The Sleeper (10 page)

Kabul was falling, and I fell asleep with my ear against the speaker of the short-wave radio. Three hours later I woke up in exactly the same position, still listening. It was dawn in Kabul and the streets were empty. The Taliban had disappeared from the Afghan capital and my eyes were wide open in the African dark. The rain had stopped. I turned off the radio and, for the first time in days, I heard real silence settle over the compound. In another hour I'd be able to hear the muezzin calling the faithful to pray near the ruins of the mosque.

A man was moving out there. The shape of him passed just at the edge of what you could see in that dark. He was running at an easy pace, but ghost-like, moving almost without sound. Then he was gone. In my last glimpse of him I saw he was carrying a rifle. I eased myself off the cot and crouched closer to the screen door. Like a hunter in a stand, I waited, and waited some more. I couldn't follow in the darkness. Slowly a predawn glow outlined the scene in front of me: the workshop, the Land Rover parked next to it. But no one appeared until the old muezzin arrived to sing out
“Allahu Akbar.”

I checked Cathleen's room. Through the door I could hear her breathing easily. No need to wake her. With no radio alarm, she would sleep for a while now. The sky was silver, clear and bright in the last minutes before sunrise. The ground was still soft. I followed the barefoot tracks of the man toward the refugee tents, then toward the long slit latrine where hundreds of footprints surrounded the ammonia-stinking sludge of shit and lye. If he was headed back into the camp or through it, I'd lost him. I walked a wide arc around the outer edge. There were still dozens of tracks. Some were women and children. Many were men. I walked one more arc, still wider. Still too many tracks. But there was only one set that belonged to a man running, where the front of the foot pressed much deeper into the earth and the space between the prints was much farther apart. The rising edge of sun in the east blasted straight at me. The tracks were headed for the border.

His legs must have been about as long as mine, I thought, starting to pace his footprints and falling into an easy stride. He moved quickly and surely over the red earth. I moved much more carefully. He did not find the straightest lines but the firmest ones in the still-wet landscape. He didn't slow down, he didn't search. He'd been over this unmarked path a lot, knew it well, knew right where he wanted to go.

A bright green stubble of grass was starting to grow across the land. Life was erupting in the first dry warmth of the day. There were even some tiny flowers. The bees would be happy, I thought. But for the first few miles outside the camp there was no hint of a tree or a bush. They'd all been ripped up and burned long ago. Only after I'd been running for about forty minutes, five miles at this pace, did I start to see little clusters of shrubs here and there, and also clusters of women in black shawls, who were gathering twigs. They must have started before light. They had to walk a long way to find anything at all to burn in their cooking fires. But the situation was desperate, and because there hadn't been a rape for more than a week, they were a little less frightened.

The footprints carried over a rise, then into a shallow stream. And there the footprints disappeared. On the far side, none of the new grass or flowers were broken by the weight of a man running across them. I walked up and down the edge of the stream. But there was no track to be seen. I turned in a slow circle beneath the wide-open sky, looking for any sign of the man with the gun, but all I saw in the distance was a cluster of about a dozen women, like a little flock of crows. One of them broke away from the group and started to run. She was strange and beautiful to watch, moving as light as air across the land, her cloak fluttering behind her long legs. She was running toward the camp. Too fast. Too damn fast. The women were looking at something out of the ordinary. The girl was running to take news.

As I approached, a cloud of flies rose up as thick as black smoke from the middle of the circle of women, then settled back. One of the shawls kicked something in front of her. The cloud rose again. The smell of raw guts, sweet and stomach-turning, caught in my throat. As I got nearer, the women started backing away from me, and from the swarm of flies on the ground.

“God Almighty,” I said.

The crawling, buzzing blanket of insects covered a sort of structure—a sort of horrible shrine, really—made from parts of a man. The ground all around it was black, stained by the blood. The legs and arms were hacked and torn apart at every joint, then leaned up against the gutted torso like logs on a bonfire. And on the top of all this, stuck on a long piece of gnarled wood, was the head. The eyes were wide open in the black face, showing flashes of white beneath the crawling flies. The mouth was wide open, too. Out from between the teeth hung the man's dismembered sex like a Satan's tongue.

I backed away, and the women started to close in again. They had some unfinished business with this oozing, seething pile in front of them and they were looking at each other to see who would make the first move. Finally, the tallest of the women, holding her cloak around her with her left hand, reached into the cloud of flies with her right hand to grab the stick beneath the severed head. She shook it hard to pry it loose from the torso. The man's cock dropped out of his silently screaming mouth and the wide-eyed face tumbled onto the ground. A weird trilling shrieked from the women's tongues, like cicadas on a summer night, but more shrill, and angry. The tall woman added the wood to the little bundle she had at her feet. Then all of them turned and walked back toward the camp. When they were gone, I used my foot to nudge the butchered man's head away from the main swarm of flies. The cheeks were puffed out. I figured the testicles were in there. And there were other things I didn't notice before. The man had a thin beard and his hair wasn't long like most of the shifta wore theirs. It was cut short like a mujahedin. “God Almighty,” I said again out loud, trying to break through the empty noise of the flies.

Beyond the circle where the women had stood I found tracks of men, and I thought I could read the story they told. Before the body was cut apart, it was dragged by a large man, whose footprints pushed deep into the earth. The trail backward was easy to follow. In a few places the feet of the dragged man made impressions at strange angles. “Still kicking,” I said, wishing there was somebody to hear. A shiver ran through me, and I thought how much I'd like to have a weapon out here. How much I needed one.

Walking back up the trail of the dragged man I came to a shallow dip in the ground. It would be easy to lie up in a place like this without being seen, unless somebody was hunting you, and knew your ways, and knew the kind of place you'd go. I crouched at the edge of that hiding place. There were tracks all over and I didn't want to disturb anything. Two—no, three men had been here. One was the man dragged away and butchered. One was the butcher. And the third, he took off running. You could see he was wearing some kind of trainers and the tracks were easy to spot.

In Africa you always see buzzards in the sky. They circle over the bodies of dead game or cattle, and you don't notice them. But now I paid attention. A flight of vultures spiraled in front of the low sun about half a mile away. I studied the line of the tracks. The toes of the running man's shoes dug deep into the soft ground. For a few yards, the bare feet of the butcher followed the tracks, then stopped. The butcher kneeled down. You could see the impression of his leg. Nearby was a brass cartridge—a casing for a 7.62-millimeter bullet. A NATO round. I followed the running man's last steps to the center of the vultures' spiral.

I waved my arms and shouted. The huge birds backed off a little, loping around, shifting from one foot to another, flapping their enormous wings, but they didn't fly away. Through the veil of insects, I saw the man's eyes were gone already. Beaks and claws had ripped his guts open, but most of his body was intact. His head was still on his shoulders, bearded, the hair cut short. And now I saw what looked like a third bloody eye socket. The bullet had hit him from behind and the exit wound was right in the middle of his forehead. The butcher was a hell of a shot, I thought. He'd gone down on his knee and taken aim from five hundred yards away. He'd let off one round. And then he went back to his business with the man he took apart. What I could not find were any tracks showing where the butcher went when he finished. All of this must have taken place at about dawn—maybe an hour and a half before I got to the scene. He might still be around, but I couldn't begin to tell you where. The police would be coming soon, I figured, and I wanted to be gone by then. But in the meantime, I hoped there'd be movement, maybe birds flying up from the scrub, maybe the shadow of the man himself, something, anything that would give him away. What I would do if I saw him I wasn't sure, but I watched the flat horizon like a sailor looking for a sign. There was none.

 

When I got to the Summit house, Nureddin was standing at his bench as usual. I pointed at the house. “Cathleen?” He pointed toward the airstrip. When Cathleen wasn't there, sign language was the only way Nureddin and I communicated.

He was putting together frames for the hives. I started tearing apart a box for more wood and nails. Waris brought us coffee. This could have been any morning in the last couple of weeks. There was nothing different at all about the way Nureddin looked. He stood tall like a soldier at attention, but was never tense. His face was serious, his eyes sharp, but you could never say what the feelings were behind them.

I wondered where he kept the gun. It was probably an FN FAL. They used NATO rounds and a lot of African armies had them in the seventies and eighties. The barrel was long, so it was good at a distance, but it wasn't so easy to hide. You could wrap it and bury it, but you really wouldn't want to put your fine rifle in this wet ground.

Nureddin came from the camp to our compound before light to get that gun. Unless he knew that I followed him, it would be right back where he kept it, probably right in front of me. Not the bench where he worked. That was too open. And not inside the house. That was too close to Cathleen and me.

I finished pulling apart one box and went to get another from our empty ammo-box wall, and that's when I knew. Because we always took the boxes from the top or the middle, down at the bottom they were pushed together tight. If you knocked holes in the adjoining sides you could hide an FAL in there, ammo, whatever you wanted.

Waris came out of the house with some more coffee for her father and for me. He nodded thanks. And she put down the tray and hugged him around the waist, the way she sometimes did, just happy he was there.

Cathleen was gone a long time at the airstrip. Now that the sky was clear, a lot of planes were coming in with supplies that had been held up for days, even weeks. So it wasn't exactly unusual that Cathleen hadn't come back yet. But nothing was sure out here. Nothing and nobody was safe. Not here. Not anywhere. Not anymore. And I felt like I didn't really know anything for sure about anybody.

Time to make a move, I thought. With Cathleen's help I had put together a pretty good picture of what the farm near Wolla Jora looked like. There were four low buildings including the main house and a small mosque. Usually there were about thirty men there, more or less. Most were from the Abir clan. They served as a guard force. They all had Kalashnikovs or M16s and they had four “technicals,” pickup trucks fitted with .50-calibers. But the actual precise number of men at the farm changed from day to day, and you couldn't really know. The Al-Qaeda contingent itself was small: three Arabs who had been in Afghanistan until a few months ago. They were Abu Zubayr's close-in protection. But Abu Zubayr didn't always stay at the farm. He had another house he went to sometimes that was closer to the coast. And sometimes he just disappeared.

It was time to call in reinforcements. Griffin was on my tail? Well, let Griffin figure out the best way to take out Abu Zubayr. The USG would probably fuck it up. But I was at the limit of my possibilities. I didn't have any decent weapons, any explosives, or any backup to carry out my own operation. I was sick of this world, where nothing was true and everything was permitted. I was tired. I wanted, more than I'd ever wanted anything else in the world, to go home.

As if nothing had happened that morning, Nureddin stood in front of me sawing joints in the miter box.

Yeah, time to go.

The Land Rover rumbled into the compound, and Cathleen was grinning when she got out. “Come inside, out of the sun,” she said. “I've just been meeting with my secret source. By tomorrow we'll have the whole picture.”

“Tell me more.”

“Deep Throat is flying over to Wolla Jora right now. I told you, he goes back and forth all the time. He buys honey over there.”

“What does he know about Abu Zubayr?”

“Just about everything, I suppose. He was making jokes, you know. Said Abu Zubayr must be the best-protected honey merchant in the world.”

“What did you ask him?”

“All the things I've been dying to ask him for the last couple of months, don't you know. Bassam's much more reliable than anyone else I talk to.”

“What, exactly, did you ask him?”

“I asked him, who is with Abu Zubayr? How long is Abu Zubayr planning to stay around? You know the questions as well as I do.”

“Did he have any answers?”

“He's going to get them.”

“That's great. Who is this guy? He's Somali? Kenyan?”

“No, no. He's Arab. Lebanese or Syrian, I think. Very cultured.”

She hesitated for a second. “Oh no, you don't. I've said too much already.”

“Cathleen, you have to tell me more about this guy.”

“I don't think so, Kurt. We have kind of a special relationship, and I wouldn't be wanting to betray that.”

“Is he a doctor?”

“Why would he be after buying and selling honey if he was a sawbones?”

“Does he have a limp?”

“You know Bassam?”

I shook my head. “Never heard that name.” If this was Bassam al-Shami then we were right on track. And if he was helping Cathleen, he was sucking us all into some kind of trap. I could feel time running out the way you do when you wake up before the alarm.

 

The 703 area code was going to show up on the bill for the sat phone, and whoever looked at it might guess it was Langley, but that didn't seem very important just now. There were two rings, then a click, then the silence of a call lost in space looking to reconnect somewhere, then another ringing tone, and finally the recorded voice of a woman with a British accent: “The mobile phone you dialed is currently occupied or has been turned off. Please try again later.”

The mid-afternoon sun burned the water out of the ground and nobody wanted to move in that wet heat. Nureddin was taking a siesta in the shade of the workshop. Waris was dozing inside with Cathleen, who had plugged an electric fan into the diesel generator. The thrum of it roared in my head.

In Kansas the leaves would be turning and the autumn cool would have settled over the land. I suddenly realized I'd missed Halloween and didn't even know what costume Miriam wore. What was wrong with Betsy and me that we couldn't find a better way to talk, to say more, even if there wasn't much time, even if somebody was listening in?

Betsy. I figured Betsy was just getting ready to go to work; might even be in the shower. I needed to hear her voice. The phone rang but there was no answer. I should have fixed the ringer. Why hadn't I just sprung for a new phone? I waited five minutes. No answer. Another five. None. I dialed the house again, and again. Probably she was dropping Miriam off at her Aunt Lea's or something. I could get her at the Jump Start in another fifteen minutes.

I lay down on the cot and tried to take a siesta myself, just a quick blackout to take the edge off my tiredness, but unconsciousness wouldn't come.

I called Langley again. The signal wandered through space and led nowhere. Griffin was in my face when I didn't want to see him, and never there when I needed him. I started to dial again, then stopped. “Fuck him.”

I called the Jump Start.

Ruth recognized my voice and she asked me right away, “Is Betsy with you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“She's been gone for two days. Nobody knows where.”

“Two days?”

“She shoulda left some kind of note or something.”

“Where's Miriam?”

“She's gone, too.”

“They're over at Lea's, aren't they?”

“Nope. Lea came here looking for them. I thought—Kurt, you mean you don't know where they are?”

“No.”

“Should we call the police?”

“Yes.” Think. “Yes. Has anybody been to the house?”

“Lea went over. She said everything's okay there.”

“The car?”

“That's there, too. It's okay.”

“Ruth.”

“Yeah, Kurt?”

“I'm really, really worried.”

“I am, too, Kurt. And I been thinking, ever since that break-in, I been kind of worried about Betsy. But you know how she is.”

“What break-in, Ruth?”

“She didn't tell you? That's what I mean about Betsy, keeps so much to herself.”

“Ruth, tell me exactly what happened.”

“It was weird, really, you know? We all said it was weird. But then we just sort of forgot about it, I guess.”

“Weird—” I counted a couple of breaths. “Weird how?”

“Cleaned out your refrigerator and freezer and, like, that was all. Must have been some bums or kids or something. ‘Kids with the munchies,' Betsy said. Mighty hungry, I guess.”

“When did it happen?”

“I don't recall exactly. End of September, beginning October maybe? Right in the middle of the day. Betsy was here. But nobody saw nothing. Guess everybody was off working. Somebody broke your back door and just cleaned out your refrigerator. Now ain't that weird?”

“Did they take the TV or the stereo?”

“No, like I said, nothing.”

“Anything in the garage? My tools, maybe?”

“No, don't think so. No. But they did break in there, opened up that old freezer of yours. But Betsy said it was prob'ly empty already. Oh, Kurt, I'm so worried.”

“Did you see anything or anybody strange around the Jump Start?”

“Nothing more than usual. I mean, no, not around the Jump Start. Um—”

“I'll call you back in a few minutes. Find out everything you can, okay? It's going to take me a couple of days to get home, but I'm coming. Got that?”

“Yes, Kurt.”

 

There wasn't much I could do until we could get Faridoon to fly back out and pick me up, and I couldn't seem to get through to him on any phone or radio.

I sat on my cot with my back against the cool wall and looked out through the screen of the porch at the emptiness of the sky. Nothing moved out there, least of all the air. I wanted to steady my mind, stop it from racing while I tried to put together the pieces of what Ruth told me. But there wasn't enough to work with yet. Betsy and Miriam had gone someplace and they didn't tell anybody. That was all I knew. Weeks before, somebody broke into my house, and it looked like they were after the Sword of the Angel.

A small speck on the southern horizon started to take on the shape of a plane. It was going very low and very slow, and without my really thinking about it, some part of my brain worked to classify the thing. Not a Cessna or Beechcraft. It was too small, too thin. It had a V-tail—but the tail was upside down. I leaned forward, like that would help, and tried to get a better look. It was flying toward us, but it wasn't flying toward the airstrip. I stepped outside.

During the Gulf War I saw cruise missiles, and I thought this might be one of them. But why would a cruise be coming after us? And this thing was different. It looked like a huge dragonfly. A Predator.

The Agency was taking a look around with one of its unmanned surveillance craft. From what I'd heard on the radio, when these things were armed with Hellfire missiles they were the CIA's new favorite toy. The Agency boys and girls thought they were great for terminations. You could sit back with your joystick and video screens wherever you were and home in on whoever you wanted to hit: death by remote control. Distant, soundless, clean, safe. But there was so much you just couldn't figure out from the air, like who really was who and what really was what.

I wondered if this Predator scanning the desert saw the fly-covered shrine left by Nureddin. What would they think about that when it showed up on their screens back at Langley?

“Anomaly,” they'd say.

The white dragonfly passed right over the Summit house at about a thousand feet. So now they were taking a look at us. Or at me.

“Ruth, have you heard anything?”

“I talked to Bud Nichols down at the sheriff's office. Oh, Kurt, I am so worried. Where are you?”

“What'd Nichols say?”

“He said he's looking. He's looking and he's calling. But technically she's not missing yet. Not until tomorrow. Can you believe that?”

“That's not good enough.”

“That's what I told him, Kurt. Especially after that thing last week, when that guy showed up at the house.”

“What guy? Ruth, quit surprising me with this stuff, for God's sake.”

“Don't Betsy tell you
anything
? She said he said he was an old friend of yours. But Betsy didn't like the look of him. ‘Too slick,' she said.”

“Did she tell you his name?”

“No. She said he just stood in the doorway—she didn't let him in—and he asked a bunch of questions.”

“What questions?”

“She didn't say, really. She just said they were about you, and she didn't like them. And I thought it was, you know, not really that important. But now all kinds of things seem important—”

“Did she tell you what he looked like? How old he was? Anything like that?”

“ ‘Too slick.' Yep. That's what she said, which I thought was kind of funny. She didn't make a big deal out of it. You know Betsy. Oh, Kurt, I am so upset I can't think straight.”

“Was he black? White? Mexican? Arab? Eskimo?”

“I guess he was just white. ‘Too slick' is all she said, and—wait—and she said—she made a kind of joke out of it—you know Betsy. He told her he had a message for you from a friend of yours named—and that was the funny part—anyway it was funny when she talked about it.”