While sitting on a roof in the hot midday sun, they get a radio message from Sørensen, who’s guarding their vehicles at the entrance to the bazaar. An entire caravan of camels, followed by goats and sheep, is approaching from the south. They can see it from the edge of the roof. There’s a second caravan approaching from the north, as if the deserted city were still a hot spot.
As the two caravans approach, they can see that the animals are accompanied by hundreds of people, including women and children. None of the women are wearing burkas or hiding their faces, which are deeply tanned and covered in tattoos.
“Should we stop them?” Sørensen asks over the radio.
“No way. They’re coming from the other side, too. Let them go wherever they want to.” Hannah looks around at the circle of men staring vigilantly. “You all know what this means, don’t you?” She stomps her foot on the roof. “Goddamn it!”
“Yes, we all know exactly what it means.” Steffensen is relieved to hear her words. “It means we’ve spent all this time on a wild-goose chase. We won’t find him here. And if he should show up somewhere, it probably won’t be us who nabs him. The Americans will have to handle it. It’s over now.” Steffensen’s voice rings with a newfound authority. He sounds like the commander he should have been all along.
The soldiers on the roof shift their feet restlessly. They look at each other, and then they look at Hannah.
“Fuck!” The word explodes in a furious outburst.
The noise of the caravans rises from the street. Nomads fill the streets on both sides of the house on the roof where they’re standing. Men and women unload the heavily burdened camels and place stacks of bags and bundles of colored fabric on the ground. It looks as if the empty bazaar has suddenly come back to life and a market is about to open. Fires are lit here and there and sheep and goats are slaughtered.
Adam peers out over the edge. One of the nomads with a black scarf wrapped around his head spots him. Breaking out in a grin, he waves at him.
“Let’s go down,” Adam suggests encouragingly.
“Some of us have to stay here. It could be a trap.” There’s no conviction in Hannah’s voice; she sounds tired and defeated. She’s exhausted the energy that kept her going for the past few days and is nothing but a despondent soldier who has abandoned finding any meaning in the manhunt.
She walks over to Sara and strikes her. Sara could have dodged the blow, but instead she just stands there and takes it. Although Hannah strikes out in desperation, the blow hits its mark precisely. Sara barely moves. She doesn’t even lower her head in humiliation. No hand rises instinctively to her cheek to protect against further blows. Clearly she’s been struck often and takes a certain pride in enduring it without flinching.
Sara takes a few steps back. Savageness flares up again in her eyes.
Hannah falls to her knees and hides her head in her hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she mumbles, her voice thick with tears.
“There’s no reason to apologize,” says Steffensen. “We all wanted this. It had to be done.” He looks at the others, who nod in agreement.
Hannah is still kneeling, her shoulders shaking. Steffensen crouches next to her and places a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Hannah. You did what you could.” He doesn’t really mean that last part, but he can afford to be charitable.
He looks up at the soldiers, his hand still on her shoulder. “We’ll turn back now.” Then he stands up. Hannah is still on her knees. He has to speak on everyone’s behalf now. The chaplain spoke to their heart, but that was just to incite their desire for revenge. Now, he has to do the opposite. They’ve been single-minded in their hunger for vengeance; they haven’t given a second thought to removing anyone who stands in their way. He has to admit that there’s something heroic about it, and they have to see that he acknowledges that, but now it’s time to lead them in another direction.
Steffensen glares at the chaplain. It’s my turn, now. Don’t try to challenge me.
He clears his throat and the soldiers look at him. “You haven’t gotten over the loss of your friends. You’ll never forget the image of that tower with their bodies. We’ll never be finished with Schrøder. Will we ever find him? Right now the answer is no. Maybe others will find him—at least we can hope so—but it’s out of our hands now. We did what we could. That’s what we have to keep telling each other. We did what we could.”
He intentionally uses “we.” It’s important: they have to get out of this together, so he has to admit that they’ve been in it together. Him, too. He can’t be removed.
He avoids looking at Hannah, who’s still kneeling on the flat rooftop.
“If we let our desire for revenge win, we’ll spend the rest of our lives with our faces up against a wall. Our lives will become sterile. That’s why we have to turn around now, not because we’re weak or have given up. There are other ways to fight this war—just as there are other ways to live the rest of our lives. We have a life after Helmand. And we have to have a life after Schrøder. We’ll go back now. Back to camp. Back to our lives. To a new beginning. We did what we could.”
He realizes that he’s also talking to himself. A new beginning. No matter what.
Steffensen can see on their faces that his words have made an impression. Viktor nods in approval, as does Adam. There’s relief in their faces. He looks forward to seeing Sørensen’s reaction. He has liberated them from the heavy burden of revenge, but he hasn’t liberated them from the sight of their dead friends. No one can do that. Maybe not even time.
The noise from the street beckons. They turn to him. He nods, and they drop their ladders from the rooftop.
14
They’re met with the smell of smoke and grilled meat, of spices and dusty camel wool, of urine, sweat, and something that might be perfume, a distillate of bodily excretions, and at the same time a rancid odor of sex and desert blossom. The day is surprisingly hot. The street’s powdery dust dances around their feet like a cloud tethered to the ground. Blue smoke billows between the boarded-up houses. People are shouting and patting each other on the back, a discomfiting physical proximity that the soldiers would normally never expose themselves to.
Viktor left Dennis and Sebastian as guards on the roof. They glance down at the street scene, irritated that they can’t join in. Their usual alertness is momentarily shut down. They were never supposed to experience this country—and now they are.
Adam and Camper are standing by a bonfire and staring at some spit-roasted lamb. Someone offers Simon a piece of cloth whose use he can’t determine. It’s not a scarf or a burka, nor is it a man with encouraging eyes who’s holding it out to him, but a woman showing her face beneath a midnight-blue shawl. Her flowing henna-colored hair falls down upon her chest. Reaching out, he tests the weight of the fabric. It’s thicker than he had expected. Maybe it’s some kind of dress.
The woman sticks three fingers in the air and says a word. Simon assumes it must be the price. He doesn’t know any Afghan languages, so he shakes his head. The woman sticks two fingers in the air while nodding insistently. Simon suddenly realizes it’s the first time he’s stood across from a woman with her face exposed in a completely everyday situation. That would never happen in Girishk. He feels like a typical tourist. He gets the crazy idea that he might buy a souvenir. I bought this while we were hunting for Schrøder.
Then he feels something poking his back.
Hannah, who’s still on the roof, is sitting with her forearms resting on her knees and staring straight ahead. Sara is at the opposite end of the flat roof. She hasn’t moved since Hannah struck her. Zuy stands a ways off, closer to Hannah than his mother. Sara stares intently at the neighboring rooftop.
Hannah follows her gaze. Armed men are popping up all over the roofs, some of them quite close, others farther away. Their flowing robes flutter in the wind. They’re wearing black turbans and holding automatic rifles ready to fire. They stand completely still, as if waiting for th
eir adversaries to make the first move. They must have come up from the courtyard the soldiers thought they had searched.
Hannah jumps up. Dennis and Sebastian could easily fire off a few rounds, but they’re too easy a target.
Someone yells from down in the street. “Don’t shoot! Surrender! They have us!” It’s Steffensen’s voice, hoarse and somewhat broken.
Dennis and Sebastian get down on their knees and lay aside their rifles, all the while keeping an eye on the turbaned men. Now the roof is teeming with armed Afghans who force the two soldiers to lie flat on their stomachs with their arms spread out to the sides. One of the turbaned men walks over to Hannah and, grabbing her by the arm, leads her across the roof. He’s going to toss me over the edge to save ammunition, she thinks. Instead, he forces her to sit down with her face turned toward the valley.
She doesn’t want to think about what’s going on down in the street. Although she hasn’t heard any gunfire, she’s certain that the crowd has been replaced by a mass of dead and mutilated bodies.
“Did you miss me?”
She looks up, but the sun is in her eyes and she has to lower her gaze. Still, she has no doubts about who is speaking.
15
She could have stood up and spit in his face. She could have spit the whole world into his face. Instead, she closes her eyes. She’s overcome by nausea, except it isn’t coming from her stomach. She feels as if she’s going to throw up her heart.
Someone grabs her arm from behind and hoists her up onto her legs. She doesn’t get to see Schrøder before she’s led back across the flat roof. The audience is over. She doesn’t turn around. She’s standing on the edge in front of the ladder that leads down into the street. A hard shove indicates that she should go down the ladder. She turns her face to the wall and tries to concentrate on the rungs. She doesn’t want to look down. The Danes are standing in a half circle, all of them with their hands in the air. Their weapons lie on the ground in front of them. To her great relief, no one is dead or wounded. They’re all there. A group of Afghans is aiming weapons at them. A bearded, turbaned face is visible behind the shoulder of every one of the soldiers: their guards pressing their weapons into their backs. They’re trapped between two rows of armed men.
Someone shoves Hannah away from the foot of the ladder. Others are on their way down. Watching all of the captured soldiers’ faces turn in the same direction, she knows that they must be staring at Schrøder.
“Hi.”
Schrøder sounds as if this is just another daily meeting. His blond hair shines beneath a black turban, and he’s wearing a newly starched white shalwar kameez. Dennis and Sebastian are led over to the group. Schrøder reviews them using every single one of their names, as if he were still their platoon leader: “Adam, Viktor, Andreas, Hannah, Simon, Sylvester, Dennis, Camper, Karlsen, Møller, Sebastian.” They all turn their faces away.
“Commander,” he says, nodding when he spots Steffensen. “I thought this was more of a—how shall I put it?—unofficial visit.”
Steffensen doesn’t respond.
He also recites the names of the soldiers they left at the APCs, Sørensen, Mathias, and Gustav. “They’re on their way,” he adds.
Steffensen starts to regurgitate uncontrollably. He holds his mouth, forcing himself to hold down the vomit. His throat is filled with the bitter taste of stomach acid. He looks down at the ground shamefully, realizing that he’s more afraid of what the men think of him than he is of dying.
“No, I have no intention of killing you. If you’d like to die, though, you only need to ask.”
“Did they ask to die back at the compound? That was an ambush! It was murder—you murdered your own men!” Steffensen, who has gotten control of his stomach, tries to make his voice sound as calm as possible. He hopes he’s making a better impression now.
“That was three days ago,” says Schrøder. “The situation is different now. That’s war. Something new is happening all the time.” He reviews them again. “I was thinking about a story a Special Forces soldier once told me. During training, they had to crawl up to the top of a thirty-meter tower. Then they were ordered to jump off. Just like that. As they were, with all of their equipment and the whole shebang. But this was no bungee jump—there wasn’t any elastic to pull them back. All of them refused. Except one. He walked to the edge and got ready to jump. He was thrown out of the corps immediately. The difference between him and the others wasn’t that he was brave and they were weak. The difference was that he was dumb and they were smart. They don’t need numbskulls in the Special Forces. So, all of you who want to die, just take two steps forward. Out over the edge, so to speak. And then I’ll have you shot.”
No one moves.
“Well,” says Schrøder. “Any takers?”
The soldiers’ faces are filled with spite. They’re clenching their teeth so hard that their jaws hurt. Every single muscle in their face is taut. They’re afraid, and they don’t want to show their fear—they mustn’t show it. Schrøder is toying with them. He’s humiliating them. He can do whatever he wants to them. He’s already killed thirteen of their comrades. Now he can kill fifteen more.
And they don’t know why. What the hell have they ever done to him? His unpredictability is the worst. They know that anything can happen, yet they don’t understand his motives.
“I see you all want to live,” he says. “You’ve made the right choice.”
“What about our families back home?” Steffensen suddenly raises his voice again. “Because it’s you—and whoever the fuck you have working for you—who’s behind those attacks on them!”
They all jump a little at the mention of their families. They haven’t discussed them for days now, but it’s always there, lurking in the background. A two-front war, with no refuge. A trapdoor of terror opens beneath their feet every time they think that their families might be in the line of fire.
“Are you still buying that nonsense? No, I don’t have any conspirators back in Denmark. You just wanted to see a pattern in some random events. And as far as that goes, Chaplain, you’re second to none!” Schrøder looks at Lukas Møller and laughs. “When it comes to being the spokesperson for the rankest form of stupidity, you’re unsurpassed. ‘I’ve seen the Devil’s face!’” He laughs again.
“So we don’t have to worry about our families?” Simon stares inquisitively at Schrøder.
“That’s what I just said.”
“Why should we believe you?” Steffensen straightens up. “You’ll say anything.”
“If I were the one behind all those misfortunes happening to your families, I would sure as hell be exploiting it by now. I’d just threaten you with more accidents if you didn’t do what I said. I’m the one who would strike your father, Simon. I would kill Karen, Steffensen. It would be the easiest thing in the world to take advantage of your gullibility. But I’m being honest with you. They were all just regular accidents back home.”
The relief is clear on their faces.
He orders them to walk through the street with their hands in the air. A couple of his men open the shutters on some former market stalls. The soldiers have already searched them earlier, checking the packed-earth floors for trapdoors that might lead to underground passages. In a few places they found small, narrow cellar rooms once used for storage. Now they watch as two of the men bend over; they seem to be lifting up the entire floor, but it’s a fake floor opening to an underground passage.
Schrøder instructs them to clip on their headlamps and go down into the darkness; it’s not a narrow tunnel they’re led into but a wide passageway. In the light of their headlamps, they can tell that they’re moving from one large room to another. Some are filled with clay pots; others house boxes that seem to contain weapons and ammunition. In others they see oil barrels. Suddenly the dark corridor is illuminated by electric bulbs, and they can hear the buzzing sound of a generator. A room with carpets and cushions opens before them. They’re ordered to sit
down on the cushions.
Adam looks around. “Where’s Hannah?”
16
Schrøder stays at the stall’s entrance. As Hannah, the last in line, starts to pass him, he reaches out his hand to stop her. They’re facing each other again. The last time she felt nauseated; this time she wants to cry. If she does, though, her tears will feel like blood from a slashed artery.
“Hannah . . .”
She has to fight with herself not to say his name. Is her heart still beating? Suddenly her eyeballs feel dried out. Any minute now they’ll burst.
You have to be stronger than me—that’s what she used to secretly beg him. Not because she was weak but because it was so lonely being strong by yourself. Now they’re standing here facing each other. Two equals? Or is she defeated? Why should it end like this?
She realizes that it’s the wrong question. Whatever motives Schrøder had for his actions, they have nothing to do with her. She just happened to be close to him when he was making his plans. He couldn’t care less about her. Is that another reason she wants revenge?
“I saved you.” There’s deranged arrogance in his voice. He hasn’t shaved. His Cupid’s bow will soon be hidden behind a full beard.
“Yes, you’re our savior.”
There’s no sarcasm in her voice; she feels neither rage nor desperation. She speaks as if her brain is nothing more than a language course with a stockpile of prerecorded responses.
“I won’t hurt you.”
“I don’t care.”
At this moment she means it—and at this moment she makes a terrible discovery. Her body doesn’t mean it. Her brain forgot to inform the rest of her. She feels a throbbing between her legs, as if they’re still making love on the floor of one of the APCs. She’s as ready as ever to surrender to this mass murderer, a man she would shoot on the spot if she had a weapon at her disposal. Her body wants something else, however—to surrender unconditionally to a man she hates. All the words she rehearsed trying to describe her feelings for Schrøder race through her head. At that time she landed on the word “capitulate.” It was more apt than she even realized. The throbbing part of her lacks any judgment.
The First Stone Page 31