'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.