Hash and Farid in the lead, with Mohammed bringing up the rear, they headed single file through the seemingly deserted camp. But as before McGarvey could feel dozens of pairs of eyes watching from all around. There was no sign that they were getting ready to break camp and go to ground somewhere else, but that could happen as soon as he got out of sight, and it would only take them a couple of hours to bug out.
They crossed the shallow stream at the far side of the camp and started up the steep switchbacks to the crest of the hill two hundred feet above. McGarvey climbed slowly, stumbling from time to time as if he was having a great deal of difficulty. The only way he was going to get his phone back was to kill Mohammed. And with three-to-one odds he needed every advantage he could get, including instilling a false sense of security in them.
Halfway up, McGarvey stopped to catch his breath. He looked down the way they had come, and across the camp to the facing hill. For a second he thought he might be seeing the glow from the tip of a cigarette about where he figured the cave entrance might be. But then it was gone, though he could well imagine that bin Laden himself, or perhaps the man called Ali, was there watching him leave. Ali fit the general description that Trumble had given them of the man sitting silently in the corner at the Khartoum meeting. And bin Laden had been respectful of his opinions. Perhaps he was bin Laden’s chief of staff. It was a possibility.
They reached the top of the hill twenty minutes later, and McGarvey stopped again for a minute to catch his breath. The moon was just coming up over the distant mountains, casting a malevolent orange glow on the snow-covered peaks. The doctor was correct about one thing; this was Afghanistan, and no one in the West had any real idea what that meant. The entire country was in chaos; the pressures of the modern world with its dazzling technologies clashing with the centuries-old insular traditions that had either defeated or swallowed every invader ever to cross the Khyber Pass. Even the Russians, with their brutality in the field, had failed to conquer the Afghanis. And there was a lot of doubt that the Taliban, with their fanatical interpretation of the Qoran, would be successful either. A strange place. A fitting place for a man such as bin Laden with his jihad and hatreds.
“Ready?” Hash asked respectfully.
“Yeah,” McGarvey said, and they started down the narrow, rocky path when a dark figure suddenly materialized out of the shadows behind some boulders.
Hash and Farid pulled up short and reached for their rifles when the figure said something in Persian, and scrambled up onto the path. It was Sarah.
“I’m coming part of the way with you,” she said in English.
“Your father will forbid this,” Mohammed told her, angrily.
“Very well. We will wait here until you return to camp and tell him.”
“I will use the radio—”
“That is forbidden except for an emergency,” Sarah warned sharply. “Or do you wish to disobey not only me, but my father too?”
Mohammed was fuming, but after a beat he shook his head. Maybe there would be two accidents, McGarvey thought. And he wondered if bin Laden knew just how unstable their situation was here.
Sarah carried a short-stock version of the AK-47 slung over her shoulder, the muzzle pointed to the ground. But she had no pack. She fell in beside McGarvey and for the first half-mile or so they moved through the night in silence. A light breeze had come up, and although it was very cold McGarvey was sweating. The lidocaine had completely worn off and besides the ache beneath his shoulder, there was a very sharp pain in his side from the incision. It was like a toothache, only worse, and he could not completely put it out of his mind. That, and Mohammed’s presence at his back, made him edgy. The clock was still running.
“I’d like to ask you a favor,” McGarvey said, finally breaking the silence.
Sarah gave him a quizzical look. “What?”
“Mohammed has my things, I would like to have them back.”
She shrugged. “When you get back to Kabul. He’s been told.”
“I’d like them now.”
“No,” she said. “I have my orders too. We all do. You will have to wait until Kabul.” She looked into his face. “I’m sorry Mr. McGarvey. I know about the electronic device that you brought with you. Its significance was explained to me. And it was explained that you must not communicate with your people until you are a long way from here. I think we will be moving from this camp. It will make us all feel better. Safer. Do you understand?”
McGarvey nodded. “We want the killing to finally stop.”
“Then I hope you are able to convince your President of this when you get home.”
They walked for a long time in silence, the night bitterly cold. McGarvey settled down, concentrating on the march because there was nothing else he could do for the moment.
“Now that you have meet my father, what do you think?” Sarah asked innocently at one point.
The path had dipped below the crest of the hill that overlooked the camp, and it started back up again, the slope gentle at first, but steadily rising. What few trees were here were stunted and gnarled in the thin topsoil. At this altitude they were just below the treeline. McGarvey took a long time to answer. Bin Laden was a monster, but to Sarah he was her father.
“I think that he’s getting tired of hiding here in the mountains,” McGarvey said. “He wants to go home.”
“Wouldn’t you?” She smiled wistfully. At that moment she looked like a tomboy, and McGarvey was reminded of his own Liz at that age. “Was the operation painful?” she asked.
“A little, but I’ll live. What did your father say about the—incident?”
Sarah stole a glance over her shoulder. Mohammed was far enough back so that he was out of earshot if they spoke softly. “He didn’t say anything. I think he is disappointed.” It was a very tough admission for her to make.
But it wasn’t your fault. If that’s what the Qoran is teaching you it’s all wrong. “The Taliban are fanatics. But do you suppose they would condone what he tried to do to you?”
“Probably. But sometimes it gets confusing.”
“Welcome to the club,” McGarvey said. He felt sorry for her, and he wondered about her mother, and her father’s other wives and all the siblings. Dinner at the bin Ladens’ would be quite a spectacle, if such mixed eating arrangements were possible in a fundamentalist’s household.
She looked at him questioningly. “Club?”
“I meant it’s the same for everybody. Nobody has all the answers, especially not young people.”
She picked up on that with eagerness. “Tell me more about your daughter. Aren’t you afraid for her safety because of all the violence in America?”
McGarvey stifled a laugh. “The newspapers have some of it wrong. They like to exaggerate.” He swept his arm around the wild mountain scenery. “This isn’t exactly a safe haven. And for you Kabul must be even worse.”
The comment hurt her. She lowered her eyes. “We don’t chose to stay here.”
“If you could leave Afghanistan where would you like to go? Riyadh? You have family there.”
“London,” she said without hesitation. “I’d like to go to school there. My English is good enough, I think.”
“Your English is very good.”
“I would like to study in school in London, and in the evenings I would go out to see plays, and attend grand openings, and eat in restaurants with my friends. On the weekends we might go driving in the country, maybe go swimming where it’s permitted. I would like to see the ocean, and the English Channel. Maybe we could go to Paris through the tunnel on a very fast train.” She half closed her eyes happy for that moment. “We wouldn’t always eat at McDonald’s, there are other places. Places where I might be able to wear a dress, makeup, nylons. And there would be magazines, and television.” She smiled. “And movies.” She gave McGarvey an excited look. “Does your daughter do all of that?”
“That and more,” McGarvey said.
“Doe
s she obey everything you tell her?”
This time McGarvey did laugh. “No. She’s a lot like you.”
Sarah’s face fell and she averted her eyes. McGarvey had said the wrong thing again. “It’s against the Qoran for a daughter to disobey her father. It brings great shame to the house.”
“It’s the same in America, but we’re just a little more tolerant of our children,” McGarvey said gently. “What would you study in school?”
“Construction engineering and economics so I could continue my father’s businesses.”
There it was again, McGarvey thought. “You don’t have any brothers to take over?”
“They’re all too young, and besides I already know more about the business than they do.”
“School takes time, maybe four years.”
Sarah shook her head adamantly. “I could learn everything I need to know in one year. Maybe less if I studied hard.”
McGarvey felt like a heel manipulating her that way, but they needed hard information. If bin Laden was dying, and didn’t have much time left—which apparently he didn’t from the things Sarah was saying—then he was getting desperate now. He’d gotten hold of a nuclear weapon and he meant to use it as a lever to assure his family’s safety.
“Then what, after you finish school?” he asked. “Would you make your headquarters in Riyadh?”
“Maybe,” she said breezily. “Maybe Yemen, or the Sudan. Of course my family has interests in a lot of places. Germany, Brazil, Japan.”
“The United States,” McGarvey suggested.
Her moods were mercurial. “Did you know that the original McDonald’s is in Downey, California?”
He had to smile. “No, I didn’t.”
“It is. I’d like to go there to see it.”
Western culture was infectious. A lot of people, her father included, thought it was a disease to be stamped out, or at the very least, to be contained. He didn’t think she spoke like this with him.
“But first there has to be peace,” McGarvey said. “The killing has to stop.”
She gave him a sharp, shrewd look. “To you my father is a terrorist. To us he is a warrior for justice, just like you claim you were in Kosovo.”
“Helping Muslims.”
“Yes, that surprised us at first,” she admitted. “But it was just a matter of influence. Washington over the rest of the world.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“What else can we believe?” she shot back. “The list of people you have dominated either with your military or with your economics goes on and on, and there’s no end in sight.”
“Do you think that your father has the answers by killing innocent people?”
“There are no innocents in the world.”
It was the same circular argument used by terrorists around the world. On the one hand they claimed to hate the United States government, but not the people. Yet their mission was to kill those people. What they couldn‘t—or wouldn’t—understand, they attacked; what they couldn’t build, they destroyed. And they had no tolerance for any view but their own. The author Salman Rushdie had to go into hiding for years because of something he’d written.
Two hundred years ago Voltaire wrote that more than half the habitable world was still peopled with two-footed animals who lived in the horrible state approaching pure nature, existing with difficulty, scarcely enjoying the gift of speech, scarcely perceiving that they were unfortunate, and living and dying almost without knowing it. Nothing much had changed since then, McGarvey thought. The real problem was that the United States had the audacity to live well and to show the rest of the world what it was missing.
They fell into a troubled silence as they continued up to the saddle in the mountains that formed a pass. They’d crossed over it on the way up here, and it was the highest point on the trip. From there it would be downhill to the resting place at the stream, and below that the long valley leading down to the village where the Rover was parked.
McGarvey could see that Sarah was puzzled. She was trying to reconcile the things he had come here to represent with what her father had taught her. On the one hand she wanted to go to the West to see with her own eyes what it was all about. While on the other hand she wanted to believe that everything in the West was bad. But it was hard for her to understand how music, and fashion, and light and life were evil, while the mountains of Afghanistan and what they were doing from here was good. She was mature enough to understand that what she was being told wasn’t necessarily all true, but she was still young enough so that she couldn’t make up her own mind. Part of that was the culture into which she’d been born, repressive to women, but a large part of it was that she was still just a kid.
There was some snow on the path for the last hundred yards or so, but the wind was blowing strongly enough that their footprints from earlier were already gone. A long, ragged plume of snow was blowing from the top of a distant mountain, lit by the bright moon so that it looked as if there was a forest fire raging up there. The scene from the top, looking both ways toward the valleys on either side was primordial. There were no lights, no roads, nothing to suggest that people lived up here, or ever had come this way except for the snow-covered path they stood on.
Sarah took Mohammed a few yards farther along the path and they had a long conference while McGarvey smoked a cigarette.
When she was finished she came back, leaving Mohammed looking even more sullen than before.
“Mohammed understands that you are bringing a very important message back to your President from my father,” she said. “No harm will come to you. He knows that he would have to answer to all of us if it did.”
“Thank you,” McGarvey said.
A faint smile creased her lips. “But don’t provoke him, Mr. McGarvey. Men such as Mohammed are creatures of—passion.”
It was an odd thing for her to say, but then she was a young woman of very great contrasts because of her un-bringing.
“I’ll behave myself.” McGarvey returned the smile. He put out his hand.
She hesitated, but then she shook his hand, hers tiny and cool in his. “Goodbye,” she said. “Allah go with you.”
“And with you,” McGarvey said.
ELEVEN
Bin Laden’s Camp
The beam of a flashlight bounced off the narrowing walls of the cave, and a moment later Osama bin Laden, stoop-shouldered, shuffled into sight. He stopped and leaned heavily on his ornately carved wooden cane, a gift from Sarah, and shined the light back the way he had come. He held his breath to listen for sounds of footsteps behind him. But the tiny chamber he’d come to was silent, as were the passageways behind him. He couldn’t even hear the sounds of the generator lost behind millions of tons of solid rock.
He turned back, and played the flashlight beam into the narrow grotto that they’d discovered at the extreme end of the system of caves. It was at a higher elevation than the rest of the chambers, and was completely free of water. Cold, but dry as a desert, yet he thought that he could feel heat coming from inside. He shivered in anticipation.
The Americans had come as he knew they would. First the ineffectual fool from Riyadh, and then the man from Washington, who was a much more dangerous adversary than they’d ever faced, if Ali was to be believed. And his chief of staff was to be believed; the man never made a mistake. Never. He was a heathen, but a very useful tool. Do not blame the rapier for its penetrating insensitivity, it’s not the sword that kills the enemy, it is the hand that directs the thrust.
He stooped so that he would not hit his head on the low roof and entered the inner chamber. About ten meters long and barely three wide, the grotto was nothing more than a passageway deeper into the mountain. But it stopped at a solid wall of rock. There was little or no airflow back here, and the air smelled ancient, indicating that there was no other way in or out except by the series of passages from the front.
For all of his life bin Laden had been surrounded by pe
ople; sometimes by his enemies, but for most of the time by his friends. But he’d always felt desperately alone. Five times a day at his prayers, and then at night with sleep that usually came only after a very long struggle, he was isolated with his own thoughts, which for the most part centered on dreams of hate and especially absolution, a concept he’d never really understood as a young man, but one that had become increasingly important to him as he grew older, and especially in this last, horrible year.
Except for a fiberglass case about a meter and a half on a side and half that deep, which rested on a slightly larger wooden crate, the chamber was empty. Bin Laden hesitated for a minute or so at the entrance, his light playing on the container.
In the beginning the struggle had seemed so simple to him. It had never been about religion, at least not in the sense that Westerners thought it was. Islam, Judaism and Christianity were fundamentally the same; they all believed in one God and the same prophets. It was a matter of interpretation, and a matter of living within a religion. The Jews blamed everyone else for their problems, as they always had, and they arrogantly believed that they, and they alone, were the chosen people. They wanted to take over their corner of the world, which in reality had always belonged to the Arabs, and they were willing to murder anyone who stood in their way. He hated them with everything in his soul. The Christians, on the other hand, led by the Americans, only paid lip service to their religion. For them the one true God was money. Their only aim since the Crusades was the rape and pillage of the world. In some ways even more important than the need for oil was the need to dominate the entire planet. To do this they were engaged in the systematic poisoning of the world with their industrial pollution, their technology and worst of all with their warped ideas. The struggle, in bin Laden’s estimation, was for nothing less than the minds and souls of Muslims to practice their lifestyle wherever they lived.
Lately, however, he had begun to question the methods he had used in the jihad. Every blow he’d struck had turned out to be nothing more than a pinprick. Bows and arrows against tanks. Valiant, but meaningless.
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