The Good Son

3

T he army is generous with dope, I’ll give them that; I walked out of there with enough OxyContin to stagger a platoon. I know a number of my fellow wounded sell it on the street, but not me. I take it as prescribed, no more, no less, whether I need it or not. I am not supposed to drive or operate heavy machinery when dosed, but I take this as a suggestion and not a rule, so I drove my rental home to my parents’ brownstone in the pricy Washington neighborhood called Kalorama. The house was empty, my father being at work and my mother in Lahore. I live with my parents on the few occasions when I find myself off duty. It’s cheap and saves a lot of hassle and it’s traditional.

I changed into sweats and opened a beer, which I also wasn’t supposed to do on the dope, and plopped down in front of the TV. I do this a lot now. Really, the worst thing about being wounded is the agony of time passing with nothing to do-no, the second worst thing. The worst thing is being weak, slow, off balance, the body no longer the spear and shield it once was. It gets me to the core, makes me nasty at times. I’m not a good patient.

Also, it’s hard to get involved in American television now. There’s no war here; all that horseshit about everything being changed by 9/11 lasted around two months and then back to sports and game shows. I don’t know, maybe that’s all right; maybe obsessing about money and sex and celebrities and celebrity sex and the teams is a sign that the terror has failed to bite, which is great, but if it’s no big deal why the hell are we breaking the army into pieces over it? Once again, not in my job description. But still, it’s another thing that makes me snap and get pissed at my fellow Americans.

I switched over to Ary, the Urdu channel out of Pakistan that my father likes, and I watched a news program, mainly about corruption scandals and unrest in the tribal areas and whether there were going to be elections and would they be honest or not. They interviewed a general who lied about the recent killing of a terror leader outside of Quetta; the guy’s car vaporized and the general said it was a Pakistani army op, although children in diapers knew it was a Hellfire missile from a CIA Predator drone. Not even that good of a liar; his eyeballs flickered and you could see the sweat on his face.

After that came sports, cricket and football, and a longer piece about a desi golfer on the pro tour, and after that a talking-head thing and I was about to switch over to Geo, looking for a cultural program, maybe hear some ghazals, when I saw my mom on the screen with an interviewer.

He introduced her as Sonia Laghari, which is her usual nom de umma, a writer and psychologist, a Pakistani-American, daughter-in-law to the late, much-mourned jurist B. B. Laghari, and one of the organizers of a conference on solutions to the current mess in the country. No mention of her famous books. There was text on the screen; my reading Urdu isn’t up to much anymore but I thought it said that this was a tape of an interview made the previous day in Lahore.

They were speaking Urdu. The interviewer’s name was Jamil Babar Khan, and he started off by complimenting her on her Urdu, and that was as nice as he got because, although Mom was in full Pakistani rig, he started right off on America and its many sins against the Muslims.

My mother smiled at him and agreed. America was not good for the umma. Mr. bin Laden was perfectly correct in his goals, although his methods were deplorable, and in her considered opinion he was destined to fry in the hottest flames of Hell for causing the deaths of women and children and of many, many Muslims. Therefore, she said, America should completely withdraw from the Muslim world. It should close its embassies and prohibit its citizens from working in Muslim nations or trading with Muslim nations. It should expel from its shores all foreigners from Muslim nations. This would eliminate the source of any conflict with Muslims and save a great deal of money, since aside from Muslim terrorists, America had no natural enemies. It should be of no concern to America how Muslim nations governed themselves.

“But what about the oil, Mrs. Laghari?” the man asked.

My mother made a dismissive gesture. Oh, the oil. That’s not a problem, she said. America and the West could become independent of Middle Eastern oil in a decade if they put their minds to it, using existing technology. The price of oil would collapse and the principal exports of the Muslim world would go back to being dates and rugs. The Saudi princes would become simple camel drivers again, no one in the West would care what happened in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, and all would return to the wonderful days of the early caliphate. Men would be simple and just, women would be chaste, sharia law would prevail throughout the umma and Osama bin Laden and his followers would no longer rage. When that happened, Westerners could return as tourists to the quaint crumbling cities of the new caliphate. They could buy rugs and dates.

Jamil Khan said, “Forgive me, madam, but that is a ridiculous position and patronizing as well. It assumes that the majority of Muslims worldwide are supportive of the mullahs and people like bin Laden. They’re not. They want the same freedoms and the same opportunities for self-improvement as people in the developed nations.”

“Yes, I believe that too,” my mother said, grinning, “with all my heart. I’m afraid I was being a bit facetious. Forgive me. But the truth is that America has poisoned the well through her clumsiness and stupidity. As it stands now, every Muslim father who wants his daughter to get an education, from Morocco to Bengal, can be portrayed as un-Islamic and a tool of the Americans. If you want democracy and free speech and secular law, that’s un-Islamic because America wants all those things too. It demoralizes the whole umma. But if America became less aggressive, the mullahs would fall on their faces, because they really cannot provide people with what they want. The Iranians would throw them all out next week if they couldn’t keep pointing to the Great Satan. Thousands of Pakistanis tolerate the Taliban, thugs who practice a religion utterly inimical to the Pakistani tradition and spirit, and why? Because American troops are occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, and killing and torturing Muslims, and bombing civilians in Pakistan itself.”

“But I thought it was the American withdrawal after the Russian war that enabled the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.”

“Yes, and so what? No American would have given two pins about how Afghanistan was ruled if bin Laden had not been based there and attacked America, and he would not have attacked America if we hadn’t been up to our armpits in the politics of Muslim nations. It is not our responsibility to decide how others should live, and whenever we try we fall into the most arrant hypocrisy. And lies. The Americans say, ‘Oh, we’re fighting to preserve our way of life; the mujahideen hate our way of life, just like the communists.’ But as bin Laden says, al-Qaeda has no interest in changing the Western way of life; he doesn’t attack Sweden. All he wanted from the 9/11 attack was the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Arabia, and he got that almost immediately. He won; the war is over. Why are we still fighting? Look, I am a Pakistani and an American. I love both my countries, but one of my countries, America, is incapable of rational action in the other country. When little boys fight with sticks, the mother must separate them and keep them in separate rooms for a while, and that is what I am suggesting.”

“The Israelis would not be happy with what you suggest, and as we all know the Americans do what the Israelis want.”

“Yes, except when they sell arms to the Saudis,” she said. “I’m tired of hearing about Israel. Israel has the only modern economy in the Middle East, the most powerful army, and over two hundred nuclear weapons. Israel can take care of itself. What keeps that ulcer raw is not only the land hunger of the Israelis, about which we can do nothing, but also the stupidity of the Palestinians, and I would say here that America is fortunate in the Palestinians, because otherwise America would be the stupidest nation in Middle Eastern affairs.”

“You think that wanting freedom and an end to a brutal occupation is stupid?”

“Of course not, but look at how they resist! They could have had their own state and an end to the occupation twenty years ago by using the same methods that were successful against the British, right here where we’re sitting. India defeated the greatest empire in history using Gan -dhian noncooperation and nonviolent resistance. You think that Israel’s nasty little empire cannot be defeated in the same way? But they don’t do that, they love their posturing and their face masks and the rifles waving, and the people are controlled by bandit gangs who are constantly selling one another out to the Mossad. It would be ridiculous if it weren’t tragic.”

The interviewer seemed not to want to pursue this line so he asked her about the conference and they talked about that for a while, and it was here I learned that they intended to meet not in Lahore, where there was at least some security, but in Leepa House in Pakistani Kashmir, which was a long fly ball from the Northwest Frontier Province, otherwise known as Jihad Central.

The rest of the interview was about who she was supporting in the coming elections, but I hardly listened, and as soon as it was over I switched it off and dialed my mother’s number on my cell phone. It was past midnight in Lahore but I didn’t care.

I got a not-available recording and left a message. I was pretty calm, considering that she had just pissed off on international television every bunch of armed maniacs on the planet except the Basques. What was she thinking? Did she want to get blown up?

As soon as I had that thought it hit me that maybe she did, maybe that was part of what made her Sonia, what my father called her trapped-fox part. I had that too, if I was honest with myself; I got it from her and from how I was brought up, maybe an adrenaline deficiency, the whole dicing-with-death thing. Or maybe not. I know guys who do sport jumping, motorcycle racing, whatever, but it’s not like that. There has to be an opponent; death has to show himself in human form; you have to beat the angel on its own terms.

These old thoughts were boiling into froth, and under them the thrill of real fear. I kept calling through the evening, the last one at eleven-thirty, and still nothing, even though it was now morning in Lahore. My mother never turns her cell phone off during the hours she’s awake. I left a message demanding an instant call-back. Then I called my Auntie Rukhsana, who keeps hers on even when she’s asleep. Also no answer. I left a similar message. Then I took another pill and had another beer, after which I conked out in my room upstairs. I’d been out a little over three hours, by my watch, before the ache and thirst and the need to go to the can got me up, which was a pretty typical night for me, and when I was up and around I heard the sound of the TV in the living room. I recalled switching it off, which meant that my father was up.

He was sitting on the couch watching Pakistani cable, and he didn’t take his eyes off the set when I came in, which was funny to begin with because my father is a formal guy, always stands up and gives a hug and a kiss when we happen to meet. I sat next to him on the couch and asked him what he was watching. The screen showed a couple of talking heads, the usual morning anchorperson and a guy with the familiar sleek and sneaky look of a Pakistani pol. He didn’t answer me and I looked at him and saw that tears were streaming down his cheeks and I knew what it was and cursed.

“Something happened to Mother,” I said.

He pointed mutely at the screen: a shot of a mountain road with a burnt-out Land Rover on it and two empty minibuses with their doors hanging open like a dead bird’s wings and Pakistani military swarming around them, looking pretty helpless. There were big patches of what had to be blood on the ground and the glitter of spent brass scattered around.

The announcer was saying that a party of foreigners had been abducted on a road in Pakistani-administered Kashmir; they had no names yet and no knowledge of what had happened to them. Then back to the anchor and the interior ministry official, who dispensed empty assurances and more ignorance.

I said, “They don’t know it’s her group.”

He replied, “But we do. My sister just called and woke me up with the news. It is Sonia’s group without question. Rukhsana recognized the minibuses. She would have been there herself had she not been delayed. She was entirely devastated.” He stared for a moment at the repeating images on the screen. “Apparently they killed the drivers and the guards.”

He threw his arms around me and sobbed and I comforted him as best I could, which to be frank wasn’t all that much. A breakdown like the one he pulled after Baba and my sisters were killed wasn’t what I needed now.

But in a few minutes he recovered himself, went away to the bathroom, and came back, composed again and grave.

I asked, “Babu, did you know she was going to Lahore? She called me and asked me tell you.”

“Of course I knew. Your mother is a wonderful woman, but she derives an infantile pleasure out of sneaking. She kept the whole thing quite dark, as she imagined, but naturally Rukhsana has kept me apprised throughout. As has Nisar. I told him I did not approve of allowing them to use the house at Leepa, but he ignored me. As he usually does, of course. He very much wanted a meeting with William Craig, and I understand this was part of the arrangement.”

“Who?”

“William Craig, the electronics billionaire. It is astounding, you know? Your mother has no regard for her own safety but surely a man of such acumen might have considered it foolish to ride without adequate security into the most terrorist-infested place on earth.”

“Maybe he wanted the thrill, like those rich guys who like to break records, ballooning around the world and like that.”

“Perhaps,” he said and gave me a funny look. “But his character is not, after all, our most pressing concern at the moment. You seem to be taking this disaster very well. Aren’t you worried about her?”

I shrugged and answered, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m in shock. It doesn’t seem real yet. Maybe it’s just a ransom gang after Craig and they’ll let the others go.”

I kept thinking that, telling myself it was true, and we sat there for hours together, not speaking, one or the other of us going for food or to the john, the other staying put, watching the tube, until the kidnappers delivered their tape and the station played it. There she was with the others, surrounded by masked men with guns. There was a statement by a man in a ski mask. After the routine condemnation of the infidel Pakistani government and their crusader allies, and the routine grievances, the murder of innocent civilians by the military forces thereof, the torture of prisoners by the authorities and the Americans, he declared that the present act was meant to provide hostages against these infamous behaviors. The captives would receive decent treatment, unlike the brothers rotting in American and Pakistani prisons, but should any more innocents be massacred by the infidels, on each day that such an event took place, one hostage would be executed. God is great! All the masked men waved their weapons and shouted this too, and the camera did a slow cruel pan across the strained and exhausted faces of all the hostages.

My father was like ice then, strangely enough; it was me who howled and cried like a baby on my father’s shoulder. And while I was crying, with the tears and snot running down my face, all I could think of was them taking her out on some hard-baked patch of ground and cutting her head off with a sword. I’d seen it done in Afghanistan more than once. The fuckers who cut people’s heads off now aren’t that good at it; it’s a lost art, one of the many things the Muslims have forgotten how to do, not like the glory days of the caliphate, when they had professionals. It turns out that beheading with a sword is harder than you would think.

My father comforted me awkwardly, like you do a child who’s bumped his nose. We’re not close. I still blame him for the way he behaved during the previous family disaster; forgiveness doesn’t come easy for me. So I pulled away from his hugs, a little abruptly, and we sat there watching the tenth rerun of that fucking tape, me thinking it was the last sight I’d ever have of my mother alive.

After a while he picked up the remote and muted the television. He said, “Will you be all right? I want to make some calls.”

“Who are you calling?”

“Well, family first. Nisar may know something, with his connections in Islamabad. We’ll see if he can find out anything that’s not for public consumption. Rukhsana too. She has sources as well, from her work. And Seyd, although I doubt I’ll get anything from him outside of the official line from ISI, especially if… no, I won’t think about that, not yet at any rate.”

I asked him what he didn’t want to think about.

“Well, you know these mujahideen groups up in Swat and Kashmir and so forth all have Inter-Services Intelligence connections. Suppose an ISI-sponsored group carried out this kidnapping?”

“But why wouldn’t that be a good thing? Seyd could help get them out.”

“Oh, Theo, I’m talking about Seyd. He’s my little brother and of course I love him, but he is a monstrously ambitious and ruthless man, who has always felt that having a famous apostate for a sister-in-law put a blot in his copybook. I don’t say he would be happy to see Sonia decapitated on television, but he would not weep bitter tears either. No, we will get no help from Seyd. My greatest hope is that he will not actively hinder plans to rescue them, if any.”

“I should go over there,” I said.

“And do what? Wander through the hills calling her name? Don’t be foolish, Theo!”

I gave him a hard look, but he stared right back at me, which was a bit of a surprise. I guess in the lives of fathers and sons there’s a moment when the kid understands his father is not some kind of god but just a guy and then he has to decide whether he likes him or not, and, if not, how he’s going to handle it. That came a little too early, in my case, and while I’ve always treated him with respect, more or less for my mother’s sake, I’ve always considered him something of a pussy, and fairly early on I arranged another father for myself, a man of unimpeachably violent barbarian credentials, every little boy’s dream.

I thought Farid would’ve crumpled under this disaster too, but he hadn’t; he was standing tall. It was me crumpling, and it pissed me off.

“You know, I have some contacts too, in the hills,” I said, snapping.

I couldn’t read the expression on his face. Shame? Sorrow? I’ve never really talked to my father about what I did between the ages of nine and seventeen, up in Afghanistan, but he knew, or could imagine it, and I know he thought it was his fault, my entire fucked-up life. So that was between us, like a big black sack of garbage stinking up the room, and there was a silence and then he looked at his wristwatch and said, “I must call now. Will you be all right?”

I said I would and he left and I turned on the sound again and flipped through the channels. After doing this for a while I learned that the group claiming responsibility was called al-Faran, which some expert commentator explained was a blowback from the Kashmiri jihad, an organization the Pakistanis had set up to give the Indian occupation grief but which had now joined with the general insurgency in the Northwest Frontier Province. The guy said that this bunch was distinguished for their media savvy and had pioneered a small but growing videotape niche market: decapitations of kidnapped Westerners. Wonderful.

The hostage tape produced a lot of media activity, mainly because of Craig, and we thought it was a good thing for us because no one was paying much attention to the other hostages. My mother’s peak of fame had been a couple of decades ago, and she had never gone in for the public intellectual business: no interviews, no talk shows, no magazine articles about the plight of women in Islam, and so forth. She hadn’t even had an author photo on her books, so the upshot was that for all anyone knew she was a regular Pakistani-American writer and no big deal, and we were anxious to keep it that way.

A senator who wanted to piss off the administration about its policies in South Asia organized a hearing about what, if anything, the government was going to do about the three-and-a-half captive Americans-Craig and some missionary couple and Mom-and they brought in a few undersecretaries who told elaborate lies-What, a rescue? Oh, shit, no, senator! We respect the territorial sovereignity of our ally Pakistan; we would never think of going in there even if we knew where they were, which we don’t-and they stood a major general up who underlined that point: there’s nothing harder than a rescue mission in hostile territory, especially with faulty intel; remember the Iran fiasco, we don’t want another one of those, oh, no.

As it happens, the unit I work for was founded right after that fiasco just so we could do shit like that on the sovereign territory of whoever, but they didn’t ask me and anyway we don’t officially exist.

Within twenty-four hours after the hostage tapes aired, we understood that as far as the Pakistanis and the Americans were concerned, the hostages were on their own. Nisar reported a stir running through the highest levels of the Pakistani government; generals had approached him in strictest confidence about moving large sums of money offshore. Everyone felt the loss of face. A party of foreigners, including an American billionaire, snatched in daylight from the heart of a district supposedly under tight army control? Questions in parliament, angry editorials from opposition papers, everyone a-tremble about what the Americans were going to do.

Which was nothing, as it turned out. Rukhsana found out from a usually reliable source in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad that the Pakistani government had been assured that no incursion whatever was being planned or even considered.

The worst thing about an event like this, besides the hell of not knowing what’s happening to the victims-the loved ones, as they always call them-is that life goes on. Traffic flows, the noble buildings still stand whitely there in Washington, people go to their jobs and eat and to bed, and after the shock is a little past, so do the not exactly bereaved, carrying on in a suffering somewhat worse than an actual death in the family, because of the torture of hope.

Me too. I thought I would go nuts if I had to hang around the house, so the day after they showed the hostage tape I went to my regular PT session and sweet-talked Brenda Crabbe into filling out a report that said I had got all the benefit out of PT that was there to be got and, if the docs agreed, I was good to go.

The following day I drove down to Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia to return to my job. Fort Belvoir is a sort of military mall that the army uses to house units that they can’t figure out where else to put, stuff like the Defense Logistics Agency and the Institute of Heraldry. Soldier Magazine is there and so is the Tactical Intelligence Support Detachment, which is us. You would think that an organization as secret as the TISD would want to stay anonymous, but no, we have a sign and a shield too, a sword cutting a chain and a Latin motto. I showed my special ID to the guard at the desk and he ran it through his computer. My army records are completely fraudulent. I’m supposedly serving in some regular unit somewhere if anyone wants to look, which suits me okay. I’m kind of a fraudulent character to begin with.

I went in to see our first sergeant, whose name is Cheney, Ronald D., although everyone calls him Dick and blames him for Iraq, in one of those boring jokes that stick to any unit. Big guy with a narrow horse face and a dimple in the middle of his chin, a lifer like me. The first thing he said when I went in there was, “What’s wrong with your eyes? They’re all red.”

I said something about getting soap in them in the shower, and he asked me how the PT was going, and I said I should be yelling hoo-ah in a matter of weeks. Then I asked him where our guys were and he said, “Team One’s in Iraq; Team Two’s in Afghanistan; Team Three’s in transit somewhere, they didn’t tell me where yet, but I’m guessing Pakistan; and Team Four’s on stateside rotation for rest and training. Did you hear about Claiborne?”

“Not hurt?”

“Shit, no. He’s leaving. He came in here and I had his reenlistment papers all ready and he said to run them through the shredder; he was going to take a job with some security outfit. Blackwater or one of those.”

“That’s fucked up,” I said. “God, Buck Claiborne! Why would he do something like that?”

“He said they were going to pay him over a hundred grand a year plus benefits, and no army chickenshit either. He didn’t say anything to you?”

“No. He was always talking about telling the service to go fuck itself, but I thought it was just talk. Well. That’s a kick in the ass.”

“Roger that. Funny he never mentioned it. You guys were pretty tight.”

Yes, we were. Buck Claiborne saved my ass when the house fell on me. He was probably the largest person ever to successfully complete Special Forces training, which tends to favor moderate-sized people like me. I was a little hurt that he hadn’t told me he was getting out. I don’t have many close relationships with the men I work with, but I thought he was an exception and I was obviously wrong. I wanted to change the subject.

I said, “I guess we weren’t that tight. By the way, has there been anything down about this terrorist kidnap yet? The Craig thing?”

Cheney said, “No, nothing. That’s up in Pak, no?”

I said it was. Our unit is descended from the one that rescued General James Dozier in 1981, when the Red Brigades snatched him. Organized for tight coordination of comint and action, we led the carabinieri commandos right to the apartment where Dozier was being held and they rescued him without firing a shot.

If no one had alerted us on the kidnapping it was more bad news. If it wasn’t us it was probably nobody, which meant the U.S. was really not going to lift a finger.

“Could you keep your ears open on that, Top? I’d like to know if anyone gets an alert on an op, anything they have going to spring them.”

He didn’t reply for a moment, looking me over. “Sure, no problem. What’s your interest?”

“Oh, one of the victims is someone I know,” I said, and then I said I’d sure like to go downrange and he said, What, you can’t wait to kill again? and I said, Yeah, it’s an all-consuming need. He laughed and said I was getting pretty short myself, and was I planning to do a Claiborne when my enlistment ran out next month? and I said, Oh, sure, like they’d let me go. As a matter of fact, reenlistment is a formality with me; the army has this little catch that they can extend you indefinitely if you have a vital skill essential to national security, which I do with my languages and cultural knowledge of South Asia, so I might as well get the re-up bonus. I am a well-paid slave soldier, like a Mameluke or a janissary.

We bullshitted for a while about army stuff, and he gave me some paperwork to fill out, and as I was leaving he said, “You know, I saw an old pal of yours the other day, Captain Lepinski, only he’s a major now. They assigned him to JSOC staff, the fuckhead.”

I said, “I’m glad to hear it. You can always trust the army to reward good work. What’ve they got him doing?”

“I don’t know. Shuffling paper. Personnel assignments, the usual shit.”

I thought that was a good thing to learn about Lepinski, because the Joint Special Operations Command staff is the outfit that cuts all our orders. I said, “Well, he probably won’t kill anyone doing that.”

I sat down at a spare desk and looked over the crap that had accumulated for me during my time away from the unit, the usual army chicken-shit, but there was one item that drew my interest. It was an evaluation form for a course I’d been to just before the operation that had got me hurt, a course about how to handle a situation where terrorists had got hold of a nuclear weapon.

I recalled it pretty well, although it must’ve been six months back. I’d been called in to see Captain Stoltz. Brian Stoltz is not a bad guy for an officer, he’s a wiry little son of a bitch like me, fair but cruel. I wouldn’t say we like each other, but we get along. He’s a runner-set some kind of record when he was at the Point-and likes to take us running carrying heavy equipment. His nickname in the army is Flyin’ Brian, but we usually say the Fly. Mine is Ice, as in Ice Tea. Billy’s was Rowboat. Is.

I knocked and walked in and saluted and he sat me down in a side chair and asked me how I was, by which I knew I wasn’t in trouble and he was going to stick me with some pain in the ass that someone had passed down the line. So after the chat, he said, “Congratulations, you’re our new CBR NCO.”

I said, “Thank you, sir. I appreciate the honor.”

He said, “And fuck you very much. There’s a course, starts tomorrow.”

I said, “What kind of course? I already had CBR training.”

“This isn’t a bullshit course,” he said. “It’s about nuclear weapons, very high level. I’m going too.”

I asked him if I should be worried and he said the brass was and had sent the word down that every unit with clandestine insertion capability had to have one officer and one NCO down to the company level familiar with the design and appearance of nuclear explosives.

He said, “I can see their point. I’ve never seen a nuclear weapon. Have you?”

“Sure. They’re pointy at one end and have a little screen with red numbers on it counting the seconds down.”

“Uh-huh, and they have the spooky girl’s voice, This device will detonate in… forty-three seconds… forty-two seconds. Well, apparently not, so they started this course. Be here at oh-six-thirty tomorrow, BDUs, bag for three days.”

“Where’s it at?”

“They didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. It’s local because we got ground transport.”

The next day we drove off into the Virginia woods to some no-name facility. They had us in pretty nice quarters, a campus kind of arrangement, with maybe fifty people taking the course, three-quarters military and the rest various kinds of civilians. I had the sense it was a CIA site, but I could be wrong on that. Stolz went off to a higher-level course with the officers, and I went to what I guess was the dumbed-down version for the NCOs.

Basically it was all about nukes, a little history with some films the general public doesn’t get to see: some background about how they work, how an amateur would go about making one, some sketchy stuff about how, if we found one, to make sure it didn’t detonate, various means of sensing the radiation they give off from a distance, and some information about the government operations devoted to preventing bad guys from getting nukes and what would happen if they did get one and we had to go in and take it away from them.

They had a guy named Morgan come down from the National Security Agency to talk about communications intel-he ran a special section at NSA that did nothing but listen to intercepts and filter them for any sign that nuclear materials had gone missing-and a woman from something called the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, which was responsible for recovering lost or stolen nuclear material, and which I’d never heard of, and she went on about the various forms of nuclear material and how hard or easy it was to make something that would explode from the various types. A man from Langley gave a briefing about al-Q capabilities in this area, and about the ease and difficulty of stealing nuclear material, and how the bad guys would handle it, and there was a special mention of terrorists who were supposedly nuclear experts, and there were pictures, in case we ever ran into one of them at the mall. The main one I recall was named Abu Lais, but they didn’t have a picture of him yet.

It was pretty interesting in a not very real way, and the impression I got was that a terrorist nuke was not all that likely, but if it happened then all bets were off; it would immediately become the only thing on the agenda of the U.S. government, balls to the wall, and so on. On the trip home me and Stoltz were in the back of a van with some SEALs and other guys we didn’t know and they were all sacked out and he turned to me and said, “What was the NCO course like?”

And I told him, and he said the officers’ course was like that but also they talked about the tactical aspects; if you knew some terrorists had a bomb, how would you go in there and get it out? It was an impossible problem, really, and they were still working on the doctrine.

“You see why,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “If the bad guys hear you coming they’ll flip a switch and take out everything within a couple of miles, including all your guys and the whole civilian population.”

“Right. So you’d have to have totally accurate pinpoint intel about where the bomb was, and you’d have to get a team on that spot without anyone raising an alarm. It would have to be perfect, no do-overs, first time right. I mean, you’ve been on enough missions-when did anything ever go perfect? I mean, we can do tactical surprise, fire superiority, sure, but that wouldn’t be enough. We would have to be on the bomb before they knew we were there. I don’t think it can be done.”

“It can be done,” I said.

“How?”

“You’d need a guy on the inside, to pinpoint the device and keep the bad guys away until the good guys got there.”

“Right. And how are you going to infiltrate a nuclear terror cell?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said, “but at least it’s doable in theory. For that matter, we pass as bad guys all the time. But any other way is instant mushroom cloud, game over.”

He thought about that for a while and then he said it was above his pay grade, and we starting talking about sports and shit.

Now, checking through the little boxes that rated how valuable you thought the course had been, I recalled it pretty well, and especially that conversation with Captain Stolz. By the time I got back to my folks’ place I had the sketch of a plan that might get my mother out of where she was with her head still on her neck.

I was anxious to talk to my father about it, not so much because I wanted his advice or because I thought he’d encourage me, but because it was the kind of thing I couldn’t pull off alone. Or maybe I wanted him to talk me out of it. I’m not much of a planner.

When I walked in he was sitting in the living room with Mohammed Afridi. My father said, “Oh, good, Theo, you’re back. Come sit down and listen to what Mo has to say.”

Afridi is about the same age as my father, wears his hair long, and has a short graying beard. He’s a Pashtun of the intellectual class, a fairly rare bird in America, and he teaches at Georgetown. He’s supposed to be one of the big academic experts on Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier Province. My father thinks he worked for the CIA during the Russian jihad, but he doesn’t talk about it to us. Which is fair because we don’t talk about my own involvement in that war either.

Afridi was talking about the situation around where my mother had been taken, and he rolled back a little to bring me up to speed. He confirmed what we already suspected, which was that the group involved, al-Faran, was pretty much a creation of the Pakistani ISI, and that up until now they had been operating in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Why they had suddenly decided to kidnap a group of foreigners was something of a mystery, but Mo thought that they never would have done it without a wink from the ISI.

“So why did ISI wink?” I asked.

He shrugged and spread his hands. “Well, that would depend on who in ISI you mean. Like all of Pakistani society it’s riven by factions, some more aggressive than others, some religious, some out for the main chance. That they have kidnapped a billionaire suggests a ransom is in the offing, although, as you know, kidnap for ransom has never been a Pashtun specialty. Hostages, yes, but taking people and exchanging them for money is a little…” He sniffed and touched his nose.

“Punjabi?” my father said, and the two of them laughed.

“You have said it, my friend, not me. No, ransom is not a Pashtun thing; it goes against the idea of hospitality. It is hard for a Pashtun to give someone food and shelter and then sell him. There is a price of twenty-five million dollars on bin Laden’s head but no one has collected it, and the same rule applies, in general, to this kind of kidnapping. It is different from stealing women for wives, which was practically the Pashtun national sport in the old days. On the other hand, Alakazai is a peculiar man.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Bahram Alakazai, the leader of al-Faran. I knew him during the war. His mother was Punjabi, so perhaps that explains it.”

My father said, “Explains what?”

Afridi was silent for a moment, stroking his beard. “He was not a man at peace with himself. You know, the Pashtuns have many vices but one vice they have avoided, and that is the divided heart. You cannot, of course, trust a Pashtun, but you can trust a Pashtun to be himself, to do the things demanded by the Pashtun code, to seek revenge, to offer hospitality, and so on. Alakazai was not like that. We could never quite understand his goals. He seemed to enjoy playing with people just for the sake of the game. And he was good at it, a master manipulator, far more subtle than the Pashtuns, Pakistanis, and Americans with whom he typically dealt. An educated man, naturally, he studied in both Pakistan and the U.K., and I believe he was in America for a time, in the eighties.”

My father said, “He seems an unlikely fellow to lead a mujahideen band.”

“Oh, for that he has Idris Ghulam Khan, his field commander, an entirely different sort, the usual fanatic. Bahram negotiates with the Pakistanis and plans grand strategy and Idris does the shooting. It seems to work, and now they have pulled off this coup. It is just the sort of affair that Bahram is good at. He likes to keep the world guessing.”

“Can you get to them?” I asked. “Find out what they intend to do with the hostages?”

He frowned and shook his head. “I can leave messages with people who might be in contact with them, but I could not guarantee that al-Faran would receive them. I feel so helpless in this matter.”

“You could do something,” I said, and my father looked at me with interest.

“Anything in my power.”

“You consult with the U.S. government, don’t you? On politics among the mujahideen?”

He smiled faintly and replied, “Officially, no, I’m afraid. But should I be asked to consult, what would you like me to do?”

“Someone must be following the terrorist chatter about this kidnap, in the CIA and the NSA. There can’t be that many people fluent in Urdu or Pashto or Dari working on this end. If you could find out who they are and what they’re talking about over there, it could give us a better idea about what’s going on.”

After that there was some polite protest from Afridi that he was a very small fish and could not pretend to penetrate very far into the guts of the national security establishment, but I pressed him a little and he promised to keep his ears open. I believed him. He’s one of the many my mother has charmed.

When he left, my father asked me why I’d made that request and I told him it could be helpful in our plan.

“What plan?”

“The plan to get the U.S. Army to invade Pakistan and rescue Sonia.”

And I laid it all out for him, just like it had popped into my head while I was filling out that eval form on the conference in the Virginia woods. It would involve my going to Pakistan, yes, but not just wandering around at random, and it would have to involve our family. I thought he would object, being a lawyer and having that legal-procedure cast of mind, but he didn’t. He thought it was a good idea, and I thought this was another example of what so often happened when my mother was in the picture, people cranking it up to do for her what they never thought they would or could do.