The Corporal's Wife (2013) (58 page)

Zach had white light in his eyes and a dull thud in his ears. The sunshine and the deafness minimised, for him, the flash-bang. He tried another, made a greater effort. It landed short of the stones and smoke burst from the canister. The wind blew it away.

He was an amateur. He knew how to translate the poetry of Mosleh al-Din Saadi Shirazi from old Farsi to modern English, he knew what mix of mortar was best for brickies and how much water to add, and he knew how to quote tracts of speeches. He didn’t know that it was best to read the fucking instructions on the side of a grenade, that it helped with smoke or gas if the thing was detonated upwind. And two were gone. The smoke went fast and made a small cloud, which had no time to settle on the rocks where the guns were.

Grenades were thrown back at them – fragmentation: killers. She fired at the man lobbing them . . . four left, five fired and all missed. He heard the shouts: they were impatient now, and the laughter had returned. They wanted her.

Zach saw her face. All the beauty had gone. A hard face, defiant. He saw the snarl at her mouth, and the ugliness it gave her. He couldn’t place her alongside the young woman who had been with him in the van, then in the street as the policeman had advanced, or at the start of the valley when they were alone and he had carried her. Then the face had been soft. Veins bulged in her neck and her eyes blazed. She fired again. He had a grenade in his hand, and he didn’t know whether it was flash-bang or smoke. He didn’t check the wind. It was a small gesture.

He saw another grenade arc towards them and screamed to her to duck. He didn’t see his own burst, or where it fell, or if it had had the remotest value. There was a smooth-sided rock close to him, no more than a yard away, and the grenade bounced close to it. If it had landed, black and squat on the rock, it would have fallen into the cavity where he and she were taking cover, but it didn’t. It rolled away from them.

He didn’t know what to do. The sun was fierce on his face, and he thought it lit him. She had the pistol up, used two hands.

And she was hit. Then Zach felt a heavy blow to his chest, up near the right shoulder, and she sprawled over him. The firing kicked earth and the grenades bounced closer.

Mikey said, ‘I reckon it’s that sort of time.’

Wally said, ‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’

Ralph said, ‘Be going the wrong way, might be the worst decision ever. But.’

He’d seen her hit. Mikey slapped on the satphone, rapped the pre-set key that held the open number where they’d be picked up – like a universal distress call, no security. Wally hitched the strap of the trauma bag over his shoulder. They had a few grenades and the Hecklers. They’d watched the grenades thrown and seen the volume of fire put down.

Mikey didn’t say it, just thought: they didn’t do medals for private contractors, or welcome-homes, with the British Legion turned out in Brize Norton or at the Final Turn, the roundabout on the way to the mortuary at the Oxford hospital; it was likely that both Contego and Six would wriggle at compensation payments for injuries. He had a small light, bright green, on the outer case of the phone. He’d seen Zach – decent enough, but a bloody passenger and an innocent – rocked by a bullet strike. They wouldn’t have cried out. People didn’t, not with gunshot wounds because the shock numbed the pain at first.

He said quietly, mouth close to the microphone, but for his guys, ‘Do it like we used to and shove it up them. If we had bayonets we’d fix them. Frontal charge. It’s what we have to do.’

A moment of clasped hands.

They broke cover. They ran towards the arse side of the rocks where the firing and the grenades had come from, aiming to take them from the back. They put down fire as they ran. They went back up the valley and away from the flags that marked the border. Fire came at them from the sides and the front. The surprise had barely lasted. They ran and the breath sobbed in their throats.

The voice boomed, the volume high. The technicians and their managers spoke only when it was seriously necessary, keeping their words minimal and hushed.

Vicki had been in the bunker communications area, burrowed far down into the rock below the sovereign base area of Dhekelia an hour before her shift was supposed to begin. That shift was now over by an hour and a half. She wasn’t alone.

If we had bayonets we’d fix them. Frontal charge. It’s what we have to do.

Until a few moments before they had been monitoring military traffic, the Iranian messages from a command post back from the frontier, the forward units placed in blocking positions. There had been a spillage of communications from the command post to more senior officers in Khvoy, and further traffic that informed headquarters complexes of developments. They had known, in the bunker, from dawn, that the day would bring closure to the mission that had been conducted in Farsi, which they followed at fourth or fifth hand. Abruptly, on a frequency they tuned into full time, a voice had shouted, over a mess of static and confusion. She – with many – had gasped.

Go for it, guys. Give it to them.

The sound then was of hammered breathing, a panting cough to clear a throat, the rattle of kit and the drumming of feet on rock. Then more noise. She had flinched, and others had tried to suppress a choke of emotion. They were voyeurs, the raincoat crowd that watched from the darkness and couldn’t have played a Samaritan’s part.

Incoming, guys, left at three o’clock, two hundred yards, automatic. Keep the fucking line, guys, keep the speed.

She, all of them, heard him clearly, because it was good kit.

Wally? Where are you, you bloody meathead? Keep in line, Wally. Wally, where the fuck are you?

The voice was pitched high and angry, the atmospherics had got worse, and a man murmured behind her that what she heard was gunfire. It was loud, constant, and battered out of the speakers. A fainter voice, from further off the microphone: she had to strain but heard it over the shooting.

Wally’s down, Mikey . . . Wally’s down.

Is he bad?

Lost half his head – that bad.

Keep going, Ralph
.

Her supervisor was behind her. In a different age, she thought, he would have had his hands on her shoulders, his fingers massaging the knotted muscle. It would have been a comfort. He stood close to her, perhaps closer than was correct, and kept his breathing steady. She didn’t know what any of them looked like, but supposed they were a composite of men who had been neighbours in her street – terraced and in a Yorkshire one-time mill town – and the brothers, fathers and cousins of the girls she’d known . . . She thought the woman would have been a beauty and—

Can you see them, Ralph? I can’t, can you?

No answer came, and tears welled.

I know they’re both hit . . . Fire from the right, automatic, one o’clock, or two . . . We have to get there, Ralph. Should never have left them. Shouldn’t . . .

Her shoulders had started to shake. Her supervisor wouldn’t have it, not from his team and not on his watch. A hissed command: ‘Steady up, girl. Not a time for incontinence.’

Where the hell, Ralph . . .?

Fainter, and a whistle with it, as if air had been in a sealed cavity but now escaped.

Gone, Mikey. Down. I’m buggered, Mikey. They got me. They . . .

She realised that now there was one. She heard metal rasping and the supervisor spoke, matter-of-fact, of a magazine being discarded and another slotted. Two were down and one ran, air sagging in his throat, towards the guns that separated him from the young man and the young woman they had been tasked to bring out across the border. There would be no more commentary. Why should there? Who would he want to communicate with? His friends – muckers, mates – were down . . . She was wrong.

They’re both hit. She’s uppermost. She fired again with her pistol. Can see the blood on her. I’ve wasted some, and Ralph did. The guy, Zach, he’s on his side. Must be her last. She’s thrown the fucking weapon at them . . . Some kid, that one . . . Hey, tell them we did what we could.

The noise from the firing, his gun loudest and their guns as background, engulfed her. Vicki didn’t understand how the man, Mikey, was still upright, going forward. She had blinked away the tears and stood erect. Her supervisor murmured that that was how she should be: ‘Have some bloody dignity.’

Grenade – fuck. A grenade, she’s bloody on it, crawled on it, and—

What she heard: shots that were closer, more distinct than before, a final volley that seemed to come from beside a microphone, and a shout, curtailed. Then, a moment after, there was a rumbled thudding and scrape, as if the microphone was grinding against a hard surface, He might have been kicking, writhing, in pain – and then the link was cut. Her supervisor said, soft in her ear, ‘He’s gone, he’s on the ground. That’s about it. Time, Vicki, to shift out.’

She thought it the worst silence she had heard. If a fly had flown across the bunker from her she would have heard its wingbeat, then the shuffling of feet, then the emptying of the space, except for those doing the screens.

It had bounced twice, then jagged sideways and come towards his head. He couldn’t have moved. It was black-painted and had worm writing on it, but he didn’t read it. He had seen the bare metal where the end of the pin had been before it was ripped off. Its momentum had gone and it had come to rest. Zach was almost close enough to smell it, and—

She had moved with speed, blood spilling from her onto him. She had made a final lunge and was past him. Her knees jostled his face.

She was lifted.

A fist might have caught her at the back of the waist, taken a grip on the belt where the pistol had been, and flicked her up. It tossed her, and he was spattered. Wet and mucous, mess and blood spilled over him. He saw, now, beyond her. He watched Mikey.

Mikey came up off the ground, used the shoulder part of his weapon to push himself up and got to his knees. It was as if he were punched. His body shook at the blows and blood was leaking from a shredded anorak. There must have been a last one and it took his neck. His head was wrenched round, and he fell . . . A great tiredness lapped at Zach, and he thought his sense of fight had expired with her, and with Mikey. He saw men coming closer. There were distorted views of boots, knees, and rifles aimed at him. His eyes closed . . . Too tired and too weak any more to care. He thought the sleep, now, would take him.

Zach sank, ebbed. He slipped and reckoned a last journey had begun. The bare skin of her leg, below the knee where the trouser hem had been rucked up, was against his face, and the cold was coming to it. It was in his hand, an identification card, held firm, and the grip would tighten as the hand chilled. He didn’t care, and the darkness gathered round him.

Chapter 20

The crows circled but were wary of the advancing cordon of troops. They made wide loops, poised to take advantage of opportunity. They lived, high on the plateau between the valley walls, on a diet of rotting carcasses: a fox that had starved or a goat that age had caught. If a mule or horse, bringing the trade along the valley, broke a leg in a rabbit’s hole, it would be shot. The birds had enough food for their survival through the winter, but the going would be harder when the snowfalls were heaviest. They took opportunities. Languidly, deceptively casual, they wheeled over the carnage of the action. Had it not been for the troops scurrying forward, the crows would have been down, strutting among the rocks, pecking in eye-sockets and delighting in open wounds.

The day had gone on. The sun dipped towards the west and the valley’s southern wall was thrown already into shadow.

They seemed nervous, the victors, of the fallen. The young men of the Guard Corps units had not before been a part of a close-quarters gun battle of such ferocity. They were shaken by the experience. There was no question, the NCOs forbade it, of treating the bodies with disrespect. At all ranks, they had realised that the charge from the hidden lie-up had represented an act of communal suicide. The bodies were not kicked. Neither was that of the young man who had carried the woman towards them. She was not a ‘foreign terrorist’ to any of them; neither was she an ‘agitator’ nor an ‘enemy of God’ nor a ‘saboteur’ nor an ‘agent of the Zionist state’. She might have been if they had not, all of them, witnessed her final moment of life when she had lifted herself to the full height of elbows and knees and had covered the live grenade two or three seconds before its detonation. The same young men might have cheered, or jeered, as a condemned man or woman was brought to the rope hanging from a crane’s arm, and snapped, with a mobile-phone camera, the moment he or she was lifted high off the ground. Here they showed respect . . . and caution.

The determination of the three men’s charge had been obvious to them because it had taken so many bullets to drop them. The evidence was sprawled on the stones, the grass and across the narrow track. So many rips in their clothing, so much blood. Weapons were not touched and pockets were not rifled. That those men were dead was apparent from the spread of pallor on their unshaven faces, the backs of their hands, and the blood in their mouths, which contained no bubbles from final breaths. The woman had lost her stomach, and the man below her was still, but his face was hidden by her leg. Other than the clatter of weapons and kit on webbing, and the crows’ cries, the valley was quiet. Some wept.