photograph. “Do you have children?”
Jack nodded. “A daughter.”
“This is my daughter.” Jack looked at the picture of a smiling Afghan girl, unveiled, her black hair falling to her shoulders. “If I do not fight them, one day they will do to my daughter what they have just done to my cousin. They will whip her for going unveiled. They will mutilate her for reading books. And they will rape her because they are animals.”
“These are not men. They have nothing to do with Allah.”
Rahid curled his lip. “The Taliban? Al-Qaeda? The Wahabists have been here since the time of the British, trying to stir us up. They have nothing to do with Afghanistan. And now their recruits come from the west. They go to so-called training camps, young Muslims who think they have learned to shoot by playing video games, and spraying rounds at a hillside while chanting holy verse. Stupid boys, fat boys, with eyes too close together. They even make poor target practice. They die too easily.”
Katya and Altamaty came onto the ledge, and Costas jumped up behind. He took off his mitt and shook Rahid’s hand, his voice breathless. “Costas Kazantzakis.”
“Ah.” Rahid bowed slightly. “The submersibles expert with the Navy Cross.”
“Jack has been telling you?”
“I read the newspapers.”
Jack shot Costas a look. “Rahid and I have been discussing the Taliban. Our enemy.”
“We’re on the same side, I take it.”
Rahid’s eyes bore down on Costas. “When a Pashtun is being shot at, he kills the person who is shooting at him. When the British came, we killed them. When the Soviets came, we killed them. And now the Taliban have come, and we are killing them.”
“And yet, twenty years ago, you spared Altamaty,” Costas said.
“We occasionally took hostages. And he was Kyrgyz, not Russian. But perhaps I should have killed him.”
“Well, now’s your chance,” Costas said.
Rahid curled his lip. “I can’t. He brought me a sheep’s head.”
“What?”
“That bag, over there. When he came up here with the woman, Katya.” Rahid pointed. Jack suddenly realized. That explained it. He had suffered the smell throughout the flight, then in the jeep. Thank God they had no time to boil it now. “When we captured him during the Soviet war, this is what I gave him to eat. And coming here again now, he remembered.”
“That’s why you spared him, back then,” Costas said. “When you captured him, you sized him up. You knew he’d bring this, if he ever came here again.”
Rahid looked at Jack, then gestured at Costas. “I like this man.”
“It’s the same in Greece,” Costas said. “Where men are men.”
“Men,” Katya murmured, “are fools.”
Rahid put away the photograph of his daughter. “Enough of this. I have to go soon. Come with me.” He led them behind the ledge to a cave in the hillside, concealed behind a jumble of rock made to look like natural scree. They passed through a door into a corridor carved out of the rock. “This was a natural cave, then my ancestors chiseled it out as a refuge at the time of the first British war in the 1840s. The men who made it worked in the lapis lazuli mines, so they knew what they were doing. We lived here during the Soviet war. We’ve got our own generator, solar-powered. The Soviets tried to destroy the cave from the air, but they didn’t have bunker-busting bombs. They tried ground assault, over and over again. That’s what Altamaty was doing here. But the whole hillside is booby-trapped. Even now, you only made it alive up that path because I knew you were coming.” He pushed open a sliding steel door at the end of the corridor, switched on a light and unplugged a dehumidifier that had been throbbing in the corner. “This room is our arsenal. My men have taken our modern weapons, but there’s enough left here for what you need.”
They filed in behind Rahid. The walls were lined with wooden gun racks, most of them empty but several dozen weapons still there. There was a whiff of gun oil in the air, and everything was spotless. Jack walked over to the nearest rack. At the top was a long, ornate gun, an antique muzzle-loader with an extravagantly curved stock and rings of decorative metalwork up the barrel. “A jezail,” he said. “Matchlock, smoothbore, early nineteenth century.”
Rahid looked at him appreciatively. “You know guns.”
“A family tradition.”
“My ancestors killed with these. They are all kept ready to shoot.”
“So I see.” Below the jezail were several percussion muskets, East India Company smoothbores similar to the one in Jack’s cabin on Seaquest II Below that were half a dozen Martini-Henry rifles, with the cipher of Queen Victoria on the receivers. In the middle was a Snider-Enfield breech-loader, with the date 1860 visible on the lock plate. Pradesh pointed at the buttstock. “Look at that,” he said. “The stamped roundel of the Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners. My regiment, and John Howard’s. He could have touched this, Jack.”
“All of these rifles were taken from the British,” Rahid said. “The Snider-Enfield was recovered from the battlefield at Maiwand, in October 1880. It was used by a British sergeant who fought to the last round, after all his Indian sappers had been killed. His name was O’Connell. That’s what those Persian letters on the stock mean. They were carved by our tribesmen, who found his name on his medals. We respect our enemies when they are brave. We are honored to take and use their weapons.”
Pradesh glanced at Jack. “Some of the sappers were redeployed up here from the Rampa jungle, a few months after the incident with the river steamer. This chap could even have been one of Howard’s NCOs.”
Jack touched the rifle stock, seeing where there was a careful repair near the breech, a darker piece of Indian wood inserted into the English walnut. He thought for a moment of the sappers that day in 1879 on the Godavari River, a thousand miles from this place. He stood back. The rest of the rifles were Lee-Enfields: snub-nosed Mark 3 rifles, made by the Ishapore arms factory in India, as well as later Mark 4 rifles from the Canadian Long Branch factory, many of them refurbished in Indian mahogany.
“We still use these,” Rahid said. “The. 303 packs a bigger punch than modern standard-issue military rounds and the Lee-Enfield is highly accurate, with a remarkable rate of fire for a bolt-action. From the time of the jezail, we have been brought up to kill with a single round. One of my men with a Lee-Enfield can take out an entire party of Taliban, carrying automatic weapons they do not know how to use. They are not like the sapper sergeant. They are an enemy we despise. We desecrate their bodies and disdain their weapons.”
Jack eyed the rifles, stopping at one with a scope. “Long Branch, Number 4 Mark 1, 1943,” he murmured. “This was the rifle I learned to shoot.” He lifted it off the rack, checked the buttstock length, then took the leather covers off the eyepieces. “Scope pattern 1918, Number 32 Mark 1,” he murmured. “Three point five times magnification.” He pushed the safety forward, disengaged the bolthead and drew the bolt out, then held the rifle up to the light and peered down the barrel. “Perfect bore.”
“We look after our weapons,” Rahid said.
Jack replaced the bolt, drew the handle up and back, pushed it forward and down to cock it, pulled the trigger, repeated the process but let the bolt snap back, then pushed it forward while pulling the trigger. He clicked out the magazine and pressed down the feed platform, feeling the tension of the spring. Rahid handed him a khaki bandolier with five pouches. Jack slung it over his left shoulder, feeling the weight of the ammunition. He opened one and took out a five round clip. “Three-oh-three British, Mark 7,” he said. He drew back the bolt of the rifle, slotted the clip into the receiver and stripped the rounds into the magazine with his right thumb, then repeated the process with another clip. He closed the bolt over them, then flipped on the safety with his thumb. “I take it I won’t need to sight this in.”
“The scope is zeroed for three hundred yards. I did it myself.”
“Not a very powerful scope,” Costas murmured.
“We didn’t have scopes when we destroyed the British Army of the Indus with our jezails in 1841,” Rahid retorted sharply.
“Point taken.”
Pradesh reached up and took down one of the Ishapore rifles from the rack above, giving it a quick inspection. “I’ll borrow one of these, if you don’t mind.”
Jack passed two clips from the bandolier to Pradesh, who stripped them into his rifle. Rahid’s radio receiver
