The Network

14

I’m not good for much the following day. But while my body’s been immobile, my mind’s been careering back and forth over the events of the previous twenty-four hours. The mind hungers naturally for certainty, but I can’t be as sure as I want to be about any of the things that are troubling me. All that is possible is an interpretation, and the one I’ve come up with has a dark side and a light side.

The dark side is that, as the Baroness indicated, someone is attempting to sabotage the operation and wants us to fail. I have accepted the cynical possibility that, somewhere along the line, there’s an agenda in favour of the survival of the Stingers. I must accept, possibly, that the Talib who accosted me yesterday was perhaps expecting me, and had been paid or persuaded to disable or kill me. Perhaps he wasn’t really a Talib at all. Perhaps Sattar, on whom my suspicion has largely fallen, has been watching the house, seen me leaving on Mondays and Tuesdays, and arranged for the Talib to intercept me on my return. The planning and effort involved in this, as well as the fact that a much simpler method could have been found to make me disappear, render it unlikely. But not impossible.

The trouble with small conspiracies is that they lead contagiously to larger ones. When I dwell on the notion that there really is a plan for the Stingers to fall into the wrong hands, I can’t help remembering Grace’s solemn prediction that there are people in America just waiting for the excuse to invade Afghanistan. All they need, she said, is to trace an act of terrorism on US soil back to Afghanistan. The Stingers could certainly provide the means. Yet the chances of planned American military involvement in Afghanistan seem so utterly remote, I have to mentally dismiss this possibility.

The light side is that if my encounter with the turbanned cable-wielder really was a devious attempt to stop us, it has failed. And if someone is still going to try to stop us, he’ll have to come up with another plan. If we leave quickly, the chances of another attempt will be much reduced. I share this idea with H when he looks in on me the next morning, because it feels right that we should move without delay.

‘Let’s leave now,’ I say.

‘What, today? What’s the hurry? You need to rest.’

‘No. We pick up the men and leave without warning them. That way no one has time to talk.’

‘Are you serious? Let’s have a look at you.’

I sit on the edge of the bed and H inspects the deep-red welts that run across my back and stomach. Dark bruises are beginning to extend along them. The skin isn’t broken, but it looks as though I’ve had an unusual accident with a very large barbecue. I wonder if they’ll leave scars.

‘Give it another day,’ he suggests.

Then we make a new discovery. I ask H to retrieve the first aid kit for me, which is with our stash of equipment in the roof space. I remember at the last minute to give him my phone so that he can check the markings I’ve left on the bags and cases with the ultraviolet light. He returns with the first aid kit, but there’s a new expression on his face.

‘How did you mark the stuff?’ he asks.

‘Vertical lines across the front that join up with the floor.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘either there’s a bloody great Afghan rat in that attic or someone’s been poking around in there. None of the lines match up.’

We’ve both been out of the house over the past few days. It’s possible that a determined visitor could have taken an interest in our stuff. We call downstairs to the chowkidar, who says there have been no visitors but that he’s had to leave the house at times.

‘I didn’t check the doors when I got back yesterday. I was too distracted.’

‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘you were a bit out of it.’

It’s an unpleasant feeling. There’s nothing for it but to recheck every piece of our equipment and all the supplies in the G. We start with the kit in the attic, hauling it down into the room and scrutinising every item minutely for any signs of tampering. H even inspects each individual round of ammunition for the Brownings. It’s all there, along with everything else, and none of it seems to have been interfered with.

Then we descend to the garage and unload everything from the G, paying particular attention to the explosives in case they’ve been altered in any way. H takes out every block of the plastic and smells it. We unwind the blasting fuse and I coil it over my arm as I inspect its length, and then rewind it onto its original spool. We do the same with the detcord. The detonators are intact.

If nothing is missing, then perhaps something has been added. Most likely is a bomb. Less probable is a transmitter to track our movements. Either one will take up a certain amount of space. We run our hands over every seam of the G’s interior, probing the seats, panels and carpets for any sign that they’ve been disturbed or modified. We check with minute care to see if there’s any indication of modified or extra wiring in the vicinity of the ignition or the panels around the dashboard. We lie on the ground with our torches and search the wheel arches and bumpers and chassis. Then we roll the G forward into the daylight to check under the bonnet, using a strip of paper to detect any tripwires before opening it fully. We peer into the fuel tank, radiator, reservoirs and lamp housings. Anything that can be readily removed and replaced, we remove and replace.

There is no bomb. There is no transmitter. No one seems to have installed a tilt switch that will go off when the car meets its first slope after leaving the house. Nothing is missing. I wonder, but not out loud, whether I could have accidentally moved the kit in the attic myself. I do not know.

It’s late afternoon. We spend the rest of the day packing, and agree to leave in the morning without telling the chowkidar or giving any advance warning to the other men. An envelope with a letter of thanks and a generous tip will express our appreciation.

Not long after sunrise, we drive to Mr Raouf, who’s not expecting us.

‘We have to leave immediately,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Moshkel nist,’ he says, no problem. He summons the other men on a two-way radio. While we wait for them to arrive, I ask if I can use his computer to check my email. He lifts a scarf from the keyboard, dusts off the screen with it and pulls back the chair for me, observing me wince as I sit. It’s an unpredictable process, and takes a dozen attempts before the modem finally connects. I log into the secure server maintained by the Firm, encrypt and send the contents of the flash drive using my own public encryption key, and ask Mr Raouf if he’ll keep the original for me in his safe, along with our second passports. What happens next is a surprise.

‘I have something for you,’ he says. From under his desk he pulls out an AK-74SU Kalashnikov with a folding stock, and presents it proudly to me.

‘For your journey,’ he says.

H’s eyebrows rise as Mr Raouf hands it over. It’s a compact automatic weapon which fires the 5.45-millimetre low-recoil round, and the barrel is much shorter than the AK-47. It can be easily hidden under a jacket and will fit snugly under a car seat, which makes it popular in Russia with special forces, drivers and bodyguards. It’s a generous gift because I suspect he’s deeply attached to such a rare and highly prized weapon, and I promise to return it to him on our return. He nods gravely as if to say ‘when you return’. At least I hope that’s what he means, and not ‘if you return’.

On journeys at home the road is a means to an end. It’s a featureless thing which doesn’t attract the greater part of your attention, and you take for granted that it won’t crumble to dust under your wheels as you while away the time with distracted thoughts, thinking of your final destination. You take for granted that your journey implies arrival.

In Afghanistan all this is reversed. The road demands your attention from the start. Every aspect of it requires effort and stamina and determination. It does, literally, crumble to dust under your wheels, and offers you no time for distracted thoughts. In the meantime your destination becomes an ever more abstract idea, a thing you doubt and question and wonder if you’ll ever reach, and as your journey lengthens you feel like a fool for blindly assuming that your eventual arrival is guaranteed. The road, in short, becomes the goal, and arrival a luxury.

Our caravan is made up of two vehicles. The trust’s white Toyota pickup leads the way, carrying Sher Del, Aref and Momen. H and I ride second in the G. Our doors and bonnets bear the vinyl stickers that Mr Raouf has supplied us with, so that our true purpose, like that of many a charitable institution operating in this part of the world, is amply disguised.

We drive through the devastated western suburbs under a brilliantly blue, clear sky. On the outskirts of the city the surfaced road ends. There was one, years before, but it’s simply been worn away. Now it’s a pale scar on which every vehicle lurches and weaves in a perpetual cloud of white dust. Which side to drive on is only an approximate convention.

Beyond the dust we can see the long chains of peaks to the north and south of the city. It’s late spring now and the mountains are draped in ice on their upper ridges, and lower down their snow-filled gulleys resemble the camouflage of a killer whale. It’s hard to believe that a country so beautiful is in the midst of a brutal conflict, and has been for years. But there’s always the ruined armoured vehicles, tilted at the verges of the road like ships that have run aground in the shallows and been abandoned, to remind us otherwise.

An hour west of the city centre the road divides. The route to the north-west leads up to Paghman and the southern towards Ghazni. We take the lower branch and move beyond Maidan Shahr, the natural pass that protects the city’s western flank. Then an hour later, at the next main junction, we turn into the mountainous folds of Wardak province, where the road deteriorates a stage further.

It’s the Afghan version of a B road, virtually impassable by Western standards but not at all bad by Afghan ones, and it’s more like being in a boat than a car because of the constant pitching and rolling. Sometimes the rocky surface of the road changes to packed earth and suddenly the crunch of stone under us is silenced as if by a ceasefire. But it’s only ever for a few miles before we are fighting the dust and stone again.

In the early afternoon we stop to buy some apples from a farmer who’s put up a stall by the side of the road. As I’m talking to the farmer, our men take their pattus, lay them over the ground near the road, and perform their afternoon prayers.

We move west through a landscape of great beauty, winding through a succession of long broad valleys where the surrounding slopes glide gently down towards the emerald-coloured patchwork of the valley floors. Beyond Jalrez, the slopes begin to steepen and grow less gentle, and the grassy bloom turns to darker stone, which rises steadily on both sides of the road.

Several hours later I hear Aref’s voice on the two-way.

‘We’re coming to Gardandiwal,’ he says. ‘I think we should stay here tonight. We won’t reach Bamiyan today.’

Gardandiwal sits at the crossroads of four mountain ranges and has the feeling of a primitive gold miners’ outpost from the nineteenth century. We install ourselves at a tiny mehman-khana beneath the clusters of mud-walled homes that sprawl up the hillside. At sunset we sit on the wooden veranda and the owner brings us kebabs and rice. The river that runs through the place is called the Helmand, says the owner of the place. It rises in the mountains to the north-east and flows all the way through the centre of the country, surrendering itself eventually to the deserts beyond Kandahar.

We move on shortly after dawn. The road begins to rise and the mountains to tighten around us. There’s no ongoing fighting in the area but the next day several pickup trucks with heavily armed men pass us in the opposite direction. They look battle-weary and well travelled, and their clothes and turbans and weapons are thick with dust. I wonder where they’ve come from and where they’ll end up. It seems likely they’re moving back to Kabul from the recent fighting in and around Yakawlang, avoiding the northern route via the Shomali plain, where Massoud’s forces are harassing their fellow fighters.

We are less than a hundred miles from the capital but we seem already to have moved back centuries. As we near the Hajigak Pass there’s a construction team hewing a new section of road from the mountainside, and there’s a long wait as we allow trucks coming the other away to squeeze past. There is no machinery. Just 500 men with pickaxes and spades, working at a furious pace, carving out and levelling the black rock. Watching them work, I have the feeling once again that we’re going back in time.

You can’t get this feeling from a map. The speed at which the influence of Kabul drops away is like a stone falling into a well.

‘Look,’ I say to H, pointing to the men hacking at the rock. ‘Afghan infrastructure.’

‘I can see why the Soviets failed here,’ he says. ‘If you invade a country you have to control the infrastructure. There isn’t one.’

H is right. Afghans depend on so little for their survival that there isn’t much for an invading army to control. The mechanisms by which a modern government influences its people simply don’t exist. Power, and its pursuit, is a fragmented and intensely local affair, and central government has never meant much to Afghans. The capital has never had significant influence in the countryside, except to take taxes or conscripts. Rural Afghanistan is made up of communities that depend on a close-knit structure of local rights designed to protect fragile resources. And since Afghans live from their land, their lives are bound up with the practical realities of survival, not abstract political or social goals. Fifty miles from the capital might as well be a different country. Five, even.

We pause at the top of the Hajigak Pass to admire the spectacular view. The men pray beside the cars. The engines smell hot. The peaks to the east and west of us soar to 15,000 feet, and the road behind and beyond us swoops down to loop between the intersecting spurs of the valleys. Then, from just below our line of sight, a man wearing a giant brown turban appears as if from out of the ground, flanked by a pair of grinning friends. The fact that he’s lost his right leg to a mine and must have ascended the pass on his crutches gives the sight a surreal quality. He stares at us with a mute grin, which reveals a wide gap where a tooth has been knocked out, and I marvel at his physical hardiness before giving him a few afghanis for his troubles, wondering how far he’ll have to go before he reaches home.

A long and winding descent leads us towards the Bamiyan valley. The surrounding geology seems to pass through every colour of the spectrum as we creep down, deepening to a purplish shade of red as we near the valley floor and turn west towards the site of the famous Buddhas. I catch glimpses of stairways and walls and ruined galleries in the cliffs above us and am reminded that Bamiyan was once a Buddhist state that resisted its Muslim overlords until well after their arrival in the seventh century. Its natural setting has always enchanted visitors. I don’t know if it’s because of the time of day, but the light seems particularly magical, and now that we’ve been released from the grasp of the mountains the valley seems a place of delicacy and charm, where slender poplars line the riverbanks and their pale leaves shimmer in the soft flame of the afternoon sun.

‘This place is stunning,’ says H. ‘I thought Afghanistan was all rocks and desert, but this is something else.’

Closer to the town, in the folds of reddish stone above us, we can make out the crumbling towers and ramparts of another long-abandoned fortified settlement. It’s Shahr-e Gholghola, the City of Lamentation, laid to waste, so the story goes, by Chengiz Khan himself in 1222.

But the town itself brings a different feeling. It’s strange to look at, because the last time I was here there was a thriving bazaar where there are now ruins. A whole section of the town has simply been annihilated. Its obvious there’s been heavy fighting and the majority of the local Hazara families have fled. They are still the underdogs of Afghan society. Their virtually autonomous kingdom was smashed by the nineteenth-century king Abdur Rahman, and the Pashtun tribes have treated them like slaves ever since. Their recent battles with the Taliban have been particularly fierce.

The radio crackles into life, and I hear Aref’s voice.

‘Taliban checkpoint ahead,’ he says. Then Momen grabs the radio from him.

‘Make sure your beard is long enough.’ He chuckles.

‘So long as it’s only my beard they want to measure,’ I say, because there are lots of jokes like this about the Taliban. Cackles of laughter erupt from both men.

‘Drive up slowly and stop,’ I say.

It’s time to introduce ourselves to the local Taliban commander. A black flag flutters from a small command post on a bluff above us, towards which Aref and Sher Del walk. They are met by two armed Talibs. They are not unfriendly, but have the tense look of people who know they don’t belong. A few others descend from the post and circle the cars but don’t quite dare to search them.

H and I get out, distribute some cigarettes to break the ice and ask if we can walk up to the Buddhas. The fighter standing next to me shrugs as if to ask why we’d want to bother but walks up with us. He leads us through a warren of steps and tunnels until we emerge above the hollow niches from which the giant statues have gazed for 1,500 years. From the top we can see a fantastic range of snow-covered peaks to the south. Closer to we can make out a red jeep racing towards our position, trailing a plume of dust.

‘That’ll be their commander,’ says H.

We meet him as we emerge from the dusty doorway at the foot of the niche. He’s unexpectedly friendly, intrigued to meet foreigners, and suggests we be his guests for the night, even though it’s obvious we have no choice in the matter. We follow him in the vehicles to a fortified compound, where we park inside the gates and unpack our things.

Whether as a courtesy or precaution, an armed Talib follows us everywhere. I suspect it’s a bit of both. We are all shown into a long room strewn with carpets, and the first of many glasses of tea is poured. As dusk falls, the room fills gradually with about thirty armed men.

‘It’s like a dinner party in Notting Hill,’ says H, as the men lay their AKs by their sides like napkins. The magazines of their weapons are doubled and taped together to give them twice the amount of ammunition without having to grope around for a fresh magazine.

The commander is a man of about thirty. We sit next to him as the meal is served. His manners are peculiarly modern, and I wonder whether he grew up in Pakistan. He has none of the formality or reserve of most Afghans I’ve met, and asks me directly about the work we’ve come to carry out. I tell him that even in England we’re concerned about helping Afghanistan with its mine problem. And because everything in Afghanistan is about establishing allegiances and invoking the names of powerful strangers, I make up a speech about the Queen, whose authority they can’t quite assess from this distance, and how keen she is to see peace and prosperity in Afghanistan, and emphasise how grateful she’ll be for the assistance we’re receiving here in Bamiyan.

‘We beat the British,’ he says cheerfully, ‘last time they came to Afghanistan.’

‘War was different then,’ I say, ‘and battles were fought man to man.’

‘Perhaps they will come back,’ he says with a smile, ‘and we can fight them again the same way.’

As darkness falls a fighter shows us to our room. We’ve been on the road only a couple of days but for some reason it feels like weeks. For a moment we wonder whether to position ourselves near the door or the window.

‘If they’re planning to kill you,’ I tell H, ‘the preferred method is to drop a rock on your head.’

‘With all those weapons they hardly need a rock.’

‘You forget how thrifty Afghans are. A rock will save them the expense of a bullet.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I hope it’s big enough. I’ve got quite a hard head.’

We leave the next morning, our heads intact. The commander has given us a handwritten letter of permission to travel as far as Yakawlang, but can’t guarantee much after that. I’m glad we’ve got the letter. There are several checkpoints as we head west, and at each we’re waved to a halt by a pair of fighters whose surly manner improves once our letter has been inspected and passed around. We’ve chosen the right combination of personalities for the lead vehicle. Sher Del is not only a Pashtun, but his white beard and confident manner give him an authority that no one will easily challenge. Aref plays the role of boffinish administrator to perfection, and between the two of them all suspicions are put to rest.

Beyond Bamiyan the high mountains draw apart, the cultivated plain broadens to a width of several miles, and the glittering braid of the river and its tall green poplars runs beside us. The lesser hills are bare and reddish, and against their starkness the valley and its carefully tended fields and borders once again seem all the more delicate.

We reach Yakawlang in the afternoon, refuel the vehicles and eat a meal of kebabs. The town has an unhappy air and looks as though it’s suffered from recent fighting, which a number of abandoned armoured vehicles confirm. We don’t want to linger, and drive south into the mountains towards Panjab. There’s almost no wheeled traffic, but we pass several families struggling on foot with their possessions piled onto donkeys, and a woman clutching a child begs us for money. The desperation in her expression is obvious and she claims the Taliban have forced her from her home. Her face and gestures haunt me like a presence as we drive further south along a deteriorating route, and our pace slows to a crawl. Several times we catch sight of trucks which have fallen from the road and tumbled into the ravines below.

As we near the Isharat Pass, the lead vehicle has its first puncture, and while Aref and Sher Del are changing the wheel, H and I get out to admire the spectacular scenery.

‘It’s not like anywhere I’ve ever seen,’ he says. ‘Every part of it’s different, like a different country. You could never win a war here.’

I ask him why not.

‘It’s the people. They belong too much. They’d never give it up.’

We’re looking over to the east where about thirty miles away the highest peaks of the Koh-e Baba range rear up from among the lesser summits in a magnificent glistening knot of ice. A purplish haze is settling over the landscape and after the relentless lurching of the route the silence is almost overwhelming. Quietly, H recites the lines of a poem.

‘We are the pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further: it may be

Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow

Across that angry or that glimmering sea

‘Regimental poem,’ he says as if emerging from a private trance. ‘Don’t know the rest.’ He looks back over the darkening mountains. ‘I’m glad I came. This is a special place.’

‘There’s some things I haven’t told you,’ I say.

‘That’s normal,’ he says. ‘There’s stuff I haven’t told you either.’

‘Like what?’

‘You killed a mate of mine, for one thing,’ he says after a pause.

The fact that this doesn’t make any sense to me does nothing to lessen the shock.

‘How? When?’

‘In Kuwait. The team that busted your Lebanese mate out. They were all Regiment blokes. You took out the team leader.’

For years I’ve never really understood why the man I killed hesitated when he was about to shoot me.

‘I didn’t know,’ I say.

‘You weren’t supposed to. It was a Special Projects op. We had the order to go in as an Israeli team. Weirdest thing is that it was going to be me leading it.’ He smiles. ‘You would have slotted me instead.’

‘I’m sorry about your friend.’

‘Kenny was his name. He was from up north, Glasgow, I think. Couldn’t understand a word he said half the time. I nearly killed him myself once on a hostage rescue practice. That’s the way it is.’ He brushes some dust from his arm. ‘Anyway, what aren’t you telling me?’

I wonder how much I should say, but the power of the land has stripped us of our secrets now, and there seems no purpose in hiding anything from him any longer. So I tell him what I can, because I cannot tell him everything, right up to my meeting with Manny in Kabul, and about the plan that we made together in the ruins of the Darul Aman Palace.

At dusk we stop in a tiny settlement and the five of us sleep on the floor of a small room in our sleeping bags. In the morning the old man who provided our accommodation brings a bundle wrapped in newspaper and says he wants to show us something very old. He unwraps a dozen small yellowish figurines that do indeed look very old, and tells us they come from somewhere nearby and that they date from the time of the Younan, the Greeks. The faces are carved from some sort of bone or tusk and portray a series of men with staring eyes and long moustaches wearing crowns or ornate headbands. They look more like the faces of the Lewis chessmen than anything from this part of the world, and it’s impossible not to wonder what uncharted portion of the region’s history they really belong to. Then he shows us an enigmatic oval-shaped stone medallion depicting a soldier with a lance, wearing a kilt-like skirt and sandals with long leather straps like a centurion’s. The script resembles nothing I’ve even seen.

We skirt north of Panjab the next morning and begin the slow and winding route towards the south-west that will take us out of Bamiyan province and into Oruzgan. It takes us five days. The landscape seems ever more wild and beautiful and untouched by the world beyond. An entire day is spent losing and refinding the correct route, driving into valleys where the track ends at the foot of a mountain or dissolves into a rock-strewn wilderness. Aref surprises me by remembering that he has some old maps in the pickup, and produces them the next morning. They’re 1:200K Soviet military maps from the 1980s, and they’re far better than the ones we’ve got. It takes a little longer to transliterate the place names, which are printed in Cyrillic script, into English and then into Persian, but they’re extraordinarily detailed.

The problem is that the locals we ask have no idea of the names of villages only a few miles distant and give us contradictory directions because they’ve never driven there and travel on paths where we can’t. To the villagers we are like aliens from a distant planet, and whenever we stop we are endlessly questioned as to where we come from by men who are barely aware that there’s even a war going on.

In one village we are sung to by a melancholy blind man who predicts that our journey will end in fire. In another we meet a man with a dancing bear, and are shown the grave of a teenage boy whose body is said to have remained intact and undecayed more than three years after his death. At another we give a lift to an old man with a club foot and a fat-tailed sheep from one end of the valley to another. By the time we are a day’s drive away from the fort, it’s our own mission that seems unreal, and the strangeness of our surroundings that has become real.

When we reach Sarnay, beyond a spectacular final pass that crests between two 13,000-foot peaks, it’s as if we’ve broken free of the grasp of the mountains. There are still some high peaks beyond us, but nothing over 10,000 feet, and the route we’re planning to follow stays on the valley floor from now on. But in the mehman-khana where we settle for the evening there’s news from an unexpected quarter.

There’s a wiry jovial old man staying in the place, who’s walked with his donkey from a village about ten miles away called Daymalek. He sits among us as the owner of the place lights several oil lanterns and puts them on the floor near us, and tells the story of how he used to smuggle weapons on his donkey past a Soviet checkpoint in the days of the jihad.

‘He’s a big smuggler,’ Aref jokes with him, ‘famous across Afghanistan.’

The old man wheezes with delight.

‘What are you smuggling these days, Hajji?’ asks Sher Del teasingly. ‘Come on, we won’t tell.’

‘Donkeys!’ exclaims the old man, and a ripple of laughter spreads through the room. ‘Right under the noses of those cursed Arabs!’ He chuckles.

But at this we all fall silent, and the old man looks at our faces wondering what it is he’s said.

‘Hajji,’ says Aref, ‘there are no Arabs around here.’

‘Wallah,’ he says. ‘By God there are. Where the roads meet between Sharow and Dasht, not half a day’s walk from here. A cultureless people,’ he adds dismissively. ‘I’ve heard Arabic, and I know what it sounds like. They’re Arabs alright. They dress wrong too.’

And suddenly we all know it’s time to revise our plan because this means there’s an al-Qaeda checkpoint further down the valley.

In the morning when we’re alone, we gather over the maps. There’s no other way out of the valley except through the checkpoint, but we’re all agreed that if there really are al-Qaeda there, they won’t take kindly to the presence of foreigners.

We all move cautiously down the valley later in the morning, but when we’re beyond the village called Dasht, H and I climb a ridge that will give us enough height to OP the checkpoint. We keep our ascent hidden and stay below the skyline, settling after a half-hour climb between some boulders from which there’s a clear view of the valley floor.

H takes out the Kite sight and positions it carefully so that it’s shielded from the sun. He puts it to his eye and adjusts the focusing ring on the eyepiece.

‘Definitely a checkpoint,’ says H. ‘PK on the roof. Generator out the back. And it looks like they’ve got comms. Have a look at that antenna. We don’t want to get involved with them.’ He hands me the Kite. ‘What do you make of those blokes outside the building where the jeep’s parked?’

I put the sight to my eye and the world shoots forward, shimmering in the heat haze. They’re half a mile away but I can clearly make out a man leaning against the wall with one foot propped behind him. His hand rises and falls as he puts a cigarette to his mouth. Another man is talking to him, then turns and enters the building. As he turns I can see he’s wearing bulky webbing across his chest. They both have AKs over their shoulders. What distinguishes them from the others around them is that instead of the traditional shalwar kameez, they’re wearing desert combat trousers and nothing on their heads, which is almost unthinkable for an Afghan. And though it’s harder to define, they don’t move like Afghans either. I share these observations with H.

‘Time for a meeting,’ he says. He covers the end of the Kite before packing it away, then sinks down and away from the skyline.

The others are waiting for us below, where we agree on a plan. H and I, accompanied by Momen, will move on foot to the neighbouring valley to the north, cross the Kadj river, and rejoin the others at a village called Garendj. We’ll take the Kite and one of the radios, and wear the Brownings against our bodies. I’ll carry Mr Raouf’s AK-SU so that in the event of a search the others won’t be incriminated. And before we move we’ll watch the others from the ridge above as they negotiate the checkpoint, and wait until they’ve passed safely through.

‘Your equipment will be ruined if you have to cross the river,’ protests Sher Del.

‘Tell him not to worry about that,’ says H. ‘And don’t use the radio,’ he says to Aref. ‘Keep it switched on in your pocket and press transmit three times if there’s an emergency.’

Aref nods.

‘What will we do if there is an emergency?’ I ask H.

‘We’ll emerge,’ he says, throwing me one of his dark looks, so I leave it at that. Then we gather the things we need from the G and pack them into his Bergen.

Like everything else, it takes longer than anticipated. From the ridge we watch as the vehicles reach the checkpoint and are waved to a halt by one of the Taliban guards. Another Talib comes out of the nearby building, and reads what we assume is the permission given to us back in Bamiyan. Aref gets out of the pickup, and is joined by Sher Del, who’s driving the G. The Talibs circle the vehicles like hyenas around their prey.

It’s an exasperating sight. Another Talib is observing the proceedings from the roof of the building. Then they all disappear inside for fifteen minutes, until Aref returns to the pickup to retrieve some documents. One of the foreign fighters we’ve seen earlier is with him, and seems to be asking a lot of questions.

Momen, who is so surprised by the power of the Kite sight he can’t take his eyes off it, agrees that the men we’ve seen aren’t Afghans. We take turns watching the checkpoint for about half an hour, sharing our observations. Occasionally one of our team comes out, smokes a cigarette conspicuously as a signal to us that things haven’t got too bad, then heads back inside to join what is obviously a protracted discussion.

‘Maybe,’ says Momen, with characteristic mischief, ‘those Taliban are lonely, and they want to make new friends.’

More than an hour passes, but eventually the men leave the building and return to the vehicles. H is watching as one of the Talibs gets into the passenger seat of the pickup.

‘Bollocks,’ he hisses. ‘Things have just got more complicated. They’ve given us an escort. Time to move.’

We leave the ridge, ascend the slope on the far side of the valley and make our way down again along a wide ravine towards the floor of the neighbouring valley, keeping enough height to be able to scan the villages on the far side of the river. There are clusters of low adobe buildings at intervals along the length of the far bank, but we’ve no way of knowing the exact position of the village where we’ve agreed to meet the others. All we can do is get as close to it as we can determine from the map and wait for nightfall.

It’s a huge relief when, on the far side of the river about a third of a mile away, we spot the signal we’ve been hoping for. It’s the satphone, blinking in infrared mode, which I’ve fixed to the roof pouch inside the G-Wagen. Through the Kite sight it’s as distinct as a parachute flare but invisible to the naked eye.

At our chosen point by the water’s edge H lays all our kit carefully in the centre of the tarpaulin we’ve brought, to which we add our folded clothes after stripping to our underwear. Around everything he lays brushwood for flotation and then rolls the tarpaulin over the contents and ties the ends of the bundle tightly with two lengths of paracord. Then he folds the ends over the centre and ties them again. Finally he cuts two short lengths from the black climbing rope, ties a triple bowline at the end of each, and steps into the loops he’s tied.

‘Second man ties on with the kit using this,’ he says, clipping a small karabiner onto the improvised slings he’s made for me and Momen. ‘Last man ties on to the far end.’ He loosens the remaining coils and passes me the rope. ‘Pay out and try not to let go. I’ll signal you from the far side.’ He screws a red filter over the head of a small torch. ‘Give me time to get opposite you.’ He waves the torch. ‘Side to side for OK and up and down if there’s a problem and you need to wait.’

Momen and I watch as he steps into the whispering black water and looks back at us.

‘I bloody hate cold water,’ he says, and there’s just enough light for me to make out the grimace on his face. Then he pushes off and quickly disappears from sight. There’s a steady tug on the rope from the current as he swims across, tracing a diagonal twice the width of the river as he’s carried downstream. I’m peering along the length of the rope, trying to picture how far he’s gone, but the pull on the rope is steady and I can’t tell where he’s ended up.

It’s Momen who sees the signal first on the far side opposite us. It looks like a cigarette glowing in the distance, and it’s waving side to side. Momen ties on, and we loop the bundle that H has made onto the rope.

‘Boro bekheir,’ I say. Go well. And then he too disappears into the blackness.

When I see the red glow of the torch for the second time, I detach the rope from the boulder we’ve secured it to and step into the flow. It’s unpleasantly cold and I hear myself swearing inventively. Then all thoughts fade as I swim as hard as I can, feeling glad of the tension on the rope as the others pull me across from the far side. I’m trembling violently when in the darkness I’m suddenly aware of hands pulling me onto the bank. We hurriedly unpack our kit and retrieve our clothes. Everything is perfectly dry.

It sounds straightforward. You need to leave a vehicle, let it go through a checkpoint and rejoin it the other side. But several factors make this apparently simple scenario more problematic than it sounds. It’s dark and you’re cold. You’ve got cuts and bruises on your body which demand attention you can’t give them. You don’t know the terrain. Your vehicle now has an armed and potentially hostile escort, and your sole human link with safety can only communicate with you in secret, via a two-way radio that he can’t use. Your friends also appear to be lying up in a small settlement nearby, where there are other civilians, so you can’t simply charge in because word of your presence will reach the wrong people far too soon for your purposes. So you will have to somehow deal with the armed escort, and do so in such a way as to not be observed. But you don’t know which building to enter, because you don’t know where anyone is. You are not in a film, where such things are achieved without hesitation or doubt, and unfold with magical ease. You are instead cold, frustrated, tired, hungry and you have no choice but to wait and watch, and perhaps pray, hoping it doesn’t get any colder.

By late morning the following day, I have my first insight into what it must feel like to belong to a criminal gang or team of kidnappers. There is something powerfully attractive to it. In the back of the G, somewhat resembling a nodding dog on the back shelf of a car only with an Afghan scarf tied over his head, the Talib escort has become our reluctant passenger.

We owe our success in part to Aref, who as night falls leaves the room where they’re all gathered on the pretext of paying a visit to the outdoor privy, from where he contacts us in a whisper on the two-way radio. They’re staying at a primitive mehman-khana with several others travellers, and there’s nothing to be done until the morning when they all leave.

So we wait for the dawn, taking two-hour stretches on watch in a dried-up irrigation ditch which, if cold, is surprisingly comfortable. It’s the nearest we can get to the vehicles, which are several hundred yards away, without breaking cover. In the early morning we all hear the triple burst of static on the radio as Aref attempts to alert us. A few moments later we hear the urgency in the near-whisper of his voice.

‘Come now,’ he says.

We’re about thirty yards from the vehicles when the others emerge from a nearby building. Momen waves to them. Aref and Sher Del wave back as if they’ve seen an old friend. The Talib escort turns in our direction as we walk up, and we see the look of uncertainty come across his face as we approach, but he makes no move for his weapon. He’s in his early twenties. The tail of his black turban hangs over his left shoulder. The look of uncertainty turns to confusion as H cocks his Browning and lines it up on the Talib in a swift and unambiguous motion. I follow up with Mr Raouf’s AK-74, and all that remains is for Sher Del to lift the victim’s weapon from his shoulder and put it on his own, and then for H to tie a scarf around his bewildered features.

‘We don’t want him doing much sightseeing,’ he says as he tightens the knot. ‘He can come in the G with us. That way he doesn’t get to overhear anything except my bad English.’

We have a certain sympathy for our extra passenger, at whose expense we’re unable to resist a few jokes.

‘Do you think he’s got a mobile? Ask him to call his girlfriend so she can come and pick him up later,’ says H.

‘He says he hasn’t got a girlfriend. But he’s got a nice-looking donkey who he misses a lot.’ And so on, because for the time being we have the advantage.

A single range of mountains separates us from our objective. In a straight line we are a little more than fifteen miles from the fort, but there’s no way to cross the range with vehicles, so we’re forced to take a route that is three times the distance and loops north and then south again around the mountains. It takes all day and half the following day. A few miles from the target we pass through a small settlement called Kadjran, where we stop to buy a few supplies. We don’t stay long, because we don’t want to be noticed, and camp out in a high deserted fold of the hills, where the GPS tells us we’re only half a mile away from the fort.

As darkness falls we take the scarf from the Talib’s head and, this being Afghanistan, allow him to eat with us because there are courtesies to be observed. Then we tie his hands again, and return him to the metal bed of the pickup with a blanket.

The colour of the sky turns imperceptibly from turquoise to an ever-deeper purple, and we see the first stars appear. Above us, silhouetted against the sky like a primeval saw blade, lies the ridge to which we’ll walk in the morning, and from which we’ll have a view, at long last, of the place we’ve come so far to see.