In Honour Bound

Chapter 7

The would be conquerors have come many times to Afghanistan.

The armies of Alexander, the hordes of Genghis Khan, the legions of Tamerlane all thrust into the deserts and mountains and crop lands of this region. All butchered and devastated and burned, all built cities and temples in their own image, all failed. Time destroys the man who would seek to impose his will over the Pathans and Uzbeks and Tajiks and Hazaras. His cities are buried in the sands, his temple's stones have made walls for the farmers' fields. The troops of Victoria, of Imperial Britain, came twice with their baggage trains and their servants and met disaster, won a brief victory, and then retreated again.

In 1919 Britain tried for the last time to impose its authority over the tribespeople of Afghanistan and the rulers of Kabul, they brought artillery and aircraft and the machine gunners who had been the widow-makers of the French and Belgian trenches, and when they returned to their homes they had won nothing.

Some lessons are not easily learned.

In late December 1979, Soviet advisers to the puppet government took over the airfields at Begram and Kabul, preparatory to the landing of a flying column of transport aircraft that would be spearheaded by the elite paratroop units of the Red army. The 4th and 105th Airborne Divisions are the cat's cream of the Soviet fighting machine, the best paid and the best equipped and the best trained. In the wake of the paratroops came the divisions of Mechanical Infantry with their tanks and armoured personnel carriers, and above them flew the fighter bombers and the gunship helicopters of Frontal Aviation. The Kremlin had decreed that a 'sympathetic' government should not be toppled by an Islamic fundamentalist rabble.

Four years later. For the man at war, four years is a life time, four years is very often a death time. Four years later, when the general drives through the streets of Kabul from his Residence to High Command HQ, his car is lined with armour-plated steel and his windows reinforced to protect him from the assassin's gun. When the convoy drives from Kabul to Jalalabad it is studded with T-64 tanks and BTR-50 troop carriers. Four years later, the air crew and maintenance crew of an Mi-24 squadron are still working round the clock to maintain the critical air supremacy. They are not fighting the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces, not the marines who are the veterans of Da Nang, not the paratroopers who crushed their opposition at Goose Green. Their enemy is a man who cannot read a tactics manual.

Bitter lessons being learned by the armed forces of the Soviet Union four years after invasion day. Each week the body bags are loaded on the transport aircraft. Each day the wounded are strapped down in the hulls of the Antonov transports for the journey to Tashkent and Dushanbe and the intensive care wards and the rehabilitation hospitals.

Killed and maimed in Afghanistan because the scriptures of history had not been learned.

Barney Crispin could have told them. Kipling had taught Barney Crispin the lesson learned a century before the Soviets came.

The photograph of his grandfather was Barney's text book.

At first the ambulance driver had refused to take Barney and the boy to the Parachinar salient. The spitting voices of Gul Bahdur and the driver had washed over Barney as he sat in the Land Rover beside the downcast Rossiter. Barney had finally opened his door and walked to the driver and put 500 rupees of bank notes into his hand and seen the hand close. Barney lifted the back packs and the two blanket-wrapped bundles into the ambulance and laid them on the floor between the two raised stretchers. Barney went to Rossiter's door, shook his hand through the window.

'Drop me in it, Mr Rossiter, doesn't matter how deep.' A mischievous grin on Barney's face.

'Let me tell you one last time that you're a fool…'

'I'm not listening, Mr Rossiter.'

'The Dreamland Hotel, then.'

'The Dreamland Hotel on Shahi Bazaar in Chitral. I won't forget.'

'Your entire bloody career…'

'And yours, Mr Rossiter.'

'A few bits of helicopter aren't worth it.'

'You're entitled to your opinion, Mr Rossiter.'

'Is it the bits of helicopters, or is it the thirteen men I sent?'

The boy was tugging at Barney's sleeve. Rossiter had closed his eyes, dropped his head down onto the steering wheel.

Barney walked away, didn't turn, climbed into the back of the ambulance after Gul Bahdur.

It was difficult to see through the dark glass windows of the ambulance. Darra and Kohat and Thai were invisible, identified only because the ambulance slowed in their traffic, and the noise of voices and vehicles seeped into the scrubbed interior where Barney and the boy lay on opposite stretchers. Slow progress, poor roads, sometimes the siren wail when they were brought to a complete halt. Once when they stopped Barney thought he heard the sharp authority voices of the military, but the delay was trifling, and Barney was soon asleep again. An ambulance has a magical run through a road block. They drove for six hours without pulling off the road for food or drink or refuelling.

At Parachinar, Barney saw nothing of the long, dust-billowing street of the frontier town. Gul Bahdur told him that he must keep his head low, that he should not be seen through the grey glass however faintly. They were a long time negotiating that street, through the bleat of goats and the whine of sheep, their smells reaching into the ambulance. Beyond the town the pace of the ambulance quickened and the road was rougher. Barney and the boy rolled on their stretchers.

Those last miles, that last hour in the ambulance, Barney was wide awake. Concentrating and considering.

He didn't have a gun. He had no language. He had no large scale map. He had no contact other than the seventeen-year-old boy opposite him. He had no plan and he was going to war.

What had Rossiter said? Didn't know whether to laugh or cry…

Men made poor decisions under the influence of emotion. In the Regiment's world, emotion was a perverse word. But uncontrolled emotion had put Barney Crispin into the back of an ambulance running west of Parachinar towards the border. He had worked for two weeks with fourteen men to train them to shoot down an Mi-24.

Thirteen were dead, the Mi-24 might as well have wiped Barney's face with the back of a fist. That's a good culture for breeding emotion. That and the boy with a bandaged head, in shock, walking for four days to return the launcher. He expected it of Barney.

And, remoter though, was the mission's first aim. Bring back the bits. But what's this? Someone hurt? Pakistan intelligence a little cross? Oh dear, end of the party. Better get young Crispin and old Rossiter onto the next plane home. Don't mind the bits, fellows. Must keep the slate clean.

Christ Almighty.

The ambulance stopped. The back door opened, bright mid-afternoon sunlight bathed them.

The ambulance had parked beside a wood-built shelter with a roof of corrugated iron. The road behind them had been dirt, it went no further. In front was a failing path stretching to the mountains ahead. The engine of the ambulance was switched off, the noise in the air was of wind and emptiness and of the call of a circling crow. Barney lifted the back packs and the missile bundles out of the ambulance. He breathed in the air that was dry and clean and hot.

'We have to move on from here,' Gul Bahdur said.

'How far?'

'This is where the ambulance waits for the casualties from inside, sometimes the wounded come in the early morning, but if they are near to death then they will be brought across the frontier in daylight and the ambulance will take them in the evening.

In the early morning and the evening the Pakistan army is often here, the Guides. It is here that they find how the war is going inside, they talk to the fighters here and go with them to the chai khanas in Parachinar, and take tea with them. If you are here and the Guides find you…'

Barney grinned. Great start that would be, locked in the Guard House of a Guides barracks, while the shit spiralled and the telegrams flew.

'Learn one thing, boy. when I ask a question I want an answer, not a speech. How far do we have to go?'

'A thousand metres, out of sight of this place.'

On the selection course for the Regiment, on training exercises in the Brecon hills and on Exmoor, Barney had walked for ten or twelve or fourteen hours with a weight equivalent to his backpack and the launch mechanism and a bundle of four Redeye missiles.

'And then?'

'When it is dark we go through the Kurram Pass. They do not try to seal the border, the Soviets and the Afghan army…'

'Just the answers, Gul Bahdur.'

The boy's head dropped. He turned away, sulking.

'We're going to need a mule,' Barney said.

A defiant reply. 'I can carry my share.'

'I said that we need a mule.'

'I said I can carry my share.'

Barney stood in front of the boy. The driver of the ambulance lounged against the engine bonnet, watching them. Barney towered over the boy. 'Another lesson, Gul Bahdur. When I say we will have a mule, we will have a mule. When I say you cannot carry the bundle, it is because you cannot carry it.'

The boy struggled to return Barney's gaze. He was exhausted, he had not slept in the ambulance. Gul Bahdur swayed on his feet.

'Why should I listen to you?'

'Because you came back to fetch me.'

'Why should I go with you?'

'Because you have to be with me if you are to kill another hundred Soviets.'

Barney was laughing. The boy's face broke, images all together of dislike and pride and exhaustion and happiness. The boy rocked in his happiness.

'In the evenings, when the caravans come together, perhaps it is possible to buy a mule. You have the money, Barney?'

Barney tapped his chest, the leather purse hanging under his shirt from a strap around his neck. 'I have the money. Perhaps when we are inside we'll buy a tank and save our feet.'

Another gurgle of Gul Bahdur's laughter.

They looped their arms through the straps of the back packs. Barney lifted up one bundle and rested it on Gul Bahdur's shoulder and saw the boy slip under the weight, and recover. He took the second bundle. They walked along the stone and sand of the path, watched all the way by the driver of the ambulance. Twice Barney stopped him before they came to a small bluff cliff, and when they were past it they were gone from the sight of the ambulance driver. Barney went a hundred yards further, then climbed away from the path over wind-smoothed rocks. He laid down his bundle, took off his pack, went to help the failing boy. Barney flopped down between the rocks and was hidden from the path. The boy sat cross-legged near to him. Barney lay on his back in the sunshine of the late afternoon, he tilted his cap over his eyes.

'When you've found a mule that I can buy, wake me.'

Barney slept, on the slopes leading to the Kurram Pass.

Schumack sat straight-backed in the mouth of the cave. The air around him was cool, clean. The cave was high in the hills, above the scrub line that reached up a little from the floor of the valley below. Four men slept in the recess of the cave behind him, snoring and grunting, noisy shites. There would have been six, but the ambush of the previous week had taken two. Crazy men, they'd been, Schumack reckoned, standing up clear of the rock cover to fire their rifles at an armoured car and shouting some fool message about Allah and jihad, that kind of crap, inviting the machine gunner to waste them and he'd obliged. They did things, these hill men, that gave Schumack the shakes.

Their excitement at close quarters combat was enough to make a one-time Marine Corps sergeant smile. Perhaps he loved them for it. He couldn't despise them for it.

Their arses getting blasted not his. If he didn't love them, he supposed, then Schumack would not have been sitting in the cave looking down on the pin prick lights of the Jalalabad airbase. When they asked his advice, he gave it. If they didn't ask, then he stayed silent. He went his own way in combat, used his training.

Sometimes they watched him and afterwards copied him. More often, in combat, they forgot everything.

Schumack had found the war he wanted. Sometimes he thought it was the best war he could have found. It was not easy for a one-handed man, to find himself a war. Schumack was good with the mortar, good with the DShK 12.7mm machine gun that had been captured off the Afghan army in the spring with a tripod mount, and learned to be good in Da Nang and Hue and Khe Sanh, when he had cudgelled the conscript cropheads into believing they could stay alive.j There were other phantom medal ribbons that might have decorated his chest, up to the time he had flown to the Desert One rendezvous in the sand plains of Iran with the Delta team, before the abort amongst the flames of crashed helicopters and Charlie One Thirties.

He had left behind a mangled hand at Desert One, sliced away by molten aluminium, but he didn't live in the past. The present and the future concerned Schumack.

The present was sitting on his bum in a cave a long way from Jalalabad. The future was the war of the mujahidin against the Soviets. He had killed three Soviets in the last ambush, he knew that, he'd seen them fall when they spilled from the truck that was disabled. When he had first come to Afghanistan he had counted the Soviets he'd killed. He didn't count any more.

He hadn't kept a body count since he had been alone. When he had first come he had been with Chuck and Paddy and Carlo. He hadn't meant to join up, just happened because they were all in Peshawar together, and two of them had been there longer than him, and Carlo came the week alter, and they could all feed from each other. Chuck said the hairies would pay for Airborne and Marine experience, and Paddy said that the Yank spooks would pay for merchandise and photographs, and Carlo said it was decently far from the state of Oregon where there was a warrant on a shelf. Maxie wouldn't call them buddies, but at first there had been a kind of a union, as good as most marriages. That was back fifteen months. Chuck had found that the hairies wouldn't pay, and he'd walked out on them, and they heard a month later that he'd put his big fat foot on a butterfly, and what the HE had started the gangrene had finished. And Paddy had stood up in an ambush because all the hairies were standing up. And Carlo had tried to wet his wick, because in Oregon that was no big deal, and before the sun was up her father had opened his throat for the ants to have a drink.

So now he had no one with whom to keep score. Sometimes when he was lonely, and it wasn't very often, he would wonder if there was a Soviet out there behind the lamps of a base camp who would ever count Maxie Schumack on his score sheet. He'd make the bastard sweat for it.

Mia Fiori lay on the cement floor of the village school, in her sleeping bag, with her head resting on her back pack. Sometimes she would be taken away by the women to the rooms used by the elderly and teenage girls. In this village she had been given the long-unused office of the schoolmaster.

The schoolmaster had been sent to the village from Kabul in the summer of 1979. A week after he had taken charge, his throat had been cut because he came from the ruling Parcham faction of the Afghanistan Communist Party and he had spent four years at a College in Samarkand, and because it was said by the men who murdered him that he was no longer a believer in the faith of Islam.

There was a gaping hole in the roof. A helicopter's rocket had given her this window to the night skies. She had been in the village two days. Her guides said that a Soviet attack had started on the Panjshir and that it was too dangerous for her to go further forward.

How long would she be here? She might be in the village for another day, or another week. The guides looked away when she had said she was as capable as any man of climbing the mountain routes into the Panjshir. She hated wasted time. When she was idle then the memory of her husband was alive. Because she had loved him, she hated to remember him. In her sleeping bag on the floor of the schoolmaster's office, her blouse and skirt folded and placed under the back pack, the loneliness washed around her. Two French doctors and a nurse waited for her in the Panjshir, she could laugh and work with them, and she was separated from them by a mountain range and by a regiment of Soviet troops. She heard the voices of the guides in the school's only classroom. Where in their priorities lay the needs of a nurse who must rush to the Panjshir and spend a month's leave in a field hospital before returning to a Paris clinic for the long winter? Perhaps in the morning word would come that the column could go forward.

Outside the window above her head a man urinated, long and noisily, and spat on the ground when he had finished.

Barney woke.

It was dark and cold, a chill was on his skin.

He heard the strike of iron shoes on the stones.

He felt the soreness in his back from the rock on which he had slept. He heard the faint curse of the boy and a faster movement of the shoes stamping down on the ground for a sure foothold.

The shapes of the boy and of a mule against the sky were silhouetted. The boy tugged the mule after him, straining to drag it from the path and over the rocks to where Barney lay. A second mule came behind, roped to the first.

'Barney.' A quiet call in the night.

'I'm here, Gul Bahdur.'

'I brought two mules.'

Barney heard the sighs of the animals' breath, and the scrape of slipping feet. He sat up. He could smell the mules and the scent of dry fodder and the odour of old excrement.

'You stole the mules?'

'I did not.' Defiance from the boy.

'If you have two mules, if you have no money, then you must have stolen them.'

Barney yawned, rubbed his eyes.

'I paid for the mules.'

'With what?' Barney wondered why he argued. They had the mules. If the kid had nicked them, what did it matter?

'With your money, Barney,' the boy said proudly.

Barney's hand went inside his shirt to the leather pouch. He pulled it open, held it close to his eyes. The pouch was empty.

'You took it off me?' A sharp anger in Barney's voice.

'I had to pay for the mules.'

'You cheeky bugger.' Whispered astonishment from Barney. 'While I was asleep…?'

Barney stood up. He felt the boy's hand pull at his arm, he felt a roll of bank notes slide into his fist. He put the money back into his pouch.

'I wouldn't have thought it possible,' Barney said.

The boy chuckled. 'I could have taken your boots if I had wanted.'

Barney swiped at him with his fist, the boy swayed away, Barney felt his fingers brush against the boy's shirt.

'What was the point of waking you?' the boy said coldly. 'You could not have bargained for the mules. Without an introduction you could not even have gone into the camp where I went to get the mules. You can fire Redeye, Barney, what else can you do? Without me you are blind.'

'When do we go?'

'There is a long caravan that will be here in an hour. They are going into Paktia and then across the Helmand river to the Hazaras, they take ammunition and food to the Hazaras. I have arranged that we can start our journey with them.'

'And then?'

'You have to decide where you want to go.'

'Where the valleys are steep, where there have been rock falls, where there are trees at the bottom of the valleys, where the valleys are disputed.'

'How far inside will you go?' the boy asked.

'As far as is necessary. I want a valley where the helicopters fly each day, every day of the week. I want a valley which they cannot ignore, into which they must come.'

'To shoot down one helicopter, to take your photographs and your pieces of that helicopter, you do not need to walk to a disputed valley.'

'I have told you the valley I want, a disputed valley.'

'It will take ten days to find that valley.'

'Then we walk for ten days.'

'Can you walk for ten days, Barney?'

'You'll know it, the next time when I hit you.'

Two hours later the column came winding up the hillside path. Barney heard the drumming footfall of the approach of the animals and the chink and rustle of their harnesses. As ghosts the men and beasts went past. He saw the weapons and the ammunition crates. A long, crawling column, and soon Barney and the boy had merged with the chain. A little before midnight they reached the high point of the Kurram Pass, and then the path fell and ran down into Afghanistan.