Kershaw was growling at him down the white phone, the local one which he used for any outgoing calls. He said something about being in someone else’s shoes and the Sergeant realised he needed to go and burn his boots, and the rest of his Tigerman outfit, before Arno tripped over them. That was next on his list. He had been helpful and available for what felt like sixty hours, and now he had to look out for his own position. He would put it all in a dustbin and set the whole lot on fire, then throw the armour plates into the sea. Why had he put the stele on the disposable part of the uniform? Never going to wear it again, of course, never really expected to get shot, and that was just the backplate, the front one would still do, though that didn’t matter because he would never need it. He was going round in circles. Sleep would be good. A necessity, actually.
He wondered where the boy was. He would call him next, this all made that acceptable. Call him and ask him to come and help. He needed company.
‘—fucking journalists now, too,’ Kershaw said, and then there was a soft, piercing purr. The Sergeant looked around, and then realised what it was and that he had been waiting for it.
‘I’m going to have to call you back, Jed,’ he said gently.
‘Like fuck you are, Lester!’
‘It’s the red phone.’ And with a certain satisfaction – my government trumps your government – he hung up.
‘This is the phone which must not ring,’ the Consul had told him. ‘It’s the phone you keep an eye on in the joyful expectation that you will never actually see it do anything. If it does, by the way, if it actually rings, my general advice would be to seek cover under something and refuse to come out until it’s over. I’m not joking. I see that you think I am, but I’m not. You being a military man and so on I realise that you won’t listen to anything so craven, but in the interest of our shared humanity, conniving old sod to real man: don’t answer the bloody phone. By the time it rings, the situation is fucked up beyond all retrieval, anyway.’
‘Has it ever rung?’
‘I was in Iraq for a while. The one there never bloody stopped. People forever picking it up. IED in Fallujah, phone rings. British contractor taken by insurgents in Basra, phone rings. Please advise. Well, what do you say? Should have had a better bloody plan in the first place. Should have done what we said we were doing in Afghanistan and left Iraq alone. Should have given our troops the right gear and sent half a million more of them. Should have admitted we were doing Empire at the behest of the Family Bush and built an Iron Frame the way we did for India. A proper infrastructure. A decade or so of that and people actually do think you might be all right. In the end. Conduct oneself with a bit of dignity and don’t let the local staff get murdered. Avoid the sexual torture of prisoners, that’s always a good one. Make good on promises regarding amnesties and suchlike. It’s slow. It’s not bloody nation-building, it’s generation-building, and it takes decades, not months. But they don’t want to hear that, they want a magic solution involving the having and eating of cakes, and any talk of a zero-sum game is heresy. So as I say: let the sodding thing wail like a banshee, have a snifter, and await results. But if you must, the answer protocol is that you give your name and shove your thumb on the plate there. Biometric, they say, and unbeatable. My wife read in the Telegraph that you can defeat the system with a bag of jelly sweets. However, be that as it may.’
‘Lester Ferris,’ the Sergeant said now, thumb pressing down unnecessarily hard, and a nasal woman told him to hold, then connected him to a conference call between people with KCBs. They were not politicians. They were serious people who did serious work.
The conversation was staccato and fragmentary because of the lag between continents, which was multiplied by the number of participants. Everyone was British and most were male, although from time to time a softly spoken schoolmistress broke in and made very intelligent, salient remarks which pushed the discussion along wiser, more cogent lines. Finally she addressed him directly.
‘Lester Ferris?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Hello, Lester. I take it you’re having a pretty tense day over there.’
He could see a helicopter through the window, circling like a nervous buzzard. The Black Fleet had blown up a landside installation, linking itself with an industrial quantity of opium. Kershaw had mentioned journalists. Crap. He hadn’t thought of that. They would have set out from bases in Bangkok and Sana’a the moment the footage went public. Some of them before. They’d be here now, and in numbers. More strangers, more eyes to avoid, more questions to trip over. Meanwhile he was talking to half of Whitehall – half of Whitehall was waiting for him to reply.
And the whole thing was about him, in a funny hat.
‘Yes, ma’am. We tend to like it calmer in Brighton House.’
‘“We”?’
‘I was instructed that the house is always plural, ma’am. Even when there’s just me.’
She laughed. ‘I’m sure you were. I’m Africa,’ she added, and he wondered for one vertiginous moment whether that was actually her name. No: she was responsible for Africa. Africa was her job, her title, and her domain. Short for Middle East and North Africa (and associated territories). Insofar as anyone in Britain was responsible for Mancreu, she was, which probably meant she’d lost a card game with Asia. He waited. She hadn’t spoken to him just to pass the time of day.
‘The question is, Lester, whether we should send someone. A lot of someones. Or let the Americans and the rest of NatProMan deal with it their way.’
Well, actually, the British contingent would clear it up pretty quickly. Lots of missing items from the armoury and the Sergeant himself injured in rather obviously relevant ways, and so on. If it got out, there’d be an almighty stink. Her problem. He waited a bit longer, then answered.
‘I’d say no, ma’am.’
‘Think you can handle it?’
‘No, ma’am. Absolutely not.’
That seemed to please her. ‘Then what is your thinking?’
He took a breath to acknowledge that he didn’t know and found himself saying forcefully, ‘I think it’s a bloody mess. But at this point it’s not a British mess. We’re bystanders. The people still quite like us and we’re helping them set up elsewhere so we’re not the villains. If NatProMan can’t take care of itself, that’s a problem for the organisation. Mancreu very specifically isn’t British soil any more, which is why it’s just me in the first place. The whole island is supposed to explode soon, anyway. But if you were to send, say, an investigation team and a lot of diplomats and so on, then that would sort of acknowledge that we care what happens here and feel responsible. And since the world press is, I gather, coming here in rather a big way and a lot of things which aren’t supposed to happen at all happen here on a daily basis, I’d suggest it’s better you be able to say “Well, we only had one chap there, and he’s a bit washed up, Afghan veteran, good man gone a bit lardy and unreliable, but gosh, it’s all everyone else’s fault.” Ma’am. You might even want a ringing denunciation up your sleeve, just in case.’
She snorted. ‘Well done, Lester.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
‘My instinct is to stay away. So in your on-the-spot opinion, if I let this ride, will I hate the outcome more than I would hate the outcome of my getting my hands dirty?’
‘In my on-the-spot opinion, I wish I wasn’t involved,’ he told her, with perfect truthfulness.
‘Then you are officially ordered not to be, and I am officially declaring this someone else’s problem. Stay out of trouble and don’t talk to the press except to say that you can’t talk to them. If they talk to you, nod and smile and say you can’t say anything and then – and this is very important – don’t. Not even to be polite. I’ll send you a form of words. If you have to, get it out and read it to them. They’ll know what that means.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘All right, then.’
And that was that, apparently. The call ende
d, or at least he was no longer part of it. The Sergeant could picture eyebrows being raised in wood-panelled rooms. Well, old fellow, that’s what I said. But if it’s good enough for Africa, it’s good enough for me . . .
It might not last. She was not bound by this one conversation. But the longer he went undiscovered the more likely he would remain so. In a short enough time, the evidence would vanish, the island’s notoriety would subside, and this would be over.
He realised he was wishing for the fire now, for the end, and felt like a traitor. And then he wondered when he had come to think of Mancreu as something he could betray.
He got rid of Tigerman’s boots and put the rest of the gear back in the armoury, stuffed the mask in a burn bag and meant to go out and throw the stele into the sea, but his body duped him and when he slumped into an armchair with a cup of tea he closed his eyes.
The boy woke him, or perhaps he simply woke and the boy was there. Either way, there was tea, and even toast.
‘They are dead,’ the boy said.
‘I know.’ No need to ask who.
The boy considered. ‘I feel better,’ he observed. ‘Is that bad?’
‘No. People tell you that you won’t, but you do. You don’t feel good. It’s just something less to worry about.’
The boy nodded. He looked pensive and unsettled. There was a formality between them, a distance, which made the Sergeant want to embrace him but at the same time warded him off. He told himself that happened, that it was part of their rhythm. There were days when they were just in the same room at the same time, and days when they were together, in sync.
‘They are not the men,’ the boy said eventually. ‘Not the real men.’
No. Somewhere there was a man behind the men, or perhaps a woman. Someone who had decided Shola’s death was necessary, for whatever reason. And that someone was Fleet, almost certainly. Fleet, where his writ did not reach, in a world he did not understand. A world he was not supposed to acknowledge existed. The boy glanced at him opaquely.
‘There are journalists,’ he muttered, as if this was even worse than murderers.
‘Where?’
‘In Beauville. They are everywhere. They try to film you if you stand still long enough or do anything interesting. They have found empty houses and they are living in them.’ He scowled. ‘We are being zerged.’
The Sergeant nodded. To zerg (vb), from the video game Starcraft: to overwhelm with vastly superior numbers. It was 101, the boy had told him shortly after their first meeting. Totally 101.
‘I sorted out the suit,’ he said, and when the boy looked up in alarm he added, ‘I still have the mask and the stele.’ For now. For in case. More crossed lines, more mismatched beginnings and middles and ends. Out of step. It’s as if we don’t know each other. Or is it that we do and this is how that goes? He hesitated. ‘Have you heard the other news?’
‘What other?’
‘Kershaw said . . . He said that there isn’t long now. That soon we’ll all have to leave. Kaiko was quite angry.’ And then quite something else which had not been clear when the missile hit.
‘Kaiko?’
‘Doctor Inoue. The xenobiologist.’
‘The science hottie.’
‘Pechorin’s having his nose redone, by the way. The other man will live, too.’ The one with the spike in his mouth.
‘That is good.’
‘What will you do?’ You’ll have to leave. Won’t you? I have no time left, but I can’t say it all now, can I? Not with you like this. Or me like this, I suppose. It could be either.
The boy shrugged. ‘Kswah swah.’
‘That’s not an answer!’ It came out of him before he could stop it, a sergeant’s bark. He regretted it immediately, awaited a furious response. None came. The boy shook his head.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not an answer.’ He seemed to find this as troubling as the Sergeant, his face contemplative.
‘I want to help,’ the Sergeant said, after a moment. ‘I just want to help. Do you mind if I try to work out some ways to do that?’
The boy inclined his head. ‘That would be very kind.’ It sounded wooden, like something from a phrasebook.
‘Don’t do anything . . . I don’t know. Just don’t. You know what I’m talking about.’ Going after Pechorin to accuse him of stealing fish.
‘I won’t,’ the boy said.
They sat together for a while, each peering at the other as if trying to see beneath the skin, and then went their separate ways.
The Sergeant pored over the files for an hour, looking without success for the two files which might be his friends. The files were all higgledy-piggledy, he discovered, shoved almost any which way into their boxes by someone who had no doubt assumed they’d never be looked at again. He got into a rhythm: right hand holds down the file, left hand traces the outer cover and lifts, right fans the pages, left seeks the photos. Check. Check again. Discard.
It was boring. He had not anticipated how boring it would be looking at one photograph after another of children who were not the child he was looking for. Once, a file caught his eye, but the boy in question would be twenty now. A brother? Not a father, however you sliced it. He shunted the file to one side. Then, abruptly angry for reasons he could not put into words, he went into Beauville.
The main street was filled with reporters for the first time ever. There were camera crews setting up in rows in front of the Portmaster’s office, and Beneseffe was telling a team of Germans firmly that this was unacceptable, that the office was out of bounds, and they were responding that there was no law on Mancreu so surely they could film where they liked. Beneseffe saw the futility of arguing with them, so he went back inside and a few moments later six large lobstermen came around the corner and politely but firmly started picking up battery packs and cases and moving them away down the street. The lobstermen were big and scarred and looked as if they could handle themselves, but today there was something else about them, too, an edgy hair-trigger dismay which made anything possible. The newsmen could smell it, and they didn’t fancy it. They cordially thanked Beneseffe for his advice and let themselves be moved along.
The Sergeant looked around. He was not alone in his bad mood. All of Beauville had it today, that sense of exposure and frustration and the resultant animal desire to bite something. He could hear the people bickering with one another, and over by the sandwich stand a scuffle broke out over mustard, two old blowhards he knew to talk to, shoving one another like children in a playground. Even the island was getting in on the act, making it worse: there was a strange, unending buzz in the ground. You couldn’t call it an earthquake. It was more like having an electric toothbrush switch itself on in your luggage. But it wasn’t stopping. It was just there, and it was distantly worrying and annoying.
He thought about the boy, about his perplexity and his unease, and looked at the faces around him, not the strangers but the locals, and realised what was wrong.
Someone had bombed them.
Yesterday, they had all been living on a volcano, and that was different in no way from every other day of their lives – or, philosophically speaking, anyone’s. You could always be hit by a bus or slip and break your neck, whoever you were and wherever you lived. That was why car bombs and the like were frightening but ultimately ineffective. They were supposed to make a point, but all they did was remind everyone of the irritating, upsetting truth that bad things could happen.
But last night something had happened. A human hand had opened the sky with directed malice, reached down among them and killed people, had done so blandly and casually. It didn’t matter that the victims had been by any measure pretty bad people. Anyone who offended against an unknown law could meet the same fate. Anyone within twenty metres of them. Anyone in a car with them or in their house. Anyone who worked with them or overheard whatever appalling secret they had to tell. Or perhaps it was nothing like that at all. Perhaps it had been target practice, or a mistake, and that
was what they were worth to the world. It was like living with a capricious god, except that god was out there in the bay and he was just some fucking idiot trying to fake it as best he could, and fuck him. Fuck him for being so rude, so stupid, so powerful and yet so utterly powerless. He could blow up a building. Big deal. Could he put it back together again? No, and that was exactly how the whole thing worked. The chemical men had broken the island and now the United Nations would burn it. No one in the wider world seemed to do anything constructive, no one built or mended. It was lawyers, guns and tax avoidance out there. Real work, reconstruction, was down to ordinary people, and no one ever spent as much money and time on that as they did on ripping things down in the first place, because it was hard.
Beauville whispered to itself, and squirmed away from the light.
He heard voices raised in argument, saw a brief pushing and tussling between two Al Jazeera Persians and a cattleman who had been lounging by a truck. A few others stepped in to head off trouble, but not without some posturing of their own. A moment later, a slim kid passing by nearly walked into the Sergeant and he had to twist to avoid the aggressive shoulder as it twitched towards him. He recognised one of the boxers from the gym, quick as a shark, but too light to take him on, for all that. The kid scowled and opened his arms in a universal gesture of offended adolescent rage. Have a go, then! Go on, grandad!
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