by Mark Dawson
Chuck finished and the secretary opened the floor. There was a long pause and, smiling, the secretary turned to Milton. “How about our visitor?” he said. “Care to share back?”
Milton cleared his throat. “Thank you for your share,” he said. The man acknowledged him with a duck of his head and, for a moment, Milton wondered whether he had said enough. He remembered the advice of his first sponsor, the man who had taken him under his wing at the first meeting he had attended in London: you had to share, he had advised him. It was the only way to draw the sting of the toxic thoughts that would inevitably lead to drink. The others were waiting to see if he was going to continue; he cleared his throat and went on. “I’m not from Hong Kong. Just here on business, stopping for a couple of days and then moving on, but I really needed a meeting tonight. I’m very grateful to have found it.”
“And we’re glad you did too,” said the secretary.
“I don’t really know what I want to talk about. I suppose it is partly about gratitude. I’m grateful to you for being here, I’m grateful to the fellowship for giving me the tools that I need to quieten my mind and I’m grateful that my life has been returned to me. I have a lot of things in my past to regret and this has been the only thing I have ever found that gives me peace. Saying that, I haven’t been to a meeting for days. It’s the longest I’ve been without one throughout my sobriety and I don’t mind admitting that it has shown me that I’m very far from being cured. I’ve been struggling with memories from my past and with the temptation to drink so that I can forget them. I couldn’t sleep tonight and I was close to going into the hotel bar and ordering a gin. If this meeting hadn’t been here, maybe that’s what I would have done. But it was, and I didn’t, and after listening to your story I know that I won’t drink, at least not tonight. Day by day, right? That’s what we say. We just take it a day at a time.” He paused again. He felt better, the stress that had twisted in his shoulders dissipating with every word. “Well,” he said. “That’s it. Thank you. I think that’s what I wanted to say.”
It was one in the morning when the meeting finished and the others explained that they usually went for noodles at a late night restaurant that was around the corner. Milton thanked them for the offer but politely declined. He wanted to have a little time to himself. The hotel was on the other side of the island.
He decided that he would walk.
Chapter Twenty-Four
HIS THOUGHTS reached back; years ago, although it still felt like yesterday. He would usually do anything to think of something else because the memory was the foundation for the dream. As he walked along the harbour front he allowed himself to remember.
Milton and Pope were in the middle of the desert. It was blisteringly hot, the air quivering so that it looked as if they were gazing through the water in an aquarium, and he could still remember the woozy dizziness of being broiled in the sun for so long. It was Iraq, at the start of the invasion, and their eight-man SAS patrol was deep behind Saddam’s lines. There was some suggestion that the madman was readying his army to fling scuds tipped with nerve gas into Israel and the patrol’s instructions were to set up observation posts, find the launchers and disable them.
A Chinook had dropped them and a second patrol, together with their Land Rovers and eighty-pound Bergens, into the desert between Baghdad and northwestern Iraq. They had been given a wide swathe of territory to patrol. They found one launcher within the first three days; they had killed the crew, slapped a pound of plastique on the fuel tank and blown the equipment to high heaven. They ranged north after that, travelling at night and hiding out during the day, and eventually they had picked up the scent of another crew.
They had tracked them to a village fifty clicks east of Al Qa’im. It was a small settlement dependent on goat herding, just a collection of huts set around a tiny madrasa. The soldiers were elite, Republican Guard, and they were smart. Their launcher was an old Soviet R-11 and they had driven it right into the middle of the settlement, parking next to the school and obscuring the vehicle beneath a camo net. The thinking was obvious: if they were discovered, surely the Americans would think twice about launching a missile into the middle of a civilian area, much less at a target that was next to a school?
They had found an escarpment five hundred feet to the west of the village and settled in to reconnoitre. They would wait where they were until either one of two things had happened: either the launcher abandoned its hiding place and moved out, in which case they would take it down with a LAW missile once it was out of range of the village, or, if it stayed where it was, they would wait until sunset to go in and take out the crew. Those options, as far as Milton was concerned, were the only ones that would remove the risk of civilian casualties.
He used the HF radio to send an update to command and then settled down to wait.
He watched the village through the scope of his rifle. Further away, just visible on the fuzzy hills in the distance, he could see the battered old 4x4s that had transported the goat herders to their animals and the indistinct shape of the men and their goats. Closer, within the village, the crew of the launcher had set up a canvas screen and were dozing beneath it, sheltering from the sun. He breathed slow and easy, placing each member of the crew in the middle of the reticule one after the other. Five hundred yards was nothing. He would have been able to slot one or maybe even two of them before they even knew what was going on, but it would be neater at night, and he did not want to frighten the children. He nudged the scope away from them, observing the women as they went to and from the small river that ran through the centre of the settlement, carrying buckets of water back to their huts. He nudged it to the right, watching the five youngsters in the madrasa. They had been allowed outside to play and run off some steam. They had a yard, bordered by a low chickenwire fence, and they were kicking a football about. Milton watched them for a while. A couple of the boys were wearing football strips, Barcelona and Manchester United, and the cheap plastic ball that they were kicking around jerked and swerved in the gentle breeze. If they knew what the scud launcher was, and the danger it represented, they did not display it in their behaviour. They were just kids having fun. The light sound of their laughter carried up to Milton on that same wind; innocent, oblivious to the chaos that was gathering on the borders of their country that would, within days, obliterate everything in its way in a mad dash to Baghdad.
Pope and the others were out of sight on the other side of the escarpment. They had raised their own small sun screen and were sheltering beneath it. Milton felt the sweat on his back, on the back of his legs, on his scalp. He felt the wooziness in his head and reached down for his jerrycan; the water was warm but he gulped down two mouthfuls, closing his eyes to savour the sensation before replacing the cap and putting it back in the Bergen. The small amount that was left had to last him all day. He scrubbed the sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand and stared through the scope again.
He knew the sound the instant he heard it. A low, rumbling groan, still ten miles out. He put down his rifle and grabbed his field glasses, scanning the haze where the mountains met the deep blue of the sky. The engine grew louder and he swung left and right until he saw it: a black dot that was coming in low and fast. He centred the dot in the glasses and watched it, hoping that it was something other than what he knew it to be. The jet was a little more than a thousand feet up, running fast, and, as it neared and separated from out of the haze, he started to make out the details: the stubby nose; the weapons pylons on the wings bristling with missiles and the big, onion-shaped bombs; the greedy air intakes three quarters of the way down the fuselage; the wide, split fins of the tail. Milton knew exactly what it was and why it was here: an A-10 Warthog, a tank buster, sent to take out the launcher.
He fumbled for the radio, opened the channel to command and reported that he had a visual of an incoming jet, repeating that the target they had discovered was surrounded by civilians and that the jet needed to abort
. There was a delay, and then static, and then, through the hiss and pop, the forward air controller told him to stand down. Milton cursed at her and opened a wide channel, identifying himself and hailing the pilot.
There was the squawk of more static and then the pilot’s voice, enveloped by the sound of his engines: “Manilla Hotel, this is POPOV35. I’ve got a canal that runs north/south. There’s a small village, and there’s a launcher under camo in the middle.”
He hadn’t heard Milton or had been told to ignore him.
Forward air control responded: “Roger that POPOV35. Clear to engage.”
“Roger that, Manilla Hotel. POPOV35 is rolling in.”
Milton threw his rifle down and sprinted for the village.
What happened next was unclear and, in the years that had passed since then, he had dreamt it so many times and in so many different ways that it was difficult to separate the truth from his fevered imaginings of it. He was running, as fast as he could, losing his footing in the deep sand and tumbling down the slope to the desert below, his boots scrambling for purchase and his hands sinking into the sand and dust and then he was up again and running hard. The Hog was a couple of miles away now, the engines louder even though the pilot had throttled back so that he could take his time. Milton ran, his boots sinking into the sand, the effort of freeing them so that he could take another step making his thighs and his calves burn. Sweat poured from his face as if it were a squeezed sponge. He made the outskirts of the village and screamed out that they needed to get away, to run, an old crone who was emptying out a pot of dirty water looking at him with alarm but staying right where she was. He ignored her, aiming for the madrasa. He was a hundred yards away and he yelled out his warning again. The Iraqis heard him, stumbling up to their feet and reaching for their rifles before they registered the noise of the jet, realised what it portended, and ran.
Milton ran past them in the opposite direction.
The children had stopped playing now. They were looking at him in confusion. Their ball rolled gently in the wind, bumping up against the side of the yard fence. One of the boys had trotted over to get it and he was closest to Milton. He was five or six.
Milton would always remember his big, brown eyes.
He screamed at them in Arabic to run.
The confusion on the boy’s face would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Too late.
Much, much too late.
Milton looked up at the pale underbelly of the Hog as it boomed overhead, a thousand yards above; the wing pylons were empty. It had dropped its bomb three hundred yards earlier and now half a ton of high explosives fell in a neat and graceful and perfectly judged parabola that terminated at the launcher. Milton couldn’t remembered what came first: the blinding flash of white light or the roar that deafened him. The blast picked him up and tossed him back twenty feet in the direction that he had arrived. The scorching hot pressure wave rolled over him, and then the wave of debris: the remains of the wooden huts, shards of metal from the launcher, the storm of grit and pebbles. He had been dropped on his back and as he opened his eyes he thought that he must have been blinded. The swirling cloud of black fumes was parted by the wind, revealing the same perfectly clear sky overhead. Debris was still falling from the sky around him. Pieces of cloth fluttered down, soaked in blood. The mushroom cloud unfurled overhead. He could smell the explosives. He could smell burning flesh. He rolled and pushed himself onto his knees. A wave of pain swept over him and he had to fight to prevent himself from fainting. He looked around: no launcher, no huts, no madrasa. No children. He looked away to his right, to the skidded splashes of red across the dun brown, and to the ribbons of bloodied flesh that had been strung from the branches of a nearby, newly leafless tree, as if left there to dry in the sun. He looked down at his chest. His shirt was bloodied. He dabbed his fingers down the centre of his sternum, further down his ribcage, to the start of his belly. He felt the rough edge of the shrapnel that had lodged just above his navel.
He didn’t remember very much of what had happened after that. Pope said later that he and the others in the Unit had been disturbed by the approach of the Hog and had seen him running into the village. They saw the bomb detonate and had found him on the lip of a deep crater where the launcher and the madrasa had been. He was slipping in and out of consciousness. They dragged him away. The explosion had painted the sky with a column of smoke fifteen hundred feet high and they knew that if any Iraqi units were nearby they would be sent to investigate. Pope carried him back to the Land Rover and they drove for ten miles until they found an abandoned shack where they had stopped. They had radioed for emergency medivac on their way out of the village but there had been ground-to-air activity and the rotor-heads were proceeding cautiously; they preferred to wait until darkness. None of the other men in the patrol thought Milton would make it. He was delirious and remembered nothing. Pope tended the wound as best he could. He told him afterwards that he was sure that he would bleed out, that there was nothing he could do to stop it, but, he had stayed with him, pressing a compress around the shrapnel until his hands were covered in Milton’s blood and, somehow, he had staunched the flow. An American army Blackhawk was sent to exfiltrate them, guided in by a tactical beacon, and it delivered Milton to the forward operating base in Saudi. He was in theatre almost as soon as the wheels touched down.
It was trite to say that Pope had saved Milton’s life. He had, though; that much was unquestionable. There had been times in the years that followed when Milton had wished that he hadn’t, that he had left him to die in the smoking ruins of the village, because that would have meant that none of what followed would ever have happened. No Group. No Control. No blood on his conscience. Recently, he had started to feel different. He had found the Rooms and the Steps and he felt, for the first time in as long as he could remember, that he had hope. Not the hope of atonement, perhaps, but the chance of a little peace.
Milton thought of Pope in the basement of Shcherbatov’s dacha. He was done for unless he went after him. Milton tried to live his life by the Steps. They had saved his life, he was quite sure about that, and he believed that if he observed them faithfully, they would keep him safe.
The Eighth Step injuncted him to make a list of the people that he had harmed.
The Ninth Step required him to make amends to all of them.
He couldn’t make amends to the people who he had harmed through his work for the Group: one hundred and thirty nine of them were already dead. He chose to interpret those two Steps to mean that he should use his skills to help others. That was how he would make things right. Tonight, as he walked through the busy streets of Hong Kong, the monsoon rains starting to fall again, he knew that he had no choice but to do whatever it took to help his friend, even if doing so would lead to his own death.
He was alright with that.
Chapter Twenty-Five
MILTON GRABBED a couple of hours of sleep, rose quietly at seven and worked out in the hotel gym for a couple of hours before getting breakfast. It was just before eleven when he returned to the room. Anna was dressed and writing an email; she logged off and closed her laptop as he came inside.
“Letting the colonel know I’m still here?”
“Where have you been?”
“The gym,” he said. “I like to run. It helps me focus.”
“And last night?”
“Never mind.”
“I’m afraid I do…”
“Are you ready to go?”
She dropped it as a lost cause and said that she was ready. They found a taxi in the rank outside and Milton asked the driver to take them to Nathan Road. The rain had continued to fall overnight and through the early morning and, even though the temperature was much less oppressive than it would have been during the summer months, it was still warm enough to render the city’s streets cloyingly humid. The driver followed Kimberley Road and then Nathan Road; when they emerged it was midday and the dampness see
med to wash over them. Anna was wearing a loose dress and sandals. Milton had on the suit that the Russians had bought for him together with one of the white t-shirts. He felt the wash of sweat in the small of his back within moments. He raised the umbrella that the hotel concierge had given him and covered them both as they made their way across the sidewalk and into the café.
Calling the place Chungking Mansion was misleading. That made it sound grand and opulent and it most certainly was not that. It was large, though: a sprawling collection of shops, takeaways, restaurants and hundreds of hostels with everything from two to twenty rooms spread over five 17-storey tower blocks. Five thousand people lived here, with another ten thousand coming to visit every day. Interpol countries were legally obliged to register foreign nationals when they checked in to hotels but that requirement was flouted here. The hostels could claim that they were distinct from hotels and, in many ways, they were. There were small businesses with a couple of rooms to large dormitories with a dozen beds to more traditionally arranged establishments with single rooms and shared bathrooms. They were cheap, occasionally cheerful, and you got what you paid for in all of them: a night’s sleep, if you were lucky, and not much else besides.