by Simon Conway
As he was speaking, Jonah observed a man step out of the shadows close to the far wall. He came towards them along a path through the thorny outlines of denuded rose bushes. Others flitted through the shadows behind him. Moonlight glinted on rifle sights and loops of ammunition. The courtyard was deserted, and for a moment Jonah thought that they were about to be attacked. He reached for his pistol, but Monteith put his hand on Jonah’s to restrain him.
“I am a friend,” the man said. “I am Khalil. I was crossing the courtyard to your rooms when I saw you.”
“You have good eyes,” Monteith replied, glancing towards the shapes hanging back in the rose bushes.
“I understand that you want to speak to me?” Khalil asked. He was wearing a chitrali cap and had a blanket around his shoulders, and it was difficult to make out much of his face, except that his smile gave the set of his jaws a starved and skeletal look.
“Are your men ready?” Monteith asked.
“They are,” Khalil replied. His smile broadened menacingly. “We will meet you tomorrow night.”
KILLING AN ARAB
January 1999
They were perfectly camouflaged. One moment there was only the ghostly, stippled bark of the gum trees and then there was a gentle rustle of the leaves, a breath of wind, and it was as if the trees were moving of their own volition, the bark unraveling. You could hear the padding of tiny feet.
“Birnam Wood,” whispered Beech.
It was close to midnight. They were waiting at a bridge west of Jalalabad. They had been standing for an hour on the concrete apron at the eastern end of the bridge when Khalil’s gang emerged from the eucalyptus plantation to greet them.
There was a collective intake of breath. “Jesus, they’re kids.” They were a pack of fifty or so, dressed in motley: tennis shoes, army jackboots, checkered scarves, haj and chitrali caps, turbans and Kalashnikovs. They had dark fuzz instead of beards and their starved, lupine faces shimmered in the moonlight. They were skittish, jockeying for position at the front of the pack, and grinning. The oldest among them could not have been more than twelve.
“This is fucked,” Lennard muttered.
“It’s the fucking Lost Boys!” Beech turned on Monteith. “You’re not serious?”
Lennard whistled. “And blow me, its Captain Hook …” Khalil stepped out of the trees with a whip in his hand. He raised it and the boys nearest to him flinched. They scattered and then circled back again, pressing in behind him. He stepped forward, and tapped Monteith’s chest with the whip.
“Yakoob Beg has confirmed that he is holding the money,” he said. “So we are yours to command.”
“This is unacceptable,” Monteith told him.
“What is unacceptable?” Khalil asked.
“These are children. I will not fight with them.”
“Then you will not fight,” Khalil replied.
They stared at each other. Jonah swore softly under his breath.
Monteith looked as if he was going to explode.
Beech left later that night. He divided his rations and ammunition between them while Monteith sat some way off on a boulder, seething.
“Technically, of course, this is desertion,” Lennard said, accepting a block of Kendal mint cake and a bottle of Tabasco.
“We don’t exist,” Beech told him. “I don’t. You don’t. This mission doesn’t.”
They bear-hugged.
“You’re letting the team down,” Alex told him, shaking his head. There had been shouting earlier. Monteith had produced a pistol and pointed it at Beech, who had simply turned his back on him. Monteith had stood there visibly shaking, before storming off.
Beech turned to Jonah. There was a pause. “You’re better than this,” he said, sadly.
They hugged, Jonah gripping him in the darkness.
At dawn, they began the long walk to the ambush position. Down a steep valley, and up the facing mountainside, their feet sinking in scree and snow, clutching at rocks to pull themselves upwards, Jonah afflicted every step of the way by Beech’s accusation. He stifled the voice, which was his own, telling him that anything, even this, was better than throwing it all in and going back to an empty life and a wife who no longer loved him. He concentrated on the sounds around him: the howling wind in the rocks, the shifting scree and the frightened chatter of the boys. Icy fog closed in on them. He wondered whether the route might be a figment of Khalil’s imagination or even a trap. He kept going, numb fingers reaching for icy rocks, terrified that if he did not keep going he’d be lost in the void. The path widened again, the fog lifted, and they came on to a ridge that seemed to overlook the whole world. Deep gorges and jagged peaks stretched away on either side. The going was easier. The path along the top of the ridge was wide, and the boulders larger and more easily navigable. They passed an old fortress, adobe-walled and crumbling, topping the ridge.
In less than five hours they stood above the gorge of the Kabul river, with the thin strip of the road running through it. Khalil spoke for the first time, turning back to them. “We will do it here, where the valley narrows.” He smiled. “They say that the Pashtuns killed many English here.”
“Let’s get this done,” Monteith growled.
Another hour passed as they hiked down to within range of the road. Years of neglect, flooding and rockslides had almost destroyed it, breaking up the tarmac, leaving huge craters. Alex sat down on a rock and blew on his fingers, before reaching into his pack for an entrenching tool. He began digging a shell scrape, a shallow two-man trench. Khalil and Monteith went to deploy the cut-off teams. Jonah stood, staring at the road. It was the oldest Afghan trick: lure the invaders into the narrows of the Kabul river gorge and cut off their means of escape.
It was all up to Nor.
The boy crouched among the jumbled rocks and dirty clumps of snow with his weapon disguised in rags. There was a hammer-and-sickle badge pinned to his chitrali cap. He looked about eleven years old.
Jonah had been watching the boy since dawn. He was located with the main ambush team, sharing a shallow scrape with Alex on the crest of a ridge overlooking the gorge. The boy was shivering, his oval eyes darting this way and that. When he had first become aware of Jonah staring at him, the boy had glared back at him, an expression that was both defiant and fearful.
Afghanistan was full of orphans.
There were times, Jonah thought, in an ambush, for instance, when soldiers could experience a sense of being of one mind, like a shoal of fishes that swerves as one under the surface of the ocean, times when an older, lower brain rises to the fore.
“Three vehicles heading east,” whispered Lennard from one of the cut-off teams, in Jonah’s earpiece.
It was one in the afternoon. Three mud-caked Shoguns with blackened windows and jerry cans lashed to the roof raced into the narrow, steep-sided ravine.
There was a collective intake of breath.
Jonah began to count: One, two …
He glanced to his left. Monteith was a few feet away, in a scrape with Khalil.
Three …
The mud beneath him smelled of the wind, of ozone.
Four …
For a brief moment, he had no awareness of future or past, just the Uzbeks in the rocks around him and the lines of cable running to him along the hillside from the charges placed where the ravine tapered at either end.
Five.
“Now,” said Monteith, as the convoy drew level with him, his voice barely audible above the roar of the Kabul river.
Jonah pressed the button and spun the key on the Russian exploder.
Events unfolded in unison: the charges exploded, rocks tumbled into the ravine in billowing clouds of dust and the road collapsed; the lead vehicle slewed sideways and rolled, tumbling into the gorge below; and the Uzbeks opened up as one with everything they had—assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades. The air crackled and swirled. Brass cases cascaded down the slope. The fuel tanks on both vehicles expl
oded.
It was over in seconds but it went on for several deafening minutes. In the next scrape Monteith gesticulated furiously at Khalil. Jonah could imagine his anger and frustration at the ill-disciplined expenditure of ammunition. Soon the bodies would be unidentifiable. It was potentially disastrous. They needed proof, photographs of the dead Arab, if the mission was to be successful.
Abruptly Khalil stood and his gang rose as one to join him. And as they did so, they let out a triumphant wailing sound, wulla-wulla-wulla, from the back of their throats. The hillside seethed with sudden movement. The Uzbeks swarmed down the slope, whooping and yelling, sliding in the scree. At the bottom, they surrounded the vehicles and dragged the passengers out.
“Go take a look,” yelled Monteith.
Jonah scrambled down the slope with Alex at his shoulder and plunged into the crowd, trying to get to where the bodies were being fought over. He was instantly disoriented. Acrid black smoke was pouring from the vehicles. The boys were pushing and shoving. Leering faces surged at him out of the smoke. Hands pulled at his clothing and his rifle. He pushed back, slamming his elbows into the nearest faces. He stamped on legs and feet. He barreled forward. He caught a glimpse of a body. The blood and charred skin and rags of clothing make it difficult to identify. Then he got a clear sight of a familiar hammer and sickle badge and the boy wearing it, with arms bloody to the elbows; in one of his hands he held a machete and in the other a dismembered head. Despite the bruised and bloody features, Jonah recognized the face immediately.
It was Jim Kiernan, the former CIA station chief from Islamabad.
They’d killed an American.
I’ll never forgive you for this. Nor’s words from two years before, disregarded at the time, brought sharply back into focus; and immediately following them, the absolute certainty that the Americans would never forgive them for this. Jonah turned and fought his way back through the crowd, desperate to find some space in which to breathe. Breaking free, he dropped to his hands and knees and retched, and retched.
“Boss, you’d better get down here,” Alex called, from beside him.
“Did we get him?” Monteith shouted.
“You really need to see this.”
Jonah rolled over on to his back. Alex was standing with his rifle hanging loosely from its sling. “This is so fucked,” he said, and slumped to the ground.
Monteith hurried down the slope. “What is it?” he demanded.
“Go and look for yourself,” Jonah said, bitterly.
Monteith shouldered his way into the crowd and returned a few minutes later, ashen faced. He strode back and forth, kicking up dust.
“What are we going to do?” Jonah asked.
“We’re fucked,” Alex said.
“No, we’re not,” Monteith snarled. “There’s nothing to tie us to this.”
Jonah looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
Vultures wheeled above the smoke. The ambush site was scorched and streaked with ash, and a bonfire burned in a crater. The boys squatted singly and in small groups, staring passively at the flames. The wreckage of the vehicles had been pushed off the road and into the gorge. The bodies were blackened sticks on the fire. Soon there would be nothing to recover.
“What do we do about Nor?” Jonah asked.
“You finish him,” Monteith said. “Find him and kill him.”
“OK,” Jonah said. He stood up.
Alex glanced up at him. “You want me to come?” Jonah shook his head.
“You think you’ll find him?” Alex asked.
“I’ll find him.”
“We’ll be waiting for you in Peshawar,” said Monteith.
It took him less than a week. It was easier than he had imagined. There was nothing surreptitious about it. He checked into the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad and simply waited. Three days later an Afghan carrying a Kalashnikov approached him across the hotel’s neatly clipped lawn and invited him casually to drive out of town.
The highway west to Kabul was littered with boulders and the man steered carefully around them. They overtook gaudily decorated trucks and lines of trudging camels, their breath condensing in the bitter cold. Soon it began to rain. There were no wipers and the man reached through the window with a rag to wipe the misting windshield. An hour later, he stopped the car beside a slope of shale.
“Go that way,” he said, pointing to a rough track that led up a ravine.
Jonah set off on foot up the mountain, hunched, with his collar turned up against the wind and sleet, and only his anger to propel him forward. After a further hour, he had climbed above the cloud layer and the moon shone down on the road ahead. He walked past a frozen waterfall.
Without warning, a man stepped out from behind a rock up ahead. It was Nor. He appeared to be unarmed.
They faced each other by moonlight. Nor saw Jonah’s face, metallic in the moonlight, with an expression wild enough to raise a warning in him, but instead of fleeing he set his face hard against his former friend and said insolently: “What’s your problem, Jonah? You betrayed me. I betrayed you. What can be fairer that that?”
Maddened, Jonah smashed his forehead into Nor’s face. Nor’s nose split like a ripe fruit and he fell to the ground. All Jonah’s tolerance, his forbearance in the face of years of careless insults—beginning with Nor’s jibes about Jonah’s never-to-be-fulfilled desire to be white, his houseboy manners, his emotional inadequacy, the sneering asides about his wife, all of it culminating in the betrayal in the Khyber Pass—was turned outward in pent-up fury. He was going to kill him. He struck Nor with wild, lashing blows. “Die!” he yelled. He dragged him down the slope to an ice-covered pool. He flung him onto it and the surface splintered and cracked. He waded into the icy water and began to pummel Nor with his fists. Nor’s face was covered in mud and blood. Jonah went on pummeling him until Nor’s misshapen head slid under, leaving only a trail of bubbles breaking the surface.
Then he trudged back down the mountain filled with a murderer’s remorse and flagged down the first car that passed. It was an ancient white Lada, driving back down from Kabul to Peshawar. Jonah pushed a wad of dollars into the Pashtun driver’s hands and curled up on the back seat, shivering.
Hours later, safely back in Green’s Hotel in Peshawar, with his hands shaking uncontrollably, he poured himself a whisky and gulped it down; then another and another and another.
The next morning Jonah met with the other Guides in the courtyard of Green’s Hotel and told them that Nor was dead. All loose ends were tied. There was no reason for anyone to know about their involvement in the death of the CIA agent Jim Kiernan. Crisis averted. Monteith and the Department in the clear. And that was what Jonah believed until the muzzle of a gun was placed against the back of his neck beside the open pit of a diamond mine in Sierra Leone and he turned to find himself face to face with his oldest friend and bitterest foe.
AMPUTATION IS FOREVER
July 2001
They came for Jonah in the night, in the darkest hour, when the insects produced a roaring wall of sound. There were four of them, RUF fighters in raggedy T-shirts and flip-flops. They stormed into the hut on a wave of cane hooch and Jonah rose to meet them, swinging his fists like jackhammers. He knocked two of them flat before a rifle butt crashed into the side of his head. He felt a tremendous shock. The next moment his knees failed and he was falling, his head smacking the ground with a thump. The dirt floor in front of him receded to a great distance. He blacked out.
When he came around, he found that he had been dragged out of the hut and into the forest. There were men standing over him, poking him in his chest and abdomen with the barrels of their guns. Behind them the stars glittered and the sound of the insects pulsed in waves. A voice that seemed familiar, but which he struggled to recognize, said, “Now it’s your turn.”
His turn for what?
A man wearing a Tupac T-shirt slung his AK over his shoulder,
straddled Jonah and bound his hands with a cable tie, tightening it so that the plastic sliced into the flesh of his wrists. The pain brought him an insight—he was in Africa. But why? He hardly ever went to Africa. He didn’t speak any of the languages. The man slapped him across the face a couple of times.
The familiar voice said, “Bring him.”
He was lifted to his feet and pushed and pulled along a narrow path through the forest. He stumbled in the darkness and fell several times. Each time the men kicked him and pummeled him with their rifle stocks before lifting him to his feet and pushing and pulling him along.
At some point, he decided that he must be dreaming. He wasn’t in the jungle at all. In fact, it turned out that he was being carried off the rugby pitch with a concussion. There were boys either side of him gripping him by his arms and legs and his shirt and shorts. It took a whole lineup to lift him. They were sloshing through the mud towards the touchline. The sky was a cloudless, cobalt blue. He was pleased to see that Nor was there, running alongside him, shouting words of encouragement through his mouth guard. Nor was the most recent addition to the first fifteen, the new scrum half, lithe and fast. Jonah was the number eight, the anchor of the scrum.
Back in the dream, the path opened out into a large sandy clearing lit by the stars. At the center of the clearing was a massive tree stump with a broad, flat surface. Its shadow reached across the clearing like a fist. They dragged him to the stump and kicked his feet out from behind him, so that he fell to his knees like a supplicant before an altar. They lifted his hands and placed them on its scarred surface.
Nor squatted before him, with the sweat on his face glistening in the starlight, and placed his hands over Jonah’s.
“Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them,” Nor said quietly at first, then angrily, then shouting, “Lie in wait for them and seize them!”
It was difficult to understand him with the mouth guard in his mouth. And he was talking in Arabic. In those days, the sword verses were Nor’s favorite bit of the Koran, possibly the only bit he knew. He’d growl them at the opposing scrum. He was nicknamed the Saracen.