Stinger
Page 27
About a mile ahead of us I could see a huddle of buildings. Beyond it a dirt road snaked away down the valley, disappearing in the shadows below the line of the sunrise.
‘Is that the Pakistani border post?’ Daru said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Please God it’s not an Afghan one.’
We hurried on across another patch of scree. Amica slipped and fell full length, gashing her cheek, but we dragged her up and staggered on.
A wisp of smoke was rising from the frontier post. I imagined the samovar being lit, and the aromas of woodsmoke, hot tea and warm bread. ‘Keep going. We’re nearly there.’ I glanced behind us. ‘Faster.’
Amica didn’t look round, but she heard the urgency in my voice and tried to increase her speed. The Taliban soldiers were no more than a mile behind us.
We broke into a stumbling trot down the rocky fields that separated us from the frontier post. Just beyond it I saw a gaudily decorated lorry parked at the side of the road. I ran on ahead, leaving Daru to help Amica the last few yards.
The two border guards were unshaven, their clothes creased and stained, but I could almost have kissed them when I recognised their Pakistani uniforms.
One held up a hand as I ran towards him. ‘Your papers,’ he said.
‘Please, you must hurry,’ I said.
‘The formalities,’ he said. ‘Paperwork. These things cannot be rushed.’
Daru and Amica staggered up to us. I looked back up the mountain. The Taliban were moving fast down the hillside less than half a mile away. ‘Please,’ I said.
He looked at me. ‘You have money?’
Daru pulled out the bundles of Afghanis he had taken from the bodies at the checkpoint.
The man smiled. ‘In Afghanistan, this is money. In Pakistan.’ He simulated wiping his arse with the notes. The other guard laughed as he tossed them to one side. ‘It is not enough.’
‘Here.’ I wrenched the watch from my wrist. ‘You can have this too.’
He took it, looked at it, then back at me. ‘It is not enough.’
The Taliban were four hundred yards away.
Daru reached inside his shirt, fumbling with something. When he withdrew his hand, I saw the glitter of gold between his fingers. He gave me a sheepish grin. ‘I am sorry. I am a thief.’
He threw two of the gold coins into the dirt. ‘That is enough,’ he said.
As the guards dropped to their knees, scrabbling in the dust for the gold, we ran past them towards the lorry.
The driver was dozing in his cab. We jumped in and I shook him awake. ‘Drive,’ I said.
Daru brandished a handful of gold coins in front of his bleary-eyed face. ‘These are yours. Drive.’
Without taking his eyes from the gold for a second, the driver started the engine, released the handbrake and had the lorry in gear and rumbling down the track. ‘Where to?’ he said, his gaze still fixed on the gold.
Daru smiled. ‘Take us to America.’
First published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by Hodder & Stoughton
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by
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Copyright © John Nichol, 1999
The moral right of John Nichol to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788637527
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Endnotes
1.
Ghost Force: The Secret History of the SAS by Ken Connor (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). « Back