In Honour Bound

Chapter 2

'You're late.'

'I wasn't driving,' Barney Crispin said.

He looked past the tall, gaunt, wire-thin man who had met him, whose hand he had shaken at the entrance to the Terminal building.

He was late. For five hours he had sat at Dhofar waiting for the connection that would complete the long, hot sleepless journey from Muscat to Rawalpindi. He was in no great humour and he didn't need a stranger telling him he was late.

Yesterday morning was the first he'd known of it. The Colonel would like to see Captain Crispin. Before lunch? No, Sir, not before lunch…right away, Sir. The orderly had saluted, Barney had grunted, tucked his shirt into his shorts, and ambled away across the sand compound to the Colonel's office. There were only a few of them now, the British officers who trained and 'advised' the armed forces of Muscat and Oman. The Colonel wore no badges of rank, no flashes. Five minutes of conversation.

Something out of the ordinary, something from London, a particular request for Captain Crispin. So, the afternoon flight to Dhofar, the small hours flight to Rawalpindi. Pack for a few weeks, no letters home as to where you're going. The passport flipped across the Colonel's table gave Technical Representative as his profession. Might he ask what he would be doing in Rawalpindi? Yes, he might ask, but no, he wouldn't be told, couldn't be told because the Colonel didn't know. Better just get on with it, hadn't he? Better get himself packed. Not a lot of time to spare. The Colonel had wished him good hunting, yes, very good hunting and we'll expect you when we see you. Oh to be young, eh? Handshake across the desk. Salute at the door. Good luck.

Goodbye.

Barnaby Crispin had been ten years in the regular army, and seven of them in the 22nd Regiment, Special Air Service. Those ten years had given him a type of patience, he could wait a few more hours to be told why it was thought necessary to pitch him out of a quiet billet in Muscat.

He disliked the name of Barnaby, and called himself Barney. He was five foot eleven. His hair was blond with a tinge of redness when the sun caught it. He was fit, solid, muscled. He walked with an easy stride, rolling on the balls of his feet. He spoke with the accent of the south of England, usually cursorily as if words were running-away bath water and were useless things. Not an easy man to read, and a difficult man to ignore.

Now Barney Crispin stood at the entrance to the Customs and Immigration hall and took in the chaos around him. Men with suitcases straining against their string bindings, women bent down with the burden of London department stores' soft furnishings, kiddies in long-trousered grey suits and bright frocks holding tin toys and howling. All around him, pushing him, shoving him, elbowing him, and he didn't even know why he was in Rawalpindi.

'I wasn't blaming you, I just said you were late,' Howard Rossiter said.

'I didn't say you were blaming me, I just said I wasn't driving.'

Rossiter decided there was little point in pretending a good humour. He had been out of his bed at first light to meet the flight. He had sat about for five hours, occasionally sipping warm orange juice, never once finding anyone capable of giving him an accurate arrival time.

He gazed into the face of the younger man. All the same, these SAS men — arrogant and conceited because they're a bloody elite. This one didn't look any different. But he had to work with this one, so he mustered a thin puddle of a smile.

There was a pain behind his temple. He'd been with some pathetic businessman the night before, all piss and wind and money success talk, but the creature had brought a quart of Chivas Regal into Pakistan, and Rossiter hadn't taken a drink for the previous ten days. All right for a business creature to run the Customs gauntlet, not all right for anyone in Rossiter's line. Crap on Islamisation, they'd agreed. About the only bloody thing they had agreed upon. Crap on dry countries. God knew how much they'd drunk while the creature spelled out the triumphs of his line of commerce and seemed to think Rossiter should be interested. But he wasn't, not one atom. Foreign and Commonwealth Office career man, that was Howard Rossiter. Not a diplomat, a diplomat was too grand for Howard Rossiter. He was an official of FCO, a road sweeper for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Something to be done that's not Intelligence and that's not Embassy or High Commission, then wheel out old Rossiter because he's a good sort of chap who gets on with things, a good sort of chap who'll get his hands dirty and hasn't the clout to whine if the work's a bit messy.

He would be fifty the next year. His grey, cut-short hair was thinning. His suit was too weighty for Pakistan in August, but his ranking did not run to Overseas Dress Allowance. He was pale and he was sweating. He thought he loathed the place they had sent him to, he thought he had loathed it from the moment he had stepped off the plane from Heathrow with the family row still clamouring in his mind. Should a sixteen-year-old girl be at a drinks party until three o'clock in the morning? That had started it. Somewhere along the way his wife had declared her imperative need of a new refrigerator. Could he leave a cheque? No, alas, he could not. What a bloody way to leave home. No kiss on the cheek, not from his wife, not from his daughter, not from his son still in bed, just a slammed bloody door and a smirk on the face of the cab driver who had heard most of it from the pavement. The row still rankled.

Getting himself out through the Customs areas and onto the apron to meet the Tristar passengers had been his one hard earned victory of the day. He'd given the officious little fart in Customs uniform a part of his mind, and that had been joyous. It was twenty-five years since Rossiter had been in Pakistan and, God, how the place had changed, and nothing for the better that he'd noticed.

He pulled back his concentration. Again the smile. 'I'm Howard Rossiter, I'm usually called Ross.'

'Pleased to meet you, Mr Rossiter. I'm Barney Crispin.'

'You didn't bring a bottle, did you?'

'No.'

'We'd better get your bag.'

Barney Crispin's bag was one of the last onto the conveyor belt.

It didn't matter to him. He yawned a couple of times and stood with his legs firm and apart and his arms casually folded and waited, and quietly enjoyed the impatience of Rossiter hovering behind him. They'd been fast enough through Passport Control and when they'd left the Immigration area a little man in uniform had snapped a salute to Rossiter as though he were the bloody Viceroy, and that had curled a smile at Barney's mouth.

The heat didn't bother him. It was his second tour to Muscat and Oman that had been interrupted. The sun didn't burn him, just leathered his face and his arms, and he could absorb the scents and smells and odours of the East.

The canvas grip bag was collected.

Rossiter shouldered his way through the hawking taxi cab drivers outside the terminal, as if he were a man for whom a limousine and chauffeur waited. Barney followed. When he was not required to lead, he was happy enough to follow. Through the noise, through the bodies, through the shouting. Coming home in a way, a sort of home, a home that had once been in his family's history. His grandfather had been here, married his grandmother here, his father had been born in some fly-blown cantonment up the road in Raj days. There had been photographs in a drawer in England, old, dog-eared and sepia. His grandfather had died here, further up the road. That made it a sort of homecoming, somewhere that his family had trod before.

It was not a limousine but a paint-scraped Land Rover.

'You'll be dying to know what it's all about. I'm sorry, you'll have to wait till we get to the hotel.'

Barney raised his eyebrows. He didn't join in the game. He gave no hint of disappointment. Rossiter would be suffering because he couldn't yet play the big briefing man. Barney threw his bag into the open back of the Land Rover.

There was hazard enough on the road without distracting the driver with small talk.

They weaved amongst the curtains of white-robed cyclists. They stuttered over the no-give-way cross roads. They swerved onto the verge to avoid the lorries blundering down the crown. Rossiter was hunched over the wheel, grinding his gears, intent on the traffic as if engaged in combat. They had turned off the main road after half an hour.

Now they were flanked by rich green undergrowth and by the white-walled bungalows of Islamabad's diplomatic community. The mauve jacaranda blooms were failing on the trees. Quite pretty, Barney thought. Not a bloody flower in sight in Muscat, and no rain to grow them. Just the sun and the wind and the sun and the mountains.

'They didn't tell you anything?'

'Nothing.'

'So you haven't been asked whether you want the job?'

'I don't expect to be asked,' Barney said.

'Well, it's a bit out of the ordinary, but not at all hair-raising. In fact I expect you will think it's pretty straightforward.' Barney didn't prompt him and Rossiter volunteered no more, so they drove to the hotel in silence.

Barney knocked on the door.

'Come.' Muffled and peremptory, like he was a bloody headmaster. But, of course, Barney had to wait for Rossiter to remember that the door couldn't be opened except by himself. He was laughing when he went into the room and Rossiter looked at him with irritation.

'I've ordered some coffee.'

'Good.'

'Please sit down, Barney.'

Barney sat down. He was close to the window and near to him was a table with a briefcase on it. He clasped his hands, rested his chin on them. He waited. Rossiter ignored him, paced until the soft tap at the door. Rossiter let in the waiter, signed the chit with a flourish, took the tray to the table, heard the door close behind his back.

'Milk?'

'No.'

'Sugar?'

'No.'

Rossiter poured thin black coffee, pushed the cup and saucer towards Barney.

Rossiter was walking again, head up, as if counting flies on the ceiling, drawing his thoughts together. Abruptly he stopped, turned and faced Barney from the centre of the room. Barney stared back at him.

'This is to be a highly secure operation…'

Barney inclined his head. God, what crap.

'Would you read this, please?'

From an inside pocket of his jacket, Rossiter took an envelope, passed it to Barney.

Barney opened it. Ministry of Defence paper, a Brigadier's signature. Captain Barnaby Crispin was to work while in Pakistan under the direction of Mr Howard Rossiter, FCO. Barney tore up the envelope and the letter and flaked the pieces into the table's ashtray and set light to them.

Rossiter coughed, poised himself, rose twice on the balls of his feet, and started to speak. 'Through a helicopter, the Soviets have achieved a quite critical of superiority over the mujahidin. The helicopter in question is the Mi-24, armoured undercarriage, armoured cockpit, big bastard. They're virtually invulnerable, they soak up the small arms fire, ignore it, spit at it. They're hard, the Afghan tribesmen, but the Mi-24 makes them run, makes them shit themselves. Another couple of years of the helicopters and there's the prospect of the mujahidin losing serious effectiveness. We don't want that. We like it the way it is at the moment, we like a dozen Soviet divisions getting bitten, we like the Soviets getting kicked around the Third World scene for aggression against a small country. We think the chaps up in the hills need a small shot in the arm, and we have the opportunity to provide it.'

We're' arriving, Barney thought, slowly but finally. His eyes never left Rossiter's face.

'We're going to blow out a helicopter, Barney…or two, or three. I don't know how many. Just as they're flying along, nice and safe, nice and happy, we'll give them a bloody great shock up the arse, up the exhaust. I'd like to think we'd be there to see it when it happens. But, that's too much. I'm the fixer, you're the instructor, but we don't get onto the field. We're strictly on the bench. I find the people we work with, you train them, and off they go over the border and do their stuff. We don't cross the border, Barney, under any circumstances, but with my organisation and your expertise, they go across the border, all the way up the backside of an Mi-24.'

Rossiter stopped. He saw the astonishment spreading on Barney's face, a cloud over sunlight. He plunged on. 'So, we're on a double bonus. We've never had a decent look at the modern Mi-24, and that's going to be rectified. I'm not suggesting they load the bloody thing's wreckage on a mule train and bring it over to us, but they'll have cameras, they'll rifle all the paperwork inside, and they'll be briefed on which bits of the electronics we want hand-carried. You can't quite believe it, can you?'

'I didn't know they had the balls,' Barney said.

'They can be quite bullish when they set their minds to it, our masters.'

'What's the missile?'

'Redeye, American…'

'It's British and American policy not to supply missiles.'

'Redeye goes to Israel. Israel ships into Iran when they were scrapping with Iraq. Iran is a conduit for the mujahidin…there'll be Israeli markings on the kit underneath the last coat of paint, the top coat markings will be Iranian. Pretty?'

'Very pretty, and you've been here a month?'

'Finding the men who'll fire Redeye, whom you'll train.'

'You've found them?'

Rossiter looked away from Barney, looked out through the window. 'I think so…it's not easy. Had to be people that we could be reasonably certain wouldn't blab to the world what they had.'

'And you have these men?'

'I said that I'd found them, but that's my problem. Your job is to train them.' An edge in Rossiter's voice.

'I'll train them, Mr Rossiter…if you've found them. How many missiles?'

Rossiter had not turned back to Barney. His answer came quickly, offhand. 'Twelve.'

'Twelve…' Barney echoed the figure in derision.

'That's what I've got coming in.'

'And what's twelve going to change?'

'Who said it had to change anything? It gets us an Mi-24, it gets us a hundred photographs, it gets us the manuals, it gets us target acquisition and locking sensors, low speed data sensor, IFF antenna, Doppler radar, you want the rest? And if we drop a few of them, think of the morale, what it'll do for the mujahidin in their caves, up in their mountains.'

'Twelve,' spoken softly by Barney, spoken to himself.

'You're not required to express an opinion.'

Barney smiled coolly. 'You won't hear an opinion from me, Mr Rossiter.'

'You can call me Ross, I've told you that.'

'I'd like a Redeye manual, it's a long time since I've seen one.'

'You trained on it in Germany. I read it in your file.'

'Oh, yes? Did the file go into the disappearance of the FCO chap on the jaunt in Libya or not? Well, it wouldn't want to upset you, would it, Mr Rossiter?'

'I'll tell you what it does say, Barney. It says "He's a cold bugger". Someone's Commanding Officer wrote that in. Those very words.' The twitch of a smirk on his face.

'Have you a Redeye manual?'

'Your bedtime reading.' Rossiter took the bruised, handled manual from his briefcase, gave it to Barney.

'And the Pakistan government?'

'If they heard anything we'd be out in five minutes.'

'British High Commission?'

'The resident spook's bringing in the hardware. He won't know what's in the package.' Rossiter came close to Barney. 'I hope we can work well together,' he said gruffly.

'I hope so.'

‘I gather your grandfather was in Afghanistan.'

'He died there.'

'I read that.'

'He died after they'd put his eyes out, cut his testicles off. It took a bayonet charge by a whole platoon to get his body back. He's buried there.'

'I didn't know.'

'Third Afghan War, 1919. Why should you have known?' There was a smile at Barney's mouth, a smile without humour. 'Do you like poetry?'

'I don't know a lot…'

'Try this…

Barney looked Rossiter full in the face, blue gimlet eyes piercing into the discomfort of the older man. 'He was too badly wounded to turn his own weapon on himself, but they heard him screaming before they went in with the bayonet to get his body back. I don't suppose that was on the file. I'll see you at dinner, Mr Rossiter.'

'I told you to call me Ross.'

But the door was already closed behind him..