Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [12]
She screwed up her face. “I think it’s really disturbing that we’re all running up the mountain and we don’t know where we’re going,” she yelled.
She was right, of course. It was disturbing, random, and emblematic. But at the time, each of us squinted at the other as if she were dim-witted.
She stopped running. I kept going, chasing my curiosity up the hill. But when I got to the top, there was nothing to see. We were charging after ghosts.
When the end came, it came quickly. It was another bitterly cold afternoon in the mountains, and I sat listlessly on a rock, listening while the warlords squabbled. Zaman was in the middle of it all, nested in some boulders a short walk up the mountain, juggling two conversations. Languidly, he negotiated by radio with a representative from bin Laden’s encampment. In between, he argued with an enraged Hazrat Ali, who was listening in on the talks, convinced that Zaman was bungling negotiations. I watched Hazrat Ali pace in a grove of thorn trees, barking at Zaman by walkie-talkie.
Zaman had wrangled a promise out of the shadowy Al Qaeda negotiator. The fighters would crawl out of their caves and surrender at eight the next morning. Zaman kept telling Hazrat Ali that this was a fair plan, a good compromise. “That gives them time to talk,” he urged a skeptical, irritable Ali.
“Don’t give them time!” Ali exploded. “The Arabs are disagreeing! Three Arabs have three ideas!”
Zaman and Ali hated each other. After battling for supremacy for years, they were now grudging allies, forced together by mutual dependence on American money. As far as I could tell, each was more interested in outmaneuvering the other than in fulfilling any duties on behalf of America. It all comes down to this, I thought. This is the tip of the spear. These slippery, wild-eyed figures are the men fighting on behalf of my country.
Blackened tree stumps and bullet-torn car doors, detritus of war, lay strewn on the ashen hillside. Ali’s soldiers rooted busily under the trunk of a bombed-out pickup in search of salvageable parts and combed shattered bunkers looking for spare bullets. Soldiers giggled over the bodies of three dead Arabs. They had been shot to shreds by machine guns. The mujahideen thought it was hilarious.
“We want to have safe passage out of your province,” the voice of the Al Qaeda spokesman scratched through the radio.
“Your blood is our blood, your children our children, your wives our sisters. But under the present circumstances, you must leave my area or surrender.” Zaman never passed up an opening for flowery tribal flourishes.
Ali was screaming at Zaman. He thought the whole thing was a trick. “Don’t give them so much time,” he urged the other warlord. “And don’t pull out of your positions overnight.”
But Zaman’s soldiers were shivering and ravenous. “Come up and hold the line yourself,” he snapped. As daylight thinned, Zaman swept triumphantly down the rocky mountain trail. His mujahideen thronged behind him, kicking up storms of dust. Gleefully they waved at the journalists, chins high as conquering heroes.
“Don’t worry!” they shouted, skidding down on their heels. “Al Qaeda is over!”
At sunrise the next morning, Tora Bora was quiet. A warplane circled in the sky overhead, spewing white rings against a vibrant blue. Silence swallowed the mountains like some foreign fog. For the first time in days, no bombs were falling. And for the first time, we reporters couldn’t get close enough to see anything. Afghan guards had closed the roads and trails leading up the mountain. I took this to mean that the Americans were up there. The Afghans would take us anywhere, straight into the line of fire, but the Americans didn’t want to be seen. When we spoke to them, they’d pull their tribal blankets tighter around themselves and pretend they didn’t speak English.
It was still five minutes before the eight o’clock deadline when Haji Zaman’s pickup bumped its way down the mountain. I ran to the roadside and flagged him down. He rolled down the window. Tears stood