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.