The sour stench of infection and human waste twisted up through the evening light, twining long shafts like a cancer on something beautiful — and adding to the captives’ misery.
“Yaqub Feng!” a fat Pakistani known as Afaz the Biter grunted from the far end of the room, where he straddled one of the three toilet holes cut into the concrete. “I will be finished here very soon. Come and spend time with your new friend Afaz.” Shirtless and glistening with sweat, the Pakistani prisoner’s distended belly rested on bent knees. He listed heavily to one side, the effect of some opiate smuggled in and sold by the guards. One of his ever-present stooges steadied him from the side, a hand on the slope of a hairy shoulder.
Yaqub ignored Afaz’s slurred summons and rubbed the stinging sweat from his eyes. Beyond the bars of the southwest wall, the evening sun wallowed toward the horizon in shimmering waves of heat. Crisscross shadows inched across the scarred backs and pitiful faces of the other prisoners before climbing up the stone on the far side of the room.
Afaz the Biter began to shout again.
“My men tell me you are Uyghur.” His jowly face was red from his efforts at the toilet. “I tasted the flesh of a Uyghur once.” He batted his eyes as if drawing on a pleasant memory. “It was much like good chicken. But… Feng… that is a Chinese name… and you look Chinese…. Chinese taste like dog.” The big man roared in a huge belly laugh, showing yellow teeth. “Lucky for me, I find dog to be delicious.”
Yaqub tried to ignore the Pakistani and kept his eyes on the shadow as it crept upward toward the tiny scratch he’d made in the stone the day before, minutes after his visitor had bribed the guards to see him. Together, the shadow and the scratch made a crude but reliable clock in a world where every minute seemed much like the last.
Ehmet leaned forward, glaring at the fat Pakistani. He turned to wink at Yaqub and spoke under his breath. “I will not let him eat you, big brother. I promise.” There was a feral quality in his brother, a certain lust for blood that frightened Yaqub, even as he offered his protection.
Yaqub tipped his head toward the scratch on the wall. “We are almost there.”
“Afaz has many men,” a skinny Chinese smuggler named Jiàn Zŏu said, leaning around Ehmet. Narrow eyes flicked back and forth from Yaqub to Afaz, glowing with something that was not quite fear. “You look like people with a plan…”
Neither Yaqub nor Ehmet answered.
Jiàn Zŏu swallowed hard. “But what if your plan does not work in time? We should put our heads together.”
“What if?” Yaqub whispered. According to Jiàn Zŏu, he had been what the Chinese called a “snakehead”—a smuggler who was an expert at moving people across borders and evading authorities — until the day he was caught.
“I may as well fight alongside you,” Jiàn Zŏu said. He had a narrow face and a wispy black mustache, which, along with his darting eyes and twitchy movements, reminded Yaqub of a rat. “Your father was Chinese,” he reasoned. “That makes us cousins. We should take care of each other.”
The only other Chinese prisoner in the cell, Jiàn Zŏu had aligned himself with the Feng brothers from the moment they’d arrived from Islamabad two days before. If he was to be believed, he had contacts with Chinese triads and other organized crime groups all around the world. He’d been arrested when some of his underlings decided to begin trafficking in drugs along with their human cargo.
Ehmet looked the jumpy snakehead up and down. “If we get out of here, you say you have contacts in China?”
Nose twitching, Jiàn Zŏu seemed to sense that that something big was about to occur. “I have contacts everywhere, cousin.” He leaned in close. “My friends will make sure we are taken care of wherever you want to go — as long as we stay alive long enough to get to them.”
Afaz growled from the other end of the room. “You should come to me on your own, Yaqub Feng! My men will not be as gentle as I will be.”
Ehmet laughed out loud at that. “I will enjoy watching this one die,” he said.
Jiàn Zŏu swallowed hard, but Yaqub saw him reach into the waist of his filthy trousers and bring out a sharpened metal spike. The little snakehead might tremble at the thought of death, but he was willing to run trembling toward it. Maybe they should bring him along.
“If the stories are true,” Jiàn Zŏu whispered, “Afaz chewed his wife to death.”
“I can see you laugh,” the fat Pakistani roared. “You will not be laughing for long.” His stooge brought him a bowl of water to clean himself. He pushed it away and stood to pull his pants up around his waist. They were stained and torn, forming more of an apron than actual pants. Sweat bathed the mahogany rolls of fat that folded over his upper body.
Yaqub took a half step away from the wall. At six feet tall to Ehmet’s five and a half, the elder brother should have been the protector. That was not the case. Ehmet put out a hand and moved in front, placing himself between Yaqub and Afaz the Biter.
The Pakistani lumbered through the crowded room, shoving and kicking aside prisoners who didn’t move out of his way fast enough. Ten feet away, he stopped. Even listing to one side, he was a formidable man with powerful arms and a low, sloping brow over piggish eyes.
He pointed at Yaqub, clicking his teeth together.
On the wall, the shadow reached the scratch.
A half a breath later a horrific explosion rattled the prison, sending a cascade of dust down the ancient brick. All eyes turned toward the outer wall trying to make sense of the noise. Earthquakes were not unheard of in Pakistan — and could prove deadly to men trapped in a dilapidated pile of stone like Dera Ismail Khan Prison.
Ehmet looked at Yaqub and smiled. This was no earthquake.
A second blast roared directly outside the bars, sending a percussive fist into Yaqub’s chest. The pressure wave knocked him backwards, slamming both him and Ehmet against the stone. They’d dropped to their bellies as a third explosion tore the bars off the cell.
Prisoners coughed and choked as smoke and dust rolled into the room. It was difficult to breathe, and impossible to see. Panicked shouts and pitiful cries rose up with the dust throughout the prison complex. The rattle-can of submachine gunfire followed fast on the heels of the explosions. Outside the wall, a guard screamed for mercy — and then screamed again as he was shot. Ehmet pressed his face up from the concrete floor and grinned at his brother. Surrounded by death, he looked happier than he’d been in a very long while.
Three minutes after the first explosion, the gunfire outside had dwindled to sporadic spurts and volleys. A dark man with a flowing black beard that reached the middle of his chest stepped through the cavernous breach in the outside wall. He wore the green uniform of a prison guard and carried a short Kalashnikov rifle at low-ready. He cast dark eyes around the room until he saw the two Uyghur men. Prisoners who had not known to get away from the outside wall prior to the explosion were scattered around the room in various stage of dismemberment.
“I am Ali Kadir,” the man with the beard said, grabbing Yaqub by the arm and hauling him to his feet. “We have come to set you free.”
Yaqub nodded, blinking. It was one of Kadir’s men who had come to see him the day before.
“We must hurry,” Kadir said. “There is a vehicle waiting outside. There are three of you.”
Ehmet shook his head. “Our cousin is dead.”
Jiàn Zŏu scuttled up in the cloud of dust. “Take me with you,” he said. “My contacts will be of use, I swear it. I assume you wish to get out of Pakistan. I am an expert at moving people from one country to another.”
Ali Kadir opened his mouth to speak as a prison guard stepped through the hole in the wall, spraying the room with bullets. One of the shots hit him in the back of the neck. Kadir fell instantly, a look of bemused surprise on his lips, and was dead before he hit the ground. Jiàn Zŏu snatched up the Kalashnikov as he fell and dispatched the guard with a short burst.