In Honour Bound

Chapter 6

Rossiter leaned across the table at lunchtime, a meal of tinned spaghetti hoops and toast, held his chin in his hands and took the deep gulp of breath to prepare himself for a rehearsed speech.

'It's bloody stupid, Barney. It's imbecile, it's not even professional.'

'I know that, Mr Rossiter.'

'It's the way we go on at home. I don't want to bring my bloody home to Peshawar.'

'I'm sorry, Mr Rossiter.'

Barney had seen the weight drift off Rossiter's face, seen his back straighten in relief. Barney wondered when he had last apologized to a grown man, he didn't think he could remember. There might have been times when he had used a tactical apology to extricate himself from a difficulty. He doubted if since he had become an adult he had ever apologised with a wide and open face to another man. It was not his way.

'That's big of you, Barney, I appreciate that.' Rossiter kneaded his hands nervously. 'Won't you call me Ross?'

And Barney had smiled, and picked up the plates and gone to the kitchen with them.

Barney had apologised, but Rossiter had first stamped down on the ice. Perhaps the fool who might have chosen the wrong group, who might have waved himself round small-town Peshawar, who lived in a world of white men that was dead thirty years ago, perhaps Rossiter was the brave man.

On that morning after the echoing clatter of the woman's heels as she fled over the verandah, had filled the bungalow, Barney had been first to the shower, and when he had dressed he had circumspectly dismantled the wooden packing crate in his bedroom and made a pile of the boards by the window and a heap of the remaining eight Redeye missiles on his bed. The boards he buried low under the woodpile that climbed against the outside kitchen wall ready for the winter. The missiles he laid in a pit dug from the hard ground of the vegetable patch behind the bungalow, and after they were hidden he covered the newly turned earth with the spread of tomato and pumpkin fronds that he had uprooted.

For the next six days there was a truce. There was slowly and painfully a coming together.

They waited for news of the group.

Day and night the waiting, and the whine of the mosquitoes, and the scuffle of the lizards, and the lowing of distant traffic horns, and Rossiter finding any excuse to get himself away from the bungalow, and Barney sitting in his chair by the window of the living room and staring out over the verandah, and waiting. Some evenings Barney would still be in the chair in the darkened room with a closed book on his knee when Rossiter came back from wherever he went with his woman, some evenings he would stumble past Barney's chair, and go to his room with an unanswered greeting.

Sometimes, in the still evenings when he was alone, Barney tossed his memories back to family, to old photographs. He could make a vague picture of his mother, dead when he was seven. It had been many years before he had discovered the circumstances of her death. A seven-year-old hadn't been told that his Mummy was in another man's car. Wasn't suitable for a seven-year-old to know that. The picture of his father was clearer. A man who had lost his verve and his way when his son was seven years old.

The picture of his father was always of an old man with a sadness alive in his eyes, a man marked down for tragedy, and he'd found it as surely as if he'd been searching.

Barney had been nineteen, a cadet at the Military Academy, escaping from something he wasn't certain existed. In the autumn, and he hadn't been home for four months, and his father had gone to collect a pension form from a Post Office. Barney's father confronting a man with a sawn-off shot gun. Anyone else would have lain on the floor.

Gone in with his knees and his elbows, that's what they'd said at the Coroner's court and at the trial, before the front of his head ended on the ceiling of the Post Office. When your mother dies in another man's car, when your father dies protecting Post Office money that would have been replaced three hours later, then relationships tend to get stunted, that's what Barney thought. Barney Crispin's next-of-kin was listed on the Regiment's file as his Colonel. There had to be a name, so it was the Colonel's name.

They were eight days into the waiting vigil. Late afternoon. Barney sitting by the window. Rossiter was behind him in the living room, grunting and whistling in his teeth as he attacked the week-old crossword in the Daily Telegraph.

'What's "He might be said to help the car go on board, but not principally", eight and five?'

Barney didn't answer, Rossiter wouldn't expect him to.

Barney watched the boy come through the open gates into the garden. He knew immediately that it was Gul Bahdur. The sight of the boy was disaster.

Gul Bahdur sidled up the driveway, hesitated and looked at the Land Rover as if to check the authenticity of the bungalow. The bandage on his head was yellow from dust, his flapping trousers and his long shirt and the blanket gathered over his shoulder were grimed in the same colour. Barney saw the stumble of tiredness as Gul Bahdur stepped up onto the verandah, and rose swiftly from his chair.

'Eight and five, I haven't an idea,' murmured Rossiter.

Barney went to the door, swung it open, and helped the boy step inside.

'Mr Davies, I do not have to remind you of the position taken by my government in relation to aid and assistance supplied to the Afghan Resistance movement…'

'You don't have to remind me, Colonel.'

'We have always drawn the line at any form of foreign intervention.'

'I know that, sir.'

'It is our public attitude, it is also our private attitude.'

Davies from the High Commission shared a sofa in the lobby of the Islamabad Holiday Inn with a Colonel of Internal Security. The Colonel wore a dark suit, a London shirt sewn with his initials and a silk tie. Martial Law had been kind to him, popping him from conventional armoured corps staff job into the shadowed heights of Security and Counter-Subversion. Davies found it hard to keep his eyes away from the man's face. It was the way the Colonel continually rolled the tips of his moustache that attracted the spook. But this man with his precise English accent was power. Davies, the spook, must show respect for such power.

'Your government has been totally consistent in its attitude, Colonel.'

'We believe that foreign intervention in the Afghanistan war poses a dangerous threat to the interests of Pakistan.'

'Understandably.'

'We have discouraged any form of mercenary involvement in Afghanistan by foreigners operating from inside our territory.'

'Successfully discouraged it, if I may say so, sir.'

'Mr Davies, these two men in Peshawar…'

'I've had the telegram back, from Refugee Action…' Davies reached into the breast pocket of his safari shirt. 'I was going to bring it to…'

The face of the Colonel was very close to the spook's. Davies could see the sheen of the wax that bound together the moustache hairs. The Colonel's voice was very quiet, a whisper in Davies' ear, his pupils uncomfortably close and dark.

'They are not mercenaries, Mr Davies. If they had been mercenaries then your Secret Intelligence Service would not have been concerned with providing them the hasty cover of charity works.'

The spook squirmed. 'Refugee Action confirm from London…'

'Don't be silly, Mr Davies.' The Colonel's voice dropped further. The spook leaned forward to hear him better. 'They should go home.'

'What do you mean, sir?'

'I think it is clear, to me it is clear. I am not saying you are lying, I am suggesting you are merely a carrier of telegrams. Get them out immediately before I am obliged to look into the objective of their mission.'

Davies leaned back on the sofa, considered whether to continue with the fabrication.

'If they are not gone, and immediately, it will be seen as a grave provocation, Mr Davies, to my government.'

'I understand, sir.'

'Just get them out.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Would you like me to have the telegram you were about to give me?'

'I don't think that's necessary, sir,' the spook said bleakly.

The boy reached under the blanket that was wrapped around his upper body and took the missile's sighting and launch control mechanism from its hiding place. He swayed on his feet, a birch in light wind, as he held out the equipment to Barney, and lifted from under his shirt the Polaroid camera.

'What happened? In God's name what happened?' The piping voice of Rossiter.

'Sit down, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said gently. He guided the boy to his own chair.

'What the bloody hell happened?'

'Have you eaten anything?'

The boy looked from the face of Rossiter that rippled in anxiety to the calm of Barney's. He found a haven with Barney, his arms dropped loose into his lap, his neck bent, his chin fell to his chest.

'Will somebody tell me what happened?' Rossiter shrill and frightened.

'You should have something to eat, Gul Bahdur.'

The boy shook his head.

'I've some coke, would you like that?'

Again the boy shook his head, and his eyes closed for a moment and seemed to open only with effort.

'Hey, kiddie, did you get another hundred? Did you kill another hundred Soviets?' Barney said softly, with the smile of a friend.

'It's been a shambles, hasn't it?' Rossiter shouted.

Barney turned, as if reluctantly, away from the boy towards Rossiter. His voice was low. 'Will you be quiet, Mr Rossiter, please…How bad, Gul Bahdur?'

The boy was shaking, as if in pain.

'Awful?'

The boy did not have to answer. Barney squatted in front of him and looked into his eyes. 'Worse than awful?'

The boy nodded.

'Tell me.'

Rossiter pulled his chair across the room, scraping the legs on the tiles, and sat over it back to front. Barney crouched close to the boy so that he would be Gul Bahdur's target.

'Two days after we had crossed from Parachinar we were on a path over a valley, we were near to the village of Sazi. We were fourteen men and four mules. There had been a great argument amongst the older men as to where we should go to find the helicopter for the Redeye. Only two of the men knew this path. Because so few men knew it, they were all frightened when they heard a helicopter. If all the men had known the path they would not have been so frightened, we all heard the helicopter, but we could not see it, it was on the far side of the mountain. Some wanted to go back, some wanted to go forward. We were in the open on this path, it was very narrow, if the helicopter had seen us then we would all have been killed. There were two mules roped together at the front, and two mules at the back. The men were pulling at the harnesses of the front mules, pulling the harnesses two ways. One man fell. The path there was not wider than a man's stride. He was hanging to the harness of a mule. He pulled the mule from the path. His weight and that of the mule, that was enough to pull over the second that was roped. They fell all the way to the valley. Do you understand me, Barney?…On the back of the second mule we had tied two Redeyes…'

'Bloody shambles,' Rossiter sighed.

Barney bit at his lip. 'The other two, Gul Bahdur, tell me.'

'We went from Paktia into Logar province. There is a river that runs south from Kabul through the town of Baraki, they told us in a village that the helicopters often use that river as a marker when they are flying to Gardez or Ghazni. We thought that we could find a helicopter there. We had walked for a day and a half and then we found the river, we came upon it by surprise because this was not a place we were familiar with, we are all from the north of Logar, you understand me, Barney? There was a helicopter, flying fast, very low over the river, almost beneath us. The men were arguing about who should fire the Redeye. One man had the launch part and he took the missile tube from another man's back. He showed his knife to get the missile tube from the other man's back. I think we were not ready to know what you told us, Barney. I tried to tell them, Barney…they would not listen. The Redeye was fired after the helicopter, it went one hundred metres, it exploded in the ground, the helicopter was more than a thousand metres away…'

'What time of the day was it?' Barney asked without anger.

'In the afternoon.'

'Geothermal heat from the ground,' Barney said quietly.

'You told us that, I tried to shout it to them. They would not listen.'

'Pig stupid bastards.' A whine from Rossiter.

'I'm not blaming you, Gul Bahdur.'

'I told them. I promise that I told them.'

'It is very difficult to hit a low flying aircraft, I know that.'

'And the fourth missile, how did you screw that up?' The sneer from Rossiter.

'Tell me, Gul Bahdur.'

'All that night there was an argument as to who should fire the last missile. There were three men who said they were the best. By the morning it was decided that the man who was the brother of the wife of our leader in Peshawar, that he should be the man. He is not a young man…he would fire it. In the morning we walked north towards Agha valley. It is very dangerous there because they know the people feed the mujahidin from their crops. We were near to the village when we heard the helicopters. There were four, two and two. I think he remembered what you had said, the man who had the Redeye, he remembered that you had said we should not fire at the first of the helicopters. As the last went overhead, he fired…'

'Overhead?' Barney closed his eyes, no longer prepared to disguise his anguish. 'When the sun was overhead?'

'The Redeye went for the sun…you told us that is what would happen.'

'It missed?'

'It went for the sun, it exploded very high.'

The voice of the boy tailed away. The silence suffocated the room. There was a tear at the boy's eye.

Rossiter's chair scraped the quiet. He stood up. 'You all need bloody kicking, each last one of you bastards.'

The boy stared into Rossiter's shadowed face.

'The helicopter was aware of something, perhaps he saw the flash of the missile. Everyone was standing up to see better the hitting of the helicopter. We were seen. The helicopters came with rockets and machine guns. Eight were killed there, in the open. We were all in the open. Five more were wounded. I don't know how I lived, why I was saved. When the helicopters had gone I went to the village, and the people came and carried back to the mullah's house those who still lived, and buried those who had died. There was a nurse, a European, who came through the village, she could not help them. I am the only one who lived, Barney.'

'Easy, boy…' Barney's hand settled on Gul Bahdur's shoulder.

'For four days I was alone, until I came to Parachinar. I did not stop for sleep or to eat.'

'Thank you.'

The boy was sobbing, tears gurgling in his throat and snuffling in his nose. Barney picked him up and carried him into his room and laid him on the bed and drew the curtain tight and left the boy in the darkness and shut the door behind him.

'That's the end,' Rossiter said. 'Whether you were right, whether I was right.'

Barney stared back at him.

'I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. That's the end. They've wrecked it. Do you laugh or do you cry, Barney bloody Crispin?'

Barney gazed out through the window. From the verandah's light he watched a fly thrash in a spider's web amongst the leaves of a creeper on the outside wall.

Rossiter was pacing, hand behind his back and hunched. 'It's the finish. All that work and for nothing. It's pathetic.'

'What are you going to do, Mr Rossiter?'

'I'm going to drive myself to Islamabad; I'm going to avail myself of secure communications at the High Commission; I'm going to call London; I'm going to tell them it's down the drain. Have you a better idea?'

'You're in charge, Mr Rossiter,' Barney said crisply. 'You'll do what you think best.'

'That's not helpful.' A flash of uncertainty from Rossiter.

'I'm not being helpful nor unhelpful. You're in charge.'

Rossiter showed his pique, found the Land Rover keys. He went to the verandah door. 'It's not that either of us is to blame, Barney. It just didn't work out.'

'Not to blame for failing to bring down a Hind, or not to blame for sending thirteen men to their deaths?'

'That's bloody ridiculous.'

Barney walked to the kitchen. Rossiter heard the chink of a metal spoon in the coffee jar. He heard the spout of water running into the kettle. He heard the match strike.

Rossiter slammed the door shut behind him.

The Brigadier rang the front door bell of the St James's flat of the Foreign Secretary at three o'clock in the morning.

The door eased open to the length of a security chain. The Brigadier held his ID card at the gap, though he could see no one. In a few moments the chain was unhooked and the door opened. The detective was shirt-sleeved, there was a revolver poking from the waistband of his trousers and a radio hanging from a strap looped over his shoulder.

All a bit melodramatic, the Brigadier thought.

'Fotheringay…I have to see the Foreign Secretary.'

The detective pulled a face. He left the Brigadier standing in the hallway and lighting a cigarette. He went to a telephone to wake the man he guarded.

'Freddie, can we have some coffee…in the drawing room.'

The Foreign Secretary came down the stairs and led the way into the heavily curtained room. He switched on a fierce ceiling light, waved for the Brigadier to sit down.

'You have my attention.'

'Afghanistan, sir.'

'The Redeye business?'

'It's collapsed.'

The Foreign Secretary tugged at a tangle of his hair, pursed his lips. A kettle whistled, muffled, behind closed doors.

'We'll wait until the coffee's ready or would you prefer tea? No? Please smoke, Brigadier.'

The Brigadier blushed. The Foreign Secretary passed him an ashtray.

The detective carried in a tray. A jug of coffee and hot milk. He left them.

'How has it collapsed?'

'Lack of discretion by our people, the Pakistan security authorities want them out. We'd stalled on that for the last week, run up a yarn about Refugee Action to give the mission a chance. That's exhausted now.'

'You gave the mission a chance?'

'Our instructor had two weeks with a group preparing them to use Redeye. The group went into Afghanistan nine days ago, fourteen of them. They bungled it. They lost two missiles, they fired two more ineffectively. Thirteen of the fourteen died. That's how it collapsed.'

'And why are you here now?'

'To clear with you that we extricate our personnel as soon as possible. Dispose of the equipment that remains and get out. Lunchtime flight to Delhi, something like that, before the Pakistanis start hollering.'

'What are the alternatives?'

'There are no alternatives, sir.'

The Foreign Secretary played with the tassel of his dressing gown cord, quite furiously. He had not touched his coffee.

'You promised me.'

'I beg your pardon, sir?'

'You promised you were going to give me the workings of a Soviet gunship helicopter.'

'I promised that you would have our best effort.'

'And you've fouled it.'

'It's not an exact science,' said the Brigadier. 'Nothing exact about downing a sophisticated helicopter when you've got a savage on the trigger with two weeks coaching behind him.'

'Did I tell you what the Americans said to me, the provocation I was under that led me to bring you in? And now you're calling it off before we've even begun.'

The Brigadier bridled. He stubbed out his cigarette.

'I'm calling nothing off, you're calling it off. You authorised an intelligence-gathering mission. You started it and now you have to end it, sir.'

There was a light smile on the Foreign Secretary's face, the smile of the disillusioned. He said nothing.

The Brigadier fidgeted in his seat. He wanted to be out, in his own bed.

'I'll send the signal then, for them to get out soonest.'

The Foreign Secretary said, 'The man you sent to Pakistan, the Special Air Service instructor, he couldn't go and get the helicopter himself, could he?'

'A British serving officer, inside Afghanistan, with a heat-seeker missile? Preposterous and out of the question. I'm sorry, sir, I've been in Intelligence fifteen years, what you learn in fifteen years is to accept a fact. The fact is that you win a few and you lose a lot. That's the way it is, whether you're playing against the Soviets or the cousins. Another thing you learn, sir, you don't throw good after bad, when it's bad you cut and quit.'

'Well, Brigadier. I am very disappointed. I am sad beyond means at thirteen pointless deaths, but I am bitterly disappointed at the failure of your mission. Send your signal and see at least if you can end the affair without any more of a mess. Freddie,' he hardly raised his voice, but the door opened, 'please show the Brigadier out when he has finished his coffee. If you'll excuse me, Brigadier, I'll go back to bed. Goodnight to you.'

Barney came into his bedroom carrying the missiles cradled across his outstretched arms. He laid them on the rug beside the bed. The boy was sleeping, on his back, mouth open, half covered by the blanket.

Beside the missiles Barney started a small pile. A bottle of penicillin tablets, a packet of three morphine-loaded syringes, a packet of salt tablets, a bottle of glucose sweets, aspirin and dysentery and diarrhoea pills. All he had rifled from the Refugee Action surgery cupboard. Onto the pile he put the hard bar of soap that would last, and then his thick socks.

Other than that his eyes were open, the boy gave no sign of having woken.

Barney undressed. His face was set, grim masked, without expression, shadowed by the light squeezing through the half opened door. He replaced his short-sleeved shirt and his jeans with the dress of a Pathan tribesman. He climbed into the wide-waisted trousers of rough cotton, pulled tight the waist string. He slipped the long shirt over his head. Then the heavy woollen socks. He was lacing his boots when the boy spoke.

'You are going home, Barney?'

'No.'

'Where are you going?'

'Walking, Gul Bahdur.'

'Where I have been?'

'Tell me about the helicopter attack.'

The boy twisted off his back, lay on his side with his hand holding up his head. Barney threaded the laces through the eyes of the boots.

'After we had fired the missile? After that? First the helicopter we had fired against turned fast away. Then it circled us, going very quickly, as it searched for us. Then it came at us. They began with the rockets. I think four rockets at a time, then when it was very close there was the machine gun, the big machine gun, the big machine gun at the front. It came over us once and when it had gone by then it turned and stayed a little way from us. Then there were more rockets, and all the time the machine gun. Each time one of the men tried to run he was caught by the machine gun. You couldn't even fire at it, every time you fired, the machine gun came after you. When it came the last time it came so low that I could see the gunner in the front and the pilot behind. I could see their faces, Barney. And all the time the other helicopters circled high above us. They watched to see that we had all been killed. I could see their faces, then the helicopters went away. It was not a very long time, the attack.'

'Why did you carry back the launcher?'

'I think you know why,' the boy whispered.

'You tell me why you brought back the launcher.'

'Without the launcher the Redeye cannot be fired.'

'Who is to fire the missile?'

'We cannot.'

'Who is to fire the missile?' The harsh grate in Barney's question.

'You, Barney.'

The first grey of dawn nudged at the material of the curtains. Barney watched the boy's face, saw the mixed paints of caution and confusion merge into understanding and then excitement. The boy leaped from the bed and flung his arms round Barney and hugged him and kissed him on the cheeks. Gently, Barney loosed the boy's hands, set him back on the bed.

'We have to go this morning.'

'Together we are going?'

'You have to be my ears and my eyes, Gul Bahdur.'

The boy bubbled with his words, 'If we go very soon, to the Red Cross hospital, then we will catch the ambulance that runs each morning to Parachinar. The ambulance will take us. It is always possible to go in the ambulance, straight through the blocks of the Pakistan Guides…'

Barney shovelled the bottles and packets and clothes into his back pack.

He heard the Land Rover scrape the gravel of the drive. He heard the engine switched off, then the footsteps over the verandah.

'We're moving out, Barney, soon as we can,' Rossiter called from the living room. 'Taking the Delhi flight…'

Rossiter was standing in the doorway. 'What in Christ's name are you doing, bloody fancy dress?'

Rossiter peered in the half light at the backpack and the pile of missiles. 'Where the hell are you going?'

Rossiter clapped his hands, as if that were a way to escape an aberration. He spoke with slow schoolmaster's emphasis. 'We're called home. Home, Barney. It is an order.'

Barney smiled. 'You'll think of something to tell them, Mr Rossiter.'

Rossiter was white faced, eyes roving, nervous. 'You'll crucify yourself. They'll have your bloody guts for it. Don't be so bloody stupid. It's your whole bloody career…it's against the bloody orders, Barney.'

'You'll think of something to tell them, you're good at that.'

'You'd be on your own.'

'That way's best.'

Barney was tying the missile tubes together, making two bound bundles. 'I have eight Redeyes, I have one helicopter to get, then I'll come out. There's a month before the weather turns…'

'It's against an explicit order…'

'A month is long enough.'

'Don't you understand…?' Rossiter gripped at Barney's arm, was shrugged off.

'What I understand is that something was started that hasn't been finished.'

'Barney, listen to me…I may be out of my fucking mind.' Rossiter went, furiously, to his room and slammed the door.

Ten minutes later Barney was finished packing. Gul Bahdur had said nothing at all.

And then Rossiter reappeared, a fool, a crass old fool…'I'm going to go to Chitral. You know where Chitral is? I'm going to lie up there and wait for you.'

'You don't have to…'

'Don't bloody interrupt me, and don't put motives into me…so you have some back up, so there's someone to pull you out of the shit when you come back. On Shahi Bazaar in Chitral is the Dreamland Hotel, I didn't give it the bloody name…any message, any messenger goes to the Dreamland, reception, name of Howard. You have to have some back up, Barney, because they're going to crucify you for this.'

'Thank you, Mr Rossiter.'

'I don't know why I'm doing this. I must be out of my mind. They'll skin us…'

'You'll think of something to tell them. Would you take us down to the Red Cross hospital, Mr Rossiter?'

'Us? Are you taking that child back? Oh, my God. I am out of my mind.' Rossiter murmured and walked outside to the Land Rover.