Veiled Freedom Read online

  Ameera’s recoil at Rasheed’s sudden appearance told Jamil his employer was not as unaware of the perils their discussions could occasion as he’d assumed. His question had been burning on Jamil’s lips all day, but he was so rarely alone with Ameera, and he hadn’t ventured to ask with Soraya or others present. Ameera’s gift was a treasure most safely kept secret.

  The furious pounding of his heart, the involuntary clenching of his fists had eased so that Jamil could stride with equanimity through workers loading the last cement-encrusted wheelbarrows and buckets into a truck outside. As Jamil hurried head down toward the mechanics yard, the three foreigners climbed into their vehicle without a perceptible glance in his direction.

  The alarm had startled Jamil even as his fingers encountered the unfamiliar wire duct-taped along the top of the cinder-block partition. But it was the shock of finding himself face-to-face with the American soldier that had driven every question from Jamil’s mind. Worse, there’d been instant recognition in the gray eyes, though their past encounter was so fleeting.

  Jamil gave a quick shake of his head as he stepped into the mechanics yard. Was it truly the foreigner’s invasion of his sanctuary that had so enflamed his emotions? Or seeing Ameera speaking so easily with her countryman?

  Jamil could still feel the warm comfort of her fingers under his, see the sympathy in her face that said she truly cared he was upset, the frankness of her gaze as she carefully thought out her answers. Honesty could admit he’d come to count such personal discussions as uniquely his privilege. And yet in her own country, Ameera was surely allowed such interaction with any number of men.

  Well, the American warrior with the narrowed stare so penetrating Jamil had feared it could read his thoughts was gone now. The man’s association with his own landlord could be a danger—or a bonus.

  And with Ameera? Little though he liked to see his employer beholden to the foreigners, Jamil couldn’t disapprove of the compound’s new fortifications. At least fretting over a decrepit Wajid’s ineffectual watch would no longer be such a distraction to his own purpose here.

  “Tu! Jamil!”

  Jamil turned around as Rasheed’s rapid steps overtook him. To his relief, the chowkidar made no reference to his earlier eavesdropping but pushed past to head toward the Russian jeep, barking over his shoulder as he did so a succession of directives. He would be back within two days. Wajid would be responsible for securing the premises at night. The clients parked inside the mechanics yard had an engine part on order and would be tendered the customary hospitality and protection from the city’s lawless nighttime streets until after the holiday. Rasheed’s departure was unexpected news. But then the caretaker wasn’t in the habit of sharing personal affairs with underlings.

  Jamil closed the gate behind the jeep, then headed across the mechanics yard. He’d noted the jinga truck with its now-familiar peacocks when he’d detoured earlier to avoid the work party crowding the pedestrian gate next door. Its crew had started a campfire behind the massive rear tires. There were three in all, passing a water pipe around the crackling flames, a Pashto music station blaring from a radio perched on the back fender. If the truck carried cargo, it wasn’t perishable from their lack of concern over the delay.

  At Jamil’s approach, the driver he’d already encountered, a large-framed, well-nourished Pashtun, raised the water pipe, a grin of invitation splitting his long beard.

  “Salaam aleykum,” Jamil greeted courteously as he waved away the offer. The warmth of the fire he left behind less easily. As November advanced, the temperature in the high mountain valley was plunging ever more sharply each time the sun dropped behind the western ranges so that Jamil’s concrete cubicle now offered little more protection than the shed roof.

  Jamil had appropriated two of the blankets he’d purchased in bulk at Ameera’s request from the bazaar. Wrapping both along with his patu around him until he was as swaddled as a baby, he maneuvered loose a now well-worn small volume and leafed to find the John injil Ameera had mentioned.

  John was a close companion of Isa Masih, Jamil already knew from the other narratives of the prophet’s life and death, and though this injil proved more difficult to comprehend, Jamil liked the music of its words. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Whatever they meant, the phrases sang with the mystic and lyrical ambiguity of a Persian court poet.

  Jamil read until he came to Ameera’s earlier quotation. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

  He broke off at the children’s call to story time and to retrieve from Wajid the cold plate of food Rasheed’s wife had left behind for them. He remained with the old man to lift heavy bars into place across the double doors at each end of the main hallway and lock exterior doors upstairs and down. Wajid accompanied Jamil to the mechanics yard to lock that gate behind him with shaky hands, then retreated to his guardhouse. Jamil waited to hear the lock click on the other side of the wall before heading back to his own quarters.

  The campfire was now out, the jinga truck party retired to their assigned guest quarters. The city power had gone off again as well, and night’s darkness would have been profound except that a brief shower earlier in the afternoon had settled the worst of Kabul’s dust, allowing the stars and a full moon to penetrate the usual haze of smoke and pollution.

  Digging out his flashlight, Jamil returned to his cocoon and his reading, trying this time to place the narrative against Ameera’s disturbing statements. The freedom of which she spoke was the desire of every man. The yearning for so many long years of Jamil’s own country.

  But to be free of sin’s guilt and shame? of the all-consuming fear of death? of standing deficient before Allah’s judgment seat? That would be a greater freedom than any army could secure. Ameera had spoken with conviction. But how could such freedom be more than a wish, a man’s hopeless desire?

  As Jamil flipped the page with an impatience that wrinkled thin paper, words jumped out at him. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

  Jamil slapped the volume shut. The truth will set you free? But what was truth? A powerful political leader had asked that same question during Isa Masih’s own trial and had received no answer.

  And which truth? Love or hate? Forgiveness or vengeance? Isa Masih’s or Muhammad’s?

  The impossibility of decision pressed on Jamil’s mind so heavily he felt paralyzed with its vacillation. A soft shuffle of sandals on gravel, the murmur of men’s voices was a welcome distraction. The jinga truck drivers tending to final bedtime needs. Leaning his head against the cinder blocks, Jamil allowed his fatigue to carry him into lassitude until new sounds jolted him to full wakefulness. The jingle of padlock and chain. The creak of a gate needing oil.

  Sliding out of his cocoon, Jamil slipped noiselessly to the window. There was no real reason, but with natural wariness he shut off the flashlight before cracking open shutters closed against the night chill. Outside the full moon was not strong enough to show more than dark shapes slipping past his quarters through the gate that now stood open in the rear partition wall of the mechanics yard.

  “Men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”

  Jamil had come across that in his reading tonight, the words branding themselves into his mind because they resonated so with his own cynicism. If it was legitimate business these men conducted, why skulk around in the night like thieves or assassins? And there were no longer just three of them. There must be at least a dozen.

  Jamil’s heart was racing far more than it had earlier, so fast it seemed those dark shadows had to hear its pounding. He stilled even his breathing as he watched, bracing himself for one of those furtive shapes to turn its head. But the roof’s overhang came down far enough to cast his window in black shadow, and Jamil’s noiseless immobility these last hours had simulated slumber because not
one shape paused to focus awareness his direction.

  Jamil waited until he could no longer hear the stealthy footsteps before slipping outside. His bare feet made no sound on the gravel, and he darted across moonlit open ground to the concealment offered behind the open gate. The padlock with its chain still hung from the dead bolt. Jamil’s fingers felt out that it was not broken but opened as though by a key.

  Or a burglar’s tools. Because any lingering hope that this was some legitimate activity dissipated as Jamil took in the back of the jinga truck, its wildly colored rear panels no longer reflecting the moon’s dim glow, but standing open to reveal a black maw that was its cavernous interior. Jamil could now put together the sounds he’d heard, those too-many dark shapes. Not cargo but men had sat patiently and silently inside that painted frame while the foreign soldiers and their subordinates completed their task, night fell, and sleep overtook the inhabitants of the compound.

  But why? This place held no treasure worth such planning and effort. Unless—

  The threads wove together with a surety Jamil knew was truth even as his cautious steps carried him through the open gate. The jinga truck driver was no client as he’d presented himself to Rasheed, but what Jamil had first feared, a male family member who’d come searching for Ameera’s charge and her child.

  And who had not, as they’d hoped, so easily given up.

  As he’d seen above the wall, the other side held an orchard, and Jamil stepped quickly into the cover of a tree. Its branches hung low enough for Jamil to relax, its burden of unpicked apricots sweet in his nostrils. Under his feet, the grass was frigid with condensation and squelchy with rotting fruit so that he regretted not taking time to grab his sandals.

  French doors and windows opening onto this orchard from that downstairs locked salon were protected by sturdy wrought-iron grilles. But one set of French doors stood open, and though the jinga truck party was nowhere in sight, a bobbing flashlight beam, low cursing, and the muffled bangs and thuds of men stumbling in the dark told Jamil where they’d disappeared. If they’d so easily breached the first two barriers, they’d be inside the main hallway within minutes.

  Jamil slid his cell phone from his vest before he remembered Rasheed was no longer in his quarters to be summoned for help. Should he call Ameera? But that would only draw her from a locked and barred suite to rush downstairs into the intruders’ arms. Jamil cast his mind back over the shape of those hurrying shadows. Had they been carrying weapons? He had to assume so. No trucker would traverse Afghanistan’s dangerous roadways without armed protection.

  Maybe the most prudent course would be to let them take what they were after, this runaway woman and her child. Jamil had not come to this city to get involved in the affairs of others. And if this was a matter of family and honor, it was no business for outsiders. If it were not for Ameera, would he even contemplate risking his own aspirations on behalf of those faceless, shrouded shapes that scurried away like ghosts at his appearance?

  And yet there were the children, who were not faceless but vivid in Jamil’s mind, crying with heart-wrenching anguish or stoic with mute bravery as he tended to their hurts, eager and smiling as they tugged him to story time, their small, warm hands and piping “Jamil-jan” carrying him unwillingly to a past he’d striven to forget. They would be terrified at strange men bursting into their sanctuary.

  And even the women. What if it were his own sister or mother hidden behind those face veils, whose pitiful story was spelled out in those personnel files he’d translated for Ameera? In young Farah, had he not glimpsed courage and hope and dreams not so unlike those he’d once known? Was it possible she was not unique?

  What would Isa Masih do?

  The prophet in the pages he’d read tonight could never just turn his back and walk away. But what could Jamil, unarmed as he was, do against so many invaders? Without Rasheed, there was no aid to be summoned, the elderly Wajid more liability than help. Had the intruders known in plotting this raid that the compound would lie helpless? Perhaps Rasheed had let slip his plans when the jinga truck driver approached pretending to be a client.

  But, wait, help did remain for the summoning. The foreigners and their subordinates who’d erected the compound’s new fortifications even while danger had already crept inside its walls. The jinga truck driver had been watching and listening enough to know how to avoid the perimeter defenses. But if the alarm should be triggered, the foreigners would come running.

  And yet to bring the American soldier with his too-seeing gaze back onto this property, into Ameera’s orbit, his own sanctuary? The agitation and loathing that rose in Jamil at the thought choked him with its intensity, paralyzing him again with vacillation.

  It was shame that freed him. What manner of man could place his own antipathy ahead of the well-being of Ameera, the children, the women Rasheed had left to his care?

  What would Isa Masih do?

  His mental debate had been furious and painful, but only seconds had been expended. Through the open French doors, the bobbing light beam had reached the other side of the salon. Above shuffles, suppressed coughs, whispers of men trying to be silent, Jamil heard the clink of metal against a keyhole.

  Without making any further effort to avoid noise or detection, Jamil raced back through the orchard gate. Springing to pull himself up on the cinder-block partition, he vaulted over. The blast of sound exploding the night’s tranquility was all he could have hoped.

  Steve’s first reaction to the alarm was annoyance. He’d only arrived back to the team house and his own bed—he checked the phosphorescent glow of his alarm clock—less than an hour ago.

  That Steve could hear the alarm two streets and more blocks away was a reminder he’d had Mac turn it to the highest setting. Two alarms in the first eight hours wasn’t the kind of record designed to improve relations with the neighbors. This was Thursday—actually, Friday now. Had some Thursday circuit party carousing its way back to their own compound done something to trip the alarm? Or maybe that wall-hopping assistant of Amy’s?

  False alarm or not, Steve was already tugging on his boots when his cell phone rang. He could barely make out the frantic whisper on the other end, but a far louder rendering in the background of the alarm disrupting the night outside left no doubt as to the speaker.

  “Steve! The alarm went off. I can hear men inside the house.”

  Steve was no longer annoyed. Now it was his M4 and tactical vest he was scooping up. Tucking his Glock into the small of his back, he started down the hall, rapping on doors, even as he demanded, “Rasheed?”

  The panic in Amy’s voice made that a futile suggestion. “No, he’s gone for the weekend. And so is Soraya. I-I think they must be the ones after Aryana. I can hear them downstairs in the hall. I’m looking for the remote control to turn off the alarm—” The anxious whisper broke off suddenly.

  Steve recognized with grim incredulity the firecracker spat punctuating the wail of the alarm.

  “They’re shooting! I have to get downstairs to the women and children.”

  “No! Stay locked in your room. Your tenants will know to do the same. They’ll have been through this kind of thing before. We’ll be there in less than five. And don’t turn off the alarm. You want to keep them off-balance.”

  Men were already boiling out of bunk beds into the hall. Mac and Phil were among the first. Rick, Ian, and McDuff of his primary team were all on night shift, but when Steve spotted Bones emerging from a dormitory, he tossed the lanky cowboy a set of car keys.

  “We’ve got a situation, so let’s move. Bones, you’re my wheels. Mac, you take the Humvee. Phil, there were shots fired so plan for casualties.”

  Steve didn’t need to give instructions as they divided themselves between the CS Suburban and a Humvee whose wheel Mac had taken. Phil hefted his medic pack into the Suburban. Bones had the accelerator floored before the Guatemalan guards had the gate open.

  The streets were empty, and Bones continu
ed accelerating, slamming the brakes only as they reached the checkpoint. Steve leaned out the window to shout to the Gurkha sentry as he hurried to lift the boom. By now the alarm was having its effect. All up and down the streets, compounds that had their own generators were turning on lights, armed guards swarming to walls and rooftops. The Suburban’s tires screeched around the corner onto the street containing the New Hope compound.

  Steve punched Redial on Amy’s number. To his relief, he could hear no more gunfire on the line or through the open window. “They’re retreating? That’s great—it’s what we want. Just stay put. We’re only a few blocks out.”

  The headlights picked up blue green walls with their new trim of barbed wire and broken glass at the next corner. And just beyond—

  They were still half a block away when the double gates of the mechanics yard burst open, followed so immediately by a truck’s massive boxy frame, its driver had clearly not bothered with a key.

  Phil spoke up from the backseat. “Steve, wasn’t that truck parked in the compound this afternoon?”

  The SUV’s headlight beams picked up a peacock motif. After lecturing Amy on internal threats, had he driven off leaving a hostile force already in place behind her defenses?

  Despite their haste, the jinga truck crew couldn’t back out too quickly without doing to its paneled sides what they’d done to the gates. The truck cab was still inside the gates, and with that alarm siren, maybe they hadn’t yet heard the approaching vehicles.

  Steve looked over at Bones. “Can you get around and cut them off?” Grabbing a Motorola hand unit from the dashboard, he radioed the Humvee. “Guys, this is our target. Don’t let them get by.”

  Bones had the accelerator to the floor again. For one breath-snatching moment, Steve could have sworn the truck’s massive rear was going to ram the SUV like a squashed bug into the opposite compound wall. Then Bones somehow had the vehicle up on a sidewalk and jouncing back down on the other side just as the jinga truck’s air brakes seized the tires to slow for the tight turn into the street. Steve could hear shouting as the occupants of the truck cab caught sight of the Humvee in a mutual glare of headlights. This time the air brakes squealed loud as the jinga truck’s getaway slammed to a complete halt.