A Loyal Spy (12 page)

Ready.

‘Come,’ she said.

The dog sprang off the sofa.

She eased herself back down the passageway to the drawing room and slipped out of the window into the lengthening shadows of the hollow on the house’s eastward side. Keeping the house between her and the mass of the hill beyond, she sprinted the hundred metres to the treeline, counting each breath as she went.

Then she was in the tangle of alder, rhododendrons and stunted oak trees. She kept heading east until she reached the cliff edge and then followed the line of cliffs northwards towards Kinuadrachd.

After a kilometre or so she dropped down into a narrow ravine between fractured stone walls that was filled with leaves and followed it down to a tiny natural harbour that was hemmed in by foliage. Jonah kept a dinghy, its outboard removed, under a tarpaulin in the rhododendrons. She stopped for a moment and listened to the gentle lapping of the waves. Nothing appeared to have been tampered with.

She headed back up the ravine to the woods. She dug with her hands in the soft earth near an oak tree. Buried there, contained within a metal locker and immersed in grease, was the outboard. Beside the locker was a jerrycan of fuel and beneath it a sealed plastic envelope. She zipped the envelope into the lid of her bag and carried the outboard down to the dinghy. Then she went back for the jerrycan.

She dragged the dinghy down to the shoreline and set about fixing the outboard. As she worked, she expected them to appear through the trees at any moment. She struggled to keep her mind clear and her actions orderly.

The outboard started first time. The dog sat beside her in the boat, its snout raised to the air. Together, they headed east across the placid water.

They spent a fitful night in a small wood beside a river, somewhere on the Craignish peninsula. Miranda woke every hour or so – the wood was full of noises, rustlings, the dapple of the moon and the melancholy hoots of owls – and felt the dog shift in response in its nest at the bottom of her sleeping bag. She realised that, lying on her back in an unknown wood, nobody knew where she was and she hardly knew where she was herself. She didn’t feel fear. Not as such. It was a long time since she had felt afraid. Though she could remember circumstances similar to these in which she had felt real fear, the kind of fear that would not let her sleep: nights spent wrapped in a blanket beside a temperamental Zil truck in the Hindu Kush, anticipating another day of playing cat and mouse with the Sukhois and Hinds of the Afghan air force.

She lay there, watching the sky lighten, and she thought of her life. Things had always happened to her. Events swirled around her like gusts of sand in a desert storm. Sometimes she stood in the eye. Then, inevitably, there was another gust of wind, a buckle of thunder in the air, and she was carried onward. There was no point trying to fight it.

Abruptly the dog scrambled up through the bag and raced off into the dawn. When she had recovered she retrieved Jonah’s postcard from the crash-bag, which had been her pillow. She stared at it: the photograph of the Bala Hissar fortress in Peshawar in Pakistan. Bala Hissar meant high fort in Farsi. She vividly remembered the slow swirl of bicycles, donkey carts, trucks, auto-rickshaws and cars around the hulking fortress. It was possible to say that her own journey had begun in Peshawar one spring, when riotous thickets of sweetpeas climbed the walls like weeds. That another man, not Jonah, had taken her by the hand and first led her into the storm.

1988–1989

‘I’ve been watching you,’ the stranger said, in perfect English. She was sitting in the courtyard at Green’s Hotel in Peshawar. She had been there for several days while her boyfriend ‘Digger’ limped around the market in an unravelling plaster cast, searching for cut-price parts for the truck. She was eighteen.

The stranger was wearing a white shalwar kameez – the white of redemption – and later, when he removed it, she saw that his body was criss-crossed with scars. And he had beautiful eyes that, even then, seemed to contain several gazes. They’d glide across her and then away like a lighthouse beam, leaving her wanting more.

‘And I’ve been watching you too,’ she said. It was March 1988, and the Soviet army was about to begin its withdrawal from Afghanistan.

He laughed at her boldness and reached out to take her right hand, turned it in his so that the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger was uppermost. His thumb rubbed the blue letter inked there.

‘R for right?’

‘Yes,’ she said, defiantly. ‘Digger’ had broken his leg two days before they were due to leave England and had spent the trip in a plaster cast. She’d driven the truck and its load of disposable gas stoves all the way from Dover, with L for left written on one hand and R for right on the other. She told him that she’d never made a wrong turn.

‘We’ll call this an accidental collision,’ he said. ‘My name is Bakr. I come from the Lion’s Den.’

She had decided to sleep with him then. Later, beneath him in his bedroom, while her discarded boyfriend searched the corridors for her, an unexpected shudder passed through her body like a bolt of lightning. And afterwards, outstretched on the sheet, softly panting, she whispered, ‘Will you take me to the Lion’s Den?’

The first leg of their journey was a seven-hour bus trip up to the Tochi Valley in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Bakr had secured her a place as a volunteer at a hospital in an Afghan refugee camp. It wasn’t the Lion’s Den. It was a stop on the way.

The camp was a squalid collection of low, dun-coloured buildings gathered around a square of baked earth. First, she was introduced to the camp administrator, who treated Bakr with a degree of deference which suggested that he was an important figure. The administrator served them tea and asked her questions about her family and origins. She told how her father had fought the Soviet-backed military regime in Somalia. He appeared satisfied with her responses.

They were given their own hut, with a white plastic chair and a mattress resting on a pallet.

‘There’s a catch,’ he said.

‘Which is?’

‘We have to get married.’

Why not? she thought. He showed her how. She spoke the words:
I have wedded you myself.
She stated the agreed term of two years and her dowry, a basil plant in an old paint can. He said:
I accept
.

They made love on the mattress and again he brought her effortlessly to climax.

He was gone the next day.

There were very few antibiotics or medicines. She spent her mornings improvising dressings for the wounded and mopping the floors. In the afternoon she worked in the office. Occasionally the Red Crescent sent supplies, and she’d scrupulously check the delivery note against the invoice.

It wasn’t really a hospital, at least not as she understood the term after an exile’s childhood in London. It was a first-aid post. It was built of rough breeze blocks with a tin roof. There were two connected rooms and each one held two rows of fifteen beds. Most of the wounded were in their thirties, though there were a few who were older – haggard, toothless old fighters who to her untutored eye could have been seventy or forty. There were no women.

Across the camp, women were almost invisible. She’d see them in their burqas, flitting between huts like ghosts. The men ignored her. She wore a headscarf, but even the wounded turned their faces from her. Only the children befriended her. She’d sit on a stone outside her hut, with the basil plant beside her, and the young girls would sit at her feet and teach her the Pashtun words for things.

Bakr brought her a gramophone that he claimed to have recovered from the ruins of a house that had been occupied by a Soviet general in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, along with some 45s. The general’s taste was distinctly capitalist, bourgeois even. They wound the gramophone up like a clock and danced to ‘Strangers in the Night’ and danced to it again. It made them think they were in another place, another time.

He was gone the next morning.

Everybody had a gun, even the wounded, who kept their Kalashnikovs hanging from the bedstead or lying beside them. On several occasions, she watched as boxes of AKs were unloaded from trucks, and stored in a concrete bunker at the edge of the camp.

As the summer temperature rose, the number of men passing through the camp increased. They were mainly Pakistanis, but there were others, Arabs from Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia. They were on their way over the border to train in Afghanistan. She envied them. They were on their way to Bakr.

The Arabs set up a makeshift firing range beyond the camp perimeter and spent the day shooting at improvised targets. When she wasn’t working, she’d go and sit on the ridge above the range, on a flat stone veined with marble. She’d watch them squatting and lying, with the stock of their weapons against their shoulders.

It was the camp administrator who told her to expect him. Bakr arrived the next day. He was filthy. His body was bruised and his feet were raw. He stank of cordite. She shooed away the children, dragged the door shut and pushed him down on the bed.

‘Teach me to fire a gun,’ she demanded, straddling him, pulling him up inside her.

In the night, Bakr got up and opened the door and cold air flooded the hut. In the moonlight his body was perfect, dark as a polished nut. He leant over slightly to light a cigarette, cupping his hand to protect the flame, and his palms and face were illuminated by the lighter. She slipped out of bed to join him and they shared the cigarette, standing naked side by side.

She never tired of looking at him, at his perfection, and it did not seem possible that she ever would.

‘All right,’ he said.

He took her hand and led her back to the bed. He kissed her, his full lips on hers. She could taste the tobacco in his mouth and the Russian vodka they had drunk earlier out of coffee jars. He was aroused again. She folded her legs around his waist, lifting herself towards him.

Bakr went down on one knee behind her, with the muscle of his thigh against the back of her leg and his right arm hooked around her midriff.

‘Load the weapon,’ he said, softly in her ear.

She tapped the magazine against the stock as she had been shown to ensure the rounds were sitting correctly on the spring and slotted it into the rifle. She pulled the cocking handle, feeding the first bullet into the firing chamber.

He reached across to the fire selector with his left hand and clicked it down two notches for semi-automatic fire. She breathed out slowly and settled slightly, her buttocks pressing against him, feeling the extent of his arousal.

He gripped her forearm. She inhaled and pressed the weapon against her cheek. She closed her left eye and aligned the front and back sights. The target was a hundred metres away, a tin of powdered milk on a rock.

‘It kicks to the left, always aim a little to the right of the target.’

The dusk light shimmered. She felt light headed, as if she were about to fall. He was the only thing that was holding her up, cradling her between his thighs and his biceps, the pennant of his cock against her buttocks. She breathed out.

‘Pull the trigger gently, it will go back farther than you expect,’ he said.

She inhaled … exhaled …

She pulled the trigger.

She turned, breathless from sprinting, surprised that she had beaten him to the rocks. Bakr waved. She saw that he was holding her headscarf and understood that he had stopped to pick it up. She looked around and located the tin can lying on its side. She picked it up and stuck her finger in the hole.

‘Look,’ she shouted.

‘You’re a natural,’ he said, handing her the scarf.

They lay side by side on a broad rock.

‘I’m bored here,’ she said. ‘I want to learn how to be a fighter.’

He laughed.

‘I’m serious!’

She punched him in the ribs, harder than she’d meant to. He doubled up, winded. ‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life,’ she said, leaning over him, pulling at his tunic. He fluttered a hand at her while he caught his breath. ‘You said you’d take me to the Lion’s Den.’

‘I did,’ he gasped.

‘So take me.’

He stretched out and looked up at her, panting.

‘I can match any man,’ she said.

He shook his head in what seemed to her to be wonderment. ‘I believe you could.’

‘Take me,’ she insisted.

He propped himself on one elbow and looked at her. ‘You know that when they want to praise a woman here they say she is quiet and shy and obedient.’

‘I’m not looking for praise. I want to do something, something meaningful.’

‘Some say that there are only two places for an Afghan woman, in her husband’s house, and in the graveyard.’

‘I’m not an Afghan woman. And you’re not an Afghan man.’

He pulled a face. ‘That’s true.’

‘So take me.’

He became serious. ‘There are some women at al-Ma’asada, Arab women who are being trained for the jihad. They are …’ He paused. ‘… set apart. It is said that they have left one place but not yet reached the other.’

He did not tell her that the other place was death.

1989

‘There is a road. It runs through the mountains from Pakistan to Afghanistan and from the caves to the front line, wherever it might be. Sometimes there are landslides and we lose the road. Sometimes it is destroyed by the Russians. Sometimes it will be there but you will not see it at first. But there will always be a road, because the road keeps our struggle alive. We are fighting against a country that thinks it is strong but it is weak. Our road is stronger than their bombs. And if you cannot find the road, then you make a new one.’

She sat at the back of the classroom, with her face covered and her head bowed like a penitent. The Algerian instructor did not acknowledge her presence. He scowled as he limped back and forth in front of the blackboard. ‘When you are scared or when you are cold or hungry, tell yourself that you are not important. What is important is what you carry. Enough rifles for five hundred men. Who cares about your lives? Your truck is everything.’