2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (10 page)

Arnold had abandoned his search for olive oil and was taking a Budweiser out of the fridge while humming the Redskins’ anthem when the red phone rang. There were only three people who could call him on this phone and he couldn’t pass any of them on to his First Secretary. It was most probably his boss from Washington, George no-lunch Shultz. It was lunch hour in Foggy Bottom and the Secretary of State kept his calls brief so Arnold picked up the phone without thinking, ready for a quick diplomatic update.

It was General Zia ul-Haq, the President of his host country, on the line, polite and pointless as ever: how’s Nancy’s health, how was she adjusting to the local weather, was she getting along with the servants, were they planning to have babies soon? Arnold went along: Nancy loved Islamabad, she had started taking Urdu lessons, she was getting used to having so many servants, she would love to call on the First Lady sometime.

“Arnie, why don’t you bring her over?” When General Zia called him Arnie, he always wanted Arnold Raphel to do something beyond the call of his diplomatic duty.

“Sure, Mr President. No true diplomat should ever eat at home. Just waiting for your invitation.”

“I know that these things should be arranged in advance, but we are having another American friend over for dinner and he would like to see you very much.”

Arnie looked at his Hawaiian steaks and panicked. Not another brainstorming session with a visiting delegation of the Pakistani Association of North American Doctors, Arnie thought. Not another wasted evening discussing models for some proposed mosque in some godforsaken New Jersey neighbourhood. Not another debate about how a minaret can be adapted so that it reflects true Islamic architectural sensibility without clashing with American aesthetic values. He was wondering how to make it clear to the General that his brief as the ambassador didn’t include being used as a guinea pig for spreading Islam in North America. He was thinking about a diplomatic enough excuse, something about Nancy having a stomach bug or entertaining a group of local newspaper editors; both useless, he knew. His domestic staff had probably already reported to the General that Ambassador Sahib was planning a honeymoon at home, and the General himself would definitely know who was entertaining local editors and where.

Before Arnie could come up with something, General put an end to his dreams of a cosy domestic evening. “Bill is coming over for dinner,” he said.

“Bill Casey?” Arnie asked, feeling very unlike the Ambassador of the United States. He wondered whether his friends in Langley were planning to put the boot in after entrusting him with the biggest assignment since Saigon. “The only difference is you’ll be managing victory rather than a defeat,” Bill had told him. The embassy was full of Bill’s people anyway, from the trio of cultural, commercial and military attaches to the political officers and the communication analysts. Sometimes Arnold wondered whether his cook was also getting his recipes from Langley. He realised the need for this, as Bill always kept reminding him that the CIA was running the biggest covert operation against the Soviets from Pakistan since their last biggest covert operation against the Soviets from somewhere else. Bill kept reminding everyone that he had the Russkis by their balls in Afghanistan. Bill was always telling his old chum Ronald Reagan that it was the Wild West all over again, that the Afghans were cowboys with turbans and that they were kicking Soviet ass as it had never been kicked before.

But Arnie was the ambassador around here and he shouldn’t have to find out about Bill’s imminent visit from General Zia. The Director of the CIA could visit wherever he wanted and whomever he wanted, but even the Director of the CIA had to inform the ambassador who was, technically, his host. But what can you do about Bill, or as Nancy always called him, Bill get-Ronnie-on-the-line Casey?

General Zia laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s just an informal visit. When Bill gets together with Prince Naif they do crazy things, you know. They called from Jeddah an hour ago and said they felt like eating that bitter-gourd, mutton-curry combination that the First Lady made last time they were here. And I said, ‘My wife is your sister and you know sisters love to feed their brothers.’”

“I’ll receive him and bring him over,” Arnie said. He had no idea where and when Bill was arriving.

“Don’t worry,” General Zia said. “They were racing their planes from Saudi to here. The Prince won and is already here. General Akhtar is picking Bill up. His plane should be landing now. You come over and if Nancy likes bitter gourds, bring her along as well.”

The Chief of Inter Services Intelligence, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman’s devotion to his duty was not the ordinary devotion of an ambitious man to his work. General Akhtar approached his work like a poet contemplating an epic in progress; conjuring up battles in his imagination, inventing and discarding subplots, balancing rhyme and reason. His work could take him in a single day from an interrogation centre to a state banquet to an unlit tarmac runway at an airport, where he would receive a guest whose arrival time he never knew. Pakistan’s second most powerful man didn’t mind waiting in the dark if the visitor happened to be the second most powerful man in United States of America.

The next time General Akhtar stood on an airfield, he would be in a uniform, he would not want to board the plane but would be forced to do so, out of sheer reverence for his chief. And that would be the last order he would ever obey.

General Akhtar looked into the orange-tinged Islamabad sky and wondered what was taking his guest so long.

Bill Casey’s C141 Star Lifter, carrying him from Saudi Arabia, circled over the military airbase outside Islamabad. The clearance for landing had been given, but Bill was still freshening up after a two-hour nap. The interior of this plane was part hotel room, part communication bunker; a flying command centre carrying so much black metal with blinking lights that a team of three sergeants worked full time monitoring and decoding the incoming and outgoing messages. There were modular frequency jammers to override all other transmitters working in a ten-mile radius, digital deflectors to misguide any missiles lobbed at the jet, double jammers to counter-jam any other jamming equipment operating in the area. It could also fly under five different identities, switching from one call sign to another as it crossed continents. It was Duke One when it took off from Saudi Arabia. Somewhere over the Arabian Sea, it had become Texan Two.

Bill’s suite on the plane was a basic budget-hotel affair, a double bed, a shower and a small television. He shaved and repacked his bag to while away some time so that Prince Naif could win the race. Five years of dealing with his Saudi counterpart had taught Bill one lesson: you can take a Bedouin out of a desert, you can take him off his camel and give him the most expensive flying machine in the world, but there was no point trying to take the camel jockey out of him. If the Prince wanted to race his plane on his way to dinner, the CIA chief would oblige.

As Bill’s C141 made its final approach to the runway and the pilot started communication with air traffic control, the counter-jammers went to work. Thousands of listeners tuning into
Golden Oldies
from Ceylon Radio heard their favourite songs interrupted by a chorus of bagpipes issuing from the cover pulse generators on the plane. The arrival was so secret that even the air traffic controller, used to the arrival of American military planes at odd hours, didn’t know that he was communicating with a VIP flight. Giving respectful instructions to the pilot, he thought, Here comes another plane full of booze and pig-meat for those American spies at the US Embassy.

The plane taxied to the furthest end of the runway and the runway lights were switched on only when it had come to a complete halt. Six identical black Mercedes limousines were parked close to the runway. Four motorcycle outriders—or pilots as they are called in the VIP Security Unit—waited on their Kawasaki 1000 motorcycles in front of the convoy, their helmet earphones on standby for instructions. General Akhtar Abdur Rehman saluted Bill Casey, a salute complete with stamping of the heel and his straight palm parallel with his right eyebrow.

“Welcome, Field Marshal,” he said. The tableau had started as a joke when Bill, in his first meeting with Akhtar, kept calling him Generalissimo. “Well, if I am a general, you must be the field marshal, sir,” Akhtar had said and now he insisted on the role play whenever Bill visited.

“Damn, Akhtar,” Bill Casey raised a limp hand to his eyebrow. “I’m dead tired.”

As the outriders switched their sirens on one by one, General Akhtar and Bill Casey got into the fourth limousine, a posse from CIA’s Special Operations Group, wearing suits and carrying no visible arms, and a group of Pakistani commandos with their sleek little Uzis, got into the other limousines and the journey to the Army House started. It was a forty-minute drive for civilians. The VIP convoy, with all traffic and pedestrian crossings blocked, could make it in twelve minutes, but General Akhtar seemed to be in no hurry.

“Would you like a drink before dinner, sir?” he asked, with both his hands in his lap.

“Are we going straight to dinner?” Bill asked wearily.

“Prince Naif is already there, sir.”

“And my friend,” Bill mimed General Zia’s moustache with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, “is he really having these visions?”

General Akhtar smiled a coy smile, puffed out his chest and said in a very concerned tone. “Eleven years is a long time. He’s a bit tired.”

“Tell me about it.” Bill slumped into his seat. “Go ahead. Get me drunk.” General Zia never served alcohol at his dinners, even state dinners, not even for known alcoholics. General Akhtar Abdur Rehman considered it his duty to keep his guests in good humour, either at his office or during the drive Co the Army House. He tapped the driver’s seat, and without looking back, the man passed him a black canvas bag. Akhtar produced two glasses, a silver ice bucket, a bottle of Royal Salute whisky and poured Bill half a glass and himself a glass of water; he asked the driver to slow down and said, “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Bill. “Cheers to you, General. Nice country you got here.” He flicked open the curtain on the limousine window and watched the crowd gathered along the roadside, straining against the security police and waiting for this convoy to hurry up and pass so that they could get on with their lives.

“Sad, though, you can’t sit down somewhere and have a goddam drink. Cheers.”

Behind the cordons set up along the road by the police for this VIP procession, people stood and waited and guessed: a teenager anxious to continue his first ride on a Honda 70, a drunk husband ferociously chewing betel nuts to get rid of the smell before he got home, a horse buckling under the weight of too many passengers on the cart, the passengers cursing the cart driver for taking this route, the cart driver feeling the pins and needles in his legs begging for their overdue opium dose, a woman covered in a black burqa—the only body part visible her left breast feeding her infant child—a boy in a car trying to hold a girl’s hand on their first date, a seven-year-old selling dust-covered roasted chickpeas, an old water carrier hawking water out of a goatskin, a heroin addict eyeing his dealer stranded on the other side of the road, a mullah who would be late for the evening prayer, a gypsy woman selling bright pink baby chickens, an air force trainee officer in uniform in a Toyota Corolla being driven by a Dunhill-smoking civilian, a newspaper hawker screaming the day’s headlines, Singapore Airline’s crew in a van cracking jokes in three languages, a pair of home-delivery arms dealers fidgeting with their suitcases nervously, a third-year medical student planning to end his life by throwing himself on the rail tracks in anticipation of the Shalimar Express, a husband and wife on a motorbike returning from a fertility clinic, an illegal Bengali immigrant waiting to sell his kidney so that he could send money back home, a blind woman who had escaped prison in the morning and had spent all day trying to convince people that she was not a beggar, eleven teenagers dressed in white impatient to get to the field for their night cricket match, off-duty policemen waiting for free rides home, a bride in a rickshaw on her way to the beauty salon, an old man thrown out of his son’s home and determined to walk to his daughter’s house fifty miles away, a coolie from the railway station still wearing his red uniform and in a shopping bag carrying a glittering sari he’d change into that night, an abandoned cat sniffing her way back to her owner’s house, a black-turbaned truck driver singing a love song about his lover at the top of his voice, a bus full of trainee Lady Health Visitors headed for their night shift at a government hospital; as the smoke from idling engines mixed with the smog that descends on Islamabad at dusk, as their waiting hearts got to bursting point with anxiety, they all seemed to have one question on their minds: “Which one of our many rulers is this? If his security is so important, why don’t they just lock him up in the Army House?”

I
stare through the windscreen with such intensity it’s as if I am the one driving the car. I can only admire how Major Kiyani doesn’t believe in giving anyone the right of way on this narrow, potholed road. He maintains his speed in the face of an oncoming truck, flicks the car headlights to full beam, his fingers tap to the music on the steering wheel and at the last possible moment it’s the truck that swerves and pulls off the road. Major Kiyani’s Corolla seems like an extension of his powers, unblinking, unlimited and needing no justification.

A child bolts out of a golden, harvest-ready wheat-field and Major Kiyani presses the car horn and keeps it pressed for a mile.

The traffic is thin at this time of the evening, mostly trucks and night buses, an occasional tractor with a few tonnes of sugar cane on an overloaded trolley with some urchins following along, trying to pull out a sugar cane or two. We pass a bull cart crawling along the side of the road; the pair of bulls pulling it are blinded by our car’s headlights; the dog walking by the cart yelps just once before ducking to avoid the speeding monster.