Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"You're lucky," Khaled answered quickly. His tone was more serious than his laughing eyes. "It's a mess, but it could've been worse."

"Worse?"

"They didn't use anything heavy-no mortars, no heavy machine guns. They would've used them if they had them, and it would've been a lot worse. That means it was a small patrol, probably Afghans, not Russians, just testing us out or trying their luck.

As it is, we've got three wounded, and we lost four horses."

"Where are the wounded guys?"

"Up ahead, in the pass. You wanna take a look at them with me?"

"Sure. Sure. Gimme a hand with my gear."

We wrenched the saddle and bridle from my dead horse, and trotted up the line of men and horses to the mouth of the narrow pass.

The wounded men were lying within the cover of a shoulder of rock. Khader stood nearby, frowning watchfully at the plain behind me. Ahmed Zadeh was gently but hurriedly removing the clothing from one of the wounded men. I glanced at the darkening sky.

One man had a broken arm. His horse had fallen on him when it was shot. The break was a bad one, a compound fracture of the forearm, near the wrist. One bone protruded at a sickeningly unnatural angle, but it remained within the envelope of flesh, and nowhere pierced the skin. It had to be set. When Ahmed Zadeh removed the second man's shirt, we saw that he'd been shot twice. Both bullets were still in his body, and they were too deep to reach without major surgery. One, in the upper chest, had shattered the collarbone, and the other had lodged in his stomach, tearing a wide and undoubtedly fatal wound from hip to hip. The third man, a farmer named Siddiqi, had a bad head-wound. His horse had thrown him against the rocks, and he'd struck a boulder with the top of his head, near the crown.

It was bleeding, and there was a clear fracture of the cranium.

My fingers slid along the ridge of broken bone, greasy-wet with his blood. The broken scalp had split into three chunks. One of them was so loose that I knew it would come away in my hand if I tugged at it. His matted hair was all that held his skull together. There was also a thick swelling at the base of the skull, where his head met his neck. He was unconscious, and I doubted that he would ever open his eyes again.

I glanced at the sky once more. There was so little daylight left, so little time. I had to make a decision, a choice, and help one man to live, maybe, while I let other men die. I wasn't a doctor, and I had no experience under fire. The work had fallen to me, it seemed, because I knew a little more than the next man, and I was willing to do it. It was cold. I was cold. I was kneeling in a sticky smear of blood, and I could feel it soaking through the knees of my pants. When I looked up at Khader he nodded, as if he was reading my thoughts. Feeling sick with guilt and fear, I pulled a blanket over Siddiqi, to keep him warm, and then I abandoned him to work on the man with the broken arm.

Khaled pulled open the comprehensive first-aid kit beside me. I threw a plastic bottle of antibiotic powder, antiseptic wash, bandages, and scissors on the ground at Ahmed Zadeh's feet, beside the man who'd been shot. I snapped out brief instructions for cleaning and dressing the wounds, and as Ahmed went to work, covering the bullet wounds, I turned my attention to the broken arm. The man spoke to me urgently. I knew his face well. He had a special talent for herding the unruly goats, and I'd often seen the temperamental creatures following him, unbidden, as he wandered around our camp.

"What did he say? I didn't get it."

"He asked you if it's going to hurt," Khaled muttered, trying to keep his voice and his expression reassuringly neutral.

"I had this happen to me once," I said in reply. "Something just like this. I know exactly how much it hurts. It hurts so much, brother, that I think you should take his gun away."

"Right," Khaled replied. "Fuck."

He smiled broadly, and brushed at the ground beside the wounded man, gradually easing the Kalashnikov out of the man's hand and out of reach. Then, as darkness closed over us, and five of the man's friends held him down, I wrenched and twisted his shattered arm until it resembled the straight, healthy limb that it once had been and never would be again.

"Ee-Allah! Ee-Allah!" he shouted, over and over through clenched teeth.

When the break was wrapped and set with hard plastic splints, and we'd patched over the wounds on the man who'd been shot, I hastily wrapped a dressing around unconscious Siddiqi's head. At once we set off into the narrow pass. The cargo was distributed among all the remaining horses. The man with the bullet wounds rode a horse, supported on both sides by his friends. Siddiqi was strapped across one of the packhorses, as was the body of Madjid, the Afghan who'd been killed in the attack. The rest of us walked.

The climb was steep but short. Puffing hard in the thin air and shivering in a cold that penetrated to my bones, I pushed and dragged the reluctant horses with the rest of the men. The Afghan fighters never once complained or grumbled. When the pitch of one climb was steeper than anything I'd known on the whole trip, I paused at last, panting heavily to regain my strength. Two men turned to see that I'd halted, and they slid down the path to me, giving up the precious metres they'd just gained. With huge smiles and encouraging claps on the shoulder, they helped me to drag a horse up the slope and then bounded off to help those ahead.

"These Afghans may not be the best men in the world to live with," Ahmed Zadeh puffed as he struggled up the scrambling trail behind me. "But they are certainly the best men in the world to _die with!"

After five hours of the climb we reached our destination, a camp in the Shar-i-Safa Mountains. The camp was sheltered from the air by a prodigious ledge of rock. The ground beneath had been excavated to form a vast cave leading to a network of other caves. Several smaller, camouflaged bunkers surrounded the cave in a ring that reached to the fringe of the flat, rugged mountain plateau.

Khader called us to a halt in the light of the rising full moon.

His scout Habib had alerted the camp to our arrival, and the mujaheddin were waiting for us-and the supplies we brought-with great excitement. A message was sent back to me, in the centre of the column, that Khader wanted me. I jogged forward to join him.

"We will ride into the camp along this path. Khaled, Ahmed, Nazeer, Mahmoud, and some others. We do not know exactly who is in the camp. The attack on us at Shahbad Pass tells me that Asmatullah Achakzai has changed sides again, and joined the Russians. The Pass has been his for three years, and we should have been safe there. Habib tells me that the camp is friendly, and that these are our own men, waiting for us. But they are still behind cover, and they will not come out to greet us. I think it will be better for us if our American is riding with us, near the front, behind me. I cannot tell you to do this. I can only ask it. Will you ride with us?"

"Yes," I replied, hoping that the word sounded firmer in his ears than it did in my own.

"Good. Nazeer and the others have prepared the horses. We will leave at once."

Nazeer led several horses forward, and we climbed wearily into the saddles. Khader must've been far more tired than I was, and his body mustVe wrestled with many more pains and complaints, but he was straight-backed in the saddle and he held the green-and white standard at his hip with a rigid arm. Imitating him, I sat up straight and kicked back smartly to start the horse forward.

Our small column moved off slowly into a silvered moonlight so strong that it cast looming shadows on the grey rock walls.

The approach to the camp from that southern climb was along a narrow stone path that swept in a graceful, even curve from right to left. Beside the path on our left was a steep drop of some thirty metres to a rubble of broken boulders. On our right was the smooth rock face of a sheer wall. When we were perhaps half way along the path, watched attentively by our own men and the mujaheddin in the camp, I developed an irritating cramp in my right hip. The cramp quickly became a piercing knot of pain; and the more that I tried to ignore it, the more agonising it felt.