The Warlord's Son Read Online Free Page A

jolt.
    “Fuck your cousin,” Skelly shouted.
    This was the sort of English even Babar could understand, and he followed without further resistance. A third Molotov cocktail released an orange genie of heat and flame, but it was well behind them, over by the photographer. Good. Skelly’s instincts had been correct. It was like being tossed into a rip current but finding you could still do the strokes, if barely. Just keep paddling sideways until the current released its grip.
    “Move it, Babar. C’mon!”
    By now the police were gaining the upper hand, and Skelly managed to squeeze behind the cordon, the uniformed phalanx moving onward. Several policemen toward the rear had unholstered their pistols. Others were raising carbines to their shoulders, taking aim. But so far, no shots. That would burst the dam for sure.
    Skelly reached into his pocket for his cell phone. Unless shots were fired, he and Babar would be safe now, having made it to a narrow empty street where every shop was locked and shuttered. He’d better call this fellow Najeeb to confirm their appointment. But what if somebody else had already hired him? Skelly swallowed a bubble of panic. There were certainly enough new journalists arriving for it to be possible.
    In fact, Skelly was part of the media’s second wave. The shock troops of mid-September had come mostly from bureaus in Europe and the Far East, plus the usual wire services and network crews. By now, a month later, many of the initial arrivals were already grumbling, convinced that either they or the story had gone stale. But one and all took comfort that at least they weren’t among the unfortunates marooned in the upper reaches of Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance. By now everyone had heard the horror stories—correspondents sleeping twelve to a room on the floors of dirty teahouses for fifty dollars a night, bathing outdoors from buckets of cold water, no doubt loaded with microbes. Working off portable generators and typing by headlamp while their breath frosted the keyboard. Rice and bread for breakfast, rice and bread for dinner. And there was nothing like a little shelling to kick-start your diarrhea first thing in the morning.
    So far on the Pakistan front the only apparent hazard besides food and the occasional mob was ignorance. Most of the world’s press had been caught well behind the learning curve, and on slow afternoons now in Islamabad you saw the latest arrivals from Washington, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Rome and Tokyo lounging by the pool of the Marriott, poring over shiny new books on the Taliban and Bin Laden, or digging into a Lonely Planet travel guide—the next best thing to interviewing your cab driver.
    For all of Skelly’s experience in poking and prodding at the world’s oozing sores, his travels had never taken him either here or Afghanistan, a gap he’d always regretted, even if he was well past the age when it would have thrilled him most. He had long read of the region’s intrigues, its violent patchwork history as a land of adventurers and warlords, whether they were tradesmen on the Silk Road or imperial chessmen in Kipling’s Great Game. He knew also that it was a land that punished the timid and the naive, and, more to the point, anyone who had lost a step. But it was soldiers and spies who usually filled the casualty lists, and he was merely a hack. He’d be fine.
    His introduction to Pakistan had come only eight hours earlier. He’d arrived at 3 a.m., stepping into the humid night air from a 757 out of Dubai following a twenty-six-hour journey that had begun on a crisp fall afternoon in the American heartland. He’d walked stiffly down the metal steps to the darkness of the warm tarmac, strolling past a silent line of military police in blue berets. The crowd of arrivals funneled through glass doors toward the fluorescent glare of the passport line. A mute gang of jumpsuited baggage handlers stood just beyond, waiting for something to do. He