The only real food Cella had on hand was a loaf of bread and two chocolate bars. Pearce thought about doing the Rocky thing and cracking open the eggs into a glass and swallowing them whole, but he thought the consistency would be like snot so he passed. But while Cella was pulling together her papers, Pearce found a cabinet full of plastic bags labeled
God bless the Italians.
The last thing Pearce asked Cella to do was the worst, but to his surprise, she agreed without protest. They dragged the dead bodies from outside into the clinic and flooded the floors of both clinics with kerosene from the heaters. He then bundled her up into the Pakistani army truck. The vehicle was clearly marked with Pakistani flags on the hood and the sides. The U.S. Army wouldn’t dare fire on it if they came on this side of the border, which, as far as Pearce knew, they wouldn’t. After pulling the vehicle out past the broken gate, he ran back in and set fire to stacks of blankets soaked in kerosene, but not before snagging one of the dead soldier’s field caps. By the time the truck lumbered away from the clinic it was engulfed in flames.
“Now what?” Cella asked.
“We head south.”
Kabul was less than two hundred miles directly north from the clinic, but Pearce knew he couldn’t drive straight there. Khalid’s men, the U.S. Army, and God knows who else were likely still searching for him up the road just over the border. His first concern was Cella’s safety, and the best he could do was get her to the Italian embassy in Islamabad. But how?
“Samira was the wife of a chief in a village about four kilometers from here.” Cella sighed. “She was pregnant with her third. He would help.”
“He might already be dead. Obviously, Marwat and Khalid were connected. Marwat knew about you and your clinic. Khalid must have tipped him off about me being here.”
“How?”
“Maybe they captured one of Daud’s people. Tortured him for information. Told him about you and I evacuating Daud to the clinic.”
“Would they have had the time?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they had planned to take you out all along and it was a coincidence that Daud’s village was hit at the same time. I don’t know. But either way, if we’re being hunted, the first place they would look for us is any village that has a connection to you. And if they aren’t already there, there’s no point in leading them there. You’ve seen how they handle business in these parts.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Ditch this truck as soon as we can. If we can get to a phone, I can call somebody.”
“A phone? Are you joking? The CIA can’t afford to give you your own cell phone?”
“I have a sat phone. But I left it at Daud’s place. I fucked up.”
An hour later, they made their way into the flatlands where the temperature had warmed up enough to turn the snow to slush. Pearce was dark enough to pass for a local, especially with his beard and army field cap pulled over his head. Cella lay flat on the bench seat whenever traffic passed in the opposite direction, which was seldom and, thankfully, always civilian — and they were too afraid of the army to dare cast a glance into the windshield.
They parked the truck in a stand of trees off the road when they saw the first power lines. Pearce knew they would lead to a place requiring electricity. But it took them another two hours of walking until they came to a collection of walled houses, shops, and even a gas station. Cella covered her entire head and face with her knit scarf. She’d also had enough sense to grab a heavy woolen shawl back at the clinic and wrapped it around her shoulders and torso to hide her figure, hunching over a little as she walked to try to conceal her height. The place was a little larger than a village, but hardly a town, let alone a city. One of the shops advertised telephone services in both Pashto and English, so they made their way there.
They entered the shop without incident, and Cella asked for the telephone service since her Pashto was far better than Pearce’s. But the man behind the counter smiled beneath a pair of thick lenses and a bad comb-over and replied in faultless English that they were more than welcome to use the phone so long as they could pay. Pearce got the sense from the proprietor that he was sympathetic to Westerners, so he offered him a stashed one-ounce gold coin for both the phone service and his silence. The man’s smile only got bigger, and he swore secrecy.
