The Corporal's Wife (2013) (49 page)

He blurted, ‘Have you seen Mehrak?’

An idiot response: ‘He’s with you.’

‘Open your bloody eyes! Look at me! I can’t fucking see him, can you?’

Auntie said, ‘He’s not been past here.’

Nobby asked, ‘When did you last see him?’

‘I don’t know – five or ten minutes?’

Auntie turned a knife. ‘Sorry, weren’t you supposed to be minding him?’

Nobby looked Sidney in the eyes, and twisted it: ‘Minding him, not giving him a history lesson.’

Sidney said, ‘The little bastard’s done a runner on me.’

Mehrak didn’t know where the path would lead him, except down. He stampeded along it. His feet slipped and he clung to the bushes at either side. He had money in his pocket, but not much. There had been some small-denomination notes and coins on the kitchen table. It would have been left by the woman, Anneliese, or by Sidney, PK or any of the others, perhaps for cigarettes or an English-language newspaper. It would have been assumed, when it went into his pocket, that one of the others had picked it up. He thought that.

Several times he was off his feet and on his back. His trousers were ripped in the seat and his elbows were scraped. He went towards the road and behind the house where the cretin – who thought he was so clever and kind – had said a hangman once lived. He found there that the path branched and took the right fork, which would lead him away from the village. That was what he wanted, and he thought it gave him time. He had been in flight before: twice in south Lebanon and once in southern Iraq, with the brigadier. They had been targeted and helicopters had searched for them. He had been inducted into Special Forces training, had not competed with the élite but had learned.

He wanted a bus and a telephone. He didn’t know what the number would be but reckoned on finding it. He was confident. She would love him, of course. He would have saved her. With his ear against the pipe in his room, he had heard the conversations that PK, his tormentor, had with London, and PK had the habit of half repeating each item told him. His wife was in Khvoy. Khvoy was filled with military units and the Revolutionary Guard Corps. She might already have been arrested. He would save her, and she would love him.

In his mind it was so simple.

He believed he controlled his and her destiny. She would recognise what he had done, and he would be believed.

There was a small stream and water bucketed down. He used it to wash his face and hands, tried to straighten his hair and checked the money in his pocket. He spilled out onto the road and began to jog.

He saw a bus stop ahead.

They drove back up the road towards Krems, then turned and drove the other way, past Dürnstein, where the castle lowered on the hill, and on towards Spitz.

They repeated it.

From Sidney, at the wheel, keeping to less than thirty miles an hour, not giving a toss about the traffic building up behind him, there came a series of moans.

Their body language did their talking. He drove, but Auntie and Nobby let the criticism drip off them onto him – as it always did when a man of supreme confidence in his own judgement was tripped. They went as far upstream as the fields of cultivated vines, and downstream to the Burg Aggstein. The last time they did the run was as good a time as any to accept failure and do the hard job.

None of them volunteered.

Auntie, the Ulsterman, had been in disciplined Protestant-biased schools on the Ards peninsula where a succession of teachers would have told pupils that ‘owning up’ always brought a reward. He didn’t suggest himself as the best man to call Petroc Kenning. Neither did Nobby. Nobby spent his life deflecting guilt and responsibility. It was down to Sidney, and he knew it. He took out his mobile and dialled.

He was connected to the landline and his wife picked it up. ‘Me. Don’t ask anything, just get me PK . . . A crisis? Some would say so. Now, please, get him.’

He turned to face Nobby, but his shoulders were towards Auntie. He said quietly, ‘You’re fucking gutless, both of you.’ He felt better for that, but neither answered him and he had hoped to provoke a reaction.

‘Petroc, it’s one of those things that doesn’t get said easy. Can’t sugar it. We’ve lost him . . . Probably down to me, but I haven’t any idea where he is. Not much more I can say.’

He rang off, then used the next junction to turn and head back for Spitz, where the grapes were in and where the safe house was, and where the catastrophe was monumental. It would not be Petroc’s way to bawl him out. Petroc, right now, would be considering how to pass the parcel on and keep the Teflon touch. He was glad he’d coughed it.

‘Sorry, Petroc, no can do. He’s at a dinner.’

‘Sara, I have – I’m sorry to say – indigestible news.’

‘Kick it my way then.’

He had never known Sara Rogers to be flustered.

So he told her – carefully. He had been inducted into the Service fourteen years earlier, courtesy of strings pulled by his uncle Hector. Nothing in his time had ever approached this level of disaster. He believed his reaction to it would be noted. Was he steady under fire or not? Did his nerve hold in adversity?

He told it as it was.

Petroc tried to recall what had been expected when the funding of the Dubai brothel had been nodded through. What had been their mission statement? What had they expected to achieve? A business man, a foreign-ministry official, a junior mullah from a scholastic background in Qoms travelling on pilgrimage, a bank official: they would have been heaved out of the whorehouse into a car and then to an interview room. Petroc would have rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and threatened dire exposure, then put the man on his flight in the morning. They had been looking for an agent in place. Long-term access and the requirement that the fly in the web infiltrated himself where he could be useful – might take a year, or five years. But Petroc had not been there. Katie had – and he didn’t fault what she’d done. Actually, she’d done a brilliant job on the hoof. And they’d done well with Mehrak. Actually, looked at calmly, it was one to shout about. He wouldn’t apologise.

‘That’s about it, Sara. I think, from a standing start, we’ve done quite well.’

‘Missing something, yes?’

‘What am I missing, Sara?’

‘We have four men on the wrong side of the border in Iran. And they’ve missed their pick-up. And where they are is alive with security-force presence. And they have that woman. “Done quite well”, Petroc? I’ll tell Tadeuz when he’s back that you’ve lost your asset. Goodnight.’

His shin had been kicked. He heard the car pull up outside, scattering gravel. Guilty as charged. Four of them across the frontier, and it hadn’t seemed a priority. Shame caught him.

The exchange found the number. He pushed more coins into the slots, and she put the call through. It rang, and was answered.

‘The embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.’

He spoke in Farsi and asked to be connected to the officer in charge of security.

‘I cannot say whether such a person is still in the embassy at this time of night. Can you leave a message—’

He said he was IRGC, of the al-Qods, and demanded to be connected.

‘It may not be possible, but I will try and—’

He told the operator he was a motherfucker, that he must be connected.

‘Please wait, the number is ringing.’

A gravelly voice answered. A security officer at an embassy would be from al-Qods. He gave his name, took a gulp of air and spewed out the story he would stay with. He was the driver and personal protection of Brigadier Reza Joyberi. He had been in Dubai on the service of the state and had been kidnapped by agents of the British. He had been flown as a prisoner to Austria and had escaped. He needed help. He was believed, and his confidence soared. No questions were asked and Mehrak was told to stay close to where he was, but not in the light. A car would come, a Volvo estate, and it would not have diplomatic plates. It would drive in circles close to the location of the phone kiosk, then flash the headlights three times. He should run to it. Just that. The call was terminated.

He left the kiosk and found a bench in a small garden. Two others had teenagers on them, groping each other, not noticing him. Of course he would be believed. And belief in his story would save Farideh. He waited.

They were on an incline, a track, and the engine was straining. Then there was a judder, a cough, and it was gone. Ralph rammed on the brake.

It sleeted steadily. Zach snuggled into the blanket and felt his clothing. It was still wet so he rifled through the drawers. He put on underwear, a pair of baggy jeans, two T-shirts, with logos from a sheep-nuts manufacturer, a sweater, a thin windcheater, which would be almost useless, and trainers with holes in the soles. The last item was a baseball cap from the Lincoln University College of Agricultural Sciences.

Farideh took two sweaters, socks, knickers and the toilet roll. The guys had their own agenda. They were arguing about what they could carry and its weight. The communications gear was for taking, the trauma bag and the firepower – the machine-guns, ammunition magazines, and the pistols that Mikey and Ralph would have. Wally had held out his hand for his but Farideh had turned away from him and would not have given it up. The grenades were divided among them so that each had a flash and bang, and gas. The cold scythed at them.

Mikey did the calculations with the map and the compass, which was now hooked on his chest. They would take hand torches but only the one used by the trail-blazer would be lit. The rest would take their chances amid stones, boulders, ruts and holes – and it was hard to look ahead because the sleet was coming from the north-west.

The postcards were still on the work surface. Zach had a silly moment. In the light from a cupboard, he memorised the address of an obvious parent, took an unused card and scrawled, ‘Sorry you just happened to meet us on a Black Dog Day when we had a heap of aggravation. Wrong place at the wrong time, Best, Foxtrot, Zulu, and the guys’. They were loaded and slung on the rucksacks.

They went on climbing and the wind hunted them down. Mikey was in front and set a good pace, then Wally, who cursed each time a gust slapped him. Zach was with Farideh. He would have called himself ‘virtually fit’ from working on the sites, but keeping a brickie or a sparks in supplies through a day was different from heaving himself up a hillside in the teeth of a gale, with the cold and wet insinuating themselves under the layers of his clothing. He knew he would struggle. He thought Farideh would have had no significant exercise in Tehran and could hear her wheezing. Ralph came last. The torchlight was increasingly hard to focus on, the track less well formed and narrower. Mikey had said they were around forty kilometres to the frontier. They would walk through the night, then make a bivouac and try for the border the next evening.

Her breathing became more laboured. Zach had to check his stride to stay with her, Ralph pushing them forward.

They went on without rest stops.

She took his hand, which was frozen, like hers. She murmured about ‘turning back’, the chance of it being over, and he felt a hard shape pressed into the palm of his hand. It was the size of a credit card, smooth, laminated.

She said, ‘With no turning back, I don’t need it. Perhaps you might want it.’

Zach pocketed it, didn’t know what it was, and they struggled on. The sleet had turned into a fine wet snow, and their trainers slipped, but Mikey set a hard pace.

There was a warbling sound, like a bird’s song on a spring morning. Zach identified it as coming from Mikey’s rucksack. Wally closed on him, rummaged and dragged out a cable. There would have been a microphone attached and an earpiece. Contact from outside their world. Mikey’s pace did not ease off, and his voice came back, lifted on the wind but indistinct. Mostly he listened, and they climbed.

Chapter 17

Zach closed on Mikey and Wally. Mikey had stopped and was crouched. The guys had said that contact on the satphone was not made lightly and they’d been scrupulous in not using it. Mikey was huddled, and Wally tried to shelter him, but there was only the small torch to help him find the earpiece in the rucksack, the little microphone and the transmit switch.

‘Yes, it’s Mikey . . . Hearing you? Not bad considering . . . How far? Reckon it’s thirty klicks . . . Yes, “secure” is on. . . . Who am I speaking to? . . . Please yourself . . . Conditions? They’re good but foul. It’s snowing and we’re hitting a plateau, but we’re making reasonable time. The ceiling’s too low for helicopters.’

Wally swore at the cold. Ralph tried to stamp his feet. None of them had thermal lining in their boots, or quilted anoraks. They hadn’t eaten properly, had no hot drinks and their flight had gone from confused to chaotic. Zach listened. His body gave Farideh some shelter.

‘Would you, sir, repeat that?’ Mikey wedged the earpiece further into his ear.

Zach’s hand was in his pocket and he could feel the hard shape of what she had given him.

‘We need to confirm and close because my battery’s running down. You said, quote, ‘‘Our man, her husband, has run. We no longer have control of him’’, unquote. Agreed . . . Thank you.’