Undersea Prison Read Online Free PDF Page A

years against the Northern Alliance until the attack on the World Trade Center when it was the Americans’ turn to invade the country.The Afghan weapons and strategies that had worked so well against the Russians were no match for US might and the Taliban were swept aside.
    Durrani took to the hills and eventually escaped into Pakistan where he stayed for several years. He remained in the employ of the Taliban, for his own security as well as to earn his keep. Occasionally he was sent back over the border on sorties, gathering intelligence on US troop movements, sometimes getting into fights with American or Pakistan border patrols. Some of his comrades-in-arms joined the fight in Iraq but Durrani did not want to move that far from his country. Most of his compatriots believed that, as with the fight against the Russians, and against the British many decades before that, a protracted guerrilla campaign against the Americans would eventually see the Afghans victorious. But the Americans had also learned from those past campaigns and the Taliban found it far more difficult to operate in the same way they had under the Russian occupation.
    A degree of order descended upon many parts of the country, Kabul in particular, but this time Durrani could not go back to being a taxi driver or live a normal life in any Afghan city. It would not take long before questions about his past were asked and so his only chance of survival was to stay among those like himself.
    He often wondered what his life would have been like if he’d married the Tajik girl. It might have kept him from joining the Taliban, for one thing. But such speculation was pointless.The Durrani who had wanted to marry and settle down was very different from the one who always went to war and there was little left of the former one anyway. Durrani was under no illusions as to how it would all end for him. Thousands of men he had known had died, and all he could remember of them were blurred images of their faces over the years. One day he knew he would join them. He could not look forward to paradise either for he was not a devout Muslim. Deep down he did not believe in such myths. It did not make sense to him that a life devoted to death and destruction could be rewarded with everlasting beauty. He could imagine nothing after life, only dark emptiness.
    Durrani drove along a dark narrow street with dilapidated single-storey homes on either side, the rooms illuminated by kerosene lamps or lonely bare bulbs. Grey water trickled from waste pipes onto sodden, crumbling concrete pavements strewn with decaying rubbish. His eyes glanced everywhere as he reached the rear entrance of a sturdy mosque in the midst of the squalor, the largest building in the neighbourhood. The side streets he had used for much of the way after entering the city were unlit and quiet but traffic was busy along the main road that passed in front of the holy building.
    He pulled to a stop in a wet and muddy gutter, turned off the pick-up’s lights and engine and sat still, his window open, waiting for his senses to grow accustomed to the sounds and shadows.
    Durrani looked down at his wrist and the Rolex watch, now clean and shining, more to appreciate his treasure than to note the time. He had few possessions, only those he could carry. The watch was the prettiest trinket he had found in years and he hoped he would not have to sell it, for a while at least. He was curious about the engraving on the back. The next time he met an educated man who could read the language of the enemy he might ask what it said.
    He lifted the Tajik scarf off the passenger seat to reveal his AK and the charred briefcase with the chain attached. He placed the case on his lap, the weapon on the floor and the scarf back over it. He wound up the window, checked that the passenger door was locked and looked up and down the street to ensure it was empty. He climbed out of the cab, locked the door, crossed the narrow road,