14

How I got back to the States. That’s an interesting story and one I usually leave out of my biography, especially when talking to women. I don’t mind telling Billy Olin, though. I had a couple of hours to kill before my flight, so I dropped in to say good-bye on my way to the airport. He was the same. People change, they say, but not Rowboat Billy. He told me once, how he got the name—we were both of us drunk in an NCO club at Fort Bragg—and I assured him it was no big thing, as I’m sure he would have said about my little secrets. It was in the early weeks of the Iraq war and him and a bunch of Rangers were set up on the river near Tikrit, looking for insurgents running down the water from there, and one night Billy spotted a rowboat and challenged it and when they kept right on going he smoked it with his SAW. And wouldn’t you know? It was a family with eight little kids. It happens. Pretty much everybody who’s been downrange has a story like that.

Mine was a little different. After I’d got blown up in my final moment as a heroic mujahid, I woke up after maybe two weeks out of it, and there was Wazir again to praise me, eyes full of love, and tell me what happened. He didn’t say that everyone else had thought I was dead and he’d carried me on his back for ten kilometers to the best doctor we had with us, Dr. Spin, and he’d fixed me up okay. I got that later from Gul Muhammed, because he was there too; we were in his home village of Barak Sharh, in Kunar Province, up near the Pakistani border.

Gul Muhammed told me that when I was fit to travel he was going to send me south with Wazir and a truckload of loot, guns, and equipment that we would sell in the bazaars of Peshawar and distribute the money to the families of the mujahideen in the camps. This trade was what had kept the resistance going. The CIA and the Saudis sent money and the Pakistanis provided support and took their cut, but it was up to the mujahideen themselves to support their families in the refugee camps, and they did it with Russian loot sold in the bazaars.

Peshawar was a different city from the one I had known in childhood, huge now, even filthier, loud with motor scooters and cars, grown rich off the blood of Afghanistan. The nations that wanted Rus sia to lose up there had poured billions through Peshawar, and a lot of it had stuck. One of those it had stuck to was our cousin Bacha Khan, who was even fatter than before and now had a big house in the Khyber Colony and a Toyota pickup. He gave us good hospitality and said he’d help us sell our stuff; he knew all the merchants and their tricky ways.

I went with Bacha to the bazaar and was royally entertained by the various bazaaris. My reputation had preceded me, as they say. By that time I was known as Kakay Ghazan, which means little warrior of God. It’s a big deal for a teenager to be treated as a man by older Pashtuns, and it seemed to me that my life had reached some kind of peak. Except for the admiration of girls, and access to them, it was exactly like being the best high school quarterback in Alabama.

I said as much to Billy, because he’d played ball in Alabama, and I wanted him to understand the full impact of what happened next. But before I could go on, a guy came in and changed Billy’s piss bag and I thought of that scene in the movie Catch- 22, when the medic just switches the pee bag and the IV bag. The asshole gave me a look, like what was I doing talking to a broccoli? I gave him a look that sent him out of there in a hurry and picked up the story.

We sold the stuff and got shitloads of money and then went to the hugely swollen refugee camps and looked up the relatives of the men whose loot we’d just sold, and I watched as Bacha handed over the money to the right people, and after that we had a feast, two sheep, and I ate more meat than I had in years, and there was wine, too, because the Pashtuns hadn’t gone crazy yet over their religion like a lot of them did later. We both got drunk and Wazir recited some Sufi poetry I hadn’t known he knew, and we got to talking some deep stuff about Sufi and Islam and so on, the kind of conversation we hadn’t had before, and I asked him who he’d learned all that from and he smiled and said, “Your mother. Who else?”

I laughed because I thought it was a joke and I was drunk, so I just ruffled his hair and put my head on his shoulder, and fell asleep soon after that. In the middle of the night I got up with an urgent need to piss. I crawled over Wazir and walked out of the room Bacha had given us and went to the latrine, which was in an out house. I used it, and when I came out two guys, or maybe it was three, knocked me off my feet, taped my mouth, threw a bag on my head, tied my hands, rolled me into a tarp, and tossed me in the back of a van.

It was weird, because I honestly couldn’t understand who would want to snatch me. It wasn’t the Russians; by that point they were out of the picture. It could’ve been rival mujahideen, or some tribal beef, or just a kidnap for ransom. There was some of that starting to show up. And then I heard two of the guys say something in a foreign language, and then it hit me that I could understand what they were saying because it was English, and not Pakistani English. They were Americans. So then I was totally baffled.

We drove for maybe half an hour and I heard the sound of aircraft engines, a jet flying pretty low above, and the van stopped and the men dragged me out and put me on a stretcher, still wrapped in the tarp, and carried me up a ramp and set me down. Then there was a lot more airplane noise and I felt motion and knew I was in a plane, a big one, and I felt the floor tilt under me and heard the scream of engines on full power. Hands tugged at my tarp and I got unrolled from it and the bag came off my head and a hand ripped the tape off my mouth and I was looking up into a woman’s face. The light in the plane was red so it took me a little while to recognize my mother.

Billy’s eye was twitching and his mouth was opening and closing like a fish. His chalky tongue lolled out a little, so I picked up a squirt bottle that was there and squirted him a drink. I thought it would be interesting and maybe a good omen if he miraculously regained consciousness then, hearing the miraculous story of my reunion with Mom—but no.

As I recall it, the main feeling I had when I recognized her was a kind of babyish annoyance, as if I’d been a nine-year-old playing cowboys or superheroes in a vacant lot and my mom had just dragged me in for supper. I’d been wounded in my dignity and she was the only one around to take it out on. The strange thing was that the last time I’d seen her I really was nine, and my relationship with her was frozen, like those insects you see trapped in amber.

I shouted at her, “What did you do? Why am I on this plane?”

She said in a calming voice, “It’s okay, Theo, you’re safe now. We’re going home.”

And I said I didn’t want to go home to Lahore, I wanted to be with Wazir and Gul Muhammed and fight in the jihad. I said I was Kakay Ghazan and a famous fighter and what do I have to do with you, woman?

She switched her language to Urdu as well and told me that the jihad was over, the Russians were leaving, and now the mujahideen would turn on one another and there would be more war, but without the blessing of God, and she did not wish me to die in such a war. She said we were not going to Lahore at all; it was time for me to return to my real family in America. I went a little crazy then, screaming at her in three languages that I was a Pashtun and the son of Gul Muhammed and the brother of Wazir and I didn’t want to go to America. I went on for a while but it was a long flight, and she had wisely left my hands and feet tied. Even though I was yelling at her she kept calm and talked in a low voice, about how I had always had two families and was a man of two nations and that this was a good thing—she didn’t want me to lose that—and how proud she was of me that after I had lost my Pakistani family I had been so quick about finding a new one, because a man without his family is nothing. But now it was my fate to have a different life. God had willed that we be brought back together, she loved me, and I had to trust in God; the Prophet, peace be unto him, said that a man should trust his mother above all others.

And I recalled that and was calmer afterward. Then I asked her why she hadn’t come to get me before this and she said because she thought I was dead. It turned out that a street boy had jumped up on the bumper of Laghari Sahib’s Rolls-Royce just before the bomb exploded, and when they had found the charred and unrecognizable corpse of a boy among the wreckage, my grandmother Noor pronounced that it was me, a last little stab of revenge, and no one had the nerve to oppose her.

I told her that her daughters and my grandfather had been avenged because I had shot the man in the godown.

She touched my face lightly with her fingertips, just for an instant. She closed her eyes, tilted her head back, took in some breath, and made an ah sound. It was hard to read her face in the dim light. I thought then that she was expressing satisfaction, but looking back I think it was some kind of devastated grief.

Then I asked, “But how did you find me? How did you learn that I was alive?”

“Because I have friends in the jihad, and they told me of a boy there who was famous for his bravery, the younger of the two sons of Gul Muhammed, and my heart was lifted because I knew it was you and that you lived. So I planned with my friends to take you. I would have gone to Afghanistan but my friends learned you were to come to Peshawar, and so it was done.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me to come with you?”

“Would you have come?”

“No. But you should have asked, not tied me like an animal.”

“I will untie you now, if you give me your word you will not try to escape when this plane lands.”

“My word,” I said, and she took out a knife and cut the cable ties at my hands and feet. I stretched and rubbed my wrists and stood up. She stood too, and I saw that I was taller than she was. A moment passed when we just stared at each other, and then we embraced. I was flooded with feelings I could not express and I thought of a ghazal of Ghalib’s that goes, My heart burns in a temple full of mysteries that, alas, have no voice to speak.

I felt my eyes prickle with tears, but I did not cry. She cried. I asked her what she had done when she heard all three of her children were dead, and she asked me what Pashtun women do when their children die in the war and I said, They keen and tear their hair and clothes and fall on the ground and cast dust on their heads, and she said, That is what I did.

So I accepted my fate like a man, and besides she was my mother. I asked her what I would do in America, since I understood there was no jihad there, and that was the only thing I knew. She said I would go to school, and, according to what I liked to study, such would be my life. I said I would not stand to be beaten anymore, because I was a man now, and only my father could beat me. At that she smiled and said, No one will beat you; they don’t beat children in American schools. This amazed me. I asked, How then do they learn anything? and she answered, They do not learn very much. She said Farid and she would teach me in our home, and when I had caught up they would put me in high school with others of my own age. I asked her what I would learn, and she said, to read and write English, and something about history and geography and also mathematics. She said, You have had an excellent fourth-grade education. It should not take more than six months to get you ready for your junior year in an American high school.

She had clothes for me. On the plane I pulled on my first ever pair of blue jeans. I had a Pearl Jam T-shirt, a quilted parka to go over it, and a pair of Nikes. The plane landed at a military airport in Germany, and we ate in a restaurant and took a commercial flight to Washington. So I entered my homeland through the various narrow gates, carrying a passport I’d never seen before. At the time I didn’t find this strange.

I was taken to their house on Tracy Place in the Kalorama neighborhood of D.C., a white colonial on a green street lined with old sycamores. Farid was welcoming and nice enough, maybe a little distant, as might be expected. I was respectful and formal with him in my turn. He was a good teacher, patient and energetic. He gave me poetry to read at first, and then fiction, and then the school subjects I would have to know. I picked up math too, with little trouble. The only thing I had problems with was writing; I couldn’t do an essay to save my ass. He worked hard, though, and so did I, and in the end he said that the inability to write was a characteristic of almost all American students, so I wouldn’t stand out from the crowd.

My mother and I spent hours watching television together, so that I would learn how to be an American. All us immigrants watch as much TV as we can, it’s the best way to learn the language and customs of the Americans. We watched soap operas because they spoke very clearly in simple sentences, and this gave me a good introduction to American idiom and sexual practices. We watched movies on the TV and game shows, to a background of my mother’s commentary. By this means I learned that the true American religion was the pursuit of pleasure and money, although they professed to worship God, and this made them cruel, although they professed to be kindly. The other part of the American creed was redemption through violence, and that made me feel right at home. The good guy and the bad guy always meet up at the end of the film, and the good guy kills the bad guy in an interesting way, and that’s the end of the movie: hug the girl and fade to black. My mother said that not all Americans were like the ones on TV, but it gave them pleasure to believe in what they saw.

There is a lot to learn in any culture, and I absorbed a good deal of this one, although, as it turned out, not quite enough. Maybe I saw the wrong movies. I liked being warm and well-fed, but there were still a few things that disturbed me about America. Cleaning your ass with dry paper instead of water, like we do in the part of the world I was from. And seeing people eating with their left hands; that still freaks me a little after all these years. And girls, the way they walked around with their sexual parts on display but weren’t whores. Very, very strange, especially to someone like me who had no real experience with women.

But the worst thing was that I was no longer armed. I would walk in the streets and imagine someone insulting me or my mother and I would have no way of obtaining satisfaction or revenge. This thought obsessed me, and when the time came for me to leave the house and go alone to school I took care to arm myself with the dagger I’d taken from my mother’s trunk. It seemed like a hundred years ago, but it was still very sharp.

Long story short, I got into a stupid argument with a football player in the cafeteria one day because he thought I was staring at his girlfriend, which I was. He pushed me and accused me of having sex with my mother, so I pulled out my knife and gutted him. A cultural misunderstanding, of the kind the U.S. government makes all the time, but that was not an excuse I could use.

I have to say Farid came through for me after I got arrested. He had a lot of contacts in the legal system, being a lawyer himself, and he got me charged as a juvenile, even though the commonwealth attorney wanted to charge me as an adult, because of the heinousness of the crime. My victim didn’t die, although he had to quit football for the season, which I guess added to the heinous nature of my crime. So basically it was a year in Bon Aire Juvenile Corrections Facility, which would be a four-star hotel anywhere north of Peshawar, and where I was a model prisoner and completed my education in American culture and got a high school equivalency degree. I still couldn’t write very well, but the standards were not high. They had job counselors there, and they were always saying that in order to succeed in life you had to have a skill set; just having a strong back and a willingness to work wasn’t enough anymore. I took the message to heart. The week after my release I enlisted in the U.S. Army. I figured I had the necessary skill set for that already.

I said good-bye to Billy and told him I wouldn’t be seeing him for a while. He didn’t show he cared, or maybe I just couldn’t see it. I’m often like that myself, so I sort of understand.

It’s a long flight to Lahore from D.C. through London, and I never learned to sleep on airplanes so I had a lot of time to think. The TV screen in the airport lounge had shown a news lady doing a story about Craig and the kidnap, with a logo that had Craig’s face and the burnedout bus from the kidnap site on it. She said it had been a week since the event, and no word on what had happened to the hostages after the first video. So I thought about that and what I was going to do and what the army had to do with all of it. I figured my days as a soldier were coming to a close, even if I didn’t get busted for this particular caper. I’m working against the interests of the United States here, no question, and I’m starting to feel funny about taking my paycheck.

No hard feelings or anything, the army does what it does, and I was reasonably happy in it, probably happier and more successful than I would’ve been in any other occupation, given my history. But I never got to love it, just like I never learned to love my mother’s country. I know that’s unusual; most immigrants, especially immigrants from the impoverished lands, turn out more patriotic than the nativeborn, but not me. Maybe it’s because I never got to know America, only TV and a prison and the military, so you could say I did not see the best parts of it.

Also, because of my upbringing, I got along a lot better with the mujahideen than I did with the Americans. Most American troops are jocky overgrown schoolboys, mainly white kids from small towns and a good chunk of minority types, and after their unit’s served together and been blooded there is unit cohesion, as they say, the men look after one another and sometimes they cry when one of their number gets blown up. But in most line units there are one or two who don’t necessarily cohere, and don’t cry at all, although otherwise they are excellent soldiers, efficient, self-sacrificing, and so on, but really they don’t give a damn. That would be me.

The plane landed in Heathrow and we went through passport control. I got the fish eye because I was traveling on my Pakistani passport and because I’d been letting my beard grow for the past week or so. My Pakistani passport says I am Abdul Ismail Laghari, although I don’t believe anyone ever called me Abdul. The name means “slave of God” and Theodore means “God-lover,” which probably amounts to the same thing, and even my Pakistani family calls me Theo. I was actually baptized Theodore at the cathedral in Lahore, privately so as not to cause scandal. So I have been a kind of undercover person from birth almost, and I am bound to offend those who like neat classifications. The passport guy (one of those) looked at his computer for a few minutes to see whether I was the terrorist I seemed to be, but then he gave the passport back to me and moved his eyes to the next in line. I suppose I will have to get used to that when I travel now.

I bought half a dozen bottles of good scotch at the duty-free shop. I have a license to possess and consume booze within the borders of Pakistan, a state that’s officially teetotal but whose citizens behave a lot like the Americans did when religious fanatics banned alcohol there some years back. My booze license is one advantage to having two identities, and bottles of scotch make a nice gift or bribe.

They called my flight and I got on with my yellow duty-free bag bulging and there was the usual boarding mess, because everyone else on the plane had been shopping too and the overheads were jammed tight. I had a seat in the next-to-last row in coach and there was a Pakistani family behind me with a five-year-old girl who insisted on sitting on her mother’s lap and shrieked when the flight attendant made her buckle in for takeoff. As soon as the flight attendant turned her back, the dad took the belt off and put the kid back on the lap. This cycle went on several times until the flight attendant threatened to throw them off the plane, after which the kid howled and kicked the back of my chair until the plane was roaring down the runway and the flight attendants were belted in, at which point the dad blithely unstrapped the kid and returned her to the lap for good. I was back in Pakistan already, where no one pays attention to rules and family peace is the main goal of life. It felt just like home.

Customs in Lahore gave me some heat about the Scotch, but since I have a pale skin and spoke perfect Urdu (and had the booze license) the guy figured I was connected to the elite and let me through. My Auntie Rukhsana was waiting for me outside passport control, and I got a big hug from her, followed by a flood of tears—Oh, your poor mother, you poor boy—and so on, and I thought it was a little extreme, it’s not like either my mother and I were the center of family life among the Lagharis. She asked me with a kind of hungry desperation how our plan was going, and I said it was going as well as could be expected but the thing now was to find out where the hostages were being held and I had to be here to do that, and she asked me how I was going to proceed, all business now, the tears dried, and I said I still had some contacts and I’d ask around. She pumped me a little then, like the good journalist she is, but I put her off, like the good secret agent I am, and at last she quit and flashed me a smile. “Little Theo, all grown up!” she said. “We’re having a party for you tonight. I hope you are not too jet-lagged.”

“Not too,” I said. “I’m used to traveling. But I’m not exactly in the party mood.”

“Yes, I understand, and we all, or almost all, feel the same way. But here the family is the most important thing; whenever something happens in your life, good or bad, the family gathers and we all eat, eat. You don’t understand that maybe, but I think we must have such a gathering, because I think you will need our help in what you are going to do. So it is, in a sense, part of why you have come.”

“Okay, got it,” I said. I’m nothing if not culturally flexible. “Who all is going to be there?”

“Oh, just the immediate family, Jafar and our children and Nisar and his wife and children. They are dying to meet you.”

“And Seyd? He’s not coming?”

She made a face. “Oh, Seyd! That’s all we would need, an ISI-wallah and you in the same room.”

“Why not? I’m sort of an ISI-wallah myself. We could have an interesting conversation.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” said my aunt darkly, and then turned to snarl in Mahji dialect at the beggars and porters who had surrounded us as soon as we left the terminal building. Another sign I was back home, people willing to carry heavy loads for a few cents, and other people treating them like dogs, and me as one of the non-dog higher beings: the feelings connected with that, and the near-solidity of the humid air, a sticky sludge of diesel, sewage, and hot spicy oils.

We got into her Mini and Rukhsana gunned the engine and pressed the horn, trusting the dog people to scramble out of our way, which they did, apparently without resentment, and she whipped us out into the exit road traffic.

I said the expected “Lahore Lahore hai,” and she laughed and replied in Mahji Panjabi.

“Yes, and can you still speak your cradle tongue, or have you forgotten?”

I answered in the same language. “I have not forgotten, Auntie, although I think that even you are more comfortable in English or proper Urdu.”

“Yes, but I am part of the cosmopolitan liberal elite that will be the ruin of pure Islamic Pakistan, according to my brother Seyd. I believe he has stopped using English entirely.”

“Then, we’ll have to speak Urdu when we meet.”

“You intend to visit Seyd?” She seemed astounded.

“Sure,” I said. “I need to find out what ISI knows about the kidnapping. I’m assuming he’ll be forthcoming. One of his relatives by marriage is among the hostages.”

“Whom he has always despised. Honestly, Theo, you cannot be so naïve. Don’t you understand that the people who did this atrocity are ISI pawns? I would not be surprised to learn that ISI arranged the whole affair.”

“Why would they do that?”

“A number of reasons. To embarrass the new government, who perhaps are not as bloodthirsty or purely Islamic as they would like. To discredit anyone working for peace with India. To curry favor with the mullahs. For money.”

“How money?”

“Well, if you have kidnapped one of the richest men in the world, I assume there will be money involved. I have heard rumors of negotiations. I have heard of lunches up in Pindi between businessmen, strangers, and high officials of the military and Inter-Services Intelligence. Something is going on. It is well known the whole country is for sale, so why shouldn’t our terrorists be for sale as well?”

“If that were true we’d have bin Laden by now. No one’s collected the twenty-five million.”

“Oh, well, those are Pashtuns. In any case, betraying a leader is a different affair entirely to selling a hostage.” Then she yelled, “Get out my way, you shit-eater, go rape your sister!” out the window at a multicolored bus as she whipped across several lanes to make a left turn.

“You’re not going to Model Town Park?” I said, as we changed direction.

“Oh, no, we are too fine for Model Town Park now. We have a house in Gulberg, which would have been quite convenient when the children were at school, but now we float around in it like fish in a tank. We have fifteen marlas, can you imagine?”

“That’s a good-sized house,” I said, falling easily back into the traditional calculations. A marla was 272 and a quarter square feet, so fifteen marlas was a big house for urban Pakistan.

“You must be doing very well, Auntie.”

“Oh, well, I am working and the children are grown and Jafar was made head of his division, and we did well on the Model Town house and some investments. You know, most people have small houses full of elderly relatives so we all take one another out to restaurants. When you are able to entertain in your own home that is a big something.”

“Yes, Auntie, I know. I was born here.”

“Of course, I know that, but you look like such an American now. Anyway, it is now considered more chic to have others to one’s house, and that was one reason we bought it. You’ll see. Of course, it is not old Lahore, not like my father’s house, but Gulberg is not nothing either.”

She sounded sad when she said this, and I asked her, “And do you entertain very much, Auntie?”

“No, we do not, or rather not for some time, because when one is promoted to head of division one has no time for such things anymore. He is in Kahuta half the time, and I am by myself. And even when we did entertain it was all very stiff, the women on one side talking children’s accomplishments, the men on the other talking office politics. No conversation that any civilized person would recognize as such. Oh, Theo, do you remember those nights at my father’s house? People from every part of Lahore, faquirs and generals, merchants, chemistry professors, journalists, ministers, and that wonderful music, with the ghazals floating up through the colored lanterns on strings. What happened to that world, that is what I want to know? We are richer than ever we were then, but somehow the taste has gone out of life. Or am I just getting old?”

I had nothing to contribute in that department, so I asked how her kids were doing, always a safe subject for a Punjabi woman, even a modern one, and she told me about Shira, who was in the foreign service, a diplomat, if you can imagine, and Hassan, who was prepping for Cambridge, and the baby, Iqbal, not such a baby anymore; he is mad for computers and doesn’t want to go to college but open his own software business, and Nisar is encouraging him, offering investments, and his father is going to shoot both of them; and we talked and argued about stuff like that for the rest of the trip to Gulberg.

The house was a new one, two floors, tan stucco, and a lot of sheet glass, with little Islamic details so you knew you weren’t in L.A. My aunt showed me to a guest room and told me dinner would be at eight, she would be out and about getting ready, and if I wanted anything just ring.

I remembered that aspect of life in Pakistan too, and after unpacking my stuff, I rang. A young woman appeared, who seemed surprised when I addressed her in her native tongue and asked her to bring me tea and snacks. Upper-middle-class Americans don’t usually have clusters of servants, but my aunt did, and I found I had not picked up any of the typical American discomfort with them. I guess you have to be born into a feudal society to understand what that’s all about.

But I was gringo enough to ask the woman what her name was and how long she’d been working for the Lagharis and tried to start a little chat, but I saw she was not happy with that, was getting more and more nervous, and I realized that the only reason a male guest would normally engage a maid in conversation would be if he was planning to throw her down on the bed and fuck her, so I froze my face into a commanding mask and waved her out.

I fell on the bed alone and conked out for a couple of hours and then I had a bath and dressed in my one suit, a custom-made number I’d picked up in Dubai a few years ago for about what a pair of decent jeans would cost in the States. I’d bought some silk shirts and a tie at the same time just for the hell of it. I’d never owned an outfit like that, and I guess I’d put it on two or three times at weddings and the occasional party at the house in D.C., but I wore it to dinner that night because I didn’t have any Pakistani clothes.

When I got down to the living room, which looked like anything you might find in suburban Washington, I found that all the men were dressed Western-style like I was, and I guess they were doing it in honor of me, which I thought was pretty neat. I think there are about twelve cousins in my generation of the family, counting me, Rukhsana’s three, and Nisar’s three girls. Seyd’s five kids were naturally absent. I was a little nervous about this gathering because of the current situation and the family history, my mom not being the pride of the clan, but it all went fine.

Better than fine, to tell the truth. I’m the senior cousin, the son of the oldest brother, which counts for something in Punjabi society; and it turned out they’d been hearing stories of my colorful exploits all their lives, mainly from Auntie R, and they were fascinated; and when it turned out I could speak their languages and wasn’t a typical American asshole, was totally desi except for the skin tones, had manners, et cetera, it turned into a love fest. Rukhsana’s three were as described, all good-looking and a lot smarter than me. Nisar’s Yasmin, Zahra, and Miah were all in various schools; they chattered and tried out their flirting and used American slang they’d picked up from the Web and movies, just wrongly enough to be charming. Pakistanis of that class obviously travel a good deal nowadays and have total access to international media, but they’re still psychologically sheltered, and now they had what amounted to a tame monster right in the family. I felt like I was coming out of a shell of my own devising into the sunlight of human life, that for the first time I could see a cure for the evil of my days, and I regretted having denied myself this for so long, nursing my isolation and loneliness, buried in the world of grunts, not that much better off than Billy Olin. What wonderful people, I thought: my family!

So we talked and laughed through a really terrific dinner, and they told me about their lives and I told them what I thought they could handle about mine, and the only things that weren’t quite right was that Seyd had refused to come or let his kids come, and Jafar came in late, when we’d already sat down, and I could see that there was something not right between him and Rukhsana.

After dinner, the men walked out on the roof terrace for smoking and guy talk and I gave Nisar and Jafar the bottles of eighteen-year-old Macallan I’d bought, which they really seemed to appreciate, and Jafar got a servant to bring glasses and ice and we all had an illicit drink, with which we toasted Babaji, and Nisar said, “Scotch is not wine,” and everyone laughed.

Then Jafar got into a discussion of the recent cricket test matches with his sons that I couldn’t really follow and Nisar took the opportunity to pull me away for a private conversation.

“So what are your plans?” he asked.

“Obviously, I want to find out where they’re holding my mother.”

“Do you think you can do that?”

“I don’t know, Uncle, but I have to try. It’s not entirely hopeless, I think. I have contacts in the jihad, and something of a reputation.”

“You’ll go north?”

“Yes. I know people in Peshawar.”

“From the jihad? How do you know they’re still alive?”

“They were the kind of people that are hard to kill.”

He chuckled at that and said, “Look, I don’t want to tell you your business, but this is a difficult time for Pakistan. The general is out for now, which is a good thing in a way, but when the lion leaves, the hyenas fight over the carcass, you know? Ordinarily, I could ease your efforts in various ways; I too know a lot of people in the north. But nowadays it’s difficult to know whom to trust. And I feel responsible, letting your dear mother and all of them go to Leepa . . . insane, really, but you know it’s quite difficult to say no to your mother and my sister all in one go.” He laughed sharply and then grew serious again. “It’s also not a good thing that Seyd did not come tonight. You understand why?”

“Rukhsana suggested that ISI might have had something to do with the kidnapping.”

“Oh, it’s more than a mere suggestion, I can tell you. My God, this organization, this so-called al-Faran, was invented, bought, and paid for by ISI. Whether they are still following orders or have set up on their own, who can say?”

“What do you hear about ransom negotiations? I mean for Craig.”

“I hear five crore—dollars, not rupees—is the asking price.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said. “It’ll be hard to move fifty million dollars in Pakistan.”

“Yes. I have interests in the largest bank in Pakistan, and now I am hearing discreet inquiries from people connected to ISI: how can they conceal an influx, an unusual influx, source unspecified? This country! Do you know, Theo, that my bribery bill is an insanely large percentage of my payroll? How can one run a nation this way? Look, I am not pure like my father. I do business, and to do business in Pakistan one must play along, but I am also my father’s son and I say there is a limit. There is still decency.”

He went on about the agony of Pakistan for a while before I brought him back to my immediate problem. “Can you get me in to see Seyd?”

“Not a good idea, Theo; he is a peculiar fellow, my dear brother. He is very proud and quite incompetent, which is a dangerous combination. He might even have you arrested or expelled. He owes me a great deal, but he would die before acknowledging how much of my influence has gone into supporting his position in the military. As for him knowing anything that could help you—well, let us just say that Seyd is not privy to the inner secrets of his organization.”

“Yes, there are people like that in every army.”

“And ours has more than most. Half our national budget goes to arms, and I ask you, have we ever won a war? The country is tearing itself apart, and these imbeciles spend and spend on nuclear weapons. Do you know the nuclear establishment employs over twenty thousand people?”

“Including Jafar. He seems to have done well out of it anyway.”

“Yes, of course, but we have brownouts in Lahore every day. How can you run businesses this way, I ask you? And these nuclear bombs, what use are they? To frighten India? Don’t make me laugh! Meanwhile, this war in the north—it could be the end of Pakistan, you know? And no one knows what the hell to do about it.”

I couldn’t help him there.

Then he asked, “Suppose you find out this location. What will you do? Because if you are thinking that the Pakistani authorities will help, I cannot encourage you. And this plan of yours—I can’t say I have much confidence in it.”

“I don’t either, but it was all we could think of. As you say, we can’t expect much help from the authorities here.”

“Yes, but I wish you had come up with something that did not involve yet another violation of our sovereignty. Poor Pakistan: caught between monsters, and yet we persist in twisting all their tails.”

He reached into a jacket pocket, removed a business card case, and wrote on the back of one of the cards with a gold ballpoint. Handing it to me he said, “This is a cell-phone number reserved for the family. If you need my help, do call, any hour. I have a very wide reach throughout Pakistan, and most problems can be solved with a proper infusion of money. It is, unfortunately, a national trait.” He laughed and patted my shoulder. “Or fortunately, I should say, in the present case.”

And then we drifted back over to the other group and the rest of the evening was devoted to talk about sports and stuff, and Nisar said he could offer me a car and a driver, if I wanted to travel north—it was safer, after all—which I gratefully declined. After a while the ladies came out and we chatted amiably under the stars. It was nice enough but it was not like an evening at Laghari Sahib’s.

The next morning I woke up early, the sky still bright pink, with little flags of the palest blue attached. I’d had a dream that the family party I’d just been at was my regular life, that the bomb had not gone off, that Laghari Sahib was still there at the head of the table and that I’d been raised and educated in Pakistan, and never been a mujahid or an American soldier, and that I was telling everyone at the table a dream I’d had, a nightmare, which was my real life and everyone thought it was awful, and for a few seconds when I woke up I didn’t know which life was real.

I dressed in my American traveling clothes and went downstairs. I found Hassan and Iqbal having tea and parathas for breakfast, and I joined them. There’s something intimate about breakfast; more than the other meals it reminds you of home and how your mother used to make your eggs and toast just right—if you had that kind of mother, which I didn’t. These parathas and this tea tasted exactly like what I used to eat every morning when I was a kid in my grandfather’s house, and waves of aching memory overcame me and I fell back into my dream a little until I realized that Iqbal was talking to me. Did I still follow cricket in the U.S.? So I snapped out of it and we talked about cricket and baseball, differences, similarities, and so on, a nice easy conversation. I said I needed a vehicle and Hassan asked if I could ride a motorcycle and I said I could, and just like that he handed me the keys to his and said I could use it as long as I wanted.

Iqbal said he had to go check his e-mail, to eye-rolling and jibes from his brother, and when he came back he had a piece of paper in his hand and a troubled expression on his face.

He handed me the paper and said, “It’s from your father. It was encrypted so I decrypted it and printed it out for you. I hope you don’t mind.”

I read the note. Hassan asked, “Bad news?”

“Sort of. My father says someone in NSA seems to have almost sniffed out what we’re doing. A woman, apparently, a translator named Cynthia Lam.”

“How did she find out?” asked Iqbal.

“He doesn’t say.”

“And how did he find out she suspects us?” asked Hassan. “I thought NSA was the topmost of top secrets.”

“It is,” I said. “But everything has leaks. My dad says he got the tip from a man named Afridi, and Afridi got it from sources he won’t reveal, as my father says discreetly. Afridi was some kind of CIA asset in the Russian jihad, and apparently he still has contacts with the spooks. But all that doesn’t matter. The question is, what do we do about it?”

Iqbal was looking at the paper over my shoulder. “I noticed he has obtained her home e-mail and IP address. And her taxpayer ID number and bank information.”

“Yeah, I’d sort of like to know where that came from. But obviously someone in Washington is supplying this information about her in the hopes that we’ll figure out some way to distract her or discredit her long enough to pull this thing off. I’m open to suggestions, gentlemen. This is definitely not my department.”

They had a number of suggestions, and I left the doing of them in their capable, devious hands. They seemed to regard it as some kind of game, which I guess it was for them, and I got myself together to do my part. It would not be nearly as gamelike.

I went out to the garage and found Hassan’s bike, a six-year-old Ducati ST in decent shape, and rode it back into the old city and the Urdu Bazaar in Anarkali. Lahore traffic was as I recalled it, maybe a little worse—more motorcycles, bigger trucks—but the same sense of riding in a circus parade operated by crazy people. Again I had the sense of dipping into an alternate existence, and also the feeling that I was comfortable in a way I was never comfortable when driving my rental through the streets of Washington—and even more at ease when I bought a Chinese fatigue jacket, a couple of shalwar kameez outfits, bull-hide sandals, and a scarf and kufi hat at a shop and changed my clothes in the back of it, wrapping my head with the scarf Pashtun style, my hands moving without thought.

Out on the street again, I swaggered around like a hill man in the big city and bought a couple of prepaid cell phones, a carton of Marlboros, and a tin hand mirror, so I could admire my beauty or kohl my eyes, and also a nylon duffel bag to put all that and my other clothes in. That done, I wandered through the bazaar and had tea and Afghan bread in a stall that Gul Muhammed used to like. The man there looked me over and addressed me in Pashto, we had the usual polite conversation, and once again memories rolled over me like heavy surf and I had to struggle not to drown in them.

After that I took the bike up Circular Road, around the old city walls to the M2, and took that north to the M1 at Pindi and on to Peshawar. Oh, the highways of my native land! Imagine an L.A. freeway’s worth of traffic on a busted two-lane blacktop, and every truck is overloaded and painted like the calliope in a carousel, and the traffic laws are a legend no one believes in anymore, and instead of safety equipment they have inscriptions from the Qur’an painted all over the vehicles. I made good time, though, on Hassan’s hot bike, not almost dying more than thrice, and reached Peshawar in the late afternoon.

To understand Peshawar you have to imagine that the crack wars they had in New York a few years ago never ended but got worse, and then the crack lords took over the whole city, and the main industries became dope, guns, and smuggling. They still get tourists, although it’s one of the few places in the world where armed guards are a major sector of the hospitality industry. Again, I felt right at home.

I stuck to the Kohat Road, avoiding the tangle of the old city, and headed straight for the Cantonment, which is where the old Raj used to hang out and which is now occupied by the new ruling classes. My clan cousin Bacha Khan had bought a huge white bungalow behind a high white wall. When I told the guards who I was they showed me right in, with peculiar expressions on their faces. It’s hard to impress a Pashtun, and I was glad to see what looked like awe on their faces, and that the name Kakay Ghazan was still remembered.

Bacha himself, I saw, remained in contention for the title of Fattest Pashtun. He bear-hugged me and sat me down on his right hand and plied me with mint tea and sweetmeats. After we had paid each other the usual compliments, asked about each other’s sons, and him expressing shock and sorrow when I said I had none, he said, “I swear before God this is like a visit from a ghost. One day you are here and the next you are gone. We thought you were dead. And now, almost twenty years later, you appear at my door. It is like a story, with djinni. Tell me now, where have you been?”

I told him what had happened to me back then and how my life had progressed since. When I was done he said, “So now you fight for the Americans instead of God. Forgive me if I don’t say that is a step in the right direction.”

I said I was leaving the army, maybe leaving America as well.

He grinned widely, and I noticed he’d had a lot of expensive dental work done.

“Are you seeking work, then?” he asked. “Because if you are, I could find an honored place for you in my business. As you see, I am prospering in a modest way.”

He gestured to the room, which was full of the kind of junk—ugly massive gilt furniture, enormous TVs and stereos—that you see across the world in the houses of very poor people who have come overnight into large sums of cash.

“What would that business be, cousin?”

“Oh, you know, import-export, various forms of trading.”

That meant he was a drug dealer, an arms dealer, or both.

“I’m flattered that you should think to include an ordinary soldier such as myself in your business. Gul Muhammed my father would be very pleased, and honored too.”

He nodded and asked, “And your father, he is well?”

“That is a question I hoped you could answer, cousin. It is a source of great shame to me that I have not seen or heard from Gul Muhammed all these many years. And unfortunately, in the times I have been in Afghanistan, my business was such that I could not make inquiries. But from what you say, he is alive?”

“I have not heard of his death, which is not the same thing,” said Bacha Khan.

“Where is he? Do you know?”

Bacha Khan seemed to consider this question for a long time. He slurped tea. He put his cup down and said, “The last I heard he was in a safe place, or as safe as a man with as many enemies as Gul Muhammed can ever be.”

“And can the son of Gul Muhammed know this place?”

I got a genial smile here. “Of course you can, although, you know, I would not like to misinform you. If God still preserves him, Gul Muhammed moves about a good deal. But I can get a message to him saying his son Kakay Ghazan has returned, and he will reply to me saying where and when you will meet. I am sure he will have great joy in hearing this news.”

“I hope so,” I said reverently, and asked, “And what of his son, my brother, Wazir? Is he still among the living?”

He shook his head sadly. “I think not. I think the war ate him—I mean the war after the Russian war. In any case he vanished, who knows how? It was a great blow to your father.”

“Yes, and to me as well. Please, can you tell me where his grave lies? I would like to honor it with a visit.”

He shrugged. “Who can tell? All of Afghanistan is a grave.”

I understood the situation now. Of course he was not going to tell me where Wazir’s grave was because that would be where Gul Muhammed was as well. Bacha Khan was a businessman; information has value, it’s a kind of virtual heroin. He had to decide how best to turn the news of my arrival to his advantage. He was Gul Muhammed’s kinsman, yes, but I had no idea what their relationship was at this point. Cousins kill one another all the time among the Pashtuns, and Pashtunistan has always been a place of infinitely tangled and conflicting loyalties. A man like Bacha Khan had to balance the government, which he bribed, against the Taliban, who more or less controlled the region, and whose various chiefs had to be bribed as well; and then there were the criminal bands, whose alliances and interests had to be considered, and he also had to take into account the various clan and personal vendettas that had been going on since forever. The thought of my American comrades trying to operate among these people made me smile.

My host took this as a good sign, and he smiled too and patted my knee. “I will send the message this very hour, God willing. Now, you will stay with me, of course. I have plenty of room.”

“That’s very generous, cousin, but I regret that urgent business calls me away.”

“What! Not even for two days? Come, reconsider! I will kill a sheep for you; we’ll have a feast, as in the old days of the Russian jihad.”

“Perhaps another time, when my business is done,” I said. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

He stopped smiling now. “What sort of business?”

“Personal business,” I said. “An affair of the heart.”

A smile bloomed again. “Oh, well, then, of course.”

“Yes, and I will need some equipment, cousin. Tell me, does Masoud still keep his shop in Karkhani?”

“You require weapons? I can give you anything you need.”

“Again, you’re most generous, but I have special needs, and besides I would like to see Masoud again and remember our old times. And I would also like to go by Kachagari to see if I have any friends left there.” This reminded him that I was a considerable person and might have connections in the refugee camps outside of his control.

“Well, then, do as you think best,” he said lightly. “But, cousin, you will find things much changed in this part of the world. It is hard to know who to trust nowadays.”

“As opposed to the past, when the Pashtuns were famous for their fidelity?”

A brief confusion on his face, then he laughed, and for somewhat longer than the remark was worth.

After that I had to refuse an armed escort to Karkhani, and we parted good pals. I left him my new cell number and he agreed to call me about Gul Muhammed. Bacha Khan could not actually kill me himself, because he was bound by pashtunwali as my host, but he could certainly sell me to someone else, in the most indirect way possible. Or perhaps he was as he seemed, a kinsman who wished me and my father well. That I could not determine which of these two possibilities was true merely meant that I had entered once more into the chronic insecurity of Pashtun tribal culture. You just live with it; it can even get to be enjoyable in a funny way, especially to an adrenaline junkie like me. As Ghalib says:

The steed of life gallops on
Out of control.
My hand no longer holds the reins,
The stirrups are torn away.
Who know where it will stop?
Who cares?

Karkhani is the famous smuggler’s bazaar of the Khyber Pass. It’s run by Afridi Pashtuns and has been since the Raj, the deal here being that the Afridis undertake to keep the pass open and the government undertakes not to interfere with the sale of smuggled goods. It has two sections, one full of fairly ordinary shops selling appliances, electronics, and other homely products to tourists and Pakistanis (what we have instead of Costco, in other words), and a restricted section, closed to foreigners, where they sell guns, opium, heroin, and hashish. I walked right into the restricted section through the checkpoint, the guards didn’t give me a second look, and directly over to Masoud’s shop. I hadn’t seen him in twenty years, but we recognized each other all right; we embraced, and he took me to the little terrace behind the shop where he entertained honored guests or special customers and suppliers. He had about a dozen sons by now and all of them gathered on the terrace and stared at us boldly while we drank tea, and the word spread through the neighborhood, and soon the mud walls around the terrace were lined with faces, all there to gawk at legendary me.

I brought up the subject of Gul Muhammed, and Masoud said he’d heard that he was living in Afghanistan, in hiding, more or less. He’d been active in the war against the Taliban and they’d put a price on his head. But he didn’t know what village he was in. I asked him if he’d ever heard of al-Faran.

He stroked his beard. “Yes, I think so. There are so many groups it’s hard to keep them straight. You would not believe what a good AK fetches now, even a Dara copy; the demand is out of control.”

“It’s the insurgency,” I said.

“Yes, the jihad against the Americans, although in the Russian jihad we had the opposite problem, the Americans and the Saudis were sending so many weapons it was almost impossible to make a living.”

“But as to al-Faran?”

“Yes, if I am not mistaken, this is a group based in Swat, I forget where, one of the groups doing jihad against the idolators in Kashmir. I think I sold them some rockets last year. Why do you want to know?”

“They kidnapped some foreigners. One of them is a relative of mine. I’d like to see if there is anything I can do to get them released.”

“Oh, yes. That was on the news. Of course they used this al-Faran, but everyone knows that that was an ISI operation.”

“Do they?”

“Of course. Al-Faran does not take a shit without ISI telling them where to drop it. It was that rich American they wanted. They will have a huge ransom and then they will use the money to fund a coup.”

“And what about the others?”

He brought the edge of his hand sharply down on the back of his neck. “On videos. This is to show that al-Faran are true mujahideen and not merely pawns of ISI. And they will sell a lot of videos, too, with so many executions. I have some in my shop, if you would care to watch one.”

“Not today, thank you,” I said.

“Then how may I serve Kakay Ghazan?” All business now.

I asked him whether he had any of those Speznatz Stechkins left. He grinned and said he did, and we both talked about the day me and Wazir had brought him a case of twenty-four that our group had won in one of our ambushes.

The Stechkin is basically a machine gun you can put in your pocket, and this batch had been modified for the Soviet special forces to include folding wire stocks and silencers. They’re rare now, and extremely expensive, but Masoud gave me the mujahid discount, and I also bought Makarov 9- mm ammunition for the thing, and five extra magazines.

We took my purchases out to the testing range, which was the roof. They don’t do returns in Karkhani, so you have to make sure the gun works before you leave the shop. I fired the Stechkin on both single-shot and full auto, and it worked fine.

I loaded all the magazines and slung it in its odd wooden holster by a strap around my neck and shoulders, concealing it under my Chinese jacket. I skipped visiting the camp. It was getting late and my bad leg was acting up, complaining about the pounding I was taking from the bike on the bad roads. I went back into Peshawar to the Qissa Khwani Bazaar and had dinner at the Salateen Hotel, which makes the best mutton karhai in the world. I could’ve used a drink, but there wasn’t one on offer, which I took as a bad sign for the future of Peshawar.

When I got back to my bike and paid off the street kids I had hired to watch it, I noticed a brown Toyota hatchback with a bent front bumper parked nearby, and I seemed to recall seeing it before, maybe in Kharkani, maybe earlier on the trip, but I was aching and tired now, and I didn’t think much about it; there are lots of brown Toyotas. Leaning against it were two men. One was a burly guy, a Punjabi by the look of him, wearing a khaki safari shirt and slacks. He had cropped hair, aviator sunglasses, and a neat brush mustache, and I thought soldier. The man he was with was taller and thinner, a Pashtun, in a shalwar kameez and a round white hat. His beard was thick, long, and black, dropping from peculiar knobby cheekbones that stood out like a couple of golf balls in the rough. In Peshawar they don’t wear T-shirts with TALIBAN written on them, but you can tell who they are.

They seemed to be arguing when I strolled up, but they stopped and the two of them stared at me, and I looked at them and gave them a polite nod. I got on the bike and rode off.

About twenty klicks south of the city, on the long grade up to the Kohat Pass, I saw the same brown Toyota again in my rearview mirror, coming up fast on my tail. I slowed a little and pulled to the left to let him pass, Sometimes in a combat situation you see a threat emerging, or rather you feel it’s going to happen without really knowing how you know, your mind has just put together a bunch of unconscious details, and so you don’t go through a door or stick your head up or whatever, and I had that feeling then.

So when the Toyota swerved violently toward me to knock me off the road, I jammed on the brakes and put the bike down and skidded for about forty feet, throwing sparks and tearing the leg off my trousers along with some patches of skin. I saw the hatchback screech to a halt in a cloud of dust and then pull a U-ey and come running back to where I was. It stopped and the passenger door and the two rear doors popped open and three guys got out, the military dude from the bazaar, hefting an AK, and two guys I’d never seen before, short wide men who had the dark skin and flat faces of Tajiks.

I pulled myself away from the motorcycle and got to one knee, my upper body bent over like I was hurting, and I lifted the Stechkin from its holster and thumbed it to full auto, and when they were about two yards from me I knocked the three of them over with one long burst.

I pointed the pistol at the driver and yelled out in Urdu to lift his hands from the wheel and get out of the car. After a brief hesitation he did so, and I made him sit on the ground with his hands behind his head. I looked him over: early twenties, shortish hair, a mustache. I figured him for a Punjabi soldier or cop of some kind. He was shaking slightly, like a bush in a faint breeze. I leaned over and checked out his hands.

I know guys who like this part, but I’ve never cared for it, it’s not combat anymore, and it’s embarrassing, to me at least, to have that kind of power over a human person. On the other hand, there are situations, like this one, where you need information.

I said, “What is this all about, brother? Why did you want to kill me?”

“Oh, God, are you going to shoot me now? Oh, God!”

“No, of course not. You are no threat to me, Naik. Is it naik?”

He dared a look up at my face. “Lance-naik. I am only a driver, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“Shabbir Hussain.”

“Very well, Lance-naik Hussain, why was your officer trying to kill me?”

“He wasn’t trying to kill you! He was going to give you to those Afghans and they would take you away. He would put it out as a kidnapping. It happens all the time on these roads.”

“And why was. . . this officer, what was his name and rank?”

“Captain Ahmed Waqar.”

“What unit?”

He lowered his face. “I am not allowed to say.”

“Don’t be stupid, Shabbir. You have no choice, and no one will ever know what passed between us. I am trying to save your life, so help me, please. What unit?”

“Intelligence. But I am only a driver. I don’t know anything.”

“Thank you. And now, why was Captain Waqar of the ISI trying to have me kidnapped?”

“I told you, sir. I am only a driver.”

“Yes, you keep saying. Would you like a cigarette?”

He would. I gave him one and let him smoke half of it in silence. Then I said, “Let’s begin again, and let’s not continue with this story that you’re only a driver. An ISI captain on a mission like this would not take along a lance-naik driver. He would require someone who could take charge if he were out of action, perhaps a senior NCO, a havildar major or a subedar, and you are too young to be either of those, so I suspect you are a lieutenant. And by the way, lieutenant, drivers have little cuts and scars on their hands and grease around their fingernails. You have never changed even an oil filter with those soft hands.”

He took in this comment and his shoulders sagged.

“Shoot me, if you like,” he said sullenly. “I’m not saying anything more.”

“Why not? Captain Waqar is dead, and your main problem will be figuring out what to tell Major Laghari when you return to Pindi. Fortunately, I understand he’s not too bright, so you should have little difficulty making up a plausible story.”

He stared up at me. “How did you know—” he began and then realized his mistake.

“How did I know you were sent by Major Laghari? Because, my friend, you have been suckered into a family affair. Major Seyd Laghari is my uncle. I bet he didn’t tell you that.”

He gaped at me. “No. He said you were an American spy.”

“I’m sure. Well, the fact is I’m not here to spy on Pakistan. I’m here to look for my mother. She’s one of the people kidnapped with William Craig. You’d know all about that, too, wouldn’t you?”

I was looking into his eyes when I said that, and I saw them register surprise and something deeper too. Perhaps guilty knowledge. I thought then that Lieutenant Hussain did not have a shining future as an intelligence agent if he could not lie more convincingly.

“And the Taliban that Captain Waqar was talking to in Peshawar. What’s his story?”

“I don’t know,” said the lieutenant sullenly. “Some Afghan.”

“Name?”

“Baz Khatak.”

“Who is he?”

“Nobody. An informant.”

An insurgent was more like it, but I didn’t press it because I thought I’d got everything I was going to get out of Lieutenant Hussain without actual torture. I made him drag his boss’s body back to the Toyota and heave it into the back compartment, and all the time he was doing that he kept looking at me, like I was going to pull some fiendish trick of the kind we Americans are famous for, maybe shoot him at the last minute. But I did not, and instead made him toss the dead Tajiks and the AK down the dropoff and let him get in his car and drive away.

The Ducati had lost some of its fairing but it was still in running order and I used it to return to Peshawar, because I was not going to try to drive back to Lahore with ISI searching the roads, as they would be as soon as the lieutenant called in what had gone down. I should have capped the poor bastard, but I didn’t have the heart; he looked too much like my cousin Hassan, even though I’ve shot dozens of people who resemble my relatives. It was just not his day to die.