Veiled Freedom (31 page)

From his perch atop the metal shed, Jamil had recorded Soraya's return. The camera manual spoke of night vision, ambient lighting, remote control, and other features he'd wanted to test. So when he'd stored away the video equipment after showing his footage to the children and their mothers, he'd slipped the camera into a vest pocket. That Ameera trusted him to lock up the equipment made Jamil shake his head. Though he wouldn't abuse that trust, his employer could not know that. Such innocent faith in other human beings was dangerous.

Though darker than useful, the zoomed-in image of a blue burqa stepping through the gate and hurrying up the cobblestone path was amazingly recognizable on the tiny screen. Less recognizable was Soraya's escort hurrying now back down the street. At first Jamil had thought the man to be the teenager he'd seen before delivering Soraya and Fatima. But this was a stockier build and taller, though he'd turned so quickly Jamil had caught only his back on film.

Jamil focused the camera instead on a kaleidoscope of peacocks spreading their tails on the side of a jinga truck parked across from the compound. He'd seen those peacocks before. Zooming in, Jamil made out human shapes in the cab. But they were too grainy for details. Out-of-town customers for the mechanics yard?

Satisfied he understood the features, Jamil slid the camera into his vest pocket and reached for Ameera's gift. Up the slope of the shed roof, music had begun playing next door, a foreign offbeat that was jarring and unpleasant to Jamil's ear. Though this was not a Thursday night, the neighbors were celebrating.

Perhaps he should expend enough of his next paycheck at the bazaar for a flashlight so he could read in his own room. Meanwhile Jamil inched up the roof to the pool of light the security lamp next door cast across the metal sheeting. Blanking his mind to the alien music, he flipped pages until he found where he'd left off reading: “Forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

This time Jamil didn't allow his anger to fling the book aside but made himself read on. Forgiveness. Not just man's but God's. And there was the catch. How could there be not just the hope of forgiveness but assurance? “God forgave” spoke of something already finished. But no one knew how the scales would tip before the day of Allah's judgment. That was presumption. Perhaps even the presumption that had led Jamil to this place.

Maybe this forgiveness was for those who could obey all the commands in these pages. Or for Isa's personal disciples. But who could? To brush one's teeth, wash three times before prayer—these one could measure daily into Allah's scales. But kindness, compassion, love?

And to an enemy! Where was the call to fight the evil and apostate? to wage war against the unbeliever? to press forward with the faith until all the world lay prostrate as foretold in submission to Allah?

And yet . . .

Jamil rubbed a weary hand across his face. What kind of world might it be if instead of battle all people chose to follow the commands in these pages? “Children, obey your parents in the Lord” had been instilled in Jamil since he could walk. But that fathers should not embitter or discourage their children? That husbands should not be harsh with their wives? That servants should work hard and be honest and not accept bribes, masters be just and generous with their servants?

And the commands to love. Love God. Love one's brother in the faith. Love wives and children and servants and neighbors. Love the helpless, the widows, the downtrodden.

Most inconceivably, love enemies.

It would be a world of peace.

A paradise.

The noise next door was proving too distracting to continue reading. Jamil put away the New Testament. But it was a sound across the cinder-block partition from the New Hope compound that prodded him to sudden alertness. The metallic scrape of a dead bolt was followed by the rusty screech of the pedestrian gate. Ameera's assistant again?

Jamil reached for the camera to focus in on a dark shape rushing across the street. He relaxed as Rasheed's bearded features emerged from the shadows. As the New Hope chowkidar reached the jinga truck, a man climbed down from the cab. The camera screen displayed the two men's inaudible conversation. Then Rasheed strode back to the open gate while the other man returned to his cab. A customer, then, but one Rasheed didn't know well enough to invite to camp inside the gate.

The chowkidar's retreating shape blazed to white as oncoming headlights overwhelmed the camera's night vision setting. Jamil slid the camera back into his vest, but he didn't return to his reading. The commotion next door had grown suddenly louder. The sound of a vehicle stopping, a gate opening offered a reason. The combination of foreign music, loud voices, and laughter was so like that to which he'd once dropped off his employer that curiosity drew Jamil up the slope of the roof, though he lowered himself first to his belly. Security might be lax next door, but an intruder appearing suddenly on the perimeter wall was as likely to draw shots as questions.

Jamil scooted well outside the pool of light before raising his head cautiously above the edge of the metal roofing. The shed roof overlooked the back garden of the neighboring compound. He didn't need to worry about being spotted, Jamil saw immediately. A dozen large, pale foreigners sprawled out on lounge chairs were giving no attention to their perimeter security.

Their noisy high spirits were explained by what Jamil could see rounding the side of the house from their front gate. A food delivery from one of Kabul's growing number of Chinese restaurants. Not male attendants as an Afghan restaurant would have but female.

Jamil had been watching only a few minutes when curiosity became stunned disapproval, then horrified disgust. Sliding back from the roof's edge, he lowered himself silently to the ground and headed to his room. Removing his vest, Jamil laid the camera carefully in his clothing box. But Ameera's book he tossed recklessly to one side, the words he'd read earlier burned from his mind by his fury.

Besides, it had been only the illusion of dreams that such a world of which he'd fantasized, the commands he'd pondered, had any place in reality. What he'd just seen was a reminder of how great a deceit lay in any such offer of hope.

A perfect morning.

From the rise where Steve stood, the graying of dawn was sharpening into focus a pastoral landscape. A flat plain, the meandering curves of a river spreading out into cultivated fields and pastures. The fields held no crops this late in the fall, their earth freshly turned over. But green lingered in pasturelands, wind-twisted mulberry trees edging fields, almond and apple groves harvested of fruit but still grasping a few leaves.

Behind the plain, rocky, snow-tipped peaks blushed pink, though stars still glittered in bright patterns overhead. Down the hillside below Steve's boots, adobe houses and mud-brick compound walls slumbered like a Christmas frieze of Bethlehem. After Kabul's dust and smog, the air was as crisp and clean and sweet as fresh-pressed local cider.

And cold.

Steve's breath hung white in the air. These were times he didn't mind the inconvenience of body armor for the extra warmth it offered. Beside him, Khalid had shed his Italian suit for the camouflage fatigues of his muj days, a heavy Army parka matching Steve's own. Turning toward Steve, he grinned savage pleasure, dark eyes flashing with excitement. This wasn't the first time the two men had stood together on a mountain slope at the edge of dawn, and something in that remembered camaraderie, the tension and thrill of combat about to begin, curved Steve's mouth to exhilaration as he met his principal's glance.

It had taken two weeks and substantial negotiation before Khalid's task force lifted off from Bagram Air Force Base. The inclusion of DEA chief Ramon Placido's team greatly simplified Steve's arrangements. With American embassy personnel involved, the U.S. task force commander had volunteered not just a Black Hawk combat helicopter but a CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter capable of ferrying thirty Afghan counternarcotics police and their Colombian and DynCorp advisers. He'd also arranged hospitality at the nearest American-manned military outpost to each planned raid.

This was the ninth such raid in three weeks. The Black Hawk and Chinook had touched down after dark last night at a nearby PRT base currently home to a hundred Texas National Guard troops. Provincial Reconstruction Team outposts were part of ISAF's “hearts and minds” program, designed to offer a nucleus of military presence while winning over local support by sponsoring such projects as schools and clinics, wells and water pumps.

The PRT bases were too small to project any serious strength, their contingents vastly outnumbered by local militias, and as their orders were largely to hole up inside and not interfere with local government, they'd done little to stem Afghanistan's escalating lawlessness. But the Texans had proved hospitable, providing two troop transports to ferry the MOI force to this small market town, along with a Humvee bristling with gun turrets and troops in full body armor as escort.

The American soldiers were not, however, authorized to participate in the dawn raid, so the transport drivers lounged against their bumpers, watching the show with Steve and the others, while the Humvee contingent spread out in a perimeter watch. Steve approved of the guards' vigilance and discipline, though less of their adulation. To these young soldiers on their first combat rotation, private security contractors were the big guns, best of the best. Assumed was that all PSCs were former Special Ops who'd been there and done great and dangerous things.

Also assumed was that they were now doing still greater, secret, and more dangerous things while raking in as reward ten times the guardsmen's biweekly paycheck.

On Khalid's other side, DEA chief Ramon Placido straightened abruptly, a hand to his earpiece. He nodded to a cameraman behind a tripod beside him, a CNN reporter chronicling the MOI operation. A blinking red light signaled the camera had gone live. Down below, someone's perfect morning was about to be spoiled.

From this rise, Steve could make out only too plainly stealthy shapes fanning out silently and furtively through the dirt streets. The raid had been scheduled to strike just before dawn. But though the PRT transport had delivered their guests to the hilltop FOB—forward operating base—in ample time, the district police chief whose jurisdiction this was had been less punctual.

The target was a compound on the edge of town where fluted columns, domes, and arches of an elaborate poppy palace thrust themselves incongruously above high brick walls and the adobe hovels of its neighbors. The owner was an Uzbek opium merchant, Akbar Dilshod. By all accounts, Dilshod was a terror, famed for taking out local competition with his own private hit squad. His men were accused of everything from rape to torture.

The reputation of Dilshod's guards was the reason Khalid had insisted on waiting for those local police reinforcements. The town was still silent, but the gray of dawn was lightening. Any moment, someone staggering out a doorway to the vegetation that was their outhouse would raise the alarm.

The Afghan task force had now stopped their stealthy advance. Outside a tall, steel gate, MOI recruits slipped forward to slap explosive charges against the hinges. Did Dilshod have no sentries up on those walls? With Steve's next white exhalation, a loud blast shattered the dawn peace. As the gate blew off its hinges, troops rushed in.

Then without a single gunshot, it was over. An MOI recruit climbed the wall to wave a blanket as an all clear. The PRT contingent unearthed thermoses of coffee and were handing them around when a knot of camouflage fatigues trudged up the hill. Among them were the minister of counternarcotics and one of Placido's DEA subordinates, who'd both accompanied the MOI task force in the raid.

The DEA agent hurried ahead to address his superior. “Bad news: the compound's empty. Someone must have tipped them off we were coming. The good news . . . well, you're going to have to see this, sir, to believe it.”

DynCorp held the embassy's security contract, and a quartet converged around the DEA agents as they hurried down the hill. As Khalid followed, Steve waved Ian, Mac, and Rick into a tight diamond around him.

Grabbing his camera from its tripod, the reporter hurried to join the protective bubble. The town was no longer sleeping as the group reached the first dirt street, eyes peering from cracked doorways and windows. But the MOI police were doing as they'd been trained, fanned out along streets and on corners, and the residents didn't venture to expose more than their eyes.

The district police chief, a burly, turbaned Tajik, welcomed the group into Dilshod's compound. Beaming satisfaction, the chief didn't lead the newcomers toward the villa but a sizable hole to one side of the courtyard. A large trapdoor had been removed to expose an underground passageway that had to extend far beyond the perimeter wall.