'No one.'
'There is somebody?'
'There won't be anybody.'
'There has to be someone, you will tell of this to someone.'
'No one. I have to go to sleep…'
'You have a woman at home?'
'No.'
'Who do you do this for, Barney?'
He dragged the blanket tighter over his head.
'Who for, Barney?'
'Is it important, Gul Bahdur?'
'What I do is for my people, for my country. What you do is not for your people, not for your country's sake. It is not for money?'
'Not for money.' He smiled to himself.
'Who for, Barney?'
'Look, boy, when the helicopters come tomorrow, and they will come tomorrow, when they come if I am asleep then I am dead, if I am dead you are dead too…'
'I am not afraid to die.'
'I am not a warrior of God, I am not a potential martyr of the Resistance. I'm not going to die here. I'm not going to die because some little bastard won't let me sleep.'
'A cheeky little bastard, Barney?'
'A cheeky little bastard with about one minute to live if he doesn't shut up and sleep.'
'Why is there no woman at home to whom you will be able to tell this?'
'It didn't happen.'
'Why not?'
'There was nothing to give to a woman,' Barney said quietly.
'There is yourself.'
'No woman would want the things I know of. I know how to break a man's neck with the edge of my hand. I know how to lie in bracken and watch the back door of a farmhouse for three days without moving, in my own country. I know how to walk twenty miles with sixty pounds on my back and then take an assault course. I know how to put down mortar fire so that six have gone before the first lands. I know how to administer morphine and fit a saline drip when a man's in shock with his guts in the mud. I have nothing to give a woman, not any woman that I have met.'
'Did you try?'
'Go to sleep, boy.'
'What do we do in the morning?'
'I tell you, and then you don't talk any more.'
'I won't talk any more.'
Barney rolled on his back. He smelt the stench of his own body, he felt the dirt in his feet. He was canopied by the stars. His voice was a whisper.
'They will sweep the valley tomorrow. They must come back to the valley because they have been challenged. They have to find and remove the missile. They will try to fly in a formation that will flush us out. They will accept that one of their helicopters will always be vulnerable, but they will reckon I won't fire on the low flying bird and give my position. One helicopter will fly high, above the roof of the valley, probably to the rear of all the others. That helicopter, the high fly bird, is mine for tomorrow. That helicopter cannot be seen by those that fly in front and below. In the morning we have to find a hiding place for the mule and for you, and somewhere that I can reach quickly after I have fired. The helicopters will come from the south because that is the direction of Jalalabad. I want to be a mile or so further south than the mule we've left. I want to be behind the highest flying helicopter when they find the mule. That's the plan.'
Barney heard the rhythmic snores of the boy.
Even in the gully, the cold of the night wind tugged at his blanket, ate at his bones.
In the first grey sheen of morning the mujahidin knelt in prayer.
A ragged gathering of old and young, educated and illiterate, from the cities and from the villages. They knelt on their hands and elbows and squashed their foreheads into the dirt in the centre of their camp. They were in two rows, straight lines, and in front of each man was his weapon, close to his hand even when he was in obeisance to far away Mecca. Alone, out in front of his men, was Ahmad Khan with the loaded Kalashnikov beside his thighs. He led the men militarily and spiritually. He called now in the high pitched singing voice of prayer to the God of Islam. He called for victory, he cried for revenge. He called for the destruction of the Soviet occupation army, he cried for the expulsion of that army from his country. His prayer united the old and the young who followed him. He was devout. He was traditionalist. Islam had fashioned Ahmad Khan over the anvil, beaten steel into his leadership.
He had heard in the night that a helicopter had been shot down further north from his camp. The still smoking burnt wreck of a helicopter had been seen.
At that first light, Ahmad Khan and his men broke camp, folded away their tents and packed their few belongings.
With the shadows still long they began the trek away from the river bed and the trees and the scrub and the lower boulder falls of the valley. If a helicopter had been destroyed the previous day, then the Soviets would return in force the following morning, that Ahmad Khan knew. There were times when he was prepared to stand and fight, and there were times when he believed in survival under the cover of the side valleys. He had learned a long lesson at the hands of the helicopters, he fought them only when there was no escape.
Everything that they owned, they carried on their backs.
He was neither pleased nor resentful at the downing of the helicopter. He felt no especial pleasure that a helicopter had been destroyed and the crew killed. The destruction was a fact. Later, as he climbed, he pondered on his meeting with the foreigner. He recalled the stubble on the foreigner's face and the pale skin beneath and the strength of the white-palmed hand that had taken his. He had set himself at a distance from the foreigner with the eight Redeye missiles. But the distance was not a great one. Already because of the presence of the foreigner in his valley he had broken his camp and was moving his fighting men to higher and safer ground The foreigner with the Redeye would be further north in the valley. Ahmad Khan controlled this valley, secured it against ground attack, protected it for the mujahidin convoys that wound across the mountains from Pakistan to the liberated Panjshir. But because a foreigner had come to his valley with a missile launcher, his control over this valley was diminished.
In practice that control exercised by Ahmad Khan over the valley and the fighting men who operated there and the few civilians who existed there was complete. No man who followed him had cause to challenge his leadership. In the way that a man might develop the talent of an engineer or a mathematician, Ahmad Khan had mastered the fine art of guerrilla warfare. He was followed because he was the best, he was good enough at his self-appointed role for the Military Governor of Laghman province to have offered a reward on his head, dead or alive, of 10,000 Afghanis. He was respected enough for no man who walked with him to have dared, or tried, to earn that reward.
Beside him was a man who wore the scarlet waistcoat that might have come from the costume of a dancing boy who entertained the caravan travellers with acrobatics, and a man who limped because a Soviet bullet had nicked the tendon behind his kneecap. He was the leader, but he listened to the men who were closest to him, heard out their grumbling at his treatment of the foreigner who had come with the missiles.
He heard the criticism, but he rejected it.
Barney lay on his stomach.
Below him, as if a sharpened chisel had made the cut, was the valley floor, a full four thousand feet beneath. The green of trees, the mottle of the scrub, the grey white strip of the river bed. When he squinted his eyes he could see the tethered mule, and once he thought he could hear a braying cry for there was no shade on its back, no water for its throat.
The poem came to him, the poem of a man who had known and watched the soldiers who had lived in their Frontier Province barracks, who had fought in these mountains.