Page 30 of What Remains (John Worthy #3)

After dropping off Davila and Harvey in Khorog, they’d driven to Tajikistan’s Zorkul Nature Reserve, which bordered the Wakhan National Park in Afghanistan.

There, they’d hidden the van in a slit cave near Concord Peak and a quarter mile from a little-used trailhead, grabbed their gear, and headed south.

By the end of that first day, they were over the border and hugging the mountains, heading east.

The passes were narrow and very high: a necessary evil, Driver said, to avoid being spotted in a landscape where it seemed that nothing moved except the snow. But avoid being spotted by whom? If the only people out here were nomads in their winter encampments? Really, who cared?

But this wasn’t his mission. Oh, he still had all that money Ustinov had given him and Davila.

Thankfully, he’d remembered the bags were rigged and could only be opened with their thumbprints.

Anyone trying to get in any other way…say, a knife…

well, that person would be in for a nasty surprise.

Before they made that run to the hospital in Khorog, he’d had Davila open his bag and also disable the incendiary device which, Ustinov claimed, functioned as a last resort: a way of making sure no bad guy got his paws on all that cash.

He didn’t know if the money would be useful, but it seemed stupid to leave it behind.

Just what Driver’s mission was or how John figured into his plans other than as both medic and hired gun, the other man wasn’t saying.

John didn’t think this was because Driver didn’t trust him because, seriously, just who was John going to tell?

No, call it a bizarre sixth-sense, but John thought Driver wasn’t saying because he needed John’s help and if he did cough up the mission plan, John might tell him what he could do with himself.

For the time being, he did what he was told. The scenery really was spectacular, though after a while, the novelty of those wild, high, snow-covered peaks vanished, principally because John was busy trying to breathe and walk at the same time.

One incongruous bit, though, never quite faded into the background. Peer over the edge of a pass and waaay down there, a long narrow, almost ruler-straight stripe that was sometimes white, sometimes black, ran down the valley’s middle and stretched both right and left as far as the eye could see.

It was all very weird. Beautiful, but eerie.

The mountains hemming the valley were something primordial: stark, corrugated behemoths of snow and ice and windswept rock seemingly as ancient as the Earth.

If not for the road, a person could believe that no one and nothing had ever set foot here before now.

They were, for all intents and purposes, completely alone.

Until the third day.