Rough and ready, but smart, the medic thought. The idea was to create a quantum of mud in the gun barrel, maybe in the Place where the shooting mechanism worked. Removing the mechanism or a part of it, as the bolt, the result would have been just to disable the weapon. But doing that way, the weapon could become a small booby trap. All was in order except the barrel, but it was hard to see it from outside. And when someone tried to shoot with the weapon, it jammed, in the best case. In the worst, it could blast in his face.
"Do you think it will work?".
It this rifle was made in Russia, surely not but it's too rough. It must be done in some Pakistani workshop. A few thousand of bullets shot, and you can throw it in the dirt. To jam this stuff, that should be enough. If not... What is written is written!"
"Yeah... " the medic snorted. The soldiers looked at the corpses.
"Do you think you have to bury them?" he asked.
The medic thought about it. Even if they buried them, the graves would have been noticed, even if unmarked. But maybe the soldiers did not think just to cancel the traces of their passage. He looked at him.
"Do you think they would have buried us?" he asked.
"I think no... " the soldier said.
And we don't have shovels, however, the medic thought.
Ahmad Dekhtah saw the caravan in the distance. He knew it was a caravan, there were mostly man, merchants with their mules loaded with stuff to sell somewhere in Pakistan, But when he saw people on the road he always recalled the convoys of refugees going to Pakistan he have seen close to his town, Ghazny, at the beginning of the war. It was for those convoys, and for the politics which had caused them, that he had joined the rebels. Not for the Russian intervention "per se". If Russians had just killed a Communist, pro-Chinese leader to replace him with a Communist, pro-Russian leader, he likely would have not cared a bit. The pro-Chinese leader had done nothing to become popular: all the other way. He was more dogmatic that all the former leaders who had ruled the country after the fall of the monarchy, and this had divided the country more than ever, between "seculars" and religious people.
But the Russians did not limit their actions to that. Since the countryside, dominated by the Islamic clergy since a lot of time before the invasion, was hostile to the secular, "blasphemous" central government, which had struck the economic interests of the clergy with its agrarian reform, the Russians preferred that those bigot peasants went away, up to Pakistan, instead of occupying the countryside or trying to find a common language with them, though this would have been not easy at all. No people, no problem, they had thought. But this had caused many people's deaths, and, on the other hands, they had just moved the problem, without solving it. Yes, the countryside became emptier than it already was, but the opposition of those displaced people, even more influenced by the Muslim radicals, had shown an unexpected resilience. And many other people, from the cities, had chosen to oppose the Government and the Russians. And he was one of them.
When he and his men met the caravan he saw that among those merchants there were refugees too. A car with a family inside. It had been to be hard to find a car and the fuel to move it, but the woman had no alternatives, if she wanted to have a chance to get to Pakistan with his man and his son: the man could surely not travel on his own or on a mule, with his wound. She was trying to get to some relatives. They have nothing anymore, in Afghanistan.
The medic of the Ahmad's group checked the wound of the man in the back seats of the car. He was surprised to see that the bandages had been changed recently, and clearly by a professional, though partly with makeshift resources, the sleeves of a shirt. The wound was quite clean too, considering the circumstances: not yet infected. The woman told Ahmad that another medic, accompanied by a dumb Nuristani boy, had visited his husband, without asking anything for his work. Good person, may Allah reward him, she said.
Ahmad told his group to give the woman all the food and the medicaments they could, then they moved away. A medic and a Nuristani boy... yes, that was them. The Nuristani was the Russian: Nuristani because blond... Yes, that medic was smart, he knew the country... And he was even a man as it takes, a real medic: he had healed the wounded man as good as he could. Even if this meant to leave a trace behind him. A man of good conscience. It was not pleasant to think that he had to kill him too.
But the medic and the Russian were going north, and even Ahad and his group were going north. And there was a war. And the medic had chosen whose side to be on.
And Ahmad and his group were traveling in a pickup.
The medic and the Russian were going by feet...
