Ian was about to die.
He clung as best he could to the steep slope as the shards of slate shifted under his feet. A few meters above, the camel train on the narrow path was still lumbering forward. Ian was so focused on not sliding down the near-vertical mountain face that he dared not look to see if his guide, Qasim, had noticed him fall.
They were supposed to be silent. Should he yell?
Ian cursed himself. He had let the pain of several days’ ride convince him it was okay to loosen his straps and adjust his posture so he wasn’t aggravating his painfully sore ass. A few hours later, he had fallen asleep and then fallen from his camel.
Ian opened his mouth as rocks shifted again.
He seized. He couldn’t move. If he held his breath, he would phase right into the mountain, and unless there just happened to be a cave or other opening right underneath him, he’d only wind up entombed forever. If he fell, he would almost certainly be impaled on the sharp rocks that studded the slope like fangs, and if not, the smaller ones would tear him to shreds as he tumbled to the gorge below.
A shadow blocked the sun.
Qasim.
His guide stood over him, his keffiyeh wrapped around everything but his eyes. He lowered a braided leather strap, and as it dangled, Ian grabbed it with his one good hand. The shift in weight caused the rocks under him to slide, and he fell flat to the ground.
But at least he held on.
Ian regained his balance, and Qasim pulled him up.
Ian nodded silently in thanks and walked back to his camel, a female whose name he couldn’t pronounce. As he brushed past the big male, Yank, the animal spit at him. Again.
Ian didn’t bother to clean the mucus from his keffiyeh this time. He just took his mount, tightened his straps, and waited.
Qasim rolled up his braided leather. Apparently it was a whip. Then he walked along the narrow path to the front of the camel train. As he passed Ian, he checked the padded restraints on his saddle and tightened them painfully, as if in punishment.
Ian groaned involuntarily, but took it.
He had never ridden a camel before. In fact, he didn’t remember ever seeing one in person, although he probably had at the zoo any number of times as a boy. They had a reputation for being foul-tempered, he knew, but his mount seemed pleasant enough. Qasim seemed to have reserved the foulest animals, like Yank, for pack duty. The big male spat at Ian every time he passed. Qasim had explained that Yank was short for Yankee, and that the animal was so named because it hated Americans. Ian explained that he wasn’t American at all, that he was Canadian by birth, and Japanese by ancestry, at which Qasim merely shrugged and asked, “What’s the difference?”
Still, Ian liked the man, despite his cultural insensitivity, and he was glad to have Qasim’s company on the three-day trek to the outskirts of Dushanbe. Qasim teased Ian relentlessly at every mistake, but he never failed to correct it appropriately, or to make sure Ian wasn’t set to fall from the narrow path they followed down the mountain—that is, if he followed instructions.
Ian pulled the blue, pattern-printed keffiyeh down from his mouth and took a swig from his canteen. His face was chapped and irregularly pink, a result of several days’ exposure to high wind and unfiltered sun at elevation. Both sucked the moisture from his body, and he was drinking often—at least twice as often as his guide. Ian wondered how Qasim did it. But then, the forty-seven-year-old’s tanned face was as craggy as the slopes of the mountains he had traversed his entire life, and probably just as dry. There weren’t many trees around, or vegetation of any kind, in fact. But the view was spectacular.
Qasim nonchalantly took his place at the head of the train and signaled for them to continue. As Ian’s funny-named camel lurched forward, he turned to check the cargo. There were seven other camels in the caravan, besides the two the men rode, and each was attached by a rope to the animal in front and behind, and each carried a pair of long wooden crates, attached to each other and hung by straps over the animals’ backs.
Guns. Lots and lots of guns. The latest tech. Or so he was told.
Ian hoped it was enough.
As his camel swayed back and forth, Ian already felt himself getting sleepy, despite the near-death experience he’d had just moments before. He was exhausted, and there was no way to pass the time. No way to charge a phone. And no signal. But the worst part was the imposed silence. There was no talking, at least not during the day. Sound carried in the mountains, Qasim explained, a truth Ian experienced directly every time he heard the call of some great hunting eagle only to scan the skies and find nothing but a distant winged speck, moving across a cliff face a good ten or twenty miles away.
“Police?” Ian had asked about the rule of silence at the outset of the journey. He wasn’t worried. He could pass through the walls of any jail. But the countdown was nearing its end. There wasn’t enough time to arrange another deal. The U.S. military rifles they’d purchased from the Afghani tribesmen the day before, which had been earmarked for anti-terror activities, weren’t exactly in steady supply.
“Perhaps.” Qasim shrugged off Ian’s suggestion. “But a slow-moving camel is an easy target for a leopard.”
Ian had immediately scanned the high cliffs, which brought a deep chuckle from his guide.
“Don’t bother. You’ll never see them coming.”
Indeed, after two and a half days of near-constant travel, they hadn’t seen—or heard—anything in the high wilderness, save the eagles and a few mountain rodents.
That night at camp, Qasim watched his young companion once again struggle to find a comfortable spot amid the rocks, as he did every night, and the old guide was finally overcome by curiosity. The question that had clearly been plaguing him for days finally came out.
“Why are you out here, my friend?” Qasim reclined on a woven mat in front of the tiny fire that crackled softly between them, and the light jumped around his skeptical face.
Ian paused. He hadn’t expected that question. It seemed like some horrible breach of etiquette. He thought smugglers weren’t supposed to ask each other questions. “Not much to say,” he lied.
“Oh, come now. Men don’t risk their lives for nothing. There must be a woman, eh?”
Ian scowled. That was a trick question. “There’ve been a few women.” Emli. Wink. Xana. “But not like that.” Axl. She would be waiting with “the others,” as they called themselves. The Faction was a collective—or so they were fond of explaining—not a hierarchy. There were no groups and no titles.
“Then why?”
Qasim took a bite from the tough, gamey dried meat that comprised the bulk of their rations. Ian had no idea what kind of animal it came from and wouldn’t have been surprised if it was the same as the one he rode.
He thought about the question. “Kind of a long story, I guess.”
Qasim chuckled and raised his arms to the clear night sky. “No TV out here, my friend. No computers. And nowhere to hide. We have only each other to pass the time.”
At the outset of the journey, on their first night together, Qasim had asked Ian several questions. About his family. About where he was from. Ian asked about the rule of silence and was told that didn’t apply after the sun went down, provided they kept their voices low. Ian was suspicious for all of ten minutes, until he departed the small camp to take a piss. A few meters from the fire, darkness engulfed him and he immediately raised his hands to steady himself. One misstep and he’d careen down the mountain, as he almost had that day.
No one traveled that high at night, Qasim explained. At least, not without a full moon. And a death wish.
Ian reclined on his own mat and looked up at the stars. It was amazing. The closest thing he’d ever seen was on a grade school trip to a campground near Banff. But this was something else. There was no light pollution at all. Ian craned his neck and wondered if he’d ever seen these stars, or if they were different on this side of the world.
Qasim cracked another twig and set it on the small fire that kept them both surprisingly warm.
Ian looked back at the fire. “I’m not sure I could explain it.”
Qasim shrugged indifferently.
Ian felt bad then, as if he’d just offended the man who had quite probably saved his life not five hours earlier.
“Well. Let’s see.” He watched the fire. It was a good question, actually. Why was he out there? “When I was nine, my dad died.”
“You said he was a soldier.”
Ian nodded. “A year or two later, we moved out of the city. Vancouver. Good ol’ O, Canada.” He stressed his un-American-ness at every opportunity. “To this little town. Not many Asians there. I mean, not that I felt oppressed or whatever. Fucking nerdy Japanese kid. What did I have to worry about, right? But it didn’t help me feel like I belonged either, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, of course.”
“When I was in high school, Mom had her first bout with cancer. She’d end up beating it and going into remission for a few years, but I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that she looked like crap and I thought . . . Holy shit. I’m gonna be alone. Like, where would I go? Who would I live with?”
“Don’t they have friends in Am—where you are from?”
“I had a few friends, but none of us were early bloomers.”
“Early bloomers?” Qasim took another pull from his strand of mystery meat.
“Low social skills. Awkward. Makes it hard. My own fault, I suppose. I never put much effort in.”
“Ah. That is strange to me. Here, a man without family, who keeps only to himself, doesn’t long survive. But please.” He motioned.
“I used to sit across from this girl in chemistry class. Stefanie. Man, I had such a huge crush on her. Of course, she liked this guy Kevin. Kev Banacek. Who was like Mr. Canada. He played hockey, but he wasn’t on the hockey team. He played guitar, but he wasn’t in a band. He didn’t need to be. Everyone liked him. He didn’t have to put effort into anything.
“This one time, I was talking to someone after class—this girl Alice, kinda nerdy like me. She asked about my mom. She prolly woulda gone out with me if I had asked. But I was too stupid to see it. Anyway, I mentioned something about how Mom was on morphine and what it did to her, and next thing I know Kev is talking to me about . . . I don’t even remember. Stuff. I just remember being shocked. Flustered.”
“How old were you?”
“Maybe fourteen or fifteen.”
Qasim grunted in understanding.
“Kev was older, I think. He invited me to this party. And I remember, he made it a point to mention Stefanie would be there. Now, as far as I knew, no one in the world had any idea how I felt. I had never spoken about it. Not even to my nerdy friends. So now I’m freaking out, like what have I done to give it away, and did she know?
“Anyway, at some point he asks about the morphine. What’s it for? How much is there?
“At that age, I didn’t know kids did prescription drugs. Like, that just wasn’t on my radar. So maybe it was a little strange, but I thought he was just more like my awkward friends than I expected. Like he was trying to ask about Mom but not doing a very good job or something.
“Couple times that week, it comes up. Kev Banacek is talking to me.
“I mentioned to Mom I got invited to a party and she thought it was the greatest thing ever. She was so sick. And it made her happy. I mentioned it and she just lit up. And I didn’t want to let her down, ya know?
“But now it was clear. I was supposed to bring a bottle.”
“Of morphine?”
Ian nodded. “Yeah.
“I was pretty sure I could get away with it. And I was pretty sure she could get more. When you’re battling terminal cancer, the docs aren’t so worried about rationing the pain meds.”
“So you took them.”
Ian nodded. “When she was sleeping. In the afternoon. Jesus, my heart was pounding so hard. I frickin’ ran to the party like I was running from the cops. It was kind of exciting, ya know? First bad thing I ever did.”
Ian paused. “And probably the worst.
“As soon as I walked through the door, scrawny kid in my too-tight geek pants and button-down shirt—who wears a button-down to a party? Kev comes over and asks if I got the bottle.
“Maybe he didn’t mean it this way, but I felt right then like I was the only one who had to buy admission, like if I didn’t have it, he’d send me home.
“So I showed him and he just kinda takes it out of my hand and raises it in the air and shouts ‘Asian kid came through!’ And everybody cheers.”
Ian stopped. “Asian kid,” he said softly.
Qasim waited.
“When this guy Merlin—that’s what everyone called him, I guess, ’cuz he was supposed to be a wizard with a hockey stick or something—when Merlin passed out the pills so everyone could get high, he handed me one. Like I was anyone else. Like it wasn’t my mom’s name on the bottle. Like she wasn’t dying of cancer back at my house.
“I didn’t take it, of course. I remember feeling sick. I wanted to cry. But I didn’t want anyone to see, so I just kind of wandered around and didn’t talk or make eye contact. I wanted to grab all the pills and put them back in the bottle and run home and pretend like none of it had happened.
“That’s when I saw Kev with a girl. On someone’s bed. They still had their clothes on, but it didn’t seem like that would last long.
“Stefanie saw it too and had her feelings hurt pretty bad. I’m not sure anything had happened between them, but it kinda seemed like it. I guess I should have said something to her. She sat on the swing set in the back yard and talked all night to this guy Dan. They actually ended up getting married. After graduation. Two kids, at last count. He’s a financial planner. I think.
“So here I stole. Narcotics. From my dying mother. Just so some other guy could get laid. And be popular. And nothing was any different. No one cared. I didn’t even have a name. I was just ‘Asian kid.’
“What happened to him? The other boy?”
“Ya know, I always thought Kev would go into sales or something, but turns out he got very sick and ended up having some kind of religious experience. Now he’s a pastor at some big popular church back home. The best part of me wishes him well and hopes he does something worthwhile with it.”
Qasim smiled wryly. “And the other part?”
Ian shrugged. “It kinda bugs me that he just happened to get sick, ya know? Like, right when life gets hard. Not that being a pastor is easy. It’s how he does it. Maybe you just have to see. He’d just found another way to use people, earning tithes by being a hypocrite, convincing everyone not to do all the exact same shit he did.”
Ian shook his head. “But whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
“And then your mother passed?” Qasim took another bite.
“Not right away. A few years later, the cancer came back. And eighteen months after that, she died. I was in college.
“I never really dealt with it. Her death. Or my dad’s. The feelings of abandonment or whatever. I suppose that’s why it hit me so hard.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had a kind of falling out with some friends recently. I really thought we had something special. Things went sideways and everyone split up. I have no idea how to find them.”
“Do you still want to?”
More than anything burst into Ian’s mind. “Yeah. I didn’t think so at first. But yeah. I really do.”
“Then you should. We need friends. Women, you know, they come and go.” Qasim scowled and waggled a hand. “But a brother-in-arms, a man who will stand and hold a sword at your side, he is worth ten fortunes. Sounds like you could have used someone like that.”
Ian laid back and looked up at the stars. “Yeah . . .” He wondered where the others were. John. Xana. Wink.
“But you still didn’t answer my question.”
“Ha. Sorry.” Ian stared up as he spoke. “I guess it’s because I don’t wanna be that kid who steals for other people. Who gets up every day of his life and goes to an office and works hard so some popular guy can get rich. Who waits for someone else to make the move. I’m out here for me.”
Qasim pulled a swig from a colorful bottle Ian hadn’t seen before. “And those?” The man motioned to the crates on the silent camels.
Ian looked. Then he turned back to Qasim. “That’s none of your business.”
The man smiled broadly, and it stretched the tanned wrinkles of his face. “You learn quickly. Get some rest, my young friend. We will reach the airstrip in the morning.”
John’s first captivity was a hunt—desperate, brutal, intimate. It was a dirty bucket. A swinging light. The spark of a car battery. The scuff of bare feet on dirt.
His second captivity was a laboratory maze. The accommodations were hi-tech, the food was adequate, and the guards were numerous. The nameless organization that held him wasn’t rushing to maximize a ransom that dwindled with time. They could be patient, calculating, and inhuman.
So it was John moved through a system designed to inflict precise and measured suffering without care. Where before he had come to know the scars on the faces of the men who burned him, now he rarely saw the same person twice. Everything was preordained. Scheduled. Efficient.
Where the men in the caves had been entrusted by their superiors to produce results with art and experience, the nameless organization bestowed no such authority on its ranks. Theirs was a system designed to appease some unseen managers who sat in conference rooms reviewing cases in bulk, men and women who needed confidence in a process they had never faced directly. Thus they traded expediency for control, efficacy for repeatability.
First were simple beatings, as with any organized syndicate. Managers were assured the easiest cases would break immediately, and it was better to get them out of the way so as not to trifle the experts. So it was that a thick-necked Mongolian tenderized John’s face with fat hands. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side.
It hurt, of course. But the truth was, all other things being equal, the soldier didn’t mind. It wasn’t that the Mongolian was inept. Far from it. Rather, it was that the throbbing sting of the beatings overrode the sharp, tingling pain that otherwise etched itself through John’s skin like burrowing razors. At the end of each session, his face was so swollen and sore that John could almost remember life before.
After the beatings came the water, scientifically designed to trigger an involuntary panic at not being able to breathe. They sprayed John with a fire hose. They dropped him in a tank and nearly filled it such that he had to lift his head to catch irregular gulps of air. They sat him in a dunking chair that bobbed up and down like a toy.
And always the same stinging smell of chemical disinfectant on recycled air. And always the same three questions:
Who is the Prophet?
Where are the others?
What is the plan?
John never answered, even as they came over and over.
Who is the Prophet?
Where are the others?
What is the plan?
John knew this game. He was an experienced player. He didn’t need to say anything. Not at first. Not until their frustration became obvious. After that, he would feign distress, making it seem like he was days from breaking. When after a time their frustration manifested again, he would let a few relevant facts slip, verifiable facts. And so it would go.
John passed the nights constructing a story, a generally false timeline salted with verifiable elements, and memorizing it backward and forward, whole and in part. Organizing facts. Putting them in a queue. What to say first. What to keep in his back pocket. Enough to make him seem useful but without putting the team in real danger. John knew this game. And his captors’ machine-like system made it all too easy. They had practically taped a map to the door of his cell.
Or so it seemed at first.
On the fourth day, the thick-necked Mongolian unexpectedly reappeared. John hadn’t expected to see a familiar face again. He pushed the soldier down the hall, where instead of turning left, as they had every time, they turned right and rolled into an elevator.
Both men were silent through twenty floors. The complex where they held him was massive. There wasn’t much hope of creating a mental map, so he focused instead on exits and transportation hubs, like the stairwell he noticed just beyond the bank of elevators.
John was deposited in a library, a dead end—only one door. The walls were filled with books inside white cabinets with ten-foot-high, glass-paneled doors. In the center of the room was a long dining table with a place setting at each end. In the ceiling was a satellite map full of white dots and connecting curves on a blue-black background.
John tongued the cut in his lip as he was rolled to the table, where a steak dinner had been laid out. Fancy plate. Genuine silver. Crystal salt and pepper shakers. Garlic mashed potatoes. Sautéed greens. Water in a fluted glass.
John watched the waiter pour the wine as someone walked into the room behind him. Not a server. Different gait. Walking confidently.
The figure strode toward the far end of the table. His face and scalp were scarred and hairless, like he’d been dropped in toxic sludge. He wore some kind of dark maroon suit made of small interlocking hexagons. Looked hi-tech.
The man sat down, cut into his steak without a word, and examined it. Satisfied with the color, he started eating.
John stayed still. His face was healing. The throb of the beatings several days before was wearing off and the razor-pains of his burns had started poking through.
It was several minutes before the host spoke.
“We know the others referred to you as Captain. Your skills and nationality suggest you were part of the United States’ clandestine services. As such, your personnel and mission files have all been redacted or destroyed, as have all links to surviving family and friends. It seems you’re nobody.”
He swallowed and took another bite. “But based on your rank and physical description, we were eventually able to locate the replacement identity you were given. John Michael Regent. Wounded veteran. War hero.”
The man in red waited.
“That isn’t your real name, is it?”
Nothing.
“Do the others have any idea who you really are?”
Still nothing.
“I didn’t think so. But then, if your former employers were following their usual protocol, one of your names will be real. Easier to avoid a slip-up that way. Is it okay if I call you John?”
The soldier picked up the salt and shook it over the greens.
“I have a real problem, John. And it’s not you and your little friends.”
Silence.
“Tell me, what do you know of the Vorgýrim?”
John set the salt shaker down.
“A man in your line of work has no doubt had occasion to run into some of the stranger aspects of our world. Sadly, such things were once a normal part of human life. It’s why the ancient documents of every culture are full of the strange and the fantastic. Even the works of men who prove themselves otherwise intelligent and reasonable. Like Thucydides. And the Confucian chroniclers in China.” The man motioned to the books around them. Then he took another bite of his dinner.
John reached up and tried to scratch his scalp under the thin helmet that kept him from hitching, but the crosshatched metal wouldn’t budge. It pinched tightly at his temples and the base of his neck. He felt the itch squirm like a worm under it.
“But the missionaries and the zealots turned them all away. Christians in the West. Muslims in the East. The Inquisition hunted down and burned at the stake anyone who was different, and much that was originally fantastic and amazing in this world died out.
“All those ancient writers embellished the truth, of course. And so an ancient tribe of savages, reduced to consuming blood by a perfectly explainable genetic deficiency, became something supernatural. Even the word ‘vampyr’ was a corruption of their name. Did you know that?”
Silence.
“But truth is always stranger than fairy tale.” The Red King looked at John’s plate. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
John picked up the pepper and started shaking it slowly into a pile on his plate.
“They’re quite probably the originators of cave painting. They participated in the sack of Rome and the fall of the T’ang Dynasty. They are the antithesis of everything we stand for, you and I. Everything you fought for. Reason. Progress. Freedom.
“I knew we would have to face them. Eventually. In the past, open confrontation had been avoided with delicacy. And their clan-based social structure prevented them from uniting. The individual family units are small and isolated, acting more or less autonomously despite paying nominal allegiance to a governing body, called the Supremacy.
“But now, thanks to a very avoidable and unfortunate accident, the dragon of the earth is stirring.” The man raised the tip of his silver knife near his burned ear. “They have heard the call of ages and awoken a handful of superior beings. Threshkar. Immortals. The ancestors of these amazing individuals once served as the personal shock troops of the Persian emperors, in fact. Beaten only by the Greeks. Beaten only by reason and cooperation.
“Soon, more will come.” He sighed. “Like a Biblical plague.”
The man in red watched his prisoner shake the pepper over and over into a pile on his plate. Then he set his knife and fork down and took a drink. “I know the game as well as you. I know you’ll stay silent until you sense our frustration growing, at which time you’ll let slip a few details to keep us on the line, buy your friends more time to do whatever it is you’re planning.”
John stopped and looked up at his host.
“I was happy to let the machine downstairs chew on you for a few days because, frankly, you and your friends are not my biggest problem, although I suspect you think you are. You’re not even second. That would be certain members of my own organization.” He sat back and took a drink. “You’re not third. That would be the rather amazing extraterrestrial who’s been hiding on our planet for some time now. You’re not fourth, although I understand you’ve met the Wisper. You’re not fifth. Or sixth. Or seventh. Or even eighth.”
He waited.
“As I said, the world is full of strange and fantastic things.”
John set the pepper shaker down.
His captor spoke again. “But as with the Vorgýrim, I do have to deal with you.” He nodded. “Eventually. And unlike the people who work for me, I don’t think a few more days in the system is going to do anything to loosen your tongue. Hence, here we are.”
John heard the door open. A man walked in. Heavy steps. Probably the thick-necked Mongolian.
A gun cocked. It was pressed to John’s back, just below his neck, where it would easily rupture his heart.
The grotesque man in red set his wine glass down. “I don’t have the time or interest in being as thorough as those who held you before.” He motioned to John’s face. “And frankly, they’ve not left us much to work with anyway. So today we’re jumping ahead a few rounds in the game. You will tell me something useful. Right now. Or you will die. Right now.” He opened his hands. “That’s it.”
Seconds ticked.
But John didn’t speak.
“Believe it or not, I don’t enjoy this game, Captain. And as I said, you are not my biggest problem. Last chance.”
Nothing.
“Very well.”
John and his adversary locked eyes.
“So be it.” The man in red nodded at the guard a second time.
The trigger was pulled.
The hammer fell.
Click.
Empty.
The gun was pulled back from John’s back.
The man in red tossed his napkin on the table. He leaned his elbows on the table. He thought. “So. It would seem I was right. Despite my underlings’ disbelief, I don’t believe your bravado is an act. You believe in what you’re doing. You legitimately care for your little friends. I suspect you’re willing to die for them, in fact. And therefore they are your one, true weakness, the way to finally break you.
“We got some good news today. It seems you won’t be alone here for very long. Isn’t that fantastic? We should have a reunion party.”
They had someone. But who?
John revealed nothing. There was nothing he could do anyway.
“Take him back to his cell.”
John felt his chair turn. He glanced at his plate as a woman stepped in to take it away. His food was untouched. At the side of the plate was a pile of pepper, smeared by fingertips.
“Are you sure your friends are coming?”
Ian looked to the foothills in the distance. Beyond them were the mountains they had just crossed. Qasim knew something was wrong. Axl and the others were supposed to have arrived an hour ago. Ian wanted to make it look like there was an unexpected confusion before politely suggesting they take off anyway.
The pilot, Eziz, was Qasim’s cousin, and looked the part. He was a few years younger and not quite as weathered, but he had the same light humor draped over a stone-cold gaze. He chewed some kind of root, spitting occasionally into the dusty gravel of the airstrip as he leaned against the plane, a twin-propped Russian monstrosity that was definitely older than Ian, maybe even than all of them.
“Perhaps you should try the radio inside one more time,” Eziz growled.
Ian had twice made a show of trying to contact the Faction, where in reality, he’d just fiddled with the knobs.
“Sure.” That was good. They were getting frustrated. One more try and they would be open to discussing Plan B. After all, they couldn’t hang out on the runway all day with a plane full of illegal arms. They would still want the last half of the money they’d been promised, but Ian figured there had to be room to negotiate.
He stood from a crouch and walked across the gravelly strip and into the single-story wood structure that served as both air traffic control and commissary. The only other building nearby was the small, dirty hangar next door. Both were empty. He looked out the window to make sure neither man had followed and noticed Eziz climbing into the plane. Ian flipped a few switches on the radio as the plane’s propellers sputtered to life.
They were definitely antsy. This would be easier than he expected. Ian was about to turn for the door when he heard the gun cock behind his head.
“Shit.” Apparently his double cross just turned into a triple.
Ian turned slowly. Three men dressed similarly to the two outside, and bearing identical daggers, had emerged from their hiding place in the back room. They were Qasim’s clan. Same pattern on their keffiyehs. Same handlebar mustaches. Hardcore mountain people. Probably killers.
Ian jumped and the man in front pulled the trigger at point blank range. The bullet passed through Ian’s forehead and ripped through the plywood wall as he phased through his attacker, like a ghost, which set all three men aghast. Ian wanted to think that, after John’s training and all the fighting recently, he was cool-headed and experienced enough to hold his breath at the sound of the gun. But in reality he knew it was entirely involuntary and he had held his breath out of total surprise and fear.
Whatever. Same difference.
Ian took a breath just before reaching the floor. He smiled at the wide-eyed man behind the shooter and yanked the pin from a grenade on the man’s belt. Then he jumped through the far wall.
But not far enough.
The simple plywood-and-beam structure offered no resistance to the grenade, which exploded after a moment of frantic yelling from inside. The blast hit Ian in the back as it ripped the building open and killed the men inside. Ian was knocked forward and got a face full of dirt and gravel.
“Ow . . .”
Tiny rocks poked his skin, puncturing it in at least a couple places, as his nose reeled from the impact. His eyes watered. His ears rang.
And the plane was making its turn onto the runway. He could hear the engines sputter and rev. They were going to take off, and with all his leverage on board!
“Shit shit shit.” Ian sat up and rubbed his nose. It stung. He fumbled in the pocket of his fatigues—his makeshift utility belt—and pulled out a restaurant pepper packet.
But his nose was already stopped up.
“Shit!”
Ian ran around to the front of the now-exposed structure just in time to see the twin-engine plane accelerating down the runway.
Ian danced in a circle in frustration. “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Not at all. His face was red. His neck strained. He blurted “God dammit!” as the plane took to the air.
“Okay, okay.” He tried to calm himself. He rubbed his nose. He shook the pepper packet. He rubbed his nose again and sniffed hard. Okay. His ears were ringing and his nostrils were stopped up from the fall. But maybe he could do it.
Ian dumped a little pepper in the crook of his hand and snorted it like a coke addict. He dropped the packet at the sting and put both hands—real and phantom—to his watering eyes.
“Holy fuck.”
A tingle.
Ian’s eyes whipped toward the retreating plane. Concentrate concentrate concentrate.
He sneezed hard—
—And appeared in the back of the low-flying plane. But just like in New York, where he had appeared too close to the wall and gotten his leg stuck in a pipe, now he was standing in a crate. All the long boxes from the caravan, save one, were stacked three high and secured by mesh to the sides of the hold. The men had opened one and left it in the middle of the floor, presumably to verify the contents before their hasty takeoff.
Ian looked to the cockpit. The oval door was open but Eziz and Qasim had their backs to him. Why shouldn’t they? They had no reason to suspect anyone was on board. And luckily, the noise from the old prop engines obscured all but the loudest sounds.
Ian tugged gently, trying to get his leg free.
Nothing.
He tugged harder.
Still nothing. He was trapped. His knee was just wider than the stretch of lower thigh that took the place of the crate lid.
He looked to the front. They still hadn’t noticed him. Over the engine noise, he couldn’t tell if they were talking to each other or not. If one of them turned and saw him, he’d have no warning. They both had knives. Eziz had a gun.
And Ian was immobile.
He looked at the crate. His leg taken the place of part of the lid as well as several of the rifles inside, stacked in alternating fashion.
If he could just get the lid off . . .
Ian squeezed the fingers of his phantom arm between his leg and the heavy lid. It was a tight fit, too tight for solid fingers, but with Stubs he was able to get a grip.
He pulled.
The men had loosened the lid more than he expected, and Ian fell back with a clatter.
Qasim and Eziz turned. Their mouths moved with exclamations Ian couldn’t hear. He kicked free of the crate and scrambled to his feet as Eziz pulled a handgun. The man shot just as Ian took cover behind the left row of cargo. The bullet struck the wood and Qasim yelled at his cousin in a language Ian didn’t recognize. Eziz yelled back. He put his gun away and drew the curved dagger from his belt, the same dagger as the men at the airstrip had carried.
From the cockpit, Qasim opened the rear cargo door. A short klaxon sounded and the door began to lower. Hot, dry air whipped through the hold. Ian smelled pasture. They weren’t more than a thousand or so feet in the air.
From his hiding place behind the stack of crates, Ian had only one thought.
I’m not dying up here with these fuckers.
He stepped out to face the grizzled mountain warrior.
Eziz smiled, adjusted his blade from under- to overhand grip, and came at Ian. The man’s eyes turned in shock and confusion when his arm was stopped in midair by . . . nothing.
Ian held with Stubs and did exactly as John taught him. He stepped in and kicked Eziz. Right in the balls. A life-and-death situation was no time to be coy, John had explained. You do what you need to survive, and damn what anyone else thinks.
Eziz grimaced and stepped back. But when his face lifted, the look in his eyes suggested Ian’s move might have been a mistake.
“Shit.”
The mountain warrior yanked his blade arm free and came at Ian with a roar. Ian took a slice across his shoulder as he moved against the stack of crates behind him.
Eziz had him pinned. Ian struggled, but his attacker was a lot stronger. The curved blade moved slowly but relentlessly toward Ian’s throat.
A life-and-death situation was no time to be coy.
Ian extended Stubs in the air. He reached around and pulled the pistol from his attacker’s belt and fired with the barrel pressed to the man’s side.
The shot rang.
Eziz’s eyes went wide.
His arms relaxed.
He slumped to the ground.
Ian stared.
He had just shot a man. At point blank range.
A crack. Ian felt a sting in his right shoulder. He dropped the gun involuntarily as Qasim recoiled his whip and cracked it again. The force surprised him and Ian stumbled back toward the open hatch.
Qasim kept his eyes on Ian as he bent to feel his cousin’s neck. Ian could guess from his facial expression that Eziz was dead. Qasim picked up the pistol and tossed it into the cockpit.
Ian looked at his right arm. His severed arm. The whip had torn his shirt. The gash on his shoulder was bleeding and painful—painful enough that he was no longer experiencing phantom limb. That meant the Oric had nothing to misinterpret, and there was no more Stubs.
That was why the gun had dropped.
“Shit.” Ian backed toward the rear of the plane. Qasim drew his blade as his whip cracked in the air near Ian’s face.
Another crack. Then another. The whip was effective. It was long enough to keep Ian out of jump range. If he phased through it, he’d only get close enough for Qasim to gut him with his dagger. And anyway, if he didn’t time his landing perfectly, he’d fall through the floor of the plane straight to his death, either splatted as a bug on the surface or entombed forever underground.
Crack.
Crack.
Ian backed to the rear of the lowered platform. With the wind and mild turbulence, he could barely keep his balance. He bent his knees and extended his arms.
All of this now seemed like a really bad idea. Everything.
Qasim yelled over the twin dins of engine and air. “I told you. We are nothing in this world without the men at our side. Unlike yours, mine stay together. We stopped your friends in the mountains.”
Qasim and Eziz hadn’t been waiting for the Faction. They’d been waiting for their clan. In truth, Ian had sent Axl and “the others” to the wrong place. Qasim’s people might have stopped them in the mountains as well, but they wouldn’t have showed up on time either way. But with his heels hanging two thousand feet in the air, Ian didn’t really feel like explaining the overlapping double crosses. Or that the Faction wasn’t what he meant by friends.
He looked down and saw a single paved road. They must be getting close to the city.
Qasim was almost gleeful. “And here I thought you people couldn’t get any more ridiculous than those fools from the CIA, bumbling around pretending like we don’t know who they are.”
Ian inched back again, drawing Qasim as close as possible. He hoped the wind was strong enough to make the whip useless. He would only get one shot.
“This is no business for a boy like you,” Qasim yelled over the roar. “I don’t know how you lost the hand, but it takes more than tragedy to make a man.”
Ian looked at the knife in Qasim’s hand. Fifty bucks said he was skilled at using it. Ian looked him in the eye. Qasim was really gonna kill him.
Like, really really.
“You’re not leaving me any choice, dude!” The wind took Ian’s keffiyeh.
“Such is life. You should have stayed home, American.”
Fuck. That did it.
Qasim came at him. Ian jumped forward, passed through, and in one movement jumped and turned, grabbing one of the supports in the roof and kicking his surprised attacker square in the chest.
The curved knife bounced off the cargo door and followed its owner screaming into the air.
“I told you.” Ian watched the man’s arms and legs flail as he fell wide-eyed to the ground. “I’m Canadian.”
Ian ran to the cockpit. He looked at all the controls. “Shit. Now I got no god-damned pilot.”
This day sucked.
Ian sat down in Eziz’s seat. The first thing he noticed was someone screaming through the radio headset. The second thing he noticed was that the plane wasn’t crashing. Must be some kind of autopilot. He scanned the dash. There was a brightly-lit, heavy red light in the middle of the display, right next to a metal switch. But the label was in Russian.
“Shit.” He looked around. Everything was in Russian.
Ian put the headset on. Someone was screaming in a language he didn’t understand—probably because the plane was heading right for Dushanbe.
“Uhhh, yeah. Hi. Um. We had some, uh, technical difficulties. But we’re okay now. Thank you.” He stopped, then remembered. “Oh—over.”
The woman on the radio yelled at him. Then someone else came on. A man. Thankfully, he spoke English, albeit with a thick accent.
“A76492, you have deviated from your flight plan and are entering restricted airspace. Turn around and land your plane for inquiry. Over.”
“Uh, look. Sorry. Like I said. We had some technical difficulties. But everything’s okay now.” Maybe. If he can figure out how to fly. He had already forgotten how hard it was to do everything one-handed. “Oh. Over.”
“A76492, who am I speaking to? Over.”
“My name is, uh. Kev. Kevin Banacek. I’m a pastor. From Canada.” Ian fumbled one-handed with his phone.
“Mr. Banacek. You are entering congested airspace. Do you know what that means? Turn your plane and land. Over.”
“Right. About that.” Google Translate said the word by the red light was “autopilot.” Perfect. Ian flipped the switch and the plane began to rock and jostle. “Shit!”
He grabbed the W-shaped handle in front of him and tried to keep it steady. “Damn, this is heavy.”
“Excuse me? A76492 say again, over.”
“Uh, nothing. Everything’s okay here. Resuming flight plan. Over.” Ian found the compass on the dash and began to turn the plane slowly. The map on his phone had calculated the trajectory and distance, and he kept turning until the arrow on the little screen matched the right heading. “Thank God for Google Maps,” he whispered.
“A76492, we have you returning to your proper course. You are still under orders to turn your plane and land. Continue on this course and we will be forced to alert the Air Force. Over.”
“Hey. Whoa. Look, here. Check the flight plan. We’re with Oxfam. I’m a pastor. We’re a humanitarian mission carrying agricultural supplies to the Chinese border, en route to the victims of the recent nuclear disaster. We had some unexpected technical difficulties, as I said. That’s all your inquiry would uncover.” He glanced back to Eziz’s dead body. “Besides making a ton of paperwork for you. Me. Everyone. And none of that will help those poor people. We’ve resumed proper course. Another hour and we’ll be out of your airspace entirely and then we’re someone else’s problem. Over.”
There was a pause.
Ian kept repeating the same phrase over and over in his mind. Please be a bureaucrat. Please be a bureaucrat. Please be a bureaucrat.
“A76492, proceed to 12,000 meters and keep present course and speed. Over.”
“Roger that! Awesome. Thank you. You’re awesome. This country is awesome. God bless the Tajik people. Just. Thank you so much. Over. And out.”
Twelve thousand meters, he thought. I can do that. Right?
Finding the altimeter was easy enough, even in Russian. Ian pulled back gently on the stick and the plane rose.
“Cool.”
Ian was admiring the view of the mountains he had from this height when he noticed the one in front of him, the one that had seemed so far away a moment ago, seemed to be coming at him very fast.
Ian pulled back more on the stick. Then more. And more. The plane went up with a jerk and Ian almost threw up. He shut his eyes for a moment. Then opened them as the plane crested a ridge with a few hundred feet to spare.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I totally got this.”