'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.