by Fritz Galt
“Yeah, but bear in mind that Kashmir means everything to Pakistan,” he said, trying not to let his envy of her show. “You remember the American cruise missiles hitting Afghanistan a month back? Those weren’t just bin Laden’s camps. We hit two camps run by Pakistanis that were training soldiers for the war in Kashmir.”
“I remember that,” she said.
“Call them soldiers, if you will, but Pakistan is shelling and bombing civilian targets in Kashmir.” He wiped his forehead with the last clean part of his bib. She had him on a roll. “You see, Pakistan’s entire objective in Central Asia is to improve and secure its own position at all costs in the commercial gateways between the Middle East and China. You can see Pakistan’s ISI, their secret agents, at work in escalating terrorist operations all along the Silk Road. That’s the once and future Panama Canal of the region. Islamabad’s primary reason for wanting Kashmir is to build a railroad link between Pakistan and the Silk Road. That would directly connect all the countries of the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea with China, avoiding Southeast Asia completely. It’s the only feasible train route, so Kashmir has become the Pakistani government’s obsession.”
He paused for a long draught of beer and continued.
“The Indians call the Pakistanis intruders, but the Indian Army is busy lobbing shells back over the Line of Control for their own domestic purposes. The whole thing is like an intricate game where both sides try to score brownie points with their own public and world opinion while irritating the hell out of each other. In reality, they’re shipping home corpses faster than they can build the boxes.” He cracked a wooden hammer against the underbelly of the crab, and white meat spilled out. “It’s nasty, nasty business.”
“I thought you were out of the loop on Kashmir.”
He buried himself in his near-empty mug, “You go to those country-wide staff meetings in Delhi.” He waved his free hand dismissively. “You hear a lot of stuff.”
“Makes nurturing the economic miracle of middle-class India look like child’s play,” she teased.
“What middle class?” He nearly stood up. She was offering him his favorite soapbox, and he couldn’t resist standing on it. “Is a man with a bicycle or a family with a sewing machine really ‘middle class?’ If middle class is a family with no running water at home and a disposable income of two extra dollars a week, I’d hardly call up Maytag and have them send over washing machines.”
He found a round piece of naan and twiddled the soft, padded bread between his fingers.
“Makes dealing with militants in Kashmir and Indo-Pak relations look positively glamorous,” he said.
“Boy, Lou,” she said. “You’re making this a lot easier for me. This has been the first real conversation outside of work I’ve had in a month.”
“That’s the spirit. Now, where are you staying the next few nights before you depart post?”
She gave him a long, searching look. “Why do you ask?”
He raised his eyebrows.
She wagged a cautionary finger dripping with garlic butter.
“I’d suck that finger if I were you,” he said.
“I’m sure you would. Nothing doing, Lou.”
He felt deflated. She had ingeniously extracted every shred of information she wanted out of him, made him lose control of his emotions and then left him high, dry and horny. What a diplomat she made. He tried to compose himself. “I mean, you can’t look sloppy tonight, as I assume you’re staying at the famed Taj Mahal Hotel.”
She nodded.
“Old wing?”
She smiled briefly.
“Ah-ha.” It was the only scrap of information she would divulge that night, and he felt redeemed. “So you’re a traditionalist. By the way, I’ve got a Congressional Delegation pulling in there later tonight. Actually, it’s not a complete CODEL. It’s just Congressman Fred Butler and his wife and daughter here on a shopping junket.”
Natalie rolled her eyes.
Lou grinned. “Hope his voice doesn’t break the ten p.m. noise ordinance.”
After Simon finished examining Mariah and left, Mick took a long, late afternoon swim.
But the refreshing waves didn’t wash Simon’s revelation away. Mariah might be dead before the end of the year, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Natalie would be devastated by the prognosis, but he had to tell her.
Still dripping wet, he reached inside the hut and grabbed his cell phone. He called their apartment in Bombay and reached the cook.
“Ma’am is at the Taj Mahal Hotel tonight, suh,” the old woman said.
Mick took down the number, thanked her and called the Taj. Listening to the phone ring on the other end, he wandered around the yard in the dusk wondering how Natalie would sound over the phone. They hadn’t talked in weeks.
Natalie answered. “Yes?”
Mick hesitated. “Bad news.”
“What happened?”
“Her condition isn’t as good as we thought. Dr. Yates says she’s stable, but she might suffer another attack.”
“Like when?”
“Like maybe before Christmas.”
“Jesus.”
“In her condition, it would probably prove fatal.”
She was silent for a full minute. All Mick heard was his wife’s shallow breathing.
“What can we do?” she finally asked.
“Nothing. Just keep monitoring her body temperature.”
There was another pause on the line, then, “Thank you, Mick.”
The line clicked dead.
Mick swore to himself and shut off the phone. Ducking under the hut’s six-foot doorframe, he barely paused to stamp his sandy feet on the mat. This drew a scowl from his housekeeper.
Sometimes he felt too alone in the world, and Mariah was his only solace. He was estranged from Natalie, a rising star in the diplomatic world. He even felt estranged from his half-brother, Alec.
Alec Pierce served under deep cover with the CIA and had been assigned to the same cities as Mick and Natalie on all their previous postings.
Mick missed his wife’s gentle persuasiveness. He missed his brother’s crazy and hormonally driven influence. And he missed the person closest at hand, his only child.
He turned his attention to the far wall of the single-room hut.
In the twilight, Mariah Pierce’s young face looked tranquil, a most unnatural state for the compact, little preschooler. The coma had deprived him of her sneaky, smiling eyes.
Nor could she spin her imaginative stories that were better than Beatrix Potter. She couldn’t invite him into the tiny tunnels she created from sofa cushions. She couldn’t serve him iced tea, a cup of tea with ice cubes in it, from her molded plastic kitchen set. And she couldn’t beg him, as she normally would several times a week, to apply pink polish to her doll-like fingernails.
He had seen no improvement in her skin coloring despite a month of fresh sea breeze and the constant flow of oxygen down her throat. She was no longer his delightful daughter, but might be so again.
The floor creaked under his bare feet. Did she sense his presence, or was that an involuntary twitch of her cheek?
He gently placed a callused palm beneath her fingertips, and lifted her hand up to his hairless chest.
“Mariah, honey. I’m here.”
He shifted his stance uneasily. That wouldn’t do.
“Okay.” He proceeded on a new course. “I know. You’re three and a half years old. You know when I’m here or not. I don’t have to say it.”
He cast about for something pertinent to say next. She had loved stories. She still did. He shouldn’t think of her in the past tense.
“Here’s a good one,” he began. “Two girls and a frog were passing the day beside a deep, deep well.” He smiled. Mariah would need more detail than that. “Okay, I’ll back up. Rewind. One girl was tall and wore a pink dress and red high heeled shoes and the other girl was short and never combed her hair, kind of lik
e you.” He leaned in closer. “What’s that? A Mommy? How did you guess it? The tall girl was the younger girl’s Mommy.”
He paused. Mariah would be wondering where her Mommy was. He checked her peaceful eyelids for a tear. There was none. Maybe Mariah still expected her Mommy to show up just as Mommy would reappear from the consulate and awaken her at the end of a long afternoon nap.
“I guess you could say her Mommy was the little girl’s best friend. She thought about her daughter all the time and missed her when she was at work.”
Damn. It was no good. He couldn’t keep telling her that Natalie was just at work, and he couldn’t keep pretending to himself. Natalie was over two hours away by plane, in Bombay. Mariah, if anyone, could see through him.
Yet how could he tell the youngster that he had stormed out of Bombay with her cadaverous body under the chill of Natalie’s disbelieving stare? That he had had to take her out of the country fast, but not to her own country because America wouldn’t accept her.
How could he tell her that she had some ghastly disease for which doctors had no name? That she wouldn’t have made it another day unless she had received prompt medical attention from an expert in Western medicine. That he had felt that Natalie’s pleas for the State Department’s internists were not enough.
How could he explain that the only American-trained doctor with any expertise in tropical diseases that he could locate outside the Fifty States was a down-and-out derelict castaway on the shores of the nearby Maldive Islands?
Mariah would never understand, and even Natalie hadn’t approved. His removing her to the island had been born out of such frustration and anger built up over the past year that he still couldn’t piece all his reasons together.
How he came to be isolated on a tiny coral reef, smoldering with fury while tenderly caring for his dying child, he might never know for certain. Meanwhile his wife sat in Bombay wondering what the hell had gone wrong.
A final few rays of sunshine burst through the open window.
“Anyway the Mommy looked forward to her times with her daughter. So today she took her to play with a frog. But this frog would have nothing of it. ‘You’re standing in my light,’ said the frog, who preferred to sleep in the sunshine in peace.”
He was out of the woods. Mariah was thinking about the grouchy frog now. Probably thinking of her Daddy, the ultimate Oscar the Grouch. Perhaps she was wondering if the frog would ever turn back into a prince.
Or worse, far worse, perhaps she was wondering nothing at all.
Natalie took a long look around her hotel room. The stiffly formal Rajasthani furnishings reminded her of a mortuary.
Several of her suitcases lay open on the carpet, and she had already begun to scatter clothes around the room. She tried to shut a suitcase, gave up, grabbed a room key and her plane ticket to Delhi, and dashed out into the hallway.
The elegant Taj banisters looked like the inside of an ornate ship. Dodging between pillars, she headed for the elevator.
An iron needle pointed to the Ground Floor. The archaic Otis would take too long to reach her.
An image of her ailing daughter entered her mind. She whirled about and began to pound down the marble staircase.
Her shoes slapped against the steps and echoed off the huge honeycomb dome that loomed over her.
She passed startled servants bearing towels and trays.
“Good evening, madam,” they said, staring openly.
Out of breath and intent on reaching the travel agency before it closed, she didn’t respond.
“Natalie,” a startled cry rose from the lobby.
She glanced ahead.
“Peter,” she said, breathless. It was Peter Sloan, a young immigration officer from the consulate.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Sure. What are you doing here?” she asked, flying past him.
“Just checking on the congressman’s accommodations.” The young man gestured toward a white van parked at the glass front entryway. “I’m just on my way to the airport—”
“Good luck,” she shouted. “I’m trying to make the travel agency before it closes.”
She flew around a corner and barged into a crowded indoor shopping arcade.
Passing windows of saris, leather goods and expensive crystal, she saw the travel agency at last.
It was closed. She skidded to a halt by the locked glass door. Nobody was inside.
Her chest heaving, she leaned her forehead against the cold glass.
In the window beside her hung a poster advertising a white sandy beach. It was too much like Mariah’s lagoon. Beside that poster hung another, far different picture. Yellow fields of saffron swayed before the majestic snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas.
She closed her eyes. She had to get a grip.
Peter.
She spun around and rushed back to the lobby. He was gone.
She jumped out the sliding glass doors. The white van was halfway down the street, heading for the airport.
She felt her shoulders sag. She could hail a cab, but her bags were still in her room.
She had to get a grip on herself.
She would leave the next day, she promised.
“Here, madam,” she heard the doorman say.
She didn’t want a taxi after all. “No, thank you,” she replied under her breath.
Then she glanced at the huge man in his white outfit and red turban. He wasn’t offering her a taxi at all. Instead, he placed a scarf over her shoulders. She looked down and saw that she was wearing her pink negligee.
Her shoulders began to tremble as he gently helped her back through the revolving glass doors.
Hidden behind a thick curtain of evening mist and dense mountain foliage, Abu listened to Indian Army regulars just three feet from his concealed face. Proximity meant everything to an infiltrator. It let him distinguish bravado from confidence in their breathing, and gave him the opportunity to kill selectively.
Brushing lightly against tree branches, the Indian patrol moved cautiously past him toward a clearing where Abu and his men had set up camp in a reinforced cave.
The war in Kashmir had shifted south into Jammu. After the Pakistanis had taken all they could in northern Kashmir, mercenaries like Abu had spearheaded a new offensive in the less mountainous south.
He didn’t consider himself part of the Pakistani Army, and indeed his only financing came through his father. But he did ally himself with Pakistan’s goals, in so far as it meant to weaken India. All the jungle skirmishes were in preparation for his personal coup de grace, the unveiling of his Moghul Project, already well underway.
The Pakistani Army relentlessly shelled border towns where die-hard Hindu villagers tried to make a stand. Attempts by infiltrators like Abu’s men and others with similar interests to push the border east were working, and the Indian Army was in a frenzy.
The previous week, Indian police had recovered three hundred kilograms of explosives in Srinagar, the summertime capital of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State. Now Indian Army search parties had started flushing out Pakistani mercenaries like Abu operating in the southern portions of the state.
Abu’s snipers had picked off numerous Indian Army jawans entering the forest, but Abu knew they couldn’t hold off a major operation such as the one that evening.
How strange that he felt that Indians were invading his territory, rather than the reverse. In fact, his band of Afghan mujahideen and Pakistani volunteers trained from infancy for battle, were infiltrating India from Pakistan. But Abu, himself, was Indian. On any other day, he could walk down the sunny streets of Jammu City and pass himself off as a law-abiding Muslim Indian, with legal identity papers to prove it.
That evening, his men would have risked exposure trying to evacuate their latest gifts from Osama bin Laden, two remote-controlled microlight airplanes that would have been perfect for delivering explosives spot on their target.
Earlier, he had sent his men away for
their protection, but he wanted to see the Army’s reaction when they discovered his stash. He popped another high-energy sugar capsule in his mouth to ward off the chilly night. He didn’t want shivering to betray his whereabouts.
Another set of footsteps crunched past on dry leaves. By now the Indians had spotted the trampled foliage and campfire of Abu’s encampment. A soldier cried out in Hindi to stop. The footsteps halted.
Abu peered into the fog that drifted through the twilight. The soldier swept aside a plastic cover that protected the microlights.
Sudden shouts of excitement erupted, and the men ran forward to look.
The two, unusual-looking plastic microlights were six feet long with a wingspan of three feet. Controlled by a hand-held remote, they had a range of three kilometers and a capacity of three kilograms of explosives.
Losing them didn’t matter to Abu, for Osama bin Laden would supply him with more.
Then the soldiers discovered the cave that Abu’s men had occupied.
He smiled to himself as the soldiers walked out with his TV set, portions of his alarm system, batteries, a wireless set and several beds. Did they intend to report everything they found, or would they keep it?
It didn’t matter. Abu lifted his finger over the detonator.
Chapter 4
Abu waited for the right moment to press the detonator button.
As Indian soldiers disappeared into the jungle, they carried every last piece of equipment they had found. Then he saw what he was looking for—soldiers proudly carrying two great trophies, the microlight airplanes.
Shivering in the shadows, Abu turned his face away and pressed the button.
Light and smoke bathed him in warmth as the two microlights exploded.
He covered his head and waited for the plane parts, burnt branches and human limbs to stop raining down on him. Several minutes passed. The sound of frightened soldiers stampeding down the forest path faded away, and the cries of the wounded gradually stopped as they succumbed to death.