The preface to Chapter 10 is "March 1981," moving the narrative forward five years. An eighteen-year-old Amir and his father are leaving Kabul in the middle of the night to the relative safety of Pakistan. Amir hints at the changes Afghanistan has endured during the past five years and the terror state it has become. At one of the checkpoints, a Russian soldier demands thirty minutes with one of the female passengers, yet Baba stands up to him. Amir feebly asks his father to sit down. Once again, Amir's cowardice is a source of embarrassment for Baba.
When the truck isn't ready to take them on to Peshawar, Amir realizes he is in a dark basement room with about thirty others. Among those others is Kamal, one of the boys who hung around Assef. Catching snippets of conversation, Amir overhears that Kamal had an encounter with four men who presumably treated him the way Assef treated Hassan. Although the truck that was supposed to transport them is beyond repair, an offer is made to smuggle the refugees in a fuel truck. In order to help him through this ordeal, Amir thinks of a pleasant memory of him and Hassan flying kites.
After they climb out of the fuel truck, Amir sums up the total of Baba's existence in Pakistan: "One disappointing son and two suitcases." Yet the suitcases are not the final image of the chapter. Chapter 10 ends with Kamal's father committing suicide after the death of his son due to the gas fumes in the tanker.
