Private Wars
Page 31
Compounding this infamy came another incident, this time at the Jala-i-Qanghi prison on 25 November 2001, where taleban and al-Qaeda fighters were being held by members of the Northern Alliance. What has been alternatively described as both an uprising or a riot broke out, and the prisoners engaged in a pitched battle with their captors, one that lasted several days until U.S. and U.K. Special Forces arrived on scene and brought with them air strikes that resulted in the deaths of over four hundred. Among the Northern Alliance forces had been two CIA officers. One of them, Johnny Michael Spann, was killed in the riot.
Chace remembered that fact especially, because it was the first time that the CIA had disclosed to the media the death in the line of duty of one of its officers. There was still some question as to whether the Company had actually wanted that information disclosed, or if it was released as the result of an overzealous White House Press Secretary. Spann became a martyr, the first American casualty of the War in Afghanistan. Apparently, there was now a memorial marker at the site of the prison, commending his soul to God.
These were the things Chace knew about Mazar-i-Sharif, the things she remembered about the city as she stepped off the RAF Tristar transport and onto the airport tarmac. The sun was already up, as was the temperature, yesterday’s heat rising from the concrete beneath her feet. She heard Lankford cursing softly behind her as he fumbled for his sunglasses.
Mazar-i-Sharif, Chace thought. An appropriate place to come for a murder.
She’d traveled in the Islamic world enough to dress for it, with long sleeves and long pants, and a tan ball cap she could tuck her hair into to preserve her modesty. There were places where it wouldn’t have been enough, and God knew that before the taleban had gone, Afghanistan had been one of them.
Just before 9/11, there’d been a job to come up in the south, in Kabul. Operation: Morningstar, and Crocker had refused to send Chace, dispatching instead Wallace and Kittering. Chace had been bitter about it at the time, but Crocker had been right; she’d have been useless on the ground then, a woman surrounded by the taleban.
It struck her as vaguely ironic that here she was now, herself Minder One as Wallace had been then, with Lankford, Minder Three as Kittering was at the time. Even the operation names—Morningstar and Sundown—seemed to parallel one another. She wondered if there was a significance in that, some subtle computer error back at Vauxhall Cross that needed to tie stellar phenomena and time of day with the word “Afghanistan.”
With Lankford beside her, Chace fell in with the cluster of personnel moving off the airfield, toward the collection of prefab buildings and huts assembled in support of the military’s operations. Mission Planning had arranged cover for them as a BBC team, with the MOD in on it, of course, just to make their entry into the country that much easier. They went through without a hitch, the RAF Staff Sergeant who reviewed their papers finding them both appropriately permissioned and permitted.
“First time to Mazar-i?” he asked as he handed Chace’s passport back.
“Yes, it is.”
“You’ve arranged for a guide?”
She looked accusingly at Lankford, who said, with convincing defensiveness, “I tried, I did, but everyone I contacted fell through on us.”
Chace snorted, looked back to the sergeant, leaning forward slightly over his desk. “Do you think you could recommend someone? Or someplace to hire someone, perhaps?”
She watched the man struggle, trying to decide if he would focus on her chest or her face. Her chest won.
“If you’ll wait a moment, miss, I’ll see what I can do.” He raised his gaze, earnest and helpful.
Chace gave him her friendliest smile. “I’d be very grateful.”
The sergeant mumbled something unintelligible, then rose from his desk and headed around the corner, calling for one of the other soldiers. Chace glanced to Lankford, saw that he was looking at her, grinning.
“Wish that trick would work for me,” he said.
“Try a tighter shirt,” Chace suggested.
An hour and twenty minutes later they had not only a guide but a guide with a car, or more precisely, a taxi and its driver. They negotiated a fee of sixty pounds per day with a long-faced Pathan named Faqir, whose English was weak but “improving,” and whose French was not quite as good. The first thing Faqir did was drive them to his home, to meet his family, and offer them dinner. There were seven, including Faqir, living beneath one roof in a modest but well-kept new house. As Chace stepped out of her boots, she found herself wondering how much of a windfall the British troops in the region had been for Faqir.
They accepted the hospitality offered them graciously, mindful of where they were and of the customs of the land, sitting around a low table with Faqir’s wife, his younger brother, his father, and his three children, two boys and a girl. Chace let Lankford do most of the talking, remaining modestly silent, and from Faqir they got what was, without a doubt, a better briefing on the lay of the land than they had received in the Ops Room. She used the camera in her photo bag to take pictures, with permission first, of course, trying to get used to carrying the thing and using the bag. In it she had several rolls of film, as well as a loaded Walther P99 with two spare magazines.
The conversation was lively, Faqir and his brother, Karim, doing most of the talking. Faqir’s eldest son was missing his left arm below the elbow, replaced with a prosthesis that didn’t quite fit. Faqir explained that the boy had lost the arm during the Northern Alliance assault on the city post-9/11. The prosthesis had been courtesy of the British, though clearly the boy needed a new one.
Lankford used English and French alternately to eke out more and more information, little by little, until finally, as the meal was finished, he slid up to the name Ahmad Mohammad Kostum and gave it a nudge into the open.
“Have you heard of him? An Agence France Presse team spoke with him a month or so ago, and said he was quite friendly.”
Faqir and Karim exchanged hasty words.
“I know this man,” Faqir told Lankford. “But he is not . . . not . . . très amiable? Yes?”
“Perhaps it was someone else, then. The one we’re looking for, he’s not Pathan, but Uzbek.”
“No, that is Kostum.”
“We’re hoping to interview him.”
Faqir ran his fingers through his beard, pulling at it, apparently deep in thought. “Kostum is south, Samangan. Up in the mountain, Kargana, I think. Far away. Very dangerous to travel there.”
“Hmm,” Chace said. “Perhaps we should hire some guards?”
Faqir looked at her and smiled, putting an arm around Karim’s shoulder. “My brother would make excellent guard.”
“When can we leave?” Lankford asked.
“Oh, tomorrow, in’shallah,” Faqir replied almost absently. “Tomorrow, yes. You can stay here, dormez. Tonight. Please stay with us here.”
The table was cleared, leaving Chace and Lankford alone. Outside, they heard a muezzin call from one of the nearby mosques for the last prayers of the day.
“What do you reckon?” Lankford asked her.
“He knows where he is,” Chace said. “Kostum isn’t trying to hide. Few of these warlords do. It’s just a matter of finding someone who can take us to him. Either Faqir can, or Faqir knows how to reach someone who can.”
“He’s just figuring how much to charge us, then.”
“That, and how dangerous the trip is. There’s still a lot of banditry about. Weighing his options.”
“As long as they’re not planning on robbing us.”
“The least of our worries, I should think,” Chace said.
Chace slept in the daughter’s room that night. The girl was perhaps eleven years old, maybe twelve, and very shy. When Chace removed her ball cap, she made friends with her by leaning forward and letting the girl touch her hair.
The next morning she woke early, the daughter still asleep, and took the momentary privacy to open the camera bag and retrieve the Walt
her. She tucked the weapon into her pants, again at her waist, covering the butt with her shirt, then ventured out to find that Lankford, Faqir, and Karim were already up and waiting for her. They shared a quick breakfast, dried fruit and goat cheese, then made their way out to Faqir’s cab, which was in actuality a rather sad and beaten Jeep Cherokee, dented and bruised by use. Karim and Faqir both carried Kalashnikovs, and Karim brandished his for their benefit, demonstrating his effectiveness as a bodyguard, before they climbed into the vehicle and set off.
They drove out of Mazar-i-Sharif, heading south on a freshly repaired road that served them well for fifteen kilometers before beginning a steady deterioration that ended some thirty kilometers after it began. They passed herds of goat and sheep, watched over by shepherds with Kalashnikovs dangling from straps at their shoulders. The lowlands surrounding Mazar-i-Sharif fell away behind them, and they began to climb. The greenery disappeared and the heat intensified, and the earth around them grew hard and yellow, as if baked one too many times. Chace supposed that it had been, at that.
Faqir switched over to four-wheel drive, and they began a torturous series of switchbacks, alternately climbing and falling, so Chace felt her teeth rattling in her skull. They passed clusters of houses, seemingly built of the same stone as the mountains. Once, Chace looked out her window into a valley, saw a shock of green below, dotted with buds of red and pink, small figures moving among the poppies, collecting the opium from the still-closed buds. A chatter of Kalashnikov fire rose up at them, warning them to mind their own business and move on.
The mountains began to rise around them, and beside Faqir in the front passenger seat, Karim fingered his own rifle, hunching forward, peering out the windows on all sides, leery of an ambush. Beside her, Lankford mirrored the action, and she was tempted to follow suit, but then saw no point in it. This was what Afghanistan was known for, this terrain, this unforgiving land, with its thousands upon thousands of places to hide, cliffs and ravines and canyons. If there was an ambush coming, they wouldn’t see it until it was upon them.
After four and a half hours and perhaps eighty-odd kilometers of travel, the road ran out on them altogether. Faqir slowed, exchanging words with his brother, and beside her, Lankford leaned in to whisper in her ear.
“There’re tracks,” he said. “You see them?”
“Problem is telling how recent they are.”
“Too right.”
The Jeep stopped abruptly, and Chace looked up to see both Faqir and Karim raising their hands. Twenty feet ahead, four men had emerged from the boulders, all with their Kalashnikovs pointed at the car. All wore white knit prayer caps to cover their heads, some with vests over their heavy shirts, some with robes. For a moment, Chace feared they’d wandered into an ambush by taleban remnants, but their garb was wrong, for lack of a better word, not devout enough, or at least she hoped so.
One of the men, his beard beginning to show gray, shouted at them, and Faqir and Karim opened their doors slowly, and Chace and Lankford followed suit. Chace caught Lankford’s eye as they moved to their own doors, shook her head slightly, warning him to keep off his weapon.
Fariq and the graybeard were speaking, the remaining three watching them, their weapons still leveled, but casually now, as if they’d quite forgotten they were doing it. That Karim hadn’t been asked or ordered to drop his own gun gave Chace hope they were on the right track, and then she heard the name “Kostum” in the litany of Pashto spoken between them. Fariq gestured back in her direction with his right hand, then at Lankford.
“You want to speak to Kostum?” the graybeard asked Lankford. “For BBC?”
“That’s right,” Lankford said.
There was more conversation in Pashto, this time between Fariq, the graybeard, and two of the others. Finally the graybeard pointed to one of the gunmen, a younger one that Chace couldn’t imagine as older than eighteen. The young man set off nimbly, up the trail, disappearing behind the boulders almost immediately.
Fariq looked at Chace, then at Lankford, saying, “We are waiting now.”
“Will it be long?” Lankford asked.
Fariq shrugged, and the graybeard asked a question, then laughed at Fariq’s response. The tension abated somewhat, muzzles dipping lower. Chace leaned against the Jeep, looking around, then down, examining the tire tracks in the dust. There’d been enough traffic along the path to make discerning different sets difficult, but at a guess, she had to think that at least four or five different vehicles had come this way fairly recently.
The heat had climbed past uncomfortable to sweltering, and she watched as Lankford removed his hat long enough to wipe the sweat from his brow. Minder Three was as fair-skinned as she, almost as tall, with straight black hair that added to his pallor. She thought he was already turning pink, and wondered if she was doing the same.
A pebble broke loose from above them, bounced down the mountainside, and the graybeard and the others with him all turned, bringing their rifles up, only to see the young man they’d dispatched as a messenger returning. He popped out from behind the rocks higher on the ridge, calling down to them and raising his arm, and immediately, Chace saw both Fariq and Karim relax.
“You can go with them,” Fariq said, addressing both her and Lankford. “We will go back now, before it is dark.”
“You’re leaving us with them?” Chace asked.
“Kostum sees you,” Fariq said. “Safe.”
He and his brother climbed back into the Jeep, starting the car once more.
The graybeard approached them, speaking and smiling at her, the others following, then coming around to get behind them. The graybeard indicated a direction, roughly the way the younger man had gone, then began leading the way.
With no other choice, Chace and Lankford followed.
They walked for another two and a half hours, and Chace suspected that the graybeard was setting an easy pace for their benefit, or more precisely, for hers. The narrow trail weaved around the rocks and scrub, summiting and then again descending. She wondered how the messenger had traveled the distance so quickly, then realized that he couldn’t have, that he must have used a radio or a satellite phone instead.
Either that or this was one hell of a setup, and she and Lankford were about to find themselves truly in the middle of nowhere, in the dead wild on the western edges of the Hindu Kush mountains. If they were going to be done here, no one would ever find their bodies.
She doubted that was how this would end up—at least, not until journey’s end. The graybeard had promised them safety, and she had to take him at his word. Al-Qaeda or Coalition, it didn’t matter who; once the promise was made, it was kept until death.
Finally they descended to a ravine, following a narrow trail midway along its side until it opened to a canyon floor. Below, a walled stronghold—it was the only way Chace could think to describe it—rested at the bottom of the way, built back against the side of the mountain, almost built into it, in fact. A cluster of trees grew in the yard, their leaves shockingly green against the deadened tan, and beyond that, in the shade cast by the mountainside, a large, almost sprawling house. A minaret rose up from the corner of the wall, and Chace could see movement inside, a man with an RPG launcher on guard.
Along the sides of the canyon, Chace saw more guard emplacements, more of the vested and robed men, sitting or standing in what little shade they could find, rifles to hand. A mortar had been positioned high on the south side, far enough away that Chace couldn’t readily identify the make and model, but it was a safe bet it had been recovered from the Soviet occupation. Chace didn’t doubt the weapon was in working order, though she wondered where Kostum found the rounds for it.
They reached the canyon’s bottom, approached the gates at the wall. The earth down here was hard-packed, and Chace could make out tire tracks, the signs of heavy vehicles that had traveled along the canyon floor. She hadn’t seen a garage on their descent, and wondered where the vehicles were stored.
“They’re going to search us,” Chace said. “Don’t fuss.”
“We’re heavy.”
“I know. Don’t fuss.”
Lankford nodded, his lips tightening, and then they had reached the gates. The graybeard called out in Pashto, and a response came back from behind the wall, and the man laughed, rested his Kalashnikov against the gate, and turned back to face them. He spoke pleasantly as he approached, holding out his hand, gesturing for the bags they were carrying on their shoulders.
Chace handed hers over, watched as Lankford did the same. The graybeard was joined by the others who had accompanied them, one of the others taking Chace’s bag from him. For a moment, everyone’s attention was on the bags, and Chace took the opportunity to smooth the front of her shirt, and in so doing, to shove the Walther fully down the front of her pants. It was uncomfortable but not intolerable, and she feigned shifting impatiently, trying to move the gun into a more concealed position.
The graybeard laughed, brought out the pistol Lankford was carrying, a Browning, showing it to him. Lankford shrugged, and the graybeard laughed again, then spoke to the man who’d been helping him. The man approached Lankford, clearly apologetic, and gestured for him to raise his hands. Chace watched as Lankford did so, submitting to the search. It was brief and efficient, but Chace noticed that the searcher avoided checking Lankford’s crotch too carefully.