Ahmed talked for a while longer. He told us the name of his village, and he gave us directions for how to find it in relation to the nearest big city. He told us about his father and mother, about his sisters and brothers. He wanted us to let them know that he'd died thinking of them. And he did, that brave, laughing Algerian, who'd always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd of strangers: he did die with his mother's love on his lips. And the name of God escaped with his last breath.
We were freezing, chilled to the bones by the stillness we'd assumed while Ahmed lay dying. Other men took over the task of cleaning his body according to the rituals of Muslim burial.
Khaled, Mahmoud, and I checked on Nazeer. He wasn't wounded, but he was so utterly and crushingly exhausted that his sleep resembled that of a man in a coma. His mouth was open, and his eyes were slitted to show the whites within. He was warm, and he seemed to be recovering from his ordeal. We left him, and examined the body of our dead Khan.
A single bullet had entered Khader's side, below the ribs, and seemed to have travelled directly to his heart. There was no exit wound, but there was extensive blood coagulation and bruising on the left side of his chest. The bullet fired by Russian AK-74s in those years had a hollow tip. The steel core of the bullet was weighted towards the rear, causing it to tumble. It crashed and ripped its way into a body, rather than simply piercing it. Such ammunition was banned under international law, but almost every one of the Afghans who was killed in battle bore the terrible wounds of those brutal bullets. So it was with our Khan. The bullet had smashed its way through his body. The gaping, jagged wound in his side had left a streak of bruising across his chest that ended in a blue-black lotus over his heart.
Knowing that Nazeer would want to prepare Khaderbhai's body for burial himself, we wrapped the Khan in blankets and left him in a shallow, scooped-out trench of snow near the entrance to the caves. We'd just finished the task when a warbling, fluttering, whistle of sound drew us to our feet. We looked at one another in fearful confusion. Then a violent explosion shook the ground beneath us with a flash of orange and dirty grey smoke. The mortar shell had struck the ground more than a hundred metres away, at the far edge of the compound, but the air near us was already filthy with its smell and smoke. Then a second shell burst, and a third, and we ran for the cave-mouth and flung ourselves into the squirming octopus of men who were there ahead of us. Arms, legs, and heads crushed in on one another as we hunkered down in terror while the mortars tore up the rocky ground outside as if it was papier-mache.
It was bad, and it got worse every day after that. When the attack was over, we searched among the blackened stipple and crater of the compound. Two men were dead. One of them was Kareem, the man whose broken forearm I'd set on the night before we'd reached the camp. Two others were so badly wounded that we were sure they would die. Many of the supplies were destroyed. First among them were the drums of fuel we'd used for the generator and the stoves. The stoves and lamps were critically important for heating and cooking. Most of the fuel was gone, and all of our water reserves. We set to cleaning up the debris-my medical kit was blackened and scorched by the fire-and consolidating the remaining supplies in the great cave. The men were quiet. They were worried and afraid. They had reason enough.
While others busied themselves with those tasks, I tended to the wounded men. One man had lost a foot and a part of his leg below the knee. There were fragments of shrapnel in his neck and upper arm. He was eighteen years old. He'd joined the unit with his elder brother six months before we arrived. His brother had been killed during an attack on a Russian outpost near Kandahar. The boy was dying. I pulled the metal pieces from his body with long stainless steel tweezers and a pair of long-nosed pliers I pilfered from the mechanic's kit.
