Everything hurt. Mac was rolled up in a ball on a hard, concave surface. Stone. He couldn’t stretch his legs – there wasn’t room. He was cold and stiff, shivering. Feverish perhaps? His forehead was burning. His mouth was dry and had the rancid taste of extreme hunger. His lips were dry and chapped. His belly ached. He didn’t want to open his eyes, but he knew he had to.
He blinked. Darkness all around him. He rubbed his eyes and tried again. Turning his head, he saw a circle of light, too bright. He looked away and waited for a few seconds. When he looked back at the circle, blinking, he saw poppies. As far as the eye could see, drifts of white and pink, bands of purple, shimmering in the glare of the sun.
Then he remembered. Running. Being chased. Wading along the irrigation canal for hours, then trudging along a track until, half-dead with exhaustion, he’d been forced to take cover by the approaching dawn. He’d found the outlet of a dried-up karez – an underground irrigation channel – and crept inside to hide.
Trying to ignore the objections of virtually every muscle in his body, he crawled towards the opening. He had no way of knowing how long he’d slept, but the sun seemed high in the sky. Late morning or early afternoon. He would have to stay hidden until dark – his captors would have spread the word in the surrounding area for people to search for him. No doubt there would be a cash reward for anyone who brought him back to Jamali’s compound. There would be people in the fields and on the road, and he couldn’t afford to be seen. Finding food and water would have to wait until nightfall, by which time he’d probably feel even weaker than he did now.
Situation hopeless.
He slumped back against the rounded stone wall. He couldn’t quite see a way out of this alive. Even if the ransom video had reached someone, anyone, who might consider helping him, they’d first have to be able to make sense of his message. And if they could, it didn’t tell them much, and they wouldn’t know where to come searching for him. He had no hopes of the ransom being paid. Fucking powers that be would rather let a man die than give money to crooks and terrorists.
He needed water desperately. He couldn’t afford to wait until sunset.
Though he couldn’t leave the karez at risk of being seen, there was another option. The underground water channels formed a vast network underneath the land for miles around, taking water from aquifers on higher ground, usually meltwater from snow, and distributing it to be used in the irrigation canals that fed the poppy fields. Of course, they hadn’t been built for this purpose. They’d been developed by the ancient Persians and had been used ever since. Each village had a mirab, or water bailiff, responsible for maintaining the karez system, for which the remaining villagers had to provide free labour.
He would have to go further into the karez until he found water.
He struggled to his feet in the low stone tunnel – too low for him to stand upright, meaning he had to walk in a crouched position. It only took a few minutes for his back to start complaining but he had no choice.
The dark tunnel sloped gently upwards, and he was able to find his way by keeping his right hand on the stone wall, carved out of the bedrock maybe centuries before. Every thirty or so metres there was an access well up to ground level which provided a small pool of daylight ahead that he could aim for. Just reach the pool of light, that’s all he had to do. Then he could stop for a breather before setting out towards the next one. Some of these shafts had ladders up the side, but most of them were broken or missing.
Eventually he came to a junction with two branches leading in opposing directions. He chose the larger branch, simply because it allowed him to stand upright, so walking suddenly became easier. He had no idea if he was headed north or south, or where he would be when he finally emerged. He didn’t care, as long as he was nowhere near Jamali’s compound.
The slope in the larger branch was less steep and he felt as if he was making better progress. It was cooler down here than in the first tunnel, which told him he was deeper underground.
However, he was becoming dangerously dehydrated. If he didn’t find water soon, it would get harder and harder to keep moving. Helmand had been suffering a drought, and the whole karez system was falling into disrepair. It was what had made Well Diggers’ work so important, but after the recent spate of murders and kidnappings, Mac doubted they’d continue with their projects in the region.
He wondered if the round he’d fired at Dope Boy had hit its mark, or whether the boy had successfully dodged it when he dropped behind the wall. But the name said it all – he couldn’t believe that Dope Boy was that quick-thinking, and it weighed heavily on him that he might have killed a kid who was already clearly being exploited. Was Akhtar Jamali pure evil or simply an opportunist making money in one of the few ways available in a country that had been at war for decades? Then he thought of his time spent in the Met, mopping up the collateral damage caused by the global drug trade, hunting terrorists who murdered innocent children, sending his own team into situations that got them killed. Jamali was evil, and Dope Boy was yet one more of thousands of victims who suffered because of a gangster’s greed.
Without his watch and in almost constant darkness, it was very hard to judge the passing of time. It seemed like he’d been walking for hours, dry mouth, dry sweat on his body, but he was canny enough to realise it wouldn’t have been as long as it seemed. Wondering how far he’d walked, he began to count the access shafts. Their frequency varied, but there was one approximately every thirty metres. So, thirty pools of light equalled nearly a kilometre. But he’d walked quite a way before he started counting them, then he lost count several times. And what did it matter how far he’d walked if he had no idea what direction he was travelling in?
He decided to rest while it was still daylight, because after dark he could come out of the karez tunnels and get the lie of the land. When he reached a side branch that contained a trickle of water, he dropped to his knees and drank. The channels carried meltwater from the mountains, fresh and clean in the winter, but stale and scarce in the summer drought, which was why most of the tunnels were dry. It tasted okay, and anyway, he hardly cared how clean it was. It was water, goddammit.
He slaked his thirst, then took his stinking clothes off to wash the sweat from his body. Though still exhausted and hungry, he felt one hundred per cent better and, moving back to the larger, dry karez, he curled up on the stone floor and went to sleep.