'Let's get the anus.'
'Rostov shouldn't be left short of an invitation.'
For a moment Medev pondered whether then and there he should put a brake on them. But Rostov didn't fly in area Delta, Rostov hadn't flown against the missile…screw Rostov. Medev saw them surge out through the doorway.
They were men at war, his pilots, and they were the cream and they were the power, they and the big birds that they flew. If they weren't hard, if they weren't right bastards then they would never have flown into the valley to find the missile, to destroy the man who fired the Redeye. Down the corridor he heard the shrill shouts of complaint, and Medev stayed silent.
Shit. He was wearing turquoise pyjamas, soft material and creaseless, and he was shaking like a piece of bloody jelly.
The pilots held Rostov up, and they poured beer from a bottle down his throat and he was gagging on the drink and slurping it from his mouth and down the front of his pyjama jacket. And the poor bastard was too frightened to struggle. And the pilots were fit, muscled and strong and Rostov was flabby and weak. And the pilots tore the pyjama jacket from Rostov and ripped the buttons away, and they were shouting and howling and below the rolls of Rostov's waist they were tugging at the cord of his trousers.
Rostov was trembling, and whimpering, and his hands were together and tight against his privates. And the pyjamas went into the stove, and the flames soared, and there was the stink of the synthetic fibre blazing. And the pilots pushed Rostov down to his hands and knees, naked, and they rode him in turn like a donkey around the dining table of the mess.
The fliers of the new squadron sidled away to their sleeping quarters. Without warning, the Frontal Aviation commander spun on his heel and walked out.
Rostov was no longer a game. Rostov was in the far corner of the mess, huddled on the ground, weeping. Rostov was alone, crying to the floor.
Medev loved his pilots, but they were animals. The Redeye missile had made animals of them, he said that to himself. Medev walked uncertainly across the carpet, skirted the table. He lifted Rostov to his feet. He hated a grown man to cry. He took Rostov out of the mess, back to his quarters. For Medev's pilots the party would continue until the first light of the new day.
On the mattress on the kitchen floor of the bungalow, Rossiter snorted and sighed and squealed through his hoarse and quaking throat.
It was rank, rich, bad pleasure. Cheeky little bitches, both of them. Cheeky was an understatement. Bloody outrageous. Parents should have been ashamed of them. It was what came of sending them to schools that didn't rate examinations. Rossiter was naked and dosed with sweet clinging hashish smoke, and Amanda without clothes against his back, and Katie without clothes against his belly. Christ knew where they'd learned it.
Tongues and teeth and finger nails, and his skin was alive and his mouth was dry, and he ached down there like someone had punched him. What happens to you, Howard boy, when you loiter with intent outside the open front of a Chitral grocery store. Fingers in his crotch, fingers in his backside, heaven knows what they learned at that school. Amanda holding another smoke to his mouth, couldn't hold it himself, hands couldn't hold steady after what they'd done to him, and Katie's fingers at him again so he was going to burst, so he was going to go mad, mad and insane, insane and delirious. He didn't know what they wanted of him, didn't know how they could find him an entertainment, and hadn't the energy to push the question.
At around the time he was enjoying his third smoke and mildly remonstrating with Katie that she couldn't expect him to respond again and again, Gul Bahdur walked heavily, limping, to the desk of the Dreamland Hotel on Chitral's Shahi Bazaar. Slung across the boy's back, awkward from its angular contents, was a filled sack of coarse cloth material.
Chapter 20
There was a narrow glow of sunshine at the dawn, an intermittent light because the winds blew hard in the valley and pushed the clouds across the face of the rising sun. A pit had been dug in the darkness hours. The bodies had been laid in it of seven men and two women and a child who was laid on a woman's breast before the blankets were wrapped around the corpses. It was said that more than one hundred thousand people had died in the prisons and the valleys and the deserts and the mountains of Afghanistan since the invasion of the Soviet armed forces in December 1979. Ten more here for the records. The grave was filled and topped by a cairn of stones. The words spoken by Ahmad Khan to the mourners carried briskly, ferried by the wind, to where Barney stood, a sing-song of defiance.
Mia Fiori was with the mourners. She had come from Atinam with the women who had died, she had carried the child who was buried.
Schumack stood with the mourners, indistinguishable as a foreigner amongst these people, head bent, shoulders swathed in a blanket, his billowing trousers snatched at by the winds.
Barney leaned against a tree trunk, away from the mourners, away from the burial.
As he watched, his face was blank of expression. He had not spoken to Ahmad Khan since Schumack had found him under the rock lip, bleeding and trembling. They had seen each other, eyed each other, but they had not exchanged words. Barney had wasted the bloody missile. The missile was as precious as his arm. He had wasted the missile because there had been no plan. If there had been a plan he need not have thrown his decoy into the skies, into the flares. The safety of Mia Fiori had taken precedence, even over the life of a pilot and a gunner and an Mi-24 helicopter. The bitterness he felt at the waste of the missile was a pattern in his mind. Again and again he saw the track of the rogue missile…
The cairn was built, and Schumack joined him under the tree. A caravan was coming through the valley within the next three, four days. More than a hundred mules and horses. Enough ammunition and mortar shells and RPG rounds to hold back a Soviet divisional attack into the Panjshir once the mountain passes were snow closed.
Ahmad Khan wouldn't come to tell him, but Schumack would: the caravan had to be protected. Barney nodded ruefully. Would there be a plan? A quick shallow grin from Barney. He squeezed Maxie Schumack's shoulder, because this man had helped him when he had limped back from his shattered hiding place to the open rock ground where the mujahidin had been caught by the gunships.
After Schumack had gone, ambling away, the girl came and sat beside Barney. She was pale, the bones of her cheeks seemed to have risen in her face. She was tight and hunched inside her blanket. She rested against Barney's shoulder staring out across the valley. He had slept the previous night with Mia Fiori lying on one side of him and the Redeye launcher on the other. She knew, and all of the camp knew, that he had fired the missile to win her safety. Her hand now lay under Barney's hand.
'When will you go?'
'When the caravan is through, while the passes can still be crossed.'
'Will you take me with you?'
'I will,' Barney said.
'There is nothing more for me here.'
'Perhaps there was never anything here for either of us.'
'When you go back to your home what awaits you there?' Her head tilting up to him, her eyes questioning, her small lips opened.
'It's a bit of a disaster, when I get home.'
'You were sent here?'
'I came myself, as you came yourself, we are the same. When I get home I will have to answer for that.'
'What will your answer be?'
'That I thought it right to come.'
'Yesterday I told you to kill a helicopter. Was it wrong to ask that?'
'From what you had seen at Atinam it was right to ask me to kill a helicopter. You had also seen the death of a pilot, but you had forgotten that.'