he had stopped beside a stall. It would be a quick purchase. He looked down at three lapis lazuli brooches. He thought he should spend the same on his wife as he had spent the month before on the agronomist's wife. He loved the deep clear blue of the stone, the blue of the early morning skies through the tinted canopy of the helicopter cockpit. He pointed to one brooch. He looked up and saw the backs of the soldiers of Mechanized Infantry merging with the cloaks and blankets and turbans and caps from Nuristan. He heard the price, he reached for his wallet. He looked back down the street and glimpsed the raincoat of one of the civilians. Just once he did not haggle over the purchase price. He paid what he was asked. He could not have explained to himself the sudden edge and suspicion he felt in the pressing bazaar street, with the crowds flowing close around him, with the buildings lowering above him with the flaked paint and the hanging washing. He slapped down the Afghani notes.
He heard a single shot. He grasped his pistol from its holster. He was wild-eyed, turning, spinning.
He saw the soldiers from Mechanized Infantry close huddled to each other, and the space growing around them, and the fallen shape beside their black walking-out boots.
He saw the terror in their faces.
He started to run.
He ran away from the soldiers and past the three civilians, frozen on their feet. Only when he was clear of the bazaar and out in the main wide street did he stop running. He realized then that he had dropped the brooch of lapis lazuli.
He returned his pistol to the holster. His head was shaking, slowly, sadly. Pyotr Medev walked away from the bazaar. He felt no shame that he had run, just the soaring pleasure that he lived and that another had been chosen. In the half an hour that it took to reach the Mikroyan residential complex his hand never left the opened flap of his holster.
His knees had steadied now, the tight fear in his belly was behind him.
He was saluted by the sentries at the main checkpoint barrier of the complex that was the home of the majority of Soviet citizens working in the Kabul government ministries and on the Fraternal Air programme. A different world behind these perimeter wire-topped walls. A world of women gossiping about home in faraway Kiev or Gorki or Volgograd or Saratov, of brightly dressed and blond haired children falling from slides and climbing into swing seats.
A world where his shirt would be slid from his chest, his trousers from his thighs. A world of warmth, and a bottle of beer, and a sausage sandwich, and the sweet taste of a woman. And the waking in the arms, against the body of a woman in the second floor flat of the Mikroyan residential complex.
Medev smiled at the children who ran past him. He backed away to allow a girl with a bag full of shopping from the Commissariat to go up the stairs of the building ahead of him. Second floor. He could have sleep-walked to that door.
As he pressed the bell button, he was grinning to himself.
He had never seen the man who stood in the door.
A thin, gaunt, tanned man. An unclipped beard, bleached sparse hair on the crown of his head, a yellow athlete's vest, a pair of baggy fawn trousers gathered at the waist by a thin belt.
The grin fled from the face of Major Pyotr Medev.
The man in the doorway looked at him, waited on him.
Medev felt the chill damp under the peak of his cap. He saw the agronomist's wife at the back of the small hallway. He saw the unbuttoned fall of her blouse. He saw the shrug of her shoulders. He saw the brooch of blue stone pinned to the breast of her blouse.
The bastard was home from his ditch in Kandahar.
'I'm sorry, stupid of me, I must have come to the wrong door.' Medev ducked his head, the gesture of casual apology. The door was closed in his face. He turned swiftly away and went down the tile steps of the staircase.
'When is Major Medev back?'
'He only went this morning…'
'I know when he went, when is he back?'
'We received a message from Kabul Movements that he was trying to get on a flight back this evening, but we heard later there was no available flight. Normally he stays overnight, I don't know why he wanted to come back.'
'Goddamnit, Rostov,' bellowed the Frontal Aviation commander. 'Cut out all the background crap and just tell me when he is due here.'
'Tomorrow afternoon, sir, fourteen hundred…'
'Reconnaissance reports a considerable column moving through area Delta. Intelligence believe this column will have reached your Major's valley by tomorrow morning.'
'What do you want me to do, sir?'
'Attack it…what else? Serve it with tea?'
'Can this not wait for Major Medev's return?'
'It cannot wait. There will be another Antonov flight at first light. The decision will then be made on the tasking of Eight Nine Two. I am assuming Major Medev would not wish another squadron to fly into area Delta?'
'Major Medev would prefer that the pilots familiar with area Delta should continue to fly there.'
'Your pilots should be ready to fly as soon as the report is evaluated.'
Rostov made his way out of the offices. Shit, the squadron to fly and Medev in Kabul. Medev had told him of the agronomist's wife and her flat in the Mikroyan, told him when they were drunk together. And the message had come through that Medev had tried to get back that evening. Must be her period, or the clap…and Medev would be foul-tempered if he was back and found the squadron airborne.
Rostov went to the mess to find Vladdy. Only a few days ago he would have been looking for Nikolai, or Viktor, or Alexei, or Sergei. But Nikolai and Viktor and Alexei and Sergei had all gone back to the Motherland in the bodybags. And after what the bastard Vladdy had done to him in the mess, done to his pyjamas, to his dignity, he didn't mind hoping that if there had to be another bodybag it would be Vladdy's.
Chapter 21
Medev had gone to his billet angry and drunk. He blamed it on the return of the agronomist from Kandahar. He had been unable to sleep. He had heard every shout from the sergeant of the perimeter guard as he livened up his sentries. Three times he had heard the rattle of automatic fire, and an accompanying thud of detonating hand grenades as the war came closer to the centre of the capital city.
He cut himself when he shaved because he had brought a new razor to Kabul and the water in the basin tap was cold.
He tried to telephone the Jalalabad base. He was told there were no lines. He shouted that it was a matter of operational necessity for him to speak to the base. He was told that he should make the call on a tactical military exchange if it were a matter of operational necessity. From the billet it was not possible to make the connection, later perhaps.
He took the half-hourly shuttle bus to the airfield. At the airfield he had four hours to wait.
It was his hope that there might be a helicopter or an aircraft seat for an early lift to Jalalabad. The Sukhois were taking off for the first of the day's bombing runs against the Panjshir. Helicopters were warming their engines for the start of operations against the bandits dug into the mountain range to the south of the capital. He saw a file of men, clutching their civilian suitcases, walking to the steps set against the fuselage of an Aeroflot four-engined Ilyushin 11–76. Going home, lucky bastards. He saw another Ilyushin, a turbo-prop and smaller, taxiing across the concrete wasteland towards a knot of parked ambulances away in the far distance, so that the loading of the casualties would not attract attention. Most of the wounded went to Dushanbe, in Tajikstan. If you lasted through the field hospitals in Afghanistan then you'd last through anything. If you lasted through Casualty Reception at Dunshanbe, then you'd been visited by a miracle and you deserved a goddamned medal, that's what Medev's pilots said.