In Honour Bound

Chapter 5

When he had left the Officers' Quarters for the staff briefing he had unfastened the leather holster flap, tested that the lanyard was secured to the handle of the weapon. It was standing orders that officers in uniform should be armed when walking out in Kabul, Pyotr Medev thought the order was of particular relevance to those such as himself who were unfamiliar with the capital city, who were occasional visitors from the out of town divisional commands. Once a week the MilPol had the job of scraping some idiot out of a bloodstained gutter, in uniform or civilian clothes. One of his own corporals had gone that way.

He had noted the cluster of Soviet civilians in front of him, men and women, slacks and open shirts and pretty floral frocks, meandering past the small stores. He had noted the four man patrol that was behind him. He was sandwiched and safe as he walked.

He had turned into the bazaar that bulged with the smells and sounds of this high-table city. Men cried from their shop fronts for custom, youths carried on their turbaned heads the wide trays of meats and cakes, children skipped between the donkeys and the horses that showed their lined rib cages. But no one barged into the path of a Soviet officer wearing the uniform of Frontal Aviation and the shoulder insignia of Major. They wafted around him as though he did not exist.

They were animals. They were dirty, filthy, ignorant and cruel. He didn't give a shit for the animals. He shouted that in his mind.

As Medev walked he checked again that the civilians were in front of him, that the patrol was behind. A careful man would return to his home at the end of a year.

There was a small, sharp grin at Medev's mouth, triggered by the thought of home, mingled with the thought of why he was now in the bazaar where the high-sided buildings shut out the high sun. Home was five weeks away, home was a woman that he sometimes loved and a small boy that he perpetually adored, but he walked in the bazaar to buy a trinket of jewellery for a married girl, bored and entertaining, and living in the Mikroyan residential sector for Soviets in Kabul. Visiting the wife of a Ukrainian agronomist on his journeys to staff briefings in Kabul roused in Medev the same excitements as piloting the Mi-24 gunship.

A child ran from a sack-draped doorway and pulled a blind man from his path.

Medev had been far away. He had not seen the blind man with the yellowed socket eyes. When he was past the blind man and the boy, Medev heard the gurgle of gathered spit in the boy's mouth, heard it smack on the street dirt behind him. He did not turn.

He lifted his wide-brimmed cap, smoothed down his short sandy hair, felt the perspiration settle on the back of his hand.

A dog hustled across the street, moving fast and low on emaciated legs, clutching raw meat in its jaws. A thrown stone hit the rear legs, spinning it, collapsing it. A man sprinted forward, billowing clothes, a shout of fury, a stick raised. The dog was beaten. It yelped, it howled under the blows, but it would not release the meat. The blows rained on the dog's spine. If a man would do that to his own dog how would he thrash a Soviet? The nightmare of a pilot was that the helicopter should plummet down towards the dry river bed of a valley, and that the pilot should live. It was the nightmare that was always with him, with him in each waking moment, harboured in each sleeping hour. Even when he walked to find a brooch of lapis lazuli to take to the woman who was married to an agronomist.

He could see the bright shirts and dress materials of the civilians in front. He looked behind and saw the patrol.

He was thirty years old. For eleven years he had flown helicopters. He had served two tours in the forward squadron bases in the DDR with the Mi-24A. He was a graduate of the Cadet Academy of Moscow, he had passed through the Staff College of Frontal Aviation at Kiev. He was qualified as an instructor on the Mi-24D. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was of the elite, he was of the chosen ones. He was a professional serviceman. At the airbase at Jalalabad in Nangarhar province he commanded two flights, each of four Mi-24D helicopters. Each month he came to Kabul for 36 hours of intensive debriefing by the staff officers of the Taj Beg palace, headquarters of the Soviet High Command.

He stopped beside a table of jewellery. Behind an opened doorway, deep in the recesses of the shop, men were squatting at their work, shapes in shadow, only the sounds of their tool-work clear. Hanging from the arch of the doorway were old curved swords and a musket that was called a jezail.

Close to an old man with the whitened beard and the tight-wrapped turban who sat behind the table were hookah vessels of brilliant blue glaze. The old man sat on a rich carpet square. The Soviet officer loomed above him. Medev pointed to a lapis brooch. Without speaking the old man counted out the price of the brooch with his fingers.

Medev knew the game. From his hip pocket he took a wad of Afghan notes. Medev's turn to count, notes to the value of a half of the sum that the old man had indicated. Medev picked up the brooch, dropped the notes on the table, walked away. He heard the protest croak of the old man.

Animals, weren't they? And right that they should be treated like bastard animals.

He went on his way. She would have prepared some food and after that he would have two hours only before he must collect his transport and get himself to the airport's military side for the flight back to Jalalabad.

The faint bleating of the mule had attracted them.

They stood, half a dozen men, on the narrow path high above the floor of the valley.

They stood and looked over the edge to the miniaturised rocks and smoothed boulders below the rock wall. On such a path, so insecure, it was not hard to believe that the two laden mules could have stumbled and fallen. They were two hundred feet above the pain-filled cry of the animal in which some small portion of life remained.

One man stood apart from the group. He wore the same clothes as they did, the fustian trousers, the baggy grey shirt with the tails loose to his knees, the wound turban of blue on his head, but he was apart. There were boots not sandals on his feet, old and worn but still serviceable. His beard and moustache were a cropped grey stubble as if once a week he abandoned the attempt to grow a full length of hair and shaved himself with a blunted razor. He was taller, his eyeline fully three inches higher than the men with him. Across his chest were two ammunition belts swathed diagonally, and cradled in the elbow of his right arm was a Kalashnikov assault rifle, two magazines strapped head to toe.

The man took no part in the debate on the crying mule.

When he wiped a fly from his nose he used his left arm and the motion drew back his sleeve and revealed a metal claw in the place of his left hand. The claw was flecked with ochre rust set as a rash in the black paint.

On the back of each of these men was a coarse webbing pack, and thrusting from the top of each pack were clustered tail fins of mortar shells. In the pack of the man who stood apart were three 88mm mortar shells, shiny and bright with the new Cyrillic lettering of Soviet ordnance. He seemed to carry no food and no spare clothing. With the smooth surface of the curve of the claw he rubbed gently against the weathered skin of his nose, wrinkled skin because he was not a young man.

The men were gathering for an ambush on the convoy that came every two weeks from Kabul to replenish the supplies of the Afghan Army garrison at Gardez in Paktia province. When such an attack was prepared by the Resistance, when there was the need for a force of more than two hundred mujahidin then the word would spread as a whisper of wind through the villages, and the men would gather at a given point. It was not for two hundred fighting men to remain in concentration for any but the briefest time, the helicopters dictated that. When the call came, the whisper, the men collected.

As soon as the attack was completed they went their separate ways. These half dozen would reach their rendezvous that evening. They had little time now to spare.

One man aimed a stone down the cliff precipice and missed the head of the live mule and struck it in the stomach and the mule gave out a shrill scream, and the man laughed.

Another man waved Maxie Schumack forward, made a gesture of shooting. They liked to watch him fire his Kalashnikov. It always amused them to see the way he clamped the shoulder stock of the rifle hard into his right shoulder and rested the barrel on his outstretched and crippled left arm. When the echo of the single shot died in the valley there was only silence. They had no time to recover the loads on the mules' backs. They set off along the path, Schumack a little behind.

He was apart from these men, yet with them. He had found the relationship that he desired. Apart but accepted. He asked for nothing more.

Pyotr Medev wondered what in exact terms was the work of an agronomist. He sat in his long underpants at the table of the small living room listening to Ilya singing from the kitchen.

He was drinking from the neck of a beer bottle when she came out from the kitchen.

She had tied a towel round her waist, and her tanned breasts hung towards the towel's knot, her hair still sweat-streaked from their love-making hung to her shoulders. What did an agronomist do? What could make it worthwhile to be down in Kandahar grubbing in the dirt beside a stinking irrigation channel, when this creature was abandoned back home? And Ilya was nuzzling her cheek against his ear, and the breasts and the nipples were playing patterns on his back, and there was a salad plate with sliced sausage in front of him, and another beer bottle on the table. He drank his beer, he picked at his sausage. She reached for his underpants, and tugged the elastic of the waist band. He groaned through a mouthful of meat, tomato dribbled from the side of his mouth. Medev sighed. The breasts, large and soft and warm and sweated, covered his mouth now, and he nibbled and felt her hand going down over him. He turned his head, extricated himself, drank from the bottle, ate from the plate, then spluttered at the sensation won by the painted nails of her fingers. Sometimes he wished she would say something, she never seemed to think it necessary. As if she could cope with signs, signs and the heavy bloody breathing.

It wasn't as if he was doing the agronomist any harm. He wouldn't have wanted to hurt the poor bastard. She'd have to play the good actress when winter came, when he made it back from Kandahar. She'd been taught things by Pyotr Medev, things that a good Georgian girl should stay ignorant of. She'd be explaining all night if she wheeled out her new tricks when he came back from Kandahar. It was three months since Medev had met Ilya, a spring afternoon at the Kargha Lake where an officer could swim in some safety, and find himself a nurse from Kabul's military hospital if he was lucky. Three months and three visits later. They hadn't wasted time. And who had time to waste? Not a bored woman in the Mikroyan residential complex while her husband was digging a ditch in Kandahar. Not an officer who commanded the pilots who flew the convoy escorts, who had to bring the big birds down through the cones of rifle and machine gun fire. Shit, and the armour was thick and good on the belly of the big bird…and if it wasn't they'd all have been home months ago in the body bags what was left of them, in the body bags and not feeling those bloody nails down in his crotch.

She wriggled on his knee so that the towel knot loosened. She was going to be the sweet death of the poor agronomist when he came back from Kandahar. Better stay put, old friend. Stick to the irrigation ditch, keep the good cold water up to your thighs.

And it wasn't as though he was being unfaithful to the woman back in Moscow. Not really unfaithful, though the nails worked at him and teased him and the towel fell further, because she wouldn't have an idea, his wife in Moscow, of flying the big bird, Mi-24D, in combat up the long Afghan valleys, over the high Afghan mountains.

Safe enough up there, up in the azure, up in the cloud, the evil waited at ground level. Only took a lucky hit or a fuel pipe blockage or a stress fracture that Maintenance hadn't caught, and he'd be down into that evil that was the ground. He'd shoot himself, he wouldn't stand about and wait, he'd shoot…

Shit, and he was with a woman, a woman with hungry breasts and wide hips, a woman into whom he could drive himself and bury himself. He cleared the food from his throat, he swigged the dregs from the beer bottle. He stood up, he picked Ilya high off the floor and her legs circled his waist so that he could carry her better, and she laughed out loud and he managed a smile, and carried her to the bedroom. For a month he could savour her. A memory for a month. He had no photograph of her, because if he carried it in his flying suit and was killed and his body recovered, then the picture would travel with his watch and his wallet back to Moscow.

If he had left a photograph of her in his quarters in Jalalabad and failed to return from a mission, then the picture with his other possessions would slip into the plastic sack to go to his wife and his son. And that was why when he took her to bed he never closed his eyes, never ever, because if his eyes were open then he would remember her better when he flew over the mountains and valleys, above the convoys, through the rifle fire.

The bed shook and creaked and heaved as the Major made a play at loving the agronomist's wife.

Four days out on the trail from the salient of Parachinar, the group of Hizbi-i-Islami mujahidin with whom Mia Fiori travelled had stopped at this village for food and sleep.

But she was a nurse so she was taken at once to the house of the mullah, and was shown the wounded. She spoke only a few words of the dialect of the Pathan tribespeople — but enough to communicate the basics of information.

Her destination was the Panjshir valley, eight or nine days and nights march ahead.

The mujahidin who escorted her would allow her to spend this one night caring for the wounded they found in the village. She had little influence over these people. It would have been different if the doctor had travelled with her, but a sudden stomach infection had put the doctor to bed in Peshawar and dictated that she travel alone with the Hizbi-i-Islami. Mia Fiori had work that had to be done in the Panjshir and she had determined to make the journey. In this village, through the hours of darkness, she could accomplish her best at cleaning and cauterising the wounds, she could feed into these wracked bodies a little of the morphine that she carried in her back pack, and then when the dawn came she must walk away from them to the next village.

There had been fourteen in the group, she was told. Eight were dead already. Five more lay on the makeshift bedding that had been spread across the swept concrete floor of the mullah's house. A boy cowered in the black shadow against a windowless wall of dry stone, hunched in a blanket, protecting something hidden. Already there was the stink of infection from the opened bowel wounds, from the embedded shrapnel, from the protruding bone splinters. She was not a surgeon, she was a nurse. She did not have the skills of surgery, nor the equipment.

On her knees she moved amongst the wounded five, dabbing with lint cloth. When she looked up and into the faces of the watching tribesmen she was met with only cold stares. As if they read her despair and wondered why she bothered. Death in the jihad was martyrdom, why then prolong a hopeless life? To win them a little comfort, she exhausted that small stock of morphine.

She had long hair, dark and curled in ringlets and falling over her ears. She had deep wind-tanned cheeks. She had the strong nose of a fighter, and the chin of a combatant.

Something of the hawk in her face, something too of the lion. A small bosom that would go unnoticed under a grey cheesecloth blouse. Long and rangy legs, loose moving in the full skirt that when she stood would cover her ankles. Grey socks rolled low on her ankles and heavy duty walking sandals.

Mia was not concerned about her appearance. The passing of the first bloom of her youth was a matter of supreme indifference to her. Appearance had not helped her as a teenager living in the tower flats of Rome's Via Nomentana, nor when she trained in nursing at the Policlinico, nor when she married the club-foot French medical student who was misshapen and whom she loved, nor when he had qualified and they married and he had piled their old Renault into an unlit parked lorry, nor when she had buried him. Appearance was an irrelevance when she had taken a job as a ward nurse in a public hospital close to St Germain. On a bright spring morning, without a comb in her hair and without cosmetics on her face, she had walked into the back street office at Aide Medicale Internationale and said matter-of-factly that she had her summer leave to fill. She had spent the previous summer with a doctor and another nurse in the Panjshir. She had spent the long Paris winter fretting again for her leave and the chance to return. A long winter of dreaming of a sort of homecoming, and on the floor of the mullah's house was the reality of the homecoming.

She stood up, and shrugged. The men gazed back at her without emotion.

Of course she knew of the jihad. All last summer the creed of the holy war and sacrifice had been belted into her by the fighters. Mia was a survivor. She sighed, and cleaned her hands on a cloth. The kerosene threw waving shadows through the room, flickered in the eyes of the men, flashed on their teeth. There were the soft, patient sob groans of the wounded for whom she knew there was no hope. She saw the boy in the corner, against the far wall from the doorway. He was wrapped in a blanket of fine bright colours and his knees made a tent of the blanket and were drawn up against his chest, and he shivered in shock, and there was dark congealed blood on his forehead.

She came close to him, knelt in front of him, seemed to shield him from the scene of dying men.

'Parla I'italiano…I'inglese?'

'English, I speak English'. A little whispered voice.

'I can speak in English. My name is Mia. What is your name?'

'I am Gul Bahdur.'

'You were with these men?' She gestured behind her. 'How long ago?'

'Four days ago, the helicopters came…I have to go back to Peshawar.'

'When you are ready you can go back. First you must rest.'

'I have to go back to Peshawar.' The boy was crying. He struggled against the tears and failed.

'When you are ready.'

Mia wiped at the tears on the soft brown cheeks of the boy. She held his chin in her hand to steady the trembling and peered at the head wound.

'It is nothing,' the boy said.

'It is your only wound?'

'It is nothing, I am here to wait for my companions to come with me.'

She felt the boy draw back from her as she dabbed at the wound. She looked into his eyes, into his youth. 'Why do you have to go back to Peshawar, Gul Bahdur?'

'I have to.'

Mia pulled back the blanket, catching the boy by surprise. She saw the Redeye missile launcher, the light of the kerosene lamp winked on the wires of the sighting. It was something she had not seen before. She dropped the blanket, concealed it.

'You have to take that back?'

The boy did not reply.

She reached into her back pack, took out a bandage and wrapped it fast and tight on the boy's forehead. His eyes glowed beneath the white of the bandage, his hair peeped above the binding. She knotted the ties, then stood up. She went back towards the five men on the floor, looked down on them, shrugged again. The gesture was understood, and the despair in her face.

Only in the Panjshir were the nurses and doctors who came from Paris accorded a genuine welcome. In the Panjshir the resistance had achieved a liberated zone. In that valley the doctors and nurses were honoured. Away in the high desert lands of the Hazaras a French doctor had been forced to quit when the village people he sought to help would not feed him because their mullah had branded him an unbeliever. But whether they were welcomed, or whether they were shunned, the small medical teams with their trifling supplies of French-donated drugs and antiseptics, lived and worked in the knowledge that their efforts were pitifully small.

And there were dangers. After the principal guerrilla commanders, the Soviets put the doctors and nurses on the top of the list for death or capture. Eight years in a Kabul gaol had been the sentence handed down to a young French doctor trapped in a surrounded village. Perhaps they all felt a sense of adventure, the doctors and the nurses, when they went to the offices of AMI to offer their services. But the spirit of adventure died fast inside Afghanistan. The first sight of a foot blown away by a butterfly anti-personnel, the first sight of a body disembowelled by the rocket's splinters, the first sight of the lemon-sized exit wound of a high explosive bullet, all of those extinguished the spirit of adventure. And for Mia Fiori it was a daily sorrow when she must move on, away from men that she could not help.

She had nursed in tragic, miserable public wards in Paris, and she had learned to hide her feelings well. Harder here, bitterly hard.

An hour later Mia left the village, a tall and long-striding figure in the middle of the column of weapon-laden men of the Hizbi-i-Islami mujahidin, and was swallowed in the pale dusk light.

The sun cascaded in gold over far mountains to the west as the helicopter wound along the thread of the Kabul river.

They flew high, more than a thousand metres, safe from ground level small arms fire.

Medev had waited nearly two hours at the officers' transportation shed at the military side of Kabul's airport before the helicopter was ready to fly. He was in lacklustre humour, always the same when he was leaving Ilya, going back to Jalalabad.

He could smell the scent of her body on his skin, he thought he could feel the taste again of her tongue in his mouth. A Colonel sat beside him in the hold of the Mi-4 troop carrier, beneath the pilot's cockpit. Behind the Colonel and Medev sat six conscripts of Mechanised Infantry. The Colonel offered Medev a slug of vodka from a hip flask. The conversation was desultory above the engine noise. Soon after take off, the sun slipped from sight.

It was a journey of an hour, going fast enough as Medev brooded on the agronomist's wife and five more weeks to be served in Afghanistan. One more visit to Kabul. One more afternoon with Ilya. Then the long flight on the Aeroflot back to Moscow, and Medev's back turned once and for all on this shitty place. Everyone believed in their own war, didn't they? It wasn't said out loud, but he supposed the Americans must have believed in their Vietnam. And the British in the South Atlantic, they would have believed in their war, although that was the reimposition of the colonialist regime. And the Israelis in the Lebanon. Medev believed in the war of Afghanistan, just wished most of the time that another bugger was there to fight it for him.

And he thought they were winning. Bloody slow, but they were winning. He had studied Vietnam. Sometimes he thought of the awfulness of fighting a war, Vietnam or Afghanistan, when you knew you were not winning. At least they were winning in Afghanistan. The helicopters were decisive, his helicopters, his Mi-24s.

'You're in helicopters?'

'I have a squadron of gunships, two flights,' Medev replied.

'Do they use them for Intelligence?' The Colonel grinned.

'We fly free fire reconnaissance.'

'No…no…Intelligence had a trick in Herat where I was before, using the helicopters.'

'We can be given assignments by Intelligence, if there is something particular.'

The Colonel looked at Medev as if unsure whether the Major beside him was play-acting dumb or merely stupid. 'Herat is difficult, close to the Iran border, they have the Khomeini disease there. It takes a rare power of persuasion to make the bandits talk under interrogation. Anything normal and they spit in your face. There was a helicopter squadron in Herat that cooperated in a most successful scheme for Intelligence.'

'What did they manage in Herat?' Medev felt the slow descent towards the Jalalabad navigation lights.

'They'd get hold of three of the bastards and put them in the back of a gunship and fly them up to a thousand metres. They'd throw the first one out, no questions, throw him out and let the others hear his squeal as he went out through the hatch. Sometimes the second isn't too sure if it's for real, if he has a doubt, he goes. The third always talks, that's what we found in Herat.'

Medev coughed. The vomit had risen in his throat. He swallowed hard, and wiped saliva from his lips with the sleeve of his tunic.

'I don't think we've tried that in Jalalabad.'

The helicopter landed, bounced on its four wheels, settled.

He heard the whine dissolve as the engines were cut. He undipped his seat harness, waited for the door to be opened.

He saw the perimeter lights of the Jalalabad airbase, and under the lights were the hoops of close coiled barbed wire.

The squadron's Adjutant, Captain Rostov, met him on the tarmac.

The Colonel had an entourage waiting, salutes and clicking boot heels. Medev had Rostov. A fat little creep. Not a flier, wouldn't know how to turn the engine, but good with the paperwork.

Medev shouldered his overnight grip and walked briskly past the Colonel's party. Away to his right, inside sand bag revetments was the line of Mi-24 helicopters that he commanded. Ahead of him were the lights of the Administration building of his squadron and the living quarters of his crews. Rostov followed, scurrying to keep up.

'What's happened?'

'Since you've been away?' Rostov sniggered. 'Hasn't been quiet.'

Medev punched the Captain's arm, punched it hard.

'You want the scandal first? Two Mig-25s came in this morning, testing the runway length or something, ground crew got at them. They have alcohol in the coolant and braking system of the 25. Ground crew were caught draining off the alcohol …'

'I don't believe it.' A gasp of astonishment from Medev.

'Truly, draining off the alcohol, one was already pissed, three in the MilPol cells. That's the scandal…The flight's back from Gardez…Alexei took it down you remember for a week, they're back and boasting their bloody tongues off. They hit a group four days ago, and they broke up an ambush this morning but the other lorries made it through, they reckon they really crapped on the ambush. Funny thing I heard about the hit four days ago, they reckon a rocket was fired at them…'

Medev had been listening quietly, happy to let Rostov chatter as they made their way to Administration. Now he turned his head sharply. 'What did he see?'

'If he'd seen anything he might have known what it was. Middle of the day, saw some movement, he was last in the flight, flash on the ground and didn't see what was fired, only the flash. Nothing hit him. He reckoned it was an RPG-7, that was the best he could do. Desperate, aren't they, if they're firing anti-tank rockets at helicopters?'

Medev knew the RPG-7. Effective range against a tank was 300 metres maximum. No guidance system, wasted against a helicopter. 'Couldn't be anything else.'

'Whatever it was, Alexei got them, blasted the arses off them.'

'He didn't go down?'

'Zapped them and got the hell out.'

'Couldn't be anything else because they don't have missiles.' They parted at Medev's door.

The image of his wife filled his mind, hurting him and blaming him. He never slept well when he came back from Kabul…in five weeks time he could forget the whole bastard place. He looked from the window of his small room. He saw the blazing line of the perimeter's lights and a speeding patrol jeep and a sentry with a dog. He drew the curtains and started to undress. He saw the photograph of his wife and his son.

Five more weeks.