In Honour Bound

Chapter 19

Two long days slipped by, two long nights.

The weather had closed over the valley. Rain and snow flurries, a cloud ceiling down onto the river bed and the orchard trees.

No helicopters were seen. Only once there had been the distant sounds of an Antonov. High beyond the clouds. A caravan came through the valley under cover of that cloud.

They were Jamiat men and wary of crossing Hizbi territory. There were formal greetings and respect was shown to Ahmad Khan by the leaders of the caravan. They took tea together and shared food, and perhaps some of the munitions carried on the backs of the horses and mules had been pilfered. The cloud cover saw this caravan through, not the power of the Redeye launcher that was never more than a yard from Barney's hand day or night. The talk told the Jamiat men of the destruction of the helicopters in the valley and sometimes these travellers hovered close to the Englishman and the American and stared at them. Ahmad Khan made no attempt to bring Barney and Schumack close to the evening gathering when two goats were slaughtered and cooked across open fires. A mullah who went with the Jamiat men once came aggressively forward to divert the attention of a group of the younger men of the caravan who had ranged themselves close to Barney and were pointing to the weapon as if it were a thing of magic.

A wall, slowly built, was erected to shut out the kafirs, the unbelievers, and Barney knew that he was the cause of the barrier, not Schumack.

'Maxie, what happened at the village?'

'I don't know,' Schumack looked away. 'No one told me.'

Barney had thought this a large caravan. Schumack told him another was expected, larger in man power and supplies and heading for the Panjshir. Perhaps that would be the last caravan to come through before the snow blocked the passes.

Summer had fled the valley. The winds clipped the trees of their foliage.

Barney brooded, became an entity of his own.

Schumack was always with him on those two days and nights. He should have sent Schumack away, should have kicked him away as a man will kick at a stray dog.

Barney was a lone man. He took his food outside the main group of fighting men, the same food and drink that was cooked in the same pots and bowls but eaten apart from them. Barney slept apart from them with only Schumack for company, huddled under the thinning valley trees. The first night and the first day after the burial of the men killed by the helicopter he had not noticed the wall that crept up around him. By the second day he had been certain of it. They had come to a deserted village, close to the crash site of the first helicopter that Barney had brought down in the valley. That was an age ago, a summer ago. There were close to a hundred men in Ahmad Khan's group.

There was no wood near the village, and they reached it after dark and too late to go down with axes and chop at the orchard trees for firewood. A miserable wet and cold evening. There was no hot food and the men found in one house a wooden chair that they broke up for a fire that would heat their green sweet tea. Schumack brought the food to Barney in another house away from the building in which the mass of men had collected. While they ate bread and dried fruit, Schumack talked of Vietnam. He talked without emotion of what he called Sam's balls-up. Of medivacs, of free-fire zones, of the 'Cong coming in human waves onto the wire and the Claymores, of the far-from-home screams of his conscripts, of the base camp coke and heroin pushers, of the clap caught by the East Coast officers. Sam's foul-up…Barney knew the pattern. Later, it would be Sam's foul-up when the Ambassador was butchered in Kabul. Later when he wanted to sleep, it would be Sam's foul-up at Desert One.

Barney waved his hand at Schumack, cut him off in full flow. His mouth was filled with the coarse grained bread. He could not remember how many days before he had stripped off his shirt and his socks and washed his body.

'I haven't asked you, you haven't told me, why I'm shut out.'

'The helicopter didn't come down.'

Annoyed, Barney shook his head. 'You can't bring every bloody one down.'

'You didn't tell them that. You were all full of shit and wind. You were like Sam — you promised and you didn't deliver.'

'I brought four down.'

'With the hairies you're as good as your last and your last didn't come down. When you're a cocky bastard then you have to deliver.'

'I had a hit. I'm certain of it.'

'Don't cry over it, hero man. They took a hit too, they lost two men.'

'They also lost a village. I didn't see them weeping in their bloody cups then…'

'You don't learn, Barney. The RPG is special to them, it's the best thing they have when they fight the tanks and the APCs. They get right up close with the RPGs, they don't piss from a distance. They'll blow a culvert in the road, they'll stop the convoy, and they'll get in to forty, fifty metres before they fire. Takes some bottle to do that…You know what they used to do before they had the RPGs? They used to get on top of the tanks and shove cow shit over the drivers' vision slits then put mines under the tracks — takes some cool to do that too. The RPGs are special, and the two men on them were special to Ahmad Khan.'

'How special?'

'Very special.' The old lined face close to Barney. The old white combed quiff of hair. The old claw on the stump gesturing in front of Barney. 'One was the husband of Ahmad Khan's sister, one was his uncle.'

Barney nodded his head, his eyes were screwed tight as if he resisted a pain. 'Thank you.'

'He gave you his best, he gave you what was special to him. Seen his way, you broke a faith.'

'Why does he let me stay in the valley?'

'Because you have three more missiles, because he has another caravan to see through.'

'It's my neck as well, it's not just his uncle's neck, and his wife's bloody brother's neck,' Barney flared.

Again the jab of the claw close to Barney's face. 'You've come late, Barney, you and old Redeye that's damned near a museum piece. You've come late and you're going early. Got it?'

'Got it.'

'What did you want? Did you think you were the second coming?'

'Got it.'

'They need a hundred Redeyes from Sam, they need a thousand tubes. All they get is crap from Sam about what heroes they are, crap about the nobility of fighting for the Free World…and they get Barney Crispin out of the clouds with one launcher and eight tubes.'

'Got it,' Barney said quietly.

'You asked…'

'Why don't you go back to your friends?'

'Because you're dead without me.'

Barney's two hands fastened onto Schumack's one good hand. Held it. 'Thank you.'

Barney stood at the window of the room. He held back the sacking that had taken the place of glass when the house had been occupied.

He saw the scudding movement of broken cloud that obscured and then presented the stars. The same stars that his grandfather would have seen before combat. The same stars that had shone down and winked on all the cavalcades of the invading armies. The men caught in the Third Afghan War would have noted those stars, and the men of the Second Afghan War, and the men of the First Afghan War would have seen the stars on the night before they went to be slaughtered in the passes on the road to Jalalabad. And the men who followed Genghis Khan and who followed Tamerlane and who followed the great Alexander. All the invaders, all of the armies of foreigners, would have seen those stars on the night before they made war in the uplands and the lowlands of Afghanistan. He felt a sense of time, gaping and incredible. He wondered if a pilot, the flier of an Mi-24, stood outside the sleeping quarters now at the Jalalabad base and stared up at the time space above him.

'Can't you sleep?'

'It's stopped raining, the cloud's breaking.'

'So they can be back,' Schumack said.

'They can fly tomorrow.'

'So they can fly tomorrow, so what?'

'Then there'll be one less of the bastards.'

'And what does that do?'

'You have to believe in victories of a sort, otherwise there's no point,' Barney said.

'That's officers' crap. There'll be a shitehawk in Jalalabad who thinks when he gets your arse that he's won a victory. He's won nothing, and when you hit another helicopter then you've won nothing. Me, I'm not an officer man, not a hero man. I wouldn't know a victory if I saw one…'

'Go back to sleep.'

'You going to get yourself a flier tomorrow?'

Barney let the sacking fall back. The stars were gone from his view. He couldn't see Schumack in the darkness.

'I don't know.'

'You need to get one, hero man; or you've overstayed.'

Barney sank down onto the floor. He was shivering. The cold gripped his body. His hand brushed against the launch tube of the Redeye. He held the tube.

'Maxie…' an urgent whisper from Barney. 'If you were the squadron commander in Jalalabad, would you come back? After the losses, would you come back here?'

'Myself, I'd go somewhere else where I can keep my arse tight, I'm not an officer. Your man at Jalalabad, he's an officer. He'll come back every day, every single day until he's had you.'

Barney lay hunched on his side, knees drawn up to his chest, the blanket wrapped over his body.

'You're a hell of a comfort, Maxie.'

'If it's comfort you want, hero man, then get on your feet and start walking.'

'Christ…go to sleep, damn you.'

They had eaten their first food of the day, they had scattered and dispersed among the rocks as precaution against aerial attack, they had seen the glimpses of blue sky between the breaking clouds, they had their weapons armed and ready.

They saw the women and the three old men and the children walking south along the track beside the river bed. The group walked slowly along the open space in the centre of the valley. It was as if they believed that no danger could threaten them any more. Barney was with Schumack and sitting a hundred feet above the valley's floor on the east wall.

When she was a full mile away he recognised Mia Fiori, with the women and the old men and the children. She carried a small child tight against her waist and her breast, she held the hand of another child that walked beside her. Half a dozen women, three men with grey white beards and stooping gait with ancient Lee Enfield rifles slung at their shoulders, and a gaggle of children. Once, as she walked, the sun flickered on her and the blouse she wore was lit, and her hair shone, but it was a long way off from Barney and the vision of an instant only.

Schumack said nothing. He sat cross-legged beside Barney.

One woman limped, another helped a matriarch, two were burdened by knotted bundles that rested awkwardly on their upper backs, and there was Mia Fiori. She walked at the front and the children trailed around her, and the women were behind her, and the old men hung at their heels like dogs. She walked straight, she walked tall-backed, she walked as though the ground was smoothed in front of her. She walked as if she were dreaming. Barney could not see her face, could not see it when she was close to the emptied stone houses where he and the mujahidin had spent the night, because the head of the child that she carried obscured her face. He wanted to reach out, to push aside the head and the face of the child so that he could see her.

In front of Mia Fiori and the children and the women and the old men, where before there had been only the desolation of boulders and scrub bushes, there was now movement. The men appeared from their hiding place and stood and waited for the column to come closer. Hard men, fighting men, and they stood and waited for the women and the children and the old men.

Barney's hand left the Redeye launcher, left it with care alongside Schumack. He rose to his feet. He ran away from Maxie Schumack down the slope to the valley's floor. He ran through the scrub bushes where the thorns grappled against his trousers, he ran over the rock boulders and the stones to the path. He ran towards her, past the fighting men who stood and waited close to the DShK machine guns and the mortars and the RPGs.

She seemed not to see him. She seemed to gaze only ahead of her.

He was running with the hunger ache in his stomach and with the louse sores on his body and with the cloy of damp in his boots and with the dirt on his cheeks.

He reached her and his arms fell around her neck and he gathered her against him, and the child that she carried gurgled against the beard on his face, and the child whose hand she held was pressed close to his leg. He saw the tears in her red, swelled eyes, he saw the river run of the tears through the mud on her face. He kissed her eyes, he kissed her tears. The children went on past him with the women and the old men. Barney clung to Mia Fiori and to the one child she carried and to the child that hugged his leg.

He kissed her forehead, he kissed her cheek.

She looked up at Barney into his eyes. She had woken from a dream. She looked into his eyes and the weakness took her, and he held her against him as she cried, and the child she carried chortled happily between them.

In a whispered small voice, she told him:

'After you had gone, after we had left the village and tried to climb into the side valleys and find caves to hide in, they came in the helicopters. The village had been bombed again, and then the helicopters machine gunned the village and the side walls. Then bigger helicopters came and they landed the soldiers at each end of the village, and also on the roof of the valley. Those on the roof of the valley moved down, quite slowly so that they would not miss a hiding place, and those at the bottom of the valley covered them with machine guns.

'They could not find all the caves, but they found enough of the caves. We had gone further than most, I don't know why, but we were further and outside the cordon that they had set. We lay in a cave with the children pressed against us because they tried to cry in their fear of the explosions and the shooting, and we buried their crying under our bodies. Into the caves where they found people they threw grenade bombs, Barney. The people were screaming, perhaps we did not have to bury the children that were with us against our bodies, their crying could not have been heard above the screaming when they were throwing the bombs into the caves.

'They took some men they had captured down to the village, and they took them to the mosque building and put them inside and they set fire to the mosque. They had a gun aimed at the door and when the men tried to run from the fire they shot them with the guns, and all the time they fired at the windows of the mosque. Nobody came out of the mosque, only the screaming came out. After that they burned all the grain stores of the village, the people cannot live in the village in the winter without the food store. They burned all their food for the winter. In the afternoon they left. When they had finished, the helicopters came again for them and lifted them away.

'I am not strong, Barney, not strong enough for what we saw. There were wounded people there, and I had nothing to give them — nothing, nothing. I came here to help these people, and I could not. I had nothing to offer them. I was as frightened as these people. I was crying with these people. They have scattered now, those that are alive. They have gone high into the mountains, but there is snow in the mountains. Barney, where was your bastard missile?'

A whispered, small voice that died on the valley's floor.

He took onto his own shoulder the child that she had carried. He took the hand of the child she had led.

'I have to have a plan, I have to have your help with a plan.'

'Three days ago I saw your plan and I buried two men because of your plan.'

Barney Crispin and Ahmad Khan were standing beside the old sewer ditch of the deserted village.

'I have to have the help so that the fire positions are coordinated.'

'You want the help so that other men cover your life with their lives.'

'That's bloody rubbish.'

'Always you demand a diversion fire that puts at risk my men, my friends. Always my brothers must stand as a shield for you so that you can fire and you can escape. Find your own plan.'

'If you want to kill the helicopters, if you want to clear the valley, you have to help me with a plan.'

Ahmad Khan stiffened, tight veins at his throat. 'I have to do nothing.'

'Don't you want the valley cleared of them?'

'I have a valley to defend, I do not have just one man to defend. I see more than one man. I see the time before you were with us, I see the time that will be after you have left us. You ask my brothers to give their lives to keep safe your plaything that you will not even let us hold.'

'Because you don't bloody know how to use it!' The spittle of Barney's anger fell on Ahmad Khan's nose and cheeks and was wiped away with the sleeve of his jacket.

'You may stay with us until the missiles are fired, but I will give no man's life to protect you. You will take your chance as we take our chance, we in the sight of Allah, and you wherever you can find chance.'

Ahmad Khan walked away. Schumack came to Barney's side. His head was shaking, his mouth was squeezed wide and together in sadness. 'They're proud, and you piss on that pride with your Redeye. One day you'll learn, hero man.'

'What do I do?'

'You stay a mile from them, always south of them so the birds come over you, and you hope that if the poor bastards are zapped that you'll get one launch away.'

'Where will you be?'

'Where I always am. Stop playing like you're God to these people. They've got Allah, they don't need you.'

'If I take three more helicopters…'

'They'll have forgotten you before you've time to fart. You're not doing it for them anyway. It's private and personal to you, whatever you're doing. Everyone can see that.'

Away from them, sitting in the shelter of a compound wall was Mia. She was more than a hundred yards from them. She squatted on her haunches and had found a blanket that was over her shoulders. She was with a group of children. She was absorbed and attentive to them. Barney could smell the scent breath of her mouth that he had kissed, and the salt taint of her tears. He saw her in the darkness of a cave covering the body of a child as the rockets and grenades and machine gun fire burst over the valley. He watched her. He slung the Redeye launcher onto his shoulder.

'Don't come with me, Maxie…watch her for me, please.'

He strode away, going south down the valley, measuring out a mile.

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 puffs of smoke…

Barney watched.

He saw her face. He saw the tears on her face, the 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.

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. 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, 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.'

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 into 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, but 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 third 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.