Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘I didn’t want to offend you by saying it’s disgusting,’ she said.

‘Oh dear,’ Hiroko sighed. ‘You’re going to be a nightmare to live with if you insist on cultural sensitivity.’

‘It’s a smelly little fruit, and you’ve got to be crazy to like it,’ Kim said.

‘Excellent.’ Hiroko smiled. ‘Thank you. And you need to vary your wardrobe. How many black T-shirts do you own?’

Harry watched with satisfaction. Whatever might be happening in the wider world, at least the Weiss-Burtons and the Tanaka-Ashrafs had finally found spaces to cohabit in, complicated shared history giving nothing but depth to the reservoir of their friendships.

In the green world, Harry Burton stepped on a dark clod and watched it break open, revealing an interior of phosphorescence. He took off his night-vision goggles and pointed at the glowing ember while his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the cave.

‘Someone was here, not so long ago.’ He ran his fingers along the cave wall and encountered a groove beneath the soot, which his fingers followed to reveal a carving of a falcon.

‘Arabs?’ asked his ex-colleague Steve, who had long since moved to the CIA paramilitary. He meant ‘al-Qaeda’.

Harry shrugged.

‘Portraiture doesn’t fit with their brand of Islam.’

‘Yeah. But mass murder, that’s OK.’ Steve gestured wearily at the contractor who walked in from the connecting cave. ‘Tell the guys we’re heading back. Nothing here. Again.’

‘It’s like they know we’re coming,’ the contractor said before returning to the adjoining cave.

Harry doubted there had ever been anyone here worth coming for. If he were an Afghan he’d light and extinguish fires in every cave of these mountains before running to claim an informant’s reward from the Americans, who were acting as though they owned a rainforest of money-growing trees. He spat on his sleeve and wiped around the falcon. It was a creature of exquisite artistry — one talon raised in imperious command. He wondered how long ago it had been perched in the mustiness of the cave, listening to battles roar and recede outside. Perhaps an Arab mujahideen of the eighties had placed it here.

He had always been uneasy about the introduction of ‘foreign fighters’ into the Afghans’ war against the Soviets. It wasn’t, he’d be the first to concede, because he had any inkling of how history would unravel over the next two decades — it was simply that some lingering idealism in him had found a nobility in the struggle of a people to win back their land from a superpower, and he could find no corresponding nobility in the men who arrived to fight infidels who had overtaken a Muslim land. It seemed so medieval.

He stepped out of the cave on to a mountain ledge, pulling binoculars out of his pack to see the land beyond the dried riverbed and barren gullies. In the plains of the Gomal district the sky and ground were in different centuries — one cut open by the blades of a Huey chopper, the other smothered by a collapsed fort and the remnants of mud houses. After two decades of war, barely anything lived here other than juniper bushes and small groups of villagers.

‘We make a desolation and call it peace,’ he said, not for the first time, placing his M4 rifle on the ground and sitting down heavily next to it, the mountain sharp against his back. The rest of his team — all younger and fitter than him — were already scrambling down, singing some song they’d made up which rhymed ‘Arkwright and Glenn’ with ‘dark fighting men’, while the Afghans who had come with them followed more quietly.

‘You want to get shot?’ Steve said, picking up the M4 and holding it out to Harry. ‘Come on, move.’

‘If they shoot me, we’ll know where they are. I’m not such a prize.’

‘When did you become such a moaner?’ Steve said, tossing the rifle into Harry’s lap and lighting a cigarette. ‘People keep asking me what the hell happened to Harry.’

‘People around me got stupid. It made me cranky.’

‘The Great Seer, Lala Buksh, speaks.’ Steve bowed from the waist.

Harry didn’t bother to respond. He had long suspected that it was Steve who had tipped off the CIA at the start of the nineties about the identity of the ‘insider’ who wrote a blistering article in an influential defence journal about the CIA’s decision to turn its back on Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. Steve was one of the few people to know that ‘Lala Buksh’ — the pseudonym of the writer — was also Harry’s Pathan alias. Harry had never taken it personally; he’d been planning to quit the CIA in any case and being forced to move up the date by a few months really made little difference to his life.

‘So I guess you must feel pretty smug now. You were right. Everyone else was wrong. Jihadi blowback, that was your phrase, wasn’t it?’ Steve made a whistling noise between his teeth, which Harry recalled as the sound of disgust he made at the end of every meeting with the ISI.

‘I didn’t say “blowback” — and I never thought we’d be back here. Violent revolution in Saudi Arabia, that was my forecast. Being here. there’s no smugness. Just failure.’

‘We shredded the Iron Curtain. That’s a failure I can live with.’ Steve took the binoculars from Harry before a reflection off its lenses drew unnecessary attention to their location. Harry resisted telling him that his obviously dyed blond hair was just as likely to provide a target.

‘But I do owe you an apology,’ Steve said. In the twenty or so years Harry had known Steve it was the first time the other man had truly surprised him. ‘Not for unmasking you. No regrets there. But I remember saying there was no future in private military corporations. I was wrong. PMCs are the future of warfare — fighting and reconstruction both. And you, Harry Burton, are a pioneer.’

‘I see the compliment — now where’s the backhand?’ There was something to be said for knowing someone as well as he knew Steve. Even when you didn’t like each other your awareness of the other’s temperament brought a familiarity to interactions that almost made the relationship seem intimate.

‘You’re an idiot to hire all these Third Country Nationals. Economically, sure, I see the sense. But stop recruiting them from Pakistan and Bangladesh. You’re acting like this is a territorial war and they’re neutral parties. Go with guys from Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Philippines. Indians are OK, so long as they’re not Muslim.’

‘I’ve worked with these men for years,’ Harry said, standing up and pulling his binoculars out of Steve’s hand. It wasn’t restraint, simply a lack of energy that kept him from reminding Steve that fifteen years ago he loved to joke that the difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan was ‘there we just had GI — here we have jee-had’.

‘Harry, Harry, Harry. Wake up and smell the burning buildings. You think I don’t know you well enough after all that time in Islamabad? There’s too much nostalgia in you. You look at those men and you see your childhood. The cook, the gardener, the driver. The Urdu teacher.’

‘If this speech is about Raza you need to seriously reconsider continuing it,’ he said, looking casually from Steve to the drop off the ledge.

‘No need to start performing Quietly Menacing Man,’ Steve said, stepping away from the edge. ‘It really doesn’t bother you — in this time, in this place — that he’s found religion?’ In response to Harry’s look of bafflement he added, ‘I saw him prostrating himself in front of a mosque the first time I flew in. He thought there was no one around to see him.’

‘Maybe he had his nose to the ground for the scent of a woman. God knows you’re not going to find one here using your eyes.’