In Honour Bound

Chapter 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, but 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 infrared seeker optics and sensor element.

The time for waiting.

And as he watched the rise of the smoke from the cave slit he thought of the instruction he had given to the thirteen men who had died with the Redeye. No bloody way they could have mastered the principle of 'fire and forget' ground-to-air missiles, launcher acquisition electronics, the azimuth angle of target aiming. And because they were dead, Barney Crispin now crouched beside the boulder and strained with his ears for the sound of a helicopter in the valley.

The smoke from the cave crept up the rock face.

He crouched down beside the boulder, his shoulders covered by the blanket, his hand close to the Redeye launcher. And waited.

They would fly in formation from the Jalalabad base and when they were north of the Kabul river they would split to their pairs and their assigned patrol sectors.

Medev bent his body away from the thrash of the rotor blades as the engines were readied for take off. Rostov was sunk behind the Major, using his body shamelessly as a wind break. Some of the ground crew had come to stand in the sunshine and watch the departure of the heavy-laden gunships. A deafening howl of engine power, a film of scampering dry dust that slitted Medev's eyes. Through the haze of the storm he could see the rocket pods on the stumpy down-slung wings. Ugly beasts, and they always brought a grim smile to Medev's face. Ugly as sin. Sand and green-brown broken camouflage on the bodies of the beasts, and underneath a grey paint hull. Two bulging domes forward of tinted bullet proof glass for the gunner and pilot. Above the pilots' canopies were the gaping circular intake orifices for the TV-2-117 Isotov powerhouse engines. Ugly as shit, and he loved them. Loved their clumsy stamping roll as they shuddered on their wheels, weighed down by a carcase of armour plate, a stomach sack of fuel, fists and teeth of machine guns and rocket pods. The helicopters, in line, lifted off. The grit flew at Medev's face. He watched them climb above the dust storm, then saw the noses dip as they turned towards the perimeter fence, towards the foothills beyond the Kabul river. He watched until they were specks in the azure sky, and until he could no longer see them.

Medev spun on his heel. He walked to Operations, the shed in which were the radio sets that would attempt constant communication with the patrolling helicopters. Other than when the patrols were masked by a mountain mass, usually when deep in the hinterland valleys, contact would be a free flow.

Two helicopters to follow the Kunar river valley north east to Asadabad.

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

Two helicopters to skim the ground traversing the mountain passes from Mehtarlam to Manduwal.

Two helicopters over the wastes of area Delta.

The quiet slipped again to the apron. Those who had watched the departure of the eight Mi-24s went back to their desks and their maintenance hangars.

Barney saw the boy heap more wood and leaves onto the fire. In a moment the smoke soared again, and above the cave it was caught by the wind and blown out across the valley and spread as a milk skim above the trees and above the dry river bed.

He looked at his watch. He wondered if they would come that morning, or in the afternoon, or the following day. If they were to come that morning then they would come soon. And, if they came, would he have the opportunity to fire? The first shot must be a killing shot. Better not to fire, if the first shot was not certain to kill.

He heard the rustle of a dragonfly's wings, but he was too far from water. He heard the drone of a searching bee, but there were no flowers on the rock slope close to him. Slowly, deliberately, Barney stood up. His head was back, pricking at the wind to identify the source of the rustle and the drone. The noise welled in the air around him.

He heard the approach of the helicopters. He waited motionless to identify the direction of the advance as the sounds grew in his ears.

He bent and picked up the cloth wads that he had made for his ears. His ears could no longer help him, the helicopters were coming from the north. He stuffed the shreds of cloth into his ears, pressing them hard. He took the Redeye, lifted it lightly onto his shoulder, and ducked through the gap behind the boulder to cover himself from the approach of the helicopters. There would be very little time when the helicopters came, thirty seconds, he thought, not more. Thirty seconds to engage the battery coolant, sight the Redeye, find the target, fire. And through all the sighting and the finding and the firing he must have a clean view for the missile head of the hot metal of the engine exhaust vent. Not a view of the nose, not a view of the underbelly, not a view of the sloped wing set into the fuselage behind and below the engine's vent.

The first helicopter he saw was lower than he had expected, meandering over the dried-out river bed, as a shark will that is in shallow water, ebbing and varying its tack. He hugged close to the boulder. The helicopter hovered five hundred metres from Barney, five hundred metres from the smoke that drifted from the cave slit.

Barney's thumb slipped over the battery switch beside his ear. They always flew in pairs, he could hear but not see the second helicopter, above and behind, masked from Barney's view by the boulder, close enough to pierce the ear wads. To kill the first helicopter was to kill himself. To destroy the lower helicopter was to invite the retaliation of the escort above, all-seeing the moment the missile was launched. You wait, Barney, you wait and you don't fire.

The second helicopter was above him, more frantic and busy than its lower partner, faster and higher, manoeuvring because its work was that of a watchman.

The smoke was as blood in the water to a shark.

The lower helicopter dipped to face the cave. There was a tumult of rocket fire, the crash of smoke and stone and shrapnel. There would be tribesmen in the cave, helpless fools who had lit a fire.

The second helicopter came down, level with Barney, and made a fast run south to north up the valley before banking sharply and turning. Barney had seen the pilot's face, jutting from the front of his flying cap. He had seen the gunner in the forward turret.

Again there was the bellow of the rockets exploding around the cave's mouth.

The second helicopter came past Barney. It was the escort, the sentry, the one that should have been flying high as guard, the one that now came to join the game of rocketing the arse-shits who were fool enough to have lit a fire in the cave in which they rested.

The second helicopter swung back again up the valley, level with Barney's eyeline, without caution. The lower helicopter presented its tail rotor to him. He heard the crack of machine gun fire aimed at the cave.

He took a great gulp of air into his lungs. The launcher was steady on his shoulder, held firm with the right hand, manipulated with the left. Right thumb on the battery coolant switch. The second helicopter flew back across Barney's line of sight. Right thumb down. He could see the yawning hole of the engine exhaust vent above the wing, below the swirl of the rotor circle. Through the crossed wires of the sight he watched the second helicopter, watched the engine exhaust vent. No more trembling, only a great calmness. The launcher was vibrating, homing and the howl of the buzzer was in his ears. His right index finger slowly squeezed the trigger stick.

Aim ahead, aim for elevation.

Fire.

Go, you bastard. Go.

The missile limped from the launcher. Strangely slow and pathetic, the first movement. Then the flash, the blast. Twenty feet in front of Barney, the main ignition.

The heat snapped into his face. A fire ball streaking across the valley's space, in pursuit of the second helicopter.

Barney heard the impact, the thunder of collision, and saw the sheet of flame and the lifting, slow motion, of shrapnel metal.

He bent to lift the spare missile tube, and ran down the hillside with the wind stripping his hair, towards the cover of the trees.

Neither man had a warning, however brief, of the catastrophe speeding towards them.

At the short range of eight hundred metres and because the helicopter was utilising no anti-missile procedures, the effect of the impact of the high explosive war head was fatal. By the time that the pilot had recovered from the pile-hammer blow above and behind him, his helicopter was careering towards the stone of the river bed. The pilot heard the scream of his gunner as the helicopter fell nose first. At that height the pilot did not have the chance to flutter down on the free run of his rotors. Loaded with fuel and ammunition, weighing close to nine tons, the big machine's plummet ended in a scraping collapse of metal on rock in the river bed.

Then the fire.

The helicopter that had been firing into the cave, its tail facing the launch position of Redeye, veered hard to starboard in answer to the single shouted exclamation of a brother pilot. He scudded fast along the valley floor, down with the loose and rounded stones, using his skill to extricate himself from danger while the gunner, craning back, yelled over the internal radio a description of their burning partner.

From the depths of the valley the pilot could not report to the Jalalabad operations room. He climbed for altitude, for safety, for vision, for communication.

Below him, climbing more slowly, was the dense column of oil black smoke.

He could not know what their reaction would be.

He was under the cover of the trees. He lay in the lee of a rock that stood half a dozen feet high between the trunks of the orchard trees. He discarded the used missile tube, looked down at the Hebrew and Parsee stencil stamps on the fibreglass tube. He loaded the second missile. He doubted he would fire, he would not look for a second opportunity, not while the blood was still hot in him, not while his chest still heaved in elation at the kill, but he would be ready.

The mules were hobbled a dozen yards from him, tight against two trees that had grown up against each other and provided a double thickness of leaf roof. The boy was across the river from him, separated by the open ground of the river bed.

Between gaps in the foliage, he could see the smoke streaming up against the sky, and he heard the report of exploding ammunition, and his nostrils filled with the smell of ignited aviation fuel.

He could not know what their reaction would be. Whether the undamaged helicopter would stay on station, whether a force of infantry would be flown in to sweep that part of the valley, whether an air strike by fighter bombers would be called down. It was morning, and he needed darkness before he could move again in real safety with his mules, before he could call the boy back from across the river bed.

Barney took the cloth wads from his ears. There was a new depth of sounds, from the ammunition, from the beat of the helicopter's engines above him. The elation had been fast coming, it slipped away now, a discarded skin. He believed he had killed two men. Minutes before he could have stood on his feet, screamed his triumph, waved a clenched fist salute above his head. The exhilaration, a passing luxury, was spat from his mind.

The voice of Pyotr Medev as he spoke into the microphone in Jalalabad Operations was quiet and detached. The voice was a fraud.

In answer to Medev, winning through the static and crackle of an intermittent radio transmission, was the voice of the pilot now hovering high over the valley 80 kilometres away to the north.

'Are there survivors? Over…'

'Not that we have seen. I repeat, there has been a fire and explosions. The fire was total. There is no movement around the helicopter. Over…'

'Is there a possibility of survivors? Over…'

'No possibility. Over…'

'After the fire is there any chance the bandits can salvage anything? Over…'

'The helicopter is destroyed. Over…'

'Tell me again: you did not see Nikolai go down? Was it ground fire or a malfunction? Over…

'I saw nothing, repeat, nothing. My gunner believes he heard an explosion, but Nikolai was out of our vision at that time. My gunner was hammering a cave. My gunner says there was an explosion, he thinks, then there was a shout from Nikolai, garbled. My gunner thinks he saw them just as they went in. He says he thinks they were already making smoke. He cannot be sure, it was very fast. Nikolai was flying low. Over…'

Medev's lips were pursed in resignation. 'How low? Over…'

'Forty, fifty metres. They were behind me. Over…'

Nikolai should have been high above, not down on his arse near the floor of the valley. Medev shook his head. 'And there is no possibility of survivors? Over…'

'The fire is still burning, there is no possibility. Over…'

'Return to base. Over. Out.'

The static snapped off, the transmission was completed. Medev put down the microphone. There was a silence in the Operations Room. He looked up at the operations wall map, into the wilderness of area Delta unmarked by roads or the red squares of towns. When he reached up on his toes he could make the chinagraph mark, a black cross, at the coordinates where the helicopter had crashed. It was the first helicopter he had lost, they were the first crew he had lost. He felt sick in his stomach.

Perhaps there had been an explosion, perhaps the helicopter had been making smoke before it came down. There was sufficient uncertainty for him to know that an accident investigation team must be flown into that valley in area Delta. For an accident investigation team to land there, he needed infantry to be lifted in to secure a perimeter around them. If Mi-8s were to go into the valley then the gunships would have to be above them. A bloody shambles…a military operation on some scale was called for.

Medev strode out of Operations and headed away in the sunshine for Divisional headquarters.

If there had been an explosion before the crash, if there had been smoke before impact, then the Mi-24 was in all probability the victim of ground fire. Medev had to know.

The helicopters had gone.

Barney lay for half an hour in the shelter place after the engine drone had left the valley. He lay in the silence that is the world of small foraging birds, and of the first leaves falling. He lay close to the peace of field flowers. There were no more explosions from the fuel tanks and ammunition of the helicopter. He lay in the silence and the peace of the orchard.

Then, abruptly, Barney moved. He would not wait for darkness, he would move out.

He hurried down towards the river bed, paused at the tree line and called the boy's name.

The boy came quickly, breaking from cover, fleet and light-footed.

Barney saw him coming, walked back to the mules. He had untied the animals and was already heading north, up the valley, when the panting boy reached him.

'It was marvellous, Barney, magnificent.'

Barney didn't look back at him, just tossed back the bridle rope of a mule.

'I saw it happen, Barney, I watched you fire Redeye…'

Barney lengthened his stride, dragging his mule along after him through the trees.

'You are pleased, Barney, it is what you wanted?'

Barney came to the edge of the orchard. His face furrowed in concentration. Half a mile of open field and rock to cover and then another orchard in front of him that was laid out beside the shell of a village. The helicopter was behind them. Barney started to trot forward, short chopped steps. He heard the wheeze of the boy's breath and the stamp of the mules' hooves.

They came to the tree line of the far orchard, crossed it, bypassed the village of broken mud-brick homes and free swinging doors and untended graves. On across more open ground where the valley narrowed, and they took a rough trail at the angle of the cliff wall, where the sun could not touch them.

Once they passed a shepherd who sat surrounded by his herd of goats that had found a feeding place in a small field from which, before the evacuation of the valley, he would have been chased. The shepherd watched them, gave no sign of interest.

Where the valley was narrow, where the trees were close set, where there was cover, and where the smoke from the helicopter could no longer be seen, Barney stopped. He tied his mule, flopped down, closed his eyes and waited for the boy.

'Will you kill another helicopter?'

'I have seven more missiles,' Barney said.

'Seven more helicopters…?'

The boy roped his mule to an apple tree's root and took some bread from his pack and broke it into two portions.

'It was wasted,' Barney said flatly. 'The moment the fire caught, it was wasted.'

'Is that all you care for? After what we suffer from the helicopters all you care for are the mechanisms?'

First the gunship helicopters strafed the empty villages on either side of the burned out skeleton fuselage, then the Mi-8 carried in the infantry.

While the investigation officers worked, the gunships clattered overhead.

Medev was there.

It was rare for Medev to be away from the Operations Room at Jalalabad, but then he had not lost a helicopter before. He had insisted, the Frontal Aviation commander had relented. Medev could prowl the rocks and boulders of the river bed and walk amongst the fragments of the crashed Mi-24. He had seen a trooper vomit as a charred and black-bodied corpse, unrecognisable as the man who had eaten breakfast beside Medev that morning, was taken from the upper cockpit. He had seen what seemed to be three burned logs removed from the nose cockpit and zipped into a white plastic bodybag. He had seen the investigators climb carefully up to the starboard engine exhaust vent. He had seen them scribbling notes, he had seen the flash of the camera lights.

Later a green brown fibreglass tube was brought from the tree line to the investigators.

Later a place was found fifty metres up the valley's side where the ground beside a large boulder rock had been scorched by a fire flash.

Medev did not quiz the investigators for a preliminary finding. He would hear their conclusions that evening, before the planning of the next day's patrols.

They were gone, back to Jalalabad, by the late afternoon, and on their way home a shepherd, taking no cover, was machine gunned to death.