The Sleeper

by Christopher Dickey

  “Looks like you need a security escort in half the country,” I said. The secretary, who spoke with an Indian accent, said, “Mr. Faridoon will be receiving you shortly. Perhaps you would like to have a seat?”

  “Thank you,” I said, and kept looking at the map. Even in peacetime nomads roamed the provinces near Somalia. But peace was a long time ago, and the wars had erased, redrawn, and erased again what there was of a border. Hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees were holed up near the town of Dadaab. There was drought and flood, hunger and famine—thousands of square miles of no-man’s-land where any man could hide if he had the money, the guns, and the right God to protect him. In the middle of the blackened badlands were three little pins: the development agency’s projects.

  “Mr. Faridoon will see you,” said the secretary.

  The man behind the large metal desk looked to be about forty, maybe a little older. He was clean-shaven, in a white shirt with long sleeves and a tie. His skin was olive, almost gray. He greeted me with a smile that was friendly but wary, like he was trying to place my face.

  “I had a beard in the old days, in Bosnia,” I said. “And the old days were nine years ago.”

  He looked at my eyes, then at my hands, and back into my eyes. “ ‘The Demolition Man!’ ” he said.

  “Is that what they called me?”

  “That and ‘The American.’ ”

  “Yeah.”

  “You are the one who blew up the Chetnik prison camp?

  “Yeah.”

  “Incredible. That was about the bravest thing I remember from those days. You saved a great many lives.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “that’s ancient history.”

  Mr. Faridoon looked at me and smiled. “History counts,” he said.

  “So does the future,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes!” He shoved the papers on his desk aside like he was clearing a path between us. He gestured for me to sit down. “And what brings you here?”

  “I always kind of wanted to see Africa,” I said. “My marriage—well, I had some personal problems and some time off. So I came.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Came here on a wing and a prayer, I guess you’d say, and then I remembered you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. He knew I was lying. He just wanted to know why. “Yes,” I said again, “and while I’m here I thought maybe I could make myself useful.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Faridoon. “You mean you want a job.”

  “I mean, if you’ve got something for a few weeks or months, I’d be happy to help out, even as a volunteer.”

  Mr. Faridoon laughed. “Do you even know what we do?”

  I did not. And I did not know whose side they were on, either. When I saw this Faridoon and the Summit Vision Charitable Trust in Abu Seif’s address book I wasn’t absolutely sure that this was the man I remembered from Bosnia. There were so many charities in the Balkans, and so many people from so many places connected to them. Some were Saudi, some Iranian, and some were, I thought, a little more mysterious. This was an Ismaili charity, and in those days I had no idea who the Ismailis might be. I knew nothing about the ancient cult of the assassins, or the modern charities of the Aga Khans. All I knew was that they had a project in Bosnia to help distribute safe heating stoves, which might have given them good cover to bring in heavy metal objects: guns, RPGs, even mortars. And in those days, that’s what I hoped they were doing. I remembered liking Faridoon. My gut and what I’d read about the Ismailis told me he could be friendly with the British services, or the Indians. Or playing on his own. Or a true doer of good deeds. Or none of the above. I laughed. “Not really, no, I don’t know what you do.”

  “I supposed not,” he said. “We build beehives, mostly. We’re helping people who have nothing to develop a grass-roots economy into something. We don’t have much call for a demolition man.”

  “I’ve spent a lot of the last eight years as a carpenter.”

  “Useful,” said Faridoon.

  “And, of course, the other area where I might help is with security.”

  “Security.” Faridoon sat back in his chair and shook his head, still smiling, thinking. “What precisely did you do after you left Bosnia? Did you just give up on the jihad?”

  “After what I saw in Bosnia—after what I saw that night at the prison camp—yeah, I quit. I realized that kind of war was never going to solve anything. I went home. I settled down.”

  “You’re from the Midwest, I believe? I can tell by the accent, although I can’t quite place it.”

  “Kansas,” I said, a little impressed.

  “Precisely.” He sat back. “Precisely.” His smile was not the easiest to read. “We learned many things in Bosnia, didn’t we, Kurt?”

  “Not enough to stop what happened on the eleventh.”

  “If you could have stopped it, would you have stopped it?” He leaned forward. “Don’t answer too quickly.”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean then,” he said. “Would you have stopped it if you could have back then? In Bosnia?” He listened to my silence, then went on. “Were you at the Ansar house in December 1992?”

  “Yes.”

  “That tall, gentle Arab who visited. So tall. So gentle. So rich, they said.”

  “I saw him. Yes, from a distance, at night.”

  “And you knew his name.”

  “Osama.”

  “And if you had known what he would do, then, would you have killed him then?”

  “I was a different man—then.”

  “Yes.” Faridoon sat back. “Yes. I think you were.” He nodded in answer to himself, and smiled. “What are you doing tomorrow morning?” said Faridoon. “I don’t think I can use an employee, but maybe”—he seemed to search for the word—“a consultant.”

  “Jump Start Restaurant, best burgers in Kansas, how can we help you?” Ruth, the other waitress, again.

  I hung up and lay back in the king-size bed at the Nairobi Holiday Inn. God, I was tired. God, I was sore. God. The mini-bar beckoned, but there wasn’t enough energy in me to get up. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what a cold beer tasted like. It hadn’t been such a long time since I had one, but that was in Kansas. It was before that clear Tuesday morning in September when everything changed. How long ago was that? Three weeks? Just a little less than three weeks. And I had the beer on…the Sunday before the Tuesday. We went with Miriam on a picnic up by the lake. There were trails up there that weren’t too crowded, even on a Sunday, and years ago Betsy and I found a little stand of trees right by the water that felt like it was all ours, and usually was. We started taking Miriam up there when she was less than a year old, and now she showed us the way. That Sunday we ate Betsy’s deviled eggs and fried chicken and potato salad, and I washed it all down with a Coors Light from the cooler, so cold it tasted like spring water. Ah, God.

  “Jump Start Restaurant, best burgers in Kansas, how can we help you?” Ruth, again. I hung up, again.

  I picked up a copy of Kenya Life Monthly from the bedside table and leafed through photographs of celebrities who came to the country to take safaris or donate money. Former President George H. W. Bush was among them, alongside the Aga Khan, at the opening of a cultural center in Mombasa. Caught in the camera flash, the old Bush looked almost like I remembered him from the Kuwait war, dignified but a little confused. The Aga Khan stood beside him, full of confidence, with a smile as comfortable as old money. The Ismaili faithful used to offer their leader his weight in gold. That was one of the things you always read about them; there were so many stories and myths. But the Ismailis were something else today. Quiet. Present. Taking care of themselves, defending their vision of their faith. They didn’t have scales, they had portfolios.

  The Old Man of the Mountain was long behind them. His fortress of Alamut was overrun by the Mongols, and his followers became just another minor, persecuted bunch of believers in Persia—unti
l the British thought they might be useful, and moved them to India during the Raj. The British always liked to work with minorities who relied on them for protection. In India the Ismailis didn’t have any friend but the Crown, and they served it well, and it served them, for more than a hundred years. Ismailis spread all over the Empire, from the jungles of Uganda to the most remote mountains of northwest Pakistan. Since the Empire ended, they stood on their own, and served their own interests, whatever those might be. The Aga Khans became playboys, and philanthropists, and hung out with ex-Presidents. But why was Faridoon’s number in Abu Seif’s computer?

  I turned off the light and fumbled for the remote control, clicked on the TV, and zapped through the channels to CNN. The present President Bush was on the screen. “The battle is joined,” he said.

  Chapter 12

  As the war in Afghanistan got under way, the television reports were all about cruise missiles and stealth fighters. From Kabul came a few of those computer-video images of “bombs lighting up the night sky,” running over and over again. They looked like they were cut apart and pasted back together. There was no way you could tell what was happening.

  I dialed Kansas.

  “Jump Start Restaurant—”

  “Ruth, let me talk to my wife.”

  “That you, Kurt?”

  “Ruth, right now. Please.”

  “You hear the war started?”

  “I heard. Please?”

  “You anywhere near it, if you know what I mean?…Oh, Betsy. Betsy, it’s Kurt. He says—”

  Betsy must have grabbed the phone out of Ruth’s hand. “Kurt, where are you?”

  “I’m far, far away from Afghanistan.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Ah, thank God. And you’re okay?”

  “I’m totally okay, except I miss you, Darling. Are you and Miriam doing all right?”

  She hesitated for just a second. “Yes. Fine,” she said. “Miriam misses you. I miss you.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” I wanted to reassure her. I wanted to reassure me. “If there’s anything wrong, I’ll come back, no matter what.”

  “No!” Her voice broke. “No. No, don’t say that, Kurt.”

  “I—”

  “Kurt, listen to me. I don’t know where you are and I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s got to be done, right?”

  She sounded scared and strong and angry and loving all at once, and for a second I didn’t know what to say. Then the words came out. “It has to be done.”

  “And nobody else can do it. Tell me that. Tell me nobody else can do what you’re doing.”

  “It’s true.”

  She started to speak but her voice choked. I couldn’t say anything either. After a second the electric life went out of the line. “Betsy?”

  “I’m here, Kurt.”

  “Betsy, what’s wrong? What is it you’re not telling me?”

  “Kurt, listen. Miriam and me, we’re here and we’re alone. Do you understand that?”

  “But you got our friends, and you got—”

  “Listen to me. If you aren’t here, we are alone,” she said. “And I’m gonna tell you something. I’m scared. Scared about you, and the world, and this war, and about the next paycheck, and I’m so, so scared I’m going to lose you. Can I just say that? I look at the TV and I’m terrified. You hear me?”

  “I am not in Afghanistan.”

  “Listen to me! What you’re doing—whatever the hell it is, wherever the hell it is—it’s got to be done. Right? Right? Don’t tell me you can just come home because you’re worried about us.”

  “But I just wanted—”

  “What you’re doing has got to be done. That’s what I tell myself every morning and every night. That’s the only excuse. The only excuse.”

  The line sounded dead again, and I was afraid she was gone. Then, “Kurt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just come back to us,” she said. “When it’s all over, come back to us.”

  Chapter 13

  We flew into the rising sun and every feature of the earth below was outlined in morning shadows. Near Nairobi, farms cluttered the land. There were patches of tall corn, and rows of sisal with leaves like clustered bayonets.

  “I expected”—I had to shout above the noise of the Cessna’s engine—“I expected wild animals.”

  “Not many here,” shouted Faridoon. “Farmers drive them away if they can.”

  “And around the camps?”

  “The shifta killed them all a long time ago. When you’ve got so many guns around, you don’t have many animals.”

  “Shifta?”

  “Somali raiders—they’re warriors, bandits, poachers. Take your pick.”

  I nodded and sat back. It didn’t seem worth shouting. “Mind if I doze off?”

  “Be my guest,” Faridoon shouted back.

  Maybe I’d been asleep ten minutes. Suddenly the plane turned hard to the left, real hard, and one of the instruments began to scream a warning. The turn continued, and the screaming got more urgent, but Faridoon was smiling. He took one hand off the wheel and pointed. “Elephants,” he said. We were making a tight spiral above them—tighter than the Cessna wanted to go.

  At first I didn’t see the animals because I didn’t understand what I saw. The earth beneath us was a rich iron red and so were the enormous things that moved across it. We were only a few hundred feet above them now. I had never seen anything living that was so huge. They had nothing to do with the elephants in circuses and zoos. It was like the difference between a scout car and main battle tank.

  The plane was screaming again. “What’s that sound?” I shouted.

  “Stall indicator. No problem.”

  “Right.”

  “Really,” he said, “relax.” He leveled out. We headed again toward the rising sun and a land that grew flatter, emptier, with every mile that passed. The plane was climbing slowly until, at about three thousand feet, we felt like we were standing still and the land beneath us was as red as the deserts of another planet. The Cessna’s engine wasn’t working so hard now, and it was just a little bit easier to talk.

  “What’s your biggest security problem?” I asked.

  “Rape,” said Faridoon. “Rape is the worst.”

  “So you know who’s doing it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Can you take them out?”

  Faridoon’s expression let me know I’d probably failed his test already. “We don’t want to start a war. The cycle of vengeance never ends in these parts, and we do not want to be part of it. We cannot be part of it. But we have to figure something out.”

  “And you were hoping I’ve got some ideas.”

  “I’m hoping,” he said. “Some of our best people at Summit are women. And they won’t—they cannot—even begin to think about working out here. Except…” Faridoon grinned. “Except Cathleen,” he said, and shook his head.

  “What makes her so special?”

  “You’ll see.” And once again, Faridoon smiled.

  Now clouds held back the sun, and heavy raindrops started to rattle on the front of the airplane like bursts of machine-gun fire. We flew low and slow over land that was dead from drought, mutilated by floods, until a sprawl of people appeared below us like ashes scattered across the earth. We circled once over rows of battered tents, small huts patched together from twigs and garbage, and a few low stucco buildings. As we approached the water-slick landing strip, I could see a large figure in a long white shirt and blue jeans—a woman with a scarf over her head—talking to three men in rumpled uniforms beside a Toyota pickup. Faridoon gentled the Cessna down onto the mud runway and we half rolled, half skated to a stop, then taxied over to the reception party. The second the engine quit turning, the woman pulled open Faridoon’s door.

  “You’ve got to talk to these bastards,” she said.

  “Good morning, Cathleen,” he said.

  “Top of the morning. Are you going to talk to t
hem or not?”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” he said, climbing out of the plane. “Cathleen, meet Kurt. I’m hoping he can help us with some of these problems.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said, starting to head back toward the soldiers.

  Faridoon put his hand on her shoulder. “Wait,” was all he said. Her face turned red and there was a terrible mix of emotions there—anger and anxiety and relief and frustration, all magnified by her size. Cathleen was a force of nature, with huge breasts and heavy arms and a kind of passion in her movements that made me think she was going to explode, but she didn’t. She waited. Faridoon went on alone to talk to the soldiers.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “The little girls,” she said. “You’d think they’d spare the little girls.” She shook her head. No, finally she wasn’t going to wait. She headed for the soldiers and I followed. “Can’t they bleedin’ do something?” she shouted at Faridoon and at them. Faridoon turned and headed her off. “We’ll discuss this when we get back to the compound,” he told Cathleen, and even though she seemed to be mad as hell, she listened to him the way someone does who knows the voice of reason when she hears it. “Now let’s unload the plane,” he said.

  In front of the Summit house, .50-caliber cartridge boxes were piled like enormous Lego blocks. “Sure looks like you’re ready for war,” I said. “You’ve got enough ammunition here for an army.”

  “No, no,” said Faridoon. “The boxes are empty. But they’re very common, especially on the other side of the border, and we’ve found that they make good hives.”

  “Wish we did have some ammunition,” said Cathleen.

  “Let’s start with some tea,” said Faridoon as we walked into the main room of the house, which was part living room, part kitchen. “And that big survey map, is it still here in the cabinet?” He spread the chart on top of a 1950s kitchen table with aluminum legs and a Formica top. We sat on lawn chairs with most of the webbing frayed or gone. Cathleen put the pot and the cups on the table and let us pour our own.