by Sean Black
I worked alongside the villagers in the fields all morning. They showed me what to do and I did it without complaint. No one seemed surprised that I was helping. It was early in the afternoon that I became aware of two men on the eastward ridge, watching me, AK-47s slung across their backs.
The pace of work settled with the falling sun. The villagers finished, and I trudged with them back up through the stepped terraces to the village. As I reached the elder’s house, I turned back toward the ridge. The men who had been watching me were gone.
The men ate first and separately from the women. The talk was of the crop, prices, and the weather, how the seasons appeared to be shifting earlier every year. It occurred to me that it was a conversation that might have taken place around a kitchen table at a farm in Iowa. No one made any mention of the two men who had been watching me from the ridge.
NINE
By the end of the week, as far as the people of the village were concerned, I simply was. While the other children tired of me, like kids at Christmas lose interest in a new toy, Sasha followed me as much as ever, peppering me with questions.
In turn, I learned more about her. The woman I had initially taken to be her mother was an aunt. Her mother was dead. The story fell from Sasha in dribs and drabs, each chapter breaking my heart a little more but steeling my resolve to see the operation through to the end.
Sasha’s mother had been born in the village, the daughter of the village elder I had met when I had first arrived. In the years before the Taliban had seized the country by the throat, she had left the village to travel to Kabul to go to school, returning only at harvest time. Then she had trained as an elementary teacher, returned to the village, married a local man and opened a small village school.
The Taliban had arrived.
I hadn’t asked Sasha for the details but, from what she told me one late afternoon as she followed me from the fields, she had been spared the truth of her mother’s fate. At first there had been night letters, warnings that her mother should learn her place. She had ignored the first two. The third had come in the form of four men, who had taken her while the family slept. Her body was returned the following week.
The little girl’s eyes were wet as she told me the last part. It was the first time I had seen her or any of the children cry. I put my arm around her and she snuggled into me. It was perhaps the greatest moment of acceptance I had received from anyone in the village so far. She trusted me enough to show what she denied everyone else: her grief, in all its rawness.
Days passed, time slowed. The novelty of village life ebbed away, replaced by routine. The two men who had been watching me were gone.
Their absence signaled a shift. They hadn’t lost interest. Their curiosity could hardly have been satiated. Neither did I think they had become more careful in their surveillance. Even if they had, I would still have known about it. That left only one option: contact with them was imminent. They were moving into the second phase of the operation.
In general, the transition from one phase, or one state of being, was the dangerous part, the part where things go wrong, taking off and landing a plane being the most obvious example. It was the same for a covert operation such as this.
I knew that I was being watched by those on my own side via satellite. But I was as alone as someone in my position could be. There would be no last-second cavalry dash if things went awry. They were operating on one simple premise that would mean either life or death: that the insurgents’ curiosity would outweigh their bloodlust. With every previous contact where this group had been able to take a prisoner alive, they had done so. They understood the value of a live captive. Not only did they serve as a bargaining chip and hold valuable intelligence, a live captive offered a propaganda bonanza that few in the West understood. If things went to plan, I hoped to avoid a TV appearance and be out of the country long before they came even close to that stage. But one always had to be at peace with the knowledge that things often didn’t go to plan. That was why I was used in these lone-operator situations. I wasn’t braver or stronger. I was simply more accepting.
TEN
A new morning dawned. The sun rose. The villagers ate. And then, with them, I began my day.
The crop was close to gathered as I moved slowly up the terraced steps to my new home. Sasha was waiting for me. A baby, only a few weeks old, bounced on her hip.
‘Your little cousin?’ I asked her in Pashtun.
She shook her head. ‘My niece.’
I had been thinking of how I might get her out of the village and kept coming up blank. Once contact was made properly I would have no room for passengers. Still, there had to be a way and I had fixed on the idea of returning briefly once my objective was confirmed. It would be risky but achievable. I would attract some major shit from higher up but that was nothing new.
Sasha stared at me unblinking. ‘Tell me again about America.’
‘What do you want to know?’ I asked her.
‘Tell me about the food.’
She was quite the little cook. I had seen her making bread and stews with a flair that would have put to shame most adults. She was bright too. She could see someone perform a task once and have it down pat. I had taught her a few words of English and, while her pronunciation left a bit to be desired, she was a quick study. Outside the village she would do well.
As far as I had been able to tell, during my thirty years on the planet, life on earth was pretty much a lottery. If you were born in the West, or into a middle-class family in one of the emerging powerhouse economies, you had a shot. If you were male, all the better, although that was a weakening determinant of someone’s opportunities. But be born female into a small village in Afghanistan and however bright, however capable you were, however determined, the odds were stacked almost insurmountably against you.
I crouched and told Sasha a little more of my invented life. I had already run through the story several times with her but, as with most kids, repetition seemed to be part of the enjoyment. I had been the same as a kid, homing in on a favorite story and asking my parents to read it to me over and over again.
Behind the little girl, the sun began to drop toward the mountains. They would come tonight. I could feel it. The end of the beginning of the operation was approaching. Soon I would enter the second, most dangerous, phase.
I snapped awake a little after midnight, dressed quickly in the dark and pushed open the door, stepping out onto the rough dirt threshold. There wasn’t as much moonlight as I would have liked but I wasn’t dictating events or their timing — not yet anyway.
If they were coming for me, I didn’t want them to find me in such confined quarters. Small spaces and lots of men hyped up with adrenalin and bravado are almost invariably a bad combination.
I had already scoped out a position near to where they had been watching me. It overlooked the fields but also formed the main lower approach to the village, a simple dirt track that would take them straight up to my quarters, but I wouldn’t be there when they arrived.
Moving up and to my left, I picked up the goat track. The village was silent. Doors closed. Candles extinguished. I heard people snoring as I flitted past a few houses.
The night itself was cold but not freezing. I took my time, listening for any suggestion of another person, but all was quiet.
Within an hour, I had found my position. Now all I had to do was wait.
ELEVEN
The men who had come for me, with their guns, scuttled around the outside of the shack. They were doing so much whispering, pointing and running back and forth that I found myself doing something I hadn’t anticipated. It was a reaction that many soldiers were familiar with, but one that rarely, if ever, made it into the movies where combat was always horrific and terrifying, and the protagonists were hard-eyed and lantern-jawed. I knew that war could be horrifying but combat, when you were in the middle of it, was many things besides. It could be funny — piss-your-pants, laugh-until-you-cou
ldn’t-breathe funny.
Finally, the older man, the one with the pulwar sword, lost patience. He pointed to one of the others, and mimed raising his foot to the wooden door.
The younger man took a run at it and hefted his boot. The door swung open, then ricocheted back into his face, leaving him sprawling on the ground. His patience exhausted, the older man wrestled the AK-47 from him and pushed his way inside, shouting in Pashtun for a man who wasn’t there to get to his feet.
Whatever meagre element of surprise they might have had was spent, and the leader was angry. The others rushed inside and he pushed one out, assigning him to guard the door.
The village was awake now. I could sense eyes peering through cracks but no one left their house. They stayed put. It was a wise move because soon there was a volley of shots from inside the hut as an AK-47 let loose with the opposite of celebratory fire.
Even with shots fired, I remained relaxed. It was no accident that the construction methods used here were also good for absorbing bullets. I had even seen a mortar shell hit a thick adobe compound wall and embed without detonating.
I waited. They would no doubt interrogate the villagers but the villagers knew nothing because I hadn’t told anyone I was leaving. The insurgents would grow bored and, with daylight, nervous.
When they left, I would follow. That was the plan. They would report back to the man I had come to find, or to an intermediary, in which case I would follow the intermediary. The West had become so adept at intercepting their electronic communications that the insurgents had pushed their intelligence channels back into the Stone Age.
The three men gathered in a huddle outside. Their voices carried to me on the cold wind as they argued. The elder shoved one of the others hard in the shoulder and the younger man shouted a torrent of abuse. The leader raised his sword, but for show rather than threat.
The argument was bad news. The leader of the group had lost face. In the American military an officer fuck-up prompts grumbling rather than an open show of defiance.
The leader raised his pulwar again. He pointed the tip toward the other houses in the village and barked orders. They started to bang on doors. When no doors opened, they kicked them wide, more carefully this time. The leader of the group tucked his pulwar back into the sash around his waist and marched behind the two men. They reached the village elder’s compound. The door opened and the man emerged. He regarded the three armed insurgents with the same lack of surprise that had greeted my arrival. It was hard to imagine a more out-of-the-way place on the planet, yet men kept arriving. Armed men. Killers.
Even when someone had come to kill you, such meetings were often highly ritualized. Cheeks were kissed, supplications made to the Prophet, hospitality offered. This was not going to be one of those times. The leader of the group drew back his hand and slapped the elder hard across the face.
The force of the blow sent him to his knees. His wife rushed to his side and the insurgent leader kicked out at her, catching her with a boot to the head as she knelt down to tend her husband. There was more shouting. The tip of the pulwar was jabbed toward my shack.
‘Where is he?’
The elder raised his hands, palms open, toward the insurgent leader. Even if he had known, he wasn’t going to tell.
The Pashtun people in rural areas lived by the code of Pashtunwali. It revolved around ten sets of principles. The tenth commandment was nanawatai, the right of a person to asylum from dark forces. Nanawatai had saved the life of Navy SEAL Petty Officer First Class Marcus Luttrell when his team had been wiped out by Taliban fighters. It had also saved the lives of members of the Pakistan military and more than one Russian soldier. A stranger who asked for protection had to be granted it, at least until a solution could be found.
More villagers had emerged from their homes, some to watch, others to scream at the men, who were running from house to house, tearing the interiors apart in a frenzied attempt to find me. At the edge of the path into the village, the children had clustered together in a tiny knot, ushered away from the eye of the storm by their mothers. Sasha stood at the front of the little group.
An icy wind rose at my back, sweeping down the mountainside, but my gaze was fixed on Sasha. With a chill that ran all the way down my back, I realized I wasn’t the only one. The insurgent leader was turning in her direction. He held the pulwar sword and moved it slowly from side to side, feeling its heft as he started toward her.
TWELVE
The other children fell away as he advanced. Sasha stayed exactly where she was, through fear or, more likely, defiance. This was her valley, her village, and no one was going to intimidate her. She had more of the Pashtunwali spirit in her tiny body than the rest of the village put together. She had been the first to meet me, and I understood now that, by leading me into the village, she had invoked nanawatai.
Without thinking, I jumped down from the rocky outcrop I was hunkered behind and began to run. For the first time since I had arrived, I felt the tiny comms device that ran into my left ear begin to vibrate. The ops center wanted to open comms. There were no pleasantries, only a question barked into my ear, so loudly that I felt my head throb.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Back to the village.’
‘Negative. Stay where you are. They’ll likely RV with the target, whether they have you or not. Repeat. Stay where you are.’
I kept running, scrabbling across the rocky ground, racing at an angle across scattergun shale. I had lost sight of the village but could still hear people shouting at the insurgents, and piercing the din, the plaintive whine of a little girl in pain.
‘Stay where you are,’ the voice in my ear repeated.
I yanked out the earpiece, clicked it off and tucked it into my pocket.
I walked toward the three men with my hands raised, palms open, to make clear that I didn’t have a weapon. I could see the other children grouped around Sasha. She lay on the ground, her knees pulled up to her chest, her face wet with blood, which poured from a wound that ran along her scalp. She was whimpering with pain. It was hard to listen to, but a good sign. Dead people didn’t make sounds.
The insurgent leader stared at the ground. He had lost control of the situation by hitting the little girl. The villagers wouldn’t forget it, and the insurgents relied on them for their day-to-day survival. The relationship between insurgents and civilians was complex. The insurgents used intimidation but were careful not to overstep the mark too frequently. An insurgency relied on the camouflage of civilian support, and if you lost that support, by striking a young girl, it was hard to win it back.
I wanted to check on the little girl but he already had the AK-47 and the Makarov pistol trained on me. From what I could see, the gash was probably not quite as bad as it looked. It would require stitches but the biggest worry was that she had suffered concussion.
I felt the prod of the gun barrel in my back. I glanced over to see a grubby exchange of money from the leader of the insurgents to the village elder. A roll of muddy notes was pressed into his palm, with a mumbled apology.
Hands reached in front of me and I felt rough fabric against my forehead. It was dragged down over my eyes and pulled tight. Hands moved to my wrists. My heart rate slowed as I let my hands be tied behind my back.
From the conversation taking place between the men, I realized that while they had been watching me for weeks there was one fact they didn’t appear to have grasped.
They had no idea that I could understand every word they were saying.
They led me back up the pass. Listening to the footsteps, I could tell that the two younger men were in front, the leader behind. The leader’s hand grasped the knot where my hands met and used it to guide me forwards.
They had stopped talking between themselves. From time to time, I would stumble forward and get a jab in the kidneys. They kept moving up, deeper into the mountains.
I counted every step. It helped me track the passage of time and d
istance and kept my mind off the little girl I had promised to keep safe and who now lay bleeding in the village.
There was no getting away from it. I felt guilty. I could have stayed where I was and allowed them to find me. I would have arrived at exactly the same point. But those weren’t my orders. I was too highly valued an asset to hand myself over. In contrast, a child didn’t enter into the equation. Those were the things you had to make peace with. Dead civilians were a by-product for both sides, sometimes by accident and sometimes by design. To reject that idea was to surrender the field of battle.
I tried to refocus. I had seen worse, much worse, than a young girl bleeding from the head. There had been other operations with civilian casualties, younger children, babies even, the horrors stacked on top of each other.
During my psy-ops training at Fort Bragg, I had sat alongside classmates and listened to a lecture about memory formation and trauma. The advice was simple. When bad shit happened, try not to think about it. There was even a fancy scientific term for not following this advice: potentiation. The more you recovered a memory, the more you dredged it up, the more the neurons in your brain, which fired together to create that memory, became grooved in a pattern. Long-term potentiation took place if you thought about an event too often. It was like walking into a huge storage facility, opening a unit and jamming the event, or how you remembered it, inside, then going back and rooting through it. The more you opened it, the more you rooted around, the more real it became.
Blindfolded, my captors pushing me along, I was already struggling to keep track of the passage of time and of the distance. The direction we were travelling? I’d lost sight of the sun as the mountains had closed in around us so I had no idea.
THIRTEEN