Bit of bad news, dear, she informed herself in her aunt Gertie’s deliciously arch tones. I’m afraid the A-team won’t be coming today. Not in five minutes or fifty. No point in kidding yourself. There’s no way an all-terrain vehicle can make it through the bazaar’s tight lanes. Bloody donkey carts have enough trouble as it is.
The A-team. “A” for absent.
She’d been quick to spot the Special Forces boys out and about. In Kabul. In Jalalabad. In Peshawar. She had wanted to chat them up, if for no other reason than to remember what it was like to speak to a man who didn’t value a donkey, or a yak, or whatever the indigenous beast of burden was around here, more than a woman.
“Crusader! Crusader!”
Look at their eyes. They’re on fire. Sarah turned in a circle. Hot. It was so damned hot. Sod this burqa. She had to get the thing off. She needed some air. She needed to breathe.
Grasping the top of the garment with her left hand, she ripped off the veil and flung it to the ground.
The gun was in her hand now. The Glock 18, thirty-three rounds of nine-millimeter Parabellum ammunition, another three clips at the ready. She held it as she’d been taught, one hand for the breech, the other on the trigger.
You must stop him, Glendenning had said, and his voice rang like a battle cry in her ear.
“In the name of the United States,” she called out, “and the government of Pakistan, I am placing you under arrest for conspiracy to commit terrorist acts.”
Abu Sayeed gestured toward the automatic weapons pointing at her, then lunged at her with the snout of his machine gun. “Under arrest? I think it’s the other way around.”
A man in a brown turban began to ululate, the terrible shriek the Pathan tribesmen utter to build up their courage. Others took it up, a war cry penetrating to the four corners of her sanity. The unearthly warbling grew louder. A siren song of death. She was no longer frightened. She was beyond that. She was defeated. Utterly, unabashedly defeated. Turning, she did a mental count of the Kalashnikovs aimed at her heart. She stopped at thirteen, which was unlucky, so she found one more to add to the collection.
“May I?” Sayeed asked, and his gentleman’s Mayfair accent stunned her as much as his rock-hard fist had moments before. Gently, he freed the gun from her hands. She did not resist. How many would she have gotten, anyway? Would she even have slain Sayeed? Half of these men were battle-hardened soldiers. The moment she’d made a move to fire, Sayeed himself, or any one of the others, would have cut her to ribbons.
Stop him.
She’d tried, damn it.
Sayeed had exchanged his rifle for a knife. A curved dagger big enough to thresh wheat. Slowly, he approached, with the Mona Lisa’s smile and a hypnotic cast to his eyes. Her hands were lead. Her feet, too. A prayer escaped her lips.
“Father,… into your hands I commend my spirit… Forgive me my sins…”
And as she recited the words, her tongue found the porcelain compartment that hid the cyanide capsule. With a trained flick, she opened it. The capsule was round and dry and lolled on the center of her tongue. Positioning it neatly between her rear molars, she congratulated herself on her bravery. Expedience was more like it. Anything had to be better than being cut with that evil blade.
Sayeed was talking to her, but she didn’t hear his voice. Strangely, all was silent. She was aware only of the heat, the drafts of warm air rising from the ground, bathing her in an arid current, luring her into a soporific trance. The blade rose in a great arc. She met his eyes and saw how very young he was beneath the beard and the dirt. Beneath the hate.
She bit down on the capsule.
A great gob of blood showered her face and suddenly, Sayeed wasn’t there any longer. He was on the ground, eyes wide open, staring in indolent horror at the splinter of bone and flesh where his forearm and hand used to be. There was a scream, and she saw that the bullet that had taken off Sayeed’s hand had continued right through and very messily blown the head off a man standing a few feet behind him.
Tat tat tat.
Gunfire crackled in the air. The dry mechanical cough of a machine gun. Loud. So incredibly loud. An amplified voice was shouting in Urdu. “Disperse immediately. Leave the area or you will be arrested.”
The hood of a Dodge four-by-four broke through the circle of men, scattering them like bowling pins. Twin thirty-caliber machine guns peered over the cab and the gunner fired a burst into the air. Someone shot at the truck. Bullets ricocheted and she winced at the bent notes. The machine guns dipped and spat fire and she heard a sound very much like someone striking a hollow pumpkin with a cricket bat. A knot of men fell upon themselves, their chests savaged, cartilage and viscera gleaming like ripe fruits.
She spit the capsule onto the ground and bent double, hawking the saliva from her mouth. God save her, she hadn’t bitten all the way through.
A soldier was standing next to her. For all the world, he looked like one of the Pakistanis who’d been taunting her. The dirt, the beard, the brown skin. She flinched at his touch. Blue eyes, she noticed dreamily, and realized she must be in some kind of shock.
“Help me get him into the truck,” the soldier was saying. “We’ve got about thirty seconds before Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys here build up their courage and all hell breaks loose.”
But as far as Sarah was concerned, hell had already broken loose. A blur of men and women ran in every direction. Every few seconds, the thirty-cals fired for effect. Cordite, dust, manure, and the ever-present army of horseflies swirled together and rose in a dense yellow fog. And still the amplified voice instructing the locals to leave the area, like Dante guiding the damned.
A spooked donkey trotted past, teeth bared and braying, dragging a pullcart stacked high with DVDs and videocassettes.
Sayeed writhed on the ground, eyes nailed to his ruined limb. He screamed in irregular spurts, a vain and tortured caterwaul that, frankly, pissed her off. “Where did you send the money?” she asked, kneeling beside him. “Why are you doing this?”
“My hand,” Sayeed was shouting. “Where’s my hand?”
“Get me a tourniquet,” she ordered the soldier.
On the ground next to him were a packet of Tic Tacs that she suspected held amphetamines rather than breath mints, a dollar bill, and a cell phone. Get the phone, she told herself. As she reached for it, a pair of soldiers frog-marched Bhatia out of his store. “Can’t find the money,” one was saying, apparently to Sarah. “It’s nowhere.”
Sarah looked up. The guards lay dead near the entry, as did the salesman who’d so badly wanted her to buy a chain. “It doesn’t mat-” she began to respond.
It was then that Sayeed moved. Drawing his legs to his chest, he kicked her in the stomach, sending her sprawling into the dirt.
“Hey!” shouted the American soldier, simultaneously shouldering his weapon and lowering it to Sayeed’s chest.
“No,” Sarah said weakly. “We’ve got to talk to him.”
But it was already too late. Sayeed had found his thresher’s knife. In a single whipsaw motion, he buried the blade into the outstretched tendons of his neck and slashed his throat.
“No!” she screamed, as blood fountained from his neck and his head collapsed onto the ground.
Only when they had cleared the bazaar and she was staring at the Karakoram’s blue-gray dreamscape far in the distance did she realize she had forgotten the cellular phone. Momentarily, she rose in her seat and thought of ordering the driver back, but she knew it was too late. Even if a second incursion were to be tolerated, the phone was already gone.