“He knows where he is,” Chace said. “Kostum isn’t trying to hide. Few of these warlords do. It’s just a matter of finding someone who can take us to him. Either Faqir can, or Faqir knows how to reach someone who can.”
“He’s just figuring how much to charge us, then.”
“That, and how dangerous the trip is. There’s still a lot of banditry about. Weighing his options.”
“As long as they’re not planning on robbing us.”
“The least of our worries, I should think,” Chace said.
Chace slept in the daughter’s room that night. The girl was perhaps eleven years old, maybe twelve, and very shy. When Chace removed her ball cap, she made friends with her by leaning forward and letting the girl touch her hair.
The next morning she woke early, the daughter still asleep, and took the momentary privacy to open the camera bag and retrieve the Walther. She tucked the weapon into her pants, again at her waist, covering the butt with her shirt, then ventured out to find that Lankford, Faqir, and Karim were already up and waiting for her. They shared a quick breakfast, dried fruit and goat cheese, then made their way out to Faqir’s cab, which was in actuality a rather sad and beaten Jeep Cherokee, dented and bruised by use. Karim and Faqir both carried Kalashnikovs, and Karim brandished his for their benefit, demonstrating his effectiveness as a bodyguard, before they climbed into the vehicle and set off.
They drove out of Mazar-i-Sharif, heading south on a freshly repaired road that served them well for fifteen kilometers before beginning a steady deterioration that ended some thirty kilometers after it began. They passed herds of goat and sheep, watched over by shepherds with Kalashnikovs dangling from straps at their shoulders. The lowlands surrounding Mazar-i-Sharif fell away behind them, and they began to climb. The greenery disappeared and the heat intensified, and the earth around them grew hard and yellow, as if baked one too many times. Chace supposed that it had been, at that.
Faqir switched over to four-wheel drive, and they began a torturous series of switchbacks, alternately climbing and falling, so Chace felt her teeth rattling in her skull. They passed clusters of houses, seemingly built of the same stone as the mountains. Once, Chace looked out her window into a valley, saw a shock of green below, dotted with buds of red and pink, small figures moving among the poppies, collecting the opium from the still-closed buds. A chatter of Kalashnikov fire rose up at them, warning them to mind their own business and move on.
The mountains began to rise around them, and beside Faqir in the front passenger seat, Karim fingered his own rifle, hunching forward, peering out the windows on all sides, leery of an ambush. Beside her, Lankford mirrored the action, and she was tempted to follow suit, but then saw no point in it. This was what Afghanistan was known for, this terrain, this unforgiving land, with its thousands upon thousands of places to hide, cliffs and ravines and canyons. If there was an ambush coming, they wouldn’t see it until it was upon them.
After four and a half hours and perhaps eighty-odd kilometers of travel, the road ran out on them altogether. Faqir slowed, exchanging words with his brother, and beside her, Lankford leaned in to whisper in her ear.
“There’re tracks,” he said. “You see them?”
“Problem is telling how recent they are.”
“Too right.”
The Jeep stopped abruptly, and Chace looked up to see both Faqir and Karim raising their hands. Twenty feet ahead, four men had emerged from the boulders, all with their Kalashnikovs pointed at the car. All wore white knit prayer caps to cover their heads, some with vests over their heavy shirts, some with robes. For a moment, Chace feared they’d wandered into an ambush by
One of the men, his beard beginning to show gray, shouted at them, and Faqir and Karim opened their doors slowly, and Chace and Lankford followed suit. Chace caught Lankford’s eye as they moved to their own doors, shook her head slightly, warning him to keep off his weapon.
Fariq and the graybeard were speaking, the remaining three watching them, their weapons still leveled, but casually now, as if they’d quite forgotten they were doing it. That Karim hadn’t been asked or ordered to drop his own gun gave Chace hope they were on the right track, and then she heard the name “Kostum” in the litany of Pashto spoken between them. Fariq gestured back in her direction with his right hand, then at Lankford.
“You want to speak to Kostum?” the graybeard asked Lankford. “For BBC?”
“That’s right,” Lankford said.
There was more conversation in Pashto, this time between Fariq, the graybeard, and two of the others. Finally the graybeard pointed to one of the gunmen, a younger one that Chace couldn’t imagine as older than eighteen. The young man set off nimbly, up the trail, disappearing behind the boulders almost immediately.
Fariq looked at Chace, then at Lankford, saying, “We are waiting now.”
“Will it be long?” Lankford asked.
Fariq shrugged, and the graybeard asked a question, then laughed at Fariq’s response. The tension abated somewhat, muzzles dipping lower. Chace leaned against the Jeep, looking around, then down, examining the tire tracks in the dust. There’d been enough traffic along the path to make discerning different sets difficult, but at a guess, she had to think that at least four or five different vehicles had come this way fairly recently.
The heat had climbed past uncomfortable to sweltering, and she watched as Lankford removed his hat long enough to wipe the sweat from his brow. Minder Three was as fair-skinned as she, almost as tall, with straight black hair that added to his pallor. She thought he was already turning pink, and wondered if she was doing the same.
A pebble broke loose from above them, bounced down the mountainside, and the graybeard and the others with him all turned, bringing their rifles up, only to see the young man they’d dispatched as a messenger returning. He popped out from behind the rocks higher on the ridge, calling down to them and raising his arm, and immediately, Chace saw both Fariq and Karim relax.
“You can go with them,” Fariq said, addressing both her and Lankford. “We will go back now, before it is dark.”
“You’re leaving us with them?” Chace asked.
“Kostum sees you,” Fariq said. “Safe.”
He and his brother climbed back into the Jeep, starting the car once more.
The graybeard approached them, speaking and smiling at her, the others following, then coming around to get behind them. The graybeard indicated a direction, roughly the way the younger man had gone, then began leading the way.
With no other choice, Chace and Lankford followed.
They walked for another two and a half hours, and Chace suspected that the graybeard was setting an easy pace for their benefit, or more precisely, for hers. The narrow trail weaved around the rocks and scrub, summiting and then again descending. She wondered how the messenger had traveled the distance so quickly, then realized that he couldn’t have, that he must have used a radio or a satellite phone instead.
Either that or this was one hell of a setup, and she and Lankford were about to find themselves truly in the middle of nowhere, in the dead wild on the western edges of the Hindu Kush mountains. If they were going to be done here, no one would ever find their bodies.
She doubted that was how this would end up—at least, not until journey’s end. The graybeard had promised them safety, and she had to take him at his word. Al-Qaeda or Coalition, it didn’t matter who; once the promise was made, it was kept until death.
Finally they descended to a ravine, following a narrow trail midway along its side until it opened to a canyon floor. Below, a walled stronghold—it was the only way Chace could think to describe it—rested at the bottom of the way, built back against the side of the mountain, almost built into it, in fact. A cluster of trees grew in the yard, their leaves shockingly green against the deadened tan, and beyond that, in the shade cast by the mountainside, a large, almost sprawling house. A minaret rose up from the corner of the wall, and Chace could see movement inside, a man with an RPG launcher on guard.
Along the sides of the canyon, Chace saw more guard emplacements, more of the vested and robed men, sitting or standing in what little shade they could find, rifles to hand. A mortar had been positioned high on the
