“Yes, miss,” he said.
“If they find you and ask why you can’t help them, tell them you can’t do anything without the Internet.”
Over Babur’s shoulder, Dagmar saw a smile flash across Ismet’s face.
“And if their car has a mechanical problem,” Dagmar said, “I would also be very grateful.” She leaned a little closer and spoke over the sound of the jet. “If this works out to my satisfaction,” she said, “I will give you another bonus payment when I return the Niva.”
Babur’s head bobbed.
“Yes, miss,” he said. “Very good.”
Baggage was loaded into the Niva. Dagmar was nervous about loading guns into the car right in front of the customs inspector, but he never looked up from whatever document he was reading.
They also took everything from the jet’s refrigerator that didn’t require cooking: bread, crackers, cans of beluga caviar, cold cuts, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, some beautiful Italian heritage pears, soft drinks, Rock Star, and bottles of water.
They figured they wouldn’t have time to stop at a restaurant for a leisurely meal.
The cabin attendants, wearing identical bemused expressions, loaded the spoil into plastic sacks and handed it over. Dagmar said good-bye to Martin on the runway apron.
“You might want to hire a guard on the plane till we leave,” she said. She had to shout over the sound of the Turkish jet cruising low over the airfield, one wing tipped down so the crew could view the runways.
“Sorry?” Martin said.
“That plane.” She pointed. “They’re going to want to kill us. Don’t let them sabotage the jet.”
Comprehension stitched its way across Martin’s features, as if different parts of his face got the message at different times. Dagmar managed to restrain her laughter; then she shook his hand and ran for the Niva.
They drove Babur to his office near the field and left him counting his pound notes.
“You did that very well,” Ismet said. “I couldn’t have improved on it.”
“He’s not the first guy I’ve bribed. You should have seen me handing hundred-dollar bills to New York’s finest when we did the Harry’s Crew live event in Washington Square Park.”
“I expect you just gave Babur a month’s salary or more.”
Dagmar touched the evil eye amulet that dangled from the rearview mirror. “Let’s hope that the men in that plane don’t have much cash on them.”
Zarafshan had an antique feel. The roads weren’t in good condition. The town was filled with enormous squat Soviet-era apartment blocs, not all in good repair. They seemed a similar vintage and shared some of the impersonality of the buildings at Akrotiri. One of the buildings seemed to have burned in the country’s latest flurry of post-Karimov adjustment.
On the road, a host of vintage Toyotas, Renaults, and Protons testified to a thriving gray market in automobiles. Some of the buildings had metal-and-plastic signs that reminded Dagmar of old Californian road signs from the 1950s, with stylish rockets, satellites, and planets. Decor from the Atomic Cafe.
“The Zap has bombed this place back to the Space Age,” she said.
Ismet smiled. “Good line,” he said.
“I stole the sentiment from a Richard Buttner story.”
Dagmar craned her head to see if she could find the Turkish airplane. It was on approach to the runway, dropping toward the ground with wheels extended.
She hoped Babur and his fellow employees were having a wonderful time, somewhere else.
Then Zarafshan simply ended, and they were in the Kyzyl Kum, on a two-lane blacktop, old and patched but absolutely arrow straight. Massive, soaring alloy towers carried power lines alongside the road, marching off to the vanishing point on the horizon, the setting sun turning the insulators to red jewels.
On the edge of the desert was a Soviet-era tank, abandoned and with dust drifting over the treads. The huge gun pointed at empty desert. The crew seemed to have just parked it there one day, left, and never returned.
The Niva’s engine screamed. The four-by-four rattled, bumped, jounced. The tires thundered on the patched road.
“I don’t think I can get above a hundred ten,” Ismet said. “The engine isn’t big enough, and it’s old.”
That was something like seventy miles per hour, Dagmar calculated. Not too great.
“Let’s hope the… the black hats… don’t get a faster car.”
She should have ordered a BMW or something, she thought. Attila could afford it.
The desert was reddish sand covered with sparse grass and scrub. Sometimes there were dunes, but mostly it was just flat. Dagmar saw sheep, goats, and occasional camels, their two humps drooping like old, shaggy haystacks.
There were occasional oases, with mud-brick buildings on perfectly straight Soviet-engineered local roads. The fields were very green until the green simply ended, and there the red sands began.
As the sun settled on the horizon the desert took on a brief, roseate beauty, the shadows stark, the sand glowing watermelon red. And then, the sun gone, everything began to fade through gray to black.
Dagmar wondered what the Turks following them were actually after. Would they try to kidnap Slash in order to silence him or simply kill him? Or were they after her and Ismet?
She supposed they’d take whatever they could get. There didn’t seem to be a lot of law and order here.
She wondered if the men who had killed Judy were among them. The thought made her turn in her seat, rummage through the bags behind them, and produce a pistol. She fed bullets into a magazine, then slipped the magazine into place with a satisfying click.
They were the second team, she reminded herself. The first team had gotten arrested in Berlin.
The thought didn’t make her feel any safer. She loaded a second magazine anyway, then put the pistol and the spare in the holster.
They paused after a couple hours. Full night had descended, with a chill wind that cut through Dagmar’s thin leather jacket as she stepped into the desert for a quiet, private pee. When she returned, she found Ismet assembling and loading the shotgun and the other pistol. Then she ate a hard-boiled egg, took a swig of Rock Star, and got behind the wheel.
The Niva would not win prizes for comfort, but it got the job done. The manual shift stuck a bit and the wheel punched her hands every time the vehicle hit a bump, but none of the gauges were in the red and the engine kept turning despite what sounded like its desperate wails for help.
She knew she had to make a left turn here somewhere. She had gotten the latitude and longitude from a Google Earth map and programed these into the GPS on her handheld, but the numbers were, she suspected, fairly approximate. Ismet seemed somehow to have fallen asleep.
There were always tracks leaving the road, most of them probably going to someone’s sheep camp. She didn’t know which, if any of them, she should take.
If all else failed, the Niva was perfectly capable of driving cross-country.
When the turn finally came she sped right past, then braked and skidded to a stop. Ismet gave a cry and stared wildly in all directions, looking for attackers. It took Dagmar several tries to find reverse with the shift, and then she backed to where a sign pointed to Chechak, giving the name in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.
The turnoff was dirt and broad enough for two trucks to pass abreast, not just a two-rut track like most of the others. The sign was wood and had been jammed in the earth fairly recently, presumably to guide trucks bringing supplies to Slash Berzerker’s IT project.
Dagmar put the Niva into four-wheel drive-fortunately she didn’t have to get out of the vehicle and mess with locking hubs. Then she jammed her foot down on the accelerator and felt the Niva lurch forward. She steered into the sign and the bullbars smashed it flat with a satisfying crack of splintered wood. Grinning, she steered onto the turnoff and punched the accelerator again. She looked over her shoulder and could see red sand flying in the taillights as the wh
eels threw up a rooster tail to mark their passage.
The road was mostly sand, but heavy vehicles had compressed it and the four-wheel drive wasn’t necessary for traction. She shifted into rear-wheel drive and was soon moving as fast as she dared, about fifty kilometers per hour, dodging potholes and drifts, the back end of the Niva fishtailing through her last-second swerves. The road was for the most part straight, but there were sudden and unanticipated turns or dips or climbs or places where the road had been washed out by a flash flood and she had to shift to four-wheel drive to get through it.
Her GPS showed her that she was getting closer to her destination.
And then the road took a precise right-angle turn to the left, completely unmarked and unexpected, and Dagmar was going too fast to stop or to make the turn. A wall of red sand appeared before them. The Niva struck the sand in an explosion of ruddy dust and suddenly they were airborne. Ismet woke with a yell. Panic flooded Dagmar as she felt weightlessness, and then the vehicle came down with a crash and she was thrown forward against her shoulder belt. Pain flared from forearms braced against the steering wheel. Her foot braced to shove the brake pedal all the way to the floor.
The Niva wasn’t moving. Dagmar sat gasping for breath, her heart hammering, a stretch of featureless sand stretching out before the headlamps.
“Are you all right?” Ismet said.
Dagmar blinked. “I think so.”
She looked around and saw that the vehicle seemed to be intact. She put the Niva into four-wheel drive, then shifted into reverse. Sand flew from the wheels, but the four-by-four wouldn’t move. The Niva wouldn’t go forward, either.
“Let me see what’s happening.” Ismet opened his door and stepped out. A blast of icy wind blew into the vehicle, and Dagmar shivered. Ismet circled the Niva and then came to Dagmar’s door. Dagmar rolled down her window, then shivered to another cold gust.
“We’re hung up,” Ismet said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Rage flooded her veins. Dagmar freed herself from her shoulder belt and stepped out onto the Kyzyl Kum.
Sand had been piled just where the road turned, a man-made dune that had since been sculpted into smooth curves by the wind. Either the sand had been scraped from the road and just dumped there or it had been placed there to stop cars that failed to make the turn, a duty that it had performed with faultless efficiency.
The Niva had climbed to the top of the dune, then lost momentum and hung itself on the crest. The sand supported the frame at its midpoint, with the wheels dangling off to either side, unable to gain enough traction to move the vehicle.
“Shit fuck shit!” Dagmar restrained herself from kicking the tires.
“We could dig it out,” Ismet said. “Do we have a shovel?”
A search revealed that a shovel was not part of the Niva’s standard equipment.
“We’ll have to use our hands,” Dagmar said. She was frozen to the bone and was keeping her teeth from chattering only with effort.
Ismet peered out into the night. He pointed. “I see a light out there,” he said. “I can’t tell how far it is, not over a flat desert. But they probably have a car or a truck, and we might be able to rent it.”
Dagmar narrowed her eyes and peered at the light. It was faint and seemed to glow from somewhere on the edge of the world.
“I’ll walk it,” Ismet said. He pulled the hood of his windbreaker over his head, then looked back at Dagmar. The headlamps gleamed off his spectacles. He touched her arm.
“Get in the car and stay warm,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”
Dagmar could only nod in agreement. Ismet equipped himself with a water bottle and some of Dagmar’s hundred-pound notes and walked off into the darkness. Dagmar got back in the Niva and cranked up the heater as far as it would go.
As the heater filled the cabin with warmth she began to regret not going off with Ismet. The Turkish gunmen, she thought, could arrive while Ismet was away, and they would see the Niva illuminated in the white splash of its own headlights. If they stopped to investigate, Dagmar would have a hard time explaining that she was just an innocent tourist who took a wrong turn.
She could become less conspicuous by turning off the lights, but then Ismet might not be able to find his way back.
Thoughts of the Turkish assassins sent her digging for her pistol. It had flown forward in the crash and ended up in the footwell. She clipped the holster to her belt. Her search had revealed some of the food they’d plundered from the Gulfstream, and so she made herself some sandwiches with the cheeses and cold cuts and ate them.
She decided that if she saw or heard a car coming, she’d turn off the lights, run into the desert, and hide. If it was Ismet, she’d emerge. If it wasn’t, she’d wait for the newcomers to leave.
The cabin was pleasantly warm. She unzipped her leather jacket and reclined the seat. Pain throbbed in her forearms. The desert stretched ahead of her in the headlights, featureless, monotonous. Dagmar closed her eyes.
She must have slept, because she came awake suddenly to the sound of metal on metal. She looked around wildly, clutched at the pistol, and threw the door open. She jumped onto the sand, hand still on the pistol, her head swiveling madly as she tried to make out where the sound was coming from.
“Dagmar, it’s me.” Ismet’s voice.
She sagged with the release of terror. She stepped away from the Niva and saw two large moving shapes looming against the Milky Way. A sound like an enormous belch sounded in the air. In sheer astonishment she beheld a pair of Bactrian camels, their breath steaming in the air.
“This is Ulugbek,” Ismet said from atop the camel on the right. “I found him at his sheep camp. His brother is away with the truck, so we rented these instead.”
From out of the darkness she saw Ulugbek’s smile under a dark mustache. “Assalomu alaykum!” he called.
“Gunaydin,” she ventured, not knowing if the Turkish greeting would translate or not.
Ulugbek kicked one leg over the front hump of his camel and dropped to the sand. He wore boots and a parka with a MontBell label. He approached Ismet’s camel, gave it a series of clucks and commands, and compelled it to kneel. Ismet dismounted awkwardly, staggered on the sand, and recovered.
Ulugbek approached Dagmar and gave her a warm, extended hug. “Hayirli tong!” he said cheerfully. He smelled pleasantly enough of strong tobacco. At a loss for what to do, she patted him on the back.
Ulugbek hugged her twice more, then set to work. The camels were already wearing leather harnesses-that’s what Dagmar had heard jingling-and Ulugbek hooked them to nylon towing straps, which he then attached to the Niva’s rear bumper. The camels farted and belched. Dagmar and Ismet watched, both shivering in the cold.
“We and the black hats are in a low-speed chase,” Dagmar said. “We’re moving at camel speed.”
“Camels can go pretty fast,” Ismet said. “I just found out.”
Ulugbek gestured for someone to get into the Niva. Dagmar did so and put the four-by-four into reverse. Ulugbek gave a yell and began hitting the camels with a stick. The animals lurched forward into the harnesses, Dagmar gunned the engine, and the Niva rocked back. Red sand flew from the wheels.
It didn’t work; the Niva was still hung on the sand. But Ulugbek had thought ahead and strapped a shovel to his saddle. More sand flew as he dug sand from beneath the Niva, and then the camels were driven forward again.
Still the Niva didn’t move. Ulugbek was indomitable: he shifted more sand, then geed up the camels a third time. The Niva lurched backward, then hung. Ulugbek applied himself to the shovel, and more sand flew.
The eastern horizon was turning pale before the Niva finally came free. Ulugbek unhooked the tow straps, then came to Dagmar’s door. Dagmar opened the door, and Ulugbek stepped forward and embraced her.
More hugs were in order, apparently. Dagmar submitted with a good grace despite the fact that Ulugbek’s efforts at digging had left him covered in sand a
nd sweat. Ismet tipped Ulugbek a can of caviar and then waved farewell as Dagmar gunned the engine and sped in the direction of Chechak.
Ismet sagged in his seat. “My god,” he said. “I never want to ride a camel again.”
“Was it painful?”
“It was too far above the ground,” Ismet said. “I was afraid I’d fall off and break an arm.”
When the rising sun at last blazed above the horizon, it showed a dark blotch on the watermelon red sands, a black oasis lying under chalky sandstone mesa. A cluster of receiver dishes and a cell phone tower stood atop the bluff.
“We’re there,” Dagmar said.
Ismet looked at the new world and yawned.
“Should I open a can of caviar?”
“That might be a little premature. Have a pear.”
The oasis grew closer. Houses of mud brick lined roads of sand. There was a general store with gas pumps out front, a coffeehouse, a tiny mosque with a metal dome that looked prefabricated, and several obese dogs lying in the early morning sunshine.
Dagmar slowed as she came into the town. Her GPS said that they had arrived. Wind blew the Niva’s rooster tail of dust over the car, and she peered through the ruddy dust. The town’s two commercial businesses both seemed closed. No one was yet on the streets.
In the sudden silence, she heard a tinkling waterfall sound. She wondered if it was wind chimes or perhaps a fountain.
She tried to phone Uruisamoglu for directions, but the cell network was down.
“God damn it!” she said.
“Go to the mosque,” Ismet said.
As she drove to the mosque she discovered the source of the tinkling sound: goats’ bells, each tuned to a different note. The herd passed in front of her, urged on by an elderly man in felt boots and an olive green Russian army anorak trimmed with rabbit fur.
More elderly men were found at the mosque, where the dawn service had just ended. They stood in their white skullcaps, carrying their beads and talking with one another. Ismet got out of the Niva, approached, and had a lengthy conversation. He got back in the Niva and gestured toward the bluffs.
“Slash is only in the most obvious place for an IT guy,” he said.
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