In Honour Bound

Chapter 3

Rossiter was better with the sleep behind him, almost human and almost interesting to Barney.

'Look at it this way, Barney, from the point of view of the opposition. There are men like you, your age, your expertise, who command flights of Mi-24s, one flight or two flights, and you're going to let them know there's a different game being played, Redeye's game. For three years and more those bastards have been steaming up and down soaking up the small arms fire like it's a gnat's bite…and suddenly, out of bloody nothing, there's a sodding great ball of fire and Ivan's in a dive, and he's yelling and next thing he knows he's dead. They've had it very easy, those bastards, chopping up villages from five hundred feet. They're going to sweat a bit now, and they won't be so bloody happy saddling up in the mornings. Think what that's going to do to the hairies on the ground, too. Going to be bloody shouting and singing, aren't they, the hairies?'

Barney chewed at his toast, spoke through the mouthful. 'I want detail on the Hind.'

'I've got all that.'

'I want maps and photographs of inside, where it'll be used.'

'I have that too.'

'I'll want to feel the ground a bit.'

'It's the same this side as theirs, that's fine.'

'That's all I need for the moment, but I want it before we meet the group.'

'We'll clear out of this dump then, get ourselves off to Peshawar.'

'Peshawar's how far?'

'Three hours' drive, half a day in our tractor. Peshawar's where the main refugee concentrations are and the base camps of the Resistance, last substantial town before the frontier.'

'My father was born there. Are you going to wear that suit, Mr Rossiter?'

'Why not?'

'Just that you're going to be rather hot.'

Barney stood up, walked away from the table, left Rossiter to pay.

Rossiter sat stock still for a moment. Was the man laughing at him? Or just Rossiter's fancy? He got up from the table and his knee caught against the edge. The table shook and his coffee spilled on the white cloth. He caught up with Barney, in the passageway by the boutique.

'It's going to be good, Barney.'

'Of course.' Barney was smiling, and the light rippled in his eyes.

'Really good, I mean.'

'Or we wouldn't be here.'

Barney loosened Rossiter's grip on his shirt and made for his room. Rossiter went back to the coffee shop to pay their bill.

They drove west out of Islamabad at a steady trundle with taxis and cars and lorries chorusing their protest behind them. Rossiter confined himself to shouted insults when he was cut up by passing vehicles, otherwise was silent.

Beside him Barney sat with his fingers clamped on a typed Hind treatment to protect it from the gusting draughts spinning through the side windows. When Rossiter spared him a glance he saw only a forehead furrowed in concentration beneath the waves of falling fair hair. They'd said in London that the man would be good, said he was serious and not a bloody cowboy. He was hellish short on human relations, but they hadn't said that.

Barney read. Hare, then Hound, and ultimately Hip begat Hind. Hind version A introduced to the 16th Tactical Air Army in East Germany in 1974. Exceeded expectations as a battlefield helicopter. Big bugger, loaded total weight of ten tons, fifty-six foot main rotor diameter. Powerful bugger. Two 1500hp Isotov TV-2 turboshafts. Barney scanned the diagrams that showed the extent of the titanium armour plating guarding the gunner's and the pilot's cockpits and the engines, fuel tanks, gearbox, hydraulics and electrical systems. Maximum ground speed and maximum altitude, 200mph and 18,000 feet. Armaments: 32 x 57mm S5 rockets and Swatter or Spiral guided missiles and traversable four-barrelled 12.7mm machine gun with drums of 1000 armour-piercing of HE incendiary rounds. But in the design of the II Hind there was no infrared signature suppression. The engine exhausts that are the target for a homing ground-to-air missile were considered ill-positioned by the Western evaluation Safe against everything but the Redeye family. Barney drew quick strokes across the diagrams to measure for himself pilot and gunner visibility. He calculated speeds of descent and rates of climb. Finally he read that the defensive powers of the Hind lay in its own attacking and counter-attacking capacity. Anyone firing at a Hind had better be sure of knocking it right out. Anything less than a fatal blow would invite a lethal counter-punch.

Barney stuffed the file back into Rossiter's briefcase.

'It's a rather good weapon.'

'"Rather good" is a bit of an understatement,' Rossiter said drily. 'And in the European theatre, it looks after our tanks. Our tanks, and our helicopters that are looking after their tanks.'

'Even with a Redeye it's not just straightforward.'

'What's not straightforward?'

'You don't just aim Redeye into the sky when there's a helicopter above and blast away. There's a bit more to it.'

'You're going to teach the hairies that little bit more,' said Rossiter sharply.

'I'm going to try to teach them.'

'You're going to teach them. That's what you're here for.'

'There are decoy flares that draw off a missile. There are all sorts of procedures. The pilots will be trained for European conditions, they'll know their anti-missile flying.'

'You'll tell the hairies all that.'

'I'm saying it won't be easy,' Barney said quietly.

'I didn't say it would be easy.'

At Attock they crossed the spread of the Indus river, at Nowshera they passed the camps of the Pakistan tank brigades. Rossiter took the new road, half completed and bone shaking, driving into a storm of dust from the lorry in front.

First as a pencil line, then as a crayon stripe, Barney saw the mountains that are west of Peshawar. They lay like a distant wall stretching right and left until they blurred into the haze. Behind them was Afghanistan.

The father of Barney's father had made this journey. More than sixty years before he had come by train with his battalion and travelled on the line that still ran beside the new road, and seen those mountains, and seen the buffalo beside the tracks, and seen the baked mud walls of the villages, and seen the women dive from sight, and seen the children run beside the carriages as they now ran beside the loaded lorries. His father's mother had come this way, and returned, returned with a baby and without a husband.

They had reached Peshawar.

They passed the towering sloped ramparts of brick that walled the Bala Hissar fort, they nudged into a confusion of scooter taxis and horse carts and brightly painted buses and laden-down lorries. Rossiter's finger was perpetually on the horn button, his face a furious scarlet as he took issue with one obstacle after the other.

'Where are we going?' Barney asked.

'I've hired a bungalow. Chappie from one of the refugee charities, gone home on leave. It's out of the way.'

At last Rossiter swung the Land Rover off the main road, onto a dirt strip. They drove between small bungalows and look one turning and then another.

'It's not quite Eaton Place for the charity people,' Rossiter said from the side of his mouth.

He had to talk, Barney recognised that, and the older man craved an answer. It would have been simple for Barney to engage in small talk, price of beer, bloody awful government, Pakistan going to the knackers, anything. It wasn't his way.

Barney gazed out at the bungalow as Rossiter braked. There was a small concreted yard in lieu of a garage and beyond it a squat building behind a raised verandah. Half hidden was a brick box for a servant near to the kitchen door. There were untidy flower beds around the verandah from which the bougainvillaea reached up to the tired white plaster walls.

'What do you think of it?'

'Fine,' Barney said.

'What would you do if I kicked you in the arse?'

'I'd break the bones in your arm,' Barney said.

'Just wondering if you were alive, that's all.' Rossiter laughed, loud and bleating.

Barney carried the bags into the bungalow. Rossiter muttered something about the cook having gone back to his village for the charity man's leave, that they'd have to fend for themselves, and took for himself the bedroom with the air conditioning. Barney was next door, an iron-framed bed, a wardrobe that didn't shut because the doors had warped. He stamped on a darting cockroach, sliming the tile floor. The water came hesitantly from a cold tap at the basin, he gathered enough in his cupped hands to wash the dust out of his face.

Rossiter stood in the doorway.

'What's for the rest of today?'

'We take delivery tonight, but there's something I'd like you to see first. It's a short drive, won't take long.' Something of a grin on Rossiter's face.

Fifteen minutes in the Land Rover.

They stopped outside a compound and walked through the open gates, between the high walls. From a central flagpole flew the red cross on white. A European nurse in snow white floated across the compound dirt, as if blind to the surroundings. She saw Rossiter and inclined her head in a formal greeting. A slope-shouldered orderly, grey-bearded, sad of face, manoeuvred a wheelchair down a wooden ramp, the man in the wheelchair sneezed but could not lift his hand to wipe away the mess. There were two huts inside the compound, long and low and single storied. Barney knew what was required of him. He walked to the wide central door of the nearest hut, paused to allow his eyes to assimilate the grey interior. He counted fifteen beds for paraplegic and quadriplegic patients. He saw the head clamps that kept the skull completely still, he saw the beds of others tilted so that their bodies would be moved and the bed sores would be less acute. They were all men, in both of the huts. Every one with passive eyes, the same dropped mouths of helplessness. He willed himself to walk past each bed, past each wheelchair, and for each man he tried to smile some comfort.

He walked out into the sunlight, into the live world. He strode to face Rossiter.

'Very clever,' Barney hissed.

'I thought there was a chance that you didn't quite understand what it was all about,' Rossiter said affably. 'The helicopters did most of them. Spinal lesions caused by rocket shrapnel, or by being under buildings that the gunships have knocked down. Pretty grim thought, isn't it, if the only treatment is days away on the back of a mule? Only a few get here, they're the ones done near the border. Bringing you here was my way of kicking your arse without getting my arm broken.'

After dark, after an awful meal out of tins organised by Rossiter, they drove out of Peshawar on the Kohat road.

There was no street lighting. Animals and people loomed late from the blackness into the glare of the Land Rover's headlights, Rossiter was quiet, but his face was satisfied as if he has won something of a victory at the International Red Cross rehabilitation clinic, and taken pleasure from the success. Barney tried to put the sights behind him, could not. Impossible to ignore, the paralysed bodies and the devastated features of the men who had come from the war across the mountains. A moon was creeping up, a thin sickle that threw only a small light on the fields and homes that lay below the causeway road. From the darkness, from the few pinprick lights, there was a bubble of noise, of voices, of animal sounds, of running water in the canal dykes, of chanting songs on the radios.

They drove for nearly an hour until they came to a junction where Rossiter pulled off the road and bumped the Land Rover over the dirt before switching off the engine and the lights. The night was around them, and the mosquitoes. Barney waited for Rossiter to speak, Rossiter kept his peace. Sometimes the lights of an oncoming truck lit the interior of the Land Rover's cab and then Barney could see the anticipation rise on Rossiter's face, and then fade with the vehicle's passing.

It was a Japanese pickup truck that finally groped into position beside the Land Rover. A man stepped down from the cabin. Quite young, Barney's age, dressed in the white-man's uniform of knee socks, pressed shorts, and an open-neck shirt festooned with pockets.

'He thinks it's radio stuff, thinks you're a communications wizard, thinks we're setting up a listening post,' Rossiter whispered.

The truck's lights were shut down, Barney heard a door closed carefully. There was the shadow of a face at Rossiter's window.

'You can give me a hand, old chap. Christ knows what you've got in there, weighs half a bloody ton, you'll be able to hear them picking their noses in Kabul with that lot. Bloody near did my back in getting it on the truck. You can get it off.' The sharp, clear accent of a south of England private education.

Barney wondered how they chose him. There had been spooks in Muscat, confident and supercilious blighters who revelled in their mystique.

Rossiter shone a torch beam out through his window and onto a wooden crate that was roped down in the back of the truck. The beam found stencilled printing, and Barney leaned across to read the letters. British High Commission Islamabad personal furnishings fragile.

'Went through Karachi customs like a dream.'

'Thanks,' Rossiter said.

'For nothing. What's going to happen to it afterwards?'

'It'll be disposed of, not your worry.'

'I don't worry easily, friend. If you two shift yourselves we'll get it into the back of yours.'

Barney and Rossiter stepped down from the Land Rover. Together they lifted the crate from the truck and edged it across the tail board of the Land Rover. The sides of the square crate were a little more than four feet across. Barney had taken the strain, Rossiter a grunting second fiddle.

'No need to make a fuss, I did it on my own,' the spook said.

'Thanks,' Rossiter said without kindness.

'You'll go a bit softly, won't you?'

'Depends what you mean by softly.'

'You're out from London, you may not know the local scene that well. If you're going to be sitting on a mountain top with a damn great wireless then the Pakkies won't be that pleased. If they find you, there'll be a fair old fuss. I've a useful piece of cooperation going on here…'

'Why don't you just piss off?' Rossiter said.

'I've a fair idea of what's going on over there without your having to sit on a mountain playing with a radio.'

'Piss off, will you, and don't tell me how to run my show.'

'I'm just telling you: people out from London are just a bloody nuisance.'

'Goodnight…' Rossiter turned to climb back into the Land Rover. 'When you're a very big boy you may just get to learn what's going on, perhaps.'

Barney grinned in the darkness. He heard the angry intake of breath from the spook. He eased himself into his seat, and Rossiter was away, turning noisily before Barney had the door closed.

'An object lesson in tact and discretion, Mr Rossiter.'

'Arrogant little shit.' Rossiter laughed.

When a car passed them, heading for Kohat, Barney saw that Rossiter was still grinning broadly to himself.

They backed the Land Rover up to the verandah steps and carried the crate into Barney's room before they turned on any of the lights. Rossiter almost at once said he was going to bed. Barney drew the cotton curtains. He took a heavy knife from his kit, and began to prise away the nails that fastened the crate. The boards creaked as he dragged them up. Barney was no weapons buff. He had come across them in his time, but not in the Regiment. Weapons were no more or less than a tool of Barney's trade.

He could not have said why Redeye was different to him from every firearm he had handled. He saw the slim symmetrical shapes of the top layer of the tubes that protected the missiles and that were wrapped in greased waterproof paper, each holding one missile and the battery coolant unit. Separate and wedged to the side of the crate with polystyrene filler shapes was the launch tube grip stock and optical sight. When he had looked down for a few seconds at the wrapped tubes and the launch mechanism he felt a sense of the ridiculous, and he shook himself as if to get rid of a hallucination, and then lifted back the crate boards. He shut away the Persian lettering that had overstamped the Hebrew script, and banged with his clenched fist down onto the wood so that the nails slid again into the sockets.

He slept long and well that night.

'He says that the mujahidin have learned to be cautious of foreigners who come with offers of help…' said the boy who played the part of interpreter.

Rossiter sighed. 'You must explain that the help we are going to offer is very positive.'

Rossiter eased back on the low plastic coated settee. Barney sat beside him, eyes alert, unmoving. They heard the boy speak, then the reply.

The boy turned to Rossiter. 'He says the leader of your country has been here, and the great men of America, and of Germany and France, and the princes of Saudi. They have all offered their help, they have all promised their support. They all tell us that we are fighting for freedom, they all tell us of our courage and that we are heroes. He says that they do not want to be told of their courage, and that they are heroes, they want the help that has been promised…'

It was four hours since Rossiter and Barney had driven to the refugee camp outside Peshawar. They had walked between the open sewers, they had gone amongst the lines of tents with their surrounds of mud walls, they had come to the prefabricated home of a leader. Now they sat on a settee and round them the shadowed room was crowded with men. Fighting men, hawk-eyed and sharp-nosed and long-fingered and heavy-bearded men. Some stood, some sat on the floor. Only their leader had another chair.

Four hours, and God knows how many of the tiny cups of sweet tea Barney had dutifully drunk. He was used to it, that was the way it happened in Muscat. He almost felt sorry for Rossiter. Rossiter in his bloody suit, as if he were a District Commissioner come to sort out a problem with a bagful of beads. He'd learn.

A part of the plan had emerged during the drive to the camp. Rossiter had found a group, yes. But the group had not actually been propositioned. No, that was going too last. He'd found a group that fought, that didn't just talk about fighting, that's what Rossiter had said. But Redeye, Redeye was far in the future. Redeye hadn't been talked about. And Rossiter's status was not yet established. So, they'd talked for four hours and the way it was going they'd talk another four bloody hours.

Barney was settled, comfortable on the settee, and could watch the closed faces of the fighting men, and wonder if those who had killed his grandfather had looked in any way different.

'I have come to talk to the leader about real help, tell him that.' Rossiter snapped his instruction to the boy. Barney's hand flickered to Rossiter's sleeve. Steady, old thing, there's no hurry.

Again the exchange of words between the leader and the boy.

'He says,' the boy chattered out the answer. 'He says he has no need of blankets or food for his people. He says that each time the mujahidin have asked for real help, for the work they have to do, then the help has been refused them.'

Barney's hand tightened on Rossiter's sleeve, 'Ask him what is the real help that he needs.'

Rossiter flashed him a glance of annoyance. It was the first interruption.

'All the world knows what is the help that is needed,' the boy replied pertly and without reference to the leader. 'Help is needed to fight the helicopter…'

The boy broke off, translated for the old man with the white beard and the narrow spectacles and white cotton trousers and the embroidered waistcoat against whose legs he sat. There was a growl of agreement from the shadow recesses of the room, then a scatter of voices. The boy looked from face to face, absorbing the talk. The boy clapped his hands for quiet.

'They say that from the time the first foreigners came offering to help us, we have asked for aid in fighting against the helicopters. The helicopter is armoured, protected, against it we have rifles. They say, what can a rifle do against armour plating? They say the helicopter massacres them because they are not given the help they have asked for. They say that if the foreigners cared for their freedom then they would be given the weapons to destroy the helicopters.'

Rossiter looked into Barney's face. Barney raised a finger slightly, the gesture that Rossiter should not speak.

'I say again, what is the real help that is needed?'

The boy translated, the voices rose in reply.

The boy held up his hand for their silence. Cheeky little sod, Barney thought, but he can be cheeky when he's pretty and has smooth cheeks and when his back rests against the knees of the leader.

'They want the missile — the missile that will destroy the helicopter.'

'What is the missile you want that will shoot down the helicopter?'

'We have asked the Americans for Redeye, we have asked the Egyptians for SAM 7, we have asked the British for Blowpipe. We know what is available, we are not just peasants off the fields, we know the names of the missiles, we can read,' the boy catapulted his answer to Barney without pause for translation.

'Which is the best?'

'Redeye,' the boy chimed in instant answer.

Rossiter leaned over close to Barney. 'Where in God's name are you going?'

Barney clipped back. 'I thought we'd better get on with what you should have done last week.'

'Watch yourself…'Rossiter whispered and flushed.

Barney smiled sweetly at Rossiter. All the eyes in the room were on him. The eyes of the fighting men. He saw a helicopter, he saw the burst of exploding flame, he saw the eyes and the faces of these men as they inched from cover to cover, from rock to rock, across the floor of a valley, inched toward the survivors of a helicopter crash. He wiped the sweat from his face.

'I'm going to clear them all out,' Barney said. 'All except the boy and the old man.'

An hour later they stepped out into the rich afternoon sunlight. A bargain had been struck.

The leader of a tribal fighting group of the Afghan mujahidin, a boy of seventeen years who had learned his English at a Lycee in Kabul, an official of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a captain of the 22nd Regiment of the Special Air Service had all shaken hands on a deal.

'You did well,' Rossiter said hoarsely when they were in the Land Rover.