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You are here: Backpacker Resources > Travel Books > Travel Book Extract for May 2011

Travel Book Extract for May 2011

Frontline - Reporting From The World's Deadliest Places by David Loyn

I

A LITTLE KILLING

The mobs rule Kabul itself, each mob under its leader imagining that it alone has frightened the British off. They do a little looting, and a little raping, and a little killing.

George Macdonald Fraser, Flashman

Kabul, Afghanistan, March 1989

There are two really dangerous times in any war, as Peter knew only too well. The beginning and the end. The times when you do not know the front lines, or where the hazards are, and people around you are frightened, on edge, ready to shoot first before asking questions. This was one of those times, endgame for Russian influence in Kabul – and he was disguised as a Russian.

The sound of the leather soles of his brogues on the broken concrete of the empty, wide, dusty street was too loud, too defined and crisp, altogether too military. Peter knew that his Bond Street shoes would easily identify him as an Englishman if anyone bothered to look. But this was Afghanistan, where the fighters he would meet would probably not even be able to read, and would believe his story that he was a Russian. He hoped. Kabul was still in the hands of Russian-backed forces for now, but the mujaheddin, who had guided him in, were at the city gates. He pulled the anonymous anorak closer around his face, against prying eyes and the thin, dry, always-cold, high mountain air.

Kabul sits at the centre of the strategic geography of high Asia, one of the highest capital cities in the world, the guardian both of the only route up to the sheer walls of the Hindu Kush to the north, and the eastern routes into the central Afghan plain. The mountains around are all bare rock in startling colours – one grey, one purple, another green. Peter had walked through most of the night, wondering at the history which gave this alien and unforgiving landscape its savage names. Hindu Kush itself means ‘Hindu killer’, and the last place they had stayed before their walk into Kabul was Sanglakh – literally ‘the blood of a hundred thousand’.

They had driven all of the day before through snow, avoiding the main road where they could, going through the mountain passes which had seen the worst-ever British military catastrophe, when the Kabul garrison had been cut to pieces in 1842. More than 16,000 men, women and children were put to the sword during an ignominious retreat. The Afghans left just one man alive, an Army surgeon, Dr William Brydon, who rode from the carnage in Kabul through the dawn to Jalalabad. (In Peter’s favourite novel, Flashman of course lived to tell the tale as well.)

Now Peter was coming through another dawn into enemy- controlled Kabul. But despite walking for much of the night they arrived too late to slip in unnoticed among the early morning commuters in the deceptive half-light of the early day. The sun was well up by the time they approached the city. They would have to take their chances alone, exposed in the too-quiet avenues.

At the other end of the street he saw what looked like a single guard, standing motionless and staring impassively towards him as he walked. There was nothing for it now. If he ran, he would be shot. He had to continue going forwards along the broken concrete road, his brogues kicking up the fine lunar dust which covers everything in Afghanistan like freshly driven snow, getting into your hair, your eyes, your nose and the cracks in your skin, clogging up cameras and computers.

Frontline by David Loyn is published by Summersdale (paperback; £9.99). It is also available through amazon.com and all good booksellers.