Jason Elliot - The Network

The strange thing is that the pain erupts not from my back but my stomach, and I look down in astonishment as my hands clutch the front of my body in reflex. It feels like a powerful electric shock and as I begin to double over in agony I’m just able to turn enough to see what’s caused the blow. The Talib is standing behind me with a length of thick black electrical cable in his right hand, which I now realise has whipped over my arm and across my abdomen.

I can’t speak. Nothing comes out of my mouth. I stare at him in astonishment, and his hand comes up in a lightning motion. The wire hits my other arm, curls over it and sends another electrifying jolt of pain across my back. Where the cable has struck it feels as if a red-hot piece of metal has been pressed against me, and I’m gripping my sides trying not to speak, because I mustn’t.

I’m amazed at how quickly pain affects the consciousness. There’s a few gawping bystanders now, gathering at the periphery of the street, but as I take in the sight of them they already seem unreal, like characters in a dream the significance of which I don’t really understand. The Talib is yelling at me, but I don’t understand and I can’t respond. I hear only a weird, animal-like moan of anguish escape me, but my attacker wants more, and the cable leaps out at me once again, delivering another burning jolt to my wrist, arm and back, and making me stumble down into the dirt.

I can’t take much more of this. If he hits me again I know I’ll be in too much pain to function. I can run, but another Talib who’s been sitting in the cab of the Toyota has got out now, and has an AK in his hands, half-raised into a firing position just to let everybody know this is their business and nobody else’s. I’ll have to shoot him first, while my vision is still good and my hand steady. But if I do, my options are not too good. I can run through this maze of streets, but I won’t escape for long. If I’m not killed, I’ll be found soon enough and the entire op will be ruined. I may or may not have time to conceal the flash disk somewhere, but I’ll then have to find a way to transmit its location to H or someone I can trust.

I can’t bear the prospect of all this. If I own up to being a foreigner he’ll stop hitting me, but I’ll be taken prisoner and searched and my map and weapon will incriminate me. God knows what will happen to me if I end up in a Taliban prison. Every scenario spells disaster.

I’m lying in the road now, propping myself up with one arm, looking him in the face, deciding that if his hand goes up again, I’ll roll to my left and shoot the one with the AK who’s leaning against the door of the pickup. He won’t be expecting it. For the moment he’s just enjoying the sight of his friend beating the hell out of an unlucky passer-by. Then, unless he acquiesces very quickly and very politely, I’ll shoot the one with the cable.

He walks towards me with a menacing swagger. Slowly, as if nursing my ribs, I move my hand under my shalwar to the holster, and find the grip of the Browning. Safety off, finger to the trigger.

‘What have you got to say for yourself now, you Panjshiri son of a whore?’ he says, or something very like it.

In a movement calculated to cause further terror, he winds an extra turn of cable over the hand that holds it, and runs his other hand along its length, as if preparing it for its next journey. But it never comes. At the moment he’s about to hit me again and, though he doesn’t know it, to be shot twice through the chest, there’s a high-pitched squeal of brakes from a few feet behind him, where a car has pulled up alongside the Toyota. At the sight of it I experience a strange sense of recognition. It takes me a few seconds before I realise why, but I get there in the end. It’s the BBC Land Rover on its way home, and behind the windscreen I can clearly see the female passenger, leaning across from her seat and honking the horn to get everybody’s attention.

She gets out, strides up to the Talib with the cable and with a minimum of ceremony introduces herself as the BBC corres-pondent and asks what the hell is going on. She has no idea it’s me, but sees only an apparently defenceless man lying in the street and a big Talib looming over him with an electric cable in his hand. She’s blathering fearlessly at him and the effect is so dramatic I’m transfixed by the spectacle. At the sight of this obviously mad, shrill foreign woman, the murderous warrior turns into a sullen schoolboy who looks as if he’s just been caught by the headmistress behind the bike sheds. He skulks with his partner back to the cab of the pickup without even looking at me, and as I stagger to the pavement the pickup roars angrily away.

Then, summoning her interpreter, she marches over to me. I avoid meeting her eye.

‘Bastards,’ she mutters in English. ‘What have they done to you?’

I’m still gripping my sides in pain.

‘Khub ast,’ I growl. ‘It’s alright.’

I try to keep my face turned from her towards the shadow. But as she looks at me, her expression turns from one of concern to curiosity.

‘I know you,’ she says quizzically. She’s squatting beside me. ‘Don’t I know you?’

I want to shake my head, but I mustn’t show that I’ve understood.

‘Zekriya,’ she calls to her driver, who’s been sensible enough to stay clear of the fray, ‘ask him if he’s alright, can you?’

‘Khub ast,’ I repeat, disguising my voice with a wince of pain.

‘That is so weird,’ I hear her say with a sigh as she stands up and walks back towards the Land Rover. ‘He looks just like someone I know. Zek?’ she calls with her hands on her hips. ‘Ask him if he’ll agree to an interview. Honestly, these poor bloody people.’

I’m not good for much the following day. But while my body’s been immobile, my mind’s been careering back and forth over the events of the previous twenty-four hours. The mind hungers naturally for certainty, but I can’t be as sure as I want to be about any of the things that are troubling me. All that is possible is an interpretation, and the one I’ve come up with has a dark side and a light side.

The dark side is that, as the Baroness indicated, someone is attempting to sabotage the operation and wants us to fail. I have accepted the cynical possibility that, somewhere along the line, there’s an agenda in favour of the survival of the Stingers. I must accept, possibly, that the Talib who accosted me yesterday was perhaps expecting me, and had been paid or persuaded to disable or kill me. Perhaps he wasn’t really a Talib at all. Perhaps Sattar, on whom my suspicion has largely fallen, has been watching the house, seen me leaving on Mondays and Tuesdays, and arranged for the Talib to intercept me on my return. The planning and effort involved in this, as well as the fact that a much simpler method could have been found to make me disappear, render it unlikely. But not impossible.

The trouble with small conspiracies is that they lead contagiously to larger ones. When I dwell on the notion that there really is a plan for the Stingers to fall into the wrong hands, I can’t help remembering Grace’s solemn prediction that there are people in America just waiting for the excuse to invade Afghanistan. All they need, she said, is to trace an act of terrorism on US soil back to Afghanistan. The Stingers could certainly provide the means. Yet the chances of planned American military involvement in Afghanistan seem so utterly remote, I have to mentally dismiss this possibility.

The light side is that if my encounter with the turbanned cable-wielder really was a devious attempt to stop us, it has failed. And if someone is still going to try to stop us, he’ll have to come up with another plan. If we leave quickly, the chances of another attempt will be much reduced. I share this idea with H when he looks in on me the next morning, because it feels right that we should move without delay.