The ISI discovers Khader’s group in Karachi

The discovery of Abdel Khader Khan’s group by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence turns a clandestine supply mission into a flight from surveillance and betrayal. The police reach the hotel and Abdel Khader Khan’s house, forcing the group to leave its lodging, while the reasons for the pursuit reveal that the Afghan resistance is divided by the rival political futures Pakistan and the United States intend to support.

The warning and the raid

The danger enters through Khaled Ansari, who returns with a troubled expression after the narrator has watched Abdel Khader Khan pray. Drawing close to the others, Khaled warns that the police have been at the hotel. When asked what police, he identifies them as the political police: the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. The alert immediately enlarges the threat beyond an ordinary police search. The group has been discovered, and, as Khaled explains, the operation has also reached Abdel Khader Khan’s house. They escaped capture because Abdel Khader Khan was away when it was hit.

The group’s first concern is practical: what identifying traces remain behind? The narrator has kept his passports, money, and knife, but his carry bag is still at the hotel, along with clothes, toiletries, books, and the plane and train tickets. Those tickets matter more than the other abandoned possessions because, as far as he knows, they are the only items there bearing a name. The danger is therefore not only that the authorities have found the group’s lodging; the bag may also connect a particular identity to the people they are pursuing.

Nazeer reaches the bag and escapes with it just before the police force their way into the hotel. He has only enough time to retrieve that one piece of luggage. The hotel manager, one of the group’s own people, has warned him, making the escape possible but also sharpening the question Khaled raises: who told the police where they were? He suspects someone very close to Abdel Khader Khan’s side. The raid thus produces both an immediate rescue and a more intimate threat: an apparent leak from inside the network.

Why the group is targeted

The narrator cannot reconcile the pursuit with Pakistan’s support for Afghanistan during the war. If the group is smuggling supplies to the mujaheddin, he reasons, the authorities should be helping rather than hunting them. Khaled’s explanation reveals the gap between backing a cause in general and choosing which faction may benefit from that backing. Pakistan assists some Afghans, but the men near Kandahar whom the group is supplying are Ahmed Shah Massoud’s men, not allies acceptable to the Pakistani government.

The disagreement is political as well as military. Massoud’s followers will not accept Hekmatyar or other pro-Pakistan resistance leaders. Pakistan and the United States have selected Hekmatyar as their preferred future ruler of Afghanistan after the war, while Massoud’s men reject him outright. In this account, the group’s supplies are dangerous not simply because they cross a border or aid armed resistance, but because they strengthen a faction that refuses the future settlement favored by powerful outside states. Pakistan’s apparent support for the Afghan cause therefore offers no protection to this particular mission.

A new life under pursuit

After the alert, Abdel Khader Khan tells the narrator that he must stay with the group and cannot return to the hotel. The police have his description and will continue looking for him. Abdel Khader Khan accepts responsibility for the danger, apologizes, and says that the betrayal will be punished—but not until the group has returned from its task. The decision suspends any immediate reckoning with the suspected informer: survival and the mission come first.

The plan ahead turns the warning into a change of identity and route. The group will travel to Quetta the next day, remain there for a time, and cross into Afghanistan when the moment is right. Once there, the narrator will have a price on his head because the Russians reward the capture of foreigners helping the mujaheddin. Abdel Khader Khan adds that they have few friends in Pakistan, an assessment made newly concrete by the raid and the possibility that someone near them has betrayed their location.

To reduce the risk of recognition, Abdel Khader Khan proposes dressing the narrator as a young man from his village: a Pashtun in local clothes, with a cap covering his white hair and a pattu, or shawl, over his broad shoulders and chest. He may be passed off as Abdel Khader Khan’s blue-eyed son. The disguise answers the immediate problem of the police description, but it also draws the narrator deeper into the group’s life: he is to travel under its protection, within its family-like presentation, and toward a mission that will make him a target on another side of the border.

Betrayal, belonging, and the turning wheel

The warning comes in the wake of a prayer, and the narrator’s response to Abdel Khader Khan is not uncomplicated. He has already recognized that the older man has used and manipulated the people around him, yet he also sees love in Abdel Khader Khan’s worried eyes and experiences it as the father-love he has long craved. That tension matters to the decision that follows: the man who has drawn him into danger is also the person offering shelter, a route forward, and a place within the group after the hotel is no longer safe.

The scene’s ending widens the meaning of the discovery without undoing its immediate peril. As The Blind Singers begin another song, their music carries the narrator into a reflection on being wanted by authorities in two distant countries. His own government has put a price on his head in Australia; now helping the Afghan resistance will bring another price, this time from the Russians. The raid therefore marks more than the loss of a hotel room. It confirms that the narrator’s fugitive life has followed him across borders and that joining Abdel Khader Khan’s mission will make that exposure more dangerous. The movement toward Quetta and Afghanistan feels, in the narrator’s reflection, like another turn of the wheel: a fate-filled passage into a new role, undertaken with full awareness that he is being pursued.