After Kamal Khan and younger brother Wasir Khan have described Mustafa as a criminal who kills women and children and who must be eliminated, Tajmir and Bob take their leave and are followed to the gate by two young boys who look like beautiful South Sea Island girls. They wear big, yellow flowers in their wavy hair, tight-fitting belts round their waists and they stare intensely at Tajmir and Bob. They don’t know which of the two to look at, slender blond Bob or powerful Tajmir with the creamy face.
‘Look out for Mustafa’s men,’ they say. ‘You can’t trust them; they’ll betray you as soon as you turn your back. And don’t go out after dark, they’ll rob you!’
The two travellers make straight for the enemy. The police station is a few blocks away from the occupied Governor’s residence and doubles up as a prison. The police station is a fortress. The walls are several metres thick. Mustafa’s men open up the heavy iron gates, and they enter a backyard; there too the beautiful scent of flowers greets them, but from flowering trees and bushes, not from the men. Mustafa’s soldiers are easy to tell apart from the Khans’. They wear dark-brown uniforms, small square caps and heavy boots. Many of them wear a scarf covering their nose and mouth and dark glasses. Not being able to see them makes them look more threatening.
Tajmir and Bob are led up narrow stairs and passages in the fortress. Mustafa sits in a room in the innermost part of the building. Like his enemy Kamal Khan, men and weapons surround him. The weapons are the same, the beards the same, the looks the same. The picture of Mecca on the wall is the same. The only difference is that the chief constable sits on a chair behind a table, not on the floor. In addition there are no flower-power young men there. The only flowers are a bunch of plastic daffodils on the chief’s table, daffodils in fluorescent yellow, red and green. Beside the vase lies the Koran wrapped in a green cloth, and a miniature Afghan flag flies from a plinth.
‘We have Karzai on our side and we will fight,’ says Mustafa. ‘The Khans have ravaged this region long enough, now we will put an end to the barbarism!’ Round him the men nod agreement.
Tajmir translates and translates. The same threats, the same words. Why Mustafa is better than Padsha Khan, how Mustafa will make peace. He is really outlining the reason for there never being real peace in Afghanistan.
Mustafa has joined the Americans in many reconnaissance sorties. He recalls how they watched over a house which they were sure contained bin Laden and Mullah Omar. But they never found anything. The American reconnaissance work continues but they are hedged around by a lot of secretiveness, and Bob and Tajmir are not enlightened further. Bob asks if they can join them one night. Mustafa laughs. ‘No, that’s top secret, that’s how the Americans want it. It won’t help how much you beg, young man,’ he says.
‘Don’t go out after dusk,’ Mustafa commands them strictly when they leave. ‘Khan’s men will get you.’
Thoroughly warned by both sides, they visit the local kebab house, a large room where cushions have been laid out on long benches. Tajmir orders pilau and kebab, Bob asks for boiled eggs and bread. He is frightened of parasites and germs. They eat hastily and hurry back to the hotel before dusk falls. In this town anything can happen and one is well advised to take precautions.
A heavy grille in front of the gate to the town’s only hotel is opened and locked behind them. They look out on Khost, a town where shops are closed, policemen are masked and the population sympathise with al-Qaida. A scowling look at Bob from a passer-by is enough to make Tajmir feel unwell. In this region there is a bounty on Americans. Fifty thousand dollars will be paid to anyone who kills an American.
They go up on to the roof to erect Bob’s satellite telephone. A helicopter flies overhead. Bob tries to guess where it is heading for. A dozen of the hotel’s soldiers have gathered around them; they look in amazement at the wire-less phone Bob talks into.
‘Is he talking to America?’ asks a long, thin rake, wearing a turban, tunic and sandals. He looks like the leader. Tajmir nods. The soldiers keep on watching Bob. Tajmir makes small talk with them; they are only interested in the phone and how it works. They have hardly seen a telephone before. One of them exclaims in a sad voice: ‘Do you know what is our problem? We know everything about our weapons, but we know nothing about how to use a telephone.’
After the conversation with America, Bob and Tajmir descend. The soldiers follow.
‘Are these the ones who will kill us once we have turned our backs?’ Bob whispers.
The soldiers are each carrying a Kalashnikov. Some of them have fastened long bayonets to the rifles. Tajmir and Bob sit down on a sofa in the lobby. An extraordinary picture hangs above their heads. It is a large framed poster of New York with both the twin towers from the World Trade Center still standing. But it is not New York ’s real skyline; behind the buildings high mountains tower. In the foreground a large, green park with red flowers has been glued on. New York looks like a small town made of wooden blocks, under an enormous mountain range.
The picture looks as though it has been hanging there for ages: it is discoloured and slightly wavy. It must have been hanging there long before anyone realised that exactly this image would be associated in such a grotesque way with Afghanistan and the dusty town of Khost, and would deliver to the country more of what it did not need: more bombs.
‘Do you know which town that is?’ asks Bob.
The soldiers shake their heads. They have seen hardly anything but one- and two-storey mud huts and it must be difficult for them to understand that the picture depicts a real town.
‘That is New York,’ says Bob. ‘ America. Those two buildings are the ones Osama bin Laden’s men flew the planes into.’
The soldiers leap up. They’ve heard about those two buildings. They point and gesticulate. That’s what they looked like! To think they had passed the picture every day without realising it!
Bob has one of his magazines with him and shows them a picture of a man every American recognises.
‘Do you know who that is?’ he asks. They shake their heads.
‘That is Osama bin Laden.’
The soldiers open their eyes wide and tear the magazine out of his hands. They crowd around it. Everyone wants to see.
‘Is that what he looks like?’
Both the man and the magazine fascinate them.
‘Terrorist,’ they say and point and hoot with laughter. There are no papers or magazines in Khost and they have never before seen a picture of Osama bin Laden, the man who is responsible for Tajmir and Bob’s presence in Khost.
The soldiers sit down and produce a large lump of hashish, which they offer Bob and Tajmir. Tajmir smells it and declines. ‘Too strong,’ he says and smiles.
The two travellers go to bed. All night machine-guns crackle. Next day they wonder how to get about and what story to follow.
Scowling they wander the streets of Khost. No one invites them to join important missions or cave-hunt for al-Qaida. Every day they drop in on the arch-enemies Mustafa and Kamal Khan to hear whether there is any news.
‘You’ll have to wait until Kamal Khan gets better,’ is the message from the occupied Governor’s residence.
‘Nothing new today,’ the police station echoes.
Padsha Khan has disappeared without a trace. Mustafa sits, petrified, behind the fluorescent flowers. There is no trace of the American Special Forces. Nothing happens. Nothing but the crackling of guns every night and the helicopters circling overhead. They are in one of the most lawless parts of the world, and they are bored. In the end Bob decides to return to Kabul. Tajmir rejoices silently: away from Khost, back to Mikrorayon. He is going to buy a huge cake for the wedding anniversary.
He returns a happy man to his own Osama, the little round one with short-sighted eyes. The mother whom he loves above everything in the whole world.