Ahead of the truck was nothing but sand — endless dunes of it, a slightly paler black than the night sky. There were no posted warnings, no signs telling him where the border was. He only had Angel’s word for where the dividing line fell. She was being very careful with that — she didn’t trust Google maps, which could be off by whole miles in places, so she had downloaded some very, very detailed maps from the CIA’s databases. Using the GPS in the tablet, she was able to tell where the truck was within a few yards.
“Okay, satellite’s up. I see… I see a couple of things, actually,” she said. He heard her clacking away at a keyboard. “Stand by.”
Chapel dropped the truck into neutral. They were down in the shadow between two dunes, and he could see nothing at all.
The border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan was long and much of it ran through trackless desert. Until recently no one had ever bothered to patrol the dividing line at all. But one of the main drug pipelines that brought opium poppies and refined heroin into Russia ran across this border, in almost a straight shot from Afghanistan. The fence and the border checkpoints north of Tashkent had been built to stop that flow, but of course the drug runners had simply diverted around the obstruction and now they moved most of their product through the Kyzyl Kum. In recent years the Russians had started paying the Kazakhs to keep an eye on their desert frontier to stem that tide. There had been problems — a few farmers who had never even known which country they lived in had been shot while herding their sheep. And plenty of drugs still got through — coverage was still spotty. It was a lot of ground to cover for Kazakhstan’s small military.
But if even one drug interdiction helicopter spotted Chapel’s team, if they fell afoul of even a single man working border patrol, their whole mission would fall apart.
“Okay,” Angel said. “Still working. But you can creep forward a little. The nearest helicopter is twenty miles away from you and heading west.”
Chapel goosed the engine, trying and failing to keep it from roaring as the wheels bit into the dune ahead and started pulling the truck up the long, sweeping face. They were in the most danger at the crests of the dunes, where starlight might glitter on their windows. Chapel hit the top of the dune and raced back down to its bottom.
“Head east for a minute,” Angel said. “Okay, stop. Wait there.”
In the dark Chapel gritted his teeth and waited. He couldn’t see what Angel saw. He couldn’t see anything. He was already exhausted from driving all night, and this anxious game of hide-and-seek made him feel like the bones of his skull were grinding against each other. He glanced over at Nadia and saw her staring out her window, as if she could help by keeping an eye out. The problem was, if they so much as saw the lights of a border patrol unit or heard the chopping noise of a helicopter, they were already dead.
“North. Go now,” Angel said. “Now! Okay, slow down, slower. Head northwest… stop. Stop, stop, stop!”
Chapel drove down into the shelter between two dunes and cut his engine.
“Hang tight,” Angel whispered. “There’s a helicopter about three kilometers to your north. That’s just inside their range of vision. Just… don’t move. Try not to make any noise, in case they have long-range microphones.”
Chapel all but held his breath. With the engine off, the cab of the truck started to get very cold, very quickly. He looked over and saw Nadia shivering, her lips pressed tightly together.
She was trying to keep her teeth from chattering.
Chapel took his hands off the wheel, as if he might accidentally switch the engine back on and give them away. He held his hands up in the air, almost afraid to put them down in case they made a noise when they hit the upholstery.
He could hear the engine ticking, pinging as it cooled. He could hear a drift of sand come tumbling down the dune in front of him, stirred by the wind. He could hear his own heart beating.
No. No, that tiny sound, softer even than the noise the sand made, that wasn’t his heartbeat. As fast as his pulse was racing, it wasn’t going fast enough to make that sound. It had to be something else. It had to be the sound of the helicopter. Was it getting closer? Was it getting louder, or was he just imagining that?
In the shadow of the dune, the truck’s roof was nearly invisible, but if anyone thought to look at it, it would seem wrong. It was too square, in this country of curving dunes. Someone could see them, someone with night-vision goggles could have spotted them, called for the helicopter to investigate… as the helo got closer, its FLIR sensors would pick up their body heat inside the cab, so much warmer than the surrounding sand. Maybe, just maybe there was a chance the helo crew would think they were animals, camels or wild pigs or whatever else lived out here, maybe they would shrug off the heat signature, but more likely they would come closer still, get a better look, and then…
“Okay,” Angel said, her voice startlingly loud in the enclosed cab. Even Bogdan jumped, lifting his long neck in the backseat and staring at Chapel and Nadia.
“Okay, give it another minute. Then head due north, and keep going,” Angel told them. “I think you’re clear.”
PART IV
Abdulla Zokirov had been born in the countryside of Uzbekistan shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union. He had never known a time when orders from Moscow shaped every aspect of his life, had never lived under the yoke of atheists far to the north who wished for nothing more than to trample his religion and his ethnic heritage. He had joined the Uzbek armed forces when he was a teenager and then the SNB when he finished his tour of duty and had spent most of his life studying police reports in Tashkent, under the tutelage of the legendary Jamshid Mirza. He had never traveled farther than Bukhara in his life, had never been outside his national borders.
Still, there was inside him an abiding hatred for all ethnic Russians. It was simply part of his DNA.
So when a pale-faced man in a black suit appeared in the dawn light at the entrance to the abandoned poultry shed in the outskirts of Vobkent, Zokirov’s hackles went up right away. Here was some mindless functionary from the frozen north come putting his nose in where it did not belong.
Zokirov removed his latex gloves — he had been examining one of the dead bodies that lay rotting in the cool darkness of the shed — and strode over to tell the Russian he was not welcome, that this was a crime scene and an internal Uzbek matter and he should just go home.
Then he saw the man’s eyes, and he forgot every word he’d meant to say.
Jamshid Mirza — who was now one of those corpses in the dark — had often spoken of the KGB in tones of reverence mixed with utter loathing. He had once been an agent of that now-defunct organization, and he had talked of how they all cultivated a particular look, a stare, a piercing expression they called the Eye of the Dead Fish. It was a look that conveyed a particular message to anyone it fell upon. You are not a human being, the stare implied. You do not have any rights. You will do what I say or I will shoot you without a moment’s hesitation. Even if you do exactly as I say, I may shoot you anyway, and if you beg for your life, you will only disgust me.
It was a lot for one look to say. Abdulla Zokirov had always thought Mirza was being dramatic, when he spoke of the Eye of the Dead Fish. No man could say so much with a single glance.
But this Russian, this man who had intruded on Zokirov’s work, had the Eye. And it spoke volumes.