She pushed herself from the wall and began to retrace her steps down the hill.
Just find Mirri and find the truth. She was no innocent—she could stand it.
She turned onto Jadayi Maywand and followed the traffic, paralleling the river. Once the city had been full of gardens. Even under the Russians, she could remember that. Could remember her papa stopping to exclaim over some lovely bloom, and point out its magnificence to her mother. Mama had always been the practical one.
Now the streets were ruined, the gardens lost in fallen bricks and weeds except for Bag Nawab, which had somehow escaped the devastation. On fine days she had taken her papa there to enjoy the green.
When he had been her papa.
She almost stumbled at the thought. He was supposed to be a man. Supposed to be Afghani and Afghanis did not let the death of a son go unavenged. Vendetta ran deep here—deep as the earth and as violent as the quakes that shook Kaabul.
But how was a blind man supposed to wreak revenge? It must eat him from the inside—her papa caught in his honor and unable to do anything. No wonder he would not admit the truth.
She held her head a little higher, scanning the blasted blocks of Mikrorayon ahead of her. The Russian-style concrete apartments had once been the face of the successful Kaabuli middle-class; now they were the symbol of the end of Russian rule in Afghanistan.
What had been an estate of green grass was now, due to drought and war, a sere landscape of blowing dust and concrete debris that crunched underfoot. Many of the buildings were no longer livable; the bombs had collapsed the floors, like naan stacked on a bread-maker’s display.
Khadija threaded between the shell-craters and heaped garbage, breathing through her mouth to avoid the stench rising in the sun’s heat. Tattered plastic bags made ragged hedges around the bases of the buildings. Building doorways gaped like hungry mouths, the wood long ago taken for heat.
Once she had been proud to say she lived in block 182. Once her parents had sat out front of the block on fine days, watching their son and daughter play with their friends.
But block 182 didn’t exist anymore—was nothing more than rubble that children climbed. They didn’t have the burden of memories of how the place had been before. They would grow up in a new Afghanistan. She would see to it.
Miraculously, while the Mujehaddin bombs had destroyed her parent’s building, block 181 where Mirri and her brothers lived still stood relatively unscathed. True, one end of the building sagged precariously, but the apartment the Shahabuddin family shared still stood.
She climbed the four floors to Mirri’s apartment. It had belonged to General Shahabuddin until the Taliban came. Then he had disappeared. Their mother had died in a rocket blast outside the building—the same blast that destroyed block 182.
At the corrugated metal that served the apartment for a door, she knocked and bobbed on her heels. She didn’t like the darkness, the graffiti on the walls, the smell of human and animal waste. It was like a cave, a grave to be buried in.
“Mirri?” she called.
The metal shifted and an eye peered out, tilted, narrow, too high off the ground. The corrugated metal shifted further revealing Mirri’s brother, Ratbil. He leaned on makeshift crutches made of long metal poles. Allah only knew where he had found such valuable metal.
“Khaditha?” His mouth was twisted from a hair lip. He peered past her into the hall. “Alone? Mirri thaid you only go out with your father.”
“Is she here? I need to speak with her—with you and Mizra.” She could speak to Mizra and Ratbil because they were like family, she had known them so long. But she could only enter if Mirri was home.
He nodded, hopped back to allow her entry, his swift turn of his body hiding the twisted foot and lower leg that happened in the same firefight that had taken their mother. He waited as she swept back the heavy folds of the filthy burka, letting it drape from her crown. The air was cool on her skin, moving through the empty window that provided the only light.
“You honor us with your visit,” Ratbil said with a bow of his head and for a moment she thought he mocked her, but his narrow-set gaze was serious.
“Mirri! Mizra! We have a guest!” He ushered her into the main room of the apartment where a tattered Persian carpet covered part of the floor. Pots clattered from the small kitchen separated by a curtain; a shadow parted from the second, smaller, room and the younger Shahabuddin brother entered.
Mizra ran his fingers through a mat of dark hair. He had obviously been sleeping, but his sleepy gaze sharpened when he saw Khadija. He averted his eyes from her.
“An apparition surely,” he said in his mellow voice. “Brother, has a houri come from Allah’s pleasure gardens?”
Khadija pulled her burka close around her as if it was a chador. Mizra made her nervous with the ardor she saw in his gaze, though he took care never to take liberty with her. She knew he hoped to court her, but would await the customary process of a woman of the house obtaining approvals from Khadija’s father. Of course, he would not want her if he knew she was dishonored.
He lolled on the carpet, his body half turned from her, so he would not sully her with his gaze. Ratbil lurched to a seat.
The two were so unalike. Ratbil thin, his face filled with the slow-boiled anger that came after his sudden infirmity. Mizra, on the other hand, was almost handsome, indolent, with piercing black eyes like his brother and a lithe, hard body that did not tend to Mirri’s warm plumpness.
Khadija fought to relax on the carpet, though every part of her strained with her decision.
“No apparition. Just a friend who needs information.”
Something passed between the two brothers. The kitchen curtain pushed aside and Mirri entered, carrying a tray of tea. The scent of her kerosene stove, and the chicken caged in the corner of the room, entered with her.
“Nothing in Kaabul ith free. Information comes at a price.”
Khadija nodded as she accepted the tea.
“I’ll pay. Mirri told me something today. I want to know more. How did my brother die? Who was responsible?”
The way Ratbil’s gaze jerked to his sister told Khadija this was important. She’d done well to come here.
“You should not have thpoken. That was Siddiqui family busineth—not ours.”
“She should know. Yaqub….”
Khadija caught Mirri’s hand as her friend settled beside her. Mirri’s warm hands gave her strength to push against Ratbil’s will.
“Yaqub was my brother. My father has held the truth from me. I need to know. It’s my right.”
“Why think we know the truth? Why come to uth?”
“Perhaps because she knows we’re her friends, neh?” Mizra’s deep voice was soft in the room, but his gaze locked on her briefly.
Though he was the younger brother, the fact he was whole and healthy allowed him liberties within the family. Still, Ratbil’s face twisted at the interruption. So, all was not peaceful in this remnant of a family. That was another product of the West—family infighting.
If war had not destroyed their country, if the West had interceded when the Russians came, then the Shahabuddin family would likely still have their father as patriarch over his sons.
“You are my friends—more.” Khadija looked gratitude in Mizra’s direction as she sipped her tannin-rich tea, but he would not meet her gaze. “Mirri is family to me. My father—I honor him, but he’s old and blind and afraid for me. I realize now, he lives in shame that he cannot avenge his son. I cannot let him live that way.”
Ratbil’s narrow-set eyes seemed caught on her face. There was a force there that Khadija had not noticed before, as if he weighed each of her words before devouring them.
Mizra, on the other hand, cupped his chin in his hand, his sideways gaze one of furtive longing.
“You’re a woman, Khadija. A lovely woman.” A flush crept up Mizra’s neck as he spoke. “Go home to your father. Go home and wait ‘til you are wed, neh?
Your husband can perform what needs to be done. A good husband will.”
He looked at his bother.
“A daughter cannot take a father’s role.”
Those words raised Khadija’s hackles. She would not be denied.
“My sister-friend told me it was Amrikaayi who killed my brother. I want to know who.”
The flicker of looks that passed between the brothers, told her they knew something more. Khadija released Mirri’s hand and fought the chill that ran down her back. Another sip of tea for heat. Finally Ratbil shrugged.
“We know rumors, neh? Your brother died in a battle between Afghani and kofr. It was a sad thing. We mourned for him—for the Yaqub we knew as children together.”
Mizra’s warm gaze finally looked at her, but it wasn’t enough to bring feeling to her limbs. Hearing the words in this room made Yaqub’s loss somehow more final and certainly more unjust.
“I remember as a child how tall he seemed. We all looked up to him, neh?” Mizra shook his head. “A waste. Truly a waste. Would that he had stayed in Kaabul and focused on our faith.”
“Where did he die, then?” She almost choked on the words.
The two brothers looked at each other again and Mirri caught Khadija’s hand.
“Bamiyan, we heard. Fighting among the filthy Hazzara.”
Khadija frowned. The Hazzara people had been decimated under the Taliban. Many Sunni towns and cities had been purged of the Asiatic-featured Shi’ites.
“But Yaqub had no links to Bamiyan.”
Mizra sat up. “You see? Our words only confuse you, neh? We should have said nothing.” He held out his tea cup for Mirri to refill.
“No!” She would not be protected. She would not be put off. She would not wait for a husband to do what needed to be done.
She ached with a need to take action. She knew by Mizra’s frown that her voice was too loud, that she was wrong to interrupt him.
“I need to know. I need more information.” She glanced at Mirri. “You…you know things. I know this. You can find out more—get me a name—something.”
Ratbil’s frown deepened. “I thaid information is valuable, Khadija.”
“I don’t care. I’ll do what’s necessary. Mirri has asked me to help you. It tells me you work for Afghans—not for the Amrikaayi and their allies. Let me help.”
“And what could a woman do?”
“Pass messages. At the clinic we often give the patients medicine. It would be possible to pass other things without notice—things that will help our country regain its glory and stand against invaders. In return you find out who killed my brother.”
“It will not be easy. We may only be able to find out an Army unit.”
She just looked at him. Finally he nodded.
The tang of the cooling tea was the taste of triumph. Then Mizra smiled.
“Inshallah, you will be family one day. I will help you.”
She needed to show them she was strong in her faith, in her honor. Strong enough she didn’t need to wait for marriage and a husband. She sipped the tea again and found it cold—as her fingers—as the cold anger that filled her. She set the cup down.
“When I know, I will exact the Siddiqui revenge.”
Chapter 9
July 25, 2002, Kashgar, Xinjiang Uigher Autonomous Zone, Western China
The woman called Ping returned to the room again, clad in the bright blue kimono and tawdry high heels she had favored since she took Michael as a lover a month ago. It had taken that long to gain her confidence—more actually, because it had taken overlong for him to realize there was no other way to get the information he needed. He didn’t like to use her, but it was a necessary evil.
She teetered like a child as she crossed to where he dressed beside the pink satin bed and its clutter of stuffed animals. He found himself wishing it was another woman he had met—one with long dark hair and the clear brown-green eyes of a gazelle.
A foolish, wasted thought.
Ping touched his face and plunked down on the bed. “You did not sleep well last night. You spoke strange words in your sleep. What is Yaqub? You say, say again, again.”
Michael pulled away, not wanting to leap into the chasm the question opened. There were screams in the blackness there—his own? The women? Yaqub? He shuddered and turned back to Ping.
She was Hui, one of the Muslim Chinese who had immigrated from around Xian to Kashgar near the border between China and Afghanistan. The Chinese government had encouraged the emigration and the Hui had come, hoping for economic opportunity. Ping had come because of her training and her job.
Her long hair fell around her blocky, small-breasted body. There was no question that her hair was her best feature. Still, her sense of adventure seemed to have found her many lovers here in western China.
“Micha,” she said, running her finger down his chest past the pink scar of the knife wound. Her fingers casually cupped his genitals in the baggy fabric of his trousers. He knew she’d taken him to her bed as an experiment. To see what a foreigner had. Enough apparently, judging by her screams when they were in bed.
“You no go, now. We have fun, yes?” She spoke in halting Uigher as she tugged at the waist of his salwar kameez, pulling them even lower on his hips.
Michael caught her hands and pulled her close to his chest. Yes, the dream had troubled him last night. His lips found hers and she opened to him, pressed against him, the kimono parting.
He held her away.
Damn, he didn’t like this, though she was a skilled lover. But Ping was a technician at a Chinese nuclear facility deep in the desert.
Before he left Kaabul, he had passed along his meager information to the American embassy via a foreign aid worker. He hadn’t waited for the orders to come here.
Given he was one of the few agents who spoke both Uigher and Mandarin, he’d come north and across the border as quickly as he could. In Kashgar he’d cooled his heels, feigning he was a rich Afghani fur trader as he tried to find his way into the Uigher community.
Instead it was only bitterness he found running like a thick current through the Kashgar market. The Uigher’s anger simmered at the Chinese government’s ban on the call to prayer at the mosque, at the bulldozing of Uigher towns to “modernize” the province, at the immigration of Chinese while the Uigher had no work. Most of all they were angry they had no country of their own.
The anger flowed around the massive concrete housing blocks that had been built to house the hordes of Chinese immigrants. The population growth had stretched the resources of the oasis town to the limit and threatened to overwhelm the Uigher culture. He’d watched and listened and assessed for six weeks before, in desperation, he made his move on Ping.
Michael stroked the woman’s hair. “You give me so many gifts, my piece of happiness.”
In truth she had given him a way into the Muslim discontent in China. Michael had heard rumors of Ping’s affair with a local Uigher leader and had watched and waited, finally seducing her away.
In Michael’s skilled hands she had told him things—the things her Uigher lover had wanted to know—like the plans of the nuclear facility. Like how she hated the enemies of Islam. Like her part in the grand design.
Such a little thing to bomb the reactor—in bed she had boasted of her part to Michael.
She looked up at him, and a tremor of—fear?—seemed to cross her features.
“You are my first like you. So big. So hairy.” She smiled and ran her fingers through the light hair on his chest. “You stay with me, yes?”
He stood and grabbed his shirt.
“I can’t, Ping. You know that. The furs come with the Sunday market. After today I’ll have a full load.”
He hauled his knee-length Tajik coat off a chair, but Ping tugged it from him, her full mouth in a pretty pout.
“You stay. You leave–leave all the time. I want you stay here for love. Furs—they wait until next market.”
Michael gent
ly took the heavy wool coat from her, uncurling and kissing each finger one by one.
“The best furs are there now—early in the month after curing through the spring.”
Her small eyes pooled with tears. “Please stay. Please?”
He might normally. What red-blooded man would turn down her desire? But he had no time; he had contacts to meet in the market and then the return to Afghanistan.
She wrapped her arms around him and held on with a fierce strength that surprised him. She was a stoic, a soldier, a product of the Chinese system who had fallen only to the need of a woman to feel beautiful and desired.
“Ping.” He grabbed her shoulders and held her away again. Tears ran down her face, but she would not meet his eyes. A sob ripped through her.
Unlike her. He grabbed her chin and turned her face to him.
“What’s going on?”
“You stay here,” she said more firmly, the tears drying on her cheeks.
“We both knew I would leave today.”
She turned to a drawer in the small dresser in one corner and glanced towards the small apartment’s door. It was the telltale move.
She turned back to him with a pistol. Chinese Tokarev, by the look of the narrow stock. Good aim.
“It’s Albemit, isn’t it?” He named her Uigher lover who had never fully left the picture. “He comes?”
Ping’s eyes went wide at his switch to Mandarin. Confirmed.
“Bastard. You use me.”
“I thought we both enjoyed ourselves.”
“They know who you are. They know you American. Now they come.”
He shook his head. Too many women seemed to look at him with hate these days. The thought brought a grin that increased Ping’s glower. Her hand wavered.
Clearly, she wasn’t used to weapons, but in some ways that made her more dangerous. The Tokarev could drop a grizzly bear easily and the damned weapon had no safety.
“You don’t want to do this, Ping.” Use her name to calm her. Keep it familiar. “Do you want China at war?”
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