The avatari, p.38
The Avatari, page 38
‘I will rely on you to ensure that no word of this ever gets out,’ the colonel said softly.
He nodded to his men who followed him out of the room, leaving Vilayat Hussain still slumped on the table, with the colonel’s parting words ringing in his ears.
‘We will leave the bottle here as a token gift for you,’ the man had said.
It would take four of his servants to pick the weeping and trembling Vilayat off the table and carry him to his bedroom.
* * *
In 1973, in response to the US Department of Defense’s need for a foolproof method of satellite navigation, the Pentagon created the concept of GPS, based on the department’s experience with all its satellite predecessors. The essential components of the GPS were the twenty-four Navstar satellites built by Rockwell International. Every twelve hours, each satellite orbited the earth in a formation 11,000 miles above it, thus ensuring that every point on the planet would always be in radio contact with at least four satellites. The first operational GPS satellite was launched in 1978. It would take fifteen more years for the system to be fully operational, but in 1986, the experimental prototypes were ready and ground transmitter-receivers, the size of a transistor were available in the Department of Defense labs.
Much before Colonel Ahmed Noorani and Claire Donovant had turned up at Vilayat Hussain’s farmhouse, she had shown one of these devices to the ISI man when they met at the Peshawar Hilton where she was staying.
‘It looks like a radio,’ he had said briefly.
‘It is a radio,’ she had replied, turning the dials until it caught some channels, finally settling on the BBC weather report.
The colonel had driven four hours from Rawalpindi to meet this woman after receiving a call from the President’s military attaché. Both he and Claire were well aware that this wasn’t just a radio, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut.
‘Need-to-know basis, I guess,’ he had said softly, lighting a cigarette.
‘I guess,’ she had replied impassively.
* * *
The caravanserai was quite decrepit, but after Zhawar, it seemed like a luxury hotel to Susan. She and Peter were given the room upstairs, located at the top of a broken iron staircase. The swarthy Mongol, who was the owner, barked orders and a number of boys scurried to clean up the rooms and put in the beds. Evidently, not many people halted here. The squat toilet was a small shack behind the building; it consisted of a pit dug in the ground, with stones conveniently placed on either side. The men decided to leave it for Susan’s exclusive use; like everyone else in the caravanserai, they would go behind the rocks.
Susan had got used to the sanitation system and was walking back from the shack when she met Peter.
‘I’ve sent the old man ahead to get in touch with the contact Vilayat Hussain had given me in Ishkashim,’ he told her. ‘It’s another hour’s ride from here.’
‘Good,’ Susan said, relieved. ‘I’ve practically run out of my own supplies.’
From the time they had left the Hilton at Peshawar, Susan had been cut off from everything she was used to – a daily change of underwear, for instance, along with the ‘luxury’ of shaving her legs and armpits. Neither she nor her companions ever mentioned the fact that as they moved closer to their destination, they also quietly did what would have once been unthinkable – reuse toilet paper.
‘Toothpaste is the last of our worries, Professor,’ Peter said dryly. ‘We need camping gear, weapons, mountaineering equipment and winter clothes. If my guess is right, you are going to get us into the high mountains.’
‘Aren’t we high enough already?’
‘At present, we’re at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. If we have to go over any of the passes, it will be another 8 to 10,000 feet.’
‘God help us!’ she said with feeling.
‘By the way, I’ve got your hot-water bath ready.’
‘Where?’ she asked, incredulous.
‘In the shelter over there,’ he replied, leading the way.
It was a small shed made of tin sheets. The two fair-haired boys they had met in the morning were standing over an aluminium tub filled with muddy brown hot water. One of them had a bedsheet in his hands, which he held like a towel.
‘Go ahead. They’ll help you,’ Peter told her.
‘I’m not having them around!’ she said indignantly.
‘It’ll be much more convenient if you did,’ he said with a grin. ‘And anyway, they probably won’t do you much harm – unless you have designs on the Mongol.’
She looked at the boys carefully. They were clean-shaven, their lips painted a startling red. She turned to Peter, disbelief writ large on her features.
‘It’s a harsh land and women are scarce. Men do what they can to get by,’ he explained with a shrug, before leaving the shed.
By evening, their supplies had arrived. They began sorting them out in the courtyard of the caravanserai.
‘You were right,’ Ashton agreed, addressing Peter. ‘We’re up against a rough bunch.’
‘Looks like Vilayat threw in a freebie,’ Peter remarked, picking up the radio he had unwrapped from the packing material. ‘Don’t remember asking for a radio, though I guess I should have; it might come in handy.’
‘Yes, it might,’ Ashton agreed, turning it on and catching a Soviet channel beaming patriotic songs in Pushtu. ‘We might be able to get weather reports.’
‘I can forecast the weather in the Wakhan for you without a radio, Colonel. But yeah, with the power of this baby, we might get some good music, maybe even some of the games.’
Meanwhile, their guide had reported that at Ishkashim, there were no rumours of any foreign expeditions making their way in this direction. So the bad guys haven’t reached here yet, Peter mused. Or, if they have, they’ve chosen another route. The more reassuring news was that no one had been asking questions about their own team.
‘I’ve got to talk to you, Colonel,’ Peter told Ashton, his voice almost hesitant, as they finished packing the supplies into rucksacks.
Ashton slowly got to his feet and faced the younger man.
‘So you’ll probably be getting back from here?’ he said, pre-empting Peter.
Peter couldn’t help noticing how old and tired the colonel suddenly looked, although his jaw remained firmly set.
‘I guess so, Colonel,’ he replied, averting his gaze and shuffling his feet uneasily in the hard-packed mud and frost of the courtyard floor. ‘If I wait any longer, I’ll be late for my appointment.’
They were in the second week of September and he would have to find his way back through most of Afghanistan and Pakistan, before catching his flight to Jo’burg.
‘When will you be leaving?’ Ashton enquired.
‘I guess I’ll see you folks off from here; you know, say a proper goodbye and all.’ Peter was still shuffling his feet.
Ashton nodded and walked away without a word.
As dusk fell, they all bedded down. The room on top which Peter and Susan were to share had a small terrace where Peter now put his sleeping bag. Susan was to use the small rickety wooden bed in the room. Exhausted from the previous night’s journey, she was fast asleep as soon as her head hit the folded towel serving as a pillow. Something, however, woke her up in the middle of the night. She opened her eyes and noticed the silhouette of a man standing by the window and smoking. It was Peter.
‘Don’t you want any sleep?’ she asked, sitting up abruptly.
‘It’s my watch,’ he replied.
‘I didn’t know we were keeping watch,’ she mumbled. ‘I thought you said the Mongol was supposed to be doing that?’
‘I’m sure he is, but we need to watch him too. Taidjut is a Hazara; his tribe owes its lineage to Genghis Khan. They have a custom of murdering honoured guests, so their spirits will remain in the house and bring them good luck.’
‘You’re kidding!’ she said with some irritation.
‘Don’t believe me if you don’t want to,’ Peter said nonchalantly and turned back to the window.
She turned to go back to sleep and found she couldn’t. After a moment, she got out of bed and came to where he was standing. He did not turn to face her. She put her arms around him and he felt her soft breasts press against him.
‘Come to bed, Peter,’ she whispered, her lips nibbling his ear.
He smelt the soap in her hair.
He turned and they were suddenly kissing, struggling with each other’s clothes. They were frantic and yet tender and gentle. When they had finished, she lay across him, one leg thrown over him, her head nuzzling his shoulder. He tried reaching for his trousers to get his cigarettes, but she muttered at him angrily, forbidding him to move. He kissed the top of her head.
‘What was all this about?’ he asked softly.
La tierra se movio. For him, the earth had moved.
‘I wanted to, before you left,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Sweet Jesus!’
‘What? Don’t tell me you minded?’ she asked him.
‘No, not at all. But I thought... ’ Peter began lamely.
‘You forget that I was an undergrad in the 70s, Peter. We were a whole lot less complicated then.’
He cursed softly and she began to giggle and he found himself laughing with her. She reached down and felt him, then climbed on top of him. He grunted under her weight.
‘I’ve decided to stay,’ he said, squirming as she began to bite his neck. When she didn’t respond, he held her still and asked, ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’
She looked at him, her expression forthright, and said with a half-smile, ‘I didn’t really expect you to leave after that, you know.’ Kissing Peter’s now open mouth, she muttered, ‘Now just stop talking, will you?’
Peter complied.
In the room below, Ashton and Duggy were awake, talking in a low monotone. Ashton was in a foul mood.
‘So from here, our destination shouldn’t be too far away; that is, if Susan is reading the map correctly.’
‘She’s doing a great job,’ Duggy said reassuringly. ‘I’m sure we’re on the right track.’
‘Glad to know you’re so optimistic,’ Ashton muttered pensively. ‘We’re just getting out of the war zone and into one of the most desolate regions in the world. And so far, we haven’t found any signs of this monastery or, for that matter, of anyone else trying to get there.’
‘I’m sure we will, Colonel. It’s just a matter of time. Don’t worry, we’ve got this far already; we’ll make the rest of the journey too.’
‘You sound a lot like my aunt, Duggy,’ Ashton observed moodily. ‘For all you know, even if we do get there, chances are that it’s just an abandoned ruin, with nothing but dilapidated buildings and dust – like all other myths. We may have come all this way for nothing; we could just as well have let those buggers find that out for themselves.’
Duggy nearly began retorting that he didn’t quite agree, but decided against it. The ‘aunt’ quip rankled.
CHAPTER 28
Into the Big Pamir and Beyond
SEPTEMBER 1986
‘Why do we need another guide?’ Ashton asked the man from Zhawar. ‘Can you not guide us, old man?’
‘No, I cannot,’ the man replied. ‘I was very young at the time. I had accompanied my father on that trip and ultimately, we never even reached the place.’
‘Why did you want to go there?’ Ashton asked curiously.
‘My father used to trade in animal skins in Feyzabad – snow leopard, wolf, ibex. He was also a great hunter who could shoot the baaz, the eagle, out of the sky with his .303.’
The old man mimicked the stance of an imaginary person holding a rifle and squinting against the glare of the sun as he aimed at a target.
‘One day,’ he went on, ‘a man comes to see him and describes this fantastic valley, untouched by humans, where these animals are supposedly found in large numbers and roam without fear, for no one ever hunts them. Intrigued, my father agreed to accompany the man to this place. They set off one day, taking me along. Just like you and members of your group, they were going to a village in the Little Pamir to pick up the guide, when my father died of the tutek – altitude sickness.’
He stopped and spat on the ground, his eyes fixed on the contours of the stark brown mountains ahead.
‘No, we will definitely need guides to get you to your final destination,’ he concluded.
And so the old man and his son went off, leaving them waiting patiently at the caravanserai until they returned. The duo had apparently gone to look for some shepherd who might have come to Ishkashim to sell his livestock and would be making his trip back up the Wakhan Corridor. There were rumours of a large number of spies in the area, which might well have been true. The corridor had been out of the war so far, but that was a situation the Soviets would very much have wanted to maintain. Travelling with a shepherd would enable Ashton’s group to travel cross-country without arousing much suspicion.
Two days passed. They utilized the period of waiting by preparing for their onward journey. They had packed their rucksacks under Peter’s supervision and Susan, who had done some trekking before, learnt how vitally important it was to pack a rucksack correctly for a high-altitude expedition.
‘Put anything you don’t need right at the bottom,’ Peter instructed them all.
‘I guess this goes to the bottom, then,’ Ashton decided with some regret, looking at his slouch hat which he held for a moment before shoving it deep into one of the rucksacks.
Ever since they had entered Afghanistan, the men had been wearing loosely tied turbans.
Duggy looked at Ashton and acknowledged his sentiments with a sympathetic shrug. He knew how fond Ashton was of that hat, which he had worn since his days in Malaya.
They had started packing in the morning and it was mid-afternoon by the time most of it was finally done.
‘I didn’t think it was going to take this long,’ Susan said, stretching her back.
‘Well, it’s a good thing we have the time to spare,’ Peter mumbled, his words coming indistinctly past the pencil held between his teeth as he made a note of every item that had gone into the rucksacks in a small diary. ‘Here, check those torches and see if they’re working before you put them in, will you?’ he added.
He made Susan memorize each item, the order in which it had been stored in the rucksack and the particular section in which she had placed it. Not content with that, he made her memorize the contents of all the other rucksacks. Then they worked out what to carry and what to discard in case the nature of the terrain compelled them to let their mules go and carry the loads themselves, and if, due to injury to one of their party, they needed to drop one of the climber’s loads.
‘Where on earth did you learn about all this?’ she asked.
‘Oh, here and there,’ he answered airily, picking up one of the packed rucksacks and swinging it easily over his shoulders to check it for weight and bulk.
‘What’s this, another guy thing about never kissing and telling?’
‘Really, if you want to know about the women, it’s never going to be a problem,’ he said with a grin.
‘Don’t bother, we get the drift,’ Ashton cut in with a wry smile.
They were all rather relieved that Peter had decided to accompany them all the way.
Having satisfied himself with the packing, Peter prepared a deep brown mixture of henna in an aluminium bowl and they all sat down to apply the paste to their hair. After leaving it on for two hours, they rinsed it off, laughing at the results which ranged from Duggy’s deep auburn to Susan’s bright copper. They had already changed into the clothes the Afghans had given them and all of them had acquired a deep tan from the harsh sun of the mountains. Unless someone looked at them closely, Ashton thought, they might very well pass off as locals.
On the second day following the guide’s departure, there was nothing much to do. They sat and played poker, with Duggy winning every game. Susan said she didn’t play and her group saw no reason to doubt her word.
‘It’s your inscrutable face, Sergeant,’ Peter said to Duggy, before getting up in disgust.
He had lost a big pot and not for the first time.
‘You would win, if you waited for a hand, Captain,’ Duggy countered, happily scooping up the money from the table, while puffing at a noxious Russian cigarette which Vilayat Hussain had sent them by the carton.
Even in this remote area, the Russian presence was palpable. The radio blared out Russian techno-pop or Soviet patriotic songs most of the time.
‘Damn, can’t make it catch any other station!’ Peter complained.
They all felt the tension in his voice.
‘Have you given a thought to who we’re up against?’ Susan now asked, voicing a question that was uppermost in their minds.
The men turned and looked at her.
‘Well, if they’re going to be operating here, they have to be well connected and it’s not going to be just about money,’ Ashton said after a moment, when he realized no one was volunteering an answer. ‘There’s a war going on here. So they have to have some government contacts too. And, of course, they will need firepower, in case they have to use it.’
‘What government contacts?’ Duggy enquired.
This time, Peter replied. ‘Could be Pakistani; they have a lot of control here. Might even be the Russians. But on second thoughts, how would these guys get to the Russians? It would have to be with Afghan help,’ he reasoned, expanding on Ashton’s argument, ‘and that wouldn’t be too difficult, provided the price was negotiated.’
‘If they are already here, it means they have deciphered the paiza and roughly followed the route we have just taken,’ Ashton added.
‘Could be,’ Susan mused. ‘If I’ve got it right, these people with their resources would have hired professionals to do the job for them. Or they might have some additional clues which we don’t.’
