Phone calls had been picked up by satellites, snatched e-mails pored over in Virginia.
Back in D.C., Joe and Eddie had sat with the director, peering at Manila passport control shots of men claiming to be “importers” when in fact they sought germs or chemicals for use against U.S. troops, or targets like London. Madrid. New York.
“I didn’t know they even had lakes in Afghanistan,” Eddie said now, looking down.
“They dried up,” Joe said.
“Look, there it is, a goddamn ship laying in a desert,” Eddie said, as the copter angled down, as the pilots strained forward, nervous, watching for white puffs below, streaking smoke tails marking the flight of shoulder-fired missiles rising from the mud flats, skimpy cornfields, watermelon patches, and refugee camp, the entire vista pathetic remnants of what had once been one of the most magnificent lakes in Central Asia.
The man strapped down in Kabul had told the Afghan officers, while Eddie tried not to throw up, “The doctor from Pakistan made the ship into a laboratory. They put explosives on the bottom of oil drums, chemicals on top.”
“I read about this region,” said Eddie, fixing the strap on his helmet. “Used to be otters here, leopards, and freshwater farming. Look at this mess. It’s worse than Secaucus. A thousand-square-mile dump.”
They passed over a mass of tents, through a gray cloud formed by four thousand cooking fires. The acrid smell of human waste and swamp washed through the open gunner’s door. Nine miles later they set down on a slightly raised area, on cracked hard earth, surrounded by softer clay, from which tall reeds sprouted like the last stubby hairs on the skull of an eighty-year-old with cancer. The Marines jumped out and, to Joe’s orders, rapid stepped through a foot-wide path in the reeds, their brittle straw-colored tops higher than the moving helmets, toward the now-invisible wreck lying like a dead whale three hundred yards away.
The only sounds were mud sucking at their boots, and flies. Joe glanced down to see, discarded, an empty canvas sack stenciled UNAID. Something living wriggled inside it. A rat or snake. He saw a mud-spattered Little Debbie snack cake, still in the wrapper, Debbie beaming, probably surprised that she’d landed ten thousand miles from home. He saw a wad of crumpled International Herald Tribune that some smuggler probably used as toilet paper. The whole place was a cornucopia graveyard for manufactured crap from the first world, where Hostess Twinkies and Dallas Cowboys T-shirts go to die.
The prisoner in Kabul had been a clerk in a hotel, a small, soft man, picked up by Afghan security guys after he left one of their agency-run brothels. Under torture he’d started crying. Eddie had gone outside, after watching what the officers did to him, and had been sick.
But with his functioning left hand, the prisoner had drawn a map smeared with blood, and later, a passing satellite had confirmed the location of the wreck, but spotted no human movement, then glided away, in the void, where military eyes peer at rooftop laundry, seeking hidden antennas in souks far below.
“They make the gasses there,” the man had gasped.
Eddie said, “Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south. Welcome to smuggler heaven. Even if the ship houses a lab, five to one it’s for heroin.”
The vista opened up abruptly and the ship lay ahead, on its side, as if it had fallen from the sky. Was it rigged to explode? The men sank into mud the color of iron oxide. Flies rode each air molecule. The heat made the ship shimmer, and it seemed larger, the closer they got. Once it had been a fish factory. Its nets had pulled glistening masses of catch from the lake. Now the lake was a thin layer of dirty water hosting bottom feeders and speedboats, but no longer heavy craft.
Once this discarded rust bucket had provided food and respect for locals. Those days, and benefits, were gone.
Eddie said, “Boot and sandal prints. At least twenty guys. Truck tracks, too, light here, then heavy. Was it delivering or removing cargo from the wreck?”
“Major Rush, we found a ladder in the reeds!”
The Marines formed a cordon to protect Joe as he went up first, M4 ready. At the top he heard movement, but it was just a fat rat waddling down the slanting deck — owner, captain, crew.
They all reached the deck without incident.
Eddie let out an amazed breath, minutes later, when they opened the door of the former mess room.
“Fuck me, One. That clerk told the truth.”
A lab.
The Marines roused two guards, teenage boys with AK-47s, asleep in a cabin where they’d been screwing. The stubs of two fat marijuana stogies lay on the deck beside them. The ship reeked of mold, hemp, sex, and piss.
“Where are the other men?” the Marine translator — a Yemeni immigrant from Orange County, California — demanded.
No answer.
The translator aimed a .45 at the head of one of the teenagers. Joe lowered it when the bluff didn’t work.
The Marines reported the rest of the ship empty, then took up defensive positions on deck, in case whoever worked there came back.
“Major, they must have seen the copter,” the lieutenant in charge of the squad said. “I suggest we hurry.”
“Where’d they go?” said Eddie.
“Maybe they got invited across the lake for a Big Mac at the local Iranian Ministry of Intelligence Office. Maybe there’s a clue in our little lab.”
“Someone’s done a pretty good job in the build-it-at-home league,” Eddie said admiringly, and uneasily, some minutes later.
Joe eyed the “lab” by flashlight, danger ticking in his throat. The portholes had been welded over, so no outside light came in, no air could flow in or out. The fume hood and small vats were state of the art. Four large electric fans filled a jury-rigged anteroom, a sort of airlock welded between the cabin, and outer door to the passageway. The fans faced inward, to keep air from escaping. It was a primitive version of up-to-date biolabs. Air was never supposed to be able to escape those labs, in case something deadly got loose. Fort Detrick level fours had vacuum antechambers, air-sucking fans, and triple-sealed hinges. But the jury-rigged lab here used household fans from some desert bazaar. Add in rubber tubes, vacuum bottles, water hoses, bleach and water decontaminant, steel milk cans and pumps, and you got Dr. Frankenstein’s lab-in-a-ship.
“Don’t try this at home, kids,” said Eddie. “Or you could wipe out your family.”
“Whoever worked here had guts,” Joe said.
“Maybe they don’t care. All those virgins waiting for them in heaven. I never understood what’s so great about virgins anyway. They thrash around and knee you in the groin,” Eddie said.
“All women knee you in the groin.”
There came, over the decrepit smells, whiffs of old alcohol and Lysol. Hanging in rusted steel lockers were chem suits, goggles, face masks, and on shelves, cardboard boxes filled with rubber gloves. There were three vintage Maytag refrigerators, but with no electricity on at the moment; whatever was inside would be moldy at best.