Kipling, bless him, had been here with his pen, with his compassion for the fighting men of these mountains, foreign and native.
'You are not going to be hit by a bullet,' the boy said fiercely from behind Barney.
'No, I am not going to be hit by a bullet, Gul Bahdur.'
'Why do you talk about it, if you are not going to be hit?'
'It's about the friends that you find,' Barney was smiling, it's about the people that you find who will help you, Gul Bahdur. It gives you a strength when you find such people, when you had not expected to find them.'
'But you will not be hit.' The boy was desperate for his assurance.
Barney laughed. 'They will not hit me, I promise you.'
The boy had looked away. His face was set, frightened.
Barney said, 'You see the mule. The mule is the trap for the helicopters. The flight line of the highest helicopter, the one that watches all the others, will be up here, up at the height that I am. He is the guard for as many as they send, that one is mine.'
'You have an arrogance,' the boy said.
'If I had no arrogance I would not be here.' Barney cuffed the boy gently. Without the boy he was nothing, and without the boy's confidence he was helpless.
'You've hidden the mule?' The boy nodded, distracted. 'Go back to the mule.'
Barney saw him hurry over the rough open ground, saw him drop down into a gully a hundred yards away, saw him rise, again running now, then disappear finally.
He checked the Redeye launcher. He had checked it three times that morning.
The pilot, Alexei, saw the tethered mule, whooped in excitement into his radio, hovered his helicopter a dozen metres above the river bed, and shouted for his gunner to engage the sleeping figure beside the mule with machine gun fire.
The pilot, Sergei, held his position five hundred metres above and five hundred metres behind.
The pilot, Vladdy, was a thousand metres above the valley floor, a thousand metres further south from the helicopter now blasting the screaming mule and the shape beside the low rock.
The pilot, Viktor, watched through the blue tint of his cockpit dome. He flew level with the top of the valley's walls.
He slackened his speed, felt the wind gusts heave at the bulk of his machine's fuselage. He was a good flier, had graduated from the Academy with commendations, but a good flier could do little to hold a stable station in these bastard winds and ceiling altitude.
The helicopter dropped, fell in a pocket, was restrained as if by an elastic string. He felt the tightening of the belts that strapped him to his flying seat.
He saw that the fall had taken him below the top rim of the valley walls. He nudged his stick, edged the bird closer to the shelter of the cliffs. Far away below him Alexei darted low over the ground, difficult to detect because of the broken camouflage markings.
Viktor knew nothing of the attack on his helicopter before the thundering impact of the Redeye warhead down through the rotor blades and into the fuselage casing above him. Because the missile, on its downward flight at supersonic speed, had first sheared through one of the five rotor blades, lopping it clear, the pilot's possibility of feathering down onto the river bed was lost.
The pilot and his gunner died as they struck the ground, in the scattering wreckage of the Mi-24, before the flame spread.
The sun was not yet high over area Delta as the black billowing smoke soared up from the valley's floor.
Chapter 14
He had run with all the strength and speed and power of his body across a hundred metres of open ground and then into the first gully, diving from sight as his mind made images of the helicopters' pilots surging out of the valley depths in their search for the source of the fire that had destroyed their friend. Once in the gully he had splayed out his blanket, tucked two corners under the tight straps of his back pack, between the straps and his shoulders, manoeuvred the blanket out over his body, and began to crawl away. Sometimes the fast leopard crawl of his training, sometimes the wary snail crawl.
He reached the boy. The boy had done what was asked of him. The mule was tied front legs and back legs, had been toppled over and lay on its side under the shelter of a lip overhang of rock. The boy's weight lay across the upper legs of the mule. The back of the mule, with the baggage still fastened, was in the depth of the rock shelter. The boy, too, was covered by the rock overhang. Barney lay beside the boy, also across the legs of the mule. He pulled up his blanket so that it covered his head. No chance yet to reload the Redeye launcher.
They must weather the storm that would break around them. If luck smiled they would survive. If luck turned away they would be machine gunned, rocketed, and wrenched apart by bullets and shrapnel.
It seemed to Barney that the helicopters quartered the ground at the roof of the valley. Dividing, quartering, coordinating, searching. Above their heads was a continuous thunder rumble, of the engines of the hunting gunships. Above their heads was the bone rattle of the machine gun fire.
They seemed to winkle every crevice, gouging into each cranny. And then they were above them, hammering blasts first, then the earth-shaking terror of shells hurtling into the gully, prising and ricochetting the rocks around them, deafening, terrifying. Their rock lip protection seemed to dissolve in a splattering mess of stone chips. Into the earth and stone beyond his head and his feet, howling, splintering, flinging rock debris. When the boy screamed in his fear, Barney flung his arm over the slight shoulders and pressed him down further onto the warm, thrashing legs of the mule. Biting into Barney's stomach was the shape of the missile launcher.
And then a terrible silence. The silence of the deaf, until very slowly it came to Barney that the attack had moved on, but that there were still helicopters cutting the sky. Gradually his hearing came back. There would have been a target for him if he had been able to discard the spent tube, if he had been able to take another loaded tube from the baggage pack, if he had the room to load the new tube and fasten in place the battery coolant equipment. But he had no room, no time, and to have exposed himself now would have been to wave an idiot's farewell.
He whispered to the boy, daft to whisper because he could have shouted against the distant thump of the rotors, he whispered to the boy what words of comfort he could find. He whispered that the helicopters hoped to break their nerve, to make them run. The wind whistled and preyed around their hiding place and sung amongst the rock crests above them. Difficult for the pilots to stay stable, difficult for them to search the rock and stone and shadow beneath them. When the helicopters were close, he was quiet. When they chased other spectres, a thousand, two thousand metres away, then he whispered his encouragement to the boy.
And then there was only the wind. The helicopters had gone.
They stayed under the rock lip more than an hour after the engine sounds had filtered away.
He exchanged the darkness of the blanket's cover for the brightness of the midday sun. He stretched himself. They left the mule and crawled to the edge of the valley wall, they peered down into the middle day haze. Barney could see the spread-out wreckage of the helicopter. He stared down, he bit at his lip, his hand was tight on the bridle rope of the mule. He saw the pall of smoke hanging over the wreckage, sucked up the tunnel of the valley's walls, and the licking of the fire. A second time — nothing to retrieve.