Kolya nodded. ‘Kirov had organised it all,’ he said.
‘It had all been planned before we got to Ghazis.’
Chapter 27
We met up with the Agitprop Brigade outside Jalalabad and headed east towards the border with Pakistan, passing Qala Akhuud and Gerdi Kac. The convoy moved slowly, negotiating the broken road with care. On both sides the mountains rose jaggedly. The rain had moved off, leaving the sky clear, sparkling, as beautiful as lapis lazuli. Sitting on top of my APC I could see Zena a few trucks behind.
The road cut through barren plains, greenery sprouting from rust-red rocks. Cerulean lakes mirrored the sky. When we passed villages, the children chased behind our vehicles, screaming, begging, hands reaching out for sweets, money, their eyes full of menace. Beside the road lay the charred corpses of APCs, cars and the shattered skeleton of a helicopter, picked clean by village vultures.
In the afternoon we pulled cautiously into a small town a little off the road, where the loudspeakers were set up to pump out local songs with rousing revolutionary words. While we kept the heavy guns trained on the village and covered the milling crowd with assault rifles, the medics doled out an array of medicines, examined the diseased, pulled rotten teeth, then stretched a large sheet between two trees, erecting their portable cinema.
‘If I have to watch Anna Karenin one more time!’ Kolya moaned.
Occasionally new films were sent out to us from the Union, but usually it was the ageing Anna Karenin, Tolstoy’s tortured story of love, or a Second World War era patriotic film. This time, though, the images flickering faintly against the stretched cotton sheet were those of a propaganda film, showing grinning Afghan workers, new apartment blocks, roads, parks, peasants working in the fields, looking up and waving, and a soldier grinning back from the turret of an APC. The children ran around in excited circles, shouting obscenities in perfect Russian; old men limped up the queue for half a tablet and a small bag of rice. There were few healthy young men to be seen.
We were not able to relax until we pulled out in the late afternoon, back on to the main road. Lieutenant Zhuralev kept up a continual, voluble, muttered protest about the exercise and snapped at anybody who addressed him.
That night we were stationed at a small base close to the road. The barracks, a large stone building, was surrounded on three sides by linked trenches. The latrines, ornately constructed from green ammunition boxes, stood some fifty metres away by a clump of eucalyptus. Sand-filled barrels dotted the base at regular intervals, providing cover from the bullets and shell fragments that were a regular feature of everyday life there.
The small company stationed at this far-flung base consisted of a wild-looking group of Uzbeks. They greeted us cheerily, especially when they discovered we had brought them rations of vodka. They stared at Zena, who was one of only two women in the Agitprop Brigade’s company, with ravenous eyes, and I feared that all their military discipline would be an inadequate check on their obvious needs.
The darkness was punctuated by the regular zip of sniper fire from the mountains, and the occasional thump of mortars. The Uzbeks paid little attention to the gunfire. Occasionally their conversation would falter as they cocked their heads to listen to the mortars, ascertaining the level of threat, but once they were sure they were not going to score a direct hit, they immediately picked up the thread of their conversation and didn’t even blink when the ground shook and the plastic covering the windows billowed out.
‘Don’t you fire back?’ Kolya asked, crouching on the floor as another shell exploded less than a hundred metres away.
The Uzbeks drew our attention to a deep thump. ‘One of ours.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the bearded commander of the garrison commented, ‘we are at the edge of their range when they are shooting from the mountains and they rarely venture down on to the plain where they would be able to score a direct hit.’
Later, seeing that Zena had left the stuffy, smoke-filled room, I slipped out into the darkness. She stood outside the door. The night air was fresh and clear, sharp with the scent of conifer and the cool dampness of the river that bordered the base. Zena felt comically large when I wrapped my arms around her. She was wearing the bulky standard-issue flak jacket, which like most of the equipment issued to us was more of a hindrance than an aid to survival. Dodging from barrel to barrel, we worked our way through the darkness down towards the river. Beneath a eucalyptus we made love quickly and fiercely, afraid only that someone would stumble upon us, or a shell would disturb us before we found relief.
‘I long for our bed,’ she whispered, as we sat, backs pressed against a wall of sand-filled barrels. My heart jumped with delight that she considered her hostel bed ours. Later we wound our way back to the barracks, avoiding the drowsy Uzbek on sentry duty, squatting by a small hut, one of our vodka bottles nestled between his legs.
The next day followed a similar pattern. We set up warily in several villages and provided cover while the Agitprop Brigade did their job. In the early afternoon we arrived in a larger village called Ghazis. The mountains rose steeply behind the village and the area was heavily wooded, with ash and juniper and an orchard of walnut trees.
Lieutenant Zhuralev cursed as we wound up the low foothills away from the main road to the village. On the crest of a hill, a little lower than the village, was a small hamlet, a few households surrounding a dusty square.
‘We’re a sitting duck!’ Zhuralev muttered furiously. ‘Why do we have to do this? Fucking Agitprop Brigade!’
Unlike in the majority of villages we had visited, a large group of young men milled around among the jostling crowd in the marketplace as the cinema screen and distribution tables were erected. Seeing them made Zhuralev more jittery than ever.
‘I don’t like this, I don’t like it one fucking bit,’ he snarled.
The afternoon passed quietly, though. Strolling about the village marketplace, keeping a sharp eye on the crowd, I glanced frequently at Zena, who worked at a furious pace with the young bespectacled medic, distributing pills and examining yellow-faced elderly men and sickly children. The young men, who had been boisterous when we first arrived, settled down and sat in the dust, watching the faint, flickering images of the propaganda film with rapt attention.
Lieutenant Zhuralev breathed a sigh of relief when the Agitprop Brigade began to pack away their gear. I brushed by Zena as she stood by the Agitprop’s APC. She caught my arm.
‘I want you,’ she whispered in my ear. Her breath was warm and dampened my skin. I felt a blistering burst of desire in my groin.
As we organised the vehicles into a convoy, and the first BMP rolled out of the village, I noticed Vassily emerge from a doorway. He loped across the marketplace and jumped up on to the back of an APC. Behind him came Kirov. Their heads ducked together in conversation.
Chapter 28
‘It can’t be,’ I protested to Kolya.
He gazed at me in the moonlight, his expression troubled. Shifting the metal box from beneath one arm to the other, he nodded solemnly.
‘That’s how it was, Antanas, tovarich. That was the deal.’
‘But…’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It was Kirov,’ Kolya repeated. ‘It was he who organised everything. They wanted her, Zena. KHAD wanted her out of the way. They considered her dangerous. Kirov had organised with KHAD that she would be arrested; they would cart her off to the Pol-e-Tcharkhi prison. She had relatives in high positions. Her uncle, her father’s brother, was a figure of some importance in the government. They would not be able to keep her long.’