Bursting through the black smoke and flames, men began running or crawling out of the cave. One of the men was a Pashtun trader named Alef. He'd been a favourite of Khaderbhai's for his jokes and irreverent satires of pompous mullahs and local political figures. His back was blown out from the head to the thighs. His clothes were on fire. They burned and smouldered around the bare, erupted meat of his back. Bones-a hipbone and a shoulder blade- were clearly visible, and moving in the open wound as he crawled.
He was screaming out for help. I gritted my teeth to make the run to him, but the helicopter appeared again. It roared past us at great speed, twice turning in tight circles to attack us from new angles in passing rushes. Then it hovered with arrogant, fearless nonchalance near the edge of the plateau that had been our haven.
Just as I started to move forward it fired two more rockets at the caves and then another two. The salvo lit up the whole interior of the cavern for an instant, and melted the snow with a rolling fireball of flames and white-hot metal pieces. One fragment landed only an arm's reach away from me. It crashed into the snow and sizzled with a blistering hiss for several seconds.
I crawled away after Khaled, and squeezed my body into the narrow cleft in the rocks.
The gunship opened up with machine guns, raking the open ground and chopping up the bodies of the wounded men who were exposed there. Then I heard another gun with a different tone, and I realised that one of our men was firing back at the helicopter.
It was the sound of a PK, one of our Russian machine guns, returning fire. It was quickly followed by a second, long
There was a shout from somewhere behind me and then a rocket fizzed past my hideaway cleft in the stone toward the chopper. It was a rocket, fired from an AK-74 by one of our men. It missed the helicopter, and so did the next two rockets, but the return fire from our men was finding its target, and convinced the pilot to cut his losses and leave.
A great shout went up from our men: Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar! Khaled and I eased our way out of the wedge of stone to find four men rushing forward and firing at the aircraft. A thin stream of rusty black smoke dribbled from a point about two thirds of the way along the length of the machine as it plunged away from us, to the metal screech of a wildly racing engine.
The young man who'd opened up the counter attack was Jalalaad, the Hazarbuz nomad. He handed the heavy PK off to a friend, snatched up an AK-74 with a taped double magazine, and bounded away in search of enemy soldiers who mightVe crept close under cover of the chopper. Two other young men ran after him, slipping and jumping down the snow-covered slope.
We searched the compound for survivors. We were twenty men at the start of the attack, including our two wounded. After it, we were eleven: Jalalaad and the two young men, Juma and Hanif, who'd left with him to find any Afghan regulars or Russians within our defensive perimeter; Khaled; Nazeer; a very young fighter named Ala-ud-Din; three wounded men; Suleiman; and myself. We'd lost nine men-one more than the eight Afghan army men we'd killed in our mortar attack on them.
Our wounded were in a bad way. One man was so badly burned that his fingers had fused together like a crab's claws, and his face wasn't recognisably human. He was breathing through a hole in the red skin of his face. It might've been his mouth, that trembling hole in his face, but there was no way to be sure. The breaths were laboured, scraping sounds that faded and weakened as I listened to them. I gave him morphine, and moved on to the next man. He was a farmer from Ghazni named Zaher Rasul. He'd taken to bringing me green tea whenever I read a book or made notes in my journal. He was a kindly, self-effacing forty-two year old-a senior man in a country where the average life span for men was forty-five. His arm was missing below the shoulder. The same projectile, whatever it was, that had severed his arm, had torn him open along his body, from the chest to the hip, on the right hand side. There was no way of knowing what pieces of metal or stone might be lodged inside his wounds. He was praying a repetitive zikkir:
God is great God forgive me God is merciful God forgive me Mahmoud Melbaaf was holding a tourniquet on the ragged stump of shoulder that remained. When he released it, the blood spattered us in strong warm spurts. Mahmoud pulled the tourniquet tight once more. I looked into his eyes.
"Artery," I said, crushed by the task that confronted me.
"Yes. Under his arm. Did you see?"
