The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Which category do you fall into?” Anthony asked.

  Up ahead, a cart pulled by oxen was blocking the street. Two men wearing long shirts and baggy trousers appeared to be wrestling with a broken axle. “I’m in the second category,” Maria started to explain. “I’ve been here for seven months—“

  In the front of the Chevrolet, the driver looked around nervously as he pulled up twenty meters from the cart. “Don’t like this,” he muttered. The bodyguard with the turban around his head tugged a .45 automatic from his shoulder holster. From behind them came the screech of brakes. Three Jeeps skidded to a stop, pinning the Chevrolet in their headlights. “Dacoit,” cried the driver. “Bandits.” The bodyguard with the shotgun flung open the door and dove for the ground and rolled once and fired both barrels at the nearest Jeep. One of the headlights sizzled out. The staccato rattle of automatic fire filled the night. Glass shattered. Dark figures loomed around the car. The driver, hit in the chest, slumped forward onto the wheel. The car’s horn shrieked. The turbaned bodyguard fell to the right, his torso hanging half out of the open door. On the road, a man kicked the shotgun out of the hands of the bodyguard and rammed the muzzle of a rifle into his back and pulled the trigger. The bodyguard twitched, then lay still. In the Chevrolet, Manny wrestled Betsy from his shoulder holster. Before he could throw the safety hands reached in and dragged him from the back seat. Bearded men hauled Anthony and Maria out the other door toward one of the two tarpaulin-covered trucks behind the Jeeps. Behind them, one of the assailants bent over the turbaned bodyguard to make sure he was dead. The bodyguard twisted and pointed his pistol and pulled the trigger at point-blank range, and a .45 caliber bullet with grooves hand-etched into its soft head shattered his attacker’s shoulder. Another man wearing combat boots kicked the bodyguard hard in the head, then reached down and slit his throat with a razor-sharp Turkish yataghan. In the back of the tarpaulin-covered truck, the three prisoners were shoved to the floor and their hands were lashed behind their backs with leather thongs. Foul-smelling leather hoods were pulled over their heads. Maria’s muffled voice could be heard saying, “Oh, shit, this is all I needed.” Under their bodies, the truck vibrated as the driver floored the gas pedal and rattled off down a side street. Minutes later the two trucks, running without headlights, bounced onto a dirt track and headed cross-country in the direction of the Khyber Pass.

  Hippolyte Afanasievich Fet made his way through the maze of alleyways of the Meena Bazaar to the tattoo shop above the Pakistani acupuncturist with the colorful sign out front that read, “Eyes, Ears, Nose, Throat & Sexual Problems.” The two bodyguards, unzipping their jackets so they could get at their shoulder holsters quickly, went up the creaking stairs first to inspect the premises. One emerged to say it was safe for Fet to enter. He went inside and sat down in the red barber’s chair in the middle of the room, which was illuminated by a single forty-watt overhead electric bulb. Shadows danced on the woven straw mats covering the wooden walls. The floor was smudged with green from the naswar—the small balls of tobacco, lime and spices Pakistanis kept tucked under their lower lip—that had been expectorated by clients. From outside came the sound of two mountain tribesmen, high on hashish, urinating into the stream of sewage running along the curb. Fet glanced at the telephone on the table and then at his wristwatch.

  One of the bodyguards said, “Maybe your watch is fast.”

  “Maybe it didn’t come off,” said the second bodyguard from the door.

  “Maybe you should keep your opinions to yourselves,” Fet growled.

  At three minutes after midnight the phone rang. Fet snatched it off the hook. A voice on the other end of the line said, in heavily accented English, “Ibrahim is on his way to Yathrib. He is not alone.”

  Fet muttered “Khorosho” and severed the connection with his forefinger. He dialed the number of the duty officer in the Soviet consulate. “It’s me,” he said. “I authorize you to send the coded message to Moscow Centre.”

  The truck had been climbing a steep mountain track for the better part of three hours. At first light the driver, downshifting and veering to avoid shell holes filled with rainwater, steered the vehicle onto a level clearing and cut the motor. The tarpaulin was unlaced and flung back, the tailboard was lowered and the three prisoners, their wrists bound behind their backs, were prodded onto solid ground. Hands pulled the leather hoods off their heads. Filling his lungs with fresh mountain air, Anthony looked around. They were obviously in some sort of guerrilla encampment high in the mountains—though it was impossible to say whether they were still in Pakistan or had crossed into Afghanistan. Layers of blue-gray mountain ridges fell away to a cinereous horizon stained with veins of tarnished silver. Anthony had the feeling you could see for centuries, and said so.

  “You’re confusing time and space,” Maria remarked sourly.

  “I thought they were pretty much the same thing,” Anthony insisted.

  “Two sides of the same coin,” Manny agreed.

  “Exactly,” said Anthony.

  Around the guerrilla camp bearded men, some with blankets over their shoulders, others wearing surplus US Army coats, were loading arms and ammunition onto donkeys and camels. Nearby, yelping dogs brawled over a bone. Next to a long low mud-brick structure, a bearded mullah wearing a white skull cap read from the Koran to a circle of men sitting cross-legged in the dirt. At the edge of the clearing, a teenage boy fired a bazooka into a tree at point blank range, felling it in a shower of splinters. Then he dragged over a wheelbarrow and began to collect firewood.

  Its engine straining, black exhaust streaming from the tailpipe, the second truck came up the mountain track and pulled to a stop on the flat. A lean and graceful figure emerged from the passenger seat. He was wearing a black turtleneck under a soiled knee-length Afghan tunic, thick English corduroy trousers, hand-made Beal Brothers boots and a brown Pashtun cap with an amulet pinned to it to ward off sniper bullets. His skin was fair, the hair under his cap long and matted, his short beard tinted reddish-orange with henna. He had the dark, intense eyes of a hunter, with shadowy hollows under them that didn’t come from lack of sleep. The fingers of his left hand worked a string of ivory worry beads as he approached the captives. He gazed out over the hills. “Five years ago,” he said, speaking English with the high-pitched, rolling accent of a Palestinian, “I was standing on this mountain top watching Russian tanks come down that road in the valley. My men and me, we sat on these stones all morning, all afternoon, all evening, and still the tanks came. We stopped counting after a time, there were so many of them. Many of the new recruits to the jihad came from the mountains and had never seen an automobile before, but Allah gave them the strength to war against tanks. They fired rockets at the tanks using hammers when the percussion mechanisms on the launchers broke down. Since then, many tanks have been destroyed and many mujaheddin have died. Against the tanks we are still making war.”

  From far below came the distant whine of jet engines, though no planes were visible. The men on the hilltop stopped what they were doing to stare down into the murky depths of the valleys. Flares burst noiselessly, illuminating the low ground haze more than the ground. Green and red tracer bullets intersected in the sky and napalm canisters exploded into bright flames on a thread of road that ran parallel to a stream. The fingers of the tall guerrilla leader kneaded the worry beads as he turned to face the three prisoners. “I am Commander Ibrahim. You are on my territory. Pakistani law is behind us, Afghan law is ahead of us. Here Pashtunwali—the Pashtun moral code—is the highest law and I am its custodian.”

  Four mujaheddin pulled a stretcher from the back of the second truck and started toward the low mud-brick building carrying the warrior who had been shot by the bodyguard in the attack on the Chevrolet. What remained of his shoulder was held in place with a blood-soaked bandanna knotted across his chest. His body quaking, the wounded man groaned in agony. Ibrahim scooped brackish rainwater from a puddle with a rusty tin can and,
propping up the wounded man’s head, moistened his lips. Then he and the three captives trailed after the stretcher. Anthony ducked under a low lintel into a dark room that was filled with smoke and smelled of hashish. Half a dozen guerrillas too young to grow beards sat around a small potbellied stove sucking on hookahs. Two old men tended to the wounded man, who had been stretched out on a narrow wooden plank. One held an oil lamp above his shattered shoulder while the other peeled away the bandanna and coated the raw wound with honey. The prisoners followed Ibrahim into a second room. Here a young boy cut the thongs binding their wrists and, motioning them toward straw-filled pillows set on the floor, offered each a bowl of scalding apple tea. Ibrahim drank in noisy gulps. After a while the boy returned with a copper tray filled with food—each of the prisoners and Ibrahim was given a piece of nan, a flat unleavened bread baked in a hole in the ground, and a small wooden bowl filled with a greasy goat stew and sticky rice. Ibrahim began eating with the fingers of his left hand—Manny noticed that he hardly used his right arm, which rested in his lap. The prisoners, eyeing one another, ate hungrily. When he’d finished his bowl, Ibrahim belched and leaned back against the wall. “While you are with me,” he said, “you will be treated, in so far as it is possible, as guests. I counsel you to rest now. At sunset we will set out on a long journey.” With that, Ibrahim removed his cap and, drawing his knees up to his chin, curled up on two cushions. Within moments, so it seemed, he was sound asleep.

  Maria pulled a pad from a pocket and filled a page with tiny handwriting. Manny caught Anthony’s eye and, nodding toward the two small windows covered with thick iron grilling, mouthed the word “escape.” The two leaned their heads back against the wall but sleep was impossible. From the next room came the unrelenting moaning of the wounded man, and from time to time a muffled cry of “lotfi konin” repeated again and again.

  Near midnight, one of the old men who had been tending the wounded man came into the room and touched Ibrahim’s elbow. “Rahbar,” he said, and he bent down and whispered something in the commander’s ear. Sitting up, Ibrahim lit a foul-smelling Turkish cigarette, coughed up the smoke after the first drag, then climbed to his feet and followed the old man out of the room. The wounded man could be heard pleading “Khahesh mikonam, lotfi konin.” Manny explained to the others, “He says, ‘I beg you, do me a kindness.’”

  The voice of Ibrahim intoned, “Ashadu an la ilaha illallah Mohammad rasulullah.” The wounded man managed to repeat some of the words. There was a moment of silence. Then the sharp crack of a low-caliber revolver echoed through the building. Moments later Ibrahim strode back into the room and settled heavily onto the straw-filled pillow.

  “He was a virtuous Muslim,” he declared, “and a shaheed—what we call a war martyr. He will certainly spend eternity in the company of beautiful virgins.”

  Maria asked from across the room, “What happens when a virtuous Muslim woman dies?”

  Ibrahim considered the question. “She will surely go to heaven, too. After that I cannot be sure.”

  Well before the first breath of dawn reached the clearing, the three prisoners were shaken awake and offered dried biscuits and tin cups filled with strong tea. Ibrahim appeared at the door. “You will be locked in the room while we bury our comrade,” he said. “After which our journey will begin.” When he’d gone, bolting the door behind him, Manny sprang to his feet and went over to one of the small windows covered with iron mesh. He could make out four men carrying the corpse, which was shrouded in a white sheet and stretched out on a plank, across the clearing. Walking two abreast, a long line of mujaheddin, some holding gas lamps or flashlights, followed behind. The cortege disappeared over the rim of the hill. Anthony tried the door but it didn’t give. Maria whispered, “What about the grille on the windows?”

  Manny laced his fingers through the grille and tugged at it. “It’s cemented into the bricks,” he said. “If we had a knife or screwdriver we might be able to work it out.”

  Anthony spotted a can of insecticide in a corner. He picked it up and shook it—there was still some fluid left in it. “Give me your cigarette lighter,” he ordered Maria.

  Manny saw instantly what he was up to. He took the lighter and thumbed the wheel, producing a flame, and held it near the grille. Anthony raised the can’s nozzle up to the lighter and sprayed the insecticide through the flame, turning it into a jury-rigged flame-thrower that slowly melted the grille. When three sides of a square had been melted, Manny bent the grille out.

  “You go first,” Anthony said.

  Manny didn’t want to waste time arguing. He hiked himself up on the sill and worked his body through the small opening. Ragged ends of the grille tore his clothing and scratched his skin. Anthony pushed his feet from behind and Manny squirmed headfirst through the window and tumbled to the ground outside. Anthony squatted and Maria stepped onto his shoulder and started to wriggle through the opening. She was half out when the bolt of the door was thrown and Ibrahim appeared on the threshold.

  Anthony cried out, “Run for it, Manny!”

  Ibrahim shouted an alarm. Feet pounded in the clearing outside the mud-walled building as the mujaheddin raced to cut off Manny. Cries rang out. Jeeps and trucks roared up to the lip of the clearing and played their headlights on the fields dropping away to a ravine. Shots were fired. In the room, Maria slipped back through the opening into Anthony’s waiting hands. Her shoulders and arms bleeding from a dozen scratches, she turned to face Ibrahim. He motioned with a pistol for them to quit the building and came out into the clearing behind them. The manhunt ended abruptly. The headlights on the Jeeps and trucks flicked out one after the other. One of the bearded fighters ran over and said something to Ibrahim in a low voice. Then he joined the others kneeling for the first prayer of the day. Rows of men prostrated themselves in the dirt facing Mecca. Ibrahim turned to Anthony as two of his men tied the prisoners’ wrists behind their backs. “My fighters tell me the escaped prisoner is for sure dead.” He stared out over the praying mujaheddin to the glimmer of light touching the top of the most distant mountain ridge, hunched like the spine of a cat. “So I think,” he added, “but God may think otherwise.”

  2

  WASHINGTON, DC, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1983

  THAT’S A LOT OF CRAP, SENATOR,” DIRECTOR CASEY GROWLED INTO the phone. He dipped two fingers into the Scotch and soda and slicked back the last few strands of white hair on his scalp. “If there was a shred of truth to any of it I’d submit my resignation tomorrow.” He listened for a while, screwing up his lips and tossing his head the way the senator did when he presided over the Select Committee on Intelligence. “Look,” Casey finally said, cutting into the soliloquy, “everyone and his brother knows I ran the President’s campaign. But what’s-his-name in the Washington Post is out to lunch when he suggests I’m running his reelection campaign from Langley.” Casey held the phone away from his ear and let the senator drone on. He’d heard it all before: the motivating force in the White House was the President’s popularity; the search for popularity drove policy; the best-kept secret in the capitol was that Reagan and his senior White House people were ignoramuses when it came to foreign affairs; the President had a hearing problem so you couldn’t be sure, when you briefed him, that you were getting through to him; he never came right out and said no to anything, it was always Yes, well or Sounds all right to me but, uh, after which the sentence trailed off; decisions, when you managed to get any, filtered down from the White House staff and it wasn’t certain where they came from; for all anybody knew Nancy Reagan could have been running the country. The terrible part was that it was all true, though Casey wasn’t about to tell the senator that; Reagan had never fully recovered from the bullet that John Hinckley had pumped to within an inch of the President’s heart two and a half years before. “The story that he can’t locate his chief of staff’s office—it’s a bad rap, senator,” he said, forever loyal to his old pal, Ron. “Reagan’s a big picture man but he’s b
een on top of everything I’ve brought up to the White House, up to and including the downing of the Korean 747 that strayed into Soviet air space two weeks ago.”

  Casey’s daughter, Bernadette, stuck her head in the door of the den and pointed upstairs: the people her father was expecting had turned up. “Senator, let me get back to you—I’ve got some Company business to attend to.” He listened for another moment, then mumbled “Count on it” and hung up. “Tell them to come on in,” he told his daughter.

  Ebby, Bill Casey’s Deputy Director Central Intelligence, had met the plane carrying Manny at McGuire Air Force Base and driven his son (after a hurried phone call to Nellie) straight out to the Director’s new tan brick house in the posh development carved out of the old Nelson Rockefeller estate off Foxhall Road in northwest Washington. As they made their way down half a level and through the three sitting rooms, he told Manny, “Jack may turn up, too. He’s worried sick about Anthony—if you have any gory details, for crying out loud keep them to yourself. No point in alarming him more than we have to.”

  “Anthony wasn’t hurt or anything,” Manny said. “It was plain bad luck that he and the Shaath woman didn’t make it through the window. I still kick myself for going first—“

  “No one faults you so don’t fault yourself.” He stepped into the den and Casey came off the couch to seize his hand. “This is my boy, Manny,” Ebby said.