The Warlord's Son Read Online Free Page B

easily spotted the print journalists among the crowd. They were the cheapskates who insisted on manhandling their own battered trolleys into position by the squealing carousel. No one spoke, everyone too stunned by the hour and the air miles to say a word. Trolley loaded, he moved onward past sullen customs agents, out a swinging door into a waiting crowd of hundreds who stood behind a rope—all those dusky faces staring at Skelly in the middle of the night, everyone in robes and veils but nary a word from any until the gypsy cabbies lunged to the fore, reaching for Skelly’s bags and asking his destination as he muttered a terse “No, no,” over and over, scanning the sidewalk ahead for the real taxi stand. He’d forgotten how he would need to be a hard bargainer, haggling with drivers and shopkeepers who would be trying to charge double or triple the local rate. It was all part of the game, even though the hundred rupees at issue might be worth only a buck and a half, and even though the driver might have eleven mouths to feed.
    There was only enough time in Islamabad for a few hours of restless sleep, followed by a hazardous breakfast of runny eggs. Then he caught a hired car to Peshawar, leaving just before dawn, because his marching orders couldn’t have been clearer: Get yourself to the Khyber Pass, and see how close you can creep to the Afghan border. If you can get across, do it. If not, see what else you can come up with.
    Easy enough, Skelly supposed, except a thousand others already had the same idea.
    But something about the brightening of the horizon had roused him from his stupor during the ride from Islamabad. He rolled down the taxi window to breathe in the day’s last wisp of cool air, watching the countryside’s slide show of minor wonders, stunning scenes of exotica beneath aromatic droops of dusty eucalyptus. He pulled a notebook from a rear pocket, suddenly determined to record everything he could while it was still fresh and new.
    The first sight to catch his eye was an old man already at work in the half-light, sweeping the curbs of the four-lane road to Islamabad with a crude rush broom, harvesting a bottomless crop of dust. Then he saw two more, doing the same. Did someone actually pay them for this? They might as well try shoveling all the sand off a beach.
    The sights multiplied as they eased into the countryside, Skelly’s right hand hurrying across the narrow page with a tiny scratching sound:
    rough wooden beds on rooftops of low homes, and in cane fields,
w/people still asleep. thin blankets & sheets, same gray as their
clothes. river crossing at Attock where alexander the great once
crossed, ancient fort on blu f. small stream in muddy ravine w/tent
pitched next to goat herd.
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water bu faloes knee-deep in irrig ditch
& one grazing in tall grass. dung patties (cows?) pressed onto plaster
walls of houses, drying for fuel. camel on haunches in cane field.
bikes loaded with everything—sticks, burlap sacks, milk pails, boxed
TVs. tall mud chimney belching heavy black smoke, terrible
smell . . .
    “What’s the smoke from?” he asked the driver, pencil pausing.
    “Brick kilns.”
    Of course. Bricks were stacked all around them.
    “They burn old tires to bake the bricks,” the driver added. Skelly wrote it down, all of it.
    Passing them on the left, loud and jangling, a cargo truck. Like all the others it was ornately painted, a thousand different colors and designs from stem to stern, the cab lit by a red dome light that made it glow like a bordello. The front of the trailer jutted over the cab, angled like the transom of a galleon on the high seas. Magnificent. An earlier one had been so overloaded with hay, every bulge swaddled in a white sheet, that from behind the truck it had looked as if it were wearing a giant turban, making Skelly laugh.
    Then, off to the left, a high formation of bare stone, opening deeply onto a quarry. There were dwellings up there, he saw, small caves