Chapter thirty-six

I couldn't face the loss of Khaderbhai, my father-dream. I'd helped to bury him, for God's sake, with my own hands. But I didn't grieve, and I didn't mourn him. There wasn't enough truth in me for that kind of sorrowing because my heart wouldn't believe him dead. I'd loved him too much, it seemed to me in that winter of war, for him to simply be gone, to be dead. If so much love could vanish into the earth and speak no more, smile no more, then love was nothing. And I wouldn't believe that. I was sure there had to be a pay-off, somehow, and I kept waiting for it. I didn't know then, as I do now, that love's a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give. But not knowing that in those bitter weeks, not thinking that, I turned from the hole in my life where so much loving hope had been, and I refused to feel the longing or the loss. I cringed within the bleak, concealing camouflage of snow and shadowed stone. I chewed the leathered fragments of goat's meat left to us. And each minute crammed with heartbeats and hunger dragged me further from the grieving and the truth.

Eventually, of course, we exhausted the supply of meat, and a meeting was called to discuss our options. Jalalaad and the younger Afghans wanted to make a run for it: to fight our way through enemy lines, and strike out for the desert region of Zabul province, close to the Pakistan border. Suleiman and Khaled reluctantly agreed that there was no other option, but they wanted clear intelligence of the enemy disposition before choosing where to launch a breakout attack. To that end, Suleiman sent young Hanif on a scouting mission that would take him on a sweeping curve from the south-west to the north and south-east of our position. He ordered the young man to return within twenty four hours, and to travel only at night.

It was a long, cold, hungry wait for Hanif to return. We were drinking water, but that only staved off the torment for a few minutes, and left us even hungrier. Twenty-four hours stretched to two days, and then into a third, with no sign of him. On the morning of the third day, we accepted that Hanif was dead or captured.

Juma, a cameleer from the tiny Tajik enclave in the south-west of Afghanistan near Iran, volunteered to search for him. He was a dark, thin-faced man with a hawk-like nose and a thickly emotive mouth. He was close to Hanif and Jalalaad-the closeness that men in wars and prisons find, against their every expectation, and rarely express in words or gestures.

Juma's Tajik clans of cameleers were traditional rivals of the Mohmand Hazarbuz people of Hanif and Jalalaad in the nomadic transport of trade goods. The competition between the groups had become intense as Afghanistan rapidly modernised. In 1920, fully one in every three Afghans was a nomad. Just two generations later, by 1970, only 2 per cent of the people were nomads. Rivals though they were, the three young men had been thrown into close co-operation with one another by the war, and they'd become inseparable friends. Their friendship had developed in the insidiously dull months that troughed between the peaks of fighting, and was tested many times in combat. In their most successful battle, they'd used land mines and grenades to destroy a Russian tank. Each of them wore, on a leather thong around his neck, a small piece of metal taken from the tank as a souvenir.

When Juma declared that he would search for Hanif, we all knew that we couldn't prevent him from doing it. With a weary sigh, Suleiman agreed to let him go. Refusing to wait until nightfall, Juma shouldered his weapon and crept from the camp at once. He'd gone without food for three days, just as we had, but the smile that he sent back to Jalalaad, as he looked over his shoulder for the last time, was bright with strength and courage. We watched him leave, watched his thin, retreating shadow sweep the sundial of the snowy slopes beneath us.

Hunger exaggerated the cold. It was a long, hard winter, with snow falling on the mountains around us every other day. The temperature fluttered above zero during the daylight hours, but sank into icy, teeth-chattering sub-zero levels from dusk until well after dawn. My hands and feet were constantly cold; achingly cold. The skin on my face was wooden, and as riven with cracks as the feet of the farmers in Prabaker's village. We pissed on our hands, to fight off the aching sting of the cold, and it helped to bring feeling back to them momentarily. But we were so cold that taking a piss was a serious issue. First there was the dread inspired by having to open our clothes at all, and then there was the chill that followed the release of a bladder of warm fluid. Losing that warmth caused the body temperature to drop quickly, and we always put it off until the last moment.

Juma failed to return that night. At midnight, with hunger and fear prodding us awake, we all jumped at a little crickle of sound in the darkness. Seven guns aimed at the spot. Then we gasped as a face loomed from the shadows, much closer than we'd expected. It was Habib.

"What are you doing, my brother?" Khaled asked him gently, in Urdu. "You gave us a big fright."

"They are here," he answered in a rational, calm voice that seemed to rise from another mind or another place, as if he was a medium speaking in a trance. His face was filthy. We were all unwashed and bearded, but Habib's filth was something so repulsive and thickly smeared that it was shocking. Like poison pouring from an infected wound, the foulness seemed to squeeze outward through the pores of his skin from some feculence deep within. "They are everywhere, all around you. And they are coming up to here to get you, to kill you all, when more men come, tomorrow, or the day after that. Soon. They know where you are.

They will kill you all. There is only one way out of here now."

"How did you find us here, brother?" Khaled asked, his voice as calm and remote as Habib's.

"I came with you. I have always been near you. Did you not see me?"

"My friends," Jalalaad asked, "Juma and Hanif-did you see them anywhere?"

Habib didn't reply. Jalalaad asked the question again, more forcefully.

"Did you see them? Were they in the Russian camp? Were they captured?"

We listened in a silence thick with our fear and the poisonous smells of decayed flesh that clung to Habib. He seemed to be meditating, or perhaps listening to something no-one else could hear.

"Tell me, bach-e-kaka," Suleiman asked gently, using the familiar term for nephew, "what did you mean, there is only one way out of here now?"

"They are everywhere," Habib answered, his face deformed by its wide-mouthed, psychotic stare. Mahmoud Melbaaf was translating for me, whispering close to my ear. "They don't have enough men. They have mined all the easiest ways out of the mountains. The north, the east, the west, all mined. Only the south-east is clear, because they think you will not try to escape that way. They left that way clear, so they can come up here to get you."

"We can't go out that way," Mahmoud whispered to me when Habib stopped suddenly. "The Russians, they hold the valley south-east of here. It is their way to Kandahar. When they come for us, they will come from that direction. If we go that way, we will all die, and they know it."

"Now, they are in the south-east. But for tomorrow, for one day, they are all on the far side of the mountain, in the north-west,"

Habib said. His voice was still calm and composed, but his face was a gargoyle's leer, and the contrast unnerved us all. "Only a few of them stay here tomorrow. Only a few will stay, while the rest of them put the last mines on the north-west slopes, just after dawn. If you run at them, attack them, fight them tomorrow, in the south-east, there will only be a few of them. You can break through and escape. But only tomorrow."

"How many are they altogether?" Jalalaad asked.

"Sixty-eight men. They have mortars, rockets, and six heavy machine guns. There are too many of them for you to sneak past them at night."

"But you sneaked past them," Jalalaad insisted defiantly.

"They cannot see me," Habib replied serenely. "I am invisible to them. They cannot see me until I am pushing my knife into their throats."

"That's ridiculous!" Jalalaad hissed at him. "They are soldiers.

You are a soldier. If you can get past them, we can do it."

"Did your men return to you?" Habib asked him, turning his maniac stare on the young fighter for the first time. Jalalaad opened his mouth to speak, but the words sank into the small heaving sea of his heart. He cast his eyes down, and shook his head. "Could you enter this camp without being seen or heard, as I did? If you try to get past them, you will die, like your friends. You cannot get past them. I can do it, but you cannot."

"But you think we can fight our way out of here?" Khaled put the question to him gently, quietly, but we all heard the urgency in it.

"You can. It is the only way. I have been everywhere on this mountain, and I have been so close to them that I can hear them scratch their skin. That is the reason why I am here. I came to tell you how to save yourselves. But there is a price for my help. All the ones you do not kill tomorrow, the ones who survive, they will be mine. You will give them to me."

"Yes, yes," Suleiman agreed soothingly. "Come, bach-e-kaka, tell us what you know. We want to share your knowledge. Sit with us, and tell us what you know. We have no food, so we cannot offer you a meal. I'm sorry."

"There is food," Habib interrupted, pointing beyond us to the shadows at the edge of our camp. "I smell food there."

True enough, the rotting pieces of the dead goat-the haram cuts from the animal-lay in a little heap in the slushy snow. Cold as it was, and even in the snow, the bits of raw meat had long begun to decay. We couldn't smell them from that distance, but it seemed that Habib could.

The madman's comment provoked a long discussion of the religious rights and wrongs of eating haram food. The men weren't rigid in the observation of their faith. They prayed every day, but not in strict adherence to the timetable of three sessions, ordained by Shia Islam, or the five sessions of the Sunni Muslims. They were good men of faith, rather than overtly religious men.

Nevertheless, in a time of war, and with the great dangers we faced, the last power they wanted ranged against them was God's.

They were holy warriors, mujaheddin: men who believed that they would become martyrs at the instant that they died in battle, and that they were assured a place in the heavens, where beautiful maidens would attend them. They didn't want to pollute themselves with forbidden foods when they were so close to the martyr's rush for paradise. It was a tribute to their faith, in fact, that the mere discussion of the haram meat hadn't occurred until we'd hungered for a month and then starved for five days.

For my part, I confessed to Mahmoud Melbaaf that I'd been thinking about the discarded meat almost constantly for the last few days. I wasn't a Muslim, and the meat wasn't forbidden to me.

But I'd lived so closely with the fighters, and for so many painful weeks, that I'd linked my fate to theirs. I would never have eaten anything while they hungered. I wanted to eat the meat, but only if they agreed and ate it with me.

Suleiman delivered the decisive opinion on the matter. He reminded the men that while it was indeed evil for a Muslim to eat haram food, it was an even greater evil for a Muslim to starve himself to death when haram food was available to be eaten. The men decided that we would cook the rotting meat in a soup, before the first light. Then, fortified by that meal, we would use Habib's information on the enemy positions to fight our way out of the mountains.

During the long weeks of hiding and waiting without heat or hot food, we'd entertained and supported one another with the stories we'd told. On that last night, after several others had spoken, it was my turn once more. For my first story, weeks before, I'd told them about my escape from prison. Although they'd been scandalised by my admissions about being a gunaa, or sinner, and being imprisoned as a criminal, they'd been thrilled by the account, and asked many questions afterwards. My second story had been about the Night of the Assassins: how Abdullah, Vikram, and I had tracked the Nigerian killers down; how we'd fought with them, defeated them, and then expelled them from the country; how I'd hunted Maurizio, the man who'd caused it all, and beat him with my fists; and how I'd wanted to kill him, but had spared his life, only to regret that pity when he'd attacked Lisa Carter and forced Ulla to kill him.

That story, too, had been very well received, and as Mahmoud Melbaaf took his place beside me to translate my third story, I wondered what might capture their enthusiasm anew. My mind scanned its list of heroes. There were many, so many men and women, beginning with my own mother, whose courage and sacrifice inspired the memory of them. But when I began to speak, I found myself telling Prabaker's story. The words, like some kind of desperate prayer, came unbidden from my heart.

I told them how Prabaker had left his village-Eden for the city when he was still a child; how he'd returned as a teenager, with the wild street boy Raju and other friends to confront the menace of the dacoits; how Rukhmabai, Prabaker's mother, had put courage into the men of the village; how young Raju had fired his revolver as he walked toward the boastful leader of the dacoits until the man fell dead; how Prabaker had loved feasting and dancing and music; how he'd saved the woman he loved from the cholera epidemic, and married her; and how he'd died, in a hospital bed, surrounded by our sorrowing love.

After Mahmoud finished translating the last of my words there was a lengthy silence while they considered the tale. I was just convincing myself that they were as moved by the life of my little friend as I was myself when the first questions began.

"So, how many goats did they have in that village?" Suleiman asked gravely.

"He wants to know how many goats-" Mahmoud began translating.

"I got it, I got it," I smiled. "Well, near as I can tell, about eighty, maybe as many as a hundred. Each household had about two or three goats, but some had as many as six or eight."

That information inspired a little gesticulating buzz of discussion that was more animated and partisan than any of the political or religious debates that had occasionally stirred among the men.

"What... colour... were these goats?" Jalalaad asked.

"The colours," Mahmoud explained solemnly. "He wants to know the colors of those goats."

"Well, gee, they were brown, I guess, and white, and a few black ones."

"Were they big goats, like the ones in Iran?" Mahmoud translated for Suleiman. "Or were they skinny, like the ones in Pakistan?"

"Well, about _so big..." I suggested, gesturing with my hands.

"How much milk," Nazeer asked, caught up in the discussion in spite of himself, "did they get from those goats, every day?"

"I'm... not really an expert on goats..."

"Try," Nazeer insisted. "Try to remember."

"Oh, shit. I... it's just a wild stab in the dark, mind you, but I'd say, maybe, a couple of litres a day..." I offered, raising the palms of my hands helplessly.

"This friend of yours, how much did he earn as a taxi driver?"

Suleiman asked.

"Did this friend go out with a woman, alone, before his marriage?" Jalalaad wanted to know, causing all the men to laugh and some of them to throw small stones at him.

In that way the session moved through all the themes that concerned them, until at last I excused myself and found a relatively sheltered spot where I could stare at the misty nothing of the frozen, shrouded sky. I was trying to fight down the fear that prowled in my empty belly, and leapt up with sharp claws at my heart in its cage of ribs.

Tomorrow. We were going to fight our way out. No-one had said it, but I knew that all the others were thinking we would die. They were too cheerful, too relaxed. All the tension and dread of the last weeks had drained from them once we'd made the decision to fight. It wasn't the joyful relief of men who know they're saved.

It was something else-something I'd seen in the mirror, in my cell, on the night before my desperate escape from prison, and something I'd seen in the eyes of the man who'd escaped with me. It was the exhilaration of men who were risking everything, risking life and death, on one throw of the dice. Some time on the next day we would be free, or we would be dead. The same resolution that had sent me over the front wall of a prison was sending us over the ridge, and into the enemy guns: it's better to die fighting than to die like a rat in a trap. I'd escaped from prison, and crossed the world, and crossed the years, to find myself in the company of men who felt exactly as I did about freedom and death.

And still I was afraid: afraid of being wounded, afraid of being shot in the spine and paralysed, afraid of being captured alive and tortured in another prison by yet another prison guard. It occurred to me that Karla and Khaderbhai would've had something clever to say to me about fear. And in thinking that, I realised how remote they were from the moment, and the mountain, and me. I realised that I didn't need their brilliance any more: it couldn't help me. All the cleverness in all the world couldn't stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness.

Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom. For me, on that last night before the battle, it was the sound of my mother's voice, and it was the life and death of my friend Prabaker... God give you rest, Prabaker. I still love you, and the grieving, when I think of you, is pinned to my heart and my eyes with bright and burning stars... My comfort, on that freezing ridge, was the memory of Prabaker's smiling face, and the sound of my mother's voice: Whatever you do in life, do it with courage, and you won't go far wrong...

"Here, take one," Khaled said, sliding down beside me to squat on his heels, and offering me one of two half-cigarettes that he held in his bare hand.

"Jesus!" I gawked. "Where'd you get those? I thought we all ran out last week."

"We did," he said, lighting the cigarettes with a small gas lighter. "Except for these. I kept them for a special occasion. I think this is it. I got a bad feeling, Lin. A real bad feeling.

It's inside me, and I can't shake it tonight."

It was the first time that we'd spoken more than the essential word or two since the night that Khader had left. We'd worked and slept side by side, every day and night, but I almost never met his eye, and I'd avoided conversation with him so coldly that he, too, had been silent with me.

"Look... Khaled... about Khader, and Karla... don't feel... I mean, I'm not-"

"No," he interrupted. "You had plenty of reason to be mad. I can see it from your side. I always could. You got a raw deal, and I told Khader that, too, on the night he left. He should've trusted you. It's a funny thing-the guy he trusted most, the only guy in the whole world he really trusted all the way, turned out to be a crazy killer, and the one who sold us all out."

The New York accent, with its Arabic swell, rolled over me like a warm, frothy wave, and I almost reached out to hug him. I'd missed the assurances I'd always found in the sound of that voice, and the honest suffering I saw in the scarred face. I was so glad to have his friendship again that I confused what he'd said about Khaderbhai. I thought, without really thinking at all, that he was talking about Abdullah. He wasn't, and that, too, like a hundred other chances to know all the truth in the one conversation, was lost.

"How well did you know Abdullah?" I asked him.

"Pretty well," he answered, his little smile becoming an asking frown: Where is this going?

"Did you like him?"

"Not really."

"Why not?"

"Abdullah didn't believe in anything. He was a rebel without a cause, in a world that doesn't have enough rebels for the real causes. I don't like-and I don't really trust-people who don't believe in anything."

"Does that include me?"

"No," he laughed. "You believe in a lot of things. That's why I like you. That's why Khader loved you. He did love you, you know.

He told me so, a couple different times."

"What do I believe in?" I scoffed.

"You believe in people," he replied quickly. "That stuff with the slum clinic and all. The story you told the guys tonight, that about the village. You'd forget that shit if you didn't believe in people. That work in the slum, when the cholera went through the place-Khader loved that, what you did then, and so did I.

Shit, for a while there, I think you even had Karla believing, too. You gotta understand, Lin. If Khader had a choice, if there was a better way to do what he had to do, he would've taken it. It all played out the way it had to. Nobody wanted to fuck you over."

"Not even Karla?" I smiled, savouring the last puff of the cigarette and then stubbing it out on the ground.

"Well, maybe Karla," he conceded, laughing the small, sad laugh.

"But that's Karla. I think the only guy she never fucked over was Abdullah."

"Were they together?" I asked, so surprised that I couldn't help the pinch of jealousy that pulled my brows together in a hard, little frown.

"Well, you couldn't say together," he answered evenly, staring into my eyes. "But I was, once. I used to live with her."

"You what?"

"I lived with her-for six months."

"What happened?" I asked, gritting my teeth and feeling stupid for it. I had no right to be angry or jealous. I'd never asked Karla about her lovers, and she'd never asked me about mine.

"You don't know, do you?"

"I wouldn't ask, if I knew."

"She dumped me," he said slowly, "just about the time you came along."

"Ah, fuck, man..."

"It's okay," he smiled.

We were silent for a moment, both of us reeling back through the years. I remembered Abdullah, at the sea wall near the Haji Ali Mosque, on the night that I met him with Khaderbhai. I remembered him saying that a woman had taught him the clever phrase he'd used in English. It must've been Karla. Of course it was Karla.

And I remembered the stiffness that was in Khaled's manner when I first met him, and I realised, suddenly, that he must've been hurting then, and maybe blaming me for it. I saw clearly what it must've taken for him to be as friendly and kind to me as he was at the beginning.

"You know," he added after a while, "you really got to go careful with Karla, Lin. She's... angry... you know? And she's hurt.

She's hurt bad, in all the places that count. They really fucked her up when she was a kid. She's a bit crazy. She did something, in the States, before she came to India. And that fucked her up, too."

"What did she do?"

"I don't know. Something pretty serious. She never told me what it was. We talked around it, if you get my meaning. I think Khaderbhai knew about it because, you know, he was the first one to meet her."

"No, I didn't know that," I answered him, frowning with the thought of how little I knew about the woman I'd loved for so long. "Why... why do you think she never told me about Khaderbhai? I knew her a long time-when we were both working for him-and she didn't say a word. I talked about him, but she never said a word. She didn't mention his name once."

"I think she's just loyal to him, you know? I don't think there's anything against you, Lin. She's just incredibly loyal-well, she was incredibly loyal to him. She thought of him like a father, I think. Her own father died when she was a kid. And her stepfather died when she was still pretty young. Khader came along just in time to save her, so he got to be her father."

"You said he was the first one who met her?"

"Yeah, on a plane. It's kind of a weird story, the way she told me. She didn't remember getting on the plane. She was running from something-something she did-and she was in trouble. She ended up going on a few different planes from different airports - for a few days, I think. And then she was on this plane that was going to Singapore from... I don't know... somewhere. And she must've had, like, a nervous breakdown or something, because she cracked up, and the next thing she knew, she was in this cave, in India, with Khaderbhai. And then he left her with Ahmed, who looked after her."

"She told me about him."

"Did she? She doesn't talk about it much. She liked that guy. He nursed her for near about six months until she got herself together again. He brought her back-into the light, like. They were pretty close. I think he was the closest thing to a brother she ever knew."

"Were you with her-I mean, did you know her then, when he was killed?"

"I don't know that he was killed, Lin," Khaled stated, frowning hard as the knot of recollections turned in his memory. "I know Karla believes it-that Madame Zhou killed him, and the girl..."

"Christine."

"Yeah, Christine. But I knew Ahmed pretty well. He was a very gentle guy-a very simple, soft kind of a guy. He was just the type to take poison with his girlfriend, like in a romantic movie, if he thought he couldn't ever be free with her. Khader looked into it, real close, because Ahmed was one of his guys, and he was sure Zhou had nothing to do with it. He cleared her."

"But Karla wouldn't accept it?"

"No, she didn't buy it. And coming on top of everything else, it really fucked her up. Did she ever tell you she loves you?"

I hesitated, partly from reluctance to surrender the little advantage I might've had over him if he believed that she did say it, and partly from loyalty to Karla-because it was her business, after all. In the end, I answered him: I had to know why he'd asked me the question.

"No."

"That's too bad," he said flatly. "I thought you might be the one."

"The one?"

"The one to help her-to break through, I guess. Something really bad happened to that girl. A lot of bad things happened to her.

Khader made it worse, I think."

"How?"

"He put her to work for him. He saved her, when he met her, and he protected her from what she was scared of, back in the States.

But then she met this guy, a politician, and he fell for her pretty hard. Khader needed the guy, so he got her to work for him, and I don't think she was cut out for it."

"What kind of work?"

"You know how beautiful she is-those green eyes, and that white, white skin."

"Ah, fuck," I sighed, remembering a lecture Khader had given me once, about the amount of crime in the sin, and the sin in the crime.

"I don't know what was in Khader's head," Khaled concluded, shaking his own head in doubt and wonder. "It was... out of character, to say the least. I honestly don't think he saw it as... damaging her. But she, kind of, froze up, inside. It was like her own father... was getting her to do that shit. And I don't think she forgave him for it. But she was incredibly loyal to him, all the same. I never understood it. But that's how I got together with her-I saw all that happening, and I felt kind of sorry for her, if you know what I mean. After a while, one thing led to another. But I never really got through to her. And you didn't, neither. I don't think anyone will. Ever." "Ever is a long time."

"Okay, you got a point. But I'm just trying to warn you. I don't want you to get hurt any more, brother. We've been through too much, na? And I don't want her to get hurt."

He fell silent again. We stared at the rocks and the frosty ground, avoiding one another's eyes. A few shivering minutes passed. At last he took a deep breath and stood up, slapping at the chill in his arms and legs. I stood as well, trembling with cold and stamping my numb feet. At the last possible moment, and with an impulsive rush as if he was breaking through a tangle of vines, Khaled flung his arms around me and hugged me. The strength in his arms was fierce, but his head slowly came to rest against mine as tenderly as the lolling head of a sleeping child.

When he pulled away from me, his face was averted and I couldn't see his eyes. He walked off, and I followed more slowly, hugging my hands under my arms to fight off the cold. It was only when I was alone that I recalled what he'd said to me: I got a bad feeling, Lin. A real bad feeling...

I resolved to talk to him about it, but just at that moment Habib stepped out of a shadow beside me, and I jumped in fright.

"For fuck's sake!" I hissed. "You scared the fuckin' shit outta me! Don't do that shit, Habib!"

"It's okay, it's okay," Mahmoud Melbaaf said, stepping up beside the madman.

Habib garbled something at me, speaking so quickly that I couldn't make out a single clear syllable. His eyes were starting from his head. The effect was exaggerated by the dark, heavy pouches beneath his eyes, which dragged the lower lids with them and showed too much white below the fractured, scattered wheel of the iris.

"What?"

"It's okay," Mahmoud repeated. "He wants to talk with everybody.

He talks to every man, tonight. He comes to me. He asks me to make it English for you, what he says. You are the last, before Khaled. He wants to speak to Khaled last."

"What did he say?"

Mahmoud asked him to repeat what he'd said to me. Habib did speak again, in exactly the same too-rapid, hyper-energetic manner, staring into my eyes as if he expected an enemy or a monstrous beast to emerge from them. I was just as steadfast in returning the stare: I'd been locked up with violent, crazy men, and I knew better than to take my eyes off him.

"He says that strong men make the luck to happen," Mahmoud translated for us.

"What?"

"Strong men, they make it for itself, the luck."

"Strong men make their own luck? Is that what he means?"

"Yes, exactly so," Mahmoud agreed. "A strong man can make his own luck."

"What does he mean?"

"I do not know," Mahmoud replied, smiling patiently. "He just says it."

"He's just going around, telling everybody this?" I asked. "That a strong man makes his own luck?"

"No. For me, he said that the Prophet, peace be upon Him, was a great soldier before he was a great teacher. For Jalalaad, he said that the stars shine because they are full with secrets. It is different for every man. And he was in too much a hurry for telling us these things. It is very important for him. I do not understand, Lin. I think it is because we fight tomorrow morning."

"Was there anything else?" I asked, mystified by the exchange.

Mahmoud asked Habib if there was anything else that he wanted to say. Holding the stare into my eyes, Habib rattled away in Pashto and Farsi.

"He says only that there is no such a thing as luck. He wants you to believe him. He says again that a strong man-"

"Makes his own luck," I completed the translation for him. "Well, tell him I appreciate the message."

Mahmoud spoke, and for a few moments Habib stared harder, searching in my eyes for a recognition or response that I couldn't give him. He turned and loped away with the stooped, crouching run that I found more chilling and alarming, somehow, than the more obvious, bulging madness in his eyes.

"Now what's he up to?" I asked Mahmoud, relieved that he was gone.

"He will find Khaled, I think," Mahmoud replied.

"Damn, it's cold!" I spluttered.

"Yes. I am too cold, like you. I am all day dreaming that this cold will be gone."

"Mahmoud, you were in Bombay when we went to hear the Blind Singers, with Khaderbhai, weren't you?"

"Yes. It was the first meeting, for all of us, at the same time together. I saw you there the first time."

"I'm sorry. I didn't meet you that night, and I didn't notice you there. What I wanted to ask you is how you got together with Khaderbhai in the first place."

Mahmoud laughed. It was so rare to see him laugh out loud that I felt myself smiling in response. He'd lost weight on the mission - we'd all lost weight. His face was drawn tight to the high cheekbones and the pointed chin, covered with a thick, dark beard. His eyes, even in the cold moonlight, were the polished bronze of a temple vase.

"I am standing on the street, in Bombay, and I am doing some passport business with my friend. There is a hand on my shoulder.

It is Abdullah. He tells me that Khader Khan wants to see me. I go to Khader, in his car. We drive together, we talk, and after, I am his man."

"Why did he pick you? What made him pick you, and what made you agree to join him?"

Mahmoud frowned, and it seemed that he might be considering the question for the first time.

"I was against Pahlavi Shah," he began. "The secret police of the Shah, the Savak, they killed many people, and they put many people in the jail for beating. My father killed in the jail. My mother killed in the jail. For fighting against Shah. I was a small boy that time. When I grow up, I fight Shah. Two times in the jail. Two times beating, and electricity on my body, and too much pain. I fight for revolution in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini makes the revolution in Iran, and he is the new power, when Shah runs away to America. But Savak secret police still the same. Now they work for Khomeini. Again I go in the jail. Again the beating and the electric pain. The same people from the Shah-the exactly same people in the jail-now they work for Khomeini. All my friends die in the jail, and in the war against Iraq. I escape, and come to Bombay. I make business, black-market business, with other Iran people. Then, Abdel Khader Khan makes me his man. In my life, I meet only one great man. That is Khader. Now, he is dead..."

He choked off the words, and rubbed a tear from each eye with the sleeve of his rough jacket.

It was a long speech, and we were freezing cold, yet still I would've asked him more. I wanted to know it all-everything that filled the gaps between what Khaderbhai had told me and the secrets Khaled had shared. But at that moment we heard a piercingly piteous scream of terror. It died suddenly, as if the thread of sound had been cut with a pair of shears. We looked at one another, and reached for weapons in the same instinct.

"This way!" Mahmoud shouted, running over the slippery snow and slush with short, careful steps.

We reached the origin of the sound at the same time as the other men. Nazeer and Suleiman rushed through our. group to see what we were staring at. They froze, silent and still, at the sight of Khaled Ansari kneeling over the body of Habib Abdur Rahman. The madman was on his back. He was dead. There was a knife in his throat where the words about luck had been only minutes before.

The knife had been pushed into his neck and twisted, just as Habib himself had done to our horses and to Siddiqi. But it wasn't Habib's knife that we stared at, jutting out of the muddy, sinewed throat like a branch from a riverbed. We all knew the knife well. We'd all seen its distinctive, carved, horn handle a hundred times. It was Khaled's knife.

Nazeer and Suleiman put their hands under Khaled's arms, and lifted him gently from the corpse. He accepted the help momentarily, but then he shrugged them off and knelt beside the body. Habib's pattu shawl was rucked up around his chest. Khaled pulled something from the front of the dead man's flak jacket. It was metal, two pieces of metal, hanging from Habib's neck on leather thongs. Jalalaad rushed forward and snatched them. They were the souvenir fragments of the tank that he and Hanif and Juma had destroyed; the pieces that his friends had worn around their necks.

Khaled stood and turned and walked slowly away from the killing.

I put my hand on his shoulder as he passed me, and walked with him. Behind me there was a howl of rage as Jalalaad attacked Habib's corpse with the butt of his Kalashnikov. I looked over my shoulder to see the mad eyes of the lunatic crushed beneath the rise and smashing fall of the weapon. And in one of those perversities of the pitying heart, I found myself feeling sorry for Habib. I'd wanted to kill him myself, more than once, and I knew that I was glad he was dead, but my heart was so sorry for him in that moment that I grieved as if he was a friend. He was a _teacher, I heard myself thinking. The most violent and dangerous man I'd ever known had been a kindergarten teacher. I couldn't shake that thought-as if it was the only truth, in that moment, that really mattered.

And when the men finally dragged Jalalaad away, there was nothing left: nothing but blood and snow and hair and shattered bone where the life and the tortured mind had been.

Khaled returned to our cave. He was muttering something in Arabic. His eyes were radiant, filled with a vision that illuminated him, and put an almost frightening resolve in the set of his scarred features.

At the cave, he removed the belt around his waist that held his canteen. He let it slip to the ground. He lifted the cartridge belt over his head from his shoulder and let that too fall. Next he rummaged through his pockets, emptying them of their contents one by one until there was nothing on him but the clothes he wore. At his feet were his false passports, his money, his letters, his wallet, his weapons, his jewellery, and even the bruised, wrinkle-eared photos of his long-dead family.

"What's he saying?" I asked Mahmoud desperately. I'd spent the last four weeks avoiding Khaled's eye and coldly rejecting his friendship. Suddenly, I was unbearably afraid that I was going to lose him; that I'd already lost him.

"It is the Koran," Mahmoud replied in a whisper. "He is telling Suras from the Koran."

Khaled left the cave and walked to the edge of the compound. I ran to stop him, and pushed him back with both hands. He allowed the shove, and then came on toward me again. I threw my arms around him and dragged him back a few paces. He didn't resist me.

He stared directly ahead at that infuriating vision only he could see while he chanted the hypnotically poetic verses of the Koran.

And when I let him go, he continued his walk out of the camp.

"Help me!" I shouted. "Can't you see? He's going! He's going out there!"

Mahmoud, Nazeer, and Suleiman came forward but, instead of helping me to restrain Khaled, they grasped my arms and gently prised them away from him. Khaled immediately began to walk forward. I wrestled myself free, and rushed to stop him again. I shouted at him and slapped at his face to waken him to the danger. He didn't resist and he didn't. react. I felt the tears hot on my cold face, stinging in the cracks that split my frozen lips. I felt the sobbing in my chest like a river rappling and rolling against worn and rounded rocks, on and on and on. I held him tight, with one arm around his neck and the other around his waist, my hands locked together at his back.

Nazeer, even as thin and weakened as he'd become in those weeks, was too strong for me. His steel hands grabbed at my wrists and peeled them away from Khaled. Mahmoud and Suleiman helped him to hold me back as I struggled and reached out to grab Khaled's jacket. And then we watched him walk from the camp into the winter that one way or another had ruined or killed us all.

"Didn't you see it?" Mahmoud asked me when he was gone. "Didn't you see his face?"

"Yes, I saw it, I saw it," I sobbed, staggering back to the cave to fall into the crumpled cell of my misery.

I lay there for hours unsleeping, filthy starving, angry, and broken-hearted. And I might've died there-some pain, sometimes, leaves you without legs or arms-but the smell of food brought me round. The men had decided that they couldn't wait to cook the last of the rotting meat. They'd boiled it in a pot during those hours, fanning the smoke away continuously and concealing the flame with blankets.

The soup was ready long before dawn, and every man took a bowl, glass, or mug of it. The stink of the rotting meat was more than our empty stomachs could bear, at first. We all vomited the foul, retching sips we took. But hunger has a will of its own, a will that's much older than the other will we praise and flatter in the palace of the mind. We were too hungry to refuse the food, and by the third try, or the fifth for some of us, we kept the repulsive, stinking brew down. Then the pain caused by the hot soup in our empty stomachs was as sharp as a belly full of fishhooks; yet that too passed, and every man forced himself to drink three helpings, and to chew the rubbery, rotting chunks of meat.

For two hours after that we took turns to dash into the rocks as the food worked through intestines and bowels that had seized in our starving bodies, and suddenly erupted.

At last, when we recovered, and when all the prayers were said, and when each man was ready, we gathered near the south-eastern edge of the compound at the place Habib had recommended for our attack. He'd assured us that the steep slope was our one chance to fight our way to freedom; and since he'd planned to fight in the attack with us, we had no reason to distrust the advice.

We were six men. The five others were Suleiman, Mahmoud Melbaaf, Nazeer, Jalalaad, and young Ala-ud-Din. He was a shy man of twenty with a boy's grin beneath an old man's faded green eyes.

He caught my eye, and nodded encouragingly. I returned the nod with a smile, and his face broke into a wider grin while his head nodded more vigorously. I looked away, ashamed that I'd spent so much time with him, months of hard time, without once trying to engage him in a conversation. We were going to die together, and I knew nothing about him. Nothing.

Dawn put fire in the sky. Wind-driven clouds streaming across the far plain were aflame, crimsoned with the first burning kisses of the morning sun. We shook hands, embraced, hugged one another, checked our weapons again and again, and stared down the steep slopes toward forever.

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.

____________________

PART FIVE

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26