The Medevac choppers were already on their way to uplift the wounded, and the base operator, two hundred miles away in an air-conditioned blockhouse, assumed the officer was calling to hurry them up and that pretty soon he’d start whining about how they were on the front line and all they needed was some goddamn support. Just like they always did.
But Keating cut through the guy’s bored update on the choppers and told him they needed a hazchem unit on the mountainside right now. Being the army – of course – that started a host of questions, requests for authorization and confusion about the chain of command. Keating knew it could go on for hours, so he yelled at the hapless operator: ‘We may have been exposed – are you listening? For all I know it’s nuclear. Certainly something serious.’
Like the operator, Keating’s men – including the barely conscious captain – were stunned. For a moment even the rising wind seemed to be swallowed by the silence. Then the operator started speaking fast, telling him to hold on while he opened a host of channels so that Keating could go through the chain of command as fast as possible.
Keating hung up – he knew that losing the connection would galvanize them into even more hurried action: in the army – as in life – sometimes you had to create a crisis in order to get people’s attention. He didn’t believe it was nuclear, but his intuition told him they had stumbled on to something evil and he didn’t know any other way to convey the urgency. He’d already decided he was going to get his ass busted for overreacting, but what else could he do?
While the staff officers back at base spun into a whirlwind of activity, what none of them realized was that, if the captain hadn’t been shot, if Keating had grown up somewhere other than in the Australian west, had he not known the look and use of quicklime – if it hadn’t been for these things and a whole lot more – the team of men in spacesuits equipped with their inflatable silver dome and towers of Klieg lights would never have arrived in time.
As it was, their fleet of Chinook helicopters landed with less than an hour to spare – any delay would have meant the quicklime would have done its work and they would never have found the corner of one saddle blanket.
Chapter Forty-one
BY THE TIME the chinooks had landed, the saracen was already down the first of the precipitous slopes and crossing a narrow, windswept plateau. If the Western world had got lucky by having Keating take command on the mountaintop, the Saracen had also encountered his own share of good fortune. He was on horseback.
His climb down the slope had become increasingly difficult, thanks to his injured hip. His experience as a doctor told him it wasn’t broken but, whatever damage he had done, he was finding it increasingly difficult to walk.
Without a crutch or length of wood to take the weight, he knew that, pretty soon, he would have to find a cave or a hole in the ground to lay up in for at least a few hours to try to rest it. That’s when, just as he started across the plateau, he saw the horse.
It was one of his pack ponies, looking lost and forlorn in the starlight, which had become separated from its brethren. It recognized his voice and, hoping as much for company as some treat, trotted towards him obediently. He grabbed the lead rope he had slashed earlier in the night, used it as a makeshift halter and scrambled on to its back.
He urged it into a canter and travelled fast across the plateau, found a path that the goat herders used in summer to access the high pasture and gave the pony its head. Mountain-bred and sure-footed, it carried him quickly down the crumbling path, instinctively avoiding the washaways of loose gravel and never losing its head, even when the drop below its hooves was a thousand feet or more.
By the time dawn came, US and UN helicopters were over the narrow plateau and searching hard, but they thought they were looking for a man on foot and they predicated all their arcs and grids on that assumption. Given that the terrain was riddled with ravines and caves, both of the natural and man-made variety, it was a slow and laborious process for the pilots and their spotters.
The perimeter of the search was steadily expanded, but the horse kept the Saracen well beyond its growing reach and, within two days, he had fallen in with a tribe of nomadic herders, riding with them during the day and sleeping between their tents at night.
Early one morning, travelling along a high ridge, he saw the old Trans-Afghan highway bisecting the valley below. He took his leave of the nomads and turned towards it.
Two hours later he had joined a river of broken-down trucks, speeding Toyota pick-ups and overcrowded buses and vanished into the chaos of modern Afghanistan.