Walter Williams - Deep State

The Niva would not win prizes for comfort, but it got the job done. The manual shift stuck a bit and the wheel punched her hands every time the vehicle hit a bump, but none of the gauges were in the red and the engine kept turning despite what sounded like its desperate wails for help.

She knew she had to make a left turn here somewhere. She had gotten the latitude and longitude from a Google Earth map and programed these into the GPS on her handheld, but the numbers were, she suspected, fairly approximate. Ismet seemed somehow to have fallen asleep.

There were always tracks leaving the road, most of them probably going to someone’s sheep camp. She didn’t know which, if any of them, she should take.

If all else failed, the Niva was perfectly capable of driving cross-country.

When the turn finally came she sped right past, then braked and skidded to a stop. Ismet gave a cry and stared wildly in all directions, looking for attackers. It took Dagmar several tries to find reverse with the shift, and then she backed to where a sign pointed to Chechak, giving the name in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.

The turnoff was dirt and broad enough for two trucks to pass abreast, not just a two-rut track like most of the others. The sign was wood and had been jammed in the earth fairly recently, presumably to guide trucks bringing supplies to Slash Berzerker’s IT project.

Dagmar put the Niva into four-wheel drive-fortunately she didn’t have to get out of the vehicle and mess with locking hubs. Then she jammed her foot down on the accelerator and felt the Niva lurch forward. She steered into the sign and the bullbars smashed it flat with a satisfying crack of splintered wood. Grinning, she steered onto the turnoff and punched the accelerator again. She looked over her shoulder and could see red sand flying in the taillights as the wheels threw up a rooster tail to mark their passage.

The road was mostly sand, but heavy vehicles had compressed it and the four-wheel drive wasn’t necessary for traction. She shifted into rear-wheel drive and was soon moving as fast as she dared, about fifty kilometers per hour, dodging potholes and drifts, the back end of the Niva fishtailing through her last-second swerves. The road was for the most part straight, but there were sudden and unanticipated turns or dips or climbs or places where the road had been washed out by a flash flood and she had to shift to four-wheel drive to get through it.

Her GPS showed her that she was getting closer to her destination.

And then the road took a precise right-angle turn to the left, completely unmarked and unexpected, and Dagmar was going too fast to stop or to make the turn. A wall of red sand appeared before them. The Niva struck the sand in an explosion of ruddy dust and suddenly they were airborne. Ismet woke with a yell. Panic flooded Dagmar as she felt weightlessness, and then the vehicle came down with a crash and she was thrown forward against her shoulder belt. Pain flared from forearms braced against the steering wheel. Her foot braced to shove the brake pedal all the way to the floor.

The Niva wasn’t moving. Dagmar sat gasping for breath, her heart hammering, a stretch of featureless sand stretching out before the headlamps.

“Are you all right?” Ismet said.

Dagmar blinked. “I think so.”

She looked around and saw that the vehicle seemed to be intact. She put the Niva into four-wheel drive, then shifted into reverse. Sand flew from the wheels, but the four-by-four wouldn’t move. The Niva wouldn’t go forward, either.

“Let me see what’s happening.” Ismet opened his door and stepped out. A blast of icy wind blew into the vehicle, and Dagmar shivered. Ismet circled the Niva and then came to Dagmar’s door. Dagmar rolled down her window, then shivered to another cold gust.

“We’re hung up,” Ismet said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Rage flooded her veins. Dagmar freed herself from her shoulder belt and stepped out onto the Kyzyl Kum.

Sand had been piled just where the road turned, a man-made dune that had since been sculpted into smooth curves by the wind. Either the sand had been scraped from the road and just dumped there or it had been placed there to stop cars that failed to make the turn, a duty that it had performed with faultless efficiency.

The Niva had climbed to the top of the dune, then lost momentum and hung itself on the crest. The sand supported the frame at its midpoint, with the wheels dangling off to either side, unable to gain enough traction to move the vehicle.

“Shit fuck shit!” Dagmar restrained herself from kicking the tires.

“We could dig it out,” Ismet said. “Do we have a shovel?”

A search revealed that a shovel was not part of the Niva’s standard equipment.

“We’ll have to use our hands,” Dagmar said. She was frozen to the bone and was keeping her teeth from chattering only with effort.

Ismet peered out into the night. He pointed. “I see a light out there,” he said. “I can’t tell how far it is, not over a flat desert. But they probably have a car or a truck, and we might be able to rent it.”

Dagmar narrowed her eyes and peered at the light. It was faint and seemed to glow from somewhere on the edge of the world.

“I’ll walk it,” Ismet said. He pulled the hood of his windbreaker over his head, then looked back at Dagmar. The headlamps gleamed off his spectacles. He touched her arm.

“Get in the car and stay warm,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”

Dagmar could only nod in agreement. Ismet equipped himself with a water bottle and some of Dagmar’s hundred-pound notes and walked off into the darkness. Dagmar got back in the Niva and cranked up the heater as far as it would go.

As the heater filled the cabin with warmth she began to regret not going off with Ismet. The Turkish gunmen, she thought, could arrive while Ismet was away, and they would see the Niva illuminated in the white splash of its own headlights. If they stopped to investigate, Dagmar would have a hard time explaining that she was just an innocent tourist who took a wrong turn.

She could become less conspicuous by turning off the lights, but then Ismet might not be able to find his way back.

Thoughts of the Turkish assassins sent her digging for her pistol. It had flown forward in the crash and ended up in the footwell. She clipped the holster to her belt. Her search had revealed some of the food they’d plundered from the Gulfstream, and so she made herself some sandwiches with the cheeses and cold cuts and ate them.

She decided that if she saw or heard a car coming, she’d turn off the lights, run into the desert, and hide. If it was Ismet, she’d emerge. If it wasn’t, she’d wait for the newcomers to leave.

The cabin was pleasantly warm. She unzipped her leather jacket and reclined the seat. Pain throbbed in her forearms. The desert stretched ahead of her in the headlights, featureless, monotonous. Dagmar closed her eyes.

She must have slept, because she came awake suddenly to the sound of metal on metal. She looked around wildly, clutched at the pistol, and threw the door open. She jumped onto the sand, hand still on the pistol, her head swiveling madly as she tried to make out where the sound was coming from.

“Dagmar, it’s me.” Ismet’s voice.

She sagged with the release of terror. She stepped away from the Niva and saw two large moving shapes looming against the Milky Way. A sound like an enormous belch sounded in the air. In sheer astonishment she beheld a pair of Bactrian camels, their breath steaming in the air.

“This is Ulugbek,” Ismet said from atop the camel on the right. “I found him at his sheep camp. His brother is away with the truck, so we rented these instead.”

From out of the darkness she saw Ulugbek’s smile under a dark mustache. “Assalomu alaykum!” he called.