Addison Cooke and the Tomb of the Khan Read online

  “My plane’s not at the airport. I keep it in a garage and tow it to the airport.”

  “Ah,” said Addison.

  “Do you have any idea what the airport charges for hangar space?”

  “What about your copilot?” asked Molly. “Do we need to call him?”

  “Mr. Jacobsen sleeps in the plane.”

  Addison’s team sprinted after Dax. He led them on bewildering shortcuts through crowded warehouses and busy loading docks, and down one fetid alley where they had to outrun a guard dog. They climbed over a chain-link fence and hid behind a hobo’s shanty while police cruisers patrolled the neighborhood with spotlights. When the coast was clear, they ducked through an open culvert under some train tracks and loped along a potholed service road.

  At last Dax rattled open the roll-top sheet-metal door of a mechanic’s garage and waved them inside.

  Addison saw a tiny six-seat twin-engine Apache airplane covered in a blue tarp. Tools were scattered everywhere. Sirens wailed closer.

  Dax sealed off fuel lines and hurled loose wrenches and ratchets into the cargo hold. “Mr. Jacobsen!” he called.

  A Great Dane appeared in the cockpit window and barked twice.

  “We’re leaving!”

  Mr. Jacobsen bounded down out of the Apache and sniffed at Addison and Molly. He was a gigantic beast, nearly as tall as Addison and at least fifty pounds heavier. He had the dour jowls of an aged district judge and regarded Addison’s team with a baleful expression.

  “Hello, Mr. Jacobsen,” said Molly.

  “He doesn’t speak English,” said Dax. “He’s Danish.”

  “Godaften, Herr Jacobsen,” offered Eddie.

  The dog barked a single profound woof.

  “What is Mr. Jacobsen’s first name?” asked Molly.

  “I don’t know,” said Dax. “I don’t speak Danish.”

  “Actually, Great Danes are from Germany,” said Raj.

  “I don’t speak German, either.”

  “Guten abend, Herr Jacobsen,” said Eddie.

  The dog barked again.

  “I think he’s bilingual.”

  Dax hurled the tarp off the plane with the flourish of a magician completing a masterful trick and expecting thunderous applause.

  Addison’s heart sank. The battered old Apache was covered in rust. He thought Eddie looked more likely to take flight than this ramshackle hunk of used parts. “Does this plane even fly?”

  “What else would it do? Tap-dance?” Dax climbed into the passenger hold, tossing blankets and empty food cartons out the window.

  Addison formed the suspicion that Mr. Jacobsen was not the only one who slept inside Dax’s plane.

  “C’mon, hurry!” Dax called.

  Addison’s team clambered onto the plane, filling the four rear passenger seats. Mr. Jacobsen bounded on board and gave Addison a sloppy, drooling lick. His tongue was like a wet eel. Addison was mortified. He pulled out his handkerchief and began mopping his cheek. “Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Huns!”

  “What’s his problem?” asked Dax, jerking a thumb at Addison. He settled in at the controls and pressed the starter. The engine kicked and the propellers whirled to life.

  “Addison’s germophobic,” said Molly.

  “Mysophobic,” said Addison. “‘Germophobic’ is not a word.”

  “Either way, it’s an irrational fear.”

  “It is extremely rational! Do you know what the Black Plague did to Europe? One-third of the population was wiped out!”

  “That was seven hundred years ago. That’s a long time to hold a grudge.”

  Dax steered the tiny plane out of the garage. “You guys always argue like this? You sound like you’ve been married for thirty years.”

  “We’re siblings.”

  Dax nodded. It was all clear to him now.

  The prop plane burst onto the service road, bouncing over rain-filled potholes. Immediately, roving police cruisers altered course, circling in. Dax yanked aviation goggles and two scarves out of the glove box. He wrapped one scarf around Mr. Jacobsen.

  The big dog appeared to sense the danger of flying with Dax. He left his front passenger seat and climbed into the rear. He had conceived a fondness for Addison and promptly sat on him.

  “He’s enormous,” Addison groaned. “Will the plane be able to take off?”

  “It’s not his fault he’s a big dog,” Dax called from the front seat. “He’s a Great Dane.”

  “He’s not that great—he can’t stop licking me.” Addison wiped more drool from his face. “He’s a Mediocre Dane at best.”

  “Does he know any tricks?” asked Molly, who didn’t mind dogs.

  “He might know a lot of tricks, but only in Danish.”

  “German,” Raj corrected.

  Police cars caught up behind the Apache. Dax opened the throttle, gunning the plane up to forty miles per hour.

  A phalanx of black Mercedes, crammed chock-full of triads, skidded around a corner, blockading the road ahead.

  “Okay, slight detour,” Dax shouted, braking hard and jerking the plane onto a busy Macau street. He merged left with no blinker and was rewarded with a chorus of horn blasts from an irate squadron of taxis. Cars honked and swerved around the airplane, dodging its outstretched wings.

  “How do you normally take your plane to the airport?” Addison shouted, clutching an overhead handgrip to keep from tipping over.

  “Normally, the service road isn’t blocked by armed triads.”

  Gunshots rang out. Addison saw holes open up in the Apache’s wing flaps.

  Dax skidded the Apache down a side alley. They smashed through several clotheslines, the propeller mashing the laundry to pieces.

  “Where did you learn to drive?” shouted Molly.

  “You think this is bad, you should see my flying.” Dax steered toward a busy intersection, police sirens flashing behind him. He leaned forward and kissed a plastic frog glued to his dashboard.

  “Did you just kiss that frog?” asked Raj.

  “Of course. It’s good luck. You should kiss it, too, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “I prefer not kissing frogs,” said Molly.

  “It’s your funeral.”

  More gunshots punched the plane. Addison noted the holes inching dangerously close to the fuel tank. “All right, quit messing around, Dax. Get us out of here!”

  “I get nose up at ninety miles per hour.”

  “So?”

  “So, I need at least two hundred yards of runway to hit that speed!” Dax pointed at the traffic clogging the street. “Any ideas?”

  A triad Mercedes pulled up next to the Apache and rolled down its windows. Addison’s eyes widened at the sight of a gun muzzle. He reached forward and yanked the plane’s nose wheel, steering the aircraft into oncoming traffic.

  “What are you doing?!” Dax shouted, fighting for control of the wheel.

  “Punch it!”

  Bullets rattled the metal frame of the cabin. Dax didn’t have any better ideas. He jammed the throttle wide open. The plane lurched forward, the engine roaring like a lion. Oncoming cars swerved out of their path. The Apache sped straight for the harbor.

  “I’m not sure this is two hundred yards!” Molly yelled.

  “Then you better kiss the frog!” shouted Dax.

  Addison, Molly, Eddie, and Raj kissed the frog.

  “Buckle up!” The plane packed on speed, mashing Addison’s team back against their seats. The rickety aircraft reached the end of the street and smashed through the pier, wood splintering across the windshield. The plane dipped. The harbor rushed toward the windshield.

  Addison’s stomach took a sickening lurch. He shut his eyes, waiting for the crash.

  It never came.

  He opened
his eyes. They were airborne. The city fell away behind them as the plane nosed toward the clouds. “Well, they will not remember us fondly in Macau.” In his relief to be alive, Addison even gave Mr. Jacobsen a few pats on the head. “If anyone has plans to return here, consider changing them.”

  “They can keep this city,” said Eddie, lying back in his seat, exhausted. “I’m through with it.”

  II

  •

  THE

  EMPIRE OF THE KHAN

  Chapter Twelve

  The Silk Road

  ADDISON HAD NEVER BEEN in a plane so small before. The cabin was about the size of Eddie’s mom’s station wagon. It was like flying a Buick Caballero ten thousand feet in the air. The plane shuddered and shook as it gained altitude. “Is this safe?”

  “Define ‘safe,’” said Dax.

  “Are we going to crash?”

  “Kid, I’m not a psychic.” Dax seemed to realize this was not the answer his paying passengers were hoping to hear from their pilot. “Okay, the plane isn’t one hundred percent safe. But it’s a whole lot safer than flying China National Airlines.”

  “That is difficult to imagine.” The plane climbed steeply, pitched at a forty-five-degree angle. Addison’s fear of heights was kicking in, so he avoided looking out of the windows. “Is China National Airlines publicly traded on the stock market?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “Well, in any case,” said Addison, “I will not be buying their stock.”

  “In Mission: Survival II, Babatunde Okonjo explains how to survive a plane crash,” said Raj. “Let’s say you fall out of an airplane without a parachute. You flatten out, glide, and aim for a body of water.”

  Dax frowned. “Water has surface tension, my friend. You fall from that height, it’s like hitting concrete.”

  Raj was ready for this. “That’s why you aim for white water—the waves break the surface tension. As long as it’s deep enough, falling into white water is like falling into bed.”

  Dax considered this and nodded. He pulled a box of toothpicks from his center console, popped one in his mouth, and offered one to Raj.

  Raj watched the way Dax’s jaw muscles worked the toothpick. He squinted and followed suit. Raj didn’t know why he needed to chew a toothpick, he just knew Dax made it look cool.

  At last the plane leveled out. Addison chanced a glance out the window. China was spread out below him, its cities and streets teeming with a billion souls. Distant factories belched noxious gray smog clouds that Addison tried to imagine were rain clouds. Lit only by the silver moon, China was a land of shadows.

  Addison carefully folded his prized white blazer and changed into his public school jacket, tie, and ivy cap. Molly wore a T-shirt, cargo pants, and rugged hiking boots. Raj swapped his forest camouflage pants for a desert pattern and topped it off with a tan T-shirt and his red bandana. Eddie wore his one pair of school slacks, which were a few inches too short for his long legs. They’d all been awake for more than a day. The roar of the engine became a soothing lullaby as they drifted off to sleep.

  Dax refueled in Deqin, a smuggler’s town where weather-beaten men offered to sneak Addison’s team across the Tibetan border for five hundred yuan. Addison studied his pocket edition of Fiddleton’s Asia Atlas and saw that the Wa headhunters, who worshipped the skulls that they captured, once lived just to the south, where they had occasionally battled the famous tiger hunters of Lanu. The air was cold and thin in the foothills of the Himalayas, and Addison was glad when they were airborne again, chased by the rising sun.

  Calloused hands on the yoke, Dax banked the Apache north and west, ever closer to the Gobi. If he was tired from flying through the night, he didn’t show it. “I think I should point out,” he said at last, “that the Gobi Desert is five hundred thousand square miles. Where exactly in the Gobi are we flying to?”

  Addison had not fully considered this. “That’s a decent question.” He cracked open his notebook and read Sir Frederick’s clue aloud for the team.

  “‘There lies an oasis town on the Silk Road by the Dragon Desert

  Where Nestorian Christians nursed me to health.

  Know ye your Templar vows. Visit the sick and say a mass for the dead. Pray for our sign and ye will know the way to the Tartar’s land.’”

  “Can you make anything of it, Molly?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “You and me both. I would give my kingdom for an Arnold Palmer to get the synaptic juices flowing.” He closed his eyes to relax his mind but then quickly realized he might fall back to sleep. Instead, he decided to employ his usual strategy, which was to simply start talking. “Well,” he began, “Sir Frederick was buried in Samarkand. And the clue said he was unhorsed three months earlier.”

  “So?”

  “So wherever we’re going must be three months' walking distance from Samarkand.”

  “Addison,” said Molly, “you’re jumping to conclusions so hard, you’re going to throw out your back.”

  “Mo, stick to me like dryer lint. Imagine you’re Sir Frederick. You’re galloping along the Silk Road, minding your own business, when you’re ambushed by bandits. They kill your trusty mount and you take an arrow in the leg. It becomes infected and you don’t have penicillin because it’s the Dark Ages. What do you do?”

  “Well, he said he found a Christian hospital.”

  “So for a few days, you’re sweating out your fever in the hospital. You have no more horse and you think you’re going to die.”

  “You find a place to hide a clue,” Eddie piped in.

  “Right. Because you can’t bear the thought of dying with your secret. You want your fellow Templar knights to find their way to the Khan’s treasure.”

  Molly picked up the thread. “When Sir Frederick gets better, he manages to walk another three months before he finally croaks in Samarkand.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That means our next clue is three months’ walking distance along the Silk Road from Samarkand,” said Molly.

  “Precisely.”

  “How far is walking distance?” asked Eddie. “He could be a power walker.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Addison. “He was dying of an arrow wound. Plus he had to climb those eighteen-thousand-foot mountains Uncle Nigel was talking about.” Addison flipped through his pocket-size edition of Fiddleton’s Asia Atlas, found Uzbekistan, and stabbed a finger in Samarkand’s general direction.

  “Raj, how many miles do you reckon a wounded man can walk in a day?”

  “With armor? And climbing mountains? Five miles, tops.”

  “Mo, how many days are in three months?”

  “Ninety.”

  “Just for kicks, let’s say Sir Frederick spent ten of those days belly-up in the hospital. So he had eighty days to hike five miles a day, which means he walked . . .”

  “Four thousand miles,” said Eddie.

  “Four hundred,” Molly corrected.

  “Oh, right. I added too many zeroes,” said Eddie, embarrassed.

  Addison studied the map, tracing a four-hundred-mile line east along the Silk Road trading route from Samarkand. His finger arrived on a city. He smiled. “We’re going to Kashgar.”

  Dax gave a thumbs-up and made a small westerly adjustment to his flight path. The sun rose higher in the sky, and the miles fell away beneath them.

  Molly practiced tiger punches and eagle claws, drilling her kung fu exercises into her muscle memory. Eddie practiced piano scales on his armrest. Addison devoured his father’s copy of The Secret History of the Mongols, learning of Genghis Khan’s stunning journey from enslaved orphan to warrior king.

  Dax refueled the Apache in Kathmandu, leaving Nepal before lunch to skirt the mountains of Pakistan. By two p.m. local time they were wheels down in Kashgar.

  •
• • • • •

  The airport was little more than a clearing in the sand. Addison stretched his aching legs and used the sun to find his bearings. To the west, the snowcaps of the Tian Shan Mountains guarded the wilderness borders to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. To the east, the desolate wasteland of the Taklamakan Desert spread to the curving horizon. To the south lay Kashgar, a chaotic warren of brown brick buildings scattered and stacked in all directions.

  Dax led the team into the heart of the town. Mr. Jacobsen, panting with the heat, padded at his heels on the dusty road. “What exactly are you looking for?”

  “Food,” Eddie answered immediately. He had already spotted a kebab vendor grilling chicken on a rotating spit.

  “Eddie, we’ve barely been here five minutes,” said Molly. “Besides, you ate four sticks of beef jerky on the plane.”

  “Those were my emergency rations,” Raj grumbled.

  Weary donkeys, heads bowed, hauled creaking carts of carpets, silk, and copper teapots up the rut-pocked street.

  “We,” said Addison, picking up Dax’s thread, “are looking for a Christian hospital where a certain Sir Frederick convalesced after meeting the business end of an arrow.”

  “And when did Fred stay at this hospital?” asked Dax.

  “Oh, about eight hundred years ago.”

  Dax gave Addison a long look. “Shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  The road opened onto a cobbled market square, choking with foot traffic. Buryat traders with broad faces and pointed bear-fur hats peddled baskets of cardamom, cloves, figs, and dates. Uyghur tribesmen with striking blue eyes lighting up their weather-tanned faces grilled chestnuts over open mulberry wood fires. Hui herders in white skullcaps shook wooden crooks and goaded their goats through the open market.

  “So how do you find this hospital?” Dax called over the din of traders and shopkeepers.

  “There’s nothing to it,” Addison said confidently. “In the Middle Ages, hospitals were run by churches. So all we need to do is find the right church, and Bob’s your uncle.”