"You're lucky," Khaled answered quickly. His tone was more serious than his laughing eyes. "It's a mess, but it could've been worse."
"Worse?"
"They didn't use anything heavy-no mortars, no heavy machine guns. They would've used them if they had them, and it would've been a lot worse. That means it was a small patrol, probably Afghans, not Russians, just testing us out or trying their luck.
As it is, we've got three wounded, and we lost four horses."
"Where are the wounded guys?"
"Up ahead, in the pass. You wanna take a look at them with me?"
"Sure. Sure. Gimme a hand with my gear."
We wrenched the saddle and bridle from my dead horse, and trotted up the line of men and horses to the mouth of the narrow pass.
The wounded men were lying within the cover of a shoulder of rock. Khader stood nearby, frowning watchfully at the plain behind me. Ahmed Zadeh was gently but hurriedly removing the clothing from one of the wounded men. I glanced at the darkening sky.
One man had a broken arm. His horse had fallen on him when it was shot. The break was a bad one, a compound fracture of the forearm, near the wrist. One bone protruded at a sickeningly unnatural angle, but it remained within the envelope of flesh, and nowhere pierced the skin. It had to be set. When Ahmed Zadeh removed the second man's shirt, we saw that he'd been shot twice. Both bullets were still in his body, and they were too deep to reach without major surgery. One, in the upper chest, had shattered the collarbone, and the other had lodged in his stomach, tearing a wide and undoubtedly fatal wound from hip to hip. The third man, a farmer named Siddiqi, had a bad head-wound. His horse had thrown him against the rocks, and he'd struck a boulder with the top of his head, near the crown.
It was bleeding, and there was a clear fracture of the cranium.
My fingers slid along the ridge of broken bone, greasy-wet with his blood. The broken scalp had split into three chunks. One of them was so loose that I knew it would come away in my hand if I tugged at it. His matted hair was all that held his skull together. There was also a thick swelling at the base of the skull, where his head met his neck. He was unconscious, and I doubted that he would ever open his eyes again.
I glanced at the sky once more. There was so little daylight left, so little time. I had to make a decision, a choice, and help one man to live, maybe, while I let other men die. I wasn't a doctor, and I had no experience under fire. The work had fallen to me, it seemed, because I knew a little more than the next man, and I was willing to do it. It was cold. I was cold. I was kneeling in a sticky smear of blood, and I could feel it soaking through the knees of my pants. When I looked up at Khader he nodded, as if he was reading my thoughts. Feeling sick with guilt and fear, I pulled a blanket over Siddiqi, to keep him warm, and then I abandoned him to work on the man with the broken arm.
Khaled pulled open the comprehensive first-aid kit beside me. I threw a plastic bottle of antibiotic powder, antiseptic wash, bandages, and scissors on the ground at Ahmed Zadeh's feet, beside the man who'd been shot. I snapped out brief instructions for cleaning and dressing the wounds, and as Ahmed went to work, covering the bullet wounds, I turned my attention to the broken arm. The man spoke to me urgently. I knew his face well. He had a special talent for herding the unruly goats, and I'd often seen the temperamental creatures following him, unbidden, as he wandered around our camp.
"What did he say? I didn't get it."
"He asked you if it's going to hurt," Khaled muttered, trying to keep his voice and his expression reassuringly neutral.
"I had this happen to me once," I said in reply. "Something just like this. I know exactly how much it hurts. It hurts so much, brother, that I think you should take his gun away."
"Right," Khaled replied. "Fuck."
He smiled broadly, and brushed at the ground beside the wounded man, gradually easing the Kalashnikov out of the man's hand and out of reach. Then, as darkness closed over us, and five of the man's friends held him down, I wrenched and twisted his shattered arm until it resembled the straight, healthy limb that it once had been and never would be again.
"Ee-Allah! Ee-Allah!" he shouted, over and over through clenched teeth.
When the break was wrapped and set with hard plastic splints, and we'd patched over the wounds on the man who'd been shot, I hastily wrapped a dressing around unconscious Siddiqi's head. At once we set off into the narrow pass. The cargo was distributed among all the remaining horses. The man with the bullet wounds rode a horse, supported on both sides by his friends. Siddiqi was strapped across one of the packhorses, as was the body of Madjid, the Afghan who'd been killed in the attack. The rest of us walked.
The climb was steep but short. Puffing hard in the thin air and shivering in a cold that penetrated to my bones, I pushed and dragged the reluctant horses with the rest of the men. The Afghan fighters never once complained or grumbled. When the pitch of one climb was steeper than anything I'd known on the whole trip, I paused at last, panting heavily to regain my strength. Two men turned to see that I'd halted, and they slid down the path to me, giving up the precious metres they'd just gained. With huge smiles and encouraging claps on the shoulder, they helped me to drag a horse up the slope and then bounded off to help those ahead.
"These Afghans may not be the best men in the world to live with," Ahmed Zadeh puffed as he struggled up the scrambling trail behind me. "But they are certainly the best men in the world to _die with!"
After five hours of the climb we reached our destination, a camp in the Shar-i-Safa Mountains. The camp was sheltered from the air by a prodigious ledge of rock. The ground beneath had been excavated to form a vast cave leading to a network of other caves. Several smaller, camouflaged bunkers surrounded the cave in a ring that reached to the fringe of the flat, rugged mountain plateau.
Khader called us to a halt in the light of the rising full moon.
His scout Habib had alerted the camp to our arrival, and the mujaheddin were waiting for us-and the supplies we brought-with great excitement. A message was sent back to me, in the centre of the column, that Khader wanted me. I jogged forward to join him.
"We will ride into the camp along this path. Khaled, Ahmed, Nazeer, Mahmoud, and some others. We do not know exactly who is in the camp. The attack on us at Shahbad Pass tells me that Asmatullah Achakzai has changed sides again, and joined the Russians. The Pass has been his for three years, and we should have been safe there. Habib tells me that the camp is friendly, and that these are our own men, waiting for us. But they are still behind cover, and they will not come out to greet us. I think it will be better for us if our American is riding with us, near the front, behind me. I cannot tell you to do this. I can only ask it. Will you ride with us?"
"Yes," I replied, hoping that the word sounded firmer in his ears than it did in my own.
"Good. Nazeer and the others have prepared the horses. We will leave at once."
Nazeer led several horses forward, and we climbed wearily into the saddles. Khader must've been far more tired than I was, and his body mustVe wrestled with many more pains and complaints, but he was straight-backed in the saddle and he held the green-and white standard at his hip with a rigid arm. Imitating him, I sat up straight and kicked back smartly to start the horse forward.
Our small column moved off slowly into a silvered moonlight so strong that it cast looming shadows on the grey rock walls.
The approach to the camp from that southern climb was along a narrow stone path that swept in a graceful, even curve from right to left. Beside the path on our left was a steep drop of some thirty metres to a rubble of broken boulders. On our right was the smooth rock face of a sheer wall. When we were perhaps half way along the path, watched attentively by our own men and the mujaheddin in the camp, I developed an irritating cramp in my right hip. The cramp quickly became a piercing knot of pain; and the more that I tried to ignore it, the more agonising it felt.
Attempting to relieve the stress on my hip, I took my right foot out of the stirrup and tried to stretch my leg. With all the weight on my left leg, I stood a little in the saddle. Without warning, my left foot gave way beneath me as my boot slipped from the stirrup, and I felt myself falling sideways out of the saddle toward the deep, hard drop to the stones. Self-preservation instincts set my limbs flailing, and I clutched at the horse's neck with my arms and my free right leg as I swung down and around. In the time it takes to clench your teeth, I'd fallen from the saddle and coiled myself upside-down around the neck of the horse. I called on it to stop, but it ignored me, plodding onward along the narrow track. I couldn't let go. The path was so narrow, and the drop so steep, that I was sure I would fall if I released my grip. And the horse wouldn't stop. So I hung on, with my arms and my legs wrapped around its neck, upside-down, while its head gently bobbed and dipped next to mine.
I heard my own men laughing first. It was that helpless, stuttering, choking laughter that makes men suffer for days with the ache of it in their ribs. It was the kind of laughter that you're sure will kill you if you can't get that next gasping breath. And then I heard the mujaheddin fighters laughing from the camp. And I arched my head backward to see Khader, facing around in his saddle and laughing as hard as the rest. And then _I started to laugh, and when the laughter weakened my arms, as I clutched at the horse, I laughed again. And as I choked out an anguished, croaky Whoa! Stop! Band karo! the men laughed harder than ever.
And so I entered the camp of the mujaheddin fighters. Men crouched around me at once, helping me from the horse's neck and steadying me on my feet. My own column of men followed us across the narrow path, and reached out to pat me on the back and slap at my shoulders. Seeing that familiarity, the mujaheddin joined in the slapping chorus, and it was fully fifteen minutes before the last man left my side and I could sit down to rest my jelly legs.
"Getting you to ride with him wasn't Khader's best-ever idea,"
Khaled Ansari said, sliding down a boulder face to sit beside me with his back to the stone. "But fuck, man, you are real popular after that trick. That's easily the funniest thing those guys have ever seen in their lives."
"For Christ's sake!" I sighed, with a last reflexive giggle of laughter. "I rode over a hundred mountains and crossed ten rivers, most of it in the dark, for a whole month, and everything was okay. I roll into the camp, and I'm hangin' on my horse's neck like a fuckin' monkey."
"Don't get me started again!" Khaled spluttered, laughing and clutching at his side.
I laughed with him, and although I was exhausted and resigned to the ridicule, I didn't want to laugh any more, so I glanced around to my right to avoid his eye. A canvas shamiana in camouflage colours provided shelter for our wounded men. In the shadows beside it, men were pulling cargo from the horses and ferrying it into the cavern. I saw Habib dragging something long and heavy away from behind the working line, and deeper into the darkness beyond.
"What's..." I began, still chuckling. "What's Habib doing over there?"
Khaled was instantly alert, and jumped to his feet. His urgency quickened me, and I leapt up after him. We ran to the line of rocks that formed one edge of the flattened mountain plateau, and as we rounded them we saw him kneeling, legs astride the body of a man. It was Siddiqi. While all the attention was on the fascinating bundles of the cargo, Habib had dragged the unconscious man from beneath the canvas awning. Just as we reached him, Habib drove his long knife into the man's neck and gave it that delicate twist. Siddiqi's legs twitched a tiny, trembling shake and then were still. Habib pulled the knife away and turned to see us staring back at him. The horror and rage in our faces seemed only to fuel the burning madness in his eyes. He grinned at us.
"Khader!" Khaled shouted, his face as pale as the moon-washed stone around us. "Khaderbhai! Iddar ao!" Come herel I heard an answering shout from behind us somewhere, but I didn't move. My eyes were on Habib. He turned to face me, swinging his leg over the murdered man and crouching on his haunches as if he was about to spring at me. The manic grin locked on his features, but his eyes grew darker-more afraid, perhaps, or more cunning.
He turned his head quickly and tilted it at an eccentric angle, as if listening with feral intensity to a faint sound in the distant night. I heard nothing but the noises of the camp behind me and the soft wail of the wind as it coursed through the canyons and ravines and secret pathways. In that instant, the land, the mountains, the very country of Afghanistan seemed to me so desolate, so bleached of loveliness and tenderness that it was like the landscape of Habib's insanity. I felt that I was trapped inside the stony maze of his hallucinated brain.
While he listened, tense in his animal crouch, with his face turned away from me, I slipped the stud-clip off my holster. I eased the gun out, and into my hands. Breathing hard, I followed Khader's instructions automatically, not realising until it was done that I'd flicked off the safety, chambered a round by pulling back the sliding return, and cocked the hammer. The sounds brought Habib round to face me. He looked at the gun in my hand. It was aimed at his chest. He looked back to my eyes, moving his gaze slowly, almost languorously. The long knife was still in his hand. I don't know what expression lit my face in the moonlight. It can't have been good. My mind was made up: if he moved a millimetre toward me, I would pull the trigger as many times as it took to finish him.
His grin widened into a laugh-at least, it looked like a laugh.
His mouth moved, and his head shook, but there was no sound. And his eyes, ignoring Khaled completely, stared a message into mine.
And then I could hear him, hear his voice in my head. You see? his eyes said to me. I'm right not to trust any of you... You want to kill me... All of you... You want me dead... But it's all right... I don't mind... I give you my permission... I want you to do it...