“You know we don’t stand a chance without the Afghans. Us, alone against the American Special Forces? It’ll never work.”
“Women and children—that’s the part I don’t like.” He sighs.
“That’s how guerrillas fight. Asymmetrical wars. All of it. We’re guerrillas now.”
“Well, I certainly don’t have any alternatives.” I can sense his helplessness.
Steffensen calls together the Danes and presents the idea to them. He doesn’t mention that it came from me. It has nothing to do with his vanity—he has very little of that left. We both know it’s simply the wisest approach.
“What about the Afghans?” asks Viktor. “This sort of pushes them into the background. How will they feel about that? It’s their country . . . their war.”
“Don’t even think about it,” I say. “You’re the American jihadists. You made the drone fall from the sky. You are in Allah’s hand. They’ll do as you say.”
Viktor turns to Steffensen. “You’re asking us to fire on our own allies.” He ignores me.
For a moment I’m unsure about Steffensen’s answer. It could go either way. Suddenly I feel as if I’m the villain, creating false opposites and trying to lead them on a wild-goose chase.
“Are the Americans really our allies?” Steffensen stares intently at Viktor. “Just a few days ago, they tried to kill us. The only reason we survived is that the Afghans came to help us.”
“Those were mercenaries gone bad,” insists Viktor. “Involved in illegal activities. Nothing more than a bunch of criminals. The American army couldn’t possibly have known what they were doing. If we tell them that, don’t you think they’ll listen to us?”
Steffensen hesitates. That’s what he thinks, too, that he can always reach an agreement. There’s always common ground. I can see it. I’m the one who answers—I can’t stop myself. This is really important. They can’t hesitate now. They can’t waver. If they do, they’ll never get home.
“They consider DarkSky one of their own—and we’ve just wiped out a whole team of their men. How do we even know it’s the army coming after us? It might be DarkSky themselves. Practically speaking, they’re an army within an army. They have ten thousand men out here. We’d be dead before we ever opened our mouths. Or else we’ll wind up in a black hole somewhere with electrodes attached to our balls and a hot poker up our ass.
“And don’t forget Schrøder,” I add. “He saved us yesterday, but he can release the wolves whenever he wants to—and believe me, he will. In everyone’s eyes, we’re jihadists. That includes the Americans.”
“I’m not so sure.” Viktor is persistent. “We wouldn’t be the first hostages who converted to Islam to save their lives. And no one takes that seriously.” He looks encouragingly at the other soldiers. “During survival training, we were told to convert if it would help the situation.” Viktor points an accusatory finger at me. “He just wants us to shoot at Americans!”
I lose control. “I’m not one of you,” I yell. “My background is Afghan, a fucking immigrant. So I must have ulterior motives—I must be up to something. Yes, I’m a Muslim, the incarnation of your worst nightmares, the shoplifter in your angst-ridden souls, the parasite on your social budgets, the wife beater who fucks his daughter every Friday while all the upstanding people are home watching So You Think You Can Dance! And I’m putting my life on the line for you! So fuck you!”
They stare at me. Any moment now, they’ll ask me to hit the road. And I fucking will. Thanks and goodbye!
Andreas is still filming. He wants to get it all, the camera-happy little asshole. “You can take that camera with you to your grave,” I yell at him. “That’s where you’re all going to end up if you don’t pull it together and for a second—just one small, little second—forget all your holier-than-thou bullshit and remember that you’re trying to survive. I’ve met Schrøder. I’ve spoken to him. You’re behaving just as he hoped you would. You’re standing there like a flock of sheep who haven’t learned shit in the past few days. If we reach our hand out in reconciliation, it’ll be shot off before you can count to three!”
I have them now. I can see the change in their faces. I should have mentioned meeting Schrøder a long time ago.
Steffensen finally looks up from the ground he’s been studying intently, as if taking measurements for his own grave. “He’s not asking you to shoot at the Americans,” he says. Shocked, I stare at him. The man can speak. It’s the commander who’s speaking now. “We aren’t at war with the US. He’s asking you to shoot at those who are shooting at you. And you will! That’s an order! I’m not going to say it again! Understood!”
Suddenly he’s standing there, Sharif, with the American accent he’s swiped off YouTube, and I could just hug him, the world’s youngest cop killer. “I don’t know what you’re up to,” he says in his surprisingly good English. “I don’t understand your tribe’s language. But I know one thing. You better get ready now unless you want to end your days here, lying beneath the fucking rocky Afghan ground.”
And then he walks around, and, God help me, the little shit gives every single one of us a high five.
47
We were wrong about one thing. It isn’t one Chinook—it’s two. There must be at least forty men. We’re clearly outnumbered, at least if we only count the Danes. But we don’t. We have the Afghans, too. The amount of armed men doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a classic mistake in guerrilla warfare to believe there’s an advantage in numbers. More people only means greater vulnerability, especially if they’re acting as one collective group. A guerrilla soldier’s strength isn’t necessarily the accuracy of his aim. It’s his talent for running. It’s firepower that counts—and the guerrilla soldier is always the underdog on that front. But we have other talents.
Some “we.” A group of farmers and half a platoon of traumatized soldiers trained to be in the majority and to expect that daddy will show up in the form of air or artillery support if the boys from the other neighborhood get too violent. Except that now we’re at war with daddy.
We can expect that only half of our original plan will succeed. We have to concentrate on one Chinook, and if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to take it out. That still leaves twenty men—and they can do enormous damage before they’re stopped. If they can be stopped.
In their long white robes, with their faces exposed and their hair down, Malalai’s three sisters are standing in a clearing among the ancient juniper trees. You might even say they look like brides. Or a prayer for peace. On the other hand, it sends mixed signals. What’s the message? And they’re women.
The idea was Sharif’s, naturally. The little shit is standing next to me, and he’s completely calm.
“Why are they standing there?” I ask. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” he replies. “Nothing. Something to distract them for a few seconds. A few costly seconds.”
We walked from dawn until we reached this clearing, and the villagers decided that we should meet the enemy here. The land still slopes upward, but it’s starting to flatten out. Steeper wooded hillsides rise on both sides. We’re walking through more of a narrow valley than an actual pass. Higher up, the vegetation becomes sparser; we’d be completely exposed if we went that way. An ideal spot for an attack—they’d just have to wait until we showed up—but it’s inside Pakistan. That’s how close we are to the border, a border drones don’t respect. American soldiers have to respect it, however, unless they want to cause a diplomatic crisis or something even worse: a counterattack from the Pakistani army.
I’m gambling on what I believe is this war’s Achilles’ heel: rebels always have a border they can retreat behind to regroup. Today we have the advantage. We’ll be in Pakistan before nightfall. If my plan works, transport will have been arranged to the Danish embassy in Islamabad. The ambassador will be working overtime when we show up, as will the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
But first we have to take care of business here.
If we survive.
The loud thump of rotor blades announces the helicopters’ arrival.
Third Platoon has scattered around the clearing; none of them is wearing a flak jacket or a helmet. The terrain here is uneven, so they’re trying to stay higher than the flat clearing in the middle of the juniper woods and yet remain invisible from the sky. Once they’ve fired, their orders are to run. Their mobility is their only chance of survival.
The Chinooks hover overhead, with two Apaches right behind them. The crowns of the juniper trees bend beneath the pressure from the twin rotors. The sight of the three young women has clearly confused the pilots. The helicopters are about ten meters up, and we can see a soldier in full combat regalia standing in an open door. His automatic rifle scans the clearing—and then his face explodes and he tumbles out the door. Camper has fired with his SAKO.
Seven white trails of smoke rise from the dense woods. The rockets are on their way. Two miss their mark, and two hit the back of one Chinook’s thirty-meter-long hull. One tears into a chopper amidships. The last two are direct hits, vanishing through the door before exploding in a fiery flash. Black smoke barrels out and the rear rotor stops. The transport helicopter starts to spin around in slow motion before crashing to the ground. A soldier jumps out the door. His back is on fire as he falls onto the grass.
Making a quick decision, the pilot in the other helicopter lands next to the burning wreck. The Malalai sisters have disappeared. One Apache fires its 30 millimeter machine gun into the edge of the woods, where twigs and needles fly off the trees. As the chopper pauses, soldiers storm out across the clearing. Before they reach the woods, two of them are down. Camper strikes again.
I hear a series of explosions as the remaining troops race into the woods and trigger Sharif’s booby traps. Small boys who know the location of the trip wires have deftly avoided them. New explosions ring out in the woods as the boys toss their hand grenades.
This is when it counts to be in the majority, even for guerrilla warriors. The forest comes alive with Danes and Afghans emptying their automatic rifles into the panic-stricken attackers, who, despite their training, have lost all orientation.
As the Apache helicopters resume their shelling, a protective layer of branches, junipers, and bark rains down upon us. The pilots can’t see anything—but they can still kill. We run in all directions. After half an hour, they give up, and we hear the Chinook take off. The smoldering wreckage of the downed helicopter is left behind. The Apaches gave their soldiers cover so they could collect their dead and wounded.
The first to appear in the clearing is Andreas with his camera. Then the Afghans show up. They search the woods for fallen Americans and find three who ran into booby traps; they were too far into the forest for their comrades to locate them before retreating. One by one, the heavy bodies are dragged out into the clearing and relieved of their equipment. Their clothes are pulled off them until the mangled, bloody white bodies lie glistening in the grass. A couple of sheep come out to graze next to the corpses.
The Afghans draw their knives. I know exactly what the Americans will find when they come back to fetch their fallen. A field where a group of flayed scarecrows who used to be humans have arranged to meet. If the helicopters don’t manage to fetch them, the ravens and vultures will hack them to pieces and take them, bit by bit, up to a heavenly burial in the Hindu Kush’s peaks.
Ten villagers fell, among them a ten-year-old boy. Third Platoon has lost two men: Gustav, one of Viktor’s boys, and Sørensen, father to Anton and Frederik. Sylvester cries as he searches Sørensen’s pockets for the boys’ photograph. I’ve heard the two men were close and that Sørensen was a father figure to Sylvester.
We bury them in unmarked graves beneath the trees. Same ritual as last time. The women wear their white flowered veils. Have they packed an entire wardrobe? Were they expecting so many fallen? Is this preparedness for death a form of Afghan realism?
We separate into groups of ten. From here to the border, we have to cover as much ground as possible. Once we hit open terrain, even our smaller units must disperse; each person will have to zigzag forward so we can be the most scattered targets possible. Slow-moving elderly and women with infants will have to wait until darkness falls, when they’ll be fetched. That’s how Third Platoon sees the plan, but the villagers don’t. They don’t want to leave the old behind; they want to run with them hanging on their backs, these wrinkled sacks of old-man skin with their brittle bones, rheumy eyes, and wiry hair. Nor do they want to leave the children behind. They want to hold their hands, which means their short legs will determine the tempo—even though it’s death they’re trying to outpace.
There’s a cynical name for it: human shields.
There’s another, truer name for it: family.
They’re still families, even in war. They’re not warriors hiding behind innocent civilians. They’re warriors defending their families. They’re warriors running for their lives with Kalashnikovs on their backs and infants in their arms.
I call Sharif over. “Come on,” I say to him. “Talk them out of it. We’ll never get out of this alive that way. The Americans are coming after us, and they won’t distinguish between armed men and civilians. They’re coming back to finish the job.”
“I don’t have that kind of influence. They’ll listen to me about effective ways to kill. That’s what I’m good at. But all that”—he shrugs—“all that shit about the old, children, and all that kind of stuff. It’s not me. It will go as it goes. I really don’t care.”
He scrunches up his face in a way that makes me think maybe he does care. He’s impatient with a world he finds old and sluggish, and there’s that sense of powerlessness, which only feeds his fury.
“Then we’re not doing it,” says Viktor. “We’re not going to try to run with them—we’ll never fucking make it to the other side.”
Irate, Dennis stares at him. “Then run ahead, if that’s what you want to do. You’ll make a real easy target. Go for it.”
We still haven’t reached the open field at the border when we hear them. Three F-18 fighter jets come roaring in low, no more than ten or fifteen meters aboveground. It feels like they’ve blown off our skulls and taken our eardrums and any loose organs with them. Many of the villagers fall on their knees and cover their ears. The jets pass again and again, but they still haven’t fired their missiles or machine guns.
They’re waiting for the open stretch.
48
An almost level plain of small gray-and-white stones spreads out before us. It might have been a riverbed once, but that was a very long time ago. No large boulders, once tossed around by untamed waters, remain. The terrain appears passable—we should be able to run across it. The sun’s rays reflect coldly off the snow-covered mountains surrounding the valley, just as they do off the jets’ shiny metal hulls. We’re standing in a forest of massive junipers, whose dense branches are covered in small deep-blue berries. The trees might be five thousand years old. Under normal circumstances, this would be a tourist attraction; now it’s a battlefield.
We’re about two hundred people. If we were to form one long row stretching across the plain, there’d be a three- or four-meter gap between each of us. If we can hold that formation while we run, we’ll be harder to hit.
I look at Gray, the former drone pilot, and I know what he’s thinking. This isn’t a rocky plain or two hundred people standing in front of it. It’s an image on a screen: we’re just blips that have to be stopped from crossing the screen. Would it be better to try to cross the plain at night? We’d still be visible as pulsing dots in the darkness.
I’m sure we’re on many screens right now. And many drawing boards and topo maps. And many agendas, both visible and hidden. The Americans’, the Pakistanis’, DarkSky’s, the villagers’, the Taliban’s, and Schrøder’s. Definitely Schrøder’s. Many forces are at play, local, global—all of the
m political—and right now they’re holding each other at bay. That’s to our advantage.
Third Platoon is here because they really want to leave.
I’m here because I have a task to perform. That’s all.
It’s seven to eight hundred meters to the Pakistan border, indicated by nothing but two stone circles, which in this landscape could mean anything. For us, though, they represent salvation. Sharif is right, wherever he gets his knowledge from: unmanned drones can operate on both sides of the border, but American fighter pilots won’t violate national sovereignty. So we can seek protection behind the two stone circles. They form an invisible wall no missile can penetrate.
Seven to eight hundred meters. How long will it take to run across it? How many will die—and for what? What right do I have to put all these people’s lives on the line?
I’m standing next to Steffensen. “If we run alone, we’ll die. If we run with the Afghans, many of them will die. A dilemma. What should we do?”
Sharif walks over to us. “I have a suggestion,” he says. “We don’t all need to run at the same time. We can go in small groups, two or three at a time, with five minutes between each group. It will take ten to fifteen hours, but we have the time.”
“Won’t they see through that?”
“Maybe—but what can they do? They can’t fire a hundred missiles just to nail a couple hundred Afghans. It’s not worth it.”
“They have machine guns, too,” I object.
“Do you think they’ll sit up there all day shooting a few people every five minutes?”
I point at the stone circles indicating the border. “And you’re sure that’s the border—that we’re safe just as soon as we’ve passed it?”
“I’m fourteen,” he says, “and I’ve already been over there twice. All of us in Khan Kala have. Fleeing, back and forth. That’s how we live here on the border. So, yes, I’m sure.”
Steffensen nods at Sharif. “I think you’re on to something. We’ll follow your plan. Tell the others.”
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