The Last Kestrel

Hasina cradled his head in her lap. She was afraid to look at his wound. The rags were matted together in clumps, fused with dried blood. When she tried to touch them, he pushed her hand away.

‘I could clean it,’ she said.

He shook his head.

‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Those boys. I know what they did. But you…?’

He looked embarrassed. ‘It didn’t work,’ he said. He gestured to his stomach. ‘The belt. It didn’t go off.’ He raised his head to look at her. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said. His tone was defensive. ‘I did it just the way they taught me.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course you did.’

He let his head fall back. She tried to imagine him with explosives strapped round his body, ready to blow himself into pieces. What he must have felt and what madness made him want to say ‘Yes’ to those crazy boys.

‘There was a flash,’ he said. ‘White light. Then burning round my stomach. I realized I was still alive, on my back in the dirt.’

His voice was trembling. Hasina took his hand and squeezed it.

‘How did you get away?’

‘I ran. I waved my arms and shouted. There was so much smoke, so much shouting, one more person didn’t seem to matter.’

‘And you hid?’

‘In the fields.’ He gestured to a cotton pouch at his side, bulging above the contour of his hip. ‘I have a weapon,’ he said. ‘A bomb.’

‘Let me take it,’ she said. She held out her hand. ‘I could bury it.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not for a woman.’

She looked again at the pouch. ‘Bury it yourself then,’ she said. ‘You’re safe now.’

He fell silent. ‘If they find out,’ he said at last, ‘they’ll call me a coward.’

‘No.’ Hasina stroked the hair from his forehead. ‘They will not find out. God has sent you back to me. He will protect us.’

His eyes had closed. She wrapped her shawl tightly round him.

‘You must stay hidden,’ she said. ‘Your father thinks you’re in Kandahar.’

‘Kandahar?’ He opened his eyes.

‘That was what Karam Uncle told him.’

He smiled to himself. ‘That would be good,’ he said.

‘Foolish boy.’ She kissed the tip of his nose. ‘Get well. Then we’ll talk of Kandahar.’

For the next week, Hasina nursed Aref every moment she could. When Abdul went to the neighbour’s fields to work, she scraped together leftover food and ran to find her son. She sat close to him while he ate. ‘You must get strong,’ she said. He pulled a sour face at the sight of food. ‘You must get well.’

He could only manage to stand bent double, his arm across his stomach. His wound ached, he said. Hasina saw the colours on the rags round his stomach shift as it bled. She saw the elderly man in him, pushing out through the young skin, and was afraid.

5

Hasina and Abdul were woken early by a strange sound. At first she thought it was Karam’s radio set. They went together into the yard. The noise grew, bouncing along the hillside. It was coming from beyond the valley, from the desert.

‘Some announcement,’ Abdul said. ‘Listen.’

An Afghan voice. A warning. Foreign soldiers were coming, it said. They must all leave. No one need be hurt. She groped for Abdul’s hand, limp at his side.

They found Karam’s compound in disarray. Men were rushing, stacking pots at the entrance. Palwasha was standing at the window, her hands on her hips, her face clouded.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ she called when she saw Hasina.

Hasina looked round at the carpets and cushions scattered across the floor. ‘You’re leaving?’

‘What does it look like?’ Palwasha’s eyes were blazing.

Hasina swallowed. ‘But where?’ she said. ‘Where will you go?’

‘Help me, won’t you.’ She didn’t look up. Hasina knelt beside her, rolling the carpets and stacking them by the door. Abdul must go too, she thought. She must make him.

As soon as they returned home, she packed a bundle for Abdul. Tin plates and cups and bread to eat on the road. From the threshold, she stood and looked back into the gloom. This was the house where she’d first come as a bride so many years ago. A good house. Not rich but honest. She looked round at the empty cots, the blankets, the wooden stools, the battered trunk.

‘You must go. Quickly.’ She pressed the bundle into his hand, propelled him towards the road. ‘Go now, with Karam and Palwasha. It’s better for us.’

She was urging him on, her hand on his broad arm. He stared down at her, his eyes bewildered. ‘But you,’ he said, blinking, ‘what about you?’

‘I’ll be right there, coming after you, won’t I?’ She tutted. ‘Hurry. I’ve got knives to gather and a pot and blankets and clothes. I need some time. But you must go ahead.’

His feet dragged as she walked with him to the main track. The road was already thick with travelling families, a swarm of villagers pulling carts, carrying infants, pots on their heads and bundles on their backs. Some led a donkey or goat.

‘See what they have?’ She gestured at the flow. ‘I need to prepare more things. Go with Karam. I’ll soon catch you up.’ Her whisper was urgent. ‘Husband, please don’t hesitate. Go.’

Abdul looked as lost as a small boy. ‘How will I find you?’ he said.

‘You’ll find me.’ She brushed her hand against his to say goodbye. ‘How could you not find me? I won’t be far behind.’

She stood to the side as he turned, reluctant and dazed, and was taken by the crowd.

She had to carry Aref to the house. His eyes rolled sightlessly in his head as she laid him out on the cot and stripped him. His body was hot, his limbs shaking. She took her cooking knife and hacked at the rags. Close to the wound, the cloth had fused with the flesh. She couldn’t cut it away. It stank. She washed down his skin with block soap and water and patted him dry with her shawl. She slid a blanket under him and wrapped it round, until he was cocooned. She boiled up sugary tea and lifted his head while she forced it, trickle by trickle, between his lips.

All night she stroked his forehead, fanned flies from his wound and murmured to him. Once, he woke abruptly, as if from a nightmare, and stared at her. His eyes were blank. His face was slippery with fresh sweat. She patted him, soothed him back to sleep.

When he woke again at first light, his fever had lifted. He was weak but he knew her and knew the place. She fed him hot tea and fragments of soft food. A hint of colour was returning to his lips.

A deep rumbling drifted in from the fields. She went out to the yard to look. A fleet of lumbering, metallic vehicles was pitching down the desert slope, making its way from the far ridge to the valley and the river below. The early morning light bounced off the sharp angles. She put her hand to her face. They were closer than she’d imagined possible. She heard a droning and turned her eyes to the sky. Aircraft were twisting there, turning sideways, one wing-tip pointing to the ground, the other to heaven, then righting themselves again with a rush. They dipped and screamed overhead. The foreigners, she thought. It had begun.

She ran back inside and forced Aref to sit, propped up against the wall.

‘Soldiers,’ she said. ‘You must go.’

He stared, his eyes dull. ‘Where?’

‘Anywhere. Go.’ She pulled his tattered, stained shirt back over his head, pushed his arms through the sleeves and watched him stuff his few possessions into its folds. ‘If these foreigners find you…’

He seemed ready to sink back onto the cot.

‘Hide in ditches, in fields.’ She tugged him to his feet. ‘Use the blessing of the land.’

From deep in the valley, the thick choke of an explosion. Hasina struggled to pull him out into the yard. When she let go of him, his legs buckled. He sank down the wall of the house to the ground. In the valley, black smoke was rising. An aeroplane dived, shrieking, from the sky, and swooped low over the hillside. She fell to the ground, covering her head with her shawl. A moment later, the earth shook. The blast deafened her.

She sat up. Aref was staring at her. Miserable and afraid.

Hasina looked at the pouch. ‘Those bombs you have,’ she said, ‘give them to me.’

His eyes widened. ‘They are not—’ he began.

She raised her hand as if to slap him. ‘Do as you’re told,’ she said.

Aref ripped open the stitching and eased out two metal objects. They were grey-green, rounded with straight metal levers.

‘You twist and pull this,’ he said, ‘then throw them. They go off like bombs.’

Hasina looked at the smallness of them in his hand. They were dull, unappetizing pieces of fruit. One was scored by a line of rust.

Another jet shot over the valley, cutting through the air. She clamped her hands to her ears. A moment later the hillside shivered. The yard trembled under her feet. She took the bombs from him. The metal was chilled and dirty.

‘Go,’ she said. ‘May Allah in His mercy protect you.’

He pulled himself to his feet, turned without a word and swayed across the yard, lurching at last into the corn.

The dense smoke of the foreign bombs blocked out the creeping vehicles, then, as it dispersed, they reappeared, always closer. Hasina pushed her way through the cornfield to the edge of the poppy below. The valley opened out before her. The foreigners’ vehicles drew a defensive circle alongside the river. Figures of men, in light brown clothes, were darting along the bank. Digging machines were throwing up clouds of dirt. Between the crash of falling bombs, she could hear the steady chug of engines.

What kind of men were these Westerners? She wrapped her arms round her chest and hugged her thin shoulders. May God protect us. She looked at the metal fruit in her hands. She must give Aref time to flee.

The soldiers made rapid progress. They slotted metal panels into a bridge and nosed them into place over the river with their machines. They worked without contest, their aeroplanes screaming overhead, deforming the face of the hillside with fire and pockmarks.

When the first men ran over the bridge, her stomach heaved. Her palms were stinging with sweat. She turned and fled back to the house. She dashed round the yard, picking up her old cooking pot and cooking knife and the large water pot. She took them with her into the house.

She pushed away the large stone, which kept the door to the house permanently open in summer and fastened the door shut from the inside. Once it closed, the house became black. She stood quietly in the cool darkness, listening to the bang of blood in her ears. The house smelt rich, of earth and family. My home, she thought. This is where Aref was made and born. She wondered how far from the house he had crawled and what hiding place he’d found.

Her eyes were starting to adjust to the thin light. It was seeping in from the back window, and from the near one, which gave onto the valley. She pulled a stool under the window and sat, looking out over the corn. Halfway up the hillside, there were shots. She swallowed, struggling to compose herself. Behind her a cry, quickly stifled.

‘Who’s that?’ She challenged the darkness. ‘Tell me.’

A scramble, a sob and a small figure crawled out from under the cot, catapulted across the room and banged into her knees. It pushed its head at her stomach, almost knocking the grenades off her lap.

‘You,’ she said. ‘What…?’

Yousaf, Palwasha’s boy, stared up into her face with bulging eyes, wet with tears. ‘I’m scared,’ he said. He started to sob. His nose was running with snot. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ His breath came in gulps. ‘I want Mummy.’

Hasina stared. Behind him, the dark shapes of the two girls rose from under the cot.

‘What are you doing here?’ Hasina was beside herself. ‘Go. Get away. Run.’

‘Don’t make us, Auntie.’ Sima’s voice was already breaking into tears. ‘Please.’

Nadira pushed past Sima and buried her face against Hasina’s thigh. Hasina ran a hand abstractedly over the child’s tousled hair. Outside, another shot. The soldiers sounded close to the outer edge of their land. She gave the children a shove.

‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Crouch down. Quiet.’

They ran together, arms churning the air, and crouched in a line against the wall. Hasina turned back to the window, light-headed with fear. She focused her eyes on the veil of corn, feeling the foreign soldiers creep closer and fingering in her wet hands the two small bombs, the only weapons she had to keep them at bay.

6

The darkness was still dense when Ellen followed the young soldier to the convoy, led by a low bouncing shaft of torchlight. She leaned against the steel of the nearest military vehicle, her flak jacket crushing her shoulders, and watched the black shapes of the men move around her in silence as they checked kit and loaded up. The air was cool and dry against her skin.

Major Mack sought her out as the men moved into position and pointed her to a Snatch in the middle of the convoy. She sat squashed up against the heavy back door. It was a tin can of a vehicle, its interior stripped bare. The Snatch shook itself into life and started to pitch and roll out of the camp gates and across open desert. She braced her legs and gripped the roof strap. Her helmet cracked against the metal struts behind her every time they banged into a hollow. She rode the impact, steadied her nerves and said nothing.

She’d never liked Snatches. The rough ride didn’t bother her but they were poor protection, nicknamed ‘metal coffins’ for a reason. If they hit anything now, an IED or a mine, the flying shrapnel would slice them to mince. What was that expression the lads in Iraq used? Everyone gets a bit.

They were wedged tightly into this one, thigh against thigh, knee scraping knee. She’d pushed the team over quota; five, instead of four in the back, sharing the same stale air. Packs and boxes were piled round their feet. The soldiers sat in silence, their faces tight with concentration. The young soldier opposite her, Frank, was looking everywhere to avoid catching her eye. He was barely twenty but thuggish, with the heavy forehead and thickset nose of a fighter. She wondered where in the UK he came from and how much military action he’d seen. Her eyes fell to the weapon, an SA-80, across his lap.

Two more lads were riding top cover, cut off at the chest; head and shoulders sticking up out of the vehicle, out of sight. When she tried to look forward, her view was filled by their broad thighs. Their scrambling feet kicked out wildly for support every time the Snatch rocked and pitched. Dillon, the lad next to her, kept getting a boot in the groin as they felt for footholds. He swore under his breath. She squeezed herself further into the corner to give him more room.

A sudden stink broke out in the hot air. Dillon flapped his hands in front of his face wildly.

‘Hold it in, Moss.’ Dillon gave one of the top cover guys a sharp poke.

The young lad, Hancock, riding top cover with Moss, ducked his head down for a second, caught the whiff and gave a snorting laugh. Dillon kicked out at him before he straightened up again. Ellen watched the way they argued, jostled for position. They were only kids. She’d spoken to Hancock, the quietest in the group, in the darkness before they set off. He was eighteen, he said, keeping his voice low. He’d joined up in January and been sent out here right after training. He looked shell-shocked already.

‘Sorry, Ma’am.’ Frank, embarrassed.

She shrugged. ‘Don’t be.’ I’m harder to offend than you realize, she thought. And I’ll be safer if you think of me as one of you. ‘And call me Ellen.’

The Sergeant Major, invisible to her in the front, barked something into the radio sets. Frank sighed and started scrabbling under the seats, checking wiring or groping for a piece of kit.

Dillon leaned towards her, knocking knees. ‘Sergeant Major says you’re famous. Like Kate Adie.’ His eyes were full of life. A cheeky lad, good humoured and excited.

‘Like who?’ Frank, pausing in his grovelling on the floor, had lifted his head to listen, watching her with new interest.

‘Nothing so glamorous,’ she said to Dillon. ‘I’m with a news magazine.’

‘He said you’ve covered more wars than he has,’ Dillon went on. ‘That true?’

‘I don’t keep count.’

‘Cool.’ Dillon looked impressed. ‘Which ones?’

‘Crimea?’ said Frank, and sniggered like a schoolboy.

Dillon kicked out at him. ‘Don’t be so bloody rude, you.’ A vicious bounce of the Snatch knocked him off the seat onto the floor. He cracked his shin on the metalwork of the back door and swore. Frank doubled up with laughter. Dillon, trying to regain dignity, crawled through the kicking legs to a box and handed her back a bottle of water. ‘Don’t mind him,’ he said, nodding at Frank. ‘Tosser.’

Ellen turned her face to the square of bulletproof window and watched the swirls of dust they were throwing up behind them, blurring the outline of the next heaving Snatch in line. There was a dull red glow in the sky beyond. The night was starting to bleed back into day. It was so cold, it was hard to believe that in a few hours, once the heat built up, they’d all long for the chill of night again. The stuffy darkness of the Snatch, with its swaying, crashing motion, and her nervous apprehension about what lay ahead, made her dull with sickness as they drove on across the desert and the light outside whitened into morning.

They stopped. Frank unbolted the back door and climbed out over her, weapon readied. Then Dillon. A moment later they came back for her. She dropped out of the back, weighed down by her flak jacket and helmet. The dry desert air was a relief. She stood for a moment, enjoying the escape from the petrol fumes, getting her bearings.

‘What next?’ she said to Dillon. He shrugged, looked away. Frank was already walking towards a mud-walled compound where other soldiers were sloughing off their packs. Dillon turned and followed him.

She put her hands on her hips, breathed deeply and scanned the terrain. They’d stopped just short of a natural ridge. Behind them, the way they’d come, lay a desiccated brown landscape of dirty sand, rocks and low scrub. Its lines were broken by simple mud-brick houses, each set apart from the others and enclosed in its own protective boundary walls. No people were visible. The only sign of life came from a pack of scavenging dogs. They were trotting, lean and mangy, across the plain.

Ahead, far below, the slow snake of a river drew a glistening line through a valley. Beyond it, thickly planted corn waved from fields, scored through by the lines of trees that defined the green zone. She narrowed her eyes against the light. The outline of a village was visible a few kilometres in, high on the hill. That must be the first target.

Thick dust, stirred up by the convoy of military vehicles, was billowing in filthy clouds all around her. More Snatches were pulling up, filling the air with fine grit, disgorging soldiers. The day’s heat was gathering. The men streamed towards the compound, bowed under the weight of the packs on their backs, shoving, talking in low voices, lighting cigarettes. She hesitated, watching them, then pulled off her helmet, as they had done, and followed.

Dillon, Frank and the others were settling against a low mud wall, smoking, rucksacks dumped at their feet. They looked tense. Freshly arriving soldiers streamed past them, competing for a place in the shade. To the side, a knot of officers was forming. They were talking in glassy public school voices. Binoculars hung from their necks. Radios squawked like parrots. Behind them, yet more vehicles were coming crashing over the desert, raising clouds of dust.

The young officers straightened up and lowered their voices. Mack appeared amongst them, not the tallest in the group but the oldest and broadest. She noted the way the other men shifted to accommodate him, deferring to him as the pack’s Alpha male. Mack exchanged a few words as he passed through, then barrelled straight towards her. Heads turned, following him.

‘Enjoy the ride?’

He leaned forward to speak to her. She caught the scent of army soap on his skin, undercut by adrenalin. As he opened his mouth to say more, a jet screeched overhead. A minute later, a flash of fire ignited out in the corn, on the far side of the valley. Smoke rose. A few seconds after that, a delayed boom.

‘Five hundred-pounder?’ she said.

Mack nodded. ‘Air offensive’s starting.’

The smoke was starting to disperse in black clouds across the corn.

‘Is it clear of civilians?’

‘We’ve issued warnings.’ His body was hard with tension, his face serious. She sensed Dillon, Frank and some of the other lads looking over at them.

Mack pulled a satellite map from his pocket and spread it out on the sand. She picked out the villages from the office map, several of them, and, in the fields, dozens of small squares that showed individual Afghan compounds. They’d be good defences, thick mud walls that could withstand artillery. They’d been built for war. The country had seen little else.

Mack started to brief her, pointing with a long finger. ‘That’s the river.’

She made her own calculations, fitting the map to the scene below them. The distances weren’t great but the terrain had its own natural fortification. The dips and ridges. The river and the steep rise beyond. And the scattered compounds. No wonder the Taliban had managed to hold it for the last few years. She felt a sense of foreboding, wondering how many failed assaults there’d been.

Heavy digging equipment was already being shunted into position at the waterside. Soldiers in the tan and brown of desert camouflage were waving their arms, signalling to the men inside the vehicles.

‘The engineers are throwing a basic bridge across. Then the men go in on foot.’ Mack traced their route on the map. ‘Up the far bank, through the fields, storming the compounds, one at a time. Then up there. That’s the first village we’ll head for.’

‘Think you’ll secure it today?’

He shrugged. ‘Depends what we find.’

He always said ‘we’, not ‘they’, she noted. He seemed to be a man who identified with his boys.

‘You can watch the progress pretty well from here,’ he was saying. He fingered the binoculars round his neck, lifted them to his eyes to scan the valley. He seemed to be looking forward to it, as if he’d bagged her a good spot at the races.

She looked past him. Moss, the fat one, and Dillon were hunched over their mess tins, boiling up foil sachets of food. Hancock, the young lad, was lolling against the wall, his eyes closed. He had an iPod stuck in his ears, his head trailing wires like a badly made bomb. He looked stressed as hell. She wondered why he wasn’t eating. No one seemed to have noticed.

‘I’ll go in with the first wave,’ she said.

Mack lifted the binoculars away from his eyes. ‘I really don’t—’

‘My risk.’ She looked him full in the face. ‘That’s fine. I need to be up close.’

His expression was thoughtful. ‘I’m not sure I can allow that,’ he said. ‘I know you’re—’

‘Come on, Mack.’ She nodded at him, trying to camouflage her nerves and sound breezy. He was a senior officer and she was pushing her luck. ‘Sure you can.’

He paused, considering her closely. ‘I’ll see,’ he said at last, and walked off.

When Frank and Dillon stubbed out their cigarettes and got to their feet, she crossed over to them. The Sergeant Major appeared, fastening his helmet. He looked at her for a second, then pushed his eyes past her.

‘Lids on, lads,’ he said. ‘Time’s up.’

‘Fucking hope not,’ said Dillon.

Hancock, beside him, looked grey with nerves.

They tightened their body armour, fastened helmets, swung their packs onto their backs and picked up their weapons. They lined up in single file, ready to head down the hill, a tense, silent group. She stood beside them, waiting.

Just as they seemed ready to set off, Mack reappeared. He spoke in a low voice to the Sergeant Major and they both turned to look at her. Their faces were stern. She wondered what they made of her. Once upon a time, when she started all this, soldiers used to stare because she was long-limbed and attractive and they couldn’t take her seriously. Now she was pushing middle age and they must think her a liability, an oddball maiden aunt who might need rescuing when the shit hit. She shrugged her flak jacket to a new position on her shoulders, switching bruises. She could move a lot faster without the damn thing. It didn’t even fit properly.