“A village called New York has been bombed.”
Mortenson pulled a yak-hair blanket over his shoulders, slipped on his frozen sandals, and stepped outside. Around the house, in the bitter cold before first light, he saw that Baig had posted a guard around his American guests. Faisal’s brother Alam Jan, a dashing blond-haired, blue-eyed high-altitude porter, held a Kalashnikov, covering the home’s single window. Haidar, the village mullah, stood scanning the darkness toward Afghanistan. And Sarfraz, a lean, lanky former Pakistan army commando, watched the main road for any approaching vehicles while he fiddled with the dial of his own shortwave.
Mortenson learned that Sarfraz had heard a broadcast in Uighur, one of the half dozen languages he spoke, on a Chinese channel saying two great towers had fallen. He didn’t understand what that meant, but knew that terrorists had killed many, many Americans. Now he was trying to find more news but, no matter how he spun the dial, the radio picked up only melancholy Uighur music from a station across the Chinese border in Kashgar.
Mortenson called for the satellite phone he’d bought specially for this trip, and Sarfraz, the most technically adept among them, rode off on his horse to retrieve it from his home, where he’d been learning to use it.
Faisal Baig needed no more information. With his AK-47 in one hand and the other balled into a fist by his side, he stared at the first blood-hued light brushing the tips of Afghanistan’s peaks. For years he’d seen it coming, the storm building. It would take months and millions of dollars poured into the flailing serpentine arms of the U.S. Intelligence apparatus to untangle for certain what this illiterate man who lived in the last village at the end of a dirt road, without an Internet connection or even a phone, knew instinctively.
“Your problem in New York village comes from there,” he said, snarling at the border. “From this Al Qaeda shetan,” he said, spitting toward Afghanistan, “Osama.”
The huge Russian-made MI-17 helicopter arrived at exactly 8:00 a.m., as Brigadier General Bashir had promised Mortenson it would. Bashir’s top lieutenant, Colonel Ilyas Mirza, jumped down before the rotor stopped and snapped the Americans a salute. “Dr. Greg, Mr. George, sir, reporting for duty,” he said, as army commandos leaped out of the MI-17 to form a perimeter around the Americans.
Ilyas was tall and dashing in the way Hollywood imagines its heroes. His black hair silvered precisely at the temples of his chiseled face. Otherwise he looked much like he had as a young man, when he served as one of his country’s finest combat pilots. Ilyas was also a Wazir, from Bannu, the settlement Mortenson had passed through just before his kidnapping, and the colonel’s knowledge of how Mortenson had been treated by his tribe at first made him determined to see that no further harm befell his American friend.
Faisal Baig raised his hands to Allah and performed a dua, thanking him for sending the army to protect the Americans. Packing no bag, with no idea where he was headed, he climbed into the helicopter with McCown’s family and Mortenson, just to be sure their cordon of security was unbreachable.
From the air, they called America on Mortenson’s phone, trying to keep calls short because of its forty-minute battery life. From Tara and McCown’s wife, Karen, they learned the details of the terror attacks.
Jamming the receiver’s headphone attachment deeper into his ear, Mortenson squinted at the cut-and-pasted vistas of peaks he could make out through the MI-17’s small portholes, trying to keep the phone’s antenna oriented toward the south, where satellites reflecting his wife’s voice circled.
Tara was so relieved to hear from her husband she burst into tears, telling him how much she loved him through the maddening static and delay. “I know you’re with your second family and they’ll keep you safe,” she shouted. “Finish you work and then come home to me, my love.”
McCown, who’d served in the U.S. Air Force Strategic Command, refueling B52s carrying nuclear payloads in midair, had an unusually vivid sense of the fate awaiting Afghanistan. “I know Rumsfeld and Rice and Powell all personally, so I knew we were about to go to war,” McCown says. “And I figured if that Al Qaeda bunch was behind it we were going to start bombing what was left of Afghanistan into oblivion any minute.
“If that happened, I didn’t know which way Musharraf would go. Even if he jumped in the direction of the U.S., I didn’t know if the Pakistani military would jump with him, because they had supported the Taliban. I realized we could end up hostages and I was anxious to get the hell out of Dodge.”
The flight engineer apologized that there weren’t enough headsets to go around and offered Mortenson a pair of yellow plastic ear protectors. He put them on and pressed his face to a porthole, enjoying the way the silence seemed to amplify the view. Below them, the steeply terraced hillsides of the Hunza Valley rose like a crazy quilt patched together of all known shades of green, draped over the gray elephantine flanks of stony mountainsides.
From the air, the problems of Pakistan appeared simple. There were the hanging green glaciers of Rakaposhi, splintering under a tropical sun. There, the stream carrying the offspring of the snows. Below were the villages lacking water. Mortenson squinted, following the traceries of irrigation channels carrying water to each village’s terraced fields. From this height, nurturing life and prosperity in each isolated settlement seemed simply a matter of drawing straight lines to divert water.
The intricate obstinacies of village mullahs opposed to educating girls were invisible from this altitude, Mortenson thought. As was the webwork of local politics that could ensnare the progress of a women’s vocational center or slow the construction of a school. And how could you even hope to identify the hotbeds of extremism, growing like malignancies in these vulnerable valleys, when they took such care to hide behind high walls and cloak themselves in the excuse of education?
The MI-17 touched down at the Shangri-La, an expensive fishing resort patronized by Pakistan’s generals on a lake an hour west of Skardu. In the owner’s home, where a satellite dish dragged in a snowy version of CNN, McCown spent a numbing afternoon and evening watching footage of silvery fuselages turned missiles slamming into Lower Manhattan, and buildings sinking like torpedoed ships into a sea of ash.
In the Jamia Darul Uloom Haqqania madrassa in Peshawar, which translates as the “University of All Righteous Knowledge,” students later boasted to the New York Times how they celebrated that day after hearing of the attack—running gleefully through the sprawling compound, stabbing their fingers into the palms of their hands, simulating what their teachers taught them was Allah’s will in action—the impact of righteous airplanes on infidel office buildings.
Now, more than ever, Mortenson saw the need to dedicate himself to education. McCown was anxious to leave Pakistan by any possible route, and burned up the sat phone’s batteries, trying to have business associates meet him at the Indian border, or arrange flights to China. But all the border posts were sealed tight and all international flights grounded. “I told George, ‘You’re in the safest place on Earth right now.’” Mortenson says. ” ‘These people will protect you with their lives. Since we can’t go anywhere, why don’t we stick to the original program until we can put you on a plane?’”
The following day, General Bashir arranged for the MI-17 to take McCown’s party on a flyby of K2, to entertain them while he searched for a way to send McCown and his family home. Face pressed to the porthole once again, Mortenson saw the Korphe School pass by far below, a yellow crescent glimmering faintly, like hope, among the village’s emerald fields. It had become his custom to return to Korphe and share a cup of tea with Haji Ali each fall before returning to America. He promised himself he’d visit as soon as he’d escorted his guests safely out of the country.
On Friday, September 14, Mortenson and McCown drove an hour west to Kuardu in the Land Cruiser, at the head of a convoy that had grown much larger than usual as the grim news from the far side of the world washed over Baltistan. “It seemed like every politician, policeman, and military and r
eligious leader in northern Pakistan came along to help us inaugurate the Kuardu School,” Mortenson says.
Kuardu’s primary school had been finished and educating students for years. But Changazi had delayed its official inauguration until an event promising sufficient pomp could be arranged, Mortenson says.
So many people crowded into the courtyard, munching apricot kernels as they milled around, that the school itself was hard to see. But the subject this day wasn’t a building. Syed Abbas himself was the featured speaker. And with the Islamic world awash in crisis, the people of Baltistan hung on their supreme religious leader’s every word.
“Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim,” he began, “In the name of Allah Almighty, the Beneficent, the Merciful.” “As-Salaam Alaaikum,” “Peace be upon you.”
“It is by fate that Allah the Almighty has brought us together in this hour,” Syed Abbas said. The stage he stood on, invisible in the crush of bodies, made him seem to float above the crowd in his black cloak and turban. “Today is a day that you children will remember forever and tell your children and grandchildren. Today, from the darkness of illiteracy, the light of education shines bright.
“We share in the sorrow as people weep and suffer in America today,” he said, pushing his thick glasses firmly into place, “as we inaugurate this school. Those who have committed this evil act against the innocent, the women and children, to create thousands of widows and orphans do not do so in the name of Islam. By the grace of Allah the Almighty, may justice be served upon them.
“For this tragedy, I humbly ask Mr. George and Dr. Greg Sahib for their forgiveness. All of you, my brethren: Protect and embrace these two American brothers in our midst. Let no harm come to them. Share all you have to make their mission successful.
“These two Christian men have come halfway around the world to show our Muslim children the light of education,” Abbas said. “Why have we not been able to bring education to our children on our own? Fathers and parents, I implore you to dedicate your full effort and commitment to see that all your children are educated. Otherwise, they will merely graze like sheep in the field, at the mercy of nature and the world changing so terrifyingly around us.”
Syed Abbas paused, considering what to say next, and somehow, even the youngest children among the hundreds of people packed into the courtyard were absolutely silent.
“I request America to look into our hearts,” Abbas continued, his voice straining with emotion, “and see that the great majority of us are not terrorists, but good and simple people. Our land is stricken with poverty because we are without education. But today, another candle of knowledge has been lit. In the name of Allah the Almighty, may it light our way out of the darkness we find ourselves in.”
“It was an incredible speech,” Mortenson says. “And by the time Syed Abbas had finished he had the entire crowd in tears. I wish all the Americans who think ‘Muslim’ is just another way of saying ‘terrorist’ could have been there that day. The true core tenants of Islam are justice, tolerance, and charity, and Syed Abbas represented the moderate center of Muslim faith eloquently.”
After the ceremony, Kuardu’s many widows lined up to offer Mortenson and McCown their condolences. They pressed eggs into the Americans’ hands, begging them to carry these tokens of grief to the faraway sisters they longed to comfort themselves, the widows of New York village.
Mortenson looked at the pile of freshly laid eggs trembling in his palms. He cupped his large hands around them protectively as he headed back toward the Land Cruiser, thinking about the children who must have been on the planes, and his own children at home. Now, he thought, walking through the crowd of well-wishers, over a carpet of cracked apricot husks that littered the ground, unable, even, to wave good-bye, everything in the world was fragile.
The next day, Colonel Ilyas escorted them to Islamabad in the MI-17, where they landed at President Musharraf’s personal helipad, for the heightened security it offered. The Americans sat in the heavily guarded waiting room, next to an ornate marble fireplace that looked as if it had never been used, under an oil portrait of the general in full dress uniform.
General Bashir himself landed outside in a Vietnam-era Alouette helicopter nicknamed the “French Fluke” by Pakistan’s military, because it was more reliable than the American Hueys of the same vintage they also flew. “The eagle has landed,” Ilyas announced theatrically, as Bashir, balding and bull-like in his flight suit, jumped onto the tarmac to wave them in.
Bashir flew low and fast, hugging the scrubby hillsides, and by the time Islamabad’s most noticeable landmark, the Saudi-financed Faisal Mosque, with its four minarets and massive, tentlike prayer hall capable of accommodating seventy-thousand worshipers, had faded behind them, they were practically in Lahore. The general set the Alouette down in the middle of a taxiway at Lahore International, fifty meters from the Singapore Airlines 747 that would carry McCown and his family away from the region that was clearly about to become a war zone.
After embracing Mortenson and Faisal Baig, McCown and his children were escorted to their first-class seats by Bashir, who, offering his apologies to the other passengers whose flight he’d helped to delay, remained with the Americans until the plane was ready to depart.
“Thinking back on all of it,” McCown says, “no one in Pakistan was anything but wonderful to us. I was so worried about what might happen to me in this, quote, scary Islamic country. But nothing did. The bad part came only after I left.”
For the next week, McCown was laid up at the posh Raffles Hotel in Singapore, recovering from the intestinal poisoning he got from Singapore Airlines’ first-class food.
Mortenson returned north toward Haji Ali, catching a ride on a military transport flight to Skardu before sleeping most of the way up the Shigar and Braldu valleys in the back of his Land Cruiser while Hussain drove and Baig bored into the horizon with his watchful eyes.
The crowd standing on the far bluff of the Braldu to welcome him seemed somehow wrong. Then, walking over the swaying bridge, Mortenson felt his breath catch as he scanned the far right side of the ledge. The high point where Haji Ali had always stood, dependably as a boulder, was empty. Twaha met Mortenson at the riverbank and gave him the news.
In the month since his father’s death, Twaha had shaved his head in mourning and grown a beard. With facial hair, the family resemblance was stronger than ever. The previous fall, when he’d come to take tea with Haji Ali, Mortenson had found Korphe’s old nurmadhar distraught. His wife, Sakina had taken to her bed that summer, suffering agonizing stomach pain, weathering her illness with Balti patience. She died refusing to make the long trip downside to a hospital.
With Haji Ali, Mortenson had visited Korphe’s cemetery, in a field not far from the school. Haji Ali, slowed by age, knelt laboriously to touch the simple stone placed above the spot where Sakina had been buried facing Mecca. When he rose, his eyes were wet. “I’m nothing without her,” Haji Ali told his American son. “Nothing at all.”
“From a conservative Shia Muslim, that was an incredible tribute,” Mortenson says. “Many men might have felt that way about their wives. But very few would have the courage to say so.”
Then Haji Ali put his arm on Mortenson’s shoulder, and from the way his body trembled, Mortenson presumed he was still crying. But Haji Ali’s hoarse laugh, honed by decades of chewing naswar, was unmistakable.
“One day soon, you’re going to come here looking for me and find me planted in the ground, too,” Haji Ali said, chuckling.
“I couldn’t find anything funny about the idea of Haji Ali dying,” Mortenson says, his voice breaking just trying to talk about the loss of the man years later. He wrapped the tutor who’d already taught him so much in an embrace and asked for one lesson more.
“What should I do, a long time from now, when that day comes?” he asked.
Haji Ali looked up toward the summit of Korphe K2, weighing his words. “Listen to the wind,” he said.
> With Twaha, Mortenson knelt by the fresh grave to pay his respects to Korphe’s fallen chief, whose heart had given out sometime in what Twaha thought was his father’s eighth decade. Nothing lasts, Mortenson thought. Despite all our work, nothing is permanent.
His own father’s heart hadn’t let him live beyond forty-eight, far too soon for Mortenson to ask enough of the questions that life kept piling up around him. And now, the irreplaceable Balti man who had helped to fill some of that hollowness, who had offered so many lessons he might never have learned, moldered in the ground at his wife’s side.
Mortenson stood up, trying to imagine what Haji Ali would say at such a moment, at such a black time in history, when all that you cherished was as breakable as an egg. His words came drifting back with an hallucinogenic clarity.
“Listen to the wind.”
So, straining for what he might otherwise miss, Mortenson did. He heard it whistling down the Braldu Gorge, carrying rumors of snow and the season’s death. But in the breeze whipping across this fragile shelf where humans survived, somehow, in the high Himalaya, he also heard the musical trill of children’s voices, at play in the courtyard of Korphe’s school. Here was his last lesson, Mortenson realized, stabbing at the hot tears with his fingertips. “Think of them,” he thought. “Think always of them.”
Chapter 20
Tea With The Taliban
Nuke ‘Em All—Let Allah Sort Them Out.
—Bumper sticker seen on cab window of Ford-F1 50 pickup
truck in Bozeman, Montana
“LET’S GO SEE the circus,” Suleman said.
Mortenson sat in the back of the white Toyota Corolla CAI rented for his Rawalpindi taxi driver turned fixer, leaning against one of the lace slipcovers Suleman had lovingly fitted to his car’s headrests. Faisal Baig rode shotgun. Suleman had picked them up at the airport, where they’d flown down from Skardu on a PIA 737, commercial flights having resumed in Pakistan, as they had in America by late September 2001.