Joshua`s Hammer (13 page)

he was from his voice. Sarah shot back a reply, her left eyebrow rising. He mumbled something else under his breath, and then climbed out of the car and stalked off.

"Not everyone has come to an equal understanding. But we can hope, Insha "Allah," she said regretfully. She opened the door, then reached across to roll up the driver's window, grab the keys and hit the door locks. "We have a long distance to travel before dawn, so we must leave now."

Farid and the other mujahed, who looked almost as young, pulled camo netting over the Rover making it practically invisible from the air even during the day. Sarah walked over to where Mohammed was waiting, his Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, and she said something to him. It was obviously a conciliatory gesture. He towered menacingly over her, and for a brief moment McGarvey thought he was going to strike her down. But then he looked away insolently. She reached out and touched his arm, and he stepped back as if he was getting ready to strike again. His hand reached for the pistol in his tunic, but Sarah stood her ground, and after several seconds he withdrew his hand.

She came back, pulling a round felt cap on her head, and stuffing stray strands of black hair inside it. She got her rifle from the other mujahed, named Hash, slung it over her shoulder, then came over to where McGarvey was standing just outside the barn.

She studied his face as if trying to read something from his expression. Her own expression was one of concern and weariness, as if she was tired of the struggle. And yet he could see clearly stamped on her face a fierce determination and pride.

"Have you come here to assassinate my father, Mr. McGarvey?" she asked directly, without guile.

McGarvey shook his head. "Just to talk," he said. He was already beginning to admire the young woman.

"About what?"

"We want the killing to stop."

She nodded her understanding. "Then I think that you must have a great deal to say."

"I do. But am I going to be wasting my time?"

She thought about that, and took a moment to formulate her answer. She was being very serious. "My father is not the monster you in the West think he is. But he is a very hard man, as the Russians found out." She smiled wistfully. "He too wants peace, but an honorable peace."

"Will he listen to me?"

"Listen to an infidel?" she asked rhetorically. Then she cocked her head and pursed her lips. "Do you believe that the prophet Isa was God? You call him Jesus."

"I didn't come here to talk about religion."

"Then your task will be doubly hard. For us, Islam is life."

"I understand."

Sarah gave him an odd, thoughtful look. "I don't know if you can. But I hope so."

McGarvey motioned toward Mohammed who had hunkered down and was looking out across the valley toward the mountains as he smoked a cigarette. "What about him?"

Sarah followed his gaze. "He is an Afghani, and maybe he is already too old to change. I think he is a spy for the Taliban."

The admission of a weakness in bin Laden's armor was extraordinary, and McGarvey wondered if she had told him that to get some kind of a reaction, or merely because she was young and naive. He didn't think she could be much older than eighteen or twenty.

"Why not send him away?" McGarvey asked.

This time Sarah laughed out loud, the sound soft and throaty. "Better to have a spy you know in your midst, than one you don't watching you from a distance."

Farid and Hash had taken four bundles from the back of the Rover. They put McGarvey's bag and laptop into one of them, and the mujahedeen, including Sarah, shouldered the heavy loads.

"I can carry some of that," McGarvey said.

"You have your work to do, we have ours," Sarah replied.

They headed north from the village along the base of the foothills that stretched up the long valley, Sarah and Farid in the lead, with McGarvey in the middle as usual, and Mohammed and Hash bringing up the rear.

Within the first fifty yards they fell into an easy, loping gait that for the first mile or two seemed unnecessarily slow. But as the floor of the valley continued to rise toward the distant mountains, sometimes hardpan and rock-strewn, at other times swampy, the ground muddy, McGarvey could feel the altitude in his lungs and his legs. He was in excellent physical condition, but he had to wonder how long Sarah and the others could keep up the pace, and if he could match it.

They spoke very little on the trek, though from time to time Farid would look back over his shoulder at the sky to the south and then shoot McGarvey a glance to make sure he was okay. He smiled each time and gave the thumbs-up sign.

Sarah was very small, maybe five-feet-two, and slender. Although her pack was as big as the others, and she carried a rifle and a bandolier of ammunition, it was she who set the pace, never once faltering or slowing down.

Around 3:30 A.M." the village already several miles behind them, they turned to the northwest into a steep arroyo down which a narrow stream bubbled gaily. They climbed for twenty minutes until the defile took a turn to the right, putting the valley below them out of sight for the first time. At a small flat spot beneath a long rock overhang that would protect them from the air, Sarah stopped and took off her pack.

"Five minutes," she announced. She took a Russian made canteen from her pack and filled it in the stream. The others did the same.

This place had been used as a rest stop before. McGarvey could see the disturbed sand, and farther back beneath the overhang someone had built small campfires. The rocks

were blackened and the overhead was dark with soot.

Sarah came back and offered him a drink from the canteen. The water was sweet and cool. Simple pleasures were the best, the line came to him from somewhere, and he smiled at her. "Thank you."

"How are your legs?" she asked.

"I'll live. Is it much farther?"

She glanced at the defile, then back east. The sun rose here around 4:30 a.m. this time of year, and the tops of the distant mountains were already turning pink. "Another twenty minutes. But it is very steep."

"Is your father's camp nearby?"

She shook her head. "We have to stop for the day. It's too dangerous for us to travel. But we'll get there by tomorrow morning."

Mohammed and the others were still at the stream and out of earshot. "Dangerous for whom?" he asked. "Not the Taliban, you have a spy with you."

"I believe you call them Keyhole satellites." She gave him a bemused look. "I think they might be watching us because of you."

Actually the satellites' infrared detectors could pick up the heat signatures of human bodies better at night. But the KH11 and12 series were in positions just now to watch the ongoing troubles in Yugoslavia, and one to watch a possible treaty violation in Antarctica. He didn't tell her that.

McGarvey offered her a cigarette, but she declined. He lit one for himself. "Do you miss Saudi Arabia?" he asked.

The question startled her. She started to say something, but then changed her mind and shook her head. "I was born in the Sudan," she said at length. "But I've never been to see my father's family." She lowered her eyes. "Have you been to Riyadh?"

She was holding something back, as if she were frightened. "Several times," McGarvey said.

"Mecca?"

"Once."

She looked up, a sad smile on her pretty face. "Then you have seen more than I have seen." "We can change all that' McGarvey said.

"I hope so," she replied. "Before it's too late."

"What do you mean?"

She drew herself up suddenly realizing that she had said too much. "It's time to go now."

McGarvey wanted to reach out to her, to take some of the load of the world she was evidently carrying off her shoulders. Maybe in the early days in the Sudan when her mother had taken care of her while her father fought Russians here in Afghanistan, she'd had a normal life. But since moving here to be at her father's side her life had to be anything but normal.

They shouldered their packs and followed the stream upward. Almost immediately the going became very difficult as the walls of the defile narrowed and rose sharply to a ridge a couple of hundred feet higher. A small waterfall tumbled from a rocky ledge, splashing on the rocks below, sending a mist rising into what developed into a thickening fog as they climbed.

All conversation became impossible because of the strenuousness of the ascent. For the next fifteen minutes McGarvey's world was reduced to the next foothold below and hand hold above. The fog closed in so completely that he could no longer see the base of the slope or the ridge. The rocks were slippery and they had to take extreme care with each move lest they lose their footing. If they started to fall they would not be able to stop themselves, and it would probably kill them.

The sky behind them was turning light now, and McGarvey sensed an urgency in the others that had not been there before. Sarah and Farid began to outdistance him, and then two mujahedeed below pressed him so that he had to speed up, take chances and unnecessary risks.

His body needed rest, but thoughts were bouncing around inside his head at the speed of light; how much longer he could continue, exactly what he was going to say to bin Laden, hoping Kathleen wasn't worrying too much about him, and that Liz was safe.

Afghanistan and the people he'd come in contact with so far were about what he'd expected from his briefings and the dossiers he'd read. But he'd not gotten the sense of isolation from his readings that he felt at this moment. He could have been on a desert island, or in the middle of Antarctica, completely cut off from civilization. Afghanistan had always been a difficult place, but now that the Taliban were mostly in control, and trying to make the country into an Islamic fundamentalist's paradise, you could get killed simply because the hairs on your arms ran the wrong way. If you were a devout Muslim, and washed yourself for the five-times-a-day prayers, the hairs on your arms would all point down toward your wrists. If a man walked to the side of the road and urinated standing up, he could be shot to death on the spot. Muslim men always squatted to pee. It was crazy to the extreme. But he was back in the field, in one of the most isolated countries in the world, where a single wrong move could cause his death, to talk a madman out of using a nuclear weapon to kill Americans. Maybe Dennis Berndt had been right. Maybe he should just say the hell with alt the talking, and simply kill bin Laden the first moment an opportunity presented itself.

He reached for the next hand hold and pulled himself up, the muscles in his arms starting to shake.

He had to believe that this path wasn't the only way to bin Laden's camp. It would be impossible to bring supplies on a regular basis this way. And although his location would be secure, his comings and goings would be severely restricted. They'd taken this route to make it impossible for McGarvey to ever find his way back. Coming up from the valley they'd passed any number of arroyos that looked exactly like this one.

Of course with his phone and the GPS chip imbedded in his body he could easily pinpoint his exact location. But they didn't know that, and he would have to make sure they didn't find out.

A series of natural stone steps angled steeply to the right, and suddenly McGarvey was over the top where Sarah and Farid were already heading along a path around a broad pool. Mohammed and Hash came over the top and the three of them followed as fast as they could.

The sun was just appearing over the far wall of the valley behind them when they reached a much larger rock overhang than the one below. Sarah had already dropped her pack, and she hurried alone along the water's edge until she disappeared in the fog twenty or thirty yards upstream.

"There will be no trouble from you now, Mista CIA," Mohammed warned.

He and the two other men dropped their bundles but carried their rifles down to the pool. Stripping off their outer clothing and boots and socks, they hurriedly rinsed their hands, mouths, noses, faces, forearms and feet three times. Then, completely ignoring McGarvey, who watched from beneath the overhang above the pool, they knelt down on their vests, faced southwest toward Mecca and began the first of their five daily prayers.

At this moment McGarvey knew that he could pull out his gun and kill them all. They were as vulnerable now as a mother was during the act of giving birth; their conscious thoughts were turned inward to the task at hand; to Allah and to the belief that some day Paradise would be theirs. A Muslim believed that life on earth was nothing more than a reflection, a mirror image, of their real lives in heaven, so whatever they did here was holy.

McGarvey sat down cross-legged in the sand and watched the three men pray. Sarah had gone off by herself because Muslim men and women did not pray together, it was forbidden by the Qoran. But as he watched he wondered where and how it had all gone terribly wrong for so many of them. Why the jihads and fatwahs, the acts of terrorism, the senseless killings, the endless wars, the in tolerance that led a man like bin Laden to contemplate using a nuclear weapon against innocent men, women and children? He didn't know if even Islam's most religious leaders could answer that simple question, and yet it was probably the most important question they'd ever been faced with. One that he had come here to ask bin Laden.

Stop the killing, there was no need for it. A strange thought, he had to admit to himself, for an assassin to entertain. But he could not ignore reality.

He got up and went deeper under the overhang where the three mujahedeen by the pool could not see him, and untaped his pistol and spare magazine from his thigh. He pocketed the magazine and stuffed the gun beneath his bush jacket in his belt at the small of his back.

When he came out again Sarah was returning from upstream, and the three men were putting on their boots. Mohammed watched her pick her way down the rocky path, and then looked up at McGarvey, his face screwing up in an expression of deep hatred.

Sarah was refreshed, as if the march and hard climb this morning had been nothing to her. When she and the others came up to the campsite she smiled wistfully. "It's too bad you don't know what you are missing, Mr. McGarvey."