The Warlord's Son (3 page)

“Fuck your cousin,” Skelly shouted.

This was the sort of English even Babar could understand, and he followed without further resistance. A third Molotov cocktail released an orange genie of heat and flame, but it was well behind them, over by the photographer. Good. Skelly’s instincts had been correct. It was like being tossed into a rip current but finding you could still do the strokes, if barely. Just keep paddling sideways until the current released its grip.

“Move it, Babar. C’mon!”

By now the police were gaining the upper hand, and Skelly managed to squeeze behind the cordon, the uniformed phalanx moving onward. Several policemen toward the rear had unholstered their pistols. Others were raising carbines to their shoulders, taking aim. But so far, no shots. That would burst the dam for sure.

Skelly reached into his pocket for his cell phone. Unless shots were fired, he and Babar would be safe now, having made it to a narrow empty street where every shop was locked and shuttered. He’d better call this fellow Najeeb to confirm their appointment. But what if somebody else had already hired him? Skelly swallowed a bubble of panic. There were certainly enough new journalists arriving for it to be possible.

In fact, Skelly was part of the media’s second wave. The shock troops of mid-September had come mostly from bureaus in Europe and the Far East, plus the usual wire services and network crews. By now, a month later, many of the initial arrivals were already grumbling, convinced that either they or the story had gone stale. But one and all took comfort that at least they weren’t among the unfortunates marooned in the upper reaches of Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance. By now everyone had heard the horror stories—correspondents sleeping twelve to a room on the floors of dirty teahouses for fifty dollars a night, bathing outdoors from buckets of cold water, no doubt loaded with microbes. Working off portable generators and typing by headlamp while their breath frosted the keyboard. Rice and bread for breakfast, rice and bread for dinner. And there was nothing like a little shelling to kick-start your diarrhea first thing in the morning.

So far on the Pakistan front the only apparent hazard besides food and the occasional mob was ignorance. Most of the world’s press had been caught well behind the learning curve, and on slow afternoons now in Islamabad you saw the latest arrivals from Washington, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Rome and Tokyo lounging by the pool of the Marriott, poring over shiny new books on the Taliban and Bin Laden, or digging into a Lonely Planet travel guide—the next best thing to interviewing your cab driver.

For all of Skelly’s experience in poking and prodding at the world’s oozing sores, his travels had never taken him either here or Afghanistan, a gap he’d always regretted, even if he was well past the age when it would have thrilled him most. He had long read of the region’s intrigues, its violent patchwork history as a land of adventurers and warlords, whether they were tradesmen on the Silk Road or imperial chessmen in Kipling’s Great Game. He knew also that it was a land that punished the timid and the naive, and, more to the point, anyone who had lost a step. But it was soldiers and spies who usually filled the casualty lists, and he was merely a hack. He’d be fine.

His introduction to Pakistan had come only eight hours earlier. He’d arrived at 3 a.m., stepping into the humid night air from a 757 out of Dubai following a twenty-six-hour journey that had begun on a crisp fall afternoon in the American heartland. He’d walked stiffly down the metal steps to the darkness of the warm tarmac, strolling past a silent line of military police in blue berets. The crowd of arrivals funneled through glass doors toward the fluorescent glare of the passport line. A mute gang of jumpsuited baggage handlers stood just beyond, waiting for something to do. He easily spotted the print journalists among the crowd. They were the cheapskates who insisted on manhandling their own battered trolleys into position by the squealing carousel. No one spoke, everyone too stunned by the hour and the air miles to say a word. Trolley loaded, he moved onward past sullen customs agents, out a swinging door into a waiting crowd of hundreds who stood behind a rope—all those dusky faces staring at Skelly in the middle of the night, everyone in robes and veils but nary a word from any until the gypsy cabbies lunged to the fore, reaching for Skelly’s bags and asking his destination as he muttered a terse “No, no,” over and over, scanning the sidewalk ahead for the real taxi stand. He’d forgotten how he would need to be a hard bargainer, haggling with drivers and shopkeepers who would be trying to charge double or triple the local rate. It was all part of the game, even though the hundred rupees at issue might be worth only a buck and a half, and even though the driver might have eleven mouths to feed.

There was only enough time in Islamabad for a few hours of restless sleep, followed by a hazardous breakfast of runny eggs. Then he caught a hired car to Peshawar, leaving just before dawn, because his marching orders couldn’t have been clearer: Get yourself to the Khyber Pass, and see how close you can creep to the Afghan border. If you can get across, do it. If not, see what else you can come up with.

Easy enough, Skelly supposed, except a thousand others already had the same idea.

But something about the brightening of the horizon had roused him from his stupor during the ride from Islamabad. He rolled down the taxi window to breathe in the day’s last wisp of cool air, watching the countryside’s slide show of minor wonders, stunning scenes of exotica beneath aromatic droops of dusty eucalyptus. He pulled a notebook from a rear pocket, suddenly determined to record everything he could while it was still fresh and new.

The first sight to catch his eye was an old man already at work in the half-light, sweeping the curbs of the four-lane road to Islamabad with a crude rush broom, harvesting a bottomless crop of dust. Then he saw two more, doing the same. Did someone actually pay them for this? They might as well try shoveling all the sand off a beach.

The sights multiplied as they eased into the countryside, Skelly’s right hand hurrying across the narrow page with a tiny scratching sound:

rough wooden beds on rooftops of low homes, and in cane fields,
w/people still asleep. thin blankets & sheets, same gray as their
clothes. river crossing at Attock where alexander the great once
crossed, ancient fort on blu f. small stream in muddy ravine w/tent
pitched next to goat herd.
3
water bu faloes knee-deep in irrig ditch
& one grazing in tall grass. dung patties (cows?) pressed onto plaster
walls of houses, drying for fuel. camel on haunches in cane field.
bikes loaded with everything—sticks, burlap sacks, milk pails, boxed
TVs. tall mud chimney belching heavy black smoke, terrible
smell . . .

“What’s the smoke from?” he asked the driver, pencil pausing.

“Brick kilns.”

Of course. Bricks were stacked all around them.

“They burn old tires to bake the bricks,” the driver added. Skelly wrote it down, all of it.

Passing them on the left, loud and jangling, a cargo truck. Like all the others it was ornately painted, a thousand different colors and designs from stem to stern, the cab lit by a red dome light that made it glow like a bordello. The front of the trailer jutted over the cab, angled like the transom of a galleon on the high seas. Magnificent. An earlier one had been so overloaded with hay, every bulge swaddled in a white sheet, that from behind the truck it had looked as if it were wearing a giant turban, making Skelly laugh.

Then, off to the left, a high formation of bare stone, opening deeply onto a quarry. There were dwellings up there, he saw, small caves hacked into the side of the limestone bluff. Chairs and beds facing outward from the openings. A boy no older than three stared back from the precipice, lit by the rising sun. Skelly waved. The boy didn’t.

Every few miles there was some sort of military installation. A barracks, followed by an engineering unit, followed by the School for Armor and Mechanized Warfare, its parking lot full of tanks. So incongruous, with their modern look and the sense of money being spent, as if the government had decided to ignore all other points on the map except these.

There were mosques, too, some of them large and grand but most of them tiny and every bit as humble and grimy as their surroundings.

The driver turned on the radio for news on the hour, finding a version in English: American aircraft had mistakenly bombed a hospital. The Taliban were claiming a hundred more civilian casualties. The Northern Alliance offensive was stalled. In American sports, the Yankees were back in the World Series.

None of it told Skelly a thing he hadn’t known. Nor could he likely add much, even after a full day of reporting. Why not give them this instead, he thought, watching the landscape roll by. Give them this whole damned drive with its sights and sounds, even the smells. Because here on the ground, without the benefit of a single interview, you could already see how easily the anger might stir, build and grow in a place like this, finding both its solace and its outlet at those little mosques, the imams issuing marching orders in holy screeds, the Arabic verses charging the air like bolts of lightning.

But at best, Skelly knew, he’d only have room for a paragraph or two of descriptive detail, and that would likely have to wait for his weekend story. Even supposing he could supply everything, could somehow distill this journey into twenty column inches of deathless prose, who would read it? Some Midwestern housewife, perhaps, over her second cup of coffee after carpooling to grade school in her combat vehicle. Or some bored accountant, yawning through a lunch break. Most everybody else would skip it, content to get their daily feed from television or, for those who wanted more, from a national paper like the
Times,
or from the Internet.

As a correspondent from a mid-sized daily, in other words, Skelly was obsolete, as quaintly useless as a typewriter in a roomful of laptops, dispensing information that would be stale hours before it ever saw print. He knew as well that this initial rush of enthusiasm and insight would subside, overwhelmed by repeated exposure and his own limitations. Try as he might, his prose would never be supple enough to stretch to the heart of the matter.

So he would have to settle for the usual rewards, not that those were insignificant. In the weeks to come, Skelly knew, he would enter realms of old codes and unbreakable taboos. His hosts would be men wondering one minute how they might cut his throat while in the next they’d offer tea and refreshment, breaking bread pulled from a smoking ceramic hole in the ground, just as they would have done it five hundred years earlier.

Yes, he was back in the Third World, all right, with its taste upon his tongue and the stench high in his nostrils. And now, standing in a cobbled alley of a Peshawar bazaar, he was doing what so many Third World people do, at least in Pakistan. He was punching in numbers on a cell phone. He wanted to reach Najeeb, but on this block, at least, the signal was too weak, so they kept walking, Babar still nervously prattling on about his cousin.

When they reached the top of a rise, Skelly tried again. Glancing back toward the demonstration, he saw that the mob was receding, a storm tide heading meekly back to sea. Utterly ridiculous that it had ever been such a close call. But it would be something to tell Janine tonight on the phone. She was the latest of his wives.
Three of them.
The number still a marvel to him, as if he were a Hollywood playboy. Sometimes he mused that if he lived in one of the Persian Gulf States he’d still have all of them, each living on her own floor in a house that would have grown higher with every marriage. Might as well do it that way, at the rate he was paying the first two. And Janine was already in a pout over this trip. The thought of their late-arriving son, Brian, was like a stab of guilt in Skelly’s chest, not so much because he missed the boy (after four previous children he’d experienced quite enough of the routines of infancy) but because in Brian he recognized yet another face that would grow disaffected and bored with him, no more interested in Skelly’s strange experiences than he would be in the tax code. Brian, like his predecessors, would grow up affixed to MTV and the Internet, saying “like” and “you know” and doing kick flips on a skate-board before he was old enough to wear a helmet. The Nation of Offspring remained the one country Skelly was reluctant to enter, and he now feared he’d waited too late to request a visa.

Enough of these thoughts of home. The jet lag must be getting to him. Pay this fellow Babar a crisp fifty, plus a tip for the equally useless cousin. Then grab a cab back to the hotel, and with any luck his fixer problems would soon be solved. But first he’d try the number again.

He punched it. Waited. Finally it began to ring.

This fellow Najeeb had better be good.

CHAPTER THREE

Regional Briefs

By Najeeb Azam

TWO KILLED:
Two women were killed in a clash between factions of the Hafizi tribe at a village near Khairpur yesterday. The warring groups resorted to free use of clubs and axes. The dead were identified as Ms. Akhtar and Ms. Jatoi. Five unidentified were taken to hospital. According to reports, an old enmity existed between the groups over the theft of a cow last year, a dispute that has claimed several lives. Last Wednesday several armed men from one group attacked a rival village with grenade launchers. Police rushed to the fighting today and controlled the situation, but both groups are said to have taken up positions in the area.

WEDDING MURDER:
A man shot his daughter dead on her wedding day in the village of Karwanzai in the Mohmand Tribal Agency yesterday. According to police, Shahid Khan, whose daughter was to marry his daughter-in-law’s brother, was unhappy with the
wata-sata
arrangement, whereby a brother and sister of one family marry the sister and brother of another. Shahid visited his daughter, Sakeena, on the morning of the wedding, then shot her in the chest and fled. She was rushed to hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries.

THERE WAS SOMETHING WORRISOME about this fellow Skelly. But what, exactly?

Najeeb took the man’s measure from across a table at the Pearl Continental, after both men had piled their plates with the bounty of the afternoon buffet. At nine dollars a plate it was criminally expensive, enough to support a family of beggars for weeks. But why complain when someone else was picking up the tab? So Najeeb had attacked the steaming silver vats with relish, ladling out chunks of chicken and lamb, drenched in curries and heavy sauces. He moved on to the sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, mounds of steamed vegetables, and big scoops of yellow rice. Lastly he plucked a few samples from what seemed to be every sort of bread from East and West, making a note to leave room for a visit to the dessert table, where honeyed pastries and frosted cakes sat regally on silver platters, barely touched even at this late hour of the afternoon. He wondered if the staff took home the leftovers.

“Been doing this long?” Skelly asked, mouth full, eyebrows cocked.

Presumably he meant interpreting, not freeloading, although there was enough of the rake in his expression to suggest both.

“A month,” Najeeb said. “Strictly Europeans and Americans so far.” Najeeb spoke as precisely as possible when meeting prospective clients. Journalists were notoriously hard to disabuse of first impressions. He was also trying to get a fix on Skelly, and what he had detected so far made him wary, although he couldn’t yet say why.

The man was in his early fifties, by the look of it. Full head of wavy hair going silver. His clothes were faded, rumpled and looked as if they’d already picked up a week’s worth of dust, although he had apparently just arrived. Decent shape. An extra pound or two around the middle, but moved as if he’d be quick on his feet when necessary. But his most striking trait was his gray-blue eyes, animated yet beaming a sense of calm and resolution that seemed at odds with the circumstances. Skelly wasn’t goggle-eyed the way most first-timers were in Pakistan. Although, like everyone else, he was already complaining about Peshawar’s soupy air.

“How can you stand it?” Skelly asked, mopping a puddle of orange sauce with a flap of local bread. “I thought you’d at least be able to see the mountains from here.”

“When I was a boy you could see all the way to Afghanistan. On some days now the smog even blows up into the Khyber Pass, although usually it is clear up there.”

“Another good reason to head for the border.”

So he, too, wanted to go to Afghanistan. Hardly a surprise.

“By the way,” Skelly said. “If I ever suggest anything foolhardy, I hope you’ll have the good sense to let me know. So don’t be shy.”

Najeeb nodded, wondering if the man had recently had a close call.

“On the other hand, if you ever see the slightest chance for getting us off the beaten path, away from the hordes”—he spread his hands to encompass the cafe, where his colleagues of all nations filled the air with multilingual chatter—“then let me know right away, even if a little hazard and hardship might be involved. Am I making sense?”

“You don’t wish to be killed. But you will take a few risks for a story the others do not have.”

“Exactly.” He smiled broadly, although Najeeb knew better than to be flattered by mere smiles. He’d found them to be cheap currency in America, doled out by shop clerks and fast-food cashiers.

“But I guess you get the same request from everybody.”

Najeeb supposed he did, although none of his clients to date had been quite so up front about their ignorance of local affairs. His previous client had also been a first-timer from America, but he’d been neat and organized, pants creased and collars pressed. At their first meeting he had handed Najeeb a typewritten list of story ideas and people he wished to meet, and he had never wasted a chance to show off his knowledge of Peshawar, making it awkward for Najeeb to correct him on the numerous occasions when he was wrong. The man had apparently read somewhere that the best first question to ask a Pakistani man was how many children he had, so he’d done so at every opportunity and was crestfallen to find that Najeeb was not only childless but unmarried, as if there were no category for that response on his chart of Peshawar demographics.

Skelly, on the other hand, was almost blithe in his ignorance.

“So what should I be asking you about this place? Went to a demo this morning, but it was nothing special. Hardly seemed like the whole city was up in arms. Just a few hundred idiots who let the police push them around. What’s everybody think of the war?”

“They hope it will not last long. The longer it goes on, the more likely the hotheads will take power. And no one wants them getting hold of the bombs.”

“The nukes?”

“Yes.”

“Reasonable enough. You’re Pashtun, right? Seems like I heard you grew up in the tribal areas.”

“Yes.” No sense leading him further in this direction.

“Are you Afridi? Your tribe, I mean. Isn’t that one of the biggest, with all sorts of clans and subclans?”

“Yes.” Stony expression, which he could pull with the best of them. “Is that a problem for you?”

“Well, no. I just . . . no. No problem at all.”

Skelly seemed flustered, as if worried he’d just made a cultural gaffe. Good. Let him think so, if that was what it took to prevent further prying. Theirs would be a business relationship only, seller to customer, and under those terms Najeeb would shape the role however Skelly wished. A Swiss television crew a few weeks ago had fancied him as the Pakistani party boy, so that’s what he’d become, letting them coax him into drinking a few beers up in their suite. He’d slurred his words and gotten obligingly giddy, playing the exotic fool to their knowing nods. The previous American, on the other hand, had pegged Najeeb as the stone-faced sage, and maybe that’s the role Skelly would choose—Najeeb the Inscrutable.

It would at least be in keeping with his training as a boy, when it was considered an advantage to hold your face rigid through both anger and elation. As his father had always said, “It is all right to boil. Just don’t show them any bubbles or steam.” He remembered a wedding celebration where the men of the village had easily spotted an outsider from Punjab only because the man had dared to tap his feet to the music. Now, with four years of America under his belt, he was somewhere between the two extremes, and perhaps it was his more Western side that suddenly felt a little sorry for Skelly’s discomfiture. To undo the damage, he found himself asking, of all things, “How many children do you have?”

“Five.”

“Boys?”

“Two of them.”

Most clients would have then been off to the races, chatting with abandon about their families. In America perfect strangers had opened themselves to him like books aboard buses and trains, or in restaurants and bars, telling him everything from their annual salary to the details of their divorce. Skelly was another matter. He shifted in his chair and grinned, or was it a grimace?

“My daughter Carol is the oldest. The youngest isn’t even two. But they’re spread all over creation. Three wives, you see.”

“Yes. Of course.”

No snapshots followed. Nor did Skelly take the occasion to say how much he missed them. Perhaps he was the sort of man who was more comfortable in the world at large.

“Do you travel much?” Najeeb asked, his curiosity piqued.

“Used to. Gotten rusty the past couple years. I’ve mostly been stranded in the Midwest, doing next to nothing. So it’s good to be out and about again.”

Stranded. An interesting way to refer to home. But it was how Najeeb felt about Peshawar, and maybe that was what unsettled him about Skelly. It was almost as if he were speaking to some latter-day version of himself, a bit heavier and grayer, yet still straining at his tether, still looking for somewhere to take root.

A sudden commotion by the hotel entrance turned their heads. A young man who had just entered the revolving door was being greeted warmly in an outburst of hugs, salaams and joyous shouts. Even the ridiculous doorman, decked out as if he were still an imperial servant of Queen Victoria, smiled appreciatively, something he almost never did for a local.

“What’s going on?” Skelly asked. “Recognize any of them?”

It was partly a test. Show me your stuff, Skelly was saying, and Najeeb realized with relief that he did know the young man, although not well.

“It is Haji din Razaq, the youngest son of Mahmood Razaq.”

“The Afghan warlord?”

“Yes. Mahmood Razaq was a Mujahedeen commander. He fought the Russians for years, but when the Taliban took power they kicked him out. Now he is rich. Made all his money in Dubai and Saudi. But he has returned, waiting like all the others to get back in the door. If it ever opens.”

“Seems like I read where he was thinking about making a forced entry. Wanting to lead his own insurrection. Or had been, until the air strikes started.”

“The word on the street is that he still is. He is supposedly going to lead a hundred men into Afghanistan.”

“When?” A quickened response with an edge to it. Najeeb should have kept it vague. Razaq’s departure was expected any day, but that sort of news would probably get Skelly up out of his chair, heading straight for Haji din Razaq.

“No one knows for sure. This week, perhaps.”

“Interesting.”

You could see the wheels turning, the man weighing risk and chance, wondering if he might get himself across the border even sooner than expected.

“Could you introduce me to the son? Before he leaves the hotel, I mean. You did say you know him.”

“I think he will recognize me.” He hoped it was true. Haji din Razaq was usually agreeable enough, if a bit impulsive like his father. For people who were about to embark on such a sensitive mission, the family was certainly spreading the word all over town. But that was in keeping with the Razaq way, which on the whole was boastful and arrogant.

“Would you like me to ask him if we could arrange a meeting with his father?”

“Yes. That would be great.”

Najeeb put down his napkin, glancing forlornly at his food. By the time he returned it would be cold. On the other hand, with a little luck he might now merit half a day’s pay.

“Wait here. I will go and see.”

Skelly watched Najeeb make his way across the lobby floor. Interesting fellow, and his English was perfect. Bit of a cold fish, but after the glibness of Babar, circumspection seemed like a virtue. Besides, Skelly had never believed it was necessary to become your fixer’s best pal, unlike some reporters who took it to extremes, even buying gifts for their children.

He did believe it was important to build trust and good chemistry. Nor was he above a few transactions in the barter of small favors—putting in a word with some consular official in exchange for a job well done. And the cold ones, he had found, almost always warmed up. But there was nothing cold or aloof about the man’s deep brown eyes, which seemed to take in everything. Guarded—maybe that was the better word. And the fellow had certainly gotten prickly about his tribal heritage. Maybe he was simply a snob. Well, even that might prove useful. Skelly would love to sneak a peek inside Pakistan’s tribal aristocracy, especially if they couldn’t find a way across the border.

And maybe this Razaq fellow would lead somewhere, although Skelly figured he was at least the hundredth reporter in line. Both
Time
and
Newsweek
had already written of the old warlord’s intentions.

By now Najeeb had reached Razaq’s son, and they were shaking hands. Good. A breath of fresh air after that dolt Babar, who was again lurking near the lobby couches, looking sheepishly in another direction whenever Skelly glanced his way. The long hours without sleep were beginning to catch up to Skelly, and the heavy meal was already making him drowsy. But he knew better than to take a nap. Probably best to stay up as late as possible if he wanted a good night’s sleep, so he poured another cup of coffee in hopes of recalibrating his spinning inner clock. He decided not to venture out for any further interviews today, lest some merchant ply him with more green tea, which would keep him from ever sleeping.

He looked again toward Najeeb, watching the man nod at the young Razaq. A good face, lean and handsome. Black hair angled lankly across the forehead, beard neatly trimmed. Physically the man reminded him of a favorite fixer from Gaza, years ago. Ahmed something or other. But Ahmed had been a chatterbox, full of gossip, hands always moving, a windup toy that never ran down. This one seemed to hold his energy in reserve, which he supposed would serve them well if they ended up traveling rough.

So how much would he have to pay for today’s services? Up to now he’d only counted on buying the man’s lunch. But if Najeeb arranged an interview with Mahmood Razaq, that would merit something extra. Shelling out for half a day would mean he’d already spent $135 on interpreters, with nothing to show for it but a brief on the demo. Not his money, though, so why worry. The worst the paper could do was call him home early, and that wouldn’t be the end of the world. Although he found himself warming to the chase. Meeting Razaq might lead to something more. Or perhaps he could take a closer look at the local exile community with its layers and its fissures. They were the ones vying to rule the new Afghanistan, already auditioning for the West even as the Taliban held fast, five weeks and counting and still in their trenches. All of which meant no hacks would be getting into Afghanistan from Peshawar anytime soon, unless you could latch on to someone like Mahmood Razaq.