I Am Pilgrim(42)

The boy didn’t realize it but, had he looked down, he would have seen his fingers wrapping tight into the coverlet of his mother’s bed. As he kissed her forehead he murmured a single word, something he had never said to her before: he spoke her name, as if she were his child.

He pulled himself to his feet and backed out of the door, keeping his eyes on her for as long as possible. Quickly he grabbed his backpack, emerged into the new day and ran fast down the path lest the tears overwhelm him and make his feet follow his heart and turn him back.

At the far end of the street, as arranged, a car was waiting. Inside were the imam and two leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They greeted him as he scrambled into the back seat, the driver slipped the vehicle into gear and it sped off to drop him at the airport.

His mother woke two hours later, rising early to finish the arrangements for the party. In the kitchen she found a letter addressed to her. As she started reading it she felt as if cold water was rising up from the floor and crushing her lower body. She felt her legs go from under her, and she only just managed to find a chair before she fell.

He told her in simple prose about seeing her in the mall with her shame in full flower, of how he was certain his sisters were complicit in her behaviour and that his only ambition had been to protect the women, exactly as his father would have wanted.

As she read on, two pages in his best handwriting, she was taught a lesson many other parents have learned – it’s usually your children who wound you the most ferociously.

Finally she came to the last paragraph and realized she had been completely deceived by the imam. What she read destroyed the last strands of her tenuous control and she fell into a chasm of loss and guilt and terrible fear.

Her son wrote that he was going to Quetta but there was no famous madrassah there, just a different type of camp hidden in the high mountains. There he would undergo six weeks’ basic training before being taken along an old smugglers’ route and over the border into the battlefield.

He said he had never had any intention of following a religious life. Like any truly devout Muslim, he was going to Afghanistan – to wage jihad against the Soviet invaders who were killing the children of Islam.





Chapter Six


DURING THE NINE years of the Afghan war, over a million people died. The Saracen wasn’t one of them – a fact which, given what he did later, would make most people question if not God’s existence then at least His common sense.

After crossing the border, the Saracen fought the Soviets for two years until, one cold February night – eighteen years old and grown tall and hard – he stood on a ridge and looked down on a road that stretched all the way to Europe.

Behind him a crescent moon cast its light across serried ranks of peaks and crags where another ten thousand battle-hardened mujahideen were also standing like sentinels.

All of them had seen remarkable things – how fast a Russian prisoner can dance when doused with gasoline and set on fire, what their own dead looked like with their genitals hacked off and stuffed in their mouths – but on this, a night of a million stars, they might as well have been standing on the fifth ring of Saturn watching the Imperial Starfleet fly past. Nobody had seen anything like it.

For forty miles along the wide valley below – and according to reports on the Afghan military radio, for a hundred miles beyond that – the two-lane blacktop was packed with low-loaders, trucks, and tank transporters. Every few miles fires were burning, lighting up the night like some Christo version of funeral pyres. As vehicles drew alongside the fires, the soldiers riding shotgun would toss out surplus material: snow suits, ration boxes, tents, first-aid kits.

Now and again ammunition or flares would go in by mistake, sending the men on the vehicles diving, lighting up the sky like dismal fireworks, throwing one of the largest convoys ever seen on earth into blinding moments of sharp relief. The vehicles were heading towards the Amu Darya river and the border with Uzbekistan: the huge Soviet 40th Army – the army of the Afghan occupation – was pulling out, defeated.

The Saracen, along with the other mujahideen, knew exactly why the Soviets had lost. It wasn’t because of the rebels’ courage or Moscow’s determination to fight the wrong war. No, it was because the Soviets were without God: it was the mujahideens’ faith that had brought them victory.

‘Allahu Akbar!’ a voice called from the top of one of the highest pinnacles. ‘God is great.’ Ten thousand other voices took it up, shouting in reverence, listening to it echo. ‘Allahu Akbar!’ – on and on it went, raining down on the Soviets as they ran for home. Afghanistan, the graveyard of so many empires, had claimed another victim.