The Good Son

16

I drove the bike back toward Peshawar for a while until I found a place with good cell reception, and then I dug out the card Nisar had given me and called the number. He answered right away and I told him what had happened and what I’d learned from the ISI lieutenant. He assumed I’d shot him too, and there was a silence on the line when I told him I hadn’t.

“Well, in that case,” he said, “you can’t travel by road back to Lahore. I can arrange a helicopter-”

I said, “Thanks, Uncle, but I don’t want to go back to Lahore. I have some business in Afghanistan.”

“Afghanistan! You are mad! The ISI has made an attempt on your life and you’re going to Afghanistan? You will be a marked man from Herat to Kandahar.”

“Nevertheless, I’m going. Can you help me?”

“Let me think.” More silence on the line. “Yes. I do a good deal of business with a security firm with an office in Kabul. Force Eight, it’s called. If you can get to the freight area of Peshawar airport, I can have them put you on a plane. They’re in and out of there all the time.”

“Thank you, Uncle. I think I can manage that. By the way, have you heard anything from Iqbal?”

“Oh, Iqbal! I tell you, Theo, you have revolutionized that boy’s life. His parents were going mad with him spending his entire existence on that damn computer, and at least now he has something useful to do with it. I cannot follow the details, but he has tapped me for a good deal of money and I can only trust that I will get it back.”

This was not a topic I wanted to discuss over a cell phone, so we said good-bye and I headed for the airport. As it happened, I knew something about Force Eight Security Services International, because people in my line of work are prime recruits for their kind of operation, which is providing private armies in nasty places. They mainly do bodyguarding and site security where our own military is either not engaged or stretched too thin and where the local cops are unreliable. I had received a few polite inquiries myself, usually around the time my enlistment was about to run out, and my sense was they had the kind of political connections that would make stop-loss orders go away. I always told them I wasn’t interested.

At the airport I bribed my way into the secure freight area as any regular terrorist might have done and rode my bike right up to a black-painted Caribou with the Force Eight logo painted on it, just like the firm was a regular nation. I had no trouble hitching a ride, because Nisar had cleared it with the higher-ups, and also I happened to know the pilot, a guy named Arnie Havens, who used to be with the 106th, what they call the Night Stalkers, the people who insert Deltas and other special operations troops. Incredible pilots, and I almost asked him what they were paying him, but I found I was sort of embarrassed about it. He seemed a little embarrassed too, to be there.

While I waited, I called Cousin Bacha Khan and told him what had happened to me and he expressed delight at my narrow escape. He seemed sincere over the phone, and I figured that was because he wasn’t up for a bonus if the snatch succeeded. Maybe he hadn’t even set it up. I said I was going to Afghanistan to look for Gul Muhammed and did he have any thoughts on that since I’d seen him last? And he said, “Your father is where you would expect to find him.” So that was all right, because I knew where that was.

We took off and made the short hop to Kabul, and when I got out of the plane I found, not to my complete surprise, Buck Claiborne. He gave me a big bear hug, and I guess he could see I was not that enthusiastic and hoo-ah, and he asked me what was wrong and I told him I thought that at least he could’ve given me a call when he was about to dump the army, and I didn’t appreciate finding out from the first sergeant, and he hemmed and hawed and said he didn’t want to bother me about it, seeing as I was wounded and recovering and all, but I could see he was a little ashamed. Buck is not devious like me.

So we had that out and then he led me into a new Denali, black with the tinted glass. There was some construction going on in Kabul but the place still looked as wrecked as it did the last time I was there; it never really recovered from the Russian war, and I remember my colonel going on about how beautiful and peaceful it was when he was growing up there.

Force Eight had leased a big guesthouse in Shari Haw, near downtown Kabul, and fixed it up with new plumbing, air-conditioning, fresh paint, the works. They had their own generator, you could have pizza and hamburgers delivered if you wanted, and the feel of the place was like you were in a pretty good motel in Arizona. They had a big room downstairs with a fifty-inch plasma TV with a satellite feed, lounge chairs, a pool table, and a bar. When Buck took me in to show me around there was a baseball game on the TV and a few men in black jumpsuits with the Force Eight flash on them sat at the bar or in the chairs. Some funny looks flew around when I walked in with Buck. I got the impression that the only Pashtuns who came through here were servants, and they relaxed when Buck told them I was a regular white guy in disguise. As he thinks.

Buck introduced me to the bartender, an Afghan he called Gus, who spoke English with an American accent. He’d spent six years in Fresno and was pretty much like any suburban bartender in the States. He served us ice-cold Buds.

Buck saw me take in the room and said, “Pretty fucking neat, huh? A far cry from.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty neat, all right,” I agreed. “The company pays for all this?”

“Oh, yeah. They treat us real nice.”

“What do you-all do?”

“Protect the diplomats, mainly. Kind of funny, a place occupied by the U.S. Army and they have to hire private guards to watch our people, but there it is. And, by the way, no fucking rules of engagement, either. Someone gets in our face, we waste them and nobody says boo, and that’s because we also protect some big-shit Afghans, government people and such. They don’t trust one another but they trust us, and we don’t catch any flak from what passes for authorities in this shit hole. Nice business, and it’s going to get bigger.”

“Uh-huh. You got anyone speaks the language? Besides Gus, I mean.”

“Not really. We got some Special Forces types who know a little Pashto, some Dari, but everyone speaks English so it’s no big deal for most things. On the other hand, my friend, someone who really speaks the language and has the culture down and shit… fuck me! You can write your own ticket. I was telling the site supervisor about you-you remember Peisecki, he was a captain in Benning when we did that Ranger thing in ’02? Yeah, him. An all-right guy, a good head; anyway, his mouth was watering.”

“Because…?”

“Well, shit! The negotiating, man! We go in with a bunch of hajjis and they’re all jabbering away, and the fucking translator just says whatever he wants, and we don’t get any of the side play. Having you there has got to be worth serious cash. Man, you got no idea how much money is sloshing around this pissant country.”

“Really? I thought it was a basket case.”

“Oh, fuck, I don’t mean the government. The government is fucked. I mean the warlords and the growers and processors. This place is smack central. Peisecki says it’s the next big profit center.”

“Protecting dope lords?”

“Hey, it’s money. This is not the world, man, don’t ever forget that.”

I looked at him and then quickly away. The eagerness on his face made my belly twist. “Well, I’m happy for you,” I said, “but personally I’d need to think about it for a while. I mean, I’m not sure I could make the jump from… you know, Thus be it ever when free men shall stand between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.”

Buck looked down at his beer and then gave me a defiant stare. “Yeah, well, I did that for twenty, bud, just like you; I got pins in my thigh and my ears are shot to hell; I hear fucking bacon frying every minute of my life, and I’m goddamned if I’m going to live in a double-wide on an E-7 pension. Uh-uh. Not when I got this opportunity. You’ll see, Ice, it’s the real deal here.”

He finished his beer in two huge gulps and signaled for another round.

While I drank I thought about Buck and what he was doing and where he came from. Buck is a country boy from the western tail of Virginia, and his people have been fighting America’s wars from way back before there was a country, an endless stream of officers and noncoms and grunts from all those little hollows and towns and farms, the heart of generations of American armies, and I thought it was a real bad sign when people like that started to talk like Buck was talking now; I thought it was bad for the country. I should be talking like that, not him, and I felt bad but hid it and we got pretty drunk that night.

In the morning, hung over, we went out to a joint down the road and ate parathas and drank sweet mint tea and he asked me what my plans were.

“I need to go to Kunar,” I said. “I need that bike you got on the plane patched up and some Afghan ID.”

“Hey, not a problem, but fuck, man, Kunar? That’s deep in Apache country.”

“I know,” I said, “but I’m an Apache.”

He laughed and slammed me on the back, and said, “Shit, I guess you are. You look like a goddamn Pashtun and you smell like one too.”

All that took a couple of days to get ready. I lived at the Force Eight compound but spent most of my time in a tea shop off Flower Street. It was run by an enterprising young fellow named Atal, one of the innumerable class of fixers without whom life in Kabul would collapse more than it has already. He had a taste for the old poetry, and we would spend the afternoons examining the crowds on Flower Street, him pointing out to me who was a drug lord, who a terror chief, and who a CIA guy, quoting Rumi, Kabir, and Ghalib to each other as appropriate, and I sank so deep into pashtunwali that it was hard to remain civil when I returned to Little America at night. As Rumi says, It is right to love your homeland, but first ask, where is it?

Once I didn’t go back at all but stayed up most of the night listening to a trio Atal had brought in, sarangi, santoor, and tabla, and I kept giving them dollars to play my favorite ghazals, and afterward I smoked opium in the back and Atal let me sleep there covered by a sheepskin.

When the bike was fixed and the papers were prepared, I asked Atal if he knew a reliable man to take the Ducati back to Lahore, a hundred bucks plus expenses and two hundred when he got back to Kabul with a note attesting it had been delivered in good order. Atal was surprised at the price being so high-there were people who would do it for nothing-and I explained that people were after me and there might be some danger. We would need a careful person, but not too careful, since he had to be seen leaving Kabul for the south on a red Ducati.

“Oh, in that case I know just the man. He goes back and forth quite often as a decoy.”

“A decoy?”

“Yes, people smuggle, of course, and there are those who steal from smugglers, so the smugglers hire people to attract the attention of the thieves, but they don’t carry much. Rangeen is one of these. And he is about your size and shape.”

This man showed up that evening and was satisfactory in every way, and the next morning he left in my clothes and I in his, he on the motorcycle and I on a bus to Asadabad in Kunar Province.

Kabul to Asadabad is about two hundred kilometers, and even given the usual state of the roads the trip should take about five hours in peacetime. Our vehicle looked like a stumpy school bus painted vivid blue on the body, with the green and black national colors on its snout, plus a good deal of gold and silver paint, some of which was twirled into Qur’anic calligraphy, including The greatest terrors shall not dismay them, and angels shall receive them. I thought that made sense, given the state of the bus and the roads it was going to traverse.

My fellow passengers were mainly Kunar peasants back from shopping trips to the big city (their purchases towered on the roof rack), leathery men with missing teeth and sun-narrowed eyes, some with their burqa-clad wives and their children, plus a trio of musicians headed for a rural wedding, a schoolteacher, and three Afghan army soldiers in uniform going on leave. It was a fair cross-section of the people of Afghanistan, mainly Pashtuns, with some Tajiks and Hazaras. The bus had not left the outskirts of the city before we were a party, with people passing around food and tobacco, showing photos, registering their opinions, telling jokes. I sat in the front of the bus with the musicians on one side of the aisle and next to the schoolteacher. He was a soft-eyed man about my age with a neat spade beard and horn-rims. He was the one I had spotted as the suicide bomber, but he was not. He said he taught English in Asadabad, and I said I knew that language and if he liked we could practice on the way.

Up the narrow climbing road at unsafe speeds, and the terrors did not dismay us; we made good enough time to the Kunar border and then, because it was not peacetime at all, we were stopped by an Afghan army checkpoint. An hour baking in the oven of the little bus while the soldiers inspected our baggage and papers. I passed, no problem, but my schoolteacher was hassled, led off the bus; and returned forty minutes later, sweaty, red in the face, fuming. His name, Janat Gul Babori, was the same as or similar to that of someone the authorities wanted and he had to prove he wasn’t that man, his argument being helped along by the usual bribe.

While we were waiting, another bus pulled up and the soldiers passed it right through without pulling people off or checking it out. I looked at Janat and he shook his head. Bribes again, the whole bus could’ve been packed with Taliban and weapons and dope, the whole country was bribed to the nipples, every public office was for sale, but what could you do? There was no Afghanistan the way there was a France or a Canada, there were only individuals and families and clans, and the Americans trying to make it different was like assembling a fighter plane out of wet toilet paper.

After that, when the bus was rolling again, we talked about the wretched state of the country and how bad it had been under the Taliban and what a mess the current masters had made of it and how tired we all were of the endless war. What didn’t come up was anything personal. I’ve sat with people I’ve met by chance on airplanes and buses in the U.S., and sometimes you get their whole life story whether you want it or not.

But in this country reserve is the rule-no, it’s more than reserve, it’s a impenetrable thick mask-that prevents the expression of any genuine feeling. Maybe there is no genuine feeling; maybe the mask is all there is. I sometimes think that’s the case, and it’s one of the weirdest things about the transition from the West. My pal Claiborne is reticent for an American, he has the stoic uncomplaining humor of his mountain people, but Claiborne is an Oprah guest compared to the average Pashtun. Not making emotional waves is like the ruling passion of his life. The Americans see it as lying, as bad faith, but we think that the protection of honor, of the family, of the clan, is worth more than any mere veracity. Among the Pashtuns a man’s front is everything; no one can penetrate it except, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a friend of the heart, and he’ll be the only person in the world who will ever know what you really feel about things. For me this had been Wazir, and I for him.

It’s impossible to explain this kind of friendship to people in the West; it gets all tangled up in the whole gay thing they have, and it’s not like that at all. Or maybe it is, I wouldn’t know. We loved each other up in the mountains, in the war; it was the core of my life then, and when I was stolen out of my life it was gone, which is why when Bacha Khan told me Wazir was dead it was like someone recounting a dream: interesting maybe, but not real life.

So we talked, Janat Gul and I, as the bus jounced over the potholes, communicating, if that’s the word, in the veiled poetic Pashtun way, until we ran into another roadblock about ten miles outside of Asadabad, this one built around a couple of up-armored humvees and a squad of imperial storm troopers, my countrymen. The Americans were trying hard to be correct and do the rules-of-engagement thing, but you could see the drawn terror on their faces; they knew that any vehicle could be a bomb and, having been on the other side a time or two, I knew they would’ve preferred smoking any wheeled vehicle from a hundred meters away and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.

They unloaded the whole bus and lined us up, and a uniformed translator helped the young lieutenant in charge question all of us, which was sort of amusing because the translator would ask a guy where he was going and what his business was, and the guy would say, indicating the American, “I am traveling to see his diseased whore of a mother fucked by dogs” or some such, and the translator would render it in English, “He is a shepherd returning home.”

When it was my turn I took a long look at the lieutenant. He was in his early twenties, smooth-faced, wearing dark sunglasses. The translator, an older man, with the tired, cynical look of a city-bred Pashtun, took my papers and asked me where I was going.

I told him and added, “You have a pretty officer, brother. Does he let you fuck him in the ass?”

“He demands it,” said the man. “All night long. I think they should pay me more than a hundred and twenty dollars a month.”

“And have you caught any Taliban here?”

“You’re joking,” he said. “These sister-fuckers couldn’t catch a terrorist if he was hanging by a rope from their balls.”

“What are you saying?” asked the lieutenant.

“Nothing, sir,” said the translator. “He’s just another shepherd going home.”

Nor did they find any Taliban on the bus, although of course Janat Gul got the treatment again, because they were working off the same lists as the first guys. They were actually less rough on us than the Afghans, but the people were more pissed off when they finally let us go. It is just shitty to be questioned by foreign troops in your own country; there’s no way you can make it right, no way in hell.

So when the bus started again our mood had turned dark. Some cursed the Americans and wished for the Taliban to return, and others asked those donkeys to recall what it was like under the Taliban; voices rose, fists shook. I leaned across to the nearest musician and offered a twenty-dollar bill, saying, “Brother, let’s have some songs.”

He smiled, shrugged, spoke to his compadres, they unlimbered their instruments-dhol, rubab, toola-and broke into a lively attan, which is to the Afghans what the samba is to Brazil. They were pretty good, and after they had got the bus jumping to the wild rhythms of the dhol, they segued into a ghazal, one voice wailing over the drone of the rubab with the waving toola tootling in counterpoint. I knew the song, it was one we’d sung in the jihad, and the next one too was an old one; they were recalling the old days, before the Taliban crushed the music and the spirit of the people in the name of an alien version of Islam preached by an Arabian maniac two hundred years ago.

And then they played one I didn’t know, about a boy warrior who loved another boy warrior in the jihad and who had mysteriously vanished, leaving his abandoned lover to mourn alone, and it wasn’t until they got to the refrain-where is my young lion, my little ghazan? I wait, I wait, I know he’ll come back-that I realized that they were singing about me, me and Wazir.

I wanted to shrivel and I felt the blood rise to my face, but then I realized these people had no idea I was the guy in the song and I relaxed a little. It’s a weird thing to find out you’re a myth.

So we arrived, singing and dancing in the crowded aisle, at the town of Asadabad, having taken over eight hours on the trip. It was late in the afternoon by then and Janat Gul the schoolteacher insisted on giving me a meal and a bed for the night. His wife and sisters had to work like mad to clean out the room in his house where they sewed clothing to supplement his schoolteacher’s wage, which I felt bad about, but you can’t turn down hospitality among the Pashtuns and they are women after all; it is women’s work.

In the morning the wife, upon whom I had not laid eyes, of course, supplied a big greasy bag full of parathas, fruit, and bread for my journey, and I started walking out of town, north and almost straight up. It was fifty-odd kilometers into the mountains of Nuristan and I’d figured on two or three days’ travel, what with my bad leg, and that worried me, because my mother had been in captivity for seven days. On the other hand, no news was good news. Jihad groups had kept hostages alive for months-years-and I kept telling myself that my mother was a survivor, because if I wasn’t thinking that I would be thinking really bad thoughts and getting crazy, and that would screw up any chance I had of getting her out.

As it turned out, I caught a lift from a Tajik in a truck hauling consumer goods and grocery items to Warna, which took me almost all the way I was going. The driver said the area was fairly prosperous since the dope trade picked up after the war, lots of orders for generators and TVs and cell phones. He asked me if I was going to the jirga at Barak Sharh, and I said I was going to Barak Sharh but I hadn’t known there was a jirga, and he said yes, the Barakzai were having one, one of their clans anyway, and he hoped I was known there because they were very strict with strangers now. It was the opium trade and because the Arabs were killing all the maliks, them and the Taliban, the shit eaters, the pigs, the sister-rapers. The Tajiks don’t like the Taliban.

We reached Warna a little after noon, and I walked up the track toward the ancestral village of my adopted ancestors. I passed the cemetery and the old Sufi shrine. The gravestones had all been smashed or toppled during the Taliban era and the shrine was a blackened shell. There was a group of armed men from the clan militia at the entrance to the village, and they braced me and asked me who I was and what I wanted, and I said I was Kakay Ghazan, and I was here to see Gul Muhammed Khan, my father.

Well, that caused a stir, and at first they didn’t believe me. They held me at gunpoint, scowling, and sent a messenger off to their honcho, who turned out to be Sahak, my old commander from the assault on Tsawkey, and he hugged me and lifted me off the ground and kissed me on both cheeks, and then he took me in to see my father.

Who was lying on a charpoy in the courtyard of his house, which was packed with armed men. And the usual thing: you haven’t seen someone in twenty years, you still expect them to look more or less the same, and it’s a shock when they don’t. Gul Muhammed the mighty had turned into an old man, his white beard dyed with henna, his strong hands reduced to chicken claws, his face stripped to sharp bones and leathery deep-lined skin. Only his eyes seemed the same: under the thick gray bristles of his brow they still had that hawkish look, but they filled with tears when he saw me and learned who I was. I fell to my knees before him and kissed his hands. We embraced while the hard men of the tribe murmured around us.

So I was welcomed back into my clan, introduced to the many I did not know, and kissed by those few I did. The clan had not loved the Taliban and had suffered for it, and they confirmed what the driver had told me, that the insurgents were assassinating the maliks and the tribal elders. This tribal jirga they had coming up was to plan a joint response and to decide what the Barakzai position would be in the new American war. They had been neutral, but with the killings this was no longer possible.

After a while the others politely withdrew to allow Gul and me to speak privately.

He smiled at me with his four teeth. “So, my son, you have grown to a man. And how many sons have you now?”

“None, Father. I’m sorry.”

“None? You have no woman?”

“I have had many women but none who wished to raise my sons.”

“Then get one who will. Get two. Men will be fighting with knives to wed their girls to Kakay Ghazan.”

“Whatever you decide, Father.”

“Good. You know Wazir has two boys. They are around here somewhere.”

“I am happy for you. I heard he has gone to Paradise.”

“Ah! Where did you hear that?”

“From Bacha Khan.”

“I see. Yes. Well, I miss him; he was a good boy.”

“May I visit his grave?”

“His grave is not here. What do you do with yourself now?” he asked, changing the subject.

“I am a soldier for the Americans.”

He gave me a sharp look. “And do you kill as they do, from far away, and never see the faces of those you slay, or whether they are enemies or children?”

“No, Father. The kind of soldier I am watches the enemy from very close, and if killing is necessary it is done silently and face to face.”

He grunted to acknowledge this, that I was not utterly without shame.

“So will you do this for your whole life?”

“I don’t know, Father. One reason why I’ve come here is to seek your counsel.”

“Then my counsel is to leave the service of the infidels and join us here. We need good men, fighters, and there is no end of gold from the poppies.”

Everyone wanted to get me into the dope business. I said, “I will consider it, Father, thank you. But before that I must do something. Some mujahideen have kidnapped my mother, and I have come to rescue her.”

“Yes? I heard something about a kidnapping of foreigners. Your mother was among them?”

“She was. Have you heard anything about where they’re holding them? It must be somewhere in Swat and perhaps even Kunar, close to the border.”

“It is not Kunar, or I would know. I hear they got five crore dollars for one of them, and I did not see a rupee of it, and I would have if they were in Kunar.”

He stroked his beard. For a while he seemed lost in thought. At last he said, “Your mother… I never met a woman like her, before or since. Many times I thought of stealing her for myself, just to see… but it was against my honor. I heard she took you herself, after the jihad.”

“Yes. Who did you hear it from?”

“Oh, you know, bazaar rumors. But it was true, I see.”

“Yes, she wanted me to be an American and be safe from the war here.”

Now he gazed off into space again, like old men do. “A remarkable woman, a devi almost. She took both my sons-”

“Both, Father?”

“I mean she used to talk with Wazir in the evenings and filled his head with strange ideas. But in the end he was a Pashtun.”

I was about to ask him what he meant, because there was something disturbing about the way Gul Muhammed was speaking, as if there were a message underneath his words that he wanted me to know but could not bring himself to voice. But now the courtyard was filling up with people; there was a continual rumble of trucks in the narrow streets outside, for the jirga was arriving, and my father had duties more important than chatting with a prodigal foster son about his mother. He asked me to sit down at his right hand, which I did, and there commenced a series of formal greetings of the assembled elders and chieftains. Tribal society is not efficient, which is one reason why it has faded over most of the earth, and I found that I was enough of an American to become bored by the pace of the proceedings. After an hour or so I excused myself and took a walk around the village.

It was a miserable little pile, with houses built of local stone and mud brick, more miniature forts than houses, surrounded by walls and dark and cramped within. In what passed for a market square, men were slaughtering sheep for the feast they’d laid on for the jirga, and I watched that for a while, but the sight of throats being cut and the gush of blood and the heads resting in the dust, swarmed with flies, reminded me of what I was trying to stop, and I moved on, back to Gul Muhammed’s house.

Entering my father’s courtyard, I waved to the guards there and they smiled and gestured for me to go through. The courtyard was more packed than before. I started to work my way through the mob and noticed that just in front of me two men were doing the same, so I stayed in their wake, like you do in a stadium or a concert. One of them was a thin Kiel with a heavy limp, probably eighteen or so, and the other was an older man in a turban; he had his hand on the kid’s shoulder, guiding him, and I thought, father and son come to the big party from some village like this one, the kid probably hasn’t seen this many big shots in his whole life.

But then the older guy gave the kid a little push and the kid moved out of sight into the crowd, and the older guy turned around to go back the other way and I saw his face, the beard, the knobby cheekbones. He looked right at me, I saw his eyes widen, and then he turned abruptly away and started to bull his way back toward the gate.

It was Baz Khatak, the man I’d seen in Peshawar talking to the ISI captain who’d run me off the road. I reached under my kameez and pulled my pistol out and started chasing him. He was pushing people aside-which is not wise in a Pashtun throng; they don’t take kindly to that kind of treatment-and men were shouting curses and kicking at him, and I’d almost caught him by the time we both got to the courtyard gate.

I saw him fumbling under his kameez and my belly lurched because then I knew what he was going for and why he’d shoved the kid forward. I shot him in the back, and he went down. I was just bringing the front sight up on the back of his head when I saw the small black box in his fist and before I could get the round off he pushed the button and as my bullets smashed his head the kid exploded.

We had twenty-seven dead and forty-eight injured, including Gul Muhammed, who’d been hit in the chest and hip by bits of human shrapnel; the human body makes a pretty good frag grenade and there was a lot of metal junk in the kid’s suicide vest in case that wasn’t enough. They brought a doctor in from the government clinic in Asadabad, probably at gunpoint, and he got the shrapnel out of my father’s stringy old body and I sat with him for a day and a night while he ran a fever and mumbled, talking to people who weren’t there or were dead.

When he was well enough to eat I fed him beef broth with a spoon, and he spoke sense for the first time, asking me what happened. I told him the story, about the Taliban I’d spotted from Peshawar and the kid with him, the bomber, and asked him to forgive me for not seeing him sooner. He waved that off.

“If it had not been for you, the bomber would have pushed through and exploded in the midst of the jirga, and I would be dead along with all the elders of the clan. You know, the reason we Pashtun don’t have a nation of our own is because no tribe can bear to see a man from another tribe above him, and so we are always under the heel of strangers. These Taliban say we should all be one people under the command of God and His holy Qur’an, as the Prophet, peace be on him, united the tribes of Arabia and conquered half the world. They are right in this, we should be united, as we were for a time against the Russians, and I do not like to see American soldiers in our country, but I have not heard that the tribes of Arabia were united by murdering their leaders.”

“So the clan will turn against the Taliban now?”

“We will have our revenge, surely, but you know what we say: the right side is good but the winning side is better. No one thinks attacking America is a real jihad, not like the Russians, when they were using mosques as latrines. If the Americans have a blood feud with the Taliban, that’s none of our affair. Let them kill each other!”

“I too have a blood feud with them, Father.”

He nodded and looked at me, not with his regular sharp and challenging stare but almost tenderly. He said, “Yes, I know. It’s what I would do and you are like me, although I didn’t raise you. I have had few regrets in my life. I lived as a Pashtun and kept my honor and my land, and that is sufficient, but I regretted not having my sons by my side. Yet you are like her too, and that’s not nothing. I have sworn an oath not to tell this, sworn it on naked steel, but I think it now touches the honor of my house, which comes before any oath, and when I swore it I did not think I would ever see you again, or that you would come with such a purpose, or that you would have saved my life, mine and these others of my kinsmen. So I will tell you, and let God judge me. They are holding these hostages in a village called Paidara, in the northern end of the Swat Valley. Until you told me, I did not know your mother was among them. But, son, let no one hear where you learned this. I would not have the Barakzai know that Gul Muhammed Khan has not kept his word.”

I said I would keep this to myself at any cost, and then he closed his eyes and said, “Good. I hope you save her. God willing I will see you again, but if not, farewell. Come here so I can bless you.”

So I leaned over and he took my head in his two hands and said a verse from the Qur’an,

“Surely those who say, ‘Our Lord is God,’ and then live righteously, no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow. Those dwell in Paradise, dwelling forever as a recompense for their deeds.”

Then he blessed me and I kissed him and said, “O my Lord, dispose me that I may be thankful for Thy blessing wherewith Thou hast blessed me and my father and mother, and that I may do righteousness well-pleasing to Thee, and am among those that surrender.”

Sura 46, the Sand Dunes. Until the words came out of my mouth I had no idea I could recall them from when they had first been beaten into me in that dusty madrasa outside Peshawar long ago, when Gul Muhammed had been a mighty warrior and me a boy. I stayed with him until he fell asleep, and then got my gear and left the house, where I was mobbed by the clan notables wanting to know what was happening and whether I was going to make a claim for Gul Muhammed’s land and status, and they were clearly relieved when I said it could all go to cousins and uncles for all I cared. That made me more pop u lar immediately, and when I said I wanted to go back to Kabul, they arranged for a truck and a driver and six heavily armed clansmen.

To get around the roadblocks we went by tracks through the hills, some of which I recalled from the jihad. It took us about ten hours to reach Chaharbagh, and from there I took a bus for the rest of the trip, about seventy miles. It only took five hours and we weren’t stopped once, perhaps by prior arrangement with the Afghan army. It’s how the suicide bombers get in but it worked for me too.

I called my Uncle Nisar from Chaharbagh on his special cell phone and told him where I was, and he said he’d have a plane waiting for me when I got to Kabul, and he did, a neat little Bombardier turboprop, so by dawn the next day I was landing in Lahore, and there was a company car to meet me. The driver was holding a sign that said MR. T. LAGHARI so I walked up and told him who I was, but he ignored me and made a shooing motion with his hands, because people who looked and smelled like me were literally beneath the notice of N. B. Laghari’s driver. But I was tired and pissed off so I used my command voice and called him a rude name in Panjabi, after which he looked at me again, with terror on his face this time, and almost tripped over himself ushering me into the Mercedes. A man unfamiliar with Kim and the Great Game, obviously.

Javed, my uncle Nisar’s valet, didn’t show by his expression that I was anything but an honored guest and a son of the house as he led me to the library. Javed was famous for not displaying any astonishment whatever, but Nisar was nearly as surprised as his driver when I walked through the door. He looked up from some papers on his desk and I could see his face change: first the contemptuous snarl, with which he was about to dismiss the ignorant sweeper who had stumbled into his room, and then the dawning surprise, tinged a little with fear, and finally the usual smiling mask snapped into place.

He rose to greet me-he even hugged me, which I considered pretty classy considering what I probably smelled like-and said, “My God, Theo, you gave me a shock. I thought I was being assaulted by terrorists from the Frontier. I would never have believed it. You look just like a Pashtun warrior-not just the fancy dress, mind you, but the stance, the expression… however do you do it?”

“The same way you manage to look like a Punjabi mogul. I am a Pashtun warrior.”

He laughed, a little nervously, I thought, and said, “Yes, of course. Your famous adventure. Well, you have safely returned to civilization in any case. I suppose you’d like a bath and a change of clothes.”

“Food first, if you don’t mind, Uncle. I haven’t eaten anything solid since I left Gul Muhammed in Kunar.”

“Oh, of course, how stupid of me! Sit down at once, and I’ll ring for a tray.” He did, Javed entered, received his orders, and floated out. My uncle resumed his place behind what I kept thinking of as B.B.’s desk, and I recalled the last time I’d sat in front of it, when he’d chewed me out for that stupid thing with the pistol, just before he was murdered. Shit happens, as we say in the army, and I thought of that, and I also thought of what Rahman Baba has to say on the subject, which is:

How long will the horse of the sky keep galloping,

How long will it race across the roof peak?

The business of the world is like a shadow,

Which has no value to the sun.

Nisar got a phone call just then, and he picked it up and looked at me apologetically and said he had to take it, and I volunteered to leave and he motioned me to keep my seat; it was just some fools in Karachi who had to bother him about every little thing. It was something to do with export licenses for rayon, and although the word bribery was not mentioned I got the impression from his half of the conversation that someone paid to expedite these licenses had gotten greedy; Nisar closed the conversation by saying he would deal directly with the ministry involved. By the time he’d sorted this out, a servant had rolled in a tray laden with tea and steaming parathas and a covered dish of kedgeree and hot buttered chapatis.

I ate gratefully, and while I ate I told Nisar what I had learned in Kunar Province, without mentioning Gul Muhammed.

When I had finished, he said, “Well, that is an achievement. You know where your mother is being held. What will you do now?”

“Obviously, the first thing is to associate the village of Paidara with the nuclear theft we’ve concocted. I can do that with some cell calls, I think, and it’d be better if one of the calling parties was in Kahuta.”

“You’re thinking of going yourself?”

“I was thinking of sending Iqbal. My face is probably pinned up in every ISI office in the country, and it’d be annoying to get picked up and maybe disappeared. They tried once and they’ll try again.”

“Yes, very wise. In fact, I think you should stay here for the time being. I’ll have someone go to Rukhsana’s and get your things. If Iqbal is to go to Kahuta I can make a plane available to him. And the same for you. I don’t want you flying commercial back to the States, it’s too easy to be picked up out of an airport line, they ask you to step into a little room and you’re never seen again. And, of course, any other way that I can be of service-”

“Hassan needs a new motorcycle.”

He nodded and made a note on his desk pad. “Not a problem. I’ll have someone see to it. Anything else?”

“Yes. Why are you doing this?”

An expression of innocent inquiry appeared on his face. It was well done, very nearly convincing. “I beg your pardon?”

“Just curious, is all. My mother’s not exactly the family favorite, is she? And you don’t know me from Adam, you were away at school for most of the time I was here as a kid, and then I show up and you open the wallet of Laghari Enterprises Ltd.: flights, money, and the breakage of any number of laws. I was wondering why. You didn’t get to where you are now in Pakistani politics and business by being a sweetheart. No offense, Uncle.”

“None taken. As to your question, your mother is the wife of the head of this family. I’m obliged to do everything in my power to secure her safety.”

He looked at me to see how this was going over, and I guess my expression didn’t quite close out the issue, so he continued, “That would be the official explanation. But in our Pakistan there is always an unofficial or actual explanation, and it is this. If the guests of Nisar Laghari are kidnapped by terrorists working under the aegis of the ISI, at least in part, then it becomes a significant signal in my world. It tells this world, among other things, that my brother Seyd, who owes everything to my patronage, has broken with me and has another patron, someone within the warmongering wing of ISI. I don’t know who this person is yet-but I do assure you that I will find out-and let him beware! The same goes for Seyd himself, although I will continue to invite him to my house and to any family events, and no one will be able to tell that he is my enemy. Whatever feelings I may have about your mother or you-and I assure you that I do have genuine feelings for you both-are of no account in this business. It is an intolerable affront. If I were to let it pass, if my guests can be kidnapped with impunity, nothing I have would be safe; my children, my nieces and nephews, my own person and property would be, as you say, up for grabs. So you come along with this scheme, and I say to myself, Why not? And I may say now that you have not disappointed me. In fact, there is no one in my circle who could have brought it off. So you see, it is really I who owe you. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

“Yes, it does,” I said. “Thank you, Uncle. And thank you for not saying if it works.”

His face turned grave. “Yes, that is the issue. And things are not as well as they could be. I assume you were not following the news on your journey.”

“No. What happened?”

“I’m afraid it’s not good news. First, Craig has been released. It was all over the news, although of course without details of the ransom. I have sources that tell me the funds have already fled the country, to various financial havens. This means the other hostages will be of no further interest to the authorities, if they ever were. In fact, it would benefit the people who set this damn thing up if they did not emerge from their captivity. Next, the terrorists have already executed one of the hostages-an American, I forget his name-in retaliation for one of your bombings. The video is all over the Internet and copies are for sale in every bazaar. There is therefore no doubt that they are serious in their threats. Finally, yesterday, a missile strike near Quetta killed the head of al-Qaeda operations in Pakistan, Khalid al-Zaydun, and about twenty other people. We can expect our terrorists to demonstrate their revenge. I’m sorry.”

I was sorry too. I said, “So if this is going to work, it’s going to have to launch right now. I should get over to Iqbal and Hassan and send the location out to where NSA can intercept it.”

“I’ll get my driver to take you, and may I suggest putting a note of urgency into it. You might say that the bomb is ready and about to be shipped to a target. The suicide plane is all prepared and so on.”

I thought that was a good idea and got up to go.

“No bath?” my uncle asked.

“No time,” I said, and thanked him, and went to call Hassan, and for the rest of the day we did all the necessary things. As it turned out, I didn’t get a chance to change my clothes and clean up until late that night. I was particularly pleased with what Iqbal had done. Framing people on corruption charges is one of the minor arts in Pakistan, and I almost felt sorry for what we were doing to the woman at NSA. Collateral damage, as they say; shit happens.

Then I waited, which anyone who has been in combat will tell you is the hardest part, the death fantasies, the wound fantasies run nonstop on the interior TV, and here it was worse, because in combat you have to think that you’re special, that you’re the best trooper, with that special edge of survival, and you tell yourself that though ten thousand fall at your right hand it will not come nigh thee, this was worse because it was someone else: my mother. I couldn’t sleep. I kept getting up and putting on clothes with crazy thoughts in my head-I was going to take a car and drive to Paidara and bust her out myself, like in the movies-and then undressing again and lying there in a sweat.

The next morning, unrested but at least clean and dressed for the West, I told my uncle that I couldn’t stay in Lahore anymore, I’d done all I could and it would be best if I returned to my unit, because if the disinformation flew, and if Iqbal’s operation to discredit Cynthia Lam worked, it was likely that we would be tasked to go in there and get the fictitious bomb. I wanted to be on the scene to control things to the extent I could, so the hostages didn’t end up being collateral damage themselves.

A couple of hours later I was on a Laghari corporate jet flying to Dubai, where I’d pick up a commercial flight back to Washington, D.C. While I was on the plane I decided that this would be my last stunt as a soldier in the United States Army. I had betrayed America, there was no way around that, and I’d proved to myself that I was really a warrior and not a soldier, that tribe and family came before the chain of command, and wearing the uniform wasn’t honorable anymore. That was one reason, and the other, which I didn’t want to think about, was that if the bastards killed my mother I was going to have to go back into the hills and arm myself, and gather my clan, and go kill a really large number of people in revenge.