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  Praise for Veiled Freedom

  “Readers will be enthralled with this penetrating look at Afghanistan and its many mysteries. . . . Windle is a top-notch storyteller.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Windle masterfully blends hard-hitting facts with a story full of intrigue and a dash of romance.”

  Romantic Times, 4½-star review

  “Jeanette Windle is the kind of storyteller other writers want to be when they grow up. If you’ve never been to Afghanistan, Veiled Freedom will put you there so vividly. But be prepared: this novel pulls no punches—your comfortable sense of American cultural logic will be stripped away as Windle exposes the thorny issues that plague this ancient land. The result is a brutal but fascinating portrayal of life as it really is in this crossroads between east and west, and nobody can describe it like Jeanette Windle. She’s like a painter so skilled that her artwork is indistinguishable from a photograph. It’s fiction, but just barely.”

  Chuck Holton, former U.S. Army Black Beret; author of the Task Force Valor series and of American Heroes with Oliver North.

  “Windle’s storytelling in Veiled Freedom is so vivid that I could practically feel the dust from Kabul’s streets on my skin as I turned the pages. Windle’s use of intricate details, intriguing characters, and important themes teases our imaginations and makes us wrestle with profound spiritual truths. This book is for the casual reader and the deep thinker alike.”

  Abdu Murray, author of Apocalypse Later: Why the Gospel of Peace Must Trump the Politics of Prophecy in the Middle East and president of Aletheia International.

  “The technical aspects of the book are spot-on. Jeanette has the gift of making the complex cultural, political, and personal issues understandable and believable. She really understands how the multitude of subplots that are the central Asian states make life hard for both the citizenry and those trying to help.”

  Joe DeCree, retired Army Special Forces major & private security contractor. Completed two combat tours with the Army in Kosovo and Afghanistan and one as a PSD operative in Iraq.

  Visit Tyndale’s exciting Web site at www.tyndale.com

  Visit Jeanette Windle’s Web site at www.jeanettewindle.com

  TYNDALE and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

  Veiled Freedom

  Copyright © 2009 by Jeanette Windle. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of woman copyright © by Desmond Boylan/Reuters/Corbis. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of city copyright © by Kabul Media, www.kabulmedia.com. All rights reserved.

  Cover design element copyright © by Shutterstock. All rights reserved.

  Interior design element copyright © by Olga Rutko. All rights reserved

  Author photo copyright © by Hirtech Camera Center. All rights reserved.

  Designed by Beth Sparkman

  Edited by Lorie Popp

  Published in association with The Knight Agency, 570 East Avenue, Madison, GA 30650.

  Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Windle, Jeanette.

  Veiled freedom / J. M. Windle.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4143-1475-4 (sc : alk. paper) 1. Afghanistan—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.I5172V45 2009

  813´.54—dc22 2009000014

  To those I hold dear—

  you know who you are—

  who offer yourselves unhesitatingly

  as hands and feet and heart

  of Isa Masih

  to shine the light of his love

  into dark places.

  “You will know the truth,

  and the truth

  will set you free.”

  —Isa Masih

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Kabul

  November 13, 2001

  “Land of the free and the home of the brave.”

  The radio’s static-spattered fanfare filtered through the compound wall. Beyond its shattered gate, a trio of small boys kicked a bundle of knotted rags around the dirt courtyard. Had they any idea those foreign harmonies were paying homage to their country’s latest invaders?

  Or liberators, if the rumors and the pirated satellite television broadcasts were true.

  Scrambling the final meters to the top of the hill, he stood against a chill wind that tugged at his light wool vest and baggy tunic and trousers. Bracing himself, he made a slow, stunned revolution.

  From this windswept knoll, war’s demolition stretched as far as his eye could see. Bombs and rockets had left only heaps of mud-brick hovels and compound walls. The front of an apartment complex was sheared off, exposing the cement cubicles of living quarters. The collapse of an office building left its floors layered like a stack of naan. Rubble and broken pavement turned the streets into obstacle courses.

  But it wasn’t the devastation that held him spellbound. So it was all true—the foreign newscasts, the exultant summons that had brought him back, his father’s dream. Kabul was free!

  The proof was in the dancing crowds below. After five long years of silence, Hindi pop and Persian ballads drifted up the hillside. Atop a bombed-out bus, a group of young men gyrated wildly. Even a handful of women in blue burqas swayed to the rhythms as they bravely crossed the street with no male escort in sight.

  Nor was blue the only color making a comeback against winter’s brown. To his far right, a yellow wing fluttered skyward. There was an orange one. A red. Scrambling on top of a broken-down tank, two boys tossed aloft a blotch of green and purple.

  Kites had returned to the skies above Kabul.

  Another tank moved slowly down the boulevard. Behind it came a parade of pickups and army jeeps, machine guns mounted in their beds. A staccato rat-tat-tat momentarily drowned out the music. But the gunfire was celebratory. The dancing mobs were not shrinking
back but tossing flowers and confetti, screaming their elation above the noise.

  He shouted with them, the fierceness of his response catching him by surprise. He’d hardly thought of this place in long years, the warm, fertile plains of Pakistan far more a home now than this barren wasteland. Yet joy welled up to squeeze his chest, the watering of his eyes no longer from wind and dust.

  “Land of the free and the home of the brave.” Down the hillside behind him, the radio blasted a Dari-language commentary. But the words of that foreign music still played in his mind. The sacred anthem his American instructors had taught their small English-language students in the Pakistani refugee camps.

  As they’d taught of their homeland, America. A land where brave and honorable warriors guarded peace-loving and welcoming citizens who lived freely among great cities of shining towers and immense wealth. A land of wheat and rice and fruit trees, grape arbors and herds of livestock that offered to all an abundance of food. The very paradise the Quran promised to the faithful.

  And Afghanistan? Land of his birth, his home? Brave, yes. No one had ever questioned the courage of the Afghan tribes. Not the Americans and Russians who were history’s most recent invaders. Nor in turn the British, Mongols, Persians, Arabs, all the way back to Alexander the Great, whose armies were the first to learn that Afghanistan could be taken with enough weapons and spilled blood but never held.

  But free?

  He blinked away the sudden blurring of his vision. When had Afghanistan ever truly known freedom? Not under all those centuries of alternating occupations. Certainly not when the mujahedeen had finally brought the Soviet empire to its knees because then they—and the Taliban after them—had turned on each other. The rockets of their warring factions had rained down on Kabul in such destruction that his family was driven at last into exile.

  “Have faith,” his father had whispered into his ear. “Someday Afghanistan will be like America. A land of freedom as well as courage. Someday we will go home.”

  Even then he’d known the difference between wishes and painful reality. And yet, unbelievably, there it was below him. Today the liberators’ anthem, his father’s dream, had come true at last for his own country.

  Yes, his country.

  His people.

  His home.

  He’d missed dawn’s first call to prayer. Now he stripped his vest to spread it over the dirt. Prostrating himself, rising sun at his back, he began the daily salat: “Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem. In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.”

  The memorized Arabic prayers were rote, but when he finished, he whispered his own passionate plea against the ground: “Please let it be true this time. My father’s dream. His prayers. Let my people know freedom as well as courage.”

  Standing, he shook out his vest. Beyond shattered towers of the city’s business center and compounds of the poor lay a quiet, green oasis. The Wazir Akbar Khan district, home to Kabul’s upper class. Its high walls, spacious villas, and paved streets looked hardly touched by war.

  His sandaled feet slipped and twisted in his haste down the hillside. At street level, his old neighborhood proved less untouched than he’d thought. The walls were scarred by rocket blasts, sidewalks broken, poplar trees lining these streets in his memory now only stumps.

  He headed toward the largest compound on the street, its two-story villa built around an inner courtyard. A brightly patterned jinga truck indicated the others had already arrived. The property differed so little from childhood memory he might have stepped back a decade. Even the peacock blue house and compound walls showed fresh paint. The Taliban officials who’d commandeered his home had at least cared for their stolen lodging. Or perhaps it had been his family’s faithful chowkidar, who’d stayed when his employers fled.

  Music and cheerful voices drifted over walls along with a hot, oily aroma that brought water to his mouth. Frying boulani pastries. He quickened his steps. He’d be home in time for the midday meal.

  At first he thought he heard more celebratory gunfire, but when the unmistakable explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade shook the ground, he broke into a run. A mound of rubble offered cover as he reached the final T-junction.

  His mind reeled. Surely he’d seen this victory convoy from the hilltop. But why were they firing on his home?

  Even as he crouched in bewildered horror, the distinctive rat-tat-tat of a Kalashnikov rifle crackled back from a second-story window. Down the street a fighter rose from behind a jeep, an RPG launcher raised to his shoulder. A single blast. Then a limp shape slid forward over the windowsill and toppled from view.

  The action unfroze his muscles, and he sprinted toward his home. A shout, the whine of a bullet overhead told him he’d been spotted. Apple trees edging the property wall offered hand- and footholds.

  His feet touched brick, then ground on the other side. The acridity of gunfire and explosives burned his nostrils as he raced forward. He stumbled across the first limp shape facedown on the lawn. Turning the body over, he fruitlessly tried to stem a red sea spreading across white robes. Their faithful caretaker would never again tend these gardens or paint these walls.

  An explosion rocked him as he raced around the side of the villa. Just inside the main entrance, the painted wooden frame of the jinga truck was burning. Behind it, the blast had blown the metal gates from their hinges. Invaders poured through the breach.

  But he only had eyes for another huddled shape on the mosaic tiles of the courtyard and a third sprawled across marble front steps. The second-story gunman had fallen across a grape arbor. Through tears of smoke fumes and grief, he noticed the Kalashnikov rifle that had dropped from a dangling, bloodied hand.

  Before he could snatch it up, a boot kicked the AK-47 out of reach. Another smashed his face into the grass. Hot metal ground into his temple. He closed his eyes. Allah, let it be quick!

  “Don’t shoot! We need live prisoners. Here, you, get up!”

  As the gun barrel dropped away, he struggled to his knees. Except for the poorly accented Dari and a shoulder patch of red, white, and blue, the man—with a flat wool cap, dark beard, hard, gray gaze, tattered scarf over camouflage flak jacket—could have been as Afghan as the mujahid whose weapon was still leveled at his head. He knew immediately who this tall, powerfully built foreigner was. For weeks Pakistani news had been covering the American elite warriors fighting alongside the mujahedeen Northern Alliance.

  Our liberators! His mouth twisted with bitter pain.

  “Where are your commanders? Mullah Mohammed Omar? Osama bin Laden?” The American must have taken his blank stare for incomprehension because he turned to his companion, shifting to English. “Ask him: where are the Taliban who had their headquarters here? And if any of these—” a nod took in the sprawled bodies—“are bin Laden or Mohammed Omar. Tell him he just might save his own neck if he cooperates.”

  “There are no Taliban here!” he said in English. He pushed himself to his feet and wiped a sleeve to clear dampness from his face and eyes. It came away with a scarlet that wasn’t his own. “This is a private home! And you have just murdered my family! Why? The fighting was over. You were supposed to bring peace!”

  “Your home? With a house full of armed combatants?” The American’s boot nudged the Kalashnikov rifle now fallen to the grass. “You were firing on our troops.”

  “They were defending our home. They weren’t soldiers. Just my father and brothers and our caretaker and his sons.”

  “You lie!” A blow rocked his head back as the mujahedeen translator snapped in rapid Dari. “You speak to me! I will translate!”

  “I am not lying!” He spat out blood with his defiant English. “This has been my family’s home for generations. Any neighbor can tell you. Yes, the Taliban stole it from us, but they have been gone for days. We only came back from Pakistan this very day.”

  He threw a desperate glance around. The last pretense of fighting was over, the mujahedeen drifting off except for
those making a neat, terrible heap of limp bodies like laundry sacks near the broken gate. Wailing rose from a huddle of burqas and small children being herded out into the street. Were his mother and sister among them? Or had caution left them behind in Pakistan?

  Then his gaze fell on a face he knew. A mujahid in full battle fatigues instead of the mismatched outfits of the others. The mujahid turned and stared at him indifferently.

  Yes, it was he. Older, gray-streaked beard and hair. But it was the family friend who’d supplied his father’s business with imported goods. Who’d been in this home countless times before their exile. Who’d brought him and his siblings small gifts and strange foreign sweets.

  “Ask him. He will tell you who I am. He knows my family. He bought and sold for my father when I was a child.”

  “Who? The muj commander?” For the first time he saw a crack in the American’s disbelief.

  The family friend walked over. His cold, measuring appraisal held no recognition as the translator intercepted him for a brief conversation. Then, unbelievably, he swung around and marched up the marble steps into the villa.

  The translator spread out his hands to the American. “The commander says he knows neither this youth nor his family. And it is well-known that all in this house have served the Taliban.”

  “No, it isn’t true! Maybe he does not recognize me. I was only a child when we left. But he knows this house and my family. Please, I must speak to him myself.”

  Another foreign warrior emerged from the villa, clipped yellow hair and icy blue eyes shouting his nationality louder than curt English. “All clear. Body count’s six male combatants. Minimal damage except the gate. This one’s the only survivor minus a handful of female dependents and kids. From what the muj told us, I expected more bodies on the ground. They must have been tipped off.”

  “Maybe. Or the muj were fed some bad intel.” The foreign soldiers moved away, and he missed the rest of their low-voice exchange.

  Then the yellow-haired American waved a hand. “We followed the rules of engagement. They were armed and shooting.”

  “A handful of AK-47s. The kid’s right—that’s practically home protection around here. And the prisoner—he’s no combatant. I saw him come over that wall. Should I turn him loose?”