we had ankle-length boots

that let us wade in shallow pools

like resolute explorers

impervious to rainwater, mud or frogspawn

or those tired warnings, seldom heeded,

not to go into the puddles on purpose.

that winter I could read the map

the water charted

and knew the purpose in a snail’s

slow, slimy track as it slid along a window pane.

then the sun came and brought with it

the end of winter

and meaning dried away

and was gone with the last of the rains.

The poem vaguely disturbed him. He didn’t know why. He put the sheet back on the desk, face down. Next, he looked through the books on the desk. To the left of the typewriter were the four Vigilante books. He picked up the uppermost one, the earliest in the series, Assignment: Africa. The binding was worn, the spine cracked in places. He leafed through it and saw that it was annotated, in a mix of pencil and red ink, words crossed out and others written in, punctuation examined and found lacking, typos circled in patient, careful loops and rings.

He put it down, and as he did he upset some invisible balance, some delicate equilibrium that had been suddenly disturbed. There was a cascade of papers, pebbles, pens, seashells and coins and the sudden unexpected noise made Joe’s palms wet with sweat, made his heart beat faster. He stepped back, tried to calm his breathing. Debris settled on the floor. Silence returned. The air itself was still, the tiny breeze he’d felt before had already departed. The air was thick with afternoon heat, afternoon dreams.

Joe examined the fallout. On the desk a seismic shift had taken place, a clash of tectonic plates creating a new pattern across the surface. Underneath what had been a miniature mountain of books a stack of pages was revealed.

They were stacked neatly one on top of the other. White pages, edges aligned, the typewritten lines running left to right in single-space. On the first page, centred, surrounded by blank space, a title: The Last Stand. Below it, a familiar sub-title: An Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante Novel.

Below, still: By Mike Longshott.

Adjacent to the manuscript was a book open face-down on the desk. The title was familiar, but it took Joe a moment to realise it was the same title he had picked up, briefly, at the market in town.

A Tourist Guide to theToraBoraCaves. He picked it up, leafed through it. Pictures of mountains, pine trees, cave openings in the bedrock. The place looked quiet and peaceful, the pictures exuding a faint air of disuse.

He moved his gaze to the typewriter. A new sheet of paper was inserted into the machine. It was partially typed. Joe reached for it, pulled it out, gently, his fingers leaving damp prints on the paper.

black dust

… in the White Mountains. In Pashto its name meant The Black Cellar Black Dust. An extensive network of natural caves, they had been greatly extended in the 1980s with the assistance of the American Central Intelligence Agency the Agency the CIA. Twenty years later they were to become the subterranean grounds for the Battle of Tora Bora between Osama Bin Laden’s men and coalition troops from the United States and the United Kingdom.

Kabul had fallen. As the tanks rolled into the city Osama Bin Laden’s fighters had already left. They went into the mountains, amassing at last in the caves of the Safed Koh, the White Mountains, fifty kilometres away from the Khyber Pass.

It should have been the last stand of Osama Bin Laden. In the event, it was nothing more than one more battle in an extensive ongoing, prolonged war.

US Air Force B-52H Stratofortress strategic bombers were deployed, fresh from the battle of Kabul. They dropped a steady barrage of bombs ordnance over the mountains, chief amongst them the 500-pound Mark 82 bombs and the 15,000-pound BLU-82 bombs, known as Daisy Cutters. US Special Forces were inserted into the battle zone by helicopters, and British SAS commandos attempted to penetrate the caves, leading to intense close-combat fire-fights. Outside, bomb craters were filled with rubble, and uprooted trees lay on their side.

As the fighting ended, and the caves had been swept clean, no trace could be found of Osama Bin Laden, nor of the bulk of his fighters. The Emir had disappeared into the snowy mountain paths, to regroup and continue the fi –

Longshott

——

Joe jumped. The sound was unexpected, loud in the silence. He had been staring at the page for some time. The rest of it was blank. It had been left off in mid-sentence. Joe looked around wildly but could see no source for the sound, which was, unarguably, a cough. He put the page down on the desk, his heart beating sickeningly fast. He heard a sort of rustling sound, coming from the direction of what he had assumed was the kitchen, the cough again, and light footsteps. Outside a bird, perhaps similarly disturbed, was chattering manically in a rapid percussion. Joe took a step back from the desk.

The shadow came first. It fell down from the open doorway onto the dusty floor, a thin emaciated blade of shade. Then it stretched, shrank, and a man came through into the room with a gun in his hand.

The man first: tall, thin, with shoulders that stooped a little, as if used to carrying a burden that could not, momentarily, be seen. The clothes hung from his frame as if he had been better fed once, and had since lost his appetite for nourishment. His face, too, was long and thin. He was unshaven. His hair was brown and, like the rest of the man, thinning.

The gun was a single-action revolver: an antique. In his other hand the man held a polishing rag. The butt of the gun was worn a smooth silver. When he saw Joe, the man stopped still. His eyes were brown and large in his face.

Joe, too, was still. His eyes were on the gun. The man said, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Are you –?’ Joe said, and somehow all the questions he wanted to ask were crowding and thronging each other in his head and what came out was, ‘Are you going to shoot me?’

‘What? The man looked down at the gun in his hand as if noticing it for the first time. He put it away on the bookcase. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even know you.’

‘I’m Joe.’

The man stared at him. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Joe.’

Outside the lone bird was still chattering away. Inside the heat felt oppressive. ‘Well, Joe,’ the man said, moving closer – ‘What do you want?’

‘I –’ as the man’s proximity increased Joe noticed a familiar, cloyingly sweet smell. It seemed to cling to the man, or perhaps to his clothes, like to a suit that had been entombed in mothballs for too long. He said, ‘You’re Mike Longshott.’

The man stopped beside the desk. His hand rested on its surface. ‘Yes…’ he said. There was a wondering note in his voice. ‘How –?’ Joe said, ‘How do you know?’ he gestured wildly in the air, taking in, in one encompassing sweep, the bookshelves, the Vigilante paperbacks, the uncompleted manuscript on the desk.

Longshott slowly nodded. Joe noticed he had a prominent Adam’s apple; it bobbed up and down as he swallowed. ‘Please,’ Longshott said. ‘Sit down.’ He gestured, in his turn, at the two worn armchairs. ‘You are a refugee?’

The question floated between them, lighter than air, unanswered. Then Longshott nodded again, equally slowly, and said, ‘Let me make some coffee.’