No man spoke to Barney. Between their mouthfuls, between their feeding they watched him.
A child gave a small china cup for tea to each man who sat on the floor.
Barney heard the shout, and knew then that it was Gul Bahdur who cried for help.
As if with a single movement he was onto his feet, his knee buffeting the shoulder of the man beside him, spilling his food into the floor. He was out of the house and into the bright sunshine. The compound walls engulfed him, he spun on his heel and heard Gul Bahdur cry in pain. Barney sprinted along the ditch, out of the village.
He saw the crowd under the trees. None of the men around the boy, and around the boy's mules, knew of Barney's approach. He flung himself into the group of men, eight or nine men. A fist was raised, smashed down into the boy's face. Hands were pulling at the sacking cover hiding the missile tubes. A terrible anger in Barney. The boy flailed with his arms to try to pull back the man who had the most secure hold on the sacking, and fell.
Barney took hold of the shirt collar of the man who had struck Gul Bahdur and threw him away so that he stumbled back into the mass of the watchers. His arm swung up, the hard edge of his fist chopped down onto the shoulder of the man who tried to pull clear the sacking.
One instant of quiet. Then the scream of the man who had been hit, and the shout of the man who had been thrown clear, and the whimper from the ground of Gul Bahdur.
The boy pulled himself up from the ground and stood behind Barney. The men gave them room, but had formed a half circle.
Barney saw the flash of a steel blade.
He heard the rattle of a weapon cocking.
A few feet of open ground separated the men and the knife and the gun from Barney and the boy. The eyes, Barney stared always into the eyes, raking from one to another to another. Brown and chestnut eyes spilling their hatred. Barney felt the boy's hands clinging to the clothes on his back, felt the fear tremble in the boy's fingers.
He never let go of the eyes. He stood his full height. He opened his arms wide and clear to his hips. He unclenched his fists, exposed the whiteness of the palms of his hands. Empty arms, empty hands.
A fly crawled on Barney's nose, searching at the rim of his nostrils.
He was without a weapon. There was a loaded and cocked rifle pointing at him, and the double-edged blade of a knife, and enough men to tear his throat from his shoulders and his eyes from their sockets.
He heard the moan of the man he had hit, he heard the chatter of Gul Bahdur's teeth.
More men had come from the compounds, those who lived in the village and the Hazaras from the column.
The mullah was amongst them, brown-cloaked, black-bearded, a tight white turban strip on his head. A man whispered in the mullah's ear.
Barney stock still, and the rifle still aimed at him, and the knife still poised to thrust at him. He stared them back. The mullah shouted at Barney.
'He is telling us to go…'the boy whispered from behind Barney's back.
The mullah pointed away from the village, his voice was a tirade.
'He says we are to go. He says because we have received the hospitality of this village we are not to be harmed. He says that the men of this village do not kill those who have received hospitality at the same hand. We have to go, Barney.'
Slowly, deliberately, Barney turned his back on the crescent of men. He felt the tickle in his spine, exposed to the rifle and the knife. Barney rearranged the sacking cover over the missile tubes.
'Untie the mules,' Barney said, a brittle crack in his voice.
The boy bent down and unfastened the ropes at their ankles and then untied the knot at the base of the peach tree.
Barney held tight to the bridle of the leading mule, the boy was behind him. Still the eyes on them, and the silence of the watchers.
Barney walked forward straight to the centre of the crescent.
The men parted. They formed an aisle for Barney and his mule, and for Gul Bahdur and his mule. The sweat dribbled on Barney's forehead, ran from his neck down the length of his shirt.
A man spat a wet, sticky mess onto Barney's cheek. Barney did not turn to him.
They had made a narrow path and Barney brushed against the man who held the rifle, forced the barrel back. If he stopped they would kill him and the boy, if he ran they would kill him and the boy. He reckoned the mullah's protection was thin armour. The right speed was the slow speed.
They passed out of the tunnel of men. Barney felt his knees weaken, sighed in a great pant of breath.
They walked around the edge of the village and the boy came level with Barney and showed the track they should take, away along a valley and towards climbing hills.
An idiot ran alongside them, trying to stand in front of Barney and his eyes were wide apart and wide-opened and there was a dribble in his mouth and old scar marks on his face. The idiot was grey-haired, grey-bearded, and he seemed to dance in front of Barney.
Gul Bahdur picked up a stone and threw it with savage force at the idiot's stomach, and there was a yelp, and Barney heard the sounds of a retreating footfall.
'Tell me, Gul Bahdur.'
'They knew we carried weapons, they wanted to take them for themselves. They could not have used the Redeye, but they did not know what we carried. They saw that we had weapons. It is not easy for them to find weapons…'
'Why did they not kill us?'
'I told you the words of the mullah. You had eaten with them. We are not savages, Barney.'
'No, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said gravely.
'You are laughing at me, Barney.'
'I've just found very little to laugh at. Is it safe to go on, in daylight?'
'You want to go back and sleep in the mullah's bed?'
And they both laughed, out loud, raucous and relieved.
Their laughter carried across a spinach field, across an irrigation channel to the outer compounds of the village where the men stood and watched the going of the European and the boy and the mules that carried weapons. They wondered why a man who had been close to death should laugh for all the world to hear him. Near to the men a group of children joined hands and danced around the idiot and avoided his kicking feet and jeered at him. The men watched the European and the boy until they were small, hazy shapes with their mules, far up the valley.
Later the children would throw pebbles from the river bed at the idiot, and he too would leave the village.
Sharp squalls of dust wind blew through the morning in Peshawar. The winds caught at the dust, picked it and tossed it from the unwatered beds of the bungalow's garden. And with the dust were pieces of paper in eddies above the driveway where Rossiter had previously parked the Land Rover.
The front door of the bungalow crashed shut, then swung back again. Inside the bungalow was devastation. The Colonel of Security had planned to arrive before the departure of those gentlemen of the charities. He had believed that his arrival at the bungalow as they were making their final preparations for departure would have confused them sufficiently for him to discover the true nature of their activity in North West Frontier Province. Stripping shelves, tipping out the cupboards, ripping open the roof space had been his retaliation at finding the bungalow empty.
But there had been rewards. In the garden, in the base of a burned out bonfire, underneath scorched foliage, he had found charred pages from a manual for the use of the American Redeye ground-to-air missile.
These remnants lay in a cellophane packet on the back seat of the Colonel's car, now being driven hard back towards Islamabad.
They had left the first river bed valley and climbed beyond the tree line and onto a scree of loose stones, over a bare and grey brown hillside. A moon surface of sliding feet and razor fine rock. They dragged the mules after them, braying in anger because they had not been adequately rested in the village and had not been watered and had been allowed only a short time for grazing under the peach trees. The sun burned down on them.