(1984) In Honour Bound

by Gerald Seymour

  'You asked me and I told you . . . but if we get a helicopter, and it's not burned out on impact, and you've some pretty pictures for your pocket, and some electronics for your suitcase, then everything's rosy . . .' Barney dived his face again into the basin, sluicing away the sand grime.

  'Just one helicopter will do me very well,' Rossiter said with emphasis. He turned away, then paused, pivoting back towards Barney. 'By the by, I heard of a party weekend after next, managed an invitation.'

  'I wouldn't have thought we'd be waving ourselves round Peshawar society.'

  'Anyone ever tell you what a miserable creep you are, Crispin?'

  'We're supposed to . . .'

  'One of the Red Cross girls,' Rossiter snapped. 'Of course, you don't have to come.

  I'm stuck here, you know. Stuck here like a bloody plain-faced virgin. You're out every day, I'm here. And don't you lecture me about security. I was organising bloody security when you were still wetting your bed. I also made Major, which it seems you've forgotten.'

  Barney towelled the water off his face and shoulders. Rossiter watched him. Barney slipped into a clean shirt, walked to the door, didn't hesitate, and Rossiter made way for him. Barney went through the living room, out through the front door and onto the verandah, then off towards the land-rover.

  'Where are you going?'

  'Out.'

  'Can I come?'

  Barney heard the desperation in Rossiter's voice, heard the pleading.

  'No. You're too old for where I'm going, like you said.'

  Barney heard the door of the bungalow slam shut. When he turned to look he could not see Rossiter.

  It was early afternoon.

  Barney drove west, through Jamrud, past the turn off where he went each morning in the Volkswagen, onwards and upwards off the plain and into the Khyber. The road climbed, snaked, in curve patterns around the bleak greyness of the mountains. Always above him, always on the highest ground, were the old British picquet forts, square-based towers now roofless and weather scarred. Alongside the road was the railway, reaching onto viaducts, diving into tunnels. He saw valleys with thin streams far below and village clusters and handkerchiefs of green cultivation. He saw the barracks of the modern Pakistan army, and the dragon's teeth of tank traps, and anti-aircraft guns aimed loftily to the west and the Afghanistan border. Clear of the Khyber he came to the township of Landi Kotal, and where the road narrowed into a gorge between steep cut rock faces, Barney pulled onto the gravel shoulder. Set in the rock and painted in vivid greens and whites and reds were the emblems of the old British regiments that had served their tours in this far border country. The Gordons, the Royal Sussex, the Essex Regiment, the First Battalion 22nd Cheshires. Barney shook his head, slowly, happily, as if he heard a lament of pipes, and a church parade hymn, and the cry of a bugle, and the shout of a drill sergeant. His grandfather would have been here . . . would have come through the gorge on his way to a battlefield in Afghanistan. He felt a bond with this man, younger than himself, who had come through the Khyber on a fighting mission more than half a century before. He felt the touch of family.

  He locked the land-rover, bent to tighten his boot laces, and climbed away from the road first up a steep gully, then onto a sharp-backed, fish's spine ridge. He climbed easily, fluently. His breathing was calm and relaxed as he stretched his stride away from the road and out into the wilderness. Beneath him was the town of Landi Kotal with its pimples of minaret towers and flat cement roofs and spiralling wood smoke columns. He turned his back on the town, setting himself instead to absorb the mountain sides. He saw caves that were dark in shadow and crevices never penetrated by the sunlight. He saw boulders behind which one or two men might hide. The exhilaration stayed with him, was his companion. He studied the ground of rock and scree and boulder, searching for imagined firing points for Redeye, hunting for the escape routes for the group once they had fired Redeye and brought down on themselves the counter-attackers of the surviving helicopters. It was why he had come to this place, to learn the feel of the mountain sides, that he might better achieve the destruction of the Mi-24.

  He climbed to a summit and sat gazing out over a great distance into Afghanistan.

  It was dark when he returned to the bungalow. Without calling Rossiter he went into his own bedroom. He lifted the loosened boards of the crate top and stared down at the slim shapes of the wrapped missile tubes. Rossiter started to hum in the next door room, to tell Barney that he was awake, perhaps it was an invitation for Barney to come and talk to him.

  Barney closed down the boards of the crate, undressed, and climbed into bed.

  He sat cross-legged in the sun with the boy beside him.

  Gathered in front of him in the shade were the men.

  He wore jeans and a long-tailed shirt of green cotton outside his belt, and the flat peakless cap of the Nuristan region covered his fair hair. Flies crawled on his face and were ignored. Close to his feet, in separate parts lay a launch tube holding a single missile and the control unit of Redeye.

  Barney talked quietly into Gul Bahdur's ear, pausing every half sentence for the boy's translation. Since he had brought the missile to the valley, the interest of his audience had quickened.

  'You have to stand still to fire. So you have to expose yourself. If you hurry, then Redeye misses. When you fire there's smoke and then the flash as the main rocket ignites. It's two stages, booster first and then main rocket... if you stand still the main rocket firing can't hurt you, it ignites more than 20 feet from you, so you're safe. It's difficult to judge distances in the air but if the helicopter looks to you very high or very far away across the valley, then don't fire. The best range is between 600 yards and 1800

  yards, less than that and the guidance system may not have time, more than that and the rocket loses strength. We go through the drill again . . .'

  Barney fastened the missile tube to the launch unit, swift, trained movements. He eased Redeye onto his shoulder, peered through the cross-wire sight.

  'You hear the helicopter coming, when you actually see it you have to stand, you track the helicopter through the sight, you fasten on the engine exhaust . . .'

  His right eye was up against the back marker of the sight, his vision wavered across the hillsides and came to rest on a hovering hawk. He tracked the hawk, lingering with its flight.

  'You switch on the battery coolant. You take your time and don't hurry. The heat of the engine exhaust talks to the guidance system - you have to listen for the buzzer that tells you Redeye has found the target of the engine exhaust - and when the buzzer is at its peak then you fire. If you've done everything I've told you, then the missile is locked on the engine exhaust and that helicopter's dead . . .'

  The sight fell from the hawk's flight, traversed back over the far hillside, over the stones of the river bed at the base of the valley to where a stork bird stood. Barney passed Redeye towards the clutch of hands that stretched out to receive it.

  'Remember, it can curve a bit and bend a little, but it's not an acrobat. It flies faster than the helicopter flies. You fire it after the helicopter, not into its path, and you don't fire straight up, not in the day. You remember that, don't you?'

  He paused. No point in continuing now4 that they had their hands on the launcher.

  He remembered the general weapons instructors at Sandhurst military academy ten years before, and the specialised weapons instructors in Hereford. One and all they'd have been tipping towards coronaries if they'd had this lot for cadets. Redeye was tugged from one set of hands to another. One tribesman wriggled on his haunches a few feet from the group so that he could savour in greater isolation the feel of the launcher on his shoulder before it was wrenched from him.

  'Do they understand the camera?' Barney said to the boy.

  'Of course.'

  'And they know what they have to try to bring me back?'

  The boy rifled in the breast pocket of his shirt, produced a new notebook.
/>   'Underneath the gunner's seat, behind armoured doors, is the fixed pod containing stabilised optics for target acquisition and tracking. Beside that is the radio command guidance antenna . . .' The boy read carefully from the notebook. 'Above the gunner's position is the low speed air data sensor, that you want as well. From inside the cockpit of the pilot you want photographs of all the dials . . .'

  'Do you have to read it?'

  'I know it by heart,' the boy said.

  'If you didn't have a notebook could you remember it?'

  'I know everything you have said . . .'

  Barney snatched the notebook from Gul Bahdur's hand. He read the clear copper plate writing. He flipped the pages, then tore out all those that covered the shopping list of the helicopter's instrumentation. He ripped the paper to small pieces, scattered them on the ground.

  'Why did you do that?' Shrill anger from the boy.

  'In case you're captured, that's why.'

  Barney stood up, his face was twisted away from the boy. He started to walk, a lizard that was sand-coloured and perfect in camouflage scrabbled clear of his feet. The boy caught up with him and, like a father, Barney put his arm around Gul Bahdur's shoulder.

  'When are you going?'

  'Tomorrow.'

  'And you will be gone . . .?'

  'A week, not more. Only into Paktia province, across the border. There are many helicopters in Paktia.'

  'You go carefully,' Barney said.

  The boy looked up into Barney's face. 'We are fighting the jihad, that is the holy war. What have I to fear? If I die in the jihad, what have I lost?'

  'I just said you were to go carefully.'

  'If I die I am a martyr.'

  'If you are captured you are a disaster.'

  Barney walked on towards the Volkswagen. The boy followed him, and after him the men, and amongst them and hidden from Barney's sight was the Redeye missile.

  Barney came up the bungalow steps. From the verandah he could hear Rossiter singing.

  . . 'And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England's mountains'. . . supported by the echo chamber of the bathroom.

  All the way back to the bungalow the doubt had eaten at him. Barney sat at the table in the living room, he was dirty and dusty strewn, and he listened to the singing and the splashing of water, and the hiss of the under arm spray.

  Rossiter came out of the bathroom, he had a towel round his waist, and was buttoning a clean white shirt over his chest. Barney felt the filth in his hair and the warm wetness and the chafe of his trousers at his groin. Barney's head dropped into his hands. He closed his eyes. He felt a great tiredness. He heard the suck of exasperation from Rossiter.

  'You're not coming?'

  'Coming to what?'

  'Don't play the bloody ass, to the party.'

  'I told you what I thought about us chucking ourselves around town.'

  'Your funeral. . . forme, I'm going to be bright and busy and in good time for the festivities. You want the sackcloth, laddie, your problem . . .' Rossiter was moving to the door of his bedroom. 'And get the stuff ready, please, Barney. As soon as I'm decent, we'll drop Mr Redeye off at the camp. After that if you want to sit here like a bleeding abbot . . .' and was gone.

  'They're not ready to go,' Barney said quietly.

  '. . . If you want to sit here on your bum and play with yourself. . .'

  'I said, they're not ready to go.'

  Rossiter reappeared. He seemed to play the senior officer, the man who had the Brigadier's letter of introduction, and his uniform was an unbuttoned shirt and a damp towel.

  'The schedule gave you a fortnight, and that's what you've had.'

  'I didn't draw up the schedule, and I'm telling you that they're not ready.'

  Rossiter smiled coldly. 'You're telling me that in two weeks you've failed to prepare them, that it?'

  'I'm not on a bloody promotion course, Rossiter, and I don't have to and I won't take that shit. I'm telling you that they're not good enough.'

  Perhaps Rossiter thought the towel would fall. He grasped the knot tightly.

  'What do you want me to do, Barney?'

  'I want a stop put on it, I want another week. I told you before, this isn't an easy weapon. If I had British infantry kiddies, I'd want more than a fortnight.'

  'Don't give them all the missiles at one go. Keep some back.'

  'Where does that get us?'

  Rossiter sighed. 'It gets us that if this crowd screw up, then we find someone else to have another go.'

  Barney flared up out of his chair. 'Very bloody bright, and wrong for two reasons.

  Wrong because if they screw up they'll lose the launcher of which we have one, so nobody gets a second chance. And second, because if they screw up they're all dead.'

  'I'll think about it,' Rossiter said, and disappeared into his bedroom.

  'There's nothing to think about. I've told you they're not ready.'

  'I'll think about it.'

  'How long are you going to think about it?'

  'I am going to a party. Your bloody doubts, nor your bloody wild horses, will not keep me from that party. While I am at that party I will think about it. When I come back I will have made my decision. Got it, Barney, my decision . . .'

  Barney stormed out of the front door, heard it slam behind him and then fly open.

  He wasopeningthe door of the land-rover when he heard the shout from Rossiter's bedroom.

  'I need the bloody transport tonight. You know I need

  it.'

  Barney turned the key in the ignition. 'Get yourself a taxi,' Barney said to himself.

  Rossiter couldn't have heard, because the engine had coughed to life. '

  He drove west towards the foothills of the mountains that were the frontier with Afghanistan. When the dark steep shadows crowded close to the road, he had parked and locked the land-rover on the hard shoulder.

  He sat, alone with his thoughts and his doubt, on a smoothed rock.

  It was just a job, the training of an Afghan resistance group to shoot down a Soviet helicopter with a man portable surface-to-air missile. But a job should always be done; well. That was his own training. And these bastards weren't ready.

  The stars glimmered down at him, down at him and down at the high wilderness of Afghanistan where the helicopters flew and where a group would be badly savaged if they went before Barney Crispin was satisfied that they were ready.

  There was just enough reflection from the apples and pears painting above the bookshelf in the living room for Howard Rossiter to comb his hair. He had the problem of all balding men who seek to cut a dash, to comb back and to hell with it, to comb forward and pretend. He was buggered if he knew what to do about Crispin's whining.

  He heard the sharp rap at the front door. He felt a shiver, ridiculous, but he felt it.

  He went to the front door. Through the glass he could see the young man standing under the verandah light. Slim, European, familiar in a vague way.

  Rossiter opened the front door.

  'Yes?'

  'Can I come in?'

  'Who are you?'

  'You don't remember me? ... I brought you a crate. You've a short memory.'

  Rossiter remembered the messenger boy from the High

  Commission in Islamabad. Complacent little prig. It was the drawling, satisfied voice he recognized.

  'I've come to mark your card.'

  'So mark it,' Rossiter said crisply.

  'Easy, sir . . .' The 'sir' was a sneer. 'I've just flogged up from Islamabad. My name's Davies, I've come to mark it before you drop us all in the shit, which is what you seem to be trying to do.'

  'Have your say, Mr Davies, then please go away.'

  The spook was in no hurry. He walked easily round the room, stopped with his back to the opened door of Barney's room. Confident, relaxed, amusing himself. He wore slacks and a short-sleeved shirt.

  'What did you say your name was?'

  'I didn't s
ay what my name was,' Rossiter said.

  'I've come to tell you that you're attracting attention.'

  Rossiter felt the draught in his stomach. 'Who's been asking?'

  'Security in Islamabad. . who you are, what you're doing here?'

  'What's been your answer?'

  'Not easy to answer when we're in the dark . . . that you're something to do with the charities. As yet Security hasn't shifted itself sufficiently to find out more, why you're spending time with one of the groups, as yet . . .'

  'If I was into the charities then I'd be meeting groups.'

  'The people you're with, I'm told, aren't the ones who'd be interested in blankets and sacks of grain. Anyway there's a setup for charities and you've ignored it. You're making a bit of a ripple. And it's a crap group.'

  Rossiter's lips were close set, pinched. He spoke with a whistle between his teeth, and he was late for picking the woman up, for phoning his taxi. 'You'd better tell me.'

  'I thought you knew all the answers . . . The ones who do the fighting are round Kabul, round Kandahar, round Jalalabad. round where the Soviets are. The ones who talk about the fighting are round Peshawar. You're with the talkers. If the best you could find was them, then you're pretty useless. You wanted to be told.'

  'We have a high level government clearance."

  'If you hadn't had, I'd have seen to it that you were out on your necks by now.'

  'How long do we have?'

  'Perhaps a week . . . I've said I'll check you out with the charities in London . . . not for your bloody sakes I'm doing it. I got a packet of fall-out last time we had idiots here and nothing more to send home than those back packs in a cardboard box courtesy of the Yanks.'

  'We'll be quiet for a week, after that we're on our bikes,' Rossiter was trying to smile and failing.

  Davies returned a warm and winning smile. 'What's the real game, what's the radio for?'

  'I was just going out when you came.'

  The smile slipped from Davies' face. Quickly he turned, twisted, went fast into Barney's bedroom. Before Rossiter had reacted, the spook had found the manual that was under Barney's pillow. Rossiter tried to shake it from him, and was shrugged away.