Page 2 of The Devil's Ransom

“Yes. I promised my sister. She won’t become some Taliban wife wearing a burka.”

Still not wanting to believe, Khan said, “But the Americans have the visa system. We can use that. We’re not talking about this going to pieces in hours. I can’t just call someone to fly us away.”

Jahn stood up, and Khan saw the fear again. He said, “Ghani is gone. You saw the helicopters. This is done. The Americans mean well, but this is going to pieces much faster than they’re aware. We need to go. Now.”

Khan stuttered, walked in a tight circle, then said, “How can we just fly out? Where will be go? Even if I can get a helicopter?”

“Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The window is closing. We cannot go to the airport. It’s absolute chaos. We need to fly from here. If you wait much longer, all the helicopter pilots will have gone without passengers, fleeing the death. They know what’s coming.”

Khan remained still. Jahn said, “Ahmad, please. If not for yourself, do it for the child. This country is gone, and she will endure a life of pain. They also know my name. They want me worse than they want the country. I have killed many, many of them. They’ll skin me alive when they find me. They know you as well. Theymightjust put you in jail.”

Khan said, “I need to go home. To pack. To get my things. I can’t just fly out. I have nothing.”

Jahn said, “You will have nothing but your life. If you go home, we will lose the window. And be stuck here.”

Khan said, “The Americans...”

“They are no help. They can’t even get their own people out.”

Khan nodded, and went to his phone. He dialed, then began speaking, eventually shouting into the handset. He hung up, turned to Jahn, and said, “A helicopter is on the way. What will we do when we land in Tajikistan?”

“We’ll figure that out when we get there. The first step is just getting out.”

Khan nodded, thinking. He turned a circle and Jahn said, “What?”

“The Bactrian Treasure. It’s here, in the palace.”

“What? You want to steal it?”

“Yes. I do. We need something when we land.”

“It’s huge. How are we going to get that out of here, under the noses of the guards protecting it?”

“I’ll say I’ve been ordered to move it for its own protection. Take it to a hiding place, just like the last president did with the Soviets.”

“They eviscerated him and hung his ass from a streetlight.”

“That’s my point. If he’d have taken the gold instead of burying it under the central bank, he might have been able to escape his fate.”

The Bactrian Treasure was a trove of over twenty thousand gold artifacts from all over the world. Roman coins, Serbian jewel-encrusted daggers, gold belts from India, it was a horde that delineated the history of the famed Silk Road during the time of Alexander the Great. Found by a Soviet archeologist in 1978 in six royal tombs in northern Afghanistan, the persons buried there remained a mystery, but the treasure was most definitely real. During the time of the Soviet occupation, it had been housed in the Arg. When the Soviets left, and the Taliban came knocking much like they would decades later, the final communist president had ordered the horde hidden in a secret vault under the central bank, with only five persons knowing of its existence.

There it had remained, hidden, during the entire rule of the first Taliban regime. The leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, had tried mightily to find it, to no avail. It had become a sticking point of embarrassment, with many, many men killed trying to recover it.

The conventional wisdom was that the Soviet troops had taken it on their way out the door fleeing Afghanistan, and it was forgotten. In 2003, after the Taliban had fallen, a retired museum worker revealed the truth: it was buried in a secret vault under thecentral bank. Now it was displayed in the Arg, just as it had been before.

Jahn said, “Even if they give you access to the treasure, it’s too big for you to move. It’s not fitting into a single suitcase.”

“I’ll get them to move it for me. There are special cases built for travel, used when it went on its world tour. It’ll fit into three, but I’ll take only one with the best pieces. We can leverage it when we land. We’ll need some ability to get money. I have a man I know. A Russian. He’ll be willing to give us cash for the treasure.”

“A Russian? They support the damn Taliban, and make no mistake, when this comes up missing, they’re going to hunt it down.”

“This isn’t like that. He’s a computer guy. Made a fortune doing networking in Russia.”

Jahn squinted his eyes and said, “What kind of ‘networking’?”

“I don’t know, and really don’t care. He loves collecting things. He was here for a conference last year and asked me to contact him if I came across anything unique. You know, outside of my job.”

Jahn grimaced and said, “Yeah, I get it. ‘Outside of your job.’ Like every other bureaucrat in this damn palace. It’s why we’re about to lose the country to a bunch of savages. You fucks couldn’t keep your hands out of the pig trough.”

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