by Chris Ryan
‘Yes. They’re across the water, near Belfast.’
‘Could she go and stay with them for a while?’
‘Well, I suppose so.’ I thought about it for a moment, and asked, ‘You mean, we have a trial separation?’
‘That would make it into a bit of a drama. I wouldn’t call it that. Just call it a break. You could try it for two or three weeks. It would give you a chance to sort yourself out. Meanwhile, I’ll give you something to take. Two a day.’ He scribbled out a prescription and handed me the chit. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You’ll be OK in a while. Try and ease off the booze, as well. That’ll help.’
‘Thanks, Doc. Thanks for listening.’
‘It was a pleasure,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed hearing your story.’
I stood up and headed for the door.
‘That’ll be £57 .50,’ Tracy said as I came out.
‘I’ll send a cheque.’
‘Seriously, are you OK?’ She uncrossed her long legs and stood up. She was almost as tall as me.
‘More or less. I’ve been getting these headaches.’
She came and stood close to me, looking into my face. ‘It’s what happened over there, isn’t it?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Well — I’m sorry. I hope you’re better soon. You probably need time to get over it.’
‘That’s what the doc said.’
‘Good luck, then.’
‘Thanks, Tracy. Your medicine’s as good as anybody’s.’ I was going to give her a peck on the cheek, but at that instant the telephone rang.
After so much emotion, my Spanish course seemed deadlier than ever. There were eight of us studying, and the bait was the possibility that a team job might come up in Colombia, where the forces of law and order were fighting the drug barons in the war against cocaine. The thought of a trip to South America was certainly an incentive, but when it came down to the nitty-gritty — Jesus Christ! (Or, as they would say down there, ¡JesuCristo!) There I sat, struggling to concentrate on the strange words and pronunciation, while all the time my mind was on Kath and what I was going to tell her. What would my mates in the Squadron say if she went home? Would they write me off as a wanker? I supposed we could invent some problem — it was true that her mother was soon going into hospital for a hip replacement, and would need looking after for a while afterwards…
Our instructor was a flabby-looking major from the Education Corps, with thin, fair hair and a poncified accent. He could speak Spanish all right, but it was quiero hablar this and más desfacio, por favor that, until my headache was worse than ever, in spite of Doc Lester’s magic pills. I stuck out the day, but only because the thought of facing Kath was worse.
When I got home that evening, I didn’t say much at first. I repeated what the doc had told me about delayed reaction and the after-effects of stress, but I waited till Kath had tucked Tim up in bed before I nerved myself to put the knife in.
I was just going to get another Scotch, but stopped myself. She was standing at one of the units in the kitchen, chopping vegetables on a wooden board. I sat down at the table behind her and said, ‘Kath, I’ve had an idea.’
‘Oh yes?’
I told her what the doc had suggested. For a while she continued chopping. Then the movement of her hand ceased, but she didn’t turn round. I thought she was crying. I knew I should go over and comfort her, take her by the shoulders, but the great block that had stifled my emotions wouldn’t allow it. I sat there in agony until suddenly she turned on me, eyes blazing.
‘So, it’s a separation you want,’ she said bitterly.
‘No, no. Just a break.’
‘A trial separation is what they call it.’
‘Well — whatever.’
‘There’s only one thing I want to know.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Is there someone else?’
I was so taken aback I hesitated before answering and, naturally, that made things worse. ‘No, no!’ I insisted. ‘There’s nobody.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course. For God’s sake!’
I can’t deny that my mind flew straight to Tracy — but nevertheless what I’d said was true.
Kath waited a moment, chopping away again at her vegetables, before she asked, ‘How do I know Mum will have us? You realize she’s going into the Musgrave any moment? She can’t put it off — she’s been waiting for years.’
‘Of course. I know. I thought maybe it would be a good idea if you were there to give her a hand when she comes out.’
‘Big deal! How long am I supposed to go for?’
‘It depends. Maybe a month.’
‘What’s everyone going to say?’
‘We’ll put it round that your mum needs help after her operation.’
‘I can see you’ve thought it all out.’
‘Kath — it’s my fault, I know. I’m not blaming you. It’s all down to me.’
She gave me a strange look. I think she was more scared than angry.
‘I’ll have to hand in my notice at the bank.’
‘I know. But that’s not the end of the world. I’ll be able to send money.’
‘Who’ll look after you if I go?’
‘I’ll manage. I can get most meals in camp.’
When she looked round again, her eyes were full of tears, and she said, half in pity, half in contempt, ‘You poor old thing!’
* * *
The bank took her resignation in good part, and we arranged for her to go the following Saturday. Her mother positively welcomed the plan, although she didn’t know what was behind it, of course. The movements clerk in camp booked air tickets — two out of my allocation of three — so that there was no cost to us. Kath didn’t take much luggage — one suitcase for herself and a holdall for Tim. As for Tim, if he’d cried as they were leaving, I think I’d have cracked up; thank God he didn’t. We’d told him he was going for a holiday with his Gran, and that chuffed him no end. He began packing his favourite teddies and telling everyone how the aeroplane would lift them up over the water and come down in Gran’s house.
We left KC at 6.30 on another lovely morning. Both of us were holding emotion at bay by keeping up a strictly practical front. As Kath got into the car she said, ‘Don’t forget to single the carrots when they’re big enough, in about a week. Leave them spaced at one every couple of inches, and push the earth well down afterwards. Otherwise carrot fly will get in.’
As we headed for Birmingham, our side of the motorway was almost empty; at the weekend, most people were going south. We didn’t talk much, and when I set the two of them down at the departure door of the terminal building, it was just a quick kiss on the cheek and, ‘We’ll speak soon, then.’ As I drove away I turned my head and saw little Tim waving.
TWO
Tony was due in from the SEAL base in Florida one evening towards the end of June. The US military flight was scheduled to arrive at RAF Lyneham at 1630, so I borrowed a car from the MT section and drove up the A40 to give him a lift to Hereford. When it turned out that the plane was an hour late, I sat around in the arrivals lounge and had plenty of time to reflect on our conversations in the Iraqi gaol.
Born in Puerto Rico, the son of an electrician, he had one brother. When he was five, his father had decided to take the family to America, in search of a better life for them all. As they were leaving, the father said they were going because America was the land of opportunity. But things didn’t work out well for them. They ended up living in a Hispanic area of New York, and after a couple of years Tony’s father died, so his mother was left to bring up the two boys on her own. By the time Tony left school he’d been stabbed twice and shot once, all in casual muggings. Prospects of civilian work were zero, so as soon as he was old enough he joined the US Marine Corps, and after two or maybe three years went on into the Navy SEALs.
In 1989 he’d taken part in Operation Just Cause, aimed at removing President Noriega from Panama. A team of four divers
was to put explosive charges on Noriega’s 65-foot patrol boat, the Presidente Porras, so that the vessel couldn’t be used to escape. Having left their own ship in two Gemini inflatables, they slipped into the harbour in wetsuits with enough oxygen to give them four hours underwater. Once they’d identified the boat, they hung 24-lb timed charges of plastic explosive over the propellers before returning undetected to their mother ship.
As they were leaving, they heard the explosives go off, and knew the patrol boat was out of action for the duration, if not for ever. The success put them on a high as they flew off by helicopter for their second task — to capture Paitilla airfield, not far from Panama City, and to disable a Lear jet owned by Noriega.
The platoon were so confident about their plan that they saw no need to take heavy weapons; they thought they could accomplish the task by stealth — sneak in, take out a few guards, and have the airfield under their command. But as their choppers approached they started to take incoming fire. Too late they realized that the place was full of Noriega’s troops, armed with heavy weapons. The SEALs eventually managed to capture the field, but only at severe cost. In the firefights, which were fearsome, they suffered eleven casualties, four of them dead. Among those four were three of Tony’s good mates. And so he learnt how easily an operation can go tits-up, ending in a bag of shit.
At last the tannoy announced the arrival of the flight, and in came the C-141 from Florida. A few minutes later Tony burst out of the Customs exit, with a pack on his back and a big holdall in his left hand. When he saw me waiting, his face lit up. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he exclaimed, hammering me on the shoulder with his free fist.
‘You’re looking good!’ I said.
‘You too.’
He’d put on weight — which was hardly a surprise, considering he’d been half-starved the last time I saw him. Now he was fit and bronzed, altogether in great shape. His tan accentuated the Puerto Rican elements in his appearance. With his jet-black hair and thick, arched eyebrows he was very dark anyway, almost swarthy; now his skin was even darker, and his teeth, when he grinned, shone even whiter. His hard New York accent was just as I remembered it: ‘work’ came out as ‘woik’, ‘person’ as ‘poyson’.
The OC had asked me to help him settle in, so on his first night I showed him round the camp before leaving him to have a shower and get his head down until the jetlag wore off. On the second evening I drove him out to Keeper’s Cottage, and on the way I decided to break the news about me and Kath. I could have kept up the pretence that she’d gone home to look after her mother, but I’d got to know Tony so well that I didn’t feel like trying to deceive him. Of course he’d never seen her, but I’d talked so much about her while we were guests of Saddam that he must have felt he knew her well.
‘Hey,’ he said when he heard. ‘That’s too bad. But you’ll get her back over.’
It was a statement, rather than a question.
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I’ve chilled out a good bit since she went away.’
‘You’ll want to see the kid, anyway.’
Again I knew he was right.
The rain was pissing down, so KC didn’t look its best, but Tony fell for it, drenched as it was. He kept saying, ‘This is real neat!’ and started on about the possibilities of hunting. He seemed surprised I hadn’t been out blasting the local wildlife. ‘Why, I bet you could hunt squirrels right in back here,’ he said, looking up at the oak spinney.
‘Oh, yeah. There’s plenty of them. Rabbits too.’
‘Who’s the gardener?’ he asked, surveying the unkempt forest of vegetables.
‘Kath. I haven’t a clue. Every time we speak on the phone she tells me to do this or that — earth up the spuds or thin out the lettuces — but I just don’t have the time.’
Indoors, the first thing Tony saw was a photo of her and Tim, taken recently in fine weather on the shore of Strangford Lough, with a background of water and smooth green islands. Kath was wearing a blue check dress and Tim, in a pale blue T-shirt and grey shorts, was standing on a stone wall, so his head was nearly level with hers. The picture had arrived only the day before, and I’d stuck it on the mantelpiece in the living room.
‘But she’s beautiful!’ said Tony. ‘And so’s he. Some kid, that. What is he now? Three?’
‘And a bit.’
‘You sure must be proud of them.’
I made some noncommittal noise and went into the kitchen to open a window. The whole cottage smelt stuffy. Tony realized the place was in a mess — I watched his dark eyes checking things, saw him run a finger through the dust on the table-top — but he was too tactful to say anything about it. I poured a couple of Scotches and we settled down for some crack.
‘So how’s things?’ he asked.
‘Improving. I had a low patch when I couldn’t get myself together at all. I was getting bad headaches and recurring nightmares about Iraq. I went on the piss — but I was so zonked I couldn’t even bring myself to go downtown with the guys. Instead I was buying cans of Stella, twenty-four at a time, and drinking them here on my own with Scotches in between. But I’m over that now. No more headaches. Nightmares gone. Everything’s fine, except for this damned course.’
‘What’s that?’
‘This language course. There’s a possibility of a team job in Colombia, so there’s ten of us learning Spanish.’
‘No kidding! You realize Spanish is my first language?’
‘I knew you spoke it.’
‘Sure do. My mom and dad always talked Spanish at home, and I grew up with it. I expect it would sound like shit to people in Madrid, but it’s Spanish all the same.’
Looking out of the window, he fired off a rapid sentence. ‘Get that?’
‘Only that it was something about the weather.’
‘Correct. I asked if it always pisses with rain during the British summer.’
‘¡Siempre!’ I had to think. ‘¡Sin falta!’
‘Boy! You got it!’
‘I fucking haven’t, Tony. That’s the trouble. I’m finding it a real hassle. Our final tests are coming up in a couple of weeks, too.’
‘Well. You just gotta fight and get through them. I guess I’ve been fighting to survive ever since I was a kid.’
Soon we made a plan. Tony was already very fit; on the initial stages of the selection course, over the Welsh mountains, he would have little trouble in purely physical terms. But I knew what a help it would be to him if he learnt the routes over the Brecon Beacons in advance: that way, he would have a big advantage if the weather turned bad or fog came down. So I offered to walk some of the ground with him, and in return, while we were tabbing, he would give me informal Spanish lessons, to increase my fluency and confidence. The deal suited us both.
We were still talking as dusk set in, and I began to wish I’d done something about supper. Over the past few weeks I’d been picking up takeaways on my run home, or else making do with a jacket potato baked in the microwave. Now I remembered that in Iraq, as we ate shitty rice and lusted after our favourite dishes, Tony had described how he liked to cook.
‘You hungry?’ I asked.
‘Sure.’
‘Want to try your hand in the kitchen? I don’t know what there is, but have a look.’
A search in the cupboards revealed nothing but a few tins of baked beans and a packet of spaghetti. Fuelled by the Scotch, Tony launched a tirade against my housekeeping.
‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed. ‘There ain’t enough here to feed a goddam mouse! You can’t have been shopping in decades. No garlic. No tomato paste. No chilli. No nothing.’
Our prospects improved when he found a bottle of olive oil and a tin of anchovies in the larder. He went into the garden with a torch and returned with a bucket full of spinach, the dark green leaves glistening with rain. Soon we were eating fishy, oily, peppery spaghetti, which we pretended was a traditional Puerto Rican recipe, and spinach pureed with butter, salt and pepper, which I had to admit was outstand
ing. Tomorrow, Tony promised, we would pay a joint visit to the supermarket and put the kitchen in order.
Three days later we drove out to the Beacons. In his regular training Tony had started to hump loads in his bergen: he hadn’t been used to it, but I told him it was essential to build up slowly to the 55 lbs that he would have to carry during the four weeks of hill-walking which formed the first part of the selection course. For our first recce, however, we took only light day-sacks containing a couple of sandwiches and a water bottle apiece.
Needless to say, rain was falling, and the clouds were touching the tops of the mountains. I parked the car in a lay-by on the B-road that runs along the side of the Talybont reservoir, so that we could get a look at the map while we were still in the dry. Tony had a hell of a pair of boots — high-leg, black leather Matterhorns lined with Goretex — and as he was lacing them up I twisted the map round until it was aligned with the compass.
‘On test week you’ll be walking all round this area,’ I told him, pointing with the blade of my clasp-knife. ‘We’ll start off up the side of the wood here, and get on to these ridges. This is the first part of the Endurance route, and you do it at night, starting out at 0300. Once you get on to the high ground the going’s easy. It’s just a matter of snaking round the ridges. You’re aiming for the summit of Pen-y-Fan… here. Highest point in the Beacons, and the centre of our universe. It’s said that every guy in the Regiment has the outline of the Fan graven on his heart.
‘What we’ll do is come round the ridge here, across the feature known as the Windy Gap, then up a horrendous climb known as Jacob’s Ladder. You almost have to use your hands to go up. The path’s been eroded out of the clay and you’re on the edge of some jagged rocks, which fall away to your right. On Endurance you’re supposed to average four ks an hour, but on the ladder you come to a grinding halt. That’s why you have to run down the hills. In fact, the guys start jogging the moment they get on to any downward slope.
‘Anyway, the ladder takes us up the back of the Fan to the summit. Then we drop down here, skirt round the flank of Corn Du and head for the obelisk… here. After that we swing away on this path, and come down to the Storey Arms on the main road. Used to be a pub, but now it’s an outdoor education centre. Cross the road, and we’ll climb up on to Fan Fawr. The spot height there’s one of your check-points, and it’s quite difficult to find. The course then takes you right away to the Cray Reservoir, in the distance to the west, but we haven’t got time for that today.