The Network - Jason Elliot [53]
His code name is Orpheus, and his real name is Emmanuel, but I’ve known him personally as Manny since before the beginning of all this. Fate had thrown us together in the Pakistani town of Peshawar, not far from the Afghan border, in the late 1980s, and our lives have been linked ever since.
We meet one evening in the restaurant of the notorious Green’s Hotel, a favourite haunt of the many misfits and adventurers drawn by the lure of the secret and dangerous war in Afghanistan under Soviet occupation. We’re starved for company and like each other at once. Manny’s been hiking in Chitral in his summer holiday from university and has made his way to Peshawar, as have I, in the hope of joining a mujaheddin group who’ll take him across the border into Afghanistan itself. At twenty-three, he’s only a year older than me but has a worldly confidence that I admire and enjoy. He’s been awarded a short-service commission by the army, which pays his way through university, after which he’s set his sights on a cavalry regiment. I’m toying with the idea of Sandhurst myself in a year’s time, so I soak up everything he tells me about his plans. We share a fascination with Afghanistan, and the chance to get closer to the conflict is irresistible to both of us.
Green’s is a dismal hotel. It’s gloomy, run-down, inefficient and, worst of all, has no alcohol licence. The Pakistani staff all know that the majority of the guests are not there for love of the hotel, but have fallen in some way under the spell cast by Afghanistan, which beckons from beyond the tribal territories some fifty miles distant. They do not share our enthusiasm for Afghanistan or its people, and make no secret of the fact they think we’re misguided. We take a morbid pleasure in their cynicism, and it’s in keeping with this spirit of defiance that Manny has smuggled a bottle of duty-free whisky into his room.
That same night we stay up drinking, and by dawn we’re planning our trip ‘inside’ together. It’s reckless and dangerous, but we reason that two heads are better than one because anything might happen once we’re inside a war zone and it seems wiser to combine our talents. There’s no way to communicate with the outside world once we’re actually in Afghanistan, and we exchange addresses at home in case one of us has to pass on bad news to the other’s family.
For a week we explore together, diving into the noise and anarchy of the bazaars in the old part of the town, where we buy Afghan clothes in preparation for our first journey into war. We make friends with a Pashtun tribesman who lives in the tribal territories near the border with Afghanistan, and travel with him to a few of the wild frontier settlements where the law has scarcely ever reached and where guns and drugs can be bought like sweets at a tuck shop. At Darra we try out a selection of a gunsmith’s wares, and the locals are duly impressed by Manny’s marksmanship. An old man, hearing we are from England, tells us the story of the charismatic faqir of Ipi, known as Mirza Ahmed Khan to the Pashtuns, who fifty years earlier led a guerrilla-style jihad against the British presence in the region. Forty thousand troops were sent to the wilds of Waziristan to hunt him down, but failed to find him in a campaign lasting more than a decade.
Then comes the news we’ve both been waiting for. A mujaheddin group agrees to smuggle us into Afghanistan to its regional headquarters in Logar province, not far south of the capital Kabul, and a few days later we settle our bills at the hotel and send our final letters home. At dawn the next day we’re moving towards the ragged purple profile of the mountains that mark the border, where we join a party of a dozen armed mujaheddin leading a small convoy of horses laden with arms and supplies.
We walk day and night, moving from village to village, sleeping in caves and on mountainsides, and are quickly immersed in all the hazards and romance