by Lee Stone
Despite his age, the old guy was well built. He was nowhere near as big as the man in Barr's dream, but imposing all the same. Especially because he was right in Barr’s face. His breath still smelled of vodka, and his face was menacing, glowing in the dying embers of the oil drum.
Barr didn’t think. He saw the gun and a decade of military training did the thinking for him. Barr’s good leg kicked up at the rugged old man, winding him. His hands pushed the gun away from him and then twisted the guy’s wrists until they gave way. The old guy sank to his knees trying to go with the pressure; drunk and ungainly.
Barr’s hand closed around the gun, pushing the old man’s fingers over the trigger. In a moment it was over; two shots rang out and the old drunk lay twitching on the concrete. He was face down, his gaping mouth drooling into the green slime.
Accusations flew between the few people under the bridge. They were suddenly scared of Barr, scared of the gun. Scared at his will to use it in anger. From what Barr could piece together, he had fallen asleep and sometime later the dead guy had returned with murderous intent having finished his vodka. He had wanted Barr’s jeans and assumed he was an easy target. Nobody had stepped in to stop him.
There was time for David Barr to move on. The other souls under the bridge were high as kites and would make the worst witnesses. Besides, the police wouldn’t be breaking their balls to work out why there was one less homeless gun-toting alcoholic on the streets of L.A. after that night. Even so, Barr took the time to drag the body into the river before beginning the long journey up the coast to Santa Barbara. He covered his tracks. David Barr was a survivor.
Chapter Three
Quetta, Pakistan. November 2009.
“But as sure as God made black and white
What's done in the dark will be brought to the light.”
- Johnny Cash, God’s Gonna Cut You Down.
Opportunity was sitting in front of Charlie Lockhart in the shape of a man called Ajmal. Hours ago, Ajmal had been relaxing on the chesterfield at the back of the teashop when Lockhart had walked in. Lockhart had felt the man’s eyes weighing him up when he first arrived in the shop. He didn’t understand Dari or Pashto, but Lockhart had a manner which put strangers at ease quickly, and he blended in easily to most places. He had a warmth and confidence about him, which usually attracted friends as surely as it repelled trouble.
A few choice phrases in Arabic, and a couple of nods towards another customer’s order, and the owner of the shop understood what Lockhart wanted to drink. He headed off to the far corner of the room to prepare his sweet mint tea.
The man on the chesterfield was dressed simply in near-white shalwar kameez and brown Kabuli sandals. There was nothing remarkable about him, except that Lockhart had the impression that he was trying to catch his eye. He turned around and inspected him. He had closely cropped hair and was probably fairly wiry underneath the loose material of his outfit. He was about five foot eight and couldn’t have weighed over ten stone.
“Aya ta pohe-gi?” he asked, looking straight at the tourist.
The man was asking him whether he understood Pashto, which mostly he didn’t. But he had understood the question, so it was hard to know how best to answer. He let the man on the sofa work out for himself if he could speak the language.
“Ta la cherta ragh-ley?” Lockhart had asked with as much confidence as he could muster.
“Where am I from?” the man had laughed. “The same place as you, by the sound of it.”
Lockhart stared at Ajmal as he recognized the inflections in his voice.
“Birmingham?”
“Alum Rock,” replied Ajmal.
Lockhart shook his head and smiled. Alum Rock was one of Birmingham’s run-down districts.
“I don’t live anywhere near Alum Rock,” he said, deadpan.
“You know what I mean,” Ajmal laughed. “We’re three thousand miles from England. People out here would think we’re virtually neighbors!”
Ajmal and Lockhart laughed, amazed by the chance of their meeting. It was strange, but Lockhart had become open-minded to coincidence and fortune during his travels. As the men got to talking, Lockhart learned that Ajmal had apparently come out to Pakistan nearly a year ago for a family wedding and had never got around to going home.
The way Ajmal told the story, he had never wanted to come to Pakistan but his family had insisted. He didn’t really know any of his Pakistani relatives, and hadn’t enjoyed the wedding much, except for when an attractive henna-covered second cousin mistook him for the groom and spent a happy ten minutes rubbing scented oil through his hair at the Mehndi ceremony.
“Well, I wasn’t going to put her straight,” he said with a mischievous smile.
After the wedding, Ajmal had taken off around the country, visiting various relatives and seeing some places his grandparents had told him endless stories about back in the three-bedroom Victorian terraced house he shared with them in Birmingham.
When he was a kid, Ajmal used to sit on the floor in the small front room of the family home and eat chicken and rice from a cheap Formica table while his grandparents sat on a hideous brown sofa behind him. His Grandma, Dadi, would ruffle her hand through his hair as he tried to eat, while his grandad, Dada, would tell stories about what it was like growing up in Balochistan years before.
A magnified picture of Quetta hung in a cheap metal frame on the wall behind them, and as his grandad told his stories about his hometown, he would point out parts of the distant mountain, blurred corners of the Main Street, or buildings that were jostling as if to get a prime spot in the photograph. There was one building towards the right-hand side of the picture which Ajmal’s grandad would always stand up to show him. On the right-hand side of the plain square frontage there was a small, dark, and very unremarkable window.
“That is where I first set eyes on Dadi” he would explain to the young boy, and Ajmal’s grandma would beam and nod her head, although she had heard the story a thousand times.
“Look how small the window is,” he would implore Ajmal. “If I hadn’t looked up through that tiny window, I would never have seen your Dadi, and then your father would never have been born and neither would you.”
“It is incredible Ajmal. Our fate and your very existence have squeezed through this tiny little window right here!” and he would tap his finger against the picture for a moment, losing himself in the magic of it all.
“So, I bet I can guess where you went when you first arrived in Quetta?” Lockhart asked Ajmal, looking at the cracked mirror behind the damaged Chesterfield. He could imagine the picture of Quetta on the wall back in Ajmal’s home in Alum Rock.
Ajmal nodded and smiled, partly because it embarrassed him he had predictably sought the house with the little window so soon after arriving in Quetta, and partly because he was pleased that Lockhart had understood how much his grandad’s story had meant to him.
“The house was broken down when I arrived, and there were cattle living inside. I was frustrated because someone had stripped the place out. The floorboards were gone, along with the ceiling.”
“The shell of the house was still there though and I could see the window that Grandad had seen Grandma through, but the staircase was gone and so I couldn’t reach it.”
Lockhart asked Ajmal what he had done next, although he could guess the answer. He had learned a lot about people on his travels; the things which made us similar, and the things which made us unique. Ajmal was not unusual. He was someone who followed his heart and was a slave to his feelings and emotions.
“I couldn’t reach the window, so I ran to the marketplace,” he explained, and Lockhart could see from the distant look in his eyes that Ajmal was re-living the excitement of that moment.
“There was a fruit stall selling everything, man. There were boxes of plums, peaches, and pomegranates, and rows of apricots and olives and cherries. The guy who ran the stall was sitting in the shade on top of a stack of empty fruit crates
and I thought I could pile them up and stand on them, so I asked him if I could buy them.”
Apparently, the seller had been a wily old man and he could see how impatient Ajmal was to get back to his window.
“These are not crates,” he had answered as he sat chewing on pistachios and almonds. “This is my chair, and chairs are very expensive today.”
Despite Ajmal’s best attempts at bargaining and pleading, the market man had been unmoved. Eventually he had agreed to relinquish his seat and in return Ajmal had purchased an entire box of apricots at something of an inflated price.
“I ran back to the cowshed with all of my crates, and a box of apricots balanced on top,” laughed Ajmal between sips of his mint tea. “I must have looked like a complete idiot!”
“When I got back, I stacked the crates on top of each other and climbed up to the little window to look out. I ate a handful of sweet apricots and I watched the dusted street for an hour as the light started to fade, and I imagined my Grandad down there, looking up at the window. I imagined the destiny of my family passing through this tiny square in front of me. Even though he was three thousand miles away, I felt closer to Dada at that moment than ever before.”
Ajmal knew all of his Grandad’s stories by heart, and Lockhart had time to listen to them. After another hour, the first shadows started to form outside the shop and afternoon slowly began to ebb away. Ajmal sat up a little straighter on the Chesterfield, adjusted the loose cotton of his salwar, and pitched in with a proposal for Lockhart.
“After the wedding when I went visiting my family, I needed some transport and the only thing for sale was a truck. It didn’t cost much, but I fixed it up and painted it. We did a lot of miles together, me and that truck. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was reliable, and when I got to Quetta, I couldn’t bring myself to part with it.”
“So, I kept it, and then I bought another one. And now I have a truck depot just outside Rawalpindi with about thirty drivers working for me. I have bought up tankers, busses, trucks–and tomorrow is a big day for me, because I’m taking a convoy down the Chaman Road.”
Everyone knew where that road led. Lockhart took a sip of his tea and studied the man on the sofa.
“How far along the Chaman Road is this convoy headed?” he asked after a moment. He suddenly felt like they were playing poker.
“We’ll go to the border, and then across into Afghanistan. We are setting out in the morning for Kandahar, and I’m a driver short. An Englishman would be helpful when we arrive at the American base, Insha’Allah. Can you drive?”
As he sat in the teashop Charlie Lockhart noticed the flow of the river and the current pushing him along. It was time to make his decision.
Chapter Four
Santa Barbara, California, December 2009.
“Your eyes are burning holes through me.
I’m gasoline. I’m burning Clean.”
– REM, Electrolite
David Barr had flown straight out of Afghanistan on the night that the job had gone wrong. He had used his contacts to get stowed away on the back of a C17 transporter to Cyprus, and then traveled on using civilian papers which he had forged before he left Kandahar Airfield. Los Angeles had been an obvious choice. Big, brash, and a million miles from his home and his family. He could feel the hot breath of serious trouble on the back of his neck, and he didn’t want to lead it back to the people he loved.
But after shooting the old man, Barr fled L.A. just like he had fled Kandahar. Self-defense or not, he felt troubled that he had killed the alcoholic under the bridge. Not guilty, exactly. But troubled. It wasn’t the first time he’d shot another man, and he had seen enough innocent deaths in Afghanistan to keep him awake for a lifetime.
The man under the bridge had been waving a loaded gun in his face and deserved everything he got. Barr was more bothered about the practicalities; about the fact that the body would wash up somewhere, and that the police at the very least might come looking for him. He badly needed to stay off the radar.
So, he fled the scene and left the City of Angels in the same way as he arrived; in the middle of the night, with his cap pulled low over his face, hoping not to be noticed. The good thing about living rough was that he had nothing to pack and nothing to arrange. He just moved on, a hundred miles up the coast to Santa Barbara.
When he first arrived, he had been edgy, and nervous. He had considered ditching his wheelchair in case he was recognized, but without medical help his legs had deteriorated to the point where he couldn’t get along without it. He had thought about smartening up and taking a job, but that would have meant paperwork and credit checks. If he opted back in to normality, he was sure that trouble would find him.
So, he continued his broken life on the streets. His wife and his daughter would mourn him, but at least they would be safe. Nobody would go looking for them. Nobody would kill them. Life became a waiting game, and Barr learned to be patient. As long as one day he could get back to his family, he would continue to live his empty life on the streets. As the guys on ESPN always said: It’s the hope that kills you.
It was only when the air turned colder that Barr realized he was spending a second winter in Santa Barbara. A full year away from his daughter. He wondered if he would recognize her if she walked up to him in the street. These days young girls were ushered quickly past him by their protective mothers. Barr didn’t blame them.
He was still thinking about his daughter when he was shaken from his thoughts by a sense of danger. Although his mind was miles away, his eyes still constantly swept the street. Force of habit. He spotted a giant of a man about half a mile away, dressed in a dark jacket and standing head and shoulders above everyone else around him. Barr's blood froze as he recognized the hulking shape. Was it really Tyler? After thirteen months of hiding, had his past finally caught up with him?
He had seen Tyler only once before, in his office in Afghanistan, but he knew exactly why he was in Santa Barbara. Tyler would interrogate him for as long as it took to discover what had happened on the road to Herat. And when he realized Barr didn't have the answers he wanted, he would kill him anyway.
When Barr saw him, he wheeled straight off State Street and into the shadows. Hitching a lift was out of the question, so he pulled together every dollar he had stashed away in his pockets and headed for the cab rank. He threw some green at the guy with the biggest-looking car, and grabbed the back door. He deftly transferred himself onto the back seat and glared at the driver in the rear-view mirror, waiting for him to pack away his chair into the trunk. No arguments.
Thirty minutes later, he was on a fast train back to Los Angeles. He knew the game was up. The giant and his boss were onto him. When they didn’t get the answers they wanted, they would kill him. At least he’d stayed away from his family. The sacrifice had been worth it.
Chapter Five
Quetta, Early November 2009
“Words that flow between friends, Winding streams, without end.”
- Mercury Rev, The Dark is Rising.
It was getting late by the time Ajmal returned to the tea shop. He had spent much of the afternoon on the phone to the office in Rawalpindi, checking the latest details about his fleet of trucks.
He was bringing prosperity to the people of Quetta with his trips into Kandahar. His drivers were getting well paid for the dangerous trip, and those who got cold feet would find ten men behind them, ready to take their place.
The women worried about their men going over the border, but enjoyed the luxuries they came back with. And mostly the men did come back. Besides, Ajmal had taken special measures to ensure that his cargo would get through to Kandahar without much trouble. He was employing mechanics and accountants and boys to stack the trucks. All of them were profiting from the trips to Kandahar.
He hoped that he could convince Lockhart to drive with him. He would put him two trucks from the front, and the chances were that he would lead the convoy by the time they arrived at Kandahar
. If anyone would trigger a roadside bomb, it would most often be the first truck, so he would keep Lockhart a little way back.
Ajmal was not stupid though. He had cut deals and reached agreements with people who mattered. Many of the people along the Chaman Road disliked convoys reaching the Americans, but most would have received instructions to turn a blind eye to Ajmal’s group of dusty trucks. Sometimes you have to dance with the Devil, he though.
As he entered the shop, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness before he spotted Lockhart on the sofa.
“Salam Alaikum," he said in his English accent as he reached out to Lockhart. "How's it going mate?"
They shook hands as Ajmal sat down, and they both knew at once that the deal was already done. Lockhart wouldn’t still be sitting there if he wasn’t interested in the journey to Kandahar.
They spoke for a while about the plan for the next day. They would set out early in the morning, driving through the dawn up into the mountains. They would stop briefly at Chaman at around ten in the morning and aim to be at the main gates of Kandahar Airfield by 3pm. Lockhart would take the third truck and be sure to stay twenty meters behind the vehicle in front. He would keep his doors locked at roadblocks. He wouldn’t get out of the cab. If the truck in front drove straight through, so should Lockhart. Child's play.
Now that Lockhart had decided, he felt happy. Afghanistan would be dangerous, but he figured this was a chance to get right to the heart of the country as an anonymous truck driver. A chance to see what the place was all about. In the dust and the noise of thirty vehicles, nobody would notice him. Once he got to the military base, he could work out his next move, and Ajmal could find someone else to drive the truck back.
Lockhart could feel the river of fate sweeping him along, pushing him towards his next adventure.
