He had developed a sharp eye for detail as a geologist. After a few passes he saw a dark line in the ground. He brushed the sand away with his hand and called the laborers over. Within seconds they had uncovered a metal plate around four feet square. They removed the plate and Vasilyev looked down into a dark shaft.
One of his Russian colleagues said, “I wonder where this goes.”
“Let’s take a look,” Vasilyev said. He ordered Raheem to round up some rope and electric torches.
As the Afghan went to carry out the request, Vasilyev heard the sound of an aircraft engine. A black dot appeared in the clear blue sky, growing in size until it morphed into the transport helicopter that brought supplies in every week. It was three days early.
The chopper landed near the troop carrier, sending up clouds of dust. A man in an army sergeant’s uniform stepped out. He engaged the squad leader in conversation, then both men came over to Vasilyev.
“We have to return to Kabul,” the squad leader said.
“When?”
“Now”
“I can’t go now,” Vasilyev said with a glance at the open shaft. “We have survey work to do.”
The sergeant spoke, his voice tinged with weariness. “The survey is over. The Soviet army is leaving the country. All civilians are being evacuated.”
As survey leader, the well-being of his fellow scientists was Vasilyev’s responsibility. He ordered his men to cover over the shaft opening, then told the Russian and Afghan geologists to return to the base camp and gather up their belongings. He paid off the laborers and said they could keep any equipment the survey left behind.
With all the scientists aboard, the helicopter rose into the air and hovered over the abandoned jeep and troop carrier. The Afghan laborers waved at the departing chopper as it gained altitude and flew over a steeply rounded hill that rose from the generally flat terrain bordering the lake.
Kabul had been at the eye of the storm as fighting between the Soviets and Afghans raged around it. But now rockets were hitting the city on a daily basis. An army truck was waiting on the tarmac when the helicopter landed. A representative from the Soviet embassy stood next to the truck with a handful of diplomatic personnel.
He greeted Vasilyev and the other Russian geologists and handed them each a packet of papers, saying, “These are your tickets home. This is my last official job.”
“I have to go back into the city to get my files,” Vasilyev said.
“Impossible.” The man pointed to a giant Ilyushin jetliner. “This will be your last chance to leave Kabul on a normal flight. Thirty thousand insurgents are massed around the city. Our troops are leaving the country. Kabul will soon fall. You don’t want to be here when the mujahideen take over.”
Vasilyev thought about the metal cabinets lining the walls of his office at the ministry. The files stuffed into the drawers bulged with maps, charts and detailed reports gathered over ten years of field expeditions to every part of the country. He turned to Raheem.
“You and the other ministry geologists must gather together the files in my cabinets and hide them. You can’t let the insurgents get their hands on this material. Do you understand?”
“I’ll tend to it as soon as you’re safely off.”
Vasilyev gave his colleague a rib-cracking Russian hug. He had sent his wife and children home weeks before his last field trip and had vacated his apartment as soon as the Soviet Union signed an accord agreeing to leave the country. The embassy staffers had climbed into the truck and were yelling at him to hurry up.
He said his sad good-byes to the Afghan geologists he’d worked with since his arrival in 1968 and climbed into the back of the truck which joined a line of vehicles pulling up to the plane to discharge refugees. The refugees loaded their own luggage in the baggage compartment and hustled up the gangway.
Chaos reigned inside the cabin. Panicked passengers claimed their unreserved seats against a backdrop of arguments and crying children. The passengers had been dressed for the cold weather and the overheated cabin reeked of perspiration and unwashed bodies.
Georgi found an empty row at the rear of the cabin, next to the bathroom, which smelled as if it hadn’t been emptied in between flights. A heavy-set man squeezed in next to him. Georgi was on the portly side, but the man overflowed the arm rests and the geologist had to lean toward the bulkhead.
The man had been a bureaucrat in a government-run building company. He talked non-stop until he was cut off by the applause greeting the announcement that the plane was ready to take off. The jetliner taxied down the runway and rose at a steep angle that would gain it altitude out of gun range as quickly as possible.
Vasilyev stared morosely at the magnificent snow-capped mountains that ringed the city. He would miss Afghanistan. The country was a geologist’s playground. Sitting astride massive tectonic plates, the country had some of the most complex geology in the world. He looked at the rugged terrain the same way some men might take in the curves of a beautiful woman.
“Tovarich.”
His seat companion waved a bottle of cheap vodka under Georgi’s nose.
“No thank you,” the geologist said.
The man jiggled the bottle. “You must drink to our comrades who have died.”
Thousands of young Russians had been killed in the nine years since the Soviet Union invaded the country. Georgi took a swig of the vile concoction and handed the bottle back. When he looked out the window he saw only clouds.
He prayed that Raheem would heed his advice. Even after trekking from one end of the country to the other, there was much he didn’t know about the ancient land. But there was one thing that he was absolutely certain of. If the material in his filing cabinets got into the wrong hands, there would be many more toasts to countless dead who were yet to be born.
CHAPTER ONE
Cait Everson was running for her life.
As she raced down the center of a quiet street, the only sounds she could hear in the sleeping suburban neighborhood were the pad-pad of her bare feet on the tarmac, the quick intake and exhalation of her breath and the menacing scuffle of footsteps from behind.
She didn’t know who her pursuers were, but her instincts told her that the men trying to catch her were no mere rapists or muggers. It went beyond their freakish appearance, the platinum hair and icy blue eyes. It was the sheer, predatory relentlessness she’d detected in their identical faces since the twin men had started stalking her weeks before.
The alarms clanged in her brain, urging her to greater speed, warning that if they caught Cait she would be as good as dead.
She gulped energizing mouthfuls of air into her lungs and put all her strength into her long-legged strides.
Only minutes before she had driven her five-year-old Honda Accord from Georgetown University across the Potomac River on the Francis Scott Key Bridge to Arlington, Virginia where she lived in a neat two-bedroom condo. Traffic had tapered off as she left the city, and as she stopped at a red light in a quiet residential neighborhood near her condo, hers was the only car around.
Headlights suddenly flared in her rear-view mirror.
Whump!
A big vehicle had slammed into the Accord’s rear bumper. Her head snapped forward. The impact failed to activate the car’s air bags, but it triggered a string of colorful oaths more suited to a sailor than a college history professor.