Farishta (11 page)

A forced smile concealed my discomfiture at this new bit of information.

“The German Army has a helicopter base across the river in Uzbekistan,” continued Wickersham. “They’re supposed to come get our boys if there’s trouble, but they won’t land anywhere that hasn’t been cleared, secured, and swept clean with a toothbrush—which pretty much eliminates any situations we might get ourselves into in Afghanistan, so don’t leave camp without your pen.”

“I won’t,” I replied nervously as I braced for Wickersham’s next bombshell.

“The doc has to sign the pen out to you. If you don’t use it while you’re here, you have to turn it in before you go home. It’s a controlled substance, y’know.”

He stopped in front of my room and pressed a key into my hand with a knowing wink. “Best to keep your room locked when you’re out, Angela.”

“Miss Morgan, is that you? Please do come in,” called the colonel from inside his office when he heard my chair scraping the floor under my typing table. I stepped through the doorway and a short, rosy-cheeked man with a thinning blond crew cut rose to welcome me. His greeting was warm and genuine and not what I had expected to receive from the commanding officer of the PRT. At last, a friendly face. I liked him already.

“Harry Wilton, pleasure to meet you and welcome to our little camp,” he said with a lilting Welsh accent. As we shook hands, he lowered his voice and added, “Would you mind terribly closing the door? ”

“Not at all,” I replied, shutting out my NATO colleagues who were watching me from behind their desks in the bullpen. “Please call me Angela.”

“And you shall call me Harry,” he said. “As you’ll soon discover, Angela, our NATO colleagues in the outer office do not like it when my door is closed, but there isn’t much privacy at this PRT, and you and I have some issues to discuss that can’t be shared with anyone else at this point. Before we begin, may I offer you a cup of tea?” he asked, reaching for a small metal pot on a tray with two cups.

“No thanks,” I replied, “I had my fill this morning.”

“Excellent. It’s already gone cold in any event. So sorry I wasn’t here to greet you when you arrived. I try to get out at least once a week to one of our safe houses in the provinces. That’s where most of our six-man Military Observation Teams—MOTS, we call them—are based. The round-trip travel alone takes more than eight hours to Sar-e Pol and several days to Maimana if the weather’s decent.

“Have the men in ops shown you where to find all the briefing books? ”

I inhaled deeply, wondering how to best answer Harry’s question. My first visit to the ops room on the day after I arrived at the PRT had been an awkward affair. I’d stood for thirty minutes in a chilly basement hallway next to the shredders outside a locked metal door with a large sign that said DO NOT DISTURB—MEETING IN PROGRESS.

A cipher lock allowed only cleared personnel into the ops room where classified materials were processed and stored. While I waited, several soldiers rushed down the stairs, punched in the code, entered the ops room, and quickly latched the door behind them without even acknowledging my presence.

I had a top-secret NATO clearance, but that didn’t seem to hold water with the men who worked in the communications and intel offices inside the vault. When the ops officer finally let me in after the meeting, he explained that it would take several weeks to validate my clearance. Until then, he could not provide me with the cipher lock codes, allow me to open a NATO e-mail account, or read the sensitive intel files where the profiles of local power brokers and warlords were kept.

“Yes, everyone’s been very helpful,” I said to Harry without much conviction, “but there appears to be a problem about my access to classified materials. I have the required clearances, but your officers want more proof, which they say will take weeks.”

Harry puffed his cheeks and blew out a stream of air. “I’ll get the chief of staff to sort that out for you. Do you have everything you need in your room?” he asked.

“Everything except heat,” I said with a smile.

There was a loud knock at the colonel’s door, and a young lieutenant barged in. His face was flushed. “Sir, the phones in the ops room are out of commission for the moment, and I wanted to warn you that the Estonians will be detonating a large cache of ammunition in . . .”

A tremendous explosion shook the building and rattled the windows in their frames. A small photo of Harry’s wife and children crashed to the floor. I gripped the arms of my chair to keep myself from bolting out of his office and diving under the nearest desk.

“Well, just now it appears, sir,” the lieutenant said with a grin.

“Thank you, John, and get those phones fixed,” said Harry, bending down to pick up the photo in its unbroken plastic frame. He looked up at me with concern. “Miss Morgan—Angela, are you feeling all right? You’ve gone quite pale.”

My hands were trembling, my heart was about to crush my ribs, and I was breathing hard. “I’m fine,” I replied in a tone that made it obvious to Harry I was not fine at all. “It’s just been a long time since I’ve heard such a loud . . . noise.”

“I’m afraid these are a regular occurrence around here,” Harry said, still observing me closely. “We’re trying to track down all the ammunition and explosives caches in this area so our Estonian friends can blow them up.”

As soon as the lieutenant shut the door behind him, Harry leaned forward on his elbows and cupped his round chin in his hands. My pulse was beginning to return to normal, but Harry’s office still felt painfully warm.

He noticed my damp forehead. “Are you quite sure you’re feeling all right, Angela?”

“I’m okay,” I repeated, although it was obvious I wasn’t. “Please continue.”

“Right. I understand you are fluent in Dari, and have been tasked with helping us sort out whether our interpreters are giving us accurate translations especially regarding the matter of the ubiquitous poppies.”

Harry explained that opium poppy cultivation in Balkh Province was expected to reach an all-time high in the spring despite the governor’s claims to the contrary. Although local warlords, who were also allies of the governor, were known to be major growers and traffickers, it had so far been difficult to prosecute any of those who had “connections.” He admitted it was possible that some of the PRT’s interpreters were concealing information, but he remained skeptical about the allegations despite the fact that life was cheap in Afghanistan, most of the interpreters were young and without powerful patrons, and it would have been fairly easy for the traffickers to co-opt a few of them.

Harry despised the cultivation of opium poppies. A nephew of his in Cardiff had been addicted to heroin before committing suicide several years ago. Watching that young man’s descent into hell, said Harry, had been the most painful experience of his life, but the safety of his soldiers patrolling the northern provinces was now his paramount concern.

He had made it quite clear to the British and American embassies in Kabul that an active poppy eradication program in the north, especially aerial spraying, would make it far too dangerous for the MOTs to safely patrol the remote sectors of our provinces. Afghan farmers, he argued, as had the American lieutenant in Kabul, would not differentiate between foreign contract eradication teams and his young soldiers.

“I do hope that with your language skills you’ll be able to help us resolve these allegations, Angela.”

“I’ll do my best, Harry,” I replied.

“I was also told that no one is to know about your fluency in Dari—with a few exceptions.”

“Exceptions?”

“Yes, my chief of staff, of course, and our incoming intel officer, Mark Davies, who speaks Pashto. I believe you and Davies met at the Foreign Office in London.”

“We did.”

“He should be arriving at the end of next week.”

“Great,” I replied with forced enthusiasm. I was in fact dreading the arrival of this man who had objected to my assignment here on all possible grounds—that I was a woman, an American, and a diplomat.

It was difficult enough trying to fit in with this all-male group of soldiers and officers, but at least none of them seemed to be openly hostile to my presence.

“It will be important to keep both of your foreign language skills quiet until we sort out this issue with the interpreters,” Harry continued.

“Yes, of course,” I said, forcing myself to stay focused on our conversation. “But according to my embassy, I’m also to serve as a political advisor to you and your officers.”

“Right. Just as your predecessor, Mr. Brooks, did.” Harry pressed his lips together before continuing. “There is one small complication, Angela. Brooks arrived when the U.S. Army was still running this PRT. Since they turned the camp over to us in 2003, Her Majesty’s government has also assigned British diplomats to serve as political advisors and reporting officers here.”

“I know that, Harry. What is the complication you’re referring to? ”

“Brooks was deeply involved in overseeing the many U.S.-funded reconstruction projects in this area. I’m not sure what they were exactly, because he was rather reluctant to share that information with us. It’s my understanding that after he left, your embassy assigned a contractor in Kabul to manage all U.S.-funded development work in the five northern provinces covered by this PRT.”

It was now clear why Plawner hadn’t said anything about my role in monitoring the reconstruction under way in the north. I had no role.

“Are you saying that I’m not needed here? ”

“No, no. Of course, you’re needed here, Angela,” Harry continued. “I’m delighted you’ve come and I fully support your assignment. I’m sure that with your language skills you’ll bring a great deal to the PRT team.”

Harry looked at me with a mix of sadness and relief as he continued. “My opinion matters little at this point, however, because I’ll be leaving at the end of next month. Colonel Jameson, my successor as PRT commander, and our new Foreign Office diplomatic representative, Richard Carrington, will hopefully arrive a few days before I depart.”

My heart dropped at this news. Finally, I had met someone at the PRT who didn’t treat me as an inconvenience, who even welcomed me, and now he was telling me he was leaving.

Harry stood up and began pacing on his threadbare carpet. “Angela, how would you like to accompany me next week to a weapons handover ceremony? We hold these little events whenever a local warlord collects enough rifles and rockets from his men to make a credible claim that his people are disarming.”

He returned to his desk and scribbled something into his calendar. “We’ll leave at 0630 hours sharp a week from Saturday. And let’s take Rahim since the old professor, my head interpreter, is still on medical leave in Kabul. You can listen in on the side conversations and brief me later on how accurately Rahim is telling us what’s being said. What do you say to that? ”

“Sounds great,” I replied with little enthusiasm.

“Excellent. You can get started on sorting through Brooks’s papers and weeding out unnecessary materials. He left several filing cabinets stuffed with old maps, brochures, UN reports, and God knows what else. I believe there may even be some State Department cables in there.

“You might also want to get your driver to take you out to the local Afghan Army base so you can meet the American military personnel who are working as embedded trainers there. A new National Guard unit arrived from the United States just a few weeks ago. I haven’t met their commanding officer yet, and I’m sure he’ll be making a courtesy call here very soon, but it might be useful for you to meet him on his own turf.”

“I’d like that,” I said. No one at the embassy had mentioned the fact that there were American soldiers working in this part of the country.

“Please feel free to sit in on our various staff meetings, Angela, and, of course, the debriefing sessions with our Military Observation Teams. Ask as many questions as you wish,” added Harry, as he paused and looked at me with concern. “Oh, yes, and get plenty of rest. Many of the men seem to come down with a nasty virus a few days after arriving, so you’ll need to keep up your strength.”

Harry was right on that count. The day after our meeting, I was hit with a miserable stomach flu. I spent the next two days in bed and in the loo next to my room. Fuzzy, Jenkins, and even Wickersham surprised me by taking turns bringing me trays of soda, broth, tea, and crackers from the field kitchen. Harry stopped by several times to make sure I was still alive. I heard nothing from Rahim.

When I had fully recovered, I arranged to have Fuzzy and Jenkins take me out to meet the American soldiers. They and their commanding officer, Colonel Hugo Tremain, were with the Texas National Guard. This lantern-jawed American officer, a long, tall Texan and devoted family man, was in real life the chief of the fire department in his small East Texas town. Tremain was respected by the Afghans and adored by his own men, who welcomed me into their drafty plywood offices and immediately offered me all the Diet Coke, blueberry muffins, and Snickers bars I could carry back to the PRT.

Tremain was a soldier’s soldier with one serious aversion. “Man dancing, don’t like it, won’t do it, Morgan,” he would remind me whenever we got into discussions about his Afghan counterpart, General Raisul, who occasionally invited him on overnight military exercises, where the soldiers would dance around the campfire in the evening.

“Sweet Jesus,” Tremain said on more than one occasion, “every time they break out the drums and the flutes and those fiddles and start dancing, Morgan, I want to crawl into my tent and hide in my sleeping bag.”

He further clarified his position on “man dancing” one afternoon when he had just returned from another patrol with Raisul. “Morgan, I will sit for five hours on a cold dirt floor with the general and his officers, drink twenty cups of green tea, and eat every speck of food I am offered with my bare right hand, including a sheep’s eyeball, but dancing should be like marriage—between a man and a woman. Period! ”