'In the morning we go south down the valley.'
'And what happens to the village?'
'I know what happens to the village,' Barney said.
Barney started to sit up, started to crook his legs under him so that he could stand. Her grip tightened on his wrist. She urged him back down, beside her. He felt the glow heat of her body through the muslin cotton of her blouse, he felt the shape of her legs against his thighs. He lay on the bend of her arm and all the time she held his wrist.
He slept a dreamless sleep, a dead sleep.
Ahmad Khan and the man who wore the red waistcoat and the man with the limp from the damaged leg worked together. They lifted the wounded who had been treated by the nurse so that their bodies formed a close large mass together in the centre of the room, and as they carried them they whispered to them of the Garden of God, and the glory of the jihad. They made their promises of victory, far away but certain victory, and they told of how the names of the martyrs would be remembered and handed down from the old fighters to the young. They were sad moist eyes that gazed up at Ahmad Khan and the man in the red waistcoat and the man with the limp, calm patient eyes as they were gently lifted.
When the work was done, Ahmad Khan knelt and took the cheeks of each man's face in his hands and lifted it to kiss the cheeks.
He took from his belt two RG-42 high explosive fragmentation grenades, and he put them in the hands of the man who had screamed when Mia Fiori had cleaned the stump wound of his leg, and in the hands of the man whose intestine pipes had sagged through his belly wall, and with care he looped the forefingers of their right hands through the metal ring attached to the firing detonator. He was last out of the door, after the man who wore the red waistcoat and the man who limped.
He closed the heavy wooden door after him, and he leaned against the stone wall and waited for the twin explosions.
Chapter 18
Gul Bahdur left the village before dawn.
Maxie Schumack had wakened Barney. He had found him curled against the body of the nurse. He had shaken Barney's shoulder roughly as if embarrassed to find him sleeping beside the woman. She had been awake, he was sure of that, but she had kept her eyes shut. Maxie Schumack had noted that the woman was dressed, that Barney was dressed. Strange man…but he could understand a man needing a woman after what Barney had done the previous day. Two helicopters downed, and opting to stay and fight, that deserved a screw. Maxie Schumack had been screwing since he was a kid, started with a daughter of the big black woman upstairs, a bony little animal, the week before the Greyhound ride to Bragg. Didn't get much of it now, not many that liked the sight of the claw. But he thought he remembered what it was like, certainly wasn't like what Mia Fiori had done to him. And Barney was dressed, and the woman was dressed.
Barney walked with Gul Bahdur and the mule, Maggie, out from the north end of the village, past the rubbish heap, past the wreckage of the helicopter. He had written a pencil message to Rossiter. The bundle was loaded on the mule's back. They walked in the darkness for two, three hundred yards together.
'And when you have given it to Mr Rossiter, then you go back to Peshawar.'
'And you?'
'I am coming when I have finished the missiles. Gul Bahdur…without you nothing would have been possible.'
'Thank you, Barney. May fortune ride with you.'
'And with you, Gul Bahdur. We showed them in this valley.'
The boy reached up, caught his arm around Barney's neck and kissed him on the cheek. And then he was gone with the clatter of the mule's hooves on the path into the half-light before morning.
An hour later, the village was alive and on the move.
The armed men of Atinam and the women and the children who were their families gathered together their goat and sheep flocks, marshalled them with the help of the yelping dogs, heaved onto their backs the bundles of their possessions and started out for the ravine side valleys.
'You can't protect them, hero man,' Maxie Schumack said to Barney. 'If you're staying, you stay with us. It's your problem if you hadn't thought that out. You can't protect the camp followers, not even with your sacred Redeye.'
As they went, Ahmad Khan and his fighting force began the trek away from the village and down the valley to the south. Barney and Schumack went with them. One of the missiles was now loaded to the launcher and carried on his shoulder, another was strapped to the top of his pack, his AK rifle was slung on his other shoulder. Schumack had roped the other two missile tubes to his back. There had been eight, there were now four. Barney knew that Schumack's arm was hurting because he had learned the signs of the bitten lip, the quiet curse, the wringing movement of the arm as if the pain was surplus water and could be flicked off.
He had not spoken to Mia Fiori before they left the village. She had gone when he had come back to the building after his short walk with Gul Bahdur. She would have been with the women and the children and their few men. Schumack had watched him come into the large room and go to the inner door and look inside, and had seen the disappointment and held his peace.
A sense of failure crept into Barney as they left the village. He would miss the cheekiness and company of the boy and doubted if he would ever see him again. He would miss the cool, worn beauty of the woman and doubted if he would ever meet her again, but the Redeye was his master. There was work still to be completed away from the homes and fields and orchards of Atinam. Barney was trained in the detailed techniques of counter-subversion. Much of the tasking of the Special Air Service was against the hard core guerrilla — Malaysia, Radfan, Muscat, South Armagh — now he played the part of the guerrilla. He appreciated the reasoning that took Ahmad Khan away from the village, could understand why the village must be left to its fate. He had killed four helicopters, he hoped he would kill four more helicopters, yet he felt a sense of failure and incompleteness as he walked away from Atinam.
The column moved in a straggling line along the west edge of the valley wall, keeping in the shadow of the cliff face. There was high, tumbling cloud behind them, wrapping the peaks of the mountains.
Schumack said, a grunt from the side of his mouth, that it would rain, and that if it rained then the first snow would not be long behind. Barney felt the itching of the sores on the flanks of his body and under the hair of his head. The boy was gone, and the woman was gone, and…shit, if it rained he had no poncho.
The senior sergeant in Maintenance Workshops had procured lengths of aluminium tubing that were designed as central heating ducts for the new prefabricated barracks occupied by the 201st Motor Rifle Division. It had cost him a bitter argument with an NCO of Pioneers.
The other NCOs who worked on the Mi-24s were regular, but the men under their direction were conscripts, shipped out for limited service, and next to useless the senior sergeant reckoned. As he watched them work, as he heard the hammering of the flanges and screw holes, and the hiss of the welding rods, and the cracks of the rivet guns, the senior sergeant pondered on this new disease that afflicted Eight Nine Two. From the eight that he serviced, four helicopters were gone. There had never been a casualty rate like it. Two replacements had come, but two revetments empty for the world to see and the conscripts to chatter about. He had not seen a portable ground-to-air missile fired, he could barely imagine it even as he scraped his mind for the image. When the Mi-24 was flown over the ground contours, that was danger for so heavy a bird. When the Mi-24 was lifted to the ceiling of its altimeter that too was dangerous. Danger also when the helicopters flew in the 'bathtub', low in the valleys with the bandits in the hills above them. Danger was not rare, not infrequent…but four pilots lost, that was something more…He knew all the pilots. The senior sergeant prided himself that any of the fliers could come to his shack beside the revetments and talk with him, and share a bottle of beer and talk performance and manoeuvrability. He knew all the pilots, they were the age of his son, he believed he was their friend. The previous day he had watched them out of Jalalabad. Twice he had watched them out, twice he had watched them in. Twice there had been the shortfall.