Gerald Seymour - In honour bound

GERALD SEYMOUR

In Honour Bound

FONTANA/Collins

They had been coming back for four days.

Four crippling, painful days of tramping out a stride across the knife rock of the mountains. Brutal days because the pace was set by a guide who moved as if he were ignorant of the bitter sharp of the stone and the scree as they climbed, then descended, then climbed again. When they moved by day there was the ferocious heat of the sun.

And when they travelled by night there were bruising falls and the stumbles and the cutting of the rock on their shins and knees and hands and elbows.

Going had been easier. The outward journey had been in a caravan of a hundred fighting men, and in the midst of a mule train column. The going had been the time of anticipation. Joey Dickens was not an athlete, he was not especially strong, but as Royal Air Force technicians (Maintenance) went, he was tough and fit. The pace of the outward journey had not been difficult for any of them, because the mules had been loaded down with food and weapons and ammunition and Joey Dickens and Charlie and Eddie had kept up with them without discomfort.

Now it was the coming back for Joey Dickens and for the two men who had sought him out in the pub a few miles from the helicopter station of Culdrose. Charlie and Eddie, in tailored suits and monogrammed shirts and wide knotted ties, had come to Cornwall because Joey Dickens had written in answer to a box number advertisement in an aviation weekly magazine. Over their pints, Charlie and Eddie had made Joey Dickens an offer, and because he was screaming under the burdens of a wife and two small ones and a terraced house on the Abbey National and furniture on the never-never he had accepted the offer of employment for the time of his summer leave.

In that first week of the year in a pub in the Cornish countryside, Charlie and Eddie had told of going into the wilderness of Afghanistan to carry out the mechanisms and electronic entrails of downed Soviet helicopters. All a little drunk, all a little noisy, and past eleven, and while the publican swept the cigarette stubs and dirt and plastic crisp and nut packets into heaps, Joey Dickens had clasped Charlie's hand and Eddie's hand and pledged his company. There was an envelope containing a thousand pounds in tenners that had slid from the inside pocket of Charlie's jacket to the hip pocket of Joey Dickens' jeans, there was the swift silk patter from Eddie that the valleys of Afghanistan were littered with Soviet hardware that fetched a colossal price, if it could only be lugged back out to the Pakistan border... Joey Dickens in the late hours had been quite captivated with the romance of digging into the guts of a Russian whirly...

Charlie said that he was just a businessman, and Eddie said that he was just a bottle washer. We can get there, they had both said, and we can get back, and we can find a client who'll pay through the nose, but they had to have someone with them who knew about the business end of Soviet helicopters, and they reckoned that Joey Dickens fitted the bill. It ought to be the paying off of the mortgage and the buying outright of the furniture. Charlie had said that he had a little company, and Eddie had said that Charlie had all the friends he needed for the disposal of the merchandise, and Charlie had said that he was in touch with a Brigadier in London, and Eddie muttered about under the counter, and Charlie had said that it was a piece of cake, and Eddie had said that all they were short of was a chappie who knew the guts of a whirly.

Nine weeks later, Charlie had brought Joey Dickens an airline ticket, return, to Islamabad/Rawalpindi.

It had taken them six days to reach the ravine. Joey Dickens had never seen such country and, to a young man from the flatlands of Lincolnshire, the ravine was something else. The ravine was a mighty fissure of the rock, and down at the base greyness and hard to see because of the camouflage paint was the broken fuselage of an Mi-24 helicopter. Close to the helicopter shell were white scrapes on the rock and black scorch squares. Joey Dickens recognised the signs of high explosive bombs and napalm canisters that had been dropped into the ravine to destroy what remained of the helicopter, but which had failed to do their work.

They parted from the caravan, left their guide on the path and edged their way down a steep gully to the floor of the ravine. The waiting in Pakistan for a helicopter carcase to be identified, and located, was forgotten. Joey's difficulties of communicating with the flash Charlie and the small talk Eddie were obliterated. The worst job had been the first: disentangling the bloated and grotesque-grown body of the pilot. Even in the cooler depth of the ravine the stench was suffocating. Joey had been violently, shudderingly sick and Eddie made a litter from a door panel and carried the body out of sight before he picked its pockets. And then, for half a day, armed with a screwdriver and a wrench and a set of spanners, Joey had worked at the in-flight computer and the radar and the guidance systems. Each item he took from the helicopter he annotated in a jotting book.

They had climbed with their loads to the top of the ravine.

They had seen the guide who sat in the shade of a rock fall waiting for them, and they had seen that on the mule that had been left for them were now fastened two wicker litters. They had seen the men who were pale from wounds who lay on the litters, and the protest had died in Charlie's mouth, and the guide had pointed to the ground and scratched the shape of a butterfly's wings, and Joey Dickens had known that two men had detonated the butterfly shaped anti-personnel mines that were scattered from the sky.

In their own back packs, Joey Dickens and Charlie and Eddie would carry the working parts of the Mi-24 helicopter.

That evening, on the bivouac beside the goat path, the diarrhoea snapped in the stomach of Joey Dickens. He had taken the pills, but he had ignored the food.

Two days back from the ravine, and the lack of food and the work of the pills had finally clamped to a halt the movement in his belly. But two days of walking in the terrible heat without the sustenance of food had drained away his strength.

Each succeeding day was harder.

On the fifth day the speed of the little group was increasing, one of the wounded men had his leg severed above the knee, and the other had his intestines bound into the ripped stomach wall with old cloth and, unless they hurried, the men would die. Charlie and Eddie were friends and could lift each other with their talk and their laughter.

Sometimes before they rested Joey Dickens was a long way behind, and his feet were an agony of blisters.

Across the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush, a group does not slow for a straggler.

His boots gnawed at his heels and toes, his muscles ached, his belly ground in sweet pain, his breath gasped in the rarefied altitude. The glare of the sun beat into his eyes from the rock surface as he followed the group up the shallow file of a dried river bed.

Sometimes he heard the banter of Charlie and Eddie, sometimes he heard the curse of the guide and the welt of a stick on the mule's back, sometimes he heard the cry of a maimed man as the pain lurched in his

body, sometimes he heard only the leaden scrape of his own boots.

He did not hear the helicopters.

He wondered why he had come. And he thought of the terraced house that was five miles from the base at Culdrose, and he thought of the pinched feet of his elder girl that would have stayed pinched for another month...

If he had stopped, if he had stood completely still, then he might have heard the engines of the helicopters.

Joey Dickens was three hundred yards behind the others. The straps of his pack bit down into his shoulders. Christ, if he'd known he was going to have to carry the stuff he wouldn't have been so bleeding keen to strip it out of the whirly. He glanced from his footfall to his wrist watch. In twenty minutes they would stop for water. The stops were regular, when they stopped he would catch up. And by nightfall, by the creeping of the dusk across the mountains' sides they would be across the frontier. This would be a dream, a time of delirium. Within moments of crossing that undrawn frontier, a cairn of stones, it would all have been a bad dream. Past the cairn, into Pakistan, six hours in a taxi to Dean's in Peshawar, a day of hotel baths and hotel food, and four hours in a taxi to Rawalpindi, and thirteen hours in the London Tristar, and then scarcely a dream.