For Valour (3 page)

Harry was sprinting across the lawn, brandishing the world’s biggest branch and shrieking like a banshee as the crunch of tyres on gravel announced the arrival of a wagon at the front of the house.

He’d obviously decided to bin Plan A. Plan B seemed to involve hurling himself straight at the target’s vehicle with the intention of clubbing him senseless.

Plan B wasn’t the best plan in the world. Then again, maybe it wasn’t the worst. When I’d slithered out from underneath the steps I could see that Koureh had his roof down. But he wasn’t about to sit there admiring the sunset while some crazed lunatic got up close and battered him around the head.

As Harry stormed onto the driveway, Koureh adjusted his steering, floored his accelerator pedal and rammed his attacker mid-thigh.

Harry cartwheeled off the front wing like a rag doll. He landed in a heap on the gravel, gave a low moan and scrabbled around with his fingernails, like a lobster trying to escape the cooking pot. He wasn’t going anywhere fast.

Koureh braked hard and threw the Saab into reverse. It took me a second to realize that he was more intent on finishing the job with Harry than getting out of my way. I caught up with him as the nearside rear tyre missed his victim’s head and bumped across his lower torso, and launched myself into the back seat as the front tyre followed suit.

Koureh spun the wheel to throw me off balance, but before his right hand could yank the gearstick into first I scrambled up and wrapped my right arm around his throat. I wrenched him out of the driving seat, away from the pedals and wheel. The wagon stalled and juddered to a halt, and I brought my left hand up to grip my right wrist and tightened my hold.

The only sounds now were the ticking of the engine and Koureh’s frantic snorts as I hauled his shoulders over the back of his seat. He shot out his legs, trying to jerk his head and body backwards to unbalance me.

His hands came up, flailing wildly, trying to loosen my grip, but it wasn’t happening. It took another couple of minutes for Plan C to achieve the result A and B had aimed for. I let Koureh’s body slide back into his seat and clambered out over the side of the wagon.

Harry wasn’t moving. I knelt beside him. There was no exterior bleeding. His legs were splayed and swelling. His pelvis was shot to pieces and both femurs were broken, but no bone fragments had pierced the skin.

I had no idea of the extent of his internal injuries, but I’d have been surprised if his spleen and kidneys had got off scot free. I shoved two fingers into his neck. His carotid told me some stuff inside him was still working. His heart was pounding like a jackhammer.

He opened his eyes, but not much. I could have blindfolded him with dental floss.

‘Is he dead?’

I eased his head towards the Saab to let him see what was slumped against the driver’s door.

‘Nice, Nick … nice …’

He groaned as he turned back to me and glanced down at his injuries. ‘Not brilliant, eh?’

‘Seen better.’ I switched into reassuring mode. ‘But I’ve heard some very good things about those Swedish doctors.’

He gave me a sort of smile. ‘I’ve heard some very good things about those Swedish nurses.’

‘Dream on, mate.’ I pulled a face. ‘They’ve got no time for ugly fucks like you.’

He knew as well as I did that going to a Swedish hospital was out of the question. Some things took too much explaining. I thought about claiming that it had been a hit-and-run; at least that was consistent with his injuries. But he’d be bedbound for weeks, so however quickly we extracted from this area, we’d still be in the country. And in the shit.

Right now his job was to stay right where he was. He knew that. He had to hold tight and take the pain until I could get him out of there and work out what to do next.

‘Mate, don’t go walkabout, OK?’

He tried to roll his eyes. ‘As if …’

The light was fading when I returned with my forked stick, the radio handset and Harry’s daysack, but it was still enough to see that he’d managed to raise himself onto his elbows and got some of the light back in his eyes.

‘I’m not going to say sorry again, Nick. I needed him to know it was us.’

‘Fair one.’ I tossed the stick onto the Saab’s passenger seat. ‘But do us both a favour, eh? The next time you decide to go on a kamikaze mission, give me some warning. If I’d known what you were up to, I wouldn’t have wasted all that time trying to turn Koureh’s dream house into a party-size Molotov cocktail.’

‘There won’t be a next time.’ His lip trembled. ‘The jobs are over, mate. We both know that. ’

It was on the tip of my tongue to remind him about his six-year-old son, but now wasn’t the time. ‘Let’s worry about that shit later.’

I zipped up his fleece, shrugged off my bomber and covered his top half with it to try to keep some heat in him.

‘Right now I need to sort the Saab and the body. Then I’ll be back with the Merc ASAP to pick you up and reconnect the gas.’

I pulled out some water before tucking the daysack between the back of his skull and the gravel. ‘I’d light you a Camel, but you know they’re not good for you. You’ll have to make do with some of this instead …’

When I raised the bottle to his lips, he wasn’t interested.

‘No, mate … My drama. I fucked up.’

I put it down on the gravel beside him in case he changed his mind.

8

I ran over to the Saab, triggered the boot release, then hoisted Koureh out of his seat and into the boot. I opened the driver’s door and tried the forked stick for size in the foot-well. Then I got in behind the wheel, shifted into neutral and switched on the engine.

About fifty metres back along the track there was a turning to the right, which led through the trees to a clearing where we’d left our Danish Merc. By the time I got there it was nearly dark o’clock.

I parked up and walked to the end of the rocky outcrop, which stood like a diving platform above the edge of the lake. One or two lights glimmered on the far shore.

When we’d arrived there at midday the water had been crystal clear to a depth of ten metres, yet I still couldn’t see the bottom. It looked like oil now. It seemed a good place for my version of a Viking funeral. Koureh was going to have to do without the flaming longboat and the drinking horns, but he didn’t deserve any of that shit anyway.

I turned the Saab’s engine on again and reversed about twenty metres. These wagons were front-wheel drive and weighed over a ton, so I needed a bit of a run-up before hitting the launch pad. I put it into second and, keeping my left foot on the clutch and my right on the brake, wedged down the accelerator pedal an inch or two with my stick. Then I lifted both feet, gripped the top of the steering wheel, lifted my arse and stepped back onto the nice soft leather.

The Saab gave a brief shudder and moved forward, gathering speed. I kept the wheel in place. As soon as I was sure it was going fast enough and wasn’t going to stall, I vaulted sideways over the driver’s door, hit the dirt and rolled. Just not as well as I’d hoped. I’d have a couple of bruises of my own in the morning.

9

The exhaust system grated against the rock and the engine whined as the front wheels left the ground and spun freely in the air, but the wagon already had enough momentum to complete its journey.

I scrambled up in time to see it hit the water, wallow for what seemed like a lifetime in the pale moonlight, then plunge nose first to its grave. Thank fuck Koureh hadn’t gone for the Monte Carlo yellow paintwork option that was all the rage with Saab freaks this year. Steel grey would match the lake bed nicely.

I kicked over the tyre marks with my Timberlands and rubbed fistfuls of dirt into the scars left by the undercarriage on the rock edge. It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could do, and we’d be long gone before the local
polisen
sent in their divers.

I fired up the Merc and headed back the way I’d come. I stopped short of the house to pick up my daysack. I’d already checked that our scrape was sterile. It wasn’t complicated – we hadn’t even been there long enough to take a shit.

Before going on round the front to pick Harry up, I folded down the rear seats to leave him as much space as possible. My plan was to put some distance between us and the lake, then get Trev on the net and tell him that Harry needed to be casevaced. I didn’t care what strings the colonel was going to have to pull, or how far I’d have to drive, I just knew that if we put Harry Callard in the care of a Swedish medic our cover would be blown, and if we didn’t, he would never see his son again.

But for the second time that day, it appeared that Harry had a different plan.

As I shut the tailgate, there was a lightning flash – the kind that seared white spots on your retinas – followed by the world’s biggest thunderclap, and a pressure wave that blew me off my feet.

10

Iraqi troops had set fire to seven hundred oil wells as part of their scorched-earth policy during their retreat from Kuwait in January 1991. We’d seen all that shit happen as our Chinook ferried us across the Iraqi border – pillars of flame reaching into the night sky. Now I knew what it was like to see one up close.

The heat was already too intense to take the direct route, so I skirted the blaze until I could get a clear view of the front of the house. My bomber jacket, the radio and Harry’s daysack were still where I’d left them, but he was no longer lying on the gravel driveway.

I raised a hand above my eyes, palm outwards, so that I could focus more clearly. One of the big picture windows that looked out over the sundeck had imploded and its shutters hung off their hinges. I reckoned its twin was about to go too.

A few shards of glass still clung to the frame as the fire raged inside. The dove-grey paint blistered on the clapboard. The canvas smouldered on the steamer chairs, and the decking beneath them was starting to crackle. I couldn’t see any sign of the Gucci hurricane lantern.

I moved closer, until the heat on my bare skin let me know that enough was enough, and the charred body I could now see lying beneath the smashed pane confirmed what I’d already begun to suspect. Somehow Harry had managed to drag his broken body onto the deck, sparked up the nickel-plated lantern and launched it through the double glazing like a missile.

I gathered up my bomber and the gear he’d left behind and legged it to the Merc. When the municipal fire brigade turned up, I didn’t want to be here to make them cups of tea.

11
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

Sunday, 14 June

Father Martyn lived in a stone-built cottage on the Welsh border, between Hay-on-Wye and Abergavenny. The front of it was covered with flowery shit and his door was always open to the left-footers in the Regiment, plus one or two others who weren’t fully paid-up members of his club.

Me and God had had a few close calls, but we still weren’t on first-name terms. That didn’t seem to matter to Father Mart. He’d always been part of the Regiment’s furniture, the secret sounding board for people who needed to get stuff off their chest. I’d gone to see him after Snakebite’s death in Baghdad, and I needed to see him again now.

I’d been back from Sweden for more than a month, and I was still having difficulty shifting Harry’s image from the screen inside my head. It wasn’t as if it was the first time I’d seen a corpse, or what fire could do to a man’s skin. I’d witnessed more charred bodies on ops than I could count. Flashbacks were a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, but I didn’t do PTSD. I probably wasn’t smart enough. I just kept seeing the look on Harry’s face when he said there wouldn’t be any more missions.

‘Cut away’ was the advice I’d given him when he’d lost it with Koureh, because cutting away had been my answer to every problem as far back as I could remember. I’d done it after a mate of mine fell off a factory roof when we were playing soldiers on my seventh birthday. Maybe I’d even done it before that, when my stepfather lost it with my mum and she turned up at the breakfast table wearing sun-gigs.

But cutting away didn’t always work.

I told Father Mart as much as I needed him to know about Harry’s death over a brew at his kitchen table.

He had his wise face on beneath the beard. ‘And?’

‘And I guess I feel responsible in some way. I’m not sure he would have come if I hadn’t persuaded him …’

‘Trevor and Harold were also close, weren’t they?’

I nodded.

‘Does Trevor feel the same?’

I hesitated for a moment. ‘Not sure. But he must feel something. He’s looking after Harry’s boy.’

Father Mart sat and listened at times like this, maybe put a hand on your shoulder, looked you straight in the eye, said a few very simple words and somehow made you feel a whole lot better than you had done when you came into the room. Right now he leaned back and steepled his fingers. ‘It sounds to me as though Harold knew you’d beat yourself up. And this was his way of trying to tell you not to.

‘He knew the risks. He could have said no, when you asked him to come. But he didn’t, did he? And it was his own decision to sacrifice himself to keep you both safe.’

He placed his palms flat on the table and leaned towards me. ‘If it had been you on the gravel instead of Harold, would you have come to the same decision?’

I didn’t have to think too hard about that one. ‘Sure. It’s a straight numbers game, isn’t it? One down, the rest stay standing.’

Father Mart’s right forefinger came off the table and jerked towards me, like he was about to accuse the woman next door of being a witch. ‘Exactly!’

I’d thought these guys were supposed to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

‘So, if it had been you instead of Harold, would you have wanted him to feel this bad?’

‘No.’

‘Then why are you?’

I racked my brain for an answer.

‘In your own time.’ He waved at my brew. ‘Please, drink your tea.’

Father Mart never stood in judgement, even when a stewards’ enquiry didn’t go his way. He never pretended to have the answer to the mysteries of the universe. And he hadn’t tried to become the dad I’d never had, or any of that shit. He wasn’t in the business of miracle cures either. He concentrated instead on reminding dickheads like me what was what, and hoped they’d get the message.