by Fritz Galt
Bill Frost had once stood there, after having passed a monk and his girlfriend who were descending at the time.
Why would the gonzo environmentalist come to that remote spot that Sunday ten days ago? Aside from the military destruction nearly a century earlier, there was no environmental story there. In fact, it was as peaceful a spot as Jake had ever seen. Magical, in fact.
Maybe that was it. Even monks brought their girlfriends there. Bill had been described by his brother as having “a girl in every port.”
Maybe Bill Frost had already found a girlfriend his first week in Mongolia, and they had come there for a romantic getaway.
“Do you know if Bill had a girlfriend?” Jake called back to Matt, who had followed him up the hill.
“I only met him in passing when he checked in to the Best Western. He had no companion then.”
“Do Mongolian women go for Western guys?” he asked, thinking back to that lonely beauty in the coffee shop.
Matt shrugged. “It isn’t taboo, but Mongolian men sure hate it.”
“Hate it?”
“I’ve seen ugly knife fights erupt over outsiders touching Mongolian women.”
Jake focused on the errant environmentalist. “Do you suppose Bill Frost might have taken a date up here?”
“It’s conceivable. But you know, Mongolian women don’t go trolling for Western men.”
“So if he had a woman,” Jake said, “could she have been a foreigner?”
“That’s more likely. But I don’t know Bill Frost’s tastes or how he operated, and there aren’t many foreigners here. There are some call girls and escorts…”
The steep meadow hardly seemed like a place to bring an escort.
The body that had been shipped to the United States was that of a man, according to Supriya Rao at the FBI Lab. If there was a woman, she would have some story to tell, and may have even been hurt by the explosion.
“Let’s look for evidence of the blast,” Jake said. “Any blackened or recently broken rocks would indicate the spot.”
“This is a granitoid,” Matt said, studying a light-colored, coarse-grained rock. “Formed from magma, then broken down by glaciation.”
Jake forgot that he was talking to a science attaché.
The two climbed from rock to rock higher up the hillside. Jake climbed on all fours up the left side, and Matt took a less steep path to the right. They passed more bombed-out buildings, but none with signs of recent damage.
Jake sniffed the air for traces of gunpowder, but only got the clean scent of cedar. He was nearly at the start of the woods when Matt called out, “How about this?”
He held up a blackened boot.
“That could be relevant.”
Jake scrambled over and took the leather boot in his gloved hand. It was a tall cowboy-style boot like those he was wearing, except that the upper half had been burned off. He smelled the singed area.
“The scarring is recent,” he said.
He flipped it over and looked at the bottom. It had a high, slender heel.
“It’s a woman’s boot.”
He looked out over the broken meadow and let the implications sink in.
The pungent scent of burnt leather told a story. A woman had come up there. She had been hurt, perhaps even killed.
There was a lot that the Mongolian police hadn’t shared with the public.
Matt was still scouting around and suddenly stood up. “Here’s another one.”
He held up a second boot, less damaged than the first.
Jake weighed the boots in his two hands. They were a pair.
“Do you mind if I take them?” Matt said.
“What for?”
“Eve’s out here in slippers. She needs better footwear.”
Jake rolled his eyes. It wasn’t how he would process a crime scene in America.
But this wasn’t America.
He handed the boots to Matt.
He still had a hard time picturing what had happened up there. In their press conference, the Mongolian police had obviously lied to the public, and something sinister had happened. A Mongolian man had been killed, a woman’s boots blown off, and an American forced to flee.
If, as the Russians alleged, the Chinese had tried to kill Bill Frost, they had blundered badly.
“Look at this,” Matt said, and scrambled lower. The area was darker in color than surrounding stones and all vegetation had been blown off the thin, remaining layer of soil.
Matt tried to read something in Russian. “Sovetskiy…” He couldn’t make out the rest.
“Is that a fuse sticking out of that thing?” Jake said.
“I…believe it is.”
Matt gently set the unexploded tank shell back on the ground. He made sure to wedge a rock under the bullet-shaped casing so it wouldn’t roll down the hill and detonate in somebody’s face.
They had just unearthed unexploded ordnance from the 1930s that might go off under the slightest pressure. Other such ammunition likely littered the hillside, threatening the lives of future hikers.
They had also just discovered a possible cause of death.
If Jake had felt like he was retracing Bill Frost’s footsteps by coming to Mongolia, he was literally tracing them down the trail, over the stream, and through the trees back to the parking lot.
What would Bill Frost have thought in those traumatic moments after the blast?
Before it happened, Bill had told the embassy that he feared for his life. Maybe he didn’t know who was after him, but he might have guessed it was either the Chinese or Russians, given their poor environmental track record.
Then Bill had been enjoying a date with a fair maiden on the serene back side of a mountain when there was a sudden explosion.
Jake looked back and could still see the scar of the recent blast.
Bill and his date might have been hiking further uphill, for that was where Matt discovered the lady’s boots.
Maybe their driver was following at a respectful distance when he stepped on live ordnance. The explosion would have instantly killed the poor guy and thrown Bill and his date further away.
If Bill didn’t know how the explosion happened, he might have feared the worst. The Chinese or Russians were after him, and he had to run away or go into hiding.
The pair would have tried to disappear among the trees. They might have even contemplated climbing over the mountain to elude the assassins.
Jake had experienced that very situation when the Chinese gorillas were after him in Washington. The first thought was to get as far away as possible.
But the lady friend had lost her boots, and climbing on rocks and walking on a carpet of needles in bare feet or stockings might have proven difficult. So they hid among the trees and watched and waited.
When nobody pursued them, they eventually climbed back down the slope.
Jake looked ahead at the parking lot, clearly visible from that vantage point. There was the CDC mammalogist taking a swab of the cow’s tongue. Jake was relieved to see that no Mongolian police had followed them out of the city, and Bill Frost would be relieved that his was the only car in the parking lot.
Somehow Bill must have retrieved the car keys from their dead and dismembered driver and returned to the car with his girl.
Jake looked beyond the parking lot at the small village. There would be no way for Bill to hole up in that town, so they would have driven back onto the main road.
There they would have faced two options: turn back toward Ulaanbaatar or head south.
Jake remembered the veteran mining engineer on the train saying that there were only three paved roads out of Mongolia, two of them leading into China.
That, put together with NSA intercepts showing Amber in the Gobi, led to some tantalizing possibilities.
He turned to Matt. “How extensive are the highways in Mongolia?”
“Highways? You mean Western-style highways?”
“Yes.”
&n
bsp; “There are none. But in the past year, the government has broken their piggy bank by paving roads to all their aimag capitals. The last road built was this one, leading into the Gobi to Omnogovi aimag.”
Jake studied the thin ribbon of asphalt that curved out of town toward distant hills that disappeared in the sunlight.
“I think that’s where we’ll find Bill Frost.”
With Matt at the wheel and Jake riding shotgun, the troupe of scientists and diplomats headed over the last mountain pass before the desert steppe.
The backseat passengers remarked on what they saw out their windows. The aspen trees that crowned the rounded peaks, the herds of horses, goats, and sheep.
They had already left all signs of civilization behind. The big city seemed like an anomaly in a country that was dominated by nature and a big sky.
“This highway is less than a year old,” Matt said, as if reading his thoughts. “There hasn’t been time for towns to spring up alongside it.”
It would be a long time before the lonely stretch looked like Route 66.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Matt asked.
“Bill Frost has a white U-A-Z van.”
“We call it a ‘Waz,’” Matt said. “It’s the most common car in the desert.”
Jake could see there weren’t many cars, period.
Two hours out of town, the countryside was dry flatland with brown grass and less trash. There was only sky and land, and of that, there was more sky than land.
Jake saw the drooping forms of cattle silhouetted against a distant ridge.
A group of horses blocked the road. They just stood there and stared at the car. Matt honked and moved forward to prod them aside.
Every half hour, they saw a cattle herd, but many lay dead.
Then Jake saw his first herd of camels. With thick coats of dark brown or light tan hair that nearly draped to the ground, the two-humped beasts either stood imperiously or kneeled in the dust.
“Stop the car,” Professor Tracy Woolman said. “I want a swab.”
Jake left the warmth of the car to follow the intrepid research scientist.
As she approached the tall, proud animals, they became skittish and walked away.
Eventually, they came upon a young camel that was kneeling in the dry scrub.
It had a nose ring, indicating that it belonged to a herder, but no rope hung through the ring.
The little guy didn’t resist as Tracy approached talking calmly.
She reached out a cotton swab and poked around the camel’s lips.
“There, there,” she said, and promptly put the swab in a sealed tube.
“Now go and join your friends.”
But the camel just sat there.
“Aren’t you well?” she asked.
There was a droopiness to the camel’s eyelids. Not that familiar with Bactrian camels, Jake didn’t know if that was normal.
The scientist probed the baby camel’s fuzzy front hump.
“No fleas,” she said.
She returned to the car shaking her head. “No sign of the plague,” she said. “But that is not a well animal.”
Two hours later, the car continued its long, straight rumble over smooth pavement, a Buddhist prayer wheel swinging from the rearview mirror.
They had passed several more camel herds, with their owners nowhere in sight. It felt like entering the pre-agricultural age.
“Hungry anyone?” Matt asked.
They pulled into the capital of Dundgovi aimag. A modest town by any standard, Mandalgovi had its own pace of life, a few shops and banks, and a mixture of Toyota Priuses and Russian-made trucks. There on the Silk Road, East met West.
The large brick school was letting out for lunch, and children in uniforms ran down a new sidewalk to their houses in town. The sidewalk turned into gravel parking lots, and Matt found a roadside restaurant that looked like it would serve their needs.
Jake swiveled out of the car. He reached for the door frame to pull himself out, and Zap!
A jolt of static electricity shot up his arm.
For the first time, he realized how dry the air was. Even his lips were beginning to crack. He needed something to drink, fast.
The first thing he noticed when he entered the restaurant were gold balloons, some popped, spelling out “Happy Birthday” on a wall. The room was full of wooden tables under chandeliers with a coffee bar in the back. The staff seemed surprised that they wanted food, although it was lunchtime.
Jake left the diplomat to order and passed through the door marked Men.
Only after some splashing and other manly noises did he learn that the bathroom was for both men and women. He encountered Eve washing her hands at the back of the bathroom.
“Uh, hello, Eve.”
“Hello, Jake.”
There might have been two entrances to the bathroom, but it formed a U shape. One could enter a woman, and exit a man.
Several minutes later after downing his last spoonful of hot rice, Jake pulled out his phone. He was about to check his connection when something told him he was no longer holding a speaking device. He was holding a live location tracker.
Even if he made no phone calls, his map and weather and who-know-what other apps were sending out GPS signals every minute that the device was turned on.
He clenched his teeth and went straight to “Settings.” In the Privacy section, he turned off the GPS locator for all his apps.
Then he held down the power button until he strangled the device to death.
Based on Jake’s unpleasant and abrupt phone conversation with Hank Frost, Cal Frost was likely working with the CIA and the CIA had likely asked the NSA to track him. Did Cal Frost know that he was eating at the Dream restaurant?
He thought back to Detective Bold demanding that he and the scientists come out of the compound with their hands up. Just how close was Cal Frost, or the Agency for that matter, to the Mongolian police? Did they tell the police where he was and that the WHO and CDC inspectors were in town?
Now that the group had seen off the bus driver at the international school, how long before the detective put it all together? Did the police figure out that they had escaped in the school van? Had they interviewed the driver? Had the police already inventoried the cars in the school’s parking lot and questioned the staff about missing vehicles? How long before they would know about the biology teacher’s borrowed Land Cruiser?
Between the CIA and Mongolian police, Jake’s little group was going to be found sooner or later.
“Everybody, turn off your phones,” he said. “And finish up. We’ve got to keep moving.”
Halfway between Mandalgovi and the next big town, Matt had to slow down for a disabled vehicle on the side of the road. With no traffic in either direction for miles, he could have easily zoomed around it.
Then Jake saw why they were slowing down.
Parked on the gravel shoulder, it looked like a white bread loaf on wheels. There was nobody inside, but it fit the general description of Bill Frost’s rented Russian-made vehicle.
“It’s a UAZ,” Matt said.
Jake checked the license plate. He had forgotten the numbers in Supriya’s email, but the letters didn’t match. He was looking for “UNH,” and this license wasn’t close.
Suddenly a loud rumble cropped up quickly from behind, followed by the blare of a horn.
The only vehicle for miles was passing.
“No,” Jake said. “Go on. That’s not Bill’s van.”
Ten minutes later, they passed into a new aimag. The sign above the highway read “Welcome to Omnogovi,” complete with pictures of camels and dinosaurs.
After the welcome sign, they passed several gas stations, whose curbs and poles were striped red and white.
Then Jake saw it. The solitary booth and adjacent police car said it all.
They were approaching a police checkpoint. He studied the layout. There was a guard booth that they had to pass, then a
no-man’s land, then another booth a hundred yards later. Several trucks were parked in the no-man’s land.
“What’s going on?” Jake asked.
“Traffic checkpoint,” Matt said, tight-lipped.
Given that they were running from the Mongolian police, just the sight of a cop car made Jake nervous.
“Do we have to go through this?” he asked.
“If we want to follow Bill, we do,” Matt said.
Jake eyed the uniformed officer inside the first booth. “What are they looking for?”
“They check for sobriety and documents.”
Jake reflexively felt in his back pocket for his fake passport. “What sort of documents?”
“Don’t worry,” Matt said. “They only check your papers if you’re carrying cargo.”
A camera light flashed at the front of the car. The police had snapped a picture of them, likely entering the number of their license plate into an online database.
Matt pulled up to the booth and stopped just short of a red-and-white traffic gate. He rolled down his window.
The officer in the booth took one look at him and likely focused on Matt’s red hair. Then he grunted, and jotted something on a small piece of paper.
Jake watched to see if the man reached for the phone. But he didn’t. Instead, he handed the slip of paper to Matt and motioned for him to proceed.
They pulled through the gate and passed the trucks that were stopped for inspection.
Matt had to nose aside a herd of sick-looking cows that wandered through the checkpoint.
“Are cattle fed here?” Tracy asked.
Matt shrugged. “There’s no more grass here than out there.” He gestured toward the dry scrubland where all vegetation was gnawed down to its roots.
Jake stared at a cow that meandered on wobbly legs in front of them. It seemed either lost or delirious.
“Do they come here for water?” Tracy asked.
“Looks like they aren’t getting any,” Matt said. “The herds are scattered all over the countryside looking for water.”
He pulled up to the second booth and handed the ticket to the officer on duty.
“Herders have to drive dozens of miles each day just to get water for their herds.”
The officer studied Matt’s slip of paper and eyed the car. Then he disappeared into his booth.
