In Honour Bound

Chapter 4

Long before, Barney knew the proverb of the Tajik people of the north of Afghanistan which said: 'Trust a snake before a harlot, and a harlot before a Pathan.'

The men he would train to fire the Redeye missile were southerners, Pathans.

He had not brought the weapon system the first morning. He would bring that later. First he would take stock of the men he had to teach. They went out on the Jamrud road, to the first foothills at the approach to the Khyber. Barney had said six men only. There were fourteen. Barney had said that only the young and the fit, the true fighters, should come. The beards of four men were white with age. They drove in a rusty Volkswagen van, pressed together, smelling and scenting together, hawking and spitting together, the sun not up two hours and the heat suffocating.

In the front, beside the driver, was the boy who made the translations.

The road took them past the big refugee camps. Two and a half million displaced persons from Afghanistan living in tents or in mud homes they had built for themselves. Three and a half million of their livestock grazing on land at the fringes of the camps, sheep and goats and cattle. And they believed that one day they would go home, which is why they sat patiently before their tents or the mud brick homes and waited for victory. One day…

Barney had never before seen refugee camps, there was something unreal about these camps, something that happened only to other people. He wondered if he could ever have been a refugee, if he could have sat with a pipe and a cup of sweet tea waiting for a victory to be won far away against ten divisions of the Soviet army.

Barney leaned forward against the crush of men in the hack of the van, he tapped with his finger on the boy's shoulder.

'What is your name?'

'I am Gul Bahdur, what is yours?'

'I am Barney, Gul Bahdur. Why are there so many in these camps — what was the one weight they could carry no longer?'

'Some foreigners say it is because they have free food here. This is a lie, Mr Barney. It is the attacks from the air.'

'Tell me.'

'The helicopters attack the villages. The helicopters have bombs and rockets. There is no defence against the helicopters.'

'Always the helicopters.'

'Before the Soviets came to Afghanistan, these men did not know fear. It was not possible to make a Pathan afraid, but the Pathan is afraid of the helicopter, do you understand me?'

'I understand you.'

'Mr Barney, you are a soldier?'

'A sort of soldier.'

'Would you not be afraid of the helicopter?'

'I understand you.'

'If you are truthful, if you accept that you too would have fear, then you will know why we have left our homes.'

'I said I understood.'

Barney lapsed back to silence.

The road was full, noisy, slow moving. They headed towards the mountain line.

'Mr Barney…'

'Yes.'

'Have you ever fought against the Soviets?'

'No.'

'Would you like to?'

Barney grinned. 'You have no right to ask me that question, and I won't answer it.'

The boy turned full face to Barney, a wide happy smile. He seemed younger than his seventeen years, little more than a child. The boy boasted as a child will. 'I have fought against the Soviets.'

'How many did you kill?' Barney asked lightly.

'More than a hundred.'

Barney was laughing. 'And how many did you wound?'

The boy shook his head and the dark hair flopped across his brow. 'None were wounded.'

Barney said quietly, 'And how many did you capture?'

'None were captured.'

They drove off the road and away parallel to the mountain line, along a shallow valley, and soon were lost from the sight of the traffic. Where the van stopped there were scattered scrub trees, with foliage sufficient to throw down patches of shade. The men spilled from the doors of the van and hurried to find a place where there was shelter from the sun. Barney was last from the back of the van. He walked slowly towards the trees, squinting his eyes, gazing deep into the emptiness around him. There was a silence here, a silence of the wind ruffling against rock and sand and bush and hillside. They sat and they watched and they waited for him, these men who did not wound or capture Soviets but who killed them.

'You'll translate for me, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said brusquely.

'Of course.'

'And exactly. You don't add and you don't take away.'

'What else?' The boy's smile was rampant.

'And don't give me any bloody cheek.'

The cheerfulness was stripped from the boy's face. He was a chastised child. His eyes dropped. 'What you say to me I will tell to them.'

Barney talked to the men under the trees about Redeye.

They knew the workings of the Kalashnikov and the AK-47 and the Lee Enfield and the Heckler and Koch rifles. They were familiar with the Soviet RPG-7 rocket launcher. They could lay a mine. They could site an ambush. Patiently Barney talked them into a world that was new and which might be bewildering. Gently he spoke to men from one of the most unsophisticated regions of the earth, to men who could not read and who could not write.

Each morning for a week the Volkswagen van brought them to the same place, and each morning Barney edged forward in his exposition and detail. He was never interrupted, he was never asked a question. The eyes never closed, the heads never turned away from him. In the middle of each morning the boy brewed tea over a gas camping stove, and then the men would talk and fool amongst themselves and ignore Barney. Ignore him until the tea was drunk.

By the end of that week Barney talked of a portable, short range missile to be used against low flying aircraft or helicopters. He spoke of a missile with flip-out cruciform tail fins. He led them into a two stage solid propulsion unit with short boost and longer sustain. He explained a guidance system of passive infrared homing. Scratching with a sharpened stick in the dirt he drew the missile to scale. Jabbing with his finger he pointed to a rock that he judged to be a mile away and then said that his missile would cover the distance to the rock in the time that it took him to count four seconds.

The next day was Friday. On the Friday he would not meet them. He told them that when they next came to the place he would bring with him the Redeye so that they could feel and hold the weapon, and then he would speak of the technique of firing and the science of target acquisition.

At the end of that week, as the men trooped back to the van, Barney found that the boy had fallen into step beside him.

'What do they say?' Barney gestured towards the men ahead of him.

'They say that if it helps them shoot down a helicopter that this torture will have been worthwhile.'

'You little bugger…' Barney swiped at the boy. 'You are going to go with them?'

'Perhaps I will be the only one who knows how it works.'

'You could get the shit kicked out of you,' Barney was laughing.

The boy looked up into Barney's face, questioning and intent. 'It works, Mr Barney, your Redeye?'

'The pride of General Dynamics, California, young man. Yes, it works.'

'How's it turning out?'

'It could be all right.'

Rossiter leaned against the open door, watching Barney swilling his face in the basin.

'I'd have thought that after a week you'd have a decent idea.'

'They'll probably get a helicopter.'

'You're none too bloody sure.'

Barney straightened, the water fell from his face. 'I said it could be all right. I said they'd probably get one.'

'You're a grudging sod.'

Barney turned to Rossiter. 'You want to know why it's only all right and why it's only probably?'

'You tell me,' Rossiter said grimly. 'You found the wrong people, Mr Rossiter.'

'What does that mean?'

'It means that the men you found are pig ignorant. They don't know how a car works, let alone a supersonic heat-seeker.'

'And where would I have found a Cambridge physicist?'

'Inside. Inside, half the leadership is defected Afghan army officers. Inside there are bright kids out of school, kids from the university, kids from the cadet college. They're what we should have had.'

'Precisely why we haven't got them, because they're inside and we're outside. And we cut our bloody cloth to the circumstances. And you've a whole week more to get them to the start line. Stop bloody whingeing.'

'You asked me and I told you…but if we get a helicopter, and it's not burned out on impact, and you've some pretty pictures for your pocket, and some electronics for your suitcase, then everything's rosy…' Barney dived his face again into the basin, sluicing away the sand grime.

'Just one helicopter will do me very well,' Rossiter said with emphasis. He turned away, then paused, pivoting back towards Barney. 'By the by, I heard of a party weekend after next, managed an invitation.'

'I wouldn't have thought we'd be waving ourselves round Peshawar society.'

'Anyone ever tell you what a miserable creep you are, Crispin?'

'We're supposed to…'

'One of the Red Cross girls,' Rossiter snapped. 'Of course, you don't have to come. I'm stuck here, you know. Stuck here like a bloody plain-faced virgin. You're out every day, I'm here. And don't you lecture me about security. I was organising bloody security when you were still wetting your bed. I also made Major, which it seems you've forgotten.'

Barney towelled the water off his face and shoulders. Rossiter watched him. Barney slipped into a clean shirt, walked to the door, didn't hesitate, and Rossiter made way for him. Barney went through the living room, out through the front door and onto the verandah, then off towards the Land Rover.

'Where are you going?'

'Out.'

'Can I come?'

Barney heard the desperation in Rossiter's voice, heard the pleading. 'No. You're too old for where I'm going, like you said.'

Barney heard the door of the bungalow slam shut. When he turned to look he could not see Rossiter.

It was early afternoon.

Barney drove west, through Jamrud, past the turn off where he went each morning in the Volkswagen, onwards and upwards off the plain and into the Khyber. The road climbed, snaked, in curve patterns around the bleak greyness of the mountains. Always above him, always on the highest ground, were the old British Picquet forts, square-based towers now roofless and weather scarred. Alongside the road was the railway, reaching onto viaducts, diving into tunnels. He saw valleys with thin streams far below and village clusters and handkerchiefs of green cultivation. He saw the barracks of the modern Pakistan army, and the dragon's teeth of tank traps, and anti-aircraft guns aimed loftily to the west and the Afghanistan border. Clear of the Khyber he came to the township of Landi Kotal, and where the road narrowed into a gorge between steep cut rock faces, Barney pulled onto the gravel shoulder.

Set in the rock and painted in vivid greens and whites and reds were the emblems of the old British regiments that had served their tours in this far border country. The Gordons, the Royal Sussex, the Essex Regiment, the First Battalion 22nd Cheshires. Barney shook his head, slowly, happily, as if he heard a lament of pipes, and a church parade hymn, and the cry of a bugle, and the shout of a drill sergeant. His grandfather would have been here…would have come through the gorge on his way to a battlefield in Afghanistan. He felt a bond with this man, younger than himself, who had come through the Khyber on a fighting mission more than half a century before. He felt the touch of family.

He locked the Land Rover, bent to tighten his boot laces, and climbed away from the road first up a steep gully, then onto a sharp-backed, fish's spine ridge. He climbed easily, fluently. His breathing was calm and relaxed as he stretched his stride away from the road and out into the wilderness. Beneath him was the town of Landi Kotal with its pimples of minaret towers and flat cement roofs and spiralling wood smoke columns. He turned his back on the town, setting himself instead to absorb the mountain sides. He saw caves that were dark in shadow and crevices never penetrated by the sunlight. He saw boulders behind which one or two men might hide. The exhilaration stayed with him, was his companion. He studied the ground of rock and scree and boulder, searching for imagined firing points for Redeye, hunting for the escape routes for the group once they had fired Redeye and brought down on themselves the counter-attackers of the surviving helicopters. It was why he had come to this place, to learn the feel of the mountain sides, that he might better achieve the destruction of the Mi-24.

He climbed to a summit and sat gazing out over a great distance into Afghanistan.

It was dark when he returned to the bungalow. Without calling Rossiter he went into his own bedroom. He lifted the loosened boards of the crate top and stared down at the slim shapes of the wrapped missile tubes.

Rossiter started to hum in the next door room, to tell Barney that he was awake, perhaps it was an invitation for Barney to come and talk to him.

Barney closed down the boards of the crate, undressed, and climbed into bed.

He sat cross-legged in the sun with the boy beside him. Gathered in front of them in the shade were the men.

He wore jeans and a long-tailed shirt of green cotton outside his belt, and the flat peakless cap of the Nuristan region covered his fair hair. Flies crawled on his face and were ignored. Close to his feet, in separate parts lay a launch tube holding a single missile and the control unit of Redeye.

Barney talked quietly into Gul Bahdur's ear, pausing every half sentence for the boy's translation. Since he had brought the missile to the valley, the interest of his audience had quickened.

'You have to stand still to fire. So you have to expose yourself. If you hurry, then Redeye misses. When you fire there's smoke and then the flash as the main rocket ignites. It's two stages, booster first and then main rocket…if you stand still the main rocket firing can't hurt you, it ignites more than 20 feet from you, so you're safe. It's difficult to judge distances in the air but if the helicopter looks to you very high or very far away across the valley, then don't fire. The best range is between 600 yards and 1800 yards, less than that and the guidance system may not have time, more than that and the rocket loses strength. We go through the drill again…'

Barney fastened the missile tube to the launch unit, swift, trained movements. He eased Redeye onto his shoulder, peered through the cross-wire sight.

'You hear the helicopter coming, when you actually see it you have to stand, you track the helicopter through the sight, you fasten on the engine exhaust…'

His right eye was up against the back marker of the sight, his vision wavered across the hillsides and came to rest on a hovering hawk. He tracked the hawk, lingering with its flight.

'You switch on the battery coolant. You take your time and don't hurry. The heat of the engine exhaust talks to the guidance system — you have to listen for the buzzer that tells you Redeye has found the target of the engine exhaust — and when the buzzer is at its peak then you fire. If you've done everything I've told you, then the missile is locked on the engine exhaust and that helicopter's dead…'

The sight fell from the hawk's flight, traversed back over the far hillside, over the stones of the river bed at the base of the valley to where a stork bird stood. Barney passed Redeye towards the clutch of hands that stretched out to receive it.

'Remember, it can curve a bit and bend a little, but it's not an acrobat. It flies faster than the helicopter flies. You fire it after the helicopter, not into its path, and you don't fire straight up, not in the day. You remember that, don't you?'

He paused. No point in continuing now that they had their hands on the launcher.

He remembered the general weapons instructors at Sandhurst military academy ten years before, and the specialised weapons instructors in Hereford. One and all they'd have been tipping towards coronaries if they'd had this lot for cadets. Redeye was tugged from one set of hands to another. One tribesman wriggled on his haunches a few feet from the group so that he could savour in greater isolation the feel of the launcher on his shoulder before it was wrenched from him.

'Do they understand the camera?' Barney said to the boy.

'Of course.'

'And they know what they have to try to bring me back?'

The boy rifled in the breast pocket of his shirt, produced a new notebook.

'Underneath the gunner's seat, behind armoured doors, is the fixed pod containing stabilised optics for target acquisition and tracking. Beside that is the radio command guidance antenna…' The boy read carefully from the notebook. 'Above the gunner's position is the low speed air data sensor, that you want as well. From inside the cockpit of the pilot you want photographs of all the dials…'

'Do you have to read it?'

'I know it by heart,' the boy said.

'If you didn't have a notebook could you remember it?'

'I know everything you have said…'

Barney snatched the notebook from Gul Bahdur's hand. He read the clear copper plate writing. He flipped the pages, then tore out all those that covered the shopping list of the helicopter's instrumentation. He ripped the paper to small pieces, scattered them on the ground.

'Why did you do that?' Shrill anger from the boy.

'In case you're captured, that's why.'

Barney stood up, his face was twisted away from the boy. He started to walk, a lizard that was sand-coloured and perfect in camouflage scrabbled clear of his feet. The boy caught up with him and, like a father, Barney put his arm around Gul Bahdur's shoulder.

'When are you going?'

'Tomorrow.'

'And you will be gone…?'

'A week, not more. Only into Paktia province, across the border. There are many helicopters in Paktia.'

'You go carefully,' Barney said.

The boy looked up into Barney's face. 'We are fighting the jihad, that is the holy war. What have I to fear? If I die in the jihad, what have I lost?'

'I just said you were to go carefully.'

'If I die I am a martyr.'

'If you are captured you are a disaster.'

Barney walked on towards the Volkswagen. The boy followed him, and after him the men, and amongst them and hidden from Barney's sight was the Redeye missile.

Barney came up the bungalow steps. From the verandah he could hear Rossiter singing '…and did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England's mountains green…' supported by the echo chamber of the bathroom.

All the way back to the bungalow the doubt had eaten at him. Barney sat at the table in the living room, he was dirty and dust-strewn, and he listened to the singing and the splashing of water, and the hiss of the underarm spray.

Rossiter came out of the bathroom. He had a towel round his waist, and was buttoning a clean white shirt over his chest. Barney felt the filth in his hair and the warm wetness and the chafe of his trousers at his groin. Barney's head dropped into his hands. He closed his eyes. He felt a great tiredness. He heard the suck of exasperation from Rossiter.

'You're not coming?'

'Coming to what?'

'Don't play the bloody ass — to the party.'

'I told you what I thought about us chucking ourselves around town.'

'Your funeral…for me, I'm going to be bright and busy and in good time for the festivities. You want the sackcloth, laddie, your problem…' Rossiter was moving to the door of his bedroom. 'And get the stuff ready, please, Barney. As soon as I'm decent, we'll drop Mr Redeye off at the camp. After that if you want to sit here like a bleeding abbot…'

He disappeared into his room.

'They're not ready to go,' Barney said quietly.

'…If you want to sit here on your bum and play with yourself…'

'I said, they're not ready to go.'

Rossiter reappeared. He seemed to play the senior officer, the man who had the Brigadier's letter of introduction, and his uniform was an unbuttoned shirt and a damp towel. 'The schedule gave you a fortnight, and that's what you've had.'

'I didn't draw up the schedule, and I'm telling you that they're not ready.'

Rossiter smiled coldly. 'You're telling me that in two weeks you've failed to prepare them, that it?'

'I'm not on a bloody promotion course, Rossiter, and I don't have to and I won't take that shit. I'm telling you that they're not good enough.'

Perhaps Rossiter thought the towel would fall. He grasped the knot tightly. 'What do you want me to do, Barney?'

'I want a stop put on it, I want another week. I told you before — this isn't an easy weapon. If I had British infantry kiddies, I'd want more than a fortnight.'

'Don't give them all the missiles at one go. Keep some back.'

'Where does that get us?'

Rossiter sighed. 'It gets us that if this crowd screw up, then we find someone else to have another go.'

Barney flared up out of his chair. 'Very bloody bright, and wrong for two reasons. Wrong because if they screw up they'll lose the launcher of which we have one, so nobody gets a second chance. And second, because if they screw up they're all dead.'

'I'll think about it,' Rossiter said, and disappeared into his bedroom.

'There's nothing to think about. I've told you they're not ready.'

'I'll think about it.'

'How long are you going to think about it?'

'I am going to a party. Not your bloody doubts, nor your bloody wild horses, will not keep me from that party. While I am at that party I will think about it. When I come back I will have made my decision. Got it, Barney? My decision…'

Barney stormed out of the front door, heard it slam behind him and then fly open.

He was opening the door of the Land Rover when he heard the shout from Rossiter's bedroom. 'I need the bloody transport tonight. You know I need it.'

Barney turned the key in the ignition. 'Get yourself a taxi,' Barney said to himself. Rossiter couldn't have heard, because the engine had coughed to life. '

He drove west towards the foothills of the mountains that were the frontier with Afghanistan. When the dark steep shadows crowded close to the road, he had parked and locked the Land Rover on the hard shoulder.

He sat, alone with his thoughts and his doubt, on a smoothed rock.

It was just a job, the training of an Afghan resistance group to shoot down a Soviet helicopter with a man-portable surface-to-air missile. But a job should always be done well. That was his own training. And these bastards weren't ready.

The stars glimmered down at him, down at him and down at the high wilderness of Afghanistan where the helicopters flew and where a group would be badly savaged if they went before Barney Crispin was satisfied that they were ready.

There was just enough reflection from the apples and pears painting above the bookshelf in the living room for Howard Rossiter to comb his hair. He had the problem of all balding men who seek to cut a dash, to comb back and to hell with it, to comb forward and pretend. He was buggered if he knew what to do about Crispin's whining.

He heard the sharp rap at the front door. He felt a shiver — ridiculous, but he felt it. He went to the front door. Through the glass he could see the young man standing under the verandah light. Slim, European, familiar in a vague way. Rossiter opened the door.

'Yes?'

'Can I come in?'

'Who are you?'

'You don't remember me…? I brought you a crate. You've a short memory.'

Rossiter remembered the messenger boy from the High Commission in Islamabad. Complacent little prig. It was the drawling, satisfied voice he recognized.

'I've come to mark your card.'

'So mark it,' Rossiter said crisply.

'Easy, sir…' The 'sir' was a sneer. 'I've just flogged up from Islamabad. My name's Davies, I've come to mark it before you drop us all in the shit, which is what you seem to be trying to do.'

'Have your say, Mr Davies, then please go away.'

The spook was in no hurry. He walked easily round the room, stopped with his back to the opened door of Barney's room. Confident, relaxed, amusing himself. He wore slacks and a short-sleeved shirt.

'What did you say your name was?'

'I didn't say what my name was,' Rossiter said.

'I've come to tell you that you're attracting attention.'

Rossiter felt the draught in his stomach. 'Who's been asking?'

'Security in Islamabad…who you are, what you're doing here?'

'What's been your answer?'

'Not easy to answer when we're in the dark…that you're something to do with the charities. As yet Security hasn't shifted itself sufficiently to find out more, why you're spending time with one of the groups, as yet…'

'If I was into the charities then I'd be meeting groups.'

'The people you're with, I'm told, aren't the ones who'd be interested in blankets and sacks of grain. Anyway there's a setup for charities and you've ignored it. You're making a bit of a ripple. And it's a crap group.'

Rossiter's lips were close set, pinched. He spoke with a whistle between his teeth, and he was late for picking the woman up, for phoning his taxi. 'You'd better tell me.'

'I thought you knew all the answers. The ones who do the fighting are round Kabul, round Kandahar, round Jalalabad — round where the Soviets are. The ones who talk about the fighting are round Peshawar. You're with the talkers. If the best you could find was them, then you're pretty useless. You wanted to be told.'

'We have a high level government clearance.'

'If you hadn't had, I'd have seen to it that you were out on your necks by now.'

'How long do we have?'

'Perhaps a week. I've said I'll check you out with the charities in London…not for your bloody sakes I'm doing it. I got a packet of fallout last time we had idiots here and nothing more to send home than those backpacks in a cardboard box courtesy of the Yanks.'

'We'll be quiet for a week, after that we're on our bikes,' Rossiter was trying to smile and failing.

Davies returned a warm and winning smile. 'What's the real game — what's the radio for?'

'I was just going out when you came.'

The smile slipped from Davies' face. Quickly he turned, twisted, went fast into Barney's bedroom. Before Rossiter had reacted, the spook had found the manual that was under Barney's pillow. Rossiter tried to shake it from him, and was shrugged away. He stood by the door, panting.

'It's a fucking manual for missiles…' the spook whispered in wonderment. 'Ground-to-fucking-air missiles.'

Rossiter went back into the living room. 'You have to forget what you saw.'

The spook was breathing heavily, he followed Rossiter. 'I'll tell you something. The weapons that come through Pakistan are controlled. There's not a drought and there's not a flood. There's just enough to keep it going. Too little and the war ends, too much and the war escalates into Pakistan. That's the understanding and it suits everybody.'

Rossiter had regained his composure. 'Don't give me that rubbish. If ground-to-air missiles suit your government, then they suit you.'

'What comic strip did they dig you out from?'

'Just run along like a good lad and keep your friends in Islamabad stalled for a week while you wait for verification of us from the charities…' Rossiter managed a smile now, an ice smile. 'That would be the best thing you could do.'

The spook, Davies, on the payroll of the Secret Intelligence Service and running the Islamabad desk while his chief was on long leave and who was nominally a Second Secretary (Consular/Visas) at the High Commission, walked out of the living room and into the night without a word.

Rossiter heard the start of a car's engine. As soon as it was gone he slapped his hands together to control his trembling. Rossiter knew what he would do. First he went to his bedroom and stripped off the blanket from his bed, then took more blankets from the top shelf of the wardrobe. Inside Barney's bedroom he manhandled the crate from under the iron frame and lifted off the crate top. He wrapped four missiles in the blankets, and hid with them the launch control unit and the loaded Polaroid camera and the spare film cassettes and a carton of flash bulbs.

The sweat dripped and ran on his body, he could not control the trembling. When he was asked over the telephone for the destination of the taxi he required, he gave first the Peshawar address of the group's camp and second the street of the International Red Cross compound.

Three hours before dawn the Volkswagen van started out for the town of Parachinar in the blunt salient of Pakistan territory jutting into Afghanistan and eighty miles from Peshawar. Against the leather sandals of the men, spread on the floor, were four Redeye missiles in their protective casing and launch unit, and Howard Rossiter's blankets. Gul Bahdur sat beside the driver, nestled close to his shoulder, the Polaroid hanging around his neck, and recited silently the words that he had memorised.

'Underneath the gunner's seat, behind armoured doors…'

Over the holed, winding road it was a six hours' drive to Parachinar, where they would eat and then sleep. Later they would drive for another hour and then leave the van and collect the small arms that were not carried in the refugee camps; and start the climb to the Kurram Pass.

'Beside that is the radio command guidance antenna. Above the gunner's position.'

Soon the boy was asleep, cuddled by the warmth and motion of the van.

In an hour it would be light.

Barney left the Land Rover in the road, walked briskly towards the darkened bungalow. He felt no tiredness. He felt as if he had been resurrected by the commune under the stars. He wondered if Rossiter would now agree with good grace to give him the extra week, and he thought how he would use it and how he would insist on organising the group to be certain that only one man had the responsibility of firing Redeye.

He let himself into the living room. He went silently towards his room. He heard a woman's giggle, and a deeper laugh, and a whisper for quiet, and the metalled heaving of a bed.

Lying on the sheet of his own army neat bed was the Redeye manual. He saw the tip of the crate protruding beyond the bed side. He bent, scraped it out, lifted the loosened lid, and counted the four launch tubes and the launch control mechanism gone. Quietly, in fury, he opened the cupboard drawer to find the Polaroid and the spare cassettes and the flash bulbs gone too. He swept out through his door.

He threw open the door into Rossiter's room. His finger found the light switch, snapped it down. Rossiter sat on the side of his bed, his eyes blinked at the ceiling light and then in hatred at Barney. He was naked save for one sock. Sitting across his waist, naked too, with her legs wrapped hard at his hips, with her arms around his neck, was a woman who was dark haired and plump and red skinned and sweating.

'Fuck you, Crispin,' Rossiter shouted.

The woman screamed.

'Get that cow out of here,' Barney said.

A sob gathered force in Rossiter's throat. 'You bastard…'

The woman whimpered, buried her face in Rossiter's chest.

'Get her out,' Barney said.

Now Barney turned away. The woman was crying. She slid off Rossiter, twisted him, hurt him. She stumbled across the tiles to retrieve her scattered clothes and ran past Barney into the living room.

With his heel Barney kicked the door shut behind him. 'You treacherous little behind-the-back bastard.'

'You came in here to tell me that?'

'You hadn't the nerve to tell me to my face?'

Fear on Rossiter's face, wide and staring eyes under the thin tangle of his hair. He tugged the single sheet on his bed across his lap. 'You weren't here, you don't know what happened.'

'What's happened is that you've sent a rubbish group away when they're not ready.'

'I didn't have a week.'

'They needed that week.'

'They needed it, they couldn't have it. The spook came. Security in Islamabad are interested in us. We're on our way in a week — a week's how long the bloody cover can stretch.'

Barney felt hideously ashamed, soiled.

'You weren't here, where in God's name were you? If we'd waited a week we'd have had to go home without any group going at all.' Rossiter rolled onto his side on the bed.

He was pathetic. His white stomach flopped close to the outline of his drawn up knees, the hanging light glistened the skin on the crown of his head. He was weeping. 'That's the best woman I've known in years. A nurse — a kind sweet woman. You think I get that at home…?'

The front door slammed. There was a clatter of heels on the wood planks of the verandah.

'The spook came here?'

'It'll keep until the morning,' Rossiter said bitterly, and his cheeks were wet. 'I've a lady to take home. It's only one helicopter we need. We're not joining their bloody war.'

Barney went back to his room, undressed, and fell on his bed.