Battle Lines

by Andy McNab

  ‘Ha! Pretended to buy a sofa from him, ha!’

  ‘Shhhhh.’

  ‘I ran out of time before we came back here, thanks to that fucking Land Rover breaking down. But I’ll do it when I get back. And it’s better. Because when I recced my face got all over their security cameras. They won’t look back months and months on their security footage, though.’

  ‘Angus, you can’t do it, mate.’

  ‘Don’t you start. Mal and Binman keep saying I can’t. But I fucking will.’

  ‘Listen, Angry. Here it’s war. Do it in England and it’s murder.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what you call it, I’m fucking doing it.’

  ‘No! You’ll go to jail. I know Mal’s a good mate but—’

  ‘You got families living out here with the Taliban scaring them and threatening them and we slot the Taliban. You got Mal’s family in Wythenshawe living in fucking terror and no one sorts it. Not even Mal.’

  ‘Listen to Mal. He knows Wythenshawe. Don’t go barging in and—’

  ‘Mal wants to sort it but he’s promised his mum he won’t do nothing. Never made no promises for me, though.’

  ‘Get a grip, Angry, you dickhead. You’ll be out of the army and into jail. For years and years.’

  Angus said: ‘Fuck off, Finny. It’s all planned. It’ll be quick and clean like a Special Forces op. I’ll be miles away before they realize what’s happened and they won’t even know where to start looking.’

  A third voice hissed at them out of the darkness.

  ‘Lads, shuddup. It’s bad enough trying to sleep here without you two yakking all night.’

  The voice sounded alert. Finny wondered if Doc had been asleep at all or if he had heard the whole conversation.

  The three men lay still in the cold, silent void of the cave. Finny could not sleep. The reason was not fear, the cold or the hard rock beneath him. It was the knowledge weighing inside him like a stone that Angus would go ahead with his mission to kill a man no matter what.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  JENNY SURVEYED THE dining-room table. It was still covered in neat piles of paper but now she could gather these up and pack them away in boxes.

  ‘I didn’t think we’d finish so early,’ said Eugene. Jenny looked at her watch. She didn’t think it was early.

  ‘They’ll all find it in their email when they get to work tomorrow morning,’ she said with satisfaction.

  ‘Come and sit down and have a glass of wine. You can relax for five minutes before you go, can’t you?’

  There were two threadbare old armchairs in front of the fire. A dog was sitting in one of them. Jenny sat down in the other. Eugene disappeared into the kitchen. Jenny watched the flames, blue, red and orange, dance wildly around the logs. She felt the fire’s heat.

  Eugene reappeared and handed her a glass of cool white wine. He seemed to be drinking whisky. He shooed away the dog, sat down and they clinked glasses.

  ‘To a successful report!’ he said.

  ‘To a successful report!’

  She sipped the wine. It tasted good.

  ‘What will happen to the report now?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, a few people have a sneak preview. Then it’s published. Then journalists come and ask questions and make comments and they mostly print rubbish, picking out the most sensational stuff. The Government promises to review our findings. And then nothing happens.’

  Jenny closed her eyes.

  ‘So it’s all been a complete waste of time?’

  ‘Probably. The Government generally shelves any recommendations it doesn’t like. But reports like ours can go some way towards shaping public opinion. At the very least it should stimulate some debate about what we want from a defence strategy.’

  The fire felt warm on Jenny’s eyelids. She didn’t want to open them. She realized how tired she was.

  ‘You know you can sleep here if you like.’

  ‘No. Thanks …’

  He said: ‘I hardly ever wish I was twenty years younger. But I do now.’

  She felt herself smile.

  He chuckled wistfully. ‘But don’t worry. I have the company of a clever, beautiful woman three times a week. I’d be an old fool to ask for more.’

  She looked at him. His face was softened by the firelight.

  They watched a log lose its shape and disintegrate in the grate to glowing grey ashes.

  ‘I must go now,’ she said, but did not get up.

  He said: ‘If I take the job in Libya, I’ll be away for six months. Until the end of the year. If you’re not working anywhere else then, will you consider coming back? I’d like to carry on with my memoirs. I’ve got a few things to get off my chest.’

  She said: ‘Chalee.’

  He flinched.

  ‘What do you know about Chalee?’ he asked, looking at the fire.

  ‘Nothing really.’

  ‘So … you tell people you’re working for me. And they say: Chalee. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I must finish my memoirs. So people know the truth.’

  She was careful. ‘Will you tell me what happened there, Eugene?’

  ‘In 2003 Chalee was a Taliban stronghold and when we leave Afghanistan in the next few years it will, in my opinion, become a Taliban stronghold again. It’s surrounded by poppies and the trade routes from the town are good and, historically, certain powerful families are based there. I was a brigadier then and I was in a very good position to take Chalee away from them. The operation took weeks to plan and I had good support with extra helicopters, Merlins covering Chinooks, A10s standing by from Kandahar, you name it, I had it in place. On the ground, I moved six hundred fighting troops out of Bastion. We knew the Taliban would put up one hell of a fight but we also knew we’d win. Then, at the very last minute, I had to withdraw. And I couldn’t tell anyone why. So there are some people who’ve never forgiven me because we didn’t take it again until 2009.’

  ‘Why did you have to withdraw?’

  Eugene frowned into the fire. ‘No choice. Special Forces had intelligence that a very senior Al Qaeda figure was in the town. At some sort of a family party. They had a hit squad lined up to go in and take him out cleanly. Killing him was more important than securing the town and trying to do both at once would have jeopardized the Special Forces operation and probably ended up with a bloodbath at the party. I was told to hold firm, then to back off completely. But since it was a Special Forces op, I couldn’t tell anyone why.’

  ‘Did they kill him?’

  ‘Not then. Not for another couple of months. They finally managed to follow him over the Pakistan border and then they got him. But, of course, no one knew anything about that. To everyone else involved, it just seemed I had a big operation lined up and that I’d bottled out of it. They knew I was extremely concerned about ensuring there were no civilian casualties and they thought I had let women in headscarves scare me away.’

  Jenny had been watching Eugene’s face. From the fast, intense way he spoke, his voice lowered, she knew that he had never told anyone this before. And she could see it was painful to tell it now.

  She said: ‘But operations often stop at the last minute. Dave’s told me. He never asks why. He knows there are good reasons and he just accepts it. Civilian casualties are a good reason.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone would have questioned it if it hadn’t been for my nephew.’

  ‘Your nephew?’

  ‘My sister’s son. In my opinion, he never should have joined the army. There was a certain family pressure, I suppose. He’s a lawyer now and he loves it.’

  ‘Was he there?’

  ‘He’d just left Sandhurst and was commanding his first platoon. He was sent straight to Chalee, where there were always skirmishes while the Taliban held it. He was wounded and before we left Bastion for our big operation, I went to see him in the hospital. He begged me to abort the whole mission, saying that the Taliban there were better equipped and
had a lot more men than we thought and were likely to take civilian hostages. He wasn’t experienced enough to know what he was saying, plus he was injured – I think he was being flown home that night. The least I could do was promise to consider what he said. So I patted his hand and told him I’d think about aborting the operation. Then I wished him good luck.’

  ‘You didn’t retreat because of anything he said?’

  ‘Of course not. I had planned the operation with great care to avoid any civilian casualties or hostage-taking. But other patients in other beds overheard every word. And when the whole operation went pear-shaped, tongues were wagging all over Bastion. It’s such a closed community that it doesn’t take much. One word in the NAAFI. Soon everyone believed that on my nephew’s scare-mongering I’d turned tail and run.’

  ‘And you couldn’t tell anyone the real reason!’

  His face was flushed now, not with anger, she thought, but by the memory of shame. ‘It was very hard. Walking around at Bastion and trying to hold my head high, knowing what people were saying about me.’

  Jenny tried to imagine the hot desert world, men and artillery and vehicles and weapons all baking in the sun, waiting to advance. And Eugene’s desperation when he realized he couldn’t.

  ‘My middle name’s Howard. I heard them calling me Eugene Coward-Hardy.’

  She did not need to ask how that felt. She saw it in his face. He continued to stare into the fire. He said: ‘Incredible how a lifetime’s hard work can be destroyed in a day.’

  ‘But you became a general.’

  ‘Yes, I made it to major general, because the high-ups knew the truth, of course. All the same, some of the mud stuck. Later on, long after the death of the Al Qaeda 2 i/c, I could let it be known why I’d retreated that day. Too late. Reputations are strange things. They have a sort of life of their own. Sometimes the hot air is a lot more pervasive than the facts.’

  Jenny thought of her own reputation. It was true. Her friends had preferred hot air to facts.

  ‘Eugene, write all this down,’ she said. ‘I want to type the true story for your memoirs. And you should write about how it feels to have everyone calling you a coward.’

  ‘There aren’t words for it, Jennifer. For the way it stings. Even now, I see soldiers looking at me in a certain way and I know they’re thinking: Chalee.’

  ‘Send me your memoirs, even from Libya, and I’ll type them. I want to. Please.’

  He sighed. ‘You know me very well, Jennifer. I think you know more about my life than anyone but me now.’

  She said: ‘Sometimes, if I’ve been typing memoirs all day, I don’t know where you stop and I start.’

  They smiled at each other.

  Eugene said: ‘Your husband’s a very lucky man. I hope he appreciates you.’

  Jenny did not answer.

  When she got up to go her body felt stiff, as if she had been sitting in one position for a long time.

  At the door, Eugene put his arms around her. It felt good, very good, to be enveloped by the warm arms of a man who cared about her. It made her feel safe and happy. She knew that he would respond if she lifted her face up to be kissed. She did not.

  As she pulled away, opening the door on to sheets of rain, he said: ‘It’s a filthy night. Will you phone me or text me as soon as you get home? So I know you’ve arrived?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  Dave sat silently, all his senses alert. He heard distant dogs barking to each other from scattered compounds. There was a spate of firing which he guessed came from a base, maybe PB Boston Red Sox. Once, far away, he heard men shouting, not at each other, he thought, but at animals. There was some occasional distant splashing and scraping which he now recognized as the sluice system.

  He thought of Lancer Dawson. He didn’t know anything about the man, didn’t even know if he was married. He would have to visit the relatives, usually either a wife or mother, and tell them about Dawson’s last hours. He wouldn’t tell them about that dead hand, reaching out for the steering wheel but grasping only water.

  At 1300 he went back into the cave. Finny was up and ready to go out instantly. Dave guessed he hadn’t slept. The others were still and no breathing was audible, let alone snoring. Maybe no one had slept.

  ‘Fucking freezing in here,’ muttered Finn as he pulled Dave up.

  On the ledge, it was very cold and very dark. When Dave passed over the night-vision goggles it crossed his mind that a grave couldn’t be darker than this cave where the rocks had been untouched by sun for millennia. He settled himself into the position he had earmarked earlier, the vantage point for watchers. Rocks above and below made it hard to be seen. And still harder to sleep here. He felt the rocks with his hands. In places their ancient, hard surfaces were smooth. The river could not rise this high, so what had smoothed them? The hands of other men like him? Had this place been a hideout for bandits and warriors in a battle-torn land for centuries? And, a chilling thought, did they use it still?

  He tried to fall asleep thinking about the other men who had crouched up here on cold nights, trying to sleep and stay alert at the same time. Sleep did not come. He ordered himself to sleep. He could not. He felt intense cold roll up his body like fog. Unable to fight it with movement, he tensed and untensed his muscles. Except he wasn’t very good at the untensing bit.

  With his face down on jutting rocks in a pitch-black cave with cold gradually seizing him and the knowledge that tomorrow morning would bring even more dangers than they had already faced, his mind threw images from the day at him.

  The hot shower at Bastion that morning. Shaving, knowing that it would be his last shave for some time. Arriving at the FOB and then rushing around to leave it at once. The boss’s nonchalant announcement that he was staying at the FOB and leaving with the relief after lunch. A US Marine pressing a Bible into the hands of an astonished Slindon. Then Slindon later, up in the tower, peering with the binoculars at a distant column of ominous black smoke – twice. The grateful, shocked voice of the boss when Dave radioed that he was bringing a medic for Gerry McKinley. The flash of the RPG preceding by a few seconds the Mastiff’s falter. His powerlessness as he was caught up in the huge machine’s twist and roll. The weight of the driver’s body; how Dawson had been as uncooperative in death as he had in life. And then their silent flight up to their chests in the murky canal …

  ‘Sarge! Wake up!’

  ‘Is it 0400?’

  ‘No, there’s blokes just down in the Green Zone.’

  ‘What sort of blokes?’

  ‘Don’t know, but I think they’re coming up here.’

  Jenny drove out of Tinnington, the rain slapping against her windscreen and gusts buffeting her car, with the feeling that she had just had a very narrow escape. She was relieved to reach the camp. Her eyes were tired. They felt as though they had sawdust in them.

  It was strange to walk up her path without the children. Stranger still to put the key in the lock with one hand and not have a baby or buggy in the other. She stepped into the empty, childless house. She was completely alone here. The dark stillness was like a cave.

  She dropped her bag into its customary corner and then, remembering her promise to phone Eugene, she fished in it for her mobile.

  She went into the dark kitchen, where she planned to sit down, pull off her shoes and have a cup of tea before falling into bed. She switched on the light.

  A man was sitting there.

  She jumped and opened her mouth to scream but no noise came out.

  ‘Evening, Jenny,’ said Steve Buckle.

  He was relaxing in a chair with his feet, one real, one fake, on the table.

  ‘Steve! What are you doing here? You made me jump out of my skin!’ Her body gasped for breath while her mind tried to make sense of this situation. And why had she spoken as if the sight of a man in the kitchen had been terrifying until she realized that man was Steve? As if he had s
ome kind of right to be sitting here in the dark? Why was she trying to normalize something which was very far from normal? In fact it was so abnormal that she still wanted to scream. Although no one would hear.

  ‘Well, Jenny, I thought it was time we had a little chat.’

  He must have taken Leanne’s key to this house. It was too easy for him.

  ‘That’s nice, Steve, but a little chat tomorrow morning would be even nicer.’

  Steve took his feet off the table and swung round to face her.

  ‘I’ll tell you what really pisses me off, Jenny. It pisses me off the way you’re smiling at me.’

  She felt her own face harden.

  ‘I’m not smiling. Because I’m not that pleased to see you. I’m tired and I’d like to go to bed now.’

  ‘Did he exhaust you? Did General Coward wear you out?’

  She wasn’t scared any more. She was angry.

  ‘Steve. Go home. If you want to talk to me, we’ll talk tomorrow.’

  She could smell booze. But his speech wasn’t slurred; his face didn’t have the distortions of drunkenness.

  ‘No, Jenny. I want to talk to you now.’

  ‘Leave this house, please. Or I’ll have to call the police.’

  He stood up and walked towards her. At first she did not move. She stood rooted to the spot, looking him directly in the eye, but as he got closer, bearing down on her like a large, armoured vehicle, she lost her nerve and started to back towards the door. He was too quick, darting around her on his prosthetic leg, slamming the kitchen door, standing against it.

  Her heart stopped pounding and started battering against her ribs.

  Steve had survived two bomb blasts. He had lost one leg. Had he also lost his sanity?

  She jumped suddenly when her mobile phone started to ring. She was still holding it and tried to answer it but Steve leaped forward and grabbed her hand roughly.

  ‘Let it ring.’

  ‘It might be Dave.’

  ‘Everyone knows you never speak to Dave these days. Too busy with your fuck buddy.’

  She felt a new fury. The phone was still ringing but she was powerless to answer it. When it had stopped he said: ‘Turn it off.’