The First Stone

by Carsten Jensen

  Finally, Hannah thinks. Viktor is demonstrating his loyalty to the mission instead of trying to sabotage it.

  They need another four-wheel-drive truck; they point their rifles threateningly at the driver and passengers to keep them at bay. The soldiers then drive the vehicles through the excited crowd that has quickly gathered. Mathias sticks his rifle out the window and lets the barrel scan the onlookers; he fires a couple of warning shots up into the air, and they step back so the cars can pass.

  Emptying the crashed APC, they haul the contents over to the bed of one of the four-wheel-drive trucks. An excited throng surrounds them. The noise of their protests must be deafening—but Hannah still can’t hear. One of the soldiers fires another warning shot. Dennis jumps in with his 12.7. The heavy machine gun finally restores peace.

  Hannah is moved into another APC. Viktor has taken over command now, and Hannah feels safe. Sara is also sitting there. Zuy is still holding his ears. Once Hannah’s hearing returns, she asks Sara to join her in the middle of the armored vehicle so they can look out over the landscape.

  They’re nearing their goal.

  11

  A few hours later they turn off Highway 1 and continue northeast on Route 611. Although they’re driving across a plain covered with irrigation ditches, the area looks anything but verdant. The ground, blanketed in white dust, is cracked everywhere, as if the irrigation ditches have all dried up. Naked trees stand in the middle of the fields, and as they draw near, they can see that the trees, like the fractured earth, are scarred from the impact of grenades and mortars. Demolished stumps and bristly roots, the detritus of explosions, are all that’s left near the road. Bulldozers have been here. The walls surrounding the houses have been blown apart, and the houses they’re supposed to protect have collapsed into ruins.

  A little farther off, at the top of a small ridge, they can see HESCO walls surrounded by barbed wire, boards, and sandbags. It must be an American base, but the outpost looks as deserted as the farms strewn across the once-fertile plain. They’ve driven into a war zone, but the battle seems undecided. The warriors have scattered from the battlefield in all directions. “FUCK,” spray-painted in silver across the boards, screams out in response to the empty landscape.

  They can see a small town built on a slightly sloping hill that ends in a mountainside. The houses aren’t surrounded by the usual walls but are arranged instead in rows facing each other. It must be the abandoned bazaar. “Tangye,” says Sara.

  A gravel road leads into town. The belts on the APCs can handle it easily, but the four-wheel-drive trucks get stuck and spin their wheels a few times before working themselves free. As they get closer, they can see that the bazaar must have been deserted several years ago. The remains of the houses’ walls have started to resemble the nearby rock formations, thanks not only to gunfire and explosions but also to the wind and rain. The landscape is slowly reclaiming the sparse evidence of humanity’s presence. Farther behind, in the more sheltered areas, the buildings seem to be in better shape.

  If anyone is up there, the convoy has already been spotted. Using their binoculars, they scan the sun-bleached clay walls. Right now there’s no sign of life. They’ve entered a ghost town. The landscape whispers it, as do the dead trees, the cracked earth, the dried-out canals, and the abandoned American outpost.

  No birds of prey circle high above their heads. The war has been here and moved on. All that remains is dust, the slow erosion of everything. And maybe some long-forgotten roadside bomb that never found its mark, or a land mine lying there like some archaeological remnant of one of the many wars fought here in the last thirty or forty years. The mines can still kill; the past is always ready to take revenge on those who ignore it.

  They decide to break for lunch and take out the American self-heating rations. Corned beef, macaroni and cheese, tortillas with tuna, and that gross clam chowder no one really likes.

  Through his binoculars, Steffensen scans Tangye’s walls. His hands are shaking. At first he thinks it’s only the binocular’s unusual weight, but then he realizes his body is sending him a signal. He doesn’t share the other soldiers’ elation; he’s more afraid than he wants to reveal.

  At that moment he spots something moving in the landscape.

  12

  The boy appears in one of the barren fields a few hundred meters away. One moment he’s there and the next he isn’t. Was he hiding in one of the dry irrigation ditches? If he can get so close without being seen, who else might be hiding in those canals?

  He’s about twelve years old, dressed in a shalwar kameez and bareheaded. In one hand he’s holding a meter-long piece of jet-black fabric waving like a ribbon behind him. First he glides it across the ground, and then a light wind picks it up and it unfurls like an endless banner. It seems so weightless that Steffensen guesses it must be made of silk.

  Camper fires a warning shot into the air. Unaffected, the boy keeps walking. Small white clouds swirl around his feet, and a plume of dust follows him everywhere. He’s too far away to catch up to. They watch him for a while, and then the boy disappears suddenly, as if he were nothing but a mirage.

  “What the hell was that?” Hannah looks inquisitively at Sara.

  “He’s close,” says Sara, pointing up at the crumbling houses along the streets of the bazaar. “Up there.”

  “Let’s get going,” says Hannah. She’s not issuing an order. There simply are no alternatives—they’ve made their choice.

  The two APCs roll up toward Tangye with the trucks following behind them. Sørensen walks alone in front of the convoy with his mine detector. It makes no difference whether they get there now or an hour from now. It won’t be a surprise attack. Every so often they stop as Sørensen lets the mine dog sniff hesitantly across the ground. They discover bombs and mines, but the metal content is so low that it doesn’t even register on the mine detector. Meanwhile the engines idle. Then they continue at the same speed as before.

  They stop on the outskirts of the bazaar. It’s too risky to drive into the narrow streets where an ambush might be waiting, if there are any people left in the deserted market town. Two ladders are attached to the APCs. They lift them up against the wall of the outermost house. Once they’re up, they’ll be able to move from roof to roof. They can survey the streets and the courtyards from above, making them less exposed and giving them a broader view. And there are no land mines on the roofs.

  They leave the APCs and trucks with three sentries, Sørensen, Mathias, and Gustav. Every step is a huge risk now. They’re in the Gray Zone, where everyone is either a total professional or a complete amateur. It’s do or die. They don’t even want to think about the third possibility—that they won’t find anything and are moving farther into a void, where any progress they’ve made will end abruptly, and there will be no hour of reckoning.

  Although Sara follows along with the soldiers, Zuy stays back with the APCs. Sørensen kneels by his side and shows him a photo of his boys, Frederik and Anton. Zuy doesn’t react.

  Once they’re on the first roof, Adam and Viktor hoist up the two ladders. They should also have troops in the streets, but there are too few of them. Watching from all sides, they move across the roofs. The narrow streets were once covered with branches and straw to screen out the sun; now there’s nothing but dried remains.

  They reach the first open courtyard, shielded by houses from the street, and lower a ladder. Sebastian and Dennis remain on the roof, their weapons at the ready, while the others crawl down the ladder. Hannah and Adam are at the front. They don’t look at each other as Adam kicks in a door. Dennis exchanges glances with Hannah when she’s the first to climb back onto the roof. She shakes her head. They’re concentrating so hard that even words are a waste of energy.

  Moving across the roofs is slow and difficult, but their own security is their highest priority. They can’t be tempted by the silence permeating the abandoned bazaar. They lose all sense of time. Two minutes might have pas
sed, or maybe an hour, when the boy with the billowing silk banner suddenly reappears. He’s standing on a roof a couple of streets away and holding the black banner above his head. There’s much more wind up here, and the long piece of fabric flaps vigorously behind him. He doesn’t move. Camper follows him again in the scope. Suddenly the boy turns to the side and starts running from roof to roof along the street. It’s a long street, and he gets smaller and smaller, the black banner streaming behind him, but before he reaches the vanishing point he’s out of sight. He must have jumped down into one of the courtyards opening before him. His banner disappears down into the hole like smoke on a film running backward, where fire swallows up the smoke instead of emitting it.

  “Good thing you didn’t shoot,” says Hannah to Camper. She thinks she saw something in his eyes. Silently, they resume their search from house to house. They find numerous traces of people—not so unusual in an abandoned bazaar—but no fresh leads, no weapons, no sign whatsoever that anyone is living here.

  Suddenly the boy appears again, this time even farther away, still running with the silk banner streaming behind him. And again he disappears.

  “What’s going on there?” Hannah looks at Sara.

  Sara shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Is it a signal? Some kind of crazy ritual?”

  “It’s him,” says Sara. “He is here. I am certain. It is meant to scare you.” Sara’s look implores Hannah. “You are the strong ones. Stronger than him.”

  Hannah nods decisively. Yes, they are stronger. “There won’t be any ambush this time. We’re ready.”

  “Are we ready?” she yells.

  “We’re ready!” they yell back.

  They continue searching until late in the afternoon. Soon it will be dark, and they’ll have to withdraw without having found anything. Yet, as ominous as the sight of the boy seems, it also confirms their suspicions. Sara was right. There’s a reason he’s appearing. This isn’t just some random boy’s game in a deserted city. He’s not just playing with black fabric. Schrøder is playing with them.

  They’re on the right track.

  They aren’t discouraged when they crawl down from the roof. The next day will bring a reckoning. This time they’re certain.

  13

  It’s too dangerous to spend the night in Tangye, so they drive back along the road they came by until they reach the deserted qalats they passed earlier. They’re taking every possible precautionary measure before driving back through the bombed-out gate. Sørensen walks ahead with his mine dog, followed by Camper, Karlsen, Andreas, and Adam, their rifles lifted. They drive through the gate and park in the courtyard. Within the ruins, among the rubble from the collapsed roofs and toppled walls, they find a single room that’s still intact; even the arched ceiling hasn’t taken a hit. Once they assign guard duty, they spread out their sleeping bags. It’s not a particularly large room, so they’re lying close together. They dare not light a fire, not here or out in the courtyard.

  They’ve laid out a plan for the next day. It’s simple—they continue searching the market town. No one mentions the possibility that the next day might also prove fruitless.

  The darkness feels massive in the windowless room, so they turn on their headlamps. Every time someone’s head moves, a ray of light falls across the rest of them, illuminating a pair of bent knees, a matte-black rifle barrel, shoulder pads from a flak jacket, or a pair of cheekbones, above them darkened eye sockets in which the light momentarily reflects off a moist cornea. They concentrate on their field rations. For a while the room consists of nothing but small illuminated tableaux: hands holding a bag or trying to fish something indeterminate out of it with a white plastic spoon. The little steam that rises from each bag quickly merges with their frosty breath before disappearing in the cold night air. A cigarette also glows here and there in the dark, and for a moment it isn’t their breath that’s dancing in the light of their headlamps but the blue smoke of burning tobacco.

  In the glow of his headlamp, Sørensen stares at a photo of his two boys. Seeing him like that suddenly irritates Hannah to no end. Why is he sitting there contemplating his family when he has no chance of giving them any sign that he’s alive? It will only weaken his focus and make him miss them even more. She thinks about Schrøder, who half-jokingly forbade the soldiers from calling home to their mothers. She’d like to rip the photograph out of Sørensen’s hand and tear it in two. Sørensen and Sylvester are whispering together. Probably the usual stuff, she guesses. Children, vacation, family—all that bullshit no one believes in when push comes to shove. Viktor is surrounded by Sebastian, Gustav, and Mathias, his boys, as he calls them. Yeah, his boys. All his concern has only made them unsure about the mission. Fortunately he’s pulled himself together. Dennis is smoking. Hannah has trouble dealing with Dennis. He’s like a self-absorbed teenager. Yet at the same time she feels sorry for him, with that asshole of a father. He has a lot to prove.

  Steffensen has no headlamp. The bag with the field rations feels scalding hot in his hands, so he has to lay it next to him on the floor, where it stays. He has no appetite. He tells himself that he needs all the strength he can get, but his throat feels thick and blocked. Not because he’s about to be sick but because he’s choked with fear.

  He can hear the soldiers smacking their lips while they eat their field rations. Otherwise there’s silence, except when they shift position and the sole of a boot scrapes across the ground. The rough clay walls reinforce the impression he has of being at the bottom of a grave full of amphibious beings who’ve momentarily chosen to ignore his existence.

  The floor is hard, and a rough spot under Hannah’s hip is really annoying her. Turning over, she bumps into a sleeping body that groans a warning. She carefully works her way to a better spot where the floor seems flatter, but the unevenness is still there. She needs sleep desperately.

  In the darkness she can hear someone moving around. Someone else who can’t sleep? She longs to share her thoughts with someone. She thinks about Adam again, although she knows that it’s impossible. He doesn’t approve of her decisions, but she can’t stop now. Or she’ll die. If they stop now, none of them will ever be human again. Can’t he see that?

  He was sitting there when she came to after the roadside bomb. That felt good, but she can’t reciprocate his feelings. Not now. Maybe never. A feeling of overwhelming loneliness engulfs her. She has to be strong—it’s her only chance. She tries to think of someone in her life, a role model to inspire her, but there’s no one. Well, Schrøder . . . for a moment she let him play that role. He raped her heart in response, raped her faith in the world, the very faith that cost her so much to muster. Now she refuses to think of him as anything more than a bullet-riddled body, its life streaming out with the blood.

  She turns over again on the uneven floor. With Adam she shared something she thought was the start of a friendship, but all it turned into was a jealous melodrama. Can they go back to what they were? The question seems misguided. Maybe in another life . . . in another world . . . but there’s only this one.

  Sara pops into her mind, the woman in whose hands they’ve placed their destiny. Is she as crazy as she herself says she is? Whatever she is, Hannah refuses to try to understand her. With sudden bitterness, she realizes that Sara reminds her of her mother. Throughout her childhood, Hannah felt like the boy Sara’s dragging around, unwanted and irrelevant, a wounded shadow who was ignored and had to look after herself. Do women have a soul? Fuck you! she says to both Sara and her mother. Her mother had no soul. She had a bottle of aquavit—the love of her life—and Hannah was just in the way. Why couldn’t she be like all the other kids from broken homes, with a stepmom and a stepdad and stepsiblings and the whole parade of artificial feelings? That would have been better than what she ended up with. She has ugly scars, too, just like the boy, except hers are on the inside. Damaged skin all over her soul. “Soul”! She sneers at the word. If Sara is talking about herself, sayi
ng that she has a soul, whatever the hell that means, then why can’t she see that her boy has one, too—and that she has no right to sacrifice his soul?

  Hannah feels a sudden kinship with Zuy. They could be siblings. They should walk through the streets, hand in hand, carrying a sign that reads: “We have a soul!”

  She never hears the guards relieving each other during the night. She wakens to the APCs’ engines revving up out in the courtyard. They decided not to wake her. They’re taking care of her. Adam hands her a bottle of water.

  “No coffee this morning,” he says.

  Once again they drive up toward the deserted city while Sørensen walks ahead with the mine sweep. Roadside bombs might have been planted during the night. No one heard or saw anything, but they’ve been behind a qalat’s protective walls. And rarely does anyone in Afghanistan see or hear anything before it’s too late.

  They finished checking one street yesterday; today they’ll check another.

  Steffensen looks over at Hannah. “Are we being played? If Schrøder is in there with his men, they could be shifting their location constantly. He could be hiding today in a street we searched yesterday. Is this a cat-and-mouse game? Isn’t our mistake believing that we’re the cat?”

  “We keep going,” says Hannah. “We don’t have any choice. We have to finish the job.”

  As they did yesterday, they leave Sørensen, Mathias, and Gustav with the APCs.

  By noon they’ve been at it since sunrise, still with no results. They’ve gone in and out of countless stalls, each time noting the same empty shelves and open shutters facing the streets, the same rotting wooden stands that once displayed baskets filled with spices. In a few places they’ve discovered cellars that must have been used to preserve goods, possibly slaughtered animals whose meat required the underground coolness. Now, like everything else in the city, they’re empty.