Undersea Prison

by Duncan Falconer

  The helicopter lay on its side like a gutted beast, its ravaged carcass burning, its rotors buckled, its tail broken off. The cabin and cockpit were fiercely ablaze and Durrani drove in a wide arc around it until he was upwind and away from the direct heat and smoke. He slammed on the brakes, slid to a dusty halt, opened the door and stood out on the sill to inspect his handiwork. His first thought was that it did not look possible that anyone could have survived. Prisoners were a bonus but rare in such attacks.

  The other vehicle halted behind Durrani’s but the men were more concerned for their own safety, anxiously scanning every quadrant of the horizon like meerkats. As far as they were concerned Durrani was putting their lives at risk by remaining in the area.

  Durrani took a long and patient look, scanning the wreckage for anything of value.The destruction appeared to be complete and he was about to swing back inside his cab when something caught his eye. Several metres from the wreckage, lying on the scorched earth, was a twisted, broken body, as charred as the surrounding debris and clearly dead. But a small metallic object lying in the midst of the remains and reflecting the strong sunlight was impossible to ignore.

  Durrani stepped down onto the ground.

  The anxiety among the others increased as they watched their leader walk casually towards the wreckage. One of them called out that they should be going. The others quickly echoed him. Durrani ignored them, his stare fixed on the body. The wind suddenly changed direction and the searing heat from the flames struck him. He was forced to shield his face with his hands and move back several steps. The wind changed again and he saw that the glinting object was a chain attached to what appeared to be a small case.

  Durrani moved in at a crouch and picked up the case, the attached limp arm in a charred jacket sleeve rising on the end of the chain.The metal handle burned him and he quickly dropped it. He drew a knife from a sheath on his belt, pulled the arm straight and dug the tip into the wrist joint, slicing through the sinews until the hand fell away. He looked for the end of the other arm lying awkwardly across the body’s back and wiped the thin coat of carbon from the face of the watch to reveal the clear, undamaged glass, the second hand rotating beneath it. The watch was cool enough to touch and he pulled it off the corpse’s wrist. He picked the chain up by using the point of the knife. The smouldering case dangled beneath it and, after a quick check around for anything else, Durrani headed back to his pick-up.

  He climbed in behind the wheel, dropped the briefcase onto the passenger seat, slipped the scorched watch onto his wrist, put the engine in gear and roared away.

  Durrani felt exhilarated as he looked around for the enemy, confident that they would not appear. He was wise enough not to celebrate until his escape was complete but seasoned enough to trust his senses. He bounced in the seat as the pick-up roared back over the tarmac road and headed for the safety of the hills and the villages that ran along the foot of it. Any doubts that he would fail to escape vanished. It had been a well-executed plan.

  Durrani looked at his new watch, the shiny metal exposed where the carbon had rubbed off. His gaze moved to the case on the seat, the cracks in the charred brittle plastic exposing more metal beneath. He looked ahead again but the briefcase and its as yet unknown contents remained at the front of his thoughts.

  Chapter 2

  It was dark by the time Durrani entered the city of Kabul in his battered, dusty pick-up. He was wearing a leather jacket whose condition matched the vehicle perfectly. He was alone. On the seat beside him, concealed beneath a Tajik scarf, was a loaded AK47 with a seventy-five-round drum magazine attached. When Durrani had contacted his Taliban mullah to report the success of the attack and describe what he had subsequently found in the wreckage he was told to report to the mosque with his find as soon as the sun had set and to ensure he was protected.That meant he was to travel with bodyguards.

  But Durrani did not like the company of others and avoided it even if it meant increasing his personal risk. He endured the presence of other men only when carrying out tasks he could not physically complete alone. In his younger days, during the fight against the Russian occupation, he had chosen to specialise in mines and booby traps because it was a military skill that he could develop alone. And to ensure he would always be employed in that role and to avoid being thrown into a regular combat company he had worked hard to become one of the best. In the process he’d gained a reputation for innovation and thoroughness, qualities that his peers felt could be employed in other roles - such as the shooting down of helicopters.

  Durrani’s desire for solitude was not a survival tactic in the usual sense although it had its advantages in that regard. He had been alone, except for a handful of acquaintances, since his early childhood. None of those few friends could ever have been described as close to him. He would not allow that. Durrani was living a lie that if discovered could give rise to dangerous accusations and lead to the loss of his head. He feared that if anyone got close to him they might somehow find out. One way of avoiding unwelcome scrutiny was to gain a reputation for being introverted. He had achieved this but it meant that he could never let his guard down. Success as a soldier bred jealousy and the need to remain enigmatic only strengthened as his celebrity increased.

  Durrani was a Taliban - or, to be more accurate, he had joined their cause. The ranks of the Taliban were made up mostly of Pashtuns, the most privileged of the Afghan tribes, and he had been accepted as one of that ethnic group since his childhood. His claim to that heritage was not entirely valid. Durrani was actually half Hazara, a race considered by the Pashtuns to be no better than slave material. The Hazara were also Shi’a whereas the Pashtuns were Sunni. The Pashtuns were the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and at one time had been considered the only true Afghans. The Hazara were not only different socially, tribally and religiously. They also looked very different: their features were distinctly Mongol - flat faces with flat noses.

  Durrani’s mother was Hazara and had grown up in Kandahar with her father who was a servant of a wealthy Pashtun family. They had lived in a hut at the bottom of the back garden and the Pashtun master’s son, who was a year older than Durrani’s mother, had spent his adolescence with her. When she had fallen pregnant in her mid-teens it had been obvious who was responsible and before the bump became too visible the girl’s father threw her out of the city.

  Durrani knew very little more about his mother’s early life than that. He didn’t know if her master’s son had forced himself upon her or if they had been lovers. Durrani did not suspect rape, though. What little his mother did say about his father, when she eventually told Durrani that he was the son of a Pashtun, revealed no sign of malice or dislike and sometimes even displayed a hint of affection.

  Durrani had no great interest in finding his father but even if he had wanted to it would have been impossible. He didn’t know where the family had lived or even who they were. All his mother had revealed to him about their identity - it was something she was quite proud of - was that they were descended from Ahmed Shah Durrani, an eighteenth-century Pashtun king of Afghanistan. In the years leading up to the Russian invasion every member of that line had been considered a potential threat to the Communist Afghan government of the day.Those who survived assassination either went into hiding or fled the country along with the rest of the royal family and their relatives.

  Durrani had been able to hide any visible evidence of his Hazara bloodline because he had not inherited the distinctive physical Mongol characteristics of that ethnic group. Instead, he had acquired his father’s angular, long-nosed, lighter-skinned features. His mother had died of some illness when he was eight before he had developed any curiosity about his male parent. By that time they were living in abject poverty in Kabul in a small mud hut on the outskirts of a residential area at the foot of a hill occupied by an old British military fort that had long since been abandoned.

  The memories of the day she died were now cloudy but Durrani remembere
d being very hungry and his mother lying on the blanket that was their bed, calling weakly for God to help her. God had not heard her: she eventually stopped making heavy and laboured breathing noises and her open eyes became still and unfocused. He shook her and asked her to wake up. When blood trickled from her lips and down the side of her mouth he knew she would never talk to him again. He did not look for anyone to help for there was no one. He could not remember ever talking to anyone else but his mother in those days and as far as he knew she had only ever talked to him - unless begging counted as talking to others. He remembered that his days with her included collecting water in a bucket from a tap and walking miles to get wood for the fire on which she cooked their paltry meals. Looking back it was hard to see how they had survived.

  Hunger eventually forced Durrani to leave his mother’s body in their dark, miserable hut and walk the streets of the city, ragged and unwashed, scavenging for something to eat. He remembered sorting through rotten food in gutters, competing for it with filthy dogs and cats, and sleeping in abandoned dwellings. Then one day - perhaps weeks later, he had no idea how long - he was literally picked up off the street and carried into a house by a man who turned out to be a schoolteacher. After nursing Durrani back to health the teacher placed him in an orphanage where he joined a dozen or so other children.

  Durrani said his name was Po-po, his mother’s nickname for him, but when asked for his family name he said, quite accurately, that he did not know. He might have told them what little he did know about his family but for reasons he could not fully understand at the time he was afraid to. His mother had never explained the complexities of race discrimination to him but he was aware that he and she had been different from the Pashtun majority and not in any positive way. Weeks later, after much badgering by the orphanage staff and the other kids, he finally muttered the only name he knew that linked him with his family. To his surprise the reaction had been most favourable, which gave him the confidence to stick with it.

  One day a little girl with features similar to his mother’s arrived at the orphanage. Durrani immediately went to befriend her but he was pulled aside and told by the other children to leave her alone because she was of a low caste. It was Durrani’s first lesson in how Hazaras were considered inferior to the Pashtuns. The Hazara children were often taunted by the others, treated like animals and made to act as if they were slaves. The schoolmasters did not appear to see anything wrong in it and only intervened when they saw the Hazara being severely beaten.

  Durrani soon realised how imperative it was that he should never mention his mother’s Hazara ethnicity. He became so fearful of the ramifications that his denial turned into a phobia.When walking the streets he would avoid eye contact with any Hazara he passed for fear that they might recognise him. A memorable exception was the day he saw coming towards him a young woman who looked exactly as he remembered his mother. He could not take his eyes off her until she was feet away, at which point he dropped his gaze and turned his back to her in case she really was his parent. He was afraid she might talk to him.

  When the woman had passed Durrani he ran up the street as fast as he could and didn’t stop until he found somewhere to hide. He did not feel shameful about his reaction. On the contrary, he was relieved at avoiding a close call. But he could not shake loose the memory of the girl’s face and he gradually became confused about his mother’s death, doubting whether she had actually died at all.The frightening implications of that were that if she was still living he could be exposed.

  Since the day Durrani had walked out of his hut, leaving his mother’s corpse inside, he had never returned to the area where they had lived. But a few days after seeing the Hazara woman in the street he was filled with the urge to learn if his mother really was still alive. The need to know was not based on any sudden longing to be with her again. His fear of being labelled a Hazara was now greater than any affection he had ever had for his mother.To avoid being seen he waited until the sun had dropped behind the mountains before making his way to the top of the hill that overlooked the area. He crept inside the old British fort and climbed the ramparts of the weathered but still imposing walls to search for the hut from afar. He could not find it where he thought it should have been. But after walking from one end of the fortifications to the other and back several times, identifying some vaguely familiar reference points, he came to the conclusion that the dwelling no longer existed.

  Durrani remained on the battlements for many hours, gazing down at the huts and houses, the people coming and going and the handful of children playing where he used to, watching in case his mother should turn up. He left when it was completely dark and all he could see was the glow of kerosene lamps inside the houses, never to return to the place again. From time to time throughout his life, whenever he caught a glimpse of the old fort as he passed through the city, his thoughts went back to those days. The most vivid memory was that of his mother lying in the hut with blood trickling from her mouth.

  So fearful was Durrani of being exposed as a Hazara that to maintain his security at the orphanage he decided to keep to himself, rarely talking to the other children. When asked about his family he shrugged and said he knew nothing other than that they were Pashtun.

  Durrani was nineteen and working in a barber shop as a floor sweeper when the Russians marched into Kabul by invitation to support the beleaguered Communist government. He might have stayed in the city if it had not been for another orphan, Rog, a Pashtun boy Durrani’s age. Rog was the only person in Durrani’s life whom he had allowed to get close enough to call a friend. When Rog one day declared that they should leave Kabul and join the mujahideen to fight against the Russian invaders Durrani experienced his first taste of the lure of adventure. It was an enticement that would subsequently tempt him many times. The following night he and Rog left the city together.

  After several days of mostly walking, with the occasional ride on a truck, they arrived at a village in the hills outside Kandahar where Rog had a relative.Within a week they had joined a band of mujahideen.

  Thus Durrani began a nomadic guerrilla existence that would span practically all of his next two and a half decades and end with his capture and incarceration in the most impregnable prison on the planet.

  The pair were initially employed by the mujahideen as general dogsbodies: carrying ammunition, fetching supplies, cooking and washing. But after Rog was killed in a Russian helicopter attack along with a dozen others in the group, Durrani was handed a rifle and from that day became one of the fighters. A year later, while being treated for a wound and recovering at a training ground in the Hindu Kush mountains, he met a fellow soldier who had recently lost an eye, a quiet, tall, muscular man with an intense and unusually charismatic personality. His name was Omar and the next time Durrani saw him, a decade later, the man had become a mullah and also the leader of a powerful new force that would eventually become known to the rest of the world as the Taliban.

  After ten years of fighting the Russians were eventually chased from Afghanistan and Durrani found himself pondering his future and how he was going to make a living. It felt strange to be considering a normal life after so many years as a warrior but it did not take him long to come to the realisation that he had no useful peacetime skills other than the ability to drive a vehicle. And so that was precisely what he did. He got a job as a taxi driver in Kabul, hoping eventually to own his own vehicle and go into business for himself. But the peace he expected to descend on Afghanistan with the end of the war against the Russians did not materialise: the battle for control of the country continued. It was not long before he was lured back into the ranks where he joined the rebellion against the Communist government that was still in power.

  Durrani’s involvement in the struggle was not motivated by any political loyalty. It seemed to him that the endless battles were for the personal gains of others and that Afghans were merely the tools of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Americans. There was little
remuneration other than what could be got from looting. But when he was called to join the fight he went because it seemed better than what he was doing at the time. He was a nomadic warrior purely for the sake of it.

  Once again Durrani took part in the capture of Kabul, a new government was installed, and he went back to driving a taxi. During the brief period of calm a pretty young Tajik girl who worked in the taxi company’s office came into his life. Durrani set his sights on marrying her. He planned to work hard enough to buy a car, set up his own taxi company and prove his worth to her. But Durrani was to have his heart broken only a few months later when the son of the taxi company’s owner announced his intentions to marry the girl, who had accepted his offer. For her he was, financially, a far wiser choice than Durrani.

  The failure of the new Afghan leadership to bring order led to the country breaking up into zones, each one led by its own warlord. The two most powerful generals were Massoud and Hekmatyer who both vied for ultimate control at the whim of the same old power-brokers: Pakistan and the US. Crime became pandemic and the general unrest led directly to the emergence of a new clan formed by a sect of Pashtun Islamic-fundamentalist students known as the Taliban. Their banner call was to rid the country of corruption, crime and greedy warlords and they quickly became very popular.

  A combination of peer pressure, heartbreak, loss of confidence in the future and the subconscious need to find a purpose to his life saw Durrani leaving Kabul to join in this latest effort to bring order to Afghanistan. He also could not ignore an important characteristic of the Taliban. They were essentially a Pashtun organisation that, in the early days at least, were keen to return the old Afghan monarchy back to power. In such uncertain times it was wise to stick with one’s own kind and so Durrani enlisted with the Taliban.

  A couple of months later he took part in the battle for Kandahar and after a successful campaign found himself marching on Kabul once again. On his thirty-sixth birthday, a date he had chosen arbitrarily as he did not know his real date of birth, the Taliban took the capital and from there embarked on a crusade to liberate the rest of the country. Durrani approved of the harsh politics of his new leaders, having decided they were necessary to bring order to his war-torn country. Neither was he deterred by the level of brutality used by the Taliban in order to enforce its rule. However, the massacre of Yakaolang left him with scars that never fully healed. Yakaolang was a predominantly Hazara town that had shown the potential for resistance to the new rulers. The truth was that the people had not yet taken up arms against the Taliban but were used as an example to any who might be considering it.