Ahmad told the driver to slow down still more as they approached the site of the RV with his men, and his keen gaze raked the road ahead and the hills on either side, alert for any danger, anything out of place. As they crested a low rise, he saw ahead of them a group of men wearing Afghan robes, standing at the side of the road in the shade of a clump of pine trees. He frowned. He was an hour early for the rendezvous, but his men were already there.
His frown deepened as they got closer to the group and he realised that most of the dozen or so men were strangers. The only face he recognised was Ghulam, his second-in-command.
One of the men held up a hand in greeting, but Ahmad felt the rising tension from the three Paras and heard the metallic click as the man alongside him slid the safety catch off his M16. ‘It’s all right, drive forward slowly,’ Khan said, but just as the words left his mouth he caught a brief flash of reflected light from the hillside out of the corner of his eye. His heart began to race. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. He reached inside his shirt, undid his money belt, and shoved it down the back of the seat behind him until it was out of sight. Ignoring the questioning look from the soldier alongside him, he told the driver to stop.
They were still some fifty yards short of the group of men, who emerged from the shade and began to walk towards them as they saw the Land Rover pull to a halt. ‘Wait here,’ Khan said. ‘Let me do the talking.’
He got out and walked up the road, calling out the traditional greeting, ‘Salaam alaikum’.
Ghulam returned the greeting. He was smiling but his eyes were hard and Khan began to fear the worst. He stared at Ghulam’s face, trying to get a read on the man. Ghulam was tense; that much was obvious.
He slowed as he saw that there were two men among the group who weren’t his followers. One he recognised as the commander of another Taliban company. His name, Wais, meant ‘Night Wanderer’. The name suited him well, for he was a dark and elusive character, at home in the shadows and on the margins, seeing everything, saying nothing. The other man was a stranger, but the AK-74 he carried, including a laser sight, and the way the others deferred to him as he stepped forward, suggested he was a powerful figure. ‘Alaikum salaam, Ahmad Khan,’ he said. ‘I am Piruz.’
‘And what wind has blown you here?’ Khan said.
‘We heard that you were bringing friends with you,’ said Piruz, waving an arm towards the assembled men. ‘We wanted to meet them. Will you not introduce us?’ He began walking slowly along the track towards the Land Rover.
Khan’s brain was racing. He glanced towards the Paras, who were showing increasing signs of agitation. ‘The faranji are no friend to any true Afghan,’ he said. ‘But just the same, they may have their uses sometimes.’
Piruz showed his teeth in a smile. ‘Then let us see what use we can make of them.’ As he neared the Land Rover, he raised his hand in greeting. ‘Welcome, English,’ he said. ‘Please lower your weapons, you are our guests and we mean you no harm.’
The gazes of the three soldiers flickered between Piruz and Khan, clearly uncertain what they should do. Still smiling and affable, Piruz leaned into the back of the Land Rover, resting his arm on the back of the seat that Khan had vacated. ‘You use the M16, I see,’ he said. ‘Do you find that …’ His voice was drowned by the roar of his weapon. Blood and brains sprayed into the air as the soldier in the back slumped over the side of the vehicle. Without a pause, Piruz swung his AK-74 through a short arc and shot the front-seat passenger through the back of his head. The windscreen shattered as the rounds smashed through it and Khan saw the blood-red smear from what was left of the soldier’s head as it slid down the windscreen.
The engine roared as the driver stamped on the accelerator in a frantic attempt to escape, but Piruz’s rifle barrel was already swinging towards him and the next shot hit the driver, punching a hole through the back of his seat. The Land Rover swerved and crashed nose down into the ditch at the side of the road, and though the driver, badly wounded, managed to stumble out of his seat, another burst from Piruz killed him stone dead before he had taken three steps.
As Khan brought up his own weapon, he felt a gun barrel in the small of his back and heard a voice hiss, ‘One more move and you will be as dead as those faranji scum.’ His weapon was taken from him and the next moment blows, kicks and rifle butts began to rain on him. As he sank to the ground, he was dimly aware of Piruz standing over him and he heard him say, ‘Hold his arms.’
There was a momentary pause and then an agonising sensation in his cheek and he smelt singeing flesh as Piruz forced the end of his gun barrel – burning hot from the rounds he had just fired – into Khan’s face. ‘That’s enough for now,’ Piruz said. ‘There will be time later to deal with the traitor as he deserves, but we need to get away from here before the faranji troops come looking for vengeance, and we need him to be able to walk.’
Khan was pulled to his feet and his wrists were bound tightly behind him with electric cable which bit into his flesh. Most of the Taliban group moved away from the road, heading up into the mountains and dragging Khan with them, but he saw that a few men were remaining behind, some digging an IED into the ground alongside the Land Rover, others running out a command wire towards a copse of wind-stunted acacia trees a hundred yards away, while still others tracked them, brushing dirt, leaves and gravel over the wire to hide it from view. Khan saw no more as two Taliban fighters took his arms, forcing him along the path that climbed the ridge towards the next valley.
He stumbled on, filled with despair. Even if British or American troops turned up and even if he wasn’t killed in the ensuing firefight, the Westerners would assume that he had deliberately led the soldiers into the ambush that killed them all.
He was dragged through the mountains, half conscious and disoriented. They climbed one ridge and descended into a rocky valley only long enough to begin scaling the next ridge beyond. Night had now fallen but still the forced march continued and at every pause along the way Khan was subjected to a fresh beating.
They eventually stopped, an hour before dawn, and laid up to rest for the day in a pine wood near the head of another desolate valley. Through the tree canopy high above him, Khan caught occasional glimpses of the vapour trails of military jets etched across the skies, and once there was the distant clatter of a helicopter’s rotors, but the noise grew no louder. He looked around for Ghulam but his friend was keeping his distance. If he was his friend, of course. Khan had no way of knowing for sure.
While most of the Taliban slept, Piruz made sure that Khan had no rest at all. Two Taliban fighters forced him to stand upright and stood guard over him, and whenever he tried to lean back against the rock face or his head sank on to his chest, they kicked him or whipped him with the electric cables they wore as belts around their waists.
The torture began in earnest after Piruz woke up, apparently refreshed after just a few hours’ sleep. Sharp splinters of wood were jammed under his fingernails, caustic liquid was forced into his eyes and he was then dragged to the mountain stream running down the hillside, thrown down and held under the water while his feet beat a tattoo on the rocky ground, the blood roared in his ears and his lungs filled with water. Just when he was about to pass out, he was dragged from the water and revived, coughing, spluttering and gasping for breath, only to be interrogated and then forced back under the water again. They wanted to know who he was working for and what information he had given to the British.