ous railway engineers had looked at the valley and decided to build else-
where. The narrow gorge-in places not even “ten meters across at its
base-had been cut by a river, long since dammed, aritkwhat remained was
essentially a rock trench, like something left over from a war. Or in prepara-
tion/or one, he thought. It was pretty obvious, after all, despite the fact that
he’d never been told anything but to keep his mouth shut about the whole
project. The only way out of this place was straight up or sideways. A heli-
copter could do the former, and a train could do the latter, but to accomplish
1)1 HI 01 II ON OK
anything else required tampering with the laws of ballistics, which was a
very difficult task indeed.
As he watched, a huge Kowa scoop-loader dumped another bucketload of
crushed rock into a hopper car. It was the last car in the train’s “consist,”
and soon the diesel switch engine would haul its collection of cars out to the
mainline, where a standard-gauge electric locomotive would take over.
“Finished,” the man told him, pointing down into the hole. At the bot-
tom, a man held the end of a long tape measure. Forty meters exactly. The
hole had been measured by laser already, of course, but tradition required
that such measurements be tested by the human hand of a skilled worker,
and there at the bottom was a middle-aged hard-rock miner whose face
beamed with pride. And who had no idea what this project was all about.
“Hai,” the superintendent said with a pleased nod, and then a more for-
mal, gracious bow to the man at the bottom, which was dutifully and proudly
returned. The next train in would carry an oversized cement mixer. The pre-
assembled sets of rebar were already stacked around this hole-and, indeed,
all the others, ready to be lowered. In finishing the first hole, this team had
beaten its nearest competitor by perhaps six hours, and its furthest by no
more than two days-irregularities in the subsurface rock had been a prob-
lem for Hole Number 6, and in truth they’d done well to catch up as closely
as they were now. He’d have to speak to them, congratulate them for their
Herculean effort, so as to mitigate their shame at being last. Team 6 was his
best crew, and it was a pity that they’d been unlucky.
“Three more months, we will make the deadline,” the site foreman said
confidently.
“When Six is also finished, we will have a party for the men. They have
earned it.”
“This isn’t much fun,” Chavez observed.
“Warm, too,” Clark agreed. The air-conditioning system on their Range
Rover was broken, or perhaps it had died of despair. Fortunately, they had
lots of bottled water.
“But it’s a dry heat,” Ding replied, as though it mattered at a hundred
fourteen degrees. One could think in Celsius, instead, but that offered relief
only as long as it took to take in another breath. Then you were reminded of
the abuse that the superheated air had to be doing to your lungs, no matter
how you kept score. He unscrewed the top from a plastic bottle of spring
water, which was probably a frigid ninety-five, he estimated. Amazing how
cool it tasted under the circumstances.
“Chilldown tonight, all the way to eighty, maybe.”
“Good thing I brought my sweater, Mr. C.” Chavez paused to wipe off
some sweat before looking through the binoculars again. They were good
ones, but they didn’t help much, except to give a better view of the shimmer-
I OM ( I A N( Y
ing air thai roiled like the surface of a stormy, invisible sea. Nothing lived
out here except for the occasional vulture, and surely by now they had
cleaned off the carcasses of everything that had once made the mistake of
being born out here. And he’d once thought the Mojave Desert was bleak,
Chavez told himself. At least coyotes lived there.
It never changed, Clark thought. He’d been doing jobs like this one
for … thirty years? Not quite but close. Jesus, thirty years. He still hadn’t
had the chance to do it in a place where he could really fit in, but that didn’t
seem terribly important right now. Their cover was wearing thin. The back
of the Rover was jammed with surveying equipment and boxes of rock sam-
ples, enough to persuade the local illiterates that there might be an enormous
molybdenum deposit out there in that solitary mountain. The locals knew
what gold looked like-who didn’t?-but the mineral known affectionately
to miners as Molly-be-damned was a mystery to the uninitiated in all but its
market value, which was considerable. Clark had used the ploy often
enough. A geological discovery offered people just the perfect sort of luck to
appeal to their invariable greed. They just loved the idea of having some-
thing valuable sitting under their feet, and John Clark looked the part of a
mining engineer, with his rough and honest face to deliver the good and very
confidential news.
He checked his watch. The appointment was in ninety minutes, around
sunset, and he’d shown up early, the better to check out the area. It was hot
and empty, neither of which came as much of a surprise, and was located
twenty miles from the mountain they would be talking about, briefly. There
was a crossroads here, two tracks of beaten dirt, one mainly north-south, the
other mainly east-west, both of which somehow remained visible despite the
blowing sand and grit that ought to have covered up all traces of human
presence. Clark didn’t understand it. The years-long drought couldn’t have
helped, but even with occasional rain he had to wonder how the hell anyone
had lived here. Yet some people had, and for all he knew, still did, when
there was grass for their goats to eat… and no men with guns to steal the
goats and kill the herdsmen. Mainly the two CIA field officers sat in their
car, with the windows open, drank their bottled water, and sweated after they
ran out of words to exchange.
The trucks showed up close to dusk. They saw the dust plumes first, like,
the roostertails of motorboats, yellow in the diminishing light. In such an7
empty, desperate country, how was it possible that they knew how to make
trucks run? Somebody knew how to keep them running, and that seemed
very remarkable. Perversely, it meant that all was not lost for this desolate
place. If bad men could do it, then good men could do it as well. And that
was the reason for Clark and Chavez to be there, wasn’t it?
The first truck was well in advance of the others. It was old, probably a
military truck originally, though with all the body damage, the country of
origin and the name of the manufacturer were matters of speculation. It cir-
1)1 HI 01 HONOR
cled their Rover at a radius of about a hundred meters, while the eyes of the
crew checked them out at a discreet, careful distance, including one man on
what looked like a Russian 12.7mm machine gun mounted in the back. “Po-
licemen,” their boss called them-once it was “technicals.” After a while,
they stopped, got out and just stood there, watching the Rover, holding their
old, dirty, but probably functional 63 rifles. The men would soon be less
important. It was evening, after all, and the caq was out. Chavez watched a
man sitting in the shade of his truck a hundred meters away, chewing on the
weed.
“Can’t the dumb sunzabitches at least smoke it?” the exasperated field
officer asked the burning air in the car.
“Bad for the lungs, Ding. You know that.” Their appointment for the
evening made quite a living for himself by flying it in. In fact, roughly two
fifths of the country’s gross domestic product went into that trade, support-
ing a small fleet of aircraft that flew it in from Somalia. The fact offended
both Clark and Chavez, but their mission wasn’t about personal offense. It
was about a long-standing debt. General Mohammed Abdul Corp-his rank
had largely been awarded by reporters who didn’t know what else to call
him-had, once upon a time, been responsible for the deaths of twenty
American soldiers. Two years ago, to be exact, far beyond the memory hori-
zon of the media, because after he’d killed the American soldiers, he’d gone
back to his main business of killing his own countrymen. It was for the latter
cause that Clark and Chavez were nominally in the field, but justice had
many shapes and many colors, and it pleased Clark to pursue a parallel
agenda. That Corp was also a dealer in narcotics seemed a special gift from a
good-humored God.
“Wash up before he gets here?” Ding asked, tenser now, and showing it
just a little bit. All four men by the truck just sat there, chewing their caq and