He strode away, going south down the valley, measuring out a mile.
He found himself a shallow cut between two granite grey rocks, and settled under his blanket, and waited. And his ears strained in the quiet of the valley for the sounds of the helicopters' coming, as the clouds rose and fragmented.
One woman had broken cover.
Under the suffocation of the memory of the attack on Atinam, one woman had run from a crevice hiding place as the first helicopter pair powered overhead.
She stood up, and ran.
Some men rose to their knees to clutch at her dress and pull her down, and failed to halt her stumbled, hysterical flight. The helicopters thundered above them tilting to starboard and port side alternately. The flares of rainbow colours shimmered in their slow fall in the valley. On the sighting of the running woman, and as the men near to her betrayed their positions, one helicopter came down low, spitting machine gun fire, and the three big bird comrades climbed for altitude and the broken cloud ceiling and the observation platform.
The mujahidin cannot lie on their faces in the dirt and between the stones while the tracer and the rockets are falling amongst them. Fear is infectious, fear is a disease, and a man who has a rifle or a DShK wheeled machine gun will try to fire back. And as each man fired up at the helicopters so he handed the aerial marksmen the location of his position.
The fighters were chopped down, slashed down between the stones of the river bed, beneath the scrub bushes where the leaf cover was already withered, around the compound walls of the deserted village. Meat for the helicopters' gunners, drink for the helicopters' rocket pods and 12.7mm four-barrelled machine guns.
Barney had no way of knowing where Mia hid, no way of knowing whether Maxie was with her.
He saw from the distance of a mile the red light of streaming tracer sinking from the camouflaged helicopters, and the flash light of their rockets, and the puff smoke of their ground strike. The woman that he thought he loved was beneath the tracer and the flash light and the puffs of smoke…
Barney watched.
He saw her face. He saw the tears on her face, the blood on her body. From a mile away, from safety, he saw the tracer and the rockets.
He crawled to his feet and the blanket dropped from his body.
He stood. The flares drifted in the skies above the valley. Three helicopters circled and manoeuvred high above the valley's cliffs.
The launcher rested on his shoulder. He aimed without hope for the strafing low-flying helicopter. Flares falling…red, green, blue, yellow, technicolour flares.
He engaged the battery coolant switch…the hum in his ear. The helicopter was at least a thousand metres away, port side on. A flare floated between Barney and the target helicopter. The woman that he loved was under the tracer and the rockets.
Barney fired.
The flash, the signal, the give away. The light careering from his hiding place.
The Redeye sped from Barney, homed low towards the helicopter, towards the flare. The flare had fallen to the ground and the helicopter was banking and losing the port side profile.
A missile gone rogue.
It flailed away from the target line. It swept up and then curved, then fell, then swung again towards the upper skies. Bright, brilliant light cavorting over the valley.
Useless light trailing a mindless warhead. For twelve slow seconds the light behind the warhead swooped and dived and rose again from the valley's floor, then the final inbuilt command of the missile's brain, then the self-destruct explosion echoed between the valley's walls.
Barney lay under a lip of rock. For half a dozen minutes the stone work was fractured and wrecked by the shrapnel slivers from the rockets, by rock fragments from the machine guns. His leg was bleeding, the side of his chest dribbled blood.
The vengeance fury of the helicopters was turned on a lip of rock. Barney lay on his stomach, he cuddled the ground as if the ground was a woman's body. He could not believe that the short roof of rock would withstand the battering, he could not believe that the squealing ricochets would not find him. On his stomach, and his mouth was filled with rock dust and his ears were deadened by the explosions.
Long after the helicopters had gone, his hands were still pressed tight against the sides of his head.
Schumack found him, lifted him up, supported him, dusted him down.
'She wasn't hurt,' Schumack said. 'Shit knows what sun shone on her.'
Drinks on Medev's bill in the mess.
Medev with his tie loosened and his shirt button undone. Medev playing the father with his young pilots. Singing too, songs from the old Ukraine, and the old Frontal Aviation anthem. A Cossack dance from Vladdy, legs raking out and arms akimbo on his chest, and the other pilots and Medev clapping to a frenzy. Drinks on Medev for his pilots. Lifting the roof of the prefabricated mess, showing the fliers of the new squadron that Medev's men had come through their ordeal. A pilot had tried to take the tablecloth off the end of the dining table, had smashed every plate and broken every glass, and spilled food and wine and vodka on the carpet. The men of the new squadron had watched and had not joined, had not been invited to join.
The Frontal Aviation commander was framed in the doorway.
Medev had forgotten the bridge-building invitation, and was straightening his tie, buttoning his collar, shouting for quiet, and the commander was waving with his arm that ceremony was out of the window, down the bottle.
'Today it all worked.' Medev's voice was slurred and proud. 'We hit a concentration of them, out in the open. They broke cover, ran like fucking rabbits, hit them like fucking rabbits in cut corn. The missile was fired, fired once, went rogue. The flares decoyed it, up and down and sideways and back into its own arse. We went in hard after the firing position, plastered it. That was Vladdy…Vladdy, I am pleased to introduce you to the Frontal Aviation commander. They plastered the place, nothing that's bigger than a mouse's arse could have lived through it…right, Vladdy?'
'Right, Major.'
'You said you would bring me his head,' the Frontal Aviation commander remarked easily.
'With what was put down on him he won't have a fucking head,' Medev chirped. 'Brandy, you'll take some brandy with us…?'
The orderly brought brandy. Medev and the Frontal Aviation commander chinked glasses. The party erupted back to life.
Medev had promised the head of the man who fired the Redeye. Vladdy was an experienced pilot. He had not seen the man, only the location of the firing flash but Vladdy had seen the ground into which he fired. He would have known. A pilot knew the damage capabilities of his firepower. If the pilot Vladdy said that no man could have survived the blasting of the machine gun shells into the rocks and the rockets, then so be it. He would have liked the body, he would have liked to have kicked the bastard's balls — dead balls or live balls — kicked them with a full-swung boot. He would have liked to have seen the face of the man, and known the man who had challenged him for area Delta.
The Frontal Aviation commander downed his glass, he looked at Medev, a half smile on his face. 'Why do you think he fired into a field of flares and at helicopters with baffles fitted, when he had no covering fire? Why do you think he did that?'
'We'll have to go and ask him,' Medev shrieked in his laughter. 'If there's anything left to ask…'
The drink flowing, vodka, brandy, beer, enough drink for them to bath in.
'Where's that arsehole Rostov?'
'Why doesn't Rostov share with us?'
'In his sack and playing, that's where the arsehole will be.'
No more sport to be gained from singing and dancing and drinking. The pilots needed new sport. The Frontal Aviation commander smiled indulgently, remembered his own youth. Rostov, Medev knew, would be in his bed; Rostov was not one to participate in a mess night carousal. Carousing was for fliers. Rostov was not a flier.