Stinger

by Stinger (retail) (epub)

  I felt a hot surge of anger. ‘Don’t lecture me. You don’t understand. You’ve no idea what it’s like to watch people die – your mates and the person you love. We were cheated of our time together. We fell in love in the middle of a war and by the time it was over she was dead. You don’t know what that feels like, do you? Well, do you?’ I heard my raised voice echoing from the bare walls and bit my tongue to stop myself from snapping at him again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said at last. ‘I know you’re right, Jeff, but if I put it away, the last trace of her will vanish. While I keep it near me, it’s as if she’s still with me.’

  Before he could reply, I heard the roar of an engine and a screech of tyres. I ran outside. A black pickup had swept through the gates and pulled up in a flurry of dust. Dexy had taken one look at it and was disappearing back to the building. ‘I’m not here, okay?’ he said. ‘I don’t exist.’

  Amica ignored my questioning look.

  A powerful, black-clad figure got out of the vehicle. He was accompanied by a boy of twelve or thirteen. ‘Taliban?’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘The next best thing – Agha Shah Azuin. He’s a local warlord. Come with me, you’ll have to speak for us.’ I walked over to the vehicle with her. The soldiers clustered in the back of the pickup eyed us narrowly as we approached, but their weapons remained slung over their shoulders.

  Azuin was an even more impressive figure at close range. Everything about him was slightly larger than life, from his barrel chest to his broad, flattened nose, broken in some past conflict. He wore his hair long in defiance of the Taliban code, and he had a full black beard and a piratical smile.

  ‘Manda nabashen – may you keep your strength.’ To my relief, he greeted me in Farsi, not the Pushtu of the Taliban, touching his hand to his heart in the gesture I was beginning to recognise as an Afghan trademark.

  ‘Zenda bashen – long life to you,’ I said.

  He introduced the tousle-haired boy as his son, Daru. After the brief ritual of greeting, the warlord came to the point. ‘I am told that your helicopter flew in a forbidden area.’

  I hesitated, then nodded.

  ‘Tell him that you have just arrived here and made a navigational error,’ Amica said, in English.

  His eyes flickered towards her, then back to me as I repeated the explanation in Farsi. There was a long silence. ‘Since you now know that you were in error, it is not a mistake you will be repeating, I think,’ he said at last. ‘It would be most unwise. You are lucky it was my men that you overflew. They are good soldiers and well disciplined. The Taliban also patrol this area. They would be quicker to shoot and would no doubt require rather more of an explanation from you.’

  There was a noticeable easing of tension and his men turned away and began talking quietly among themselves.

  ‘Offer hospitality,’ Amica said, again in English. ‘Our custom requires it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Azuin said before I could speak. ‘We will take tea with you.’

  ‘You speak English.’

  ‘A little. I fought with some of your countrymen during the war against the Soviets.’ He gave a broad smile. ‘We killed many Russians together and shot down several of these.’ He jerked his thumb towards the Hydra.

  As Amica hurried away to bring tea, the warlord strolled over to the helicopter and walked around it, peering inside. Daru shot a quick glance in his father’s direction, then held out his left arm towards me. ‘You want to buy watch, Inglisi? I’ll make you good price.’ He pulled back his sleeve to reveal a row of six Russian watches strapped to his forearm.

  I smiled, but shook my head. ‘I already have one.’

  ‘Then as a present for your woman.’ He rolled his eyes and drew a double curve in the air with his hands.

  ‘Thanks, but no.’

  ‘Cigarettes then. American.’ He pulled the sleeve of his jacket down over his arm and produced a pack of cigarettes from an inside pocket.

  ‘No, thanks, I don’t smoke.’

  He pointed along the track up the hillside. ‘Our village is thirty kilometres from here. Anything you need, I can get for you. Ask for Daru, son of Agha Shah Azuin, everyone knows me.’

  I smiled. ‘I can well believe that. I’m Sean, son of Donal, and I’ll keep it in mind, thanks.’

  Amica returned with the tea, then withdrew a few yards. As we drank it, the boy pestered me with questions about the West. ‘I shall go there one day,’ he said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  His father overheard and silenced him at once with a curt command. Daru glowered but fell silent.

  The warlord drained his cup and held it upside down, shaking it in a gesture that showed he wanted no more. He again touched his hand to his heart. ‘We may meet again. May you travel safely.’ There was a glint in his eyes.

  I bowed my head. ‘And may you not be weary on your journey.’

  Azuin strode back to the pickup.

  Daru winked at me. ‘Remember, Inglisi, anything you want, I get.’

  As I walked back towards the building, I saw Dexy watching from the shadows inside the door. ‘Are you always this shy with strangers?’ I said.

  ‘Only with the ones I know.’ He walked over to Amica. I watched them talk, their heads close together, their voices low and urgent, and suddenly envied their intimacy.

  Chapter Four

  For the next few weeks I ferried the mine-clearing team and their equipment to and from the minefields around the village. To my relief we overflew no more guard posts, but at Dexy’s insistence we took a slightly different route each time and a wider arc to the north and east, while he lay on the floor in the cab taking photographs and calling out reference points from his map to guide us.

  The terrain grew ever more brutal the further north-east we flew: rank upon rank of jagged peaks, some towering far above us, thrown into sharp relief by the low sun. Between them were narrow valleys, with near-vertical slopes of broken rock and scree, down which ferocious mountain torrents plunged.

  There seemed no level ground to be seen, no trace of man’s presence other than a handful of thin, wavering tracks disappearing into the shadowed darkness of ravines. One, far to the east, seemed to end in a huge waterfall that arched outwards over a sheer cliff face. The wind blew the spray high into the sunlit air, creating a shimmering rainbow mist.

  When not flying, Jeff and I watched the clearance teams inching their way across the minefields. Amica was usually with us, on standby in case of an accident. A few times, I noticed Dexy drift away from the group into the cover of the woods. On each occasion he was gone for several hours, returning without explanation just before we returned to base for the day.

  At other times he led the clearance teams. Men armoured like Kevlar knights used their steel lances to probe the stony soil for its deadly crop. At each find they retreated while a charge was detonated, then resumed their ponderous progress, the area they had cleared marked by fresh craters in the red earth.

  The team was a polyglot collection: ex-soldiers from black Africa and the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, Arabs and a few Afghans, all drawn to one of the most dangerous jobs on earth by the chance to earn what by Western standards was still a pittance. My wages were paid by the RAF, but I could not help wondering how many extra mine clearers could have been employed with the £100,000 a year that Jeff was drawing from AMCO’s limited funds.

  I felt such guilt sitting in relative safety while they risked their lives that the next day I asked Dexy if he would train me to work as part of a clearance team.

  He laughed. ‘You’re here to fly helicopters, Sean.’

  ‘I could do both.’

  ‘You could, until the point where a mine blows your leg or your fool head off. If you’re lying there in a pool of blood, who’s going to fly the chopper to get you and any other casualties to safety?’

  Even as I bridled at his brusque dismissal, I saw the logic in what he said. He slapped me on the back. ‘Come on, let’s take five.�
��

  We walked down the hill into the village. The streets leading to the central square were thronged with traffic. Mules and horses, trucks and men pushing bicycles passed us, each of them weighed down by swaying sacks of wheat. A mill had been set up in the square, driven by a clanking, ancient, wood-fired steam engine. An old man sat cross-legged on the ground, waiting as his wheat was ground. Others were winnowing, tossing grain high into the air with wooden shovels. The chaff drifted down like snow, covering everything with fine yellow dust.

  The village bazaar consisted of a handful of stalls, a few awnings pinned to the mud walls of the houses and cardboard boxes and wooden cases spread in the open.

  I saw Daru selling single cigarettes at a price that would have bought a pack in Kabul. He smiled and waved as he saw me. ‘Remember, Inglisi – anything you want I get.’

  The blacksmith’s forge was surrounded by piles of rusty metal. Pieces of armour plating and truck body panels, the turret of a tank, a length of one of its tracks and a broken rotor blade from a helicopter lay among a mound of unidentifiable metal fragments awaiting their transformation into scythes, axes, shovels, buckets and cooking pots. A circular bomb crater nearby had been turned into a fish pond. It was fringed by spent bomb and shell casings filled with soil and planted with flowers.

  Four Taliban soldiers kept an indolent eye on the proceedings, lounging against their pickup in the shade of the giant walnut tree. They looked at us with some curiosity and muttered to each other, their eyes following us as we walked down the street.

  In the corner of my eye I caught a sudden flash among the trees on the hillside above the village. Dexy reacted immediately. ‘Incoming! Get down. Get down.’ He pushed me forward, sending me sprawling in the dirt, and dropped alongside me.

  There was a roar, a huge explosion and debris thudded and spattered on the ground around us. Then there was a soft rain of finer fragments. I heard a piercing scream and the crackle of flames.

  An RPG, fired from the hillside, had missed its intended target – the Talibans’ pickup – and had blasted apart a market stall and the house behind it instead. The contorted body of a young boy lay on the ground a few yards away. He lay unmoving, his face a mask of blood, one leg torn off.

  I thought of Daru and leapt to my feet, then saw him untouched a few yards away. The dead boy’s mother ran screaming to her child, her arm bloodied, the skirt of her burka shredded by shrapnel. A man rushed to cover her with a blanket, more concerned by her indecency than her wounds or her loss. She cradled the dead child to her, rocking him as she howled her grief.

  The Taliban vehicle stormed away from the village, up the hillside, the soldiers in the back firing wild bursts into the trees, while the mother was led away, still clutching her child. A bloodstained sandal lay in the dirt. A villager picked it up, threaded a single rose through it, then laid it in the centre of the pool of blood.

  A group of men shoved the still smoking debris of the market stall to one side, the owner scrabbling in the dust on his hands and knees, searching for fragments of his stock that he could salvage. The others, including Daru, resumed trading as if nothing had happened. Behind me I heard the wheezing clank of the threshing machine as it was restarted.

  Dexy glanced at me as he dusted himself down. ‘Just another perfect day in paradise.’

  There was scattered firing from inside the forest for several hours, but the Taliban returned empty-handed. Their vehicle pulled up outside the gates in a cloud of dust. Shouts were exchanged, and then it drove away.

  Amica went to investigate and hurried back a few moments later. ‘A Taliban commander from Kabul is arriving later today. It can only be Salan.’

  ‘What does he want?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but he is a powerful man. It would be wise to offer the best hospitality we can give.’

  ‘I know the hospitality I’d like to give him.’

  Amica put a hand on my arm. ‘Perhaps you will have a chance one day.’

  One of the village boys was dispatched to the bazaar to buy a sheep, while others cleared the debris from the cooking pit and began lighting a fire. A scrawny sheep was dragged up the hill, bleating as if it already knew its fate. It was ritually killed and drawn, then impaled on a spit over the fire, still with the stubble of its fleece attached. The stench of burning wool filled the air for some time.

  We heard Salan’s convoy approaching long before it arrived, horns blaring, rifles firing endless volleys into the air.

  ‘We should get under cover,’ Dexy said. ‘It’ll be raining lead when that lot comes down again.’

  We watched from the wall of the compound as the convoy paused in the village square and Salan descended from his Toyota like a potentate to greet the village elders.

  I caught the glint of the bullet hanging around his neck on a thong. ‘What’s with his personal jewellery?’ I said.

  ‘A bullet retrieved from the body of a wounded man is a very powerful talisman,’ Amica said.

  ‘What about from a dead man?’

  ‘Just the opposite.’

  As if his arrival was the signal that she had been awaiting, the mother of the dead boy appeared from her hut on the edge of the village, surrounded by other women competing in volume with her own lamentations.

  Amica followed my gaze. ‘No death is more noble than to die fighting in the jihad,’ she said. ‘Or so the mullahs tell us.’

  ‘Then the mullahs are talking shit,’ I said. ‘There’s no nobility in the death of someone years before their time, only heartbreak for those they leave behind.’

  She studied me in silence for a moment. ‘Who did you lose?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Was it your wife?’

  I hesitated under the scrutiny of those dark eyes, but suddenly felt the need to tell her. ‘She died before she could become my wife,’ I hurried on, glad of the chance to explain to someone who had lost her own love and might understand something of what I felt. ‘She was my navigator when I flew fast jets. She drowned almost three years ago. We had to bale out of our aircraft into the sea.’ I swallowed, trying to clear the lump from my throat. ‘I was there. Her hand was in mine, but I still couldn’t save her.’

  Amica touched my arm for a moment, her fingers cool against my skin. Then she was silent for a long time, staring past me into the gathering darkness. ‘I am sorry for you. The hardest thing is to be the one who survived. There is not a day that I do not ask myself if there was some way I could have saved my husband – distracted the Taliban, attacked them – anything so that they would have taken me and spared him.’

  She shrugged. ‘I keep forcing myself to remember that day. I tell myself that I do it in the hope that the repetition will eventually make the horror fade, but I sometimes wonder if it is just to keep some memory of him alive. So much has gone. My memories almost seem as if they belong to someone else. Sometimes I cannot even remember his face. All I have are fragments, the feel of his hand in mine, the sound of his laughter, and even that seems to grow fainter the more I strain to hear it.’

  She fell silent again, her head tilted to one side as if listening for a voice in the night breeze, and I did not break that silence. In fact I found it strangely comforting to have found someone who apparently understood the grief I felt. Amica put her hand on my arm and let it rest there for a moment. ‘I hope you find happiness one day.’

  ‘You too.’

  Neither of us stirred, or met the other’s eye. Then she moved away across the compound, the rustle of her clothing like a whisper in the dark.

  An hour passed before the convoy returned. As the vehicles stopped inside the compound Amica emerged from her hut, once more shrouded in the mauve burka.

  I greeted Salan in halting Farsi, feeding him a mixture of obsequious politeness and blatant flattery. My mouth was dry, but his face betrayed no sign of recognition. My few days’ growth of beard might have fooled him, or perhaps he saw so many frightened faces that one l
ooked much like another to him. His one keen eye roved the compound as he made the formal replies required by custom.

  One of the Taliban soldiers was helped down from a pickup, his leg dark with blood. While searching in the forest for the man who had attacked the village, he had been mistaken for an enemy and shot by one of his companions. Amica volunteered to look at the wound.

  Salan turned his gaze towards her. ‘It is not fit work for women.’

  ‘Then let me have a look,’ I said, anxious to divert his attention.

  He swung round and stared at me. ‘You are a doctor?’

  ‘I trained as a medic.’

  The Taliban soldier was laid on a low table and I crouched alongside him. ‘The shinbone’s broken,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to set it.’ I reached into the medical kit for some morphine.

  Salan held up his hand. ‘What is that?’

  ‘A drug to ease the pain.’

  ‘No drugs.’

  ‘They are used when cutting the hands off thieves.’

  His fierce gaze held mine. ‘They would not if I was ruler of Afghanistan.’

  ‘It will hurt.’

  ‘No drugs.’

  The soldier took the loose end of his turban between his teeth as I began cleaning the wound. Then with the point of a knife I dug out the bullet lodged against the bone. The soldier lay still, apparently impervious to the pain. I could hear the broken bones grating against each other as I set the leg, but he made no sound. Only the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the set of his jaw as he clamped his teeth into the filthy cloth showed the agony he was suffering.

  There was a murmur of excitement from the other soldiers as the bullet was passed round. I finished bandaging and splinting his leg, then two of Salan’s men carried him to the pickup and laid him on the bare metal floor.

  A moment later there was a thunderous explosion. Shrapnel was rocketed overhead, and rocks and clods of earth the size of footballs thudded down around us.