To everybody’s intense disappointment, Rakhim ordered us to stay on board with our seat belts fastened. He didn’t trouble to inform us that the plane was going to take off again with us still captive, but I deduced that from his order. One of his goons took the trekker’s hat and threw it outside with a remark that had to mean, “I’m not flying any farther with that stench.”

  That guy then trained his pistol on us, while Rakhim still held the pilot at gunpoint. Not the best circumstances to attempt an escape; Ben and I would have to unfasten our seat belts to teleport back to Merzadeh, and that would give this bastard plenty of time to shoot at least one of us. And what would they do to the other hostages?

  The woman who’d screamed was sobbing quietly behind me. While our captors were busy loading something onto the plane and refueling it, I took the opportunity to twist around in my seat and get a look at her.

  It was another oh shit moment: there was a toddler on her lap. I remembered the cavalier attitude Omar al-Zanji had taken towards his child hostages – particularly the threat of executing them if we didn’t call off the rescue attempt – and felt almost sick enough to throw up, myself. Between fear and the picture of the co-pilot’s shattered head, which would probably remain etched on my brain for the rest of my life, I had a hard time restraining that urge.

  The fact that, unlike the trekker, I didn’t have a hat to vomit into probably helped even more than the knowledge that it would make me miserable, show weakness in front of these bastards, and help nobody.

  Sitting beside the young mother was a beardless Taklan man. Probably not allied with the others, since he wasn’t wearing a face fungus to show off his piety. Good. (I was having a really hard time finding good things about our present situation, especially now that it appeared we weren’t to be released here. Wherever ‘here’ was.) The man was patting the baby’s back and crooning a little song in some foreign language, probably Taklan or Russian.

  I stuck a hand between Ben’s seat and mine. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Thalia Lensky.” Lame. Couldn’t I come up with anything more encouraging? The mother was probably going to cry even harder once she realized how useless Ben and I were.

  “Are they going to kill us next?”

  “I don’t think so. They could have done that at Merzadeh Airport if they’d wanted to.” Oh, great, Thalia. Reassure the woman by telling her our captors could be even worse. “I think we’re hostages. They’ll keep us alive and probably take pretty good care of us; we are their best chance of getting away.” I rubbed my cheek. I didn’t completely believe that myself. But at least she stopped sobbing.

  “Do you really think so? – Oh,” she said, before I had to answer that question with more reassuring half-truths, “I’m Penny Nicholson. And this is my son Ryan. We’re going – we were going to join my husband at the border post in Lairon.”

  “I am Koshan Idrisov,” said the young man beside her. In English, thank God. “I was supposed to guide these two –” he jerked his chin towards the trekkers seated across the aisle “—to meet up with the Lakes of the Pamirs trek. We were going to disembark at Darvoza. That is the only other real airport in Taklanistan, you know?”

  Penny nodded. “I was supposed to get a ride in a jeep from there to Lairon. Oh, Jim—” She sniffed and her eyes filled with tears.

  Koshan patted her hand. “Now, now. We may still be freed at Darvoza. These small airplanes do not have very much fuel, I think. Our captors will have to go far to be out of reach of the army, and they may not wish to use up fuel to carry our weight past Darvoza.” And even more weight was being loaded now, in the form of smallish boxes that the terrorists lifted and set down with grunts of effort suggesting that the boxes were indeed filled with something heavy. Like books. I didn’t think.

  “Oh, do you really think so?” Penny Nicholson said again.

  “It seems very likely,” said the trekking guide. His eyes met mine, and I could tell that he was thinking the same thing I was. They could as easily dispose of the extra weight, and at less risk, by killing us and throwing our bodies out of the plane.

  The plane’s engines roared to life again, and the two goons sat down quickly at the back. The takeoff was so short that I gripped the armrests of my seat. It felt like we were rising at a forty-five degree angle. Was this plane, with all its extra cargo, able to take off so sharply?

  A glance out the window explained it, sort of. The so-called runway where we had landed and taken off was a frighteningly short strip of asphalt. The tall, pale grasses at the end of the asphalt strip were bowed to the ground; the pilot must have taken off at the last possible moment. I breathed a short prayer of thanks for the skill of the pilot.

  I don’t remember exactly how long we were in the airplane for this second trip; I was too busy, alternately distracting little Ryan (who was through sitting on his mother’s lap, and made his displeasure so clear that I was afraid one of the goons would be irritated enough to shut him up) and trying to control my stomach and the urge to scream as the plane zigzagged through those barren mountains that I’d admired – when looking at pictures of them. When the window showed those mountains so close that I was afraid the wings of the plane would brush against them, they didn’t look nearly so beautiful.

  At least we were allowed to talk now; the goons had stretched their legs out and were trying to sleep, although hands still resting on their guns were a warning against attempting anything. In any case, I don’t think any of us thought that starting a fight in a small plane that was playing tag with mountains would be a good idea.

  As we got farther into the mountains, the plane rose higher and we became unhappily aware that the cabin was unpressurized. Ben and one of the trekkers complained of headaches, and the trekker said he felt nauseated.

  “Try not to throw up,” his companion and I said simultaneously.

  “Think of something else,” Koshan advised. “And do you happen to have any energy bars in your packs? It might help to nibble on one.”

  The trekker – really, it was absurd that we hadn’t even exchanged names yet – rummaged in the pack at his feet and came up with a colorfully wrapped fruit bar. Without the wrapper it looked much less attractive, a brownish stick with a rough texture, but he broke off half of it and nibbled a minuscule bite at a time and started to look much better. He offered the other half to Penny, who encouraged Ryan to gnaw on it. This had a wonderful effect in calming the kid and led to a sociable exchange of names. I learned that our companions were George and Tommy. They had chartered the plane because they’d been too late for the start of the trek they’d signed up for. They had hoped to get to Darvoza ahead of the others and wait for the group there. As for Koshan, he was being flown out to meet the same party, to replace a guide who had fallen ill and returned to the capital.

  “How long do you think until we reach Darvoza?” I asked Koshan.

  He looked unhappy. “Darvoza… is not in the high mountains. Also it is north-east of Merzadeh, and we are traveling east only.” He glanced behind him, at the mystery boxes that had been loaded at our previous stop, and looked even more unhappy. For fear of upsetting Penny again, I decided not to press him. He might, after all, simply have been bummed out by the prospect of losing the paying job he would have picked up in Darvoza.

  Tommy, the trekker who’d thrown up on the first flight, provided a distraction by going through his own pack and pulling out a wool shirt which he offered to Penny. She wrapped up Ryan and Koshan took the toddler on his lap for a bit of a change. Now warm, and chewing (and dribbling) on the piece of fruit bar, he was cheerful again and I think we all felt happier for looking at him.

  I wouldn’t have minded having that warm, wriggling little body on my own lap for comfort, but it would have been foolish to disturb him when he was so happy with Koshan. Besides, I reminded myself, the dribbling was reaching epic proportions, and I really didn’t need to get my shirt soaked with baby drool. I had a feeling it might be some time before I got a change of clothes.

  When the plane started to descend again, I made the mistake of looking down. All I could see was snow and rocks. We got closer to the ground, and now all I could see was rocks. This wasn’t airplane territory! It wasn’t even helicopter territory.

  I heard a sharp click behind me and twisted around to find that Koshan had unfastened his seat belt. I started to ask if he’d lost his mind and then saw what he was doing: pulling out the belt so that he could put it around Ryan as well. “These little ones are so light, they can bounce around the cabin in a rough landing,” he said quietly.

  That rough it was going to be?

  Oh, yes. I didn’t even have time to dial up the panic a notch when we slammed into rocks, bounced into the air again, hit more rocks and came to a shuddering halt approximately eighteen inches from the mountain cliff that reared up in front of us. A door flew open; the sound of metal twisting filled the cabin, and there was a stink of burning rubber.

  Ryan began to wail. He also contributed a stink of his own to the air inside the cabin.

  “You bastard,” our pilot said bitterly to Rakhim. “I had a half share in this airplane.”

  Rakhim shrugged. “Now your partner will have a full share of the wreck,” he said, smiling, and shot the pilot.

  19. A broken city

  First the ground shook, then it seemed to swoop in a sickening curve, and then things began falling.

  Large, heavy things.

  Like walls.

  Like ceiling tiles.

  Like pieces of the roof.

  Lensky shook his head, half blinded by the dust that the collapsing roof had raised. Where was Gary? He’d been standing right there…

  Where there was, now, a jagged piece of roof and a spreading red stain.

  No.

  He plunged forward, got his hands on the roof fragment and heaved. Nothing moved. He put his head back and bellowed, “Help! I need some help here! There’s a man trapped!”

  A moment later he remembered how to say it in Farsi.

  Then he tried Polish. It should be close enough to Russian…

  Something worked. A pair of gloved hands slid under the fragment, next to his. On his other side, a man in a sweaty blue shirt hissed with effort. Slowly, slowly they levered up the fragment…

  “Can you hold it?” Lensky demanded, first in English, then in Farsi; then, as his mind started working again, in the local dialect.

  “Taklan. It’s a language, not a dialect,” Gary’s voice said in his memory as he dove under the trembling fragment, found Gary’s arms and pulled him out. There was blood, too much blood.

  “Where?” he demanded as his helpers let the roof fragment crash down again.

  “Just my head,” Gary said with a twisted grin. “Too hard to damage. You know how scalp wounds bleed.”

  His face was half white with plaster dust. The other half was nearly as white. And when he tried to stand up, his right leg buckled under him and he collapsed. Lensky felt along the leg; just below the knee there was an unnatural swelling, and when he pushed on it ever so lightly Gary screamed.

  “Ambulance! I need an ambulance!”

  So did far too many others, many of them hurt worse than Gary.

  They made the jolting ride to the hospital in a rusted-out sedan belonging to the man in the blue shirt. Lensky never did find out his name.

  In a hallway filled with gurneys, a white-coated man cut off Gary’s pants leg to reveal what looked like a very bad break, took Gary’s pulse, and said, “Not an emergency. He can have some pain medication. A doctor will set that when he has time. It may be some time; do not let him move that leg.”

  The man who drove them to the hospital had scooped up his sport coat and thrown it over Gary when he started to shiver. Now, when someone brought blankets for Gary, Lensky retrieved his coat, slipped it on and buttoned it up so that he looked at least halfway respectable. Looked like someone that doctors would listen to. At least it covered up the Glock on his hip.

  It didn’t help. Everybody was working desperately on more serious cases, people who wouldn’t make it if they didn’t get treatment right now.

  Time crawled. Gary made lame jokes, then fell silent. Suddenly his eyes flew open. “Yuldashev,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Kambiz Yuldashev. I was to meet him this afternoon. You’ll have to go.”

  “I don’t have time. Thalia—”

  “The radar guys don’t know where the plane landed. Yuldashev might know where Rakhim would flee to. You have to go.” Gary gave a street address and an apartment number, and Lensky jotted the information down on his arm.

  At last they wheeled his gurney away, and Lensky fell onto a wooden chair and started thinking again. Would Gary be kept at the hospital? He couldn’t wait. He would miss the appointment.

  He buttonholed a woman in a white uniform and demanded to know what would be done with the patients after emergency treatment. He extracted a promise that yes, if he was discharged after treatment the American could stay at the hospital until someone from the embassy came for him. “Though he will have to go back out to the hall again,” she warned him. “He is not hurt badly enough to be given a room.”

  “How do you know?” She hadn’t even been there when the doctor did his one-minute appraisal.

  She gave him a pitying look. “If he was not taken for treatment until now, he is not one of the really bad cases. They get the rooms… those who live.”

  There were more people piling in through the emergency entrance now, injured people from the other side of the city and their families screaming for help. Just how bad had this earthquake been, anyway?

  Never mind – it was over now. But the delay had been almost too long; he glanced at the clock on the wall, realized that he would have to hustle to meet Gary’s informant. Lensky pulled the coat sleeve back over his arm and walked outside.

  To his surprise, he was able to get a taxi almost at once. Every driver had been taking wounded people to the hospital; the one he waved down was happy to get a paying fare back to downtown. He was somewhat less happy when it transpired that Lensky actually meant downtown, where there was some serious earthquake damage, rather than the fringe of the commercial district. But he kept his bargain, and even agreed when Lensky asked him to wait outside the apartment building for a few minutes.

  A splash of water to rinse the worst of the dust off his face and hands, a clean shirt, an extra clip for the Glock, and he put the dusty sport coat back over his holstered weapon. Time to get on with it.

  “6122 Street of January 14,” he told the driver.

  The man looked surprised. “You are sure? Is not nice neighborhood for Americans.”

  “I’m sure, and twenty ergashis on top of your fee if you get me there before…”

  His watch was smashed. When had that happened? “In twenty minutes,” he substituted.

  Too many streets were blocked with wreckage. The driver took him on a wild ride, tires squealing in protest against the sudden turns required by impromptu detours. There was fallen masonry everywhere, and half the buildings were obviously damaged.

  And once, at a traffic light where armed guards were enforcing the traffic laws, he felt the taxi quiver for no apparent reason. An aftershock?

  Street of January 14 was in a district of Soviet-era apartment buildings that stood way too tall for an earthquake zone. None of the shoddily constructed towers seemed to have fallen down yet; the earthquake must not have been as bad here as at the airport. But it seemed like the entire population of the neighborhood was out in the street. The cab crept through the milling people until Lensky dug in his pocket, tossed the cab fare and the promised twenty-ergashi tip into the front seat, and said, “I’ll walk from here.” It would be faster.

  Would Yuldashev even attempt to make this meeting, or was he dealing with earthquake-related emergencies of his own? As Lensky drew closer to the address he’d been given, he saw an anomalous movement: someone was going into the tower that others were fleeing. He thought it was a man wearing a gray cloth coat. Yuldashev had been wearing gray on the day of the polygraph. But he wasn’t close enough to make a positive ID.

  Five pushing, swearing minutes later, Lensky reached the front door of the tower. Inside he was greeted by darkness. Of course. There was no electricity. And even if there had been, would he have wanted to trust himself to a poorly maintained, Soviet-era elevator?

  “Stupid question,” he muttered to himself. “If I had a sense of self-preservation, I wouldn’t be here to begin with.”

  At least the apartment was only on the fifth floor. Sweating with nerves as much as exertion, Lensky worked his way up the stairwell by the light of the one narrow window set in the wall at each landing. Twice he felt light aftershocks shaking the building. With the first one he paused to ride it out. With the second he paused, crossed himself, and remembered a prayer from his boyhood.

  The apartment door was ajar, a slightly lighter shadow in the darkness of the narrow hall. Lensky slipped inside and saw that Kambiz Yuldashev was standing there, as quietly as if he was waiting to buy a box of cigarettes.

  He pulled together enough Taklan to thank the man for his sense of responsibility in coming to the appointment under such difficult conditions.

  “They suspect me,” Yuldashev said. “You promised to take care of Tahmina if that happened.”

  Lensky thought of pointing out that they hadn’t actually had any information from Yuldashev yet, but he thought it would be useless. If the man believed he was under suspicion, it was unlikely that he’d be able to persuade him to resume his role as one of Rakhim’s loyal lieutenants. Besides, he couldn’t see abandoning an agent at risk just because little things like an earthquake and the start of a civil war got in the way.

  “Take her to the embassy,” he said. “I’ll make some calls. Give them my name if they give you any trouble. Perhaps you had better stay there too.”

  In his first show of emotion, Yuldashev began expressing his eternal gratitude to his benefactor, the savior of his family, the –”

 

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