Torchwood_The Men Who Sold The World

by Guy Adams

  He shook Mr Wynter’s hand and offered him a broad smile. ‘Been a while,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed,’ Mr Wynter agreed. ‘I was beginning to think you’d managed to find a way to get along without me.’

  ‘Never a chance of that I’m afraid,’ the man replied. ‘You can’t run a country without breaking some heads.’

  Mr Wynter laughed politely.

  ‘I ordered the set menu,’ the man said. ‘I hope that’s all right?’

  ‘Fine, I’m sure.’

  ‘It’s very good. The chef knows his business.’

  ‘And here was I thinking you chose the place because you were trying to make a point.’ Mr Wynter nodded towards the theatre.

  ‘Oh.’ The man smiled, as if the location had only just occurred to him. ‘I see what you mean. I dare say if Lincoln had been watching a “madcap musical”, he may have welcomed the bullet.’

  ‘In my experience nobody ever does.’

  ‘No? Well I dare say you would know. I can’t say I’ve been in that position.’

  ‘No, you prefer to pull the trigger several states away.’

  ‘Naturally. It improves my aim no end.’

  ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis,’ said Mr Wynter.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Thus always to tyrants,’ Mr Wynter translated. ‘It’s what Booth was reported to say just after he’d shot Lincoln.’

  The other man smiled. ‘We tyrants have always had a bad press.’

  The waiter entered carrying two plates of shrimp salad. For a few minutes both men ate, Mr Wynter delicately forking mouthfuls of crab meat and shrimp.

  ‘You know,’ said Mr Wynter’s employer, placing his cutlery across his half-finished plate, ‘I was reading an article about shrimp. It’s put me off. Apparently they congregate around sewage pipes. It’s where they breed.’

  Me and the shrimp both, thought Mr Wynter.

  The main course was hanger steak. The meat bled on their white plates.

  ‘So what do you think will happen now?’ asked Mr Wynter’s employer, finally referring to the business in hand.

  Mr Wynter chewed at his steak slowly. He found he suffered bad indigestion otherwise. ‘I think Colonel Gleason is going to kill a lot more people before he is stopped.’

  His employer nodded. ‘We’re inclined to agree. Such a pity you weren’t able to deal with him in Cuba.’

  Mr Wynter had been waiting for this. His failure was not something either of them were used to discussing.

  ‘I spent last night looking at red-hot satellite photos of Havana in flames,’ his employer continued. ‘I was almost tempted to have them framed.’

  ‘The weaponry in question was impressive.’

  ‘So I hear. We’ve asked for more details from the Brits.’

  ‘How are they taking the loss of their people?’

  ‘I think they’re more concerned we might stop our cheque.’

  They finished their steak and waited on the dessert, a plate of beignets drizzled with Greek honey.

  ‘I can’t resist sweet things,’ said Mr Wynter’s employer. ‘My wife tells me my cholesterol will kill me one day.’

  ‘Something surely will,’ Mr Wynter replied, brushing icing sugar from his fingers.

  Thirteen

  Gleason was dreaming of the dust. That first time in Iraq.

  The desert had changed him, as it had so many people. The sand beneath your feet, the open sky that glowed so red at night you swore it was on fire.

  The horrors were always there. The threat of gas attack, the promise of the Republican Guard, the rattle of the chain guns. But, for all that, Gleason had found peace. Marching invisible, relying on GPS because the sandstorms were so thick you couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. The distant crump of shells so soft and remote they could have been signals from another world. It was a soft world, a world for dreaming in as your hot hands wiped sweat on the metal of your weapon and the feeling of that solidity pressed against your belly was all that stopped you floating away for ever.

  Gleason often thought of the death of Major Rider.

  Rider had been his commanding officer on that slow walk towards Kuwait. A gentle soldier, one of the old breed fostered in peacetime. Rider talked about ‘preventative measures’ and ‘respect for the enemy’; he bemoaned the failure of ‘diplomatic solutions’. Gleason had considered him unfit for his rank. If you don’t want dirty hands, don’t go to war. He followed Rider under sufferance. He followed because of orders not respect.

  ‘The man shits himself at shadows,’ he had said one night, huddled with the boys under a tent roof, listening to carpet bombing in the distance. ‘If we ever meet the Republican Guard, he’ll be on his knees before they even draw a target.’

  ‘The sand doesn’t suit him,’ said a young New Yorker Gleason had talked to a few times, Patrick Mulroney. ‘It’s just somewhere he used to lose golf balls.’

  There was a ripple of laughter at that. But not from Gleason. He thought it was too true to be funny. He hated marching behind a man like that.

  February of 1991, they were on the move just north of Basra.

  The weather was cool for once, overcast with a threat of rain and as they marched out past the ruins it was as if a whole world had rolled over and died in the night. The remains of Iraqi vehicles formed a chain into the desert. Bombed-out tanks. Armoured vehicles spit open and smoking. From a distance, the dead convoy looked like the spine of a dinosaur revealed by the wind blowing back the sand.

  Up close, the smell of death was more recent. The vehicles were not empty. Pieces of soldiers draped where the explosions left them. Half-cooked but blackened, like bad barbecue meat seared in the white-hot flash of the coalition’s righteous fire. People left to smoulder and crackle.

  As they made their way past the dead convoy, the sandstorm descended and they had to rely on GPS and the crackle of radios. They couldn’t see more than a few feet to either side of them. The world had gone away and they were marching alone.

  The first bark of gunfire had everyone in a panic. Nobody could tell where it had come from and they were frightened to fire back in case they hit their own.

  Rider shouted for them to find cover, and Gleason went on the move, the sound of blood pounding in his head as he ran through the sand to the safety of an upturned jeep. It was like running underwater. He felt sealed off and numb. There was the sharp crack of rifle fire, tinny and lifeless, not the spectacular gunfire of movies but the real handclaps of hot metal flying through the air on the hunt for something to stop it.

  ‘Keep to the rear,’ he shouted into his radio. ‘Stay behind the convoy, anything on the other side’s a target.’

  But the targets didn’t come.

  They returned fire anyway, hoping for a lucky shot.

  The enemy raked the convoy with 30mm rounds and it sounded like a factory. The remorseless clang of riveting. The pounding bells of metal on metal.

  If one of those hits you, it’ll leave a hole, Gleason thought. One you’ll be able to put your whole damn hand in.

  ‘Return fire!’ he shouted, wondering where the hell his commanding officer was. Wondering if Rider had run off and left them in this invisible war.

  ‘Major Rider?’ he asked his radio. ‘Are you receiving me, sir?’

  There was no reply but static, the crackle of open airwaves that reminded him of eggs frying in hot oil. That empty crackle could mean anything, it could mean that they were dead, they were gone, swallowed whole by the static and the dust and now it’s just you. Here in the desert. Gun in your hands.

  There was another burst of gunfire, and Gleason caught a glimpse of muzzle flare, no more than a few feet away. He took the shot, firing quickly before he had chance to lose the target. There was the flat sound of his rounds meeting a body out there in the dust, finding their home, burrowing out of sight.

  There was more fire from his left. It was one of his own because his radio squawked and someone started crowing over the
ir kill. Two down, but how many more?

  There was silence for a while. Every moment fat with expectation. Every moment bearing the potential of renewed fire, of that one bullet that might kill you, the one that will turn the lights out and make the world as you know it just stop.

  Gleason began to think it might be over. That it was just a couple of stray conscripts, lost and afraid out here in the storm.

  He made his way out from behind the jeep and ran slowly along the convoy for a few hundred yards, listening out for anything but the strain and creak of his own pack, of the gentle thud of his boots in the sand.

  He stopped behind the curled track of a tank and listened.

  There was a noise. The soft crackle of the radio. That pop of eggs in the skillet.

  He moved towards it, his side of the convoy, further out into the whiteout of the storm.

  He knew he should stick by the vehicles, knew he would become disorientated out there where the wind was full of the desert and nothing could be seen. But that crackle drew him.

  ‘Who is it?’ came a voice. An American voice. Afraid, shouting out into the wilderness like a fool who has lost his way. It was a voice Gleason recognised.

  ‘Major?’ he asked. ‘That you?’

  ‘Sergeant?’ Rider replied. ‘Careful where you step, it’s not safe.’

  Gleason looked down but it was force of habit. If there were mines beneath him he’d only know when his size twelves landed on one. ‘You stuck, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Can’t reach my radio,’ the voice was close, just ahead and to the right. ‘Got turned around in the storm. I daren’t move. I think I’m stood on…’

  Rider couldn’t finish that thought; it scared him too much. Gleason didn’t need him to. Gleason understood. Rider was spooked. He had either scared himself to a standstill or he really was on a mine. Either way, Gleason’s feelings were the same.

  ‘Why are you all the way out here, sir?’ he asked the storm, moving towards where he guessed Rider would be. ‘Were you running?’

  ‘I told you,’ the voice replied, and it was close, very close, Gleason would see him soon. ‘I got turned around.’

  ‘Thought you were running towards the enemy, did you, sir?’ Gleason asked.

  Rider didn’t reply. There was a shape in the sandstorm ahead, and Gleason knew he’d found his commanding officer.

  He walked right up to him, pressing up close so that he could see the look in Rider’s eyes.

  ‘It’s all right, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve found you now.’

  He dropped low and checked the ground. Rider was right to be scared – his boot was stood on a mine.

  Gleason stood back up. ‘Bad news, sir,’ he said. ‘You’ve trodden in something.’

  He laughed a little at that, though it was no joke, not to either of them.

  ‘Can you help me, Sergeant?’ Rider asked, and the look of desperation on the older man’s face gave Gleason his first sense of what real power could feel like. He had this man’s life in his hands and the appreciation of that was something that would change Gleason for ever.

  ‘I can, sir,’ he replied, drawing out his knife. ‘I can help you.’ He pressed the tip of the knife into Rider’s thigh. ‘How long do you think you’ll be able to stand still?’ he asked. ‘Because you really can’t afford to move. Sir. If you move, it’ll go off, and it’ll take everything below the belt, sir. You’ll be a hollow man, sir. Spilling his brave guts in the sand, sir. Can you be still?’

  ‘Sergeant…’ Rider replied. ‘Please…’

  ‘Were you running, sir?’ Gleason asked. ‘That’s all I want to know. Tell me the truth and I’ll help you, but I need to know. Were you running?’

  There was silence between them. The wind whistled. Somewhere, dropped on the ground, Rider’s radio crackled. But there were no voices. Just for a few seconds, no words.

  ‘Yes,’ Rider answered. ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Gleason replied. Slowly, not wanting to trigger the landmine, he lifted Rider’s tunic and brought up his knife so the tip of its blade met the man’s scared, sweating belly. ‘Try and stay still, sir.’

  He pushed the knife in halfway. It was a good knife, it slid in beautifully. He held it there for a moment, then withdrew it and ran.

  He could step on a mine himself, he knew. But he was willing to play the odds, to enjoy a spin on the battlefield roulette as, behind him, his commanding officer, the weak and disgusting Major John Rider, tried to stay still while his life slowly bled away.

  Gleason ran for twenty seconds before, behind him, there was the sound of the mine going off.

  Gleason kept running, enjoying it. Loving the freedom of just pushing forward into the unknown, lost to direction and sense.

  He stopped as he collided with someone else.

  ‘Sir?’ It was Mulroney. ‘We thought we’d lost you.’

  For a moment, Mulroney saw Gleason’s real face, the wild look of a man who had found blood out there in the desert and thrived off the taste of it. It was a moment that would bond them together for the rest of their lives. Then Gleason dropped his mask back down, became the dutiful soldier once more.

  ‘Tracking the Major,’ he said. ‘Tried to help, but he stepped on a mine. Nothing to be done.’

  Mulroney nodded and Gleason thought the storm was stopping, he certainly found his vision clearing after what felt like years, maybe even his whole life.

  ‘I’m sure you did whatever you could, sir,’ said Mulroney.

  They walked back to the rest of the men, navigating first with their radios and then, as the storm finally cleared, their eyes.

  Part of Gleason is still walking.

  Waking up on clean sheets, Gleason rolled out of bed and looked down on a body that was as scarred as his mind.

  He walked into the en-suite bathroom and showered. He couldn’t shake the sensation of being coated in sand, the dream clinging to him as it always did. He worked away at it with sponge, soap and nail until his skin was scalded and held the heat of the water even once he’d towelled off and dressed in T-shirt and jeans. He looked in the mirror and saw the pink face of an old soldier staring back at him.

  ‘When will you just fade away?’ he asked it. It didn’t bother to reply.

  Downstairs Mulroney was also up, wandering about the kitchen in his jockey shorts.

  ‘Want some food?’ he asked as Gleason sat down at the breakfast bar.

  He noticed his commanding officer was not quite at ease with the day, a troubled look in his eyes.

  ‘Something wrong?’ he asked.

  Gleason shook his head. ‘Just not quite acclimatised, you know how it is.’

  ‘Battlefield and bed roll then Colorado sunshine and French toast. I know. I’ve got juice too, unless that’s a step too far.’

  ‘Juice would be good.’

  Mulroney poured Gleason a glass of orange juice and returned to whipping his eggs.

  They’d been there three days now, and the heat of gunfire seemed a long way away. The ghost of a previous life.

  Mulroney dipped bread into the eggs and laid the soggy result in the skillet. Hot oil hissed and popped, reminding Gleason of dead men’s radios.

  He didn’t let the memory put him off his food.

  Later, with Ellroy and Leonard woken up and sent into town for supplies, Gleason and Mulroney stood beneath the big Colorado sky, dreaming up damage.

  They took it in turns to use the rocks for targeting practice, first of all methodically working through the items they had yet to test and then just shooting off for fun.

  ‘You think how different things would have been if we’d had weapons like this before?’ Mulroney asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Gleason replied. ‘With weaponry like this, we’d own the Middle East by now.’ He let off a blast from a Sontaran handgun, ploughing a black furrow through the earth. ‘We’d be swimming in oil. Still…’ he said, dumping the gun on the grass and reaching for the Ytraxorian rifle, ‘it�
��s this that’s really going to make the difference for us.’

  ‘You love that thing,’ said Mulroney. ‘I’m not sure I see the potential myself. It seems too random. Don’t get me wrong, it’s powerful, I get that. But where’s the fear? If we want to really shake up our previous employers, we want to threaten them with something that has the world shaking. Shooting people off into the sky seems a bit low-key.’

  ‘Trust me,’ Gleason replied, when I really let rip with it the world will shake more than you can imagine.’

  Fourteen

  Rex and Shaeffer landed at Colorado Springs Airport, having managed not to shoot each other on the flight, although it had been a close-run thing.

  ‘When we get a car,’ said Shaeffer, ‘I’m driving. No way am I letting someone as highly strung as you behind the wheel.’

  ‘Highly strung, my ass. Motivated is the word you’re looking for.’

  ‘Motivate yourself into an early grave unless you learn to chill out.’

  The car-hire office was doing its best to cheer them up, all bright yellows and pastel blues.

  ‘Hi there,’ said the man behind the reception desk. ‘My name is Albert. What can I do for you today?’

  ‘We’d like to order a sandwich, Albert,’ said Rex. ‘This the right place?’

  ‘Ignore my surly friend,’ Shaeffer interrupted. ‘He’s scared of flying so it makes him all stroppy when we land. We’d like to hire a car, something compact but with a bit of enthusiasm under the hood.’

  ‘I’m sure we can help you with that.’

  ‘Thanks, Albert,’ said Rex giving Shaeffer a homicidal look, before wandering over to a corner of the office to kick a plastic pot plant.

  Once they had their car – and a brief argument in the car park as to who would be driving it – they headed out of the city and towards the open country.

  The Rockies reached up around them, and they couldn’t help but feel small as they wound their way through the landscape of dense trees and imposing rock.