Schumack had found the war he wanted. Sometimes he thought it was the best war he could have found. It was not easy for a one-handed man, to find himself a war. Schumack was good with the mortar, good with the DShK 12.7mm machine gun that had been captured off the Afghan army in the spring with a tripod mount, and learned to be good in Da Nang and Hue and Khe Sanh, when he had cudgelled the conscript cropheads into believing they could stay alive.j There were other phantom medal ribbons that might have decorated his chest, up to the time he had flown to the Desert One rendezvous in the sand plains of Iran with the Delta team, before the abort amongst the flames of crashed helicopters and Charlie One Thirties.
He had left behind a mangled hand at Desert One, sliced away by molten aluminium, but he didn't live in the past. The present and the future concerned Schumack.
The present was sitting on his bum in a cave a long way from Jalalabad. The future was the war of the mujahidin against the Soviets. He had killed three Soviets in the last ambush, he knew that, he'd seen them fall when they spilled from the truck that was disabled. When he had first come to Afghanistan he had counted the Soviets he'd killed. He didn't count any more.
He hadn't kept a body count since he had been alone. When he had first come he had been with Chuck and Paddy and Carlo. He hadn't meant to join up, just happened because they were all in Peshawar together, and two of them had been there longer than him, and Carlo came the week alter, and they could all feed from each other. Chuck said the hairies would pay for Airborne and Marine experience, and Paddy said that the Yank spooks would pay for merchandise and photographs, and Carlo said it was decently far from the state of Oregon where there was a warrant on a shelf. Maxie wouldn't call them buddies, but at first there had been a kind of a union, as good as most marriages. That was back fifteen months. Chuck had found that the hairies wouldn't pay, and he'd walked out on them, and they heard a month later that he'd put his big fat foot on a butterfly, and what the HE had started the gangrene had finished. And Paddy had stood up in an ambush because all the hairies were standing up. And Carlo had tried to wet his wick, because in Oregon that was no big deal, and before the sun was up her father had opened his throat for the ants to have a drink.
So now he had no one with whom to keep score. Sometimes when he was lonely, and it wasn't very often, he would wonder if there was a Soviet out there behind the lamps of a base camp who would ever count Maxie Schumack on his score sheet. He'd make the bastard sweat for it.
Mia Fiori lay on the cement floor of the village school, in her sleeping bag, with her head resting on her back pack. Sometimes she would be taken away by the women to the rooms used by the elderly and teenage girls. In this village she had been given the long-unused office of the schoolmaster.
The schoolmaster had been sent to the village from Kabul in the summer of 1979. A week after he had taken charge, his throat had been cut because he came from the ruling Parcham faction of the Afghanistan Communist Party and he had spent four years at a College in Samarkand, and because it was said by the men who murdered him that he was no longer a believer in the faith of Islam.
There was a gaping hole in the roof. A helicopter's rocket had given her this window to the night skies. She had been in the village two days. Her guides said that a Soviet attack had started on the Panjshir and that it was too dangerous for her to go further forward.
How long would she be here? She might be in the village for another day, or another week. The guides looked away when she had said she was as capable as any man of climbing the mountain routes into the Panjshir. She hated wasted time. When she was idle then the memory of her husband was alive. Because she had loved him, she hated to remember him. In her sleeping bag on the floor of the schoolmaster's office, her blouse and skirt folded and placed under the back pack, the loneliness washed around her. Two French doctors and a nurse waited for her in the Panjshir, she could laugh and work with them, and she was separated from them by a mountain range and by a regiment of Soviet troops. She heard the voices of the guides in the school's only classroom. Where in their priorities lay the needs of a nurse who must rush to the Panjshir and spend a month's leave in a field hospital before returning to a Paris clinic for the long winter? Perhaps in the morning word would come that the column could go forward.
Outside the window above her head a man urinated, long and noisily, and spat on the ground when he had finished.
Barney woke.
It was dark and cold, a chill was on his skin.
He heard the strike of iron shoes on the stones.
He felt the soreness in his back from the rock on which he had slept. He heard the faint curse of the boy and a faster movement of the shoes stamping down on the ground for a sure foothold.
The shapes of the boy and of a mule against the sky were silhouetted. The boy tugged the mule after him, straining to drag it from the path and over the rocks to where Barney lay. A second mule came behind, roped to the first.
'Barney.' A quiet call in the night.
'I'm here, Gul Bahdur.'
'I brought two mules.'
Barney heard the sighs of the animals' breath, and the scrape of slipping feet. He sat up. He could smell the mules and the scent of dry fodder and the odour of old excrement.
'You stole the mules?'
'I did not.' Defiance from the boy.
'If you have two mules, if you have no money, then you must have stolen them.'
Barney yawned, rubbed his eyes.
'I paid for the mules.'
'With what?' Barney wondered why he argued. They had the mules. If the kid had nicked them, what did it matter?
'With your money, Barney,' the boy said proudly.
Barney's hand went inside his shirt to the leather pouch. He pulled it open, held it close to his eyes. The pouch was empty.
'You took it off me?' A sharp anger in Barney's voice.
'I had to pay for the mules.'
'You cheeky bugger.' Whispered astonishment from Barney. 'While I was asleep…?'
Barney stood up. He felt the boy's hand pull at his arm, he felt a roll of bank notes slide into his fist. He put the money back into his pouch.
'I wouldn't have thought it possible,' Barney said.
The boy chuckled. 'I could have taken your boots if I had wanted.'
Barney swiped at him with his fist, the boy swayed away, Barney felt his fingers brush against the boy's shirt.
'What was the point of waking you?' the boy said coldly. 'You could not have bargained for the mules. Without an introduction you could not even have gone into the camp where I went to get the mules. You can fire Redeye, Barney, what else can you do? Without me you are blind.'
'When do we go?'
'There is a long caravan that will be here in an hour. They are going into Paktia and then across the Helmand river to the Hazaras, they take ammunition and food to the Hazaras. I have arranged that we can start our journey with them.'
'And then?'
'You have to decide where you want to go.'
'Where the valleys are steep, where there have been rock falls, where there are trees at the bottom of the valleys, where the valleys are disputed.'
'How far inside will you go?' the boy asked.
'As far as is necessary. I want a valley where the helicopters fly each day, every day of the week. I want a valley which they cannot ignore, into which they must come.'
'To shoot down one helicopter, to take your photographs and your pieces of that helicopter, you do not need to walk to a disputed valley.'
'I have told you the valley I want, a disputed valley.'
'It will take ten days to find that valley.'
'Then we walk for ten days.'
'Can you walk for ten days, Barney?'