He stood by the door, panting.
'It's a fucking manual for missiles . . .' the spook whispered in wonderment.
'Ground-to-air fucking missiles.'
Rossiter went back into the living room.
'You have to forget what you saw.'
The spook was breathing heavily, he followed Rossiter. 'I'll tell you something. The weapons that come through Pakistan are controlled. There's not a drought and there's not a flood. There's just enough to keep it going. Too little and the war ends, too much and the war escalates into Pakistan. That's the understanding and it suits everybody.'
Rossiter had regained his composure-. 'Don't give me that rubbish. If ground-to-air missiles suit your government, then they suit you.'
'What comic strip did they dig you out from?'
'Just run along like a good lad and keep your friends in Islamabad stalled for a week while you wait for verification of us from the charities . . .' Rossiter managed a smile now, an ice smile. 'That would be the best thing you could do.'
The spook, Davies, on the payroll of the Secret Intelligence Service and running the Islamabad desk while his chief was on long leave and who was nominally a Second Secretary (Consular/Visas) at the High Commission, walked out of the living room and into the night without a word.
Rossiter heard the start of a car's engine. As soon as it was gone he slapped his hands together to control his trembling. Rossiter knew what he would do. First he went to his bedroom and stripped off the blanket from his bed, then took more blankets from the top shelf of the wardrobe. Inside Barney's bedroom he manhandled the crate from under the iron frame and lifted off the crate top. He wrapped four missiles in the blankets, and hid with them the launch control unit and the loaded Polaroid camera and the spare film cassettes and a carton of flash bulbs.
The sweat dripped and ran on his body, he could not control the trembling. When he was asked over the telephone for the destination of the taxi he required, he gave first the Peshawar address of the group's camp and second the street of the International Red Cross compound.
Three hours before dawn the Volkswagen van started out for the town of Parachinar in the blunt salient of Pakistan territory jutting into Afghanistan and eighty miles from Peshawar. Against the leather sandals of the men, spread on the floor, were four Redeye missiles in their protective casing and launch unit, and Howard Rossiter's blankets. Gul Bahdur sat beside the driver, nestled close to his shoulder.
the Polaroid hanging around his neck, and recited silently the words that he had memorised.
'Underneath the gunner's seat, behind armoured doors . . .'
Over the holed, winding road it was a six hours' drive to Parachinar, where they would eat and then sleep. Later they would drive for another hour and then leave the van and collect the small arms that were not carried in the refugee camps; and start the climb to the Kurram Pass.
'Beside that is the radio command guidance antenna. Above the gunner's position . .
.'
Soon the boy was asleep, cuddled by the warmth and motion of the van.
In an hour it would be light.
Barney left the land-rover in the road, walked briskly towards the darkened bungalow. He felt no tiredness. He felt as if he had been resurrected by the commune under the stars. He wondered if Rossiter would now agree with good grace to give him the extra week, and he thought how he would use it and how he would insist on organising the group to be certain that only one man had the responsibility of firing Redeye.
He let himself into the living room. He went silently towards his room. He heard a woman's giggle, and a deeper laugh, and a whisper for quiet, and the metalled heaving of a bed.
Lying on the sheet of his own army neat bed was the Redeye manual. He saw the tip of the crate protruding beyond the bed side. He bent, scraped it out, lifted the loosened lid, and counted the four launch tubes and the launch control mechanism gone. Quietly, in fury, he opened the cupboard drawer to find the Polaroid and the spare cassettes and the flash bulbs gone too. He swept out through his door. He threw open the door into Rossiter's room. His finger found the light switch, snapped it down. Rossiter sat on the side of his bed, his eyes blinked at the ceiling light and then in hatred at Barney. He was naked save for one sock. Sitting across his waist, naked too, with her legs wrapped hard at his hips, with her arms around his neck, was a woman who was dark haired and plump and red skinned and sweating.
'Fuck you, Crispin,' Rossiter shouted.
The woman screamed.
'Get that cow out of here,' Barney said.
A sob gathered force in Rossiter's throat. 'You bastard . . .'
The woman whimpered, buried her face in Rossiter's chest.
'Get her out,' Barney said.
Now Barney turned away. The woman was crying. She slid off Rossiter, twisted him, hurt him. She stumbled across the tiles to retrieve her scattered clothes and ran past Barney into the living room.
With his heel Barney kicked the door shut behind him.
'You treacherous little behind-the-back bastard.'
'You came in here to tell me that?'
'You hadn't the nerve to tell me to my face.'
Fear on Rossiter's face, wide and staring eyes under the thin tangle of his hair. He tugged the single sheet on his bed across his lap.
'You weren't here, you don't know what happened.'
'What's happened is that you've sent a rubbish group away when they're not ready.'
'I didn't have a week.'
'They needed that week.'
'They needed it, they couldn't have it. The spook came. Security in Islamabad are interested in us. We're on our way in a week, a week's how long the bloody cover can stretch.'
Barney felt hideously ashamed, soiled.
'You weren't here, where in God's name were you? If we'd waited a week we'd have had to go home without any group going at all.' Rossiter rolled onto his side on the bed.
He was pathetic. His white stomach flopped close to the outline of his drawn up knees, the hanging light glistened the skin on the crown of his head. He was weeping.
'That's the best woman I've known in years. A nurse, a kind sweet woman. You think I get that at home . . .?'
The front door slammed. There was a clatter of heels on the wood planks of the verandah.
'The spook came here?'
'It'll keep until the morning,' Rossiter said bitterly, and his cheeks were wet. 'I've a lady to take home . . . It's only one helicopter we need. We're not joining their bloody war.'
Barney went back to his room, undressed, and fell on his bed.
5
When he had left the Officers' Quarters for the staff briefing he had unfastened the leather holster flap, tested that the lanyard was secured to the handle of the weapon. It was standing orders that officers in uniform should be armed when walking out in Kabul, Pyotr Medev thought the order was of particular relevance to those such as himself who were unfamiliar with the capital city, who were occasional visitors from the out of town divisional commands. Once a week the MilPol had the job of scraping some idiot out of a bloodstained gutter, in uniform or civilian clothes. One of his own corporals had gone that way.
He had noted the cluster of Soviet civilians in front of him, men and women, slacks and open shirts and pretty floral frocks, meandering past the small stores. He had noted the four man patrol that was behind him. He was sandwiched and safe as he walked.
He had turned into the bazaar that bulged with the smells and sounds of this high-table city. Men cried from their shop fronts for custom, youths carried on their turbaned heads the wide trays of meats and cakes, children skipped between the donkeys and the horses that showed their lined rib cages. But no one barged into the path of a Soviet officer wearing the uniform of Frontal Aviation and the shoulder insignia of Major. They wafted around him as though he did not exist.
They were animals. They were dirty, filthy, ignorant and cruel.
He didn't give a shit for
the animals. He shouted that in his mind.
As Medev walked he checked again that the civilians were in front of him, that the patrol was behind. A careful man would return to his home at the end of a year.
There was a small, sharp grin at Medev's mouth, triggered by the thought of home, mingled with the thought of why he was now in the bazaar where the high-sided buildings shut out the high sun. Home was five weeks away, home was a woman that he sometimes loved and a small boy that he perpetually adored, but he walked in the bazaar to buy a trinket of jewellery for a married girl, bored and entertaining, and living in the Mikroyan residential sector for Soviets in Kabul. Visiting the wife of a Ukrainian agronomist on his journeys to staff briefings in Kabul roused in Medev the same excitements as piloting the Mi-24 gunship.
A child ran from a sack-draped doorway and pulled a blind man from his path.
Medev had been far away. He had not seen the blind man with the yellowed socket eyes.
When he was past the blind man and the boy, Medev heard the gurgle of gathered spit in the boy's mouth, heard it smack on the street dirt behind him. He did not turn.
He lifted his wide-brimmed cap, smoothed down his short sandy hair, felt the perspiration settle on the back of his hand.
A dog hustled across the street, moving fast and low on emaciated legs, clutching raw meat in its jaws. A thrown stone hit the rear legs, spinning it, collapsing it. A man sprinted forward, billowing clothes, a shout of fury, a stick raised. The dog was beaten.
It yelped, it howled under the blows, but it would not release the meat. The blows rained on the dog's spine. If a man would do that to his own dog how would he thrash a Soviet?
The nightmare of the pilot was that the helicopter should plummet down towards the dry river bed of a valley, and that the pilot should live ... It was the nightmare that was always with him, with him in each waking moment, harboured in each sleeping hour. Even when he walked to find a brooch of lapis lazuli to take to the woman who was married to an AGronomist.
He could see the bright shirts and dress materials of the civilians in front. He looked behind and saw the patrol.
He was thirty years old. For eleven years he had flown helicopters. He had served two tours in the forward squadron bases in the DDR with the Mi-24A. He was a graduate of the Cadet Academy of Moscow, he had passed through the Staff College of Frontal Aviation at Kiev. He was qualified as an instructor on the Mi-24D. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was of the elite, he was of the chosen ones. He was a professional serviceman. At the airbase at Jalalabad in Nangarhar province he commanded two flights, each of four Mi-24D
helicopters. Each month he came to Kabul for 36 hours of intensive debriefing by the staff officers of the Taj Beg palace, headquarters of the Soviet High Command.
He stopped beside a table of jewellery.
Behind an opened doorway, deep in the recesses of the shop, men were squatting at their work, shapes in shadow, only the sounds of their tool-work clear. Hanging from the arch of the doorway were old curved swords and a musket that was called a jezail.
Close to an old man with the whitened beard and the tight-wrapped turban who sat behind the table were hookah vessels of brilliant blue glaze. The old man sat on a rich carpet square. The Soviet officer loomed above him. Medev pointed to a lapis brooch.
Without speaking the old man counted out the price of the brooch with his fingers.
Medev knew the game. From his hip pocket he took a wad of Afghan notes. Medev's turn to count, notes to the value of a half of the sum that the old man had indicated.
Medev picked up the brooch, dropped the notes on the table, walked away. He heard the protest croak of the old man.
Animals, weren't they? And right that they should be treated like bastard animals.
He went on his way. She would have prepared some food and after that he would have two hours only before he must collect his transport and get himself to the airport's military side for the flight back to Jalalabad.
The faint bleating of the mule had attracted them.
They stood, half a dozen men, on the narrow path high above the floor of the valley.
They stood and looked over the edge to the miniaturised rocks and smoothed boulders below the rock wall. On such a path, so insecure, it was not hard to believe that the two laden mules could have stumbled and fallen. They were two hundred feet above the pain-filled cry of the animal in which some small portion of life remained.
One man stood apart from the group. He wore the same clothes as they did, the fustian trousers, the baggy grey shirt with the tails loose to his knees, the wound turban of blue on his head, but he was apart. There were boots not sandals on his feet, old and worn but still serviceable. His beard and moustache were a cropped grey stubble as if once a week he abandoned the attempt to grow a full length of hair and shaved himself with a blunted razor. He was taller, his eyeline fully three inches higher than the men with him. Across his chest were two ammunition belts swathed diagonally, and cradled in the elbow of his right arm was a Kalashnikov assault rifle, two magazines strapped head to toe.
The man took no part in the debate on the crying mule.
When he wiped a fly from his nose he used his left arm and the motion drew back his sleeve and revealed a metal claw in the place of his left hand. The claw was flecked with ochre rust set as a rash in the black paint.
On the back of each of these men was a coarse webbing pack, and thrusting from the top of each pack were clustered tail fins of mortar shells. In the pack of the man who stood apart were three 88mm mortar shells, shiny and bright with the new Cyrillic lettering of Soviet ordnance. He seemed to carry no food and no spare clothing. With the smooth surface of the curve of the claw he rubbed gently against the weathered skin of his nose, wrinkled skin because he was not a young man.
The men were gathering for an ambush on the convoy that came every two weeks from Kabul to replenish the supplies of the Afghan Army garrison at Gardez in Paktia province. When such an attack was prepared by the Resistance, when there was the need for a force of more than two hundred mujahidin then the word would spread as a whisper of wind through the villages, and the men would gather at a given point. It was not for two hundred fighting men to remain in concentration for any but the briefest time, the helicopters dictated that. When the call came, the whisper, the men collected.
As soon as the attack was completed they went their separate ways. These half dozen would reach their rendezvous that evening. They had little time now to spare.
One man aimed a stone down the cliff precipice and missed the head of the live mule and struck it in the stomach and the mule gave out a shrill scream, and the man laughed.
Another man waved Maxie Schumack forward, made a gesture of shooting. They liked to watch him fire his Kalash- nikov. It always amused them to see the way he clamped the shoulder stock of the rifle hard into his right shoulder and rested the barrel on his outstretched and crippled left arm. When the echo of the single shot died in the valley there was only silence. They had no time to recover the loads on the mules'
backs. They set off along the path, Schumack a little behind.
He was apart from these men, yet with them. He had found the relationship that he desired. Apart but accepted. He asked for nothing more.
Pyotr Medev wondered what in exact terms was the work of an agronomist. He sat in his long underpants at the table of the small living room listening to Illya singing from the kitchen.
He was drinking from the neck of a beer bottle when she came out from the kitchen.
She had tied a towel round her waist, and her tanned breasts hung towards the towel's knot, her hair still sweat-streaked from their love-making hung to her shoulders. What did an agronomist do? What could make it worthwhile to be down in Kandahar grubbing in the dirt beside a stinking irrigation channel, when this creature was abandoned back home? And Ilya was nuzzling her cheek against his ear, and the breasts
and the nipples were playing patterns on his back, and there was a salad plate with sliced sausage in front of him, and another beer bottle on the table. He drank his beer, he picked at his sausage. She reached for his underpants, and tugged the elastic of the waist band. He groaned through a mouthful of meat, tomato dribbled from the side of his mouth. Medev sighed. The breasts, large and soft and warm and sweated, covered his mouth now, and he nibbled and felt her hand going down over him. He turned his head, extricated himself, drank from the bottle, ate from the plate, then spluttered at the sensation won by the painted nails of her fingers. Sometimes he wished she would say something, she never seemed to think it necessary. As if she could cope with signs, signs and the heavy bloody breathing.
It wasn't as if he was doing the agronomist any harm. He wouldn't have wanted to hurt the poor bastard. She'd have to play the good actress when winter came, when he made it back from Kandahar. She'd been taught things by Pyotr Medev, things that a good Georgian girl should stay ignorant of. She'd be explaining all night if she wheeled out her new tricks when he came back from Kandahar. It was three months since Medev had met Ilya, a spring afternoon at the Kargha Lake where an officer could swim in some safety, and find himself a nurse from Kabul's military hospital if he was lucky. Three months and three visits later. They hadn't wasted time. And who had time to waste? Not a bored woman in the Mikroyan residential complex while her husband was digging a ditch in Kandahar. Not an officer who commanded the pilots who flew the convoy escorts, who had to bring the big birds down through the cones of rifle and machine gun fire . . . Shit, and the armour was thick and good on the belly of the big bird . . . and if it wasn't they'd all have been home months ago in the body bags what was left of them, in the body bags and not feeling those bloody nails down in his crotch.
(1984) In Honour Bound Page 6