Legends (39 page)
“Guilty of what?” Martin had asked after pleading innocent to the formal charge of high and low treason.
“Guilty of working for a foreign intelligence agency,” Hamlet had shot back. “Guilty of trying to steal Russia’s blowarfare secrets.”
“My only interest,” Martin had had Almagul say, “is to interview Samat Ugor-Zhilov.” And he had explained about Samat’s humanitarian quest repatriating to a village in Lithuania the bones of Saint Gedymin in order to obtain the sacred Torah scrolls and bring them to Israel.
“And where,” Hamlet inquired, leaning forward, cocking his big head so as to better catch Martins response, “would Samat find the bones of Saint Gedymin?”
“I was told he’d traced them to a small Orthodox church near the city of Cordoba in Argentina.”
“And what,” the warlord continued, his short feet dancing on the ammunition box, “would Samat offer the Argentines in return for the bones of the saint?”
Martin realized he’d reached the mine field. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s one of the questions I wanted to ask Samat.”
At which point Hamlet launched into a tirade so fierce that Almagul had all she could do to keep up with him. “He says you know very well what Samat would trade, otherwise you would not have come to this island. He says the Russian nuclear arsenal will become obsolete in ten years time and the Americans will rule Russia unless Samat is able to perfect bio weapons to counter the American threat. He says bio weapons are the only cost efficient answer to Russia’s problem. He says it costs $2 million to kill half the population of one square kilometer with missiles loaded with conventional warheads, $80,000 with a nuclear weapon, $600 with a chemical weapon and $1 with a bio weapon Vozrozhdemye Island, he reminds you, was once the center of bio weapon research for the Soviet Union: Under Samat’s direction, and with Samat’s financial backing, Vozrozhdemye is once again developing a bio arsenal that will save Russia from American domination.”
Hamlet collapsed back into the throne. One of the white coated scientists brought over a porcelain basin filled with water smelling of disinfectant and the warlord rang out the sponge in it and mopped his feverish brow.
Martin said, very quietly, “Are you suggesting that Samat gave bio weapon seed stock to the Argentineans in exchange for the bones of the saint?”
“That is not what I am suggesting,” the warlord groaned when he heard Alamgul’s translation. “Is that what I am suggesting?” he asked the scientists in lab coats.
“Nyet, nyet,” they responded in a discordant chorus.
“There is the proof,” Hamlet cried, waving toward the scientists as if they were his star witnesses.
“Then what are you suggesting?” Martin had Almagul ask.
“Who is on trial here, you or me?” the warlord retorted furiously. “I am not suggesting Samat provided the Argentinean military with bio weapons I am also not suggesting that he provided them with the orbits of American spy satellites. That rumor is without substance. It is a fact of life, as any idiot knows, that to get high-quality photographs, the spy satellites are obliged to orbit earth at low altitudes, circling the planet in a polar orbit every ninety minutes. It is a fact of life that they are over any one point on the earth’s surface for only a few minutes. If you know when one of the satellites is due overhead, you can suspend operations you do not want the Americans to photograph. India and Pakistan have been doing this for years. So has Iraq. From whence comes the rumor that it is from Saddam Hussein in Iraq that Samat obtained the American satellite orbits that he traded to the Argentines for the bones of the saint.”
It dawned on Martin that Hamlet and the people around him were stark raving mad; characters that Alice might have come across when she fell down the rabbit hole. He decided it was in his interest to humor the mad warlord. “And what in the world could Samat have given to Saddam Hussein in return for the orbits?”
Almagul whispered, “It is perilous to know the answer,” but Martin, drunk on state secrets, ordered her to translate the question.
Hamlet drew his navy revolver from its holster and spun the chamber, sending the ticking sound reverberating through the auditorium Then he raised the revolver and sighted on Martin’s head and said “Bang, bang, you are extinguished.” He laughed at his little joke and the others in the auditorium laughed with him, albeit somewhat anxiously, so it seemed to Martin. After a moment Hamlet said, “If Samat had wanted to go down that path, he could have traded to Saddam Hussein anthrax spores and hemorrhagic seed viruses that were harvested here on the island in exchange for the orbits.” The warlord lifted the goggles off of his eyes and scratched thoughtfully at the side of his bulbous nose with the barrel of the revolver. A stunted grin materialized on his thick lips. “He could have traded the orbits for the bones of the saint. And the bones of the saint for the Torah scrolls. But it goes without saying, none of this actually happened.”
Hamlet, tiring of the game, gaveled the butt of his revolver down on the arm of the throne. “You and the girl are guilty as charged and sentenced to the monkey cages, to be used as guinea pigs in our experiments. Case closed. Trial over. Court adjourned.”
The groaning of the giant scavenger in the last cage shook Martin out of his reverie. Almagul, sitting on the icy floor with her back to the bars in the cage next to Martin, buried her head between her knees. Her body shook with silent sobs. Martin reached through the bars to touch her shoulder. “I recognize the men in the cages,” the girl whispered hoarsely. “They are the ones missing from Nukus. We are all surely going to die like my father and my sister,” she added. “They have already killed six scavengers from Nukus and thrown their bones to the flamingoes. The worst part is that I have no sister to take my name.”
In the last cage the giant scavenger pitched forward onto his knees, with his head touching the ground, and then rolled onto his side. The scientist filming the test called to the two others in Russian to come over and look. The man with the clipboard produced a large skeleton key and opened the padlock on the monkey cage and the three Russians in lab coats, still wearing their gas masks, ducked inside and crouched around the body. One of them raised the scavenger’s limp wrist and let it flop back again. “Konstantin will be extremely pleased with his ebola ” he started to say when the giant scavenger, bellowing with a primitive furor, sprang to life and began shattering the gas masks and the facial bones of the scientists with his fists. With blood seeping from under their gas masks, two of the scientists crawled on all fours toward the low door of the cage, but the giant caught them by their ankles and hauled them back and, climbing over their bodies, pounded their faces into the cement floor. In the other cages the prisoners called to the giant scavenger to free them, but he kept lifting the heads by the hair and smashing them into the cement. It was Almagul’s voice that finally penetrated to the wild man’s brain. Gasping for air, a maniacal gleam in his bulging eyes, the scavenger released his grip on the bloody heads and looked up.
Almagul called his name and spoke soothingly to him in the strange language of the scavengers. The giant, his arms and shirt drenched in blood, crawled through the door of his cage and staggered to his feet. The other prisoners were all talking to him at once. Almagul spoke quietly to the giant. Martin noticed that mucus was seeping from his nostrils as he lurched across the basement to the stainless steel table, snapped off one of the legs and came back to the cages. One by one he slipped the narrow end of the steel leg through the padlocks and, using the bars for leverage, snapped open the locks. Martin was the last to emerge from the cages. The giant collapsed at his feet Martin, reaching to help him, found he was burning with fever. “There is nothing we can do for him,” Almagul said. The other scavengers backed away from the fallen man until Almagul snapped angrily at them. One of them came forward and brought the stainless steel table leg down on the giant’s head to put him out of his misery. Then, armed with steel legs from the table and the wooden legs broken off chairs, the scavengers made their way up the stone steps. Almagul, leading the way, carefully opened the steel door leading to the blowarfare laboratory and stepped aside to let the others through. Two Russian scientists napping on cots were strangled to death by the desperate prisoners. Three other scientists were working with frozen anthrax spores in a walk-in refrigerator. Martin thrust one of the stainless steel legs through the door handles, locking the Russians inside, and then turned up the thermostat. The three scientists, realizing they were trapped, began pounding on the thick glass window in the door. One of the prisoners found a plastic jerry can in a closet filled with kerosene for the heating unit. He splashed kerosene over the shelves filled with petri dishes and filing cabinets. Almagul struck a match and tossed it into the spilled kerosene. A bluish fire skidded across the floor. In a moment the laboratory was awash in flames.
The escaping scavengers stumbled across two guards playing backgammon in an ante chamber with razor-stropped one-edged Cossack sabers stacked in four old umbrella stands. Both of the guards lunged for their rifles but were clubbed to death before they could reach them. Snatching the two rifles, stuffing their pockets with bullets, Martin and Almagul led the scavengers, armed now with sabers, up a back staircase that led to the lobby. The single guard on duty there backed against a wall and raised his hands in surrender when he saw the scavengers; one of them walked up to him and split his skull open with a single stroke of his sword. On a gesture from Martin, the men spread out and burst through the several double doors into the auditorium. The fight was short and lethal. Furiously working the bolt of his rifle, hardly bothering to take aim, Martin a pulse pounding in his temple, his trigger finger trembling provided covering fire from the back of the auditorium as the escaping prisoners, brandishing the sabers over their heads and screaming savagely, charged down the aisles. The warlord, who had been holding court from the throne, cowered behind it as his guards, caught by surprise, desperately tried to fight off the attackers. Two of the prisoners were killed before they reached the stage; a third was shot in the face as he climbed onto it. When Martin’s bolt-action rifle jammed, he caught Lincoln’s voice roaring in his ear: Grab it by the barrel, for Christsake, use it as a club. Gripping the hot barrel with both hands, Martin joined the battle on the stage, clubbing wildly at the guards as they tried to fend off the blows with their rifles or their arms. When one of the guards stumbled, Martin pounced on him and pinned him down while a prisoner hacked off the guard’s hand holding the rifle. Breathing heavily, Martin stood up as another prisoner planted one foot on the neck of the fallen man and slit open his back, exposing his spine down to the coccyx. Gradually the prisoners, pushed by a ferocity that came from having nothing to lose and their lives to win, overpowered the guards who were still alive. The wounded guards,
with blood gushing from ugly gashes, and the three who surrendered were hauled into the orchestra pit and decapitated with saber strokes to the napes of their necks. One headless man took several short steps before collapsing to the floor. Martin, sick to his stomach, watched the scavengers circle around the throne almost as if they were playing a harmless child’s game. Hamlet had pulled the square of thick theater curtain that had been used as a carpet over his head. The scavengers tore it away from his clutching hands and prodded the warlord to his feet with the points of their sabers. Wiping snot from his nose, Hamlet begged for mercy as the prisoners stripped away his canvas leggings and boots and gloves and goggles and marched him through the auditorium and lobby and out into the street.
Picking his way barefoot through the gutter to avoid the fleas, Hamlet kept babbling in the strange language of the scavengers, but nobody paid the slightest attention to what he was saying. As the sun edged above the horizon, the group retraced the route Martin had taken into Kantubek, passing the ornate building with the mosaic in the lobby depicting the weight of the state. When they reached the motor pool hangar, aswirl in sand and dust, the scavengers found a roll of electric wire and lashed the warlord of Vozrozhdemye Island to one of the gutted green trucks, his wrists bound over his head to the rusted frame of a window, his bare feet just reaching the drift of sand when he stood on his toes. The warlord whimpered something and Almagul, watching from the street, called out a translation for Martin.
“He pleads with them not to leave him here where the rodents and fleas can get to him. He appeals to be shot.”
“Ask him where Samat went when he left here,” Martin shouted.
“I do not understand his answer,” Almagul called back. “He says something about the bones of a saint being returned to a church in Lithuania.”
“Ask him if the church is in the village of Zuzovka near the frontier with Belarus.”
“I think he has become mad. He tells only that Samat is a saint he says this over and over.”
Hamlet Achba could be heard ranting incoherently as the four surviving prisoners and Martin and Almagul made their way along the track that ran through the dunes to the beached boat. At one point Martin stopped to look back at Hamlet. He was about to start up the dunes toward the warlord when he heard Dante’s wild Irish cackle in his ear. Don’t you know the bible instructs victims how to survive emotionally? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burning for a burning, laddie. When Martin hesitated, Dante sighed in despair. Aye, you’re a weak-kneed excuse for a man. Martin had to agree. Nodding grimly, he turned and stumbled down the hill to join the others on the beach. The men rinsed the blood off their bodies in the sea and tugged the boat off the sand and climbed aboard. Almagul started the outboard, sending the white flamingoes scattering into the air. She backed the boat until the water was deep enough to swing it around and head at full throttle toward the mainland. While Almagul distributed watermelon and goat cheese from the hamper, Martin gazed back at the ghost town of Kantubek, growing smaller and smaller until it finally vanished into the tulle-like haze that thickened as the sun stepped higher in the east.