Chapter Forty-one

BY THE TIME the chinooks had landed, the saracen was already down the first of the precipitous slopes and crossing a narrow, windswept plateau. If the Western world had got lucky by having Keating take command on the mountaintop, the Saracen had also encountered his own share of good fortune. He was on horseback.

His climb down the slope had become increasingly difficult, thanks to his injured hip. His experience as a doctor told him it wasn’t broken but, whatever damage he had done, he was finding it increasingly difficult to walk.

Without a crutch or length of wood to take the weight, he knew that, pretty soon, he would have to find a cave or a hole in the ground to lay up in for at least a few hours to try to rest it. That’s when, just as he started across the plateau, he saw the horse.

It was one of his pack ponies, looking lost and forlorn in the starlight, which had become separated from its brethren. It recognized his voice and, hoping as much for company as some treat, trotted towards him obediently. He grabbed the lead rope he had slashed earlier in the night, used it as a makeshift halter and scrambled on to its back.

He urged it into a canter and travelled fast across the plateau, found a path that the goat herders used in summer to access the high pasture and gave the pony its head. Mountain-bred and sure-footed, it carried him quickly down the crumbling path, instinctively avoiding the washaways of loose gravel and never losing its head, even when the drop below its hooves was a thousand feet or more.

By the time dawn came, US and UN helicopters were over the narrow plateau and searching hard, but they thought they were looking for a man on foot and they predicated all their arcs and grids on that assumption. Given that the terrain was riddled with ravines and caves, both of the natural and man-made variety, it was a slow and laborious process for the pilots and their spotters.

The perimeter of the search was steadily expanded, but the horse kept the Saracen well beyond its growing reach and, within two days, he had fallen in with a tribe of nomadic herders, riding with them during the day and sleeping between their tents at night.

Early one morning, travelling along a high ridge, he saw the old Trans-Afghan highway bisecting the valley below. He took his leave of the nomads and turned towards it.

Two hours later he had joined a river of broken-down trucks, speeding Toyota pick-ups and overcrowded buses and vanished into the chaos of modern Afghanistan.