Another gurgle of Gul Bahdur's laughter. They looped their arms through the straps of the back packs. Barney lifted up one bundle and rested it on Gul Bahdur's shoulder and saw the boy slip under the weight, and recover. He took the second bundle. They walked along the stone and sand of the path, watched all the way by the driver of the ambulance. Twice Barney stopped him before they came to a small bluff cliff, and when they were past it they were gone from the sight of the ambulance driver. Barney went a hundred yards further, then climbed away from the path over wind- smoothed rocks. He laid down his bundle, took off his pack, went to help the failing boy. Barney flopped down between the rocks and was hidden from the path. The boy sat cross-legged near to him. Barney lay on his back in the sunshine of the late afternoon, he tilted his cap over his eyes.
'When you've found a mule that I can buy, wake me.'
Barney slept, on the slopes leading to the Kurram Pass.
Schumack sat straight-backed in the mouth of the cave. The air around him was cool, clean. The cave was high in the hills, above the scrub line that reached up a little from the floor of the valley below. Four men slept in the recess of the cave behind him, snoring and grunting, noisy shites. There would have been six, but the ambush of the previous week had taken two. Crazy men, they'd been, Schumack reckoned, standing up clear of the rock cover to fire their rifles at an armoured car and shouting some fool message about Allah and jihad, that kind of crap, inviting the machine gunner to waste them and he'd obliged. They did things, these hill men, that gave Schumack the shakes.
Their excitement at close quarters combat was enough to make a one-time Marine Corps sergeant senile. Perhaps he loved them for it. He couldn't despise them for it.
Their arses getting blasted not his. If he didn't love them, he supposed, then Schumack would not have been sitting in the cave looking down on the pin prick lights of the Jalalabad airbase. When they asked his advice, he gave it. If they didn't ask, then he stayed silent. He went his own way in combat, used his training.
Sometimes they watched him and afterwards copied him. More often, in combat, they forgot everything.
Schumack had found the war he wanted. Sometimes he thought it was the best war he could have found. It was not easy for a one-handed man, to find himself a war. Schumack was good with the mortar, good with the DShK 12.7mm machine gun that had been captured off the Afghan army in the spring with a tripod mount, and learned to be good in Da Nang and Hue and Khe Sanh, when he had cudgelled the j conscript cropheads into believing they could stay alive.j There were other phantom medal ribbons that might have decorated his chest, up to the time he had flown to the Desert One rendezvous in the sand plains of Iran with the Delta team, before the abort amongst the flames of crashed helicopters and Charlie One Thirties.
He had left behind a mangled hand at Desert One, sliced away by molten aluminium, but he didn't live in the past. The present and the future concerned Schumack.
The present was sitting on his bum in a cave a long way from Jalalabad. The future was the war of the j mujahidin against the Soviets. He had killed three Soviets in the last ambush, he knew that, he'd seen them fall when they spilled from the truck that was disabled. When he had first come to Afghanistan he had counted the Soviets he'd killed. He didn't count any more.
He hadn't kept a body count since he had been alone. When he had first come he had been with Chuck and Paddy and Carlo. He hadn't meant to join up, just happened because they were all in Peshawar together, and two of them had been there longer than him, and Carlo came the week alter, and they could all feed from each other. Chuck said the hairies would pay for Airborne and Marine experience, and Paddy said that the Yank spooks would pay for merchandise and photographs, and Carlo said it was decently far from the state of Oregon where there was a warrant on a shelf. Maxie wouldn't call them buddies, but at first there had been a kind of a union, as good as most marriages. That was back fifteen months. Chuck had found that the hairies wouldn't pay, and he'd walked out on them, and they heard a month later that he'd put his big fat foot on a butterfly, and what the HE had started the gangrene had finished. And Paddy had stood up in an ambush because all the hairies were standing up. And Carlo had tried to wet his wick, because in Oregon that was no big deal, and before the sun was up her father had opened his throat for the ants to have a drink.
So now he had no one with whom to keep score. Sometimes when he was lonely, and it wasn't very often, he would wonder if there was a Soviet out there behind the lamps of a base camp who would ever count Maxie Schumack on his score sheet. He'd make the bastard sweat for it.
Mia Fiori lay on the cement floor of the village school, in her sleeping bag, with her head resting on her back pack. Sometimes she would be taken away by the women to the rooms used by the elderly and teenage girls. In this village she had been given the long-unused office of the schoolmaster.
The schoolmaster had been sent to the village from Kabul in the summer of 1979. A week after he had taken charge, his throat had been cut because he came from the ruling Par- cham faction of the Afghanistan Communist Party and he had spent four years at a College in Samarkand, and because it was said by the men who murdered him that he was no longer a believer in the faith of Islam.
There was a gaping hole in the roof. A helicopter's rocket had given her this window to the night skies. She had been in the village two days. Her guides said that a Soviet attack had started on the Panjshir and that it was too dangerous for her to go further forward.
How long would she be here?
She might be in the village for another day, or another week. The guides looked away when she had said she was as capable as any man of climbing the mountain routes into the Panjshir. She hated wasted time. When she was idle then the memory of her husband was alive. Because she had loved him, she hated to remember him. In her sleeping bag on the floor of the schoolmaster's office, her blouse and skirt folded and placed under the back pack, the loneliness washed around her. Two French doctors and a nurse waited for her in the Panjshir, she could laugh and work with them, and she was separated from them by a mountain range and by a regiment of Soviet troops. She heard the voices of the guides in the school's only classroom. Where in their priorities lay the needs of a nurse who must rush to the Panjshir and spend a month's leave in a field hospital before returning to a Paris clinic for the long winter?
Perhaps in the morning word would come that the column could go forward.
Outside the window above her head a man urinated, long and noisily, and spat on the ground when he had finished.
Barney woke.
It was dark and cold, a chill was on his skin.
He heard the strike of iron shoes on the stones.
He felt the soreness in his back from the rock on which he had slept. He heard the faint curse of the boy and a faster movement of the shoes stamping down on the ground for a sure foothold.
The shapes of the boy and of a mule against the sky were silhouetted. The boy tugged the mule after him, straining to drag it from the path and over the rocks to where Barney lay. A second mule came behind, roped to the first.
'Barney.' A quiet call in the night.
'I'm here, Gul Bahdur.'
'I brought two mules.'
Barney heard the sighs of the animals' breath, and the scrape of slipping feet. He sat up. He could smell the mules and the scent of dry fodder and the odour of old excrement.
'You stole the mules?'
'I did not.' Defiance from the boy.
'If you have two mules, if you have no money, then you must have stolen them.'
Barney yawned, rubbed his eyes.
'I paid for the mules.'
'With what?' Barney wondered why he argued. They had the mules. If the kid had nicked them, what did it matter?
'With your money, Barney,' the boy said proudly.
Barney's hand went inside his shirt to the leather pouch. He pulled it open, held it close to his eyes. The pouch was empty.
'You
took it off me?' A sharp anger in Barney's voice.
'I had to pay for the mules.'
'You cheeky bugger.' Whispered astonishment from Barney. 'While I was asleep . .
.?'
Barney stood up. He felt the boy's hand pull at his arm, he felt a roll of bank notes slide into his fist. He put the money back into his pouch.
'I wouldn't have thought it possible,' Barney said.
The boy chuckled. 'I could have taken your boots if I had wanted.'
Barney swiped at him with his fist, the boy swayed away, Barney felt his fingers brush against the boy's shirt.
'What was the point of waking you?' the boy said coldly. 'You could not have bargained for the mules. Without an introduction you could not even have gone into the camp
where I went to get the mules. You can fire Redeye, Barney, what else can you do?
Without me you are blind.'
'When do we go?'
'There is a long caravan that will be here in an hour. They are going into Paktia and then across the Helmand river to the Hazaras, they take ammunition and food to the Hazaras. I have arranged that we can start our journey with them.'
'And then?'
'You have to decide where you want to go.'
'Where the valleys are steep, where there have been rock falls, where there are trees at the bottom of the valleys, where the valleys are disputed.'
'How far inside will you go?' the boy asked.
'As far as is necessary. I want a valley where the helicopters fly each day, every day of the week. I want a valley which they cannot ignore, into which they must come.'
'To shoot down one helicopter, to take your photographs and your pieces of that helicopter, you do not need to walk to a disputed valley.'
'I have told you the valley 1 want, a disputed valley.'
'It will take ten days to find that valley.'
'Then we walk for ten days.'
'Can you walk for ten days, Barney?'
'You'll know it, the next time when I hit you.'
Two hours later the column came winding up the hillside path. Barney heard the drumming footfall of the approach of the animals and the chink and rustle of their harnesses. As j ghosts the men and beasts went past. He saw the weapons and the ammunition crates. A long, crawling column, and soon Barney and the boy had merged with the chain. A little before midnight they reached the high point of the Kurram Pass, and then the path fell and ran down into Afghanistan.
8
They walked in silence and around them floated the column of men and animals. There was little noise. Only the scrape of leather on mule skin, the spitting of phlegm, the soft Pushtun whisper. Most of the walking hours there was a thin cloud lacing the near full moon. A light wash of silver settled on them.
The men walked with a long flowing step, gliding their sandalled feet onto the roughness of stone and rock. Barney listened for the panting exertion that would tell him these men felt the pace of their march, but these were mountain men, they could walk for twenty hours in a day, they could walk for seven days in a week. They went straight backed, they moved with their heads held high. These men danced on the track while Barney's step was awkward and without grace.
The darkness was brushed with grey before the thin dawn light crawled onto the landscape. First the individual stones under his marching boots, then the curl of the path in front of him, then the dull brown blanket draped on the body of the man in front, then the raw opened sores on the flanks of the mule that this man led, then the line of mules and men that reached as far as the path's curl, then a valley beyond escarpments and lesser hills, then the blur of tree foliage, then the shadow of far distant cultivated fields.
With the coming of the day the pace of the column quickened. Barney wondered whether this was from fear of aerial surveillance, or simply the grumble of empty stomachs and the demands of tiredness. Barney looked up the line ahead to see if there was one man who walked separately from the others and kept his head cocked to the small winds for the sounds of helicopter's flight. Barney saw no man who walked separately. They were noisier now, and faster in their descent, as if there was a relief at the return to their familiar places from the refugee camps.
Their war, their battlefield. If he walked in their column he must abide by their rules. If Barney had been a helicopter pilot, and seen this ant-paced column, he would have wet himself with excitement. Their war, their battlefield, their rules. His eyes scanned the top ridges of the hills, his ears groped for the rattle of rotor blades. He heard nothing and he saw nothing.
Beside a river bed of stones was a village, a smear of dun brown amongst the green surround.
They came down Off the open slopes and hit the tree line and Barney saw figs hanging ripe in the branches and further on the track there were peaches in an orchard, and the sun was shaven from the back of his head by the leaves' shade. The mules tried to stop and graze between the trees and were dragged on.
When they were close to the village they skirted a blackened crater. They walked on a raised path between two irrigation channels and came to a place where rockets had breached the channels, spilled the waters, dried them. Barney felt the tightness crawling on his skin. The village was a cluster of earthbrick compounds with the walls smeared with more earth as if to make a plaster covering. Barney saw the brick work where rocket fire and cannon shells had gouged away the smooth mud skin. The homes were small fortresses, each an individual refuge, with narrow doors of heavy planked wood.
Over one building at the far end of the village was a rough crenellated tower, the mullah's mosque. A desperate scent of poverty and of filth. Small children in the bright clothes that made a nonsense of the dust dirt in which they lived ran to greet the column. A knot of men, young and old, had gathered at the point where the path came from the orchards and fields to the outer line of the village.
The boy hurried to Barney's elbow.
'They are strangers, these people, to the ones we have come with. . . We have to be patient.'Gul Bahdur made the explanation with awkwardness, as if the tribal divisions of his nation were a personal responsibility.
'What happens?' Barney asked.
'They talk a bit, they flatter a lot. There is a protocol. . .' The boy shrugged. 'The village is often used by the Resistance caravans, that is why it is often bombed.'
The column broke from its line and took sanctuary under the trees. The mules hacked at the thin grass and weed growing from the dry earth. At the entrance to the village, men from the column and men from this small community negotiated their credentials.
'How long will they be?'
'They will be as long as it takes them to discuss what has to be discussed.'
Now that the column was halted, now that the sunlight was full on the trees, now that Barney could be seen, he became the object of detached interest. Coffee eyes watched him and followed his movements.
'Will we sleep here?'
'Probably it is best that we sleep here, but we go no further with these people. They are going to the west, we are going to the north or the east.'
'Will they give us food?'
'The Pathan has pride in the hospitality of his home. He will share what food he has
. . . You have walked all night, Barney, why now do you want to hurry?'
Why indeed? Barney Crispin had flouted an order. He had ripped to shreds a whole career, broken the chain to the superiors he had obeyed in every waking moment of his army service. So why hurry? Nothing to go back to, unless everything he did from now on was well done, thoughtfully done, done without haste.
The man who led the column embraced the mullah of this village. The protocol was completed. The men of the column rose from their squatting rest under the peach trees.
The mules were hobbled. Barney saw the boy tie the back ankles of their two animals together and then loop the rope around the base of a tree.
Barney walked carefully alongside a ditch that ran the length of the central aisle of th
e village. The stream of the ditch was the colour of polished jade, a green shine of oil.
Because he was hungry, Barney thought he might be sick. The smell of the ditch caught in his throat. Still the men of the village stared hard and distantly at Barney.
Some of the roofs of the buildings carried the marks of a rocket strike, torn holes, scorched woodwork.
The walls were pocked by cannon fire, but not pierced. From the slope of the walls Barney could sense their thickness at the base, a width sufficient to absorb the strike of a helicopter's machine gun fire. Be against the base of a mud wall if you have to take cover.
They sat on the floor of a darkened room. The nan bread was already cooked, for the villagers had been watching the advance of the column down the hillside for a long time. The men who were heading for Hazarajat were dispersed amongst several huts.
The light around Barney was faint, filtered through one small window with a cracked pane, and the half opened door. The nan was passed to Barney on a plate of beaten metal. He broke the pieces, dipped them singly into the central ironware pot of meat juice. He had been so hungry that he had not looked for the boy, had not seen that the boy had not come into the hut with him. On the earth floor behind them the men had laid their personal weapons. There were Soviet made Kalashnikovs, and old bolt-actioned Lee "Enfields manufactured for the British Imperial army half a century before, a single Heckler and Koch rifle from Germany.
He heard shouting outside, a dispute, an argument.
Barney ate wheat bread, and then scooped with his fingers at a bowl of rice that had been drenched with a bitter orange juice.
Again he heard the shouting, something shrill and desperate.
No man spoke to Barney. Between their mouthfuls, between their feeding they watched him.
A child gave a small china cup for tea to each man who sat on the floor.
Barney heard the shout, and knew then that it was Gul Bahdur who cried for help.
(1984) In Honour Bound Page 10