Farishta (9 page)

The faded lime green airport terminal, a crumbling relic of 1960s-era U.S. foreign aid, looked abandoned. Across the southern horizon, the snow-capped mountains loomed like frozen sentinels. To the north, the flat, salt-encrusted desert rolled empty and featureless toward the Amu Darya River and the high steppes of central Asia.

There were no airplanes or equipment on the runway and no people except for two young British soldiers in camouflage uniforms, smoking cigarettes and lounging against a battered white Toyota Land Cruiser that was idling near the empty terminal.

Unlike the American soldiers and Marines I had seen on duty in Kabul, these men were not wearing helmets or body armor, just heavy jackets and floppy hats to protect their eyes from the intense glare of the winter sun.

The pilots cut the engine only long enough for me to deplane and unload my suitcases and equipment. They wished me well, closed the hatch, and taxied away, leaving me standing alone with my pile of gear at the far end of the runway.

Both soldiers took final drags on their cigarettes, crushed them under their boots, and climbed slowly into their vehicle. Long before my two-man welcoming party drove up to where I was waiting on the tarmac, the South Africans were in the air and on their way back to Kabul.

“Welcome to Mazār, ma’am, I’m your vehicle commander, Lance Corporal Franklin Fotheringham,” said a tall, unsmiling, and very muscular young soldier with a large olive-green assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He had just the beginnings of a ginger beard, and his youthful face offered a stark contrast to the weapon he was carrying.

“That,” he said, pointing at his equally young, but much thinner, dark-haired companion, “is your driver, Lance Corporal Peter Jenkins.”

Jenkins nodded in my direction. “Just so you know, ma’am,” he added in a thick Cockney accent, “the lads don’t call your vehicle commander Fotheringham. Everyone calls him Fuzzy.”

Fuzzy had nothing to add to this piece of information. He and Jenkins were clearly showing me only enough courtesy to avoid being accused of rudeness. While disappointing, this only confirmed my expectations about how I would be greeted upon my arrival at the PRT.

Fuzzy effortlessly tossed my suitcases and body armor into the back of the Toyota with his free hand. “You can leave your Kevlar and your helmet in the boot of your vehicle, ma’am,” he said. “You won’t be needing those things up here.”

“This vehicle is mine?” I asked. No one had mentioned that I had my own Land Cruiser.

Fuzzy, I quickly learned, was a man of few words. He nodded toward Jenkins, who responded to the rest of my questions.

“Yes, ma’am, it’s owned by your government, and it’s been at the PRT since before we arrived. The American bloke who was here before you used it. As you can see, it’s not in the best of shape. We’ve patched the seats with duct tape and the engine gets pretty loud when we go over sixty-five clicks, so we calls it the Beast.”

I could hear the Beast growling as it idled next to us on the tarmac. I also noticed that one of its windows was partially open, something that would not be possible in the hardened vehicles they used in Kabul.

“Isn’t it armored? ” I asked, embarrassed at the slight quaver in my voice. I had grown accustomed to the protective bubble in which embassy personnel existed in Kabul. I didn’t want these soldiers to see how nervous I was, but I found it impossible to conceal my anxiety.

“Oh, no, ma’am. We don’t use them vehicles up here. No need. No one’s shooting at us—at least right now,” Jenkins added with a grin. Fuzzy did not smile at this remark.

“That’s why we don’t wear the Kevlar or the helmets, ma’am. The locals actually seem to like us, and the colonel, he wants us to drive around waving and smiling, weapons on the floor, passing out free newspapers in the local lingo. Can’t do that in those armored buckets with the windows glued shut. And they’re fucking heavy—impossible to maneuver on muddy roads in the mountains. Lord help us if we had to drive one of those two-ton fuckers through a river or near the edge of a cliff.”

Jenkins stopped speaking and looked at me, his eyes wide, fingers pressed to his lips. “Sorry, apologies for the language, ma’am. We’re not used to having the ladies around.”

“Don’t worry about your language, but I’d rather you didn’t call me ma’am. It’s Angela.”

“Right, Angela,” replied Jenkins as he waited impatiently for me to climb into the Beast, which was growing angrier and louder. I felt the knot in my throat pushing up, but I was not going to show any weakness in front of these young soldiers.

“Would you mind turning off the motor for a minute, Jenkins ? ”

Rolling his eyes at my request, he reached in and pulled the key out of the ignition. The Beast shuddered violently then grew still. I sucked in a lungful of icy mountain air, released it slowly, and began to focus on my surroundings the way Mike, the Special Forces medic, had shown me the day I’d lost it during first-aid class. A blanket of silence settled over the empty runway, magnifying the vastness of the place and making me feel suddenly, inexplicably safer.

The absence of machine-generated noise was having an equally profound effect on Jenkins and Fuzzy. They were both staring up at three raptors circling high above us, black chevrons against an impossibly blue sky. The only sounds were the rustling of the wind through the dry grasses along the runway and the raptors calling to one another overhead.

“Ma’am—Angela, we’ll need to load up,” whispered Jenkins, tapping me softly on the shoulder and bringing to a close my few moments of serenity. “We’re driving back through town with vehicles coming from the Forward Support Base. They’ll be arriving any minute.”

As he switched on the ignition and the Beast began to protest like a camel struggling to its feet under a heavy load, a convoy of three PRT vehicles rumbled by us. We followed them off the airfield, leaving it as we had found it, silent and empty with the raptors circling overhead.

January 4, 2005
✦ PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAM, MAZĀR-I-SHARĪF

Long before sunrise the following morning, I was startled out of a deep sleep by three soldiers running down the metal staircase outside my room. Their elongated shadows backlit by the security lights on the roof of the PRT danced across the bedsheet I had tacked over my window for privacy. I sat up, breathing hard, as the clatter of boots on metal faded into the predawn silence. According to a thermometer nailed to the wall near my bed, it was forty-five degrees inside my room.

Somewhere in the neighborhood, the quavering voice of a muezzin was summoning the Mazāri faithful to the first of their five daily prayers. His singsong chanting took me back to that last day in Beirut with Tom, who had awakened as he always did when the first calls to prayer began drifting across the city. He brought me a steaming cup of coffee and a croissant and greeted me with two kisses—one on the lips and a second one on my swollen belly. Already dressed in his sweatpants, T-shirt, and sneakers, he was about to leave for his solitary morning jog along the corniche.

I showered, threw on my clothes, and ran out the door in a rush, forgetting to put on the brooch Tom had given me for my birthday. During my meetings that morning, each time my fingers moved absently to press against my expanding midriff, I would reflexively lift them to touch the spot where the brooch should have been pinned to my lapel—and grow anxious at its absence. Later in the day, when Tom’s body was pulled from the smoking rubble, I held him in my arms sobbing and rocking him like a baby. Returning alone to our apartment that evening, I found the tiny golden goddess on her leaping gazelle lying next to Tom’s coffee cup in the kitchen.

Hoping to banish the memories of my husband’s body in the charred ruins of the embassy, I rose from the bed in my room at the PRT and peered out my second-floor window. Under the glare of a full moon, I could see across the street an old mullah in front of a tiny mosque. He was standing before his prayer rug under the bare branches of a gnarled tree that cast a lacy trellis of blue shadows across the snow in his courtyard. When his chanting ended, I crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling.

The camp generators kicked into high gear, interrupting my momentary descent into melancholy. Somewhere in my suitcase was a box of earplugs, but it was too cold and I was too depressed to search for them. Wrapped in a fleece robe, flannel pj’s, and two pairs of wool socks I burrowed deeper into my embassy-issued sleeping bag, and curled into a tight ball.

I had planned to take a shower the previous night before bed, but I couldn’t bring myself to enter the British officers’ steaming all-male redoubt.

“What the hell,” I muttered, switching on my light, crawling out of my sleeping bag, picking up my towel, and marching down the darkened hallway into the empty men’s shower room. Thirty minutes later, I returned to my room thoroughly parboiled. I dressed in the khaki cargo pants, hiking boots, and long-sleeved white shirt that would become my unofficial uniform, put on a down jacket, and sat at my desk with a volume of Rumi. He would have to comfort me until the sun rose over the eastern desert and breakfast was served.

During the first thirty minutes of our drive from the airport back to the PRT the previous afternoon, my two young escorts had not said a word. Jenkins was focused on keeping up with the convoy and maneuvering the Beast through the clogged streets of Mazār-i-Sharīf, while giving the right of way to every camel, donkey, and darting child we passed.

The British Army driving style contrasted starkly with the aggressive tactics I had experienced in Kabul, riding with American security details. This ‘softly, softly’ approach was a calculated risk taken by British forces to gain the trust of the locals. I gritted my teeth and wished I could put on my body armor without looking like a complete wimp—I had felt so much safer in the fully armored American vehicles. But I could tell from the smiles and friendly waves of pedestrians that the British tactic was having the desired effect.

As we rode, I felt my anxiety slipping away. Even though they were giving the illusion of casual openness, my two military escorts were on high alert. I watched Fuzzy scan the sidewalks, giving special attention to the long rows of rusted shipping containers, which had been converted into shops and decorated with hand-painted signs. Each one bustled with vendors and customers haggling over piles of merchandise that spilled from their dark interiors.

Fuzzy was also examining the shoes of the burka-clad women who floated by us hidden beneath their blue pleated shrouds. When I asked him what he was looking for, he explained tersely that the “shoe test” was his method of determining whether there was actually a female concealed under the yards of billowing cloth.

Jenkins swung the Beast around a busy traffic circle, and we headed down a wide boulevard into the city center. Ahead loomed Afghanistan’s most revered shrine, the glistening, ceramic-tiled, five-hundred-year-old Blue Mosque, surrounded by broad walkways and expansive rose gardens. A low fence of filigreed wrought iron enclosed the entire plaza, and a bustling two-lane road funneled traffic around the sacred complex.

“Do you guys know the history of this place? ” I asked, hoping to spark a conversation with my sullen escorts.

“I don’t, ma’am,” replied Jenkins, glancing quickly at Fuzzy. “What about you, mate?”

Fuzzy didn’t respond. He continued to sweep his eyes slowly back and forth out the front windshield, while his enormous hands squeezed and released the barrel of his rifle. His eyes lingered briefly on the blue-tiled domes and arches of the mosque complex before he resumed his rhythmic scanning of the pedestrians and their footwear.

“Fuzzy? ” I repeated. “Do you know? ”

Silence.

“Why doesn’t he answer?” I asked Jenkins.

“He’s watching.”

“Watching for what? ” I asked.

“For anyone who might want to kill us.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded as I looked in alarm at the suddenly menacing crowd. “You just said that you drive around up here with your windows down, waving and smiling.”

“We do, ma’am—but Corporal Fotheringham, Fuzzy, he’s a sniper, and he’s had a tour of duty in Iraq. He says we can’t ever be too careful,” explained Jenkins as he steered the Beast through heavy traffic around the Blue Mosque plaza.

“So tell us the story of the mosque, ma’am,” said Jenkins as he slowed to avoid hitting an old man dragging a wooden vegetable cart across the road, “we’ll be at the PRT in a few more minutes.”

“Would you please not call me ma’am?”

“Right, Angela. Now tell us the story.”

“Okay. Legend has it,” I began, “that Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, was assassinated in A.D. 661 and buried in Kufa, Iraq. Did you get to Kufa while you were in Iraq, Fuzzy? ”

There was no reply, so I continued. “Many Shiite Muslims swear that Ali’s followers, in order to protect his body from desecration, strapped it to a white camel, which walked to Mazār-i-Sharīf and dropped dead of exhaustion right where the shrine is today.”