The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  “I would have killed myself,” Zarah said.

  “Me, too,” Lori said. “But first I had to kill Heydrich.”

  2

  The opportunity did not present itself until two years later, after Heydrich had taken her to Prague.

  Lori said, “The contact was a child, a girl of nine or ten, who befriended me in a park in the Lesser City. I was allowed to walk and take the air for an hour or two every other day. Heydrich said he was worried about my safety, so I was always accompanied by one of the Gestapo women who passed as my maids but were really my keepers. The little girl wasn’t always in the park, but when she was, she and I played with dolls together on a bench—the usual tea parties and dress-up games. Her name was Liesl. She called me by my name, Hannelore. I enjoyed it; it diverted the mind. Everywhere you looked everything was in ashes, but little girls still played with dolls. Then the child began to pass messages to me. At first I didn’t understand. She did it as part of the I-say-then-you-say make-believe conversation between the dolls. Nothing was ever in writing. The dolls were called Liesl and Hannelore. At the second meeting the child began delivering messages: ‘Liesl says, Hannelore, we want to kill the evil man. Hannelore says, I will help you, Liesl.’

  “But I would not say it. It was so diabolical, using a child as an agent provocateur, that I thought that Heydrich must surely be behind it. The child spoke German as if she had learned it from educated parents and she had a German nanny, a tall, athletic, handsome woman with a Viennese accent. My Gestapo maid talked to the nanny while I played dolls with the little girl. This child was the only person I knew in Prague apart from Heydrich and my keepers. It was plain to see that the maid and the nanny enjoyed each other’s company even more than the child and I liked being with each other, but for quite different reasons.”

  At first Lori pretended not to understand what the child was saying to her. She regarded the episode as some sort of demented test of what Heydrich called their love, especially since her maid always led her straight to the nanny and child, as if to an assignation. By now the maid and the nanny were holding hands, whispering, giggling. The child continued to deliver messages: “Liesl says, Please tell me you understand my messages; Hannelore says, I do understand and I want to help.”

  “Gradually I began to regard what was happening as an opportunity for escape,” Lori said. “If I betrayed Heydrich and he found out about it, he would either kill me outright or, far more likely, send me to a camp to die. Both alternatives were acceptable. In either case I would be free of him, so I decided to play the game. One afternoon when Liesl and I were playing dolls and the maid and the nanny were walking back and forth in front of the bench arm in arm, heads close together as they whispered to each other, I made a move. I said, ‘Hannelore says, I will help you. But Liesl must tell me how.’ The child said, ‘Liesl says, Hannelore must say where he is going to be outdoors and at what time.’

  “It was some time before I had the necessary information. Heydrich was close-mouthed about his public appearances, but I overheard a lot because he visited me almost every day and talked over the telephone to his aides. By eavesdropping I learned that he was going to be in a certain place at a certain time two days hence. The next day, I met the child and gave her the information. The child said, ‘Thank you. Liesl says, We will come for you at that same hour. Be ready.’

  “On stroke of the hour at which Heydrich was assassinated by gunmen while riding in his car, the nanny turned up, alone, at my apartment,” Lori said. “She said it was her day off. She was a big, strapping girl with a very sweet face. The maid was delighted to see her. They kissed—I was watching through a crack in the door—and immediately went into a bedroom together.”

  Moments later the nanny emerged from the bedroom with a silenced pistol in her hand and shot the other maid through the forehead. She then opened a book in Heydrich’s study, found a key inside, and opened a trunk-size strongbox filled with jewels, gold coins, and reichsmarks. She loaded some of the jewels and gold coins into the pockets of her coat, the rest into two handbags. She handed one of these to Lori: “Carry this.” The Amphora Scroll was also in the trunk. Lori took it. Holding a forefinger to her lips for silence, the nanny opened the door into the outer hall. When the Gestapo man on duty in the hallway turned around with a smile, the nanny shot him dead also, caught his dead body as it fell, and dragged it inside the apartment.

  “Not a word had been spoken,” Lori said. “But now, in a whisper, the nanny said, ‘Liesl says, Put on your coat and follow me.’”

  The nanny led Lori to a streetcar stop. They got on the next streetcar. There were German soldiers in uniform on board. They stared at Lori and the nanny, but got off without making an approach. Two stops later, the nanny said, “I leave you here. Get off at the next stop. Follow a man wearing a green scarf. You will need this.”

  Lori said, “This was the handbag she had told me to carry, weighed down with gold coins and paper reichsmarks.”

  At the next stop Lori got off and followed the man as instructed into an apartment building. He left her alone in an empty flat.

  “Like the nanny, he was silent,” Lori said. “Inside the apartment he said, ‘I will come for you in a few days. Don’t leave fingerprints. Don’t go near the windows. Don’t make noise. There is food in the kitchen.’ He left and locked me inside. It seemed quite possible that I had exchanged one prison for another, one madman for another. But a week later, after dark, the man in the green scarf let himself in with the key.”

  He took her to another empty apartment at the edge of the city. After that she was passed from empty safe house to empty safe house until she was close enough to the Hungarian frontier to walk across.

  “And the rest you have found out for yourself,” Lori said. “Or so Zarah tells me. Hungary, Palestine, Norman Schwarz, my life in the mountains.”

  “Not everything,” I said. “Why Kyrgyzstan?”

  It was too dark to see Lori’s face, but when she answered her voice was as faint as Paul’s; I had to strain to hear her. Tarik gave her a sip of vodka and her voice came back, but even hoarser than before.

  “Heydrich may have been dead,” she said. “But his men lived on. I had done something to be punished for no matter how long this took, and besides, I had the Amphora Scroll; I had stolen their gold. If I went back to Hubbard—and how could I?—they would hunt me down eventually and kill him and everybody else I loved. In the library at the country house in Hungary I found an old journal written by a dead member of the Bathory family. It described a trip he had made to Kyrgyzstan, described the people and the language. There were maps. He had gone in through Afghanistan. I memorized the list of Kyrgyz words in the diary, copied the maps, waited for the war to end.”

  I said, “You realized that Kyrgyzstan was part of the Soviet Union and what that meant, especially to a German in 1945?”

  “Of course, but that was its charm.” Lori said. “It was the most inaccessible place in the world for a Nazi, the last place even Heydrich’s men would or could go.”

  Nevertheless Lori had never believed that she was safe. Not while Heydrich’s men lived, not while she had the Amphora Scroll and they knew she had it, because who else but Lori would have known enough about it to steal it?

  “That was why she ran to Xinjiang when she heard that an elderly foreigner who claimed to be her son was looking for her,” Paul said. “She thought it must be one of Heydrich’s men. She had never imagined me as an old man.”

  “But you followed her.”

  “With Tarik’s help, yes,” Paul said.

  I said, “What made you trust him, Tarik?”

  I spoke English. Tarik replied in the same language. “I knew all about him, Mother had told me about her other son,” he said. “Besides, he looks like our mother. I knew that. Now I saw it. We went back for her together. We knew where to look. She thought the scroll would be safe in the labor camp.”

  “And you were caught by the Chine
se?”

  “No.”

  I said, “You just walked through the gates of a labor camp of your own free will?”

  Paul shrugged. “I’d come a long way to find her. I felt as she did, that a Chinese labor camp was as good a place as any to end my days, and no worse than the camp she and my father and I would have been sent to in 1940 if she hadn’t saved our lives on the train at Aachen. And then, I’d been looking for her all my life.”

  At this point I thought that I had heard all that I had any business to know. Why the Chinese had sent fake ashes to Washington when they knew that Paul Christopher was alive and well in Xinjiang was simply beyond my power to understand. I left the Christophers together, seated in a circle in the center of a vast empty quarter of the Earth. They murmured to one another. Soon I couldn’t hear their faint voices. A few steps after that I could not see them by the light of stars.

  3

  To my mild surprise, all of the Christophers were still with me in the morning. Kevin appeared just after first light, right on schedule. He arrived on horseback. This time he was wearing Uzbek dress, assault rifle slung across his back, knife in his belt, pistol in a shoulder holster, grenades, binoculars, satellite telephone— everything but war paint. He and some of his men had set up camp about thirty miles away in the hills near the Jomon-Kŭm Sands. Another team was posted at the airstrip in Turkmenistan. Each team had a satellite phone and a backup radio.

  “The guys in Turkmenistan are waiting for Ibn Awad’s party to arrive and set up camp,” Kevin said. “When that happens, our guys will study the target, watch the pattern of activity, count heads, identify weaknesses.”

  “And hope they’re not discovered.”

  “Not much chance of that because no one expects them to be there and they’ll stay hidden and study Ibn Awad’s security routine. The idea is to get the information that will make the job of capturing the old man feasible instead of merely possible. And in the end, overcome the security, extract the target, and get everybody out alive and all in one piece.”

  “How many people will you need to carry out this extraction?”

  “A minimum of eight,” Kevin said.

  “Ibn Awad has at least fifty bodyguards.”

  “Eight will be enough,” Kevin said.

  “I hope you’re right,” I said. “However, let’s say you make the snatch and somehow kill or immobilize all of Ibn Awad’s holy warriors. You’ll still be in the middle of a desert with hundreds of miles of empty country between you and the nearest town and thousands of miles between that town and safety. Not to mention that everybody in the town in question will be a Muslim eager to save Ibn Awad from the infidels. How exactly are you going to extract your prisoner?”

  “Improvise,” Kevin said.

  “Improvise? You’re an interesting fellow.”

  Kevin smiled his inimitable smile. “We’ll be in touch,” he said.

  He mounted his horse and rode away.

  4

  That afternoon, the rest of the Old Boys arrived. We sat in a circle on Lori’s rug, drinking tea and watching as Tarik worked the Saker falcon against the cloudless sky. And then Charley Hornblower reminded us that life is full of surprises. While the rest of us had been watching the falcon, he had been emptying one of his large manila envelopes and arranging its contents onto the rug before him—text, maps, photographs, each held down by a small rock. A photocopy of Kalash’s map was spread out as the centerpiece. The map was much annotated with yellow Post-its and highlighter inks in various colors.

  “I think I’ve found something interesting,” Charley said. “The migratory path of the houbara bustard passes right over every airstrip on Kalash’s map. Except one.”

  Charley’s blunt forefinger traced the flyway, marked on the map as a thick line of pale blue ink. Just as Charley had said, the birds flew right over the airstrips in Sudan, Balochistan, Iran and Turkmenistan, where Kevin’s scouts were at this moment keeping watch over Ibn Awad’s advance party.

  After Turkmenistan, the bustards’ migratory path turned east, missing the airstrip in the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands by a couple of hundred miles. This was unsettling news. Kevin had concentrated his forces at the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands airstrip, less than fifty miles from where the Old Boys were now sipping tea. Kevin believed—I believed, we had all believed—that the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands airstrip was the best place to make our move on Ibn Awad. I didn’t ask if Charley was sure of his facts. Of course he was.

  I said, “I’m somewhat surprised.”

  “It surprised me, too,” Charley said. “But every bit of data I could find and all the expert opinion suggests that the airstrip in Uzbekistan is no place to find the houbara bustard at this time of the year. Or any other time.”

  “So where is the bird’s next stop?” Jack asked.

  “The Sardara Steppe in Kazakhstan,” Charley said.

  Jack said, “Can Kevin fall back to that location?”

  “I’d have to ask Kevin,” I said. “He and I talked about the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands and only about the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands as the point of attack.”

  Jack nodded amiably, suddenly calm and agreeable, as if this problem was perfectly manageable. But the message in his voice, his gaze, his body language was written in a personal Braille that everyone present could read: Kiss the operation good-bye, boys.

  I said, “Any thoughts?”

  Silence. Then Paul said, “If there are no houbara bustards at the Uzbekistan airstrip, then why is it on the map?”

  That was the question, all right. One possible answer was that there was no such airstrip. Except that Kevin said there was. Another was that it was a trap. I looked around the circle of faces and saw no sign that anyone wanted to make a guess. The question remained. Why would Ibn Awad build an airstrip to hunt the houbara bustard in the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands if there are no houbara bustards there?

  It was Paul who broke the lengthy silence. “Maybe Ibn Awad stops in the Jomon-Ku˘m Sands for some other reason,” he said.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as paying a visit to his bombs.”

  “Now that,” Harley said, “is what I’d call an interestin’ idea.”

  We ate a cold supper and went to bed early. I tossed and turned until shortly before dawn, then went outside. There was better visibility in this desert than there had been in Xinjiang. Even as a sliver, the moon produced a sort of warped daylight. Distant objects, such as the Z˘ etimtov Hills, wrapped in blue shadow, were quite visible.

  “It all looks primeval, doesn’t it?” Zarah said. Her voice was hoarse, another trait she shared with her grandmother, but strong and distinct.

  I jumped. I hadn’t seen her and despite everything I’ve just said about the revealing light of the moon, I couldn’t locate her. Then she sat up and I saw that she had been sleeping on the rug where we had taken tea earlier in the day.

  “However, it is not so untouched as it seems,” Lori said. “Tarik and I were talking about it during the night. He was here as a child with his father, and one night while everybody was sleeping the earth moved.”

  “An earthquake?”

  “That’s what they thought at the time even though it didn’t feel exactly like an earthquake.”

  I said, “Did it happen on this spot, where we’re camped?”

  “Further west and north,” Lori replied. “They were camped near the well at Sarim, about two days’ journey from here on foot. The well at Sarim is miles and miles from anything else, which is interesting, because according to the map it lies between two highways that seem to go nowhere, and it’s only twenty miles or so from the end of a railroad that begins in Samarkand and also goes nowhere.”

  That was funny. I said, “Anything else?”

  “Tarik says the railroad and the roads were brand-new back then. The Russians built them after the war with Gulag labor. They were always doing things like that. Nobody paid attention, just steered clear.”

  “So there was this shaking of the earth,” I sa
id. “Then what?”

  “After the shock they saw headlights, lots of them, converging on a single point. In the morning, there were many, many Russians in uniform running hither and yon.”

  At long last we had our stroke of luck.

  After breakfast Tarik and Charley and I piled into a vehicle and headed for the well at Sarim. It was a wild ride. Only Tarik knew exactly where we were going, so he drove. His Kyrgyz genes were in full command of him and he was in command of the bucking, rattling machine. Charley, notebook computer open in his lap, bounced around in the back seat. How he could type under these conditions was a mystery but somehow he managed. The computer was hooked up to the satellite phone.

  At last he shouted, “I think I’ve got something. Stop the car.”

  Standing on solid ground, Charley showered us with facts. There had been 596 underground nuclear tests in the Soviet Union between 1949 and 1985. Nearly all were conducted in Kazakhstan or on the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Arctic.

  “However,” Charley said. “There were two underground tests in Uzbekistan. One of these occurred around the time Tarik is talking about.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, if Tarik’s recollection is correct.”

  I said, “For what purpose?”

  “It was classified as ‘peaceful,’ meaning not for military purposes,” Charley said. “A lot of these peaceful underground tests were designed to study seismic waves. The Russians also mined for oil and gas with nuclear explosions. Or created underground storage chambers for liquefied natural gas.”

  “Underground storage chambers?”

  “Yep,” said Charley.

  We got back into the car. When we reached the site, or what Tarik believed was the site of the underground explosion, Charley was first out of the car. Naturally he had brought along a Geiger counter—essential equipment, after all, if you’re looking for stolen A-bombs—and he whipped this out. When he switched it on, it chattered. Charley read the gauge and whistled.