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Chapter 17
Thirty minutes after they left Al Kamen, Jase finally relaxed his grip on the steering wheel of the lumbering box truck. It was a rough ride with the brakes squealing and rocks banging against the undercarriage. But the truck held everyone, and it was full of gas. The only things that mattered.
The Humvee was ahead of them, and Jase knew that Dev and Cody were watching for potential problems. They were communicating with Laila via their SAT phones, and so far, all was well.
If they made it all the way to Kabul without any problems, it would be the equivalent of holding a winning lottery ticket. Almost certainly not going to happen.
Dev and Cody were taking a route that avoided most of the villages and towns between Al Kamen and Kabul, thank God. The white truck would stand out in the darkness, but when dawn broke over the mountains in about two hours, they’d be less visible.
“Do you think I should call Mel and warn her about the families?” Laila asked quietly.
“Dev and Cody have already taken care of that,” Jase said, equally quietly. No one could hear them, but he needed to focus on sounds outside the truck. Dev and Cody were good, but they didn’t have eyes in the backs of their heads.
“So she’ll be expecting us?” Laila asked, gripping her thighs as she stared into the darkness, realizing she wouldn’t see a threat until they were on top of it.
“Yeah.” He glanced over at her. “Not sure how happy she’ll be about it, though.”
“I don’t care,” Laila said immediately. “I couldn’t have left those girls to the mercy of the Taliban.” She swallowed hard. “I’m worried about Sadira, but she made her choice.”
“The Taliban always need money,” Jase said. “If her parents are wealthy, the girl will be fine.”
She sighed. “That meeting I told Mel about? With the stranger who drove to Al Kamen? It was at Sadira’s house. So her father is probably already aligned with the Taliban.”
“Which means his daughter will be shielded from any harm,” he said. A hot burst of anger at the injustice blew through him. “They don’t brutalize the children of their supporters,” he said. “If they did they wouldn’t have many supporters.”
He glanced over at Laila who was scanning from side to side. Watching for trouble. “Call Cody and ask him if he sees anywhere ahead we can stop. I need to change into the clothes Bahram brought for me, and we need to get rid of Feroz’s body. And our passengers might need a bathroom break.”
Laila nodded and grabbed her SAT phone. Punched in the number, and moments later she said, “You see a good stopping place ahead? We need to bury Feroz and Jase needs to change his clothes.”
She listened for a long moment, nodding. “Okay. Sounds good. See you there.”
She ended the call and swiveled to face him. “Cody said there’s an oasis on the satellite map about an hour away. We can bury Feroz and you can change your clothes. Let everyone out to take care of business. We hustled them out of Al Kamen really fast.”
“Okay,” Jase said, his mind sifting through the information. No downside he could see. “Good idea. I don’t want to get anywhere near Kabul with a body in the Humvee.”
“And you need to look like an Afghani if we’re stopped.”
“Yeah,” he said, glancing at his desert camo. “Pretty hard to sell myself as a native wearing this.”
As the truck rumbled through the desert, Jase said, “Keep me awake. Tell me about your life in the States. Where you live. What you do for a living. What you do for fun. I need to hear about normal. Ordinary. Safe.”
She laughed, a small sound that sent a ripple of pleasure through him. He wanted to hear Laila laugh on a regular basis. Wanted to know how she acted when she felt safe.
“I live in Madison, Wisconsin and teach high school Spanish and French. I’ve always learned new languages easily, and that was one of the reasons the CIA accepted me.”
“Why did you apply?” he asked, curious about her motivation.
She shrugged one shoulder. “After ten years of teaching, I was a little burned out. My school is in an upper middle-class neighborhood and the kids were... entitled. Spoiled. I got sick of their helicopter parents berating me if their kid didn’t get an A on everything. So I decided to try something else.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to switch to a different school?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah, but where’s the challenge in that? I felt teaching those girls was doing some good in the world.”
They talked for a while, sharing stories of growing up and Jase’s decision to join the Navy. He kept it light and simple. They didn’t talk much about their families, thank God. The less he thought about his parents, the happier he was.
But he wondered why Laila didn’t talk about her family.
Close to an hour later, Laila straightened in her seat, nodded toward a blur of blackness in front of them. “Maybe that’s the oasis Cody mentioned,” she said, and Jase looked where she was staring. He couldn’t make out any colors, but the darkness was denser in front of them, hiding the mountains and desert in the distance.
