Chapter Thirty-eight

THE SARACEN TOOK the cotton out of his ears and headed towards the village. At its edge, he stopped at a small cairn of stones he had placed there and counted every step as he walked forward. After nine paces he moved hard to the left and avoided a buried landmine.

The whole village was booby-trapped – a task he had undertaken as soon as he had secured the prisoners in their stone tomb. Accompanied by his packhorses, he had set off along a maze of precipitous paths which led even higher into the towering mountains. After several wrong turns when his memory failed him, he found – in a chaos of wind-torn boulders – the entrance to a complex of caves.

The mountains were studded with such places – some natural, others hollowed out with dynamite – all used by the muj during their protracted war with the Soviets. This one, an ammunition dump, was built by the Saracen and his comrades then abandoned on the day the war ended.

By the beam of a flashlight he made his way into the deepest cavern. The light swept across the walls, revealing boxes of mines, grenades, mortars and other ordnance, which had sat untouched for so many years. Nearly all of it had been supplied by the CIA, so it was good quality – none of that Soviet or Pakistani crap – and the thin mountain air had preserved it better than any underground bunker.

The Saracen found what he needed, transferred it into grey ammo boxes and a dozen wooden barrels and returned to the village. All that afternoon and late into the night he rigged improvised explosive devices and booby traps along the alleys and throughout the ruined buildings. The reason was simple: unlike his attitude to the Soviets, he had respect for the US forces and many of their allies.

Ever since he had devised the human trial he had known that UN troops would be searching for the prisoners – with growing determination when they received no ransom demand – and though he believed they would never come to a wrecked village as remote as this, he wasn’t taking any chances.

Now, with his mission almost at an end, he had to follow his secret signs carefully to avoid tripping an unseen wire or opening the wrong door. One mistake and he would join the Italian woman and her two friends in the choir invisible.

He made it back to the kitchen, fed the horses, cooked his dinner and slept better than he had in months. He woke with the dawn and, after the ritual washing and prayers, set about moving out. He had already dug a large pit behind the village headman’s house and now he filled it with bags of the quicklime he had carried with him specifically for the purpose. The chemical would destroy the bodies and so degrade any other material thrown into the pit that no forensic specialist in the world would be able to find a clue about what had happened in that lonely and evil place.

Dressed in his bio-hazard suit, with one of his last tanks of oxygen strapped to his back, he used a hand bit to drill a small hole in the heavy wooden door. He slid a plastic tube with a small nozzle attached to the end of it through the hole, put the other end into a large container of Lysol and used a foot-operated pump to spray gallons of the disinfectant over the bodies and the interior of the cell. When he felt he had covered as much as possible, he swapped out the disinfectant for an old military can full of gasoline. He sprayed the fuel inside, dousing the bodies, the straw, the wooden beams, and the stone itself. He pulled out the plastic tube and filled the hole with a gasoline-soaked rag, put a match to it and moved back fast to safety.

He had been in two minds about torching the cell in order to help sterilize it, afraid that the smoke would attract attention, but the day was clear and bright and he was confident that the timber inside was so old that it would burn fast and clean. He was right about that, but he was astonished by the ferocity of the fire – as if nature itself were offended by what had been done within its walls.

Once the flames were out, he extinguished the embers with more Lysol and, still wearing his bio-hazard equipment, used the horses, coils of rope and several meat hooks to haul the charred bodies into the pit. They were closely followed by everything else that had been touched or used by any of them during their stay – plates, utensils, syringes, the burnt remnants of the saddle blankets. Still in the suit, he showered himself in disinfectant, stripped naked, showered himself again in the Lysol, dressed and tossed the suit into the quicklime.

It was dusk, and he’d almost finished refilling the grave when he went back to the kitchen to get the last two bags of lime to spread around the top of the pit in order to deter any wild animals.

Inside, the horses were waiting, ready to be saddled, and the solitude and silence of the high mountains was almost oppressive. Even the wind had dropped to a whisper.

He didn’t hear a thing, and he would never have had any warning of the shit that was coming in at over two hundred miles an hour – except for the horses.