Agent 6 ld-3 Page 24

  Though she was less than a few paces away, her body muddy and bruised, speaking directly to him – a pitiful figure that would surely elicit sympathy from any normal man – Leo felt disconnected from her. The experience was akin to being submerged under bathwater and looking up at this woman. They belonged to different worlds: his was warm and calm while her was troubled and cold. The sensation wasn’t indifference, or callous disregard. He wanted to know what she was saying and interested to know what had happened. Feeling the rush from his last inhalation, he sucked in deeply through his nose and imagined if gods existed they would watch mankind as Leo now watched Nara, distant observers of events unravelling before them.

  Leo closed his eyes.

  *

  Nara stopped speaking. Her mentor, the inscrutable Leo Demidov, the man she’d come to in her hour of need, had taken one look at her distressed state and fallen asleep. She hadn’t been bundled up in his arms, comforted with a promise that she would be protected. Her teacher allowed her to remain on the floor, bloodied and bruised, without an offer of help or even an expression of concern. Oddly, the lack of attention had a calming effect. By some margin she was the most competent person in the room.

  She stood up, moving towards the bed, regarding her mentor with a pipe protruding from his open palm, head and body slumped like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She could smell opium. She hadn’t known that he was an addict but it seemed obvious now. He was erratic, absent-minded, unreliable but it was hard when judging a foreigner not to suppose their eccentricities were due to the fact that they were from another land.

  Taking control, she assessed her situation. She was inside and behind a locked door. Had the streetlights not come on she might have been able to reach the apartment without being seen. As it was, she’d been chased all the way here, unable to shake her attacker. She hurried to the window, crouching down, looking out. Expecting to see just one person she discovered there was commotion on the street: at least five or six men. She couldn’t make out their faces. An angry gathering had formed at the foot of the steps. No doubt the sight of a half-clothed woman running into a Soviet adviser’s home at night had caught the attention of the neighbours. Her attacker had been only seconds behind her: he was already with the crowd, stirring their emotions. He would not give up. They were organizing a group, a lynch mob to kill them both, just as had happened in Herat, when Afghan women and Soviet advisers alike had been executed.

  Mapping her position in the city in relation to government installations, Nara tried to work out where help might come from. The Soviet Embassy was at the southern end of Darulaman Boulevard. She needed a telephone. She retreated from the window, returning to Demidov on the bed. He was out cold. Abandoning her teacher, she searched the apartment, unable to find a telephone. For a man who believed that searching a person’s belongings would reveal details of their character it was odd that he owned so little. There was less furniture in his entire apartment than her room at home. Unless panic had blinded her, there was nothing of any use. She searched the apartment again, thinking that in her haste she must have missed the telephone. On the second search she found the socket and stared at it blankly until she understood he did not own a phone. It was characteristic of him. He would not want to be contacted or bothered. Their best chance of escape had vanished. Panic swelling in her chest, she dropped to her mentor’s side, shaking him violently by the scruff of the neck. If he didn’t own a phone maybe he owned a gun.

  – Wake up!

  His eyes rolled like two heavy stone slabs, briefly revealing the whites. Nara ran to the kitchen, filled a dirty glass with cold water, returned to the bed and threw it in his face.

  *

  Leo opened his eyes and touched the spots of water on his face. He’d forgotten the events of the last few minutes and when he looked up to see his most promising student standing at the foot of the bed he wondered what she was doing in his apartment. She was in a state of some disarray. How long had she been standing there and where had she come from? He tried to remember her name but couldn’t. Enveloped in a sensation of supreme comfort, all he wanted was to sleep. Feeling his eyes close, he asked, his voice croaky:

  – Why are you here?

  She crouched down, close to him. He noticed that her lip was bleeding and her cheek was bruised. She’d been beaten. Her voice was shrill and loud and it annoyed him to be disturbed in this way. She said:

  – They tried to kill me. They broke into my home.

  Leo felt the opium pipe roll out of his hand. He tried to catch it, closing his palm, but it was too late. His student cried out:

  – Don’t you understand? They’re outside! They followed me here! We’re in danger!

  Leo nodded but he was not sure what he was agreeing with. Breathing deeply, he watched as Nara took the candle and placed it under his outstretched hand. His skin began to burn.

  There was a sensation that his brain slowly registered as pain. A patch th. Brn began to blister. He jerked his hand away, the fastest movement he’d made for hours, studying it as a bubble of red, angry skin took shape. Cracks appeared in his fragile opium shell. He felt sick, a confusion of pain and opium-contentment, the two sensations clashing. Standing up, unsteady on his feet, he was straddling two worlds: the opiate existence and the real world, where there was pain and grief and loss. Resting against the wall, the sickness grew stronger. He walked to the sink, running his hand under cold water. The pain came and went, then returned even stronger than before.

  Leo managed to keep the nausea under control. He turned back to the room, regarding his protegee’s injury, slowly deducing the events that must have preceded her arrival. She was only partially dressed and he gestured at the few items of clothing in his possession, spread across the floor and a single chair.

  – Take what you need.

  While she rooted through his slim assortment of clothes, he asked:

  – Who did this to you?

  Before she could answer the apartment went dark. The power had been shut off.

  Leo peered out over the city. There were lights on next door. His neighbours had electricity. The wires to the apartment must have been cut. He looked down at the street below. There were at least ten people outside.

  – Who are they?

  – I don’t know. Two men attacked me at home. I injured one. The other chased me.

  – Did they speak to you?

  – They’d found out I was working for the secret police.

  He thought for a moment, examining the blister. Nara joined him, wearing his baggy grey trousers.

  – Do you own a gun?

  He shook his head, watching as Nara’s strength briefly left her, her expression seeming to collapse. For the first time she sounded helpless:

  – What are we going to do?

  If the mob broke in Leo knew his time in Afghanistan would count for nothing. The crowd would kill him without a second thought, seeing him as no different to the soldiers who’d recently arrived in Red Army uniforms.

  Something struck the timber door. There was another heavy blow and a white zigzag line appeared. They would be inside in seconds.

  Leo lifted up his mattress, leaning it against the door. At the base he piled up the bed sheets and his collection of books. He smashed his only chair, kicking the timber fragments onto the heap. Looking around for more things to burn he saw the collection of letters that he’d started composing for his daughters back home. There were at least fifty partially written pages, efforts at correspondence that he’d abandoned, disheartened by his inability to express himself – his writing came across as matter of fact and unemotional, detailing what the city looked like, or how he’d grown to enjoy a new type of food. He was incapable of putting into words the simple fact that he missed his daughters and regretted any anguish he’d caused by his absence.

  Nara cried out:

  – Leo!

  The attackers continued to rain blows against the door. They were almost insid
e. Keeping the letters, Leo picked up the fat-bellied, old-fashioned kerosene lamp. He threw it against the door and it smashed. Kerosene poured down the timber. He picked up the candle, lighting the kerosene. Flames ran across the floor, up the mattress, over the wood. The mattress popped and spat, and in seconds the sheets were ablaze.

  Grabbing the spare container of kerosene, he gestured for Nara to join him by the far window.

  – Climb onto the roof.

  The roof was lined with tin, supported by a timber frame. Nara knew it would burn. She said:

  – The roof?

  Leo nodded.

  – We better hope someone saves us before it collapses.

  Their attackers were no longer trying to break the door down, confused by the fire. As Nara pulled herself onto the roof, Leo collected his opium pipe. Perched on the window ledge, he threw the second container into the middle of the fire. The plastic quickly melted. Climbing up onto the roof, feeling a sudden rush of heat, he glanced back to see the mattress consumed with flames, billowing black smoke.

  On the roof, he surveyed the substantial smoke trail rising into the night sky. A patrol might come in time. Nara was crouching in the corner of the roof furthest from the fire. Leo sat beside her. He now owned nothing in the world apart from the clothes he was wearing, the bundle of unfinished, inarticulate letters to his daughters and the opium pipe in his pocket. Legs crossed, he watched as the flames broke through a patch of roof. They did not have long. For the first time that night he behaved as any normal man might and put an arm around his injured student.

  Kabul Province Surobi District Barqi-Sarobi Dam 50 Kilometres East of Kabul

  Same Day

  Picking from a fistful of sugar-coated almonds, Fahad Mohammad sat near the crest of a hill overlooking the Kabul River. A bright moon hung over the gorge, but even without its light he could navigate down the slopes that dropped sharply to the river. Cradled in between the hills, like a giant concrete mouth, was the Sarobi Dam. It providing a significant portion of the capital’s electricity, and its strategic importance to the occupation could not be underestimated. The access road had been fortified with checkpoints and barbed-wire barriers. Two tanks were stationed at the top of the dam, one facing north, one south – guns angled high as if they feared that the mountains would rise up and smash the precious structure. Impressive as these defences might seem to Soviet planners they were of little concern to Fahad. No attack by the mujahedin was ever going to travel up the road. He liked to tell his men: The Soviets worry about controlling roads. This is not a country of roads. Let them keep our roads. We will keep the rest of Afghanistan.

  There were perhaps fifty soldiers in total protecting the facility, a mix of Afghan army recruits commanded by the occupiers. The notion that this was a coalition of equals was insultng – the Afghans were under orders, subservient, slaves in their own country and an abomination in Fahad’s eyes. Though the troop numbers were significant, their cautious deployment underscored their belief that mines scattered across the gorge would prevent any attack.

  As Fahad chewed on the last of his almonds, he could see one of the mines, a bulbous shape not more than ten metres away. A person might mistake it for a rock, for these mines were not dug in by a specialist team but dropped by enemy planes, scattered from the sky. Specially designed wings spun them through the air to slow their descent, grotesquely copying nature’s design of a seedpod, to land softly. They were the most innocuous looking of weapons. Children mistook them as toys since the colour of the plastic case varied according to where they were dropped, whether the reds or yellows of the mountain soil, or the greens of vegetated areas. Though they could be seen by a vigilant naked eye they were almost invisible to metal detectors, containing only a thin aluminium detonator. Fahad estimated there were several thousand spotted through these hills, none of them intended to kill. An examination revealed that they did not have enough explosives to guarantee death. They were designed to maim. An injured mujahedin was far more valuable to the occupation than a dead man. A wounded soldier could result in an entire operation being called off as the survivors carried him home. The dead presented no such problem: they were left where they lay.

  Fahad returned to his team.

  – Allahu Akbar.

  It rippled through the group, and once there was silence Fahad led the descent down the gorge. His team consisted of four other men including his younger brother, Samir – a young man with delicate feminine features. In contrast, Fahad was much taller and leaner. Standing still he appeared awkward. But in motion his body was elegant and nimble, one of the fastest soldiers on foot, able to trek across vast distances without a break, taking only mouthfuls of water from rivers he passed along the way. Fahad loved his three brothers, including Samir, but he held grave reservations about his abilities as a soldier.

  Samir was in charge of the explosives, deciding for this mission to use kama, a stable mix that wouldn’t detonate by accident. It could only be set off by a charge from the inside. It could be dropped, or knocked, the carrier could fall over and stumble without killing the group. Samir spent much of his free time fashioning new kind of bombs, toying with different detonators, experimenting with timers, testing the destructive impact of packing nails around the explosives or ball-bearings, which were much harder to obtain. He had no appetite for hand-to-hand combat and he was no leader. Yet his bomb-making skills were invaluable. Even more advantageous, he had no scars to give away his trade, no fingers missing, no eye full of shrapnel. Perhaps deceived by his soft face, Soviet soldiers never suspected him and he was able to pass through checkpoints with ease whereas Fahad was always stopped and searched, as if it were possible to read in his expression the fury and destructiveness of his intentions. For this mission Fahad had wanted to leave him at home. Samir argued that he was the most experienced with the explosives and he was needed at the dam in order to make the charges, to adapt to the circumstances. After much disagreement, Fahad had given in. He still felt uneasy about the decision, a niggling feeling in his gut that wouldn’t go away.

  Once the descent was completed, they would begin their approach a kilometre downstream from the dam, out of sight of the guard patrols. There was no way to defuse the mines but Fahad had cleared a path during the day, marking a safe route for them to follow in the dark. They moved slowly, in single file, unable to use torchlight, guided by the footsteps carefully dug into the ground as markers. As the ground slid under each step they were forced to stop and find their balance, unable to reach out and steady themselves for fear of grabbing a mine. It took almost an hour to reach the bottom of the gorge.

  Moonlight caught the Kabul River as it broke over rocks. The enemy had taken many precautions against a possible attack only to ignore the river itself. Their thinking was conventional: their orthodoxy would be their undoing. Fahad stepped into the river, stifling a desire to exclaim out loud at the cold. He could hear the sharp intake of breath as his men entered the water behind him. They had no specialist clothing. They’d abandoned the customary loose-fitting shirts, instead wearing American-style T-shirts that didn’t drag in the fast-flowing water. They wouldn’t survive long in these temperatures if their heads or necks became wet. They needed to keep their upper torso dry by navigating through the shallows. Stealth was their only chance of survival, rigging the explosives to detonate and then retreating.

  The aim of the operation wasn’t to bring the dam crashing down. Though it would be a glorious sight, it would be an impossible task, even with Samir’s expertise. They were attempting to damage the tunnels underneath it, to cause enough structural instability to shut the facility for repairs. It would cripple operations in Kabul. The Soviet regime would have to concentrate its efforts on energy security, keeping its resources close to the capital, while the resistance could gather strength. It would be a great psychological victory: striking at the heart of the occupation’s source of power the same day as Fahad’s older brother, Dost Mohammad, murdered an
entire class of trainee secret-police officers.

  As they navigated the final twist of the river, the dam was directly up ahead. The control room could be seen clearly, the men in charge standing at the windows. The river was at its most powerful here, contained within the narrowest area, the speed of flow controlled by the level of discharge from the dam. At the flick of a button the control room could dump water, enough to flood the riverbed, sweeping the team downstream. Several spotlights zigzagged across the valley and across the river, passing directly in front of Fahad. He sank down, his head just above the water. The spotlight moved on.

  Within touching distance of the steep concrete face, Samir began his work. The rest of the team took up positions around him. No longer moving, Fahad shivered. He was unable to stop, his hands shaking. Concerned about his brother’s coordination, he moved to help him only to find he wasn’t readying the explosives: instead, he was chipping at the concrete.

  – What are you doing?

  The crash of the water released from the dam concealed their conversation. Samir said:

  – If the explosives are planted just a short depth inside the concrete the force of the explosion will travel inwards, through the structure. It might even bring the whole thing down!

  Fahad was furious.

  – This wasn’t the plan. We have to damage it, that’s all. A hole is too risky. They’ll hear us! We don’t have time!

  – The river is loud enough to conceal the sound of our work. Fahad implored er’s:

  – You don’t have to do this to impress me. Set up the explosives and go! Stick to the plan! This isn’t about your pride!

  Insulted, Samir turned away, striking the concrete again, trying to chisel a hole.

  A spotlight snaked along the riverbank towards the face of the dam. This time its movements were deliberate and careful. They’d heard something. Fahad gestured for his men to duck, pulling his brother down with him. The spotlight hit the water, turning it as bright as day. Fahad prayed.