by Andy McNab
I managed to finish not only the curry but also apple strudel and a coffee quicker than they did their starter, and they'd been there when I arrived. I'd often wondered if I had a bit of Arab in me. When it came to food, I just wanted to eat, belch and fuck off.
I also had to prepare and pack my Bergen for tomorrow. Once Magreb picked me up, I wouldn't be back until Saturday. By the morning, I'd either have got Dom back or he'd be dead.
'Hello, Nick, this is a strange place to write about being' – the Australian who'd sat next to me on the plane put his fingers in the air to make the quote sign as he sat and joined them – 'Outside the Comfort Zone…' He gave me one of those knowing nods that diplomats do in films.
I left him with his friends. I felt more at home with Magreb.
58
Kartayi Seh District Friday, 0243 hrs Magreb had parked the Hiace between two truck containers while I checked my map. We were looking out over a sort of village square a couple of hundred metres wide. In the middle stood a small 1950s Russian anti-tank gun with a steel plate at either side of the barrel. The rubber tyres were decaying; it seemed to be there as decoration. Maybe the people of Russia couldn't afford to donate a shiny new Toyota.
The road we'd taken off the main drag south was tarmac and pothole-free. The two-storey, flat-roofed concrete houses either side of it seemed a lot more upscale than round Basma's way. All of them sheltered behind walls, security lights and rolls of razor wire. Many had plywood guard huts. A couple looked like they'd been on the wrong end of a B52's payload, but even so, the rubble had been neatly swept up and piled inside their remains.
Headlights came up the road behind us and carved through the square. The beam bounced along the different-coloured walls before eventually reaching the gates of the corner house. They swung open.
'That has to be J's, mate.' I showed him my hand. 'House fifty, blue gates, in the corner.'
The area might be high-rent by Kabul standards but Magreb didn't like being there. 'Mr Nick, I hear about this place. Is dangerous, maybe. Bad people come here. Very bad. I wait, maybe, take you back to hotel, be safe.'
Two silhouettes moved round the vehicle to check it before it drove inside.
'Don't worry about it, mate. Just drop me off and I'll give you a call later, yeah?'
The headlights splashed across more vehicles inside the compound, and I saw house lights still further on. The gates closed as I pulled out three hundred-dollar bills and tried to hand them over. 'This is for tonight and the next two. Remember, I said I'd pay you anyway.'
He took them, but gave two back. 'You pay me when I work, Mr Nick.' He pocketed the equivalent of nine days' pay and the rest went back into my jeans.
I climbed out and lifted my Bergen from the footwell. 'OK, mate. But in my book, if you're on standby for a call, that's working.'
He held out a hand to stop me closing the door just yet. 'You really not want me wait and take you back to hotel? Your friend look too nice be with man who go to this place.'
More headlights bounced towards us from the main.
'I'll call you tomorrow. Go on, mate. Go and get your head down.'
I closed the door gently and took the Hiace's place between the containers as Magreb drove off.
An Italian armoured-vehicle two-ship trundled into the square, probably a neighbour-hood-watch thing to make the residents feel safe. Two guys on.50 cals stuck out of the tops. They did a lap before heading off to look good elsewhere.
I had a quick scratch of the sutures, swung the Bergen over my shoulder, then moved out of the gap and made my way across the packed-mud square. At the gate of number fifty, I could hear the steady thump of music. I gave it a couple of bangs.
A small peephole slid open. It was too dark to see eyes.
'No car? You no car?'
'I live just round the corner, mate. No need. You letting me in or what?'
The gate opened just enough for me to slip through. A Tilley lamp hissed away inside yet another plywood guardhouse. Blankets were heaped on the floor. A kettle steamed above a portable gas burner.
The music got louder and light spilt from a door fifty or so metres away. Vehicles looked more abandoned than parked, like the place was so hot the punters couldn't wait to get in.
59
The two guards were bearded lads in their fifties. They toted AKs and had Osprey, but without the collars and bat-wings.
They shone their torches to draw my attention to a couple of printed signs, covered with dirty plastic and pinned to the plywood of their hut.
One said: Two more killed last week. No more weapons allowed in the house. Leave them in your vehicles. We will search you.
And the other: If you have a gun or no folding money, you get no drink or fun with the honey.
They pointed at my Bergen. 'In here, leave here.'
I smiled as I dropped it from my shoulder. 'No, no, mate, I'm going to keep it with me. You can search it here, yeah?' I stepped inside and unzipped the top. 'See? No guns.'
One knelt and had a rummage while I held up my hands for the other to frisk me. It wasn't a very good search: Afghans don't like touching strangers that intimately. They hold hands with each other as they walk down the road, but they aren't too keen to feel someone's bollocks to see if there's a little revolver nestling between his legs.
My Gunga Din gear came out and was piled on the floor, along with my map, my bum-bag, now stuffed with money instead of toilet paper, and the Yes Man's phone wrapped up in a black-and-white shemag, the sort the two girls in the Gandamack should have had. None of it raised an eyebrow. All they were interested in was weapons.
Next out was my jar of Marmite. The guy held it up like he thought it was high explosive.
I smiled and squatted down next to him. I undid the lid and mimed digging in with an imaginary spoon. 'Mmm, yum-yum.' I dipped in a finger and gave it a suck. I offered him some. He took a sniff and recoiled. The other lad had a taste, and looked like he was going to throw up.
'You either love it, mate, or hate it.' I packed it away as if I'd been given permission to go.
I shook them both by the hand before I turned and left.
The music got even louder as I picked my way round the vehicles and towards the large two-storey house.
Two more beards sat cradling AKs on the doorstep. They had no body armour, and looked bored. They waved me through.
I pushed open the heavy wooden door and felt like I was about to step into a Wild West saloon. A thick fug of cigarette smoke hung in the air, but this being Kabul, it was sickly sweet. Instead of a pianist on a honky-tonk, Justin Timberlake yelled from invisible speakers. Or maybe Justin was actually there – it was impossible to see much beyond the end of your nose.
The whole of the ground floor seemed to consist of one huge room. Old sofas and armchairs were dotted around on bare, beer-soaked floorboards. Dining- and coffee-tables had been stained and bleached by years of spillages and cigarette burns.
There was a sea of faces, and every guy was white. The girls looked Pakistani. Some were dressed in green Russian uniforms with drunken-sailor type hats. Some were in saris. The rest catered for other tastes as they tottered round serving drinks in high heels, ripped fishnets and tight mini-skirts.
There were lots of wide eyes, sunk behind gaunt cheeks, just like in any other opium den on the planet.
60
I ventured further in and found it wasn't just whores and punters having fun. Small monkeys, about a foot from head to tail, jumped about the place dressed in little camouflage uniforms. Miniature plastic AKs were strapped to their backs. They jumped on tables and grabbed drinks or cigarettes. One was smoking a joint. Another soaked its face fur with beer as it tried to drink from a can.
I headed towards the one boy who looked as though he still paid fleeting visits to my planet. He had a straggly beard that came down to his chest and made him look like he should be taking over Middle Earth from the Good Wizard. His hair was tied back in
a ponytail. He stood behind a makeshift bar in the corner.
Bottles were stacked on shelves. Pictures, flags, college pennants, all sorts were plastered across the wall: Union flags, Stars and Stripes, soccer teams, American-football sides. A poster showed Mel Gibson doing his Braveheart thing. His face was peppered with 9mm holes. The ceiling was the same. There were so many strike marks it looked like a dartboard. This room had seen a few party-size bursts, that was for sure. Either the president was too shit scared to shut the place down or he was a regular.
I could hear Brits, Americans, French, Italians. There were other languages I couldn't make out over the music, but then I heard one I did recognize, even with Justin going full blast.
The Serbs sat on a sofa; each had a whore on his lap. Mr Sheen's fifteen-year-old wore a sari that was up round her waist. Top Lip's was in Red Star gear. She kept stroking his long greasy hair away from his sweating face. Mr Sheen pushed his girl out the way so he could gob off to his mate. Then he leant back and shouted at a group of three guys I took to be Americans. He jabbed a finger at them and repeated himself, but they ignored him and carried on laughing and drinking.
The whole lot were probably freelancers, bounty-hunters drawn here from all over the world like gold prospectors to the Klondike. Only here the prize was Osama, al-Qaeda and any of the Taliban leadership. There was still a price of something like fifty million dollars on bin Laden's head, but most of these guys wouldn't have a clue where to start.
I'd played with the idea of coming here myself for a while, until I did a little digging. It soon became clear I'd be hanging around like this lot. Some had resorted to seances in one of Osama's old houses in the city, the one he'd used to accommodate wives number one and two. They'd legged it when the Americans started bombing, leaving behind just an old bra and a kettle.
Their landlord, the next-door neighbour, wasn't happy. Bin Laden owed him five hundred dollars in rent so he had to make up the cash somehow. He came up with the ingenious idea of installing a few local Mystic Megs, lighting a couple of candles and charging bounty-hunters through the nose to come and get guidance from the other side.
Nobody challenged me. In a place like this nobody asks you your business, and nobody gives you eye-to-eye. Not that most of the guys there tonight could have focused that well anyway.
A couple of monkeys sat and licked at puddles of beer. Maybe they'd had their cans confiscated.
Pictures ripped from magazines were stuck to the wall. The Tora Bora caves getting the good news from a squadron of B52s. Members of the Northern Alliance grinning as they propped up dead Taliban. A double-page spread from a porn mag of two guys and a girl, with Bush's and Musharraf's heads stuck over the men's at either end, and Blair as the meat in the sandwich.
The bar was built entirely from old steel mortar-round containers. They were a bit rusty, but the Cyrillic writing was still visible. The top was a couple of beer-soaked planks.
A couple of girls in laddered fishnets took drinks away on trays. My eyes stung from the smoke. The wizard behind the bar took a long look at my Bergen. 'You planning to stay the weekend, man?' The shelf behind him was packed with whisky bottles. A monkey, either drugged or drunk, lay flat out on his back, an arm and a leg dangling into space. The bottles had been relabelled with pictures from magazines. Hitler stood in the Bavarian mountains. Mussolini looked dead hard with his helmet on. Bin Laden, in his robes and combat jacket, nursed his AK beneath the CNN logo.
'No, mate.' I had to lean across the bar and meet him half-way to make sure I could be heard. 'I was told I could buy protection here. I'm heading south and I need at least a short.'
He certainly had enough protection at his feet. Parked on the lowest shelf was an HK53, a sort of 5.56 version of the MP5. It was loaded with a thirty-round mag and two more, taped together, head-to-toe, sat within easy reach.
61
'You on Osama watch?'
'Nah, just fishing about for work.'
The look on his face said he'd heard that one too many times before. 'You're going the wrong way, man. He's up north.'
I smiled and waited for a yes or no. If he didn't have a weapon, I'd try my luck in the car park. But it would be risky with the guards out there, and I had no time to fuck about.
He pointed through an open doorway that led to the back of the house. The door had been removed – or pulled off its hinges. 'Up the stairs, look for Stu.'
Justin finally shut up and some Indian music came on. A couple of girls in saris got up and began gyrating. The wizard gripped my arm. 'I'm telling you, he's with those Pakistani bitches way up north, getting high and laughing at us all, man.'
The flat-out monkey awoke with a jolt, maybe startled by the change of music. He rolled right off the shelf and landed in a puddle of beer on the floor. He got to his feet and staggered away to war, leaving his hat behind. But, like a good soldier, he kept his weapon with him.
The corridor took me to a set of stairs. A naked bulb burnt on the landing. The noise filtering down was a mix of drunken shouts and girly squeals.
Somebody had propped a mannequin against the wall at the top of the stairs. They'd given him a rubber bin Laden mask. An unlit cigarette dangled from the mouth, and he was plastered with lipstick and eye-shadow. The finishing touch was a pair of fake women's breasts, the sort the local dickhead would wear while cooking a barbecue.
A rough Jock voice came from a room at the far end. I followed it. That door was missing too. The ones either side of it were intact and closed. From behind them came the rhythmic pounding of mattress springs and a chorus of moans and groans.
The open room was piled high with six packs of plastic two-litre water-bottles. The bare floorboards were riddled with holes. The wood was splintered inwards. No wonder weapons weren't allowed downstairs. Punters who'd come up for a shag would have ended up with their bollocks shot off. Not much repeat business in that.
The walls were plastered with more pictures and magazine cuttings. The connecting door to my right seemed to be a shrine to Jonathan 'Jack' Idema. I remembered him. He'd become world news when he'd got caught running his own private interrogation centre a few years ago. During his trial, he said he'd been given a passport and visa by an unnamed American agency. He claimed he'd been fitted up – the FBI was out to get him because he refused to name the sources who had tipped him off about a nuclear smuggling operation in Lithuania.
Idema might have been away with the fairies, but his victims weren't. The pictures on the door showed what the police had found inside his homemade torture chamber. Three Afghans hung upside down from the ceiling, naked and totally covered with blisters and burns from boiling water. Another eighteen or nineteen were found dead in a trunk. They'd crammed the poor fuckers in there and locked the lid. Three more were in a cupboard, their flesh whipped raw.
The pictures could have come straight from the Yes Man's folder.
62
The shrine shifted suddenly as the connecting door opened. One of the girls came out carrying a red plastic bowl, some liquid soap and an old grey towel that had probably once been white.
The picture on the door was now at an angle but I could still see our mate Jack in court, pointing and ranting from the dock. He had a beard, and wore sunglasses and combat fatigues with US flags stitched all over them. I remembered him claiming he'd been working for the US government and had received orders from Donald Rumsfeld. Nothing to do with multimillion- dollar bounties, of course. Fuck it, I might still have a go myself when this was over.
I passed the door to see a stained stripy mattress. Sprawled across it, an overweight and hairy white man scratched his bollocks with one hand and smoked with the other. Next to his pile of clothes on the floor, a used condom leaked its contents.
'Stu?'
His well-fed head lifted from the mattress long enough for him to suck in another lungful of nicotine. 'Fuck off.' His French accent certainly didn't belong to a Stu.
I carried on to the
end of the corridor.
'Stu?'
The guy in the open room was playing chess with a young local lad, maybe fifteen at a push. Their board lay across a couple of cases of Miller Lite.
His head jerked up. 'Aye?'
It was a challenge, not an answer, and it came straight from the Gorbals. He had a wiry grey barnet and a beard that needed a good trim. So did his nostril hair, which grew straight into his moustache. He was early sixties, with pale skin and a nose that had been broken so many times it was almost flat. I nodded appreciatively at his blue Hawaiian shirt. 'Nice. The guy from downstairs sent me. I'm looking for a short. I was in the Gandamack and-'
'I know.' His eyes were back on the chessboard but he put up a hand. 'They called. The two of them want to shoot up for free if I sell you something. What am I? A fucking charity?' His head came up slowly. 'You people, you never give up, do you? Why have you come all this fucking way? English, I suppose?'
His attention went back to the chessboard. The white pieces were carved soldiers, Western-style, with helmets and body armour.
He stood up and waffled in local to the boy. Whatever he was saying, it sounded along the lines of 'Move any of these and you're history.'
I looked at the black pieces. They had turbans, beards and Gunga Din kit.
He looked me up and down as he came towards me. 'You've come to play big boys' games and you don't even have the brains to sort yourself out with a fucking weapon. What are you, son? A fucking bank clerk, thinking all this shite is some sort of great adventure?'
He needed a dental plan even more than Magreb. The few teeth that weren't black had an inch of nicotine on them. And he stank.