Barney and Schumack held the mule. The boy lifted its front right leg, gouged with a knife, a sharp edged flint stone fell to the path.
They set off on the path again.
After a few hundred yards the boy, without explanation, gave Barney his mule's rope and skipped back along the track.
Within five minutes he was again at Barney's side.
'When the Soviets find the body of their traitor, they will have something to think of.'
Barney caught at the shirt of the boy. 'You horrible little bastard. Don't ever do that again, not when you're with me.'
'You do not own our war, Captain Barney,' the boy shouted back, and pulled himself free of Barney's grip. 'You do not own us because you have eight Redeyes.'
Further up the track Schumack had stopped, listened. He called back, 'Oh boy, Captain Crispin, eh? And his Redeyes. Redeye, Jesus, that went out with the Ark…only eight, shit…'
Schumack spat on the ground, shook his head, started to walk again.
Twice during the flight the pilot of the helicopter had complained to his Jalalabad control that he was unable to make contact with the ground signal. Twice he had complained that the search was impossible if he could not be guided onto his target. He was careful. One helicopter only had been assigned. They should have flown in pairs, that was the standard procedure, but the excuse had been given that all of the squadron's machines were to undergo extensive servicing maintenance, that an exception would be made of one Mi-24. He had the wavelength open, for more than an hour, tuned for the message that would tell him where his quarry could be found. He flew over villages, over orchards, over the small cultivated fields that were outlined by irrigation ditches.
Without the ground transmission it was hopeless, wasted time and wasted fuel. The second time he had spoken to Jalalabad control they had patched him through to his squadron commander. Major Medev was adamant, Intelligence swore that the source was good.
The helicopter drifted above the flat roofs of the village homes, above the minaret towers, above the goats, above the women who had been taking in the summer's second harvest and who now ran in their full skirts to the compounds.
Because they had been ordered to fly at 400 metres, the gunner in the nose bubble of the Mi-24 was able to see the wheel and the hover of the first vultures. Specks in a clear sky, falling fast, then hovering, then dropping down amongst the sparse trees on the last slopes before the river plain. Through his mouthpiece radio, the gunner alerted the pilot.
What else to look at? The helicopter settled high over a track, clearly visible between the trees. The gunner could see the birds below, in a clutch quarrelling over a bundle of blanket. The pilot disobeyed his standard procedures, he eased the helicopter down towards the tree tops. The vultures scattered. Hovering just above the path the gunner saw the smashed radio set. Close to it was a man on his back. The gunner saw the trousers at the man's knees, the raw blood mess in the man's groin, the bulge of blood at the man's mouth.
The gunner retched, across his knees, his boots, onto the floor space between his feet.
The pilot radioed again to Jalalabad control, and the dust driven up from the path by the rotor blades settled back onto the flies and later the vultures made a feast of the bloodied corpse of a man who had chosen to collaborate.
They waded and swam the Kabul river at dusk.
Low water with summer near spent, and the autumn rains not yet falling on the low ground, and the winter snows not yet cascading onto the mountains of the Hindu Kush that lay as a grim barrier ahead. The mules were fearful of the water, had to be bullied into the centre stream depths, coaxed into a frantic swimming stroke. The river bed mud oozed into Barney's boots, and when they came to the rocks on the north side, on the Laghman side, his grip slipped under water and twice he was ducked to his nostrils.
They had seen a helicopter once, quartering the far bank and the villages to the south, and then turning to the east and Jalalabad.
The boy had said that the river could not be crossed at this place at any time other than late summer. Only when the water was at its lowest could the crossing be attempted, and all the bridges were guarded by Afghan army units. If it had been earlier in the year they would have had to trek away to the west, towards Kabul.
On the Laghman side of the river they came to an orchard of apple trees, and stripped off their clothes and wrung the dark water from them, and lay on the cool grass. When Barney went to help Schumack get the water from his shirt and trousers, he was waved brusquely away. The boy dressed first, crawled into his sodden shirt and trousers in the last light of the day to walk to the village whose lights they could see, to beg for food.
After the boy had gone, after the light wind had caught coldly at Barney's skin, he stood to take his clothes down from the branches where they were hooked alongside the ripening apples.
'You did well, Maxie.'
'If you don't do well, you're dead.'
'I'd never thought we could be tracked, hadn't thought of it.'
'The Soviets aren't playing games. They play hard, if it's dirty why should they give a shit?'
'You have to be dirty to win, right?'
'Up to your arse in shit to win.'
'I had a grandfather here, he died here. In 1919. Third Afghan War. His hands would have been pretty clean.'
'And he didn't win. Where did he die?'
'A place called Dakka.'
'Near the border, about forty miles from here.' There was an edge in Schumack's voice as if to stifle any sentiment. 'I hope he died well, your grandfather.'
'They'd made a camp at Dakka. Six infantry battalions, artillery, even some cavalry — that dates it — they were out on flat ground, no shade, not a lot of water. The Afghans had the high ground, had guns there. Usual British answer, send in the infantry to get the guns. They used the old county regiments from England, Somerset Light Infantry and North Staffs, exhausted before they even started because they'd legged it from the garrisons in India. They went up the hillsides with bayonets fixed. They cleared the guns but too late for my grandfather. When I was a boy I read some of my grandmother's papers, some nasty things were done to him. I don't know whether my grandfather died well, I'm pretty sure he died screaming.'
'Not an easy place to die well in, Afghanistan,' Schumack said.
The boy was coming through the trees. Before he reached them they could smell the fresh baked bread that was wrapped in muslin cloth.
For two days Barney and the boy and Schumack and the two mules plodded north from the plains of the Kabul river up into the dry brown hills, on towards the grey mountain sides of Laghman.
Remote, barren countryside. Small villages set close against escarpments for protection against the winter's weather. Handkerchief fields that had been scraped for stones and that were withered for lack of water. Lonely shepherds who sat away from the tracks and who watched their passing without greeting. An exhausting, dangerous countryside, devoid of hospitality. Once Schumack had shown Barney a butterfly anti-personnel innocent on the path in its camouflage brown paint, scattered from the sky. And when they were past the range of its effectiveness he had detonated it with a single shot.
They needed to eat, they needed to sleep well, they needed shelter from the growing winds that flew into their faces from the wastes of the Hindu Kush.
Barney would sniff with his nostrils up into those winds and seem to sense that this was the place he had come to find. When they stopped, the regular five minutes in each hour, Barney would stand straight and gaze forward at the mountains and slip off his cap and let the wind into his hair. His place, the killing ground for the helicopters. But he must eat and he must sleep, and his body was filthy, and the lice had started to work over his skin, and his beard was an uncomfortable stubble.