The First Stone

by Carsten Jensen

  “Let me explain,” says Steffensen.

  He tells them about working with the American security firm, DarkSky, which they know about from Iraq Robert. He chooses to ignore any doubts that might be plaguing him. They can’t afford skepticism. He speaks with conviction, and they listen. As soldiers, they’ve learned to live with uncertainty. They’re ready for the final act.

  Hannah stands up. “I’m not on board with this,” she says.

  Dennis also stands up, his face bright red. “Schrøder has to be killed! We need to finish the job!”

  “Listen.” Steffensen raises his hands dismissively.

  Hannah interrupts him. “What’s Schrøder getting out of this? Have you even thought about that? Why would he suddenly just let us go? It makes no sense!”

  “Hannah’s right!” Dennis appeals to the others.

  The group seems to be split in two, just like before, but they’ve lost their taste for referendums. Steffensen can tell. The word “home” is all they’re hearing.

  “We don’t have a choice,” says Viktor. His boys, Gustav, Mathias, and Sebastian, back him up immediately.

  Sørensen is tired and despondent. The missile attack brought an end to his short-lived optimism. “I can’t take any more,” he says.

  Sylvester feels the same way. “I have to think about my child.” Coming from him, that’s a new acknowledgment. Camper and Karlsen have also had enough—they don’t even need to say it. Whatever brought them on this mission, they’ve lost their enthusiasm.

  “We should be happy our losses haven’t been even greater,” says Simon. That’s also a kind of decision.

  Andreas is fidgety; he glances at Hannah and Dennis and then looks at the others. He’s trapped in his own indecisiveness. Still, the balance of power has shifted. There’s no longer a majority behind Hannah’s uncompromising decisions. Now, they support Steffensen—and they don’t need to demonstrate it by raising their hands.

  A truck with an open bed is waiting for them. Two turbaned, bearded men holding Kalashnikovs squat with their backs against the dusty cab. They don’t stand up to aim their weapons at the Danes. For the first time in many days, they don’t have the barrel of a rifle pointing at them. Their freedom seems to have already arrived.

  As they climb up into the truck, the two Afghans stand up with outstretched hands. One after the other, they shake the Danes’ hands. With each handshake, the two men place a hand on their hearts and bow their heads, as if in reverence.

  They ignore Hannah.

  A man who up until now was one of their guards approaches and tosses bottles of water into the truck bed.

  Hannah looks around. “Where’s Schrøder? He’s not coming with us? Or is he waiting on the other side?”

  “We’re out of his hands.” Steffensen can hear the triumph in his own voice.

  The back of the truck reeks of sheep’s wool. They’re standing on a thin layer of half-pulverized, straw-filled sheep shit. Sheep transport, thinks Steffensen. The word sets off a chain reaction of associations, leading to cattle cars, which to European ears has a somber ring. Cattle cars, rumbling freight trains filled with Jews on their way to civilization’s final stop, the Nazi extermination camps, people reduced to animals, to something less than animals. But this is different, he thinks. No one is guarding us. There’s a contract that unites us. No weapons are forcing us. We’re in the open air, with plenty of room around us. They’ve even given us water to drink. If this is a cattle car, we’re in first class. From now on, I’ll always associate the smell of sheep with freedom.

  As they leave the city, many faces turn in their direction. Cars beep, and every so often a passing hand waves at them.

  They look at each other.

  “What just happened there?” asks Viktor. “Why are they waving? Who do they think we are?”

  24

  “So you have no idea where they are?”

  I realize I’ve gotten all I’m going to get out of Sara. She’s led me part of the way; now I have to figure out the rest. I pick up the pace.

  Sara adjusts her gait to match mine. Apparently the gunshot wound isn’t bothering her anymore. “The country is large. It’s easy to disappear here,” she says. “The men you are seeking could be anywhere. They could be nowhere. And if you ask, no one will tell you anything, because then you are a stranger who is too curious.”

  “How do I convince them that I’m one of them?”

  “A man who travels alone is always a threat, but not a man traveling with a woman. He has someone to protect.”

  The wind is starting to pick up. Sara’s burka flutters, and my patu flaps like a banner from my shoulder. I pull it closer around me. I just hope the wind doesn’t turn into one of these monster sandstorms.

  Radio, TV, and the press have their stories to tell, as does the internet. The secret service can listen in—satellites pick up everything—but the Afghan people have stories no one will hear. They might be wild distortions of what really happened, but they always contain some kernel of truth. I experienced it in the bazaar in Sangin, where I first picked up the trail of the vanished soldiers. I have to pursue stories that are passed around orally. Sara is part of this shadowy world of stories that the secret service will never hear. She led me here, and now she’s passing me on, like a relay, going from hand to hand.

  We reach the highway. Sand flies across the pothole-riddled asphalt, which turns every drive into a challenging slalom. The sky above is clear. The wind seems to be staying close to the ground, forcing the sand out onto the flat landscape. After half an hour, a van appears, an old Mercedes that, instead of winding up in some junkyard in Europe, has been driven through mountains and deserts to its afterlife out here. It’s painted red, green, and yellow, and its cab and bed are festooned with floral ornaments, as if the vehicle’s sole purpose is to announce the arrival of a traveling circus. Small painted vignettes of camels, lions, mosques, and mountains—along with hand-lettered words of wisdom—lead to the same conclusion.

  The bearded, turbaned driver stops and leans over to open the door for us. It’s like stepping into the van of a circus ringmaster. Behind the wheel sits a fat, round man with a hooknose and a black beard spreading down across his embroidered kirtle. A white scar cuts across one of the eyebrows in his dark face. His wide grin bids us welcome.

  I get in first, so I can sit between Sara and the driver; anything else would send the wrong signal. She’ll neither speak nor show any other sign of life. She’ll just sit there with her shameful sex hidden beneath her burka. The fabric might seem light, but in reality it’s an impenetrable wall.

  I offer brief answers to his questions about who I am and where I’m headed. He’s going to Zabul Province, north of Helmand, where the American presence is sparse. Of course, there are always those ever-present drones, the eye in the sky that we believe is all-seeing but whose nearsightedness I’ve learned more about in recent days.

  The driver doesn’t say a word about his cargo—and I don’t ask. It’s not opium, or he’d be driving with an escort or a couple of armed men sitting next to him. Yet, even if it were, that wouldn’t make him a criminal, or even a member of some crime organization. He’s just a man doing his job. The wall we think we’ve built between the law and lawlessness means nothing here.

  “Have you heard?” he asks, shooting me an excited look. Addressing only me, he ignores Sara’s presence, a sign of respect for my right of ownership.

  “Heard what?” I ask.

  “A group of Americans has converted to Islam, and they’re fighting on our side now. They’ve already killed many of their own.”

  I try to decode his story. Americans? This could be the missing Danes. To the Afghans, all uniformed foreigners are Americans.

  I glance at his cell phone, which is lying on the dashboard. “Do you have pictures of this conversion?”

  “You mean on my cell phone? No, I don’t.” He points to one of his ears, beneath his turban. “But I hear abou
t it everywhere I go.”

  I ask him where the conversion occurred. He mentions the city of Kalat. “That’s where I’m headed,” he says.

  “Us, too,” I say.

  “It is a miracle city!” His eyes brighten. “A holy place. A martyr is buried there. If you are sick, you will be cured. I’ve seen it myself!”

  “That’s fantastic,” I say, trying to make my voice sound as excited as his. “What made the Americans convert?”

  “Well, that’s obvious.” He laughs indulgently. “They realized that Allah is great. In the middle of the town square, the infidels converted and spoke the kalima. Now they are our brothers. They’re fighting on our side.”

  I want to ask him who he means. I need to know whom I’m speaking to. Is he a Taliban sympathizer? If that’s the case, I need to pay him lip service. Before I manage to ask my question, he goes on with his story.

  “They saved three women the Americans tried to kidnap. They shot the infidels and hanged them naked from a tower, so their disgrace could be seen by all. That’s how they are. They are fighting for Afghanistan’s honor. They fight for our women’s honor. They’re fighting for us all.”

  I want to glance at Sara, who knows the truth about the three women—we met at their grave—but her burka is an insurmountable barrier between us right now. I know instinctively that I have to concentrate on the driver. He’s not some isolated fabulist. The imagination of an entire people is at work here. I’m sure that thousands of Afghans are hearing and repeating the same story at this very moment. A myth is taking shape right before my eyes, and the story of the attack on the qalat has already become part of it. Like all myths, it doesn’t just have the power to motivate those who hear it and pass it on: it becomes its own reality, stronger than anything their eyes or ears could tell them. Black becomes white, the guilty are cleansed, and villains end up as heroes.

  But is there a kernel of truth?

  The missing soldiers are the main characters—no doubt about that. He’s talking about the naked bodies of their murdered comrades and the women who were used as shields. Although there were few eyewitnesses, many want to pass the story on, so it has barreled across the landscape. But why does black become white? Why this lionizing of the enemy? Why not just brag about humiliating the soldiers?

  The conversion is the key. It must have actually happened, though probably not voluntarily. In its light, however, the soldiers’ ambush has been reinterpreted and turned into the opposite. The story is told backward, starting with the conversion, so from now on, the new converts can do no wrong. Even their past has been rewritten.

  “They’re shooting drones down, too!” The fat ringmaster laughs triumphantly and points up at the truck’s dented roof.

  I can’t help but laugh along. “Really?” I ask. He nods energetically.

  The pieces are starting to fall into place. Myths behave like conspiracy theories; what’s cloudy becomes clear. They assign motives and patterns where there might be only coincidences. They connect the dots. The vanished soldiers have become the object of a people’s fantasies. They could be characters in a video game. East and West—they both share the illusion of invincible heroes.

  I don’t know if the vanished soldiers are in the city where we’re headed, but it’s worth a try. I do know one thing: I’ll hear even more stories about them, and there’ll be some iota of truth in each of them. It’s my job to put it all together. The Afghans create their picture. I create mine. The soldiers have disappeared into the myth. It’s a battle about truths, and in the middle of it all is a group of frightened, humiliated, powerless Danish soldiers who want only one thing—and it’s not to play hero. They just want to go home.

  I could show those tired, worn-out faces to every single Afghan. I could show them these men whose only desire is to go home, and every single Afghan would deny what he saw. That’s not some special Afghan phenomenon. As an intelligence agent, I encounter it all the time. Facts are always depressing. They refute the large, glorious truths we’ve just invented. Facts make us smaller when we need to feel larger. That’s why my job is so thankless. The truth is never welcome.

  The ringmaster slows down. Up ahead, I can see the wreckage of a dark-green truck pushed to the side of the road. Its charred body is still smoking, and the 12.7 millimeter machine gun attached to its bed has been torn loose. It’s a police vehicle. Two outstretched figures lie on the asphalt with pieces of bloodstained clothing all around them. A policeman with an AK-47 signals to us; he crawls up on the footboard and asks the driver where he’s going. He glances at me and then at burka-covered Sara. I tell him my name. Sara says nothing; her presence is irrelevant to the officer. Then he steps back onto the road and waves us on.

  Once we’ve driven a bit, the grinning driver turns to me. “It’s them,” he says. “The American jihadists. Afghanistan’s new friends.”

  I should have seen that coming. Still, I stare incredulously at him. “Do you really think so?”

  He laughs affirmatively. “Of course,” he says. “They strike everywhere.”

  I want to ask him to turn around, so I can interrogate the policemen we just passed. But that’s impossible. Asking that kind of question would immediately make me look suspicious. No one would believe I was asking just to satisfy my own curiosity. Out here, you always ask on someone else’s behalf—there’s always an ulterior motive.

  Also, what would happen if Afghan security forces started to believe that a squad of crazy converts was out to get them? Their own allies would hunt down the Danes, and MIA would turn into KIA. Except that my countrymen would be killed by their own instead of the enemy. The thought is crazy—but is it impossible?

  I stare out at the road pointing straight at the mountains on the horizon. We’ll be there in a few hours. Where? Am I headed for some murderous dreamscape? Just what do Afghans dream about? And where is my place?

  25

  We approach the city, which spreads up the side of the mountain in a row of plateaus, as if it’s built on terraces. The road wandering through the scattered qalats is dramatically uneven, as if half of it washes away every time it rains. The truck sways and rumbles in second gear and then first. Its powerful motor roars in protest while the driver struggles with the gearshift.

  I notice the photograph of a young man with a mustache hanging on many of the walls. I ask who he is. “A martyr,” he answers. “He killed two American soldiers. They found him two days later and set their dogs on him.”

  I expect to hear that my Danish jihadist friends have already avenged his murder, but I don’t. Instead, he says that many sick people are healed at the holy shrine in the center of town, where the Americans also got religion.

  “Do you really not know anything about all this?” The driver glances at me. Is that suspicion in his eyes?

  “We’re from Iran,” I say. “Rafsanjan in Kerman.” I’m referring to a refugee camp in eastern Iran. Several million Afghans who fled wars in the eighties and nineties live in Iran.

  “Long journey,” he says. “Welcome back.”

  On one of the plateaus, there’s a long row of stalls. The truck stops. As I say goodbye, I shake the driver’s hand. Sara steps down onto the gravel, and I follow her.

  “Have you been here before?” I ask. She shakes her head beneath the burka.

  We step into a dining area that is nothing more than a tarp held up by a couple of branches. Diners are sitting around a greasy, shiny plastic tablecloth laid out on the ground. I hand Sara a handful of bills, and she disappears behind a canvas separating the women’s section from the men’s. Our conversation is temporarily interrupted. I’m hungry after my fast in the desert.

  I order naan and lamb. When Sara reappears, I ask the host for directions to the shrine of the murdered martyr. He dries his dirty fingers on his kirtle and tells me the way.

  Sara walks behind me. There isn’t much we can discuss like this.

  “They are gone,” she says. “You won’t find t
hem here.”

  “Not even Schrøder?”

  “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Her tone surprises me. Is she giving up? Does she want out? Has she followed me here, but no farther?

  “Do you want us to go our separate ways?”

  “No,” she says. “I want to see how this ends.” There’s power in her voice again. Her anger has returned—the anger I sense is always churning within her.

  “I thought you knew how this ends.” I can’t hide the trace of irony in my voice, although she seems to ignore it.

  “I do know,” she says. “I know how it ends. But I also want to see it. It is not the same thing.”

  Although the road up is steep, it’s still crowded in both directions. Rattling vehicles with colorful trunks, camels, and pedestrians move forward at the same pace, but the road belongs to the camels towering over both the crowds and the vehicles. I feel like a pilgrim approaching his goal.

  When we reach the next plateau, I turn right. Sara follows closely behind me. Two rows of qalats sit across from each other facing an open square. In the middle of the square sits a black nomad’s tent with green banners that have verses from the Koran written on them.

  There’s no one around the tent and possibly no one in it, either. Maybe the martyr’s altar beneath the black canvas stopped fulfilling promises that the lame would walk and the blind would see a little too quickly. It’s hard to guess what’s behind such a miracle factory. Maybe it’s the dead man’s family, trying to compensate for the loss of a family member and profiting off his reputation. Maybe there are more cynical financial backers, for whom this is strictly business. If the pilgrims had come from faraway places, then no one could verify whether they were actually sick before they showed up.

  The miracle factory isn’t what’s grabbing my attention—it’s the bombed-out remains of a qalat on the other side of the square. Small columns of smoke still rise, and the dusty reflection of destroyed buildings seems to hover in the air. The buildings must have been bombed in the last few days. Who was the target? A local warlord informed on by a rival? The Taliban? Schrøder? The Danes? I can’t rule anything out. Not even that last possibility. Anyone could have the Danes in their crosshairs now.