by Mike Bond
When she’d come from Paris she’d told herself this would happen, the horrible torturing wounds and senseless deaths, the endless nights of no sleep, fatigue and despair. “You got what you asked for,” she muttered to herself, stepped into the tent, in its dim lantern light a slender unshaven man in a long white shirt, a weary face and thinning hair, a man young just a few years ago. “What do you want?” she said in Pashto.
“Please come. I have sick children.”
She thought of the boy she had just killed. “Who doesn’t?”
“There are many –”
Her body ached so with exhaustion she wanted to fall down in the mud and die. “What’s wrong?”
“They keep going, they can’t stop, it comes out of them like water. We have two hundred. It’s an orphanage. Some thirty, maybe, have this sickness.”
“I don’t have enough medicine, just a few doses...”
“It’s not too far – Shari Kuhna, behind the old mosque.”
“I’m a westerner, a woman... I can get killed just being there –”
“We all can, Doctor.”
She took her medical bag and stumbled after him. Shrapnel was falling with a random ticking sound. Shells were hitting toward Hazara and Bagnal in the north, bright red and yellow flowers, their shock waves slapping her face. With its telltale whooshing chatter a PK machine gun opened up, a few rifles returning fire, and the sharp crescendo of cracks she had come to know were grenades from a Plamya launcher.
“Why are you here?” he said.
When she didn’t answer he said, “I was a teacher. In Edeni, a village in the Kush.”
“Never heard of it.”
“No one has. But now my brother Wahid’s a famous warlord – Eagle of the Hindu Kush. Soon Edeni also will be famous,” he added sarcastically.
“Assassins,” she gasped. “You’re all assassins.”
He picked up speed. “Here is the dangerous part. Hurry!” They ran down an alley to a cratered boulevard and along a line of deserted sidewalk stalls. Something came up behind them, footsteps. Ahmad grabbed her hand. “Faster!”
A light flashed on, shapes surrounding them. “What have we here?” a deep voice.
“A foreign woman?” another said. Men with guns, mujihadeen.
“You bastard,” Sophie hissed at Ahmad. “You set me up.”
A hand whacked her mouth. “Cover your head, slut!” Someone yanked her kerchief over her eyes and shoved her into the street. She fell banging her knee, tried to stand but he pushed her down. “Here?” one said. A snick of rifle bolt.
A muzzle jabbed the back of her head. “No!” she begged.
“She’s not Russian!” Ahmad screamed. “She’s a doctor! Saving our children!”
A 155 hit with a great fiery whack knocking them down. Ahmad snatched her arm and they ran through clouds of dust and crashing stones, beams, and roof tiles, the air wailing with bullets. Ahead the street caught fire, red flashes of exploding ammo and gasoline. Two machine guns were firing to the right, rifles everywhere. They dodged through markets blasted by explosions, shrapnel glowing like coals. The Salaam Hotel had been hit, the front wall gone, empty rooms staring through the smoke, a bed standing sideways in the street like a tethered mule.
The orphanage was a low building with shuttered windows and three candlelit rooms where children lay on straw and burlap sacks. Holding her breath against the stink she stepped around piles of mucused bloody feces. “I have only twelve doses,” she said. “We pick the sickest ones. But not those who’ll die anyway.”
One by one she treated them, scanning their feverish eyes, her cool hand on hot foreheads. “Feed them rice and lots of boiled water. Be sure to boil the water. Most of them will live.” She stood, fighting the pain in her knee where she’d been knocked down. “Now let’s look at the other kids...”
Daylight began to slink through the shuttered windows. From distant streets came a hubbub of voices, women calling children, storekeepers announcing their wares, sounds of cars and animals... It seemed unreal that after such a night of carnage and terror anyone still lived. “I’ll go back with you,” Ahmad said.
“No, it’s safe now.” She could tasted blood in her mouth where she’d been slapped. “With the veil I’m fine.”
She limped the rubbled streets through the beautiful bright morning. A loudspeaker crackled with a muezzin’s call to morning prayer. A deep despair filled her. Again she wondered why she’d come: had her life in Paris been so bad?
Why be a doctor? What in all this insanity was worth saving? She thought of the boy she had killed, and again of St. Exupéry: the parable of Mozart assassinated. Would that angelic boy have grown up just another religion-maddened killer? How could he not? She fell to her knees tugging aside her veil and vomited on the street. A man walking by kicked her. She raised herself dizzily, refastened her veil and continued on her way.
Tracks
“IT’S GUS!” McPhee pointed at the footprint in the crusted snow.
Jack knelt beside it, fighting hope. An Afghani boot, large. “Could be a shepherd, anyone.”
“It’s his size. Tracking toward the DZ.”
The rising sun was a dim yellow orb in the snow blowing north from the peaks. The wind cut like acid, making his head throb. The pain was so awful he feared it would kill him, wanted desperately to take codeine but couldn’t risk the numbness. “We need to stow you somewhere,” he said to McPhee. “So Sean and I can look for Gus.”
“I want a suite with a bar and Jacuzzi. And three hookers. It’s in my contract.”
“You couldn’t even get it up with one,” Loxley grunted.
“Chopper!” Jack yelled, shoving McPhee behind a boulder as a black gunship screamed over the ridge and down the far side.
“Coming back,” Loxley said.
“No,” Jack said. “That’s trucks.” He ran to the ridgetop. In the valley below three halftracks with red stars on the roofs and twin machine guns were coming up a dirt road. Grabbing McPhee Jack ran for a gully, knocking down rocks that clattered into the valley. The halftracks growled nearer. There was no place to hide, just rocks in sight of the chopper or the halftracks that had stopped two hundred feet below. Soldiers jumped from them and deployed along the road.
“Chopper!” Jack snapped, “northeast.” The soldiers were coming up the road. The chopper roared back over and dropped out of sight.
One halftrack driver stood smoking in his open door. In Jack’s sights he had a boyish familiar mouth, sandy hair poking from under a gray fatigue cap. Shielding his eyes with one hand he stared up at them. “Oh shit.” McPhee tucked his rifle into his cheek.
A hawk drifted over, low and broad-winged. The boy tossed his cigarette, jumped down and watched it slip over the ridge. “Regular ornithologist,” Loxley said.
“Let’s waste him,” McPhee said. “All three drivers.”
“Can’t,” Jack said, “that patrol’ll have us –”
“Here they come anyway.” The Soviets crossed the road in patrol formation and started up the ridge, short dark-faced Kazakhs in burly coats and flat gray hats. “Too many,” Loxley whispered. “Can’t get them all.”
“Coming up both sides of this gully –”
“Let’s hit them now,” McPhee said.
“Rest of them’ll get us.”
The chopper flitted back over, an alien bird guarding its brood. A deep voice called and the soldiers turned parallel to the slope, one passing below Jack with his fuzzy hat low over his brow, eyes on the ground. The officer called again and the soldiers quartered back down to the road, stamping snow off their boots as they climbed into the tracks.
“How the Hell,” Loxley said, “didn’t they see us?”
“Didn’t expect us to be here,” Jack said. The halftracks gurgled to life and snarled back down the road. Jack noticed he was clenching his rifle, tried to relax his fingers but they were frozen to the stock. The last halftrack halted in a puff of smoke. With a ragged y
a-ya-ya the starter turned over but the engine wouldn’t catch. One by one the soldiers jumped out of the back, one glancing uphill.
“Here we go again,” Loxley said.
“The other two are around the turn,” McPhee said. “Let’s take this one out. Now.”
“No!” Jack hissed. “It’ll bring the chopper back.”
“What’s that!” Loxley said. “In the back?”
A reddened body lay on the track’s deck beside a pack and tangled parachute. “We don’t have to look for Gus anymore,” Loxley said quietly.
The soldiers push-started the halftrack and climbed on, standing on the muddy bloody form that had been Gus. “Our cover’s blown,” McPhee said. “They’ll be all over this mountain.”
“We’re moving out fast.” Jack eyed the sky. “Snow’s coming.”
Everything before now seemed unreal: the C-130 from Sin City to Guam, the mess hall and bunks the night before, the last bottle of tequila, screwing the last Filipino girl on the beach, riding the last soft phosphorent roll of surf to the shallows, Gus singing off-key to the Eagles and Pink Floyd –
The Russian boy on the track had seemed like Jack’s friend Cole Svenson, made him think of Cole’s grin as he pulled in a trout and almost fell out of the canoe, or the night he and Cole had gotten stoned with Susie and Barb in the woods where two centuries ago Jack’s ancestors had farmed, and now it was forest again, old rock walls snaking between the trees.
Cole a Marine now in Beirut. Keeping the ragheads from killing each other.
ALL DAY THEY CLIMBED the mountain into a blizzard that burned their lungs like fire. After dark they laid up for a half hour in the rocks. Jack checked his watch: 21:20 hours. 11,740 feet. 41 below zero. The glow of the watch blinded him. His fingers were freezing though he kept sticking them in his crotch to warm them. “Another twenty hours maybe, to get there.”
“This guy in Edeni –” McPhee chewed his icy mustache.
“Wahid al-Din –”
“– better be easy to find.”
Edeni. Warm fires, warm stone huts, warm smiles. Something to stop this head from hurting. Food. Safe. Jack shouldered his and McPhee’s willow backpacks and goat bags, slung the Strela tubes alongside them, and picked up his rifle. He spit another mouthful of blood, pulled up McPhee and started up the mountain.
DUSK WAS DYING on the high black cliffs of the Little Kowkcheh River as they neared Edeni. Climbing the riverside path toward the village Jack switched to point, Loxley with McPhee a hundred feet behind. “If there’s something I don’t like,” Jack said, “I’ll wave you back.”
But what could change in three years in Edeni? They might even ask him to start teaching again. His blood brother Ahmad, genial and harassed, glasses sliding down his nose. Ahmad’s mother singing Tajik folk songs as she crouched over the fire cooking goat stew and barley. She who tried to be the mother she’d thought Jack’d lost, because no mother would let her son come to this bedeviled country. Her evil son Wahid finger-combing his beard, the Koran like a bulletproof amulet clutched to his chest.
The night he and Ahmad had cut their palms and clasped bloody hands saying the tribal oath, “Now you are my brother.” Wahid in the background smiling through his hatred.
Jack’s old students, their ready jokes and laughter. The snake in his desk drawer, the mouse in his tea, the burrs under his saddle the first time he’d ridden buzkashi. When Jack had asked a class, “How can I share nine goats among three brothers?” a boy had laughed, “I’d keep seven, and give one to each of my brothers.”
Home Office had sent him to Afghanistan with a Peace Corps cover before the Soviets invaded because he spoke Russian, had learned it with French and Spanish at U of Maine. He was quick with languages and had learned Pashto easily, and they wanted “viable Intel on the evolving situation”. Though he’d been thrown out of West Point he still owed four years and this was one way to do them. Soon he had come to love the village and teaching and his kids, and now he was coming home with one buddy dead and another smashed up.
The time he’d shown the kids a Time magazine photo of Manhattan’s night skyline, the two new Towers gleaming, and a sour-tempered boy named Suley quoted the Koran about the cities God destroyed because their inhabitants lived in too much ease and plenty.
The Koran. Wahid’s contemptuous glare, endlessly finger-combing his beard and spitting proverbs. “How is it,” Jack once asked Ahmad, “that you and your brother are so unlike?”
“He was from a different father who was killed by the Uzbeks for stealing sheep. My father died fighting Pitav men who tried to take our horses, so we both knew sorrow. But he can never see joy in life. Most people when they see a happy person it makes them happy too. But Wahid when he sees a happy person says Just wait, some day you’ll be miserable as me.” Ahmad shrugged. “Maybe why he loves the Koran.”
“Either unhappy people are drawn to religion,” Jack said, “or religion makes people unhappy – I’m not sure which.”
“Islam means I submit,” Ahmad answered. “But how can we submit to God’s will in a world with so much pain and evil? Are pain and evil what God wants?”
The trail into Edeni had changed, no tracks of horses, goats, or men. Rifle off safety, Jack eased round the last bluff.
Bare blackened timbers pointed up from snow-covered shattered walls. His hut was gone, and Ahmad’s mother’s. He crouched watching, saw no movement, took up a position in the ruins of his hut against the pile of flat stones that had once been its roof.
After a while he waved the others up. “Now what?” McPhee said.
“We kill them all.”
“They look to be already dead.”
“The Russians. We kill them till the last one in Afghanistan is dead.”
“No problem,” Loxley said. “There’s only a few million.”
Jack checked the perimeter of the dead village. I should have killed the blond kid at the halftracks. I should’ve killed them all.
Every Russian in Afghanistan.
Now I will.
Necessary Evil
WHEN THE PRIEST’S brown Dodge had pulled up the drive one warm November afternoon eighteen years ago Jack’s mother had screamed and clasped her hands to her face. Fearing he’d done something wrong Jack ran into the barn and climbed up among the sweet-smelling prickery bales. But she’d soon walked tall and tear-streaked into the barn to call him down and tell him his father had died in a faraway place she called Viet Nam.
He could still smell the spicy hay, still hear the song on the radio that warm November afternoon, To dance beneath the diamond skies with one hand waving free.
Wind from the Kowkcheh canyon walls blew ice down his neck. “These ruins,” he said, “were my neighbor’s house. Those walls, that’s where I taught school.”
“Let it go, Jack,” McPhee said.
“There was a huge old tree shaded the whole place...”
Loxley slid a chunk of wood into the flames. “To think you were their teacher! No wonder this country’s so screwed.”
“Everyone lived on nothing and worked like mules. Half their kids died before they were five. But they were happier than the young Americans the Peace Corps sent to teach them how to live.”
“The guys have multiple wives,” Loxley said “Of course they’re happier.”
McPhee eased himself up against the broken wall. “Are you nuts?”
“The idea,” Jack said, “was stir up the Muslims, send in all these Korans, fund the mullahs and bomb-throwers. Pay the Soviets back for Nam. But this...”
McPhee cut goat meat on his rifle stock. “Everybody knows war sucks.” He chewed a piece, working the toughness back and forth in his teeth. “Except the politicians who start them. Who won’t get hurt in them.”
Jack leaned aside to spit blood. Sometimes he feared the pain might crush his brain, spread in waves down his spine. “It’s a bad concussion,” McPhee said, “bleeding like that.”
“It’s getting
better.”
“Stop lying, asshole.”
Jack glanced at McPhee’s leg. “Three weeks till you can walk.”
“So where’s my hookers and tequila?” McPhee brushed snow off his shoulders. “My damn Jacuzzi?”
“We should abort,” Loxley said, “get this numbnut’s ass to Pakistan.”
“We’re not supposed to go there,” Jack said. “Or be here, for that matter.”
“Military intelligence,” McPhee sighed, “is an oxymoron.”
“Remember the night driving to Vegas,” Loxley said, “and Gus asked is an oxymoron a dumb steer? And you said no, it’s a bum steer, and he said no, that’s a hobo driving...”
“I keep seeing him,” McPhee said. “But he’s not here.”
Jack stepped outside to dig in the snow for more wood, tugged a long hard piece from the drifts but it was a skinny arm and hand with curled frozen fingers. He dropped it and wiped his hand but the greasy frozen flesh stuck to his palm. He kept looking for wood, rubbing his hand on his pants.
New tracks crossed the snow. Loxley, out hunting wood like me. The tracks skirted the last burnt houses and vanished. Fear snaked up his back. He crouched to make a smaller target, blew on his hand trying to loosen his fingers, reached for the Makarov.
“Touch that gun,” a voice from the ruins said in Pashto, “and you die.”
“I’m not Russian.”
“You’re a foreigner. I’ll shoot you just for that.”
“My friends are in the hills. They’ll kill you.”
“You have two friends. One of them’s wounded. Both are in that hut over there. I can kill them both from here. You’re injured too, aren’t you?”
Jack felt fury that he’d duped himself into feeling safe. “I was a teacher here. I’ve come back to help my friends.”
“What friends?”
“Ahmad al-Din.”
“Brother of Wahid?”
“It’s cold. Come to the fire and talk.”
The man was short and wiry, in his fifties, named Sayed, icicles in his short black beard, dressed in a knit hat and sheepwool coat, with a worn and polished Enfield that he kept close. As he tore through the goat meat Jack gave him he said he’d come to Edeni to bury his cousin, but when he’d seen their fire decided to wait till morning and kill them. “I thought you were Russian,” he said. “You weren’t speaking Pashto.”