| Description | 'The sun did not rise in Peshawar. It seeped - an egg-white smear that brightened the eastern horizon behind a veil of smoke, exhaust and dust. The smoke rose from burning wood, cow dung and old tyres, meagre flames of commerce for kebab shops and bakers, metal-smiths and brick kilns. The exhaust spluttered from buzzing blue swarms of motor rickshaws, three wheeled terrors that jolted across potholes, darting between buses like juiced-up golf-carts'. Into this smoky chaos of sprawling humanity comes Skelly, a burned out American war corrrespondent, now in harness again thanks to a messy divorce and too many children. Post 9/11 he's back in the game, in yet another new and extremely hazardous location, dropped from the skies after scarcely as much preparation as one might make for a weekend at the beach. But first he must find a 'fixer'; someone local yet who speaks English, who is good on the ground, and can arrange transport; a man who is essential to keeping one alive and safe, yet knows where the action is. And, for every war correspondent in Peshawar, the action is across the border in the mountain strongholds of Afghanistan. Soon Skelly and his fixer, Najeeb, are driving dusty roads north, in the wake of Mahmood Abdul Khan - ex-Mujahadeen, ex-Taliban, currently good friend of the Allied Forces. For Skelly has been promised the scoop of a lifetime, the sort that will allow him to write his own ticket back to the States. He and Najeeb are on the trail of the tribal leader whom every American is after, the biggest fish of them all.... |
