Chapter thirty-five

Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women.

You know that's true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into battle. They talk about home, and they talk about the women they love. And you know it's true when you watch them die. If he's near the earth or on the earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in his hand. If he can, he'll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley, or the plain. If he's a long way from home, he'll think about it, and he'll talk about it. He'll talk about his village, or his home town, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won't scream of causes. At the very last, he'll murmur or he'll cry out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, even as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it's a woman, and a city.

Three days after Khaderbhai left the camp, three days after I watched him ride away from us through the soft new snow, sentries at the southern lookout on the Kandahar side of the camp shouted that men were approaching. We rushed to the southern edge to see a lumpy confusion of shapes, perhaps two or three human figures, struggling up the steep slope. Several of us reached for binoculars in the same instant and trained them on the spot. I made out one man crawling, inching his way up the slope on his knees, and dragging two prone figures. After a few moments of study I recognised the powerful shoulders, the bowed legs, and the distinctive grey-blue fatigues. I handed the binoculars to Khaled Ansari and bounded over the edge in a sliding run.

"It's Nazeer!" I shouted. "I think it's Nazeer!"

I was one of the first to reach him. He was face down in the snow, and he was breathing hard. His legs were pushing against the snow, seeking purchase, and his hands were locked in wraps of clothing at the throats of two men. He'd dragged them to that spot on their backs, one in each hand. It was impossible to guess how far he'd come, but it looked to be a long way, most of it uphill. The man in Nazeer's left hand, nearest to me, was Ahmed Zadeh. He was alive, but seemed to be badly wounded. The other man was Abdel Khader Khan. He was dead.

It took three of us to wrench Nazeer's fingers from the clothes.

He was so exhausted and so cold that he couldn't speak. His mouth opened and closed, but the voice was a long, unsteady croak. Two men seized the shoulders of his clothes and dragged him back up to the camp. I pulled open Khader's clothes at the chest, hoping to revive him, but when I put my hand on his body the skin was ice-cold and stiffened and woody. He'd been dead for many hours, perhaps more than a day. The body was rigid. The arms and legs were bent a little at the elbows and knees, and the hands were curled into claws. His face, however, was serene and unblemished beneath its thin shroud of snow. His eyes and his mouth were closed as if in a peaceful sleep, and he was so gently dead that my heart refused to believe him gone.

When Khaled Ansari shook my shoulder, I came to the moment as if from a dream, although I knew that I'd been awake for the whole of the time since the sentries had first given us the alarm. I was kneeling in the snow, against Khader's body, and cradling the handsome head in my arms, against my chest, but I had no recollection of doing it. Ahmed Zadeh was gone. Men had dragged him back to the camp. Khaled, Mahmoud, and I dragged and half carried Khader's body back with us and into the big cave.

I joined a group of three men who were working on Ahmed Zadeh.

The Algerian's clothes were stiff with frozen blood around the middle, below the chest. Piece by piece we cut them away, and just as we reached the torn, minced, bloody wounds on his raw skin, he opened his eyes to look at us.

"I'm wounded..." he said in French, then Arabic, then English.

"Yes, mate," I answered him, meeting his eyes. I tried a little smile, but it felt numb and awkward, and I'm sure he drew little comfort from it.

There were at least three wounds, but it was difficult to be sure. His abdomen had been ripped open with a vicious, gouging tear that might've been caused by shrapnel from a mortar shell.

For all that I could tell, the piece of metal could've been inside him, nudging up against his spine. There were other gaping wounds in his thigh and groin. He'd lost so much blood that his flesh was curled and grey around the wounds. I couldn't begin to guess what damage had been done to his stomach and other internal organs. There was a strong smell of urine and other wastes and fluids. That he'd survived so long was a miracle. It seemed that the cold alone had kept him alive. But the clock was ticking on him: he had hours or only minutes to live, and there was nothing I could do for him.

"It is very bad?"

"Yes, mate," I answered him, and I couldn't help it-my voice broke as I said it. "There's nothing I can do."

I wish now that I didn't say it. Of the hundred things that I wish I'd never said or done in my wicked life, that little quirk of honesty is right up there, near the top of the list. I hadn't realised how much the hope of being rescued had held him up. And then, with those words of mine, I watched him fall backward into the black lake. The colour left his skin, and the small tension of will that had kept his skin taut collapsed, with little twitches of quivering surrender, from his jaw to his knees. I wanted to prepare an injection of morphine for him, but I knew that I was watching him die, and I couldn't bring myself to take my hand from his.

His eyes cleared, and he looked around him at the cave walls as if seeing them for the first time. Mahmoud and Khaled were on one side of him. I knelt on the other. He looked into our faces. His eyes were starting from their sockets with fear. It was the desolate terror of a man who knows that fate has abandoned him, and death's already inside, stretching and swelling and filling up the life-space that used to be his. It was a look I came to know too well in the weeks that followed, and in the years beyond. But there, on that day, it was new to me, and I felt my scalp tighten with a fear that mimed his. "It should have been donkeys," he rasped.

"What?"

"Khader should have used donkeys. I told him that from the beginning. You heard me. You all heard me."

"Yes, mate."

"Donkeys... on this kind of job. I grew up in the mountains. I know the mountains."

"Yes, mate."

"It should have been donkeys."

"Yes," I said again, not knowing how to respond.

"But he was too proud, Khader Khan. He wanted to feel... the moment... the returning hero... for his people. He wanted to bring horses to them... so many fine horses."

He stopped talking, choked by a little series of grunting gasps that began in his wounded stomach, and thumped upwards into his stuttering chest. A trickle of dark fluid, blood and bile, dribbled from his nose and the corner of his mouth. He seemed not to notice.

"For that, only, we went back to Pakistan in the wrong direction.

For that, to deliver those horses to his people, we went to die."

He closed his eyes, moaning in pain, but then just as quickly opened them again.

"If not for those horses... we would have gone east, toward the border, direct toward the border. It was... it was his pride, do you see?"

I looked up, exchanging a glance with Khaled and Mahmoud. Khaled met my eye, but then shifted his gaze quickly to concentrate on his dying friend. Mahmoud held my stare until we both nodded. It was a gesture so subtle that it would've been imperceptible to an observer, but we both knew what we'd acknowledged and what we'd agreed upon with that little nod. It was true. It was pride that had brought the great man to his end. And strange as it may seem to someone else, it was only then, understanding the pride in his fall, that I began to truly accept that Khaderbhai was gone, and to feel the gaping, hollow sense of his death.

Ahmed talked for a while longer. He told us the name of his village, and he gave us directions for how to find it in relation to the nearest big city. He told us about his father and mother, about his sisters and brothers. He wanted us to let them know that he'd died thinking of them. And he did, that brave, laughing Algerian, who'd always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd of strangers: he did die with his mother's love on his lips. And the name of God escaped with his last breath.

We were freezing, chilled to the bones by the stillness we'd assumed while Ahmed lay dying. Other men took over the task of cleaning his body according to the rituals of Muslim burial.

Khaled, Mahmoud, and I checked on Nazeer. He wasn't wounded, but he was so utterly and crushingly exhausted that his sleep resembled that of a man in a coma. His mouth was open, and his eyes were slitted to show the whites within. He was warm, and he seemed to be recovering from his ordeal. We left him, and examined the body of our dead Khan.

A single bullet had entered Khader's side, below the ribs, and seemed to have travelled directly to his heart. There was no exit wound, but there was extensive blood coagulation and bruising on the left side of his chest. The bullet fired by Russian AK-74s in those years had a hollow tip. The steel core of the bullet was weighted towards the rear, causing it to tumble. It crashed and ripped its way into a body, rather than simply piercing it. Such ammunition was banned under international law, but almost every one of the Afghans who was killed in battle bore the terrible wounds of those brutal bullets. So it was with our Khan. The bullet had smashed its way through his body. The gaping, jagged wound in his side had left a streak of bruising across his chest that ended in a blue-black lotus over his heart.

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-mache.

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 illa 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 ener- getic. 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 mightVe 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.

Less than one hour after their return, a counter-bombardment rained on our compound with whining, whistling, thumping explosions. As the deadly attack subsided, we crawled from our hiding places to hear a strange, vibrating hum. Khaled was a few metres away from me. I saw the fear rasp across his scarred face.

He began to run toward the small cover provided by clefts in the rock walls opposite the caves. He was shouting and waving for me to join him. I took a step towards him and then froze as a Russian helicopter rose like some huge, monstrous insect over the rim of the compound. It's impossible to describe how immense and predatory those machines seem when you're under fire from them.

The monster fills the eye and the mind, and for a second or two there seems to be nothing else in the world but the metal and the noise and the terror.

In the instant that it appeared, it fired on us and wheeled away like a falcon falling to the kill. Two rockets scorched the air as they streaked toward the caves. They travelled with incredible speed, much faster than my eyes could follow. I swung round to see one rocket smash into the stone cliff above the entrance to the cave complex and explode with a shower of smoke, flame, rock, and metal fragments. Immediately after it, the second rocket entered the cave-mouth and exploded.

The shock wave that hit me was a physical thing, like standing on the edge of a swimming pool and having someone push me in with the flat of his hands. I slammed onto my back and gasped, choking for air, with the wind knocked out of me. I could see the entrance to the caves.

The wounded men were in there. Other men were hiding in there.

Bursting through the black smoke and flames, men began running or crawling out of the cave. One of the men was a Pashtun trader named Alef. He'd been a favourite of Khaderbhai's for his jokes and irreverent satires of pompous mullahs and local political figures. His back was blown out from the head to the thighs. His clothes were on fire. They burned and smouldered around the bare, erupted meat of his back. Bones-a hipbone and a shoulder blade- were clearly visible, and moving in the open wound as he crawled.

He was screaming out for help. I gritted my teeth to make the run to him, but the helicopter appeared again. It roared past us at great speed, twice turning in tight circles to attack us from new angles in passing rushes. Then it hovered with arrogant, fearless nonchalance near the edge of the plateau that had been our haven.

Just as I started to move forward it fired two more rockets at the caves and then another two. The salvo lit up the whole interior of the cavern for an instant, and melted the snow with a rolling fireball of flames and white-hot metal pieces. One fragment landed only an arm's reach away from me. It crashed into the snow and sizzled with a blistering hiss for several seconds.

I crawled away after Khaled, and squeezed my body into the narrow cleft in the rocks.

The gunship opened up with machine guns, raking the open ground and chopping up the bodies of the wounded men who were exposed there. Then I heard another gun with a different tone, and I realised that one of our men was firing back at the helicopter.

It was the sound of a PK, one of our Russian machine guns, returning fire. It was quickly followed by a second, long chun chun-chun-_chun burst from another PK. Two of our men were firing at the helicopter. My only instinct had been to hide myself from the ruthlessly efficient killing machine, but they not only exposed themselves to the beast, they actually challenged it and drew its fire.

There was a shout from somewhere behind me and then a rocket fizzed past my hideaway cleft in the stone toward the chopper. It was a rocket, fired from an AK-74 by one of our men. It missed the helicopter, and so did the next two rockets, but the return fire from our men was finding its target, and convinced the pilot to cut his losses and leave.

A great shout went up from our men: Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar! Khaled and I eased our way out of the wedge of stone to find four men rushing forward and firing at the aircraft. A thin stream of rusty black smoke dribbled from a point about two thirds of the way along the length of the machine as it plunged away from us, to the metal screech of a wildly racing engine.

The young man who'd opened up the counter attack was Jalalaad, the Hazarbuz nomad. He handed the heavy PK off to a friend, snatched up an AK-74 with a taped double magazine, and bounded away in search of enemy soldiers who mightVe crept close under cover of the chopper. Two other young men ran after him, slipping and jumping down the snow-covered slope.

We searched the compound for survivors. We were twenty men at the start of the attack, including our two wounded. After it, we were eleven: Jalalaad and the two young men, Juma and Hanif, who'd left with him to find any Afghan regulars or Russians within our defensive perimeter; Khaled; Nazeer; a very young fighter named Ala-ud-Din; three wounded men; Suleiman; and myself. We'd lost nine men-one more than the eight Afghan army men we'd killed in our mortar attack on them.

Our wounded were in a bad way. One man was so badly burned that his fingers had fused together like a crab's claws, and his face wasn't recognisably human. He was breathing through a hole in the red skin of his face. It might've been his mouth, that trembling hole in his face, but there was no way to be sure. The breaths were laboured, scraping sounds that faded and weakened as I listened to them. I gave him morphine, and moved on to the next man. He was a farmer from Ghazni named Zaher Rasul. He'd taken to bringing me green tea whenever I read a book or made notes in my journal. He was a kindly, self-effacing forty-two year old-a senior man in a country where the average life span for men was forty-five. His arm was missing below the shoulder. The same projectile, whatever it was, that had severed his arm, had torn him open along his body, from the chest to the hip, on the right hand side. There was no way of knowing what pieces of metal or stone might be lodged inside his wounds. He was praying a repetitive zikkir:

God is great God forgive me God is merciful God forgive me Mahmoud Melbaaf was holding a tourniquet on the ragged stump of shoulder that remained. When he released it, the blood spattered us in strong warm spurts. Mahmoud pulled the tourniquet tight once more. I looked into his eyes.

"Artery," I said, crushed by the task that confronted me.

"Yes. Under his arm. Did you see?"

"Yeah. It's gotta be stitched up or clamped or something. We've gotta stop the blood. He's lost too much already."

The blackened, ash-covered remains of the medical kit were grouped on a piece of canvas in front of my knees. I found a suture needle, a rusty mechanic's pliers, and some silk thread.

Freezing cold on the snowy ground, and with my bare hands cramped, I ran stitches into the artery, and the flesh, and the whole area, desperate to lock off the gush of hot, red blood. The thread snagged several times. My stiffened fingers trembled. The man was awake and aware, and in terrible pain. He screamed and howled intermittently, but returned always to his prayer.

My eyes were full of sweat, despite the shivering cold, when I nodded to Mahmoud to release the tourniquet. Blood oozed through the stitches. It was a much slower flow, but I knew the trickle would still kill him in the long run. I began to pack wads of bandage into the wound and then to wind on a pressure dressing, but Mahmoud's bloody hands seized my wrists in a powerful grip. I looked up to see that Zaher Rasul had stopped praying and stopped bleeding. He was dead.

I was breathing hard. It was the kind of breathing that does more harm than good. I suddenly realised that I hadn't eaten for too many hours, and I was very hungry. With that thought-hunger, food-I felt sick for the first time. I felt the sweaty wave of nausea surge over me, and I shook my head free of it.

When we returned our attention to the burned man we found that he, too, had succumbed. I covered the still body with a canvas camouflage drop-sheet. My last glimpse of his scorched, featureless, melted face became a prayer of thanks. One of the agonising truths for a battle medic is that you pray as hard and almost as often for men to die as you pray for them to live. The third wounded man was Mahmoud Melbaaf himself. There were tiny grey-black fragments of metal and what seemed to be melted plastic in his back, his neck, and the back of his head.

Fortunately, the spray of that hot material had only penetrated the upper layers of his skin, much like splinters. Nevertheless, it was the work of an hour to rid him of them. I washed the wounds and applied antibiotic powder, dressing them wherever it was possible.

We checked our supplies and reserves. We'd had two goats at the start of the attack. One of them had run off, and we never sighted it again. The other was found cowering in a blind alcove formed between high, rocky escarpments. That goat was our only food. The flour had burned to soot with the rice and ghee and sugar. The fuel reserves were completely exhausted. The stainless steel medical instruments had suffered a direct hit, and most of them had deformed into useless lumps of metal. I scraped through the wreckage to retrieve some antibiotics, disinfectants, ointments, bandages, suture needles, thread, syringes, and morphine ampoules. We had ammunition, and some medicines, and we could melt the snow to make water, but the lack of food was a very serious concern.

We were nine men. Suleiman and Khaled decided that we had to leave the camp. There was a cave on another mountain, about twelve hours' march away to the east, which they hoped might give us adequate protection from attack. The Russians were sure to have another helicopter in the air within a few hours at most.

Ground forces wouldn't be far behind.

"Every man fill two canteens with snow, and keep them inside his clothes, next to his body, on the march," Khaled said to me, translating Suleiman's orders. "We carry weapons, ammunition, medicines, blankets, some fuel, some wood, and the goat. Nothing else. Let's go!"

We left on the march with empty stomachs, and that state defined us for the next four weeks as we hunkered down in the new mountain cave. One of Jalalaad's young friends, Hanif, had been a halal butcher in his home village. He slaughtered, skinned, gutted, and quartered the goat when we arrived. We prepared a fire with wood that we'd carried from the ruined camp, and a sprinkle of spirit from one of the lamps. The meat was cooked- every last morsel, except for the parts, such as the legs of the animal below the knee joint, which were regarded as haram, or forbidden for Muslims to eat. The carefully cooked meat was then rationed into small daily shares. We stored the bulk of the cooked flesh in an improvised refrigerator scooped out of the ice and snow. And then, for four weeks, we nibbled at the dry meat and cringed inwardly as hunger twisted us around the craving for more.

It was an expression of our discipline and good-natured support for one another that the meat from one goat kept nine men alive for four weeks. We tried many times to slip away from the camp and reach one of the neighbouring khels to secure some extra food.

But all the local villages were occupied by enemy troops, and the entire mountain range was surrounded by patrols of Afghan army units led by Russians. Habib's tortures had combined with the damage we'd done to the helicopter to rouse a furious determination in the Russians and Afghan regulars. On one foraging mission, our scouts heard an announcement echoing through the nearest valley. The Russians had attached a loudspeaker to a military jeep. An Afghan, speaking in Pashto, described us as bandits and criminals, and said that a special task force had been set up to capture us. They'd put a reward on our heads. Our scouts wanted to shoot at the vehicle, but they thought it might be a trap designed to draw us out of hiding.

They let it pass, and the words of the hunters echoed in the sheer, stone canyons like the howl of prowling wolves.

Apparently acting on false information-or perhaps following the trail of Habib's bloody executions-the Russians, working from all the surrounding villages, concentrated their searches on another mountain range to the north of us. For so long as we remained in our remote cave, we seemed to be safe. So we waited, trapped and hungering and afraid, through the four coldest weeks of the year. We hid, creeping through shadows in the daylight hours, and huddled together without light or heat in the darkness every night. And slowly, one ice-edged hour at a time, the knife of war whittled the wishing and hoping away until all that was left to us, within the hard, disconsolate wrap of our own arms around our own shivering bodies, was the lonely will to survive.

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-26