We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (16 page)

‘Why did you get dressed?’

‘I couldn’t sleep. Maybe I’ll go down and talk to Mohamed.’

‘Was there any bombing?’

‘No. Nothing. Just the headlights. And the mystery.’

‘The hell with the mystery. I went out on a limb to get this bed for us tonight and you and I are going to stay in it together till the sun comes up.’

Astrid took his face between her hands and shook his head gently. ‘I like you, with your eyes all full of the world and your dumb little rages,’ she said. She went to the hatch and began descending the ladder. Before he could ask her where she was going, she was gone. He heard her talking to Mohamed below and couldn’t make out what she said. It took Kellas minutes to put on his clothes and boots and when he tried to follow Astrid his first foot on the ladder skidded off into space. For a moment he was hanging by his hands. He recovered and shinned down. Mohamed came towards him, asking what the matter was. Kellas was looking round and he saw Astrid walking towards the runway. He went after her, with Mohamed telling him to be watchful. A stillness that could not be divined hung over the commander’s outpost; sleep or wakefulness, neither admitted the shouting of English words. In the starlight, reflected off the concrete panels of the runway and the taxiways, Kellas could see Astrid walking ahead of him. She reached the runway and began to walk along it, back the way they had arrived. She had a lead of about thirty yards. A man squatted at the edge of the runway, his Kalashnikov resting
in the circle of his arms like a shepherd’s crook. His head followed Astrid past, then Kellas.

Kellas began to run. The concrete was pitted with the pox of time and Astrid heard the scratch of his boots on the grit that accumulated there. She turned round once, saw him, stretched her legs and ran forward with a good stride. They ran for two hundred yards in this way, keeping the same distance from each other, like competitors in a marathon, hanging off each other, waiting for their moment. The cold thinned the air. The stars brushed against Kellas’s skin and prickled. He thought that if he looked up he might see that they were crushing dark tracks through the stars, like children running through a cornfield. He could not think what he would say to Astrid now. He had stopped thinking. There was the rush of cold air, the beat of his feet on the ground, his heart, the stars, the darkness and the runner ahead of him. He did not know if he was pursuing or being led.

Astrid cut a turn off the runway towards where one of the ruined aircraft lay. Kellas put on a sprint. Astrid looked round again but did not, or could not, run faster, and he caught up with her. They stopped and stood face to face, a few feet apart. They were both breathing hard. Kellas’s whole being was violently flushed through with a desire to have Astrid, not merely to have her but to take her, and he would not know until he tried whether she wished to be taken. He could not stop this. He stepped towards her and she began to run again, with Kellas after her. She ran into a dead end, another one of the aircraft shelters, open to the sky, but this one empty. She backed up against the far wall. He could see in the faint light that she was watching his face as he approached her. Her face said to him: I want to see what you will do with me. Kellas went up to her and took hold of the waistband of her jeans with both hands. He unfastened them and pulled them and her panties down a few inches and put his thumb inside her. The skin of her navel was cold as he brushed against it and the heat inside her spread to him through his skin. He felt her press her clitoris
against the saddle of his hand and she pushed herself off the wall and began to ride his thumb. They kissed, more ravenous than before. Astrid was very wet and Kellas took his mouth away from hers and crouched down, holding his arm out stiff for Astrid to fuck his thumb, adding a finger as she twisted and her breathing grew louder, adding a second finger, before Astrid pulled him out and he bared his cock and they lay down on the bare concrete and fucked till they came.

‘That was new,’ he said later.

‘That was something new,’ said Astrid.

They walked back to the watchtower, climbed the ladder and went to sleep together, breast to breast, his knee between her thighs, his head muffled between the pillow and Astrid’s hair.

He woke suddenly, alone, not knowing if the gunshot receding in his head was dreamed or real. It was morning. He sat up. The light outside burned his retina. It was still cold in the shade of the platform. He heard the sound again, the dismal, consequential sound of a gunshot, and a wave of human voices, a moan, or a cheer. He pulled on his jeans and shirt and went to the parapet. He couldn’t see anyone. Mohamed was gone. He finished dressing. While he was descending the ladder he heard the gun being fired again.

He found them at ground level, in the old taxiway between the aircraft shelters. Astrid was standing with her back to him. Next to her was Sardar, in his boiler suit, taking aim with Astrid’s pistol at a pair of large-calibre shell cases set up on a rusted barrel about thirty yards away. A group of the commander’s fighters, and the commander, stood on either side of them. They heard Kellas coming and looked around. They grinned and laughed and bent their heads a little as if they expected him to be angry. As if they expected him to bring order to a scene they did not understand themselves.

Sardar squeezed twice and the gun went off and rocked against his wrists. The second shot hit one of the shell cases. It jumped in
the air, fell back onto the surface of the drum and rolled against the rim. Astrid called out ‘That’s one with two, man.’ Sardar lowered the pistol. Astrid turned and saw Kellas and grinned, shaking her head. She looked round at the fighters, holding her arms out and nodding. ‘I win, right? Right? I got two with two.’ She hadn’t put her scarf back on and her fringe swung bright in the heavenish light of morning.

The fighters laughed and shuffled and looked at each other, not sure what to do next and not sure where to put their hands. Astrid took the gun from Sardar, stuck it in her anorak pocket and extended her right hand towards him. Smiling and blushing, slowly and afraid, he moved his right hand to meet hers. Astrid took it and shook it and Sardar withdrew it and let it hang limp from his wrist, as if it no longer belonged to him. The other fighters were laughing.

They roused Mohamed, a motionless hump in the dark, warm-sweat smell of one of the shelter buildings, and sat around the cloth, as the night before, to eat breakfast. Astrid avoided meeting Kellas’s eyes. She talked only to Mohamed and through him to Sardar. She was excited and talkative. Her voice was fast and unsteady. Apart from Sardar, who had gained confidence, who was anxious to persuade Astrid of something and kept interrupting her and Mohamed, the commander and his fighters were no longer smiling so much. There were frowns and they looked more into their tea and at each other than at Kellas or Astrid.

Astrid stopped talking and looked at Kellas. ‘You’re quiet,’ she said.

‘I ran out of things to say.’

Astrid rocked her head from side to side, looked down, folded a piece of bread and jam and put it in her mouth. She spoke loudly to him with her mouth full. ‘You don’t like to see me with the gun, huh?’

‘I like you better without it. “Don’t ever mess with guns.”’

‘If it’s Johnny Cash you’re thinking of, “Don’t ever play with
guns” was the line. My mother did tell me that. She was right. But this isn’t playing. Where do you think you are? You can’t pretend that you’re not here. That you have nothing to do with all this.’

‘I’m trying to be neutral.’

‘There’s only two ways to be neutral in a war. One is not to know about it, and the other is not to care.’ Astrid got up abruptly, brushing her hands. She beckoned to Sardar to follow her and leaned down to Kellas on the way out. She patted the pocket where the gun was and said: ‘Being professionally friendly.’

Kellas looked after her, then looked at the commander and put his hand on his heart.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. The commander waved at him that he shouldn’t worry, spoke a few words of benediction and ran his hands over his face. The meal was over, and the company stood up and went out. The cook and his boy came, climbed up to the platform and began with great care to remove the bedding. Kellas watched them for a while, soothed by their diligence and trouble. It took them ten minutes to lower the pallets down the ladder.

Astrid was on the other side of the taxiway between the shelters, sitting on the back of the tank while Sardar stood half out of the turret, a spanner in each hand, gesturing to her. There was an oil stain on his forehead. Kellas walked over.

‘Hey,’ said Astrid.

‘Hey. Do you speak Dari now?’

‘Sardar spent a year at college in Belgrade. We both speak about the same amount of Serbian.’

The cars wouldn’t come to pick them up for another six hours. Kellas climbed the platform and waited for the bombing to begin. He spent time looking through an old pair of Soviet field glasses at the Taliban positions. They had a reticle painted on the lenses for an artilleryman to reckon distance. He studied the desert behind the Taliban lines. He saw trucks, grinding through the dust.

Kellas turned the binoculars to look at the tank. He twisted the focus knob until Astrid’s laughing mouth could be seen clear and
sharp, and Sardar listing points with gestures of a spanner. He seemed eloquent in Serbian.

When Mohamed and the commander came up to the platform, Kellas asked about the trucks. Mohamed said they were Taliban trucks. Kellas asked the commander why he didn’t fire at them; why none of the Alliance troops fired at them. Mohamed translated the question, and the commander smiled unhappily, turned from side to side and looked out over the parapet. He had a broad pakul hat and wore a fawn blanket over his dark grey shalwar kameez. He moved with impatience, like a small-time builder forced to take on a mean, tiring, low-margin job. Through the binoculars, Kellas could make out the flapping canvas over the backs of the trucks, and the bounce of the cabins as they bucked through the desert. Without the magnification, they crawled across the ground like lice.

The commander spoke, looking at Kellas only once he’d finished speaking. Mohamed translated.

‘If we hit and destroy ten trucks, the Taliban will still have enough,’ he said.

Kellas put the binoculars down and glanced at the tank. Sardar was beckoning to Astrid. He disappeared inside the turret and Astrid clambered over, picked up an oil-stained canvas bag and stood looking down into the hatch. She reached into the bag and passed a tool to the red hand that came out.

‘That’s not much of an argument, surely,’ murmured Kellas to the commander, picking up the binoculars again. ‘You have to start somewhere.’

The commander rolled a little and stepped in and out of his flip-flops when Mohamed translated.

‘If we fire at them, they fire back,’ said the commander. ‘Why should I risk my men, and you, and Mohamed, when the Americans are going to win the war for us anyway?’

The day was getting bright. The light off the sandy ground had turned harsh. Kellas wondered if it was too early to call Duncairn.
His parents were early risers. It looked as if he’d picked a non-bombing day. Perhaps there was a way to get the cars to come earlier. There was no need for Astrid to be loitering around Sardar and his broken-down tank.

The commander spoke in a voice Kellas hadn’t heard before, the raised voice of a man with responsibilities, offended by foolish subordinates. Kellas was interested to know who he was talking to and looked round and saw that it was him. He blushed and waited for Mohamed to translate, but the commander spoke for a minute, his eyes fixed and wide and his mouth snapping, and Mohamed only looked at the ground, pinching his left thumb with his right thumb and index finger.

‘The commander is saying he doesn’t have good links with the artillery,’ said Mohamed in the end. ‘They often miss. He says it would be a waste of ammunition.’

‘Tell the commander it’s OK,’ said Kellas. ‘I didn’t mean to offend him.’

‘He is angry with you,’ said Mohamed. ‘He thinks you are criticising him.’

‘Tell him I’m sorry,’ said Kellas.

Before Mohamed could say anything the commander began talking angrily again. By the end he was shouting and Mohamed tried to interrupt him, gently touching his sleeve. ‘The commander says those trucks over there, the ones you call Taliban trucks, they’re carrying goods for the Taliban now, but maybe tomorrow or the next day they’ll be carrying goods for us. They’re only drivers.’

Kellas and Mohamed tried to soothe the commander. He stopped shouting and began taking short steps back and forward along the edge of the parapet, fidgeting with the controls of the walkie-talkie he carried and muttering. Kellas left the platform. At the bottom of the ladder he looked over and saw that Astrid and Sardar were squatting in the weeds on top of the aircraft shelter where the tank was parked. Sardar was pointing out something in the distance and Astrid was leaning in to look along his arm. She turned, saw Kellas
and beckoned to him. He walked across and found the path up to where the two were crouched.

‘See that tree trunk over there?’ said Astrid. She pointed to a broad swelling in the ground about a thousand yards to the east, of sand scaled with stones and scrub, where a squat, branchless wooden vertical poked out of the crest.

‘I see it,’ said Kellas.

‘Sardar reckons he can hit it with one shot. I say he can’t.’

Kellas looked down at the tank. The open turret hatch was encircled by stained tools. The entire machine looked as if it had been dug up, passed through fire, then water, then left to rust for decades.

‘The tank works?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘Don’t fuck about with it, Astrid. Leave it alone.’

Astrid was not listening to him. ‘He needs the commander’s permission before he can fire the gun. Can you ask him? The commander won’t listen to me. The commander thinks you’re the commander of me.’

‘I can’t do that. What if you hit someone?’

‘It’s nowhere near us, or the Taliban. It’s no man’s land.’