13
The accident investigation officer was a thorough young man. He was not in awe of his audience - the Frontal Aviation commander, the Colonel of Intelligence, a divisional army staff officer, and Major Medev - and they heard him through without interruption.
'An Mi-24 was downed in area Delta after receiving a direct hit in the proximity of the engine exhaust from an infra-red guided ground-to-air missile. The missile was fired from an elevated position at the side of the valley at a lateral trajectory from a range of eight hundred metres. We discovered a launch tube for an American manufactured Redeye missile, sometimes given the designation FIM-43A. The markings on the missile tube tell us it was nine years old, that it w,as issued to the Israeli Defence Force, and then transferred to the Iranian army. We found the tracks of one man and two mules . . .'
'The tracks of one man?' Medev said. 'Tell me of those tracks.'
'They were boot marks, they have been photographed, but I do not yet have the prints. A large boot with a heavy gripping tread.'
'The bandits wear sandals, or shoes, not climbing boots.'
'Not my concern, Major Medev. I merely report the type of boot that was worn at the place where the tube was found.'
'We wear boots, a European wears boots,' the Colonel of Intelligence said. 'We have to be careful not to leap to
conclusions, but the Afghan does not generally wear boots.'
'We are dealing with a ground-to-air missile, not a footwear problem,' said the staff officer.
The Colonel of Intelligence said, 'Five days ago, perhaps a week, we received information that a European and a local national and two mules were crossing Nangarhar province coming north towards the Kabul river and Laghman . . .'
'You acted on that information?' enquired the staff officer.
'We were able to trace the path of these persons for some days. The trail was lost as we were in the process of an airborne interception. I am correct, Major Medev?'
'The interception was aborted. The final directions close to the river did not materialise,' Medev said quietly.
'Unfortunate,' the staff officer said.
'More unfortunate for our comrade who operated the ground radio. He was shot; he was castrated; his testicles were left for his lunch.'
The staff officer said nothing.
The Frontal Aviation commander leaned forward over his desk, his finger pointed at Medev. 'When the helicopters fly in pairs, one should cover the other. Evidently this did not happen?'
'A fire was lit in a cave, possibly the fire was a trap. The pilot paid with his life, and with the life of his gunner, for ignoring his orders.'
'It is important that your pilots fully understand their procedures,' the Frontal Aviation commander stiffly divorced himself from the responsibility.
'Eight Nine Two has two bodies to send home, I think our pilots have been reminded of their procedures.' Medev looked each man in the face. 'If we have a European in area Delta, if we have a man who will lay a trap to kill one helicopter, then I ask what is to be our response?'
'You find the bastard, that's my suggestion,' said the staff officer. 'Find him and kill him.'
The Frontal Aviation commander said, 'I will send a preliminary report to Kabul this evening. Find this man tomorrow, Major Medev, and I can send a further report to Kabul.'
it will not be straightforward, sir. Area Delta is . . .'
'Aggressive flying will make it straightforward, Major Medev.'
It was the end of the meeting.
As the light failed, they had left the resting place, moved on, gone north. The valley floor was a gentle gradient, but the slightest of slopes over the rough ground was hard on the leg muscles, aching on the lungs.
The sinking sun was behind them. Barney walked into his moving shadow. He felt the tiredness. He felt the dirt on his body. He felt the lice-bite sores chafing under his arms. He felt a weakness, a looseness, in his stomach. And no bed tonight, no shelter from the evening wind. He wondered how long the boy could sustain the route marching and the lack of warm food. Barney stopped.
'Gul Bahdur. . .'
The shout echoed in the valley, came back to him from the rock faces.
'. . : By first light tomorrow we have to be on top of the valley, where is the place to climb?'
The answering voice, weak and failing in the winds. 'You cannot climb in the dark.'
'Where is the place to climb?'
The boy was staggering closer to Barney, slipping on the rocks, tears nearly suppressed. 'You cannot climb in the dark, in the day you can climb a side valley. You can see the side valley as well as I can, ahead.'
'If I can climb in the dark, so can you.'
'Not in the dark, Barney.'
Barney watched the boy, watched his spirit driving him closer, watched his courage.
He stumbled, he grazed his knee, he squeezed his eyes, he clung to the mules" bridle ropes. Barney set down the Redeye launcher, sat beside it, waited for the boy to reach him. They could only climb to the summits by using the side valleys. He wanted to taunt the boy, to tease more strength into his slight body. He thought he had succeeded. Only by the inventive use of their stamina would they live.
There were no trees here that had survived the last winter. There was a fallen, bark-peeled bough beside the river bed where it had been left by the spring's floods.
Barney led a mule to the bough and roped it to the dead wood. He unloaded the two missiles and his back pack from the mule. From the pack he took trousers, the only pair other than the ones that he wore, and a shirt, and without asking he took the turban from the boy's head.
'What are you doing, Barney?' the boy asked, a small tired voice.
'I have to trick them for each firing to succeed. With the fire we tricked them. With this too, perhaps.'
He took small stones and stuffed them into the legs of the trousers and into the waist, filled the trousers. He laid the shirt above the trousers and found more stones for the body of the shirt and for the arms. The trousers and the shirt were half masked by a rock, but would be visible from the air. He took a stone that was the size of a ripened melon and put the boy's turban on it and placed it against the neck of the shirt.
Together they loaded the two missile tubes and the pack onto the other mule's back.
They tramped off into the grey shadow light towards the place where the side valley dropped onto the valley's floor. The boy looked back, he saw the tethered mule and saw the half hidden shape of a man who slept beside the mule.
It had taken Barney and the boy three and a half hours to reach the roof of the valley.
Without the mule it would not have been possible. A dull, stubborn animal but even when blindfolded by darkness the animal uncannily found a secure foothold. They had clung alternately to the rope, to the bridle, to the packs and missile tubes, to the mule's tail. Their shins were raw from the rocks they had blundered against. High over the valley the winds whipped their clothes and chilled them. The last five hundred metres he half-carried the boy, held his arm crooked through his own.
The side valley wavered in no clear course, darting right and left over what in the spring would be torrent courses. No lights shining in the mountains, no sounds other than the scrape of their own feet and the mule's hooves straining for grip, and the stones that were dislodged and tumbled away under them. Higher on the climb there was a murmur of light from the crescent moon, thinly washed, so that Barney could see the shape in front of him of the mule's head, and could see the outline beside him of the boy's body. Hours since they had eaten, more hours since they had slept the sort of sleep he needed.
They came to the summit, they reached an upland plain. The stars were around them. The wind pinioned their clothes against their bodies and there was no respite from it. The mule would go no further.
The mule had taken them to the upper reach of the side valley and would go no further. Barney discovered a shallow gully, discovered it by falling headlong into it
, and his momentum carried the boy in after him, and the mule bleated at the sudden dragging on its bridle. He hobbled the mule with difficulty and tied the rope to his ankle. They drew their blankets around them, and lay snuggled in the gully.
'Barney . . .'
'We have to sleep, Gul Bahdur.'
'When you go home, when you have fired the eight Redeyes, who will you tell of this time?'
'No one.'
'There is somebody?'
'There won't be anybody.'
'There has to be someone, you will tell of this to someone.'
'No one. I have to go to sleep . . .'
'You have a woman at home?'
'No.'
'Who do you do this for, Barney?'
He dragged the blanket tighter over his head.
'Who for, Barney?'
'Is it important, Gul Bahdur?'
'What I do is for my people, for my country. What you do is not for your people, not for your country's sake. It is not for money?'
'Not for money.' He smiled to himself.
'Who for, Barney?'
'Look, boy, when the helicopters come tomorrow, and they will come tomorrow, when they come if I am asleep then I am dead, if I am dead you are dead too . . .'
'I am not afraid to die.'
'I am not a warrior of God, I am not a potential martyr of the Resistance. I'm not going to die here. I'm not going to die because some little bastard won't let me sleep.'
'A cheeky little bastard, Barney?'
'A little bastard with about one minute to live if he doesn't shut up and sleep.'
'Why is there no woman at home to whom you will be able to tell this?'
'It didn't happen.'
'Why not?'
'There was nothing to give a woman,' Barney said quietly.
'There is yourself.'
'No woman would want the things I know of. I know how to break a man's neck with the edge of my hand. I know how to lie in bracken and watch the back door of a farmhouse for three days without moving, in my own country. I know how to walk twenty miles with sixty pounds on my back and then take an assault course. I know how to put down mortar fire so that six have gone before the first lands. I know how to administer morphine and fit a saline drip when a man's in shock with his guts in the mud. I have nothing to give a woman, not any woman that I have met.'
'Did you try?'
'Go to sleep, boy.'
'What do we do in the morning?'
'I tell you, and then you don't talk any more.'
'I won't talk any more.'
Barney rolled on his back. He smelt the stench of his own body, he felt the dirt in his feet. He was canopied by the stars. His voice was a whisper.
'They will sweep the valley tomorrow. They must come back to the valley because they have been challenged. They have to find and remove the missile. They will try to fly in a formation that will flush us out. They will accept that one of their helicopters will always be vulnerable, but they will reckon I won't fire on the low flying bird and give my position. One helicopter will fly high, above the roof of the valley, probably to the rear of all the others. That helicopter, the high fly bird, is mine for tomorrow. That helicopter cannot be seen by those that fly in front and below. In the morning we have to find a hiding place for the mule and for you, and somewhere that I can reach quickly after I have fired. The helicopters will come from the south because that is the direction of Jalalabad. I want to be a mile or so further south than the mule we've left. I want to be behind the highest flying helicopter when they find the mule . . . That's the plan.'
Barney heard the rhythmic snores of the boy.
Even in the gully, the cold of the night wind tugged at his blanket, ate at his bones.
In the first grey sheen of morning the mujahidin knelt in prayer.
A ragged gathering of old and young, educated and illiterate, from the cities and from the villages. They knelt on their hands and elbows and squashed their foreheads into the dirt in the centre of their camp. They were in two rows, straight lines, and in front of each man was his weapon, close to his hand even when he was in obeisance to far away Mecca. Alone, out in front of his men, was Ahmad Khan with the loaded Kalashnikov beside his thighs. He led the men militarily and spiritually. He called now in the high pitched singing voice of prayer to the God of Islam. He called for victory, he cried for revenge. He called for the destruction of the Soviet occupation army, he cried for the expulsion of that army from his country. His prayer united the old and the young who followed him. He was devout. He was traditionalist. Islam had fashioned Ahmad Khan over the anvil, beaten steel into his leadership.
He had heard in the night that a helicopter had been shot down further north from his camp. The still smoking burnt wreck of a helicopter had been seen.
At that first light, Ahmad Khan and his men broke camp, folded away their tents and packed their few belongings.
With the shadows still long they began the trek away from the river bed and the trees and the scrub and the lower boulder falls of the valley. If a helicopter had been destroyed the previous day, then the Soviets would return in force the following morning, that Ahmad Khan knew. There were times when he was prepared to stand and fight, and there were times when he believed in survival under the cover of the side valleys. He had learned a long lesson at the hands of the helicopters, he fought them only when there was no escape.
Everything that they owned, they carried on their backs.
He was neither pleased nor resentful at the downing of the helicopter. He felt no especial pleasure that a helicopter had been destroyed and the crew killed. The destruction was a fact. Later, as he climbed, he pondered on his meeting with the foreigner. He recalled the stubble on the foreigner's face and the pale skin beneath and the strength of the white- palmed hand that had taken his. He had set himself at a distance from the foreigner with the eight Redeye missiles. But the distance was not a great one. Already because of the presence of the foreigner in his valley he had broken his camp and was moving his fighting men to higher and safer ground The foreigner with the Redeye would be further north in the valley. Ahmad Khan controlled this valley, secured it against ground attack, protected it for the mujahidin
convoys that wound across the mountains from Pakistan to the liberated Panjshir. But because a foreigner had come to his valley with a missile launcher, his control over this valley was diminished.
In practice that control exercised by Ahmad Khan over the valley and the fighting men who operated there and the few civilians who existed there was complete. No man who followed him had cause to challenge his leadership. In the way that a man might develop the talent of an engineer or a mathematician, Ahmad Khan had mastered the fine art of guerrilla warfare. He was followed because he was the best, he was good enough at his self-appointed role for the Military Governor of Laghman province to have offered a reward on his head, dead or alive, of 10,000 Afghanis. He was respected enough for no man who walked with him to have dared, or tried, to earn that reward.
Beside him was a man who wore the scarlet waistcoat that might have come from the costume of a dancing boy who entertained the caravan travellers with acrobatics, and a man who limped because a Soviet bullet had nicked the tendon behind his knee-cap. He was the leader, but he listened to the men who were closest to him, heard out their grumbling at his treatment of the foreigner who had come with the missiles.
He heard the criticism, but he rejected it.
Barney lay on his stomach.
Below him, as if a sharpened chisel had made the cut, was the valley floor, a full four thousand feet beneath. The green of trees, the mottle of the scrub, the grey white strip of the river bed. When he squinted his eyes he could see the tethered mule, and once he thought he could hear a braying cry for there was no shade on its back, no water for its throat.
The poem came to him, the poem of a man who had known and watched the soldiers who had lived in their Frontier Province barracks, who had fought in the
se mountains.
I han't forgit the night
When 1 dropped be'ind the fight
With a bullet where my belt-plate should a' been.
I was chokin' mad with thirst,
An' the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin', gruntin' Gunga Din.
'E lifted up my 'ead,
An' he plugged me where I bled,
An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o' water green.
It was crawlin' and it stunk,
But of all the drinks I've drunk
I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din . . .'
Kipling, bless him, had been here with his pen, with his compassion for the fighting men of these mountains, foreign and native.
'You are not going to be hit by a bullet,' the boy said fiercely from behind Barney.
'No, I am not going to be hit by a bullet, Gul Bahdur.'
'Why do you talk about it, if you are not going to be hit?'
'It's about the friends that you find,' Barney was smiling, it's about the people that you find who will help you, Gul Bahdur. It gives you a strength when you find such people, when you had not expected to find them.'
'But you will not be hit.' The boy was desperate for his assurance.
Barney laughed. 'They will not hit me, I promise you.'
The boy had looked away. His face was set, frightened.
Barney said, 'You see the mule. The mule is the trap for the helicopters. The flight line of the highest helicopter, the one that watches all the others, will be up here, up at the height that I am. He is the guard for as many as they send, that one is mine.'
'You have an arrogance,' the boy said.
'If I had no arrogance I would not be here.' Barney cuffed the boy gently. Without the boy he was nothing, and without the boy's confidence he was helpless.
'You've hidden the mule?' The boy nodded, distracted. 'Go back to the mule.'
Barney saw him hurry over the rough open ground, saw him drop down into a gully a hundred yards away, saw him rise, again running now, then disappear finally.
(1984) In Honour Bound Page 17