No more of that. No more slaughter. No more chaos.
But whatever he thought, he was still the veteran campaigner and his ability to march on an empty stomach was undiminished. Soon the stragglers of the group ahead came into view. As always it was his two fellow Pakistanis at the rear. Both were very thin and clearly at the end of their resources. Nine months the two had been on the road. Having started from a mountain village in Northern Pakistan they had crossed to Iran and walked to the Turkish border. Most of their money had gone when a con man promised them flights and a visa to Greece, but they kept enough to get them to Bulgaria. Ahead of them went the Turk, Mehmet, and the Arabs, a Jordanian called Mumim, and a Palestinian from Lebanon who gave his name as Jasur. Out in front were the three Kurds - the young man who had given him mint tea, his uncle and a friend from his uncle’s village. They had the promise of work in Athens and had only been travelling for a matter of weeks. They were the freshest of the party and it was clear they felt themselves out of place in this group of migrants, harried from one country to another and sometimes reduced to eating leaves and grubs to survive.
High in the pastures above them Khan noticed one or two locals moving about with their beasts. Cow-bells sounded with an unmusical clank across the valley. He was glad his party was not walking bunched up together because that always made people suspicious. In this country, where Muslims were so feared, they had to keep their wits about them. The men with dark skin - the two Pakistanis and the Jordanian, who had African blood in him - had to be especially careful. Not for the first time, he was grateful for his own light colouring, which family tradition held came from Alexander the Great’s soldiers. Some part of him registered that he should feel at home here in Macedonia.
As he was having these thoughts he noticed the Kurds hesitate. He stopped and put his hand up to the sun and tried to see through the shimmer of heat already coming off the road. They had seen something in front of them. One had dropped his bed-roll and knapsack and spread his arms in surrender. He was showing that they weren’t carrying weapons. His companions turned round to consult the others, or maybe to warn them.
Khan saw a figure moving in the clump of bushes on the left of the road. He was wearing a uniform that was exactly the same colour and tone as the shaded vegetation. A wisp of smoke came from behind him - a campfire - and beyond that tarpaulins had been stretched across the lower boughs of the trees. On the other side of the road, parked up in a cutting, were a truck and two covered jeeps.
The Kurds didn’t seem to know what to do. One of them began to retrace his steps. He was gesticulating, shooing the rest of the party back up the way they had come. More soldiers moved from the shade onto the yellow strip of road; they swaggered and almost dragged their weapons along the ground. Khan recognised the type - soft, untested, conscript bullies. He had seen them before in the Balkans and he knew exactly what was going to happen next.
One of the soldiers, probably the first man to move from cover, raised his gun waist high, fired and brought down the retreating man. The other two Kurds turned back in disbelief to the soldiers, raising their hands. They dropped to their knees to beg for their lives but were killed the instant they touched the ground. One slumped forward; the other keeled over in slow motion.
With the first shot the remainder of the party had taken to their heels. The two Arabs and the Turk ran straight up towards Khan, but the Pakistanis had thrown away their possessions and dived for the bushes. The soldiers were galvanised. They ran across the road, climbed into their jeeps and, with great swirls of dust, turned the vehicles and tore up the valley towards the three men still on the road. Unlike the first shots that had killed the Kurds, the fusillade of gunfire that came from the lead jeep echoed around the hills. The Turk was hit in the leg but limped on. One of the Arabs stopped and tried to drag him to safety, but the soldiers were upon them in a second and both men were mown down. Khan moved to the side of the road into shade. He watched the jeep pull up and the soldiers unleash a volley of shots into the corpses. The other jeep had stopped a little further back so that the Pakistanis could be hunted down. Shortly afterwards Khan heard another crackle of shots. A man cried out. Then a lone shot - the
coup de grâce
- snapped through the woods.
Khan shouted at the Palestinian who was now about a hundred yards away. He knew their only chance was to head off into the trees above them. He yelled and yelled at the man as if willing him to win a race. Khan had been in such situations before and, judging by the way Jasur was bent double and zigzagging the final few yards towards him, it wasn’t the first time he’d been under fire either. Together they slipped through a gap in the bushes and began to climb. The undergrowth was still wet from the storm and the soil gave way easily under their feet, but in a few minutes they got above the road and saw that both jeeps had pulled up below them. They heard shouting and a few shots were loosed off into the trees, but it was obvious the soldiers were unwilling to go in after them just yet. A truck arrived and they saw a man get out, an officer shouting at the top of his voice. He was clearly organising a sweep of the hillside.
Khan watched for a few seconds longer, steadying Jasur by holding his shoulder. He looked up the slope and decided that rather than crashing on through the wood and giving away their position, they should stay where they were. He explained in a mixture of Arabic and English, then pushed his still uncomprehending companion into the undergrowth and covered him with saplings wrenched from the loose soil. He went to find his own hiding spot about twenty paces up the hill and dug himself in, efficiently covering his legs with dirt and pulling boughs across him to hide the disturbance. Once in place, he hissed a few words of encouragement down to Jasur just as he had done a few years before when waiting in an ambush with a group of novice Mujahadin, all of them quaking in their boots.
For about fifteen minutes he heard no noise from either the road or the woods around them, but gradually the sound reached him of the soldiers slashing at the undergrowth and calling out to each other. He fastened his gaze on the bushes where Jasur was hidden, hoping that the Palestinian’s nerve would hold when the soldiers passed by. He wriggled a little and felt in his back pocket for the knife he’d picked up in Turkey. He placed it in his mouth then swept the dirt back over his chest and arms and sank into the forest floor.
The soldiers were close to them now. He estimated that one was about thirty yards above him while another, who was moving much more slowly, would eventually pass between him and Jasur. He held his breath and waited. Suddenly the uniform appeared a few yards from him. The man stopped, unzipped himself, thrust his pelvis forward and started pissing. The stream of urine glittered in the light filtering through the trees. As he neared the end he shouted up the hill to his friend, a crude joke bellowed to the forest.
Khan decided to launch himself the moment the soldier turned away. Just then, the saplings which had so artfully concealed Jasur erupted, and his head and torso appeared. The soldier was caught unawares. He turned and yelled out a single syllable of surprise. But instead of firing he struggled to zip himself up and seemed to have difficulty getting hold of the automatic which he had swung round on his back while he urinated.
He must have heard Khan behind him, the movement of earth and rush of air, but he showed no sign of it as the weight of his body was pulled back onto the knife. His shaven head came back and his eyes met Khan’s with a strange awkwardness, an embarrassment at the sudden intimacy with the man covered in dirt, not understanding that the first blow of the knife had neither punctured his heart nor severed his spinal cord, and that there would be no second blow. Khan let him sag to the ground and in an instant removed his water bottle, gun, and ammunition clips. He wagged his finger at the soldier and put it to his own lips. The soldier looked up terrified, but managed a nod.
Jasur came to his side and crouched down. They were hidden from the soldier above them who had started to call out to his companions, repeating one name. Alarm rang in his voice, which communicated itself up and down the line of soldiers and they all started calling out. Khan darted another look at the soldier and jabbed the gun at him in a way that couldn’t be misunderstood. They turned and began to climb, moving around the main thickets so as to make as little noise as possible.
A minute or two passed then all hell broke loose. The soldiers discovered their wounded companion and started up the hill, firing shots into the trees above them. The old maxim of mountain warfare came back to Khan - flight is always better than fight. Long-practised at fleeing into the mountains, he quickened his pace and blocked his mind to the pain that would come with the exertion. They went straight up for a hundred and fifty yards but soon Jasur was begging him to slow down. He had given his all in the sprint up the road. Khan put an arm round him and felt his skinny frame heaving and his heart racing. There was virtually no muscle or fat on him. He tucked his hand under Jasur’s armpit and started to haul him up the hill, the Palestinian’s breath wheezing in his ear. They went another fifty yards and scrambled over some rocks. Ahead of them the trees thinned out to the pastures where he had seen the cattle herds. Beyond these he remembered the rocky crags that he’d noticed in shadow when he was lying in the field. It meant they were steep, but it didn’t follow that they were impassable.
He turned round. Jasur, who had fallen to his knees, was silently coughing phlegm onto the rock. His eyes and nose were streaming and his skin had become grey. The medic in Khan guessed these were not tears but some kind of allergic reaction, probably caused by pollen or the leaves he’d been covered with, but when he took hold of his head and looked into his eyes, his diagnosis changed. Jasur was having an asthma attack and showed every sign of heart strain. Khan rolled him onto his back and started to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation, then pressed down rhythmically on his chest a dozen times. The Palestinian coughed again and began to breathe more easily, but his eyes showed that he knew exactly what was happening and Khan thought he’d probably experienced an attack like this before. He put his hand to the man’s pulse - more regular now - and lifted his head to give him some water from the soldier’s bottle. At that moment they heard the soldiers making their way up the hill. He dragged Jasur back across the rocks so he was out of view and then snaked forward on his stomach to look over the edge. There were four of them and further down the slope came another trio, but they had no appetite for the climb and were stopping every few feet to mop their brows and curse.
He tried the safety catch of the AK47, made sure that the magazine would come away when he needed it to, then lay flat on the rocks with his face resting on the polished wooden stock. As he waited his thoughts slipped back to the first moment of the day and he realised dully that whatever his dreams and hopes for the future, this was the way his life was cast. His fate was to be covered in grime and sweat, waiting in ambush with a murderous old gun in his hand.
Behind him Jasur uttered a dramatic series of gurgles and retches. Khan was worried for his companion but could not risk turning now. He nudged him gently on the shoulder with his boot and that seemed to quieten him. For one moment he thought the change in direction of the soldiers’ voices meant they had given up, or taken a path off to the left, but suddenly he heard them directly below him. He pulled himself forward and raised his arms so that the gun was angled downwards over the edge of the rock. After the initial burst he bobbed up and saw that he’d hit some of the first group in the legs. They fell backwards without even knowing where he was. One recovered and fired in the direction of the rocks, a long way wide of the mark. Khan sneaked another look and squeezed the trigger. This sent them tumbling from their cover down the slope. They don’t mind killing unarmed men in the open, he thought, but they’ve got no taste for real battle. He fired, changed clips and fired some more. Now there was no sign of them, although he heard one yelping like a lost puppy in the woods.
He turned and wriggled back to Jasur, lying against the rock, facing away from him. He touched him on the shoulder and said they ought to be going. Could he make it? He shook him and, feeling no life, rolled the Palestinian over.
His skin was ashen, saliva foamed at his mouth and his eyes stared without meaning at the tiny red spiders that circled on the rock surface in front of him. Khan was shocked. Bewildered. He pushed himself to his knees and shrugged, thinking that he should - no, he must - find out who this man was and one day let his family know what had become of him. He felt all over the body and eventually located a little pouch hanging from a string inside Jasur’s trousers. He flipped it open and saw some folded documents, one or two pictures, a printed prayer and an identity card. He would look at them properly later. Now he had to leave and hope that the Macedonians would bury the Palestinian.
He got up, and without looking down the hill, jogged off into the next clump of trees and made for the crags above.
CHAPTER THREE
Herrick put down the evening paper. It reported that Vice Admiral Norquist had not recovered consciousness before expiring at 5.30 a.m. this morning, May 15. He had died from heart failure during an operation to remove the bullet that had lodged in his spine. The President of the United States issued a statement saying that the assassination of his friend and mentor was a deep personal blow to him and his family, but more than this, it was another strike against America and all good Americans should mourn his sacrifice.