He closed his eyes, moaning in pain, but then just as quickly opened them again.
"If not for those horses... we would have gone east, toward the border, direct toward the border. It was... it was his pride, do you see?"
I looked up, exchanging a glance with Khaled and Mahmoud. Khaled met my eye, but then shifted his gaze quickly to concentrate on his dying friend. Mahmoud held my stare until we both nodded. It was a gesture so subtle that it would've been imperceptible to an observer, but we both knew what we'd acknowledged and what we'd agreed upon with that little nod. It was true. It was pride that had brought the great man to his end. And strange as it may seem to someone else, it was only then, understanding the pride in his fall, that I began to truly accept that Khaderbhai was gone, and to feel the gaping, hollow sense of his death.
Ahmed talked for a while longer. He told us the name of his village, and he gave us directions for how to find it in relation to the nearest big city. He told us about his father and mother, about his sisters and brothers. He wanted us to let them know that he'd died thinking of them. And he did, that brave, laughing Algerian, who'd always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd of strangers: he did die with his mother's love on his lips. And the name of God escaped with his last breath.
We were freezing, chilled to the bones by the stillness we'd assumed while Ahmed lay dying. Other men took over the task of cleaning his body according to the rituals of Muslim burial.
Khaled, Mahmoud, and I checked on Nazeer. He wasn't wounded, but he was so utterly and crushingly exhausted that his sleep resembled that of a man in a coma. His mouth was open, and his eyes were slitted to show the whites within. He was warm, and he seemed to be recovering from his ordeal. We left him, and examined the body of our dead Khan.
A single bullet had entered Khader's side, below the ribs, and seemed to have travelled directly to his heart. There was no exit wound, but there was extensive blood coagulation and bruising on the left side of his chest. The bullet fired by Russian AK-74s in those years had a hollow tip. The steel core of the bullet was weighted towards the rear, causing it to tumble. It crashed and ripped its way into a body, rather than simply piercing it. Such ammunition was banned under international law, but almost every one of the Afghans who was killed in battle bore the terrible wounds of those brutal bullets. So it was with our Khan. The bullet had smashed its way through his body. The gaping, jagged wound in his side had left a streak of bruising across his chest that ended in a blue-black lotus over his heart.
Knowing that Nazeer would want to prepare Khaderbhai's body for burial himself, we wrapped the Khan in blankets and left him in a shallow, scooped-out trench of snow near the entrance to the caves. We'd just finished the task when a warbling, fluttering, whistle of sound drew us to our feet. We looked at one another in fearful confusion. Then a violent explosion shook the ground beneath us with a flash of orange and dirty grey smoke. The mortar shell had struck the ground more than a hundred metres away, at the far edge of the compound, but the air near us was already filthy with its smell and smoke. Then a second shell burst, and a third, and we ran for the cave-mouth and flung ourselves into the squirming octopus of men who were there ahead of us. Arms, legs, and heads crushed in on one another as we hunkered down in terror while the mortars tore up the rocky ground outside as if it was papier-mache.
It was bad, and it got worse every day after that. When the attack was over, we searched among the blackened stipple and crater of the compound. Two men were dead. One of them was Kareem, the man whose broken forearm I'd set on the night before we'd reached the camp. Two others were so badly wounded that we were sure they would die. Many of the supplies were destroyed. First among them were the drums of fuel we'd used for the generator and the stoves. The stoves and lamps were critically important for heating and cooking. Most of the fuel was gone, and all of our water reserves. We set to cleaning up the debris-my medical kit was blackened and scorched by the fire-and consolidating the remaining supplies in the great cave. The men were quiet. They were worried and afraid. They had reason enough.
While others busied themselves with those tasks, I tended to the wounded men. One man had lost a foot and a part of his leg below the knee. There were fragments of shrapnel in his neck and upper arm. He was eighteen years old. He'd joined the unit with his elder brother six months before we arrived. His brother had been killed during an attack on a Russian outpost near Kandahar. The boy was dying. I pulled the metal pieces from his body with long stainless steel tweezers and a pair of long-nosed pliers I pilfered from the mechanic's kit.
There was nothing substantial that I could do for the savaged leg. I cleaned the wound, and tried to remove as much of the shattered bone as I could wrench free with the pliers. His screams settled on my skin in an oily sweat, and I shivered with every gust of frosty wind. I put sutures into the ragged flesh where clean, hard skin would support them, but there was no way to close the gap over completely. One thick chunk of bone protruded from the lumpy meat. It occurred to me that I should take a saw, and hack the long bone off to make a neat wound of the stump, but I wasn't sure if that was the right procedure. I wasn't sure that it wouldn't make the wound worse than it was. I wasn't sure... And there's only so much screaming you can bring yourself to cause when you're not sure what you're doing. In the end, I smothered the wound in antibiotic powder and wrapped it in non-adhesive gauze.
The second wounded man had taken a blast in the face and throat.
His eyes were destroyed, and most of the nose and mouth were gone. In some ways, he resembled Ranjit's lepers, but his wounds were so raw and bloody, and the teeth were so smashed, that Ranjit's disfigurements seemed benign in comparison. I took the metal pieces from his eyes and his scalp and his throat. The wounds at his throat were bad, and although he was breathing fairly evenly, my guess was that his condition would worsen. After dressing his wounds, I gave both men a shot of penicillin and an ampoule of morphine.
My biggest problem was blood, and the need to replace what the wounded men had lost. Not one of the mujaheddin fighters I'd asked during the last weeks had known his own or anyone else's blood type. Thus it was impossible for me to blood-match the men, or to build up a bank of donors. Because my own blood type was +O, which is known as the universal donor type, my body was the only source of blood for transfusions, and I was the walking blood bank for the whole combat unit.
Typically, a donor provides about half a litre of blood in a session. The body holds about six litres, so the blood lost in donation amounts to less than one-tenth of the body's supply. I put a little more than half a litre into each of the wounded men, rigging up the intravenous drips that Khader had brought with him as part of his smuggled cargo. I wondered whether the equipment had come from Ranjit and his lepers as I tapped my veins and those of the wounded fighters with needles that were stored in loose containers rather than sealed packets. The transfusions took nearly 20 per cent of my blood. It was too much. I felt dizzy and faintly nauseous, unsure if they were real symptoms or simply the slithering tricks of my fear. I knew that I wouldn't be able to give more blood for some time, and the hopelessness of the situation-mine and theirs-crushed my chest with a flush and spasm of anguish.
It was dirty, frightening work, and I wasn't trained for it. The first-aid course that I'd completed as a young man had been comprehensive, but it hadn't covered combat injuries. And the work I'd done at my clinic in the slum was little help in those mountains. Beyond that, I was running on instinct-the same instinct to help and heal that had compelled me to save overdosed heroin addicts in my own city, a lifetime before. It was, of course, in great part a secret wish-like Khaled, with the vicious madman Habib-to be helped and saved and healed myself.