In the air, whispering high above the valley, was the sound of an aircraft engine.
'I have no medicines, I have nothing.'
'I know that.'
It was not possible for Barney to believe what Schumack had told him. Not a woman of this loveliness. Not a woman who squatted beside the river pool at dawn and washed her clothes, and whose long free hair tumbled over her cheeks.
'There is nothing I can do for those who are hurt in your fight.'
'I know that.'
'I have no morphine, I have no steriliser, I have no disinfectant.'
'You should cut some dressings.' Barney could barely recognise the coldness in his voice.
She smiled him a pale smile.
'It is just that you fighting men should know of the havoc for those who have to clear up after you.'
He heard the whine approach of a slow-moving aircraft.
'I am sorry about your medicines, truly sorry.'
She snorted as a reply, she flung back her head and her hair waved away onto her neck. He saw her swan throat, he saw the flash of white teeth and coral soft lips. Away to the south he saw an aircraft. A biplane, single-engined, a silhouette clear against the upper cirrus haze.
'Your sorrow will not help the people who are wounded in the fighting, the fighting you have travelled a long road to provoke.'
Barney threw his shirt back over his head, 'I can't say more than I'm sorry.'
'You have come to shoot down one helicopter so that you can take home with the parts.'
'Yes.'
'For these people your missile is a disaster, and when you have made the disaster you will not be here to gather up the bloody body parts.'
Barney was stung. 'I don't make a habit of bleeding my principles round the place.'
'You're a spy,' she spat the words. 'You are dirtied…'
'You're not a spy? You don't talk with your bloody Consul when you get to Peshawar? You don't get debriefed? You don't talk to Aerospatiale and Dassault about every Soviet aircraft that goes over your bloody little head?'
'I said you were dirtied — you are filthied. You cannot believe anyone has a motive above yours. You cannot believe in anyone who does not creep behind the coat of their government.'
'You should cut some bandages.'
He hated himself. He tried to see into her eyes, to win some softening. She twisted her head away from him. He saw the cherry flush on her cheeks.
He walked away.
Gul Bahdur was running breathless to meet him.
Gul Bahdur had caught Barney's arm, was hurrying him back to the village, chattering at him. Barney turned once. The woman still squatted at the side of the pool.
Above was an Antonov Colt. It was the aircraft that Frontal Aviation used for high-level reconnaissance. The aircraft from which the cameras pinpointed the targets for the strike aircraft and the gunships.When the reconnaissance aircraft came over early in the morning then the aerial bombardment would follow. Night on day, certainty.
The Antonov Colt had roused the village. There were men running with rifles in their hands, others pulling behind them the wheeled frames of the two DShK machine guns. There were mothers screaming for the children to begin the climb to the caves in the valley walls.
Barney and Schumack and the boy, between them, carried the launcher and the five spare missile tubes towards the position that had been agreed south of the village, beyond the fields and the groves of mulberry and walnut.
They passed Mia on the path. She was cartwheeling her arm, as if to dry the brassiere and the pants and the woollen socks in the cool air.
Chapter 16
Three pairs of Sukhoi SU-24 all weather interdiction/strike bombers had been sent from the sprawl of the Begram airbase outside Kabul.
Codenamed 'Fencer' by the NATO planners, the SU-24 is the pride of the Soviet air capability in Afghanistan, and is as familiar in the blue skies above the Hindu Kush mountains as the wheeling kites and buzzards.
From altitude, from beyond the reach of the small arms and machine gun defences, they deliver with the casualness of a newspaper boy's dawn drop the 500kg and 1000kg bombs that are slung beneath the wing pylons and hard points of the lower fuselage.
The SU-24 has an awesome record. A maximum speed of 2120 kilometres per hour. A combat radius of 1100 kilometres on the hi-lo-hi flying profile. They carry an armament of 5700 kgs. But the maximum speeds of the SU-24 are irrelevant in the circumstances of Afghanistan. There is no aerial combat here. There are no hostile interceptor fighters, there are no batteries of radar-guided missiles against which the technology of the Sukhoi's inbuilt defences can be pitted. No harm can come to the kites and buzzards that circle over the valleys, and no harm either to the SU-24s that swoop down from the upper turbulence to run in over their given targets.
Anything that moved in the valley was designated as a target. The abandoned villages in the central part of the valley were smashed. The rockets arrowed with laser controlled aim towards the mouths of the caves, setting up in the recesses the shock waves that would pierce the ear drums and blast the air from the lungs of men who hid there. No counter strike was possible. The bombers owned the skies, owned the floor of the valley. Along the length of this gouged-out cut in the mountains, men and women and children huddled in the protection they had chosen when they had first seen the speck of the Antonov at dawn, huddled and shivered and prayed to their God of Islam.
A creeping carpet of bombs fell on the valley floor. The carpet roll was kicked out at the southern end of the valley and spread towards the northern fastness of the valley, towards the village of Atinam.
In their briefings at Begram, the two-man crews who would sit cramped beside each other in the Sukhois had been told to husband sufficient of their bombs and rockets to strike a devastating and unnerving blow at the village.
As the carpet strayed north along the valley towards the village of Atinam, so the white heat flares spilled from the bombers, flaming in vigour as they fell. If a missile had been fired then the flares would have diverted the warhead away from the hot metal of the tail engine exhausts.
No missile was fired.
There was no ground fire from the mujahidin of Ahmad Khan who had taken to the caves and the natural camouflage of the valley's walls, and to the gullies and ravines of the side valleys. There was no response to the shattering thunder bellow of the bombs exploding in the valley.
From the skies the bombers fell upon the village of Atinam.
They swept down in a blast that smashed across the valley, was trapped by the valley sides and echoed and echoed up the cliff walls.
The bombs dropped from under the wings and fuselages of the Sukhois. Graceful pellets as they arced away from the aircraft, falling casually at first while the bombers above them surged upwards for altitude. Growing in lethal size as they fell. No longer pellets as they struck the ground, as the detonation flashed, as the smoke dust ripped into the air above the fields and the mulberry trees and the homes of Atinam.
Falling slower than the bombs were the flares that drifted down in their brilliance to spend themselves in a flaming beauty amongst the houses and the irrigation canals and the orchards.
On his stomach, from the entrance of a cave, Barney Crispin watched the airstrike.
Schumack was beside him, and crouched over his back and peering across his shoulders was the boy, Gul Bahdur.
The village was no simple target for the Sukhois' pilots.
They were reluctant to come low into the valley. Their line of attack was not a tree-skimming, house-hopping flight close to the fields and the path and the river bed.