progress until they were three miles from the pass.
Quinn saw the lone man from nearly a mile away, picking his way across a boulder-strewn side hill leading seven camels.
Quinn motioned for Garcia to pull off the trail alongside him on an uphill swell of gravel and dismount. There was just enough room for both bikes. It took his breath away when she shook her thick hair free of her helmet. He looked away quickly, back at the approaching camel herder, hoping she hadn’t noticed his stares.
The herdsman’s clucking and scolding could be heard for ten minutes before the little troupe crested the rise in the trail. Each camel had a barbed stick through its nose attached to a cord connecting it to the animal ahead. The man held a piece of rope from the nose of the lead beast. Only the baby trotted independently of the rest, even more knock-kneed and gangly than the adults.
“You have your camera handy?” Quinn asked.
Garcia tapped the chest pocket of her riding jacket. “Right here.”
The copper bell on the baby’s halter clanged happily as it plodded closer over the stony path.
“Go ahead and get it out,” he whispered, smiling at the approaching man. “It’s always some herder that trips you up… He needs to think we’re just tourists.”
The herdsman raised his right hand to his breast, bowing his head slightly. He was young, still in his twenties with a flint-hard look in his eye the smile couldn’t conceal. A FAM, fighting-age male, he carried a paratrooper Kalashnikov with a folding stock hung on a cloth sling over his shoulder. The Wahkir didn’t see enough traffic for professional bandits, but if one smuggler happened to be better armed than another he met along the path, there was no honor among those in the black market. The collar of a wool suit jacket was turned up against the chill. The tail of his flimsy shirt hung out over stained khaki military trousers. Thin leather sandals did little to protect his cracked feet from the ravages of weather and stone.
Quinn thought it best to play dumb and gave an awkward Chinese greeting.
The camel man shook his head, grinning with a mouth full of indigo and snuff-stained teeth.
“No Chinaman,” he said. He puffed up his chest. “Pashtu.”
The herder eyed the Royal Enfields with a keen interest, dropping the rope to his lead camel. He patted the seat on Jericho’s bike. “You sell?”
Quinn shook his head. It never surprised him when traders talked business in a whole multitude of languages. They might not be able to tell you the time, but they could barter, curse, and call you a cheapskate in the language of your choice.
Quinn shook his head. “Not mine. Umar’s bikes. You know Umar?”
The herdsman’s eyes went wide. He showed his blue-black teeth. “Umar’s bikes,” he repeated. He turned to stare at Garcia for a moment, took a deep breath, and stooped to pick up his lead rope.
Without a word of good-bye he clucked at his camels and started down the trail toward the Karakoram Highway. His animals trundled along after him bawling and farting until they fell back into their traveling jog.
“That was weird,” Garcia said tucking the camera back in her pocket.
Quinn threw a leg over his Enfield, anxious to be moving again. “I’m pretty sure he was looking at you as much as the bikes.”
Garcia paused. “What if he pulled the rifle?”
Quinn pretended to act incredulous. “And that from a woman who just witnessed my physical prowess at not beating Umar the giant. Come on, we should get going. That fight gave us a late start. We need to make it over Gabrielle’s secret pass by nightfall.”
“You afraid we’ll run into Chinese soldiers?”
“Nope,” Quinn said, starting his bike. “The big problem on smugglers’ trails is smugglers.”
Marc Cameron
Act of Terror
C HAPTER F ORTY-ONE
T hey rolled through the gap between two great, guardian-like boulders and into Afghanistan an hour before sunset. There was nothing to mark the nameless pass but for a stone cairn topped with the skull of a heavy-horned Marco Polo sheep. A half mile in, they were met by a crude, hand-painted and weatherworn sign showing a human figure with his leg being blown off by a land mine. It was a notice to all to keep to the relative safety of the trail.
Quinn stopped for a moment to check the map Gabrielle had drawn, comparing it to the topographic tour map Umar had supplied. The detail gave out thirty miles into Afghanistan. Quinn hoped that would be enough.
The next forty-five minutes saw them descend six thousand feet. A camp at ten thousand feet would be uncomfortable for flatlanders, but it would be infinitely better than one at sixteen thousand. Quinn slowed, turning back to Garcia, two bike-lengths behind him. It was impossible to tell behind her full-face helmet, but her eyes said she was grinning.
Ten minutes later they’d hidden both motorcycles behind a faded gray boulder, in a fold of the mountain of the main trail. Quinn removed his heavy armored jacket, setting up camp in the suspendered riding pants and a gray long-sleeved wool T-shirt. While cotton might be king in the south, growing up in Alaska had taught him wool was the way to go when things got wet and cold.
Garcia still wore all her gear against the chill and donned a Nepalese wool beanie with earflaps and braided cords.
“You’ve come a very long way from Cuba,” Quinn chuckled. He situated the aluminum poles of their mountaineering tent over the flattest patch of rubble he could find. They’d told Umar they were married as part of the cover story-he would have been unhappy sending an unmarried woman out alone with Quinn. Wanting to save space on the smallish Enfields, the big Ugyhr provided only one tent. Luckily, it was a three-person, which in mountaineering terms translated as “tight for two.”
Garcia squatted opposite Quinn and helped him thread the poles into the sleeves of the bright orange fabric. “Must be old hat for you,” she said, teeth chattering. “I suppose this is a lot like Alaska?”
“In some ways.” Quinn looked to his left at the sheer rock face that faded into a layer of clouds a thousand feet above. Fifty feet to his right an abrupt ledge fell away to nothingness for nearly a mile. Howling winds raced off hidden glaciers and the distant hush of a river whispered up from the valley floor. “Yeah, I guess it does remind me of home.”
Quinn finished snapping in the last pole and looked up to see Garcia shaking her head and blinking as if she was dizzy.
“We should feed you and get to bed,” he said.
She smiled weakly. “Not tonight, honey. I have a headache.”
He took her by the shoulders and led her to the base of a car-sized rock, where he made her a sort of nest with their bedrolls and sleeping pads. “You sit here while I whip us up my two-mile-high specialty.
Garcia drew her knees to her chest, drawing her neck inside her jacket like a turtle and her hands into her sleeves. Only the pink tip of her nose showed above the collar of her coat.
“Seriously,” she moaned. “I don’t want to be a whiner, but I feel like someone may be digging my eyes out with a spoon. I couldn’t eat a bite.”
“It’s the altitude,” Quinn said. “I should have paid attention to it earlier.”
“I’m a big girl, in case you haven’t noticed.” She let her head loll back against the boulder.
“You rest. I’ll make supper,” he said. He thought: Oh, I’ve noticed all right.
A couple of aspirin and Quinn’s mutton noodle soup worked miracles. Ronnie went from feeling like she’d been trampled by a camel to aching as though she’d just been dragged by one. The pain in her head down to a dull throb, she was able to concentrate on Jericho.
“Hard to breathe up here,” she said, wanting to make conversation.
“There’s this sign on the wall above the swimming pool at the Academy,” he said. “ The Air Is Rare.” He held a mug of soup under his chin. Steam curled around the stubble of beard that seemed twice as dark as it had only a
