He exchanged a look with Nadir. The young man seemed overwhelmed, his eyes panicky.
“Do they know you’re with the Taliban?”
“Yes, of course, but they do not care. I do not belong to their clan or their village. Blood has been spilled and it must be paid in blood. It is Pashtun tradition.”
“Do you think this shura might really condemn me to death?”
“I will defend you,” Nadir said shakily. “I will tell them that you are under the protection of Mullah Omar. They have great respect for him.”
“Will that be enough?”
“I—I hope so,” he stammered.
In other words, Nadir was asking him to gamble with his life.
Malko looked around. The crowd had shuffled off the highway, and traffic was moving normally again. AK-47s slung over their shoulders, the men were heading to their vehicles to drive to the village, where they would decide Malko’s fate.
Suddenly the toothless old man turned and shouted something at them.
“What did he say?” asked Malko.
“We are to follow him in the taxi.”
“That’s fine. It’ll give us a chance to escape. All we have to do is let them get ahead of us.”
Things were looking up.
Malko climbed back into the taxi, followed by Nadir, who gave the driver his instructions. The driver, who understood the situation perfectly, said something in a plaintive voice.
“He is asking if we can pay him now,” explained Nadir.
The driver apparently had no illusions about the outcome of the shura.
As Nadir was looking for his money, they suddenly saw the most agitated of the villagers, the one who had threatened Malko, exchange a few words with the toothless old man, then come striding back toward the taxi.
He looked as hostile as ever, and Malko was sure he would vote to kill him without hesitation. If only the Australians were still here! But they had probably gotten into their armored vehicles and taken off.
The angry man climbed in next to the driver, the barrel of his Kalashnikov poking against the car roof. He spoke sharply to the driver, who looked even more terrified.
“We are going to the village together!” Nadir translated. “It is three miles from here.”
Which meant they had less than five minutes to decide what to do. After that, it would be too late.
They passed the army officer who’d been killed and whose body had been rolled into the ditch.
A sinister omen.
For a couple of minutes, nothing happened. They passed rocks, a few sheep, a shepherd. They were in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly Malko turned to Nadir. He had made up his mind.
“We can’t go to the village,” he said firmly.
“What do you mean?” said the young Afghan. “The driver is doing what the man in front tells him to. You must not try anything foolish!”
“Don’t worry,” Malko reassured him.
He slid his right hand down along his leg, reaching the grip of his GSh-18. He tore the pistol from the ankle holster, chambering a round as he raised it to his lap.
Nadir was now gaping at him in horror.
Malko pressed the barrel of his automatic against the bearded villager’s neck. To Nadir he said, “Tell him not to move, just to give us his rifle. We’ll stop the car and let him out.”
When the man felt the cold steel on his neck, he started violently and turned around with a roar, his features twisted in fury.
Half-dead with fear, the taxi driver braked and stopped the car without being told.
The villager feverishly tried to free his AK-47, its barrel banging this way and that. Malko yelled to Nadir, “Tell him to settle down! I’m not going to shoot him.”
Nadir stammered a few words, but they failed to calm the man. The threat of the pistol clearly wasn’t enough. With the taxi stopped, he suddenly yanked the door open and jumped out, still tangled in the strap of his Kalashnikov.
“Get us out of here!” Malko yelled at the driver, forgetting that he didn’t understand English.
Rigid with fear, his hands clamped on the steering wheel, the driver didn’t budge. Malko turned to Nadir.
“Tell him to drive away, fast!”
Nadir blurted something, but the driver still didn’t react. Suddenly, Malko looked out the open door to see the bearded man getting up, looking enraged. The moment he was on his feet, he slipped the AK-47 off his shoulder and chambered a round, clearly intending to shoot them.
The terrified driver now threw his door open and ran off down the road. Malko found himself staring into the wild eyes of the bearded villager, who was aiming his AK-47 at the car. In a second, he would empty his magazine at them. Malko couldn’t hesitate: it was his life or theirs.
He fired the GSh-18 as the villager was bringing his rifle to bear. The first bullet hit him in the chest, sending him stumbling backward, finger still clenched on the trigger. Its barrel now pointed at the sky, the AK-47 loosed a long burst that went over the car. Malko had already fired again, this time hitting the man in the hip. He tumbled to the ground and lay sprawled in the dust.
“You killed him!” said Nadir dully.
Standing not far from the taxi, the driver was wailing like a banshee.
Pretty emotional, for a Talib.
Malko got out, the automatic still in his hand.
The motionless villager’s eyes had glazed over. Fortunately there was nobody else on the road. Now as white as a sheet, Nadir came over to Malko.
“What are we going to do?” he moaned. “They are going to come after us!”
“We aren’t going to wait for them,” said Malko, still shocked by the sudden turn of events. He’d never thought he would have to kill this frenzied villager, but if he hadn’t acted, they would all be dead.
“Tell the driver to turn around,” he ordered. “We can’t stay here.”
He had no desire to battle any villagers who came to see what had happened. But the driver stood rooted to the spot, arms hanging by his sides. In the distance, Malko could see a car coming their way. This was no time to dawdle. He pointed his gun at the driver. To Nadir, he said, “Tell him that if he doesn’t get back in, I’ll kill him!”
Nadir didn’t need to translate for the driver to finally move. He came back and slid behind the wheel as Malko climbed in. The man was so rattled that he stalled the engine three times before getting it going.
“Turn around!” yelled Malko.
This time, Nadir translated.
The driver made a clumsy U-turn and they headed back the way they’d come.
The only evidence of the incident was the villager’s body lying in the middle of the road.
As they drove, a shaken Malko went over the series of events that had led him to shoot the man who was about to kill him. It made him sick, but fate had given him no choice.
Suddenly the driver spoke up in a whining voice.
“He says he can’t let us stay in his taxi anymore,” translated Nadir.
“Where does he want to go?”
Nadir asked the question, and the Afghan answered in the same plaintive tone.
“He has to go back to Kabul now. If he shows his face in the village, they will kill him. This is very serious because he will never be able to drive the Kabul-Ghazni route again. He wants a lot of money in compensation.”
Malko still had ten thousand dollars on him, the equivalent of half a million afghanis. An enormous sum, and more than enough.
“Okay, tell him I’ll give him five hundred thousand afghanis, but he has to take us back to Kabul.”
Nadir passed this on, but the driver didn’t seem satisfied. He made a long speech, which Nadir translated:
“He says that when the villagers find the body, they are going to alert the whole region. He’s risking his life by letting us ride with him. He says he’s going to drop you off at the next town, whether or not you give him the money. Otherwise, it’s too dangerous.”
This was a disaster.
Thinking quickly, he asked Nadir, “Are we expected in Ghazni?”
“Yes, why?”
“Is there some other way to get there that doesn’t go through the village?”
The idea of going back to Kabul was wrenching.
After a long talk with the driver, Nadir finally said, “He does not know the way, and it would be too risky. If he is stopped in a village, his life would be in danger.”
“Aren’t there any coalition troops around here?”
“No, they are based much farther away, beyond Ghazni.”
Meanwhile, they were still driving north, toward Kabul. Going back to square one enraged Malko. Without the stupid accident caused by the Australians, they would have reached Ghazni by now, and he would be on his way to Quetta.
They drove for another twenty minutes, until the first houses of a village appeared. The driver pulled into a parking lot below a small restaurant, stopping next to a white SUV that was being washed. A few trucks and private cars were parked there, and a dozen truckers were sitting up on the terrace.
The taxi driver turned around and had a long conversation in his usual plaintive tone with Nadir, who summarized it for Malko.
“He apologizes but says he is afraid. The villagers are sure to tell everybody what happened. They will be looking for him at the checkpoints. He is going to try to get back to Kabul as soon as possible, but he will not be able to work anymore.”
“I thought he was a member of your organization,” said Malko.
“Not really,” Nadir admitted. “He is a sympathizer. He does favors for us. Because of what happened he will not be able to drive a taxi anymore. He is afraid somebody will remember his license number. Out here in the provinces, the villagers are in charge, not the president.”
The driver then said something brief.
“He wants his money.”
Malko realized that there was no point in arguing. Pulling hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, he counted off eight thousand dollars, keeping two thousand for himself. He handed the wad of bills to the driver, who pocketed the money without counting it.
The moment they got out, he raced off as if he had the devil on his tail.
Malko watched thoughtfully as the taxi drove away and disappeared in traffic. “Aren’t you worried that he might turn us in?”
Kotak’s nephew looked shocked. “Oh no, he is my second cousin! He would not do that. It would lead to reprisals.”
“What do we do now?” asked Malko.
Nadir pointed at the restaurant. “Let us get something to eat. No one will mind us.”
It was lunchtime. They climbed the wooden stairs and sat at a table next to an orange seller. Nadir was right; nobody paid them any attention.
Just then a minibus stopped down below, let out some passengers, and drove off in a cloud of dust.
“Couldn’t we take one of those back to Kabul?” suggested Malko.
The idea didn’t exactly fire Nadir with enthusiasm. “It is risky,” he warned. “You are a khareji, and foreigners never travel that way. They would spot you at the first checkpoint.
“I have a better idea: I will get in touch with my uncle and have a car sent from Kabul. Only it will take some time. We need someone trustworthy.”
A skinny, bearded young man came to take their order and looked at Malko in surprise. Nadir chatted with the waiter for a moment, and he left.
“I ordered palau and fruit juice,” he said. “They do not have much here. To keep the waiter from wondering, I told him you were an agricultural engineer and our taxi had to drop us off. Do you like dahl, lentil soup? He recommended it.”
“Dahl it is, then!”
The situation looked none too promising. Malko had been forced to kill a man, he was stuck out in the boonies, and his only real option was to go back to Kabul, where he’d started. Plus, he imagined that all the restaurant customers were staring at him. You didn’t see many foreigners in the Afghan countryside.
Nadir was on the telephone. When he hung up a few minutes later, he looked annoyed.
“I was not able to reach my uncle,” he said. “I talked to his secretary. He will try to solve the problem, but we will not have a car for several hours.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Wait here,” said Nadir with an apologetic smile. “There is nothing else we can do.”
Malko looked at the cars passing on the road below the restaurant.
What was he going to do when they reached Kabul? He would be even more vulnerable than when he’d left. And he now had the killing of an Afghan on his back.
Malko felt caught in a web, and it was getting tighter all the time.
A secretary put an emailed report from the NDS supervisor in Ghazni on Parviz Bamyan’s desk. He tossed it onto a stack of papers and went on writing his memo for President Karzai’s chief of staff. Bamyan didn’t pay much attention to incident reports from provincial officers.
A single assignment filled his entire calendar: track down CIA operative Malko Linge, who was a suspect in the attempt on the president’s life. Karzai was putting terrific pressure on the Directorate to produce results, as a matter of both honor and safety. While officially blaming the Taliban for the attack, he was privately convinced the Americans were behind it. But he needed proof.
The NDS chief finished his memorandum summarizing the measures taken to find Linge, listing the places under surveillance and the people interrogated. He had even ordered the people manning the roadblocks to note all vehicles driving in and out of the Ariana Hotel. He couldn’t stop them, of course, but at least he would know who they were. More than thirty NDS agents had been assigned to the investigation.
Feeling weary, Bamyan decided to take a break and asked his secretary to bring some tea.
As he sipped his tea and ate some orange slices, he picked up the last file to come in and quickly perused it.
Suddenly his pulse quickened.
The Ghazni NDS officer had reported an odd incident.
ISAF troops had mistakenly killed two young villagers, and their cousins and friends set up a roadblock, hoping to seize governmental officials or soldiers in retaliation. Nothing unusual about that.
In checking cars, they had stopped a taxi headed for Ghazni with a khareji of unspecified nationality in it. They tried to detain him, but in a series of confused events, the foreigner’s group shot one of the villagers and escaped. The taxi had driven off toward Kabul and parts unknown.
Bamyan gave the report a long look.
Why in the world would a foreigner take a taxi on such a dangerous highway, instead of flying? Suddenly Bamyan thought of Linge. What if it were him?
He absolutely had to know more.
Bamyan found his list of provincial NDS officers and phoned Ghazni. He was soon talking to the writer of the report, who confirmed the events and said they had taken place in a village called Yusuf Khel.
“Get up to Yusuf Khel right away,” he said, “and call me back from there.”
Bamyan no longer felt like drinking tea. He didn’t have any proof, of course, but he had a hunch he was on the right trail. And that raised other questions. Whoever had helped Linge take an Afghan taxi, it wasn’t the CIA. Which meant he was getting help from somebody local. Pushing aside his other files, Bamyan took the one that listed Linge’s contact in Kabul and noticed several visits to the Wazir Akbar Khan mosque. According to an agent, the khareji had called on Musa Kotak, the former minister for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice—a man shielded by President Karzai to keep an open channel to Quetta.
It was obvious: Linge had used the Taliban network to get out of Kabul.
So when President Karzai fulminated about the Taliban and the Americans ganging up on him, he wasn’t far wrong. Bamyan now had to confirm what so far was just a theory. He called one of his deputies and had the surveillance around the mosque increased. If Linge came back to Kabul, that was where they sho
uld be looking for him.
Malko glanced at his watch: it was 4:30 p.m.
He and Nadir had been hanging around the restaurant for more than four hours. Customers had come and gone, never staying long, and the two of them were now part of the landscape. From time to time the young man ordered tea, but otherwise, the waiters ignored them. In Afghanistan, the notion of time was flexible.
“What the hell is taking him so long?” hissed Malko angrily.
“My uncle told me that they found a car. But at this time of day it takes almost two hours just to get out of Kabul.”
“Can’t you phone them?”
“No. They know where we are. The driver is someone we can trust; he is close to my uncle. Maybe he had trouble getting his car. We just have to wait.”
In any case, there was nothing else to do.
An hour earlier, a police car had pulled over below them, and Malko’s heart had jumped into his mouth. But the two cops just drank some tea and left without even glancing at him.
Suddenly he saw an old VW bus coming from the Kabul direction in the middle of the highway, its turn signal blinking, clearly headed for the restaurant. It made the turn and parked below the terrace. A young man in Western clothes got out, and Nadir exclaimed, “It is Koshan! He is here to pick us up!”
The man climbed the wooden stairs and came over to their table. The two young men embraced, and Nadir explained the situation: “First he had to repair the car, and then had a lot of trouble getting out of Kabul. Traffic, you know.”
Malko glanced at his watch: it was 5:15.
The old white VW bus didn’t look too speedy, but it was better than nothing.
“Okay, let’s go!”
He was seething with impatience. He had no idea what he would be facing in Kabul, but anything seemed better than this endless wait out here in the sticks.
“I am getting in front,” Nadir announced. “Lie down on the backseat as if you are asleep. It will be better for the checkpoints. We will tell them you are sick.”
Malko did so. The VW bus had seen better days, and its interior was pretty dilapidated. He stretched out as best he could behind the front seats, his feet against the sliding door. Within minutes, they were driving toward Kabul.
Chaos in Kabul Page 19