by Dan Mayland
Granted, they’d both unsnapped the leg loops on their harnesses, so that they could remove their pants, but the leg loops weren’t essential. Worst-case scenario, Decker figured they would just be left hanging by their waist belts.
That was a risk Decker was more than willing to take. His knees sank into the nylon floor of the portaledge, his right shoulder kept hitting the rock wall on one side of the tent wall, and the whole contraption was swinging back and forth. Through an open air vent, he could see the rock wall and a little picturesque silver thread of a stream cutting through the valley far below them. Jessica laughed and so did Decker. Life just didn’t get much better than this, he thought.
Then his cell phone rang.
He ignored it. From the ring tone, he knew it was a call from home—almost certainly his mother or father, the last people he wanted to speak to right now. Talk about a buzzkill.
“Why are you stopping?” said the Aussie. She reached around and smacked his thigh as though taking a crop to a lazy horse.
“Who’s stopping?” said Decker—though he had slowed down. He loved his parents, but they weren’t exactly an aphrodisiac. When his phone stopped ringing, he flipped Jessica into a doggie-style position, smacked her rear, and got back to business.
But a few seconds later, his phone started ringing again. It was the same ring tone. Which meant it was almost certainly his mother—if he didn’t pick up the first time, she always tried again. His father would have just left a message.
“Shit, Mom.”
Jessica gave a little huff of disgust. “I’m not your mom.”
No, she most certainly wasn’t his mother, Decker thought. He forced himself to ignore both the ringing and the image of his mother standing impatiently—phone in hand—in the kitchen of the New Hampshire home he’d grown up in. But before long, he’d gotten one of his knees wedged painfully under one of the metal bars that formed the frame of the portaledge. Time to finish this off, he thought.
His phone started ringing again.
“You gotta be kidding me. I’m sorry, I have to answer this.”
“Shut up.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“I’ll really scratch you this time, you fruit loop.”
“I have to take this. No joking, Jess. Three calls means there’s a problem.”
Jessica sighed as he pulled out of her, then she flipped to her back, and patted him gently on the chest.
Decker fished his phone out of the pocket of his Gore-Tex shell jacket, which he’d wedged in a corner of the portaledge.
“Hello?”
As expected, it was his mother. “John,” she said. “How are you?”
“Ah…” He detected a quiver in his mother’s voice.
“I’ve got some bad news, honey.”
Decker felt his stomach rise up to his throat. His mom was a call-it-as-she-sees-it tough army wife who’d raised three huge boys in northern New Hampshire, all of whom had entered the military. Overly sentimental, or dramatic, she wasn’t. If she said she had bad news, it was bad news.
“What is it, Mom?”
Jessica unzipped another air vent in the portaledge. Decker felt a cool breeze on his bare schlong. In the distance he could see a line of snow-capped, glaciated mountains. Pine trees grew in the canyon below. He loved it here. The lakes in the valleys were pristine, the streams filled with trout. People called it the Switzerland of Central Asia and he thought that was about right. In between jobs for CAIN, he’d taken to exploring the countryside, often hooking up with expat women looking to explore the world. He’d been pretty damn happy over the past six months.
He had a feeling all that was about to end.
“It’s your father.”
“What happened?”
His mother began to cry. “He…” It sounded as though she’d pulled the phone away from her mouth. A moment later, she came on again. “He got up real early like he always does, to load the stove, and he was out back at the wood shed, when…”
She started crying again.
Decker glanced at Jessica. She looked up at him with a worried expression. He shook his head.
Over the phone, a distant voice Decker recognized as his younger brother’s said, “Let me tell him, Mom,” and then his brother was on the phone, saying, “He had a heart attack. When he was splitting wood.”
“Is he… dead?”
“No, but he’s in the ICU. I don’t know, Deck.”
“When did this happen?”
“An hour ago. We’re at the hospital.”
“Is he going to make it?”
“I don’t know, man. They’re running tests now. We should know more soon.”
“I’ll come home.”
Decker did the calculations in his head. There was still a little light left. On the way up, they’d climbed a mixture of ice and rock, but if they packed up quickly and rappelled down now, avoiding the ice as much as they could and sacrificing gear to the mountain to speed things up, he figured they could be on the ground in under an hour. Once on the ground, they’d have a decent hike back to the car ahead of them, but it was mostly downhill and they were both in good shape. They could run it. Getting back to Bishkek tonight was doable.
“I think mom would appreciate it.”
11
“So I talked to Rosten,” said Kaufman. “The son of a bitch turfed me up.”
“How high?” asked Mark.
“High enough.”
“To the top?”
“No.”
Mark figured that meant Rosten had sent Kaufman to the deputy director of the CIA.
“And?”
“And I’m to tell you that you’re to proceed immediately to our embassy in Bishkek, wait for Rosten to arrive, and then turn the child over to whoever Rosten tells you to. The Bishkek station has already been given the heads up. They’re expecting you. You’re to say nothing more about this to anyone except Rosten, including Bamford.”
Serena Bamford was the chief of the CIA’s Kyrgyzstan station.
“Huh. Did you get any answers as to why Near East was running an op in Kyrgyzstan behind your back?”
“No. Nor did they tell me what the op was. Apparently Central Eurasia’s role now is to provide support services for Near East.”
Kaufman’s sarcasm was evident.
“What happens if I don’t turn in the kid?” asked Mark.
“Beats me. I wouldn’t want to find out, though.”
“Well, I appreciate your helping me with this, Ted. And I tell you what—I’ll let you know how it all works out. I don’t answer to Langley anymore.”
“I’d be grateful.”
Mark sensed that Kaufman wasn’t being the slightest bit ironic. Back during the Cold War, when Kaufman had joined the CIA, Central Eurasia—which included Russia—had been a powerful division. That’s part of the reason why Mark too had been so eager to be a part of it. But after the Soviet Union collapsed, much of Central Eurasia’s power had shifted to Near East. That shift had accelerated tenfold after 9/11. Now Near East was a division on steroids—they were heavily militarized, ran drone missions 24-7, were deeply integrated with the CIA’s counterterrorism center, and were the best funded of all the CIA’s divisions. Central Eurasia, meanwhile, had become a bit of a backwater.
But it was Kaufman’s backwater, and Mark was certain his old boss hated being pushed aside on his own turf.
The US embassy was located at the southern end of Mira Avenue—a perfectly straight road lined with huge white poplar trees. The actual embassy building wasn’t visible from the road, nor was there even a sign announcing its existence—which meant a lot of visa seekers wound up overshooting the place and asking directions from the constantly put-upon Kazakhs who had built their new embassy just down the street.
Those fortunate enough to find the US embassy were greeted by a large parking lot walled off by waist-high red-and-white concrete blocks designed to deter truck bombers. Beyond the parking lot, a t
all black fence mounted on a thick concrete base encircled a low-slung, unobtrusive bunker-like building.
The only break in the fence came in the form of a silver, bulletproof gatehouse, which was marked with a United States embassy seal and manned by Kyrgyz security guards.
Mark had been to the embassy plenty of times. First, just as a courtesy, to let the CIA know he was operating in Kyrgyzstan, and later to negotiate contracts the Agency was considering awarding to CAIN.
He checked in with the Kyrgyz guards at the gatehouse—because he was on a list of pre-cleared visitors, he was allowed to keep his phone—and went through the metal detector. Minutes later, he was met by a tightly wound young brunette who claimed to be an economic officer working for the State Department. In reality, Mark recalled, she was a CIA operations officer, one that Mark’s friend John Decker had been assigned to guard on several occasions. She escorted him past the marine security guard checkpoint and then to a sterile, utilitarian room deep within the bowels of the main building.
An oval conference table had been set up in the center of the room. Sturdy metal office chairs with hard-plastic back rests had been arranged around the table.
The room also had a self-locking door, which clicked shut when the last of Mark’s minders departed.
12
Daria printed out full-size reproductions of the flag of Saudi Arabia, the flag of Jordan, and then the flags of a dozen more Arabic-speaking countries in and around the Middle East.
Muhammad looked on as she arranged the colorful printouts on the floor in a large semi-circle. When she was finished, she sat cross-legged on the floor next to him, smiled, and said in Arabic, “Which is Muhammad’s flag?”
The boy said he wanted his Anna.
“Which is Muhammad’s flag? This one?” Daria pointed at the flag of Saudi Arabia.
Mohammad approached the piece of paper, looked at it, then kicked it angrily. He did the same to the next flag, only he didn’t appear as angry. By the time he kicked the third flag, he had a smile on his face. After kicking wildly at all the flags on the floor, then throwing some of the papers in the air and trying to bat them with his hand as they fluttered to the ground, Daria said, “Hey Muhammad, want to watch TV?”
Mohammad gave an enthusiastic one-word answer—yes.
“And what does Muhammad want to watch?”
The boy said something that sounded, to Daria, like Cap Kareem. So she said, “Let’s try to find that, OK? Can you help?”
Muhammad nodded.
Daria took her iPod, showed it to Muhammad, loaded up Google, and searched for Kareem tv Arabic children.
The first result was for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Wikipedia entry. The second was for an animated Arabic children’s show entitled Captain Karim Qitar Al Hekayat, a program that claimed to introduce children to “the wonderful world of storytelling and reading.”
“You want to watch Captain Karim?” asked Daria.
Muhammad did.
After another Google search, Daria learned that Captain Karim Qitar Al Hekayat was produced by a children’s television network based out of Qatar.
Now we’re talking, she thought, hoping that it was a network with limited distribution throughout the region. If she was lucky, it would be exclusive to Qatar, and that would tell her where Muhammad was from.
A few more quick searches, however, told her Captain Karim Qitar Al Hekayat was distributed throughout all Arab countries. And Europe.
She pulled up YouTube, found a few Captain Karim videos, selected the longest one, and handed her iPod to Muhammad. Then she stood up, intending to use the laptop computer in the spare bedroom to print out copies of the outlines of various Arab-speaking countries. As a young girl, even as a preschooler, she imagined she might have recognized an outline of the United States.
Muhammad pushed something on the phone that made the screen go dark, then screamed in frustration.
“No problem, Muhammad.” Daria took the phone back and stroked the boy’s hair. “We watch in the kitchen. OK?”
Muhammad said he wanted his Anna.
“I know you do, baby, I know you do,” Daria said in English. She picked up Muhammad and settled him on her hip as she carried him into the kitchen. Switching back to Arabic, she asked “Muhammad hungry?”
He’d had some ice cream not long ago, but Daria knew that little boys ate a lot and that a hungry kid was an unhappy kid—though she also realized that Muhammad had a lot more to be unhappy about than just being hungry.
She opened the pantry door and saw a box of butter cookies on the top shelf, the kind that Mark liked.
She pulled them down and was about to ask Muhammad whether he wanted a cookie when the boy pointed enthusiastically at the package and said, “Bistoog! Bistoog!”
“Kalweki?” said Daria, using what she thought was the Arabic word for cookie.
Mohammad said no, he wanted bistoog. He pointed again to the package, so she opened it and gave him a cookie.
“Bistoog,” he said again, taking the cookie and eating it.
She took another cookie out of the package. “Bistoog?”
Muhammad grabbed the cookie. “Bistoog,” he confirmed. That gave Daria an idea.
She set up her iPod on the kitchen table, propped it up against a cookbook, sat Muhammad on a pillow in one of the kitchen chairs, got the Captain Karim video going again, poured him a glass of milk, left him with the open pack of bistoogs, and then headed to her computer.
Within ten minutes, she was pretty sure she’d figured out where Muhammad was from.
She knew Arabic was like English, in that the various Arabic-speaking countries had their own regional accents, or slightly different words for things. Just as a truck in the United States was a lorry in Great Britain, she’d learned that in parts of Kuwait, and on the island nation of Bahrain, a cookie was commonly called a bistoog, a variation on the English word biscuit.
The Captain Karim video ended. Muhammad called out for her, and she came to him. He was still sitting at the kitchen table. Half of the cookies were gone and crumbs were scattered all over the table and floor.
“Where are you from, Muhammad?”
“Ba-bay.”
Daria thought of how, for many English-speaking toddlers, library became liberry, or spaghetti became sgabetti. “Muhammad is from Bahrain?”
“Yes.”
“Bahrain is your home?”
Bahrain was a small island in the Persian Gulf connected to Saudi Arabia via a long causeway. Although it was an independent nation, it had been a protectorate of Great Britain for many years—hence the use of the word bistoog.
“Yes.”
“Where is your Anna?”
“In ba-bay.”
13
The first thing Decker did when he got down off the cliff was call Bruce Holtz, his boss at CAIN.
“Dude,” said Decker. “You got a minute?”
“Yo, Deck… hold on,” said Holtz. Then, “This about Mark?”
“No. What’s up with Mark?”
“Ah, nothing. Gimme a sec.”
Decker heard Holtz typing away at a keyboard.
Jessica, who was coiling their climbing rope, gave him a look that said, Hurry up already. She and Decker were both wearing headlamps—the last light of day had disappeared ten minutes ago.
“Listen,” said Deck. “I’m going to have to bail on next week’s job.”
Holtz stopped typing.
Decker added, “Something’s come up,” and then he told Holtz about his dad.
After a lengthy pause, Holtz said, “All right. I understand. No problem.”
Though he didn’t sound sympathetic, he didn’t sound angry either.
“Sorry, I know that screws you over.”
“Shit happens. I got family too. You do what you have to do, man.”
“Well, what I have to do right now is get a flight out of here pronto. I’ll fly commercial if I have to, but if CAIN can hook me up with a military
transport, that would rock. The sooner the better.”
“I’m busy as hell, I got this fucking thing going on with Mark.”
“All right.”
“But I’ll put in a call. It’ll just take a second.”
“I appreciate it. What’s going on with Mark?”
“Oh, he’s busting my balls on this CAIN situation that’s going down. It’s confidential, so I can’t say more, but give me a heads-up if he calls you, would you? And if you could not let Mark know that you’re keeping me in the loop, I’d appreciate it.”
“Ah, yeah.” Decker wasn’t about to sandbag Mark, not after all Mark had done for him, but he didn’t see any point in telling Holtz that. “Anyway, you’ll let me know about the flight?”
“I’ll put in a call to the air base, see what I can do.”
14
Daria called Mark, and when he didn’t pick up, left a message for him about the Bahrain connection.
Then she loaded up another Captain Karim video for Muhammad. Halfway through it, the boy’s eyes began to droop, so she took the seat cushions off the couch and made a sleeping area for him in the bedroom—on the floor, because she worried he might fall off the bed.
She let him watch the rest of the Captain Karim video on his new bed, rubbing his back as he sucked on his pacifier. By the end of the show, Muhammad’s eyes had closed. She looked at him for a moment, marveling at his smooth skin, his lips pursed so sweetly around the pacifier that it almost made her physically ache to look at him. His black hair curled around a tiny, perfectly formed ear, and his shallow, steady breathing was as beautiful a sound as she’d heard in this world.
What happened to you, Muhammad?
One thing was certain, she wouldn’t tolerate seeing this child thrown back to the wolves.
She sat with him for a few more minutes, until she was sure he was fast asleep, and then walked to the living room and sat down on the cushionless couch. She called a potential benefactor she was supposed to meet in Almaty the next day and asked to postpone that meeting until a week from now. A flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, that she’d booked for two days from now, she canceled altogether.