“You need some cleaning up,” she said. “I’ve got a make-up kit you can use after I give you some first aid.”
Cait said she would be delighted to accept the offer and the two women walked off, chatting like old friends, leaving Hawkins and Cal with Amir.
“My apologies for the inconvenience.” Amir said. “From what Dr. Cait told me about how you came to her rescue, I realize now that I was under a misapprehension.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Hawkins said in a tone that didn’t match his nonchalance.
Amir picked up on the edge in Hawkins’ voice. “I understand your anger.” There was sadness in his eyes as he watched the bodies of Ghatool and Baht being carried to the armored vehicle. “My judgment was clouded by emotion. I was very fond of those men. They were loyal.”
Amir’s readiness to order him killed signified a flinty hardness of personality, but he was clearly shaken up over the death of his men. Hawkins was intrigued, too, in the way Amir spoke English, with an American accent.
Speaking in Pashto, Hawkins said, “A broken hand can work, but a broken heart can’t.”
Amir’s jaw dropped. It was rare for a westerner to speak Pashto and even more shocking to hear the old Afghan expression of sympathy from the lips of this stranger.
“True, but in this case the hand still has work to do. To begin with, we have much to learn about each other. May I suggest some refreshments?’
The warlord clapped his hands and some of the guards who had been standing around went to the carrier and pulled out a plastic bag and a couple of coolers. Within minutes, the contents of the bag had morphed into an open-sided pavilion. Blankets and cushions were spread out in the shade.
Abby and Cait returned. They had washed the dirt off their faces, and applied touches of make-up that had improved their spirit as well as their appearance.
Amir served plates of cold spiced lamb and rice to his guests, which they washed down with ice tea. Cait chewed slowly, applying a cold pack to her sore jaw in between bites. While they dined, another cooler was passed to the guards, who had taken up stations at the fort’s gate and around the courtyard.
Amir took a last bite, cleaned his fingers with a packaged hand wipe and looked around at the others.
“Now that we have fed our bodies, it is time to feed our souls with stories. Would you be so kind as to go first, Mr. Hawkins?”
Matt had been thinking how he might reply to the question that would inevitably be asked of him. Amir was too sharp to be deceived by fibs, so Hawkins decided to tell the full story, editing it here and there.
He began with a short resume of his stint as a SEAL in Afghanistan. Amir nodded when he learned how Hawkins knew Pashto and proverbs. He sat quietly while Hawkins told how he had been wounded and left the navy to pursue scientific studies. He touched on his work at Woods Hole and said that he had been hired by what he termed as a government group to search for the Prester John treasure in the lake. He explained without going into detail that a terrorist organization wanted the treasure as part of a scheme against America.
“To buy weapons?” Amir said.
“As I understand it, they think the treasure will give them some historical legitimacy in their attacks on the U.S.”
“Are you saying that you can explore the lake waters?” Cait broke in with excitement in her voice.
“We have the equipment that will help us do that. Yes.”
Amir raised his hand off his lap and held it in front of him as a gesture of disbelief.
“You plunged right into this mission without question, apparently,” he said. “Weren’t you skeptical?”
“Yes, I was very skeptical, until the attempt on my life.”
He told how the two men had broken into his house and tried to kill him.
When he described the twin attackers, a gasp came from Cait’s throat. “Those are the same men who tried to kidnap or kill me,” she said. “They are the reason I fled the country and came to Afghanistan.”
“You’re still here Mr. Hawkins, so the assassins must have failed,” Amir said. “What happened?”
“I killed one of them. The other got away.”
Amir mulled the answer for a moment, a slight smile on his lips.
“Go on with your fascinating story,” he said.
Hawkins told how an acquaintance in Kabul had persuaded him to hire Rashid as a guide. He described their journey up to the theft of the desert buggy and the trek through the night to find the vehicle.
“When we arrived at the fort we found the bodies of your men,” Abby explained. “We stayed outside to keep watch and Matt went in to check things out.”
“It’s fortunate for me that he did,” Cait said. “I was so engrossed taking photos in the map room. I wish I had been paying attention, maybe I could have done something.”
“You could do nothing against an armed and ruthless thug,” Amir said. “Tell me, Dr. Cait, what did you think of the map room?”
“It’s wonderful, but I’m puzzled by the vandalism to the map. Who would do such a thing?”
“I had the same thought the first time I saw the room years ago.” He gazed at the tower, a thoughtful expression on his face, then he pushed himself up from the cushion with his cane. “I would like to see this Rashid person.”
“I’ll show you around,” Hawkins volunteered.
“I’m coming with you,” Cait said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said with determination in her voice. “I left my camera and my cap behind.”
Hawkins shrugged and led the way to the tower entrance and up the stairs to the map room.
If the sight of Rashid’s body bothered Cait, she didn’t show it except for a slight wrinkle of her nostrils. Amir picked the knife from off the floor near the corpse. The blade was short but razor-sharp.
“A coward’s weapon,” he said with distain.
He tossed the knife aside, bent over Rashid’s body and brushed away the flies settling on the mouth and lips. “This pig resembles a family of bandits that lives in a village around fifty miles distant. It’s hard to tell, though. I assume you’re responsible to the wounds to his face.”
“No,” Hawkins said. “The credit for those goes to Dr. Everson, who fought him tooth and nail.”
Cait had squatted to retrieve her baseball cap and the plaster fragments. “Not exactly a nail,” she said. She picked up a shiny piece of metal and stood.
“This.”
She was holding a chisel in her hand.
“The mystery of the damaged map is apparently solved,” Amir said. “This tool was used to chop away the missing section.”
“That only solves part of the mystery,” Cait said. “We don’t know why the damage was done or who did it.”
Hawkins asked if he could look at the chisel and held it under the flashlight.
“There are initials here on the shaft. K and an M. Any idea what they might stand for?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t make any sense,” Cait said.
“Give it a try.”
“My guess is that the letters stand for Kurtz Mining. I found similar initials on a timber in a flooded mine shaft his expedition dug to get at the treasure.”
“I read about the Kurtz expedition in your report,” Hawkins said. “Why would he mess up the map?”
Cait held the two shards with the letters on them side by side. “I think the map had the location of Prester John’s kingdom and Kurtz didn’t want anyone else to know where it was. He was sometimes scoffed at for his pursuit of legends. Think of the glory that would come if he discovered the treasure and found Prester John’s kingdom. Maybe even the Prester’s tomb. My guess is that he made a paper map before covering his trail.”