Barney clipped back. 'I thought we'd better get on with what you should have done last week.'
'Watch yourself…'Rossiter whispered and flushed.
Barney smiled sweetly at Rossiter. All the eyes in the room were on him. The eyes of the fighting men. He saw a helicopter, he saw the burst of exploding flame, he saw the eyes and the faces of these men as they inched from cover to cover, from rock to rock, across the floor of a valley, inched toward the survivors of a helicopter crash. He wiped the sweat from his face.
'I'm going to clear them all out,' Barney said. 'All except the boy and the old man.'
An hour later they stepped out into the rich afternoon sunlight. A bargain had been struck.
The leader of a tribal fighting group of the Afghan mujahidin, a boy of seventeen years who had learned his English at a Lycee in Kabul, an official of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a captain of the 22nd Regiment of the Special Air Service had all shaken hands on a deal.
'You did well,' Rossiter said hoarsely when they were in the Land Rover.
Chapter 4
Long before, Barney knew the proverb of the Tajik people of the north of Afghanistan which said: 'Trust a snake before a harlot, and a harlot before a Pathan.'
The men he would train to fire the Redeye missile were southerners, Pathans.
He had not brought the weapon system the first morning. He would bring that later. First he would take stock of the men he had to teach. They went out on the Jamrud road, to the first foothills at the approach to the Khyber. Barney had said six men only. There were fourteen. Barney had said that only the young and the fit, the true fighters, should come. The beards of four men were white with age. They drove in a rusty Volkswagen van, pressed together, smelling and scenting together, hawking and spitting together, the sun not up two hours and the heat suffocating.
In the front, beside the driver, was the boy who made the translations.
The road took them past the big refugee camps. Two and a half million displaced persons from Afghanistan living in tents or in mud homes they had built for themselves. Three and a half million of their livestock grazing on land at the fringes of the camps, sheep and goats and cattle. And they believed that one day they would go home, which is why they sat patiently before their tents or the mud brick homes and waited for victory. One day…
Barney had never before seen refugee camps, there was something unreal about these camps, something that happened only to other people. He wondered if he could ever have been a refugee, if he could have sat with a pipe and a cup of sweet tea waiting for a victory to be won far away against ten divisions of the Soviet army.
Barney leaned forward against the crush of men in the hack of the van, he tapped with his finger on the boy's shoulder.
'What is your name?'
'I am Gul Bahdur, what is yours?'
'I am Barney, Gul Bahdur. Why are there so many in these camps — what was the one weight they could carry no longer?'
'Some foreigners say it is because they have free food here. This is a lie, Mr Barney. It is the attacks from the air.'
'Tell me.'
'The helicopters attack the villages. The helicopters have bombs and rockets. There is no defence against the helicopters.'
'Always the helicopters.'
'Before the Soviets came to Afghanistan, these men did not know fear. It was not possible to make a Pathan afraid, but the Pathan is afraid of the helicopter, do you understand me?'
'I understand you.'
'Mr Barney, you are a soldier?'
'A sort of soldier.'
'Would you not be afraid of the helicopter?'
'I understand you.'
'If you are truthful, if you accept that you too would have fear, then you will know why we have left our homes.'
'I said I understood.'
Barney lapsed back to silence.
The road was full, noisy, slow moving. They headed towards the mountain line.
'Mr Barney…'
'Yes.'
'Have you ever fought against the Soviets?'
'No.'
'Would you like to?'
Barney grinned. 'You have no right to ask me that question, and I won't answer it.'
The boy turned full face to Barney, a wide happy smile. He seemed younger than his seventeen years, little more than a child. The boy boasted as a child will. 'I have fought against the Soviets.'
'How many did you kill?' Barney asked lightly.
'More than a hundred.'
Barney was laughing. 'And how many did you wound?'
The boy shook his head and the dark hair flopped across his brow. 'None were wounded.'
Barney said quietly, 'And how many did you capture?'
'None were captured.'
They drove off the road and away parallel to the mountain line, along a shallow valley, and soon were lost from the sight of the traffic. Where the van stopped there were scattered scrub trees, with foliage sufficient to throw down patches of shade. The men spilled from the doors of the van and hurried to find a place where there was shelter from the sun. Barney was last from the back of the van. He walked slowly towards the trees, squinting his eyes, gazing deep into the emptiness around him. There was a silence here, a silence of the wind ruffling against rock and sand and bush and hillside. They sat and they watched and they waited for him, these men who did not wound or capture Soviets but who killed them.
'You'll translate for me, Gul Bahdur,' Barney said brusquely.
'Of course.'
'And exactly. You don't add and you don't take away.'
'What else?' The boy's smile was rampant.
'And don't give me any bloody cheek.'
The cheerfulness was stripped from the boy's face. He was a chastised child. His eyes dropped. 'What you say to me I will tell to them.'
Barney talked to the men under the trees about Redeye.
They knew the workings of the Kalashnikov and the AK-47 and the Lee Enfield and the Heckler and Koch rifles. They were familiar with the Soviet RPG-7 rocket launcher. They could lay a mine. They could site an ambush. Patiently Barney talked them into a world that was new and which might be bewildering. Gently he spoke to men from one of the most unsophisticated regions of the earth, to men who could not read and who could not write.
Each morning for a week the Volkswagen van brought them to the same place, and each morning Barney edged forward in his exposition and detail. He was never interrupted, he was never asked a question. The eyes never closed, the heads never turned away from him. In the middle of each morning the boy brewed tea over a gas camping stove, and then the men would talk and fool amongst themselves and ignore Barney. Ignore him until the tea was drunk.
By the end of that week Barney talked of a portable, short range missile to be used against low flying aircraft or helicopters. He spoke of a missile with flip-out cruciform tail fins. He led them into a two stage solid propulsion unit with short boost and longer sustain. He explained a guidance system of passive infrared homing. Scratching with a sharpened stick in the dirt he drew the missile to scale. Jabbing with his finger he pointed to a rock that he judged to be a mile away and then said that his missile would cover the distance to the rock in the time that it took him to count four seconds.
The next day was Friday. On the Friday he would not meet them. He told them that when they next came to the place he would bring with him the Redeye so that they could feel and hold the weapon, and then he would speak of the technique of firing and the science of target acquisition.
At the end of that week, as the men trooped back to the van, Barney found that the boy had fallen into step beside him.
'What do they say?' Barney gestured towards the men ahead of him.
'They say that if it helps them shoot down a helicopter that this torture will have been worthwhile.'