“Jesus,” he gasped, causing Najeeb to turn his way, clutching him as if Skelly might be about to fall. “No. I’m all right. I just can’t believe this.”
He looked at Najeeb, whose eyes were wide, glazed in the light of the lantern. These were his people, Skelly suddenly realized, in a way he never had before. What must he think of all this?
The two Razaq men whom Skelly hadn’t recognized were the first to be hanged, and they went in a hurry. Their mouths were open and moving, and you could see the crazed look in their eyes, but the din of the mob was too loud to hear a thing they were saying as men rushed to either side of the tableau for a better view. Najeeb took advantage of the surge to push forward a good fifteen feet or so. Skelly pulled out his notebook, his head still clearing.
“Shouldn’t someone be selling popcorn?” he croaked, the dark joke ringing hollow even to his own ear as the first two bodies twitched into view, eyes bulging, tongues lolling and the baying of the crowd rose to a roar.
He looked again toward Najeeb, who was expressionless now, watching his people swarm and surge around the bodies while two volunteers tugged again at the ropes, as stout as seamen reefing sails in a storm. Then Skelly looked around at the faces of the crowd, their teeth showing as they shouted and bounced, and he realized he’d seen them all before in one place or another across the world, his own country included. At wars and demos and sporting events, calling for blood and victory. These were Skelly’s brothers, too.
Skelly’s fever suddenly blasted him with a wave of cold, a chill that threatened to drop him to his knees, so he grasped Najeeb’s shoulder, nearly letting go of his notebook. Najeeb gripped him around the waist and held on until the moment passed, Skelly nodding to let him know it was all right, the crowd surging around them once again.
Razaq’s brother and son were next, handled clumsily as attendants thrust them toward the ropes. One was stoic, the other shouting, which caused the spectators at the front to spit—lunging motions that produced trailing gobs of brown liquid from the hash and tobacco they’d been chewing. Other men leapt forward in ones and twos to slap at the victims’ heads and kick at their calves, the shouts coming in great bursts now.
Nooses slipped over their heads, then tightened, and the attendants stepped back. The two men then rose next to the previous victims, twitching and kicking as they lurched upward, heave by heave, toward the branches of the eucalyptus. Skelly now recognized Salim as the one on the right, the one who’d been shouting defiantly. He remembered him from Razaq’s house, gracious and quiet, and he felt sick to his stomach, no trick of fever this time. Someone bumped him from behind and he shoved defiantly back, the brief surge of strength departing as suddenly as it had come, so that he nearly fell. Najeeb caught him, pulling him forward. Skelly looked again toward the gallows and saw Salim still kicking, baggy garments fluttering as his knees pumped, face turning purple. One knee, then the other, like a beetle on its back. Then slower. Then nothing, head sagging but still with a face the color of raw meat.
A man standing near the front, the old fellow from the courtroom who had wielded the switch, raised both arms, and the crowd began to go quiet, because now it was time for the main event. The shouting died quickly, and every head turned toward the right, because there he was, the one they’d all come to see.
Razaq merited three escorts to the gallows, not that he was struggling in the least. His mouth was shut, drawn in a prim line. There was a purplish bruise across his left cheek where someone must have struck him on the way out of the courtroom, but if the man was in pain he did a fine job of hiding it. Skelly touched his notebook, then thought better of it. He would have no trouble remembering a single detail of this. The problem would be in forgetting it, and a shudder momentarily gripped him as if his body were already trying.
The last of the crowd’s noises vanished as the noose went round Razaq’s neck. The atmosphere was almost one of reverence now, or perhaps it had finally hit home to everyone exactly what they were doing, killing this man who could claim hundreds, perhaps thousands, of followers. This moment would either make their names or mark them for life.
The tugs now came, with audible grunts and heaves, two men pulling together. Razaq’s answer was a gargling cry, as if he’d at last thought of something to say but had waited too late, the words trapped below the knot. You could actually hear the rustle of his kameez, the scuffle of sandals in the crowd, then a lonely cough. Razaq made one feeble kick, then another. Then his face went dark and the light left his eyes. Skelly sighed loudly, Najeeb’s grip tightening around his waist.
The crowd stirred, still transfixed by the body that now swayed gently above them, high toward the leaves. Then Kudrat stepped before them. Where was Bashir for all this, Skelly wondered, feeling sickened and angry. Was the man gloating? Accepting congratulations? Counting up the payment for his services?
Then Skelly spotted him over to the right, nearly as much in the margins as Skelly and Najeeb, almost as if he were trying to melt into the surroundings. He no longer looked either triumphant or eager, and it dawned on Skelly that some strange new dynamic might now be in motion. But as far as Skelly was concerned, Bashir’s place in this tiny moment of history was ensured—he was the blackguard, the betrayer, the Taliban henchman who had delivered Razaq to the mob. The thought seemed finally to stir his professional instincts, and Skelly sensed the story beginning to percolate in his mind—an exotic and horrifying morality play, even though he wasn’t yet sure of some of the roles. Was Sam Hartley really a player? And if so, for whom? To what end? And where were the Arabs he had seen earlier?
The extra thinking took energy, and it cost him. A new blaze of fever took hold, consuming all the questions he’d been mulling. He looked back up at Razaq, the big man’s body now still in the glow of the lantern. It felt as if he were viewing the scene through thick glass, while a weary heaviness settled in his bowels.
Looking left to the fringes of the crowd, there they were once again, he realized. It was the Arabs he’d seen earlier, plus about half a dozen more, seemingly having materialized from nowhere. Perhaps they had arrived in the middle of the proceedings, while his attention had been turned toward the front. Some were on horseback, and now he could smell the animals. Manure and hay, the sweat of their hides. The longer he looked, the more of them he saw, although it was back toward the limits of the lantern’s lighting, so he couldn’t be sure of their numbers. Toward the rear of the scene, fainter still, was a new arrival on horseback, this one tall and lanky, almost abnormally high in the saddle. He wore a green camouflage jacket around a white kameez. Salt-and-pepper scraggle of a beard, and the long face everyone knew so well, topped by the white pillbox that he wore in every poster in every bazaar. Skelly shivered, feeling that even his illness had suddenly turned melodramatic. He didn’t dare take out his notebook now, not wanting to be seen scribbling any description of these men, but he furtively squinted toward them, wondering if he could really be seeing what he thought he was. Then the horse turned, and the tall rider drifted into shadow. Skelly looked to Najeeb for confirmation of the sighting, but the young man’s eyes were still locked on Razaq, a forlorn gaze bereft of hope.
“Najeeb,” he said breathlessly, tugging at a sleeve. “Who are they back there? Do you see them?”
Najeeb turned slowly, then shook his head, seemingly unimpressed at first, then turning quickly back toward the gallows, as if prodded by a new sense of urgency.
“The Arabs,” he said. “Don’t look at them. Don’t let them see you.”
Somewhere nearby a generator roared to life. A string of lightbulbs switched on, garishly lighting the scene, throwing long shadows from the five bodies into the field behind the trees. Skelly glanced left. No sign now of the Arabs, or of anyone on horseback. Shouldn’t he have heard them galloping away?
Then Kudrat spoke, his voice pealing loudly over the heads of the mob, turning every face toward his. His message was brief, presented sternly. Najeeb tra
nslated without prompting.
“You see before you the fate of traitors.”
Skelly would have expected something better, a touch of the poetic, or a quote from the Prophet. Some rhetorical flourish to give his account a punchy ending. But on further reflection he supposed that it fit. Blunt and businesslike, just like the executions. A chilling man who killed, then strode onward to the next transaction.
Then another man stepped forward by the lights, older than Kudrat but wearing an identical black turban.
“The local imam,” Najeeb muttered. “He is quoting the Koran. ‘Let evil be rewarded with evil.’ Plus a few other lines.”
“That one will do fine,” Skelly said, taking out his notebook and jotting it down.
The rest of the man’s speech was as predictable as that of an evangelist at a tent revival, he supposed; standard fire and brimstone. Damn them all and pass the plate. He realized that the adrenaline of the previous moments was flagging, and now all he wished to do was to crawl back into his bed. Let the pills do their work, then when daylight arrived he would try to track down the satellite phone. He was certain that Bashir would want to oblige, provided Kudrat would let him.
When the imam finished, some of the crowd began to drift away. Their earlier joy was drained. Perhaps they had begun to consider the possible consequences. Or maybe they were already bored.
Then Kudrat stepped forward with raised arms, and everyone halted. So there was more still to come, then. As Kudrat began to speak, Skelly sensed the crowd perking up, as if some new twist had reclaimed its attention.
“What is it?” he whispered to Najeeb. “What’s happening?”
Najeeb held up a hand, intent on hearing, which Kudrat didn’t make any easier by slipping into a low tone, not gentle or calm but stern and foreboding, no longer king of the rally but still its master and executioner.
“There are two more,” Najeeb said in a low voice. “Two more traitors to be hanged.”
For a few harrowing seconds Skelly was sure the two would be Najeeb and himself. But no one came to grab them, and everyone looked to the right, where there were the sounds of a struggle, then a shout. He was appalled to see Bashir being hauled forward along with one of his top men. Bashir yanked and struggled, and for an astonishing moment he broke free, only to be grabbed by men up front who seemed only too eager to assist Kudrat. Bashir reacted with an outraged shout in Pashto—no more English from him now—and as he continued he disappeared in a hail of punches and kicks, the muffled sounds of the blows creating a ripple of amusement in the crowd, appreciative of this encore performance after so little drama during the first five killings.
By the time Bashir’s face surfaced again he was nearly to the gallows, with a streak of blood on his right cheek. His mouth opened and he cried out.
“Traitors,” Najeeb said. “He is calling everyone traitors.”
“Why are they doing this?” Skelly asked. Everything was dissolving—his story, their means of escape, perhaps their very chance for survival—all of it being led to execution along with Bashir, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why.
“I suspect it is because either he or Kudrat has ambitions we don’t know about,” Najeeb said, leaning to speak into Skelly’s ear. “And I suspect that they may have something to do with your friend.”
“Sam Hartley?”
“I would not say his name again in present company.” Najeeb’s manner was as grave as his own.
The rope went around Bashir’s neck. He was still shouting—incoherently now, the pale pink mouth flashing like the belly of a landed fish. Then he stopped issuing sound altogether as the noose tightened and the volunteers hauled at the line. Bashir jolted upward. A foot. Then a yard. Then another. For a few moments he kicked like an angry child, then he went still, his tongue lolling.
The men around them began to drift away now that this last bit of entertainment had ended with such a whimper. Najeeb took Skelly’s arm, and they turned to go as well, both of them too stunned to speak. Then Kudrat approached from the left on a course to intercept them, red beard bobbing with every step. He spoke, and a few of his men turned to listen, although most paid it no mind, perhaps because the action was done for the night. Kudrat’s message was in Pashto, and Skelly tried to glean the gist of it by watching Najeeb’s face. The results weren’t promising. His fixer’s mouth went tight in a grim line, and his eyes seemed bottomless. Maybe they’d been expelled, told to scram even before it was light, and they’d have to spend the next few hours picking their way through the fields of unexploded bombs.
Kudrat was finished now. He turned away without another glance at them, which Skelly hoped was a good sign. If they were so unimportant, then why go to the trouble of doing something unpleasant to them?
“What did he say?”
Najeeb wouldn’t look at him. “You do not want to know all of it.”
“I do. Every word.”
Najeeb sighed and looked him in the eye.
“He asks that you think of this moment in your dreams tonight, because tomorrow there will be another trial. Yours.”
Skelly supposed that he should feel a bolt of fear, or terror, but his mind had seen and heard all it could hold for one evening, and the idea of a tomorrow seemed remote, far across a weary chasm of fever and sleep. A gurgle from his stomach told him that he must have absorbed the blow somewhere, but for the moment all he could do was offer the phrase that had leapt to mind earlier, when Bashir—was the man really dead now?—had burst into their room with his flashlight. Then he spoke it, in the barest of whispers.
“First the sentence, then the trial.”
“I will do what I can,” Najeeb said, placing a hand on his shoulder like a brother, or a father, a strength of grip that in Skelly’s weakened state was nearly overpowering. “I am very sorry. I will do what I can.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
NAJEEB LAY AWAKE in the dark listening to Skelly’s ragged breathing, amazed that the man could sleep. He supposed it had more to do with exhaustion and illness than with the ability to relax under threat of a death sentence. Perhaps the humane thing to do would be to withhold his medicine, for what could be worse than awakening fine and recovered only to be harangued and hanged, strung up by people whose shouting he wouldn’t even comprehend. Najeeb wondered how much he should even translate, appalled at the idea of deciphering their hatred to the bitter end. Far better if Skelly were to remain delirious, barely cognizant.
Or perhaps other options remained. The door was still unlocked. But when he had opened it a few minutes earlier he had found two burly men posted outside, eyes and gun barrels glittering in the lantern light. In another hour the sky would begin to lighten. He wondered if any of Bashir’s men were disillusioned enough to help him try something. He doubted it. They seemed to have taken their leader’s execution in stride. Another day, another boss.
He must have drifted off to sleep because the next thing he knew someone was beating on the door. He sat up with a start, blinking. There was pale light at the crack beneath the door, then a full wash of misty brightness as the door swung inward, the opening filled by two dark shapes, one of which reached toward him. A painfully strong grip took hold of his shoulder.
“Come with us.”
Najeeb barely had time to put his sandals on as the men pulled him toward the door.
“Just wait. Hold on.”
“Come. Now.”
“Hold it.”
Skelly was still asleep, breathing quietly now. Najeeb hated the thought of the man awakening alone. No breakfast and nothing to look forward to but an execution, surrounded by babble.
“I have to stay.”
“Come!”
The second man kicked him in the backside, driving him out the door like a goat. He began to wonder if this wasn’t the prelude to yet another trial. Or perhaps with him they’d skip the preliminaries altogether. He was merely the American’s paid minion, who could be dispatched with n
o audience other than the two ruffians who’d spent the night outside his door.
But once he came along they loosened their grip. They walked him to a little grove of eucalyptus where the remains of a campfire sighed and whined. A small man crouching next to it placed a teapot on the coals, then piled sticks at the other end, blowing at the reddening bundle.
“Wait here,” a guard said, then both men left.
Najeeb squatted by the fire to warm himself. By now the little man had coaxed a flame, which built as he added sticks, hissing and crackling, the sound of morning itself, with the air redolent of smoke. The man ignored him, so Najeeb said nothing. Then he heard footsteps approaching from behind and turned to see an oddly familiar bulk against the eastern brightness. Or was it the smell he recognized, an aromatic sharpness of someone who has been striding through open countryside just before dawn, a dewdrop bouquet of rosemary, goat dung, sweat and sandal leather.
“Najeeb, my son. Rise.”
It was an order he knew from long ago, from naps in the hills and overnight hunting expeditions. The man might as well have been his father, though by all rights he might also have been a rival.
“Aziz?” Najeeb stood, fully awake now.
“Tracking you down again, just like the time when you were twelve, following those eagles over the passes until you stumbled into Shinwari country. They’d have cut your balls off, and these fellows will do the same if they get half a chance. Fortunately the two outside your door were a little more agreeable. Let’s get you out of here.”
The man had aged—hardly a surprise—but the old light in his eyes looked different. It was as if someone had knocked the glass from a lantern. The flame still burned strongly, but the gleam on the surface was gone, the spark that had once shone from dawn to dusk.
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