BLACK HOWLCHAPTER ONE
“YO, CRUSADER!”
He yelled and waved, skipping across a rock field in front of a marmalade sun.
“Salibi! Khe chare!” he shouted. Behind him, the sky looked like a message from God.
He stumbled on a boulder, slipped backward and plummeted from sight. Moments later the kid leapt back into view, jumping up on the rock, eyes-shock wide, like he’d been shot out a catapult.
I waved back—he stood there, mumbling a prayer in the middle of the wasteland as the mountains darkened.
The kid brushed himself off, checked the truth of his old Lee Enfield sights. Thin, troubled-looking, filthy olive salwar, the boy gave me a conspiratorial wink—we’d both just gotten away with something—then started skipping toward me again with his eyes locked to the ground—
“Firangi! Khe chare!”
His young, high, excited voice carried across the wasteland, piercing the wind-ruffled still. Him and I—the only landmarks on a horizon of pure rock: the only two people in the world.
Hey-O, Frank! Yo! Crusader!
His tone, lopsided grin, his raucous greeting—it was in his eyes that I saw that I was about to die in Kandahar.
The kid was Pashtun: this level of informality to a stranger was taboo-breaking rude. The entrance to Paradise was barred to Allah’s most hated kind—“the foulmouthed who speak in an offensive manner.” Even with a Feranji barbarian—a disgusting, big nose vandal such as myself—the kid’s honour should have taken precedence.
He should have been quick; he was slow. He should have been polite; he was familiar. He should have been on point; he was clumsy. All this could be a sign that he was fresh. That our Security Team aced our actual assignment when we weren’t acting like a low-rent taxi/extortion service. Maybe, just maybe this particular group were now whittled down to the point where even the press-ganged farmers’ boys weren’t good enough to train.
But Kandahar makes few fools—the stupid generally won’t survive beyond crawling age. This was the kind of enthusiasm a kid has on stage in their first school play. He was probably thinking that so long as he got me back inside the Q, who cared what he said or how he behaved? This was a role, all the normal rules suspended. He was the first part of a trap, the most important role of his life, and he was impatient and excited to pull it off, get me back into the fortress, and then—
He’d see the kind of man he’d normally be running from in terror: up close, bloodied, screaming in his death agonies. It would be his first real taste of revenge—which, like love, is a drug you can get a taste for without even sampling it firsthand.
I watched the kid coming and thought—yup, I’m fucked. The black hole that lived inside my chest wondered if a quick, sunset death in the next hour wouldn’t be preferable to ever waking again.
I parked the thought, took a breath, and started my part in the proceedings. I raised my hand, placed it over my heart, and shouted the old familiar—
“Salaam alaikum!”
Head lowered, formal, respectful. The kid laughed even louder than before—like he’d just seen a dog trying to talk. I took this as an invitation to come forward, but as I started walking his laughter froze.
The kid raised his hands and yelled out, suddenly all panic—
“Mainuna!”
Landmines. Afghanistan’s primary root crop; as common here as opium poppies. They’d turned Kandahari soil into layer after layer of misery—in many places, three different kinds of mines sat on top of each other in different strata, fixing the different eras of Afghan occupation and their come-and-go empires in its geology. There was a Soviet layer, a Muj layer, a Northern Alliance layer. The Soviet layer was, of course, the deepest and most pernicious—even with thirty plus years of explosives degradation, these mines still killed or crippled about a thousand children a year.
Boys like my rendezvous partner had to memorise the routes through minefields, to lead from the front whenever units came through the area. A few years of uninjured work would prove that he was a man, then they would switch out his Lee Enfield rifle for an AK, and he would become a proper Muj in training. And if he failed—just like me, he could easily be replaced.
The kid reached the edge of the rocks, looked around intently, then gestured that I should follow him, step for step.
Then he was off again, ahead of me by fifteen paces, skipping and jumping over the rocks—close enough that I could catch his footsteps, far enough away to be spared the first of the blast, if something went wrong.
The sky was cloudless, the horizon gradiated through pre-sundown colours. A kestrel wheeled around high in front of us, then flapped away, harried by magpies. Their fading cries were replaced by the occasional sing-song sounds of the lad ahead as he pointed at a particular rock as a warning.
“Dah!”, to the left. “Um!” to the right. “Dah-um-do”—three right ahead of us—a little sung mnemonic that changed constantly and mapped out more than half a mile of mines. I started to catch the little marks he took cues off—scratches into the rocks. Little crosses, “V” an “W” shapes. They must have picked up these signs from the Russians, I thought.
A cloud passed in front of the sun, and a bright ray swept across the ground ahead, touched the just-revealed Qala on the horizon, then shimmered out of sight into the valleys beyond the mountain.
The fortress was built on a ridge top that only accessible by foot, or by donkey, or by helicopter. I’d hoped that the mines might be less severe from this direction—and I’d clearly been wrong.
Two reasons had brought me clambering across a minefield into a Taliban enclosure with no backup.
1) The folks in the Q still had enough of the good shit to knock our birds out of the sky.
2) My orders were to bring the hostage back alive.
Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to take our Operation Manager’s “facts” on trust. But as the only volunteer, I’d been dropped off in an MD 530 ten clicks South. I was assured it would return two clicks West of the Q for extraction, keeping the element of surprise, should things go to plan.
Things weren’t going to go to plan. They never did. I wasn’t sure they wanted the hostage alive, or didn’t believe that they planned to come and get me.
I wondered why I’d volunteered when nobody else would, and the black hole inside me whispered suggestively that maybe I really did want to kill myself.
We were half a football field from the minefield’s edge. On the ridge, by the setting sun, I could see the cracked mud walls of the ruined Qala. It had been burnt, blown up, half-fallen off the edge of the mountain: it looked like the kind of place God made an example of in the Old Testament.
And I was almost there. The kid turned to me and winked. He opened his mouth to say something.
Then he shot into the air like a firecracker—ten to fifteen feet—a pulse ripped through my body and the air went black.