Page 177 of Whisper

Three Weeks Prior

War came to the mountains.

Dawood tucked his face into his scarf as the wind of the valley whipped around the trees, sluiced down a rocky gorge. Towering peaks shielded their valley. Their new camp.

Rickety trucks clambered over the flinty shale roads, carrying the brothers and their supplies. They slid, skidding out, and came to a stop beside an eternally dry wadi, desiccated for over a millennium. The sun, just starting its descent for the evening, glinted through the scraggly trees at the top of the range. Sharp rays cut through the fading daylight, sucking color from the valley.

Kandahar, Afghanistan, was a wild, untamed, vastness. He thought he’d been at the end of the world before, in Bajaur, on the mountain with no name. But, this, in the depths of Afghanistan, was the bitter end. A land of endings, of ghosts, of dead things.

The wind seemed to carry voices, snippets of whispers and soft cries, echoes of screams and laughter, the lives of so many cut short, the voices as broken as the bodies who once spoke. Their valley, for the moment, seemed to shiver, echo like Dawood had picked up the world and held it to his ear, as if he could hear all of the world’s woe like holding a seashell and hearing the ocean. Torment scratched at his bones.

“It is time to pray!” Dawood called. He waved to the drivers, to the brothers in the backs of the trucks. “Time forsalah!”

The brothers hurried to form lines behind him, jostling shoulders. He waited while they unfurled their prayer mats and quieted.

In the mountains and as they crept across borders, they did theirwudhu, their ablutions, with dust.

“In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful.” Dawood kneeled, cupping the cold earth and rubbing it over his hands. He let the grains blow away, then rubbed his palms over his face.

He breathed in, the scents of life, of Afghanistan. Allah was in these hills. He was with these men. He’d been with them the day war arrived in their mountain home, in Bajaur, three years before. When the bullets and the bombs fell, and the soldiers arrived, and the sky had burned the mountain to the ground, turning everything to dust.

Pakistan Northwestern Frontier

Bajaur Province

Federally Administered Tribal Areas

Three Years Before

Pakistan, pressured by the United States, pushed into the tribal territories, sweeping for extremists, for terrorists. Their sweeps were broad, their attacks indiscriminate. The bees, the drones flown by the CIA and the US military, appeared overhead, as did their constant, ceaseless hum.

When the bombs fell, and the fires burned through the farms, everyone tried to hide. Tried to hunker down and ride out the surging violence, the waves of attacks from the military trying to cleanse the mountains of all living souls. No matter who they were.

Bombing the mountain out of existence seemed to be the strategic plan. All night, fire rained, stars seeming to fall, bombs that erased families from the face of the world. Farms. Homes. Lives. Dawood huddled with ’Bu Adnan in the trees, lying on his belly.

He heard every agonizing scream. Every cry from the children he’d cared for, had helped bring from infancy to adolescence.

He heard their cries go silent, cut short, after the blasts, after the shock waves tore through their homes.

One bomb took out Behroze’s family home. Another theqala. A third and fourth obliterated farms, spread fire to four families’ homes.

It was no use staying. It was suicide to remain. They fled, running from the flames, running for their lives. Dawood carried Behroze, burned, but alive, playing in the fields behind his house when the bomb fell. They stumbled down a ragged goat path, hiding from the sky.

’Bu Adnan made it halfway down the mountain.

He stumbled, fell. Cried out to Allah.

Dawood, leading everyone, called for a halt. Tucked his people into dark spaces between the trees, hiding women and children and old men as best he could.

The drones hovered overhead. He could feel their optics, feel the hunting gaze of the pilot. Predator drone. Predator. What an apt name. He felt like an animal. Desperation flooded him, sang in his veins.

He slid to the dirt beside ’Bu Adnan, the man who’d become his baba. Six years, they’d been a family. Six years, he’d had a father again.

“Baba, we must keep going.”

“Astaghfirullah, ibni. I cannot.” ’Bu Adnan clutched his chest. His heart. Six years, and ’Bu Adnan had gone from the man of strength, built like an ox, to an old man, almost paper frail. He’d aged before Dawood’s eyes, as if time was robbing him. Robbing them. “I knew I could never make it down the mountain. Even with Allah.”

“You can do this, Baba. You can. I will carry you—”