The Good Son

19

I n Dubai airport I checked my e-mail and found two significant messages, one from Farid and the other from First Sergeant Cheney. Farid’s said, “Threat eliminated. Contact me as to your status.” I found a pay phone, called him, and learned we’d got rid of Cynthia Lam and the government had completely bought the nuclear scam. Then I called Cheney and he told me that all leaves were canceled and to get my ass back to Fort Belvoir ASAP. Of course he couldn’t give me operational details over the phone, but I assumed we were part of the government’s commitment to go in and shoot up Pakistan, so I felt pretty good, and for the rest of my trip I managed not to think more than a little about some of our people getting killed chasing the phantom I’d created.

I cabbed in from Dulles, loaded up my gear, changed into my digital-camo battle-dress uniform, left a note for Farid, and drove to Belvoir. The second I walked into the orderly room, Cheney said, “Goddamn, Bailey, where the fuck were you? I said ASAP.”

“I was in Dubai,” I said.

“What the fuck were you doing in-oh, never mind. The old man wants to see you. He’s been on my ass every half hour about you all day.” He lifted his phone and shooed me away and I went down a couple of hallways to the company commander’s office.

I saluted and Stoltz told me to sit down. He didn’t ask me where I’d been, or why, which I thought was a good sign.

“Bailey, you recall that nuclear-threat clambake we went to last summer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I hope it’s still fresh in your mind, because it happened.”

“No shit, sir? The terrorists have a bomb?”

“Maybe more than one. There’s a shit storm over this from the White House on down: every resource we got, balls to the wall.”

“Do we have a location?”

“As a matter of fact, we do, it’s Pakistan, and we’ve apparently got some intel that the things won’t be there for much longer, so everything’s moving very fast. We have a manifest call for twenty-hundred hours.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Tell me about it. But we’re going, ready or not.”

“Why us? There are all kinds of resources deployed downrange.”

“You’re why, my son, which was why we were going fucking crazy that you were off on leave. You remember that conversation we had in the car coming back from the conference? About how to handle a live nuke situation?”

“Yeah, I do. Don’t tell me. I just volunteered for a dangerous solo mission.”

“That’s right. And now you and me are going to firm it up so it’s not total amateur hour, and then we’re going to go down the hall to Colonel Boone and present it to him and the battalion staff, and God have mercy on our souls.”

So we firmed it up. Every army plan is the same, whether it’s a platoon sergeant taking a strongpoint or a general leading an invasion: intelligence, operations, supplies, and communications, all laid out according to a fixed form. We had plenty of intel about this place, Paidara, which turned out to be a village of about a thousand people, high up a side valley of the Swat River, one little track going up to it, maybe a hundred buildings, a mosque, an inn; the Taliban were in complete control. We had close-up photographs of every building in town, natural light and infrared. One building in particular stood out on the infrared. It was unusually hot, and there was a big diesel generator outside it. They figured that was the bomb factory, which was a lucky break for me, something that gave a little extra credibility to my scam. For all I knew it was a place they were manufacturing weapons-half the villages in Taliban areas have shops like that-and I nodded and agreed it would be the first place to check out. Aside from that the operation was simple: insert one troop (me) in disguise. For supplies, I’d have a radio beacon and the usual weapons. If I couldn’t actually get to the imaginary bomb I would secure the beacon at the building it was in, which would then be targeted from the air, with a really, really big piece of ordnance, reducing the nuke to tiny fragments and rendering the place uninhabitable for a thousand years, but tough shit on them. Before that, I was to get out and they’d send a chopper. On the other hand, if I secured the bomb, I’d contact by radio and the village would be taken by assault. Since the nuke was fictitious, that’s the button I was going to push, right after I had my mother.

We tapped the whole thing out on Captain Stolz’s computer, and one of our guys made a PowerPoint out of it, and we tweaked it right up to the time we had to go see Lieutenant Colonel Boone. Sergeants usually don’t go to these officer briefings where our fates are decided by people smarter than we are, so I was pretty interested, and I thought it was kind of cool for them to invite me, my first and last officer briefing. Because obviously they were not going to find a bomb when they got to the beacon, only a slightly confused middle-aged American woman, who would tell them all about the scheme her son had devised that had brought them to this obscure place. The son by that time would be long gone, back into the hills, heading for wherever.

That’s what I was thinking while the briefing was going on, and I was thinking also about the strange gravity of American soldiers, how isolated they are from their own society, where death is ignored or, when it comes, gets treated like an unfortunate mistake, or sentimentally, with the candles, the ribbons, the teddy bears, and how they struggle to make war safe for their guys, like it was pro football or something. And the heaviness of their wit, their American joshing, the sports talk, so different from that of my grandfather and his friends or my Pashtuns. They are terrific men; I admired them, but right there in that meeting I understood that I was not and never would be like that. I would never be easy with such men, nor they with me, and my American self sort of dribbled away. I looked out at the meeting through Pashtun eyes and felt like the oldest man in the room.

Forty hours after that I was the sole payload of an MC-130P Combat Shadow aircraft flying at twenty-two thousand feet over the Hindu Kush toward the Swat Valley. They’d decided on a HALO insert rather than trying to get me in by chopper because you never could tell when some goatherd might decide to take a leak in the middle of the night and see or hear the thing and raise an alarm. A couple of years back we’d lost a Chinook and sixteen men on a mission that way, and they didn’t want to take any chance of the same thing happening on this one, especially not with that unique asset, me. I was feeling a little sausage-like because I had my Pashtun outfit on and over that a jumpsuit, and over that a heated suit. The crew chief let me know we were a half hour off the drop point, and I laid out my stuff and gave it the final check. I had an altimeter and a GPS that would clip to the front of my jumpsuit and I had my special beacon, a CIA unit that was rigged to look like a cheap Chinese portable radio, and it worked as a regular two-way radio in case I needed it. I had a big Pashtun knife, and my Stechkin too, and I cleaned and loaded that in the plane’s red light.

Then my ears started popping, because the plane was descending, fast but carefully between the walls of the Swat Valley, which are around fifteen thousand feet high. We got the five-minute light from the flight deck. I stood up, switched to my portable oxygen bottle, put on my helmet, and attached my rucksack to the chute harness with a cord. I held the rucksack to my belly and clumped down the aisle of the plane. The rear clamshell opened, letting in the chill and the roar of the wind. The crew chief grabbed my shoulder hard and let go and I gave him the thumbs-up. In the red light he looked like a demon worried about the existence of goodness and I grinned at him, looking myself, I guess, like a more enterprising one. I walked past the line where you weren’t supposed to go unless you were in a safety harness, and when the light next to the door turned from amber to green I stepped out into the clouds.

I love doing this, I have to say. I’ve loved it since my first jump at Benning years ago, and I guess a month hasn’t gone by since then that I haven’t jumped out of an airplane, either at work or for fun. This particular jump was a high-altitude, low-opening jump, which means that I dropped free fall for a mile through cloudy damp freezing darkness, completely opaque, no light at all except the tiny glow from my instruments. It was like falling through the sea at the bottom of the ocean. It wasn’t like a sky dive for amusement, where you can horse around in the air, but it had its own appeal, a jump like that you know you’re really alive, you inhabit your skin the way you don’t do any other way I know, sex maybe excepted.

Since it was a drop into mountains, I had to watch the altimeter and the GPS all the way down so that I would land in a flat place-a more or less flat place-in the Swat Valley and not on some rock, because altimeters work by measuring air pressure. It was going to give me distance above sea level but not distance above the random mountain, so it was dangerous as hell, but strangely enough I felt no fear at all. I was in the zone. I had the perfect confidence of the fanatic, and I thought of Ghalib’s lines:

I have become the dust in her street.

O wind, let me down, I don’t want to fly anymore.

As it happened, I came out of the clouds at about two thousand feet, in rain, and of course I couldn’t see much and I popped the chute and the MT-5 opened up above me and I was flying. A modern military parachute is basically a controllable kite; subject to the wind, you can fly it as long as you like and land on a crate of eggs without much damage. So I watched my GPS, headed toward a tributary of the Swat River, and found it all right; I could see the white froth of its passage over rocks, and I landed nicely on a little gravelly beach.

I pulled my pack shovel from my rucksack, buried the flight suit and chute and helmet and boots, tossed the shovel in, and kicked gravel into the hole. I took my Stechkin in its wooden holster from the pack, strapped it on under my kameez, and wrapped my blankets over my shoulders against the thin rain. I found a sheltered place among the rocks that bordered the river, wrapped myself tightly in my blankets, and fell asleep.

In the morning sheep awakened me and for a second I was back in my youth, when I was herding for the jihad and the sound of sheep was always in my ears, especially in spring when the ewes call constantly to their new lambs, as they were now. I hoisted on my rucksack and knotted my blankets around my shoulders the way we do in that country and clambered up through the rocks until I came to a track on the east side of the river.

It was a good-sized flock, maybe eighty sheep guided by a middle-aged man and a boy. I approached the man and wished him peace and he did the same and I offered him a pinch of tobacco and a piece of newspaper and we both rolled and smoked and talked about sheep for a while. He was going to Kalam to sell his lambs and ram yearlings, and I said, “Brother, I see God is smiling on me today in meeting you.”

He asked me how so, and I told him that I too was going to Kalam, but to buy sheep, not sell them. My brother’s son was getting married this week in Paidara and I was going to give a feast for our whole clan, and if he would sell me half a dozen ewes and their lambs I would save a journey. He reflected on the providence of God and regretted that he was a poor man and could not give me a discount; I would have to pay the full Kalam market price, and he named a figure that, as an old shepherd myself, I reckoned was three times the sum that any sheep had ever sold for in any market from Herat to Lahore. I told him he had mistaken me for a rich man, or for someone in the market for sheep that had been especially trained to walk on wires or could talk in human tongues. I was only interested in ones that could be eaten, and I named a lower price.

He said that perhaps I had mistaken him for a charitable trust, but no, he was just a poor shepherd trying to earn a living, and I had to hear a story about the miseries of shepherding in these dark times, and we went around the block for a while in the good old way and finally I closed the deal for half a dozen ewes and their lambs for about 50 percent over market, and these the least desirable sheep in the flock, bot-flied, dull-eyed, and thin.

I used my Pashtun knife to cut a crook from a willow thicket and walked off with my flock toward Paidara. I had landed, by design, about ten klicks away, and dragging along with my sheep it took me until early afternoon to climb the high valley trail to the first mujahideen checkpoint outside the village. This was four beards with AKs and one on a Toyota pickup with a mounted Russian heavy machine gun. We had a nice chat, and I offered one of my ewes and her lamb as a gesture of my sincere support for the jihad. I passed through with smiles and good wishes.

Paidara was what I expected, a crumbled brick hamlet with some signs of recent prosperity: a shop selling cheap consumer goods, electric generators, fewer beggars than average, and scores of Taliban driving the narrow streets in mud-spattered brand-new trucks and SUVs. The jihad was good business, apparently. I asked a man on the street where the butchers were and sold off my sheep for about half what I’d paid for them. In the necessary chat with the butcher and his pals, and the curious Taliban passers-by, I gave a name and clan lineage out of Kunar in Afghanistan, which more or less protected me from undue suspicion. People cross the border all the time, of course, and when they found I was just a shepherd, not too bright, and had no smuggled goods, they all lost interest.

I went to the tea shop and drank sweet milky tea until it was coming out of my ears, and picked up the town gossip. Big doings recently in Paidara, I learned. The place had been Taliban for quite a while, and they were digging in, fortifying houses and tunneling; the Pakistani army had announced a truce, but no one trusted the Pakistani army, well known to be in the pay of the Americans. Besides that, Arab mujahideen had arrived, there were hostages, money had flowed, and more would flow from this. I asked where they kept the infidels. Oh, that was another good story. One of the infidels had grabbed a weapon and killed the Taliban emir and his chief men, and in the affray the Arabs had stolen the hostages. Did I know one of them was a witch? Yes, she had bewitched many in the village, telling them their dreams and what they meant, and some said she had bewitched the new emir, Idris Ghulam, of whom I had possibly heard, a local boy whose valor was famous throughout the Swat. He would deal with the treacherous Arabs, although there were complications having to do with a weapons factory the Arabs had set up in the village, and no one wanted to lose the money that brought in. Negotiations between the two groups was ongoing, and everyone hoped that soon they would start to chop heads again; everyone was looking forward to the fun.

Sheep for feasting were getting scarce, and I learned how much I’d gotten ripped off on my flock. Much laughter here-all Pashtuns love a fool. A man named Abdur took pity on the poor jerk me and offered a room for the night. I said I would be glad to accept, but I had a family duty. My aunt had recently been widowed in a village not too far away and I had promised I would bring her back to the family in Kunar Province. I couldn’t impose on his hospitality with another guest.

He dismissed this airily: of course you can invite her, another woman is nothing, you are both welcome. I thanked him sincerely, saying that God would remember his generosity and threw in the quote about the blessedness of charity to the wayfarer from the Qur’an. So that was all set. I’d snatch my mother, bring her back here veiled, and get on with the rest of the mission. I walked home with my new pal, and we sat on rugs in the main room of his house and were fed by silent black shapes, and we talked of the terrible times. My man had no real objection to the Taliban, at least they kept crime under control and he thought the government was too harsh when it tried to uproot them. Bombs! Artillery! Many innocents had died. But of course the Taliban were wicked as well; they demanded that all rents be paid into their hands and not to the rightful landlords, of which he was one, and they murdered anyone who objected. Yes, it was a terrible time, but with God’s help perhaps it would improve. Slowly, without seeming to, I turned the conversation to the captive infidels. I said I assumed the Arabs had them hidden away and no one knew where they were. Of course everyone knew; it was in the house of his wife’s cousin, which he was renting to the Arabs, who at least paid dollars to the landlord. And he told me more than I needed to know about the house, how much his wife’s cousin had paid for it, who had owned it before, and what improvements had been made since, and said his wife’s cousin was a fool like all his family, since the man could’ve gotten far more for such a fine house if he had only known how to bargain.

Then I excused myself and said I had to go fetch my aunt and would probably be back quite late. Abdur wished me a safe journey and said his wife and daughters would be happy to receive the begum at any hour. I went out into the street. Perfectly black, overcast, a narrow alley like a mine shaft. I squatted down and screwed the silencer into my Stechkin and switched it to single shot. Then I strolled off to the wife’s cousin’s house. Paidara was shut down for the night, no one around, no sounds but the occasional dog barking and the purr of a generator. It had been a piece of good luck to meet Abdur, but anyone in the village could’ve given me information almost as good. Everyone knew everyone’s business in a village like this, and it would never occur to any of them that an American soldier could pass as one of the tribe. I had a pretty good map of the village in my head from studying the satellite shots and I didn’t have much trouble finding the house, a short street away from the inn.

It was a two-story building of the usual adobe brick and crumbling plaster, with an outside stairway up to the top floor and a high wall around it topped with a few strands of barbed wire. The gateway was closed with a wooden gate capped with spikes and faced with sheet-metal panels, and the windows were closed with louvered shutters. Bars of light strayed from the louvers in one of the upstairs windows, and I could see a ruddier flickering light coming from behind the closed gate. I stayed in the shadows across the little street and listened for a while. Men were talking in Arabic, softly: at least two, not more than four. I waited. They teach us to wait in my part of the army, and it’s one of the hard things; you have to stop thinking you’re in a movie, where action follows action.

Someone raised his voice, and there came an answering voice from the roof of the house. There was a man up there; I could just make out his silhouette. So figure three guys standing around a fire barrel in front and one up on the roof. He had to go first.

I walked through the darkness to the back of the house. Very good. A shedlike extension behind it with a tin chimney and a sloping tiled roof that connected with the rear wall of the house. It was not hard to get up on the tiles, and then it was a climb of maybe fifteen feet up the wall. Brick houses in this part of the world are not hard to scale; the brickwork is rough and often crumbling and the people are poor and slow to make repairs. I’d been climbing up walls like this since I could walk. I scrambled up and over the low parapet and crouched there in its shadow.

I heard steps. The roof guard had finished his conversation and was making his rounds, or maybe he was just moving because of the chill. He walked right by me and I stood up behind him and silently shot him through the head and grabbed his AK before it could hit the ground.

I slung the rifle over my shoulder and went down the outside stairway from the roof to the second floor. The door was unlocked and I entered the house. I was in a hallway with four doors. The only light came from under the door at the end of the hall; someone had a lamp going in there. It was enough light to see where they were keeping the hostages. It’s hard to turn a private house into a jail. The interior doors of a house don’t ordinarily lock from the outside, but the Arabs had attached two simple barrel bolts to each door, top and bottom. I chose one of the doors, pulled the bolts, and went in.

Two charpoys, each with a sleeping form under blankets. I bent my face closer to one sleeping head and sniffed. Unwashed woman. I took a lock of the invisible hair between my fingers. It was fine and when I walked my fingers down the strand I found that it was longer than my mother’s hair. I went to the other sleeper and sniffed again and closed a deep unconscious switch, an animal relic. I knew my mother’s smell. Gently, I touched her face. Her eyes popped open and her mouth opened to say something but I placed my hand over it.

“Quiet,” I whispered. “It’s me, Theo.”

“Theo,” she said and stared at me. She looked like she thought she was dreaming. “How did you get here?”

“Parachute.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“It’s a long story, Mother, and we haven’t got time. We have to get out of here.”

“Get out… you mean all the hostages?”

“No, just you. I came for you.”

“Theo, I can’t, I can’t just leave all these people.”

“You won’t have to. There’s a rescue operation on the way, but I want you where I can keep an eye on you. Put your shoes on.”

The other woman stirred in her sleep and made a sound. After a moment’s hesitation I heard my mother feeling around for her footwear and she stood up and I led her out of the room, bolting the door behind me.

Then someone shouted from outside. And again, more urgently. The men in front must have missed hearing from the guard on the roof. Footsteps and shouts on the outside stairway. I switched my machine pistol to full automatic.

A door opened. The hallway flooded with light. The black shape of a man in the doorway at the end of the hall. Everything was moving in slomo now as it does in a firefight. I had to take out the man in the doorway and then I’d go to the head of the stairs and shoot the guys coming up. I raised my Stechkin. I put the sight on the silhouette and squeezed the trigger, and as I did so, my mother struck my elbow an upward blow and the burst slammed into the ceiling.

“Theo!” she yelled. “Don’t shoot him. It’s Wazir!”