Where Men Once Walked

by Mark L Watson

  The kid spoke.

  “You are welcome to be with us, we all take care of each other. Where we go and how though is not something I can predict”

  Rashim nodded.

  “Of that I am sure”

  When the door to the mess hall opened again Rashim and the kid were each laying on the benches and drifting into sleep. The Dutchman and the American walked in and rejoined them at the table.

  “Well?” the kid asked.

  The Dutchman looked into the empty coffee pot and then over to the kitchen but the officer had left his post.

  Neither man replied.

  “Could you make contact?” he asked again, sitting up.

  “No” the Dutchman replied, turning back to the table, “there is nobody to make contact with”

  The kid frowned.

  The American sat down.

  “We tried every channel” he said “the team in there established a line with Pakistan and Iran and a Russian naval fleet, but nothing else”

  The kid’s heart dropped and the lump in his throat prevented him from speaking again. Rashim sat silently at the end of the bench listening.

  “Can we get some coffee?” the Dutchman called, though there was nobody there to listen.

  “So what does that mean?” the kid asked.

  The American turned to him and scowled.

  “What does it mean?” he snapped, “It means nothing. We’re just here aren’t we? What do you think it means?”

  The kid nodded.

  The Dutchman took the empty coffee pot and walked across to the kitchen door and pushed it open and went inside. He returned a moment later with the pot and crossed back to the table and poured himself a cup of coffee and slid the pot to the American who too poured it into a cup and drank and breathed in through his teeth when it burned his mouth.

  They sat for some time drinking the coffee and saying little to each other. The Dutchman paced around the hall talking to himself and the American was outside in the afternoon heat smoking when the mess doors opened again and the Captain walked in flanked by a senior officer. He was smiling and approached the table where they sat as though there were no troubles in his world though there were many.

  “I am sorry you were unable to contact those who could help you but I cannot tell you that this surprises me. You are very small fish and this is a very large ocean and by all accounts there are very few surviving American aircraft anyway”

  The Dutchman looked up at him from the corner of his eyes and frowned at the man’s candour.

  He said nothing.

  “And so I have some good news for you”

  The Dutchman turned to face him, still frowning.

  “I have two medics here who have been commissioned from Hyderabad to assist with the construction of my medical facility, they have been here for nearly ten days now, very clever men they are, both of them. They are both Institute of Medical Sciences graduates and both combat trained too, we are very lucky to have them”

  The Dutchman widened his eyes slightly at the Captain, impatient.

  “They are leaving here tomorrow morning with the Halo to Nagpur, and on then to Hyderabad, you could go with them should you wish”

  The kid and the Dutchman smiled and thanked him and asked to look at a map to determine what that meant for their route. Rashim also thanked the Captain but told him that he would not be travelling that route as it would take him many hundreds of miles in the wrong direction and that he was closer to his final destination there in the mess hall than he would be in Nagpur.

  The Dutchman went out onto the tarmac and the American was sitting on a thin metal chair in the shade of the building, smoking.

  He called over to him and joined him and told him the news and the American laughed and thanked the heavens.

  A dull drone in the sky to the west neared them and they each looked over into the shimmering heat and against the white sky the tiny black silhouette of a Mi-8 cruised closer and eventually hovered and landed on the tarmac in front of them.

  “How far is Nagpur then?” the American asked.

  The Dutchman laughed dryly and shrugged and shook his head.

  “No idea, but the Captain said we can reach the coast from there”

  “The coast?” the American replied, “for what?”

  He flicked the end of his cigarette against the wall and it exploded in a tiny splash of orange embers and fell to the floor.

  “Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria” the Dutchman started.

  The American squinted at him.

  “You wanna overland through the middle east?”

  The American thought about this and eventually turned back to the Dutchman.

  “You think we should take a boat?” he asked.

  The Dutchman shrugged.

  “I don’t know where we’ll get a boat, but do you not think that is a far better idea than trekking like this across the entire damn planet? We could head up the Suez into Cairo”

  The American nodded slowly.

  “I guess you’re right”

  He thought again for a while.

  “Do you know how to drive a boat?” he asked.

  The Dutchman smiled.

  “No”

  The American smiled too.

  “Well that didn’t stop us last time, eh?” he laughed.

  The Dutchman laughed.

  “That thing ended up in the Mekong, remember? Let’s not do that again”

  The American smiled and stood and looked back to the Dutchman.

  “Well, it’s still safer than walking through Iraq”

  They slept that night in a small barrack at the air base. It was intolerably hot and only cooled with a wall fan and none of them slept properly at all. In the morning they were risen early by the bell ringing in the hallway and within a few moments they heard the airmen and soldiers dressing and preparing for the day. There was no running water in the room and each man washed himself from a hose in the courtyard suspended from an aerial. The kid and the Dutchman and the American joined the short queue and washed naked for a few seconds before the next man pushed them forward.

  The sun was still low over the flat land to the east and the air was calm and a group of whistling ducks passed overhead. The men watched them as they came and went as though sights like that were rare to come by which indeed they were.

  They took coffee in the mess hall and sat with their third and then fourth cup while the men around them finished and went about their business until they were the only men still sitting in the room.

  “Have you decided where you will go, Rashim?” the kid asked.

  Rashim pursed his lips, his eyes almost staring through the kid.

  “I will go to Jaipur, to my brother. This is my plan”

  The kid nodded.

  “I will go east and I will find transport and I will go there to him, what else is there for me do? If it takes me a year to make this journey then at least I will have made it there and at least I will still be alive. It is not possible for me to know what lays ahead of me, but this can be said for all of us, can it not?”

  The men all agreed and drank their coffee and sat in contemplation of it.

  At just after eight, the junior Aircraftman entered the hall and waved to the men and they all waved back.

  “Is my cargo ready?” he called to them and they smiled and nodded and told him that they were indeed ready and the Dutchman joked that even if they were to be packaged in boxes to be shipped they would still be ready.

  “And you do not wish to travel?” he asked Rashim.

  He shook his head.

  “OK, well you should please come now also”

  He led them out onto the hot tarmac where the matt grey Mi-26 sat in the sun.

  A group of servicemen were loading boxes into the back through the giant rear door and when they had finished they waved and a man brought over a 4x4 and drove it carefully into the open rear hold of the helicopter. The men secured its whee
ls with straps and climbed out and shook hands with the pilots and the other servicemen and they climbed into the cockpit.

  The building door opened to the side of the compound and an officer walked across to them with an assault rifle and the American and the Dutchman turned to him.

  “You are not going with these men?” he asked Rashim.

  “No, I will travel alone from here”

  The officer nodded and handed the rifle over to him.

  “I believe this is yours then” he smiled.

  Rashim took it from him and inspected it and it was one of the three AK-103s they had taken from the Assam Rifles at the trainyard.

  “The ammunition has been removed and is with the driver there” he pointed across to the open-topped 4x4 parked by the hanger, “they will take you to Ara to the state line and you can take it from him there where you can go as you please”

  Rashim thanked the officer and thanked the kid and the Dutchman for their companionship. He shook their hands and embraced the American who he called wrestler and told him that without them he would not be alive and he would never forget that. They wished him well and said they would pray for his safe travel and he left with the officer to the waiting car, holding the rifle swinging by his side.

  A man whistled to them from the helicopter and waved them over and they crossed the tarmac to the great machine which sat purring in anticipation of its flight. They climbed in to the huge hold behind the parked 4x4 and the kid looked back over his shoulder just as the man with the moustache was pulling away into the morning light in a cloud of diesel smoke, rifle in hand.

  Chapter Ten

  Patna to Nagpur by Soviet Halo

  The three men were harnessed into the cargo hold of the Mi-26 and seated on metal chairs which pulled down from the walls and each wore a pair of blue earguards that had hung above their seats.

  At the front of the helicopter’s cargo hold the medic’s 4x4 was buckled onto the metalwork of the chassis with long straps and steel clips. Three servicemen were seated behind it in uniform and each nodded and smiled to the men when they were led aboard but none of them spoke. There were small round windows along the body allowing thin shafts of white sunlight to poke through the grey metal and create circles of illumination on the opposing sides like airholes in an animal crate.

  There were hoses and wires protruding from the shell of the craft allowing oxygen tanks and medical equipment to be connected and space for stretchers to be clipped into place if needed, and there were medical boxes fixed to the walls every few feet and space inside to park two or even three trucks and the 4x4 was dwarfed where it sat, even though it was itself a large vehicle.

  The noise was tremendous even through the earguards, and when they banked south after takeoff the kid called to the American next to him to comment on the view that appeared through the window of Patna burning below but his words were lost entirely in the roar of the turbines and the rotorblades and the American didn’t even look around when he spoke.

  The kid had hoped that the six hour flight would give him some time to sit back and to catch up on lost sleep but it was apparent to him at that time that it would absolutely not be possible, due not only to the deafening scream of the helicopter but also the thin metal seat on which he was sat and the harnesses which was holding him perfectly upright against the hard metal wall. He thought he could lay down on the seats in the 4x4 or maybe attach a medical stretcher to the fixings and sleep on that but he sat patiently and simply waited. He knew then that it would be a long flight with little reprieve but that in any case they should be thankful for this opportunity and the help which they had been given.

  He would not admit it to the American and the Dutchman and he did not like to admit it to himself but part of him knew inside that they had little chance of making it all the way across the continent and beyond without some tragedy befalling one or all of them unless they were helped and the helicopter in which he sat was exactly that. The trip across Myanmar was long and arduous and had certainly taken its toll physically and psychologically on them but he knew that they were playing the long game and reaching the end would always seem possible to him. He was built to persevere. On entering into India the scale of their mission had been realised and he had spent some time on the train doubting whether they would make it and that was indeed before they had been locked in the trainshed and had their rail journey cut by more than half. He knew Rashim had been right when he said that nobody could predict what lay ahead and he thought that the only thing he could be certain of was uncertainty itself.

  The kid was lost in dreamy thought.

  He was imagining being at home with Abi. He could feel the cold wind blowing against them and he could see her pulling her jacket together and laughing at him and he could see Bella running around in the trees chasing grouse and barking and jumping and running away again and he could taste the warm tea on their return to the warm house where they sat for hours together talking about life and what had been and what would be. She smiled to him and he knew that warmth and felt safe in it and knew that it would be forever. He could no longer hear the drone of the pistons or the grinding of the rotorblades and he was numb to the metal seat. His eyes were closed though he wasn’t asleep but suspended in a dream more vivid to him than all of reality and though he didn’t know it he was smiling. He felt her hair and her cold hand holding his own. The servicemen on the helicopter were moving around and the Dutchman was on his feet talking to them but he couldn’t tell they were there at all. Autumn leaves blew in through the back door and the dog snapped at them and chased them in circles and the loudspeaker beeped loudly and the pilot’s voice came booming through the speakers.

  He snapped awake and it gave him an immediate headache.

  The servicemen fastened up the boxes and took their seats and the Dutchman returned to them and strapped himself into the harness.

  The American was fast asleep sitting bolt upright in his seat with the earguards slipping down his face.

  The helicopter started to descend.

  The heat poured in through the open back door of the helicopter like thick treacle and immediately soaked through their bones. Outside on the dusty tarmac of the international airport a small greeting party stood awaiting their arrival. The medics carried their bags and boxes to the back of the craft and the servicemen loaded them into an airport luggage truck and hurried them away. An officer stepped forward and the men saluted one another and rushed away and the officer turned to the helicopter as the American and the Dutchman and the kid emerged from the back of it, squinting into the sun.

  He nodded to them and remained where he stood as they approached him and the American saluted informally to him.

  “Bihta told me I could be expecting a US delivery, I assume you are it?” he said, half smiling.

  “Yessir” the American replied.

  The man shook his head.

  “That Captain is soft, for all his valour. I’m sure you have swapped phone numbers and are taking each other for dinner soon”

  “He’s helped us a lot, sir”

  “Well, good sir, I hope you do not expect the entire Indian Air Force to extend to you the same”

  The Dutchman shook his head and looked the officer in the eyes.

  “We don’t expect a thing, we were simply hitchin’ a ride”

  The officer nodded and thought about this and looked to the helicopter where the 4x4 was being slowly reversed out of it.

  “Come on” he said, “I will show you out”

  They climbed into the waiting flatbed truck and an officer drove them over to the terminal building which was commandeered and under military control. A line of fighter jets and service aircraft were parked along the side of the runway and trucks of green and grey and black buzzed about the buildings. An alarm was sounding and to the south a double door burst open and uniformed soldiers came running out and climbed into trucks and sped off to someplace.

  The officer parked a
t the terminal building and they climbed out and went in through the glass doors and followed the hallway into a series of offices where men in shirts hurried about their business.

  They didn’t say anything to him or to each other and eventually they rounded into the lobby of the building where soldiers guarded the doors with assault rifles.

  The officer motioned gently and somewhat sarcastically towards the exit and smiled dryly to them.

  “You do not have bags?” he asked frowning.

  They shook their heads.

  “We did, now we got nothing” the American said, smiling sarcastically back to him.

  The officer’s eyes softened momentarily and showed a nuance of sympathy that had not been evident prior to that moment.

  He looked around him as though he were being watched though there was nobody watching them at all.

  He looked at his watch.

  “Do you need to freshen up before you leave?”

  The American shook his head, more intent on spiting the man’s earlier rudeness than taking charity from his newfound kindness.

  The Dutchman interjected.

  “Yes please, if that’s possible”

  He looked the American hard in the eyes and the American looked away and breathed in through his nostrils.

  The officer nodded.

  “I will show you. Come”

  He led them through what had once been the passport control and through the baggage checking machines and into the departure hall where the lines of shops and restaurant were all closed and shuttered and dark. A group of airmen were sitting on the cushioned seating playing cards and shouting to each other and they didn’t look up as the men passed.

  They walked through a series of doors and some were locked and others weren’t and most of the lights were out and eventually they left the building and walked around the stone wall and re-entered again through a double door.

  “How long has your air travel been grounded?” the Dutchman called.