‘I don’t want guns,’ Scullion said. ‘This is a cultural outing.’
‘Nice distinction, Major,’ Luke said. ‘But either we take our assault weapons or we’re not moving an inch away from this convoy.’
‘I’ll remind you, I’m in charge,’ Scullion said.
‘You’ll be wanting to protect your section, then,’ Luke said. The two men stared at each other for a moment and then Scullion smiled.
‘All right, girls,’ he said. ‘We’re taking a trip. Look lively and bring your bang-sticks like the good soldier says.’
Scullion commandeered a jeep and steered it off the line. He drove onto a patch of desert and Rashid came with extra water. When Luke said there might be flak about them absconding from the convoy, Flannigan pointed to other servicemen wandering free. A team of Canadians and Dutch were already setting up a makeshift volleyball net. ‘The line is two kilometres long, Captain,’ Flannigan said. ‘Jesus, it’s fine. Remember in Basra we used to go sightseeing all the time. The boys get sick waiting.’ A second jeep carried two of the Royal Caledonian boys and a couple of the Canadians and Scullion waved the vehicle alongside. He hadn’t been so keyed up at any time since the platoon left Camp Bastion.
‘What’s with the wheels?’ asked Lennox.
‘They’re the bomb,’ Luke said.
‘Seriously the bomb,’ Flannigan said.
‘White motherfucken Land Cruisers,’ said Lennox. He rolled his tongue and spat on the ground. ‘Brand new.’
‘Bought for the ANA by the Americans,’ Luke said.
‘No way.’
‘Yes way.’
‘Holy mother of Jesus,’ Flannigan said.
The major had his hand on a map. Rashid was rolling another joint and kept indicating places of interest. At one point, Rashid wetted his hand with saliva and dampened the area under his eyepatch. Scullion saw it and it made his stomach heave. It was a new thing: Rashid now did that to him, made him anxious, revolted. But as usual with the regiment, events moved faster than thoughts, and the quartet of 1st Royal Western Fusiliers, Flannigan, Dooley, Lennox and Campbell, climbed into the back and all felt rewarded when the air-conditioning kicked in and went turbo and seemed to blow the heat and the dust from their brains.
Dooley put his rifle on the floor and pulled out a CD. ‘Stick this mother on,’ he said, handing it over. Scullion looked round when the music filled the car and he grinned the grin of a middle-aged man finding freedom again in the sound of a metal band at full pelt.
‘What the fuck is this?’ Luke shouted.
‘For your musical delectification,’ Dooley said, holding up the case.
‘Delectation,’ said Luke.
‘Whatever,’ Dooley said. ‘Brain Drill. Featuring the fastest drummer in the world, Marco Pitruzzella.’
‘Turn that off, our kid,’ Flannigan said. ‘It’s fucken unbearable.’ The car bumped over the road and white dust billowed at the second Land Cruiser coming at the rear.
‘Jack up the volume,’ said Lennox.
Luke dropped his shoulders. Everything was cool and the boys were happy. It was irregular to go off-site but stuff happens and it wasn’t his job to commandeer everything. Scullion knew they were close to the kind of holy ground where lapis lazuli lies under the dirt. They passed a man on the road who was holding up a fistful of windscreen wipers.
Rashid said a few words to Scullion and then he closed the map and stared into a group of trees. Looking back on that day, they’d understand that Rashid had been in charge, he’d planned everything, directed it, without ever seeming to be other than his usual subservient self. He had the gift of patient belief and the habit of silence. They were three miles from Tappeh-ye Mondi Gak and Rashid felt the coming simoom, a red mist of hot sand. The Land Cruiser was like a bubble of air in the local bloodstream, and he hoped the mist wouldn’t mess with the car’s radiator or upset the plan to get to the ancient site and from there to Bad Kichan. The music was loud and Rashid looked towards the mountains beyond the bank of trees, the mountains plain and beautiful and dark blue in the crags. In the foothills of De Mundagak Ghar a boy in brown scarves stared down at the road. Rashid saw him and rolled down his window, and, putting his arm out, tapped the door twice. Rashid glanced round at Scullion and saw he was miles away and beating the steering wheel in time to the drums and the boys were singing in the back of the vehicle. When Rashid lifted his eyes again to the hill the boy had gone. Luke later understood that this had been the ANA captain’s gift to his people, to let them know, as promised, here and there along the way, that the British soldiers were making progress towards the village.
THE PROPHECY OF THE PETROL
‘What is that?’
‘An old water wheel,’ Rashid said. They walked past it and away from the vehicles to see the ruined fort. It stood alone in the desert, a doorway, a piece of wall, an arch maybe, a rampart like a broken tooth. Scullion felt he saw sand blowing off the white ruins and it excited him. The poet Shelley came into his mind and he wanted to talk about that with his young friend, but, when he turned, he saw Luke was remote. Some fellows get eaten up by the army and forget what it’s all about.
He climbed up to the fort and stroked a wall and looked through the remains of an old window. ‘The lone and level sands stretch far away,’ he recited, and when he stood back he felt his stoutness, a sudden feeling of increase, next to all this thinning beauty. When he looked again through the hole he saw a lone camel walking in a daze.
The Scottish boys from the second jeep came up the dirt track to the fort looking stoned. ‘Hey, Dooley,’ Flannigan said. ‘Here come the Jocks and one of them’s got a shite Gucci leg-holster the same as yours.’ The soldier he was talking about carried a six-pack of bottled water and had a T-shirt wrapped round his head. Luke recognised him as the lance corporal who had sat in front of him during the briefing in Maiwand, the boy who spoke about Scullion’s reputation.
‘Any you diddies want a beer?’ the boy said, smiling up. He had a Browning pistol in his leg-holster and an SA80 rifle over his shoulder. Luke turned round when he heard the accent and caught a bottle of water. Rashid passed a new joint to Lennox and walked down to the vehicles.
‘Where you from?’ Luke asked.
‘Ayrshire,’ the boy said. ‘I’m Mark.’
‘Whereabouts in Ayrshire?’
‘Dalgarnock.’
‘My gran lives in Saltcoats.’
‘Just up the road,’ Mark said. ‘I went to St Andrew’s. They pulled it down to make way for the new school.’
‘And my mother lives in Troon,’ Luke said.
‘That’s mad. I used to go to the Pavilion in Ayr, the raves up there. Do you ever go to the Metro?’
‘The club in Saltcoats?’ asked Luke.
‘Aye. I got a knock-back from there, man. I’m like, “You can fight for your country but you cannae get into a club …”’
Lennox passed them the joint and Luke and the boy smoked it while Dooley set up some of the water bottles. ‘Target practice,’ Dooley said.
‘You shouldn’t waste water, dude,’ said the Canadian. He had driven with the Scots boys in the second vehicle.
Scullion came down from the fort and he seemed high. ‘I reckon everybody drinks too much water, anyway,’ he said. ‘In Ireland when I was a kid nobody drank water. I can honestly say my mother never once set a glass of water down in front of me.’ He sweated as he said it and the sweat ran into his eyes. He dragged his hand wearily down his face and wondered if the fort had anything buried around it. He would kill for a little Hellenistic carving or a bracelet to take home.
Luke’s eyes locked on to the bottles. The light was coming through them and caused a rainbow stripe to appear on the white wall of the fort. The boy Mark tipped the rifle off his shoulder and took aim, the joint dangling from his lips as he crinkled an eye. ‘Die, motherfuckers,’ he said and looked pleased as the water exploded. Scullion enjoyed the boys’ laughter and felt nauseous
again at the metallic smell and the echo in the valley. He hoped he’d remembered to put a 355 radio in the car in case he got lost or the convoy moved or something.
‘It’s fucken boiling out here,’ Lennox said, wiping factor thirty on his neck and shoulders.
‘Twos up on that,’ Mark said. Lennox squirted sunblock in his direction and they all laughed.
‘Cumshot,’ said Flannigan.
‘I’m totally wasted,’ Dooley said.
The blue sky above the fort, the blue sky, thought Scullion, throwing a stone down into the gully. ‘Alexander the Great dug wells near the Oxus to get fresh water,’ he said, ‘and the water was bad. You know why? There was thick black liquid seeping into the water.’
‘Black liquid?’ said Flannigan.
‘Oil. The general’s advisers said it was a bad omen. The advisers. They said it warned of troubled times.’
‘Did they get rich?’ Lennox asked.
Scullion ignored him. It was a sign of leadership: knowing exactly when to ignore people and for how long. ‘It’s the first mention of oil in literature,’ he said, and Luke, the younger officer, his former pupil, turned briefly out of interest but let his interest die. Luke lay on his back with a hand over his face, palm open to the sun, and felt sure that whatever happened after the tour he might never again see a day like this. An entire version of himself was moving into the shade and he experienced the mild distaste that comes before a change, the fear of nostalgia.
‘They don’t build them like this any more,’ said Flannigan. He looked at the ruin and spat in the dust.
‘We don’t build anything,’ Scullion said. ‘That’s part of the problem out here. Even the Soviets built apartment blocks. All we do is help bring in metal containers. Drop them from the sky, promise to helicopter them out at the end. Life’s complicated, boys. Look over there: the ancients had windows, ventilation. You won’t see that in a shipping container. We’re all just part of a transit area nowadays.’
A WEDDING FEAST
The elder had a fistful of gambling chits and he squatted down with his brothers to flick quails. They all looked up when the soldiers came into the village in their loud jeeps. Scullion drove to the end of the only road and stopped on a humpback bridge, next to a school where children could be heard chanting in a study circle. The CD stopped when Scullion turned off the engine. He rolled down the window. They could hear the water running. A woman spread a light blue burqa on the grass.
The village was fresh, Luke said later, green like an oasis, and after the hilltop the air seemed soft. Maybe it was the children’s voices and the noise of the quails, a life not to do with heat. Everything in the desert emerges from heat and goes back to heat, but in Bad Kichan there was water and activity and tins with labels on them. ‘Keep your eyes open,’ Scullion said. One of the local men came to the vehicles with his hands up. He spoke rapidly and Dooley released the catch. The major turned to find Rashid. ‘Is he speaking Dari? Tell him to fuck off.’
‘A wedding today,’ Rashid said. ‘The man offers you blessings.’
‘That’s some crazy-ass mumbling,’ Lennox said.
Scullion looked nervous. ‘Tell the old fox to back off. I can speak a little Pashtun if he wants to bless.’
‘He is younger than you,’ said Rashid.
‘I don’t care if he’s sweet sixteen, Rashid. I want him to get the fuck back from this squad. That’s an order.’
‘An order, sir?’
Rashid’s good eye was clear. He was the only one of the group not feeling nervous and his sense of command, his entire presence, had altered when he spoke, and it altered further as he stepped through and touched the shoulder of the local man. Whatever he said made the man tap his chest and walk down the track to where the villagers had gathered. Rashid turned to the boys and put out his hands and smiled. ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘This is a feasting day and custom says you must join to celebrate.’
Children followed them and Scullion handed out packs of coloured pencils from his thigh pockets. He laughed as they grabbed them and he gave them sweets when the pencils ran out. He was feeling good because you only get worried when there are no children, when the place is quiet and the people are inside. Luke had the same thought. As they walked up, Scullion could see past rickety doors into the low mud dwellings. One house revealed a huddle of eyes, men sitting on a red carpet, and he stopped at the door to examine them. They were around a television set, watching an old tennis match between Borg and McEnroe.
The street was busy and there was music outside the hujra, the guesthouse, where three chickens’ heads lay in a puddle of blood. Rashid handed a case of water to Scullion to give to the elder and as he placed the water at the man’s feet Scullion said, ‘As-salaam alikum.’
‘W-alikum-as-salaam,’ the man said.
‘Khair Yosay,’ Scullion said. The ANA captain turned to Scullion and a smile creased the contours of Rashid’s short, dark beard as he said, ‘Your accent is very strange.’ Luke peered into the pomegranate grove at the side of the guesthouse and saw a group of boys there, all dressed in brown. Some of them touched their breasts as he looked and he did the same. There was a wall around the grove and Luke could see a cart loaded with fruit. Silently, he heard co-ordinates and radio crackle in his head and he imagined an aerial shot of the village. Calm the fuck down, he told himself. Stay on it. He counted heads. He couldn’t be sure but he thought one of the boys in the grove, the one in the long waistcoat, was holding a mobile phone. Luke tried to work out what was going on and he wanted to be friendly but he hated the phone and how they all stood still.
‘Let’s not hang about here,’ Flannigan said.
‘You’re fine,’ Scullion said. ‘Listen, guys. It’s cool. This is how we bring peace to these people.’
‘What, by barging into a private wedding?’ said Luke.
‘Showing face,’ Scullion said. ‘Taking an interest. A wee bit of civilised banter. A glass of tea.’
Luke saw a heap of cartons against the wall labelled Nestlé Fruita Vitals. ‘We need to get out of here.’
Rashid stood still. Scullion looked again at the leader of the village shura and bowed to him and wished he had a cigar he could offer him. Whatever Scullion said, the sweat was pouring off him and his mouth was dry, yet he believed, deep at the centre of all this rising alarm, that something existed in faith or memory that would serve them well. Whatever it was, he believed in the code. He was from County Westmeath and he knew about gangs and he knew about boys who wanted to be the big man. He’d known them for thirty years and they didn’t piss on their own doorstep. He looked over at the soldiers in his party and felt they were each a version of himself. ‘Let’s not insult this gentleman’s hospitality,’ he said.
Mark looked at a low wall where a row of skewered kebabs were cooking on a grill. Beside it, on the dusty ground, were several basins of stew and rice. A bowl of almonds caught his eye as he stood up straight and looked at the sky and thought of a Chinese restaurant back home. He and Lisa Nolan used to go there for curry and chips and he thought of good times and a trip they made with their friend Father David. He never expected to see a sky this blue or almonds in a copper bowl.
The young bride came down the road wearing a white headscarf and a dress of many colours. Dooley thought of his sister’s wedding in Skibbereen. Lennox moved out of the way and followed the sound of clapping into the house where the people danced. For a moment, standing there, Private Flannigan felt that everything tilted in the direction of these people, because of their happiness and the young groom’s way of looking at his wife. The soldiers went in and out of the house with their rifles up and Luke noticed the boys in the orchard had stepped closer to the road. Scullion was clapping his hands to the music, beaming and nodding, and when he turned he saw Luke moving towards him and swiping the air, saying, ‘We have to get the fuck out of here right now.’
The boys in the orchard started throwing rocks. One of them struck Scullion in
the chest and he turned open-mouthed to see a smear of men shouting and flailing in the first seconds of panic. He grabbed Rashid’s arm to stop the gun but Rashid held it straight out and it was pointing at Mark, the Scottish soldier, who was standing in the middle of the road facing them, shouting ‘Come ahead ya dirty bastard!’ Rashid shot him point blank in the face, blood gushing from the man’s mouth. Rashid shouted a name and instantly the kid with the mobile phone rushed forward screaming and Luke turned his rifle and shot him dead. At the same time, Dooley lunged out with a bayonet and stabbed Rashid in the neck. Lennox saw the Scot fall in the road with his face covered in blood and he saw Rashid collapse on top of him, then he turned and opened fire into the orchard. In a second or two they were all shooting into the orchard, and Luke joined them, his heart going mad as he shouted over the noise.
An old man wearing pink came out of the hujra with his hands clasped together in supplication, crying. Was that crying, thought Dooley, or was he laughing? The bowl of almonds seemed to explode next to him as Dooley opened fire again and the old man spun and fell backwards through the door where the screaming seemed to swallow him. Scullion dragged the body of Rashid along the road and fired into him. Then he took out his service revolver and shot him in the eye, standing over the body and staring down. By now the Canadian colonel was bent over Mark, the young lance corporal, blowing into his mouth and after a minute or so the colonel looked up with blood on his face and shook his head because it was no use.
At the edge of the orchard, among shattered pomegranates and grey rocks and blood, the boys of the village lay in a heap. One wasn’t yet dead and he opened and closed his mouth. Luke would remember the whiteness of the boy’s teeth as he opened his mouth to breathe and dropped his small hand to the ground. The women wailed. They wailed everywhere. Scullion was now bent over the mangled body of Rashid, speaking to him, asking him why. Flannigan dragged Scullion off the body, shouting, ‘Got to go, sir. Luke, take charge. We’ve got to get away from here.’
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