I Am Pilgrim(92)

Satisfied that they were properly secured, the Saracen approached them and lifted the woman’s robe in order to examine her more closely. Underneath, he saw that her cotton shirt was crumpled and ripped and her jeans had lost the buttons at the fly. He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her on the trip – the outlaws who abducted her might have been devout Muslims, but they were also men.

Her tattered shirt barely covered her belly and the Saracen, being a doctor, guessed from the sight of it that she was about four months pregnant. A different man – a less religious and a more humane man – might have been affected by it. But not the Saracen: the prisoners weren’t people to him, they were a gift from God.

He turned and saw, hanging on the steel mount that had once supported a pair of Soviet field binoculars, that a package containing not only the keys to their manacles but their passports and wallets had been left for him.

As the gagged prisoners watched, he opened the documents and learned that the woman was Italian, twenty-eight years old, unmarried, an aid worker with WorldVision. He guessed that she had been grabbed while on one of her field trips, probably betrayed by the people she was trying to help.

He turned to the back of the woman’s passport and looked at the photograph. Though nobody would have known it from her filthy state, it showed she was a pretty woman: long, dark hair, a ready smile, deep-green eyes. Those eyes didn’t leave the Saracen’s face, trying to communicate, pleading, but he ignored them and turned his attention to the men.

The younger of them was Japanese. In his mid-twenties, he sported spiky hair and a barbed-wire tattoo around one muscular forearm. The Saracen had seen enough of popular culture in Lebanon to know that the man would be considered hip or cool. He disliked him instantly. According to his documents, he was a freelance sound-recordist. In light of the dangers in Afghanistan and the voracious demand of the 24-hour news channels, he was probably making a fortune, which would explain the four thousand dollars and the two small foils of cocaine tucked in the back of his wallet.

The guy shackled beside him – the oldest and calmest of them all – was a Dutch engineer. His book said he was forty-six, and the photos in his wallet revealed he was the father of three teenage kids. The visas indicated he had made a career out of hardship postings – Nigeria, Iraq, Bosnia, Kuwait – and survived them all. Not this time, Insha’Allah, the Saracen thought.

He looked at them all again. Though his face didn’t show it, he was delighted: they were physically strong and his medical eye told him they were all in good health. If his home-made virus could kill them, it could kill anyone.

There was one other piece of good news: given their situation, they were relatively calm and he guessed that the tribesmen had told them they were a commodity in a well-worn financial transaction. Apart from opium poppies and hemp plants, kidnappings for ransom had become about the only growth industry in Afghanistan. The outlaws would have told the victims that, as long as they behaved properly and their employers knew how to play the game, no harm would come to them. A couple of weeks of living rough, then they would be back in their air-conditioned compounds, their employers would be a few hundred thousand dollars lighter, and a group of villages with no running water or means of support would have enough to live on for another ten years.

The Saracen took the gags out of their mouths and threw them three water bottles. They had barely finished drinking before they started trying to communicate with him. Because English was the only language the three prisoners had in common, they tried it first. The Saracen shrugged, feigning that he had no idea what they were saying. Having had no success, the woman tried the few bits of Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, she had picked up while working there. After that it was Dari, the most common of the Afghan languages, but the three prisoners’ pronunciation was so bad and their vocabulary so limited even they had no idea what they would have said had he replied.

Instead he spoke to them fast in Arabic, and now it was their turn to look confused. With seemingly no hope of communication, the Saracen turned and walked into the bunkhouse. By the time he brought the horses out, the three prisoners were speaking softly to one another in English, their discussion confirming what the Saracen had guessed: they were certain they had been abducted for ransom. The Japanese hipster even suggested they try to drag the chain in order to give the AWAC overflights, or whatever other means were being employed, the best chance of finding them.

The Dutch engineer had been watching the Saracen, and he wasn’t convinced he was just a lowly escort. There was something in his economy of movement, the coiled energy, that made the Dutchman think it wouldn’t be wise to toy with him. He’d seen the same quality in the battle-hardened guerillas in Kosovo, the toughest men he had ever known.