by Mainak Dhar
I heard men’s voices up ahead and closed my eyes, praying that Hanif would be okay, that I was not sending a child into harm’s way, imagining what it would be like if Aman was ever in a similar situation.
More voices, raised in anger or irritation this time, the sound of a slap. I clenched my fist, fearing the worst. Then crying. Hanif begging for mercy, saying that all he wanted to do was to go home.
I didn’t understand all the words, but the pleading in his tone was unmistakable.
Some men were laughing now. Then, a harsh voice cut through the laughter, shutting all of them up.
I had expected it, but this new voice spoke in accented Pashto, mixed up with English, and finally he issued a loud command in English. ‘Check his damn uncle out and get rid of them.’
Then, silence.
Footsteps approaching my position.
Hanif speaking in a deliberately high-pitched voice, saying his uncle needed help. Then, he began to cough loudly. That was our agreed signal that he was close enough for me to get ready.
He was just a kid, but my heart went out to Hanif for just how brave he was being for my sake. He kept pleading with the men that he had two goats and both were now lost and that his father would have his hide for it. That his uncle had broken his leg in chasing the goats down a hill and needed urgent help. I was that uncle.
We had agreed to that code. Two goats meant that there were two men coming with him.
Hanif had been so convincing that they had decided to get rid of him and his pesky uncle. They planned to kill both of us and get rid of the bodies. After all, who would come asking for a kid and his uncle in this part of the world.
Karzai had scanned the area and concluded earlier that they had no visible guard posts, perhaps trying as best as they could to maintain the illusion that this was just another tiny village.
But they had two sentries watching the approach Hanif and I had taken. We had waited four hours to see when they rotated sentries before making our way there when the sentries changed. I was sure they had spotted us, and I had tried to look as convincing as I could about dragging my supposedly broken leg along, using a branch as support, before collapsing behind the rock, where I now waited. We had bet that the men in the village would not send too many men out to check whether we posed a threat, and dispose off a child and a man with a broken leg.
The footsteps were closer and I heard both men chamber rounds and rack back the slides on handguns.
So, they didn’t want to waste rifle ammo on a kid and an injured man.
That was fine with me.
They expected an injured man, who had perhaps passed out from pain.
As Hanif came into view past the rock, I pulled him hard past me and, out of the way and out of the line of fire, in case the men got a chance to shoot.
The first man, surprised by this sudden turn, barely had time to react when I grabbed the back of his head with my left hand and stabbed up with the combat knife I had kept hidden in the folds of my clothes, burying it almost up to the hilt in his neck. The man’s eyes bulged and he emitted a low moan as I pulled him behind the rock. His friend, who was now past the rock, was turning towards me, his gun coming up, as he was trying to come to grips with the sudden attack.
Karzai was perhaps seven hundred meters away from us, sitting in his concealed sniper’s nest with a suppressor on his rifle. About 2,296 feet, give or take. The muzzle velocity of the Dragunov is 2,722 feet per second. Over that kind of range, the bullet slows down due to the impact of air resistance and gravity, but the Math was inescapable.
From the time Karzai pulled the trigger, it took less than a second for the bullet to hit the man just above the nose. As he went down, his face shattered beyond recognition, I grabbed his body and pulled him towards me, to ensure that his comrades back in the village wouldn’t see him fall.
Both men were carrying AKMs and Glocks. We didn’t really need their guns or ammunition, but one of them was carrying a hand-held radio set which I took. Neither of them had any identification, but both looked to be locals, perhaps hired for guard duty and to keep passing villagers at bay.
I dragged both bodies behind some bushes near us. It wouldn’t keep them concealed for long from anyone looking seriously for them, but it might buy us some time.
One of the radios crackled to life.
The voice at the other end was speaking in English. ‘Where have you disappeared? Get back. Have you started looking for the damned goats?’
I covered my mouth a bit, pretending to cough, hoping that the guy calling wasn’t best buddies with the guard and would know immediately that I wasn’t him.
‘We’re getting rid of these two. Ten minutes.’
‘Idiot. Can’t take you ten minutes to get rid of them. Get back fast. The boss is headed down and we needed extra security around the guest hut.’
My ears perked up at that. Perhaps, the hostages were in the village after all. If there was reason to believe that the hostages were kept elsewhere then the plan was for us to move back and regroup. Take advantage of whatever intel we had.
But if the hostages were likely to be in the village, there was only one way to go.
Immediate action.
***
Not for nothing had Karzai got his fearsome reputation when he had been a sniper in Afghanistan, with the call sign of Seven Six Two, for the 7.62MM shells he fired with devastating effect. One shot, one kill. That had been his credo.
Karzai was now demonstrating that with devastating impact.
I had not yet looked around the rock, for fear that guards in the village would see us, but the commotion we heard told us that his diversion was working.
The radio I was holding crackled to life.
‘Man down!’
‘Another down in the eastern corner!’
‘Another one down!’
Karzai was taking shots at will, but picking off targets in different parts of the village, making it seem like they were under attack from multiple directions.
Some idiot panicked and fired off his rifle on full-automatic, with no real hope of hitting anything or anybody other than by accident, but adding to the chaos.
‘Reinforce the perimeter. Go, go, go!’
Whoever was running the show had dropped all pretence of being a local. All transmissions were now in English.
Hanif peeked around the rock and whispered back to me. ‘No guards now.’
By then, I had put on the turban one of the guards had been wearing, his ammunition belt wrapped around my chest and waist, and I picked up his rifle.
Hopefully in the chaos, I would pass for just another guard.
I ran straight into the village, closely followed by Hanif.
The boy was a natural. He peeled away to the left, screaming at the top of his voice.
‘They shot my uncle! They shot one of your men as well. They are coming now! They are coming here.’
Four black-clad men jogged past me towards the passage I had just come from, as I entered the heart of the village. Three men were standing near a small hut in a corner. That must be where the hostages were.
We ran towards them. While I was carrying a rifle, there was no way I would succeed by shooting my way out of this, not without getting Zoya and Aman killed.
Once again, Hanif’s pluck and acting skills saved the day. He barreled into the first man, who swatted him away, and began pouring the choicest English abuses at him.
Hanif, doing an admirable job of pretending to not understand a word, kept crying and babbling in Pashto.
It was clear that all three men were outsiders. One of them looked at me, clearly taking me for another guard.
‘Who the fuck are you? When did you join up?’
‘Got in recently. Was told in the fort to join you guys here and then things went crazy. This kid keeps screaming. No fucking idea what’s going on.’
The man walked up to me, sizing me up. ‘Where you from, buddy? Never seen you be
fore in any of the group briefings.’
The man was American, judging by his accent. My bet was that he was a mercenary or a Private Military Contractor hired for this job by whoever was orchestrating it.
The world of PMCs was a murky one – private armies, often manned by special forces soldiers, who figured out that serving a private paymaster was more enriching than serving their flag.
The US had begun hiring many of them in Iraq and Afghanistan to do the dirty work where it would be politically inconvenient to have their regular troops involved, and yes, body counts among PMCs made it to the front pages less often than when regular troops were killed.
I don’t think I was a great actor, but I had been trained to bullshit as long as I could if I ever found myself in enemy hands, and one trick our trainers had taught us was that the best lies were the ones that were most closely based on some semblance of truth. That way, you could try and prolong the lie, even under interrogation or mild torture. If it got worse than that, well you were probably dead anyway, and keeping up your cover story was the least of your concerns.
‘I’m Indian. Was in Navy Marine Commandos and then got hired up by LRC when I was in the Congo on peacekeeping. Good money, saw the world, and then was told I was sub-contracted to come here. Who cares who’s the boss, as long as they pay, right?’
He smiled and nodded at his friends. ‘Just another grunt stupid enough to sell his soul for money and land up in this shithole like us.’
They all had a laugh and I grinned along.
Hanif had begun babbling again, and this time I slapped him.
‘Shut up, kid.’
The man in front of me grinned, but his expression changed when the radio at his shoulder crackled to life.
‘We lost another man near the front gate. Snipers. Get more reinforcements there.’
The guard looked at me and nodded. ‘You, stay put here with Doug and two of us will go and check it out.’
Doug was tanned like the others and with dark skin, and if I were to guess, it was not his real name, or perhaps was the name he had adopted in the US. Or, perhaps his ancestors had been from the Middle East, and he had grown up in Brooklyn and was indeed called Doug. Who cared? The bottom line was that all of them seemed to be of Middle eastern origin, which suited their story of being ISIS terrorists.
If there’s one thing worse than a bad guy with a gun whom you’re trying to think of how to kill, it’s the bad guy who talks too much. Sheer distraction, but you get to learn all kinds of stuff that can come in handy later.
‘Hey man, weird shit, right? We got these hostages and the bosses up there won’t say squat about what they want. Only the small group up there with Khalid know what’s up. And, what’s with the Chinks? They’re suddenly here, lording it over everyone. If they didn’t pay so well, I’d get out of this shithole.’
‘How many Chinese?’
‘Not too many. Most of the guys wearing black are Chinks, so that makes less than ten. The rest of us, they want us dressed like fucking jihadis. God knows what they want. There are some old Taliban tunnels out to the East where they keep bringing in weapons and reinforcements from. Scuttlebutt is that some big fish came in a while ago, with more Chinks. That’s why Khalid’s been up there. He’s not bad, as far as officers go, but I don’t know how much even he knows about the real deal here.’
Doug offered me a cigarette which I refused.
He shrugged. ‘They say smoking kills. Throat cancer and all that. Hell, with all the shit we go through, there are many more ways I could get killed.’
‘You got that right, buddy.’
With that, I stepped closer to him and slit his throat, easing him down to the ground, my hand clamped across his mouth.
I called Sandberg on the sat-phone I had been carrying. ‘Now! Now!’
Within seconds, the ground around me shook, as two Hellfire missiles fired by the Predator circling overhead hit the village, one impacting the far eastern edge and the other to the west, close to the path which led up to the base.
I had no idea if the strikes killed any of the bad guys, though I supposed the drone operator would have been watching for where they were gathered.
At over a crore rupees a pop, it was a very expensive way to take out one or two men, or just rearrange the dirt and rocks in some random Afghan village, but if Karzai’s sniper attacks had caused chaos, this took it to the whole next level.
Men began running out of some huts nearby. I saw two more black-clad men, rushing past me. If there was someone in command, it wasn’t obvious who it was, and while everyone was running around, I whistled to Hanif. He ran to the hut and as I kicked the door open, he ran inside, screaming for me to come in.
I rushed in and saw a figure huddled in a corner.
Zoya!
As she looked up at me, her first reaction was disbelief.
‘Zo, let’s get you out of here. Come on.’
Zoya ran into my arms.
I held her tight, relief flooding through me at finding her safe.
Then, I now got a look at her face, streaked with dirt and dried tears. Her eyes were wide open in terror and there was blood trickling down from the edges of her mouth, where she had been struck.
I felt a cold dread spread through me.
‘Where’s the woman they brought with you? Where’s Aman?’
‘Aadi, they took Aman. They took both of them a little while ago. They have Aman!’
Nine
‘Men coming in from the right. Many men with guns!’
Hanif kept shouting in English and Pashto alternatively, hiding behind one of the shacks a few metres from the hut where Zoya had been kept. He did his job well, as the guards, panicked by the shots Karzai had fired and then the large explosions caused by the missiles, ran in that direction, hoping to get some payback.
Well, some of them did. Usually the brave or the stupid are the ones who run towards danger. Many others run the other way.
This is what two fine gentlemen, figuring their paychecks didn’t quite cover this sort of hazard, were doing as they headed straight towards the dilapidated building behind which Zoya and I were crouching.
I had hoped for a clean run to the gate but as with most plans, things tended to go off script the moment the action began.
I didn’t want to fire and attract attention from the other guards, so I slipped out from behind the building and stabbed the first man, aiming for the kidneys. As he screamed and went down, I stabbed him again in the neck.
I didn’t have enough time to turn before the second man was on top of me. He was a big man, as tall as me and wider around the shoulders and chest. If his complexion didn’t give away the fact that he was no Middle Eastern or Afghan jihadi, his tackle, perhaps perfected as an American football player in school or college, confirmed that like most of the men in the village he too was an American mercenary or PMC.
The tackle also totally flattened me, knocking the wind out of me.
He was on me, trying to choke me with his big hands.
I turned one of his fingers the wrong way, and as it snapped, I could see his face contort in rage.
Guess he hadn’t counted on an Afghan villager doing that, had he?
Then he began swinging away at my face with his fists. I blocked the first few, but with his strength, it was inevitable that I got a couple of pretty hard hits to my head.
When I got my first really bad scar on my forehead after a tussle with a jihadi near Uri sector in Kashmir, my CO had joked that I shouldn’t worry, chicks dig scars.
But after a point, you stop looking rakish and look like someone’s punching bag and this guy was not just trying to kill me, he seemed to be on a personal mission of tearing my head off with his bare hands.
I tried to roll, he countered; I got a blow into his midriff, but he didn’t really seem to feel it.
If fancy unarmed combat training wasn’t going to work, time to get back to basics. I grabbed his hand and bit it
as hard as I could. I drew blood, he screamed and recoiled. But that only seemed to piss him off even more, as he brought his head down and smashed it into my face.
I managed to move my head to just enough to the right to try and protect my nose. If he hadn’t broken my nose, he must have come very close to it, considering how much it hurt. His hands closed around my neck once again and he began squeezing.
When you’re in deep shit you, sometimes notice the weirdest things. And, what I noticed as he loomed over me was that he wasn’t bad looking at all, other than some really messed up teeth. Perhaps with better luck or better dental hygiene, he might have got a break in Hollywood.
So, this is how I was meant to die. Strangled to death by a Brad Pitt lookalike with bad teeth in the middle of a bloody Afghan village, which was so small that nobody had even told me its name.
Brad’s eyes widened and I saw him convulse, once, twice as his grip around my neck loosened.
I took in deep breaths, like a man pulled out from under water as the hero-lookalike turned around.
That was when I saw Zoya standing there, bloodied knife in hand.
The man slapped her, sending her spinning to the ground.
Hanif picked up the knife and ran at the man, stabbing him.
The man, clearly much tougher than your average Hollywood hero, swatted him away as well.
Zoya and Hanif may not have killed him, but they had brought me the time and space I needed.
The man’s neck was exposed to me now and I struck him as hard as I could, aiming for his Adam’s Apple.
He grabbed his neck, losing his balance and I rolled out from under him, grabbing my knife, which had been lying out of reach and diving on top of him, stabbing him repeatedly till I was sure he was dead.
All I wanted to do at that point of time was to lie there and close my eyes, but we had no such luxury.
I got up, pulling Zoya up and grasping her in a hug.
With my other hand, I pulled Hanif up, and the three of us stood there for a second, just holding each other, glad to be alive.
‘You okay?’
Hanif grinned up at me, despite the blood coming out of a split lip. ‘Now you’re just like Salman.’