His judgement told him that a hill community such as Chitral was not a place for police informers. If he was discreet he could survive in this place for three or four weeks. The Night Manager of the Dreamland was the first man with whom he had taken the risk of conversation since he had driven into Chitral. He had found his bungalow, he had broken a window, made his entry, he had set up his base. He had forced the garage door and hidden the Land Rover. He had emerged from his refuge only at dusk. Of course it could not last, not forever. It could last three or four weeks, and after that, stuff it…
As he stumbled between the pot holes, left the chai kanas and the eating houses and the shanty homes behind him, he was happier than he could remember. Howard Rossiter was returning to his operational headquarters. The source of that dream sense of happiness was the scale of the outrage that he had inflicted upon his employers and his family. Sod them. By now he would have been posted as 'missing'…a man from FCO never went 'missing' without permission. His family would know that he had disappeared in Pakistan. His happiness was knowing that for once they'd be scratching their bums in FCO, wondering what in Christ's name old Rossiter was up to. Happiness was knowing that his woman, Pearl, and those bloody awful children would be crouched on the front room settee with the bloody telly turned down and wringing their hands and wondering where the hell the old dogsbody had lost himself.
He climbed easily over the wooden gate that blocked off the winding drive up to the bungalow from the side road. It would be a rotten supper. He hadn't trusted himself to light the stove. Supper would be cold and eaten in the light of one shaded candle. His bed was a mattress on the kitchen floor, he would be on it by eight, nothing else to do…but it was worth it. Worth it just to think of FCO, and Pearl and the children on the front room sofa.
The kitchen door opened easily. He slid into the shadow, into his safe house. He laid his paper bag on the table. He wondered where Barney Crispin would sleep that night, what he would eat. A funny bugger, that Barney. Once he could have killed Barney, always he could have accepted his friendship. He thought about Barney in those distant mountains.
For the second day they kept to the high grounds above the valley.
It was a land of desolation, of beauty, of their feet falling on the small petal violet and white flowers, of limitless cloudless skies, of staggering views far into a fantasy land of summits and crags.
Once the boy whistled from behind Barney, and Barney froze and turned and looked to the boy who pointed away with his arm to a rock escarpment near to their trail, and after a hesitation of identification Barney saw the creature.
A snow leopard, a cat of infinite and still majesty, astride a rock.
Barney had passed it, not noticed it. The cat would have watched his coming, his going. Alone, self-sufficient. The ears of the cat flicked back, flattened on the sleekness of its head. It rose in an easy lithe movement and was gone. Barney looked for it beyond the escarpment, but didn't see it again. The cat had brought a smile to his face, he waved his thanks to the boy and trudged on.
He was a wild sight, a sore sight. He was filthy, he smelled the smell of his own body, the hair under his cap was matted and tight, his trousers were torn from the times he had run and tumbled for cover amongst sharp stones.
They would not reach the village at the top of the valley that night. They would sleep once more in the open, they would find a fissure to drop into. The food had been husbanded and was not finished. They would sleep again on the roof of the valley, shivering, coughing, enduring.
When they stopped, when the boy had caught up with him, Barney cupped the palms of his hands together and told the boy to pour water from his bottle into his hands, and he let the mule drink. Twice the boy filled the bowl of his hands, and he felt the rough mouth of the beast and the slurping tongue against his fingers. Afterwards Barney patted the neck of the mule. He called the mule Maggie. He thought the mule had a Maggie personality. He could mutter sweet things into Maggie's long soft ears. For what it had gone through the mule deserved a name. Maggie had been half-starved, denied water, tied under a rock and strafed. Maggie deserved better than they could give her.
'Tomorrow we will reach the village.'
'Why have the people stayed, Gul Bahdur, in this one village?'
'It is in a gorge at the furthest top of the valley. The valley sides are very close. It is said that it is difficult for the planes to make their attacks, they cannot easily approach. I think they have machine guns there…they used to have machine guns. The Soviets cannot attack every village in Afghanistan.'
'Which group is there?'
'The village is used by the men who follow Ahmad Khan, your friend…' The boy could still manage a darting grin at Barney. 'It is Hizbi-i-Islami. It is not important inside Afghanistan to which group the fighters belong. It is important in Peshawar, not here. What is important here is the killing of Soviets.'
'Bravely spoken, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said drily. 'When the Resistance has won they will make you the Minister for Propaganda.'
'What should be more important than killing Soviets?'
'For you, nothing.'
'And for you, Barney?'
'It is not your concern what is important to me.'
The boy wriggled closer to Barney. In the half-light his face was near to Barney's, keen and questioning. 'Why did you come, Barney?'
'It is not your concern why I came.'
'I have the right to know.'
'No rights.'
'Will you tell me? The truth.'
'Talk about something else, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said softly.
'Why do you hide?'
Barney laughed.
The boy persisted. 'You said there was no woman you could tell of this to, when you returned.'
'I said that, yes.'
'Your mother?'
'She was killed a long time ago.' Barney's voice was far away, as remote as the presence of the snow leopard on the escarpment.
'Your father?'
'He's dead. He was shot. There's a man in prison at home, the man who shot him. My father was trying to stop this man robbing something. That's all that happened.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Why should you be sorry? It's not your concern.'
'You have no brother or sister?'
'There are no brothers, no sisters. There is no one, Gul Bahdur.'
'Is that why you came, Barney, because there is no one?'
Just doing a job, and it seemed the crappiest of reasons for sitting in a rock crack cuddled with a heat-seeker. Better not to look for explanations, better to pray that the next big bird doesn't catch fire on impact, and better to be out and away before the explanations as to what Barney Crispin, Captain, was doing in Afghanistan became too feeble.
'There's no one gives a damn, Gul Bahdur.'
The boy moved away. Barney watched him turn his back, wrap himself into his blanket and settle onto the hardness of the rock.
Chapter 15
At their northern end, the valley's walls made a plunging ravine. Save for the torrent slides in the side valleys the walls were all but vertical and at the foot separated by a few hundred yards of flat ground on either side of the river bed. For much of the day, the floor of the valley at this point lay in shadow.
On large scale maps, the village of Atinam was marked as a black speck inserted between the two coils of contour lines at the valley's extremity. Only on large scale maps. It was too small a community to have exercised any but the most exact of cartographers. With the coming of the fourth year of the war, Atinam was the only inhabited village in an otherwise depopulated valley. Before the Soviet invasion, the valley had been home for some thousands of Nuristanis. Many of them now lived in the camps for refugees across the border. But the villagers of Atinam had stood their ground.