(1984) In Honour Bound

by Gerald Seymour

  The last coffin was carried forward. Medev snapped, as if in afterthought, to a parade ground salute; behind him the pilots, the gunners and maintenance crews followed suit.

  The ramp creaked up and closed on the tin coffins. Medev heard the quiet crying of a pilot behind him. Nothing wrong in that.

  He made a sharp left turn. The small parade spluttered away in broken rank. The engines of the aircraft were turning.

  He found Rostov in Operations. He would plead the excuse of overseeing the radio and communications. That he hadn't been on the apron was enough to burn at Medev.

  'The whole squadron's up tomorrow, including the replacement flier.'

  'Where to?' Rostov said easily, as if in the previous few minutes he had not stood and looked from the window.

  'Where the Hell do you think?' Medev flared. 'That shite valley in Delta. We're to hit everything, wherever the bas- tards are . . . villages, caves, everything. They may have thought themselves smart to have some fuck pig foreigner walking their valley with a Redeye. When the airstrikes have finished with them they'll know how smart they were.'

  Rostov shrugged. 'There are no decoy flares on the base. I've requisitioned Kabul for them, I don't know how long they'll be in coming.'

  'After tomorrow we won't need decoy flares.'

  Medev strode out.

  Harney and Ahmad Khan walked away from the village, beyond the fields and into the groves of mulberry and walnut.

  They sat in the shade. It was colder that late afternoon. The sun was already beyond the valley wall. Barney's blanket was on his back with the corners gathered at his chest.

  He had slept, he had eaten, he had washed again and rinsed an old foulness from his mouth. He was fresh. The chill meant the and of the summer. The coming of winter meant snow on the high passes that were the trail to Pakistan.

  Ahmad Khan spat the last of the mulberry fruit from his mouth, wiped his lips with the sleeve of his jacket.

  in the years they have been here, the Soviets have learned the pattern of our weather, and of our movement of weapons and ammunition. They know that through this valley we transport much of what we will need when the winter comes. So, they will try to prevent the caravans coming through the valley, of course . . .' A slow, serious smile from Ahmad Khan. 'And now you have come here with your missile and you have made me a problem.'

  Barney gazed into the deep mahogany of his eyes.

  'Because of the missile launcher, will the Soviets counterattack with such force that the route for the caravans is blocked; or because of the launcher will the skies be empty of

  Soviet helicopters? This is my problem, to know which is the truth.'

  'You have to find that truth for yourself, Ahmad Khan.'

  'You will not tell me that your missile will destroy the helicopters when they come?'

  Barney spoke softly. 'There are two helicopters in the valley. Before I came there were none.'

  'You will not claim that without your missile we cannot hold the valley?'

  'I make no claim. You alone can decide.'

  'And what do you want in Atinam?'

  'The opportunity to kill helicopters.'

  'Will the missile protect us, or will it bring upon us a retribution we cannot survive?

  You make another problem for me.'

  'For you to answer.'

  'What will you do when you have exhausted your missiles?'

  'Go back to my home.' His head jerked up to face Ahmad Khan. 'When I have fired them, there is nothing more I can do here.'

  'Most men would tell me of their commitment to the Afghan Resistance . . .'

  'I am not most men.'

  if I do not help you, what will you do?'

  'Go back down the valley, and fire the missiles until I have a helicopter I can strip,'

  Barney said.

  'And if I expel you from the valley?'

  'Then you give life to the helicopters.'

  There was spittle in Ahmad Khan's mouth as he laughed, a grating laugh. Their hands met, gripped and held. There was not friendship. Only a contract, an understanding.

  They talked until it was dark, and on after the shadows had vanished in the night fall. They planned the battle. They talked of the siting of two DShK machine guns that could fire eighty rounds a minute, of ball and tracer. They talked of the concentration of automatic rifle fire.

  As they walked back to the village, Ahmad Khan took Barney's hand. It was without embarrassment, without affectation. 'I asked a question which you did not answer. Will the missile protect us or will it bring disaster?'

  'Wait till the helicopters come,' Barney said. 'And listen to them scream.'

  'And after you have brought down one helicopter that is not destroyed, you will leave us?'

  'You won't be crying when I do.'

  Late into the night Barney sat with Schumack. Behind the closed inner door there was the woman. Barney had not spoken to her that evening. She had gone to her cell of a room before he had finished the meal he had taken with Ahmad Khan and his lieutenants. More refinements now for the defence of the village, more specific positioning for the heavy machine guns. Schumack had much to offer, a bedrock of experience that reached far beyond Barney's. Once Gul Bahdur came to the door of their house and peered in and saw the American and the Englishman close to the fire and bent over a diagram, and closed the door without sound and went away, and Barney had not seen the unhappiness on the boy's face, the child who believes his friendship has been usurped.

  'I'll be beside you when they come,' Schumack said, and yawned. 'Without me you'll get your arse kicked.'

  'Probably,' Barney said.

  For an hour the man who wore the red waistcoat and the man who had the limp from the bullet scar behind his knee-cap were huddled on either side of Ahmad Khan and in front of the slow guttering fire.

  He was a stranger, he was an unbeliever, he was an adventurer, a foreigner who offered nothing to the long-term

  defence of the valley. He was the parasite on the sheep's neck. The American was different, the American asked for only bread and bullets and the American was the known enemy of the Soviets. The woman was different because she gave her help to the children and the women, and if there were to be a battle she would treat the wounded amongst the fighters. The foreigner, they set apart from the American and the woman.

  'He has no feeling for the struggle of the Resistance, only for the mission that is his own.'

  'You cannot know whether his missile will protect us, or devastate us.'

  Ahmad Khan heard them through. The man in the red waistcoat and the man with the limp were allowed their say until their argument had run its course. They lapsed to silence. When Ahmad Khan gave his decision they would not dispute it.

  'He said there were two killed helicopters in the valley, when before there had been none. He said that when the helicopters came back to the valley that I would hear their screams ... He will stay.'

  Barney washed in the pool below the bridge as the sun sidled on the rim of the valley's west wall. He had slept well. He had heaved his shirt off his shoulders and knelt beside the ice cold water to cup the wetness over his body, over his face, over his hair. The cockerel, the pride of the village, had wakened him. The water dripped from his hair, ran round his ears, fell from his face, dribbled on his chest. The pool ripples fled away from him as he scooped and scooped again at the water. His chest was white except for the patches of the scarlet lice sores. He was a disciplined man and had not scratched them. Bloody near impossible to ignore them.

  There was a great beauty in the stillness of that morning, the haze of the sun between the jagged upper crags of the

  rock face, the droplets of water in the first frosts of autumn, the shadows drawn out amongst the trees.

  'Will you fight today, with your missile?'

  Barney started up, the water tumbling from his hands. She stood on the path above the pool. She carried a handful of clothing. She wore the blouse of
yesterday, unbuttoned at the throat, and the long sweeping skirt that flicked at the buckles of her sandals. She pushed the hair from across her eyes. There was a mockery in her question, there was the tease that fighting was the game of boys not yet grown to adulthood.

  'If the helicopters come, yes.'

  'You have come across the world to find a place to fight?' A half-laughing voice, a face that showed no amusement.

  'As you have come, half across the world.'

  'I came to help people, not to interfere . . .'

  'Perhaps they'll pin a medal on you, when you go home,' Barney said.

  She came past him, down to the water. At the edge of the pool she dropped the clothing she had brought. A brassiere, a pair of sparse pants, woollen socks. She hitched up her skirt and squatted and started to scrub with her hands at the garments.

  In the air, whispering high above the valley, was the sound of an aircraft engine.

  'I have no medicines, I have nothing.'

  'I know that.'

  It was not possible for Barney to believe what Schumack had told him. Not a woman of this loveliness. Not a woman who squatted beside the river pool at dawn and washed her clothes, and whose long free hair tumbled over her cheeks.

  'There is nothing I can do for those who are hurt in your fight.'

  'I know that.'

  'I have no morphine, I have no steriliser, I have no disinfectant.'

  'You should cut some dressings.' Barney could barely recognise the coldness in his voice.

  She smiled him a pale smile.

  'It is just that you fighting men should know of the havoc for those who have to clear up after you."

  He heard the whine approach of a slow-moving aircraft.

  'I am sorry about your medicines, truly sorry.'

  She snorted as a reply, she flung back her head and her hair waved away onto her neck. He saw her swan throat, he saw the flash of white teeth and coral soft lips. Away to the south he saw an aircraft. A biplane, single-engined, a silhouette clear against the upper cirrus haze.

  'Your sorrow will not help the people who are wounded in the fighting, the fighting you have travelled a long road to provoke.'

  Barney threw his shirt back over his head, i can't say more than I'm sorry.'

  'You have come to shoot down one helicopter so that you can take honfe the parts.'

  'Yes.'

  'For these people your missile is a disaster, and when you have made the disaster you will not be here to gather up the bloody parts.'

  Barney was stung. 'I don't make a habit of bleeding my principles round the place.'

  'You're a spy,' she spat the words. 'You are dirtied . . .'

  'You're not a spy? You don't talk with your bloody consul when you get to Peshawar? You don't get debriefed? You don't talk to Aerospatiale and Dassault about every Soviet aircraft that goes over your bloody little head?'

  'I said you were dirtied, you are filthied. You cannot believe anyone has a motive above yours. You cannot believe in anyone who does not creep behind the coat of their government . .

  'You should cut some bandages.' He hated himself.

  He tried to see into her eyes, to win some softening. She twisted her head away from him. He saw the cherry flush on her cheeks.

  He walked away. Gul Bahdur was running breathless to meet him.

  Above was an Antonov Colt. It was the aircraft that Frontal Aviation used for high level reconnaissance. The aircraft from which the cameras pinpointed the targets for the strike aircraft and the gunships. Gul Bahdur had caught Barney's arm, was hurrying him back to the village, chattering at him. Barney turned once. The woman still squatted at the side of the pool. When the reconnaissance aircraft came over early in the morning then the aerial bombardment would follow. Night on day, certainty.

  The Antonov Colt had roused the village. There were men running with rifles in their hands, others pulling behind them the wheeled frames of the two DShK machine guns. There were mothers screaming for the children to begin the climb to the caves in the valley walls.

  Barney and Schumack and the boy, between them, carried the launcher gnd the five spare missile tubes towards the position that had been agreed south of the village, beyond the fields and the groves of mulberry and walnut.

  They passed Mia on the path. She was cartwheeling her arm, as if to dry the brassiere and the pants and the woollen socks in the cool air.

  16

  Three pairs of Sukhoi SU-24 all weather interdiction/strike bombers had been sent from the sprawl of the Begram airbase outside Kabul.

  Codenamed 'Fencer' by the NATO planners, the SU-24 is the pride of the Soviet air capability in Afghanistan, and is as familiar in the blue skies above the Hindu Kush mountains as the wheeling kites and buzzards.

  From altitude, from beyond the reach of the small arms and machine gun defences, they deliver with the casualness of a newspaper boy's dawn drop the 500 kg and 1000

  kg bombs that are slung beneath the wing pylons and hard points of the lower fuselage.

  The SU-24 has an awesome record. A maximum speed of 2120 kilometres per hour. A combat radius of 1100 kilometres on the hi-lo-hi flying profile. They carry an armament of 5700 kgs. But the maximum speeds of the SU-24 are irrelevant in the circumstances of Afghanistan. There is no aerial combat here. There are no hostile interceptor fighters, there are no batteries of radar-guided missiles against which the technology of the Sukhoi's inbuilt defences can be pitted. No harm can come to the kites and buzzards that circle over the valleys, and no harm either to the SU-24s that swoop down from the upper turbulence to run in over their given targets.

  Anything that moved in the valley was designated as a target. The abandoned villages in the central part of the valley were smashed. The rockets arrowed with laser controlled aim towards the mouths of the caves, setting up in the recesses the shock waves that would pierce the ear drums and

  blast the air from the lungs of men who hid there. No counter strike was possible. The bombers owned the skies, owned the floor of the valley. Along the length of this gouged-out cut in the mountains, men and women and children huddled in the protection they had chosen when they had first seen the speck of the Antonov at dawn, huddled and shivered and prayed to their God of Islam.

  A creeping carpet of bombs fell on the valley floor. The carpet roll was kicked out at the southern end of the valley and spread towards the northern fastness of the valley, towards the village of Atinam.

  In their briefings at Begram, the two-man crews who would sit cramped beside each other in the Sukhois had been told to husband sufficient of their bombs and rockets to strike a devastating and unnerving blow at the village.

  As the carpet strayed north along the valley towards the village of Atinam, so the white heat flares spilled from the bombers, flaming in vigour as they fell. If a missile had been fired then the flares would have diverted the warhead away from the hot metal of the tail engine exhausts.

  No missile was fired.

  There was no ground fire from the mujahidin of Ahmad Khan who had taken to the caves and the natural camouflage of the valley's walls, and to the gullies and ravines of the side valleys. There was no response to the shattering thunder bellow of the bombs exploding in the valley.

  From the skies the bombers fell upon the village of Atinam.

  They swept down in a blast that smashed across the valley, was trapped by the valley sides and echoed and echoed up the cliff walls.

  The bombs dropped from under the wings and fuselages of the Sukhois. Graceful pellets as they arced away from the aircraft, falling casually at first while the bombers above them surged upwards for altitude. Growing in lethal size as they fell. No longer pellets as they struck the ground, as the detonation flashed, as the smoke dust ripped into the air above the fields and the mulberry trees and the homes of Atinam.

  Falling slower than the bombs were the flares that drifted down in their brilliance to spend themselves in a flaming beauty amongst the houses and the ir
rigation canals and the orchards.

  On his stomach, from the entrance of a cave, Barney Crispin watched the airstrike.

  Schumack was beside him, and crouched over his back and peering across his shoulders was the boy, Gul Bahdur.

  The village was no simple target for the Sukhois' pilots.

  They were reluctant to come low into the valley. Their line of attack was not a tree-skimming, house-hopping flight close to the fields and the path and the river bed.

  They flew high where they could not be taken by automatic rifle and machine gun fire.

  Sometimes they hit the homes, more often the big bombs whistled down with a cat's screech short of the village into the fields and the orchards.

  In the cave's mouth the blast of the explosions sung in Barney's ears. He had never before been under aerial bombardment. Simulated stuff, of course he had been through that. But never this . . . And he was safe, away from the village. He was safe while the women and children of Atinam cowered in caves that were nearer their homes, and they could see their homes and their food stores burning, and they could hear the screams of their animals under the orchard trees. Mia would be closer to the bombs, she would be with the people that she could help. He thought that Gul Bahdur was pounding his back but he could hear nothing.

  He saw an explosion amongst the trees. He saw goats scatter away, those that had not been caught by the winging shrapnel. He wondered where Gul Bahdur had tethered Maggie. And he heard through the bomb blasts the voice of Mia Fiori beside the river pool; he saw the skin of her neck; he heard the light tread of her feet; he saw the gentleness of her fingers.

  'You are a coward, if you won't fire . . .a coward. . .you should have stayed with your own people.'

  Gul Bahdur's hysterical screaming spilled onto Barney.

  'Not against the planes, Gul Bahdur.'

  'You are frightened of the planes.'

  'I can't kill them, not like the helicopters.'