Barney walked away, didn't turn, climbed into the back of the ambulance after Gul Bahdur.
It was difficult to see through the dark glass windows of the ambulance. Darra and Kohat and Thai were invisible, identified only because the ambulance slowed in their traffic, and the noise of voices and vehicles seeped into the scrubbed interior where Barney and the boy lay on opposite stretchers. Slow progress, poor roads, sometimes the siren wail when they were brought to a complete halt. Once when they stopped Barney thought he heard the sharp authority voices of the military, but the delay was trifling, and Barney was soon asleep again. An ambulance has a magical run through a road block. They drove for six hours without pulling off the road for food or drink or refuelling.
At Parachinar, Barney saw nothing of the long, dust-billowing street of the frontier town. Gul Bahdur told him that he must keep his head low, that he should not be seen through the grey glass however faintly. They were a long time negotiating that street, through the bleat of goats and the whine of sheep, their smells reaching into the ambulance. Beyond the town the pace of the ambulance quickened and the road was rougher. Barney and the boy rolled on their stretchers.
Those last miles, that last hour in the ambulance, Barney was wide awake. Concentrating and considering.
He didn't have a gun. He had no language. He had no large scale map. He had no contact other than the seventeen-year-old boy opposite him. He had no plan and he was going to war.
What had Rossiter said? Didn't know whether to laugh or cry…
Men made poor decisions under the influence of emotion. In the Regiment's world, emotion was a perverse word. But uncontrolled emotion had put Barney Crispin into the back of an ambulance running west of Parachinar towards the border. He had worked for two weeks with fourteen men to train them to shoot down an Mi-24.
Thirteen were dead, the Mi-24 might as well have wiped Barney's face with the back of a fist. That's a good culture for breeding emotion. That and the boy with a bandaged head, in shock, walking for four days to return the launcher. He expected it of Barney.
And, remoter though, was the mission's first aim. Bring back the bits. But what's this? Someone hurt? Pakistan intelligence a little cross? Oh dear, end of the party. Better get young Crispin and old Rossiter onto the next plane home. Don't mind the bits, fellows. Must keep the slate clean.
Christ Almighty.
The ambulance stopped. The back door opened, bright mid-afternoon sunlight bathed them.
The ambulance had parked beside a wood-built shelter with a roof of corrugated iron. The road behind them had been dirt, it went no further. In front was a failing path stretching to the mountains ahead. The engine of the ambulance was switched off, the noise in the air was of wind and emptiness and of the call of a circling crow. Barney lifted the back packs and the missile bundles out of the ambulance. He breathed in the air that was dry and clean and hot.
'We have to move on from here,' Gul Bahdur said.
'How far?'
'This is where the ambulance waits for the casualties from inside, sometimes the wounded come in the early morning, but if they are near to death then they will be brought across the frontier in daylight and the ambulance will take them in the evening.
In the early morning and the evening the Pakistan army is often here, the Guides. It is here that they find how the war is going inside, they talk to the fighters here and go with them to the chai khanas in Parachinar, and take tea with them. If you are here and the Guides find you…'
Barney grinned. Great start that would be, locked in the Guard House of a Guides barracks, while the shit spiralled and the telegrams flew.
'Learn one thing, boy. when I ask a question I want an answer, not a speech. How far do we have to go?'
'A thousand metres, out of sight of this place.'
On the selection course for the Regiment, on training exercises in the Brecon hills and on Exmoor, Barney had walked for ten or twelve or fourteen hours with a weight equivalent to his backpack and the launch mechanism and a bundle of four Redeye missiles.
'And then?'
'When it is dark we go through the Kurram Pass. They do not try to seal the border, the Soviets and the Afghan army…'
'Just the answers, Gul Bahdur.'
The boy's head dropped. He turned away, sulking.
'We're going to need a mule,' Barney said.
A defiant reply. 'I can carry my share.'
'I said that we need a mule.'
'I said I can carry my share.'
Barney stood in front of the boy. The driver of the ambulance lounged against the engine bonnet, watching them. Barney towered over the boy. 'Another lesson, Gul Bahdur. When I say we will have a mule, we will have a mule. When I say you cannot carry the bundle, it is because you cannot carry it.'
The boy struggled to return Barney's gaze. He was exhausted, he had not slept in the ambulance. Gul Bahdur swayed on his feet.
'Why should I listen to you?'
'Because you came back to fetch me.'
'Why should I go with you?'
'Because you have to be with me if you are to kill another hundred Soviets.'
Barney was laughing. The boy's face broke, images all together of dislike and pride and exhaustion and happiness. The boy rocked in his happiness.
'In the evenings, when the caravans come together, perhaps it is possible to buy a mule. You have the money, Barney?'
Barney tapped his chest, the leather purse hanging under his shirt from a strap around his neck. 'I have the money. Perhaps when we are inside we'll buy a tank and save our feet.'
Another gurgle of Gul Bahdur's laughter.
They looped their arms through the straps of the back packs. Barney lifted up one bundle and rested it on Gul Bahdur's shoulder and saw the boy slip under the weight, and recover. He took the second bundle. They walked along the stone and sand of the path, watched all the way by the driver of the ambulance. Twice Barney stopped him before they came to a small bluff cliff, and when they were past it they were gone from the sight of the ambulance driver. Barney went a hundred yards further, then climbed away from the path over wind-smoothed rocks. He laid down his bundle, took off his pack, went to help the failing boy. Barney flopped down between the rocks and was hidden from the path. The boy sat cross-legged near to him. Barney lay on his back in the sunshine of the late afternoon, he tilted his cap over his eyes.
'When you've found a mule that I can buy, wake me.'
Barney slept, on the slopes leading to the Kurram Pass.
Schumack sat straight-backed in the mouth of the cave. The air around him was cool, clean. The cave was high in the hills, above the scrub line that reached up a little from the floor of the valley below. Four men slept in the recess of the cave behind him, snoring and grunting, noisy shites. There would have been six, but the ambush of the previous week had taken two. Crazy men, they'd been, Schumack reckoned, standing up clear of the rock cover to fire their rifles at an armoured car and shouting some fool message about Allah and jihad, that kind of crap, inviting the machine gunner to waste them and he'd obliged. They did things, these hill men, that gave Schumack the shakes.
Their excitement at close quarters combat was enough to make a one-time Marine Corps sergeant smile. Perhaps he loved them for it. He couldn't despise them for it.
Their arses getting blasted not his. If he didn't love them, he supposed, then Schumack would not have been sitting in the cave looking down on the pin prick lights of the Jalalabad airbase. When they asked his advice, he gave it. If they didn't ask, then he stayed silent. He went his own way in combat, used his training.
Sometimes they watched him and afterwards copied him. More often, in combat, they forgot everything.