Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Outside.

Snow was still coming down, the icy bits pecking at his face and hissing over the aluminum cargo containers. The wind spun the fine snow into miniature dervishes that danced in the light from his torch. He stood for a moment, listening to the sizzle of snow over his parka, the patter of ice on aluminum, the distant but continual chuckle of water spilling from the mouth of the spring. A scent of boiled egg yolks and hot metal hung in the air, and, for the first time in years, he thought of his mother: the way she took a steam iron to his father’s shirts as she watched old movies on television on a Sunday afternoon. He remembered one film…what was it? Ah, yes, Stella Dallas . Classic Barbara Stanwyck. He’d watched, fascinated, one eye on the film, the other on his mother pressing the lapels of his father’s shirts into neat, stiff, perfect triangles while huge tears rolled down her cheeks and pearled on her chin. Every now and again, a tear would splash onto a shirt, leaving an irregular gray splotch like a squashed spider.

His mother was beautiful in that classic way: strong cheekbones, a wide mouth, expressive eyes. Long hair the color of a raven’s wing. When he’d been younger, he remembered turning to his mother as they watched an oldie and saying, with something like awe, Mom, I didn’t know you were in the movies. She’d only laughed and said, No, dear. That’s Joan Crawford.

Remembering his mother hurt. He bet his therapist would say that memory of his mother ironing—running hot steel over white linen, obliterating every trace of her tears—was a metaphor for the fear John knew she’d felt that night he’d eavesdropped: I’m so worried, so afraid. Afraid of my own child, Tom. And his father: He’s perfectly fine. He’s just going through a rough patch. All teenagers are moody, you know that. You worry too…

“Stop it.” The words rose and mingled with a misty curtain of steam swirling over a stone walkway encircling the spring’s large containing pool. Turning down the path, he gave the memories an irritable mental shrug. Nothing to see here, folks, just move along.

He focused instead on the fog hanging low and thick along the stone path. The spring itself was hidden by a large cap of white limestone warm enough to remain free of snow. Two metal stepladders, one to the left and one right, had been drilled into the rock midway down from where he stood. The main pool was very large, maybe forty feet in diameter, though he couldn’t tell how deep the water was. Probably not very: the last thing you’d want was someone drowning.

Slipping on a pair of ice crampons he’d packed in his duffel, he tucked the pry bar from Parviz’s van under an arm and headed for the cargo container to his right first. Ankle-deep fog swirled and eddied; his crampons’ metal teeth bit and crackled and crunched patches of hoar frost.

Although he’d brought the ring of keys he’d found, he didn’t need them. The container wasn’t padlocked, which probably meant there was either nothing inside or whatever was there wasn’t worth stealing. The interior was a largely barren changing area: benches, hooks drilled into the aluminum walls, and a long cupboard on a far wall. The cupboard wasn’t locked and contained stacks of folded towels smelling faintly of mildew and laundry detergent. No dust, no insect carcasses. Panning his flashlight over the floor, he saw only his footprints in a thin patina of dust.

Outside, again, circling the pool to the two cargo containers directly across from those in which they were sheltering. Locked. He studied the locks’ thick bodies and heavy shackles. He wasn’t sure a pry bar would even work.

After chewing over that for a second, he shook out the ring of keys he’d taken, wincing a bit at the loud rattle and chime of metal against metal before thinking, in the next instant, that there was no one else around to hear. Eventually, he found two with the same logo as the locks. When he tried slipping the key into the keyhole, though, he couldn’t. Crap. A veteran of several ice-cold Wisconsin winters, he knew what the problem was. Shining his flashlight on the lock, he caught the wink of ice. Steam from the hot springs had gotten into the guts and frozen the mechanism.

He fished out a lighter from a pocket. The lighter, a dark blue Bic, had been in the top drawer of the desk in the container that served as the hot spring’s office. Flicking his Bic to life, he held the flame beneath the keyhole. In a few seconds, the first drips appeared. He wiped away the water and then repeated the process three times until no more ice melted. Then he tried the key again and smiled as it turned with an audible chik.

In contrast to the largely barren changing room, this container held metal shelves. Several contained foodstuffs, all of them dried: cans of coffee, tea, bags of rice and flour, dried lentils, beans. Nothing in glass, just as there was nothing that might cause a container to burst or leak when the temperature dropped. So, no cans of soup, tuna, stew. But there were cans of dried milk powder. Packets of dried soups.

Okay, this is good. Below all of these dried foodstuffs were two shelves of plastic bladders, the type people used to store water. These were only three-quarters full and bulged with ice . Excellent. He wouldn’t have to purify water. There was also something else, though. A quicksilver flit at the back of his brain, a minnow of a thought there and gone, too slippery to grab by the tail. Something important he wasn’t seeing here, but what? After another moment, he gave up, decided not to think too hard about it, hoping the thought would surface again.

Turning his flashlight to a bottom shelf, he ran his light over several large cardboard boxes and then stopped when he picked out the words stamped on the side:

Meal Ready to Eat?, Cold Weather Individual

Menu 1-22

069

“Wow,” he said, the word rising in a cloud of steam. Cold-weather MREs were designed for use in environments like the Arctic or Antarctica, which translated into meals with many more calories than the average MRE because to stay warm, you also needed calories.

This carton’s pack date, 4069, meant that the MREs had been shipped in 2014 on March 10, the 69 th day of that year. In May of that year, Obama announced the beginning of the U.S. withdrawal from the country. Probably there’d been a scramble for MREs that, the military said, lasted anywhere from five to ten years. Given how many boxes there were in that storage container, whoever worked this place figured that the relative peace of the years preceding this meant plenty of tourists.

MREs never came with an expiration date. The military said an MRE’s shelf life, at normal temperatures, was about five years. Normal translated to about 75-80 degrees F. The cooler the temperatures, though, the longer these lasted. The military gave a conservative estimate of a decade. Up here in the mountains and given how long the temps hovered around bone-cold up here, he bet these suckers would last for twenty.

He stuffed the pack he’d brought with several meals, reasoning that the dry stuff—crackers, cookies, even dehydrated soups—would certainly be good. Plus, all MREs came with self-contained heaters that would warm the food. No need even for fuel.

Stepping from that container, he closed the door and was about to work on the lock for the second container when he stopped, glanced back at the padlock to the first, which he’d left dangling. Stupid, don’t do it. Unless he found something like WD40, he’d have to reheat the padlock every time. But he felt uneasy leaving the container unlocked. Like advertising that someone’s broken in. On the other hand, Parviz’s van was at the base of the hill, and he’d cracked open the office door. He was certain at least a few of his tracks would still be visible. Anyone approaching the baths would know someone was here.

But what if there’s another way up? He remembered the yak and donkey caravans traversing distant narrow passes. Not everyone would have a vehicle. There might be another way into this place that a person could reach only on foot. If he was lucky, the storm would let up when the sun rose in a few hours. Then he might suss out the terrain, figure out whether there was another way to the summit that wasn’t the road. That way, he might avoid unpleasant surprises, like a local dropping in.

Anyway...he snicked the shackle’s heel back into place. Better safe than sorry. If they were here long enough for him to use up all the lighters he’d found, he’d leave it unlocked. But at the first break in the weather, he was loading Davila into the van and driving all the way back to Dushanbe and find the American embassy, get word to Patterson, and get Davila the medical help he needed.

Doing that also meant he’d failed. That he would be leaving Roni behind, again.

I’m sorry, love, but I won’t do it. He moved on to the second container. I can’t leave Davila behind the way I left you.

He repeated the process of de-icing the padlock on the second container. When the shackle slipped free, he hauled back on the door. The metal gave with a high squeal reminiscent of Parviz’s slider which set his teeth and made him grimace.

At first, he thought the second cargo container was empty, but that was because he’d been expecting ranks of shelves. There were none.

But…there was something else: something that surprised him so much he nearly dropped his light.

Jackpot.