The last hour has been spent on old country tracks, to reach their current isolated destination in the middle of the desert. It has taken nearly three hours to get from Chabahar to Jor on the rickety old Tata truck. Rabinder Kumar, Lieutenant Commander, Indian Navy (retired), now with the intelligence service, husband of Shalini and father of two beautiful daughters. He himself has become so immersed in his cover that sometimes, late at night, he recites his own name to himself, just to make sure he still remembers it. Once every two months, Control drafts and forwards a message to her from him, assuring her that all is well, along with his salary payment. His ex-Navy background blends into that story well. Therefore, his wife thinks he’s on secondment to a scientific research mission, on a boat somewhere in the remote recesses of the Indian Ocean. Control is obsessed with the fact that Chabahar is flooded with Pakistani spies. Receiving any kind of communication would risk blowing his cover. They feel it would be best for all concerned if his wife didn’t know his exact whereabouts.
He hasn’t even spoken to his wife for two years. His mouth salivates at the thought of it. He longs for his wife’s cooking, the aloo bhujias and daal with tarrka, with a side of homemade spicy achaar, prepared so lovingly by her own hand. Besides, he hates the food in this country.
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The driver looks at him and offers him the container, but he declines. The driver has sat himself down on the ground and opens a Tupperware container which has a simple breakfast of flatbread and cottage cheese. He jumps off the truck and circles around to the side of the dirt track. He tends to stay clear of them, thus further cementing the belief that he is a sifarshi with nothing in common with the rest. To them, he is simply a slightly underqualified logistics coordinator who, according to the rumour mills, has gotten this assignment because the company chairman is a distant relative. None of his erstwhile ‘co-workers’ in the shipping company where he has been placed are aware of his real job. This is a deep cover independent assignment, so there are no colleagues to share his burden. The work is boring, consisting of endless observation of Chabahar port and its surrounding areas. After two years, the monotony and isolation of this place is getting to him.
The dust in this desert has a physical presence, constantly pushing and prodding, looking for a way in. After all, his native Bihar is a dusty place as well, but it’s nothing like this.
It flavours his food, it corrodes his equipment, and permeates itself into his clothes. The dust, constant and coarse, that gets into everything. It’s the thing he hates most about this place. The man wipes the gritty dust from his eyes and rouses himself from the flatbed of the ancient Tata truck. The air itself seems infused with diesel fumes. The edge of the modern world, a junkyard where the detritus of a post-industrial society is dumped. In a world of shadows, where lying is an art, will those on the hunt get to the mole in time? Eos presents an exclusive excerpt from Omar Shahid Hamid’s fifth novel, Betrayal When a captured spy reveals the presence of a mole within Pakistan’s intelligence establishment, a race against time ensues to unearth the double agent.