Shantaram (101 page)

Suleiman led the second. Following Habib's directions, they set up their mortars about a kilometre away from the enemy camps-a distance that was well inside the maximum effective range. The bombardment commenced just after dawn, and continued for half an hour. The strike teams found eight Afghan soldiers when they entered the ruined camps. Not all of them were dead. Habib went to work on the survivors. Sickened by what they'd agreed to let him do, our men returned to the camp, hoping never to see the madman again.

Less than one hour after their return, a counter-bombardment rained on our compound with whining, whistling, thumping explosions. As the deadly attack subsided, we crawled from our hiding places to hear a strange, vibrating hum. Khaled was a few metres away from me. I saw the fear rasp across his scarred face.

He began to run toward the small cover provided by clefts in the rock walls opposite the caves. He was shouting and waving for me to join him. I took a step towards him and then froze as a Russian helicopter rose like some huge, monstrous insect over the rim of the compound. It's impossible to describe how immense and predatory those machines seem when you're under fire from them.

The monster fills the eye and the mind, and for a second or two there seems to be nothing else in the world but the metal and the noise and the terror.

In the instant that it appeared, it fired on us and wheeled away like a falcon falling to the kill. Two rockets scorched the air as they streaked toward the caves. They travelled with incredible speed, much faster than my eyes could follow. I swung round to see one rocket smash into the stone cliff above the entrance to the cave complex and explode with a shower of smoke, flame, rock, and metal fragments. Immediately after it, the second rocket entered the cave-mouth and exploded.

The shock wave that hit me was a physical thing, like standing on the edge of a swimming pool and having someone push me in with the flat of his hands. I slammed onto my back and gasped, choking for air, with the wind knocked out of me. I could see the entrance to the caves.

The wounded men were in there. Other men were hiding in there.

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
chun
chun-chun-_chun burst from another PK. Two of our men were firing at the helicopter. My only instinct had been to hide myself from the ruthlessly efficient killing machine, but they not only exposed themselves to the beast, they actually challenged it and drew its fire.

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?"

"Yeah. It's gotta be stitched up or clamped or something. We've gotta stop the blood. He's lost too much already."

The blackened, ash-covered remains of the medical kit were grouped on a piece of canvas in front of my knees. I found a suture needle, a rusty mechanic's pliers, and some silk thread.

Freezing cold on the snowy ground, and with my bare hands cramped, I ran stitches into the artery, and the flesh, and the whole area, desperate to lock off the gush of hot, red blood. The thread snagged several times. My stiffened fingers trembled. The man was awake and aware, and in terrible pain. He screamed and howled intermittently, but returned always to his prayer.

My eyes were full of sweat, despite the shivering cold, when I nodded to Mahmoud to release the tourniquet. Blood oozed through the stitches. It was a much slower flow, but I knew the trickle would still kill him in the long run. I began to pack wads of bandage into the wound and then to wind on a pressure dressing, but Mahmoud's bloody hands seized my wrists in a powerful grip. I looked up to see that Zaher Rasul had stopped praying and stopped bleeding. He was dead.

I was breathing hard. It was the kind of breathing that does more harm than good. I suddenly realised that I hadn't eaten for too many hours, and I was very hungry. With that thought-hunger, food-I felt sick for the first time. I felt the sweaty wave of nausea surge over me, and I shook my head free of it.

When we returned our attention to the burned man we found that he, too, had succumbed. I covered the still body with a canvas camouflage drop-sheet. My last glimpse of his scorched, featureless, melted face became a prayer of thanks. One of the agonising truths for a battle medic is that you pray as hard and almost as often for men to die as you pray for them to live. The third wounded man was Mahmoud Melbaaf himself. There were tiny grey-black fragments of metal and what seemed to be melted plastic in his back, his neck, and the back of his head.

Fortunately, the spray of that hot material had only penetrated the upper layers of his skin, much like splinters. Nevertheless, it was the work of an hour to rid him of them. I washed the wounds and applied antibiotic powder, dressing them wherever it was possible.

We checked our supplies and reserves. We'd had two goats at the start of the attack. One of them had run off, and we never sighted it again. The other was found cowering in a blind alcove formed between high, rocky escarpments. That goat was our only food. The flour had burned to soot with the rice and ghee and sugar. The fuel reserves were completely exhausted. The stainless steel medical instruments had suffered a direct hit, and most of them had deformed into useless lumps of metal. I scraped through the wreckage to retrieve some antibiotics, disinfectants, ointments, bandages, suture needles, thread, syringes, and morphine ampoules. We had ammunition, and some medicines, and we could melt the snow to make water, but the lack of food was a very serious concern.

We were nine men. Suleiman and Khaled decided that we had to leave the camp. There was a cave on another mountain, about twelve hours' march away to the east, which they hoped might give us adequate protection from attack. The Russians were sure to have another helicopter in the air within a few hours at most.

Ground forces wouldn't be far behind.

"Every man fill two canteens with snow, and keep them inside his clothes, next to his body, on the march," Khaled said to me, translating Suleiman's orders. "We carry weapons, ammunition, medicines, blankets, some fuel, some wood, and the goat. Nothing else. Let's go!"

We left on the march with empty stomachs, and that state defined us for the next four weeks as we hunkered down in the new mountain cave. One of Jalalaad's young friends, Hanif, had been a halal butcher in his home village. He slaughtered, skinned, gutted, and quartered the goat when we arrived. We prepared a fire with wood that we'd carried from the ruined camp, and a sprinkle of spirit from one of the lamps. The meat was cooked- every last morsel, except for the parts, such as the legs of the animal below the knee joint, which were regarded as haram, or forbidden for Muslims to eat. The carefully cooked meat was then rationed into small daily shares. We stored the bulk of the cooked flesh in an improvised refrigerator scooped out of the ice and snow. And then, for four weeks, we nibbled at the dry meat and cringed inwardly as hunger twisted us around the craving for more.

It was an expression of our discipline and good-natured support for one another that the meat from one goat kept nine men alive for four weeks. We tried many times to slip away from the camp and reach one of the neighbouring khels to secure some extra food.

But all the local villages were occupied by enemy troops, and the entire mountain range was surrounded by patrols of Afghan army units led by Russians. Habib's tortures had combined with the damage we'd done to the helicopter to rouse a furious determination in the Russians and Afghan regulars. On one foraging mission, our scouts heard an announcement echoing through the nearest valley. The Russians had attached a loudspeaker to a military jeep. An Afghan, speaking in Pashto, described us as bandits and criminals, and said that a special task force had been set up to capture us. They'd put a reward on our heads. Our scouts wanted to shoot at the vehicle, but they thought it might be a trap designed to draw us out of hiding.

They let it pass, and the words of the hunters echoed in the sheer, stone canyons like the howl of prowling wolves.

Apparently acting on false information-or perhaps following the trail of Habib's bloody executions-the Russians, working from all the surrounding villages, concentrated their searches on another mountain range to the north of us. For so long as we remained in our remote cave, we seemed to be safe. So we waited, trapped and hungering and afraid, through the four coldest weeks of the year. We hid, creeping through shadows in the daylight hours, and huddled together without light or heat in the darkness every night. And slowly, one ice-edged hour at a time, the knife of war whittled the wishing and hoping away until all that was left to us, within the hard, disconsolate wrap of our own arms around our own shivering bodies, was the lonely will to survive.

____________________

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I couldn't face the loss of Khaderbhai, my father-dream. I'd helped to bury him, for God's sake, with my own hands. But I didn't grieve, and I didn't mourn him. There wasn't enough truth in me for that kind of sorrowing because my heart wouldn't believe him dead. I'd loved him too much, it seemed to me in that winter of war, for him to simply be gone, to be dead. If so much love could vanish into the earth and speak no more, smile no more, then love was nothing. And I wouldn't believe that. I was sure there had to be a pay-off, somehow, and I kept waiting for it. I didn't know then, as I do now, that love's a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give. But not knowing that in those bitter weeks, not thinking that, I turned from the hole in my life where so much loving hope had been, and I refused to feel the longing or the loss. I cringed within the bleak, concealing camouflage of snow and shadowed stone. I chewed the leathered fragments of goat's meat left to us. And each minute crammed with heartbeats and hunger dragged me further from the grieving and the truth.

Eventually, of course, we exhausted the supply of meat, and a meeting was called to discuss our options. Jalalaad and the younger Afghans wanted to make a run for it: to fight our way through enemy lines, and strike out for the desert region of Zabul province, close to the Pakistan border. Suleiman and Khaled reluctantly agreed that there was no other option, but they wanted clear intelligence of the enemy disposition before choosing where to launch a breakout attack. To that end, Suleiman sent young Hanif on a scouting mission that would take him on a sweeping curve from the south-west to the north and south-east of our position. He ordered the young man to return within twenty four hours, and to travel only at night.

It was a long, cold, hungry wait for Hanif to return. We were drinking water, but that only staved off the torment for a few minutes, and left us even hungrier. Twenty-four hours stretched to two days, and then into a third, with no sign of him. On the morning of the third day, we accepted that Hanif was dead or captured.

Juma, a cameleer from the tiny Tajik enclave in the south-west of Afghanistan near Iran, volunteered to search for him. He was a dark, thin-faced man with a hawk-like nose and a thickly emotive mouth. He was close to Hanif and Jalalaad-the closeness that men in wars and prisons find, against their every expectation, and rarely express in words or gestures.

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,
bach-e-kaka,"
Suleiman asked gently, using the familiar term for nephew, "what did you mean, there is only one way out of here now?"

"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,"

Habib said. His voice was still calm and composed, but his face was a gargoyle's leer, and the contrast unnerved us all. "Only a few of them stay here tomorrow. Only a few will stay, while the rest of them put the last mines on the north-west slopes, just after dawn. If you run at them, attack them, fight them tomorrow, in the south-east, there will only be a few of them. You can break through and escape. But only tomorrow."

"How many are they altogether?" Jalalaad asked.

"Sixty-eight men. They have mortars, rockets, and six heavy machine guns. There are too many of them for you to sneak past them at night."

"But you sneaked past them," Jalalaad insisted defiantly.

"They cannot see me," Habib replied serenely. "I am invisible to them. They cannot see me until I am pushing my knife into their throats."

"That's ridiculous!" Jalalaad hissed at him. "They are soldiers.

You are a soldier. If you can get past them, we can do it."

"Did your men return to you?" Habib asked him, turning his maniac stare on the young fighter for the first time. Jalalaad opened his mouth to speak, but the words sank into the small heaving sea of his heart. He cast his eyes down, and shook his head. "Could you enter this camp without being seen or heard, as I did? If you try to get past them, you will die, like your friends. You cannot get past them. I can do it, but you cannot."

"But you think we can fight our way out of here?" Khaled put the question to him gently, quietly, but we all heard the urgency in it.

"You can. It is the only way. I have been everywhere on this mountain, and I have been so close to them that I can hear them scratch their skin. That is the reason why I am here. I came to tell you how to save yourselves. But there is a price for my help. All the ones you do not kill tomorrow, the ones who survive, they will be mine. You will give them to me."

"Yes, yes," Suleiman agreed soothingly. "Come,
bach-e-kaka,
tell us what you know. We want to share your knowledge. Sit with us, and tell us what you know. We have no food, so we cannot offer you a meal. I'm sorry."

"There is food," Habib interrupted, pointing beyond us to the shadows at the edge of our camp. "I smell food there."

True enough, the rotting pieces of the dead goat-the haram cuts from the animal-lay in a little heap in the slushy snow. Cold as it was, and even in the snow, the bits of raw meat had long begun to decay. We couldn't smell them from that distance, but it seemed that Habib could.

The madman's comment provoked a long discussion of the religious rights and wrongs of eating haram food. The men weren't rigid in the observation of their faith. They prayed every day, but not in strict adherence to the timetable of three sessions, ordained by Shia Islam, or the five sessions of the Sunni Muslims. They were good men of faith, rather than overtly religious men.

Nevertheless, in a time of war, and with the great dangers we faced, the last power they wanted ranged against them was God's.

They were holy warriors, mujaheddin: men who believed that they would become martyrs at the instant that they died in battle, and that they were assured a place in the heavens, where beautiful maidens would attend them. They didn't want to pollute themselves with forbidden foods when they were so close to the martyr's rush for paradise. It was a tribute to their faith, in fact, that the mere discussion of the haram meat hadn't occurred until we'd hungered for a month and then starved for five days.

For my part, I confessed to Mahmoud Melbaaf that I'd been thinking about the discarded meat almost constantly for the last few days. I wasn't a Muslim, and the meat wasn't forbidden to me.

But I'd lived so closely with the fighters, and for so many painful weeks, that I'd linked my fate to theirs. I would never have eaten anything while they hungered. I wanted to eat the meat, but only if they agreed and ate it with me.

Suleiman delivered the decisive opinion on the matter. He reminded the men that while it was indeed evil for a Muslim to eat haram food, it was an even greater evil for a Muslim to starve himself to death when haram food was available to be eaten. The men decided that we would cook the rotting meat in a soup, before the first light. Then, fortified by that meal, we would use Habib's information on the enemy positions to fight our way out of the mountains.

During the long weeks of hiding and waiting without heat or hot food, we'd entertained and supported one another with the stories we'd told. On that last night, after several others had spoken, it was my turn once more. For my first story, weeks before, I'd told them about my escape from prison. Although they'd been scandalised by my admissions about being a gunaa, or sinner, and being imprisoned as a criminal, they'd been thrilled by the account, and asked many questions afterwards. My second story had been about the Night of the Assassins: how Abdullah, Vikram, and I had tracked the Nigerian killers down; how we'd fought with them, defeated them, and then expelled them from the country; how I'd hunted Maurizio, the man who'd caused it all, and beat him with my fists; and how I'd wanted to kill him, but had spared his life, only to regret that pity when he'd attacked Lisa Carter and forced Ulla to kill him.

That story, too, had been very well received, and as Mahmoud Melbaaf took his place beside me to translate my third story, I wondered what might capture their enthusiasm anew. My mind scanned its list of heroes. There were many, so many men and women, beginning with my own mother, whose courage and sacrifice inspired the memory of them. But when I began to speak, I found myself telling Prabaker's story. The words, like some kind of desperate prayer, came unbidden from my heart.

I told them how Prabaker had left his village-Eden for the city when he was still a child; how he'd returned as a teenager, with the wild street boy Raju and other friends to confront the menace of the dacoits; how Rukhmabai, Prabaker's mother, had put courage into the men of the village; how young Raju had fired his revolver as he walked toward the boastful leader of the dacoits until the man fell dead; how Prabaker had loved feasting and dancing and music; how he'd saved the woman he loved from the cholera epidemic, and married her; and how he'd died, in a hospital bed, surrounded by our sorrowing love.

After Mahmoud finished translating the last of my words there was a lengthy silence while they considered the tale. I was just convincing myself that they were as moved by the life of my little friend as I was myself when the first questions began.

"So, how many goats did they have in that village?" Suleiman asked gravely.

"He wants to know how many goats-" Mahmoud began translating.

"I got it, I got it," I smiled. "Well, near as I can tell, about eighty, maybe as many as a hundred. Each household had about two or three goats, but some had as many as six or eight."

That information inspired a little gesticulating buzz of discussion that was more animated and partisan than any of the political or religious debates that had occasionally stirred among the men.