The Walking Dead

  He had talked of the matter with his friend, and the Engineer had scowled drily at what was asked of him, and the device was remotely controlled. The boy might have frozen at the moment of detonating the device against his chest, or panicked at the sight of the security men round the recruits' queue outside the police station, might have remembered a girlfriend or a mother, might have sweated too much; it was not possible, after what he had asked the boy with his incessant questions, that a bomber should fail, be captured, then interrogated. The Engineer had killed him, from a vantage-point two hundred metres away, by sending a dialled electronic signal to the mobile phone encased in the bomb against the boy's chest. Twenty-two dead in the queue and, more importantly, the knowledge of travel inside the enemy's territory gained.

  From the village bus shelter, with his bag hitched on his shoulder, he had followed directions and gone past shops and small businesses, a house used by a dentist, another by accountants, and fine homes. Then he had hit open road. A small pink-painted cottage, with rose briars clambering on the walls but not yet in flower, was the final building in the village, and a man shuffled on the grass on hospital sticks but did not see him. There were flat fields on his left and a hill with bare-branched trees to his right. Cars sped past and did not slow because he was unremarkable…as unremarkable when he walked away from the village as Muhammad Ajaq, the Scorpion, when he moved in the crowds of the Triangle's towns. How many times had he been through the roadblocks of the Americans, his face disguised and his papers doctored? So many times. Then his demeanour was humble and filled with respect for the soldiers.

  He saw grazing cattle. He saw a tractor far away in a field and thought it planted seed or scattered fertilizer. He saw peace that was total and without danger. And in the middle of that peace he saw the small, low, white-painted building, and turned down the lane. There was a sign: Oakdene Cottage.

  Mud was splashed on his trouser ankles and puddles soaked his shoes. He approached the cottage, then saw movement at a window. He came to a wooden gate, straightened his shoulders and lengthened his stride so that, from the beginning, he assumed an image of authority. Where he fought, Ajaq would have had a weapon. His authority, there, would have been backed by a loaded rifle or pistol, or by a knife sharpened on a stone, and by the reputation of his name–the Scorpion. Here, in a cottage in the English countryside, that authority would rest on his bearing and in his eyes, and from the respect his voice demanded.

  The door opened in front of him. The Engineer greeted him.

  They hugged as if it had been weeks, not hours, that they had been separated.

  He was not led inside, where shadows hovered, but was walked into the garden, the Engineer's arm in his. They went to a corner where the hedge was high and they were hidden from the farmhouse across the fields.

  His head flicked towards the window. He knew that, there, they would be watching. 'How do you rate them?'

  'They are both shit and satisfactory.'

  'How are they satisfactory?'

  'What they were asked to provide was provided. I can build it and I have started on it.'

  'How are they shit?'

  'So soft, with no hardness, and they talk. All the time they talk…

  I tell you, I trust none of them. The girl cooks well but she and all of them are inquisitive. They believe themselves to be important. You should whip them.'

  'What else?'

  'I feel this place is a trap. It is like, in my mind, a trap we would place on the banks of the Euphrates, if we had chickens or ducks, to take a fox. If we trap a fox, we bludgeon it. I am not comfortable here, or with them.'

  'You prefer home where there are many traps.'

  'I think only of home and–God willing–my return.'

  He punched the bulk of the Engineer's arm. He went inside, stooped under low beams and checked the rooms–his, the Engineer's, the girl's, and the room that was still empty. He saw the air-beds spread across the floor of the largest bedroom. Then he called them together, using the staccato voice of command. One, who seemed the youngest, with great thick spectacles on his nose and a clear-skinned face, said that it was time for his second prayer of the day, and could they wait until he had knelt and faced the Holy City?

  Ajaq said, 'The war does not wait, and I do not wait. You want the opportunity to pray, then fuck off away from here and go back to your mother. Suckle her milk and pray. You pray when I give you the opportunity. First, you must learn obedience. Nothing that I say to you is for debate. I am to be obeyed. Where I come from, if a man or a woman falls me I kill them. I may kill them with my hand and break their neck. I may kill them with a knife so that their blood runs in the sand. I may kill them with a shot that disintegrates their skull. For disobedience, for the ignoring of my instructions, I kill. You may believe yourselves to be of importance, to be persons of significance. Then you are wrong. You do not have the importance of a single bullet. The desert sand I scoop up with my hand and use to wipe my arse, each grain of it has more importance than any of you. If you show vanity, I will beat you, and if I beat you, you win live in pain for many days. Remember it, you obey me. Do you have questions?'

  There were none. The silence clung round him in the room. He looked into each of their faces, but none dared meet his gaze. He thought that the girl in the T-shirt and jeans had a good body but the scar spoiled her.

  He went to a comfortable chair, sat and rested, and he waited for the last of them to come the escort and the Threatened Swan. Muhammad Ajaq slept. He dreamed of blood and wire, the whine of a ricochet and the clatter of a machine-gun, the vivid pure light of the exploding belt and the charcoal grey cloud that followed it. He slept deeply.

  It was beyond the limits of her experience and she did not know how to respond.

  They had been in the kitchen and Faria was at the sink, washing plates and bowls, when the sound of the car came labouring towards the cottage. None of them–Khalid the driver, Syed the watcher or Jamal the recce man–had helped her, or offered to dry what she rinsed. The washing-machine had been churning with their clothes when the first murmur of the car had been heard. She had put her own underwear and tight T-shirts in with their jeans, socks, sweatshirts and boxers. Later she would carry the damp load into the garden and hang it out. The strength of the sun and the breeze would dry it, and she did not care whether the men were offended by the sight of her flimsy white garments against theirs.

  He seemed so small and vulnerable.

  They had been in the kitchen, the quiet settled on them, since the lashing they had been given in the living room–and through the shut door came the gentle snore of a man at peace. The man who had built the bomb was in his room and there had been the sound of the door locking from the inside. What had made the lashing more terrifying was that the voice had never been raised. The intimidation, threats, had been spoken calmly and each of them, while they were battered, had cringed forward to hear him better. Faria understood it: they were in his control, doll figures held in the rough palm of his hand, and all could be crushed if he closed his fist.

  He seemed to look round him, and across their faces, to measure their mood, then gave a smile of deep, genuine warmth.

  On hearing the car, they had spilled out of the kitchen. The noise from the opening and shutting of doors, the slamming of the car's, had woken the man in the chair and he had started up with violence in his movement. His hand had snatched at the air above his lap–as if a weapon should have been there while he slept. Faria had seen, then, a flicker of annoyance on the man's features–as if he had betrayed himself. It was gone and the calm of authority bathed him.

  Ramzi, the thug, was behind the boy. All of them, from the kitchen, had formed a crescent in front of him, but the boy looked past them to the chair, and the face there had softened and was unrecognizable from that of the beast an hour before. The face lit and the smile spread.

  She heard a key turn in a lock and a draught hit the back of her neck. She smelt the breath
of the man and heard the wheeze in his throat, then the door was locked again, but she could remember what she had seen: wires, sticks and the slim little detonators; the batteries, the soldering iron she had bought in the late-night hardware shop, the needle and thread and the waistcoat…and all for this young man. He seemed so frail. She fidgeted, as did the others in the crescent. She was not alone. Khalid, Syed and Jamal all shifted their weight and did not know whether to go forward to welcome him or hang back. The smile spread brighter, wider. When he half turned and faced the chair, his coat was thrown open and she saw. clearly the motif of the bird on his chest and thought it tried to make a show of protecting itself–but she knew that if a wing was broken it was helpless and would die. In her mind, she seemed to see the images from the videos, from Chechnya; Afghanistan and Iraq, of explosions and mutilations. Faria shivered. He had no fear. She saw none. He went to the chair, bent, kissed the cheeks offered to him.

  She heard, 'I rejoice, my leader, that I have found you.'

  'I welcome you, Ibrahim. You have my respect and you are honoured.'

  What was she? What were Khalid and Syed, Jamal and Ramzi? They, she, were of lesser importance than grains of sand used to wipe a bottom after defecation, but he–Ibrahim, so slight and so threatened, walking with death–was respected. Love, she thought, shone in him. He went from the chair, from the sheikh, to the end of the crescent's line. As if he performed a ritual, Ibrahim took the hand of Khalid, held it and kissed the driver's cheeks. Khalid was rooted and could not respond. Then Syed, whose eyes blinked with uncertainty. Then Jamal…

  He was -condemned. He had come to them, and his love for them was blazoned, and he smiled into their eyes, and their work was to help him successfully to destroy his body. When he was a pace from her, she closed her eyes and vomit rose in her throat. He bobbed his head at her, and edged past. She sensed it. The hand was taken, the fingers linked. The hand, the fingers, had come from the table where the bomb had been constructed. They handled the sticks and the detonators, they might have had on them the stains of the soldered fluids, now dry, that fastened the wires to the terminals. She heard, too, the gentleness of the kiss on the face of the man whose eyes pored over the intricacies of the device. The vomit climbed from her throat to her mouth.

  Faria ran.

  She went down the corridor, flung open the bathroom door and knelt over the bowl. It came from her stomach and her body shook. Which of them, if asked, would have done it? Would Khalid or Syed, Ramzi or Jamal–would she–have worn the waistcoat that was being made, with its load, in the locked room behind her? She was in the bathroom until her gut had emptied.

  She–and Faria swore it as she retched–would not return the love that was given. Not ever.

  He was stood down as were the others, divided from him, of the Delta team.

  Time to kill. David Banks was on the far side of the canteen from them. Weekends in the police station had the character and life of a morgue, an empty, soulless place and so quiet. The mass of civilian staff was absent and a wedge of polished, cleaned tables separated him from his team. All would have known that he had been offered a route back to acceptance–a fulsome apology–and that he had thrown it back in the inspector's face. He sat in a distant corner, beyond the fruit machines, the chocolate and soft-drink dispensers, and was in shadow.

  He was on overtime rates, double time. They should have been doing the escort of a Principal–a former home secretary, responsible for contentious legislation in the earlier days of the War on Terror–but at the last minute the man had pleaded a bout of influenza and cancelled his speech. The team was booked for the day, the overtime sheets had been issued, and the monies would be paid whether they were inside a draughty hail in Bethnal Green or idling in the canteen. In the rest of the Delta team, they were as decent men as was Banks;

  as tolerant as was Banks; as bloody-mindedly stubborn as was Banks. He did not move towards them, they did not move towards him. If the team had been on the road, or in the hail and listening to the Principal's speech, there would have been professional linkage between him and them; the job would have been done. But they were in the canteen and there the relationship had collapsed. Of course Banks had thought about it…Push his chair back, get to his feet, cross the chasm of the canteen and spout the necessary. A place at the table would have been found for him, a magazine would have been heaved at him and he would have been told, 'Good shout, Banksy. It never happened. What do you reckon on those long-johns? They say your bollocks'll never freeze in them, but they're forty-eight quid a pair and…' But he didn't, couldn't, was never even close to pushing back the chair and starting the walk. For Christ's sake, one of them could have done the trot over the canteen floor, and none had.

  He had read late into the night after getting back to his bedsit, had had to read slowly because the handwriting was steady in its deterioration, and what was to come–he sensed it–would be agony.

  If he had not been on double time, weekend duty, he would have been tramping the streets, not reading the diary of Cecil Darke but getting himself over to Wandsworth and a little cul-de-sac where a developer had squeezed in a block of modern terraces. He would have been heading for Mandy's home. Pathetic, but still she dominated him. The divorce had gone through years back, but Mandy obsessed him, her and the money. If he had reached there, had turned into the cul-de-sac, he might have stood on the corner and looked along the street to where she lived, or he might have hit the door with his fist and started the futile inquest again; the source of the acrimony was always the money–the worth of the wedding presents, his maintenance payments, the sale of the old house, his cut and hers. The escape from it was overtime and maybe, now, the leather-covered notebook in his jacket pocket.

  The other guys, the rest of the Delta team, talked marriages, relationships and girlfriends, and would have included him if he'd wanted it. He had never talked of Mandy with them–it wasn't any of their damn business.

  They'd ship him out. He'd heard there was a WDC on the Golf team who was off on maternity leave and had heard also that a DC on the Kilo lot was transferring to the Anti-Terrorist crowd. He would be parcelled off, and it would not be the end of his world, just a different set of magazines and different chat. On Golf or Kilo, life would go on–fresh start–and he would have the same status.

  What he thought, sitting in the shadows of the canteen and as far from the big window as he could be, he had stayed true to Cecil Darke, his great-uncle. Precious little else in his life was as important as staying true to that man. He reached down.

  There was no bloody purpose in his own life. None, and it hurt.

  Too right, that man was a hero. He'd had principles, guts, but no bloody thermal socks and long-johns and no training days in the Alley to sharpen him. He hadn't had the best weapons all oiled and loved in the Armoury, but he'd had hope. Banks had not intended to produce the notebook, but he did. He lifted it from the pocket. He turned aged pages that told of the great journey. In the emptiness of his own life there was only, as a goal, a transfer to Golf or Kilo…and the cold, and the brotherhood of friends. He found the place where he would walk again with a hero.

  He read.

  13 February 1937

  These have been the worst forty-eight hours of my life. I have little ability to describe them, but can only try. I did not know that the world could be so savage, but now 1 think I have learned the depths of despair.

  I should start with our advance. We were moved forward after the Moors crossed the Jarama river on the night of the ninth. It is said they came to the French volunteers' position making no sound to alert our comrades, and that they cut the throats of the defenders, having taken their trenches without warning. I have not slept at all since then. I do not think it possible to sleep in the first-line trenches, or the second or the third, if there is the thought that the Moors can come into our positions and kill us while we sleep.

  The British battalion is now under the command of the XVth Inte
rnational Brigade. We are called the 1st Battalion, and also called the Saklatvala Battalion–Saklatvala was an Indian Communist who called for the independence of the colony, but I had not heard of him. I write this because what will come later, and must be written, is so awful. I put off what I have to write.

  Our brigade commander is Colonel 'Gal', and he is Russian. The British battalion has a new commanding officer, Tom Wintringham, who is a good man but we do not think he has military experience. He has led us since Wilfred Macartney was shot in the leg by the political officer, Peter Kerrigan, who was cleaning his pistol. Under Captain Wintringham we went forward to hold the line and block the Moors, and we were sent to a hill and ordered to defend it to the last. We call it Suicide Hill. It is where I am now.

  We were supposed to dig in. It is not possible. The ground is frozen solid and we have no spades and no pickaxes. We make holes with bayonets if we have them or with our hands. The staff officers say we should not give a yard, but they are not with us. All through today we have been under the fire of machine-guns from the Germans, the Condor Legion, and from heavy artillery, and from the bombing attacks of the German pilots. This is a hell place, and we cannot burrow away from it. We are not rabbits and we are not rats. The machine-guns are above us, on a higher hill in the village of Pingarron–the name should be known because from there hell comes and falls on us. In the afternoon, because we had taken so many casualties, volunteers were called for to advance off our Suicide Hill and to attempt to reach the machine-guns.. I did but was not chosen. Ralph did, but he too was not chosen. Daniel was chosen.