Black Site (25 page)

Jamal walked him back to the cart behind his vehicle and guided him in, grabbed an extra patoo, wrapped it tightly around the American, and helped him sit up. His clothing was no longer wet, but still Jamal helped him take off his kameez, and replaced it with an old green sweater that was a few sizes too small for the American’s frame. He pushed a pakol hat on his head and helped him toward the front of the cart, facing backward. A plastic canteen of water was placed in his hand—Jamal assured him it was safe for him to drink—and then a flat loaf of bread appeared. The young Afghan leaped up to the tractor’s seat and refired the engine. The machine lurched forward, found a wide enough place in the trees to turn, and then began heading back to the northeast.

The tractor had been a necessity for this part of the trip—the truck would not have made it ten kilometers on these steep, rutted, and narrow spurs—but, unlike the Toyota truck, there was no good way on the tractor or in the cart behind it to hide the American for the return trip to civilization. With Mister Racer’s beard and clothing he would not look in any way suspicious to passing donkey caravans or men on foot, and this stretch was normally too disused for the Taliban to establish roadblocks. Still, Jamal would not be surprised to pass a small Taliban convoy or two heading toward the Afghani border, and then his fate would rest on the whims of the unit’s commander and whether or not he was in the mood to stop these two locals or to continue on to the war just over the mountains.

Jamal and Bob had decided that they would not press their luck and try to make it all the way to Peshawar. Mister Bob’s cover was as a logistics coordinator for an aid group called World Benefactors, so he was allowed outside of the city of Peshawar as far as a relief supply warehouse just west of the city of Jamrud. If Jamal could stay out of sight of the heavily traveled Grand Trunk Road, he just might be able to deliver his human cargo to Mister Bob’s warehouse, where the two Americans could ride together back to Peshawar in a large World Benefactors truck.

Everything hinged on the next three hours. If they were stopped by a Pakistani army patrol they would be arrested. Mister Racer might be expelled after an international incident, but a poor young Afghan refugee caught in the perpetration of international espionage would likely just disappear.

And if they were stopped by the Taliban or al Qaeda fighters who camped in the area to organize and train locals for the jihad, there was not one shred of doubt that they would both be killed.

Mister Racer could communicate in the local language to a degree, but he would not last through three seconds of questioning. Jamal could claim his “friend” was from Nuristan, a province of Afghanistan in the Hindu Kush mountain range populated by Muslims with lighter skin, and it was not common that a Nuristani would speak Pashto. But this cover story was thin. To check this legend one would just need to ask this foreigner to drop down onto his janamaz and pray.

Racer would reveal himself as a nonbeliever, and Jamal would thereby be revealed as a conspirator with the nonbelievers, and that would be that.

THIRTY

They made the first hour of their return trip wholly without incident. The American lay swaddled in blankets in the back as it bounced and shook and shuddered behind the loud tractor. He was all but hidden below the wooden lip of the cart, and the various odds and ends Jamal had hurriedly tossed back there at 4 a.m. to give the appearance that he was a merchant or a laborer served well to conceal his stowaway. It had been Bob Kopelman’s idea that Jamal half fill the cart, so the young Afghan had tossed items from the garage where he kept the tractor. There were some hammers and nails, a shovel, a pick, blankets, water jugs, and four large jerricans full of fuel.

The items rattled and bounced, and they gave the vehicle and the driver an air of purpose.

Just after safely crossing the Khyber Agency Road, Jamal stopped in a deep valley and turned off the engine so he could refill the tractor’s gas tank from a can in the back. He also took the opportunity to make a quick call on the satellite phone. Mister Bob answered immediately, reported that he was already on the Grand Trunk Road, west of Peshawar, and heading toward the warehouse. He reported seeing many Frontier Corps convoys on the main thoroughfare through this part of Khyber Agency, which was no great surprise, but he was making good time and expected to arrive at the rendezvous point well ahead of the Euroleopard tractor negotiating the arduous terrain to the south.

Soon the American climbed up onto the vinyl seat next to Jamal. Jamal wanted Mister Racer to remain hidden in back, but the valley here was steep on both sides and anyone approaching would have to do it from straight ahead, so he was less worried about being surprised by strangers.

Jamal asked, “Are you feeling better?”

In broken Pashto the American said, “Yes. Thank you. And thank you for coming to get me.”

Jamal shrugged. “I came because Mister Bob asked me to. This was not the plan. I was going to pick you up tomorrow where I left you.”

“I know. I am sorry.”

Jamal just repeated himself. “I came because Mister Bob asked me to.”

Racer said, “I understand the danger you are in, friend. If you are caught—”

“Caught? I would not have to be caught. I only have to be suspected of helping you and my life will be over. If the Taliban suspect me for one second you will find me hanging in the square by my hands, and my head will be hanging by a rope between my knees.”

That image lingered in the dusty air while they made their way over a dry hillock low in a valley. Finally Raynor asked, “So why do you do it? Is Bob a good salesman?”

Jamal took a moment with the question; apparently he did not recognize it as a joke at first. When he did, he laughed.

“No, no.” He thought before speaking. “I have been living at Kacha Garay camp outside of Peshawar. But Mister Bob has helped me, and now I help him. God willing, someday the Taliban will be gone, and I will be a truck driver.”

“That is your dream?”

“Yes. Not the truck you saw the other day. That is for thieves and men who travel off the highway. Inshallah, I will someday own a proper truck. A semi truck. I will move back home to Kabul and deliver goods all over my country.”

“Do you want a family?”

Jamal shook his head. “I am too old to take a wife.”

“How old are you?”

“I do not know.” Racer had met many Afghans who were not certain of their age. “But I must be thirty.”

“That’s not too old.”

“This is not America. It is very different in my culture. Here I am an old man.”

Racer did not speak again. After a moment he patted Jamal on his sweat-soaked back, then climbed back into the cart behind the tractor.

*   *   *

Jamal and Kolt entered the plains of Kohat just after noon. They traveled almost due north along narrow farm tracts running alongside fields of winter wheat and grasses and fallow farmland. Mud-walled compounds and simple houses dotted the hilly landscape, and trees and brush alongside the roads helped conceal them from great distance.

They skirted far to the east of Sara Garhi, a city legendary for an epic battle in 1897 when twenty-one Sikhs under British rule fought to the last against ten thousand Pashtun attackers, killing hundreds before being wiped out.

Things had been going well, but Jamal made his first mistake by leaving the low mountains and heading instead farther to the east; he had been searching for a smoother trail, but he’d followed a promising spur that took him all the way out onto a ridge that ran above the flatlands to the east. Off in the far distance, a mile away or more, was the Hyatabad–FATA road, and as soon as Jamal realized he could be seen by anyone with binoculars at the Frontier Corps outpost that would inevitably be located there, he knew he’d screwed up. He felt completely exposed for a quarter mile, then took his first opportunity to leave the mule trail by following a dry stream bed back due west.

Mister Racer was in the back and unaware of the danger. Jamal did not want to tell him, because he worried the American would be mad at him.

*   *   *

Five minutes of bone-jarring travel on the stream bed was about all Kolt could take. He heard the iron bolts in the wooden cart bed cracking the oaken beams, and he was concerned that the cart at least, and perhaps even the big tractor itself, would fall to pieces if they continued on this terrain. Jamal seemed to be taking the rocks and boulders much faster now than earlier, and Kolt sensed a problem from the driving technique of the young man. He rolled up to his knees to ask Jamal why they had left the dirt track, but as soon as he did this, the tractor lurched to a stop. Racer flew forward into Jamal’s back before righting himself and looking up the stream bed.

Four men stood in dappled shadows under a massive cherry tree twenty-five yards ahead.

Black turbans were piled high on their heads. Folded-stock Kalashnikovs swung from slings around their necks.

Beards hung to their breasts.

These were Taliban, and Raynor knew it.

Jamal let out a slight high-pitched gurgle from his throat that Raynor could hear even over the rumbling engine.

Kolt did not see a vehicle, but assumed these guys wouldn’t be this far out in the boonies on foot. There would be horses, donkeys, or a four-wheel-drive pickup somewhere close. Perhaps more Taliban as well. These men weren’t set up for ambush—perhaps they’d just been resting and drinking tea—but they’d obviously heard the tractor from a distance and had moved away from their camp to come investigate.

Kolt thought quickly. Options? Vehicle or not, he and Jamal weren’t going to outrun these guys or their rifles on a damned tractor, and Raynor did not even possess a sidearm to fight them with. The Makarov was back at the bottom of the river, and his knife, impotent as it would have been against four men with assault rifles, had been left as a prop back in Zar’s compound.

Options? What options?

“Keep going, Jamal. Maybe they will let us pass.”

Jamal reached down to shift the Euroleopard back into gear. His hand shook, and that, combined with the perspiration on his palm, with the terror coursing through his body, caused him to stall the vehicle. Quickly he reached down to restart it, but Raynor patted him on the back.

“It’s okay, friend. Just relax.”

The four Taliban hefted their weapons and approached the tractor. Jamal sat in the seat and Raynor knelt in the cart behind, facing the men with the rifles.

*   *   *

“As salaam aleikum,” said the driver of the tractor. Twenty-eight-year-old Abdul Salaam did not reply; instead, he held his rifle up, snapped his fingers, and motioned for his three men to spread out around the tractor and do the same.

Abdul and his three cousins were in hiding here in the hills west of Hayatabad. They had been part of a larger unit that had killed a French aid worker and his six Pakistani army bodyguards nearly a month ago up in Chitral, and the group had broken apart to avoid capture. Abdul Salaam and the other three had been heading slowly south. Their plan was to make it to Parachinar, where they would join a donkey caravan that would head west all the way to a crossing point through the mountains into Afghanistan, where, God willing, they would fight and kill more infidels.

Abdul Salaam did not know who these men were on the big red tractor. They could be locals. They could be smugglers.

They could be spies.

Abdul Salaam would find out.

“Wa alekeum a salaam,” he said finally. “Where are you going, friends?”

While he waited for the driver to respond, he checked to make sure his cousins had their weapons’ safeties off, and they surrounded the vehicle in an arc that did not endanger one another with gunfire from their own weapons should the need arise to kill these men. Yes, good. These three would be good fighters over the border. They would kill many infidels. Many Americans.

He looked back at the driver of the tractor. The man was afraid. He had not spoken.

“I asked you where you were going?”

“To Peshawar.”

Abdul Salaam suspected instantly that the man was lying. “In this riverbed? There are roads to Peshawar. Where are you from?”

The driver in the light blue salwar kameez looked down to his hands. Abdul Salaam checked them—they were empty. The Taliban leader took a step forward and his cousins followed suit. They closed to within fifteen feet of the front grille of the big tractor.

“I am sorry, sir,” said the man. He sounded like an Afghan. Perhaps from Kabul. “We have been delivering goods, and are returning to Peshawar. We wanted to avoid the Frontier Corps on the main roads.”

Smugglers.
Abdul Salaam nodded slowly.
Hardly unusual out here.
“What goods did you deliver, and to where?”

“Hashish. From Kabul to Mingora.”

“You and your friend?”

“Yes. Yes, that is correct.”

“What is your name?”

“Jamal.”

“And your father’s?”

“I am from Kabul. My father’s name was Muhammad Metziel.”

“Jamal, the Koran does not allow for the consumption of narcotics. ‘Make not your own hands contribute to your destruction,’ it clearly says. Are you not a follower?”

The Afghan said, “Yes, brother, I am a follower. I do not use the drugs. I am only trying to make a living.”

“By profiting from the suffering of others? The Koran says, ‘Anyone who believes in Allah and the Last Day should not hurt his neighbor.’”

“I…” The man in the seat of the tractor said nothing else. He was shaking now.

Abdul Salaam enjoyed making men shake in fear. Not just infidels. Anyone who defied the law of the Koran.

He turned his attention to the man in the back of the cart. “Do you speak, friend?” This man looked different. He was lighter in complexion and older, and, unlike his friend, he appeared calm.

The one called Jamal said, “He is my associate from Nuristan. He does not speak Pashto.”

“I see,” said Abdul Salaam.

*   *   *

Kolt Raynor desperately tried to picture a map of the FATA in his head. With all the other concerns and calculations going on up there in his brain, the geography was difficult to get his mind around. Still, he didn’t think Jamal’s story added up. They were traveling west when he made it as if they were going east, Mingora was way too far south to travel from by tractor, and while Kolt could manageably pass for a lighter-skinned Muslim, a non-Pashto-speaking Afghan from Nuristan Province would not be of much use as a drug smuggler down here in the Pashtun tribal FATA.