As he walked from San Francisco's Ferry Building into the heart of the bustling downtown, Sargon Heinrich was still getting used to the feeling of freedom.

Freedom to walk past a white car without worrying that it would suddenly explode. Freedom from ubiquitous men carrying AK-47 assault rifles. Freedom to stroll down the street, drinking in the dust-free air, talking to whomever he chooses.

Oh -- and freedom from a Kabul jail cell, where the Bay Area entrepreneur -- who just turned 41 -- spent nearly two months before being acquitted of gun-smuggling charges he believes were a thinly veiled kind of extortion.

Now -- after surviving repeated interrogations, two trials and one bad night when Taliban prisoners came looking for him with sharpened sticks -- he's back at work, meeting with investors to prove he's still both alive and sane and getting ready to leave in a few weeks for a big overseas business trip.

Right back to Kabul, where all his troubles began.

"I'm back there in 20 days," he said. "Success for my partners, success for myself is going to be my best revenge for what came to pass."

But it's more than personal success Heinrich seeks. He sees his work overseas as a partner in a construction firm employing hundreds of Afghan workers as not just a profitable venture, but an essential part of the struggle against terrorism -- fighting hatred with opportunity.

"When people have food in their stomachs, they don't get filled in the mosques with all kinds of venom," he said. "Afghanistan is so much closer to where we want it to be than people think. It just takes a little, little more effort."

To Heinrich, returning to Kabul is not just a business trip -- it's a continuation of a professional and personal odyssey rooted in his childhood.

He was born in Chicago to a German father and an Assyrian mother who named him for the ancient ruler of a broad swath of the Middle East.

His father, at one point dean of students at UC Riverside, took a job at San Francisco's Bechtel Corp., and the young Sargon spent part of his youth in places like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Dubai.

Moving to the Bay Area in 1984, Heinrich earned a bachelor's degree in political science and economics at St. Mary's College in 1986 and a master's in organizational development at the University of San Francisco in 1988.

Around the same time, he followed his father's path to Bechtel, where he spent 13 years -- once filling up two passports in one year, and moving to Kuwait after the first Gulf War to spend two years working in reconstruction and troubleshooting.

When he left Bechtel in 1998, Heinrich took with him a long and varied resume and a conviction about the role U.S. businesses like Bechtel could play in the world.

"I have a very core belief that business has to be a force for good," he said.

"I call it the rubber-band effect. ... When one part of the world has progressed so far and another part has not progressed at all, that rubber band is either going to pull the backward people forward or it's going to pull the forward people backward."

Heinrich didn't get into that kind of business right away. He started a software company that he sold in 2001, and launched a holding company with diversified interests in media, high tech and retail.

But by the end of 2001, tired of dealing with lawyers, Heinrich's interests returned to the basics. At the same time, the Sept. 11 attacks returned his eyes to the link between commerce and international relations. He decided to get to business in war-torn Afghanistan.

"This is a four-pronged battle in Afghanistan," Heinrich said, beginning an explanation he offers with the ready words of frequent repetition.

"You've got the military side, which is a battle in itself for security. You've got the political side, which is a battle to keep a fledgling democracy going. ... There is an economic side, in which you're trying to build businesses so that people actually have futures and hope. And then there's a social side.

"I characterize myself as taking on the economic side."

At the time, a lot of the business in Afghanistan was big contract work, Heinrich said -- huge reconstruction projects financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Heinrich wanted to try a different tack.

"I said, ... 'I'm going to go to Afghanistan, I'm going to invest in a small company and I'm going to build a pure Afghan company, with the idea being I can leave in two years and it will last forever and employ a lot of people.' "

It seemed like a good plan. But the reality of Kabul when Heinrich arrived in February 2004 -- to a welcome wagon of guards rushing to dress him in body armor at the airport -- seemed daunting.

"I've lived and worked in 162 countries. And I've never seen anything like what I saw when I landed in Kabul," he said. "It's destitute and (has) a real medieval feeling. Like going back in time. That was my first impression."

Afghanistan seemed a country broken by 40 years without hope, Heinrich said -- a place where everybody seemed to be worried only about what they could get from you here, now, and forget about the future.

It was an impression quickly counterbalanced, he said, by his new business partner, Habib -- for security reasons, Heinrich declined to give his partner's last name or the name of their company in Afghanistan.

"When I met him, I was really just bowled over by the enthusiasm," he said -- and impressed by the maturity his new partner showed despite his mere 25 years of age.

"I could see he had really moved far from hauling gravel in the back of a rented car and selling it, to building a drywall company to starting a construction company," Heinrich said. "He was the only person I ever met who reinvested in his company. ... I got to see the opposite side of Afghanistan."

For a while, Heinrich said, things went great -- tapping back into his experience with startups and reconstruction, he and Habib soon landed contracts ranging from constructing the interiors of Kabul's first five-star hotel to building bases for NATO and private security firms.

The work quickly employed 120 Afghans and was soon profitable, with some fat contracts -- like the one in October that brought in a $250,000 deposit to a Kabul bank.

Two days later, Heinrich said, 40 armed men -- police, about half in uniforms -- burst into the hotel restaurant where he was sitting down for a game of dominoes with fellow expatriate businessmen.

"None of them had badges," Heinrich said. "And they started rounding everybody up and beating the hell out of them. ... I had a gun put in my mouth. It was a pretty rough night."

It wasn't clear what the men wanted, Heinrich said. One asked him where the guns were, and he handed over a holstered pistol that a U.N. pilot had insisted Heinrich take after an incident in Iraq where a helicopter was shot down and the survivors killed.

"Is this it?" they asked. "That's it," he said. They took him away.

"We were brought in and interrogated for three days where nobody knew where we were," Heinrich said. "Three days in a police station, interrogation rooms, sleeping in a chair, handcuffed. It wasn't pleasant."

Then came the demands for money for his release, beginning with a demand for $250,000 -- a figure he found to be an interesting match to his company's recent deposit -- then lower figures. Heinrich said he refused to pay, telling the police he was a "nonperforming asset" best divested.

"I couldn't live with myself if I had paid," he said. "What kind of example am I setting for the company that we're trying to build if I had paid?"

Eventually, the international community -- law enforcement, business associates, the embassies -- learned where Heinrich was being held along with three other businessmen, two Englishmen and an Indian. But the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan -- which declined to comment on the case, citing federal privacy laws -- was in a difficult situation, he said.

"I always sympathized with them," he said. "They didn't know if I was guilty or not guilty. ... They weren't there to get me out of jail."

Still, as days stretched into weeks, there were times he wondered if he could hold out. The other prisoners were beaten and interrogated with electric shock, he said, and he narrowly escaped being killed by a group of Taliban prisoners who came for him two days before his trial, beating on his door with sharpened wooden sticks.

Finally, after 56 days and two trials, the charges against Heinrich were dropped for lack of evidence by a judge who chastised the prosecution for legal errors and illegal detention and said he was taking the expatriates' goals of helping Afghanistan into consideration.

But to be freed, Heinrich was told, an Afghan would have to provide his bail until the prosecution decided if it would appeal. Habib, his young partner, and Habib's family combined their property assets for the bail, he said.

"They take you being their responsibility very seriously. They consider me part of the family," he said. "On multiple occasions, (Habib's) 87-year-old father requested that he be put in jail and have them let me out."

The three men incarcerated with Heinrich received suspended sentences and fines for possessing unlicensed firearms and reportedly have been released. Heinrich is scheduled for a final appearance before Afghanistan's Supreme Court in May to make the acquittal permanent, he said -- a court date he plans to make, partly to ensure that Habib's family does not lose his bail.

In the run-down prosecutor's office near Kabul's chaotic central courts, Heinrich's prosecutor, Haji Bahlol, insisted that his original case was strong and legitimate, but added that while the case remained with the appeal court, he expected Heinrich to remain free.

"I suggest that in the case of Heinrich they will forgive him with the time that he has already served for possessing a gun illegally," he said. "I think that because of their relationship with the international community, the court has asked for them to be released."

Even without the legal issue, Heinrich said, he would return to Afghanistan. For despite the danger and scorn from those who decry Bechtel and its like as war profiteers, he believes that U.S. business can help defuse global tension.

"We're in a struggle that is global, and it really affects every American. Every person I employ is another person that is not going to pick up arms against American soldiers," he said. By the end of the year, he hopes to double the number of Afghans his companies employ to 800.

It's a struggle, Heinrich believes, that cannot be waged with mailed checks and phone calls, but has to be waged with boots on the ground -- boots belonging to soldiers, civilians and entrepreneurs.

"There's a lot of mothers and fathers losing their children in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have to sacrifice. There are a lot of people who aren't these big mega 'war profiteers' who are investing there. There are a lot of Afghan Americans who are going back there and risking their lives," Heinrich said.

"We all risk. It's a question of what we risk for."

Thomas Coghlan of the Chronicle Foreign Service contributed to this report. E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at mstannard@sfchronicle.com.

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