The Emerald Scepter

CHAPTER THIRTY

No matter how hard he scrubbed, Professor Saleem could not wash the blood from his hands. He tried different solvents and abrasives but the crimson stain persisted. He scrubbed harder. The skin dissolved, then the flesh deteriorated, and he realized to his horror that he was looking at the pure white bones of his fingers and palms.

He awoke with his heart hammering in his chest and his face bathed in a cold sweat. He knew the source of the nightmare. He had gone to sleep thinking of a spirited exchange he had had with his cousin at ISI headquarters in Islamabad over the use of violence by unpredictable men with extremist views as a cat’s paw to accomplish the intelligent service’s goals.

“I agree. This is a foul business,” Cousin Mohamed had said, leaning back in his chair to tent his fingers. “Sometimes we get our hands dirty, but remember that we can always wash them clean.”

“That’s true, cousin, but sometimes the soap can be so strong that it removes the skin,” the professor had rejoined.

The professor checked out his hands and was relieved to see that the flesh was attached to his fingers, then he dozed off again. He was awakened by one of the Doctor’s guards carrying a tray with a glass of tea and hard cakes. He was hungry and the meager repast was like a feast to him. They must have gained the Doctor’s trust because they were not blindfolded this time. It was still dark when he went outside and got into the Impala with Marzak and the Doctor.

The car took them back to the field that had been used for the helicopter drop-off the day before. The unmarked helicopter arrived within minutes. When the professor went aboard, he saw four hard-faced men wearing military uniforms that, like the helicopter, had no designations.

The professor squeezed past the SCUBA gear stacked on some of the other seats and found space to sit at the rear of the cabin. Marzak got in the front behind the pilot and co-pilot.

The helicopter lifted off and after a couple of hours in the air, began a vertical descent into a valley between snow-capped mountains, landing on a low hill next to the three Bell Cobra AHI-F guns ships. All markings on the narrow fuselages were painted over.

Several dozen bearded tribesmen came running over to meet the helicopter. Undeterred by the dust cloud stirred up by the spinning rotors, they surrounded the aircraft and shot bursts from their automatic weapons into the air to greet the landing party. The professor followed Marzak out of the helicopter. A man dressed in a flight uniform came over from one of the Cobras and spoke to Marzak. He couldn’t hear their conversation, but he saw the man nodding his head.

When the conversation ended, Saleem went over to Marzak. “The Doctor’s followers are excited to see us.”

Marzak smiled. “They are impatient to see the show.”

“Show? I don’t understand.”

“The Doctor asked me to have the helicopters make a practice run on that abandoned village,” Marzak said, gesturing in the direction of a cluster of buildings at the foot of the hill. “He wants his men to know what they can expect when it comes to the real thing.”

Within minutes, the Cobra’s rotors thrummed the air. The gunships lifted off and gained elevation, then flew along the length of the valley in a single line until they diminished to the size of gnats. At the vanishing point they did a U-turn and sped back at a hundred-and-fifty miles an hour.

As they approached the village, the gunships angled down on a long descending trajectory, leveling off in a low wedge formation with the lead pilot’s aircraft at point. The sound of buzz-saws cut through the chop of rotors as the Cobras fired the three-barreled Gatling cannons housed under their noses.

The guns were made to penetrate tank armor and the 20 mm slugs easily ripped through the mud-walls at the rate of more than seven hundred rounds per minute. Buildings crumbled to dust under the fierce fusillade.

As a follow-up, the Cobras unleashed seventy millimeter rockets from pods slung under their stubby wings. The rockets streaked into their targets and exploded in yellow and white blasts that produced billowing clouds of black smoke. The helicopters ended their run and banked around in a big curve.

The professor was wearing aviator sunglasses, but he averted his gaze from the blinding explosions for a second. When he looked back he could not believe his eyes. Figures were emerging from the columns of smoke. There had been people inside the buildings! Those that had survived the guns and rockets had been turned into human torches. They only made it a few steps before they fell to the ground where they burned like logs in a fire place.

All around him the bearded men shot their guns in the air and cheered. The Professor pushed his way through the throng to Marzak.

“You said the village was abandoned!” Saleem said.

Marzak shrugged.

“I was telling the truth, Professor. The village was abandoned by its original inhabitants. It has since been used as a prison to hold traitors while it was decided what to do with them. When I spoke to the Doctor this morning we decided what to do with them,” Marzak said. “Why? Is there a problem?”

So that was what Marzak’s conversation with the helicopter pilot was all about. The professor was enraged at having been made a party to murder, but he was aware of the tribesmen, who had gone menacingly silent, and were crowding in close around them.

He forced his lips into a smile.

“No,” he said. “No problem.”

He turned away and strode back to the transport helicopter. The deadly demonstration had only reaffirmed what he already knew, that his cousin had underestimated the ruthlessness of these men. They would stop at nothing.

Tomorrow the three Cobra helicopters would swoop in and unleash their power on the warlord’s compound. The transport helicopter carrying Marzak and his newfound friend would land the dive team and their guards at the treasure site. They would be joined by the other helicopters after they had reduced Amir’s compound to smoking rubble.

Professor Saleem was neither a coward nor a hero. Like most men, if sufficiently pressed, he had the potential to earn either title, but extremes of behavior were not part of his character. He preferred to occupy a safe middle ground that placed no demands on his ego or his well-being. Now, to his dismay, for the first time in his life he was having moral qualms that could not be rationalized away with clever intellectual argument.

He knew that Amir Kahn’s village would have women and children. The thought of these innocents facing the same awful force as the inhabitants of the so-called abandoned village had knocked him from his precarious perch of neutrality, leaving him in a position where he was seriously entertaining the thought of doing something that would place him in danger.

There was only one problem. He hadn’t quite decided what to do.

Or even if there were anything he could do.