khan.sharif.chronicles

Had I got used to living in Gulistan? Even started to think it was boring? Maybe. But after the murder and our desperate, crazy and law-breaking drive to save little Amir’s life, I know Central Asia isn’t going to run out of surprises however much longer I live here.

 Amir’s father was Duran, our family’s cook. We live in the city of Khan Sharif, and they both lived in a little flat in our back garden. Of course, Amir should have been home in his village, but Duran was lonely and he’d brought Amir to the city a few months back.

 Because of what we did, I’m not going to name the big British company my Dad works for, or give our family name. But I’m Zachary, and my sisters and I go to the International School.

I’d noticed Duran and Amir don’t have the Genghis Khan features of most Gulanis. They’re from some minority ethnic group down on Gulistan’s southwest border.

I never thought much about it.

The crash that woke us in the half dark on a winter morning was the start of Amir’s ethnicity being the biggest and scariest thing in our lives.

* * * * * *

We all jumped out of bed and ran to the front door, and when we looked out, Duran’s bicycle was lying smashed and twisted on the drive. Someone had thrown it over the gate, but it looked like it had first been run over by a truck, and when we got to it, there was blood.

All we could think was: this is a message, a warning, a threat. But why, and for what? And where is Duran?

Mum thought first of Amir. She ran to the flat, found him asleep, and took him into our house. I’m still impressed she thought to take everything of his she could see, so no-one would know a child had lived there, and start asking where he was now.

Dad unlocked our gate, and some of the neighbours’ cooks and cleaners were talking in a little huddle on the road. They didn’t want to tell Dad what this was about, and I don’t think any of them spoke English anyway. But then the young guy who delivers everyone’s hot flat bread each morning came along on his bike, and he told him.

 Dad came in and locked our gate again, locked the front door, and sat down beside Mum. His face was pale and his hands were shaking.

He said, ‘He was in a fight last night. Someone suddenly pulled a knife. In all the struggling one of the men he was fighting with was killed. The victim’s family and the police have decided it was our man who did it, probably because they despise his ethnic group. Now the family and friends have sworn revenge, and the police want to arrest him if he’s not murdered first.’

Mum held Amir closer. ‘What can we do?’

‘I’ve told the bread delivery boy he didn’t come home. Everyone believes he’s headed for his village.’

‘What about this little one?’

‘His father’s new enemies would kill him if they found him. On the other hand, if the police find the little fellow, they wouldn’t bother to drive him hundreds of kilometres home. They would probably dump him in some horrible local orphanage.’

‘Or … use him as bait to catch his father …

’Yes. I expect so.’

They’d been careful not to use Duran’s name, and Amir doesn’t understand English. But he knew something was going on.

‘Zaccy, nima qilyapsiz?’

I learn Gulsha at school. I said, ‘Masele joq, Amir’. There’s no problem.

‘Men Atam kayda?’ Where’s my Daddy?

‘Qishloq jol.’ On the way to the village.

He started to cry, so I told him he’d soon be home too, and we fed him breakfast, and by now all our family were feeling we were trapped in a terrible dream. This couldn’t be happening in real life. Not Duran. Had he really killed a man? Even as an accident?

My Dad got on Google maps, and looked where the village was, and how far. I thought, Dad, you’ve never driven outside the city. Be real!

But of course he wasn’t actually thinking he’d do it, not then.

It was only after the police had pounded on our gate, hard-faced and hostile, searching our property, trashing Duran’s flat, and we’d been terrified they’d discover Amir in my sister’s bedroom. Then we started saying, Well what else can we do?

This isn’t a dangerous or violent country. We had trouble thinking that any Gulanis would actually be out for bloody revenge. But it didn’t have to be even one in a thousand, did it? Just a few friends or family of the dead man.

Dad got out the road map – there’s no GPS going to tell you to turn left, turn right, where he had to go.

That’s when I said, ‘You’re going to have to take me, too.’

‘Absolutely not, Zachary!’

‘You don’t speak Gulsha, and Amir doesn’t speak English.’

‘That won’t matter.’

‘It will. Think about it.’

‘I’m not even going to consider it!’

‘If he panics how are you going to calm him down?’

‘You just explain now where I’m taking him.’

‘Dad, he’s only five! He won’t carry that in his head for two days!’

Mum said, ‘I don’t want to say it, but I think Zachary’s right.’

So my parents argued for about ten minutes, and I just went and packed a bag with my toothbrush and a change of clothes and Amir’s few things.

I had a very bad feeling about this.

Dad doesn’t even enjoy a picnic in the woods. His natural environment is a glass and steel office tower. He can navigate Europe’s most complex motorways, but could he handle Gulistan’s rural roads?

I’d seen those roads. And I was pretty sure on that winter morning he hadn’t, and that he had no idea what he’d just got us into.

We drove out into the street right on half nine. Any neighbors watching only saw the British father and two of his children in the car, the fifteen-year old boy and the youngest girl on his lap. Actually they would have only seen her pink tracksuit, long dark hair under a hat, and her head bent over a game on a tablet.

I’d told Amir, ‘You’re going home to apam, to mummy. But it’s syr, a secret, ankayt, a surprise.’

Right then I think Dad and I were more worried about having a little kid in the front seat, and not in a child restraint in the back, than anything.

We got clear of the city, heading south where foreigners don’t go much, because all the pretty tourist stuff is north: the forests and hills and the snow-covered Northern Border Mountains.

But going south it just gets drier and dustier, and unless you’re an archaeologist there’s nothing to go there for. Or, unless you’re a couple of kidnappers on the run with someone else’s child disguised in a black wig from your sisters’ dress-up box.

Not far south of the city edge there was a roadblock. A police 4WD blocked a narrow bridge, and police were searching inside a bus. Amir snuggled into me, shaking and whimpering. I kept my mouth shut, and Dad just smiled and said ‘Tourists’, and showed them his papers.

It’s hard to sit smiling like an idiot tourist who has nothing to hide, when you’ve stopped breathing with fear, your insides twisted into a knot. I held up our camera, the prop Mum had handed us as we left.

The police might not have bought the tourist story, but their orders were only to search vehicles for Duran. They told Dad to open our boot, checked inside, slammed the lid down, and waved us through.

In the UK, the police would have identified the car as the same one seen a few hours ago at the house where Duran used to work.

We rumbled south through mile after mile of dry farmland where stalks of harvested crops stood like a buzz haircut in the dust.

Every hour or so we slowed down for another little grey-brown town of one and two story concrete and mud brick buildings, brightened by advertising signs and children on the street in red parkas, pink sweaters and yellow plastic boots.

Amir slept or looked out the window, numbed into silence by the landscape rolling by. Dad never spoke, his eyes on the broken bitumen ahead of his tires, gripping the wheel tight whenever he had to move half onto the dirt shoulder, out of the path of an oncoming truck.

We both jumped at a sudden thumping noise under the car, and Dad pulled over and stopped. Flat tire. If Dad had ever changed a wheel it was way before I was born. He climbed out slowly, walked to the back and opened the boot.

A car with four Gulani guys skidded to a stop, spraying gravel. They all jumped out, grinned at us, grabbed the spare, the jack and the wheel brace, and had the wheel changed and the ripped one back in the boot nearly as fast as a racing team pit crew.

Still grinning, they each shook Dad’s hand, got back in their car and roared off, tires spitting gravel. I don’t think I’d heard them say six words between them.

Near midday Dad parked under some leafless trees outside a small town. I left Amir with him, hung the camera over my shoulder and leaned into the cold, gritty wind as I trudged along the road edge to the shops. I came back with hot samosas, some spotty apples, Cokes and chocolate.

Dad walked up and down and flexed his arms while he ate, tossed his empty bottle in the car, and we drove on. Now there was no more cropland, only desert scrub and once or twice a shepherd on horseback watching over sheep.

The next police check-post really scared us. The police were like, Oh yeah? Foreigners coming here as tourists? With a young child? In the end they let us go through, but it was a close call. Too close.

Dad said. ‘If any police see Amir’s face, they will recognize his ethnicity and guess whose child he is. They’ll take him into custody and arrest us for kidnapping, impeding a police investigation, accomplices after the fact, and violating the terms of our visas.’

My Dad just said that? My Dad, who was so strict about doing the right thing, obeying the rules? He brought us up to be honest, loyal to our friends, look people in the eye, not take the easy way out. But what happens if being loyal to someone means breaking the rules, even the law? And who were we being loyal to? Duran, who might have killed someone? Amir? Or Amir’s mother, who we’d never met?

We spent the night in the car, hidden a hundred yards off the road behind a rocky outcrop. I didn’t sleep well, it was too cold, but I did think a lot. In the morning I told Dad, ‘You won’t like this idea, but I know how we can get Amir through any police checks we run into today.’

He didn’t like it. He was shocked I’d even suggest it. I was, too. But how else could we hide Amir?

My Dad looked years older. I knew he hadn’t slept much last night, and Gulistan’s desert borderland was a long, long way from his comfort zone. Plus, there’d been hours and hours driving on a bad road.

But for him the worst must be the conflict between doing the right thing in getting Amir home, and doing the wrong thing by lying and breaking the law. I was sure of that.

He probably thought he was setting me a terrible example. I thought he was just totally awesome. Would any of my friends’ dads do this trip for a little lost boy?

An hour after we got back on the road we saw a village straddling the narrow strip of potholes laced together with bitumen that the map still called a ‘highway’. A petrol pump stood outside a sort of general shop. A teenage boy came out and pumped the petrol by hand, his breath coming out as puffs of steam.

I went inside with Amir over my shoulder, his face buried in my parka. The shop had everything you might sell to poor villagers and farmers, and as well as food I bought a thin purple polyester blanket printed with flowers.

Then I went to the rubbish heap behind the shop and carefully walked in something that stank like a dead cat.

 We drove on south. Dad looked exhausted.

Getting towards midday we saw a proper, permanent border police check-post. The tourist story was never going to work here, in the most boring dry landscape you ever saw. Dad opened the window, and rolled to a stop. We held wads of tissues over our noses. On the back seat was a sad little rolled up blanket.

The police were not happy, which you’d expect, posted out here because they were not the shiniest buttons on the commissioner’s uniform, checking maybe five vehicles a day, for no real purpose.

Dad held out his papers, and I pointed sadly at the blanket behind us. ‘Bizdin bakshashimiz kichik kuzi.’ Our gardener’s little daughter. ‘Ayol bezgek ket ush kun ilgari’ She died of the fever three days ago. ‘Uni atam arizahada zatadi.’ Her father is in the hospital. ‘Men oylaymi ol omirmin.’ I think he will die too. We are taking her body to her village.’

The police stepped back in panic. They’d got a face full of dead cat stink. They waved us on. ‘Ket! Ket! Ket!‘ Go! Go! Go! Just drive!’

Dad put the car in gear, and drove on, the road climbing now into dry, rocky hills and the surface so bad he hardly got into top gear. I didn’t believe there would be another check-post, and I was holding Amir in my arms again. He’d started sucking his thumb, dark shadows under his eyes.

We turned off onto a gravel road, heading south, and after about ten kilometers we saw two dozen mud brick houses in a shallow valley with some fruit trees and sheep and irrigation ditches.

Had we found the right place? When Duran had described where he came from, he hadn’t been giving us directions how to go there. We’d pinned our hope on this being the only village so close to the south-west border.

Dad said, ‘I don’t want to alarm them by driving right into the village. If they’ve heard about the stabbing, they might think we’re the revenge mob.’

‘Yes. Okay.’

He stopped, and I opened the door and got out with Amir. I stood him on his feet and took his hand. The whole village had come out to stand and watch when they heard the car, and we walked towards them.

 Voices shouted. Hands pointed. A woman ran to the front and screamed. ‘Amir!’

I never heard a woman make a sound like that.

Amir snatched his hand free, then he was flying down the dirt road, his arms out, sobbing, ‘Apam! Apam! Apam!’

It was the gentle growl of a light plane flying low over the city that snapped me around, eyes searching the sky. We don’t see a lot of them in Central Asia. And, more weird, the sound didn’t come from the usual flight path in and out of the Khan Sharif airport.

We can see that flight path from our high school, and the planes we see are commercial airliners or military aircraft. Or, sometimes, rich people’s private jets.

But this was a single engine light plane, banking away from the city center, and it looked like towards the school in the middle of the lunch hour.

 Six hundred of us were outside, kicking footballs on the sports field, playing volleyball or tennis on the courts, or just hanging out.

 I saw a lot of other kids stop dead, too, and just stare up at the sky. Not just a quick check, but like, ‘What’s going on?’

We were getting our phones out, sweeping the sky till we found the plane, coming at us head on. Now it was like, ‘What the hell?’

It was dropping altitude, and suddenly kids started running off the sports field, racing for the buildings, screaming, ‘It’s coming down!’

I backed against the Science Block, keeping the plane firmly in the center of my screen. No question it was coming down on the sports field. I was sweating, my hand holding the phone was shaking. Could a plane land there? Could it? Safely? But why? Why was it even over the city?

Instinct kicked in. I’m a journalist’s son. I had to get this. This was a story. I hoped like hell it wasn’t a tragedy. Just a story, okay? Please, just a bit of drama. Bust the plane up, maybe, but no-one hurt.

It looked like that might happen. Coming in over the fence. All the grass ahead. Then the plane bucked like a saddle horse gone rogue. Engine roar. Nose up. Wing down. Dropping sideways like a shot bird. Sickening crunch as plane impacts ground. Small bits in all directions. Silence.

Me running, phone camera fixed on the wreckage growing bigger, filling the screen. Maybe someone is alive. Maybe I can do something, anything. In the distance behind me I hear shouts and screams. Other students are running towards the plane too. All of us with our phones out. All of us hoping we’ll find the pilot alive.

We stop. He isn’t. He isn’t alive, and he isn’t alone. Two dead guys. The pilot and his passenger.

From behind us teachers are shouting, calling us back to the buildings.

One of the boys beside me throws up on the scarred grass.

‘Come on,’ one of the others mutters. ‘Nothing we can do.

‘Yeah. Let’s go.’

They straggle away. I would, too, except my Dad is a foreign correspondent. He tells the world about wars and earthquakes and terrorism and governments who have dirty secrets they want to keep secret. I’ve been marinated in trauma reporting.

I’ve just never seen trauma until this second.

With some teacher bellowing from the buildings, ‘Joel Fleming! Get back here at once!’ I’m filming the two guys in the plane. I’m filming the pilot, who has a small, neat blue-lipped hole between his headset and his right eye.

I’m filming the passenger, who has a pistol in his right hand.

I’m filming the backpack behind the seats that has visible wires, and I’m pretty sure contains explosives. I want to check and make sure, but I think I’m lucky it hasn’t suddenly decided this would be a good time to explode and take out the nasty foreign kid with the camera.

I back away, and not because the teacher is still shouting himself hoarse, and the sirens that have been screaming closer and closer are now inside the school carpark.

Through a mist of tears I look at the pilot who refused to fly into whatever building the terrorist targeted this morning. Who innocently took a charter job, and is now dead on my school’s sports field. Who wouldn’t risk crossing the flight path of a passenger jet, so tried to come down here.

I duck my head for a moment in respect, and slowly turn back to the school buildings, cutting a straight course through the dozen or so emergency vehicles screaming across the grass.

The teacher meets me, purple and spitting with rage. I don’t hear him. Behind him the kids and teachers are massed and in collective shock, staring at the plane, the emergency vehicles, and now the military vehicles spilling out personnel. Of course, most of the kids are not too much in shock to be filming everything.

I snapped out of whatever daze I’d been in, and thumbed my screen with fast jabs that sent the video to Dad.

About then the Principal ordered us all back into the central quad area of the school, where we couldn’t see the plane any more, and I wasn’t sorry. I knew too much about what was in that cockpit. The guys who’d gone out to the plane with me hadn’t looked as close as I had.

We all got told to sit down, packed in tight on the grass, the pavers, or benches if we were lucky. The teachers were all talking on their phones, then to each other, then back on their phones. Staring at us. More muttering to each other. No-one knew what to do. The staff must have training for all kinds of dramas, but maybe not this. All this week and next, the trauma counselors were going to be busy as squirrels in autumn.

Busy with the teachers, before they ever got to us.

Everyone’s phone was screeching with incoming calls from parents. Word had got out all over the city. Kids were in tears answering calls. Voices up at least two octaves. Parents were in total panic. They were trying to get to the school but had run into military road blocks.

 I texted Dad and told him about the road blocks, too. I’d never supplied him a story before.

But today some terrorist had decided to fly a plane and explosives into … What? The Presidential Palace? Department of the Army? The Parliament? Or was it called Congress? I couldn’t remember. Didn’t matter. He’d planned on some big, important building, but all he’d achieved was to mess up our soccer field. And kill an innocent man.

My parents both rang me. ‘I’m okay,’ I told them. ‘Just sitting in the quad. Did you send out my story, Dad?’

‘Of course. Well done. Well done! There’ll be updates, but yes, your video’s the first report. Now, you sure you’re okay?’

‘Sure. Just sitting around with my mates. We’ll probably be back in class any minute.’

That was a lie, of course. I felt terrible. I was shaking like I had a fever. Couldn’t get the image of the cockpit out of my head. But I wasn’t telling him that. He’d think I was soft.

Right then, these military types came walking fast into the quad. Not armed, but covered in badges and eagles on their epaulettes and stuff, so we knew they were high ups. Everyone got very quiet.

One of them barked out in English, ‘Who was filming the plane on their phone?’

Um, like… everyone? Are you stupid?

‘Who filmed the plane that landed in the school?’

 Landed?

The purple-faced teacher was looking around for me. I ducked behind someone and looked at my sneakers.

‘Who has filmed the plane?’ shouted the officer.

Nobody moved. Nobody answered.

‘Then everyone will hand over their phones! Now! Every phone! Hand them over!’

Just like I thought. Governments want to keep their secrets, secret. He couldn’t possibly know one of us had filmed what they’d also found by now – that backpack. And the gun. But we’d all filmed the result of that gunshot – a plane calmly coming in to land suddenly convulsively out of control, and crashing.

And so the government was doing what governments everywhere do. Keeping an event secret, from their citizens and the world, because it made them look like not totally in control.

Except … Was this guy living in some previous century? The images had already gone out to everyone’s social media friends.

‘Hand over your phones!’ he ordered the kids sitting right in front of his shiny black shoes. They hunched down and left their phones hidden. He shouted louder, and way at the back Vitaly pulled out his phone and held it high, filming the officer going off his brain.

That really upset him, and he raved and yelled for Vitaly to stop filming and give him the phone. Wing Yan and Farida pulled out their phones and started filming, then Suvash, Ismaila and Sven, and then all of us were pulling out our phones, holding them up, filming the three officers.

For maybe five seconds they just stood there, then they turned like on a parade ground and marched back towards the fallen plane and the dozens of vehicles and crowds of workers and officials that must be out there now, hidden from us by the Science Block.

Phone power. Phones get a bad rap, sometimes, but that day they told the truth to the world, and truth is always power.