The Reluctant Hero

by Michael Dobbs

  He began repeating the prayer as he made his way up the last few steps, trying with his words to shame the guards, and to drown out their mockery. God is great! But where was He?

  They offered him a hood, but he declined, his eyes brimming with hatred. Why should he hide from them, help them sleep? And while he was shaking his head in contempt, they shackled his feet in irons, so that now he could do no more than shuffle inches at a time. Then one of the guards approached. He had the noose in his hand and was reaching out for him.

  ‘May God shit on your soul and on the memory of your mother!’ the prisoner spat, no longer able to contain his fear. What difference did it make if they beat him again, broke his bones? But they didn’t, not this time.

  ‘Yeah. You just tell him when you see him,’ the guard smirked through crooked teeth. ‘In about forty seconds,’ he added.

  Was it so close?

  The noose tightened around his neck, rough, scratching, its ferocious knot nestling behind his left ear. That’s where it would happen. About the second vertebra. Snap clean through his spinal cord, if they had got it right. Instant unconsciousness, he had been told. But how did anyone know? Then he would hang there, slowly strangling, even as the heart raced to respond. That’s when the priapism would happen. Unless, of course, these barbarians couldn’t even arrange an execution and his body fell too far, when the head would be wrenched completely off his body. Allah O Akbar! Allah O Akbar! Allah O Akbar! Be merciful . . .

  A patch of white stood out in the middle of the scaffold. The trapdoor.

  He tried to imagine a field of fresh white tulips spreading in the early sun, but the illusion wouldn’t last. He couldn’t concentrate. Too many scuffed heel marks.

  He could do no better than hobble now, swaying as he moved forward, inch by inch, his mind stuttering along with his feet.

  Allah O Akbar! For pity’s sake . . .

  His voice rose as he prayed. He could feel his bladder screaming. And there, directly in front of him, was the angel once more, his smile like quicksand for the soul, beckoning him forward. He couldn’t think of a single reason why he should any longer do as he was told, but he did so anyway, afraid that if he stood still his bladder would betray him, yet even as he stepped forward, the noose seemed to slip around his neck, and was tightened, savagely. He could feel the knot pressing into his neck.

  He began to struggle, but only inside. It was as though a wall was closing around him, blocking his view. Stand tall. See beyond it. To the meadow once more. God is great! Stand tall!

  He stretched to the very tips of his toes, stretching to see if his beloved grandmother was still there, waiting. God rest her soul.

  And there she was, so very close he felt as though he would be able to reach out and touch her, her weathered skin the colour of freshly turned earth, her smile like a new moon, wrinkling her face like a flood plain in spring. And tears in her eyes. Why tears?

  He felt his footing slip, and for a moment he lost sight of her, the wall once more. Stand tall! Stand tall!!!

  And there she was again.

  It took Harry three attempts to get his key in the lock. Once inside, however, he proved more adroit at filling a glass. He was already so drunk that very little was making sense, nothing lined up properly; his thoughts were half-formed, his emotions wholly exaggerated.

  Today was the day Julia had died, just six months after Zac Kravitz had dragged her from the sinking boat, Harry had led her off-piste and into the path of an avalanche. There had been no warning. One moment she was there, skiing almost within touching distance, then the mountain had moved.

  Snatched away, just when they needed each other most. No, not so much needed – wanted. Since her escape from Guinevere’s clutches, life seemed to have taken on an added richness, as if every day must be lived to the full, in case it was her last. And Harry was at the centre of it all, with a look, a word, a scribbled message, a smile, and they had tumbled closer together. At least, that’s the way he remembered it. Never had they made love so generously, or so frequently, and Julia had taken the lead. It was as if she was in her own race against time.

  He hadn’t realized how desperate she was to become pregnant, and hadn’t even realized she had succeeded, not until the doctors in his Swiss hospital had told him. She may not have known herself. Harry had lost not only Julia, but their child.

  There had been plenty to fill his life these past ten years – enough, in truth, to fill quite a number of lives. Plenty of women, too, even another brief marriage, but no one like Julia. And in the lonely reaches of this night, it seemed to hurt as much as it had done that first day when he had returned home from the Alps, entirely alone. Now he sat in the dark, with his drink and his coruscating guilt, as streetlights pointed sharp fingers of accusation at him through the half-drawn curtains. He began to mutter feebly, his tears washing the dribbles of whisky from around his lips, his voice like ripping sandpaper.

  ‘So I called to the barman to pour me another,

  Me soul was fair bleeding—’

  He choked on the words. Harry drank to forget. Yet no matter how hard he tried, it had all been stirred back into his life by two words.

  Zac Kravitz.

  Kravitz had never been a true friend, a soul mate, he had been too much of a head-banger for that. Impetuous. Sometimes arrogant. Harry sat and began ticking off all the reasons why Zac didn’t matter to him any more. He owed him, of course, for Julia, but hidden somewhere deep inside was a voice that kept insinuating it would have been better if Julia had gone down with the boat. Harry would surely have found that easier to deal with than Switzerland. Then he wouldn’t have felt it was all his fault.

  Julia, in those last six months, had brought more light into his life than he had ever known. He owed Zac for that.

  The American had been callous with his own wife, P.J. She’d eventually left him, but that wasn’t so strange. Delta types often demanded too much, or too little, from those who loved them: Harry knew the same might be said of him – would be by Bernice. So P.J. had left the scene, taking their three kids and the dog with her, and soon afterwards Zac had gone missing, deliberately hidden himself away, turned his back on everyone, his badly burned back. That’s why he’d been forced to quit, honourably discharged, his career gone down in flames with Guinevere. Yet the same could have happened to anyone in Special Forces, at any time, and often did, because when you live on the edge there’s always the danger you will fall. Harry would have done anything for Zac, and had tried, but he couldn’t do a damned thing after Zac had taken himself off and hidden in the shadows. He was a man who knew how to cover his tracks.

  Besides, it was all so very long ago. What the hell was the point? Harry cried, first in despair, then in anger at Zac for coming back to screw up his life. He fumbled for his glass, grabbed at it with both hands, only for it to fall, spilling the last of the whisky on the rug.

  The bedside clock showed it was shortly after 4 a.m. Harry sat bolt upright in his bed, naked, and sweating profusely. He stared round in alarm. The bed beside him was cold, empty. Distant memories of his evening began creeping back. Yes, he’d screwed up again.

  Fragments of the dream that had woken him began to return. He scrabbled for the elusive pieces, but the only thing he was able to see was Julia’s face. Under the water – or was it melting ice? Fading. Sinking. Her lips forming one word.

  Goodbye.

  In fear and impotence Harry began pounding the empty pillows beside him. He’d have given his life to have again those last six months, and his soul to have had six months more. But as he hit the pillows, blindly, in rage, the anger was pushed aside by despair and remorse, which hurt even more. Harry grabbed the pillow and buried his head in it to hide his tears.

  He lay still for many minutes, trying to find a route to safety through the war that had broken out within his mind. Somewhere outside, above the streets of Mayfair and in a night made endless day by wasted lights, seagulls who had swapped c
liff face for roof tops bickered and pranced. It seemed as though they were mocking him, but it came nowhere close to how much Harry mocked himself. A man can spend a lifetime arguing about the balance between honour, duty, position, reputation, those things by which others measure him, but in the end it’s what’s inside that matters.

  Harry sat up in bed once more. ‘Fuck you, Zac,’ he said quietly, before heading for the shower.

  CHAPTER TWO

  New Year’s Day had set in misty and frozen, as bleak as the year it had left behind. The sky was low, like beaten tin, and the air filled with tiny needles of ice. As Harry stepped out around the Serpentine, the lake at the heart of Hyde Park, he left a trail of dragon’s breath in his wake. He kicked out at a pebble, which scuttled for many feet across the persistent ice before disappearing into dark, reluctant water.

  He had sat on his patience for as long as he could before calling d’Arbois. That had been shortly before eight, an hour that on such a day would normally have caused outrage, but they were both members of the 24/7 club, both Europeans who had grown used to the fact that events which shaped their world nowadays occurred in distant parts and different time zones. It was God’s revenge on the imperialists. Anyway, as the French Foreign Minister had recently been overheard muttering, no one slept soundly while the new US Secretary of State was awake and functioning.

  ‘We need to talk. About Zac,’ Harry had said, without preliminaries.

  ‘We already have,’ a reluctant d’Arbois had replied. ‘I know very little else.’

  ‘Even so.’

  They had agreed to meet at one of the coffee shops overlooking the Serpentine. In midsummer the place would be overrun with excitable children demanding ice cream and another ride on the boats, but today it was almost deserted. They sat at one of the tables outside, wrapped to the ears in their overcoats, out of earshot of the members of the skeleton staff, unwilling to risk the remote possibility that any of them spoke much English.

  ‘Hervé, thank you,’ Harry began, acknowledging the kindness the other man was showing by disrupting his day.

  ‘It is always a pleasure to help a friend, Harry. And you sounded . . .’ He hesitated while he searched for the appropriate word. ‘Restless. That’s not like you.’

  With the words wrapped in d’Arbois’s gentle but occasionally stiff accent, Harry couldn’t tell whether the other man was expressing concern or administering a scolding – no, not a scolding, he decided. The Frenchman was a man of many sides; his judgements were usually political, rarely personal.

  ‘I wasn’t in much of a frame of mind to take on board everything you were saying last night,’ Harry said, scooping some froth from his cappuccino. ‘Run it past me again. Please.’

  The Frenchman looked out over the grey surface of the lake, his eyes settling on the naked trees at the edge of the park. With his dark cashmere overcoat and silver hair he seemed to be as one with this monochrome day. ‘There is precious little to my tale, Harry. I brought it to you only because I knew of your past liaisons with him. And I have heard nothing but snippets – fragments – in the margins of other conversations.’

  Harry didn’t need to guess too hard at what was meant. Spy talk. In Algeria, d’Arbois had come into contact with the DGSE – the Direction Générale de la Securité Extérieure, the French equivalent of MI6 or the CIA – and those who were brought under its wing were rarely allowed to escape. Contacts would be maintained, oiled over drinks, meals and many years, particularly with someone as influential as d’Arbois. It would be beneficial to both sides. D’Arbois was renowned for the depth of his connections along the corridors of power and those at the DGSE would want to share them, scratch each other’s backs. Anyway, chances were they’d all gone to school together and slept with each other’s sisters. It was the French way. Since d’Arbois’s retirement from most of his public roles, he had been courted by many private concerns – international companies, defence contractors, financial institutions. Knowledge is profit, and Hervé knew a lot of people. It kept him in cashmere.

  ‘These Central Asian republics are cowboy country,’ he continued. ‘Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and the rest have become cheap copies of their old masters in Moscow. They’ve lost their Soviet shackles but not the mindset and dark habits. Mix all that with the oil and gas and other natural resources that have been found in some of these places, and you have the makings of some of the most unappealing regimes in the world. And yet,’ – he paused to sip his coffee – ‘much of this seems to have passed Ta’argistan by. For most people it was little more than miles and miles of barren rock. Then the rumours started to grow. Some new mineral source has been discovered there, so it was said, some fountain of riches that will turn it into the Switzerland of Asia, but . . .’ D’Arbois shrugged. ‘Nothing has come of it. That hasn’t stopped the adventurers and buccaneers circling, of course. Apparently that’s when your friend Zac came into the picture. There was talk he made a personal enemy of the President. I’m not sure, I can only guess, but perhaps he even tried to organize a coup.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. A coup? For what possible reason?’

  ‘Who can tell? Ambition, greed, revenge? None of it’s new. Leaders in every country live under threat, sometimes from unlikely sources. As for Ta’argistan, it may be an inhospitable jumble of rocks but they’ve been fighting over it for a thousand years, tribe against tribe, khan against khan. Throw in the possibility of oil or gas or gold . . .’ He spread his gloved hands.‘Anything could happen. And does.’

  Harry frowned, trying to follow this through. ‘Will they put him on trial?’

  ‘Why should they?’

  ‘To make an example of him. Discourage others.’

  ‘Believe me, if they dragged everyone suspected of malevolence to the dock, it would become their leading industry. No, they manage these things in the shadows. They prefer the dark ways. They don’t have to fry testicles in Victory Square to prove their point.’

  ‘But won’t the US government help?’

  D’Arbois shook his head. ‘Did the British government help when the son of Margaret Thatcher got himself involved in some ridiculous coup in Africa? No, not even then. Such matters are too embarrassing. It’s better to look the other way. Move on.’

  ‘To the next fuck-up.’

  ‘Leave the bodies behind.’ The Frenchman uttered the words quietly.

  That had never been Harry’s way. He’d once carried a dying colleague for two days on his back through the Iraqi desert. You didn’t leave your mates behind, particularly mates like Zac. ‘I want to help him,’ he replied.

  ‘Too late. He’s beyond help. It’s possible he is no longer alive.’

  ‘But I owe him.’

  ‘Your loyalty is admirable, my friend, but in this case I fear it is misplaced. Zac Kravitz is one of those unfortunates who has dropped through the drain of history. You owe him nothing. Enjoy yourself. Celebrate the New Year. Put all this behind you. I should never have mentioned it.’

  Celebrate. Forget. So I called to the barman to pour me another . . .

  ‘There is nothing for you in Ta’argistan,’ d’Arbois insisted softly.

  Nothing but Zac Kravitz. The man who saved Julia.

  Suddenly they were interrupted. A dog, a hideous over-engineered creation barely larger than a cat with stumpy legs and bulbous eyes, had fled from the clutches of its female owner and come to forage. It was scratching at the Frenchman’s trouser leg, its damp paw placed firmly on his polished shoe. Harry thought d’Arbois was bending to stroke it, but instead he picked it up until it was dangling by its kitsch jewelencrusted collar. Almost carelessly, he tossed it back in the direction of its owner, not hard enough to cause damage but more than enough to make his point. Both dog and owner yelped in surprise, then began to stare at him, moist eyes bulging with accusation and pain. The Frenchman stared straight back, so forcefully that they wilted and withdrew. He wiped his
shoe with one of the paper napkins that had arrived with the coffee.

  ‘You must forgive me, Harry. I have a plane to catch.

  Zurich by five.’

  ‘On New Year’s Day? The gnomes must be hard task-masters.’

  ‘No, just very busy.’ He stared at Harry, as if struggling to make up his mind whether to reveal some close-held secret. ‘Look, there’s one of your British parliamentary groups going to Ta’argistan in the next couple of days. Roderick Bowles – you know him, of course? – he’s leading it. Perhaps he could help.’

  Roddy Bowles help? There had to be a first time. ‘Thank you, Hervé.’

  ‘I must rush.’ D’Arbois hesitated. ‘I’m so very sorry to be the bearer of such disturbing gossip. But that’s all it is Harry. Gossip.’

  As he departed, striding away into the grey morning, the Frenchman wrapped his arms around his chest for comfort. He’d heard that Harry had been off form recently, turning down ministerial posts offered by the Prime Minister, wandering around town with disgracefully unsuitable women – unsuitable, at least, for an Englishman. Then there had been last night. Harry Jones, of all people, beginning to show the fracture lines, as if he had supped too greedily of life’s riches and was being dragged down by excess. D’Arbois had seen it happen so many times before.

  Nearby, a duck came in to land on the lake, its wings thrashing the air in increasing concern before it was dumped arse-first on the ice. It suddenly found itself sliding along, out of control, before eventually stumbling to its feet and trying to restore what remained of its ruffled dignity. A bit like Harry, the Frenchman thought. Definitely slipping. Losing it. Wouldn’t have happened in the old days, not at all. There was a time when he’d never have been able to fool Harry so easily, pulled the wool over his eyes all the way down to his underwear.

  His triumph amused him, made him feel invincible, even at his age. D’Arbois stepped out around the lake with an added spring to his step, humming a tune by Berlioz.