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  “That depends on how you treat me,” McGarvey said with a straight face. It was like dealing with children in a toy store. Only these were armed and dangerous children who could lash out and kill him without a moment’s hesitation or thought.

  The one holding the rifle on McGarvey laughed as if the comment was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Maybe if we treat you like a prince you will give it to us?” he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “What would you do with a computer?”

  “Send email,” the mujahed replied nonchalantly as if it was something he did every day.

  “What about my phone?”

  “No portable phones in Afghanistan. It is not allowed.”

  “If you damage it I will expect payment,” McGarvey warned sternly. “I have respect for my possessions, I expect the same from you.”

  The mujahed flicked his rifle’s safety catch off.

  “Whoever carries my telephone will be responsible for its safety,” McGarvey insisted, not backing down.

  The small mujahed at the door said something, his voice so soft as to be barely audible. But the warrior with the phone handed it to him without hesitation.

  The one holding the gun on McGarvey safe tied his weapon, and insolently stepped aside. “We go now,” he said sullenly.

  McGarvey got the impression that something was going on between them; some power struggle between the one holding the gun and the slightly built mujahed at the door, which made an already volatile situation even more dangerous.

  “What about my bags?”

  “I’ll take them,” the one who’d frisked McGarvey said.

  McGarvey walked out of the room and down the corridor to the waiting elevator, two of the mujahedeen in front of him, and two, including the sullen one, behind him. Downstairs, the lobby was illuminated by only one dim light behind the registration desk. No one was around, but he got the impression that they were being watched. When they got outside, McGarvey looked up at the perfectly clear sky. Because there were so few lights in the city the stars were brilliant, and because of the elevation it seemed as if he could reach up and touch them. There were no sounds in the city. None of the usual sirens you always heard in large metropolitan centers at this time of night; no rumbling trucks or buses, no airplanes flying overhead. Not even any wind tonight, and the air sine I led of burning charcoal mixed with a sweeter, fresher, more fragrant odor of gardens, maybe fruit trees in blossom, or flowers. Pleasant smells.

  McGarvey’s bags were put in the back of the van, and he was waved into the middle seat. One of the other mujahed climbed in behind the wheel, the slightly built one in the front passenger seat. The other two got in the back seat behind McGarvey, once again sandwiching him in so there was no possibility of him causing any trouble. They gave him a filthy balaclava and motioned for him to put it on. It occurred to him that his escorts weren’t hiding their identities from him, but from someone they expected to encounter tonight. Perhaps a police or military patrol. The city was officially under curfew until four in the morning.

  “When we are stopped you will do no talking,” the sullen one in back said.

  “Whatever you say.”

  “This is important,” the driver said. “Your life is in danger, and we must protect you. So you do as we say. Understand?”

  The truce between bin Laden and the ruling Taliban religious party still ran deep. Bin Laden had left his family and his businesses in Saudi — Arabia in 1979 to help the Afghanis fight Russians. He’d been wounded several times, and he had gained the reputation of being a very brave, very fierce fighter. He was a hero of the people, much respected, especially in the countryside and small villages, but even his welcome was finally beginning to wear out. Afghanistan was an insular country that wanted as little to do with the outside world as possible. They wanted to tend to their own lives, which centered around Islam, and they simply wanted to be left alone. But bin Laden’s terrorist jihad around the world had brought unwanted attention to the Taliban for continuing to harbor him. It was one of the reasons, McGarvey thought, that he was so willing to open a dialogue with the U.S. If he was forced to leave Afghanistan he needed someplace to go. The logical choice would be his home in Saudi Arabia. But that would take U.S. influence; in fact it would probably take a great deal of pressure on the Saudi ruling family just to talk about it, and bin Laden knew it. If they were stopped by a police patrol a fiction could be maintained that the cops didn’t recognize anyone in the van. It was a truth through the back door. But if McGarvey showed his clean-shaven race, or if he spoke, it would be obvious that he wasn’t an Afghani, and the police would have to do something about him. So the only logical solution out of such a dilemma would be to shoot him and dump his body alongside the road. Not a perfect solution, but one that everyone could live with if they had to. An American came to Afghanistan, despite warnings from his own State Department, and bandits or opposition forces had kidnapped and killed him to embarrass the Taliban. It happened all too frequently to foreign visitors. Even bin Laden could claim that he wasn’t responsible. Someone had gotten to McGarvey before his people could reach him and guarantee his safety.

  “I understand,” he said. He pulled on the balaclava.

  “Very good, mista the driver said, and they pulled out of the hotel’s driveway and headed north the way McGarvey had come in from the airport. He looked back and caught a glimpse of a face in a third floor window of the hotel, but then they turned the corner.

  All the cars parked at the government buildings were gone, only a blue-and-white Flat police car was left beside the fountain in Pustunistan Square. But nobody seemed to be in it, and they went around the traffic circle and hurried up Bebe-Maihro Street Like thieves in the night, McGarvey thought. They were tense, and no one said a word. But Kabul had always been the most dangerous place in all of Afghanistan because it was a crossroads between the West over the Khybar Pass, and Islam. The city was straining at its ideological seams, and could burst at almost any moment given the slightest provocation. No one in the van wanted to give them that.

  The mujahed driving the van wasn’t as slow as the cabbie had been this afternoon, and they passed the road to the airport fifteen minutes after leaving the hotel. A Russian built BDRM-2 armored scout car was parked just off the highway, the Afghani white flag hanging limply from its whip antenna.

  The slightly built mujahed said something to their driver, who immediately slowed down, pulled off the opposite side of the road and stopped twenty-five yards from the scout car. Again his voice was so soft that McGarvey couldn’t catch the words or even the tone of voice.

  The scout car’s turret came around and its 7.62mm PKT machine gun slowly depressed to a point directly at them.

  “Say nothing, mista one of the men in back warned. “Do not move.”

  The slightly built one said something else to the driver, then got out of the van and headed across the highway as a man dressed in a military uniform climbed out of the scout car.

  “Fool,” the sullen one in back whispered harshly in English, which struck McGarvey as odd.

  The mujahed and officer met halfway in the middle of the highway. For a full minute it seemed as if they just stood there, but then the officer pointed at the van, and the mujahed shook his head. He took something out of his pocket and handed it to the officer. They stood there for another long minute, and then the mujahed turned and slowly walked back to the van, the officer not moving from his spot.

  The way the slightly built mujahed moved also struck McGarvey as off; lightly on the balls of his feet, as if he was a ballet dancer, or as if his boots were a couple of sizes too small and he was getting ready to bolt at any moment

  He climbed in the passenger seat, motioned for the driver to go, and then glanced back at McGarvey. For a brief moment their eyes met, and McGarvey suddenly knew what had bothered him, and the realization was staggering.

  There was no traffic, and the mujahed drove at a steady sixty mi
les per hour in silence, leaving McGarvey to sit back, his eyes half-closed, as he tried to convince himself that he was wrong.

  The highway was perfectly straight, but ran in ever rising undulating waves higher into the mountains. A hundred miles or so to the northwest was the Hindu Kush mountain range, which was the western extremity of the Himalayas. A no man’s land of some of the highest peaks in the world; snow-covered, treeless, where rock slides and avalanches dominated the upper slopes, while Afghani and Russian sown land mines dominated the approaches. A little farther north the forces opposing the Taliban waged their war of independence for a bleak country that had not seen any real peace since Genghis Kahn. A strange land of harsh, man killing contradictions in which Osama bin Laden, himself a man of many contradictions, had found his manhood, his God and his war.

  There was nothing in the dossiers on the man that McGarvey had studied that gave any clue as to what had happened during the ten years he had been here fighting Russians. But something must have happened to him, because coming into Afghanistan he’d been the son of a billionaire father loyal to the Fahd family, and when he came out he’d become a religious fanatic and terrorist bent on kicking the royal family out of Riyadh, removing all foreigners from the Arabian peninsula and killing Americans whenever and wherever he could.

  It was here in the mountains that he had set up his headquarters from where he ran his worldwide businesses and attacks. Voltaire had written that to succeed in chaining the multitudes you must seem to wear the same fetters. Bin Laden wore the same clothes, ate the same food and lived the same hard life as the people he led. And they were willing to follow him to the death.

  Looking at the back of the head of the mujahed in the front passenger seat, McGarvey thought that he was beginning to understand at least one aspect of bin Laden. The man might appear to be insane, but he was not a fanatic; on the contrary he was probably a realist who was perfectly willing to use whatever resources were available to him, no matter what the Qoran and his God had to say about it. If he had the bomb it made him the most dangerous man on earth, because given the right push he would not hesitate to use it.

  A half-hour after they’d passed the military checkpoint near the airport, McGarvey glanced out the window. In the distance ahead he spotted the green and white rotating beacon of Bagram Air Base. It had been built by the Russians during the war, for air operations around the capital city. Now the Taliban used it for what few military aircraft they had operational — a few French-built Mirage fighters, a number of MiG-21 Floggers and a few Russian Hind attack helicopters — and for the headquarters of their military high command. They also had a prison there just off the end of one of the runways, but to this point the CIA had almost no hard intelligence on the place. What few people the Company had managed to send out there had simply disappeared, and had never been heard from again. A hard place, in a harsh land.

  A few miles farther on the van suddenly slowed down and turned onto a narrow dirt road that wound its way down a sharply sloping hill, across a shallow, rocky stream, then back up behind a low hill to a copse of gnarled trees. The partially bombed-out ruins of a large stone-and-mud house were hidden beneath a latticework of wooden poles supporting a thick tangle of grape vines that were in full leaf.

  It was obvious that no one lived here, but the van stopped on a slight rise, its headlights flashing against what once was the front entrance of the house. They caught a glimpse of three small windows whose blue shutters seemed as if they’d been painted just yesterday. The middle shutter was open. The driver said something in Dari, Afghan Persian, and the slightly built mujahed apparently agreed, because they continued the rest of the way down to the house. The open shutter was a signal that this place was safe.

  The driver doused the headlights and drove around to the back of the house where a dark brown, mud-spattered, late model Land Rover was parked in the shelter of an extension of the grape arbor. He pulled up beside it, and a minute later five mujahedeen came out of the house, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. They all wore balaclavas, and at least to a casual observer they could pass for McGarvey and the four who had taken him from the hotel. One of them was even wearing a bush jacket, and another was slightly built.

  Without a word, McGarvey, his bags and his four escorts transferred to the Land Rover. The five from the house got into the van and drove off. He sat in the back seat between two of his escorts, but the driver made no move to start the engine.

  The windows were down and the night had become very cold. A light breeze had started from the north and they could smell the snow from the distant peaks.

  McGarvey lit a cigarette, and the driver turned around and looked at him, so he passed the pack around. When it came back it was empty.

  “How much longer do we have to wait here?” he asked.

  “Not long,” the driver said, contentedly drawing on the American cigarette. “If there is trouble at the checkpoint we will hear the gunfire.”

  “Not from this distance. That has to be sixty or seventy kilometers.”

  “It’s only five kilometers to Bagram. Sometimes there is trouble, but only sometimes.”

  McGarvey had misunderstood. The van was not returning to Kabul as he had thought it would. It was continuing north as a probe to see if the highway was blocked. The five who had gone ahead were risking their lives to make sure that McGarvey’s group got through.

  “What if they’re stopped?” he asked.

  “There are other routes. But this way is faster.”

  It was exactly as McGarvey thought. However they got him up to bin Laden’s camp, it would not be by the main route. “How much farther do we have to go?”

  The driver started to answer, but the slightly built mujahed, the only one not smoking, said something and he turned away.

  “The sooner I see him, the sooner the fighting will stop. That’s why he wanted the meeting.”

  “The struggle will not end until all feringhi are dead, Insha’Allah” the sullen one beside McGarvey shot back angrily. It was the word for foreigners with a rude connotation.

  “Is that what you want now — paradise?” McGarvey asked, pushing the man. He wanted to find out just how tight bin Laden’s control was on them. “If you want Paradise that badly, why don’t you put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger? Save us all some trouble.”

  The mujahed yanked a Russian army-issue PSM pistol from inside his vest, pointed it an inch from McGarvey’s head and pulled back the hammer.

  “Mohammed,” the slight mujahed warned softly.

  The mujahed’s aim didn’t waver, but his eyes flicked to the front seat. McGarvey reached up, grabbed the man’s wrist and jammed his thumb between the hammer and the rear of the slide, making it impossible for the pistol to fire. He twisted the gun right, then sharply left breaking the man’s grip and pulled the gun away from him.

  “The next time you point this toy gun at me, I’ll take it away from you again, shove it up your ass and fire all eight rounds.” McGarvey eased the hammer down and handed the gun to the momentarily stunned Mohammed who looked as if he wanted more than anything else to slit McGarvey’s throat.

  He took the pistol and held it so tightly that even in the dim starlight McGarvey could see that the man’s hand had turned white.

  The slight one from the front said something in Persian, and after several long seconds Mohammed slowly put the gun away. He stared at McGarvey a little longer, and then threw his head back and laughed almost hysterically, his hands now gripped tightly around the barrel stock of the Kalashnikov resting between his knees.

  McGarvey figured that the man was insane, and he was going to have to keep a tight watch on his back for the remainder of the mission. The mujahedeen were very quick to take offense, and very very slow to forgive or forget, but they admired courage. And bin Laden’s control was anything but complete.

  The night remained deathly still except for the light breeze. After another ten minutes the slightly b
uilt mujahed gave a nod. The driver started the engine and headed slowly back to the highway by the same dirt track across the narrow stream that they had taken to get here.

  Mohammed sat forward, cradling his rifle and staring at McGarvey, while the mujahed on McGarvey’s right watched out the window.

  They stopped on the slight rise just before the highway. In the distance across a flat plain the air base was only partially lit. The airport beacon was still flashing, but the runway lights were out and most of the low, hulking buildings were dark. But there were lights showing on what appeared to be guard towers and tall fences even farther in the distance, which McGarvey took to be the prison.

  Nothing moved in either direction on the highway for as far as they could see, nor were there any signs of movement or lights in the sky. If there were an opposite side to the civilized world this was it. Dark, hidden, bleak, a perfect place for a man such as bin Laden. A desert scorpion in its nest ready to strike out with its poison.

  The driver headed down the steep track then back up the deeply rutted path to the highway. He turned north and accelerated before he finally turned on the Rover’s headlights. They were so bright after they’d gotten their night vision that they were partially blinded for the first couple of minutes.

  Passing the road to the air base they spotted several military vehicles parked just inside the gates about a half-mile away. The guardhouse was lit up, but they saw no signs of movement, nor was the Volkswagen van anywhere to be seen. This seemed to encourage McGarvey’s captors so that as they sped north into the night, putting the base miles behind them, the mood in the Rover got increasingly lighter, the tension melting away. They started to laugh and talk, obviously relieved. They had passed two hurdles, and looking toward the not-so-distant mountains, McGarvey could feel the biggest hurdle of all approaching: Osama bin Laden and his madness.