The Old Boys (51 page)

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.

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.

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 be 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.

Tarik and I armed ourselves from David’s bomb and gun shop in the back of the vehicle and set off on foot. The idea was that David and the others would wait by the car and follow on foot if I called on the satellite phone and told them they were needed. Tarik had spent his life climbing up and down mountains and he seemed to have unlimited breath and endurance. He moved too fast for me, but I only had to take two steps to his three, so I managed to keep up after a fashion. By the time the yurt came in sight I was gasping. My hands shook violently. Had an enemy popped up out of the ground, as I was expecting one to do at any second,
I probably would not have been able to hit him with a shotgun, and I didn’t have a shotgun.

The yurt had been burned. Only its charred poles were still standing. Apart from this dismal sight it was impossible to guess what had already happened or see what was happening now. A lot of shooting was still going on but the shooters all seemed to be in the prone position. The ground where we lay was so flat and so utterly lacking in cover that they couldn’t stand up or even crawl without being shot. Each side was sending out fire inches above the ground to keep the other flat on its collective face. At the rate at which ammunition was being expended I didn’t see how the fight could go on much longer, but who knew? If we were spotted, either side would fire on us as a precaution.

So far we hadn’t been seen, but this could change at any moment. Tarik took charge. He pointed to the hills and set off at a run without bothering to see if I followed. By now I had gotten my breath back, or enough of it at least to keep him in sight. I had not had a stitch in my side since school days, but I had one now. After a few more minutes I was reminded of another thing that every teenage runner knows about—the second wind. The stitch went away. I breathed easier, I stopped hearing the hammering of my own heart. My hands steadied, my knees stopped trembling.

A few hundred feet up the flank of the hill, Tarik found a vantage point. I flopped down beside him. We saw men in robes and red-checkered Arab head scarves on one side, men in Uzbek dress on the other. There were many more Arabs than Uzbeks, so many more that I wondered where they had all come from. They couldn’t possibly have fitted aboard the small executive jet parked on the tarmac at Ibn Awad’s camp. In the distance, sun flashed on glass. Through binoculars I counted ten pickup trucks parked in the distance. Ibn Awad had brought in reinforcements overland.

There were seven Uzbeks, one of whom was dead or soon would be, judging by the splotch of blood on the back of his shirt and the disjointed way in which he was sprawled on the ground.
I could see their weapons—the Belgian assault rifles Kevin and his men carried. But where were the Christophers? There was no sign of Lori or Paul or Zarah.

The impulse not to interfere was strong. As long as the two sides were firing at each other, we had relative freedom of movement. Freedom of movement was exactly what we needed if we were to have a prayer of finding the missing Christophers. On the other hand, Kevin’s team was on our side at least in theory, whereas Ibn Awad’s men were irrevocably our deadly enemies. If they won this skirmish, our life expectancy would shrink dramatically. But how to help the good guys? Tarik and I could hardly open fire from our aerie. We were at least half a mile from the battlefield. We could move off to the side and open enfilading fire, except that we’d have to stand up or at least kneel to do this and we’d almost certainly be filled with lead by both sides before we squeezed off a shot. I called David on the satellite phone and told him what was going on and what I thought he could do about it.

He said, “You’ll be the observer?”

“That’s right. Just stay on the phone. Do you remember how to do this?”

“I’ve got a vague recollection. And no doubt I’ll have a lot of advice.”

Minutes later the Old Boys’ vehicle came into view. Through the glasses I saw David jump out, run around to the rear, and start rummaging in the cargo compartment. Moments after that our lads were hustling forward, carrying heavy objects. They fitted these together as if they were an infantry squad that practiced this sort of thing every day instead of once every fifty years. Before I knew it they were ready to fire the Soviet mortar that I had ridiculed when David showed up with it the day before.