I saw the first flashes of fire from the enemy Kalashnikovs. They were far away, at least two hundred metres, much further than I'd guessed. A tracer bullet fizzed past me, only one step to my left. We wouldn't make it. We couldn't make it. There weren't many of them-there weren't many guns firing-but they had so much time to get a sight on us and shoot us down. They were going to kill us all. Then a wild flurry of explosions crunched into the enemy lines. The idiots! They blew up their own mortar shells, I thought, and gunfire like fireworks rattled the world from everywhere at once. And Nazeer raised his assault rifle, and fired as he ran, and I saw Mahmoud Melbaaf firing ahead of me, on my right, where Suleiman had been, and I raised my weapon, and pulled the trigger.
There was a horrible, blood-freezing scream somewhere very close.
I suddenly recognised it as my own, but I couldn't stop it. And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step.
And then, in a world suddenly soundless as the deepest sea, my legs stopped still, and hot, gritty, filthy, exploding earth clogged my eyes and my mouth. Something had hit my legs.
Something hard and hot and viciously sharp had hit my legs. I fell forward as if I'd been running in the dark and I'd smashed into a fallen tree trunk. A mortar round. The metal fragments.
The shock-deafened silence. The burning skin. The blinding earth.
The choking struggle for breath. There was a smell that filled my head. It was the smell of my own death-it smells of blood, and seawater, and damp earth, and the ash of burned wood when you smell your own death before you die-and then I hit the ground so hard that I plunged through it into a deep, undreaming darkness.
And the fall was forever. And there was no light, no light.
If you stare into its cold dead eye, the camera always mocks you with the truth. The black-and-white photograph showed almost all the men of Khader's mujaheddin unit assembled for the kind of formal portrait that makes the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India seem more stiff and gloweringly self-conscious than they really are. It was impossible to tell from that photo how much those men had loved to laugh, and how readily they'd smiled.
But none of them were looking directly into the lens of the camera. All the eyes but mine were a little above or below, a little to the left or the right. Only my own eyes stared back at me as I held the picture in my bandaged hands, and remembered the names of the men leaning together in the ragged lines.
Mazdur Gul, the stonemason, whose name means labourer, and whose hands were permanently grey-white from decades of work with granite... Daoud, who liked to be called by the English version of his name, David, and whose dream it was to visit the great city of New York and eat a meal in a fine restaurant...
Zamaanat, whose name means trust, and whose brave smile concealed the agony of shame he'd felt that his whole family lived in hungry squalor at Jalozai, a huge refugee camp near Peshawar...
Hajji Akbar, who'd been appointed as the doctor in the unit for no other reason than that he'd once spent two months as a patient in a Kabul hospital, and who'd greeted my acceptance of the doctor's job, when I arrived at the mountain camp, with prayers and a little Dervish dance of joy... Alef, the mischievously satirical Pashtun trader, who died crawling in the snow with his back torn open and his clothes on fire... Juma and Hanif, the two wild boys who were killed by the madman Habib... Jalalaad, their fearless young friend, who died in the last charge... Ala ud-Din, whose name in English is shortened to Aladdin, and who escaped unscathed... Suleiman Shahbadi, of the furrowed brow and sorrowing eyes, who died leading us into the guns.
And in the centre of the assembly there was a smaller, tighter group around Abdel Khader Khan: Ahmed Zadeh, the Algerian, who died with one hand clenched in the frozen earth and the other knotted into mine... Khaled Ansari, who murdered the madman Habib and then walked into the lost world of the smothering snow ... Mahmoud Melbaaf, who survived the last charge like Ala-ud Din, unwounded and unmarked... Nazeer, who ignored his own wounds to drag my unconscious body to safety... and me. Standing behind and a little to the left of Khaderbhai, my expression in the photograph was confident, resolute, and self-possessed. And the camera, they say, doesn't lie.
