All the generations of his family-his grandparents, from both sides, his parents, his wife's parents, his uncles and aunties, his brothers and sisters, his wife, and his children. All gone, in just one hour of one day. Even the animals, the goats and the sheep and the chickens, were all dead. Even the insects and the birds were dead. Nothing moved. Nothing lived and nothing survived."
"He make... a bury... all men... all women... all childrens ..." Nazeer added.
"He buried them all," Khader nodded. "All his family, and his friends from childhood, and his neighbours. It took so long to do it, all alone, that it was a very bad business, at the end. Then, when the job was done, he took up his gun and rejoined his mujaheddin unit. But the loss had changed him in a terrible way.
This time he was like a different man. This time he did everything in his power to capture a Russian, or an Afghan soldier fighting for the Russians. And when he captured one-and he did capture them, many of them, because he was very good at it after that-when he did capture them, he tortured them to death by impaling them on a sharpened steel spike, made from the wooden handle and the blade of the shovel he had used to bury his family. He has it now. You can see it strapped to the top of his pack. He ties the prisoners to the spike by their hands, behind their backs, with the spike touching their backs. At the moment that their strength fails them, and the metal spike begins to tear its way through their bodies, forcing its way out through their stomachs, Habib leans over them, staring into their eyes, and spits into their screaming mouths."
Khaled Ansari, Nazeer, Ahmed Zadeh, and I stood in a deeply breathing silence, waiting for Khader to speak again.
"There is no man who knows these mountains, and the region between here and Kandahar, better than Habib," Khader concluded, sighing wearily. "He is the best guide. He has survived hundreds of missions in this region, and he will get us to our men in Kandahar. And there is no man more loyal or trustworthy, because there is no man in Afghanistan who hates the Russians more than Habib Abdur Rahman. But..." "He is completely insane," Ahmed Zadeh offered into the silence with a Gallic shrug, and I found myself liking him, suddenly, and missing my friend Didier in the same instant. It was just the kind of pragmatic and brutally honest summary that Didier might've made.
"Yes," Khader agreed. "He is insane. His grief has destroyed his mind. And for as much as we need him, there is the fact that he must be watched at all times. Every mujaheddin unit from here to Herat has cast him out. We are fighting the Afghan army that serves the Russians, but the fact is that they are Afghans. We receive most of our information from soldiers in the Afghan army who want to _help us to win against their Russian masters. Habib cannot make this fine distinction. He has only one understanding of this war: to kill them all quickly, or to kill them slowly.
And he prefers to kill them slowly. There is such a cruel violence in him that it frightens his friends no less than his enemies. So he must be watched, while he is with us."
"I'll watch over him," Khaled Ansari declared firmly, and we all turned to look at our Palestinian friend. His face was set in an expression of suffering and anger and determination. The skin was tight across his eyes from brow to brow, and his mouth was drawn into a wide, flat line of tenacious resolve.
"Very well..." Khader began, and he would've said more, but with those two words of consent Khaled left us and walked toward the slumped, forlorn figure of Habib Abdur Rahman.
Watching him leave, I was struck with a sudden, clutching instinct to cry out and stop him. It was a foolish thing-an irrational stabbing dread that I was losing him, losing another friend. And it was so ridiculous, so petty in its jealousy, that I bit down on it and said nothing. Then I watched him sit down opposite Habib. I watched him reach out to lift the gaping, murderous face of the madman until their eyes met and held, and I knew, without understanding it, that Khaled was lost to us.
I dragged my eyes from the sight of them, as boatmen drag a lake with starry hooks. My mouth was dry. My heart was a prisoner pounding on the walls inside my head. My legs felt leaden, fixed to the earth with roots of shame and dread. And as I looked up at the sheer, impassable mountains, I felt the future shudder through me like thunder trembling through the limbs and wearied vines of a storming willow.
