High Stakes in Kabul

And a Cozy Mystery Writing Toolkit

Camp Phoenix, Kabul, Thanksgiving 2005

Kabul traffic moves at a crawl.

The city is at least 3,500 years old.

Its streets weren’t designed for masses of cars.

In 2006 I was an aid worker in Afghanistan and used to the congestion and to not being able to see past the cars surrounding us.

I’d just left a meeting that had to be cut short because of “some trouble” outside Kabul.

There’d been a car accident between some US soldiers and locals, and there were rumors of unrest.

But that was outside Kabul.

Nothing to worry about, but I’m chronically paranoid.

So with the NGO’s driver at the wheel, I called my friend, Fran, at the office, to ask if she’d heard anything.

Then the car in front of us pulled away, revealing a riot.

They’d set up a roadblock, one man swinging a piece of metal from a bedframe as a makeshift toll gate arm.

The other thirty or so brandished clubs and rusty farm implements.

I remember several sickles and a wicked-looking hand axe with a rounded blade.

I still see the latter in my nightmares.

We were trapped, men beating on the car and shouting their rage.

My driver sat paralyzed.

You know that old trope about the soldier who’s days away from going home when he takes a bullet?

So did I.

My boss on my prior project in Kabul was murdered a week before he was set to leave—a long, sad story I may tell another time.

Now, I was a week away from leaving Afghanistan for good and surrounded by men hunting Americans.

Heart banging, voice shrill, I urged the driver to just move slowly forward.

He wouldn’t or couldn’t, his hands white knuckling the wheel, his jaw locked, his gaze fixed.

I wasn’t in a much better state.

The organization I worked for had about half a dozen armored cars and a couple dozen “soft shells” for roughly 150 workers.

The director’s wife kept an armored car on call so she could go shopping, etc.

The rest of us had to bargain for the other five whenever we had out-of-office work assignments.

I’d lost the bidding war and had gotten stuck with a car that wasn’t armored.

If the crowd tried, they’d get in, and I’d be dragged out.

While the SUV rocked under their blows, Fran answered her phone. When she heard what was going on, she ran it across the hall to the security team.

I tried to explain to them where the riot was happening—but not out of any hope of rescue.

In good traffic, the office with its security team was thirty to forty minutes away.

The mob would break in well before that, and then…

Then there was that hand axe.

There was no rescue coming.

I knew I wasn’t getting out of this alive.

Terror is supposed to narrow one’s vision to focus on the threat.

Maybe because the threat was all around me, my vision had broadened.

I could see every face, every detail.

A little guy wearing a scowl gripped a brick. In slow motion, he cocked his skinny arm back and threw.

The brick smashed through the passenger window. Being a crappy Kabul brick, it broke into three pieces.

I shrieked, threw myself to the other side of the seat, and dropped my phone.

The car had been breached.

Maybe that’s what snapped the driver out of his fugue state.

He slowly drove through the crowd, and we were out.

I was alive.

Two blocks later, we passed a couple Afghan cops sitting placidly at a roundabout, oblivious to what was going on down the road.

Since I didn’t think we’d make it to the office, I told the driver to take me home, a mere five blocks away.

The compound had whimsically been given the call sign PARIS, because my friend Frances lived there too.

The automatic weapon fire started about the time we drove through the compound’s gate.

I’m pretty sure now it was the cops doing the shooting, but at the time I had no idea of the source.

The cell system went down.

Fortunately, I had a radio in my room. All the staff had them, along with call signs, which whiskey-tango-foxtrot I promptly forgot.

I radioed our NGO’s security team and told them about the gunfire.

One of the guys asked if I wanted them to bring me a gun.

Short of a mounted gun turret, I didn’t think it would do much good. I declined the offer and said I’d prefer it if they’d get me out of there.

They agreed.

While I waited, I showered the glass out of my hair and packed a go-bag.

The armored car arrived an hour later.

We couldn’t race straight to the safehouse though. First, we had to collect other stranded foreigners.

By this time, the rioters had vanished from the streets.

But they’d left behind roadblocks of flaming garbage and other debris.

Our SUV sped through them, acrid black smoke roiling in our wake.

Staring between the shoulders of the driver and the security specialist in the front seat, I noticed a crowd of hundreds marching across the road ahead.

Our SUV sped straight toward them.

Though it was impossible, I’d swear I saw that rounded hand axe brandished above the heads of the marchers.

We drew closer.

I cleared my throat. “Is that an, ah, angry mob ahead?”

The security specialist’s head jerked up. “Right,” he rapped out to the driver, “turn around.”

The driver swung the SUV hard, toward one of Kabul’s infamous sewage ditches, and I sucked in a breath.

These ditches run along the roadsides and are a good two feet deep (at least) and maybe 18 inches wide—big enough to incapacitate our SUV.

The mob marching toward the embassy was a lot bigger than the one that had stopped me earlier. If we broke an axle, how long would it take before they noticed us?

Our SUV screeched to a halt inches from the ditch. The driver completed a three-point turn. I started breathing again.

Okay, I may have been hyperventilating.

Ten minutes later, we made it to the safe house.

There, I had to deal with… other people.

Normally, I like other people.

But these other people hadn’t been caught up inside the mob.

My new housemates’ attitudes toward the whole affair ranged from exited to annoyed by the inconvenience.

They couldn’t understand why I was so shaken.

I huddled on a sofa and turned on my radio.

Over its hisses and clicks, a man screamed, “Paris is burning! Paris is burning!”

The compound I’d just left? Burning?

More gunshots popped in the distance.

The radio crackled and fell silent.

The phones were still down. Anything could have been happening outside the walls of the safehouse, and I imagined everything.

I managed to get an email out to my father, assuming he’d hear about the riot, and assuring him I was fine.

I wasn’t fine.

By the next day, the city had calmed down.

I returned to the compound.

It had not burned down, but there had been a pitched battle at its walls.

The local guards had fought off looters climbing the walls. The fight had left them with scuffed knuckles and a couple black eyes.

And a few burns.

The looters had pitched Molotov cocktails over the walls, setting the upper part of the fence—a strip of bamboo meant to raise the sightline—alight.

A trail of broken glass littered the thin red carpet all the way to my bedroom—glass I’d shed from my clothes and hair on the way inside the day before.

I checked my email.

There was one from my father, and I felt a rush of relief. At last, someone who cared.

His response?

What riot?

The international news hadn’t reported on the riot, because… why would they?

It wasn’t even a blip in the news cycle.

But it had been a big deal to me.

I’d barely escaped a horrible death, and no one even knew.

I grew irrationally angry. (Yes, it was ridiculous, and yes, I got over it).

To the world, a riot in far-off Kabul was unimportant.

Even a little boring.

But for me, the stakes had been life-and-death.

I’ve been working on a Cozy Mystery Writing Toolkit, and one of the things I address in it are stakes.

The higher the stakes, the more gripping your story.

Cozy mysteries avoid high-stakes dramas like serial killers or global conspiracies.

The stakes in a cozy mystery are more personal.

But just because they’re personal, it doesn't mean they’re low-stakes.

While the looming loss of a small-town business, the destruction of a reputation, or the potential loss of a loved one aren’t world-ending high-stakes, they can be world-ending for the people involved.

These are stakes that are relatable, and that’s how they hook the reader.

I plan to make the toolkit available in early 2026.

Now that I’ve told you, I’ve got reputational stakes involved, so I have to get it done.

If you’d like to receive notifications when the Cozy Mystery Writing Toolkit becomes available, sign-up HERE.