“You can see what the Russians tried to hide quite plainly in the moonlight,” he said.
I said, “What do you mean by that, Tarik?”
“Come,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
He led us uphill for a few meters to a spot where we could overlook the valley. He pointed a finger.
“I don’t see it,” I said.
“I only saw it myself for the first time tonight,” Tarik said. “You’re looking for traces of an old highway and a railroad roadbed.”
Now that Tarik had told me what to look for they leaped to the eye. Two long parallel cuts were visible on the desert floor below. The fainter of the two must have been the highway. The railway roadbed was easier to detect because it had once been a raised embankment and now it was scattered over a much wider strip of land. It was obvious that the highway and the railroad had been bulldozed. And it was just as obvious why this had been done. The Russians had wanted to hide what they had done here—not because they were ashamed of themselves for having despoiled yet another untouched natural fastness, but because it was one of their innumerable Cold War secrets.
Just before the end of the line, the railroad had made a sweeping left turn, buttonhooking in that direction for a mile or so before it curved right again. From where we stood on the hilltop, the traces of this unusual track looked like a backward question mark.
“That must’ve been where they offloaded the gas from the tank cars,” Harley said. “That buttonhook must be two, three miles long. They could move up their tank cars in a half circle, park ’em on the track, and pump ’em out one by one as slick as you please. Wish I’d known about that when they were doin’ it. Where were you when I needed you, Tarik?”
It was obvious where the pumping station was likely to be— at the tip of the hook of the question mark. The moon, now waxing toward the half, provided all the light we need. We drove down the hill and paced off the distance to the center. This was rough measurement indeed but the best we could do without a surveyor’s transit. Harley commenced pacing back and forth, his coat hanger held before him. Meanwhile Charley, feeling no doubt like the forgotten man, went prospecting with his Geiger counter—ancient wisdom versus twentieth-century science. It was surprising how far the Geiger counter’s clicking, or any mechanical noise, carried in a place so lifeless that there were no natural sounds except when the wind blew.
A couple of hours before dawn, Harley’s coat hanger dipped. “Pretty strong dip,” he said. “Must be somethin’ down there.”
He stood where he was, marking the spot, until the rest of us got there with shovels. The dirt here was far looser than it had been on the hilltop and with Tarik and David and me taking turns with the shovel, we made steady progress. When the hole was about hip deep, we struck concrete.
“Problem is, it’s just concrete,” Harley said. “Now we know there’s somethin’ there. But what we got to do is find the way in.”
We dug again. Despite the nip in the air—at four in the morning it couldn’t have been more than forty degrees Fahrenheit—we were all sweating. I had always imagined that ditch-digging left the mind free for long trains of poetic thought, as it had for Paul Christopher during his first prison term in China. However, I found that I had to concentrate every minute on what my body was doing. Also I was beginning to get blisters on my hands and if I thought at all, it was about them.
Fortunately, Tarik had lived in a world of toil and sweat all his life, so he could wield a shovel and keep his wits about him at the same time. It was he who spotted the headlights approaching from the south, the direction in which Ibn Awad’s camp lay. I counted fifteen, moving slowly, and so did Tarik. Nobody else could see well enough to run a total.
“Fifteen’s an odd number,” Harley said. “Guess that means there’s at least one motorcycle. Or a one-eyed car.”
Charley’s Geiger counter chattered. He said, “Very hot spot here.”
We all knew what the headlights meant: we’d better get out of there as quickly as possible. On the other hand we could all hear Charley’s Geiger counter and we knew what that very possibly meant: We’d found Ibn Awad’s bombs minutes before Ibn Awad’s men were going to arrive, shoot us all dead, and take possession of them.
I said, “Tarik, how long before they get here?”
“Half an hour, maybe less.”
David said, “Dig we must, don’t you think?”
Jack said, “I have a question. Suppose we’ve found the bombs. What are we going to do with them even if we dig them up? If we take them with us, we die of radiation poisoning. If we leave them here, a lot of people may die in other places.”
“That pretty well sums up the choices, Jack,” Harley said. “So why don’t we just dig the durn things up now and think about what to do with ’em later?”
He grabbed the shovel and attacked the ground, making dirt fly. After thirty seconds of all-out effort he handed the shovel off to me and staggered away, clutching his chest and gasping for breath. The hole was three feet deep when Tarik took over from me. Soon the shovel rang as it struck an obstruction. Tarik bent over and touched it.
“Metal,” he said. “I think it’s a hatch.”
Five minutes more and he uncovered the wheel that unlocked the hatch. Charley handed him the Geiger counter. It went wild.
Charley said, “I don’t think you should open that thing. Radiation will come out like smoke up a chimney.”
This was wise counsel, but if we did not open the hatch how would we know what we had found? Tarik apparently had the same thought. He spun the wheel until we heard the latches click, then tugged. The hatch did not open. I got down on my stomach, reached into the hole, and took hold of the wheel. David did the same. We heaved. The hatch came open with a whoosh. Charley’s Geiger counter chattered again, more rapidly than before.
Someone handed me a flashlight. I shone it inside and there in their tomb were the Uncle Joes, all twelve of them side by side. They seemed to be in mint condition. According to my watch, digging down to the hatch and opening it had taken about fifteen minutes. The headlights, though still distant, were about the size of baseballs now. We had maybe another fifteen minutes.
David had backed his vehicle up to the hole. The cargo area was a jumble of gear—vodka, food, guns, ammunition. I assumed he meant to load the bombs aboard and try to make a getaway, but then I saw that he had another idea. While Tarik and I were shoveling, he had kneaded together several blocks of Red Army surplus explosive and was screwing a fuse into the putty-gray blob that resulted. The blob was about the size of a soccer ball—big enough to destroy almost anything in an enclosed space.
By now insect intelligence had taken over. We were all thinking the same thought in the same moment—even Jack. This thought was, Blow the damn things up. Nobody asked if we had time to get clear, or what the effect would be on the atmosphere or the people downwind from this site. The headlights were closer.
“We drop the explosive down the hatch and cover the hole,” David said. “We set up a remote detonator, jump in the cars, and drive fast. When we’re a couple of miles away, we throw the switch on the transmitter and up it goes.”
Jack said, “This is a Russian radio detonator we’re talking about?”
“What can I say?” David asked. “It’s what we have and it’s all we have. We can use two, in case one fails.”
David handed me the blob. I lowered it through the hatch. It was attached by wires to an antenna and a radio receiver. David set this up some distance away. The approaching vehicles were so close now that we could make out the sound of their engines, though we could not yet see anything but yellow headlights. They were traveling abreast. I squinted, trying to make out more details. One by one our own vehicles departed, all except the one driven by David Wong. He stood beside it, shouting at me to hurry up.
He jumped out of the car and ran back to me.
“What’s the matter?” he shouted.
“What if it’s Kev
in?”
“Then he should have told us he was coming. Come on, Horace, we’ve got to go.”
Three men on motorbikes shot out of the dust cloud and accelerated toward us. I felt wind on my cheek and heard the snap of bullets passing by. We sprinted to the vehicle and jumped inside. David put it into motion before the door closed and drove at breakneck speed across the desert. I stuck my head out of the window and looked back. Within the dust cloud I could see muzzle flashes as the motorcyclists fired at us with automatic weapons. The back window of our vehicle was shattered by a round that zipped between David’s head and mine and blew out the windshield.
When you stopped to think about it, as I now had the leisure to do, this was strange behavior. Why were these people shooting at us? So far we had done them no harm. We had found the bombs, yes, but how could they know that for sure? How could they even know who we were? Did the answers to all these thoughtful questions really matter? These guys were trying to kill us no matter who we were or what our intentions.
David had grasped this reality right away. He opened the roof and handed me a loaded Kalashnikov. It was no easy trick to fit myself and the weapon through the small opening in the roof, but I managed to do so just in time to see the motorcyclists pulling abreast of our car. They wore wind-filled burnooses and, incongruously, bulbous, shiny white crash helmets with black face shields. The one on the left was leveling his rifle at David’s head from a range of about ten feet. A split second later his weapon flew out of his hand and he shot off his bike, propelled backward as if lassoed. I smelled gunsmoke, saw a flash, looked behind me, and saw a gun barrel protruding from the rear side window. Tarik had shot the man. Up to that point I had not even noticed that Tarik was with us.
The motorcyclist on the left, either oblivious to the fate of his friend or in love with death, was now aiming his weapon at me. Before I could raise my own rifle—knowing all the while that I hadn’t time to do so before the other man fired—David swerved the vehicle and sideswiped the motorcycle.
A hundred meters or so to our rear the dust was thinning, settling. I could see no more pursuers. Maybe we had gotten away. Then I looked to the left and right of our tail of boiling dust and saw headlights. Up ahead, quite close, was the steep ochre mountain where we had camped. David was pounding on my leg. I put one arm inside the vehicle, intending to fold my whole body back inside, joint by joint and appendage by appendage. David put something in my hand. It was the transmitter for the remote detonator.
“I’m going to speed up now,” he said.
Speed up? The landscape was already a blur. I expected the bucking vehicle to start tumbling end over end at any moment.
“As soon as we’re parallel to the mountain, but just before we get behind it, push the button,” David yelled. “Can you hear me?”
We had no idea what was going to happen if the bomb went off. David saw this in my face.
He shouted, “Horace, just do it. Please!”
David was right. This was not the moment for second thoughts. I understood his plan. He wanted to be on the other side of the mountain, shielded from the blast, when the bomb went off. If we were killed before the button was pushed it would never go off. Not only were a couple of dozen gunmen trying to murder us, but their friends were almost certainly trying to disarm our bomb at this very second.
The sun came up. David began to turn hard right—car rocking, motor racing—for his run behind the mountain. I pressed the button on the transmitter. For an interminable moment I heard and saw nothing. Then I heard the explosion, distorted and louder than seemed possible, rolling over us as if it was being amplified through a very old loudspeaker. The ground, the whole landscape, shook itself like a wet dog. A chunk of the mountain the size of a church fell off and bounced across the desert. Then another, then an avalanche. The sky filled with a flickering glow, yellow and blue like a gas burner, which was then enveloped by a huge black cloud.
David fought the wheel. I expected the car to turn over at any moment and in spite of all that was going on, I still had a thought for myself because my head and shoulders were sticking out of the roof.
Like Dr. Oppenheimer in Nevada, I thought, “What have we done?”
That is a question you ask yourself only if you already know the answer and wish that you didn’t.
8
No, we hadn’t touched off a nuclear explosion. We had ignited the underground reservoir of liquefied gas, and of course this released a large amount of radiation. The pumping station where Ibn Awad’s bombs had been stored was connected to a pipeline running into the lake. When our explosive went off, it sent a blast of flame and heat down the pipeline. This triggered an underground explosion that very nearly brought the mountain down. Common sense should have told us this would happen, but in the heat of the moment we had not been listening to our more judicious selves. Somehow the cavern contained the explosion, but a huge jet of burning gas vented into the sky through what used to be the pumping station. The ground above the lake writhed with tongues of blue flame escaping through cracks in the underlying rock.
From the hilltop we saw no sign of human beings living or dead, and the fact of the matter was, we didn’t know for certain whom we had killed. Terrorists? Kevin’s men? Was there a difference? We assumed that the dead and missing were Ibn Awad’s men, but as you have seen as this report unfolded, our assumptions were not always correct.
“Nice work,” Harley said.
Jack said, “We’re going to have half of Kazakhstan on our necks before we know it.”
“Not to mention the Sierra Club,” Charley said.
Ah, liberal guilt. We had just accomplished one of the two impossible things we set out to do and instead of being wildly elated, we were overcome by shamefaced embarrassment. Lighting eternal flames fueled by radioactive gas was politically incorrect. We were old enough to know better. We had violated the sacred Outfit creed: Do Good by Stealth. We had accomplished the mission, yes, but nobody could say we had tiptoed in and tiptoed out.
“Well,” said Harley. “At least we’ll get no thanks for this and that’s somethin’ to be thankful for.”
Meanwhile Ibn Awad was probably among the privileged few who were watching the fireworks from afar. Unless Kevin had used the distraction we had provided to take the old man prisoner, Ibn Awad would be thinking about getting on his airplane. If he was permitted to do that, the whole cycle would begin again. He would find someone else to sell him more bombs and this time he would use them before we or anyone else could catch up to him. It took me a moment to find my satellite phone and punch in Kevin’s number. It rang several times. I got Kevin’s voice mail.
The airstrip was thirty miles away. There was no road. We could not get from here to there in less than an hour and a half. I wasn’t sure if we had enough gasoline to get there. We siphoned the fuel from two of the three vehicles and poured it into the tank of the one that seemed least likely to break down. David handed out weapons and ammunition to everybody and all six of us piled into the one car, Tarik at the wheel. We skirted the site of the explosion. The earth crawled with worms of flame. The fumes were suffocating, the heat intense. Again I looked for corpses but saw none. I don’t know why I expected to. Anyone who was anywhere near the pumping station—the likeliest place to be if you were trying to prevent David’s blob from going off—would have been vaporized by the explosion of burning gas from underground.
9
Tarik got us within sight of the airstrip in a little over an hour. We saw no lookouts on our way in. There was no point in caution, no time to reconnoiter. Tarik drove right onto the runway and parked our car in front of the airplane. We jumped out. In addition to assault rifles, we had two rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Charley and Harley, our two least agile commandos, were issued these weapons with instructions to fire on the aircraft if it attempted to take off.
The rest of us—Jack, Tarik, David, Ben and I—headed into camp, rifles at the ready, expecting to b
e cut in half at any moment by a chainsaw of AK-47 rounds. We could smell coffee, hear goats bleating behind the cookhouse, see windblown clothes drying on a line. Nothing happened. The camp was deserted. Not a soul could be seen, not a sound could be heard, not a trace of life could be detected except for six magnificent peregrine falcons, wearing hoods, that sat on perches at the back of Ibn Awad’s dining tent. They were absolutely motionless, apparently asleep. Had Ibn Awad and everyone else in camp rushed to the fire that burned beyond the horizon? This seemed unlikely to me and apparently Tarik has his doubts also, because he turned on his heel and ran from the tent. By the time I got outside he was dog-trotting toward the edge of camp, his eyes fixed on the ground beneath his feet. He was following the wheel tracks that led northward, in the direction of the fire. After a few moments he stopped and ran off to the right, his eyes still on the ground. Then he stopped and pointed east.
I joined him. Tire tracks told the story. A large number of vehicles had left the camp together. After about two hundred meters a car and five motorcycles had split off from the main convoy, made a sharp right turn, and driven due east. The yurt was due east of Ibn Awad’s camp. This made perfect sense. Ibn Awad was interested in gaining possession of two things—the bombs and the Amphora Scroll. He had sent messengers to pick up the bombs and gone himself to collect the scroll. Lori had the scroll. Lori was in the yurt.
Tarik said, “We should go. Now.”
Tarik followed the tracks left by Ibn Awad’s convoy, or what we assumed was Ibn Awad’s convoy. We hadn’t used the GPS to locate our position since Tarik joined us. He seemed to know exactly where he was at any given moment. After an hour he stopped the car and got out to listen. The Z˘ etimtov Hills were framed in the windshield. The yurt was quite close now. I dismounted also. In the distance I heard the pop-pop of gunfire. The sound was too far away to tell if two different sets of weapons were being fired, so we couldn’t tell which was in progress, a firefight or a massacre. There seemed to be too much shooting for it to be the latter, considering that there were only three people in the yurt.
The Old Boys Page 36
