Wall of Night

43

As Tanner was heading toward Beijing proper, Cahil was suffering through a white-knuckle landing aboard a Soviet-build Anatov-27 whose floor had more patches than an Appalachian quilt.

He gripped the armrests tighter and glanced at his seatmate, an elderly Mongolian man wearing purple pants, a yellow tunic and a splotchy fur hat. He reminded Bear of a Mongolian Willy Wonka.

“Boombity, boombity, boom,” Willy yelled over the roar.

It was a fair impression of the sound the wheels were making on the rutted landing strip.

“Yeah,” Cahil replied. “Boombity.”

Abruptly the engines died away, leaving behind only the sound of the thumping tires. Cahil realized the pilot had shut off the engines to conserve fuel, a priceless commodity in Mongolia.

As the plane coasted to a stop, Cahil felt a tap on his shoulder.

“No more boombity,” Willy said with a toothless grin. “Stop now.”

“Never volunteer yourself, Bear,” Cahil muttered.

The answer to the game Cahil had come to call “Where in the World is Mike Skeldon?” had been answered two days earlier by a static-filled, ten-second phone call.

With Dick Mason and the CIA’s resources at his disposal, Cahil had moved Kycek to a safe house in rural Virginia, where a team from Langley’s Science and Technology Directorate set up a phone-router for Kycek’s home number in Asheville. From Monday morning forward, all Kycek’s incoming calls were automatically routed to a switchboard in the safe house’s basement.

Promptly at noon on Tuesday, a call came in. As instructed, Kycek let it ring three times, then picked it up. As he did so, the CIA technician flipped on the recorders and the speakers.

“Hello?” Kycek said.

“Ready to travel?” the voice asked.

“I’m ready.”

“Tomorrow morning, Ronald Reagan. Go to the TWA desk; there’ll be a ticket waiting for you.”

“Okay,” Kycek said. “Uh, should I bring anything?”

“Yeah: warm clothes.”

The line went dead.

Kycek hung up. Cahil turned to the technician, who said, “Not enough for a solid trace, but it was overseas, that’s for sure.”

“Warm clothes,” Kycek said. “Wonder what that means? Russia, you think?”

Cahil shrugged and clapped him on the shoulder. “Not your worry anymore,” he replied, then thought, Yeah, definitely Russia. But where and why?

Russia via lovely Mongolia Cahil thought as they slowed beside the gray terminal building. Painted on its front in bright red and black was a fur-hatted Mongol on a galloping horse. Cahil assumed it was the Mongolian state seal. Just to be sure, he tapped Willy and pointed.

“Suhe Baator,” Willy explained. “Suhe the Hero.”

“The liberator of Mongolia,” Cahil replied.

“Yes, yes! Great liberator. Kharasho!”

Kharasho was the Russian word for “good.” Though the Russians had been gone for over a decade, their legacy lived on. Many Mongolians still spoke a mixture of Mongol and Russian along with a smattering of Dorbet, Buryat, and a dozen other dialects.

The plane shuddered to a stop. As if on cue, the passengers leapt up. The door was flung open by the lone flight attendant.

When Bear reached the door, instead of stairs he found a telescoping aluminum ladder leaning against the Anatov’s fuselage. He climbed down, then let himself drop the last few feet to the ground, stirring up a cloud of fine, gray dust.

Despite himself, he smiled. “One small step for man …”

Within minutes the passengers, aircrew and maintenance people had disappeared into the terminal building and Cahil found himself alone with the dust and the plane. A gust of wind blew across his face and he shivered. From horizon to horizon, the sky was a pristine, unblemished blue. The travel book he’d read on the flight called Mongolia “The Land of the Million Mile Sky.” He now saw why.

These were the steppes of the Mongol hordes. Seven hundred years ago, Genghis Kahn and his tribe of bantam-size horsemen rode out of these grasslands and conquered half the known world. It must have been an awesome sight, Cahil thought: the bleak green hills, the blue sky, and in between, tens of thousands of Mongols, spearheads jutting skyward like the branches of a moving forest.

Maggie would love this, he decided. She was a born and raised Montanan, a child of Big Sky Country. Of course, Montana had nothing on Mongolia. This was nothing but sky — millions of square miles of it. Thinking of her and the girls, he felt suddenly lonely.

They’re fine, he told himself. They’re fine, and you’ll be back to them soon.

The airport sat atop one of the foothills in the Hentiyn Nuruu mountain range; below lay Ulaanbaatar proper. Aside from a few multistory buildings and coal-belching smokestacks, most of the city’s structures were squat affairs similar.

The air was filled with the tangy scent of what he guessed to be mutton, the cornerstone of Mongolian cuisine: Mutton, mutton fat, and mutton juice combined with gnarled potatoes, bland radishes, and soggy cabbage.

He followed the road down out of the foothills, across a bridge spanning a muddy river, and reached a road his map called Engels Avenue. Somewhere in the distance he heard strains of music, and it took him a moment to recognize it: “Hey Macarena …” Ulaanbaatar, it seemed, was several years behind the newest tunes. Bear imagined a group of squat legged, dusky cheeked Mongol teenagers dancing the Macarena and found himself laughing.

He veered left down Engels and soon reached the Ulaanbaatar railway station.

He checked his watch: 11:30. Skeldon’s written instructions, which had been attached to the ticket at Dulles, had been curt: Go to the train station and wait. You’ll be met sometime after noon.

Bear mounted the deserted platform, explored a bit, checked the train schedule (the next arrival was due in in three days from Ulan-Ude, Russia), then found a bench and sat down.

At three o’clock, a green, Russian Yaz truck — the Soviet version of the U.S. Army’s deuce-and-a-half — screeched to a stop beside the platform. The driver’s door opened and a man climbed out.

The mysterious Mike Sheldon, Cahil thought.

He matched Latham’s description to a tee: a few inches over six feet, rangy but muscular, blond buzz cut, and a hawk nose. As Skeldon walked toward the platform, Cahil could see his eyes scanning the ground around him. The LRRP on patrol. Retired or not, Skeldon was still a soldier-scout at heart

Skeldon mounted the platform steps and walked to Cahil’s bench. “You’ve lost weight”

And you’ve lost your Southern twang. The persona of Joe-Bob the Handyman was gone.

“Thanks. You trying to pick me up?”

“You’ve lost weight,” Skeldon repeated impassively.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“I went to Jenny Craig, so what?” Cahil growled. “Look, I’ve been flying on a death trap for the last six hours. Can we save the quiz for later?”

“No. Where’d you go to college?”

“Purdue. Dropped out in my senior year, joined the navy, and went into EOD — Explosive Ordinance Disposal.”

“Separation date?”

“My DD-two-fourteen says May ninth of eighty-nine, but they got it wrong. It was the tenth.”

Skeldon asked him a few more questions, then nodded. “Grab your bag and follow me.”

Skeldon drove away from the railway station and turned onto Peace Avenue. The road teemed with goats, horses, automobiles, and pedestrians, all of whom seemed to be obeying their own personal traffic laws. “No traffic police, I assume?” Cahil said.

“Nope,” replied Skeldon.

“How many people in the city?”

“Half a million. About forty percent of them live on steppes just outside the city in gherrs.”

“What’s a gherr?”

“It’s what we call a ‘yurt’—you know, those teepee-like things.”

“All year around — summer or winter?”

“Summer’s about a month long here; blink and you miss it. Mongols are tough.”

“Genghis Khan.”

“Yep. Tough.”

An hour later they were twenty miles outside the city and traveling northeast on a rutted dirt tract. On either side of the road the steppes and rolling hills spread to the horizon.

“Can you tell me anything about where we’re going, what we’re doing?” Cahil asked.

Skeldon glanced at him, hesitated a moment, then replied, “We’re headed to Naushki, on the Russian border. Once we’re across, we’ll link up with our team outside Kazachinskoye.”

“Never heard of it.”

“You and six billion other people.”

“You said ‘team.’ I thought it was just you and me.”

For the first time since they met, Skeldon laughed. “You kidding me? For where we’re headed, we’re gonna need all the help we can get.”