The Reluctant Hero

by Michael Dobbs

  She hadn’t been in a church since her marriage, except for Remembrance Sunday, which was inescapable duty. And they hadn’t been churches like this, so overpoweringly ornate, filled with mysteries and flickering candles and polished woods, and relics waiting for the lips of the devout, and the overpowering waft of incense. An old babushka in dark widow’s weeds was bent over the steps before the altar, worn polishing cloth in her hand, while close by another woman trimmed candles in their glittering brass holders. Martha slipped into a pew at the back of the church, trying to make herself invisible amongst the congregation of gilded saints that stood on all sides. From the mosaic of the vast domed ceiling, the robed figures of Christ and the apostles stared down on her.

  She hadn’t tried prayer, not since she was eleven and wanted a pony, but as she sat on the hard wooden seat she envied the simple faith of the elderly women who toiled in front of her. Yet strange things had been happening to her, deep inside, and she had never wanted anything more in her adult life than what she sought now – Harry, and his safety. She slipped to her knees. It couldn’t hurt.

  She bent her head, closed her eyes, focused her mind, summoned all her energies and willed him to be free. ‘Please, God,’ she whispered.

  When she raised her eyes and sat up once again, she felt a surge of comfort. She still had no idea about God, but she knew for certain that something special had happened in her life through meeting Harry and coming to this place with him. In finding Harry, she had found part of herself that had been missing.

  She remembered Zac, what had happened to him, and her imagination began to prey upon her. What would they do – no, what were they doing – to Harry? Half-formed fears began to crowd into her mind, chasing away the comfort she’d found. Then her attention was caught by a painting in a huge gilded frame that hung on a wall near at hand. It was of a young man, St Sebastian the Martyr. It made her think of Harry. His hair was the same colour, the eyes had a similar cast, and his lips were parted, calling out in despair, his body tied to a tree and pierced through with many arrows. The blood from his wounds trickled down below his knees. With a cry of torment that echoed throughout the church and startled the babushkas, Martha jumped to her feet and ran from the church.

  ‘There are only two things I require from you, Mr Jones, and then we can get this entire unpleasant business over with.’ Beg made it sound as if he was about to do Harry a favour.

  ‘You mean you can kill me.’

  ‘I think life is so often overrated, don’t you? Particularly when it involves so much suffering. In any event, I have very little time. The President is, after all, the President, and he is an impatient man. He requires that his instructions are carried out promptly. So although your suffering will not be prolonged unnecessarily, it will, I’m afraid, be intense. Until you tell me what it is I need to know. But that shouldn’t be so difficult. Only two things.’ He counted on his crooked fingers. ‘First, of course, I must know who helped you. You understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘And second?’

  ‘I would like to know why, Mr Jones. Why you have done this. Given your life up for a friend.’

  ‘The first I will never tell you,’ Harry whispered. ‘And the second, you will never understand.’

  ‘A pity. A very great pity. I would have enjoyed the privilege of talking with you some more, but . . . to business.’ He crossed to the cupboard, his storehouse of terrors. When he turned back once more, he was holding a tray of surgical instruments that he laid on the desk directly in front of Harry. Pliers, clamps, needles, scalpels, even a saw. As battered as his eyes were, Harry couldn’t drag them away. Beg knew it. It was always the same. His fingers hovered over the tray in a grotesque pantomime, as though it was a box of chocolates and he was having difficulty in making up his mind which treat to select.

  ‘Please, Mr Jones, try to understand. There is nothing personal in this. Truly.’

  ‘You’ll be suggesting we hold hands next.’

  ‘I will gain no pleasure in watching you suffer.’

  ‘Screw you, Beg. This isn’t a spectator sport for you, you get your rocks off on making people suffer. Is it instead of sex? What is it with you, is there no woman in your life? Or is it something else that does it for you – young boys, perhaps? Dead sheep? A pound of raw liver?’ He was lashing out, trying to hit a target, struggling to hide his fear. ‘Or is it that you’re not only inadequate but undersized, too? The shortest dick in the boys’ showers, was that it?’ Harry was sweating now, the tension cascading down his face.

  Beg turned, and something sparkled in his hand. ‘I think, on that front, you have no cause to be making any claims,’ he snorted as his eyes dropped to Harry’s groin.

  ‘I’m freezing.’ ‘And afraid.’

  Of course he was. Beg was holding a scalpel.

  For the first time Harry tried to test his bonds, but the leather straps were thick and securely fastened. He could do no more than wriggle, or was it that he was shivering?

  ‘Who helped you? Give me their names. Otherwise . . .’ Beg took a step forward. The state of his hands meant that he was forced to hold the scalpel crudely, in the palm of his hand rather than with his fingers, but whichever way he held it, it was moving straight for Harry’s uninjured eye. Harry closed it, not in any hope of protection but in order to try to compose himself for what was to come. Should he laugh, sneer, scream, suffer in silence? This might be the last decision he ever made. He wanted desperately to get it right.

  ‘The names, Mr Jones. You don’t need to go through this. Just give me their names.’

  Yet when Harry opened his eye once again, Beg realized he wasn’t going to cooperate. There was a strength, a resilience, a glimmer of hatred in this man that Beg knew he would have to overcome before he got anything from him. He lunged forward.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Harry felt the lance of the blade, the warm blood falling onto his shoulder, the deadening numbness that the body insists on in those moments when it struggles to deal with profound offence. His mind went blank, preparing itself for the tidal wave of outrage that would soon engulf it.

  On cue, through the numbness, came galloping the messengers of intense pain. When Harry dared to open his eye, he found he could still see, and only inches in front of him, bending down to inspect his handiwork, was Amir Beg. Suddenly Harry’s ear began to scream as though it had been thrust into a brazier of hot coals. A substantial chunk of it had been sliced off.

  ‘You did that deliberately?’ he gasped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Missed my eye.’

  ‘But of course. Without your eye it’s impossible to see what is coming. That’s half of it, and often the most important half. You must be able to see in order to be aware of what is to come, and for your fear to undermine your courage. You know how this works, Mr Jones. Fear can achieve what simple pain cannot.’ There was nothing simple about the pain that was sinking its teeth into the side of Harry’s head. Beg took some medical gauze and began wiping Harry’s shoulder, as though in concern. ‘You don’t think I enjoy this savagery, do you?’

  ‘Every minute, you sick bastard!’ Harry cried out as Beg dabbed at his ear. He couldn’t defeat the pain, he could only try to fight it as long as possible, in the mind as much as in the body, which was why Beg was insistent on attending to both.

  ‘Come, come,’ Beg muttered in reproach, his breath upon Harry’s burning cheek, ‘you said you took an interest in Afghanistan, just across our border. You must have seen what the Americans and British have done there, been part of it, even. Oh, what do you call it? Exceptional measures. Extraordinary rendition. Strange language, but what can we expect when Vice President Cheney spent so many years compiling the dictionary? Neat bureaucratic phrases, designed to set Western consciences at ease. And how easy that has proved to be. The abuses were massive, they were carried on for years, yet in your parliaments and amongst your peoples there was barely a whimper raised in protest. And you, Mr
Jones, I understand you were not only a politician but also a soldier. You bear twice the measure of guilt. Even if you weren’t part of it, you most certainly were aware of it.’

  ‘Only the photographs,’ Harry muttered weakly. Splashed all over the media. He couldn’t deny Beg’s point. What had gone on in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay had come to sicken him. Acts that had been carried out in the name of extracting truth and approved, even insisted upon, by politicians who then repeatedly lied about such things. In the national interest. Whenever they were forced to argue their case and justify what had happened, they fell back on claiming that a few casualties were inevitable in defending that interest, weren’t they? No need to look too closely. Although the strangest thing was that when the lies were exposed and the account presented, it was mostly only sergeants and lower ranks who were forced to pay, and not a single politician. It was the one time in his life when Harry had felt shame. The irredeemable tarnish on the brass. And Beg had been clever enough to open that old wound, and pull it apart.

  This was no longer merely a matter of violence, a onesided contest of brute force between gaoler and captive, it had become a battle of wills between two men, testing each other. There could be only one result, for it was never going to be a fair fight and at any moment he chose Beg could bring the game to an end by crushing the other man with a flick of a wrist, yet while it continued, it was real, and its outcome mattered, if only to the two of them.

  ‘We are much the same, you and me,’ Beg said.

  ‘You’re more flexible than me,’ Harry responded, panting in pain. ‘I’d never bend as low as Karabayev’s arse.’

  ‘In a few minutes you will bend lower than you ever believed possible.’

  ‘You serve him. Yet you loathe him, don’t you?’ ‘Let me put it this way. I’d much rather have him sitting in this chair than you. And perhaps I shall. Soon.’

  ‘Doesn’t it worry you, sharing opinions that could get you on the wrong end of your noose?’

  ‘But I do it only with those I know will never be in a position to repeat them.’

  ‘Fuck you.’ It was the best Harry could do. He was supposed to be playing mind games, but the pain of his ear was growing so intense that it felt as though Beg were slicing off another chunk. The battle with the injury was already exhausting him. Beg knew it, and would take advantage.

  ‘You see, Mr Jones, pain is life. Without life there can be no pain, and so pain is the ultimate proof of a man’s existence. And it is cumulative, layer upon layer of it, like oil on a painting, getting ever thicker. That’s what we do, that’s what this process is about. It’s a form of art. Piling pain upon pain, to the point where you will give me what I want. We will paint a picture together. From the names.’

  ‘Art? You couldn’t even hold a fucking brush. And I’ve seen what you call your artwork, plastered over the wall beside the scaffold.’

  ‘You will talk.’

  ‘Name, rank and address.’

  ‘We shall see.’

  ‘Tell me, Beg, why do you hate your country so much?’

  ‘Me? Hate Ta’argistan?’ For the first time, Beg seemed taken aback, knocked off course by a thrust he hadn’t expected.

  ‘Your country has betrayed you. You were born for better things than this, playing the lapdog to a man like Karabayev.’

  Beg’s mouth twitched. How did this man see these things? Were his feelings so obvious? Then he realized this was nothing but a game. ‘No, I don’t hate my country.’

  ‘You think when Karabayev goes they’ll let you take his place? Look in the mirror, Beg. You’re not the sort they let out into the daylight, not a half-man who makes women flinch and children run screaming from the room. You’re a creature of the shadows. And that’s where they’ll keep you.’

  With a snort of rage Beg lurched forward, and another chunk of Harry’s ear was gone. Harry moaned. There would come a point where the pain would overwhelm him, drive him into unconsciousness and he would no longer be able to talk, but that point was still some way off. Meanwhile, Beg recovered his composure, shook himself, not just physically but mentally, grabbing control back from Harry.

  ‘The pain in my hands is nothing compared with what you will endure, Mr Jones. But I somehow sense that more blood is not the answer. I look at your body, with those marks, its scars, reminders of the battles it has fought, and they suggest to me that you are a man so accustomed to blood that I am unlikely to persuade you by shedding a little more, perhaps not even a lot more. In any event, I don’t have the time to waste in playing with you. We must become more serious.’

  The blood of which Beg was talking had now completely filled Harry’s right ear, yet he didn’t need to catch all the words to sense the threat that was being made. What came next? The fingernails? Sawing off an entire finger? Beg was right, the damage was done in the mind, and Harry was growing very afraid.

  Beg was bending over something in the far recess of the room, on the other side of the cupboard, Harry couldn’t see. He returned pushing a trolley. On it was a box with a prominent dial, and leading from it were thick cables, like car jump leads, with dull metal paddles of what looked like bronze or copper at their end. A red flex trailed behind the trolley to a power point.

  ‘I suspect you have seen something like this before. It can deliver high voltage with low current – that means it causes very serious pain without killing you. You can see its advantages.’ Beg flicked a power switch, fiddled with the rheostat dial and picked up the paddles by their insulated handles. ‘We use these on the extremities. Start with your toes, then move up to your testicles. And after that, if you are still stubborn, your tongue. Layer upon layer, you see. I tend to linger over the testicles, avoid the tongue, if possible; it makes it more difficult to talk afterwards. Although very few push me as far as the tongue.’

  ‘As you say, nothing personal.’

  ‘You will talk, Mr Jones. They all do. Your friend, Mr Kravitz, did. It’s only a matter of when.’

  Beg was kneeling in front of Harry, the terminals in his hand. He touched them together, a harsh yellow spark shot between them that added the smell of ozone to that of the antiseptic. Sitting in the chair, naked, with his legs apart, unable to move, Harry felt desperately vulnerable. He was still damp, from the shower, and with sweat. He knew Beg was right. It was a matter of time. And pain. He would talk, so why not do it now?

  Suddenly pain seared through his body, jerking it taut, forcing it against the bonds. Harry screamed. It lasted for only a couple of seconds. Beg was toying with him, letting him know what was to come. Beg withdrew the paddles and the pain began slowly to subside, but Harry still moaned. He spat out a filling that had cracked, he could taste blood in his mouth.

  ‘That’s good, a very good start,’ Beg said.

  Harry tried to mumble something. Beg drew closer, put his ear to Harry’s mouth.

  ‘I want to tell you something,’ Harry whispered.

  ‘Excellent!’ Beg cried in triumph.

  ‘You . . . you still smell as though someone’s just poured a bucket of shit over you.’

  Their eyes met, in hatred. And the pain began again. For longer, and far more intense. Harry lost control over his body, which fought to escape, fighting the leather bonds, his arms twisting until blood started seeping from his wrists. Harry was screaming, which satisfied Beg; it meant he was still conscious.

  ‘Have you anything else to tell me,’ Beg enquired, ‘or shall we move further up the body?’

  Harry was moaning, panting, sweating. Beg was right. Pain had a quality of thickness and it was pressing down on him, trying to suffocate him. His lungs were burning. God knew what would happen next. He didn’t think he could take much more.

  Yet, slowly, Harry became aware that something had distracted Beg’s attention. It was his hand. While the electrical current had jolted his body back and forth, Harry’s wrists had twisted within their restraining straps and the palms of his hands were n
ow facing upwards, the fingers outstretched in their agony. And embedded in his right palm, surrounded by bruised and suppurating flesh, was Zac’s chess piece.

  Beg cried in both surprise and delight at his discovery. ‘You see, Mr Jones, you can have no secrets from me!’ His eyes mocked as he bent forward for a closer inspection and his broken, crooked fingers reached out to claim his prize. Harry felt the other man’s fingers scrabbling at his palm. And something on Beg’s exposed wrist glinted in the light. A Rolex – Zac’s. Julia’s.

  Harry wanted it back. To reclaim what was hers. This bastard had no right to it. So, with every tattered shred of strength he could muster, Harry’s own fingers closed around those of the other man.

  Harry wasn’t fully conscious, only half aware of what was happening. Everything was confusion, and pain, and through it all he heard more screaming. Yet this time it wasn’t his own. It was Beg’s.

  Beg was trying to pull away. He grabbed a paddle, slapped it against Harry, but it required both paddles to make the circuit, not just one. He stretched out with his free hand, trying to reach for something from the desk, one of the cutting instruments, but as he scrabbled at it the scalpel dropped to the ground and bounced out of reach. ‘Help! Help!’ he screamed. It was pointless. The guards never responded to screams from this room.

  Harry squeezed still harder, using all his scrambled physical and mental resources to crush the other man’s crippled joints. It was as if his entire life had been reduced to this one moment.

  Beg’s body twisted, curled, like an autumn leaf. The resistance flooded from it, and he collapsed at Harry’s feet.

  ‘Ya vas umolyau,’ he whimpered. ‘I beg you . . .’