Dexy’s tone was suddenly sombre. ‘Because if you do not, the Americans will rain down bombs and missiles from the skies until they have obliterated not only the Stingers but the surrounding land as well. Thousands of people – your people – will die.’ He glanced at me for support.
‘The power of the Americans has no limits,’ I said. ‘There will be no soldiers you can fight against; you will not even see the aircraft that attack you. There will only be endless attacks from the air against which even the Stingers will be no defence. Your people will be maimed, killed, poisoned. Those that survive will starve. That is why we ask you to help us spare your own people from such suffering.’
He looked from me to Dexy. ‘How do I know that you’re speaking the truth?’
‘You have heard of the attacks on Iraq and the cruise missiles the US fired against the desert camps of Osama bin Laden?’ Dexy asked. ‘That is nothing to the destruction that will pour down on here. The Americans have nuclear weapons too. If they have to use them to destroy the Stingers, they will.’
Azuin’s expression had grown more grim as he listened. When we had finished speaking, he sat in silence for several minutes. Then he raised his head and looked us each in the eye. ‘I will help you,’ he said.
Dexy was already spreading out our maps. ‘This is the cave that we entered last night.’
Agha Shah leaned over to look. ‘It is a store cave, one we used in the war against the Soviets. The Taliban still make use of it, but I believe the cave that you are seeking is − here.’ His broad finger stabbed down on the valley immediately to the south.
‘How can we be sure?’ Dexy said.
‘I also used that cave during the Soviet war,’ the warlord said. ‘Since the Taliban took over, the area has been forbidden territory even to their allies. There are sangars at both entrances to the gorge where the cave is located, and there are many guards.’ He smiled. ‘I know, because the food convoys that supply them pass through my territory.’
‘But it still could be drugs stored there, not Stingers,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘It could, but precious though morphine base is to the Taliban, they do not normally defend it with anti-aircraft guns. There are two on the ridge above it and my men have told me that they have also seen men armed with Stingers in the sangars above the ravine. So at least there will be one or two there, no?’ His powerful shoulders shook as he chuckled at his own joke.
‘What of the interior?’ Dexy said. ‘Is it one cave or many?’
‘I do not know. Much work has been carried out there by the Taliban. The river was discoloured for many weeks with the spoil from their workings.’
‘What about the approach?’
‘The track is on a broad rock ledge on the north face of the ravine. Above and below it, the walls are sheer.’
‘Could they be climbed?’ I said.
Azuin turned to look at me. ‘I am regarded as a brave man, but I would not do it. The track runs behind a waterfall; it is broad enough for only two men to pass. The cave you are seeking lies four to five hundred metres beyond the falls.’ The warlord looked up from the map. ‘It is a dangerous journey, my friends. There are many Taliban patrols and they fight like Afghans, not Sovs.’
‘We’ll make it,’ Dexy said.
Daru’s voice piped up as he stepped out from behind a pillar at the side of the courtyard. ‘And if the Stingers were destroyed, the Americans might be grateful?’
I laughed. ‘They might be very grateful.’
A smile spread across Azuin’s face. ‘Then be sure you survive to tell them.’ He paused. ‘I will escort you to the boundaries of my territory, but beyond that I cannot go. If the Taliban discover I have betrayed them…’ He left the sentence unfinished.
He led us away from the village and up the track we had used to lay a false trail the day before. Had I not been so exhausted, the irony of it pointing straight at the very target we were seeking might have raised a smile.
He led us on to the point where the river forked. To the left was the valley we had penetrated during the night, to the right lay the one we were now seeking.
‘Go with God.’ Azuin touched his heart, then turned away.
We moved up the valley, using the cover of the wooded lower slopes. A shoulder of rock compressed the river into a narrow gorge. We had to climb above it before we could see the upper valley. A corridor some two hundred yards wide had been carved down the mountain by a landslide, stripping it of trees and cover. We had no option but to cross it, though it was horribly exposed.
Dexy and Tank went first, then gave cover as the rest of us followed. I crouched low, the weight of my bergen pushing me down. I measured each footfall on the loose, shifting surface.
We emerged on to a high, sloping plateau ten miles in length, and broadening to some four or five miles in width, before the steep walls of the valley began to converge again. They culminated in a narrow cleft breaking the line of the mountains, a black ravine carved by the river. If Azuin was right, this was our target.
The earthquake damage was much less severe here, but the devastation of war was all around us. The plain was littered with craters, and the trees on the slope where we stood were scarred by the shells that had fallen there. The edges of the dirt road winding across the plateau below us were lined with the skeletons of trucks and armoured vehicles, punctured by bullet holes and still blackened by fire.
As we advanced up the valley, the tree cover gradually grew more sparse. Soon we were walking along the margins of the plain, hugging the valley wall. Dexy raised a hand. The fierce sunlight made the rock face hot to the touch, but it also cast our shadows, black against the red-brown stone. We dropped to our hands and knees and began to crawl along a ruined irrigation channel. Our footmarks scored the surface but there was no time for better concealment.
We flattened ourselves against the ground as we heard a shout. I raised my head enough to peer over the rim and saw an old man a couple of fields away cursing his mule as he tried to drive it forward. It moved a few yards, dragging a wooden plough through the parched earth, then stopped again. The old man paused long enough to look at something away to our right. I followed his gaze and saw two shepherds driving a handful of sheep further down the valley.
The channel ended in a bomb crater twenty feet deep. Clouds of flies hovered over a trickle of scummy water at its base. The ground rose on the far side of the crater, but there was no trace of cover.
‘It could have gone underground,’ Amica said. ‘Our ancestors dug tunnels under the plain from the bed of the river to irrigate the fields.’
We climbed the far side of the crater, then wormed our way forward to a low ridge, pausing just below the edge. As I stared across the plateau, I began to realise that the stippled pattern of craters and holes in front of us was too regular to be random.
Among the bomb craters were lines of neat holes surrounded by low cones, protruding a couple of feet above the level of the plain.
‘They’re like bell pits,’ I said. ‘Shafts linked by tunnels. They use them for irrigation.’
‘Very interesting,’ Rami said, ‘but.’
Tank held up his hand then pointed towards the road. We lay motionless, straining our ears. I waited a couple of minutes, raised my head a fraction of an inch at a time, and peered through the strands of dry grass.
Back across the fields I could see the mule still hitched to its plough, but the farmer had left it to walk to the roadside. A red Toyota pickup was parked there, and a large group of Taliban soldiers was talking to him. As I watched, he raised an arm and pointed towards the low ridge we had just crossed.
Half a dozen soldiers began moving towards us, while the rest advanced slowly along the road. I looked around. The ground ahead of us was as bare as a beach at low tide. There was no cover, no way of escaping without being seen.
‘We can take the first group, no problem,’ Dexy said. ‘But that will bring some serious shit down on us. He tho
ught for a moment, then nodded to Tank. ‘Fix up a diversion in that ditch back there; we’ll break cover and leg it as soon as you’re back. If we’re split, RV at that clump of trees, thirty minutes after sunset.’
Tank shrugged his bergen off his shoulders and pulled out a detonator and some explosives. Holding his Kalashnikov in his hand, he flattened himself against the ground and began crawling back the way we had come, towards the Taliban.
They had fanned out and were moving slowly across the fields in a line. Tank was outlined against the sky for a moment as he crossed the ridge. There was a shout and one of the Taliban soldiers swung up his rifle and fired. The shot struck a rock a couple of feet from Tank and whined away. He disappeared from sight, dropping below the level of the ridge.
The Taliban soldiers changed course, racing to cut him off. I raised my head a fraction more and saw Tank running, bent double along the bottom of the irrigation ditch. The soldiers were now also out of sight, but they must have reached the ditch. I heard the crack of rifles, then there was the boom of an explosion. Clods of earth were flung into the air and a cloud of dust drifted away on the wind.
We waited, ready to move at a moment’s notice. Then Tank wormed his way over the ridgeline. Still stooping, he sprinted down to join us.
‘Sorted?’ Dexy said.
He nodded.
‘It’s bought us a bit more time,’ Dexy said. ‘And if they’re stupid they may think that was a mine and slow down. Even if they don’t, they still have to guess which way we’ve gone. We might have doubled back or moved on up the valley, and we might have split our force. Ready? Let’s go.’
We moved out fast. I was bent double, running with the crushing weight of the bergen on my back. I ran blind, following the footsteps of the man in front, gasping for breath, my muscles burning with the effort. We crossed one field, and another, then I heard the rattle of rifle fire.
‘Down!’ Dexy shouted. No orders were given or other words exchanged, but he and Tank immediately began to wriggle back along the ground in a wide loop to one side, while Rami and Boon did the same on the other. I raised my head. The Taliban were no more than a hundred yards away and closing fast.
There was a burst of fire and the earth was whipped around me. Amica was ahead of us, already in the cover of a low mound, but Jeff and I were pinned down in the open. The mound was only twenty yards away, but if we ran for it, we’d be cut to pieces before we’d covered half that distance.
‘I’ll distract them,’ Jeff said. ‘You make a dash for the mound, then cover me.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, ‘you’ll get yourself killed.’
He ignored me, scrambling to his knees.
‘Get down, you idiot.’ I grabbed at his arm, but he shrugged me off.
‘Run,’ he said, then took off in the opposite direction.
There was the crack of gunfire as I sprinted for the mound and dived into cover beside Amica. As I raised my head, the brief, savage barrage of fire fell silent. A blizzard of white flakes like snow was drifting down around me, pouring out of a clear blue sky. I shook my head, trying to clear my vision.
I heard a groan. A hole had been blown in Jeff s bergen and I could see the shredded remains of one of his precious toilet rolls, a red stain spreading across the white paper. The rest was still fluttering to the earth around me.
I belly crawled to him and turned him over. There was a wet, dark hole in the pit of his stomach and I could hear his breath bubbling through a torn lung. ‘You stupid bastard,’ I said. ‘Why did you have to?’
There was a noise and I whipped round in fright. Dexy and Tank dropped into cover alongside me. ‘The Taliban?’ I said.
‘Out of it, but there are others back down the track.’ He glanced at Jeff and then at me. ‘We can’t take him,’ he said.
I began to argue, then stopped myself, knowing he was right. I looked down at Jeff. His eyes were fastened on mine and he tried to say something, but choked and spat blood.
I laid a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t try to talk. I know what you want. I’ll go and see them. I’ll make sure they’re all right. I’ll do it, I swear.’
Dexy took out his knife, cut the straps of Jeff’s bergen and eased it out from under him. He cursed. ‘Shit, we need that explosive.’
‘We can manage without it,’ Tank said. ‘There’s no way we can carry any more.’ He laid the bergen on the ground near Jeff, stooped over, connecting wires and detonators, then carefully closed the top.
‘You can’t leave a booby trap there,’ I said. ‘If it goes off, it’ll take Jeff with.’ I fell silent as I met Dexy’s gaze.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll fix it.’
I took the syrette of morphine from around Jeff’s neck. ‘I’ll give you this for the pain.’
‘I’ll take care of it,’ Dexy said. ‘You go on.’
I hesitated, laying a hand on Jeff’s brow, but Tank took my arm and pulled me away. We followed the others, who were already moving off across the field.
Amica squeezed my hand as I came up with her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
I looked back. Dexy was still crouching over Jeff. We had gone only another five yards when we heard a single shot. Dexy was already moving towards us. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘They can’t hurt him now.’
Chapter Fourteen
We moved on across the plain. Dexy and Tank were leading and Rami and Boon guarding the rear, while Amica and I struggled on in the middle. The sight of Jeff’s body and the look in his eyes kept returning to me. I was sick and weary to my bones; only adrenalin kept me moving.
We scrambled through another bomb crater and paused to scan the ground ahead and behind us. There was no sign yet of pursuit. ‘We don’t have long,’ Dexy said. ‘Then the shit is going to hit the fan in the biggest possible way.’
I looked around. We were now in the middle of the plain, surrounded by the same blank landscape of empty, dust-laden fields and bare rock faces. We could keep crawling from crater to crater, but any watcher on the high ground above us would spot us in an instant.
A few yards away there was another of the conical mounds.
I grabbed Dexy’s arm. ‘The irrigation tunnels. We can use them.’
He thought for a moment. ‘What if they’re blocked?’ Then he shrugged. ‘What have we got to lose? Let’s do it.’
Rami, Boon, Amica and I made directly for the mound. Tank and Dexy laid a false trail across the field back to the rock face and returned, walking backwards to double the tracks. Then they followed us to the mound, sweeping away the rest of our trail behind them.
I shone my torch into the hole, but couldn’t see the bottom. ‘How deep are these things?’ I said.
Amica shrugged. ‘I’m not sure, twenty feet, maybe thirty.’
I pushed the undergrowth aside and reached down inside the shaft, feeling for handholds. The walls felt cool, but smooth and dry. I uncoiled the rope from my waist and Dexy took the strain as I got ready to lower myself. ‘How does the last one get down?’ I said.
‘Let’s worry about that when we see how deep it is.’
I lowered my feet and let myself down hand over hand. It was pitch black. As I looked up, I could see Amica’s face framed in the entrance, watching me. I moved my hands half a metre at a time and counted each one until my feet touched a soft mound of dust and sand.
The coolness of the tunnel was a relief after the furnace heat of the plain above. I switched on my torch. The shaft and tunnels were carved from the solid rock. I paused, marvelling at the strength and endurance of men who had hacked it out with no more than hand tools. Then I crouched down on my knees and peered up the tunnel. I could see a dim glow of light from the next shaft.
I called up, my voice echoing. ‘It’s okay, we can get through to the next shaft at least. That’s as far as I can see. It’s about eight metres down here. The last one will have to jump. It’s a reasonably soft landing though.’
‘That’ll b
e all right,’ Dexy said. ‘I did worse than that in parachute training.’
They pulled the rope back up and lowered Amica. Dexy came last. He lowered his bergen, then dropped the rope. The circle of light disappeared as he lowered himself into the opening. He hung from his fingertips and then let go, landing with a thud that drove the breath from his lungs.
‘Are you all right?’ I said.
‘Sure.’ He took a compass reading and then we moved off into the tunnel. It was about five feet high and wide, and I had to stoop to clear the roof, adding to the ache in my thighs. Underfoot was bare rock, earth, wet sand and a few pools of brackish water. In places, rockfalls had brought down parts of the wall and roof of the tunnel, half-blocking it with mounds of rubble.
I extinguished my torch, trying to conserve the batteries, and we moved on through the darkness. In the distance I could see a circle of light. We paused at the foot of the next shaft, watching and listening for any sound from above before moving back into the darkness.
At intervals the tunnels forked, but each time we took a compass bearing and moved on in the direction closest to the ravine at the head of the valley. My thigh muscles were screaming with the effort of crouching for so long and I heard Amica’s laboured breathing close behind me. The scrape of our boots was the only other sound.
I lost count of the number of openings we passed and all track of how far we had travelled, but the tunnels became damper and wetter as we moved on. We began to wade through shallows and pools which sometimes reached our knees.
As we approached the next shaft, we entered another deep pool. We paused in the shadows, listening for noise from above as the reflected light rippled off the walls and roof.
Dexy and Tank crossed first, then Amica. As I began to wade out through the water, I heard a voice. I shrank back into the shadows, my heart pounding. There was a splash just in front of me. Then I saw the white line of a rope tauten as a bucket of water was hauled back up towards the light.
Amica stood in the mouth of the tunnel beyond the shaft. She looked back at me and tried to smile. We waited as the bucket was raised and lowered four more times, then stood in silence for another five minutes before moving on.
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