“You have your work to do, we have ours,” Sarah replied.
They headed north from the village along the base of the foothills that stretched up the long valley, Sarah and Farid in the lead, with McGarvey in the middle as usual, and Mohammed and Hash bringing up the rear.
Within the first fifty yards they fell into an easy, loping gait that for the first mile or two seemed unnecessarily slow. But as the floor of the valley continued to rise toward the distant mountains, sometimes hardpan and rock-strewn, at other times swampy, the ground muddy, McGarvey could feel the altitude in his lungs and his legs. He was in excellent physical condition, but he had to wonder how long Sarah and the others could keep up the pace, and if he could match it.
They spoke very little on the trek, though from time to time Farid would look back over his shoulder at the sky to the south and then shoot McGarvey a glance to make sure he was okay. He smiled each time and gave the thumbs-up sign.
Sarah was very small, maybe five-feet-two, and slender. Although her pack was as big as the others, and she carried a rifle and a bandolier of ammunition, it was she who set the pace, never once faltering or slowing down.
Around 3:30 A.M., the village already several miles behind them, they turned to the northwest into a steep arroyo down which a narrow stream bubbled gaily. They climbed for twenty minutes until the defile took a turn to the right, putting the valley below them out of sight for the first time. At a small flat spot beneath a long rock overhang that would protect them from the air, Sarah stopped and took off her pack.
“Five minutes,” she announced. She took a Russian made canteen from her pack and filled it in the stream. The others did the same.
This place had been used as a rest stop before. McGarvey could see the disturbed sand, and farther back beneath the overhang someone had built small campfires. The rocks
were blackened and the overhead was dark with soot.
Sarah came back and offered him a drink from the canteen. The water was sweet and cool. Simple pleasures were the best, the line came to him from somewhere, and he smiled at her. “Thank you.”
“How are your legs?” she asked.
“I’ll live. Is it much farther?”
She glanced at the defile, then back east. The sun rose here around 4:30 a.m. this time of year, and the tops of the distant mountains were already turning pink. “Another twenty minutes. But it is very steep.”
“Is your father’s camp nearby?”
She shook her head. “We have to stop for the day. It’s too dangerous for us to travel. But we’ll get there by tomorrow morning.”
Mohammed and the others were still at the stream and out of earshot. “Dangerous for whom?” he asked. “Not the Taliban, you have a spy with you.”
“I believe you call them Keyhole satellites.” She gave him a bemused look. “I think they might be watching us because of you.”
Actually the satellites’ infrared detectors could pick up the heat signatures of human bodies better at night. But the KH11 and12 series were in positions just now to watch the ongoing troubles in Yugoslavia, and one to watch a possible treaty violation in Antarctica. He didn’t tell her that.
McGarvey offered her a cigarette, but she declined. He lit one for himself. “Do you miss Saudi Arabia?” he asked.
The question startled her. She started to say something, but then changed her mind and shook her head. “I was born in the Sudan,” she said at length. “But I’ve never been to see my father’s family.” She lowered her eyes. “Have you been to Riyadh?”
She was holding something back, as if she were frightened. “Several times,” McGarvey said.
“Mecca?”
“Once.”
She looked up, a sad smile on her pretty face. “Then you have seen more than I have seen.” “We can change all that’ McGarvey said.
“I hope so,” she replied. “Before it’s too late.”
“What do you mean?”
She drew herself up suddenly realizing that she had said too much. “It’s time to go now.”
McGarvey wanted to reach out to her, to take some of the load of the world she was evidently carrying off her shoulders. Maybe in the early days in the Sudan when her mother had taken care of her while her father fought Russians here in Afghanistan, she’d had a normal life. But since moving here to be at her father’s side her life had to be anything but normal.
They shouldered their packs and followed the stream upward. Almost immediately the going became very difficult as the walls of the defile narrowed and rose sharply to a ridge a couple of hundred feet higher. A small waterfall tumbled from a rocky ledge, splashing on the rocks below, sending a mist rising into what developed into a thickening fog as they climbed.
All conversation became impossible because of the strenuousness of the ascent. For the next fifteen minutes McGarvey’s world was reduced to the next foothold below and hand hold above. The fog closed in so completely that he could no longer see the base of the slope or the ridge. The rocks were slippery and they had to take extreme care with each move lest they lose their footing. If they started to fall they would not be able to stop themselves, and it would probably kill them.
The sky behind them was turning light now, and McGarvey sensed an urgency in the others that had not been there before. Sarah and Farid began to outdistance him, and then two mujahedeed below pressed him so that he had to speed up, take chances and unnecessary risks.
His body needed rest, but thoughts were bouncing around inside his head at the speed of light; how much longer he could continue, exactly what he was going to say to bin Laden, hoping Kathleen wasn’t worrying too much about him, and that Liz was safe.
Afghanistan and the people he’d come in contact with so far were about what he’d expected from his briefings and the dossiers he’d read. But he’d not gotten the sense of isolation from his readings that he felt at this moment. He could have been on a desert island, or in the middle of Antarctica, completely cut off from civilization. Afghanistan had always been a difficult place, but now that the Taliban were mostly in control, and trying to make the country into an Islamic fundamentalist’s paradise, you could get killed simply because the hairs on your arms ran the wrong way. If you were a devout Muslim, and washed yourself for the five-times-a-day prayers, the hairs on your arms would all point down toward your wrists. If a man walked to the side of the road and urinated standing up, he could be shot to death on the spot. Muslim men always squatted to pee. It was crazy to the extreme. But he was back in the field, in one of the most isolated countries in the world, where a single wrong move could cause his death, to talk a madman out of using a nuclear weapon to kill Americans. Maybe Dennis Berndt had been right. Maybe he should just say the hell with alt the talking, and simply kill bin Laden the first moment an opportunity presented itself.
He reached for the next hand hold and pulled himself up, the muscles in his arms starting to shake.
He had to believe that this path wasn’t the only way to bin Laden’s camp. It would be impossible to bring supplies on a regular basis this way. And although his location would be secure, his comings and goings would be severely restricted. They’d taken this route to make it impossible for McGarvey to ever find his way back. Coming up from the valley they’d passed any number of arroyos that looked exactly like this one.
Of course with his phone and the GPS chip imbedded in his body he could easily pinpoint his exact location. But they didn’t know that, and he would have to make sure they didn’t find out.
A series of natural stone steps angled steeply to the right, and suddenly McGarvey was over the top where Sarah and Farid were already heading along a path around a broad pool. Mohammed and Hash came over the top and the three of them followed as fast as they could.
The sun was just appearing over the far wall of the valley behind them when they reached a much larger rock overhang than the one below. Sarah had already dropped her pack, and she hurried alone along the water’s edge until she disappeared in the fog twenty or thirty yards upstream.
“There will be no trouble from you now, Mista CIA,” Mohammed warned.
He and the two other men dropped their bundles but carried their rifles down to the pool. Stripping off their outer clothing and boots and socks, they hurriedly rinsed their hands, mouths, noses, faces, forearms and feet three
