‘Leave? Where are we going?’
‘We have to get out of here. How are you feeling?’
‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘I’m okay.’
I sat up on the cot bed and swung my legs over the side. When my feet hit the floor there was a pain so excruciating in my shins that I moaned aloud. Another fierce pain throbbed at my forehead. I probed with my blunt, bandaged fingers at a wad of dressing beneath a bandage that wound round my head like a turban. A third pain in my left ear nagged for my attention. My hands were aching, and my feet, swaddled in three or more layers of socks, felt as if they were burning. There was a painful ache in my left hip, where the horse had kicked me when the jets had torn up the sky above us, months before. The wound had never properly healed, and I suspected that a bone was chipped beneath the tender flesh. My forearm felt numb near the elbow, where my own horse had bitten me in its panic. That wound was also months old, and it too had never really healed.
Doubled over, resting on my thighs, I could feel the tightness of my stomach and the leaner flesh of my legs. I was thin, after starving on the mountain. Too thin. All in all, it was a mess. I was in a bad way. Then my mind came back to the bandages on my hands, and a sensation close to panic rose like a spear in my spine.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ve gotta get these bandages off,’ I snapped, tearing at them with my teeth.
‘Wait! Wait!’ Mahmoud cried. ‘I will do it for you.’
He unwound the bulky bandages slowly, and I felt the sweat run from my eyebrows onto my cheeks. When both lots of bindings were removed, I stared at the disfigured claws that my hands had become, and I moved them, flexing the fingers. Frostbite had split my hands open at all the knuckle joints, and the bruise-black wounds were hideous, but all the fingers and all the fingertips were there.
‘You can thank Nazeer,’ Mahmoud muttered softly as he examined my cracked and peeling hands. ‘They were thinking to cut off your fingers, but he would not let them. And he would not let them leave you until they treated all your injuries. He did force them to help the frostbite injuries on your face, also. He had the Kalashnikov and your automatic pistol. Here-he asked me to give it to you, when you wake up.’
He produced the Stechkin, wrapped in a coil of cheesecloth. I tried to take it, but my hands couldn’t hold the bundle.
‘I will keep it for you,’ Mahmoud offered with a stiff little smile.
‘Where is he?’ I asked, still dazed and drilled by the pain, but feeling better and stronger by the minute.
‘Over there,’ Mahmoud indicated, nodding his head. I turned to see Nazeer, sleeping on his side on a cot similar to my own. ‘He is resting, but he is ready to move. We must leave here soon. Our friends will come for us at any time now, and we must be ready to move.’
I looked around me. We were in a large, sand-coloured tent with pallet floors and about fifteen folding cot-beds. Several men wearing Afghan clothing-loose pants, tunic shirts, and long, sleeveless vests in the same shades of pale green-moved among the beds. They were fanning the wounded men with straw fans, washing them with buckets of soapy water, or carrying away wastes through a narrow slit in the canvas door. Some of the wounded were moaning or speaking out their pain in languages I couldn’t understand. The air in that Pakistani plain, after months in the snowy peaks of Afghanistan, was thick and hot and heavy. There were so many strong smells, one upon another, that my senses rejected them and concentrated on one particularly pungent aroma: the unmistakable smell of perfumed Indian basmati rice, cooking somewhere close to the tent.
‘I’m fuckin’ hungry, man, I gotta tell ya.’
‘We will eat good food soon,’ Mahmoud assured me, allowing himself a laugh.
‘Are we…? This is Pakistan?’
‘Yes,’ he laughed again. ‘What can you remember?’
‘Not much. Running. They were shooting at us… from a long way off. Mortars everywhere. I remember… I was hit…’
I felt along the padded bandages that swathed my shins, from knees to ankles.
‘And I hit the ground. Then… I remember… was it a jeep? Or a truck? Did that happen?’
‘Yes. They took us. Massoud’s men.’
‘Massoud?’
Ahmed Shah. The Lion himself. His men made the attack on the dam and the two main roads-to Kabul and to Quetta. They put a siege on Kandahar. They are still there, outside the city, and they will not leave, I think so, until the war is over. We ran into the middle of it, my friend.’
‘They rescued us…’
‘It was, how to say, the less they do for us.’
‘The
‘Yes. Because it was them who killed us.’
‘What?’
‘Yes. When we made our escaping out of the mountain, running down, the Afghan army shoot at us. Massoud’s men see us, and think we are some of the enemy. They are a long way from us. They start to shoot at us with mortars.’
‘Our own people shot at us?’
