First as a pencil line, then as a crayon stripe, Barney saw the mountains that are west of Peshawar. They lay like a distant wall stretching right and left until they blurred into the haze. Behind them was Afghanistan.
The father of Barney's father had made this journey. More than sixty years before he had come by train with his battalion and travelled on the line that still ran beside the new road, and seen those mountains, and seen the buffalo beside the tracks, and seen the baked mud walls of the villages, and seen the women dive from sight, and seen the children run beside the carriages as they now ran beside the loaded lorries. His father's mother had come this way, and returned, returned with a baby and without a husband.
They had reached Peshawar.
They passed the towering sloped ramparts of brick that walled the Bala Hissar fort, they nudged into a confusion of scooter taxis and horse carts and brightly painted buses and laden-down lorries. Rossiter's finger was perpetually on the horn button, his face a furious scarlet as he took issue with one obstacle after the other.
'Where are we going?' Barney asked.
'I've hired a bungalow. Chappie from one of the refugee charities, gone home on leave. It's out of the way.'
At last Rossiter swung the Land Rover off the main road, onto a dirt strip. They drove between small bungalows and look one turning and then another.
'It's not quite Eaton Place for the charity people,' Rossiter said from the side of his mouth.
He had to talk, Barney recognised that, and the older man craved an answer. It would have been simple for Barney to engage in small talk, price of beer, bloody awful government, Pakistan going to the knackers, anything. It wasn't his way.
Barney gazed out at the bungalow as Rossiter braked. There was a small concreted yard in lieu of a garage and beyond it a squat building behind a raised verandah. Half hidden was a brick box for a servant near to the kitchen door. There were untidy flower beds around the verandah from which the bougainvillaea reached up to the tired white plaster walls.
'What do you think of it?'
'Fine,' Barney said.
'What would you do if I kicked you in the arse?'
'I'd break the bones in your arm,' Barney said.
'Just wondering if you were alive, that's all.' Rossiter laughed, loud and bleating.
Barney carried the bags into the bungalow. Rossiter muttered something about the cook having gone back to his village for the charity man's leave, that they'd have to fend for themselves, and took for himself the bedroom with the air conditioning. Barney was next door, an iron-framed bed, a wardrobe that didn't shut because the doors had warped. He stamped on a darting cockroach, sliming the tile floor. The water came hesitantly from a cold tap at the basin, he gathered enough in his cupped hands to wash the dust out of his face.
Rossiter stood in the doorway.
'What's for the rest of today?'
'We take delivery tonight, but there's something I'd like you to see first. It's a short drive, won't take long.' Something of a grin on Rossiter's face.
Fifteen minutes in the Land Rover.
They stopped outside a compound and walked through the open gates, between the high walls. From a central flagpole flew the red cross on white. A European nurse in snow white floated across the compound dirt, as if blind to the surroundings. She saw Rossiter and inclined her head in a formal greeting. A slope-shouldered orderly, grey-bearded, sad of face, manoeuvred a wheelchair down a wooden ramp, the man in the wheelchair sneezed but could not lift his hand to wipe away the mess. There were two huts inside the compound, long and low and single storied. Barney knew what was required of him. He walked to the wide central door of the nearest hut, paused to allow his eyes to assimilate the grey interior. He counted fifteen beds for paraplegic and quadriplegic patients. He saw the head clamps that kept the skull completely still, he saw the beds of others tilted so that their bodies would be moved and the bed sores would be less acute. They were all men, in both of the huts. Every one with passive eyes, the same dropped mouths of helplessness. He willed himself to walk past each bed, past each wheelchair, and for each man he tried to smile some comfort.
He walked out into the sunlight, into the live world. He strode to face Rossiter.
'Very clever,' Barney hissed.
'I thought there was a chance that you didn't quite understand what it was all about,' Rossiter said affably. 'The helicopters did most of them. Spinal lesions caused by rocket shrapnel, or by being under buildings that the gunships have knocked down. Pretty grim thought, isn't it, if the only treatment is days away on the back of a mule? Only a few get here, they're the ones done near the border. Bringing you here was my way of kicking your arse without getting my arm broken.'
After dark, after an awful meal out of tins organised by Rossiter, they drove out of Peshawar on the Kohat road.
There was no street lighting. Animals and people loomed late from the blackness into the glare of the Land Rover's headlights, Rossiter was quiet, but his face was satisfied as if he has won something of a victory at the International Red Cross rehabilitation clinic, and taken pleasure from the success. Barney tried to put the sights behind him, could not. Impossible to ignore, the paralysed bodies and the devastated features of the men who had come from the war across the mountains. A moon was creeping up, a thin sickle that threw only a small light on the fields and homes that lay below the causeway road. From the darkness, from the few pinprick lights, there was a bubble of noise, of voices, of animal sounds, of running water in the canal dykes, of chanting songs on the radios.
They drove for nearly an hour until they came to a junction where Rossiter pulled off the road and bumped the Land Rover over the dirt before switching off the engine and the lights. The night was around them, and the mosquitoes. Barney waited for Rossiter to speak, Rossiter kept his peace. Sometimes the lights of an oncoming truck lit the interior of the Land Rover's cab and then Barney could see the anticipation rise on Rossiter's face, and then fade with the vehicle's passing.
It was a Japanese pickup truck that finally groped into position beside the Land Rover. A man stepped down from the cabin. Quite young, Barney's age, dressed in the white-man's uniform of knee socks, pressed shorts, and an open-neck shirt festooned with pockets.
'He thinks it's radio stuff, thinks you're a communications wizard, thinks we're setting up a listening post,' Rossiter whispered.
The truck's lights were shut down, Barney heard a door closed carefully. There was the shadow of a face at Rossiter's window.
'You can give me a hand, old chap. Christ knows what you've got in there, weighs half a bloody ton, you'll be able to hear them picking their noses in Kabul with that lot. Bloody near did my back in getting it on the truck. You can get it off.' The sharp, clear accent of a south of England private education.
Barney wondered how they chose him. There had been spooks in Muscat, confident and supercilious blighters who revelled in their mystique.
Rossiter shone a torch beam out through his window and onto a wooden crate that was roped down in the back of the truck. The beam found stencilled printing, and Barney leaned across to read the letters. British High Commission Islamabad personal furnishings fragile.
'Went through Karachi customs like a dream.'
'Thanks,' Rossiter said.
'For nothing. What's going to happen to it afterwards?'
'It'll be disposed of, not your worry.'
'I don't worry easily, friend. If you two shift yourselves we'll get it into the back of yours.'