We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek Page B

it.’ said Astrid.
    At dawn next morning they found places in the two Uaziks hired by a Swiss TV crew to make the three-day journey through the mountains to Jabal os Saraj, where Alliance troops had been preparing a last stand against the Taliban until the Americans began to hammer from the air at their new common enemy, there on the Shomali plain, at the portals of Kabul. With the Swiss reporter and cameraman and his Slovenian producer, their Tajik interpreter from Dushanbe, an Afghan escort and two drivers, they were nine with their gear in the cars when they drove up the valley. The escort was a former bodyguard of Ahmed Shah Massoud, proud without scale of his acquaintance with the hero of the Hindu Kush, a pride not dented by his failure to prevent Massoud being assassinated by al-Qaida afew days before the attacks on New York and Washington. The bodyguard was a handy cocky talker through each of the checkpoints they passed, always three young men with old guns and a piece of rope stretched across the road. Before setting out the westerners wrapped their equipment in clingfilm and wound scarves around their faces. The Swiss reporter invited Astrid to ride with him, the cameraman and the bodyguard, while Kellas rode with the interpreter and the producer.
    ‘The old Swiss guy, he’s going to fuck her,’ said the interpreter, Rustum, after half an hour’s travelling. He said it without emphasis, as if he were talking about the past, rather than the future.
    ‘What if she doesn’t want to?’ said Kellas. He was mistrustful of the producer, a tanned and moody individual looking for an opportunity to turn into Werner Herzog once he had a good day of wilderness on either side of them.
    ‘Where’s she going to go?’ asked the interpreter, but less confidently, startled and then made gloomy by Kellas’s assertion that Astrid was capable of independent action. He was twenty five. He’d already made one profitable trip to and from Afghanistan since the big western TV networks rediscovered the country. He smoothed his moustache and rested his chin on the shoulder of the Slovenian producer in the front seat.
    ‘What do you think, Alex?’ he said.
    ‘Is fifty old?’ said Alex. ‘Not for a Swiss guy.’
    At first the road was a swathe of small, half-loose rocks embedded in soil that had become dust as fine as talcum powder. Once a second, the old Soviet army car jolted and lifted the passengers in their seats. The dust splashed off the tyres of the Uazik in front as fluid as milk before spreading high and wide around them so that the day turned yellow and they bound their scarves tight across their mouths and nostrils. It was mid-October, and they were thousands of feet above sea level, and climbing, yet the sun shone. It was warm. In the heights the dust lessened and the stones of the road became coarser still, rounded boulders the size of cow heads,with gaps between. However high they climbed there was always a swoop of red rock and scree on either side looming over them, a hard gradient up to a ridge implausibly close to the sky. They passed ammunition trucks, boxes marked ‘Grenades’ shifting in their open trailers with each bump, and CNN’s water, and convoys of brutalised donkeys carrying panniers of dried dung. They drove round lakes where the water was the colour of blood and lakes where the water was the colour of grass. At the first crossing of a river, they stopped, and everyone got out except the drivers. The bridge was a row of crooked, spindly tree trunks laid from one bank to another without being fixed to either bank, or to each other. The drivers crossed with swift bravado and the others walked across. When they got back into the cars, Astrid switched. She sat in the middle of the back seat, between Rustum and Kellas. Kellas noticed that she sat down warily.
    ‘Wait,’ she said, holding up her hand when he tried to get in beside her. She reached into the waistband of her jeans, under her anorak,