ASSASSINS

by Mike Bond

  As they followed the trail down the tracks grew fresher. From a rocky spur they saw down into the Panjshir Valley, a huge canyon of red and brown rock soaring up into glaciers and vertical peaks. Far below the River sparkled in its black bed like a new-skinned snake.

  Beyond was Pakistan. Strange that they could cross that and in days be in Peshawar, take a plane home. He sat on the rock spur. There was a howl like the wind, growing louder.

  “Plane!” He shoved Loxley into the rocks as the MiG screamed down at them with guns blazing and the world exploded.

  “EVERYTHING’S OKAY on your X-rays,” Sophie said.

  Leo held his head steady. Every time he moved it the damned thing hurt like hell. “I suppose I have to thank you.”

  “It’s my job. If I had the choice I’d let you all die.”

  “In that field clinic, when I realized I was alive, that I had a new life...”

  “Sometimes that happens when you’re wounded. We normally don’t realize how close death always is.”

  “Before this I was just a tank commander. Now I don’t see the point.” It irritated him how difficult it was to understand what he wanted to say, how the drugs made him mumble.

  “Your young men who come in here all shot up. Nineteen years old, a pretty girl at home and now they have no legs, no testicles, or they’re blind. Ask them.”

  A rat scampered along the wall and hid behind a gurney, its tail sticking out like a gray string. “So you think Afghanistan would be better as a feudal theocracy?” he said sharply. “People killing people because they wear the wrong kind of veil?”

  “So you’re killing them so they don’t kill each other? Is that it?”

  “To hell with all that. As soon as I’m better will you have dinner with me?”

  “With you?”

  “What, you have a husband or something? To hell with him too.”

  “I don’t have a husband. Or something.” Her green eyes hardened. “Why would I spend time with a killer? You realize what you’re doing to Afghanistan?”

  This was his new life, he told himself, he didn’t have to reasonable. “We’ll go to the officers’ mess, or the Hotel International –”

  “I just took twenty-six pieces of metal and plastic out of your skull.”

  “My father’s lived forty years with slivers of Panzerfaust in him.”

  She turned to check a monitor behind him. “So get him down here and we’ll operate on him too.”

  New sun through a bandanna stretched across the window warmed his face. He started to stand. “Don’t do that!” she snapped but the damn room spun around and the edge of the bed came up and smacked him in the face.

  She had him by the arm; he stood. “Got to do what you feel. Life’s too short.”

  She sat him on the edge of the bed. “And you, back in Moscow –”

  “Leningrad. Once was called St. Petersburg but we don’t mention that.”

  “– you don’t, back there, have a wife or ‘something’?”

  “I wouldn’t ask you if I did.”

  She was gone. Yet he could imagine her clearly as if he’d always known her: a runner’s tall lithe form – when could she have time to run in all this insanity? Strong cheekbones and a wide mouth over large white teeth, long honey-auburn hair – the beauty of someone who doesn’t know how lovely she is.

  He couldn’t breathe, dizzy. His head throbbed; blood was trickling down inside the bandages. Valley of the Moon, the words came to him but he did not know why.

  JACK COULDN’T understand what had happened, then remembered. “Where’s the MiG?”

  “Left us for dead.” Loxley said. “I told you we shouldn’t get caught up here.”

  “Asshole,” Jack laughed, dizzy with joy at evading death. “I was the one said that.”

  The world was silent but for the hiss of falling snow. Jack glanced at the sky: no snow was falling. “My ears.” His voice bounced around inside his head like a ping-pong ball.

  “Me too,” Loxley batted an ear with the heel of his hand. “Gonna need a hearing aid. Like my Grandma. Suppose that’s covered in our retirement?”

  “Yeah, just like Owen’s twenty-four hour hookers and Jacuzzi.”

  Loxley pulled him up. “So let’s go find him.”

  They jogged along the tracks down toward the Panjshir River and southward toward the Soviet base at Parian. “They’re gonna sell him to the Russians,” Loxley said.

  Jack thought of Sayed’s uncle and his three sons who had led him to Wahid. If you couldn’t trust the people from one valley to the next, how could you unite them?

  “If the Soviets get him – whole thing – will unravel.” Lose another man and he was a failure as an officer. As a man. The words echoed in his head, a metronome pacing him as he ran, Lose another man... Failure as a man... Lose another man...

  The snow thinned and soon the tracks picked up a mule trail that was wider and easier to run on. “He’s dragging one foot,” Loxley said, “going slow as he can.”

  “He goes too slow they’ll shoot him.” Jack saw the three brothers shooting Owen and that made him run faster, holding the AK in his right hand, gripping one strap of his willow basket pack against his shoulder with his left.

  LEO SAT IN MORNING sun in the hospital ward, a book on his lap, watching his fellow wounded soldiers. The one-legged hobbling on crutches, the wheel-chaired somberly rolling, another going round in circles by himself. A few with wrapped heads sitting quietly, some with bandages over their eyes. One on a bench kept chuckling as he snatched with his left hand at a right arm that was no longer there.

  Heroes of the Soviet Union. For this wound he’d get a – what medal was it they gave to those stupid enough to step in the way of a bullet? And he was a lucky one.

  “Still alive?” the doctor said, her French alien amidst the din of Russian. “I did too good a job –”

  “I’ve been watching these wounded men. And trying to understand why, in the vast chaos of life, did they end up here to be killed or ruined for life?”

  “It disgusts me, healing people so they can kill again.”

  “Me too. I don’t understand why we fight... this damn wound has ruined me... But why are you here?”

  “Too many injured Afghani women – the male doctors here won’t touch them.”

  “Damn it, that’s why I’m here – to help change this place!”

  “Evil always starts with good intentions.”

  “A waste of time, talking with you.” He turned away, furious yet not wanting her to leave, surprised to find himself reach out and take her hand. “You look exhausted...”

  She yanked it away. “Been here all night.”

  “Doctors Without Borders – I thought you pulled back to the refugee camps in Pakistan?”

  “I had a choice, stay or go.”

  “So you stay?”

  “Like I said, I’m the only one to treat the women.” Her face was half-turned toward the sun; he could see the tendons in her neck, the steady pulse in her throat, the smooth luster of her skin, her small full breasts and the long indent of her waist. He imagined her naked, his mouth dry. Yet how defenseless she was, soft skin and long limbs and lovely lips. Wasn’t it better to be in a tank with seven inches of steel around you? But then the duki hit you with an RPG that drives through the steel and fills the inside with flame, so nothing’s left of you but charred teeth.

  “Now what are you thinking?” she said.

  “The Big Bang.”

  “Big Bang?”

  “This physicist in Moscow, he thinks the universe began with the collision of two particles, two neutrinos maybe. But of course the question –”

  “Where did the two neutrinos come from?”

  “Do you know City of the Blind, by the Afghani poet Sana’i? When an elephant arrives, all the blind people touch a different part of it trying to understand what it is.” He picked up the book, translating slowly,

  “Those who touched the ear sai
d an elephant is thick and flat as a carpet

  Those who touched his trunk said it is a terrifying shape like a pipe

  Those who touched its foot said it is long and straight as a column

  Each one, discovering a part, formed the wrong idea,

  And not understanding the elephant as a whole, remained in blindness

  This is how people think of God

  And why the reason goes astray.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Like them, I believe only what I can feel for myself.”

  A bell was ringing. She stood. “Incoming.”

  He flinched. “It’s not your problem.”

  “My problem is injured people. People hurt by soldiers like you –”

  “I don’t want to argue with you, damn it. Before you came I was thinking of Rumi –

  Before death’s swordsman charges,

  Call for the scarlet wine

  You are not gold, O careless fool!

  To be buried and dug up again.”

  She moved to the door. “So what’s the point?”

  “The point is you should have dinner with me. We’ll drink wine, like Rumi says. Because once we’re dead we’ll never drink wine again.”

  IN BRIGHT sun Sophie crossed Al Minaya, humming under her breath so none of the passing men would hit her for speaking aloud.

  “What a lovely day!” she exclaimed to the old crone at the desk as she closed the door of the woman’s shelter behind her.

  The woman glanced at Sophie over her spectacles. “You were out all night.”

  “Extra wounded.” Why, Sophie wondered, am I explaining myself to this rancorous prude? These women who become what their men see in them...

  In the hall she went to the sink and turned on the faucet. It spat air, then nothing. What a fool she was to think there’d be water. She took water from a pail on the woodstove and washed her hands in the sink and with an old toothbrush from her pocket scrubbed under her nails. Galaya the new girl came into the kitchen with another pail of water. “I put aside some rice for you last night,” Galaya said. “Sorry there’s no lamb. The other women ate it all.”

  Sophie restrained the ditzy urge to hug her. “They need it more than I do.”

  Galaya smiled then caught herself and hid her face. Sophie took the bowl of rice to her room. "Having a good day?" she said to the crucifix over the bed. She did not feel sleepy. She sat at her desk eating the rice and studying her Russian lesson book. Сегодня ясное небо, she wrote, п тицы летают высоко: The sky is clear today, and the birds are flying high.

  Rue the Day

  THROUGH HIS SOVIET field glasses Jack scanned the stone farmhouse hunched in the lee of wind-stripped trees in the valley below. Two mules huddled against a wall, tails between their legs. Smoke pointed like an arrow northward; a bright spot of green was a Soviet tarp pinned by stones to the roof and crackling in the wind.

  “He’s got to be here.” He checked the setting sun.

  “They’re not mounting watch,” Loxley said. “Think they own the place.”

  “We got two grenades left. If he comes out to piss, we take the guy with him and toss the grenades inside?”

  “One guy on each side of the door.”

  “Or one guy in front, the other in back.”

  “I don’t want you shooting me by accident, asshole.”

  “What if he don’t have to piss?”

  “Owen? All he ever does. Remember Vegas, him pissing in that fountain?”

  Jack settled into the rocks. The beauty of sleep. “I’ll wake you in half an hour. Then I’ll sleep half an hour. Then we move in.”

  “Imagine, those fuckers in there... Talkin shit. Eatin Mohammed up sideways. Don’t even know, dumb fuckers. They’re about to die.”

  AHMAD CLIMBED a tank barrier of charred cars and splintered telephone poles, dragging his sack of food behind him. In the old days Kabul had been warmer, but now with so many buildings knocked down and no trees standing, nothing stopped the cold wind. In the old days of the king, before the Muslim uprising, when there’d been food for everyone, a multiparty assembly, a constitution, girls in miniskirts, rock’n roll on the radio, cafés and movies...

  Now by day he prowled Kabul’s bludgeoned streets for food – beet tops, rancid potatoes, spoiled feed from slaughterhouse pens, discarded Soviet rations, old cans from bombed-out basements. At night, exhausted and hungry, he carried what food he’d found or stolen back to the orphanage where a hundred seventy children – the number changed depending on who died, what new ones came – waited with bleak eyes and swollen bellies. It wasn’t an orphanage, really, just Ahmad and an ancient woman named Safír whose husband was dead and whose home this house had once been.

  When he could he sent kids across the Pakistan border to the UN camps, but this was dangerous and expensive. And more and more new ones kept coming – in Afghanistan there was no lack of orphans.

  Today he’d found five candles in a blasted teashop. This was a dilemma. It would be wonderful to have them when Safír amputated a gangrened or mine-shattered limb – this she did with a little curved saw her husband had used to prune fruit trees in what had been the garden. But if she used the candles he could not trade them for food, for a sack of maggoty grain from the United Nations, or even a box of powdered milk robbed from the Soviet “Peace Through Friendship” warehouse.

  A rustle behind him made him spin round: nothing. Rats, or a starving dog, or just this Kush wind from the north. When death comes they say sometimes you hear it coming.

  A smashed Soviet armored car lurked in an alley. It might have rations, even vodka, God willing, that he could trade for medicine or use to anesthetize a child or sterilize a wound. Why say “God willing”? Anyone who’d lived through this would never believe in God.

  He put down his bag, inside it the day’s find of barley swept up from a shop floor, a chocolate bar from under a bed in a deserted Soviet bivouac, seven good cabbages, a pigeon not long dead, the five candles. The armored car’s seats were carbonized and bent by an explosion; it looked like the interior of an oven. But in the back, that silver glow – a canteen, maybe? Gingerly he squirmed through the shattered windshield.

  No, it was just a canister of some kind – teargas maybe, broken and useless for trading. He heard a noise outside, a skidding sound – his bag! He dove out the windshield and sprinted after a kid dragging the bag down the street. The kid caught an ankle in barbed wire and fell spilling cabbages and candles. Ahmad grabbed him. “You little bastard!”

  “I’m not a bastard,” the kid answered, barely breathless.

  Ahmad suppressed a laugh. This country with its insane proprieties, to be dying of hunger yet worry what someone calls you. “What are you, then?”

  “My mother and father are dead. But I’m not a bastard.”

  Ahmad pulled him closer. “I know you! From Edeni. It can’t be – Suley?”

  The kid would not face him. “It’s me!” Ahmad shook him. “Your teacher!”

  Suley had grown into a gaunt fierce boy, perhaps thirteen, so skinny and dirty it was hard to tell. Grasping his wrist Ahmad tried to gather the cabbages back into the bag but they kept rolling downhill. He swore when he saw that two candles had broken.

  Suley snatched at Ahmad’s hand to pry it from his wrist. The kid’s fingers were like steel. Ahmad grabbed his hair. “You’re coming to our orphanage. There’s other kids your age. And food, when guys like you don’t steal it.”

  “You’ll rue the day,” the boy tried to yank free, “you found me.”

  “KNIFE –” Jack rubbed his hands, trying to warm them.

  “Check.” Loxley was shivering too.

  “Full magazine mounted, two spares.”

  “Check.”

  “One grenade each.”

  “Check.”

  “20:03:15.”

  Loxley looked at his Spetsnaz watch. “Check.”

  “20:18 we’re on both
sides of the door, behind the wall. Anybody comes out is gonna be night-blind, we can move in behind them soon as the door’s closed.”

  Night had fallen, bitter cold. Rocks stung Jack’s hands as he crawled toward the door. To his left he could not see Loxley. Even when they had taken up positions he could barely make him out on the far side of the door. From inside a steady rumble of voices.

  A voice moved toward the door. Wood squeaked on the mud floor as the door dragged open, then closed. An Afghani came out, relieved himself, burped and went inside. Odors of wood smoke and cooked barley lingered.

  After a few minutes two voices came toward the door. A dark shape moved out into the night, then another, a third. The door shut.

  “Here I am,” a voice said in English. McPhee. “Out here with two assholes, one on each side, both with guns...”

  “Shut up,” a voice said in Pashto.

  “. . . and a bunch of people inside, one guy with a gun, the rest civilians...”

  “Shut up!” the voice said again, a thunk of a rifle butt against flesh. After a moment, spattering sounds on the frozen ground. “Let’s go in,” another voice said in Pashto. “Catch your death out here.”

  Jack and Loxley closed in behind them. Jack yanked back one man’s head and drove the combat knife into his throat. The man gurgled, dropped to his knees, tried to shake him off. “Owen!” Jack whispered. “It’s us!” He pulled the man back up to keep his rifle from hitting the ground.

  “Where the fuck you been!” McPhee whispered.

  “Grab their guns. Can you walk?”

  They left the two bodies behind a boulder, circled back to the mule track and ran down it toward the Panjshir Valley. After a few minutes they pulled up.

  “That was brilliant, telling us who they were,” Jack panted. “How many.” He wiped blood from his hands with snow, thinking that with each new death the killing bothered him less. “We have to run all night or these guys’ll catch us. There’s a trail along the west side of the valley, about a thousand feet above it. We take that toward the Soviet outpost at Parian, then swing back up toward the Little Kowkcheh.”

  “Parian’s where they were taking me, sell me to the Russians.”