Barney and Schumack held the mule. The boy lifted its front right leg, gouged with a knife, a sharp edged flint stone fell to the path.
They set off on the path again.
After a few hundred yards the boy, without explanation, gave Barney his mule's rope and skipped back along the track.
Within five minutes he was again at Barney's side.
'When the Soviets find the body of their traitor, they will have something to think of.'
Barney caught at the shirt of the boy. 'You horrible little bastard. Don't ever do that again, not when you're with me.'
'You do not own our war, Captain Barney,' the boy shouted back, and pulled himself free of Barney's grip. 'You do not own us because you have eight Redeyes.'
Further up the track Schumack had stopped, listened. He called back, 'Oh boy, Captain Crispin, eh? And his Redeyes. Redeye, Jesus, that went out with the Ark . . .
Only eight, shit . . .'
Schumack spat on the ground, shook his head, started to walk again.
Twice during the flight the pilot of the helicopter had complained to his Jalalabad control that he was unable to make contact with the ground signal. Twice he had complained that the search was impossible if he could not be guided onto his target. He was careful. One helicopter only had been assigned. They should have flown in pairs, that was the standard procedure, but the excuse had been given that all of the squadron's machines were to undergo extensive servicing maintenance, that an exception would be made of one Mi-24. He had the wavelength open, for more than an hour, tuned for the message that would tell him where his quarry could be found. He flew over villages, over orchards, over the small cultivated fields that were outlined by irrigation ditches.
Without the ground transmission it was hopeless, wasted time and wasted fuel. The second time he had spoken to Jalalabad control they had patched him through to his squadron commander. Major Medev was adamant, Intelligence swore that the source was good.
The helicopter drifted above the flat roofs of the village homes, above the minaret towers, above the goats, above the women who had been taking in the summer's second harvest and who now ran in their full skirts to the compounds.
Because they had been ordered to fly at 400 metres, the gunner in the nose bubble of the Mi-24 was able to see the wheel and the hover of the first vultures. Specks in a clear sky, falling fast, then hovering, then dropping down amongst the sparse trees on the last slopes before the river plain. Through his mouthpiece radio, the gunner alerted the pilot.
What else to look at?
The helicopter settled high over a track, clearly visible between the trees. The gunner could see the birds below, in a clutch quarrelling over a bundle of blanket. The pilot disobeyed his standard procedures, he eased the helicopter down towards the tree tops. The vultures scattered. Hovering just above the path the gunner saw the smashed radio set. Close to it was a man on his back. The gunner saw the trousers at the man's knees, the raw blood mess in the man's groin, the bulge of blood at the man's mouth.
The gunner retched, across his knees, his boots, onto the floor space between his feet.
The pilot radioed again to Jalalabad control, and the dust driven up from the path by the rotor blades settled back onto the flies and later the vultures made a feast of the bloodied corpse of a man who had chosen to collaborate.
They waded and swam the Kabul river at dusk.
Low water with summer near spent, and the autumn rains not yet falling on the low ground, and the winter snows not yet cascading onto the mountains of the Hindu Kush that lay as a grim barrier ahead. The mules were fearful of the water, had to be bullied into the centre stream depths, coaxed into a frantic swimming stroke. The river bed mud oozed into Barney's boots, and when they came to the rocks on the north side, on the Laghman side, his grip slipped under water and twice he was ducked to his nostrils.
They had seen a helicopter once, quartering the far bank and the villages to the south, and then turning to the east and Jalalabad. The boy had said that the river could not be crossed at this place at any time other than late summer. Only when the water was at its lowest could the crossing be attempted, and all the bridges were guarded by Afghan army units. If it had been earlier in the year they would have had to trek away to the west, towards Kabul.
On the Laghman side of the river they came to an orchard of apple trees, and stripped off their clothes and wrung the dark water from them, and lay on the cool grass. When Barney went to help Schumack get the water from his shirt and trousers, he was waved brusquely away. The boy dressed first, crawled into his sodden shirt and trousers in the last light of the day to walk to the village whose lights they could see, to beg for food.
After the boy had gone, after the light wind had caught coldly at Barney's skin, he stood to take his clothes down from the branches where they were hooked alongside the ripening apples.
'You did well, Maxie.'
'If you don't do well, you're dead.'
'I'd never thought we could be tracked, hadn't thought of it.'
'The Soviets aren't playing games. They play hard, if it's dirty why should they give a shit?'
'You have to be dirty to win, right?'
'Up to your arse in shit to win.'
'I had a grandfather here, he died here. In 1919. Third Afghan War. His hands would have been pretty clean.'
'And he didn't win. Where did he die?'
'A place called Dakka.'
'Near the border, about forty miles from here.' There was an edge in Schumack's voice as if to stifle any sentiment. 'I hope he died well, your grandfather.'
'They'd made a camp at Dakka. Six infantry battalions, artillery, even some cavalry
- that dates it - they were out on flat ground, no shade, not a lot of water. The Afghans had the high ground, had guns there. Usual British answer, send in the infantry to get the guns. They used the old county regiments from England, Somerset Light Infantry and North Staffs, exhausted before they even started because they'd legged it from the garrisons in India. They went up the hillsides with bayonets fixed. They cleared the guns but too late for my grandfather. When I was a boy I read some of my grandmother's papers, some nasty things were done to him. I don't know whether my grandfather died well, I'm pretty sure he died screaming.'
'Not an easy place to die well in, Afghanistan,' Schumack said.
The boy was coming through the trees. Before he reached them they could smell the fresh baked bread that was wrapped in muslin cloth.
For two days Barney and the boy and Schumack and the two mules plodded north from the plains of the Kabul river up into the dry brown hills, on towards the grey mountain sides of Laghman.
Remote, barren countryside. Small villages set close against escarpments for protection against the winter's weather. Handkerchief fields that had been scraped for stones and that were withered for lack of water. Lonely shepherds who sat away from the tracks and who watched their passing without greeting. An exhausting, dangerous countryside, devoid of hospitality. Once Schumack had shown Barney a butterfly anti-personnel innocent on the path in its camouflage brown paint, scattered from the sky. And when they were past the range of its effectiveness he had detonated it with a single shot.
They needed to eat, they needed to sleep well, they needed shelter from the growing winds that flew into their faces from the wastes of the Hindu Kush.
Barney would sniff with his nostrils up into those winds and seem to sense that this was the place he had come to find. When they stopped, the regular five minutes in each hour, Barney would stand straight and gaze forward at the mountains and slip off his cap and let the wind into his hair. His place, the killing ground for the helicopters. But he must eat and he must sleep, and his body was filthy, and the lice had started to work over his skin, and his beard was an uncomfortable stubble.
The second night they sought out a village, walked in the late afternoon up the stamped earth path towards the tight corral of houses with the dogs raucou
s around them and snapping at their legs and running from the kicks of the mules. The men who watched their approach were armed. Barney saw the Kalashnikovs and the Lee Enfields and one rifle that he recognized from pictures he had seen as the SVD Dragunov, the standard Soviet sniper weapon. Men with cold faces.
He felt the nervousness of the boy.
'These are not the people of Peshawar . . .'
'We have to eat, we have to sleep. I know these are the fighting men.'
The boy went forward. Barney and Schumack stood back, holding the bridles of the mules. Fifty metres in front of them the boy spoke to a man who wore a close bound turban of blue upon his head, with a night-dark beard uncut and hanging against his chest, and a Soviet assault rifle loose in his hand. No smile, no welcome. The boy talking fast and the man listening.
'It's all down to the boy,' Schumack said from the side of his mouth.
'Yes.'
'If he says the wrong thing they could chop us and take the mules.'
'Just shut up, Maxie.'
'So as you know.'
'I know,' Barney said tightly. His finger was on the Safety of his Kalashnikov, his eyes never left Gul Bahdur's back.
The man shrugged, assumed indifference, gestured back over his shoulder into the village.
The boy turned to Barney, his face alive with relief. Barney felt the tremble in his knees. They walked into the village. There were rocket craters, there were shrapnel scars, there were the pattern lines on the walls of machine gun fire, and there were roof beams rising jagged and charred from the buildings.
They went up the steps of a once white washed concrete- faced building with a flat roof.
'They are going into the mountains tomorrow,' Gul Bahdur said. 'They are of the Hizbi-i-Islami group. Their leader is one day and a half's walk away. It is what you wanted, Barney?'
'It is.'
After dark they sat on the floor of the house that had once been a school. A dozen men and Barney and Schumack, under a paraffin lamp hanging from a ceiling hook.
While they sat, while they drank tea, the loads from the mules were carried in and placed under the supervision of Gul Bahdur against the far wall. At the sight of the uncovered missile tubes Schumack screwed his face up to stare at Barney, and Barney looked through him. Later they were given goat bones to chew. There was bread. There was a gummy rice that stuck behind Barney's teeth. By the door were heaped the weapons of the mujahidin. He was amongst the world's most feared guerrilla force. He felt a desperate elation.
A girl stood in the doorway.
Barney shook his head, unbelieving.
"I am Mia Fiori. . .'
He heard the words, the soft-accented English of the Mediterranean. He rose to make her welcome. Schumack didn't move.
'I am a nurse with Aide Medicale Internationale . . .'
He saw the dark ringlets of her hair, and the buttoned blouse, and the long skirt that was gathered at her waist and fell free to her ankles.
'They say you are going north in the morning. . .Will you take me with you, take me where I can be of use . . .?'
He watched the shimmer of the skin of her cheeks, and the way she held her hands and clasped and unclasped her fingers.
To Barney she was beautiful, a mirage in this place. He shook his head.
'These people won't take me. To them I am only a woman.'
All the room watched Barney.
'My name is Crispin. I'm a collector of strays.' Gul Bahdur flashed him a look of pure hatred and Schumack waved once to her with his iron claw, grinning. 'I'll take you, but it will be early that we leave.'
11
The valley was slightly more than thirty miles long, gouged as a deep ditch, running north to south. In places it was as narrow as five hundred metres, at its widest point little more than two thousand. The sides of the valley alternated between cliff precipices and more gradual slopes, but from any place on the floor of the valley the flanking walls seemed to rise high and intimidating. A water course ran the length of the valley, but it was dry, waiting for the rains and the first snow fall. Winding amongst the boulders and stones of the river bed was a track that would be suitable only for a four-wheel-drive lorry or jeep, or for a tank. Where the valley was widest there had lived until quite recently whole village communities. Now they were gone. They had herded together their sheep and their goats and their mules, and they had trekked over the mountains to Pakistan. The villages they had left abandoned had been bombed, rocketed, devastated. The fields were now caked in stringy dried yellow grass. The valley was a place of ghosts. Into the side walls ran small valleys, fissures in the granite rock, water drains for the change of season that would bring the melted snow down from the high peaks. These small valleys, these fissures, gave access from the valley floor to the upland pastures where the herds were grazed in summer. But the herds had gone, and the shepherds. The flowers remained, growing as weeds in the field squares, sprouting ochre and red and blue where once there had been vetch and lentil and pumpkin plants.
The valley had formerly been prosperous. It lies across a nomads' and caravanners'
trail from Pakistan's northern mountains towards the Panjshir of Afghanistan. The trail comes down into the middle of the valley, crosses between three villages and then climbs again westwards. If the valley is not open to the traveller then he must resign himself to the minimum of another week's walking at altitude to skirt this trusted route.
It is a trail trodden with history. The great Alexander brought his army from Europe along this path, through this valley, perhaps the first of the bands of fighting men to find this by-pass of the mountain peaks. In this area the people carry the stamp of those former armies, now they are called Nuristanis, before that they were the Kafiristanis -
the strangers, known for their pale skins and their fair hair and their blue eyes and their old ways of animism worship. They are a world set apart from the tribespeople of the Pathans and the Uzbeks and the Tajiks and the Hazaras, and they live now in the refugee camps in Pakistan.
The war has fallen with its full ferocity on these villages under the high cliff walls.
Along this trail the mujahidin carry their munitions and weapons before the winter halts the resupply of the mountain fighters, and in the valley's villages they rest and take shelter. The bombers and the helicopter gunships stampeded the people of these villages into exile.
The morning after they had arrived at the southern entrance to the valley, Schumack had gone.
They had shaken hands with a certain formality that was a part of neither of them, and the American had muttered something about joining up with a group further into the mountains to the west. He had gone early and blended away with half a dozen men who were laden down by the weight of mortar bombs and the ammunitions belts for a DShK 12.7mm machine gun.
The girl went with Schumack because he was going in the direction of the Panjshir.
Perhaps he would reach the Panjshir, perhaps not. He would take her towards Panjshir.
The girl had thanked Barney as if he was responsible for her moving towards her goal, and she had headed off walking easily at Schumack's side.
Barney felt a sort of
loneliness when they had gone, winding away along
the river bed and then becoming ant creatures as they started to climb into a side valley. The girl had been with
him for two days, the American for five. He thought
of them as friends, and they had gone as casually as if they would surely meet before the day's end and, or as if, for their part, they had nothing to share with him or his life.
The camp was a collection of tents pegged out under trees a quarter of a mile from the nearest empty village. Eight tents, all sand-brown and carrying the stencilled markings of Afghan Army and Soviet equipment. Captured weapons, captured ammunition, captured tents. After Schumack and the girl had gone, Barney went back to the tent that he had shared with them and Gul Bahdur. He looked down at where she had sl
ept, separated from himself and Maxie Schumack by the boy whose back had been to her as if she might eat him in the darkness. He saw the place on the rug where her curled body had been.
The boy read him. He had opened the tent flap and pulled a face at Barney.
'The Chief will talk to you.'
A quick grin from Barney. The meeting that was the make or the break.
He followed Gul Bahdur out of the tent.
His name was Ahmad Khan. He was the leader of the mujahidin in the valley. He was his own master and he acknowledged no superior. The Hizbi-i-Islami Central Committee in Peshawar exercised a fragile hold on his activities provided that weapon and ammunition were supplied to him above what he took from his enemy. In his territory his authority was undisputed.
He was not from these mountains. He was a man of the city, from Kabul. He was twenty-five years old. Barney found a slight, spare man with moustache, with full lips and a jutting clean-shaven chin. He wore a black turban, wound loosely and with the end hanging like a tail on his shoulder. His dress was a grey check sports jacket without front buttons, torn at the right elbow, cotton jeans, a pair of jogging shoes bright blue and white. He sat on the ground a little way from the tents and alone.
Barney came to him, sat cross-legged in front of him.
'I speak English, I was taught English at the Lycee Istiqual in Kabul. Later I worked with an Englishman, an engineer. Before I came here I had begun to be a schoolmaster.
My English is good?'
'Excellent,' Barney said. He waved Gul Bahdur away, saw the boy hesitate and then drift back from them, out of ear shot and disappointed.
(1984) In Honour Bound Page 14