Khyber Run (5 page)

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Past the city, we flew over more scattered homesteads and fields just sprouting lines of green. The airport was a scabby-looking strip along the side of the highway. We landed long enough to let the four of us out, and the helicopter took off again.

Inside the airport compound, every building was a mound of sandbags with openings more like rifle slits than windows. I wondered if the rooms would feel as cool as caves in the summer, with all that earth packed around them.

Mike made a phone call as we walked through a sandbag maze to a chain-link fence with green metal strips woven through it and razor wire along the top.

Wind whistled through the steel wire, the sound itself chilling. The temp was in the high forties or low fifties, chilly enough to keep me shivering. Jalalabad was supposed to be tropical, more like Miami than Pensacola. And, technically, it was pretty close to spring.

The other guys weren't shivering. I resented that, guessing they had a layer of polypro between their skivvies and their camo tops. But if they had that to keep them warm now, they'd probably be sweating in the afternoon when I'd be perfectly comfortable.

Just outside the gate, a battered Chevy Suburban hauling a four-horse trailer stopped. The driver stuck a grizzled head out the window. “Oy, Mickey!"

"Hey, Golf! How they hanging?” Mike shook hands before walking around to the shotgun seat. Which, here, might very well be the shotgun seat in more than name. Echo opened the back and threw Oscar's pack in, then his own. I stowed my own between them. I hadn't yet inventoried my medical kit. Nobody was going to manhandle my pack and smash half my goodies before I could make sure each item was packed properly.

Echo got in behind Mike. Oscar waved me to the middle of the backseat, the safe spot. The claustrophobic spot. I shook my head. “I'll take window seat."

Mike said something, and the driver lowered his window. His voice was very quiet, very British. “He says get in, Zulu."

I didn't like being ordered around like a teenager. Especially not knowing the ranks around me. But they might have some reason that didn't bear discussion in this sandbagged corner of the world. I got in.

Golf studied me through the rearview mirror and pulled a three-point turnaround. I didn't know you could do that with a Suburban and a trailer, much less do it with eyes glued to the rearview mirror. He straightened out on the highway pointed west, toward the city, and threw a glance at Mike. “Would you believe they're building a golf course just north of my place?"

Mike snorted. “They've been building a golf course north of your place for the past eight years. Between incoming mortars and
buzkashi
games and mysteriously vanishing bulldozers, of course. How are the horses?"

"Glenda shows no improvement. I'm afraid her riding days are over."

"Pity. But she's more than earned a retirement."

"You need to consider putting her down. Nine horses have been wounded by small arms fire in the last few months, and others are being poisoned or fed bits of concertina wire. They're targeting OGA stock, but no one's immune."

OGA. The injured sponges I'd dealt with had few pleasant things to say about the Other Government Army, which from what I heard was mostly CIA and the British equivalent.

Mike looked out the window. “You still booked most of the day?"

The driver sighed. “Roger that. Won't be able to move out until midafternoon. If the road hasn't been mined again, we'll still get you and the beasts well out of the area before dark."

"But if we push the edge, will you be able to get home again safely?"

"Mickey...I live here."

Echo grinned. “Are you saying we have most of a day to kill in town?"

I blinked. The youth culture, the notion that the very young should freely inject themselves into a discussion between their elders, was something I'd never fully absorbed. How could people know they were overstepping their bounds when the boundaries were never made clear? I'd gone into the military partly for the comfort of having a known hierarchy, unambiguous rules that could be learned by no more effort than reading a list of them.

Were the sponges that much more impertinent than swabbies? Maybe Echo was just a law unto himself. If he'd had a college education, he'd probably be OGA.

Mike smiled like an indulgent father. “Think you-all can find something to do?"

Roger that
. I wanted my feet on the ground. Wanted to see what it felt like now.

"I'll save you most of the hike, get you through the first checkpoint. Then I shall have to abandon you babes in the wood."

Mike yawned. “We appreciate it, as always."

We got stuck in a slow line behind that first security checkpoint. An SUV two pickup trucks ahead of us was searched, and the occupants’ papers scrutinized at length by Afghan National Army troops.

Golf turned off the Suburban's engine and sighed. A herd of sheep and a donkey wagon of greens plodded past us. Then a bicycle-pulled wagon was waved into line behind us. Unless the ANA had a tech fetish, it seemed pretty random.

At length, the SUV was released, then the pickup behind it, leaving only one Toyota pickup, this one with a plywood gun mount behind the cab, ahead of us in line.

Golf turned the key and moved us forward. The ANA waved the occupants out of the cab of the pickup with the gun mount, though. Golf killed his ignition again. “There's tea in the thermos. Help yourselves, do."

The men lost patience, went to waving their arms and raising their voices.

"Assholes.” Echo pulled out his computer again. “They've just added an hour to the wait."

Not an hour, but it was more than half an hour. We emptied the thermos, which had oversweetened black tea in it, and munched our way through a box of oranges from behind the seat.

The Toyota was unloaded and searched. Two Coalition MPs on motorcycles showed up and scrutinized the men's papers, made a phone call, removed the Toyota's bumpers and crawled about in the road checking the wheel wells, and made at least one more phone call.

A trio of young boys lugging huge baskets piled with dried sheep dung trudged by unquestioned. They leaned forward, using forehead straps to manage weight their narrow shoulders and sticklike arms couldn't have borne. I knew what their cervical X-rays would someday look like. But when the question is whether to suffer starvation now or crippling arthritis later, there is no good answer.

When we finally got to the checkpoint, an ANA sergeant with a bushy beard grinned in through the driver's window. “RSM Griffitzi! Who are your friends?"

Golf pulled a comically astonished face. “These, Habibullah? Do you not recognize the famous
chapandaz
from Texas, USA?"

A wrinkle deepened at one corner of Oscar's mouth. He understood at least some Pashtun, then, and the idea of being called a famous buzkashi player amused him.

The sergeant laughed heartily and slapped the roof. “Stay out of trouble, sir. Next!"

Golf dropped us at the edge of a bazaar. “Leave your packs. I'll put them in the tack room."

I hesitated. “I still haven't inventoried my gear."

Mike wrapped a shemagh under his chin. “What's there now will be there in the afternoon."

Echo was leaning way back into the back, pulling items out of his pockets and stowing them in his pack. “Relax, Zulu. You don't want to carry everything all day, do you?"

Then he slung the SAW over his shoulder. Next to him, Oscar slung his own rifle and pocketed ammo for the SAW.

I wasn't going to get my way. Patience, the poet said. My father's favorite advice. But I wasn't feeling real patient.

Jalalabad in the day was going to be a lot warmer than Kabul at night, but right now that wind on my ears and neck was cold. “Do I have a shemagh in the pack?"

Echo grinned, wrapping his own with a flourish. “Let's buy one."

I slapped my flat pockets. “Somebody didn't bring my wallet."

Mike looked at me. “Shut the door and let the man go, Zulu."

Patience
. I grabbed my little M4 and slung it over my back with what grace I could muster.

"One more thing,” Mike said. “You speak English only."

"And if I am asked for ID?"

He handed me a wallet-sized envelope. “It would be best if you don't go off on your own."

I checked the envelope. It had a typed note saying I was a corpsman with authority to carry restricted medication and giving a phone number to call, should I need to be identified. Great. For all I knew, this is what the mercenaries or the OGA carried.

The bazaar we found was disconcertingly familiar, down to the piles of rubble from the last earthquake. Or an earthquake half a century ago. Or an artillery barrage—which again could have been last summer or sixty years ago.

We found a stall displaying dozens of shemaghs within minutes, but they were of wool so coarse it might be karakul. I didn't want that against my skin.

Karakuls are born with the crimped black wool prized as “Persian lamb,” but they are the nastiest of sheep. A karakul has a tail as wide as a beaver's, packed with fat they can live on like a camel lives off its hump. Dung collects in the tail wool, and maggots collect in the dung. I'm not sure I could eat mutton if the only sheep I'd ever seen were karakul.

The grit-laden wind carried the thick, sweet scent of diesel, the comforting smoke of the soft fires I grew up with, baking naan, hints of astringent herbs and fresh spices, the oily lanolin of fresh fleeces. Noise echoed, ricocheting off every wall: livestock bleating and braying, bicycle bells, horns and revving engines from the omnipresent Toyota pickups and Toyota SUVs, and everywhere the haggling voices.

People flashed rupees, euros, dollars. If anyone was using the official currency of Afghanistan, I didn't see it.

Turbans, what my family called
lungee
, were plainly not the height of fashion here. Men and boys wore embroidered caps instead.

I remembered patients, guys I'd tried to rehab for quick return to their units, calling a turban the mark of a terrorist. But where in the US getting hassled for wearing something would give it gangsta cachet, the people here would be distressed to provoke continual displays of rudeness. So they wore caps instead.

I looked for a familiar wrap anyway. If I could find someone wearing his turban wrapped the way we wrapped it, or in any familiar way, I might be looking at someone who might know where my kin could be found.

Around the corner the wind shifted; the stench of live goat stung my eyes and nose. We paused to get our bearings outside a stall crowded with well-fed donkeys, but even donkey farts couldn't override the pungent aroma of the goats up the street.

I saw a little girl with a huge scabby sore on her top lip—so swollen it pushed her nose aside—crouching between piles of rubble, surreptitiously reaching through a rusty wire fence to milk a goat into a dented canteen cup. She moved like a thief, so I slid my eyes right past her. The infection distorting her face was bad enough. I'd treated hundreds of cases of leishmaniasis, but it takes a course of antibiotics she wasn't likely to get. If she was also hungry enough to steal milk from a goat smelling that bad, she had all my sympathy.

Zarr
, my father would have murmured.
A pity.

I remembered a distant cousin her age, orphaned by some feud or other. As a kindness, Grandfather had bought her to raise as a bride for my youngest uncle.

She kept stealing food, hiding it in her bedding. Scoldings and beatings didn't stop her, but after a while my mother got the idea to hand her a piece of naan every night, to hold in her hands as she went to sleep. That was when she stopped stealing. She turned into quite the chipper little bird then. She used to sing as she milked goats in the evening—outside, where anyone could hear.

I wished I could remember her name.

A few goats would be a welcome present if by chance I happened to find my folks. “Out of curiosity, what's my spending limit, Mike?"

He handed me a wallet. “We chipped in to give you a couple of hundred overall. Just remember you don't speak the lingo until we're well out of here."

I tucked my “ID” into the wallet. “Why not?"

"Security. Basic precaution."

Basic bullshit
. I hated being a mushroom. But at least they were trying to make me like the dark. A couple of hundred in dollars or euros would buy several goats, a few sheep, and a boy to tend them for a year. Which left, of course, the problem of finding the folks.

It didn't take long to find a lightweight shemagh that was long enough to wrap properly, thin enough to knot easily, but thick enough to keep my ears and neck warm if I went out at night. The first price asked was fifteen dollars. I used my Bangkok-honed dickering skill to wrangle the seller down to eight dollars, which was great fun with me pretending to speak only English and him pretending he didn't speak a word of English.

The eight bucks was a good enough price to lend sincerity to his parting wish that I might grow wealthy and that my sons would be enlightened. I thanked him, remembering to do it in English, tied the shemagh loosely about my neck, and offered the old familiar wish that he be safe, prosperous, and happy.

When I looked up, his face had gone still, the eyes chilling above his grin. He knew those words, despite my use of English. He judged and condemned me in that instant: Spy. Apostate. Traitor.

I smiled vacantly into his cold black eyes and pretended I didn't see death.

Maybe basic security precautions weren't bullshit after all.

Oscar appeared at my elbow. “Decent knives over there."

Oscar had good taste in knives. Four booths in a row had
chooras
and sword-length
salwar yatagans
, both of them the traditional Khyber knife with the straight back-edge. They looked hand forged and lethally primitive next to sensuously curved machete swords straight out of some Indiana Jones movie, and one shop's gaudy
kukris
for the tourists who didn't know a Pakhtun from a Sikh.