There is no bomb. There is no transmitter. No one seems to have installed a tilt switch that will go off when the car meets its first slope after leaving the house. Nothing is missing. I wonder, but not out loud, whether I could have accidentally moved the kit in the attic myself. I do not know.
It’s late afternoon. We spend the rest of the day packing, and agree to leave in the morning without telling the chowkidar or giving any advance warning to the other men. An envelope with a letter of thanks and a generous tip will express our appreciation.
Not long after sunrise, we drive to Mr Raouf, who’s not expecting us.
‘We have to leave immediately,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Moshkel nist,’ he says, no problem. He summons the other men on a two-way radio. While we wait for them to arrive, I ask if I can use his computer to check my email. He lifts a scarf from the keyboard, dusts off the screen with it and pulls back the chair for me, observing me wince as I sit. It’s an unpredictable process, and takes a dozen attempts before the modem finally connects. I log into the secure server maintained by the Firm, encrypt and send the contents of the flash drive using my own public encryption key, and ask Mr Raouf if he’ll keep the original for me in his safe, along with our second passports. What happens next is a surprise.
‘I have something for you,’ he says. From under his desk he pulls out an AK-74SU Kalashnikov with a folding stock, and presents it proudly to me.
‘For your journey,’ he says.
H’s eyebrows rise as Mr Raouf hands it over. It’s a compact automatic weapon which fires the 5.45-millimetre low-recoil round, and the barrel is much shorter than the AK-47. It can be easily hidden under a jacket and will fit snugly under a car seat, which makes it popular in Russia with special forces, drivers and bodyguards. It’s a generous gift because I suspect he’s deeply attached to such a rare and highly prized weapon, and I promise to return it to him on our return. He nods gravely as if to say ‘when you return’. At least I hope that’s what he means, and not ‘if you return’.
On journeys at home the road is a means to an end. It’s a featureless thing which doesn’t attract the greater part of your attention, and you take for granted that it won’t crumble to dust under your wheels as you while away the time with distracted thoughts, thinking of your final destination. You take for granted that your journey implies arrival.
In Afghanistan all this is reversed. The road demands your attention from the start. Every aspect of it requires effort and stamina and determination. It does, literally, crumble to dust under your wheels, and offers you no time for distracted thoughts. In the meantime your destination becomes an ever more abstract idea, a thing you doubt and question and wonder if you’ll ever reach, and as your journey lengthens you feel like a fool for blindly assuming that your eventual arrival is guaranteed. The road, in short, becomes the goal, and arrival a luxury.
Our caravan is made up of two vehicles. The trust’s white Toyota pickup leads the way, carrying Sher Del, Aref and Momen. H and I ride second in the G. Our doors and bonnets bear the vinyl stickers that Mr Raouf has supplied us with, so that our true purpose, like that of many a charitable institution operating in this part of the world, is amply disguised.
We drive through the devastated western suburbs under a brilliantly blue, clear sky. On the outskirts of the city the surfaced road ends. There was one, years before, but it’s simply been worn away. Now it’s a pale scar on which every vehicle lurches and weaves in a perpetual cloud of white dust. Which side to drive on is only an approximate convention.
Beyond the dust we can see the long chains of peaks to the north and south of the city. It’s late spring now and the mountains are draped in ice on their upper ridges, and lower down their snow-filled gulleys resemble the camouflage of a killer whale. It’s hard to believe that a country so beautiful is in the midst of a brutal conflict, and has been for years. But there’s always the ruined armoured vehicles, tilted at the verges of the road like ships that have run aground in the shallows and been abandoned, to remind us otherwise.
An hour west of the city centre the road divides. The route to the north-west leads up to Paghman and the southern towards Ghazni. We take the lower branch and move beyond Maidan Shahr, the natural pass that protects the city’s western flank. Then an hour later, at the next main junction, we turn into the mountainous folds of Wardak province, where the road deteriorates a stage further.
It’s the Afghan version of a B road, virtually impassable by Western standards but not at all bad by Afghan ones, and it’s more like being in a boat than a car because of the constant pitching and rolling. Sometimes the rocky surface of the road changes to packed earth and suddenly the crunch of stone under us is silenced as if by a ceasefire. But it’s only ever for a few miles before we are fighting the dust and stone again.
In the early afternoon we stop to buy some apples from a farmer who’s put up a stall by the side of the road. As I’m talking to the farmer, our men take their pattus, lay them over the ground near the road, and perform their afternoon prayers.
We move west through a landscape of great beauty, winding through a succession of long broad valleys where the surrounding slopes glide gently down towards the emerald-coloured patchwork of the valley floors. Beyond Jalrez, the slopes begin to steepen and grow less gentle, and the grassy bloom turns to darker stone, which rises steadily on both sides of the road.
Several hours later I hear Aref’s voice on the two-way.
‘We’re coming to Gardandiwal,’ he says. ‘I think we should stay here tonight. We won’t reach Bamiyan today.’
Gardandiwal sits at the crossroads of four mountain ranges and has the feeling of a primitive gold miners’ outpost from the nineteenth century. We install ourselves at a tiny mehman-khana beneath the clusters of mud-walled homes that sprawl up the hillside. At sunset we sit on the wooden veranda and the owner brings us kebabs and rice. The river that runs through the place is called the Helmand, says the owner of the place. It rises in the mountains to the north-east and flows all the way through the centre of the country, surrendering itself eventually to the deserts beyond Kandahar.
We move on shortly after dawn. The road begins to rise and the mountains to tighten around us. There’s no ongoing fighting in the area but the next day several pickup trucks with heavily armed men pass us in the opposite direction. They look battle-weary and well travelled, and their clothes and turbans and weapons are thick with dust. I wonder where they’ve come from and where they’ll end up. It seems likely they’re moving back to Kabul from the recent fighting in and around Yakawlang, avoiding the northern route via the Shomali plain, where Massoud’s forces are harassing their fellow fighters.
We are less than a hundred miles from the capital but we seem already to have moved back centuries. As we near the Hajigak Pass there’s a construction team hewing a new section of road from the mountainside, and there’s a long wait as we allow trucks coming the other away to squeeze past. There is no machinery. Just 500 men with pickaxes and spades, working at a furious pace, carving out and levelling the black rock. Watching them work, I have the feeling once again that we’re going back in time.
You can’t get this feeling from a map. The speed at which the influence of Kabul drops away is like a stone falling into a well.
‘Look,’ I say to H, pointing to the men hacking at the rock. ‘Afghan infrastructure.’
‘I can see why the Soviets failed here,’ he says. ‘If you invade a country you have to control the infrastructure. There isn’t one.’
H is right. Afghans depend on so little for their survival that there isn’t much for an invading army to control. The mechanisms by which a modern government influences its people simply don’t exist. Power, and its pursuit, is a fragmented and intensely local affair, and central government has never meant much to Afghans. The capital has never had significant influence in the countryside, except to take taxes or conscripts. Rural Afghanistan is made up of communities that depend on a close-knit structure of local rights designed to protect fragile resources. And since Afghans live from their land, their lives are bound up with the practical realities of survival, not abstract political or social goals. Fifty miles from the capital might as well be a different country. Five, even.