by Dalton Fury
But he did it anyway. He had made the difficult decision to help the Americans, and whatever came after that, Allah would decide. He would survive, inshallah, or he would die.
Inshallah.
Unlike most others here in western Pakistan, Jamal was motivated neither by tribal affiliation nor by religious precepts. His allegiance to America was personal, born out of his own experience and his own loss and his own pain, and this motivation rivaled anyone’s here in the FATA, from the most devout Wahhabis to the Pashtuns deeply instilled with the honor code of Pashtunwali.
Already Jamal had seen more death than most men his age. The Afghan was near thirty, and his every memory was laced with visions of blood, bribery, and backstabbing.
He did not remember the Russians attacking his village—they came just a few years before his birth—but he grew up with stories of the helicopter attack that killed his cousins and uncles.
He did, however, remember the bombing of his hometown as the Soviets left in 1989, and again around the time the Afghani Communists collapsed a few years later at the hands of feuding warlords. As a child he would squat in the corner of his home at night, unable to sleep as the bombs rained down on the hills surrounding Kabul.
Then the bombs stopped falling, but the danger had only begun. Because then the Taliban came.
As a teenager, neighbors spoke of Jamal having been blessed with his father’s hands. While most kids peddled tainted gasoline on the side of the road or pushed a cart of hay, Jamal learned his father’s trade, repairing and building weapons. It was honest work, not smuggling guns or harming anyone. No, Jamal’s father did a thriving business restoring everything from seventeenth-century swords and shields to mid-eighteenth-century muzzleloaders.
But the Taliban were in charge of Kabul now, and the Taliban had enemies. They demanded firepower, not souvenirs.
Soon Jamal’s father was put to work for the Taliban. His new masters reasoned that if he could make an old bolt-action Enfield look showroom new, then he could certainly file the iron sites on a Kalashnikov properly.
Jamal knew his father wasn’t happy. But he also knew it was healthier to submit to the pressure than to resist the bearded and black-turbaned fighters that visited his small back-alley shop every few days. Jamal vowed to make it as easy on his aging father as he could. He sat cross-legged on a soiled green pillow and delicately sanded and filed the trigger mechanisms of the AK, the most prolific Eastern Bloc rifle in the world.
And then the Americans came.
By the time of the terror attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, Jamal had all but inherited his father’s shop. Within weeks the Taliban fled Kabul and the Westerners arrived. Jamal noted the incredible interest the foreigners had in Chicken Street just up the road from the old abandoned American embassy. He wanted in. Reluctantly, his father agreed to move the shop two streets over to the back room of a carpet vendor. Jamal wasn’t looking for a secretive location, but it was all they could afford.
Jamal was astonished by the new and insatiable desire for junk weapons. Americans were willing to pay top dollar and in U.S. currency for the same rifles he contemplated leaving behind in the old shop during the move. Jamal worked hard, restoring weapons for these polite and well-to-do foreigners, and within a year his shop was well known throughout Kabul.
Jamal Metziel did harbor concerns that Taliban spies would notice the profits he was raking in from the Westerners. Kabul had fallen a year earlier and the ruling shura had moved across the border to the Northwest Frontier Province, but that did not mean there was no Taliban influence on the bustling streets of the Afghanistan capital.
The beards and black turbans were gone, but the Taliban’s henchmen were not.
Jamal liked the Westerners and feared the Taliban, but one night black helicopters landed in the square near his shop, and green-eyed soldiers poured out. Jamal, his two teenage brothers, and his ailing father were snatched up by American Special Forces. He was surprised the women and children in the compound weren’t shot on sight. He had heard the stories of how the Americans valued only the fighting-age males and would kill the women during these roundups. But the women were left alone. Must be another group of Americans, he decided. He and his brothers and father were classified as PUCs—persons under custody—and flown to Bagram for lengthy interrogation.
Jamal was surprised that he wasn’t tortured. He had figured his father certainly had been, as the interrogators only seemed to want to know about his father’s relationship with the Taliban and where Osama bin Laden was. They must have believed them all because within three weeks they were given new clothes, one hundred dollars each for their trouble, a bottle of water, a new Koran, and a nighttime helicopter ride to Kabul airport, where they were curtly released without so much as a wave good-bye. In talking with his father and brother on the way home he was astonished to learn that no one had been beaten by the Americans.
The very next night the Taliban came to their shop. Jamal’s father was taken in the night by a half-dozen armed men. Jamal and his brothers were knocked around a bit as they tried to come to their father’s aid, but they were left behind. It was clear the jihadists had questions of their own. What had Jamal’s father told the Americans?
Jamal was in the shop when he heard the news. His father’s body had been hung by its bare feet from a telephone pole in the western part of Kabul. His head was found stuffed inside a bloody burlap sack a few feet from the pool of blood that had drained from the headless torso.
Jamal was crushed and confused. His father had always done exactly what the Taliban asked. He never openly resisted, only in private to his family at home.
The young Afghan sold the shop to the carpet vendor for practically pennies. He didn’t care—he just wanted to get out of Kabul and protect his brothers and mother. They packed their meager belongings and headed east toward Jalalabad. But before they could settle in there they learned that the underground Taliban was alive and well in Jalalabad, so they continued to Pakistan and a refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar.
Jamal took on odd jobs for enough money to help his family. Soon his cousins and uncles arrived at the camp, and they found menial work in Peshawar and nearby Darra Adam Khel.
On a Monday evening in April of 2010, while Jamal drove his recently purchased tractor-pulled delivery cart through the less accessible valleys of Khyber Agency, Jamal’s mother and his youngest brother were purchasing items in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar in the heart of Peshawar. Items Jamal had sent them to fetch. Items he would resell on his next run to the FATA. A protest in the market hampered the movements of the two. Seconds later a bomb exploded in the crowded street. Jamal’s mother and brother were blown into tiny bits of unrecognizable flesh and skin and hair.
Al Qaeda took credit for the bomb.
Once more the jihadists had taken members of his family from him. He was devastated, he was consumed by anger, but he still had to make money to survive, so he continued his delivery runs into the FATA.
* * *
A compound out of town and in the hills needed potable water once a week. Jamal thought that was odd. He didn’t know why the people living in the compound couldn’t drink the same murky stream water that everyone else did, but he wasn’t complaining. He needed the work.
Jamal drove his tractor to the compound once or twice a week past armed guards on the edge of the road. He also thought it odd that he was always made to climb off the tractor and raise his arms to be frisked. He was never sure if the armed men were Pakistani Taliban or maybe even foreign jihadists now under the al Qaeda banner. When he arrived at the compound a funny-looking black wand was waved around his body. It ticked slowly. After Jamal was checked, several men searched the tractor before he was allowed to pump the water into the large drum.
He saw a pair of foreigners, al Qaeda from Turkey he decided, and then his suspicions were raised further about the goings-on in Shataparai when he was sent to pick up antibiotics at a pha
rmacy and deliver them to the compound.
When, on his third week of deliveries to the compound, a bored guard mentioned Western prisoners, he decided what he would do.
The next day Jamal Metziel rose from his afternoon prayers in Peshawar and took a bus to the U.S. embassy. After waiting in lines outside the building for hours he was led into a hallway. Here he asked to speak to someone in the Central Intelligence Agency. A Pashto-speaking American woman treated him with more respect than any government employee he’d ever met, either back home in Afghanistan or here in Pakistan. He told her his story, and she took notes. Then she asked him many questions about himself: his family, his history, his motivation.
He was told to return in two days, but when he did return, he was told by the same woman that someone would contact him at his home.
As he left the bus stop to return to his tiny flat, a big, burly, white-haired man dressed like any other local on the street called out to him from his small car. Within minutes they were driving together through the city, and the man revealed himself to be an American.
Jamal had no clue that “Mister Bob” was not, in fact, in the Central Intelligence Agency.
TWENTY-TWO
Jamal waited by his “broken-down” truck for hours. Mister Bob had told him that the agent would come out of the sky, but Mister Bob had also said there were many factors in play and he could not promise that the man would arrive on time. Only once during his wait did Jamal encounter others on the broken road. Four men with pack mules loaded with cans of tainted gasoline passed by at eight thirty in the morning. And well behind the men, two women in bright blue burkas shuffled along, carrying heavy loads in their hands. Jamal wished the men peace, and avoided glancing at the women so as not to offend the men, and the procession moved on.
At 10:30 a.m. he was ready to leave. It was another three hours from here to the village of Shataparai, and he had to make his delivery at the compound of Zar Afridi, even if he had to go on alone. And even if the American spy arrived right this second and they set off immediately, he would not make it back to Peshawar before dusk, and the roads into Khyber were dangerous after dark.
Jamal looked up into the clear blue sky and prayed to Allah, willed a man in a parachute to appear.
* * *
Shortly after eleven, Kolt arrived at a low rise that, according to his GPS, should put him just above his rendezvous point with his contact. He dropped his backpack in a copse of low bushes, crawled forward on his hands and knees, and crested the rise.
Down below him, not more than fifty yards, he saw the old yellow truck. It had pulled off the rough dirt track, and the driver had the hood raised. The beige plastic water tank in back was full of water, and the rest of the bed contained boxes and cartons and other items a traveling merchant might transport.
Then Raynor saw his contact. Jamal was thin. He wore a prayer cap and a blue kameez under a gray vest, and had a short scruffy beard. The man looked up to the sky, and even from this distance, Raynor saw the nervous expression on his face.
He didn’t blame the contact for being scared or, for that matter, being pissed off. Kolt was three hours late. He quickly scooted back down the hill to retrieve his backpack, thankful that his strenuous walk/climb was almost over. A minute later he crested the hill again and headed toward the truck.
Jamal turned to him as soon as he appeared, but he looked utterly confused.
“A sallum aleikum,” said Kolt.
“Wa aleikum a salaam.”
The men shook hands, but the Afghan did not smile. He spoke in Pashto, because other than some Dari and a little Arabic he knew no other language. “I have been here for many hours. I thought you were coming from the sky.”
Kolt answered in his halting Pashto. “I did come from the sky, but missed my landing. Thank you for waiting for me.”
“It is a big problem. I will be late for my delivery.”
“Then we should go.”
Kolt and Jamal hid the American’s rucksack in a hollowed-out area below the driver’s seat. It barely fit, and then only after much pushing of the seat by both men and some colorful cursing by Raynor. Then Kolt climbed into the backseat, and Jamal shut the hood and fired the engine.
For the first twenty minutes of the journey Raynor rode in the back of the little truck’s cab, crouched next to the stash compartment behind the folded-forward seat. He spent the time asking Jamal about the lay of the land around them. He was interested in the area, of course, but mostly he was trying to get a feel for this agent. Was he as reliable as Bob promised?
As Jamal answered, sweat beads dripped from the tip of his hooked nose, and Kolt did not take this as a good sign. He had no problem with the kid being scared of the Taliban. But was he, in fact, afraid of Raynor? Afraid the American would figure out what treachery he had up his sleeve?
Kolt did not know. He kept up the conversation, searching for any clue as to what was going on in the Afghan’s mind.
“Not much of a road, is it?” Raynor commented. The path they traveled on was rutted and narrow; large boulders had to be avoided or carefully driven over, Jamal attacking each obstacle one wheel at a time. Even with the big tires and the four-wheel drive, the truck threatened to bottom out several times on the hard dirt track.
Jamal said, “It is a mule trail. It is difficult for this truck, and I can only do it this time of year, after the rains and before the snow. Normally I drive my tractor.”
Kolt nodded.
“You speak the language well,” Jamal complimented. He was visibly nervous, checking his rearview, checking both sides of the road.
Kolt himself looked around before saying, “Thank you.”
“But you do not sound like a Pashtun.”
“I know. I do not plan to deceive anyone.”
Jamal nodded. “Good. You will fail. You are not that good.”
Raynor kept his head low but his eyes just high enough to see out the front of the dirty windshield. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. The steep hills all around, the low scrubland, the rocky dirt road, everything looked the same in all directions. His GPS told him they were headed southwest, which was correct, but other than that, he had no idea if he and Jamal were following the same plan.
For all he knew this skinny, scruffy young man was going to sell him out to the Taliban just around the next turn.
This part of the mission, Raynor knew, he’d just have to go with the flow and hope like hell that Bob Kopelman was a better judge of character than the CIA.
The late-morning temperature was nearing seventy-five, and the sun shone directly on the unair-conditioned truck cab. Raynor was tucked tight behind the front seats, and his legs were near cramping. Still, he realized the box he’d soon be forced to climb into would be tighter and hotter and much more stifling.
“How close are you going to get me to the compound?”
“Mister Bob did not tell you?”
“He told me. I want to hear it from you.”
“It will be less than one kilometer away. There is a turn in the road just before the village. Two weeks ago Mister Bob told me to stop there and check the hill. I climbed into the trees and found a good place from where you can watch the compound.”
Raynor nodded—he’d play along—but he’d make his own arrangements once Jamal dropped him off. He wasn’t sure where he was going to find overwatch on Zar’s buildings, but he was damn sure not going to go exactly where this unproven contact expected him to be hiding.
“How long will you be in the compound itself?” he asked the Afghan.
“Normally thirty minutes.”
“And you will pass by the same road when you leave the village?”
“Of course. This village is very small. There is only one road to Shataparai.”
* * *
Soon Kolt slid around and got his feet into the stash compartment behind the passenger seat, and he struggled to slide his body inside. The space in the stash was large enough to accom
modate him, with difficulty and discomfort, and it was black as night and hot as hell. He found a bottle of water that Jamal had placed there for him. He assumed the liquid would be somewhere just short of boiling, but he appreciated the gesture. Kolt had his CamelBak and he’d wet his patoo and placed it around his neck. When Jamal slid the metal door up he mercifully left the hatch open a half inch. He then locked the left rear seat back into position. Kolt would have to shut it tight soon enough, but for now the dusty and diesel-infused air was the most beautiful part of his world.
Every bump and bounce in the road seemed amplified here down low behind the cab, and Raynor cursed the lack of infrastructure in the FATA, and added a curse for Jamal, as they rocked and rolled slowly toward the west. When the truck drove through a stream that reached up to the frame of the cab, Raynor heard splashing on the bottom of his metal coffin, and then water squirted in on his leg through a seam in the box that had not been well soldered. Kolt fought a brief bout with panic—he’d surely drown here if the truck got stuck in the stream. But seconds later they were back on dry land, and with that came the banging rocks, the dust and the fuel fumes that made their way through that slight gap in the corner weld, and the infernal stifling heat.
The truck never got out of first gear, but Raynor felt it slow down even more than normal, and he quickly sealed the sliding door tight with his right elbow. This, he assumed, was the first of the two outer checkpoints, just a few kilometers from Shataparai village. The engine remained idling. It sounded rough to the American down there seated just behind the engine, but a breakdown was only one of his many worries. He lay on his side in the fetal position, not moving or even breathing deeply. He pictured Taliban guards looking into the cab and under the truck just now, and he hoped like hell they didn’t look too closely.
After less than a minute they were moving again. Kolt had heard no voices during the stop, but he felt confident they had just made it past their first obstacle.