'The lady should go to the kitchen.'
'I beg your pardon…' Not said bravely.
'Please put her at once out of this room.'
The girl ran to the kitchen, the door slammed behind her.
'This is an intolerable intrusion…'
The Colonel threw the cellophane bag onto the table.
'Your friends from Refugee Action, Mr Davies, why would they have needed the manual of the Redeye missile? Tell me that.'
The spook closed his eyes.
'I told you to get them out of the country.'
'They'll have gone by now.'
'That is one more lie, one more to the many you have told me.'
The Colonel reached to the table and retrieved the cellophane bag.
'I would not drink too much tonight, Mr Davies. You will need a clear head when you compose your cyphers to London.'
Davies watched him leave through the door he had never closed, heard the engine of a car start, heard the car purr away into the night. The secretary stood in the kitchen doorway and saw the spook's head sinking and saw his fist beat down onto the tablecloth beside his nose.
Chapter 9
Pyotr Medev had made the mess the meeting place of the young pilots. It was where they relaxed, where they fooled when there was no flying in the morning, where talk of tactics and detail were banned.
There were arm chairs around the walls and the centre of the room was taken by a long wood table, well polished, at which thirty officers could be seated. More arm chairs were in a horseshoe around the stove. The Frontal Aviation transport and fighter-bomber squadrons at Jalalabad had their own quarters, and there was another much larger complex across the runway for the offices and accommodation of the 201st Motor Rifle Division. Eight Nine Two of Frontal Aviation was a compact squadron, an entity of its own. It was under strength, two flights instead of four, but Medev believed it to be as efficient as any in the country. He was proud of his officers, proud of their qualities.
All the pilots but two were there, and the Maintenance Officer and the Stores Officer, and Rostov. The gunners, of course, were not officers, they had separate quarters. This was the room for the fliers, of the young and the elite. Sometimes they made Medev feel an old man with their horseplay. He believed he loved them all, even when they were drunk and daft. They were like children to him, his family.
Pyotr Medev had not lost a single young man under his command in Afghanistan.
Other squadrons of Frontal Aviation had taken casualties. The big troop carriers, the Mi-8s, they took losses, they were not as armour-protected as the Mi-24s. If there were no casualties, no helicopter losses, at the end of his twelve months, then that indeed would be a triumph for Medev.
The orderly saw Medev when he was not more than a dozen feet into the mess and hurried forward with Georgian brandy in a small glass. Medev thought he kept the glass filled and ready in the kitchen for the squadron commander's entrance. He liked that, and the cheerful greeting from the orderly. And he liked also the way that the fliers snapped up from the chairs on his entrance, so that he could wave them down again, and make something of it.
If they were busy, Medev thought, they would have little time to reflect. If they had little time to reflect then they would have less time to doubt. Doubt was the prerogative of Pyotr Medev. Doubt amongst the fliers was unthinkable.
Carrying a tray with two bowls of soup, the orderly passed him again. Medev turned, saw the two pilots who had come into the mess after him. They smiled, dropped their heads in a gesture of respect. Meals were kept back for those on late flying duties.
Medev had eaten earlier at Divisional HQ, but he took a chair and sat opposite the pilots. They would talk and he would listen and ask a few questions, but listen. That was his way with the young fliers.
'Wasn't easy to find, not in that light, not with the references they gave us…we found it all right, but the map coordinates were wrong, that ought to be sorted out…'
Medev waved his hand, enough about the maps.
'I went down, Alexei stayed up. I used the rockets first. I took the target of a large compound in the village centre…that's where the bastards usually are, that's where they'd entertain their bastard guests, right?…then I put the machine gun into them. I didn't get any munition explosions, just one fire, probably cattle fodder. We took some ground fire on the third pass, some undercarriage hits.'
'It was the right village?' Medev asked 'It was the village we were sent to.'
'I'm sure it was the village we were sent to…the Intelligence report for the tasking said that a European with weapons would be in that village. If a European was coming to the village with munitions then I have to believe the village would be waiting for him, there would be men who would defend the village waiting for him.'
'Perhaps Intelligence gave us wrong information.'
'I cannot believe Intelligence gave us incorrect information.'
Medev grinned, pulled a face. The fliers would make light of a dusk mission.
Medev knew the problems. Thermal updraughts after the heat of the day, the swirling winds of the late afternoon that made contour flying hazardous, the difficulties of night navigation back down to Jalalabad from the mountains. He wouldn't tolerate Intelligence messing with his fliers.
'They told us at the briefing that this man and his mules would reach the village in the late afternoon, that was why we had to attack late…perhaps he had not reached the village.'
'Perhaps not,' Medev said.
'Are there really Europeans out there, Major Medev?'
'How could Europeans help these shits? Wouldn't they know what they're really like, Major?'
'I don't know,' Medev said softly. 'To your first question and to your second question, I don't know.'
'There was one fat bastard, he ran from the houses, I followed him at 40 metres up. My bloody gunner wouldn't fire, it was like a fox chase, he ran till he dropped. When he'd dropped my gunner punctured him…he must have run 200 metres. My bloody gunner says he likes to let them run, says it's good for their health.' The pilot, Alexei, was spilling soup from his spoon as he laughed.
Medev left them to their meal. He muttered his congratulations and headed for his room. He had a letter from his wife to read, but the letter competed in his thoughts with the confusions caused by an Intelligence assessment that reported a European with munitions heading for a village south of Jalalabad.
They buried the martyr early in the morning.
The ground was too hard for the village men to scrape out more than a shallow hole.
The cannon from the helicopter had decapitated the man, and they laid his head in the space between his knees and then made a high pile of stones over his body as protection against the vultures, and set amongst the stones a stick with a white strip of cloth tied to it as indication that he had fallen in battle.
Schumack stood a little aside from the men who had carried the body from the village and who had listened to the few words of the mullah. He had stood with his head bowed, but he had not intruded on the burial. Close to him had crouched an idiot, a strange shrunken creature with a wide grin and gap-toothed smile and torn clothes and scars on his face. He had not seen the idiot before the attack by the helicopters. Perhaps he had come in the night and slept under a field wall of stone. There was little charity in the villages for idiots. Feed the fittest, because the fittest were the fighters. An idiot would roam from village to village, and get scraps of food if he was fortunate.
The man they buried had been the last of Schumack's companions. They had been together but they had only had the basics of a common language. If a man wanted to run out of a house where he was safe and protected by mud brick walls and stand upright in a compound yard to get a better aim at a strafing helicopter, that was his business. Since Chuck and Paddy and Carlo had gone he would never walk out from this war…but, shit, he wouldn't make it easy for them, not as easy as standing in the open with an AK against a big bird.