Touching Stars by Emilie Richards Page B

was?”
    “For taking the job in Afghanistan?”
    “No, for staying too long when I was clearly past my usefulness. And for trusting the wrong people.”
    She knew only the bare bones of the story. As an ex-wife, no one had felt it necessary to communicate many details to her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
    “As a journalist, one of the first things you learn is to suspect everybody. And you multiply that times ten when you’re in hostile surroundings. I knew that. But I got cocky. After all that time in the country, I thought I could tell a friend from an enemy, that I had some kind of sixth sense about who was telling the truth and who wasn’t. Even though I was living in a different culture, with different signals.”
    She waited, and when he didn’t go on, she prodded him gently. “And it was harder to tell than you thought?”
    “You know some of what happened from the news, I’m sure. We learned the military was planning a thrust in the south to clear out the Taliban. The rumor was that some of the Taliban leaders were holed up northeast of Kandahar, in Zabul province. I wanted to see what I could find, to initiate a dialogue with some of the less radical adherents to help viewers understand the stakes. I was warned not to go on my own, but I was sure I knew what I was doing. I had an armed guard. I had my translator, who had been with me through other tight spots, my cameraman.”
    This part of the story was not unfamiliar. Eric’s translator had arranged an interview, but only if he left his guard behind. Safety had been guaranteed for Eric and his cameraman, Howard Short, a tough African-American father of one who had agreed to film the interview as a personal favor to Eric. Instead, they had been bound and thrown into the back of a truck and taken to the small village of Dai Chopan.
    Gayle could imagine what questions her ex-husband asked himself every night. “Eric, your instincts have proved to be excellent any number of times.”
    “Not this time. The whole world knows we were delivered into the hands of our captors by my translator. But not everybody knows Adib was as much my friend as Howard. I’d called in favors to get his family into safer housing, paid for his baby son’s flight to Germany to have a cleft palate repaired. We’d had so many good conversations about the differences in the way our countries saw the world. He knew I was reporting the situation in his country, not cheering anybody from the sidelines.”
    “And he betrayed you?”
    “I still don’t know why. Either he was more desperate or more furious than I’d suspected. Some of his wife’s family were killed in a coalition bombing in Jalalabad, and I know that deeply affected him. But I didn’t see even a glimmer of regret in his eyes when he as much as signed our death warrants. We were a sacrifice, and he didn’t have any more feeling about delivering Howard and me to those men on that road out of Kandahar than if we had been lambs or goats.”
    “Then you think they really intended to kill you? That it wasn’t some form of theater? Maybe Adib thought you would be safe, but that a point would be made before they let you go.”
    “You’re trying to put a good spin on it, Gayle, but there isn’t one. I’ll never know what Adib thought. He and his family vanished. But our captors? Oh, they were going to kill us. That was never in doubt from the first moment we saw them. When was the only question.”
    Deep inside, she had thought so, too, but now her stomach knotted at the confirmation.
    Eric rested his palm against his forehead, as if willing the memory away. “Howard was the one who saw our chance and made sure we took it. On our second night at the house in Dai Chopan, they decided to move us again under cover of darkness. I had picked up just enough Pashto on my own to figure that out. We were both exhausted, dehydrated. It’s amazing how quickly you can decline without food or water. But we knew we had to