The Network - Jason Elliot [135]
For years I’ve never really understood why the man I killed hesitated when he was about to shoot me.
‘I didn’t know,’ I say.
‘You weren’t supposed to. It was a Special Projects op. We had the order to go in as an Israeli team. Weirdest thing is that it was going to be me leading it.’ He smiles. ‘You would have slotted me instead.’
‘I’m sorry about your friend.’
‘Kenny was his name. He was from up north, Glasgow, I think. Couldn’t understand a word he said half the time. I nearly killed him myself once on a hostage rescue practice. That’s the way it is.’ He brushes some dust from his arm. ‘Anyway, what aren’t you telling me?’
I wonder how much I should say, but the power of the land has stripped us of our secrets now, and there seems no purpose in hiding anything from him any longer. So I tell him what I can, because I cannot tell him everything, right up to my meeting with Manny in Kabul, and about the plan that we made together in the ruins of the Darul Aman Palace.
At dusk we stop in a tiny settlement and the five of us sleep on the floor of a small room in our sleeping bags. In the morning the old man who provided our accommodation brings a bundle wrapped in newspaper and says he wants to show us something very old. He unwraps a dozen small yellowish figurines that do indeed look very old, and tells us they come from somewhere nearby and that they date from the time of the Younan, the Greeks. The faces are carved from some sort of bone or tusk and portray a series of men with staring eyes and long moustaches wearing crowns or ornate headbands. They look more like the faces of the Lewis chessmen than anything from this part of the world, and it’s impossible not to wonder what uncharted portion of the region’s history they really belong to. Then he shows us an enigmatic oval-shaped stone medallion depicting a soldier with a lance, wearing a kilt-like skirt and sandals with long leather straps like a centurion’s. The script resembles nothing I’ve even seen.
We skirt north of Panjab the next morning and begin the slow and winding route towards the south-west that will take us out of Bamiyan province and into Oruzgan. It takes us five days. The landscape seems ever more wild and beautiful and untouched by the world beyond. An entire day is spent losing and refinding the correct route, driving into valleys where the track ends at the foot of a mountain or dissolves into a rock-strewn wilderness. Aref surprises me by remembering that he has some old maps in the pickup, and produces them the next morning. They’re 1:200K Soviet military maps from the 1980s, and they’re far better than the ones we’ve got. It takes a little longer to transliterate the place names, which are printed in Cyrillic script, into English and then into Persian, but they’re extraordinarily detailed.
The problem is that the locals we ask have no idea of the names of villages only a few miles distant and give us contradictory directions because they’ve never driven there and travel on paths where we can’t. To the villagers we are like aliens from a distant planet, and whenever we stop we are endlessly questioned as to where we come from by men who are barely aware that there’s even a war going on.
In one village we are sung to by a melancholy blind man who predicts that our journey will end in fire. In another we meet a man with a dancing bear, and are shown the grave of a teenage boy whose body is said to have remained intact and undecayed more than three years after his death. At another we give a lift to an old man with a club foot and a fat-tailed sheep from one end of the valley to another. By the time we are a day’s drive away from the fort, it’s our own mission that seems unreal, and the strangeness of our surroundings that has become real.
When we reach Sarnay, beyond a spectacular final pass that crests between two 13,000-foot peaks, it’s as if we’ve broken free of the grasp of the mountains. There are still some high peaks beyond us, but nothing over 10,000 feet, and the route we’re planning to follow stays on the