by Gary Haynes
“Where in Sindh?”
“Sukkur.”
“What river passes by Sukkur?”
“The Indus. Sukkur is on the west bank,” Tom said.
He knew that if the questioning went much further, the little that Crane had been able to tell him in the short time they’d had at the Ariana would be exhausted.
“Why are you on this road?”
Good question, Tom thought.
“There was a traffic jam. Miles long. And as I said, I’m in a hurry.”
The man stepped back, and took a cellphone from his green combat jacket. As he started to thumb it, Tom checked the position of the other three. The two in the truck were still smoking their reefers, while the third man was starting to get interested in what was happening.
The man looked at the cell and then at Tom.
He recognizes me, he thought. How the hell does he recognize me? But then he realized that the Pakistani guards or the cops he’d disabled might have given his description to a sketch artist, which, given the timeframe, could’ve been emailed nationwide.
Tom shifted into overdrive. He heaved the door open, just as the man was bringing his AK up in an arc. The door caught him in the kneecaps with a sickening thud, and he doubled over. Tom flung himself out and sprang up from behind the partially rebounded door. He shot the upright man in the shoulder, the impact spinning him around, his AK kicking in his hand, as he involuntarily let off a short burst to the side. A second later and the man would have had him.
Moving out from the door, Tom pistol-whipped the man he’d hit with it and ran forward, pointing his SIG.
The men in the truck were fumbling for their AKs, their close proximity and the drugs temporarily disorientating them, Tom guessed. He squeezed off two rounds above their heads and shouted out in Urdu, ordering them to hold up their hands. He fired twice more, emphasizing that it would be a good move. They couldn’t duck down behind the sides for cover, because the truck’s rear was facing him where it had parked on the road. Wavering for a second or two, they did as they were told. He barked at them to get off the truck and lie face down on the ground. They did so, albeit with reluctance.
He turned. The man he’d hit with the butt of his SIG was struggling to get up. Tom jogged backward, keeping an eye on the two on the ground. As he got parallel with the man, he punched him hard on the jaw. He fell sideways, groaning, a trickle of blood oozing from his crooked mouth. Tom picked up the AK and walked over to the man he’d shot, dipping down to gather up his weapon, too. The man’s face was contorted in agony, his good hand grasping the bloody entry wound in his shoulder.
Tom ran to the back of the truck and pulled off the other two AKs by their nylon straps. Grabbing them one at a time from the barrel, he swung them to gain momentum before tossing them up among the jagged rocks. He thought about disabling the truck by shooting the tyres, but walked back towards the car instead. The man he’d punched was reviving, his hand groping for something under his jacket. As Tom reached him he bent down, snatched the man’s hand away and pulled out a hand grenade, pocketing it.
The cellphone, he thought. Seeing it lying about two metres away, he walked over and picked it up. He checked it. His face stared out at him and he went cold. The photo had been taken in Islamabad just hours before.
Tom went back over to the man he’d shot. He stuck the SIG into his waistband and crouched down beside his bare head, the man’s greasy hair falling to his shoulders. He saw fear in the amber-coloured eyes. As he grabbed his cotton shirt, the man winced. But when he ripped off the sleeve and used it as a tourniquet to ease the blood flow, the man’s expression turned to one of confusion.
Then he frisked him, taking out his cellphone. Checking it, he saw his photo. He walked over to the two men who’d been on the truck, their heads still face down in the dirt. He did the same routine, pocketing their cells before pulling one of them over onto his front. He looked petrified, but said nothing. Tom stuck the muzzle of his SIG into the man’s hairless cheek.
“Where did you get a photo of my face?” he said in Urdu, harshly.
The man shook his head a fraction.
Unless he spent the next half an hour or so doing things to them that he didn’t relish, he figured he wouldn’t get anywhere. Besides, they were foot soldiers of the uneducated variety. The chances of them knowing anything of significance were slim.
Straightening up, Tom nodded towards the wounded man. “He needs urgent medical attention. If you follow me, I will kill all of you.”
The man he’d questioned nodded.
If he’d had to kill them, he would have. The thought made him question if what he was doing was right. But too many questions were already spinning around in his head, not least how they had a photo of him on their cells. Too many questions, he told himself. As he walked back to the Toyota he felt a searing pain erupt from the side of his neck. A split second later, he heard the clattering of metal on the road.
He twisted around deftly, pointing his SIG. The man he’d spoken to was wearing shin-length boots, high enough to hide a knife. Tom raised his free hand, stroked his neck with his fingers, seeing the blood as he held them before his eyes. Although he was sure it was just a flesh wound, he cursed himself for being sloppy.
The man, still standing, held up his hands and made a pushing movement with them, his tongue licking his bottom lip as he breathed heavily. Tom groaned, the pain making his eyes water. He cocked the SIG. The man covered his face with his arms and seemed to shrink to half his former size. He said he had two children and started praying to Allah.
After a full fifteen seconds, Tom lowered the SIG.
Too many fresh corpses were buried in this earth, and beneath them the yellowing bones of thousands more. Like the splintered roots of a dead forest, he imagined. He wasn’t going to add to that if he had a choice in the matter.
41.
Linda had put on the burqa, as she’d been ordered to do. There was no need for a niqab, her face being covered almost completely by the garment’s lace net. But at least the man hadn’t trampled on her dignity by staying in the cell as she’d changed. She remembered that the men had left the room at the makeshift operation theatre where her tracking device had been removed from her arm. Another confirmation that they were Muslims. Something that she’d decided to take advantage of.
Propped up against the stone wall, she clasped her hands. She’d accepted there’d been a chance, albeit a remote chance, that she could be injured or assassinated while performing her public duties. But now the worst had happened, and if her plan didn’t work she’d likely die here. She guessed that being executed in a burqa would be a political statement for the Leopards. But then she remembered that the wearing of the burqa was very rare in Shia countries. Most women opted for and were permitted to wear only the hijab, a simple headscarf. The realization puzzled here. If she was in Pakistan, maybe the Leopards, being Shias, were intent on blaming it on the Sunnis. But what about the words on the tape recorder? Besides, although the generals had passed a law that all women wear the hijab, Pakistani women only wore the burqa in the Tribal Areas and Balochistan. She wondered if she would be taken to one of those regions. Her thoughts made her head ache, that and the dehydration she was suffering from.
She pictured John and her girls. John hadn’t said anything expressly, but she knew he had been unhappy about her visit. It was a dangerous place with no respect for Western women, after all. And she recalled an unfamiliar sense of foreboding as soon as she had arrived in Pakistan. Something that had prompted her to ring home far more than usual.
In her temporary office in Islamabad two hours before she’d been kidnapped, she’d decided to wake John and the girls. After the girls stopped yawning, she told them she loved and missed them, that she would be back on Tuesday and that they would all watch a movie together. She asked them to look after their father and to remember that he was a dear man. The girls had just grumbled at being woken up and had gone back to be
d.
John had been confined to a wheelchair two years ago, his spine shattered in a hit and run while out for an early morning jog. He’d done his best to cope with the physical and mental trauma of his disability, but she knew he was struggling. When he’d asked her if she was all right, she’d brushed it off, saying that it was the jet lag and heat getting to her.
She got up and paced about now, finding the garment both restrictive and degrading. For those who chose to wear it, good luck to them, she thought. But she felt genuine sympathy for the millions of women who were forced to live in them daily before being effectively locked away at night behind closed doors. She smiled, despite everything. The burqa would play a part in helping her break free from the men who guarded her.
She said a prayer for her family and then one for herself, as she did every morning and evening, although she had no idea of the time. She’d asked God to give her the strength to carry out what she’d set her mind to.
42.
The person Crane had arranged to meet Tom just before the Af-Pak border drove a faded blue saloon. She was a striking-looking woman, who said she was an American, the daughter of first-generation Pakistani immigrants. She was a little under six feet in flats, her shoulder-length hair dragged back from her flawless skin by a jet-black hijab. She was heavy-boned but lean, her eyes the colour of red cedar wood. Confident.
When he asked her name, she just smiled before pouring him a coffee from a Thermos, sweetened with sugar to the point that it resembled liquidized molasses. Then she patched up his neck with Vaseline and a bandage, and gave him some painkillers from the glovebox. It eased the throbbing sensation a little and he thanked her.
Despite her calm demeanour, the incident with the ISI and his face on the cells had still left him feeling shaken. That and what Crane had said when he’d rung him a few miles from Torkham, as he’d asked him to.
“How did they get a photo of my face?” Tom had asked. “It was only a few hours since I was in Islamabad.”
“There were only two men who could’ve taken your photo—that’s what you’re thinking right now, ain’t it?” Crane said.
“Yeah. Khan or the cab driver. But the cab driver was random, so it had to be Khan.”
“The eyes play tricks, especially in stressful situations. You got one of the cells on you?”
Tom dropped the disposable cell onto the front passenger seat and pulled over onto a stony verge. A little way beyond, the edge of the verge fell away a hundred metres or more to the base of a red-earth ravine. He jerked out one of the cells he’d put in the bag. He thumbed the image open.
“Shit!” he said, smacking his forehead.
He was wearing a white shirt in Islamabad, and had been given a similar one by the cab driver’s cousin. But the white shirt he had on in the photograph had a different collar. He picked up the disposable.
“What is it?” Crane asked.
“It’s a different shirt.”
“Think. When were you wearing it?”
“I … When we came back from Kurram, at the Ariana. With you, Crane,” he said, knowing there were scores of people at the former hotel who could’ve taken his photograph.
“What did Khan tell you?”
Tom was a little taken aback by Crane’s abrupt change of subject. “Only where Hasni lived,” he said, lying, still conscious that Crane could spoil matters for him.
“You sure?”
Wait, Tom thought. Crane might have set the whole thing up. After he’d been insistent about going over the border, he figured Crane might have seen an opportunity and ordered Khan to tell him about Mahmood. By why all the subterfuge? Maybe Crane was covering his tracks if things went to rat shit. Is he using me? Tom thought.
Then he decided that he was starting to think like Crane, and did his best to zone out the internal dialogue. It would simply confuse him.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Are you done this time?” Crane asked.
“I’m done.”
“Looks like you got Khan killed, too,” Crane said, disconnecting.
Tom thought that that was a vicious jibe, given the secretary’s sentence. But he guessed that Crane had a right to be angry. Still, if Crane hadn’t engineered the whole thing, the only person who knew what he planned to do in Boston was Khan, he thought. Unless he’d crumbled under torture, if in fact he hadn’t made it out. The realization that Hasni’s men could be waiting for him stateside as he went after his son, Mahmood, didn’t exactly fill him with confidence. But he’d told himself to shape up. He might be getting somewhere.
As the saloon got close to the border a stream of trucks packed with food and white goods from the port of Karachi were waiting to enter Afghanistan. The woman pulled over and told Tom to hide in the trunk, covering his body with a stack of Pakistani silks wrapped in clear polythene. His leather holdall was in there, too. He figured that Crane was serious about wanting him to quit. As he curled up into a ball, just as the dome light was fading, he inhaled a couple of gasps of fresh air.
After crawling along towards the border-crossing proper, the car slowed to a halt. He heard the door open and the voices of the Pakistani border guards and the woman, but they were faint. He sensed that his whole body was covered in a sheen of sweat. The trunk was flipped and he tensed, refusing even to breathe. He felt something prodding him that he took for a baton. The silks were pulled off. Tom turned around and stared at the dark faces of two border guards, standing motionless outside the car. The woman said nothing but offered them a brown-paper package.
The guards looked at one another.
“A million rupees,” she said in Pashto. “And we leave now.”
Tom’s face was frozen in an open-mouthed stare. He could go for his SIG, but what was the point? he thought. If he wounded or killed them, the cop’s words in Islamabad would come true: You will never get out of Pakistan.
The younger of the two raised his long baton, and Tom flinched involuntarily. But the older one, his yellowing eyes fixed on Tom, motioned with his hand for him to lower it. The younger one hesitated before complying. The older one nodded to the woman and snatched the package from her hand, closing the trunk slowly afterwards. Tom breathed out audibly and brought his hand down over his face, furrowing the skin.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
Crane had told him that the average Pakistani wage was PKR 250,000 per annum, about $2,500. His freedom had just been bought for ten thousand dollars. But before the car pulled away, he heard two muted cracks, as if they’d whacked the car’s hood with their batons, although it’d sounded as if something had smashed. He wondered if the windshield had been hit.
Fifteen minutes later, the woman stopped opposite a clump of sprawling banyan trees. The trunk was opened and Tom felt the dry air swamp him. He clambered out and got back into the front passenger seat, realizing the windshield was still intact. They travelled in silence, the woman manoeuvring past the various hazards with apparent ease. They weren’t held up at the dozen or so Afghan police and security services’ checkpoints, either, due in no small part to the plastic wallet which she handed over.
But by the time they reached the steep summit of Kabul gorge, the wind was gale force and a dust cloud hit them. The cloud was so dense that the woman slowed down to a near stop. Lightning struck nearby and thunder boomed. Tom noticed that she was gripping the leather steering wheel tightly. The voltage from the storm clouds was almost palpable.
“Maybe we should stop for a while. Till it clears,” he said.
“He said no stopping.”
“You known him long?”
She just stared ahead, not even a flicker or a twitch in response. But then she pressed a switch underneath the dash and began to drive with confidence again, despite Tom realizing that the headlights had been knocked out. After he asked if she’d been a cat in a past life, she explained that she’d activated the night-vision section of the windshield, together with an infrared camera sited in the
plastic casing of the rear-view mirror. The IR scanned the road ahead, projecting any life forms onto a small video screen beneath her side of the dash. The faded bodywork made the saloon look like a wreck, but it was carrying close to $250,000 worth of equipment.
The disposable cellphone rang. Tom took it out of his pocket.
“You safe?” Crane asked.
“Yeah. We’re just coming into Kabul,” Tom said, thinking Crane’s mood changed quicker than a crack addict’s.
“There was a bug in my room, hidden in a clock radio. The room is swept once a week. The last time was three days ago.”
Tom didn’t doubt that that was possible.
“And, Tom. Dump the cellphone the female operative gave you at the Ariana. Do it now.”
Crane didn’t have to say why. Tom knew that was how the men at the roadblock had known he’d be arriving there, despite their incompetence once he had. And if they knew that, they’d know where Khan lived. He just had to hope that Crane would be able to get a message to him before he returned there, if he’d gotten out. Then he realized that whoever had been tracking the cell would know he’d been to Hasni’s home, too. It was all bad. But he had a gut feeling that things would only get worse.
43.
By 14:02, Tom was inside Kabul International Airport. He’d cleaned up in a restroom, changed into jeans, a khaki shirt and sneakers, and had dumped the SIG a mile away after wiping it down. He got a cup of coffee from a fast-food restaurant in the departure lounge and eased himself into a low-slung plastic seat. He looked around, feeling eyes on him. A different form of paranoia now, one that he didn’t care for at all; one that was playing with his mind and making him feel jittery.
He took out his smartphone from his holdall and emailed Lester, the friend he’d told Crane he was seeing in Boston, but not why. He hoped he’d pick up the message quickly on his cell. The man’s full name was Lester Wilson. He owned a private security business. When Tom had asked him how he’d swung that, Lester had told him that this was America, and even a man who’d gotten thrown out of the Marines could prosper. Lester had been a US Marine for eleven years, three of which he’d spent in military custody for various offences, the most serious of which was punching an officer. An act that had also led to his dishonourable discharge. But Tom and Lester had become friends.