‘Get out of here, get out of here,’ he tells himself under his breath.
By the time he gets back to the house the darkness above him is splintering into light and it is almost dawn and a faint call to prayer is coming from the direction of Megiddo to the north of the house. He wonders if he should go to the mosque and try to glean information from the worshippers, and decides against it because someone could alert the Pakistani military or the Americans to his presence. He falls asleep in Akbar’s room, listening to the muezzin, having locked the door and dragged a table against it — listening to the muezzin and to his own whispers, ‘Get out of here, get out of here.’
*
Carrying the snow leopard cub inside his shirt, the American soldier steps across the international boundary line sometime around 3 a.m., leaving Afghanistan’s Paktika Province and entering South Waziristan. The cub’s small head sticks out from the top two undone buttons of the soldier’s kameez. He walks through the night that is full of the schemes of terrorists and the plots of generals, the mathematics of war. There is a chalky wind and he carries a rucksack on his back and there is a large Thuraya satellite phone in a holster around his waist. Another, smaller satellite phone is concealed in the pocket in the shorts he wears under his trousers, in case he has to relinquish the Thuraya.
A Special Forces soldier, he found the snow leopard during a raid at a house in the town named Megiddo, and among the things in his rucksack are six of the several dozen tins of cat food he has had shipped from the United States.
There are night-opening flowers on the cactuses. He walks through the moths that are feeding on them, fluttering audibly around him. These mostly barren hills are being used by terrorists to flee Afghanistan and he is alert as he walks. His younger brother was murdered by a freed prisoner back in January.
There is no name, but the first finger on each of the prisoner’s hands was missing.
Walking across an expanse of sand where the prevailing wind has produced corrugated wrinkles, like a broken staircase of white marble, he notes the angle at which he walks relative to the pattern, keeping it constant so as not to lose orientation. The maverick. He told the others in his team that he would be back in twenty-four hours, or would call them if he needs assistance. If he isn’t back within twenty-four hours they will begin to look for him.
From time to time he makes sure that the leopard is facing his chest because he knows the eyes can be seen from a mile away in the desert.
Loaded into the memories of both satellite phones are the photographs of the prisoner who killed his brother, taken when he was originally captured. He should never have been freed — he never revealed his name and that should have been indication enough that he was a hardened terrorist, most probably belonging to the upper echelons of al-Qaeda. He should have been taken to Cuba for complete and advanced interrogation. The proof of it being that he shot dead two Americans the instant he was released. A detailed investigation is being carried out into how such a shrewd and astute prisoner, who was clearly a threat to the United States and to peace in this region, was given his freedom.
But it is difficult to be sure. The innocent and the guilty both weep in the interrogation rooms, leaving wet spots on the material of the jumpsuits as they wipe large tears on their shoulders. ‘I swear to Allah on my heart and limbs …’ ‘I swear to Allah on my mother’s grave …’
He stops and looks around as he comes to a river, to make sure he is travelling in the right direction. Most rivers in South Waziristan flow from west to south, he knows, and he remembers his brother’s paranoia about crossing streams or rivers in Afghanistan, having heard stories about plastic Russian mines still flowing in the currents. But this is Pakistan.
There are American military bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Croatia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia — a base in each vicinity, ready to mobilise and put down possible threats. And it is no longer a case of American happiness, American freedom, American interests, the American way of life. Now it is about the survival of America itself.
He is navigating by the stars as he walks, picking a new constellation every twenty minutes as the old one shifts direction with the earth’s rotation. Hercules. Ophiuchus. He wonders if among them there is a spirit or god or goddess that walks the battlefield, collecting the last words of the dying, enumerating every drop of spilled blood.
What were his brother’s last words?
Careful even when boisterous, as a Military Policeman his brother had never violated the rules, had in fact intervened one afternoon when an interrogator forgot himself during a session and made physical contact with the prisoner — grabbing the jumpsuit and shaking the kid. Most of the prisoners are so thin, small and undernourished that there is constant fear that one of them will die from the strictness of even the normal regime. He has yet to shed a tear over his brother’s murder, willing the fact of the departure out of his mind as best he can, existing in the unexamined haze, stopping himself whenever he hears himself humming the song his brother had loved, taught to him by their mother.
*
Mikal is ravenous when he wakes after just two hours of sleep. The sun is up. Taking four eggs from the refrigerator he cooks them and carries the frying pan out to the riverbank, watching the water as he eats, a warm wind coming from the desert. He washes the pan and puts it back on the shelf and looks at his wristwatch. The woman who came to cook at the house every day lives a mile upriver, but it is too early to pay her a visit. He digs a hole and then goes into the south wing and wraps the two dogs in a bedsheet and carries them out. Rather than break the stiff limbs he widens the hole he has dug.
The bag with the dollars has stayed at his side at all times, but now he places it in the wardrobe in Akbar’s room, arranging clothes around and on top until nothing can be seen. He is about to lock the wardrobe when he stops. Guns have been combined with keys, with knives, forks and spoons, and in Akbar’s father’s room there is a steel chest made to contain valuables which has a percussion pistol mounted inside it. If the lid is opened without setting a special catch, the pistol fires. This is where he deposits the bag. Afterwards he looks at his wristwatch once again and walks out of the house and goes along the riverbank.
A man is sitting on the cook’s veranda reading a newspaper. He is in his fifties, with untidy pewter stubble and an Adam’s apple as pronounced as his nose. He looks up and examines Mikal.
‘Uncle, my name is Mikal. I am Akbar’s friend,’ he says and nods over his shoulder. ‘From the house.’
The man doesn’t answer for a while. Then he calls into the house. ‘Fatima.’
The woman appears at the door with one hand shading her eyes. Then she comes forward wiping her hands on her veil and stands beside the man. She has recognised Mikal.
‘Have you just come from the house?’ the man asks.
‘Yes, I spent the night there.’
The woman gasps.
They tell him about the ten-hour firefight. The army cordoning off a zone around the house. The assault included paramilitary forces from the Frontier Corps and Waziristan Scouts. This was Pakistan’s first ever operation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, under pressure from America. Members of the security forces as well as Chechen, Uzbek and Arab militants were killed. Many foreigners fled into the desert and the hills.