At the beginning of November a group of protesters in Iran had stormed the American embassy in Tehran, taking forty-nine Americans hostage. And seventeen days later David had arrived in Islamabad, very late in the evening, falling asleep almost immediately in his hotel room owing to the exhaustion of the travel. He had finished college for now and intended to spend the fall months travelling in northern Afghanistan, something he had wanted to do for some years. His plan was to go from Islamabad to Peshawar, and from there — one long road full of twists, veering like a kite’s tail — move on through the Khyber Pass to the city of Jalalabad and then on to Kabul. The languages around him were still many-lettered lumps in his mouth and ears but he was sure he could get by. Seven days a week for eight weeks — he had taken a course in ancient Greek during the summer, discovering suddenly that he had a gift for languages, and he carried with him a copy of the oldest surviving Greek tragedy, the Persians, Aeschylus contemplating the East’s grief and shock at finding itself defeated by the West.
While he slept, Saudi national guardsmen encircled the Kaaba, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. A delusional fundamentalist had declared himself the Messiah and, having barricaded himself inside the mosque with his followers a few hours earlier, opened fire on the worshippers. The fanatics — they wanted a purer Islam implemented in Arabia, calling for song, music, film and sports to be banned — had smuggled in their assault rifles and grenades in coffins, the mosque being a common place to bless the dead. The Saudi government did not tell anyone who was responsible for the invasion of the holiest site in Islam, the place every single practising Muslim turned his face to five times a day. Not long after David Town got up on the morning of 21 November, the rumour spread through all the cities of Islam — from country to country, continent to continent — that the killings in the Kaaba were carried out by Americans as a blow against Islam, perhaps in retaliation for the Tehran embassy siege.
He didn’t know about this rumour when he left his hotel. He had to visit the US embassy to be updated on the situation in Afghanistan. The rebellion against the Communist government, begun back in the spring, had now spread to most provinces there.
At a pedestrian crossing he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small notebook to check something. Last night while having dinner at the hotel, he had had a brief conversation with a Pakistani man at the next table. Upon learning of David’s interest in gems, the delightful pedant told him that the Emperor Shah Jahan’s wealth had included eighty-two pounds of diamonds, 110 pounds of rubies, 275 pounds of emeralds, fifty-five pounds of jade and two thousand spinels. David had written it all down, but now, this morning, he wanted to confirm that another detail had been committed to paper: the treasury also contained four thousand living songbirds.
He glanced at the page and just at that moment the car that had come to a halt to allow him to cross, with its front fender only two feet away from him, jerked forward by six inches. The driver had decided to startle him for sport. He gave the windshield a cursory look and continued without breaking his stride — not in all honesty due to strong nerves, but because he was distracted by the four thousand birds and hadn’t really seen the car move until it had already come to a stop, knew he wasn’t about to be run over.
The car drove away but it was back minutes later, coming to a screeching stop beside him on the sidewalk and disgorging four men. They were friendly, more or less his own age, and they invited him to a nearby teahouse, very pleased to have met an American, asking him how they could migrate to USA the Beautiful. When he regained consciousness about two hours later, in a back alley, the skin on his head was split open in two places. There were cuts and bruises on the rest of his body too. He had no coherent memory except a faint impression of the car driver’s features filled with malice, of an arm locking onto his neck from behind to choke him. By not reacting how he was meant to when the car jolted forward suddenly, David had obviously caused the driver to lose face with his companions.
David thought he’d never encounter this man again, but he would see him only a few hours later under circumstances even more murderous. He’d learn that his name was Fedalla. And, some years from now, he would be one of the first people David would suspect of being involved when Zameen and Bihzad disappeared.
Blood on his face and clothes like a wild cursive script, he arrived at the US embassy around noon and was admitted when he produced his passport. The nurse had just finished attending to him when buses began pulling up outside the main gate. Hundreds of armed men streamed out in wave upon wave and began jumping over the perimeter fence, firing guns and hurling Molotov cocktails.
There were six Marines at the embassy but they were not allowed to open fire. They were in any case massively outnumbered. Within minutes, one of them, a twenty-year-old from Long Island, had caught a bullet in the head.
The rioters were led by a gang of students from the fundamentalist Islamic wing of the city’s university. Inspired by the events in Tehran and the fire-breathing triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini, they had been waiting for a chance to demonstrate their own power.
David, and 139 embassy personnel and the dying Marine, found themselves behind the steel-reinforced doors of a vault on the third floor as they waited for the Pakistani government to send police or military troops.
The vault echoed to the sound of a sledgehammer coming down on CIA code equipment that could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the mob, a mob now fifteen thousand strong.
Around and below them, the building was on fire, the floor of the vault beginning to get intensely hot, the tiles blistering and warping under their feet. The other Marines were still out there but the request from them to open fire was repeatedly denied as it would only incite the riot further. When the ground floor had completely filled with smoke the Marines retreated upstairs to join the others in the vault, dropping tear-gas canisters down each stairwell as they came.
Despite pleas from the ambassador and the CIA station chief, hour after hour passed without any rescue attempt by the Pakistanis. Giant columns of gasoline-scented smoke issued from the building, visible from miles away — miles away where rioters arriving in government-owned buses were also attacking the American School while children lay cowering in locked rooms.
The mob at the embassy climbed onto the roof and pounded on the hatch door that led down into the vault. David, looking up at the ceiling, watched it buckle and twist from the blows over the course of an hour, the oxygen running out, many around him fainting or vomiting. But the hatch door held and as the sun set over Islamabad the rioters dissolved away into the darkness.
From the vault they emerged with the body of the dead Marine. Two Pakistani employees of the embassy lay on the first floor, killed by asphyxiation and then badly burnt. An American airman had been beaten unconscious and left to die in the fire.
Climbing onto the roof David saw the arrival of a few Pakistani troops at last. They stood around, and David thought he recognised one of them — the young man who had been behind the steering wheel of the car. The photographs that were taken of these moments would later confirm his suspicions. Fedalla. So he was in the army.
Later that evening David, and most of the others who had feared for their lives in the vault for over five hours, were amazed to learn that President Carter had just telephoned Pakistan’s dictator General Zia and thanked him for his help.
In the near future, upon joining the CIA, David would know that the explanation for some events existed in another realm, a parallel world that had its own considerations and laws. As he watched Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington accept the gratitude of the United States and claim that Pakistani Army troops had reacted ‘promptly, with dispatch’, he had little idea of the larger things at stake, didn’t know why the United States could not afford to dwell on the issue. Khomeini’s revolution had meant the loss of important listening posts in Iran that had been trained on the Soviet Union. General Zia had accepted a CIA proposal to locate new facilities on Pakistani soil.