Chaos in Kabul

by Gérard de Villiers

  After two days of inaction and anxiety, he was feeling as if he’d been exiled to another planet. Morning and evening, a figure in a blue burqa came in and bustled about in the kitchen. In the morning she made him tea and chapatis with honey and ghee, and sometimes a kind of yogurt.

  In the evening it was palau—spiced rice with chunks of lamb—or flat chelow kebab, served with rice and fruit.

  The woman never spoke to him; besides, she almost certainly didn’t know English. Meanwhile, Kotak’s nephew Nadir hadn’t given any sign of life.

  Malko was cut off from the world. The house didn’t have a radio or TV, of course. He was feeling bored, and there was nothing he could do about it. He was safe, and the NDS agents must be wondering where he’d disappeared to. But he was getting anxious to leave Kabul, dangerous though that might be.

  To pass the time, he daydreamed.

  Suddenly his cell phone rang, and he jumped.

  It hadn’t rung in the last two days, and when he looked at the screen, his heart began to pound: Alexandra’s number!

  He was so flabbergasted, he let the phone ring and ring.

  Alexandra never called him when he was on assignment. It was an absolute rule.

  Finally he roused himself and grabbed the phone. “Putzi?”

  The connection wasn’t very clear, but through the static he heard a man’s voice. “Malko?”

  “That’s me. Who are you?”

  “We’ve been worried,” said the unknown man. “We haven’t heard from you.”

  Malko immediately understood: the CIA had routed the call through Alexandra’s cell phone or was using her number. In a way, it cheered him; he hadn’t been completely abandoned.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Do you plan to come home soon?” the man asked in a level tone. “Where are you?”

  “I’m still in Kabul, but not at the same place.”

  He didn’t want to say more on the phone. There was a long silence on the other end; then the man ended the conversation:

  “Very well. I’ll call you again.”

  The message was clear: Malko was not to phone, either Langley or the White House.

  He gazed at his now-silent phone. He would have loved to talk to Alexandra, but the call was a trick that she surely didn’t know about. Her number was in his CIA personnel file, and they must have used it without her knowledge.

  Malko stretched out on the bed and let his mind wander. People at the CIA were worried about him, but probably more worried about themselves. On the loose in Kabul, Malko was a live hand grenade: the link between the United States and the attempt on President Karzai. If he hadn’t answered, his CIA backers would probably be resting easier, but when he saw Alexandra’s number, he couldn’t resist.

  Hearing footsteps downstairs, he figured the blue burqa was back. But then the steps creaked on the wooden staircase, and Kotak’s nephew Nadir appeared. His arms were full of presents, which he tossed onto the bed: a new suit of Afghan clothes, heavy boots, and a long brown coat.

  “We are leaving tomorrow morning at six!” he announced. “We are going to Ghazni, the first stage in your trip.” This was a town about ninety miles south of Kabul, a Taliban stronghold.

  “Won’t it be risky, with the checkpoints?”

  “No,” said the nephew with a slight smile. “Taxis drive that route all the time, and the soldiers at the checkpoints do not bother them. With your clothes and turban, they will not even realize you are a foreigner, and you will not be noticed. In Ghazni you will be taken in by a cousin who will handle the rest of your voyage.”

  John Mulligan stared at the encrypted message that Clayton Luger had just sent him. So Malko was alive and still in Kabul! The national security advisor felt reassured, because he liked Malko, but also anxious. How would he survive in the Afghan capital? Also, what would happen if he were captured?

  Parviz Bamyan still hadn’t located Malko Linge, and Nelson Berry was out of reach. There was no question of going after him in Logar Province, and interrogating his staff hadn’t produced anything. Maureen Kieffer was busy at her workshop, where surveillance continued. And word had come back from the CIA. The station claimed it had had no contact with Malko. It was as if he’d vanished into thin air.

  Hunkered down in his palace, President Karzai exploded when he learned that the investigation wasn’t making any progress. On his orders, security measures on every road out of town were reinforced, and NDS informers constantly patrolled the few restaurants and guesthouses frequented by expats.

  Without result.

  Nor did Bamyan know quite what to make of a piece of new information from the Kabul police. The day after the assassination attempt, a man named Sangi Guruk had been shot at home along with his two wives and one of his children. No one had seen or heard anything. The police figured the killer must have used a gun with a silencer.

  Guruk had been in charge of the palace garage and vehicles, and whoever shot at the president’s Mercedes must have had information about his motorcade. The murdered Guruk could have tipped the person off, which was probably why he’d been killed.

  By whom?

  The NDS chief couldn’t imagine Linge venturing out to Guruk’s neighborhood, so it must have been whoever had fired at the president.

  The party was in full swing.

  There were only men in Baber Khan Sahel’s house, along with a covey of adolescent singing and dancing boys. Dressed like women, with bright clothes and sequined bracelets at their wrists and ankles, they swayed to the rhythms of a tambourine trio, entertaining the lord of the manor and his guests.

  Baber Khan Sahel was the biggest drug lord in Pul-i-Alam, the capital of Logar Province, and he had a good reason for throwing this party. He had just bought a large share of the poppy crop and was reselling it to traffickers. Their laboratories were located to the south, along the Pakistani border, as the chemicals needed to turn poppy into heroin came from Pakistan. Because of the rapacity of the participants, these transactions occasionally turned violent.

  So Baber Khan Sahel hired Nelson Berry to make sure everything went smoothly. Berry and his partners, Rufus and Willie, were professionals, in no danger of being turned or intimidated, and they had enough firepower to keep even the most vicious traffickers in line. The guests included two representatives of the local Taliban, which levied a tax on the lucrative trade.

  Outside, the house was guarded by Baber Khan Sahel’s sentinels, and no one would have thought to disturb this family get-together.

  In the euphoria, the master of the house gave an order and the young dancers obediently stepped onto a large table to continue dancing to the sound of the tambourines.

  One of the boys started gyrating in front of Berry, who was leaning on a bench strewn with cushions. He immediately started clapping in time with the young dancer’s undulations. Flattered at having caught this khareji’s attention, the boy thrust out his hip and clicked his ring cymbals. His eyes made up with kohl, he had slender arms and legs and moved with a kind of feminine grace. In Afghanistan it was said that women were for making babies, but boys were for pleasure.

  The eyes of the guests were beginning to glisten. Though Berry was the only person drinking alcohol—and discreetly, at that—the men sitting around the table didn’t hide their mounting excitement.

  Somewhat reluctantly, the local Taliban representatives quietly left the party.

  The boy was now dancing for Berry alone, swinging his hips like a woman, thrusting his stomach out, and giving the South African ever more explicit glances.

  In turn, Berry could feel his senses coming alive. It was almost impossible to find an available woman in Afghanistan, but there were any number of accommodating, handsome young boys. It wasn’t politically correct to say so, but parties like this one happened in every village, sometimes organized by the local mullah. Raping a woman was a crime punishable by death, but sodomizing a teenager was a minor sin. After all, it didn’t have any consequen
ces.

  On a final note, the three musicians finished playing.

  A hubbub followed.

  Some of the guests left, for various reasons. Others hastened to help the young dancers down from their improvised stage. Baber Khan Sahel didn’t have to move. The most heavily made-up boy gracefully jumped to the floor and came to kneel in front of him. The dancer who had excited Berry did the same, curling up at the South African’s feet while giving him a seductive look, well aware of what would happen next.

  Soon every turbaned, bearded guest had his boy. The only light in the room came from thick, smoky tallow candles.

  Berry and the young dancer exchanged a long look. They didn’t need to speak. The South African calmly stood and took the boy by the hand, leading him to the bedroom Baber Khan Sahel had provided. It was pretty basic, furnished only with a sharpoi bed with a blanket, clothes hooks on the wall, and a copper tray on a tripod. The dancing boy went to sit cross-legged on the bed.

  Berry left him for a few moments to open the shutter and look out at his SUV parked in the courtyard. Darius had rigged a bed in the back and was asleep, guarding a leather bag with half a million dollars that no one else knew about.

  Which was just as well.

  The South African closed the shutter and stretched out on the bed. He didn’t have long to wait.

  The boy crawled over and slipped a small hand into Berry’s open shirt, stroking his chest and nipples with feminine delicacy.

  Berry happily closed his eyes and started thinking hard about Elena, one of the Russian waitresses at the Boccaccio who sometimes sold her charms to him.

  When it was over, Berry gave a sigh of delight.

  All in all, it was just as good as with Elena.

  Drained and happy, he took a thousand-afghani bill from his trousers and stuffed it into the boy’s hand.

  “Now, get out!” he said in Dari.

  The young dancer didn’t need to be told twice. Clutching his clothes in one hand and the money in the other, he silently disappeared.

  They hadn’t said a word to each other, but what would have been the point? They came from two different worlds.

  When he was alone, Berry became thoughtful. The glow of pleasure gradually faded as black clouds of anxiety moved in. He couldn’t stay in Logar Province forever. Eventually he would have to go back to Kabul—a Kabul where Hamid Karzai was still president and where Berry might well be a suspect. He knew the Afghans. Even without any proof, they could still stick him in an NDS cell.

  He wondered what had happened to Malko. If he had fallen into the hands of the NDS, Berry’s future was in serious jeopardy.

  Before he realized it, he was asleep.

  It was five thirty in the morning, and Malko was finishing getting dressed. He put the shalwar kameez on over his Western clothes, keeping the ankle holster and pistol. Wearing a turban, he wouldn’t attract any attention. Many Afghans were light skinned.

  He heard the door downstairs open, then footsteps on the staircase. Nadir came in, gave Malko a quick once-over, and smiled approvingly.

  “That is perfect,” he said. “No one will notice you sitting in the back of the taxi. I will take care of everything.”

  Malko had some tea and a chapati, then followed Nadir outside. An old Corolla was parked nearby, with a young bearded man at the wheel. Malko and Nadir got in the back. Emerging onto a wide, potholed avenue, they reached the outskirts of Kabul in about half an hour.

  The driver pulled into a big Ensalf service station on their right. Besides the cars at the pumps, some twenty blue and yellow taxis were parked around the gas station.

  “They all go to Ghazni,” Nadir announced. “Follow me.”

  One of the drivers got out and gave Nadir a hug. The men exchanged a few words, and Nadir said, “This is one of my cousins. We will go in his taxi.”

  Three minutes later, they were heading for the mountains. The car’s seats sagged and its shocks were shot, but it rode well. They constantly passed overloaded trucks and minibuses. Malko was starting to relax when they reached the first curves leading up to the pass.

  “Aren’t there any checkpoints?” he asked.

  They were just then passing a roadblock stopping cars bound for Kabul.

  “Not in this direction,” said Nadir. “Anyway, they know my cousin, and they do not bother him.”

  A layer of fog forced the taxi to slow to twenty miles an hour. Reaching the pass, they drove by a long military barrier that featured bundled-up soldiers, an old Russian armored personnel carrier, and a few coils of barbed wire.

  Ahead, the soldiers had stopped a minibus, making its passengers get out and searching them.

  When Malko and Nadir’s taxi reached the chicane, their driver said a few words to the soldier on duty. He waved them through, and they started down from the pass. Malko heaved a mental sigh of relief. He was out of Kabul!

  The Taliban methods were working.

  “There are no more checkpoints before Ghazni,” said Nadir.

  Malko dozed as the monotonous landscape rolled by. They pulled off the bumpy highway into a truck stop for tea and biscuits, then went on. Ghazni was much lower than Kabul, and the temperature gradually rose.

  “We will be there in twenty minutes,” announced Nadir.

  Suddenly their driver slammed on the brakes. Leaning forward, Malko saw a dozen men standing in the middle of the highway. At first, he thought it was an accident but then realized that the men were carrying AK-47s; one had an RPG-7 on his shoulder. They had set up an improvised roadblock and were checking the cars.

  They were probably Taliban.

  In spite of having Mullah Kotak’s nephew with him, Malko felt an unpleasant shiver run down his spine.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “It is just a Taliban roadblock,” said Nadir, who didn’t seem especially concerned.

  They were now moving at walking pace. Cars were being stopped for a few moments, then allowed to drive on. When their turn came, the taxi driver rolled his window down to speak with a fierce-looking bearded man who was checking the cars. They exchanged a few words, and the man put his head inside the car. He immediately jerked back and started screaming at the driver. Malko caught just one word: “khareji!”

  In seconds, their taxi was surrounded by a dozen hostile, bearded men who made them pull to the side of the road. Nadir went over and had a tense conversation with their leader.

  The men were toothless, unkempt, and filthy and had AK-47 magazines jammed into their pockets. They were all glaring menacingly at Malko.

  “What the hell is going on?” he asked.

  “Something stupid happened,” said Nadir. “An Australian ISAF patrol shot two boys from the village, mistaking them for Taliban. These are their cousins and their friends. They want revenge. But do not be afraid. I told them who I was and said that you are under my protection, in the name of pashtunwali”—the Pashtun hospitality code. “But they are very angry and we have to talk with them.”

  Just then, shouts arose nearby. Armed villagers were dragging a man out of his car and beating him with their rifles while yelling and swearing. His hands in the air, their unfortunate victim tried to explain himself.

  Suddenly a bearded man with bulging eyes, more agitated than the others, burst from the crowd and screamed at the man at length. Then, without warning, he raised his AK-47 and fired a burst full in the man’s face, tearing off his lower jaw. He fell to the ground in a shower of blood. The shooter then calmly finished him off with a short burst to the chest.

  Nadir had turned pale. To Malko, he said, “He was an Afghan National Army officer in civilian clothes. They say he was an accomplice of the coalition.”

  Several of the men kicked the body into the roadside ditch. Malko was starting to feel very uneasy. Even without alcohol, these villagers were as worked up as a bunch of angry drunks.

  Now the man with bulging eyes was standing in front of Malko and yelling at him in Pashto.
Nadir immediately intervened. Speaking quietly, he managed to calm him somewhat. But suddenly the man turned on Nadir, seeming even angrier than before. The young man was as pale as death, but he stepped in when the man tried to haul Malko aside. A new discussion followed. Nadir again calmed things down, but he turned to Malko. “They say you are a spy.”

  Better and better, thought Malko.

  Hunched behind the steering wheel, their driver tried to make himself inconspicuous as he watched the scene unfold. Suddenly a tall old man in a turban cut through the crowd, a Lee-Enfield rifle on his shoulder. His face was gaunt, and a few snaggled teeth showed in his bushy beard.

  Putting his hand on his heart, Nadir greeted the old man at length and started a conversation in a much quieter tone. But Malko could see that Kotak’s nephew was getting upset.

  “What’s going on?” he asked again.

  “This is the village chief,” Nadir explained. “He is in charge. He has decided to hold a shura with the elders to decide your fate. The villagers are very upset. Two innocent boys have died.”

  “My fate? What does he mean by that?”

  They were now surrounded by armed men who were looking at Malko and speaking more and more angrily.

  “What are they saying?”

  “Some of them want to let you go in the name of pashtunwali,” said Nadir. “Some of them want to kidnap you and sell you to the Taliban. And others want revenge for the blood of the two young boys shot by the Australians.”

  “How?”

  “By killing you.”

  At first, Malko experienced an odd feeling of detachment. It took him a few seconds to fully realize that it was his life they were talking about. He was somewhere in the wilds of Afghanistan, in a place he couldn’t name, among people he couldn’t communicate with and who lived in another world.

  But their logic was implacable; two boys from their village had been killed, so they would take revenge by killing a foreigner. It just happened that the foreigner was Malko, who had nothing to do with the blunder by the Australian soldiers.