The Warlord's Son (11 page)

Najeeb picked up the phone, almost surprised to hear a dial tone. Then he tried Daliya’s number, waiting in agitation as the ringing continued just as it had throughout the day. He counted the tones to calm himself, pulse slackening, and when he reached twenty he hung up.

Stepping back to the living room, he pawed through the wreckage of papers beneath his desk, finding Rukhsana’s number scribbled on an electric bill from the previous month. He dialed it, and she answered almost right away. They’d spoken before, but always under happier circumstances, while conspiring to plot another rendezvous with Daliya.

“I haven’t heard from her since this morning,” Rukhsana said. “
Very
early.” She sounded peeved about it. “Although I understood why, once she told me where she was. Congratulations.” Her tone was scolding. “She was a fool to spend the night. You wouldn’t believe the cover story we came up with, but her aunt and uncle haven’t called, so they must have gone for it.”

“I can’t reach her on her cell, and I’ve been trying all day,” Najeeb said. “When I got home my apartment was trashed and the door was open. There was a dead man out front and the police were just arriving, but no sign of Daliya. I was hoping you’d call her uncle’s to see if she’s there. I sure as hell can’t.”

Rukhsana’s tone changed to one of alarm. “She never turns her cell off. I’ll try them now and call you right back.”

He waited only three minutes, reshelving books to kill the time.

“She wasn’t in. They’re worried sick. They’re wondering if they should call the police.”

Should they? Then the entire story of their relationship would come out, and he would face even more unwanted scrutiny. But where could Daliya be?

“I don’t know what to do. But, yes, they should call the police, report her missing.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “Don’t mention me, though. Not yet. Not until tomorrow, if you can wait that long.”

“But they’ll ask where she was last night.”

“Use the cover story for now. If you have to tell them about me later, the police will understand why you were covering for her.”

But would they? And would Najeeb lie to the police on Rukhsana’s behalf?

“Covering for
you,
you mean,” Rukhsana said coldly.

“Yes, for me. But if she turns up tonight, there’s no sense getting her in deeper trouble.”

“But what if she doesn’t? What if she’s not back by morning?”

“I don’t know. I may be on my way to Afghanistan by then.”

“Afghanistan?”

Now he detected a note of mistrust.

“Journalistic business. Translating for an American.”

“And you can’t give up your hundred dollars a day, even for Daliya.”

“It’s a hundred and fifty. And, no, I can’t, because she’s part of the reason I’m earning it.”

Did he mean that? He thought so. Hoped so. But Rukhsana wasn’t buying it.

“Yes, you keep telling yourself that.”

She hung up before he could answer.

Najeeb sat on a torn cushion, anxiety building in his chest. He tried to think of any reason Daliya might voluntarily disappear, but he came up empty. Then he remembered the envelope and pulled it from his pocket.

It now seemed malignant. And how could a message carried by a dead
malang
be anything but cursed? He knew that was his childhood speaking, a village superstition flitting around his brain like a bat.

He tore it open, pulling out the folded paper of the same creamy bond, covered with the same cramped writing. This time there were two messages.

“104:1” began the first. “Woe betide every backbiting slanderer who amasses riches and sedulously hoards them, thinking his wealth will render him immortal! By no means! He shall be flung to the destroying flame. Would that you knew what the Destroying Flame is like. It is God’s own kindled fire, which will rise up to the hearts of men. It will close in upon them from every side, in towering columns.”

The next passage was prefaced by a brief note in Pashto: “For your American friend.” Followed by more Arabic from the Prophet:

“4:78. Wherever you be, death will overtake you; though you put yourselves in lofty towers.”

Najeeb crumpled the paper and let it drop to the floor.

CHAPTER NINE

A RUMBLE OF THUNDER awakened Skelly just after dawn, and he was thrilled to hear raindrops spattering fatly on the balcony. Finally, a downpour to scrub the sky clean, making the air fit for human consumption. He rolled over comfortably in the darkened bed, listening to the trees whipsaw in the gusting squall.

When he threw open the curtains an hour later on the brightness of a clearing sky, it was evident that the storm hadn’t been up to the task. Leaves and grass were rinsed of dust, almost shocking in their fresh greenness, but the air smelled like a drowned campfire, and the sky was already filmed over in a sticky whiteness, like Vaseline on a lens.

Maybe it would be better in the hills, and he took heart, remembering that a day of travel lay ahead. Tonight he might well bed down in Afghanistan, without electricity or running water. A regular campout. His gear was piled by the door, and he resolved to check out of his room, even though there was now a waiting list. Jalalabad or bust.

Najeeb was again late for their appointment at the
Frontier Report,
damn him, but it was a short drive to Fawad’s house in the heart of the cantonment, next to the local UN headquarters, and when they arrived it was clear no one was leaving anytime soon. Word of the caravan had leaked out overnight, and at least fifty journalists were encamped on the man’s lawn. Mounds of luggage and TV equipment sat beneath huge rubber trees. Correspondents and photographers milled loudly, smoking cigarettes and reading the local papers as they stepped around robed old men, bowing silently on prayer rugs.

There was a sign-up sheet going around—in case transportation ran short, someone said—and by the time Skelly got hold of it he and Najeeb were at spots 53 and 54. So much for being in on the ground floor.

A few minutes later Fawad emerged grandly from the house in a billow of spotless blue garments. He was tall, thin, with a bony irregular head that convinced you he’d led a life of hardship and deprivation. He was at least a decade younger than Razaq, with a trimmed beard and black hair turning silver at the ears and sideburns. He seemed taken aback by the spectacle he’d wrought, shaking his head with a frown of concern.

“We are arranging for more transport,” he announced, hands outstretched as if appealing for patience. The mob quieted, drawing closer for the update. “The buses will arrive very soon. Then we will be under way.”

The first bus didn’t show for another ninety minutes, and it was a creaky red model with a mere thirty seats.
Flying Titanic
was painted in jolly script on the side.

“Now who wants to board
that
one,” an Australian said to laughter. The smaller
Cruising Enjoy
arrived moments later, followed by an orange bus from the Nawaz Model School. Skelly wondered how many students would be grumbling about having to walk home this afternoon. By now, at least another fifty hacks had arrived, ants streaming toward the only picnic in town, restive in the broiling sunny haze. Some were already digging into expedition rations as the lunch hour came and went. A tall Swede sat on a cinder block, boiling water on a small propane stove for a pouch of Ramen noodles.

The horde’s presence, with its money belts and thick folds of currency, attracted a steady incursion of industrious beggars and urchins. A barefoot boy who looked about ten, his face coated in dust, offered to spit-shine shoes while his companion, a head shorter, played a two-note tune by drumming an empty Pepsi bottle with a stick.

Skelly shooed them away, wishing Najeeb were there to do it. He was probably off in a corner on his cell phone, as he seemed to have been all morning, worse than a stockbroker keeping track of the market. Skelly wondered what had made him so sullen and preoccupied, or maybe he was always like this. Another dusty waif materialized at Skelly’s sleeve, bowing with a jerky motion—“How are
you,
sir?”— probably his entire repertoire of English. He lit a tin of incense and fanned the acrid smoke toward Skelly, ashy and sickly sweet, supposedly for good luck, but it was the last thing you wanted to breathe on a hot, soupy day.

“No, get it out of here.” Skelly fanned back and turned away. An Italian woman slipped the boy a hundred-rupee note, which would only encourage him.

Out in the narrow street, a man wearing a blue UN cap emerged from between the buses, announcing that they were blocking the UN’s driveway. Fawad’s minions scurried to accommodate him, and the journalists groaned at the prospect of further delay. Fawad, sensing he was about to lose the audience of a lifetime, then announced impulsively that it was time to board. The protests of the UN man were drowned out by an ungodly rush and clutter, with everyone shouldering cameras, duffels, sleeping bags and satellite phones while shouting in half a dozen languages. Skelly tracked down Najeeb, but by the time they reached the street all three cargo bays were stuffed full, and a sweating face stared from every window.

“Try that one,” Skelly shouted, nodding toward the
Flying Titanic.
Not surprisingly, it had the most remaining seats. They barely squeezed aboard, Najeeb near the front and Skelly in the last row, stuffing half his gear onto an overhead shelf and holding his sleeping bag in his lap, wondering if he’d even be able to pull a notebook from his rear pocket. A pencil jabbed his right thigh, which he tried to remedy until discovering that it belonged to the Japanese man seated next to him. By now the aisle was jammed, the standees clamoring after the whereabouts of colleagues and equipment. Skelly mopped his brow. It must be a hundred degrees. He wondered how hard it would be to pry loose a water bottle from overhead, then remembered Najeeb had their water, twenty rows and a million miles forward.

“Fucking great,” a familiar voice said. He wrenched left to see Canadian radio reporter Lucy Chatterton across the narrow aisle, peering around the rump of a fat Austrian.

Wonderful. Chatty Lucy, who would have to be endured for who knew how many hours to come. In ten-minute doses she could be wildly entertaining, with a razor wit and easy warmth. Beyond that her conversations turned into monologues, a maddening buzz of insecurities and exaggerations, frenetic lectures to show off her local knowledge and prolific filing habits, laced with anecdotes to demonstrate that she was every inch the macho adventurer, more so than even the most hardened flak-vested blowhard males.

Or maybe Skelly’s reaction had more to do with his general discomfiture around female correspondents. One would think he would have gotten used to them by now. There had been a thriving population of women in war zones since the Persian Gulf War in ’91, when they flourished despite Saudi restrictions. Most male reporters had taken to it naturally. Skelly never quite made the leap.

It wasn’t as if he were Old School, or voted Republican. Nor did he begrudge their chance to be here. Maybe it was just that, at age fiftythree, he’d been born a few years too soon. Or so he told himself, knowing that older colleagues had adjusted fine. Perhaps it was the way some of them tried to turn every journey into a sort of slumber party, sharing secrets of their families and friends until the small hours. Or the knack some had for showing compassion in the field, even grief, but without letting it ruin their copy.

Lucy wore her politics on her sleeve. She’d spout off one minute about the ennobling integrity of an indigenous culture, then rail away in the next about its treatment of women, as if you could fix the latter without harming the former. Yet her prose was as coldly dispassionate as stainless steel, cutting straight to the heart of a nation’s woes.

He’d spotted her once outside a sagging refugee tent, taking a family under her wing, doing them favors and bringing treats. Later she’d helped them apply for asylum in North America, shepherding them through the whole horrible system.

Skelly had allowed himself to cozy up to a local family only once, during a two-month swing through Kosovo. He took chocolate to the children and coffee to the parents, and rounded up university applications abroad for the eldest son. The dad built a wooden toy for one of Skelly’s daughters, and the mom mailed a sweet card in broken English to his second wife. Two months later Skelly returned to find they’d literally been blown to pieces in a mortar attack, all three children dead and both parents crippled and disconsolate. He’d sworn off fraternization forever, and felt like averting his eyes whenever a colleague started in.

“Looks like we might never leave,” Lucy said.

“Think we’ll reach the border before dark?” Skelly asked.

“We better. They kick you out of the Tribal Areas at sundown. And we don’t want to be on the road to Jalalabad after dark.”

“Pretty lawless, I guess. I heard there’s a war on.”

“We’d make a nice thermal signature on an F-16’s radar screen. Be too bad to come all this way only to get vaporized by Uncle Sam.”

“You don’t think Fawad’s got all that worked out?”

“Good point. Safe passage in exchange for a CIA briefing, maybe?”

Or a Transgas briefing, Skelly thought, wondering whether Hartley had been exaggerating about all the competing loyalties and connections. He was of two minds about conspiracy theories in places like this. While it was certainly plausible for some key players to juggle several agendas at once, he also believed that competing interests tended to cancel each other out. The key was finding out which agenda, ideology, or secret motive struck the deepest emotional chord. That’s the one that would win every time, long after the money men and gunrunners went home. It was the zealots who had staying power—another reason he’d rather follow Razaq, who carried the unmistakable aura of the true believer. With Fawad one sensed the drab, pale wattage of a ward politician, an opportunist. Even if this expedition pierced the border, it would probably amount to little more than an exotic dateline or two. There would be no grand adventure.

“Shit,” Lucy said. “Looks like we’re unloading.”

It was true. Grumbling and groaning with every step, the journalists were spilling back into the street, sodden with perspiration. Fawad was speaking heatedly with a knot of UN men.

“Will there be an official statement?” Skelly’s Japanese seatmate asked no one in particular. “A press conference?” Skelly shook his head, wondering whether Tokyo ever got any news that didn’t come from a press conference.

“Who’s your fixer?” It was Lucy again, hovering at his shoulder as they stepped off the bus.

“I was just looking for him. Najeeb Azam. Beautiful translation, and supposedly well connected. A bit hard to read, though. So far, anyway.”

“Mine’s great.” (Well, of course he was, Skelly thought. He was Chatty Lucy’s.) “And he speaks Dari, which I think we’ll need, especially the farther inside the country we get.”

“Here’s Najeeb,” Skelly said. The man looked as hangdog as he had all day.

Lucy introduced herself, then pulled forward her own fixer, whose name was Javed. Skelly didn’t catch the last name, but he noticed that Najeeb had gone rigid. If the man had been distant before, he was now positively stony, and Javed seemed to be the reason.

Perhaps the two were journalistic rivals. Javed worked at the
International Daily.
Otherwise there was little about the man to inspire animosity. If anything he seemed dull, balding and plump with droopy eyes. He looked more like a bureaucrat than a reporter.

“Javed says he doubts they’ll let us across the border,” Lucy said brightly, testing it on Najeeb. “Even though Fawad seems convinced the skids are greased.”

“Maybe Javed has better connections,” Najeeb said, not at all warmly.

“His connections are excellent,” she said, oblivious to the jab. Javed said nothing. He stared at Najeeb, sleepy eyes unblinking, as if daring him to make another crack.

“Yes, I’m sure they are,” Najeeb said. “Excuse me. I have to make a phone call.”

“I see what you mean,” Lucy said after a pause. “Not the friendliest guy in the world.”

Then Javed spoke up. “There are colleagues of mine who are available to serve you, if you are not satisfied with him.” He handed Skelly a business card. Nice offer, Skelly supposed, although he wondered if Javed got a referral fee.

“Yes, well. Things are working out for now. But thanks.”

The buses revved their engines and were suddenly on the move, momentarily panicking just about everyone who’d left items on board. Fawad appealed for calm.

“We will leave in an hour,” he shouted. “Two more buses are coming. We had to make way for the UN. We will reload around the corner.”

More grumbling and more dark humor. A few in the crowd set off in search of fresh food and water. Skelly pulled out a notebook and began recording the surroundings. If the day was a bust he might still have to file. But what? A scene-setter? A media story? You never knew what the editors might want, so he kept scribbling.

The delay was an hour, and in the meantime another dozen journalists trickled in. But when the two extra buses finally arrived there were just enough seats for everyone. So, at three o’clock, with at least two hours and thirty miles of traffic, checkpoints and hairpin mountain curves ahead, everyone settled in wearily for the ride. Skelly again trooped to the back, this time grabbing a window seat. Najeeb ended up several rows forward. And with a blast of blue exhaust, the
Flying
Titanic
was under way, bound for the Khyber Pass.

It was a cumbersome convoy. At the front was a truck carrying Fawad and twenty of his men, flags flying. The men were heavily armed, although no one seemed to have noticed them throughout the morning. Next came another truck, similarly fortified, followed by five larger ones loaded to the brim with sacks of flour, lentils, rice and powdered milk. In the spectrum of aid convoys that Skelly had seen over the years, this one was a mere hiccup, carrying barely enough to feed a few hundred people for a week. He suspected that the armed escort carried the more emphatic message—namely, that Fawad intended to be a player in his corner of the new Afghanistan and had the money and the connections for a credible bid. If you ate his groceries you’d be buying into his viability, at least until the lentils ran out.