The First Stone Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE FIRST STONE

  “A tour de force, composed of the stuff war classics are made of.”

  —Berlingske

  “Gripping, and its horror takes hold of the reader, but by the end there is no avoiding taking a stand . . . difficult to leave behind.”

  —Jyllands-Posten

  “Sets a new standard for political thrillers. A masterpiece.”

  —Deutschlandfunk Kultur

  “The connections between the intimate and the political, between the personal and the sweeping narrative, are evoked with a force and precision reminiscent of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.”

  —Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire

  “Carsten Jensen demonstrates what a brilliant storyteller he is.”

  —Dagens Nyheter

  ALSO BY CARSTEN JENSEN

  We, the Drowned

  I Have Seen the World Begin: Travels through China, Cambodia, and Vietnam

  Earth in the Mouth

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Carsten Jensen and Gyldendal

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Mark Mussari

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Den første sten by Gyldendal in Denmark in 2015. Translated from Danish by Mark Mussari. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2019.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542044394 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542044391 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542044387 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542044383 (paperback)

  Cover design by David Drummond

  First edition

  I met Shah Wali in a mujahedeen camp in the Arghistan valley in 1988 while the Russians were still in Afghanistan. I noticed him because his childlike face was constantly twitching, like that of someone much older who has suffered repeated trauma. The mujahedeen told me that Shah Wali was a trained assassin. Though only twelve years old, he had already killed six people. This book is dedicated to Shah Wali and to all the others whose lives have been stolen by a war that has no end.

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Map

  Prologue

  Part 1 THIRD PLATOON

  WHITE ZONE

  1

  YELLOW ZONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

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  29

  RED ZONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

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  17

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  GRAY ZONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Part 2 KHAIBER

  BLACK ZONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

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  19

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  23

  24

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  58

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Manuel began to realize that to make war successfully you must riddle the living flesh with fragments of steel.

  —André Malraux, Man’s Hope

  Prologue

  I walk among graves, both full and empty. Who checks the contents of the coffins? Who monitors the inscriptions on the gravestones? Who were they when they were alive? Who are they when they die?

  Part 1

  THIRD PLATOON

  WHITE ZONE

  1

  The faded August sky feels flat like a ceiling. They can’t see the desert on the other side of the walls, but they know it’s there, infinite in a way they can’t imagine. Their job is to search for the enemy while the enemy searches for them. A game of hide-and-seek waits out there in the emptiness.

  There’s no conveyor belt to carry them off to their destinies, no incessantly rumbling thunder warning of the front’s proximity, no loud pounding rhythm that will devour them. In four months they’ll be on leave, and in six they’ll be free again. This war is merely one episode in their lives.

  The platoon leader stares at his men. “You chose to come here. Nobody forced you. Don’t forget that. You’re here voluntarily. One day that choice will become either a badge of honor or of shame.”

  There is noise, but it’s coming from their own side. Rumbling in the air indicates a large airport nearby, transport flights landing and taking off, gravel swirling up from helicopter propellers, fighter jets roaring off the runway. This war seems to be all comings and goings—and no place at all.

  “You can’t decide whether or not you’re going to sweat,” says the platoon leader. “Just like you can’t choose whether you’ll be constipated or have the runs. Your body is like a car with no steering wheel. There’s no gear stick, clutch, brakes, or gas pedal. You’re passengers in a vehicle you have no control over.”

  Rasmus Schrøder has brilliant-blue eyes that, up close, reveal a darker shade, marine blue or maybe even purple. His flaming-red lips curve in a perfect Cupid’s
bow, marred only by a small scar. He hasn’t shaved this morning. Like many of the others, he’s planning to grow a full beard, as if the desert dictates that they should all look like the enemy they have such trouble locating.

  He calls Denmark the White Zone: a place where hearts beat in lazy, measured harmony, sixty to eighty times a minute, where life is lived half asleep, satisfied and defenseless. You face an armed man and beg for your life instead of smashing his larynx. The White Zone is for sheep.

  They’ve left one continent and flown halfway across another. Mountains, deserts, rivers, and lakes. Dots in the wasteland indicate the presence of a village. Denmark could hide in the fold between two mountain chains. They weren’t sure just when they left the airspace over Iran and crossed the border into Afghanistan. What’s a border seen from ten kilometers above?

  “You’re soldiers. You belong in the Yellow Zone, where your hearts beat a hundred times a minute. The zone of vigilance. In the Red Zone, you’re fighting for your lives. In the Gray Zone, your back is up against the wall.” Schrøder always pauses here. “Panic waits in the Black Zone. When you want to say you can’t take anymore, it’s not because you’re close to breaking down. It’s only because it’s hard. When you can taste blood and hear your heart pounding in your ears—that’s when you’ll know you’re finished.”

  Camp Bastion stretches out in all directions. Gravel roads meet at right angles and then continue on until the next right-angled intersection. There are barracks, containers, and tents, all the same color as the gravel. In the distance are HESCO walls, bales of gravel held together by felt and galvanized steel netting. Quick to erect and quick to tear down. Nothing catches or excites the eye. The air trembles in the heat, a portent of impending mirages.

  Third Platoon gets ready to move out into the desert and head to Camp Price. Their flak jackets, rifles, and gear bags hang on them with a weight they never fully felt during basic training.

  Now it’s serious, they think. Hopefully, they’re listening to the beating of their hearts.

  YELLOW ZONE

  1

  Hannah has on a military-green tank top; nearly everyone else in Third Platoon is naked from the waist up. Back in Denmark, they spent all summer working on their tans, so the white-hot Helmand sun doesn’t bother them. Some are covered in tattoos. Others still have blank backs, torsos, and arms waiting to be filled with crosses, the Danish flag, skulls and crossbones, or declarations of love for solidarity and other abstract notions, usually rendered in swirly Latin script. They’re a gallery on the march, canvases waiting for a brush.

  They’re all winners. That’s how they think of themselves—not because they expect to win a war that’s already lasted so many years. They’re winners because they’ve made it this far. They survived basic training. They’re good enough. The losers are the ones who gave up along the way, either because they lacked the stamina or didn’t understand the meaning of discipline. Maybe they could handle an automatic rifle, but that’s not enough when you don’t understand that you’re responsible for the man next to you.

  Third Platoon left Camp Bastion behind and has acclimated to their new camp, Forward Operating Base Price, named—like so many other bases—after a dead soldier. Between its tents and containers, Camp Price can house five hundred: three hundred and fifty are Danes and the rest are Brits. A squad of American Special Forces is ensconced behind an enclosure in the middle of camp. Sometimes they show up at the mess tent, but no one is allowed into mini-America—except the observation tower rising above the Special Forces’ tents and overlooking the distant mountain chains. Instead of barracks, as in Camp Bastion, there are spacious dark-brown tents equipped with air-conditioning and interconnected by black plastic grids laid out as paths in the gravel.

  They’ve been on their first patrols, but not into battle. The landscape is monotonous, except along the riverbanks of the densely populated Green Zone: the battlefield with its enclosed farms, cornfields, and windbreaks, and a labyrinth of mud walls rife with possibilities for ambush. Flares counterpoint the Iron Age architecture, and the sound of gunfire punctuates the goats’ bleating and the children’s cries. They’ve grown accustomed to it. The noise of war is a sign of life.

  When they’re out on patrol, they keep to the middle of Highway 1. All traffic pulls over to the side of the road and stops—or else flares are fired as warning shots. The armored personnel carriers rumble between two rows of stopped vehicles. Fear of car and roadside bombs determines their behavior.

  “We couldn’t force the traffic to stop in Iraq,” says Robert, one of the platoon’s three sergeants. He spent time in Iraq, not in the sandboxes to the south, Camp Eden or Camp Danevang, but employed in an American security firm in Baghdad. Bodyguard, escort, transport—that kind of work. The firm was called DarkSky. None of them has ever heard of it. “Contractor,” he calls himself.

  “Mercenary,” says Schrøder.

  In Iraq they drove their silvery Mitsubishi Pajeros in the left passing lane. Because attacks always came from behind, making drivers vulnerable, attackers would be forced over to the passenger side while a machine gunner sat ready to fire from the open hatchback.

  “Human shields,” says Robert, who is soon christened Iraq Robert. He speaks with the voice of experience. “Everyone uses human shields. And so did we. Whenever we’d near an intersection where we knew there might be an ambush or a roadside bomb, we’d wave the traffic ahead. Cars loaded with families, women, children—the whole nine yards. That way they could face the music. Standard procedure. That’s what survival means. Be a bastard or die.”

  There would be something hard about Robert’s face if not for a slightly squinting, unfocused look that lends him a vulnerable expression. When he concentrates, his squinting becomes more pronounced. “At least I’m an honest bastard.” He strokes the stiff stubble on his chin.

  “We don’t do that kind of thing here,” responds Schrøder the first time he hears Robert pontificate about the war in Iraq.

  “I know,” replies Robert. “Afghanistan is the good war.”

  They can’t get used to the people moving around the landscape. Heavy faces with prominent noses and a surfeit of beards, deep-set eyes that seem to both ignore and judge them at the same time. Flowing clothes, turbans, kirtles, shawls, broad pants, all in swaths of fabric that both hide their wearers and impart a certain gravity, as if they’ve grown right out of the landscape, just like their crops. They think the garment is called a “dish-dash”—but that’s the Saudi Arabian ankle-length robe. Schrøder corrects them: “Shalwar kameez.” There’s no Danish word for the fortified Afghan farms, so they use the English “compounds.” “Qalat,” says Schrøder, who’s also the language officer and speaks Pashto. “It’s called a qalat.” Two other important words are “badal” (revenge) and “nang” (honor). Will the soldiers ever learn them?

  The Afghans seem biblical to them, like survivors from another age, possessed of a stubbornness that’s difficult to distinguish from hostility. The fact that they’re sitting behind the steering wheel in some battered Toyota Corolla or lifting a cell phone to their ear makes them no less strange. The Danes share a smoke with them. They’ve been given a phrase book with a hundred words and phrases: How are you? I’m fine. Do you have any weapons? Open the trunk. Hands up. Lie flat on your stomach. Surrender.

  The Brits call the Taliban “ragheads” or “shitheads.” The Danes say “towelheads” or “Tali-bob.” Troops call the locals “LN,” an abbreviation for “Local Nationals.” The Afghans call the soldiers “ferengi,” which means “those from the West.” The soldiers never speak to an Afghan without feeling the weight of their automatic rifle in their hand. Still, no one in the platoon has any confirmed kills.

  “Schrøder, tell us the truth. Why are you really here?”

  Jakob’s tone is playful. It’s not really the way one talks to his superiors. But the soldiers have become close in the course of their eight months of training, and they th
ink they know everything about their platoon leader. He’s had a career in the army that—though not totally by the book—still doesn’t deviate drastically. He was in Afghanistan with an earlier squad, but they’re mostly curious about his job in civilian life.

  At nineteen, Jakob is the platoon’s youngest. The others tease him constantly about his age. Jakob says whatever he’s thinking, and his curiosity is boundless. He has red hair and freckles across his nose. He’s the only man wearing a shirt while sitting in the sun, which is still strong even though it’s September. Most of them have added an extra layer of tan to the summer’s sunburn, but milky-white Jakob is still burned on his neck and arms. His face hides in shadow beneath a bright-red baseball cap.

  “Did they fire you? Were you stealing from the till?” Jakob won’t stop teasing Schrøder.

  “I’m here to make a difference.” There’s just enough irony in Schrøder’s voice to indicate that they shouldn’t take his answer too seriously.

  “We don’t believe it.” Michael, in his twenties and five years older than Jakob, is a sharpshooter and a kind of big brother to him. He always comes to Jakob’s defense and sees to it that the teasing doesn’t escalate. He grins encouragingly at Jakob, who’s sitting on a chair with his rifle in his lap. They’re preparing their equipment. Michael’s right shoulder is covered by a leopard baring its teeth. “In Omnia Paratus” is written below it. “Ready for everything.”

  “Okay,” says Schrøder. “To get my hands dirty. Accomplish something. That’s why I’m here.” He hesitates for a moment. “Inspiration.”

  As a civilian, Schrøder worked in the gaming industry and helped to design several well-known video games. Most involved skinhead assassins with codes tattooed on their exposed necks and faces with about as much expression as a thumb. That’s made him the most popular subject among the platoon’s men. They’ve discussed it repeatedly. “If you were Schrøder, would you swap that life for this one here? Think about it. Sitting in front of a screen and playing the coolest video games all day long—and getting paid for it, too.”

  Still, the discussion always ends the same way: reluctantly admitting that, yes, they would trade places. Of course, they have no idea what it means to be Schrøder, but they know what it means to be here. Right now they’re bored, but something’s bound to happen. Jakob can sense it when he holds his rifle in his hands. It isn’t a joystick he’s fiddling with. This is the real thing.