And, like blind men, we trusted Habib, without question, as our guide. None of the Afghans in our group lived in the border region, and they were as dependent on his knowledge of those secret passes and fortuitous ledge-pathways as I was.
When he wasn't leading the column, however, Habib inspired far less confidence. I came upon him once as I scrambled over some rocks to find a place to take a piss during a rest stop. He was kneeling in front of a roughly square slab of stone, and beating his forehead against it. I leapt down to stop him, and discovered that he was weeping, sobbing. The blood from his torn forehead ran down his face to mix with the tears in his beard. I poured a little water from my canteen onto a corner of my scarf, and wiped the blood from his head to examine the wounds. They were rough and jagged, but largely superficial. He allowed me to lead him, unprotesting, back to the camp. Khaled rushed up at once and helped me to apply ointment and a clean bandage to his forehead.
"I left him alone," Khaled muttered when the job was done. "I thought he was praying. He told me he wanted to pray. But I had a feeling..."
"I think he was praying," I answered.
"I'm worried," Khaled confessed, looking into my eyes with a febrile mix of heartbreak and fear. "He keeps setting mantraps all over the place. He's got twenty grenades on him under that cloak. I've tried to explain to him that a mantrap has no conscience-it might just as easily kill a local nomad shepherd, or one of us, as a Russian or an Afghan soldier. He doesn't get it. He just grins at me, and does it a little bit more secret. He rigged some of the horses with explosives yesterday. He said it was to make sure the Russians didn't get their hands on them. I said to him, what about us? What if the Russians get their hands on us? Should we be rigged with explosives, too? He said it was a problem he worried about all the time-how to make sure we were dead before the Russians got their hands on us, and how to kill more Russians after we were dead."
"Does Khader know?"
"No. I'm trying to keep Habib in line. I know where he's coming from, Lin. I've been there. The first couple years after my family was killed, I was as crazy as he is. I know what's going on inside him. He's filled up with so many dead friends and enemies that he's kind of locked on one course-killing Russians - and until he snaps out of it, I just gotta stay with him as much as I can, and watch his ass."
"I think you should tell Khader," I sighed, shaking my head.
"I will," he sighed in return. "I will. Soon. I'll talk to him soon. He'll get better. Habib will get better. He's getting better in some ways. I can talk to him real well now. He'll make it."
But as the weeks of the journey passed, we all watched Habib more closely, more fearfully, and little by little we all realised why so many other mujaheddin units had cast him out.
With our senses alert for menace from without and within, we travelled by night, and sometimes by day, north along the mountainous border towards Pathaan Khel. Near the khel, or village, we swung north-north-west into deserted mountainous terrain that was veined with cold, fresh, sweet-water streams.
Habib laid out a route that was roughly equidistant between towns and larger villages, always avoiding the main arteries that local people used. We trudged between Pathaan Khel and Khairo Thaana; between Humai Khaarez and Haji Aagha Muhammad. We forded rivers between Loe Kaarez and yaaru. We zigzagged between Mullah Mustafa and the little village of Abdul Hamid.
Local pirates, demanding tribute, stopped us three times on the way. Each time, they revealed themselves at first in high vantage points, with guns trained on us, before their ground forces swept from hiding to lock the way forward and cut off our retreat. Each time, Khader raised his green-and-white mujaheddin flag emblazoned with the Koranic phrase:
