Homeward Bound

The medic was the first who woke up that morning. The soldier was still sleeping, and he decided not to disturb him. No breakfast, as the day before. The food was too scarce. Maybe that guy could run away with the food. Maybe after having cut his throat... No, he was not that kind of man, able to kill someone who had saved his neck. And on the other hand, the soldier had seen the way the medic could solve the situations, with "chutzpah", without shouting. And if there was to shoot, then two shooters are better than one. So, there was no problem...

When the soldiers woke up, the medic was ripping straws and little boughs from the ground and the groves and the trees all around. When he saw that the soldier was looking at him, he showed him some boughs in his hand.

"You better collect some of this stuff. They can be useful."

"Why?"

"These two nights we have slept like children, and no one has bothered us, but it can go the other way. There can be guerrilla men, deserters and bandits around here. Especially at night. We better sleep in shifts."

"And what we will do with those straws and boughs?"

"We will throw them all around. If someone puts his feet on them, it will be easier to hear him coming in."

"Do you think it will be enough?" the soldier said, with skepticism. And he was quite right.

"It's a way to have one more chance. If not, what is written is written... As those guys say," he nodded around.

"Yeah... " the soldier said, starting to strip bough. Better one more chance than nothing. "Hey... Did you know some of ours who accepted to fight... with those guys?"

"Well... just one, in this zone. As far as I know."

"And what has become of him?"

"He died. In action. And really not so well... " the medic said. The soldier stopped and stared at him.

"Not so well?"

The medic snorted, and pointed his finger to his own underbelly, looking at the soldiers. It was not so necessary to say that the poor sod was crying as a butchered beast. The soldier could get the picture by himself. In fact, he got it, and his face became very expressive.

"What is written is written, right?" he said. The medic nodded.

"Yeah... " he said. And started picking straws and boughs again.

He never liked that dude. He was too sure to be cunning, changing the flag...

After some hours of walking, they met two armed men. The medic started to play his role, and even the soldier did his best playing the dumb again. The two men seemed to buy the story at face value, as the caravan the day before. But the medic was not sure. He tell them farewell and turn his back to them, pretending to look at the map with the "dumb", but he heard no steps going away.

That was a problem. Maybe they were too much smart and knew the "dumb" was a Russian. Or maybe they didn't give a damn about the war, and were just private entrepreneurs, caring their own interests. The medic was a Westerner, and West meant dollars...

"When I say "turn", turn on your right hand side and shoot like hell," he mumbled. Then started walking away, with the "dumb" on his right-hand side. Almost immediately, he heard the metal noise of the fire selectors of two AK47 pulled out from the position of safety... "TURN!"

It was the last word the two Afghans heard, and maybe they died because they wonder what that meant...

The medic and the soldiers kept frozen for almost a minute, their weapon aimed where the Afghan were, before to fall down dead. The medic was stunned and half deafened: an AK47 and a gun put together make a lot of noise. 40 bullets shot in a few seconds, one more, one less. If the things were gone otherwise, they would be their LAST few seconds. That's why the medic had shot. Even if now he did not believe he did it. But he did. He threw the gun away. Heck: he DID it...

"Here we are!" the soldier said. "Two "kalash", some mags, and some almost-fresh food!"

The medic looked at him. He was not exalted by the killing, but quite at ease, even happy. As a setter with a porridge in his mouth. That was his element. His turf.

The medic nodded. it was war. If you have to shoot, then shoot. And goddamn, there WAS to shoot at... That guy had done the right thing. And he too...

"Look, if they have something more with them... " he said, with a strange voice. The soldier noted it, and looked at him quite worried. "They could have other things, money, who knows... and they don't need them anymore. We do... "

The soldier tilted his head with a slight smile of superiority, then did what the medic had said. Welcome, o brother, in the holy congregation of the manslaughters. That was what that smile said. But before to inspect the two corpses, he took the gun from the ground and gave it back to the medic.

"You have another mag for this," he said. With a friendly smile.

The two unlucky would-be robbers had not so much more on themselves. Some money, some bumpers, some documents, some magazines, nothing else. Some banknotes, as some tats, were tainted with blood, and so, useless. Too many questions to answer, if they tried to use it for buying something. The man threw away the tainted "nan". The banknotes were always paper. They could be handy for other purposes. Then he looked around. There was nothing more to do, there.

"Well... let's go... "

"Walt!" the soldiers said. He put away the magazine from the rifle he judged more run down, took a banknote, put it on the ground, swept a bit of road dust it with his hand, then let the dust slip from the banknote down by the barrel of the gun, and poured some water in it, letting just a thin thread of water drip from the bumper down the barrel.

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...