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.
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.