Then light shone ahead.
The exit.
He fled toward it, diving through it from a yard away to freedom, landing hard, almost forgetting to make that last leap to save his life.
McKay caught him in his arms and rolled him to the side.
A howl burst forth from the tunnel, full of frustration and the promise of bloody vengeance.
As Jordan tumbled away, he caught sight of the male leopard stepping to the mouth of the tunnel—then the world exploded.
Fire.
Smoke.
Pelting rocks and stinging grit.
Jordan shook free of McKay’s embrace but stayed on his knees.
He took in deep gulps of fresh air, trying to clear his head.
He watched for any sign of the leopards through the smoke, but the tunnel had completely collapsed. As he stared, an avalanche of rock continued to flow down from above, further sealing the passageway, reburying those bones along with the two leopards inside.
“How many land mines did you use?” Jordan gasped out, his ears still ringing from the blast.
“Just one. Didn’t have time to dig up more than that. Plus, it was enough.”
Before him, the mass of Shahr-e-Gholghola steamed and shuddered. Jordan pictured the subterranean cavern collapsing into stony ruin below. More explosions ripped through the ruins, blasting smoke and rock.
“The quaking is triggering other land mines to blow,” McKay said. “We’d better haul ass out of the way.”
Jordan didn’t argue, but he kept a wary eye on the ruins.
They retreated to the thatched-roof house. Cooper came stumbling out to meet them. Blood ran down one side of his face.
“What happened?” Jordan asked.
But before Cooper could answer, Jordan hurried past his teammate to find the home empty.
What the hell . . .
Concern for the girl spiked through him.
Cooper explained. “As soon as you went into the cave, the girl dove through the window. I tried to go after her, but that damned professor clubbed me, screaming, ‘Let her go! Let the demons take her.’ That guy was a whack job from the beginning.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. I just woke back up.”
Jordan sprinted out of the hut. Falling snows filled in their tracks but he could see that the girl’s tiny feet pointed west, the professor’s east. They’d gone in opposite directions.
McKay caught up to him.
A thump-thumping beat echoed in the distance.
A helicopter, ablaze with light, came sweeping toward them from Bamiyan, drawn like moths to a flame. The Rangers had heard the explosions.
“Great,” McKay said. “Now the cavalry comes.”
“What’s next, Sarge?” Cooper asked.
“We let someone else get the professor,” Jordan said, rediscovering his outrage. It flowed through him, warming him, telling him what he must do, centering him again at long last. “We go get that little girl.”
THREE DAYS LATER, I sit in my nice warm office at the Afghan Criminal Techniques Academy. All the paperwork has been filed; the case is closed.
The events surrounding that night were blamed on a single unusual finding at the ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola: a gas signature emanating from deep underground. The gas was a hydrocarbon compound called ethylene, known to cause hallucinations and trancelike states.
I remember my own confusion, the things I thought I saw, the things I wished I hadn’t. But they weren’t real. They couldn’t have been. It was the gas.
The scientific explanation works for me. Or at least I want it to.
The reports also attribute the leopards’ strange and aggressive behavior to the same hydrocarbon toxification.
Other loose ends are also resolving.
Professor Atherton was found a mile from the ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola—barefoot, raving, and suffering from hypothermia. He ended up losing most of his toes.
McKay, Cooper, and I had searched through the night for the little girl, and eventually I found her nestled in a shallow cave, unharmed and warm as toast in my coat. I’d been grateful to find her, relieved that I had cared enough to keep searching. Maybe I’d find my way back to those innocent Iowa cornfields someday after all.
The girl had no memory of the events at the ruins, likely a blessing. I’d taken her to a doctor, then turned her over to her relatives in Bamiyan, thinking that was the end of it.
But the cave where I found her, not far from the ruins, revealed itself to be the entrance to a small crypt. Inside rested the remains of a young man, entombed with the weapons and finery of a Mongol noble. Genetic studies are under way to determine if the body might not be that of Genghis Khan’s grandson, the emissary the king of Shahr-e-Gholghola had murdered centuries ago that set in motion the events that would lead to the citadel’s downfall.
But it was the manner of that young man’s death that keeps me sitting at my desk this winter morning staring at the neatly filled out report and wondering.
According to Atherton’s stories, the Shansabani king had slain his daughter’s suitor by decapitating him after he discovered their planned elopement. And the Mongolian body in the tomb had no head.
Could the emissary and the lover have been the same man? Had the king’s daughter fallen in love with the Khan’s grandson? Had that tragic love triggered the massacre that followed? Everyone always said that love led to good things, but it didn’t always. I find myself playing with my wedding ring again and make myself stop.
I don’t know, but as I sit here, stuffing the reports in a folder, I remember more details. How Azar told me that leopards were the royal symbol of the Shansabani kings. How Farshad screamed about the girl being possessed by a djinn and hunted by ghosts.
Was he right after all?
With the opening of the tombs, had something escaped?
Had the wisp of a long-dead princess slipped into the girl, seeking another to help carry her to her lost love?
Had her father, still mired in anger and vengeance, possessed those two leopards, the royal sigils of his family, and tried to drag her back to the horrors hidden under Shahr-e-Gholghola?
And in the end, had the explosions that resealed that tomb reburied his grave along with the bones of the leopards, ending the angry king’s ghostly pursuit of his daughter?
Or were the pair of hunters merely leopards, not possessed by anything more than hunger, their aggression fueled by the toxic gas in their new den?
And those voices. Had it just been the cats? I hadn’t been able to track down another Bactrian scholar, so no one but the professor had translated those eerie sounds into words. Maybe he was unhinged by his colleagues’ deaths or already affected by the gas from his earlier work at the dig site.