The end, when it comes, is always too soon. My skin was tight on my face, drawn back by the muscles of my neck and jaw, those muscles in turn pulled taut by the shoulders and arms and frostbitten hands, clutching the final agony of the gun.
Suleiman gave the order. My stomach dropped and locked, and froze as hard as the cold unfeeling earth beneath my boots. I stood up, and crossed the lip of the ridge. We started down the slope. It was a magnificent day, the best clear day for months. I remembered thinking, weeks before, that Afghanistan, like prison, had no dawns and no sunsets in the stone cages of its mountains. Yet the dawn that morning was more lovely than any I’d ever known. When the steeper slopes eased into a more gradual decline, we picked up the pace, jogging over the last of the rose-pink snow and into the grey-green rough ground beyond.
The first explosions we heard were too far away from us to frighten me. Okay. Here it comes. This is it … The words chattered through my mind as if someone else spoke them: as if someone, like a coach, was preparing me for the end. Then the explosions were closer, as the enemy mortars found their range.
I looked along our line, and saw that the others were running harder than I was. Only Nazeer was still beside me. I tried to run faster. My legs seemed wooden and numb: I saw them moving, running, step after step, but I couldn’t feel them. It took a gigantic effort of will to send the message to my legs, and command them to greater speed. At last I stumbled into a faster run.
Two mortars exploded quite close to me. I kept running, waiting for the pain, and waiting for the killing joke. My heart was churning in my chest, and my breathing came in gasping, grunting little puffs of cold air. I couldn’t see the enemy positions. The mortar’s range was well over a kilometre, but I knew they had to be closer than that. And then the first shots spattered, the tun-tun-tun-tun of the AK-74s—theirs and ours. I knew they were close. They were close enough to kill us, and close enough for us to kill them.
My eyes raced ahead on the rough ground, looking for holes or boulders, trying to find the safest path. A man went down, left of me, along the line. It was Jalalaad. He was running beside Nazeer, and less than a hundred metres from me. A mortar shell exploded directly in front of him and ripped his young body into pieces. Looking down again, I jumped over rocks and boulders, and I stumbled but didn’t fall. I saw Suleiman, fifty metres in front of me, clutch at his throat and then fall forward, running a few more paces doubled-up as if he was searching for something on the ground in front of him. His body crumpled and collapsed over his face, tumbling to the side. His face and throat were bloodied and broken and torn open. I tried to run around him, but the ground was rough and strewn with rocks, and I had to jump over his body as I ran.
I saw the first flashes of fire from the enemy Kalashnikovs. They were far away, at least two hundred metres, much further than I’d guessed. A tracer bullet fizzed past me, only one step to my left. We wouldn’t make it. We couldn’t make it. There weren’t many of them—there weren’t many guns firing—but they had so much time to get a sight on us and shoot us down. They were going to kill us all. Then a wild flurry of explosions crunched into the enemy lines. The idiots! They blew up their own mortar shells, I thought, and gunfire like fireworks rattled the world from everywhere at once. And Nazeer raised his assault rifle, and fired as he ran, and I saw Mahmoud Melbaaf firing ahead of me, on my right, where Suleiman had been, and I raised my weapon, and pulled the trigger.
There was a horrible, blood-freezing scream somewhere very close. I suddenly recognised it as my own, but I couldn’t stop it. And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step.
And then, in a world suddenly soundless as the deepest sea, my legs stopped still, and hot, gritty, filthy, exploding earth clogged my eyes and my mouth. Something had hit my legs. Something hard and hot and viciously sharp had hit my legs. I fell forward as if I’d been running in the dark and I’d smashed into a fallen tree trunk. A mortar round. The metal fragments. The shock-deafened silence. The burning skin. The blinding earth. The choking struggle for breath. There was a smell that filled my head. It was the smell of my own death—it smells of blood, and seawater, and damp earth, and the ash of burned wood when you smell your own death before you die—and then I hit the ground so hard that I plunged through it into a deep, undreaming darkness. And the fall was forever. And there was no light, no light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
IF YOU STARE into its cold dead eye, the camera always mocks you with the truth. The black-and-white photograph showed almost all the men of Khader’s mujaheddin unit assembled for the kind of formal portrait that makes the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India seem more stiff and gloweringly self-conscious than they really are. It was impossible to tell from that photo how much those men had loved to laugh, and how readily they’d smiled. But none of them were looking directly into the lens of the camera. All the eyes but mine were a little above or below, a little to the left or the right. Only my own eyes stared back at me as I held the picture in my bandaged hands, and remembered the names of the men leaning together in the ragged lines.
Mazdur Gul, the stonemason, whose name means labourer, and whose hands were permanently grey-white from decades of work with granite … Daoud, who liked to be called by the English version of his name, David, and whose dream it was to visit the great city of New York and eat a meal in a fine restaurant … Zamaanat, whose name means trust, and whose brave smile concealed the agony of shame he’d felt that his whole family lived in hungry squalor at Jalozai, a huge refugee camp near Peshawar … Hajji Akbar, who’d been appointed as the doctor in the unit for no other reason than that he’d once spent two months as a patient in a Kabul hospital, and who’d greeted my acceptance of the doctor’s job, when I arrived at the mountain camp, with prayers and a little Dervish dance of joy … Alef, the mischievously satirical Pashtun trader, who died crawling in the snow with his back torn open and his clothes on fire … Juma and Hanif, the two wild boys who were killed by the madman Habib … Jalalaad, their fearless young friend, who died in the last charge … Ala-ud-Din, whose name in English is shortened to Aladdin, and who escaped unscathed … Suleiman Shahbadi, of the furrowed brow and sorrowing eyes, who died leading us into the guns.
And in the centre of the assembly there was a smaller, tighter group around Abdel Khader Khan: Ahmed Zadeh, the Algerian, who died with one hand clenched in the frozen earth and the other knotted into mine … Khaled Ansari, who murdered the madman Habib and then walked into the lost world of the smothering snow … Mahmoud Melbaaf, who survived the last charge like Ala-ud-Din, unwounded and unmarked … Nazeer, who ignored his own wounds to drag my unconscious body to safety … and me. Standing behind and a little to the left of Khaderbhai, my expression in the photograph was confident, resolute, and self-possessed. And the camera, they say, doesn’t lie.
It was Nazeer who’d saved me. The mortar shell that had exploded so close to us, as we ran into the guns, ripped and ruptured the air. The shock wave burst my left eardrum. In the same deafened moment, pieces of the exploded shell passed us in a hot metal blizzard. None of the larger chunks of metal hit me, but eight small pieces of the shrapnel smashed into my legs below the knees—five in one leg, and three in the other. Two smaller pieces hit my body—one in the stomach, and one in the chest. They tore through the heavy layers of my clothing, and even pierced my thick money belt and the solid leather straps of my medic’s bag, burning their way into my skin. Another chunk hit my forehead, high above the left eye.
They were tiny fragments, the largest of them about the size of Abe Lincoln’s face on an American penny coin. Still, they were travelling at such a speed that they took my legs out from u
nder me. Earth, thrown up by the explosion, peppered my face, blinding and choking me. I hit the ground hard, just managing to turn my face aside before the impact. Unfortunately, I turned the burst eardrum to the ground, and the violence of the blow rived the wound even further. I blacked out.
Nazeer, who was wounded in the legs and the arm, pulled my unconscious body into the shelter of a shallow, trench-like depression. He collapsed himself, then, covering my body with his own until the bombardment stopped. Lying there with his arms around my neck, he took a hit in the back of his right shoulder. It was a piece of metal that would’ve hit me, and might’ve killed me, had Khader’s man not protected me with his love. When all was quiet, he dragged me to safety.
‘It was Sayeed, yes?’ Mahmoud Melbaaf asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘It was Sayeed who took the picture, was it not?’
‘Yes. Yes. It was Sayeed. They called him Kishmishi…’
The word swept us into remembrances of the shy, young Pashtun fighter. He’d seen Khaderbhai as the embodiment of all his warrior heroes, and he’d followed him everywhere, adoringly, with eyes he quickly cast down when the Khan looked his way. He’d survived smallpox as a child, and his face was severely pockmarked with dozens of small, brown, dish-like spots. His nickname, Kishmishi, used with great affection by the older fighters, meant Raisins. He’d been too shy to pose with us in the photograph, so he’d volunteered to operate the camera.
‘He was with Khader,’ I muttered.
‘Yes, at the end. Nazeer saw his body, at the side of Khader, very close to him. I think he would ask to be with Abdel Khader even if he knew, before the attack, that they would get an attack, and get killed. I think he would ask to die like that. And he was not the only one.’
‘Where did you get this?’
‘Khaled had the roll of film. Remember? He had the only camera that Khader give his permission. The film was with other things he let fall down to the ground from his pockets when he went from us. I take it with me. I put it in the photo studio last week. They return the photos this morning. I thought you would like it to see them, before we leave.’
‘Leave? Where are we going?’
‘We have to get out of here. How are you feeling?’
‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘I’m okay.’
I sat up on the cot bed and swung my legs over the side. When my feet hit the floor there was a pain so excruciating in my shins that I moaned aloud. Another fierce pain throbbed at my forehead. I probed with my blunt, bandaged fingers at a wad of dressing beneath a bandage that wound round my head like a turban. A third pain in my left ear nagged for my attention. My hands were aching, and my feet, swaddled in three or more layers of socks, felt as if they were burning. There was a painful ache in my left hip, where the horse had kicked me when the jets had torn up the sky above us, months before. The wound had never properly healed, and I suspected that a bone was chipped beneath the tender flesh. My forearm felt numb near the elbow, where my own horse had bitten me in its panic. That wound was also months old, and it too had never really healed.
Doubled over, resting on my thighs, I could feel the tightness of my stomach and the leaner flesh of my legs. I was thin, after starving on the mountain. Too thin. All in all, it was a mess. I was in a bad way. Then my mind came back to the bandages on my hands, and a sensation close to panic rose like a spear in my spine.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ve gotta get these bandages off,’ I snapped, tearing at them with my teeth.
‘Wait! Wait!’ Mahmoud cried. ‘I will do it for you.’
He unwound the bulky bandages slowly, and I felt the sweat run from my eyebrows onto my cheeks. When both lots of bindings were removed, I stared at the disfigured claws that my hands had become, and I moved them, flexing the fingers. Frostbite had split my hands open at all the knuckle joints, and the bruise-black wounds were hideous, but all the fingers and all the fingertips were there.
‘You can thank Nazeer,’ Mahmoud muttered softly as he examined my cracked and peeling hands. ‘They were thinking to cut off your fingers, but he would not let them. And he would not let them leave you until they treated all your injuries. He did force them to help the frostbite injuries on your face, also. He had the Kalashnikov and your automatic pistol. Here—he asked me to give it to you, when you wake up.’
He produced the Stechkin, wrapped in a coil of cheesecloth. I tried to take it, but my hands couldn’t hold the bundle.
‘I will keep it for you,’ Mahmoud offered with a stiff little smile.
‘Where is he?’ I asked, still dazed and drilled by the pain, but feeling better and stronger by the minute.
‘Over there,’ Mahmoud indicated, nodding his head. I turned to see Nazeer, sleeping on his side on a cot similar to my own. ‘He is resting, but he is ready to move. We must leave here soon. Our friends will come for us at any time now, and we must be ready to move.’
I looked around me. We were in a large, sand-coloured tent with pallet floors and about fifteen folding cot-beds. Several men wearing Afghan clothing—loose pants, tunic shirts, and long, sleeveless vests in the same shades of pale green—moved among the beds. They were fanning the wounded men with straw fans, washing them with buckets of soapy water, or carrying away wastes through a narrow slit in the canvas door. Some of the wounded were moaning or speaking out their pain in languages I couldn’t understand. The air in that Pakistani plain, after months in the snowy peaks of Afghanistan, was thick and hot and heavy. There were so many strong smells, one upon another, that my senses rejected them and concentrated on one particularly pungent aroma: the unmistakable smell of perfumed Indian basmati rice, cooking somewhere close to the tent.
‘I’m fuckin’ hungry, man, I gotta tell ya.’
‘We will eat good food soon,’ Mahmoud assured me, allowing himself a laugh.
‘Are we …? This is Pakistan?’
‘Yes,’ he laughed again. ‘What can you remember?’
‘Not much. Running. They were shooting at us … from a long way off. Mortars everywhere. I remember … I was hit …’
I felt along the padded bandages that swathed my shins, from knees to ankles.
‘And I hit the ground. Then … I remember … was it a jeep? Or a truck? Did that happen?’
‘Yes. They took us. Massoud’s men.’
‘Massoud?’
Ahmed Shah. The Lion himself. His men made the attack on the dam and the two main roads—to Kabul and to Quetta. They put a siege on Kandahar. They are still there, outside the city, and they will not leave, I think so, until the war is over. We ran into the middle of it, my friend.’
‘They rescued us …’
‘It was, how to say, the less they do for us.’
‘The least they could do for us?’
‘Yes. Because it was them who killed us.’
‘What?’
‘Yes. When we made our escaping out of the mountain, running down, the Afghan army shoot at us. Massoud’s men see us, and think we are some of the enemy. They are a long way from us. They start to shoot at us with mortars.’
‘Our own people shot at us?’
‘Everybody was shooting—I mean, everyone shooting in the same time. Afghan army, they were shooting at us also, but the mortars that did hit us, I think they were our own side. And that made Afghan army and Russian soldiers run away. I killed two of them myself when they run away. The men of Ahmed Shah Massoud, they had Stingers. The Americans give them the Stingers, in April, and since that time, the Russians having no helicopters. Now the mujaheddin fight back in every place. Now the war is over, in two years, or maybe three, Inshallah.’
‘April … what month is this?’
‘Now is May.’
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Four days, Lin,’ he answered softly.
‘Four days …’ I’d thought it was one night, one long sleep. I looked over my shoulder again at the sleeping form of Nazeer. ‘Are you s
ure he’s okay?’
‘He is injured—here … and here—but he is strong, and he can move himself. He will be well, Inshallah. He is like a shotor!’ he laughed, using the Farsi word for camel. ‘He makes his mind, and nobody can change him.’
I laughed with him for the first time since I’d woken. The laugh sent my hands to my head in an effort to contain the throbbing pain it caused.
‘I wouldn’t like to be the one who tried to change Nazeer’s mind about anything, once it was made up.’
‘Me too not.’ Mahmoud agreed. ‘The soldiers of Massoud, they carried you and Nazeer, with me, to a car, a good Russian car. After the car, we moved you and Nazeer to a truck, for the road to Chaman. At Chaman, the Pakistanis, border guards, they want to take Nazeer’s guns. He give them money—some of your money, from your money belt—and he keep his guns. We hide you in the blankets, with two dead men. We put them on top of you, and we show them to border guards, and tell that we want to give good Muslim burial for these men. Then we come into Quetta, to this hospital, and again they want to take Nazeer’s guns. Again he give them money. They want to cut your fingers, because of the smell …’
I put my hands to my nose, and sniffed at them. There was a rotten, death-foetid smell to them still. It was faint, but clear enough to remind me of the rotting goat’s feet we’d eaten as our last supper on the mountain. My stomach churned, arching like a fighting cat. Mahmoud quickly reached for a metal dish and thrust it under my face. I vomited, spitting black-green bile into the bowl, and fell forward helplessly onto my knees.
When the nausea attack passed, I sat back on the cot and snatched gratefully at the cigarette Mahmoud lit for me.
‘Go on.’ I stuttered.
‘What?’
‘You were saying … about Nazeer …’
‘Oh yes, yes, he pull his Kalashnikov out from under his pattu and point it at them. He tell them he will kill them all, if they cut you. They want to call the guards, the camp police, but Nazeer, he is in the door of the tent, with his gun. They cannot go past him. And I am on his other side, looking for his back. So they fix you.’