2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (21 page)

“Want some fun?” Without waiting for an answer I put the plane into a thirty-degree dive, trimmed my ailerons, gave some right rudder and yanked the stick to the right. Bannon tried to jump in his seat but the plane was pulling hard, the gravity pinned him down. The right wing kept rolling up and soon we were inverted, hanging from our safety harnesses. I decided to hold the plane there and pressed the intercom button.

“Who shafted Colonel Shigri?”

It’s a great vantage position to see the world from; with your feet pointing at the sky, neck stretched and eyes staring at earth, just the way I used to hang upside down from the apple tree in our backyard on Shigri Hill.

“Fuck,” Bannon said, his voice sounding metallic on the intercom. “Get my fanny back on the ground.”

I obliged. I eased the stick to the left and pushed the right rudder in; the plane completed a roll. I checked the altimeter. Six thousand feet. Exactly where we had started.

“Wasn’t that a perfect roll?” I looked towards Bannon, my left hand working the trimmer. Bannon’s face was yellow, and his forehead had broken into sweat. His burp filled the cockpit with the smell of Coca-Cola and half-digested omelette.

“Fury Two levelling off at six thousand.”

The tower babbled on for a few seconds.

“Roger,” I said, without listening.

Bannon was talking.

“Nothing to do with us. I heard stuff but that’s all bullshit. You’ve got to look at the context and the context in this case was this.” He counted invisible money with the thumb and forefinger of both his hands. “There was a lot of moolah going into Afghanistan. This whole jihad against communism was nothing but loads and loads of mazuma. The mujahideen just loved their greenbacks, you know. And yes we brought them mules from Argentina and ack-acks from Egypt and AK47’s from China and stingers from Nevada but what really worked with them was the dollar. Not questioning their motives here, mind you. Your average muj is happy with a shawl on one shoulder and a rocket launcher on the other, he is the best guerrilla fighter we have got—God, I could have used some of them in Nam—but what I am saying here is that the leadership, the commanders with their villas in Dubai and their cousins trading in Hong Kong, I mean nobody could keep track of anything. Although money wasn’t their basic motive, the muj just loved their dollars. But so did your brass and it’s only natural that in a situation like this some of it went missing.” He was still holding the end of the joint in his hand. I took it and flicked it out of the air vent; it ballooned up before dancing away into the space.

“Spare me the analysis. Are you saying Colonel Shigri was one of those people who wanted your greenbacks?”

Dad’s bank manager came to see me the day after his funeral and transferred his account to my name. Three hundred and twelve rupees in credit.

“Oh no. Not at all. Not remotely suggesting that.”

I yanked the stick to the left, and pushed in the right rudder to keep the plane from drifting. I wanted to have a good look at Bannon’s face. He took a deep breath and peered out of the cockpit, surveying Black Valley where some enterprising bugger had cut down the pines on a mountainside and arranged whitewashed stones to read:
Mard-e-Momin, Mard-e-haq, Zia ul-Haq, Zia ul-Haq
.

“I’m all ears,” I said, banking away from the mountains. I was in no mood to give him an Urdu lesson or explain what the Man of Faith was doing on top of a Black Valley mountain.

“You know how much money was passing through Colonel Shigri’s hands? Not putting a price on the hardware here, not counting the humanitarian aid. Just the moolah in Samsonites. Three hundred million dollars cash. Every quarter. And that is American taxpayers’ money, not taking into consideration the Saudi royal dosh. So twenty-five mil goes missing—and I say this with my hand on my heart—that sounds like a big pile of greens but it was nothing. No one batted an eyelid at our end. Hey, you don’t count pennies when you are fighting the single worst enemy since Hitler. But. But. Twenty-five mil is a lot of money for your folks. You knew your dad better than I did. I know he had his flash uniforms and rigid principles but the man liked his Scotch, he liked his female companions, so you never know.” I stared at him without blinking. “Look, man, all I’m saying is this: I don’t know and you don’t know how much a hooker costs in Switzerland. But it sure don’t cost twenty-five million US dollars.”

“Do I look like someone who has inherited twenty-five million dollars?”

He looked at me blankly, wondering why was I taking it all so personally. I rummaged in my pocket and produced a crumpled fifty-dollar bill. “This is all I’ve got.” I threw the note in his lap where it lay like an unproven accusation.

I wondered if I should tell him that I helped Dad take care of that money. Bannon would have never believed me. I took a deep breath and pressed the radio button. “Fury Two, beginning radio silence drill.”

I pushed the stick forward till it wouldn’t go any further, threw in the full left rudder; the plane went into nose dive and its wings danced a 360-degree dance. The plane headed down, revolving on all three axes. The nose was chasing the tail, the wings were whirring like the blades of a blender; negative Gs were pulling our guts into our throats. The green squares of fields and shimmering straight canals were dancing and becoming bigger with every rotation. I glanced towards Bannon. His hands were flailing in the air, his face contorted with a suppressed scream.

Dad was screwing hookers in Geneva while I was waking up every day at five in the morning to justify his investment in my public-school education and spending my summer vacations inventing physical exercises for myself?

Bannon was a bullshit artist.

The altimeter read two thousand feet. I cut the throttle, yanked the full right rudder in, eased back the stick and the plane slowly curved upwards. The greens began to recede again. Bannon’s voice was frightened, hoarse.

“Are you trying to kill an American?”

“I am just trying to talk,” I flicked the radio button on and gave the air traffic controller a call. “Radio silence out. Spin recovery completed.”

Bannon began to speak in a measured tone, as if making a speech at his favourite aunt’s funeral.

“He didn’t have a case officer or anything. It was a loose arrangement. But we knew he was one of the good guys, and trust me, there weren’t many of them. We were gutted. I wasn’t involved then. I wasn’t even on the South Asia desk, man, but I knew some guys who had worked with him and they were crying in their beers. It was a big loss. And not that people didn’t raise a ruckus, but it was all about staying the course and moving on, all diplomatic bull.”

“So nobody bothered to find out?”

“No they didn’t. Because they knew. The orders came from the top. They didn’t want to rock the boat, so to speak. I mean it’s no secret. Shit, sure you know. From the very top.” He waved to the black mountain with white stones. “Mard-e-Haq.”

I was pleasantly surprised at his grasp of Urdu. I patted his shoulder and gave him an understanding nod.

“So what are you doing here now? What do you want from me?”

“Shit. I am only the Silent Drill instructor. You know the rules.”

I stayed quiet for a moment. “It must have come up in meetings, memos. After all, he was your best man.” I moved the stick left and started preparing for landing.

“What were they going to say? Hey, stop the Cold War, our cross-eyed Mard-e-Haq is not fighting by the book? But trust me, man, this is all guesswork. Educated guesswork done by folks in Langley who loved your dad, but guesswork nonetheless. Nobody knew for sure. It was all very low-level stuff. I’ve got no clue who pulled the trigger.”

“I would have understood if it was the barrel of his gun in his mouth. He was that kind of a man. But it was his own bed sheet,” I said, before asking the tower for permission to land and informing the air traffic controller that I had an airsick passenger on board.

Secretary General’s whispers are echoing in the cell. I can’t decide if he is in a delirium or trying to entertain me. “Comrade, I think I’ve gone blind. I can’t see anything.” I rub my own eyes and don’t see anything. But I know I am not blind. “I swear I can’t see anything. They brought food, they opened the door but I didn’t see anything. Not a thing.”

“It’s probably night-time, comrade,” I say, trying to suppress a yawn. Remember day and night? Night, day, then again night.

A
fter the Inter Services Intelligence’s counter-espionage unit carried out its weekly sweep through the living quarters of the Army House for any bugs or jamming devices, Brigadier TM started an old–fashioned, hands-on inspection of the premises. He removed the hand-woven burgundy silk covers from the sofa cushions and ran his fingers along their velvet lining. He gave the matching drapes a good shake, combed his way through the brown silk tassels and looked suspiciously at the silver curtain holdbacks. The Persian rugs, plundered from the palaces of Afghan kings and presented to General Zia by Afghan mujahideen commanders, were removed one by one and TM’s boots searched for any uneven surfaces on the grey synthetic underlay. The table lamps, shiny brass with silk cord switches, were turned on and off and on again. Brigadier TM’s mistrust of the ISI was based on a simple principle: the cops and thieves should be organised separately. His problem with the ISI was that everything was being done by the same people. After sweeping through the living quarters with their bug detectors and scanners and patting the seats of some random chairs they had simply signed a document saying no espionage devices were detected. Brigadier TM never knew whether to trust these signed documents. After all, potential presidential assassins don’t go about their business signing affidavits as they close in on their target. Brigadier TM had done his staff and command course, and he understood why a country needed an intelligence service, why an armed service needed spies to spy on its own men and officers, and he could live with that. But there was another reason he didn’t like these military intelligence types. Brigadier TM didn’t like them because they didn’t wear uniforms. It was hard enough to trust anyone who didn’t wear a uniform, but how on earth could you trust someone
with a rank
, who didn’t wear a uniform? Brigadier TM considered ISI a menace on a par with the corrupt Pakistani police and lazy Saudi princes, but since his job was to watch and keep quiet, he never mentioned it in front of General Zia. Going through the trophy cabinet, he concluded that the sheer amount of stuff in the Army House was a security hazard. “Who needs all these photos?” He stood in front of a wall covered with framed portraits of former generals who had ruled the country. Brigadier TM couldn’t help noticing that they had progressively got fatter and that the medals on their chests had multiplied. He came to the end of the row of photographs and stood in front of a large portrait. In this oil painting, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Founder of Pakistan, was wearing a crisp Savile Row suit and was absorbed in studying a document. With a monocle in his left eye and his intense gaze, Jinnah looked like a tortured eighteenth-century chemist on the verge of a new discovery.

Brigadier TM looked at the Founder’s portrait with admiration; he didn’t mind civilians if they were properly dressed and behaved like civilians. “Look at this guy.” He took a step towards the portrait. “He was a civilian and he wore civilian clothes and he said civilian things, but at heart he was a soldier.” TM didn’t mind saluting this guy, out of sheer patriotism, the kind of patriotism that only a decorated soldier can feel; he took a step backwards and saluted. As his foot landed on the carpet, his hand made an arc in the air and his open palm reached his eyebrow, the frame tilted. It tilted ever so slightly, but Brigadier TM’s alert eyes noticed the tilt and he suddenly looked around. He felt embarrassed and shy, like a child who has disturbed an immaculate ikebana arrangement at a rich cousin’s house. Brigadier TM moved forward, held the frame by its corners with both his hands, took a step back to see if it was level and then with a shudder let the frame go. His right hand reached for his holster and stopped. The Founder had winked at him from behind his monocle. He could swear he had seen his left eye move.

“I have done that myself sometimes.”

When TM heard General Zia’s voice, he turned round and saluted, this time less aggressively, shifting his feet slightly to cover the frame so that Zia couldn’t see the tilt in it.

Without his uniform and presidential paraphernalia, General Zia seemed to have shrunk. His silk gown floated about him. His moustache, always waxed and twirled, drooped over his upper lip.

He was sucking it nervously. His hair, always oiled and parted down the middle, was in a state of disarray, like a parade squad on tea break.

“He was the only true leader we have ever had,” General Zia said and stopped as if expecting Brigadier TM to correct him.

Brigadier TM was still in shock. He didn’t believe in superstitions. He didn’t believe in coincidences. He knew that if your gun was oiled and safety catch unlocked, it would shoot. He knew if your wind-speed calculations were accurate and you knew how to control your descent, your parachute would land you where you wanted to land. He knew if you mentioned a prisoner’s daughter’s name after keeping him awake for three days, he would talk. Brigadier TM had no experience of monocle-wearing dead men in gilt-edged frames blinking back to his salutes.

“This portrait is not security-cleared, sir. General Akhtar should not have violated Code Red.”

“Dear son, I can live with the rumours in the American rags but do I have to be scared of pictures gifted to me by my own intelligence chief? Is General Akhtar under suspicion now? Are you saying I am not safe even in my own drawing room?” General Zia paused for a moment, then added, “Or do you not like the man in the picture?”

“He was a civilian, sir, but he got us this country.”

General Zia thrust his hands in the pockets of his gown to hide his irritation; Brigadier TM had no sense of history. “Well, if you compare him to that
banya
Gandhi, or that fornicator Nehru, yes, of course he was a great leader. But since then there have been others who in their own humble way…” General Zia looked at TM’s blank face, realised that he wasn’t going to get any compliments from him and decided to change the subject.