The weather shifted during those weeks to the cold heart of a severe winter. Snow fell in fitful gusts and squalls that left us sodden in our many-layered patchwork uniforms. A freezing mist drifted so slowly through the mountains that it sometimes hung suspended for hours at a time: still and white and as impenetrable to the gaze as frosted glass. The ground was always muddy or frozen, and even the stone walls of the caves we lived in seemed to ring and tremble with the icy chill of the season.
Part of Khader’s cargo had consisted of hand tools and machine components. We’d set up two workshops in the first days after our arrival, and they were busy throughout the creeping weeks of the winter. There was a small capstan lathe, which we’d bolted to a homemade table. The lathe ran on a diesel engine. The fighters felt certain that there were no enemy forces within earshot, but still we dampened its noise with a little igloo of burlap sacks that covered the engine, leaving gaps for the air inlet and exhaust gas outlet. The same engine powered a grinding wheel and a speed drill.
With that assembly, the fighters repaired their weapons and sometimes adapted them to suit new and different purposes. First among those weapons were the mortars. After aircraft and tanks, the most effective battle weapon in Afghanistan was the Russian 82-millimetre mortar. The guerrillas bought the mortars, stole them, or captured them in hand-to-hand fighting, often at the cost of human lives. The weapons were then turned on the Russians, who’d brought them into the country in order to conquer it. Our workshops stripped the mortars down, refitted them, and packed them in waxed bags for use in combat zones as far away as Zaranj in the west, and Kunduz in the north.
Apart from the cartridge pliers and crimping tools, the ammunition and the explosives, Khader’s cargo also included new parts for the Kalashnikovs that he’d purchased in the arms bazaars in Peshawar. The Russian AK-
Kalashnikov’s AK-47, the most influential and widely manufactured of the new assault rifles, operated by diverting some of the propellant gases produced by a fired bullet into a cylinder above the barrel. The gas drove a piston that forced the bolt back against its spring, and cocked the hammer for the next round. The rifle weighed about five kilos, carried thirty rounds in its curved metal magazine, and fired the 7.62-millimetre rounds at around 2,300 feet per second, over an effective range greater than 300 metres. It fired more than a hundred rounds per minute on auto, and about forty rounds every minute on the semi-automatic, single-shot function.
The rifle had its limitations, and the mujaheddin fighters were quick to explain them to me. The low muzzle-velocity of the heavy 7.62-millimetre round defined a looping trajectory that called for tricky adjustments to hit a target at three hundred metres or more. Muzzle flash on firing the AK was so bright, particularly with the new 74 series, that it blinded the firer at night, and often betrayed his position. The barrel overheated rapidly, becoming too hot to hold. Sometimes a round grew so hot in the chamber that it exploded in the user’s face. That fact explained why so many guerrilla fighters held the gun away from their bodies, or over their heads, in battle operations.
Nevertheless, the rifle worked perfectly after total immersion in water, mud, or snow, and it remained one of the most efficient and reliable killing machines ever devised. In the first four decades after its development, fifty million of them were produced-more than any other firearm in history-and the Kalashnikov, in all its forms, was carried as a preferred strike weapon by revolutionaries, regular soldiers, mercenaries, and gangsters all over the fighting world.
