In Honour Bound

There was no wood near the village, and they reached it after dark and too late to go down with axes and chop at the orchard trees for firewood. A miserable wet and cold evening. There was no hot food and the men found in one house a wooden chair that they broke up for a fire that would heat their green sweet tea. Schumack brought the food to Barney in another house away from the building in which the mass of men had collected. While they ate bread and dried fruit, Schumack talked of Vietnam. He talked without emotion of what he called Sam's balls-up. Of medivacs, of free-fire zones, of the 'Cong coming in human waves onto the wire and the Claymores, of the far-from-home screams of his conscripts, of the base camp coke and heroin pushers, of the clap caught by the East Coast officers. Sam's foul-up…Barney knew the pattern. Later, it would be Sam's foul-up when the Ambassador was butchered in Kabul. Later when he wanted to sleep, it would be Sam's foul-up at Desert One.

Barney waved his hand at Schumack, cut him off in full flow. His mouth was filled with the coarse grained bread. He could not remember how many days before he had stripped off his shirt and his socks and washed his body.

'I haven't asked you, you haven't told me, why I'm shut out.'

'The helicopter didn't come down.'

Annoyed, Barney shook his head. 'You can't bring every bloody one down.'

'You didn't tell them that. You were all full of shit and wind. You were like Sam — you promised and you didn't deliver.'

'I brought four down.'

'With the hairies you're as good as your last and your last didn't come down. When you're a cocky bastard then you have to deliver.'

'I had a hit. I'm certain of it.'

'Don't cry over it, hero man. They took a hit too, they lost two men.'

'They also lost a village. I didn't see them weeping in their bloody cups then…'

'You don't learn, Barney. The RPG is special to them, it's the best thing they have when they fight the tanks and the APCs. They get right up close with the RPGs, they don't piss from a distance. They'll blow a culvert in the road, they'll stop the convoy, and they'll get in to forty, fifty metres before they fire. Takes some bottle to do that…You know what they used to do before they had the RPGs? They used to get on top of the tanks and shove cow shit over the drivers' vision slits then put mines under the tracks — takes some cool to do that too. The RPGs are special, and the two men on them were special to Ahmad Khan.'

'How special?'

'Very special.' The old lined face close to Barney. The old white combed quiff of hair. The old claw on the stump gesturing in front of Barney. 'One was the husband of Ahmad Khan's sister, one was his uncle.'

Barney nodded his head, his eyes were screwed tight as if he resisted a pain. 'Thank you.'

'He gave you his best, he gave you what was special to him. Seen his way, you broke a faith.'

'Why does he let me stay in the valley?'

'Because you have three more missiles, because he has another caravan to see through.'

'It's my neck as well, it's not just his uncle's neck, and his wife's bloody brother's neck,' Barney flared.

Again the jab of the claw close to Barney's face. 'You've come late, Barney, you and old Redeye that's damned near a museum piece. You've come late and you're going early. Got it?'

'Got it.'

'What did you want? Did you think you were the second coming?'

'Got it.'

'They need a hundred Redeyes from Sam, they need a thousand tubes. All they get is crap from Sam about what heroes they are, crap about the nobility of fighting for the Free World…and they get Barney Crispin out of the clouds with one launcher and eight tubes.'

'Got it,' Barney said quietly.

'You asked…'

'Why don't you go back to your friends?'

'Because you're dead without me.'

Barney's two hands fastened onto Schumack's one good hand. Held it. 'Thank you.'

Barney stood at the window of the room. He held back the sacking that had taken the place of glass when the house had been occupied.

He saw the scudding movement of broken cloud that obscured and then presented the stars. The same stars that his grandfather would have seen before combat. The same stars that had shone down and winked on all the cavalcades of the invading armies. The men caught in the Third Afghan War would have noted those stars, and the men of the Second Afghan War, and the men of the First Afghan War would have seen the stars on the night before they went to be slaughtered in the passes on the road to Jalalabad. And the men who followed Genghis Khan and who followed Tamerlane and who followed the great Alexander. All the invaders, all of the armies of foreigners, would have seen those stars on the night before they made war in the uplands and the lowlands of Afghanistan. He felt a sense of time, gaping and incredible. He wondered if a pilot, the flier of an Mi-24, stood outside the sleeping quarters now at the Jalalabad base and stared up at the time space above him.

'Can't you sleep?'

'It's stopped raining, the cloud's breaking.'

'So they can be back,' Schumack said.

'They can fly tomorrow.'

'So they can fly tomorrow, so what?'

'Then there'll be one less of the bastards.'

'And what does that do?'

'You have to believe in victories of a sort, otherwise there's no point,' Barney said.

'That's officers' crap. There'll be a shitehawk in Jalalabad who thinks when he gets your arse that he's won a victory. He's won nothing, and when you hit another helicopter then you've won nothing. Me, I'm not an officer man, not a hero man. I wouldn't know a victory if I saw one…'

'Go back to sleep.'

'You going to get yourself a flier tomorrow?'

Barney let the sacking fall back. The stars were gone from his view. He couldn't see Schumack in the darkness.

'I don't know.'

'You need to get one, hero man; or you've overstayed.'

Barney sank down onto the floor. He was shivering. The cold gripped his body. His hand brushed against the launch tube of the Redeye. He held the tube.

'Maxie…' an urgent whisper from Barney. 'If you were the squadron commander in Jalalabad, would you come back? After the losses, would you come back here?'

'Myself, I'd go somewhere else where I can keep my arse tight, I'm not an officer. Your man at Jalalabad, he's an officer. He'll come back every day, every single day until he's had you.'

Barney lay hunched on his side, knees drawn up to his chest, the blanket wrapped over his body.

'You're a hell of a comfort, Maxie.'

'If it's comfort you want, hero man, then get on your feet and start walking.'

'Christ…go to sleep, damn you.'

* * *

They had eaten their first food of the day, they had scattered and dispersed among the rocks as precaution against aerial attack, they had seen the glimpses of blue sky between the breaking clouds, they had their weapons armed and ready.

They saw the women and the three old men and the children walking south along the track beside the river bed. The group walked slowly along the open space in the centre of the valley. It was as if they believed that no danger could threaten them any more. Barney was with Schumack and sitting a hundred feet above the valley's floor on the east wall.

When she was a full mile away he recognised Mia Fiori, with the women and the old men and the children. She carried a small child tight against her waist and her breast, she held the hand of another child that walked beside her. Half a dozen women, three men with grey white beards and stooping gait with ancient Lee Enfield rifles slung at their shoulders, and a gaggle of children. Once, as she walked, the sun flickered on her and the blouse she wore was lit, and her hair shone, but it was a long way off from Barney and the vision of an instant only.

Schumack said nothing. He sat cross-legged beside Barney.