Slung on his shoulder were two rifles. His own Kalashnikov and that of the man now buried. If they were to follow the airstrike of the previous evening then the Mi-8 helicopters would come to the village with the Soviet troops mid-morning. That was their pattern, and they were a methodical people.
As the last stones were piled on the grave cairn, Schumack left the village. He was alone when he strode away down the goat path, his pack on his back, his blanket hanging on his shoulders, his right hand taking the weight of the rifles' straps, his left hand that was a claw hanging loose against his hip. They had given him some bread, they had filled his water canteen. He left for the emptiness of the high slopes, for the places where the wild flowers grew in their blues and yellows in the rock fissures.
Always when he was alone he aimed to climb above the flight path of the helicopters. If Schumack hated one thing in his life it was the helicopters of Frontal Aviation.
By the time Schumack was out of earshot of the village they were already repairing the damaged roofs and slapping wet mud onto the cannon holes in the walls. No man watched him go, only a few children, and the idiot.
He would drift like a feather in the winds. The feather would fall, and Schumack would find a group that would permit this itinerant warrior to attach himself to their column or to their fighting base. He was an uncomplicated man. He could endure the boredom of the weeks between combat because time meant little to him. He asked for food, for water, and for ammunition for the two strapped magazines of his Kalashnikov. Because he asked for so little he did not go short. He had walked for two hours when he saw them.
Ahead of him and above him. A dust puff on the scree alerted him, a tiny inconsistency in the shape of the upper hillside.
He took from his backpack a one-eyed spy glass. He rested the glass on his damaged left arm and with his right hand fiddled with the focus.
Two men, two mules.
A man taller than the other and more solidly built. A man who walked in short chopped strides. No stranger could walk like an Afghan.
He turned off the path. He found a way through the tree line, through the scrub line and out onto the scree, a way that would bring him to the same height but behind them.
It was raining. It always rained in London in late August. Dripping streets, slippery pavements, traffic snarled. Rain doubled the time of the journey to Whitehall and FCO.
The detective varied his route these days. Sometimes he came via the Mall sometimes by Birdcage Walk, sometimes round by Victoria Street. Pretty pointless, the Foreign Secretary thought, because he always ended up at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office back door, the trusty Ambassador's entrance.
His Personal Private Secretary made a point of meeting him just inside the doorway.
'Good morning, Minister…'
Down the corridors and past the portraits — he'd be there himself soon, Heaven help him, hung for posterity, picking their way along the Eastern carpets.
'Quite a quiet day for you, Minister.'
'We went through my day last night. I know what I have today.'
'Not everything, you don't, sir. Brigadier Fotheringay is camping outside your office. Says he has to see you. I've told him you're busy, but…'
'I'll see him immediately,' the Foreign Secretary said.
'You have a number of other appointments, sir.'
'Immediately, I said, and put everything else on hold.'
'What advisers will you want to sit in?'
'I'll deal with this alone, Clive.'
In the next fifteen minutes the Foreign Secretary would drink half a dozen cups of black coffee. The Brigadier's cup remained untouched and grew cold.
'A specific instruction was sent to this man Rossiter in Peshawar, an instruction stating unequivocally that he should at once leave Pakistan, plus the instructor, and return via New Delhi to the United Kingdom, and you are telling me that your instruction was communicated to Rossiter, and that so far as you can discover that instruction, that order, Goddamnit, has been ignored? I find that incredible. And to cap it all, your best intelligence is that these two men, two men whom it took Pakistan's chaps ten minutes to smoke out, have simply disappeared.'
'That is correct, sir.'
'And what is your explanation?'
'My explanation, sir?'
'I am entitled to ask for an explanation.'
'I don't have one. Other than that an order has been ignored, there is no explanation.'
'Could they have gone…'
'Not Rossiter, he's too old.'
'Could the instructor have gone?'
'Into Afghanistan, he could have.' The Brigadier sighed. 'It has to be a possibility, and a very ugly one. The repercussions, if he's caught, hardly bear thinking about.'
'What would he have gone into Afghanistan for? the Foreign Secretary asked.
'To shoot down a bloody helicopter, what else?' The Brigadier's voice was shrill. 'To strip the thing.'
'He'd be a brave young man, Brigadier.'
'I'll have him strung up by his thumbs when I get him back. I'll break him, smash him…'
'And Rossiter?'
'Rossiter's a low grade, second-rate nobody. He was hand picked for this sort of thing. He's never made an original move nor had an original thought in his life.'
'I see. What about the instructor? Has he ever given way to an original thought, I wonder. Who is he?'
'Captain Crispin of the SAS.'
'If Captain Crispin has entered Afghanistan, and if the Soviets were to capture him there, then the implications would indeed be quite horrifying. Bad enough if the Pakistanis were to find him. But if that's the journey he's embarked on, then I have to say that I am rather taken with him. A gutsy young man.'
'He wasn't asked to be gutsy, Foreign Secretary. He was given his instructions and expected to obey them.'
'Quite so, Brigadier. But as you keep saying, you win some, you lose some. Little did I suspect how prophetic you would be. Tell me this: if he has gone into Afghanistan, just how likely is he to succeed, provide us with Hind's innards?'
'A total stranger to the country, not speaking the local tongue, one chance in a thousand, and a better than even chance of getting himself killed or captured.'
'Well, that's a pretty prospect, Brigadier. If you can come up with any fresh disasters, you'll keep me posted, will you?'
'That's not quite fair,' the Brigadier said and let himself thankfully out of the room.
He was a foreigner and he was a soldier.
Schumack found over the next three hours as he tracked the man and the boy and the two mules that he could have set his watch on the minutes they spent resting each and every hour, on the hour. A trained man would rest for a few minutes in each hour.
Much of the time Schumack could not see them as they hugged the curved hillsides.
He estimated that he was a mile behind them. He had closed his speed to their pace.
Schumack, Marine Corps Sergeant, knew a soldier's trail when it was laid in front of him. He wondered when he should close with the foreigner, perhaps at dusk. He'd considered whether the foreigner could be a Soviet surveillance officer, but dismissed the thought.
'He's a Maxie Schumack,' he said aloud to himself. 'He's the same as Maxie Schumack, fighting man, come to kick Soviet ass like Maxie Schumack does. Not a white bum Soviet. Too dangerous for the shites to be walking the hills, love their balls too much to go walking.'
The sun beat down on him, played tricks with his eyes, and twice he retrieved the spy glass from his pack and searched the backgrounds of rough rock wall and low scrub trees for the men and their mules, and could not see them. But there was always the track of the hooves for him to follow, the outline of small sandals, and the imprint of a soldier's boots.