Joshua`s Hammer (12 page)

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 they could smell the snow from the distant peaks.

McGarvey lit a cigarette, and the driver turned around and looked at him, so he passed the pack around. When it came back it was empty.

"How much longer do we have to wait here?" he asked.

"Not long," the driver said, contentedly drawing on the American cigarette. "If there is trouble at the checkpoint we will hear the gunfire."

"Not from this distance. That has to be sixty or seventy kilometers."

"It's only five kilometers to Bagram. Sometimes there is trouble, but only sometimes."

McGarvey had misunderstood. The van was not returning to Kabul as he had thought it would. It was continuing north as a probe to see if the highway was blocked. The five who had gone ahead were risking their lives to make sure that McGarvey's group got through.

"What if they're stopped?" he asked.

"There are other routes. But this way is faster."

It was exactly as McGarvey thought. However they got him up to bin Laden's camp, it would not be by the main route. "How much farther do we have to go?"

The driver started to answer, but the slightly built mujahed, the only one not smoking, said something and he turned away.

"The sooner I see him, the sooner the fighting will stop. That's why he wanted the meeting."

"The struggle will not end until all feringhi are dead, Insha'Allah" the sullen one beside McGarvey shot back angrily. It was the word for foreigners with a rude connotation.

"Is that what you want now--paradise?" McGarvey asked, pushing the man. He wanted to find out just how tight bin Laden's control was on them. "If you want Paradise that badly, why don't you put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger? Save us all some trouble."

The mujahed yanked a Russian army-issue PSM pistol from inside his vest, pointed it an inch from McGarvey's head and pulled back the hammer.

"Mohammed," the slight mujahed warned softly.

The mujahed's aim didn't waver, but his eyes flicked to the front seat. McGarvey reached up, grabbed the man's wrist and jammed his thumb between the hammer and the rear of the slide, making it impossible for the pistol to fire. He twisted the gun right, then sharply left breaking the man's grip and pulled the gun away from him.

"The next time you point this toy gun at me, I'll take it away from you again, shove it up your ass and fire all eight rounds." McGarvey eased the hammer down and handed the gun to the momentarily stunned Mohammed who looked as if he wanted more than anything else to slit McGarvey's throat.

He took the pistol and held it so tightly that even in the dim starlight McGarvey could see that the man's hand had turned white.

The slight one from the front said something in Persian, and after several long seconds Mohammed slowly put the gun away. He stared at McGarvey a little longer, and then threw his head back and laughed almost hysterically, his hands now gripped tightly around the barrel stock of the Kalashnikov resting between his knees.

McGarvey figured that the man was insane, and he was going to have to keep a tight watch on his back for the remainder of the mission. The mujahedeen were very quick to take offense, and very very slow to forgive or forget, but they admired courage. And bin Laden's control was anything but complete.

The night remained deathly still except for the light breeze. After another ten minutes the slightly built mujahed gave a nod. The driver started the engine and headed slowly back to the highway by the same dirt track across the narrow stream that they had taken to get here.

Mohammed sat forward, cradling his rifle and staring at McGarvey, while the mujahed on McGarvey's right watched out the window.

They stopped on the slight rise just before the highway. In the distance across a flat plain the air base was only partially lit. The airport beacon was still flashing, but the runway lights were out and most of the low, hulking buildings were dark. But there were lights showing on what appeared to be guard towers and tall fences even farther in the distance, which McGarvey took to be the prison.

Nothing moved in either direction on the highway for as far as they could see, nor were there any signs of movement or lights in the sky. If there were an opposite side to the civilized world this was it. Dark, hidden, bleak, a perfect place for a man such as bin Laden. A desert scorpion in its nest ready to strike out with its poison.

The driver headed down the steep track then back up the deeply rutted path to the highway. He turned north and accelerated before he finally turned on the Rover's headlights. They were so bright after they'd gotten their night vision that they were partially blinded for the first couple of minutes.

Passing the road to the air base they spotted several military vehicles parked just inside the gates about a half-mile away. The guardhouse was lit up, but they saw no signs of movement, nor was the Volkswagen van anywhere to be seen. This seemed to encourage McGarvey's captors so that as they sped north into the night, putting the base miles behind them, the mood in the Rover got increasingly lighter, the tension melting away. They started to laugh and talk, obviously relieved. They had passed two hurdles, and looking toward the not-so-distant mountains, McGarvey could feel the biggest hurdle of all approaching: Osama bin Laden and his madness.

Something else from Voltaire came to his mind; something he'd written an entire chapter about in the book he'd been working on for nearly ten years.

Voltaire had almost no regard for governments, especially their institutions and bureaucracies. But he understood that governments were not buildings and monuments alone, but were made of people. Voltaire wrote that if a man wanted to obtain a great name, and be the founder of a sect or an establishment, it helped to be crazy. Be completely mad, he said.

"But be sure that the madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age. Have in your madness reason enough to guide your extravagances; and do not forget to be obsessively opinionated and obstinate. It is certainly possible that you may get hanged; but if you escape hanging, you will have altars erected to you."

Was that it, McGarvey wondered. Was bin Laden looking for an altar; some last act that would go down in history as so tremendous, so heinous that he would never be forgotten?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Into the Afghan Mountains

They passed through the deserted streets of a good sized town called Charikar about 2:30 a.m. The only evidence that the place wasn't devoid of life were lights here and there behind the walls of compounds, and a few cars and trucks parked off the narrow streets. There was nothing that looked even remotely like an open hotel or restaurant, although in the city center there were several official-looking buildings in front of which were parked some army vehicles.

Charikar was the provincial capital of Parawn and was the scene of a substantial Russian effort to keep the puppet communist regime in power during the war. In a true Afghan tradition, the mujahedeen never fought in the city until near the end. Instead of confronting the Russian troops, the Afghani warriors manned an extensive series of ditches and tunnels that completely surrounded the place. Russians found it almost impossible to move in or out without heavy casualties. The communists said that they controlled the city. But the mujahedeen sentiment was as simple as it was direct: Do the men in prison control the prison?

His escorts did not seem nervous passing through the town, and McGarvey figured that the farther out of Kabul they went the less influence the Taliban had on the people, and the more bin Laden's sympathizers were welcome. Listening to the talk flowing around him in Persian it occurred to him that if they had been high strung before, they were relieved and even happy now. Even Mohammed seemed to lighten up.

A few miles north of the city they crossed a stone bridge over a raging mountain river, and ten minutes later they pulled off the highway and bumped along a narrow, extremely rocky track that wound its way west and, as far as McGarvey could tell, south, back toward the river. The mountains were all around them now, and the early morning hour was very cold; perhaps in the high thirties.

At one point the driver stopped the Rover and shut off the headlights. They sat in silence for a full five minutes to let their night vision come back, and then started off again. Now the track rose so steeply in places that the driver had to switch into the low range of four-wheel drive, and even then the going was nearly impossible at times.

For a couple of thousand yards they followed what was probably a donkey path, very slowly, a fifty-degree slope rising on their right, and a shear cliff that dropped three hundred feet down into the river on their left. They could hear the low-throated roar and feel the tremendous power of the water rushing through the narrow gorge below, and even the mujahedeen seemed respectful of this place.

Gradually the walls of the steep cut began to widen, until they came dramatically out to a long, rising valley, the end of which rose suddenly toward a pair of snowcapped mountains that were probably still twenty-five or thirty miles away. The hills on either side of the valley were covered with brush and small trees in dark irregular patterns like long waves on a barren sea.

The path ended, finally, and the driver had to pick his way to the northwest toward a cut at the base of the valley, negotiating around the larger boulders, but driving over everything else with back-jarring bumps. It seemed as if they were at the top of the world here in this valley, even though the mountains rose far above them. The scale was impossible to accept.

A half hour later they crossed a wide, shallow stream, and turned north again, following its twists and turns, and finally after a long loop that ran with the contours of the hills, they came to the bombed-out ruins of a small village. Only a few mud and stone walls were left intact. Shattered bricks, splintered wooden poles and trees and glass and pottery shards littered the entire settlement. Even before the bombing--probably by the Russians if this had been a mujahedeen stronghold, McGarvey thought--this place had to have been a very mean spot in which to subsist. And yet as they came from the south he could see that the river went directly through the middle of the town where patios had been constructed, villagers could sit in the mornings with their tea, or in the late afternoons for their prayers beside the flowing water. He also picked out the remnants of several small fields of corn mostly gone to seed now, and perhaps a half-acre of grapevines in what was once a well-tended vineyard. There'd probably been goats and chickens and all the other basic necessities of a simple Muslim life. Laughing children playing in the dusty streets, old men talking Islam in the chaikhanas, tea houses, while then- veiled women went about their chores floating through the village like ghostly figures; seen but not seen except behind the walls of their homes.

They parked on the far side of the village in the ruins of a barn. The driver shut off the engine, got out and walked back about twenty yards to a clearing where he studied the sky to their south for a minute or so. When he came back he pulled off his balaclava and stuffed it in a pocket. He was just a kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with a thin mustache, scraggly beard and wide, dark eyes beneath finely drawn eyebrows.

He said something in Persian.

"In English, Farid," the slightly built mujahed said. "For our guest."

He took off his balaclava, and McGarvey saw that he had guessed correctly back at the checkpoint. The mujahed was a young woman, not a man, with fine features, high, delicate cheekbones, a clear complexion, full, rich lips and dark, almond-shaped eyes that were alive with simple amusement.

"The sky is clear. No one follows." Farid's accent was very strong.

"We have only two hours to make our first camp," the woman said. "We'll have to hurry." Her voice was soft and cultured, she'd been educated in England or perhaps Europe, or at the very least tutored by someone very good. She turned and looked back at McGarvey. "You knew when we stopped at the airport, didn't you?"

"I wasn't sure," McGarvey said. "It had to be very dangerous for you to come into Kabul, and then to talk to that officer."

She shrugged matter-of-factly. "My father expects it of me. He's a religious man, Mr. McGarvey, but he is a Saudi, and modern."

"Are you Osama bin Laden's daughter?"

"I am Sarah, his oldest child."

The CIA had little or nothing of any substance about bin Laden's family. He knew nothing about her.

Mohammed, who had taken off his balaclava to reveal a heavily pockmarked face under a thick salt-and-pepper beard, was angry. He scowled, and then said something in Persian to Sarah. He wasn't as young as McGarvey thought