by Mike Bond
Jack nodded at the Arabs standing in a nervous silent circle. “Home Office sent us ten new fedayeen.”
“What are we supposed to do with ten more fucking A-rabs?”
“And twenty launchers and a hundred ninety-seven SA-7s.”
It started raining as they lashed the launchers and missiles to the camels’ packsaddles and roped them down under Russian tarps. The rain and wind and the kerosene lanterns made the camels nervous and they stamped their hooves and bit at the men. Bandit stood under a pine watching and shaking rain off his fur.
Before they reached the pass into Afghanistan the rain had turned to blizzard. The camels bellowed and tried to turn back and kicked at the men when they poked them with bayonets to keep them going. Jack’s gloves froze to his rifle; rain had frozen his Pakistani coat and he couldn’t stop shivering no matter how fast he climbed.
Loxley grabbed Jack’s shoulder and yelled into his face. “Gotta bivvie up.”
“We’ll fucking die! With this wind chill it’s fifty below.” Jack yanked at the lead camel looking for the trail in the blinding snow, but each time he opened his eyes the snow sliced into them. Then in the darkness he made out a trail. Thank you God, he thought. I promise I’ll believe in You, just make this the trail.
It was. A deep wide furrow in the snow, drifted over but still visible. He could just make out the first of Wahid’s men behind him leading the second camel. Ahead a rock rose from the snow – a cairn. Joy surged through him. Going to make it.
The cairn was soft and warm. Not a rock. Fresh camel dung. They’d come in a circle. Tracking themselves.
Bandit sat on his haunches looking quizzically at Jack. His ears and the bridge of his nose were white. Why are you going round in circles? he seemed to ask. Can’t you smell the trail? For goodness sakes it’s right in front of you. We were here only a week ago – can’t you remember?
“Show us the trail, Bandit,” Jack tried to say, but his lips had frozen.
Bandit shook off snow, raised a rear foot and scratched at his ear, sniffed the camel dung, lifted a leg and peed on it, scuffed snow over it and trotted into the night.
Jack dragged the camel along behind Bandit. When the dog got too far ahead he sat in the snow waiting. Jack looked back, barely seeing the next man and camel behind him.
They were going down. With each step the camel slid forward on Jack’s heels. Bandit came back barking and wagging his tail.
The wind knocked Jack over, cracking his knee on a rock under the snow. He tried to rub the knee but could not feel his hands, saw one glove was missing, his hand cold as a metal claw. He fumbled the rope into the other hand and stuck the numb hand inside his pants.
In minutes the snow had risen to their waists. The camels stumbled and skidded, faltering under the weight of the missiles. Even Bandit grew afraid, plowing ahead, begging them Hurry, hurry.
The wind raged against a headwall beside them. He remembered this place: the trail two feet wide notched into the cliff, loose rock under the slippery snow, at his left elbow a straight drop to rocks a half mile below. Climbing this section a week ago the camels had been frightened.
When he looked there was no one behind.
He shoved back on the halter but the camel ran him down and skidded him off the edge, his body dangling by the halter wrapped around his wrist. He snatched at the rock with numb hands, but it was sheer, no grip. The camel jumped back, slamming him against the cliff. The rope had frozen round his wrist; he couldn’t free it. The camel swung him over the edge and back again, his rifle banging his ribs.
His fingers were helpless against the ice-hard rope. He bit at an end but the camel jerked back and tore it from his teeth. He was blinded by snow, his hat gone. Wind screamed in his ears. The camel backed up, dragging him onto the trail. She pawed a front hoof at the snow, lowered her head to his. Unexpectedly she nuzzled him, her triangular mouth warm hairy and lip-thick against his face. “You saved me,” he told her. “Good girl.” He rose and she followed him, head bobbing up and down at his elbow. Bandit came back barking: I’ve followed the trail down. It’s easy.
The trail leveled. Ahead were huts, a great bowl of rock sheltered from the wind. The camel knelt with a groan and he started to unsaddle her. “We’re saved!” he told her.
Someone whacked his shoulder. McPhee. “Loxley!” McPhee screamed. “He fell!”
Jack leaped up. “Where?”
“Over the edge. You and your camel kept on going and his fell over!”
Jack ran back up the mountain screaming “Sean! Sean!” He knelt on the narrow trail where gouged snow showed someone had fallen, tried to climb down the cliff in the darkness but it was vertical and icy. He started to fall, scrambled back.
His face had frozen. He went back down the trail to the huts and unsaddled his camel. Aktoub came with a plastic cup and milked her as she stood shivering in bowl of rock, and handed the cup to Jack. “It is a very tall cliff,” Aktoub yelled over the wind. “Even in summer we can’t reach the bottom.”
McPhee had built a fire of camel dung and window frames from one of the huts. He did not speak.
Nothing’s more important than your buddy’s life.
Bandit came, licked Jack’s hand and curled up by his feet. I’ll make it up to him, Jack told himself. Whatever it takes, I’ll be stronger, harder.
More deadly than before.
Coals
BY APRIL THE KABUL HILLS shimmered with new grass. On the low south-facing slopes the snow had gone except in canyons the sun could not reach. With the warmer weather, mujihadeen offensives were picking up, and the roar of MiGs taking off from Bagram and the thud of distant artillery grew constant as the rumble of a sea.
Sophie had put apple blossoms in a bowl on the table of the little house they’d found near the Hospital. “I didn’t pick them,” she said. “The wind knocked them down.”
Leo hung his coat on the nail by the door. “I worry about you alone here. When I go back to the Panjshir you should move in with the old women –”
“Isn’t that what the Crusaders did – sent their women to live with nuns?”
“Things are getting worse –”
“I see how many wounded come in every day.”
“Yesterday a shell hit the Haji Yaqub mosque.”
“Do Muslims get Heaven credits if they die in a mosque? Like dying in battle?”
He fumbled for his Yavas, remembered he’d stopped smoking. “Fuck them.”
“I’m so tired of their needs and fanaticism. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot and then saying, ‘It’s your fault, fix me or I’ll kill you.’”
He unwrapped the newspaper around the mule steak he’d bought at Jade Welayal Bazaar. “You know what today is?”
“The twenty-fifth, isn’t it? Or the twenty-fourth?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Stop teasing me!”
“Our anniversary – the night we went to the café –”
“You’re right – one month!”
He put rice a pan and poured water over it. “See, already you’ve forgotten.”
“How could I? The sweat and cigarette smoke, the canned beef from Dushanbe –”
“Any normal woman would’ve jumped at that.” He took two bottles from his rucksack. “The best Georgian champagne.”
“My God! How did you find it?”
“The Chizikhs won’t miss it...”
“What is Chizikhs?”
“Rear echelon bigwigs.” He lit the kerosene stove and put the rice on to boil, and in the street found some boughs and planks and made a fire in the courtyard. They sat with their backs against the west wall of the house, drinking the first bottle of champagne as the sun sank behind the Paghman hills and the fire burned down to coals and he put the mule steak over the fire on a window screen from a blasted house.
“I saw Ahmad today,” she said. “He needs more food for the children... He told me his brother’s a mujihadeen leader in the Panjshir – some Ea
gle of the Hindu Kush.”
Leo scratched his back against the coarse wall. “Wahid al-Din. The one who suddenly has missiles.”
“He wants you to meet his brother, try to arrange a peace.”
He slid his palm up her thigh. “In this place there’s no word for peace.”
“Stop that! He met Galaya, the girl who used to help me at the clinic. He seems quite taken with her.”
“Nothing like war to make people horny.”
“It’s easy to be happy, isn’t it? All you need is somebody to love and food and a place to sleep. Why isn’t everybody happy? Then we wouldn’t have wars...”
“That night at the café a month ago – really now, what did you think about being there, with this dirty old tank commander, his lecherous friends –”
“I only cared about you.”
“I was sure you didn’t like me.”
“Already I was in love with you.”
“Suppose someday we’ll be like my folks – old and chubby and wrinkled and a little forgetful and still always calling each other ‘Lyubemets’ – that means ‘Darling’?”
“I’ll never be chubby.” She squeezed his hand. “Your fire’s dying out – hadn’t you better go fix it?”
“That’s when it cooks the best. After the flames are out, and all that’s left is coals.”
“YOU’RE THE ONE making making all these orphans,” Ahmad said. “Your opium from the Panjshir – you have more money than I can dream of – can’t you give just a little?”
Wahid put down the stone with which he was sharpening his bayonet. “You’ve come all the way from Kabul to beg?”
Ahmad glanced round the circle of grim men. “It’s for children, Wahid –”
“Send the boys to madrasah to learn proper Islamic ways. The girls don’t matter.”
“Massoud’s agreed to a peace – why won’t you?”
“He won’t live out the year.” Wahid smiled at the men around him. “True?”
“True,” they murmured.
“If all the clans could make peace with each other, we could negotiate with the Soviets... They’ve lost thousands of soldiers. They’d like to find a way out.”
“They make the same mistake the English did a hundred years ago: not closing the passes into Pakistan. And not understanding that we’re not afraid to die.”
“Because we have nothing to live for.” Ahmad felt exhausted and dispirited. “The Americans who bring you arms and mujihadeen – they’re infidels too –”
“True. Even this Jyek who was your friend in Edeni, it’s he who brings the Strelas.”
“He’s here? Jyek? Where?”
“Gone to Pakistan with the other Americans to get more missiles. He’s very good at killing Russians, by the way, these Communists who now seem to be your friends.”
How could this be? Ahmad wondered. He thought of the night in Edeni when he and Jack had clasped bloodied hands – I will always defend my blood brother, they had sworn, with my own blood. Had Jack come back to avenge Afghanistan? “If I meet some Soviet officers,” Ahmad said, “through a doctor I know, would you talk with them?”
“What would I gain,” Wahid chuckled, “from peace?”
“You have so much influence with the northern clans – not for nothing they call you Eagle of the Hindu Kush... Use this power to unite us and you’ll be our leader.”
Wahid snapped the bayonet onto his AKMS. “There’ll be a shura council in a week. Perhaps I might discuss with the other chiefs what we could gain by talking peace.”
“And the children in the orphanage, can’t you give something?”
Wahid shook his head. “God takes care of children as He wishes. Money is for guns.” He smiled. “And missiles, when we can get them.”
AT 40th ARMY HQ Leo took the stairs to General Volnev’s office two at a time but that made his head pound. He slowed, surprised to feel winded at the top. Damn cigarettes – she was right to make him stop.
He watched the cigarette pinched into a notch of the General’s ashtray, could almost taste its slender ascending veil of smoke. Smoking’s like war, we hate it but can’t stop doing it. “If we can expand this truce beyond Massoud –”
“All it’s done is start a civil war between him and the other warlords.” Volnev drained a plastic coffee cup. “The moment we’re gone...”
“This Ahmad seems real. And his brother’s a big mujihadeen. If I can learn what they want...”
“Doesn’t matter what they want, Gregoriev. It’s what they need.”
Like everyone else, Leo thought, what they need is peace to raise their children. Be with the one they love. Enough to eat. “Everyone wants peace, Sir.”
Volnev sucked at his cigarette, waved away smoke. “These bastards want war. War and more war. They don’t love their women, they love war.”
Leo waited. “I try to understand the Afghanis, but...”
“We can’t. They’re not like us. We send rockets into space, unravel the secrets of the human mind, create superb engineering, raise our daughters to be brain surgeons. They step in the same medieval camel shit they’ve always walked in, huddle in mud hovels, hide their daughters in head rags and beat them if they show their face.” Volnev paced, waving his empty cup. “Sixty years ago we were like them – theocratic superstitious peasants in straw huts, leading our nags around parsimonious fields rented from nobles who thought because they had twenty words of French and wiped their ass with paper they were better than us!”
He snuffed out his cigarette. “Look what we’ve done in sixty years – twice defeated the world’s most evil war machine, created the world’s highest educational standards – out of our superstitious theocratic peasants, mind you! Ah shit!” Volnev tossed his cup onto his desk, spattering the papers scattered across it. “All the good men we’ve lost!”
“Maybe it’s time we stop. Sir.”
Bent forward with both palms on his desk Volnev stared at him. “We thought everyone could be brought into one modern world.” He laughed. “But they’re infected with Islam – this theocracy of theirs. We’re pissing in the wind.”
“It’s the leaders who want war... The crazy mullahs and tribal chieftains.”
“Isn’t that la condition humaine?”
“I’d like to give it a shot, Sir.”
“You’ve had a serious head wound. And you’ve got that lovely French doctor... Somebody’s got to make babies in this world instead of killing. I’m going to send you home.”
“We Russians aren’t supposed to die a natural death, as Gogol says. And I can’t leave my men, no more than you can.”
Volnev snatched the coffee cup from his desk, refilled it from the jug on the teletype table. “Fine,” he sighed, “Meet them halfway. Then maybe we can take our dead and go home.”
Stronger than Stone
OUT OF THE DUSK came the muezzin’s wail for evening prayer. In the distance small arms were firing, then the steady thump of D-30 howitzers, each a jinni sucking life from the world.
Ahmad slipped past the silent children and out the back of the orphanage. At night Kabul so terrifying. Couldn’t see where mines might be, or who might be hunting him in the darkness.
Leo was waiting with a translator in the teashop near Soviet HQ where they’d met before. “It’s dangerous here,” Ahmad said.
Leo rose to shake his hand. “Where isn’t?”
Ahmad could not help but smile at this grizzled, coarse big-fisted man from far away. Easy to see why the French doctor loved him. “Thank you for the rice last week.”
“We’re sending more tomorrow. What does Wahid say?”
“The Americans are sending even the teachers who were here before, to fight you.”
“Teachers? Tell me.”
“One who was my friend... If only you and he could meet...” Ahmad broke off. “Speaking of food –”
“He’s with your brother, this American?”
Ahmad did not like this translator. Un
shaven, in a Soviet army tunic, with an Uzbeki accent. Like the bandits who had killed his father. “If you meet Wahid what will you say?”
“That we’d like to see Afghanistan united. Putting its energy into schools, health care, infrastructure.”
“If you want to make a deal with my brother don’t mention unification.”
“Why not?”
“He’d lose influence. He wants power, not peace. Like Hekmatyar, all these Lords of War – isn’t that what you call them?”
“Warlords, yes.”
Ahmad started to drink his tea, stopped. You never knew what was poisoned anymore. “If they had to choose between a healthy Afghanistan under foreign influence, or a bombed-out slaughterhouse under their rule...”
Leo said nothing, nodded. “So what do I offer him?”
“A piece of somebody else’s territory. That’s how to excite him.”
Leo grinned. “Whose?”
“More of the Panjshir.”
“Take it from Massoud?”
“Because Massoud’s made a truce with you. Then go to Massoud, offer him Wahid’s territory in Badakhshan. That’s how things are done in Afghanistan.”
“There’s a Russian proverb about giving the same horse to two men. Instead of sharing it they cut it in half.”
“Wahid offers to meet in Kowkcheh Valley, where the Varduj River comes in.”
“That valley’s too narrow. Parian – where the tar road stops?”
“The Valley of the Moon? It’s narrow there too.”
“Tell him a week from today. At noon.” Leo stood. “We’ll be in a convoy, with air cover. Defensive only.”
Ahmad snuck home through the dark and broken streets. Food tomorrow. Why was he possessed by such sorrow and dread? Because of this war, he decided. It kills all hope. Not this Gregoriev, though. He seemed the type to look into the jaws of Hell and not lose courage.
“SO YOU LIKED it in Kabul,” Wahid said.
Suley snuck another lamb rib from the pot. “There was lots to steal. Not like Edeni.”
“Eat up,” Wahid smiled. “With us there’s always plenty.”
“In the orphanage there was nothing. Rice swept from a floor. Weeds from the road.”