Jeff suddenly gave a cry of triumph and reached into a sack propped in a dark corner near the back of the shop. He stood up, brandishing a half-dozen toilet rolls. They were of indeterminate provenance and yellow with age, and the paper looked as hard and brittle as parchment, but he added them to the pile of merchandise with the air of a man who had found the Rosetta Stone. I shook my head in disbelief.
‘Laugh all you like,’ Jeff said. ‘I’m not wiping my arse on rocks if I can help it.’
The shopkeeper’s beam broadened even more as he totalled our bill. We paid with a sheaf of Afghanis, drank the tea his sweating assistant had brought, and parted from him on a wave of mutual good wishes.
We pushed our way back through the crowded streets to the pickup. Amica sat in silence for some time. ‘Afghanistan used to be the crossroads of Asia,’ she said. ‘In the bazaars of Kabul and Herat you could find the riches of the whole continent on display – porcelain and silks from China, spices from the east, pearls from the Gulf, furs, gold and diamonds from the Soviet Union, emeralds and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.’
Her face was invisible behind the veil of the burka, but I could hear the sadness in her voice. ‘What do we have now? Sandals cut from old tyres and cooking pots made from Soviet scrap metal. Only the arms dealers and drug runners are thriving.’
She pulled the sleeve of her burka back to look at her watch. ‘We must hurry; you have an appointment at the football stadium with Salan and his men. It would not be wise to keep them waiting.’
‘What are they going to do to us?’
‘To you? Nothing. They’re going to make you watch what passes for justice here.’
‘Public executions?’
She nodded. ‘There’s one every Friday.’
Chapter Three
We left Panna guarding the pickup and joined the crowds thronging the streets towards the sports stadium. Signs in three languages credited the UN and German aid agencies with financing its restoration. The new concrete terracing and unmarked steel crash barriers were a bizarre contrast to the surrounding desolation.
The Taliban guard examined our papers. He laughed and I heard the word ‘Salan’ as he called to an officer nearby. The man nodded and moved away through the crowd.
I hesitated, unsure of what was to happen, but the guard waved me forward, shifting his gaze to the next person in the queue. As I slowed just inside the gates, I heard Amica’s low voice behind me. ‘Go to the right. Women sit in a separate section.’
The two women moved away through the crowd. It parted before them, leaving a circumspect corridor through which they could pass. Jeff and I squatted on the bare concrete terracing, shading our eyes from the sun. The grass of the football pitch at the centre of the stadium was burnt brown and scarred with tyre tracks. A wooden stage had been erected, surrounded by banks of loudspeakers, as if a rock concert were about to take place.
Amica was invisible somewhere among the four or five hundred burka-clad women segregated from the crowd of at least ten thousand. Children moved through, selling drinks, cigarettes, sweets and bread, while Taliban soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the arena, using lengths of electric cable or the branches of small trees as whips.
A party of mullahs and officers strode out of the tunnel. Among them I recognised the hook-nosed profile of the Taliban commander, Salan. A roar went up from the terraces as if the Afghan football team were taking the pitch.
For the best part of an hour the mullahs took it in turns to harangue the crowd from the platform, their voices distorted by the loudspeakers. At length Salan raised his arm and the first victim was driven into the stadium in the back of a red Toyota. The crowd greeted him with laughs and jeers. A mullah read the charge sheet as three doctors, surgical masks hiding their faces, mounted the platform.
Four soldiers held the man while a doctor injected an anaesthetic into his arm and applied a tourniquet, producing a scalpel from a black case.
The crowd fell silent, pressing forward for a better view.
The victim made no sound as the doctor sliced through the flesh around his wrist and then cut the tendons and snapped the joint. He passed the severed hand to Salan who inspected it minutely, then tossed it into the dirt beneath the platform. There was a roar from the crowd. The doctor bandaged the stump and the man, still mute, was driven away.
I felt sick. The use of the trappings of modern medicine made the barbaric ritual even more disturbing than if his hand had been severed by a sword.
Two more thieves were treated the same way before yet another red Toyota carried in the star turn, a man accused of murdering a rival in a dispute over a piece of land. The father of the victim was led on to the platform and asked whether he had it in his heart to grant mercy to the killer. He gave an emphatic shake of his head. ‘If all the world’s gold was given to me, still I could never forgive him.’
His speech was greeted with another roar from the crowd. Salan handed the old man a Kalashnikov. The murderer, still showing no apparent emotion, was forced to kneel. His hands were tied behind his back and a turban wound around his head, covering his eyes.
The victim’s father stood behind him, raised the Kalashnikov and fired. His shot only hit the man in the shoulder. He slumped forward, writhing and screaming as blood sprayed out over the platform. The old man fired twice more, one shot hitting the stomach, the other missing altogether.
As he hesitated, Salan took him by the arm and dragged him forward until he was standing directly over his victim. Salan then took the rifle barrel and pressed it against the head of the still screaming man. He stood back, barked an order and the old man fired two more shots. The body jerked and at last lay still.
There was a moment of silence as the echoes faded, and then bedlam – roars and cheers from the crowd, and a volley of shots into the air by the Taliban soldiers. The dead man’s family scrambled to load the body into a pickup and drove it out of the stadium.
A mullah made a fiery closing speech, shrieks of feedback adding emphasis as he threatened a similar fate to all criminals, traitors and enemies of Islam. Then the mullahs, Salan and the other Taliban officers marched down from the platform and disappeared into the tunnel. A soldier picked up the three severed hands lying in the dirt and tossed them into the back of a pickup.
As the soldiers drove out of the stadium, men and boys ran out across the pitch. They clustered around the platform, examining the bloodstains in the dust and searching for the spent bullets that had killed the man.
Sick and shaking from the bestial display, Jeff and I allowed the crowd to sweep us along, out of the stadium and back towards the centre of Kabul. We leaned against the pickup, waiting for Amica and her colleague, still not exchanging a word, but studying the faces of the people pushing past. Brothers, sons, friends and families hurried by, animated and excited.
When the women arrived, we drove off through the busy streets. No one spoke until we were back inside the compound.
As I walked away from the pickup, Amica caught my arm. She studied my face for a moment. ‘There are even worse sights to be seen here, Sean. Adulterers and unmarried couples are stoned to death, gay men are buried alive under a pile of rubble.’ She shuddered. ‘No one deserves to die like that.’
‘Not even Salan?’
A shadow passed over her face. ‘Not even Salan,’ she said, but they were hollow words.
She turned away and with a sweep of her arm took in the amputees’ building as well as the stadium, still visible on the skyline. ‘The terrible things that you see here can affect people in one of two ways. Some are hardened, made cruel and indifferent to the suffering of others. The rest.’ She broke off for a moment. ‘People like you, I hope, try to do something, however small, to make a difference.’
I shook my head. ‘People like me are cowards when faced with a regime built on oppression and cruelty. We are the good Germans, the people who look the other way and pretend they cannot see.’
She took
my arm, her fingers digging into my flesh. ‘No. You are not like that. But like me, you must bide your time, even if that means standing silent as you are humiliated or as another victim is whipped defenceless at your feet.’ She released her grip. ‘Our turn will come.’
* * *
At first light the next morning we began loading equipment and supplies for the journey to Konarlan. I helped Dexy stack helmets with toughened plastic visors, thick, steel-reinforced gauntlets, long, thin metal probes and riot shields into the cab.
Then he walked to a low stone shed near the gates. It was covered with an earth mound, leaving only the steel door exposed. ‘The magazine,’ he said. ‘We told the Taliban we’d site it near the gates so they could keep an eye on it. Actually we decided that if it was going to go up, it might as well be as far from us and as close to them as possible.’
He unlocked the door and passed me a stack of boxes of charges and rolls of detonator cord. ‘Don’t drop the heli while we’re carrying these, will you?’
‘Only if the Taliban drop it for me.’
We finished loading inside an hour, and I topped up the tanks from one of the grey rubber fuel bladders at the far side of the compound. The whole of the morning was then taken up by trying to get permission for the flight from the Taliban.
Just as we were about to write off another day, one of the guards sauntered over to us. ‘We have received word from our commander. You may go to Konarlan.’
In case they changed their minds again, we scrambled aboard and I fired up the engine. I glanced across at Jeff as the others settled themselves in the back. His face was even more pale than usual and his hand was already clamped around the flare release. ‘All right?’ I said.
‘Sure, let’s get to it.’
I was already more confident of the handling of the Hydra, and our ascent, if a little ragged, was much less turbulent than the day before. This time there were no raised rifles or shots from the Taliban guards.
I held the heli in a tight spiralling climb over the compound, and Jeff kept his grip on the flare release, his knuckles white as he punched out clusters of flares, counting down the intervals between launches, the five seconds it took for each white hot flare to burn itself out.
For the three-hundred-mile journey to Konarlan, we had to fly at over six thousand feet to keep clear of the ground. In order to stay out of AK47 firing range from the heights, we would have had to fly at above nine thousand feet, close to the Hydra’s flight ceiling.
The altimeter crawled upwards as the rotors flailed through the thin air. At last we reached the safe height and I levelled, lowering the collective a couple of notches to ease the burden on the labouring engines and to conserve fuel.
We headed north-east towards the range of mountains soaring into the sky, their snow-capped peaks gleaming gold in the afternoon sun. I dropped my gaze to focus on the terrain below and ahead of us, keeping myself at maximum alert, my eyes never still, ranging over the bare hillsides.
‘Beats flying fast jets, doesn’t it?’ I said.
I saw the sun glint off Jeff s visor as he turned to look at me. ‘Does it? You could have fooled me.’
‘Then why are you doing it?’
Before he could reply I saw light flash from the windscreens of a line of vehicles moving along a dirt road towards a small town. The dark, rectilinear shapes of other vehicles, possibly tanks, were drawn up in the cover of a belt of trees overlooking the valley floor.
I pressed the right rudder, giving us a little extra distance on them, then glanced away, checking the fuel levels and oil and engine temperatures.
There was a shout from Amica over the intercom. ‘Look out! Missile!’
I felt cold sweat on my brow. Before she had finished speaking I had thrown the heli into a hard left-hand break and hauled the collective up to the stops. ‘Flares! Flares!’ I yelled.
Jeff froze.
‘Flares! Now!’
His hand jerked once, twice, and a shower of flares spilled out behind us. ‘Flares gone.’
I craned my neck around, trying to get my eyes on the missile. As I held the heli in its corkscrew dive, I glimpsed a burst of smoke and flame on the ground below and to our right. I scanned the sky around us, then pulled the cyclic back to end our dive and regain our lost height. I lowered the collective, allowing some of our speed to wash off.
I flicked the intercom switch. ‘It’s okay. It was ground fire – artillery or a mortar or something – there’s some sort of skirmish going on down there.’
‘I’m sorry. I saw a flash, flame and smoke. I thought.’
‘You did the right thing. We’ll give them a wide berth, they just may not be happy to be overflown.’
There were a few more bursts from assault rifles as we flew on. I saw the muzzle flashes in the shadows among the trees, but if they were aimed at us, we were well out of range.
I adjusted the controls again, then glanced across at Jeff. ‘What happened back there?’
‘We both know what happened. I bottled it.’
‘You’re all right now, though?’
‘Yes, I’m all right.’
He didn’t sound it.
As we approached Konarlan, Dexy’s voice came over the intercom: ‘Take a sweep north and east of the village as you come in. Take it down to a thousand feet and navigate for a fork in the river about ten miles north. Come around forty degrees from there to overfly the track where it crosses the ridge, then swing south again back to Konarlan. Okay?’
I glanced at the map on my knee. ‘It’s marked as a restricted area.’
‘I know.’
‘So why are we flying into it? We already know that the Taliban tend to shoot first and ask questions afterwards.’
‘Because there’s a minefield that we want to take a look at from the air,’ Amica said.
‘Are we doing it with their permission?’
Dexy cut in. ‘Just do it, will you?’
I glanced at Jeff. He shrugged. ‘They’re the bosses.’
As I began the sweep I heard the loading door in the cab slide open. I glanced behind me. Dexy was lying flat on the floor, steadying a camera against the door frame. I concentrated on flying. We passed low over the fork in the river and skimmed over the track, provoking a flurry of activity from a guard post on the ridge.
I held my breath, barely daring to turn my head, but there were no shots. Then we were safe, speeding back down the valley towards Konarlan.
Amica talked me in to the compound, on the hillside just above the village. The ground wash whipped up a dust storm that shrouded everything from view, making the final few metres of our descent as much a matter of guesswork as teamwork. I shut down the engines and climbed out of the cockpit.
The compound was much smaller than the one in Kabul. The only building had once been a girls’ school, redundant since the Taliban came to power. Dexy disappeared inside with his cameras and Jeff followed him in search of food. I took the chance to explore the village with Amica.
Konarlan was a cluster of mud-brick houses at the foot of a thickly forested hillside. Above us the river tumbled over rocky rapids in a thunderous cascade of foaming green water, then flowed fast but silent along the edge of the village before disappearing from sight.
The dome of the mosque had once been covered in dazzling sky-blue tiles, but centuries of wind had eroded its western face, stripping the tiles and eating into the mud bricks beneath. A piebald patchwork of tiles still covered the leeward side, and at the foot of the walls glazed fragments glittered like gemstones in the dust.
At the front of the mosque was a pool for ritual ablutions, shaded by an ancient walnut and a clump of mulberry trees from which clusters of white, pink and purple fruit shone against the dark green of the leaves. Banks of dog roses, wild lavender, juniper and thyme grew alongside the lanes, filling the cold, clear air with perfume.
Above them the tree-clad slopes gave way to stark, rocky peaks, piercing the deep, almost vio
let blue sky to the north and east. High above me I could make out eagles circling on the thermals.
I breathed in deeply. ‘It’s hard to imagine a more peaceful or idyllic place.’
Amica nodded. ‘Yet every family here is touched by war.’ We walked back to the compound. Jeff was nowhere to be seen, but I found the cramped room we were to share easily enough. I left most of my gear in my bergen – there was nowhere else to store it anyway – but I put my clock, and a photograph in a battered pewter frame, on the window ledge.
I was still staring at the photograph when Jeff came back in. ‘You should check out the latrine; it’s the usual shit pit with straining bar, but it’s got the longest drop I’ve ever.’ He paused. ‘Sorry, am I interrupting?’
I laid down the photograph. ‘No. I was just thinking.’
‘Sean, tell me to mind my own business if you like, but you can’t keep toting that picture round with you. All it’s doing is dredging up the past. I know you loved her and what a tragedy it was that she drowned, but you’ve got to let her go. How the hell are you ever going to escape the past with Jane looking over your shoulder all the time?’
‘I’m not sure I want to,’ I said.
Jeff took a deep breath. ‘Mate, you’re plug ugly, but you’ve got everything going for you. Don’t waste the rest of your life grieving for what you’ve lost.’ He checked my expression. ‘Jane wouldn’t have wanted you to be like this.’
‘You didn’t know her.’ There was an edge to my voice.
‘I only met her a couple of times, but I could see how full of life she was.’ He flushed. ‘Sorry, that was a dumb thing to say, wasn’t it? I only meant – I’m not saying anyone will ever replace her, but you’ve got to be open to the possibility of other relationships, other friendships at least. Keep her memory in your heart, but don’t keep sticking a knife in yourself by having her picture where you can see it every time you look up.’
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