“We were right in the middle of the tunnel when the radiator blew,” Mortenson says, “on an uphill curve, so traffic couldn’t see us until the last second. It was the worst place we could possibly get stuck.”
Mortenson grabbed his rucksack and fished through it for a flashlight. Then he remembered that in the rush to repack, he’d left it at the guest house in Kabul, with his laptop and cameras. Mortenson climbed out and bent over the open hood with Abdullah. And by the light of the matches that blew out in the frigid breeze swirling through the tunnel almost as soon as Abdullah lit them, Mortenson saw that the jeep’s rubber radiator hose had disintegrated.
He was wondering whether he had any duct tape to attempt a repair when, with a panicked shrill from its airhorns, a Russian Kamaz III cargo truck roared downhill, down the center of the tunnel, right toward them. There was no time to move. Mortenson braced for the collision and the truck swerved back into its lane, missing the jeep’s hood by inches and tearing off its sideview mirror.
“Let’s go!” Mortenson ordered, pushing Abdullah and Kais toward the tunnel wall. Mortenson felt the wintry air blowing harder and held his hands out toward it like a dowser, jogging flush with the tunnel wall, searching for its source. As the headlights of another truck careening toward them scraped along the tunnel’s uneven rock face, Mortenson saw a slash of blackness that he took for a door and pushed his companions through it.
“We stepped outside, into snow at the top of a mountain pass,” Mortenson says. “There was a moon, so we could see clearly enough. And I tried to get a bearing on which side of the pass we were on, so we could start hiking down.”
Then Mortenson saw the first red stone. It was almost obscured by snow, but once Mortenson spotted it, he could clearly make out the dozens of other reddish depressions stippling the white snowfield.
Afghanistan is the most heavily mined country on earth. With millions of tiny explosives buried by half a dozen different armies over decades, no one knows exactly where the patient devices lie in wait. And after a goat or a cow or a child loses its life locating them, demining teams paint rocks in the area red before they can spare the months it can take to laboriously clear them.
Kais saw the red rocks surrounding them, too, and began to panic. Mortenson held the boy’s arm, in case he was tempted to run. Abdullah, who’d had more than enough experience with mines already, pronounced the inevitable.
“Slowly, slowly,” he said, turning and retracing his steps through the snow. “We must go back inside.”
“I figured it was fifty-fifty we’d get killed in the tunnel,” Mortenson says. “But we would definitely die out there.” Kais was frozen in place, but gently, Mortenson led the boy back into the blackness.
“I don’t know what would have happened if the next vehicle wasn’t a truck, climbing slowly uphill,” Mortenson says. “But thank God it was. I jumped out in front of it to flag it down.”
Mortenson and Kais rode, wedged between the five men in the cab of the Bedford. Abdullah steered the powerless jeep as the truck pushed it uphill. “They were rough guys, smugglers,” Mortenson says, “but they seemed all right. They were taking dozens of new refrigerators up to Mazir-i-Sharif, so the truck was overloaded and we were barely moving, but that was fine with me.”
Kais stared at the men anxiously and whispered in English to Mortenson. “These the bad men,” he said. “Teef.”
“I told Kais to be quiet,” Mortenson says. “I was trying to concentrate, to use all the skills I’d acquired over a decade of working in Pakistan to get us out of there. The smugglers were Pashtun and Kais was a Tajik, so he was going to be suspicious of them no matter what. I just decided to trust them and make small talk. After a few minutes, everyone relaxed and even Kais could see they were okay, especially after they offered us a bunch of grapes.”
As they climbed to the crest of the tunnel, Mortenson crunched the juicy fruit between his teeth greedily, realizing he hadn’t eaten since breakfast the previous day and watched the back of the rented white jeep turning black as the Bedford’s grill scraped the paint from the Russian vehicle’s tailgate.
After the road pitched down toward the other side of the pass, Mortenson thanked the crew of refrigerator smugglers for the rescue and the delicious grapes, and, along with Kais, climbed back in behind Abdullah. The driver had managed to get the headlights on faintly, even with the engine off, by turning the ignition switch, and Mortenson slumped back on the cargo bench, exhausted. In Abdullah’s capable hands, they coasted silently downhill all the way to daylight.
To Taliban and Soviet troops, the Panjshir Valley, to their east, beneath mountains brushed by the gathering light, was a shadowland of suffering and death. The soldiers’ predictable progress between the gorge’s rock escarpments made them easy targets for bands of Massoud’s mujahadeen aiming rocket launchers from vantage points high above the valley floor. But to Mortenson, with dawn limning the sharp tips of the snowy peaks mauve, the distant valley looked like Shangri-La.
“I was so happy to get out of that tunnel and into the light that I hugged Abdullah so hard I almost made him crash the jeep,” Mortenson says. After his driver managed to stop just short of a roadside boulder, they climbed out to attempt a repair. As the sun rose, it became easy to see the problem—a section of radiator hose six inches long would have to be patched. Abdullah, a veteran not only of war, but of countless roadside repairs, cut away a section of the spare tire’s inner tube, wrapped it around the damaged section of hose, and secured it with a roll of duct tape that Mortenson found stuck to a package of cough drops in his rucksack.
After refilling the radiator from his precious bottles of mineral water, Mortenson was once again on his way north. It was the holy month of Ramadan, and Abdullah drove fast, hoping to reach a tea stand where they could be served breakfast before the day’s fast officially began. But by the time they reached the first settlement, a former Soviet garrison named Pol-e-Kamri, both roadside restaurants were shuttered for the day. So Mortenson shared out a bag of peanuts he had squirreled away for such an occasion, and Kais and Abdullah munched them hungrily until the sun breached the valley’s eastern wall.
After their breakfast, Abdullah left to search on foot for someone willing to sell them gas. He returned and drove the jeep up into the courtyard of a crude mud home, where he parked next to a rusting barrel. An old man shuffled out toward them, bent almost double and walking with a cane. It took him two minutes to remove the cap from the gas tank with his enfeebled hands. He began cranking the barrel’s pump himself, but as Abdullah saw how much effort the task cost him, he leaped out to take over.
While Abdullah pumped, Mortenson spoke to the old man as Kais translated from Dari, the close relative of Farsi that was the most common language in northern Afghanistan. “I used to live in the Shomali,” the man, who introduced himself as Mohammed, said, referring to the vast plain north of Kabul that had once been Afghanistan’s breadbasket. “Our land used to be a paradise. Kabulis would come to their country homes near my village on weekends, and even King Zahir Shah, blessed be his name, had a palace built nearby. In my garden, I had every kind of tree and grew even grapes and melons,” Mohammed said, his mouth, toothless except for two tusklike canines, working at the memory of his vanished delicacies.
“Once the Taliban came, it was too dangerous to stay,” he continued, “so I moved my family north of the Salang for their safety. Last spring, I returned to see if my home had survived, but at first, I couldn’t find it. I was born there as a boy and had lived in that place for seventy years, but I couldn’t recognize my own village. All the houses were destroyed. And all the crops were dead. The Taliban had burned not only our homes, but every bush and tree as well. I recognized my own garden only by the shape of a burned apricot tree’s trunk, which forked in a very peculiar way, like a human hand.” Mohammed said, wheezing with indignation at the memory.
“I can understand shooting men and bombing buildings. In a time of w
ar these things happen, as they always have. But why?” Mohammed said, putting his question not to Mortenson, but letting the unanswerable lament hang in the air between them. “Why did the Taliban have to kill our land?”
On their passage north, it became increasingly clear to Mortenson just how much killing had been done in Afghanistan, and how thoroughly not just the civilians, but the combatants, must have suffered. They passed a Soviet T-51 tank, its turret blown askew by fearsome forces, which served as a magnet for village children who climbed on top of it to play at war.
They rolled along a graveyard whose headstones were the charred carcasses of heavily armed Soviet Hind helicopters. Their crews, Mortenson thought, had been unlucky enough to fly near Massoud’s stronghold after the CIA made Stinger missiles and the training to fire them effectively available to mujahadeen leaders battling America’s Cold War enemy here, leaders like Osama Bin Laden.
Pasted to the flanks of every piece of rusting war materiel, the face of Shah Ahmed Massoud regarded their progress from posters, a secular saint of northern Afghanistan, insinuating from somewhere beyond life that these sacrifices had been necessary.
By dusk, they had passed through the towns of Khanabad and Konduz, and were approaching Taloqan, where they planned to stop for their first real meal in days, after evening prayer released them from the fast of Ramadan. Mortenson, who was due to address an important group of donors in Denver a week later, was weighing whether to press Abdullah to drive on toward Faizabad after dinner or wait for the security of daylight to proceed, when a fusillade of machine-gun fire fifty yards ahead of them forced Abdullah to slam on the brakes.
Abdullah jammed the gearshift into reverse and stomped on the gas, sending them careening backward, away from the red stream of tracer bullets pulsing through the gathering dark. But gunfire erupted behind them and Abdullah hit the brakes once again. “Come!” he commanded, pulling Kais and Mortenson out of the jeep and into a muddy ditch at the side of the road, where he pressed his companions into the oozing earth with his clawed hands. Then Abdullah raised them in a dua, beseeching Allah for protection.
“We had driven straight into a turf battle between opium smugglers,” Mortenson says. “It was trafficking time and there were always skirmishes that time of year to control the mule trains that transported the crop. They fired back and forth at each other over our heads with their Kalashnikovs, which make a real distinctive stuttering sound. I could see by the red glow of their tracer bullets that Kais was totally panicking. But Abdullah was angry. He was a real Pashtun. He lay there muttering, blaming himself for putting me, his guest, in danger.”
Mortenson lay prone in the cool mud, trying to think his way out of the firefight, but there was nothing to be done. Several new gunners joined the battle, and the intensity of fire above their heads surged, tearing the air into shreds. “I stopped thinking about escape and started thinking about my kids,” Mortenson says, “trying to imagine how Tara would explain the way I’d died to them, and wondering if they would understand what I was trying to do—how I didn’t mean to leave them, that I was trying to help kids like them over here. I decided Tara would make them understand. And that was a pretty good feeling.”
The headlights of an approaching vehicle illuminated the berms on both sides of the road where the warring squads of opium smugglers crouched, and their fire tapered off as they took cover. The truck appeared, traveling toward Taloqan, and Abdullah jumped up out of the ditch to flag it down. It was a poor vehicle, an aged pickup that listed to the side on its damaged suspension, carrying a load of freshly harvested goat hides on their way to a tannery, and Mortenson could smell the stench of putrefying flesh before it stopped.
Abdullah ran forward to the cab, as sporadic bursts of gunfire crackled from both sides of the road, then shouted toward the ditch for Kais to translate. The boy’s thin, trembling voice, speaking Dari, requested a ride for the foreigner. Abdullah called for Mortenson to come and waved frantically toward the bed of the truck. Mortenson, crouching as he’d been trained two decades earlier, ran toward him, weaving to make himself a tougher target. He jumped in the back and Abdullah threw a blanket of goat hides over Mortenson, pressing him down beneath the moist skins.
“What about you and the boy?”
“Allah will watch over us,” Abdullah said. “These Shetans shoot at each other, not us. We wait, then take the jeep back to Kabul.” Mortenson hoped his friend was right. Abdullah slapped the tailgate with his claw and the truck jolted into gear.
From his berth beneath a pile of rotting goatskins, Mortenson held his hand over his nose and watched the road behind him unwind as the rattletrap truck picked up speed. After they’d traveled half a kilometer, he saw the firefight resume. The widely spaced streams of tracers leaped across the road like ellipses. But to Mortenson, who wouldn’t learn his friends had survived until the following week, when he returned to Kabul, they looked more like question marks.
The truck rolled on through Taloqan toward Faizabad, so Mortenson did without dinner once again. The stench in the back of the truck wasn’t conducive to hunger, but eventually, rolling slowly through the night, his animal instincts won out. He thought of his peanuts, and only at that moment realized he’d left his bag in the jeep. Anxiously, Mortenson sat up and patted the pockets of his vest until he felt the outline of his passport and a brick of American dollars. Then, with a jolt, he remembered that the king’s calling card was in his abandoned bag. There was nothing to be done, he realized, sighing. He’d just have to approach Commandhan Khan without an introduction. So Mortenson wrapped his checkered headscarf over his nose and mouth and watched the truck’s passage under the starry sky.
“I was alone. I was covered in mud and goat blood. I’d lost my luggage. I didn’t speak the local language. I hadn’t had a meal for days, but I felt surprisingly good,” Mortenson says. “I felt like I had all those years earlier, riding on top of the Bedford up the Indus Gorge with my supplies for the Korphe School, having no clue what was ahead of me. My plan for the next few days was vague. And I had no idea if I’d succeed. But you know what? It wasn’t a bad feeling at all.”
The goatskin sellers dropped Mortenson at Faizabad’s Uliah Hotel. At the peak of the opium-trafficking season, all the rooms were full, so the sleepy chokidar offered Mortenson a blanket and a berth in the hall, next to thirty other sleeping men. The hotel had no running water, and Mortenson was desperate to wash the goat stink off his clothes, so he walked outside, opened the spigot on a tanker truck of water parked beside the hotel, and slopped the icy stream of water over his clothes.
“I didn’t bother trying to dry off,” Mortenson says. “I just wrapped myself in my blanket and lay down in the hotel hallway. It was about the most disgusting place to sleep you could imagine, with all these seedy opium smugglers and unemployed mujahadeen burping up a storm. But after all I’d been through I slept as well as if I’d been in a five-star hotel.”
Before four in the morning, the chokidar woke the hallway full of sleeping men with a meal. Ramadan dictated no food could be consumed after morning prayer, and Mortenson, so far beyond hunger that he had no taste for food, nonetheless joined the men, shoveling a full day’s supply of lentil curry and four flat loaves of chewy chapatti down his throat.
In the frosty predawn, the country surrounding Faizabad reminded Mortenson of Baltistan. The day to come insinuated itself along the peaks of the Great Pamir range to the north. He was in his familiar mountains again, and if he didn’t take in the details, he could almost imagine he’d returned to his second home. But the differences were unavoidable. Women were much more visibly a part of public life, moving freely along the streets, though most of them cloaked themselves within white burkhas. And the proximity to the former Soviet Republics was obvious, as gangs of heavily armed Chechens, speaking in Slavic cadences that sounded especially foreign to Mortenson’s ear, marched in businesslike fashion toward mosques for morning prayer.
With few res
ources available, Faizabad’s economy revolved around the opium trade. Raw paste was collected in bulk from the poppy fields of Badakshan, refined into heroin in the factories around Faizabad, then shipped through Central Asia to Chechnya and on to Moscow. For all their flaws, the Taliban had harshly suppressed the production of opium. And with them gone, especially in northern Afghanistan, poppy planting had resumed with a vengeance.
According to a study by Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had spiked from nearly nonexistent under the Taliban to almost four thousand tons by the end of 2003. Afghanistan by then produced two-thirds of the world’s raw material for heroin. And those opium profits, funneled back to the warlords, as they were called in the West, or commandhans, as they were known in Afghanistan, enabled them to recruit and equip formidable private militias, making the feeble central government of Hamid Karzai increasingly irrelevant the farther you traveled from Kabul.
In Badakshan, as far from Kabul as one could get in Afghanistan, absolute power resided with Commandhan Sadhar Khan. Mortenson had heard stories about Khan for years. His people spoke of him glowingly, as they still talked about his martyred comrade in the struggle against the Soviets and the Taliban, Shah Ahmed Massoud. Khan, like all commandhans, took a tariff from opium traffickers whose mule trains passed through his lands. But unlike many, he plowed the profits back into his people’s welfare. For his former fighters, he’d built a thriving bazaar and disbursed small loans so they could start businesses, helping to ease the transition from mujahid to merchant. Khan was as beloved by his people as he was feared by his rivals for the harsh judgments he was in the habit of meting out.
Sarfraz, the former Pakistani commando from Zuudkhan who had helped to protect Mortenson when the news from 9/11 arrived over his shortwave radio, had met Khan on his own less-than-legal travels in the Wakhan Corridor as a smuggler. “Is he a good man? Yes, good. But dangerous,” Sarfraz said. “If his enemy doesn’t agree to surrender and join him, he ties him between two jeeps and pulls him apart. In such a way he has become like the president of Badakshan.”