Veiled Freedom

by Jeanette Windle

  Maybe this forgiveness was for those who could obey all the commands in these pages. Or for Isa’s personal disciples. But who could? To brush one’s teeth, wash three times before prayer—these one could measure daily into Allah’s scales. But kindness, compassion, love?

  And to an enemy! Where was the call to fight the evil and apostate? to wage war against the unbeliever? to press forward with the faith until all the world lay prostrate as foretold in submission to Allah?

  And yet . . .

  Jamil rubbed a weary hand across his face. What kind of world might it be if instead of battle all people chose to follow the commands in these pages? “Children, obey your parents in the Lord” had been instilled in Jamil since he could walk. But that fathers should not embitter or discourage their children? That husbands should not be harsh with their wives? That servants should work hard and be honest and not accept bribes, masters be just and generous with their servants?

  And the commands to love. Love God. Love one’s brother in the faith. Love wives and children and servants and neighbors. Love the helpless, the widows, the downtrodden.

  Most inconceivably, love enemies.

  It would be a world of peace.

  A paradise.

  The noise next door was proving too distracting to continue reading. Jamil put away the New Testament. But it was a sound across the cinder-block partition from the New Hope compound that prodded him to sudden alertness. The metallic scrape of a dead bolt was followed by the rusty screech of the pedestrian gate. Ameera’s assistant again?

  Jamil reached for the camera to focus in on a dark shape rushing across the street. He relaxed as Rasheed’s bearded features emerged from the shadows. As the New Hope chowkidar reached the jinga truck, a man climbed down from the cab. The camera screen displayed the two men’s inaudible conversation. Then Rasheed strode back to the open gate while the other man returned to his cab. A customer, then, but one Rasheed didn’t know well enough to invite to camp inside the gate.

  The chowkidar’s retreating shape blazed to white as oncoming headlights overwhelmed the camera’s night vision setting. Jamil slid the camera back into his vest, but he didn’t return to his reading. The commotion next door had grown suddenly louder. The sound of a vehicle stopping, a gate opening offered a reason. The combination of foreign music, loud voices, and laughter was so like that to which he’d once dropped off his employer that curiosity drew Jamil up the slope of the roof, though he lowered himself first to his belly. Security might be lax next door, but an intruder appearing suddenly on the perimeter wall was as likely to draw shots as questions.

  Jamil scooted well outside the pool of light before raising his head cautiously above the edge of the metal roofing. The shed roof overlooked the back garden of the neighboring compound. He didn’t need to worry about being spotted, Jamil saw immediately. A dozen large, pale foreigners sprawled out on lounge chairs were giving no attention to their perimeter security.

  Their noisy high spirits were explained by what Jamil could see rounding the side of the house from their front gate. A food delivery from one of Kabul’s growing number of Chinese restaurants. Not male attendants as an Afghan restaurant would have but female.

  Jamil had been watching only a few minutes when curiosity became stunned disapproval, then horrified disgust. Sliding back from the roof’s edge, he lowered himself silently to the ground and headed to his room. Removing his vest, Jamil laid the camera carefully in his clothing box. But Ameera’s book he tossed recklessly to one side, the words he’d read earlier burned from his mind by his fury.

  Besides, it had been only the illusion of dreams that such a world of which he’d fantasized, the commands he’d pondered, had any place in reality. What he’d just seen was a reminder of how great a deceit lay in any such offer of hope.

  A perfect morning.

  From the rise where Steve stood, the graying of dawn was sharpening into focus a pastoral landscape. A flat plain, the meandering curves of a river spreading out into cultivated fields and pastures. The fields held no crops this late in the fall, their earth freshly turned over. But green lingered in pasturelands, wind-twisted mulberry trees edging fields, almond and apple groves harvested of fruit but still grasping a few leaves.

  Behind the plain, rocky, snow-tipped peaks blushed pink, though stars still glittered in bright patterns overhead. Down the hillside below Steve’s boots, adobe houses and mud-brick compound walls slumbered like a Christmas frieze of Bethlehem. After Kabul’s dust and smog, the air was as crisp and clean and sweet as fresh-pressed local cider.

  And cold.

  Steve’s breath hung white in the air. These were times he didn’t mind the inconvenience of body armor for the extra warmth it offered. Beside him, Khalid had shed his Italian suit for the camouflage fatigues of his muj days, a heavy Army parka matching Steve’s own. Turning toward Steve, he grinned savage pleasure, dark eyes flashing with excitement. This wasn’t the first time the two men had stood together on a mountain slope at the edge of dawn, and something in that remembered camaraderie, the tension and thrill of combat about to begin, curved Steve’s mouth to exhilaration as he met his principal’s glance.

  It had taken two weeks and substantial negotiation before Khalid’s task force lifted off from Bagram Air Force Base. The inclusion of DEA chief Ramon Placido’s team greatly simplified Steve’s arrangements. With American embassy personnel involved, the U.S. task force commander had volunteered not just a Black Hawk combat helicopter but a CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter capable of ferrying thirty Afghan counternarcotics police and their Colombian and DynCorp advisers. He’d also arranged hospitality at the nearest American-manned military outpost to each planned raid.

  This was the ninth such raid in three weeks. The Black Hawk and Chinook had touched down after dark last night at a nearby PRT base currently home to a hundred Texas National Guard troops. Provincial Reconstruction Team outposts were part of ISAF’s “hearts and minds” program, designed to offer a nucleus of military presence while winning over local support by sponsoring such projects as schools and clinics, wells and water pumps.

  The PRT bases were too small to project any serious strength, their contingents vastly outnumbered by local militias, and as their orders were largely to hole up inside and not interfere with local government, they’d done little to stem Afghanistan’s escalating lawlessness. But the Texans had proved hospitable, providing two troop transports to ferry the MOI force to this small market town, along with a Humvee bristling with gun turrets and troops in full body armor as escort.

  The American soldiers were not, however, authorized to participate in the dawn raid, so the transport drivers lounged against their bumpers, watching the show with Steve and the others, while the Humvee contingent spread out in a perimeter watch. Steve approved of the guards’ vigilance and discipline, though less of their adulation. To these young soldiers on their first combat rotation, private security contractors were the big guns, best of the best. Assumed was that all PSCs were former Special Ops who’d been there and done great and dangerous things.

  Also assumed was that they were now doing still greater, secret, and more dangerous things while raking in as reward ten times the guardsmen’s biweekly paycheck.

  On Khalid’s other side, DEA chief Ramon Placido straightened abruptly, a hand to his earpiece. He nodded to a cameraman behind a tripod beside him, a CNN reporter chronicling the MOI operation. A blinking red light signaled the camera had gone live. Down below, someone’s perfect morning was about to be spoiled.

  From this rise, Steve could make out only too plainly stealthy shapes fanning out silently and furtively through the dirt streets. The raid had been scheduled to strike just before dawn. But though the PRT transport had delivered their guests to the hilltop FOB—forward operating base—in ample time, the district police chief whose jurisdiction this was had been less punctual.

  The target was a compound on the edge of town where fluted columns, domes, and arche
s of an elaborate poppy palace thrust themselves incongruously above high brick walls and the adobe hovels of its neighbors. The owner was an Uzbek opium merchant, Akbar Dilshod. By all accounts, Dilshod was a terror, famed for taking out local competition with his own private hit squad. His men were accused of everything from rape to torture.

  The reputation of Dilshod’s guards was the reason Khalid had insisted on waiting for those local police reinforcements. The town was still silent, but the gray of dawn was lightening. Any moment, someone staggering out a doorway to the vegetation that was their outhouse would raise the alarm.

  The Afghan task force had now stopped their stealthy advance. Outside a tall, steel gate, MOI recruits slipped forward to slap explosive charges against the hinges. Did Dilshod have no sentries up on those walls? With Steve’s next white exhalation, a loud blast shattered the dawn peace. As the gate blew off its hinges, troops rushed in.

  Then without a single gunshot, it was over. An MOI recruit climbed the wall to wave a blanket as an all clear. The PRT contingent unearthed thermoses of coffee and were handing them around when a knot of camouflage fatigues trudged up the hill. Among them were the minister of counternarcotics and one of Placido’s DEA subordinates, who’d both accompanied the MOI task force in the raid.

  The DEA agent hurried ahead to address his superior. “Bad news: the compound’s empty. Someone must have tipped them off we were coming. The good news . . . well, you’re going to have to see this, sir, to believe it.”

  DynCorp held the embassy’s security contract, and a quartet converged around the DEA agents as they hurried down the hill. As Khalid followed, Steve waved Ian, Mac, and Rick into a tight diamond around him.

  Grabbing his camera from its tripod, the reporter hurried to join the protective bubble. The town was no longer sleeping as the group reached the first dirt street, eyes peering from cracked doorways and windows. But the MOI police were doing as they’d been trained, fanned out along streets and on corners, and the residents didn’t venture to expose more than their eyes.

  The district police chief, a burly, turbaned Tajik, welcomed the group into Dilshod’s compound. Beaming satisfaction, the chief didn’t lead the newcomers toward the villa but a sizable hole to one side of the courtyard. A large trapdoor had been removed to expose an underground passageway that had to extend far beyond the perimeter wall.

  Steve preceded Khalid cautiously down the steps. Though he’d no real interest in this operation beyond his own principal’s safety, he blinked in stunned appreciation. There had to be a thousand kilo bricks of opium down here, while burlap bags of hashish extended down the tunnel from floor to man-high ceiling as far as Steve could see.

  “There’s way too much to consider removing into evidence,” DEA chief Placido said. “The value alone would draw Tallies like flies if we tried to convoy all this overland. My suggestion is that it be destroyed on the spot.”

  “Yes, yes,” Khalid agreed. He turned to the CNN reporter. “And you will film it so that all the world will know it has indeed been destroyed and not removed to sell elsewhere.”

  It took some time for additional C-4 and explosives to be requisitioned from the PRT base. Back on the safe retreat of the rise, the cameraman made satisfied noises beside Steve as the blast ripped a trench in the ground at least a hundred feet long.

  Before the dust settled, Khalid addressed the cameraman’s mike. “The largest seizure Afghanistan has ever seen. . . . The MOI will set the example in ending the hold corruption and drug dealing has taken on this beautiful country. . . . The rich and powerful will not be spared. . . . The burning stench of this poison has reached the portals of Allah himself to cry out for justice.”

  Behind Khalid, the camera angle offered potential TV audiences a spectacular view of black billows from smoldering opium and hashish as well as the orange, green, and purple monstrosity of Dilshod’s poppy palace.

  The CNN reporter was nodding respectful approval of the minister’s extravagant statements.

  And why not? Steve demanded of himself. Despite Dilshod’s escape, these last three weeks had been every bit the triumph Khalid had promised. In nine raids, a dozen major opium kingpins had been rounded up along with scores of minor arrests. Even without this last haul, opium seizures had stacked up to over two thousand kilos by Steve’s running count.

  Maybe Khalid really is the guy who can turn the MOI and this whole big mess around. In fact, with a few more like him, there just might be hope for this country.

  All in all, Steve felt more approving of his former ally and client than he had in years.

  “Did you give out any information?” Amy demanded anxiously.

  Hitching his dusty AK-47 higher on his shoulder, Wajid scratched at his beard, expression baffled.

  Amy realized she’d spoken in English and switched to simple Dari. “The man who spoke to you, did you tell him about the women who live here?”

  The elderly guard shook his head. “I told the man what I know. Women live here as in any dwelling. They are respectable women who keep their faces covered in my presence. So I do not know their faces. Nor their names. Only the foreign woman Ameera.”

  Amy now had an idea of what had spooked Aryana. A man had knocked on the gate after Amy and the others left for the neighborhood outreach yesterday, Wajid was just now bothering to inform Amy. He’d asked for a woman he claimed to be a runaway female relative. Had Aryana spotted a face she knew loitering along the street while she’d been helping load the truck?

  “And you don’t remember a name? Or what the man said she looked like?”

  Unlike Farah and some of the others, Aryana had kept her burqa firmly over her face when she’d stepped outside with a load, so Amy wasn’t concerned the man could have actually identified the young woman. But the fact that anyone was making inquiries was worrisome. The Welayat bureaucracy wasn’t supposed to release where their former prisoners had taken shelter, but Amy was under no illusions the information couldn’t be bought at the right price.

  “He gave no description, and I did not listen to names since I told him I knew nothing.” Wajid looked agitated, so Amy desisted from further questions.

  “Thank you. You did right. But next time please do not give them my name either.” Ameera was not the name by which officialdom knew the New Hope country manager, so hopefully the guard’s slip wouldn’t be a problem. “And tell me right away if anyone asks about our people.”

  Turning to Rasheed, who’d brought her Wajid’s report, Amy switched with relief from laborious Dari to English. “Unless he comes back, I guess we won’t really know if this man was after Aryana or anyone else here. Either way I’m concerned about our security, especially if there’s the slightest chance info is being leaked to family members. How long would it take to get some concertina wire on top of the perimeter wall? Maybe a second guard? Or even a guard dog?”

  “A dog is an unclean animal,” Rasheed said. “And marking the property with such defenses as the foreigners use announces to all who pass by that inside are rewards worth pursuing. It would draw thieves like flies. Would it not be simpler to talk with such men as came yesterday and find out what they seek? If there is a father or brother willing to take custody of this Aryana or any woman receiving shelter here, is it not their right and duty to do so?”

  Amy had started walking back with Rasheed from the gate to the main house. Now she stopped to stare at him. “I couldn’t allow that. The whole idea of New Hope is to give these women a sanctuary so they won’t have to go back to family situations where they’re mistreated. Certainly not against their will. Besides, Aryana is a widow, and it’s her brothers-in-law she’s afraid of, not blood relatives.”

  Rasheed looked down at Amy as though she’d materialized from another planet. “It is not for a woman to raise her will against the men of her family. Nor is it for outsiders to interfere with proper discipline within a family. If Aryana is a widow, the law is clear. She belongs to her husband’s family, and
one of her husband’s brothers must take her as wife. Islam does not permit that zakat, charity, be wasted on those not truly in need.”

  Amy breathed deeply to quell the anxiety beginning to squeeze at her stomach. As evenly as she could muster, she answered, “I certainly don’t want to disrespect your country’s law. But your MOI gave New Hope permission to run this shelter, and I’ve given my word to these women that they’ll be safe here. So I hope you understand I must insist we get some security procedures into place. Not just to protect their physical well-being but their identities and whereabouts. If even one of these women comes under threat, none of them are going to feel safe living here. If I have to, I’ll move our entire operation elsewhere before I let that happen.” It wasn’t a challenge Amy had any wish to carry through.

  Rasheed was still staring at Amy, but she could no longer read his expression. Then he shrugged. “You concern yourself without reason. A runaway wife is a matter of honor, but these women have already received judgment and been punished for their crimes. What respectable family would wish for their return?”

  A majority opinion in Afghanistan, no doubt. But Amy hadn’t forgotten Debby’s earlier warning about Aryana. It might not be the woman’s return or a second marriage her in-laws were after.

  “I am chowkidar, not owner,” Rasheed continued. “I cannot make changes to the property without proper authorization.”

  An issue he’d never raised on any of Amy’s past requests. “So I should contact the owner about the security?”

  “Khalid is not in Kabul at this time,” the chowkidar answered indifferently. “In any case, the minister is an important man and busy. He does not deal with such matters as properties and rent. It is his deputy Ismail through whom all arrangements have been made.”