‘Don’t worry,’ Zadeh muttered, putting a hand on Khaled’s shoulder once more.
‘I can’t help it,’ the Palestinian insisted, looking around him into the darkness. ‘It’s a fuckin’ bad start. I think he’s out there, staring at us, right now.’
When Khader completed his prayers, we carried Siddiqi’s body back to the canvas shamiana, and wrapped it in cloth until the rituals of burial could be performed on the following day. We worked for a few hours more and then lay down in the cavern, side by side for sleep. The snoring was loud, and the exhausted men were restless in their slumber, but I lay awake for other reasons. My eyes kept drifting back to the place, moonless and thickly shadowed, where Habib had disappeared. Khaled was right. It had started badly, Khader’s war, and the words echoed in my wakeful mind. A bad start…
I tried to fix my eyes on the clear and perfect stars of that fated night’s black heaven, but again and again my concentration lapsed, and I found myself staring at the dark edge of the plateau. And I knew, in the way we know without a word that love is lost, or in the sudden, sure way we know that a friend is false and doesn’t really like us at all, that Khader’s war would end much worse, for all of us, than it had begun.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
FOR TWO MONTHS of cold and ever colder days we lived with the guerrilla fighters in their cave complex on the Shar-i-Safa range. They were hard months in many ways, but our mountain stronghold never came under direct fire, and we were relatively safe. The camp was only fifty crow-kilometres from Kandahar. It was about twenty kilometres from the main Kabul highway and about fifty kilometres south-east of the Arghandab Dam. The Russians occupied Kandahar, but their hold on the southern capital was tenuous and the city was subject to recurring sieges. Rockets had been fired into the city centre, and guerrilla fighting on the outskirts claimed a steady toll of lives. The main highway was in the hands of several well-armed mujaheddin units. Russian tank and truck convoys from Kabul were forced to blast their way through blockades to resupply Kandahar, and that they did, from month to month. Afghan regular army units loyal to the Kabul puppet government protected the strategically important Arghandab Dam, but frequent attacks on the dam threatened their hold on the precious resource. Thus we were roughly in the centre of a triad of violent conflict zones, each of which constantly demanded new men and guns. The Shar-i-Safa range offered no strategic advantage to our enemies, so the fighting didn’t find us in our well-disguised mountain caverns.
The weather shifted during those weeks to the cold heart of a severe winter. Snow fell in fitful gusts and squalls that left us sodden in our many-layered patchwork uniforms. A freezing mist drifted so slowly through the mountains that it sometimes hung suspended for hours at a time: still and white and as impenetrable to the gaze as frosted glass. The ground was always muddy or frozen, and even the stone walls of the caves we lived in seemed to ring and tremble with the icy chill of the season.
Part of Khader’s cargo had consisted of hand tools and machine components. We’d set up two workshops in the first days after our arrival, and they were busy throughout the creeping weeks of the winter. There was a small capstan lathe, which we’d bolted to a homemade table. The lathe ran on a diesel engine. The fighters felt certain that there were no enemy forces within earshot, but still we dampened its noise with a little igloo of burlap sacks that covered the engine, leaving gaps for the air inlet and exhaust gas outlet. The same engine powered a grinding wheel and a speed drill.
With that assembly, the fighters repaired their weapons and sometimes adapted them to suit new and different purposes. First among those weapons were the mortars. After aircraft and tanks, the most effective battle weapon in Afghanistan was the Russian 82-millimetre mortar. The guerrillas bought the mortars, stole them, or captured them in hand-to-hand fighting, often at the cost of human lives. The weapons were then turned on the Russians, who’d brought them into the country in order to conquer it. Our workshops stripped the mortars down, refitted them, and packed them in waxed bags for use in combat zones as far away as Zaranj in the west, and Kunduz in the north.
Apart from the cartridge pliers and crimping tools, the ammunition and the explosives, Khader’s cargo also included new parts for the Kalashnikovs that he’d purchased in the arms bazaars in Peshawar. The Russian AK—Avtomat Kalashnikova—was designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in the 1940s, in response to German armament innovations. Toward the end of the Second World War, German army generals disobeyed the explicit orders of Adolph Hitler and produced an automatic assault rifle. The armaments engineer Hugo Schmeisser, using the germ of an earlier Russian concept, developed a weapon that was short, light, and fired its magazine of thirty bullets at a practical rate of more than a hundred rounds per minute. Hitler was so impressed with the weapon he’d previously forbidden that he named it the Sturmgewehr, or Storm Weapon, and immediately ordered its intensive production. It was too little, too late for the Nazi war effort, but Schmeisser’s Storm Weapon set the trend for all assault rifles for the rest of the century.
Kalashnikov’s AK-47, the most influential and widely manufactured of the new assault rifles, operated by diverting some of the propellant gases produced by a fired bullet into a cylinder above the barrel. The gas drove a piston that forced the bolt back against its spring, and cocked the hammer for the next round. The rifle weighed about five kilos, carried thirty rounds in its curved metal magazine, and fired the 7.62-millimetre rounds at around 2,300 feet per second, over an effective range greater than 300 metres. It fired more than a hundred rounds per minute on auto, and about forty rounds every minute on the semi-automatic, single-shot function.
The rifle had its limitations, and the mujaheddin fighters were quick to explain them to me. The low muzzle-velocity of the heavy 7.62-millimetre round defined a looping trajectory that called for tricky adjustments to hit a target at three hundred metres or more. Muzzle flash on firing the AK was so bright, particularly with the new 74 series, that it blinded the firer at night, and often betrayed his position. The barrel overheated rapidly, becoming too hot to hold. Sometimes a round grew so hot in the chamber that it exploded in the user’s face. That fact explained why so many guerrilla fighters held the gun away from their bodies, or over their heads, in battle operations.
Nevertheless, the rifle worked perfectly after total immersion in water, mud, or snow, and it remained one of the most efficient and reliable killing machines ever devised. In the first four decades after its development, fifty million of them were produced—more than any other firearm in history—and the Kalashnikov, in all its forms, was carried as a preferred strike weapon by revolutionaries, regular soldiers, mercenaries, and gangsters all over the fighting world.
The original AK-47 was made of forged and milled steel. The AK-74, produced in the 1970s, was made from stamped metal parts. Some of the older Afghan fighters rejected the newer weapon, with its smaller 5.45-millimetre round and its orange plastic magazine, preferring the solidity of the heavier AK-47. Some younger fighters chose the 74 model, dismissing the heavier gun as an antique. The models they used were produced in Egypt, Syria, Russia, and China. Although they were essentially identical, the fighters often preferred one to another, and the trade in the weapons, even within the same unit, was energetic and intense.
Khader’s workshops repaired and refitted the AKs of every series, and modified them as required. The workshops were popular places. The Afghan men were insatiable in their desire to know about weapons and learn new skills with them. It wasn’t a frenzied or brutal curiosity. It was simply necessary to know how to handle guns in a land that had been invaded by Alexander the Great, the Huns, the Sakas, the Scythians, the Mongols, the Moghuls, the Safavids, the British, and the Russians, among many others. Even when they weren’t studying at the workshops or helping out with the work, the men gathered there to drink tea made on spirit stoves, smoke cigarettes, and talk about their loved ones.
And for two months I worked with them every day. I
melted lead and other metals in the little forge. I helped to gather scraps of firewood, and carried water from a spring at the foot of a nearby ravine. Trudging through the light snow I dug out new latrines, and carefully covered them over and concealed them again when they were full. I turned new parts on the turret lathe, and melted the helical metal shavings to make more parts. In the mornings I tended to the horses, which were billeted in another cave further down the mountain. When it was my turn to milk the goats, I churned the milk into butter and helped to cook naan bread. If any man needed attention for a cut or graze or sprained ankle, I set up the first-aid kit and did my best to heal him.
I learned the answering choruses of a few songs, and in the evenings when the fires were smothered and we huddled together for warmth, I sang with the men as softly as they did. I listened to the stories that they whispered into the dark, and that Khaled, Mahmoud, and Nazeer translated for me. Each day when the men prayed, I knelt with them in silence. And at night, enclosed within the breathing, snoring swathe of their soldier-scented sleep—smells of wood-smoke, gun oil, cheap sandalwood soap, piss, shit, sweat soaking into wet-serge, unwashed human and horse hair, liniment and saddle-softener, cumin and coriander, peppermint tooth powder, chai, tobacco, and a hundred others—I dreamed with them of homes and hearts we longed to see again.
Then, when the second month ended, and the last weapons were repaired and modified, and the supplies we’d brought with us were all but exhausted, Khaderbhai ordered us to prepare for the long walk home. He planned to make a detour west, toward Kandahar and away from the border with Pakistan, to deliver some horses to his family. After that, with marching packs and light weapons, we would march by night until we reached the safety of the Pakistan border.
‘The horses are nearly loaded,’ I reported to Khader when I’d packed my own gear. ‘Khaled and Nazeer will be back up here when it’s all done. They told me to let you know.’
We were on the flattened top of a tor that gave a commanding view of the valleys and then the desert plain that stretched from the foot of the mountains all the way to Kandahar at the horizon. For once, the cloudy mists and snow had cleared enough for us to take in the whole, panoramic sweep of the view. There were dark, thick clouds massed to the east of us, and the cold air was damp with the rain and snow they would bring, but for the moment we could see all the way to the end of the world, and our wintry eyes were drowning in the beauty of it.
‘In November of 1878, the same month that we started this mission, the British forced their way through the Khyber Pass, and the second Afghan war with them began,’ Khader said, ignoring my report, or perhaps responding to it in his own way. He stared toward the ripple of haze on the horizon caused by the smoke and fire of distant Kandahar. I knew that some of the horizon’s shimmer and drizzle might’ve been exploding rockets, fired into the city by men who’d lived there once as teachers and merchants. In the war against the Russian invaders, they’d become devils in exile, raining fire upon their own homes and shops and schools.
‘Through Khyber Pass, there came one of the most feared, brave, and brutal soldiers in the whole British Raj. His name was Roberts, Lord Frederick Roberts. He captured Kabul, and began a ruthless martial law there. On one day, eighty-seven Afghan soldiers were killed by hanging in the public square. Buildings and markets were destroyed, villages were burned, and hundreds of Afghan people were killed. In June, an Afghan Prince named Ayub Khan announced a jihad to drive out the British. He left Herat with ten thousand men. He was an ancestor of mine, a man of my family, and many of my kinsmen were in the army that he raised.’
He stopped talking and flicked a glance at me, his golden eyes gleaming beneath the silver-grey brows. His eyes were smiling, but his jaw was set and his lips were compressed so tightly that they showed white at the rims. Reassured, perhaps, that I was listening to him, he looked back to the smouldering horizon, and spoke again.
‘The British officer in charge of Kandahar city at that time, a man named Burrows, was sixty-three years old, the same age that I am today. He marched out of Kandahar with one thousand five hundred men—British and Indian soldiers—and he met Prince Ayub at a place called Maiwand. You can see the place from here, where we sit, when the weather is good enough. In the battle, both armies fired canons, killing hundreds of men in the most terrible ways that can be imagined. When they met each other, as one man to another man, they fired their guns at such close range that the bullets went through one body to strike the next. The British lost half their number. The Afghans lost two thousand five hundred men. But they won the battle, and the British were forced to retreat to Kandahar. Prince Ayub immediately surrounded the city, and the siege of Kandahar began.’
It was cold, bitterly cold on the windy tor, despite the unusually bright, clear sunlight. I felt my legs and arms growing numb, and I longed to stand up and stamp my feet, but I didn’t want to disturb him. Instead, I lit two beedies, and passed one to him. He accepted it, raising his eyebrow in thanks, and took two long puffs before continuing.
‘Lord Roberts—do you know something, Lin, my first teacher, my dear Mackenzie Esquire, always said this thing, Bobs your uncle, all the time, and it became a thing that I also said, to imitate him. Then, one day, he told me that the saying came from him, from Lord Frederick Roberts, because, you see, the man who killed my people in hundreds was so kind to his own soldiers that they called him Uncle Bobs. And they said that if he was in charge, everything would be well—Bobs your uncle. I never said that again, not ever, after he told me that. And something that is very strange—my dear Mackenzie Esquire was the grandson of a man who fought in the army of Lord Roberts. His grandfather and my kinsmen fought each other in the second British war against Afghanistan. That is why Mackenzie Esquire had such fascination for the history of my country and such knowledge about the wars. And, thanks be to Allah, I did have him as my friend, and my teacher, while men were still alive who bore the scars of fighting the war that killed his grandfather, and killed mine.’
He paused again, and we listened to the wind, feeling the first sting of the new snow that it was bringing to us: the shivering wind that began in distant Bamiyan, and dragged the snow and ice and frosty air from every mountain all the way to Kandahar.
‘And so Lord Roberts went from Kabul, with a force of ten thousand men, to relieve the siege of Kandahar. Two-thirds of his men were Indian soldiers—and they were good fighting men, those Indian Sepoys. Roberts marched them from Kabul to Kandahar, a distance of three hundred miles, in twenty-two days. Much more than the distance we covered, you and I, from Chaman, on our journey—and you know that took us a month, with good horses, and help from villages along the way. And they marched, from freezing snow mountains to burning desert, and then, after twenty days of this unbelievable march through hell, they fought a great battle with the army of Prince Ayub Khan, and they defeated him. Roberts saved the British in the city, and from that day, even after he became the field marshal of all the soldiers in the British Empire, he was always known as Roberts of Kandahar.’
‘Was Prince Ayub killed?’
‘No. He escaped. Then the British put his close kinsman Abdul Rahman Khan on the throne of Afghanistan. Abdul Rahman Khan, also an ancestor of mine, ruled the country with such a special wisdom that the British had no real power in Afghanistan. The situation was exactly the same as it was before—before the great soldier and great killer, Bobs your uncle, forced his way through the Khyber Pass to fight the war. But the point of this story, now that we sit here and look at the fires of my burning city, is that Kandahar is the key to Afghanistan. Kabul is the heart, but Kandahar is the soul of this nation, and who rules Kandahar also rules Afghanistan. When the Russians are forced to leave my city, they will lose this war. Not until then.’
‘I hate it all,’ I sighed, sure in my own mind that the new war would change nothing: that wars can’t really change things. It’s peace that makes the deepest cuts, I thought. And I remember thinking it?
??I remember thinking that it was a clever phrase, and hoping for a chance to work it into our conversation. I remember everything about that day. I remember every word, and all those foolish, vain, unwary thoughts, as if fate had just now slapped my face with them. ‘I hate it all, and I’m glad we’re going home today.’
‘Who are your friends here?’ he asked me. The question surprised me, and I couldn’t guess at his intention. Reading my baffled expression, and clearly amused, he asked me again. ‘Of those you have come to know here, on this mountain, who are your friends?’
‘Well, Khaled, obviously, and Nazeer —’
‘So, Nazeer is your friend now?’
‘Yeah,’ I laughed. ‘He’s a friend. And I like Ahmed Zadeh. And Mahmoud Melbaaf, the Iranian. And Suleiman is okay, and Jalalaad—he’s a wild kid—and Zaher Rasul, the farmer.’
Khader nodded as I ran through the list, but when he made no comment I felt moved to speak again.
‘They’re all good men, I think. Everyone here. But those … those are the men I get on with the best. Is that what you mean?’
‘What is your favourite task here?’ he asked, changing the subject as quickly and unexpectedly as his portly friend Abdul Ghani might’ve done.
‘My favourite … it’s crazy, and I never thought I’d ever say this, but I think tending the horses is my favourite job.’
He smiled, and the smile bubbled into a laugh. I was sure, somehow, that he was thinking about the night I’d ridden into the camp hanging from the neck of my horse.
‘Okay’ I grinned, ‘I’m not the best horseman in the world.’
He laughed the harder.