My mind raced back to those events, events that for years I had tried to forget, events that tortured my dreams. I saw them playing back across my mind. Every movement caught in slow motion; an indelible looped videotape. Playing, playing, playing.
‘But it didn’t happen like that,’ I whispered.
‘No,’ Kolya agreed. ‘It didn’t.’
Winding down the low hill, the convoy passed with care beneath the overhanging trees, the telescopic radio antenna projecting from the turret of the APC clicking against the branches above. The Agitprop Brigade’s APC was towards the end of the convoy. Behind, protecting it at the rear, was a BMP with a grenade launcher and a heavy machine gun fitted on top. At the foot of the hill, the track twisted through a clump of trees and forded a shallow stream thick with reeds. Close by the road stood a pair of ramshackle, isolated buildings. The mud walls had begun to crumble, and the windows were blackened holes. Close to the buildings was a small cemetery, coloured rags, faded by the weather, fluttering from sticks. On the low hill behind them was the family compound, its modest buildings huddled around the little square.
The first vehicles forded the stream and disappeared from view behind the thick undergrowth the drooping foliage. The APC I was seated on slowed as it approached the stream. I clung tight as it dipped into the hollow. Glancing back, I glimpsed Zena laughing with the bespectacled medic. She closed her eyes as she laughed, throwing back her head.
The APC splashed into the stream. The water shimmered in the dappled light that broke through the thick canopy of oak and ash. The water had run off the mountains, and was icy cold. The coolness rose from its surface. The APC had slowed sufficiently for me to leap from it. I landed on the sandy bank of the stream. Crouching down, I dipped my hands into the water and threw it up against my dusty face.
‘In Kirov’s plan, we would be ambushed as we forded the stream,’ Kolya explained, quietly, coming to me and resting his hand on my shoulder. I knelt down, felt the path dampen the knees of my trousers.
‘It was a good place for an ambush,’ Kolya continued. ‘The curve in the road that put the last vehicles out of sight of the first; the fact that we had to slow down to ford the river; the vantage point of the village on the hill.
‘Zena was travelling in one of the last APCs, that had been organised. On the last BMP were the armaments Hashim’s friends wanted. It should have been easy. The road was mined. The last two vehicles would be cut off, quickly surrounded, and the objectives achieved with minimum fuss.’
When I glanced up from the stream, wiping the freezing droplets of water from my cheeks, brushing them up through my hair, I noticed a sudden movement in the blackened window of one of the abandoned buildings. It was so fast, so fleeting, I could not be sure it had not been a trick of the light. I stood up, retrieving my gun from the river bank.
Experience had taught us excessive caution, and I called to the driver of the next APC, which was slowly negotiating the steep slope to the bed of the stream. His head bent out of the APC and he shouted to me, but the roar of the engines, the crunch of gravel and the splash of the water drowned out his voice. I stepped into the water and jogged over to the APC.
The water detonated with an ear-shattering crunch. l pitched back. Fighting for breath, I choked and gagged. Rising from the water long enough to grab half a breath before my arms gave way, I plunged down again beneath the icy surface. Confused and panicked, I rolled on to my back. The water was not deep. I grabbed another breath and struggled to my knees. I glanced around.
In the centre of the ford the APC billowed thick black smoke. Its guts had been wrenched violently open. The air whistled and the ground danced. The stream flamed. My gun was lying close, submerged beneath the flickering surface of the water. I reached for it.
Though it was perhaps only a moment, time stretched elastically as I fought to make sense of events◦– to incorporate them so that I might react. My eyes flicked from the hulk of charred metal that had been an APC up the incline to the BMP and the Agitprop Brigade’s APC. The vehicle was accelerating towards the stream, bodies tumbling from it, scattering into the undergrowth, bouncing on the dusty earth. The BMP reversed furiously back up the slope, its machine gun spitting pink-blue flames randomly, spraying the hillside, ripping through the foliage, bullets pinging from the trunks of the trees and dancing across the mud walls of the buildings. Figures emerged from the undergrowth. They scrambled over the BMP. The heavy machine gun jerked up, sending its stream of fire into the sky.
In the window of the abandoned house at the foot of the hill, flames flickered menacingly. I saw Zena, crouched foetally in a shallow hollow, beneath the mud wall. Her face rose, crumpled with despair. She shouted out, but her voice was lost. I stumbled forwards, the icy water spraying around me. My right arm throbbed. As if in a dream, my legs seemed to paddle in soup, barely moving forwards. Distinctly I heard the zip of bullets slit the air around my head; saw the hollow beneath the trees shiver and swell with light, dust and stones splaying out, a wall vanish.
Behind Zena the air billowed with flames. Her mouth opened and she screamed. Her beautiful ochre skin puckered as she cried into the blistering sky.
Among the dark figures that had emerged from the shadows, I noticed a familiar face darting across the track towards where Zena lay huddled. For a moment I could not place where I had seen his sharp features before. Kirov stood, as if bewildered, on the far bank of the stream, his automatic slung loosely, staring across the water at the mayhem. I waved for him to move across with me, but he did not react. I shouted at him, and, as if only then noticing me, he brought up his rifle. It struck me suddenly that I had seen the sharp featured man in the café in Jalalabad talking to Kirov.
When I glanced back across the water Zena had gone. I stumbled towards the bank, eyes searching the undergrowth. Farther up the track the BMP was disappearing over the crest of a rise. From the way the blackened APC lay twisted in the stream it was evident it had hit a mine. A group of our soldiers regrouped on the far side of the stream. Setting up a heavy machine gun, they opened up on the brush higher up the slope. The ground rocked as a grenade exploded close to the Agitprop’s APC.
A movement on the hillside caught my eye. Glancing up, I saw Zena being pushed by two figures, advancing up the hill through the heavy undergrowth towards the family compound. Ducking into the trees, I worked my way around the side of the hill and, finding a path on the far slope, advanced to the summit cautiously. A goat was tethered by the wall of the first hut. It gazed at me nonchalantly as I approached. Chickens cackled and fluttered across the dusty earth. From the ford in the hollow, machine-gun fire rattled. Dark smoke curled up through the tops of the trees.
As I reached the square in the centre of the family compound, Zena emerged, pushed from behind by two Afghans in civilian dress. She stumbled and fell heavily to the ground. One of the men, the one I recognised from Jalalabad, shouted. He kicked her and, bending, grabbed a handful of her hair, pulling her face from the dust. While his short, bearded colleague watched, he shoved the nozzle of his pistol against the back of her head.
Without pausing to consider, I raised my rifle, sighted it and fired. The bearded Afghan looked up, surprised, as his colleague pitched violently to one side. I shot another round immediately and the second Afghan twisted around and fell backwards. Zena squealed.
She turned to me, her eyes wide with fear, uncomprehending. I called for her to come across the square. She nodded and stumbled to her feet. As she staggered across the dusty square, her shirt became entangled in some stray wire.