Bolt Action

by Charlie Charters

  Nancy Zoh studies Lamayette from across the room, one of her eyebrows slightly raised. ‘This is Ms Kirsten Ackerman. Think of her as my personal envoy. Treat her with respect, and you and I will get along fine until we don’t have to get along any more, Mr Bill Lah – May – Eight.’ And she bites off the final ‘T’.

  Crunching down on the sound like a goddamn shark.

  Operation Macchar, minus three days

  Outside the village of Elton

  Derbyshire Peak District

  Poor Button. Tristie Merritt’s heart goes out to the guy. One of the biggest men the Paras ever recruited . . . and look at him now. Washing up a day’s worth of plates, pots and pans . . . six foot six and 250 pounds . . . in an outlandish two-piece red Santa miniskirt with a plush fur trim. His thick, tree-trunk legs squeezed into the striped stockings. His huge shoulders and long bare back dwarfing this sexy little number, and his baggy, greying underpants hanging down, prolapsed out of the bottom of the skirt. It’s a vision from a cross-dressing lingerie nightmare.

  But the rest of Ward 13 love it.

  Amidst all the cackling and teasing in the small farmhouse kitchen, Button sees Tristie’s concern and his eyes twinkle. ‘Don’t worry, Captain. I’ll jam ‘em up next time.’

  ‘It’s not a good look, Button.’ And he nods. Yeah. Not good.

  This is humour British Army-style. You mess up, you pay the penalty. And the best penalty is some kind of slur on their manhood (females, technically, can earn a Para beret, but cannot actually serve with them in combat). After all, who would want to be a girl? Different frigging species.

  Button’s sin had been coming last in the morning PT drill. Run a mile. One hundred push-ups, then a hundred crunches. Run another mile. Seventy-five push-ups and seventy-five crunches. Run a third mile. Fifty push-ups and a final fifty crunches. The end.

  Each losing member of Ward 13 gets to set the next day’s PT but first has to go through the ritual humiliation: all the housework and domestic chores to be performed either in the Santa dress, or a supposedly sexy green milk-maiden dress. Purchased online from an American website called Love My Plus Size. A full-length black fishnet body stocking with a halter top had had to be retired injured several days ago. Weasel, who runs proceedings as adjutant, expressed concerns that the bodysuit was becoming too popular. He thought Whiffler might even be deliberately losing just to wear it. Whiffler furiously denied this, but it was a denial not much believed . . . his freckled face blushes too deep for it to be wholly untrue.

  Time to roll up the sleeves. ‘Button. When you’re ready.’

  ‘Give me a couple of minutes . . . I’ll be right with you. Just put this pansy dress back in Whiffler’s locker. Like he asked.’ More laughter, and young Whiffler’s head ducks under his newspaper as an avalanche of tea towels and laundry rains down on him.

  When Button’s back in his civilian clothes they gather around the marble-topped kitchen table with its cups of coffee, tea and ashtrays full of smoking cigarettes.

  Tristie kicks off the discussion. ‘It’s Day Eleven since we delivered our demands. Three more days until the MoD make their decision.’ She looks at each of them closely and they scrutinise her. Eyes eager. Knowing today is one of the mini-deadlines that had been set.

  So she pulls out a copy of this morning’s Times. Turns to the classifieds section. Spreads it out slowly on the top of the table so everybody can see, and takes out a lime-green highlighter pen. There’s a nervy silence in the kitchen. Everybody knows what this is about . . .

  Ward 13 had made one demand, and sent off two letters. The first – a warning that they had MacIntyre’s laptop, and the second – proof that the encryption had been cracked and the Trident plans were theirs. That was the sum total of the communication.

  In that second letter, Tristie had added a series of short texts. Three classifieds that they, the MoD, had to place in the personals column of The Times to prove their good faith. On Day 6, Day 9 and the last one, Day 11. Today.

  Last week, when Day 6 came around, Tristie had snuck down to the village shop in Elton. Alone. She could hardly bring herself to look at the news-stand. Even then, when she had the paper in hand, she made reading it last for ever. Thumbing through the comment pages, digesting the City Diary. She was a jumpy bag of nerves by the time she got to the Register section. Her eyes traced slowly across the Court Circular. Births, Marriages and Deaths . . . bridge and chess news. Finally personals. Was it there? Her chest so tight at this point from holding her breath for minutes . . . Legal Notices . . . For Sale.

  Then. There it was . . .

  ‘Gollum. f.Woman obsessed by desire to get a ring on her finger to the point of self-debasement and self-loathing.’

  Yes, yes, yes, Tristie roared. She’d curled right over, almost hugging her knees as she pumped the air with her fist. And the little old lady behind the counter enquired, ‘Did you get lucky with the lottery, dearie?’

  Day 9 the classified was there as well. Only this time she sort of knew it would be.

  ‘Gollum. mf. Sexual partner intent on slipping their finger into your precious ring.’

  And today, Day 11, the final classified. Hence the sense of expectation. Delight even. Everybody in the room understands how the army works and the MoD would be no different. A mass of paperwork and sign-offs. The big thrill is that somebody at the MoD would have had to submit a requisition note for the expenditure, get it approved and countersigned. Perhaps, in some darkened room, they have a posse of code breakers sifting through these gags to work out who they were dealing with. Their psychological profiles. The whole thing appealed to the team’s strong collective sense of the absurd.

  So. Tristie leans forward and with great confidence circles the final classified. Turns the pages around so they can all see.

  ‘Gollum. “That bird I had last night was a right Gollum. Blimey. Must be medically trained, checking my prostrate out like that.” From William Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona.’

  A cheer goes up and there are high-fives around the table. Then Button wants to know whether Shakespeare actually wrote like that. “Cos at school it were shit boring.’

  ‘No, Button.’ Tristie shakes her head. ‘We got these off the Internet. They’re jokes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Shoe adds, ‘We’re trying to mess them up, Button. This would have gone up to the Chief of the General Staff. He would have seen these, and he’d be the guy who’d press the button, to get them published. All this stuff about sticking fingers up arses.’ He repeats this with emphasis. ‘The Chief of the General Staff. Do you see?’

  ‘Oh,’ says Button. ‘I get it now,’ and he smiles, wolfishly. ‘Screwed ‘em up here, haven’t we?’

  And his Para colleagues chime in. ‘Yes, Button.’

  Tristie watches her men goofing around, and allows herself a long, contented sigh of relief. This is really happening. They might actually make a difference. Now the only thing left to do is wait. Wait a few more days, and get out of the country in time for the trade.

  Operation Macchar, minus two days

  Marghazar Zoo

  Margalla Hills

  Islamabad

  Pakistan

  The zoo is remote, at the head of a finger-like ravine pointing northwards from the city into the earliest foothills of the Himalayas. Except for the occasional random sounds of caged animals from the far side of the thick surrounding walls, it’s dark and silent, coming up to eight in the evening.

  By one of the rear entranceways, two hunched figures hide in the shadows. Trying to lift something.

  ‘When they warned me about you . . .’ Kirsten Ackerman bends down to grasp the two handles on her side of the white plastic body bag (‘. . . a body bag?’ she says to herself, hardly believing what she’s about to do) ‘. . . I didn’t imagine we’d be doing this on our first date. You. Me. And a dead gorilla.’

  He guffaws. ‘Any time you wanna go back to sticking coloured pins into maps
so that some deputy assistant desk jockey can watch your ass wiggling . . .’

  Facing her, no farther away than the width of the body bag, Lamayette counts off, ‘. . . two, three, UP . . .’ and easily lifts his side of the bag. The body weighs in at nearly four hundred pounds. She had seen the paperwork. A little startled sound escapes from Ackerman as she hauls her side up. Nnnnnghh. Crap, this is heavy . . .

  The CIA station chief whispers, ‘Let’s go . . .’ Their Ford SUV is parked under the dark of a sprawling fig tree and Lamayette’s local driver appears from its gloom, shaking his head in disbelief, as so often before. Moments later, with the body bag hefted into the back, the car is barrelling down the winding Margalla Hill road, headed towards the Chaklala Military Airbase. Hangar 14.

  Exactly why, Ackerman has no damned idea. She clasps her hands together rather primly on her lap. ‘The deceased. Mind if I ask, what was his name?’

  Lamayette turns, a look of shock on his face. ‘He had a name?’ Mocking her.

  ‘All zoo animals have a name. Especially gorillas.’

  Suddenly serious, the CIA chief’s eyes are everywhere, scanning nervously through the darkened windows for signs of danger. They have no outriders or support vehicles. A big risk for a diplomatically plated car at night, even one rocketing at speed. Finally he relents and looks across at her, and with a simple flick of some internal switch he fixes his eyes on her in such a way that she knows he’s speaking the truth. It’s a powerful effect. ‘His name was Tickle.’

  ‘Tickle?’

  Lamayette gets a handkerchief and wipes down his bald head and neck. ‘Tickle. They were going to put him down. Sick boy, he was. Then I arranged for his treatment and had him shipped here.’

  ‘And where did this gorilla come from, this big lump of frozen meat we’ve been carting around the place?’

  Lamayette’s look changes. As if he’s expended his quotient of seriousness for the moment. ‘Some jungle a couple of miles from here.’

  Ackerman crosses her arms. Irritated. ‘They don’t have gorillas in Pakistan.’

  ‘They don’t? Hafiz, is this true . . . ?’ and the local driver cranes his head around, baffled. And with sarcasm hanging heavy in the air, Lamayette slips back into silence. Scanning. Nervous. Alert.

  Ackerman takes the hint.

  She stares out of the window, watches mutely as the white-on-green road signs flash past, counting down the miles to the international airport with which the military airbase shares a runway. There is only the uneven, raspy breathing of the driver and the rhythm of Lamayette smoking. Cigarette pack. Lighter. Sharp, stiff inhale. Long, slow exhale. Pause. Again . . . Finally, the sshhhfff of the stub crushed into the ashtray. Then again. Cigarette pack. Lighter . . . It would appear he has no need of conversation.

  Lamayette’s not a bad guy . . . truth be told. He had yelped with alarm on hearing she’d followed the exact same college pathway as Hillary Clinton. Slapped his big shiny head. Oh! Crap. Wellesley and Yale. But she had detected a lot more teasing than the wariness that men commonly transmitted. That’s not to say she feels in any way charmed by Lamayette. It’s just that he is so different. Free-wheeling. Hey. First date, and she’s sharing a car with a frozen, dead gorilla. Go figure.

  The clincher had been her knowledge of languages. Sure, Ambassador Zoh had railroaded the two of them together. Hardly a promising start. But the dynamic of the relationship changed the moment Lamayette learnt about her languages. In his eyes, she was no longer some supercilious broad, come to gum up his works.

  Like Lamayette, Ackerman is fluent in Urdu and Dari, the main languages respectively of Pakistan and Iran and parts of Afghanistan. And both could speak Arabic as well, not surprising given the number of loanwords spread through the Koran.

  Her ace is Pashto. The language of forty-odd million Pashtuns living either side of the two-thousand-mile mountainous border that separates Pakistan and Afghanistan. Given the roaming nature of the Pashtun, they often had Dari or Urdu as second languages. But the nitty-gritty of their lives and culture, the uncompromising Pashtunwali honour code and the interplay between the more than a thousand tribes and sub-tribes is always transmitted in Pashto.

  It’s only as the driver turns off the main road, bumping down on to some rutted tarmac and slowing up for the complicated process of security clearance, that Ackerman decides she’s had enough of the silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmurs, ruefully.

  Cigarette in mouth, Lamayette grips the headrest in front of him tightly, steadying himself. ‘Sorry for what?’ he finally replies.

  The car edges inside the Chaklala compound, past a guardhouse on one side, and on the other a row of vintage Pakistan Air Force planes, all well lit and arranged on plinths. ‘I know what they’re doing to you.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  It feels like she’s trespassed on a private grief. Now that she’s raised the subject, Ackerman is almost too embarrassed to continue. ‘The Inspector General’s investigation . . . the visit next week.’ Whoever said the CIA eat their own had been dead on the money.

  Lamayette shrugs his massive shoulders, grumbles, ‘Bunch of do-nothing back-stabbers,’ as the SUV swings out from the shadows of the hangar wall and drives on to a floodlit apron. The car heads straight for an ungainly-looking helicopter sitting up on its back wheels. The unmistakably ugly lines of a Soviet design. Five drooping rotor blades hang limply from the main turboshaft.

  The Caucasian crewmen in green flying suits clamber out of the CIA-run, Russian-built Mil-17 as the car draws alongside, stopping within inches of the drop-down doorway. Lamayette rubs his hands with glee as he steps out. ‘Look and learn, toots!’ A big toothy grin. ‘Little bit of history here. This beauty of a flying crate took the then Islamabad station chief into Afghanistan. Twenty-seventh of September 2001. The very first American boots on the ground. They landed just north of Kabul. Come to take names and kick ass. Hence the codename. Jawbreaker.’

  He pauses for a moment, listening to the stillness, sniffs the dry, hot night air, takes another Lucky Strike. As the cigarette dangles from the side of his mouth, he switches on his sincerity eyes. ‘Should have been me . . . Jawbreaker. The guy who rode this chopper instead was running down his final ninety days before retirement. Nine-eleven was supposed to be my moment. Where are you, Bill? my bosses cried. We need you in Tajikistan. Jawbreaker is yours. Where the hell are you?’

  He looks thoroughly embarrassed. ‘And do you know where I was?’, this huge beast of a man standing at the foot of the helicopter door.

  Ackerman wonders whether a wisecrack would be appropriate. Getting your oversupply of testosterone treated. She decides not. ‘No idea.’

  He glances away. Crewmen pre-flight the helicopter. Kick the wheels. Poke a torch up into the landing gear. Tickle’s body bag is being stowed. A thought plays through Ackerman’s mind. Am I going somewhere?

  Lamayette puts his weight on the foot of the three-step, fold-down door. Can’t bring himself to look at her. ‘I was in Hilo, Hawaii. Of all the damned stupid places to be. My country’s hour of greatest need, and I’m in a locked room under judicial supervision. Negotiating with three sets of divorce lawyers representing my beloved ex-wives. No children, mind, and each of them remarried at least once. But the judge ruled I’d failed to appear at the alimony proceedings in one lawsuit, hadn’t turned over the financial records demanded by another. Said I was a flight risk, said I couldn’t leave the state until I’d squared things away. And do you know how that feels? You can’t imagine . . . having nothing but talk to cover your shame; not being ready when your country called.’ He offers his hand up the stairs. ‘Remember that tonight.’

  Listening to this mea culpa, Ackerman had had her face set to Sympathy. Too late. She suddenly realises she’s been co-opted into something she doesn’t understand. Remember that tonight. Remember . . . remember what?

  What the hell am I supposed to be doing tonight?

  Against all her instinc
ts, she finds herself putting her hand into his. Climbing aboard. As they buckle in, and the rotors start to spin and the turbos whine, she nudges his shoulder. Shouts into his ear. ‘No chance you’re going to tell me what it is we’re doing?’

  Lamayette is preoccupied, looking forward, through the open cockpit door to the two pilots and the flight engineer. He gives them a thumbs-up and moments later a sideways lurch takes the Mil-17 into the air.

  Operation Macchar, thirty-six hours to go

  Pearl Continental Hotel

  Khyber Road

  Peshawar

  Just past three in the morning and the few lights of the five-storey Pearl Continental twinkle in the near-distance. It’s not a fancy hotel. A sixties-designed box with plenty of concrete cornices. But then Peshawar is hardly tourist friendly: less than forty miles to the Afghan border and that same distance again puts you in Tora Bora, which is where US and British special forces lost Osama Bin Laden. It’s also a lawless, modern-day Saigon full of no-go areas: encircled by anti-government Taliban, and deeply penetrated by radical Muslim preachers fronting sympathetic political parties. Proof of this is the shroud of tarpaulin and scaffolding that hangs over part of the hotel’s front, after a suicide bomb that killed almost twenty people.

  In the quiet of the hotel car park Bill Lamayette is fine-tuning things, with the help of the most trusted driver he has. ‘Is she the one, Mr Bill?’ the tall Pakistani asks in his courtly manner.

  ‘The one what, Jahanghir?’ The two of them are trying to dress the dead gorilla. Tickle is sitting upright in the front passenger seat of yet another black Ford SUV. A 2009 model Expedition. This one registered to the US consulate in the city, and used exclusively by the CIA. So far they’ve managed to get a 5XL Louisiana State sweatshirt over the corpse’s head. Getting the stiff, leathery fingers through the sleeves is not easy.