“Do you have a cell phone?” asked Alton.
“I have this,” replied Mastana, withdrawing an older model from her pocket. “It is my mother’s.”
“What is your number? The fastest way to stay in touch will be text messaging.” They traded phone numbers and sent a short message to confirm all information was entered correctly.
“I guess that’s it,” said Alton. He stopped to look at her. “I’m glad to see you doing so well. Please be careful so you’ll stay that way.”
Mastana laughed. “I do good. You will see.” After exchanging another parting hug, Alton remained while Mastana walked toward the exit.
After waiting ten minutes, Alton trudged to the waiting Growler. “Let’s get back to camp.” On the way, he phoned David. “The wheels are in motion. Now all we can do is wait.”
CHAPTER 23
Kabul, Afghanistan
Mastana sat next to her mother at dinner. As usual, her Uncle Dani ate with them.
“Uncle,” said Mastana, “guess what I heard in the bazaar today.”
“What, my niece?”
“I was looking at jewelry, and I heard one man tell another man that Zahid Sohal, a great Al-Qaeda leader, is very angry.”
Dani’s ears perked up at the mention of his organization. “Why is he angry? Did you hear?”
“I did not hear all of it, Uncle, but I believe the man in the bazaar said one of Zahid’s best informants on the activities of the Americans has been kidnapped—by Al-Qaeda! Can it be true, Uncle?” she asked with wide, innocent eyes.
Dani ruminated for a minute. “It might be. What kind of informant? Did they say his name?”
“The informant is a lady, Uncle. They did not say her name, but they did say she worked in a restaurant where many American soldiers visit. The name of the restaurant is…” She pressed her eyes shut as if in great concentration, then opened them with a look of satisfaction. “…Gandamak’s. It is Gandamak’s Lodge. She listens to the Americans talk and tells Zahid what she has learned.”
“And Zahid Sohal is angry, is he?”
“Yes, Uncle. The man in the bazaar said the informant provided useful information about the Americans almost every day, and now Zahid no longer has the source of information.” Mastana repeated her question. “Could it be true, Uncle?”
“It might be. I do not know this Zahid, but I think I should find out more about this.”
Dani quickly stood up from the table and strode into the next room. From the animated—albeit one-sided—dialog that followed, Mastana knew her Uncle had placed a call, but she could not discern exactly what he was saying. She could only hope the plan was unfolding as expected.
Later that evening in a different Kabul neighborhood, a burly guard entered the locked room in which Fahima had been held prisoner since the night of her abduction. “Come with me,” he grunted.
Fahima followed, wide-eyed. Was she to be executed? Interrogated? Freed? She had no idea.
The guard led her into a large dining room filled with men, one of whom was Hadir. A young girl also sat in a chair against the back wall.
Hadir locked Fahima in a cold stare. “I have some very interesting news. Can you guess what it is?”
Fahima’s eyes darted from person to person. No one seemed to offer a friendly gaze. She held her head erect. Looking directly at Hadir, she replied, “No, I do not know what news you have.”
“I was told you are secretly working for Al-Qaeda. The honorable Zahid Sohal, one of our leaders, says you listen to the American soldiers in your restaurant and pass along information to him.”
Fahima felt dizzy from the torrent of information. What was he talking about? Who was Zahid Sohal? Were they testing her?
“Why did you not tell us this before, sister?” asked Hadir. “Why did you not tell us you were working for Zahid?”
Fahima froze, not knowing how to answer. Her gaze alighted on the girl in the back of the room. The child stared at her with compassionate eyes and nodded, her head moving almost imperceptibly. Somehow, without speaking to the girl, Fahima understood her next step, the only response she could make if she hoped to leave the house alive.
“Why do you think, brother?” retorted Fahima. “The Americans have ears everywhere. How many of our people would I have to tell about my secret role before the Americans discover I am not their friend? I am grieved I have to say this even now, in front of so many, but I have no choice.”
“Those are true words, sister,” acknowledged Hadir. “I now wish I had questioned you alone.” He glanced fiercely around the room. “All who are gathered here, you are sworn to secrecy on our sister’s mission!”
“I thank you,” said Fahima gravely. “I can only pray that the Americans do not learn of my role. Not every jihad is fought in the street, with guns and bombs. Some are fought in the midst of our enemy, quietly, with careful ears and a good memory.”
“Sister, your words ring of the truth,” declared Hadir. “We shall never tell others of your mission. Are all present in agreement?”
“Yes!” they roared in unison.
Fahima bowed her head. “Again, I thank you, my brothers.” The girl on the back wall sat motionless, but she viewed the proceeding with a distinct aura of satisfaction.
“And now,” concluded Hadir, “We will take our sister back to her home.” Turning to Fahima, he added, “Your honor remains intact, daughter of jihad. I will return you to your family. And I return your clueless guard, too. It is clear he knows nothing.”
As Mastana rode home in her uncle’s car, she removed her mother’s phone from her pocket.
“What are you doing, niece?” asked Dani, glancing at her momentarily as he drove through the dark, bumpy streets.
“I am playing a game,” she returned in a singsong voice. When her uncle’s eyes returned to the road, she opened the phone’s texting application and sent a message: The bird is free from the cage.
All afternoon and late into the evening, David had traveled throughout the city, scouring Kabul’s informant network for leads on Fahima’s location. As Alton waited for his friend to return, he spent several hours texting other associates to assess the progress of his own plan. He attempted to send a text message to David, but it repeatedly failed to deliver. David’s voice service was equally unavailable. Perhaps he was out of range of the city’s unpredictable cell service. At 3:00 a.m., Alton eventually gave up, too exhausted to stay awake. As he crawled into bed and closed his eyes, he anxiously reflected on the surprise that awaited his friend in the morning.
CHAPTER 24
Camp Eggers, Kabul, Afghanistan
A piercing, buzzing sound penetrated the heretofore-serene darkness. Alton sat up and switched off the alarm. He immediately checked his text messages. David had returned a mere hour ago and had gone to bed. The others wouldn’t arrive for a few more hours. He would refrain from waking David until then.
Three hours later, Alton rocked David’s half-dressed form back and forth. “Time to wake up, Sleeping Beauty!” he yelled. Normally, David had to drag himself out of bed, but this day he popped up like a prairie dog, ready to continue the search for Fahima.
“Whoa there, partner,” reassured Alton. “No need to hurry. We have a team briefing in thirty minutes.”
“Team briefing…?” asked David, still shaking the cobwebs from his sleep-deprived mind.
“Yes, the team searching for Fahima and Hadir will gather at one-thousand hours in Alpha building’s main briefing room.”
David approached the meeting location five minutes early, fully energized and ready to begin a new day’s work.
“Okay, let’s get ready—” began David as he rounded the doorframe and entered the room.
David froze to the spot, his words dying in mid-sentence. A smiling Fahima stood in the center of the room, while Alton and Mallory exchanged glances and smirked from behind her. Other than appearing slightly disheveled, Fahima seemed to be fine.
“What the h
ell…?” David trailed off, still in shock. The reality of the moment finally sank in, and he broke into a huge grin. “Fahima!” he exclaimed, advancing toward her.
She also advanced and threw her arms around David’s neck, relief and delight radiating from her face. Unable to contain his joy, David wrapped her in a bear hug and swiveled her from side to side. At the end of the embrace, they detached a little self-consciously.
Still wearing a crooked grin, David asked, “How…?”
“I’ll explain everything at the mess hall,” said Alton, “I believe Fahima is hungry, and we wouldn’t want to put her through any more trials today.”
“Yes,” said Fahima to Alton as she gazed at David and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Thank you. I am very hungry. I have not eaten since yesterday morning.”
The four friends sat down at a table located along the back wall of the mess hall. As Fahima did justice to the ample portions on her plate, Alton recounted her rescue.
“You remember I asked you yesterday morning if you had a double agent with any type of leadership role in Al-Qaeda?” he asked David.
“Of course. I gave you the name of…” he hesitated.
“Mallory knows,” reassured Alton. “She has the necessary clearance. And she worked with me on the plan.”
“Hardly—,” began Mallory.
“In any case,” interrupted Alton, smiling at Mallory before returning his attention to David, “you told me about Zahid Sohal.”
“Right—he has a minor leadership role in Al-Qaeda. He’s not part of the inner circle, but he regularly provides good information.”
“You told me on the condition that I not reveal Zahid’s identity as our agent,” said Alton.
“That’s right,” acknowledged David. “If the insurgents find out he’s working for us, he and his family are dead.” Fahima’s eyes darted from speaker to speaker during the conversation. She was also being told of her rescue plan for the first time.
“So here was my challenge,” said Alton. “I had an Al-Qaeda contact but no cover story which gave him a plausible reason for intervening in this case. He’s located in the eastern side of Kabul and has never visited Gandamak’s Lodge. I had already contacted Mastana—the girl I helped the day of the bazaar blast—to see if she knew of Hadir or Fahima’s whereabouts or had any other way of helping.
“I met Mastana in person yesterday. Shortly after I arrived at the meeting place, she mentioned that her uncle is a member of Al-Qaeda. It was the perfect opportunity. Mastana could drop the name of a legitimate Al-Qaeda leader to her uncle, knowing that as soon as her uncle verified the story with Zahid himself, Fahima would be freed. From Al-Qaeda’s point of view, it would make sense that Fahima would help Zahid with intelligence-gathering. Zahid never visits Gandamak’s himself, so he’d need an informant to pass along information from there. During the meeting with Mastana, I contacted Zahid and filled him in. He was happy to help.
“A nice side effect of this approach is it leaves Fahima free to resume her role at Gandamak’s. Since Al-Qaeda believes she is an informant listening to American conversations, they’d be more suspicious if she didn’t return.
“The biggest risk in all of this was that we had no way to communicate the plan to Fahima. We had to count on her resourcefulness and improvisation if Hadir raised any questions about her relationship to Zahid.”
“Yes,” added Fahima, wiping a bit of scrambled eggs off her chin, “I was scared. Last night, I see a girl in the room with the Al-Qaeda men. She is staring at me all the time. When Hadir ask me why I do not say anything about Zahid, the girl nodded at me. I think she is trying to tell me this is the story I should use to leave that bad place. So I…how you say?…go along with the story. Then Hadir take me and Tahir to our homes.” She shrugged as if indifferent to the whole episode and scooped up more eggs from her tray.
David whistled and shook his head. “It was perfect,” he said, looking at Alton. “I owe you…so much. How do you come up with these plans?”
It was Alton’s turn to shrug indifferently. “It wasn’t just me. I was concerned that Fahima wouldn’t know how to react when Hadir questioned her about our cover story. Mallory conceived the idea of sending Mastana along with her uncle to the location where Fahima was being held prisoner. Her presence proved to be essential to pulling off the plan.”
Mallory grabbed Alton’s upper arm and—while scolding Alton in general—gave it a good you-don’t-give-yourself-enough-credit shaking. When Mallory finished the admonition, she casually let her hand drop on top of Alton’s forearm. Without moving his head, Alton lowered his gaze to observe the hand she so gently rested on his limb. His mind flashed back to the corner table at Gandamak’s the night of Fahima’s abduction. In some ways so near…
At last, Fahima finished her meal and sat back in her chair.
“Would you mind if Fahima and I stepped away for a minute?” asked David.
“No, of course not,” said Alton and Mallory in unison, grinning.
“We can leave,” added Alton. He began to stand, but Fahima waved him back to his seat. She and David walked a few paces away and stood facing each other, far from the other occupants of the sparsely-populated cafeteria but within easy earshot of Alton and Mallory.
“Fahima…,” began David, clearly flustered, “I don’t even know how to describe my feelings for you. I should have told you a long time ago…” He looked at the floor for a second, struggling to proceed.
“David,” said Fahima softly, “do you know why I trust the girl last night? Her eyes tell me what she is thinking, that she is my friend. What do you think your eyes tell me?”
She laid her palm aside his face and raised herself on her toes to kiss him. The elation flowing from David’s face suggested he might not descend from cloud nine for a solid week, if ever.
“Fahima, I don’t know exactly where we go from here,” said David, “but I know I want to be with you, more than anything.” It was his turn to initiate a kiss, oblivious to everything but the rapture of the moment.
As they separated, Fahima beamed at David. “And I want to be with you, David Dunlow.”
Alton turned to Mallory. “Is this the part where they ride off into the sunset?”
“Yeah—in a tank.” She laughed and elbowed him in the ribs. “This is Afghanistan, after all.”
As David and Fahima continued to talk, Alton felt an indescribable pleasure in witnessing—at last—the new and better unity of the two friends who had admired each other from a distance for so long. Despite their disparate cultural backgrounds, he predicted a happy future for the couple.
Alton glanced at Mallory. She seemed to be as content as he. She turned her gaze to him, and he self-consciously lowered his to the floor, worried that the romantic euphoria was getting to him. For a moment, as he had caught Mallory’s eye, he had believed she would offer a friendly reception to a similar declaration on his part. He flashed back to the time he had first met Mallory, in this very cafeteria. The sunlight had poured into the room from a window behind her, bathing her in an ethereal glow, as if she were an angel come to mingle with mere mortals.
Alton sternly reminded himself that fantasies were no substitute for the truth of his new future, one in which Mallory wouldn’t be interested in assuming a romantic role. The futility of such thoughts jolted him back to reality. Why ruin a friendship by trying to make it more than it could be? He had to remind himself of this repeatedly as Mallory once again gripped his upper arm in delight at the sight of happy couple in front of them.
That evening, Alton called Mastana to share the details of the day’s reunion between David and Fahima. She was overjoyed, not only for Fahima’s release but also for the new relationship between the two friends.
“None of this would have happened without you,” said Alton, “I’m so proud of you. You’re so brave and confident. Now I owe you one.”
“No,” replied Mastana. “Before, you save me. This time, I do n
ot save you. I help you save another Afghani.”
“Well, either way, you did a great job. If you can do all this now, at age twelve, I can’t wait to see what you’ll accomplish when you’re all grown up.”
Two Months Later
CHAPTER 25
Camp Eggers, Kabul, Afghanistan
Alton’s months in C2 continued to roll along. Knowing his days in the Army were likely to be limited, he resolved to make the best of his remaining time. He felt grateful for those comrades who had reached out to him in friendship during his deepest despondency. Thanks to them, he had formed new, unexpected bonds in this phase of his life. Those new bonds were gradually providing Alton with a brighter hope for the unknown future that stretched out before him.
As Alton had predicted, the relationship between David and Fahima had flourished. Last week, David had mentioned that Fahima had applied for a US permanent-resident visa, pointing to his friends’ intention to remain together after David’s deployment to Afghanistan ended. Alton felt genuinely happy for them.
Alton continued his physical therapy, now comprised of a single, early-morning workout completed each day before reporting for duty. Despite his diligence, the pain in his limb persisted. He observed with concern the arc of his recovery tapering off. He was inclined to force a continuation of his healing by working harder, but Dr. Dunwoody had warned him that this approach could be counterproductive.
“If you overdo it, you could reinjure yourself,” she had said, “and if that happens, you’ll probably have a more profound permanent injury.”
Mindful of this admonition, Alton was careful to follow the prescribed physical-therapy routine to the letter.
The patience Alton needed to endure the physical demands of his exercise regime was matched by that required to endure Captain Graham, whose antics had not changed.
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