The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  The only road north out of Kerman ran through a hilly salt desert. There were two or three oasis villages between Kerman and the point on the map, three hundred miles distant, where the road turned eastward across the Afghan border. And beyond that to the city of Herat.

  Norman said, “I fully expected that I would die for love long before we got to Herat. Lori did not say that this was our final destination, but I couldn’t imagine a more hidden place on the face of the earth.”

  On the second morning out of Kerman they were attacked by men on camels who rode out of a blinding white sunrise and riddled their tent with bullets.

  “Because of the fleas in the rugs Ibrahim had sold us, Lori and I had taken to sleeping on the ground in the open,” Norman said. “On this particular morning we were on a little hill above the camp. We had our rifles with us. There were seven men in the attack. They were armed with jezails, old black powder muzzleloaders, and they riddled our empty tent with bullets. Without saying a word, Lori began firing. I had no idea how well she could shoot. But she knocked one man off his camel at a range of at least two hundred yards before I got in my first shot. My weapon was the one with the scope on it, which rendered it useless because we were shooting into the sun.”

  By the time Norman got the scope detached, a matter of a few seconds, Lori had downed another man and wounded a camel, which threw its rider and was now running in agonized circles. The rest of the bandits were fleeing back into the blinding disk of the sun. Norman, who as you will remember was a trained sniper, downed one of them and wounded another, who held onto his mount and kept going. The survivors were now out of range over open sights.

  “Before I could stop her, Lori was running down the hill toward the camp,” Norman said. “She wasn’t wearing her turban and her hair was flying like a blond flag. I grabbed the scope and a box of ammunition and followed. No choice. I caught up with her just as she was leaping into the truck. She started it up with a roar and took off after the fleeing men.”

  They were off the road, driving through open country. In such circumstances the old rattletrap could not go much faster than a running camel, but even a camel gets tired, and after a few minutes the men stopped on a hilltop, made the animals lie down, and began firing on the truck from behind a screen of rocks.

  “Lori made a wide circle around the hill, then put the truck in low gear and drove it to the top of another little hill about a hundred yards away from the first,” Norman said. “The enemy’s jezails were pretty well at the limit of their range.”

  This time the sun was behind Norman and Lori. She parked the truck behind a big rock, climbed to the top of it, fell on her stomach, and began methodically shooting the camels.

  “Head shots every time,” Norman said. “The camels just jumped in their skins and died. I lay down beside her. She said, ‘The men are yours.’”

  Norman had not been made a sniper by the British army because he was faint of heart, but this seemed extreme. The men were defeated, and where could they go without camels?

  Lori said, “Kill them, Norman.”

  “I understood what she was telling me,” he said. “If we didn’t kill them all they’d have a motive for revenge and we’d never be free of them.”

  He put the scope back on his rifle and one by one he shot the men, the last one being a mere boy, judging by his agility, who tried to escape by running down the hill, dodging from rock to rock.

  “In minutes they were all dead, men and animals,” Norman said. “Lori was as composed when the smoke cleared as a woman coming out of a theater.”

  They left the dead brigands and their camels where they lay, as an advertisement to others.

  4

  Even in Herat Yeho had a friend. Although this is not much mentioned in radical Islamist circles nowadays (and I never knew it until Norman told me), the local people still believed in 1946 that they were the descendants of an Israelite tribe that had been captured and marched to Babylon by Nebuchadrezzar after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. Eventually these people made their way into western Afghanistan, founded Herat, became the tribe called the Pathan, and started conquering their neighbors. Like their purported ancestors under Joshua and modern Israelis under men like Yeho, they were ferocious and merciless warriors and conquerors. They called themselves the Ben i-Israel, sons of Israel. They lived under a semblance of ancient Hebraic law, spoke a different language from the rest of the Afghans, and believed that their lineage made them the most noble people in Afghanistan and its destined rulers.

  In the thirteenth century they ran up against the Ghuzz, a Muslim Turkoman people whose missionary army attacked Herat. The forty inhabitants of Herat who survived the siege converted to Islam—just how wholeheartedly one can only guess—but their legendary history and law were recorded in sacred books. The hereditary keeper of these texts was Yeho’s friend Habibullah. Once again it was Lori who knew where to find Habibullah and what to say to him.

  “With Yeho you never knew, but I don’t see how Habibullah could have been expecting us,” Norman said. “He took us in anyway when we mentioned Yeho’s name.”

  From the outside, Norman said, Habibullah’s house looked like a hovel, but inside it was spacious, with divans and tables and Persian carpets laid edge-to-edge. It swarmed with servants. The windows were closed against the stench and the heat and the flies. Little boys stirred the fetid air by pulling the ropes on fans suspended from the ceiling. Habibullah took it for granted that Lori and Norman were a married couple.

  “Or maybe he didn’t, since we were infidels and it didn’t matter anyway,” Norman said. “For whatever reason, he put us up together in an apartment of our own. As soon as we were inside the door, Lori ripped off the chador. She was fully clothed underneath, of course, but Habibullah rolled his eyes to heaven to avoid looking at her face. She immediately pulled a scarf across it and covered her hair. Habibullah relaxed. But he let us know that Lori should not wander around the house veiled or unveiled, and that he would conduct business with us in our own apartment. I would eat meals with him. Lori would be fed in her room by women.”

  All the business was done by Lori, reciting briskly from mental lists. She wanted three good horses, a stallion and two mares, clothes suitable for a journey through the mountains, and at least two hundred rounds of ammunition for her pistol and each of the two rifles. Also one good saddle for a rider and two packsaddles, food for thirty days and such medicine as was available, and largescale maps and verbal directions across northern Afghanistan and India as far as China. She would pay in gold through Habibullah.

  The horses must be the very best available and she must inspect and ride them before any deal was made. She communicated in English with Habibullah, who spoke the language well, like most educated Afghans and so many others who lived on the pink parts of the map as the sun was setting on the British empire. Lori found the horses she wanted—not the beautiful Arab steeds Norman had imagined, but wiry surefooted animals that were not much larger than ponies.

  “Naturally she rode like a Cossack and knew all about horseflesh,” Norman said. “Her repertoire of skills amazed me. She had acquired most of them as a child. Before Hitler the Germans were great believers in overeducation, and I guess these accomplishments were just things that were expected of the daughter of a Prussian baron. Except maybe the marksmanship. Her father taught her to shoot when she was ten, she said, in case the Russians ever came.”

  In less than a week Habibullah acquired everything Lori needed, including the sporting ammunition she had specified. This was something of a miracle, considering where Herat lay on the map and the fact that Europe had been at war for six years and in all that time no one had been making ammunition for civilian use. Knowing what she wanted and never taking no for an answer had been important parts of Lori’s Prussian education.

  “She said nothing about her plans or the future, but then she never had,” Norman said. “One morning I woke up and she was gone. Again. I
knew this was going to happen eventually, of course, and the way she made love the night before—as if orgasm was a period at the end of a sentence—should have told me that I was getting the only good-bye I was ever going to get. Still, it was a shock. I knew what had happened from the moment I opened my eyes, but I gave no more thought to following her than if she had cut off my feet and taken them with her. There was no place for me where she was going, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life among the people she was going to find when she got to wherever that might be.”

  This time, Lori left him a letter.

  “It was quite impersonal, written in German, which was the language she and I spoke to each other,” Norman said. “She enclosed her wedding ring, with her initials and her husband’s, the date, and a word or two about love engraved around the inside. It was not for me, or even for her husband, but for Paul in case he ever showed up. I was to give it to him and say nothing.”

  “Say nothing?”

  “I guess she wanted him to think of the ring as evidence that she was dead. Why else would she ever part with it? But she wouldn’t ask me to lie about it.”

  “And did you do as she asked when Paul finally found you?”

  “No.”

  “Why? Did you think she had changed her mind?”

  “Hardly,” Norman said. “The fact is, I wanted someone to find her. I’ve spent my life wishing that I had had the balls to do it myself, but I wanted to be with her in Paris, not in the middle of nowhere.”

  He fell into a silence. His large brown eyes, as keen as a youngster’s, were unfocused, looking into the past. He left without saying good-bye.

  FIVE

  1

  Our Arabist, Ben Childress, and I had agreed that we would never meet in a place where there was even the smallest probability that we might be seen together by Arabs. He chose Ireland, a country hotel on Lough Swilly in Donegal, about as far north and as much out of the way as one can go in Ireland. Ceaseless rain and icy wind chilled your bones. Ben arrived on the second day in time for tea. He was a Massachusetts man, raised on a stony mountaintop farm. As a boy, he had milked cows and chopped wood and walked to a one-room school. His people talked with a twang that made Harley Waters sound like a radio announcer. Ben himself sounded like a fellow who had gone to Princeton, which in fact he had done on the GI Bill of Rights after going ashore on D-Day with the First Infantry Division and somehow living through the remainder of the war.

  Ben said, “Sorry, Horace, but what I’ve got for you may make you feel like the white hunter in the storybook.”

  “Which white hunter?”

  “The one tracking the tiger who comes across his own footprints on a jungle path and realizes that he’s walked in a circle and the tiger is stalking him.”

  I said, “Do go on, Ben.”

  “Ibn Awad knows you’re after him again.”

  “You know he knows?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then you know he’s alive?”

  “I have reason to think so.”

  “You’ve seen him with your own eyes?”

  “Not yet. But I saw the fatwah he’s issued against you. All believers are instructed to kill you on sight. Very good description of you appended.”

  “Ibn Awad signed this fatwah?”

  “That’s a trick question,” Ben said. “You know he can’t read or write. Just like the Prophet. And since he’s officially dead and wants to stay that way, he had the fatwah issued by somebody else. But it came from him.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “Not yet. He keeps on the move. From what I’m beginning to suspect, not just from one part of the Arabian desert to another. From desert to desert all over Africa and Asia, wherever there are Muslims.”

  That not yet was pure Childress. If Ben said he knew something, he knew it. He had the lofty certitude of Sherlock Holmes—achieved in his case, as far as I know, without the help of cocaine. He even looked like Holmes or, rather, like Basil Rathbone in the role of Holmes—dark hair, large aquiline nose, tight smile, white crooked teeth, a bachelor through and through, though not nearly so indifferent to the ladies as Holmes had been. Nor as rotten to the Watsons of this world, whose ranks, in Ben’s estimation, included me and nearly everyone else he’d ever known.

  Except Arabs. After Princeton, Ben had taken a degree in oriental languages at Oxford. From his tutors or the language he was studying or maybe from a desire to escape the musty gloom of England, he had contracted Arabitis. After getting his degree Ben had spent a year living in the Ar Rub al Khali desert with a band of bedouins who claimed to be the last descendants of the Quraysh tribe, who were thought by scholars to speak the purest Arabic. Many people who have lived among the bedu end up wanting with all their hearts to be as unlike them as possible. Ben, however, thought they were wonderful. He converted—sincerely—to Islam and became one of them, and for the rest of his life could become one of them again whenever the occasion demanded. This was a tremendous asset to the Outfit, which had recruited him in college and paid his way through Oxford. He was an Arab at heart, but an American do-gooder by instinct. He wanted to rescue the Arabs from their own ignorance and from sword of Christendom. Above all he did not want to become an American T. E. Lawrence, one of a long line of idealists who had been entranced by the Arabs and ended up betraying them. However, he was an idealist. He wanted above all to save the Arabs from one another, which was why he had helped me out in the original Ibn Awad operation. He had understood before anyone else that the old man was insane, and that he had it in his power to bring down the unholy wrath of the West on his innocent people.

  Ben was protective of his sources. Nevertheless I asked the necessary question—but cautiously.

  “Can I have some context for all this?” I asked.

  “You mean names?” Ben said.

  “Not necessarily, Ben. But it’s my skin we’re talking about here.”

  “Same type of sources as usual,” Ben said. “I have an old friend whose grandson is a member of a terrorist cell. My friend used to be a terrorist himself, so like any grandfather who had a wild youth, he worries about the kid, wishes he had listened to him and practiced medicine.”

  “But he skipped med school?”

  “No, he’s an M.D., a surgeon trained in the States. It’s just that his practice is confined to terrorists. He travels constantly, patching up the wounded—kind of like an Outfit medic.”

  “How does he know where to go?”

  “He gets an e-mail from whoever controls him and gets on a plane.”

  “So how does he know anything about Ibn Awad?”

  “Because the last patient he treated, in a desert camp, in Tunisia, was Ibn Awad’s German doctor. He has cancer.”

  Tunisia? Did this mean that Ibn Awad had relocated to the Sahara? Ben Childress didn’t think so.

  “For one thing, our young doctor—call him Mubarak—wasn’t sure he was in Tunisia,” Ben said. “He deduced this from the fact that he was flown in a private plane to an airstrip among sand dunes like the ones in the Tunisian desert. When he got home, he described the German doctor to his grandfather and the old man knew it was Claus Bücher.”

  “How could he be sure?”

  “He couldn’t be sure. But he knew Bücher by sight and behavior. Lots of people did in the old days, before Ibn Awad was allegedly assassinated. At that point, Bücher disappeared. But before that, he was a man about town. There was nothing secret about Bücher’s position in Ibn Awad’s household.”

  Tea arrived on a tray carried by a fair-haired young waitress. Ben engaged her in conversation and in a matter of minutes was in possession of her entire curriculum vitae. She may have begun by thinking that she was talking to a nice old gentleman, but after the first five sentences Ben’s age ceased to matter. He was simply a lean and hungry male with an interested look in his eye. Ben had learned much from the bedu, but asceticism was not one of the lessons. He was famous for the spell he cas
t on women. At cocktail parties I had watched other men’s wives take off their shoes, remove their earrings, shake their hair, dance to inaudible music while merely chatting with Ben in a corner of the room.

  When the waitress left us, reluctantly, I asked Ben why he thought Ibn Awad was moving his hiding place. He finished eating a buttered scone before replying.

  “Because Mubarak was called back to treat Bücher,” Ben said. “This time he flew to Tehran by commercial jet and was given another ride in the private plane. Then a long helicopter ride. He wound up in an entirely different place from the last time.”

  “Also in the desert?”

  “Yep. Different landscape altogether, different feel. But the same tents, which included a fully equipped portable hospital. Operating room, all the latest instruments and gadgets. He says it was a U.S. Army field hospital.”

  “How would he know that?”

  “Maybe he watched M*A*S*H. Anyway, that was his opinion.”

  “Why did he go back?”

  “To report biopsy findings,” Ben said. “The tests confirmed that Bücher had cancer of the pancreas. This is invariably fatal. The patient didn’t accept the diagnosis. They argued in Arabic. This time Bücher told Mubarak who he was. He mentioned his degree from the University of Vienna, the most famous medical school in the world when he was there. He emphasized the fact that he had been personal physician to Ibn Awad for many, many years.”

  “Bücher just blurted that out?”

  “He wanted professional respect. He wasn’t quite ready to stand before the Judgment seat. He wanted Mubarak to do something.”