She was holding something back, as if she were frightened. “Several times,” McGarvey said.
“Mecca?”
“Once.”
She looked up, a sad smile on her pretty face. “Then you have seen more than I have seen.”
“We can change all that,” McGarvey said.
“I hope so,” she replied. “Before it’s too late.”
“What do you mean?”
She drew herself up suddenly realizing that she had said too much. “It’s time to go now.”
McGarvey wanted to reach out to her, to take some of the load of the world she was evidently carrying off her shoulders. Maybe in the early days in the Sudan when her mother had taken care of her while her father fought Russians here in Afghanistan, she’d had a normal life. But since moving here to be at her father’s side her life had to be anything but normal.
They shouldered their packs and followed the stream upward. Almost immediately the going became very difficult as the walls of the defile narrowed and rose sharply to a ridge a couple of hundred feet higher. A small waterfall tumbled from a rocky ledge, splashing on the rocks below, sending a mist rising into what developed into a thickening fog as they climbed.
All conversation became impossible because of the strenuousness of the ascent. For the next fifteen minutes McGarvey’s world was reduced to the next foothold below and handhold above. The fog closed in so completely that he could no longer see the base of the slope or the ridge. The rocks were slippery and they had to take extreme care with each move lest they lose their footing. If they started to fall they would not be able to stop themselves, and it would probably kill them.
The sky behind them was turning light now, and McGarvey sensed an urgency in the others that had not been there before. Sarah and Farid began to outdistance him, and then two mujahedeed below pressed him so that he had to speed up, take chances and unnecessary risks.
His body needed rest, but thoughts were bouncing around inside his head at the speed of light; how much longer he could continue, exactly what he was going to say to bin Laden, hoping Kathleen wasn’t worrying too much about him, and that Liz was safe.
Afghanistan and the people he’d come in contact with so far were about what he’d expected from his briefings and the dossiers he’d read. But he’d not gotten the sense of isolation from his readings that he felt at this moment. He could have been on a desert island, or in the middle of Antarctica, completely cut off from civilization. Afghanistan had always been a difficult place, but now that the Taliban were mostly in control, and trying to make the country into an Islamic fundamentalist’s paradise, you could get killed simply because the hairs on your arms ran the wrong way. If you were a devout Muslim, and washed yourself for the five-times-a-day prayers, the hairs on your arms would all point down toward your wrists. If a man walked to the side of the road and urinated standing up, he could be shot to death on the spot. Muslim men always squatted to pee.
It was crazy to the extreme. But he was back in the field, in one of the most isolated countries in the world, where a single wrong move could cause his death, to talk a madman out of using a nuclear weapon to kill Americans. Maybe Dennis Berndt had been right. Maybe he should just say the hell with all the talking, and simply kill bin Laden the first moment an opportunity presented itself.
He reached for the next handhold and pulled himself up, the muscles in his arms starting to shake.
He had to believe that this path wasn’t the only way to bin Laden’s camp. It would be impossible to bring supplies on a regular basis this way. And although his location would be secure, his comings and goings would be severely restricted. They’d taken this route to make it impossible for McGarvey to ever find his way back. Coming up from the valley they’d passed any number of arroyos that looked exactly like this one.
Of course with his phone and the GPS chip imbedded in his body he could easily pinpoint his exact location. But they didn’t know that, and he would have to make sure they didn’t find out.
A series of natural stone steps angled steeply to the right, and suddenly McGarvey was over the top where Sarah and Farid were already heading along a path around a broad pool. Mohammed and Hash came over the top and the three of them followed as fast as they could.
The sun was just appearing over the far wall of the valley behind them when they reached a much larger rock overhang than the one below. Sarah had already dropped her pack, and she hurried alone along the water’s edge until she disappeared in the fog twenty or thirty yards upstream.
“There will be no trouble from you now, Mista CIA,” Mohammed warned.
He and the two other men dropped their bundles but carried their rifles down to the pool. Stripping off their outer clothing and boots and socks, they hurriedly rinsed their hands, mouths, noses, faces, forearms and feet three times. Then, completely ignoring McGarvey, who watched from beneath the overhang above the pool, they knelt down on their vests, faced southwest toward Mecca and began the first of their five daily prayers.
At this moment McGarvey knew that he could pull out his gun and kill them all. They were as vulnerable now as a mother was during the act of giving birth; their conscious thoughts were turned inward to the task at hand; to Allah and to the belief that some day Paradise would be theirs. A Muslim believed that life on earth was nothing more than a reflection, a mirror image, of their real lives in heaven, so whatever they did here was holy.
McGarvey sat down cross-legged in the sand and watched the three men pray. Sarah had gone off by herself because Muslim men and women did not pray together, it was forbidden by the Qoran. But as he watched he wondered where and how it had all gone terribly wrong for so many of them. Why the jihads and fatwahs, the acts of terrorism, the senseless killings, the endless wars, the intolerance that led a man like bin Laden to contemplate using a nuclear weapon against innocent men, women and children? He didn’t know if even Islam’s most religious leaders could answer that simple question, and yet it was probably the most important question they’d ever been faced with. One that he had come here to ask bin Laden.
Stop the killing, there was no need for it. A strange thought, he had to admit to himself, for an assassin to entertain. But he could not ignore reality.
He got up and went deeper under the overhang where the three mujahedeen by the pool could not see him, and untaped his pistol and spare magazine from his thigh. He pocketed the magazine and stuffed the gun beneath his bush jacket in his belt at the small of his back.
When he came out again Sarah was returning from upstream, and the three men were putting on their boots. Mohammed watched her pick her way down the rocky path, and then looked up at McGarvey, his face screwing up in an expression of deep hatred.
Sarah was refreshed, as if the march and hard climb this morning had been nothing to her. When she and the others came up to the campsite she smiled wistfully. “It’s too bad you don’t know what you are missing, Mr. McGarvey.”
“I’m happy for you that you have your faith,” McGarvey said.
“I think it’s not very different for you.” She was serious now, her round face radiant, her dark eyes wide and earnest, filled with a deep, almost sensuous expression. “First came Abraham and Moses, then Isa and finally Mohammed. All on the same path to Allah. We’re all traveling together.”
“Or should be,” McGarvey said.
Hash and Farid had gathered some wood and they were starting a campfire. They looked up curiously.
“Insha’Allah,” Sarah replied softly.
“Yes, God willing.”
Mohammed, who had been standing a little apart, watching and listening, said something sharp in Persian.
“Don’t blaspheme,” Sarah told him reasonably, and she waited for an argument. When it didn’t come she nodded in satisfaction. “We’ll have something to eat now, and then get some rest. Maybe we’ll catch some fish this afternoon for our dinner.”
Their breakfast was nothing more than some very strong
black tea and the flat bread called nan. It was quite good and filling, but not satisfying. Mohammed took his meal down to a flat rock beneath the branches of a small tree at the water’s edge, and turned his back to them. McGarvey thought about trying to talk to him, but he didn’t think it would do any good. The man was like a volcano, or a time bomb, ready to explode at the slightest provocation. There was nothing McGarvey could say to him that would make the slightest difference. They could have come from different planets. They had no real common language, the very meanings of the words they used were completely different for each of them. Mohammed was a man like many others McGarvey had met in his career, filled with an unreasoning hate through which nothing could penetrate.
Even Farid and Hash sat slightly apart from Sarah, and while she was eating they avoided looking directly at her as much as possible. There were other subtle things going on between them as well; in the way they spoke to her, deferentially, but with a slightly irritating delay every time they answered a question or followed an order. When they did speak to her, they would look at each other first for support. Sarah was bin Laden’s daughter, and therefore she was a very important personage in their world. But she was a woman, and their strong Islamic upbringing made it almost impossible for them to deal with her on an equal, let alone superior, basis.
Still another subtle layer to the situation was the very fact that bin Laden had sent his daughter to help fetch McGarvey. It was a clear message that he was a modern man after all, whereas the Western media portrayed him as a rabid Islamic fundamentalist whose only mission in life was to kill the infidels.
McGarvey looked inward for a brief moment and he could see Trumble’s face. Allen had protested being pulled out of Riyadh and brought back to Langley, and yet McGarvey had read a measure of relief in the man’s eyes. Something had been going on in his life that he hoped coming home would help. Sending families over there was a double-edged sword for the CIA. On the one hand a wife and children provided a stabilizing influence on the field agent, even lent them a sense of legitimacy. On the other it was usually the agent’s families who cried uncle first. When that happened families came apart, and the agent’s effectiveness was diminished. There was a high rate of divorce in the Company, and a disturbingly high rate of suicide.
“Tell me please about Disney World and EPCOT,” Sarah said, bringing him out of his thoughts. “Have you been there?”
McGarvey looked at her, trying to gauge what she really wanted to know; if she’d brought this up now to tell him that she knew about the killings of Trumble and his family. But all he saw was a naivete; a genuine interest, even eagerness. No cunning.
“Not for a long time,” he said. “But how about you? There’s one just outside of Paris.”
“I’ve never been to France,” she said. She exchanged a glance with Farid.
“Well, your English is good, you didn’t learn it in Yemen or the Sudan, did you?”
“I had tutors.”
“Haven’t you ever been out of the Middle East?”
She smiled wistfully. “I was allowed to attend school in Switzerland for just one year when I was quite young. But then my father wanted me to come home, and my mother agreed that it would be for the best.”
“Then you know at least a little about the West,” McGarvey said.
“I was watched very closely,” she said. “And I was never allowed to go off campus with the other girls.”
McGarvey knew what it must have been like for her. She’d been a rich man’s daughter, with bodyguards watching her every movement. It was a wonder that bin Laden had allowed her even that much freedom.
“My daughter went to school in Switzerland,” he said.
Sarah’s eyes lit up. “Tell me about her, please. Does she watch MTV?”
“I don’t know, but I suppose she does,” McGarvey said laughing. “Have you seen it?”
“In Switzerland, but there are no televisions here.” A look of frustration crossed her pretty features. “Does she wear pretty clothes?”
“Sometimes.”
“Dresses.”
McGarvey nodded.
“Makeup?”
Again McGarvey nodded.
“She doesn’t listen to her father then,” Hash said sadly.
“How old is she?” Sarah, still enthused, asked.
“Twenty-three.”
“Does she have a job? Does she earn her own money?”
For some reason McGarvey thought about Allen Trumble’s daughter, wondering what she would have grown up to do. Follow in her father’s footsteps like Liz was following in his; like Sarah following in her father’s? “She works translating Russian into English, and she’s become pretty good with computers.”
“She is like a Sabra woman then,” Sarah said as a statement of fact. “The Americans, like the Israelis, have at least that much right. Their women are allowed to be mujahedeen.” She looked again at Farid and Hash, who averted their eyes. “That is not possible here. Yet.”
“Or ever will be,” Mohammed said darkly at the entrance to the overhang. He was seething with rage. If he was a Taliban spy, Sarah’s talking so openly to McGarvey, let alone that she had spent time in the West, thought women should have rights, and wore no veil to cover her face, was a major insult to his religious, and therefore political, beliefs. If they’d been in Kabul now she would have been arrested and very possibly put to death, bin Laden’s daughter or not.
Sarah flipped her left hand at him, another Islamic insult, and he reacted as if he had been slapped, but he said nothing.
“It is time to get some rest now,” she said. “We’ll leave at dusk if the sky is clear of the enemy.”
“I’ll take the first watch,” Mohammed said, and he turned and walked off.
McGarvey slept fitfully until noon on the rough wool blanket they provided for him. Instead of warming up, the fog persisted and the day remained chilly and damp. When he opened his eyes Sarah and the others were leaving the shelter of the overhang with their Kalashnikovs.
He sat up. “Is there trouble?”
“It’s time for our prayers, Mr. McGarvey,” Sarah answered softly. “Go back to sleep.”
When they were gone, he got up and went to the entrance where he could just make out the misty figures of the three men by the pool. Sarah had already gone upstream.
Watching them rinse their bodies in the Islamic ritual he was once again struck by the contradictions of their religion and their war of terrorism. When they knelt down to face Mecca and began their prayers he wondered what they were thinking about, or if, as the Qoran instructed, they were giving themselves completely to the moment and to their God.
When they were finished Farid and Hash came back up to the campsite, but Mohammed remained behind. They passed McGarvey without a word, and curled up in their blankets.
Mohammed turned and looked up river in the direction Sarah had gone. McGarvey stepped a little farther back into the relative darkness of the overhang so that the mujahed would have to come halfway up the hill in order to see him standing there. But Mohammed never looked up, instead he unslung his rifle and started up stream.
McGarvey checked Farid and Hash. They were already dead to the world, their blankets drawn over their heads so that only their noses poked out. Taking care not to wake them he crept out of the campsite and went down to the water’s edge. He hadn’t noticed on the way up, but now he could see that the stream had been partially dammed to form the pool, meaning this was a regular stopping place. From the air it would look natural; only from up close could you see that someone had piled rocks across the stream. A narrow but well-used path skirted the edge of the river.
He followed the path for about thirty or forty yards until it angled away from the stream and disappeared into a thick tangle of brush and tall grasses. He stopped to listen, but the day was silent except for the soft gurgle of the creek off to his left.
Pulling out his pistol he headed slowly into the thicket, careful
to make as little noise as possible, stopping every few yards to listen.
The path took an abrupt turn back to the left, and plunged down into a water-filled hole about twenty feet across. He could see footprints in the mud on the high side of the depression, and he followed these, coming again to the river’s edge in another thirty yards. Trees and even thicker, taller brush and grasses hung over the water so that McGarvey had to duck low to make his way through.
Somewhere just a few yards farther upstream, a man said something low, and urgent in Persian, which was followed almost immediately by Sarah’s equally low and urgent reply.
McGarvey could not understand the language, but he knew from the tone of their voices that something was wrong. He pushed his way through the last few feet of tangled brush until the path opened to a narrow beach along another, much smaller pool than the one below at their campsite.
Mohammed, his back to McGarvey, stood at the water’s edge. He was a few feet away from Sarah who’d been bathing in the pool. She was completely naked, crouching in a defensive posture in ankle-deep water. Mohammed’s rifle was leaning against a rock along with her rifle and clothing, fifteen feet away. He must have sneaked up on her when she was swimming.
He suddenly lunged, and she couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. He caught her arm and yanked her roughly onto the beach where he pawed her breasts.
She didn’t scream, but she snarled something at him in Persian. He pulled back a hand to hit her, and she raised her slender bare arm to ward off the blow.
The angle and the light were bad, but McGarvey raised his pistol and fired one shot, hitting Mohammed in the back of the hand, the wound erupting in a splash of blood. The shot echoed sharply off the wall of the cliff across the stream, and Mohammed bellowed in shock and pain. He let go of Sarah’s arm and pawed inside his vest for his pistol as he swung around like an angry bull.
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