For Valour (13 page)

On my way back to the 911, I bent down and rammed the other two bananas as far as I could up the Mondeo’s exhaust. It had been our favourite party trick since a bunch of us had seen
Beverly Hills Cop
during our early days in the Regiment, and it still cracked me up all these years later. Unless he was a big Eddie Murphy fan, it would take him a while to work out why the Ford’s ignition system was suddenly letting him down.

8

I made it to the Farnborough exit without my shadow reappearing, and took off cross-country, steering clear of the military chokepoints clustered around Aldershot.

I took far too long to get to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, but I wanted to try to avoid leaving Father Gerard with any unwanted visitors. I also needed to find a choggy shop in a backstreet in Kingston.

I dipped into the first one I came to. The lads who ran it were big fans of flickering neon and sold everything from dodgy DVDs to Elvis costumes and previously enjoyed satnavs. I spent the rest of Sniper One’s hard-earned cash and some of my own on four second-hand unlocked Nokias.

Three were for me and one was the late Christmas present I’d promised Father Mart. I bunged fifty quid on each of the Lebara pay-as-you-go SIM cards.

The software at GCHQ had been designed to track who was contacting whom rather than the content of their messages, first off, so text traffic on these gizmos would have a good chance of staying under the radar as long as we didn’t communicate anything that set their alarm bells ringing.

9

Father G was en route from Lingfield to Saturday-evening mass, but still managed to give me the impression he had all the time in the world.

He got even more cheerful when I suggested that he swapped the 911 for his Skoda instead of hiding it away in his lock-up, and threw open the boot of his wagon so I could transfer my kit. I asked if he wanted to remove the rosary beads hanging from his rear-view. He shook his head. He had a feeling I could use the Good Lord’s help and, anyway, he had a spare.

Before we said our goodbyes I gave him one of the Nokias and asked him to get it to Father Mart ASAP. In return, he gave me the name and address of a friendly B-and-B.

On the way there I made a rare sighting of a public phone box. I didn’t want to use and bin one of my spare mobiles, so I filled the slot with coins and called Cyprus. An old mate of mine who’d retired from the Green Army had managed to swing a civvy admin job for himself at RAF Akrotiri. It was Bob’s way of living the dream.

‘Beats a wet Saturday night in Salisbury, Nick, I kid you not,’ he’d told me, the last time we’d shared a brew. ‘Sure, I’m chained to a keyboard or buried in a filing cabinet from nine to five every weekday, but the rest of the time it’s sun, sea and quite a lot of …’ He’d licked his lips. ‘If you take my meaning. You know the island’s patron is Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty?’

He’d obviously read the brochures. And since he looked like a greyer, more spiky-haired version of Barry Manilow, I reckoned he’d be like a pig in shit there.

Bob picked up on the third ring, so I guessed it was still too early in the tourist season for his escort duties to have kicked in big-time.

Troops returning from Afghan stopped by the base for four days’ decompression. Regiment lads didn’t stay as long as the rest, but I thought it might be worth asking Bob to keep an eye out for Jack Grant. I told him I’d connect from time to time and asked him to keep his mouth shut.

He knew me well enough not to ask why.

1

During two separate ambushes in Al-Amarah in 2004, Private Johnson Beharry saved the lives of at least thirty comrades while being hosed down by a blizzard of incoming AK-47 rounds and RPGs, one of which detonated on the hatch cover of his Warrior, seven inches from the front of his head.

When he was awarded the Victoria Cross for ‘extreme gallantry and unquestioned valour’ the following year, he didn’t have a clue what it meant. Mind you, he had an excuse. He’d spent most of his life up a hill with his nan in the far north of Grenada. Bermondsey was only a stone’s throw from the Imperial War Museum, and when I was busy nicking trainers off the back of other people’s barrows down there, I’d never heard of the VC either.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t seen
Zulu
as a kid. It wasn’t until much later that I soaked up the story of how eleven were won during the course of one engagement at Rorke’s Drift. Maybe it was because they’ve only handed out a few more than that in total since the Second World War – Beharry was the first living recipient in nearly forty years. Whatever, although I quite fancied the idea of being saluted by the chief of the General Staff if I passed him on the square, I’d never fantasized about winning one myself.

Most other soldiers I knew felt the same way. And the few times we came across someone with VCs in their eyes, we tried to stay out of their way. Self-sacrifice is one of the boxes you have to tick, and that’s not always healthy. You don’t even get on the shortlist, these days, unless you’ve had at least a 97 per cent chance of not surviving the action, and some commentators believed that it should only be awarded posthumously.

It wasn’t always like that. When they first started awarding them during the Crimean War, Queen Vic wouldn’t pin one on your chest unless you were still around to tell the story.

The VC and GC Association looked after the interests of the winners, past and present. They nurtured the handful of survivors, making sure the old ones got to their reunions and the young ones didn’t end up folding themselves inside bits of cardboard in doorways off the Strand. They also protected the memories of the dead.

The Association didn’t always see eye to eye with the MoD, but its HQ overlooked the Horse Guards Parade ground on one side and Whitehall on the other – which was why I wasn’t about to swing by their offices on Monday morning. I never felt completely comfortable in the corridors of power at the best of times, and this wasn’t the best of times.

Besides, I thought I might have another way of finding out some stuff I needed to know.

2

I’d first worked with Maggie in Derry in the late eighties. I’d been press-ganged into 14th Intelligence Company – which we called the Det – and she’d been seconded from the Firm (MI5). It hadn’t been a career choice for either of us, but we both seemed to thrive in an environment where we had to be switched on 24/7.

I used to call her Moneypenny because she was a bit starchy on the outside but kind of sexy too – not that any of us lads with overly long sideburns and five days’ stubble got to put that to the test. She christened me Bag O’Shite. It wasn’t until we had a PIRA active-service unit under surveillance past dark o’clock one night that I got to see her in action.

We’d pinged a bomb factory in a dilapidated house not too far away from the Holy Child Primary School. The players had been mixing low-explosive cocktails in an industrial coffee grinder and had an arms cache in the back garden. Our job wasn’t to pile in and turn the place over: it was to keep an eye on things until we could put away as many of them as possible.

We were walking up an alleyway that ran along the back of two rows of terraces between Bogside and the Creggan with a pocketful of miniature transmitters. The plan was to secrete the devices inside the PIRA weapons and see where they ended up. Our lords and masters put ops like this under the heading of ‘technical attacks’; we called it jarking. The opposition were wising up to it, but we still got a good few results.

The rain hung in the air around us and the alleyway stank of piss. Only one street lamp in five seemed to work, but that was enough to make the garbage bags glisten and pick out the rats crawling over them. It was also enough for the shadows of the four hooded figures that suddenly appeared behind us to dance along the slimy breezeblock walls that hemmed us in. The players were checking us out.

Maggie and I both had 9mm shorts tucked into our waistbands, but that didn’t give us an edge; if we drew down, we were compromised big-time.

I ran through our options. There weren’t many, and run like fuck was shaping up to be my favourite. Maggie had other ideas. She grabbed my arm with her right hand and gripped the very greasy hair at the back of my neck with her left. She pushed herself against me.

Leaving my right arm free to draw down if her diversion didn’t work, she raised her lips to mine and kissed me long and hard.

I stopped in my tracks. Our shadows did too.

Then she turned back towards them and unleashed an Ulster-accented fusillade that can’t have been on the syllabus at Cheltenham Ladies College. ‘What the fock are youse pervs looking at? Can’t a girl have a moment to herself in this focking town?’

They spun on their heels and slouched back the way they’d come. One of them kicked a can along the path in front of him so we knew he had more important things than shagging on his mind.

I breathed out slowly and grinned. ‘So, where were we, Moneypenny?’

She brushed my arm aside and gave me a bollock-shrivelling glare. ‘Don’t get any ideas, dickhead. That was for their benefit, not yours.’

Nothing ever happened between us, either then or in the years that followed, but later the same evening she gave me the kind of smile that made me think it might still be on the cards. ‘You know what “Creggan” means, Bag O’Shite? It means “stony place”. Isn’t that fun?’

3
South London

Sunday, 29 January

Maggie binned the security services at the end of our Derry tour and joined an NGO – Save the Children or Oxfam or something like that. Then a handful of years ago she’d got a job with the secretary of the VC and GC Association. She told me she wanted to spend some time in the world as it should be: she’d got a bit tired of the way it actually was.

‘A world full of dead medal winners?’

She gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘You’re smarter than that, Bag O’Shite. I mean a world in which people confronted by the most testing of circumstances teach the rest of us how to behave, a world where generosity of spirit is the keynote.’

I wasn’t as smart as she seemed to think I was, but I liked her take on courage. I didn’t really believe it, but I liked it.

That exchange ran through my mind as I sat in the Skoda not far from Denmark Hill, with eyes on the small but perfectly formed semi she shared with two Persian cats. The house had been empty when I arrived, but I’d seen breakfast stuff on the table by the window in her kitchen/diner and her bicycle was missing, so I reckoned she hadn’t disappeared for a weekend in the country. And if she had, so what? I’d just wait out.

Cornell’s Professor James Maas coined the term ‘power nap’ in the nineties, but every squaddie since the dawn of time has known that getting your head down for anywhere between six and thirty minutes gives you optimum battery recharge without the disadvantage of sleep inertia. The trick is not to get caught doing it on stag.

I wasn’t sure whether the sudden shift in the air molecules inside the car had woken me, or the coldness of the muzzle against the soft skin below my ear. Either way, I needed to sharpen up my act. I’d messed around with my body clock a fair amount in the last week or so, but that was no excuse: it was the story of my life.

I stole a glance in the rear-view, but whoever was behind me had taken care to stay in the blind spot. I eased my right palm in the direction of the pistol grip.

‘Raise both hands very slowly and place them on top of your steering wheel. Do not make any attempt to reach for the Browning beneath your thigh.’

The voice was low, but crisp and authoritative. I did exactly what it told me to.

4

‘I know you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, Bag O’Shite, but when you can’t even get the old tricks right any more, I’d say it’s time to start looking for alternative employment.’

Maggie removed the mouth of her Coke bottle from my neck.

‘Let’s do us both a favour and get you off the streets. Fancy a brew? You look as though you could use a shot or two of caffeine. Unless you’d prefer to stay out here and say a few Hail Marys instead.’ She gestured at the rosary beads swinging gently from the rear-view.

I replaced the Browning in my waistband and exited Father Gerard’s wagon. ‘I thought you’d never ask, Moneypenny. As long as it’s proper builders’ tea. I don’t want any of that fruit-flavoured shit you posh birds go for.’

Maggie had a hint of grey around the temples but looked as good as she had in Derry. She squeezed my arm as she steered me across the street. ‘Don’t worry, Stone. Your secret’s safe with me.’

We went a couple of paces further.

‘Nice car, by the way …’ She could no longer stop herself snorting with laughter.

The cats weren’t in any hurry to make me feel at home. Maybe they’d seen me asleep at the wheel as well. The expression in their cool green eyes made it clear that, as far as they were concerned, my stay was very, very temporary.

Maggie’s place was filled with fascinating stuff. Leather-bound books spilled off her shelves. Her walls were covered with antique prints of mosques and deserts and men who looked like Lawrence of Arabia. A curved Omani ceremonial dagger with a jewelled silver hilt hung beside a framed service sheet from the ceremony at Westminster Abbey commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Victoria Cross. When I leaned in closer I saw that the surviving recipients had signed it for her.

She flicked on the kettle and dug around in the fridge. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stretch to spicy chicken kebabs without a bit of warning, but a club sandwich wouldn’t be out of the question.’

I helped her clear the breakfast things from the table I’d pinged earlier and sat down.

She ate with the precision she brought to everything else I’d seen her do. I wolfed my plateful of food, got some of the brew down my neck and spent a minute or two fiddling with the handle of my mug.

When I looked up, Maggie was giving me the same eyebrow treatment that Grace Nichol had when I was trying to convince her that my visit to Ella’s surgery was a complete coincidence.