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“I told them that you are a better driver than my real driver!” Sabit told me. His secretary pouted.

Sabit grabbed the guns. I may have grown up in Montana, but I had little experience with weapons. I had fired a .22 only once before, while visiting a friend in Idaho, and I had never shot a Kalashnikov. Yet I had honed my aim on plenty of video games. Sabit told the men to set up targets. They ran out to the ridges of dirt and set up different targets—mostly clumps of dirt.

“I can’t tell what the targets are,” I said. “They all look like dirt.”

“Pay attention!” Sabit said. He ordered his lackeys to put some coins out. We sat cross-legged on the carpets. I leaned down, fired the .22 and hit a few clumps of dirt, which exploded. I was not really aiming, as I could not tell one clump from another.

“You’re not bad,” Sabit said.

We kept firing. He passed me the Kalashnikov. The kickback bruised my chest, and the first shot missed all the clumps wildly. Bang, bang, bang. Every bullet sent up a puff of dust. This was much more fun than playing video games. I traded guns with Sabit and shot the .22. A man came running up near Sabit’s fence, to our right. He started yelling in Pashto. Sabit leaped up and started running toward the man, screaming and waving his Kalashnikov. The man ran away. Sabit turned around and walked back toward me.

“He told me it wasn’t safe and it was too loud,” he said, laughing. “I threatened to kill him.”

Finally, when Sabit’s men moved a coin to a ridge about ten yards in front of me, I hit it with the .22. Not a bad shot, but much more impressive if I hadn’t been at point-blank range. Sabit decided to leave. “Come on, you’re driving.”

I managed to get us back to Kabul, where I somehow maneuvered through the free swim that passed for Kabul traffic, merging around traffic circles, avoiding donkey-pulled carts, all while trying to slow down over potholes. I dropped Sabit off and planned a lunch date the next week. His driver/secretary then drove me home. “He’s fired every driver he’s ever had,” the man told me. “Driving for him is just not possible.”

I certainly didn’t want the gig. In the following days, I focused on my real job. I worked on a story about three Americans jailed twenty months earlier for running an illegal jail for Afghans under the guise of an import-export business. The team, led by a litigious former U.S. soldier named Jack Idema once convicted of fraud in the States, had actually grabbed Afghan men off the street, accused them of being terrorists, and held them in a makeshift prison. Why? I wasn’t certain, but I believed that Idema craved the glory and embraced the messianic ideology of the anti-jihad. He was the kind of guy who would write a book and call it My War without irony, the kind of guy who thought he would be the one to bring down Osama bin Laden single-handedly, ideally using a piece of duct tape, staples, and other tricks of his tradecraft. Idema was an embarrassment for almost everyone—mainly because many people had bought his story. U.S. forces held one Afghan turned over by Idema for two months. International peacekeeping forces helped Idema carry out three raids on houses where he captured Afghans. Several Afghan officials were videotaped meeting with Idema, who many people assumed was a member of the U.S. special operations forces because he acted and dressed like one. For years, Idema had been a legend on the Kabul scene, so often at the Star Wars–like bar in the Mustafa Hotel that a cocktail was named after him, that two bullet holes in the ceiling were supposedly made by him. He was known as “Tora Bora” Jack, for his tales from 2001 and 2002 when he allegedly hunted bin Laden, which won him a starring role in Robin Moore’s book The Hunt for bin Laden. A lot of sketchy foreigners had flooded Afghanistan, but Idema was one of the sketchiest. He was known for insinuating that he was a spy. He had tried to hire Farouq to work with him, but Farouq was