The guard never once looked at him, perhaps on orders from Adeel. Wingo was fine with that. He was not a chatty person and never said with ten words what he could say with only one, or better yet simply a glance.
After Peshawar would come the capital city of Islamabad. From there he would make his crossing into northern India with the documents provided him by Adeel. Then it was a straight shot south to New Delhi. And from there a long-haul flight home with one connection in Doha, provided he could get a fake passport in India. Total flight time to go halfway around the world, about twenty hours. It had taken him far longer than that to go only two hundred miles.
Yet he had a lot farther to go to catch his ride on a jumbo jet to the States.
When he glanced behind him and saw the other vehicle closing in, Wingo suddenly realized that he might not even make it to Peshawar.
CHAPTER
22
WINGO’S FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT this had been a total setup, with the guard next to him fully in on the conspiracy. When the shot came through the window and blew through the back of the guard’s head, Wingo didn’t think that anymore.
He screamed at the driver in Pashto to basically put the gas pedal through the floorboard if he wanted
to keep living. The taxi surged ahead even as shots pinged off the car.
As the dead guard slumped against him, Wingo grabbed the man’s AR-15. He aimed it through the blown-out window, waited for the other car to edge closer, and then pulled the trigger. There were three men in the other car, but he was aiming for only one of them.
Wingo fired and the other driver’s blood exploded against the windshield. The vehicle veered off to the side, slammed against a solid road barrier, caught fire, overturned, and a few seconds later exploded.
Wingo turned back around and looked at his driver.
“Shit.”
He felt the cab drift. He leapt over the front seat and settled next to the driver. He was an older man who would not age one day more. A bullet to the back of his head, probably a ricochet, had seen to that.
Wingo took control of the steering wheel, then stretched his leg out
and hit the brakes. He guided the car over to the side. Luckily there were no other vehicles on this stretch of road. He lifted both bodies out of the vehicle, pushed them over the barrier, and watched as they rolled down the dirt slope and settled at the bottom on a pile of boulders. He did not have time to give them a proper burial. He simply muttered a prayer.
Then he glanced over at the flaming car. His first impulse was to run over and find out who they were and why they were after him. But the flame ball increased as the gas in the tank was burned off. He quickly realized there would be nothing useful left. Just blackened corpses, bone, and twisted metal.
He drove off with no guard and no driver and his clothes covered in the guard’s blood. He had a destroyed rear window, a blood-splattered interior, and no guarantee that he had not been betrayed. If they did know where he was, another car would be sent after him. Or they might simply be waiting up ahead for him. And “up ahead” was formidable enough as it was, and it didn’t involve men with guns.
Wingo had read Rudyard Kipling, who had described the Khyber Pass as a “sword cut through the mountains.” This was an apt description, he felt, only unlike a sword blade the road was far from straight. The area here could have been the landscape on another planet that did not allow for human life. It was beyond bleak, beyond foreboding. No trees grew here. No animals made their homes here. No humans really lived here. It was simply here so one could go from one country to another as fast as possible, with “fast” being a relative term.
The pass was largely shut down in the late fall and winter. The grade was too steep and the climate too dangerous during those times. And Wingo was perilously close to “those times.” He could feel the winds coursing through the mountains settling under his car and lifting it slightly. The pass was essentially a series of switchbacks connected by short distances of straight roads and tunnels through the Hindu Kush Mountain Range. It could be nauseating to drive even at slow speeds.
Wingo was not driving slowly. He was channeling his inner Formula One driver. The wind was blowing in through the shattered window and making his teeth chatter despite his having the heat cranked.
As he raced along, in his mind he was sorting through the possible scenarios and his counter for each one. He checked his watch and calculated how much farther it was to Peshawar. Then he debated whether he needed to even go there. Peshawar was a large city, with more than two and a half million residents spread over nearly five hundred square miles. That was good in that it was easier to hide among so many people. But it was bad in that you had many more eyes that might be spying on you, and the authorities would be only minutes away no matter where you were.
He decided to head directly to the Indian border. The documents that he had been given by Adeel should be sufficient to get him across. However, if Adeel had betrayed him, tipping off the men in the destroyed car, these documents were useless.
Wingo had to make a judgment call. Trust Adeel or not?
Normally, the answer would be an easy one for Wingo. You couldn’t trust anyone. But he had looked the man in the eye. He had heard his words for himself. He decided that he trusted Adeel. The men in the car coming after them might have simply been criminals looking to rob or kidnap an American and hold him for ransom. That was not unusual in these parts.
Once through the pass he pulled off the road and changed into fresh clothes from his knapsack, burying the bloody ones. He drove into a small town late that night and left the shattered and bloodied taxi on a side street. He took a room in a local hotel where the manager accepted cash and asked no questions. The next morning he arranged for the rental of a motorbike using the document that Adeel had provided. He rode off on the bike. His next goal was to make the Indian border. Pakistan’s national highway system was a good one, and the kilometers flew past. He stopped to eat and refuel. As he neared the border, he slowed.
This would be the real test of Adeel’s loyalty. Or betrayal.
Wingo had been through this border before. The crossing was right down the middle of the village of Wagah. It had been split in half when demarcation took place in 1947, creating the country of Pakistan from land that had formerly been part of India. Wagah had perhaps the most elaborate border closing ceremony in the world. It took place right before sunset each day and involved the Indian and Pakistan border guards putting on an elaborate dance of exaggerated marching and high stepping with feet routinely reaching above heads. Crowds gathered, music was played, and the opposing guards would confront each other with aggressive posturing and grim faces, like two roosters about to duel.
Wingo didn’t care about the performance. He simply wanted to hit the crossing shortly before the performance was to begin, because the crowds would have gathered and the guards would be focusing more on their upcoming performances than on border scrutiny. He timed it well, because he was the last person to cross the border before it was closed. When he reached Indian soil he looked back only once as the music started, the guards marching out to do their dancing battle. No one would remember the sole American on the motorbike who was so eager to leave Pakistan.
CHAPTER