The Ruins

by Matt Rogers

  ‘Okay,’ Slater said. ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘I cannot have this conversation in English.’

  Despite his stoicism, Slater’s heart skipped a beat.

  He tightened his grip on the rifle.

  Of course.

  Didn’t think of that.

  He said, ‘I assume you’re one of the only ETIM soldiers in this region who speaks it.’

  ‘Almost the only one. And if there are others who speak it, I do not know them. All the information I need must be given to me in Uyghur. You will not understand it.’

  Slater knew exactly what it meant.

  He knew exactly what would be required.

  And it was the one thing he’d been determined not to do ever since the informant had betrayed him in Gaochang.

  To trust.

  Slater said, ‘How are we going to get around this?’

  ‘It is up to you,’ Mehmut said. ‘I don’t have to make the call. But then I would need to guess where the prisoners are being kept.’

  Slater lapsed into silence.

  In times like these, tough decisions had to be made.

  He put himself in Mehmut’s shoes.

  He would absolutely let his organisation know he was being held hostage if given the chance.

  He couldn’t risk it.

  But at the same time, he had no way to decipher Uyghur. His earpiece lay smashed in the sand amidst the Jiaohe ruins, and the only way he could contact Lars was to send written messages — his GPS device doubled as a satellite device, without the ability to initiate calls.

  He put that all together, and figured out a way forward.

  He said, ‘Mehmut, I’m going to ask you to do a few things. And you’re going to do them without hesitation or I’ll shoot you dead.’

  Mehmut said, ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you have a wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And a child?’

  ‘Yes. Two. A boy and a girl.’

  ‘Does your home have a landline phone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Give me the number.’

  Mehmut rattled off a string of digits. Slater slid the GPS device out of his pocket and entered them into a text box.

  He said to Mehmut, ‘Are you lying?’

  Mehmut said, ‘No,’ but he paused for a moment.

  Slater picked up the carbine and touched the barrel to the man’s head.

  14

  Mehmut shivered, and a bead of sweat ran down his forehead and trickled onto the steel.

  It got awfully cramped in the jeep’s interior.

  Mehmut sobbed.

  Slater said, ‘I know your family are important to you. But you have to do what I say, or I’ll kill you right here, and then they’ll have no-one to support them. Your call.’

  Mehmut fed him a new phone number. Entirely different from the first set of digits. Slater entered it into a new text box, and then repeated his line of enquiry.

  ‘Are you lying?’

  ‘No.’

  No hesitation this time.

  But Slater still didn’t trust the man.

  He said, ‘Take out your phone.’

  Mehmut retrieved a battered old Nokia from one of the baggy pockets in his khakis. Slater took it off his hands, and a thought crossed his mind.

  Can I get Lars on this phone?

  But then there was nothing which Mehmut could use to call his employer. They needed two phones in action at the same time.

  Slater regretted his failure to lift one of the dead ETIM soldiers’ battered phones off their bodies in the Jiaohe ruins. He’d figured he could use Mehmut’s phone to call Lars when the situation demanded it. He hadn’t anticipated anything like this.

  He scolded himself for his ineptitude.

  Then he dialled the number Mehmut had fed him, and waited for the line to connect.

  It was answered on the first ring.

  ‘Mehmut!’ a female voice cried.

  What followed was a long string of indecipherable Uyghur, but she sounded concerned, and she sounded genuine.

  Slater hung up the phone, and passed it back to Mehmut.

  Then he hit “send” on his own device.

  The number flew up to the satellites, and then back down to a desk owned by Uncle Sam.

  Slater said, ‘My employers will use that number to triangulate the position of your home. If I die in China, I’ve instructed them to blow your family to pieces with a drone. Now it’s in your best interests to see me succeed. You’re going to do everything you possibly can to help me retrieve the hostages, or I’ll make sure to murder you and your entire family — whether I have to do it myself, or my employers have to do it for me. Either way, it will be done if you lead me astray. Understand?’

  Mehmut drove with both shaking hands on the wheel to prevent himself from veering off the road due to stress.

  He nodded, his face pale, his eyes wide.

  Slater hadn’t relayed any instructions to Lars at all.

  But Mehmut didn’t need to know that.

  Sometimes, you had to pretend you were a monster to get the job done.

  Slater settled back in the passenger seat, lowering his guard as he realised he had Mehmut in the palm of his hand.

  15

  Mehmut made the call.

  It went off without incident.

  He was terrified of the alternative.

  He tried his best to disguise the panic in his voice as he spoke to his colleagues. He babbled in Uyghur, and waited for responses. Slater let him do as he wished. He knew the man wouldn’t dare to rebel. Not anymore. Not with the wellbeing of his family hanging in the balance.

  Slater didn’t even bother to check who Mehmut was calling. There was no feasible way to keep track of the dialogue, and he figured he had the necessary leverage anyway. So he sat back and kept a firm grip on the carbine and waited for a progress report.

  After ten minutes, Mehmut ended the call.

  Slater kept quiet.

  The man took a deep breath and said, ‘There are three of them. Their names, according to what they told my colleagues, are Samantha, Noah, and Ethan. They’re being held exactly where I thought they would be — in the Tian Shan mountain range. My organisation is planning to torture them in eight hours time, and film all of it. Then they will kill them on camera and upload it for the world to see. I will take you there before any of this happens. I promise.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘They believe you are in my custody. They asked me to pass the phone to one of the others, but I said they were all sleeping, and that you were tied up in the back seat. They didn’t like the sound of that, but they gave me what I wanted to know anyway.’

  ‘So there’ll be no suspicion when we arrive?’

  ‘As far as I can tell — no.’

  ‘That’s not good enough.’

  ‘I’m trying my best!’ Mehmut screamed, and Slater heard his voice waver.

  A twang of empathy stabbed Slater in the gut.

  But he silenced it, and once again pressed the carbine’s barrel to the side of the man’s head.

  ‘Hysterics won’t get you anywhere,’ he said, his voice monotonous, his demeanour ruthless.

  Mehmut said, ‘Please do not hurt my family.’

  ‘You were going to sit back and watch those kids get mutilated.’

  ‘It is not personal. It is political. It is for a cause.’

  Slater shoved the barrel harder into the side of the man’s head. ‘I don’t give a shit.’

  Mehmut openly wept.

  Slater lowered the carbine, and then he got angry.

  For real this time.

  Here was this man in tears over his predicament who seemingly couldn’t understand the hypocrisy at play. Mehmut had a family, and he probably loved that family dearly, but Slater imagined the three college dropouts had families that loved them equally.

  And Mehmut wouldn’t have said a word as his fellow ETIM extremists tore t
hem limb from limb.

  Slater said, ‘Take me to the camp, and pray I don’t cut your throat before we get there.’

  They lapsed into silence. Neither felt the urge to speak. Slater stewed restlessly in the passenger seat and did his best to control his rage, and Mehmut seemed to sense his life hung precariously in the balance.

  When Mehmut realised that mentioning his family hadn’t softened Slater, the man grew cold and emotionless. Slater slowly started to understand that most of their words to each other had been twin performances, operating in unison.

  But Mehmut did care about his family, because he drove Slater past endless locations that would have been perfect opportunities for an ambush.

  They passed the outskirts of Ürümqi half an hour later, and Slater stared in awe at the presence of civilisation. It felt like a hostile alien world out here, and when the three-million strong city loomed up out of the desert, he found it hard to believe it was real.

  The sun rose, warming the region, and the beautiful dawn sky revealed their path as they left Ürümqi behind and pushed forward into desolation.

  Slater saw the Tian Shan mountain range to the southwest, and he turned in his seat to give the towering buildings one final glance before they disappeared for good. Then it was back to the remote desert roads and the distant snow-capped mountains.

  The wind came slicing over the front windshield, battering both of them in their seats, and the desert flashed by faster and faster on both sides of the vehicle. Slowly, it turned from hot sand to cool rock. And then they were in a whole new biome, a couple of hours after speeding past Ürümqi.

  Over the incessant noise of the wind, Slater said, ‘I hope you haven’t reconsidered what I said before.’

  Mehmut turned to him, and Slater noted the man’s eyes were ice.

  Emotionless.

  Expressionless.

  Slater’s insides churned.

  He waved the carbine in front of the man’s face.

  He said, ‘I’m still the one with the weapon — even though you were faking all that emotion.’

  Mehmut said, ‘The emotion — yes. Prioritising my family — no. I am not a monster like you may believe. I thought you would fall for theatrics, but you didn’t. You are not as weak of an American as I anticipated.’

  Slater said, ‘Good to hear.’

  ‘I will take you to the camp. And I have not alerted them like you might suspect. They are expecting you as a prisoner, so they will have their guard down. That is all I can promise you.’

  ‘No more games?’

  ‘No more games.’

  Don’t trust anyone.

  It came back to haunt him.

  He turned away from the many faces of Mehmut and let the man focus on the drive. He couldn’t have been more uncertain. He didn’t know where the translator’s allegiances truly lay, or whether he was telling the truth about anything.

  Does he even have a family?

  Am I walking into a trap?

  Slater stiffened against the wind as the jeep climbed into the Tian Shan mountain range. It mounted an endlessly rising trail that weaved through snow-capped mountains. A shiver worked its way down his spine, and the temperature plummeted, and he found himself thinking, How the hell am I still in the same country?

  The sun no longer held its heat, and although the day was bright the weather was far from warm.

  And then, when it seemed like they might actually make it to the mountain camp in one piece, Mehmut jolted in his seat.

  Slater panicked, despite his best intentions not to.

  His heart leapt into his throat at the sudden movement.

  It was exactly what he’d been anticipating all along, but he was ashamed to admit he’d dropped his guard. He was focused on the alien landscape flashing past on either side. Not on the man in the driver’s seat.

  He had a tight grip on the carbine in an instant, and the barrel aimed at Mehmut’s throat in the next.

  And then he realised Mehmut hadn’t been trying anything.

  He’d been startled by something in front of them.

  Slater instinctively swung the carbine around to aim out the front windshield.

  Bad move.

  There were a convoy of vehicles across the road. Close to ten men milled around them. Probably more. Slater couldn’t get an accurate headcount with a single glance.

  He thought, Shoot.

  Mehmut had deliberately barrelled toward an ETIM roadblock.

  Of course he had.

  But that wasn’t right. Because Mehmut was just as startled as Slater by the appearance of the convoy. And as Slater looked harder, he saw black uniforms and black caps and black rifles in their hands — all the firearms state-of-the-art, all the clothes neat and pressed.

  Not terrorists.

  Government.

  Chinese authorities.

  Secret police.

  And then Slater really started to panic.

  16

  His brain raced a million miles an hour.

  Shoot?

  Fight?

  Surrender?

  Run?

  What the hell was he to do?

  Mehmut made the decision for him. The translator stamped on the brakes and slowed rapidly on the rural mountain trail and raised both hands high above his head, all at once. Slater looked across, then looked back at the convoy — all of the policemen were realising what was coming toward them and bracing for a war.

  They could recognise an ETIM vehicle when they saw one.

  Slater swore under his breath.

  He was a black man in the passenger seat of a known terror vehicle with an M4A1 carbine in his hands.

  The barrel was pointing out the windshield.

  There were little other ways to interpret the situation.

  Besides, what could he say?

  Actually, I’m not a terrorist. I’m a rogue U.S. government operative inserted into your country via HALO jump with an arsenal of weaponry.

  So he lowered the gun and put his hands in the air, too.

  The jeep slowed to a pathetic halt and then they were on him, like a swarm of bees, all ten of the secret policemen flooding the stationary vehicle. Slater saw at least five gun barrels in his face. He sighed, and lowered the carbine to the footwell, placing it between his feet. He looked each man dead in the eyes, subtly demonstrating that he planned to surrender.

  For now.

  Because he was more than aware of the lawlessness of the region. There were hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs imprisoned in “re-education camps” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He didn’t want to know what they would do to ETIM soldiers caught with weapons on them near a known insurgent camp.

  He also didn’t understand the relationship between the secret police and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

  The lack of intel had come around to bite him.

  He looked to Mehmut for anything resembling an explanation of what was about to happen.

  But Mehmut was largely preoccupied with getting the shit beaten out of him.

  Three secret policemen in their black caps dragged him over the lip of the driver’s door and threw him to the trail. There was frantic babbling in a language unknown to Slater — back and forth between Mehmut and the police. One of the bigger policemen soccer-kicked the translator in the face — a couple of teeth flew out of his mouth, and blood sprayed from between his lips.

  Slater tensed up.

  No-one had laid a hand on him yet. He chalked it up to a number of reasons. Mehmut was a smaller, scrawnier, pastier man. Slater was big and bulky and looked menacing as hell, and his skin was noticeably darker than any of the Uyghurs in the region. He was an anomaly as far as the police were concerned.

  He could see them glancing at each other, wondering if they should go the same route as their colleagues.

  Mehmut gulped back a mouthful of his own blood and said something inflammatory.

  And he pointed an accusatory finger at
Slater.

  Slater stared back at him.

  Stared right into his soul.

  Thinking, That’s the way you want this to go?

  And Mehmut seemed to actually reconsider it. He saw the demonic look in Slater’s eyes, and probably thought, Maybe my instincts weren’t right. Maybe I shouldn’t throw him under the bus.

  So he started trying to backtrack, to take the blame off Slater, but it was already too late.

  The three policemen standing around him screamed at their comrades, and suddenly Slater had three pairs of hands on his shirt.

  They hauled him over the lip of the door, which took considerable effort. He didn’t fight back. There were still guns in his face.

  His world became a chaotic mess of wind and dirt and fists. He landed on the hard earth on his rear, and tried to get himself into a seated position before the first of the blows rained down, and fought to ignore the sobering fact that if there were no guns in the mix he could beat all of them to death with his bare hands.

  He adopted a turtle-shell style defence, covering the sides of his head with his meaty forearms, preventing any punches from connecting behind his ears and knocking his equilibrium off. So the majority of the shots he took were superficial, and they came from untrained opposition, who were by overwhelming majority small and skinny and wiry. A couple of well-timed punches slipped through his guard, darting between his forearms, and one cut him just above the eyebrow. He blinked hard as warm blood flowed down into his eye.

  On the other side of the jeep, he heard Mehmut screaming.

  It was chaos.

  Utter chaos.

  Somewhere in the midst of the beating, he counted how many policemen were there on his side of the car.

  Three raining down punches.

  Two holding rifles.

  Five total, with three on the other side.

  Only eight.

  Not ten.

  I can handle that.

  Another punch slipped through and cracked his nose. He couldn’t tell if it was broken or not, but it stung like hell, and his eyes watered involuntarily. That threw his co-ordination off for a moment, and another punch opened the cut above his eyebrow, rupturing the skin.