The Year of the Locust, page 14
“We guessed you would have to abandon any packhorses—they are too easily seen and tracked. Your only chance is on foot, and in case you don’t know it, thirst and injury will kill you very fast out here. Take off your shoes.”
“What?”
“Take them off,” he repeated, motioning a gray-bearded man forward. He was holding several pairs of sandals, identical to those that several of the men were wearing. “They are made by a craftsman in the bazaar,” the soldier explained. “The best you’ll ever find.
“They’re meant for the rough terrain here, comfortable and impossible to destroy. You can climb canyon walls in them, and believe me, you’ll be doing that—to even have a chance you have to go where their four-wheel drives and half-tracks can’t follow.”
I nodded; I had already thought of that. With my shoes off, Gray Beard was fitting different sandals, selecting the best size and ready to use a long knife to adapt them. I turned to the soldier, indicating the other men. “You all know who I am?” I asked.
“Of course,” he replied. “You’re an anonymous traveler, a solitary man on a trail who saw a chance to help some children and their mother. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see anything else, the setting sun made it impossible. Then you vanished.” He smiled again.
“Did you know him, the man they crucified?” I asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “People had seen him at the bazaar, passing through. He was always traveling, they said, but nobody knew where or why. He was alive when they brought him here—barely. They’d tortured him and dragged him off the back of a flatbed on a blanket.
“Five of us—friends—were here with our families.” He indicated men who were ranged around the small clearing. “We were buying supplies and ammunition when they ordered us outside and told us to dig a foundation for the cross. They had brought it with them, even heavier than the sins of a nonbeliever,” he said, and smiled again, gently. “They laid the cross and the victim down beside us and we dug—”
“You said he was still alive,” I said. “Did he talk, say anything?”
“Cursed a lot, even though he was very weak,” the soldier replied. “He said his cousin was also a member of the Army—he had overheard him speaking to his wife and had betrayed him.”
It rocked me—sold out and crucified by a member of your own family? Sometimes there seemed to be no end to the evil in the world.
“He kept saying that everything he had done was for his family,” the soldier continued. “From where he was lying, he could see his wife and daughters, and every few minutes, he would try to call out and tell them he was sorry.”
Just imagining it was harrowing enough, and I forced the narrative forward. “Did he say anything about a meeting?” I asked.
“There was a moment when he looked at us and said if a traveler came to tell him that everything he had told them was true. Every word.”
I thought for a moment of the photograph on the cigarette paper, the information about a spectacular, and the date—all the things we had thought might be an attempt to goose the price—and I was certain that a man tortured and about to be crucified would have no reason to lie.
“He said he was due to meet someone within a few hours,” the soldier continued. “But that can’t have been true—he must have been rambling, because nobody has arrived. We have no idea who that could be.” He raised an ironic eyebrow at me.
I smiled. “Did he say anything about a plan, a time and place? A foreign city, or cities maybe?” I fought to keep my voice calm and measured but I was desperate, trying to salvage anything that I could.
The soldier shook his head. “He was close to death, then they started to roll him onto the cross. This time he really was rambling—he said there was a town in India where evil had come on the wind, a place of never-ending tragedy.”
“What?” I said, immediately alert. “A town in India?”
“Like I said, he was really rambling,” the soldier replied. “It was nearly all about his family, trying to say goodbye. They already had him on the cross, so then they nailed his hands and feet to it and raised it upright. You saw the rest.”
“What a strange thing to say,” I said, virtually to myself. I had finished the goat stew, and Gray Beard had finalized fitting and adjusting the sandals. “Evil had come on the wind?”
“We must go,” the soldier said, motioning to his colleagues to pick up their weapons and equipment. “As you are not here, we can’t say farewell, can we?”
We both smiled. “I know you are not of the faith,” he continued, more serious. “But allow me anyway—barak Allahu feek. May Allah’s blessings be upon you.”
“Wa feeka. And on you, too,” I replied in the time-honored fashion. He turned and motioned to the others, and I watched in silence as they faded into the night.
Standing in the darkness, reality closed in on me: there was nothing now, no mission worthy of the name, only the words of a dying man. How could a town in India, a place of never-ending tragedy, he had said, be a target or offer any clue to a terrorist attack in the West?
CHAPTER 45
I started gathering my few possessions together, thankful for the decent food and the lightweight water skins, but with nothing else to alleviate my sense of impending doom.
Deep inside one of the most hostile countries in the world, I knew I had no hope of getting back to the safety of the Pakistani border, a fact I had been aware of since the moment I had decided to try to help the mother and her children.
I would have had to travel the huge distance on foot, been forced to avoid every track and cross endless miles of arid terrain without food or water. Even worse, once the Army heard of the events at the intersection—in about an hour’s time, by my guess—they would know who was responsible and would flood the zone with foot patrols, four-wheel drives, drones, and now—I had learned—their dogs.
I knew enough after years of being tracked and pursued that if I was going to survive, my only realistic option was to call for help: I had to be exfiltrated as fast as possible.
A phone would have been the answer, of course; I could have made an encrypted call to the agency. But there was no point in thinking about that, I told myself—I couldn’t rectify what had been done. Lacking any form of communication, as far as I could see there was only one hope of getting a message out to Langley.
To that end, I crouched down and consulted the crown prince. Because the watch was designed for the Muslim world, it had a display around the edge of the dial that indicated the time for each of the five daily prayers. It told me that dawn was eleven hours away. It meant I had twelve hours and nineteen minutes to organize everything I needed to get a message to Langley; even if I suffered no setbacks it was going to be incredibly tight.
I raised the telescopic sight to my eye, positioned my finger, and activated the mapping function. Within a few seconds I found what I was looking for and saw that I had to set a course almost due south.
I was heading overland, back to the Plateau of White Stones. If I could make it there, maybe I had a chance. Twelve hours and eighteen minutes.
CHAPTER 46
It started off as a bad night, the worst of the entire mission, and rapidly got worse. Running in darkness, falling and stumbling across an uncharted wasteland, I tried to stick to the ridges, but countless times I was forced down into canyons and then up rugged hillsides.
Within the first hour my clothes were torn and ripped as a result of encounters with jagged rocks and, on one occasion, having to fight my way through a stretch of thornlike scrub with the rifle. At least four times I threw myself face-first into the dirt, spooked by birds I mistook for drones with night vision or thermal imaging.
Then, just before dawn, guided by the mapping, I finally saw the pylon with its shredded wind sock. I dumped my water containers at its base, stripped off my shirt, and—using it as a pouch—began to gather as many of the smaller white stones as I could find.
During the endless hours of preparation at Langley, I had not only seen the plateau on electronic maps but I had also examined scores of satellite photos of almost my entire route, including a large number of high-definition shots of the area surrounding the plateau. All of the photographs were classified, watermarked with the NSA logo, and clearly imprinted with the details of their origin and the time and date they were taken. As a result, I knew that every day the Afghan-Axis Galileo 4 spy satellite followed a schedule determined by sunrise: it passed over the plateau and its surroundings at exactly one hour and nineteen minutes after dawn.
In normal circumstances, such spy photos might not be looked at for days, but I had one advantage. Because I hadn’t used the phone to upload the daily photo, Langley would have assumed something had gone wrong, and I was certain that the thousands of images from each day’s satellite pass would be examined minutely and immediately to try to find either me or my body. In addition, if situations in the past were any guide, the seventh floor would have already alerted all of our secret assets in the country to be on standby to try to help if necessary.
First, however, I had to send a message, and then—as they said in those parts, inshallah, if God wills it—would come the rescue. Time after time, I gathered the stones and dumped them next to the dead-flat section that I and the ponies had crossed several days earlier. When the pile was large enough, and as dawn broke, I walked back to the wind sock, took my hourly sip of water, and sat down to work out exactly what my message needed to say. That was when I saw the drone.
It was battery operated and silent; I would never have known it was approaching except for the fact that whoever was controlling it flew it along the eastern edge of the old airstrip and the rising sun caught its fuselage. I was sitting partly in shadow under the wind sock and it gave me just enough time to hurl myself forward as it came closer, hugging the earth, thankful that both my clothes and my shirtless back were so filthy they were as effective as any camouflage.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched it, hoping that I wouldn’t see it lose altitude and circle above me. It was with a flood of relief I saw its shadow pass the other side of the wind sock and keep going. I counted to twenty and then raised my head to just catch sight of it making a hard left turn and disappearing over the edge of the plateau. It didn’t mean, however, that the threat was over. From its straight line, constant altitude, and sharp turn, I figured it wasn’t a random search flight. The unseen operator was flying a grid: sooner or later it would be back, coming in from a different angle.
Drone or no drone, I opened up the mapping function and started to search for a road where one of our Iranian assets might have a chance of picking me up and helping me to cross the border into either Pakistan or Afghanistan. Within a couple of minutes I found a back road—probably little more than a dirt track—that I could reach in two to three days of hard trekking. In the scorching temperatures, I calculated I had just enough water for three days and nothing more.
The back road, however, connected two provincial towns, meaning that it fed into a wider and more accessible road network, allowing an extraction team to travel fast to meet me. In addition, the map also showed there was a small bridge halfway along that would act as an easily identified rendezvous. I rechecked my calculations, noted down the coordinates, and ran for the pile of stones.
I had thirty-two minutes until Galileo 4 passed overhead.
CHAPTER 47
The message had to be simple and large enough so that it would immediately grab the attention of the photo analysts and researchers who would be combing through the photos. I started by spelling out the letters S-O-S.
I had chosen the clearest part of the old runway, confident that the stark white rocks against the parched grass would be legible. It took longer than I had anticipated, though—laying out the stones chewed through the minutes, and so did constantly checking the distant edge of the plateau for the drone.
I was almost finished with the next part—M-A-N D-E-A-D—when I made my automatic check of the sky: with the sun slanting across the airstrip, I saw the drone approaching fast.
I threw myself down, lying prone, trying to mask as much as possible of the message with my body and only lifting my head an inch to check the predator’s progress. It was staying to the far edge of the field, flying low, just my side of the dense trees, looking at the forest as the operator worked on the assumption—I figured—that anybody on the run would stick to cover and never be out in open country. I lay perfectly still, the stones I had laid a few minutes before digging into my ribs and groin, making the urge to move almost unbearable, and waited to see—barely breathing—if it turned toward me.
Lying face down, watching the drone flying along the line of trees, knowing that if it was going to see me and change direction it would be any minute now, I couldn’t help but think about what had happened at the intersection. I had no doubt it would have been easier to turn my back on the kids and head for the border, so I suppose it was only natural, given my perilous situation, to ask myself if it had been a mistake. With the drone coming closer, I thought about the life I had wanted to live and the navy ships I’d always hoped to command, when I recalled something my mother had told me when I was a child. It hadn’t crossed my mind in twenty-five years but I guess it had taken root somewhere and was waiting for its moment in the sun.
Mom was not well educated, but as I have said, she was a devout woman, and there was only one public figure she had ever admired unreservedly: Martin Luther King Jr. She was barely a teenager when she heard Dr. King speak in front of a quarter of a million people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and that experience had never left her; she told me about that day more times than I can recount, and she knew his famous “I have a dream…” speech almost by heart.
But it was a quite different address of his that she told me about one scorching day at the end of a Florida summer, sitting on the back porch, twilight coming in and watching the fireflies, a ten-year-old boy and his mother, easy in each other’s company. “You know why I respected the reverend so much?” she asked quietly. “Because of a simple lesson he taught. He said that if most people saw a man being attacked in the street, they would ask themselves: what will happen to me if I get involved?
“But Dr. King said that was the wrong question,” she continued. “The real question was this: what will happen to the man if I don’t? I want you to always remember that.”
What will happen to the man if I don’t? I recalled. No, I had no regrets about the children.
The wind was growing stronger, swirling grit into my eyes, but I couldn’t blink or move. The drone was directly parallel to me, passing in and out of the shadows cast by the trees—if it was going to turn toward me, it had to be now.
It continued to fly forward. Slowly, I let myself breathe again. Its reappearance had cost me valuable time but I didn’t move until I was convinced it was out of sight. Then I scrambled up and checked my watch: nine minutes to the satellite. Running now, no time to grab a water pouch and wash the grit from my eyes, I finished the message with two minutes to spare. In the middle of the old landing strip, standing beside the white stones and their message, I quickly stripped off my headdress and the rest of my legend’s outfit, getting down to just a pair of chinos. I tilted my face upward and stared into the sky.
I had to ensure that when the satellite photographed me, they would be able to see my face and identify me, but I knew they would also lift a host of other bodily measurements off of the photos. They would then run a full suite of biometrics—height, width of the chest—to make certain that I wasn’t an impostor and they weren’t falling into some kind of trap.
Duress, I suddenly thought in a panic—knowing how paranoid the agency was, I figured they would worry that there might be men hidden among the trees with weapons trained on me and that, unarmed, I was only acting under duress. A minute to go. I ran hard for the wind sock, grabbed the rifle—and the water bags—and returned to my spot. Bare-chested, staring high into the sky, thinking about Galileo 4 spinning closer, holding the rifle at the hip ready to fire, the safety off and the magazine loaded, probably looking like some strange prophet or—more likely—a madman, I counted down.
I hit zero. I may have made it to the appointed time but I had no idea how long the satellite would be overhead and I wanted to give myself every chance, especially as I had no certainty that the prince was as accurate as he claimed to be.
For a further four minutes I stood there, immobile and exposed, imagining what would unfold at Langley in a few short minutes. I knew that the first thing would be an encrypted phone call from the NSA saying, in their usual understated way, that they had just received some interesting photos. Then all hell would break loose.
CHAPTER 48
Due to a unique circumstance, it was Madelaine O’Neill who witnessed more of that night’s events at Langley than anyone, and it was certainly she who gave the clearest account of them.
She told me later that she had been working, alone in her office, that evening. With no photos from me since I had crossed the border, she had been told to drill into her files and try to find a lead on anybody along my route—apart from the Army of the Pure—who might have either killed me or been holding me captive. Kidnap for ransom was a definite possibility—apart from drugs, it was about the only growth industry in the entire region. Madelaine said that in the absence of any photos or demand for money, the view within the agency was that I had run into trouble almost immediately and was dead.
Just before ten p.m. she heard the door at the end of the corridor outside her office open and the sound of a man running. She opened her door in time to see Buster Glover with a phone to his ear.
“They’ve found him. He’s alive,” Buster yelled at the head of research, who was in the corridor, going home. “They want you in the conference room now.” The head of research just stared at the assistant director, then wordlessly turned and unlocked his door.
