Amber (28 page)

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.

‘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.'

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.

‘Keep low,' I shouted as she straightened to untangle it.

‘What?' she mouthed, turning.

A dark hole opened in her throat and she gasped. A look of intense surprise flickered across her face. A second hole opened in her cheek. She spun around as if she had been slapped violently and fell to the earth. For one moment I watched as her fingers scrabbled in the dirt.

‘Zena…'

I lurched forward. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement in the dark shadow of one of the huts.

‘Zena,' I called again.

My body lay across hers, protecting her. I grasped her tight, felt her body buck beneath my own. Her eyes did not shut. I closed my hand around the wound in her neck, my palm slipping on the soft wet flesh. The blood pumped hotly between my fingers. She gazed up, a look of astonishment on her face.

‘Zena,' I whispered into her ear.

She moved, but it was her muscles twitching. Her skin paled. The blood pooled in the dirt. The weight of my body, as I shifted, pressed the air from her lungs so that she gasped and spat bloodily, her unblinking eyes staring fixedly into eternity.

From the shadows I heard the shuffle of footsteps and the click of a magazine being slotted into place. I looked up into the shadowed doorway of one of the huts. An elderly man gazed out, Kalashnikov raised. Rising from the earth, blood dripping from my hands, my shirt dark and wet, clinging to my chest, I faced him. He shouted something in Pashtu and waved the gun. I stepped towards him. He shouted louder, pointing the gun at me threateningly. From my belt I took my knife. The old man tottered out into the sunlight. He pointed at the girl and shouted. He pointed at the two men and shouted again. He waved the gun at me and shouted some more. His pale, old eyes were wild with fear.

Knocking the gun from his hands, I grabbed the front of his tunic. He fell to his knees, gabbling, pointing at his hut, at the three bodies strewn across the centre of his little village. I wound the dirty white cloth of his turban in my fist and jerked his head back. He looked up into my eyes, his lips moving continually, words pouring forth incomprehensibly, his arms jerking back and forth between his hut and the bodies. I took the knife and, with one hand holding his head back, slit his throat. He gargled, his lips moving silently, working still as the blood fountained out across the front of my shirt.

Kneeling beside me, Kolya stroked my back. I pressed my forehead against the sharp gravel of the path. I smelt the earth beneath me, felt the small stones biting into my flesh. I dug my fingers into the soil, turning it, clawing at it.

‘It's over,' Kolya murmured. ‘It's all over now. It's finished.'

He placed the metal box on the path beside me, and attempted to pull me up from the ground.

‘Let's get a move on,' he encouraged. ‘We have the bracelet. It was for this that Kirov sold her. He betrayed us all. We lost half the battalion in that ambush.'

When the old man was dead, I stood for some moments in the centre of the square. Below the village, in the hollow where the road forded the stream, the battle was still raging. Rocket fire shook the ground, automatic gunfire chattered among the trees. I knelt beside Zena and gently lowered her eyelids. I kissed her forehead. Her skin was cool and clammy.

Birds had begun to gather on the roofs of the houses. Insects swirled in dark clouds, settling already on the bloody pools, on the stained earth, on the warm flesh of the bodies. I picked Zena up and moved her to the side of the square, laid my jacket over her face and shoulders.

I worked quickly, moving from hut to hut, gathering wood. Tables, chairs, wardrobes, roofing, doors. I fashioned a pyre in the centre of the square, stuffing dry grass into the gaps between the wood. I worked with care, as if building a bonfire at home, making sure that when I lit it, it would go up. When the clumsy pyre was finished I took a can of fuel I had come across in one of the huts and poured it liberally over the wood. For some moments I stood back, surveying my work. It gave me grim satisfaction to see the sturdiness of the table on which I would lay her.

Her body rested on the ground, by the hut, her limbs carefully arranged, my jacket covering her, keeping away the flies. I knelt by her, pulling back the khaki shroud. She could have been sleeping. She did not look so different from those times when I had awoken in the morning to see her face by my side in her room in the hostel in Jalalabad. A little paler perhaps. There was a smudge of dirt on her forehead. I took the corner of my jacket, dampened it with my saliva and wiped the soot from her skin, cleaned the neat wound in her cheek, washed away the blood from her throat.