James Huston: Fallout

Iran-Pakistan border: Midnight, 3 March 2002

“Hafez,” the older guard said. “Someone is coming.”

The headlights working their way down the rutted road two miles away were not a welcome sight. The two Pakistani border guards were standing their usual night duty on Pakistan’s mountainous border with Iran. They both knew they weren’t there because of their skill as guards. They were there because they had failed in their duties elsewhere, and the only place left to put them was an obscure border in the mountains on a rutted road in the middle of the night where one vehicle a night might come through loaded with chicken feed.

Hafez sat up in the drafty wooden shack warmed only by a glowing electric space heater that was inadequate against the biting cold. He breathed in loudly through his nose, trying to stretch while pretending that he hadn’t been sleeping. They both had scruffy beards and wore mismatched Army uniform pieces. “I know,” Hafez said harshly as he stood. Even though he was younger, he outranked the older soldier. Hafez was in charge of the border crossing until they were relieved in three hours. “We will inspect him completely,” he said.

The older guard groaned. “What for? There is never anything. Why bother?”

“Think about it! Why would a truck come through this checkpoint? We get shepherds, traders, refugees, but not trucks.” Hafez sniffed against the cold. “Not many anyway.”

The older guard looked at him, then at the truck, now half a mile away. It started to snow softly in the darkness. The floodlights pointing out from their guardhouse toward the truck highlighted the snowflakes. “We do get trucks; five or ten every month. What difference does it make anyway?”

“It is our job ,” Hafez answered as he threw back the sliding door and put the strap of his assault rifle over his shoulder. He stepped in front of the truck that had pulled up to the bar that defined the border between the two countries. The Iranian border guards two hundred yards away had waved the truck out of Iran without so much as a comment. Hafez put out his hand for the truck to stop. He shook as a chill rushed through him. “Right here,” Hafez said in Urdu.

The driver stopped and rolled down his window. “Good morning,” he said in Farsi as he handed Hafez his passport and the truck’s documents.

Hafez shook his head as he took the driver’s papers. He didn’t understand Farsi. He looked at the older guard behind him. “Iranian.”

On top of a large hill between the border and the high mountains behind it, Riaz Khan lay on his belly on the cold ground and cursed as he studied the border scene through his night vision binoculars. “They are stopping the truck,” he said to the men behind him, who could not be seen from the border side of the hill. “This was supposed to be the easiest crossing point,” he said as he glanced back at one of his men.

“That’s what we were told.”

“You had better be right.”

At the border, the older guard nodded, completely uninterested.

Hafez looked at the truck, then leaned into the floodlights so he could read the documentation. “Where are you going?” he asked the driver, again in Urdu.

“I don’t understand,” the man said in Farsi.

“You speak English?” Hafez asked.

“Little,” the driver replied.

“Where are you going?” Hafez asked.

The driver’s face soured. “Everything is in the papers.”

Hafez didn’t like that response at all. “Get out of the truck,” he ordered.

The driver looked up at the falling snow, reluctantly grabbed his coat off the seat, and slid to the frozen ground. “What did I do?” he asked as he threw on his heavy, soiled coat and jammed his hands into the pockets.

“I didn’t ask you about the papers. I asked you where you were going. Do you not know where you are going without looking at your papers?”

“Quetta,” the driver said. He spit on the ground, partially in contempt of the guards, but ambiguously enough that they couldn’t accuse him of it.

Hafez knew Quetta, a distant Pakistani city. “Why?”

“Because they told me to go to Quetta. Why do you think I’m going to Quetta? For vacation?”

Hafez looked at the truck. It was a Russian-made stake truck that had seen better days. The diesel engine idled roughly. The back of the truck was full of random scrap metal exposed to the elements. “What is in the truck?”

“Scrap metal.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“From the Aral Company in Kazakhstan.”

Hafez studied the papers in his gloved hands. “You are driving a piece-of-shit truck from Kazakhstan to Pakistan, all the way through Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran to deliver scrap metal?”

The driver hunched his shoulders. “If you think it is stupid, tell the one who is paying me to ship it. Now I must go. My penis is going to freeze off.”

“I don’t care about you or your frozen penis,” Hafez said, stepping in front of the man. “Pull over there,” he said, pointing at a dirt spot to the right of the road.

“Aaaaaah,” the driver protested.

“Move your truck over now,” Hafez warned, “or you will never pass through this country.”

The driver held his tongue. He climbed back into the cab. He forced the reluctant transmission into first gear and moved the truck to the side.

“Get the machine,” Hafez ordered the older soldier.

The older guard protested in Urdu, confident the driver couldn’t understand them. “What is the point? We have never found anything, and if we drop the machine it will break and they will make us pay—”

“Get it!” Hafez ordered.

The older guard mumbled as he walked to the storage shed behind their guard shack and took out the American instrument they been trained on. It rarely got used. He carried it to Hafez and held it out. “Here.”

On the hill, Khan had seen enough. He couldn’t hear what was being said, but he knew by the gestures of the guards that his plan was on the verge of collapse. “Let’s go,” he said angrily. “Get your weapons ready.” Khan and the men with him ran to their two trucks and raced down the dirt road in the dark with their lights off.

“You do it,” Hafez said at the checkpoint. “I’m going to watch this driver. I don’t trust him.”

The older guard turned on the machine and watched the needle as he walked around the truck, ready to find nothing so the inspection could be over and he could go back to the warm shack. Directly above the VU-meter on the instrument was a small plate that said in English, a gift of the american people. He watched the needle as he turned the corner to the back of the truck. Suddenly it jumped to life and bounced around the lighted dial. He looked closely at the indicator, then at Hafez, who was standing by the cab of the truck with the driver. He motioned with his head for Hafez to come to the back of the truck.

Hafez frowned in concern and started walking to the back of the truck. “Stay right there,” he said to the driver. He joined the older guard. “What?” he asked.

The guard simply looked at the meter on the box. Hafez followed his gaze, realized what it meant, and stepped away from the truck. The older guard followed suit.

“Twelve hundred milliroentgens per hour!” Hafez exclaimed. He ran back to the front of the truck. “What is this?” he screamed at the driver. “What are you doing? What do you have in there?” he asked, pointing to the scrap metal piled in the back of the truck.

Hafez turned and ran to the guard shack for the phone as the two unlighted trucks rounded the hill and headed straight for him. He stopped and watched the trucks come, then looked back at the older guard, who was standing stupidly next to the truck staring at the VU-meter on the instrument. The driver was inching away from the truck. Hafez stepped toward the oncoming trucks and took his assault rifle off his shoulder. He didn’t like the way this was developing.