"I left him alone," Khaled muttered when the job was done. "I thought he was praying. He told me he wanted to pray. But I had a feeling..."

"I think he was praying," I answered.

"I'm worried," Khaled confessed, looking into my eyes with a febrile mix of heartbreak and fear. "He keeps setting mantraps all over the place. He's got twenty grenades on him under that cloak. I've tried to explain to him that a mantrap has no conscience-it might just as easily kill a local nomad shepherd, or one of us, as a Russian or an Afghan soldier. He doesn't get it. He just grins at me, and does it a little bit more secret. He rigged some of the horses with explosives yesterday. He said it was to make sure the Russians didn't get their hands on them. I said to him, what about us? What if the Russians get their hands on us? Should we be rigged with explosives, too? He said it was a problem he worried about all the time-how to make sure we were dead before the Russians got their hands on us, and how to kill more Russians after we were dead."

"Does Khader know?"

"No. I'm trying to keep Habib in line. I know where he's coming from, Lin. I've been there. The first couple years after my family was killed, I was as crazy as he is. I know what's going on inside him. He's filled up with so many dead friends and enemies that he's kind of locked on one course-killing Russians - and until he snaps out of it, I just gotta stay with him as much as I can, and watch his ass."

"I think you should tell Khader," I sighed, shaking my head.

"I will," he sighed in return. "I will. Soon. I'll talk to him soon. He'll get better. Habib will get better. He's getting better in some ways. I can talk to him real well now. He'll make it."

But as the weeks of the journey passed, we all watched Habib more closely, more fearfully, and little by little we all realised why so many other mujaheddin units had cast him out.

With our senses alert for menace from without and within, we travelled by night, and sometimes by day, north along the mountainous border towards Pathaan Khel. Near the khel, or village, we swung north-north-west into deserted mountainous terrain that was veined with cold, fresh, sweet-water streams.

Habib laid out a route that was roughly equidistant between towns and larger villages, always avoiding the main arteries that local people used. We trudged between Pathaan Khel and Khairo Thaana; between Humai Khaarez and Haji Aagha Muhammad. We forded rivers between Loe Kaarez and yaaru. We zigzagged between Mullah Mustafa and the little village of Abdul Hamid.

Local pirates, demanding tribute, stopped us three times on the way. Each time, they revealed themselves at first in high vantage points, with guns trained on us, before their ground forces swept from hiding to lock the way forward and cut off our retreat. Each time, Khader raised his green-and-white mujaheddin flag emblazoned with the Koranic phrase:

Inalillahey wa ina illai hi rajiaon We come from God, and unto God do we return Although the local clans didn't recognise Khader's standard, they respected its language and intent. Their fierce, belligerent postures remained, however, until Khader, Nazeer, and our Afghan fighters explained to them that the group was travelling with, and under the protection of, an American. When the local pirates had examined my passport and stared hard into my blue-grey eyes, they welcomed us as comrades-in-arms, and invited us to drink tea and feast with them. The invitation was a euphemism for the honour of paying them a tribute. Although none of the pirates we encountered wanted to upset the critically important American aid that helped to sustain them in the long years of the war by attacking an American-sponsored caravan, it was unthinkable that we might pass through their territory without providing some plunder. Khader had brought a supply of baksheesh goods for that very purpose. There were silks in peacock blue and green, with rich inter-weavings of gold thread. There were hatchets and thick-bladed knives and sewing kits. There were Zeiss binoculars - Khader had given me a pair, and I used them every day-and magnifying spectacles for reading the Koran, and solid, Indian made automatic watches. And for the clan leaders there was a small hoard of gold tablets, each weighing one tola, or about ten grams, and embossed with the Afghan laurel.

Khader hadn't merely anticipated those pirate attacks; he'd counted on them. Once the formal courtesies and tribute negotiations were concluded, Khader arranged with each local clan leader to re-supply our caravan. The re-supply provided us with rations while we were on the move, and also guaranteed us food and animal feed at fraternal villages that were under the control or protection of the clan leader.

The re-supply was essential. The munitions, machine parts, and medicines that we carried were priorities, and left us little room for surplus cargo. Thus we carried a little food for the horses-two days' ration at most-but we carried no food at all for ourselves. Each man had a canteen of water, but it was understood that it was an emergency ration, to be used sparingly for ourselves and the horses. Many were the days we passed with no more than one glass of water to drink, and one small piece of naan bread to eat. I was a vegetarian, without being a fanatic about it, when I started on that journey. For years I'd usually preferred to eat my fruit and vegetable diet when it was available. Three weeks into the trek, after dragging horses across mountains and freezing rivers, and trembling from hunger, I fell on the lamb and goat meat that the pirates offered us, and ripped the flesh half-cooked from the bones with my teeth.

The steep mountain slopes of the country were barren, burned of life by biting wintry winds, but every flat plain, no matter how small, was a vivid, living green. There were wild flowers with red, starry faces, and others with sky-blue pom-pom heads. There were short, scrubby bushes with tiny yellow leaves that the goats enjoyed, and many varieties of wild grasses topped with feathery bowers of dried seed for the horses. There were lime-green mosses on many of the rocks, and paler lichens on others. The impact of those tender, viridescent carpets between the endlessly undulating crocodile's back of naked stone mountains was far greater than it mightVe been in a more fertile and equable landscape. We responded to each new sight of a softly carpeted incline or tufted, leafy moor with similar pleasure-a deep, subliminal response to the vitality in the colour green. More than a few of the tough, hardened fighters, trudging between the walking horses, stooped to gather a little clutch of flowers so that they might simply feel the beauty of them in their dry and calloused hands.

My status as Khader's American helped us to negotiate the badlands of the local pirates, but it also cost us a week when we were stopped for the third and last time. In an effort to avoid the little village of Abdul Hamid, our guide Habib led us into a small canyon that was just wide enough for three or four horses to ride side-by-side. Steep rock walls rose up on either side of the canyon trail for almost a kilometre before the funnel opened out into a much longer, wider valley. It was the perfect place for an ambush and, in anticipation, Khader rode at the head of our column with his green-and-white banner unfurled.

The challenge came before we were a hundred metres into the gorge. There was a chilling ululation from high above-men's voices raised in an imitation of the high-pitched, warbling wail of tribal women-and a sudden tumble of small boulders as a little avalanche spilled into the canyon before us. Like others, I turned in my saddle to see that a platoon of local tribesmen had taken up positions behind us with a variety of weapons trained on our backs. We halted immediately, at the first sound.