Across the dusty street, behind high walls, was the Saudi-built Madrassa-I-Arabia, where two years later, John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” would come to study a fundamentalist brand of Islam called “Wahhabism.” Lindh, fresh from the crisp climate of Marin County, would reportedly wilt under the anvil of Waziristan’s sun, and cross the passes into Afghanistan, to continue his education at a madrassa in the mountains with a more temperate climate, a madrassa financed by another Saudi, Osama Bin Laden.
All afternoon, they drove deeper into Waziristan, while Mortenson practiced a few polite Pashto greetings the driver taught him. “It was the most stark area you could imagine, but also beautifully serene,” Mortenson says. “We were really getting to the heartland of the tribal areas and I was excited to have made it so far.” Just south of Ladha, as the sun dropped into Afghanistan, they arrived at Kot Lan-garkhel, Khan’s ancestral home. The village was just two general stores flanking a sandstone mosque and had the flyblown feel of end places the world over. A dusty piebald goat relaxed across the center of the road, its legs splayed so flat it looked like roadkill. Khan called out a greeting to men in a warehouse behind the bigger of the two shops and they told the driver to pull the car inside, where it would be safe overnight.
The scene inside the warehouse set Mortenson immediately on edge. Six Wazir men with bandoliers criss-crossed on their chests slumped on packing crates smoking hashish from a multinecked hookah. Piled against the walls, Mortenson saw stacks of bazookas, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and crates of oily new AK-47s. He noticed the whip antennas of military-grade field radios sticking up behind boxes of powdered fruit-punch-flavored Gatorade and Oil of Olay and realized he’d blundered into the stronghold of a large and well-organized smuggling operation.
Wazir, like all Pashtuns, live by the code of Pashtunwali. Badal, revenging blood feuds and defense of zan, zar, and zameen, or family, treasure, and land, are central pillars of Pashtunwali. As is nenawatay, hospitality and asylum for guests who arrive seeking help. The trick was to arrive as a guest, rather than an invader. Mortenson climbed out of the car in his ridiculous costume and set about trying to become the former, since it was too dangerous to search for another place to stay after dark.
“I used everything I’d learned in Baltistan and greeted each of the men as respectfully as I knew how,” Mortenson says. “With the few Pashto words Khan taught me on the drive down, I asked how were their families and if they were in good health.” Many of the Wazir men had fought alongside American Special Forces in their crusade to drive the Soviets from Pashtun lands in Afghanistan. Five years before B52s would begin carpet-bombing these hills, they still greeted some Americans warmly.
The scruffiest of the smugglers, who smelled as if hashish oil was seeping from his pores, offered Mortenson a mouthpiece of the hookah, which he declined as politely as possible. “I probably should have smoked some just to make friends, but I didn’t want to get any more paranoid than I already felt,” Mortenson says.
Khan and the elder of the gang, a tall man with rose-colored aviator glasses and a thick black mustache that perched, batlike, on his upper lip, talked heatedly in Pashto about what to do with the outsider for the evening. After they’d finished, the driver took a long draw from the hookah and turned to Mortenson. “Haji Mirza please to invite you his house,” he said, smoke dribbling through his teeth. The tension that had been holding Mortenson’s shoulders bunched against his tight shalwar drained away. He’d be all right now. He was a guest.
They climbed uphill for half an hour in the dark, past ripening fig trees that smelled as sweet as the hash fumes wafting off the Wazir’s clothes. The group walked silently except for the rhythmic clink of gunstock against ammunition belt. A blood-red line along the horizon was the last light fading over Afghanistan. At a hilltop compound, Haji Mirza called out, and massive wooden doors set into a twenty-foot earthen wall were unbolted from inside and swung slowly open. A wide-eyed guard studied Mortenson in the light of a kerosene lantern and looked like he’d prefer to empty his AK-47 into the foreigner, just to be on the safe side. After a harsh grunt from Haji Mirza, he stepped aside and let the entire party pass.
“Only a day’s drive from the modern world, I really felt we’d arrived in the Middle Ages,” Mortenson says. “There was no moat to cross, but I felt that way when I walked inside.” The walls were massive, and the cavernous rooms were ineffectually lit by flickering lanterns. A gun tower rose fifty feet above the courtyard so snipers could pick off anyone approaching uninvited.
Mortenson and his driver were led to a room at the center of the compound piled with carpets. By the time the traditional shin chai, green tea flavored with cardamom, arrived, the driver had slumped against a cushion, flung his leather coat over his head, and set Mortenson’s nerves rattling by settling into a phlegmy bout of snoring. Haji Mirza left to supervise the preparation of a meal, and Mortenson sipped tea in uncomfortable silence for two hours with four of his henchmen until dinner was served.
Mahnam do die, Haji Mirza announced, “dinner.” The savory smell of lamb lured Khan out from under his coat. Urbanized as he appeared, the driver still drew a dagger at the sight of roasted meat with the dozen other Wazir at the feast. Haji Mirza’s servant placed a steaming tray of Kabulipilau, rice with carrots, cloves, and raisins, on the floor next to the lamb, but the men only had eyes for the animal. They attacked it with their long daggers, stripping tender meat from the bone and cramming it into their mouths with the blades of their knives. “I thought the Balti ate meat with gusto,” Mortenson said, “but this was the most primal, barbaric meal I’ve ever been a part of. After ten minutes of tearing and grunting, the lamb was nothing but bones, and the men were burping and wiping the grease off their beards.”
The Wazir lay groaning against pillows and lit hash pipes and cigarettes. Mortenson accepted a lamb-scented cigarette from one of the Wazir’s hands and dutifully smoked it to a stub, as an honored guest should. By midnight, Mortenson’s eyelids were leaden, and one of the men rolled out a mat for him to sleep on. He hadn’t done so badly, he thought, as the tableau of turbaned men slipped in and out of focus. He’d made contact with at least one tribal elder, however hash-besotted, and tomorrow he’d press him for further introductions and begin to explore how the village felt about a school.
The shouting worked its way into Mortenson’s dream. Just before abandoning sleep, he was back in Khane, listening to Janjungpa screaming at Akhmalu about why their village needed a climbing school instead of a school for children. Then he sat up and what he saw made no sense. A pressure lamp dangled in front of his face, sending shadows lurching grotesquely up the walls. Behind the lamp, Mortenson saw the barrel of an AK-47, aimed, he realized, his consciousness ratcheting up a notch with this information, at his chest.
Behind the gun, a wild man with a matted beard and gray turban was shouting in a language he didn’t understand. It was 2:00 a.m. Mortenson had only slept for two hours, and as he struggled to understand what was happening to him, being deprived of the sleep he so badly needed bothered him more than the eight unfamiliar men pointing weapons at him and pulling him up by the arms.
They jerked him roughly to his feet and dragged him toward the door. Mortenson searched the dim room for Khan or Haji Mirza’s men, but he was quite alone with the armed strangers. Calloused hands gripped his biceps on both sides and led him out the unbolted compound doors.
Someone slipped an unrolled turban over Mortenson’s head from behind and tied it tight. “I remember thinking, ‘It’s so dark out here what could I possibly see?’” Mortenson says. They led him down a trail in the doubled darkness, pressing him to walk fast and propping him up when he stumbled over rocks in his heelless sandals. At the trailhead, a phalanx of arms guided him up into the bed of a pickup and piled in after him.
“We drove for about forty-five minutes,” Mortenson says. “I was finally fully awake and I was shivering, partly because it was cold in an
open truck in the desert. And also because now I was really afraid.” The men pressing against him argued violently in Pashto, and Mortenson assumed they were debating what to do with him. But why had they taken him in the first place? And where had Haji Mirza’s armed guards been when this lashkar, or posse, had burst in without firing a shot? The thought that these men were Mirza’s accomplices hit Mortenson like a blow to the face. Pressing against him, his abductors smelled smoky and unwashed, and each minute the pickup drove deeper into the night felt, to Mortenson, like a mile further from ever seeing his wife again.
The truck pulled off the highway, then bumped uphill along a rutted track. Mortenson felt the driver hit the brakes, and the truck turned sharply before stopping. Strong hands pulled him out onto the ground. He heard someone fumbling with a lock, then a large metal door swinging open. Mortenson stumbled over the doorframe, hands bruising his upper arms, down a hallway that echoed with their progress, and into a dark room. He heard the heavy outer door slamming shut. Then his blindfold was removed.
He was in spare, high-ceilinged room, ten feet wide and twenty long. A kerosene lantern burned on the sill of a single small window, shuttered from the outside. He turned toward the men who had brought him, telling himself not to panic, trying to marshal the presence of mind to produce some same small pleasantry, anything to start trying to win their sympathy, and saw a heavy door clicking closed behind them. Through the thick wood, he heard the dispiriting sound of a padlock snapping shut.
In a pool of darkness at the far end of the room, Mortenson saw a blanket and pad on the dirt floor. Something elemental told him sleep was a better option than pacing the room, worrying about what was to come. So he lay down on the thin pad, his feet dangling a foot over the edge, pulled a musty wool blanket over his chest, and dropped into dreamless, uninterrupted sleep.
When he opened his eyes he saw two of his abductors squatting on their heels beside his bed and daylight trickling through the slatted window. “Chai,” the nearest one said, pouring him a cup of tepid plain green tea. He sipped from a plastic mug with a show of enthusiasm, smiling at the men, while he studied them. They had the hard, winnowed look of men who’ve spent much of their life outdoors, suffering privation. Both were well into their fifties, he guessed, with beards as matted and dense as wolves’ winter coats. A deep red welt ran the width of the forehead of the one who’d served him tea. And Mortenson took it for a shrapnel wound, or the crease that marked the transit of a nearly fatal bullet. They had been mujahadeen, he decided, veterans of the Afghan guerilla war against the Soviets. But what were they now? And what were they planning to do with him?
Mortenson drained his mug of tea and mimed his desire to visit a toilet. The guards slung Kalashnikovs over their shoulders and led him out into a courtyard. The twenty-foot walls were too high for Mortenson to see any of the countryside, and he noted a guard manning the gun tower high above the far corner of the compound. The scarred man motioned toward a door with the barrel of his Kalashnikov, and Mortenson entered a stall with a squat toilet. He put his hand on the door to pull it shut, but the scarless guard held it open with his foot and walked inside with him while the other stared in from outside. “I use squat toilets with buckets of water all the time,” Mortenson says. “But to do it with two men watching. To have to, you know, clean yourself afterward while they stare at you, was nerve-wracking.”
After he’d finished, the guards jerked the barrels of their guns back the way they’d come and prodded Mortenson toward the room. He sat cross-legged on his sleeping mat and tried to make conversation. But the guards weren’t interested in trying to decode his gestures and hand signals. They took up positions by the door, smoked bowl after bowl of hashish, and ignored him.
“I began to get really depressed,” Mortenson says. “I thought, ‘This could go on for a very long time.’ And that seemed worse than just, you know, getting it over with.” With the single small window shuttered, and the lamp guttering low, the room was night-dim. Mortenson’s depression outweighed his fear and he dozed, slipping in and out of half sleep as the hours passed.
Bobbing up into consciousness, he noticed something on the floor by the end of his mat. He picked it up. It was a tattered Time magazine dated November 1979, then seventeen years out of date. Under a coverline that read “The Test of Wills,” a garish painting of a scowling Ayatollah Khomeini loomed like a banshee over an inset photograph of a defeated-looking Jimmy Carter.
Mortenson flipped through pages, limp with age, detailing the early days of the Iran Hostage Crisis. With a jolt that jarred his stomach, he confronted photos of helpless blindfolded Americans at the mercy of fanatical, taunting crowds. Had this particular Time magazine been put here as a message of some sort? Or was it a hospitable gesture, the only English reading material his hosts had on hand? He snuck a glance at the guards to see if their faces were ripe with any new meaning, but they continued talking quietly together over their hashish, still seemingly uninterested in him.
There was nothing else to do but read. Angling the pages toward the kerosene lantern, he studied a special report, in Time’s stentorian style, on the ordeal of the American hostages in Teheran. Details were provided by five female embassy secretaries and by seven black Marine guards, who were released soon after the embassy was taken. Mortenson learned that the black hostages were released at a press conference under a banner that read “Oppressed Blacks, The U.S. Government is our Common Enemy.”
Marine Sergeant Ladell Maples reported that he was forced to record statements praising the Iranian revolution and told he’d be shot if he misspoke.
Kathy Jean Gross, who spoke some Farsi, said she struck up a tenuous relationship with one of her female guards and wondered whether that led to her release.
Mortenson read how the hostages were forced to sleep on the floor with their hands and feet tied. They were untied for meals, to use the toilet, and for the smokers among them to indulge their habit. “Some of us were so desperate to be untied longer that the nonsmokers started to smoke,” Time quoted one woman, named Elizabeth Montagne.
The special report ended on what Time’s team of writers considered a powerfully ominous note: “The White House was prepared for the chilling but very real possibility that the hostages would spend their Christmas with Khomeini’s militants in the Teheran Embassy.” With the benefit of seventeen years of hindsight, Mortenson knew what journalists never suspected in November 1979—that more than two Christmases would pass before the hostages’ 444-day ordeal came to an end.
Mortenson put down the magazine. At least no one had tied him up or threatened to shoot him. Yet. Things could be worse, Mortenson thought. But 444 days in this dim room was too terrible to contemplate. He might not be able to speak Pashto, but he’d find a way to follow Kathy Jean Gross’s lead, Mortenson decided. He’d manufacture some way to communicate with these men.
After picking at a meal of dal and Kabuli pilau, Mortenson lay awake much of the second night, test-driving and rejecting various strategies. His Time magazine talked about the Iranian captors’ suspicion that some of their hostages were employed by the CIA. Could that be why he was kidnapped? Did they suspect him of being an agent sent to spy on this relatively unknown new phenomenon, the Taliban? It was possible, but with his limited language skills there was no way he could explain the work he did for Pakistan’s children, so he put persuasion aside.
Was he being held for ransom? Despite the fact that he still clung to the hope that the Wazir were simply well meaning and misunderstood, he had to admit that money might be a motive. But again, he hadn’t the Pashto to convince them how comically little cash he had. Was he abducted because he was an infidel trespassing in a fundamentalist land? Turning this over as the guards enjoyed their chemically enhanced sleep, he thought it might be likely. And thanks to a tailor, he might be able to influence his captors without speaking their language.
His second morning in the room, when the guards roused him with tea, he
was ready. “El Koran?” he said, miming a man of faith paging through a holy book. The guards understood at once, since Arabic is the language of worship for Muslims the world over. The one with the forehead scar said something in Pashto that Mortenson couldn’t decipher, but he chose to interpret that his request had been noted.
It wasn’t until the afternoon of the third day that an older man, whom Mortenson took to be the village mullah, arrived holding a dusty Koran, covered in green velvet. Mortenson thanked him in Urdu, just in case, but nothing flickered in the old man’s hooded eyes. Mortenson brought the book to his mat on the floor and performed wudu, the ritual washing when water isn’t available, before he opened it reverently.
Mortenson bent over the sacred book, pretending he was reading, quietly speaking the Koranic verses he’d learned under the eyeless gaze of a dressmaker’s dummy in Rawalpindi. The grizzled mullah nodded once, as if satisfied, and left Mortenson alone with the guards. Mortenson thought of Haji Ali, likewise illiterate in Arabic, but tenderly turning the pages of his Koran just the same, and smiled, warming himself over this ember of feeling.
He prayed five times a day when he heard the call from a nearby mosque, worshipping in the Sunni way in this Sunni land, and poring over the Koran. But if his plan was having any effect, he noted no change in the demeanor of his guards. When he wasn’t pretending to read the Koran, Mortenson turned to his Time magazine for comfort.
He’d decided to avoid the stories about the hostage crisis, noting how his head spun with anxiety after each rereading. He blotted out his surroundings for thirty minutes at a time with a fawning profile of the famous candidate who’d just declared his desire to run for president— Ronald Reagan. “It is time to stop worrying about whether someone likes us and decide we are going to be respected again in the world,” Reagan told Time’s editors, “So no dictator would ever again seize our embassy and take our people.” Under President Clinton, America’s respect in the world had steadily climbed, Mortenson thought. But how, exactly, could that help him? Even if an American diplomat could trade on that prestige to try to free him, no one even knew where he was.