Chapter 32: "The Missing Falcons - I"

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Written on 27th April

"Here, have some soup," Salma carefully walked into the room with her eyes firmly fixed on the bowl of soup.

Sarah - who was already sprawled on the mattress Salma had arranged for her while she took a quick bath - turned to her, her eyelids thick with sleep.

"I don't think I can stay conscious to eat at this point," Sarah mumbled, pulling herself up. "I just need my brain to shut down so I can catch a break."

"Have something in your stomach so you can sleep properly," Salma replied, handing her the soup bowl. "It's soup. Requires very little effort to eat it and a full stomach is an excellent drug for sleep."

Sarah took a spoonful.

"You said the same thing about a hot bath," she said.

"Yeah, that eases your brain and body too." Salma arranged the pillows behind Sarah so she could relax against them while she finished her soup.

"You know, I'd come here more often if I get treated like this." Sarah smiled lazily between spoonfuls of soup.

Salma could tell the food was doing her good.

"I know how horrible it is when you stay sleepless for too long," Salma replied.

Sarah eyed her carefully but did not press the matter further. Salma was grateful. She pulled out her laptop and placed it on her bed.

"What do you plan on doing in the meantime?" Sarah asked, putting the soup bowl away.

"Watch a movie or something," Salma replied, fixing her earphones.

"You're staying in the room?" Sarah asked.

"Yes," Salma confirmed, grinning at her widely. "I'll be watching over you like a guardian angel."

Sarah snorted as she straightened her pillows and slumped against them.

"You'll be watching a movie," she replied, "but thanks anyways. I need to feel safe to sleep and I think I'll be safest with the princess watching over me."

"I'm not a princess!" Salma snapped to which Sarah laughed into her pillow. "And also, you could be in the most danger at the moment because of me being around you."

"Matter of perspective." Sarah yawned and then turned over her side, closing her eyes.

Salma closed the curtains and perched on her bed in front of her laptop to be a silent companion while her friend tried to sleep.

Two hours went by. Sarah had been turning restlessly next to her bed but for the past hour or so, she had been quiet and still. As the movie ended, Salma silently shut the screen of the laptop. She removed her earphones and placed the laptop on the bed, then checked up on Sarah. She was sound asleep. Biting into her lips, Salma carefully stepped off of her bed and tip-toed around Sarah's mattress. Her teeth dug harder into her lower lip as she tried to shut the door as softly as she could.

Once outside, Salma exhaled a sigh of relief and stretched.

"She's asleep?"

Salma turned around to see her mother coming out of Asim's room with one of his shirts in hand.

"Yeah," Salma replied, following her mother downstairs. "Asim couldn't be bothered to put his laundry in the basket again?"

"No, he learned his lesson the last time," her mother replied with laugh then raised the shirt. "He managed to tear a slit in his shirt last night and asked me to fix it."

Her mother took a seat on the couch and searched through her needle box for the right kind of thread. Salma shifted uncomfortably, before dropping heavily next to her mother.

"Mum?" she asked.

"Hmm?"

Salma wiggled her toes and chewed on her inner lip.

"I need to talk to you about something," Salma began.

She felt her mother's shrewd eyes flit to her for an instant before turning back to her sewing.

"What about?" she asked, her stern tone less than helpful. Salma was certain her mother had some superpower for detecting unpleasant conversations like Spiderman's Spidey-sense. Salma's stomach knotted painfully.

"About Zayn." Salma sighed.

The reaction was bare minimum. She had expected it.

"What about him?" Her mother continued the sewing.

"He . . ." Salma trailed off contemplating on how much to share. "He might have asked for my number," she ended up saying, deciding to not get into the details of how, when or why it had happened.

"There's no need for that," came her mother's expected reply.

"Him asking for permission?" Salma frowned.

"No, you giving him your number," her mother corrected.

Salma's frowned deepened. Although she was quite certain her mother would react this way, she still found it odd. Zayn and she were Mahrams for all practical reasons. He asking for her number was not wrong per se. In fact, it was just a matter of Salma's approval at this point. Her mother did not think so.

"Alright," Salma replied with a sigh as she stood up. She decided to keep her opinions on her mother's weird take on the matter to herself. "Make sure you lot let Zayn know I am not allowed. I don't want him holding grudges against me."

***

Salma sat across her father nibbling on her sandwich quietly. Asim and her mother were at Anne's. Salma mulled over asking her father why her mother held so many strange ideas around marriages, and why she was so adamant about holding what was socially acceptable compared to what was right. Salma was not overly excited about Zayn having her number but her mother's opposition had made her think. Aliya was different from the rest of the family. Although raised with the same values, she more of a conformist and viewed things as what was appropriate according to the people and the culture instead of what was permissible in her Deen.

Salma opened her mouth to ask but the commotion behind her interrupted her. She turned around to see a still groggy Sarah back off to fix her niqaab.

"You're up?" Salma asked, making her father attentive to her friend too.

"Yeah," Sarah replied, stepping back in. "Had to pray 'asr. Assalam o alaikom, Mr. Rahman."

"Wa Alaikom Assalam," her father replied cheerfully. "I heard the tough cookie isn't so tough after all."

"Don't ask." Sarah huffed, taking a seat next to Salma. "I almost lost my mind. I most probably would have manifested Toryal crawling underneath my bed had Salma not come to my rescue."

Her father laughed loudly. Salma shook her head.

"Don't think too much into it," Mr. Rahman reassured. "We'll be keeping an eye on things. You're welcomed to stay here if it makes you feel safer."

"Thank you," Sarah replied, reaching for a glass and filling it up.

Salma put the plate of sandwiches in front of her.

"No, problem." Mr. Rahman smiled, picking up his plate and glass. "I'll let you girls eat in peace."

"No, no, Mr. Rahman, wait," Sarah asked him to remain seated as he got up. "I can manage sandwiches through my niqaab. Also, I had been meaning to ask you something."

Her father smiled again, placing his food on the table again.

"I suppose I am destined to get interrogated today." He chuckled.

Sarah frowned.

"What do you mean?" she asked before turning to Salma. "Do you happen to have a straw?"

Salma nodded and got up as her father answered Sarah.

"Princess had been meaning to ask me something," he said, smiling at Salma as she came back. "Were you not?"

Salma stiffened in the middle of giving Sarah the straw.

"How did you know?" she asked, sounding surprised and concerned.

Sarah dipped the straw in her glass and took a sip as she observed the father-daughter duo converse.

"You were mulling it over. I could tell," Mr. Rahman replied, a teasing smile still playing on his lips. "What troubles my princess?"

Salma looked away, turning her attention back to her sandwich.

"Nothing," she replied. "Maybe some other time."

Mr. Rahman shrugged.

"Alright then, unlike you, your friend over here doesn't do a 'should I ask or stay silent' chant in her head," he said. "So I suppose we'll stick to Sarah interrogating me."

Sarah frowned.

"I do overthink at times," Sarah replied. "I lost sleep over it not too long ago, but anyway." She placed her half eaten sandwich on her plate and dusted crumbs off of her fingers. "I wanted to know but your colleague almost socked me for asking. What exactly happened to Hurayra?"

Salma stiffened. Her father too, seemed to have been caught off guard. Whatever he had thought she had to ask, Hurayra's demise was not one of them.

Salma pushed back on her seat and craned her neck to peek into the sitting room. She knew her mother was not around but she still had to check. What happened to her Uncle was a sensitive subject. It brought too many horrible memories for Aliya. She usually ended up crying and so everyone laid off the subject. Salma just knew that after Grand Chief Sulaiman's death, his son disappeared in an attack too. An explosion had taken him away. Not much was left to bury. Her mother had never recovered from the brutal way in which her brother had gone.

Mr. Rahman inhaled a deep breath, releasing it slowly. Salma watched Sarah calmly waiting for his reply. She felt envious of her friend for being so direct and confident. Had this question popped up in Salma's head, she would have spent three hundred years wondering how she should ask the question and if she should ask it at all.

"Toryal planted seeds of doubt in your head, didn't he?" Mr. Rahman guessed, resuming his dinner. He was being his normal self, except that his smile was now replaced by grim lines.

"You think that because . . ?" Sarah asked.

"That man is good at injecting poison in one's thoughts," Mr. Rahman replied. "I doubt he was there to threaten you. He just meant to nurture suspicions in your head."

"And what would he get out of it?"

"You're my daughter's closest friend," Mr. Rahman replied. "You chased him out of town wielding a baseball bat like Salahuddin's wielded his sword. You don't think poisoning you serves him any purpose?"

"You deny having any involvement in Hurayra's case?" Sarah redirected him back to the question.

"I had a lot to do with Hurayra but none of what Toryal told you," Mr. Rahman replied.

Sarah could see Salma's eyes spark with curiosity too. It was clearly the first time she was hearing anything new about her Uncle.

"You know what he told me?" Sarah cocked her head.

"You live-streamed the whole exchange for us, Sarah," Salma pointed it out.

"Yes, but Mr. Rahman was on the road on his way to the campus when I was live-streaming." Sarah shrugged.

"And I never listen to, or get updated about previous recordings," her father told Salma with mock secrecy. "It's how we do things at the Green Coat Agency."

Salma chuckled. Sarah's shoulder slumped.

"I'm still sleep deprived," she defended her stupidity.

Amused, the father-daughter duo returned back to their food. Not Sarah.

"So." She cleared her throat then she asked again. "What exactly happened to Hurayra?"

The Green Coat sighed as he saw the two girls looking at him expectantly.

"You're persistent," he muttered, then put his sandwich down.

"Will you tell us?" Salma asked in a small, unsure voice.

"Yeah, alright," he replied. "I better tell you what I know."

The girls sat up a little straighter with excitement.

"No one is exactly sure what happened to him," he began. "Everything was a chaotic mess back then. Too many important people were being murdered. The security apparatus was overwhelmed.

"After the attack on the fly-past of the 'Fighting Falcons' – the first batch of Sthooriy F-16 pilots - the ruling family and the Falcons were identified as targets with the highest risk. They had to be protected. With Sulaiman killed, the rest of the targets were bulked into pairs to provide a more profound cover to them. Each member of the ruling family was to be paired with a Falcon. And no two pairs were to stay at the same place at the same time."

"Why?" Salma asked. She was sitting up straight, leaning on the table as the story drew her in.

"Too much concentration," he said the oft repeated line.

"Easy targets." Salma nodded in understanding.

"Exactly," he replied. "If they stayed away from each other, they could not be targeted with a single attack."

"And yet you paired a ruling family member with a Falcon?" Sarah asked.

"Like I said, the country security apparatus was overwhelmed, so we had to put them together to be able to give each family-falcon pair a thicker security layer," he replied. " A lot of changes had to be made. The Premier's family mostly shifted to airbases to allow their Falcon counter-parts to take part in their flying exercises without any hindrance. Also, the bases were more secure. However, Hurayra was a problem."

"A problem?" Salma raised a brow.

"Well, your uncle wasn't the easiest brat to deal with it, he was a problem over all," he said much to Salma's amusement, "but this time I mean he was both a Zamarud zai and a Fighting Falcon. Pairing him either way was a concentration of targets. On his insistence – and he was too thick-headed to argue with once he started insisting - it was decided that he would paired with his friend and fellow Falcon, Zarrar Khan instead of any of his family members."

"Any idea why he insisted on Zarrar?"

"Amongst the targets, it was evaluated that Hurayra was of the highest risk after his father, Grand Chief Sulaiman. I suppose he realized, he would be endangering his family if he were paired with any of them."

"And he didn't like Zarrar?" Sarah assumed, remembering Burak mentioning a friend that had betrayed Hurayra.

Mr. Rahman took a sip of his water.

"Oh no, they were thick as thieves, those two," Mr. Rahman replied. "Zarrar's father is an agent himself. With a lot of connection inside and outside the agency, I think Hurayra felt Zarrar was the most protected person of the lot. He probably thought he wasn't going to raise Zarrar's threat levels that high. And even if he did, Zarrar could handle it."

"Zarrar's father was a Green Coat?" Salma asked, her eyes wide with interest.

"No, not a Green Coat," Mr. Rahman replied.

"Then how was he an agent?" Salma asked immediately.

"He's working for the Pakistani agency, ISI," Mr. Rahman replied.

"But how's that possi --"

"Zarrar's father, Babar Khan is from Peshawar area in Pakistan. He's been working for us," Mr. Rahman quickly cleared her confusion. "Intelligence agencies collaborate a lot. He's been a very valuable collaborator between the two agencies for a very long time. That's why I said he had connection inside and outside the agency. Also, he being ISI was probably why Hurayra thought his son was safer. The Tor Guls have a very complicated relationship with ISI. Both of them are usually at odds with each other for the Tor Gul's involvement in the drug trade in the neighboring Afghanistan, and also, it is believed that the Tor Guls had reached out to the Indian RAW behind the Green Coats back. The ISI claims to have intercepted that message."

"What happened?" Sarah asked keenly.

"It's another story for another time. Thing is, nobody's got anything to prove it. Both RAW and Tor Guls deny that allegation," Mr. Rahman replied. "But since India and Pakistan are always just a few seconds away from nuking the region into oblivion, it wedged a cleave between ISI and Tor Guls and interestingly, RAW and Tor Guls too. In any case, it was believed that taking Zarrar out could make it real between the Tor Guls and ISI, and so we thought Hurayra was safest with the ISI agent's son."

"You realized you were wrong?" Sarah guessed.

"We realized quite soon that we were indeed, very wrong." Mr. Rahman replied.

Author's Note:

And that's the story for another day, now isn't it😂?

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