Chapter Twenty-One
Friday, March 11, 1988
Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Mohmand Agency
The 165-mile route from Islamabad to the tiny village of Sham Shah near the Afghanistan border took more than seven hours, much of it along gray, dusty, potholed roads crammed with overloaded trucks, carts pulled by mules, rusty bicycles, and battered cars.
Johnson and Vic, sitting in the rear seats of a dented and heavily scratched double-cab Toyota pickup truck, spoke little as the driver, a Pashtun employed by the CIA, piloted them northeast. They skirted Peshawar to the north and then headed over the mountains to Ghalanai, the main town of the Mohmand Agency, which nestled in a natural bowl surrounded by towering peaks on all sides.
Outside the agency hospital in Ghalanai, a low-slung single-stor
