The Warlord's Son

by Dan Fesperman

  “Try that one,” Skelly shouted, nodding toward the Flying Titanic. Not surprisingly, it had the most remaining seats. They barely squeezed aboard, Najeeb near the front and Skelly in the last row, stuffing half his gear onto an overhead shelf and holding his sleeping bag in his lap, wondering if he’d even be able to pull a notebook from his rear pocket. A pencil jabbed his right thigh, which he tried to remedy until discovering that it belonged to the Japanese man seated next to him. By now the aisle was jammed, the standees clamoring after the whereabouts of colleagues and equipment. Skelly mopped his brow. It must be a hundred degrees. He wondered how hard it would be to pry loose a water bottle from overhead, then remembered Najeeb had their water, twenty rows and a million miles forward.

  “Fucking great,” a familiar voice said. He wrenched left to see Canadian radio reporter Lucy Chatterton across the narrow aisle, peering around the rump of a fat Austrian.

  Wonderful. Chatty Lucy, who would have to be endured for who knew how many hours to come. In ten-minute doses she could be wildly entertaining, with a razor wit and easy warmth. Beyond that her conversations turned into monologues, a maddening buzz of insecurities and exaggerations, frenetic lectures to show off her local knowledge and prolific filing habits, laced with anecdotes to demonstrate that she was every inch the macho adventurer, more so than even the most hardened flak-vested blowhard males.

  Or maybe Skelly’s reaction had more to do with his general discomfiture around female correspondents. One would think he would have gotten used to them by now. There had been a thriving population of women in war zones since the Persian Gulf War in ’91, when they flourished despite Saudi restrictions. Most male reporters had taken to it naturally. Skelly never quite made the leap.

  It wasn’t as if he were Old School, or voted Republican. Nor did he begrudge their chance to be here. Maybe it was just that, at age fiftythree, he’d been born a few years too soon. Or so he told himself, knowing that older colleagues had adjusted fine. Perhaps it was the way some of them tried to turn every journey into a sort of slumber party, sharing secrets of their families and friends until the small hours. Or the knack some had for showing compassion in the field, even grief, but without letting it ruin their copy.

  Lucy wore her politics on her sleeve. She’d spout off one minute about the ennobling integrity of an indigenous culture, then rail away in the next about its treatment of women, as if you could fix the latter without harming the former. Yet her prose was as coldly dispassionate as stainless steel, cutting straight to the heart of a nation’s woes.

  He’d spotted her once outside a sagging refugee tent, taking a family under her wing, doing them favors and bringing treats. Later she’d helped them apply for asylum in North America, shepherding them through the whole horrible system.

  Skelly had allowed himself to cozy up to a local family only once, during a two-month swing through Kosovo. He took chocolate to the children and coffee to the parents, and rounded up university applications abroad for the eldest son. The dad built a wooden toy for one of Skelly’s daughters, and the mom mailed a sweet card in broken English to his second wife. Two months later Skelly returned to find they’d literally been blown to pieces in a mortar attack, all three children dead and both parents crippled and disconsolate. He’d sworn off fraternization forever, and felt like averting his eyes whenever a colleague started in.

  “Looks like we might never leave,” Lucy said.

  “Think we’ll reach the border before dark?” Skelly asked.

  “We better. They kick you out of the Tribal Areas at sundown. And we don’t want to be on the road to Jalalabad after dark.”

  “Pretty lawless, I guess. I heard there’s a war on.”

  “We’d make a nice thermal signature on an F-16’s radar screen. Be too bad to come all this way only to get vaporized by Uncle Sam.”

  “You don’t think Fawad’s got all that worked out?”

  “Good point. Safe passage in exchange for a CIA briefing, maybe?”

  Or a Transgas briefing, Skelly thought, wondering whether Hartley had been exaggerating about all the competing loyalties and connections. He was of two minds about conspiracy theories in places like this. While it was certainly plausible for some key players to juggle several agendas at once, he also believed that competing interests tended to cancel each other out. The key was finding out which agenda, ideology, or secret motive struck the deepest emotional chord. That’s the one that would win every time, long after the money men and gunrunners went home. It was the zealots who had staying power—another reason he’d rather follow Razaq, who carried the unmistakable aura of the true believer. With Fawad one sensed the drab, pale wattage of a ward politician, an opportunist. Even if this expedition pierced the border, it would probably amount to little more than an exotic dateline or two. There would be no grand adventure.

  “Shit,” Lucy said. “Looks like we’re unloading.”

  It was true. Grumbling and groaning with every step, the journalists were spilling back into the street, sodden with perspiration. Fawad was speaking heatedly with a knot of UN men.

  “Will there be an official statement?” Skelly’s Japanese seatmate asked no one in particular. “A press conference?” Skelly shook his head, wondering whether Tokyo ever got any news that didn’t come from a press conference.

  “Who’s your fixer?” It was Lucy again, hovering at his shoulder as they stepped off the bus.

  “I was just looking for him. Najeeb Azam. Beautiful translation, and supposedly well connected. A bit hard to read, though. So far, anyway.”

  “Mine’s great.” (Well, of course he was, Skelly thought. He was Chatty Lucy’s.) “And he speaks Dari, which I think we’ll need, especially the farther inside the country we get.”

  “Here’s Najeeb,” Skelly said. The man looked as hangdog as he had all day.

  Lucy introduced herself, then pulled forward her own fixer, whose name was Javed. Skelly didn’t catch the last name, but he noticed that Najeeb had gone rigid. If the man had been distant before, he was now positively stony, and Javed seemed to be the reason.

  Perhaps the two were journalistic rivals. Javed worked at the International Daily. Otherwise there was little about the man to inspire animosity. If anything he seemed dull, balding and plump with droopy eyes. He looked more like a bureaucrat than a reporter.

  “Javed says he doubts they’ll let us across the border,” Lucy said brightly, testing it on Najeeb. “Even though Fawad seems convinced the skids are greased.”

  “Maybe Javed has better connections,” Najeeb said, not at all warmly.

  “His connections are excellent,” she said, oblivious to the jab. Javed said nothing. He stared at Najeeb, sleepy eyes unblinking, as if daring him to make another crack.

  “Yes, I’m sure they are,” Najeeb said. “Excuse me. I have to make a phone call.”

  “I see what you mean,” Lucy said after a pause. “Not the friendliest guy in the world.”

  Then Javed spoke up. “There are colleagues of mine who are available to serve you, if you are not satisfied with him.” He handed Skelly a business card. Nice offer, Skelly supposed, although he wondered if Javed got a referral fee.

  “Yes, well. Things are working out for now. But thanks.”

  The buses revved their engines and were suddenly on the move, momentarily panicking just about everyone who’d left items on board. Fawad appealed for calm.

  “We will leave in an hour,” he shouted. “Two more buses are coming. We had to make way for the UN. We will reload around the corner.”

  More grumbling and more dark humor. A few in the crowd set off in search of fresh food and water. Skelly pulled out a notebook and began recording the surroundings. If the day was a bust he might still have to file. But what? A scene-setter? A media story? You never knew what the editors might want, so he kept scribbling.

  The delay was an hour, and in the meantime another dozen journalists trickled in. But when the two extra buses final
ly arrived there were just enough seats for everyone. So, at three o’clock, with at least two hours and thirty miles of traffic, checkpoints and hairpin mountain curves ahead, everyone settled in wearily for the ride. Skelly again trooped to the back, this time grabbing a window seat. Najeeb ended up several rows forward. And with a blast of blue exhaust, the Flying Titanic was under way, bound for the Khyber Pass.

  It was a cumbersome convoy. At the front was a truck carrying Fawad and twenty of his men, flags flying. The men were heavily armed, although no one seemed to have noticed them throughout the morning. Next came another truck, similarly fortified, followed by five larger ones loaded to the brim with sacks of flour, lentils, rice and powdered milk. In the spectrum of aid convoys that Skelly had seen over the years, this one was a mere hiccup, carrying barely enough to feed a few hundred people for a week. He suspected that the armed escort carried the more emphatic message—namely, that Fawad intended to be a player in his corner of the new Afghanistan and had the money and the connections for a credible bid. If you ate his groceries you’d be buying into his viability, at least until the lentils ran out.

  Skelly concentrated on the view, which as they approached the outskirts of Peshawar gave way first to the Katchagarhi camp, then to a vast sprawl of bazaars and buses, rough-and-tumble shops that were two stories high, stretching down crowded alleys—toy vendors followed by plumbing equipment, then building supplies, then cigarettes, then tea shops. On and on it went.

  “What’s this place?” he asked, tapping the shoulder of a Brit whose name he couldn’t remember.

  “Smugglers Bazaar. You can even buy hashish and Kalashnikovs, or a grenade launcher. That’s all toward the back, of course. Special escort required. But everything you see comes in illegally. Goes into Afghanistan for about ten minutes, then somebody hauls it back across the border, duty free.”

  “Even with a war on?”

  “Especially with a war on.”

  A mile or so later, having left the bazaar behind, the buses pulled to the shoulder in a cloud of dust. The drivers climbed out, papers in hand. Skelly saw Fawad disappear into a low guardhouse with two of his men. But the greater attraction was less than a hundred yards farther up the highway. Two round towers of white stone topped by battlements sat astride the pavement, connected by a crenellated arch spanning the highway. Trucks passed beneath it in either direction. On the horizon beyond loomed a huge range of brown mountains against a brilliant blue sky. They’d reached the official entrance to the Khyber Pass. Tired as he was from all of the waiting, Skelly was elated, and as the buses got back under way he gawked like a tourist. They passed the Jamrud fort, chunky and red on a stony knoll. Later, to the right on a bare plain, a forlorn Pashtun graveyard—a leafless forest of thin sticks poked into the scrabble, each fluttering with a makeshift cloth banner, most of them tattered by the breeze. There was a lonely stillness to the place, yet with every fluttering breeze the site seemed alive with restless souls.

  The buses began climbing, engines groaning with effort. But the air here was clean and clear, blessed relief from Peshawar, and he gazed up into the high shadows of the brown crags, unable to resist imagining that tribal warriors were concealed there, training their gun barrels on the intruders as they had done for centuries, leathery creased faces beneath dusty turbans just the way Kipling had described them.

  Skelly had been a wanderer for as long as he could remember. Scenery wasn’t the attraction. It was sheer newness that drew him. New languages, new villages, new rail routes and forests and hillsides—a craving that had begun in his earliest years. He remembered a long bicycle ride at age ten, a sense of shattering old boundaries and restrictions as he pedaled hard, then harder, down blocks he’d never traveled. It had probably been the blandest sort of suburbia, but even the unfamiliar street names had charged him up, and when he’d gotten home he had furtively pulled a city map from a drawer of his father’s desk to retrace the journey, feeling like a junior Marco Polo.

  His mother had tried to curb his tendencies, especially after she caught him cycling one day through a neighborhood she never drove through without locking the doors and rolling up the windows. It reminded him of how Janine had become lately, staying ever closer to home. She’d strenuously opposed this latest trip—God, he really should have phoned her by now. But that was the trouble with marriage, or had been so far anyway. Every wife eventually turned into his mother, trying to rein him in, ordering him home this instant. Which of course only made him stay out longer, way past bedtime—for so many months on two occasions that he found himself attracted to some other woman altogether. Both had become new Mrs. Skellys, and now he wasn’t sure what terrified him more—the prospect he might repeat the pattern yet again, or that he might have finally become so old and undesirable that no woman would ever again offer him the chance.

  The bus paused briefly on a hairpin turn, seeming to lurch outward across the yawning canyon. They had reached the literal high point of the ride, and the views were breathtaking. In valleys and glens he saw small tribal villages along muddy streams, the larger houses surrounded by high stone walls and watchtowers. Smuggler barons, he supposed. Or opium lords. He wondered if any of these places were Najeeb’s old haunts, and he sought out his fixer in the forward rows, spotting the black hair of his head as it bobbed with the motion of the bus. But what was this? Najeeb was standing now, inching into the aisle and stepping toward the front, gripping a seat for balance, then leaning low to speak with someone across the aisle. But who?

  It was Javed, Chatty Lucy’s fixer. So they did know each other, then. Najeeb had turned so his face was in profile, and he wore the glowering expression he’d shown earlier to Javed. It was the most emotion Skelly had yet seen in the man, and Skelly was entranced. Not that he wanted to bond with Najeeb. Chatty Lucy probably knew the name of all Javed’s children by now and had already bought them treats. Perhaps Skelly should have her sit next to Najeeb for a while, to pry out all his secrets.

  Najeeb was leaning lower now, and both men were speaking rapidly. He saw that Chatty Lucy was watching, too. Skelly thought he heard a heated burst of words in Urdu over the volume of the grinding gears.

  “Wonder what that’s all about,” Skelly proffered.

  “An argument?” Lucy suggested.

  “Looks that way. Any guesses why?”

  Lucy shrugged. She seemed nervous about something, almost embarrassed.

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s your fixer.” She paused dramatically. “Javed says he’s ISI.” Skelly felt his stomach drop. “Najeeb?”

  She nodded, seeming to make an effort not to gloat.

  “And what’s he base that on?” Tone rising defensively. Because what clearer verdict could there be for his own poor judgment than being duped by some government snoop?

  “He didn’t say. But he sounded pretty sure. Says that a few of them get jobs at the local papers, then work as fixers. It’s how they keep tabs on us.”

  It would certainly explain the guarded attitude, and all the furtive phone calls.

  “Great. Well, hell. I guess if the Times got sucked in, then I shouldn’t feel too bad.”

  “You should fire him. Get a new one. I’d be happy to share Javed today, if you want. If we get across you can always hire a local. Javed has friends in Jalalabad.”

  Just what he needed, wasting time to find another fixer while everyone else was reporting and filing. Maybe Janine was right. His time for this sort of thing was past.

  “Thanks. But I might as well use him while he’s here. There won’t be much for him to do today anyway, at this rate. Besides, maybe it isn’t true.”

  Lucy shook her head. “Javed knows his stuff.” (Translation: And so do I.) “And I don’t think anyone on the bus wants an ISI man around, listening to our interviews, tracking our movements. You need to get rid of him.”

  Others were beginning to eavesdrop. Skelly was furious.

  “Look. Let me speak to him f
irst. Preferably before you tell the known world.”

  She nodded grudgingly, making it clear the agreement was limited. By tomorrow she’d be telling everyone. By now Najeeb had returned to his seat, the back of his head unreadable, and when Skelly turned to look out the window again the romance of the place was gone. Now it was only brown hills and starving peasants—drought, war and famine, in all their sameness. He crossed his arms, angry at Najeeb, at himself and of course at Chatty Lucy. His last great chance for making a splash, and it was falling apart.

  Just perfect, he thought, and as the bus rolled deeper into the pass he couldn’t help but recall the long roster of foreigners who had come to grief here through similar misjudgments. Dead conquerors, dead explorers and now one dead career.

  Just bloody fucking perfect.

  CHAPTER TEN

  NAJEEB STARED STRAIGHT AHEAD, rigid with anger, as the bus rounded a curve. He glanced across the aisle, but the Clerk—Najeeb refused to think of him as Javed, too jolly a name for such a cold-blooded creature—was gazing out the window, seemingly bored.

  Moments ago Najeeb had finally summoned the nerve to confront him, having brooded ever since the Canadian woman introduced them. Already irritable and frantic over Daliya’s whereabouts, he had decided to unburden himself even if every translator on board overheard him. At least the loudness of the bus would provide some cover. So he stepped into the aisle and got straight to the point.

  “Why are you here?” he demanded, grabbing a seat back for balance as the bus lurched. The Clerk snapped to attention.

  “I might ask you the same. Aren’t you supposed to be with Razaq? You won’t win any points reporting on this bunch.”

  “But why are you here?”

  “None of your business. And I can’t believe you think it is.”

  “What have you done with Daliya? Where is she?”

  The Clerk frowned. “Who the hell is Daliya? I’m working for Lucy.”