I shrugged and answered, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m in shock. It doesn’t seem real yet. Maybe it’s just a ransom gang after Craig and they’ll let the others go.”
I kept thinking that, telling myself it was true, and we sat there for hours together, not speaking, one or the other of us going for food or to the john, the other staying put, watching the tube, until the kidnappers delivered their tape and the station played it. There she was with the others, surrounded by masked men with guns. There was a statement by a man in a ski mask. After the routine condemnation of the infidel Pakistani government and their crusader allies, and the routine grievances, the murder of innocent civilians by the military forces thereof, the torture of prisoners by the authorities and the Americans, he declared that the present act was meant to provide hostages against these infamous behaviors. The captives would receive decent treatment, unlike the brothers rotting in American and Pakistani prisons, but should any more innocents be massacred by the infidels, on each day that such an event took place, one hostage would be executed. God is great! All the masked men waved their weapons and shouted this too, and the camera did a slow cruel pan across the strained and exhausted faces of all the hostages.
My father was like ice then, strangely enough; it was me who howled and cried like a baby on my father’s shoulder. And while I was crying, with the tears and snot running down my face, all I could think of was them taking her out on some hard-baked patch of ground and cutting her head off with a sword. I’d seen it done in Afghanistan more than once. The fuckers who cut people’s heads off now aren’t that good at it; it’s a lost art, one of the many things the Muslims have forgotten how to do, not like the glory days of the caliphate, when they had professionals. It turns out that beheading with a sword is harder than you would think.
My father comforted me awkwardly, like you do a child who’s bumped his nose. We’re not close. I still blame him for the way he behaved during the previous family disaster; forgiveness doesn’t come easy for me. So I pulled away from his hugs, a little abruptly, and we sat there watching the tenth rerun of that fucking tape, me thinking it was the last sight I’d ever have of my mother alive.
After a while he picked up the remote and muted the television. He said, “Will you be all right? I want to make some calls.”
“Who are you calling?”
“Well, family first. Nisar may know something, with his connections in Islamabad. We’ll see if he can find out anything that’s not for public consumption. Rukhsana too. She has sources as well, from her work. And Seyd, although I doubt I’ll get anything from him outside of the official line from ISI, especially if… no, I won’t think about that, not yet at any rate.”
I asked him what he didn’t want to think about.
“Well, you know these mujahideen groups up in Swat and Kashmir and so forth all have Inter-Services Intelligence connections. Suppose an ISI-sponsored group carried out this kidnapping?”
“But why wouldn’t that be a good thing? Seyd could help get them out.”
“Oh, Theo, I’m talking about Seyd. He’s my little brother and of course I love him, but he is a monstrously ambitious and ruthless man, who has always felt that having a famous apostate for a sister-in-law put a blot in his copybook. I don’t say he would be happy to see Sonia decapitated on television, but he would not weep bitter tears either. No, we will get no help from Seyd. My greatest hope is that he will not actively hinder plans to rescue them, if any.”
“I should go over there,” I said.
“And do what? Wander through the hills calling her name? Don’t be foolish, Theo!”
I gave him a hard look, but he stared right back at me, which was a bit of a surprise. I guess in the lives of fathers and sons there’s a moment when the kid understands his father is not some kind of god but just a guy and then he has to decide whether he likes him or not, and, if not, how he’s going to handle it. That came a little too early, in my case, and while I’ve always treated him with respect, more or less for my mother’s sake, I’ve always considered him something of a pussy, and fairly early on I arranged another father for myself, a man of unimpeachably violent barbarian credentials, every little boy’s dream.
I thought Farid would’ve crumpled under this disaster too, but he hadn’t; he was standing tall. It was me crumpling, and it pissed me off.
“You know, I have some contacts too, in the hills,” I said, snapping.
I couldn’t read the expression on his face. Shame? Sorrow? I’ve never really talked to my father about what I did between the ages of nine and seventeen, up in Afghanistan, but he knew, or could imagine it, and I know he thought it was his fault, my entire fucked-up life. So that was between us, like a big black sack of garbage stinking up the room, and there was a silence and then he looked at his wristwatch and said, “I must call now. Will you be all right?”
I said I would and he left and I turned on the sound again and flipped through the channels. After doing this for a while I learned that the group claiming responsibility was called al-Faran, which some expert commentator explained was a blowback from the Kashmiri jihad, an organization the Pakistanis had set up to give the Indian occupation grief but which had now joined with the general insurgency in the Northwest Frontier Province. The guy said that this bunch was distinguished for their media savvy and had pioneered a small but growing videotape niche market: decapitations of kidnapped Westerners. Wonderful.
The hostage tape produced a lot of media activity, mainly because of Craig, and we thought it was a good thing for us because no one was paying much attention to the other hostages. My mother’s peak of fame had been a couple of decades ago, and she had never gone in for the public intellectual business: no interviews, no talk shows, no magazine articles about the plight of women in Islam, and so forth. She hadn’t even had an author photo on her books, so the upshot was that for all anyone knew she was a regular Pakistani-American writer and no big deal, and we were anxious to keep it that way.
A senator who wanted to piss off the administration about its policies in South Asia organized a hearing about what, if anything, the government was going to do about the three-and-a-half captive Americans-Craig and some missionary couple and Mom-and they brought in a few undersecretaries who told elaborate lies-What, a rescue? Oh, shit, no, senator! We respect the territorial sovereignity of our ally Pakistan; we would never think of going in there even if we knew where they were, which we don’t-and they stood a major general up who underlined that point: there’s nothing harder than a rescue mission in hostile territory, especially with faulty intel; remember the Iran fiasco, we don’t want another one of those, oh, no.
As it happens, the unit I work for was founded right after that fiasco just so we could do shit like that on the sovereign territory of whoever, but they didn’t ask me and anyway we don’t officially exist.
Within twenty-four hours after the hostage tapes aired, we understood that as far as the Pakistanis and the Americans were concerned, the hostages were on their own. Nisar reported a stir running through the highest levels of the Pakistani government; generals had approached him in strictest confidence about moving large sums of money offshore. Everyone felt the loss of face. A party of foreigners, including an American billionaire, snatched in daylight from the heart of a district supposedly under tight army control? Questions in parliament, angry editorials from opposition papers, everyone a-tremble about what the Americans were going to do.