To Barney it was lunacy to be climbing an open hillside in the brightness of daylight. If the helicopters came, the boy seemed to say, then it was willed. Against all of Barney's training, against all that he had taken as a second nature, he climbed to the summit of the range.
They were out of sight of the village, that was enough for the re-establishment of the disciplines.
Beyond the lip of the topmost summit they rested. From now he would dictate the method of movement. No crest outline, always a mountain shape behind them. They would rest for ten minutes in each hour, rest regardless. He told the boy what would happen, braced for a dispute, and the boy seemed indifferent.
Beneath them were a series of lower hill tops. Beyond and below the hill tops, hazed and vague, was a dark strip placed against their path.
Barney squinted, peered forward. He had no binoculars, and he had no weapon, and he had no map.
'It is the Kabul river,' Gul Bahdur said.
Barney nodded. His hand shielded his eyes.
'We have to cross that river, Barney. Beyond the river are the mountains and the valleys that you want for Redeye.'
'How long to the river?'
'Three days, perhaps.' The boy sat close to Barney. 'When you reach the valleys, what will you do?'
'Damage a few helicopters, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said.
The boy heard the lightness in the words and their emptiness. He looked quickly at Barney, and there was a bleakness in Barney's face that discouraged a reply. The boy stood and went to the bridle of his mule, and waited.
They came down the hillside, sometimes slipping, sometimes relying on the sure grip of the mules to hold them.
Barney's forehead was lined from a private pain. The flies buzzed at his face, the water ran on his body, the sun burned at his neck.
What was the shelf life of Redeye? Ten years? Who has asked how many years this consignment of Redeye had lain on the shelf? Anyone? Good enough for the hairies, and some of them should work. Barney in his briefings had skated over the small matter that Redeye was now out of service with the US, replaced by Stinger. Don't give them the bad news, Barney. Give them the good news, the news that Redeye is supreme. No reason to tell them that Stinger's better, or that Britain's Blowpipe is better. Or that you're not certain what happens to the infrared seeker optics stored in an atmosphere of dry nitrogen all those years. Don't tell them any of that or they might not be so keen to have their arses shot off.
Barney jerked at the rope tied to the bridle of his mule.
'It's not a wonder weapon, Redeye. It's good but it doesn't work bloody miracles,' Barney said.
The boy did not answer. His eyes were cast down. The hillsides dropped away in front of them.
In the late afternoon Rossiter drove into Chitral. He had been at the wheel of the Land Rover for thirteen hours, stopping only once for fuel. His head ached, his shoulders were knotted in tiredness, he felt filthy all over his body.
He came into town past the polo field on his left and the cargo jeep station on his right, up the main street of white washed cement and dun brown brick, over the fast-flowing river, past the mosque, past the Dreamland Hotel, past the Tourist Lodge, past the Land Rovers and the Toyota trucks, past the oak and juniper trees. Through the town he forked off from the main road.
Chitral lies eighteen miles by crow's flight from Afghanistan across the first tower-high mountains of the Hindu Kush. He had thought through the long hours of his journey where he would stay. It was the end of summer, the time when the holiday bungalows of the Islamabad diplomats and the Rawalpindi autocracy would be abandoned for the winter. He would find a remote bungalow, with a back door window that could be broken. Howard Rossiter's friends — not many of them but there were some — would not have believed that he could be considering both house-breaking and deliberate mutiny to the department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that employed him. They would, those few friends, have been astonished to learn that Howard Rossiter had sung at the top of his voice and until he was hoarse, much of the way between Peshawar and Chitral. He held the independent Pakistan in contempt. He held the Islamised Pakistan, ruled in recent years by Martial Law, in total contempt.
He had cheerfully calculated that it would take the authorities many hours to circulate a description of himself and details of his Land Rover to the police posts around Peshawar.
He didn't doubt that he was through whatever feeble net was now being cast for him.
It was cold on the hillside. Barney shivered. The boy was close against him having crawled under Barney's blanket. The village was a thousand feet below them, and three miles in the distance. Once the sunlight, falling fast and crimson behind them, had glinted on the white paint of the mosque minaret. Once the sunlight had snatched at the perspex glass of the helicopter's cockpit.
That was the helicopter that flew lowest, drifting over the flat rooftops, hunting out the targets. When the rockets were fired then the skies around the helicopter seemed darkened to a blackness by the brilliance of the flame flashes. From their vantage point, Barney and the boy could hear the impact of the rockets and the chatter of the forward machine 3 gun sited below the pilot's canopy. Above the low-flying helicopter was its mate, circling and suspicious, another eye for the partner.
Barney watched in fascination. He did not think of the \ villagers who might be on the floors of their homes, nor the mujahidin who might be running for firing positions between the dry brick compounds, nor of the beasts that would be stampeding in their corrals of thorn hedge. Barney watched the movement of the helicopters, and learned. Barney recognised in this attack the standard procedure. One helicopter low, one high above in support. A fire had started on the edge of the village. Grey smoke spinning from the grey landscape into the grey skies.
Beside Barney the boy wept. Behind them and underneath an overhang of rock, the mules stamped their hooves and strained against the tethering ropes and the drone of the helicopter engines and the explosions.
'Why do you do nothing?' The boy said the words over and over.
When the darkness had settled onto the village, the helicopters climbed and turned. The fire in the village blazed. The engine noises sidled away.
Barney stood up. 'We'll sleep here.'
'Were you frightened to attack the helicopters?' The boy spat the words at Barney.
Barney caught the collar of Gul Bahdur's shirt, gripped it, seemed to lift the boy. 'Take me to the mountains and valleys north of Jalalabad. That's where our work is. Not here.'
A secretary from Chancery sat opposite the spook, across his dining room table, the candlelight flickering her lipstick and the perspiration sheen of her shoulders.
It had taken him weeks of nagging persuasion to get her to dinner at his apartment.
There was a bottle of French wine beside the candle, diplomats' privilege over the prohibition legislation. He'd served soup (albeit from a tin), the mutton chops were under the kitchen grill, and some quite passable potatoes and carrots were steaming on the rings, and there was ice cream in the fridge and cheese on the sideboard. She hadn't said much, and he didn't know yet whether the evening would be successful.
He heard the knock at the door, repeated before he was out of the chair. He smiled weakly at the girl, and cursed to himself.
He opened the door.
The Colonel of Security swept through the hallway, past him, into the room. He held a cellophane bag in his hand.