‘I think we should let the negotiators play it out,’ he advised. ‘We’ve got a saying in Holland: “If the shit is up to your neck – whatever you do, don’t make waves.”’
Before they could discuss it further, the Saracen yelled at them. Although they couldn’t translate the words, they clearly understood the zipping motion he made across his mouth: he wanted silence and, when he took his prayer mat out of his saddlebag, they understood why. Dawn was breaking and it was time for the first prayer of the day.
As soon as he was finished, the Saracen picked up his AK-47, took the safety off, set it to full automatic and undid their leg manacles. One by one, their hands still cuffed, he bundled them on to the back of the horses, shoving hard on the Japanese guy’s injured arm – wounded when the outlaws did the uptake – being particularly brutal to him. Nobody was going to drag the chain on this excursion.
The first day’s travel was the easiest, but by nightfall the three prisoners were still exhausted and saddle-sore. The Saracen ordered them off the horses, manacled them by lengths of chain attached to a steel spike he had driven into the ground, and set about building a fire while they shuffled behind boulders to pee and crap.
With his back to them, he prepared a pot of tea black and sweet enough to mask the taste of the strong sedative he had added, then poured it into three mugs. Throughout the terrible day he had refused to pass the water canteens around, despite their mimed pleas, and the prisoners drank long and deep of the tea. The Saracen threw blankets down on the ground next to the fire and, within an hour, his charges, still manacled and cuffed, had all slipped into a deep and strange sleep.
The Saracen approached the woman, who was lying on her face, legs apart, one knee cocked up, and knelt beside her. With the two men passed out, there was no risk of him being disturbed, and he reached out and lowered the jeans with the missing buttons until her brief white panties were exposed.
He stared for a moment, then his hand touched her exposed buttock and slid slowly towards the softness of her inner thigh. Only at the last moment did he recall that he was a man of God and a doctor and stop himself. He turned away, breathing hard, and looked up at the starlit night. He murmured a prayer for forgiveness, took several minutes to compose himself and then opened the small roll of medical supplies which he had taken from a packhorse earlier in the night. Inside was a tube of numbing gel, a bi-pronged needle and the two remaining glass vials of smallpox vaccine that he had stolen from the facility in Syria.
During the day’s long ride he had decided that she would be the best candidate to test whether the virus could break through the vaccine and, as a result, he had to immunize her as fast as possible. He had quickly dismissed the idea of vaccinating her in the arm – he didn’t want her to be able to see the site and start asking herself what it meant – and had concluded that the point where her buttocks met would be best. She wouldn’t be able to see it and she would almost certainly believe it was a saddle-sore.
Apart from his brief encounter with temptation, the vaccination went off without difficulty, and the following morning the woman woke with a fever, a searing headache and a swollen sore on her butt. The Saracen listened as the men speculated that something might have bitten her in the night and then watched them turn and mime to him that the woman would have difficulty riding. The Saracen mimed back that it was a saddle-sore, gave them full canteens of water and placed a blanket over the woman’s saddle to cushion it for her. He even helped boost her up into the seat.
For six more days, travelling both by day and night, stopping only when he was too exhausted to carry on, the Saracen rode behind them, using a knotted rope to keep the horses, and sometimes their passengers, awake and moving.
Within twenty-four hours of the inoculation, the woman’s fever had started to diminish and, though he had no way of knowing – short of removing her jeans and seeing if there was a scar – he was confident that the vaccine had taken.
Climbing higher every hour, they took a long, looping route to avoid any human settlement and headed deep into the bleakest part of the Hindu Kush. Despite their overwhelming fatigue, the prisoners weren’t surprised at the pace the Saracen set: everybody in Afghanistan, on both sides of the kidnapping divide, knew that one of the rules of the business was that, immediately after the uptake, the merchandise had to be kept moving.
Nevertheless, understanding the reasons didn’t make the journey any easier, and by the time the Saracen arrived at his final destination, the prisoners were barely conscious from exhaustion. They raised their lolling heads – it was just after midnight – and looked at an abandoned village so remote and hidden that a mountain herdsman would have been hard pressed to find it.