The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan (10 page)

T
he pirates who owned the
Shebelle
, a cargo ship in the port at Civitavecchia, near Rome, were not the kind of Jolly Roger pirates most people would have recognized. None of them owned a parrot, or carried a cutlass, or wore a three-cornered hat, or drank rum; most of them didn’t drink at all. Their flag was not a white skull and crossbones on a black background but a white star on a sky-blue background, which were the colors of Somalia, a country located in the so-called Horn of Africa, and that does indeed resemble the horn of a great white rhino gouging at the underside of the Arabian Peninsula and the countries of Yemen and Oman.

These modern pirates did, however, have a first mate called Mr. Khat, who wore a golden earring, and a captain with an eye patch called Rashid Ali Sharkey, and they were interested in treasure, although not the kind of treasure you put in a chest and bury on a remote desert island. For the Somali pirates, treasure wasn’t gold doubloons or pieces of eight but a substantial ransom paid by electronic transfer
into a no-questions-asked bank account in Switzerland, and they got it by demanding money from the families and governments of their kidnap victims — that is, when they weren’t hijacking oil tankers and smuggling wild animals for private zoos, or stealing high-value cars, or just thumbing their noses at the British Royal Navy.

Captain Sharkey was less than convinced about the merits of holding Groanin for ransom and, squeezed around the tiny desk in his cabin, he told Decebal that he might have preferred an American.

“Do you have any Americans?” he asked the young gangster.

“No, just this Englishman.”

“Pity.”

“Next time I’ll bring you a nice, fat American.”

“Do that,” said Captain Sharkey. “Only not a fat one, please. Americans might have plenty of money but they’re expensive to keep, mainly because they’re always eating, and you have to be very careful they don’t also eat into your profits.”

“So who are the best people to kidnap?” asked Decebal.

“Best of all to kidnap are your billionaires,” said Captain Sharkey. “Like Rashleigh Khan. Because they have the most money. A man such as he could lose a million dollars out of his back pocket and he wouldn’t notice. But the best race to kidnap are your Germans. They always pay immediately. Your French always pay, too, but it’s best to count the money carefully before you let the victim go. Your Australians are too well traveled and wise to get themselves kidnapped at all. Your Canadians are too dull ever to get themselves
kidnapped. Your Irish, they make better kidnappers than victims. As do your Italians. And of course, your Turks. Once I kidnapped a Swede and he was so miserable and cried so much I ended up letting him go because he was depressing me. This is the so-called Stockholm syndrome that you sometimes read about.”

“And the British?” asked Decebal.

Captain Sharkey shook his head.

“Your British are not at all good to kidnap,” he said. “They have principles, or at least that’s what they tell themselves when they refuse to pay a ransom. The reality is that they just don’t like spending money. Your Scots won’t ever pay at all, because they have no money in the first place. They’re even more mean than the English and that’s saying something.”

He thought for a moment. “And never ever kidnap a Russian,” he said. “They take it very personally and will make it the business of a lifetime to track you down and have some horrible revenge on you.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” said Decebal.

“You say this man Groanin is a butler, yes?”

Decebal nodded. “According to him he works for a very wealthy man called Nimrod. And has done for many years.” He paused. “So. Do we have a deal?”

“I don’t know,” said the captain. “I must seek advice on the matter.”

He shifted his eye patch and allowed a small golden scarab to crawl out of his empty eye socket.

Decebal tried hard to conceal his horror but it was no good; his jaw dropped like a drawbridge.

“Aiee,” he gasped. “What is that?”

Captain Sharkey lifted the back of his hand up to the beetle and allowed it to sit on his prominent knuckles.

“Say hello to my little friend,” said Captain Sharkey.

“You keep a beetle in your eye socket?”

“It’s the safest place for him,” said the captain. “That way I always know where he is. If I kept him in my pocket, I might easily sit on him.”

Decebal smiled politely and decided these Somali pirates were much tougher than he had ever supposed.

“But why keep it at all?”

“This is no ordinary beetle,” explained Captain Sharkey. “This beetle is the guardian of my future. He makes all my difficult decisions. Such as this one.”

Captain Sharkey pointed at the table on which two words were written, each at opposite ends.

“This is the Somali word for
yes
,” he said. “And this is the Somali word for
no.
When I do not know what to do, I ask the beetle and then put him on the table. If the beetle walks to yes, then that is the answer to the question; and when the answer is no, the beetle, he will walk there. Always he has led me in the correct way. Always his advice has been the right advice. I show you.”

The captain kissed the beetle’s back and then placed it in the center of the table.

“Ringo.” The captain shrugged. “That is the beetle’s name. Tell me, Ringo. This Nimrod. Is he as wealthy as the English butler says he is?”
The beetle hesitated for a moment, its antennae feeling the air thoughtfully. Then it walked, slowly but surely, toward one of the words written on the table.

Decebal, who neither spoke nor read Somali, shook his head.

“Which is it?” he asked. “Yes or no?”

“Ringo says yes, that this Nimrod is indeed wealthy.”

The captain picked the beetle up and kissed it again. “Very wealthy?”

Once again the beetle walked smartly toward the Somali word for
yes
.

The exercise was repeated twice more and in this way the captain concluded, quite correctly, that Groanin was loved by Nimrod, that he would certainly be missed, and that Nimrod might pay a substantial ransom to have his butler safely returned.

The captain picked up the beetle and kissed it for a fifth time.

“But is this English butler dangerous?”

Once again, the beetle walked toward the Somali word for
yes
.

“The Englishman
is
dangerous,” said the captain. “Interesting.”

“Nonsense,” said Decebal. “He’s harmless. You only have to look at him.”

“Are you calling Ringo a liar?”

“Er, no. But seriously, Captain, when you see the Englishman, you’ll understand for yourself. He’s fat and
he wears a bowler hat, like some comedian in an old movie.”

Captain Sharkey picked up the beetle and replaced it carefully in his empty eye socket. “I will look at this Englishman myself,” he said, and called for his first mate, Mr. Khat.

“Where did you put the Englishman?” he asked.

“In one of the stolen sports cars,” said Mr. Khat.

The three criminals went out of the cabin and looked down from a gangway into the cargo hold where six stolen Lamborghinis were parked.

Inside the yellow one, a Lamborghini Gallardo, Groanin’s left arm was handcuffed to the steering wheel. There was little room in the supercar and, trying to keep up his spirits, the butler was listening to a football match on the car radio. Manchester City, his beloved football team, was doing rather badly in a game against Inter Milan F.C. The game was not going well for City and by the time the fourth goal went into the back of the Manchester net, Groanin was in a filthy, violent mood and, like any normal disgruntled English football fan, was ready to take out his disappointment on anyone or anything, including a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car.

For some people, football matters more than almost anything.

“Oh, that does it,” growled Groanin. “It’s quite bad enough to be dragged around this flipping country by one hoodlum after another. But it’s more than a man can take to have to listen to his team playing like a bunch of schoolgirls.”

First, he pulled the steering wheel off with his abnormally powerful arm; then he punched out the windshield and climbed out of the car onto the hood. And seeing the logo on the front of the car’s elongated hood, Groanin realized that the car, like the team Manchester was playing, was Italian.

“I’ve had just about enough of Italians,” he shouted. “And all things Italian.”

Groanin proceeded to hammer a series of large dents into the hood with his big, clunking fist.

At this point, one of the Somali crewmen ran up to Groanin with a crowbar and was promptly thrown out of the cargo hold.

“You see? You see?” Captain Sharkey shook his head. “The man is dangerous.”

“I had no idea,” said Decebal, astounded that the butler appeared to be so strong and rather horrified that he had been ordering around such a man as this. “He is like Samson.”

“Then we had better find Delilah,” said Captain Sharkey. “And put him to sleep very quickly, or else I will have no cars to sell in Egypt.”

The captain said something to the first mate, who saluted and ran off to fetch something.

Meanwhile, Groanin lifted one of the front wheels of the Lamborghini and then turned the vehicle onto its side.

“Silly, stupid car, anyway,” roared Groanin. “Driven by silly, stupid people.”

Mr. Khat arrived back on the gangway with a tranquilizer gun and handed it to the ship’s captain.

“We keep this as a precaution,” explained Captain Sharkey. “Because we are transporting lions and leopards from Africa to private zoos. No self-respecting Russian billionaire can show his face these days if he doesn’t have his own big cat.”

He loaded the rifle with a dart, took aim at Groanin’s backside, and fired.

“Yaroo!”

Groanin plucked the tranquilizer dart from his substantial behind, flung it at another retreating crewman, and grinned fiercely as it speared the Somali’s earlobe.

“Double top,” he said with some satisfaction for, in his day, Groanin had been a skilled darts player.

But the damage to Groanin was done. A strong sedative was already coursing through the butler’s bloodstream. Then he yawned and sat down on the floor of the cargo bay and went to sleep.

“Ringo never lies,” said Captain Sharkey. “Clearly the man is dangerous. But equally, clearly he is also close to someone who is very wealthy. And who will pay for his safe return.”

“So does that mean we have a deal?” repeated Decebal.

“Yes.” Captain Sharkey handed Decebal an envelope full of money, which was the amount Decebal had agreed to for giving Groanin to the Somali pirates. “We have a deal.”

“Good.”

“There will be more,” said the captain, “if he fetches a good price.”

“How much were you thinking of demanding?” asked Decebal.

“One million dollars is a nice, round figure,” said Captain Sharkey. “I like this number.” He shrugged. “It’s what we always ask. We don’t always get that much but it’s a very good place to start.”

Decebal nodded. “One million dollars always makes people sit up and pay attention,” he said.

“Until then, we could use a new cabin boy. The last one fell overboard and was drowned. Or eaten by sharks. Possibly both. This Mr. Groanin can make himself useful on the voyage back to Somalia. Perhaps by then the cell phones will be working again and we can start to turn the screw a little. When we get to Port Said, I’ll send a letter to the British consul, explaining the situation. In that way, we shall get publicity and perhaps even more money.”

A
camel?” said Philippa. “Why a camel?”

“Yeah,” said John. He recalled a vividly unpleasant memory of his first animal transubstantiation, which had required his djinn-spirit self spending some time inside a camel’s body, in Egypt. The stink of being that camel still lingered in his mind’s nostrils, to say nothing of the taste in his mouth afterward. “And what’s a camel going to tell us that doesn’t sound like one enormous belch?”

“To understand that,” said Nimrod, “it’s necessary that I tell a sad story about the death of Genghis Khan. Not that there was anything sad in particular about him being dead, as he was a thoroughly nasty piece of work and seemed to take enormous pleasure in killing as many people as possible.
Sometimes whole cities were put to the sword when they resisted being conquered by him. Until the Nazis came along, there wasn’t anyone who managed to kill more people than Genghis Khan. No, there was something else that made it sad. At least, I’m certain that you, Philippa, will think so. This is certainly the saddest story that
I
ever heard.”

On the silky-soft carpet it was pitch dark with only a warm breeze in their faces to remind them all that they were actually flying through the air. Nimrod’s velvet-lined voice sounded soothing and almost hypnotic so that even the professor struggled to stay awake and listen to what he was saying. He kept pressing a sharp fingernail into his own flesh to help keep alert enough to understand why they were going to Afghanistan at all. Like any other professor, Snorri Sturloson was someone to whom understanding was important.

Axel was no less attentive to Nimrod’s voice especially since he had once been bitten by a camel spider that was the size of a hamburger, and that had left him on an antibiotic drip in a hospital. It didn’t matter that camel spiders have nothing really to do with camels — they’re called camel spiders because they live in the desert; just the word
camel
always left Axel expecting the word
spider
to scrabble after it at up to ten miles an hour, which is fast for any small creature. And in the dark, he flinched as the fingers of Philippa’s hand walked their way into his own.

“I don’t like sad stories,” admitted Philippa.

“Me, neither,” said John.

“Then ye that have tears prepare to shed them,” said Nimrod.

“The great Lord of the Earth and the Sky and, of course, the Mongols, Temujin, also known as Genghis Khan, died in August 1227. His death was shrouded in much secrecy, as the Mongols were besieging some city or other at the time and they hardly wanted news of his death to give heart to their enemies. Indeed, Genghis himself had given strict orders to this effect.

“ ‘Don’t let the enemy know about my death,’ he commanded his men. ‘Don’t mourn me in any way in case the enemy finds out about it. Just keep the siege going; and when eventually they surrender, annihilate them all.’

“It’s certain these orders would have been obeyed by his sons and generals. Genghis Khan had always demanded unquestioning obedience. But as well as this particular campaign, there was of course the legacy of his sons and the security of the whole Mongol empire to think of. Imagine it: an empire one-fifth of the world’s land area — almost thirty million square miles from the Pacific to the Caspian Sea. Genghis knew how hard it was to keep an empire this size in control and that news of his death would be greeted with joy and very likely revolt, too, as people all over Europe and Asia tried to throw off the cruel Mongol yoke.

“It’s this strategic need for secrecy that may have contributed to the great and enduring mystery surrounding his burial. And it must have worked because for years after his death people still assumed he was alive, or that he was a god and could not die. All in all, as an exercise in public relations and media manipulation, the Mongols’ handling of the death of Genghis Khan was extremely successful.

“Of course, it was customary for a great lord to be buried in some style, with many of his treasures and possessions. And, in the case of Genghis Khan, this included large quantities of gold plate, many jewels, his favorite saddle, his sword, several of his wives, and, of course, the Hotaniya crystals of the Xi Xia emperor, Xuanzong. Naturally, this created a problem for the Mongols. How and where to bury Genghis Khan with honor but without drawing attention to his burial place? For, as well as wishing to preserve the idea that Genghis Khan was still alive, his sons also wished to prevent the grave from being despoiled by robbers.

“A huge underground mausoleum was excavated by slaves who were then slaughtered to a man; the soldiers who had killed these slaves were themselves executed in their turn. A large part of the mausoleum was taken up with their corpses.

“Finally, when the grave was ready, the funeral cortege set off and, leaving nothing to chance, everyone it met on the way was also murdered. It’s said that twenty thousand people died in order that the whereabouts of the grave of Genghis Khan could be kept a secret.

“Of course, the sons and brothers of Genghis Khan wished to be able to find his grave again, in order that they might come and do his memory homage. And this presented them with a difficulty. For if the grave was unmarked, how would they remember where it was? There were no accurate maps, no latitude and longitude, no satellite navigation aids to help them. What made things worse was that Mongolia, as you’ll see for yourselves, is a land of immense plains called
steppes, with very little in the way of geographical features like mountains and valleys to help them out.

“When a solution finally presented itself, it appeared to have been under their noses all along. Smell holds a significant place in Mongol culture. In fact, human body scent was assumed to be an important part of a person’s soul. And, considering they never took baths, human souls must have been very smelly indeed. As a result, while other people were in the habit of kissing or shaking hands, Mongols were in the habit of sniffing each other like dogs. Anyway, they decided that the best aide-mémoire for finding the grave of Genghis Khan again was smell — but not his smell, although that would have been ripe enough. No, it was the smell of something else they decided to use.

“Being nomadic tribesmen, they knew a lot about animals — horses, goats, and camels in particular. They knew that camels have an excellent sense of smell, not to mention equally excellent memories. Camels are able to find water in the desert because they are able to detect the smell of something called geosmin, which is produced by bacteria in freshly turned earth. But they are even more adept at remembering and smelling their own offspring.”

“I don’t like the way this story is shaping up,” said Philippa.

“Then brace yourself, Philippa,” said Nimrod. “The Mongols took a female camel and its newborn baby to which it was giving milk and buried the baby camel alongside the body of Genghis Khan.
Alive.
They knew that the mother camel would always remember the spot. And that in the
years to come they would only have to release and follow the mother camel for it to lead them to where the calf — that’s what we call a baby camel — was buried.” “No!”

Philippa let out a wail, which, in the darkness, sounded much as a baby camel would have sounded as it was buried alive, and which made everyone jump, including Nimrod.

“That is awful,” she exclaimed. “How could anyone do such a terrible thing? How could people be so cruel?”

John let out a loud guffaw.

“Typical girl,” he said. “She says nothing when she hears about how twenty-thousand people were slaughtered in order to keep their mouths shut about the secret place where Genghis Khan is buried. And then she goes all gooey when some baby animal is killed.”

“That
is
the saddest story I ever heard,” insisted Philippa, ignoring her twin brother, which she was in the habit of doing.

“Perhaps it is,” admitted the professor. “But all of this happened almost eight hundred years ago. But even you, Nimrod, cannot seriously be suggesting that this mother camel is still alive. I know, I’ve seen some remarkable things today that persuade me that there is more in the world than I ever dreamed was possible. But an eight-hundred-year-old camel? No, surely not.”

“I haven’t finished my story,” said Nimrod. “You see, the Mongols thought they’d been very clever. Every spring the descendants of Genghis Khan, intent on honoring his memory, would release the mother camel and, without fail,
it would always return to the exact spot where the calf was buried. The camel, of course, was treated very well. It was named Dunbelchin —”

“Good name for a camel,” said John.

“After one of the Khan’s wives. It was fed with the best oats and grass and it was adorned with a jeweled bridle and a beautiful saddle, which of course made it a most valuable camel in the eyes of men. Too valuable, for one day it was stolen.”

“Serves ’em right,” said Philippa.

“The Mongols were beside themselves with anger and frustration,” continued Nimrod. “For without the mother camel, how could they ever hope to find his secret burial place again? They searched high and low for the camel. And suspicion fell upon a notorious camel thief called Hotak, who came from a town called Parwan, north of Kabul in Afghanistan, and that today is known as Charikar. But Hotak eluded capture and fled with his camels to Kandahar.

“Meanwhile, a special clan of Mongols called the Darkhats was created in order to find the tomb, and to prevent anyone else from finding the tomb. The clan continues to this day, although it remains uncertain if the Darkhats ever found the tomb themselves.”

“I’m getting confused now,” said the professor. “What is any of this to do with Sidi Mubarak Bombay and John Hanning Speke?”

“Good question,” said Nimrod. “They may not have succeeded in finding the grave of Genghis Khan but, according to Bombay’s book, they certainly managed to see a beautifully
tooled camel saddle and bridle, probably Mongolian, that belonged to a camel trader in Kandahar by the name of Ali Bilharzia. They themselves were convinced that the saddle and the bridle were more than five hundred years old and had once adorned Dunbelchin, the mother camel that was possessed of the knowledge of how to find the tomb of Genghis Khan.”

“I’m beginning to see where you’re going with this,” said Philippa.

“I’m glad you are,” said Axel. “I’m still in the dark.” He blinked hard against the all-enveloping black night sky, as if he hoped he might see something that would help illuminate his understanding of their mission, but he remained wrapped in literal and metaphorical darkness.

“Me, too,” admitted the professor. “Bombay and Speke made this discovery almost one hundred and fifty years ago. I don’t have to tell you that things have changed a lot in Afghanistan since they were there. Four wars will do that.”

“Four?” John sounded surprised.

“Two Anglo-Afghan wars in the nineteenth century,” said the professor, “after which there was peace for a hundred years. Then the Russian invasion of 1979, which preceded a war that lasted ten years, and lately, the Americans have been fighting there, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.”

“And yet some things in Afghanistan never change,” said Nimrod. “That’s one of the things people never understand about Afghanistan. Trying to make that country change is always a mistake. It’s just as much of a mistake now as it was
a mistake at the beginning of the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1839.”

“I take it you’ve been to Afghanistan before,” said Axel.

“Oh, yes. When I was a student, it was a very popular place to visit.”

“Let me get this straight,” said the professor. “You’re proposing that we go to Afghanistan to look for a camel that’s been dead for almost eight hundred years. Is that correct?”

“All will be revealed,” promised Nimrod. “In good time.”