It was said without rancour or emotion, purely as a matter of fact. Even so, if most young men had said such a thing the governor would have laughed and offered them another one of his fine cigarettes. But most youths had never faced a Soviet Hind helicopter gunship in full rampage, not once, not even in their worst nightmares. Watching the Saracen, the governor wondered, not for the first time, if he himself could have found the courage – armed with nothing more than a Blowpipe – to have done it. Like everybody else in Afghanistan, he knew the missile was one of the worst pieces of shit ever invented, almost guaranteed to result in the death of anyone unfortunate enough to use it.
Shoulder-fired, the four-foot missile used a manual-guidance system: in other words, you fired the missile and then used a joystick on a small radio box to steer it to the target. As if that wasn’t dangerous enough, the missile made such a bright flash at launch that the intended victim, usually a helicopter, invariably saw it coming.
Immediately, the crew on board would turn the craft, bringing their multi-barrelled machine guns and fifty-calibre cannons to bear. Firing a hailstorm of metal, the pilot would try to annihilate the operator and his joystick before he could steer the missile home.
To be seventeen years old, alone, with no parent to bury you let alone protect you, to stand at sunset on a mountain scree in Afghanistan with only the long shadows to hide you, with shards of rock and bullets blasting past as hardened airmen unleash the dogs of hell, to stand in the eye of a twister with the world whirling and disintegrating all around, to hear the deafening roar of rotors and engines, the scream of machine gun and cannon as it approaches fast, to hold your ground, never to run or flinch and to work a joystick in the face of onrushing death, to count the endless seconds for a horse of the apocalypse to turn away in fear, to twist the stick and guide the warhead into the soft underbelly of its engine and feel the heat of the explosion then smell the death and burning flesh and realize suddenly it wasn’t your own, not this time anyway – well, there are not many men who can do that.
Three times the Saracen played one of the deadliest games of chicken ever known, and three times he won. Lord Abdul Khan would never laugh at anything such a young man said.
‘Stay,’ the warlord told him quietly. ‘The Saudis will arrest you the moment you arrive. With your name and a history of jihad you won’t get past the border.’
‘I know,’ the Saracen replied, pouring them both more tea. ‘When I leave I go to Quetta – a thousand dollars in the arms bazaar there buys a passport in any name you want.’
‘Maybe – but be careful, most Pakistani forgers are shit. What nationality will you take?’
‘I don’t care, anything that’ll get me into Lebanon. There’s a medical school in Beirut that’s one of the best.’
Abdul Khan paused. ‘You’re going to study to be a doctor?’
He nodded. ‘If I’m no longer a Saudi, how else can I return to my country and live there?’ he said. ‘It’s closed to foreigners but not to doctors – a foreign Muslim with a good medical degree is guaranteed a visa. It has one other advantage. The Mabahith won’t spend time monitoring a doctor. They’re supposed to save lives, aren’t they?’
Abdul Khan smiled but just kept looking at him. ‘It’ll take years,’ he said finally.
‘A lifetime maybe.’ The Saracen smiled back. ‘But I have no choice, I owe it to my father. I think that’s why God kept me safe on the mountain – to destroy the House of Saud.’
The governor sat in silence for a long while – he had never thought the young fighter could do anything that would impress him more than facing down the Hinds. He had been wrong.
He swirled the tea in his cup and finally raised it in salute – he knew more about revenge than most men. ‘To Saudi Arabia and vengeance then,’ he said. ‘Insha’Allah.’
‘Insha’Allah,’ the Saracen replied. God willing. And for close to fifteen years that was the last word that passed between them; the governor and his escort left at dawn the next morning. Three weeks later, though, after the foreign fighters had struck their camp and were waiting for the last snowstorm of the year to pass, two of the governor’s young nephews dragged themselves into the village.
They had been forced to turn their mounts loose in the blizzard and, while the horses made their way down to safer ground, the two youths climbed on through the storm. Unannounced, completely unexpected, they brought a small oilskin package with them for the Saracen, the legendary mujahideen who was only a little older than they were.