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eBook Category: Suspense/Thriller
eBook Description: A bumbling American smuggler inadvertently involves a beautiful woman from the World Health Organization in his mounting list of problems when a bag containing millions worth of opium is substituted for his at a train station. After a corpse appears in his hotel room, police, drug dealers and a motley crew of thugs and ne'er-do-wells pursue them in a cross-country dash to the ashram of his partner, an eccentric guru who invented an herbal cure for hemorrhoids, worth more than the opium.

eBook Publisher: The Fiction Works, Published: 2004
Fictionwise Release Date: January 2004

5 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [219 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [205 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [189 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [710 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [204 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [194 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [235 KB] , hiebook (KML) [537 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [297 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [170 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [209 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [264 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [296 KB]
Words: 63000
Reading time: 180-252 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

In the mountains near the Khyber Pass a rifleman in crossed bullet belts and a flowing turban knelt on the roof of a bus and cursed the steel suitcase he was tying down. It was cold. He breathed vapor jets.

This was a heavy case, and awkward, and he was trying to fix it to a plank platform already crowded with passengers and piled with bundles. He threw a man off and flung luggage over his shoulder after him. The case almost slipped away.

"Damn this case!" he said. "Confuse and confound this filthy hell-bound case and all into whose hands it falls! And may they burn to be rid of it as I do!"

He knotted the frayed rope, gave it a contemptuous twang and climbed down the ladder to his horse, his rifle swaying tall on his back.

"May it fall on someone's head!"

An elbow came through a window and then a turbaned white-bearded head, craning to see how precariously the case was tied.

The two men exchanged no glance.

As the horn blew and the bus pulled away the white-beard continued to lean out and watch how the fastening took the jolts.

Inside people sat five to a seat, perched squatting on seat backs, sat in the aisles and lay in the luggage racks. Now that they were moving they bounced ceiling high and the bus leaned from side to side on loose joints.

The land was open and hilly in the Pass and covered with snow. Signs warned of tribal country where the police had no authority. Do not stop!

At the top of the Pass they could see on their left the white wall of the Himalayas, and before them the plain that swept across Pakistan into India.

They were a day and a night crossing Pakistan, stopping here and there for passengers to find a place on top or squeeze inside. The windows showed arms, buttocks, cheeks and hips wedged flat to the glass.

They paused at rivers for radiator water. Men jumped down and put blocks under the wheels to keep the bus from rolling away, and the man with the white beard stood off watching the case, taking care no one could connect him with it.

They passed through Peshawar with its bazaars spread out under a high fortress; through Nowshera, Attock, Hassan Abdal, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Gujar Khan, Ihelum, Gujrat, Gujranwala, Kamoke, Shandure and sprawling Lahore where muezzins called from the loudspeakers of hundreds of mosques.

The road was narrow. They had to slow almost to a stop and creep past oncoming trucks painted with flowers.

At night the trucks were near invisible, their headlights painted blue and green, and the strings of flashing lights around the drivers' seats could only be seen from up close.

They arrived the next day in the border town of Waga and pulled up before Pakistan customs. Passengers climbed down and others up. There was a busy prying loose of baggage and the steel suitcase slipped away.

It fell on someone's head. A man squatting by a rear wheel to relieve himself was pounded permanently in that position without realizing what had killed him.

A crowd gathered. Senior customs officers pushed through. One of them glanced at the white-beard, who nodded discreetly at the case.

The bus was searched anyway. The gas tank was probed.

Inside the shed clothing was massaged and bundles were spread on tables. There would be loss of baksheesh and of pride if anything should slip through and then be found by the Indian officers.

Outside two guards took the body behind the shed and sat it on the ground, then returned for the steel case, which they carried more gently across neutral territory to Indian customs. There a clairvoyant woman was passing along a line of travelers, taking each by the back of the neck and locking eyes with him.

The officer supervising this detached himself and had two of his own guards load the case on a bus for Amritsar.

That night in Amritsar, amid policemen watching for Sikh terrorists, a ragged man carried the case down from the roof of the bus, looked across the street at a man in a plaid turban and followed his glance to the bus to Delhi.

He climbed the ladder at the rear of that bus and lodged the case in the rack.

The man in the plaid turban crossed the street, boarded the bus and pushed his way back to a seat by the last window. As it was pulling away his arm hung out and stretched back, some rupee notes between his fingers. The ragged man ran along beside and took them, stopped and brought his hand to his forehead as the bus bounced off into the dark.

In the morning the police got on and made everyone stand and be searched. They hauled three men outside where they took off their blankets and dropped their pants. Something was found. A bribe was handed over. It was flung to the ground. Entreaties were made. More notes were handed over. The men got back on the bus.

A policeman started up the ladder for the baggage when the man in the plaid turban hung his arm out the window and reached back with some notes between his fingers. The policeman stepped down off the ladder for them but, while the arm remained extended, the fingers withdrew into a fist. The policeman came around for a look at his face and it turned away. But when another policemen jumped onto the ladder this one waved him off.

As the searchers within approached the rear the one outside hissed, the fingers opened and he snatched the money. The police inside filed off and stood unmindful of the dust as the bus pulled away.

The second time there was a rich man aboard and his servants handed money through the windows to the policemen as if distributing alms to beggars. And so it was received, with hands to foreheads, bows and smiles; and the bus passed unsearched.

The third time, outside Delhi, the women on the bus were searched internally.

"Jesus Christ!" said an Englishwoman. "What is this?"

They went through Jullundur, Phagwara, Ludhiana, Khanna, Sirhind, Ambala, Kurukshetra, Karnal and Pakpat. They passed camels in the snow.

It was cold in Delhi. People huddled in the street six under a blanket, warming their hands at fires of boxes and tires. Children lurked in rag tents slung on the sidewalks. In the four-level bus station people slept in the girders and a cow trotted on the ramps, frightened by the bus.

The man in the plaid turban hired a beggar to transfer the case and boarded a bus for Dhaulpur.

As they passed Agra the next day the Taj Mahal floated on mist in the distance and vultures circled over corpses on the riverbank.

On a railway platform in Dhaulpur the steel case stood alone. A safe fifty feet away the man in the plaid turban beckoned a porter, showed him his ticket and nodded at it.

The porter, red-turbaned like all porters, squatted and grappled it up onto his head, then took it into a second-class carriage, found a bench, chased away the ones without tickets and left it there.

When the train pulled out Plaid-Turban was standing in the open carriage doorway. He stood there all day and lay on the floor there all night as the train screeched and clattered its way toward Bombay.