The Good Son (58 page)

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!”

T
hey took Cynthia to the basement of the main NSA building, OPS-2A, where the police force that monitors Crypto City has its headquarters. She was placed in the canonical windowless room with a table and two chairs, all bolted to the floor. There was no sound from outside, the only noise the whir from the overhead vent. At one corner of the ceiling hung a small closed-circuit TV camera.

She sat and avoided looking at the camera. The Dutch courage from the martinis was rapidly fading, and this vexed the martinis, so that they no longer wanted to dwell in this unprofitable belly. Along with her spicy lunch they were sending urgent messages that they wished to leave, perhaps to decorate the sterile top of that table, or the floor.