The Good Son (49 page)

“Yes, that is Sarbaz Khalid Khan. What about him?”

“He is the one charged with your death. And you must do nothing against him, because if you were to kill him or send him away, Alakazai would only find another, and that one I might not know. Instead, you must make sure that the next time you require a victim to murder, he is one of the guards as he was before. This is very important.”

“Why is it important? I don’t understand.” He pulls at his beard in frustration, he slams his fist into his palm, a shocking sound in the tiny room. “My God, I must be insane to be listening to a woman teach me how to fight!”

“You are a fool if you believe I am a woman, Idris. Of course a woman could not tell you anything important. But that is only the face and body you see. Who interprets these dreams is not a woman but a man, Ismail Raza Ali, a Sufi of the Naqshbandiyya order, who dwells in me, although he has been in Paradise almost thirty years. I am only the string he plucks. He speaks to you through me.”

She sees the whites of his eyes flash in the lamplight. “That is impossible.”

“Yes,” she says. “We say God can do all things, but we don’t believe it.”

I
drove the bike back toward Peshawar for a while until I found a place with good cell reception, and then I dug out the card Nisar had given me and called the number. He answered right away and I told him what had happened and what I’d learned from the ISI lieutenant. He assumed I’d shot him too, and there was a silence on the line when I told him I hadn’t.

“Well, in that case,” he said, “you can’t travel by road back to Lahore. I can arrange a helicopter—”

I said, “Thanks, Uncle, but I don’t want to go back to Lahore. I have some business in Afghanistan.”

“Afghanistan! You are mad! The ISI has made an attempt on your life and you’re going to Afghanistan? You will be a marked man from Herat to Kandahar.”

“Nevertheless, I’m going. Can you help me?”

“Let me think.” More silence on the line. “Yes. I do a good deal of business with a security firm with an office in Kabul. Force Eight, it’s called. If you can get to the freight area of Peshawar airport, I can have them put you on a plane. They’re in and out of there all the time.”

“Thank you, Uncle. I think I can manage that. By the way, have you heard anything from Iqbal?”

“Oh, Iqbal! I tell you, Theo, you have revolutionized that boy’s life. His parents were going mad with him spending his entire existence on that damn computer, and at least now he has something useful to do with it. I cannot follow the details, but he has tapped me for a good deal of money and I can only trust that I will get it back.”

This was not a topic I wanted to discuss over a cell phone, so we said
good-bye and I headed for the airport. As it happened, I knew something about Force Eight Security Services International, because people in my line of work are prime recruits for their kind of operation, which is providing private armies in nasty places. They mainly do bodyguarding and site security where our own military is either not engaged or stretched too thin and where the local cops are unreliable. I had received a few polite inquiries myself, usually around the time my enlistment was about to run out, and my sense was they had the kind of political connections that would make stop-loss orders go away. I always told them I wasn’t interested.

At the airport I bribed my way into the secure freight area as any regular terrorist might have done and rode my bike right up to a black-painted Caribou with the Force Eight logo painted on it, just like the firm was a regular nation. I had no trouble hitching a ride, because Nisar had cleared it with the higher-ups, and also I happened to know the pilot, a guy named Arnie Havens, who used to be with the 106th, what they call the Night Stalkers, the people who insert Deltas and other special operations troops. Incredible pilots, and I almost asked him what they were paying him, but I found I was sort of embarrassed about it. He seemed a little embarrassed too, to be there.

While I waited, I called Cousin Bacha Khan and told him what had happened to me and he expressed delight at my narrow escape. He seemed sincere over the phone, and I figured that was because he wasn’t up for a bonus if the snatch succeeded. Maybe he hadn’t even set it up. I said I was going to Afghanistan to look for Gul Muhammed and did he have any thoughts on that since I’d seen him last? And he said, “Your father is where you would expect to find him.” So that was all right, because I knew where that was.

We took off and made the short hop to Kabul, and when I got out of the plane I found, not to my complete surprise, Buck Claiborne. He gave me a big bear hug, and I guess he could see I was not that enthusiastic and hoo-ah, and he asked me what was wrong and I told him I thought that at least he could’ve given me a call when he was about to dump the army, and I didn’t appreciate finding out from the first sergeant, and he hemmed and hawed and said he didn’t want to bother me about it, seeing as I was wounded and recovering and all, but I could see he was a little ashamed. Buck is not devious like me.

So we had that out and then he led me into a new Denali, black with the tinted glass. There was some construction going on in Kabul but the place still looked as wrecked as it did the last time I was there; it never really recovered from the Russian war, and I remember my colonel going on about how beautiful and peaceful it was when he was growing up there.

Force Eight had leased a big guesthouse in Shari Haw, near downtown Kabul, and fixed it up with new plumbing, air-conditioning, fresh paint, the works. They had their own generator, you could have pizza and hamburgers delivered if you wanted, and the feel of the place was like you were in a pretty good motel in Arizona. They had a big room downstairs with a fifty-inch plasma TV with a satellite feed, lounge chairs, a pool table, and a bar. When Buck took me in to show me around there was a baseball game on the TV and a few men in black jumpsuits with the Force Eight flash on them sat at the bar or in the chairs. Some funny looks flew around when I walked in with Buck. I got the impression that the only Pashtuns who came through here were servants, and they relaxed when Buck told them I was a regular white guy in disguise. As he thinks.

Buck introduced me to the bartender, an Afghan he called Gus, who spoke English with an American accent. He’d spent six years in Fresno and was pretty much like any suburban bartender in the States. He served us ice-cold Buds.

Buck saw me take in the room and said, “Pretty fucking neat, huh? A far cry from.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty neat, all right,” I agreed. “The company pays for all this?”

“Oh, yeah. They treat us real nice.”

“What do you-all do?”

“Protect the diplomats, mainly. Kind of funny, a place occupied by the U.S. Army and they have to hire private guards to watch our people, but there it is. And, by the way, no fucking rules of engagement, either. Someone gets in our face, we waste them and nobody says boo, and that’s because we also protect some big-shit Afghans, government people and such. They don’t trust one another but they trust us, and we don’t catch any flak from what passes for authorities in this shit hole. Nice business, and it’s going to get bigger.”

“Uh-huh. You got anyone speaks the language? Besides Gus, I mean.”

“Not really. We got some Special Forces types who know a little Pashto, some Dari, but everyone speaks English so it’s no big deal for most things. On the other hand, my friend, someone who
really
speaks the language and has the culture down and shit. . . fuck me! You can write your own ticket. I was telling the site supervisor about you—you remember Peisecki, he was a captain in Benning when we did that Ranger thing in ’02? Yeah, him. An all-right guy, a good head; anyway, his mouth was watering.”

“Because. . .?”

“Well, shit! The
negotiating
, man! We go in with a bunch of hajjis and they’re all jabbering away, and the fucking translator just says whatever he wants, and we don’t get any of the side play. Having you there has got to be worth serious cash. Man, you got no idea how much money is sloshing around this pissant country.”

“Really? I thought it was a basket case.”

“Oh, fuck, I don’t mean the government. The government is fucked. I mean the warlords and the growers and processors. This place is smack central. Peisecki says it’s the next big profit center.”

“Protecting dope lords?”

“Hey, it’s money. This is not the world, man, don’t ever forget that.”

I looked at him and then quickly away. The eagerness on his face made my belly twist. “Well, I’m happy for you,” I said, “but personally I’d need to think about it for a while. I mean, I’m not sure I could make the jump from. . . you know, Thus be it ever when free men shall stand between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.”

Buck looked down at his beer and then gave me a defiant stare. “Yeah, well, I did that for twenty, bud, just like you; I got pins in my thigh and my ears are shot to hell; I hear fucking bacon frying every minute of my life, and I’m goddamned if I’m going to live in a double-wide on an E-7 pension. Uh-uh. Not when I got this opportunity. You’ll see, Ice, it’s the real deal here.”

He finished his beer in two huge gulps and signaled for another round.

While I drank I thought about Buck and what he was doing and where he came from. Buck is a country boy from the western tail of Virginia, and his people have been fighting America’s wars from way back
before there
was
a country, an endless stream of officers and noncoms and grunts from all those little hollows and towns and farms, the heart of generations of American armies, and I thought it was a real bad sign when people like that started to talk like Buck was talking now; I thought it was bad for the country.
I
should be talking like that, not him, and I felt bad but hid it and we got pretty drunk that night.

In the morning, hung over, we went out to a joint down the road and ate parathas and drank sweet mint tea and he asked me what my plans were.

“I need to go to Kunar,” I said. “I need that bike you got on the plane patched up and some Afghan ID.”

“Hey, not a problem, but fuck, man, Kunar? That’s deep in Apache country.”

“I know,” I said, “but I’m an Apache.”

He laughed and slammed me on the back, and said, “Shit, I guess you are. You look like a goddamn Pashtun and you smell like one too.”

All that took a couple of days to get ready. I lived at the Force Eight compound but spent most of my time in a tea shop off Flower Street. It was run by an enterprising young fellow named Atal, one of the innumerable class of fixers without whom life in Kabul would collapse more than it has already. He had a taste for the old poetry, and we would spend the afternoons examining the crowds on Flower Street, him pointing out to me who was a drug lord, who a terror chief, and who a CIA guy, quoting Rumi, Kabir, and Ghalib to each other as appropriate, and I sank so deep into pashtunwali that it was hard to remain civil when I returned to Little America at night. As Rumi says,
It is right to love your homeland, but first ask, where is it?

Once I didn’t go back at all but stayed up most of the night listening to a trio Atal had brought in, sarangi,
santoor
, and tabla, and I kept giving them dollars to play my favorite ghazals, and afterward I smoked opium in the back and Atal let me sleep there covered by a sheepskin.

When the bike was fixed and the papers were prepared, I asked Atal if he knew a reliable man to take the Ducati back to Lahore, a hundred bucks plus expenses and two hundred when he got back to Kabul with a note attesting it had been delivered in good order. Atal was surprised at
the price being so high—there were people who would do it for nothing—and I explained that people were after me and there might be some danger. We would need a careful person, but not too careful, since he had to be seen leaving Kabul for the south on a red Ducati.

“Oh, in that case I know just the man. He goes back and forth quite often as a decoy.”

“A decoy?”

“Yes, people smuggle, of course, and there are those who steal from smugglers, so the smugglers hire people to attract the attention of the thieves, but they don’t carry much. Rangeen is one of these. And he is about your size and shape.”

This man showed up that evening and was satisfactory in every way, and the next morning he left in my clothes and I in his, he on the motorcycle and I on a bus to Asadabad in Kunar Province.