Authors: Jeanette Windle
Tags: #FICTION / Christian / General, #FICTION / Religious
Veiled Freedom
Praise for
V
eiled
F
reedom
“Readers will be enthralled with this penetrating look at Afghanistan and its many mysteries. . . . Windle is a top-notch storyteller.”
Publishers Weekly
“Windle masterfully blends hard-hitting facts with a story full of intrigue and a dash of romance.”
Romantic Times, 4½-star review
“Jeanette Windle is the kind of storyteller other writers want to be when they grow up. If you've never been to Afghanistan,
Veiled Freedom
will put you there so vividly. But be prepared: this novel pulls no punchesâyour comfortable sense of American cultural logic will be stripped away as Windle exposes the thorny issues that plague this ancient land. The result is a brutal but fascinating portrayal of life as it really is in this crossroads between east and west, and nobody can describe it like Jeanette Windle. She's like a painter so skilled that her artwork is indistinguishable from a photograph. It's fiction, but just barely.”
Chuck Holton, former U.S. Army Black Beret; author of the Task Force Valor series and of
American Heroes
with Oliver North.
“Windle's storytelling in
Veiled Freedom
is so vivid that I could practically feel the dust from Kabul's streets on my skin as I turned the pages. Windle's use of intricate details, intriguing characters, and important themes teases our imaginations and makes us wrestle with profound spiritual truths. This book is for the casual reader and the deep thinker alike.”
Abdu Murray, author of
Apocalypse Later: Why the Gospel of Peace Must Trump the Politics of Prophecy in the Middle East
and president of Aletheia International.
“The technical aspects of the book are spot-on. Jeanette has the gift of making the complex cultural, political, and personal issues understandable and believable. She really understands how the multitude of subplots that are the central Asian states make life hard for both the citizenry and those trying to help.”
Joe DeCree, retired Army Special Forces major & private security contractor. Completed two combat tours with the Army in Kosovo and Afghanistan and one as a PSD operative in Iraq.
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Veiled Freedom
Copyright © 2009 by Jeanette Windle. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph of woman copyright © by Desmond Boylan/Reuters/Corbis. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph of city copyright © by Kabul Media, www.kabulmedia.com. All rights reserved.
Cover design element copyright © by Shutterstock. All rights reserved.
Interior design element copyright © by Olga Rutko. All rights reserved
Author photo copyright © by Hirtech Camera Center. All rights reserved.
Designed by Beth Sparkman
Edited by Lorie Popp
Published in association with The Knight Agency, 570 East Avenue, Madison, GA 30650.
Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION
®
. NIV
®
. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Windle, Jeanette.
Veiled freedom / J. M. Windle.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4143-1475-4 (sc : alk. paper) 1. AfghanistanâFiction. I. Title.
PS3573.I5172V45 2009
813´.54âdc22 2009000014
To those I hold dearâ
you know who you areâ
who offer yourselves unhesitatingly
as hands and feet and heart
of Isa Masih
to shine the light of his love
into dark places.
“You will know the truth,
and the truth
will set you free.”
âIsa Masih
Table of Contents
Kabul
November 13, 2001
“Land of the free and
the home of the brave
.
”
The radio's static-spattered fanfare filtered through the compound wall. Beyond its shattered gate, a trio of small boys kicked a bundle of knotted rags around the dirt courtyard. Had they any idea those foreign harmonies were paying homage to their country's latest invaders?
Or liberators, if the rumors and the pirated satellite television broadcasts were true.
Scrambling the final meters to the top of the hill, he stood against a chill wind that tugged at his light wool vest and baggy tunic and trousers. Bracing himself, he made a slow, stunned revolution.
From this windswept knoll, war's demolition stretched as far as his eye could see. Bombs and rockets had left only heaps of mud-brick hovels and compound walls. The front of an apartment complex was sheared off, exposing the cement cubicles of living quarters. The collapse of an office building left its floors layered like a stack of
naan
. Rubble and broken pavement turned the streets into obstacle courses.
But it wasn't the devastation that held him spellbound. So it was all trueâthe foreign newscasts, the exultant summons that had brought him back, his father's dream. Kabul was free!
The proof was in the dancing crowds below. After five long years of silence, Hindi pop and Persian ballads drifted up the hillside. Atop a bombed-out bus, a group of young men gyrated wildly. Even a handful of women in blue burqas swayed to the rhythms as they bravely crossed the street with no male escort in sight.
Nor was blue the only color making a comeback against winter's brown. To his far right, a yellow wing fluttered skyward. There was an orange one. A red. Scrambling on top of a broken-down tank, two boys tossed aloft a blotch of green and purple.
Kites had returned to the skies above Kabul.
Another tank moved slowly down the boulevard. Behind it came a parade of pickups and army jeeps, machine guns mounted in their beds. A staccato rat-tat-tat momentarily drowned out the music. But the gunfire was celebratory. The dancing mobs were not shrinking back but tossing flowers and confetti, screaming their elation above the noise.
He shouted with them, the fierceness of his response catching him by surprise. He'd hardly thought of this place in long years, the warm, fertile plains of Pakistan far more a home now than this barren wasteland. Yet joy welled up to squeeze his chest, the watering of his eyes no longer from wind and dust.
“Land of the free and the home of the brave.”
Down the hillside behind him, the radio blasted a Dari-language commentary. But the words of that foreign music still played in his mind. The sacred anthem his American instructors had taught their small English-language students in the Pakistani refugee camps.
As they'd taught of their homeland, America. A land where brave and honorable warriors guarded peace-loving and welcoming citizens who lived freely among great cities of shining towers and immense wealth. A land of wheat and rice and fruit trees, grape arbors and herds of livestock that offered to all an abundance of food. The very paradise the Quran promised to the faithful.
And Afghanistan? Land of his birth, his home? Brave, yes. No one had ever questioned the courage of the Afghan tribes. Not the Americans and Russians who were history's most recent invaders. Nor in turn the British, Mongols, Persians, Arabs, all the way back to Alexander the Great, whose armies were the first to learn that Afghanistan could be taken with enough weapons and spilled blood but never held.