The Crooked Silk Road

The Silk Road ran crooked out of China through the Middle East and eventually into Europe. From China the road led to the Torugart Pass in Kyrgyzstan and into Naryn. It was there that the three lives, Mei Lam, Howard Penterrose and Ivan Ivanovich Bobkov first, came together. Frequently trucks drove off the edge of the mountains into unrecoverable places; some of those trucks contained human cargo. On rare occasions a survivor would show-up back on the road, and in 1974, Mei Lam, a young Chinese girl, badly injured, survived such a fall. Mei's parents recently had a baby boy. Fearing the penalty for having another child, they sold their daughter into domestic service. They didn't know that young girls sold in that fashion often ended up as sex slaves. In 1993, Howard Penterrose had been posted to the USAID Mission in Naryn, where he met General Ivan Bobkov. Bobkov headed the Russian border police stationed along the Silk Road in a number of former Russian SSRs. Howard and Mei, who had also recently started working for USAID, wondered why Bobkov was being treated like a VIP at the Mission. Solving that mystery would be Howard's and Mie's lifetime adventure.