by Simon Conway
“You want me in there with you?” Nakamura asked.
“No, I’m fine, thanks,” Jonah replied. He felt excitement rising in him like a wave and rubbed his face in an involuntary spasm.
The MPs emerged. “Do your best,” one of them said.
Jonah ducked through the flap. There was a propane tank in the corner with a coil that spurted flame and a huge MP standing to one side with a wooden baton. The prisoner was sitting on a camp chair, still wearing his hood. Opposite him was a second chair. Jonah sat in it. The first thing that he noticed was the smell—a sharp, animal reek—rising off the prisoner, and then his stillness. The hands lightly cupped in his lap, his knuckles covered in scabs. He struggled to remember, was Nor ever this still?
“Shall I remove the hood, sir?” the MP asked. Jonah nodded.
The MP stepped forward and with a flourish pulled off the sandbag.
Jonah stifled a gasp. He barely recognized him. Nor’s face was a death mask, a skull-like landscape of ridges and flint-like points with the skin stretched taut across them. His neck was impossibly thin and his shaven head was covered in faded, yellowing bruises. His lips were cracked and purple from the cold and strings of frozen snot hung from his nostrils. Looking at him, with his head hanging and his hands and feet in chains, Jonah was filled with shame at seeing his friend so degraded.
“Can you take off the cuffs?” he asked.
“No, sir,” the MP told him firmly.
Nor lifted his head and accused Jonah with his hard and cavernous eyes.
“I came as quickly as I could,” Jonah said, and in doing so acknowledged that there was never going to be an end to his sense of responsibility. From the schoolyard to the parade square, from the Home Counties to the North-West Frontier, Jonah had been his keeper and his mentor. “You have to talk me,” he told Nor, “if you want to get out of here.”
Nor closed his eyes and tipped his head back, exposing the tiny purple veins in his eyelids, displaying a sort of weary fatalism.
“If you don’t talk to me, they’ll send you to Guantanamo. Once you’re there you won’t get out.”
Nor opened his eyes, lowered his head and spoke in a voice that was barely a whisper: “As for the unbelievers, their works are like a mirage in the desert. The thirsty traveler thinks it is water, but when he comes near he finds that it is nothing.”
Jonah recognized it as coming from the Koran’s twenty-fourth sura, al-Nur, the Light. “I’m here to offer you a deal.”
Nor raised his head again and studied Jonah. “Of course, you are,” he said. “You’re an errand boy.”
“Yeah, and you’re Mr. Kurtz. Fuck you.”
Jonah woke to the crackle of machine-gun fire in the darkness. Men were tumbling out of the camp beds around him and reaching for their boots, rifles and combat gear. After a couple of minutes of frantic fumbling someone shouted “Let’s move” and suddenly they were running—a scattering of adrenalin-filled shadows—towards the terminal building.
They took cover with a group of marines beside a burned-out snack bar in the baggage reclaim area and listened for an hour or so to the sound of incoming machine-gun fire on the perimeter and the pop and crash of outgoing mortar fire. Rumors swirled like dust—the enemy were in the wire; there were suicide bombers at the gate.
Gradually the fire grew more sporadic and eventually Jonah relaxed. He engaged the safety catch of his rifle.
Beside him Nakamura said, “I heard you got Silent Bob to speak?”
“Yes,” Jonah replied.
“In English?”
“Yes.”
Nakamura was incredulous. “You know him?”
“We were at school together,” Jonah admitted. Though what he meant was that they were the best of friends: they collected spiders in jam jars in suburbia and fed them with insects; they sprinted from arrow-slit to arrow-slit in Crusader castles in Lebanon; they built traps and hides; and they perfected their battlefield death throes. Nor was best at dramatically dying—no surprises there!
“Nobody tells us anything,” Nakamura complained. “How we’re supposed to get any usable intelligence out of these people is beyond me.” He took off his helmet and lit a cigarette. He stared at the burning tip. “My mother says these will kill me. That’s funny in this place.”
Jonah nodded sympathetically.
“Would you say Bob’s high value?” Nakamura asked.
“Yes,” Jonah responded. “His real name is Nor.”
“That means light, right?”
“Yes, Nor means light.”
From what Jonah could gather from listening to the interrogators, most of the prisoners in the cages were judged to be of dubious or little intelligence value: they were simply “swept up.” Foot soldiers who had been lifted in combat operations and, for want of anything else to do with them, had been fed through the chain to Kandahar, a way-stage on the route that would eventually lead them to the recently opened camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. It seemed that with every step his confidence in the War on Terror was further eroded.
“I don’t want to speak out of turn,” Nakamura said, “but I’ve talked to several guys I know in Special Forces who were camped on the outskirts of Kunduz with Dostum’s fighters, in the days before the town fell. They said that right up until the end the Pakistanis were flying planes out of the city on an air corridor authorized by our own military command. We had intelligence that when we first laid siege to Kunduz, there were eight thousand or so Taliban and Arab fighters holed up in there. But by the time the city fell there were less than three thousand left. Everybody important got away. Our allies flew our enemies away. It’s got to make you wonder. If your friend is genuinely high value and he was left behind, then he was left behind for a reason.”
“Or he chose to stay behind,” Jonah said, thoughtfully.
As they were walking back, they passed a soldier sitting in a deckchair outside his tent. He was wearing headphones and singing along with a song:
“But we’ve wander’d monie a weary fit, sin auld lang syne …”
“Happy New Year,” Nakamura told him.
The man gave him a thumbs-up. It was 2002.
Jonah rose just before dawn and stepped out of the tent, standing for a while beneath the purple sky, watching the sun on the horizon, its light casting the distant mountains in jagged silhouette. The barren and dusty earth stretched in every direction, and it seemed as if there was nothing alive in it. It was a landscape that had consumed armies—the Russians and the British—and it was difficult not to imagine that a similar fate awaited this most recent intervention.
His thoughts keep going back to his conversation with Nakamura the night before. A profound sense of unease had descended upon him, and the germ of an idea had begun to form in his mind. He ducked back into the tent and went over to Nakamura’s cot. He knelt beside it and shook him awake.
“Has he been X-rayed?” Jonah asked.
Nakamura shuddered and blinked. “No.”
“Is there an X-ray machine in the med center?”
“I think so.”
“Get him over there. Let’s take a look.”
It was darker than the surrounding organs, an opaque mass about the size of an egg lodged in the bowel. They were standing in a tent in the med center. An army doctor was holding the X-ray sheet up to a light panel on the tent wall.
“What is it?” Nakamura asked.
Jonah ignored the question. “Do you have a safe?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you get it out of him?” Jonah asked.
The doctor nodded. “Sure. We can give him an enema and monitor his bowel movements. It will take a few hours. It will be messy and unpleasant. But we’ll get it out of him.”
“Do it.”
This time he brought cigarettes. The MP removed the sandbag from Nor’s head and Jonah offered him one. His face was paler and the hollows of his eyes were if anything deeper and more cavernous. He shrugged in acceptan
ce and Jonah put the cigarette filter directly into his mouth.
“Why didn’t you fly out of Kunduz on the airlift when you had the chance?” Jonah asked.
For a few brief moments, they were face to face as Nor leaned forward to accept a light—only inches apart over the lighter flame—and it occurred to Jonah that if Nor genuinely harbored murderous desire then now was the time to attack. Behind them the MP cleared his throat and tapped the end of his baton against his thigh. Nor sat back in his seat and inhaled. He closed his eyes and exhaled a thin stream of smoke.
“You can fly out of here tonight, if you cooperate,” Jonah told him.
Nor opened his eyes, lifted his cuffed hands and removed the cigarette from between his lips.
“Do they know about Kiernan?” he asked, glancing at the MP.
“I ask the questions.”
Nor took another drag and paused before exhaling. “Tit for tat. You answer my questions and I’ll answer yours.”
It was no way to conduct an interrogation, but when dealing with your oldest friend and oldest joe there was no such thing as established procedure. “Of course, they don’t know,” Jonah hissed.
“You must be shitting yourself.”
“Why were you left behind in Kunduz?” Jonah demanded, angrily.
“Why aren’t you at home with your family, Jonah?”
Jonah stood up. “We just pulled a Kinder Egg full of diamonds out of you, enough to finance a major terrorist operation. These people are going to go to work on you. They’re champing at the bit. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
He turned to leave the tent.
“Don’t go,” Nor said to Jonah’s back.
Jonah sighed and turned back. “You need to talk to me.”
“The Pakistanis knew about the diamonds,” Nor explained. “If I’d tried moving them out on the Kunduz airlift the ISI would have seized them as soon as I touched down in Peshawar. It seemed better to take my chances with the Northern Alliance. What happened to your marriage?”
“It didn’t last.”
“You look like shit,” Nor told him.
There was a pause. “You don’t look so hot yourself,” Jonah said.
Nor laughed bitterly, and within seconds was doubled up by a racking cough.
“We need to get you out of here,” Jonah said, sorrowfully.
“Spare me your pity,” Nor hissed. “Give me another cigarette.”
Jonah put another in his mouth and lit it for him. Nor inhaled hungrily and broke into a further fit of coughing.
“What do the Americans want me to do?” he rasped, eventually.
“They want you to agree to work for them.”
He didn’t appear surprised. “This place is full of spies. I can’t just walk out of here.”
“They’ve manufactured an alibi. They’re going to render you to a third nation. From there they’ll arrange for you to escape.”
“So where am I going?”
“Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. The Dark Prison in Layoune.”
Nor ground the butt of his cigarette into the cold sand with his heel.
“Nice,” he said.
“What are you up to?” Jonah asked.
Nor shook his head and smiled wryly. “I’m your loyal soldier, Jonah, as always.”
It was textbook: the liar’s lean—Nor’s entire frame tilted toward the exit. The pleasure a liar shows when his lie is believed.
The MPs came for them in the night, rattling their batons on the sides of the cages, provoking howls of protest. They opened three cells and dragged the occupants—Nor and two others for cover—out on to the sand. They were strapped to rough-ground gurneys, each one with an all-terrain wheel, and their hands, feet and mouths were wrapped with duct tape. A hood was placed over each head. They were rolled out on to the runway to wait for the next plane.
Jonah delivered the diamonds to Winthrop in a nondescript business park in McLean, Virginia. It was after midnight. He’d flown into Andrews Air Force Base on a troop transport flight from Incirlik. He was met on the tarmac by a large and unfriendly Persian-American with a flattened boxer’s nose. He introduced himself as Pakravan.
“You’re the bagman, right?”
“I’m the man with the bag,” Jonah confirmed.
Pakravan lead him to a beaten-up 4Runner and drove him off the base, around the outer loop of the Beltway and into Fairfax County.
The office resembled a dentist’s waiting room, though without the out-of-date magazines. There was overhead strip lighting, a laminate desk with a swivel chair, a row of fabric-covered guest chairs and a rectangular window with off-white vertical blinds. At the desk, there was a man wearing a long, black rekel coat and the beard and uncut sideburns of a Hasid. In front of him on the desk was a velvet pad, a pair of tweezers and a jeweler’s loupe. Winthrop was leaning against a bare wall on the far side of the room. No introductions were offered. Jonah emptied a specimen bottle containing the diamonds on the pad and the man started inspecting them one at a time, while Jonah, Winthrop and Pakravan waited in silence.
The man put down his loupe. “They are the real thing. Very good quality: brilliant cut, white, internally flawless with no visible inclusions. The smallest one is probably no less than two carats.” Winthrop sprang off the wall with grin on his face. He slapped Jonah on the back with one hand and gripped his upper arm with the other. “You did well.”
“I’d like to go home now,” Jonah told him.
Winthrop retained his grip on Jonah’s upper arm. “Of course, take a few days back in London, but we’re not done with you yet.”
“What does that mean?”
“We want you to go down to the Sahara and pick up Nor. Steer him to safety. By which I mean shepherd him for a day or two until it’s time to hand him over to our people. He’s just out of prison. We think he’d benefit from a familiar face. A school friend.”
FIRE DESTRUCTION HORIZON
January 2002
Jonah met Alex Ross, his former colleague from the Afghan Guides, at the top of the Monument, Wren’s two-hundred-foot-tall Doric column erected to commemorate the Great Fire of London. Alex was nothing if not melodramatic. His bodyguards patted Jonah down before the turnstile at the foot of the spiral staircase. Jonah used to think that Alex’s employees, with their short-barreled names—Taff, Ginger, Smudge—were an affectation, a piece of razzmatazz to impress the clients who bought into the glossy brochures put out by his security company, filled with panic rooms and quick response units. But ever since Alex organized the kidnapping of his ex-wife’s lover, Jonah had come to see the wisdom in it. These days, Jonah found Alex’s presence a provocation; he’d beat him to a pulp given half the chance.
Jonah had got off the red-eye flight from Washington that morning, switched on his phone at baggage claim and received the instruction to meet at the Monument.
“Fuck it,” Jonah muttered. He wasn’t going to trudge up the staircase like some old, wheezing knacker—he’d rather arrive warmed up for a fight, bellowing and dripping. He sprinted to the top and burst out of the stairwell on to the viewing platform.
He needn’t have bothered. Alex was oblivious. He had settled upon a new, apocalyptic and very lucrative calling. He removed his sunglasses and gestured expansively for Jonah’s benefit. “The fire raged for five whole days, Jonah. The heat was so intense the roof of St. Paul’s collapsed and the streets ran with molten lead. Thirteen thousand houses destroyed. Afterward the stones of the buildings were calcinated and brilliant white. Can you imagine it, the city as a skeleton, white as bone and surrounded by ash as far as the eye could see?”
Panting, Jonah scanned the horizon, searching for signs of conflagration, of the city white as bone. The view to the north was of the financial heart of the City, the Lloyds Building with its steel guts on the outside, the NatWest tower and the unfinished Gherkin; and, to the south, the river, its bridges and tour boats; and after it the mass of the southern boroughs, its housin
g estates and gas holders.
“September 1666,” Alex explained. “The diarist Samuel Pepys described it as a bow of flame about a mile in width. They stopped it short of the Tower by using gunpowder to demolish rows of houses.”
Beneath them traffic climbed the pavements as police cars edged forward, their sirens dopplering, pulsing in the air.
“The city has always been under threat. Did you know it burned to the ground fifteen times between AD 764 and 1227?”
Dutifully, Jonah fed him his cue. “No, I don’t think I knew that,” he gasped.
“The last time was on the twenty-ninth of December 1940 when the incendiaries fell like rain. Almost a third of the city was reduced to rubble and ash. Sixteen of Wren’s churches were destroyed. Only St. Paul’s survived. You want statistics? In the first two months of the Blitz the Germans dropped thirty thousand bombs on the capital. Six hundred bombers came in waves on the first night. Six thousand civilians died in the first thirty days. Twice as many people as died in the Twin Towers.”
“And your point is, Alex?” Jonah asked.
“My point is that the city is not invulnerable. It never has been. Destruction on a massive scale is not some remote fantasy dreamed up by doomsayers. It’s a credible risk. We live with it every day. And we know our enemy now. We know the deep wells of resentment and hatred out there. We know the ranks of young men willing to immolate themselves on the promise of paradise. And we know our own weaknesses, the nodes and pinch points where people are funneled together: Liverpool Street, King’s Cross, Paddington. The tube stations, nightclubs, shopping centers and cinemas. Our vulnerable termini. We may have only minutes to live. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel inflamed. I get a hard-on just thinking about it.”
“Do folks pay for this performance?” Jonah asked.
Alex grinned wolfishly and ran a hand through his unruly blond hair. “Of course. I bring all my City clients up here.”