The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (59 page)

Some of these hooligans were in Mogadishu, you see. They step on Pakistan whenever
it suits them. My friends are not outlaw Arabs.

Well, let’s talk about that. I think they mean to improve their game.

Yes, you’re right. We should.

They were slow to get out of the pro shop, the colonel rejecting his first bag of
rental clubs, filling a second bag with individually selected woods and irons, inspecting
an array of putters as though they were hunting rifles, sighting down the shafts,
before choosing one to his satisfaction. Okay, quipped Ben, good-natured in his mild
but growing concern for what he had gotten himself into, I can see I have not been
sufficiently briefed on the good colonel’s talents.

Rumor has it you were swinging a club down in Haiti, said the undersecretary, and
the colonel smiled and confessed to chip shots only onto an improvised practice green,
unless of course someone was so insufferably stupid as to stand in his way. Then,
chuckled the colonel,
I took out the wood.

Eville tried to reconstruct the insights of the morning into a coherent picture of
what had happened on the island, glue a frame around what he had long suspected was
his unwitting role in events otherwise contrived for a purpose he could not perceive,
into which he had been inserted not essentially as a Delta operative—he could see
this more clearly now, but as a player working deeper, blacker, so deep and so black
he himself wasn’t quite sure what he was doing or why or for whom. The United States
Army wasn’t much invested in what went down or festered up in Cap-Haïtien. He was
Chambers’s boy after all, sent there for a still opaque reason, a reason ostensibly
covered by his big-brother assignment with the undersecretary’s gonzo daughter, whom
he now had to assume was privy to more than one layer of the deception.

Wake Up and Smell the Latrine Fact Number One, he said to himself—the Pakistani colonel
and Steven Chambers were old comrades-in-arms, orchestrating the cash flow and weapons
shipments for the mujahideen’s white-hot war out in Central Asia. Fact Number Two—the
undersecretary had suggested to the colonel that the time had come to partner up again
on the tilting, rubble-strewn dance floor of Fuckistan.
Fuckistan!
the colonel had guffawed, snorting a laugh through his fat Pashtun nose.
Hah, very good, Steven.
Okay, Eville said to himself as they moved out to the first tee, what does that mean?

We Pakistanis are a very competitive race, the colonel proclaimed, as though a mountain
of data existed to back him up on the goofy chauvinism of this assertion. He chose
a driver from the bag held upright by the sullen Coleman, and so began the nine holes
of warfare, as practiced hand to hand among the ruling classes, between Kahn and Ben
across the piney hillocks of Pinehurst #2, one of the world’s most superior courses,
Sammy bragged, and, circa 1898, America’s first golf resort.

1898, was it? Colonel Kahn said to the ground in front of him as he leaned over between
the blue markers to puncture the Bermuda grass with his tee and ball and strolled
back to address the Friends of Golf. Latecomers, eh? he jabbed smugly. The Rawalpindi
Golf Club, my home course, established 1885. Steven has been there and can tell you.
In paradise, isn’t it, Steven. The foothills of the Himalaya.

The colonel returned to his ball and set his stance only to relax it again for the
sake of further illuminating the Americans about the benefits of a Pakistani golfer’s
congenital volume of good fortune, athletes naturally gifted with excellent motor
control but the secret to their success, said Khan, was an Asian mind-set that married
competitiveness with a balanced inner calm. Then the colonel resumed his stance, threatening
the ball with a flurry of quarter-swings before he cocked his arms fully into position
and fired the white orb a mile down the skinny fairway, the ball sailing and rising
and sailing and dropping centered on the lane between shoals of beachy sand that counted
as rough below the channel of pine thickets shaping the hole. Sammy whistled and Ben
snarled.

You bastards could have warned me.

The colonel’s father, an Air Force officer assigned as an attaché to the foreign ministry,
had taken his family from Islamabad to London when the colonel was a boy. Excelling
through the forms at the elite private schools, not merely in the classroom but on
the golf and tennis squads, the colonel had then entered Cambridge, matriculating
out of the university straight into the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the initial
training center for cadets destined to become British Army officers, or, for cadets
imported from the boondocks of commonwealth states, the promising youth meant to be
fast-tracked into the higher ranks of their nation’s armed forces. At Sandhurst as
at Cambridge, Kahn was again courted as a scratch golfer, a token dusky-skinned champion
out on the Hampshire courses surrounding the academy. After two years as a cadet,
which culminated in Kahn being awarded the Overseas Cross for the all-around best
wog in his class, he received his commission as second lieutenant and, in short order,
Rawalpindi summoned him home, eastward into the service of his country and an entry-level
position at the ISI directorate, where his rank rose steadily through the intelligence
service according to his reliable performance out on the links with a heady eclectic
assortment of the world’s spymasters, arms dealers, and bagman princes. Most of them,
sniffed Kahn, faders, choppers, and chokers, the kind of blokes knocking worm-burners
off the tee.

Gee, that’s quite a story, said Sammy. Goes to show you what you don’t know. I had
always thought golf was a Christian sport. I never imagined Muslims would take to
it.

The colonel stopped and looked at Sammy with a nervous smirk. Let me ask you, said
Sammy, not very convincing as an open-faced yokel, awed by the little mysteries of
the big world. You ever played golf with the Talib gang? The Reverend Omar? Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar? Or what’s his name? Sammy snapped his fingers. Mr. Hakkadin? You know who
I mean, Steven.

Jalaluddin Haqqani, Chambers said helpfully. Charlie Wilson called him goodness personified.

You ever played a round of golf with Goodness Personified, Colonel? Sammy asked.

He is not Taliban, said the colonel. He is Punjabi and will not accept Arabs telling
him how to pray or fight.

All I’m asking, Colonel, is what does Sharia law have to say about golf?

I’m quite certain, absolutely nothing.

Well, there you go, said Sammy. I think I can speak for all of us when I say our hopes
and prayers are with you, Colonel, as the man we trust to bring the great game of
golf to Afghanistan.

Ha-ha-ha
. Kahn hammered his laughter as flat as the fairway.
Ha-ha
. That’s very good. Let’s hope the Afghanis appreciate our great game, isn’t it?

Eville watched the curtain close on their thinning amiability, the duplicity of tight
smiles and the wink of implied threats, not an exercise in affable one-upsmanship
but a charade with insane implications, lives saved or lost depending on this sentence
or that pun.

Here they were on seven and the Paki had just slapped a drive worthy of Nicklaus straight
into the gut of Ben’s sanguine and normally indomitable self-assurance. Goddamn it
to hell, Ben howled on the seventh tee. Where does a Stone Age Muslim get off hitting
a ball like that, son of a bitch, and Khan grinned viciously, handing his club back
to Coleman, needling Ben,
That is your mistake right there, isn’t it? In the nutshell, I believe you say. You
think I give a shit about Islam.

I want you to know, Colonel, said Ben, nothing on this earth would make me happier
than to program a six-pack of Tomahawks to pay a visit to some of your madrassas.

Steven, the colonel protested. You promised me we were playing today with friends.

The undersecretary, penciling in his scorecard, glanced over at Khan with well-practiced
sympathy. I apologize for Ben’s rudeness, he said. I think Ben expected he was going
to roll you over.

Apology accepted, of course, said Khan.

On the other hand, continued Chambers agreeably, look what happens when you put a
white man’s back against the wall. They don’t take it very well, do they?

You right about that, said Coleman, paving the way for everybody to laugh again, and
they went on to finish the round, Kahn and Ben trading holes seven and eight only
to be rejoined in the self-canceling impotence of their identical talents on the ninth.

After Colonel Rashid Khan had pocketed a three-thousand-dollar check from Ben, he
of the freshly striped Christian buttocks, the Friends of Golf sent him on his way
back to Islamabad and his treacherous directorate, recommitted, he swore with his
gloved right hand over his heart, to working in a mutually advantageous relationship
with the Americans. Partnership, fellowship, you cannot disagree, Steven, this is
our destiny.

Saying his farewells, Khan rubbed it in one last time, the win over Ben having affected
him with a giddy infusion of bad sportsmanship, waving Ben’s check above his head
like a flag taken in battle.

American money is always put to good use in Pakistan, eh, Steven?

The gift bag is officially empty, Ben said. No concessions, no mulligans, no nothing.

And may I ask, Ben, how is your bum? said Khan. Perhaps my excellent caddy will be
so kind as to apply some ointment to the lacerations.

Rashid, the undersecretary cautioned. Keep in mind we’re not guys inclined to find
the time to issue démarches.
That’s the message here. Deliver it to Islamabad.

Agreed, said Khan, shaking the undersecretary’s hand as an electric cart arrived to
whisk him back to the pro shop and the car waiting to return him to Pope Air Force
Base. Lovely to play again, Steven. We should do it more often.

One more thing, said Chambers. This kid Yousef is very fond of his uncle.

Very good, said Colonel Khan. Done. We will keep an eye on him.

You know what I’m saying, said Chambers. I’m saying, share.

Yes, yes, said Khan. But I am dancing on snakes.

Understood, said Sammy. We’re going to put their heads on pikes and we want flies
crawling across their dead eyes.

Don’t look so mystified, Ev, Chambers said. Friends kept close and enemies kept closer
was the law of the shadowlands. He told Burnette the plan, although it was not a plan
anybody was particularly wedded to, to send him out to Pakistan, a liaison for special
operations that were about to enter an actionable phase in Central Asia. That had
been their intent, the Friends of Golf and Delta’s Colonel Hicks, and they had been
willing to let the chemistry develop of its own accord in the laboratory of Haiti.
There had to be some chemistry in these relationships or they quickly became untenable—well,
it was a preference, not a law, and they’d find another mission to occupy Captain
Burnette.

I can’t hide it, sir, said Burnette, his relief at Khan’s exit turned to gratitude.
We weren’t Simon and Garfunkel.

They had veered off from the tenth tee to walk in loose formation toward an isolated
gazebo overtaken by blooming wisteria vines, its cedar-shake roof sheltering a picnic
table where the resort’s staff was finishing its prep for what would be their lunch—pitchers
of iced tea, two silver chafing dishes containing warm Kaiser rolls and Carolina pit
barbecue, a serving bowl with cole slaw, a bottle of Trappey’s hot sauce. Chambers
told Eville to drop the bag and come sit down before Sandy Coleman, his mouth already
sharked around a dripping sandwich, ate up everything in sight.

Unlike the slow peeling back of the underlying mysteries of the morning, the ensuing
revelations sprang forth like Russian nesting dolls in reverse—big, bigger, biggest—jolting
Eville toward ever-higher states of both alertness and dread, beginning with the surprise
of how nonblack—not white but processed, pasteurized mainstream, a federally owned
civil servant—Sandy Coleman turned out to be as he got down to business, rushing with
his food to clear his ravenous hunger from the agenda. Be right back, he said, as
everyone else was getting started with the fixings, and he wiped red sauce from his
hands with a napkin and gulped from his glass of iced tea and stood up to trot over
to Ben and Sam’s electric cart and returned carrying a large brown envelope and sat
back down, shorn of any vestiges of jive, to deliver his briefing to the Friends of
Golf.

What have you got for us, Sandy? said Sam.

Coleman opened with a date of prime importance to the culture of his profession, December
2, 1993, the last day in the life of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel. Into the
vacuum left by Escobar’s death in Colombia’s narcotrafficking power struggle had stepped
the Cali cartel, the dominant organization for the past few years but under increasing
pressure from attrition and rivals and armies and prosecutors and governments and
in danger of losing its monopoly of the market. That freighter you boarded in Gonaïves,
Captain? said Coleman. She was carrying what might turn out to be the last large shipment
of cocaine the Cali people ever manage to pull together. Time will tell, but the trending
suggests that these people won’t be in business by next year.

Aw, cripes, said Eville, that ship showed up in Cap-Haïtien.

That is correct, said Coleman, explaining that, anchored in the harbor in Le Cap,
the freighter had off-loaded seven tons of product, give or take a ton, which were,
over the course of a week, broken down into smaller units to be loaded onto smaller
vessels to make high-speed or low-profile runs into the coastal waters of Florida,
Texas, and Louisiana.

How did I miss that? Burnette lamented, his forehead propped with the palm of his
right hand.

Eville could read Coleman’s unspoken recrimination in the man’s eyes
before the agent attempted to console the captain with bureaucratic push-offs. Cancel
that thought, he told Burnette. Our interagency priorities are best addressed when
we allow the product to flow through a completed network. Anything you might have
done to intervene would have been counterproductive and we would have waved you back.
We depend on the transshipment of those loads. We need to be able to track the supply
and distribution chain and identify affiliates, okay? So let’s get back on point.
Why Cap-Haïtien? The answer is twofold, part one obvious and not so interesting, part
two very interesting. The first reason is the endemic corruption of the Cap-Haïtien
police department. The HNP command changed hands during this period—I know Captain
Burnette, if he likes, could speak to that. Anyone falling out of his chair yet? The
second reason is why you gentlemen asked me here today, aside from your fraternal
impulse for playing practical jokes—not to say that I take no pleasure in my role
in your little skits.