass cylinder have disappeared. She went for a ride one morning and never came back.”

  “Come on! On horseback? At age ninety-four?”

  “I’m quoting Askar. She’s a vigorous old girl. Still rides two or three mornings a week, though no longer at the gallop. “

  “They didn’t go looking for her?”

  “Her son Tarik went after her. He didn’t come back, either, so they figured he’d found her and she’d be okay.”

  “But they did go looking for them?”

  “In due course, yes. She wasn’t in the village. Neither was Tarik. The women think she’s gone home to die, wherever home is.”

  I said, “David, how do you assess Askar’s reliability?”

  “In the past he never steered me wrong,” David replied.

  “Back then it would have cost him a lot of money if you caught him lying. And that’s no longer the case.”

  “No,” David said. “But he’s not penniless. He gave me a satellite phone number to call in case I wanted to talk to him.”

  THREE

  1

  The last time I saw Moscow, twenty years before, her heart was barely beating. Now it seemed to be fibrillating. We were confronted everywhere by wonders. Restaurant food was edible, waiters smiled for tips. Bare skin and German cars were much in evidence, money was a more popular topic of conversation than the weather, the jokes were about sex instead of the Politburo. Darkness still fell at four o’clock in December. At four-thirty on our first day in town, Harley Waters pulled me out of my hotel room into a snowstorm.

  “Everything in town is still wired,” he said. “The only difference is, two organizations are listening in instead of one—the mafia and the Russian intelligence service.”

  Since the mafia was composed mostly of former members of the KGB, prurient curiosity remained all in the family. Harley had chosen a good night for the kind of walk he had in mind. Snow fell so thickly that it was pretty well impossible to see anyone who was more than a few feet away. Also, it was quitting time in Moscow and the trampling crowd left so many fresh footprints that tracking was impossible. The blizzard and Harley’s knowledge of Moscow’s nooks and crannies meant that we had little trouble ditching the three-man team that was following us.

  He led me out of the storm and underground into a subway station. Our surveillance did not reappear, so we assumed we really had lost them. Even after miles of walking in circles this was chancy because of my height. I was less of a curiosity here than in Brazil or China, but I still attracted a lot of attention. I am used to this, but the fact remains that being six foot five is a handicap in a man whose profession requires him to be unobtrusive. That’s why I worked inside instead of outside like Paul Christopher, the perfect singleton, who sat so still and said so little that waiters sometimes did not notice that he was at the table and neglected to take his order.

  Very few people were left in our subway car when we arrived at our stop. We emerged into the blizzard in a benighted neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Huge apartment buildings with snowdrifts on their flat roofs stood hunchbacked in the storm. Feeble light the color of urine showed in scores of tiny windows. One of these misshapen boxes was surrounded by a fence topped by barbed wire and broken glass. This meant that it had once been home to Soviet secret policemen and suchlike. The fence was designed to keep the masses out.

  Harley’s friend Mikhail Orlov, former colonel in the KGB, lived alone in a top-floor flat that smelled of cabbage, sausages, and garbage. Harley explained that Mikhail, who had lost a leg in Afghanistan, found it difficult to carry the trash down sixteen flights of stairs. Because of what he used to be, no one in the new Russia volunteered to help him. Not that Mikhail was interested in hiding his past: his well-pressed KGB uniform, boots, medals and all, hung on a hanger from a hook on the wall. Clearly he was ready to return to duty on a moment’s notice.

  Mikhail embraced Harley and kissed him on both cheeks. He locked eyes with me as if reading coded messages written on my irises and shook my hand firmly, letting me know how strong he was even when in a friendly mood. Obviously Harley and this KGB man were old friends. Mikhail was a stubby fellow with a shaved head, Slavic cheekbones and pale blue eyes with epicanthic fold. He wasn’t wearing his wooden leg—it hung from another peg on the wall—but used no crutch or cane. Instead he hopped around on one foot, fetching smeared glasses for the vodka and a spoon—just one—for the caviar Harley had brought. Even after drin
king half a liter of vodka, he never lost his balance. His good leg must have been incredibly strong.

  Harley hadn’t told me why we were here—only that Mikhail was an interesting fellow who had done some work for him in the past. When the level of the vodka bottle was right, Harley said, “After his wounds made it difficult for him to work undercover, Mikhail was the officer in charge of nuclear security at the Darvaza-76 scientific facility in Turkmenistan.”

  Mikhail locked eyes with me again. Up to this point we had been making small talk in Russian—haltingly in my case—but now he began to speak English.

  Mikhail said, “You are the man who stole the American election, am I right?”

  Ah, the old reliable icebreaker. “Something like that,” I replied.

  “You were on Russian television.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, very cheeky. Anywhere else besides America you would have been shot.”

  I smiled, the first time this had been tried by anyone so far this evening. “No doubt. But U.S. punishments are not so merciful as in the more enlightened countries.”

  “You think something is worse than death?”

  His tone was contemptuous. What could an American possibly know about death? Admittedly, Mikhail himself was an expert. He had belonged to an organization that had hanged, starved, shot, and worked to death more Soviet civilians in time of peace than the whole number of combatants killed in action on both sides in World War II. Now the KGB had vanished into thin air, leaving him with a uniform and decorations that would get him stoned in the streets, a full colonel’s pension worth less than $2,000 a year, and a wooden leg that did not fit. Harley, glancing with wry New Hampshire shrewdness from glowering Russkie to scowling Yank, decided that it was time to put the meeting back on track.

  “Maybe we should talk business,” he said.

  Mikhail nodded—about time! He turned up his radio and hopscotched over to the stove to fetch a pot of tea. After pouring the tea into the vodka glasses, he sat down and drew his chair closer so that we sat with our heads only inches apart. The music was so loud—the Red Army Chorus bellowing golden oldies—that we could not otherwise have heard a word.

  Harley said, “Mikhail knows that we have an interest in missin’ Soviet backpack nuclear devices, and he’s got somethin’ to tell us about that.”

  Evidently Harley had already made a down payment on the information, because Mikhail immediately came to the point. All traces of disdain and one-upmanship vanished as if by magic, and suddenly he was not a vodka-soaked, resentful used-to-be but an intelligence professional delivering a briefing.

  “You are right to be concerned,” he said. “Some of our devices are missing.”

  “How many?”

  “Twelve, we think. The inventory was problematical. The missing devices are small, one or two kilotons each, but they are special weapons.”

  “Special in what way?”

  “First, because they are compact,” Mikhail said. “Second, because they are sheathed in cobalt, so the point is not explosive force but the effect and durability of the radiation.”

  I must have looked shocked because Mikhail paused and in an almost kindly tone said, “You did not know that?”

  “We had been told that they were dirty,” I said. “But not about the cobalt. You’re absolutely sure of your facts?”

  “Oh, yes. Just one of these devices, detonated in Red Square, would make Moscow uninhabitable for centuries.”

  “And you let twelve of them be stolen?”

  “Somebody did, yes. It was a great mistake.” Mikhail reached out and touched my chest with a blunt index finger. “It would be better, my friend, to hold your questions until the end.”

  He was right, and in any case I had no more questions to ask. There was nothing unbelievable about what he was telling me. The Soviets had manufactured and stored thirty tons of smallpox virus for use as the payloads for biological weapons, so why wouldn’t they make cobalt bombs?

  I said, “Sorry, go on,” and picked up my glass of tea. It was scalding hot and even sweeter than Tajik tea.

  “In the last days of the Soviet Union, just before the fall of Gorbachev…” Mikhail spat after mentioning the name, “… I was sent from the KGB hospital in Odessa straight to Darvaza-76.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A Naukograd, a secret science city. The 76 means that it is seventy-six kilometers from Darvaza, the nearest city in northern Turkmenistan. There are—were—about fifty Naukograds in the USSR. New weapons were invented, developed, manufactured and stored in such places. I thought you knew this from your spy satellites.”

  “Maybe Harley knew it,” I said. “But that wasn’t my department.”

  “Lucky for us,” Mikhail said. This man really didn’t like me. Looking at Harley, he said, “May I continue?”

  Harley gave him a priestly wave of the hand.

  Mikhail drew breath and said, “Because of the lax discipline in the Red Army that followed the retreat from Afghanistan, not to mention the confusion in the Kremlin caused by Gorbachev’s strangulation of the party, this problem of missing weapons had developed.”

  Mikhail had been selected to solve the problem because he had broken up a ring of Red Army officers in Afghanistan that had been selling Soviet arms to the mujahadin.

  He said, “The great fear, you understand, was that these backpack bombs had fallen into the hands of religious madmen. The mujahadin or, worse, the Chechens. We knew that arms paid for by the Saudis and others were flowing into Chechnya. Volunteers from all over Islam were sneaking into Chechnya. Large amounts of cash were crossing the frontier. The motherland was facing a second Afghan war, but this time on her own soil. And then there was the jihadist movement you people were financing on the China frontier as a second front in the Afghan war.”

  David Wong’s project. Small world.

  On arrival at Darvaza-76, Mikhail immediately arrested the officer in charge of security along with everyone else who had a key to the warehouse.

  “I told them they would tell me everything they ever knew, everyone they suspected, every detail of their own movements and whereabouts for every moment of their lives,” Mikhail said. “To encourage the others, I shot a couple of junior officers who were obviously innocent and therefore of no interest to my investigation.”

  The survivors understood what Mikhail was saying to them, but they had a problem. No one knew when the weapons had disappeared. Or even, at first, if the count was correct. They weren’t exactly sure how many of the special cobalt weapons they had had in the inventory, or how many might be floating around inside the military apparatus. The army drew weapons for training purposes and sometimes forgot to send them back until forcefully reminded to do so by Moscow.

  It took the remainder of the night for Mikhail to walk us through his investigation. His inquiries had been exhaustive. He had read every security record, every log, every sentry list. He had questioned everyone at the base, soldier or scientist, man, woman or child. But the long and short of it was that despite his meticulous detective work, Mikhail had never discovered who sold the bombs or who bought them. Or if they had simply been stolen, though this seemed unlikely because Darvaza-76 was a sealed city, surrounded by a concrete wall five meters high with electrified wire on the top, patrolled twenty-four hours a day by KGB troops.

  Of course someone had to pay. The base commander and a dozen others, including three nonessential technicians and a handful of sergeants, were shot after a trial at which they saved their families by confessing to crimes the KGB knew they had not committed.

  I asked Mikhail, “You weren’t worried that one of these fellows hadn’t told you all he knew before he was executed?”

  “That was not a realistic possibility.”

  “But weren’t you concerned about all those loose ends?”

  “No,” Mikhail said. “I assumed that sooner or later we would find the missing bombs. They were virtually unshielded to
cut down on their weight, and they gave off so much radiation that they should have been readily detectable. However, I was wrong. We spent millions of rubles looking for them all over the Soviet Union with everything from satellites to soldiers with Geiger counters. We never found a trace.”

  Meaning what, in Mikhail’s opinion?

  “There were many theories,” he replied. “They could be stored deep in a cave or a mine or an oil well. Or hidden someplace where there was already a lot of background radiation from old test explosions. We looked in all such places in the Soviet Union— Kazakhstan, Siberia, Kamchatka, the arctic testing sites, nuclear waste dumps, salt mines, coal mines. The old regime was not tidy about such things, so the country is full of possible hiding places. We found nothing.”

  “It did not occur to you that the bombs might have gone abroad?”

  “Of course. But we had no responsibility to protect any other country.”

  “You still thought these bombs were going to be detonated inside the USSR?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was one other probable target.”

  “The United States?” Mikhail said. “Not many in the Red Army or the KGB would have wept over a terrorist nuclear attack on New York or Chicago.”

  2

  It was a long subway ride back to the hotel and when we got there, in time for breakfast, no hot water was left for a shower and shave. Harley and I were eating kippers and eggs in the dining room, waiting for the hot-water tank to fire up again, when a young man walked through the door and headed straight for our table. He was a muscular, keen-eyed type: Well-cut navy blue blazer, creased gray flannel pants, striped shirt, faux Eton tie, shoes too cheap for the ensemble. Everyone in the world who wears Western clothes looks like an American these days. Consequently I wasn’t sure if this man was a Russian mafia hit man or one of ours or what.