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.
