Under an Afghan Sky (2 page)

“Does it hurt?” Khalid asked. I nodded, though it felt more numb than anything. He unwrapped the black scarf that was wrapped around his neck and slipped it under my right arm, tying it in a tight knot at the shoulder. My kameez was ripped and soaked in blood. Shafirgullah offered me the bottle of orange pop, and this time I reached out and accepted. I took a few sips.

“Good?” Shafirgullah asked. I nodded. He opened a box of cookies. They were sandwich-style—two vanilla wafers with chocolate cream in the middle. “Biscuit?” he offered. I took one and ate it. And then another. It must have been mid-afternoon and I’d last eaten around seven that morning—a poached egg and toast in the café at the Serena Hotel. I loved having breakfast at the Serena. There was always a buffet with fresh fruit and juices, and breads baked that morning. You could have eggs any way you wanted, and the coffee was rich and dark. I could still taste the coffee. I’d had two cups.

“Get up,” Khalid ordered suddenly.

We continued walking. The mountain was getting steeper. In the distance, I could see another village. Or maybe that was Kabul?
I really had no idea where I was in relation to the capital, or where we were going. Khalid and Shafirgullah kept looking up to the sky, and I could hear the faint rumble of airplanes.

“Do you have a GPS?” Khalid asked.

“No,” I said, “why?”

“Airplanes. They tracking us.” He led us into a ravine where the ground was covered with shale-like rocks. It was hard to walk and keep my balance. “Shh. Sit down.”

Again, we sat down. The men took their Kalashnikovs off and put them on the ground. We waited. The airplane sound got louder, then faded. The two of them started searching my knapsack again. They pulled out my wallet and this time went through all my cards.

“Credit cards,” Khalid said.

“Yes,” I told him, “but they’re only good in Canada. You can’t use them here.” He nodded and put them back in their compartments.

“Where this money is from?” He pulled out several denominations of Canadian bills.

“Canada.”

“How much is this?”

I reached out and he put the bills in my hand. I counted.

“About a hundred dollars,” I answered. He took the bills back and stuffed them in the pocket of his pants.

The men seemed convinced that I had a GPS, and they were determined to find it. Instead, they found my Nike wristwatch, which Khalid held to his ear as if to listen for the ticking. Then he took a sharp rock and smashed it into pieces. And then he smashed the pieces some more.

“That was my watch, not a GPS.” I scowled at him. He had moved on already, pulling out my camera from the bag. I had a little
Canon point-and-shoot that I’d bought—it was basically brand new—to take with me to Beijing while I was on assignment at the Summer Olympics only two months before. I watched as they took it out of its case and found the on switch.

“Camera,” Shafirgullah said, proud that he knew how to say the word in English.

They scrolled through all my pictures, asking questions. “Who is that?” “Where is this?” “What were you doing?”

Khalid pointed the camera at me, motioned to Shafirgullah to sit next to me, and took a picture of us. Then Shafirgullah picked up his gun and pointed it to my head. He said something in Pashto and laughed—and click, the pose was captured.

The two men traded places. Khalid showed Shafirgullah which button to push, and it was his turn to hold the gun to my head.

“Stop this,” I said to them, “it’s not nice.” They laughed. “And it’s not funny.”

Suddenly there was a
beep, beep, beep.
It was coming from my crotch.

“What is that?” Khalid asked. “You have GPS!”

“No,” I lied, “that’s coming from your phone.” I pointed to his pocket.

Beep, beep, beep.

“Where is that? It is your pocket! Give to me!” Khalid was angry now. I had no choice but to pull my spare phone from my pants and hand it over.

“You lie to me,” Khalid said. “You say you no have GPS.”

“I don’t. It’s a phone. I forgot I had a spare one.”

He grabbed the blue-and-white Nokia cell phone from my hand and did the same thing he had done with my other phone: he took the battery and the SIM card out and put them and the phone in his pocket.

“What else in your pocket?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“I want to see.” He stuck his hand in one pocket and then the other, and pulled out a small one-decade rosary. I’d bought it in Italy that summer when three of my girlfriends and I were in Tuscany for our friend Maureen’s wedding. It was made of rose petals, and at one time had a nice rose smell, but the scent had long worn off. I’m not super-religious but I am a practising Catholic, and I’d kept the rosary in my right pants pocket since I bought it.
Never know when you might need it, Mellissa.
Khalid threw the beads to Shafirgullah, who tossed it onto the gravel.

“Let me keep that,” I said, reaching my hand out. Shafirgullah picked it up and gave it back to me, and I put it back in my pocket.

“Get up,” Khalid ordered. He said something to Shafirgullah in Pashto and the curly-haired man pointed his gun at me, pushing me forward. We started walking—up, up, up, and over, it seemed. I assumed we were headed west, since the sun was starting to set in that direction. We hadn’t gotten very far when I heard voices in the distance.

“Shh. Stop! Sit!” Khalid ordered.

Shafirgullah and I sat down and watched as Khalid cocked his Kalashnikov and walked off.

“Biscuit?” Shafirgullah asked as he opened another box of sandwich cookies. He took four of them and handed the box to me. I took one and munched. I was more thirsty than hungry, but the bottle of orange pop was empty.

Soon, Khalid was back. After the two men exchanged a few words, Khalid took out his cell phone. He walked around until he found a signal and then made a phone call. I could vaguely hear an agitated male voice on the other end. When the call ended, Khalid made another. The second call lasted only a few seconds.

Shafirgullah pulled out the smokes again and waved the package in my direction. I said no, but Khalid took one and they both lit up.

“Get up,” he ordered, and the three of us started walking again.

The sun was really setting now, and a cool wind was blowing as we reached the top of the hill.

“You are cold?” Khalid asked me.

I nodded and he took off his large black coat, about two sizes too big for him, and put it on my shoulders. I’m on the small side, and the coat was much, much too big for me and kept slipping off. He motioned for me to put it on, and then sighed as I struggled with it. Exasperated, he grabbed my left arm and stuck it in the sleeve of the coat. My right arm was still tied up in the scarf, and he held out the right sleeve as I gingerly tucked my arm into it.

“Okay?” he asked. I nodded. We were heading downhill. The air was cool, and the sky had become an amazing canvas of pinks, purples, and blues. I could see other mountains around us and a stream to the left, and for a minute, the beauty of the rugged land made me catch my breath. There were birds flying overhead, swooping down occasionally to pick at some tall grass on the hillside.

“Where are we?” I asked. “What’s the name of this mountain?”

“You do not know,” Khalid answered. I knew he wouldn’t tell me. He didn’t want me to know where I was, or where I was going. We continued walking for another hour. Dusk had fallen, and I was starting to feel a little faint again.

“Stop here.” Khalid reached for his cell phone and made a call. More Pashto. I wished I understood it. Shafirgullah again offered me a cigarette. This time I took one. The matches were damp and he had trouble getting one to light up, going through match after match after match. Finally, I took the box from him, struck two matches together against the side of the box; both ignited. I lit all
three cigarettes and passed the men theirs. I took a drag of mine and felt a head rush.

It had been more than a year since I’d smoked a cigarette. During my first stint in Afghanistan, we had gone off the main base at Kandahar Airfield to camp out at Ma’sum Ghar, one of the forward operating bases. It was about fifty degrees Celsius at the time, and the tent we were sleeping and working in had no air conditioning. There was no breeze, and the air hung heavy over and inside the tent. My cameraman, Sat Nandlall, had started smoking as soon as he arrived in Afghanistan, and now he and Richard Johnson, an artist/photographer for the
National Post,
were basically chain-smoking in the tent while we waited to head out on operations with the Canadian soldiers. I vowed I wouldn’t start. Besides the obvious reasons, I didn’t want to start smoking because I’m a runner, and it hampers my ability to run long distances. The second-hand smoke in the hot tent was so bad that it drove me out, and so I went to hang out with the soldiers in the common tent across the way. That tent was at least open.

It turned out that all the soldiers smoked—or at least the ones I was sitting with. One of them offered me a cigarette and that was it. I smoked like a chimney during my six weeks in Afghanistan and then stopped as soon as I got on the flight back to Canada. I hadn’t had a puff since.

We were smoking the last puffs of our cigarettes when Shafirgullah pulled out another.

“Why are we stopped here?” I asked.

“We waiting,” Khalid answered.

“For what?”

“You like motorcycle?” he asked.

“What?” I wasn’t sure what he was asking.

“Motor-cycle,” he enunciated, so I might understand better. “You ride?”

“I have before. Why?” I replied.

“We wait. Motorcycle.”

I didn’t understand. “Where are you taking me?”

“We go to my home,” he said. “It is nice place. You will like.”

I asked him if had family there—a mother? A father?

“My girlfriend there.”

“Your girlfriend,” I repeated.

He nodded and smiled. “I not kill you. We just want money.” Of course they wanted money. I knew how this worked.

“How much money you want?” I asked. I was beginning to speak like they did—in broken English.

Khalid lit another cigarette. “Two people. Last two people we take. They from Germany and Britain. We get… how you say… ten hundred—”

“Ten hundred?” I asked.

He was trying to do the math in his head. “Ten thousand hundred…”

He pulled out my notebook from my knapsack. He wrote a one, and five zeros after it: 100 000.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” I said.

“Yes. Each one,” he replied.

“That is what you want for me,” I asked, “a hundred thousand dollars?” My heart sank. The idea of my network or someone having to negotiate with these guys didn’t sit well with me. I’d heard of hostage-takers demanding millions from other governments and organizations.

Khalid looked at me closely, as if studying my face. “No, for you, maybe we ask two. Two hundred thousand.”

“But you won’t kill me?” I wanted to be sure.

“No, I no kill you.”

“Promise?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Shake my hand. Promise.” I reached out my hand. He took it and held it firmly.

“I no kill you. I promise you.”

I hung onto his hand for a second longer to make sure he had shaken on his promise, then reached for another cigarette. Shafirgullah, who had been fixated on his cell phone and was text-messaging on it during this entire exchange, took a smoke out of the package and handed it to me, along with the matches.

I lit it and inhaled deeply. The nicotine must have emboldened me. I asked Khalid if I could use his phone.

“Who you want to call?” Khalid asked in reply.

“My friend.”

“Why?”

“To let him know I am okay. He will be worried about me.”

“It is a boyfriend?”

“Yes. Just one call. He will be worried.”

Khalid and Shafirgullah conferred in Pashto for a minute.

“Okay, one call.”

Khalid reassembled my phone and handed it over to me. It was the phone I had hidden and that had beeped earlier. Now I saw that there was a text message. It was from Paul. Paul Workman, the CTV correspondent with whom I’d developed a close bond since we met in Kandahar the year before. “What can you tell me?” it read. I knew then that he knew what had happened to me. With trembling fingers, I pulled up his number on speed dial. It rang twice.

“Hi, it’s Paul.”

“Hi, P. It’s me. I’m okay, don’t worry, I’m okay.”

“Where are you?”

Khalid motioned to me. “Tell them you are with the Taliban.”

“I’m with the Taliban,” I said into the phone. “But I am okay.”

“Oh, Mellissa.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine.”

Paul asked me if I had any idea where I was, and if my captors were listening in.

“Yes, they’re listening. They are treating me well. I’m being looked after by a very nice man. His name is Khalid. He wants to speak to you.”

At that moment, Khalid took the phone from me. “Hello. Everything is okay. She is with us. We looking after her.” Suddenly he looked spooked and abruptly ended the call. He took the phone apart again and put it in his breast pocket.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I hated that I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye. I couldn’t imagine what was going through Paul’s mind.

He pointed up to the sky. “Planes. They are tracking us.”
What paranoia,
I thought. I could hear the faint noise of an airplane flying somewhere, but it was nowhere near us. The sound faded after a few minutes.

“I never got to say goodbye to him,” I said. “Can I make one more call?”

“No, enough,” he replied.

“Please? One more call. Just to finish and say bye. Please?”

Khalid looked at me and sighed. He reached into his pocket and took out the components of my phone. Battery, SIM card, back cover. He handed them and the phone back to me. I dialed Paul’s number again.

“Hello, it’s Paul.”

“Hi, it’s me again. I’m just calling to say goodbye.”

“What?!”

“I didn’t get to say bye before. I’m okay. They’re treating me well. Don’t worry. They just want money.”

“How much money? Ask them, where do we send the money?” Paul said. The line was crackly. But I was surprised that there was even cell phone service where we were—it was Afghanistan, after all, and we were in the hills.