The beers were chilling in the morgue-size fridge, the Hawaiian steaks marinating in white ceramic dishes. Arnold had already programmed his dish antenna to receive the game and now he was going through the kitchen shelves looking for olive oil and a pepper grinder. He was determined to create a little bit of the East Coast behind the barbed-wire-topped walls of his eighteen-bedroom ambassadorial mansion. He was trying not to think of the three different layers of security surrounding his residence, the numerous antennae and satellite dishes stuck on the roof and colour-coded telephones dotting the whole living area.
Arnold wanted to make it a memorable evening. He wasn’t a domestic type of diplomat but he was acutely aware that Nancy had put her own career in the State Department on hold so that she could be with him in this blasted city. For one evening, it’d be just like the old days when after putting in long hours at their Washington office they would take turns doing meals, Nancy cooking yet another variation on lasagne and Arnold when it was his turn getting a sudden urge to order Chinese takeout. Islamabad was a whirl of conspiracies and dinner parties; there were more CIA subcontractors and cooks per household than meals in a day. Nancy had started referring to herself as Nancy begum, the housewife with no housework.
Arnold had abandoned his search for olive oil and was taking a Budweiser out of the fridge while humming the Redskins’ anthem when the red phone rang. There were only three people who could call him on this phone and he couldn’t pass any of them on to his First Secretary. It was most probably his boss from Washington, George no-lunch Shultz. It was lunch hour in Foggy Bottom and the Secretary of State kept his calls brief so Arnold picked up the phone without thinking, ready for a quick diplomatic update.
It was General Zia ul-Haq, the President of his host country, on the line, polite and pointless as ever: how’s Nancy’s health, how was she adjusting to the local weather, was she getting along with the servants, were they planning to have babies soon? Arnold went along: Nancy loved Islamabad, she had started taking Urdu lessons, she was getting used to having so many servants, she would love to call on the First Lady sometime.
“Arnie, why don’t you bring her over?” When General Zia called him Arnie, he always wanted Arnold Raphel to do something beyond the call of his diplomatic duty.
“Sure, Mr President. No true diplomat should ever eat at home. Just waiting for your invitation.”
“I know that these things should be arranged in advance, but we are having another American friend over for dinner and he would like to see you very much.”
Arnie looked at his Hawaiian steaks and panicked. Not another brainstorming session with a visiting delegation of the Pakistani Association of North American Doctors, Arnie thought. Not another wasted evening discussing models for some proposed mosque in some godforsaken New Jersey neighbourhood. Not another debate about how a minaret can be adapted so that it reflects true Islamic architectural sensibility without clashing with American aesthetic values. He was wondering how to make it clear to the General that his brief as the ambassador didn’t include being used as a guinea pig for spreading Islam in North America. He was thinking about a diplomatic enough excuse, something about Nancy having a stomach bug or entertaining a group of local newspaper editors; both useless, he knew. His domestic staff had probably already reported to the General that Ambassador Sahib was planning a honeymoon at home, and the General himself would definitely know who was entertaining local editors and where.
Before Arnie could come up with something, General put an end to his dreams of a cosy domestic evening. “Bill is coming over for dinner,” he said.
“Bill Casey?” Arnie asked, feeling very unlike the Ambassador of the United States. He wondered whether his friends in Langley were planning to put the boot in after entrusting him with the biggest assignment since Saigon. “The only difference is you’ll be managing victory rather than a defeat,” Bill had told him. The embassy was full of Bill’s people anyway, from the trio of cultural, commercial and military attaches to the political officers and the communication analysts. Sometimes Arnold wondered whether his cook was also getting his recipes from Langley. He realised the need for this, as Bill always kept reminding him that the CIA was running the biggest covert operation against the Soviets from Pakistan since their last biggest covert operation against the Soviets from somewhere else. Bill kept reminding everyone that he had the Russkis by their balls in Afghanistan. Bill was always telling his old chum Ronald Reagan that it was the Wild West all over again, that the Afghans were cowboys with turbans and that they were kicking Soviet ass as it had never been kicked before.
But Arnie was the ambassador around here and he shouldn’t have to find out about Bill’s imminent visit from General Zia. The Director of the CIA could visit wherever he wanted and whomever he wanted, but even the Director of the CIA had to inform the ambassador who was, technically, his host. But what can you do about Bill, or as Nancy always called him, Bill get-Ronnie-on-the-line Casey?
General Zia laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s just an informal visit. When Bill gets together with Prince Naif they do crazy things, you know. They called from Jeddah an hour ago and said they felt like eating that bitter-gourd, mutton-curry combination that the First Lady made last time they were here. And I said, ‘My wife is your sister and you know sisters love to feed their brothers.’”
“I’ll receive him and bring him over,” Arnie said. He had no idea where and when Bill was arriving.
“Don’t worry,” General Zia said. “They were racing their planes from Saudi to here. The Prince won and is already here. General Akhtar is picking Bill up. His plane should be landing now. You come over and if Nancy likes bitter gourds, bring her along as well.”
The Chief of Inter Services Intelligence, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman’s devotion to his duty was not the ordinary devotion of an ambitious man to his work. General Akhtar approached his work like a poet contemplating an epic in progress; conjuring up battles in his imagination, inventing and discarding subplots, balancing rhyme and reason. His work could take him in a single day from an interrogation centre to a state banquet to an unlit tarmac runway at an airport, where he would receive a guest whose arrival time he never knew. Pakistan’s second most powerful man didn’t mind waiting in the dark if the visitor happened to be the second most powerful man in United States of America.
The next time General Akhtar stood on an airfield, he would be in a uniform, he would not want to board the plane but would be forced to do so, out of sheer reverence for his chief. And that would be the last order he would ever obey.
General Akhtar looked into the orange-tinged Islamabad sky and wondered what was taking his guest so long.
Bill Casey’s C141 Star Lifter, carrying him from Saudi Arabia, circled over the military airbase outside Islamabad. The clearance for landing had been given, but Bill was still freshening up after a two-hour nap. The interior of this plane was part hotel room, part communication bunker; a flying command centre carrying so much black metal with blinking lights that a team of three sergeants worked full time monitoring and decoding the incoming and outgoing messages. There were modular frequency jammers to override all other transmitters working in a ten-mile radius, digital deflectors to misguide any missiles lobbed at the jet, double jammers to counter-jam any other jamming equipment operating in the area. It could also fly under five different identities, switching from one call sign to another as it crossed continents. It was Duke One when it took off from Saudi Arabia. Somewhere over the Arabian Sea, it had become Texan Two.