away he had to go with them. They walked to a hollow, about fifty yards from where the others were sleeping, and he was prodded roughly down the slope. Khan thought he knew what they were going to do. What they planned to do afterwards was anyone’s guess – shoot him and say he had started the fight, or simply throw him down the ravine they had skirted a few minutes before entering the forest? He raised both hands and made as if to welcome the idea by reaching out to touch Zek’s shoulder.
Zek told the two younger men to hold Khan over the tree, and started unbuckling himself to reveal a rank pair of undershorts. With an interested glance Khan again tried to show that he was more than happy about the situation and indeed enjoyed the prospect of indulging them. He even made to undo his own trousers. But they turned him and forced his head down violently on the tree trunk. The smell of resin and forest mould reached his nostrils. He glanced under the young man’s arm and saw the guard behind readying himself. Lust had drained all meaning from his expression and he hissed for his two accomplices to hurry. Khan placed his feet squarely apart, to appear cooperative, and wiggled with a little coo of excitement. The young man holding the gun to his head sniggered, relaxed his grip and swapped hands to free himself to help yank Khan’s trousers down. This was the opening Khan had waited for. He slipped from under his captor’s arm and jabbed his left elbow back twice into his face, grabbing the barrel of the pistol and sending him to the ground. The completion of the movement brought him face to face with Zek, whose expression flooded with consternation. He smiled awkwardly just before Khan butted him once in the forehead, then knocked him cold with a second blow from his forehead delivered as he grabbed the man’s shoulders and held him.
He spun round, but there was no need to attack the third boy, who had jumped away, raising his hands with a sly smile as if to say the whole thing had been a bit of harmless horse-play. Khan arranged his clothing and walked to the top of the hollow where he found Vajgelis contemplating the scene. He held Khan’s AK47 under his arm, his hands tucked into the waistband of his chocolate brown corduroys.
‘These men shit,’ he said, his chin jutting with contempt. ‘These men, they fuck pigs. I sorry for these hospitality. These men…’ Words failed him, he shook his head and held out the machine gun for Khan, at the same time reaching for the pistol that Khan had taken from the young man. As Vajgelis took hold of it, he snatched the machine gun back from Khan’s grasp. ‘You walk with me now, Mujahadin.’
A minute or two later the two injured men staggered up from the hollow with blood over their faces. Zek’s nose was split and ballooning. They went to Vajgelis and Khan understood they were pleading to be allowed to kill him, but the request met with a tirade of abuse from Vajgelis, who tweaked Zek’s ear and cuffed the younger man around the head.
A few minutes later they set off, Vajgelis at the head of the column and Khan just behind him with two older men now appointed as his minders. For four or five hours they walked along the parched tracks. As the sun sank behind the mountains they came to a lumber road littered with bark. The mules were tethered to the trees where they hung their heads and steamed and stamped their hooves. The men stood around smoking and glancing down the mountain.
Shortly, Khan saw truck lights slash through the trees and heard it grinding up towards them with many changes of gear. The men began to loosen the straps on the mules, but were told to stop by Vajgelis. He ordered them into the middle of the track with their guns showing. The truck appeared a few minutes later and pulled up. About a dozen men, all armed to the teeth, scrambled down from the back and flashed torches across the faces of the men in the road. Vajgelis moved forward. Recognising the driver of the truck, he signalled for the mules to be brought up and unloaded.
Long before this moment Khan had suspected that Vajgelis’s band was involved in drug smuggling, not insurgency, and as the first tightly filled sacks were deposited at the tailgate of the truck, he wasn’t in the least surprised to see the driver slit one open with a knife and taste the contents. Each time a mule was unloaded he sampled at random.
The time came for departure and the men from both sides lined up to face each other. Vajgelis pointed to a man in the line opposite and beckoned him across the track. Khan realised they were exchanging hostages. Now it was the driver’s turn. Vajgelis moved closer to Khan, laid an arm round his shoulder and moved him back out of range of the truck lights. The trick worked perfectly. The driver walked over to them, placed his hand on Khan’s other shoulder and steered him to the truck. Vajgelis laughed and murmured, ‘Mujahadin is shit also.’
Khan was thrown in the back and nobody took much notice of him as the truck made its way down the mountain and then bumped across a flat plain to the coast. A couple of hours later, the truck suddenly turned off the road, careered down a rutted track and juddered to a halt. The men tumbled out, unloaded the sacks and bore them off to a jetty where a powerboat was tethered. Khan could make out its shape in the dark and he heard the engine’s exhaust spluttering in the gentle swell.
They set off back up the mountains and after a couple more hours came to a small, almost derelict village. They pulled up in some kind of farmyard or compound. Cats darted from the lights of the truck and some dogs barked. Here the remnants of an old agricultural living were jumbled with the trophies of drug trafficking. There were animal stalls, a collapsed cart and a hay-rick, but also a large satellite dish and a pair of identical black SUVs chained by the fenders to a metal post. Khan was stiff from the ride and moved gingerly into the light. When the men saw his face for the first time there was a sudden uproar, and he was pulled from one man to another, spat upon, kicked and rifle-butted. There was no doubt in Khan’s mind that these were his last moments on earth. But their anger subsided and the driver who had picked him from Vajgelis’ group walked up and looked him over, muttering imprecations under his breath and asking questions. All Khan could do was smile idiotically and shake his head saying, ‘English? I speak English only.’
‘No ingleesh,’ said the driver. ‘No ingleesh.’
He was taken to one of the stalls and tied to a beam, while they made a cursory search of his possessions. At length someone was fetched from a neighbouring village to interpret. He was a mild, emaciated man in middle age, wearing mittens and a scarf wrapped around his head though the night was warm. He introduced himself to Khan as Mr Skender. He had once been a waiter in London, he said, but returned to his village after developing tuberculosis. To Khan he looked very sick indeed.
‘I have to hear some things from you,’ said Skender, rubbing the circulation into his hands and wiping a runny nose. He gestured to the driver. ‘Mr Berisha wants to know why you are working with Vajgelis. Tell Mr Berisha who you are.’
Khan gave his name and said that he had come overland from Pakistan, looking for work in the West. All the time looking directly at Berisha, he said he was from a high-born family but that he was without money. He had rich friends in the United States – one who was like a brother to him. This man would reward handsomely anyone who helped him now, in a way that was beyond Mr Berisha’s dreams. He added that they should take no notice of his present appearance.
Skender gave a brief translation to the driver, who called for a table and chairs. More lights were brought. Berisha sat down and poured some konjak for Skender and himself.
‘Mr Berisha thinks you are terrorist,’ said Skender.
‘Then tell Mr Berisha that I’m not a terrorist,’ said Khan. ‘All I want is to find work and continue my medical studies.’
‘You are a doctor?’ asked Skender doubtfully.
‘I studied medicine in London and I plan to return there to continue.’
At the end of the translation Berisha stroked his chin and growled a few sentences.
‘Mr Berisha wants to know why a doctor, an educated man, is in the mountains with Vajgelis? He is a very dangerous man, this Vajgelis. You are fortunate to be alive. He trusts only his own people.’
Khan told him about the killings on the road, his flight from the Macedonian security forces and how he’d met Vajgelis’ group on the border. Berisha sat with his lower lip hanging and his foxy little eyes darting around Khan, as if this would somehow prise out his secret. Skender explained that Berisha was a very clever man: Khan’s presence there was like a philosophical problem to him. He might be a Muslim terrorist, or he could be a Macedonian agent who’d been sent to infiltrate the network and report back to the authorities. Maybe he was a plant from the Vajgelis clan to see if his part of the network could be taken over. The very thought of this prompted Berisha to get up and prowl around the stable stabbing at his imagined foes in the dark.
‘Mr Berisha wishes you to know that he is strong and will not tolerate a challenge to his authority in this part of the mountains from Vajgelis. He will cut Mr Vajgelis’ testicles and feed them to his dogs. He wishes you to tell this to Vajgelis if you are allowed to live long enough to see him again.’
