(1984) In Honour Bound
Page 11
As if with a single movement he was onto his feet, his knee buffeting the shoulder of the man beside him, spilling his food into the floor. He was out of the house and into the bright sunshine. The compound walls engulfed him, he spun on his heel and heard Gul Bahdur cry in pain. Barney sprinted along the ditch, out of the village.
He saw the crowd under the trees. None of the men around the boy, and around the boy's mules, knew of Barney's approach. He flung himself into the group of men, eight or nine men. A fist was raised, smashed down into the boy's face. Hands were pulling at the sacking cover hiding the missile tubes. A terrible anger in Barney. The boy flailed with his arms to try to pull back the man who had the most secure hold on the sacking, and fell.
Barney took hold of the shirt collar of the man who had struck Gul Bahdur and threw him away so that he stumbled back into the mass of the watchers. His arm swung up, the hard edge of his fist chopped down onto the shoulder of the man who tried to pull clear the sacking.
One instant of quiet. Then the scream of the man who had been hit, and the shout of the man who had been thrown clear, and the whimper from the ground of Gul Bahdur.
The boy pulled himself up from the ground and stood behind Barney. The men gave them room, but had formed a half circle.
Barney saw the flash of a steel blade.
He heard the rattle of a weapon cocking.
A few feet of open ground separated the men and the knife and the gun from Barney and the boy. The eyes, Barney stared always into the eyes, raking from one to another to another. Brown and chestnut eyes spilling their hatred. Barney felt the boy's hands clinging to the clothes on his back, felt the fear tremble in the boy's fingers.
He never let go of the eyes. He stood his full height. He opened his arms wide and clear to his hips. He unclenched his fists, exposed the whiteness of the palms of his hands. Empty arms, empty hands.
A fly crawled on Barney's nose, searching at the rim of his nostrils.
He was without a weapon. There was a loaded and cocked rifle pointing at him, and the double-edged blade of a knife, and enough men to tear his throat from his shoulders and his eyes from their sockets.
He heard the moan of the man he had hit, he heard the chatter of Gul Bahdur's teeth.
More men had come from the compounds, those who lived in the village and the Hazaras from the column.
The mullah was amongst them, brown-cloaked, black- bearded, a tight white turban strip on his head. A man whispered in the mullah's ear.
Barney stock still, and the rifle still aimed at him, and the knife still poised to thrust at him. He stared them back. The mullah shouted at Barney.
'He is telling us to go . . .'the boy whispered from behind Barney's back.
The mullah pointed away from the village, his voice was a tirade.
'He says we are to go. He says because we have received the hospitality of this village we are not to be harmed. He says that the men of this village do not kill those who have received hospitality at the same hand . . . We have to go, Barney.'
Slowly, deliberately, Barney turned his back on the crescent of men. He felt the tickle in his spine, exposed to the rifle and the knife. Barney rearranged the sacking cover over the missile tubes.
'Untie the mules,' Barney said, a brittle crack in his voice.
The boy bent down and unfastened the ropes at their ankles and then untied the knot at the base of the peach tree.
Barney held tight to the bridle of the leading mule, the boy was behind him. Still the eyes on them, and the silence of the watchers.
Barney walked forward straight to the centre of the crescent.
The men parted. They formed an aisle for Barney and his mule, and for Gul Bahdur and his mule. The sweat dribbled on Barney's forehead, ran from his neck down the length of his shirt.
A man spat a wet, sticky mess onto Barney's cheek. Barney did not turn to him.
They had made a narrow path and Barney brushed against the man who held the rifle, forced the barrel back. If he stopped they would kill him and the boy, if he ran they would kill him and the boy. He reckoned the mullah's protection was thin armour. The right speed was the slow speed.
They passed out of the tunnel of men. Barney felt his knees weaken, sighed in a great pant of breath.
They walked around the edge of the village and the boy came level with Barney and showed the track they should take, away along a valley and towards climbing hills.
An idiot ran alongside them, trying to stand in front of Barney and his eyes were wide apart and wide-opened and there was a dribble in his mouth and old scar marks on his face. The idiot was grey-haired, grey-bearded, and he seemed to dance in front of Barney.
- Gul Bahdur picked up a stone and threw it with savage force at the idiot's stomach, and there was a yelp, and Barney heard the sounds of a retreating footfall.
'Tell me, Gul Bahdur.'
'They knew we carried weapons, they would have wanted to take them for themselves. They could not have used the Redeye, but they did not know what we carried. They saw that we had weapons. It is not easy for them to find weapons . . .'
'Why did they not kill us?'
'I told you the words of the mullah. You had eaten with them . . . We are not savages, Barney.'
'No, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said gravely.
'You are laughing at me, Barney.'
'I've just found very little to laugh at. Is it safe to go on, in daylight?'
'You want to go back and sleep in the mullah's bed?'
And they both laughed, out loud, raucous and relieved.
Their laughter carried across a spinach field, across an irrigation channel to the outer compounds of the village where the men stood and watched the going of the European and the boy and the mules that carried weapons. They wondered why a man who had been close to death should laugh for all the world to hear him. Near to the men a group of children joined hands and danced around the idiot and avoided his kicking feet and jeered at him. The men watched the European and the boy until they were small, hazy shapes with their mules, far up the valley.
Later the children would throw pebbles from the river bed at the idiot, and he too would leave the village.
Sharp squalls of dust wind blew through the morning in Peshawar. The winds caught at the dust, picked it and tossed it from the unwatered beds of the bungalow's garden. And with the dust were pieces of paper in eddies above the driveway where Rossiter had previously parked the land- rover.
The front door of the bungalow crashed shut, then swung back again. Inside the bungalow was devastation. The Colonel of Security had planned to arrive before the departure of those gentlemen of the charities. He had believed that his arrival at the bungalow as they were making their final preparations for departure would have confused them sufficiently for him to discover the true nature of their activity in North West Frontier Province. Stripping shelves, tipping out the cupboards, ripping open the roof space had been his retaliation at finding the bungalow empty.
But there had been rewards. In the garden, in the base of a burned out bonfire, underneath scorched foliage, he had found charred pages from a manual for the use of the American Redeye ground-to-air missile.
These remnants lay in a cellophane packet on the back seat of the Colonel's car, now being driven hard back towards Islamabad.
They had left the first river bed valley and climbed beyond the tree line and onto a scree of loose stones, over a bare and grey brown hillside. A moon surface of sliding feet and razor fine rock. They dragged the mules after them, braying in anger because they had not been adequately rested in the village and had not been watered and had been allowed only a short time for grazing under the peach trees. The sun burned down on them.
To Barney it was lunacy to be climbing an open hillside in the brightness of daylight. If the helicopters came, the boy seemed to say, then it was willed. Against all of Barney's training, against all that he had taken as a second nature, he climbed to the summit of the rang
e.
They were out of sight of the village, that was enough for the re-establishment of the disciplines.
Beyond the lip of the topmost summit they rested. From now he would dictate the method of movement. No crest outline, always a mountain shape behind them. They would rest for ten minutes in each hour, rest regardless. He told the boy what would happen, braced for a dispute, and the boy seemed indifferent.
Beneath them were a series of lower hill tops. Beyond and below the hill tops, hazed and vague, was a dark strip placed against their path.
Barney squinted, peered forward. He had no binoculars, and he had no weapon, and he had no map.
it is the Kabul river,' Gul Bahdur said.
Barney nodded. His hand shielded his eyes.
'We have to cross that river, Barney. Beyond the river are the mountains and the valleys that you want for Redeye.'
'How long to the river?'
'Three days, perhaps.' The boy sat close to Barney. 'When you reach the valleys, what will you do?'
'Damage a few helicopters, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said.
The boy heard the lightness in the words and their emptiness. He looked quickly at Barney, and there was a bleakness in Barney's face that discouraged a reply. The boy stood and went to the bridle of his mule, and waited.
They came down the hillside, sometimes slipping, sometimes relying on the sure grip of the mules to hold them.
Barney's forehead was lined from a private pain. The flies buzzed at his face, the water ran on his body, the sun burned at his neck.
What was the shelf life of Redeye? Ten years? Who has asked how many years this consignment of Redeye had lain on the shelf? Anyone? Good enough for the hairies, and some of them should work. Barney in his briefings had skated over the small matter that Redeye was now out of service with the US, replaced by Stinger. Don't give them the bad news, Barney. Give them the good news, the news that Redeye is supreme. No reason to tell them that Stinger's better, or that Britain's Blowpipe is better. Or that you're not certain what happens to the infra-red seeker optics stored in an atmosphere of dry nitrogen all those years. Don't tell them any of that or they might not be so keen to have their arses shot off.
Barney jerked at the rope tied to the bridle of his mule.
it's not a wonder weapon, Redeye. It's good but it doesn't work bloody miracles,'
Barney said.
The boy did not answer. His eyes were cast down. The hillsides dropped away in front of them.
In the late afternoon Rossiter drove into Chitral. He had been at the wheel of the land-rover for thirteen hours, stopping only once for fuel. His head ached, his shoulders were knotted in tiredness, he felt filthy all over his body.
He came into town past the polo field on his left and the cargo jeep station on his right, up the main street of white washed cement and dun brown brick, over the fast-flowing river, past the mosque, past the Dreamland Hotel, past the Tourist Lodge, past the land-rovers and the Toyota trucks, past the oak and juniper trees. Through the town he forked off from the main road.
Chitral lies eighteen miles by crow's flight from Afghanistan across the first tower-high mountains of the Hindu Kush. He had thought through the long hours of his journey where he would stay. It was the end of summer, the time when the holiday bungalows of the Islamabad diplomats and the Rawalpindi autocracy would be abandoned for the winter. He would find a remote bungalow, with a back door window that could be broken. Howard Rossiter's friends - not many of them but there were some
- would not have believed that he could be considering both house-breaking and deliberate mutiny to the department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that employed him. They would, those few friends, have been astonished to learn that Howard Rossiter had sung at the top of his voice and until he was hoarse, much of the way between Peshawar and Chitral. He held the independent Pakistan in contempt. He held the Islamised Pakistan, ruled in recent years by Martial Law, in total contempt.
He had cheerfully calculated that it would take the j authorities many hours to circulate a description of him- j self and details of his land-rover to the police posts around Peshawar.
He didn't doubt that he was through whatever feeble net was now being cast for him.
It was cold on the hillside. Barney shivered. The boy was ; close against him having crawled under Barney's blanket. The village was a thousand feet below them, and three miles in the distance. Once the sunlight, falling fast and crimson behind them, had glinted on the white paint of the mosque minaret. Once the sunlight had snatched at the perspex glass of the helicopter's cockpit.
That was the helicopter that flew lowest, drifting over the flat rooftops, hunting out the targets. When the rockets were fired then the skies around the helicopter seemed darkened to a blackness by the brilliance of the flame flashes. From their vantage point, Barney and the boy could hear the impact of the rockets and the chatter of the forward machine 3 gun sited below the pilot's canopy. Above the low-flying helicopter was its mate, circling and suspicious, another eye for the partner.
Barney watched in fascination. He did not think of the villagers who might be on the floors of their homes, nor the mujahidin who might be running for firing positions between
the dry brick compounds, nor of the beasts that would be stampeding in their corrals of thorn hedge. Barney watched the movement of the helicopters, and learned. Barney recognised in this attack the standard procedure. One helicopter low, one high above in support. A fire had started on the edge of the village. Grey smoke spinning from the grey landscape into the grey skies.
Beside Barney the boy wept. Behind them and underneath an overhang of rock, the mules stamped their hooves and strained against the tethering ropes and the drone of the helicopter engines and the explosions.
'Why do you do nothing?' The boy said the words over and over.
When the darkness had settled onto the village, the helicopters climbed and turned.
The fire in the village blazed. The engine noises sidled away.
Barney stood up.
'We'll sleep here.'
'Were you frightened to attack the helicopters?' The boy spat the words at Barney.
Barney caught the collar of Gul Bahdur's shirt, gripped it, seemed to lift the boy.
'Take me to the mountains and valleys north of Jalalabad. That's where our work is.
Not here.'
A secretary from Chancery sat opposite the spook, across his dining room table, the candlelight flickering her lipstick and the perspiration sheen of her shoulders.
It had taken him weeks of nagging persuasion to get her to dinner at his apartment.
There was a bottle of French wine beside the candle, diplomats' privilege over the prohibition legislation. He'd served soup (albeit from a tin), the mutton chops were under the kitchen grill, and some quite passable potatoes and carrots were steaming on the rings, and there was ice cream in the fridge and cheese on the sideboard. She hadn't said much, and he didn't know yet whether the evening would be successful.
He heard the knock at the door, repeated before he was out of the chair. He smiled weakly at the girl, and cursed to himself.
He opened the door.
The Colonel of Security swept through the hallway, past him, into the room. He held a cellophane bag in his hand.
'The lady should go to the kitchen.'
'I beg your pardon . . .' Not said bravely.
'Please put her at once out of this room.'
The girl ran to the kitchen, the door slammed behind her.
'This is an intolerable intrusion . . .'
The Colonel threw the cellophane bag onto the table.
'Your friends from Refugee Action, Mr Davies, why would they have needed the manual of the Redeye missile? Tell me that.'
The spook closed his eyes.
'I told you to get them out of the country.'
'They'll have gone by now.'
'That is one more lie, one more to the many you have told
me.'
The Colonel reached to the table and retrieved the cellophane bag.
'I would not drink too much tonight, Mr Davies. You will need a clear head when you compose your cyphers to London.'
Davies watched him leave through the door he had never closed, heard the engine of a car start, heard the car purr away into the night. The secretary stood in the kitchen doorway and saw the spook's head sinking and saw his fist beat down onto the tablecloth beside his nose.
9
Pyotr Medev had made the mess the meeting place of the young pilots. It was where they relaxed, where they fooled when there was no flying in the morning, where talk of tactics and detail were banned.
There were arm chairs around the walls and the centre of the room was taken by a long wood table, well polished, at which thirty officers could be seated. More arm chairs were in a horseshoe around the stove. The Frontal Aviation transport and fighter-bomber squadrons at Jalalabad had their own quarters, and there was another much larger complex across the runway for the offices and accommodation of the 201st Motor Rifle Division. Eight Nine Two of Frontal Aviation was a compact squadron, an entity of its own. It was under strength, two flights instead of four, but Medev believed it to be as efficient as any in the country. He was proud of his officers, proud of their qualities.
All the pilots but two were there, and the Maintenance Officer and the Stores Officer, and Rostov. The gunners, of course, were not officers, they had separate quarters. This was the room for the fliers, of the young and the elite. Sometimes they made Medev feel an old man with their horseplay. He believed he loved them all, even when they were drunk and daft. They were like children to him, his family.
Pyotr Medev had not lost a single young man under his command in Afghanistan.
Other squadrons of Frontal Aviation had taken casualties. The big troop carriers, the Mi-8s, they took losses, they were not as armour-protected as the Mi-24s. If there were no casualties, no helicopter losses, at the end of his twelve months, then that indeed would be a triumph for Medev.