In Honour Bound

Chapter 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 other, 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 here 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 then, 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 own 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.

In his operations room he read the forecast for the 24 hours ahead. Rain in the valleys in area Delta, snow on the high ground. Let it rain, let it snow. Let the rain fall and snow flake down on the body of that bastard foreigner. He was only sorry he had never seen the body and never had the chance to kick the arse off it.

They had stayed on the mattress the whole day through.

He couldn't believe they could sleep so long. Both stark naked, the blankets all over the place, and sweet clean satisfied sleeping breathing. A bloody eye opener for Howard Rossiter were Katie and Amanda. In the middle of the day he had first extricated himself from where he had slept between them. He'd made them some tea, felt bloody ridiculous standing beside the cooker while the kettle boiled and him wearing only a drying-up cloth knotted around his waist. No tea wanted. He'd gone back to the mattress, crawled over Katie, snuggled up to Amanda.

That had been the day, unique in the life of Howard Rossiter.

The room was darkening again. The way they'd slept through the day frightened the hell out of him. God alone knew what energy they'd have stored up for the evening's work. He lit a cigarette and flicked the dead match into the emptied soup tin on the floor near their heads. The cigarette didn't taste much, not after the night-time smokes, nothing to get his throat onto. When the cigarette was finished, he stubbed it out in the tin, and climbed again over Katie, saw her eyes twinkle and open, saw her mouth curl in a giggle. Bloody idiot he was. And bloody marvellous it had been. He muttered that he had to go out, saw the eyes close, saw the mouth settle. There was a law against this sort of thing at home, and for all he knew probably a law against it in Chitral. Probably get him castrated in public, if he only knew.

He closed the kitchen door quietly behind him. He went to the side of the bungalow, looked into the kitchen, saw the debris of clothes on the floor, saw the girls sitting up on the mattress, saw their heads jumping in mime laughter.

He hurried away for his nightly rendezvous at the Dreamland Hotel.

Outside the dull-lit facade of the hotel, Rossiter hesitated. The night and day that he had spent on the mattress with Katie and Amanda were now just a taste in his mouth and a weariness in his gut. The training had taken over. He raked the street around him, he found no tail.

He heard his name called. Rossiter swung round. He jackknifed straight. A slight persistent voice. He twisted towards the source of the sound. Shadow beside a parked lorry. His name again. He waited for a movement, for a figure to emerge from the shadow. He walked forward. No movement in the shadow. He was sweating. He felt the thin light of the street lamp fade from his face. He walked into the darkness.

'Hello, Mr Rossiter…'

'Who is it?' A stiff, quavering voice from Rossiter.

'It is Gul Bahdur.'

Christ, the boy who had come to the Peshawar bungalow with the bandage on his head and trapped Barney into the lunacy of the long walk into Afghanistan.

'Is Barney here?'

'No, Mr Rossiter.'

'Is he hurt? Is he all right?'

'I saw him four days ago, he was not hurt then.'

'Where did you see him?'

'Three days west of the border, in the north of Laghman, in a village called Atinam.'

The boy lifted from the ground a dark sacking bundle, held it between them. 'Barney said to bring this to you.'

'Oh, my God…'

'It is the parts of an Mi-24, the parts that you wanted, Mr Rossiter.'

'He actually shot one down?'

'Four, he shot down four. He fired four missiles, from the fourth only could he take the pieces you wanted.'

A hiss of shock from Rossiter. 'And why is he not with you?'

'He wants to kill four more helicopters. He wants to clear the valley where he is of helicopters.'

Rossiter was dazed, his hand took the weight of the sacking bundle. He reached to feel the concealed angular pieces.

'Clear a valley?'

'Driving out the helicopters, that is what Barney is doing,' the boy said. 'There are photographs as well, and notes that Barney made about the helicopter, and he wrote a letter for you.'

Rossiter grasped the folded paper that the boy had taken from the inside of his waistcoat. He hadn't his reading glasses with him, and it was too dark anyway to make out anything written on the torn edged paper. This was where it ended, what it had all been about, in the shadow on a pavement at the side of the Dreamland Hotel and holding a bag of a Hind's electronics. He was jolted, struck back from the thought of how crazy it all was.

'Will he make it out?'

'It is snowing in the passes.'

'Does he know the route?'

'Perhaps he will have a guide, perhaps not.'

'How long does he mean to stay there?'

'He is with the Resistance and he has pledged to clear their valley of helicopters.'

He had been screwing through the night, taking his pleasure, gasping his happiness on his back. He thought of Barney. He saw the determination in his face. He saw the deep distant eyes. Barney was out there, fighting a war. He thought he might vomit up his food and the hashish and the sweat tastes of the girls. Out there, out beyond the mountains, out beyond the borders of all sanity. Barney fighting a war with gunship helicopters while Howard Rossiter screwed himself towards senility.

He took the bundle in both hands and slung it over his shoulder, and put the letter in his top pocket. He led the way back to the bungalow.

Gul Bahdur told him, as they walked, of the smoke that had crawled from a cave, of the tethered mule and of stone-filled clothes beside a river bed, and of the light streak across a valley, and of the destruction of the helicopters. The boy told him of the bombers' run on the village, and of the helicopter strikes that had followed.

Rossiter said nothing, nothing for him to say, a world beyond his comprehension.

Gul Bahdur told him about an American called Maxie Schumack who had one hand and one claw. He told him about a nurse from Europe who worked without medicine in the village. He seemed hardly to hear the boy. The bundle concerned him. If there was anything to be saved from the awfulness of the boy's stories then that salvation lay in the bundle. How to shift it, how to get it away from Chitral, those were the new, furious preoccupations of Howard Rossiter. If he failed to get it away then he had destroyed himself, and broken Barney Crispin. The boy was telling him of a guerrilla leader called Ahmad Khan, and of a Soviet pilot whose testicles had been ripped from his body, but Rossiter no longer listened.

Rossiter stopped at the gate to the bungalow. He gripped Gul Bahdur's shoulders, placed him beside the gate, and went on alone up the driveway. He paused at the window.

The girls were sitting up on the mattress, smoking. He saw his tooth marks, a double weal, in Amanda's shoulder. He felt a growing outrage. He saw what he thought was an incarnation of the Devil. He saw Katie teasing the nipple of her friend.

Tears thundered in Rossiter's eyes. He pounded open the kitchen door. The room ahead of him was a moisture blur. He swept into the room. His feet were close to the mattress.

'Go away!' he screamed. He turned his back on them, could not look down into their faces. 'Go away, you little bitches…'

He heard behind him the scurry of their movement.

'Away…'

He heard the sounds of their dressing, the whispering of their clothes, the clatter of their sandals, the sweeping up of their belongings.

'Away, out, out, out!' Rossiter shrieked.

He heard the crash of the kitchen door heaved open. He heard their feet sliding on the mud and gravel of the driveway. Then he turned, and saw the mattress and the brief powder blue pants discarded on the linoleum. He picked up the pants and pocketed them.

Rossiter went back to the gateway to collect Gul Bahdur. The boy said nothing of the two phantom shapes that had run past him, loud in their laughter.

Later, when he had examined the contents of the sacking cloth bundle, when he had stared into the clear quality of the Polaroid photographs, when he had glanced over the notes describing the Mi-24 cockpit interior, he left the boy in the bungalow and set off again for the Dreamland.

At the hotel he found a telephone. He waited twenty minutes for the connection to the Night Duty Officer at the High Commission in Islamabad. He asked for a message to be passed as a matter of urgency to Mr Davies. It was past office hours, the caller would appreciate, Mr Davies had gone home.

'Just do it,' Rossiter said.

When he was outside again, it was raining. He tucked his neck down into his chest. If it was raining in Chitral, then snow would be falling on the high mountain passes over the border. He wiped the rain droplets from his nose and started to run, a slow shambling run back to the bungalow.

Barney and Schumack were a thousand yards ahead of the column. He walked with the loaded launcher across his shoulder and with the last of the missile tubes strapped to his back pack, and with the AK-47 assault rifle hanging at his side.

There was now a plan, negotiated by Schumack. The column was moving south and Barney would be ahead and clear of the column, and if the helicopters surprised them, flew north up the valley, they would pass over Barney on the attack run, and he would have the chance to fire on the engine exhausts. The two DShK machine guns wobbled on the wheels inside the column, one in the centre and one in the rear. If the helicopters came, then the DShK fire would draw their attention. That was the extent of the plan.

Mia was away behind him, with the children and the one woman who had come with her from Atinam.

The column was moving to a place near the centre of the valley where a side valley came down from the west and where a side valley rose up to the east. It was a place where the main trail from the Pakistan border crossed the valley on the route to the liberated zones of the Panjshir. The big caravan of munitions would come down the side valley from the east and the men would rest their animals in the valley before climbing again to the west. In one day, or in two days, or in three days the caravan would arrive. The men who would come with the caravan were not of Ahmad Khan's allegiance. But the code of Pushtunwalah ruled in the valleys and the mountains, the hospitality to a traveller, the sharing of bread and meat. The code dictated that Ahmad Khan would fight to his last man, to his last round of ammunition, to ensure the caravan a safe crossing of his valley. For the caravan's sake Ahmad Khan allowed Barney Crispin to walk with his column.

Barney was aware of Schumack's exhaustion. He didn't suggest the American should carry the spare missile. Usually when they walked together Barney was a yard or two ahead, sometimes now he had to stop to allow himself to be caught. The claw was hurting Schumack. He seemed to wring the claw more frequently and to pinch at the flesh above the strapping as if that squeezed a poison out of his arm. Deepening age lines at the eyes and a slower step and a wheezing breath.

'Why don't you come out with me, when I go with her?'

'I'm not running.'

'It's not running away, to come out of this place.'

'I've done my running, did it for Sam. We ran out of 'Nam, holding our arses and running like we were scared. We ran in Kabul all the way down to the airport to load "Spike" Dubs' body on the transport because we'd screwed saving him. We ran out of Desert One before we'd even started. You ever run away, hero man? It's dirty as shit. Doesn't count that some mother with tabs on his shoulder, gold on his cuffs, tells you it's not running, that it's strategic withdrawal or tactical abort. I'm not running any more and, thank Christ, Sam can't tell me to run any more.'

'Your gut's in trouble, hell only knows what insects you've got crawling around inside you.'

'If I come out where do I go? Back to Sam? They had us run out of 'Nam after we'd filled 55,000 bags, takes some counting when you're running, fifty-five thousand stiffs and, nine years later, they've just got round to remembering the fifty-five thousand who couldn't run when they gave the shout. Back in Sam, they treat them like crap, those who ran when they were told. Treat them like they're some sort of mother disgrace. You ever been in Sam, Barney? It's diseased. It's all queers and pervs and hippies and weirdos. It's rotten like my gut, it's rotten with running.'

'Do you have no one to go back to?'

'No one.' A whistle of breath between Schumack's teeth. 'I'm past running to go looking for someone.'

Barney turned, still walking, to look at Schumack. He saw the strain and the tiredness. He saw a man who stamped his feet onto the rock path to keep up his speed.

He saw the pallor of the stubbled cheeks and the dark eye caves.

'Will the helicopters come for the caravan?'

'Sure. The Antonov'll find them. That mother always finds them. When the Antonov recce finds them, then we'll have the helicopters come. Specially after you've missed twice.' A dry laugh from Schumack.

Barney could not remember how many days ago he had come to the valley, but there had been flowers between the rocks then, the pink of the wild roses and the mauve blue of the violets. Now he saw no flowers. He saw the grey green brown of the rocks and the scrub bushes and the trees that were losing their foliage.

'Let me take you out when I go.'

'Did I ever tell you about Kabul?'

'No, but you will,' Barney said lightly.

'You're not my fucking officer — don't you piss on me. We are the most powerful nation on earth, that's what Washington calls us, and the Ambassador is the representative of the most powerful nation on earth, got it Captain Crispin? In Kabul we had less clout than a black used to have in Baton Rouge. Three shites had the Ambassador in a hotel room, and the Soviets were running the "rescue" show. Some fucking rescue. The Soviets wouldn't let us up the stairs to the landing where our Ambassador was held, they wouldn't talk to us, wouldn't let us talk to him. They shut every fucking door on us. We were shouting, "Stall and play for time and delay", and the Soviets were arming up the attack squad, machine guns and rockets and automatic rifles. We wanted to play the old softly softly, they were going to storm before it was even decent. We were the most powerful nation on earth and we couldn't shift those mothers, but those crap Ivans ignored us — they pissed on us. I don't know whether they shot our Ambassador themselves, or whether the Afghans did, or whether the gooks who'd taken him did. He was pretty dead by the time they let us get to him, damn near dead. I'll give you a long word you didn't know I had. I hate impotence. I hate fannying about, if that's easier for you. So, no, I'm not going.'

'I understand.'

'I didn't ask your opinion, hero man, I was telling you.'

'I understand what you're saying, but there has to be somewhere better for you than here.'

There was no reply. Barney heard only the stamp of Schumack's boots and the rasp of the breath in his throat.

The British High Commission in Islamabad is run on rigid and compartmentalised tracks.

To the Night Security Officer who had taken Rossiter's call, Davies the spook was Mr Davies with the rank of Second Secretary and member of Consular and Visas. No way that a Night Security Officer, with 22 years service in the Black Watch behind him and a Regimental Sergeant Major's stripes thrown in, was going to shift himself after office hours by telephoning a Second Secretary. Not for him to know who was the High Commission's spook in residence. And the message for Mr Davies was incomprehensible. The message paper was folded, left in Davies' pigeon hole, and since the spook did not come to the High Commission until late the following afternoon, that message had already gathered a fine film of dust.

'Package to collect 3550 lands of dreams 7156, Miss Howard.'

That was the message.

Enough to make the spook weep. All right, yes, security men had a tail on him in Islamabad. All right, yes, there was a tap on his telephone. But this was so ghastly, so melodramatic. He'd known as soon as he met Rossiter that the man was lacking a scintilla of style.

From his map of Pakistan he traced out the coordination of 35 50 North 71 56 East. His finger nail converged on the place name of Chitral. Bloody Howard Rossiter up on the bloody border. He took from a shelf a well worn 'Pakistan — a Travel Survival Kit'—too right, everything was survival in Pakistan. Under 'Accommodation and places to eat in Chitral' he found a one line reference to the Dreamland Hotel on Shahi Bazaar. Not very sophisticated Mister Howard bloody Rossiter, and a piece of luck that the lumbering fool on night duty at the High Commission hadn't put the message over his home telephone. He wouldn't have reckoned that the cracking of this code would have taken Pakistan Security five minutes more than it had taken him.

Not that the spook could make the trip up country, not with the tail that had been on him since Rossiter and his Action Man had disappeared. The new fellow in Information would enjoy a drive out of town. He could take the High Commission Land Rover.

The spook had heard the rumour from the Americans, where else, that in one valley in Laghman province helicopters had been shot down. They dropped their silver about and they heard the most. He looked at his map. Laghman province and Chitral were not adjacent, but not a million miles.

'Alexander…? Davies here…I need a spot of help. I wonder if you could pop up before you shut your shop for the night…it'll keep till I see you. Cheers.'

It would be a job for the Diplomatic Bag. And after he'd bagged the package then he'd have to find a way of shipping the bloody undesirables out, new passport, overland into India, and all the rest of the paraphernalia…

Bugger London, bugger them for messing about on his patch.

He strode away down the corridors of the Taj Beg, out into the autumn light, past the sentries in their spick-span uniforms that never saw the shit filth of combat, past the fat arse staff officers who knew fuck-all of the war in the mountains, past the MilPol jeep with the lolling shites who rounded up the fighting men when they were on a Twenty Four in Kabul and looking for hash or tail, past all the cretin apparatus that thought the war was winnable.

Go where my pilots go, pigs. The silent shout from Medev. See how you fucking like it. Fly between the tight arse valley walls and see if you're so sure. Fly through the ground fire cones of shells and smell your shit-heavy pants when you've landed.

From the debriefing staff pigs, Medev reckoned he had received the barest of understanding on the problems of flying helicopters inside a confined valley space and against a ground-to-air missile marksman. He had lost four helicopters. He had lost eight crewmen. His pilots were not novices, he was told, they were expected to have assimilated the training received in Warsaw Pact exercises where they flew over simulated Redeye and Stinger and Blowpipe battlefields. But where were the flares he'd requested a clear week earlier? Why weren't the flares sent from Begram or Central Equipment Depot? Why did he have to use distress flares? Because no bastard would get off his arse. None of the pigs were impressed by the engine exhaust baffles.

The bandits had won a victory, he was told, but the losses were insupportable. But the bastard was dead, Medev had shouted back at his interrogators, the bastard was chopped.

Medev was not a celebrity. To them he was just a commander who had taken fierce casualties.

Still seething, he boarded the shuttle bus between the Taj Beg headquarters and the secure accommodation provided for staffers and visiting field men. There was an armed guard beside the driver, half awake and half asleep, and half dead he'd be if he were on his feet in area Delta.

He wore his best dress uniform. He wore medal ribbons on his chest. He wore his cap jauntily. He wore a polished leather pistol holster on a polished leather belt.

The bus dropped him by the entry to the old city's bazaar.

He waited on the pavement after the bus had gone for a group of his countrymen to form. He would not go into that bastard warren bazaar on his own. There were some off-duty soldiers. He saw the red flash of the Mechanized Infantry, the Army's donkeys. Two out of half a dozen were armed. Little more than boys, any of them, about eighteen years old. They led the way into the first of the narrow bazaar streets, and Medev followed a few metres behind. There were three civilians behind him, a hundred metres behind. He felt safe.

The anger sidled away from him as he walked the bazaar street, threaded his way through the people and the smells and the indifference. In her last letter his wife had sent him a list of items she wanted him to bring back. What did the silly cow think he was going to do? Hire a lorry and drive over the Oxus river bridge at Termez, and take a north west left turn for Tashkent and Orenburg and Kuybyshev and Ryazan and Moscow, two and a half thousand klicks…chests, carpets, cotton materials, a refrigerator…did she think the squadron commander of Eight Nine Two had a line in looting on the side? Silly cow…

he had stopped beside a stall. It would be a quick purchase. He looked down at three lapis lazuli brooches. He thought he should spend the same on his wife as he had spent the month before on the agronomist's wife. He loved the deep clear blue of the stone, the blue of the early morning skies through the tinted canopy of the helicopter cockpit. He pointed to one brooch. He looked up and saw the backs of the soldiers of Mechanized Infantry merging with the cloaks and blankets and turbans and caps from Nuristan. He heard the price, he reached for his wallet. He looked back down the street and glimpsed the raincoat of one of the civilians. Just once he did not haggle over the purchase price. He paid what he was asked. He could not have explained to himself the sudden edge and suspicion he felt in the pressing bazaar street, with the crowds flowing close around him, with the buildings lowering above him with the flaked paint and the hanging washing. He slapped down the Afghani notes.

He heard a single shot. He grasped his pistol from its holster. He was wild-eyed, turning, spinning.

He saw the soldiers from Mechanized Infantry close huddled to each other, and the space growing around them, and the fallen shape beside their black walking-out boots.

He saw the terror in their faces.

He started to run.

He ran away from the soldiers and past the three civilians, frozen on their feet. Only when he was clear of the bazaar and out in the main wide street did he stop running. He realized then that he had dropped the brooch of lapis lazuli.

He returned his pistol to the holster. His head was shaking, slowly, sadly. Pyotr Medev walked away from the bazaar. He felt no shame that he had run, just the soaring pleasure that he lived and that another had been chosen. In the half an hour that it took to reach the Mikroyan residential complex his hand never left the opened flap of his holster.

His knees had steadied now, the tight fear in his belly was behind him.

He was saluted by the sentries at the main checkpoint barrier of the complex that was the home of the majority of Soviet citizens working in the Kabul government ministries and on the Fraternal Air programme. A different world behind these perimeter wire-topped walls. A world of women gossiping about home in faraway Kiev or Gorki or Volgograd or Saratov, of brightly dressed and blond haired children falling from slides and climbing into swing seats.

A world where his shirt would be slid from his chest, his trousers from his thighs. A world of warmth, and a bottle of beer, and a sausage sandwich, and the sweet taste of a woman. And the waking in the arms, against the body of a woman in the second floor flat of the Mikroyan residential complex.

Medev smiled at the children who ran past him. He backed away to allow a girl with a bag full of shopping from the Commissariat to go up the stairs of the building ahead of him. Second floor. He could have sleep-walked to that door.

As he pressed the bell button, he was grinning to himself.

He had never seen the man who stood in the door.

A thin, gaunt, tanned man. An unclipped beard, bleached sparse hair on the crown of his head, a yellow athlete's vest, a pair of baggy fawn trousers gathered at the waist by a thin belt.

The grin fled from the face of Major Pyotr Medev.

The man in the doorway looked at him, waited on him.

Medev felt the chill damp under the peak of his cap. He saw the agronomist's wife at the back of the small hallway. He saw the unbuttoned fall of her blouse. He saw the shrug of her shoulders. He saw the brooch of blue stone pinned to the breast of her blouse.

The bastard was home from his ditch in Kandahar.

'I'm sorry, stupid of me, I must have come to the wrong door.' Medev ducked his head, the gesture of casual apology. The door was closed in his face. He turned swiftly away and went down the tile steps of the staircase.

'When is Major Medev back?'

'He only went this morning…'

'I know when he went, when is he back?'

'We received a message from Kabul Movements that he was trying to get on a flight back this evening, but we heard later there was no available flight. Normally he stays overnight, I don't know why he wanted to come back.'

'Goddamnit, Rostov,' bellowed the Frontal Aviation commander. 'Cut out all the background crap and just tell me when he is due here.'

'Tomorrow afternoon, sir, fourteen hundred…'

'Reconnaissance reports a considerable column moving through area Delta. Intelligence believe this column will have reached your Major's valley by tomorrow morning.'

'What do you want me to do, sir?'

'Attack it…what else? Serve it with tea?'

'Can this not wait for Major Medev's return?'

'It cannot wait. There will be another Antonov flight at first light. The decision will then be made on the tasking of Eight Nine Two. I am assuming Major Medev would not wish another squadron to fly into area Delta?'

'Major Medev would prefer that the pilots familiar with area Delta should continue to fly there.'

'Your pilots should be ready to fly as soon as the report is evaluated.'

Rostov made his way out of the offices. Shit, the squadron to fly and Medev in Kabul. Medev had told him of the agronomist's wife and her flat in the Mikroyan, told him when they were drunk together. And the message had come through that Medev had tried to get back that evening. Must be her period, or the clap…and Medev would be foul-tempered if he was back and found the squadron airborne.

Rostov went to the mess to find Vladdy. Only a few days ago he would have been looking for Nikolai, or Viktor, or Alexei, or Sergei. But Nikolai and Viktor and Alexei and Sergei had all gone back to the Motherland in the bodybags. And after what the bastard Vladdy had done to him in the mess, done to his pyjamas, to his dignity, he didn't mind hoping that if there had to be another bodybag it would be Vladdy's.