“Hey, you!” he called in heavily inflected Urdu, gesturing me over to his truck. If it had been any colour other than the summer soil before, now there was no way to tell. The engine ticked, unable to cool in the blasting heat, and already pans were coming out and being laid on the bonnets, ready to fry the mid-morning breakfast–no need for flames. I approached, quietly counting up the weapons and making an assessment of the type of men who’d so rudely disrupted my sightseeing. Mercenaries and thieves, I decided, the only sign of uniform being a red bandanna that each wore somewhere about their person. The man who’d called to me was clearly their leader, a great smiling face above a stubbly beard.
“You’re not from around here–you CIA?” he demanded.
“I’m not CIA,” I replied wearily. “Just here to see the Buddhas.”
“What Buddhas?”
“The Buddhas of Bamiyan?” I suggested, doing my best not to let my contempt of this bandit’s ignorance show. “Carved into the mountainside itself?”
“Hell yeah,” mused the man on the truck. “I’ve seen them. You’re right to go now–twenty years from now they won’t even be standing!”
I stepped back, surprised, and had another look at this ragged, smelling, dust-covered man. He grinned, touched his hand to his forelock and said, “Well, nice to meet you, even if you aren’t CIA.”
He hopped down from the truck and began to head away.
I called out, surprised at myself for even doing it, “Tiananmen Square.”
He stopped, then swung round on the spot, toe pointing up and ankle digging into the dirt as he did, like a dancer. Still grinning his easy grin, he swaggered back towards me, stopping so close I could feel the stickiness coming off his body. “Hell,” he said at last. “You don’t look much like a Chinese spy neither.”
“You don’t look like an Afghan warlord,” I pointed out.
“Well, that’s because I’m only passing through this place on the way to somewhere else.”
“Anywhere in particular?”
“Wherever there’s action. We’re men of war, see–that’s what we do and we do it well–and there’s no shame in that because it’ll happen without us anyway, but with us–” his grin widened “–maybe it’ll happen that little bit faster. But what’s a nice old gentleman like you doing talking about Chinese geography, hey?”
“Nothing,” I replied with a shrug. “The word just popped into my head. Like Chernobyl–just words.”
Fidel’s eyebrows flickered, though his grin remained fixed. Then he gave a great chuckle, slapped me so hard on the shoulder that I nearly lost my footing, stepped back a little to admire his handiwork, and finally roared out loud. “Jesus, Joseph and the Holy Mary,” he blurted. “Michael fucking Jackson to you too.”
We ate together. The family whose house we ate in were told in no uncertain terms that they were going to receive guests, but Fidel’s men at least supplied most of their own bread and threw bottle tops at the kids, who seemed excited enough to collect these trinkets. The mother stood in the door, watching us through the blue veil of her burka, daring us to break a single one of her pots.
“I’m born in the 1940s,” explained Fidel, tearing off hunks of roast lamb from the bone with an impressive set of well-worn teeth, “which is shit, because I miss a lot of the good stuff. I’m usually OK to go do the Bay of Pigs though, and obviously–hell–obviously I do Vietnam. I spend a lot of time on the conflicts in Africa too but, you know, so much of that is just about scaring the natives and I’m like, where’s the craft in that? Give me proper war to fight, damn it; I’m not some psychopath who likes seeing infants cry! Iran and Iraq are starting to get good round this time, though Iran’s no fun once the shah’s gone, I can tell you that. Kuwait’s a good ’un, and I’ve tried the Balkan shit too, though again that’s all so much ‘Kill the civilian, kill the civilian, run from the tank!’ and I’m like, Jesus guys, I’m a fucking professional, do you have to give me this shit?”
“Are you a soldier most of your lives?” I asked.
He tore off another strip of meat. “Yeah. My dad’s a soldier, which is where I guess I got it from–spend a lot of kiddy years growing up on Okinawa and, my God, the people there, they have something, I mean like, something iron inside, you gotta see it. I’m paid up with the Club,” he added, an afterthought needing clarification, “but all that sitting around, all that sex and the politics? Jesus, the politics, it’s all so-and-so-said-this-three-hundred-years-ago and so-and-so-slept-with-such-and-such-but-then-so-and-so-died-and-got-really-jealous, and I just can’t be having that. I mean, I dunno, maybe it’s the Club I grew up with–do you find it like that?”
“I don’t spend much time with the Club,” I admitted, embarrassed. “I get easily distracted.”
“Hey, for immortals, Club guys are really inconsistent? You know they killed me with an overdose once? I was like, Jesus guys, I’m only thirty-three and now I’ve gotta go through potty training again? What the fuck?”
“I tend to self-medicate in my later years,” I admitted. “Mid-sixties, early seventies, I always get the same disease…”