by Fritz Galt
“All ready, sir.”
Alec felt ready to protest, but realized that it was a scene enacted not for his sake, but on a ritual basis.
The doctor sat before a square wooden box and pressed a button.
The patient shrieked with a rumbling animal growl. His body nearly jolted out of his handlers’ grasp. A ripple of tension quivered through his torso and traveled down the length of his limbs to his fingers and toes. His eyelids fluttered, and his eyes rolled back.
After ten agonizing seconds, the patient’s body relaxed.
One orderly removed the headphones and examined the patient’s ears, presumably for burn marks.
The Australian doctor stood, looked briefly at his fellow foreigner on the mattress, nodded with satisfaction and left the room.
Alec stood back as the men pushed the inert patient out of the room.
“What was that all about?” he asked Hasan.
“ECT. Electro Convulsion Therapy,” Hasan said. “Good for the patient as well as the doctor.”
Finally, the full horror of the situation hit him. These were the hostages captured by Al-Faran in 1995. And they could be him.
The Norwegian tourist may have been beheaded, but at least several of the others were still alive, forever trapped in a sadistic circle of patient and doctor.
Hasan smiled at Alec. It was all the evidence he needed to prove that he represented Al-Faran.
He forced a smile in return, but his lips felt cold and petrified. They returned in silence to Hasan’s office.
There, he cleared his throat. “I’m ready for Abu,” he said, his voice sounding weak and uncertain.
“We can leave immediately,” Hasan said.
He gestured out his open window at a box-like, two-cylinder Maruti.
“We have a long day’s drive to Kargil.”
Chapter 52
Mick rolled into Kargil with the Black Cats during a heavy downpour.
Kargil had once been a city, he could tell. However, from all appearances, it wouldn’t take long before it disappeared altogether from the face of the earth.
Like a graveyard of protruding headstones, the flattened landscape was punctuated only by an occasional standing wall. Against the remnants of these buildings, tents and rusty metal slums sheltered inhabitants from the icy rain.
He passed a smoldering prairie on the city’s exposed northern plateau. There, a recent shell from the Pakistani-occupied mountains had made a direct hit on an ammunition dump. The blast had cleared a large perimeter of military structures, leaving behind goats to prod under the shards of bomb casings for grass.
Few people scavenged among the scars of a decade’s worth of bombardment. India’s northern-most city had become a ghost town.
Sleet pelted Mick’s back as he staggered past a ring of sentries toward a field hospital. He lifted his eyes to the mountains and saw fresh snow on the shoulders of the peaks.
He leapt a puddle at the entrance and landed in the hospital’s darkened doorway. There, he immediately stumbled over a patient’s legs and fell against a cement floor. He lay for a while, sprawled on his back, staring at a row of empty light sockets that lined the cavernous room.
In the glimmer of winter light coming through dirty windows, he made out the form of his medic pushing patients out of the way. Bloody gauze had been wrapped around various parts of their uniforms.
“Don’t make room for me,” he said. “I don’t need a bed.”
“You’ll stay here tonight,” the medic said. “A doctor can keep an eye on you.”
“What doctor?” he asked, looking for a sign of medical staff. There was none. “This is a holding tank, not a hospital.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the medic said, and abruptly left.
He cursed and propped himself up on an elbow. His wounded companions made no sound. Which ones of them were already dead?
A glint of metal flashed briefly on a patient’s shoulder. He was a military officer. Mick studied the man’s uniform more closely. He wasn’t from the Indian army. The other uniforms were all the same.
He was surrounded by Pakistani prisoners of war.
Driving through the rain, Hasan suddenly slammed his foot on the brake.
Alec glanced at him with concern.
The car skidded sideways on the narrow mountain road that threaded between two opposing mountain ranges.
“Listen,” Hasan said, pointing ahead.
Then he heard it. A deep rumbling shook the earth.
“Artillery?”
“No. Look.” Hasan pointed forward. Trees were giving way above the next bend in the road.
They watched the swath of trees flatten as if some mysterious hand were combing the forest.
“What is it?”
“A landslide.”
To Alec’s horror, the entire side of the mountain came sliding down over the road. Tree trunks tumbled like matchsticks. A twenty-meter wall of mud came to a rest just ten meters from the hood of their car.
Long after the earth had stopped shaking, he and Hasan remained motionless inside their car. The only sound came from rain drumming steadily on their tinny roof.
He closed his eyes. Hasan had saved them from certain death, but now he’d never reach Abu in Kargil.
Then Hasan leaned down and grabbed a cell phone next to his seat.
He punched in a number and waited. “Abu? This is Hasan. We need a lift. We got stopped by a landslide just past Dras.”
He nodded to the voice on the other end and turned his phone off.
“Now what?”
“It won’t take long. Fifteen minutes.”
A short, wordless wait later, he heard giant scissors cutting the air above. The car began to rock in a buffeting wind.
He looked up through the windshield. It was a helicopter.
“That’s Abu?” he shouted above the roar.
Hasan checked his watch and smiled. “Fifteen minutes. He’s as good as his word.”
From out of the storm, Mick saw the beams of two flashlights playing over the field hospital where he lay.
He recognized the ebullient voice of Lieutenant Chatterjee. “He’s in here. You’ll find him in tolerable good health.”
“Speak for yourself,” Mick called out.
“Ah, there you are,” Chatterjee said, his light beam finding Mick’s face.
“Would you mind pointing that thing somewhere else?”
“Righto, old man.”
He had just about had enough of the young lieutenant, but he stopped short of saying so. The flashlight beams floated over the ashen faces of patients, some lying flat on the floor, others propped against the walls.
“What will happen to these guys?” he asked, getting to his feet. He had spent several hours with them and not gotten a response from any of them. Apparently they were under orders not to speak with the enemy.
“I suppose we’d ship them back over the border, if only the Pakistanis wanted them. But they don’t.”
“You’re kidding.”
The second officer took him by the arm and dragged him out of the building. Tossing a rain jacket over him, the officer took him past the sentries, down a mud road and toward a cluster of former shop fronts.
Finally beyond earshot of the POWs, the officer explained in a kind, sad voice, “The Pakistanis state officially that their troops are not involved in Kashmir. They claim this is a homegrown drive for independence. Therefore, they won’t claim either their POWs, their wounded, or even their dead.”
“Why don’t you send them back?”
“We try. We raise a white flag, broadcast a message for them to accept the troops, we wait for a day or so, and then the other side comes back over a bullhorn saying that they refuse to accept the soldiers.”
“So they just sit here and rot.”
“Essentially, yes,” the officer said with a sigh.
They entered a store where a gas lantern flickered on a table. A taut row of Black Cat Commandos
with black nomex coveralls and Heckler & Koch 9mm MP-5 submachine guns lined the walls.
Mick and the officer took seats around the smelly, yellow flame. In the light, he could see crossed swords on the officer’s shoulder insignia. He was a general. He had a thick neck and a rounded gray face that featured bushy white, forward-thrust eyebrows and a white mustache. Something about the combination reminded him of Chicago’s former mayor, Harold Washington.
“Chatterjee informs me that you have a scheme for apprehending Abu Khan,” the general said, folding his arms and sitting back. “Tell me.”
He glanced at the row of Black Cat commandos, sleek and muscular standing stiffly at ease.
“I’d like to avoid a counter-terrorist operation,” he explained. He only had a half-baked plan. “I know Abu Khan, and he knows me. I’ve already chased him across half of Kerala’s waterways and flushed him out of his mansion in Goa. He’ll meet me face to face.”
“Under what conditions would he meet his enemy?” the general asked.
“He doesn’t know I’m with you. I could convince him that I’m alone.”
“Alone and lonely in Kargil?” the general said, shaking his head. “I rather doubt he’d believe that. This is nothing but a military enclave. There’s our position in Kargil, his position across the Indus River and the Pakistanis in the mountains opposite. Nobody enters this sector without permission from the Indian Army or help from militants.”
“Fine. I’ll tell him the Indian Army escorted me here. Given the proper invitation, he’d still meet with me. He has the vial for personal protection. If we harm him, he’ll have it destroyed.”
“Why would he choose to meet with you in any event?”
The cold, damp air helped him think through his fever. What did Abu really want? Women? Money? Islamic Law? Revenge? Power? Respect?
As far as he knew, Abu was driven by a desire for all of these, each a means to the other’s end, and his ultimate success would be the overthrow of India.
He might offer Abu a U.S.-brokered peace settlement with India. Curiosity alone would lure him out of his camp.
“In my pocket,” he said in a low tone, “I hold a joint letter from the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of India. It grants Mr. Khan full authority over the Indian Armed Forces.”
The general’s round face gained several defined edges. “Show me that letter,” he demanded, lurching forward in his chair.
Mick sat back, staring down the general. He couldn’t keep a straight face for long, and cracked a smile. “If you believed me, then maybe Khan might believe me.”
“Show me that letter,” the general repeated, irritated and undeterred.
“General, there is no letter. It was only a ploy.”
“If there is such a letter, show it to me now.”
Mick stood up and reached for his pocket. Before his hand could touch his pants, a line of Glock 17 pistols flashed in the light.
He raised his hands, and the Black Cats relaxed.
“Do you do VIP duty, too?” he asked the guards. “I could use some.”
He received no response.
The general closed his eyes and nodded. “Okay. We’ll let you contact Abu Khan. You’ll ask him to visit you at a neutral location. When he arrives, you will disclose that you don’t have the letter in your possession. You will share some brandies and set another meeting date with him. The brandy will contain a slow-acting poison, and he’ll return to his camp only to die in the night. Don’t worry, we’ll get the antidote to you in plenty of time. Then we’ll take advantage of his group’s disarray and attack in the dark.”
Mick was impressed. “Done this sort of thing before?”
Alec felt like a snowflake. As the Kargil-Dras Valley fell away below the military chopper, he became just one more snowflake swirling high above otherwise inaccessible peaks. The helicopter struggled to climb above the clouds, and suddenly they were a bed of pink cotton candy below him. The sky was an unblemished sapphire blue.
Several minutes later, the glorious sunset disappeared as the droning bird plunged into the darkness below. A premature nightfall had already descended on the valley. After a long, wind-buffeted descent, where he felt his brain rattling in his skull, it settled in the center of its own search light on a patch of wet grass.
The transition from heaven to hell was abrupt.
A covered Jeep awaited him. He and Hasan jumped in, alongside an armed militiaman with narrow eyes and red cheeks.
Their headlights occasionally fell on a raging river that was swollen beyond its banks.
“What river’s that?” he asked his Al-Faran guide.
“The Indus River,” Hasan responded.
Alec nodded. He was vaguely aware of the two great rivers of India. Cradles to India’s early civilization, the two rivers were like a wishbone, with Kashmir at the top. Pakistan pried away at the Indus, and India yanked on the Ganges.
The mercenary camp was built on the site of a farm village. All was dark under wartime lighting. He saw only the occasional pinprick of light emanating from a crack of blackened window here, or a hastily opened and shut door there.
It was his last chance to review his plan. Al-Faran had accepted him, but Abu had never met him. He would offer himself, for pay of course, for Abu’s cause.
He felt bad about leaving Mick to languish with a fever in the blast furnace of Jaisalmer. At least his brother had a nurse to care for him, and it was a good haveli. Besides, Mick wasn’t going anywhere in his condition.
Alec was compelled to separate from his brother. Not only did Alec prefer to operate alone, he required a totally convincing cover, and Abu would recognize Mick.
His only concern was Camille. If she gave him away… He clenched his teeth.
Then his mind turned to her curvaceous figure. What a fox.
One way or another, her ass was his.
Alec’s Jeep ground to a halt before a mud-walled hut. He and Hasan ran through the slanting downpour. Once safely inside the door, they shook the rain off their parkas.
The interior was crammed with unhappy faces. There were mercenaries wearing turbans, berets and Tibetan caps. The room smelled of gun oil and hashish. Nobody stepped forward as their leader or even acknowledged his presence.
He turned to Hasan. “Where’s Khan?”
“I’m sure he’ll call for us when he’s ready.”
Hasan found a patch of dry dirt and sat. So Alec followed suit.
“Great accommodations,” he marveled to one of the strangers beside him.
No response.
“Speak English?”
Again, no response.
“Chinese? Hebrew? Eskimo?”
It didn’t take long to realize that the social norm was to eschew conversation and avoid eye contact. What a way to spend a life.
At various spots around the room, pungent candles sputtered on the floor. They cast flickering, ghostly shadows against the windowless walls.
After an hour, all he had heard was the occasional field gun sending a rocket over to the Indian side of the Line of Control.
At last, a Jeep pulled up.
“Rodriguez,” the driver shouted through the rain.
Alec patted the passport in his pocket and picked up his backpack.
“You won’t be needing that,” Hasan said. “Keep it here to reserve your space.”
He wasn’t so sure he’d ever see the pack again. It only held some changes of clothes, but for some reason he wanted to cling to the only familiar object within a thousand miles.
Empty handed, he dashed with Hasan out to the waiting Jeep.
The vehicle sped forward, plunging into a dozen muddy potholes before sliding to a halt.
“Khan is keeping,” the driver said.
Alec entered the large farmhouse where Khan was keeping.
Dressed in green camouflage attire amidst a mosaic of other rebels, Abu Khan, with his trimmed beard, appeared to be the youngest man there.
But he also stood taller than most of the rest, his bearing showing him clearly in charge.
Only one man stood taller. Wearing a distinctive white Pathan hat from Afghanistan was the powerful leader of global terrorism, Osama bin Laden. Looking up with a face straight out of an FBI Most Wanted poster, bin Laden briefly evaluated him with his large, soulful eyes, then dismissed him just as quickly.
Abu and Osama were discussing an invitation that Abu had just received.
“Why would the CIA bother to send a man here?” bin Laden was asking with a critical tone. “I make it a practice to distrust such moves.”
“My friend, you must learn to accept Allah’s bounty. I will go meet him.”
Seeing Abu turn toward him, Hasan introduced “Juan Rodriguez” to the group.
Abu seemed more than preoccupied with other matters. “Where have you worked before?” he shot at Alec.
“Colombia. Mexico. I’m trying out Kashmir for the first time.”
“So what can you do? Fly a plane? Set explosives? Are you a doctor?”
“Mostly I’m just a warm body,” Alec said. “I can handle a gun. I can speak Chinese. And I come cheap: seven thousand dollars a month.”
“So little?”
“Plus food,” he hastened to add.
“I’m taking volunteers, not prima donnas.”
“Okay. Five thousand dollars.”
Abu took a second look at him. “I’ve been working in Kashmir for ten years on less than five thousand dollars a year. We’ve gotten to this point by sweat and toil. This is hardly a commercial venture.”
“Okay then, three thousand.”
“Return to your hut and report for duties tomorrow. One thousand dollars is all I pay.”
Alec and Hasan turned to go.
“Hasan, old friend,” Abu said, suddenly noticing him.
They stopped in their tracks.
“I didn’t recognize you at first.”
Hasan turned with a smile.
“It’s been, what, five years since you disappeared?” Abu reflected.
“At least.”