The Old Boys (46 page)

The noise seemed to be headed straight for me. I glimpsed the first vehicle when an errant breeze opened a peephole. The car was a Chinese version of the Soviet Jeep, painted in sand-colored camouflage. The driver wore goggles and a white surgical mask. So did the man standing upright in the front seat beside him and two or three riflemen deployed in front of the vehicle in a skirmish line. I ran another hundred paces to my right and took up a new position behind another rock. This time I lay down to make a smaller target of myself. My intention was to keep moving to the right until I was behind the Han and then, if I heard firing, to close in until I could see them and open fire.

More shouting. The whiny sound of vehicles in reverse, then
advancing in low gear. The crash of metal against a rock. Another gust of wind cleared away another patch of dust. To my immediate front, perhaps ten meters away, I glimpsed a second vehicle and more skirmishers. How were all these different people finding me? Was it dumb luck? Were they searching in all directions in spokes-of-a-wheel fashion or what? I moved again. I had no idea where I was in relation to the cave. I half expected to find myself at any moment running in mid-air after having stepped off a cliff. My nose was full of dust. I had an overwhelming desire to sneeze. Before I could drop my gun and squeeze my nose shut, I emitted a loud honking
ah-choo
.

Almost immediately a grenade exploded on the other side of the rock I was hiding behind. It made a terrific flash and bang, shrapnel flying all over the place, and its concussion sucked a hole in the dust. For an instant I could see again. Three skirmishers, one of them fitting another rifle grenade to the launcher on his weapon, were spread out before me. All were in the kneeling position, Kalashnikovs pointed straight at me. If I could see them, they could see me. I opened fire with the submachine gun and saw one of them knocked backward. Many others, seen and unseen, returned fire, sparks flying from the muzzles of automatic weapons and bullets flying every which way. I dug a grenade out of Askar’s bag, pulled the pin, and threw it in the general direction of the gunfire. As soon as the grenade went off I ran back the way I had come. This time bullets followed me as I ran, ricochets whining off rocks, as if I were a visible target. When I stopped and flopped down behind another rock, the fire seemed to be concentrated on that point.

What was going on here? How did they know where I was in this haze? How could they know? And then
I
knew. The transmitter for the homing beacon. It was in the pocket of my parka, where I had put it after Ze had handed it over to me the night before. They were reading its signal. That is what had guided them straight to the mouth of the cave. That was the reason that Askar and his friend had ridden right by them in the storm without
being detected. But how could it be on? I hadn’t touched the switch. Ze must have handed it to me with the switch on. This was a suspicion I was loath to entertain.

I got out the transmitter. Sure enough, it was switched on. At this discovery I felt, of all things, deep embarrassment. Why had I not checked the thing out before dropping it trustingly into my pocket? I switched it off. After a moment the firing stopped. How gratifying to know what had been causing it. I was about to tiptoe away when I realized that I had been presented with the opportunity of a lifetime to perform a useful action—the opportunity of a very short lifetime perhaps, given my present circumstances, but an opportunity nevertheless. I picked up the transmitter—it was turned off now, remember—and walked straight toward the enemy. It was easy enough to avoid bumping into them because they were still shouting to one another through the fog and one of them was screaming in agony.

I walked until I could hear voices all around me to my left and right and to my front and rear. I was right in the middle of the attacking force, or near enough. I found a tall rock, placed the transmitter on top of it, and switched it on. I then hit the dirt as enthusiastically as if I were once again a young Marine being shot at by these kids’ grandfathers. Fire erupted from all points of the compass. Grenades exploded. Cries of pain broke out, a choir of the wounded, as the Han, firing blindly into the dust, shot at the transmitter signal, missed me, and killed and wounded one another. Someone with a good set of lungs bellowed the order to cease fire. I recovered the transmitter and switched it off.

Moans, curses, the acrid smell of cordite. Owing to my own cleverness, I was surrounded, with enemies between me and every possible exit. It was imperative that I move before these people recovered their wits and started closing in. I did so, gingerly. The Han were still making a lot of noise—recriminations, no doubt— but all it would take to undo me was one alert soldier keeping his mouth shut. Naturally I ran into him in a matter of seconds. He was crouched, rifle at the ready, with his back to me. He must have
sensed my movement because he sprang to his feet, firing his Kalashnikov wildly as he spun on his heel. There was no time to aim and shoot or run away, which was the option I wanted with all my heart to exercise, so without thought I launched myself sidewise into the poor frightened fellow. All two hundred-forty pounds of me clipped him at the knees. His assault rifle, still firing, flew from his grasp and he collapsed, shrieking in pain. I must have torn every tendon in both his knees. I wish I could tell you that I slipped away into the rosy murk that enveloped us both and left him shrieking. But I did not. I kneeled on his back, seized his chin and jerked his head sharply backwards.

I heard his neck break, then heard hoofbeats. A Kyrgyz on horseback plunged out of the dust, then back into it again, missing me by inches. Invisible now, he fired his submachine gun. Someone fired back. Others were shooting, too. Muzzle blasts embroidered the dust all around me. Hooves pounded, gears clashed, ricochets sang, men shouted and grunted and screamed. Grenades exploded. The Kyrgyz were attacking the Chinese vehicles on horseback. I flattened myself onto the dead man’s body. This put me cheek to cheek with him. He was an underfed, smallish fellow, probably not yet out of his teens, with a backcountry face pitted by acne, a flattened nose. I still held his head in my hands. It was quite heavy. This was the second human neck I had wrung on this trip. The first, in Moscow, was an accident, but it was a strange specialty to acquire so late in life.

Suddenly the firing ceased—at least the automatic gunfire did. I still heard single shots, sandwiched between moments of silence. The fight was over and the winners were hunting down and killing the wounded. Both sides were using Russian weapons or Chinese copies thereof, so it was impossible to tell who was doing the shooting.

I heard another horse nearby. In a piercing stage whisper, Someone said, “Horace!”

I said, “Here.”

I realized that I was whispering, too. I cleared my throat and
shouted the same word. Zarah, on horseback, emerged from the cloud. She led a second horse. “Climb up,” she said. “We should get out of here.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. But which way was the way out? Zarah seemed to be in no doubt about this. I mounted the horse, the same irascible hammerhead I had been riding all along. As soon as the beast felt my weight it kicked, reared, bucked. Somehow I held on. Zarah tossed me a rope.

“Hold onto that,” she said. “I’ll lead.”

That was fine with me. I suspected that this was not the first time Zarah had ridden a horse through a sandstorm. I grasped the rope, let go of the reins, and let my horse follow the others.

We rode at the trot for a couple of hours. This was excruciating because I had cracked a rib or two when I threw the illegal cross-body block on the young soldier. We were headed west and the storm was blowing eastward, so the visibility got steadily better. By the time we stopped to rest the exhausted horses, the sky was almost blue again, and in the distance, far below, we could see a very large lake.

Lori pointed to it. “Kyrgyzstan,” she said.

A week after this, I met the rest of the Old Boys and the Christophers near a small lake at the foot of the Z˘ etimtov Hills, at the northern edge of the Jomon-Ku˘m sands. If I tell you that this spot was approximately 250 miles northwest of Tashkent, not far from Uc˘kuduk and fifty miles from the nearest unpaved road, you’ll know precisely where we were: in the middle of nowhere. The Christophers arrived first. I caught a glimpse of their camp from the top of a rise about half a mile away. It was late afternoon. This was a wrinkled khaki landscape, more barren than Xinjiang, so the azure lake filled with snowmelt was a startling punctuation mark— especially since Zarah’s Saker falcon hung above it, looking whiter than it really was in the diagonal light of the descending sun.

By the time I drove down into the valley and parked beside the yurt, all four of the Christophers were on hand to greet me. Zarah kissed me on the cheek, Paul gripped my hand, Lori and Tarik stood apart and watched me with matching blue-gray eyes as if they had never seen me before. In a way they hadn’t. We had traveled together in a sandstorm, barely speaking, and we had parted and gone our separate ways as soon as we crossed the frontier. Lori and Tarik were as much strangers to me as I was to them. For all intents and purposes so was the resurrected Paul. I knew no more about how he happened to be alive or about his recent adventures
with Lori and Tarik than I had known when we were reunited in the labor camp in Xinjiang. There had been no chance for a family pow-wow then or while we were moving through the dust storm or shooting and being shot at during the firefight by the ice cave or riding blindly for the frontier.

Inside the yurt, with the last light of the winter day falling through the smoke hole, I got out the vodka and food I had brought from Tashkent. Tarik drank the vodka Russian style, bottoms up, and showed not the slightest effect from three quick glasses of the stuff. He was a taciturn, watchful fellow. Apart from skin tone and Tarik’s handsome curved nose, he and Paul resembled each other—gesture, posture, timbre of the voice, their athletic way of moving. During supper we conversed as politely, as lightheartedly as if we had been seated around a mahogany table in evening clothes instead of crouching in a circle on a dirt floor while eating with our fingers. The Christophers told me about their long drive from Kyrgyzstan to this place. They had crossed the frontier at night, with Tarik and Lori on foot, because Tarik had no passport and Lori had done such a good job of disappearing that it was impossible to prove that she even existed. I was handling the vodka less well than Tarik, and after an hour of civilized generalities I was ready to turn the conversation in a more useful direction by asking a rude question or two. Of all the faces in the circle, only Paul’s was turned my way. He had picked up on my mood. I knew the signs—the smallest of smiles, a hint of amusement deep in the eyes. Paul was reading my thoughts as if they were subtitles. Knowing me as he did, he guessed what might be coming next. Or so I was convinced. At any rate, he saved me from myself before I could even clear my throat.

“Horace,” he said in a surprisingly audible voice, “How about a breath of fresh air, a look at our little lake?”

Zarah had been silent throughout the meal. Now she stood up. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Lori and Tarik and I will come, too.”

Lori said, “We will?”

“Yes,”
Zarah said. “This is the first time the whole family has ever been together.”

Lori shook her head. “Not tonight,” she said.

“Ah, my dear, especially tonight,” Zarah said.

“Why especially tonight?”

““There are questions I want to ask.”

The two women locked eyes. They were not smiling at each other now, but my, they were alike. The moment stretched to a breaking point.

Then Lori said, “All right.”

She adjusted her shawl, took Zarah’s hand and followed her out of the yurt. It was a short walk to the lake. The water, when you stood close to it, smelled of snow and gave off waves of cold. Paul had said nothing, had scarcely moved except to walk alongside me. Now he picked up a flat stone and skipped it along the thread of light laid down on the glassy water by the new moon. Four skips. We had played this game in the Berkshires when I was a child. My stone bounced five times before sinking. Paul spun another stone across the water. This time all was as it always had been and should be: he won with a near-impossible six skips.

Tarik had brought a rug. While Paul and I skipped stones, he spread it on the ground and helped his mother to sit down. Zarah, legs crossed, sat down facing her grandmother and very close to her. We three men sat down, too, Tarik taking his mother’s hand. He did this as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Paul watched, and even in this uncertain light I could see that this was a gesture that he felt he had no right to make.

Zarah said, “Now tell us what happened.”

“When?”

“Begin in 1940.”

Lori nodded, then began to speak with absolute directness, as if she had long been rehearsing these words. She had a rather hoarse voice and I wondered if she had sounded this way as a young woman. If so, it must certainly have added to her allure.