'We have to go this morning.'
'Together we are going?'
'You have to be my ears and my eyes, Gul Bahdur.'
The boy bubbled with his words, 'If we go very soon, to the Red Cross hospital, then we will catch the ambulance that runs each morning to Parachinar. The ambulance will take us. It is always possible to go in the ambulance, straight through the blocks of the Pakistan Guides…'
Barney shovelled the bottles and packets and clothes into his back pack.
He heard the Land Rover scrape the gravel of the drive. He heard the engine switched off, then the footsteps over the verandah.
'We're moving out, Barney, soon as we can,' Rossiter called from the living room. 'Taking the Delhi flight…'
Rossiter was standing in the doorway. 'What in Christ's name are you doing, bloody fancy dress?'
Rossiter peered in the half light at the backpack and the pile of missiles. 'Where the hell are you going?'
Rossiter clapped his hands, as if that were a way to escape an aberration. He spoke with slow schoolmaster's emphasis. 'We're called home. Home, Barney. It is an order.'
Barney smiled. 'You'll think of something to tell them, Mr Rossiter.'
Rossiter was white faced, eyes roving, nervous. 'You'll crucify yourself. They'll have your bloody guts for it. Don't be so bloody stupid. It's your whole bloody career…it's against the bloody orders, Barney.'
'You'll think of something to tell them, you're good at that.'
'You'd be on your own.'
'That way's best.'
Barney was tying the missile tubes together, making two bound bundles. 'I have eight Redeyes, I have one helicopter to get, then I'll come out. There's a month before the weather turns…'
'It's against an explicit order…'
'A month is long enough.'
'Don't you understand…?' Rossiter gripped at Barney's arm, was shrugged off.
'What I understand is that something was started that hasn't been finished.'
'Barney, listen to me…I may be out of my fucking mind.' Rossiter went, furiously, to his room and slammed the door.
Ten minutes later Barney was finished packing. Gul Bahdur had said nothing at all.
And then Rossiter reappeared, a fool, a crass old fool…'I'm going to go to Chitral. You know where Chitral is? I'm going to lie up there and wait for you.'
'You don't have to…'
'Don't bloody interrupt me, and don't put motives into me…so you have some back up, so there's someone to pull you out of the shit when you come back. On Shahi Bazaar in Chitral is the Dreamland Hotel, I didn't give it the bloody name…any message, any messenger goes to the Dreamland, reception, name of Howard. You have to have some back up, Barney, because they're going to crucify you for this.'
'Thank you, Mr Rossiter.'
'I don't know why I'm doing this. I must be out of my mind. They'll skin us…'
'You'll think of something to tell them. Would you take us down to the Red Cross hospital, Mr Rossiter?'
'Us? Are you taking that child back? Oh, my God. I am out of my mind.' Rossiter murmured and walked outside to the Land Rover.
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.