Authors: Mike Lawson
The problem, DeMarco had told Emma, was that he didn’t know any Muslims. Not one. He hadn’t been able to talk to Youseff’s wife, in part because she didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak whatever language people from Somalia spoke. Not even knowing the name of the language they spoke in Somalia showed how ignorant he was. But the other reason he hadn’t been successful questioning her was because he was a white guy and looked just like all the white FBI guys who had already questioned her.
The biggest weakness in DeMarco’s conspiracy theory was that he could find no evidence that either Mustafa Ahmed or Youseff Khalid had been coerced to do what they did. He suspected in Reza Zarif’s case that somebody – possibly the late and unlamented Donny Cray – had held a gun to the heads of Reza’s children, but he couldn’t find anyone who had been killed or kidnapped or tortured to make Youseff and Mustafa do what they did. And one of the reasons he couldn’t do this was because he couldn’t get people to talk to him.
But Emma did know Muslims. And she wasn’t a white man. DeMarco wanted Emma to see if she could find someone close to Mustafa Ahmed who might have been used to force him to strap on a bomb. They decided to focus on Mustafa because he had lived in D.C., whereas Youseff’s family was in New York.
The first thing Emma did was call a man who knew a number of languages spoken in Muslim countries. He was an interpreter who worked at the DIA, his parents were from Pakistan, and he was a Muslim. His name was Zafarullah Nazimuddin, a name almost impossible for most of his coworkers to pronounce or remember. His American friends all called him Zafa.
Emma paid a gypsy cabdriver to borrow his cab for the day and then told Zafa she wanted him to pretend to be a cabbie, park at some of the stands where Mustafa used to wait, and talk to drivers who knew him. She wanted Zafa to find out as much as he could about Mustafa and identify the people closest to him. Zafa, being very bright, took less than three hours to accomplish his mission.
‘Emma,’ he said, ‘everybody all says the same thing. Mustafa was a soccer nut, and the person closest to him was one of his nieces. The girl’s an Olympic-caliber player, and she was given a scholarship to UVA. The guy kept a picture of her on the sun visor of his cab, a shot he took of her heading the ball into the goal, and he was always showing it to his pals.’ Four hours later Emma was in Charlottesville, Virginia, lying to a sweet woman in student housing to find out where Mustafa’s niece resided.
Anisa Aziz wasn’t so much pretty as striking. She had an angular face, high cheekbones, a strong nose, and heavy eyebrows over intense black eyes. Her eyes radiated intelligence. She was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants, and maybe it was the athletic wear, but Emma had the impression that this girl just
flew
down the field when she was playing. To Emma, Anisa had seemed unusually nervous when she answered her door and saw Emma standing there. Maybe that was because Emma was a stranger or maybe it was because she had been expecting someone official to come calling – someone from the FBI – because of what her uncle had done.
‘May I help you?’ she said to Emma.
‘I’d like to talk to you about your uncle,’ Emma said.
‘Are you with the police? The FBI?’
‘No,’ Emma said, ‘but I’m working with somebody in the government who doesn’t believe that your uncle was a terrorist, somebody who believes he was forced to do what he did.’
‘My uncle was the kindest man I ever knew.’
‘I’m sure he was, Anisa, but then why did he do it? Why did he try to blow up the Capitol?’
Anisa hesitated before she spoke, but when she did, all she said was, ‘I don’t know.’ She didn’t look at Emma when she said this.
‘Were you threatened in some way? Did someone tell your uncle that you’d be harmed if he didn’t do what he was told?’
The girl shook her head. ‘No. Nobody did anything to me. And I don’t know why he did it. Now I have to go. I have a test to study for,’ she added lamely.
Anisa started to close the door and, when she did, Emma saw a bruise on the inside of the girl’s upper right arm; then she noticed a mark on her neck. The bruise on her arm could have been caused by someone grasping her arm, but the girl was an athlete and there could be other explanations for the bruise. The mark on her neck, though, didn’t look like something you’d get from running into another player. It was an ugly red line, and it looked to Emma like a ligature mark made by something thin, not a rope or a cord, maybe a wire. Emma stopped Anisa from shutting the door.
‘How did you get that mark on your neck?’
‘Mark?’ the girl said, as if confused, but her hand had moved unconsciously in the direction of her neck. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Anisa, don’t you want people to know the truth about your uncle?’
‘The truth! It wouldn’t matter what I said. You people think we’re all terrorists, even people like me who were born here. I’m as American as you are,’ she added, her dark eyes flashing, daring Emma to say that she wasn’t.
‘I know you are,’ Emma said. ‘And if you need help, if someone’s threatening you …’
‘I have to study,’ Anisa said, and began to push the door closed. ‘You have to go.’
‘Okay, I will,’ Emma said. ‘But I want you to take this.’ She handed the girl a card. ‘On the front of that card is my name and my cell phone number. On the back is the name and phone number of a Muslim woman, a woman from Afghanistan who now lives in Maryland. All I’m asking is that you call that woman and ask her about me. She’s expecting your call. After you speak to her, and if you feel you can trust me, call me. Please.’
Emma found a motel near the campus and checked in. She wasn’t sure if Anisa would call her, but she wanted to be close by in case she did. She flopped down on the bed and lay there looking up at the ceiling – and her mind drifted back to Afghanistan, to a village on the slopes of the Hindu Kush, to the woman she had told Anisa to call.
Emma, four U.S. Army Rangers, and an interpreter had been choppered into the village. She and the men were all dressed like the villagers, Emma wearing a loose-fitting robe, a veil covering her face. Their mission was to talk to the village chieftain: a ruthless thug, an opium trader, and a man who had gained control of his small fiefdom by shooting his predecessor in the back but who, for the moment, was an American ally. This was in the days when Osama bin Laden was an American ally as well, helping the Afghanis fight the Russians.
They explained to the chieftain that the Russians were building an airfield in a valley approximately fifty miles from the chieftain’s village – fifty
hard
miles through steep mountain terrain that could only be navigated by brave men and sure-footed packhorses. And when they got close to the airfield, they’d have to travel mostly at night, because the Russians would have helicopters in the sky looking for mujahideen warriors. But in a month, Russian troopships and helicopters would begin to use the airfield, and then men equipped with surface-to-air missiles and mortars, men hidden in the caves and rocks surrounding the meadow, could do significant damage.
‘How do you know about this airfield?’ the chieftain said. When he spoke he looked at the interpreter, never at Emma, even though he could tell that the interpreter was only telling him what Emma said. The chieftain was a man who found it unfathomable that a woman could be speaking to him about a serious matter like this.
Emma pointed upward and said through the interpreter, ‘We have eyes in the sky. Satellites and spy planes.’ She wasn’t sure the chieftain knew what a satellite was, but she knew he’d be too proud to ask.
‘And for doing this, what do I receive?’
‘Missiles and mortars,’ Emma said. ‘And a chance to vanquish your enemy.’
The chieftain smiled. ‘You can’t eat missiles.’
‘Three thousand dollars for going to the airfield,’ Emma said. ‘Five thousand dollars for every troopship you destroy and two thousand for every helicopter. In American dollars.’
That was an incredible amount of money for people in this part of the world, and Emma knew that the percentage the chieftain would share with his people would be minuscule. She also knew the chieftain would lie about how many aircraft he had destroyed, but that was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was disrupting Russian operations.
The chieftain didn’t say anything. He looked down at the map lying in the dirt and, with a cracked, blackened fingernail, traced the route to the meadow.
‘
Three
thousand for a helicopter,’ he said.
Negotiations completed, Emma had one of the Rangers contact their base camp to send back the helicopter and offload the weapons, but she was informed that there would be a six-hour delay for some unspecified reason. Weather, mechanical problems, Russian activity – it didn’t really matter; it was out of her control. She went into the tent where her men were waiting and began to open a packet of what used to be called C-rations but were then called M.R.E.s – meals, ready to eat. She’d always suspected the name was some bureaucrat’s idea of a joke. She was trying to open a can of peaches with the ridiculous little can opener that came in the packet when she heard a commotion outside the tent, a man shouting and people whistling and clapping. ‘Henderson,’ she said to one of the Rangers, ‘see what’s happening.’
Henderson was the ranking Ranger, and he and the interpreter came back a couple minutes later. ‘They’re going to stone a woman,’ Henderson said. ‘She committed adultery.’ Henderson was a hardened combat veteran, but this was something that seemed to shock even him.
Emma sat there a moment, rubbing her eyes with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. She knew she should do nothing. She was under strict orders not to interfere in local affairs, and in particular she knew her mission was to make an ally out of this particular chieftain. But she
couldn’t
do nothing.
Emma rose and walked out of the tent. Behind her she heard Henderson say, ‘Ma’am. Where are you going, ma’am?’
Emma ignored Henderson. She stood there looking at the scene in what passed for a village square. A woman was standing there, her hands bound behind her back, a terrified look on her face. A man was standing next to her, screaming to the mob that had gathered. Emma didn’t know if the man was a religious leader, a judge, or the woman’s husband. As the man was talking – raving, actually – she saw boys placing stones in baskets and cooking pots. The boys’ eyes gleamed with anticipation.
Emma looked around for the chieftain and finally saw him. His butt was resting on the rim of the village well, and he was smoking a cigarette as he chatted casually with another man. At one point, he gestured toward the bound woman in the square and laughed and shook his head. Emma guessed that he was saying the Afghani equivalent of ‘The dumb bitch, can you believe it?’
Emma turned toward the interpreter, a doe-eyed man with a receding chin, and said, ‘Come with me,’ and began walking toward the chieftain.
‘Ma’am, you can’t interfere,’ Henderson, the Ranger sergeant, said. When Emma ignored him, he muttered, ‘Goddammit all’ under his breath, then said to his men, ‘Get your weapons.’
Emma had been with the four-man Ranger unit for three weeks now, and when the unit was first assembled, the men had been told she was in charge. They hadn’t been told her rank or what organization she belonged to, but the bird colonel who briefed them told them she was the
man
. The soldiers figured that the tall blond gal was from one of the spy shops and it was probably some kinda political thing that the army had to go along with, but they had a hard time believing that they were going into the badlands with a young good-looking woman leading their squad. They’d follow her orders, of course – they were Rangers – but what they really expected was that Emma would listen to their sergeant and do whatever he said. It didn’t take them long to figure out that she was bright enough to ask for the sergeant’s input, but in the end she was the one who made the decisions. Emma had, even then, all those indefinable qualities of leadership that inspire confidence and obedience and loyalty, and after only a short period the Rangers were accustomed to following her lead. But now she was doing something that the soldiers knew was wrong – or at least wrong from the perspective of their mission.
Emma strode up to the chieftain. He raised his haunches off the rim of the well and looked down at her; he was six-foot-six. Emma took the veil off so he could see her face – she
hated
that damn veil – and while looking directly at the chieftain, she said to her interpreter, ‘Tell him I want him to stop this.’
She saw the rage forming in the chieftain’s face; women didn’t speak to him that way. He looked as if he might strike Emma, but he restrained himself. He said something the interpreter translated as ‘This is a tribal matter. Go back to your tent, woman.’
Emma suspected that if she threatened not to pay him or give him the missiles, he’d agree and then stone the woman as soon as the Americans left. She also knew she had to come up with some solution that would allow the chieftain to save face. He’d kill Emma and her men before he’d be humiliated by her in front of his tribe.
Emma looked over her shoulder. The man who had been speaking in the center of the square had stopped. The condemned woman had slumped to the ground. The villagers were all looking over at the chieftain and Emma. Most of the villagers at this point, even the women, held stones in their hands.
‘Tell him,’ Emma said to her interpreter, ‘that the American army wants that woman. Tell him we need a … a cook.’
Henderson, who was now standing next to Emma, said, ‘Ma’am, you can’t do this.’
‘Tell him,’ Emma said, ignoring Henderson, looking directly into the chieftain’s eyes, ‘that we’ll pay him a thousand dollars for the woman.’
The chieftain looked at Emma, then over at his people, then back at Emma again. ‘The woman has a daughter,’ the chieftain said.
‘Tell him we’ll train the daughter to be a cook too. We’ll pay five hundred for her.’