The Warlord's Son (12 page)

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 first. 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.”

“So I guess you don’t know about the dead man, either.”

This at least got a rise out of him, but whether out of embarrassment or bafflement Najeeb couldn’t say.

“You’re out of your mind. What the hell are you talking about? And do you want everyone to hear you?” The Clerk lowered his voice, forcing Najeeb to lean closer. The nearby foreign journalists seemed mildly curious but mostly annoyed, probably figuring that the locals had brought some petty grudge aboard.

“Do you think I’m the only one on this bus, or this caravan, with something to hide?” The Clerk practically spit out the words, poking a stubby forefinger into Najeeb’s chest and hissing into his ear. Najeeb wanted to grab his collar and shove the round head against the window, but with the Clerk now grabbing his shirtfront it was all he could do to keep from collapsing into the seat atop the man. “Do you think I’m the only person here who can do you harm?”

The Clerk then pushed him away. Najeeb, jolted by the parting remark, nearly tripped over a duffel bag in the aisle before sagging past his Swedish seatmate to his spot by the window. And now here he was, still fuming and still afraid, both for himself and for Daliya, waiting for the swirl of angry confusion to calm and settle in his head.

He breathed deeply, his
kameez
sticking to the sweat on his back. Then he tried to take stock of what he knew and where he stood. Daliya was missing and unreachable, almost certainly due to someone who’d been watching them. By now the police would be looking for her, and possibly for him as well, depending on what Rukhsana had decided to say. A nameless
malang,
some religious fanatic from the hills, was dead practically on his doorstep, but only after having penned his direst warning yet. And the ISI still had its hooks in him, which might or might not have something to do with the Clerk’s presence on the bus. And who the hell had the Clerk been referring to just now, with the remark about “others” who might do him harm? Then there was Karim, emissary of his uncle Aziz, who’d come all the way to Najeeb’s apartment but apparently without a message.

As if all that weren’t enough, Najeeb was now trapped in this bus, bound for an unwanted border crossing that might keep him tied down for days, out of touch with everyone who mattered, yet still in harm’s way. His world might change completely in his absence, but he wouldn’t know until they returned. He pulled out his cell phone, but the signal was gone. It wouldn’t be back until they returned to Peshawar.

He considered all the journalists around him. They were tourists, really, even if of a more knowledgeable and inquisitive strain. And so naive. He wondered how they would react if they really knew how far beyond help they already were in case something went wrong. Even with Fawad’s men aboard, and even with the occasional roadside bunker housing soldiers of the Frontier Police, Najeeb knew from experience that with every mile beyond Peshawar the government’s influence waned like the signal of a weak radio station, or the signal of his cell phone. By the time you entered the Khyber Pass it was lost altogether in static and whine, an unreachable bandwidth. Lawless was an understatement.

He looked out the window, hoping the view might calm him, but what he saw was a landscape that still haunted and ruled him, and he easily imagined the feel of the stones beneath the thin rubber soles of his sandals. Looking toward the sun, he recalled what it felt like to stand atop a high pass, a moment of calm, bright blueness up where the hawks circled, face raised to the heavens, the air crisp and cool, a clarity that made you gasp for more. He hadn’t taken a deep breath like that in years without feeling the stench of the city clutch at his insides.

There were plenty of fond memories locked in these hills, but his current mood seemed to be screening out all but the bad ones. When they’d passed the Smugglers Bazaar a half hour earlier he’d been reminded of one of the worst weeks of his boyhood, a spell of servitude ordered by his father, who had angrily deemed him in need of penance, of toughening. For six awful days he had manned a pushcart for a smuggling baron along the tribal border, an ally of his father’s who controlled illicit commerce for dozens of commodities. Najeeb began each circuit at a darkened stone warehouse, piling the cart heavily with cartons of Marlboros and boxes of Surf detergent, then shoved the load at a straining trot a quarter mile down a bumpy path toward the border of the North-West Frontier Province and the crowded stalls of the bazaar, half panicked that a Pakistani customs guard might approach at any moment. If your cart was impounded it wiped out a week’s worth of earnings and won you a flogging from the boss. Even if you made it safely to your destination, some pigeonhole shop deep in the bazaar, you gave up half your thirty-rupee reward to the merchant who controlled the transit area.

But the worst part of the week had been the other boys, small-time bullies with their own ideas of turf and tribute, punching and kicking and demanding a cut of his pay, then spitting derisively when he handed it over. They’d been forewarned of the young khan’s arrival, the son of the mighty
malik,
knowing he was usually off-limits to such casual abuse. But not this week, they’d been told. The usual rules were suspended. Treat him as you would any newcomer. Meaning each day brought cuts, bruises and welts along with the few rupees Najeeb managed to hang on to. At times he gave as good as he got, to the point where he was fighting in his dreams. This continued for two weeks after his return home, kicking and scuffling through the night until the blanket came off, then awakening in a fury beneath a sky full of stars.

Such was the lifestyle of these hills, where every division of power had its subdivision, and every line of demarcation was a zone of struggle and torment. There were four major tribes in the Khyber Agency alone, with each divided into
khel
s, and every
khel
into clans, every clan into subclans, and so on, down to the rival gangs of begrimed boys, tangling dawn to dusk for the last remaining scraps of pride and conquest.

Najeeb’s father had stood atop one of the loftier levels of this hierarchy. Of course, this was not royalty in the Western sense of the word, as Najeeb would discover whenever he tried to explain his heritage to friends in college. For all its medieval character, it was a knighthood of
kameez
and bandoleer, not ermine and armor; of turbans, not tiaras; Kalashnikovs, not lances. The castles of this realm were stone compounds with wrought-iron gates, mud walls and kitchen smokeholes. Or such had been the case until Najeeb was in his teens, for he had come of age in an era of great changes.

Early in life, his father’s status had brought scarcely more than the right to lord it over their village, where most residents barely fed themselves and paid little in tribute or rent. His family ate the same lentils and spinach as the others, his mother pounding barley into flour on a hollowed stone, his sisters churning soft cheeses and curds, buttermilk and
warqa.
They drank black tea by day, green tea by night, boiling the leaves with milk and sugar.

When the villagers brought them anything it was usually tomatoes, which his father shied from, believing they caused impotence, a fear especially acute in a man who had produced only one son. For special meals they might wring the neck of a chicken or dispatch Najeeb and the other local children to help Aziz do some fishing, Pashtun style, not with nets but by cutting a five-rupee stick of dynamite in half, then tying it to a lump of phosphorous wrapped in cloth. Aziz lit the phosphorous, then tossed the bundle into the deepest pool, the flame holding even under water, drawing the fish like a beacon, then exploding with a thud and a bubbling geyser. It was the greatest entertainment the children might witness for weeks, as stunned fish bobbed to the surface, dead eyes turned to the sky, everyone wading in to skim the catch into woven baskets.

But when Najeeb was only five, war arrived next door in Afghanistan on a wave of Soviet tanks and helicopters, and by the time he was ten the world was a very different place. On came the gunrunners and the quiet men from America with no last names, nodding and smiling with their broken Pashtun, mouths full of promises and briefcases full of cash. Soon in their wake came a strange and sullen breed of holy men, some on horseback, mouths curled in scorn. The men of the village turned ascetic and scornful, yet for all of the new piety the valley’s poppy fields bloomed as never before, and the passing caravans were laden with new cargoes—hand-held missile launchers heading west, oozing brown sacks of opium paste heading east. And wedged between them, families of refugees, stumbling through the passes while Najeeb watched from the shadows of the rocks, at rest with his lunch and a flask of tea.

The new commerce quickly pushed his family’s standard of living upward, leaping centuries at a time: running water, a telephone in the village, an automobile, even a television. For years its only signal was a screen full of snow with garbled sound, yet it played almost continuously in the
hujera,
like some new totem of authority.

Najeeb’s great windfall was to be dispatched across the hills to a school that taught writing and English and mathematics, a three-mile walk that cost him dearly in stones and derision from boys who had learned from their grandfathers exactly what to chant at such presumption:

You are learning at the English school,
You are learning for money.
There will be no place in heaven for you,
And for this you will hang in hell.

To extract payment for these indulgent hours of learning Najeeb’s father sent him into the hills every afternoon with an old rifle, on orders to bring home birds for the table, even though by then his family had moved well beyond lentils and barley bread. But the chore proved anything but punishment. Najeeb cherished the old gun, more for its look and feel than for the way it performed. He was never much of a shot, even when drawing a bead on an imaginary redcoat or a rival Shinwari, and the few times he did bring down a bird he enjoyed it more for the opportunity to study his prey than for the satisfaction of the kill, so much so that he began taking along pencil stubs and scraps of paper so he could sketch them. He began to admire these creatures, to envy their independence and mobility—soaring to far valleys whenever they pleased. But he was discerning in his devotion. Birds that fed and hunted in packs earned only disdain—fluttery sparrows, just like the boys in the village. Vultures, too, were loathsome, with one notable exception—the lammergeier, the only one among them that hunted alone, waiting for the rest to eat their fill because only he knew how to unlock the hidden treasures of the marrow, carrying bones aloft, then dropping them to the stones below, prying the red food from the cracks. Clever, that bird, outwitting them all.

But he hid his drawings, of course, sketching in secret until the day his uncle Aziz came upon him, lost in thought while shading a hawk’s spread of tail feathers in grays and blacks. Aziz’s shadow fell on the page, and Najeeb braced for a scolding. But Aziz only laughed, then praised the likeness, making it clear that this would be a secret between them. Even then Najeeb was aware that at some level this was a betrayal, but an alliance was formed. It was cemented forever weeks later when Aziz trudged up the hill with a smile almost wicked in its joy, then pulled from his baggy pocket a small bundle wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied up with string, stamped with the blue seal of a bookseller in Peshawar. Najeeb tore it open to reveal a flash of colors as brilliant as anything he had ever seen—a set of colored pencils, a small sketch pad and, best of all,
A Field Guide to the Birds of the Indian
Subcontinent.
At last he could put a name to everything he shot or spied, even the huge old owl—a Eurasian Eagle Owl, he learned—that haunted the crumbling ruins of the ancient Buddhist stupa.

But the gift, of course, led inevitably to the awful moment of exposure, when his father found his hidden drawings and shredded them in a rage, calling his son a
bedagh,
a whore, and everything he could think of that was womanish or unholy. Yet even his father couldn’t bring himself to destroy something as fine and expensive as the guidebook, so he had merely kicked it, then decreed Najeeb’s week of penance at Smugglers Bazaar. And Najeeb, emerging tougher yet wiser, had stored up his resentment, letting it silently accrue interest until the pivotal moment in Tariq’s office in Islamabad, when he finally paid back his father in full.

“Yes, I know what is in the cave,” he had said at last, breaking his silence for the patient professional. And he did know, having found the place on one of his walks. Not a new place at all to him, even if at that particular time it had been filled with all sorts of new equipment— boiling kettles and steel drums, pipes and tubing and pressure gauges. Sacks of opium paste were piled along one wall, their contents being transformed as if by magic into much smaller bags holding the white powder of heroin. Najeeb’s father had found the way to eliminate the middleman, and thus became wealthy enough to send his only son off to college, while practically daring federal authorities to do something about it, if they only knew where to look.