(1984) In Honour Bound

by Gerald Seymour

  Bloody near did my back in getting it on the truck. You can get it off.' The sharp, clear accent of a south of England private education. Barney wondered how they chose him.

  There had been spooks in Muscat, confident and supercilious blighters who revelled in their mystique.

  Rossiter shone a torch beam out through his window and onto a wooden crate that was roped down in the back of the truck. The beam found stencilled printing, and Barney leaned across to read the letters. British high commission islamabad personal furnishings fragile.

  'Went through Karachi customs like a dream.'

  'Thanks,' Rossiter said.

  'For nothing. What's going to happen to it afterwards?'

  'It'll be disposed of, not your worry.'

  'I don't worry easily, friend. If you two shift yourselves we'll get it into the back of your's.'

  Barney and Rossiter stepped down from the land-rover. Together they lifted the crate from the truck and edged it across the tail board of the land-rover. The sides of the square crate were a little more than four feet across. Barney had taken the strain, Rossiter a grunting second fiddle.

  'No need to make a fuss, I did it on my own,' the spook said.

  'Thanks,' Rossiter said without kindness.

  'You'll go a bit softly, won't you?'

  'Depends what you mean by softly."

  'You're out from London, you may not know the local scene that well If you're going to be sitting on a mountain top with a damn great wireless then the Pakkies won't be that pleased. If they find you, there'll be a fair old fuss. I've a useful piece of co-operation going on here . . .'

  Why don't you just piss off,?'Rossiter said.

  I 've a fair idea of what's going on over there without your having to sit on a mountain - playing with a radio.'

  Piss off, will you, and don't tell me how to run my show.'

  I'm just telling you: people out from London are just a bloody nuisance.'

  'Goodnight . . .' Rossiter turned to climb back into the land-rover. 'When you're a very big boy you may just get to learn what's going on, perhaps.'

  Barney grinned in the darkness. He heard the angry intake of breath from the spook.

  He eased himself into his seat, and Rossiter was away, turning noisily before Barney had the door closed.

  'An object lesson in tact and discretion, Mr Rossiter.'

  'Arrogant little shit.'

  Rossiter laughed. When a car passed them, heading for Kohat, Barney saw that Rossiter was still grinning broadly to himself.

  They backed the land-rover up to the verandah steps and carried the crate into Barney's room before they turned on any of the lights. Rossiter almost at once said he was going to bed. Barney drew the cotton curtains. He took a heavy knife from his kit, and began to prise away the nails that fastened the crate. The boards creaked as he dragged them up. Barney was no weapons buff. He had come across them in his time, but not in the Regiment. Weapons were no more or less than a tool of Barney's trade.

  He could not have said why Redeye was different to him from every firearm he had handled. He saw the slim symmetrical shapes of the top layer of the tubes that protected the missiles and that were wrapped in greased waterproof paper, each holding one missile and the battery coolant unit. Separate and wedged to the side of the crate with polystyrene filler shapes was the launch tube grip stock and optical sight. When he had looked down for a few seconds at the wrapped tubes and the launch mechanism he felt a sense of the ridiculous, and he shook himself as if to get rid of a hallucination, and then lifted back the crate boards. He shut away the Persian lettering that had overstamped the Hebrew script, and banged with his clenched fist down onto the wood so that the nails slid again into the sockets.

  He slept long and well that night.

  'He says that the mujahidin have learned to be cautious of foreigners who come with offers of help . . .' said the boy who played the part of interpreter.

  Rossiter sighed. 'You must explain that the help we are going to offer is very positive.'

  Rossiter eased back on the low plastic coated settee. Barney sat beside him, eyes alert, unmoving. They heard the boy speak, then the reply.

  The boy turned to Rossiter. 'He says the leader of your country has been here, and the great men of America, and of Germany and France, and the princes of Saudi. They have all offered their help, they have all promised their support. They all tell us that we are fighting for freedom, they all tell us of our courage and that we are heroes. He says that they do not want to be told of their courage, and that they are heroes, they want the help that has been promised . . .'

  It was four hours since Rossiter and Barney had driven to the refugee camp outside Peshawar. They had walked between the open sewers, they had gone amongst the lines of tents with their surrounds of mud walls, they had come to the prefabricated home of a leader. Now they sat on a settee and round them the shadowed room was crowded with men. l ighting men, hawk-eyed and sharp-nosed and long-fingered and heavy-bearded men. Some stood, some sat on the floor. Only their leader had another chair. Four hours, and God knows how many of the tiny cups of sweet tea Barney had dutifully drunk. He was used to it, that was the way it happened in Muscat. He almost felt sorry for Rossiter. Rossiter in his bloody suit, as if he were a District Commissioner come to sort out a problem with a bagful of beads. He'd learn. A part of the plan had emerged during the drive to the camp. Rossiter had found a group, yes. But the group had not actually been propositioned. No, that was going too last. He'd found a group that fought, that didn't just talk about fighting, that's what Rossiter had said. But Redeye, Redeye was far in the future. Redeye hadn't been talked about. And Rossiter's status was not yet established. So, they'd talked for four hours and the way it was going they'd talk another four bloody hours. Barney was settled, comfortable on the settee, and could watch the closed faces of the fighting men, and wonder if those who had killed his grandfather had looked in any way different.

  'I have come to talk to the leader about real help, tell him that.' Rossiter snapped his instruction to the boy. Barney's hand flickered to Rossiter's sleeve. Steady, old thing, there's no hurry.

  Again the exchange of words between the leader and the boy.

  'He says,' the boy chattered out the answer. 'He says he has no need of blankets or food for his people. He says that each time the mujahidin have asked for real help, for the

  work they have to do, then the help has been refused them.'

  Barney's hand tightened on Rossiter's sleeve, 'Ask him what is the real help that he needs.'

  Rossiter flashed him a glance of annoyance. It was the first interruption.

  'All the world knows what is the help that is needed,' the boy replied pertly and without reference to the leader. 'Help is needed to fight the helicopter . . .'

  The boy broke off, translated for the old man with the white beard and the narrow spectacles and white cotton trousers and the embroidered waistcoat against whose legs he sat. There was a growl of agreement from the shadow recesses of the room, then a scatter of voices. The boy looked from face to face, absorbing the talk. The boy clapped his hands for quiet.

  'They say that from the time the first foreigners came offering to help us, we have asked for aid in fighting against the helicopters. The helicopter is armoured, protected, against it we have rifles. They say, what can a rifle do against armour plating? They say the helicopter massacres them because they are not given the help they have asked for.

  They say that if the foreigners cared for their freedom then they would be given the weapons to destroy the helicopters.'

  Rossiter looked into Barney's face. Barney raised a finger slightly, the gesture that Rossiter should not speak.

  'I say again, what is the real help that is needed?'

  The boy translated, the voices rose in reply.

  The boy held up his hand for their silence. Cheeky little sod, Barney thought, but he can be cheeky when he's pretty and has smooth cheeks and when his back
rests against the knees of the leader.

  'They want the missile, the missile that will destroy the helicopter.'

  'What is the missile you want that will shoot down the helicopter?'

  'We have asked the Americans for Redeye, we have asked the Egyptians for SAM

  7, we have asked the British for Blowpipe. We know what is available, we are not just peasants off the fields, we know the names of the missiles, we can read . . the boy catapulted his answer to Barney without pause for translation.

  'Which is the best?'

  'Redeye,' the boy chimed in instant answer.

  Rossiter leaned over close to Barney. 'Where in God's name are you going?'

  Barney clipped back. 'I thought we'd better get on with what you should have done last week.'

  'Watch yourself. . .'Rossiter whispered and flushed.

  Barney smiled sweetly at Rossiter. All the eyes in the room were on him. The eyes of the fighting men. He saw a helicopter, he saw the burst of exploding flame, he saw the eyes and the faces of these men as they inched from cover to cover, from rock to rock, across the floor of a valley, inched toward the survivors of a helicopter crash. He wiped the sweat from his face.

  'I'm going to clear them all out,' Barney said. 'All except the boy and the old man.'

  An hour later they stepped out into the rich afternoon sunlight.

  A bargain had been struck.

  The leader of a tribal fighting group of the Afghan mujahidin and a boy of seventeen years who had learned his English at a Lycee in Kabul and an official of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a captain of the 22nd Regiment of the Special Air Service had all shaken hands on a deal.

  'You did well,' Rossiter said hoarsely when they were in the land-rover.

  4

  Long before, Barney knew the proverb of the Tajik people of the north of Afghanistan which said: 'Trust a snake before a harlot, and a harlot before a Pathan.'

  The men he would train ; to fire the Redeye missile were southerners, Pathans.

  He had not brought the weapon system the first morning. He would bring that later. First he would take stock of the j men he had to teach. They went out on the Jamrud road, to the first foothills at the approach to the Khyber. Barney had said six men only. There were fourteen. Barney had said that only the young and the fit, the true fighters, should come. The beards of four men were white with age. They drove in a rusty Volkswagen van, pressed together, smelling and scenting together, hawking and spitting together, the sun not up two hours and the heat suffocating.

  In the front, beside the driver, was the boy who made the translations.

  The road took them past the big refugee camps. Two and a half million displaced persons from Afghanistan living in tents or in mud homes they had built for themselves. Three and a half million of their livestock grazing on land at the fringes of the camps, sheep and goats and cattle. And they believed that one day they would go home, which is why they sat patiently before their tents or the mud brick homes and waited for victory. One day . . . Barney had never before seen refugee camps, there was something unreal about these camps, something that happened only to other people. He i wondered if he could ever have been a refugee, if he could have sat with a pipe and a cup of sweet tea waiting for a victory to be won far away against ten divisions of the Soviet army.

  Harney leaned forward against the crush of men in the hack of the van, he tapped with his finger on the boy's shoulder.

  'What is your name?'

  'I am Gul Bahdur, what is yours?'

  'I am Barney., Gul Bahdur, why are there so many in these camps, what was the one weight they could carry no longer?'

  'Someforeigners say it is because they have free food here. This is a lie, Mr Barney.

  It is the attacks from the air..

  'Tell me.'

  'The helicopters attack the villages. The helicopters have bombs and rockets, there is no defence against the helicopters.'

  'Always the helicopters.'

  'Before the Soviets came to Afghanistan, these men did not know fear. It was not possible to make a Pathan afraid, but the Pathan is afraid of the helicopter, do you understand me?'

  'I understand you.'

  'Mr Barney, you are a soldier?'

  'A sort of soldier.'

  'Would you not be afraid of the helicopter?'

  'I understand you.'

  'If you are truthful, if you accept that you too would have fear, then you will know why we have left our homes.'

  'I said I understood.'

  Barney lapsed back to silence.

  The road was full, noisy, slow moving. They headed towards the mountain line.

  'Mr Barney . . .'

  'Yes.'

  'Have you ever fought against the Soviets?'

  'No.'

  'Would you like to?'

  Barney grinned. 'You have no right to ask me that question, and I won't answer it.'

  The boy turned full face to Barney, a wide happy smile. He seemed younger than his seventeen years, little more than a child. The boy boasted as a child will. 'I have fought against the Soviets.'

  'How many did you kill?' Barney asked lightly.

  'More than a hundred.'

  Barney was laughing. 'And how many did you wound?'

  The boy shook his head and the dark hair flopped across his brow. 'None were wounded.'

  Barney said quietly, 'And how many did you capture?'

  'None were captured.'

  They drove off the road and away parallel to the mountain line, along a shallow valley, and soon were lost from the sight of the traffic. Where the van stopped there were scattered scrub trees, with foliage sufficient to throw down patches of shade. The men spilled from the doors of the van and hurried to find a place where there was shelter from the sun. Barney was last from the back of the van. He walked slowly towards the trees, squinting his eyes, gazing deep into the emptiness around him. There was a silence here, a silence of the wind ruffling against rock and sand and bush and hillside. They sat and they watched and they waited for him, these men who did not wound or capture Soviets but who killed them.

  'You'll translate for me, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said brusquely.

  'Of course.'

  'And exactly. You don't add and you don't take away.'

  'What else?' The boy's smile was rampant.

  'And don't give me any bloody cheek.'

  The cheerfulness was stripped from the boy's face. He was a chastised child. His eyes dropped. 'What you say to me I will tell to them.'

  Barney talked to the men under the trees about Redeye.

  They knew the workings of the Kalashnikov and the AK-47 and the Lee Enfield and the Heckler and Koch rifles. They were familiar with the Soviet RPG-7 rocket launcher. They could lay a mine. They could site an ambush. Patiently Barney talked them into a world that was new and which might be bewildering. Gently he spoke to men from one of the most unsophisticated regions of the earth, to men who could not read and who could not write.

  Each morning for a week the Volkswagen van brought them to the same place, and each morning Barney edged forward in his exposition and detail. He was never interrupted, he was never asked a question. The eyes never closed, the heads never turned away from him. In the middle of each morning the boy brewed teavover a gas camping stove, and then the men would talk and fool and ignore Barney. Ignore him until the tea was drunk.

  By the end of that week Barney talked of a portable, short range missile to be used against low flying aircraft or helicopters. He spoke of a missile with flip-out cruciform tail fins. He led them into a two stage solid propulsion unit with short boost and longer sustain. He explained a guidance system of passive infra-red homing. Scratching with a sharpened stick in the dirt he drew the missile to scale. Jabbing with his finger he pointed to a rock that he judged to be a mile away and then said that his missile would cover the distance to the rock in the time that it took him to count four seconds.

  The next day was Friday.
On the Friday he would not meet them. He told them that when they next came to the place he would bring with him the Redeye so that they could feel and hold the weapon, and then he would speak of the technique of firing and the science of target acquisition.

  At the end of that week, as the men trooped back to the van, Barney found that the boy had fallen into step beside him.

  'What do they say?' Barney gestured towards the men ahead of him.

  'They say that if it helps them shoot down a helicopter that this torture will have been worthwhile.'

  'You little bugger . . .' Barney swiped at the boy. 'You are going to go with them?'

  'Perhaps I will be the only one who knows how it works.' 'You could get the shit kicked out of you,' Barney was laughing.

  The boy looked up into Barney's face, questioning and intent. 'It works, Mr Barney, your Redeye?'

  'The pride of General Dynamics, California, young man. Yes, it works.'

  'How's it turning out?' 'It could be all right.'

  Rossiter leaned against the open door, watching Barney swilling his face in the basin.

  'I'd have thought that after a week you'd have a decent idea.'

  'They'll probably get a helicopter.' 'You're none too bloody sure.'

  Barney straightened, the water fell from his face. 'I said it could be all right. I said they'd probably get one.' 'You're a grudging sod.'

  Barney turned to Rossiter. 'You want to know why it's only all right and why it's only probably?' 'You tell me,' Rossiter said grimly. 'You found the wrong people, Mr Rossiter.' 'What does that mean?'

  'It means that the men you found are pig ignorant. They don't know how a car works let alone a supersonic heat-seeker.'

  'And where would I have found a Cambridge physicist?'

  'Inside . . . inside, half the leadership is defected Afghan army officers. Inside there are bright kids out of school, kids from the university, kids from the cadet college.

  They're what we should have had.'

  'Precisely why we haven't got them, because they're inside and we're outside. And we cut our bloody cloth to the circumstances . . . And you've a whole week more to get them to the start line. Stop bloody wingeing.'