Shepherd took his wallet and slipped a piece of paper across the table. ‘I got some basic info from his army record,’ he said.
Sharpe picked up the piece of paper, folded it, and slid it into his pocket. ‘This Lex was a friend of the Paras who were killed?’
Shepherd nodded. ‘Yeah. In fact, if I hadn’t warned him not to go with them, he’d probably be dead now too.’
‘So he’s out for revenge, too?’
Shepherd nodded again. ‘Yeah.’
‘So why not just let him have what intel we get and leave it up to him? Keep yourself out of it.’
Shepherd sighed. ‘It’s not as easy as that.’
‘It never is,’ said Sharpe.
AFGHANISTAN, 2002
Little Lailuna loved to sing, but singing was forbidden by the Taliban. Afghanis had kept caged birds from time immemorial but they were now banned, for the beauty of their song and of their plumage was considered too distracting for those whose lives should be devoted to the serious study of the Quran. The flying of kites, which had always drawn watching crowds as they swooped and soared against the backdrop of the azure sky and the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush, was also outlawed, as were films, magazines containing pictures, and music, singing and dancing.
Little Lailuna didn’t know that as she sang for her classmates. She was only five years old, and she loved to sing. She didn’t know that Taliban patrols attacked and beat women and even girls as young as nine years old for not wearing the chadri – the Afghan burqa. Nor did she know that high-heeled shoes were also forbidden as ‘no man should hear a woman’s footsteps lest it excite him’. Or that women were forbidden to speak loudly ‘lest a strange man should hear their voice’, and they were banned from leaving their houses unless accompanied by a male blood relative.
She was so lost in her song that Lailuna didn’t hear the Taliban militants pull up outside the school building in a Toyota Landcruiser. Lailuna was singing to her classmates, her back to the dusty street. She saw their smiles fade and she faltered and stopped as she saw them back away from her. She turned around and her eyes widened as she saw the four tall, bearded men in the black robes and turbans of the Taliban glowering at her. They were carrying canes. She shot a glance at her teacher, who was now ghost white and visibly trembling. Still Lailuna did not understand. ‘Shall I finish my song?’ she asked, hesitantly.
One of the Taliban swung back his bamboo cane and began lashing out at her, striking her on the legs and back. She fell to the floor crying, but still the cane whistled down, again and again. She curled up into a ball, still sobbing, and through her tears saw her teacher kicked, punched, dragged away and thrown into the back of the Toyota.
The men returned to herd Lailuna and her classmates out of the building with more kicks and blows. Then they took a can of petrol, splashed it around the classroom and set fire to it, and as the building burned, they told Lailuna and the other girls to go home and never return, that the school was finished. Then the Taliban jumped into the Toyota and drove off with Lailuna’s teacher in the back. The teacher was never seen again. Lailuna ran home and hid in the dark corner beneath the stairs. She was still there when her father, Ahmad Khan, returned several hours later, and it was some time before he was able to persuade her to tell him what had happened. He sat with her throughout the night as she tossed and turned in the grip of nightmares.
Ahmad Khan had been born the son of a poor farmer from Nangahar province in the far east of Afghanistan. The remote and lawless lands straddling the border were ruled by warlords and tribal headmen, and neither the Afghani nor the Pakistani governments had more than minimal control or influence over them. Khan’s father grew opium poppies in the arid, stony soil, the only cash crop that would produce enough income to feed his family. Khan’s father was a devout Muslim, a haji who had scraped and saved for over twenty years to raise the money for his pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of his faith that was required of all Muslims at some point in their lives.
Khan had suffered an eye infection as a child which went untreated because there was no doctor in the village and richer men than his father could not afford the cost of the doctor in Jalalabad, fifty miles away. For a while it looked as if he would lose his sight, but in time he recovered, though his left eye, while still functioning, was left with a strange milky-white pupil instead of its previous hazel colour. When they saw him, some of their more superstitious neighbours muttered about ‘the evil eye’, and ushered their children away from him. From then on Khan was something of an outsider even in his own community, feared more than liked.
His two younger brothers worked the fields but Khan’s father had always had greater ambitions for his eldest son. His dream was that Khan would one day become a mullah or imam – a leader of the faith – or a hafiz – devoting himself to memorising the entire Quran. With that in mind, his father had enrolled him in a madrassa across the border in Peshawar. But Khan was more interested fighting than studying, and when he turned nineteen he recrossed the border to join the mujahedin fighting the Russians in the dying days of the war against the Soviets. Most Afghan men were good shots, but Khan was exceptional, a lethal sniper at long range and equally deadly with an AK-47 or an RPG.
Eventually the Soviets withdrew after their final humiliation at the hands of the mujahedin and Khan returned to the family farm and reconciled with his father. He shared the work in the poppy fields and married the wife his father had chosen for him, the young, doe-eyed daughter of a cousin, named Bahara – ‘the bringer of spring’. For a while, Khan remained aloof from the fighting that again engulfed the country as the rival mujahedin factions plunged Afghanistan into civil war.
Time after time, rival warlords either stole his opium crop or demanded tribute for leaving it unmolested. So when Mullah Omar, ‘The Commander of the Faithful’, pledged that his new movement would eliminate corruption and the rule of the warlords, and bring peace and order to Afghanistan, Khan was one of the first to enlist in the cause – known as the Taliban.
He rose rapidly through the ranks and was a commander by the time that the Taliban liberated Kandahar province, and was one of those who hanged the principal warlord from the barrel of one of his own tanks. Herat followed next and within two years Kabul had also fallen to the Taliban, with Mullah Omar taking power and renaming the country ‘the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’.
Khan returned home to his wife, but although several years had passed since their marriage, still they had not been blessed with a child. He had almost despaired, believing that Bahara must be barren, but at last she told him she was pregnant, and in time she gave birth to a daughter. Born during the full moon, she was christened Lailuna – bright moonlight. Three years later came a double tragedy. Pregnant again, Bahara died in childbirth and her baby, the son they had both dreamed of, died with her.
That was why Lailuna was everything to him now, all that he had. She was the sun, the moon, the stars in the winter sky, the blossom on the mulberry trees in spring, and when she sang, her voice was as sweet to him as the song of the mountain nightingale, whose beautiful call was always the first, long-awaited harbinger of summer.
Khan’s father grumbled that raising children was women’s work and urged him to marry again, but Khan refused. When he was away, he left Lailuna in the care of his sister, but whenever he was at home, his daughter was at his side. Few Afghan girls were educated, least of all in the frontier territories, but Khan defied his father’s opposition to the idea and sent her to a small school in the nearest town. Funded by foreign charities, it was run by an Afghan emigrée who had returned to her native land after living abroad for twenty years. There Lailuna blossomed. If Khan’s Taliban comrades disapproved of his actions in seeking an education for his daughter, they kept their opinions to themselves, for he was a great warrior, feared and respected by all.