The Prince of Bagram Prison (21 page)

“No, Jamal,” Kat corrected him. “I said you might go to America. And you still might. It's just that Madrid is where you're needed now.”

“I want to stay here,” Jamal insisted. He looked as if he was about to cry.

“You can't stay here forever,” Kat said. “You know that. None of us can. In another few months I'll be leaving myself.”

Jamal brightened, though whether his change of mood was genuine or for her benefit Kat could not be sure. The latter, she thought, knowing his desperation to please her. “And later I will go to America?”

“Yes.” What was she supposed to say? “Yes, later.”

K
AT HAD KNOWN
that she was lying when she told Jamal she would be back in the morning to see him off, but she made the promise anyway. She convinced herself it wasn't cowardice that motivated her deception but concern, wanting the boy to get a good night's sleep before a long day of traveling. But the truth was that she couldn't bring herself to be there when Kurtz came for him, and neither could she find the courage to tell Jamal.

She'd taken up a collection in the ICE, netting nearly a hundred dollars in pocket money and a hefty supply of junk food. To this she added her own donation and, in a sacrifice that she knew was provoked entirely by guilt, her iPod. All of this she entrusted to one of the night-duty MPs, with the instructions that Jamal be given it in the morning.

It was late when Kat finally left the facility, nearly midnight, and she found herself heading down Disney Drive toward the British camp. She and Colin hadn't planned to meet, but she knew that she couldn't go back to her tent without some kind of consolation.

It was nearly a mile to the far end of the runway, and Kat was shivering by the time she reached the British camp, her toes numb in her boots, her cheeks pinched and red. June, Kat thought, and she could see her breath in the air, could feel the threat of snow in the knife's edge of wind that cut through her thin jacket. The sky was overcast, the clouds thick enough to mask any hint of moonlight or stars.

Kat knew the MPs at the British gate by now. Colin's team had been held on base for nearly two weeks, since the death of the Iranian, and Kat had become a regular visitor to the camp during that time. Normally, she tried to bring some small token graft with her—the British soldiers were especially fond of the packets of powdered-drink mix the Americans inexplicably received in all of their care packages—but tonight she was empty-handed.

The guard waved her over, and Kat shrugged her apologies. “I'll get you next time,” she told him, cupping her hands to her mouth and savoring the warmth of her breath in her palms.

“Don't worry about it.” He smiled, slightly embarrassed, as always, to be included in their charade. For by now it was clear that Kat's visits to the camp were anything but official. “They're next door,” he said, motioning in the direction from which she had just come.

Kat glanced back down the empty road toward the barbed-wire enclosure that was the official home of Bagram's special-operations task force. The camp was strictly off limits to any non–Special Forces personnel. Kat had never once ventured inside its perimeter, and she was reluctant to do so now, but the thought of making the cold walk back to her tent with only her own accusatory thoughts for company was more than she could bear. Waving to the British MP, she trudged off down Disney Drive, then turned in through the unmanned entrance to the Special Forces camp.

Unlike the neighboring British camp, with its neat rows of tents and bright flags, the Special Forces facility was more post-apocalyptic fraternity house than colonial outpost. Just inside the front gate was a giant barbecue pit, over which some enterprising soldiers were roasting a whole goat on a large, mechanized spit. Like all the native Afghan creatures Kat had encountered, it was a scrawny, pitiful beast, its head lolling loose on its half-severed neck, its doleful eyes reflecting the flames.

The men, Rangers from the looks of them, glanced up with mild interest as Kat passed but made no move to stop her. Kids, Kat thought. Her brother's age and younger. Some of them not even old enough to grow a respectable beard. And certainly none of them were about to tell a woman in civilian clothes where she could or could not be. Instead, one of them reached forward with the barrel of his M4 carbine and prodded the carcass in an adolescent mimicry of anal sex. The others laughed crudely.

Kat stopped just inside the pit's smoky halo and addressed the soldier who had made the gesture. “I'm looking for the British team,” she said.

He shrugged—outsiders were not welcome here, that much was clear—then pursed his lips and spit into the fire. “They've got some tents back behind the mess,” he said with palpable hostility, nodding toward a large, low structure.

Turning, Kat made her way along the trajectory of the Ranger's gaze toward the rear of the camp. Unlike the tents in Viper City, to which soldiers were quick to add their own creature comforts—mini refrigerators and laptops, photographs of family and friends—the accommodations here were basic at best, temporary shelter for the brief forays the Special Forces soldiers were occasionally forced to make back to Bagram for supplies or to drop off prisoners.

Provisional, just as Colin was, Kat thought, glancing at the squatters' tents and Porta Johns, chiding herself for having imagined otherwise, for having convinced herself the two of them could somehow overcome their surroundings. She reached the dark mess hall and paused, ready to turn back, her teeth chattering as she scanned the last few rows of tents. Out past the fence, the rotting hulk of an old MIG glinted in the perimeter lights.

There was a noise from behind her, a boot stuttering across the uneven ground, and Kat turned to see Colin emerging from around the corner of the mess.

“Kat?” The surprise in his voice was edged with irritation. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm sorry,” she apologized. “I shouldn't have come.”

Colin stopped where he was, offering her no argument.

“They're taking Jamal in the morning,” she said.

“Oh.” He nodded, distracted, then glanced past her toward the front gate.

Waiting for someone, Kat thought, and for a moment the thought that Colin was having an affair with someone other than her crossed her mind. “‘Oh’?” she said angrily. “That's all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say? You went into this with your eyes wide open. You made your choice, now it's time to live with it.”

“It was the right thing to do,” she shot back, suddenly defensive. “We couldn't very well send him back where he'd come from.”

“No,” Colin agreed, “you couldn't.”

It was the same unsentimentality she'd fallen for that first night in Oman and it seemed unfair to hold it against him now, but she did. “At least I don't have his blood on my hands,” she said. Though they hadn't spoken about the Iranian, Colin had been visibly shaken by the prisoner's death, and Kat knew full well the force of the barb.

He lunged forward, grabbing her. “You don't know anything about what happened out there, understand? Nothing.” He was utterly, terrifyingly calm in his anger, his hand hard on her wrist, the force in the gesture just enough to inflict the maximum pain without breaking Kat's arm.

“You're hurting me,” she told him, fighting to keep her voice steady.

“Lovers' quarrel?” The voice came from behind Kat.

Colin released his grip, and she spun around to see Kurtz coming toward them. He had a smug look on his face. Pleased, she thought, to see them like this.

Colin stepped away, distancing himself from her. “She was just leaving.”

And suddenly Kat realized that it was Kurtz he'd been waiting for. “Yes,” she agreed, trying but failing to make sense of the situation, to imagine what Kurtz was doing there. She looked over at Colin, but he refused to meet her gaze. “I think I'd better go.”

“L
OOKS LIKE WE
'
LL BE HERE
for a while,” Kat observed as Kurtz pulled their rented Peugeot off the highway and into the parking lot of a BP station.

Kurtz nudged the car into a slot next to the pumps, cut the engine, and looked at his watch. It was midafternoon, time for the
Asr,
and a crowd of men, most of them truck drivers from what Kurtz could tell, were gathered near two outside water spigots.

It had taken them more than five frustrating hours to get a rental car and get out of Tangier. Now this simple stop for gas would set them back another half hour, and that was if they were lucky.

“I don't think we're in Kansas anymore,” Kurtz remarked.

Kat unbuckled her seat belt and opened the passenger door. “I'm going to find a bathroom,” she announced, climbing out of the Peugeot.

Kurtz watched her disappear into the station, then turned his attention to the men. The pre-prayer ablutions was a ritual Kurtz had seen hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times, but it continued to fascinate him nonetheless. It was always a remarkable thing to watch grown men debasing themselves in public. For the cleansing, like the prayer itself, was performed in such a way as to humble, even humiliate, the worshipper.

As with the prayer itself, there were strict rules to be followed, a sequence in which everything was to be done. First the declaration of pious intent, then the washing itself. The hands three times, the mouth three times, the nose three times, and so on. The ears just once, in a fashion both graceful and ridiculous, the gestures like those of a baseball player signaling a teammate, the inner sides with the forefingers and the outer sides with the thumbs.

The true believers are those who feel a fear in their hearts when God is mentioned.
Kurtz thought of the words of the Koran as he watched the men roll their socks down and set them carefully aside. It was this last step of the process that he found most disarming, the men's feet bare and vulnerable beneath the spigot.

Kurtz had crushed a man's foot once, using only his hands and a piece of wood, so he knew from experience just how easy it was to do, how delicate were the bones upon which men, even those of physical power, walked.

Not just once a day, he thought, but five times, and each time the same supplication. It was simply not possible for someone raised in the West to conceive of such a thing, to understand the sheer surrender required for faith on such a level.

For a moment, Kurtz felt a hot surge of jealousy toward the men. As they unrolled their prayer rugs and moved into the
qiyam
—hands to the ears, palms to the
qiblah
—he thought that this was what was needed. No questions, no moral equivocating, just the courage to know, to bow down and sublimate yourself entirely. To do what needed to be done.

K
AT HAD FORGOTTEN
what it meant to be a woman in an Islamic country. Even in a place like Morocco, swamped as it was with Western tourists, she was aware of just how much was forbidden her based on her sex. Much of Arab life is lived in public, in cafés and town squares, places from which women are effectively barred. And though Kat understood that there was a different life, rich in its own right, being lived in kitchens and behind
mashrabiyya,
she questioned the equality of that life. The fact that she could neither see it nor participate in it only added to her skepticism.

She had witnessed this kind of segregation to a much more terrifying degree in Afghanistan. The women there had been nothing more than ghosts, groups of huddled and silent figures begging along the roadsides or gliding to and from the market. She herself had faced the stares of the Afghan men in the booth, the cold looks of disdain and shame. Or, worse, the desperate attempts to keep from looking at her at all. But there she had been insulated by her uniform. There she had been the one with all the power. While here, she was quickly realizing, the opposite was true.

Kat tried not to look at the group of men performing their ablutions as she made her way across the parking lot and into the gas station. Her mere presence during their prayers, she knew, was not just distracting but forbidden, and she had no desire to impose herself on them. But she needed to find a bathroom and she figured it was better to do so now than to wait until they were engaged in prayer.

An old man, bent and palsied, had been left inside to watch the counter and the cash register. He glanced up at the sound of the door opening, his rheumy eyes taking Kat in with obvious skepticism.

Kat smiled her most non-threatening smile. “
As-salam alaykum,
” she said. The words felt good in her mouth, as they always did, the sounds rich and strong. If nothing else was true, she loved this language.

The man's face widened into a thin but appreciative grin. “
Wa alaykum as-salam,
” he replied.
And upon you, too
.

Kat asked him about the bathroom, and he motioned with a grunt toward the back of the building and a door, slightly ajar.

The facilities, it turned out, were located just off the rear of the station, in a small cinderblock outbuilding. Though primitive by Western standards, they were clean and functional, and Kat was grateful for them. As she made her way back inside, she noticed a weather-worn pay phone attached to the station's rear wall.

“Does the phone in the back work?” she asked the old man, and was surprised to get a vigorous nod in response.

All the currency she had on her was in euros, but she was hoping the gas station, situated as it was on the main road south from Tangier, would be willing to offer her some kind of exchange. She glanced around the cluttered shop, taking in the dusty merchandise: cans of motor oil and racks of plastic prayer beads, bright packages of Bamiball lollipops and Nestlé chocolate bars. And, on a shelf next to the cash register, a pile of colorful head scarves.

Glancing out the front window to confirm that Kurtz was still in the car, Kat pointed to the pile of scarves. “I'll take the blue one, please.” In any case, it would not be a bad thing to have. She took a twenty-euro note from her pocket and offered it to the man. “I'm sorry. It's all I have.”