family and his businesses in Saudi — Arabia in 1979 to help the Afghanis fight Russians. He’d been wounded several times, and he had gained the reputation of being a very brave, very fierce fighter. He was a hero of the people, much respected, especially in the countryside and small villages, but even his welcome was finally beginning to wear out. Afghanistan was an insular country that wanted as little to do with the outside world as possible. They wanted to tend to their own lives, which centered around Islam, and they simply wanted to be left alone. But bin Laden’s terrorist jihad around the world had brought unwanted attention to the Taliban for continuing to harbor him. It was one of the reasons, McGarvey thought, that he was so willing to open a dialogue with the U.S. If he was forced to leave Afghanistan he needed someplace to go. The logical choice would be his home in Saudi Arabia. But that would take U.S. influence; in fact it would probably take a great deal of pressure on the Saudi ruling family just to talk about it, and bin Laden knew it. If they were stopped by a police patrol a fiction could be maintained that the cops didn’t recognize anyone in the van. It was a truth through the back door. But if McGarvey showed his clean- shaven race, or if he spoke, it would be obvious that he wasn’t an Afghani, and the police would have to do something about him. So the only logical solution out of such a dilemma would be to shoot him and dump his body alongside the road. Not a perfect solution, but one that everyone could live with if they had to. An American came to Afghanistan, despite warnings from his own State Department, and bandits or opposition forces had kidnapped and killed him to embarrass the Taliban. It happened all too frequently to foreign visitors. Even bin Laden could claim that he wasn’t responsible. Someone had gotten to McGarvey before his people could reach him and guarantee his safety.
“I understand,” he said. He pulled on the balaclava.
“Very good, mista the driver said, and they pulled out of the hotel’s driveway and headed north the way McGarvey had come in from the airport. He looked back and caught a glimpse of a face in a third floor window of the hotel, but then they turned the corner.
All the cars parked at the government buildings were gone, only a blue-and-white Flat police car was left beside the fountain in Pustunistan Square. But nobody seemed to be in it, and they went around the traffic circle and hurried up Bebe-Maihro Street Like thieves in the night, McGarvey thought. They were tense, and no one said a word. But Kabul had always been the most dangerous place in all of Afghanistan because it was a crossroads between the West over the Khybar Pass, and Islam. The city was straining at its ideological seams, and could burst at almost any moment given the slightest provocation. No one in the van wanted to give them that.
The mujahed driving the van wasn’t as slow as the cabbie had been this afternoon, and they passed the road to the airport fifteen minutes after leaving the hotel. A Russian built BDRM-2 armored scout car was parked just off the highway, the Afghani white flag hanging limply from its whip antenna.
The slightly built mujahed said something to their driver, who immediately slowed down, pulled off the opposite side of the road and stopped twenty-five yards from the scout car. Again his voice was so soft that McGarvey couldn’t catch the words or even the tone of voice.
The scout car’s turret came around and its 7.62mm PKT machine gun slowly depressed to a point directly at them.
“Say nothing, mista one of the men in back warned. “Do not move.”
The slightly built one said something else to the driver, then got out of the van and headed across the highway as a man dressed in a military uniform climbed out of the scout car.
“Fool,” the sullen one in back whispered harshly in English, which struck McGarvey as odd.
The mujahed and officer met halfway in the middle of the highway. For a full minute it seemed as if they just stood there, but then the officer pointed at the van, and the mujahed shook his head. He took something out of his pocket and handed it to the officer. They stood there for another long minute, and then the mujahed turned and slowly walked back to the van, the officer not moving from his spot.
The way the slightly built mujahed moved also struck McGarvey as off; lightly on the balls of his feet, as if he was a ballet dancer, or as if his boots were a couple of sizes too small and he was getting ready to bolt at any moment
He climbed in the passenger seat, motioned for the driver to go, and then glanced back at McGarvey. For a brief moment their eyes met, and McGarvey suddenly knew what had bothered him, and the realization was staggering.
There was no traffic, and the mujahed drove at a steady sixty miles per hour in silence, leaving McGarvey to sit back, his eyes half-closed, as he tried to convince himself that he was wrong.
The highway was perfectly straight, but ran in ever rising undulating waves higher into the mountains. A hundred miles or so to the northwest was the Hindu Kush mountain range, which was the western extremity of the Himalayas. A no man’s land of some of the highest peaks in the world; snow-covered, treeless, where rock slides and avalanches dominated the upper slopes, while Afghani and Russian sown land mines dominated the approaches. A little farther north the forces opposing the Taliban waged their war of independence for a bleak country that had not seen any real peace since Genghis Kahn. A strange land of harsh, man killing contradictions in which Osama bin Laden, himself a man of many contradictions, had found his manhood, his God and his war.
There was nothing in the dossiers on the man that McGarvey had studied that gave any clue as to what had happened during the ten years he had been here fighting Russians. But something must have happened to him, because coming into Afghanistan he’d been the son of a billionaire father loyal to the Fahd family, and when he came out he’d become a religious fanatic and terrorist bent on kicking the royal family out of Riyadh, removing all foreigners from the Arabian peninsula and killing Americans whenever and wherever he could.
It was here in the mountains that he had set up his headquarters from where he ran his worldwide businesses and attacks. Voltaire had written that to succeed in chaining the multitudes you must seem to wear the same fetters. Bin Laden wore the same clothes, ate the same food and lived the same hard life as the people he led. And they were willing to follow him to the death.
Looking at the back of the head of the mujahed in the front passenger seat, McGarvey thought that he was beginning to understand at least one aspect of bin Laden. The man might appear to be insane, but he was not a fanatic; on the contrary he was probably a realist who was perfectly willing to use whatever resources were available to him, no matter what the Qoran and his God had to say about it. If he had the bomb it made him the most dangerous man on earth, because given the right push he would not hesitate to use it.
A half-hour after they’d passed the military checkpoint near the airport, McGarvey glanced out the window. In the distance ahead he spotted the green and white rotating beacon of Bagram Air Base. It had been built by the Russians during the war, for air operations around the capital city. Now the Taliban used it for what few military aircraft they had operational — a few French-built Mirage fighters, a number of MiG-21 Floggers and a few Russian Hind attack helicopters — and for the headquarters of their military high command. They also had a prison there just off the end of one of the runways, but to this point the CIA had almost no hard intelligence on the place. What few people the Company had managed to send out there had simply disappeared, and had never been heard from again. A hard place, in a harsh land.
A few miles farther on the van suddenly slowed down and turned onto a narrow dirt road that wound its way down a sharply sloping hill, across a shallow, rocky stream, then back up behind a low hill to a copse of gnarled trees. The partially bombed-out ruins of a large stone-and-mud house were hidden beneath a latticework of wooden poles supporting a thick tangle of grape vines that were in full leaf.
It was obvious that no one lived here, but the van stopped on a slight rise, its headlights flashing against what once was the front entrance of the house. They caught a glimpse of three small windows whose blue shutters seemed as if they’d been painted just yesterday. The middle shutter was open. The driver said something in Dari, Afghan Persian, and the slightly built mujahed apparently agreed, because they continued the rest of the way down to the house. The open shutter was a signal that this place was safe.
The driver doused the headlights and drove around to the back of the house where a dark brown, mud- spattered, late model Land Rover was parked in the shelter of an extension of the grape arbor. He pulled up beside it, and a minute later five mujahedeen came out of the house, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. They all wore balaclavas, and at least to a casual observer they could pass for McGarvey and the four who had taken him from the hotel. One of them was even wearing a bush jacket, and another was slightly built.
Without a word, McGarvey, his bags and his four escorts transferred to the Land Rover. The five from the house got into the van and drove off. He sat in the back seat between two of his escorts, but the driver made no move to start the engine.
The windows were down and the night had become very cold. A light breeze had started from the north and
