by Mike Bond
“Only I speak Pashto,” Jack said.
Sayed nodded his chin at McPhee and Loxley, meaning what about them?
“They also come to help my friends.”
Sayed smiled. “Everyone’s helpful these days.”
“Where can I find Wahid?”
“My uncle might know. He lives an hour upriver.”
“We’d be grateful, Sayed, if in the morning you could show us.”
“And your friend there, with the broken leg?”
“We’ll walk slowly, and help him.”
“It’s foolish to help the injured. If God wants him out of the way, why interfere?”
SOPHIE CUT AWAY the woman’s veil where it had hardened with blood to her face. The woman snatched her hand. “No!”
“I have to cut it to fix your face.”
“Mule. Mule kick very much. Not take away the veil.”
“And broke your arms, too? How did it kick the back of your head?” Sophie ducked into the tent where Jean-Luc, a flashlight in his teeth, was operating on a farmer who had stepped on a mine. “I need another morphine,” she said.
Jean-Luc put down his scalpel and the flashlight and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his arm. “Who for?”
“That woman’s been beaten. Won’t let me take off the veil. It’ll infect.”
“Damn it, Sophie! Every one you give to takes it from someone else.”
“You think I don’t know?” She took one of the last vials outside and injected the woman. After a few moments the woman quieted and Sophie pulled the veil from her skin. Both cheekbones were broken, top front teeth gone, one eye swollen shut. “Tell me,” she whispered, “who did this to you?”
“Mule kick. Mule kick very bad.”
Sophie covered the woman with a blue UN tarp and left her half asleep on the stretcher. Soon she’d come down from the morphine and there’d be no more to give her and the pain would drive her crazy. And in the morning there’d be new wounded coming in from the bombing of Charikar.
She took a bucket to the well but it only brought up mud. Staying on the path that had been cleared of mines she went to the stream and came back with a half-bucket of foul liquid, but the gasoline stove wouldn’t light. She searched among the gas cans but they were all empty. She cast around for wood chips or camel dung for a fire but they were gone too. She lay on the ground beside the woman’s stretcher and wrapped herself in her robes. To hell with Jean-Luc. To hell with all men. Either they beat women or destroyed the world. Or both.
Unlike this woman she could leave any time. Another PIA flight to France, another job in a Paris emergency room. But what good was experience treating napalm burns and land mines there? What good would Paris be, after this?
SAYED’S UNCLE lived with three sons and their families in a stone compound above the Little Kowkcheh. Cherry trees grew in the courtyard and junipers along the walls. An old man with a knife scar down his face, he sat by the fire holding his baby granddaughter.
“Infidels!” He spat; it hissed in the fire. “Each time they come we kill them. Long ago the Persians. Then the Greek Alexander. Genghis Khan. Tamerlane of Samarkand. The English pale-skinned like you – three times they came, three times defeated... Now these Russians spill our blood and we theirs.” The baby whimpered, he stroked her head.
“Vengeance is a joy divine, the Koran says,” Jack answered.
“Vengeance is poisoned meat you feed your enemies. But you must then eat yourself.”
“I’d like to leave my friend here – he of the broken leg. Till he’s better.”
“You have to pay. If the Russians come we leave him.”
Next morning one of his sons led Jack and Loxley up the cliff past frozen waterfalls and across an icy log over a crashing tributary of the Little Kowkcheh to a hanging valley where junipers grew along a cliff. “I ain’t doing this again,” Loxley said. “I do not intend to die falling.”
Hidden by a fallen rock slab a Russian Army blanket covered a cave mouth. They crawled down a long tunnel into a smoky cavern stinking of spoiled mutton, sheepskins, sweat, clove tobacco and gun oil. In the gloom men crouched round two fires drinking tea and cleaning weapons; others lay sleeping on a rocky platform. Wahid stared up at Jack, surprise then anger contorting his features. “What evil jinni brings you here?”
“When I left, before the Russians came, I said I’d return.”
“But why?” Firelight deepened the cobra-shaped scar on Wahid’s right cheek. He had grown angular and thin, Jack noticed; gray snaked through his tangled hair and beard.
“What happened to Edeni?”
Wahid half-smiled. “The Russians can’t defeat us, so they kill our families.”
“Ahmad?”
“Run to Kabul. War’s too rough for him.”
“Your mother?”
Wahid swung his head, meaning Don’t ask.
“My students?”
“Their deaths were a necessary evil. To give us strength.”
Jack stared into the fire seeing their faces. Yesterday he thought he had all his children. Now he had none. He wanted to clasp his aching head, lie down forever. “We bring you weapons. And the promise of more.”
“When you left Edeni you were a teacher. Now you’re a soldier, promising guns?”
A man brought chai, the cup warming Jack’s hands. “More than guns.”
“A few infidels from across the ocean, you’re going to kill a million Russians?”
“No. We’re here to help you kill them.”
“No. You want the Russians tied up in Afghanistan forever. We’ve been fighting them while you Americans have been drinking liquor and consorting with your women. We can kill them, blow up their tanks and trucks. But not helicopters. Because of the helicopters we can’t hide, can’t travel except at night. We’re easy to track in winter. In the last battle I was the only one who survived, and even then I was wounded.”
“To destroy Russian helicopters you need missiles. From us infidels.”
“So I’ve heard. Strelas, the Russians call them...”
“It means Arrow. It’s also called SA-7. We’ve brought you two, and a launcher.”
“You come here, after three years, with two missiles, and expect to be welcomed?”
“The hungry man shouldn’t complain how he’s fed –”
“We don’t need infidels to kill infidels.”
With his Russian combat knife Jack cut a loose thread from his sleeve. “Any time the Russians want they’ll chopper you to pieces.”
“Yes,” a gap-toothed man said. “We should try these Strelas.”
“That’s true, Aktoub,” another added. “I’m tired of hiding from the helicopters.”
Wahid smiled. “I was only angry because two missiles is not enough. Of course you should try them – next time the Russians come up Kowkcheh canyon.”
Aktoub nodded. “In a week perhaps they come. We can try them then.”
“Bring the Algerian named Husseini and the other new Arabs,” Wahid said. “Let them taste blood.”
“In a week, then.” Jack sheathed his knife. “If the Strelas work we might find more. With two hundred camels of Strelas maybe you could win this war.”
Ghost Bait
DAWN BLOODIED the peaks above the Kowkcheh canyon. An early spring wind hissed through last year’s dead grass, bringing the rushing sound of the river up from the canyon far below. A hawk circled overhead and dove fast digging its talons into the grass, then flapped slowly upward, a brown rabbit jerking in its claws.
“See how well we’re hidden,” Hassan Husseini said in French. “If the hawk can’t see us surely the Russians can’t.”
Jack scanned the rocky, bouldered slope below where Loxley and Wahid’s other mujihadeen hid in their spider holes, glanced down at the dirt road snaking along the edge of the cliffs beneath them. “The hawk saw us. She just didn’t care.”
“He,” Husseini said. “It is the male that hunts.”
&
nbsp; Jack tried to ignore the dull throb in his brain. “She. The male is brighter-colored. And they both hunt.”
He tried to recapture his thoughts. Perhaps due to the danger, they flitted quickly from one memory to another. He had been thinking of his dream last night where all his students were still alive and were singing and playing and happy. Then seeing the hawk had made him think of the fields and forests of home, why Susie didn’t love him, if anyone would ever love him. Would he have been different, more lovable, if his father had lived?
He rubbed his chin on the breech of his AKMS. For months in Sin City and now in this month in Afghanistan his beard had grown, but still it itched. “Pull your muzzle in under the overhang,” he said to Husseini, “so it doesn’t reflect, and a MiG sees it.”
“MiG? I see no MiG.”
“There’ll be one. And he’ll pick you out just like the hawk did that rabbit. And you’ll squeal, too, when you die.”
“In a bad mood today? Miss your television, easy women, going to the mall?”
From almost beyond hearing came a far rumble. He felt a stab of fear, a weird frailty, an uprushing in his throat. “The Russian tanks!” Husseini shivered. “They’re coming!”
“They’re climbing to the pass. It’ll be twenty-two minutes before they’re here. If they don’t take the other road.”
“Inshallah.”
“Forget God’s will. Just do what I tell you.”
Husseini pretended Jack wasn’t there. Pouting like a girl. But push him too hard and he’ll shoot you in the back and call it another victory for Allah. You couldn’t trust the Afghanis – many who’d rather bury a knife in a friend than a Russian. But even more you couldn’t trust these holy warriors Home Office was bringing in from Egypt, Saudi, Yemen and other Muslim countries. Even the Afghanis said Never let an Arab walk behind you.
Particularly Algerians like Husseini, although they spoke French. The France you loved they hated. All of them finding their way to Hell for a shot at Paradise.
If the tanks didn’t come then everything would be fine. In three weeks they had to report to Ackerman in Pakistan; maybe there’d be no need to return here. But if the tanks came there would be a firefight and he might die, Loxley too, when otherwise they would have lived. His stomach fluttered; sweat slid down his arms; he feared Husseini might see.
“You shouldn’t smile,” Husseini said. “I am doing this for a spiritual reason. I am not a mercenary like you.”
Jack sighed. “Aren’t there any atheist Muslims?”
“It is against Sharia. To be a Muslim is to know that the Koran is the exact perfect word of God. A Muslim who does not believe the Koran must be killed.”
“If the Koran is perfect it has no mistakes? Then who’s right – Sunni or Shiite?”
“That came later –”
Jack felt an itch to needle him. “The Koran says the world is flat. Yet you came in an airplane around it.”
“God brought me –”
“Sura Twenty-two says one of God’s days is a thousand of ours, but Sura Seventy says fifty thousand... The Second Sura says God created the earth then the heavens, but the Seventy-ninth says the opposite. If one’s wrong, how can the Koran be perfect?”
“Do not challenge God. Or you will burn in Hell forever.” Husseini shrugged. “Actually, as an infidel you will anyway.”
The vapor trails of two MiGs cleared the peaks, pink in early sun, the planes silver pinpoints before them. Jack checked his watch. “Eighteen minutes,” he called to Loxley.
“Eighteen minutes,” Loxley answered.
“And why,” Jack turned to Husseini, “does the Tenth Sura say God guides us to the truth, yet the Fourteenth says God leads astray whom he pleases? How can we know if we’re guided to the truth or led astray?”
The tanks made a steady grumble now, mixed with the jagged whine of APCs. How many troops in those APCs – a hundred? How were twenty-one mujihadeen, plus five new Arab “warriors of God” like Husseini, and him and Loxley, going to stop well-trained Soviet troops with tanks and APCs? And if choppers came?
If the Strelas had been damaged in the jump? They sometimes misfired anyway – what then? His wrist was trembling; he reminded himself of what had happened to Edeni.
Once long ago you went to war with a stone, a knife, a club. You faced the man you fought. You didn’t die from a speeding chunk of lead you never knew was coming. Then came the thrown rock, the spear, the arrow. Death you can’t see coming. Now this.
Husseini was rubbing his thumb on his AK sling, a little scratching noise. Scared too.
If the tanks came this way and the MiGs could make the cut down the canyon, he and the others would be blown apart. He imagined his body in bloody chunks; it made his gut lurch. But Wahid’s men had said the MiGs couldn’t make the cut.
If he died here no one would ever know where or how.
God guides us to the truth, yet God leads astray whom he pleases. Fools.
If you’re never afraid, Captain Perkins had said back in Sin City, we don’t want you.
He checked his Spetsnaz watch, wondered what had happened to the Soviet Special Forces commando who once had worn it. “Eleven minutes.”
Think what they did to Edeni. Get them for that.
IN THE LEAD T-55 TANK Captain Leo Gregoriev was also thinking of death. How it came when you least expected – you were bending to tie a shoe and stepped on a mine, or taking a leak beside your tank like Kostlev and a sniper spread your brains across the turret for crows to feed on. “Throttle back!” he yelled at the driver. “Number Two can’t keep up.”
“It’s not him, Sir. He’s slowing for those damned sardine cans behind him.”
They bothered him, those APCs, the men packed into them. He shoved up the tank’s hatch and dawn poured in lovely after the oily stench inside, the wind sharp in his lungs. It made you so alive to breathe this air, see these mountains. Even in Afghanistan, dung heap of human misery and cunning.
“Which way at the top, Sir?” the driver called.
Ahead the dirt track widened as it eased up the slope to the pass. He stopped the tank and stepped down. Only danger and love make you alive. Was that why he was here?
Gravel crunched under his boots and hissed away on the wind. Among the rocks so many places a sniper could hide. The thought made his chest feel hollow, afraid. You’re the one who asked to be here. The battle of modern civilization against backward fanaticism, science and reason versus superstition and hatred. Is that why?
A half-fallen cairn cast a rumpled shadow where the road forked. One fork bent east toward the headwaters of the Mashhad River. The other cut right and dropped round a cliff toward the Kowkcheh canyon.
His body ached to climb inside the safety of the tank. Instead he walked a few meters down the right fork, saw another section far below notched across walls of stone. Vertical canyons below it, above it cliffs and wide avalanche fans of tawny rock.
His men called the Afghanis duki – ghosts. We’re ghost bait, the men said. You go on patrol to draw fire so the Air Force can come down and hit them. But by the time the MiGs arrive the duki are gone.
That’s why they call them ghosts.
On the left fork there’d be no duki on the saddle, but they could be down in the valleys above the Mashhad River. But on the right fork, toward Kowkcheh canyon, where would they hide in the steep rock and still have good fields of fire?
Either way could be duki. Which way did they think he’d go? Imagine you’re a superstitious peasant and you hate everyone who comes here. How would you think?
Would they think he’d go left because the first part was less dangerous? Or that he’d first think that but therefore go right?
If the patrol’s purpose was to entice the duki to shoot at you then you should take the fork where they might do so. Where they felt safer. Or thought you were more exposed. Far above two MiGs sketched rosy trails across the brightening sky making him feel safer.
With his s
eniority and combat time he could be in Moscow, vodka bars and luscious willing girls, working his way up the promotion ladder. He hitched his jacket and kicked a rock off the cliff. “We’re going right,” he called climbing onto his tank. “Spread the word.”
The tank lurched forward, slowed where the road squeezed round the cliff. The sky narrowed, darkened. The canyon was like this war: the deeper you go the worse it gets.
With a shock he realized Number Two had pulled within ten meters. “Speed up!” he yelled down. He couldn’t hear the driver over the clanking treads and roaring engine. He bent down into the open turret.
“No traction, Sir,” the driver called. “Road’s getting bad.”
Behind his tank came the second T-55 then the line of sardine cans and a last tank. He felt better when the two first tanks and the first APCs had passed the rock face, the road slanting sharply down, on the right a four-foot high shoulder, on the left abyss.
The tank slowed to nudge its way round a nose of rock. Ahead there was no road, nothing but straight cliff where the road had been. And far below the river.
“Back up! Come in, Rabbit!” he yelled into the radio.
“Rabbit here!” came from the last tank. “We’re taking fire, Sir.”
“Turn upslope till you can fire the fifties over the shoulder!” He snatched the airlink radio. “Othello this is Truelove!”
Through the tank’s armor came the whack of bullets, the ear-cracking shudder of a grenade. “Come in Othello!” he radioed to the MiGs high above, “Truelove here!” The tank lurched back, whammed into the tank behind it, snapping his neck.
“Othello here.” The pilot’s voice was tinny, indistinct. “I hear you, Truelove.”
“We’re being hit! Get down here!”
“On our way.”
“They’re up the canyon above the road. They’ve cut it in front of us. You can’t hit them from above, you have to drop on them from the west.”