The Warlord's Son Read Online Free PDF Page A

hacked into the side of the limestone bluff. Chairs and beds facing outward from the openings. A boy no older than three stared back from the precipice, lit by the rising sun. Skelly waved. The boy didn’t.
    Every few miles there was some sort of military installation. A barracks, followed by an engineering unit, followed by the School for Armor and Mechanized Warfare, its parking lot full of tanks. So incongruous, with their modern look and the sense of money being spent, as if the government had decided to ignore all other points on the map except these.
    There were mosques, too, some of them large and grand but most of them tiny and every bit as humble and grimy as their surroundings.
    The driver turned on the radio for news on the hour, finding a version in English: American aircraft had mistakenly bombed a hospital. The Taliban were claiming a hundred more civilian casualties. The Northern Alliance offensive was stalled. In American sports, the Yankees were back in the World Series.
    None of it told Skelly a thing he hadn’t known. Nor could he likely add much, even after a full day of reporting. Why not give them this instead, he thought, watching the landscape roll by. Give them this whole damned drive with its sights and sounds, even the smells. Because here on the ground, without the benefit of a single interview, you could already see how easily the anger might stir, build and grow in a place like this, finding both its solace and its outlet at those little mosques, the imams issuing marching orders in holy screeds, the Arabic verses charging the air like bolts of lightning.
    But at best, Skelly knew, he’d only have room for a paragraph or two of descriptive detail, and that would likely have to wait for his weekend story. Even supposing he could supply everything, could somehow distill this journey into twenty column inches of deathless prose, who would read it? Some Midwestern housewife, perhaps, over her second cup of coffee after carpooling to grade school in her combat vehicle. Or some bored accountant, yawning through a lunch break. Most everybody else would skip it, content to get their daily feed from television or, for those who wanted more, from a national paper like the
Times,
or from the Internet.
    As a correspondent from a mid-sized daily, in other words, Skelly was obsolete, as quaintly useless as a typewriter in a roomful of laptops, dispensing information that would be stale hours before it ever saw print. He knew as well that this initial rush of enthusiasm and insight would subside, overwhelmed by repeated exposure and his own limitations. Try as he might, his prose would never be supple enough to stretch to the heart of the matter.
    So he would have to settle for the usual rewards, not that those were insignificant. In the weeks to come, Skelly knew, he would enter realms of old codes and unbreakable taboos. His hosts would be men wondering one minute how they might cut his throat while in the next they’d offer tea and refreshment, breaking bread pulled from a smoking ceramic hole in the ground, just as they would have done it five hundred years earlier.
    Yes, he was back in the Third World, all right, with its taste upon his tongue and the stench high in his nostrils. And now, standing in a cobbled alley of a Peshawar bazaar, he was doing what so many Third World people do, at least in Pakistan. He was punching in numbers on a cell phone. He wanted to reach Najeeb, but on this block, at least, the signal was too weak, so they kept walking, Babar still nervously prattling on about his cousin.
    When they reached the top of a rise, Skelly tried again. Glancing back toward the demonstration, he saw that the mob was receding, a storm tide heading meekly back to sea. Utterly ridiculous that it had ever been such a close call. But it would be something to tell Janine tonight on the phone. She was the latest of his wives.
Three of them.
The number still a marvel to him, as if he were a Hollywood