It still came on, unaware of the single man in the red goatskin boots and black cape, squinting along the Browning-type barrel, on a crag in the middle of nowhere.
As it came nearer, the Nuristani gently squeezed the trigger. Easy, now … He could see a gun barrel in its nose. A big one. This was a hostile kakiwar all right.
But this would not be more difficult than killing a really big black bear. After all, they closed in and clutched you.
The helicopter had moved its angle of approach slightly, and was heading for him almost sideways. That was a pity; he would not, after all, be able to get it in the nose. And it was travelling faster than he had thought, unused as he was to estimating distance with such game. Flying sideways!
He would have to strike it from behind, as it passed below him through the valley. In that way he might wound it, anyway.
As it roared past with a great wind, Shtasu panned his gun on the rock, and fired. What the hunter did not know was that the huge Mi-24s were patched, in vulnerable places, with armour, which could easily withstand the heaviest shotgun ball. Armoured, that is, with titanium steel to protect the pilot from below, from the sides – but not from behind or above. The Soviet would learn that lesson later: when they’d lost enough of them to snipers.
The big bullet crashed through the glass and went through the back of the Russian pilot’s neck, coming out at the other side, and crashing to the cockpit floor, stopped only by the inner surface of the bulletproof glass windscreen. Range sixty metres.
The helicopter had been diving through the valley two hundred feet away and twenty feet below him, when he fired.
Kara? Where was it? He peered down. There it lay, a mass of burning wreckage, in a river at the bottom of his valley. Four hundred feet below. There should be some useful pickings there, when it cooled down. That might help Mas Wousup’s butter makers to pay for the damage. Some of it was metal. Useful for the blacksmith.
The hunter Shtasu, the Eye, looked over to where the dairy people were running about near the sheds, looking less like agitated ants now. Good. They’d got the fire out. Like a mad sky-elephant, that kakiwar: smashing something that had nothing to do with him. Well, he’d heard about mad elephants; they had to be killed.
He’d go to see Wousup now, and visit the kakiwar’s carcass later.
Yuri Nikodemov had seen the helicopter swoop, had heard the crash of the explosion when it bombed the Kamdesh butter shed, had seen it return. And, when he heard the report of the shot from Shtasu’s gun and saw the Mi-24 fall, he realized that the war had caught up with him.
The Russian put on his flying jacket and jackboots, picked up his stick and started to scramble down the mountain, towards the wreck. Why, he did not know: as he got near, the blast of the exploding shells, cartridges and bombs threw him into a crevasse. By the time he had struggled free and found the way again, all was silent.
As he approached, he saw that the fire was out: whether burnt out or blown out by the explosions, he was not sure. The framework lay like the skeleton of a gigantic whale. There was no sign of a survivor. There was no point in staying here. Best to get back to the izba.
Nikodemov started up the slope again, finding what looked like a bridle path. He had only taken about thirty steps when he saw, coming from the opposite direction, another man.
Wousup hadn’t needed the hunter’s help, and had signalled to him across the crags that all was now under control. As he made his way towards the wreck of the helicopter, Shtasu saw, coming up the path from the opposite direction, a man. Strange: first a big false bird, like a carriage in the sky, and then a man coming from it. Had he been inside? Perhaps he was one of those men who rode sky-carriages. Yes, of course. Shtasu had heard about them. Everyone in Nuristan was proud that it was one of them, a Nuristani, who had gone to Kabul, and had become Komondon-i-Tiyara, ‘Commander of the Fliers’. They had roaring sky-carriages, it was said.
The two men stopped and looked at one another. Shtasu saw a Frank, a man in faranki clothes, at any rate: but with a full beard and carrying a stick, otherwise unarmed. Like one of those foreign hunters who used to come here, years ago. Perhaps he was an Afghan of some kind, an Awdali.
They were only a few metres apart now. Shtasu decided to try Pashtu: he knew a little. ‘Starai ma she – may you never be tired!’ he said.
The man shook his head.
Shtasu pointed to himself. ‘Shtasu.’ He indicated the sky and the sun. His name meant ‘starshine’; surely this man would understand that?
There was no response, so he tried sign language. The people of Nuristan used it all the time because, at a distance, the roar of the waterfalls drowned speech, even shouts. No, sign language didn’t work with this stranger.
The Russian looked at Shtasu. He’d never seen anything like this apparition before. Wearing Nuristani breeches, a black cloak of fine wool, with blue eyes, fair hair – and carrying a very modern automatic shotgun, a powerful one.
Shtasu tried again, this time with the only Persian phrase he knew, which the Awdalis said to one another: ‘Manda nabashen – may you never be tired!’
Then, ‘Kara kakiwar – where’s the bird?’ Didn’t he understand anything?
The other man was looking at his gun. ‘Stwa – four shots,’ Shtasu explained. Better reassure him, ‘wrorim, my brother.’
The Russian spoke now, in his own language, telling him he didn’t understand. ‘Ya ni gavaryu Nuristanski.’
He must be some kind of an Afghan, thought Shtasu. Foreigners surely didn’t ride about in Kakiwars.
‘Tushish Awdali?’ He pointed to Nikodemov. Then, touching his own breast, he said, ‘Mam Nuristani.’
The lieutenant understood. Nuristani, of course. ‘Mam Russki,’ he said.
Russki? What was that? Shtasu wondered. Some kind of Frankish person? He spoke again.
‘Tushish Faranki?’
‘Franki, da, tovarish.’
He was a Frank, after all. Anyway, the Faranki was unarmed: he should be welcomed. The Nuristani took some dried apricots from his leather pouch. ‘Yaw! eat!’
Understanding the gesture, Nikodemov accepted the fruit, and offered Shtasu some jalghozas, pine kernels, from his pocket. Shtasu took two or three, as a token of goodwill. The Russian gestured to him to take more. Shtasu wasn’t hungry: besides, the niceties had been sufficiently observed. He smiled. ‘Mam awzhekh – I have already eaten. Kuja-st aamou?’ Where was this stranger’s house?
He had to draw a hut on the soil with a twig before the Russian understood. The man was asking about his izba. Nikodemov pointed up towards the small valley above them.
Together the two men climbed up to where the little shack rested against a rock. Now Shtasu understood. This man was some kind of a traveller, and as such he was his guest: protected by the sacred laws of hospitality. But he could not stay here, it was going to be too dangerous. Little by little, he managed to convey that, however nice this place might be at the moment, it would not be long before it was impossible to survive there. ‘Aaw, water – dash – rain – zeym – snow.’ Shtasu gestured, showing how the snow line would come down, how rain would fall, how snow would pile up, three metres high, in spite of the sun throughout the winter. Best to get away.
‘Come to my house, brother, you are welcome.’ With signs and a medley of words in the Dari-Nuristani lingua franca, the hunter took his new guest to his own home.
There was no airstrip in all Nuristan, and the Afghan governor and officials had defected from the communist regime, most of them taking refuge in nearby Pakistan. Nuristan had been cut off from Afghanistan for a year, and was only occasionally patrolled by reconnaissance aircraft.
Salt and small manufactured articles like needles were now difficult or impossible to get. Nuristan was returning to its ancient, medieval, self-sufficient economy.
Things were to remain very much the same for a few months more – until the Russians tried to conquer the ancient land. When that happened, the Nuristanis put
up such a fight that both the unwilling Afghan troops, sent ahead, and the Russian soldiers, untrained for mountain warfare, were wiped out or put to flight in one engagement after another. The Russians fell back on mass air attacks on civilians, bombing every town and any village they could find, with fire and high-explosives. Still they could not demoralize the Nuristanis, and the fight continued. The people who had defied the armies of Alexander the Great were not impressed by their new enemies, with or without modern technology.
But that was later. In the meantime, faithful to their age-old code of hospitality, the Nuristanis looked after the Russian lieutenant well, and arranged for a party of men to take him to the Afghan administrative border, where he was handed back to the Soviet authorities.
When Nikodemov had asked people who knew Nuristan the meaning of the word, banna, which the people of the mountains had said to him so often, they had said, ‘It means wror, in Pashtu, baradar in Persian: “brother”.’
That had been nine months ago.
With the call of the forest in his mind and the hospitality of the mountain villagers in his heart, with the picture of Shtasu the hunter holding up his hand in farewell clearly before him, Nikodemov now wheeled the rotorcraft away, towards his distant landing pad. He would not defile his honour. He would return one day guiltless to the izba, his home among the tall cedars of Nuristan.
The lieutenant flicked the transmission switch.
‘Nikodemov to helibase. No sighting of a terrorist caravan. The upland valley is clear of suspicious figures right to the mountains. I repeat. No sign of bandits.’
‘Helibase to Nikodemov. Nichevo, never mind, Comrade Leytenant. Must be a false alarm. Resume normal duty and return to base as scheduled. Helibase out.’
Nobody else in the helicopter seemed to have seen the caravan: so he had not really taken much of a risk, the lieutenant thought, as he covertly checked the crew’s behaviour.
Some day, Lieutenant Nikodemov was sure, he would return to Nuristan. But not in a kakiwar like this, not in a uniform, not as a foreigner. Just now, of course, he had to carry on. He had relatives in Leningrad to think of – and his oath as an officer.
He was not ready yet.
He grinned to himself. The Eagle must be feeling good. Good luck, banna, brother, Eagle. You are still free.
2 The Wild Ones of Murad Shah
The Lower Paghman Range
JULY 5
‘Teeo pang!’ Adam faced the huge man dressed in a cloak of fox and lynx skins who held a long, thin knife at his throat, while two others held him fast. It didn’t look as though he would be able to talk his way out of this ambush.
No journey to the north now. He’d probably be dead in a minute. The caravan was resting. Adam had gone down the mountain slope to talk to one of the patrols, and had almost reached their brushwood hideout when, as if from nowhere, three men had leapt upon him. Big men, in belted furs, with strange faces quite like Europeans, grey or green eyes, straight noses, fair and red hair.
They had whisked him away from the patrol’s hideout so fast that the three guerrillas sitting inside had not heard a thing.
It was mid-morning, and the sun was hot. These men were dressed for a colder climate than this. One of them unwound a length of rope from around his waist, rough rope that might have been made from creepers, and tied The Eagle’s ankles and wrists with it. Another man took up a long pole and the three pushed it between his arms and legs and lifted him, as people do a dead or captured wild animal, and carried him uphill, away from where the guerrilla caravan was resting.
He could now see that the men were wearing strings of pierced crystals around their necks, their hair was long and matted, and their feet padded along with the tread of mountain folk. Each one wore a beautiful silver-mounted dagger in his belt. As they walked, they chanted softly, ‘pang! pang!’
Adam struggled and started to shout, hoping to attract the attention of some of his guards. Instantly the men stopped. One of them picked up a rock, and almost casually, but with great precision, struck the captive at the back of the neck. The Eagle blacked out.
He came to with a searing headache, and found himself still being carried, still uphill. He gave a cry as the jogging pace of the men jolted his spine, the pain shooting up into his head. Quietly the leader took up a stone and indicated, by signs, that if he did not remain silent, he would be struck again. ‘Amou, laysat,’ he said.
Pang? Amou laysat? He wasn’t Russian, anyway.
He lost consciousness again. When he came to, someone was splashing cold water on his face.
He was in a cave, with a brushwood awning just covering the entrance. Inside, a fire was burning, fed by some dry material which gave almost no smoke. Around him, lit by torches of resinous wood stuck at an angle from holes in the cavern walls, he could see shapes hanging. Human? No. They were pieces of animals, smoked and drying.
The man handed him something and made motions to show that he should eat it. His hands were still bound. Adam took the food with both hands and tasted it. It was a sort of bread, made of barley or lentils. It tasted gritty, and had pieces of charcoal embedded in it. Then the man lifted a clay pot and held it to his lips. Adam drank. It was good water.
The fifteen or twenty other men in the cave crowded around him, making welcoming signs. Adam indicated that they should untie him, but the leader laughed and shook his head.
There was nothing to do but wait.
They had emptied Adam’s pockets and were amusing themselves, examining their contents. Passed from hand to hand, they looked at, shook and even tasted the various objects. They liked the watch, the pocket compass and the knife. They seemed baffled by the comb, the money and the notebook. Finally they put everything in a neat heap and covered the pile with stones.
Some hours later they brought him soup, of meat flavoured with herbs. It was delicious. ‘Yaw, pang!’ they said.
Evidently he was pang. ‘Yaw’ undoubtedly meant ‘eat’.
His head still hurt. It must be late afternoon. They had not killed him, but what did they want? And what would happen to the caravan?
He was sitting, still bound, on the cave floor with his back to a rock. One of the wild men had, with a kindly gesture, put a fur blanket under him, and made a cushion from a bundle of straw for him to lean against. He watched as the men went about their business.
Two or three of them were cleaning weapons. There was a pile of knives, one or two modern guns and an automatic pistol. They showed that they knew what they were doing, using the oil and the pull-throughs expertly, squinting down barrels for traces of dirt, emptying and refilling magazines to check for possible jamming. Armed, experienced fighters.
Two men were operating a strange type of mill, a conical container into which they put large seeds. When they had satisfied themselves that it was full enough, they fixed a heavy, angled wooden stick into the centre of the mill. One man was then blindfolded, for all the world like an ox on a water-wheel, and, taking the stick in his hands, he moved round and round. The other man inspected the result of his labours: a thick oil dripping into a bowl from small holes in the base of the earthenware cone. When the bowl was nearly full, one of the men took up a pot and filled it with the liquid.
Across the cave from this scene, three others were carefully laying long strips of dried meat on boards covered with cloth. Wooden mallets were used to pound the meat until it became a powder. This material was then put, in handfuls, into cotton bags which were weighed in the hand and then sewn up. Concentrated food rations, no doubt.
This was all very interesting, thought Adam, but what about his own people? They would be worried, and might send out a party to search for him. And yet, if they did, it was unlikely that they would find this place.
The men were now talking together in low voices. They were discussing something and pointing to the cave’s opening. They did not seem interested in Adam at all. Every now and then they would stand still and listen. Adam could not hear
anything, but they probably had far better ears than his.
They must have had a scout outside: a man came into the darkness, running, and repeated something three or four times. It sounded to Adam like Marut, which was not reassuring. He remembered that this was the name of a fallen angel from Islamic lore. Marut taught men magic, and he was suspended in a rocky pit on Earth as a punishment for his sins …
Marut. Suddenly the dwindling light from the cave’s entrance was briefly darkened and a tall, thin figure, dressed in some tight-fitting garment, lifted the awning and slipped inside. The cavemen surrounded him. With cries of welcome they offered him something to drink, and then pointed out the captive.
The newcomer unslung an automatic carbine from his back, and walked over to Adam, sitting down on the ground in front of him. Adam saw that he had a full beard like his captors, but was darker, more like an Afghan, and was dressed in a grey Afghan Army uniform without rank or other badges. Perhaps thirty years of age, he had very dark eyes and extremely white teeth, which flashed as he smiled.
Before he said anything he reached forward with a knife in his hand and cut the bonds from Adam’s limbs with two quick movements. Then he sat back, cross-legged and took off his Pashtun sandals, massaging his feet. Apparently satisfied with this, he said in Dari: ‘Welcome. We shall be eating in about an hour, when the lads have got the food ready.’
Adam felt distinctly annoyed. ‘What is this all about? I have been attacked and kidnapped, and I don’t want to eat with you, whoever you are!’
Once he’d said it, he felt slightly ridiculous.
The man laughed. ‘I’m sorry, but now you know where we are, we’ll have to keep you here until we move on. This is our karar-gah, our resting place.’
‘Who am I going to tell, you idiot! Who cares what a bunch of madmen are doing and where they are? You’d better let me go. I suppose you’ve told these apes that you are the accursed demon Marut, and got them to work for you …’