“I’m impressed.”
She looked for mockery, but found none. “It’s been done before. Taking people out, I mean. Besides, we’ve had plenty of time to think about it.”
“You had help?” His gaze was steady as he waited for her answer.
“From the women who run this safe house, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.”
“A scary thing, revolutionary women.”
“Yes. We hope so.” In an effort to gloss over the moment, she went on quickly. “You should eat something to rebuild your strength. Are you hungry?”
“I could eat a horse. Not that it would be my first choice on the menu.”
“Don’t worry,” she said in dry reassurance. “It’s far too great a delicacy these days to waste on an American.”
She turned away and left the room. Her smile faded as the heavy door clicked shut behind her. She had been half-afraid to broach the escape plan to Wade Benedict, afraid he’d refuse to consider something that didn’t involve fast transport, heavy weaponry and him in control. It had gone well, almost too well. She’d think he was up to something except that she didn’t see how that was possible.
There was one part of the escape plan that still had to be implemented. She’d thought it best to put it off until just before they left the fortress. Wade wasn’t going to like it, she knew, but maybe waiting until it was too late to change the plan would make it easier to gain his cooperation. She could only hope.
“Not just no, but hell no!”
Wade wadded the burqa that Chloe had just handed him into a ball, then slung it across the room with such force that it bounced off the wall. She glared at him and went immediately to pick it up.
“You must wear it,” she declared, thrusting it toward him again. “The guard at the checkpoint won’t look twice at yet another woman covered from head to toe.”
“That’s because no man would be caught dead in one of the things.”
“You’d rather take a chance on being spotted with your height and puny excuse for a beard?” she demanded with a wave toward his dark stubble. “Especially when the guard may have been warned to watch for Americans?”
“It’s better than hiding behind women’s skirts,” he answered with dogged illogic.
“You won’t be hiding, just escaping notice.”
“Oh, sure. And a funny-looking female I’ll make, standing a head taller than you.”
“You won’t be standing. You’ll be in the back seat pretending to be carsick or pregnant or whatever you like that will allow you to slump in your seat. Anyway, the major part of a man’s extra height is in his leg bones. We’ll look more equal sitting next to each other.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and tucked his fingertips into his armpits. “I won’t wear it.”
“You have to,” she cried in angry desperation. “There’s no other way. So you don’t like it, so what? I don’t like it, either. No woman likes it, but we have to put up with it all the time. I don’t see why you can’t endure the hateful thing for a couple of hours.”
He stared at her for long seconds. “Whose idea was this?”
“Several of us decided on it.”
“Including you.”
She lifted her hands and let them fall so the burqa slapped against her knee. “There’s nothing personal about it!”
“You’re sure it’s not because of what I said the other night?”
“Absolutely not.” That much was true, which didn’t mean it hadn’t occurred to her that he’d be getting a taste of something he was so sure was a deliberate choice.
“I suppose you’ll be covered up head and ears, too?”
“Of course.”
He stared at her for long seconds, the intensity of his gaze an indication of the swift pace of his thoughts. Then he put out a hand and snatched the burqa from her, shaking it out like a bedsheet. It hung in his hands, an enormous spread of cream-colored fabric since it was long enough to cover him to the ground. His reaction was profane. He rolled it up with a winding motion and shoved it back at her again.
“No.”
“Yes!” She pushed it against his chest. “If I’m to get you out of this country, you have to help.”
“I’m supposed to be taking you out of here.”
“Well, you can’t. Maybe that’s my fault. Maybe it’s bad luck, bad karma or just bad timing. It doesn’t matter because nothing can change it. We have to go on from here. And wearing this damn burqa is the best way to do that.”
He fastened his gaze on the veil across the bottom of her face that wavered with her every angry breath. Slowly a look of consideration tinted his hazel eyes a darker shade of green. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said at last.
“A deal?” Every ounce of the wariness rising inside her was in those words.
“That’s right. It’s fair enough, I think, considering what you want me to do.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll put this thing on if you’ll take yours off.”
“My burqa?”
“And the scarf thing, veil or whatever you call it that you’re wearing.”
She lifted a hand to the cloth cover. “No, really. I need camouflage, too.”
“Doesn’t have to happen now,” he said with a magnanimous gesture. “But the minute we’re safe on the other side of the border, off it comes.”
It was a reprieve, though he didn’t know that. Any unveiling would be minimal, since she had every intention of leaving him in Pakistan and returning to Ajzukabad with the driver.
“Fine,” she said.
His features went blank with surprise. “That’s an agreement?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll get rid of everything, let me see your face with nothing in the way?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?” she demanded in irritation. “Though I fail to see why it’s so important to you.”
“I don’t like people keeping things from me.”
Uneasiness shifted through her. He couldn’t know what she had in mind. Could he? “I’m not.”
“Aren’t you? Then take it off now.”
“I don’t have time.” She dropped the burqa on the pallet and moved toward the door. “You might want to get ready, too. We leave in ten minutes.”
His comment, and expression when he made it, remained with Chloe during the long ride to the border. All she wanted to keep from Wade was her intention to go back to Ajzukabad. Well, and how much she knew about the things that haunted his dreams. And yet, she’d felt such instant resistance to letting him see her naked face. Why was that? Vanity, maybe, the fear that he’d be disappointed? Or was it nothing to do with him personally, but reluctance to expose any portion of herself to any man? Was it not so much her physical appearance she was keeping to herself as the thoughts and feelings that might show in her face? She’d grown so used to concealing these things, to pretending to be a passive nonentity in a world of masculine violence. The burqa had become a mask of compliance she wore while going about her subversive activities behind it. To be forced to cast it off and stand with all her resentment and animosity in plain view was like being stripped naked. It might be all right in another place and time where everyone wore the same open face, but not here, and not now.
The town fell away behind them. They began to climb the lower reaches of a mountain range that blended eventually into the Hindu Kush. The sere hills rolled ahead of them in shades of beige and gold, ochre and brown that complemented the dusty green of juniper and pine forests. Behind these rose the misty, cloud-shrouded ranges of some of the tallest mountains in the world. High in their blue and purple fastness lay a handful of high-altitude passes through the mountains that had served as trade and invasion routes for centuries, and still did. One of these, the Azad, or Free, pass carved out during the wars of the British Raj, was the route they would be taking.
Their transport was a station wagon, a big, lumbering model almost forty years old.
Such vehicles were popular for their durability, but also because they provided maximum passenger and cargo space. The driver was Kemal, a Tajik who spoke Dari Persian instead of Pashtu. A large man with the thick, blond-streaked hair of his kind, he slouched behind the wheel in morose silence, perhaps from fear or resentment at being assigned to drive two Americans to safety. He sent the station wagon along at a pace that threatened to destroy the tires as they bounced into the holes that pocked the pavement, and would have gone faster if not for the sharp complaints of the young woman beside him. This was Freshta, one of the most daring of the RAWA operatives. She was with them to smuggle out of the country a video showing a woman being executed for the crime of adultery. Once in Pakistan, she would put it into the hands of RAWA members who would see that it reached Western journalists sympathetic to the cause of the women of Hazaristan.
Chloe sat on the middle seat with Wade who was every bit as moody as Kemal. He wore the burqa as if it were a penance, staring through the mesh screen like a hawk through the bars of a cage. His smoldering irritation might have been comical if it hadn’t brought to mind the anger she’d felt when she first put one on. In any case, she didn’t dare smile for fear he might snatch the despised garment off and throw it at her.
“Are you okay?” she asked, largely as an excuse for staring at him.
The look he gave her was more than a little sardonic.
“What I meant was, no dizziness or nausea? No bleeding because of the jolts?”
“No.”
The clipped sound of his voice scraped on her nerves, but she did her best to ignore it. He wouldn’t be here if not for her, she reminded herself. If she had sent him on his way instead of dithering over whether to go or stay, he’d never have been hurt. She felt guilty that he’d come so far, gone to such expense, for nothing since she couldn’t go back home with him. He’d brought the news of the inheritance that gave her the promise of independence as well, and she owed him for it. More than that, he was an American, her countryman. She refused to allow him to make her forget her obligation to him.
With the barest of glances in her direction, he asked, “How far do we have to go?”
“A couple of hours to the border, and the same to Rawalpindi on the other side. Everything will be all right once we reach Pakistan.”
“So we’re still flying out?”
“I found the plane tickets in your jeans pocket.”
He gave a curt nod. “Your arrangements aren’t too different from what I’d planned.”
“They wouldn’t be, I suppose. There are a limited number of possibilities. The main problem will be the border crossing.”
“Right.”
“We’ve done the best we could.”
He made no answer. When she glanced at him, he was staring out the window again at the saw-toothed peaks that loomed ahead of them.
Time wore on. They left the river valley and began to ascend into the pass, winding along in a northwesterly direction over switchbacks that terraced the rocky brown slopes. As the climb grew steeper, they caught up with more slow-moving truck traffic and had to gear down to accommodate it. The trucks were hampered not only by the climb but also by the refugees that clogged the road, some alone, some in family groups, and many of them with everything they owned piled into ramshackle trucks or on handcarts, donkeys, camels and the occasional goat. The two hours Chloe had predicted became three as they crawled along, sometimes coming to a complete halt for moments on end.
The heat inside the station wagon grew stifling with the lack of air movement through the windows. The elevation of the pass wasn’t high enough, at just over three thousand feet, to gain much in the way of mountain coolness, and the stone walls rising around them trapped and held the sun’s warmth as well as blocking any breeze. Breathing became more difficult under Chloe’s burqa, and she knew it was the same for Freshta and particularly Wade since he wasn’t used to it. The smells of sweat, musty upholstery, exhaust fumes and the animal dung along the roadway didn’t help matters.
The distance they advanced between stops grew shorter and shorter. The station wagon began to make ominous rattling sounds. Kemal got out the next time they came to a stall and poured water into the radiator from a plastic jug carried in the cargo area. They drank from the same jug, letting the cool liquid slide down their parched throats. Afterward, they inched along another few miles. Every now and then Kemal tapped the gauge on the dash panel and muttered into his beard.
The stone walls became cliffs that towered higher around them, far too high to climb. The sun slanted down below the peaks in the west, so the black shadow of the mountains inched lower on the near wall. The border station would close soon.
Then it loomed ahead of them. They crept closer, and the traffic line halted again. Kemal opened the door and got out to stand staring up the road. His eyes narrowed and his eyebrows drew together in a straight line at the edge of his turban.
Chloe looked at Freshta, who understood Dari Persian, as well as a half dozen other common dialects. Instantly the operative put a sharp-voiced query to Kemal. The exchange that followed was brief, with a sound that sent apprehension singing along Chloe’s veins.
“Well?” she asked, suddenly breathless.
“The guard has stopped a truck and made the driver show his papers while they search the hold in back,” Freshta answered.
“And that’s all?”
“By no means. They have made the woman who rides with him remove her burqa, so she may be searched as well.”
8
The station wagon crept forward again. Wade stared at the cliffs, but they offered no way out. They couldn’t turn back without attracting the kind of attention they didn’t want. The best thing seemed to be to keep going and hope the border guard was doing random searches. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so helpless. His own fault, of course, for leaving the details of getting out of the country to other people. Not that he’d have been able to arrange it any better.
It was infernally hot under the glorified bedsheet he wore. He didn’t mind that so much as the lack of ventilation. His own body heat was trapped under the confining cloth, and the constant trickle of sweat made his wound itch and burn. On top of that was the sheer confinement, giving him the urge to yank it off and devil take the consequences. The surprising thing to him, after just a few hours of it, was that Hazaristan women hadn’t risen as a body and murdered every man in sight. The burqa rage in this country had to far surpass any amount of U.S. road rage.
Chloe seemed all right with it. In fact, she was amazingly calm about their slow creep toward possible arrest. No doubt years of wearing a damn burqa did wonders for self-control. It sure kept anyone from actually seeing you sweat.
While these thoughts ran through one part of his mind, another section was busy with contingencies. He grasped the weapon tucked into the waistband of his pants, testing to see how hard it would be to bring it into play. As Chloe glanced his way, he asked, “Kemal is armed, I suppose?”
“You can be sure of that.”
“He know how to use it?”
The look she gave him was cool. “I’d say so. The men of his family have been fighters for generations.”
“Why isn’t he in the army then?”
“He was, until a Taliban unit overran his village a few months ago. Everyone in it was rounded up and shot for aiding the opposition forces. He lost his grandfather, his mother, two younger brothers, a sister and three nephews. Not unnaturally, he deserted when he heard. An older sister had been working with the RAWA, so here he is, aiding us while also acting as liaison between the organization and the opposition.”
Wade considered asking if the woman called Freshta had a similar background, but thought better of it. It seemed everybody had a horror story. “I didn’t realize the two groups had the same aims.”
“They don’t always. Some of the opposition leaders are as rigid in their interpretation of the Qur’an as the Taliban. Stil
l, the relative easing of restrictions in Afghanistan gives us hope.”
There it was again, her alignment with women like Freshta. Wade let it pass, however, since his mind was on other things.
The big truck in front of them blocked his view of the border station. All he could see was a couple of people standing on the side of the road as if waiting for the search to be over. The driver was watching them, too, his eyes narrowed and his fingers drumming on the steering wheel.
“What are the chances of Kemal opening fire if something starts going down?” he asked Chloe in a low murmur.
“Excellent. His job is to protect us as well as take us across the border.”
Her tone suggested that she considered it a reasonable arrangement. She apparently figured he was in no shape to use a weapon. He’d be the first to admit that he wasn’t in top form, but he was stronger than he’d led her to believe. That was the way he intended to keep it for a while longer.
He suspected that the past two days at the RAWA stronghold had left Chloe feeling even more grateful than she had been before, and guilty that she was running out on her friends. He could almost see her withdrawal into the dedicated mind-set she’d shown during their meeting in the garden. If he was a betting man, he’d put money on her planning to get him out of the country and on a plane home then go underground to defeat the Taliban. That might be noble, but he couldn’t let it happen. If he must play the invalid to keep her off guard, then so be it.
She seemed less wary of him while he was down, so to speak. He didn’t mind reining in his normal fast rate of recovery if it allowed him to get closer to her. The time might come when he’d need every advantage he could find or manufacture.
The truck ahead pulled into place for its turn, and Kemal eased the station wagon another few yards forward. They watched as the driver was ordered out and patted down for weapons. Freshta exclaimed under her breath, then spoke to Kemal in sharp tones. The driver spread his hands in the universal gesture of helplessness. A second later, he reached down and felt under his seat as if checking a hidden weapon. Wade felt his stomach muscles contract. The prospect of a gun battle was all right, but he didn’t care for the idea of the two women being caught in the middle of it.
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