The sound was unmistakeable. Behind North a gun cocked. Then another. The thick grip of the Glock so close, but not close enough. He laid down the binoculars, raised his hands slow, wrapped them around the back of his head interlacing cold, stiff fingers. There was an etiquette at times of surrender. He hoped it included not shooting him. He moved sideways a fraction, enough to give him a chance of the Glock. But his captors were ahead of him. A wrenching, blinding pain as a boot drove itself into the fork between his legs, up the stem of him and into every neuron in his body as the Glock was kicked away. The boot that came in for his ribs seconds later was a welcome diversion.
Chapter 56
NORTHUMBERLAND
7.05am. Friday, 10th November
The corporal who dismantled the Glock, flinging the magazine, slide and frame in all directions, was 5ft nothing. The private bigger, but not big enough. North felt the temptation – the rat-faced corporal out of sadism, the dead-eyed private out of boredom – to beat him into bloody unconsciousness. But between the blows, came the creeping awareness that if they did, they’d either have to risk splitting up or carry him bodily to their Land Rover.
He hadn’t heard them approach, which meant they parked it at a distance. He willed himself to look huge and heavy.
With a final punishing kick – the sole of the Army boot hard against North’s sacral bone – the corporal sent North sprawling, his jaw slamming off the ground, making his head ring. He vowed vengeance.
The nasty boys stood at a distance, their rifles pointed at him. North swayed as he got to his feet, raising his arms in surrender, widening his eyes to bring his two captors into focus. Two, plus guns, against one. He liked the odds.
The corporal grinned – there was a black gap where his two front teeth should be, which was a shame North thought, because it meant he couldn’t punch them out for him later.
“See anything you fancy?” The binoculars swung from a strap over the corporal’s shoulder.
North spat blood and phlegm from between swollen lips.
“No, but you must get that a lot.”
There was a time delay before the squaddie sniggered, but temper blazed, immediate and dangerous, in the smaller man’s eyes.
There was something askew about the soldiers. Nothing a civilian would have noticed.
But North was no civilian.
Aborting his inferior’s laugh, the NCO used his palm to chop through the air. The Land Rover lay in that direction, north-west of the stake-out position. They must have left it by the copse, half a mile away. Nowhere it would have been seen.
If it hadn’t been for the two men pointing guns at his back, North would have enjoyed the early-morning walk. He had stiffened on the ground. With movement, his bruised muscles shrieked at every step but at least the kinks and knots were unraveling. The day after all was fine, and the game was on.
The uniforms were too new. Serge. Standard issue, but stiff, the pressed creases ever so slightly out of sync with where the creases should be.
The haircuts were short but not short enough. The boots they’d kicked him with, dull.
And the private had a tiny scrap of tissue pressed against a shaving cut that had decapitated one of his crimson boils. Sloppy. Careless. Classic New Army. Even if the corporal was a regular, he’d been recently promoted.
North stumbled, then groaned, putting his raw-knuckled hands to his belly as if there might be internal bleeding – or an injury to an organ painful enough to mean he didn’t pose a live threat – and the teenage squaddie jabbed him in the ribs with the business end of his rifle.
They won’t like it… he heard from behind him.
As the blood lust from the beating dropped away, the corporal was working out exactly what North would have seen through the binoculars. The women? The children? It was the break in concentration North was waiting for.
He staggered, then lurched to one side, as if his foot caught in a tussock and the beating knocked all sense and balance out from him. The corporal caught him under the arms, the gun to one side between them. In thanks, North reared up and backwards, smashing the back of his skull into the smaller man’s nose. A roar of outrage and pain as North swung round, taking fistfuls of uniform and the skin under it, to fling the bleeding corporal bodily into the younger man’s arms. North closed in, seizing hold of the gun barrel and wrenching it from the corporal’s hands before slamming it into his face – once, twice, three times. Behind him, the squaddie panicked – squealing, unable to free his own gun from under the NCO’s body. North swung the rifle wide to slam the butt hard into the corporal’s temple, who folded down on to his knees and flat on to his face, exposing the acnefied teenager to the air and North, and freeing his rifle. Eyes wild, he lifted it to point the barrel at North.
“So much as think about firing that gun at me, and I’ll kill you with it, sonny,” he said.
The private began to shake. Hand-to-hand combat was a professional skill a well-trained soldier could acquire. The instinct to kill has to be born in him.
“Not like Call of Duty is it?” North said. “Put down the rifle.”
They were more evenly matched than the lad knew. He had his finger on the trigger. North had been using the other rifle as a club. His hands weren’t where they should be. But subduing the enemy was more than a matter of mechanics, sometimes it came down to animal instinct. North raised himself to his full height and leaned in towards the private. He scowled with all the anger and ill temper he could muster – the beating he’d taken making him seem monstrous. The private’s spirit broke and North gestured for him to throw the rifle to the ground.
“I’m going to ask you a question – the most important question you’ve ever been asked.” A dark patch bloomed in the lad’s crotch and North lowered his eyes to the stain travelling down the right leg, then raised them again. The private blushed. “Did you call in the fact you’d seen me?”
“Corporal Mac wouldn’t. He said we’d bring you in. That way there’d be a bonus in it.”
God bless privatised soldiers.
“I’m going to ask you another question.”
The soldier looked confused as if he could cope with one but not two. That two was higher than he could count.
“How do you feel about getting naked with me?”
Chapter 57
North made sure he went in the side entrance rather than the rear gate the Land Rover had left from. If the nasty boy lied to him about the time they were expected back. If he’d given him the wrong docket, North was lost. The mobile was in his right hand, partly obscuring his face and he kept the left on the wheel. The ammonia smell of the lad’s urine filled his nose. He slowed to a crawl but didn’t stop it, using his knees to keep the steering straight, raising his hand as if in thanks, as if he was in a hurry. In uniform. Driving a barracks vehicle complete with permit. If he could get them to wave him through, he might just make it.
The guard on duty was having none of it. The barrier stayed down. North dropped the mobile on the seat next to him and it slid into the dip of the corrugated seat. Two rifles lay between the seat and the door. He estimated it would take him five seconds to pull one up from the gap, turn it and fire into the guard’s face. He estimated it would take the guard four – three if he was good. By his reckoning there were another three men in the hut and at least four within calling distance of the gate.
“You’re late,” the guard’s nose zig-zagged across his face, giving his voice a mushy nasal tone. A second guard came out and slowly started his circuit of the Land Rover as if he’d never seen one before. North fought back the urge to have done and shoot them both. “Docket?”
“Traffic,” North said with a grin, handing him the patrol form with the vehicle’s license plate. A biting wind had blown up out of nowhere, coming over the deserted scrubland to fling itself against the wire and into the camp. From a distance, bleeting started up as if the flock had caught sight of a wolf, while through the window of the guardh
ouse, a pale moon-face regarded him. Then another, this one long and thin. The shorn hair on the back of North’s neck rose. His fingers itched for the rifle, for its stock and its trigger. Was he going to have a firefight before he made it through the gate?
The guard smiled against his better judgment, tucking the docket into his top pocket and buttoning the flap, and North grinned in return. He had patrolled enough god-forsaken spots himself. Boredom and winter could make miseries of the best of men, and he doubted very much whether the crook-nosed Welshman qualified as the best of men in the first place.
“Anything out there?” The guard gestured towards the great outdoors, rocking back and forth on his feet. North got the impression he was a city boy, Cardiff probably and that the desolate moorland worried him. He leaned his elbow on the door frame of the car, happy to talk, to pass the time of day and to hell with where he should be, to hell with orders.
Anything out there? Not unless you were to count the two soldiers tied back-to-back in the copse, the corporal still unconscious, the sniveling private wrapped in a tarpaulin from the boot of the Land Rover. He didn’t want the lad to freeze to death.
“Is there ever?”
The guard moved the weight of his body from one foot to the other, flicking his eye to the passenger seat, back to the unfamiliar driver.
“And it’s worse now the toss-bags have cut the morning patrol back to a one-man op.” North made it sound casual, resentful, a matter of Them and Us. “Mac’s not happy.”
“No one told me.” The guard scowled as if it was North’s responsibility.
He shrugged. A half-smile of sympathy. They were privates. They were in this together.
He turned the key in the ignition. “I’ll be sure and get the CO to copy you in.” Sure he would like to talk more, but there were things to be done. He revved the engine ever so slightly.
The guard sighed, stepped back, nodding his head. “Do that.” He gestured for his colleagues in the guardhouse to raise the barrier, watching as the Land Rover slid through.
Chapter 58
He drove as if he knew where he was heading. He was in. Best not to think too hard about whether he’d ever get out again.
Tanks under tarps lined the roadside interspersed with armoured vehicles and multi-wheeled low-loaders. Privatization pumped significant capital into the New Army’s hardware – hardware that looked as if it might be on the move any day. Back from the road, nasty boys marched in formation, eyes forward, combat boots crunching on gravel. The squaddies were new too. He could tell by the hesitation in the rhythm of every third or fourth recruit. Was it Left or Right? Which was Left? Which Right? The exasperated drill sergeant risked a swift look at the vehicle and its driver, concerned in case an officer was judging the performance. Only a private. He relaxed enough to shout a string of obscenities at the recruits as they wheeled left away from the road, and North breathed again.
Ahead, a double-storied building stood, bigger than the rest, its shallow concrete steps leading to double doors. HQ. Other Land Rovers were parked in front of it alongside a dozen or so civilian cars. The barracks were jumping. He drove into a space between a black Mercedes and a silver Porsche. Army pay had to be on the up.
No sign of the civilians. If they’d gone for breakfast, they would have finished by now and they’d be back in the huts. Honor Jones and her friend Peggy might both be dead, and this might be for nothing. He might be about to spend what time he had left behind bars in an Army brig, or very dead himself. Honor had green and gold eyes. He tried to remember them. He tried not to remember that most of the time she looked like she despised everything about him.
“Do you ever think of the consequences of your actions?” she’d shouted after he drove into the sea. Yes, he did. It just didn’t look that way when you were drowning.
He slung one of the two rifles over his arm, tucking the other under the passenger seat. He didn’t want anyone glancing into the vehicle and wondering why there was a rifle and no soldier. He slammed the door and started walking. He hadn’t had to walk like a soldier for five years. There was a knack. Don’t overthink it. Instead, trust your own body to know where to go. A bit like fighting. Hup, two, three, four. About turn. Pick it up. He found himself walking in time to the distant marching of the parade ground. Faster. Best plan: get in and get out before anyone knew he was here. Because once they did, it was getting grievous and fast.
From his vantage point out on the moorland, he’d made out the mesh wire wall running between normal barrack life and a no man’s land, alongside another mesh wire wall separating the no man’s land from the holding camp of civilians. He hadn’t however picked out the gate. He waited with apparent patience, while a soldier red-nosed and bleak with the bitter cold, hauled it open. The nasty boy didn’t look at him, only waved him through then banged the gate closed behind him, leaving North caught in the churned up open ground between the two fences.
Exposed.
A rat in a trap.
His skin prickled as, inch by inch, the second gate into the enclosure opened.
Same rat. Bigger trap.
A low buzzing this side of the wire. Engineers had brought in generators to flood the inner fence with electricity. North tightened the grip on the rifle. Hup, two, three, four.
The holding pen seemed bigger once he was through the gates, with three long low huts and a brick building out of which poured the greasy fumes of frying oil. The civilians had their own canteen – which made sense. Eating together maintained the division, the Other-ness. There were soldiers and there were prisoners – guilty by the very fact they were here.
The door to the first hut stood ajar. The smell hit him first. The sweat of bodies too closely confined. The harsh institutional antiseptic of bulk-bought cleaning products. A sweet underlying note of over-worked Army latrines which no chemical could kill. Then the colours – only greys and washed-out blacks. In a crumpled shirt and a knitted tie – a Bible clasped to his chest, an old man lay under the covers of the cast-iron bed nearest the door. Ranged around a large Formica table towards the back of the hut, thirty or more women sat alongside two dozen or more children. Ned had severely underestimated the numbers of the disappeared.
There was no sign of Peggy at the table.
No one had heard him come in. The old man’s breathing rasped in and out like sea over shingle, like something hurting. Ned’s voice. High-pitched and irritating. The old man’s eyelids were thin and veined over sunken eyes and his lips tinged with blue, even so North sensed his wakefulness. Ned’s list of the disappeared. Arcing wipers against the wet glass. Blazing headlights. The face in front of him was crisscrossed with a thousand lines and older than the thumbnail photograph North last saw in the car. Honor’s warmth next to him. Who was he? North struggled to recall the name – Anthony Walsh, veteran union leader. Former miner.
“What is it you want, lad?” Walsh’s voice was alert and hostile as the eyes opened.
“Peggy Boland,” North kept his voice low and hoped the old man wasn’t deaf.
He glanced towards the door. That’s where they’d come from. Because some point soon, and it wouldn’t take long, the corporal and private would be missed. The parked Land Rover would confuse the situation. It implied they were back from patrol – unless anyone checked with his new best friend at the gate. If they did that, North had a problem sooner rather than later. But however it played out, the clock was on him. Not least because he needed to leave before the next patrol discovered the last patrol, an alarm went off and an anxious-to-please recruit who couldn’t yet march in step, shot him. Leaving would be the sensible thing to do – how to stay alive, because there are some things better left unseen, and there are some things which cannot be unseen. And men, women and children snatched up from their homes and imprisoned behind an electric fence on remote moorland guarded by New Army soldiers, was one of them.
Walsh attempted to sit up in bed, his breathing harsh and broken as if there was a stor
m blowing up over the sea.
“You’re too late.” Abandoning the attempt, he sank back against the pillows with a rasping sigh as he reached out to lay the Bible on the wooden chair next to him. Argument filled North’s head, Walsh young again and angry, speaking to a crowd, urging them on, outdoors, cold rain falling on the upturned faces and the NUM banners.
He picked up a tiny brass bell lying on the blanket that covered him. “Brace yourself, lad. We’ll have to bring in management.”
The tinkling bell.
A doorbell.
A young soldier ringing, then knocking on Walsh’s door, the furtive glance over his shoulder, the warmth of the old man’s greeting. Walsh knew the soldier, had done since he was a child, the lad’s shorn head bent, steam rising from the mug of sugared tea he held. A New Army recruit known to Walsh – a family friend? A neighbour’s son? He’d told his dad about the prisoners – that it didn’t seem right. There were women and kids. His dad had said to talk to Tony, see what the old man thought.
And what had the old man done? Rung the Ministry of Defence? Enough to draw attention to himself, and end up here. If North had it right, he didn’t want to think what happened to the young whistleblower. If he was lucky, the reluctant nasty boy was in a military prison or “peace-keeping” someplace hot and dangerous a world away. If he wasn’t, he was buried close by in a shallow grave out on the English moorland.
There were times North hoped he was delusional because otherwise his country was a darker place than he’d ever thought possible.
At the back of the room, a dark-eyed woman sat surrounded by children bent over jigsaws. Her arm was wrapped around a boy pressed up against her clutching a toy lamb – the boy who cried on his way to breakfast. She turned at the sound of the bell, her belly huge, and from across the hut, North felt the pregnant woman’s disturbance, her raw fear at the sight of the uniform, sensed the steady heartbeat of the child inside her. Behind the backs of the children, she pulled at the arm of the older woman along from her.
Killing State Page 26