Juma's Tajik clans of cameleers were traditional rivals of the Mohmand Hazarbuz people of Hanif and Jalalaad in the nomadic transport of trade goods. The competition between the groups had become intense as Afghanistan rapidly modernised. In 1920, fully one in every three Afghans was a nomad. Just two generations later, by 1970, only 2 per cent of the people were nomads. Rivals though they were, the three young men had been thrown into close co-operation with one another by the war, and they'd become inseparable friends. Their friendship had developed in the insidiously dull months that troughed between the peaks of fighting, and was tested many times in combat. In their most successful battle, they'd used land mines and grenades to destroy a Russian tank. Each of them wore, on a leather thong around his neck, a small piece of metal taken from the tank as a souvenir.
When Juma declared that he would search for Hanif, we all knew that we couldn't prevent him from doing it. With a weary sigh, Suleiman agreed to let him go. Refusing to wait until nightfall, Juma shouldered his weapon and crept from the camp at once. He'd gone without food for three days, just as we had, but the smile that he sent back to Jalalaad, as he looked over his shoulder for the last time, was bright with strength and courage. We watched him leave, watched his thin, retreating shadow sweep the sundial of the snowy slopes beneath us.
Hunger exaggerated the cold. It was a long, hard winter, with snow falling on the mountains around us every other day. The temperature fluttered above zero during the daylight hours, but sank into icy, teeth-chattering sub-zero levels from dusk until well after dawn. My hands and feet were constantly cold; achingly cold. The skin on my face was wooden, and as riven with cracks as the feet of the farmers in Prabaker's village. We pissed on our hands, to fight off the aching sting of the cold, and it helped to bring feeling back to them momentarily. But we were so cold that taking a piss was a serious issue. First there was the dread inspired by having to open our clothes at all, and then there was the chill that followed the release of a bladder of warm fluid. Losing that warmth caused the body temperature to drop quickly, and we always put it off until the last moment.
Juma failed to return that night. At midnight, with hunger and fear prodding us awake, we all jumped at a little crickle of sound in the darkness. Seven guns aimed at the spot. Then we gasped as a face loomed from the shadows, much closer than we'd expected. It was Habib.
"What are you doing, my brother?" Khaled asked him gently, in Urdu. "You gave us a big fright."
"They are here," he answered in a rational, calm voice that seemed to rise from another mind or another place, as if he was a medium speaking in a trance. His face was filthy. We were all unwashed and bearded, but Habib's filth was something so repulsive and thickly smeared that it was shocking. Like poison pouring from an infected wound, the foulness seemed to squeeze outward through the pores of his skin from some feculence deep within. "They are everywhere, all around you. And they are coming up to here to get you, to kill you all, when more men come, tomorrow, or the day after that. Soon. They know where you are.
They will kill you all. There is only one way out of here now."
"How did you find us here, brother?" Khaled asked, his voice as calm and remote as Habib's.
"I came with you. I have always been near you. Did you not see me?"
"My friends," Jalalaad asked, "Juma and Hanif-did you see them anywhere?"
Habib didn't reply. Jalalaad asked the question again, more forcefully.
"Did you see them? Were they in the Russian camp? Were they captured?"
We listened in a silence thick with our fear and the poisonous smells of decayed flesh that clung to Habib. He seemed to be meditating, or perhaps listening to something no-one else could hear.
"Tell me,
"They are everywhere," Habib answered, his face deformed by its wide-mouthed, psychotic stare. Mahmoud Melbaaf was translating for me, whispering close to my ear. "They don't have enough men. They have mined all the easiest ways out of the mountains. The north, the east, the west, all mined. Only the south-east is clear, because they think you will not try to escape that way. They left that way clear, so they can come up here to get you."
"We can't go out that way," Mahmoud whispered to me when Habib stopped suddenly. "The Russians, they hold the valley south-east of here. It is their way to Kandahar. When they come for us, they will come from that direction. If we go that way, we will all die, and they know it."
"Now, they are in the south-east. But for tomorrow, for one day, they are all on the far side of the mountain, in the north-west,"
