CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Eyes curved like the sword of Perseus, like the wings of hawks in flight, like the rolled lips of seashells, like eucalyptus leaves in summer-Indian eyes, dancers' eyes, the most beautiful eyes in the world stared with honest, unbeguiling concentration into mirrors held for them by their servants. The dancers I'd hired to perform at the wedding ceremonies for Johnny and Prabaker were already in costume beneath the modest covering of their shawls.

In a chai shop near the entrance to the slum, emptied of customers for the purpose, they made the final adjustments to their hair and make-up, professionally swift amid excited chattering. A cotton sheet strung across the doorway was just sheer enough in the golden lamplight to reveal thrillingly indistinct shadows, inflaming fierce desires in many of those who crowded outside, where I stood guard and kept the curious at bay.

At last they were ready, and I threw the cotton screen back. The ten dancers from Film City's chorus lines emerged. They wore traditional tight choli blouses and wrap-around saris. The costumes were lemon yellow, ruby, peacock blue, emerald, sunset pink, gold, royal purple, silver, cream, and tangerine. Their jewels-hair clusters, plait tassels, ear rings, nose rings, necklaces, midriff chains, bangles, and anklets-struck such sparks of light from lanterns and electric bulbs that people blinked and flinched to look at them. Each heavy anklet carried hundreds of tiny bells and, as the dancers began their slow, swaying walk through the hushed and adoring slum, the sizzling clash of those silver bells was the only sound that marked their steps. Then they began to sing:

Aaja Sajan, Aaja Aaja Sajan, Aaja Come to me, my lover, come to me Come to me, my lover, come to me The crowds that preceded and surrounded them roared their approval. A platoon of small boys scrambled along the rough path ahead of the girls, removing stones or twigs, and sweeping the way clear with palm-leaf brooms. Other young men walked beside the dancers, cooling them with large pear-shaped fans of fine, woven cane. Further ahead along the path, the band of musicians I'd hired with the dancers approached the wedding stage silently in their red and white uniforms. Prabaker and Parvati sat to one side, and Johnny Cigar sat with Sita on the other side.

Prabaker's parents, Kishan and Rukhmabai, had travelled from Sunder for the event. They planned to spend a full month in the city, staying in a slum hut beside Prabaker's own. They sat at the front of the stage with Kumar and Nandita Patak. A huge painting of a lotus flower filled the space behind them, and coloured lights formed glowing vines overhead.

When the dancers slowly entered the space, singing love, they stopped as one and stamped their feet. They twirled in place, turning clockwise in perfect unison. Their arms moved with the grace of a swan's neck. Their hands and fingers rolled and swirled like silk scarves sailing the wind. Then suddenly they stamped their feet three times, and the musicians struck up a wild, enravishing rendition of that month's most popular movie song. And with the cheering in every throat around them, the girls danced into a million dreams.

Not a few of those dreams were my own. I'd hired the girls and the musicians, not knowing what kind of show they'd planned to put on for Prabaker's wedding. Chandra Mehta had recommended them to me, and he'd assured me that they always devised their own program. That first black-market money deal Mehta had asked me to transact-the ten thousand American dollars he'd wanted-had borne black fruit. Through him I'd met others in the film world who wanted gold, dollars, and documents. In the previous few months, my visits to the film studios had grown more frequent, and the profit for Khaderbhai accumulated steadily. There was a certain reciprocal cachet in the connection: the filmi types, as they were known in Bollywood, found it exhilarating to be associated, at a safe distance, with the notorious mafia don, and the Khan himself wasn't indifferent to the glamour that laminated the movie world. When I approached Chandra Mehta for help in organising the dancers, two weeks before Prabaker's wedding, he'd assumed that the Prabaker in question was an important goonda working for Khaderbhai. He put time and special care into the arrangements, selecting each girl from personal knowledge of her skills, and teaming them with a band of the best studio musicians. The show, when we finally saw it, would've satisfied the manager of the raunchiest nightclub in the city. The band played a long top ten of the season's most popular songs. The girls sang and danced to every one of them, giving seductive and erotic emphasis to the sub-text of each phrase. Some of the thousands of neighbours and guests at the slum wedding were pleasantly scandalised, but most were delighted by the wickedness-Prabaker and Johnny first among them. And I, seeing for the first time how lubricious the uncensored versions of the dances were, gained a new appreciation of the subtler gestures I'd seen so often in the Hindi films.

I gave Johnny Cigar five thousand American dollars as a wedding present. It was enough money for him to buy the little hut that he wanted in the Navy Nagar slum, near the spot where he'd been conceived. The Nagar was a legal slum, and purchasing the hut there meant the end of eviction fears. He would have a secure home from which to continue his work as unofficial accountant and tax consultant to the many hundreds of workers and small businesses in the surrounding slums.

My present to Prabaker was the deed to his taxi. The owner of the small fleet of taxis sold the deed to me in a vicious bout of bare tooth-and-knuckle haggling. I paid too much for the vehicle and its licence, but the money meant nothing to me. It was black money, and black money runs through the fingers faster than legal, hard-earned money. If we can't respect the way we earn it, money has no value. If we can't use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose. Nevertheless, out of respect for the formalities of tradition, I damned the taxi fleet owner, at the conclusion of our deal, with that most polite and hideous of Indian business curses-__May you have ten daughters, and may they all marry _welll!-a string of dowry commitments sure to exhaust all but the sturdiest fortunes.

Prabaker was so pleased and excited with the gift that the gravity he'd assumed in the role of the sober groom exploded in a whooping cheer. He leapt to his feet and danced a few pumps of his hip-thrusting sexy dance before the solemnity of the occasion overwhelmed him once more, and he sat down with his bride. I joined the thick, gyrating jungle of men in front of the stage, and danced until my thin shirt clung to me like seaweed in a shallow wave.

Returning to my apartment that night, I smiled to think how different Vikram's wedding had been. Two days before Prabaker and Johnny wed their sister-brides, Vikram was married to Lettie.

Against the passionate and occasionally violent opposition of his family, Vikram had opted for a registry office ceremony. He'd responded to the tears and pleading of his loved ones with one formulaic phrase: This is the modern India, yaar. Few of his family members could bring themselves to face the agony of that public repudiation of the ancient, gorgeously elaborate Hindu wedding they'd long planned for him. In the end, it was only his sister and his mother who joined the little circle of Lettie's friends, and watched as the bride and groom promised to love and honour one another for the rest of their days. There was no music, no colour, and no dancing. Lettie wore a burnt-gold suit, with a broad, gold straw hat bearing organdie roses. Vikram wore a three-quarter-length black coat, a black-and-white brocade vest, black gaucho pants with silver piping, and his beloved hat.

The ceremony was over in minutes and then Vikram and I half carried his grief-stricken mother to her waiting car.

On the day after their wedding, I drove Vikram and Lettie to the airport. Their plan was to repeat the ceremony in London with Lettie's family. While Lettie phoned her mother to confirm their arrival time, Vikram seized the opportunity for a heart-to-heart with me.

That's what a man has to do. I don't mean to get into your personal shit, but it's kind of sad that you don't know that already."

I laughed, but he held the serious frown.

And you earned her fuckin' respect. She told me a couple of times, man-about the cholera and all that in the zhopadpatti.

You knocked her out with all that Red Cross shit, man. She respects you! But you don't cherish her trust. You don't trust her, Lin, because you don't trust yourself. And I'm afraid for you, man. Without a good woman, a man like you-men like you and me-we're just asking for trouble, yaar."

Lettie approached us. The grim purpose dimmed in his eyes, washed away by the look of love he turned on her.

She handed me a folded strip of black cloth, about a metre long and a hand-span wide. When I opened it out I found a small card in the centre.

And for three weeks, after that night, I tried to lose the loneliness that their three happy marriages had pulled from my heart by taking every job I was offered, and cutting every deal I could devise. I flew one passport run to Kinshasa staying, as instructed, at the Lapierre Hotel. It was a nearly squalid three storey building in a laneway parallel to Kinshasa's long main street. The mattress was clean, but the floor and the walls seemed to be made from recycled coffin-wood. The grave-like smell was overpowering, and a sweating damp filled my mouth with gloomy, unidentifiable tastes. I chain-smoked Gitanes and gargled Belgian whisky to kill them. Rat-catchers patrolled the corridors, dragging conspicuous hessian sacks that bulged with writhing, fat animals. Cockroach colonies had claimed the drawers of the dresser, so I hung my clothing and toiletries and other personal items from hooks and thick, crooked nails conveniently hammered into every surface that would endure them.

On my first night I was ripped from a light sleep by gunshots in the corridor beyond my door. I heard a crumpling thump, as of a body falling, and then shuffling footsteps pulling something heavy, backwards, along the bare wooden floor of the hallway. I clamped a fist around my knife and opened the door. Men were standing at three other doors in the corridor, drawn as I was by the sounds. They were all Europeans. Two of them held pistols in their hands, and one held a knife similar to my own. We all looked at one another, and then at the trail of blood that smeared its way down the corridor out of sight. As if in response to a secret signal, we all closed our doors again without a word.

When I followed the Kinshasa run with a mission to Mauritius, my hotel on the island-nation provided a welcome and agreeable contrast. It was called the Mandarin, and it was in Curepipe. The original structure was built as a small-scale reproduction of a Scottish castle. The turreted resemblance was clear enough, on the winding approach through a neat English garden. Inside the building, however, the guest entered a kingdom of Chinese baroque designed by the Chinese family who were the new owners of the hotel. I sat beneath huge, fire-breathing dragons and ate Chinese broccoli with snow peas, garlic spinach, fried bean curd, and mushrooms in black bean sauce by the light of paper lanterns, while the windows gave a view of castellated battlements, gothic arches, and rose-studded topiary.

My contacts, two Indians from Bombay who lived in Mauritius, arrived in a yellow BMW as had been arranged. I got into the back of the car and had barely spoken a greeting when they took off at such tyre-torching speed that I was hurled backwards into a corner of the seat. We screamed along back roads at four times the speed limit for fifteen knuckle-whitening minutes and then they pulled into a silent, deserted grove. The overheated car cooled down with little clinks and clunks of sound. There was a strong smell of rum on both men.

The contacts looked at one another and then back at me. The driver raised his mercury-lens glasses, revealing eyes that looked as though he kept them in a glass of brown vinegar beside his bed at night.

The passenger lifted his glasses, and they both smiled as widely as their hangovers would allow.

They laughed.

The passenger lifted a bag from between his feet and opened it to reveal many bundles of cash.

I sighed, breathing slowly and forcing calm into the little whirlwind that my mood was making out of my mind. I looked out the window. We were parked in what seemed to be a green forest fire. Tall plants as green as Karla's eyes whirled and shuddered in the wind all around us. There was no-one and nothing else in sight. "Let's just see what we got here. Ten passports at seven thousand bucks apiece. That's seventy thousand bucks. At the exchange rate of, say, thirty Mauritian roops to the dollar, that gives me no less than two million, one hundred thousand rupees. That's why you got such a big bag. Now, forgive me for seeming obtuse, gentlemen, but just where the fuck am I going to change two million rupees into dollars without a fuckin' currency certificate?"

It's all set up."

He'll change all the roops into dollars, and you'll be cool. No problem. There's even a bonus in it for you. You'll see."

The trip through Singapore passed off without a hitch, and the Mauritian currency fiasco provided a few unexpected benefits. I made a valuable, new contact in the Singapore moneychanger-an Indian from Madras named Shekky Ratnam-and I took my first look at the profitable smuggling run of duty free cameras and electrical goods from Singapore to Bombay.

When I rode out to the Oberoi Hotel to meet Lisa Carter, after handing the dollars to Abdul Ghani and collecting my fee, I felt positive and hopeful for the first time in far too long. I began to think that I might've thrown off the dark moods that had settled on me after Prabaker's wedding night. I'd travelled to Zaire, Mauritius, and Singapore on forged passports without raising the vaguest suspicion. In the slum, I'd survived from day to day on the small commissions I made from tourists, and I had only my compromised New Zealand passport. Just a year later I lived in a modern apartment, my pockets were bulging with freshly ill-gotten gains, and I had five passports in five different names and nationalities, with my photograph on every one of them. The world of possibility was opening up for me.

The Oberoi Hotel stood at Nariman Point, on the handle of Marine Drive's golden sickle. Churchgate Station and Flora Fountain were a five-minute walk away. Ten minutes more in one direction led to Victoria Terminus and Crawford Market. Ten minutes in the other direction from Flora Fountain led to Colaba and the Gateway Monument. The Oberoi lacked the postcard recognition that the Taj Hotel inspired, but it compensated for that with character and flair. Its piano bar, for example, was a small masterpiece of light and cleverly private spaces, and its brasserie vied determinedly for the title of the best restaurant in Bombay.

Walking into the dark, richly textured brasserie from the brilliant day, I paused and blinked until my eyes found Lisa and her group. She and two other young women were sitting with Cliff De Souza and Chandra Mehta.

The girls laughed hysterically. Their names were Reeta and Geeta.

They were aspiring actresses on the first rung-a lunch date with key second-tier players-and they gushed it up with a bug-eyed enthusiasm that wasn't far from panic.

I sat down in the vacant chair between Lisa and Geeta. Lisa wore a thin, lava-red pullover beneath a black silk jacket, and a skirt. Geeta's silver spandex top and white jeans were tight enough to be anatomically explicit. She was a pretty girl, maybe twenty years old, with her long hair pulled into a high ponytail.

Her hands fretted at the table napkin, folding and unfolding a corner of the cloth. Reeta had a neat short hairstyle that suited her small face and gamine features. She wore a yellow blouse with a deep, confrontation neckline, and blue jeans. Cliff and Chandra both wore suits, and it seemed that they were coming from or going to an appointment of some significance. "I'm starved," Lisa said happily. Her voice was light and confident, but she squeezed my hand under the table so hard that her fingernails pinched their way into my skin. It was an important meeting for her. She knew that Mehta planned to offer us a formal partnership in the casting business we'd been running unofficially. Lisa wanted that contractual agreement. She wanted the approval that only a contract could provide. She wanted her future in writing. "Let's eat!"

He summoned the waiter with a glance and waved the menu aside, launching straight into his list of preferences. It began with a white soup entree made with lamb cooked in blanched-almond milk, worked its way through grilled chicken in a cayenne, cumin, and mango marinade, and ended, after many other side platters, with fruit salad, honey kachori balls, and kulfi ice cream.

Listening to Mehta's lengthy and precise list of dishes, we all knew that it would be a long lunch. I relaxed, and let myself drift in the flow of fine foods and conversation.

Cliff replied, grinning widely. Mehta laughed with him and the girls joined in, clearly relieved to have the tension at the table diluted with the little joke. "I don't want to see anyone hurt, least of all you, Chandrabhai. All I'm saying is, you have to see it from their side if you want to understand why they're feeling all this. They're native Marathi speakers. They're born here in Maharashtra. Their grandfathers, all the way back to... who knows, three thousand years or more, they were all born here.

And then they look around in Bombay, and they see all the best jobs, all the businesses, all the companies owned by people from other places in India. It drives them crazy. And I think they have a point."

Cliff De Souza shrugged.

I paused to give someone else a chance to comment or query what I'd said. They were all eating, and listening intently. I continued.

They lived in the kind of poverty where every meal cost them a crown of thorns in worry, and slaving work. I think it must break their hearts to see people from other parts of India living in fine homes while they wash in the gutters of their own capital city."

I took a few mouthfuls of food, waiting for a response from Mehta. After a few moments, he obliged.

I looked at her. Our eyes held just long enough to feel good and guilty at the same time.

Encouraged by that febrile curiosity, Cliff De Souza spun out yarns about the Bollywood stars, and Chandra Mehta added titillating ruffles of gossip throughout. It became clear during the lunch that Cliff had an eye for Reeta, and Chandra Mehta directed much of his attention to Geeta. The long lunch was the beginning of a long day and night they'd planned to spend together. Warming to their themes, and with half their minds on the pleasures of the night to come, the movie men gradually shifted their gossip and anecdotes into the area of sex and sexual scandals. They were funny stories, sometimes straying into the bizarre. We were all laughing hard when Kavita Singh entered the restaurant. The laughter was still rippling through us as I introduced Kavita around the table.

I stood at once and excused myself, nodding to Lisa that she should stay and wait for me to return. Kavita and I walked to the foyer of the restaurant. When we were alone, she spoke.

She left, smiling for me and crying for him at the same time. At the table, I apologised for breaking up the lunch and offered a vague excuse for leaving. Without asking her if she wanted to come, I pulled back Lisa's chair for her and lifted her handbag from the chair's high back.

I glared at him.

I held open the door of the brasserie for Lisa, and looked back at the table. Cliff and Chandra had their heads close together, their whispers excluding the bewildered girls.

On the bike, outside the hotel, I told Lisa everything that I knew. Her healthy tan faded suddenly and her face was pale, but she pulled herself together quickly. She agreed with me that a trip to Leopold's was logical, as a first step. Abdullah might be there, or he might've left a message with someone. She was afraid, and I felt that fear twisting in the muscles of her arms as she clung to my back. We hurtled through the ponderously slow traffic, riding on luck and instinct just as Abdullah might've done. At Leopold's we found Didier drinking himself into the liquid abyss.

I grabbed the front of his shirt and shook him. The waiters, who all liked Didier as much as I did, watched me and calculated how far they would let me go.

Where did it happen?"

You know Mehmet. He's also Iranian, like Abdullah. Some of the police from the Colaba station, across the road, were in the ambush. They said that he was surrounded in a little street near Crawford Market. They called on him to surrender himself to them.

They said he stood perfectly still. They said his long hair was streaming behind him in the wind, and his black clothes. They talked about that for quite some time. It is strange, don't you think, Lin, that they were talking about his clothes... and his hair? What does it mean? Then they... they said he took two guns from his jacket, and began to shoot at them. They all returned the fire at once. He was shot so many times that his body was mutilated, they said. It was torn apart by the fusillade."

Lisa began to cry. She sat down next to Didier, and he wrapped an arm around her in the automatism of grief and shock. He didn't look at her or acknowledge her. He patted at her shoulder and rocked from side to side, but his sorrow-struck expression would've been the same if he were alone and wrapping his arms about himself.

Crawford Market police station. I had to go there. I had to see the body. I had to see him. Maybe he was alive...

I'll be back."

A spear rammed into my side, up beside my heart, and out through the top of my chest. The spear of Abdullah's death, the spear of thinking about his dead, dead body. I rode to Crawford Market, and every breath pushed the rough spear up against my heart.

Near the market police station I was forced to abandon the bike because a milling crowd mobbed the road. Striking out on foot, I soon found myself in a wild, aimlessly rambling frenzy of people.

Most of them were Muslims. What I could make out from the many chants and shouted slogans indicated that they weren't simply mourners. Abdullah's death had touched off a prairie fire of discontent and long-nursed grievances in the neglected acres of the poor around the market area. Men were shouting a confusing collection of complaints, and clamouring for their own causes. I could hear prayers ringing out from several places.

Inside the legions of screaming men it was chaos, and every step toward the police station was won with a wrestling, shoving effort of force and will. Men came in waves that swept me sideways and then forward and then back. They pushed and punched and kicked out with their legs. More than once I almost went under those trampling feet, reaching out at the last moment to save myself by grappling my fingers into a shirt or a beard or a shawl. I finally caught sight of the police station and the police. Wearing helmets and carrying shields, they were three or four deep across the whole width of the building.

A man beside me in the crowd seized my shirt and began to punch me about the head and face. I had no idea why he'd attacked me- maybe he didn't understand it himself-but it didn't matter. The blows were struck, and I was in it. I covered myself with my hands and tried to wrench myself free. His hand was locked onto the shirt, and I couldn't shake him off. I stepped in closer, jabbed my fingers into his eyes, and crashed my fist into his head just ahead of the ear. His hand released me and he fell back, but others began to punch at me. The crowd opened out around me and I shaped up, punching out at random and hitting anything within range.

It was a bad situation. I knew that sooner or later I would lose the energy and the surprise that kept the posse of men at bay.

Men rushed at me, but only one at a time and with no technique.

They took solid hits and drew back. I danced around, hammering anyone who came near me, but I was surrounded and I couldn't win.

It was only the crowd's fascination with the fighting that kept them from surging forward in a strangling crush of bodies.

A determined phalanx of eight or ten men broke through the circle, and I was face to face with Khaled Ansari. I was running on instinct, and I almost punched him. He held out both hands, waving for me to stop. His men ploughed their way back into the crowd, and Khaled pushed me in behind them. Someone punched my head from behind, and I turned and ran at the mob again, wanting to fight every man in the city; wanting to fight until they punched me numb; until I couldn't feel that spear, dead Abdullah's spear, in my chest. Khaled and two of his friends wrapped their arms around me and dragged me out of the writhing, lunatic hell that the street had become. "His body's not there," Khaled told me when we found my bike. He wiped the blood from my face with a handkerchief. My eye was swelling up quickly, and blood dripped from my nose and a cut on my lower lip. I hadn't felt the blows at all. There was no pain.

The pain was all in my chest, right next to my heart, and I breathed it in, and out, and in.

I rode back to Leopold's, and found Johnny Cigar sitting at Didier's table. Didier and Lisa were gone. I collapsed in a chair beside Johnny, much as Lisa had done beside Didier a few hours before. Leaning my elbows on the table, I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands.

Johnny broke down and wept, bringing himself under control only with deep breaths and a clench-jawed effort of will.

You know how these fellows take some short-cuts at night, on the main road. It's forbidden, but still they do it, yaar, to save miles of pushing those heavy carts. This cart was full of steel for building. Long steel pieces. They lost the control of that cart on a hill. It slipped from their hands, and it rolled backwards. Prabaker came around the corner in his taxi, and the whole thing went into the front of the car. Some of the steel went through the window. The man and the woman in the back were killed. Their heads came off. Completely off. Prabaker was hit in the face."

He wept again, and I reached out to comfort him. Tourists and patrons at other tables glanced at us, but quickly looked away.

When he recovered, I ordered a whisky for him. He gulped it in one tip of the glass, as Prabaker had done on the first day that I met him.

We walked into the critical-care ward, and found Kishan and Rukhmabai sitting at the side of his bed and weeping in one another's arms. Parvati, Sita, Jeetendra, and Qasim Ali were all standing in solemn silence at the foot of the bed. Prabaker was unconscious. A bank of machines monitored his vital signs. Tubes and metal pipes were taped to his face-what was left of his face. That great smile, that gorgeous, solar smile, had been ripped from his face. It was simply... gone.

In a duty room on the ground floor, I found the doctor in charge of his care. I pulled a bundle of American hundred-dollar bills from my belt and offered it to him, asking him to forward any further accounts to me. He wouldn't take it. There was no hope, he said. Prabaker had hours, perhaps only minutes, to live. That was why he'd allowed the family and friends to remain at the bedside. There was nothing to do, he said, but wait with him, and watch him die. I returned to Prabaker's room and gave Parvati the money, together with everything I'd earned on my most recent courier run.

I found a toilet in the hospital and then washed my face and neck. The cuts and wounds on my face filled my aching head with thoughts of Abdullah. I couldn't bear to think those thoughts. I couldn't hold the image of my wild, Iranian friend surrounded by cops and shooting it out until his body was torn and bloodied. I stared into the mirror, feeling the acid burn of tears. I slapped myself hard awake, and returned to Prabaker's floor.

I stood with the others, at the foot of his bed, for three hours.

Exhausted, I began to nod off, and I had to admit that I couldn't stay awake. In a relatively quiet corner, I put two chairs against the wall and went to sleep. A dream swallowed me whole, almost at once. It carried me to Sunder. I was floating on the murmuring tide of voices on that first night in the village when Prabaker's father put his hand on my shoulder, and I clenched my teeth against the stars. When I woke from the dream, Kishan was sitting there beside me with his hand on my shoulder, and when I met his eyes we both sobbed helplessly.

In the end, when it was sure that Prabaker would die, and we all knew it, and we all accepted the fact that he had to die, we went through four days and nights of watching his brave little body suffer, what was left of him, the almost-Prabaker with the amputated smile. In the end, after days and nights of watching him suffer that pain and bewilderment, I began to hope that he would die, and to wish for it with all my heart. I loved him so much that in the end I found an empty corner in a cleaner's room, where a tap dripped constantly into a concrete trough, and I fell to my knees on a place marked by two wet footprints, and I begged God to let him die. And then he did die. In the hut he'd once shared with Parvati, Prabaker's mother, Rukhmabai, unfurled her thigh-length hair. She was sitting in the doorway with her back to the world. Her black hair was night's waterfall. She cut across thickly, close to her head, with sharp shears, and the long hair fell like a shadow dying.

At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabaker. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

____________________

CHAPTER THIRTY

Heroin is a sensory deprivation tank for the soul. Floating on the Dead Sea of the drug stone, there's no sense of pain, no regret or shame, no feelings of guilt or grief, no depression, and no desire. The sleeping universe enters and envelops every atom of existence. Insensible stillness and peace disperse fear and suffering. Thoughts drift like ocean weeds and vanish in the distant, grey somnolency, unperceived and indeterminable. The body succumbs to cryogenic slumber: the listless heart beats faintly, and breathing slowly fades to random whispers. Thick nirvanic numbness clogs the limbs, and downward, deeper, the sleeper slides and glides toward oblivion, the perfect and eternal stone.

That chemical absolution is paid for, like everything else in the universe, with light. The first light that junkies lose is the light in their eyes. A junkie's eyes are as lightless as the eyes of Greek statues, as lightless as hammered lead, as lightless as a bullet hole in a dead man's back. The next light lost is the light of desire. Junkies kill desire with the same weapon they use on hope and dream and honour: the club made from their craving. And when all the other lights of life are gone, the last light lost is the light of love. Sooner or later, when it's down to the last hit, the junkie will give up the woman he loves, rather than go without; sooner or later, every hard junkie becomes a devil in exile.

I levitated. I floated, upraised on the supernatant liquid of the smack in the spoon, and the spoon was as big as a room. The raft of opiate paralysis drifted across the little lake in the spoon, and the rafters intersecting over my head seemed to hold an answer, some kind of answer, in their symmetry. I stared at the rafters, knowing that the answer was there and that it might save me. And then I closed my eyes of hammered lead again, and lost it. And sometimes I woke. Sometimes I was wide-awake enough to want more of the deadening drug. Sometimes I was awake enough to remember it all.

There'd been no funeral for Abdullah because there was no body for them, for us, to bury. His body had disappeared during the brawling riot just as Maurizio's body had disappeared-as completely as a flared, exhausted star. I joined the others to carry Prabaker's body to the ghat, the burning place. I ran with them through the streets. I ran with them beneath the garlanded burden of his little body, chanting names of God, and then I watched his body burn. Grief roamed the lanes of the slum afterward, and I couldn't remain there with the gathering of friends and family who mourned him. They stood near the spot where Prabaker had been married only weeks before. Tattered streamers from the wedding still dangled from the roofs of some of the huts. I spoke to Qasim Ali, Johnny, Jeetendra, and Kishan Mango, but then I left them and rode to Dongri. I had questions for lord Abdel Khader Khan: questions that crawled inside me like the things in Hassaan Obikwa's pit.

The house near the Nabila Mosque was closed, locked up with heavy padlocks and utterly silent. No-one in the forecourt of the mosque or the street of shops could tell me when he'd left, or when he might return. Frustrated and angry, I rode to see Abdul Ghani. His house was open but his servants told me that he was out of the city on a holiday, and wasn't expected home again for weeks. I visited the passport factory, and found Krishna and Villu hard at work. They confirmed that Ghani had left them instructions and sufficient funds for several weeks of work, and had told them that he was taking a holiday. When I rode to Khaled Ansari's apartment, I met a watchman on duty who told me that Khaled was in Pakistan. He had no idea when the dour Palestinian would return.

The other members of Khader's mafia council were just as suddenly and conveniently absent. Farid was in Dubai. General Sobhan Mahmoud was in Kashmir. No-one answered my knock at Keki Dorabjee's house, and every window was darkened with a drawn shade. Rajubhai, who'd never been known to miss a day at his counting house in the Fort, was visiting a sick relative in Delhi. Even the second-level bosses and lieutenants were out of town or simply unavailable.

Those who remained, the gold agents and currency couriers and passport contacts all over the city, were polite and friendly.

Work for them seemed to continue at the same pace and with the same routines. My own work was just as secure. I was anticipated at every depot, exchange centre, jewellery store, and other point of contact with Khader's empire. Instructions had been left for me with gold dealers, currency men, and the touts who bought and stole passports. I wasn't sure if it was a compliment to me-that I could be relied upon to function in the absence of the council-or that they saw me as so inconsequential in their scheme of things that I didn't merit an explanation.

Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city.

I'd lost Prabaker and Abdullah, my closest friends, in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You Are Here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. I was that point in space and time where Abdullah's wild violence intersected with Prabaker's happy gentleness.

Adrift, then, and somehow un-defined by their deaths, I realised with unease and surprise how much I'd also come to depend upon Khader and his council of bosses. My interactions with most of them had been cursory, it seemed to me, and yet I missed the reassurance of their presence in the city almost as much as I missed the company of my dead friends.

And I was angry. It took me a while to understand that anger, and to realise that Khaderbhai was its instigator and its target. I blamed him for Abdullah's death: for not protecting him and for not saving him. I couldn't bring myself to believe that Abdullah, the friend I'd loved, was the brutal madman Sapna. But I was ready to believe that Abdel Khader Khan had some connection to Sapna and to the killings. Moreover, I felt betrayed by his desertion of the city. It was as if he'd abandoned me to face... everything... alone. It was a ridiculous notion, of course, and quite self-aggrandising. The truth was that hundreds of Khader's men were still working in Bombay, and I dealt with many of them every day. But still I felt it-betrayed and forsaken. A coldness, formed from doubt and angry fear, began to spread inward toward the core of my feeling for the Khan. I still loved him, and I was still bonded to him as a son to his father, but he was no longer my revered and flawless hero.

A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them. Khader was one of my twelve, but his disguise was always the best. In those abandoned, angry days, as my grieving heart limped into numbing despair, I began to think of him as my enemy; my beloved enemy.

And deal by deal, crime by crime, day by day my will and purpose and hope staggered toward the pit. Lisa Carter pursued and won her contract with Chandra Mehta and Cliff De Souza. For her sake I sat in at the meeting that clinched the deal, and I signed on as her partner. The producers saw my involvement as important. I was their safe conduit to the black money of the Khader Khan mafia-an untapped and virtually inexhaustible resource. They didn't mention that connection, not then, but it was a key factor in their decision to sign on with Lisa. The contract specified that Lisa and I would supply foreign junior artists, as bit players were known, for three major studios. The terms of payment and commissions were set for two years.

After the meeting, Lisa walked me to my bike parked at the sea wall on Marine Drive. We sat together at the precise spot where Abdullah had put his hand on my shoulder, years before, when my mind was filled with the drowning sea. We were lonely, Lisa and I, and at first we talked to one another as lonely people do-in fragments of complaint, and corners clipped from conversations that we'd already had with ourselves, alone.

Lisa laughed, because I'd surprised her with the quote, but the laugh ended in a long sigh. She tilted her head to let the wind play with her hair.

Now she's gone, and I'm still freaking out about Modena."

She turned her head quickly and met my eye. Her expression smiled at the lips, but a tiny frown creased her forehead. She was wearing a red salwar kameez. The long, loose silk shirt clung to her breasts and the outline of her figure in the strong sea breeze. Her blue eyes glittered with courage and other mysteries.

She was brave and fragile and tough in the same instant. She'd dragged herself from the life that was drowning her at Madame Zhou's Palace, and she'd beaten heroin. In defence of her friend's life, and her own, she'd helped to kill a man. She'd lost her lover, Abdullah, my friend, his body torn and mutilated by bullets. And it was all there, in her eyes and her thin face, thinner than it should've been. It was all there, if you knew what to look for, and if you knew where to look.

Karla hates her more than... I've never seen anything like it in my life. Karla hates her so much that she's a bit crazy with it, if you know what I mean. She thinks about Madame Zhou almost all the time, and she'll get her, sooner or later."

I turned my head to look at her, but when her blue eyes met mine I changed the subject.

She talks to you through a metal grille. There's at least one in every room, so she can watch what's going on, and talk to the girls or the customers. It's a fuckin' creepy place, Lin. I'd rather die than go back to that."

There was another silence. Waves pushed at the shoreline of rocks and pebbles at the base of the wall. Seagulls hovered, prowling the wind for signs of things that slithered and scuttled among the rocks.

Seventy, eighty grand-a lot more, you know, than Maurizio carved up Modena for, and got himself killed for. It's crazy, isn't it?"

I looked into the wind, feeling the day alternately warm and cool and warm again on my face and arms as the breeze turned and returned across the bay. A small fleet of fishing canoes drifted past us on their way back to the fishermen's sandy refuge near the slum. I suddenly remembered the day in the rain, sailing in a canoe across the flooded forecourt of the Taj Mahal Hotel and beneath the booming, resonant dome of the Gateway Monument. I remembered Vinod's love song, and the rain that night as Karla came into my arms.

And staring, then, at the ceaseless, eternal waves, I remembered all that had been lost since that storming night: prison, torture, Karla gone, Ulla gone, Khaderbhai and his council gone, Anand gone, Maurizio dead, Modena probably dead, Rasheed dead, Abdullah dead, and Prabaker-it was impossible-Prabaker, also dead. And I was one of them: walking and talking and staring at the wilding waves, but as dead in my heart as all the rest.

I looked at her for a while, reading the runes in her sky-blue eyes. Then I stood from the wall, held her in my arms, and kissed her. It was a long kiss. We lived out a life together in that kiss: we lived and loved and grew old together, and we died. Then our lips parted, and that life we might've had retreated, shrinking to a spark of light we would always recognise in one another's eyes.

I could've loved her. Maybe I already did love her a little. But sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her.

And I still loved Karla. I loved Karla.

I rode away, and never looked back. I paid three months' rent on my apartment, and paid substantial baksheesh to the watchman in the car park and the watchman in the building. I kept one good, forged passport in my pocket, put all my spare passports and a bundle of cash into a satchel, and left it with my Enfield Bullet bike in Didier's care. Then I took a cab to Gupta-ji's opium den near the Street of Ten Thousand Whores, Shoklaji Street. I climbed the worn wooden steps to the third floor and walked into the cage that junkies build for themselves, one shiny, sharp, steel bar at a time.

Gupta-ji provided a large room with twenty sleeping mats and wooden pillows for his opium smokers. For those with special needs he reserved other rooms behind that open den. Through a very small doorway, I entered the discreet corridor that led to those back rooms. It was so low that I had to stoop, almost to crawling. The room I chose had a cot with a kapok mattress, a weathered carpet, a small cabinet with wickerwork doors, a lamp with a silk lampshade, and a large clay matka filled with water. The walls on three sides were made from reed matting stretched upon wooden frames. The last wall, at the head of the bed, looked out over a busy street of Arab and local Muslim traders, but its windows were shuttered so that only a few bright stars of sunlight gleamed in the chinks and gaps. There was no ceiling. Instead, the view overhead was of heavy rafters crossing and joining one another in support of the clay tile roof. I got to know that view very well.

Gupta-ji took money and instructions, and left me alone. The room, so close to the roof, was very hot. I took my shirt off, and switched off the lamp. The dark little room was like a cell; a prison cell at night. I sat on the bed and, almost at once, the tears came. I'd cried before, in Bombay. I'd shed tears after I met Ranjit's lepers, and when the stranger had washed my tortured body in Arthur Road Prison, and with Prabaker's father at the hospital. But that sorrow and suffering had always been stifled: somehow, I'd managed to choke back the worst of it, the flood of it. Then, alone in that little opium cell with my ruined love for those dead friends, Abdullah and Prabaker, I let it go.

The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings.

They're wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

Gupta-ji gave me time. When at last I heard the sliding, scuffing sound of his chappals as he approached the door I smeared the sorrow from my face, and switched on the lamp. He'd brought what I'd asked for-a steel spoon, distilled water, disposable syringes, heroin, and a carton of cigarettes-and he set the items out on the little dresser. There was a girl with him. He told me that her name was Shilpa, and that he'd assigned her to me as a servant. She was young, years less than twenty, but already scarred with the glum expression of the working professional.

Hope, ready to snarl or grovel like a beaten cur, cowered in her eyes. I sent her and Gupta-ji away, and cooked up a taste of heroin.

The dose sat in the syringe for almost an hour. I picked it up and put the needle against a fat, strong, healthy vein in my arm five times, only to put it down again unused. And for the whole of that sweating hour I stared at the liquid in the syringe. That was it. The damnation drug. That was the big one, the drug that had driven me to commit stupid, violent crimes; that had put me in prison; that had cost me my family, and lost my loved ones.

The everything-and-nothing drug: it takes everything, and gives you nothing in return. But the nothing that it gives you, the unfeeling emptiness it gives you, is sometimes all and everything you want.

I pushed the needle into the vein, pulled back the rose of blood that confirmed the clean puncture of the vein, and pressed the plunger all the way to the stop. Before I could pull the needle from my arm, the drug made my mind Sahara. Warm, dry, shining, and featureless, the dunes of the drug smothered all thought, and buried the forgotten civilisation of my mind. The warmth filled my body as well, killing off the thousand little aches, twinges, and discomforts that we endure and ignore in every sober day.

There was no pain. There was nothing.

And then, with the desert still in my mind, I felt my body drowning, and I broke the surface of a suffocating lake. Was it a week after that first taste? Was it a month? I crawled onto the raft and floated there on the lethal lake in the spoon, carrying the Sahara in my blood. And those rafters overhead: there was a kind of message in them, a message about how and why we all intersected, Khader and Karla and Abdullah and I. Our lives, all of us, in the link to Abdullah's death, intersected in some uniquely profound way. It was there, in the rafters, a key to the code.

But I closed my eyes. I remembered Prabaker. I remembered that he was working so hard and so late on the night he died because he owned the taxi, and was working for himself. I'd bought the taxi for him. He'd be alive if I hadn't bought that taxi for him. He was the little mouse that I'd trained and fed with crumbs in my prison cell; the mouse that was crucified. And sometimes the breeze of a clear, unstoned hour gave me an image of Abdullah in the minute before he died, alone in the killing circle. Alone. I should've been there. I was with him every day. I should've been with him then. Friends don't let friends die like that-alone with death and fate. And where was his body? And what if he was Sapna?

Could my friend, my friend I loved, really have been that ruthless, insane mutilator? What did Ghani say? Pieces of Madjid's slaughtered body were found all over his house... Could I have loved the man who did that? What did it mean, that some small, insistent part of me feared that he was Sapna, and loved him anyway?

And I fired the silver bullet into my arm again, and fell back on the floating raft. And I saw the answer in the rafters overhead.

And I was sure I would understand it with a little more dope, and a little more, and a little more.

I woke to see a face glaring at me and speaking fiercely in a language I couldn't understand. It was an ugly face, a scowling face, defined by deep lines that descended in curved chines from his eyes and nose and mouth. Then the face had hands, strong hands, and I found myself lifted from the raft of my bed and propped unsteadily on my feet.

He pulled me around to face him again. There was enormous power in his arms. He clamped the metal grapples of his hands on my arms.

I'd been three months in the room at Gupta-ji's. They were three months of heroin every day, and food every other day, and the only exercise a short walk to the toilet and back. I didn't know it then, but I'd lost twelve kilos-the best thirty pounds of muscle on my body. I was thin and weak and still stupid on drugs.

He relaxed his grip as I nodded toward the little table where my wallet, watch, and passport rested. Gupta-ji and Shilpa waited in the corridor beyond. I gathered up the possessions and put them into my pockets, pretending to co-operate with Nazeer. When I judged the moment to be right, I swung round at him with an overhand right. It should've hit him. It would've hit him when I was healthy and sober. I missed him completely, and threw myself off balance. Nazeer drove a fist into my solar plexus, just under the heart. I doubled over, winded and helpless, but my knees locked stiffly and my legs wouldn't fold. He raised my head, with his left hand locked into a patch of my hair, pulled his right fist back at shoulder height, hesitated in the precision of his aim, and then rammed his fist into my jaw. The full force of his neck, shoulders, and back were in the blow. I saw Gupta-ji's lips pout and his eyes squint in a wince, and then his face exploded in a shower of sparks that left the world darker than a cave full of sleeping bats.

It was the only time in my life I was ever knocked out cold. It seemed that I was falling forever, and the ground was impossibly far away. After a time I was dimly aware of movement, floating through space, and I thought, It's okay, this is all a dream, a drug dream, and I'm going to wake up any minute now, and take more drugs.

Then I came down with a rumpled crash on the raft once more. But the raft-bed that I'd floated on for three long months had changed. It was different, somehow-soft and smooth. And there was a new and wonderful smell, a gorgeous perfume. It was Coco. I knew it well. It was Karla. It was the perfume on Karla's skin.

Nazeer had carried me over his shoulder all the way down the flights of stairs and out into the street, where he'd dumped me into the back seat of a taxi. Karla was there. My head rested in her lap. And I opened my eyes to look into her lovely face. And her green eyes looked back at me with compassion and concern and something else. I closed my eyes, and in the moving darkness I knew what it was, that something else in her eyes. It was disgust. She was disgusted by my weakness, my heroin habit, my stink of neglect and self-indulgence. Then I felt her hands on my face, and it was like crying, and her fingers moving the caress across my cheek were the tears.

When the taxi finally stopped, Nazeer carried me up two flights of steps as easily as he might've lugged a sack of flour. I came to consciousness again draped over his shoulder, looking down at Karla as she climbed the steps behind us. I tried to smile at her. We entered a big house through a back door that led to a kitchen. Beyond the large, modern kitchen, we came into an enormous, open-plan living room, with one wall of glass that looked out upon a golden beach and the dark sapphire sea.

Flipping me over his shoulder, Nazeer lowered me with more gentleness than I'd expected to a pile of cushions near the glass feature wall. The last hit I'd injected, just before he'd kidnapped me from Gupta-ji's, was a big dose. Too big. I was groggy and lapsing. The urge to close my eyes and surrender to the stone swept over me in almost irresistible, immersible waves.

I laughed, because standing was the last thing on my mind. In the laugh I felt the soreness, dimly, through the stone, on the point of my chin and the hinge of my jaw.

She smiled, and the smile was sad because it was the wrong question. I know that now. I'm not stoned now. That was my chance to know the whole of the truth, or as much of the truth as she knew. If I'd asked her the right question, she would've told me the truth. That was the power behind her intense stare. She was ready to tell me everything. She might've even loved me, or begun to love me. But I hadn't asked the right question. I hadn't asked about her. I'd asked about him.

I'll see you then, maybe."

I saw Didier this morning-he says hello, by the way-but that's it. I'm not sticking around. I agreed to help get you out of that little suicide pact you had going with yourself at Gupta-ji's.

Now you're here, you're safe, and I have to go."

She turned and spoke to Nazeer. They were speaking Urdu, and I understood only every third or fourth word of their conversation.

He laughed, listening to her, and turned to look at me with his customary contempt.

I made a bet with him that you'd make it."

She laughed, and it was so rare to see and hear her laugh that I took those bright, round syllables of happiness into me like food, like drink, like the drug. Despite the stone and the sickness, I knew with perfect understanding that the greatest treasure and pleasure I would ever know was in that laugh; to make that woman laugh, and feel the laughter bubbling from her lips against my face, my skin.

I woke unwell. I woke alert and cold and needing heroin. My mouth was filthy and my body ached everywhere at once.

I pulled myself up on the pillows and looked around the room. It was the beginning of evening, and night's long shadow was creeping across the sandy beach beyond the window. Nazeer sat on a piece of carpet near the entrance to the kitchen. Khader was dressed in the loose pantaloons, shirt, and tunic-vest of the Pathans. The clothes were green, the favourite colour of the Prophet. He looked older, somehow, after just those few months.

He also looked fitter, and more calm and determined than I'd ever seen him.

Nazeer watched me. He was outwardly calm, but I knew that he was ready to spring.

I exhaled a full breath in an exhausted sigh of relief. I felt tears stinging my eyes, and I bit the inside of my cheek to kill them.

I remembered the fight; the mysterious fight. Abdullah and I- we'd fought with a group of Iranian men on the street. I tried to remember other details from that day, but I couldn't think past the sharp, guilty twist of regret that I'd never asked Abdullah who the men were or why we'd fought them.

That much is done, for Abdullah."

I relaxed against the cushions, and closed my eyes for a moment.

My nose was beginning to run, and my throat was clogged and sore.

I'd built up a big habit in those three months-three grams of pure Thai-white heroin every day. The turkey was coming on fast, and I knew that it would be two weeks in Hell's punishment unit.

The cramps were creeping into my stomach. I groaned, and looked away.

So you see, when you go with my men to the war in Afghanistan, you must know how to ride a horse."

To Afghanistan-my home, that I have not seen for more than fifty years. And I am inviting you-I am asking you-to go with me. The choice, of course, is yours to make. It is a dangerous job. That much is certain. I will not think less about you, if you decide not to go with me."

Where we will go there are many rival clans, and they have fought with one another for hundreds of years. They have long traditions of raiding one another and taking whatever they can as plunder on their raids. Only two things unite them, just at this time-love for Allah, and hatred for the Russian invaders. At the moment, their chief allies against the Russians are the Americans. They are fighting with American money and American weapons. If I have an American with me, they will leave us alone, and let us pass, without molesting us or stealing more than a reasonable amount from us."

That is why I need you."

Questions writhed in my shivering mind, hundreds of them, but the cold turkey was crippling me. Cold, greasy sweat from the struggle smothered my skin. The words, when they came at last, were rushed and faltering. "Why are you doing this? Why Kandahar? Why there?"

They are fighting a jihad, a holy war, to drive the Russian invaders out of the homeland. We have helped them in many ways, up to this time. Now it is time to help them with guns, and with my blood, if it is necessary."

He looked at the sickness trembling across my face, and cutting facets from my eyes. He smiled again, pressing his fingers into my shoulder until that pain, that touch, his touch, was all I felt for a moment.

When he left me, I went to the bathroom. Stomach cramp stabbed me with eagle's claws, and then twisted my insides with talons of agony. Diarrhoea shook me with convulsive spasms. I washed myself, shivering so violently that my teeth clattered together.

I looked in the mirror and saw my eyes, the pupils so large that the whole iris was black. When the light comes back, when the heroin stops and the turkey starts and the light returns, it rushes in through the black funnels of the eyes.

Wearing a towel around my waist, I walked back to the big main room. I looked thin. I was stooped, and shivering, and moaning involuntarily. Nazeer looked me up and down, with a sneer curling his thick upper lip. He handed me a pile of clean clothes. They were exact copies of Khader's green Afghan costume. I dressed, shaking and trembling and losing my balance a few times. Nazeer watched me, his knotty fists balled at his hips. The sneer rippled his lip like the opening ridges of a clamshell. His every gesture was so loud and broad that it had the exaggeration of pantomime, but his dark eyes were fierce with menace. I suddenly realised that he reminded me of the Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. He was an ugly, troll-like caricature of Mifune.

His answer was to walk to the front door of the house and throw it open. He pulled some fifty-rupee notes from his pocket, and hurled them onto the floor.

We all cope with anxiety and stress, to one degree or another, with the help of a cocktail of chemicals produced in the body and released in the brain. Chief among them is the endorphin group.

The endorphins are peptide neurotransmitters that have pain relieving properties. Anxiety and stress and pain bring on the endorphin response as a natural coping mechanism. When we take any of the opiates-morphine or opium or heroin, in particular- the body stops producing endorphins. When we stop taking opiates, there's a lag of between five and fourteen days before the body begins a new endorphin production cycle. In the meanwhile, in that black, tortured crawlspace of one to two weeks without heroin and without endorphins, we learn what anxiety and stress and pain really are.

What's it like, Karla asked me once, cold turkey off heroin? I tried to explain it. Think about every time in your life that you've ever been afraid, really afraid. Someone sneaks up behind you when you think you're alone, and shouts to frighten you. The gang of thugs closes in around you. You fall from a great height in a dream, or you stand on the very edge of a steep cliff.

Someone holds you under water and you feel the breath gone, and you scramble, fight, and claw your way to the surface. You lose control of the car and see the wall rushing into your soundless shout. Then add them all up, all those chest-tightening terrors, and feel them all at once, all at the same time, hour after hour, and day after day. And think of every pain you've ever known-the burn with hot oil, the sharp sliver of glass, the broken bone, the gravel rash when you fell on the rough road in winter, the headache and the earache and the toothache. Then add them all up, all those groin-squeezing, stomach-tensing shrieks of pain, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, and day after day. Then think of every anguish you've ever known. Remember the death of a loved one. Remember a lover's rejection. Recall your feelings of failure and shame and unspeakably bitter remorse. And add them all up, all the heart-stabbing griefs and miseries, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, and day after day. That's cold turkey. Cold turkey off heroin is life with the skin torn away.

The assault of anxiety on the unprotected mind, the brain without natural endorphins, makes men and women mad. Every junkie going through turkey is mad. The madness is so fierce and cruel that some die of it. And in the temporary insanity of that skinned, excruciated world, we commit crimes. And if we survive, years later, and become well, our healthy recollection of those crimes leaves us wretched, bewildered, and as self-disgusted as men and women who betray their comrades and country under torture.

Two full days and nights into the torment, I knew I wasn't going to make it. Most of the vomiting and the diarrhoea had passed, but the pain and anxieties were worse, much worse, every minute.

Beneath the screaming in my blood there was a calm, insistent voice: You can stop this... you can fix this... you can stop this... take the money...get a fix... you can stop this pain ...

Nazeer's bamboo and coconut-fibre cot was in the far corner of the room. I lurched toward it, watched closely by the burly Afghan, who was still sitting on his mat near the door. Trembling and moaning with pain, I dragged the cot closer to the great window that looked out on the sea. I took up a cotton sheet and began to tear at it with my teeth. It gave way in a few places, and I ripped it along the length, tearing off strips of cloth.

Frantic in my movements and close to panic, I hurled two thick, embroidered quilts onto the rope bed for a mattress, and lay down on it. Using two of the strips, I tied my ankles to the bed. With a third strip, I secured my left wrist. Then I lay down, and turned my head to look at Nazeer. I held out the remaining strip, and asked him with my eyes to bind my arm to the bed. It was the first time that we'd ever met one another's eyes in an equally honest stare.

He rose from his square of carpet and walked toward me, holding the stare. He took the strip of cloth from my hand and bound my right wrist to the frame of the bed. A shout of trapped, panic fear escaped from my open mouth, and another. I bit down on my tongue, biting through the flesh at the sides until blood ran past my lips. Nazeer nodded slowly. He tore another thick strip from the sheet and twirled it into a corkscrew tube. Sliding it between my teeth, he tied the gag behind my head. And I bit down on the devil's tail. And I screamed. And I turned my head to see my own reflection tied to the night in the window. And for a while I was Modena, waiting and watching and screaming with my eyes. Two days and nights I was tied to the bed. Nazeer nursed me with tenderness and constancy. He was always there. Every time I opened my eyes, I felt his rough hand on my brow, wiping the sweat and the tears into my hair. Every time the lightning strike of cramp twisted a leg or arm or my stomach, he was there, massaging warmth into the knot of pain. Every time I whimpered or screamed into the gag, he held my eyes with his, willing me to endure and succeed. He removed the gag when I choked on a trickle of vomit or my blocked nose let no air pass, but he was a strong man and he knew that I didn't want my screams to be heard. When I nodded my head, he replaced the gag and tied it fast.

And then, when I knew that I was either strong enough to stay or too weak to leave, I nodded to Nazeer, blinking my eyes, and he removed the gag for the last time. One by one he untied the bonds at my wrists and ankles. He brought me a broth made from chicken and barley and tomatoes, unspiced, except for salt. It was the richest and most delicious thing I ever tasted in my life. He fed it to me, spoon by spoon. After an hour, when I finished the little bowl, he smiled at me for the first time, and that smile was like sunlight on sea rocks after summer rain.

Cold turkey goes on for about two weeks, but the first five days are the worst. If you can get through the first five days, if you can crawl and drag yourself into that sixth morning without drugs, you know you're clean, and you know you'll make it. Every hour, for the next eight to ten days, you feel a little better and a little stronger. The cramps fade, the nausea passes, the fever and chills subside. After a while, the worst of it is simply that you can't sleep. You lie on the bed at night, twisting and writhing in discomfort, and sleep never comes. In those last days and very long nights of the turkey, I became a Standing Baba: I never sat or lay down, all day and all night, until exhaustion collapsed my legs at last and I sank into sleep.

And it passes, the turkey passes, and you emerge from the cobra bite of heroin addiction like any survivor from any disaster: dazed, wounded forever, and glad to be alive.

Nazeer took my first sarcastic jokes, twelve days after the turkey began, as the cue for my training to commence. From the sixth day I'd been walking with him as light exercise, and for the fresh air. The first of those walks had been slow and halting, and I'd returned to the house after fifteen minutes. By the twelfth day I was walking the length of the beach with him, hoping to tire myself so much that I could sleep.

Finally, he took me to the stable where Khader's horses were kept. The stable was a converted boathouse, one street away from the beach. The horses were trained for beginning riders, and carried tourists up and down the beach in the high season. The white gelding and grey mare were large, docile animals. We took them from Khader's stable-master and led them down to the flat, hard-packed sand of the beach.

There's no animal in the world with a deeper sense of parody than a horse. A cat can make you look clumsy, and a dog can make you look stupid, but only a horse can make you look both at the same time. And then, with nothing more than the flick of a tail or a casual stomp on your foot, it lets you know that it did it on purpose. Some people know from the first contact with the animal that they'll ride well, and bond with the beast. I'm not one of those people. A friend of mine has a strange, antimagnetic effect on machines: watches stop on her wrist, radio receivers crackle, and photocopy machines glitch whenever she's near. My relationship with horses is something like that.

The thickset Afghan cupped his hands to boost me onto the gelding's back, nodding his head for me to climb up, and winking encouragingly. I put my foot into his hands and sprang up onto the white horse, but in the instant that I sat on its back the previously meek, well-trained creature hurled me off with a prodigious, arching kick. I soared over Nazeer's shoulder and landed with a thump on the sand. The gelding galloped away down the beach without me. Nazeer stared after it, gape-mouthed. The animal was only calmed and returned to my presence when he fetched a blinding bag, and placed it over its head.

That was the beginning of Nazeer's slow, reluctant acceptance of the fact that I would never be anything other than the worst horseman he knew. The disappointment should've plunged me deeper into the well of his contempt, but in fact it provoked an opposite reaction. In the weeks that followed he became solicitous and even tender-hearted toward me. For Nazeer, that stumbling ineptitude with horses was a terrible affliction, as pitiable in a man as a painfully debilitating illness. And even at my best, when I managed to remain on the horse for minutes at a time, and work the beast in a circle by flapping my legs at its sides and yanking with both hands at the bridle, my gracelessness moved him close to tears.

Nevertheless, I persevered with the lessons, and I exercised every day. I worked my way up to twenty sets of thirty push-ups, with a minute rest between each set. I followed the push-ups every day with five hundred sit-ups, a five-kilometre run, and a forty-minute swim in the sea. After almost three months of the routine, I was fit and strong.

Nazeer wanted me to gain some experience at riding over rough terrain, so I arranged with Chandra Mehta for us to visit the riding range at the Film City movie studio ranch. Many of the feature films had horse-and-rider sequences. The teams of horses were cared for by squads of men who lived on the vast tracts of hilly land, and were on call for stunt and action scenes. The animals were superbly well trained but, barely two minutes after Nazeer and I had mounted the brown mares assigned to us, my horse threw me into a stack of clay pots. Nazeer took up the reins of my horse and sat in his saddle, shaking his head pityingly.

Two falls later, as I climbed wearily into the saddle, I heard a familiar voice. I looked around to see a group of riders. At their head was a cowboy looking like Emiliano Zapata, with a black hat hanging on his back from a leather thong.

He raised one eyebrow quizzically.

Exasperated, I climbed down and stood next to him, facing the two horses.

There are three things that no Indian man can resist: a beautiful face, a beautiful song, and an invitation to dance. I was Indian enough, in my crazy white way, to dance with Vikram, even if it was simply that I couldn't bear to see him dance alone. Shaking my head, and laughing despite myself, I joined in his routine. He guided me through the dance, adding new steps until we had the turns and walks and gestures in perfect time together.

The horses watched us with that peculiarly equine mix of white eyed timorousness and snorting condescension. Still, we danced and sang to them in that grassy wilderness of rolling hills, under a blue sky as dry as the smoke from a campfire in the desert.

And when the dance was over, Vikram spoke to my horse in Hindi, letting it snuffle at his black hat. He passed the hat to me then, and told me to wear it. I slipped it over my head and we climbed into the saddles.

Damn if it didn't work. The horses cantered off, and gently broke into a gallop. For the first and only time in my life, I almost looked like a horseman. I knew the elation, for a glorious quarter hour, of fearless synergy with the great-hearted animal.

Closely following Vikram's lead, I flew at steep inclines and conquered them to plummet over the summit, and hurtle downward into curving loops of wind and scattered shrubs. We stretched out over flatter grasslands in effortless, lunging snatches at the ground, and then Nazeer joined us with his riders at the gallop.

For a little while, for a moment, we were as wild-willed and free as the horses could teach us to be.

I was still laughing about it and chattering to Nazeer when we climbed the stairs and entered the house on the beach two hours later. I walked my excited smile through the door and saw Karla standing by the long feature-wall window and staring out at the sea. Nazeer greeted her with gruff fondness. A tiny bright smile rushed from his brow to his chin, trying to hide behind his scowl. He seized a litre bottle of water, a box of matches, and a few sheets of newspaper from the kitchen, and left the house. "He's leaving us alone," she said.

I walked to her, and kissed her. It was a brief kiss, almost shy, but all the love in my heart was in it. When our lips parted, we held one another close, both of us looking at the sea. After a while we saw Nazeer, down at the beach, collecting driftwood and dry scraps for a fire. He wedged the balled up newspaper between the twigs and sticks, lit the fire, and sat down beside it, facing the sea. He wasn't cold. There was a warm breeze leaning in on a hot night. He lit the fire to show us, as night rode the waves across the setting sun, that he was still there, on the beach; that we were still alone.

That was true. I knew that. I'd discovered it, at last, the hard way. But how had she come to know it from such a little acquaintance of him? One of the worst of my many failings, in those exile years, was my blindness to the good in people: I never knew how much goodness there was in a man or a woman until I owed them more than I could repay. People like Karla saw goodness with a glance, while I stared, and stared, and too often saw nothing past the scowl or bittering eye.

We looked down at the darkening beach and at Nazeer, sitting straight-backed beside his little fire. One of my small victories over Nazeer, when I was still weak and dependent on his strength, had been with language. I'd learned phrases in his language faster than he'd learned them in mine. My fluency had forced him to communicate with me in Urdu most of the time. When he tried to speak English, the words came out in awkward, truncated couplets, top-heavy with meanings and tottering on small feet of blunt sense. I taunted him often about the crudity of his English, exaggerating my confusion and demanding that he repeat himself, that he stumble from one cryptic phrase to another until he cursed me in Urdu and Pashto, and withdrew into silence.

Yet, in truth, his scissored English was always eloquent, and often a cadenced poetry. It was abbreviated, to be sure, but that was because the superfluous had been hacked from it, and what remained was a pure and precise language of his own-something more than slogans and less than proverbs. Against my will, and unknown to him, I'd begun to repeat some of his phrases. He said to me once, while grooming his grey mare, All horse good, all man not good. For years afterward, whenever I encountered cruelty and treachery and other kinds of selfishness, especially my own, I found myself repeating Nazeer's phrase: All horse good, all man not good. And on that night, holding Karla's heart against my own as we watched his fire dance on the sand, I remembered another of his English iterations. No love, is no life, he used to say. No love, is no life.

I held Karla as if holding her could heal me, and we didn't make love until night lit the last star in our wide window of sky. Her hands were kisses on my skin. My lips unrolled the curled leaf of her heart. She breathed in murmurs, guiding me, and I spoke rhythm to her, echoing my needs. Heat joined us, and we enclosed ourselves with touch and taste and perfumed sounds. Reflected on the glass, we were silhouettes, transparent images-mine full of fire from the beach, and hers full of stars. And at last, at the end, those clear reflections of our selves melted, merged, and fused together.

It was good, so good, but she never said she loved me.

I'm not explaining it well, but-"

I felt the small stir of restlessness in her body, against mine, that said she wanted to move. I didn't move.

She closed her mouth, and pressed her lips together so tightly that they formed a white scar. Slowly, cell by cell, it seemed, her body drew back into itself all that she'd given to me a few moments before.

I didn't know why. Maybe it was the cold turkey, what I'd been through in the last months, and the new life I felt I'd won.

Maybe it was death-Prabaker's death, and Abdullah's, and the death I secretly feared was waiting for me in Afghanistan.

Whatever the reason, it was stupid and pointless and even cruel, and I couldn't stop wanting it.

When Nazeer returned from the beach, coughing and clearing his voice loudly to announce his arrival, we were already showered and dressed. He smiled-such a rare thing, that smile-as he looked from me, to her, and back again. But the cold sorrow in our eyes drove the downward curves of his face into willow wreaths of disappointment, and he looked away.

We watched her leave in a taxi on that long and lonely night before we went to Khader's war, and when Nazeer finally met my eyes he nodded, slowly and solemnly. I held the stare for a few moments, but then it was my turn to look away. I didn't want to face the strange mix of grief and elation I'd seen in his eyes because I knew what it was telling me. Karla was gone, yes, but it was the whole world of love and beauty that we'd lost that night. As soldiers in Khader's cause we had to leave it all behind. And the other world, the once unlimited world of what we might yet be, was shrinking, hour by hour, to a bullet's blood red full stop.

____________________

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Nazeer woke me before dawn, and we left the house as the first yawning rays of light stretched into the fading night. When we climbed from our taxi at the airport we saw Khaderbhai and Khaled Ansari near the entrance to the domestic terminal, but we didn't acknowledge them. Khader had laid out a complex itinerary that would take us, with four major changes of transport, from Bombay to Quetta, in Pakistan, near the Afghan border. His instructions were that we should appear at all times to be individual travellers, and that the travellers shouldn't acknowledge one another in any way. We were setting out with him to commit a score of crimes across three international boundaries, and to interfere in a war between Afghanistan's mujaheddin freedom fighters and the mighty Goliath of the Soviet Union. He was planning to succeed in his mission, but he was also allowing for failure. He was ensuring that if any of us were killed or captured at any stage, the trail of connections back to Bombay would be as cold as a mountain climber's axe.

It was a long journey, and it began as a silent one. Nazeer, scrupulous as ever in his conformity with Khaderbhai's instructions, never uttered a single word on the first leg from Bombay to Karachi. An hour after we'd checked into our separate rooms in the Chandni Hotel, however, I heard a soft tap on the door. Before the door was halfway open he slipped inside and pressed it shut behind him. His eyes were wide with nervous excitement and his manner was agitated, almost frantic. I was unsettled and a little disgusted by the conspicuousness of his fear, and I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder.

He saw the condescension behind my smile, even if he didn't understand the full meaning of the words. His jaw locked around some inscrutable resolve, and he frowned at me fiercely. We'd become friends, Nazeer and I. He'd opened his heart to me. But friendship, for him, was measured by what men do and endure for one another, not by what they share and enjoy. It puzzled and even tormented him that I almost always met his earnest gravity with facetiousness and triviality. The irony was that we were, in fact, similarly dour and serious men, but his grim severity was so stark that it roused me from my own solemnity, and provoked a childish, prankish desire to mock him.

He allowed me a grim little smile and then opened the door.

Glancing briefly along the corridor, he slipped out again as swiftly and silently as he'd entered. I looked at my watch. One o'clock. I had three hours to kill. For my passport-smuggling missions, Abdel Ghani had given me a money belt that was his uniquely original design. The belt was made from a tough, waterproof vinyl and was several times wider than the standard money belt. Worn flat against the stomach, the belt could hold up to ten passports and a quantity of cash. On that first day in Karachi it held four of my own books. The first of them was the British book that I'd used to purchase plane and train tickets, and register at the hotel. The second book was the clean American passport that Khaderbhai required me to use for the mission into Afghanistan. The two others, a Swiss book and a Canadian book, were spares for emergency use. There was also a ten thousand dollar contingency fund, paid in advance, as part of my fee for accepting the hazardous mission. I wrapped the thick belt around my waist, beneath my shirt, slipped my switchblade into the scabbard at the back of my trousers, and left the hotel to explore the city.

It was hot, hotter than usual for the mild month of November, and a light, unseasonable rain had left the streets hazy with a thickened, steamy air. Karachi was a tense and dangerous city then. For several years the military junta that had seized power in Pakistan and executed the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had ruled the nation by dividing it. They'd exploited genuine grievances between ethnic and religious communities by inciting violent conflicts. They'd pitted the indigenous ethnic groups-particularly the Sindis, the Pashtuns, and the Punjabis-against the immigrants, known as Mohajirs, who'd streamed into the newly founded nation of Pakistan when it was partitioned from India. The army secretly supported extremists from the rival groups with weapons, money, and the judicious application of favours. When the riots that they'd provoked and fomented finally erupted, the generals ordered their police to open fire. Rage against the police violence was then contained by the deployment of army troops. In that way the army, whose covert operations had created the bloody conflicts, were seen to be the only force capable of preserving order and the rule of law.

As massacres and revenge killings tumbled over one another with escalating brutishness, kidnappings and torture became routine events. Fanatics from one group seized supporters from another group, and inflicted sadistic torments on them. Many of those who were abducted died in that fearsome captivity. Some vanished, and their bodies were never found. And when one group or another became powerful enough to threaten the balance of the deadly game, the generals incited violent conflict within their group to weaken it. The fanatics then began to feed on themselves, killing and maiming rivals from their own ethnic communities.

Each new cycle of violence and vengeance ensured, of course, that no matter what form of government emerged or dissolved in the nation, only the army would grow stronger, and only the army could exercise real power.

Despite that dramatic tension-and because of it-Karachi was a good place to do business. The generals, who were like a mafia clan without the courage, style, or solidarity of genuine, self respecting gangsters, had seized the country by force, held the entire nation hostage at the points of many guns, and looted the treasury. They lost no time in assuring the great powers, and the other arms-producing nations, that Pakistan's armed forces were open for their business. The civilised nations responded with enthusiasm, and for years Karachi was host to junketing parties of arms-dealers from America, Britain, China, Sweden, Italy, and other countries. No less industrious in their pursuit of a deal with the camarilla of generals were the illegals-the black marketeers, gunrunners, freebooters, and mercenaries. They crowded into the cafes and hotels: foreigners from fifty countries who had crime in mind and adventure in their hearts.

In a sense, I was one of them, a ravager like the rest of them, profiting from the war in Afghanistan like the rest of them, but I wasn't comfortable in their company. For three hours I drifted from a restaurant to a hotel to a chai shop, sitting near or with groups of foreigners who were searching for a quick buck. Their conversations were dispiritingly calculating. The war in Afghanistan, most of them conjectured cheerily, had a few good years left in it. The generals were, it had to be admitted, under considerable pressure. There were rumours that Benazir, daughter of the executed prime minister, was planning to return to Pakistan from exile in London to lead the democratic alliance opposed to the junta. But with a little luck and skilful connivance, the profiteers hoped, the army might remain in control of the country-and the well-established channels of corruption-for some years yet.

The talk was of cash crops, a euphemism for contraband and black market trade goods, which were in great demand along the entire border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Cigarettes, particularly American blends, were selling at Khyber Pass for sixteen times their already inflated Karachi price. Medicines of every kind were generating profits that increased in scale from month to month. Winter clothing, suitable for snow habitats, was exceptionally marketable. One enterprising German freebooter had driven a Mercedes truck loaded with surplus German army alpine issue uniforms, complete with thermal underwear, from Munich to Peshawar. He'd sold the lot, including the truck, for five times its purchase value. The buyer was an Afghan warlord who was favoured by western powers and agencies, including the American CIA. The heavy winter clothing, after a journey of thousands of kilometres through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, never reached the fighting men of the mujaheddin in the snow-draped mountains of Afghanistan. Instead, the winter uniforms and underwear were stored in one of the warlord's warehouses in Peshawar, awaiting the end of the war. The renegade and his small army were sitting out the war in the safety of their fortress compounds in Pakistan. His plan was to launch a strike for power with his own troops after the real fighting against the Russians was done, and the war was won.

News of that new market-a warlord, cashed up with CIA money and hungry for supplies at any price-sent thrilling, speculative ripples through the community of foreign opportunists in Karachi.

I encountered the story of the venturesome German and his truck full of alpine uniforms in three slightly different incarnations during the course of the afternoon. In a fever, something like gold fever, the foreigners passed the story among themselves as they pursued and closed down deals for shipments of canned foods, bales of brushed fleeces, shipping containers of engine parts, a warehouse full of second-hand spirit stoves, and stocks of every kind of weapon from bayonets to grenade launchers. And everywhere, in every conversation, I heard the dark, desperate incantation: If the war goes on for another year, we'll have it made...

Vexed and gloomy with squalling emotions I entered the Faloodah House in the Bohri bazaar, and ordered one of the sweet, technicoloured drinks. The faloodha was an indecently sweet concoction of white noodles, milk, rose flavours, and other melliferous syrups. The Firni House in Bombay's Dongri area, near Khaderbhai's house, was justly famous for its delicious faloodah drinks, but they were insipid when compared to the fabulous confections served at Karachi's Faloodah House. When the tall glass of pink, red, and white sugary milk appeared beside my right hand, I looked up to thank the waiter and saw that it was Khaled Ansari, carrying two drinks.

I looked into his honest, open, scarred face and it occurred to me that Khaled knew me better than I knew him. Would I have noticed and realised how troubled he was, I wondered, if our roles were reversed, and he'd entered the Faloodah House with such disturbing preoccupations? Probably not. Khaled was so often gloomy that I wouldn't have given it a second thought. "Well, it's just a bit of soul-searching, I guess. I've been doing some research, digging around in some of the chaikhannas and restaurants you told me about-some of the places where the black-market guys and the mercenaries hang out. It was pretty depressing. There's a lot of people here who want the war to go on forever, and they don't give a shit who's getting killed or who's doing the killing."

Khaled asked gently, looking down into his glass.

Khader asked me to be his American, and I'm doing it. But I don't know why."

We were silent for a while, sipping at our drinks and listening to the clatter and buzz surrounding us in the busy Faloodah House. A large portable radio was playing romantic gazals in Urdu. I could hear conversations in three or four languages from customers close to us. I couldn't understand the words, nor could I even identify which languages they were: Baluchi, Uzbek, Tajik, Farsi...

We finished our drinks and walked out into the late afternoon sunlight, pausing beyond the doorway to light our cigarettes.

Don't say goodbye."

He turned on his heel and walked away, stepping out to the edge of the road and into the fast lane of foot traffic between the footpath and the cars.

I turned and walked off in the opposite direction. Some minutes later, at the perimeter of the bazaar, a taxi slid to a stop quickly beside me. The back door opened and I jumped in next to Khaled. Another man was in the front seat beside the driver. He was in his early thirties, with short, dark brown hair receding from a high, wide forehead. His deep-set eyes were of a brown so dark as to seem black until direct sunlight pierced the irises to reveal the auburn earth tones swirling within them. His eyes stared evenly, intelligently, from beneath black brows that all but met in the centre. His nose was straight, descending to a short upper lip, a firm determined mouth, and a blunt, rounded chin. It was obvious that the man had shaved that day, and probably not long ago, but a blue-black shadow darkened the lower half of his face along the neat, sharply defined lines that governed his beard. It was a strong, square, symmetrical face, handsome in its strength and even proportions if not in any one outstanding feature.

We shook hands, sizing one another up with equal candour and affability. His strong face might've seemed severe but for a peculiar expression that screwed his eyes into a gentle squint, and creased the crests of his cheeks with smile lines. Whenever he was concentrating, whenever he wasn't completely relaxed, Ahmed Zadeh wore an expression that made him look as if he was searching for a friend in a crowd of strangers. It was a disarming expression, and it endeared him to me at once.

I took the folded envelope and slipped it into the pocket of my shirt, to read when I was alone.

You'll meet him in a few minutes."

I turned my face to the window, and as if that were a signal, the two men began to speak in Arabic. I listened to the smooth, swiftly flowing syllables and I let my thoughts drift on that sibilant music. Beyond the window the streets grew less ordered, and the buildings grew more shabby and unkempt. Many of the mud brick and sandstone buildings were single-storey dwellings, and although they were obviously inhabited by whole families they seemed unfinished: barely standing before they'd been possessed and used as shelters.

We passed through whole suburbs of such haphazard and impetuously constructed sprawls-dormitory suburbs thrown up to cope with the headlong rush of immigrants from villages to the rapidly expanding city. Side streets and lateral avenues revealed that the duplication of those crude, resemblant structures extended all the way to the horizon of sight, on either side of the main road.

After almost an hour of slow progress through sometimes impassably crowded streets, we stopped momentarily to allow another man to join us in the back seat. Following Khaled's instructions, the cab driver then turned his taxi around and returned along precisely the same congested route.

The new man was Mahmoud Melbaaf, a thirty-year-old Iranian. A first glimpse of his face-the thick, black hair, the high cheek bones, the eyes coloured like a sand dune in a blood-red sunset- reminded me so much of my dead friend Abdullah that I flinched around the pain of it. In a few moments the similarity dissolved:

Mahmoud's eyes protruded a little, his lips were less full, and his chin was pointed, as if it was designed to hold a goatee beard. It was, in fact, a very different face.

But in the clear thought of Abdullah Taheri and the piercing pain of missing him, I suddenly understood a part of the reason I was there, with Khaled and the others, on a journey into someone else's war. One part, a vital part of my readiness to face the risks of taking on Khader's mission, was the guilt I still felt that Abdullah had died alone, surrounded by guns. I was putting myself in the nearest equivalent, surrounding myself with enemy guns. And in the instant of thinking that thought, in the moment of daubing the unspoken words on a grey wall of my mind-death wish- I rejected it, with a shudder that shivered across the surface of my skin. And for the first time in all the months since I'd agreed to do the job for Abdel Khader Khan I felt afraid, and I knew that my life, there and then, was no more than a handful of sand squeezed into my clenched fist.

We got out of the car a block away from the Masjid-i-Tuba Mosque.

Following one another in single file, with twenty metres between each man, we reached the mosque, and removed our shoes. An ancient hajji attended to the shoes while he muttered his meditational zikkir. Khaled pressed a folded bank note into the man's calloused, arthritic hand. As we entered the mosque I looked up and gasped in surprise and joy.

The interior of the mosque was cool and immaculately clean.

Marble and stone tiles gleamed from fluted pillars, mosaic arches, and vast stretches of patterned floors. But above and beyond all that, drawing the eye irresistibly, was the enormous white marble dome. The spectacular canopy was a hundred paces across, and bejewelled with tiny, polished mirrors. As I stood there, gaping in wonder at its beauty, the electric lights in the mosque came on and the great curve of marble above us gleamed like sunshine on the million peaks and ripples of a wind-worried lake.

Khaled left us immediately, promising to return as soon as possible. Ahmed, Mahmoud, and I walked to an alcove that gave a view of the dome, and we sat down on the polished tile floor. It was some time since the evening prayer-I'd heard the call of the muezzin while we were driving in the cab-but there were still many men absorbed in private prayer throughout the mosque. When he was sure that I was comfortable, Ahmed announced that he would take the opportunity to pray. He excused himself, and walked to the bathing fount. With his face, hands, and feet washed according to ritual, he returned to a little clear space beneath the dome and commenced his prayer.

I watched him with a tiny germ of envy at the ease with which he opened his communication with God. I felt no urge to join him, but the sincerity of his meditation made me feel much more alone, somehow, in my solitary, unconnected mind.

He completed the prayer and, as he began the walk back to us, Khaled returned. He wore a troubled expression. We sat close together, our heads almost touching.

You were both lucky. He was out of the house, and they didn't get him. What have you got with you, from your hotel? What did you leave there?"

Ahmed grinned at me.

Clothes, toiletries, a few books. That's it. But there's the tickets-the plane and the train tickets I bought. I left them in my carry bag. That's the only thing with a name on it, I'm pretty sure."

If they could do it, they would take all of our weapons and our medicines and our other supplies, and give them to their own..."

We all listened intently, and heard the sounds of singing and music from somewhere outside the mosque.

We stood and followed him out of the mosque to collect our shoes.

Walking around the building in the gathering dark, we approached the sound of the singing.

That's what the meeting was all about. Didn't you know?"

He laughed as he asked the question, and his tone was as honest and ingenuous as it ever was, but still the words stabbed into my mind. Didn't you know? Didn't you know?

Khader was planning the trip all that time ago, I thought, on the first night that I met him. I remembered with perfect clarity the large, smoky room where the Blind Singers sang for their private audience. I remembered the food that we ate, the charras we smoked. I remembered the few well-known faces I'd recognised that night. Were they all involved in the mission! I remembered the young Afghan who'd greeted Khaderbhai with such respect, bending low enough to reveal the pistol held within a fold of his shawl.

I was still thinking of that first night, still worried by the questions I couldn't answer, when Khaled and I came upon a large group of men, hundreds of them, sitting cross-legged on the tiles of a wide forecourt adjacent to the mosque. The Blind Singers finished a song and the men applauded, shouting Allah! Allah!

Subhaan Allah! Khaled led us through the crowd of men to a relatively sheltered alcove where Khader sat with Nazeer and several others. When I caught his eye Khaderbhai raised his hand, signalling for me to join him. As I reached his side he grasped my hand and pulled me down beside him. A number of heads turned in our direction. Conflicting emotions stumbled into one another in my haunted heart: fear, that I was so conspicuously associated with Khader Khan, and a flush of pride that he'd drawn me, over all others, to sit at his side.

He was reading my mind and I was sure, somehow, that it was deliberate: that he was fully aware of the dizzying impact of his words. I was suddenly angry with him, suddenly resentful, even of the touch of his hand on my arm.

He remained silent until at last I turned to face him. When my eyes met his I felt the sting of impulsive tears, and I mastered them by grinding my jaws together. It worked, and my burning eyes remained dry, but my mind was in turmoil. The man with the cinnamon-brown skin and the trim, white beard had used and manipulated me and everyone else he knew as if we were his chained slaves. Yet there was such love in his golden eyes that it was, for me, the full measure of something I'd always craved from the innermost coils of my heart. The love in his softly smiling, deeply worried eyes was a father's love: the only father-love I'd ever known.

But that will wait until we return from our task. Tomorrow we travel to Quetta. We must remain there for some time. When the time is right, we will make the crossing into Afghanistan. And from that day, for as long as you are in Afghanistan, there will be a price on your head. The Russians pay well for the capture of foreigners who help the mujaheddin. And we have few friends here in Pakistan. I think we will have to get some local clothes for you. We will dress you like a young man from my village-a Pashtun, like me. Yes, with a cap to cover your white hair, and a pattu, a shawl, to throw over your broad shoulders and chest. We will pass you off, perhaps, as my blue-eyed son. What do you think?"

What did I think? The Blind Singers cleared their throats noisily, and the assembly of musicians began the introduction to a new song with the plaintive wail of the harmonium and the blood-stirring passion of the tablas. I watched the long, slender fingers of the tabla players clap and caress the trembling skins of the drums, and I felt my thoughts drift away from me in the hypnotic flutter and flow of the music. My own government had put a price on my head, in Australia, as a reward for information leading to my capture. And there, across the world, I was putting another price on my head. Once more, as the wild grief and rapture of the Blind Singers rippled through a listening crowd, once more, as the eyes of that crowd blazed the ecstasy of their devotions, once more I surrendered to the fate-filled moment and felt myself, my whole life, turning with the wheel.

Then I remembered the note in my pocket: the letter from Didier that Khaled had given me in the taxi two hours earlier. Caught up in the superstitious twist of coincidence and history repeating itself, I was suddenly desperate to know what the letter said. I slipped it from my pocket and held it close to my eyes in the yellow-amber light that reached us from lamps high over our heads.

Dear Lin, This is to tell you, mon cher ami, that I have discovered who was it-the woman who betrayed you to the police and had you put inside the prison and beaten so badly. Such a terrible thing! Even now I am still desolated by it! Well then, the woman who did this thing is Madame Zhou, the owner of the Palace. Up to this time, I have not learned the reason for what she did, but even without some understanding of her motive for doing this terrible thing to you, I have only the best sources to assure me that it is true.

I hope that I will hear from you soon.

Your dear friend, Didier.

Madame Zhou. Why? Even as I formed the question in my mind, I knew the answer. I suddenly remembered a face staring at me with inexplicable hatred. It was the face of Rajan, Madame Zhou's eunuch servant. I remembered that I'd seen him watching me, on the day of the flood, when we'd rescued Karla from the Taj Mahal Hotel in Vinod's boat. I remembered the malignant hate that had filled his eyes as he'd watched me with Karla, and watched me drive away in Shantu's taxi. Later that night the police had arrested me, and my prison torture had begun. Madame Zhou had punished me for defying her, for daring to challenge her, for impersonating an American consular officer, for taking Lisa Carter away from her and, yes, perhaps for loving Karla.

I tore the letter into pieces and put the fragments back in my pocket. I was calm. The fear was gone. At the end of that long Karachi day, I knew why I was going to Khader's war, and I knew why I would return. I was going because my heart was hungry for Khaderbhai's love, the father-love that streamed from his eyes and filled the father-shaped hole in my life. When so many other loves were lost-my family, my friends, Prabaker, Abdullah, even Karla-that look of love in Khader's eyes was everything and all the world to me.

It seemed stupid, it was stupid, to go to war for love. He wasn't a saint and he wasn't a hero: I knew that. He wasn't even my father. But for nothing more than those seconds of his loving gaze, I knew that I would follow him into that war, and any other. And it wasn't any more stupid than surviving just for hate, and returning for revenge. For that's what it came down to:

I loved him enough to risk my life, and I hated her enough to survive and to avenge myself. And I would have that revenge, I knew, if I made it through Khader's war: I would find Madame Zhou, and I would kill her.

I closed my mind around that thought as a man might close his hand around the hilt of a knife. The Blind Singers cried the joys and agonies of their love for God. Beside me, surrounding me, hearts soared in response. Khaderbhai turned his head to meet my eyes, and nodded slowly. I smiled into the golden eyes filled with tiny, swaying lamplights, and secrets, and sacred pleasures summoned by the singing. And, God help me, I was content and unafraid and almost happy.

____________________

We spent a month in Quetta-a long month of waiting with the frustration of false starts. The delay was caused by a mujaheddin commander named Asmatullah Achakzai Muslim. He was the leader of the Achakzai people in the region of Kandahar, which was our ultimate destination. The Achakzai were a clan of sheep and goat herders who'd originally been members of the dominant Durrani clan. In 1750, the founder of modern Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Abdali, divided the Achakzai from the Durrani and established them as a clan in their own right. That was in accordance with Afghan tradition, which allowed a sub-clan to be separated from its parent clan when it reached sufficient size or strength. It was also an admission by the wily warrior and nation-builder Ahmed Shah that the Achakzai were a force to be reckoned with and appeased. Through two centuries the Achakzai increased their status and their power. They earned a well-deserved reputation as fierce fighters, and every man in the clan could be counted on to follow his leader without question. During the early years of the war against the Russians, Asmatullah Achakzai Muslim formed his men into a well-armed, highly disciplined militia. In their region they became the spearhead of the independence struggle: the jihad to drive out the Soviet invaders.

Toward the end of 1985, as we prepared ourselves in Quetta for the crossing into Afghanistan, Asmatullah began to vacillate in his commitment to the war. So much depended on his militia that when he pulled his men back from active service, and began secret peace talks with the Russians and their Afghan puppet government in Kabul, the entire war of resistance in the Kandahar region collapsed. Other mujaheddin units not under Asmatullah's control, such as Khader's men in the mountains north of the city, remained in their positions; but they were isolated, and every supply route to them was perilously vulnerable to Russian attack. The uncertainty forced us to wait until Asmatullah decided whether to continue the jihad or switch sides and support the Russians. No-one could predict which way he would jump.

Although we were all restive and agitated with the wait-as the days limped into weeks, it seemed interminable-I used the time well. I practised phrases in Farsi, Urdu, and Pashto, and even picked up a few words in some Tajik and Uzbek dialects. I rode horses every day. While I never managed to eliminate my clownish, arm-and-leg-flapping gestures when I made the animals stop or go or turn in a desired direction, I sometimes did succeed in dismounting them by climbing down rather than being hurled to the ground on my back.

I read books every day from a bizarre, eclectic collection supplied to me by Ayub Khan, a Pakistani, and the one member of our group who'd been born in Quetta. Because it was judged too dangerous for me to leave our safe-house compound at a horse ranch on the outskirts of the city, Ayub brought me books from the central library. The library was stocked with obscure and fascinating English-language books that were an inheritance from the days of the British Raj. The name of the city, Quetta, was derived from the Pashto word kwatta, meaning fort. Its proximity to the Chaman Pass route to Afghanistan, and the Bolan Pass route to India, ensured Quetta's military and economic significance for millennia. The British first occupied the old fort in 1840, but were forced to abandon it after sickness in the troops and ferocious resistance from the Afghans had withered the colonial force. It was reoccupied in 1876, and firmly established as the premier British possession in that region of the North West Frontier of India. The Imperial Staff College for military officers in British India was established there, and a thriving, prosperous market-centre grew up in the spectacular, natural amphitheatre of the surrounding mountains. A cataclysmic earthquake on the last day of May in 1935 destroyed most of the city and killed twenty thousand people, but Quetta was rebuilt, and the clean, wide boulevards and pleasant weather made it one of the most popular holiday resorts in northern Pakistan.

For me, restricted then to the compound, the chief attraction of the city was the random selection of books that Ayub brought to me. Every few days he appeared at my door, grinning hopefully and handing the bundle of books to me as if they were treasures from an archaeological dig.

And so it was that I rode during the day, acclimatising myself to the thinner air above five thousand feet, and at night read the diaries and journals of long-dead explorers, extinct editions of Greek classics, eccentrically annotated volumes of Shakespeare, and a dizzyingly passionate terza rima translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy.

Abdel Khader Khan said to me from the doorway of my room one night, after we'd been a month in Quetta. I closed the book that I was reading and stood to greet him at once. He took my hand and enclosed it within both of his own, muttering a whispered prayer of blessing. When he accepted the chair that I offered him, I sat down on a stool an arm's reach away. He had a parcel wrapped in cream chamois leather under his arm. He placed it on my bed and settled back comfortably.

I took two beedies from a pack, lit them in my hand with the play of a match, and handed one to him.

There is no inherited right to be a leader, and a leader's son who has no wisdom or courage or skill at speaking to the people will be passed over for another man with better skills. My father was very anxious for me to succeed him and to continue his life work, which was to raise his people from ignorance, and to ensure their future well-being. A wandering Sufi mystic, an old saint who visited our area when I was born, had told my father that I would grow up to become a shining star in the history of my people. My father hoped for this with all his heart but, unfortunately, I showed none of a leader's skills, and no interest in attaining them. I was, in short, a bitter disappointment to him. He sent me to my uncle, here in Quetta.

And my uncle, who was a prosperous merchant then, put me in the care of an Englishman, who became my tutor."

Every time that I think of him, I remember the laughter in his eyes. And he loved it in Quetta. He loved the mountains, and the cold air in winter. His thick, strong legs were built for climbing mountain paths, and he roamed these hills every week, often with me alone for company. He was a happy man who knew how to laugh, and he was a great teacher."

He lapsed into silence, and I pondered the weight and measure of that phrase... for the first time...

But it was a very cruel beating, and I could not bear to watch it. Filled with the importance of being the son of a village leader, and being the nephew of one of Quetta's most prosperous merchants, I commanded the man to stop beating the child. He took offence, of course, and there was an argument. The argument became a fight. And then he was dead, stabbed in the chest with his own dagger-the dagger he had tried to use on me."

He was silent again for a while, staring at a point on the floor between our feet. I could hear music, distant and muffled, coming from the other side of the compound. There were many rooms radiating outward from a central courtyard that was larger but less grand than that in Khader's Bombay home. From some of the nearer rooms I could hear the low, water-bubble murmur of conversation and the tapping drum-roll of an occasional laugh.

From the room next door, Khaled Ansari's room, I heard the unmistakable clikka-k'chuck of a Kalashnikov AK-74 assault rifle being cocked and cold-fired after cleaning.

I tried to leave my home, because I was the cause of the feud, but my father refused to let me leave, and I could not oppose him. The feud went on for years, and the killing went on for years. I lost my two brothers, and both of my uncles, my father's brothers. When my own father was badly wounded in an attack, and unable to stop me, I told my family to spread the rumour that I had been killed. I left my family home. The blood feud ended some time after that, and peace was restored between the two families.

But I was dead to my family, because I had sworn an oath to my mother that I would never return."

The breeze through the metal-framed window that had been cool in the earlier evening was suddenly cold. I stood to close the window, and then poured a glass of water from the clay pitcher on my nightstand. Khader accepted the glass, whispered a prayer, and drank the water. He handed me the glass when he was finished. I poured water into the same glass and sat down on the stool to sip at my drink. I said nothing, afraid that, if I asked the wrong question or made the wrong comment, he would stop talking altogether and leave the room. He was calm, and he seemed to be completely relaxed, but the brilliant, laughing gleam was missing from his eyes. It was also disturbingly out of character for him to be so expansive about his own life. He'd talked to me for long hours about the Koran or the life of the Prophet Mohammed or the scientific, rational basis for his moral philosophy, but I'd never known him to tell me or anyone else so much about himself. In the lengthening silence I looked at the lean, sinewed face and I controlled even the sound of my breathing, lest it disturb him.

We were both dressed in the standard Afghan costume of a long, loose shirt and wide-waisted pants. His clothes were a light, faded green and mine were pale blue-white. We both wore leather sandals as house slippers. Although I was heavier and deeper in the chest than Khaderbhai, we were roughly the same height and build across the shoulders. His short hair and beard were white silver, and my short hair was white-blonde. My skin was tanned to a shade resembling his natural, almond-shell brown. If it wasn't for the sky in my blue-grey eyes and the alluvial gold in his, we might've been taken for father and son.

He turned to face me. His smile was radiant: a new, gentle, artless smile that had never moved his face before in any conversation with me.

He fell silent, staring ahead at the floor where it met the mud brick wall. After a time, he spoke.

He repeated the phrase into a silence that was thickening around us and seeming to press in upon my burning eyes.

I watched him wade through the past, his eyes blazing recollections, and then he shook himself back into the moment.

He opened the chamois-leather parcel to reveal a pistol in a side holster, several magazines, a box of ammunition, and a metal box.

Lifting back the lid of the metal box, he displayed a cleaning kit of oil, graphite powder, tiny files, brushes, and a new, short pull-through cord.

Khaderbhai showed me how to clean the Stechkin. It was more complicated than I'd imagined, and it took the best part of an hour for him to walk me through the instructions for its complete service, repair, and handling protocols. It was a thrilling hour, and men and women of violence will know what I mean when I say that I was drunk with the pleasure of it. I confess with no little shame that I enjoyed that hour with Khader, learning how to use and clean the Stechkin automatic pistol, more than the hundreds of hours that I'd spent with him while learning his philosophy. And I never felt closer to him than I did that night as we hunched over my blanket, stripping and reassembling the killing weapon.

When he left me, I turned out the light and lay back on my cot, but I couldn't sleep. My mind was caffeine-alert in the darkness.

At first I thought about the stories Khader had told me. I moved through that different time in the city I'd come to know so well.

I imagined the Khan as a young man, fit and dangerous and fighting for Chota Gulab, the gangster boss with a little rose scar on his cheek. I knew other parts of Khader's story-I'd heard them from some of the goondas who worked for him in Bombay.

They'd told me how Khaderbhai had seized control of Gulab's little empire when the scarred one was assassinated outside one of his cinemas. They'd described the gang wars that had erupted across the city, and they'd talked of Khader's courage, and his ruthlessness in crushing his enemies. I knew, as well, that Khaderbhai was one of the founders of the council system, which had brought peace to the city by dividing territories and spoils between the surviving gangs.

I wondered, as I lay in a darkness scented with the polished floor-and-raw-linen odours of the gun and the cleaning oil, why Khaderbhai was going to war. He didn't have to go-there were a hundred more like me, prepared to die for him in his place. I remembered his strangely radiant smile when he'd told me about his first meeting with Chota Gulab.

I recalled how quick and youthful his hands had been when he'd shown me how to clean and use the gun. And it occurred to me that he might've been with us, risking his life, simply because he was hungry for the wilder days of his youth. The thought worried me because I was sure that at least some small part of it was true.

But that other motive-that he'd judged the time right to end his exile, and to visit his home and family-worried me more. I couldn't forget what he'd told me. The blood feud that had killed so many and driven him from his home had only ended with his promise, to his mother, never to return.

After a while my thoughts drifted, and I found myself reliving, moment for moment, the long night before my escape from prison.

That, too, was a night without sleep. That, too, was a night of wheeling fears and exhilaration and dread. And just as I had on that night years before, I rose from bed before the first stir and shuffle of the morning, and prepared myself in the dark.

Soon after dawn, we took the train to Chaman Pass. There were twelve from our group on the train, but none of us spoke through the several hours of the journey. Nazeer sat with me, and we were alone for much of the trip, but still he held his stony silence.

With my pale eyes concealed behind dark sunglasses, I stared through the window and tried to lose myself in the spectacular view.

The train ride from Quetta to Chaman was one of the glories of the illustrious sub-continental railway system. The tracks wound through deep gorges and crossed riverscapes of astounding beauty.

I found myself repeating, as if they were lines of poetry, the very names of the towns through which it passed. From Kuchlaagh to Bostaan, and the small river crossing at yaaru Kaarez, the train climbed to Shaadizai. At Gulistan there was another climb, with a sweeping curve that followed the ancient dry lake at Qila Abdullah. And the jewel in the twin steel-bands of that crown, of course, was the Khojak Tunnel. Built by the British over several years at the end of the nineteenth century, it smashed its way through four kilometres of solid rock, and was the longest in the sub-continent.

At Khaan Kili the train negotiated a series of sharp curves, and at the last remote regional stop before Chaman we climbed down with a few dusty locals and were met by a covered truck. When the area was deserted we climbed onto the extravagantly decorated truck, and followed the main road toward Chaman. Before we reached the town, however, we took a side road that seemed to end in a deserted track, with a stand of trees and several scrubby pastures, about thirty kilometres north of the main highway and the Chaman Pass.

We climbed down from the truck, and as it drove away we mustered in the shade of the trees with the main group of men, who'd been waiting there for us. It was the first time that we'd assembled in our full number. There were thirty of us, all men, and for a moment I was reminded of the men who gathered in similar groups in prison yards. The fighters seemed tough and determined and, although many of them were lean to the point of being thin, they looked healthy and fit.

I removed my sunglasses. As I scanned the faces, my eyes met those of a man who stared back at me from the heart of darkness.

He was in his late forties or early fifties, and perhaps the oldest man in the group after Khaderbhai. His short hair was grey beneath a brown, round-edged Afghan cap, identical to the one I wore myself. His short, straight nose divided a long, pointed face that was so deeply lined beneath the sunken cheeks that it appeared to have been slashed with a machete. Heavy bags hung below his eyes. Theatrically peaked eyebrows like the wings of a black bat spiked above his eyes, but it was the eyes themselves that caught and held me.

As I locked eyes with him, returning his psychotic stare, the man began to stumble toward me. After the first few shambling steps, his body twitched into a more efficient mode, and he began to lope, covering the thirty metres that separated us in long, crouching, feline strides. Forgetting that the gun was strapped to my side, my hand instinctively moved to the hilt of my knife and I took half a pace backward with my right foot. I knew the eyes. I knew the look. The man wanted to fight me, perhaps even to kill me.

Just as he reached me, shouting something in a dialect that I couldn't recognise, Nazeer stepped from nowhere to stand in front of me and bar his way. He shouted something back at the man, but the other ignored him, staring past his head at me and shouting his question, again and again. Nazeer repeated his reply, shouting to match the other. The crazed fighter tried to shove Nazeer out of the way with both hands, but he might as well have tried to push aside a tree. The burly Afghan stood his ground, forcing the madman to shift his gaze from me for the first time.

A crowd had formed around us. Nazeer held the man's lunatic stare, and spoke in softer, pleading tones. I waited, tensed and ready to fight. We haven't even crossed the border yet, I thought, and I'm going to have to stab one of our own men...

Khaderbhai walked between the men, and put his hand on the madman's shoulder. The man turned immediately, and with eyes that seemed ready to weep, searched Khader's face. Khader repeated what Nazeer had been murmuring, in a similarly soothing tone. I couldn't understand all of it, but the sense was clear. No. He is American. The Americans are here to help us. He is here with us to fight the Russians. He will help us to kill the Russians. He will help us. We will kill many Russians together.

When the man turned to face me once more, his expression had changed so dramatically that I was moved to pity him, when a moment before I was ready to run my knife into his chest. His eyes were still deranged, hanging unnaturally wide and white beneath the brown irises, but his frenzied expression had collapsed into such wretched, pitiable misery that his face reminded me of the many ruined stone cottages we'd seen beside the roads. He looked once more into Khader's face, and the stutter of a smile flickered across his features as if animated by an electric pulse. He turned and walked away through the crowd. The tough men parted for him warily, compassion vying with fear in their eyes as they watched him pass.

Habib Abdur Rahman. He is a schoolteacher-well, he once was a schoolteacher, in a village on the other side of these mountains.

He taught the little ones, the youngest children. When the Russians invaded, seven years ago, he was a happy man, with a young wife and two strong sons. He joined the resistance, like every other young man in the region. Two years ago he returned from a mission to find that the Russians had attacked his village. They had used gas, some kind of nerve gas."

All the generations of his family-his grandparents, from both sides, his parents, his wife's parents, his uncles and aunties, his brothers and sisters, his wife, and his children. All gone, in just one hour of one day. Even the animals, the goats and the sheep and the chickens, were all dead. Even the insects and the birds were dead. Nothing moved. Nothing lived and nothing survived."

This time he was like a different man. This time he did everything in his power to capture a Russian, or an Afghan soldier fighting for the Russians. And when he captured one-and he did capture them, many of them, because he was very good at it after that-when he did capture them, he tortured them to death by impaling them on a sharpened steel spike, made from the wooden handle and the blade of the shovel he had used to bury his family. He has it now. You can see it strapped to the top of his pack. He ties the prisoners to the spike by their hands, behind their backs, with the spike touching their backs. At the moment that their strength fails them, and the metal spike begins to tear its way through their bodies, forcing its way out through their stomachs, Habib leans over them, staring into their eyes, and spits into their screaming mouths."

Khaled Ansari, Nazeer, Ahmed Zadeh, and I stood in a deeply breathing silence, waiting for Khader to speak again.

And he prefers to kill them slowly. There is such a cruel violence in him that it frightens his friends no less than his enemies. So he must be watched, while he is with us."

Watching him leave, I was struck with a sudden, clutching instinct to cry out and stop him. It was a foolish thing-an irrational stabbing dread that I was losing him, losing another friend. And it was so ridiculous, so petty in its jealousy, that I bit down on it and said nothing. Then I watched him sit down opposite Habib. I watched him reach out to lift the gaping, murderous face of the madman until their eyes met and held, and I knew, without understanding it, that Khaled was lost to us.

I dragged my eyes from the sight of them, as boatmen drag a lake with starry hooks. My mouth was dry. My heart was a prisoner pounding on the walls inside my head. My legs felt leaden, fixed to the earth with roots of shame and dread. And as I looked up at the sheer, impassable mountains, I felt the future shudder through me like thunder trembling through the limbs and wearied vines of a storming willow.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The main road from Chaman, in those years, crossed a tributary of the Dhari River on the way to Spin Baldak, Dabrai, and Melkaarez on the highway route to Kandahar. The whole journey was less than two hundred kilometres. By car, it took a few hours. We didn't take the highway route, of course, and we didn't have cars. We rode on horseback over a hundred mountain passes, and the same journey took us more than a month.

We spent that first day camped beneath the trees. The baggage- the goods we were smuggling into Afghanistan, and our personal supplies-was scattered in a nearby pasture, covered by sheepskins and goatskins to give the appearance, if seen from the air, of a herd of livestock. There were even a few real goats tethered among the woolly bundles. When dusk finally smothered the sunset, a whisper of excitement went through the camp. We soon heard the muffled tread of hooves as our horses approached.

There were twenty riding horses and fifteen pack animals. The horses were a little smaller than those I'd learned to ride on, and my heart lifted with hope that I might find them easier to control. Most of the men moved off at once to hoist and secure the baggage onto the pack animals. I started off to join them, but Nazeer and Ahmed Zadeh intercepted me, leading two horses.

Nazeer handed the reins to me, and checked the straps on the short, thin Afghan saddle. Satisfying himself that all was as it should be, he nodded his approval.

The horses are really a gift for Khader's people near Kandahar.

We would be better on this trip with camels. Donkeys would be the best, in my opinion, in the narrow passes. But the horses are animals of great status. I think Khader insisted on using horses because it is important how we look when we make contact with the wild clans-the men who will want to kill us, and take our guns and our medicines. The horses will make us important in their eyes. And they will be a gift of much prestige for Khader Khan's people. He plans to give them away on the way back from Kandahar.

We will ride some of the way to Kandahar, but we will walk all the way home!"

He wheeled the horse expertly and cantered over to a mounted group who'd assembled around Khaderbhai some fifty metres away. I glanced at Nazeer. He nodded for me to mount the horse, offering me an encouraging little grimace and a muttered prayer. We both fully expected that I would be thrown, and his eyes began to close in cringing anticipation. I put my foot in the stirrup and sprang off with my right foot. I hit the saddle with a harder jolt than I'd planned, but the horse responded well to the mount and dipped her head twice, anxious to move off. Nazeer opened one eye to see me sitting comfortably on the new horse. Delighted and flushed with unselfconscious pride, he beamed one of his rare smiles at me. I tugged at the reins to turn the horse's head, and kicked backward. The horse responded calmly, but with a smart, stylish, almost prancing elegance in its movement. Snapping at once into a graceful canter, she took me toward Khaderbhai's group with no further prompting.

Nazeer ran along with us, a little behind and to the left of my horse. I glanced over my shoulder and exchanged equally wide eyed, bewildered looks with him. The horse was making me look good. It's gonna be okay, I whispered to myself, knowing, as the words trotted through the thick fog of vain hope in my mind, that I'd uttered the certain jinx formula. The saying, pride goeth... before a fall... is condensed from the second collection of the Book of Proverbs, 16:18-Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. It's attributed to Solomon. If he did say it, Solomon was a man who knew horses intimately well; much better than I did as I clicked up to Khader's group and reined the horse in as though I knew-as though I would ever know - what I was doing in a saddle.

Khader was speaking in Pashto and Urdu and Farsi, giving the men last-minute instructions. I leaned across to whisper to Ahmed Zadeh.

You don't ride a horse over a mountain, of course. You push and drag and sometimes help to _carry a horse over a mountain. As we neared the base of the sheer cliffs that form the Chaman range, dividing the southwestern part of Afghanistan from Pakistan, it became clear that there were in fact gaps and pathways and trails leading into and over them. What had seemed to be smooth walls of bare, mountainous rock proved on closer inspection to be formed in undulating waves of ravines and tiered crevices. Ledges of stone and lime-encrusted barren earth wound through those rocky slopes. In places the ledges were so wide and well flattened as to seem like a man-made road. In places they were so jagged and narrow that every footstep of horse or man was brooded over with careful, trembling consideration before it was made. And the whole of it, the whole stumbling, slipping, dragging, shoving breach of the mountain barrier, was done in the dark.

Ours was a small caravan when compared to the once mighty tribal processions that had plied the silk route between Turkey and China and India, but in that time of war our numbers were remarkable. The fear of being seen from the air was a constant worry. Khaderbhai imposed a strict blackout: no cigarettes, torches, or lamps on the march. There was a quarter moon that first night, but occasionally the slippery paths led us through narrow defiles where smooth rock rose up sharply, drowning us in shadows. In those black-walled corridors it was impossible to see my own hand held in front of my face. The whole column inched its way along the blind clefts in the rock wall, men and horses and goats pressed hard against the stone, and shuffling into one another.

In the centre of just such a black ravine, I heard a low whining sound that rose quickly in pitch. I was walking, or sliding my feet, between two horses. I had the reins of my horse in my right hand, and the tail of the horse in front wrapped around my left hand. My face was sliding against the granite wall, and the path beneath my feet was no wider than the length of my arm. As the sound rose in its pitch and intensity, the two horses reared in the same instinct, and stamped their hooves in staccato fear.

Then the whining sound suddenly erupted in a roar that rattled the whole mountain, and ripped into an explosive, shrieking scream of satanic noise directly over our heads.

The horse to my left bucked and reared in front of me, pulling its tail from my hand. Trying to retrieve it, I lost my footing in the dark and slid to my knees, my face scraping against the rock wall. My own horse was terrified, as frightened as I was myself, and it struggled forward on the narrow path, following an impulse to run. I still held the reins, and I used them to pull myself to my feet, but the horse rammed into me again with its head, and I felt myself slide backward from the path. Fear stabbed into my chest and crushed my heart as I stumbled, slid, and fell off the path into the lightless void. I fell the full length of my body, and stopped with a wrenching snap as the reins in my hand held fast.

I was dangling in free space over a black abyss. Millimetre by millimetre I felt the downward creep, the easing, slipping creak of leather as I slid further from the edge of the narrow ledge. I could hear the shouts of men, all along the ledge above me. They were trying to calm the animals, and they were calling out names to account for their friends. I could hear the horses screaming their fear and snorting in protest. The air in the ravine was thick with the smells of piss and horseshit and frightened man sweat. And I could hear the scrabbling, scraping clatter of hooves as my own horse struggled to maintain its footing. I suddenly realised that as strong as the horse undoubtedly was, its foothold on the crumbling, jagged path was so precarious that my weight mightVe been enough to drag it over the ledge with me.

Flailing with my left hand in the impenetrable dark, I grasped the reins and began to drag myself back up to the ledge. I put one set of fingertips on the edge of the stony path and then choked a scream as I slipped backwards into the dark crevasse.

The reins held again, and I dangled over the gap, but my situation was desperate. The horse, fearing that it would be dragged over the edge, was shaking and dipping its head violently. An intelligent animal, she was trying to rid herself of the bridle, bit, and harness. At any moment, I knew, she would succeed. I gave a snarl of rage through clenched teeth and dragged myself to the ledge once more.

Scrambling up to my knees, I gasped in sweating exhaustion and then, working to an intuition that starts in fear and spikes on a jet of adrenaline, I jumped up and to my right as my neighbour's horse kicked out in the black, blind night. If I hadn't moved, it would've struck me on the side of the head, and my war would've ended there and then. Instead, the life-saving reflex to jump meant that the blow struck my hip and thigh, driving me into the wall and against my own horse's head. I threw my arms around the animal's neck, as much to comfort myself with its touch as to support my numb leg and aching hip. I was still cradling her head in my arms when I heard shuffling steps and felt someone's hands slide from the wall onto my back.

But the Paks like to remind them they're here, just the same. Are you sure you're all right?"

And for a few moments, when I reached that pale oasis of moonlight, I felt safe and sure of myself. Then we pushed on, hugging the cold, grey stone of the canyon-silo, and in minutes we were in blackness again, with nothing but faith and fear and the will to survive.

We travelled so often at night that we sometimes seemed to be feeling our way to Kandahar like blind men, with our fingertips.

And, like blind men, we trusted Habib, without question, as our guide. None of the Afghans in our group lived in the border region, and they were as dependent on his knowledge of those secret passes and fortuitous ledge-pathways as I was.

When he wasn't leading the column, however, Habib inspired far less confidence. I came upon him once as I scrambled over some rocks to find a place to take a piss during a rest stop. He was kneeling in front of a roughly square slab of stone, and beating his forehead against it. I leapt down to stop him, and discovered that he was weeping, sobbing. The blood from his torn forehead ran down his face to mix with the tears in his beard. I poured a little water from my canteen onto a corner of my scarf, and wiped the blood from his head to examine the wounds. They were rough and jagged, but largely superficial. He allowed me to lead him, unprotesting, back to the camp. Khaled rushed up at once and helped me to apply ointment and a clean bandage to his forehead.

But as the weeks of the journey passed, we all watched Habib more closely, more fearfully, and little by little we all realised why so many other mujaheddin units had cast him out.

With our senses alert for menace from without and within, we travelled by night, and sometimes by day, north along the mountainous border towards Pathaan Khel. Near the khel, or village, we swung north-north-west into deserted mountainous terrain that was veined with cold, fresh, sweet-water streams.

Habib laid out a route that was roughly equidistant between towns and larger villages, always avoiding the main arteries that local people used. We trudged between Pathaan Khel and Khairo Thaana; between Humai Khaarez and Haji Aagha Muhammad. We forded rivers between Loe Kaarez and yaaru. We zigzagged between Mullah Mustafa and the little village of Abdul Hamid.

Local pirates, demanding tribute, stopped us three times on the way. Each time, they revealed themselves at first in high vantage points, with guns trained on us, before their ground forces swept from hiding to lock the way forward and cut off our retreat. Each time, Khader raised his green-and-white mujaheddin flag emblazoned with the Koranic phrase:

Inalillahey wa ina illai hi rajiaon We come from God, and unto God do we return Although the local clans didn't recognise Khader's standard, they respected its language and intent. Their fierce, belligerent postures remained, however, until Khader, Nazeer, and our Afghan fighters explained to them that the group was travelling with, and under the protection of, an American. When the local pirates had examined my passport and stared hard into my blue-grey eyes, they welcomed us as comrades-in-arms, and invited us to drink tea and feast with them. The invitation was a euphemism for the honour of paying them a tribute. Although none of the pirates we encountered wanted to upset the critically important American aid that helped to sustain them in the long years of the war by attacking an American-sponsored caravan, it was unthinkable that we might pass through their territory without providing some plunder. Khader had brought a supply of baksheesh goods for that very purpose. There were silks in peacock blue and green, with rich inter-weavings of gold thread. There were hatchets and thick-bladed knives and sewing kits. There were Zeiss binoculars - Khader had given me a pair, and I used them every day-and magnifying spectacles for reading the Koran, and solid, Indian made automatic watches. And for the clan leaders there was a small hoard of gold tablets, each weighing one tola, or about ten grams, and embossed with the Afghan laurel.

Khader hadn't merely anticipated those pirate attacks; he'd counted on them. Once the formal courtesies and tribute negotiations were concluded, Khader arranged with each local clan leader to re-supply our caravan. The re-supply provided us with rations while we were on the move, and also guaranteed us food and animal feed at fraternal villages that were under the control or protection of the clan leader.

The re-supply was essential. The munitions, machine parts, and medicines that we carried were priorities, and left us little room for surplus cargo. Thus we carried a little food for the horses-two days' ration at most-but we carried no food at all for ourselves. Each man had a canteen of water, but it was understood that it was an emergency ration, to be used sparingly for ourselves and the horses. Many were the days we passed with no more than one glass of water to drink, and one small piece of naan bread to eat. I was a vegetarian, without being a fanatic about it, when I started on that journey. For years I'd usually preferred to eat my fruit and vegetable diet when it was available. Three weeks into the trek, after dragging horses across mountains and freezing rivers, and trembling from hunger, I fell on the lamb and goat meat that the pirates offered us, and ripped the flesh half-cooked from the bones with my teeth.

The steep mountain slopes of the country were barren, burned of life by biting wintry winds, but every flat plain, no matter how small, was a vivid, living green. There were wild flowers with red, starry faces, and others with sky-blue pom-pom heads. There were short, scrubby bushes with tiny yellow leaves that the goats enjoyed, and many varieties of wild grasses topped with feathery bowers of dried seed for the horses. There were lime-green mosses on many of the rocks, and paler lichens on others. The impact of those tender, viridescent carpets between the endlessly undulating crocodile's back of naked stone mountains was far greater than it mightVe been in a more fertile and equable landscape. We responded to each new sight of a softly carpeted incline or tufted, leafy moor with similar pleasure-a deep, subliminal response to the vitality in the colour green. More than a few of the tough, hardened fighters, trudging between the walking horses, stooped to gather a little clutch of flowers so that they might simply feel the beauty of them in their dry and calloused hands.

My status as Khader's American helped us to negotiate the badlands of the local pirates, but it also cost us a week when we were stopped for the third and last time. In an effort to avoid the little village of Abdul Hamid, our guide Habib led us into a small canyon that was just wide enough for three or four horses to ride side-by-side. Steep rock walls rose up on either side of the canyon trail for almost a kilometre before the funnel opened out into a much longer, wider valley. It was the perfect place for an ambush and, in anticipation, Khader rode at the head of our column with his green-and-white banner unfurled.

The challenge came before we were a hundred metres into the gorge. There was a chilling ululation from high above-men's voices raised in an imitation of the high-pitched, warbling wail of tribal women-and a sudden tumble of small boulders as a little avalanche spilled into the canyon before us. Like others, I turned in my saddle to see that a platoon of local tribesmen had taken up positions behind us with a variety of weapons trained on our backs. We halted immediately, at the first sound.

Khader slowly rode on alone for some two hundred metres. He stopped there, with his back straight in the saddle, and his standard fluttering in the strong, chill breeze.

The seconds of a long minute ticked away with the guns behind us, and the rocks poised above. Then a lone figure appeared, riding toward Khader on a tall camel. Although the two-humped Bactrian camel is native to Afghanistan, the rider's was a single-humped Arabian camel; the type bred by long distance cameleers of the northern Tajik region for use in extremes of cold. It had a mop of hair on its head, thick and shaggy neck-fur, and long, powerful legs. The man riding that impressive beast was tall and lean, and appeared to be at least ten years older than Khader's fit sixty-plus. He wore a long, white shirt over white Afghan pants, and a knee-length, sleeveless, black serge vest. A snowy white turban of sumptuous length was piled majestically on his head. His grey-white beard was trimmed away from the upper lip and the mouth, descending from his chin to nudge his thin chest.

Some of my friends in Bombay had called that kind of beard a Wahabi, after the sternly orthodox Saudi Arabian Muslims who trimmed their beards in that way to imitate the style preferred by the Prophet. It was a sign to us, in the canyon, that the stranger possessed at least as much moral authority as temporal power. The latter was emphasised with spectacular effect by the antique, long-barrelled jezail that he held upright, balanced on his hip. The muzzle-loaded rifle was decorated along all of its wooden surfaces with gleaming discs, scrolls, and diamond shapes fashioned from brass and silver coins and polished to a dazzling brilliance.

The man drew up beside Khaderbhai, facing us and within a hand's reach of our Khan. His bearing was commanding, and it was clear that he was accustomed to a comprehensive respect. He was, in fact, one of the very few men I ever came to know who equalled Abdel Khader Khan in the esteem-perhaps even the veneration- that he commanded from others with nothing more, or less, than his bearing and the sheer force of his fully realised life.

After a lengthy discussion, Khaderbhai wheeled his horse gently to face us.

I kicked backward, uttering what I hoped was an encouraging sound. All eyes on the ground and above us were on me, I knew, and in the swollen, silent seconds I had a vision of the horse throwing me to the ground at Khader's feet. But the mare responded with a smart, prancing canter, and found her own way through the column to stop at Khader's side. "This is Hajji Mohammed," Khader announced. He swept around us with a broad movement of his open palm. "He is the Khan, the leader of all the people, in all the clans, and all the families here."

Believing me to be an infidel, the leader didn't respond to my greeting. The Prophet Mohammed adjured his followers to return the peaceful greeting of a believer with an even more polite greeting. Thus the greeting Asalaam aleikum, Peace be with you, should've been answered, at the very least, with Wa aleikum salaam wa rahmatullah, And with you be peace and the compassion of Allah. Instead, the old man stared down from his perch on the camel and greeted me with a hard question.

It was the same question every Afghan had asked me, the American, since we'd entered the country. And although Khaderbhai translated it for me again, I understood the words and I'd rehearsed the answer.

It was a good answer and Hajji Mohammed was pleased with it, but it was a much better question, and it deserved a better response than my hopeful lie. The Afghans, from Mazar-i-Sharif to Kandahar, knew that if the Americans had given them Stinger missiles at the outbreak of the war, the mujaheddin would've beaten the invaders back within months. Stingers meant that the hated and mortally effective Russian helicopters could be smashed from the skies. Even the formidable MiG fighters were vulnerable to a hand-launched Stinger missile. Without the insuperable advantage of the air, the Russians and their Afghan army proxies would be forced to fight a ground war against the mujaheddin resistance-a ground war they could never win.

Cynics among the Afghans believed that the Americans refused to supply Stingers, for the first seven years of the conflict, because they wanted Russia to win just enough of the Afghan War to over-reach and over-commit themselves. If and when the Stingers finally arrived, the Russians would suffer a defeat that cost them so much in men and resources that their entire Soviet Empire would collapse.

And whether the cynics were right or wrong, the deadly game did play itself out in exactly that way. The Stinger missiles did turn the tide of the conflict, when they were finally introduced, a few months after Khader led us into Afghanistan. The Russians were so weakened by the war of resistance fought by those very Afghan villagers, and millions like them, that their monstrous, Caligulan empire crumbled around them. It worked, it played out that way, and what it cost was a million Afghan lives. What it cost was one-third of the population forced from their homeland. What it cost was one of the largest forced migrations in human history-three-and-a half million refugees moving through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, and a million more exiled in Iran, India, and the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. What it cost was fifty thousand men, women, and children with one or more limbs amputated through land-mine explosions. What it cost was the Afghan heart and soul.

And I, a wanted criminal, working for a mafia crime lord, impersonated an American and looked those people in the eye, and lied to them about the weapons I couldn't give them.

Hajji Mohammed liked my answer so much that he invited our group to attend the wedding celebrations of his youngest son. Concerned that a refusal might offend the elderly leader, and genuinely touched by the generous invitation, Khader accepted. When all the tributes were exacted-Hajji Mohammed drove a hard bargain, demanding and receiving Khader's own horse as an additional, personal gift-Khaderbhai, Nazeer, and I agreed to accompany the leader to his khel.

The rest of our column made camp in a pastured valley with plentiful fresh water. The break in our forced march allowed the men to groom and rest the horses. The pack animals were in constant need of attention and, with the cargo concealed in a protected cave, the unburdened beasts were free to gambol and roam. Our men prepared to feast on four roasting sheep, aromatic Indian rice, and fresh green-leaf tea provided by Hajji's village as their contribution to our part in the jihad. With the practical business of tributes negotiated and received, the senior men of Hajji Mohammed's village-like all the Afghan clan leaders we'd encountered on the journey-acknowledged us as fighters in the same cause, and offered every help they could provide. As Khader, Nazeer, and I rode away from the temporary camp toward the khel, the sounds of singing and laughter followed us, echo chasing playful echo. It was the first time we'd heard that lightness of heart from our men in the twenty-three days of the journey. Hajji Mohammed's village was in celebration when we arrived. His profitable, bloodless encounter with our column of armed men had added to the gathering thrill of anticipation for the wedding.

Khader explained how the elaborate rituals of Afghan matrimony had been unfolding for months before we'd arrived. There'd been ceremonial visits between the family of the groom, and the family of the bride. In every case, small gifts such as handkerchiefs or scented sweets had been exchanged, and precise courtesies were observed. The bride's dowry of extravagantly embroidered cloths, imported silks, perfumes, and jewellery had been publicly displayed for all to admire, and was then held in trust for her by the groom's family. The groom had even visited his bride-to-be in secret, and he'd presented her with personal gifts as he spoke to her. According to custom, it was strictly forbidden for him to be seen by the men in her family during that secret visit, but custom also required him to be helped by the girl's mother. The dutiful mother, Khader assured me, had remained with the couple while they spoke to one another for the first time, and had acted as their chaperone. With all that achieved, the couple was ready for the culmination of the marriage ceremony itself, to be held in three days' time.

Khader took me through the finest details of the rituals, and it seemed to me that there was a kind of urgency in his normally gentle, teacher's manner. At first I guessed-rightly, I think- that he was reacquainting himself with the customs of his people, after his five long decades in exile. He was reliving the scenes and celebrations of his youth, and he was proving to himself that he was still Afghan, in all that his heart knew and felt. But as the lessons continued through the following days, and the intensity of his attention to them never failed, I finally realised that the long explanations and histories were for my benefit more than his. He was giving me a crash course in the culture of the nation where I might be killed and where my body might be laid to rest. He was making sense of it-my life with him, and my possible death-in the only way that he knew. And understanding that, without ever speaking of it to him, I listened dutifully and learned everything I could.

Kinsmen, friends, and other invitees streamed into Hajji's village during those days. The four main houses of Hajji Mohammed's fortress-like men's kal'a, or compound, were tall, square, mud-brick buildings. High walls surrounded the kal'a, and one large dwelling stood in each of the four corners. The women's kal'a was a separate set of buildings behind even higher walls. In the men's compound we slept on the floor and cooked all our own meals. It was already crowded in the house that Khader, Nazeer, and I joined but, as new men arrived from distant villages, we all simply squashed in further.

Sleeping in our clothes, we top-and-tailed across the whole floor, each man sleeping with his head beside the feet of the next. There's a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defence reflex-a warning sound that frightened potential predators away from the mouth of the cave when our lower-Palaeolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep. That group of Afghan nomads, cameleers, sheep and goat herders, farmers, and guerrilla fighters lent credibility to the idea, for they snored so thunderously and with such persistent ferocity through the long, cold night that they would've frightened a pride of ravenous lions into scattering like startled mice.

During the day, the same men prepared complex food dishes for the Friday wedding. Those dishes included flavoured yoghurts, piquant goat's or sheep's milk cheeses, oven-baked cakes made with corn flour, dates, nuts, and wild honey, biscuits baked with richly churned goat's milk butter and, of course, a variety of halal meats and vegetable pulao. While the foods were being prepared, I watched as men dragged a foot-operated grinding wheel into an open space, and the groom devoted a tense hour to putting a razor's edge to a large, ornate dagger. The bride's father watched that effort with a critical eye. After satisfying himself that the weapon was suitably lethal, he gravely accepted it as a gift from the younger man.

Each day the men also rehearsed ritual group-dances with the musicians and singers who'd been hired to complement the formal, public celebration. The dancing gave me the chance to see a new and completely unexpected side of Nazeer. He hurled himself into the whirling chorus line of men with grace and passion. Moreover, my short, bow-legged friend, whose bulky arms seemed to jut outward from the tree trunk of his thick neck and chest, was by far the best dancer in the entire assembly, and quickly earned their admiration. The whole secret and invisible inner life of the man, his full creative and spiritual endowment, was expressed in the dance. And that face-I'd said, once, that I'd never seen another human face in which the smile was so utterly defeated-that scowl-creased face was transfigured in the dance until his honest, selfless beauty was so radiant that it filled my eyes with tears.

I laughed. When I turned to look at him, he laughed as well.

And this is likely to be going on all over the universe. How am I doing so far?"

I waited, but he didn't reply, so I continued with my summary.

If rocks are made out of the same stuff that people are made out of, how come rocks aren't alive, but people are? I mean, where does life come from?"

He raised an eyebrow at the foolishness of my flippant response and then shook his head slowly.

The point is a boiling cauldron of light energy. Something caused it to expand-we don't know yet what caused it-and from light, all the particles and all the atoms came to exist, along with space and time and all the forces that we know. So, light gave every little particle at the beginning of the universe a set of characteristics, and as those particles combine in more complex ways, the characteristics show themselves in more and more complex ways."

He paused, watching my face as I struggled with the concepts and questions and emotions that looped in my mind. He got away from me again, I thought, suddenly furious with him for having an answer to my question, and yet struck with admiring respect for the same reason. There was always something eerily incongruous in the wise lectures-sometimes they were like sermons-of the mafia don Abdel Khader Khan. Sitting there against a stone wall in an all-but-Stone Age village in Afghanistan, with a cargo of smuggled guns and antibiotics nearby, the dissonance created by his calm, profound discourse about good and evil, and light and life and consciousness, was enough to fill me with exasperated irritation. "What I have just told you is the relationship between consciousness and matter," Khader proclaimed, pausing again until he had my eye. "This is a kind of test, and now you know it. This is a test that you should apply to every man who tells you that he knows the meaning of life. Every guru you meet and every teacher, every prophet and every philosopher, should answer these two questions for you: What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil? And, What is the relationship between consciousness and matter? If he cannot answer these two questions, as I have done, you know that he has not passed the test."

He stared at me, reading the full measure of the unconscious insult: How is it that an Afghan gangster like you knows so much about science and higher knowledge? I looked back at him, remembering a day at the slum with Johnny Cigar when I'd made the cruel mistake of assuming him to be ignorant simply because he was poor.

And later, as the wedding whirled and clamoured to the last wail of its rejoicing, and as we rejoined our men and scrambled, clattered, and strained our way across new mountains, I tried to unwind the wreath of thorns that Khader had coiled around my heart with his words. The wrong thing for the right reasons...

Once before he'd tormented me with that phrase. I chewed at it, in my mind, as a bear will chew at a leather strap that binds it by the leg. In my life, the wrong things were almost always done for the wrong reasons. Even the right things that I did were too often goaded by the wrong reasons.

A gloomy mood enwrapped me. It was a sullen, doubting temper that I couldn't shake off, and as we rode into the winter I thought often of Anand Rao, my neighbour from the slum. I remembered Anand's face smiling at me through the metal grille of the visitor's room at Arthur Road Prison: that gentle, handsome face, so serene, and softened with the peace that had suffused his heart. He'd done the wrong thing for the right reasons, as he saw it. He'd calmly accepted the punishment that he'd earned, as he said to me, as if it was a privilege or a right. And at last, after too many thinking days and nights, I cursed Anand. I cursed him to drive him from my mind because a voice kept telling me-my own voice, or maybe it was my father's-that I would never know that peace.

I would never come to that Eden in the soul, where acceptance of punishment and acknowledgement of wrong and right roll away the troubles that lodge like stones in the barren field of an exiled heart.

Moving north again at night, we climbed and crossed the narrow Kussa Pass in the Hada Mountains. The journey of thirty crow kilometres was closer to one hundred and fifty climbing-and descending-kilometres for us. Then, exposed to the wide sky, we travelled over flatter land for almost fifty kilometres to cross the Arghastan River and its tributaries three times before we reached the foothills of the Shahbad Pass. And there, with my mind still choked on its rights and wrongs, we were fired on for the first time.

Khader's command that we commence the climb of the Shahbad Pass without a rest saved many lives, including my own, that cold evening. We were exhausted after the headlong, trotting march across the open plain. Every man among us hoped for rest at the foothills of the pass, but Khader urged us on, riding the length of the column and shouting for us to keep on, keep on, and keep up the pace. Thus we were moving fast when the first shots were fired. I heard the sound: a hollow metal tapping, as if someone was rapping on the side of an empty gasoline can with a piece of copper pipe. Stupidly, I didn't associate it with gunfire at first, and I kept trudging forward, leading my horse by the reins. Then the bullets found their range, and they smashed into the ground, our column, and the rock walls around us. The men scrambled for cover. I fell to the ground, grinding my face into the dust of the stony path and telling myself that it wasn't really happening, that I hadn't seen the man in front of me ripped open across his back as he stumbled forward. Our men began firing from all around me. And rapid-breathing the dust into my mouth, stiff with fear, I was in the war. I mightVe stayed there, with my face in the dirt and my heart thumping seismic terror into the earth, if it wasn't for my horse. I'd lost the reins, and the horse was rearing in fright.

Fearing that it might trample me, I scrambled to my feet and scrabbled at the flailing reins to regain control of her. The horse that had been so impressively obedient to that point was suddenly the worst of the entire column. She reared and then bucked. She stamped her hooves and tried to drag me backward. She thrashed and drove us in tight circles, trying to find an angle where she could kick backward at me. She even bit me, snapping at my forearm and causing intense pain through three layers of clothes.

I glanced along the line, left and right. Those nearest to the pass were making a run for it, leading their animals toward the rocky shelves for shelter. Those immediately in front of me and behind me had managed to bring their horses down, and they crouched beside or behind them. Only my horse was still rearing and widely visible. Without a horseman's skill, it's a damn hard thing to convince a horse to lie down in a battle zone. Other horses were screaming in fear, and each whinny of terror put more panic into mine. I wanted to save her, to bring her down and make less of a target of her, but I was afraid for myself as well. The enemy fire slammed into the rocks above and beside me, and with every shattering sound I flinched like a deer nudging a thorn hedge.

It's a bizarre feeling, waiting for a bullet to strike: the nearest experience I can recall that's anything like it is falling through space, and waiting for the safety chute to open.

There's a special taste; a unique taste. There's a different smell on your skin. And there's a hardness in the eyes, as if they're suddenly made of cold metal. Just when I decided to give up and let the animal fend for herself, she buckled easily and followed my dragging arms down and onto her side. I hurled myself down with her, using her swollen middle as a shield. In an attempt to calm her, I reached over to pat at her shoulder. My hand squelched in a bloody wound. Raising my head, I saw that the horse had been struck twice, once high on the shoulder and once in the belly. The wounds were streaming blood with every heaving breath, and the horse was crying-I have no other word for it.

The sound was a breathy, stuttering, whining sob. I put my head against hers, and wrapped my arm around her neck.

The men in my group concentrated their fire on a ridge about one hundred and fifty metres away. With my body pressed hard against the ground, I peeked over the mane of my horse to see dusty plumes rise and spill over the distant ridge as bullet after bullet rammed into the earth.

And then it was over. I heard Khader shouting in three languages for the men to stop shooting. We waited for long minutes, in a stillness that groaned and moaned and sobbed. I heard footsteps crunching the stones nearby, and looked up to see Khaled Ansari running toward me at a crouch.

She's-"

Habib's gonna finish them off. Just stay here and keep your head down. I'll be back."

He ran off at a crouch, stopping here and there along the column behind me. My horse was breathing hard, whimpering with every third or fourth chugging breath. The flow of blood was slow but steady. The wound in her belly was oozing a dark fluid that was darker than blood. I tried to soothe her, stroking her neck, and then I realised that I hadn't given her a name. It seemed grievously cruel, somehow, for her to die without a name. I searched my mind, and when I pulled the net of thought up from the blue-black deep there was a name, glittering and true.

And she was right. She was right."

I was babbling, raving, in shock. I know the symptoms now. I've seen other men under fire for the first time. A rare few know exactly what to do: their weapons are returning fire before their bodies have finished an instinctive crouch and roll. Others laugh, and can't stop laughing. Some cry, and call for their mama, or their wife, or their God. Some get so quiet, shrinking down inside themselves, that even their friends get spooked by it. And some talk, just like I talked to my dying horse.

Habib scrambled up to me in a slithering, zigzag run, and saw me talking into the mare's ear. He checked her over thoroughly, running his hands over the wounds and probing under the thickly veined hide to feel for the bullets. He pulled his knife out of its scabbard. It was a long knife, with a dog's tooth point. He positioned it over the horse's throat and then paused. His mad eyes met mine. There was a sunburst of gold around the pupils of his eyes that seemed to pulse and whirl. They were big eyes, but the madness in them was bigger, straining and bulging at them as if it wanted to burst outward from his very brain. And yet he was sane enough to sense my helpless grief, and to offer me the knife.

It may be that I should've taken the knife and killed the horse, my horse, myself. Maybe that's what a good man, a committed man, would've done. I couldn't. I looked at the knife and the trembling throat of the horse, and I couldn't do it. I shook my head. Habib pushed the knife into the horse's neck and gave it a subtle, almost elegant twist of his wrist. The mare shuddered, but allowed herself to be calmed. When the knife left her throat, the blood gushed in heart-thrusted bursts onto her chest and the sodden ground. Slowly, the straining jaw relaxed, and the eyes glazed over, and then the great heart was still.

I looked from the gentle, dead, unfearing eyes of the horse into the sickness that careered in Habib's eyes, and the moment that we shared was so charged with emotion, so surreally alien to the worlds I knew, that my hand slid involuntarily along my body to the gun in my holster. Habib grinned at me, a toothy baboon grin that was impossible to read, and scrambled away along the line to the next wounded horse.

I'm sure he was dead before his knees hit the ground. It was that fast!"

As it is, we've got three wounded, and we lost four horses."

We wrenched the saddle and bridle from my dead horse, and trotted up the line of men and horses to the mouth of the narrow pass.

The wounded men were lying within the cover of a shoulder of rock. Khader stood nearby, frowning watchfully at the plain behind me. Ahmed Zadeh was gently but hurriedly removing the clothing from one of the wounded men. I glanced at the darkening sky.

One man had a broken arm. His horse had fallen on him when it was shot. The break was a bad one, a compound fracture of the forearm, near the wrist. One bone protruded at a sickeningly unnatural angle, but it remained within the envelope of flesh, and nowhere pierced the skin. It had to be set. When Ahmed Zadeh removed the second man's shirt, we saw that he'd been shot twice. Both bullets were still in his body, and they were too deep to reach without major surgery. One, in the upper chest, had shattered the collarbone, and the other had lodged in his stomach, tearing a wide and undoubtedly fatal wound from hip to hip. The third man, a farmer named Siddiqi, had a bad head-wound. His horse had thrown him against the rocks, and he'd struck a boulder with the top of his head, near the crown.

It was bleeding, and there was a clear fracture of the cranium.

My fingers slid along the ridge of broken bone, greasy-wet with his blood. The broken scalp had split into three chunks. One of them was so loose that I knew it would come away in my hand if I tugged at it. His matted hair was all that held his skull together. There was also a thick swelling at the base of the skull, where his head met his neck. He was unconscious, and I doubted that he would ever open his eyes again.

I glanced at the sky once more. There was so little daylight left, so little time. I had to make a decision, a choice, and help one man to live, maybe, while I let other men die. I wasn't a doctor, and I had no experience under fire. The work had fallen to me, it seemed, because I knew a little more than the next man, and I was willing to do it. It was cold. I was cold. I was kneeling in a sticky smear of blood, and I could feel it soaking through the knees of my pants. When I looked up at Khader he nodded, as if he was reading my thoughts. Feeling sick with guilt and fear, I pulled a blanket over Siddiqi, to keep him warm, and then I abandoned him to work on the man with the broken arm.

Khaled pulled open the comprehensive first-aid kit beside me. I threw a plastic bottle of antibiotic powder, antiseptic wash, bandages, and scissors on the ground at Ahmed Zadeh's feet, beside the man who'd been shot. I snapped out brief instructions for cleaning and dressing the wounds, and as Ahmed went to work, covering the bullet wounds, I turned my attention to the broken arm. The man spoke to me urgently. I knew his face well. He had a special talent for herding the unruly goats, and I'd often seen the temperamental creatures following him, unbidden, as he wandered around our camp.

He smiled broadly, and brushed at the ground beside the wounded man, gradually easing the Kalashnikov out of the man's hand and out of reach. Then, as darkness closed over us, and five of the man's friends held him down, I wrenched and twisted his shattered arm until it resembled the straight, healthy limb that it once had been and never would be again.

When the break was wrapped and set with hard plastic splints, and we'd patched over the wounds on the man who'd been shot, I hastily wrapped a dressing around unconscious Siddiqi's head. At once we set off into the narrow pass. The cargo was distributed among all the remaining horses. The man with the bullet wounds rode a horse, supported on both sides by his friends. Siddiqi was strapped across one of the packhorses, as was the body of Madjid, the Afghan who'd been killed in the attack. The rest of us walked.

The climb was steep but short. Puffing hard in the thin air and shivering in a cold that penetrated to my bones, I pushed and dragged the reluctant horses with the rest of the men. The Afghan fighters never once complained or grumbled. When the pitch of one climb was steeper than anything I'd known on the whole trip, I paused at last, panting heavily to regain my strength. Two men turned to see that I'd halted, and they slid down the path to me, giving up the precious metres they'd just gained. With huge smiles and encouraging claps on the shoulder, they helped me to drag a horse up the slope and then bounded off to help those ahead.

After five hours of the climb we reached our destination, a camp in the Shar-i-Safa Mountains. The camp was sheltered from the air by a prodigious ledge of rock. The ground beneath had been excavated to form a vast cave leading to a network of other caves. Several smaller, camouflaged bunkers surrounded the cave in a ring that reached to the fringe of the flat, rugged mountain plateau.

Khader called us to a halt in the light of the rising full moon.

His scout Habib had alerted the camp to our arrival, and the mujaheddin were waiting for us-and the supplies we brought-with great excitement. A message was sent back to me, in the centre of the column, that Khader wanted me. I jogged forward to join him.

Nazeer led several horses forward, and we climbed wearily into the saddles. Khader must've been far more tired than I was, and his body mustVe wrestled with many more pains and complaints, but he was straight-backed in the saddle and he held the green-and white standard at his hip with a rigid arm. Imitating him, I sat up straight and kicked back smartly to start the horse forward.

Our small column moved off slowly into a silvered moonlight so strong that it cast looming shadows on the grey rock walls.

The approach to the camp from that southern climb was along a narrow stone path that swept in a graceful, even curve from right to left. Beside the path on our left was a steep drop of some thirty metres to a rubble of broken boulders. On our right was the smooth rock face of a sheer wall. When we were perhaps half way along the path, watched attentively by our own men and the mujaheddin in the camp, I developed an irritating cramp in my right hip. The cramp quickly became a piercing knot of pain; and the more that I tried to ignore it, the more agonising it felt.

Attempting to relieve the stress on my hip, I took my right foot out of the stirrup and tried to stretch my leg. With all the weight on my left leg, I stood a little in the saddle. Without warning, my left foot gave way beneath me as my boot slipped from the stirrup, and I felt myself falling sideways out of the saddle toward the deep, hard drop to the stones. Self-preservation instincts set my limbs flailing, and I clutched at the horse's neck with my arms and my free right leg as I swung down and around. In the time it takes to clench your teeth, I'd fallen from the saddle and coiled myself upside-down around the neck of the horse. I called on it to stop, but it ignored me, plodding onward along the narrow track. I couldn't let go. The path was so narrow, and the drop so steep, that I was sure I would fall if I released my grip. And the horse wouldn't stop. So I hung on, with my arms and my legs wrapped around its neck, upside-down, while its head gently bobbed and dipped next to mine.

I heard my own men laughing first. It was that helpless, stuttering, choking laughter that makes men suffer for days with the ache of it in their ribs. It was the kind of laughter that you're sure will kill you if you can't get that next gasping breath. And then I heard the mujaheddin fighters laughing from the camp. And I arched my head backward to see Khader, facing around in his saddle and laughing as hard as the rest. And then _I started to laugh, and when the laughter weakened my arms, as I clutched at the horse, I laughed again. And as I choked out an anguished, croaky Whoa! Stop! Band karo! the men laughed harder than ever.

And so I entered the camp of the mujaheddin fighters. Men crouched around me at once, helping me from the horse's neck and steadying me on my feet. My own column of men followed us across the narrow path, and reached out to pat me on the back and slap at my shoulders. Seeing that familiarity, the mujaheddin joined in the slapping chorus, and it was fully fifteen minutes before the last man left my side and I could sit down to rest my jelly legs.

Khaled Ansari said, sliding down a boulder face to sit beside me with his back to the stone. "But fuck, man, you are real popular after that trick. That's easily the funniest thing those guys have ever seen in their lives."

I laughed with him, and although I was exhausted and resigned to the ridicule, I didn't want to laugh any more, so I glanced around to my right to avoid his eye. A canvas shamiana in camouflage colours provided shelter for our wounded men. In the shadows beside it, men were pulling cargo from the horses and ferrying it into the cavern. I saw Habib dragging something long and heavy away from behind the working line, and deeper into the darkness beyond.

Khaled was instantly alert, and jumped to his feet. His urgency quickened me, and I leapt up after him. We ran to the line of rocks that formed one edge of the flattened mountain plateau, and as we rounded them we saw him kneeling, legs astride the body of a man. It was Siddiqi. While all the attention was on the fascinating bundles of the cargo, Habib had dragged the unconscious man from beneath the canvas awning. Just as we reached him, Habib drove his long knife into the man's neck and gave it that delicate twist. Siddiqi's legs twitched a tiny, trembling shake and then were still. Habib pulled the knife away and turned to see us staring back at him. The horror and rage in our faces seemed only to fuel the burning madness in his eyes. He grinned at us.

He turned his head quickly and tilted it at an eccentric angle, as if listening with feral intensity to a faint sound in the distant night. I heard nothing but the noises of the camp behind me and the soft wail of the wind as it coursed through the canyons and ravines and secret pathways. In that instant, the land, the mountains, the very country of Afghanistan seemed to me so desolate, so bleached of loveliness and tenderness that it was like the landscape of Habib's insanity. I felt that I was trapped inside the stony maze of his hallucinated brain.

While he listened, tense in his animal crouch, with his face turned away from me, I slipped the stud-clip off my holster. I eased the gun out, and into my hands. Breathing hard, I followed Khader's instructions automatically, not realising until it was done that I'd flicked off the safety, chambered a round by pulling back the sliding return, and cocked the hammer. The sounds brought Habib round to face me. He looked at the gun in my hand. It was aimed at his chest. He looked back to my eyes, moving his gaze slowly, almost languorously. The long knife was still in his hand. I don't know what expression lit my face in the moonlight. It can't have been good. My mind was made up: if he moved a millimetre toward me, I would pull the trigger as many times as it took to finish him.

His grin widened into a laugh-at least, it looked like a laugh.

His mouth moved, and his head shook, but there was no sound. And his eyes, ignoring Khaled completely, stared a message into mine.

And then I could hear him, hear his voice in my head. You see? his eyes said to me. I'm right not to trust any of you... You want to kill me... All of you... You want me dead... But it's all right... I don't mind... I give you my permission... I want you to do it...

We heard a sound, a footstep, behind us. Khaled and I jumped and whirled in fright to see Khader, Nazeer, and Ahmed Zadeh rushing to join us. When we looked back, Habib was gone.

Abdel Khader was kneeling beside the dead man, whispering prayers with his hands held palms upwards.

Make a check of all his stuff-check his horse, and his pack. See what weapons or explosives he might've had on him. I didn't get too good a look, before, but I think he had some stuff under his jacket. Fuck, this is a mess!"

When Khader completed his prayers, we carried Siddiqi's body back to the canvas shamiana, and wrapped it in cloth until the rituals of burial could be performed on the following day. We worked for a few hours more and then lay down in the cavern, side by side for sleep. The snoring was loud, and the exhausted men were restless in their slumber, but I lay awake for other reasons. My eyes kept drifting back to the place, moonless and thickly shadowed, where Habib had disappeared. Khaled was right. It had started badly, Khader's war, and the words echoed in my wakeful mind. A bad start...

I tried to fix my eyes on the clear and perfect stars of that fated night's black heaven, but again and again my concentration lapsed, and I found myself staring at the dark edge of the plateau. And I knew, in the way we know without a word that love is lost, or in the sudden, sure way we know that a friend is false and doesn't really like us at all, that Khader's war would end much worse, for all of us, than it had begun.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

For two months of cold and ever colder days we lived with the guerrilla fighters in their cave complex on the Shar-i-Safa range. They were hard months in many ways, but our mountain stronghold never came under direct fire, and we were relatively safe. The camp was only fifty crow-kilometres from Kandahar. It was about twenty kilometres from the main Kabul highway and about fifty kilometres south-east of the Arghandab Dam. The Russians occupied Kandahar, but their hold on the southern capital was tenuous and the city was subject to recurring sieges. Rockets had been fired into the city centre, and guerrilla fighting on the outskirts claimed a steady toll of lives. The main highway was in the hands of several well-armed mujaheddin units. Russian tank and truck convoys from Kabul were forced to blast their way through blockades to resupply Kandahar, and that they did, from month to month. Afghan regular army units loyal to the Kabul puppet government protected the strategically important Arghandab Dam, but frequent attacks on the dam threatened their hold on the precious resource. Thus we were roughly in the centre of a triad of violent conflict zones, each of which constantly demanded new men and guns. The Shar-i-Safa range offered no strategic advantage to our enemies, so the fighting didn't find us in our well-disguised mountain caverns.

The weather shifted during those weeks to the cold heart of a severe winter. Snow fell in fitful gusts and squalls that left us sodden in our many-layered patchwork uniforms. A freezing mist drifted so slowly through the mountains that it sometimes hung suspended for hours at a time: still and white and as impenetrable to the gaze as frosted glass. The ground was always muddy or frozen, and even the stone walls of the caves we lived in seemed to ring and tremble with the icy chill of the season.

Part of Khader's cargo had consisted of hand tools and machine components. We'd set up two workshops in the first days after our arrival, and they were busy throughout the creeping weeks of the winter. There was a small capstan lathe, which we'd bolted to a homemade table. The lathe ran on a diesel engine. The fighters felt certain that there were no enemy forces within earshot, but still we dampened its noise with a little igloo of burlap sacks that covered the engine, leaving gaps for the air inlet and exhaust gas outlet. The same engine powered a grinding wheel and a speed drill.

With that assembly, the fighters repaired their weapons and sometimes adapted them to suit new and different purposes. First among those weapons were the mortars. After aircraft and tanks, the most effective battle weapon in Afghanistan was the Russian 82-millimetre mortar. The guerrillas bought the mortars, stole them, or captured them in hand-to-hand fighting, often at the cost of human lives. The weapons were then turned on the Russians, who'd brought them into the country in order to conquer it. Our workshops stripped the mortars down, refitted them, and packed them in waxed bags for use in combat zones as far away as Zaranj in the west, and Kunduz in the north.

Apart from the cartridge pliers and crimping tools, the ammunition and the explosives, Khader's cargo also included new parts for the Kalashnikovs that he'd purchased in the arms bazaars in Peshawar. The Russian AK-Avtomat Kalashnikova-was designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in the 1940s, in response to German armament innovations. Toward the end of the Second World War, German army generals disobeyed the explicit orders of Adolph Hitler and produced an automatic assault rifle. The armaments engineer Hugo Schmeisser, using the germ of an earlier Russian concept, developed a weapon that was short, light, and fired its magazine of thirty bullets at a practical rate of more than a hundred rounds per minute. Hitler was so impressed with the weapon he'd previously forbidden that he named it the Sturmgewehr, or Storm Weapon, and immediately ordered its intensive production. It was too little, too late for the Nazi war effort, but Schmeisser's Storm Weapon set the trend for all assault rifles for the rest of the century.

Kalashnikov's AK-47, the most influential and widely manufactured of the new assault rifles, operated by diverting some of the propellant gases produced by a fired bullet into a cylinder above the barrel. The gas drove a piston that forced the bolt back against its spring, and cocked the hammer for the next round. The rifle weighed about five kilos, carried thirty rounds in its curved metal magazine, and fired the 7.62-millimetre rounds at around 2,300 feet per second, over an effective range greater than 300 metres. It fired more than a hundred rounds per minute on auto, and about forty rounds every minute on the semi-automatic, single-shot function.

The rifle had its limitations, and the mujaheddin fighters were quick to explain them to me. The low muzzle-velocity of the heavy 7.62-millimetre round defined a looping trajectory that called for tricky adjustments to hit a target at three hundred metres or more. Muzzle flash on firing the AK was so bright, particularly with the new 74 series, that it blinded the firer at night, and often betrayed his position. The barrel overheated rapidly, becoming too hot to hold. Sometimes a round grew so hot in the chamber that it exploded in the user's face. That fact explained why so many guerrilla fighters held the gun away from their bodies, or over their heads, in battle operations.

Nevertheless, the rifle worked perfectly after total immersion in water, mud, or snow, and it remained one of the most efficient and reliable killing machines ever devised. In the first four decades after its development, fifty million of them were produced-more than any other firearm in history-and the Kalashnikov, in all its forms, was carried as a preferred strike weapon by revolutionaries, regular soldiers, mercenaries, and gangsters all over the fighting world.

The original AK-47 was made of forged and milled steel. The AK-74, produced in the 1970s, was made from stamped metal parts.

Some of the older Afghan fighters rejected the newer weapon, with its smaller 5.45-millimetre round and its orange plastic magazine, preferring the solidity of the heavier AK-47. Some younger fighters chose the 74 model, dismissing the heavier gun as an antique. The models they used were produced in Egypt, Syria, Russia, and China. Although they were essentially identical, the fighters often preferred one to another, and the trade in the weapons, even within the same unit, was energetic and intense.

Khader's workshops repaired and refitted the AKs of every series, and modified them as required. The workshops were popular places.

The Afghan men were insatiable in their desire to know about weapons and learn new skills with them. It wasn't a frenzied or brutal curiosity. It was simply necessary to know how to handle guns in a land that had been invaded by Alexander the Great, the Huns, the Sakas, the Scythians, the Mongols, the Moghuls, the Safavids, the British, and the Russians, among many others. Even when they weren't studying at the workshops or helping out with the work, the men gathered there to drink tea made on spirit stoves, smoke cigarettes, and talk about their loved ones.

And for two months I worked with them every day. I melted lead and other metals in the little forge. I helped to gather scraps of firewood, and carried water from a spring at the foot of a nearby ravine. Trudging through the light snow I dug out new latrines, and carefully covered them over and concealed them again when they were full. I turned new parts on the turret lathe, and melted the helical metal shavings to make more parts.

In the mornings I tended to the horses, which were billeted in another cave further down the mountain. When it was my turn to milk the goats, I churned the milk into butter and helped to cook naan bread. If any man needed attention for a cut or graze or sprained ankle, I set up the first-aid kit and did my best to heal him.

I learned the answering choruses of a few songs, and in the evenings when the fires were smothered and we huddled together for warmth, I sang with the men as softly as they did. I listened to the stories that they whispered into the dark, and that Khaled, Mahmoud, and Nazeer translated for me. Each day when the men prayed, I knelt with them in silence. And at night, enclosed within the breathing, snoring swathe of their soldier-scented sleep-smells of wood-smoke, gun oil, cheap sandalwood soap, piss, shit, sweat soaking into wet-serge, unwashed human and horse hair, liniment and saddle-softener, cumin and coriander, peppermint tooth powder, chai, tobacco, and a hundred others-I dreamed with them of homes and hearts we longed to see again.

Then, when the second month ended, and the last weapons were repaired and modified, and the supplies we'd brought with us were all but exhausted, Khaderbhai ordered us to prepare for the long walk home. He planned to make a detour west, toward Kandahar and away from the border with Pakistan, to deliver some horses to his family. After that, with marching packs and light weapons, we would march by night until we reached the safety of the Pakistan border.

In the war against the Russian invaders, they'd become devils in exile, raining fire upon their own homes and shops and schools.

He stopped talking and flicked a glance at me, his golden eyes gleaming beneath the silver-grey brows. His eyes were smiling, but his jaw was set and his lips were compressed so tightly that they showed white at the rims. Reassured, perhaps, that I was listening to him, he looked back to the smouldering horizon, and spoke again.

When they met each other, as one man to another man, they fired their guns at such close range that the bullets went through one body to strike the next. The British lost half their number. The Afghans lost two thousand five hundred men. But they won the battle, and the British were forced to retreat to Kandahar.

Prince Ayub immediately surrounded the city, and the siege of Kandahar began."

It was cold, bitterly cold on the windy tor, despite the unusually bright, clear sunlight. I felt my legs and arms growing numb, and I longed to stand up and stamp my feet, but I didn't want to disturb him. Instead, I lit two beedies, and passed one to him. He accepted it, raising his eyebrow in thanks, and took two long puffs before continuing.

And, thanks be to Allah, I did have him as my friend, and my teacher, while men were still alive who bore the scars of fighting the war that killed his grandfather, and killed mine."

He paused again, and we listened to the wind, feeling the first sting of the new snow that it was bringing to us: the shivering wind that began in distant Bamiyan, and dragged the snow and ice and frosty air from every mountain all the way to Kandahar.

And they marched, from freezing snow mountains to burning desert, and then, after twenty days of this unbelievable march through hell, they fought a great battle with the army of Prince Ayub Khan, and they defeated him. Roberts saved the British in the city, and from that day, even after he became the field marshal of all the soldiers in the British Empire, he was always known as Roberts of Kandahar."

He smiled, and the smile bubbled into a laugh. I was sure, somehow, that he was thinking about the night I'd ridden into the camp hanging from the neck of my horse.

He laughed the harder.

I lit two more beedies, not for the need of them, but for the distraction they provided, and their little warmth.

I said it quickly-too quickly, perhaps-and I felt him watching me closely as the seconds passed.

I didn't want to go on: the dreams had been about Karla.

Because I am telling you about my dream. He was on foot, walking somewhere. I rode up behind him on my horse-it was a perfect, beautiful white horse-and although I didn't see his face, I knew it was him. So I got down from my horse, and gave it to him. And my face was lowered, out of respect, all the time. But at last, I lifted my eyes to see him riding away into the light of the setting sun. That was my dream."

He was calm, but I knew him well enough to see the dejection that hooded his eyes. And there was something else, something so new and strange that it took me a few moments to realise what it was: fear. Abdel Khader Khan was afraid, and I felt my own skin creep and tighten in response. It was unimaginable. Until that moment I'd truly believed that Khaderbhai was afraid of nothing.

Unnerved and worried, I moved to change the subject.

I congratulated myself on the successful change of theme and mood by standing up. I stamped my feet and slapped at my sides to get the blood moving. Khader joined me and we began the short walk back to the camp, blowing warmth into our frozen hands.

He is my favourite poet. And he is Karla's favourite poet also."

The words were ice around my heart.

Didn't you know this? I am very surprised. I was sure that Karla would have talked to you about me. Certainly, I have talked to her about you, many times."

My mind was like the screaming jets that had screeched over us in the dark ravine: all noise and black fears. What had Karla said as we lay together, struggling against sleep, after fighting the cholera epidemic? I was on a plane, and I met a businessman, an Indian businessman, and my life changed forever... Was that Abdul Ghani? Is that what she meant? Why hadn't I asked her more about her work? Why didn't she tell me about it? And what did she do for Abdul Ghani?

He began to speak again, but I cut him off quickly.

The cold was suddenly inside me, running through my veins, and my eyes were made of snow. Khader kept walking, but when he noticed that I'd stopped, he halted. He was still smiling when he turned to face me. Khaled Ansari approached us at that instant, and clapped his hands together loudly.

He's been doing so much crazy stuff-the things he's done to Russian prisoners, and even some of the Afghan prisoners near here on the Kandahar road in the last couple weeks are... well, it's grisly shit-and I'm hard to impress in that way. It's so weird, the men are going to do something about it. They're so spooked, they're gonna shoot him on sight. They're talking about hunting him down like a wild animal. I have to... I have to try to help him, somehow. I'm gonna stay, and try to find him, and try to talk him into coming back to Pakistan with me. So... you go on without me tonight, and I'll... I'll come through in a couple of weeks, on the next trip out. That's... that's it, I guess. That's... what I came to say."

There was a cold silence after the little speech. I stared at Khader, waiting for him to speak. I was angry, and I was afraid.

It was a special fear-the kind of arctic dread that only love can inspire. Khader stared back at my face, reading me. Khaled looked from one to the other of us, confused and concerned.

She wanted someone there who could help her, if you had no good intention with her."

I wasn't listening. My mind was all angry arrows, whistling backward to a much earlier time and place. I was searching for Karla-for the Karla I knew and loved-but every moment with her began to give up its secret and its lie. I remembered the first time I'd met her, the first second, how she'd reached out to stop me from walking in front of the bus. It was on Arthur Bunder Road, on the corner near the Causeway, not far from the India Guest House. It was the heart of the tourist beat. Was she waiting there, hunting for foreigners like me, looking for useful recruits who could work for Khader when he needed them? Of course she was. I'd done it myself, in a way, when I'd lived in the slum. I'd loitered there, in the same place, looking for foreigners just off the plane who wanted to change money or buy some charras.

Nazeer walked up to join us. Ahmed Zadeh was a few paces behind him. They stood together with Khaderbhai and Khaled, facing me.

Nazeer screwed his face into a scowl, and scanned the sky from south to north, calculating the minutes before the snowstorm hit us. The packing for the return journey was complete and double-checked, and he was anxious to leave.

A freezing wind blew into the broad plateau, and we all shuddered, unsteadied, as the force of it whipped at our clothes and faces. The sky darkened swiftly as a dirty, grey tide of cloud crossed the mountains and tumbled on toward the distant plain and the shimmering, dying city.

I was so cold, as the first flakes whirled about us, that I shivered and shook and couldn't stop my jaw from shuddering.

There was a hard silence, the kind of deadly, breathing silence that insinuates itself into the memory more deeply than the sharpest sound.

I looked at Nazeer and Ahmed Zadeh. They stared back evenly. My eyes shifted to Khaled Ansari. He returned my stare with an anguished and angrily defiant grimace that pulled his whole face into the jagged lash of the scar that divided his features.

They all knew. They all knew that Khader had left me in there.

But it was okay. Khader didn't owe me anything. He wasn't the one who put me there. He didn't have to get me out. And he did, in the end: he did get me out of jail in the end, and he did save my life. It was just that I'd taken so many beatings, and other men had taken beatings for me, trying to get a message out to him... and even if we'd succeeded, even if we'd managed to get a message to him, Khader would've ignored it, and left me there, until he was ready to act. It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.

I had an arrangement with Madame Zhou. She was helping us to meet with the politicians, and get favours from one of the generals from Pakistan. He was a... contact... of hers. He was, in truth, Karla's special client. She was the one who first brought him, that Pakistani general, to Madame Zhou. And it was a critical connection. He was critically important to my plans. And she was so very angry with you, Madame Zhou, that nothing less than prison would satisfy her. She wanted to have you killed in there. As soon as my work was done, at the earliest day, I sent your friend Vikram for you. You must believe me when I tell you that I never wanted to hurt you. I like you. I-" He stopped suddenly because I put my hand on the holster at my hip. Khaled, Ahmed, and Nazeer tensed at once and raised their hands, but they were too far away to reach me in a single springing leap, and they knew it.

Nazeer took a slow, almost casual step, and stood in front of Khader, shielding him with his body.

Khader replied, and it was the only time I ever heard his voice waver and falter.

He stood his ground a moment more, and I could feel the urge to take the gun out and shoot him: an urge that was drowning me in cold, shivering waves of revulsion and rage.

His face was stiff with cold. Snow had settled on his moustache and beard, and it was impossible to read his expression. But his golden eyes gleamed through the grey-white mist, and the old love was in them still. Then he turned, and he was gone. The others turned with him, and I was alone in the storm with my hand frozen and trembling on the holster. I snapped the safety clip off, pulled the Stechkin out, and cocked it quickly and expertly, just as he'd taught me. I held it at my side, pointed at the ground.

The minutes passed-the killing minutes, when I might've gone after him and killed him, and myself. And I tried to drop the gun then, but it wouldn't fall from my numbed and icy fingers. I tried to prise the gun free with my left hand, but all my fingers were so cramped that I gave it up. And in the whirling white snow-dome that my world had become I lifted my arms to the white rain, as I once had done beneath the warm rain in Prabaker's village. And I was alone.

When I'd climbed the wall of the prison all those years before, it was as if I'd climbed a wall on the rim of the world. When I slid down to freedom I lost the whole world that I knew, and all the love it held. In Bombay I'd tried, without realising it, to make a new world of loving that could resemble the lost one, and even replace it. Khader was my father. Prabaker and Abdullah were my brothers. Karla was my lover. And then, one by one, they were all lost. Another whole world was lost.

A clear thought came to me, unbidden, and surging in my mind like the spoken words of a poem. I knew why Khaled Ansari was so determined to help Habib. I suddenly knew with perfect understanding what Khaled was really trying to do. He's trying to save himself, I said, more than once, feeling my numb lips tremble with the words, but hearing them in my head. And I knew, as I said the words and thought them, that I didn't hate Khader or Karla: that I couldn't hate them.

I don't know why my heart changed so suddenly and so completely.

It might've been the gun in my hand-the power it gave me to take life, or let it be-and the instincts, from my deepest nature, that had prevented me from using it. It might've been the fact of losing Khaderbhai. For, as he walked away from me, I knew in my blood-the blood I could smell in the thick, white air, the blood I could taste in my mouth-that it was over. Whatever the reason, the change moved through me like monsoon rain in the steel bazaar, and left no trace of the swirling, murderous hate I'd felt only moments before.

I was still angry that I'd put so much of a son's love into Khader, and that my soul, against the wishes of my conscious mind, had begged for his love. I was angry that he'd considered me expendable, to be used as a means to achieve his ends. And I was enraged that he'd taken away the one thing in my whole life- my work as the slum doctor-that might've redeemed me, in my own mind if nowhere else, and might've gone some way to balance all the wrong I'd done. Even that little good had been polluted and defiled. The anger in me was as hard and heavy as a basalt hearthstone, and I knew it would take years to wear down, but I couldn't hate them.

They'd lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn't like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill _in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

Afterwards, when the snow cleared, I stood a little apart from Khaled to watch Khaderbhai and Nazeer and their men leave the camp with the horses. The great Khan, the mafia don, my father, sat straight-backed in his saddle. He held his standard, furled about the lance in his hand. And he never once looked back.

My decision to separate myself from Khaderbhai and to stay with Khaled and the others in the camp had increased the danger for me. I was far more vulnerable without the Khan than I was in his company. It was reasonable to assume, watching him leave, that I wouldn't make it back to Pakistan. I even said those words to myself: I'm not gonna make it... I'm not gonna make it...

But it wasn't fear that I felt as lord Abdel Khader Khan rode into the light-consuming snow. I accepted my fate, and even welcomed it. At last, I thought, I'm gonna get what I deserve.

Somehow, that thought left me clean and clear. What I felt, instead of fear, was hope that he would live. It was over, and finished, and I never wanted to see him again; but as I watched him ride into that valley of white shadows I hoped he would live.

I prayed he would be safe. I prayed my heartbreak into him, and I loved him. I loved him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women.

You know that's true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into battle. They talk about home, and they talk about the women they love. And you know it's true when you watch them die. If he's near the earth or on the earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in his hand. If he can, he'll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley, or the plain. If he's a long way from home, he'll think about it, and he'll talk about it. He'll talk about his village, or his home town, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won't scream of causes. At the very last, he'll murmur or he'll cry out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, even as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it's a woman, and a city.

Three days after Khaderbhai left the camp, three days after I watched him ride away from us through the soft new snow, sentries at the southern lookout on the Kandahar side of the camp shouted that men were approaching. We rushed to the southern edge to see a lumpy confusion of shapes, perhaps two or three human figures, struggling up the steep slope. Several of us reached for binoculars in the same instant and trained them on the spot. I made out one man crawling, inching his way up the slope on his knees, and dragging two prone figures. After a few moments of study I recognised the powerful shoulders, the bowed legs, and the distinctive grey-blue fatigues. I handed the binoculars to Khaled Ansari and bounded over the edge in a sliding run.

I was one of the first to reach him. He was face down in the snow, and he was breathing hard. His legs were pushing against the snow, seeking purchase, and his hands were locked in wraps of clothing at the throats of two men. He'd dragged them to that spot on their backs, one in each hand. It was impossible to guess how far he'd come, but it looked to be a long way, most of it uphill. The man in Nazeer's left hand, nearest to me, was Ahmed Zadeh. He was alive, but seemed to be badly wounded. The other man was Abdel Khader Khan. He was dead.

It took three of us to wrench Nazeer's fingers from the clothes.

He was so exhausted and so cold that he couldn't speak. His mouth opened and closed, but the voice was a long, unsteady croak. Two men seized the shoulders of his clothes and dragged him back up to the camp. I pulled open Khader's clothes at the chest, hoping to revive him, but when I put my hand on his body the skin was ice-cold and stiffened and woody. He'd been dead for many hours, perhaps more than a day. The body was rigid. The arms and legs were bent a little at the elbows and knees, and the hands were curled into claws. His face, however, was serene and unblemished beneath its thin shroud of snow. His eyes and his mouth were closed as if in a peaceful sleep, and he was so gently dead that my heart refused to believe him gone.

When Khaled Ansari shook my shoulder, I came to the moment as if from a dream, although I knew that I'd been awake for the whole of the time since the sentries had first given us the alarm. I was kneeling in the snow, against Khader's body, and cradling the handsome head in my arms, against my chest, but I had no recollection of doing it. Ahmed Zadeh was gone. Men had dragged him back to the camp. Khaled, Mahmoud, and I dragged and half carried Khader's body back with us and into the big cave.

I joined a group of three men who were working on Ahmed Zadeh.

The Algerian's clothes were stiff with frozen blood around the middle, below the chest. Piece by piece we cut them away, and just as we reached the torn, minced, bloody wounds on his raw skin, he opened his eyes to look at us.

There were at least three wounds, but it was difficult to be sure. His abdomen had been ripped open with a vicious, gouging tear that might've been caused by shrapnel from a mortar shell.

For all that I could tell, the piece of metal could've been inside him, nudging up against his spine. There were other gaping wounds in his thigh and groin. He'd lost so much blood that his flesh was curled and grey around the wounds. I couldn't begin to guess what damage had been done to his stomach and other internal organs. There was a strong smell of urine and other wastes and fluids. That he'd survived so long was a miracle. It seemed that the cold alone had kept him alive. But the clock was ticking on him: he had hours or only minutes to live, and there was nothing I could do for him.

I wish now that I didn't say it. Of the hundred things that I wish I'd never said or done in my wicked life, that little quirk of honesty is right up there, near the top of the list. I hadn't realised how much the hope of being rescued had held him up. And then, with those words of mine, I watched him fall backward into the black lake. The colour left his skin, and the small tension of will that had kept his skin taut collapsed, with little twitches of quivering surrender, from his jaw to his knees. I wanted to prepare an injection of morphine for him, but I knew that I was watching him die, and I couldn't bring myself to take my hand from his.

His eyes cleared, and he looked around him at the cave walls as if seeing them for the first time. Mahmoud and Khaled were on one side of him. I knelt on the other. He looked into our faces. His eyes were starting from their sockets with fear. It was the desolate terror of a man who knows that fate has abandoned him, and death's already inside, stretching and swelling and filling up the life-space that used to be his. It was a look I came to know too well in the weeks that followed, and in the years beyond. But there, on that day, it was new to me, and I felt my scalp tighten with a fear that mimed his. "It should have been donkeys," he rasped.

He stopped talking, choked by a little series of grunting gasps that began in his wounded stomach, and thumped upwards into his stuttering chest. A trickle of dark fluid, blood and bile, dribbled from his nose and the corner of his mouth. He seemed not to notice.

For that, to deliver those horses to his people, we went to die."

He closed his eyes, moaning in pain, but then just as quickly opened them again.

I looked up, exchanging a glance with Khaled and Mahmoud. Khaled met my eye, but then shifted his gaze quickly to concentrate on his dying friend. Mahmoud held my stare until we both nodded. It was a gesture so subtle that it would've been imperceptible to an observer, but we both knew what we'd acknowledged and what we'd agreed upon with that little nod. It was true. It was pride that had brought the great man to his end. And strange as it may seem to someone else, it was only then, understanding the pride in his fall, that I began to truly accept that Khaderbhai was gone, and to feel the gaping, hollow sense of his death.

Ahmed talked for a while longer. He told us the name of his village, and he gave us directions for how to find it in relation to the nearest big city. He told us about his father and mother, about his sisters and brothers. He wanted us to let them know that he'd died thinking of them. And he did, that brave, laughing Algerian, who'd always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd of strangers: he did die with his mother's love on his lips. And the name of God escaped with his last breath.

We were freezing, chilled to the bones by the stillness we'd assumed while Ahmed lay dying. Other men took over the task of cleaning his body according to the rituals of Muslim burial.

Khaled, Mahmoud, and I checked on Nazeer. He wasn't wounded, but he was so utterly and crushingly exhausted that his sleep resembled that of a man in a coma. His mouth was open, and his eyes were slitted to show the whites within. He was warm, and he seemed to be recovering from his ordeal. We left him, and examined the body of our dead Khan.

A single bullet had entered Khader's side, below the ribs, and seemed to have travelled directly to his heart. There was no exit wound, but there was extensive blood coagulation and bruising on the left side of his chest. The bullet fired by Russian AK-74s in those years had a hollow tip. The steel core of the bullet was weighted towards the rear, causing it to tumble. It crashed and ripped its way into a body, rather than simply piercing it. Such ammunition was banned under international law, but almost every one of the Afghans who was killed in battle bore the terrible wounds of those brutal bullets. So it was with our Khan. The bullet had smashed its way through his body. The gaping, jagged wound in his side had left a streak of bruising across his chest that ended in a blue-black lotus over his heart.

Knowing that Nazeer would want to prepare Khaderbhai's body for burial himself, we wrapped the Khan in blankets and left him in a shallow, scooped-out trench of snow near the entrance to the caves. We'd just finished the task when a warbling, fluttering, whistle of sound drew us to our feet. We looked at one another in fearful confusion. Then a violent explosion shook the ground beneath us with a flash of orange and dirty grey smoke. The mortar shell had struck the ground more than a hundred metres away, at the far edge of the compound, but the air near us was already filthy with its smell and smoke. Then a second shell burst, and a third, and we ran for the cave-mouth and flung ourselves into the squirming octopus of men who were there ahead of us. Arms, legs, and heads crushed in on one another as we hunkered down in terror while the mortars tore up the rocky ground outside as if it was papier-mache.

It was bad, and it got worse every day after that. When the attack was over, we searched among the blackened stipple and crater of the compound. Two men were dead. One of them was Kareem, the man whose broken forearm I'd set on the night before we'd reached the camp. Two others were so badly wounded that we were sure they would die. Many of the supplies were destroyed. First among them were the drums of fuel we'd used for the generator and the stoves. The stoves and lamps were critically important for heating and cooking. Most of the fuel was gone, and all of our water reserves. We set to cleaning up the debris-my medical kit was blackened and scorched by the fire-and consolidating the remaining supplies in the great cave. The men were quiet. They were worried and afraid. They had reason enough.

While others busied themselves with those tasks, I tended to the wounded men. One man had lost a foot and a part of his leg below the knee. There were fragments of shrapnel in his neck and upper arm. He was eighteen years old. He'd joined the unit with his elder brother six months before we arrived. His brother had been killed during an attack on a Russian outpost near Kandahar. The boy was dying. I pulled the metal pieces from his body with long stainless steel tweezers and a pair of long-nosed pliers I pilfered from the mechanic's kit.

There was nothing substantial that I could do for the savaged leg. I cleaned the wound, and tried to remove as much of the shattered bone as I could wrench free with the pliers. His screams settled on my skin in an oily sweat, and I shivered with every gust of frosty wind. I put sutures into the ragged flesh where clean, hard skin would support them, but there was no way to close the gap over completely. One thick chunk of bone protruded from the lumpy meat. It occurred to me that I should take a saw, and hack the long bone off to make a neat wound of the stump, but I wasn't sure if that was the right procedure. I wasn't sure that it wouldn't make the wound worse than it was. I wasn't sure... And there's only so much screaming you can bring yourself to cause when you're not sure what you're doing. In the end, I smothered the wound in antibiotic powder and wrapped it in non-adhesive gauze.

The second wounded man had taken a blast in the face and throat.

His eyes were destroyed, and most of the nose and mouth were gone. In some ways, he resembled Ranjit's lepers, but his wounds were so raw and bloody, and the teeth were so smashed, that Ranjit's disfigurements seemed benign in comparison. I took the metal pieces from his eyes and his scalp and his throat. The wounds at his throat were bad, and although he was breathing fairly evenly, my guess was that his condition would worsen. After dressing his wounds, I gave both men a shot of penicillin and an ampoule of morphine.

My biggest problem was blood, and the need to replace what the wounded men had lost. Not one of the mujaheddin fighters I'd asked during the last weeks had known his own or anyone else's blood type. Thus it was impossible for me to blood-match the men, or to build up a bank of donors. Because my own blood type was +O, which is known as the universal donor type, my body was the only source of blood for transfusions, and I was the walking blood bank for the whole combat unit.

Typically, a donor provides about half a litre of blood in a session. The body holds about six litres, so the blood lost in donation amounts to less than one-tenth of the body's supply. I put a little more than half a litre into each of the wounded men, rigging up the intravenous drips that Khader had brought with him as part of his smuggled cargo. I wondered whether the equipment had come from Ranjit and his lepers as I tapped my veins and those of the wounded fighters with needles that were stored in loose containers rather than sealed packets. The transfusions took nearly 20 per cent of my blood. It was too much. I felt dizzy and faintly nauseous, unsure if they were real symptoms or simply the slithering tricks of my fear. I knew that I wouldn't be able to give more blood for some time, and the hopelessness of the situation-mine and theirs-crushed my chest with a flush and spasm of anguish.

It was dirty, frightening work, and I wasn't trained for it. The first-aid course that I'd completed as a young man had been comprehensive, but it hadn't covered combat injuries. And the work I'd done at my clinic in the slum was little help in those mountains. Beyond that, I was running on instinct-the same instinct to help and heal that had compelled me to save overdosed heroin addicts in my own city, a lifetime before. It was, of course, in great part a secret wish-like Khaled, with the vicious madman Habib-to be helped and saved and healed myself.

And though it wasn't much, and it wasn't enough, it was all I had. So I did my best, trying not to vomit or cry or show my fear, and then I washed my hands in the snow.

When Nazeer was sufficiently recovered, he insisted on burying Abdel Khader Khan with the strictest adherence to ritual. He did that before he ate a meal or even drank a glass of water. I watched as Khaled, Mahmoud, and Nazeer cleaned themselves, prayed together, and then prepared Khaderbhai's body for burial. His green-and-white standard was lost, but one of the mujaheddin provided his own flag as a shroud. On a simple white background, it carried the phrase:

La illa ha ill' _Allah There is no god but God Mahmoud Melbaaf, the Iranian who'd been with us since the Karachi taxi ride, was so tender and devoted and loving in his ministrations that my eyes went again and again to his calm, strong face as he worked and prayed. If he'd been burying his own child, he couldn't have been more gentle or clement, and it was from those moments during the burial that I began to cherish him as a friend.

I caught Nazeer's eye at the end of the ceremony, and at once I dropped my face to stare at the frozen ground beside my boots. He was in a wilderness of grieving and sorrowing shame. He'd lived to protect and serve Khader Khan. But the Khan was dead, and he was alive. Worse than that, he wasn't even wounded. His own life, the mere fact of his existence in the world, seemed like a betrayal. Every heartbeat was a new act of treachery. And that grief, and his exhaustion, took such a toll on him that he was quite seriously ill. He looked as much as ten kilos lighter. His cheeks were hollow, and there were black troughs beneath his eyes. His lips were cracked and peeling. His hands and feet worried me. I'd examined them, and I knew that the colour and warmth hadn't fully returned to them. I thought he might've suffered frostbite in his crawl through the snow.

There was, in fact, a task that did give his life purpose at that time, if not meaning, but I didn't know that then. Khaderbhai had given a last instruction, a last duty to perform, in the event of his death during the mission. He'd named a man, and ordered Nazeer to kill him. Nazeer was following that instruction even then, simply by staying alive long enough to carry out the murder. It was what sustained him, and his whole life had shrunk to that forlorn obsession. Knowing nothing of that then, as the cold days after Khader's burial became colder weeks, I worried constantly for the tough, loyal Afghan's sanity.

Khaled Ansari was changed by Khader's death in ways that were less obvious but equally profound. Where many of us were shocked into a dull, dense attention to routines, Khaled became sharper and more ener- getic. Where I often found myself adrift in stunned, heart broken, bittersweet meditations on the man we'd loved and lost, Khaled took on new jobs almost every day, and never lost his focus. As a veteran of several wars, he assumed Khaderbhai's role of adviser to the mujaheddin commander Suleiman Shahbadi. In all his deliberations, the Palestinian was intense and tireless and judicious, to the point of being solemn. They weren't new qualities for Khaled-he was ever a dour, fervent man-but there was in him, after Khader's death, a hopefulness and a will to win that I'd never seen before. And he prayed. From the day we buried the Khan, Khaled was the first to call the men to prayer, and the last to lift his knees from the frozen stone.

Suleiman Shahbadi, the most senior Afghan left in our group- there were twenty of us, including the wounded-was a former community leader, or Kandeedar, from a clutch of villages near Ghazni, two-thirds of the way to Kabul. He was fifty-two years old, and a five-year veteran of the war. He was experienced in all forms of combat, from siege to guerrilla skirmish to pitched battle. Ahmed Shah Massoud, the unofficial leader of the nation wide war to expel the Russians, had personally appointed Suleiman to set up the southern commands near Kandahar. All the men in our ethnically eclectic unit felt such awe-struck admiration for Massoud that it wasn't too strong to call it a kind of love. And because Suleiman's commission had come directly from Massoud, the Lion of the Panjsher, the men gave him an equally reverential respect.

When Nazeer was well enough to give a full report, just three days after we'd found him in the snow, Suleiman Shahbadi called a meeting. He was a short man with big hands and feet, and a sorrowful expression. Seven lines and ridges like planter's furrows creased his broad, high brow. A thickly coiled white turban covered his bald head. The dark, grey beard was trimmed around the mouth, and cut short beneath the jaw. His ears were slightly pointed-an effect that was exaggerated against the white turban-and that puckish touch combined with his wide mouth to hint at the cheeky humour that once mightVe been his. But then, on the mountain, his face was dominated by the expression in his eyes. They were the eyes of an unutterable sadness; a sadness withered and emptied of tears. It was an expression that engaged our sympathy yet prevented us from befriending him. For all that he was a wise, brave, and kindly man, that sadness was so deep in him that no man risked its touch. With four sentries at their posts around the camp, and two men wounded, there were fourteen of us gathered in the cave to hear Suleiman speak. It was extremely cold-at or below zero-and we sat together to share our warmth.

I wished that I'd been more assiduous in my study of Dari and Pashto during the long wait in Quetta. Men spoke in both languages at that meeting, and every one after it. Mahmoud Melbaaf translated the Dari into Arabic for Khaled, who transformed the Arabic into English, leaning first to his left to listen to Mahmoud, and then leaning right as he whispered to me.

It was a long, slow process, and I was amazed and humbled that the men waited patiently for every exchange to be translated for me. The popular European and American caricature of Afghans as wild, bloodthirsty men-a description that delighted Afghans themselves endlessly when they heard it-was contradicted by every direct contact I had with them. Face to face, Afghan men were generous, friendly, honest, and scrupulously courteous to me. I didn't say anything at that first meeting, or at any of those that followed, but still the men included me in every word they shared.

Nazeer's report on the attack that had killed our Khan was alarming. Khader had left the camp with twenty-six men, and all the riding and pack horses, on what should've been a safe-passage route to the village of his birth. On the second day of the march, still a full day and night from Khaderbhai's village, they were forced to stop for what they thought was a routine tribute exchange with a local clan leader.

There were hard questions asked about Habib Abdur Rahman at the meeting. In the two months since he'd left us, after killing poor, unconscious Siddiqi, Habib had instituted a one-man war of terror in what was for him a new area of operations-the Shar-i Safa mountain range. He'd tortured a Russian officer to death.

He'd dealt similar justice, as he saw it, to Afghan army men, and even mujaheddin fighters whom he judged to be less than fully committed to the cause. The horrors of those tortures had succeeded in nailing terror to everyone in the region. It was said that he was a ghost, or the Shaitaan, the Great Satan himself, come to rend men's bodies and peel the masks of their human faces back from their very skulls. What had been a relatively quiet corridor between the war zones was suddenly a turmoil of angry, terrified soldiers and other fighters, all pledged to find and kill the demon Habib.

Realising that he was in a trap designed to capture Habib, and that the men surrounding him were hostile to his cause, Khaderbhai tried to leave peacefully. He surrendered four horses as a tribute, and gathered his men. They were almost free of the enemy high ground when the first shots rattled into the little canyon. The battle raged for half an hour. When it was over, Nazeer counted eighteen bodies from Khader's column. Some of them had been killed as they lay wounded. Their throats had been cut.

Nazeer and Ahmed Zadeh had only survived because they were crushed in a tangle of bodies, of horses and men, and appeared to be dead.

One horse had survived the encounter with a serious wound. Nazeer roused the animal, and strapped Khader's dead body and Ahmed's dying one to its back. The horse trudged through the snow for a day and half a night before it crumpled, collapsed, and died almost three kilometres from our camp. Nazeer then dragged both bodies through the snow until we found him. He had no idea what had happened to the five men who were not accounted for from Khader's column. They might've escaped, he thought, or they might've been captured. One thing was certain: among the enemy dead, Nazeer had seen Afghan army uniforms and some new Russian equipment.

Suleiman and Khaled Ansari assumed that the mortar attack on our position was linked to the battle that had claimed Abdel Khader's life. They guessed that the Afghan army unit had regrouped and, perhaps following Nazeer's trail, or acting on information gouged from prisoners, they'd launched the mortar attack. Suleiman assumed that there would be more attacks, but he doubted that they would launch a full frontal assault on the position. Such an attack would cost many lives, and mightn't succeed. If Russian soldiers supported the Afghan army units, however, there might be helicopter attacks as soon as the sky was clear enough. Either way, we would lose men. Eventually, we might lose the high ground altogether.

After much discussion of the limited options open to us, Suleiman decided to launch two counter attacks with mortar units of our own. To that end, we needed reliable information about the enemy positions and their relative strength. He began to brief a fit, young Hazarbuz nomad named Jalalaad for the scouting mission, but then he froze, staring at the mouth of the cave. We all turned and gaped in surprise at the wild, ragged silhouette of a man in the oval frame of light at the opening of the cave. It was Habib. He'd slipped into the camp unseen by the sentries-an enigmatically difficult task-and he stood with us, two short steps away. I'm glad to say I wasn't the only one who reached for a weapon.

Khaled rushed forward with such a wide and heartfelt smile that I resented it, and resented Habib more for inspiring it. He brought the madman into the cave and sat him down beside the startled Suleiman. And then, with perfect calm and clarity, Habib began to speak.

He'd seen the enemy positions, he said, and he knew their strength. He'd watched the mortar attack on our camp, and then he'd crept down to their camps, so close that he'd heard them decide what to eat for lunch. He could guide us to new vantage points where we could fire mortars into their camps, and kill them. Those who didn't die outright, he wanted it understood, belonged to him. That was his price.

The men debated Habib's proposal, speaking openly in front of him. It worried some that we were putting ourselves in the hands of the very lunatic whose monstrous tortures had brought the war to our cave. It was bad luck to link ourselves to his evil, those men said; bad morals and bad luck. It worried others that we would kill so many Afghan army regulars.

One of the seemingly bizarre contradictions of the war was that Afghan met Afghan with real reluctance, and sincerely regretted every death. There was such a long history of division and conflict between the clans and ethnic divisions in Afghanistan that no man, with the exception of Habib, truly hated the Afghans who fought on the side of the Russians. Real hatred, where it existed at all, was reserved for the Afghan version of the KGB, known as the KHAD. The Afghan traitor Najibullah, who eventually seized power and appointed himself ruler of the country, headed that infamous police force for years, and was responsible for many of its unspeakable tortures. There wasn't a resistance fighter in the country who didn't dream of dragging on a rope and hoisting him into the air by his neck. The soldiers and even the officers of the Afghan army, however, were a different matter: they were kinsmen, many of them conscripts, doing what they had to do in order to survive. And for their part, the Afghan regulars often sent vital information concerning Russian troop movements or bombardments to mujaheddin fighters. In fact, the war could never be won without their secret help. And a surprise mortar attack on the two Afghan army positions, identified by Habib, would cost many Afghan lives. The long discussion ended with a decision to fight. Our situation was judged to be so perilous that we had no choice but to counter-attack and drive the enemy from the mountain.

The plan was good, and it should've worked, but like so much else in that war it brought only chaos and death. Four sentries remained to guard the camp, and I stayed behind as well to care for the wounded. The fourteen men of the strike force were divided into two teams. Khaled and Habib led the first team;

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.

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.

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.

They will kill you all. There is only one way out of here now."

Habib didn't reply. Jalalaad asked the question again, more forcefully.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

Suleiman asked.

In that way the session moved through all the themes that concerned them, until at last I excused myself and found a relatively sheltered spot where I could stare at the misty nothing of the frozen, shrouded sky. I was trying to fight down the fear that prowled in my empty belly, and leapt up with sharp claws at my heart in its cage of ribs.

Tomorrow. We were going to fight our way out. No-one had said it, but I knew that all the others were thinking we would die. They were too cheerful, too relaxed. All the tension and dread of the last weeks had drained from them once we'd made the decision to fight. It wasn't the joyful relief of men who know they're saved.

It was something else-something I'd seen in the mirror, in my cell, on the night before my desperate escape from prison, and something I'd seen in the eyes of the man who'd escaped with me. It was the exhilaration of men who were risking everything, risking life and death, on one throw of the dice. Some time on the next day we would be free, or we would be dead. The same resolution that had sent me over the front wall of a prison was sending us over the ridge, and into the enemy guns: it's better to die fighting than to die like a rat in a trap. I'd escaped from prison, and crossed the world, and crossed the years, to find myself in the company of men who felt exactly as I did about freedom and death.

And still I was afraid: afraid of being wounded, afraid of being shot in the spine and paralysed, afraid of being captured alive and tortured in another prison by yet another prison guard. It occurred to me that Karla and Khaderbhai would've had something clever to say to me about fear. And in thinking that, I realised how remote they were from the moment, and the mountain, and me. I realised that I didn't need their brilliance any more: it couldn't help me. All the cleverness in all the world couldn't stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness.

Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom. For me, on that last night before the battle, it was the sound of my mother's voice, and it was the life and death of my friend Prabaker... God give you rest, Prabaker. I still love you, and the grieving, when I think of you, is pinned to my heart and my eyes with bright and burning stars... My comfort, on that freezing ridge, was the memory of Prabaker's smiling face, and the sound of my mother's voice: Whatever you do in life, do it with courage, and you won't go far wrong...

It's inside me, and I can't shake it tonight."

It was the first time that we'd spoken more than the essential word or two since the night that Khader had left. We'd worked and slept side by side, every day and night, but I almost never met his eye, and I'd avoided conversation with him so coldly that he, too, had been silent with me.

The New York accent, with its Arabic swell, rolled over me like a warm, frothy wave, and I almost reached out to hug him. I'd missed the assurances I'd always found in the sound of that voice, and the honest suffering I saw in the scarred face. I was so glad to have his friendship again that I confused what he'd said about Khaderbhai. I thought, without really thinking at all, that he was talking about Abdullah. He wasn't, and that, too, like a hundred other chances to know all the truth in the one conversation, was lost.

He told me so, a couple different times."

Shit, for a while there, I think you even had Karla believing, too. You gotta understand, Lin. If Khader had a choice, if there was a better way to do what he had to do, he would've taken it. It all played out the way it had to. Nobody wanted to fuck you over."

We were silent for a moment, both of us reeling back through the years. I remembered Abdullah, at the sea wall near the Haji Ali Mosque, on the night that I met him with Khaderbhai. I remembered him saying that a woman had taught him the clever phrase he'd used in English. It must've been Karla. Of course it was Karla.

And I remembered the stiffness that was in Khaled's manner when I first met him, and I realised, suddenly, that he must've been hurting then, and maybe blaming me for it. I saw clearly what it must've taken for him to be as friendly and kind to me as he was at the beginning.

She's hurt bad, in all the places that count. They really fucked her up when she was a kid. She's a bit crazy. She did something, in the States, before she came to India. And that fucked her up, too."

I hesitated, partly from reluctance to surrender the little advantage I might've had over him if he believed that she did say it, and partly from loyalty to Karla-because it was her business, after all. In the end, I answered him: I had to know why he'd asked me the question.

Khader made it worse, I think."

But then she met this guy, a politician, and he fell for her pretty hard. Khader needed the guy, so he got her to work for him, and I don't think she was cut out for it."

He fell silent again. We stared at the rocks and the frosty ground, avoiding one another's eyes. A few shivering minutes passed. At last he took a deep breath and stood up, slapping at the chill in his arms and legs. I stood as well, trembling with cold and stamping my numb feet. At the last possible moment, and with an impulsive rush as if he was breaking through a tangle of vines, Khaled flung his arms around me and hugged me. The strength in his arms was fierce, but his head slowly came to rest against mine as tenderly as the lolling head of a sleeping child.

When he pulled away from me, his face was averted and I couldn't see his eyes. He walked off, and I followed more slowly, hugging my hands under my arms to fight off the cold. It was only when I was alone that I recalled what he'd said to me: I got a bad feeling, Lin. A real bad feeling...

I resolved to talk to him about it, but just at that moment Habib stepped out of a shadow beside me, and I jumped in fright.

Habib garbled something at me, speaking so quickly that I couldn't make out a single clear syllable. His eyes were starting from his head. The effect was exaggerated by the dark, heavy pouches beneath his eyes, which dragged the lower lids with them and showed too much white below the fractured, scattered wheel of the iris.

He talks to every man, tonight. He comes to me. He asks me to make it English for you, what he says. You are the last, before Khaled. He wants to speak to Khaled last."

Mahmoud asked him to repeat what he'd said to me. Habib did speak again, in exactly the same too-rapid, hyper-energetic manner, staring into my eyes as if he expected an enemy or a monstrous beast to emerge from them. I was just as steadfast in returning the stare: I'd been locked up with violent, crazy men, and I knew better than to take my eyes off him.

Mahmoud asked Habib if there was anything else that he wanted to say. Holding the stare into my eyes, Habib rattled away in Pashto and Farsi.

Mahmoud spoke, and for a few moments Habib stared harder, searching in my eyes for a recognition or response that I couldn't give him. He turned and loped away with the stooped, crouching run that I found more chilling and alarming, somehow, than the more obvious, bulging madness in his eyes.

Mahmoud laughed. It was so rare to see him laugh out loud that I felt myself smiling in response. He'd lost weight on the mission - we'd all lost weight. His face was drawn tight to the high cheekbones and the pointed chin, covered with a thick, dark beard. His eyes, even in the cold moonlight, were the polished bronze of a temple vase.

It is Abdullah. He tells me that Khader Khan wants to see me. I go to Khader, in his car. We drive together, we talk, and after, I am his man."

Mahmoud frowned, and it seemed that he might be considering the question for the first time.

He choked off the words, and rubbed a tear from each eye with the sleeve of his rough jacket.

It was a long speech, and we were freezing cold, yet still I would've asked him more. I wanted to know it all-everything that filled the gaps between what Khaderbhai had told me and the secrets Khaled had shared. But at that moment we heard a piercingly piteous scream of terror. It died suddenly, as if the thread of sound had been cut with a pair of shears. We looked at one another, and reached for weapons in the same instinct.

We reached the origin of the sound at the same time as the other men. Nazeer and Suleiman rushed through our. group to see what we were staring at. They froze, silent and still, at the sight of Khaled Ansari kneeling over the body of Habib Abdur Rahman. The madman was on his back. He was dead. There was a knife in his throat where the words about luck had been only minutes before.

The knife had been pushed into his neck and twisted, just as Habib himself had done to our horses and to Siddiqi. But it wasn't Habib's knife that we stared at, jutting out of the muddy, sinewed throat like a branch from a riverbed. We all knew the knife well. We'd all seen its distinctive, carved, horn handle a hundred times. It was Khaled's knife.

Nazeer and Suleiman put their hands under Khaled's arms, and lifted him gently from the corpse. He accepted the help momentarily, but then he shrugged them off and knelt beside the body. Habib's pattu shawl was rucked up around his chest. Khaled pulled something from the front of the dead man's flak jacket. It was metal, two pieces of metal, hanging from Habib's neck on leather thongs. Jalalaad rushed forward and snatched them. They were the souvenir fragments of the tank that he and Hanif and Juma had destroyed; the pieces that his friends had worn around their necks.

Khaled stood and turned and walked slowly away from the killing.

I put my hand on his shoulder as he passed me, and walked with him. Behind me there was a howl of rage as Jalalaad attacked Habib's corpse with the butt of his Kalashnikov. I looked over my shoulder to see the mad eyes of the lunatic crushed beneath the rise and smashing fall of the weapon. And in one of those perversities of the pitying heart, I found myself feeling sorry for Habib. I'd wanted to kill him myself, more than once, and I knew that I was glad he was dead, but my heart was so sorry for him in that moment that I grieved as if he was a friend. He was a _teacher, I heard myself thinking. The most violent and dangerous man I'd ever known had been a kindergarten teacher. I couldn't shake that thought-as if it was the only truth, in that moment, that really mattered.

And when the men finally dragged Jalalaad away, there was nothing left: nothing but blood and snow and hair and shattered bone where the life and the tortured mind had been.

Khaled returned to our cave. He was muttering something in Arabic. His eyes were radiant, filled with a vision that illuminated him, and put an almost frightening resolve in the set of his scarred features.

At the cave, he removed the belt around his waist that held his canteen. He let it slip to the ground. He lifted the cartridge belt over his head from his shoulder and let that too fall. Next he rummaged through his pockets, emptying them of their contents one by one until there was nothing on him but the clothes he wore. At his feet were his false passports, his money, his letters, his wallet, his weapons, his jewellery, and even the bruised, wrinkle-eared photos of his long-dead family.

Khaled left the cave and walked to the edge of the compound. I ran to stop him, and pushed him back with both hands. He allowed the shove, and then came on toward me again. I threw my arms around him and dragged him back a few paces. He didn't resist me.

He stared directly ahead at that infuriating vision only he could see while he chanted the hypnotically poetic verses of the Koran.

And when I let him go, he continued his walk out of the camp.

Mahmoud, Nazeer, and Suleiman came forward but, instead of helping me to restrain Khaled, they grasped my arms and gently prised them away from him. Khaled immediately began to walk forward. I wrestled myself free, and rushed to stop him again. I shouted at him and slapped at his face to waken him to the danger. He didn't resist and he didn't. react. I felt the tears hot on my cold face, stinging in the cracks that split my frozen lips. I felt the sobbing in my chest like a river rappling and rolling against worn and rounded rocks, on and on and on. I held him tight, with one arm around his neck and the other around his waist, my hands locked together at his back.

Nazeer, even as thin and weakened as he'd become in those weeks, was too strong for me. His steel hands grabbed at my wrists and peeled them away from Khaled. Mahmoud and Suleiman helped him to hold me back as I struggled and reached out to grab Khaled's jacket. And then we watched him walk from the camp into the winter that one way or another had ruined or killed us all.

I lay there for hours unsleeping, filthy starving, angry, and broken-hearted. And I might've died there-some pain, sometimes, leaves you without legs or arms-but the smell of food brought me round. The men had decided that they couldn't wait to cook the last of the rotting meat. They'd boiled it in a pot during those hours, fanning the smoke away continuously and concealing the flame with blankets.

The soup was ready long before dawn, and every man took a bowl, glass, or mug of it. The stink of the rotting meat was more than our empty stomachs could bear, at first. We all vomited the foul, retching sips we took. But hunger has a will of its own, a will that's much older than the other will we praise and flatter in the palace of the mind. We were too hungry to refuse the food, and by the third try, or the fifth for some of us, we kept the repulsive, stinking brew down. Then the pain caused by the hot soup in our empty stomachs was as sharp as a belly full of fishhooks; yet that too passed, and every man forced himself to drink three helpings, and to chew the rubbery, rotting chunks of meat.

For two hours after that we took turns to dash into the rocks as the food worked through intestines and bowels that had seized in our starving bodies, and suddenly erupted.

At last, when we recovered, and when all the prayers were said, and when each man was ready, we gathered near the south-eastern edge of the compound at the place Habib had recommended for our attack. He'd assured us that the steep slope was our one chance to fight our way to freedom; and since he'd planned to fight in the attack with us, we had no reason to distrust the advice.

We were six men. The five others were Suleiman, Mahmoud Melbaaf, Nazeer, Jalalaad, and young Ala-ud-Din. He was a shy man of twenty with a boy's grin beneath an old man's faded green eyes.

He caught my eye, and nodded encouragingly. I returned the nod with a smile, and his face broke into a wider grin while his head nodded more vigorously. I looked away, ashamed that I'd spent so much time with him, months of hard time, without once trying to engage him in a conversation. We were going to die together, and I knew nothing about him. Nothing.

Dawn put fire in the sky. Wind-driven clouds streaming across the far plain were aflame, crimsoned with the first burning kisses of the morning sun. We shook hands, embraced, hugged one another, checked our weapons again and again, and stared down the steep slopes toward forever.

The end, when it comes, is always too soon. My skin was tight on my face, drawn back by the muscles of my neck and jaw, those muscles in turn pulled taut by the shoulders and arms and frostbitten hands, clutching the final agony of the gun.

Suleiman gave the order. My stomach dropped and locked, and froze as hard as the cold unfeeling earth beneath my boots. I stood up, and crossed the lip of the ridge. We started down the slope. It was a magnificent day, the best clear day for months. I remembered thinking, weeks before, that Afghanistan, like prison, had no dawns and no sunsets in the stone cages of its mountains.

Yet the dawn that morning was more lovely than any I'd ever known. When the steeper slopes eased into a more gradual decline, we picked up the pace, jogging over the last of the rose-pink snow and into the grey-green rough ground beyond.

The first explosions we heard were too far away from us to frighten me. Okay. Here it comes. This is it... The words chattered through my mind as if someone else spoke them: as if someone, like a coach, was preparing me for the end. Then the explosions were closer, as the enemy mortars found their range.

I looked along our line, and saw that the others were running harder than I was. Only Nazeer was still beside me. I tried to run faster. My legs seemed wooden and numb: I saw them moving, running, step after step, but I couldn't feel them. It took a gigantic effort of will to send the message to my legs, and command them to greater speed. At last I stumbled into a faster run.

Two mortars exploded quite close to me. I kept running, waiting for the pain, and waiting for the killing joke. My heart was churning in my chest, and my breathing came in gasping, grunting little puffs of cold air. I couldn't see the enemy positions. The mortar's range was well over a kilometre, but I knew they had to be closer than that. And then the first shots spattered, the tun-tun-tun-tun of the AK-74s-theirs and ours. I knew they were close. They were close enough to kill us, and close enough for us to kill them.

My eyes raced ahead on the rough ground, looking for holes or boulders, trying to find the safest path. A man went down, left of me, along the line. It was Jalalaad. He was running beside Nazeer, and less than a hundred metres from me. A mortar shell exploded directly in front of him and ripped his young body into pieces. Looking down again, I jumped over rocks and boulders, and I stumbled but didn't fall. I saw Suleiman, fifty metres in front of me, clutch at his throat and then fall forward, running a few more paces doubled-up as if he was searching for something on the ground in front of him. His body crumpled and collapsed over his face, tumbling to the side. His face and throat were bloodied and broken and torn open. I tried to run around him, but the ground was rough and strewn with rocks, and I had to jump over his body as I ran.

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.

____________________

PART FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

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.

It was Nazeer who'd saved me. The mortar shell that had exploded so close to us, as we ran into the guns, ripped and ruptured the air. The shock wave burst my left eardrum. In the same deafened moment, pieces of the exploded shell passed us in a hot metal blizzard. None of the larger chunks of metal hit me, but eight small pieces of the shrapnel smashed into my legs below the knees - five in one leg, and three in the other. Two smaller pieces hit my body-one in the stomach, and one in the chest. They tore through the heavy layers of my clothing, and even pierced my thick money belt and the solid leather straps of my medic's bag, burning their way into my skin. Another chunk hit my forehead, high above the left eye.

They were tiny fragments, the largest of them about the size of Abe Lincoln's face on an American penny coin. Still, they were travelling at such a speed that they took my legs out from under me. Earth, thrown up by the explosion, peppered my face, blinding and choking me. I hit the ground hard, just managing to turn my face aside before the impact. Unfortunately, I turned the burst eardrum to the ground, and the violence of the blow rived the wound even further. I blacked out.

Nazeer, who was wounded in the legs and the arm, pulled my unconscious body into the shelter of a shallow, trench-like depression. He collapsed himself, then, covering my body with his own until the bombardment stopped. Lying there with his arms around my neck, he took a hit in the back of his right shoulder.

It was a piece of metal that would've hit me, and might've killed me, had Khader's man not protected me with his love. When all was quiet, he dragged me to safety.

The word swept us into remembrances of the shy, young Pashtun fighter. He'd seen Khaderbhai as the embodiment of all his warrior heroes, and he'd followed him everywhere, adoringly, with eyes he quickly cast down when the Khan looked his way. He'd survived smallpox as a child, and his face was severely pockmarked with dozens of small, brown, dish-like spots. His nickname, Kishmishi, used with great affection by the older fighters, meant Raisins. He'd been too shy to pose with us in the photograph, so he'd volunteered to operate the camera.

And he was not the only one."

They return the photos this morning. I thought you would like it to see them, before we leave."

I sat up on the cot bed and swung my legs over the side. When my feet hit the floor there was a pain so excruciating in my shins that I moaned aloud. Another fierce pain throbbed at my forehead.

I probed with my blunt, bandaged fingers at a wad of dressing beneath a bandage that wound round my head like a turban. A third pain in my left ear nagged for my attention. My hands were aching, and my feet, swaddled in three or more layers of socks, felt as if they were burning. There was a painful ache in my left hip, where the horse had kicked me when the jets had torn up the sky above us, months before. The wound had never properly healed, and I suspected that a bone was chipped beneath the tender flesh.

My forearm felt numb near the elbow, where my own horse had bitten me in its panic. That wound was also months old, and it too had never really healed. Doubled over, resting on my thighs, I could feel the tightness of my stomach and the leaner flesh of my legs. I was thin, after starving on the mountain. Too thin. All in all, it was a mess. I was in a bad way. Then my mind came back to the bandages on my hands, and a sensation close to panic rose like a spear in my spine.

He unwound the bulky bandages slowly, and I felt the sweat run from my eyebrows onto my cheeks. When both lots of bindings were removed, I stared at the disfigured claws that my hands had become, and I moved them, flexing the fingers. Frostbite had split my hands open at all the knuckle joints, and the bruise black wounds were hideous, but all the fingers and all the fingertips were there.

He produced the Stechkin, wrapped in a coil of cheesecloth. I tried to take it, but my hands couldn't hold the bundle.

I looked around me. We were in a large, sand-coloured tent with pallet floors and about fifteen folding cot-beds. Several men wearing Afghan clothing-loose pants, tunic shirts, and long, sleeveless vests in the same shades of pale green-moved among the beds. They were fanning the wounded men with straw fans, washing them with buckets of soapy water, or carrying away wastes through a narrow slit in the canvas door. Some of the wounded were moaning or speaking out their pain in languages I couldn't understand. The air in that Pakistani plain, after months in the snowy peaks of Afghanistan, was thick and hot and heavy. There were so many strong smells, one upon another, that my senses rejected them and concentrated on one particularly pungent aroma: the unmistakable smell of perfumed Indian basmati rice, cooking somewhere close to the tent.

I felt along the padded bandages that swathed my shins, from knees to ankles.

I laughed with him for the first time since I'd woken. The laugh sent my hands to my head in an effort to contain the throbbing pain it caused.

After the car, we moved you and Nazeer to a truck, for the road to Chaman. At Chaman, the Pakistanis, border guards, they want to take Nazeer's guns. He give them money-some of your money, from your money belt-and he keep his guns. We hide you in the blankets, with two dead men. We put them on top of you, and we show them to border guards, and tell that we want to give good Muslim burial for these men. Then we come into Quetta, to this hospital, and again they want to take Nazeer's guns. Again he give them money. They want to cut your fingers, because of the smell..."

I put my hands to my nose, and sniffed at them. There was a rotten, death-foetid smell to them still. It was faint, but clear enough to remind me of the rotting goat's feet we'd eaten as our last supper on the mountain. My stomach churned, arching like a fighting cat. Mahmoud quickly reached for a metal dish and thrust it under my face. I vomited, spitting black-green bile into the bowl, and fell forward helplessly onto my knees.

When the nausea attack passed, I sat back on the cot and snatched gratefully at the cigarette Mahmoud lit for me. "Go on." I stuttered.

The Afghans, they don't like the Pakistan police. They have big trouble with Pakistan police. Everybody has trouble with Pakistan police. So they give a permission to me, and I take Nazeer's guns when he sleep. And I look after him. And I look after you. Wait- I think our friends are here!"

The long flaps of the tent's doorway opened all the way back, stunning us with the yellow light of a warm day. Four men entered. They were Afghans, veteran fighters; hard men, with eyes that stared at me as if they were looking along the decorated barrel of a jezail rifle. Mahmoud rose to greet them, and whispered a few words. Two of the men woke Nazeer. He'd been in a deep sleep, and spun round at the first touch, grasping at the men and ready to fight. Reassured by their gentle expressions, he then turned his head to check on me. Seeing me awake and sitting up, he grinned so broadly that it was a little alarming in a face so seldom struck with a smile.

The two men helped him to his feet. There was a wad of bandage strapped to his right thigh. Supporting himself on their shoulders, he limped out into the sunlight. The other men helped me to my feet. I tried to walk, but my wounded shins refused to obey me, and the best I could manage was a tottering shuffle.

After a few seconds of that embarrassingly feeble scuffling, the men formed a chair with their arms and swept me up effortlessly between them.

For the next six weeks, that was the pattern of our recovery: a few days, perhaps as long as a week, in one location before an abrupt shift to a new tent or slum hut or hidden room. The Pakistan secret service, the ISI, had a malign interest in every foreigner who entered Afghanistan without their sanction during the war.

The problem for Mahmoud Melbaaf, who was our guardian in those vulnerable weeks, was the fascination our story held for the refugees and exiles who harboured us. I'd darkened my blonde hair, and I wore sunglasses almost all the time. But, no matter how careful and secretive we were in the slums and camps where we stayed, there was always someone who knew who I was. The temptation to talk about the American gunrunner who was wounded in battle, fighting with the mujaheddin, was irresistible. Talk like that would've been enough to pique the curiosity of any intelligence agent from any agency. And had the secret police found me, they would've discovered that the American was in fact an escaped convict from Australia. That would've meant promotions for some, and a special thrill for the torturers who would get to work on me before they handed me over to the Australian authorities. So we moved often and we moved quickly, and we spoke to none but the few we trusted with our wounded lives.

Little by little, the details emerged: the more complete story of the battle we'd run into, and our rescue after it. The Russian and Afghan soldiers who'd surrounded our mountain comprised the best part of a company and, as such, were probably led by a captain. Their sole purpose in operating among the Shar-i-Safa Mountains was to catch and kill Habib Abdur Rahman. A huge reward had been posted for his arrest, but the terror and the horror that his atrocities had forced into their minds made the hunt for him a much more personal operation for the searchers. So mesmerised were they by his savage hatred, and so obsessed were they with his capture, that they failed to detect the stealthy advance of Ahmed Shah Massoud's forces. When we made our break for freedom, acting on Habib's information that most of the Russians and the Afghans were busy laying mines and other traps on the far side of the mountain, the startled sentries in the deserted enemy camp had opened fire. They'd thought, perhaps, that Habib himself was coming for them, because their fire was wild and undisciplined. That action had precipitated the attack that was being planned by Massoud's mujaheddin, who must've seen the firing as a pre-emptive strike by the Russians. The explosions I'd seen and heard as I ran toward the enemy-they blew up their own mortar shells, the idiots- were actually direct hits on the Russian positions by Massoud's mortars. The wider mortar strikes that tore into our line were mere accidents: friendly fire, as they say.

And that was the elated moment I'd called glorious, in my mind, as I ran into the guns: that stupid waste of lives, that friendly fire. There wasn't any glory in it. There never is. There's only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one.

Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun.

When we fell, Massoud's men pursued the fleeing enemy all the way around the mountain and into the returning company of minelayers.

The battle that followed was a massacre. Not one man of the force sent to catch and kill Habib Abdur Rahman survived. He would've liked that, the madman, had he been alive to hear it. I know exactly how he would've grinned, with his wide mouth gaping soundless and his grief-crazed eyes bulging on swollen hatreds.

All that cold day, and into the sudden evening, Nazeer and I had remained on the battleground. As we shivered in the swiftly falling shadows of sunset, the mujaheddin and the survivors from our own unit returned from the fighting to find us. Mahmoud and Ala-ud-Din brought the dead-Suleiman and Jalalaad-from the barren mountain.

Massoud's men had combined with independent Achakzai fighters to claim the Chaman highway from the Pass all the way to the Russian defensive perimeter of besieged Kandahar, less than fifty kilometres from the city. The evacuation to Chaman, and through the Pass to Pakistan, was rapid and without incident. We rode in a truck, carrying our dead friends with us, and reached the checkpoint in hours-the journey that had taken us a month of mountains on Khader's horses.

Nazeer healed rapidly and began to regain weight. The wounds in his arm and the back of his shoulder closed over well, and gave him little trouble. But the larger and deeper wound to his right thigh seemed to have damaged the ligamentary relationship between muscle, bone, and tendons, from his hip to his knee. The upper leg was stiff, and he still walked with a limp as he swung his right step around the hip, instead of through it.

His spirits were relatively high, however, and he was anxious to return to Bombay-so anxious, in fact, that his fretting attention to my slower recovery became irritating. I snapped at him a couple of times when his solicitous urging-You better? You come now? We go now?-became unendurably annoying. I didn't know then that he had a mission, Khader's last mission, waiting for him in Bombay. The mission was all that held his grief and his shame at surviving Abdel Khader in check. And every day, as our health improved, the obligations of Khader's last command to him grew more suffocating; and his dereliction, as he saw it, more profane.

I had preoccupations of my own. The wounds on my legs were healing readily enough, and the skin on my forehead closed safely over a small, lumpy ridge of bone, but my ruptured eardrum became infected, and it was the source of a constant and almost unbearable pain. Every mouthful of food, every sip of water, every word I spoke, and every loud noise that I heard sent piercing little scorpion stings along the nerves of my face and throat, and deep into my fevered brain. Every movement of my body, or turn of the head, stabbed into that sweating excruciation. Every inward breath, and sneeze or cough, magnified the torment. Shifting accidentally in my sleep and bumping the damaged ear sent me starting up from the cot with a shout that woke every man for fifty metres around.

And then, after three weeks of that maddening, torturous pain and massive, self-medicated doses of penicillin and hot antibiotic washes, the wound healed and the pain receded from me just as memories do, like landmarks on a distant, foggy shore.

My hands healed around the deadened tissue on the knuckle joints.

Truly frozen tissue never really heals, of course, and the injury was one of many that settled in my flesh in those exile years. I took the suffering from Khader's mountain into my hands, and every cold day sends me back there with my hands aching, just as they did when I clutched at the gun before the battle.

Nevertheless, in the warmer air of Pakistan my fingers flexed and moved and obeyed me. My hands were ready for the work I had waiting; the little matter of revenge in Bombay. Although my body was thinner after the ordeal, it was harder and tougher than it had been all those plump months before, when we'd first set out for Khader's war.

Nazeer and Mahmoud organised our return trip by a series of connecting trains. They'd acquired a small arsenal of weapons in Pakistan, and were intent on smuggling them into Bombay. They concealed the guns in bales of fabric, and shipped them in the care of three Afghans who were fluent in Hindi. We rode in different carriages, and never acknowledged the men, but the illicit cargo was always on our minds. The irony of it-we'd set off to smuggle guns into Afghanistan, and we were returning to smuggle guns into Bombay- made me laugh, when it occurred to me, as I sat in my first-class carriage. But the laughter was bitter, and the expression it left on my face turned the eyes of my fellow passengers away.

It took us a little over two days to get back to Bombay. I was travelling on my false British book, the one I'd used to enter Pakistan. According to the entries in the book, I'd overstayed on my visa. Using the little smiling charm I could muster and the last of the money Khader had paid me, the last American dollars, I bribed the officials on both the Pakistani and Indian sides of the border without raising so much as the flicker of an eye. And an hour after dawn, eight months after we left her, we walked into the deep heat and frantic, toiling fervency of my beloved Bombay.

From a discreet distance, Nazeer and Mahmoud Melbaaf supervised the unloading and transport of their military cargo. Promising Nazeer that I would meet up with him that night at Leopold's, I left them at the station.

I took a cab. I felt drunk on the sound and colour and gorgeous flowing kinesis of the island city. But I had to concentrate. I was almost out of money. I directed the driver to the black market currency-collection centre in the Fort area. With the taxi waiting below, I ran up the three narrow wooden flights to the counting room. A memory of Khaled wrung out my heart-I used to run up these stairs with Khaled, with Khaled, with Khaled-and I clenched my jaw against it, just as I bit down on the pain in my wounded shins. The two big men, loitering with intent on the landing outside the room, recognised me. We shook hands, all of us smiling widely.

I looked into his tough young face. His name was Amir. I knew him to be brave and reliable and devoted to the Khan. For the blink of an eye it seemed, incredibly, that he was making a joke about Khader's death, and I felt a quick, angry impulse to stiffen him.

Then I realised that he simply didn't know. How is that possible?

Why don't they know! Instinct told me not to answer his question.

I held my eyes and my mouth in a hard, impassive little smile, and brushed past him to knock at the door. A short, fat, balding man in a white singlet and dhoti opened the door and thrust out his hands at once in a double handshake. It was Rajubhai, controller of the currency collections for Abdel Khader Khan's mafia council. He pulled me into the room, and closed the door. The counting room was the core of his personal and business universe, and he spent twenty out of every twenty four hours there. The thin, faded, pink-white cord across his shoulder, under his singlet, declared that he was a devout Hindu, one of many who worked within Abdel Khader's largely Muslim empire.

I struggled to keep the surprise from my face. Rajubhai was a senior man. He held a seat at the council meetings. If he didn't know that Khader was dead, then nobody in the city would know.

And if Khader's death was still a secret, then Mahmoud and Nazeer must've insisted on the suppression of the news. They hadn't said anything to me about it. I couldn't understand it. Whatever their reasons, I decided to support them and to keep my silence on the matter.

It wasn't an answer to his question, and his eyes narrowed on the word.

Three thousand rupees was a considerable sum to the street runners, or in the slums, but it was a trifling amount in the context of the black-market currency trade. Rajubhai's office collected a hundred times that much and more every day, and he'd often paid me sixty thousand rupees at a time as my wage and my share of commissions.

Rajubhai turned his head and gestured, with a twitch of his eyebrows, to one of his clerks. The man handed over three thousand rupees in used but clean hundred-rupee notes. Riffling the small bundle first, from habit, as a double check, Rajubhai handed the notes across. I peeled off two notes to put in my shirt pocket, and pushed the rest inside a deeper pocket in my long vest.

I took the steps two at a time on the way down to the cab, feeling the shock of each jump shudder into my shins. The driver swung out into the traffic at once, and I directed him to a clothing shop that I knew on the Colaba Causeway. One of the sybaritic splendours of Bombay is the limitless variety of relatively inexpensive, well-made clothes constantly changing to reflect the newest Indian and foreign trends. In the refugee camp, Mahmoud Melbaaf had given me a long, blue-serge vest, a white shirt, and coarse brown trousers. The clothes had served for the trip from Quetta, but in Bombay they were too hot and too strange: they drew curious attention to me when I needed the camouflage of current fashion. I chose a pair of black jeans with strong, deep pockets, a new pair of joggers to replace my ruined boots, and a loose, white silk shirt to wear over the jeans. I changed in the dressing room, sliding my knife in its scabbard under the belt of my jeans and concealing it with the shirt.

While waiting at the cashier's desk, I caught sight of myself unexpectedly in an angled mirror that showed my face in three quarter profile. It was a face so hard and unfamiliar that it startled me to recognise it as my own. I remembered the photograph taken by shy Kishmishi, and looked again into the mirror. There was a cold impassiveness in my face-and a determination, perhaps-which hadn't even begun to gleam in the eyes that had stared so confidently into the lens of Khaled's camera. I snatched up my sunglasses and put them on. Have I changed so much? I hoped that a hot shower, and shaving off my thick beard, would soften some of the hard edges. But the real hardness was inside me, and I wasn't sure if it was simply tough and tenacious or if it was something much more cruel.

The cab driver followed my instructions and pulled up near the entrance to Leopold's. I paid him, and stood on the busy Causeway for a minute, staring at the wide doorway of the restaurant where my fated connection to Karla and Khaderbhai had really begun. Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future. People knew that once, deep within the ur-mind, the ur-imagination. You can still find those who decorate doorways, and reverently salute them, in every culture, from Ireland to Japan. I stepped up one, two steps, and reached out with my right hand to touch the doorjamb and then touch my chest, over the heart, in a salaam to fate and a homage to the dead friends and enemies who entered with me.

Didier Levy was sitting in his usual chair, commanding a view of the patrons and of the busy street beyond. He was talking to Kavita Singh. Her eyes were averted, but he looked up and saw me as I approached the table. Our eyes met and held for a second, each of us reading the other's shifting expressions like diviners finding meanings in the magic of scattered bones.

There was a little more grey, I thought, in the mop of dark curls that brushed the collar of his jacket. The pale blue eyes were a little more tired, a little more bloodshot. Yet the wicked, leering mischief still arched his eyebrow, and the playful sneer I knew so well, and loved, was still there, curling his upper lip. He was the same man, in the same city, and it was good to be home.

She was beautiful. Her thick, dark brown hair was tousled and awry. Her back was straight. Her eyes were clear. And, as she held me, the casual, friendly touch of her fingers on my neck seemed like such a tender ravishment-after the blood and snow of Afghanistan-that I can still feel it, through all the years since.

The disappointment in his eyes moderated my tone, if not my mood.

She walked out with my eyes on her, and when the drinks arrived Didier insisted that I sit down with him at last.

So we sat, and he raised his glass immediately to toast with mine.

I raised my glass in turn, clinked it against his, and threw back the double.

I stared back at him in silence, secretly delighted to be back in the company of someone who knew me well enough to read between the frown lines.

I helped them bury him. He's dead. They're all dead. We're the only ones left from here-Nazeer, Mahmoud, and me."

Didier was ashen-faced, and the grey seemed to move even into his eyes. Stricken by the news-he looked as though someone had struck him hard on the face-he slumped in his chair and his jaw fell open. He began to slip sideways in the chair, and I was afraid that he would fall to the floor or even suffer a stroke.

His weary eyes drifted up to meet mine.

He dropped his gaze again, and lapsed into a reverie so rich in thought and feeling that his head twitched and his lower lip trembled in the turbulence of it. I was worried. I'd seen men go under before. In prison, I'd watched men succumb, fragmented by fear and shame, and then slaughtered by solitude. But that was a process: it took weeks, months, or years. Didier's collapse was the work of seconds, and I was watching him crumple and fade from one heartbeat to the next.

I moved around the table and sat beside him, pulling him close to me with an arm around his shoulder.

I left my bike, my Enfield, with you. I left my passports and my money and some other stuff. Do you remember? It's very important.

I need that stuff, Didier. Do you remember?"

He blinked, and turned his head to look at me, his upper lip curling in the familiar sneer.

At Didier's apartment I shaved, showered, and changed into the new clothes. Didier insisted that I eat something. He cooked an omelette while I went through the two boxes of my belongings to find my stash of money-about nine thousand American dollars-the keys to my bike, and my best false passport. It was a Canadian book, with my photo and details inserted in it. The false tourist visa had expired. I had to renew it quickly. If anything went wrong in what I planned to do, I would need plenty of money and a good, clean book.

She is finished, Lin."

I moved to the door of his apartment, and he ran to join me. It was the fastest I'd ever seen him move, and I smiled at the strangeness of it.

But there's too much that's-I don't know-tied up in it, I guess."

I couldn't explain it to him. It was more than just revenge-I knew that-but the web of connections between Zhou, Khaderbhai, Karla, and me was so sticky with shame and secrets and betrayals that I couldn't bring myself to face it clearly or talk about it to my friend. "Bien," he sighed, reading the determination in my face. "If you must go to her, then I will come with you."

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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Didier Levy was the worst pillion passenger I've ever known. He held on to me so tightly, and with such rigid tensity, that it was difficult to steer the bike. He howled as we approached cars, and shrieked when we sped up to pass them. On critical, sweeping turns he wriggled in terror, trying to straighten the bike from its necessary lean into the curve. Every time I stopped the bike at a traffic signal, he put both feet down to the ground to stretch his legs and moan about the cramps in his hips. Every time I accelerated away, he dragged his feet on the road and fidgeted for several seconds until he found the footrests. And when taxis or other cars ventured too close to us, he kicked out at them or waved his fist in frantic outrage. By the time we reached our destination, I calculated that the danger faced during a thirty-minute ride in fast traffic with Didier was roughly equivalent to a month under fire in Afghanistan.

I pulled up outside the factory run by my Sri Lankan friends Villu and Krishna. Something was wrong. The signs outside had changed, and the double front doors were wide open. I went up the steps and leaned inside to see that the passport workshop was gone, replaced by an assembly line producing garlands of flowers.

Minutes later I left him with the bike near the entrance to Abdul Ghani's mansion. The watchman at the street door recognised me, and snapped his hand up in a theatrical salute. I put a twenty rupee note in his other hand as he opened the door, and I stepped into the cool, shadowed foyer to be greeted by two servants. They knew me well, and led me upstairs with wide, friendly smiles and a little mime-show of comments on the length of my hair and the weight I'd lost. One of the men knocked on the door of Abdul Ghani's large study, and waited with his ear to the door.

The servant entered, closing the door behind him, and returned a few moments later. He wagged his head at me and opened the door wide. I walked inside, and the door closed. Brilliant sunshine blazed at the high, arched windows. Shadows reached in spikes and claws across the polished floor. Abdul was sitting in a wing chair that faced the window, and only his plump hands were visible, steepled together like sausages in a butcher's window.

I was shocked to see how the months, the nine months since I'd seen him, had aged Khader's old friend. The thick hair was grey to white, and his eyebrows were frosted with silver. The fine nose was pinched by deep lines that swept past the curve of his mouth to a sagging jaw. His lips, once the most sumptuously sensual I'd seen in Bombay, were as split and cracked as Nazeer's had been in the snow mountains. The pouches beneath his eyes drooped past the peak of his cheekbones and reminded me, with a shiver, of those that had dragged down the eyes of the madman Habib. And the eyes-the laughing, golden, amber eyes-were dull, and drained of the soaring joys and vain deceits that once had shone in his passionate life.

Abdul clutched at his chest and sobbed like a child, mewling and moaning incoherently as the tears rolled fat and freely from his large eyes. After a few moments he recovered, and looked up at me.

The sobbing spilled over again, and he plunged his face into his fleshy hands. I watched him uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or say. Since the moment that I'd cradled Khader's body in my arms on the snowy slope of the mountain, I'd refused to face the fact of his death. And I was still angry with Khader Khan. So long as I held that anger before me like a shield, loving Khader and grieving for him were deep and distant wonders of my heart.

So long as I was angry, I could fight off the tears and miserable longing that made Ghani so wretched. So long as I was angry, I could concentrate on the job at hand-information about Krishna, Villu, and the passport workshop. I was on the point of asking him about them when he spoke again.

You might think we could afford it. The sum is not so great, after all. But you're wrong. There is no organisation that can support such an insane hero curse as Khader's. And I couldn't change his mind. I couldn't save him. The money didn't mean anything to him, don't you see? You can't reason with a man who has no sense of money and its... its value. It's the one thing all civilised men have in common, don't you agree? If money doesn't mean anything, there is no civilisation. There is nothing."

He trailed off into indecipherable mumbles. Tears rolled into the little rivers they found on his cheeks, and dropped through the yellow light into his lap.

We rebuilt the cellar, and fitted it out. There is a trapdoor in the kitchen floor. Iqbal will show you the way. The boys are working there now."

I went down through the house to the kitchen and lifted the heavy trapdoor. A dozen steps led into the floodlit cellar. Krishna and Villu greeted me happily, and went to work on my passport immediately. Few things excited them more than a counterfeiting challenge, and they chattered in a spirited little argument before agreeing on the best approach.

While they worked, I examined Ghani's new workshop. It was a large space-much larger than the basement of Abdul Ghani's mansion alone. I walked some thirty to fifty metres past light tables, printing machines, photocopiers, and storage cupboards. I guessed that the basement extended beneath the next large house in the street beside Ghani's. It seemed likely that they'd bought the house next door, and connected the two cellars. If that were so, I assumed, there would be another exit, leading into the neighbouring house. I was searching for it when Krishna called to tell me that my rush-jobs visa was ready. Intrigued by the new set-up beneath the houses, I promised myself that as soon as possible I would return and inspect the workshop thoroughly.

We found a narrow lane that gave access to the rear of the buildings in the street. In contrast to the proud, clean, main street, the access lane was filthy. We stepped carefully between rank, scum-covered pools of black liquid, and skirted piles of oily, unidentifiable debris. I glanced at Didier, knowing from his wretched grimace that he was calculating how many drinks it would take to rid himself of the stench that filled his nostrils.

The walls and fences on either side of the lane were made of stone, brick, and cement, patched together over many decades, and swarming with a wormy writhe of plants, mosses, and creepers.

Counting back from the corner, building by building, we found the rear of the Palace and pressed on a short wooden gate, set into a high stone wall. The gate opened at the touch, and we stepped into a spacious rear courtyard that must've been a luxurious and beautiful retreat before the mob had attacked it. Heavy clay pots had been toppled and shattered, their burdens of earth and flowers spilled in muddy confusion. Garden furniture had been smashed to kindling. Even the paving tiles were cracked in many places, as if they'd been struck with hammers.

We found a blackened door that led into the house. It was unlocked, and swung inward with a rusty creak of complaint.

I stepped inside. The door swung shut behind me, and I wished that I'd thought to bring a torch. It was dark, and the floor was treacherously cluttered with broken dishes, pots, pans, and other vessels strewn amid the black lumps of furniture and fallen beams. I picked my way slowly through the ground-floor kitchen and on into a long corridor that led toward the front of the big house. I passed several rooms that were burned. In one of them, the fire had been so fierce that the floor was missing, and the charred bearers showed through the gaps like the ribs of some great animal's remains.

Near the front of the house I found the stairway that I'd taken, years before, when I'd come there with Karla to save Lisa Carter.

The Compton wallpaper, once so rich in colour and texture, was scorched and peeling from the blistered walls. The stairway itself was carbonised, its carpet scorched to stringy clumps of ash. I climbed up slowly, testing each step before pressing down with my full weight. One step collapsed beneath me when I was halfway to the top, and I scrambled upward more quickly to the landing on the first floor.

On the upper level I had to pause while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few moments I could make out the gaps in the floor, and I began to inch my way around them. The fire had incinerated some parts of the house, leaving holes and blackened stumps, while sparing other parts of the house altogether. Those pristine sections were so clean, and so precisely as I remembered them, that they heightened the eerie strangeness of the place. I felt as if I was moving between the past, before the fire, and the ruined present: as if my own memories were creating those grandiose, unconsumed zones in the house.

Some way along that wide passage on the upper level my foot plunged through a papery section of floor, and in my hard reaction I drove backward into the wall behind me. The wall itself collapsed and I found myself falling, in a clumsy stumble, flaying out with my hands to find something solid to cling to amid the crumbling rubble. I landed with a thump, much more quickly than I expected, and realised at once that I was inside one of Madame Zhou's secret corridors. The wall I'd fallen through appeared to be as solid as all the others, but it was merely a plywood screen papered over with her ubiquitous Compton pattern.

I stood up and brushed myself off in a very narrow, low corridor that snaked ahead, following the shapes and corners of the rooms it circumscribed. Metal grates were set into the walls of the rooms that the secret corridor passed. Some of them were low, near the floor, and others were higher. Beneath the higher metal grates were boxed steps. From the lowest of those steps I looked into a room through the heart-shaped gaps in the metal grille. I could see the whole room beyond: the cracked mirror on the wall, the burned and collapsed bed, and the rusted metal nightstand beside it.

There were several steps above the one on which I stood, and I imagined her, Madame Zhou, crouched there on the topmost step and breathing silently while she watched, and watched.

The corridor wound through several turns, and I lost my bearings, unsure in the enshrouding darkness if I faced the front of the house or the rear. At one point the secret corridor inclined sharply. I climbed upward until the higher metal grilles disappeared, and I stumbled in the dark upon a flight of steps.

Feeling my way upward, I encountered a door. It was a small, paneled wooden door-so small and perfectly proportioned that it mightVe been furnished for a child's playhouse. I tried the doorknob. It turned easily in my hand. I pushed it open, and shrank back immediately at the inward rush of light from beyond.

I stepped into an attic room lit by a row of four stained-glass dormer windows that peaked like little chapels and reached out over the external roof of the house. The fire had reached the room, but it had failed to destroy it. The walls were darkened, splashed with streaky burn-shadows, and the floor was holed in places to reveal a deep sandwich layer between it and the ceiling of the room below. Parts of the long room, however, were quite solid and untouched by the flames. In those islands of exotically carpeted floor and unblemished wall-space, furniture still stood intact and unmarked. And in the stiff, enwrapping arms of a throne-like chair, her face twisted in a manic stare, was Madame Zhou.

As I approached her I realised that the malevolent stare wasn't directed at me. She was staring with hatred and spite at some point in the past, some place or person or event that held her mind as firmly as a chain holds a dancing bear. Her face was made up with a thick smear and powdering of cosmetics. It was a mask- more tragic, for all its deluded exaggerations, than grotesque.

The painted mouth was bigger than her own lips. The scrawled eyebrows were larger than the real ones. The daubed cheeks were higher than the bones beneath them. When I stood near enough, I saw that there was a trickle of drool dripping, dripping, from the corner of her mouth into her lap. The smell of alcohol, undiluted gin, wreathed her and coiled into other smells, more foul and sickening. Her hair was almost concealed by a wig. The thick coils of the black, pompadour wig hung slightly askew, revealing the short, sparse grey hair beneath. She was dressed in a green silk cheongsam. The neck of the dress covered her throat almost to her chin. Her legs were folded, with her feet resting on the seat of the chair beside her. They were tiny feet-the size of a small child's feet-enclosed in soft, silk slippers.

Her hands, as limp and expressionless as her slack mouth, lay in her lap like things washed up on a deserted shore.

It was impossible for me to tell her age or her nationality. She might've been Spanish. She might've been Russian. She might've been Indian, in part, or Chinese, or even Greek. And Karla was right-she had been beautiful once. It was the kind of beauty that grows from the sum of its parts rather than from any one outstanding feature: a beauty that strikes the eye rather than the heart, and a beauty that sours if it isn't nourished by some goodness from within. And she wasn't beautiful then, in that moment. She was ugly. And Didier was right, too: she was beaten and broken and finished. She was floating on the black lake, and soon the dark water would drag her under. There was a deep silence where her mind used to be, and a blank, uncraving emptiness where once her cruel and scheming life had ruled.

Standing there, invisible to her, I was astonished and bewildered to realise that I felt not angry or vengeful, but ashamed. I felt ashamed that I'd filled my heart with revenge. The part of me that had wanted to-What? Had I really wanted to kill her?-was the very part that was like her. I looked at her, and I knew that I was looking at myself, my own future, my destiny, if I couldn't rid my heart of its vindictiveness.

And I knew, as well, that the revenge I'd fed myself with and planned through the weeks of my recuperation in Pakistan was not merely hers, not only hers. I was striking out at myself, and at a guilt I could only face in that moment of shame as I looked at her. It was the guilt I felt for Khader's death. I was his American-his guarantee against the warlords and pirates. If I'd been with him, as I was supposed to be, when he'd tried to take the horses to his village, the enemy might not have fired on him.

It was foolish and, like most guilt, it only told one half of the story. There were Russian uniforms and weapons on some of the dead around Khader's body: Nazeer had told me that. My being there probably wouldn't have changed a thing. They would've captured me or killed me, and the result for Khader would've been the same. But reason didn't play a big part in the guilt I'd felt, deep in my heart, since the moment I'd seen his dead face beneath its shroud of snow. Once I'd faced it, I couldn't shake the shame. And somehow, the blame and repining sorrow changed me. I felt the vengeful stone fall from the hating hand that had wanted to throw it. I felt light, as if light itself filled me and lifted me up.

And I felt free-free enough to pity Madame Zhou, and even to forgive her. And then I heard the scream.

A heart-piercing shriek, as shrill as a wild pig's, pulled me round just in time to see Rajan, Madame Zhou's eunuch servant, running at me at full speed. Caught off balance by the charge, I stumbled backward with his arms wrapped around my chest, and we crashed into and then through one of the attic windows. I was leaning out backwards, looking up under blue sky at the crazed servant and the eaves of the house behind his head. I felt the unmistakable cold trickle of blood on the top and the back of my head where the broken glass had made deep cuts. More glass fell in jagged shards as we wrestled in the smashed window, and I shook my head from side to side to save my eyes. Rajan clung to me and drove forward with his feet in a weird, running shuffle that gained him no space at all. It took me a moment to understand that he was trying to push me out through the window- to push us both out, into the big fall. And it was working. I felt my feet beginning to lift off the floor under the pressure of his effort, and I slipped further out through the little steeple of the dormer window.

Growling with fury and desperation, I clutched at the window frame and dragged us back into the attic with all my strength.

Rajan fell backward, and scrambled to his feet with astonishing speed to run shrieking at me again. There was no way to step around his quick charge, so we closed again in a murderous grapple. His hands locked on my throat. My left hand clawed at his face, looking for the eye. His long, curved fingernails were sharp, and they pierced the skin of my neck. Shouting from the pain, I found his ear with the fingers of my left hand, and used it to pull his head close enough to punch with my right. I hammered my fist into his face, six, seven, eight times until he wrenched free from me, tearing the ear half away from his head.

He fell back a step and stood there, panting heavily and glaring at me with a hatred that was beyond reason or fear. His face was bloody. His lips were split into a broken tooth, and the skin over one eye, where the eyebrow had been shaved off, had opened up in an ugly cut. His bald head was cut and bleeding where he'd crashed through the glass. The blood was in one eye, and I guessed that his nose was broken. He should've quit. He had to quit. He didn't.

Shrieking, shrill and weird, he ran at me. I sidestepped and slammed a hard, short right hand into the side of his head, but he reached out with his clawed hand as he fell, and clutched at my trousers. His momentum pulled us both down and then he scrambled, crab-like, to cover me, reaching out for my neck. Once more the claws bit into my shoulder and my throat.

He was lean, but he was strong and tall. I'd lost so much weight in Khader's war that we were evenly matched for strength. I rolled once, twice, but couldn't shake him. His head was tucked in close to mine, and I couldn't punch at him. I felt his mouth and his teeth against my neck. He was straining forward, butting heads with me and biting. His long, sharp claws punctured my throat to the stubs of his fingers.

I reached down and found my knife. I pulled it out and around, and rammed it into his body. The blade went into his thigh, high up near the hip. He raised his head in a howl of pain, and I stabbed him in the neck, close to the shoulder. The knife went in through the front and deep into the shoulder, crunching an edge of bone and gristle on the way. He scrabbled at his throat, and rolled away from me until his body met the wall. He was beaten.

There was no fight left in him. It was over. And then I heard the scream.

I jerked my head around to see Rajan creeping out of the gap between the broken floor and the ceiling of the room below. It was the same man, or so it seemed, but whole and unharmed: the same bald head, shaved eyebrows, decorated eyes, and clawed fingernails painted as green as a grass snake. I swung round quickly to see that Rajan was still there, curled in a moaning heap against the wall. It's a twin, I thought stupidly. There's two of them. Why didn't anyone tell me? And I turned again, just as the screeching twin rushed at me. The second one had a knife in his hand.

He held the thin, curved blade like a sword, sweeping it in a vicious arc as he ran. I allowed his frenzied sweep to pass and then stepped in close, jabbing downward with my own knife. It cut his arm and shoulder, but he was still free to move. His knife slashed backward toward me. He was fast-fast enough to cut my forearm. Blood ran quickly from the wound, and rage pulled me into him with my right fist punching and jabbing with the knife. Then a sudden black, blood tasting pain crashed into the back of my head, and I knew I'd been hit from behind. I scrambled past the twin, and twisted round to see wounded Rajan, his shirt painted on his skin with his own blood. There was a lump of wood in his hand. My head was ringing with the force of the blow he'd struck. Blood was running from wounds on my head, my neck, my shoulder, and the soft inside of my forearm. The twins began wailing again, and I knew they were about to make a new charge. A tiny seed of doubt ripened and burst open in my mind for the first time since the bizarre contest had begun: I might not win this...

I grinned at them, shaping up for their charge with my fists high and my left foot forward. Okay, I thought. Let's go. Let's finish it. They ran at me, keening that high-pitched scream again. The one with the lump of wood, Rajan, swung it at me. I raised my left arm to block the blow. It came down hard on my shoulder, but I rammed my right fist into his face and he fell backward, his knees folding before he hit the floor. His brother slashed at my face with the knife. I ducked and weaved, but the knife cut my head at the back, above the neck. I came up under his guard and jammed my knife into his shoulder, all the way to the crank. I'd aimed for his chest, but it was still a useful wound because his arm below the knife went as limp as seaweed, and he screeched away from me in panic.

Years of anger broke through: all the prison-anger I'd buried in the shallow grave of my resentful self-control. The blood running down my face from the cuts and gashes on my head was liquid anger, thick and red and spilling from my mind. A furious strength ripped the muscles of my arms, shoulders, and back. I looked from Rajan and his twin to the imbecile in the chair. Kill them all, I thought, dragging the air in through clenched teeth, and growling it out again. I'll kill them all.

I heard someone calling me, calling me, calling me back from the edge of the abyss into which Habib, and all those like him, had plunged.

I heard the sound of his footsteps, and I heard him curse as he stumbled in the dark. He pushed open the little door and stooped to enter the room. There was a gun in his hand, and I was glad to see him. I watched his face as he quickly took in the scene-the blood on my face and arms, the blood on the bodies of the twins, the drooling figure in the chair. I saw his shocked surprise harden and settle into the grim, angry line of his mouth. Then he heard the scream.

Rajan's brother, the one with the knife, let out that blood numbing waul and ran at Didier, who swung his pistol round without hesitation and shot the man in the groin, near the hip.

He crumpled and flung himself sideways, yowling sobs of pain as he rolled on the floor, doubled over his bleeding wound. Rajan limped to the throne-like chair and draped his body in front of Madame Zhou, shielding her with his bare chest. He stared his hatred into Didier's eyes, and we knew that he was willing to take a bullet to protect her. Didier took a step towards him, and levelled the pistol at Rajan's heart. The Frenchman's face was set in a severe frown, but his pale eyes were calm, and gleaming with his cool and absolute dominion. That was the real man, the steel blade within the shabby, rusting scabbard. Didier Levy: one of the most capable and dangerous men in Bombay.

I reached out to cover the gun in Didier's hand. Rajan flinched and flexed. His twin, crying out in pain, began to drag himself away from us along the edge of the wall. Then I slowly pushed Didier's hand downward until the gun was at his side. Rajan met my eyes. I saw the surprise and fear in his black eyes soften into relief. He held the stare a moment longer and then limped to his brother's side.

With Didier close behind me, I made my way along the secret corridor and back to the blackened stairs.

Spluttering and coughing in the cloud of charcoal dust and floating fibres, I wriggled against my fallen friend to sit upright. My neck was stiff and sore, and I'd landed on my wrist and shoulder, spraining them both, but I seemed to be intact and otherwise unbroken. Didier had landed on me, and I heard him moaning grumpily.

We laughed as we hobbled out of the ruined Palace together, and the laughter stayed with us in the hours that followed while we bathed our wounds and dressed them. Didier gave me a clean shirt and trousers to wear. His wardrobe was surprisingly stylish and colourful for a man who dressed in such a drab uniform at Leopold's. He explained that most of those bright new clothes had been left with him by lovers who'd never returned for them, and I thought of Karla, giving me clothes that had once belonged to her lovers. And the laughter bubbled up anew as we ate a meal together at Leopold's while Didier talked of his most recent romantic disasters. We were laughing still when Vikram Patel ran up the steps with his arms wide in an excited greeting.

I stood just in time to receive his flying hug. Holding my shoulders with his arms straight, he looked me over, frowning at the cuts on my head and face.

I turned my head to look at Didier, who shrugged non-committally and then glared at Vikram with his teeth bared in fury.

I caught the eye of our waiter and nodded to him, gesturing for a new round of drinks. We were silent until they arrived and the drinks were poured, and then, with the glasses in the air, I proposed a toast.

It is not safe. Stay away from the dundah places."

The word dundah, or business, was the slang term we used for all of Khader's black-market operations in Bombay. They'd become targets, somehow.

Of course he was the traitor. Of course he was the one who'd tried to have us arrested and killed in Karachi. That's who Khaled had been talking about on the night before the battle: not Abdullah, but Ghani. Abdul Ghani...

I sat down again, avoiding the eyes of my friends until I could disguise the dread that I knew they would read in them.

But somehow, in some way, for some reason, the love had died in me, and I suddenly realised it, and was suddenly sure. It wasn't completely over, my feeling for Karla. It never is completely over. But there was nothing of the jealousy I once would've felt for the stranger Ranjit. There was no rage against him, and no feeling of hurt inspired by her. I felt numbed and empty sitting there, as if the war, and the loss of Khaderbhai and Khaled, and the face-off with Madame Zhou and her twins had poured anaesthetic into my heart.

And there was, instead of pain, a sense of wonder-I could think of no other way to describe what I was feeling-at Abdul Ghani's treachery. And behind that almost spiritual awe there was a dull, throbbing, fatalistic dread. For even then the bloody future his betrayal had forced on us was unfolding and spilling into our lives, like the sudden blossom of a drought-forced rose in a red, falling rush to dry, unyielding earth.

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