Aussie Lewis dragged the long ten-by-six-foot raft of wooden slats and canvas down to the river’s edge at a point where he estimated the current would take him diagonally across to the other side, where the bend in the river was jammed with floes of ice, coagulated where the current had narrowed. With darkness approaching, he fed the two long poles that he was going to use as a slipway into the water and firmly anchored the raft by means of ten tough hide straps, which in turn were held fast by wooden stakes that he’d driven into the sandy soil with the butt of his AK-74.
With slipway and raft held steady, he went up the bank to bring down the Kawasaki. He saw movement near it, dropped, and heard a noise, the same low moan he thought he’d heard before. It was a Mongolian herdsman lying next to the bike. He must have made his way down to the river as Aussie had done a last-minute check around the ghers. Aussie switched the AK-74 off safety and, going low, crawled about to the right of the Kawasaki so as to come up behind the man. If the man had punctured his gas tank, Aussie swore he’d take his head off at the neck. When Aussie was only a few feet from him he could see the old man had done nothing of the sort. Aussie could see the man’s del blood-soaked to the chest. He had been one of those who had been shot by the Spets who were punishing them for not knowing anything of the SAS/D. When he saw Aussie in the tattered del he gestured with what little energy he had left for the SAS/D trooper to come closer.
Lewis moved his finger off the safety of the AK-74 and could tell from the old man’s chest wound that he was not long for this world. It was a miracle he had managed to crawl so far from the rubble of the ghers. Aussie Lewis knelt beside him and gave him several sips of water from the motorcycle’s canteen. The man made as if to talk but could only gesture, the same kind of moan coming from his throat, but it was as clear as a desert day in that dark, dust-riven twilight what he wanted — begging Lewis to finish him off, to see that his agony might not go on.
Aussie couldn’t use the AK-74 for fear of the shots being heard, but the old man was reading his thoughts and drew his hand across his own throat. Aussie Lewis nodded, and with an agnostic’s hedging of the bet, made the sign of the cross on the old man, whose hands now stretched out from his side. Perhaps the old man would understand, perhaps not. Aussie took out his K-bar knife and quickly drew it across the old man’s throat. The blood spurted then gurgled like a crimson brook, and it was done. Aussie then dug a hole in the sand and covered the old man, leaving a hastily rigged cross from two of the gher slats, then he lifted the Kawasaki. It felt twice as heavy as before as he wheeled the bike aboard the raft and again had to lower it before cutting the leather straps that had held the raft in place.
Immediately he began pushing on the stern oar — a long slat — hard to port to catch the current. A piece of jagged ice about four feet square bumped into the raft, sent a shudder through it, then another hit it amidships. “Bloody hell!” was Lewis’s response, but in the swift current he was now already a third of the way across the river with only seventy yards to go, desperately working the rudder hard to port lest he be sucked into the fast-flowing midbend channel. But the length of the raft took care of that, for it couldn’t make a sharp turn and its front end was already crashing and splintering into the packed ice of the bend.
In a flash, Aussie was racing through the ice jam with the painter of hide and anchoring the hide rope to a stake he was driving hard into the ground. Then without pausing for breath he hauled for all his might, the ice jam now helping him slide the raft, albeit bumpily, a few feet forward, acting like glider wheels beneath the raft, but then one of two pieces obstructed him. Suddenly he could pull it no further. He felt the impact of several more lumps of ice hitting the stern of the raft but paid no attention, going back and starting the Kawasaki on its side, holding it in neutral then lifting it up and in one movement pushing it hard forward and accelerating in gear. He was off the raft in a second and up the side of the riverbank, heading north of the river through the tract-less Dornod depression, not toward the Great Wall, which was hundreds of miles to the south, but instead toward the still-existent wall of Genghis Khan. He estimated it would be about 150 miles to the border — three to four hours if he made good time, barring any other impediments. Certainly the Spets would think he was still on the southern side of the Herlen River, heading east toward Choybalsan, rather than north.
Now and then he had to slow down on the rock-strewn stretches, but at others the firm grassland, still hard despite the thaw from its winter hardness, gave him a surprisingly fast and relatively comfortable ride. “No problems,” he assured the Kawasaki. “Not to worry.”