(1984) In Honour Bound

by Gerald Seymour

  He found himself a shallow cut between two granite grey rocks, and settled under his blanket, and waited. And his ears strained in the quiet of the valley for the sounds of the helicopters' coming, as the clouds rose and fragmented.

  One woman had broken cover.

  Under the suffocation of the memory of the attack on Atinam, one woman had run from a crevice hiding place as the first helicopter pair powered overhead.

  She stood up, and ran.

  Some men rose to their knees to clutch at her dress and pull her down, and failed to halt her stumbled, hysterical flight. The helicopters thundered above them tilting to starboard and port side alternately. The flares of rainbow colours shimmered in their slow fall in the valley. On the sighting of the running woman, and as the men near to her betrayed their positions, one helicopter came down low, spitting machine gun fire, and the three big bird comrades climbed for altitude and the broken cloud ceiling and the observation platform.

  The mujahidin cannot lie on their faces in the dirt and between the stones while the tracer and the rockets are falling amongst them. Fear is infectious, fear is a disease, and a man who has a rifle or a DShK wheeled machine gun will try to fire back. And as each man fired up at the helicopters so he handed the aerial marksmen the location of his position.

  The fighters were chopped down, slashed down between the stones of the river bed, beneath the scrub bushes where the leaf cover was already withered, around the compound walls of the deserted village. Meat for the helicopters' gunners, drink for the helicopters' rocket pods and 12.7mm four- barrelled machine guns.

  Barney had no way of knowing where Mia hid, no way of knowing whether Maxie was with her.

  He saw from the distance of a mile the red light of streaming tracer sinking from the camouflaged helicopters, and the flash light of their rockets, and the puff smoke of their ground strike. The woman that he thought he loved was beneath the tracer and the flash light and the puff smoke . . .

  Barney watched.

  He saw her face. He saw tears on her face, blood on her body. From a mile away, from safety, he saw the tracer and the rockets.

  He crawled to his feet and the blanket dropped from his body.

  He stood. The flares drifted in the skies above the valley. Three helicopters circled and manoeuvred high above the valley's cliffs.

  The launcher rested on his shoulder. He aimed without hope for the strafing low-flying helicopter. Flares falling . . . Red, green, blue, yellow, technicolour flares.

  He engaged the battery coolant switch . . . the hum in his ear. The helicopter was at least a thousand metres away, port side on. A flare floated between Barney and the target helicopter. The woman that he loved was under the tracer and the rockets.

  Barney fired.

  The flash, the signal, the give away. The light careering from his hiding place.

  The Redeye sped from Barney, homed low towards the helicopter, towards the flare. The flare had fallen to the ground and the helicopter was banking and losing the port side profile.

  A missile gone rogue.

  It flailed away from the target line. It swept up and then curved, then fell, then swung again towards the upper skies. Bright, brilliant light cavorting over the valley.

  Useless light trailing a mindless warhead. For twelve slow seconds the light behind the warhead swooped and dived and rose again from the valley's floor, then the final inbuilt command of the missile's brain, then the self-destruct explosion echoed between the valley's walls.

  Barney lay under a lip of rock.

  For half a dozen minutes the stone work was fractured and wrecked by the shrapnel slivers from the rockets, by rock fragments from the machine guns. His leg was bleeding, the side of his chest dribbled blood.

  The vengeance fury of the helicopters was turned on a lip of rock. Barney lay on his stomach, he cuddled the ground as if the ground was a woman's body. He could not believe that the short roof of rock would withstand the battering, he could not believe that the squealing ricochets would not find him. On his stomach, and his mouth was filled with rock dust and his ears were deadened by the explosions.

  Long after the helicopters had gone, his hands were still pressed tight against the sides of his head.

  Schumack found him, lifted him up, supported him, dusted him down.

  'She wasn't hurt,' Schumack said. 'Shit knows what sun shone on her.'

  Drinks on Medev's bill in the mess.

  Medev with his tie loosened and his shirt button undone. Medev playing the father with his young pilots. Singing too, songs from the old Ukraine, and the old Frontal Aviation anthem. A cossack dance from Vladdy, legs raking out and arms akimbo on his chest, and the other pilots and Medev clapping to a frenzy. Drinks on Medev for his pilots. Lifting the roof of the prefabricated mess, showing the fliers of the new squadron that Medev's men had come through their ordeal. A pilot had tried to take the tablecloth off the end of the dining table, had smashed every plate and broken every glass, and spilled food and wine and vodka on the carpet. The men of the new squadron had watched and had not joined, had not been invited to join.

  The Frontal Aviation commander was framed in the doorway.

  And Medev had forgotten the bridge-building invitation, and was straightening his tie, buttoning his collar, shouting for quiet, and the commander was waving with his arm that ceremony was out of the window, down the bottle.

  'Today it all worked . . .' Medev's voice was slurred and proud. 'We hit a concentration of them, out in the open. They broke cover, ran like fucking rabbits, hit them like fucking rabbits in cut corn. The missile was fired, fired once, went rogue. The flares decoyed it, up and down and sideways and back into its own arse. We went in hard after the firing position, plastered it . . . that was Vladdy . . . Vladdy, I am pleased to introduce you to the Frontal Aviation commander . . . they plastered the place, nothing that's bigger than a mouse's arse could have lived through it . . . right, Vladdy?'

  'Right, Major.'

  'You said you would bring me his head,' the Frontal Aviation commander remarked easily.

  'With what was put down on him he won't have a fucking head,' Medev chirped.

  'Brandy, you'll take some brandy with us . . .?'

  The orderly brought brandy. Medev and the Frontal Aviation commander chinked glasses. The party erupted back to life.

  Medev had promised the head of the man who fired the Redeye . . . But Vladdy was an experienced pilot. He had not seen the man, only the location of the firing flash. But Vladdy had seen the ground into which he fired. He would have known. A pilot knew the damage capabilities of his firepower. If the pilot, Vladdy, said that no man could have survived the blasting of the machine gun shells into the rocks and the rockets, then so be it. He would have liked the body, he would have liked to have kicked the bastard's balls, dead balls or live balls, kicked them with a full-swung boot. He would have liked to have seen the face of the man, and known the man who had challenged him for area Delta.

  The Frontal Aviation commander downed his glass, he looked at Medev, a half smile on his face. 'Why do you think he fired into a field of flares and at helicopters with baffles fitted, and when he had no covering fire? Why do you think he did that?'

  'We'll have to go and ask him,' Medev shrieked in his laughter. 'If there's anything left to ask . . .'

  The drink flowing, vodka, brandy, beer, enough drink for them to bath in.

  'Where's that arsehole Rostov?'

  'Why doesn't Rostov share with us?'

  in his sack and playing, that's where the arsehole will be.'

  No more sport to be gained from singing and dancing and drinking. The pilots needed new sport. The Frontal Aviation commander smiled indulgently, remembered his own youth. Rostov, Medev knew, would be in his bed, Rostov was not one to participate in a mess night carousal. Carousing was for fliers. Rostov was not a flier.

  'Let's get the anus.'

  'Rostov shouldn't be left short of an invitation.'

&nbs
p; For a moment Medev pondered whether then and there he should put a brake on them. But Rostov didn't fly in area Delta, Rostov hadn't flown against the missile . . .

  screw Rostov. Medev saw them surge out through the doorway.

  They were men at war, his pilots, and they were the cream and they were the power, they and the big birds that they flew. If they weren't hard, if they weren't right bastards then they would never have flown into the valley to find the missile, to destroy the man who fired the Redeye. Down the corridor he heard the shrill shouts of complaint, and Medev stayed silent.

  Shit. He was wearing turquoise pyjamas, soft material and creaseless, and he was shaking like a piece of bloody jelly.

  The pilots held Rostov up, and they poured beer from a bottle down his throat and he was gagging on the drink and slurping it from his mouth and down the front of his pyjama jacket. And the poor bastard was too frightened to struggle. And the pilots were fit, muscled and strong and Rostov was flabby and weak. And the pilots tore the pyjama jacket from Rostov and ripped the buttons away, and they were shouting and howling and below the rolls of Rostov's waist they were tugging at the cord of his trousers.

  Rostov was trembling, and whimpering, and his hands were together and tight against his privates. And the pyjamas went to the stove, and the flames soared, and there was the stink of the synthetic fibre blazing. And the pilots pushed Rostov down to his hands and knees, naked, and they rode him in turn like a donkey around the dining table of the mess.

  The fliers of the new squadron sidled away to their sleeping quarters. Without warning, the Frontal Aviation commander spun on his heel and walked out.

  Rostov was no longer a game. Rostov was in the far corner of the mess, huddled on the ground, weeping. Rostov was alone, crying to the floor.

  Medev loved his pilots, and they were animals. The Redeye missile had made animals of them, he said that to himself.

  Medev walked uncertainly across the carpet, skirted the table. He lifted Rostov to his feet. He hated a grown man to cry. He took Rostov out of the mess, back to his quarters. For Medev's pilots the party would continue until the first light of the new day.

  On the mattress on the kitchen floor of the bungalow, Rossiter snorted and sighed and squealed through his hoarse and quaking throat.

  It was rank, rich, bad pleasure. Cheeky little bitches, both of them. Cheeky was an understatement. Bloody outrageous. Parents should have been ashamed of them. It was what came of sending them to schools that didn't rate examinations. Rossiter was naked and dosed with sweet clinging hashish smoke, and Amanda without clothes against his back, and Katie without clothes against his belly. Christ knew where they'd learned it.

  Tongues and teeth and finger nails, and his skin was alive and his mouth was dry, and he ached down there like someone had punched him. What happens to you, Howard boy, when you loiter with intent outside the open front of a Chitral grocery store. Fingers in his crotch, fingers in his backside, heaven knows what they learned at that school. Amanda holding another smoke to his mouth, couldn't hold it himself, hands couldn't hold steady after what they'd done to him, and Katie's fingers at him again so he was going to burst, so he was going to go mad, mad and insane, insane and delirious. He didn't know what they wanted of him, didn't know how they could find him an entertainment, and hadn't the energy to push the question.

  At around the time he was enjoying his t'hird smoke and mildly remonstrating with Katie that she couldn't expect him to respond again and again. Gul Bahdur walked heavily, limping, to the desk of the Dreamland Hotel on Chitral's Shahi Bazaar. Slung across the boy's back, awkward from its angular contents, was a filled sack of coarse cloth material.

  20

  There was a narrow glow of sunshine at the dawn, an intermittent light because the winds blew hard in the valley and pushed the clouds across the face of the rising sun. A pit had been dug in the darkness hours. The bodies had been laid in it of seven men and two women and a child who was laid on a woman's breast before the blankets were wrapped around the corpses. It was said that more than one hundred thousand people had died in the prisons and the valleys and the deserts and the mountains of Afghanistan since the invasion of the Soviet armed forces in December 1979. Ten more here for the records. The grave was filled and topped by a cairn of stones. The words spoken by Ahmad Khan to the mourners carried briskly, ferried by the wind, to where Barney stood, a sing-song of defiance. Mia Fiori was with the mourners. She had come from Atinam with the women who had died, she had carried the child who was buried.

  Schumack stood with the mourners, indistinguishable as a foreigner amongst these people, head bent, shoulders swathed in a blanket, his billowing trousers snatched at by the winds.

  Barney leaned against a tree trunk, away from the mourners, away from the burial.

  As he watched, his face was blank of expression. He had not spoken to Ahmad Khan since Schumack had found him under the rock lip, bleeding and trembling. They had seen each other, eyed each, but they had not exchanged words. Barney had wasted the bloody missile. The missile was as precious as his arm. He had wasted the missile because there had been no plan. If there had been a plan he need not have thrown his decoy into the skies, into the flares. The safety of Mia Fiori had taken precedence, even over the life of a pilot and a gunner and an Mi-24 helicopter . . . The bitterness he felt at the waste of the missile was a pattern in his mind. Again and again he saw the track of the rogue missile . . .

  The cairn was built, and Schumack joined him under the tree. A caravan was coming through the valley within the next three, four days. More than a hundred mules and horses. Enough ammunition and mortar shells and RPG rounds to hold back a Soviet divisional attack into the Panjshir once the mountain passes were snow closed.

  Ahmad Khan wouldn't come to tell him, but Schumack would: the caravan had to be protected. Barney nodded ruefully. Would there be a plan? A quick shallow grin from Barney. He squeezed Maxie Schumack's shoulder, because this man had helped him when he had limped back from his shattered hiding place to the open rock ground where the mujahidin had been caught by the gunships.

  After Schumack had gone, ambling away, the girl came and sat beside Barney. She was pale, the bones of her cheeks seemed to have risen in her face. She was tight and hunched inside her blanket. She rested against Barney's shoulder staring out across the valley. He had slept the previous night with Mia Fiori lying on one side of him and the Redeye launcher on the other. She knew, and all of the camp knew, that he had fired the missile to win her safety.

  Her hand now lay under Barney's hand.

  'When will you go?'

  'When the caravan is through, while the passes can still be crossed.'

  'Will you take me with you?'

  'I will,' Barney said.

  'There is nothing more for me here.'

  'Perhaps there was never anything for either of us.'

  'When you go back to your home what awaits you there?' her head tilting up to him, her eyes questioning, her small lips opened.

  it's a bit of a disaster, when I get home.'

  'You were sent here?'

  'I came myself, as you came yourself, we are the same. When I get home I will have to answer for that.'

  'What will your answer be?'

  'That I thought it right to come.'

  'Yesterday I told you to kill a helicopter. . . Was it wrong to ask that?'

  'From what you had seen at Atinam it was right to ask me to kill a helicopter. You had also seen the death of a pilot, but you had forgotten that.'

  'I had forgotten.' Her head swung away, to gaze out over the lightening valley. '. . .

  When you go home, to whom do you go?'

  'To nobody.'

  'There is a someone, there must be a someone.'

  'No. There is nobody.'

  'I have nobody, when I go to Paris there is nobody.'

  Barney took her hand, lifted it to his lips, kissed the knuckles of her fingers.

  'We will go home
together, so that we shall each have someone.'

  Barney stood up, his teeth were clenched shut. He slung Redeye onto his shoulder.

  He was remembering the way she had bathed the slashes and nicks and cuts in his side and legs. He felt again the finger touch of her hands.

  'As soon as the caravan has cleared the valley I will take you.'

  A light rain was falling. Rain in the valley, snow on the high ground.

  She called after him.

  'When you leave this valley, will you look down on it for a last time?'

  'No,' said Barney.

  Even the piercing hangover failed to deter the light step of Pyotr Medev as he left the office of the Frontal Aviation commander. While the launcher was loose in area Delta there was no possibility of his being permitted to take the monthly trip to Kabul for the de-briefing at the High Command's Taj Beg palace. He had taken coffee with his commander, black and mercifully thick, and he had been given his clearance. He would be a celebrity at the Taj Beg, he was told. He was the man who had fought off their most serious threat. It didn't bear thinking about if the helicopters could not fly at will in the mountain countryside to which the tanks and the APCs were denied access. His experiences would be picked and sifted. He would tell them about the flares and the emergency baffles.

  And he would see the wife of that fool, the agronomist of Kandahar . . . And he would buy a present in the bazaar for his wife. One more week in Jalalabad and he would be flying the long haul, to the transport base of Frontal Aviation south of Moscow in the belly of the big Antonov 22. A week's packing up and winding down in Jalalabad and then a freedom bird home. Shit. . . and the woman at home had better be in a happier humour when he came through the front door. Her last letter was all whining about shortages, the child's cold, about him not writing regularly . . . nothing sweet, nothing feminine. But he was damned if the thought of her would take anything from the anticipated delight in the agronomist's wife in Kabul.