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this was alien to him.
    ‘We don’t have time to waste,’ the mullah said testily. ‘Do as he says. That is a command.’
    Durrani had been obeying orders of one kind or another all his life and during the last fifteen years they had been those of mullahs.To act without question was ingrained in him. He pulled off his robe to reveal a grubby sweat-stained wool shirt.
    ‘And your shirt,’ the doctor said.
    Durrani unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it off his shoulders and held it in his hand as the doctor studied him from where he stood. Durrani was sinewy, without an ounce of fat on him, his taut muscles and large veins well defined beneath his tight yellowy-brown skin. He was also covered in a collection of interesting scars.
    The doctor slowly walked around him, pausing to study the marks of some of the old injuries. He had no doubt that each of them had some kind of horrifying story attached to it. He was not wrong.
    A series of deep gouges on Durrani’s chest was the result of shrapnel from a missile fired from a Russian helicopter in the Jegay Valley in 1983. A round indentation on his right lat with a corresponding one on his back marked the entry and exit holes of a bullet that had struck him during his first assault on Kabul. A scar across the side of his stomach was from a cut given to him by a Pakistani fighter two days after the Yakaolang massacre when the man accused Durrani of cowardice. Durrani cared little for the man’s opinions and was content to ignore him but the man took the lack of reaction as proof of his accusation and drew his knife to kill him. Durrani was not easily riled but a threat of death was sufficient to get his blood up. The Pakistani’s thrust to Durrani’s side was his last attack. Durrani side-stepped, knocked the man’s arm away, closed the gap between them in the next instant, wrapped an arm around his assailant’s throat and, while others looked on, crushed his windpipe, letting go only when the man had been dead a good half-minute. His back bore the chequered scars of dozens of lashes that he had once received from a Saudi troop commander who had accused Durrani of stealing loot he was not entitled to. During the next battle a week later Durrani bided his time and in the thick of the fighting he pulled the pin from a grenade and stuffed it down the back of the man’s chest harness. No one suspected that the explosion and subsequent disintegration of the Saudi was Durrani’s way of taking revenge.
    ‘You have survived much,’ the doctor muttered.
    ‘He is my best,’ the mullah said with some pride.
    ‘Lie on the desk,’ the doctor said. ‘On your back.’
    The mullah cleared the items off the desk and Durrani sat on the edge of it and lay back.
    The doctor moved alongside Durrani, concentrating his examination on the fighter’s stomach area. He took hold of the top of Durrani’s trousers and pulled them down as far as his pubic hairs, prodding around his lower abdomen.‘It should not be a problem,’ the doctor finally acknowledged.
    ‘You must do it now,’ the mullah said. ‘Tonight.’
    The doctor nodded and turned to get his bag from the floor in the corner of the room.
    The mullah leaned over Durrani to look into his eyes. ‘He is going to perform a small operation on you.’
    Durrani stared up at him, unsure how to respond. But whatever was going to happen would happen and, as the mullah had said, Durrani would find out the reason behind it soon enough.
    The doctor placed his bag on the desk beside Durrani and removed a bottle of lidocaine, a hypodermic needle, a scalpel, some gauze and a pair of rubber gloves which he pulled on over his hands. Durrani stared at the cracked smoke-stained ceiling and concentrated on detaching his consciousness from whatever was happening to him.
    The doctor filled the hypodermic needle with the lidocaine and wiped a small area of Durrani’s lower abdomen with an antiseptic swab. ‘I’m going to anaesthetise a small area of