(1984) In Honour Bound

by Gerald Seymour

  The Brigadier bridled. He stubbed out his cigarette.

  'I'm calling nothing off, you're calling it off. You authorised an intelligence-gathering mission. You started it and now you have to end it, sir.'

  There was a light smile on the Foreign Secretary's face, the smile of the disillusioned. He said nothing.

  The Brigadier fidgeted in his seat. He wanted to be out, in his own bed.

  'I'll send the signal then, for them to get out soonest.'

  The Foreign Secretary said, 'The man you sent to Pakistan, the Special Air Service instructor, he couldn't go and get the helicopter himself, could he?'

  'A British serving officer, inside Afghanistan, with a heat-seeker missile?

  Preposterous and out of the question. I'm sorry, sir, I've been in Intelligence fifteen years, what you learn in fifteen years is to accept a fact. The fact is that you win a few and you lose a lot. That's the way it is, whether you're playing against the Soviets or the cousins. Another thing you learn, sir, you don't throw good after bad, when it's bad you cut and quit.'

  'Well, Brigadier. I am very disappointed. I am sad beyond means at thirteen pointless deaths, but I am bitterly disappointed at the failure of your mission. Send your signal and see at least if you can end the affair without any more of a mess. Freddie,' he hardly raised his voice, but the door opened, 'please show the Brigadier out when he has finished his coffee. If you'll excuse me, Brigadier, I'll go back to bed. Goodnight to you.'

  Barney came into his bedroom carrying the missiles cradled across his outstretched arms. He laid them on the rug beside the bed. The boy was sleeping, on his back, mouth open, half covered by the blanket.

  Beside the missiles Barney started a small pile. A bottle of penicillin tablets, a packet of three morphine-loaded syringes, a packet of salt tablets, a bottle of glucose sweets, aspirin and dysentery and diarrhoea pills. All he had rifled from the Refugee Action surgery cupboard. Onto the pile he put the hard bar of soap that would last, and then his thick socks.

  Other than that his eyes were open, the boy gave no sign of having woken.

  Barney undressed. His face was set, grim masked, without expression, shadowed by the light squeezing through the half opened door. He replaced his short sleeved shirt and his jeans with the dress of a Pathan tribesman. He climbed into the wide waisted trousers of rough cotton, pulled tight the waist string. He slipped the long shirt over his head. Then the heavy woollen socks. He was lacing his boots when the boy spoke.

  'You are going home, Barney?'

  'No.'

  'Where are you going?'

  'Walking, Gul Bahdur.'

  'Where I have been?'

  'Tell me about the helicopter attack.'

  The boy twisted off his back, lay on his side with his hand holding up his head.

  Barney threaded the laces through the eyes of the boots.

  'After we had fired the missile? After that? First the helicopter we had fired against turned fast away. Then it circled us, going very quickly, as it searched for us. Then it came at us. They began with the rockets. I think four rockets at a time, then when it was very close there was the machine gun, the big machine gun, the big machine gun at the front. It came over us once and when it had gone by then it turned and stayed a little way from us. Then there were more rockets, and all the time the machine gun. Each time one of the men tried to run he was caught by the machine gun. You couldn't even fire at it, every time you fired, the machine gun came after you. When it came the last time it came so low that I could see the gunner in the front and the pilot behind. I could see their faces, Barney. And all the time the other helicopters circled high above us.

  They watched to see that we had all been killed. I could see their faces, then the helicopters went away. It was not a very long time, the attack.'

  'Why did you carry back the launcher?'

  'I think you know why,' the boy whispered.

  'You tell me why you brought back the launcher.'

  'Without the launcher the Redeye cannot be fired.'

  'Who is to fire the missile?'

  'We cannot.'

  'Who is to fire the missile?' The harsh grate in Barney's question.

  'You, Barney.'

  The first grey of dawn nudged at the material of the curtains. Barney watched the boy's face, saw the mixed paints of caution and confusion merge into understanding and then excitement. The boy leaped from the bed and flung his arms round Barney and hugged him and kissed him on the cheeks. Gently, Barney loosed the boy's hands, set him back on the bed.

  'We have to go this morning.'

  'Together we are going?'

  'You have to be my ears and my eyes, Gul Bahdur.'

  The boy bubbled with his words, if we go very soon, to the Red Cross hospital, then we will catch the ambulance that runs each morning to Parachinar. The ambulance will take us. It is always possible to go in the ambulance, straight through the blocks of the Pakistan Guides . . .'

  Barney shovelled the bottles and packets and clothes into his back pack.

  He heard the land-rover scrape the gravel of the drive. He heard the engine switched off, then the footsteps over the verandah.

  'We're moving out, Barney, soon as we can,' Rossiter called from the living room.

  'Taking the Delhi flight. . .'

  Rossiter was standing in the doorway.

  'What in Christ's name are you doing, bloody fancy dress?'

  Rossiter peered in the half light at the back pack and the pile of missiles.

  'Where the hell are you going?'

  Rossiter clapped his hands, as if that were a way to escape an aberration. He spoke with slow schoolmaster's emphasis.

  'We're called home. Home, Barney. It is an order.'

  Barney smiled. 'You'll think of something to tell them, Mr Rossiter.'

  Rossiter was white faced, eyes roving, nervous. 'You'll crucify yourself. They'll have your bloody guts for it. Don't be so bloody stupid. It's your whole bloody career . .

  . It's against the bloody orders, Barney.'

  'You'll think of something to tell them, you're good at that.'

  'You'd be on your own.'

  'That way's best.'

  Barney was tying the missile tubes together, making two bound bundles.

  'I have eight Redeyes, I have one helicopter to get, then I'll come out. There's a month before the weather turns. . .'

  'It's against an explicit order . . .'

  'A month is long enough.'

  'Don't you understand . . .?' Rossiter gripped at Barney's arm, was shrugged off.

  'What I understand is that something was started that hasn't been finished.'

  'Barney, listen to me ... I may be out of my fucking mind.' Rossiter went, furiously, to his room and slammed the door. Ten minutes later Barney was finished packing. Gul Bahdur had said nothing at all. And then Rossiter reappeared, a fool, a crass old fool . .

  . 'I'm going to go to Chitral. You know where Chitral is? I'm going to lie up there and wait for you.'

  'You don't have to . . .'

  'Don't bloody interrupt me, and don't put motives into me. . .so you have some back up, so there's someone to pull you out of the shit when you come back ... On Shahi Bazaar in Chitral is the Dreamland Hotel, I didn't give it the bloody name . . . Any message, any messenger goes to the Dreamland, reception, name of Howard . . . You have to have some back up, Barney, because they're going to crucify you for this.'

  'Thank you, Mr Rossiter.'

  'I don't know why I'm doing this. I must be out of my mind. They'll skin us . . .'

  'You'll think of something to tell them. Would you take us down to the Red Cross hospital, Mr Rossiter?'

  'Us? Are you taking that child back? Oh, my God. I am out of my mind.' Rossiter murmured and walked outside to the land-rover.

  7

  The would be conquerors have come many times to Afghanistan.

  The armies of Alexander, the hordes of Genghis Khan, the legions of Tamerlane
all thrust into the deserts and mountains and crop lands of this region. All butchered and devastated and burned, all built cities and temples in their own image, all failed. Time destroys the man who would seek to impose his will over the Pathans and Uzbeks and Tajiks and Hazaras. His cities are buried in the sands, his temple's stones have made walls for the farmers' fields. The troops of Victoria, of Imperial Britain, came twice with their baggage trains and their servants and met disaster, won a brief victory, and then retreated again.

  In 1919 Britain tried for the last time to impose its authority over the tribespeople of Afghanistan and the rulers of Kabul, they brought artillery and aircraft and the machine gunners who had been the widow-makers of the French and Belgian trenches, and when they returned to their homes they had won nothing.

  Some lessons are not easily learned.

  In late December 1979, Soviet advisers to the puppet government took over the airfields at Begram and Kabul, preparatory to the landing of a flying column of transport aircraft that would be spearheaded by the elite paratroop units of the Red army. The 4th and 105th Airborne Divisions are the cat's cream of the Soviet fighting machine, the best paid and the best equipped and the best trained. In the wake of the paratroops came the divisions of Mechanical Infantry

  with their tanks and armoured personnel carriers, and above them flew the fighter bombers and the gunship helicopters of Frontal Aviation. The Kremlin had decreed that

  a

  'sympathetic' government should not be toppled by an Islamic fundamentalist rabble.

  Four years later. For the man at war, four years is a life time, four years is very often a death time. Four years later, when the general drives through the streets of Kabul from his Residence to High Command HQ, his car is lined with armour-plated steel and his windows reinforced to protect him from the assassin's gun. When the convoy drives from Kabul to Jalalabad it is studded with T-64 tanks and BTR-50 troop carriers. Four years later, the air crew and maintenance crew of an Mi-24 squadron are still working round the clock to maintain the critical air supremacy. They are not fighting the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces, not the marines who are the veterans of Da Nang, not the paratroopers who crushed their opposition at Goose Green. Their enemy is a man who cannot read a tactics manual.

  Bitter lessons being learned by the armed forces of the Soviet Union four years after invasion day. Each week the body bags are loaded on the transport aircraft. Each day the wounded are strapped down in the hulls of the Antonov transports for the journey to Tashkent and Dushanbe and the intensive care wards and the rehabilitation hospitals.

  Killed and maimed in Afghanistan because the scriptures of history had not been learned.

  Barney Crispin could have told them. Kipling had taught Barney Crispin the lesson learned a century before the Soviets came.

  A scrimmage in a Border Station - A canter down some

  dark defile - Two thousand pounds of education Drops

  to a ten-rupee jezail -

  The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride, Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

  The photograph of his grandfather was Barney's text book.

  At first the ambulance driver had refused to take Barney and the boy to the Parachinar salient. The spitting voices of Gul Bahdur and the driver had washed over Barney as he sat in the land-rover beside the downcast Rossiter. Barney had finally opened his door and walked to the driver and put 500 rupees of bank notes into his hand and seen the hand close. Barney lifted the back packs and the two blanket-wrapped bundles into the ambulance and laid them on the floor between the two raised stretchers. Barney went to Rossiter's door, shook his hand through the window.

  'Drop me in it, Mr Rossiter, doesn't matter how deep.' A mischievous grin on Barney's face.

  'Let me tell you one last time that you're a fool. . .'

  'I'm not listening, Mr Rossiter.'

  'The Dreamland Hotel, then.'

  'The Dreamland Hotel on Shahi Bazaar in Chitral. I won't forget.'

  'Your entire bloody career . . .'

  'And yours, Mr Rossiter.'

  'A few bits of helicopter aren't worth it."

  'You're entitled to your opinon, Mr Rossiter.'

  'Is it the bits of helicopters, or is it the thirteen men I sent?'

  The boy was tugging at Barney's sleeve. Rossiter had closed his eyes, dropped his head down onto the steering wheel.

  Barney walked away, didn't turn, climbed into the back of the ambulance after Gul Bahdur.

  It was difficult to see through the dark glass windows of the ambulance. Darra and Kohat and Thai were invisible, identified only because the ambulance slowed in their traffic, and the noise of voices and vehicles seeped into the scrubbed interior where Barney and the boy lay on opposite stretchers. Slow progress, poor roads, sometimes the siren wail when they were brought to a complete halt. Once when they stopped Barney thought he heard the sharp authority voices of the military, but the delay was trifling, and Barney was soon asleep again. An ambulance has a magical run through a road block. They drove for six hours without pulling off the road for food or drink or refuelling.

  At Parachinar, Barney saw nothing of the long, dust- billowing street of the frontier town. Gul Bahdur told him that he must keep his head low, that he should not be seen through the grey glass however faintly. They were a long time negotiating that street, through the bleat of goats and the whine of sheep, their smells reaching into the ambulance. Beyond the town the pace of the ambulance quickened and the road was rougher. Barney and the boy rolled on their stretchers.

  Those last miles, that last hour in the ambulance, Barney was wide awake.

  Concentrating and considering.

  He didn't have a gun. He had no language. He had no large scale map. He had no contact other than the seventeen- year-old boy opposite him. He had no plan and he was going to war.

  What had Rossiter said? Didn't know whether to laugh or cry . . .

  Men made poor decisions under the influence of emotion. In the Regiment's world, emotion was a perverse word. But uncontrolled emotion had put Barney Crispin into the back of an ambulance running west of Parachinar towards the border. He had worked for two weeks with fourteen men to train them to shoot down an Mi-24.

  Thirteen were dead, the Mi-24 might as well have wiped Barney's face with the back of a fist. That's a good culture for breeding emotion. That and the boy with a bandaged head, in shock, walking for four days to return the launcher. He expected it of Barney.

  And, remoter though, was the mission's first aim. Bring back the bits. But what's this?

  Someone hurt? Pakistan intelligence a little cross? Oh dear, end of the party. Better get young Crispin and old Rossiter onto the next plane home. Don't mind the bits, fellows.

  Must keep the slate clean. Christ Almighty.

  The ambulance stopped. The back door opened, bright mid-afternoon sunlight bathed them.

  The ambulance had parked beside a wood-built shelter with a roof of corrugated iron. The road behind them had been dirt, it went no further. In front was a failing path stretching to the mountains ahead. The engine of the ambulance was switched off, the noise in the air was of wind and emptiness and of the call of a circling crow. Barney lifted the back packs and the missile bundles out of the ambulance. He breathed in the air that was dry and clean and hot.

  'We have to move on from here,' Gul Bahdur said.

  'How far?'

  'This is where the ambulance waits for the casualties from inside, sometimes the wounded come in the early morning, but if they are near to death then they will be brought across the frontier in daylight and the ambulance will take them in the evening.

  In the early morning and the evening the Pakistan army is often here, the Guides. It is here that they find how the war is going inside, they talk to the fighters here and go with them to the chai-khanas in Parachinar, and take tea with them. If you are here and the Guides find you . . .'

  Barney grinned. Great start that would be, loc
ked in the Guard House of a Guides barracks, while the shit spiralled and the telegrams flew.

  'Learn one thing, boy. when I ask a question I want an answer, not a speech. How far do we have to go?'

  'A thousand metres, out of sight of this place.'

  On the selection course for the Regiment, on training exercises in the Brecon hills and on Exmoor, Barney had walked for ten or twelve or fourteen hours with a weight equivalent to his back pack and the launch mechanism and a bundle of four Redeye missiles.

  'And then?'

  'When it is dark we go through the Kurram Pass. They do not try to sea! the border, the Soviets and the Afghan army. . .'

  'Just the answers, Gul Bahdur.'

  The boy's head dropped. He turned away, sulking.

  'We're going to need a mule,' Barney said.

  A defiant reply. 'I can carry my share.'

  'I said that we need a mule.'

  'I said I can carry my share.'

  Barney stood in front of the boy. The driver of the ambulance lounged against the engine bonnet, watching them. Barney towered over the boy.

  'Another lesson, Gul Bahdur. When I say we will have a mule, we will have a mule.

  When I say you cannot carry the bundle, it is because you cannot carry it.'

  The boy struggled to return Barney's gaze. He was exhausted, he had not slept in the ambulance. Gul Bahdur swayed on his feet.

  'Why should I listen to you?'

  'Because you came back to fetch me.'

  'Why should I go with you?'

  'Because you have to be with me if you are to kill another hundred Soviets.'

  Barney was laughing. The boy's face broke, images all together of dislike and pride and exhaustion and happiness. The boy rocked in his happiness.

  'In the evenings, when the caravans come together, perhaps it is possible to buy a mule. You have the money, Barney?'

  Barney tapped his chest, the leather purse hanging under his shirt from a strap around his neck. 'I have the money. Perhaps when we are inside we'll buy a tank and save our feet.'