“No shit?” Bianco called. “What’re we, amateurs?”
Richards replied over his shoulder, “They haven’t got the best track record with hostage rescue.”
Chavez smiled at this. “Yeah, well, we’re Rainbow.”
21
HAD HE BEEN in an objective frame of mind, Nigel Embling might have recognized his current mood as nothing more than self-indulgent crap, but at that moment it was his considered decision that the world was in fact going quickly and directly to hell. Later he would likely reevaluate that decision, but right now, sitting at his kitchen table over a cup of tea and reading the morning’s Daily Mashriq, one of Peshawar, Pakistan’s half-dozen daily newspapers, nothing he saw improved his mood.
“Bloody idiots,” he grumbled.
His houseboy, Mahmood, magically appeared in the kitchen’s doorway. “Something, Mr. Nigel?” Mahmood, eleven, was too happy and eager by half-especially at this time of day-but Embling knew his household would be a shambles without him.
“No, no, Mahmood, just talking to myself.”
“Oh, that’s not good, sir, not good at all. Touched, that’s what people will think. Please, if you would, be certain to save your talking for at home, yes?”
“Yes, fine. Go back to your studies.”
“Yes, Mr. Nigel.”
Mahmood was an orphan, his mother, father, and two sisters having died in the rash of Sunni-on-Shia violence that had plagued Pakistan following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Embling had all but adopted the boy, giving him food, board, a small stipend, and, unbeknownst to Mahmood, a steadily growing trust fund he’d inherit when he turned eighteen.
Another mosque burned, another faction leader found murdered, another rumor of rigged elections, another ISI intelligence officer arrested for stealing state secrets, another call for calm from Peshawar. It was a damned shame, all of it. Not that Pakistan had ever been the model of peace, mind you, but there had been some periods of mostly calm, though even that was just a sham, a thin film covering the cauldron of violence always boiling just under the surface. Still and all, Embling knew there was no place else for him on earth, though he’d never quite understood why. Reincarnation, perhaps, but whatever it was, Pakistan had certainly wormed its way into his life, and now, at age sixty-eight, he was firmly and irrevocably rooted in his adopted home.
Embling knew that most men in his position would be, and perhaps should be, afraid-an Anglo-Saxon Christian from England, birthplace of the British Raj, or “rule” in Hindi. For the better part of ninety years, from the mid-1850s to just after World War Two, Great Britain had held sway over what it called the “Indian Subcontinent,” which had at various times during its history included India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somaliland, Singapore, and Lower and Upper Burma, today known as Myanmar, though Embling still and always would call it Burma, political correctness be damned. Though memories of the British Raj in Pakistan had faded with time, its impact had never completely disappeared, and Embling could see it and feel it every day he went out, in the stares from the old-timers in the market and in the whispered conversations between policemen who’d heard the stories from their parents and grandparents. Embling did nothing to hide his heritage, and he couldn’t have if he’d wanted to anyway, what with his perfect but ever-so-slightly accented grasp of Urdu and Pashto. Not to mention his white skin and six-foot-four-inch frame. Not a lot of natives with those traits.
Still, he was mostly shown respect, and that had nothing to do with lingering deference to the Raj but rather his own history. He had, after all, been in Pakistan longer than many of the people you might find in the Khyber Bazar market on any given day. How many years, exactly? he thought. Give or take holidays or brief assignments to Pakistan’s neighbors… Say, forty-plus years. Long enough for his former (and sometimes current) compatriots to have long ago labeled him as “gone native.” Not that he minded. For all its shortcomings and all the near misses and dodgy spots he’d seen, there was no place for him but Pakistan, and in his secret heart he took it as a point of pride that they thought him so well integrated that he was “more Paki than Brit.”
Embling, at the tender and naive age of twenty-two, had been one of MI6’s many postwar Oxford recruitments, having been approached by the father of a schoolmate who Embling had thought worked as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Defence but who was in fact a scout for MI6-one of the few, in fact, who had warned his superiors that the infamous traitor Kim Philby was a less-than-stellar catch who would in time either muck up so badly he would cost lives or be tempted and slip over to the other side, which he did, working as a mole for the Soviets for many years before being exposed.
After surviving the rigors of MI6 training at Fort Monckton on the Hampshire Coast, Embling was assigned Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, or NWFP (or Pakhtunkhwa or Sarhad, depending on who you were talking to), which abutted Afghanistan, at the time just becoming a playground for the Russian KGB. Embling had spent the better part of six years living in the mountains along the border, making inroads with the Pashtun warlords who ruled the gray area of overlap between Pakistan and Afghanistan. If the Soviets put out feelers in Pakistan’s direction, it would likely come over the mountains and through the lands of the Pashtuns.
Save the occasional trip home to the UK, Embling had spent his career in the Central Asian Stans-Turkistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan-all of which fell in varying degrees and in various times under the rule or at least the sway of the Soviet Union. While the American CIA and his compatriots in MI6-officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, a term Embling had never taken to-were fighting the Cold War in the fog-shrouded streets of Berlin and Budapest and Prague, Embling was traipsing the mountains with the Pashtun, living on quabili pulaw dampukht (rice with carrots and raisins) and bitter black tea. In 1977, unbeknownst to his superiors in London, Embling had even married into a Pashtun tribe, taking as his bride the youngest daughter of a minor warlord, only to lose her two years later in a Hind airstrike when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Her body had never been recovered. He often wondered if that was why he’d stayed in Pakistan long after he’d retired. Was some sad part of his heart still hoping to find Farishta still alive somewhere? Her name, after all, when translated into English, meant “Angel.”
A pipe dream, Embling now thought.
A pipe dream, just like the idea of a stable Pakistan.
Seven thousand miles away in Silver Spring, Maryland, Mary Pat Foley was having a similar thought over a similar beverage-her one cup of half-caf/half-decaf reheated and salted coffee she allowed herself in the evening-but on a wholly different topic: the Emir, and the two questions that had plagued U.S. intelligence for the better part of a decade: where he was and how to catch the bastard. With few and only fleeting exceptions, and despite being the White House’s Public Enemy Number One, a position with which Mary Pat mostly disagreed. Certainly the guy needed to get caught or, better yet, put down for good and scattered to the winds, but killing the Emir wasn’t going to solve America’s problem with terrorism. There was even some debate over how much, if any, operational intelligence the Emir possessed; Mary Pat and her husband, Ed, now retired, tended to fall on the “not a hell of a lot” side of the argument. The Emir knew he was being hunted, and while he was a grade-A sonofabitch and a mass murderer, he sure as hell wasn’t stupid enough to put himself in the operational need-to-know loop, especially nowadays, with terrorists having stumbled onto the beauty of compartmentalization. If the Emir was an acknowledged head of state sitting in a palace somewhere, he would likely be getting regular briefings, but he wasn’t-at least no one thought so. He was, as best the CIA could tell, holed up somewhere in the badland mountains of Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan. But that was the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack scenario, wasn’t it? Still, you never knew. Someday someone would get lucky and find him, of that she was certain. The question was, Would we get him alive or otherwise? She didn’t really care either way, but the idea of standing toe to toe with the bastard and looking him in the eye did hold a certain appeal.