Knowing that Nazeer would want to prepare Khaderbhai’s body for burial himself, we wrapped the Khan in blankets and left him in a shallow, scooped-out trench of snow near the entrance to the caves. We’d just finished the task when a warbling, fluttering, whistle of sound drew us to our feet. We looked at one another in fearful confusion. Then a violent explosion shook the ground beneath us with a flash of orange and dirty grey smoke. The mortar shell had struck the ground more than a hundred metres away, at the far edge of the compound, but the air near us was already filthy with its smell and smoke. Then a second shell burst, and a third, and we ran for the cave-mouth and flung ourselves into the squirming octopus of men who were there ahead of us. Arms, legs, and heads crushed in on one another as we hunkered down in terror while the mortars tore up the rocky ground outside as if it was papier-mâché.
It was bad, and it got worse every day after that. When the attack was over, we searched among the blackened stipple and crater of the compound. Two men were dead. One of them was Kareem, the man whose broken forearm I’d set on the night before we’d reached the camp. Two others were so badly wounded that we were sure they would die. Many of the supplies were destroyed. First among them were the drums of fuel we’d used for the generator and the stoves. The stoves and lamps were critically important for heating and cooking. Most of the fuel was gone, and all of our water reserves. We set to cleaning up the debris—my medical kit was blackened and scorched by the fire—and consolidating the remaining supplies in the great cave. The men were quiet. They were worried and afraid. They had reason enough.
While others busied themselves with those tasks, I tended to the wounded men. One man had lost a foot and a part of his leg below the knee. There were fragments of shrapnel in his neck and upper arm. He was eighteen years old. He’d joined the unit with his elder brother six months before we arrived. His brother had been killed during an attack on a Russian outpost near Kandahar. The boy was dying. I pulled the metal pieces from his body with long stainless steel tweezers and a pair of long-nosed pliers I pilfered from the mechanic’s kit.
There was nothing substantial that I could do for the savaged leg. I cleaned the wound, and tried to remove as much of the shattered bone as I could wrench free with the pliers. His screams settled on my skin in an oily sweat, and I shivered with every gust of frosty wind. I put sutures into the ragged flesh where clean, hard skin would support them, but there was no way to close the gap over completely. One thick chunk of bone protruded from the lumpy meat. It occurred to me that I should take a saw, and hack the long bone off to make a neat wound of the stump, but I wasn’t sure if that was the right procedure. I wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t make the wound worse than it was. I wasn’t sure … And there’s only so much screaming you can bring yourself to cause when you’re not sure what you’re doing. In the end, I smothered the wound in antibiotic powder and wrapped it in non-adhesive gauze.
The second wounded man had taken a blast in the face and throat. His eyes were destroyed, and most of the nose and mouth were gone. In some ways, he resembled Ranjit’s lepers, but his wounds were so raw and bloody, and the teeth were so smashed, that Ranjit’s disfigurements seemed benign in comparison. I took the metal pieces from his eyes and his scalp and his throat. The wounds at his throat were bad, and although he was breathing fairly evenly, my guess was that his condition would worsen. After dressing his wounds, I gave both men a shot of penicillin and an ampoule of morphine.
My biggest problem was blood, and the need to replace what the wounded men had lost. Not one of the mujaheddin fighters I’d asked during the last weeks had known his own or anyone else’s blood type. Thus it was impossible for me to blood-match the men, or to build up a bank of donors. Because my own blood type was O, which is known as the universal donor type, my body was the only source of blood for transfusions, and I was the walking blood bank for the whole combat unit.
Typically, a donor provides about half a litre of blood in a session. The body holds about six litres, so the blood lost in donation amounts to less than one-tenth of the body’s supply. I put a little more than half a litre into each of the wounded men, rigging up the intravenous drips that Khader had brought with him as part of his smuggled cargo. I wondered whether the equipment had come from Ranjit and his lepers as I tapped my veins and those of the wounded fighters with needles that were stored in loose containers rather than sealed packets. The transfusions took nearly 20 per cent of my blood. It was too much. I felt dizzy and faintly nauseous, unsure if they were real symptoms or simply the slithering tricks of my fear. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to give more blood for some time, and the hopelessness of the situation—mine and theirs—crushed my chest with a flush and spasm of anguish.
It was dirty, frightening work, and I wasn’t trained for it. The first-aid course that I’d completed as a young man had been comprehensive, but it hadn’t covered combat injuries. And the work I’d done at my clinic in the slum was little help in those mountains. Beyond that, I was running on instinct—the same instinct to help and heal that had compelled me to save overdosed heroin addicts in my own city, a lifetime before. It was, of course, in great part a secret wish—like Khaled, with the vicious madman Habib—to be helped and saved and healed myself. And though it wasn’t much, and it wasn’t enough, it was all I had. So I did my best, trying not to vomit or cry or show my fear, and then I washed my hands in the snow.
When Nazeer was sufficiently recovered, he insisted on burying Abdel Khader Khan with the strictest adherence to ritual. He did that before he ate a meal or even drank a glass of water. I watched as Khaled, Mahmoud, and Nazeer cleaned themselves, prayed together, and then prepared Khaderbhai’s body for burial. His green-and-white standard was lost, but one of the mujaheddin provided his own flag as a shroud. On a simple white background, it carried the phrase:
La ilia ha ill’Allah
There is no god but God
Mahmoud Melbaaf, the Iranian who’d been with us since the Karachi taxi ride, was so tender and devoted and loving in his ministrations that my eyes went again and again to his calm, strong face as he worked and prayed. If he’d been burying his own child, he couldn’t have been more gentle or clement, and it was from those moments during the burial that I began to cherish him as a friend.
I caught Nazeer’s eye at the end of the ceremony, and at once I dropped my face to stare at the frozen ground beside my boots. He was in a wilderness of grieving and sorrowing shame. He’d lived to protect and serve Khader Khan. But the Khan was dead, and he was alive. Worse than that, he wasn’t even wounded. His own life, the mere fact of his existence in the world, seemed like a betrayal. Every heartbeat was a new act of treachery. And that grief, and his exhaustion, took such a toll on him that he was quite seriously ill. He looked as much as ten kilos lighter. His cheeks were hollow, and there were black troughs beneath his eyes. His lips were cracked and peeling. His hands and feet worried me. I’d examined them, and I knew that the colour and warmth hadn’t fully returned to them. I thought he might’ve suffered frostbite in his crawl through the snow.
There was, in fact, a task that did give his life purpose at that time, if not meaning, but I didn’t know that then. Khaderbhai had given a last instruction, a last duty to perform, in the event of his death during the mission. He’d named a man, and ordered Nazeer to kill him. Nazeer was following that instruction even then, simply by staying alive long enough to carry out the murder. It was what sustained him, and his whole life had shrunk to that forlorn obsession. Knowing nothing of that then, as the cold days after Khader’s burial became colder weeks, I worried constantly for the tough, loyal Afghan’s sanity.
Khaled Ansari was changed by Khader’s death in ways that were less obvious but equally profound. Where many of us were shocked into a dull, dense attention to routines, Khaled became sharper and more energetic. Where I often found myself adrift in stunned, heart-broken, bittersweet meditations on the man we’d loved and lost, Khaled took on new jobs
almost every day, and never lost his focus. As a veteran of several wars, he assumed Khaderbhai’s role of adviser to the mujaheddin commander Suleiman Shahbadi. In all his deliberations, the Palestinian was intense and tireless and judicious, to the point of being solemn. They weren’t new qualities for Khaled—he was ever a dour, fervent man—but there was in him, after Khader’s death, a hopefulness and a will to win that I’d never seen before. And he prayed. From the day we buried the Khan, Khaled was the first to call the men to prayer, and the last to lift his knees from the frozen stone.
Suleiman Shahbadi, the most senior Afghan left in our group—there were twenty of us, including the wounded—was a former community leader, or Kandeedar, from a clutch of villages near Ghazni, two-thirds of the way to Kabul. He was fifty-two years old, and a five-year veteran of the war. He was experienced in all forms of combat, from siege to guerrilla skirmish to pitched battle. Ahmed Shah Massoud, the unofficial leader of the nation-wide war to expel the Russians, had personally appointed Suleiman to set up the southern commands near Kandahar. All the men in our ethnically eclectic unit felt such awe-struck admiration for Massoud that it wasn’t too strong to call it a kind of love. And because Suleiman’s commission had come directly from Massoud, the Lion of the Panjsher, the men gave him an equally reverential respect.
When Nazeer was well enough to give a full report, just three days after we’d found him in the snow, Suleiman Shahbadi called a meeting. He was a short man with big hands and feet, and a sorrowful expression. Seven lines and ridges like planter’s furrows creased his broad, high brow. A thickly coiled white turban covered his bald head. The dark, grey beard was trimmed around the mouth, and cut short beneath the jaw. His ears were slightly pointed—an effect that was exaggerated against the white turban—and that puckish touch combined with his wide mouth to hint at the cheeky humour that once might’ve been his. But then, on the mountain, his face was dominated by the expression in his eyes. They were the eyes of an unutterable sadness; a sadness withered and emptied of tears. It was an expression that engaged our sympathy yet prevented us from befriending him. For all that he was a wise, brave, and kindly man, that sadness was so deep in him that no man risked its touch.
With four sentries at their posts around the camp, and two men wounded, there were fourteen of us gathered in the cave to hear Suleiman speak. It was extremely cold—at or below zero—and we sat together to share our warmth.
I wished that I’d been more assiduous in my study of Dari and Pashto during the long wait in Quetta. Men spoke in both languages at that meeting, and every one after it. Mahmoud Melbaaf translated the Dari into Arabic for Khaled, who transformed the Arabic into English, leaning first to his left to listen to Mahmoud, and then leaning right as he whispered to me. It was a long, slow process, and I was amazed and humbled that the men waited patiently for every exchange to be translated for me. The popular European and American caricature of Afghans as wild, bloodthirsty men—a description that delighted Afghans themselves endlessly when they heard it—was contradicted by every direct contact I had with them. Face to face, Afghan men were generous, friendly, honest, and scrupulously courteous to me. I didn’t say anything at that first meeting, or at any of those that followed, but still the men included me in every word they shared.
Nazeer’s report on the attack that had killed our Khan was alarming. Khader had left the camp with twenty-six men, and all the riding and pack horses, on what should’ve been a safe-passage route to the village of his birth. On the second day of the march, still a full day and night from Khaderbhai’s village, they were forced to stop for what they thought was a routine tribute exchange with a local clan leader.
There were hard questions asked about Habib Abdur Rahman at the meeting. In the two months since he’d left us, after killing poor, unconscious Siddiqi, Habib had instituted a one-man war of terror in what was for him a new area of operations—the Shar-i-Safa mountain range. He’d tortured a Russian officer to death. He’d dealt similar justice, as he saw it, to Afghan army men, and even mujaheddin fighters whom he judged to be less than fully committed to the cause. The horrors of those tortures had succeeded in nailing terror to everyone in the region. It was said that he was a ghost, or the Shaitaan, the Great Satan himself, come to rend men’s bodies and peel the masks of their human faces back from their very skulls. What had been a relatively quiet corridor between the war zones was suddenly a turmoil of angry, terrified soldiers and other fighters, all pledged to find and kill the demon Habib.
Realising that he was in a trap designed to capture Habib, and that the men surrounding him were hostile to his cause, Khaderbhai tried to leave peacefully. He surrendered four horses as a tribute, and gathered his men. They were almost free of the enemy high ground when the first shots rattled into the little canyon. The battle raged for half an hour. When it was over, Nazeer counted eighteen bodies from Khader’s column. Some of them had been killed as they lay wounded. Their throats had been cut. Nazeer and Ahmed Zadeh had only survived because they were crushed in a tangle of bodies, of horses and men, and appeared to be dead.
One horse had survived the encounter with a serious wound. Nazeer roused the animal, and strapped Khader’s dead body and Ahmed’s dying one to its back. The horse trudged through the snow for a day and half a night before it crumpled, collapsed, and died almost three kilometres from our camp. Nazeer then dragged both bodies through the snow until we found him. He had no idea what had happened to the five men who were not accounted for from Khader’s column. They might’ve escaped, he thought, or they might’ve been captured. One thing was certain: among the enemy dead, Nazeer had seen Afghan army uniforms and some new Russian equipment.
Suleiman and Khaled Ansari assumed that the mortar attack on our position was linked to the battle that had claimed Abdel Khader’s life. They guessed that the Afghan army unit had regrouped and, perhaps following Nazeer’s trail, or acting on information gouged from prisoners, they’d launched the mortar attack. Suleiman assumed that there would be more attacks, but he doubted that they would launch a full frontal assault on the position. Such an attack would cost many lives, and mightn’t succeed. If Russian soldiers supported the Afghan army units, however, there might be helicopter attacks as soon as the sky was clear enough. Either way, we would lose men. Eventually, we might lose the high ground altogether.
After much discussion of the limited options open to us, Suleiman decided to launch two counter attacks with mortar units of our own. To that end, we needed reliable information about the enemy positions and their relative strength. He began to brief a fit, young Hazarbuz nomad named Jalalaad for the scouting mission, but then he froze, staring at the mouth of the cave. We all turned and gaped in surprise at the wild, ragged silhouette of a man in the oval frame of light at the opening of the cave. It was Habib. He’d slipped into the camp unseen by the sentries—an enigmatically difficult task—and he stood with us, two short steps away. I’m glad to say I wasn’t the only one who reached for a weapon.
Khaled rushed forward with such a wide and heartfelt smile that I resented it, and resented Habib more for inspiring it. He brought the madman into the cave and sat him down beside the startled Suleiman. And then, with perfect calm and clarity, Habib began to speak.
He’d seen the enemy positions, he said, and he knew their strength. He’d watched the mortar attack on our camp, and then he’d crept down to their camps, so close that he’d heard them decide what to eat for lunch. He could guide us to new vantage points where we could fire mortars into their camps, and kill them. Those who didn’t die outright, he wanted it understood, belonged to him. That was his price.
The men debated Habib’s proposal, speaking openly in front of him. It worried some that we were putting ourselves in the hands of the very lunatic whose monstrous tortures had brought the war to our cave. It was bad luck to link ourselves to his evil, those men said; bad morals and bad luck. It worried others that we would kill so many Afghan army regulars.
One of the seemingly bizarre contradictions of the war was that Afghan met Afghan with real reluctance, and sincerely regretted every death. There was such a long history of division and conflict between the clans and ethnic divisions in Afghanistan that no man, with the exception of Habib, truly hated the Afghans who fought on the side of the Russians. Real hatred, where it existed at all, was reserved for the Afghan version of the KGB, known as the KHAD. The Afghan traitor Najibullah, who eventually seized power and appointed himself ruler of the country, headed that infamous police force for years, and was responsible for many of its unspeakable tortures. There wasn’t a resistance fighter in the country who didn’t dream of dragging on a rope and hoisting him into the air by his neck. The soldiers and even the officers of the Afghan army, however, were a different matter: they were kinsmen, many of them conscripts, doing what they had to do in order to survive. And for their part, the Afghan regulars often sent vital information concerning Russian troop movements or bombardments to mujaheddin fighters. In fact, the war could never be won without their secret help. And a surprise mortar attack on the two Afghan army positions, identified by Habib, would cost many Afghan lives.
The long discussion ended with a decision to fight. Our situation was judged to be so perilous that we had no choice but to counter-attack and drive the enemy from the mountain.
The plan was good, and it should’ve worked, but like so much else in that war it brought only chaos and death. Four sentries remained to guard the camp, and I stayed behind as well to care for the wounded. The fourteen men of the strike force were divided into two teams. Khaled and Habib led the first team; Suleiman led the second. Following Habib’s directions, they set up their mortars about a kilometre away from the enemy camps—a distance that was well inside the maximum effective range. The bombardment commenced just after dawn, and continued for half an hour. The strike teams found eight Afghan soldiers when they entered the ruined camps. Not all of them were dead. Habib went to work on the survivors. Sickened by what they’d agreed to let him do, our men returned to the camp, hoping never to see the madman again.