Marc Cameron
Day Zero
For Martha Cope, Charlotte Skidmore, Bill Witherspoon, and Gene Reynolds — teachers who inspired and expected.
Epigraph
Violence isn’t the answer. Violence is the question… The answer is yes.
Prologue
Emiko Miyagi was not accustomed to wearing so many clothes. Considering the deeply conservative Islamic practices in this part of Pakistan, the muscular little Japanese woman was fortunate to be wearing her head. Defending herself was not normally a problem she worried about. At forty-four, she could have killed any three men in the village at one time without batting an eye. Still, she knew that enough wild dogs could bring down even a powerful lioness, so she covered her body — and kept her plans to herself.
Tugging at the heavy, earth-colored robe she wore over her slacks and long-sleeve cotton shirt, Emiko pulled her black head scarf tight against the breeze and heaved a five-gallon plastic water jug onto the uneven wooden bed of a donkey cart with a dull thump. In truth, forty pounds of water was nowhere near too heavy for her, but she had to keep up appearances.
She used the back of her arm to mop the drops of sweat from her forehead and paused from her work at the communal well to gaze through the crystalline air of the broad river valley. She could have been in Montana were it not for the slumping stone houses and terraced green fields. Dark stands of spruce and oak spilled down the boulder-strewn mountains that rose up on either side. The ever-present smell of wood smoke, human waste, and burned trash, common to underdeveloped countries, also provided a clue that she was a long way from any amber waves of American grain.
A rusty diesel engine and the series of belts and pulleys that served as a pump for the community well stood alongside the knock-kneed beast. Two black weatherproof Pelican cases containing Emiko’s water-testing equipment sat in the back of the cart. There was other gear too — sure to get her head sawed off with a dull knife if it was discovered.
The warped wheels on the ancient cart listed heavily to the right just like her hovering warden, Ismail. The village headman had assured her the bent old man was her protector, but Emiko knew better. The man was little more than her guard — who seemed much more intent on catching her in some minute violation of Sharia law than protecting her from danger.
It was unheard of for a woman to move about the village unaccompanied by a male escort — even a woman who was supposed to be a Japanese NGO scientist assisting with a clean water initiative. Japan and Pakistan had a special arrangement, with the former sending great sums of money and aid while the latter agreed to protect the people administering the aid… for the most part.
Traditions ran deep here in the untamed wilds of the Kohistan Province, where every household was required to have a male leader. Lone women were such a danger to religious sensibilities that local clerics had threatened female NGO aid workers with forced marriage to village men — or on occasion, simply dragged them into the street and shot them.
A recent outbreak of dysentery had paved the way for this male-dominated society to allow Miyagi into the valley — because of her supposed scientific background in potable water systems.
Had they known her real intentions, the villagers would have cut her down on the spot.
Ismail canted sideways, leaning on his knotted elmwood cane beside the sun-bleached timbers of an old well house. The ribs of the long-gone building, with timbers curved upward, were gray and weatherworn, like something out of an ancient sailing ship. They were taller than the old man by a head and leaned inward, surrounding the communal pool of the well. A round pakool hat, common in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, slumped over Ismail’s wizened brow. The long, pajamalike shirt and pants known as shalwar kameez clung to his bony body. He looked as if he might topple over at any moment. Surely in his seventies, he was a dinosaur in this impoverished area of an impoverished country where fifty-five was considered elderly. Presumably too old to have unclean thoughts about a female infidel scientist, he did his job without speaking. He watched her every move, ensuring that she committed no blasphemy or insult to the village. It was a tall order for a tribal area where, just months before, a minority Christian woman had earned herself a death sentence for drinking out of a village well and then dipping that same cup — that had touched her infidel lips — back in the water.
A soft breeze tumbled down from the blackness of the Karakorum Mountains, bringing welcome relief from the mid-morning heat. The wind pulled the old man’s wisp of a beard to one side, adding to his tilted appearance. Emiko kept an eye on Ismail while she moved around the well, inspecting the pump. It made her belly burn that he could stand there in his light cotton clothing while she baked in a layer of robes that covered her from head to ankle — all in an effort to shield him from lascivious thoughts.
The water loaded, she returned to the well. A stone wall, a little taller than her knees, formed a circular reservoir pool roughly fifteen feet across. Water dripped from a rusted pipe beside the engine. Patches of green grass and lush weeds grew around the edge of the pool, taking advantage of the shade and consistent supply of water. Miyagi took a small glass vial from the folds of her robes and leaned over the wall and dipped it into the pool. A slurry of stone and mortar from the decaying wall skittered over the lip and sank into the dark water.
Miyagi muttered under her breath as if she cared about the water, while she paid close attention to the reason she was actually in the village. Fifty feet away, under the sprawling branches of an ancient oak tree, seven bearded men sat in council. The men spoke with animated gestures over mid-morning tea. Now and again barking voices carried over on the breeze, loud enough that Miyagi could tell they were having a heated conversation about something.
Ismail gave Emiko a long, chastising look, before hobbling off toward the meeting-tree without a word of explanation. He was apparently satisfied that she could not possibly fall into serious mischief while merely filling glass vials with water. He was probably hoping the men under the tree would give him a handout of naswar, the local snuff made from tobacco, lime, and indigo. It was already a slight to his manhood that he was assigned to watch the female foreign devil all day long anyway. Emiko frightened him, and as she well knew, the worst of all insults a woman could pay a man was to make him aware of his fears.
Emiko Miyagi had been in Pakistan for four months, ingratiating herself with a Japanese NGO, Helpful Hands, an organization that funded water testing and the building of tube wells in rural Pakistan. She was smart enough to learn enough about the process to look like an expert to all but the most trained eye, and when one of the scientists had to return to Japan because of an illness, Emiko had assumed her identity and slid into her place.
Far from any sort of scientist, Emiko was a hunter, and found herself in this lawless area of Pakistan for one reason alone. She was looking for a man named Qasim Ranjhani. She’d discovered his name in a book during her last trip to Japan — a journey where a close friend had lost her life. Ranjhani was the key to unraveling the plot that put a foreign mole into the US presidency.
For months, her work had yielded nothing, but now, in this remote valley, she’d heard the other women speak of a meeting of Al Qaeda and another terrorist group known as the Jundalla — or Soldiers of God. The Jundalla had claimed responsibility for many atrocities in northern Pakistan over recent years — including the murder of eighteen passengers on a bus for the crime of being Shia rather than Sunni Muslims. The driver, a Sunni, was killed because he didn’t answer quickly enough when quizzed about Fajr prayer. Later, this same group had slaughtered sixteen international mountain climbers at the base camp to Nanga Parbat in Gilgit Baltistan.