The Company

  Ibrahim, a moody man who could explode in rage if he thought Islam was being mocked, spit out, “What do you Westerners know of onions? Here everyone has suffered, and deeply, at one time or another.”

  Hoping to draw biographical details out of Ibrahim, Anthony asked, “Are you speaking from personal experience?”

  His eyes clouding over, Ibrahim stared out a window; clearly the story was distressing to him. “It was in the middle seventies,” he recounted. “The Iranian SAVAK arrested me when I was transiting Tehran in the mistaken belief that I worked for Iraqi intelligence. This was before the start of the Iran-Iraq war when tension between the intelligence services ran high. The terrible part was that I did not know the answers to their questions so I was powerless to stop the torture, which lasted for three days and three nights. There are still moments when I feel the pliers biting into the nerves on my right arm and the pain shooting to my brain, and I must clamp my lips shut to keep from screaming.” Beads of sweat materialized on Ibrahim’s upper lip as he sipped nabidth from a tin cup. “I live with the memory of searing pain,” he continued. Ibrahim retreated into himself for some time. Then, almost as if he were talking to himself, he picked up the thread of the story. “Believe me, I do not hold it against the Iranians. In their place I would have done the same. I have been in their place, here in Afghanistan, and I have done the same. When I convinced the SAVAK of my innocence they again became my comrades in the struggle against imperialism and secularism.”

  A thin boy who had lost a leg to a mine hobbled in on one crude wooden crutch deftly balancing a straw tray filled with small cups of green tea. Ibrahim distributed the cups and sat down cross-legged on a frayed mat to drink one himself. From high above the hamlet came the whine of jet engines. A mujaheddin darted into the room and reported something to Ibrahim. He muttered an order and his men quickly extinguished all their gas lamps and candles, and the small fire in the chimney. From another valley came the dull thud of exploding bombs. In the darkness Ibrahim murmured a Koranic verse. From the corners of the room, some of the fighters joined in.

  On the evening of the tenth day of the journey, Ibrahim led his band and the two prisoners to the edge of a riverbed that cut through a valley. A rusted Soviet tank lay on its side, half submerged in the water. In twos and threes, the mujaheddin crossed the gushing torrent in a bamboo cage suspended from a thick wire and tugged across by hand. Maria clutched Anthony’s arm as the two of them were pulled over the raging river. Once on the other side, Ibrahim set out in the pale light cast by a quarter moon, clawing up steep tracks filled with the droppings of mountain goats. After hours of relentless climbing they reached a narrow gorge at the entrance to a long canyon. Steep cliffs on either side had been dynamited so that the only way into and out of the canyon was on foot. Inside the gorge, the trail widened and the terrain flattened out. Hamlets of one-story stone houses lay half-hidden in the tangle of vines that grew over the slate roofs. Vintage anti-aircraft cannon covered with camouflage netting could be seen in the ruins of a mosque and the courtyard of a stable. In the pre-dawn murkiness men holding gas lamps emerged from doorways to wave scarfs at Ibrahim. The Pashtun headman of one hamlet buttoned a Soviet military tunic over his Afghan shirt, buckled on an artificial leg and hobbled over to shake hands with the mujaheddin as they passed in single file. “Your courage is a pearl,” he intoned to each. Further up the trail, the group reached a mud-walled compound with a minaret rising from a mosque in the middle and a line of mud-brick houses planted with their backs against a sheer cliff. Smoke spiraled up from chimneys, almost as if Ibrahim and his warriors were expected. A young woman appeared at the doorway of one of the houses. When Ibrahim called to her, she lowered her eyes and bowed to him from the waist. Two small children peeked from behind her skirt.

  “We are arrived at Yathrib,” Ibrahim informed his prisoners.

  Lighting a gas lamp, Ibrahim led Anthony and Maria up to an attic prison. “This will be your home until the Americans agree to deliver missiles in exchange for your freedom. Food, tea, drinking and washing water will be brought to you daily. The ceramic bowl behind the curtain in the corner is to be used as a toilet. You will lack for nothing.”

  “Except freedom,” Maria said scornfully.

  Ibrahim ignored the comment. “For one hour in the morning and another in the afternoon you will be permitted to walk in the compound. Guards will accompany you at a distance. If you hear the wail of a hand-cranked siren, it means Russian planes or helicopters have been spotted so you must take shelter. I wish you a good night’s sleep.” He looked hard at Anthony. “Tomorrow, God willing, we will begin your interrogation,” he said softly. “Prepare yourself.” With that Ibrahim backed down the ladder, lowering the trapdoor behind him.

  Anthony looked across the room at his companion. Her collarless shirt was soaked with sweat and plastered against her torso just enough for him to make out several very spare ribs. Maria removed her boots and stretched her feet straight out and, unbuttoning the top two buttons of her shirt, absently began to massage the swell of a breast. Shivering in her damp clothes, she shed for the first time the tough exterior that she had gone to great pains to project—the ballsy female journalist who could hold her own in a male-dominated profession. Out of the blue she said, “We’re fooling ourselves if we think we’re going to get out of this alive.”

  Anthony watched the flame dancing at the end of the wick in the gas lamp. The truth was that the mention of an interrogation had shaken him. He remembered Ibrahim’s account of being tortured by the Iranian intelligence service. In their place I would have done the same. I have been in their place, here in Afghanistan, and I have done the same. Anthony wondered how much pain he could stand before he cracked; before he admitted to being a CIA officer and told them what he knew about the Company’s operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  Glancing again at Maria, he saw how miserable she was and tried to raise her spirits. “Man is a victim of dope in the incurable form of hope,” he recited. He smiled in embarrassment. “I had a lit teacher at Cornell who made us memorize Ogden Nash—he said it would come in handy when we were trying to impress girls.”

  She smiled weakly. “Are you trying to impress me, Anthony?”

  He shrugged.

  She shrugged back. “If we ever get out of here—“

  “Not if. When. When we get out of here.”

  “When we get out of here we’ll start from scratch. You’ll quote Ogden Nash and I’ll be suitably impressed, and we’ll see where it goes.”

  As Ibrahim made his way across the compound toward the two prisoners the next morning, a beardless young man wearing a dirty white skullcap fell in behind him. He had a dagger wedged into the waistband of his trousers and an AK-47 with spare clips taped to the stock slung from a shoulder. A yellow canary, one of its legs attached to a short leash, perched on his forearm.

  Anthony had noticed the lean young man hovering near Ibrahim on the long trek across the mountains and had nicknamed him the Shadow. “Why do you need a bodyguard in your own village?” he asked him now.

  “He is not here to guard my body,” Ibrahim replied, “He is here to make sure that it does not fall alive into the hands of my enemies.” He gestured with a toss of his head. “Come with me.”

  Maria and Anthony exchanged anxious looks. He tried to smile, then turned to follow Ibrahim and his Shadow toward the low building at the far end of the compound. Pushing through a narrow door, he found himself in a whitewashed room furnished with a long and narrow wooden table and two chairs. A 1979 Disneyland calendar was tacked to one wall. Three of Ibrahim’s young fighters, scarves pulled across their faces so that only their eyes were visible, leaned impassively against the walls. Ibrahim’s Shadow closed the door and stood with his back to it next to a pail filled with snow that had been brought down from the mountains earlier that morning. Ibrahim settled onto one of the chairs and motioned for Anthony to take the other one. “Do you have any distinguis
hing marks on your body?” he asked his prisoner.

  “That’s a hell of a question.”

  “Answer it. Do you have any tattoos or scars from accidents or operations or birth marks?”

  Anthony assumed Ibrahim wanted to be able to prove to the world that the diplomat named McAuliffe was really in his custody. “No tattoos. No scars. I have a birthmark—a dark welt in the form of a small cross on the little toe of my right foot.”

  “Show me.”

  Anthony stripped off his sock and Clark boot and held up his foot.

  Ibrahim leaned over the table to look at it. “That will serve nicely. We are going to amputate the toe and have it delivered to your American Central Intelligence Agency in Kabul.”

  The blood drained from Anthony’s lips. “You’re making a bad mistake,” he breathed. “I’m not CIA. I’m a diplomat—“

  Ibrahim’s Shadow drew the razor-edged dagger from his waistband and approached the table. Two of the warriors came up behind the prisoner and pinned his arms against their stomachs.

  Anthony started to panic. “What happened to that famous Pashtun moral code you told us about?” he cried.

  Ibrahim said, “It is because of the moral code that we brought snow down from the heights. We do not have anesthetics so we will numb your toe with snow. That’s how we amputate the limbs of wounded fighters. You will feel little pain.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t do this—“

  “For God’s sake, we must,” Ibrahim said.

  The last of the warriors brought over the pail and jammed Anthony’s bare foot into the snow. Ibrahim came around the table. “Believe me, when the thing is accomplished you will feel proud of it. I counsel you not to struggle against the inevitable—it will only make the amputation more difficult for us and for you.”

  Anthony whispered hoarsely, “Don’t hold me down.”

  Ibrahim regarded his prisoner, then nodded at the two warriors pinning his arms. Very slowly, very carefully, they loosened their grip. Anthony filled his lungs with air. Tears brimmed in his eyes as he turned away and bit hard on his sleeve. When it was over Ibrahim himself pressed a cloth to the open wound to stop the bleeding. “El-hamdou lillah,” he said. “You could be Muslim.”

  Five days later, with Anthony hobbling on a makeshift crutch next to Maria during one of their morning walks, Ibrahim’s prisoners witnessed the arrival of the gun merchant. A swarthy-skinned man with a long pointed beard, he wore opaque aviator’s sunglasses and a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap with a handkerchief hanging off the back to protect his neck from the sun. He and two black Bedouins drove a line of mules charged with long wooden crates through the main gate and began unpacking their cargo onto woven mats. In short order they had set out rows of Chinese AK-47 assault rifles, American World War II bazookas, German Schmeisser MP-40s, as well as piles of green anti-tank mines with American designations stenciled on them. As the morning wore on, mujaheddin drifted up to the compound from the hamlets spread out below it and began to inspect the weapons. Some of the younger fighters looked as if they had stumbled into a candy store. Calling to his friends, a teenager wearing camouflage fatigues rammed a clip into an AK-47 and test fired a burst at some tin cans atop the back wall, causing the mules to bray in fright. Ibrahim, followed by his everpresent bodyguard, appeared from one of the stone houses set against the cliff to talk with the gun merchant. Tea was brought and they settled onto a mat to haggle over the prices, and the currency in which they would be paid. The two men came to an agreement and shook hands on it. Rising to his feet, the gun merchant noticed the two prisoners watching from a distance and apparently asked his host about them. Ibrahim looked across the compound, then said something that caused the gun merchant to turn his head in Anthony’s direction and spit in the dirt.

  “I don’t think Ibrahim’s visitor likes us,” Anthony told Maria.

  “He’s a Falasha, judging from the look of him,” Maria said. “I wonder what an Ethiopian Jew is doing so far from home.”

  The delicate woman who spoke English with a thick Eastern European accent kept Eugene on the phone as long as she dared. He had to understand, she said, that his calls were moments of grace in an otherwise bleak existence. Aside from her friend, Silvester, she was utterly alone in the world. When the phone rang and Eugene’s voice came over the line, well, it was as if the sun had appeared for a fraction of a second in a densely overcast sky and you had to squint to keep the light from hurting your eyes. Oh, dear, no, she didn’t mind having to find another furnished apartment after every phone call. Over the years she had more or less become used to the routine. And she understood that, to protect Eugene, it was important for him never to reach her at the same number twice. Thank you for asking, yes, she was well enough, all things considered…What she meant by that was: considering her age and the dizzy spells and nausea that followed the radiation treatments and her miserable digestion and of course the tumor eating away at her colon, though the doctors swore to her that cancers progressed very slowly in old people…Oh, she remembered back to some hazy past when men would say she was exceptionally attractive, but she no longer recognized herself when she looked at the curling sepia photographs in the album—her hair had turned the color of cement, her eyes had receded into her skull, she had actually grown shorter. She didn’t at all mind his asking; quite the contrary, Eugene was the only one to take a personal interest in her…Please don’t misunderstand, she didn’t expect medals but it would not have been out of place, considering the decades of loyal service, for someone to drop a tiny word of appreciation from time to time…Alas, yes, she supposed they must get down to business…She had been instructed to inform Eugene that his mentor required him to organize a face-to-face meeting with SASHA…the sooner, the better…He would discover why when he retrieved the material left in SILKWORM one seven…Oh, how she hoped against hope that he would take care of himself…Please don’t hang down yet, there was one more thing. She knew it was out of the realm of possibility but she would have liked to meet him once, just once, only once; would have liked to kiss him on the forehead the way she had kissed her son before the Nazi swines hauled him off to the death camp…Eugene would have to excuse her, she certainly hadn’t intended to cry…He would! Why, they could meet in a drug store late at night and take tea together at the counter…Oh, dear child, if such a thing could be organized she would be eternally grateful…It could be a week or so before she found a suitable furnished apartment so he could ring back at this number…She would sit next to the phone waiting for him to call…Yes, yes, goodbye, my dear.

  They came to the rendezvous marked as

  in the tic-tac-toe code from opposite directions and met just off the Mall between 9th and 10th Streets under the statue of Robert F. Kennedy. “There were people in the Company who broke out Champagne and celebrated when he was gunned down,” SASHA recalled, gazing up at Bobby, who had been assassinated by a Palestinian in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel just after winning the 1968 California Democratic Presidential primary.

  “You knew him, didn’t you?” Eugene asked.

  The two men turned their backs on the statue and on the woman who was setting out the skeletons of fish on newspaper for the wild cats in the neighborhood, and strolled down 10th street toward the Mall. “I don’t think anybody knew him,” SASHA said. “He seemed to step into different roles at different periods of his life. First he was Black Robert, Jack Kennedy’s hatchet man. When JFK was assassinated he became the mournful patriarch of the Kennedy clan. When he finally threw his hat into the ring and ran for President, he turned into an ardent defender of the underprivileged.”

  “From Black Robert to Saint Bobby,” Eugene said.

  SASHA eyed his cutout. “What’s your secret, Eugene? You don’t seem to grow older.”

  “It’s the adrenalin that runs through your veins when you live the way we do,” Eugene joked. “Every morning I wonder if I’ll sleep in my bed that night or on a bunk in a cell.”

/>   “As long as we’re vigilant, as long as our tradecraft is meticulous, we’ll be fine,” SASHA assured him. “What Starik has to tell me must be pretty important for you take the trouble—“

  “You mean the risk.”

  SASHA smiled faintly. “—for you to take the risk of personally meeting me.”

  “It is.” Eugene had deciphered the document he’d retrieved from SILKWORM one seven, and then spent a long time trying to figure out how to come at the subject with SASHA. “It’s about your recent replies to Starik’s query of September twenty-second—you left messages in dead drops at the end of September and the first week of October. Comrade Chairman Andropov is absolutely positive that he has analyzed the situation correctly. He was furious when Starik passed on your reports—he even went so far as to suggest that you had been turned by the CIA and were feeding Moscow Centre disinformation. That was the only explanation he could see for your failing to confirm that ABLE ARCHER 83 is covering an American first strike.”