The First Stone Page 11

  Hannah has never thought of their platoon leader as a man she might be attracted to: she has only thought of him as an officer. A chasm exists between them—and that’s just fine. Boundaries are clear in an army. War is chaos, but the army is order. Something simply happens when you’ve fought together. In CrossFit, you scream out your anger, your frustration, your pain—you surf on a wave of adrenaline created by you. In a way, war is just the same, but the wave is bigger and the forces you mobilize come from somewhere deeper within you.

  Even totally exhausted, she can lie down on her cot and feel overcome by a desperate passion. She might be thinking of her dead comrades when suddenly her overwhelming sorrow turns into an equally powerful desire to be taken by some heavy, living body. All of her, right down to her last thought, concentrates at that moment in her pussy, waiting to explode. When she touches herself, she knows that the orgasm is nothing more than a time-out. It’s going to take more than a spasm in her pussy.

  I’m at war. I don’t have time to think about sex. That’s what most people think, as if the urge to fuck stems from surplus energy. Nonsense. In war, you’re always ready to die or take a life—and when you live on the edge, sex is never far away. Sex and violence and death are all part of the same merciless desire.

  After the workout, she lay in the gravel, and that was how she felt when she looked up at Schrøder while listening to his stirring speech.

  She wasn’t thinking: I want him! No, she was thinking: He has to take me!

  He’s your platoon leader, a voice inside her admonished. He’s your officer.

  So what, her entire body answered.

  The APC rumbles off into the rutted tracks on the last stretch from Highway 1 into camp. There isn’t much room in the open hatch, so she and Schrøder keep bumping into each other. Hannah lets her body sway loosely to the truck’s movements, causing her hip to brush against his. Not once, but often. Schrøder looks at her. She looks at him. What are his eyes saying? That he’s aware of her touch? What are her eyes saying when they answer his? That was the idea?

  As they near the camp gate, Schrøder breaks the silence. “In my tent, sixteen hundred hours. I’ll be alone.” They exchange one last glance, and then they both stare out over the landscape. Hannah stiffens. Her cheeks are hot. Her heart is pounding.

  At sixteen hundred hours, she walks down a corridor covered in loose-fitting white plastic that makes it look like a tunnel in a chalk mine. There are rectangles of military-green canvas on each side, all of them zipped shut. Behind them are square, high-ceilinged tents with exposed light bulbs hanging in a row from a suspended cable, eight-man rooms where the officers reside. One of the canvas doors hangs half open. She pushes the fabric aside and steps in.

  Schrøder is sitting on a cot.

  “Take off your clothes!” he says in an officer’s tone.

  Turning around, she zips up the opening and then quickly takes off her clothes. Hannah is overcome by a fierce desire that renders all the words she can’t find unnecessary. Even before he touches her, her whole body is trembling.

  19

  “How’s the food out here?” asks Eigil. “Have you had any Afghan food?”

  They stare at him. In the mess tent they get lunch omelets and can choose from at least seven different ingredients: onion, peppers, tomatoes, two kinds of cheese, ham, and bacon. They have chocolate muffins and brownies with their coffee. Lobster every Friday.

  Afghan food! What’s he talking about?

  “Gay!” says Mads.

  Although Eigil Kaurason’s parents are both Icelandic, he grew up on the isle of Møn and has Danish citizenship. He’s tall and flawlessly beautiful in a classically male way, with thick curly brown hair and perfect white teeth he’s always flashing in a large smile that seems to greet the whole world. His eyes sparkle in competition with his teeth.

  Eigil is so handsome that Mads thinks he could easily be gay. Looks-wise, Mads is Eigil’s only competition—though on some bitter level Mads senses he’s already lost that battle. Everyone knows that Mads always scores and can get any girl he wants, but they don’t know anything about Eigil, who never talks about himself.

  There’s nothing limp about Eigil’s wrists. He’s a sharpshooter. It takes a steady hand to hold a Finnish SAKO TRG-42 sniper rifle. There can’t be any shaking, not even the slightest tremor. Eigil was the last to arrive—and even though it’s his first deployment, a sharpshooter always comes with a certain reputation. The rest of them shoot randomly in disorderly engagements; no one knows if they’ve ever even hit the enemy. Too often it takes an artillery grenade or a five-hundred-pound bomb to end any direct combat. A sharpshooter never pulls the trigger unless the enemy is in his crosshairs. A second later his talents are confirmed: the red mist, as professionals call it, that tells him the skull has exploded, enemy brain matter flying in all directions.

  Mads has been playing Counter-Strike since he was what he calls younger (that is, three or four years ago). The game involves counterterrorism, dismantling time bombs, and freeing hostages. It’s all about killing as many terrorists as possible. Mads was one of the best players—he even has the papers to prove it. His team, Death Squadron, won gold in the World Cyber Games in 2007.

  “In Counter-Strike,” he says, looking at Eigil with all the authority of a gold-medal winner, “we call snipers ‘campers,’ because they’re always waiting around for the right moment while the rest of us put our lives on the line for points. Nobody likes them.”

  “But they’re the ones who score,” says Eigil.

  “Camper,” says Mads, as he has now christened Eigil. Clearly he thinks the nickname shifts the difference between them in his favor.

  In a high, girly falsetto, he contorts part of a crude pop melody:

  “Oh, Camper. How was I supposed to know you covered that creaking door?”

  Camper is there for the good of the platoon. They lost Michael and Jakob in an ambush in the Green Zone—but would a sharpshooter have made any difference? Barely. It was all too chaotic, and what they couldn’t see, he certainly wouldn’t have seen, either. Now, if he’d been lying up on High Ground looking through a 56 millimeter lens that magnified up to twenty-five times . . . yeah, maybe.

  That’s where he’s headed now, along with his observer, Karlsen, a solidly built man in his mid-twenties with a shaved head and blond eyelashes. They lie for four hours staring down into the Green Zone. Their guess is that several roadside bombs are still buried along the path where Schrøder’s platoon was ambushed and that the Taliban will come back to dig up the unused ones so they can use them in other areas. Their mission has been cleared from above: Camper has permission to shoot to kill from the moment a Taliban soldier appears with the dug-up bomb in his hand. Neutralize the enemy, as they say. Good expression. There’s nothing personal about it. Two armies face each other, and at this moment the SAKO’s heavy barrel is the front line.

  They have a view out over the farms and the poplar trees that form a living fence around the cornfields. A man in a black turban stops on his motorcycle. He starts digging in the gravel while curious locals gather around him. In the rifle’s scope, Camper watches as he carefully separates the battery, wires, and explosive materials from each other. Hard to get a direct hit, though, because of all the locals standing around him.

  Karlsen has calculated wind strength, distance, and trajectory. They’re shooting from a high point down onto a lower one, but this so-called angle of terrain is difficult to replicate at home on the flat Danish landscape. To learn it, Camper had to lie on top of Blåvand Lighthouse and shoot down at targets. He had a hell of a time getting as far as he has.

  Down in the Green Zone, the Taliban fighter has finished disassembling the roadside bomb. He looks around at the bystanders and spots a small boy looking curiously at him. Smiling at the boy, he stretches out his arms as if inviting him to take a ride.

  “Human shield,” says Karlsen. “He wants to use the kid as a shield.”
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br />   Just as the boy takes a step forward, Camper pulls the trigger. The man’s turban is ripped off his head as if yanked away by an invisible hand. The motorcycle topples over, and he lands heavily on the ground with one leg beneath it. In the rifle’s scope, Camper can see the remains of the blown-off head surrounded by a black, soiled cloth.

  The bystanders scatter in all directions, except for the boy, who remains standing in front of the dead man. His mouth is open in what Camper assumes must be a scream, though they’re too far away to hear it. No one returns for the child. For a long time, he stands next to the dead man. His mouth stays open, while his shoulders rise and fall, as if the screams have exhausted him and he’s having trouble breathing.

  20

  “This man would like to know how many times a week you do it with your wife.”

  Roshaan looks at the Danish CO.

  This is Ove Steffensen’s third meeting with Naib Atmar, and the conversation has taken an unexpected turn.

  They’ve never mentioned their families before. Steffensen hesitates a moment before answering. “Three times.” That’s not strictly true. He’s not in the habit of counting, but he thinks that number is probably a bit high. Two might be closer to the mark. Sometimes one. Neither of them is young. Still, it doesn’t hurt to exaggerate a little.

  “Me, too.” The warlord breaks into a huge smile, as if suddenly recognizing a brother in the Dane.

  Well, now I know that, thinks Steffensen. He has never thought about the warlord’s sex life; apparently it’s not so different from his own. “How many wives do you have?” he asks, as if he’s reminding the warlord of the difference between them.

  “Three. And you?”

  “Polygamy is forbidden in Denmark. I have just the one.”

  “I know you can’t have many wives in the West. Have you always been together with her? Haven’t there been others?”

  “My first wife died. I divorced my second wife. Now I’m with the third—her name is Karen.”

  “Karen.” Atmar savors the word. He pronounces it surprisingly well. “See? You’re just like me. Three wives. No difference.” He sends Steffensen a knowing grin.

  “But I don’t have them all at once. I have them one at a time.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. It’s the same principle. Your system is merely more practical. Ours is a mess. Three wives at once. Nothing but screaming and shouting. Always fighting with each other. Then they gang up on me. You call us warlords. If you only knew. Afghanistan’s worst war is in the home.”

  “Are you with each of them three times a week?” Steffensen’s voice sounds playful.

  As always, Roshaan’s expression remains neutral. The warlord ignores him. The interpreter is there to serve; he doesn’t exist. Steffensen wonders if Roshaan feels humiliated. He never asks. Anyway, it can’t be changed. Atmar has the attitudes he has, and Steffensen needs to talk to him.

  Atmar laughs it off. “I am a strong man—but not that strong. And I don’t have the time. I have a lot of power, and power is time consuming. I concentrate mostly on one of them.”

  “And that must be the most recent, who is also the youngest and most beautiful?”

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you? But I married my youngest wife only because I needed to ally myself with her clan. My oldest wife is my favorite. She knows me best of all. She knows what I like, and I know what she likes.”

  “It reminds me of myself a little,” says Steffensen. A yearning for intimacy sweeps over him and he lets it. Details from one’s private life—something that can be shared—these kinds of things grease the wheels. They don’t teach that at the Royal Danish Defense College, but business people know it. Steffensen knows it, too, and now he has the opportunity to use his knowledge in an unexpected context. Very unexpected, but he enjoys the situation; it gives him the opportunity to move into unknown territory in a way that he still understands.

  “I broke my arm once,” he says. “I never would have managed without my wife. You share limbs. You develop a common body. You no longer have two arms—you have four. That’s a marriage.

  “When my first wife died,” he continues, “I remarried too quickly. My new wife was much younger than me, and soon I discovered that we didn’t have much in common. There’s definitely something flattering about a younger woman’s interest. Still, I got bored with her company, and I don’t think I was really fulfilling her needs, either. Now I’m married to a woman my own age. It’s much better.”

  The warlord looks straight ahead, thoughtfully. “It is more difficult to live with a woman than to run a war,” he says. “In war, it’s all about destroying your enemy. Very simple. Bang—and he’s dead. In marriage, it’s about turning your enemy into your friend. Much more complicated.”

  Are they talking about war or women? Both, really. There’s a duality in everything Naib jan says that sharpens Ove jan’s hearing. Everything has to be translated, not only from Pashto to Danish, but also from one meaning to another.

  “It’s my impression that that’s how you are running the war here in Afghanistan,” says Steffensen. “My sense is that you are trying to turn your enemy into your ally instead of killing him.”

  “You’re a wise man, Ove jan. I’ll have to be on my guard in the future. Or you will cheat me, instead of the other way around.”

  The both laugh. They’re always on their guard with each other, as they should be. Otherwise they wouldn’t be professionals. But in vigilance there is also respect. And right now it’s growing.

  21

  “Ove jan,” says the new director of Helmand Security. “How much does a ticket to your country cost?”

  And so it begins. Surprised, Steffensen looks at him. “Are you going on vacation in Denmark?” He strikes a light tone, despite the warlord’s gloomy expression. He has no doubt that his Afghan counterpart’s mien has been carefully rehearsed.

  “You must buy me, my three wives, and my nine children tickets to your country. One-way tickets. I am not coming back to Afghanistan. You must get me a qalat surrounded by high, thick walls. And you must hire security guards. It can’t be far from the nearest school. My children must not be illiterate, as I am. You must see to it that they have good teachers in English and mathematics. My girls shall also go to school. I support women getting an education.”

  Steffensen knows there is a subtext, something unspoken, but the warlord is offering no help in clarifying the mystery. To ask him directly would be a breach of etiquette.

  Steffensen tries to hide his confusion. “Naib jan,” he says, “what you are asking me will be difficult. Very difficult. Why do you want to leave? Afghanistan is your country. And there are schools here where girls can get an education. That’s exactly what we’re fighting for—together.”

  “No, you are mistaken if you believe Afghanistan is my country. Right now the country belongs to the foreign troops. When you leave, it will be the Taliban’s country. It will never be my country again. I’m finished here. My children’s lives are in constant danger. I am an outlaw in my own country.”

  Steffensen glances at Roshaan. This involves the interpreter, too. If Roshaan loses faith that his employer can win the war, it will hurt his loyalty. Steffensen looks earnestly at the warlord. “We won’t leave Afghanistan until security has been created. That’s why we’re here. To liberate the country from the Taliban. We aren’t leaving until our mission has been accomplished.”

  They look each other in the eye, their voices serious. Still, Steffensen knows that they’re really speaking about something else. He doesn’t believe his own words for a single minute, and he doesn’t expect Atmar will, either. It’s one of the rules of the game that you pretend you believe in negotiations like this, while monitoring each other’s tone of voice, the pauses and their length, the silences that always speak the loudest. But what the hell do they mean?

  “You know quite well, Ove jan, that when you leave Afghanistan, it will not be because you have shot
the last member of the Taliban but because there will be ten times more Taliban than there were when you arrived. Just the sight of you results in a hundred new recruits a day here. I can’t even trust my own men. They’re employed in a security firm now, I tell them. Yes, thank you. But they can make more money with the Taliban, and they get permission to shoot you, too. Have they received nice uniforms? Do you greet them with respect? Treat them like valuable allies? I tell you, Ove jan, it tugs at the trigger finger of their humiliation every time you avoid saying hello to them. What shall I tell them? They already know that once you leave they will be hanged from the nearest pylon. You remember what happened to Najibullah?”

  Steffensen can’t recall who Najibullah is. Roshaan rescues him: “The last Communist head of state in Kabul. He hid for four years in a UN building. Taliban broke into the building and hanged him from a traffic light. But not before they castrated him.”

  Atmar glances quickly from one man to the other, as if he suspects that Roshaan is doing more than simply translating.

  Steffensen nods. “Yes, that was terrible,” he says.

  “That could be my destiny.” The warlord raises his hands as if in prayer. “It can be everyone’s destiny. We should move into your camp. Soon it will be the only place where we can be safe. Will you give us a tent? Will you provide us with armored vehicles? Machine guns, artillery? We can protect you. But will you also protect us? I don’t even need to ask. I can see it in your face. The answer is no. You are my friend. I know that. But you cannot do business on your own. And that is why things are as they are. You must buy me a ticket to Denmark.”

  “I promise,” says Ove jan, flashing his most winning smile, “that one day we will dance Attan together in the courtyard of your qalat in Denmark.”