Reamde

Abdul-Ghaffar (“Servant of the Forgiver”—she had remembered that much Arabic by this point)—was a blond, blue-eyed American man of perhaps forty-five, though he might have been ten years older than that and in good shape. He had close-cropped hair, was burly but trim, and appeared to work out a lot. A soccer player or a wrestler—a practitioner of some sport, anyway, that didn’t require height, for he was maybe five seven. His native language was of course English, and he followed the others’ conversations even more poorly than Zula, who could catch perhaps a third of what they were saying. The obvious question that was posed by his choice of name—what was he seeking forgiveness for?—would go unanswered for now. But it seemed clear that he had converted to Islam late in life and was eager to make up for lost time. She got a clue when he turned his head to expose a skin graft on the top of his head, about the size of a postage stamp. She had seen similar damage on her fair-skinned, farm-dwelling relatives. He was under treatment for malignant melanoma, and he probably had less than a year to live. Until she’d seen that, she’d wondered why a man like Jones would look upon this all-American newbie as anything other than an FBI plant.

The power of laziness was a continual wonder to her. Not that jihadists had any monopoly on that. But with so much manpower up in this camp, could they really not cook their own food? Not set up a little buffet line, pile it on their plates without feminine assistance? All the while leaving Zula chained to some other tree, out of earshot. But it seemed huge to them that their captive female perform this work for them. She was being put on display, she decided, like Cleopatra being towed through Rome. Jones wanted the others to see how the infidel girl had submitted to his mastery.

Which she hadn’t, of course. But for purposes of this one meal she was happy to act that way. She even kept her hood up over her head like a sort of chador. And she listened to what they were saying, astonishing herself by how much of their conversation she could now understand.

They ate together for a while, satisfying their appetites, chatting and joking. And then Jones began to address them in a now-let’s-get-down-to-business tone. And what he said was that he would be hitting the sack very soon, since he needed to rise long before sunrise to begin the next phase of the operation. He would not see them again for several hours after that. In the meantime, they needed to sleep well but rise in good time and make all ready to divide into two camps: the base camp and the expedition. The latter group would be larger than the former and would be moving out on a great adventure. But this in no way diminished the importance of the base camp crew or detracted from the glory that they would achieve and the heavenly reward that they would reap …

(It was, Zula realized, just another business meeting. The only thing missing was the PowerPoint presentation. Some of the group—presumably the Cs—were being given the shit work, and Jones had to soften them up first with the meal and the fake camaraderie.)

Staying behind to enjoy Zula’s excellent campfire cuisine would be Zakir, Ershut, and two others. One of these, Sayed, Zula had mentally classified as a graduate student: a quiet man, closer to forty than thirty, who seemed markedly uncomfortable in the camping and hiking milieu. It was obvious to Zula why he and Zakir were being left behind—she’d have made exactly the same choice—and both of them looked some combination of disappointed and relieved.

Ershut, though, was dumbfounded. The same went for Jahandar, an Afghan whom Zula had last seen perched on the top of the RV with a sniper rifle and a pair of binoculars. Zula herself had to make a modest effort to hide her own astonishment, for if ever there was a man cut out for a long trek down the length of a mountain range in hostile territory, it was Jahandar. To the point where Zula had some difficulty in imagining how they had smuggled him this deep into a Western democracy. They must have drugged him, packed him into a crate, shipped him over by air freight direct from Tora Bora, and kept him pent up on a mountaintop until now. Everything about his appearance—the hat, the beard, the glare, the battle scars—should have got him arrested on sight in any municipality west of the Caspian Sea. Anyway, never mind how they’d managed it, Jahandar was here, and he was pissed. And this encouraged the normally taciturn Ershut to voice objections of his own to Jones’s plan.

They kept glancing over at her. As if to say, How many people does it take to keep tabs on a girl chained to a tree?