CHAPTER ONE
Afghanistan, May 2007
From four o’clock in the afternoon we sit in silence on the mountainside, high above the road. It was hot when we took up our positions, but as the night has darkened the temperature has plummeted. I’m glad of my thick pullover and windproof jacket.
There is no moon. The scrubby plants around us have faded into the blackness. I smell an aromatic bush. I hear the breathing of my comrade. Nothing else.
Flickering starts in the eastern sky, so faintly that at first I think my eyes are playing tricks on me. There’s the clatter of a pebble far below me. Special Forces. My comrade’s breathing becomes faster, and I feel my own pulse start to race.
As the flickering becomes brighter, I make out individual beams of light piercing the sky. There is a distant rumble of diesel engines. I think of the other warriors of faith, a dozen of us on each side of the pass, split into six pairs, each pair with a mortar and six bombs. Silently I praise Allah that we are undiscovered.
And then, with brilliant headlights and roaring trucks, the convoy rounds the corner. My dark-adapted eyes are dazzled. No matter. We have to wait in silence for one minute after the first vehicle has passed. Stealthily, my comrade takes hold of the firing cord. Five – four – three – two – one. He pulls the cord. Almost simultaneously I hear the whistle of other mortars. The Americans, surrounded by the noise of their machines, hear nothing.
I’ve reloaded the mortar before the first of our bombs strike. Again the cord is pulled, and a missile whistles into the air. Reload, fire. Reload, fire. There’s a huge explosion from the east, towards the rear of the convoy, and a fireball racing into the sky. I can feel its scorching heat on my face. There’s shooting from the soldiers with the convoy but it’s wild, unaimed. Reload, fire. Reload, fire.
That’s all the bombs gone. Time to leave. I move as quickly and silently as I can up the hill, up to the path leading over the ridge into the next valley. Tomorrow I will be back in Pakistan, the day after that on the train to Karachi. Within seventy-two hours I will be back home in England. “Bismillah, Saleem,” whispers my comrade. We will not meet again.
Hi Penny,
I find the change in tense in the first line off-putting. We sit from four o'clock in the afternoon, which was hot, but now it's dark it's colder - too mixed up. We have been sitting, perhaps.
The terrorist as narrator, and present tense all the way through? It could work to keep it active, but could also be quite wearing to read after a while, but that's a purely personal view.
There's no reason why this subject shouldn't be publishable if you've got it 100% right - if you've got inside the skin of the narrator. Why not consider self-publishing? That's what I'm doing, and while it's a little more complicated than one might think to work out fonts, covers, and all the gubbins, it's actually quite a smooth process. If you want Kindle just to publish your book, rather than buying a package of editing and proof-reading and so forth, it is pretty much free (depending on whether you pay for a cover artist.) You'll have to do all the publicity yourself, but you would as a new author no matter who published the book.
What's best: to leave it and your hard work to fester in a drawer, or to put it out there for people to read? Let the public decide. You've got nothing to lose, and much to gain.
Lorraine
Hi Clare,
My brother, who is a published author of fiction, looked through the MS. I've used his insights to strengthen it.
It's going into a drawer for two reasons; I'm not at all sure that the subject matter will be publishable however good it is (I mean, the terrorist is in the first person throughout...); and I'm now bored with writing and re-writing and re-re-writing. A year is enough of my life to spend on that. I'm 65. I've only got so many years left!
Hi Penny, it's hard to say from such a short extract, but this does make me want to read more and discover who the mysterious bomber is. If I was reading this I'd want to know a bit more about one of the central characters quite soon after this extract, just so I had someone to be invested in, but that's just me.
It's a shame you're thinking of putting it away in a drawer. If you don't want to use a professional is there another fresh pair of objective eyes you could use?
Clare