“Have great care, my friend and brother.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Even before the hittites settled the region four thousand years ago, Bronze-age troglodytes were tunneling into the strange volcanic domes, knobs, cones, spires, and furrowed massif ridges of Cappadocia, digging a network of subterranean communities whose rooms and passages extended for miles beneath the chalky tufa, providing separate housing for hundreds of people at a time. Living quarters were equipped with bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens, as well as shrines, water cisterns, stables, storage areas, workshops, and wine cellars. There were public hospitals, churches, and internment grounds. Entries, ledges, balconies, staircases and pillars; frescoes and sculptures; even furnishings such as tables, chairs, benches, and sleeping platforms were carved whole out of the firm yet malleable stone. Tiny slots in the walls between individual dwellings allowed communication throughout daily routines, and provided an efficient civil alarm system in periods of emergency.
Over the centuries of Roman occupation, diverse groups of ethnic tribesmen, and then early Christians — including, it is believed, Paul the Apostle — found refuge from persecution in this hive-like underground megalopolis. Later it sheltered reclusive monastic orders from the brutalities of Mongol, Arab, and Ottoman invaders. In recent decades, isolated portions of it — the equivalent of contemporary neighborhoods, towns, and belt cities — have been excavated by archaeologists and in a few cases opened to tourists. Some parts of the complex remain either undiscovered or known only to local peasant populations. A few were occupied by Kurds streaming northward from Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War, and to this day function as hidden strongholds for Kurdish militia bands at violent odds with the governments of Turkey and its international allies… including, for a variety of reasons, the United States.
For that, Ibrahim thought as he spurred his horse forward over the rugged slopes, if for no other reason, the man-made caves south of Derinkuyu would have been an ideal hideaway for Gilea Nastik and her cousin Korut Zelva after the Times Square bombing. There were many Kurdish sympathizers in these isolated regions, hillmen who tended to be suspicious of anyone they didn’t know, and who would resent intrusions into local affairs by outsiders. Even those who were politically neutral would have nothing to do with the group that had come hunting for the terrorists.
And since he was Roger Gordian’s man on the spot in this isolated territory, Ibrahim worried that if any local tribesmen spotted his riding party, the butchers were almost certain to be alerted.
He rode at a steady gallop, the muscular, sweat-slick sides of his steed rippling like oil beneath his stirrups. The sun was plunging solidly down on his shoulders, giving a bleached-out shimmer to the terrain… a wasteland so stark and craggy that nothing on wheels — not ATVs, not even Sword’s small fleet of fast-attack vehicles — could have traversed it.
There were stretches here that seemed to exist in a still pocket of eternity, Ibrahim mused. Stretches where change was resisted at an elemental level, where roads and telephone lines came to the end of their reach, and large distances were traveled on horseback or not at all. The land did not compromise; you adapted or you were defeated.
Ibrahim rode on, his hands loosely gripping the reins. The neck of his horse rose and fell, rose and fell, with an easy, swaying sort of rhythm. To his left and right, the hooves of his teammates’ mounts slapped the ground, beating up little clods of pebbles and ashy soil. The men wore lightweight dun-colored fatigues and carried VVRS M16 rifles fitted with M234 RAG kinetic-energy projectile launchers. They had gas masks and protective goggles strapped around their necks.
Perhaps a kilometer distant, Ibrahim could see a huge arch-backed formation pushing up from the surrounding terrain. The honeycomb tiers of openings on its high rock walls had once led to the lodgings of a caravansary. There traveling merchants would come to a temporary halt in their routes, bringing supplies to the cities beneath the ground, descending from the upper chambers through long stepped passages.
Now, Ibrahim knew, the passages would be filled with scorpions — human scorpions as well as the traditional ones. And the mission of his team was to flush out their hiding place, and capture the deadliest of the creatures, without killing any of them. The quarry, however, would show no such compunction. Given a chance, they would slaughter him and every one of his men, leave them to rot on the barren earth.
Well, no struggle was ever fair to all sides. Ibrahim and his brothers-in-arms knew the job they had to do, and would try as well as they could to get it done. The rest was up to Allah.
The lair of the scorpion ahead of them, they clipped along through the desert silence.
The porter at the Hanedan hotel had left the village at dawn, barely ahead of the strangers who had arrived over the past two days. He took little-known shortcuts between the slopes of the forbidding moonscape, driving his animal relentlessly toward the humped shelf of land that served as the main access to the underground hideout. Other rabbit holes existed through which men could enter and leave the chambers, but most led to passages that had become blocked, or collapsed, over hundreds of years.
Korut would have positioned the bulk of his sentries at the shelf, and they needed to be warned. Aya, they did, and fast.
The young hotel worker shot a glance back over his shoulder, saw the armed riders and their horses as small advancing dots at his rear, corkscrews of desert dust winding into the air above them. He did not know who had sent them on their manhunt; in truth, it was of no matter to him or his fellow villagers. Some weeks ago Gilea and Korut had returned to Derinkuyu, needing shelter and protection, and they had gotten it. Gilea and Korut were linked to his people through blood and clan lines, and had their allegiance to a soul.
He would not fail. He would get to them before the interlopers, tell them of the advancing threat, even if it meant running his horse to the ground.
Nothing his relatives could have done — nothing — would prevent him from aiding in their escape.
Korut snapped a full 30-round magazine into his Kalashnikov AKMS, slung the assault rifle over his shoulder, and ran down the corridor, his footsteps thudding flatly off its pocked and pitted stone floor. Minutes ago, an anxious voice had shouted to him through the slot in his wall, alerting him to a raid. Strangers were coming across the waste. Less than a klick to the south, and getting closer by the second. They had ridden out of the village that morning, a mixed group consisting of Turks, Americans, and Europeans.
It was a stroke of good fortune that Gilea had already departed, leaving him behind to train and recruit new operatives. By now, she would have made her rendezvous with the minisubmarine in Amasra, on the northern coast, and be halfway across the Black Sea to her destination.
He did not think his pursuers were CIA or Interpol. They would have come with helicopters, even planes, but not on horseback. Whatever its multinational composition, this force was commanded by men who knew the land, using inbred native tactics. Could it be the mysterious organization he’d had been informed about, the same one that had sent a team into Roma’s office in New York?
There was no way to be sure, and ultimately what was the difference? They had sought him out, they had located him, they were coming for him.
Korut only prayed he could make them live to regret it.
Ibrahim saw the sun heliographing off the automatic weapons on the bluff even before they released their first volleys. He glanced up at the shooters poised in the cave openings, their rifles kicking against their arms, rattling out bursts of fire.