Chapter 15

Leif Baron hadn't been kidding about camel trails. They came equipped with real camels.

"Okay, are we officially having an adventure now?" Trish Baxter called from the back of her beast. Wedged between the furry humps, she swayed alarmingly in her saddle with each lurching step the camel took.

"Well, if you're cold, miserable, uncertain where you're going to spend the night, hoping it doesn't snow again, and your butt and the insides of your legs are chafing," Annja said, "that's definitely an adventure."

It was cold, although not currently snowing, and the winds weren't strong as the group threaded their way among hills where the steep rocky sides were dotted with bare scrub. Annja and her mount were cresting a low gravelly pass between ridges. Half of the long column had already passed over it.

Annja wasn't at all miserable. Oddly enough the transfer to the camel and mule train had perked up the spirits of the whole Chasing History's Monsters crew. In fact, everybody's moods had improved. It was as if the transition from the familiar modern world to the Arabian Nights version had signaled an entry into a fantasy realm. Annja held no illusions that they were any safer than when they were clanking along in their collection of ramshackle vehicles. And she didn't know if any of the others actually harbored any. But she still shared the general high spirits.

* * *

THEY HAD DRIVEN PERHAPS twenty miles from the point of the ambush, along roads that started out as goat tracks and got worse from there. Charlie had brought Annja and Levi into the Citroën to ride with him in the lead vehicle while Larry drove. Baron and Hamid followed in the truck right behind.

"So what's the CV in 2CV stand for, anyway?" Larry asked, trying to play tour director, as usual.

"Cheval-vapeur," Annja said. "The full name means 'two steam horses.'"

"Steam horses? You're kidding!"

"Not at all," Annja said, smiling despite herself. It was a relief to get away from the Chasing History's Monsters crew and their silent reproach. Their stares had gotten a little hard to take while waiting for Baron's return. She'd struggled to keep from telling them to grow up and face the reality of their situation. "It's a measure of engine power," she continued.

"Surely you don't mean this car has only two horsepower?" Charlie said, turning around in the front passenger seat to stare at Annja in alarm.

She shook her head. "Different measurement system. And no, I don't have any idea what it really means. I just always loved the name steam horses."

"You're quite a remarkable woman, Ms. Creed," Charlie said.

"It's simple French, Mr. Bostitch," she said.

Half an hour later the car had come to a stop next to what appeared to be a large herd of camels and donkeys standing in a draw. Everyone had gotten out of the cars, believing they were only stretching their legs and lower backs—welcome, after jouncing over miles of washboard track. The Chasing History's Monsters crew unloaded their gear and set to shooting the herd, grateful to have something to do.

Baron put his head together with Hamid and a little wizened man with a skullcap and a spectacular gray beard falling halfway down a long blue robe that hung almost to the high tops of his green Converse knockoffs. The small man seemed to have charge of the beasts.

When the conversation wrapped up Baron came striding purposefully back shouting orders to the acolytes. Looking bemused they started unpacking gear from the trucks. Suddenly, Annja saw a large group of men rise from behind the rocks up a slope to their left.

Then she realized with some surprise that the men weren't armed. Instead they were throwing away cigarettes they'd been squatting out of the wind to smoke, which she hadn't smelled because the wind was blowing away from her. The men hadn't even been hiding, which unnerved her since she hadn't spotted them. They started gathering up the ropes trailing from the halters on the enormous shaggy two-humped beasts.

"What's going on?" Jason demanded of Baron.

Baron showed him a mirthless smile. "There's only one way around the Turkish army patrols, and the cars can't go, junior. So we're saddling up to ride. Old-school."

* * *

"SO DO THESE THINGS, LIKE, BITE?" Tommy Wynock sang out. The travelers rode in front of the long line of baggage animals. He had a video camera propped on one shoulder. With his other hand he hung on for dear life to the high pommel of his camel saddle.

"Yes," Baron called. "Keep any fingers you want to keep away from their mouths."

"But they're, like, so much fuzzier than real camels," Tommy said.

"They are real camels, you dork," Trish said.

"No, I mean, like, those ones on the old cigarette packs, like you always see in old movies with Arabs in them. The ones with one hump."

"Those are dromedaries, these are camels," Jason Pennigrew said.

"How much longer do we have to ride these ambulatory skeletons?" Robyn Wilfork called out. "Have pity on an old man's bones."

"Not up to it, Wilfork?" Baron said.

"Oh, cut him some slack, Leif," Charlie said. "I feel the same way." Annja had the strong impression he was aching to add the words I need a drink.

"We've got some distance to make yet," Baron said. "Just a little longer tonight, though."

"Aren't we past the army patrols yet?" Jason asked.

"Nope."

"Hey!" Larry Taitt called out. He fumbled his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, back into place and pointed.

Looming up suddenly before them against the mauve evening sky was…a block, almost a cube, huge and featureless, with a white or sand-colored wall tinged pink and orange with light thrown horizontally beneath the canopy of clouds by the near-setting sun.

"What's that?" Trish asked.

Hamid had turned his camel and, swatting it lightly and deftly on the flanks with his whip, brought it trotting back along the line.

"It is what they call here a khaan," he said.

"It's a caravanserai," Annja said in amazement.

"What's that?" Josh Fairlie asked.

"It's, like, a Holiday Inn for camel caravans," Tommy said.

Everyone looked at him in surprise.

"You don't mean to tell me you've ever actually cracked a history book," Jason said.

"I think I read it in an old X-Men comic," Tommy said.

One of the other men, stocky and middle-aged, rode out in the lead on a mule. He was already halfway down the slope toward a high and broad arched opening in the wall. As they got closer Annja realized there were narrow windows around the upper stories. They looked like arrow slots. Or rifle loops.

Both Jason and Tommy had their bulky video cameras balanced on their shoulders, with the rubber eyepiece guards pressed to their faces. "Loving this," Jason said.

The arched door was actually a passage at least twenty feet long. As they rode through Annja craned her neck to look upward. In the gloom she couldn't see anything but shadowed stone.

"Looking for murder holes?" Wilfork asked cheerfully.

"What are those, Mr. Wilfork?" asked Levi, who rode right behind Annja clinging to his saddle with both hands.

"They put them in the ceilings of the entrances to medieval European castles," Annja said. "They used them to pour stuff like boiling oil on unwelcome visitors. And yes, Mr. Wilfork, I was looking for them."

Trish, who rode right in front of Annja, had passed into the open courtyard inside the caravanserai. She twisted around in her saddle. "You guys are sick," she said while scowling at them.

"Not Levi," Annja said. "He was just asking a simple question."

Trish glared at Annja for a moment then turned and rode away.

They emerged into a wide courtyard. The tan ground was swept bare of snow and tamped hard. Around the courtyard the lower floor was lined with stalls with broad but pointed arches similar to the ones they entered through. A well of yellow-stuccoed mud-brick occupied the center of the large open square. Snow huddled in clumps against the south and west walls, dirty and with the glazed look that suggested it had partially melted and frozen over.

Some of the stalls held animals. Some held men sitting cross-legged on carpets, smoking and arguing. Others stood empty. A gallery ran around the second floor. Beyond it were what looked like small rooms—or cells. Between the armed men walking along the gallery and at least a couple more on the flat roof, Annja got an impression of a prison more than of a hostelry.

As the procession wound inside and around the central well the animals came to a halt. They brayed greetings to the beasts in the stalls. The human guests eyed the newcomers with an interest Annja hoped was only curiosity.

"Holy crap, we're not actually going to stay here?" Jason said.

"No," Hamid said. "You'll be at the Hilton over the next ridge where you cannot see. Paris Hilton herself, she will carry your bags."

"But it's medieval," Trish said with disbelief.

"It is Asia," Hamid said. "Not the Asia of the Chinese infidels or Singapura with its shiny skyscrapers. The real Asia. We are poor here. Things go as they always have, with little change."

Annja couldn't help noticing that wasn't strictly true. She doubted, for example, that carvanserais in the heyday of the Silk Road had boasted any appreciable number of bicycles. Nor had many of the guests in Tamerlane's time sported Kalashnikov rifles, or auto-pistols thrust through their sashes. Much as they no doubt would have liked to.

The caravan master had dismounted and gone to talk to several large men who stood not far from the entrance. Hamid joined them. Instructing the others to hang loose, Charlie followed Hamid. Larry Taitt trotted obediently behind.

Stiffly everyone else climbed off their mounts. Annja stretched. Her back made interesting noises, creaking and popping, but it felt wonderful.

The other inmates of the caravanserai either ignored them or eyed them with frank interest. "These totally look like the dudes who held Tony Stark hostage in the first IronMan movie," Tommy said with fanboy fervor.

"Hold that thought," Baron said.

"What kind of people do you think they really are?" Tommy asked.

Jason shrugged. "Smugglers. Drug runners. Terrorists."

"I don't know about you," Baron said, "but I intend not to go sticking my nose in their business, and hope they'll extend us the same courtesy."

Trish glared at him. "What, you're not going to do anything about it?"

"What, like call in an air strike on my cell phone? Then where would we spend the night?"

"I thought you were the big law-and-order type," she said.

He shook his head. "What you think of as the law doesn't reach here and never has. Most likely never will. Regardless of what you and I might prefer. But there's law here, just the same. The Old Testament patriarchs would feel right at home. And I think we'll find all the order we need."

"You really think that?" Jason asked.

Baron shrugged. "What I know is that we're a long way from home, and it's probably not a good idea to go making enemies. This isn't New York City and we're the foreigners. Satisfied, junior?"

Jason, Tommy and Trish all moved closer to each other and looked unhappy but they kept their opinions to themselves.

The caravanserai turned out to be run by an indeterminate number of brothers, each one larger and more formidable than the last, and ruled over by an even bigger patriarch, who looked like Omar Sharif if Omar Sharif had turned into the Incredible Hulk, and whose white moustache was the largest Annja had ever seen on a human being. Then again she wasn't sure she'd ever seen a larger human being to go with it; but even at that he barely lived up to its magnificence.

"Bismarck himself would go palsied with envy of that brush," Wilfork murmured. "I've only ever seen one greater, and that was on a Sealyham terrier."

"The rules are simple," Hamid said, coming from the darkness and gesturing for the party to gather together near the well in the compound's center. He explained that the caravanserai was run by Gypsies—which he seemed to disapprove of—and that they were good Muslims, which he heartily approved of.

"You want anything, you pay," he said. "You cause disturbance, they beat you with sticks and throw you out in the snow. You steal, they chop off your hand. You use a weapon, or threaten one of them, they kill you. Then it's your body they throw out in the hills."

"They don't even give you a proper Muslim burial?" Wilfork asked.

"They leave you for the wolves," Hamid said, nodding with approval.

"Wolves?" Larry Taitt asked, his eyes saucer-like behind his glasses. For once his compulsive amiability seemed to have deserted him. It was such a startling transformation Annja suspected their guide had touched a raw phobia.

"Like that's a big deal," Trish scoffed, her hands in the pockets of her thick down-filled jacket. "Wolves are never known to attack people."

Hamid fixed her with a baleful dark eye. "This may be true in the land of clean sheets and the MTV. Our strong Kurdish wolves have steel in their spines," he said menacingly.

Despite the talk of wolves, after piling the gear and saddles in several stalls, the caravan master and a couple of his drovers led the unloaded camels and mules back out into the cold evening. Hamid explained there was an enclosure on the far side of the caravanserai from the one they'd come in through.

"Aren't they worried about bandits?" Josh asked.

"Why?" Zeb asked.

"They're all inside with us," Jeb said, finishing his twin's thought.