His grin widened into a laugh-at least, it looked like a laugh. His mouth moved, and his head shook, but there was no sound. And his eyes, ignoring Khaled completely, stared a message into mine. And then I could hear him, hear his voice in my head. You see? his eyes said to me. I’m right not to trust any of you… You want to kill me… All of you… You want me dead… But it’s all right… I don’t mind… I give you my permission… I want you to doit…

We heard a sound, a footstep, behind us. Khaled and I jumped and whirled in fright to see Khader, Nazeer, and Ahmed Zadeh rushing to join us. When we looked back, Habib was gone.

‘What is wrong?’ Khader asked.

‘It’s Habib,’ Khaled answered, searching the darkness for a sign of the madman. ‘He went crazy… he is crazy… he killed Siddiqi… dragged his body here, and stabbed him in the throat.’

‘Where he is?’ Nazeer demanded angrily.

‘I don’t know,’ Khaled replied, shaking his head. ‘Did you see him go, Lin?’

‘No. I turned with you, to see Khader, and when I looked back he was… just… gone. I think he must’ve jumped down into the ravine.’

‘He can’t have jumped,’ Khaled frowned. ‘It’s gotta be fifty yards down there. He can’t have jumped.’

Abdel Khader was kneeling beside the dead man, whispering prayers with his hands held palms upwards.

‘We can look for him tomorrow,’ Ahmed said, putting a comforting hand on Khaled’s shoulder. He looked up at the night sky. ‘There is not much of this moonlight left for us to work. We still have a lot to do. Don’t worry. If he’s still around here, we will find him tomorrow. And if we do not-if he is gone-perhaps it is not the worst for us, non?’

‘I want the guard to watch for him tonight,’ Khaled ordered. ‘Our own guys-the men who know Habib well-not the guys from here.’

‘Oui,’ Zadeh agreed.

‘I don’t want them to shoot him, if they can help it,’ Khaled continued, ‘but I don’t want them to take any chances, either. Make a check of all his stuff-check his horse, and his pack. See what weapons or explosives he might’ve had on him. I didn’t get too good a look, before, but I think he had some stuff under his jacket. Fuck, this is a mess!’

‘Don’t worry,’ Zadeh muttered, putting a hand on Khaled’s shoulder once more.

‘I can’t help it,’ the Palestinian insisted, looking around him into the darkness. ‘It’s a fuckin’ bad start. I think he’s out there, staring at us, right now.’

When Khader completed his prayers, we carried Siddiqi’s body back to the canvas shamiana, and wrapped it in cloth until the rituals of burial could be performed on the following day. We worked for a few hours more and then lay down in the cavern, side by side for sleep. The snoring was loud, and the exhausted men were restless in their slumber, but I lay awake for other reasons. My eyes kept drifting back to the place, moonless and thickly shadowed, where Habib had disappeared. Khaled was right. It had started badly, Khader’s war, and the words echoed in my wakeful mind. A bad start…

I tried to fix my eyes on the clear and perfect stars of that fated night’s black heaven, but again and again my concentration lapsed, and I found myself staring at the dark edge of the plateau. And I knew, in the way we know without a word that love is lost, or in the sudden, sure way we know that a friend is false and doesn’t really like us at all, that Khader’s war would end much worse, for all of us, than it had begun.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

FOR TWO MONTHS of cold and ever colder days we lived with the guerrilla fighters in their cave complex on the Shar-i-Safa range. They were hard months in many ways, but our mountain stronghold never came under direct fire, and we were relatively safe. The camp was only fifty crow-kilometres from Kandahar. It was about twenty kilometres from the main Kabul highway and about fifty kilometres south-east of the Arghandab Dam. The Russians occupied Kandahar, but their hold on the southern capital was tenuous and the city was subject to recurring sieges. Rockets had been fired into the city centre, and guerrilla fighting on the outskirts claimed a steady toll of lives. The main highway was in the hands of several well-armed mujaheddin units. Russian tank and truck convoys from Kabul were forced to blast their way through blockades to resupply Kandahar, and that they did, from month to month. Afghan regular army units loyal to the Kabul puppet government protected the strategically important Arghandab Dam, but frequent attacks on the dam threatened their hold on the precious resource. Thus we were roughly in the centre of a triad of violent conflict zones, each of which constantly demanded new men and guns. The Shar-i-Safa range offered no strategic advantage to our enemies, so the fighting didn’t find us in our well-disguised mountain caverns.