Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

We searched the compound for survivors. We were twenty men at the start of the attack, including our two wounded. After it, we were eleven: Jalalaad and the two young men, Juma and Hanif, who'd left with him to find any Afghan regulars or Russians within our defensive perimeter; Khaled; Nazeer; a very young fighter named Ala-ud-Din; three wounded men; Suleiman; and myself. We'd lost nine men-one more than the eight Afghan army men we'd killed in our mortar attack on them.

Our wounded were in a bad way. One man was so badly burned that his fingers had fused together like a crab's claws, and his face wasn't recognisably human. He was breathing through a hole in the red skin of his face. It might've been his mouth, that trembling hole in his face, but there was no way to be sure. The breaths were laboured, scraping sounds that faded and weakened as I listened to them. I gave him morphine, and moved on to the next man. He was a farmer from Ghazni named Zaher Rasul. He'd taken to bringing me green tea whenever I read a book or made notes in my journal. He was a kindly, self-effacing forty-two year old-a senior man in a country where the average life span for men was forty-five. His arm was missing below the shoulder. The same projectile, whatever it was, that had severed his arm, had torn him open along his body, from the chest to the hip, on the right hand side. There was no way of knowing what pieces of metal or stone might be lodged inside his wounds. He was praying a repetitive zikkir:

God is great God forgive me God is merciful God forgive me Mahmoud Melbaaf was holding a tourniquet on the ragged stump of shoulder that remained. When he released it, the blood spattered us in strong warm spurts. Mahmoud pulled the tourniquet tight once more. I looked into his eyes.

"Artery," I said, crushed by the task that confronted me.

"Yes. Under his arm. Did you see?"

"Yeah. It's gotta be stitched up or clamped or something. We've gotta stop the blood. He's lost too much already."

The blackened, ash-covered remains of the medical kit were grouped on a piece of canvas in front of my knees. I found a suture needle, a rusty mechanic's pliers, and some silk thread.

Freezing cold on the snowy ground, and with my bare hands cramped, I ran stitches into the artery, and the flesh, and the whole area, desperate to lock off the gush of hot, red blood. The thread snagged several times. My stiffened fingers trembled. The man was awake and aware, and in terrible pain. He screamed and howled intermittently, but returned always to his prayer.

My eyes were full of sweat, despite the shivering cold, when I nodded to Mahmoud to release the tourniquet. Blood oozed through the stitches. It was a much slower flow, but I knew the trickle would still kill him in the long run. I began to pack wads of bandage into the wound and then to wind on a pressure dressing, but Mahmoud's bloody hands seized my wrists in a powerful grip. I looked up to see that Zaher Rasul had stopped praying and stopped bleeding. He was dead.

I was breathing hard. It was the kind of breathing that does more harm than good. I suddenly realised that I hadn't eaten for too many hours, and I was very hungry. With that thought-hunger, food-I felt sick for the first time. I felt the sweaty wave of nausea surge over me, and I shook my head free of it.

When we returned our attention to the burned man we found that he, too, had succumbed. I covered the still body with a canvas camouflage drop-sheet. My last glimpse of his scorched, featureless, melted face became a prayer of thanks. One of the agonising truths for a battle medic is that you pray as hard and almost as often for men to die as you pray for them to live. The third wounded man was Mahmoud Melbaaf himself. There were tiny grey-black fragments of metal and what seemed to be melted plastic in his back, his neck, and the back of his head.

Fortunately, the spray of that hot material had only penetrated the upper layers of his skin, much like splinters. Nevertheless, it was the work of an hour to rid him of them. I washed the wounds and applied antibiotic powder, dressing them wherever it was possible.

We checked our supplies and reserves. We'd had two goats at the start of the attack. One of them had run off, and we never sighted it again. The other was found cowering in a blind alcove formed between high, rocky escarpments. That goat was our only food. The flour had burned to soot with the rice and ghee and sugar. The fuel reserves were completely exhausted. The stainless steel medical instruments had suffered a direct hit, and most of them had deformed into useless lumps of metal. I scraped through the wreckage to retrieve some antibiotics, disinfectants, ointments, bandages, suture needles, thread, syringes, and morphine ampoules. We had ammunition, and some medicines, and we could melt the snow to make water, but the lack of food was a very serious concern.

We were nine men. Suleiman and Khaled decided that we had to leave the camp. There was a cave on another mountain, about twelve hours' march away to the east, which they hoped might give us adequate protection from attack. The Russians were sure to have another helicopter in the air within a few hours at most.

Ground forces wouldn't be far behind.

"Every man fill two canteens with snow, and keep them inside his clothes, next to his body, on the march," Khaled said to me, translating Suleiman's orders. "We carry weapons, ammunition, medicines, blankets, some fuel, some wood, and the goat. Nothing else. Let's go!"

We left on the march with empty stomachs, and that state defined us for the next four weeks as we hunkered down in the new mountain cave. One of Jalalaad's young friends, Hanif, had been a halal butcher in his home village. He slaughtered, skinned, gutted, and quartered the goat when we arrived. We prepared a fire with wood that we'd carried from the ruined camp, and a sprinkle of spirit from one of the lamps. The meat was cooked- every last morsel, except for the parts, such as the legs of the animal below the knee joint, which were regarded as haram, or forbidden for Muslims to eat. The carefully cooked meat was then rationed into small daily shares. We stored the bulk of the cooked flesh in an improvised refrigerator scooped out of the ice and snow. And then, for four weeks, we nibbled at the dry meat and cringed inwardly as hunger twisted us around the craving for more.

It was an expression of our discipline and good-natured support for one another that the meat from one goat kept nine men alive for four weeks. We tried many times to slip away from the camp and reach one of the neighbouring khels to secure some extra food.

But all the local villages were occupied by enemy troops, and the entire mountain range was surrounded by patrols of Afghan army units led by Russians. Habib's tortures had combined with the damage we'd done to the helicopter to rouse a furious determination in the Russians and Afghan regulars. On one foraging mission, our scouts heard an announcement echoing through the nearest valley. The Russians had attached a loudspeaker to a military jeep. An Afghan, speaking in Pashto, described us as bandits and criminals, and said that a special task force had been set up to capture us. They'd put a reward on our heads. Our scouts wanted to shoot at the vehicle, but they thought it might be a trap designed to draw us out of hiding.

They let it pass, and the words of the hunters echoed in the sheer, stone canyons like the howl of prowling wolves.

Apparently acting on false information-or perhaps following the trail of Habib's bloody executions-the Russians, working from all the surrounding villages, concentrated their searches on another mountain range to the north of us. For so long as we remained in our remote cave, we seemed to be safe. So we waited, trapped and hungering and afraid, through the four coldest weeks of the year. We hid, creeping through shadows in the daylight hours, and huddled together without light or heat in the darkness every night. And slowly, one ice-edged hour at a time, the knife of war whittled the wishing and hoping away until all that was left to us, within the hard, disconsolate wrap of our own arms around our own shivering bodies, was the lonely will to survive.