Kara Kush

  It was true that President Carter had stated, years ago, that anyone trying to control the Gulf ‘would be repelled by any means, including military force’. But what if the Russians used surrogates, or puppets, as in Afghanistan? In Asia, Africa and the Americas, Soviet policy was to use local people as their Trojan horse.

  And the Afghans? They were anything but a spent force. Three years after they had been all but written off by the West as a nation hopelessly lost to the Russians, the people were still fighting: so effectively that the guerrillas controlled 99% of the country, and the Russians even had to dive-bomb the cities to regain control.

  The Russians, of course, were far from being beaten, but they were taking a military and propaganda hammering such as they never had before. The West, on the other hand, was not helping the Afghans. And yet – perhaps to represent themselves as saints – the leaders of the developed world had actually said that they were sending arms. They had the best of both worlds. By not supplying arms and saying that they were doing so, they avoided annoying the Russians, since the Kremlin knew what was, and what was not, getting through. At the same time, all the peoples of the East who sympathized with the Afghan freedom struggle now believed that the West was whiter than white, and active in the struggle. The Russians gained on all counts. They had a place to test weapons, and, with luck, could convince their own people – and some others as well – that the ‘Western interventionists’ were trying to fight the Soviet Union through Afghan guerrilla surrogates. And, as long as the non-aligned nations thought that the Western powers were giving arms to the Afghans, they would not do anything themselves to help.

  The only losers in this game of bluff were the people of Afghanistan itself. It was hard to believe, but those were the real facts. The increased supply of arms was due to Afghan patriot, not to foreign, effort.

  And now, almost incredibly, the Afghans had produced this story – or this fact – that they had found the ancient hidden treasure of Ahmad Shah, billions of dollars worth, and had offered it to King Zaid. To buy arms, to free themselves, to get the Russians out, to remove them, some distance at least, from Narabia and the other oil states.

  ‘Jamal.’ Zaid had made up his mind. ‘This is your mission. I want you to go to Europe, to America if necessary. Search among the libraries there, ask scholars. Is there any truth in the tale of this treasure, and what is its quantity? This sort of information, as everyone knows, is not easily to be found in the East. Even if it is here, it would take us years to dig it out. The scholars and the libraries of the West have centuries of information on the East.’

  ‘By my eyes, Father.’ The Prince bowed.

  ‘I shall have these coins tested, Jamal, to make sure that they are not counterfeit. I shall have it done locally, to avoid any interest if they are sent to the West. The press there get hold of everything, and we could have the Russians after us in a matter of days. If the coins are genuine, you shall leave immediately.’

  ‘Your lightest wish is my command.’ Jamal inclined his head.

  The King ticked off his instructions on his fingers. ‘Make the arrangements for the stocks and other investments to be liquidated at my signal. Keep in touch through our consulate in Zurich. We can trust Consul Ali Husseini there. I have a direct radio link with him from the palace. When you have confirmation or otherwise about the treasure, radio me in the Mas-haf Cypher.’

  ‘By my head, eyes and heart.’ Jamal gave the salute: touching his forehead, brows and breast.

  The King looked at the glittering mohurs once again. He and his old friend, Ambassador Akbar of Afghanistan, had played many a game of chess, gone on many a hawking expedition together. They had watched camel races, had vied with one another in the composition of poetry, had even been adjudged equals in calligraphy. His friend was in trouble. That counted, too. Even if the gold turned out to be counterfeit, he would try to do something for him. And the price of gold was going up: some said that it would double within six months.

  The friend, the gold, the SS 20s …What a combination. First it was recalcitrant camels which had been the bane of his life. Then oil people and diplomats. Now he was haunted by friendship, treasure and missiles. Well, perhaps things had got so bad that they could only improve from now on.

  ‘Gold? Testing gold is simplicity itself, Majesty. Methods have been known for centuries, and new ones are being added all the time.’ Artran Yunanian, the Armenian chemist, bowed with every word he spoke. He had known the King for decades, and feared him; but Zaid had always been good to him, and whenever he called for Artran, there was some commission or some reward never far away.

  ‘Artran. What do you make of these?’

  Yunanian gasped as the fifty pieces, bright as from the mint, were poured out of a bag onto the table.

  He took one up and bit it. ‘It’s soft enough to be real, Majesty. Perhaps you have found a hidden hoard, somewhere near the palace? I could get you a good price. These are collectors’ pieces, you know, very ancient.’

  ‘No, I was sent them by a friend.’ They might be of interest to collectors, but millions of them on the market would destroy their scarcity value. ‘I want them properly assayed and I want it done at once, and I do not want anyone else to know.’

  The podgy chemist looked at the monarch with an expression which combined servility, delight and injured innocence. ‘Instantly, Majesty, properly and secretly. How could it cross your noble mind, the noblest of all minds, that I, Artran Yunanian, father of Sagdasht Artranian, on whose beloved head I swear, Majesty, that I could ever betray a confidence? Why, I’ll kill my wife and child …’

  ‘That won’t be necessary, Artran. Just test the gold. How old are the coins, by the way?’

  Artran squinted at them. The lettering was in the Arabic script. Like thousands of Armenians in the Arab world, mostly shopkeepers, he had never learned to read it, although he could speak the language fluently enough.

  ‘Oh, they must be one or two thousand years old, Majesty …’

  ‘I hope that your chemist art is better than your history, Artran. How do you assay gold, anyway?’

  ‘Sire, there are several methods. In the streak test, you draw it along a hard surface and compare the colour and softness of the streak with that made by a known quality of gold. That’s the simplest, but there are alloys which are equally malleable, so it is not much use nowadays. Then there is the acid test. Certain alloys defy acids, but they are generally those made in advanced countries, and, as this gold comes from the East, the acid test would probably suffice.’

  ‘I want a conclusive result, Artran!’

  ‘In that case, Majesty, I would have to find the specific gravity. This test is foolproof. All metals and alloys displace a different and distinct quantity of water. By measuring this, we can positively determine if the coin is gold.’

  ‘That is the test you shall do. When can you report the result to me?’

  ‘This evening at sundown, Majesty.’

  ‘Very well. Take these coins and go.’

  ‘May the life of the greatest King, Shadow of the Almighty on Earth, be everlasting …’

  ‘Get out, Artran, and take that packet over there with you.’

  Yunanian the chemist scuttled out, clutching the package wrapped in a fine Kashmir shawl which he knew, by custom and experience, contained a fat bundle of currency notes, payment for his trouble. A king, in the East at any rate, always gave people presents which corresponded with his own dignity and importance, not with theirs.

  Throughout the day, the King faithfully fulfilled his obligations. He read State papers, said his prayers, visited the new dry dock. He also received several relatives who wanted to set up profitable enterprises, such as flying in frozen chickens from California or building ten new hotels. These would add to the thirty which already stood, monuments to man’s inhumanity both in aspect and content, dotting the panorama of bleak hills amid which the capital sat: the highest point on a huge and arid plateau, be
st suited to Bedouins’ flocks and oil rigs, sweeping down to the great flat beaches beyond which was the Arabian Sea – and Afghanistan.

  The hotels, the ambassadors, the docks and the chamberlains – and the oil wealth – might come and go, the King reflected, again and again during that day. But the Bedouins, his people, would go on for ever.

  When Yunanian had counted his bakhsheesh, and found it to be no less than five hundred dinars, worth over a thousand dollars, he took the coins to the little laboratory behind his shop and tested them. Yes, there was no doubt that they were gold, and fine gold at that. The King had got hold of gold. There had been about fifty coins. Why was he so keen to have them analysed? Surely because there must be more, and very many more, somewhere. Otherwise he would never have troubled himself to call in Yunanian. A hundred mohurs like this, would be worth, let’s see, at a thousand dollars an ounce – say about $44,000. Peanuts, though, to such as the King, who already had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of millions of dollars in cash, investment and revenues.

  Yunanian was sure that the King was up to something. But what? What else had he said? Nothing. Except to keep it secret. He would go back to the King, taking his report, and try to find out more.

  As the sun set, Yunanian was sitting in the palace courtyard, waiting to be summoned by the inner guard. He could have got as far as the ante-room where people with business with the King usually waited: but that would have cost money. The guards and ushers knew their services were worth something, and made sure that visitors knew it, too. But Yunanian realized that Zaid would call for him in any case, and the guards and the courtiers would have to find him, double-quick. So he waited. Perhaps there would be another reward, a further bundle of notes, for doing the assay.

  Someone tugged impatiently at Yunanian’s sleeve. It was the palace guard. ‘Hurry, Armani, Armenian! Our Lord the King commands!’

  The interview was brief.

  ‘Well, Artran, are they genuine?’

  ‘Perfectly, Majesty.’

  ‘Good.’ The King was relieved, and it was this sensation which may have caused his guard to slip. ‘By the way, have you ever heard of a king, an ajami, a Persian, called Ahmad Shah?’

  ‘I have, of course, Majesty.’ Yunanian, like many others in the East, always said that. ‘I do not know,’ after all, is something said only by ignorant people. He had in fact never heard of Ahmad Shah, but it did indeed sound like an ajami name. Ajam, the Dumb. What the Arabs called people who did not know the Arabic language, especially Persian-speakers.

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘That he was a king.’ That was safe enough! He must be a king.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I may need some time to remember, Majesty.’

  ‘Did you hear that he had a treasure?’ The mistaken belief, that Yunanian was trustworthy and that he might really have known something about Ahmad Shah, had overcome King Zaid’s natural caution.

  The Armenian stood silent for a moment, wondering what to say. Then, recovering himself, he poured forth such a farrago of nonsense, produced from an overheated imagination fuelled by a desire for information and reward, that Zaid soon saw the familiar pattern.

  ‘All right, Yunanian. That will be all. Tell nobody. Keep the five gold pieces I gave you, for yourself. Now go. I have important matters to attend to.’

  Yunanian bowed low and backed from the royal presence.

  Once outside, his mind began to work again. Five gold mohurs, over fifteen hundred dollars worth in gold value. As collectors’ pieces, who knows? They were very old. Perhaps worth twenty-five thousand dollars the lot. Not a bad day’s work. But there was something else that might bring him even more. The treasure of King Ahmad Shah. That was it. Zaid was a silly old fool. Once a Bedouin, always a Bedouin. He had found a treasure. More likely, someone else had found one and he knew about it.

  ‘Majesty, perhaps you have found a hidden hoard?’ ‘No, I was sent them by a friend …Is it gold? Are they genuine …A Persian-speaking king …Did you hear that he had a treasure?’ It must be a really big treasure: that was certain.

  Yunanian did not know of any Persian-speaking kings who had been anywhere near Narabia. And he could hardly go to Iran or anywhere like that to seek the treasure: especially with so little to go on. No, unfortunately, there would be no progress in that direction. Anyway, the gold had already been found: King Zaid’s possession of the coins was proof enough of that. So Yunanian would not be likely to get his hands on any more of it. That left him with that other commodity which he knew was often as valuable as any merchandise, though more perishable than any: information. ‘News, like fish, must be sold before it stinks.’ That was the old saying. He would get onto it tomorrow morning.

  Roger Lowther was Third Secretary and Visa Officer at the British Embassy, Consular Section, Hadiqa City, Kingdom of Narabia. That, at any rate, was what it said on his office door. In fact, all the visa work was done by the intrepid and officious Miss Hilda Spencer-Starman, technically his deputy. His own title, like that of many another minor intelligence officer in British diplomatic stations around the world, was as improbable as the size and hideous colouring of the immense plaster Lion-and-Unicorn coat of arms which surmounted the entrance to the Embassy’s Chancery inside the walled compound. Lowther often winced as he passed below this monstrosity: the size and shape dictated, no doubt, by some London functionary whose desire to impress foreign natives matched his lack of taste.

  There hadn’t been any news for days. Lowther had done The Times crossword, and even the one from the Illustrated Weekly of India: once the parish magazine of the Bombay expatriate Memsahibs and now often barely literate, though clearly aping the manners and actions supposed by this generation to have been those of the former elite.

  Lowther shook his head, to unstick his straw-coloured hair from his sweating forehead. He had switched off the air-conditioning and opened the supposedly bomb-proof window to get some air, however full of sand and flies it might be. He had sinus trouble, and the chilled air made it worse. He was typical of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of young men and women who filled the lower echelons of the Foreign Service, in London and abroad, and he knew it. He had met too many of them to think otherwise.

  A Third Secretary, a dogsbody, fetching and carrying for the ambassador, and sometimes only the counsellor. Spending countless months, sometimes years, in ‘just brushing up your knowledge of Siam, I mean Thailand, my boy’, of not being able to join his father’s London club because ambassadors belonged to it, and it would not be seemly for them to meet him on equal terms. ‘Sitting in’ on allegedly important meetings which seemed to have a beginning and, mercifully, an end, but no middle and no easily discernible purpose. Discussions, briefings, situation papers, the same old offices, the same kind of chairs. ‘No, of course, at your level you can’t have a Persian rug on your floor. I don’t care if it is only a Turkoman saddlebag. Why, even Ministers …’

  Lowther’s clerk Halabi affected a sickly sort of familiarity with him because they were both British subjects (and, as the passports put it, citizens of the United Kingdom); Halabi, who had been born in Aden, now came into the room. He was carrying a cup of tea on a saucer which also held a sodden gingernut. It must be eleven o’clock.

  Lowther had passed examinations in Arabic, though he had an execrable accent and hardly knew any of the language, to the great wonderment, respect almost, of all the Arabs who met him. When he had first arrived at the embassy, three and a half years ago, Lowther had asked Halabi to speak to him in Arabic as often as possible and, infuriatingly, Halabi had turned this request to his own advantage. He regularly said sentences, in Arabic, to Lowther, but in the same appalling accent that was Lowther’s own. It gave him great satisfaction. Besides, nobody else really understood what passed between them. The rest of the British staff assumed it was some obscure Arabian dialect that was involved, while many Arabs imagined that it was an especially polished form of English. H
alabi had fostered the latter impression.

  Halabi now moved forward and adopted a conspiratorial posture, pursing his lips and leaning, too close, towards the Englishman.

  ‘Jar all jar sows all Armawny, bee kidmatic,’ he drawled. He was quite proud of that. Anyone with less experience of Lowther-speak would probably have said, ‘Ja al-jasus al-Armani, bi-Khidmatak.’

  He was trying for effect, too. It worked, as usual, setting Lowther off like an alarm clock. He leapt from his chair, looked wildly around, and shook his fist at the man from Aden. ‘Halabi, how many times have I told you not to say “The Armenian spy is here”? Mr Artran Yunanian is a British subject who comes here from time to time to see about visa and other matters.’ He struck out, petulantly and without effect, at a fly which was slowly circling the biscuit in his saucer.

  Halabi shrugged. He nearly said that nobody else understood their patois anyway, but that would have annoyed Lowther further. One knew when to stop.

  ‘And put on a clean galabiya. You look terrible.’ Lowther gazed at the billowing, ankle-length nightshirt with distaste.

  Halabi withdrew, again bowing in that way which Lowther always suspected to be some private joke. Or copied from an American film, set in Algiers.

  Lowther gulped his tea and then pressed the button of the intercom. ‘Halabi, tell Mr Yunanian I’m on some urgent work, and would he kindly wait.’ He started to nibble his biscuit, displacing the fly.

  Lowther had his own style with Yunanian. Once the man had, he believed, been on the point of blackmailing him. Certainly he had behaved with undue and oily familiarity when speaking about certain unusual videotapes for Lowther that had been delivered to his pharmacy by mistake.

  When he had heard the chemist’s story, Lowther’s first reaction, as always, was to check it against three things. First, was it true? Second, was it useful? Third, if true and useful, what was it worth? One couldn’t waste taxpayers’ money.