The Last Kestrel
Jill McGivering

For my mother

I have seen a green country, useful to the race, Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished, Even the last rat and last kestrel banished – God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

‘Report on Experience’ by Edmund Blunden

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

The line was taut. The cord circles tightened into handcuffs, burning his wrists. He was propelled forward, dragged on the rope, stumbling over sand and stones on the leash. His neck craned backwards, his face towards the sky and the glare of the sun fired the cloth of his blindfold. His tongue flickered to his lips, tasted their dryness. Sweat blossomed on his scalp, trickled down his temples, stung chapped skin.

He was sick with shock, his limbs convulsing. The man had jumped him from behind, from nowhere, and knocked him to the ground. He had pinioned him, his knee hard in his back, and bound his eyes before he could twist his face to see. Who was he? He caught the stink of male sweat; his own, bitter with adrenalin, and, overlaying it, the thick meaty smell of the man.

He stretched the tendons of his neck and managed to move the cloth a fraction. The material was wound tightly round his head, pressing into his eyes and, as he lifted it, he created a narrow slit of light at the bottom. Light, there, below, just beyond his vision. His eyes bulged, forcing themselves downwards, straining towards his chin, to focus on the paper-thin line of brightness. Was that a blur of sand he could see, dancing with pinpricks of colour? His head was bursting with effort and fear.

He tried to take control of his body, to steady his breathing and, with it, his mind. This man is taking me somewhere. He has a plan for me. With this thought, hope rose. He almost giggled, intoxicated with it. If he were going to kill me, he would have done it by now. Wouldn’t he? Yes. Alhamdulillah. Thanks be to God. He grasped this hope and hugged it to him, a lifebelt thought. Yes. If he—

A sharp rock at his toes and he was tripping, his feet splayed. The cord closed its teeth more sharply round his wrists, biting into the skin. The rope jerked. Pain through his hands, a sudden white heat in his shoulder sockets, his arms. A rush of air on his face as he fell forward, crashing, bouncing hard against the ground. Air struck out of his chest, leaving him gasping. Fine sand rose in a cloud, filling his mouth, his nose, making him choke. The stink of grit close to his face, a smell of dead sand and desiccated dirt.

A pause. He was alive, breathing noisily in, out. His nostrils ran wet with mucus or blood. He tried to lift his head and opened his mouth a crack to speak. His eyes, encrusted with sand, were trying to force themselves open beneath the cloth. His tongue was thick. He held his breath to listen. He heard the man, close to him, exhale.

His head was held down, his face pressed into the sand. A weight on the back of his head. A foot. The hard sole of a boot. He bucked and twisted, trying to flip over, to turn his covered face to the man, to beg. The boot held him firm, standing on his skull, grinding his nose into the dirt, causing a hundred minute sharp stones to embed in his forehead, his chin. A wave of nausea brought bile into his throat, riding a swell of panic.

A metallic click. A gun being cocked. He opened his mouth to shout but no word came. The sharp stink of piss, hot and steamy. The sudden wetness in his groin. A searing flash of white light. Cleansing and bleaching everything in an instant. The halo of the gunshot Jalil didn’t live to hear.

1

The room was shabby and hot. Ellen, sitting cross-legged on the threadbare carpet, tried to shift her weight and ease herself into another position without attracting attention. Her knees were aching.

Dust hung heavy in the air, suspended in the shafts of early evening light which were pressing in through open windows. The furniture was sparse. Just an old-fashioned television on a stand, a vast dark-wood dresser, scraped and scuffed by several generations, and worn cushions scattered across the carpet and against the walls.

Jalil’s mother was kneading her hands, rhythmically squeezing one through the other, back and forth. Her head was bent, watching her fingers as if their restlessness surprised her. The skin was papery. The veins along the backs of her hands stood full and thick with purple blood, part of the map of her new shrinking self.

Her scarf was pulled forward, screening her face, although the only male present was her young son. He was squatting on his haunches beside her, pressed against her body for comfort. He was a thin boy of ten or eleven with protruding ears and a scab on his chin. He was too young to understand he’d become the man of the house.

The daughter, embarrassed by her mother’s silence, tried to take control. She leaned forward to Ellen to whisper. ‘You understand,’ she said. ‘A very big shock.’

‘Of course.’

The daughter pushed a dish of greasy long-grained rice towards Ellen. It was laced with flakes of nut and plump stock-rich raisins. Ellen added another spoonful to her plate. She broke off a piece of fresh ridged bread, warm and spongy, and wiped it round, pinching a piece of lamb and rice together with her forefingers. She leaned forward over the plastic cloth. It was spread out between them on the floor, dominating the room, covered with cheap glass dishes of home-cooked food, a litre bottle of Coca-Cola and a smatter of shot glasses.

She brought her hand to her mouth, pushed the food between her lips, even though she had no appetite. The lamb had been marinated in a pungent sauce and she chewed slowly. She knew the rules. They must press food on her even after she was sated, to show respect, and she, to show thanks, must eat it.

‘He has a friend there.’ The daughter’s voice faltered as she corrected herself. She was fiddling with the fabric of her headscarf, playing it between her long fingers, shading her eyes. ‘Had a friend.’

Ellen looked up. The daughter was nineteen or twenty, a little younger than Jalil. Her nose was broad and prominent, as his had been. Sitting so close to her mother, she looked a younger, less broken version of her, with clear olive skin and expressive eyes ringed with kohl. She’d already lost her father. Now she’d also lost her older brother, any uncle or cousin could push her into a hasty marriage.

‘His friend,’ Ellen asked her, ‘is he also a translator?’

The daughter nodded. ‘His name is Najib,’ she said. ‘An old classmate of his, also from Kabul.’

‘And he’s still in Helmand?’

‘Yes. Maybe now he can help you instead of Jalil.’ She breathed heavily. ‘With your reports.’

The girl attempted a smile but looked away and it crumpled. Ellen pushed a piece of lamb round her plate with her bunched fingers, struggling to find the will to eat. In four years of coming back and forth to Kabul to cover Afghanistan for NewsWorld, this was the first time she would work without Jalil. He’d been full of life, of talent; exactly the sort of man his country needed. His death sickened her. He should never have turned to the military for work. She looked round now at the faces that mirrored his.

Jalil’s mother lifted her fleshless hands and ran them through the boy’s hair and along the contours of his face, as if she were a blind woman, learning him. He wriggled, sighed, scratched himself around the ribs, then settled against her again and submitted to the hands without protest.

‘It was Najib who told us.’ The corners of the daughter’s mouth were tight with tension. All this was just a week old and they were still in shock.

The daughter leaned forward automatically to press on Ellen the dish of meat and rice. Ellen forced herself to take a little more. The lamb split easily into pieces on her plate, releasing aromatic steam. It was good meat. They must have paid a lot of afghanis for it. Without Jalil, money would be tight. She was very conscious that she was the only one eating. The family sat round her, dull-eyed, and watched. This evening, she knew, they would pick at her leftovers.

The daughter was educated. Some course in management or teaching–Ellen couldn’t recall what exactly. Her neat gold earrings, her shoulder-length bob and the tailoring of her Afghan kameez gave her a hint of Western stylishness.

‘What will you do now?’

The daughter shrugged. ‘Find work.’ Her tone was lifeless.

‘I could ask around,’ Ellen said. ‘The aid agencies might need someone. Or the embassies.’

The daughter kept her eyes on the plastic cloth between them. It was dotted now with stray grains of rice and wet circles of water and Coke where glasses had stood.

Jalil should be here. Their visits to this small family room, with its bare walls and peeling white plaster, had become a ritual whenever she’d worked with him. He’d always invited her home for a special evening meal, planned for the end of her stay once their work was done, and hosted by his mother. It was an honour to be welcomed into an Afghan home. His family had been proud that Jalil had an important English friend who paid him well in dollars.

Without him, the air in the room was stale. She had done the right thing in making the effort to come, dashing from the chaos of Kabul Airport to these hushed rooms, but their grief was drowning her. She tore off a final piece of bread, ran it round the congealing sauce on her plate. Another few minutes and she’d have to head back to the airport to report for the military flight south to Helmand Province.

The daughter had lifted her eyes to the television and was staring at it sightlessly. The sound was muted but the images flickered on, splashing colour and light into the room. From the heavy dresser, Jalil’s face stared out. It was a black and white photograph that Ellen had never seen before, framed in black. A spray of plastic flowers sat in a small glass vase beside it. It was an old-fashioned studio portrait that looked several years out of date. Jalil was wearing a pale kameez with a stiff collar. His hair, usually so unruly, was combed severely to one side, glossy and fixed in place, perhaps with gel. His expression, straight into the camera, was serious and subdued. She bet he hated that picture. It wasn’t at all how she wanted to remember him.

When she looked away, she saw him as he used to be, sitting opposite her, stooped over his food, his long legs crossed, his back pressed against a cushion and the wall, his hair flopping forward over his forehead. His mother, shyly triumphant, would have fussed over their meal, pressing too much rich food on them both. She and her daughter would have cooked all day in readiness. His little brother, adoring, would be horsing around, overexcited. Climbing on him until he was pushed aside and told to behave. She looked over at the boy now. He had Jalil’s delicate features, the same long black eyelashes and large eyes that would break hearts. Now, though, they were red-rimmed and anxious as he pressed his cheek against his mother’s side for comfort, like a much younger child.

She turned to the daughter. ‘On the phone,’ she said in a low voice, ‘you said something. About the way he died.’

The daughter tutted under her breath, gave her mother a quick glance, then lowered her eyes to her lap. Her fingers plucked again at the hem of her headscarf.

Ellen persisted. ‘What did you mean? What makes you think you weren’t told the truth?’

‘They said he was killed by the Taliban when they were out on patrol. An ambush. That’s what they said.’

The daughter unfolded her legs and brought herself to her feet, crossed to the dresser and opened a drawer. It was crammed with yellowing papers. She picked out an envelope near the top, withdrew a single sheet of thin paper and spread it out on the floor between them, smoothing it with her fingertips. The writing was neat, covered in the ink squiggles of Pashto.

‘From him?’

Across the room, her mother had lifted her head to watch. Ellen felt the weight of the silence, of the room’s holding its breath.

‘This is the last letter we received from him,’ the daughter said. She traced the writing gently with her finger. ‘He says he is leaving Helmand, leaving the job with the military. We should expect him home.’ She paused, blinked, continued. ‘But he sounds upset. “Things are not as I thought,” he says. “Not at all.” He writes to Mama not to worry. He’ll find work in Kabul.’ She glanced up at Ellen. ‘He means some work for foreign journalists, like he did with you. Translating.’ She paused. ‘He liked to work with you. Always when you came here. He looked forward to it.’

Ellen nodded, holding her gaze. ‘I did too.’

The daughter sighed, turned back to the letter. ‘“Don’t be angry. I cannot stay here any longer. It is not honourable.” This is what he says.’ She looked up again and Ellen saw her hesitate before she decided to speak. ‘I think he sounds afraid.’

Ellen let her eyes fall to her own hands, limp in her lap. She forced herself to face this new thought of Jalil’s fear. It sat heavy in her gut. Was it fear for his life that had made him decide to leave? A wave of nausea took her. She clenched her hands into fists, resisting it, and saw her knuckles whiten. It is not honourable for me to stay, he’d written. Honour. A cornerstone for him, she knew that.

It’s my fault, she thought. His death. I could have stopped it. She closed her eyes, screening it all out, digging her nails into her palms. Her breaths were coming in short bursts in the quietness and she tried consciously to slow and lengthen them. The family mustn’t see her distress.

A splutter of static and microphone squeal broke into the room from outside as the dusk call to prayer began. It filled the silence, shimmering in through the open windows and across the room, a young male voice of sad sweetness. Ellen sat, rigid, feeling the blessing of prayer wash over them, low and melodious in its devotion. She concentrated on breathing. The room was soft with memories.

The first time she worked with Jalil, they’d embarked on an intense ten-day road trip, interviewing dozens of Afghans about the forthcoming elections. What did they expect from their politicians? Who did they support? They’d asked shopkeepers, housewives, farmers and traders, piecing together material for a four-page spread on the general mood and how Afghans saw their future.

She’d been given Jalil’s number over lunch in Islamabad. A friend on The New York Times had just come out of Afghanistan. With so many journalists swarming through Kabul, decent translators were thin on the ground.

‘Kinda young,’ he’d said, scribbling down the mobile phone number on a paper napkin. ‘But good. Smart as a whip.’

For the first three days of the trip, she’d wondered. Jalil had been nervous, stumbling over his English. He seemed shy. He was little more than twenty and she was used to working with older men, canny operators who were usually ex-journalists themselves. They could be cocky and not always trustworthy but they brimmed with confidence and they knew a story when they saw one. By comparison, Jalil seemed naive.

On the fourth day, they turned off the road and bumped along dirt to a cluster of mud-brick houses. A boy, herding goats, flattened himself against a wall to watch and was turned to a ghost by the fine brown dust beaten up by the wheels. Beyond him a thin man was tugging at a donkey whose body was rendered invisible by a vast load of brushwood. A girl with a dirt-encrusted face ran to the man and clutched at his leg as they passed, her eyes round.

The schoolteacher, a contact of Jalil’s, greeted them warmly. They sat cross-legged on cushions in his bare front room and drank green tea from tall glasses. Jalil translated back and forth. Yes, the schoolteacher told them, his voice measured, everyone in the village knew about the elections. He was encouraging them all to vote. But would the politicians help them? He had his doubts. Would they bring electricity to the village? And then, there was the school. He shook his head, his eyes pleading. He hadn’t been paid his salary for so long now, for four, five months. How could he—?

The throb of an approaching truck interrupted him. He looked towards the window, nodded to Jalil and, in the doorway, pushed his bare feet back into the sandals waiting there. Ellen sipped her scalding tea and listened to the slam of a truck door outside, then low voices.

The man who entered with him smiled round. He had a short beard and a brown Afghan hat and greeted them with easy confidence. Ellen sat up, interested, to watch. My cousin, said the schoolteacher, and clicked his fingers to his son to run for a fresh chai glass. Just a few minutes later, before the conversation had really resumed, Jalil got to his feet, thanked the schoolteacher and ushered Ellen hastily out of the house.

‘That was abrupt.’ Ellen watched the passing landscape with dismay from the back seat of the vehicle. They’d spent several hours driving out to find the schoolteacher and she’d left with barely half an interview. ‘What’s the hurry?’

Jalil was sitting in the front passenger seat by the driver. He mumbled something she didn’t catch.

‘He had more to say,’ she went on. The late morning sun was intense. Her head, encased in a headscarf, was already hot. ‘We didn’t have to leave just because his cousin came.’

‘That man he calls his cousin,’ Jalil turned back to her and lowered his voice, ‘he is not a good man.’

Ellen shook her head. ‘Why do you say that?’

Jalil raised his hand and worked it open and closed like the mouth of a glove puppet. ‘Blah blah,’ he said, snapping his thumb against his fingers. ‘He is a man to go blah blah blah to someone. To some powerful man. He came rushing to see us for a reason.’ He stared at Ellen. His voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘Maybe he is going blah blah to some Taliban.’

Ellen glanced out of the window at the swirling dust, the blank brown landscape. They were in the middle of nowhere. ‘Oh, come on.’

When she looked back at Jalil, he was frowning.

‘Maybe they’re just cousins.’ She sighed to herself. She’d hurt his pride. ‘He seemed friendly enough.’

‘You saw his smile?’

‘What about it?’

Jalil pointed to his own mouth. ‘So much of gold in his teeth. New gold.’

Ellen shrugged. So what? He had gold teeth.

‘His watch?’ Jalil ran his hand round his wrist. ‘Foreign watch. New.’ Jalil paused, watching her reaction. ‘Who gave him all this money?’

He faced forward again. His hair was sticking together in clumps along the top of his neck.

Ellen thought about what he’d said. The teeth, the watch. She hadn’t noticed them. Jalil had. ‘He could be a businessman,’ she said. ‘A trader.’

Jalil gave a dismissive grunt. ‘Business?’ He gestured out of the window at the emptiness of the desert. ‘Here?’

She paused and considered. Maybe Jalil was smarter than he looked. He just wasn’t loud. ‘Blah, blah,’ she said. She was used to Afghan men with big egos. Jalil was different. She lifted her own hand and opened and closed it like a mouth, as he had done. ‘Blah blah, blah blah.’

He turned back to see and she snapped her hand open and closed at him until they both started to laugh, saying ‘blah, blah’ stupidly to each other as the driver swung back onto the road and they headed through the dry, swirling dust towards the next village.

Now, in this grieving house, the call to prayer gave a final burst of static and came to a close. Silence reached into the room. Ellen shifted her weight. It was already late.

‘Manana.’ Thank you. She placed her right hand on her heart in a gesture of thanks and bowed her head to Jalil’s mother. Ellen unravelled her legs and rubbed her ankles to bring them back to life. She reached forward to gather together the scattered dishes and help to clear them. Jalil’s sister protested, pushing Ellen’s hands away and scolding her softly, as Ellen knew she would.

In the dim hallway, she covered her head with a voluminous scarf, wound the ends round her neck to keep it in place and bent to lace up her boots. Jalil’s mother had retreated to the kitchen and only the daughter was hovering, adjusting her own scarf nervously in folds round her head and shoulders as she watched Ellen prepare to leave.

Ellen gestured the girl to come towards her. In a quick movement, she took a bundle of dollars from her pocket, folded the girl’s long fingers round the money and enclosed her hands for a moment in the mesh of her own. Behind them rose a clatter of dishes, shifting in the sink. A tap coughed and water splashed onto a hard surface. The girl hesitated and opened her mouth to protest.

‘Balay,’ said Ellen. Yes. Her voice was firm. ‘Please.’

The girl prised off Ellen’s fingers and thrust the money back at her. Her eyes were proud. She knows what Jalil asked me, Ellen thought. She blames me. The money was thick and greasy in her hands. Dirty. She pushed it back into her pocket. She and the girl stared at each other, unspeaking.

The moment was ended by Jalil’s mother who came out to them from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. Her scarf had fallen back to her shoulders. Her hair, prematurely grey, was clipped into a bun, dripping strands.

She embraced Ellen, kissing her on both cheeks, then pressed herself against her body. She smelt of rose-water and spices and her hair was dry and prickly against the soft skin of Ellen’s neck. She pulled back and took Ellen’s hands in her own. She clasped them, looking up into her eyes. Her palms were hot and firm. Her eyes looked so like his. Deep brown with fragments of light radiating outwards. As she spoke, Ellen read the concern there.

‘Don’t go, she is saying.’ The daughter was standing beside them, her voice cool as she translated her mother’s words. ‘It’s too dangerous. Don’t go to Helmand, she says. Go back to your own country and forget your work here. Be safe.’

His mother embraced her a second time. Ellen felt the hardness of the smaller woman’s ribs against her own flesh, the compact muscle of years of labour.

‘I must go,’ she said at last. She put her hands on Jalil’s mother’s shoulders and lifted her away. ‘I’ve got stories to file.’

His mother was reaching up to Ellen’s cheek, patting it with a cupped hand.

‘I’ll find out,’ Ellen said. ‘Tell her. I’ll find out what happened to Jalil.’

His mother spoke once more as her daughter unbolted the door and opened it. The family’s guard, standing outside in the shadows, rushed forward, his rifle glinting in the half-light. He escorted Ellen across the shabby courtyard to the high metal gate set in the compound wall. His mother had used one of the phrases Jalil had taught Ellen in the time they’d worked together. One she didn’t need anyone else to translate for her. May Allah bless you, she’d said. May Allah protect you.

2

The C-130 was a whale of an aircraft. It rattled and groaned as it flew them over the desert towards the base. The vibrations trembled through her bones as she sat, strapped in place against the aircraft’s outer shell, against a climbing frame of military webbing. The army-issue earplugs had moulded themselves to the inside of her ears, but the noise was still deafening. Too loud to breathe.

All along the edge of the aircraft and down its central spine, sharing a running canvas seat, young soldiers were dozing, their heads lolling forward against their chests. They were solid and thick limbed, prickling with kit, guns upright between their thighs. The low military lights in the ceiling were painting them a ghoulish underwater green, sickly as corpses. She looked down the row of faces. They were hard jawed with sharp haircuts, their skin slackened by sleep, iPods in their ears. The more wars she covered, the younger they got. It was airless. Her muscles were tense with apprehension. She shifted her weight, wiped her forehead.

The two young air crew at the rear unbuckled their lap-belts, clipped on safety lines and started to move round the aircraft, signalling to each other, positioning loads and preparing for landing. The lumbering transport plane slid to one side, then dropped.

She thought of the desert below, endlessly flat and barren and peppered with stones. It would be black there now but when she closed her eyes, she saw it as she remembered it, in daylight, a scarred land, the colour of grey-brown nothingness, a land flayed to its skeleton. Jagged ridges of mountains rising, sharp with shadows and the contours of vast bite marks gouged out of the earth. The only signs of human life were the occasional stick figures of boys, herding goats, and the square compounds of weatherworn houses, their mud walls rubbed smooth like wave-lapped sandcastles, surviving in the middle of all this lifelessness. The only shade was cast by the broad silhouette of the aircraft, running along beneath them, darkening the earth below.

There was a mechanical shudder as the back of the aircraft cranked open, showing dirty night sky. The smell of dust filled her nostrils as it rushed in, coating everything like softly falling brown snow. They were almost down.

As they landed, the dirt rose in clouds, filling the air with fine sand. She ran down the back ramp in sequence, clumsy with the weight of the rucksack on her back and the beetle-case of her flak jacket, into the hot scour of the blast from the aircraft. She followed the dark shape of the young soldier ahead of her, through the swirling sandstorm, over shifting pebbles, to the wire fence that signalled the outer edge of the base.

A young sergeant with a clipboard led her through the warren of structures. Past the NAAFI store where knots of soldiers were sitting idly at Formica tables on a wooden porch, nursing cups of bad coffee. Past the deserted cookhouse and the giant tents, with their male and female ablution blocks, to a small accommodation tent where they’d found her a berth. He unzipped the heavy canvas outer flap and held it for her as she ducked through, her back aching from the rucksack and the cramped journey.

‘Scoff from seven to eight tomorrow,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll find the cookhouse?’

The tent was dark. She ran a torch beam along the row of green canvas camp beds to find the only one without bedding, and dropped her rucksack by it. Dark sleeping-bag caterpillars lay on most of the others. She looked quickly over the spaces between the beds, at the sand-coloured clothes-tidies hanging down from the ceiling, neatly piled with socks and shirts and books. At the rows of flip-flops, trainers and army boots tucked below. The camp bed next to hers, against the end wall, had a leaning cork board, crammed with snapshots of party groups, young women with arms round each other’s shoulders, sticking out tongues, pulling faces, raising bottles of beer to the camera. They were framed by a mess of greetings cards of cartoon bears and kittens and dogs and a giant cut-out heart, emblazoned with the words: Luv ya loads!

The washing line that ran across the back of the tent was strewn with stiffly dried pink and green towels and camouflage trousers. She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, aware of the heaviness in her limbs. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the army, she thought, looking round. Far too soft. And far too rebellious.

The night air was heavy with stale sweat, overlaid with the perfume of cheap talcum powder and soft with female breathing. The sudden roar of an aircraft engine cut through from outside. She listened, trying to identify it as the sound peaked, then faded away into the night. She nodded to herself. Despite all the discomfort and danger, war zones made her feel more fully alive than any other place she knew.

She dug out her towel and wash-bag and lit a path by torch to the ablution block, where she showered off the dust in a stainless-steel cubicle, punching the valve repeatedly for spurts of lukewarm water to rinse herself off. Army life. She looked at herself in the mirror as she towelled herself dry, taking in the slackness of her skin. One of these days, she thought, I’ll be too old for this. But not quite yet.

Her cot would be stiff and uncomfortable, she knew. But she was exhausted. She’d sleep.

At breakfast the next day, she sat at the end of a trestle table in the cookhouse, absorbing the clatter and chat of the soldiers around her and sawing with a plastic knife at a piece of bacon in a mess of cooling baked beans. Printed notices were stuck to the inner wall of the tent with tape. ‘Your Mother doesn’t work here. Clean up after yourself.’ Beneath it was a list of ‘Rules of the Cookhouse’ in smaller print. She thought of Jalil, wondering if he’d eaten here, what he’d made of life with the British army. It was still hard to believe she’d never see him again.

‘Ellen?’

She looked up.

‘Heard you were coming. You just in?’

John from The Times. She feigned a smile. He was already threading his thick legs through the gap between the chair and the table, dropping his plastic tray onto the table top. It was piled with food.

He looked smug, appraising her instinctively like a circling, sniffing dog.

‘How long you here for?’ His breath smelt sour with hunger. He tore open his plastic sachet of a napkin and plastic cutlery and fell on his breakfast, a mingling mush of hash browns, scrambled eggs, sausages and bacon.

‘A week or so,’ she said. He’d put on weight. He was starting to look middle-aged. She wondered if he were thinking the same about her. They were both the wrong side of forty. The hair at his temples was flecked with grey. The start of a double chin was showing in the slackness of his jaw. ‘You?’

He was breaking a bread roll in his broad fingers, smearing it liberally with half-melted butter, inserting a sausage. His nose and cheekbones were pink with sunburn, his lips chapped.

‘Same. Off to Lamesh today. If there’s a place on the helo.’ He started to chew, spilling breadcrumbs.

Helo. Just say helicopter, for pity’s sake. John was one of those self-important war correspondents who thought they were really soldiers.

‘Saw you were in Iraq last month.’ He was stuffing the bread and sausage into his mouth. ‘You get up to the north?’

She shook her head. ‘Just Basra. You?’

‘All over.’ He swilled down a paper cup of orange juice. ‘Bloody hairy.’

She ripped open a plastic portion of margarine and spread it on a round of toast, the plastic knife grating like a washboard. ‘How’s it been here?’

He spoke and chewed at the same time, swallowing his food in gulps as if he expected to be summoned to breaking news at any moment. ‘Pretty good.’ He nodded at her. ‘Lots of bang-bang.’

‘Anyone else around?’

‘A newbie from the Mail. Left now.’

‘Jeremy something?’

He screwed up his face, not much interested. ‘Don’t remember. And some young kid from a regional. Doing puff pieces on Our Boys.’

They sat in silence for a few minutes, chewing. He was a windbag but he was experienced. He was also a sharp operator and she didn’t trust him an inch.

‘Heard about Nayullah?’ He scraped his fork round his plate, scooping up beans.

She nodded. She’d read the agency reports. Nayullah was a town on the new front line that had been out of bounds until recently. Now the army was trying to establish a presence there. It had just been shaken by its first suicide bomb.

He shovelled in another forkful of beans, staining his lips orange. ‘Took out a few ANP. What a shower they are. But civilians, mostly. Women and children.’

The Afghan police. She’d done stories on them in Kabul. Poorly trained new recruits without kit or ethics. She’d heard they’d been the target. The bomb had exploded in the market, a day or two before Jalil died.

‘Did you get down there?’

He nodded. ‘That afternoon. Not pretty.’ He shrugged. ‘Hard to get a picture they could use.’

‘Any idea who it was?’

He wiped off his tray with a crust and crammed it into his mouth. She waited until he could speak.

‘Not much left to ID. Locals, not foreigners, they say. Young lads.’ He drained the last of his tea and licked his lips, his eyes darting round the soldiers as they queued to sterilize their hands or emerged with trays of food and settled to eat. He’s looking for someone else, she thought, so he can trade up from me.

‘Food’s not bad,’ he said, ‘considering.’

She swished the tea round her paper cup and considered the Nayullah bomb.

‘What do you make of it?’

He ignored her. A thought was crossing his face, crumpling his forehead into a frown. ‘This new offensive. They letting you join it?’

She shrugged, trying not to give anything away. ‘Don’t know yet.’

‘I’ve done it anyway,’ he said quickly. ‘Sent London a piece yesterday.’

He was comforting himself. He pushed away his tray with a lordly gesture and sat back. ‘Major Mack. The Commander. You met him? Decent guy. Old school.’

She tried to steer him back to her question. ‘So what about the Nayullah bomb? A reaction?’

He nodded. ‘Know how much the army’s pouring into this? They’re knocking the Taliban off ground they’ve held for years. So, question is,’ he brandished a finger at her, ‘why aren’t the rag-heads putting up a better fight?’

‘And?’

He shrugged. ‘They can’t. Haven’t got the numbers. Or the kit. But they can sure as hell slow things up. Roadside bombs. Suicide attacks. Shoot and scoot. Then disappear back into the woodwork.’

She nodded, drank her coffee. The fact he was telling her this meant he must have filed on it already. Two soldiers pulled out chairs and joined their table.

‘Could drag on like that for years. Thirty years’ time, I reckon, we’ll still be dug in here.’ He pushed back his own chair, tore off a disinfectant wipe from the plastic canister on the table and ran it over the table top in front of him. She did the same. ‘The Brits, I mean,’ he said. ‘God help me, hope I’m out by then.’

They picked up their trays and walked to the dustbins outside to dump the lot.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘bugger all to do round here. Coming for a smoke?’

She sat beside him on the slatted bench in the smoking area, a secluded corner set apart from the accommodation tents. The soldiers had knocked up a rough trellis and hung it with camouflage netting for shade. A grumpy-looking soldier was installed in one corner, an ankle resting on the opposite knee, smoking silently and keeping himself to himself.

John offered her a cigarette and, when she refused, scratched a match and lit up in a rush of sulphur.

‘That’s new, isn’t it?’ He was pointing at the gold band on her wedding finger. His eyes were keen. ‘You got lucky?’

She turned the ring on her finger. ‘My mother’s.’ It felt odd. She didn’t usually wear it but, when she travelled alone, it didn’t hurt to look married. ‘She died a few years ago.’ She looked down at it, thinking of her mother. She’d had the same long fingers, a warm, strong hand to hold. ‘There’s a matching engagement ring. My sister’s got that.’

John was laughing. ‘Thought it was a turn-up,’ he said. ‘Always had you down as a die-hard spinster.’

The soldier opposite was looking at them. She wondered what he was thinking. He glanced away again, stony-faced.

‘Maybe you’ll bag yourself a nice soldier boy.’ John was amusing himself, sniggering into his fug of smoke. ‘You’re in the right place for it.’

She turned to look at his slack-skinned face and managed to smile. Ten years ago, she would have told him to shut up, she had plenty of men in her life. Ten years ago, that was true. Nowadays she was alone and used to it and, anyway, she couldn’t be bothered to argue. John wasn’t worth it. He was on his third wife already.

He leaned back and drew on his cigarette. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘what’s your angle?’

‘The usual.’ She shrugged. ‘Life on the front line.’

He nodded, eyes on her face, not looking convinced. ‘It’s a shit hole,’ he said. He leant towards her, lowered his voice. ‘One of the world’s greatest.’

He drew on his cigarette. The smoke rose into the thick, hot air.

‘Corrupt as hell, this country,’ he said. He rubbed his fingers together to indicate money-grubbing. ‘Can’t trust them.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know so.’ He tipped back his head and exhaled lazily. ‘Even the uniforms say so. Off the record. Ask Major Mack.’

She wondered how many Afghans John actually knew. He was a master of the hack’s instant guide.

‘Modern democracy, here?’ he said. ‘All bollocks. They’re stuck in the Stone Age.’

The soldier opposite them reached forward to the sand-filled mortar shell that served as an ashtray and stubbed out his cigarette. It splayed into sparks and died. Without acknowledging either of them, he heaved himself to his feet, all bulk and swagger, and left. A pause.

The morning sat slow and still on their shoulders. The muffled whine of a radio or television drifted through to them from the nearest tent. Beyond the open metal fence, past the parked container trucks and military vehicles, miles of desert lay shimmering in the gathering heat. There’s nothing here to sustain life, she thought. No water, no natural shelter, no food. It’s utterly desolate. This is an artificial world, built from nothing in the middle of nowhere. The Afghans must think we’re crazy.

‘It’s like we’ve learnt nothing.’ Next to her, John’s one-sided conversation had reignited. ‘Two centuries spilling blood, trying to civilize this godforsaken land, and here we are, back again.’

She stayed silent, waiting for him to finish. John was a man who liked to talk, not listen. Especially in conversation with a woman.

‘Of course it matters.’ He drew on his cigarette, snorted, exhaled skywards in a stream of smoke. ‘Regional security. India. Pakistan. Securing the borders. All that crap. But these guys we’re bankrolling? Money down the toilet.’

He coughed, spat into the sand at his feet.

‘All at it. Stuffing their pockets,’ he said. ‘Bloody narco-state.’

She sat quietly while he cleared his throat and started to smoke again. The heat was gathering. Already her skin was desiccating, scrubbed raw by the fine sand which invaded everything.

‘Do a patrol of police stations if you can. Great story.’

She smiled to herself. That meant he’d already exhausted it.

‘Used syringes everywhere. Beards sitting around in dirty vests. Half of them stoned. God help us. And they’re the good guys.’

She seized her chance to cut in. ‘Heard one of the translators got killed,’ she said. She tried to keep her tone light. ‘Guy called Jalil. You come across him?’

He stuck out his lip, shook his head. ‘Heard something about that. Ambushed, wasn’t he?’

‘Was he?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s what I heard. Last week? Didn’t file. Two Brits died around then. In a Snatch. That was big. You see that one?’

He paused, thinking it over, then turned to her, his eyes shrewd. ‘Why’re you asking about the Afghan anyway?’

‘No reason.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Just wondered.’

He stubbed out his cigarette, stretched, sighed. The fumes of dying ash mingled with the smell of his sweat. ‘Drugs,’ he said, ‘betcha. He must’ve been on the take.’ He got to his feet. ‘Or unlucky. Wrong time, wrong place.’

He coughed, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. His eyes were sunken. The putt of helicopter blades came to them softly from a distance, strengthening as they listened. They peered up into the sun-bleached sky. ‘Chinook,’ he said.

The throb of the blades was steadily building. She got up too to get under canvas before it came in low and whipped up a frenzy of sand.

‘Dying for a drink.’ He looked at her. ‘You didn’t by any chance…?’

‘Booze? ’Fraid not.’

He tutted, sighed. ‘Well, not long to go.’

They walked back together to the main drag, their boots clattering on the plastic military decking underfoot. As they separated, he pointed a stout finger at her, all fake bonhomie. ‘I’m moving off again this afternoon. But you keep safe. Hear me?’

She nodded, shook his outstretched hand. ‘I always keep out of trouble,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘Yeah. Right. Like hell you do.’

She stood for a moment, watching him walk away. The thick set of his shoulders showed just the beginnings of a stoop. Anything happened to me, she thought, he’d be licking his chops in the rush to file. And then probably spell my name wrong. She turned down between the rows of tents towards her own, thinking of the vodka stashed away in her second shampoo bottle.

Inside the darkened tent, she sat on the edge of her cot and listened to the breathing of the women sleeping around her, overlaid with the stutter of the air conditioning. The joys of shift work. She closed her eyes and let herself think.

John was wrong about Jalil. He wouldn’t have been mixed up in drugs or on the take. She was sure of that. If he’d been a less principled young man, heaven knows, he’d be alive and well now and far away from Helmand. She ran her hands heavily down her face. There was no escaping it. Whoever pulled the trigger, it was her fault he’d ended up in Helmand at the wrong end of a gun.

Jalil had come to her at the guesthouse in Kabul on the final afternoon of her last visit. They had worked together as usual for a fortnight, companionable but businesslike, sharing long days of dusty travel, conducting interviews in airless rooms across the capital and in hot, fly-thick shacks beyond it. They’d endured running sweat and toxic smells and sat together on filthy floors, sipping chai and nibbling on plates of stale sweetmeats and pastry that were barely edible but necessary to consume for the sake of politeness.

Now, on the final day of that visit, she had her story and had withdrawn to write. She was sitting in relative comfort at the desk in her room at the guesthouse, with pots of tea and good food to order and the luxury of empty hours ahead of her. She’d need them. Phil, her editor back in London, was already pushing her for copy, complaining she’d taken too long. He usually gave her a decent amount of time to research each story. A week–or even two, sometimes. But he expected a lot in return. Six- or seven-thousand-word pieces that broke new ground and were carefully crafted. Now she had the facts but she needed to focus on writing and rewriting until she had a news-feature that even Phil would consider strong enough to print.

It was at this point, when she was halfway through her second draft, that she was interrupted by a hesitant tapping at her door. She opened it to find Jalil, looking out of place amongst the kitsch foreign decor and rich fittings of the hallway.

‘Come in,’ she said, without thinking. Of course he wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be proper. Instead he stayed hovering there on the public side of the threshold with growing awkwardness. She sighed to herself and signalled to him to wait while she went back to her laptop and reluctantly turned it off. The story had just been coming together. Now her flow of thought was lost and she was irritated.

They sat together in the parched garden on wicker chairs with stained cotton cushions. She tried to press him to accept a drink–tea or fresh juice–and he politely refused. He was struggling, she could see, under a great weight of embarrassment. Her attempts to lighten the atmosphere by chatting to him only prolonged the awkwardness. Finally she fell silent and they sat, side by side, looking out at the darting birds and the startlingly bright colours of the flowerbeds, and she waited until he was ready to speak.

‘It is only a loaning,’ he said. ‘I will pay back everything. More than everything. Interests as well.’ He spoke carefully into the still heat of the garden, his voice stilted as if he’d practised his speech many times. ‘We will make a proper agreement. I will pay you this much in this year and this much in the next. Like this. Very proper.’

He had the offer of a place at Pennsylvania State University to study engineering, he said. He’d applied there because the distant cousin of a friend of the family lived nearby.

‘All the living is no problem for me,’ he said. ‘I can sleep anywhere. They have some bedroom with their sons. That’s enough for me. And I can eat with them at night-time. Cheap food. Afghan food.’ He twisted and untwisted his fingers in his lap, still unable to look her in the face.

Once he had his degree, he could get a good job, he said. Then he would have enough money to support his mother and sister and pay for his little brother to attend a good school.

‘Everything I will pay back,’ he said again. ‘This loaning is for the fees.’ A hint of pleading had entered his voice. ‘The fees are very costly in United States. So much of money.’ He tailed off. The quietness rushed in and smothered them both.

She tried to think how to phrase a reply. As she was finally about to open her mouth to try, he spoke again.

‘Some of this money’, he said, ‘my relatives can give me. And from friends of my mother. Men who knew my father also. But not all.’

He hesitated. ‘I need still more money. Maybe two, three thousand US dollars.’ He was staring at his feet, his long toes, flecked with dark hairs, at the edge of his sandals. ‘It is so much of money. I know. It dishonours me to ask. But it is just…’ He broke off as if his English were failing him. ‘This is a very difficult matter…’

He left the phrase hanging. A cat, its pregnant belly hanging low, ran across the grass in front of them. It was a mangy thing, flea-bitten and feral. They watched together as it crouched in the flowerbed, hunting.

She had been asked for money several times in her career by people she had grown to know well. People from developing countries who had no one else to ask. It was always for something significant. For a major operation for an elderly parent or for schooling for a child. She was a journalist, she told herself. An outsider who travelled, observed, reported and then moved on. She had to stay separate, to be objective. Don’t interfere. Don’t cross the line.

‘I’d love to,’ she said. She too was staring at his toes, at the neat square cut of his nails. ‘Really. But I just can’t. I am sorry. Perhaps I could—’

‘Of course.’ He interrupted her at once, nodding and waving his hand as if to bat away the awkwardness between them. ‘I’m sorry. Please. Forgive me.’

Suddenly they were both on their feet, making hasty, nervous movements and hiding their shame with a flurry of meaningless arrangements, confirming what time the car would take her to the airport the next morning and discussing the final settlement of the driver’s bill.

Afterwards she had gone back to her room, ordered a fresh pot of chai sabz and a plate of Afghan bread and jam and immersed herself in her story. It was only later, when her friend at The New York Times emailed to tell her about his death in Helmand, that she stopped, shaken, and really thought back. By giving up work with journalists and instead signing a contract to go into conflict zones and translate for the military, he was risking his life. Suddenly it became clear to her why he’d done it. He’d been desperate for the money so he could escape.

‘Ellen Thomas?’ Someone was hissing her name into the darkness, through the lifted tent flap. The tone was more accusation than question. When she emerged, a young soldier was pacing outside, looking impatient. ‘The Major sent me. Follow me.’

He led her across the camp, then turned sharply right into a dim narrow corridor between hessian sandbag walls. Engineers corps, she thought. Build anything. He pushed open a plywood door and ushered her inside, down a hallway and into an office.

It had the dead smell of an underground bunker, ripe with dust and recycled air. It was poorly lit by low-wattage bulbs, strung on wires that were pinned in loops along the wood ceiling struts like Christmas decorations. An old air-conditioning unit was panting against one wall, making memos and notices on the board above it flutter and crack.

‘Ellen?’

A short, compact man rose from behind a desk and came forward to greet her. His gaze was direct, his eyes a surprising blue. Intense, she thought at once. Intelligent. He was muscular but the creases round his eyes suggested he must be about her age, forty something. His hair was blond and clearly thinning, the dome of his head glowing warmly in the mellow light, offset by arches of thicker growth above his ears.

‘Major McKay,’ he said. ‘But call me Mack. Everyone does.’

He pumped her hand, his fingers hard in hers.

‘Thought we’d lost you,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’

He nodded to the young soldier who bustled about at a water heater with polystyrene cups and powdered milk and handed them drinks.

‘Well.’ He folded himself onto a chair and gestured to her to sit too. ‘The famous Ellen Thomas. I’m honoured.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed.’ The coffee smelt strong and stale.

He smiled, showing even teeth. Somewhere behind him, a clock was ticking. Civilizing the desert, she thought. War was surreal.

‘Read a lot of your stuff,’ he said. ‘Brave woman. Hope we’re going to pass the Thomas test here.’

She smiled back. ‘Not brave,’ she said. ‘I just report.’

His manner was confident. Yes, she thought, in a crisis, this was a man you’d trust.

‘Not sure I always agree with you, though.’ He tutted. ‘That piece on Basra.’

Oh no, she thought. A man with opinions on my work. She lowered her lips to her polystyrene cup and watched his face as he took issue with her argument on Iraq. His look was sharp. He was articulate, clearly. A good adversary. But a debate on Basra wasn’t what she needed right now. Iraq already seemed a long time ago.

She pretended to listen, nodding in increments and scanning the room. A war room. Shared and impersonal. Desks piled with folders and papers. Behind him, a flip chart with notes written across it in marker pen in a loopy, sloping hand. ‘What are we fighting for?’ read the heading, underlined. Then a list: Cathedrals. Real cider. Bangers and mash. Small cottages. Little old ladies in teashops. She wondered which young wags had brainstormed that and from which part of rural England they’d been plucked. She became aware again of the clock’s tick. Mack had stopped talking.

‘So what’s the plan?’ she said. ‘What’s this offensive?’

He paused, watching her, then got to his feet. ‘We’re about to take new ground.’ He drew her across to an area map tacked to the wall and used his pen as a pointer. ‘Here’s the camp, where we are now. Early tomorrow morning, B and C Company will move into position in this area of desert here.’ He pointed to a white space some distance north into the desert. No tracks were marked. The only roads snaked from the camp in different directions, to the south and west. ‘The Danes will provide backup here. The Estonians here. Once they’re in place, B and C Company will launch a fresh attack here. Crossing the river at this point. Into this area of the green belt.’

She nodded, taking in the distances, the contours. There were several villages marked in the target area, clusters of squares and dots.

‘How well fortified is it?’

He shrugged. ‘Pretty well. The enemy’s been dug in there for more than two years.’

They’ll have an established underground bunker system then, she thought. Carefully constructed traps.

‘Mines?’

‘Almost certainly.’

She looked again at the map, trying to imagine the terrain. ‘So you expect resistance. Probably a lot.’

‘We’re always prepared for contact with the enemy,’ he said.

‘Any estimate of timings?’ She pointed to the first village, high on a ridge above the river. ‘When do you think you’ll reach here? Noon?’

‘Depends.’ His eyes were thoughtful. ‘Depends how much resistance there is.’

She finished her coffee. She wanted to sort out her kit and repack for the field. Today might be her last chance to eat fresh food, shower and get some sleep.

‘Now,’ he was saying, ‘you need to have a think. I have to make it clear to you: it will be dangerous out there. We can’t guarantee your safety. You understand that? So you need to weigh up the risks against the gains. Of course, you’re a reporter. You’ve got a job to do. But you may think it wise to stay in camp tomorrow. I can arrange a briefing for you here. Then the following day we can review…’

She dropped her cup into the dustbin and turned to face him. He came to the end of his speech and paused. ‘Don’t feel,’ he said, ‘you have to give me an answer now. Think it over.’

‘I’ve thought,’ she said. ‘What time do we leave?’

3

Almost two weeks earlier

Late in the night, a sound woke Hasina. She opened her eyes with a jolt and listened. Abdul, her husband, breathed heavily beside her. The stale but comfortable animal smell of him filled her nostrils. The room was clotted with darkness. She eased herself off the cot and wound her long cotton scarf round her shoulders and head.

Outside, she poured herself water from the jug, drank a little, then wet the end of her scarf. The night air was fresh and earthy, after the breath-thick room. She crept round the side of the house, scanning the mud yard and the running blot of the low boundary wall. The goats stamped, moving nervously in a half-circle on their tethers. Beyond them, the field of standing corn stretched away in a solid dark block. She stood, hidden in the shadow of the house, and rubbed the damp tail of her scarf round her neck. Nothing.

She looked out across the land. She knew every stone, every ditch of this field as well as she knew the bumps and contours of her son’s body, of her husband’s body too. It was good land. It rose like a blessing out of the barren desert, green fields made fertile by the sudden appearance of the river. The soil had fed as many generations of her husband’s family as anyone could remember. Like the people, it struggled to stave off exhaustion. She ran her eyes along the raised ridge, looking for fresh signs of collapse. When the rains were heavy, the top layer could lift and run away with the torrents of water. Their carefully dug irrigation channels silted up and, once the rain stopped, they squelched through them, feeling the mud ooze between their toes, to sieve the earth between their fingers and pile it back.

But at this time of year, in the long stifling hope of rain, it was baked hard, a sunken square of land that they struggled to keep moist. The first crop of the year was long since harvested. The second crop–corn for themselves and poppy to sell to Abdul’s brother, Karam–was growing higher, day by day. She sniffed the air, tasting the health of the plants. The first harvest had been average. This second one held more promise.

She settled on a stone and rocked herself. Somewhere out in the desert, wild dogs were calling to each other. A low breeze was blowing in from the plains. She wrapped her moist scarf across her face, shielding her eyes from the lightly swirling sand.

Then she heard it. A tiny human explosion: a sneeze. She lowered the rim of her scarf. Someone was out there, hiding in the corn. She listened, her senses raw. After some time, a barely audible rustle, as if someone, deep in the cornfield, were shifting their weight.

She crept forward, one slow step at a time, feeling out the ground with each foot. She made her way, bent double, down the side of the field, balancing on the thin strip between the last planted row and the ditch. Every few paces, she stopped and listened.

Finally she heard breathing. Short, shallow breaths. She turned towards the centre of the corn and reached forward to ease apart the corn stems, as if she were parting a curtain. She let out a sudden cry. Crouched in front of her, looking right into her eyes, so close she could reach out and touch him, was a young man, a stranger, his head wrapped in the printed cotton scarf of the jihadi fighter. A brass talisman gleamed on a leather thong round his neck. It was in the shape of a bird, its wings spread and claws outstretched. The young man frowned. The thin moonlight caught the metal casing of the gun he held across his body, its muzzle a matter of inches from her bending head.

The three young men perched on the perimeter wall and lit up fat cigarettes. Hasina’s son, Aref, sat beside them, the only one without a gun propped against his legs. Hasina recognized the acrid smell of fresh hashish. Aref smoked too, when the cigarette was offered, but self-consciously. They were teasing him, laughing and calling him ‘little brother’. Such arrogance. Hasina wanted to slap their faces. They thought they were so clever, these boys with guns. They were nothing more than troublemakers, with their bullets and bombs. Whatever they called themselves, Leftists, jihadis, mujahideen. She’d seen so much death already.

Moving quietly, she poured water into cups and offered it to them. They reeked of stale sweat. She tried not to let her disapproval show. Even the poorest villager showed respect to his body by keeping clean.

As the young men smoked, she pulled Aref away and took him to the back of the house. His eyes were sullen.

‘Who are these boys?’ she said. ‘Why have you brought them to our home? Have you no respect?’

He scowled. ‘They are my brothers.’

‘Brothers?’ She stared at him. ‘How do you know them?’

Aref turned his eyes to the earth. ‘Karam Uncle,’ he said.

Hasina blinked. Karam? He had dark contacts, she knew that. Selling poppy to them had made his fortune. But fighters, like these?

‘You’ve met them before?’

‘Many times.’ He gave a thin smile. ‘I have trained with them.’ He lifted his hands as if he were aiming a gun at her. ‘You never knew, did you?’

What a child, she thought. She saw triumph in his eyes. What would Abdul say? Those times Aref had disappeared for two, three days on Karam’s business. Was it for this? She wanted to take hold of his shoulders and shake him hard. Instead she reached for his hand. ‘Aref, these are not decent boys.’

‘Not decent?’ He swatted her away. ‘These men are fighting. Defending our land. Not decent?’

Hasina sighed. Beside them the goats shuffled and pressed, hot and pungent, against her. She thought of that face, so close to hers in the corn. He looked little more than a boy, but his eyes, hard and knowing, were old.

‘Where are they from?’

Aref gestured vaguely. ‘Beyond Nayullah.’

‘They should go home, Aref. Back to their families.’

Her son was looking at her the way some men in the village looked at their wives, as if women had no more brains than a goat.

‘They’re fighters. Not farmers.’ He spat out the word with disdain. ‘They’re fighting for Allah.’

Behind them, one of the young men let out a barely stifled laugh. She froze, frightened the noise would wake Abdul.

‘Bring them to the back,’ she said. She untied the goats and led them out into the clearing. ‘I’ll fetch food.’

She sat in the shadow of the wall and watched them. They bristled with tense excitement as they whispered and sniggered. They didn’t attempt to wash. They kicked the area clean of goat droppings and dirty straw and half sat, half lay on the mud. Once they’d pulled off their boots, they fell on the food she’d given them. Their long-nosed guns lay at their sides. Aref sat with his arms curled tightly round his knees, a look of devotion on his face.

What lives were these boys leading, fleeing across the desert as the foreigners advanced? The boys were settling to sleep now, their arms round their guns as if they were wives. Their faces had relaxed. Sleep was turning them to boys again. She imagined their mothers, lying in the darkness in small mud-brick houses like their own. She bowed her head and tried to pray for them, to beg Allah to give them His guidance and keep them safe from harm. But all she could see when she closed her eyes was the eager face of her own son, loyal as a dog at their feet.

When she woke at first light, the young men had disappeared. So had Aref. He must be guiding them off the village land. An hour or two, then he’d be back. She waited, listening for his step every moment as she swept and cooked. Morning passed. When she took food to Abdul in the fields, she stayed with him as he ate. Should she tell him? She read the exhaustion in his face and held her tongue. By mid-afternoon, she was desperate. She straightened her skirts and walked through the village to the grand compound of her brother-in-law, Karam.

Her sister-in-law, Palwasha, was lying on her side on a crimson carpet. It was decorated with geometric designs in black, yellow and cream. The colours were strong and bright. Abdul’s wealthy brother had sent his first wife back to her family for failing to bear children. Now he spoiled his second wife with costly gifts. Hasina pursed her lips. Before this, only the mosque had been decked with carpets.

Palwasha was pulling at her elder daughter’s hair, tugging it into tight plaits. Sima was grimacing. Palwasha’s wrists tinkled with bracelets as she flexed her arms.

‘I should never have come to live here,’ Palwasha said as soon as she saw Hasina. Her eyes, heavily circled with kohl, rolled dramatically. ‘I told Karam I would simply die. I’m a town girl. People should remember that.’ She looked sullenly at Hasina. ‘Why am I telling you?’ she said. ‘You never understand a thing.’

Hasina settled herself on the compact mud, some distance from the edge of the carpet. Palwasha talked such nonsense. The village women said her family had married her off to Karam because they were in debt.

‘Of course, sister-in-law,’ Hasina said. ‘Life here must seem very harsh to you.’

Sima squirmed, struggling to break free. Palwasha slapped her leg. Sima’s breathing juddered as she tried not to cry.

‘Primitive!’ Palwasha muttered. ‘You’re so right.’

She finished plaiting and pushed Sima away. The girl crept out into the compound to join her young brother, Yousaf, and sister, Nadira, chasing chickens and setting them flapping through the straw.

‘How are your good mother and father?’ Hasina spoke the ritual greetings politely. ‘Your younger sister? May Allah grant them good health.’

Palwasha didn’t bother to answer. A younger woman should show respect. It was Hasina’s due. But they took their status from their husbands. Abdul was just a farmer. Karam was rich.

‘The village is hard for you,’ Hasina tried again. She looked at the thick carpet under Palwasha’s thigh, the expensive brass pots and plates stacked in the corner behind her. ‘But perhaps,’ she went on, ‘in these troubled times, we are safer here.’

‘Safer?’ Palwasha was picking at her polished nails. ‘May God help us! If I have to die, please, not here. That would be too cruel.’ She let out a sudden laugh.

‘The foreign soldiers are advancing, sister-in-law.’ Hasina proceeded carefully. ‘Have you heard? They’re already in Nayullah.’

Palwasha rolled over onto her back. ‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘No one ever comes here.’ She is just a girl, Hasina thought, looking at her long body, stretched out, petulant, on the floor.

‘Besides,’ Palwasha added, ‘my husband has powerful friends.’ She sat up and crossed her legs carefully, as if posing for a portrait. ‘In another year, the foreigners will be gone. Then Karam and I will move to the city.’

Hasina breathed deeply. She rarely visited Palwasha nowadays. The girl had so few brains. ‘Sister-in-law,’ she said, ‘I am worried about Aref. Have you seen him?’

‘Aref?’ Palwasha’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why would he be here?’

‘To see your husband, perhaps.’

‘Karam’s not here.’ Palwasha frowned, her mood changing. She languidly stretched her legs, one at a time. ‘He’ll be back tonight, inshallah.’ She rose and left the room, leaving Hasina staring at emptiness.

In the evening, when Abdul had eaten, Hasina crept back to Karam’s compound. She had barely swallowed a mouthful all day. Her mouth was too dry, her stomach too twisted with fear.

She tapped on the metal gate. One of Karam’s men opened the inner door and peered out. She waited inside, her back pressed back against the wall, until Karam’s broad silhouette emerged from the house.

‘Sister-in-law?’

She bowed low. ‘Karam brother-in-law. I am so sorry to trouble you. But—’

‘Aref?’

She looked up sharply. ‘You know where he is?’

‘Of course. He is about my business.’

Hasina felt her knees buckle. ‘Your business?’ She held his gaze. ‘The young men. I saw them.’

Karam’s expression soured. ‘Some things’, he said, ‘should be left unspoken.’

She pulled her scarf across her face. Karam looked round, as if for eavesdroppers, before he spoke in a low voice.

‘Of course he has gone,’ he said. ‘It is his duty.’

She looked at the large compound, the servants, the animals. She knew where the money came from. From poppy. Karam was beholden to these fighting men. But Aref?

‘He is so young.’ She thought of his boyish face, his foolishness. ‘If anything happens to him…’ Her voice trailed off. What hope did these young boys have? She knelt before him and raised the trailing cloth of her scarf on the flat of her hands, beseeching him.

‘Go home to your husband.’ He turned away, embarrassed at her begging, and took a step back. ‘My brother needs to control his wife. Do I need to teach him?’

Hasina tried to steady her voice. ‘No, brother-in-law,’ she said.

Someone moved in the shadows behind her. The bolt on the inner gate slid back, inviting her to leave.

‘He has a chance’, Karam whispered as he pulled her to her feet, ‘to defend his people. To do God’s will. You should be proud.’

As she stepped through, the gate clanged shut behind her. Outside, she sank against the compound wall, her face buried in her hands, her scarf stuffed against her mouth to stifle the sound, and sobbed.

The night after Aref’s disappearance, she found no sleep at all. The night cries and howls outside were full of menace. Aref was somewhere out there, in a ditch or cornfield. Hungry. Afraid. Had they made him go, those boys? She turned onto her side and drew up her knees. Aref had looked so smug when he spoke of training with them. Training to fight? She wrapped her arms round her body in anguish. Had Karam really sent their boy to these hotheads? Recently, Aref had gone off on Karam’s business more often, sometimes for several days. Selling poppy, she’d thought. They hadn’t asked questions. But training with these foolish, fired-up boys? She moaned to herself. Beside her, Abdul stirred.

They had welcomed Karam’s interest in Aref. They had let him influence their boy. He had power and money. Abdul trusted his elder brother with his life. What would he say, if all this were true?

She twisted on her front, buried her face in her shawl. And now the foreign soldiers were waging war against them. She put her fist to her mouth. She was cold with fear. Abdul would never believe that Karam would put their son in danger. She must tread carefully. Allah alone knew how.

As soon as she saw first light, she got up. She tried to wash the exhaustion out of her body with cool water, then forced herself to start her chores. Abdul emerged, yawning, to find much of her work already done.

‘I’ll go to the big market today,’ she told him while he ate. ‘I need spices. And my cooking pot is cracked. These village ones are useless.’

‘Cracked?’ He looked up. ‘But it’s new.’

Hasina spread her hands. ‘Why quarrel over a pot?’ she said. ‘Anything you need?’

He shrugged. He was already finishing his bread and tea. He dipped into his pocket and pulled out some crumpled notes. ‘Spend it with care,’ he said.

She waited until he had set off for the fields. She wrapped her best shawl around her head and shoulders, making sure her hair was properly covered, and picked her way along the edge of the fields, down the hillside towards the riverside track. Her body settled into the rhythm of the long walk to Nayullah.

The big market was held every week but she didn’t go often. It took a whole morning and, besides, they couldn’t afford to buy much. Today she’d needed a reason to walk. If she stayed in the fields all day, her worry would suffocate her. She looked out across the river, at the thick reeds breaking the water, the flies in a low black cloud on the surface. She’d bought treats at the market for Aref when he was a boy. Nuts and sweets in twists of coloured paper. Cheap plastic toys. How he’d loved them. She wiped off her forehead with the end of her scarf. Now where was he?

She lengthened her stride. The sunlight was bouncing sharp and clean off the water at her side. It was a blessing from Allah, the river. The land around it was green with ripening corn and low foliage. A lizard ran into the path in front of her, froze, then darted for cover. When she raised her eyes to look beyond the river, the desert softly shimmered in the heat, stretching away to the horizon, endlessly thirsty and barren.

A boy came slowly towards her, herding goats along the river bank. He was a gawky child. She nodded to him as he approached but he slid his eyes away, embarrassed. He clicked his tongue at the goats, slapping at them with a long switch. The goats knocked and stumbled against each other. They filled the narrow path and she stepped into the scrub to let them pass. For some moments, the air was suffused with the low tinkling of the bells at their necks and the thick pungent scent of hot goat.

She walked on, thinking. Since she could remember, there’d always been fear and fighting here and restless young men eager to kill. Her own family’s village had been razed by the Leftists when she was a girl. The baker and his wife tortured and killed. No one would tell her why. Their children, her playmates, had been sent around the village to grow up with cousins. Sad children, after that, with fewer friends. When would it end? She thought again of Aref. The way those young men had strutted like cockerels, all self-importance. Such foolishness.

As she finally approached the market, she quickened her pace. The stalls were spilling out along both sides of the dirt road and deep into the land behind it. She looked over the hawkers. That was someone she recognized, that farmer. Over there, another. Regulars from a nearby village. She’d bought from them since they were boys. Baskets woven by their wives. Clay pots. Vegetables and fruit. They were seated silently on the edge of the large cloths they’d rolled out over the dirt. Something about their stillness made her uneasy.

She walked further, past a fat row of dented trucks. The metalwork flashed with sunlight. More outsiders. Vegetables gave way to bales of used garments and second-hand shoes, hillocks of garish foreign plastic, buckets and bowls. The old men and boys who sat with these goods, cross-legged, their feet bare, were strangers.

Her head was starting to ache. A volley of cries from crackling loud-hailers. Cages of chickens squawked and clawed. Young men were cooking up snacks in pots, flipping them with flattened knives. The smell of frying oil hung heavy in the air. How Aref loved oily snacks when he was a child. What would those boys with guns give him to eat today?

A young boy, weighed down by a bulging bag, came running towards her. He stuck to her side, brandishing a plastic bottle of juice. He pushed it in her face, urging her to buy. She swatted him away. Across the road, a group of young men skidded to a halt on motorbikes, kicking up dust. They wore dark glasses and faded foreign T-shirts, cotton scarves tied loosely round their necks. They were whooping and showing off. They called out insults to a passing group of mothers and daughters. The young women pulled their scarves more closely round their faces. Hasina hesitated.

A sudden movement caught her eye, down beyond the market, towards Nayullah. There were men in the road, waving their arms and flagging down vehicles. The sun glinted on metal at their chests. She screened her eyes to look. Guns.

They were Afghans, not foreigners. They wore shabby uniforms, bunched in folds at the waist. There was a barrier in the road. They were stopping passing vehicles, forcing them to pull in to the side and be searched. At that moment, a motorbike came roaring through, two young men clinging to the seat. Behind it a battered pickup truck, open at the back like a farmer’s vehicle, was forced to a halt. Were the men in uniform asking the drivers for money? Who were they? She frowned. This was something new. It unsettled her.

She turned in from the street and picked her way down the narrow mud aisles between the stalls. The clamour flowed over her. Last time she was here, she’d bought boots for Aref. He’d be wearing those boots now. She looked round, trying to get her bearings. The second-hand shoe stall had gone. Everything looked different. The stalls seemed brasher, the shouting stallholders more aggressive. Other shoppers barged and jostled her, as some pressed their way forward, others forced their way past. Every time someone stopped to examine the goods, crouching down to turn over in their hands a plastic sandal or cotton scarf, they became a rock in the stream, damming up the crowd behind them.

Hasina began to feel light-headed with the noise, the heat and her lack of sleep. Through the crowd, she saw a face she recognized. A fruit-seller. An old man from a village near town. She pushed her way towards him.

‘May Allah bless and protect you,’ she said to him. ‘And all your family.’

‘And may He also bless and protect yours.’ He got to his feet, pushed his toes into his sandals. His cap was dusty. He moved to the side, clearing a small space at the side of his stall so she could step in from the thoroughfare.

‘So busy today,’ she said. She wiped her face with her shawl.

‘Yes, so many people.’ He gestured to her to sit, then turned from her to his goods. He had arranged a display of oranges in a carefully balanced pyramid, small misshapen pieces of fruit, picked too early in the season. He spent time choosing one, then sliced it open over the earth with his knife and handed her a piece to suck. The sweetness of the juice made her heady. He settled down, cross-legged, beside her, and smiled as he watched her eat, showing, through his grey beard, black stumps of teeth.

She sucked on the orange, pulling her scarf forward round her face. In front of them, the crowd streamed past. ‘How is business?’

The old man spread his hands. Hasina saw the bulging veins running along their backs. ‘Like this, like that,’ he said. ‘When the rains come, then it will be better.’

‘Yes, let’s pray for rain soon.’

They nodded. The fat man at the next stall began to shout through a loud-hailer, urging passers-by to stop and look. The rich smell of the orange cut into the stale sweat all around her.

‘I’ve never seen so many vehicles,’ she said.

The old man scowled. ‘And those new police, you saw them?’ He wagged his finger at her. ‘Thugs. The foreigners give them guns.’

Hasina felt the orange thicken in her throat. The policemen’s guns must be good then. Better than the country-made weapons of the fighters. She threw the orange peel behind her onto the ground, wiped her sticky fingers on her scarf.

‘So much trouble.’ She looked round. No one was close enough to hear. ‘More killing in town, I hear.’

The old man raised his hands to the sky. ‘Every day.’

They sat with their heads close, whispering in each other’s ears in the midst of the hubbub, as if they were sheltering together under a tree in a violent storm.

‘The foreign soldiers have built a camp in the desert,’ he said. ‘Just a few miles outside Nayullah. They’re trying to shake out all the…’ He paused, hesitating as he chose his word. ‘…the fighters.’

She nodded. ‘I heard.’

‘Every day they drive through the streets, big guns pointing everywhere, shouting at us all.’ He shook his head. ‘The children throw stones. Everyone’s afraid.’ He coughed, spat to the side.

‘First the Russians, now the Americans,’ Hasina said. ‘When will they leave us in peace?’

The old man tutted agreement. ‘Today, even people from town have walked out here.’ He paused, gestured about him with an outstretched arm. ‘People are frightened to go to market in town in case the foreigners come. How many are being killed?’ He lowered his voice to a murmur. ‘Killed or just disappeared.’

Hasina closed her eyes. She felt the ground beneath her sway and put her hand to her face. Her fingers, close to her nose, stank of orange. When she opened her eyes again, the old man was looking at her with concern.

She swallowed hard. ‘Will we ever see peace?’

‘We chased off the Russians. But it cost a lot of blood.’ He paused, looked away into the blur of the crowd. ‘All the bombing. My old body doesn’t matter. But the young people, the children…’ He sighed.

A passer-by stopped to examine the oranges. The old man got to his feet and invited him to taste one. The man walked on without speaking. The old man settled back. ‘These people,’ he said. ‘No manners.’

His expression suddenly lightened as he remembered something. He reached in his pocket to pull out a grimy photograph. A cheap studio portrait, creased with wear. It showed a couple, uncomfortable in new clothes, posing stiffly with an infant. ‘See,’ he said. His face shone with pride. ‘I have a grandson now. Finally! After so many years of just girls. Praise be to Allah!’

‘What a blessing,’ she said. ‘I’ll pray he grows up safe and healthy.’

She got to her feet.

‘Pray he grows up safe,’ he whispered. ‘And not speaking American.’

She bought spices and, at a hardware stall, bargained for a stout cooking pot. She started back along the road. The cries from the market stalls were garish in her ears. Her hand steadied the pot on her head. The young boy, hawking his local juice, ran up again as soon as he saw her, pushing the bottles in her face. She fended him off with her free hand.

‘Have you no manners?’ she said. The boy paused, backed off a little. ‘Weren’t you taught to show respect?’ He took a step towards her again. ‘Well, weren’t you?’

She was punched in the back of the head. Struck hard. Pitched forward. Knocked down. A deep, resonant boom. Powerful as thunder. Her bones vibrated with it. Her face smacked into the ground. Deafened. Dust filled her eyes. Her mouth. A wave of sickness. Her limbs were shaking, drumming the ground in spasms. She blinked frantically, trying to see. She managed to lift her head. The broken shards of the pot were rocking from side to side in the road.

She lay still. She must breathe. The world must settle into place again. Alive. Praise Allah. She was alive. She closed her eyes. She was sinking. Her limbs were like stones. Still and heavy, held by the ground. She tried again to lift her head, to open her eyes. She was breathing now. The air stank. Petrol. Burning cloth. A stench of singed meat. Her stomach was convulsing. Around her, a blur of fast-moving shapes. People were running. Arms were waving in and out of clouds of dust. She could hear nothing. Was she dying? No. A pop. She was bursting up from the bottom of a well. Raw sound broke into her ears. Screaming. Men shouting. Feet beating on the road.

The soft tang of fruit pulp broke near her face. Rivulets of juice running in the dust. Bubbling as it sank into the ground, turning it to mud. The small boy. His bottles. Burst. She sensed him scrambling to his feet beside her. He peered into her face. His brown eyes wide with terror. A sweet boy. Like Aref. She shouldn’t have scolded. He was staring past her, back down the road, towards the market. Something there. What? She eased her head from the ground. Twisted her neck. Black smoke hung, thick and oily. A tall orange flame. A flame dirty with smoke, bent like a person staggering. She let her face fall back to the dust. Exhausted. Someone was tugging at her. A frightened voice in her ear. ‘Get up, Auntie. Get up.’ The boy.

Finally she managed to sit. She was in the road. In the way. People were crying. Hugging children. A man, running, stepped on her hand. His arms were brimming with shoes, snatched up from somewhere. A plastic sandal fell in the dirt beside her. Green. Shiny. How stupid, she thought. To steal an odd shoe.

The boy had run towards the smoke. Now he came running back. His face was contorted. He knelt in the dirt, took hold of her shoulders and shook them.

‘Get up.’ He seemed ready to cry. Why didn’t he leave her be? He was pulling on her arms. She got onto her knees, then to her feet. She stood uncertainly. Swaying. Her scarf was in folds at her neck, her head exposed. She lifted it back into place. She felt sick. Her head was dizzy with fumes, with noise. Maybe she should sink down and sit again. The boy, pulling at her, was agitated.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What now?’

He lifted his hand and pointed down the road to the wreckage. ‘The policemen,’ he said. ‘Look!’

She tried out her legs. They were shaking. She took a step. The boy buzzed about in front of her. She was intact. She was alive. He seized her hand and pulled her forward, down the road.

A ring of people had formed. A tight crowd. Men stood, silent with shock. Others draped their arms round shoulders and craned forward to see. Their arms and heads were blocking her view. The boy had crouched to look through the legs. She sank down beside him. The flame was burning quietly in a sheath of smoke. It was thin and dying, rising from a greasy heap of twisted metal. The fumes filled her mouth. The air was shuddering with its heat.

She twisted to see through the gaps. She could make out the mangled remains of vehicles. She couldn’t tell how many. Too many blackened parts. Many were blown some distance. They smouldered where they lay. Scattered fragments of metal, of glass, covered the surface of the road. Dark pools of oil, others of blood, stained the dust. Splashes of black and deep red against brown.

She sat heavily. The boy was pulling at her sleeve, pointing. She couldn’t look. The heat of the fire, the press of the men, was making her giddy. She tasted bile and tried to swallow it back. She put her hand to her mouth. ‘I’m sick,’ she said. No one was listening.

The boy was still tugging. She lifted her head. Through the legs and the shifting smoke, she made out figures slumped along the road. A policeman, his torso drenched in blood. On his side. A woman, her hair blackened with soot. Sitting. Bent over the shape of a child stretched across her lap. A man, staggering, his hands grasping the air. A boy, staring about him in confusion. A police radio, abandoned on the ground, suddenly sparked into life, pumping out voices from far away. She covered her eyes with her hands. Too much. How could this happen? The fading smell of orange was still on her fingers. Dizziness enfolded her in waves. She lowered her head to her lap.

The sounds swelled and faded and swelled again in her ears. She sat. She had to get home. How would she get home? She shifted her feet. The soles of her sandals stuck to the filth in the road. Two men beside her were talking in low voices. She opened her eyes, looked up at them. Their faces swam.

‘What happened?’ She didn’t bother with the customary greetings.

‘Bombs,’ said one of the men. ‘Maybe two.’ He gestured towards the debris. ‘Suicide bombers.’

‘Who?’ She had clasped his leg, digging her nails into his cotton trousers. ‘Who did it?’

He leaned back from her, his face closing. ‘Who knows?’

Aref. Could he be…? She crawled frantically into the crowd. Pushing herself forward through the legs like a dog. A young man barred her way with his foot. She knocked it away. She was nearing the front. Voices above. Men moved aside for her. Now the heat from the fire was scorching. She blinked, stared in disbelief. The horror. Soot-blackened corpses. Hair burned. Flesh swollen and bubbling as it cooked. A single arm, severed. Lying with its knuckles to the ground, fingers curling. Half a man’s body. A pair of trousers still clinging, drenched with blood, to the legs. She moaned. She couldn’t look. Her elbows gave way. Her face fell to the dirt. She was shaking too much to move.

Her mind was bursting. Images seared her eyes. Her throat burned with acid. Abdul. I must reach Abdul. She was sobbing, rocking herself. It wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true. Allah, in His mercy, would never allow it. Such wickedness. Such mutilation. She started to wail. A strangled sound. High-pitched with pain. She had seen another thing. Too terrifying to bear. Limp on the ground, blackened and pockmarked, a brass talisman. Still threaded on a scrap of leather. In the shape of a bird with its wings spread and claws outstretched.

A man was dragging her away, scolding her. The boy’s face was in hers, hovering with big eyes. The crowd around her was being broken up. A thickset man seized hold of her shoulders and propelled her forward, away from the flames, the bodies. He was stern-faced. Get away, he kept saying. Go home. The foreign soldiers are coming. Go! A mess of people tugged at her.

She didn’t know how she got home. She had a sense of running, stumbling, arms outstretched. Calling Abdul. Aref. She made it just inside the hut, then collapsed on the ground in the cool darkness. She flattened her palms against the mud, clinging to it. The earth was spinning out of control. Her stomach turned. Her body, exhausted, ached. She banged the flat of her hands against the ground. She dug her fingernails into the earth, scraping them along the smooth earth, and howled. Her eyes were already blind with weeping.

As she lay there, pounding the floor with her hands, all she could hear were the voices. A pitiful voice which refused to believe it. Maybe he’s safe. Maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe he said No and left them. Even as her mind tried to think this, a second voice was louder, tolling like a bell, saying: it’s over, it’s over, my boy, my Aref, he’s gone. The smell of burning flesh seemed to cling to her.

Her face was flattened against the mud. Cool against her cheek. Darkness. After some time, she didn’t know how long, she heard shuffling and whispering. A very ordinary noise. It seemed to drift down to her from across a vast divide. She lay still, trying to block it out. The noise grew louder.

A small hand brushed against her hair, tentative at first and soft, then a little firmer as it stroked. Another hand patted her back, light rhythmical taps, the way a child might bounce a ball. She let herself sob a little more, leaking tears and mucus into the wet mud round her face. The hands paused, stopped. There was whispering. She tried to ignore it, to shut out the world, to focus on her grief, her pain. After a few minutes, the hands started again to pat, to stroke.

Something landed on the mud beside her head, smooth skin rubbing up against her temple, nuzzling her. She lifted her head a fraction and opened her eyes. A pair of clear brown eyes were an inch or two from her face, full of worry and puzzlement.

‘Hasina Auntie?’ Sima asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

She closed her eyes again, let her head fall back to the wet mud. She could sense the other children as well. That must be Nadira who was patting her back and crooning nonsense in a low voice, as if she were soothing a favourite doll. Hasina could hear Yousaf too. He was out in the back, perhaps, talking to the goats, petting them and setting them twitching on their tethers.

Hasina tried again to lift her face. Her head was throbbing. She should just die here. Coming back to life was too hard, too painful.

‘We came to see you,’ Sima said. She reached in to Hasina and tried to wipe off her filthy face with her scarf. ‘To say hello.’

Hasina couldn’t speak. She let the girls prod her into a sitting position, rested her back against the cot. She looked sightlessly at the dead legs stretched out in front of her, worn out with running.

Sima tried to bend herself into Hasina’s vision. ‘Hasina Auntie,’ she said, ‘shall I fetch Mother?’

Hasina shook her head. May God protect her from that foolish woman. Sima disappeared. Hasina could feel the warm shape of Nadira cuddled beside her. She was still patting Hasina, now on the thigh.

Sima reappeared with a cup of water. ‘Drink this,’ she said. She pushed it into Hasina’s hands. ‘Water is very good for health. You’ll feel much better.’

She took the water and drank. It was cool and pure in her dirty mouth. I might get better, she thought suddenly. What if I were to survive and carry on without him? What an insult that would be. She fell to weeping again, her hands to her face. The small arms of the girls hung on her wherever they could find purchase.

The children stayed with her all afternoon. They crouched beside her, gazing at her with anxious eyes, until she finally stopped crying. Then, as she sat there, worn and indifferent, they started to prattle.

‘I like your house,’ Sima said. ‘It’s quiet.’ She pulled Nadira to her feet, took both her hands and started to turn with her. ‘There’s always someone shouting in ours. It’s too noisy.’

Hasina let her chin fall to her chest. It will always be quiet here now. It is a dead house.

The girls started to spin, bumping into the cots. They fell in a heap, giggling. Hasina watched them dully.

‘Will you tell us more?’ Sima said. She rolled onto her stomach and kicked up her legs behind her. ‘Your story. About the village and the children.’

‘Please, Hasina Auntie!’ Yousaf had appeared in the doorway. ‘No one tells us stories except you.’

Hasina, looking at him, thought of Aref. Aref’s face when he was a boy. The long lashes that veiled his eyes, the softness of his skin, his milky smell. She turned her face away from them. ‘There is no more story,’ she said.

Late in the afternoon, she took the children home. She heard Palwasha scold them as they went into the house, the slap of a hand on bare skin. Where had they been? Thoughtless creatures.

Hasina sank to the ground, there in the compound yard, her legs too weak to bear her. When Palwasha came out with strong sweet tea, Hasina left it sitting beside her in the dirt, steaming, until it was cold and wasted.

Finally Karam came out. He crouched beside her and put his hand on her shoulder.

‘I salute you,’ he said in a low voice, ‘precious mother of a martyr. May Allah bless you.’

Hasina didn’t look at him.

‘You shouldn’t have seen it,’ he said. ‘That was wrong.’ He put his hand under her chin and lifted her face. ‘You must keep this secret.’

She stared at him. What could he be thinking? How could she possibly…?

‘Remember the gossip in the village after the death of Masoud’s son.’ Karam’s eyes were stern. ‘He was a martyr.’ He paused. ‘But not everyone understood.’

Hasina did remember. People said the boy brought danger to the village. No one wanted their own sons to copy him.

Karam took her arm, pulled her roughly to her feet. For a moment, she thought her legs would falter. But Karam’s hand was gripping her, keeping her upright. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Say nothing.’

She stared, bewildered. How could she bear this loss in silence, alone, without the comfort of her husband? How was that possible? ‘But Abdul—’

‘I will tell him the boy has gone away. To Kandahar. For now, you must say nothing.’

He was propelling Hasina forward towards the gate. His grip cut into her flesh.

‘Abdul trusts me,’ he said. He turned her to face the compound gate, to leave. ‘You must trust me too.’ He opened the gate and half guided, half pushed her through into the road. ‘You should be joyful,’ he said. ‘Alhamdulillah. Thanks be to Allah.’

4

Two days after the market bombing, Hasina dreamt of Aref and woke, wondering. It was late in the night. In the yard, the stars were strong, the moon almost fully grown. The shapes of the land shone in the half-light. The stones, the ditches, the corn, high as a man. The rich, earthy scent of it. Their home. Their land.

She went to sit on the large flat stone at the top of the fields. The mud was cold under her feet. She drew her shawl round her shoulders. The first chill of autumn. She tried to calm herself, leaning her mind into the scream of insects in the undergrowth at her feet.

The foreign soldiers were coming. Everyone said so. Where would she and Abdul go, if they were driven off their land? She shuddered. Impossible, she thought, that Allah, who had given them this land, this blessing on His people, would force them to leave it.

She closed her eyes. Images swarmed into her head, dancing and weaving. Aref’s presence. She could feel him. The warm scent of his body, first as a small boy, then as an awkward young man. This is my grief, she told herself. Grief is making his ghost rise and come back to me. She reached out her hands, imagining her fingertips on his skin.

A stick cracked in the corn. She kept still. Better to keep the dream, she thought, and be slaughtered where I sit, than to lose my Aref, my boy, a second time. The rustle in the corn grew louder, closer. Finally, she opened her eyes.

The air was silvery with moonlight. The noise was in the field, just a few metres from her. An animal, perhaps. Or the slow stealth of a person. Was that a low dark shape, crouching? She crept forward to peer into the corn.

His ghost was haunting her. She blinked. How fat he was, his stomach rounded. Then she made out the rags tied round his middle, stained with patches of black. When he raised his eyes, his face was pallid. The face of the dead. She stretched out her arms.

‘Aref?’

He lifted himself to his hands and knees and crawled towards her.

‘My Aref?’

He collapsed half at her feet, half across her knee. She buried her face in his neck, inhaling him. She patted him with fluttering hands, her fingers working him as if they were kneading bread. She took possession again of each hollow, each joint, each rib, each knob of spine, relearning his body for herself, the way she’d first learned it when he was put into her arms as a new baby, all those years before. He was moaning quietly. When her hands reached his face, her fingers were black and wet with blood. In stroking him, she smeared his cheeks, his chin.

She rocked him hard, encircling him with her arms to keep him safe. He lay, limp, and surrendered to her.

She expected the dream to end. When her arms began to ache, she pulled back her face to look. His forehead and cheeks were moist with sweat, his skin chilled. She lifted her fists and pummelled him in the chest.

‘How could you?’ she heard herself saying. His body was jumping, jolted by her hammering fists. ‘How could you leave me?’

He raised his arms and groped for her wrists. His grasp was weak. Her anger dissolved into weeping.

‘Aref,’ she moaned. ‘You precious fool.’

‘I need to hide,’ he whispered. ‘Just until I’m strong again.’

Hasina half dragged, half walked him along the ridge at the top of the fields, away from the village. Along the outer edge of their land, Abdul had dug an irrigation channel for flash floods. Now it was dry. She searched for the most hidden stretch and cleared away the stones there. Aref lay on his back in the channel, his eyes glazed. The earth sides were smooth and steep, as if he lay already in his grave.

Hasina cradled his head in her lap. She was afraid to look at his wound. The rags were matted together in clumps, fused with dried blood. When she tried to touch them, he pushed her hand away.

‘I could clean it,’ she said.

He shook his head.

‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Those boys. I know what they did. But you…?’

He looked embarrassed. ‘It didn’t work,’ he said. He gestured to his stomach. ‘The belt. It didn’t go off.’ He raised his head to look at her. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said. His tone was defensive. ‘I did it just the way they taught me.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course you did.’

He let his head fall back. She tried to imagine him with explosives strapped round his body, ready to blow himself into pieces. What he must have felt and what madness made him want to say ‘Yes’ to those crazy boys.

‘There was a flash,’ he said. ‘White light. Then burning round my stomach. I realized I was still alive, on my back in the dirt.’

His voice was trembling. Hasina took his hand and squeezed it.

‘How did you get away?’

‘I ran. I waved my arms and shouted. There was so much smoke, so much shouting, one more person didn’t seem to matter.’

‘And you hid?’

‘In the fields.’ He gestured to a cotton pouch at his side, bulging above the contour of his hip. ‘I have a weapon,’ he said. ‘A bomb.’

‘Let me take it,’ she said. She held out her hand. ‘I could bury it.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not for a woman.’

She looked again at the pouch. ‘Bury it yourself then,’ she said. ‘You’re safe now.’

He fell silent. ‘If they find out,’ he said at last, ‘they’ll call me a coward.’

‘No.’ Hasina stroked the hair from his forehead. ‘They will not find out. God has sent you back to me. He will protect us.’

His eyes had closed. She wrapped her shawl tightly round him.

‘You must stay hidden,’ she said. ‘Your father thinks you’re in Kandahar.’

‘Kandahar?’ He opened his eyes.

‘That was what Karam Uncle told him.’

He smiled to himself. ‘That would be good,’ he said.

‘Foolish boy.’ She kissed the tip of his nose. ‘Get well. Then we’ll talk of Kandahar.’

For the next week, Hasina nursed Aref every moment she could. When Abdul went to the neighbour’s fields to work, she scraped together leftover food and ran to find her son. She sat close to him while he ate. ‘You must get strong,’ she said. He pulled a sour face at the sight of food. ‘You must get well.’

He could only manage to stand bent double, his arm across his stomach. His wound ached, he said. Hasina saw the colours on the rags round his stomach shift as it bled. She saw the elderly man in him, pushing out through the young skin, and was afraid.

5

Hasina and Abdul were woken early by a strange sound. At first she thought it was Karam’s radio set. They went together into the yard. The noise grew, bouncing along the hillside. It was coming from beyond the valley, from the desert.

‘Some announcement,’ Abdul said. ‘Listen.’

An Afghan voice. A warning. Foreign soldiers were coming, it said. They must all leave. No one need be hurt. She groped for Abdul’s hand, limp at his side.

They found Karam’s compound in disarray. Men were rushing, stacking pots at the entrance. Palwasha was standing at the window, her hands on her hips, her face clouded.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ she called when she saw Hasina.

Hasina looked round at the carpets and cushions scattered across the floor. ‘You’re leaving?’

‘What does it look like?’ Palwasha’s eyes were blazing.

Hasina swallowed. ‘But where?’ she said. ‘Where will you go?’

‘Help me, won’t you.’ She didn’t look up. Hasina knelt beside her, rolling the carpets and stacking them by the door. Abdul must go too, she thought. She must make him.

As soon as they returned home, she packed a bundle for Abdul. Tin plates and cups and bread to eat on the road. From the threshold, she stood and looked back into the gloom. This was the house where she’d first come as a bride so many years ago. A good house. Not rich but honest. She looked round at the empty cots, the blankets, the wooden stools, the battered trunk.

‘You must go. Quickly.’ She pressed the bundle into his hand, propelled him towards the road. ‘Go now, with Karam and Palwasha. It’s better for us.’

She was urging him on, her hand on his broad arm. He stared down at her, his eyes bewildered. ‘But you,’ he said, blinking, ‘what about you?’

‘I’ll be right there, coming after you, won’t I?’ She tutted. ‘Hurry. I’ve got knives to gather and a pot and blankets and clothes. I need some time. But you must go ahead.’

His feet dragged as she walked with him to the main track. The road was already thick with travelling families, a swarm of villagers pulling carts, carrying infants, pots on their heads and bundles on their backs. Some led a donkey or goat.

‘See what they have?’ She gestured at the flow. ‘I need to prepare more things. Go with Karam. I’ll soon catch you up.’ Her whisper was urgent. ‘Husband, please don’t hesitate. Go.’

Abdul looked as lost as a small boy. ‘How will I find you?’ he said.

‘You’ll find me.’ She brushed her hand against his to say goodbye. ‘How could you not find me? I won’t be far behind.’

She stood to the side as he turned, reluctant and dazed, and was taken by the crowd.

She had to carry Aref to the house. His eyes rolled sightlessly in his head as she laid him out on the cot and stripped him. His body was hot, his limbs shaking. She took her cooking knife and hacked at the rags. Close to the wound, the cloth had fused with the flesh. She couldn’t cut it away. It stank. She washed down his skin with block soap and water and patted him dry with her shawl. She slid a blanket under him and wrapped it round, until he was cocooned. She boiled up sugary tea and lifted his head while she forced it, trickle by trickle, between his lips.

All night she stroked his forehead, fanned flies from his wound and murmured to him. Once, he woke abruptly, as if from a nightmare, and stared at her. His eyes were blank. His face was slippery with fresh sweat. She patted him, soothed him back to sleep.

When he woke again at first light, his fever had lifted. He was weak but he knew her and knew the place. She fed him hot tea and fragments of soft food. A hint of colour was returning to his lips.

A deep rumbling drifted in from the fields. She went out to the yard to look. A fleet of lumbering, metallic vehicles was pitching down the desert slope, making its way from the far ridge to the valley and the river below. The early morning light bounced off the sharp angles. She put her hand to her face. They were closer than she’d imagined possible. She heard a droning and turned her eyes to the sky. Aircraft were twisting there, turning sideways, one wing-tip pointing to the ground, the other to heaven, then righting themselves again with a rush. They dipped and screamed overhead. The foreigners, she thought. It had begun.

She ran back inside and forced Aref to sit, propped up against the wall.

‘Soldiers,’ she said. ‘You must go.’

He stared, his eyes dull. ‘Where?’

‘Anywhere. Go.’ She pulled his tattered, stained shirt back over his head, pushed his arms through the sleeves and watched him stuff his few possessions into its folds. ‘If these foreigners find you…’

He seemed ready to sink back onto the cot.

‘Hide in ditches, in fields.’ She tugged him to his feet. ‘Use the blessing of the land.’

From deep in the valley, the thick choke of an explosion. Hasina struggled to pull him out into the yard. When she let go of him, his legs buckled. He sank down the wall of the house to the ground. In the valley, black smoke was rising. An aeroplane dived, shrieking, from the sky, and swooped low over the hillside. She fell to the ground, covering her head with her shawl. A moment later, the earth shook. The blast deafened her.

She sat up. Aref was staring at her. Miserable and afraid.

Hasina looked at the pouch. ‘Those bombs you have,’ she said, ‘give them to me.’

His eyes widened. ‘They are not—’ he began.

She raised her hand as if to slap him. ‘Do as you’re told,’ she said.

Aref ripped open the stitching and eased out two metal objects. They were grey-green, rounded with straight metal levers.

‘You twist and pull this,’ he said, ‘then throw them. They go off like bombs.’

Hasina looked at the smallness of them in his hand. They were dull, unappetizing pieces of fruit. One was scored by a line of rust.

Another jet shot over the valley, cutting through the air. She clamped her hands to her ears. A moment later the hillside shivered. The yard trembled under her feet. She took the bombs from him. The metal was chilled and dirty.

‘Go,’ she said. ‘May Allah in His mercy protect you.’

He pulled himself to his feet, turned without a word and swayed across the yard, lurching at last into the corn.

The dense smoke of the foreign bombs blocked out the creeping vehicles, then, as it dispersed, they reappeared, always closer. Hasina pushed her way through the cornfield to the edge of the poppy below. The valley opened out before her. The foreigners’ vehicles drew a defensive circle alongside the river. Figures of men, in light brown clothes, were darting along the bank. Digging machines were throwing up clouds of dirt. Between the crash of falling bombs, she could hear the steady chug of engines.

What kind of men were these Westerners? She wrapped her arms round her chest and hugged her thin shoulders. May God protect us. She looked at the metal fruit in her hands. She must give Aref time to flee.

The soldiers made rapid progress. They slotted metal panels into a bridge and nosed them into place over the river with their machines. They worked without contest, their aeroplanes screaming overhead, deforming the face of the hillside with fire and pockmarks.

When the first men ran over the bridge, her stomach heaved. Her palms were stinging with sweat. She turned and fled back to the house. She dashed round the yard, picking up her old cooking pot and cooking knife and the large water pot. She took them with her into the house.

She pushed away the large stone, which kept the door to the house permanently open in summer and fastened the door shut from the inside. Once it closed, the house became black. She stood quietly in the cool darkness, listening to the bang of blood in her ears. The house smelt rich, of earth and family. My home, she thought. This is where Aref was made and born. She wondered how far from the house he had crawled and what hiding place he’d found.

Her eyes were starting to adjust to the thin light. It was seeping in from the back window, and from the near one, which gave onto the valley. She pulled a stool under the window and sat, looking out over the corn. Halfway up the hillside, there were shots. She swallowed, struggling to compose herself. Behind her a cry, quickly stifled.

‘Who’s that?’ She challenged the darkness. ‘Tell me.’

A scramble, a sob and a small figure crawled out from under the cot, catapulted across the room and banged into her knees. It pushed its head at her stomach, almost knocking the grenades off her lap.

‘You,’ she said. ‘What…?’

Yousaf, Palwasha’s boy, stared up into her face with bulging eyes, wet with tears. ‘I’m scared,’ he said. He started to sob. His nose was running with snot. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ His breath came in gulps. ‘I want Mummy.’

Hasina stared. Behind him, the dark shapes of the two girls rose from under the cot.

‘What are you doing here?’ Hasina was beside herself. ‘Go. Get away. Run.’

‘Don’t make us, Auntie.’ Sima’s voice was already breaking into tears. ‘Please.’

Nadira pushed past Sima and buried her face against Hasina’s thigh. Hasina ran a hand abstractedly over the child’s tousled hair. Outside, another shot. The soldiers sounded close to the outer edge of their land. She gave the children a shove.

‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Crouch down. Quiet.’

They ran together, arms churning the air, and crouched in a line against the wall. Hasina turned back to the window, light-headed with fear. She focused her eyes on the veil of corn, feeling the foreign soldiers creep closer and fingering in her wet hands the two small bombs, the only weapons she had to keep them at bay.

6

The darkness was still dense when Ellen followed the young soldier to the convoy, led by a low bouncing shaft of torchlight. She leaned against the steel of the nearest military vehicle, her flak jacket crushing her shoulders, and watched the black shapes of the men move around her in silence as they checked kit and loaded up. The air was cool and dry against her skin.

Major Mack sought her out as the men moved into position and pointed her to a Snatch in the middle of the convoy. She sat squashed up against the heavy back door. It was a tin can of a vehicle, its interior stripped bare. The Snatch shook itself into life and started to pitch and roll out of the camp gates and across open desert. She braced her legs and gripped the roof strap. Her helmet cracked against the metal struts behind her every time they banged into a hollow. She rode the impact, steadied her nerves and said nothing.

She’d never liked Snatches. The rough ride didn’t bother her but they were poor protection, nicknamed ‘metal coffins’ for a reason. If they hit anything now, an IED or a mine, the flying shrapnel would slice them to mince. What was that expression the lads in Iraq used? Everyone gets a bit.

They were wedged tightly into this one, thigh against thigh, knee scraping knee. She’d pushed the team over quota; five, instead of four in the back, sharing the same stale air. Packs and boxes were piled round their feet. The soldiers sat in silence, their faces tight with concentration. The young soldier opposite her, Frank, was looking everywhere to avoid catching her eye. He was barely twenty but thuggish, with the heavy forehead and thickset nose of a fighter. She wondered where in the UK he came from and how much military action he’d seen. Her eyes fell to the weapon, an SA-80, across his lap.

Two more lads were riding top cover, cut off at the chest; head and shoulders sticking up out of the vehicle, out of sight. When she tried to look forward, her view was filled by their broad thighs. Their scrambling feet kicked out wildly for support every time the Snatch rocked and pitched. Dillon, the lad next to her, kept getting a boot in the groin as they felt for footholds. He swore under his breath. She squeezed herself further into the corner to give him more room.

A sudden stink broke out in the hot air. Dillon flapped his hands in front of his face wildly.

‘Hold it in, Moss.’ Dillon gave one of the top cover guys a sharp poke.

The young lad, Hancock, riding top cover with Moss, ducked his head down for a second, caught the whiff and gave a snorting laugh. Dillon kicked out at him before he straightened up again. Ellen watched the way they argued, jostled for position. They were only kids. She’d spoken to Hancock, the quietest in the group, in the darkness before they set off. He was eighteen, he said, keeping his voice low. He’d joined up in January and been sent out here right after training. He looked shell-shocked already.

‘Sorry, Ma’am.’ Frank, embarrassed.

She shrugged. ‘Don’t be.’ I’m harder to offend than you realize, she thought. And I’ll be safer if you think of me as one of you. ‘And call me Ellen.’

The Sergeant Major, invisible to her in the front, barked something into the radio sets. Frank sighed and started scrabbling under the seats, checking wiring or groping for a piece of kit.

Dillon leaned towards her, knocking knees. ‘Sergeant Major says you’re famous. Like Kate Adie.’ His eyes were full of life. A cheeky lad, good humoured and excited.

‘Like who?’ Frank, pausing in his grovelling on the floor, had lifted his head to listen, watching her with new interest.

‘Nothing so glamorous,’ she said to Dillon. ‘I’m with a news magazine.’

‘He said you’ve covered more wars than he has,’ Dillon went on. ‘That true?’

‘I don’t keep count.’

‘Cool.’ Dillon looked impressed. ‘Which ones?’

‘Crimea?’ said Frank, and sniggered like a schoolboy.

Dillon kicked out at him. ‘Don’t be so bloody rude, you.’ A vicious bounce of the Snatch knocked him off the seat onto the floor. He cracked his shin on the metalwork of the back door and swore. Frank doubled up with laughter. Dillon, trying to regain dignity, crawled through the kicking legs to a box and handed her back a bottle of water. ‘Don’t mind him,’ he said, nodding at Frank. ‘Tosser.’

Ellen turned her face to the square of bulletproof window and watched the swirls of dust they were throwing up behind them, blurring the outline of the next heaving Snatch in line. There was a dull red glow in the sky beyond. The night was starting to bleed back into day. It was so cold, it was hard to believe that in a few hours, once the heat built up, they’d all long for the chill of night again. The stuffy darkness of the Snatch, with its swaying, crashing motion, and her nervous apprehension about what lay ahead, made her dull with sickness as they drove on across the desert and the light outside whitened into morning.

They stopped. Frank unbolted the back door and climbed out over her, weapon readied. Then Dillon. A moment later they came back for her. She dropped out of the back, weighed down by her flak jacket and helmet. The dry desert air was a relief. She stood for a moment, enjoying the escape from the petrol fumes, getting her bearings.

‘What next?’ she said to Dillon. He shrugged, looked away. Frank was already walking towards a mud-walled compound where other soldiers were sloughing off their packs. Dillon turned and followed him.

She put her hands on her hips, breathed deeply and scanned the terrain. They’d stopped just short of a natural ridge. Behind them, the way they’d come, lay a desiccated brown landscape of dirty sand, rocks and low scrub. Its lines were broken by simple mud-brick houses, each set apart from the others and enclosed in its own protective boundary walls. No people were visible. The only sign of life came from a pack of scavenging dogs. They were trotting, lean and mangy, across the plain.

Ahead, far below, the slow snake of a river drew a glistening line through a valley. Beyond it, thickly planted corn waved from fields, scored through by the lines of trees that defined the green zone. She narrowed her eyes against the light. The outline of a village was visible a few kilometres in, high on the hill. That must be the first target.

Thick dust, stirred up by the convoy of military vehicles, was billowing in filthy clouds all around her. More Snatches were pulling up, filling the air with fine grit, disgorging soldiers. The day’s heat was gathering. The men streamed towards the compound, bowed under the weight of the packs on their backs, shoving, talking in low voices, lighting cigarettes. She hesitated, watching them, then pulled off her helmet, as they had done, and followed.

Dillon, Frank and the others were settling against a low mud wall, smoking, rucksacks dumped at their feet. They looked tense. Freshly arriving soldiers streamed past them, competing for a place in the shade. To the side, a knot of officers was forming. They were talking in glassy public school voices. Binoculars hung from their necks. Radios squawked like parrots. Behind them, yet more vehicles were coming crashing over the desert, raising clouds of dust.

The young officers straightened up and lowered their voices. Mack appeared amongst them, not the tallest in the group but the oldest and broadest. She noted the way the other men shifted to accommodate him, deferring to him as the pack’s Alpha male. Mack exchanged a few words as he passed through, then barrelled straight towards her. Heads turned, following him.

‘Enjoy the ride?’

He leaned forward to speak to her. She caught the scent of army soap on his skin, undercut by adrenalin. As he opened his mouth to say more, a jet screeched overhead. A minute later, a flash of fire ignited out in the corn, on the far side of the valley. Smoke rose. A few seconds after that, a delayed boom.

‘Five hundred-pounder?’ she said.

Mack nodded. ‘Air offensive’s starting.’

The smoke was starting to disperse in black clouds across the corn.

‘Is it clear of civilians?’

‘We’ve issued warnings.’ His body was hard with tension, his face serious. She sensed Dillon, Frank and some of the other lads looking over at them.

Mack pulled a satellite map from his pocket and spread it out on the sand. She picked out the villages from the office map, several of them, and, in the fields, dozens of small squares that showed individual Afghan compounds. They’d be good defences, thick mud walls that could withstand artillery. They’d been built for war. The country had seen little else.

Mack started to brief her, pointing with a long finger. ‘That’s the river.’

She made her own calculations, fitting the map to the scene below them. The distances weren’t great but the terrain had its own natural fortification. The dips and ridges. The river and the steep rise beyond. And the scattered compounds. No wonder the Taliban had managed to hold it for the last few years. She felt a sense of foreboding, wondering how many failed assaults there’d been.

Heavy digging equipment was already being shunted into position at the waterside. Soldiers in the tan and brown of desert camouflage were waving their arms, signalling to the men inside the vehicles.

‘The engineers are throwing a basic bridge across. Then the men go in on foot.’ Mack traced their route on the map. ‘Up the far bank, through the fields, storming the compounds, one at a time. Then up there. That’s the first village we’ll head for.’

‘Think you’ll secure it today?’

He shrugged. ‘Depends what we find.’

He always said ‘we’, not ‘they’, she noted. He seemed to be a man who identified with his boys.

‘You can watch the progress pretty well from here,’ he was saying. He fingered the binoculars round his neck, lifted them to his eyes to scan the valley. He seemed to be looking forward to it, as if he’d bagged her a good spot at the races.

She looked past him. Moss, the fat one, and Dillon were hunched over their mess tins, boiling up foil sachets of food. Hancock, the young lad, was lolling against the wall, his eyes closed. He had an iPod stuck in his ears, his head trailing wires like a badly made bomb. He looked stressed as hell. She wondered why he wasn’t eating. No one seemed to have noticed.

‘I’ll go in with the first wave,’ she said.

Mack lifted the binoculars away from his eyes. ‘I really don’t—’

‘My risk.’ She looked him full in the face. ‘That’s fine. I need to be up close.’

His expression was thoughtful. ‘I’m not sure I can allow that,’ he said. ‘I know you’re—’

‘Come on, Mack.’ She nodded at him, trying to camouflage her nerves and sound breezy. He was a senior officer and she was pushing her luck. ‘Sure you can.’

He paused, considering her closely. ‘I’ll see,’ he said at last, and walked off.

When Frank and Dillon stubbed out their cigarettes and got to their feet, she crossed over to them. The Sergeant Major appeared, fastening his helmet. He looked at her for a second, then pushed his eyes past her.

‘Lids on, lads,’ he said. ‘Time’s up.’

‘Fucking hope not,’ said Dillon.

Hancock, beside him, looked grey with nerves.

They tightened their body armour, fastened helmets, swung their packs onto their backs and picked up their weapons. They lined up in single file, ready to head down the hill, a tense, silent group. She stood beside them, waiting.

Just as they seemed ready to set off, Mack reappeared. He spoke in a low voice to the Sergeant Major and they both turned to look at her. Their faces were stern. She wondered what they made of her. Once upon a time, when she started all this, soldiers used to stare because she was long-limbed and attractive and they couldn’t take her seriously. Now she was pushing middle age and they must think her a liability, an oddball maiden aunt who might need rescuing when the shit hit. She shrugged her flak jacket to a new position on her shoulders, switching bruises. She could move a lot faster without the damn thing. It didn’t even fit properly.

Mack beckoned her towards him. ‘Go if you want to,’ he said. His eyes were thoughtful. ‘But it’s your risk.’

He spoke quietly, acknowledging that they both understood what might lie ahead.

‘Of course.’ She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

The men around her were starting to move. She hesitated for a moment, steeling herself, then forced herself to press forward and join them before she could think any more about it. Mack stood, unsmiling, and watched her, binoculars idle on his chest. She fixed her eyes on Dillon’s broad back and fell into step, stretching her stride to match her footprint to his. Hancock was behind her, his breathing as shallow as her own.

They threaded their way down the hillside and reached the bridge. The soldiers grouped there, the bridge builders, ran their eyes over her as she mounted the treads. The rush of the river rose from below. A broad, fast-flowing river. The Taliban must have thought an attack from this side was impossible. Her boots rattled on loose metal. The scream of a jet and a dull boom from the hillside ahead told her the bombs were still falling. When she reached the other side of the bridge, her boots hit earth again and silence.

She followed Dillon into the first field, into thick curtains of corn. It was high, ready for harvesting, stretching up above her head. Visibility was terrible. The corn cloaked everything. There could be a whole army out there, low against the ground. She steadied her breathing. The corn stank, a bland, cloying smell of dry grass. Flies were buzzing round her face. Her helmet slipped heavily back and forth as she moved her head, tugging at its chin-strap. Diagonally, through the crops, she could see muddy irrigation ditches. Good hiding places for fighters who knew the ground. Her ears thumped with her own blood and the swish of corn against her boots and body.

Dillon ducked suddenly to one side and she flattened herself into the corn behind him. The firm earth was a relief and absorbed the shake in her limbs. She thought of the layout of the satellite map. They should be approaching the first compound. Ahead, someone fired a shot. Silence. The scratch of a voice on Dillon’s radio. He started creeping forward again, bent double. She followed, keeping close to him.

At the edge of the field, the land opened out. The next field was full of rows of low bushes. A dull, mud-walled building rose beyond it, a primitive house with a single round hole for a window. The walls looked thick. It must be black as night inside.

The Sergeant Major and Moss were crouching behind the low compound wall with their weapons trained on the black rectangle of the doorway. The Sergeant Major was hollering something in a Lancastrian version of Pashto. ‘Raw-ooza! Raw-ooza!’

A sudden movement to the side of the building. She swung and stared into the dopey brown eyes of a donkey as it stuttered into view from behind the corner. It reached the extent of its tether and was jerked back, its head jolted, its eyes rolling white, its long ears flattened in fright against its head. Dillon raised his gun and took aim. The donkey backed clumsily, as if it knew, and disappeared again with a toss of its head.

The Sergeant Major fired a high warning shot. Two men had appeared in the doorway, walking forward into the earth yard. Their eyes were wide with terror, their hands high in the air. One of the men was elderly, tottering on bent legs. His beard was white and ragged. His lips were moving soundlessly, either in fright or prayer. The other man was stout and middle-aged, a fat belly bulging beneath his long kameez. Their clothes looked threadbare, pathetic. They shuffled forward in rope sandals, round hats perched on their heads.

Ellen had reached the cover of the wall now and threw herself down against Dillon, her helmet banging round her face. A moment later, Hancock bumped up against her on the other side. He and Dillon stuck their weapons along the top of the wall and gave cover as the Sergeant Major and Moss went forward and pushed the Afghan men down on their knees. They pressed them against the outside of the building, their hands splayed palm-out against the mud above their heads. Moss patted them down. Nothing. The Sergeant Major was shouting for a translator, signalling the rest of them forward. The back of the old man was shaking violently as he crouched against the wall.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.