The black walls of the cliffs had just begun to open out again and the floor of the riverbed started to level, when I was caught by a wall of water. I lost my footing and fell heavily. I struggled upwards, gasping for air, my arms flailing. I managed to grab hold of a rock and drag myself clear of the surface so I could look back up the canyon.
The rising tide beyond the dam must have made a small breach, no more, but it was clear that our time was running out.
I stumbled on. The blood was pounding and roaring in my ears and my breath was ragged. Amica was just about keeping pace, but she was staggering and her head was lolling on her shoulders. Dexy seemed to be running from memory, his face ghost-white, his expression vacant.
More rounds speckled the water around me. I splashed through the shallows, accelerating as I felt grit and sand beneath my feet. There were more shots from our pursuers, but they were now caught among the rocks while we were increasing our distance from them.
A faint greying of the sky marked the dawn. I could now see that the rim of the ravine was lower below the cleft than above it. I scanned the wall and saw a dark, jagged line – either a fault or a crevasse opened by the earthquake – running down towards the river. If we could scale the cliff, we might be safe.
Rami was twenty yards ahead of me. I shouted and pointed. He swerved and began to climb.
I waited for the other two to catch up, expecting our pursuers to come through the barrier of rocks at any moment. Then I began to climb. I had made many more difficult ascents in my mountaineering days, but never when exhausted, in semi-darkness and soaked to the skin.
With only one arm, Dexy was struggling. I paused to help Amica, then Dexy, over a smooth, almost featureless block of rock. I heard a crack above me and flattened myself against the rock face, shouting a warning.
A boulder the size of my head, dislodged by Rami, smashed down the cliff, so close to my face that I felt a rush of air as it passed. Amica threw herself sideways to avoid it, her arms clawing at the air. I threw out a hand, caught her sleeve and held her until she regained her balance.
We began to climb again. Above me I saw Rami outlined against the sky. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘He’s almost at the top. It’s not much further.’
There was the sound of firing from below and bullets struck the cliff around me. The Taliban soldiers were closing fast. Half-hidden inside the crevasse, we were protected for the moment, but soon we would become more exposed.
I pulled myself upwards, the muscles in my arms and legs screaming. Above the rasp of my own breath I could hear Amica sobbing with the effort as she dragged herself up behind me. More rounds smashed into the rock, ever closer to me.
Then I felt a stabbing pain in my leg. I swayed and almost fell. I was only a few feet from the top.
Rami was leaning over the edge looking down at us. Beneath the rattle of gunfire I heard a low rumble. I stared back up the valley. A tide of foam sped along the floor of the ravine. Behind it came a wall of white water, filling it from brim to brim.
The soldiers on the riverbed were swept away, driven like matchwood by the avalanche of water.
I threw myself upwards and my hand caught the edge of the ravine. I dragged myself up and twisted around, leaning back over the edge as I shouted at Rami to help.
Amica reached out her hand towards mine. It fell short. There was terror in her eyes. I inched forward, hanging over the cliff from the waist, still screaming at Rami to help.
I saw Dexy’s face below Amica. Then the water engulfed him.
Amica threw herself forward and her hand met mine. I gripped it with all my strength and dug the fingers of my other hand into a crack in the rock.
Before I could brace myself or take another breath, I felt myself lifted and shaken, crushed by the weight of water. Pain tore through my left hand as the flood tried to sweep me from the rock.
I was dimly aware of the touch of Amica’s fingers, still clasped around my right hand, but the roaring water drowned every other sense and my chest was bursting.
Then my head came clear of the surface. I choked, coughing and spitting, and filled my lungs with air. I felt the rock beneath me and pressed myself against it.
Amica’s face appeared, water pouring from her nose and mouth. Her eyes flickered and I felt her grip tighten. Rami was only a metre away. ‘Help me,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake, help me.’
He looked me in the eye, then turned and ran. I heard another roar and saw a fresh line of white water careering down the canyon towards us.
Amica’s grip weakened and I felt her start to slip away.
My worst nightmare had returned. I saw Jane’s hand slipping from mine, the waters closing over her face forever.
‘NO!’ I lunged forward and grasped Amica’s wrist. I pulled her arm with all my might, hauled her back over the edge, and dragged her to the rock Rami had used to save himself. I shielded her body with mine and braced myself as the second wave broke over us.
I felt as if I was sinking, the pressure building in my ears, my heart pounding, my tortured lungs screaming for air. The water was tearing at me, dragging me inexorably away. I fought against the urge to breathe, but as my consciousness faded, freezing water filled my mouth and nose.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the wave had swept past. I collapsed to my knees, retching. If a third one came, I was dead. I dragged myself upright.
Amica had slumped forward, face down on the ground. I felt ice in my heart. I called to her, rolled her over and then began thumping her chest with the heels of my hands, driving water from her lungs. She lay corpse-still for a moment longer, then convulsed, coughing and choking, as more water poured from her mouth.
Her eyes flickered open. I put my arms around her and we sobbed on each other’s shoulders.
The floodwater started to drop back into the ravine. I looked around. We were alone; not a figure moved in the whole of the valley. Rami had either escaped or drowned, I no longer cared which.
I looked at Amica. She was deathly pale and trembling with shock and cold. ‘Can you stand?’ I said. ‘Can you walk?’
She nodded.
As I put my weight on my left leg, I felt a stabbing pain. I looked down. One of the rounds fired by the Taliban had ripped across my calf, gouging its way through the flesh.
Arms around each other, we hobbled away from the edge of the ravine. The narrow plain was barely recognisable. All trace of the track had disappeared and the force of the flood had stripped the vegetation from the fields, leaving a glistening surface of wet mud and bare rock.
We stumbled on as it got lighter. On the far side of the plain, against the mountain wall, a mound of boulders had been washed from the cliff face and then dumped by the flood. There was a narrow gap behind them, just wide enough for the two of us to squeeze into.
Amica took the shell dressing from my belt kit. The wrapper had been perforated and the dressing was sodden and stained. She hesitated, then squeezed out as much water from the dressing as she could and bandaged my wound. Then we huddled down together, hidden from sight, crying with relief at our own survival and with grief for the loss of our friends.
We had succeeded in our mission, but at what cost? I thought of all the deaths – Dexy, Boon, Tank, Jeff, Dave and the other guys buried alive by the earthquake – and of all the bereaved wives and fatherless children left behind.
Other deaths weighed on me too. No one waited for me or depended on me, yet I seemed to be condemned always to survive while others, more deserving of life, did not.
Too exhausted to keep watch, we closed our eyes and fell asleep, Amica’s head still resting on my shoulder.
Chapter Sixteen
The sun was high in the sky when I woke. I was still cold and tired, my bones ached and the wound in my calf was throbbing. Amica slept on, huddled against my shoulder. I kept my movements slow, trying not to wake her as I raised my head a fraction to peer from behind the shelter of the rocks.
Beyond the valle
y wall, thin cloud trailed from the peaks of the mountains to the north and east of us, like smoke in the wind. I saw vultures spiralling on the thermals high above us. The feathers at their wingtips clawed at the piercing blue of the sky.
I could see no movement, no living thing, on the floor of the narrow plain that separated us from the ravine. It was littered with flood debris – broken branches, tree trunks, even huge boulders – dumped as the water receded.
Depressions and shell craters in the floor of the plain were flooded with water that steamed in the heat of the sun. The soil, reduced to patches of chocolate-brown mud, was already crazed with cracks as it dried. Trapped once again in its rocky gorge, the sound of the river had faded to a sullen roar, but a dark stain about three metres up the cliff behind us told a different story.
My movement was enough to wake Amica. She sat up, her face blank, staring at me as she tried to piece together the events of the previous night. Her cropped hair was matted with dirt and mud, her face grey with fatigue.
I stood, still crouching behind the boulders, and tried to rub some life and warmth back into my limbs. I fumbled at my belt for my emergency rations. My belt kit was still sodden, but the foil packets were unbroken. I opened one and ate a couple of mouthfuls, then passed the rest to Amica. She ate even less than me. The effect was almost worse than having no food at all.
‘How is your leg?’ she said.
‘It hurts, but it’ll be all right. You?’
‘Okay. Should we wait for dark?’
I hesitated and scanned the plain again from end to end. Nothing moved, ‘We should.’
‘But?’
‘We need to make whatever time we can while the Taliban are reorganising. When they realise what’s happened they’ll be piling troops in here. If we’re still in the area, we’re dead.’
‘Then let’s take our chance.’
I moved out of our shelter and took a few hesitant steps. The pain in my leg flared with each one, but I gritted my teeth and kept moving. It eased to a dull ache, but I could see a spot of fresh blood staining the bandage.
Amica followed me as I limped along the edge of the plateau, hugging the valley wall. Our footprints made an unmistakeable trail through the mud but there was nothing we could do about it. Our only hope was to be long gone when the first Taliban soldiers set eyes on them.
I had formed no coherent plan, driven more by the urge to keep moving than anything else. To head down the valley was inviting capture, but to move back towards the caves seemed even more suicidal. Had I been alone and uninjured I might have tried to scale the sheer walls of the valley and escape over the ridge, but carrying a leg wound and with Amica alongside me, it was impossible. Our only hope seemed to be to keep on past the natural barrier where the granite outcrop cut the valley in half, and then seek a way up the gentler cliffs beyond.
My movements became easier and the pain in my leg lessened as a little warmth crept back into my bones, but it did nothing to ease my weariness, or the despair that threatened to overwhelm me. We were alone in a hostile country and every hand would be raised against us. There seemed so little hope, so little point in carrying on, that I felt a powerful urge simply to give up, lie down and await the end. I tried to bury the thought, but it returned again and again. Only fear of what Amica would suffer at the hands of the Taliban if they found us, and the ice-hard glint of determination in her eyes, kept me moving.
We walked in hundred-yard stages, pausing between each one, crouching down to look for any movement and listen for any sound. The silence was total. There was only the empty plain and the sky above.
We paused in the shadows of the ridge barring the way to the lower half of the valley, ate another mouthful of rations and took a few mouthfuls of water. I refilled my canteen from a flooded bomb crater, though the water was as brown and muddy as the river from which it had come, then I wormed my way forward and raised my head. I was totally unprepared for what I saw. We had passed through here just the previous day, but it was as if I had never set eyes on this landscape before.
The steep ravine that had channelled and curbed the worst impact of the flood broadened into a valley below it, and the wall of water it had unleashed had hit the valley like a nuclear bomb.
The thin covering of earth had been stripped away, laying the bedrock bare. Not a single tree, not a building remained standing. The entire village of Agha Shah Azuin, the blue-tiled mosque and the rows of houses as squat and strong as forts, had disappeared. All that remained were low mounds of mud-covered rubble dumped by the flood and boulders so massive that even its ferocious power had not been enough to dislodge them.
The only movement came from the vultures and ravens gorging themselves among the detritus abandoned at the edge of the flood as the waters receded.
‘What have we done?’ Amica said. ‘We have destroyed the Taliban’s missiles, but killed more people than if they had used them.’ She lowered her head to her arms and wept.
I put a hand on her shoulder, but could find nothing to say, no way of denying the truth of her words. I led the way in silence to the valley floor. We kept close to the edge of the plain, skirting mounds of rubble and pools of mud and slurry that sucked at our legs like quicksand. I averted my eyes from one mound of rubble where a group of vultures were bickering over their spoils, their heads stained crimson.
Amica trudged on, her face white, keeping her gaze fixed on the ground. On the outskirts of what had once been Agha Shah Azuin’s village, the foundations of houses protruded through the mud and silt. We walked on. A quarter of a mile ahead of us, I could see a faint grey line rising from the high-water mark. A path, little more than a goat track, led upwards, disappearing behind a shoulder of the hill. I pointed to it and urged Amica on.
We had perhaps two hours of daylight remaining; long enough, I hoped, to reach the ridge dividing this valley from the next and make out a safe route we could take across it during the night. Fatigue dragged at me, but I was reluctant to rest in case my leg stiffened up. Occasional spots of fresh blood still showed on the bandage.
As we left the site of the village, I saw tracks in the mud ahead of us, leading towards the path up the hillside. I crouched down to examine them. They had been made at least a couple of hours earlier; the edges of the footprints had dried in the sun. I hesitated, but could see no choice but to follow them up the hillside.
We moved on with greater caution. As we rounded the shoulder of the hill I pulled Amica down into cover. A building stood at the side of the trail, above the flood line, perhaps a hundred yards away. It had been hidden from us until now by the fold in the hills. The window apertures gaped empty and the roof had fallen in. The remains of a crude stone chimney stack poked up from the ruins of one wall.
We watched for five minutes and then began to move forward. As we approached, I heard a noise, as faint at first as the wind whistling through a cracked windowpane. I turned my head, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound, then eased my rifle from my shoulder and slid off the safety catch.
I went on, one step at a time. The noise grew louder. I motioned Amica to get down into cover, then wormed my way through the dirt below a gaping window frame and flattened myself against the wall by the door.
I took three deep breaths to steady myself, then swung round the door frame and levelled my weapon. The room was a mess of rubble and fallen timbers, but a boy was crouching in the far corner, in the crook of the wall. A Kalashnikov lay on the ground alongside him as he sat hunched, his arms wrapped around his knees, rocking slowly backwards and forwards, keening to himself.
Daru stopped and stared at me in silence. Keeping my eyes fixed on him, I called to Amica.
‘Where is your father?’ I said to the boy.
He shook his head.
‘Your mother?’
‘Gone, all gone.’ He began to cry again.
Amica ran to him and held him until he quietened. ‘How did you escape?’ she said.
‘I
got up before dawn to take the goats to the high pasture.’ He spoke in a low monotone. ‘The muezzin had just begun to call the faithful to prayer when I heard a sound like thunder. The goats scattered. I tried to chase them, but they kept running.
‘When I looked back, the village had disappeared, buried under the water. Later, I climbed back down the track. My father, my mother, my brothers and sisters, all had gone. I could not even find where our house had been, so I came back here to my uncle’s house. But he left yesterday morning on the haj. I’ve been waiting here for someone to come back.’
Amica hugged him to her again, tears pouring down her face. ‘They won’t be coming back, Daru. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Where are the other survivors?’ I said. ‘I saw more than one set of tracks in the mud back there.’
‘The Taliban killed them,’ he said. ‘Two other boys from the village escaped the flood because they had been herding their goats. We went down to the village together. Once I had seen it, I came back here; they said they would wait in case anyone came back.
‘An hour later I heard shots. I ran out of the house and hid in the trees. When I looked down towards the village, I saw two Taliban soldiers standing over the other boys’ bodies.’
I was thinking hard. ‘Were the men officers?’
He nodded. ‘They had a missile. Only officers fire them.’
I froze. ‘How do you know it was a missile?’
‘I know all weapons, Inglisi.’
‘Describe it to me.’
‘It was dark green, with a wide, round top.’ He used his hands to sketch the size and shape in the air. ‘And it had letters on the side in your language.’
I felt sick. ‘There was definitely only one?’ I said.
He nodded.
Amica met my gaze. ‘They must have escaped from that tunnel with one.’
I finished the sentence for her. ‘Or they kept it with the anti-aircraft guns in one of those sangars on the clifftop.’
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