The voice of Pyotr Medev as he spoke into the microphone in Jalalabad Operations was quiet and detached. The voice was a fraud.
In answer to Medev, winning through the static and crackle of an intermittent radio transmission, was the voice of the pilot now hovering high over the valley 80 kilometres away to the north.
'Are there survivors? Over…'
'Not that we have seen. I repeat, there has been a fire and explosions. The fire was total. There is no movement around the helicopter. Over…'
'Is there a possibility of survivors? Over…'
'No possibility. Over…'
'After the fire is there any chance the bandits can salvage anything? Over…'
'The helicopter is destroyed. Over…'
'Tell me again: you did not see Nikolai go down? Was it ground fire or a malfunction? Over…
'I saw nothing, repeat, nothing. My gunner believes he heard an explosion, but Nikolai was out of our vision at that time. My gunner was hammering a cave. My gunner says there was an explosion, he thinks, then there was a shout from Nikolai, garbled. My gunner thinks he saw them just as they went in. He says he thinks they were already making smoke. He cannot be sure, it was very fast. Nikolai was flying low. Over…'
Medev's lips were pursed in resignation. 'How low? Over…'
'Forty, fifty metres. They were behind me. Over…'
Nikolai should have been high above, not down on his arse near the floor of the valley. Medev shook his head. 'And there is no possibility of survivors? Over…'
'The fire is still burning, there is no possibility. Over…'
'Return to base. Over. Out.'
The static snapped off, the transmission was completed. Medev put down the microphone. There was a silence in the Operations Room. He looked up at the operations wall map, into the wilderness of area Delta unmarked by roads or the red squares of towns. When he reached up on his toes he could make the chinagraph mark, a black cross, at the coordinates where the helicopter had crashed. It was the first helicopter he had lost, they were the first crew he had lost. He felt sick in his stomach.
Perhaps there had been an explosion, perhaps the helicopter had been making smoke before it came down. There was sufficient uncertainty for him to know that an accident investigation team must be flown into that valley in area Delta. For an accident investigation team to land there, he needed infantry to be lifted in to secure a perimeter around them. If Mi-8s were to go into the valley then the gunships would have to be above them. A bloody shambles…a military operation on some scale was called for.
Medev strode out of Operations and headed away in the sunshine for Divisional headquarters.
If there had been an explosion before the crash, if there had been smoke before impact, then the Mi-24 was in all probability the victim of ground fire. Medev had to know.
The helicopters had gone.
Barney lay for half an hour in the shelter place after the engine drone had left the valley. He lay in the silence that is the world of small foraging birds, and of the first leaves falling. He lay close to the peace of field flowers. There were no more explosions from the fuel tanks and ammunition of the helicopter. He lay in the silence and the peace of the orchard.
Then, abruptly, Barney moved. He would not wait for darkness, he would move out.
He hurried down towards the river bed, paused at the tree line and called the boy's name.
The boy came quickly, breaking from cover, fleet and light-footed.
Barney saw him coming, walked back to the mules. He had untied the animals and was already heading north, up the valley, when the panting boy reached him.
'It was marvellous, Barney, magnificent.'
Barney didn't look back at him, just tossed back the bridle rope of a mule.
'I saw it happen, Barney, I watched you fire Redeye…'
Barney lengthened his stride, dragging his mule along after him through the trees.
'You are pleased, Barney, it is what you wanted?'
Barney came to the edge of the orchard. His face furrowed in concentration. Half a mile of open field and rock to cover and then another orchard in front of him that was laid out beside the shell of a village. The helicopter was behind them. Barney started to trot forward, short chopped steps. He heard the wheeze of the boy's breath and the stamp of the mules' hooves.
They came to the tree line of the far orchard, crossed it, bypassed the village of broken mud-brick homes and free swinging doors and untended graves. On across more open ground where the valley narrowed, and they took a rough trail at the angle of the cliff wall, where the sun could not touch them.
Once they passed a shepherd who sat surrounded by his herd of goats that had found a feeding place in a small field from which, before the evacuation of the valley, he would have been chased. The shepherd watched them, gave no sign of interest.
Where the valley was narrow, where the trees were close set, where there was cover, and where the smoke from the helicopter could no longer be seen, Barney stopped. He tied his mule, flopped down, closed his eyes and waited for the boy.
'Will you kill another helicopter?'
'I have seven more missiles,' Barney said.
'Seven more helicopters…?'
The boy roped his mule to an apple tree's root and took some bread from his pack and broke it into two portions.
'It was wasted,' Barney said flatly. 'The moment the fire caught, it was wasted.'
'Is that all you care for? After what we suffer from the helicopters all you care for are the mechanisms?'
First the gunship helicopters strafed the empty villages on either side of the burned out skeleton fuselage, then the Mi-8 carried in the infantry.
While the investigation officers worked, the gunships clattered overhead.
Medev was there.
It was rare for Medev to be away from the Operations Room at Jalalabad, but then he had not lost a helicopter before. He had insisted, the Frontal Aviation commander had relented. Medev could prowl the rocks and boulders of the river bed and walk amongst the fragments of the crashed Mi-24. He had seen a trooper vomit as a charred and black-bodied corpse, unrecognisable as the man who had eaten breakfast beside Medev that morning, was taken from the upper cockpit. He had seen what seemed to be three burned logs removed from the nose cockpit and zipped into a white plastic bodybag. He had seen the investigators climb carefully up to the starboard engine exhaust vent. He had seen them scribbling notes, he had seen the flash of the camera lights.
Later a green brown fibreglass tube was brought from the tree line to the investigators.
Later a place was found fifty metres up the valley's side where the ground beside a large boulder rock had been scorched by a fire flash.
Medev did not quiz the investigators for a preliminary finding. He would hear their conclusions that evening, before the planning of the next day's patrols.
They were gone, back to Jalalabad, by the late afternoon, and on their way home a shepherd, taking no cover, was machine gunned to death.
Chapter 13
The accident investigation officer was a thorough young man. He was not in awe of his audience — the Frontal Aviation commander, the Colonel of Intelligence, a divisional army staff officer, and Major Medev — and they heard him through without interruption.
'An Mi-24 was downed in area Delta after receiving a direct hit in the proximity of the engine exhaust from an infrared guided ground-to-air missile. The missile was fired from an elevated position at the side of the valley at a lateral trajectory from a range of eight hundred metres. We discovered a launch tube for an American manufactured Redeye missile, sometimes given the designation FIM-43A. The markings on the missile tube tell us it was nine years old, that it w,as issued to the Israeli Defence Force, and then transferred to the Iranian army. We found the tracks of one man and two mules…'