Chapter 13: The Open Trail

April 2011

The patrol came on a Tuesday, in the late morning, when the sun had been working at the south slopes for three weeks and the trails through the pass had finally opened enough to carry men.

Omar saw them first. He’d never really stopped watching — some part of a soldier never does — and from the high rocks above the field where he’d been clearing the winter’s deadfall he caught the movement on the far ridge that wasn’t wind and wasn’t goat: the particular spacing of men moving tactically, strung out, covering one another. He went flat on instinct and watched, and his heart did something complicated in his chest, because he knew that spacing. He knew that gait. He’d walked that way ten thousand times himself.

Americans.

For a long moment he lay in the cold rocks and didn’t move, and felt the whole of his two lives pull against each other in him like a seam about to tear.

He could let them pass. The thought came and he let it come, honestly, because he owed it that much. He could lie still in these rocks and let the patrol work down the valley and out again, and go back down to the house, to Mariam and the baby coming, to Nadia and Yasmin and Dina, to the only happiness he had ever known that was wholly his — and stay. Disappear. Become a man who used to be a soldier, in a pass at the roof of the world, and grow old with his four wives and their children and never be found.

And the women would die for it.

That was the truth that ended the daydream, the same truth that had kept the gear behind the false wall all winter. Not today, maybe, and not this month — but a household that sheltered an American, in this valley, was a household living on borrowed time, and the loan was nearly called. There had already been two searches. There was talk of a third. Four women now carried his children, and every one of those children was an American citizen the moment it drew breath, and there was exactly one man in the world who could make the government on the far side of that ridge move heaven and earth to get them out — and he was lying in the rocks watching that government walk past.

He closed his eyes. He thought of Yasmin’s face. He thought of all four of their faces.

Then he did the hardest thing he had ever done, which was to choose the long road that might save them over the short road that would surely doom them, and he came up out of the rocks slow and careful, hands held wide and empty and high, and he walked down toward the open ground where the patrol could see him, a lone unarmed man on a hillside in Nuristan, calling out in clear American English the recognition words he’d carried in his head for six months like a prayer he’d never expected to say.

He had a few hours. The patrol leader — a young captain who looked at Omar like he was seeing a ghost, because to the United States Army Sergeant Omar Mansoor had been dead since October — gave him that much. They would move out before dark, back the way they’d come, toward the firebase two valleys over. Omar would go with them. There was no version of events in which he didn’t.