We climbed down from the truck, and as it drove away we mustered in the shade of the trees with the main group of men, who'd been waiting there for us. It was the first time that we'd assembled in our full number. There were thirty of us, all men, and for a moment I was reminded of the men who gathered in similar groups in prison yards. The fighters seemed tough and determined and, although many of them were lean to the point of being thin, they looked healthy and fit.

I removed my sunglasses. As I scanned the faces, my eyes met those of a man who stared back at me from the heart of darkness.

He was in his late forties or early fifties, and perhaps the oldest man in the group after Khaderbhai. His short hair was grey beneath a brown, round-edged Afghan cap, identical to the one I wore myself. His short, straight nose divided a long, pointed face that was so deeply lined beneath the sunken cheeks that it appeared to have been slashed with a machete. Heavy bags hung below his eyes. Theatrically peaked eyebrows like the wings of a black bat spiked above his eyes, but it was the eyes themselves that caught and held me.

As I locked eyes with him, returning his psychotic stare, the man began to stumble toward me. After the first few shambling steps, his body twitched into a more efficient mode, and he began to lope, covering the thirty metres that separated us in long, crouching, feline strides. Forgetting that the gun was strapped to my side, my hand instinctively moved to the hilt of my knife and I took half a pace backward with my right foot. I knew the eyes. I knew the look. The man wanted to fight me, perhaps even to kill me.

Just as he reached me, shouting something in a dialect that I couldn't recognise, Nazeer stepped from nowhere to stand in front of me and bar his way. He shouted something back at the man, but the other ignored him, staring past his head at me and shouting his question, again and again. Nazeer repeated his reply, shouting to match the other. The crazed fighter tried to shove Nazeer out of the way with both hands, but he might as well have tried to push aside a tree. The burly Afghan stood his ground, forcing the madman to shift his gaze from me for the first time.

A crowd had formed around us. Nazeer held the man's lunatic stare, and spoke in softer, pleading tones. I waited, tensed and ready to fight. We haven't even crossed the border yet, I thought, and I'm going to have to stab one of our own men...

"He was asking if you are a Russian," Ahmed Zadeh muttered from beside me, his Algerian accents rolling over the R in Russian. I flicked a glance at him, and he pointed at my hip. "The gun. And your pale eyes. He thinks you are a Russian."

Khaderbhai walked between the men, and put his hand on the madman's shoulder. The man turned immediately, and with eyes that seemed ready to weep, searched Khader's face. Khader repeated what Nazeer had been murmuring, in a similarly soothing tone. I couldn't understand all of it, but the sense was clear. No. He is American. The Americans are here to help us. He is here with us to fight the Russians. He will help us to kill the Russians. He will help us. We will kill many Russians together.

When the man turned to face me once more, his expression had changed so dramatically that I was moved to pity him, when a moment before I was ready to run my knife into his chest. His eyes were still deranged, hanging unnaturally wide and white beneath the brown irises, but his frenzied expression had collapsed into such wretched, pitiable misery that his face reminded me of the many ruined stone cottages we'd seen beside the roads. He looked once more into Khader's face, and the stutter of a smile flickered across his features as if animated by an electric pulse. He turned and walked away through the crowd. The tough men parted for him warily, compassion vying with fear in their eyes as they watched him pass.

"I am sorry, Lin," Abdel Khader said softly. "His name is Habib.

Habib Abdur Rahman. He is a schoolteacher-well, he once was a schoolteacher, in a village on the other side of these mountains.

He taught the little ones, the youngest children. When the Russians invaded, seven years ago, he was a happy man, with a young wife and two strong sons. He joined the resistance, like every other young man in the region. Two years ago he returned from a mission to find that the Russians had attacked his village. They had used gas, some kind of nerve gas."

"They deny it," Ahmed Zadeh interjected. "But while they fight this war they are testing their new weapons. A lot of the weapons used here, land mines and rockets and everything, are new experimental weapons that have never been used in a war before. Like the gas that they used on Habib's village. There is no war like this one."

"Habib wandered alone through the village," Khader continued.

"Everyone was dead. All the men and the women and the children.

All the generations of his family-his grandparents, from both sides, his parents, his wife's parents, his uncles and aunties, his brothers and sisters, his wife, and his children. All gone, in just one hour of one day. Even the animals, the goats and the sheep and the chickens, were all dead. Even the insects and the birds were dead. Nothing moved. Nothing lived and nothing survived."

"He make... a bury... all men... all women... all childrens ..." Nazeer added.

"He buried them all," Khader nodded. "All his family, and his friends from childhood, and his neighbours. It took so long to do it, all alone, that it was a very bad business, at the end. Then, when the job was done, he took up his gun and rejoined his mujaheddin unit. But the loss had changed him in a terrible way.

This time he was like a different man. This time he did everything in his power to capture a Russian, or an Afghan soldier fighting for the Russians. And when he captured one-and he did capture them, many of them, because he was very good at it after that-when he did capture them, he tortured them to death by impaling them on a sharpened steel spike, made from the wooden handle and the blade of the shovel he had used to bury his family. He has it now. You can see it strapped to the top of his pack. He ties the prisoners to the spike by their hands, behind their backs, with the spike touching their backs. At the moment that their strength fails them, and the metal spike begins to tear its way through their bodies, forcing its way out through their stomachs, Habib leans over them, staring into their eyes, and spits into their screaming mouths."

Khaled Ansari, Nazeer, Ahmed Zadeh, and I stood in a deeply breathing silence, waiting for Khader to speak again.

"There is no man who knows these mountains, and the region between here and Kandahar, better than Habib," Khader concluded, sighing wearily. "He is the best guide. He has survived hundreds of missions in this region, and he will get us to our men in Kandahar. And there is no man more loyal or trustworthy, because there is no man in Afghanistan who hates the Russians more than Habib Abdur Rahman. But..." "He is completely insane," Ahmed Zadeh offered into the silence with a Gallic shrug, and I found myself liking him, suddenly, and missing my friend Didier in the same instant. It was just the kind of pragmatic and brutally honest summary that Didier might've made.

"Yes," Khader agreed. "He is insane. His grief has destroyed his mind. And for as much as we need him, there is the fact that he must be watched at all times. Every mujaheddin unit from here to Herat has cast him out. We are fighting the Afghan army that serves the Russians, but the fact is that they are Afghans. We receive most of our information from soldiers in the Afghan army who want to _help us to win against their Russian masters. Habib cannot make this fine distinction. He has only one understanding of this war: to kill them all quickly, or to kill them slowly.