(1984) In Honour Bound

by Gerald Seymour

  'Who are you?' The eyes were unwavering.

  'I am Barney Crispin . . .'

  'And who is Barney Crispin? His name tells me nothing.'

  He had known since Parachinar that the question would be asked, but he had never been clear what would be his answer. The eyes stared into him.

  'I am British.'

  'Who pays you?' A soft singing voice that demanded an answer.

  'I am Barney Crispin, I am British, and I have the weapons to shoot down eight helicopters.'

  'You were sent here by the government of Britain?'

  Barney offered no reply.

  'Why does the government of Britain wish to help us shoot down eight helicopters?'

  Barney gazed into his face, saw the clear lines of white teeth, saw the flies that haloed his head.

  'You do not have to know, I do not have to know. If you allow me to stay, then the helicopters will have their power over your valley destroyed. At the moment the helicopters are safe from you. With the missiles that I have, the safety of the helicopters is ended. Why I am here is not important to you.'

  'I decide what is important to me.'

  Barney recognised the twist of anger.

  'What is important to you is that I destroy eight helicopters, that I change the pattern for flying of all the helicopters that come to this valley.'

  'What is important to me, I decide that. Why should I not take your missiles and send you away?'

  'Because you are not trained to use the missile. You might hit one, if you were lucky, you are not competent to hit eight. That is why you won't send me away.'

  'What is the missile?"

  'It is the American Redeye missile. It is satisfactory but not modern. If the missiles have not been destroyed by the journey here, if there is no malfunction, then the missile is effective.'

  'What is the principle of the missile?'

  'Heat-seeker, it targets onto the engine exhaust vent. Do you understand that?'

  'I was trained to be a schoolmaster. I am not ignorant.'

  it is necessary to pick with great care the moment of firing.'

  'Eight helicopters only?'

  'How many have you shot down this year?'

  It was Ahmad Khan's turn to peer into Barney's face, and not reply.

  'Not even one?'

  The drone of the flies, the flutter of a single bird, the tumble fall of a distant stone on the valley's walls.

  if you have not shot down one helicopter how can you refuse the opportunity to shoot down eight helicopters?'

  'You guarantee eight?'

  ‘I guarantee my best efforts, eight times.'

  'Can the helicopter avoid the missile?'

  'If the pilot is cleverer than I am, then he has that chance, if he is not cleverer his helicopter is dead. You want to know what is in it for me? I want the opportunity to strip the first helicopter, not for its weapons, for its electronics. That is all that I ask in exchange for the opportunity to travel with you.'

  'I tell you what I think . . . You are a military trained man, you are sent here by your government. . .'

  'That's not the point. .

  'Hear me out.' A blaze in the eyes.

  'The little of the truth you have told me is that you wish to strip the first helicopter that is not destroyed on crashing. Not all of the truth is that you say you will stay until you have fired eight missiles. I believe you at the first, I do not believe you at the second. If you are a soldier then you will have an order, when you have achieved that order you will run away with your prize.'

  'You have my promise.'

  'Why should I value your promise? You come to kill a helicopter, to take its working parts. The knowledge will not help me, nor my people. That knowledge is for you, for your own people.'

  'You can have my word, my hand.'

  'Last year from a village north of here a helicopter was shot down, from above, perhaps it was a lucky shot, the Soviets came the next day with their airborne troops.

  They caught a dozen of the men of the village, they chained them together, they put petrol over them, they set fire to them.'

  'Try me,' Barney said, as if he had not heard.

  'What do I have to do, to try you?'

  'You have to bring the helicopters to your valley.'

  A snort of derision from Ahmad Khan. 'The helicopters come. I do not have to bring them. When the mujahidin are in the high valleys the helicopters cannot reach them, but the mujahidin must come down into my valley, and when the helicopters come they do not come at my bidding.'

  'I tell you this, Ahmad Khan, before the snow falls, if you will trust me, the helicopters will not fly with impunity to this valley.'

  'We have been fighting for four years. We shall fight on here after you have gone.

  In our struggle for liberation you mean nothing to us.'

  'A helicopter destroyed is more than you have managed.'

  'You take a freedom with me.' A flaring anger, loud at his mouth, bright in his eyes.

  'We did not ask you to come here. We do not need the sacrifices that the help you offer will demand of us.'

  'That is the talk of an obstinate man,' Barney said.

  Ahmad Khan stiffened his back straight. His hand clasped at something through the thickness of his jacket, perhaps a pistol, perhaps a knife. Barney felt a strange confidence.

  'You dare to call me obstinate?' Ahmad Khan spat the question at Barney.

  'If you send me away then I call you an obstinate fool.'

  'To us you are an unbeliever. You do not have the faith of Islam, you have no commitment to our freedom. You seek only to help yourself.'

  'In helping myself I help you,' Barney said evenly. 'How often do the helicopters come?'

  'Every two days, every three days, every day, it changes, but I do not want your help.'

  'What do you do when the helicopters come?'

  'We hide,' Ahmad Khan shouted.

  'I can destroy them for you,' Barney shouted back.

  'I fight my own war.'

  'From the back of caves?'

  Ahmad Khan hissed his surprise. 'You take a chance with me. Englishman.'

  'You take a chance with the lives of the men that follow you. To be obstinate is to throw away the lives of your men.'

  Barney saw the hand loosen from whatever was concealed under Ahmad Khan's coat. Ahmad Khan stood, rising with an easy grace from the squat. Suddenly he smiled, the sweet smile of dismissal.

  'I do not know why you are here, and I do not want you.'

  'It is for you to decide.'

  'I have decided.'

  Barney did not argue. He shrugged.

  'You can take some food, then you should go back to Pakistan.'

  'I thank you for the food, but I will not go back to Pakistan.'

  'You go where?'

  'I will go ten miles up your valley, perhaps you will see the smoke from the first helicopter.'

  Barney looked up at the young guerrilla commander and saw his puzzlement. He felt no hostility towards him. There was an openness about the man that he admired.

  Barney had not been open. He had not spoken of the age of Redeye, he had not fairly detailed the limitations of targeting onto the engine exhaust vents. He had not mentioned the potential damage to the electronics from the long overland journey on the backs of the mules. He had not described the evasion techniques available to the pilots of an Mi-24. He had not said that he would leave when the instrumentation was strapped on the mules' backs. He had played an arrogant game, not an honest game. But he had lost nothing, and everything. He stood up.

  'How many men do you have?' Barney asked.

  'What is it to you?'

  'How many men?'

  'More than fifty,' a scent of pride from Ahmad Khan. 'In the side valleys there are more.'

  'And the valley is important?'

  'You know the valley is a route used by the Resistance.'

  if they were to come with tanks and armoured
cars . . .'

  'I have machine guns, I have anti-tank rockets.'

  'Be ready for them, but they will not have the helicopters.' Barney smiled carelessly.

  He held out his hand, took Ahmad Khan's, gripped it.

  'Why are you here, Englishman?'

  'I think we will meet again.'

  Barney walked away, over to the boy. He saw the apprehension in Gul Bahdur's face. He told the boy that the leader had said that they should take food from the camp, and asked the boy to collect it. Barney went back to the tent beside which the two mules were tethered and grazing. In the dimness of the tent interior he bent over the piled parts of the Redeye missile kit. He had made a promise, he had given his word. He thought of Rossiter who had torpedoed his FCO career. He thought of the boy with the bloodied head who had walked back to the frontier with the launcher. He thought of thirteen men who were dead. He thought of a village that he had seen under attack from the hovering helicopters. He thought of a schoolmaster and the fierce pride that had taken him from the city to the valley shadows. Lastly he thought of an old man who was his father who had scuffled with a gunman without thought for his own safety. They were clear, sharp, painful thoughts.

  Barney stowed the missiles onto the backs of the mules and lashed tight the ropes.

  It was mid morning when they left the camp, Barney holding the bridle close to the jaw of the mule and the boy a few paces behind him. More than a hundred yards along the track stood Ahmad Khan. Barney looked straight ahead, said nothing as he passed Ahmad Khan, who stared over his head, ignored his going. There was the clipping tread of the mules, the stamp of Barney's boots, the shuffle of the boy's sandals. A great hush over the valley, a great quiet and emptiness that was not moved by the steady pace of Barney and the boy and the two mules.

  Once clear of the camp, Barney's eyes roved across the valley floor and the bouldered river bed and the uncultivated fields and the fruit trees that were overgrown, unpruned from the previous year. Over the jagged shapes of the rock falls at the base of the cliff walls. Up onto the steep, smoothed slopes where only the hardiest of scrub bushes had taken root. Out into the fissure valleys that groped away to the sides.

  Towards the mountain peaks that were distant, pale in the sunshine, deceptively close.

  He was hunting for cover, for advantage, for a firing position.

  The map was sheeted with a cellophane cover, and marked with chinagraph symbols that positioned Soviet and Afghan Army garrisons and suspected bandit concentrations.

  They were crowded into the room, eight pilots for eight Mi-24s. They would fly the following morning, return for their machines to be refuelled, go up again in the afternoon hours. They would fly in four pairs on different patrol routes, and the pattern would be repeated after refuelling. The helicopters were capable of covering great distances, they would quarter many of the deep valleys and rifts of Laghman province during the two patrols.

  They were young, early twenties, they wore the common uniform of close cropped hair, tanned faces, keen and aware eyes. Since he had taken command of Eight Nine Two he had not lost one of them. He had earned their trust.

  Two helicopters to prowl the wide Kunar river valley from its fork with the Kabul river and upstream to Asadabad.

  Two helicopters to trace the river between Qarqai and Ali Shang to the west.

  Two helicopters to take their start point at Mehtarlam and then follow the road track north towards Manduwal.

  Two helicopters to operate in the vacuum wilderness between Mehtarlam and Mahmud-e Eraqi, the wilderness designated as patrol area Delta.

  He stabbed with his pointer at the contour lines of the map. The squadron had been there before, into area Delta. Medev grimaced. There existed in Delta only deep valleys and cliff escarpments and friendless mountains. None of his fliers wanted Delta.

  Medev caught the eye of one of the young men who would fly an Mi-24 into area Delta in the morning, the pilot Nikolai. He had been into area Delta before, he was reliable, he was careful. Area Delta was in their tasking. Area Delta must be covered. A silence had fallen on the briefing room, the pilots waited on him. Silence was an infectious disease at the briefings. They were good pilots, those going into area Delta, as good as he had. They hated area Delta for its wildness, lack of friendly force base camps, for its weather, for the problems of rescue pick-ups.

  'It will be search and destroy, what you search out you destroy. I suggest a ground speed of 70 kph. Met report for tomorrow is clear visibility, no cloud, winds strong to severe with a possibility of 50 klick gusts. That's all.'

  There were seldom questions. He tried to be exhaustive in his handling of all matters that might prove of concern to his fliers. He did not encourage his fliers to ask questions for the sake of hearing their own voices. There was the shuffling of feet, the scraping of chair legs. Medev smiled warmly, saved an additional warmth for the pilot, Nikolai, who would lead in the morning into area Delta.

  Just when the light was failing, Barney found the place. They had travelled five hours since leaving the camp. He

  had been restless, pushing himself forward, unwilling to talk with the boy. Now he had found the place.

  He estimated that the width of the valley floor was a thousand yards. To the north and the south were villages. Between the villages and on either side of the river bed were orchards still with the summer's leaf canopy. At their lowest point the valley walls sloped gradually into the tree line, and above the trees on one side were scrub bushes of thorn ,and then heavy boulders that a millennium before had crashed from the upper rock face.

  Standing now amongst those rocks he looked across the valley to the cave entrance opposite him. Near to the mouth of the cave, a lateral slit, he could see the movements of the boy who worked to collect dried grass and small branches for the fire that would be lit in the cave the next morning.

  He was satisfied. Barney came down over the rocks, dropped through the cracks and gullies and into the twilight of the orchard where the mules were hobbled.

  Before the light had gone, by the time that the boy had returned from collecting the materials for the fire, Barney had assembled the Redeye missile

  12

  The boy was quiet, quieter than at any time since he had carried the launcher into the bungalow at Peshawar. Barney remembered the talk of killing a hundred Soviets.

  None" of the crap and bubble from the boy now, and no cheek. This was real, on the valley's wall and above the valley's floor, the time for boasting past. When they had first woken, the boy had gone a few yards from Barney and sunk down to his knees and elbows in prayer; he had not prayed before, not when it had just been the two of them together. Gul Bahdur was to go into combat in the company of a foreigner, he was to fight alongside an unbeliever, he was to stand back to back with a man who could not speak his first language. Barney understood why the boy was quiet, why he had ripped at the food and not cared to gather the crumbs.

  A bird came, a finch of brilliant yellow feathers, and hopped and skipped near to them and revelled in the unexpected feast.

  Barney saw the freedom of the bird when it fled from him and perched out of reach on a branch before diving back with courage reassembled to the ground beside him.

  He wondered whether he could lure it into his hand.

  The bread was finished. The grey light was spreading down the far wall of the valley. The Redeye missile, launch tube attached to the launch mechanism, rested on a rock beside Barney. Time for the boy to go.

  The boy knew. There was fear in his face that he could not hide.

  if you fire at the helicopter and you do not kill it. . .'

  'I will kill it, Gul Bahdur.'

  'You can promise you will kill it?'

  'Watch me, Gul Bahdur.'

  The boy smiled back, thinly, without certainty, and was gone, down into the first line of the trees in the orchard.

  Barney started to climb up the west side of the valley. He took with him a second tube
.

  He hoped if the helicopters came that day that they would come early, before the sun straddled the centre of the valley in the white midday heat. He hoped that the simple lure he had baited for the helicopter would draw it to within his firing range. He hoped the helicopters would be cruising gently as a dragonfly in flight. . . Cut the bloody hoping, Barney.

  He reached a rock boulder, lichen covered, and balanced some one hundred and fifty feet above the orchard's trees. The boulder was fifteen feet high, twenty feet from front to back and, behind it, and accentuating the precariousness of its grip on the slope, was a narrow gully wide enough for a man to pass. It was a firing position. Whether the helicopters came from the north or from the south he would have the cover of the boulder until they had passed. Barney set down the missile and the spare tube. He took his one handkerchief from his pocket and ripped a tear in it with his teeth, and then pulled it to narrow shreds with his hands and screwed up two pieces and plugged them in his ears, and was satisfied, and took them out and laid them on the stone beside the missile. Next he loaded the battery system into the body of the launch unit.

  The sunlight was clearing the haze of early morning, sharpening the greens of the valley floor, and the greys and brown tints of the valley walls. He could see more than two miles each way down the valley.

  Across the valley a spiral of smoke drifted up from the dark entrance of the cave that was below the height at which Barney now sat. He saw the boy bend over the fire at the mouth of the cave, and a further billow of smoke as green wood replaced the kindling of dried branches.

  Remember that at all times the missile must see the engine exhaust vent that is set port and starboard on the upper side fuselage, behind the pilot, below the rotor blade transmission.

  Remember that the engine exhaust is the only target for Redeye.

  Remember the helicopter must be in steady flight for all of the missile's journey time.

  Remember to aim forward, to aim high.

  Barney looked down as the sun winked on the transparent disc at the forward end of the launch tube, and behind the disc onto the infra-red seeker optics and sensor element.