by Mainak Dhar
‘Hey, Khalid. Where did you serve? I’d guess you were American, though your family roots may be from somewhere dustier and sunnier. No offence, but you don’t look like special forces. You look more thoughtful than grunts like me.’
He looked at me. I could see that he was thinking over in his mind whether he should join the conversation. My last line had hit home. He motioned his men to go ahead.
‘I was a soldier. And, you’re right, I wasn’t another Army grunt. But your definition of what makes someone special may be limited, and perhaps biased.’
So, our resident hijacker and wannabe terrorist had a sense of humour.
I was sure I would kill the bastard sometime, or die trying, for what he had done on the plane and the danger he had put my family in, but if a little bonhomie and banter got me to know more about where I was headed, why not?
‘Perhaps, Khalid, perhaps. But then we are all biased, aren’t we? So, what do your bosses really want?’
He raised an eyebrow as if to ask me if I really expected him to answer.
‘Come on, Khalid. Aman and I are as good as dead. I don’t really expect to get out of here alive, so satisfy my curiosity at least. You guys are clearly not ISIS or any other ragtag group. Throw in some covert Chinese special forces, and you guys are clearly something much more.’
I could see him smirk at the mention of the Chinese, though he averted his eyes quickly. It was something else I had learned and might put to use, if I lived that long that is.
The radio strapped to his shoulder crackled to life and he turned to one side, whispering into it. Two of his men came back to cover us.
Karzai had been silent so far and now leaned over to me. ‘Smart. Keep the bastard talking. He is itching to show off. Feed his ego a bit more and we’ll know who he is. You saw how he reacted to the mention of the Chinese.’
‘Yup! It was the look of someone being given help when he didn’t think it was needed. His bosses seem to have got the Chinese in, or who knows, the Chinese are running the whole show, and he’s been reduced to being another hired help.’
Karzai nudged me. ‘Khalid seems to be smart. I’d bet on him having been an officer at some point, but that big guy behind you looks like an idiot. Needle him, piss him off and we may learn more about who these guys are. Come on, all you need to do is irritate him. In other words, just be yourself.’
I gave him a dirty look and turned to one of the gunmen near me, a hulking, olive-complexioned man trying to look like a jihadi, but probably another of the mercenaries hired by Khalid’s bosses for this job.
‘Hey, Jack.’
He scowled at me. ‘My name is not Jack.’
‘Well, Jill then. You know that rhyme about Jack and Jill going up that hill…’
‘Shut the fuck up or I’ll shoot you.’
I whistled and took a step back as if scared at his threat.
‘Easy, big boy. I don’t think your masters have given you that long a leash. I just wanted to know how much longer we have to go.’
‘Keep walking, you motherfucker, and don’t talk.’
Khalid was back, and had apparently caught the last of the exchange.
‘Rasool, take it easy. Why do you always piss people off, major?’
‘Because it makes them careless and easier to kill.’
His expression changed as he stared at me, right in the eye, assessing me. ‘God knows what my bosses are thinking. We should have just killed you as soon as we could have. You’re going to be trouble.’
‘Yup. Always have been, always will be.’
He shook his head, almost sadly. ‘Too bad. I can see you must have been a good soldier, even though you are a real pain in the ass.’
‘Don’t the two mean the same thing? I mean how may good soldiers have you met who are pushovers? Were you one, before you stopped serving your country and started killing unarmed men for money, I mean?’
He stopped walking and looked at me, his voice a hoarse whisper, ‘You know nothing about me, major. Nothing. Be careful with what you say.’
‘So, enlighten me.’
Khalid continued walking, and I reached out and held his left hand. The big man I had needled earlier raised his rifle, but Khalid nodded at him to relax.
‘I lost my family in a terror attack and realised that usual channels and means did nothing to bring the killers to justice. We fought the good, clean fight, one which our bosses and politicians were comfortable with and sanctioned. But the real fight was fought in dark corners where they would not want to go. They were more interested in public relations and pulling our boys out of harm’s way than actually engaging the enemy and destroying him. I was contacted by men who said they would allow me to go in where others wouldn’t and I signed up. But I later realised that many of my old bosses were mixed up with my new bosses, and used my new teammates for their dirty work – ones they could not sanction publicly. It seemed to be the best of both worlds when it came to using the few skills I had.’
‘What did you do before this, Khalid?’
He looked up. ‘Almost there, major. Once there, I don’t think you’ll like what my bosses have in store for you. I don’t particularly like you, but I respect you as a soldier, and if I had to kill you, it wouldn’t be while torturing you to death.’
I looked at Karzai. At least now we knew what was in store for us, though the knowledge was scarce comfort.
‘So, Khalid, out of courtesy to the soon-to-depart, who the fuck were you before you got mixed up in this?’
I had not been prepared for his answer. ‘If you really must fucking know, major. I was Special Operations Group. I killed people for the CIA.’
Ten
The first thing I saw when I was herded into the outpost was a giant drawing of a Spartan. It was faded in places but clearly someone had gone to great lengths to draw the warrior well. Probably one of the American soldiers posted here, with some artistic talents and time on his hands – Whether it was because he fancied himself and his comrades as elite warriors like the Spartans of yore, or thought of them being left to make a doomed last stand like in the movie 300.
Khalid didn’t follow us in, but four of his men were with us. We were greeted by four masked men wearing black.
I asked one of them whether he had bought along any Veg Manchurian with him, earning me a baleful stare through the slits for his eyes. He had clearly heard of the Chinese Indian dish. Then, I told him I would trade him intelligence for a bottle of Tsing Tao beer, which was perhaps the only good thing China made.
That made the man shove me in the chest.
‘Do you want to piss everyone off so much that they just kill us faster?’
I smiled at Karzai.
‘Hey, you heard the man. We’re going to be tortured and killed. I doubt they have cable TV in this shithole, so any entertainment we get has to be of our making.’
Karzai rolled his eyes, but said nothing, as we went deeper into the base and were pushed towards a large cabin.
I could see two men manning a heavy machine gun post on a raised platform and a masked man sitting by a corner, a portable Surface to Air Missile launcher by his side. I lurched towards him, as if I had tripped. One of the men pushed me back hard towards the cabin. It was Rasool, the same man I had exchanged words with on the climb up.
As the cabin door opened, I whispered to Karzai, ‘The SAM had Russian markings. CIA agent, Chinese bosses and Russian missiles. All we now need is for them to serve French wine and some British fish and chips, and we’re ready to have a bloody world summit up here.’
The cabin inside was considerably warmer than the air outside and lit with lamps placed around it. In the centre, was a large table on which were scattered maps and charts.
Two men sat near another table in the corner, which had a laptop and communications gear on it. I noticed one of the displays showed black and white visuals of what appeared to be footage from the drone they had out there.
This looked
more like a military command centre than an abandoned base where ISIS hijackers just happened to find sanctuary.
Karzai and I were pushed into two chairs and our hands tied behind us.
The big man I had made such great friends with made it a point to tie mine very tight, and whispered into my ears, ‘I will enjoy seeing you suffer.’
I kissed him on the cheek. ‘I love you too, sweetheart.’
He recoiled, as if I had just slapped him and spat at me. ‘Mad fucker.’
As he left the room, I began to laugh.
Both the men seated in front of the communications gear turned to look at me, surprised as to why anyone would be laughing in the circumstances in which I found myself.
Karzai looked at me, exasperated.
‘What? I think he’s just trying to hide his real feelings for me. If he agreed to practice better dental hygiene and his breath didn’t smell like week-old garbage, who knows, I might even fall for him. Imagine that as a plot twist. Me finding true love out here with that fat bastard.’
Karzai leaned his head back and began to laugh.
That set me off. Soon both of us were laughing uncontrollably.
The two men in the room got up and scurried out.
Soon, three masked men came in, flanked by a large Caucasian man, who stood out both for his size and bulk, and his neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard. He must have been really fit and strong when he was young, but he looked to be in his sixties, and it looked like his middle age had gone in lifting more beer cans and steaks than weights, judging by the size of his gut. He was also dressed in jeans and a bright pink Polo t-shirt, which just added to the sense of the bizarre. He was looking at me, a smile on his lips, and then snapped his fingers.
A masked man came up to me and slapped me. Very hard.
That was a good way to get me to shut up. Getting me to behave was another matter altogether.
I spat back at the masked man, having the satisfaction of seeing my spit and blood land on his face, as he stepped back and hit me again.
When I leaned forward as if to spit again, he actually took a step back and I grinned.
‘Fooled you.’
The Caucasian man shook his head as he came towards me. ‘You do your reputation justice, Ghosh. A troublemaker. Someone who sticks his nose into things he should better leave alone, and has an immense capacity for pissing off the wrong people.’
‘So, big unnamed fat white dude in pink, did you bring me here just to hurt my feelings with your words or to shock me to death with your fashion sense?’
He took a deep breath, as if trying to calm himself and then looked at Karzai. ‘You are clearly his better and mercifully quieter half. Seven Six Two in person. I was so thrilled to learn this guy was on the plane. But it’s a real bonus to find out that you were with him. When I heard a sniper was helping him, I wondered. Then, I took a look at our drone footage. Yes indeed, it was you. Have you wondered why I’m so happy to see both of you here? Why I insisted that we get both of you alive even if it meant letting this man’s family go?’
Before Karzai could say anything, I cut in. ‘Do you realise you speak in very long, boring sentences? Some pauses, some inflection would get your listeners to understand you more and maybe leave you with less of a chance of keeling over from a cardiac arrest in mid-sentence.’
He glared at me. ‘Don’t push it. You will not enjoy what’s coming. It will be very long and not be boring at all. I just had to know how much you knew.’
Now, it was my turn to be puzzled. ‘Know about what?’
He smiled, though it was devoid of humour and resembled more a shark baring its teeth at its prey.
‘I want to know exactly how much both of you learned about Project Lotus.’
‘Lotus? What does that have to do with anything?’ Karzai blurted out. He seemed to be as puzzled as I was.
The man knelt in front of him, shaking his head.
‘Everything, my soon to be dead sniper, everything. The two of you disrupted one leg of it, took out some small fry operating for me in Mumbai. But now you’re here, smack in the middle of its biggest operational leg. It is a small world, my sniper. You don’t realise it, but you began your days as a fugitive because you killed men hired by me.’
Karzai was normally the calm one of us, but I saw his eyes blaze with fury.
American Private Military Contractors had raped the girl he had loved, and she had killed herself, not being able to live with the shame. That is how Aman Karzai, a highly trained sniper who had fought for the Northern Alliance and then the Afghan government against the Taliban, had killed those men for revenge, and become the infamous sniper Seven Six Two.
Project Lotus. Two words which seemed to be coming back to haunt us. I had thought that was the name for the drug smuggling ring that we had busted in Mumbai just over a year ago. Now it appeared that we had barely scratched the surface.
The man looked at me, before turning to his men. ‘Take these two into the room and get them ready. I think they fancy themselves to be hard men, so they may take some persuading. This is going to be a long night.’
***
The room was dark except one small lantern in a corner and stank. As Karzai and I entered, we saw graffiti that had been etched on a wall.
‘Welcome to the Valley of Death.’
Perhaps etched by an American soldier from long ago.
We realized there was another prisoner in the room. She sat huddled in one corner of the filthy room, wrapped in a tattered blanket, face covered.
As we came closer, she stirred and the blanket slid, revealing her face.
There was some dried blood on the edges of her lips, showing she had been beaten. A prisoner, held by brutal killers who had threatened to execute her, and shown so far that they had every intention of carrying out their threat.
Yet, her eyes still shone with defiance.
She saw Aman first and glared.
‘Are you here to kill me?’ she spit out.
He recoiled, not knowing what to say.
Then, she saw me step into the light from behind Karzai. Her features softened as she recognised me.
‘You were on the flight. Your wife and baby were with me.’
I knelt before her. ‘I know, Rachel. They are safe now.’
She sat up, the blanket falling from her shoulders.
I saw that she had bruises on her shoulders and neck.
‘Are you okay?’
She smiled.
While there was an edge of bitterness in her reply, I could see that her spirit was still unbroken.
‘When a man asks a woman in my position that, they ask many things. I fought as well as I could and, it wasn’t enough. They got me. They haven’t raped me, though I know they could at any time. I have no hope of the US negotiating with them. I was a president’s daughter, I know how it works. They will strike back if they can, and my life could end one way or the other.’
Karzai was now sitting next to me, looking at the woman, whose cell we now shared.
‘Ma’am, my name is Aman Karzai. I am a prisoner here like you. I think both the Major and I will not live to see tomorrow because these men believe we know more than we do, and will torture us to find out.’
‘Well then, Aman. If we’re all to die tomorrow, how should we live today?’
‘Your father said you are a remarkable woman. I can see why he is so proud of you.’
I saw the first hint of emotion in her as she looked at me, her voice breaking slightly as she replied. ‘You spoke to him?’
‘Just before we came here.’
‘You weren’t captured?’
‘We were, in a way. We agreed to come here in return for my family being taken to safety.’
She looked at me for a while and then turned her face away.
Karzai sat next to her and I could see he was troubled by something.
‘What’s up, Aman?’ I asked.
‘You are fighting for your
family, so of course, you’re going to go out of your way to protect them. You and I were mixed up in Project Lotus, so they want us. What I don’t get is why they would go to so much trouble to get her. Just because she’s a former President’s daughter? Just because she spoke out against the drug trade? They’re making themselves a big, fat target for the US by doing this. Consider all the players mixed up in this. The guy who walked up with us was former CIA. And then, you have that fat American out there with the Chinese. What’s going on?’
Rachel spoke up. ‘The good news is that I can fill you in.’
When anyone starts with something being good news, especially when you’re in the sort of hell hole we were in, you can be sure that bad news is sure to follow.
Rachel didn’t disappoint. ‘The bad news is that because of what I know, we are all going to die.’
***
They came for me first.
Maybe because they believed I had links with Indian intelligence agencies, while Karzai was known to them as a rogue operator with no known allegiances to any government. Or, maybe, because I had pissed them off so much that they wanted to work on me first.
Either way, I found myself sitting on a rickety metal chair, my hands tied with duct tape to the handles and my feet similarly tied to the front legs.
Two masked men flanked me, pointing rifles at me while the fat American stood in front of me, together with another masked man. A tall, lean man, who moved with the easy fluidity of a professional athlete, or more likely in this case, a trained killer.
The American took out a cigar and lit it up with a Zippo.
‘You know that shit will kill you, unless your high cholesterol and obesity doesn’t give you a heart attack first.’
He took a long drag of the cigar and I could see the tip glowing bright. Then, without further ado, he pressed the tip into my left hand, just above my knuckles. He kept pressing it down for a few seconds.
I closed my eyes. It hurt like hell, and I bit down to prevent myself from shouting out in pain. I wouldn’t give these bastards that satisfaction.