The Zargari Incident

By Kristin Henderson

During a rocket attack on his military base in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, a young American diplomat isn't running for the bunker. He's in bed with a missionary aid worker.
Sonny Sonnenfeld is a foreign service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development. He's been posted to a strategic but forgotten corner of war-torn Afghanistan where he's the sole civilian representative of the U.S. government and its money. Clara Santos is the sole aid worker still brave enough-- or crazy enough-- to stick it out in this violent backwater province. She's a beautiful, conflicted woman and Sonny has fallen for her hard.
Then Clara goes missing in Zargari, a godforsaken desert town crawling with insurgents and drug-runners. What she was doing down there, no one knows. Armed only with his wits and an iPod loaded with jazz, Sonny plunges into a desperate search for Clara. From dusty forward operating bases to a garish narco palace to a lonely Silk Road ruin, Sonny uncovers the plots and counter-plots swirling around Clara's disappearance. His survival depends on knowing who to trust. But he quickly learns that in a murky war zone like this one, cold-blooded killers and con-men can be heroes and anyone can be the enemy -- Marines, insurgents, his own Afghan colleagues, a druglord wearing makeup and bling, and most especially a cross-dressing, rifle-toting American businesswoman who's playing a very deep game. Even as he's drawn to her, Sonny trusts her least of all. He's forced to wrestle with his own best and worst instincts in this page-turning thriller that wrestles with the dark complexities of America at war. The labyrinth of conspiracies and betrayals is made vividly real by journalist Kristin Henderson's experience reporting with Marines and diplomats in Afghanistan.
In the end, on a velvety green wheat field surrounded by endless acres of opium poppy, Sonny's dogged pursuit of the truth erupts in both betrayal and redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kristin Henderson
• Release date: Nov 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301356393

Book preview

Acknowledgements

In 2008, I went to Afghanistan on assignment for The Washington Post Magazine. During the month I spent in Helmand and Kandahar, I encountered only three other western reporters, and they were just passing through. At the time, all eyes were on Iraq. The increasingly harrowing war in Afghanistan, and the joint military-civilian effort there, were on no one's radar.

I'm grateful to David Rowell, my articles editor at the magazine, who helped me start figuring out how to tell that off-the-beaten-path story during some very long phone conversations.

I'm also grateful to my agent, Sam Stoloff, for serving as my book editor through many struggling drafts.

Thanks, too, to Laura Mendelson, Barry Goldstein, Leslie Kostrich, Ingrid Slyder, Erin Heitman, Tim Austin, Frank Henderson, and Tom Henderson for slogging through various drafts to provide feedback.

Most of all, I'm grateful to the many members of the development, diplomatic, military, and Afghan communities who shared their experiences and knowledge with me. The majority of our conversations were off the record, so I won't name you here, but you know who you are. I hope you also know how much I appreciated your patience and generosity.

Though this story is based in reality, and I've tried to make it as realistic and factual as possible, it is a work of fiction. Zargari and the nameless province where the story is set don't exist and the characters are all my invention.

Anything I got wrong is also my doing. Sometimes it's even on purpose: The security protocols that I describe for protecting foreign service officers are somewhat different from the real ones, for obvious reasons; the necessities of plot require the story to move at a zippier pace than real bureaucratic life; and although the everyday speech of bureaucrats and military service members consists of wall-to-wall acronyms, to spare the reader I've used substitutes wherever possible, such as police instead of ANP (Afghan National Police).

To my readers who spot others errors, please let me know! I'll post corrections so we can all learn something.

Kristin Henderson

Fall 2012

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Cast of Characters

Acronyms

Chapters 1 - 17

Chapters 18 - 41

Chapters 42 - 66

Chapters 67 - 80

Also by Kristin Henderson (free samples)

About the Author

Cast of Characters

(in order of appearance)

Sonny Sonnenfeld - a USAID officer

Clara Santos - an American aid worker

Batoor - Sonny's Afghan deputy

Governor Khan - the provincial governor

Hapless - a British counter-narcotics agent

Mehdi - Sonny's Afghan assistant

Verner van den Heuvel - a Dutch development contractor

Johnny - Clara's Afghan driver

Samira - Clara's Afghan assistant

Fuji Prince - an American businesswoman

Ismail Haq - the district governor of Zargari District

Gus - a civil affairs Marine

Sergeant Lovette - an infantry Marine

Colonel Jalil - the Zargari District police chief

L.T. - Sgt. Lovette's commanding officer

Haji Angar - a Zargari businessman

Commandan Qajeer - the northern druglord

Darrell - Sonny's bodyguard

Bash - Sonny's bodyguard

Joe Ball - Verner's deputy

Ghatola Pashtoon - head of the provincial women's council

Patwal - Clara's Afghan bodyguard

Peewee - a Marine helicopter pilot

Tinker - a Marine helicopter pilot

Congressman Harlan Goodnight - House Appropriations Committee chairman

Back to Table of Contents

Acronyms

FOB - forward operating base

IED - improvised explosive device

ISI - Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's intelligence agency

KIA - killed in action

NGO - non-governmental organization

OCC - operational control center

PRT - provincial reconstruction team

RPG - rocket-propelled grenade

USAID - United States Agency for International Development

USDA - United States Department of Agriculture

XO - executive officer

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Chapter 1

The Katyusha rocket came in just as Sonny rolled over, just after Clara whispered, Let me on top, her eyes wide and dark as if she were possessed. The rocket punched through the night air with a rushing sizzle that grew to a shriek a second before impact. The blast was close enough for Sonny to feel the concussion in his gut.

Since he was already rolling, he wrapped his arms around Clara and rolled them both off the bed to the floor, his sleeping bag slithering along with them, because that was what you did in a rocket attack. You got down, you made yourself as flat as possible. If the next rocket hit even closer, the exploding shrapnel would fly over you instead of into you.

Sonny covered Clara's naked body with his. For a long minute, all was still, the only sound their hushed breath and Billie Holiday's voice slip-sliding around the melody of Body and Soul. Billie was turned down low on the iPod in the speaker dock, which sat on a case of bottled water next to his helmet and slumped body armor.

The flooring was a plastic grid that let dirt fall through to the ground beneath. It was biting into Sonny's elbows. His rimless glasses had slipped. He shifted to get a wad of the sleeping bag under an elbow and pushed the glasses up on his nose. Clara always wanted him to keep them on, even in bed. She said specs made him look less like a jock and more like a poet.

Outside in the sandy corridor, footsteps emerged from other rooms and crunched quickly away. Sonny looked down at Clara. Feel like going to the bunker?

She blushed and wouldn't meet his eyes. Then everyone will know I'm here. She kept her gaze on Sonny's hand, palm down on the sleeping bag alongside her face. The possessed Clara was gone, the shy, self-conscious Clara in her place. Sonny wasn't sure which one turned him on more. She never wanted anyone to know when she was here in his room. It had been five months of sneaking around, three long weeks since he'd last seen her.

Her finger traced the ridge of his knuckles. What about you?

He shrugged and shook his head. It's freezing out there. And scampering for the bunker's always a crapshoot anyway. You could stay put, laying low where you would probably be okay, or book it for the increased safety of the bunker, betting against the increased risk of getting creamed by the next rocket if one came in during the forty seconds it took you to get there. Besides. He bent his head to her averted face, kissed her jaw. I'm busy.

Six months ago, he was walking into the provincial governor's residence, she was walking out. She was short, brown eyes, dark hair, cherubic lips and cheeks. She was wearing a pink headscarf and was about to flip a sky blue burqa forward over her face. But she was too pert-nosed and open-faced to be anything but a westerner. Albert Sonny Sonnenfeld, provincial field program officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, had been in Afghanistan for two weeks. He stuck out his hand. Hi, I'm the new --

She recoiled, averting her face. I know who you are.

American. But maybe that headscarf and burqa were more than just a nod to local custom, maybe she'd gone native. Sonny withdrew his hand. Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you...

She swept past, vanishing inside the burqa.

He watched her float away, a small, sky blue ghost. She slipped into the back of a dented sedan alongside another burqa-clad figure, two Afghan men up front. The young driver had a Mafioso's mustache. The other man, a typical beard.

Back in the fortified provincial reconstruction team compound where Sonny lived and worked, he asked his deputy Batoor about her. As it happened, they were old friends. Like a daughter, Batoor said, even though she was a Christian from Albuquerque. That sounded like a punchline to Sonny until Batoor went on to describe approvingly how she practiced her Christianity with as much piety and modesty as any good Muslim and Sonny realized she must be very religious.

Her name was Clara Santos. Though she was even younger than Sonny, she'd been here in this breathtaking, godforsaken, out-of-the-way Afghan province longer than any other westerner, building and running clinics for the last western non-governmental organization still sticking it out. Every other western NGO packed up and split the province years ago after an ambush left a couple of aid workers dead. Clara clung to her independence the way saints clung to the cross, as if it would save her. She called it neutrality. The only side she was on, she said, was the children's side. She wouldn't even speak to a coalition or U.S. government official like him if there was a chance someone might see her. Sonny, for one, couldn't say her faith was misplaced. She was still here, still alive, and everyone else was gone. But he also knew no one was bullet-proof.

Clara was on top, her eyes dark and intense again, when the next rocket hit.

It was farther away than the first, but still Sonny reached up to yank her down. She batted at his hands and rocked harder, her mouth open and panting. He got an arm around her waist as another sizzling roar seemed to emerge from between her lips. This one sounded like it was ripping open a seam in the air overhead and he bolted upright, as if he could shield her by sitting up and clutching her close, one arm around her shoulders, the other cradling the back of her head. The shriek ended behind him in a chest-thumping boom. Dust rained down.

In the quiet that followed, he heard Billie's brave, sad voice. He felt Clara's thighs tremble convulsively against his hips, her ragged, orgasmic breath against his neck. He pulled her down to the plastic grid, pushed his glasses back up again, and looked around. His concrete, monkish little cell was intact. The sandbagged window was unbroken. The flimsy door to the corridor was still shut. It must not have been as close as it had felt.

He turned his face back to Clara. She turned her face away. He raised up on an elbow. She curled her whole body away.

You okay? he whispered, though he knew the answer. She was never okay in the minutes after. I wish I could believe Jesus can't see me right now, she'd whispered sadly the first time, but I know He can. She'd turned out to be just as devout a Christian as Batoor had said she was. She avoided any Jesus talk around Afghans, but around Sonny she talked about Jesus like he was a friend she'd grown up with. And yet she had let Sonny explore her breasts the first night they spent alone together, and she was the one who slipped off her loose-fitting Afghan women's trousers the second.

He hadn't expected it to go that far that fast. At first he preferred not to question his luck. Then he wondered if maybe Clara Santos was yet another hypocritical product of religious repression. But nothing about her seemed that false. It was just great chemistry, the kind that doesn't come along often and knocks you off your moorings when it does. She'd admitted, in bits and pieces, that she'd fallen as hard for him as he had for her, almost from the moment they first saw each other. Ever since then, her feelings for him had been crashing head-on into the faith she'd grown up believing. Sonny would catch glimpses of it -- she'd be giddy one minute, miserable the next. He'd try to help, try to get her to talk about it. But whatever doubts she was wrestling with, she was as protectively secretive about them as she was about everything else.

She shivered and tugged the sleeping bag over her hips. Cold in here.

He pulled the blanket down from the bed to cover them both.

She held her half of it under her chin like a child's security blanket. I'm sorry.

For what?

I only came here tonight to tell you something. I didn't mean to, you know, do... this... Her voice trailed off. Her hands bunched more of the blanket over her breasts. The visible side of her face reddened.

Sonny smiled. How does someone who's so good at sex have such a hard time saying the word? He lifted his hand to stroke her round, burning cheek.

She jerked from his touch. I'm not good. I'll leave as soon as they give the all clear.

In the middle of the night? Are you crazy? It's not safe.

I have a ride. Sonny. I'm getting married.

He laughed. Doesn't one of us have to pop the question first?

She rolled onto her stomach to reach her clothes, in a heap on the plastic grid floor. It's not a joke.

What? His laughter died. What are you talking about?

Still lying down, she awkwardly began to dress. I was engaged when I met you, she mumbled. I broke it off. The way I feel when I'm with you has made me realize that you're not the one God wants me to be with. It's him. Everything is simpler with him. I don't have to compromise anything.

Sonny stared at her. Humiliation splintered into rage. Had she really just made him expose how much he cared about her and then kicked him in the balls? The rage melted away into bafflement. No. He couldn't believe it. She didn't work that way, not the Clara he knew. He replayed her words in his head. She'd mumbled that confession without looking up, like a prisoner reading what her jailer had written.

He realized she was still talking, something about how she'd never felt anything like she did with him.

But that's a good thing, he said.

No! She shook her head hard and reached for her trousers. It's making me crazy. It's just too confusing.

As she struggled to pull them on, he glimpsed a flash of silver on her ankle -- the silver-and-lapis bracelet he'd given her because he liked those slender ankles of hers so much. If there really was another man, why was she still wearing it? Something else had to be going on here.

His thoughts jumped to that day two weeks after he first saw her disappear into her burqa. She had reappeared in the doorway of his office looking for her old friend Batoor. The burqa was off, tucked away. Without it, she looked plump. Only later did he discover she had an old-fashioned body, big curves packed onto a small frame. Plump in the right places -- that's what he would decide later, when he was sinking himself into those curves.

Batoor wasn't around that day. Sonny asked if there was anything he could help her with, and for the first time she bestowed a smile on him -- a saintly smile for the new arrival, patronizing in a motherly sort of way. It would have annoyed him if she hadn't then said, Well, Batoor says he trusts you, so I guess I can, too. He hadn't realized Batoor thought that much of him.

She wanted to send a memo to her foundation in Stockholm. Ordinarily, she used the internet cafe that was run by some Pakistanis in the bazaar. The cafe was the only publicly accessible place in the province with an internet connection.

But the Pakistanis running the cafe, she said in a hushed voice, were ISI. Pakistani intelligence. That was news to Sonny. She didn't want the ISI reading her memo, and when Sonny read it, he understood why. If what she'd written was on the mark, it could get her killed. Since sending that memo via the Pakistani cafe wasn't an option, he'd found a way to send it for her. With her okay he'd tried to share it with counter-intelligence, too. But they'd just patted him on the head and told him to stick to paving roads, so he'd figured her memo was just like all the other wild conspiracy rumors whispering around Afghanistan, and therefore not particularly dangerous.

But what if counter-intelligence was wrong? He watched her fumble with her sweater. Clara?

She raised her eyes to him.

Is there really someone else?

She nodded.

Really? What's his name?

She shook her head.

You know what I think?

She shook her head again.

I don't think there is anybody else. I think it's the Pakistanis.

Her eyes widened. Why would you think that?

All I have to do is look at how scared you are. They found out about the memo, didn't they. And they want to shut you up.

Of course not. That's ancient history.

And you're afraid, he insisted, that if they find out about us they'll figure out I had something to do with it and they'll come after me, too.

She primly pursed her cherub's mouth. The Afghans have much more to fear from the Pakistanis than you or I.

Then who's threatening you?

Listen to you. No one. Not in so many words. I mean, really, no one. She was a poor liar. She didn't look at him as she said it.

She'd finished dressing. In the far distance, another rocket boomed. He dragged over his body armor. Put this on, too.

She reminded him that she'd put her life in Jesus' hands long ago. He asked her to just do it for him. Please. She let him velcro her into the flak vest.

Look, he murmured, if you're pushing me away to protect me, forget it. He settled his helmet on her head. The contrast of all that hard macho gear around her soft face only made her look more girlish; it did nothing to reassure him. He lay down beside her. But if it's to protect yourself, I can live with that. Just don't cut me off. Let me keep passing you guidance on where the threats are. Don't just rely on Batoor. He doesn't have the same access that I do.

I have my own sources. Please don't worry. Please. I'm fine.

Are you? Really? We all calculate the risks every day, but you've been here so long I don't think you can tell what's risky anymore. Like tonight. You can't just walk out of here. The streets aren't safe at night.

I told you, I have a ride this time.

Just stay here. You can have my room. I'll go sleep in the office. Clara, if anything were to ever happen to you... He couldn't finish the thought.

She rolled onto her side and for a long minute she looked at him. Slowly, her eyes softened with the same sad weariness that filled Billie Holiday's voice. Oh Sonny, she sighed. You've always complicated everything for me.

They lay on the floor's plastic grid without touching, clothes on, waiting for the all clear. The iPod had gone still. The light was switched off. In the silent, pitch-black room, the inches between them felt like miles.

I know it's the Pakistanis, Sonny whispered into the blackness.

He heard her whisper back, It is not.

Then who is it?

The man I'm going to marry.

Abruptly, Sonny sat up, strained to see her in the dark. Maybe this guy did exist. Maybe -- "Is he the one who's threatening you?"

He heard her draw a quick breath and hold it.

Is he?

At last she breathed out in a trembling whisper, Sonny, when I'm with you, it makes me feel dirty.

She hadn't denied being threatened. Each breath she took continued to tremble, and he realized she was crying. He ached to hold her. "Then marry me, Clara."

All he heard was her trembling breath, and the rustle as she widened the space between them.

When the all clear came and she got up to go, Sonny said to her back, I don't give up, Clara. Not that easily.

She took off his body armor and left.

Chapter 2

The deadly part of Clara's memo, assuming it was accurate, wasn't the part that explained why certain elements in Pakistan's intelligence service wanted a weak, messy Afghanistan that they could control instead of an independent, viable Afghan state that might dry up the ISI's cut of the drug trade, turn on Pakistan, and ally itself with India or Iran. Talking heads from think tanks chattered about that on TV all the time.

If true, the deadly part was her list of Afghan government officials who were working for the ISI. The list named names throughout southern Afghanistan. It described their activities, from helping supply the ISI's internal drug cartel with opium and heroin to hits on anti-Pakistani Afghans.

As he read, Sonny began to realize that Clara Santos got her kicks from living dangerously. To write something like this? To actually put it down on paper? But she denied it, said she was just out of options. An ISI-backed Taliban faction had launched a lucrative new fundraising campaign -- kidnap Afghan doctors out of her clinics, whack off an ear or a nose or a finger, deliver it to the family with a demand for ransom.

She'd wanted to send that memo to her foundation office in Stockholm so they could get it to their man in Islamabad. Discreet pressure could be applied. Doctors could be protected. Children could be saved.

Sonny was pretty sure that was the moment he fell for her completely, old-fashioned figure, patronizing beatific smile, and all. He had looked up from reading that memo and she was talking about saving the sick children of Afghanistan, one by one, but it wasn't her words that drew him in. It was her eyes, wide and dark like she was either stoned or possessed. He'd never seen that wordless purity and simplicity of purpose outside of a jam session before.

In New York once, down in a dark basement jazz club, Sonny had watched sax man Kenny Garrett turn to his drummer, a young phenom named Nathan Webb. Garrett hunched over his sax toward Webb and the drummer's beat obediently lashed out. The keyboards and bass fell back.

As the wave of drumbeats rose and crashed, the drummer's sticks became blurs. His face contorted with the dark, wide-eyed intensity of a weightlifter struggling to lift a great weight. Lean shoulders hunching, elbows jerking, he stared spellbound at Garrett, who was still bowed toward him with his eyes closed, his sax working up to a scream. The rhythm rose and fell and rose again. The dark walls crept in.

Finally Garrett turned away and the drummer sagged forward, released, hands dropping, sweat dripping from his nose and chin. When Sonny and Clara had sex, after she came, she'd sag forward like that. Whatever she committed to possessed her -- trusting in Jesus, helping sick children, achieving orgasm. Those were her Garretts. Since that moment when Sonny read what she'd written and looked into her eyes in his office, he hadn't been able to help thinking it was possible that, maybe, one day, her Garretts could include him.

Just before dawn, the first muezzin's call to prayer seeped into Sonny's sleep the way it always did. The tinny loudspeaker voice rose and fell in a minor key. Soon another voice joined in from another mosque, different key, different cadence. Then another and another until there were dozens of them, all competing to be heard.

Sonny wrapped himself in his blanket and sat outside on the stoop to listen. The moon had set and the sun hadn't risen yet. A billion stars powdered the dark air above the cold blackness that surrounded him, the air filled with disembodied voices, each singing a different song. They clashed and merged and harmonized into a strange, haunted chorus.

His first morning here, it had raised all the hair on the back of his neck. It reminded him of a wolf pack howling at the moon. When he told Clara that later, she said it reminded her of her church back home, when the Spirit would move and everyone would sing in tongues, each person singing their own God-given melody in their own God-given language, all at the same time.

Like, real foreign languages? he'd asked.

She'd shrugged and her face had closed, as if she already regretted saying even that much. Never mind.

So... real language or not, how does it work?

It just comes to you, she mumbled. You open your mouth like a baby bird and it just comes out.

Like how?

She looked away.

He leaned around to look into her face.

She'd gotten up and moved away from him. He was not welcome there.

Sonny asked her once if she'd ever done any proselytizing here. Only on her first trip, she'd admitted, when she came with a group from her church. As they rebuilt a bombed-out house or fed hungry children, the Afghans would ask them about life in America -- how many wives can a man marry, who can marry, how are animals slaughtered. Clara and her fellow church members took those questions as an opportunity to witness about Jesus, hand out religious tracts, show religious videos.

Were you guys nuts? Sonny had asked.

Back then, the Taliban hadn't come back yet, she said. We weren't in much danger.

But the people you were witnessing to...

Yeah, we heard one of them got flogged by their family. I quit doing it. I wasn't here to get people flogged.

After that mission trip, Clara went home, dropped out of college, and started looking for a less overtly religious way to get herself back over here. She found it in the Healthy Child Foundation. Now I just witness through my actions, she said. The rest I leave to God.

Outside the wire, the dozens of muezzins had quieted, leaving a single voice. This one never sang, he spoke. Ranted really. Whoever he was, he always sounded angry. As his sermon echoed out over the town from the loudspeakers at the main mosque, Sonny got up and went back inside to get ready for the day. In addition to everything else he had to do, now he had to find out who this asshole was who'd intimidated Clara into marrying him.

Chapter 3

Two weeks later, the phone rang in his ear a long time before his brother finally picked up. Good morning! Sonny announced. It's me!

Oh God, Bobby groaned. I knew it had to be you. Then he suddenly seemed to wake up. "God, it's good to finally hear your voice."

Bobby was never that sincere. Okay, said Sonny, I can take a hint. I'll catch you another time.

No, wait, that's not -- Bobby stopped to yawn. -- what I meant. What time is it there?

He really must have been half asleep. On the phone, details like that were off limits. They violated operational security and Bobby knew it. Late gig? was all Sonny said.

Oh. Sorry. Yeah. Me and Juke and Kendrick and a dude you don't know on horn.

They talked about the relative merits of the bassists, drummers, and horn players they knew. Nothing about Sonny's location or line of work. You never knew who was listening. Bobby talked about a recent keyboard acquisition, and a girl he'd met. How's yours? Bobby asked.

We had a minor setback.

You dumped her?

She dumped me.

Aw man, I was kidding.

For a guy named Verner. It really wasn't the Pakistanis after all.

"Verner? She dumped you for a guy named Verner?"

Until today, when Sonny had finally ferreted out the name of God's pick for Clara, Verner van den Heuvel had been just another development contractor to Sonny. He'd had no idea that