A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  “Teach me to fire a gun,” she demanded, straddling him, pulling him up inside her.

  In the night, Bakr got up and opened the door and cold air flooded the hut. In the moonlight his body was perfect, dark as a polished nut. He leaned over slightly to light a cigarette, cupping his hand to protect the flame, and his palms and face were illuminated by the lighter. She slipped out of bed to join him and they shared the cigarette, standing naked side by side.

  She never tired of looking at him, at his perfection, and it did not seem possible that she ever would.

  “All right,” he said.

  He took her hand and led her back to the bed. He kissed her, his full lips on hers. She could taste the tobacco in his mouth and the Russian vodka they had drunk earlier out of coffee jars. He was aroused again. She folded her legs around his waist, lifting herself towards him.

  Bakr went down on one knee behind her, with the muscle of his thigh against the back of her leg and his right arm hooked around her midriff.

  “Load the weapon,” he said, softly in her ear.

  She tapped the magazine against the stock as she had been shown to ensure the rounds were sitting correctly on the spring and slotted it into the rifle. She pulled the cocking handle, feeding the first bullet into the firing chamber.

  He reached across to the fire selector with his left hand and clicked it down two notches for semi-automatic fire. She breathed out slowly and settled slightly, her buttocks pressing against him, feeling the extent of his arousal.

  He gripped her forearm. She inhaled and pressed the weapon against her cheek. She closed her left eye and aligned the front and back sights. The target was a hundred meters away, a tin of powdered milk on a rock.

  “It kicks to the left—always aim a little to the right of the target.” The dusk light shimmered. She felt light-headed, as if she were about to fall. He was the only thing that was holding her up, cradling her between his thighs and his biceps, the pennant of his cock against her buttocks. She breathed out.

  “Pull the trigger gently, it will go back farther than you expect,” he said.

  She inhaled … exhaled …

  She pulled the trigger.

  She turned, breathless from sprinting, surprised that she had beaten him to the rocks. Bakr waved. She saw that he was holding her headscarf and understood that he had stopped to pick it up. She looked around and located the tin can lying on its side. She picked it up and stuck her finger in the hole.

  “Look,” she shouted.

  “You’re a natural,” he said, handing her the scarf.

  They lay side by side on a broad rock.

  “I’m bored here,” she said. “I want to learn how to be a fighter.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m serious!”

  She punched him in the ribs, harder than she’d meant to. He doubled up, winded. “I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life,” she said, leaning over him, pulling at his tunic. He fluttered a hand at her while he caught his breath. “You said you’d take me to the Lion’s Den.”

  “I did,” he gasped.

  “So take me.”

  He stretched out and looked up at her, panting.

  “I can match any man,” she said.

  He shook his head in what seemed to her to be wonderment. “I believe you could.”

  “Take me,” she insisted.

  He propped himself on one elbow and looked at her. “You know that when they want to praise a woman here they say she is quiet and shy and obedient.”

  “I’m not looking for praise. I want to do something, something meaningful.”

  “Some say that there are only two places for an Afghan woman, in her husband’s house, and in the graveyard.”

  “I’m not an Afghan woman. And you’re not an Afghan man.”

  He pulled a face. “That’s true.”

  “So take me.”

  He became serious. “There are some women at al-Ma’asada, Arab women who are being trained for the jihad. They are …” He paused. “… set apart. It is said that they have left one place but not yet reached the other.”

  He did not tell her that the other place was death.

  THE LION’S DEN

  1989

  “There is a road. It runs through the mountains from Pakistan to Afghanistan and from the caves to the front line, wherever it might be. Sometimes there are landslides and we lose the road. Sometimes it is destroyed by the Russians. Sometimes it will be there but you will not see it at first. But there will always be a road, because the road keeps our struggle alive. We are fighting against a country that thinks it is strong, but it is weak. Our road is stronger than their bombs. And if you cannot find the road, then you make a new one.”

  She sat at the back of the classroom, with her face covered and her head bowed like a penitent. The Algerian instructor did not acknowledge her presence. He scowled as he limped back and forth in front of the blackboard. “When you are scared or when you are cold or hungry, tell yourself that you are not important. What is important is what you carry. Enough rifles for five hundred men. Who cares about your lives? Your truck is everything.”

  It was said that he had been injured in the battle for Jaji, where only a few dozen Arab fighters led by Sheikh Osama Bin Laden had fought off the Soviets. The same Bin Laden who had provided the bulldozers that built the caves and the road.

  She attended classes from dawn until dusk: driver training, vehicle maintenance, convoy drills, weapons handling and religious instruction. She was hungry and dirty. Her fingernails were cracked and her feet were blistered. The only interruptions to the lessons were the call to prayer and the incessant air-raid warnings.

  At night, she slept on a blanket laid across a wooden pallet in a small cave that was segregated from the men. Each morning, she washed in a bucket, wet a washcloth and, holding it above her head, squeezed the freezing water on to herself. She hurried down the tunnels with her head bowed, clutching her textbook: Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants.

  She would not meet anyone’s eye. She stayed away from the darkest tunnels.

  There were three other female students. One was Algerian, the other two Egyptian. Four women in a cave complex full of angry young men. Their husbands were jihadis who had died in the fighting in Khost, leaving them without protection or resources. Unable to return to their home countries for fear of arrest and imprisonment, and unwelcome in a camp whose populace regarded them as a rebuke and an embarrassment, they were treated as pariahs.

  They did not expect to survive.

  She had no idea where Bakr might be. She felt his absence like a stabbing pain. She could not reconcile him—the extravagance of his physical passion or the tenderness of his speech—with the columns of angry, repressed young men in the tunnels. She wondered whether he had abandoned her.

  A student asked, “What is it like when the Russians bomb?”

  “It’s like the wind, as if the wind came from hell,” the instructor replied, his eyes shining like polished stones. “Or like the sun as if it came down to earth.”

  “The Russians are the enemy of the earth,” the cleric declared.

  “I wish I could raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain,” they chanted in unison. There were moments of exaltation, when the recitations and the chanting combined to create a tumult of passion in her chest. “Many a small band has, by God’s grace, vanquished a mighty army.”

  Their enemies were numerous and powerful: heretics, pagans, crusaders—but their belief and their willingness to sacrifice their own lives to establish God’s rule on earth made them all but invincible.

  “Our duty will not end with victory in Afghanistan,” the cleric told them. “Jihad will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us so that Islam will reign again: Palestine, Bokhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, Philippines, Burma, Yemen, Tashkent and Andalusia.”

  Jalalabad. A mighty
battle was coming. The rumor spread through the tunnels like wildfire. Finally, they were taking the battle directly to the enemy. For the first time she saw Pakistani advisers in the tunnels—it was said that they were demanding a tangible victory that would fatally undermine Najibullah’s puppet regime. The city of Jalalabad at the head of the Great Trunk Road was the target. Weapons and cash poured in from across the border. The young men hurried with renewed vigor down the tunnels.

  At night, she sat on her palette and cleaned her gun. Once, she saw Sheikh Bin Laden in the tunnels with his pack of Egyptian bodyguards. He was impossibly tall and slender, somehow too fragile for the task. But you only had to look into the Egyptians’ eyes to see the fury that would carry them and anyone alongside them to careless death. She folded herself against the wall as they passed and was trembling for minutes afterward.

  Bakr came and she realized that what she wanted from him was shamefully little. A night of warmth and the consolation of his body. The oblivion of sex. The raw simplicity of it. He led her to a cave that showed signs of being hastily vacated by others. People always made way for him. He was like a prince who could part the tides, not like the sheikh, who was constantly besieged by followers, but special nonetheless. He undressed her, taking his time with each button. Naked, they wrapped themselves in sheepskins. With his penis inside her she felt almost complete. And suddenly hungry for more, for permanence—she raised her pelvis to him, to retain every last drop of his sperm. He whispered the words of a poet in her ear: “You are more precious than my days, more beautiful than my dreams.”

  She would give him something even more precious than herself. She was sure of it. Before he left he told her that the battle would begin with an assault by ten thousand warriors.

  They drove their loads of guns, blankets and gas stoves to meet the southbound trucks at the exchange point on a high plateau and swapped the loads for wounded men and broken equipment to be taken to the caves. They drove at night with only the moon to light their way, twenty-five trucks in single file. During the day they slept, or at least tried to, among the rocks in the deepest valleys, with camouflage tarpaulins covering the trucks. Just before dawn, when the convoy stopped, the four women would cook food together and share a cigarette, before wrapping themselves in blankets and huddling together out of the wind.

  As the weeks passed the number of wounded increased, and news carried by them was all bad. The assault had started well enough with the capture of the village of Samarkhel and the Jalal-Abad airfield, but it had soon foundered on well-defended Afghan army positions around the city. The wounded described the withering fire from bunkers and trenches, and the screams of the dying caught in the minefields and low wire entanglements. The Afghan air force flew a hundred sorties a day over the city. Antonov transport planes, modified to carry bombs, flew at high altitude out of range of the Stinger missiles. They dropped their payloads of cluster munitions on the battlefield, saturating the hillsides with flying shrapnel. And Scud missiles, fired by Soviet troops deployed around Kabul, rained down.

  There were so many wounded that it was impossible to conceal them all at night. The risk of the convoy being found by the Afghan air force increased with each passing day.

  Several times, they were forced to halt and wait for several days while the wounded died in droves and gangs of men with AKs strapped to their backs broke rocks and shoveled snow to open the road. That was when she felt most exposed, when her hands most often reached for the reassurance of her own AK.

  She would not have long to wait to be tested.

  A giant strode through the mountains toward them. It was dusk and she was sitting in the truck’s cab, staring fearfully at the sky, when the Russian Sukhois found them. It was beyond anything she could have imagined.

  They had been stuck in a bottleneck for eighteen hours, jammed like sardines in a tin. The road was closed by a rockslide at the end of a long and narrow ravine. Her truck was near the back of the convoy, her view of the road ahead blocked by a dog-leg in the ravine. The other women were in the trucks behind her. There was nothing for them to do but pray.

  After the first detonation, the ground buckled like molten plastic and a tide of pulverized stone came rolling down the ravine, turned the corner and engulfed the truck. The windshield turned white and shattered. She was thrown across the cabin, bounced off the passenger door and rolled into a ball in the foot well. A blast of heat forced her to cover her face with her hands. Beside her the plastic seat cover bubbled and melted. She could feel her eyebrows singed off and struggled for breath as the heat sucked the air out of the cab. The second detonation blew her out of the cab. She hit the ground and rolled into a ball.

  The ground was bouncing up and down. Further detonations followed, with sheets of flame. Flying stone chips grazed her forearms and her shoulders. She crawled behind a boulder and dug into the dirt with her hands.

  She felt the warmth of his hands, holding hers, drawing her up out of the cold and darkness. She opened her eyes. Bakr was sitting there, beside the hospital bed with her hands in his.

  “Is … is …?” She couldn’t find the words.

  He knew what she was asking. He smiled. “The baby is fine.” She gasped, her jaw falling slackly open, giving her breath and her thanks to the air.

  “I’m taking you home,” he said.

  She closed her eyes again. As she drifted back into unconsciousness, she found herself wondering where that home might be.

  THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES

  1990–1991

  What had she expected? Not the air-conditioned chill of Saudi palaces and shopping malls, the chauffeur-driven limousines and the all-enveloping tentacles of the family conglomerate. Not Bakr’s purposeless drifting or his incessant womanizing. Not the admission that in Afghanistan he was at times a reluctant spy for the Saudi intelligence services, sending back reports on the kingdom’s most famous prodigal, Osama bin Laden. She had not known what to expect. How could she have known? She had married a pauper, who had nothing to offer her but a few words of poetry and a basil plant in a can of paint. How could she have expected that he would turn out to be a wastrel, the dissolute younger son of an incredibly wealthy family?

  “Come to Saudi Arabia,” Bakr had said, in a casual manner, at the hospital in Peshawar. Why not, she thought, she was sick of Afghanistan. It was no place to have a child.

  “I’d follow you to the ends of the earth,” she told him.

  Shortly after the birth of her son Omar in a Saudi hospital, Miranda was told that her womb would have to be surgically removed because the placenta had grown into and through the wall of her uterus. She was in her early twenties. It didn’t seem fair.

  She loathed Saudi Arabia. It was the ends of the earth. What am I doing in this appalling country that does not deserve its riches, she thought, where I’m not even allowed to drive, when it’s the only skill that I possess?

  When Bakr was offered a position revamping a failing import/export business in Kuwait City she encouraged him to take it—anything to get out of Saudi. The business was an offshoot of one of the holding companies run by the family conglomerate. It specialized in importing luxury Western goods into Iraq. It was being run by one of Bakr’s uncles, Ebrahim, who had founded it back in the seventies but was old and diabetic now, and more interested in the small nomad museum that he owned in Kuwait City than forging relationships with Iraqi traders.

  Who could have expected that Bakr would take to the work with such zeal? Or that there was nothing he would not do to close a deal …

  Miranda wrenched the car door’s handle, stumbled away from the Mercedes and stood bent with her hands on her knees, nauseous, barely staying upright, her gaze lifted towards the distant horizon. She wanted somebody to come out of the shimmering desert air and save her. Far away she saw the ripple of a mirage: a burning death in Afghanistan, like that of her Egyptian friend, whose charred corpse was pried from a burned-out Zil; or a parade of lovers, Bakr passing her, l
ike a gift tied with ribbons, from one man to another; having to fuck her way out of a nightmare in which she was sinking as if into quicksand.

  She wanted to yell in Bakr’s face, When did I stop being precious to you?

  She held her head between her knees and waited for the mirage to fade.

  It was Bakr’s uncle Ebrahim whose comment had caused her to storm out of the building and drive out into the desert until she couldn’t drive any more. He’d said, “Are you concerned that Bakr may take another wife?”

  She didn’t know why it had upset her so much. It wasn’t as if Bakr’s womanizing was what bothered her most. There was something hopeless and unresolved about his behavior, which was what had made him so attractive to her, and was probably what appealed to the women who fell for him.

  She straightened up and rubbed the small of her back with her hands. Three months had passed since the hysterectomy and she could count on one hand the number of times that she’d had a civil conversation with Bakr in that time. Any attempt at discussion made him furious. Of course, he’ll take another wife, she wanted to scream—this man that I married that is as elusive as a wisp of smoke. Gulf men wanted sons. Now that she was not capable of delivering another it was inevitable.

  She turned and walked back to the car.

  Omar’s huge eyes followed her as she reached into the foot well and recovered the small, floppy-eared rabbit that had fallen there. She tucked it in under one of the straps of the child car seat and nuzzled Omar’s tummy with her nose. He reached for her face with his tiny fingers.

  “I love you,” she whispered. He smiled.

  She got back in the car, turned it around and drove back into Kuwait City. She found Ebrahim standing on the steps of the nomad museum with a repentant expression on his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m just a foolish old man.”

  It wasn’t Bakr’s womanizing that bothered her; what bothered her was being offered by her husband to his business partners for their sexual gratification.