In making the journey, Gursel hoped that Arion’s endorsement would permit him to do commerce with the Kurdish shepherds who still lived in the nearby caves and the village of Koboli.
As the trail widened and Gursel’s cart rolled into the clearing, he was assailed by the repugnant smells of something long dead. When he was able to get a better look, he saw dotting the landscape the entire length of the meadow — the carcasses of sheep, hundreds of them. Their bodies were still bloated, but already in the early stages of decay.
“What is the smell?” Divan asked. Gursel knew she was still too small to understand the concept of death, and when he looked down at her, her eyes had already begun to tear and she was shaking.
His first impulse was to hold her close to him and console her, but she had already seen the devastation.
Instead, he crawled down from the cart and instructed the girl to stay where she was.
Later, near noon, Carnal Gursel finished his gruesome audit. His search had taken him into a half-dozen caves and each time he was confronted with the same nightmare: the bodies of every Kurd man, woman, and child had somehow been subjected to the same terrible fate. Their faces were twisted into masks of agony. Their throats were bloated, their stomachs distended, and there was ample evidence of hemorrhaging from the eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth. Dogs, goats, and several head of donkeys had suffered a similar fate.
During the course of his morning-long odyssey from one cave to another, Gursel had twice gone back to check on his young daughter. The girl, although still upset, appeared to be all right, and Gursel returned to his search, hoping to find the cause of the curse that had befallen the tiny Kurdish settlement. Throughout the morning he counted bodies, and whenever possible searched through their belongings in hopes of learning names. Some he had learned. Others would suffer ignominy in their untimely death. He had tried to gather all the names and facts he could. He knew Arion would want to know every last detail.
Finally, with the unrelenting mountain sun hammering down on the scene, and the stench of death assailing him from all directions, he concluded his investigation and started back to his cart. That was when he discovered the first of the strange canisters, made of metal, no more than ten centimeters in length and perforated with thousands of tiny holes. It was dented and even ruptured at one end of the cylinder. By the time he reached his cart, he had stumbled across two more of the strange-looking cylinders.
Gursel would later admit that he had thought about burying the remains of the unfortunate Kurds, but the enormity of the task and the smell made him decide to turn back and return to Shaqlawa.
Then, as he started to leave, he looked back one last time. This time, like his daughter, he too had tears in his eyes.
It was a longtime habit; on Sundays Robert Miller caught up with his paperwork. As Clancy Packer’s chief administrative assistant and number-one handyman at the Internal Security Agency, he had long ago fallen into the habit of reading field reports on the day when most everything else in Washington had been boarded up for the weekend.
On Sunday, the phone seldom rang and the office was usually deserted. Deserted, that is, if he disregarded the two agents monitoring the latest reports from the world’s hot spots in the basement of the three-story building.
Miller was a bachelor, a title he treasured more highly than even that of AA. to the agency’s number-one man, Clancy Packer. He was average height, average weight, and considered himself to be of no more than average intelligence. The fact that he had graduated with honors from Georgetown’s prestigious law school apparently had done nothing to change that assessment. As well as average, Robert Miller also considered himself to be a realist — and that meant he knew what made him valuable. At the head of that list was an incredible memory for detail. Robert Miller had a mind that was somehow able to capture and retain the most minute aspects of long-ago events-many of which were embarrassingly irrelevant and served no useful purpose.
As usual, the majority of the reports he scanned on this particular Sunday were routine — so much so in fact that the agency’s man in Northern Ireland had even taken the time to include a couple of limericks at the end of his report. The report from Malaysia read almost word for word like the one from the previous week. It wasn’t until he began to review the file from Israel and the Palestinian territories that something caught his attention — two sentences in the second paragraph:
We continue to hear rumors of field testing by Iraqi extremists of a “mustard gas” type agent similar to that used in previous Iraqi attacks on Kurdish tribesmen. Air solvent samples taken by agencies monitoring the impacted areas would seem to verify at least some of these rumors…
Miller read the two sentences a second time, turned around in his chair, hit the “on” switch, opened the files, and typed out the words Poison Warfare (Nerve) Gases on his keyboard. The information began trailing across his monitor. He indexed down past Tabun (GA), Sarin (GB), and Soman (GD), until he came to the information he was looking for, the cyanides. The symptoms and formula for both hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride appeared on the screen — and Miller studied them.
He was still hunched over his keyboard when the phone rang. Out of habit he reached for it before he remembered he had instructed the men manning the phones that he did not want any calls. When he picked it up, it was too late.
“Miller here,” he grumbled.
“Didn’t expect to find anyone there, Robert,” Langley admitted, “but I’m glad I caught you.”
Miller slouched back in his chair.
“What’s the matter? No tennis matches today?”
Peter Langley laughed.
“For Christ’s sake, Robert, don’t you do anything but hole up in that damn office of yours? If you’d bother to look out your damn window, you’d know it’s coming down by the buckets out there. Not only that, it’s getting colder.”
“Then I’m in the right place,” Miller said with a laugh.
“Is Clancy there?”
“Negative. In fact, he’s in the wrong place. He’s sitting out there in the rain and cold at the Redskins game. I don’t expect to see him or talk to him until tomorrow. Any message?”
“Matter of fact, there is. I just got a call from a Dr. Henry Stanhouse over at Immigration Services.”
Miller repeated the name.
“Stanhouse. Do I know him?”
“He runs their screening unit. At any rate, they’ve come across something they think we should know about. It seems they got a body bag over there with some bad stuff in it.”
“Bad stuff? What the hell kind of report is that?”
“Look, I don’t know enough about this to know what I’m talking about… but I did pick up on some of the background. Three weeks ago, the Red Crescent received word of an outbreak of some kind along the Iraqi-Turkish border in a Kurd settlement near Shehab on the Iraqi side.
The Red Cross sent a representative in to see if they could be of any help. What they found made their toes curclass="underline" eighty or so dead Kurds and all of the livestock in the encampment wiped out as well. The RC rep thought he might be looking at some new kind of plague or something and made arrangements to have an autopsy performed on one of the cadavers. Bottom line, the Turkish authorities couldn’t do much with it and the body was shipped over here so the folks at DIS could have a look at it.”