“Why aren’t you practicing medicine anymore? Surely there is a need.”
“It isn’t as simple as that. I came from a poor family. My father cleaned an office building. We lived together in one room and shared everything, nine of us. After I got my degree, we ran out of money. Without a further degree in some specialty, I wasn’t able to get a job. It was meant to be. I was nothing, and Allah wanted me to remember that.” He looked down at his hands on the table.
Not guilt, but shame. Parker thought of the comparison in the Arab mind. A man could feel guilt in the desert, alone, but not shame. Shame required the judgment of others. A poor man whose family scraped together everything so he could attend medical school and who then could not find a job in medicine was shamed.
“Be patient in tribulation and adversity.” Parker quoted the Koran.
“Yes, indeed, Allahu Akbar.” Liaquat looked up. “Our world is poor and miserable. The infidels have corrupted the government. They help the Americans kill our brothers and sisters. They help the Americans rape our women.”
Parker remained silent.
“It is nothing to be a doctor. At LGH, the patients come by the hundreds and wait from before dawn to well past dark to see a doctor who is paid less than a hundred dollars a month. And then he tells them to take antibiotics that they cannot buy.”
“LGH?”
“Lahore General Hospital.” Liaquat became more animated as his anger grew. “Now, I am known. Now, my people respect me. I and my brothers against my cousin; I and my cousins against the stranger!”
By venting in this way, Liaquat had let it be obvious for the first time: This otherwise unassuming man, this doctor, was the enemy. An emissary of Yousef, here to escort Parker to his chief.
And that’s when reality finally sunk in, striking Parker with the force of a sledgehammer:
The mission had begun.
CHAPTER 50
“You didn’t bring much?”
“No.” The pilot didn’t feel much like talking. She had slept for nearly twenty-four hours after they reached the cabin. It had been a brutal trip across the Pacific and then, in the small van, across much of Canada.
“It is…” she paused looking for the words. “Different?”
Her mind was trying to comprehend the vast, almost shockingly different colors of the changing fall forest. The burned reds and bright oranges overwhelmed. Her world different, a palette of browns and blacks, dust and dirt, mud and rocks.
“Yeah.” Her Canadian counterpart spoke almost as little as she did.
This isolated cabin was a way station on her mission, and he the guide. He was to get her across Canada and then drop her off. Each part of the cell remained isolated, none knowing the role of the other.
The stop would be brief. Soon they would move on again.
“It is time for prayers.”
“Yes.”
He pulled out his prayer rug and pointed it toward a mountain range to the east. She had given up her rug as a part of this journey. Even in New Zealand, she had only dared pray with the curtains tightly closed.
It was a dispensation that the Chechen had given her.
“Muhammad would approve of such. It is a time of battle.”
They would pray and then sleep. And then, as before, head east.
“I have a dream,” she said. “Now, it is every time I close my eyes.”
It would not be long now before she reached her destination. And then she would embark on her final flight.
CHAPTER 51
Yousef was awake well before the eastern sunlight started to illuminate the cave entrance, cut by the hand of nature into a crack at the base of a cliff. It was bone-chillingly cold. The cave lay on the far end of the valley, below the steep mountain range to the west. Yousef moved slowly as he stepped past the bodies asleep on their prayer rugs back-to-back on the dirt floor. As he shook off the sleep, he looked toward the entrance, where dim gray light marked the early beginnings of the day.
The cave faced the east. Several mud huts, directly in front of the entranceway, had been built on rock-stacked foundations that had supported other huts from the past, which had occupied the site for centuries. The cave had provided protection since the army of Alexander the Great first crossed the mountains to the south. And as during time of Alexander, today the people of the valley resisted the invaders. Time was irrelevant; resistance lived on.
The sun first lit up the peaks well above the cave; the end of the valley remained in a dull light.
At the opening to the cave, an old woman poured a cup of steaming liquid from a black pot kept in the glowing coals of the fire pit. The pit was tucked into the entranceway, under the overhang of a lip of granite and out of sight of the sky. The smoke drafted back into the cave, which saturated the clothes that they wore, but the overhang kept the heat of the fire from registering on the satellites that constantly combed the mountains.
The liquid burned as he put the cup to his lips.
Yousef wrapped the end of his shawl around the metal cup. He blew on the chai. Steam floated up in the chilling morning air from the mixture of hot milk and tea.
“Give me the cell.”
Umarov, squatting next to the remnants of the fire, handed him a cell phone. It was one of several that would be used only once. Umarov never slept.
“And the card?”
“Mahmud had the bag.”
“That worthless dog.” Yousef threw the cup of chai against the wall of one of the mud huts. It clanked as it bounced off the yellow dirt wall. “Why did you give it to Mahmud?”
Umarov shrugged.
Yousef’s patience with Malik Mahmud had been wearing thin. Mahmud was the son of the senior Malik Mahmud, who led what had started out as the Free Aceh movement of Indonesia. When Yousef had insisted that Mahmud stay and fight with him before receiving money for his father’s group, he hadn’t realized the sad truth: Mahmud was not like his father. He was a whiner who could not abide the cold winter climate of Pakistan. It wasn’t only the weather, though: Mahmud always expected more than he would be given.
“Wake up, you flea-ridden carcass!”
Yousef kicked the small man sleeping at the edge of the group. It pushed Mahmud into another sleeping man less than an arm’s length away. The only thing that separated the two was the AK-47 machine gun that each kept close.
The twenty-odd fighters looked like geese sleeping in a large, dense flock. And like geese, as one awoke, the others awoke. Like dominoes, one turned over and, in turn, another one started to wake. They slept together in a tight roost, sharing their body heat in the frigid cave.
Umarov had taught those on guard duty to sleep on the outside of the circle. The guards would wake up their reliefs in two-hour shifts.
“You stupid fool. Where are the cards?” Yousef barked at the little man huddled on the edge of the circle near the wall of the cave.
“What? I’m sleeping.” Mahmud rolled over, ignoring Yousef, despite all the others starting to stir and shake off the sleep.
Yousef grabbed a rock from a pile stacked up at the entrance and slammed it into the back of Mahmud’s skull.
“Tuhan baik!” Mahmud yelled like a scalded cat, “Good God!” in his Indonesian language.
Yousef knew better than to seriously injure the man, but he drew blood nevertheless.
Sullenly, Mahmud threw the bag of phone cards at Yousef and pulled up against the wall of the cave holding the back of his head with blood dripping through his fingers. He looked like an abused pet huddled in the corner of his pen, his eyes locked on Yousef’s.