by Mike Bond
Still at the back of his mind a haunting worry... Could imagination warn him of danger? Could time reverse: could he see his future and be allowed to change it?
He’d done what he came to do. But that didn’t matter. What did matter? What if he’d become a soldier only to finish what his father had begun? Was that him?
Wars would never end: each grew out of those before it. His foot splashed and he shook it quickly so the water didn’t soak it. If you take the wrong path, the Koran says, God will surely punish you.
Bandit growled, blocked the trail. Jack tried to wave the others down but they kept coming. He grabbed Husseini, whispered, “You’re supposed to watch me!”
“At night there’s nothing –” Husseini started to say in a loud voice.
“Shut up!”
Aktoub and McPhee came up. “Somebody coming!” Jack said. They ran back the trail and McPhee and Jack deployed the men in the willows with a field of fire down the trail to the stepping-stone bridge.
“Tell them,” McPhee called, “no shooting till we know who it is.”
“If they’re up here at night,” Aktoub said, “they’re enemy.”
“If there’s too many,” Husseini panted, “we should let them pass –”
A distant rustle, scuff of sandal on rock, the low steady breathing of men coming fast. “Hekmatyar’s men,” Aktoub hissed. “I smell them.”
“Let them pass!”
“They’re infidel-sucking scum, camel’s offal, enemies of God –”
“We must kill them fast,” Husseini said. “Before they can shoot.”
“I said don’t shoot!”
In a spat of green fire Husseini opened up, the shadows diving off the trail, their muzzle flashes and tracers snapping back. A man screamed, a hot spike smashed through Jack’s shoulder, crushed the air from his lungs.
He lay choking face down in mud. Guns boomed and chattered. He rolled over and with his left hand tried to cover the soaking horrible hole in his right shoulder. A man stood over him, glint of bayonet flashing down as Bandit leaped roaring – a pistol shot and yelp.
Bullets snapped like wasps. The pain was awful. The firing slowed, stopped. I’m dying, Jack realized. After all this...
McPhee’s voice was calm and measured but Jack couldn’t understand. His shoulder was crushed, afire. McPhee lifted him. “Sling your good arm around my shoulder and run!”
“Morphine!”
“Gave you some.”
“Where’s Bandit?”
“Go!”
Everything grew sharp, starlight on the trail, blood pouring down his chest, the squeaking of a man’s sandals as he ran past. Every step drove pain into his shoulder, sucked strength from his thighs and calves. The trail switchbacked up into a cold rain that froze on his face. “Over the top now,” McPhee panted. “Down there a van. Take you Kabul.”
“Where’s Bandit?”Time passed. “Morphine!” he begged.
Hours of jolting agony, whistle of wind through the van’s bullet-pocked window, incessant squeal of an axle, the shudder of a clutch plate each time the driver changed gear. Day became night that became day then night again. He lost Bandit then found him then lost him again, the soft fragrant fur, the rasp of a wet tongue on his cheek. McPhee’s rough constant voice, the hand on his forehead or lifting up his head to adjust the tarp beneath.
“Bandit?” he asked, surprised at the awful pain in his throat.
McPhee drove the needle home. “Soon no more English. Pashto only. You’re just another raghead with a bullet in him. An Afghani regular with the Russians, shot by mujihadeen. Aktoub’s gonna stay with you. Remember: you’ve been shot by mujihadeen. Pick a name, an Afghani name. Somebody you know from your village.”
There was somebody. “Ahmad.”
Thirst blazed down his throat into his lungs and stomach, down the arteries of his legs and arms, seethed up into his mouth till every breath baked his swollen lips and drove the superheated blood through his brain like lava. Again and again McPhee raised Jack’s head to the jiggling canteen. “Stay with us, Jack. Stay with us.”
“Where are we?”
“Kabul. Ebnecina hospital. Aktoub will check on you every day. I’ll be in a safe house by the hospital. Soon as you’re out we head to Peshawar.”
Going home. Jack eased into a welling sense of being protected and cared for. Good tough dependable McPhee. He clasped McPhee’s hand. “Need to find my dog.”
“He died. Saving your ass.”
WHITE GLARE, WHITE WALLS, stinging odors, hushed racing voices and flickering bulbs. He floated down a river smooth and silent, a gurney wheeled into a small room smelling of chemicals. Clack of X-ray plates then hushed voices sucked down into a vacuum of silence.
A woman’s voice, weary and full of pain. Speaking Pashto but not a native. “For a week,” she said. Another voice – Aktoub’s – arguing.
“If you move him,” she said, “he’ll die.”
Her voice turned away; another voice answered in the same tongue and he realized it was Russian. His joy switched to terror. I’m Ahmad from Edeni. Shot by mujihadeen.
Sooner or later you get payback. Save me, he begged her. I’ll love you forever.
SOPHIE WATCHED THE DYING MAN on the operating table. It wasn’t the bullet-shattered shoulder that would kill him but the septicemia. “How many days since he was shot?” she’d asked the Afghani irregular who’d brought him, but the man had just shrugged, “I wasn’t there... Maybe three days? It was the mujihadeen who shot him.”
She adjusted the floodlight over the table to shine on the wound. What did it matter who shot who? They were all assassins. They all deserved to die.
She was dead too but still went through the motions. You forced yourself to take a breath each time you noticed you had stopped. Every time you were alone the tears poured down your face like lost children and choked your throat till you were so worn of crying you hardly did it any more in public. Your chest was crushed; the world hummed around you, electric and false, but you couldn’t find a place it wouldn’t reach you.
“Hook him up,” she told the nurse, “antibiotics, fluids, get him under so I can irrigate and debride the wound...”
“If he’s going to die, Doctor...”
She couldn’t take it another minute. Yes, a minute she could. But not another hour. Not to help this man. How many had he killed? Why save them when they’ll only kill more?
“You’ll do the anesthesia?” the nurse asked anxiously.
A clatter of stretchers being brought into the next room, a man moaning. If she could just make it through the next hour. The next day. “Nemerov’s not here?”
“You’re the only one tonight.”
Every single thing reminded her of Leo’s death. Every moment. That he was not here anymore. Would never be here.
The dying man’s face was drained of blood. Septic shock, acute infection. Supposedly he was on the Russian side. But there were no allegiances in this horrible country. Who was to say this man hadn’t killed Leo? She bit back a sob. I will not cry any more in front of people.
He wasn’t going to make it. The infection too advanced, no primary treatment, the filth, bullet fragments, and dead tissue in the wound. She didn’t have the drugs to fight it. But he’d been strong and healthy, she could see that, more muscular and taller than most Afghanis, a hill man probably. Beard not as dark as most, such deep blue eyes.
Unlike most Afghanis his biceps and triceps were thick and corded like those of weightlifters back home. With a number twelve scalpel she pulled out a piece of cloth the bullet had punched through the bone. It was the typical arcing trajectory of a boat-tailed AK bullet through human flesh. By habit she described the wound as she worked. “Clavicle shattered lateral third, glenoid cavity and scapular fractures, coracoclavicular ligament not salvageable... sepsis... we’ll need to set him up with IV penicillin...”
“But if he’s not going to live?” the nurse said. “When we need the
medicines?”
With the back of her wrist Sophie adjusted her mask, took a breath to steady herself. “Go check on the new ones.”
The wounded man’s skin where the sun hadn’t touched it was paler than any Afghani’s. Bright teeth, no cavities, two silver fillings. Well done. Modern.
The nurse came back. “Three wounded, one critical. Two dead.”
“Call Captain Alexov – this man’s not Afghani,” Sophie started to say, then stopped. To Hell with him. He’d soon die and get dropped in a hole, she didn’t care.
Owe You
THE LIGHT NEARED, pale yellow, orange in its center, flickered away. It’s not true, he realized, that when you die there’s a bright tunnel. No, the light comes and goes.
Pain. Did that mean he was alive?
The light neared. “Who are you?” a woman said in English.
Who am I?
“Just now you spoke English,” she said. ”We heard you.”
“Please,” he said in Pashto. “Help me.”
“Who are you?” she said in Dari.
Ahmad from Edeni. Shot by mujihadeen. Someone had told him that, but in English. He could not think the words in Dari. “Who are you?” she said, a different language.
Duki – was that the word? No, there was something wrong with that. “Help me,” he said again in Pashto.
A distant knocking. Loud banging. Hard heels coming. “Spetsnaz!” the woman whispered.
Spetsnaz? He felt fear, not knowing why.
A loud voice, nasty and deep. Rustle of uniforms and clink of weapons. “You can’t come in here!” the woman yelled.
“We come where we want. Who’s he?”
Silence. “An Afghani irregular,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“The man who brought him –”
“We’re looking for a duki. He could be the one!”
The gurney shuddered as a hand snatched back the sheet. Jack felt cold, afraid. “Stop that!” the woman said. “He’s dying. Two Russians were with the ones who brought him.”
“You – you’re not Russian!”
“My husband was Russian. He was killed last month.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Go ask General Volnev. Now get out of here.”
Silence. The sheet up to his chest. He opened his eyes. She was young and thin. He realized with sudden terror that she had spoken Russian. “Please water,” he said in Pashto.
“Soon,” she answered, “you’re going to have to tell me who you are.”
AHMAD WATCHED THE PURPLE Kabul sky and wished for rain. If this drought kept on there’d be no water for people to drink or cook with or to put out the fires the bombs and shells made. Everything so dry that even the mud and dung houses burned when tracers hit them.
It was not even September but in the orchards the withered fruit had fallen from the trees. The wheat had come up only an inch and died. The farmers were turning their goats into the fields where they stepped on mines or died of hunger or the farmers ate them first.
“Remember when the rains were good?” Galaya said. “Everyone had fat animals and tall wheat? I wore blue jeans like American girls. We went to movies. Now if you don’t wear a veil they throw acid in your face.”
“We had a parliament,” he remembered. “A democratic constitution. Schools and teachers, a university, professors...”
“I’ve washed all the little girls with the last of the bath water. The little boys are yours. The water’s filthy.”
“But it’s wet. It washes some dirt away.”
“And deposits more.”
He smiled. “I forget how much worse life was before you –”
She reached out. Her hand was slim and cool and tense. He felt an electric shock up his back into his head. So this’s it, he thought. This’s how you know.
JACK LISTENED TO THE HOMELY sounds of Kabul through the window above his hospital bed – women calling children, storekeepers yelling their wares, a donkey’s bray, a rattle of trucks. A loudspeaker screeched, roared static, then a muezzin’s aggrieved chant. He was back in the world and everything was wonderful.
His upper right arm was wrapped against his ribs, the forearm across his chest. With his good left arm he reached out for the tin cup of water beside the bed, drained it. The motion hurt his wounded shoulder but it was a good pain. How had she saved him? Who was she?
I know who I am. Ahmad from Edeni. Shot by mujihadeen. McPhee said so.
A distant whine became a howl. He cringed as a shell whined down. An instant of pure silence then the air sucked in and the bed shook and plaster sifted down from the ceiling. After a few moments the sounds of the city picked up again as if nothing had happened.
He looked up at the IV. Had to get out of here. Where was McPhee?
When he woke again she was there. “Where am I?” he said in Pashto.
“You’re not Afghani,” she said, also in Pashto. ”Who are you?”
“Are you Russian?” he said in Pashto.
“French. And you?”
He thought of Husseini. But if he said he was Algerian she’d speak to him in French and catch him that way. “From Saudi Arabia. I came to Afghanistan –”
“To fight the Russians?”
He sensed danger. “I’m fighting nobody. A journalist.”
“We’ll send a messenger to your embassy then. For them to come get you. And pay your bill...”
He reached out his left hand. “You saved me. Why?”
Noises on the stairs. He sat up. He had no gun, nothing. She ran into the corridor.
Three young men in beards and turbans burst in, dirty and hard-faced, eyes red with opium, carrying AKs. Then another, gray-bearded, pistol in his hand.
She followed them back in. “Please!”
“Silence, woman!” The older man turned on Jack. “Who’s this?”
“A Saudi journalist. His embassy’s coming to get him. Please leave!”
“He’s a Soviet spy. Shoot them both.” He stepped out the door and his steps receded down the corridor.
One of the three men gave the doctor a carious smile. “Or we sell her. Think, how much money –”
“Warriors of God,” said a fat one with a white eye, ”have no need for money.”
The one with bad teeth glanced at the doctor. Another who limped pointed his head – outside. “We fuck her and shoot him,” bad teeth said. “Then we sell her.”
“Too much noise, shooting inside,” said the fat one. “Hurts my ears.”
More shells came drifting down softly like rain then ear-crushing explosions. “Our Muslim brothers from the north,” said bad teeth. “Shelling us.”
“That’s Soviet 155s,” the doctor said. “Now get out!”
“I won’t go out in this,” the fat one said, “just to shoot them.”
Bad teeth cocked his AK at her. “We shoot them here.”
“It’ll hurt my ears,” the fat one said.
“Dangerous out there,” said the one who limped. “I agree, we shoot them here.”
“You’re with Hekmatyar,” she said.
“And so?”
“When he finds out you’ve bothered me he’ll kill you.”
“He loves us,” the fat one said.
“Last week I saved his brother’s life. In Jalalabad. He’s sworn to protect me.”
“I didn’t know he had a brother...”
“His brother Abdullah – you doubt me?”
“We were told there was a foreigner here,” bad teeth said. “One of the ones who killed some of our men last week, in the Kowkcheh.”
“I’m Saudi,” Jack said. “We bring guns to Hekmatyar. We too are warriors of God –”
“Tell Hekmatyar I’ve saved a true believer,” she called after them. “Praise God!”
When they were gone she yanked his IV. “You’re not Saudi.”
He took a deep breath. “You saved me,” he said in French, “Vous avez sauvé ma vie.”
She stared at him an instant, grabbed his hand and pulled him up. “That’s bad French. Vous m’avez sauvez la vie.”
He stood. “It’s true you saved his brother?”
“Whose brother?”
“Hekmatyar.”
“That pig. I’ve never met his brother.” She gripped his good arm, her slim body hard against him as she walked him down the dirty corridor toward a patch of daylight. “I’m taking you to a friend in Kabul. Where you’ll be safe till you get stronger.”
He made himself walk faster. “When they come back they’ll kill you too!”
“I’m leaving soon. To work in a refugee camp on the border. Hurry!”
“You’ve saved me.” Jack gasped with pain on the steps. “I owe you.”
“Save someone else. Then we’ll be even.”
Langley
I’LL GET KILLED, she thought, leading him out the door down a long street of battered buildings. She tightened her black veil round her hair and face. He could be ISI, Spetsnaz even.
Even weak and injured he gave off a sense of physical power, emotional solidity. Who was he? “You have to walk alone,” she told him. “I can’t touch you in public.”
“Go away,” he muttered, breathing hard, not looking at her. “You’re going to get killed.”
“Turn right there, at the bottom of the hill. Hurry! Faster!” She waved at a passing jeep but it picked up speed. “Bastards,” she hissed.
“Where you taking me?”
“Like I said, to a friend. You’ll be safe there. Whoever the Hell you are.”
IT WAS A DARK DIRTY part of Kabul stinking of charred buildings and broken sewers. She hustled him up a reeking path to a low rambling building. Dusk was falling. He reeled on his feet, nauseous with pain. She banged on the door. “Hey!” she called softly. “It’s me.”
A slim man came to the door, poorly shaven, a thin graying beard, black spaces between his teeth, his hair receding, narrow glasses down his sharp nose. “It is you!” he smiled. “Our guardian angel! Quick, inside!”
It was a narrow entry lit by a smoky candle. Jack stared at him. The doctor took the man’s hand and nodded at Jack. “Can you keep him a few days?”