The Red Turkestan was inching around a shallow bend in the river when a posse of children appeared on the nearer bank, waving and shouting and running to keep pace with the boat. Two houses came into view, larger and closer to the river than others, and between them a road sloped down to a landing stage that extended some fifty feet out into the rust-colored water. Several small boats were tethered to one side, a large, flat ferry-raft to the other. A score and more people were gathered at its end. Some seemed to be arguing with a group of soldiers.
Three of the latter clambered into one of the small boats and pushed off into the current.
Brady appeared with the firing mechanism for the machine gun, and slotted it into place with a metallic clang. Piatakov watched the soldiers rowing out toward the center of the river. The gap between the two craft steadily shrank.
They must be mad, Piatakov thought.
Brady fired a burst, shattering the still air. The soldiers stopped rowing; the crowd on the landing stage rushed pell-mell for the safety of the bank. The children stood watching, every one on tiptoe; Piatakov could physically sense their excitement.
One of the soldiers raised a rifle, and Brady fired another burst, this time much closer. An argument broke out in the small boat, and the rifle was knocked aside. At that moment a bullet whined off the metal rail only inches from Piatakov’s hand.
He spun around. The young officer was taking aim with both hands, his eyes squinting against the sun, sweat pouring down his face. Piatakov dived to one side and was still reaching for his own gun when another two shots rang out in quick succession. Neither came anywhere near him.
He looked up to see the officer slide down the upper deck rail, his gun dropping onto the planking below and bouncing over the side. Chatterji walked off the bridge to examine the body and signaled that the man was dead by drawing a hand across his own throat.
The small boat was retreating toward the landing stage. Piatakov glanced across at Brady and found him staring straight ahead.
“Mountains!” the American called out, and sure enough, looming through the heat haze, a faint but enormous wall rose up to meet the southern sky.
The party left Karshi soon after dusk. The garrison commander, with only ten fit men at his disposal, had refused to spare more than four without explicit orders from his military superiors in Tashkent. There had been no volunteers, and the chosen quartet, all local men, didn’t bother to hide their lack of enthusiasm. The guide, a local Turcoman of unfathomable age, was of a more sanguine temperament. He listened to Komarov’s instructions, translated in halting Turkmen by McColl, and nodded. “Two nights,” he said in Russian, holding up the appropriate number of fingers for emphasis.
They left town with the disused railway, but the tracks soon diverged and were lost in the rapidly darkening night. Their ponies were all stallions, and none, McColl noticed with interest, had been castrated. They were suitably frisky.
Their road, increasingly ill defined, wound its way through the rolling terrain. Seeing them by day, McColl had taken the humpbacked shapes for dunes, but there was nothing temporary about them. It looked like some passing Medusa had turned this sandy desert to stone, leaving the impression of an ocean petrified in midstorm.
There was life, though, and in abundance. Large, ratlike creatures with long hind legs and tails darted across the moonlit slopes; tortoises in astonishing profusion crawled out of the party’s path as rapidly as nature allowed. More worryingly, an immense number of fearsome-looking scorpions seemed to be lining their route like a gruesome guard of honor. McColl imagined them falling in line behind the procession, a swelling army of trembling pincers waiting to devour their prey at a site of their own choosing.
Every couple of hours a well tower would loom up against the night sky, and there, for reasons that seemed both clear and truly bizarre, they would pause to quench their thirst with water they’d carried from Karshi. The Turcoman told McColl that one well was 750 feet deep; two camels were needed to raise the bucket over the wooden pulley. McColl imagined the women weaving the seemingly endless rope, as the men delved deeper and deeper.
The tower that greeted them as the sky began to lighten was ringed by long-abandoned huts, and the guide announced that they would spend the day in the latter’s shady interiors. But only, he added, once the scorpions had all been flushed out. After the soldiers had been to work and pronounced the chosen huts clear, the Turcoman still insisted on a daylong patrol of the perimeter. Otherwise, he said with a knowing grin, someone was sure to be stung in his sleep.
Komarov claimed the first watch, and the others laid themselves out on the rock-hard ground. McColl was the first relief and, after sweating his way through an hour of invigilation and beating the odd transgressor to pulp with the butt of his borrowed rifle, passed on the weapon to Maslov and went back to sleep.
Piatakov heard it before he saw it. He was sitting aft, half-hypnotized by the undulating reeds, when the airplane’s drone seeped out of the noise of the riverboat’s progress. Jerking his head around, he saw it, a biplane flying low over the water, coming downstream toward them, out of the yellow sky. He had no sooner identified it than the plane was above and past him, the clatter of its engine drowning the splash of the paddle, its shadow flashing across foredeck and bridge. Leaping to his feet, Piatakov saw it reappear, a flash of red above the ship’s superstructure, gaining height as it turned a wide half circle above the desert.
Brady was hustling down the steps. “Which way did it go?”
Piatakov pointed out the dark spot, fading southward.
“Looking for us, then.”
“Probably.”
The American wrung his hands with what looked suspiciously like glee. “Kerki,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for us.”
Kerki
It was still light when McColl felt a rough hand on the shoulder and opened his eyes to see Maslov pointing a Webley straight at his head. “Come outside,” the young Ukrainian ordered.
McColl rose to his feet and made his way out into the early evening sunlight, where Komarov and Caitlin were waiting, the former’s face expressionless, the latter’s a study in torment.
“Would I be right in thinking your real name is Jack McColl?” Komarov asked.
There seemed no point in denying it. “You would.”
“And do you admit to being an English agent?”
Scottish, McColl thought perversely. And serving a man rather than a country. But why waste his breath quibbling? “I do,” he said.
“An imperialist spy,” Maslov said smugly, as if delighted that life had so generously lived up to his expectations.
“I have some questions,” Komarov said, squatting down on his haunches and idly picking up a saxaul twig.
McColl leaned back against the wall of the hut, wondering if anyone was still on scorpion watch.
“Are you willing to answer them?” Komarov asked.
“That depends on what they are.” He couldn’t tell from Caitlin’s face whether or not Komarov had already accused her of knowing who he was.
“Of course.” Komarov drew a circle in the sand with the twig. “What is your part in this business?”
“I don’t have one. Not directly. My old boss in London sent me here to find out what ‘this business’ is.”
Komarov drew another circle inside the first. “What is this man the boss of?”