Cross-legged in the half-light, on a threadbare rug covering an otherwise bare concrete floor, the general of the presidential palace guard is no longer in his natural environment.
He is surrounded by large, white bags of rice, plastic buckets, dusty kettles, empty bird cages, power tools, broken machinery and other items of bric-a-brac to be found in the cellar of a modest Afghan home in a shabby neighbourhood. Such as this one.
Brigadier General Piraz Ata Sharifi is a huge man. Perhaps 20st: moon-faced and shaven-headed. In other words, he's distinctive.
And distinctive is not good in his case. Since the Taliban seized power on August 15, he has become one of the most wanted fugitives in Afghanistan.
Less than five months ago, the general was sharing a Kabul conference table with General Sir Nick Carter, Britain's most senior soldier. He has a photo on his phone to prove it.
Until a few weeks ago he was in charge of the day-to-day security of President Ashraf Ghani, who — as head of state — was the personification, in theory at least, of the West's efforts to secure a democratic, pluralistic Afghanistan.
General Ata Sharifi pictured in the Jalalabad basement where he is in hiding from the Taliban
Now the president has fled, the Western-backed government is history and General Sharifi — who, to his chagrin, was not privy to the VIP evacuation — has a price on his head. Wanted posters to that effect have appeared at Taliban security positions all over Kabul.
They show the general's mugshot and the following words: '[This is] General Piraz Sharifi, who also has the nickname "Ata".
'He was the special guard of the president. He has 300 weapons with him now. If you know about the person or his location, you should inform the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
'There is a reward for such information of one million Afghanis.'
One million Afghanis is the equivalent of £10,000 — a fortune in a country in which 90 per cent of the people are surviving on less than £1.60 a day.
So the general has been reduced to living — quite literally — an underground existence; moving from cellar to squalid cellar.
It was in one such hideaway that Mail photographer Jamie Wiseman and I met him last week.
Ours was an extraordinary encounter with a once powerful figure brought low.
During our meeting the general vented his anger and despair at being abandoned and 'betrayed', not only by those whom he protected, but by the West whose cause he served.
He showed me the pleading emails he has sent to the Ministry of Defence in London and Johnny Mercer MP, by whom he claimed to have been trained in Afghanistan.
He also promised to expose the corruption of his former boss who, he says, fled the country with bags containing hundreds of millions of dollars of public money.
The general has the palace CCTV evidence to prove this, he says. He will share the evidence if he can escape himself.
That is a pretty big 'if'. And getting bigger by the day. Because a manhunt has been declared across the Afghan capital and this week the Taliban dragnet was closing in.
His messages on our WhatsApp correspondence grow ever more pitiful, hopeless.
The general's dread of capture is heightened by the knowledge that the search is being directed by the most ruthless member of the new Taliban government.
One of the general's brothers has already been recognised in the street and summarily shot.
Another is safe and living in the UK. But which scenario is the general to follow?
In his cellar, he says to me: 'I don't have 300 weapons as the Taliban claim, but I do have one gun and one bullet.
'If the Taliban come here, I will kill myself. If they capture me they will kill me anyway.'
We were first contacted about the general by a third party.
They were aware of our interest in those Afghans employed by the British who had been left behind in the chaotic UK airlift — Operation Pitting — that ended on August 28. We had met several of these individuals, who had worked as interpreters or security guards.
General Sharifi was in another category altogether. Twenty-four hours after the first contact, the general said he wanted to meet.
We were summoned to a rendezvous with another vehicle on the edge of the eastern city of Jalalabad.
Then we were led into a neighbourhood of back streets until we stopped outside a house behind a crumbling wall.
We were told to wait until the street was empty before entering through the gate.
Brigadier General Piraz Ata Sharifi is a huge man. Perhaps 20st: moon-faced and shaven-headed. In other words, he's distinctive
Inside the front yard children stopped playing to stare at the foreigners. One of them, we learned later, was the general's daughter.
We were led through the modest property — far from palatial either in size or appointment — to the top of a flight of stone steps that led down to the cellar.
And there we found the general, looming in the twilight.
He was wearing a shalwar kameez rather than his red-tabbed staff uniform. His manner was understandably restrained.
'I did not sleep last night after we spoke,' he admitted. 'I asked myself: 'Who is this guy? Why is he really coming to see me?' It is hard to trust anyone in my situation.'
But he knew he needed a line of communication with the world beyond Afghanistan if he was to have any chance of survival.
And so we settled ourselves onto the threadbare rug. And then the general began to tell his remarkable story.
He had been a military officer for more than two decades and joined the presidential palace's security force in 2005, his salary paid by the U.S. government.
In 2010 and beyond, he said, he underwent instruction from British Army personnel.
One of them, he said, was Johnny Mercer, now MP for Plymouth Moor View.
Mercer was previously a captain in the Royal Artillery who served as a training and liaison officer with Afghan forces during this period.
By the start of this year, the general was in charge of some 1,500 handpicked troops of the presidential security force.
They were the most trusted soldiers in the Afghan military.
One of the general's duties was to make sure that other, possibly less loyal formations were disarmed or sent away before the president visited the location they had been guarding.
He showed me several photos of himself beside former Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
Since the Taliban takeover, he has deleted all pictures that show him with President Ghani, who succeeded Karzai in 2014.
On August 15, the general left home to go to work at the presidential palace as usual.
'Then I went to the defence ministry ahead of the president. He was supposed to go there to talk about the defence of Kabul (against the approaching Taliban).
'One of my jobs was to disarm the soldiers on guard at the ministry before the president arrived, for his security,' he said.
'We were waiting for the president there. But then I got a call to say that
