The Sleeper (8 page)

As the war in Afghanistan got under way, the television reports were all about cruise missiles and stealth fighters. From Kabul came a few of those computer-video images of “bombs lighting up the night sky,” running over and over again. They looked like they were cut apart and pasted back together. There was no way you could tell what was happening.

I dialed Kansas.

“Jump Start Restaurant—”

“Ruth, let me talk to my wife.”

“That you, Kurt?”

“Ruth, right now. Please.”

“You hear the war started?”

“I heard. Please?”

“You anywhere near it, if you know what I mean?…Oh, Betsy. Betsy, it's Kurt. He says—”

Betsy must have grabbed the phone out of Ruth's hand. “Kurt, where are you?”

“I'm far, far away from Afghanistan.”

“Ah,” she said. “Ah, thank God. And you're okay?”

“I'm totally okay, except I miss you, Darling. Are you and Miriam doing all right?”

She hesitated for just a second. “Yes. Fine,” she said. “Miriam misses you. I miss you.”

“You're sure you're okay?” I wanted to reassure her. I wanted to reassure me. “If there's anything wrong, I'll come back, no matter what.”

“No!” Her voice broke. “No. No, don't say that, Kurt.”

“I—”

“Kurt, listen to me. I don't know where you are and I don't know what you're doing, but it's got to be done, right?”

She sounded scared and strong and angry and loving all at once, and for a second I didn't know what to say. Then the words came out. “It has to be done.”

“And nobody else can do it. Tell me that. Tell me nobody else can do what you're doing.”

“It's true.”

She started to speak but her voice choked. I couldn't say anything either. After a second the electric life went out of the line. “Betsy?”

“I'm here, Kurt.”

“Betsy, what's wrong? What is it you're not telling me?”

“Kurt, listen. Miriam and me, we're here and we're alone. Do you understand that?”

“But you got our friends, and you got—”

“
Listen
to me. If you aren't here, we are alone,” she said. “And I'm gonna tell you something. I'm scared. Scared about you, and the world, and this war, and about the next paycheck, and I'm so, so scared I'm going to lose you. Can I just say that? I look at the TV and I'm terrified. You hear me?”

“I am not in Afghanistan.”

“
Listen to me!
What you're doing—whatever the hell it is, wherever the hell it is—it's got to be done. Right?
Right?
Don't tell me you can just come home because you're worried about us.”

“But I just wanted—”

“What you're doing has got to be done. That's what I tell myself every morning and every night. That's the only excuse. The
only
excuse.”

The line sounded dead again, and I was afraid she was gone. Then, “Kurt?”

“Yeah.”

“Just come back to us,” she said. “When it's all over, come back to us.”

We flew into the rising sun and every feature of the earth below was outlined in morning shadows. Near Nairobi, farms cluttered the land. There were patches of tall corn, and rows of sisal with leaves like clustered bayonets.

“I expected”—I had to shout above the noise of the Cessna's engine—“I expected wild animals.”

“Not many here,” shouted Faridoon. “Farmers drive them away if they can.”

“And around the camps?”

“The shifta killed them all a long time ago. When you've got so many guns around, you don't have many animals.”

“Shifta?”

“Somali raiders—they're warriors, bandits, poachers. Take your pick.”

I nodded and sat back. It didn't seem worth shouting. “Mind if I doze off?”

“Be my guest,” Faridoon shouted back.

Maybe I'd been asleep ten minutes. Suddenly the plane turned hard to the left, real hard, and one of the instruments began to scream a warning. The turn continued, and the screaming got more urgent, but Faridoon was smiling. He took one hand off the wheel and pointed. “Elephants,” he said. We were making a tight spiral above them—tighter than the Cessna wanted to go.

At first I didn't see the animals because I didn't understand what I saw. The earth beneath us was a rich iron red and so were the enormous things that moved across it. We were only a few hundred feet above them now. I had never seen anything living that was so huge. They had nothing to do with the elephants in circuses and zoos. It was like the difference between a scout car and main battle tank.

The plane was screaming again. “What's that sound?” I shouted.

“Stall indicator. No problem.”

“Right.”

“Really,” he said, “relax.” He leveled out. We headed again toward the rising sun and a land that grew flatter, emptier, with every mile that passed. The plane was climbing slowly until, at about three thousand feet, we felt like we were standing still and the land beneath us was as red as the deserts of another planet. The Cessna's engine wasn't working so hard now, and it was just a little bit easier to talk.

“What's your biggest security problem?” I asked.

“Rape,” said Faridoon. “Rape is the worst.”

“So you know who's doing it?”

“Sometimes.”

“Can you take them out?”

Faridoon's expression let me know I'd probably failed his test already. “We don't want to start a war. The cycle of vengeance never ends in these parts, and we do not want to be part of it. We cannot be part of it. But we have to figure something out.”

“And you were hoping I've got some ideas.”

“I'm hoping,” he said. “Some of our best people at Summit are women. And they won't—they cannot—even begin to think about working out here. Except…” Faridoon grinned. “Except Cathleen,” he said, and shook his head.

“What makes her so special?”

“You'll see.” And once again, Faridoon smiled.

Now clouds held back the sun, and heavy raindrops started to rattle on the front of the airplane like bursts of machine-gun fire. We flew low and slow over land that was dead from drought, mutilated by floods, until a sprawl of people appeared below us like ashes scattered across the earth. We circled once over rows of battered tents, small huts patched together from twigs and garbage, and a few low stucco buildings. As we approached the water-slick landing strip, I could see a large figure in a long white shirt and blue jeans—a woman with a scarf over her head—talking to three men in rumpled uniforms beside a Toyota pickup. Faridoon gentled the Cessna down onto the mud runway and we half rolled, half skated to a stop, then taxied over to the reception party. The second the engine quit turning, the woman pulled open Faridoon's door.

“You've got to talk to these bastards,” she said.

“Good morning, Cathleen,” he said.

“Top of the morning. Are you going to talk to them or not?”

“That's what I'm here for,” he said, climbing out of the plane. “Cathleen, meet Kurt. I'm hoping he can help us with some of these problems.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she said, starting to head back toward the soldiers.

Faridoon put his hand on her shoulder. “Wait,” was all he said. Her face turned red and there was a terrible mix of emotions there—anger and anxiety and relief and frustration, all magnified by her size. Cathleen was a force of nature, with huge breasts and heavy arms and a kind of passion in her movements that made me think she was going to explode, but she didn't. She waited. Faridoon went on alone to talk to the soldiers.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“The little girls,” she said. “You'd think they'd spare the little girls.” She shook her head. No, finally she wasn't going to wait. She headed for the soldiers and I followed. “Can't they bleedin' do something?” she shouted at Faridoon and at them. Faridoon turned and headed her off. “We'll discuss this when we get back to the compound,” he told Cathleen, and even though she seemed to be mad as hell, she listened to him the way someone does who knows the voice of reason when she hears it. “Now let's unload the plane,” he said.

In front of the Summit house, .50-caliber cartridge boxes were piled like enormous Lego blocks. “Sure looks like you're ready for war,” I said. “You've got enough ammunition here for an army.”

“No, no,” said Faridoon. “The boxes are empty. But they're very common, especially on the other side of the border, and we've found that they make good hives.”

“Wish we did have some ammunition,” said Cathleen.

“Let's start with some tea,” said Faridoon as we walked into the main room of the house, which was part living room, part kitchen. “And that big survey map, is it still here in the cabinet?” He spread the chart on top of a 1950s kitchen table with aluminum legs and a Formica top. We sat on lawn chairs with most of the webbing frayed or gone. Cathleen put the pot and the cups on the table and let us pour our own.

“This is the border with Somalia,” said Faridoon. A straight line ran north and south, highlighted in pink. “This is where we are.” Just to the left of it, and about eight kilometers inland. “Now,” he said to Cathleen, “tell us what's been happening.”

“More of the same,” said Cathleen. “A whole lot more of the same. Oh, Faridoon, the little girl they brought in last night. Oh, God, you must come see her with me. Ten years old, Faridoon. And every night there are more. And we know we only hear about a few of them.”

“It's the shifta doing this?” I asked. “These Somali bandits?”

“No,” said Cathleen. “I've been out here a long time and I know shifta better than I know some of my cousins in Dublin. The shifta take advantage. They get what they can get. But this is more like an organized campaign, like there's a method to the madness.”

“How's that?” I asked.

“It's a protection racket these sick fucks are about. And in Allah's name no less. The men here see that they can't defend their wives or daughters. They see the soldiers and police don't do the job. But over here”—she pointed to a town called Wolla Jora on the far side of the border—“there's a lot of Itihaad people. Just when the rapes are increasing, some of their preachers show up in the camps. Quiet like. And they say they're going to do the job the police don't. They say they're going to give men back their dignity, they're going to protect their women-folk. You know, ‘Islam is the solution.' ”

“And nobody does anything.”

“No. A few years ago the Ethiopians went into the northern areas—here.” She moved her hand over a corner of the map. “They were going after Itihaad for their own reasons. But, you know, it's like trying to clean with a dirty mop. You just spread the dirt around. Then last year we started hearing about new arrivals across the way, in this area.” She drew a circle with her finger. “Not sure who they were, but the Itihaad people were very impressed with their new guests. You could see that right away. Their guns got better. Their trucks got better. And, you know what, the rapes increased.”

“Al-Qaeda?”

“Some of its best and brightest,” said Cathleen.

“A long way from home,” I said.

“For them the rapes are bonus pay, don't you know.”

The clinic was four grimy stucco walls beneath a tin roof dense with cobwebs. There were eight metal beds. The paint on them was worn away by the clenched hands of patients in pain and the iron legs were rusted by pools of sweat. Some of the sick were on the floor, crowded inside because of the rains. The girl was curled up on a stained mattress, wrapped in a coarse wool blanket. She had a high forehead, delicate features, and large, warm black eyes that seemed to see us, but not to follow us. The air near her was stale with sickness. She smiled when Cathleen spoke, but did not lift her head. Cathleen ran the back of her hand over the girl's cheek and said something else to her in a language I did not understand.

Outside the clinic a tall man with midnight-black skin stood beneath the eaves clutching a stick. He looked into the distance like a sentry and his jaw was set, whether in pain or anger was hard to tell. Faridoon approached him and spoke a few words, but the man said nothing. He just nodded his head slowly, almost rhythmically, the way some athletes do when they're about to sprint out of the blocks. But there was nowhere for this man to go, nothing for him to do.

“That was the girl's father,” said Faridoon as we drove back toward the compound.

“That little girl is his only child,” said Cathleen. “Her mother's dead. But after something like this, some men in these parts might walk away from the shame, you know. Not him. I think he really is a good man.”

“What did he do before he came here?” said Faridoon. “He doesn't look like a farmer.”

“Shifta,” said Cathleen. “Ivory poacher back in the old days.”

“Ah,” said Faridoon.

“Ah, Mother of God!” said Cathleen. “It just breaks your heart. You won't find tougher people than these in the whole world. Too tough for their own good. And so proud, and so completely fucking hopeless.” She turned on me. “Do you have any idea what that girl has been through?”

“I saw women who were raped in Bosnia,” I said. “I have an idea.”

Cathleen shook her head. “In Somalia, girls are mutilated already when they are six or seven years old. Did you know that? All of their genitals are cut away with a knife or a razor blade and they are sewed almost shut.”

“Why the hell would they do that?”

“
Women
do it to them—the mothers to the daughters—because that's what the men expect. So when a little girl like that is raped, the sheer physical damage to her, and the pain, is almost beyond belief. She is lucky, very lucky, she did not die. And she still might. And we don't even have tests here to see if she's been infected with HIV, which she might well be. And I ask myself what kind of men would do that to her. And I can't get over the idea that this is part of some sick goddamned game by the people across the way.”

“You don't know that,” said Faridoon.

“I see what's happening,” said Cathleen.

“Do you hear any names?” I said.

“Abu Zubayr is the name I heard,” she said.

 

Early in the afternoon, as soon as there was a break in the weather, I drove Faridoon back to the airport. “See what we can do here,” he said as we pulled the blocks out from under the tires of the Cessna. “Develop an action plan. But don't cross the border under any circumstances.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.” He climbed into the pilot's seat but left the door open to talk. He looked over the controls. “You're going to be tempted to talk to Abu Zubayr, but that could be a trap—and almost certainly will be.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know him. And so do you.”

“I do?”

“I'm sure you met him in Bosnia. Very quiet. That was before he lost the sight in his eye. In those days he was called Salah.”

“The Salah who used to sleep in the Ansar house? The one who sat next to Osama when he came.”

“That's the one.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“We met in Wolla Jora town when he first came. He said he's in the honey business now.”

“Salah.”

“Leave him alone, at least for now. Are we clear about that? Perfectly clear?”

I nodded, and couldn't think why I felt relieved, then realized that was the connection to Summit. Or might be.

Faridoon swung the door of the Cessna closed and cranked the engine. A couple of minutes later, he was skimming the bottom of the clouds.

 

Cathleen brought a Coleman lantern to the table. The blue-white glare shone like a cold sun on the contour lines of the map. She leaned over the chart, planting her hands on both sides, seeming to want to take the chart and the land it represented into her arms and smother it all in her breasts.

“Wolla Jora is the town, but the place you want to know more about,” she said, “is this farm about two miles outside, which is where the distinguished visitors from abroad hold court and make their plans. Or so I'm told by some of the Orormo who wander back and forth through here.” She traced lines with her finger through small valleys and riverbeds. “You see how easy it is for them to cross the border. Nobody's watching.” She shook her head and took a deep breath, studying every curving line on the map like a sorceress reading chicken guts before, finally, she heaved another sigh. It was hard to keep my eyes on the map with her huge breasts right in front of me. She looked up into my face. “Would you be wanting a little of mother's milk?” she said.

She must have seen I looked a little confused.

“Whisky,” she said. “Would a glass of whisky do you?”

“Yes. Yes, it would,” I said.

 

Cathleen and I sat in the dark in a pair of the low lawn chairs, our drinks cradled in our hands, talking to each other's outlines.

“Have you known Faridoon a long time?” I asked.

“About six years,” said Cathleen. “Since he first brought me out here from Ireland.”

“How'd he find you?”

“The world of beekeepers is not so huge, you know.”

“His good luck.”

“Hah. And mine I suppose.”

“Are you Ismaili?”

“No thanks. We Catholics have enough strange beliefs.” I could hear her take a swallow of whisky. “Well, maybe if the Aga Khan was to propose to me I'd give it some thought, you know. But I haven't had him come courting in quite some time. I take it you're not a convert yourself.”

“No.”

“Know much about the Ismailis, do you?”

“A little bit I've read.”

“Don't know much myself. Sure you've heard why they were called ‘assassins'—
hashishin,
because they were after smoking dope to help them on their way to Paradise. Seem to have given that up, though. More's the pity.”

“Hah! Yeah.”

“You know they scared the bejesus out of Richard the Lion-heart and his crew, and scaring the English is no bad thing. I'd send them to Heaven for that. Did you ever hear how they'd jump off towers when the Old Man of the Mountain told them to? They'd do anything he commanded. Jump off towers. Disguise themselves as women. Spend years working in some rival's court, just waiting for the order to kill.”

“I read about that, yeah.” I took a long sip of the whisky. “Sounded like fairy tales, but…”

“But what?”

“Now it sounds like Bin Laden.”

“I reckoned you'd say that. But the Old Man, you know, he was after something different. He was playing with the idea of Paradise, not just for the hereafter, but for the here on earth. You know what he used to say?”

I shook my head in the dark.

“ ‘
Nothing
is true.' ” Cathleen slurred a little. “
Everything
is permitted.' ”

I tried to see her face, but I couldn't make out any of the features.

“And Faridoon is part of all that?”

“Oh no, darlin'. Nobody was ever part of that. It was all made up, don't you know? The Ismailis don't bother anybody. They've got schools, they've got foundations, ‘the Aga Khan this,' ‘the Aga Khan that,' and there are charities like this one.”

“So Faridoon's not an assassin?”

“No more than you are,” she said.

“He said he talked to Abu Zubayr in Wolla Jora.”

“He told you that, did he?”

“Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“What did Abu Zubayr tell him?”

“Oh, I think it was a right difficult conversation. Abu Zubayr called him a heretic. But, then, you'd expect that, wouldn't you? And Abu Zubayr called him a British spy. Can you imagine that? Faridoon?”

“I guess it's hard to imagine.”

“And he told Faridoon he would kill him if he ever saw him again.”

“And he meant it?”

“Oh, I think so.”

The dark settled in on us. The whisky in my glass was almost gone.

“So tell me,” I said.

“Tell you what?” she said.

“Is anything true? Is everything permitted?”

Cathleen laughed.