“What does it mean?” I asked, squinting to read the grainy, Cyrillic text.
“They’re Soviet shoulder-fired missiles,” she explained, starting the video again.
As the crate continued on its journey to the truck, two newcomers stepped out of the building and stood watching. The camera angle and the film quality made it impossible to see their faces, but the first man, the shorter of the two, stood out in Western garb, tan fatigues, light pants and a short-sleeved collared shirt. The second man was dressed as the men unloading the trucks were, though even in his baggy pants and long shirt, he was unquestionably an authority figure.
“Any idea who they are?” I asked.
“No,” she said, pointing to the first man, “but I’d give you a hundred-to-one odds this guy’s CIA.”
“Our mystery man?”
“Maybe.”
“What do you think was in those boxes they took off the truck?”
“Heroin, most likely.”
“All transported courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency,” I remarked.
“No use letting those trucks come back to Pakistan empty,” she said, a slight hint of sarcasm in her voice.
“You think what we were doing was wrong?” I asked.
“It’s not my place to think,” she countered.
“Is that the kind of secret someone would want to keep?”
“At the time, maybe, but this is all pretty much common knowledge now.”
“The drugs?”
Helen shrugged. “Everyone knows that’s how the mujahideen financed their war.”
“But why the Soviet weapons?”
“Most of the weapons we fed into Afghanistan were either replicas of the Soviet stuff or real foreign matériel bought on the black market. Stuff the mujahideen could have picked up on the battlefield. A lot easier to explain than a truckload of American Stingers.”
Two more crates had emerged from the building while we spoke. As the second was being hoisted into the truck’s bed, one of the men holding it fumbled momentarily and lost his grip. The wooden box tilted sideways, its base striking the ground, its top sliding ajar. There was a moment of harried activity as the two men scrambled to right their load. The lid was put back on, and the crate slid into the truck and out of our view.
“Did you see that?” Helen asked, running the video backward.
“See what?” I asked, watching the crate fall again.
“There’s nothing in there,” she said, pausing the film as the top opened and slid away. “There’s nothing in the box.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, looking into the bare crate. She was right, there seemed to be nothing inside, but I didn’t see why that mattered.
“No SA-7s,” she said. She ran the video backward again, back to the moment when the men had stepped out of the building with the first crate. “Look at how they’re carrying them,” she noted, moving her face closer to the monitor.
I shrugged. Whatever she saw was lost on me.
“A shoulder-fired missile is a pretty weighty thing, but look at these guys.”
I followed her gaze to the screen. What I had missed the first time seemed obvious now. The men carrying the crates moved easily, too easily for men with even moderate burdens. “There’s nothing in any of them!” I exclaimed.
“But why the empty crates?” The question was meant for herself, not me, but I answered anyway.
“Maybe someone wanted it to look like there were SA-7s in there,” I offered.
Helen didn’t say anything. Her eyes were glued to the monitor. We watched the tape roll on past what we’d already seen. Several more crates were loaded into the truck. Then, suddenly, something rattled the men on the ground. One of the pair with the automatic rifles pointed upward, in the camera’s direction, and all the other heads followed, faces moving in unison toward our rooftop vantage point.
“C’mon,” Helen murmured, talking to the two observers, the Westerner and the other man. “This way. Look this way.”
And then, as if by a miracle, the two men turned to look up.
“Jibril,” Helen said, touching her finger to the image of the taller man.
“And the other one?” I asked. “The American?”
Helen paused, scanning the face. “I don’t know,” she said.
Jibril gestured frantically, and the gunmen sprinted across the alley. The camera followed as they barged through a door directly below and disappeared.
“They’re coming up,” I said, my heart beating as if I were on the roof with them.
What followed was a flurry of confusion, two sets of feet, one male, one female, the legs and blurred torsos of the cameraman and the woman with the microphone. The camera sped across the roof, bumping dizzyingly against the man’s hip, then plunged into a dim stairwell. The lens caught a nauseating jumble: a pile of filthy rags, a line of metal railing flaring light, a rat fleeing the commotion, a broken window.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, leaning in closer to the monitor, transfixed by the familiar setting, this panicked descent I’d made so many times in my dreams.
“What?” Helen asked. “What is it?”
“I’ve seen this before,” I told her.
The couple reached a landing and hesitated. The cameraman pivoted, searching for something, another way out, perhaps. Then he leaned forward, and we saw what he saw: figures moving in the semidarkness below, a man with a gun climbing the stairs, and behind him a second man.
The cameraman ducked through a doorway off the stairs and the woman followed. Here was the same room I knew so well, the cathedral-like ceiling and grimy windows. In the paltry light I caught my first full glimpse of the woman since I’d seen her earlier on the roof. The wrap had slipped from her head, and her hair was wild and disheveled, slick with sweat where it fell around her face.
“This woman,” Helen said, as the camera swung down again, catching dusty floorboards and feet.
“What?”
“I know her. I think I know her.”
As if in response the lens pitched upward suddenly and caught her face again, the angles of it exaggerated by the room’s shadows, by the grainy tape. She was terrified, that much was certain, afraid of what she knew was to come. I could, I thought, feel the moment as she felt it, the cold slant of the light, the abandoned smell of the place, the sound of the man next to me struggling to get his breath back.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I was in Islamabad from ’eighty-seven to ’eighty-nine,” Helen explained. “It was my first foreign gig, the tail end of the war. God, I can’t remember her name.”
“But you knew her?”
“I knew who she was. She was with CNN, I think. It’s been so long. I used to see her around, you know, the local watering holes.”
We both watched as a hand reached into the frame and grabbed the woman’s hair.
“They’re going to kill her,” I said, my knowledge of what was about to happen as certain as if I had been there. And hadn’t I? Hadn’t I felt the knife against my own throat?
Something winked in the dim light, a flash of metal. The scythe of a blade crossed the woman’s neck, carving a single dark line across her throat. Not me, I thought, but her, and yet the realization brought little relief.
“It was my second summer there,” Helen said as we watched the monitor in silence, waiting for something else, anything that would tell us we were wrong. But there was nothing more to see. “It would have been ’eighty-eight. July, I think. None of us knew what had happened. They dumped her body onto Aga Khan Road, right outside the Marriott.”
As the tape went black, I thought of Heloise, and of the other sisters, and Inspector Lelu, the way the word massacre had spilled from his mouth.
“Jibril was blackmailing him,” Helen said, pointing to the unknown figure. She had run the tape back to the moment when the two men lifted their faces to the camera.