What did he want?
He spoke impeccable English, was polite without being obsequious, called her Miss Wilson in a rather old-fashioned, formal way. He had studied – he told her – at the Bramshill Police Training College, and had survived an English winter. He’d smiled warmly at that triumph, and apologised that he knew only very little of her work.
Why had he brought her a basket of fresh fruit?
Dry and dusty, the Marib Governorate was no longer fertile enough to cultivate. It might have been when the queen of Sheba was setting off with a camel train loaded with gifts for Solomon in Jerusalem; could have been wonderful ground for a horticulturalist when the ancient sluices were letting water from the dam run through the irrigation channels. He had already given her a printed visiting card, something she had never been given anywhere, by anyone, in the area. He was a major in the police; it was a stepping stone to promotion to serve in this district. They were ‘difficult times’ in Sana’a, but it was important that legitimate government survived – one which had the backing of the United Nations – and it was necessary for people of ‘principle’ to stand firm in the face of terrorist and ethnic-minority assaults, massacres and other atrocities.
Why had he arrived at the tent camp without warning?
It was clear to Henry that the soldiers and their corporal were unsettled by the appearance of the man in his laundered and pressed uniform, with his sleek haircut, and clean-shaven cheeks and trimmed moustache. Lamya sat close to her. Her disapproval at the intrusion was clear. The corporal stayed in earshot, as if fearful of the major’s motive. She could imagine him in a Berkshire pub, calling for gins or pints of beer for fellow students and instructors, winning their confidence and making friends. Why had he produced a photograph from his wallet, showing the House of Commons in the background, and his wife in Western clothes with two small boys?
Why did he think her worth his attention? Lamya served tea and biscuits, using her best mugs, both from her last visit to the Natural History Museum. Lamya had insisted that the chipped one went to him. It would have been obvious to him that neither her maid nor the corporal had any English. His voice was silkily soft, a caress. Not that he’d get anywhere near her – not with Lamya and the corporal close by. She had started to wonder, as they exchanged banalities on English life – but didn’t ask about her scholarship – if he had simply heard that, down the road from his headquarters, at Sirwah, was an Englishwoman who did important archaeological work. She had started to consider whether there was an innocent reason for his arrival, but had ditched that notion.
In English, and a persuasive tone, he got to the point. ‘It is a time in the affairs of my country, Miss Wilson and also in the interests of yours, when we have to strive to push back the evil that afflicts our lives. I believe it was the English political theorist, Edmund Burke, two centuries ago, who said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” We had a seminar to discuss it at the college. To some colleagues – your people, Miss Wilson – it seemed abstract and almost irrelevant, but not to me. It is in our hands if we are to confront those who destroy what they can and build nothing. We have a duty to stand firm. Burke spoke of “good men”, but I would add ‘‘good women’’ to his remarks. I am very serious. I think Burke indicated that both natives of a country and visitors who receive its hospitality should stand together and resist the tyranny of terrorism with all means available. Would you disagree, Miss Wilson?’
She began to speak, stumbled over her words, then chose them carefully; she thought her response sounded empty of sincerity, even to her own ears. ‘I am, Major, merely an archaeologist, grateful for the facilities and help I receive.’
His eyes never left her face: much of him was beautiful, though not the eyes. ‘It is difficult, Miss Wilson, to step aside. I do not. My wife and my children are in Sana’a. I could not bring them here, not to this scorpions’ nest. Today a man hangs on a cross in a village near here, on the road to Marib. I do not have the forces, nor has the military, to go and prevent his further suffering – it is what I have been told by travellers who come through our checkpoint. I do what I can, but problems confront me.’
‘I try to celebrate, Major, the extraordinary history of Yemen. I work to expose its epic significance. I think I play a part.’
She wriggled, could barely believe she had uttered such rubbish.
He said, ‘At the college, a policeman from the English countryside made a remark to the effects that some aspect of Irish policing was not his responsibility, I will not bore you with the detail. An officer from Ireland, from the north, old and overweight with a weariness in his face, said – and we all heard it – “fucking balls”. He was asked to withdraw his criticism, but refused. Quite a drama. Excuse me, Miss Wilson, but thinking that digging up a few items – figures without heads or feet, broken pots – is the best contribution you can make, that is “fucking balls”. You disappoint me.’
He stood. It was not anger on his face, nor irritation, but a sort of sadness, and she felt like a chastised child. He ducked his head, thanked her for her time, and for the tea, turned and put on his cap. A pistol in a holster bounced on his hip.
‘What did you want of me?’
‘Just eyes and ears, and the prospect of my being able to visit you and discuss your work. But, perhaps you don’t want involvement; perhaps you look for an easy life and search for the indulgence of not being partisan in this fight. Miss Wilson, good afternoon.’
She thought it, shouted it in her mind, bit her tongue hard enough for it to hurt. Yelled it in her throat but without sound, ‘But I am fucking partisan and I am fucking involved. Just join the fucking queue of those who walk all over me. I am tolerated, my work has an importance that goes beyond this little fucking war that will last a decade, not a half-century, and will be lost, forgotten under a yard of sand in a millennium. Just fucking listen to me, which nobody does.’ He did not acknowledge her silence; he adjusted his beret and whistled sharply and his driver gunned the engine of an open-topped jeep.
They drove away. Lamya and the corporal watched her. What had he wanted? Why had he been here? She shrugged, could not find a satisfactory answer.
He was a nice-looking man, actually. Handsome, and well-mannered, and would have been good company at a dinner. A candle’s light would have sparkled in his eyes but not brought any warmth to them. If the photograph of his wife and children had stayed in his wallet, she would have taken him back . . . she craved a man, fingers reaching, hands grappling, was so lonely. Yearned for a body against hers, more even than a whisky and lemonade, a beer from a fridge, a bar of chocolate from a supermarket. The cloud kept away the sun’s light, and there was quiet. She looked towards the horizon and saw a dull and grey-coloured ridge in the middle distance, and the dust thrown up by the major’s vehicle and the escort, and saw a fine column of smoke in a village and thought that was where a man was dying on a cross, or had already died. She did not know who would come, when it would happen, what more would be demanded of her: she would wait.
She went back to the trench they were working, and where the two Yemenis appointed by the museum were, and they showed her what they had found, the fractured pieces of some kitchenware, and she slipped down to help them with her trowel and her brush. It had been a bad day, a fucking awful day, and it was not finished.
Rat was a careful man; he worked using a mixture of experience and judgement, based on what was laid out in front of him each time he deployed.
He had Slime beside him. It was a good relationship and one he had nurtured – as if training a difficult puppy. Slime, in effect, was his mule. He carried the heaviest load of gear, and made the scrape if that was needed, dug it out and camouflaged it, and spoke when he was required to, and made up their meals from the cold ration packs, and watched Rat’s back.
He had sent the MI6 man, Corrie, back. He called him, to his face, ‘Sixer’, and would not copy Slime in using ‘Boss’.
He ran Slime, had from the day he’d dragged him from the ditch in Basra. He’d had more difficulty directing the younger man since the fiancée had come on the scene; she was not a girl he particularly liked, and a threat to his authority. There’d been nothing so far, on this mission, for him to complain of, though, and, as a careful man, he had what he needed in place.
Slime had the spotting scope and Rat used the binoculars. The Sixer hadn’t wanted to return to the main bivouac, but he’d been sent anyway; he would have weighed up whether it was worth an argument, and had conceded it. Rat was always comfortable when he had Slime with him, shoulder to shoulder, and no distracting chat. They had checked out the crucifixion a half-hour earlier, but it was not in their brief and not important, he had looked for the turncoat that Corrie had identified, but had not seen him again. He had seen the police arrive at the tent camp and had evaluated distance on the officer, and on the woman, and on the vehicles, and he’d found that useful – with the rifle he’d brought it would have been a remarkable shot to have hit the camp. Most of the time they checked ground at the base of the escarpment, and the barren landscape that separated them from the road. If he was to shoot, he reckoned it would be against a target on the road, in a vehicle – about as hard as they came. He searched for cover, a little rain gully, a heap of earth made by ants, or a place where the dirt had been blown up into a small ridge by gales – anywhere that offered dead ground for him and Slime. He had the rifle laid out, and the magazine on, and the safety, and the assault rifle lying against his left leg, and Slime was on his right side with the spotter scope and had his rifle, and at their feet were a cache of the grenades. He’d have liked a bit of plastic to be blown by the wind and help him estimate how much a bullet would deviate in flight, a torn bag, down there: that would be fixed after dark. Might be the last time he had a chance to shoot, could be. Would want to make it count. Of his twenty-five kills, Slime had been with him for nineteen of them, and knew the rhythm of a shooting, taking an enemy down.
He had his logbook beside his elbow and drew his own small maps with a stub of pencil, marking where a hide might be and watching traffic on the road. The Sixer had wanted to be with him in the stake-out, but he was at the back and would stay there till the daylight failed. He considered the possibilities: it seemed likely that the village to the west, heading into the foothills, was built on the highest ground, a mix of high walls and small windows and tight doorways and narrow alleyways, and would be the one best suited to a secure meeting. Going east was a string of other villages, but those were on flat ground and harder to defend in an emergency. It was a chance, could not be more. In the main bivouac was the satphone, to be used once, for an urgent call; the description of a vehicle would be given and the Predator called down. Not what he wanted.
If he did have a chance to shoot – one bullet, two at the most – it would give him serious personal satisfaction. No one but Slime and the Sixer would know, would have seen the skill of it. Sometimes, when his mind slipped among images, he’d go through the twenty-five killings and rank them in his own mind. Which was the best? One in Helmand, 950 yards, a Talib compound commander caught short on the edge of a maize field, squatting down so only half of him was visible. A dried watercourse on the right, down which wind funnelled, but that was at 600 yards, and another at 380, which was a valley entrance. Maybe the guy had a stomach upset, because he’d hung around, and had been reaching up for a broad leaf from the maize to clean his arse. He’d fired then – it was as good a shot as any. Might not get another go, might be the end of the road for him. And when that had slipped from his mind, then he’d found himself considering the old man who’d come to Bisley, and had had the dog with him, and had sniped in northern Iraq, people said, and was a legend, and no one seemed to know what the hell he’d done in detail, which was good: meant he had never blabbed. Some did. Some wrote books about where they’d been and how many they’d dropped. Rat reckoned that degrading. And he felt annoyed, and jabbed Slime with his elbow. The spotter scope was on the village where a man took an age to die on a cross: Rat didn’t like it. Not right that Slime should watch a slow death. He did not want to consider their future, any of them, if caught. Also unsettling was the steady march of the goats and the boy who herded them towards the incline’s base.
They went back to looking for ground, and back to waiting for darkness, and then Rat started to think of another kill, one that might also have ranked with his best.
Corrie lay under the scrim net. The light falling on his face was filtered and the flies had found him.
Rat had said that he wouldn’t go down the incline with him in the darkness. If Rat did not go, then neither would Slime. Why argue? He had not. What he would have liked to do was get to the main road, near to the tent camp, and wait for a bus, a Transport for London double-decker, and the right one – a number 2 or 36 or 436 – and drop the guide, Jamil, off at the first stop down the road, and then keep on it, nice seat in the front of the top deck, and go over the Thames and press the button and have it stop on the pavement by the main gate. He’d leave those two shites where they were, and let them sweat and curse. He felt no more for them than he had those many months before for the Italian and the Canadian and the Austrian. No bond . . . Might use the guide as a distraction or to draw fire, and might leave him near the perimeter fence to sit on his haunches and wait. They had had no conversation. Corrie did not care about his father and was not interested in how Jericho had found him and employed him. Corrie didn’t do talk about football teams in the Premier League or the Bundesliga, or about families, or about local politics. Could be called miserable and arrogant. There was nobody whose opinion mattered to him, other than his own.
Did he trust the boy? Sometimes and sometimes not. Would he risk much if the boy were endangered? Unlikely. Would the guide, Jamil, chance his own safety if it were Corrie who were down? He’d be an idiot if he did.
Maybe he’d trust a few of the guys in the pub in the village; they were enough. He dozed intermittently – not much else to do. He glanced again at his watch. The cloud above him was darker. He’d be moving in three hours; he would take a handgun and a sack of the flash-bangs and the gas. The guide had an old Kalashnikov rifle, with the folding butt, and it slipped easily enough under the jacket he wore over his long shirt.
Nothing achieved yet, all to do. He wondered how it had been on that island and seemed to see men, dressed in rags and skins and with lank hair, pushing rafts out into water beyond their depth, and ferrying stones that might have weighed a quarter-ton or more, and capsizing their craft of branches lashed together, and going into the water after the stones that were tipped on top of ones already carried out to the place. Might have taken an extended family a summer to build the place and think of it as safe, and he considered how many times they had taken to the crannog in fear, and if they’d died there. It was what he had come for, to prove a refuge was false.
The quiet nestled around him, and there was time to kill. He chuckled out loud, spat it from his throat, and the flies scattered. His lot was bad? Lightly armed, in a place of danger, no crannog of his own to scuttle to. Worse where Belcher was? Worse, living the lie, and seeing the cross. Worse. And after the chuckle came the smile.
The man on the cross had died.
He might have considered Belcher to be his only friend – he who listened and smiled and nodded encouragement – as he talked of his home and the fields around his village. His life and agonies were over. Belcher was not tasked to take him down, the security did that. Others would dig a grave. The family, in that village, would probably have been proud of him, and never know of the shame or horror at the end of the boy’s life.
Belcher watched, felt anxious. Not that this was anything new to him. He had to watch: a man who turned his back on the death of a traitor was ‘suspect’. The ‘unfortunate’ was a rag doll now, fluids dripping off him and spoiling the dark overalls of the men who freed the arm restraints. He might have talked du
ring the waves of torture inflicted in the final hours before being led out to the cross. Who were his friends? Who did he talk to? Who showed him sympathy? Many had heard him scream during the early hours of interrogation. The security men were not likely to rush towards Belcher, even if the boy had named him, but would stalk him, seek to trap him. The body was carried away; the litter was an old blanket. There were no children and no stones thrown, no derision, and no respect.
No imam would say prayers across the grave, which had been dug at the back of the village, where women took rubbish and there were oil drums in which waste was burned. It would be a deep grave, because they would not want dogs excavating him or vultures homing in on a disinterred corpse. It would be hard for Belcher to know if the security men had already started to target him. He had lived for months now with the anxiety levels peaking, had been in that state of deep uncertainty since those smooth words had ensured his recruitment.
He’d felt true fear on the first night of his prison sentence, aged nineteen. Like moths to a light, or the way gulls circled over kids eating chips on the sea wall, and always closer, those old men. Men, with tattoos on hairy arms that were white from lack of sunlight, bald and scarred scalps, and stomachs that bulged over belts, eyeing him like he was tender meat. Wanting him, and talking of what they’d do. A screw standing close to him had muttered, ‘Just watch out for yourself, lad, and don’t think we’re everywhere. Best you find a friend.’ The first night they had allocated a cell for him, alone, and men had hammered on the door and obscenities had drifted through it. He’d never thought of himself as ‘pretty’; he had been so frightened. He was there because he had stayed silent, not snitched on the others. He’d heard voices all through the night hours, and wondered what he would have to give to win a ‘friend’. It was what they laughed about in Shades, in the bar: men pulled down their zips and nestled in behind and dropped a kid’s pants and shoved, without using Vaseline, and the pain must have been acute.
Jericho's War Page 17