by Fritz Galt
Health experts had yet to discover the new risk, but within weeks the disease would spread exponentially and dramatically increase the number of malaria-induced fatalities to Indians and foreign visitors, and set off shock waves around the world.
As he eagerly waited for the disease to take hold on a large scale, he had many other irons in the fire, related things to attend to. The best place to lay low and launch his operations was the chaotic and dynamic battle theater of Kashmir.
In the distance, the pristine mountains of Kashmir dangled from the shoulders of the Himalayas like a splendid, multifaceted jewel wedged between Pakistan and India. Unhappily, the jewel was flawed, cracked down its center by a jealous feud between the two neighbors.
The cracks were evident from the day Jammu and Kashmir were forged into a single state. India had joined the picturesque and prosperous Muslim Kashmir with the craggy Buddhist Ladakh region to the northeast and the fertile fields of predominantly Hindu Jammu to the south.
With three religions in one state, India had hoped to swing a local referendum in favor of Indian statehood. Instead, New Delhi’s gerrymandering provoked several UN Security Council demands for an independent plebiscite for Kashmir alone, and, not unexpectedly, incurred the wrath of militants like Abu Khan.
That summer, a particularly cold wind had blown down the length of the zigzagging strip of artillery emplacements and bunkers, known as the Line of Control.
Pakistan-backed volunteers like Afghan mujahideen and him had infiltrated Indian-controlled territory and, with great success, were wreaking havoc on the morale of local Indian troops.
Abu looked down at the torn page he had just received, and punched a number into his cell phone. Below him, a gray Hanuman langur monkey leapt from branch to branch begging for scraps of food from the militants in their concealed jungle encampment.
The knoll’s elevation had the best phone reception, as a static hiss gave way to a normal telephone ring.
“Hail the Lord in all His glories,” crackled the irksome, wavering voice of Swami J.P. Nilayam.
“Guru Swamiji, this is Abu. I’ve just received the photograph.”
“Very good, Child of God.”
Between cold fingers, Abu held a page torn from an American college yearbook. Someone had circled the graduation picture of an attractive young co-ed. The girl’s dishwater blonde hair was long and straight. An open and happy expression radiated out from her.
“Might she be one of your disciples?” Abu asked suspiciously.
“Who knows? Many wanderers on the path to truth have found the Temple of the Highest Peace.”
“Good on you. Now give me the bloody details.”
The guru turned businesslike. “She arrives by U.S. Air Force jet in Bombay tonight late and will be overnighting at the Taj Mahal Hotel.”
“She must be quite well off to afford the Taj.”
“It’s not her money that we’re wanting. Let me relate to you the Parable of the Destitute Man in whom—”
“Begging your pardon, Swamiji. Save your parables for somebody who will lend a better ear. As for me, I’m wanting to know whose money we’re after?”
“Her father is chairman of a Most High Congressional Committee in Washington. He can release the funding we’re after to complete our Blessed Program.”
Abu smiled at the irony of it all: the American Government funding him and his brother, Rajiv. The Americans had discontinued Rajiv’s grant in Atlanta, money that would have helped rid the Third World of malaria. Now the great wellspring of funds would flow again, directly into Abu’s Moghul Project.
The guru continued. “You’ll bring her untouched and unscathed to my ashram here in Kerala.”
“As you wish. May I have a word with my good brother?”
“Rajiv is presently hard at work in his laboratory, utterly immersed in test tubes.”
“Well, tell him to do the needful,” Abu said in a soothing voice. “Once he comes across the vaccine, we’ll put the congressman’s contribution to good use distributing vaccines to all the needy of India.”
“Lord Vishnu preserve you.”
“There’s no Lord involved at all. We will have the American public to thank.”
“Well put. They will bring us the Joy of Life. There is a story told me concerning several farmers who were digging an irrigation ditch from one commune to the next—”
Abu silently clicked off the phone, and muttered, “Swamiji, you might have devious plans, but your stories are deadly dull.”
And he was also incredibly naïve. Abu surveyed the leafy treetops that ran like a carpet to the craggy, snow-covered peaks of Kashmir. The money wouldn’t buy a single vaccine for India.
Just then, from the western slope, he heard a rifle report like someone dropping a flat piece of plywood on the ground. At nearly the same instant, a bullet whistled past his ear.
The Indian Army had found him.
Chapter 3
That evening, the American consul general, Lou Potts, invited Natalie to an early dinner at Bombay’s Trishna Seafood Restaurant. It was his idea to give his employee a proper send-off before she left for a new job in Delhi.
He caught his reflection in the window before entering the dark restaurant. He was a small, spare man with dark eyebrows and alert eyes, and he normally had little time to waste on purely personal occasions. Nevertheless, his social radar usually did perk up when he spotted an attractive woman needing his personal attention.
As soon as they were seated under a pin light in the busy restaurant, a waiter set some appetizers before them. First came a basket of spicy round papad that always reminded Lou of something smashed under the hoof of an elephant. Then came a bowl of pickled onions and a tray with three types of hot sauce.
“Beer?” Lou asked Natalie.
She nodded.
“Seafood? King crab?”
She nodded uncertainly.
“Two Kingfishers, one of your biggest pomfret and a King crab,” he told their aproned waiter, who nodded and left.
Lou passed on the appetizers and looked directly into Natalie’s captivating eyes. Their clear blue quality resembled topaz gems.
He and Natalie seemed to sparkle in each other’s company.
The consulate hadn’t thrown a party for her, and he knew why. The community as a whole had a problem with the idea of a woman actually letting her husband take a desperately ill child away, let alone to an isolated island.
Even he found her actions indefensible.
However, it did happen, and everyone talked openly about what a bad mother she was. Unfortunately, he had to admit, if the father had stayed back instead, it probably would have garnered no more than a few “asshole workaholic” comments.
He was sorry to see that she’d been made a pariah at post, and his heart went out to her. “Have you resolved the situation in regard to your daughter?” he asked, purposefully avoiding any mention of Mick.
Her eyes suddenly turned misty. “I’ve already gone down there once to see Mariah,” she said carefully. “It isn’t easy for me to live without her, especially since she’s in such a fragile state. I miss her terribly, but I have to remain objective. It could take years for her to recover, and I can’t quit my job over it. Now that I’ve seen her down there, I can visualize where she is and how she is. And Mick does take good care of her.”
“You’re a strong woman.”
“Sometimes I think there must be something wrong with me. I pulled back. I didn’t go with her. It’s like some mother chromosome is defective in me.”
“What happened?”
She clearly found the conversation difficult and looked away for a minute, holding a napkin over her mouth and slender nose.
He felt uncomfortable waiting. Although he seemed to be getting to the heart of the problem, it disappointed him that he would have to bring up Mick, who he knew deep down was as deserving a husband as anyone Natalie could meet.
“And why did Mick leav
e us?” he finally asked. He phrased it as “us” because Mick was also estranged from him, and in quite a permanent way. That summer, Mick had quit his job at the American Consulate in Bombay, and thereby cut short a promising career in the CIA.
Natalie lowered her napkin, revealing teary, swollen eyes. “Only Mick knows for sure. I know that he’s unhappy, and I know that he’s hurt. In my heart, I believe that if Mariah gets better, it’ll lift his spirits and he’ll want to reconcile our differences and bring our family back together.”
“And if she doesn’t get better?”
She turned several ways, as if trying to escape from her seat.
“You wouldn’t divorce, would you?” he pressed.
She picked up a fork and fingered the long, sharp prongs. Head bent, her silky auburn hair cascaded over her eyes. “We haven’t brought it up.”
He sat back and sighed. He hated to put her through the grilling, but now he knew the lay of the land. She would never leave Mick, no matter what separated them. And she was even more of a wreck because of it. It was time to bolster her psyche.
“About the Kashmir issue,” he started anew. “I think it’s great that you’re going to Delhi to handle that.”
He didn’t know exactly what job was awaiting her in Delhi, and he was dying to find out. She had received an urgent “Eyes Only” cable demanding immediate action several days before they tried to evacuate their daughter, and from that moment on, she had seemed resolved to stay in India. All Lou knew was that the new job had something to do with nukes and Kashmir, both subjects dear to his own heart.
“Quelling all the recent violence and nuclear proliferation in the region is high on the president’s agenda,” he said, trying to feel her out. “You’re the right man for the job, so to speak. We were wasting your talents down here.”
“Thanks,” she said with a shrug. “You don’t have to say that.”
“I mean it,” he said with emphasis.
As his most senior officer who had “opened her window” to joining the Senior Foreign Service, she was knocking at the door of an ambassadorship one day. She had an interesting record: PNG’d in Yugoslavia and then returning to stop an invasion, uncovering nuclear terrorists in the South China Sea, not to mention personally foiling an assassination attempt on the president’s life on a visit to Switzerland. Her methods had been extraordinary for a pinstripe diplomat, and the results shone through.
“You’re damn effective,” he said. “And I hated to see you shortchanged by an inferior assignment down here. You’re a fine woman and a fine mother and a fine diplomat.”
“These days I don’t feel like I can have it all.”
“If anybody could pull it off, you could. Now Natalie, just look at yourself. You do have it all.”
“Everything but a husband and a child.”
He stared hard at her pretty, heart-shaped face.
Over the past month, she had lost the impertinent, arched eyebrow expression and the clear look that could see straight through a man. Nor did the corners of her mouth curl kittenishly with her trademark sassy smile that could move mountains and pry open a man’s heart.
“Look at it this way,” he offered, realizing it would sound somewhat lame. “You’re working to save their lives, too.”
“How?” she shot back. “An Indian-Pakistani thermonuclear war might create a greenhouse effect that melts the polar icecaps that, in turn, swamps the Maldives? I think my family has more immediate concerns that I should be addressing.”
“You will. Your daughter will pull out of it and become a beautiful young lady. You don’t want her to grow up in a world of terrorists and sectarian violence and the threat of nuclear war, do you? Natalie, you’re in a unique position to assure a better future for your child and all other children of the world. Now don’t go sulking off down Self-Pity Street.”
He spotted the waiter bringing in their dishes. The flat, round, steaming fish called a pomfret still had its head, fins and tail intact. And an enormous red King crab sat perched on a platter like a trophy with its claws extended.
“Lecture’s over,” he said.
Natalie looked relieved.
The waiter set the spicy pomfret and garlic-smothered crab before them and helped them tie on black cotton bibs.
The pomfret’s dull, burnt eye stared up accusingly, and Lou noticed that Natalie opted for the crab.
“I’ve been reading all the cable traffic on Kashmir and researching it a bit,” she said, jabbing absently at the juicy meat inside a thick crab leg. “Pretty thorny issue. Looks like the two countries are rushing headlong toward war.”
Lou squeezed a tiny yellow lime over his fish, and nodded.
Like India, Pakistan’s leaders were living in an atmosphere of crony capitalism and officially condoned corruption, from vote buying and bid rigging down to organized crime. The only way they could divert people’s attention away from the money flowing into their personal bank accounts in Islamabad was to play up their historic actions to free Kashmir.
And Kashmir was the perfect distraction. It was a powder keg issue that played on the nationalist sentiments of the Pakistani population that itself had earned its independence from India at great cost. That summer, Pakistan Army units and Pakistan-trained militants had launched incursions into Indian-controlled land.
Meanwhile, India was preparing to hold national elections, and the leading candidate for the opposition party was none other than an old-time Hindu Kashmiri, patriotically waving the Indian flag over the state and whipping up anti-Pakistan fervor in the rest of the nation.
The current Indian prime minister, fighting for his political life and trying to outflank his opponent, retaliated against Muslim militant activity in Kashmir by launching air strikes against Pakistani supply routes on the other side of the Line of Control. His simultaneous use of 155-milimeter Bofors howitzer guns escalated the fighting to its most intense level since the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971.
“As part of my new job description,” she continued, “I’ll be partly responsible for preventing Muslim countries in the region from teaming up on conflicts, and sharing resources such as money, arms, troops and technology. And, at this point, I would say that Afghanistan is the key country to watch in that regard.”
She was luring him, and he took the bait. “Well, you are aware of various Afghan mercenaries operating in Jammu and Kashmir,” he said. Some of the mujahideen who were laid idle after the liberation of Afghanistan from the Soviet Union had gone to work for various and sundry other causes, Kashmir included. “And remember that Pakistan backs Afghanistan on most issues.”
“Yes. Pakistan is only one of three countries to recognize the Taliban regime in Kabul,” she said, leaning over her still full plate. “But will it add up to Pakistan sharing nuclear secrets with al-Qaeda?”
“I have no idea, but don’t discount anything. Mick would know more about it than I do. Here, try some pomfret.” He laid a thick slice of blackened fish on her mound of crabmeat.
He knew that Kashmir was a counter-terrorism and military matter traditionally handled by CIA men such as Mick and the Defense attachés in Delhi. However, with Afghanistan harboring bin Laden, the world’s political leaders had turned their attention to the question.
“Any Pakistani nuclear scientists roaming around Afghanistan would give me the chills,” Natalie said.
“We no longer have an embassy in Kabul, so you couldn’t exactly become our ambassador there,” he said, letting his speculation dangle temptingly.
But no sign of confirmation registered on her face. Instead, she focused on the subject of Pakistan. “It seems to me that Pakistan has everything to lose if it shares its weapons. We’ve propped up Islamabad for so long that we’ve become indispensable to them. How could they afford to share nuclear secrets without losing our economic and military support?”
He leaned forward and whispered with pretend urgency, “One day your closest friend will betray you.”
She laughed sarcastically, and, possibly thinking about Mick, said, “I’ve seen that already.”
Lou wiped his burning lips and reached for a crab leg.
He saw Natalie watching him, and there was no detectable flicker of fondness in her eyes. Rather, he saw curiosity. She appeared fascinated by the problems of the region. As he had served around South Asia for much of his career, he was open to new information, but he wasn’t going to give it out without a price. The longer she sat there tapping into his insights into the region, the more he wished Delhi had pegged him for the job.
“Have you ever been to Kashmir?” she finally asked.
He took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Yeah, I did Srinagar and Leh in the Sixties. Beautiful valley up there in Kashmir running up to its capital, Srinagar. It’s just like they say: Kashmir’s the Switzerland of Asia. Surrounded by snow-covered peaks. Nearly inaccessible mountain passes, except maybe in the dog days of summer. Such beautiful peaks and quiet lakes. I lived on one of those houseboats on Lake Dal for a week. Lovely. Such a shame it’s been closed to tourists for over a decade. And it looks like the doors will stay shut for some time to come.”
“Now it’s crawling with Pakistani terrorists and heavy-handed Hindu nationalists,” Natalie said, updating the picture. “Delhi uses Kashmir’s ‘special status’ to run roughshod over the Muslims and Buddhists.”
“Not to mention the Muslims’ Jamat-I-Islami Party espousing Kashmir independence from India,” he added. “You’ve got the Muslim political party disowning the terrorists in Kashmir, and the terrorists supposedly acting alone. It’s kind of an IRA-Sinn Fein two-step going on up there.”
Natalie took a swig of her beer, and said airily, “So we’ve got the Hindu-controlled government on one side, the Kashmir separatists doing their own thing, and the Pakistan’s proxy war of terrorists and insurgents. It should be great fun.”