“Not much further,” said Mr. Mystery just when I was thinking that lying down in the snow would be better than going on. It gave me strength, but he lied about the further bit. I figured I was still in Pakistan. Wander around an Afghan village at night like this and we'd have stepped on land mines.
After an eternity of being dragged through the snow, we arrived at a cleft in the rock with hard-packed snow forming a roof over the top. I got the “Ssh” signal again. I kept still, thinking there might be more Arabs wandering around, when I heard a familiar snort.
“Here,” I heard the guy say.
He led the way through the cleft. I saw a big horse and a little horse with big ears — a donkey. The horse stamped a hoof and shook its head and snow went flying. The guy talked to each animal softly, and then pulled heavy blankets off each. The animals were saddled and ready to go. Whoever this guy was, he'd done his homework. “Can you ride?” he asked me.
“Which side are the gears on?” I replied.
He turned the NVG on me.
“Just kidding.”
In fact, I'd only ridden once before. I'd been eighteen and a girl I wanted to get to know without her clothes on was into horses. I went away with her on a riding weekend. I had this fantasy that all the bouncing up and down in a saddle would make her eager for sex. It did, and she was, only not with me but with the guy from the stable. I went home empty-handed. The girl went home pregnant and never rode again. And neither had I. Until now. I took a tentative step toward the horse.
“ Uh-uh, buddy. The little one's yours,” he said as he gave the donkey a pat on its rump, which made its ears twitch. “It'll follow the horse.” He handed me a long stick. “If it decides it doesn't want to go forward, give it a jab like this.” He demonstrated, a stabbing motion down into the side of the beast's neck. I must have looked doubtful because he added, “Don't worry, you won't hurt it.”
I gave the animal a pat on its neck. The muscle there was like a sheet of hairy iron. My guide gave me a hand up and the animal took a step forward and twitched its ears at me.
We rode through the night in silence. Like the guy said, the donkey followed the horse. I just hoped the horse didn't step off the mountain. I gathered we were in a hurry, even though pursuit was looking less likely by the hour. It continued to snow till just before dawn, covering our tracks. When the low sky finally lightened to a slate gray, we were making our way down a ridge and into a valley. The mountain on the other side — slabs of ice and black rock — rose into the clouds and disappeared.
“Down there is the border with Afghanistan. Beyond is the pass we have to take,” said the man.
“You from New York City?” I asked.
“That obvious?” he replied.
“ Uh-huh. I'm from New Jersey,” I said, now with enough strength to exercise my curiosity.
“I know.”
“Is that why you hit me so hard?” I asked.
“No, I hit you hard so that I could come back another day and rescue your ass. And I didn't use a closed fist.”
“I don't remember the details.”
The animals beneath us picked their way down the slope the way Clare's kid, Manny, removed green things from his fried rice — with infinite care.
“How're you doing?” he asked.
“Good.” There was a bag of food attached to the saddle and I'd been eating my way through the contents — cheese, flat bread, and olives. My strength was coming back fast.
“Cool,” he said. “So, what were you doing? Did it have something to do with the raid on Phunal?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”
“That's OK. You don't have to say.”
“What do you know about Phunal?”
“The night you were captured, we saw an explosion in the sky. It was close to the village we were occupying, so we investigated. We came across you while searching for the wreckage. You can find all kinds of useful things in plane wreckage. Anyway, we found you and located your gear. A lot of it was damaged. You must have come down hard.”
“You could say that,” I agreed.
“What did you do with your parachute? We looked everywhere for it.”
“I got hungry, so I ate it.”
“Come on, really… what'd you do with it?”
I told him what I thought happened, but he didn't believe me. He seemed to prefer to believe that I had, in fact, eaten the damn thing. Hell, I still had trouble swallowing the truth myself.
We traveled in silence, huddled into our blankets, trying to keep out the bitter cold. My body ached like it had never ached before. I believed I could actually feel the bones beneath my skin and it felt like blades of frozen steel had scraped them. I huddled down low on the saddle and tried to get into the donkey's rhythm. I watched the animal's neck, the snow melting to ice and crusting its coarse hair, and tried not to think about the thousand or so feet of sheer drop to the valley below, just a couple of steps to my right.
Eventually, my animal came to a stop beside the horse. The guy turned toward me, steam coming from his mouth when he opened it. He said, “We heard a couple of days later, after we recovered you, that Phunal was attacked. It's some secret test base or something, right? A lot of people were killed. Some scientist was kidnapped. From the way it went down, sounded like coalition Special Forces at work. The feeling is, you were supposed to be one of them, but something went wrong with the plan. Allah's will. So, they were going to hand you over to the new revolutionary Pakistan government and make trouble for Washington. But then, as you know, we had an unexpected guest. But I suppose you're wondering what a nice boy from New York is doing in a place like this?”
“Yeah, had crossed my mind,” I said, but in truth I was thinking about Butler and Dortmund. They'd killed everyone on that plane. And then they had still followed through on the mission. Why? What the hell was going on?
“Like I said, my cover was blown getting you out anyway, so I guess I can tell you.”
He didn't get around to letting me in on his secret for a little while longer. We'd reached a treacherous part of the road cut into the side of an almost vertical granite face. We dismounted and walked the animals across. My traveling companion had to help me down. I couldn't move — my body had locked up solid.
“As I was about to say, I am Lieutenant Ibrahim al-Wassad, at your service,” he said as we mounted up again with what I hoped was the most dangerous section behind us.
“Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant,” I said through frozen lips burning with cold.
“I was U.S. Army infantry, then U.S. Army intelligence, then CIA, then, hell, now I'm not sure what or who I am. Someone in a back room somewhere found out I had American-Afghan parents, could speak Pashtu and a fair smattering of Dari, worshipped in the Islamic faith, and did pretty well at West Point. Before I knew what was going on, I was given a whirlwind course in spycraft at Langley, then counterterror at Quantico, and rotated into Afghanistan.
“Three months after that, I'm working deep cover as a schoolteacher in a town up north in the heart of the Pashtun region, saying all the right things about what a great idea jihad is. Two months later, I'm recruited by a remnant of the Taliban. I join the band, and go touring. Over the past six months we've played up and down the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, looking for action, but not too much action, because the people I'm with at least have the good sense not to go head-to-head with coalition forces. Hit-and-run stuff, mostly. I've done some bad things in the name of this mission… then you drop in and make life difficult.”