The Reluctant Hero (32 page)

‘It was always the way in old Ta’argistan. Perhaps we shall be able to remember such things once again. Before it gets too late.’

‘Some revolutions take a lifetime. Others arrive in a weekend. There is always hope.’

‘I’m the impatient type.’

‘Good.’

As they sat in the back seat of the car, they began a tally of their clothing. Martha had her cheap boots that were little more than trainers, a pair of trousers and the thin bright green coat in which she would have flown back home, plus the cheap anorak she had bought that morning.

‘And this,’ Harry said, pulling from the gym bag a sweat shirt that brought with it a strong smell of stale male sweat.

‘Is that really necessary?’ she asked, examining the stains and trying to ignore the smell.

‘Yes. These, too,’ Harry instructed, producing a pair of desperately underwashed gym socks. ‘As gloves. The cold is our greatest enemy out there. Next to Amir Beg, of course.’

‘But he’s behind us.’

‘He’ll be ahead of us by morning.’

She struggled into the clothes, looking like a clumsily stuffed rag doll, while Harry brought out the rest of the contents of the bag. ‘I need to put on these shorts,’ he announced. ‘You may wish to cover your eyes,’ he said as he began to unbutton his uniform trousers.

‘Do I have to?’ she whispered. But there was no coquettish smile, she was beginning to understand what lay ahead of them.

Harry slipped off the guard’s boots with a sigh of relief; already his toes were raw, but when he tried to replace them with the trainers he found in the bag, he discovered the new footwear was impossibly small. Ta’argis were so much smaller. So the boots would stay. After he had finished rearranging himself, he forced them back on his feet. Even the effort of putting them on made him wince.

Their other supplies were now packed into the empty rucksack and it was zipped closed. Then Bektour stripped off the sweater he was wearing, leaving him clad only in a T-shirt. ‘Here, take this,’ he said, handing it across.

‘No,’ exclaimed Martha, ‘you’ve already done too much—’

But Harry’s hand was reaching out to accept this last gift. He knew, as did Bektour, how priceless it might be. ‘Another debt we owe you. Thank you.’ He thrust it at Martha. ‘Wrap it around your head. You’ll need it.’

As soon as she had opened the door she understood what he meant. She’d never been a wimp, but this was different from anything she had ever experienced. She shuddered as freezing air began attacking every inch of exposed skin. She tied the sweater tightly around her head, then pushed her hands deep inside the old socks. They helped Bektour turn the car round, manhandling it across the ice. They said their farewells. Moments later the car began slipping downhill. Harry and Martha watched it until it had vanished from sight.

‘Come on, girl,’ Harry said, ‘a nice warm bed is waiting for us on the other side of those mountains.’

It was a remark that should have called for a riposte of some sort, but as she looked up she found she had to bend her neck to an impossible angle before she could see the tops of the mountains. For the first time she began to comprehend the reality of what lay ahead. She said nothing as they began walking into the rapidly fading light.

It had been Harry’s intention to walk through the night, it was safer that way, hidden from prying eyes, and although they had no torch the moonlight reflecting back from the snow would be strong enough for them to see. Yet as soon as they set off they found their progress slow; where there was ice their footwear slipped, and where there was soft snow they sank into it up to their calves. The day had already wrung the last drops of strength from them, and although Martha
uttered not a word of complaint, she was clearly exhausted. Harry felt no better. They had to stop.

The blanket of snow that covered the landscape around them hid most of its features, but about an hour after darkness they stumbled across a small shelter, a shepherd’s retreat used in summer, when the pasture was rich and green and the sun so hot that the stones on the tracks would burn their feet. It was a pathetic construction of old scraps of wood panel, with a single sheet of plywood leaning up against the opening where a door should be. Sheets of plastic were tied over branches to form a roof. Inside, Harry pulled out a cigarette lighter: the interior was bare, apart from a couple of armfuls of old straw that had been thrown or blown into one corner.

‘Welcome to the best room in the house,’ Harry muttered.

‘It’s . . .’ She was about to declare it freezing, using plenty of colourful adjectives for elaboration, but it would have been pointless. Even inside the shelter, the simple act of breathing left wisps of frost hanging in the air. ‘It’s charming, Harry,’ she declared. ‘How romantic of you. I have to admit I’d fancied the idea of a dirty weekend with you but not quite . . . this dirty.’

‘A couple of hours. Then we carry on.’

‘Chance of a fire?’

He shook his head. ‘One spark and the entire structure will burn. Tell the whole country where we are.’

They scraped the straw together to form a crude
mattress, but only after Martha had inspected it closely for any trace of life. They sat side by side, munching chocolate and nuts.

‘We must try to get some sleep,’ Harry said.

Martha looked at the straw. Some of the strands were moving in the draught. She shook her head. ‘Not possible.’

‘Martha, you’d be surprised what’s possible. Comfort’s a little like pain. It’s a state of mind. Stay positive.’

‘I don’t even have a blanket.’

‘You have me.’

‘Then you’ll have to do, I suppose.’

‘I could always start making a speech. Sleep is all but guaranteed.’

‘I’ll try the more conventional route, if you don’t mind,’ she said, nestling into his arms. ‘By the way, you smell like an old sweatshirt.’

He held her tight, trying to cover as much of her body with his as he could.

‘We’ll make it all right, won’t we?’ she whispered.

‘Course we will.’

‘Men lie when they get a girl in their arms.’

‘Trust me.’

‘You know, one day I’d like to.’

She forced herself closer to him in the straw, sharing the heat of their bodies. It wasn’t as she had imagined it might be.

A couple of hours, Harry had said, yet daylight was seeping through the cracks and holes in their shelter when he woke. His abused body had demanded rest, even on the earth floor of an open igloo. When his eyes cleared themselves of sleep, he discovered Martha looking at him from close quarters.

‘Been awake long?’ he asked, stirring.

‘Forever.’ Her eyes were tired, her teeth trembling, chattering. She hadn’t been able to sleep, to shut herself off from the cold. Not the best way to start their day.

He groaned as he moved. Every muscle was stiff and truculent, every movement sent out a blast of complaint from his ribs. At least the cold would have closed the wound on his ear, he reflected, preventing it from bleeding further, so why did it still hurt like hell?

As he watched his breath form vapour trails just beyond the tip of his nose, Harry’s mind wandered to what lay ahead of them. The border with Afghanistan was approximately thirty miles away as the crow flew. That sounded encouraging. Thirty miles was nothing compared with what they had made him do at
Hereford, little more than a day’s gentle yomp, even in full gear. Except that neither of them bore the slightest resemblance to crows. Picking their way along snowcovered trails, through ravines and valleys, up the sides of mountains, would require much more of them than thirty miles. Anyway, the border was nothing more than a line on a map that had been dreamed up in some imperial outpost and bore no resemblance to the realities on the ground. Even when they had reached it they would still be a long way from safety, with many more miles to make through the mountain wilderness of Afghanistan before they found anything that resembled help.

Long before that they would somehow have to find a pass through the mountains, which would take them up to twelve thousand feet. At that height even the trees had trouble surviving. During the night, whatever warmth the air had drawn from the day would be sucked back out and they would be attacked by temperatures of minus twenty. That was before the wind got up, forcing the cold into them, like a hammer driving nails. They couldn’t withstand those sorts of temperatures for long, not in their ludicrously inadequate clothing.

Yet there was one consideration more powerful than all the others. Amir Beg.

Harry should have killed him, he was clear about that now. It had been an unforgiveable lapse to let him live, a moment of pathetic weakness, for now Beg
would do everything within his considerable powers to capture them. If the mountains didn’t get them, he would. He’d stop at nothing to get at Harry, and his appetite for revenge would consume Martha, too. That was why they had to take this route, because it was the shortest. With every hour that passed, the obstacles would grow more difficult, their strength less reliable, and the pursuit more desperate. They had to get out very soon, or they wouldn’t get out at all.

That was Harry’s plan. It inevitably had many weaknesses, but also one potentially catastrophic flaw. Beg would have worked all that out, too.

Harry stretched, groaned some more, it was time to get on with it. They –
he
– had already wasted precious hours asleep. He tried to wriggle his toes inside his boots but he couldn’t feel them. A bad sign. They were too cold, and the boots too tight. A perfect recipe for frostbite. So instead he wriggled his fingers. He had no gloves, and during the night, as Martha had used one of his shoulders as a pillow, he had kept his hand warm by lodging it in her armpit. The other, he now discovered to his surprise, had somehow infiltrated its way inside her anorak and was clasped both firmly and warmly to her breast.

‘I’m sorry,’ he stuttered, a little startled, ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

Her wide eyes stilled his feeble protest. ‘You animal,’ she whispered, then smiled.

‘Martha, I’m so sorry you got mixed up in all this.’

‘I’m not.’ And, reluctantly, she rolled out of his arms.

Harry clambered awkwardly to his feet and started a series of exercises, stretching his limbs and swinging his arms. ‘Gets the system going,’ he said, looking at Martha, who was looking unimpressed and had retreated to a corner.

‘I’d prefer a filter coffee. Maybe some low-fat yoghurt with fresh raspberries on the side,’ she replied.

‘We need to generate some heat, but not so much that we start sweating. That’ll soak our clothes, which will freeze. We have to pace ourselves.’

‘Preferably in a warm bed. With a great dollop of crème fraiche.’

‘What?’

‘On the raspberries, you fool.’

She began flapping her arms, yet found these getup-and-go calisthenics genuinely difficult. She was wearing so many layers of clothing that even bending an arm was a challenge. ‘I feel like some medieval knight,’ she protested.

‘Be grateful.’ Harry was sitting back down trying to ease off his boots. They were very stubborn, and it was a struggle. When at last the feet appeared, they were unnaturally pale, except at the points where they had been rubbed raw. Martha gasped when she saw them.

‘It’s fine,’ he said, trying to reassure her. ‘White is fine. Not fun, but fine. It’s when they go black that life
becomes a bitch.’ He spent several minutes massaging them, taking considerable care, encouraging the blood to circulate, but along with renewed life came the pain, and it was all he could do to force them back into the boots.

‘That must hurt like hell,’ she whispered.

‘Reminds me of something Amir Beg said. That pain is life.’

‘Did he?’ Martha’s eyes were drawn to the bulge beneath Harry’s woollen hat. ‘The bastard.’

‘But he was right. Up here in the mountains there isn’t any comfortable alternative. If it stops hurting and you feel nothing, that’s the time you should start to panic.’

‘Are you going to be all right, Harry? Here am I all dressed up like Santa Claus but you . . .’ She cast a critical eye over his assorted items of clothing that were so inadequate they barely covered the skin in places. ‘You’re not exactly dressed for the job, are you?’

‘One night sleeping together and already you’re criticizing my wardrobe.’

‘A girl’s got to have standards.’

‘Just consider this as my underwear,’ he said, and began pulling the shelter apart, gathering together the various lengths of rope and pieces of plastic sheeting. He squatted on the floor and started tearing at the plastic, then reached for the cigarette lighter and began burning through the rope until he had several shorter pieces, unravelling the strands until they were reduced
to string. This string he used to tie the plastic around his arms, securely, so they wouldn’t slip too much, but not so tightly that his circulation would be cut. Then he began stuffing straw inside the plastic. She stared at him in bewilderment.

‘Not pretty, I grant, but better than freezing,’ he declared. He tore a hole in a larger piece of plastic and placed it over his head to form a poncho, tying it at his waist and once again stuffing the space inside with straw. ‘It helps insulate. Traps the air,’ he said, ‘like a string vest.’

‘You look like Worzel Gummidge’s grandfather,’ she declared, shaking her head at the results. ‘It’s difficult to take things seriously with you dressed like that.’

‘It’s because I take things seriously that I’ve got to do this.’ He folded up the larger remaining sheets of plastic and bound them with more rope, slinging the bundle over his shoulder. ‘Just in case.’

‘Of what?’

‘Wish I knew.’

The old hut around them was now in a state of far greater decay than even they had found it. It got worse as Harry began dragging out branches and large sticks that had been used to prop up the walls. He selected two that were stout and reasonably straight. ‘Walking sticks,’ he announced, handing her the smaller one.

They stepped outside, the plywood board that had passed for a door falling flat in front of them, causing an explosion of snow. Despite the decrepit nature of the shelter, they knew it had served its purpose, for as
much as they had suffered inside, out here the air was cold enough to chew.