The Avatari (48 page)

‘What is it, you idiot?’ he asked, looking at his watch. It was 2 a.m.

‘Some men have arrived in a jeep and are asking for you, sahib. There’s a
firangi
woman with them,’ the servant panted, fear palpable in his voice.

‘Who are they and what business do they have with me at this time of the night?’ he asked grumpily, getting out of bed. ‘Are they police?’

‘I don’t know, sahib. They did not tell me. They are not in uniform, but they are carrying weapons.’

‘Whoever they are, they’re going to wish they hadn’t bothered me!’ he said with feeling.

His wife was a niece of the Governor by marriage. Really, he thought, this country was going to the dogs if
sharif
people like him were being disturbed in the middle of the night. Being honest and respectable didn’t count for anything these days, it seemed.

As Hussain came out into his drawing room, a shawl thrown over his nightclothes, he noticed that two people were seated there. One was a small, bearded man, evidently a compatriot, puffing on a cigarette; the other, a white woman with curly brown hair. Hussain did not recognize either. Standing behind the two was a group of four men, dressed in the traditional attire of tunic and shalwar, with rifles slung over their shoulders. Vilayat Hussain’s own guards stood at the far end of the large room, their hands folded behind their heads. One of them, bleeding from a wound to the mouth, was moaning softly. The seated duo did not rise to greet Hussain as he approached. The man continued to smoke his cigarette. Vilayat Hussain came to a halt in front of them and stood with his hands folded across his chest.

‘What is the meaning of this outrage?’ he demanded to know, trying to lend his voice as much aggression as he was capable of. He knew, however, that he hadn’t been able to conceal his nervousness. ‘Who are you and what are you doing in my house at this time of the night? Do you know who I am?’

His visitors ignored him, as if he had not spoken at all. The way the man sat calmly, not even sparing him a glance, was unnerving. Hussain had also noted that his visitors had not invited him to take a seat. Strangely enough, he felt he couldn’t do so without their permission, although this was his home.

The silence was almost palpable as the man took his time over his cigarette. Then he squashed the butt on the woollen carpet and reached into the pocket of his tunic. He took out a photograph and handed it to Vilayat Hussain. The latter gazed at it; the man in the photo was Peter.

‘Do you know him?’ the man now asked in a soft, raspy voice.

Vilayat remembered being shown the same photograph earlier, when the police had questioned him during their investigation of the blasts at Nawab Sahib’s farm. But his interrogation – if at all it could be described as such – had been perfunctory. The fact that he had had the Governor put through a call had helped, as had the large briefcase of money he had placed on the desk of the superintendent of police.

‘Yes, I have seen this man,’ he now replied, ‘but I have already told the police what I know about him.’

‘We are aware of that. Are you sending certain supplies to him?’

‘There is no question of that, sahib.’ Vilayat Hussain’s voice was muted, placating, and the ‘sahib’ had popped out almost involuntarily. ‘I am now aware the man is a dangerous terrorist, a fact that I was not, unfortunately, privy to earlier. Otherwise, I would not have had anything to do with him. I had taken him to be a
firangi
professor. My sole intention was to earn some valuable foreign exchange for my country. I am a patriotic Pakistani, sahib.’

The man yawned, then nodded to the men behind him. Two of them instantly came forward and seized Hussain from either side, forcing him against a table. One of them pushed Hussain’s head down on the table, while the other yanked down his pyjamas. A third man took out a bottle from his shalwar and held it in front of Hussain’s face. He smelt kerosene.
Allah
protect me
, he cried silently, as he lost control of his bladder and felt his warm urine trickling down his now bare legs.
It is Ahmed
‘Kasai’, the butcher!

Colonel Ahmed Noorani of the Inter-Services Intelligence was a man everyone had heard of, but few had seen. Rumoured to be the protégé of General Ishaq Khan, head of the ISI, he reported directly to his chief and the President. If this man had now chosen to visit him, Vilayat Hussain knew that none of his friends in high places, including the Governor and his own numerous ISI contacts, could save him. The rude story about the colonel circulating around the bazaars of Peshawar involved the ‘fiery kiss to the backside’ he reportedly gave people who found themselves in his clutches. The colonel was alleged to have a thing for pouring kerosene down a victim’s rectum, a method of interrogation that ensured a slow, agonizing and humiliating end. Another part of the story, which the terrified Vilayat Hussain now remembered with startling clarity, was the colonel’s penchant for invariably ‘kissing’ his victims, even after they had told all.

‘In the name of Allah, please let me go, sahib!’ Hussain was screaming and begging for mercy now. ‘I am just a poor, misguided businessman. Have mercy on me!’ he panted.

Colonel Noorani waited for Vilayat’s screaming to subside. Then he said, ‘You have committed high treason, Vilayat Hussain. You knew that the
firangi
was not “Jeremy Glass”, but one Peter Radigan, a mercenary wanted by the CIA.’ He glanced briefly at the woman who nodded back at him and continued, ‘Yet you helped him carry out his plans and did not bother to inform the authorities.’

One of Noorani’s men picked up the bottle and touched the tip to Vilayat’s anus. His response was a terrified, bestial scream.

‘Yes, sahib. I am to send supplies to this man,’ Hussain blabbed. ‘To be delivered at Ishkashim in Afghanistan. But I will do no such thing. I give you my word, sahib, as Allah is my witness, on the head of my firstborn!’

The colonel looked at the woman who inclined her head in agreement. He then spoke in his soft voice. ‘On the contrary, you will deliver your supplies, Vilayat Hussain. After all, we do not want you to renege on your deal and sully your reputation. However, you will also deliver some gifts that we want to send this man.’

‘Anything, sahib, anything! Your wish is my command!’ Hussain said in a frantic voice.

At a gesture from the colonel, one of his men placed a radio on the table.

‘Good. See that this gets delivered, along with the other stuff.’ The colonel’s voice sounded bored now.

Ahmed Noorani rose abruptly to his feet. So did the woman. On their way out, the colonel lit another cigarette and approached Hussain. When he was really close, he stared into the man’s eyes. Unwillingly, Hussain met his tormentor’s gaze. Later, he would recall, as he woke up sweating at night, that it was like looking into the eyes of the Shaitan, the devil himself.

‘I will rely on you to ensure that no word of this ever gets out,’ the colonel said softly.

He nodded to his men who followed him out of the room, leaving Vilayat Hussain still slumped on the table, with the colonel’s parting words ringing in his ears.

‘We will leave the bottle here as a token gift for you,’ the man had said.

It would take four of his servants to pick the weeping and trembling Vilayat off the table and carry him to his bedroom.

* * *

In 1973, in response to the US Department of Defense’s need for a foolproof method of satellite navigation, the Pentagon created the concept of GPS, based on the department’s experience with all its satellite predecessors. The essential components of the GPS were the twenty-four Navstar satellites built by Rockwell International. Every twelve hours, each satellite orbited the earth in a formation 11,000 miles above it, thus ensuring that every point on the planet would always be in radio contact with at least four satellites. The first operational GPS satellite was launched in 1978. It would take fifteen more years for the system to be fully operational, but in 1986, the experimental prototypes were ready and ground transmitter-receivers, the size of a transistor were available in the Department of Defense labs.

Much before Colonel Ahmed Noorani and Claire Donovant had turned up at Vilayat Hussain’s farmhouse, she had shown one of these devices to the ISI man when they met at the Peshawar Hilton where she was staying.

‘It looks like a radio,’ he had said briefly.

‘It
is
a radio,’ she had replied, turning the dials until it caught some channels, finally settling on the BBC weather report.

The colonel had driven four hours from Rawalpindi to meet this woman after receiving a call from the President’s military attaché. Both he and Claire were well aware that this wasn’t just a radio, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut.

‘Need-to-know basis, I guess,’ he had said softly, lighting a cigarette.

‘I guess,’ she had replied impassively.

* * *

The caravanserai was quite decrepit, but after Zhawar, it seemed like a luxury hotel to Susan. She and Peter were given the room upstairs, located at the top of a broken iron staircase. The swarthy Mongol, who was the owner, barked orders and a number of boys scurried to clean up the rooms and put in the beds. Evidently, not many people halted here. The squat toilet was a small shack behind the building; it consisted of a pit dug in the ground, with stones conveniently placed on either side. The men decided to leave it for Susan’s exclusive use; like everyone else in the caravanserai, they would go behind the rocks.

Susan had got used to the sanitation system and was walking back from the shack when she met Peter.

‘I’ve sent the old man ahead to get in touch with the contact Vilayat Hussain had given me in Ishkashim,’ he told her. ‘It’s another hour’s ride from here.’

‘Good,’ Susan said, relieved. ‘I’ve practically run out of my own supplies.’

From the time they had left the Hilton at Peshawar, Susan had been cut off from everything she was used to – a daily change of underwear, for instance, along with the ‘luxury’ of shaving her legs and armpits. Neither she nor her companions ever mentioned the fact that as they moved closer to their destination, they also quietly did what would have once been unthinkable – reuse toilet paper.

‘Toothpaste is the last of our worries, Professor,’ Peter said dryly. ‘We need camping gear, weapons, mountaineering equipment and winter clothes. If my guess is right, you are going to get us into the high mountains.’

‘Aren’t we high enough already?’

‘At present, we’re at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. If we have to go over any of the passes, it will be another 8 to 10,000 feet.’

‘God help us!’ she said with feeling.

‘By the way, I’ve got your hot-water bath ready.’

‘Where?’ she asked, incredulous.

‘In the shelter over there,’ he replied, leading the way.

It was a small shed made of tin sheets. The two fair-haired boys they had met in the morning were standing over an aluminium tub filled with muddy brown hot water. One of them had a bedsheet in his hands, which he held like a towel.

‘Go ahead. They’ll help you,’ Peter told her.

‘I’m not having them around!’ she said indignantly.

‘It’ll be much more convenient if you did,’ he said with a grin. ‘And anyway, they probably won’t do you much harm – unless you have designs on the Mongol.’

She looked at the boys carefully. They were clean-shaven, their lips painted a startling red. She turned to Peter, disbelief writ large on her features.

‘It’s a harsh land and women are scarce. Men do what they can to get by,’ he explained with a shrug, before leaving the shed.

By evening, their supplies had arrived. They began sorting them out in the courtyard of the caravanserai.

‘You were right,’ Ashton agreed, addressing Peter. ‘We’re up against a rough bunch.’

‘Looks like Vilayat threw in a freebie,’ Peter remarked, picking up the radio he had unwrapped from the packing material. ‘Don’t remember asking for a radio, though I guess I should have; it might come in handy.’

‘Yes, it might,’ Ashton agreed, turning it on and catching a Soviet channel beaming patriotic songs in Pushtu. ‘We might be able to get weather reports.’

‘I can forecast the weather in the Wakhan for you without a radio, Colonel. But yeah, with the power of this baby, we might get some good music, maybe even some of the games.’

Meanwhile, their guide had reported that at Ishkashim, there were no rumours of any foreign expeditions making their way in this direction.
So the bad guys haven’t reached here yet
, Peter mused.
Or,
if they have, they’ve chosen another route.
The more reassuring news was that no one had been asking questions about their own team.

‘I’ve got to talk to you, Colonel,’ Peter told Ashton, his voice almost hesitant, as they finished packing the supplies into rucksacks.

Ashton slowly got to his feet and faced the younger man.

‘So you’ll probably be getting back from here?’ he said, pre-empting Peter.

Peter couldn’t help noticing how old and tired the colonel suddenly looked, although his jaw remained firmly set.

‘I guess so, Colonel,’ he replied, averting his gaze and shuffling his feet uneasily in the hard-packed mud and frost of the courtyard floor. ‘If I wait any longer, I’ll be late for my appointment.’

They were in the second week of September and he would have to find his way back through most of Afghanistan and Pakistan, before catching his flight to Jo’burg.

‘When will you be leaving?’ Ashton enquired.

‘I guess I’ll see you folks off from here; you know, say a proper goodbye and all.’ Peter was still shuffling his feet.

Ashton nodded and walked away without a word.

As dusk fell, they all bedded down. The room on top which Peter and Susan were to share had a small terrace where Peter now put his sleeping bag. Susan was to use the small rickety wooden bed in the room. Exhausted from the previous night’s journey, she was fast asleep as soon as her head hit the folded towel serving as a pillow. Something, however, woke her up in the middle of the night. She opened her eyes and noticed the silhouette of a man standing by the window and smoking. It was Peter.