Colonel Imtiaz Afridi watched the first rays of sunlight tinting the ridges, reflecting off the snow with brassy radiance, spilling over rocks and sand, illuminating the harsh terrain. Afridi was bundled up in a flight suit, over which he wore a down parka. An insulated helmet protected his head and glacier goggles shielded his eyes, yet he felt exposed. The pilot kept low to the ground, no more than a hundred feet above the rocks. At this hour of the morning, the air was perfectly still. Two lakes appeared in the distance, pools of ice that observed their progress with unblinking omniscience.
At first the mountains seemed distant, scattered along the ruffled hem of the horizon, but as they entered the Nubra Valley, ridgelines began to converge and one summit led on to the next, folding and unfolding like an elaborate origami of peaks and passes. Afridi recognized the shape of the land, and the winding course of the river below. He had flown here dozens of times and had studied the topography, from early British survey maps to recent satellite images.
They kept to the eastern slope of the valley, never climbing above the silhouette of the ridge, though the helicopter was equipped with instruments that made it invisible to those who might try to track its flight. Afridi spotted a road below them, an army fuel dump, and farther on, an encampment of fiberglass huts surrounded by disheveled tents.
As they came around a bend in the river, he caught sight of a sheer ice wall, rising almost eight hundred feet and stretching from one side of the valley to the other. Though he had witnessed this scene more times than he could count, the sight of the glacier always pinched a nerve inside Afridi’s chest.
Siachen. The highest battlefield in the world. On either side, unyielding mountains were armored in ice and rock. The frozen carapace of the glacier, littered with debris, was an impervious shield, a barren wasteland. Yet men sacrificed their lives to protect this desolate frontier. Hostile armies of India and Pakistan faced off across the shifting surface of Siachen. For every soldier killed by enemy fire, nine others died from altitude and exposure. Here the fault lines of history converged with the tectonic fissures of Asia, an apex of collision and partition. Less than a hundred kilometers farther west lay the northern frontiers of Afghanistan.
For a moment, it seemed as if the helicopter might not clear the ice wall, its engine straining. Afridi’s eyes shifted briefly to the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Bhandari, who was intently watching the flickering gauges on the console before him. He coaxed the throttle to give them a fraction more power. At the last minute, they rose above cracked lips of ice and glided over the broad expanse of Lower Siachen. Afridi’s hands were gloved in thick down mittens, but he could feel the cold creeping into his fingers. The Lama’s propellant was a special blend of aviation fuel, refined for these altitudes. The air above Siachen made everything viscous, blood and oil turning to wax. The helicopter lurched suddenly as a gust of wind came down one of the lateral valleys, out of territory occupied by Pakistan. It almost felt as if an artillery round had passed beneath their skids.
In front of them lay the painted mountains, Rimo I and III. The pilot banked the helicopter in a shallow arc that followed the course of a secondary glacier, Terong Gal. The difficult part now lay ahead. As they turned 160 degrees, Afridi had an unobstructed view of the Rimo peaks, not a smooth feature on their surface. Raddled ice and blistered snow were mangled into a fierce beauty by the early light. Forty years ago, Afridi had attempted to climb the lesser peak and survived an avalanche on its lower slopes only to turn back 800 meters from the summit as daylight waned and temperatures dropped.
He could see the shadow of the helicopter projected on the hard packed snow beneath them, flying parallel to his thoughts. Crossing Terong Col, at 6,000 meters, they dipped into the upper reaches of the Shyok Valley, the so-called “river of death.” Another glacier spread below them, narrower than Siachen, steeper and more constricted. They were out of range of Pakistani guns, though Chinese intrusions along the Aksai Chin had put this region in dispute.
Bhandari spoke into his microphone. “Sir, up ahead … should we bear left or right?”
“To the left,” Afridi said, hearing his own voice amplified inside the helmet. “Beyond that bergschrund, where the glacier bends out of sight.”
His eyes scanned the slopes. For several minutes nothing revealed itself, but as they entered the bowl beneath the northern flank of Rimo’s massif, Afridi spotted the wreckage. He raised one hand and gestured. The pilot saw it, too.
On a sloping ice field, at the uppermost end of the glacier, lay the fuselage of an aircraft that had broken into three pieces. One of the wings had been sheared off three hundred meters lower down, at the point of impact. The other had fragmented as the twin-engine turboprop ploughed its way uphill. From a distance, it looked as if the plane might have had a chance to land safely, but as they approached, Afridi could see how the glacier fractured and buckled. They were almost above the crash site now, fifty feet off the ground, as the pilot began to circle. A black smear of oil marked the trajectory of the plane. One of the engines lay to the side, its propellers remarkably intact. Afridi noted that it was an Anatov AN 24, not an Illyushin IL 114, as the initial report had indicated.
The crash had occurred barely twenty-four hours earlier, and the first reconnaissance reported no survivors. The plane’s markings had been painted over, though Afridi could see an indistinct line of numbers and letters near the tail. It hadn’t caught fire, but there was no chance of anyone coming out of this accident alive. Even if they had, they would have frozen to death by now. More than likely, only two or three crew had been on board, no passengers. The helicopter hovered over the largest piece of the fuselage.
“What’s that?” Afridi said, as if speaking to himself. His microphone conveyed the question to his pilot, who descended within twenty feet of the glacier. A human hand seemed to beckon for help, its fingers grasping at nothing. Where the plane had been ripped in half, the ice was strewn with body parts, dozens of arms and legs. Torn shreds of cardboard fluttered in the breeze as the rotor blades kicked up snow, making it difficult to see. But the severed limbs were unmistakable, a gruesome tableau, as if dozens of victims had been butchered on the ice.
Afridi heard Bhandari curse, an expression of bewilderment and dismay.
“Put her down over there,” the colonel instructed, waving to a level patch, thirty meters from the crash debris.
Once they were on the glacier, the helicopter’s blades came to a halt, though the engine kept running, and Bhandari unbuckled himself from his seat.
“Go and take a look,” Afridi said. He would have got down, too, if his legs permitted. The pilot walked cautiously across to the gruesome remains, stopping for a moment, as if he didn’t have the courage to go on, then kneeling beside one of the legs, its foot shod in a black leather boot. Reluctantly, he picked it up and also retrieved an arm that lay nearby, cut off below the elbow. A few minutes later, he returned to the helicopter. As Bhandari opened the hatch on his side of the Lama, he handed Afridi the two limbs. Both were artificial. The hard synthetic material was a pinkish hue, like the plastic complexion of a mannequin.
When they lifted off again, Afridi was still holding the prostheses on his lap. The arm was female, tapering to the wrist, fingers open, as if gesturing for something. The leg was a man’s, with steel calipers on either side of the knee, a hinged mechanism that made it possible to walk. Below him, Afridi could see many more of these false limbs littering the crash site. The smaller arms and legs were for children, like dismembered dolls lying in the snow, scattered pieces of a human puzzle.
Four
When Luke agreed to accompany the body back to America, it wasn’t because of any sentiments for the man who had died. It was a free business class ticket, round trip to Washington, DC. He had been told that the casket would be delivered directly to the airport. All he had to do was travel on the same plane as a courier. He also had to carry the dead man’s suitcase and sign some papers to verify the identity o
f the deceased. His name was Carlton Fletcher. Luke had met him once or twice at cocktail parties in Islamabad, an older expatriate in his late fifties. Fletcher had introduced himself as a consultant for a waste water project in Gujranwala, funded by USAID. That was all Luke knew about him.
The only thing they had in common was that they smoked, though Luke had quit since then. A month ago, he and Fletcher had spent five minutes alone together on the balcony of a friend’s house off Murree Road, while their cigarettes burned down in the darkness. He remembered that Fletcher talked about hunting wild boar on the outskirts of Islamabad.
“Unbelievably good eating,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten the taste of fresh pork.”
If he’d met him again on the street, Luke might not have recognized Fletcher. He didn’t have distinctive features, a moderately overweight man with a bad complexion and receding hairline. His glasses were tinted, the kind that change color with the light. At the end of their conversation, Fletcher had stubbed out his cigarette in a potted fern. After the two of them went back inside, they didn’t speak again. Four weeks later, Luke heard he was dead and the embassy was looking for someone to travel home with the body. One of secretaries in the Commercial Section called Luke and persuaded him to volunteer. He was told that Fletcher had died of a heart attack in the bathroom of a service apartment he shared with another consultant who was away in Sialkot when it happened.
As a journalist, Luke lived on the margins of the expatriate community, but unlike most of the foreign correspondents, he had been born in Pakistan and spoke Urdu. His dark brown hair and beard allowed him to move about unnoticed on the streets of Rawalpindi, where he rented an apartment in a modest, middle-class neighborhood. At the same time, he kept his contacts amongst the embassy crowd in Islamabad, shuttling between the two worlds out of professional necessity but also because it was something he had done for most of his life. He was entirely comfortable sitting around with Pakistani reporters and speaking Urdu or Punjabi over innumerable cups of tea or having dinner with the bureau chief of the New York Times, listening to bombastic theories about American foreign policy. Though he didn’t completely belong to either world, Luke had learned how to adapt to circumstances.
Once or twice a year, he returned to the United States, not because of any particular need to maintain his tenuous links with the country, though his sister lived there, but because it seemed necessary to keep his professional identity intact. He often traveled for work to other parts of Asia, but when a chance like this came up, Luke was happy enough to accept a free ticket to the US, even if it meant accompanying a dead man halfway round the world.
Repatriation of human remains is a relatively routine process. After a doctor issues a death certificate, the embassy takes over and handles all of the details—informing the family, cancelling the passport, getting clearances from the police, hiring a mortician to embalm the corpse, and booking the coffin on an international flight. The consular official who dealt with Fletcher’s case was in his late twenties, a pale, bored-looking man who might as well have been sending a piece of lost luggage back to its original destination. He gave Luke a manila envelope full of papers and explained that someone from the family would meet him when he reached Washington. Representatives from a funeral home would collect the body at the airport. Luke just had to sign a receipt and hand over the suitcase, as simple as that. When the consular official gave him his ticket, he glanced at it for moment.
“You’re coming back in a week?” he said, as if it were a mistake.
Luke nodded. “I’m just going to visit family for a few of days.”
“Short trip,” the official said. “If I were you, I’d stay away from here as long as I could.”
Smiling, Luke said, “I’ve lived in Pakistan most of my life. This is home for me.”
“No shit!” the man said, then looked aside, as if it made him uncomfortable.
The flight they’d booked him on was Emirates to Dubai and then United direct to DC. Because the dead man had been working for the US government as a contractor, it had to be an American carrier or codeshare airline. Even in death, Carlton Fletcher was obliged to comply with the protocols of Washington’s bureaucracy. Altogether, it was a twenty-hour journey. But, of course, that didn’t matter to the dead man. For Luke, it wasn’t so bad, either, since he was traveling business class. As a freelance writer, he was used to economy seats and cheap connections.
Leaving Islamabad, everything went smoothly. He didn’t even have to see the casket because the people from the embassy took care of that. Fletcher’s only piece of luggage was a hard shell Samsonite case that looked as if it had been around the world a couple of times. Checking it in, along with his own bag, Luke wondered what was inside and whether he would need to declare anything at Customs, but nobody seemed concerned.
The flight took off on time, and he fell asleep almost immediately. At Dubai, he had a two-hour layover. Resisting the urge to buy a carton of Marlboros, he got a bag of Iranian pistachios instead and two bottles of duty-free perfume as a gift for his sister and her partner. He didn’t know what kind of perfume they would like, but the Filipino salesgirl recommended something with a Scandinavian name and another called Scheherazade. Back on the plane, when he sniffed his wrist where the girl had dabbed the fragrance samplers, he wasn’t sure he’d made the right choice.
Once they were in the air again, they left behind the slender spire of the Burj e Khalifa and the stylized outline of the Palm Jumeirah development, its drooping fronds and artificial lagoons protruding into the blue waters of the Persian Gulf. Luke stared out the window, but soon there was nothing but desert stretching in all directions, an ocean of Arabian sand. He tried to watch a movie but fell asleep again, waking up as they were flying over the Mediterranean. He felt an ache between his eyes and an edgy feeling of needing a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked for three weeks, but being in an airplane seemed to make the craving worse. As the flight dragged on, Luke found himself getting angry with Carlton Fletcher for having died and making him go on this journey. He wasn’t looking forward to meeting the dead man’s wife or kids, whatever family he had. He didn’t want to offer condolences to strangers, pretending to be sympathetic as he gave them the suitcase. For a moment, Luke began to wonder what it would be like if his corpse were in the hold and Fletcher was taking him back instead.
Better you than me, my friend, he said to himself, shaking off the thought. Hours later they circled Washington and touched down at Dulles. Entering the terminal, Luke walked as quickly as he could, avoiding the escalators and taking the stairs to stretch his legs. The luggage was already going around and around on the carousel when he got there, his own and Fletcher’s. At Customs, he handed over the papers for repatriation of human remains. The female officer who flipped through the documents was wearing latex gloves.
“Are you a family member?” she asked.
He started to explain. “No, just an acquaintance. The embassy—”
“Anything else to declare?”
Luke shook his head.
From there he had to go to a special reception area, wheeling his trolley through an automatic door, where an airline official told him to wait.
A few minutes later, two men in black overcoats walked in. He could tell they were from the funeral home before they introduced themselves. Luke gave them the envelope containing the death certificate and canceled passport. Another door opened, and a baggage handler wheeled in the coffin on a gurney. It was a simple, aluminum box, smaller than he had imagined.
“Is someone from the family here?” Luke asked.
One of the undertakers nodded. “She’s parking her car.”
A minute later, the door opened again and a woman walked in. She was in her mid-thirties, with short brown hair, a year or two younger than Luke. Wearing a gray wool coat over a pleated black dress, she looked as if she were going straight from here to the funeral.
“Ms. Holman,” the undertaker introduced the
m, “this is Mr. McKenzie.”
She glanced across at the casket briefly before shaking Luke’s hand. When she turned in his direction, her eyes were dry and her face composed.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Luke said.
There was a trace of a smile on her lips.
“My uncle,” she said.
The airline official seemed to be in a hurry and got them both to sign the papers on his clipboard, then nodded to the men from the funeral home. The coffin was taken outside, and suddenly it was just the woman and Luke. For a moment, he didn’t know what to say, before pointing at the suitcase.
“That’s his,” he said. “Would you like me to take it to your car?”
“What about you? Where are you going?” she asked.
Luke mentioned the hotel that the embassy had booked for him, near Farragut Square.
“I’ll drop you there,” she said. “It’s the least I can do.”
Five
After a brief halt in Leh for refueling, the helicopter returned to the Himalayan Research Institute in Mussoorie, touching down a few minutes past noon. Situated at the highest point on the ridge in Landour cantonment, overlooking the central range of the Himalayas, HRI was a secluded complex of buildings surrounded by deodar trees. Except for the satellite dishes and the helipad, it might have been a colonial club rather than a state-of-the-art surveillance center. Over the past three decades, Afridi had established HRI as India’s primary intelligence facility in the Himalayas, and he directed the Institute with the singular purpose of defending the country’s northern frontier. Though technically retired from military service, he was acknowledged as the foremost expert on mountain warfare and security, an analytical genius with a fierce sense of national duty. Though he was tired from the journey and grateful to be home, Afridi’s first priority was to examine the evidence they had retrieved. Removing his helmet and hoisting himself out of the Lama and into his wheelchair, the colonel gave instructions that he wanted the artificial limbs taken to the MI room. He would be there in half an hour.
The Dalliance of Leopards Page 2