Simon Hawke - Khyber Connection

The name Hindu Kush meant "Hindu Killer". To the foreigner who had grown up with the myth that Hell was located far beneath the surface of the earth, the Hindu Kush was proof it could be found at the top of the world as well. The 700-mile-long wall of rock that bordered Afghanistan on the north lay to the west of the impassable Himalayas. The terrain was otherworldly, both in its savage beauty and in its foreboding deadliness, a rockstrewn, broken landscape which looked as if it had been carved out of the earth with Vulcan’s chisel. For six months out of every year a banshee winter wind known as the shamal screamed down ice encrusted slopes that made the Grand Canyon look like a small Arizona drywash. During the summer months the heat defied belief. Here and there could be found a small oasis, lush and verdant, a valley rich with fig palms and walnut groves, but for the most part it was a trackless wasteland of sheer rock which ripped holes in the sky.

The country had defied the armies of Darius the Great and Alexander. The Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had stormed through its mountain passes, but had never truly conquered it. The British Raj had floundered here for years, arrogantly claiming it as part of its empire, yet never taming it. The country, and the wild people who inhabited its inhospitable heights, endured and would not be subjugated. The Hindu Kush killed all those who did not belong there. It was a cold and lonely place to die.

Huddled behind an outcropping of rock in one of the countless hairpin turns of the Khyber Pass, Sergeant Thomas Court struggled to hold on to life and prayed the Ghazis would not find him. His body was pierced by three jezail bullets, but he did not tear dying of his wounds so much as he feared the ministrations of the Ghazis. He could hear the screams of other wounded soldiers as the Afridi tribesmen found them and proceeded with the vivisection. The throat-rending screams echoed off the rock walls of the Khyber like the ululation of the damned in Dante’s final circle. The mountain tribes showed no mercy to the firinghi invader.

Court had managed to half crawl, half drag himself up into the rocks, where he had taken refuge in a small stone sangar, an improvised fortification of piled boulders which tribesmen constructed for use as sniper’s nests. There were hundreds of them in the pass, at varying elevations, and from these primitive stone bunkers the Pathans would fire down at those below them with their jezails-the long-barrelled matchlock rifles they employed with devastating accuracy, able to drop a British soldier at a distance of 1000 yards. Their skill with the primitive jezails made them that much more formidable with captured British Martini-Henry and Snider rifles, superior firearms which the tribesmen turned against their original owners with unholy glee.

The scene below where Court lay in the sangar, resembled a painting by Heironymous Bosch. Bodies were scattered everywhere. British soldiers and khaki-clad Sikhs of the Indian Army, Gurkhas, kilted Highlanders, corpses torn and bloodied, pack animals wandering about untended, riderless horses, camels oblivious to the death throes all around them; it was a scene of mind-numbing carnage through which the ghostly, white-clad Ghazis moved like wraiths, brandishing their charra knives. The grisly, swordlike blades rose and fell on those luckless enough to have survived. As the hour grew late, the screams became fewer, though no less hideous.

Court shivered and cursed the sadists in the Referee Corps who had selected this particular horror as an historical scenario within which to stage a temporal confrontation action. He had survived the trench fighting of the First World War, been wounded in a naval action off the Barbary Coast, and had made it back from the death march at Bataan. He had served as a Roman legionary, an Indian scout in the American southwest, and a Spanish conquistador under Pizarro, but nothing in his career as a soldier in the Temporal Army Corps could compare with this bone-chilling nightmare. Nothing he had ever seen had terrified him as much as the sight of hundreds of screaming Ghazis pouring down out of the rocks, descending upon the regiment like locusts under the black flags of the jehad. Never before had he encountered fighters like the Ghazis. When the Pathan tribes went Ghazi, it made no difference whether they were Afridi or Mohmand or Yusufzai. Any feuds between the Orakzais of Tirah and the Mahsuds of Waziristan became forgotten as they united in jehad and became Chazi, Muslim fanatics in the grip of a religious fever, kamikazes without planes who believed that the slaughter of the infidels would open up the gates of paradise to them. With such an incentive, they knew no fear. They could not be turned. The blessings of the Prophet were upon them, and death in combat was but a passage to Islamic heaven. The British soldiers had fought bravely, but they were outnumbered ten to one. They had been softened up by sniper fire and rock bombardment from the cliffs, and then the human wave engulfed them and they died. And died. And died.

Court held onto his Martini-Henry as if the rifle were his lover. He had one round left. Only one. If the Ghazis found him, he would write his own name on that bullet. If they didn’t find him, if he could hang on long enough, the Search and Retrieve teams would clock in from the 27th century and home in on his implant. If he was still alive then, they would clock him back to his own time and he would be treated for his wounds in an army hospital. The referees would then add his survival into the point spread that would guide them in reaching a decision in the arbitration action that had sent him back to the year 1897, to fight in a war within a war. If he survived, he would never know who won. He would never know how many other soldiers of the 27th century had died in the Khyber Pass, slaughtered by the Ghazis. He would never even know the details of the events in his own time which had led to the arbitration action. He would only know that he had survived, that he tad beaten the odds in a game in which the mortality rate was astronomical. He would know that he had survived to fight again and that the next time, perhaps, the odds would finally catch up to him. Maybe they already had.

He thought about his one remaining bullet. His entire life began to revolve around that tiny piece of lead.

It was growing dark. Vultures wheeled overhead. Court’s teeth were chattering. His wounds no longer pained him. He knew that was a bad sign. There was nothing he could do. There were no longer any screams coming from below him. Nothing lived down there. The Ghazis had melted away into the mountains, taking with them the spoils of the battle — the guns, supplies, and animals. He had been spared death by dismemberment, but now it seemed only a matter of what would kill him first-exposure or his wounds. He thought about that precious bullet. It was a tempting thought, a secure and quick solution. Yet, on the other hand, the instinct to survive was strong within him. The S amp; R teams would arrive soon, they had to. Like the mythic Valkyries, they would bear away the bodies of the dead soldiers from the future and sweep the battlefield to cheek for possible survivors. All he had to do was stay alive.

He heard a flutter of wings. Large wings. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating. It seemed entirely too melodramatic to be dying in a mountain pass, in a savage wilderness at the ceiling of the world, and to hear the flapping of the deathbird’s wings approaching. And it was a deathbird, only a prosaic one, a vulture. The ugly bird alighted on the sangar wall not two feet away. Its scrofulous face stared at him indifferently.