Hash and Farid, packs slung over their shoulders along with their Kalashnikovs, waited in the darkness. Mohammed, also carrying a pack and a rifle, stood a few feet away, the same crazy look as before on his broad peasant’s face. They were to be his escorts back to the Rover parked in the village, and then back to Kabul. But whatever instructions bin Laden had given them about McGarvey’s safe passage were going to be ignored by Mohammed. McGarvey could see it in the man’s eyes. Mohammed was obviously itching to get out of the camp where somewhere in the mountains there would be an accident.
McGarvey glanced up at the entrance to the cave in the hillside. Bin Laden had the nuclear bomb hidden somewhere, perhaps even here. That was the only consideration now; getting it back.
“Who has my things?” he asked.
Mohammed raised his pack a couple of inches off his shoulder, but said nothing. His eyes were wild.
“We’ll go now, mista Hash said.
“I want to see my things first,” McGarvey said. “I don’t trust this bastard. He looks like a thief.”
Hash said something, and Mohammed opened the bundle and dumped the contents in the dust. McGarvey’s pistol and spare magazine of ammunition were wrapped in an old rag, but the laptop computer and telephone were missing.
“Where are the rest of my things?”
“The computer stays here. Ali has it,” Hash said apologetically.
“What about my telephone?”
Mohammed took it out of his pocket, then laughed uproariously. “I’ll give it back to you in Kabul, you’ll see.”
Hash and Farid in the lead, with Mohammed bringing up the rear, they headed single file through the seemingly deserted camp. But as before McGarvey could feel dozens of pairs of eyes watching from all around. There was no sign that they were getting ready to break camp and go to ground somewhere else, but that could happen as soon as he got out of sight, and it would only take them a couple of hours to bug out.
They crossed the shallow stream at the far side of the camp and started up the steep switchbacks to the crest of the hill two hundred feet above. McGarvey climbed slowly, stumbling from time to time as if he was having a great deal of difficulty. The only way he was going to get his phone back was to kill Mohammed. And with three- to-one odds he needed every advantage he could get, including instilling a false sense of security in them.
Halfway up, McGarvey stopped to catch his breath. He looked down the way they had come, and across the camp to the facing hill. For a second he thought he might be seeing the glow from the tip of a cigarette about where he figured the cave entrance might be. But then it was gone, though he could well imagine that bin Laden himself, or perhaps the man called Ali, was there watching him leave. Ali fit the general description that Trumble had given them of the man sitting silently in the corner at the Khartoum meeting. And bin Laden had been respectful of his opinions. Perhaps he was bin Laden’s chief of staff. It was a possibility.
They reached the top of the hill twenty minutes later, and McGarvey stopped again for a minute to catch his breath. The moon was just coming up over the distant mountains, casting a malevolent orange glow on the snow covered peaks. The doctor was correct about one thing; this was Afghanistan, and no one in the West had any real idea what that meant. The entire country was in chaos; the pressures of the modern world with its dazzling technologies clashing with the centuries-old insular traditions that had either defeated or swallowed every invader ever to cross the Khyber Pass. Even the Russians, with their brutality in the field, had failed to conquer the Afghanis. And there was a lot of doubt that the Taliban, with their fanatical interpretation of the Qoran, would be successful either. A strange place. A fitting place for a man such as bin Laden with his jihad and hatreds.
“Ready?” Hash asked respectfully.
“Yeah,” McGarvey said, and they started down the narrow, rocky path when a dark figure suddenly materialized out of the shadows behind some boulders.
Hash and Farid pulled up short and reached for their rifles when the figure said something in Persian, and scrambled up onto the path. It was Sarah.
“I’m coming part of the way with you,” she said in English.
“Your father will forbid this,” Mohammed told her, angrily.
“Very well. We will wait here until you return to camp and tell him.”
“I will use the radio—”
“That is forbidden except for an emergency,” Sarah warned sharply. “Or do you wish to disobey not only me, but my father too?”
Mohammed was fuming, but after a beat he shook his head. Maybe there would be two accidents, McGarvey thought. And he wondered if bin Laden knew just how unstable their situation was here.
Sarah carried a short-stock version of the AK-47 slung over her shoulder, the muzzle pointed to the ground. But she had no pack. She fell in beside McGarvey and for the first half-mile or so they moved through the night in silence.
A light breeze had come up, and although it was very cold McGarvey was sweating. The lidocaine had completely worn off and besides the ache beneath his shoulder, there was a very sharp pain in his side from the incision. It was like a toothache, only worse, and he could not completely put it out of his mind. That, and Mohammed’s presence at his back, made him edgy. The clock was still running.
“I’d like to ask you a favor,” McGarvey said, finally breaking the silence.
Sarah gave him a quizzical look. “What?”
“Mohammed has my things, I would like to have them back.”
She shrugged. “When you get back to Kabul. He’s been told.”
“I’d like them now.”
“No,” she said. “I have my orders too. We all do. You will have to wait until Kabul.” She looked into his face. “I’m sorry Mr. McGarvey. I know about the electronic device that you brought with you. Its significance was explained to me. And it was explained that you must not communicate with your people until you are a long way from here. I think we will be moving from this camp. It will make us all feel better. Safer. Do you understand?”
McGarvey nodded. “We want the killing to finally stop.”
“Then I hope you are able to convince your President of this when you get home.”
They walked for a long time in silence, the night bitterly cold. McGarvey settled down, concentrating on the march because there was nothing else he could do for the moment.
“Now that you have met my father, what do you think?” Sarah asked innocently at one point.
The path had dipped below the crest of the hill that overlooked the camp, and it started back up again, the slope gentle at first, but steadily rising. What few trees were here were stunted and gnarled in the thin topsoil. At this altitude they were just below the treeline. McGarvey took a long time to answer. Bin Laden was a monster, but to Sarah he was her father.
“I think that he’s getting tired of hiding here in the mountains,” McGarvey said. “He wants to go home.”
“Wouldn’t you?” She smiled wistfully. At that moment she looked like a tomboy, and McGarvey was reminded of his own Liz at that age. “Was the operation painful?” she asked.
“A little, but I’ll live. What did your father say about the — incident?”
Sarah stole a glance over her shoulder. Mohammed was far enough back so that he was out of earshot if they spoke softly. “He didn’t say anything. I think he is disappointed.” It was a very tough admission for her to make.
But it wasn’t your fault. If that’s what the Qoran is teaching you it’s all wrong. “The Taliban are fanatics. But do you suppose they would condone what he tried to do to you?”
“Probably. But sometimes it gets confusing.”
“Welcome to the club,” McGarvey said. He felt sorry for her, and he wondered about her mother, and her father’s other wives and all the siblings. Dinner at the bin Ladens’ would be quite a spectacle, if such mixed eating arrangements were possible in a fundamentalist’s household.
She looked at him questioningly. “Club?”
“I meant it’s the same for everybody. Nobody has all the answers, especially not young people.”
She picked up on that with eagerness. “Tell me more about your daughter. Aren’t you afraid for her safety because of all the violence in America?”
McGarvey stifled a laugh. “The newspapers have some of it wrong. They like to exaggerate.” He swept his arm around the wild mountain scenery. “This isn’t exactly a safe haven. And for you Kabul must be even
