Den of Snakes

by Damian Vargas

  ‘It ain’t like that,’ said Charlie. Eddie shook his head and waved his hand around at the large room and shook his head.

  ‘Keep telling yourself that if you want, but I think you’re kidding yourself. You think you’re living freely in a paradise, pulling all the strings, controlling everything. But you ain’t. You may have escaped the law back home, for now. But you’re a prisoner here instead. Alright, you’ve got a fancy house, flash cars and go to all these crazy parties every night, but you ain’t free, Charlie. Not really. You’re lying to your friends and doing whatever you’re doing behind their backs’.

  ‘You don’t understand, Eddie’.

  ‘I ain’t stupid. You’re using your friends. And I don’t want none of it. I’m sorry, but this ain’t for me. I told you. I gave my word to someone that I’d help him out. Someone that would do the same for me’.

  Charlie stared at his brother, seemingly wrestling with inner thoughts before responding. ‘But you won’t do something for me?’ he said. ‘Fine. I get it. I weren’t around for you, so why would I expect you to be there when I need help’. He slumped down into the couch and sighed.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ said Eddie.

  ‘I can’t go back, Ed. To England. To prison. I can’t. Maybe the others could take it, but I’d go fuckin’ bananas. You don’t know what it’s like’.

  Eddie placed the empty glass down and stepped towards his brother. ‘What happened to “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime”?’

  Charlie reached for the bottle and topped up his glass. ‘I tried it. It didn’t suit me. Besides, a man’s got to tread his own path. That’s what mum always told us, right?’

  ‘Pretty sure she didn’t have this in mind for you when she said that,’ said Eddie. He turned and started walking towards the stairs. ‘But anyway, my path is taking me to Angola’.

  ‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ said Charlie. ‘Come to the party, though, please? One last night together? For old time’s sake. All on me, of course’.

  ‘Too bloody right it will be,’ said Eddie as he made his way up the stairs. He headed to his bedroom, pulled his damp shirt off and sat down on the bed. He thought back to when Charlie had left the family home, with the Lawson family. It had been the summer of 1967. Eddie had only been twelve at the time and his brother had promised to visit regularly. For the first few months he had kept his word, popping in once every week or so, but the attractions of the big city had quickly become a distraction and the visits became less and less frequent. By the time Eddie had reached his fifteenth birthday, he had not seen his older brother for nearly six months.

  Charlie did not turn up for that birthday either. Instead, he had sent a scrawled note, which arrived a few days later with an apology. ‘Something came up. Sorry. I’ll make it up to you, little bruv. Happy birthday,’ his older sibling had written, but even that had proven to be yet another promise that Charlie failed to keep.

  It had been at that point that Eddie had realised that he was alone and that he had to take charge of his own destiny. Nobody else was going to help him. Mrs Lawson’s health had been rapidly deteriorating. Mr Lawson, Eddie’s adopted father, had become increasingly bitter, and sometimes violent. Eddie had joined a local boxing club in South Harrow, taking a bus there from school most afternoons. He would do his homework on the bus. One of the other regulars at the gym, a grey-haired Scotsman, was a former soldier who had served in Aden and Oman. The Scot had an endless repertoire of captivating stories and delighted in sharing them with his young protege. He often brought in extra sandwiches for the young Eddie.

  ‘You need to put some meat on them bones, boy,’ the old soldier would say.

  Eddie had not been a high achiever at school but had nonetheless finished with a respectable set of four O-levels. On his sixteenth birthday, he took a train ride into central London and walked into the Army recruitment office in Westminster where he applied to join the parachute regiment. Nine weeks later Eddie left the Lawson household and joined the British Army. He had written to Charlie to tell him and asked if they could meet up beforehand but received no reply. His brother, he reluctantly concluded, cared only about himself.

  Nothing’s changed, he thought and reached for his wallet. He pulled out a business card and studied it for a few seconds. It had an expensive-feel. The paper was thick and a brilliant white, the ink a glossy black.

  Col. John J Hawkwood (ret.)

  Managing Director

  Hawkwood International Limited, London.

  01 434 7771

  He picked up the telephone receiver on the bedside cabinet, dialled the number and waited for a reply.

  ‘Hawkwood International, how can I help you?’ said a female voice after a couple of rings.

  ‘Hello. I’m calling with a message for the Colonel. My name is Eddie Lawson’.

  ‘Hello, Mr Lawson. I can take your message’.

  ‘Please tell the Colonel that I expect to be in Kinshasa within a week’.

  ‘Understood. I will get your message relayed to Colonel Hawkwood right away’.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Eddie. He heard a couple of strange mechanical clicking sounds, but thought nothing of it as he placed the receiver down and laid back on the bed. ‘Once a soldier, always a soldier,’ he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

  Eddie watched intently as his exhaled breath turned instantly into a misty, floating vapour in front of his position. It was the middle of the night. The moon and stars were hidden from view behind a thick layer of rain clouds. The only sounds he could hear came from the light drizzle dropping upon the dense clumps of upturned peat that had been thrown up by the British artillery several hours earlier. The sweet odour of cordite still hung in the air.

  He took his hand off his rifle grip and slowly reached back to rub his lower back. He had been laying in the same shallow, damp depression for nearly three hours now, waiting for the expected counterattack from the Argentinian Marines that his patrol of paras had ousted earlier that day. The British had caught the South American troops by surprise and quickly forced them out of their forward position - an observation point located atop a rocky outcrop fifty yards from where Eddie presently lay. The paras had killed five of the enemy without suffering any losses. Not this time. One of the Brits had got shot in the arm, but the wound was not severe and the man, private Higgins, had been patched up and sent back out into the field. Higgins had made Monty Python ‘flesh wound’ jokes continually afterwards. Eddie chuckled. Moments like that were the glue that bonded the lads together when things got tough. He scanned the skyline again but saw nothing except blackness and drifting fog.

  ‘Maybe they aren’t coming back this time,’ he thought.

  His optimism vanished in an instant at the sight of an illumination flare which rapidly made its way up into the sky from behind a small hillock over to his left. It burst into life several hundred feet in the air, suspended under a small canopy, and then slowly drifted down towards the paras. The undulating topography of his surroundings offered little cover from its light.

  ‘Here they come, boys,’ the Colonel’s voice bellowed from somewhere over to Eddie’s right. ‘Weapons at the ready.’ His pulse quickened as he flicked off the safety catch, then peered through the iron sights of the black SLR. He scanned the horizon, searching for signs of oncoming Argentinian soldiers through the slow swirling mist. Nothing.

  ‘Maybe they are just fucking with us,’ he thought. Then came the now-familiar sound of bullets zipping through the air close by. He forced his chest and shoulders down further into the black soil.

  ‘There they are,’ shouted one of the other paras. ‘Hundred yards ahead. About a dozen of the bastards’. The sky was suddenly full of bright tracer rounds, making their way back and forth between the two opposing forces. The disquieting silence of the previous hours was gone, replaced by a chaotic cacophony of small arms fire.

  Eddie caught sight of a group of Argentinian soldiers crouching
low as they made their way out of the cover of one of the low dips in the dark landscape. He took careful aim, squeezed the trigger and let off three shots. The targets merged into the darkness. He had no idea if he had hit any of them. A bullet smacked into the small wall of soil that he had pushed up in front of himself. He forced his face down into the dirt, laying still - waiting to be sure that no more rounds were coming his way. The smell of the peat was pungent. Images flashed by of a shopping excursion with his family to the local garden centre as a young boy.

  Then he heard the roar of an aircraft overhead.

  The jet flew over him in half of a second, then disappeared off over the horizon. He had not seen the plane, but he had recognised the sound. It was one of the Argentine Skyhawks.

  He closed his eyes and braced for the inevitable explosion. The blast of the ordinance came a moment later and swept over him for what felt like forever. The hot air lifted the helmet off his head and pushed him several feet to his left. Pieces of steaming mud and grass rained down in every direction. He struggled for fresh air and rolled over onto one side. There was now screaming in all directions.

  He forced himself up to his knees, picked up the rifle and lifted it to the horizon. At first, he saw nothing. Then, after a few seconds, men started standing up off in the distance. They were Argentinian Marines, each armed with a FN-FAL - a Belgium-designed weapon from which his British S1A1 self-loading rifle had also been derived. He took aim at one of the men and squeezed off a couple of rounds. The man started running towards him. Eddie fired again. Four shots in quick succession, but the man kept coming. More Argentinians started appearing from within the fog. Dozens of them, then hundreds. Eddie began to fire again, but none of the rifle rounds made their mark. He yanked the empty magazine from the weapon and glanced behind him, looking for support, but there was no sign of the rest of his patrol.

  His comrades had vanished. They had deserted him. He was alone. He swivelled back towards the oncoming enemy. There were now thousands of them. He started firing, each shot surely landing plumb centre of the targets at which he aimed, yet none of them fell. They just kept coming. They were nearly upon him now, only thirty yards away. The entire horizon was full of camouflaged uniforms. His rifle fell silent, the magazine empty once again, and then it dawned upon him how each one of the soldiers running towards him had the exact same face. Horror gripped him as he realised it to be the face of the teenage Argentinian conscript he had killed among the slippery, black rocks of Goose Green just a day earlier. Bullets zipped past his ears. He stood up and let the rifle fall from his grasp. He closed his eyes.

  His own yells brought him back into the present. They only stopped when he caught sight of the bright blue sky through the open window next to the bed. He was sitting up, his hands firmly gripping the bedsheets. He closed his eyes and attempted to regain control of his body.

  One thousand, two thousand…just breathe. Calm. A dream, it’s just a fuckin’ dream. Calm. Eddie let the fresh oxygen flood through his body and then fell back onto the bed. The sheet was sodden, and he kicked it off. He wiped the dribbled saliva from his stubbled face, then reached over to the bedside table for a bottle of yellow pills and took two out. He put them in his mouth, picked up a plastic beaker and then washed the tablets down with a mouthful of lukewarm water.

  When will this ever fucking stop?

  At this point, he noticed that his new jacket which had previously been in the shopping bag now hung from the wardrobe door. A chair was positioned in front of it, with a piece of paper placed on it. He forced himself up and ambled over to the chair.

  The note had his name written on it. It was from Charlie.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you. I have some business to deal with.

  Thought I’d let you get some kip.

  Kenny will pick you up at eight in a taxi.

  See you at the party”.

  Eddie walked back towards his bed and picked up his watch. It was nearly half-past seven.

  ‘Shit,’ he said and marched towards the bathroom.

  Kenny arrived a little after eight. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said over the intercom from where the taxi was waiting up at the front gate.

  ‘No worries. I’ll be right with you,’ said Eddie. It was still uncomfortably warm, so Eddie carried the jacket over his shoulder as he made his way up the gravel path. He opened the side gate and was greeted by the smiling Kenny.

  ‘How you doin’ son?’ said the older man. He was wearing a short-sleeved, light blue shirt and a pair of off-white cotton slacks.

  ‘Good, yeah. Got some kip. Still hot though, innit?’

  Kenny laughed. ‘I guess so. You get used to it after a few years’. He ushered Eddie towards the taxi’s open rear door. The driver, a skinny black man wearing a yellow tee-shirt and a red baseball cap, waited for both men to get comfortable then performed a slow u-turn to head down towards the coast.

  ‘So, where’s this party?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘Marbella Beach Club,’ replied Kenny. ‘It’s our regular haunt. We’ve had some quality times there’. He leaned forward towards the driver. ‘Mind if I smoke in your car, Mustapha?’

  ‘No problem, Mister Kenny,’ said the driver. Kenny held out the packet to Eddie who hesitated for a moment before declining.

  ‘I keep tryin’ to give ’em up’.

  ‘Sensible man. Filthy habit,’ said Kenny before putting a cigarette between his lips and lighting it. He inhaled, holding the smoke for a few seconds and then exhaled it out of the window. His fingers nails were stained a mustard colour. His skin was a leathery brown and freckled. Kenny appeared to be older than the rest of the crew.

  ‘So, how d’you run into the rest of the guys,’ asked Eddie.

  ‘School. I was in the same year as Charlie,’ said Kenny. He laughed. ‘He was bleedin’ sure of himself, even then. This one time, in a history lesson I think it was, the teacher caught him staring out the window when we were supposed to be doin’ a test. On the industrial revolution, it was. I remember it clearly. The teacher started givin’ Charlie a lecture about needing to knuckle down or he’d have no future and all that. Quite a big bloke, that teacher. Ex-soldier, like you. Only had one leg, though. Had it shot off in Korea, I think. Anyway, Charlie just kept looking out the window. The geezer starts screaming at him, all sergeant major-like. He was right losing his rag, he was’.

  Kenny took another drag on his cigarette and laughed.

  ‘But get this,’ he continued. Charlie stands up, picks up his satchel and just walked out of the room. Didn’t say a word. Just opened and shut the door behind him and left the building. The teacher was livid. Spittin’ feathers he was’.

  ‘What happened after that?’ said Eddie.

  ‘Oh, I think he got suspended for a few weeks. And the cane. But I just remember how the entire class was all mesmerised. We were all about thirteen’. He looked Eddie in the eye. ‘You just didn’t do that in them days. I remember seeing the faces of all the other kids, their mouths wide open. Bloody marvellous it was. He was never one for authority, was Charlie. None of us was. Still aren’t’. He took one last drag of the cigarette, burning it down almost to the filter, then flicked the stub out of the open window. ‘And I hear you’re a bit of a rebel too’.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Eddie. ‘I was a soldier for over ten years. All I ever knew was taking orders’.

  ‘But you got thrown out, right? Charlie told us you decked an officer. Got yourself locked up for a bit, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was at the end. After the war’.

  ‘Yet you want to go back into that game. To be a merc?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Eddie. ‘Once a soldier -’.

  ‘Always a soldier?’ said Kenny. ‘As a hired grunt in some private army, fighting in some country nobody gives a shit about?’

  Eddie shifted back in his seat. ‘It’s a job. It pays well’.

  ‘I’m sure it does. But you can’t do that forever. You’re
in good shape now, granted. But the years will catch up with you eventually. Trust me. And war’s a young man’s game’.

  ‘You sound like my brother. Talkin’ about something you ain’t never experienced,’ said Eddie.

  ‘I did a couple of years’.

  ‘No combat, though. A few cushty years in West Germany, weren’t it? And, if I recall, you spent a lot of that locked up for nicking army supplies, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. You’re right, I never had anyone shootin’ at me, nah. But I lost my old man in the war. Killed in France, he was. Shot by a sniper near Caen. My uncle Brian, too. He was in the far east. The family never knew what happened to him. I was brought up by a generation that went through that shit. We all were. Your old man was in the war, right?’

  ‘My stepdad, yeah. He was in Africa, in the eighth army under Montgomery’.

  ‘And he was pretty fucked up from it, weren’t he?’

  ‘This got a point, Kenny?

  ‘Just that it seems to me like you should aim bigger, that’s all’.

  ‘You know, for a bunch of blokes what don’t like authority, you all seem intent on telling me what to do,’ said Eddie.

  ‘We ain’t trying to tell you what to do, Ed. We can see the potential in you and we’d hate to see it go to waste, that’s all. You’re big and strong, yes, but you’re friggin’ smart too, you’re your own man. I think you could make something of yourself down here. More than gettin’ your arse shot off in some bleedin’ shithole nobody gives a flying fuck about’.

  ‘What if that’s what I want?’ said Eddie.

  ‘What? To die in Angola? Or Mozambique, or some other fucked-up country. Is that really what you want?’ Eddie turned his face toward the window. Kenny put his hand on Eddie’s shoulder. ‘You’ve had a rough time. I get it. So does Charlie. You saw a lot of shit, did some things in the Falklands and it’s affected you. But you are a strong fuckin’ geezer, Ed. You and Charlie are very similar. That attitude. That determination. You can make a great life for yourself on the Costa. Make a lot of money. Money you could use to look after your family. But not if you throw your life away fighting somebody else’s war for them’.