(1984) In Honour Bound

by Gerald Seymour

  GERALD SEYMOUR

  In Honour Bound

  FONTANA/Collins

  1

  They had been coming back for four days.

  Four crippling, painful days of tramping out a stride across the knife rock of the mountains. Brutal days because the pace was set by a guide who moved as if he were ignorant of the bitter sharp of the stone and the scree as they climbed, then descended, then climbed again. When they moved by day there was the ferocious heat of the sun.

  And when they travelled by night there were bruising falls and the stumbles and the cutting of the rock on their shins and knees and hands and elbows.

  Going had been easier. The outward journey had been in a caravan of a hundred fighting men, and in the midst of a mule train column. The going had been the time of anticipation. Joey Dickens was not an athlete, he was not especially strong, but as Royal Air Force technicians (Maintenance) went, he was tough and fit. The pace of the outward journey had not been difficult for any of them, because the mules had been loaded down with food and weapons and ammunition and Joey Dickens and Charlie and Eddie had kept up with them without discomfort.

  Now it was the coming back for Joey Dickens and for the two men who had sought him out in the pub a few miles from the helicopter station of Culdrose. Charlie and Eddie, in tailored suits and monogrammed shirts and wide knotted ties, had come to Cornwall because Joey Dickens had written in answer to a box number advertisement in an aviation weekly magazine. Over their pints, Charlie and Eddie had made Joey Dickens an offer, and because he was screaming under the burdens of a wife and two small ones and a terraced house on the Abbey National and furniture on the never-never he had accepted the offer of employment for the time of his summer leave.

  In that first week of the year in a pub in the Cornish countryside, Charlie and Eddie had told of going into the wilderness of Afghanistan to carry out the mechanisms and electronic entrails of downed Soviet helicopters. All a little drunk, all a little noisy, and past eleven, and while the publican swept the cigarette stubs and dirt and plastic crisp and nut packets into heaps, Joey Dickens had clasped Charlie's hand and Eddie's hand and pledged his company. There was an envelope containing a thousand pounds in tenners that had slid from the inside pocket of Charlie's jacket to the hip pocket of Joey Dickens' jeans, there was the swift silk patter from Eddie that the valleys of Afghanistan were littered with Soviet hardware that fetched a colossal price, if it could only be lugged back out to the Pakistan border . . . Joey Dickens in the late hours had been quite captivated with the romance of digging into the guts of a Russian whirly . . .

  Charlie said that he was just a businessman, and Eddie said that he was just a bottle washer. We can get there, they had both said, and we can get back, and we can find a client who'll pay through the nose, but they had to have someone with them who knew about the business end of Soviet helicopters, and they reckoned that Joey Dickens fitted the bill. It ought to be the paying off of the mortgage and the buying outright of the furniture. Charlie had said that he had a little company, and Eddie had said that Charlie had all the friends he needed for the disposal of the merchandise, and Charlie had said that he was in touch with a Brigadier in London, and Eddie muttered about under the counter, and Charlie had said that it was a piece of cake, and Eddie had said that all they were short of was a chappie who knew the guts of a whirly.

  Nine weeks later, Charlie had brought Joey Dickens an airline ticket, return, to Islamabad/Rawalpindi.

  It had taken them six days to reach the ravine. Joey Dickens had never seen such country and, to a young man from the flatlands of Lincolnshire, the ravine was something else. The ravine was a mighty fissure of the rock, and down at the base greyness and hard to see because of the camouflage paint was the broken fuselage of an Mi-24 helicopter. Close to the helicopter shell were white scrapes on the rock and black scorch squares. Joey Dickens recognised the signs of high explosive bombs and napalm canisters that had been dropped into the ravine to destroy what remained of the helicopter, but which had failed to do their work.

  They parted from the caravan, left their guide on the path and edged their way down a steep gully to the floor of the ravine. The waiting in Pakistan for a helicopter carcase to be identified, and located, was forgotten. Joey's difficulties of communicating with the flash Charlie and the small talk Eddie were obliterated. The worst job had been the first: disentangling the bloated and grotesque-grown body of the pilot. Even in the cooler depth of the ravine the stench was suffocating. Joey had been violently, shudderingly sick and Eddie made a litter from a door panel and carried the body out of sight before he picked its pockets. And then, for half a day, armed with a screwdriver and a wrench and a set of spanners, Joey had worked at the in-flight computer and the radar and the guidance systems. Each item he took from the helicopter he annotated in a jotting book.

  They had climbed with their loads to the top of the ravine.

  They had seen the guide who sat in the shade of a rock fall waiting for them, and they had seen that on the mule that had been left for them were now fastened two wicker litters. They had seen the men who were pale from wounds who lay on the litters, and the protest had died in Charlie's mouth, and the guide had pointed to the ground and scratched the shape of a butterfly's wings, and Joey Dickens had known that two men had detonated the butterfly shaped anti-personnel mines that were scattered from the sky.

  In their own back packs, Joey Dickens and Charlie and Eddie would carry the working parts of the Mi-24 helicopter.

  That evening, on the bivouac beside the goat path, the diarrhoea snapped in the stomach of Joey Dickens. He had taken the pills, but he had ignored the food.

  Two days back from the ravine, and the lack of food and the work of the pills had finally clamped to a halt the movement in his belly. But two days of walking in the terrible heat without the sustenance of food had drained away his strength.

  Each succeeding day was harder.

  On the fifth day the speed of the little group was increasing, one of the wounded men had his leg severed above the knee, and the other had his intestines bound into the ripped stomach wall with old cloth and, unless they hurried, the men would die. Charlie and Eddie were friends and could lift each other with their talk and their laughter.

  Sometimes before they rested Joey Dickens was a long way behind, and his feet were an agony of blisters.

  Across the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush, a group does not slow for a straggler.

  His boots gnawed at his heels and toes, his muscles ached, his belly ground in sweet pain, his breath gasped in the rarefied altitude. The glare of the sun beat into his eyes from the rock surface as he followed the group up the shallow file of a dried river bed.

  Sometimes he heard the banter of Charlie and Eddie, sometimes he heard the curse of the guide and the welt of a stick on the mule's back, sometimes he heard the cry of a maimed man as the pain lurched in his

  body, sometimes he heard only the leaden scrape of his own boots.

  He did not hear the helicopters.

  He wondered why he had come. And he thought of the terraced house that was five miles from the base at Culdrose, and he thought of the pinched feet of his elder girl that would have stayed pinched for another month . . .

  If he had stopped, if he had stood completely still, then he might have heard the engines of the helicopters.

  Joey Dickens was three hundred yards behind the others. The straps of his pack bit down into his shoulders. Christ, if he'd known he was going to have to carry the stuff he wouldn't have been so bleeding keen to strip it out of the whirly. He glanced from his footfall to his wrist watch. In twenty minutes they would stop for water. The stops were regular, when they stopped he would ca
tch up. And by nightfall, by the creeping of the dusk across the mountains' sides they would be across the frontier. This would be a dream, a time of delirium. Within moments of crossing that undrawn frontier, a cairn of stones, it would all have been a bad dream. Past the cairn, into Pakistan, six hours in a taxi to Dean's in Peshawar, a day of hotel baths and hotel food, and four hours in a taxi to Rawalpindi, and thirteen hours in the London Tristar, and then scarcely a dream.

  He had to say that he had never met a man like Charlie. A bull of a man was Charlie and, when he charged, the fences broke. He'd made that little spook in Peshawar jump to it on the home shipment for Charlie's Brigadier. The guy didn't like it, but, by God, he'd do it. And even if Charlie was ten years older than Joey Dickens then he could still walk faster. He wondered what he would tell his wife. Down in the Gulf somewhere he'd said, and she'd looked at him as if he was off with a woman to Torquay and not dared make the challenge. Christ, her bloody eyes would be out on stops when he came back without a roll on his stomach and with the black

  bulge of his bank account. When he was back, in the solid comfort of the front bedroom, he might tell her about Charlie.

  He had to shade his eyes to see the group in front. He blinked. The right heel blister was the worst. . . bastard. He wiped the sweat that ran from his forehead down into his eyes. He saw the guide run from the mule he had been leading. He saw Charlie and Eddie scramble away from the river bed towards the surrounding rocks.

  Joey Dickens did not understand.

  Just the ache in his head, the pinch of pain in his stomach, and the hurt in his feet.

  He did not understand what he watched and what he saw.

  There was a rumble behind him, the light throb of a coming drummer.

  The mule walked on, the rope dangling from its head collar, same pace, same destination. The man with the shattered leg rose up from his litter on the flank of the mule. He gestured into the brightness of the sky behind Joey Dickens, The man who was wounded screamed in his fear and the words reached Joey Dickens, but he did not know the Pushtu language.

  He spun, and looked up. The ache and the pain fled.

  They were a pair.

  Two helicopters for Corporal Dickens to stare up at. An RAF maintenance technician, and he was watching the dive descent of two battle cruiser helicopters. He saw the breakup of camouflage paint; he saw the serial number on the belly; he saw the tinted glass bulbs that masked the gunner and the pilot; he saw the nose machine gun meandering for an aim; he saw the rocket pod clusters; he saw the mark of the red star.

  He began to run; he pounded after the mule; and the skin ripped off his heel blisters.

  There was a patter by his feet, and dust sprinkling up from the track, and the whine of a ricochet, and the snap of fractured rock, and the shrieks of the men who were wounded and lying on the mule's litters, and the crash as the first rocket exploded.

  There were no trees. There were no bushes. There were no sheltering rock crevices.

  He ran.

  A few yards, and his breath was weeping in his throat when the spray of machine gun bullets trapped him, imprisoned him. The rocks around were wet, red and soft with his intestines.

  The machine gun bullets cut the body of Joey Dickens into pieces. The bullet path moved forward to punch into the laden mule, into the men who were already wounded, into Charlie and Eddie who had found no hiding place, into the low huddled figure of the guide.

  The helicopters hammered the still air, quartering the sides of the valley then rose again for the high empty skies.

  In the evening, after darkness had curtained the river bed, some tribesmen who were making their way to the Pakistan border found the bodies of their countrymen and the mule and the three white foreigners. They piled the bodies together and placed over a shallow scuffed grave a heap of stones to keep off the birds of prey.

  They had taken the back packs from Charlie and Eddie and Joey Dickens and tipped away the weighty equipment, so that one man could comfortably carry all three packs.

  They would take them to the bungalow office of the American consul in Peshawar and would be rewarded with dollars.

  The mule's body they left across the path.

  It had been a small luncheon party, in an upper room of the United States Embassy in Mayfair's Grosvenor Square, to introduce the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency who was making a rare visit to London. The guest of honour was Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and the two were now alone at the table.

  'Foreign Secretary, there's a thing I've been waiting for this opportunity to discuss with you, and it's for your ears only,' the Director said.

  'Tell me.'

  'Afghanistan is our patch. We wouldn't mess on your patch in Zimbabwe . . .

  Afghanistan's our theatre.'

  'I am afraid I don't know what you can be referring to, Director.'

  'Look, we're private, we're colleagues, and we share what we get, but what you've started doing in Afghanistan is off the park. We'd prefer you to put the brake on it, a hard brake.'

  'I said, I don't know what you're talking about.'

  'Three weeks ago you had three creeps shot up when on their way out with aircraft parts, helicopter parts. We know what they had because among the possessions of one of them was an inventory. We had something in the works to get the same stuff, we had to abort after your people messed up. Just do us a favour, will you, and stick to interrogating Afghans when they're on Rest and Recuperation back in Peshawar.'

  'I find your attitude quite offensive,' said the Foreign Secretary, 'and I repeat: I have no knowledge of this matter.'

  'Your people need a lot from us, more than we need from you . . . I'll tell you something, the Mi-24 Hind helicopter is the best the Soviets have. When it comes down they blow it to pieces. This one was more or less intact because the terrain prevented their bombers getting in to destroy it. While we were putting our thing together, to go get it properly, your people went in and botched it, pissed on something that was precious.'

  'That is offensive and unwarranted.'

  The Director smiled, bland and cold.

  'I'm concerned that, in the future, professional work isn't hampered by the bungling of British amateurs. Of course, if you would have me believe that you know nothing of teams of incompetent Englishmen tramping around the edges of the Soviet Union, well, with some reluctance I'll believe it. Just this once.'

  The Ambassador had crossed to them. Within a moment the smiles were wide, the handshakes crisp.

  An hour after returning to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, his vexation undiminished, the Foreign Secretary waved to an arm chair the Deputy Under Secretary who headed the Secret Intelligence Service. The Foreign Secretary briskly retailed the American complaint.

  'Not our bailiwick, I'm afraid, sir . . .'The Deputy Under Secretary was a pillar of calm in the storm. 'We're clean, and that's what I told our cousin two days ago. I said that if they wanted to stamp on this sort of thing that he should take advantage of today's lunch. If you'll forgive me, sir, I would stress that my people in Pakistan are interested in detailed and expert analysis of the military and political situation appertaining to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan and the resistance with which their occupation is confronted. Put bluntly, sir, I don't regard the collection of ironmongery as my service's priority. These three mercenaries were in touch with Army Intelligence, and I gather they had an understanding with a Brigadier Fotheringay for payment if they delivered. Against our better judgement, we had agreed to ship their stuff home.

  That was the limit of our involvement.'

  Next he welcomed into his office the First Secretary who headed the Afghanistan desk at FCO. He offered him a drink that was politely declined. The First Secretary glanced openly at his watch as if one train home had been missed.

  They talked for an hour.

  'The military position is, in summary . . .?' The Foreign Secretary stretched at his desk.

 
'Quite satisfactory for the Soviet forces inside Afghanistan. Since they don't have a public opinion problem, their casualties are acceptable. The mujahidin - that's what we call the dissidents, the Resistance forces - can cope fairly well with the Soviet and Afghan Army tanks, artillery, all the ground force elements. If that was all there was to it, then we'd have stalemate. It's the helicopters that make the difference. You will recall, sir, that it is the policy of Her Majesty's government, and Washington's policy, that ground-to-air missiles should not be supplied to the mujahidin. The local chaps can't touch the helicopters. The helicopters are the decisive element. Given time, and this is our assessment, the helicopters will be the foundation of Soviet victory over the Resistance.'

  'Is there a special helicopter?'

  'There's one, the gunship. It's the Mi-24 . . . It's the best they have, perhaps the best anyone has.'

  'What do we know about it? How much of it is worth finding out more about?'

  'I'm not a military man but, as I understand it, the D and E versions are in Afghanistan, those are the latest . . . They're very much wortfy finding out more about.

  Anyone who builds helicopters would be more than grateful for information about this chappie!'

  The wife of the Foreign Secretary had gone to church. He'd told her to make his apologies to the rector. His detective let the Brigadier into the house. The couple who kept house for them in London and in Herefordshire always took Sundays off. At weekends the detective was more of a butler than a bodyguard.

  He didn't know a great deal about the man who was ushered into his study. Only that he was Henry Fotheringay (known as Fo'am to only a very few), that he held the serving rank of Brigadier, and that he headed that department of the Ministry of Defence that specialised in acquiring the details of Soviet weapons systems. A tall sort of cove, very straight in the back, and with a fidgeting tick in his hands. It was early in the day, but the Foreign Secretary poured two thin sherries.