CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
NAJEEB LAY AWAKE under his blankets in the dark. The only sound from the town was an occasional passing conversation, and he didn’t like what he was hearing. For the past half hour he had been trying to dream up a way out of this mess, and he was pretty sure he had come up with one.
A flashlight beam shone through the slatted door, and the next voice he heard was Skelly’s.
“Damned dark out here, isn’t it?” Skelly stepped inside, clipping his light to a dead electrical wire dangling from the ceiling. “Jesus, it’s filthy in here.”
“I don’t think this
hujera
is used much anymore, except by boys and animals.”
“Are we the former or the latter? After two days without a shower I’m not sure.” Skelly groped for his sleeping bag.
“They came and took our phone while you were gone. The generator, too.”
“Heard about the phone,” Skelly said, tossing aside the bag, then looking straight at Najeeb. “Razaq had it. He was asking where you got it. Said I should ask you, but he seemed to have a pretty good idea.”
So that was why Razaq had been upset. Najeeb wondered whose informants had been talking to whom and what they had been saying about him. Whatever the case, it was time to level with Skelly. Otherwise they were finished, and he found himself deeply regretting the possibility.
“The ISI gave it to me,” he said, holding Skelly’s gaze. “One of their supervisors, a man named Tariq.”
“You might have told me. What else have you been holding back?”
“What else do you want to know?”
“Razaq seemed to think you have a history of this.”
“Of what?”
“Being an informant. Ratting people out.”
“Like my father, you mean. That was the only other time.”
“Razaq said you betrayed him to the ISI.”
“Another case of coercion. Not that I can defend it. My father was in the opium trade. Tariq wanted information, and like a fool I gave it to him. That was seven years ago. I have not been home since.”
“I’m sorry.” Skelly seemed to mean it. “Guess that explains the reception you got at the checkpoint. The one where they got us out of the truck. That one guy was eyeing you like a trophy. He work for your dad?”
“Yes. I knew him growing up.”
“Well, whatever the reason, Razaq is convinced you’re now some kind of spy for Bashir.”
“No. Just for Tariq. He wanted a full report. On Bashir as well as Razaq.”
“Sounds like they don’t trust anybody. Either that or the Americans have shut them out of the loop on Razaq. Anything else I should know?”
Najeeb hesitated, then decided why not. “Yes. Daliya—my girlfriend, as you call her—she is still missing. I never found her, and I would not have come with you except Tariq ordered me to. That is when he gave me the phone.”
“Ordered you?”
“He would have handed me to the police, who wanted to question me about Daliya’s disappearance. And, well . . . also about a body at my apartment building. They found him lying next to a knife from my kitchen. He had been putting religious messages under my door.”
“You didn’t . . . ?”
“No. I did not. But someone made it look like I did. And now Tariq has me doing whatever he wants, so here I am.”
“In one hell of a mess.”
“We both are.”
“By being with Razaq, you mean.”
Najeeb nodded. “I have been listening to his men as they walk by. They are scared, expecting the worst. When Razaq sets out tomorrow, he will find that a few more of them have disappeared.”
“He’s heading north all the same. Right at the crack of dawn.”
“To Heserak?”
Skelly nodded.
“The Ali Khel Gorge,” Najeeb said. Just as he had feared.
“He mentioned that. Said it might be trouble.”
“Which is why we should avoid it.”
“As if we had a choice.”
“We do. We can stay behind.”
“For you that might work. Razaq might prefer it. But he wants me along as a witness. To tell the world in case somebody does him wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter. We can still hide you. Right now, if you wanted.”
“What about the sentries?”
“We bribe them. Fifty dollars and they will do whatever you want. From what I have been hearing it might not take that much.”
“Then where would we go?”
“Into some family’s house. Another bribe. A year’s worth of income in one of these homes. They will keep us in the back until Razaq’s gone. He may want you along, but no way he wastes time searching house to house.”
“Then a few hours later Bashir rolls into town and we’re right back where we started.”
“So we wait a few extra hours. Maybe an extra day. Then Bashir leaves and we work our way back to Peshawar. With the money you have we can hire all of the horses and guides we need.”
“Unless someone decides it’s more profitable just to rob us and kill us.”
“Yes, that is possible, too.”
“Look, Najeeb. I know I’m paying you a hundred-fifty a day. But if you want to pack it in, I wouldn’t blame you. Razaq’s English is good enough that I can make do as long as he’s around, so I’m going. Stupid, maybe. But it’s my job, not to mention a hell of a story, the biggest I’ve ever had. I’m no cowboy. Never have been. But if I bail out now then I might as well never have gone into this business. Understand? Besides, if Razaq has the backing he claims, he should make it fine, even if Haji Kudrat’s waiting up ahead.”
“American backing, you mean. Do you really believe in that?”
Skelly shrugged. “Sometimes. If I don’t think about it too hard.”
For a moment Najeeb considered arguing the point. With a little more persuasiveness he might even have won it. Skelly’s insistence on proceeding was, at best, foolhardy. Yet there was something ennobling about it as well, as if the man were laying claim to his small niche of history, like every other foreigner who had made a name in these hills—spies and soldiers and scouts, toiling for the greater glory of distant monarchs and ministers—all had traipsed naively into the dust. And now here was Skelly, scribe of the West, trying to make sense of these imponderable rustics for the enlightenment of the plain folk back home. It was a strange business the two of them were up to, a dynamic he wouldn’t have diagrammed in a millenium of imaginings. Yet here they sat, trying to convince themselves they still controlled their destinies, even as one warlord slept just down the hallway and another was camped on the mountaintop just over their shoulders.
Skelly would need him tomorrow, and also on the day after that. And soon enough, he hoped, Daliya would need him as well. In the world of his boyhood he would have been expected only to save his own skin, to cut and run. But in the world he was trying to fashion for himself now, he supposed, it was time to show some staying power, some trust and reliability. Besides, even if he were to return to Peshawar tomorrow, Tariq would likely throw him in jail, and then where would they all be? For now, at least, the best means of escape was to keep moving forward, deeper into uncertainty.
So, rather than argue, Najeeb simply nodded.
“All right, then,” he said. “I will go north with you in the morning. But we should sleep now. It will be a long day.”
Skelly seemed almost disappointed, as if he’d secretly wanted to be talked out of his venture. Then he, too, nodded and crawled into his sleeping bag. A moment later he shut off his flashlight, and the only sound in the room was the mutter of a sentry, well down the corridor. Talking sedition, no doubt. Sedition and desertion. Maybe Najeeb should have argued after all. Too late now, either way. In six more hours they would be on the march.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SKELLY AWOKE covered in sweat, clammy and shivering against the slippery liner of his sleeping bag.
“Great,” he muttered, groping for his duffel in the dim light, wondering where the Cipro might be. The call to prayer blared through the town, the amplification as harsh and fuzzy as on a cheap car stereo. It sounded like the mosque was right next door.
Najeeb stirred, groaning beneath his wool blankets, nothing of the man visible but black hair. Skelly swallowed a dry lump in his throat, but his greater worry was his stomach and the regions below, gurgling warmly, a thermal spring of bubbling mud. He reeled slightly as he stood on bare feet, reaching for a water bottle. He felt wrung out, brittle.
“Where’s the shitter?”
“The what?” Najeeb sat up, propped on his elbows.
“The toilet. The WC.”
“Next door.”
It was another open doorway beneath the verandah of the guest house, a small, gloomy room that looked as if it hadn’t been washed for weeks. There was a ceramic hole in the middle of the floor, with a bucket of water parked nearby for manual flushing. Skelly grubbed himself into place, forehead beading with sweat as a violent chill seized him like a spirit. Thank God he had his Cipro. He’d take two now for maximum wallop, then a third at midday. His belly clenched, issuing forth a gush like molten lead. Then another shudder, goose bumps on his arms and legs. He cleaned up as best he could and stepped outside, opening the water bottle to rinse his hands, dripping dark blotches onto the dusty street. The prayer droned on, piercing his eardrums.
Skelly had expected to find the streets empty, but at least a dozen men were already out, shooing goats as they tightened straps on horses and pack mules. Every man but one had a gun on his back, and that was Razaq, giving orders and pointing this way and that.
Najeeb materialized at Skelly’s side, a scrap of bread in his hand. Skelly didn’t want to even think about food, but it was probably a good idea to force some down even if it carried a fresh load of microbes. His belly gurgled as if arguing against the plan. He wondered whether their satellite phone was strapped to one of the mules. Their ISI sat phone, he reminded himself.
“Looks like we better get moving,” he said. “Why don’t you get our stuff together. I’ll try to get a word with Razaq.”
In his weakened state, Skelly felt as if he was walking on stilts, and he was nearly spent by the time he reached Razaq. The warlord had paused in his preparations and was gazing up at the hillside where Bashir must be. Skelly could faintly make out the path Najeeb and he must have taken last night. Razaq, he saw, was wearing the old sword, the one from his ancestors. It was sheathed at his side and hanging from a belt.
“For luck?” Skelly said, pointing.
“And for memories. We leave in ten minutes.”
Then he turned away, shouting more orders in Pashto. Skelly’s stomach rumbled, and he headed off to find his pills. Maybe nerves were part of the problem. Whatever the case, it was time to saddle up.
Ten minutes later, right on schedule, they rode out of Azro single file, clopping and clanking in the morning stillness. Not even the children came into the streets to see them off, and the only two women in sight began arguing loudly with each other from facing rooftops, shouting across a narrow alley past fluttering gray banners of drying laundry. Najeeb’s prediction of further desertions proved correct; despite the addition of a few new recruits from Azro, Razaq was departing the town with about as many men as he’d brought.
Skelly soon grew used to the nauseous motion of the horse, the bump and sway nearly lulling him to sleep as his saddle creaked like a rocking chair. Najeeb kept his thoughts to himself, for the most part. Small talk would have seemed out of place, and there was nothing to translate or describe—nothing but the brown-gray monotony of the encircling hills.
After the first few miles the sun crept over a ridge, finally bringing a little light and warmth to the gloom, but Skelly felt no better than when he’d awakened, alternately shivering and burning, sweat beading on his forehead and running down his back. Najeeb pulled alongside, a concerned look on his face.
“You don’t look well,” he said. “It is good that I came.”
“Yes,” Skelly said, although he was beginning to wonder if they’d done the right thing. “I think we’ll be all right.” Every few minutes he checked the hills behind them for sign of Bashir’s party, but there was nothing, not even a glint of sunlight on metal.
Toward noon they rounded a wide bend and halted. Just ahead the valley narrowed, with steep rock walls towering on either side and huge stones piled in a sloping tumble on both sides of the road. The passage ahead looked narrow enough in some places to resemble a tunnel with the roof removed, a hardscrabble of coruscated brown and gray that went on and on, the blueness of the sky tempered only by a faint corona of dust that seemed to rise on every breeze. At the head of the column, Razaq pulled binoculars from a saddlebag. Some of his men dismounted and began kneeling by the side of the road.
“The Ali Khel Gorge,” Najeeb whispered from behind. “A good place to stop.”
Skelly dismounted, and his stomach folded back in on itself. He took the opportunity to stumble into the boulders a few yards, where he again unloaded his bowels, hands gripping the dusty stones while the men muttered in prayer just beyond. Another bout of nerves, he told himself. Reaching his saddlebag, he took a long draught of water, rinsing his mouth and swallowing deeply.
“Next time shit in the road,” Najeeb said firmly. “I did not see you’d gone there until it was too late.”
“Mines?” Skelly asked.
Najeeb nodded.
As they remounted a few moments later Skelly peered farther down the formidable gorge, trying to imagine what it must have been like piloting tanks down the narrow road—the big green craft beetling along like alien creatures, turrets swiveling, treads ringing and whining. Then some barefoot Mujahedeen in a turban rising up from a boulder to fire a tube from his shoulder, a shell whooshing into the treads as warriors swarmed suddenly from the rocks, darting flares of blue and white gowns. He held that vision as he watched Razaq unsheathe his sword and raise it high, pointing it forward from the saddle as the column prepared to resume its progress. Skelly yanked out his notebook to record the moment, oddly charmed by the gesture—Razaq’s massive bulk astride the big roan and all his men at the ready. There was no one but them in the valley, it seemed, them and the big clean sky where only a hawk was on patrol, spiraling on an updraft as it disappeared over the ridge.
Razaq sheathed his sword and they were under way, Skelly’s horse setting off before he had time to pocket his notebook. A bloom of heat flushed his face and chest, followed by a shudder of cold.
For the first hour he flinched at every new sound, at every clank and mutter from the column, scanning the stones for signs of movement. Gradually he fell back into his earlier rhythm, nodding and swaying, but just as his eyelids began to droop there was a white flash of light from ahead on the right, followed by a second flash, even brighter, and his stomach clenched. A rider four horses ahead slumped left, blood geysering from his side just as the sound of the gunshot reached them, a sharp boom that echoed up the sides of the gorge.
“Jesus!” Skelly cried, struggling to free his feet from the stirrups while keeping his head down.
From high on the slope to the right a voice shouted maniacally in some foreign tongue, seeming to carry Skelly’s heart with it as it reverberated up the opposite hillside.
Then all hell broke loose.
Gunshots seemed to come from everywhere at once,
cracks
and
zips
and
thunks
as the slugs found stone and flesh, echoes doubling the effect. Skelly finally wrenched his feet free and dropped awkwardly to the ground, certain that at any moment a bullet would tear into him. The better riders were pulling their horses to the ground with them, but Skelly could only watch and listen as a slug struck his own mount with an ugly
thwack.
A hole in the saddle spurted blood, and Skelly had to scramble crablike out of the way of the red stream. The beast groaned and sagged to its front knees, slumping left and nearly falling on him. He crawled between a pair of boulders, his mind seeming to scatter in a hundred directions at once. Thankfully, the same aspects of the terrain that made it prime ambush country also made it easy to take cover.
Skelly jerked his head left and right, looking for Najeeb, feeling that his eyes were rolling in his head like those of a wild animal, bulging with panic and adrenaline. He finally glimpsed Najeeb, pressed to the ground behind him, sheltering in the same rocks.
“You okay?” Skelly shouted, his voice emerging in an unsteady croak.
“Yes. The man behind me was hit.”
By now some of Razaq’s men were returning fire, aiming toward muzzle flashes and puffs of smoke. Echoes roared up the canyon, then for a moment the shooting seemed to abate. Skelly eyed the road behind them for any sign of Bashir, but for the moment their escape route seemed clear. Up ahead Razaq was crouched among boulders on the opposite side of the road, speaking with some of his men. There was shouting back and forth between the stones.
“They’re saying we should fall back,” Najeeb said. “Work our way back down the road. The attackers won’t be able to move as quickly as we can. The footing is very bad. Very steep. In some places all you can do is go up or down. But we’ve already lost four men, maybe half the horses, so be ready to move soon.”
“Is it Bashir?” Skelly asked. “Just harassing us, maybe.”
“Not possible. There is no way he could have moved ahead of us without us knowing. Not last night, and not in the gorge.”
“So is it Kudrat, then?”
“Maybe. Him or bandits. Or some other person who thinks the gorge belongs to him. Look, we are moving. Ready?”
Skelly would have preferred staying put for the moment. At least here he knew he was under cover. And what he really needed now was water. His mouth was so dry he could barely speak, and even breathing was difficult. But the men around him were indeed on the move, so Skelly got going as well, crabbing his way back down the road from behind the boulders, keeping his head low, palms and knees already scoured by the rough ground. A few gunshots pinged in the rocks like the remnants of a hailstorm. One popped the dust a foot ahead of him, and he had to fight back an urge to rise up and run. Then came an even stronger impulse to freeze, to press his face into the dust and wait for it all to end.
“Move,” Najeeb urged from behind. “Keep going.”
Other men scrambled nimbly past, staying just off the roadway, weaving through stones and boulders. A horse trotted past, a miracle it was still standing. Did Skelly have his notebook? Yes. That was something, he supposed. And his satchel was where it almost always was, strapped across his shoulder. What about his bag, with all his clothes? Forget it. Just get out of here. Maybe the attackers wouldn’t pursue them. Even if they were caught, maybe he’d be spared—after all, he was nothing but a hack. But for the moment he was a target like all the others, a head and torso to aim at.
“Keep moving!” Najeeb shouted. “If we fall behind they’ll cut us off!”
“I’m going, I’m going.” His voice had begun to return. Better, he told himself. Just stay calm. Stay low.
Their movement meant that only one or two of Razaq’s men were bothering to return fire, and for a few moments the shooting from the hills intensified, although so far there had been nothing heavier than automatic-weapons fire.
He wondered momentarily about the satellite phone. It was probably gone by now, shot full of holes or crushed beneath a horse. Across the narrow road to his left a man raised up on his knees and fired a burst from his Kalashnikov, then immediately dropped. As far as Skelly could tell, the man hadn’t even aimed. Was this how they’d done it for twenty-three years here in all the nonstop fighting since the Soviet invasion? Ambushes and wild firing among the ravines, lobbing the occasional shell into cities and towns. Or maybe this was the way gun battles went the world over, no matter what the army. If so, he could hardly blame them for shooting wildly. For all his experience in war zones this was the first time he’d been caught in the middle of a firefight, and he’d be damned if he’d have taken aim either in the middle of this chaos.
Twenty minutes of scrambling took them a few hundred yards, past a sharp bend in the road, and once they cleared it the gunfire practically disappeared. Najeeb must have been right about the ambushers’ lack of mobility. None had apparently been able to keep pace. The route behind them remained clear. Perhaps they really would make it out of here.
Skelly saw Razaq dare to stand for a moment, cool as could be but still scanning the hills for muzzle flashes or signs of movement. This emboldened several of his men to stand, as if competing to prove their worth. Skelly waited a moment longer—nothing to prove as far as he was concerned—then he, too, rose to his feet, brushing the dust from his pants and shirt. He was spent, limp and feverish with a new flush of heat. Suddenly light-headed, he sat back down a moment, then rose unsteadily again and shouted to Razaq.
“Where to? Back to Azro?”
“It is our only option.”
Provided that Bashir had left the option open, that is, although neither man dared say so.
“Do they know?” Skelly asked Razaq, gesturing toward the other men. “About your so-called rear guard, I mean.”
“I told my brother and my son. Not the others.”
Skelly nodded, not sure what he thought of that. Then he turned to Najeeb. “Maybe you were right. Maybe we should have stayed in Azro.”
“It is not to question now,” Najeeb said. “What is to happen will happen.”
“Maybe. But you were right all the same. I’m sorry.”
Najeeb didn’t reply, but he didn’t seem angry either. Good for him, then, because from here on out they would need each other’s help more than ever.
Razaq took stock of his caravan. Five of his men had been hit. One was dead for certain—Skelly had seen the man’s face, or lack of it. So was the man who’d been shot in the chest at the beginning of the ambush. Three others were wounded but still on their feet. One with a bloody left leg groaned loudly as he wrapped the wound with his
kameez
and struggled back into the saddle, shirtless atop one of the seven remaining horses. The other two men had wrapped their arms with shreds of their filthy garments. Both were expressionless, as seemingly unmoved by their misfortune as seasoned commuters confronting another traffic jam.