The Corporal's Wife (2013) (60 page)

He gave the binoculars to the major, and hugged him. That was how Dunc Whitcombe showed his gratitude. The major broke the hold. Mandy Ross did not imitate him.

A military ambulance wound up the hill, turned off the road and into the quarry.

‘What do we do with her?’ he asked.

‘Dead as mutton by the look of it,’ she answered him.

‘She was what we’re here for. They brought her in spite of a contrary order.’

He reckoned it more what men did when they were on the ground, amid the realities, not standing back. He supposed he knew what had to be done. He turned on his heel and went to the back of the quarry. He walked to where Khebat hovered, and waited a moment while a whispered call was concluded. He had his wallet out, and his near-frozen fingers flicked through several hundred-dollar bills. He took out ten. He passed them into a grimy fist and said what he wanted. It would be done, he was assured. He thanked the man for the help his son, Egid, had given. He asked for an email address. He took another note, a ten-dollar bill, from his wallet and the man wrote it across it in pencil. He put the bill back in his wallet. It would be good for a smuggler of class-A narcotics to have an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service of Great Britain in his debt, a worthwhile bonus for a day’s trading.

The arrangements were not his and the major did not try to involve him. Orderlies from the ambulance cut the twine holding the young man, Zach Becket, in place, massaged his ankles and wrists, lifted him from the horse onto a wheeled gurney and hurried him to the ambulance. One of his hands was on his chest and clasped tight in it was a small plastic shape but Dunc couldn’t see what it was. Mandy was beside Zach and held his other hand; his breathing was laboured. His wounds and wet bandaging were exposed before a rug was thrown over his chest and stomach. He didn’t speak. He looked into their faces. Dunc didn’t know whether Zach recognised him or Mandy. Zach’s face spoke of overriding pain and shock, and perhaps a shot of morphine with which the Iranians might have dosed him, or perhaps the numbness that came from an experience that was impossible to share.

Dunc realised that Zach Becket’s eyes were not on him or Mandy, but struggling to hang onto a view of the other horse, where Egid sat, and the figure draped behind the saddle.

The doors closed. The ambulance manoeuvred to clear the haphazardly parked vehicles. Mandy told him it would drive to the airfield north of Van where a medevac bird, a Black Hawk, would meet it and fly the boy to
I
ncirlik. There, he’d get the care he needed. The Americans usually tied up loose ends for them, and their dependence annoyed him.

Khebat’s pick-up had gone, while the child and the two horses were distant, wreathed in the snowfall. Dunc had paid for a decent, respectful funeral – cheap at the price. Soldiers were loading their lorry and the major was a passenger in his open jeep, where a brigadier, who would have been the most prized intelligence catch of the year – for Six, Friends and Cousins – had sat briefly before he was thrown back to his death. A convoy pulled away.

When he was in the car he’d get on his phone, call up a junior staffer from the embassy and have him fly up, first plane, the next morning. The man would go to the town cemetery, witness the funeral and ascertain that Dunc’s money had been well spent.

He took Mandy’s arm. ‘Come on. Time to go home.’

Rollo said, ‘I wouldn’t feel down, Petroc. Defectors are seldom the gold dust we think they’ll be. Look on it as a glass half full. When did it start? A week ago? Not much more. You reacted fast and with due diligence. You extracted material that was otherwise unavailable, drained the beggar dry, and you’ve embarrassed his people. You’ve gained greater credence with our esteemed principal ally. I rate it good, clean-cut at the end. I’m not saying that defectors seldom deliver the goods we yearn for, but too many end up short of that line. Your man, Petroc, has given more than could sensibly have been anticipated, and you’ll have created a storm of epic chaos back where he came from. Scapegoats will be sought, blood will flow and suspicion will spill out. It would all be such fun to watch from across the Gulf – and the silly man went home. A desperate error for anyone wanting to enjoy the sunshine next spring.

‘Anyway, Petroc, here we’ve had wonderful news. Actually, Stephie and I are rather squiffy. Between us we’ve put back a bottle of Freixenet on rather empty stomachs. He’s been located, our bear. He was spotted at first light this morning. Our old boy, who’d given us such heartache, was seen going across a field and one of our younger enthusiasts has been up to the farm, on the east side of Somiedo, and managed to take a photograph of the pad print in a patch of overnight snow. Massive, and the identification can’t be disputed. He’s the absolute prize specimen in our neck of the woods and mountains. He’s magnificent and we’ve been through hell. Anyway, his being seen puts our priorities into perspective. Small things can matter so much. Am I rambling? Probably. My regards to your uncle, please. Do tell him our good news.’

The clocks would change that weekend. Lighter mornings and darker evenings but – at just a few minutes to six – there was still enough light in the skies over London for Tadeuz Fenton to gaze out over the river and enjoy . . . There was much to enjoy. A good session with the Germans, a fair session with the French, an excellent session with the director general, one-to-one and without an aide scribbling shorthand: he had been congratulated on a job well done. He had finished with his colleague who ran the desk in Oman, and they’d talked of a young man soon to be put across the Gulf to crew a relative’s fishing boat with a camera to mark out the coves and inlets where the fast patrol boats, with missiles, were hidden. A fine session.

Sara Rogers was at his door. ‘Go well?’

‘I thought so. He’s going in a couple of weeks. We have high hopes.’

Unusually for her, she queried him: ‘Is it considered a long-term business?’

He watched a tug boat and a police launch passing it. ‘Wouldn’t have thought so.’

‘How long?’

‘Say, four or five weeks before the alarm bells ring. Might be two months. They’re usually rather headstrong, that type of youngster, and don’t calculate risk. Not to worry, we’ll get plenty before he’s in the net.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Please, get the sherry out – don’t want you scratching for it when he’s already here.’

She said, ‘Petroc’s gone home.’

‘Can’t have – we’re talking over sherry . . . You all right, Sara?’

He hadn’t looked at her before now, had breezed in. She was as white as a sheet, holding her fingers to stop them shaking. She told him. He’d been with the DG. Petroc had come in and told her the channel on the communications console to use. They had stood together, not speaking, and listened. The office had been filled with it. There had been the shouts.
Wally, where are you, you bloody meathead? Wally, where the fuck are you? . . . Wally’s down, Mikey. Wally’s down . . . We have to get there, Ralph. Should never have left them. Shouldn’t . . . Gone, Mikey. Down. I’m buggered, Mikey. They got me. They . . .

There had been the shooting, which beat back off the walls of the fourth-floor office on which there was a print of the Annigoni portrait of the Queen, a watercolour of the Cotswolds, and a photograph of Tadeuz Fenton bobbing his head to a cardinal, fully robed. She heard each grenade, and the screams. She said that Petroc had taken a squashed red rose from his buttonhole, held it tightly, shredded its petals and chucked it, a rather expert aim, into the rubbish bin by her desk. She told Tadeuz Fenton what Petroc had said: ‘Sara, if I’d contemplated this scale of casualties, this carnage, I would never have launched it. Fuck the sherry. I’ll be in Dubai tomorrow. If I’d known . . .’ She repeated it, word for word.

Tadeuz Fenton came to her. His hands rested lightly on her shoulders. So calm. ‘We’re rather pleased with how it panned out . . . I didn’t expect Petroc Kenning to show a trace of squeamishness. It’s a war, for Christ’s sake. There are casualties in war. We may have – or our allies may have – servicemen flying over that bloody place, even putting boots on the ground, and what this business raked up will save lives. Isn’t that clear? Enough.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do. We move on. It went well and is behind us. Please, Sara, would you fix a map of the strait, the Hormuz bit and the islands, on a wall where I can see it from my desk? It happened. Another chapter. No one ever said this was work for the faint-hearted or the limp-wristed.’

‘Of course, Tadeuz. I expect you’ll take a sherry after such an “excellent session” with the DG.’

Dunc saw him. The site was beside a main road, flanked by mesh fencing so it was easy to see. He was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with slopping cement.

It was a rare summer’s day, the temperature would have been nudging thirty, was certainly high twenties, with a clear blue sky. He was a fine-looking young man . . . It was eight months since Dunc had seen Zach Becket carried on a stretcher to an ambulance. It was eight months and not much more than a week since he had pulled the lad off a wintry, sodden site, brought him south and captured him with fine words about the ‘national interest’, having the ‘privilege to make a real contribution’ and— He was bronzed and, like all the other men, wore a uniform of heavy boots, soiled jeans and an orange safety helmet.

The two bullet holes were easily seen.

There was a conference at the University of Warwick, a ‘brains trust’ of military, intelligence and academics. They’d come together for a couple of days during the students’ vacation. He’d driven up from London the previous evening, she’d taken the train, and the first session was due to launch at noon. They’d reckoned they had time to get across from the campus and find him.

Mandy had done the work – not difficult. It had been in no one’s interests to proclaim an operation inside Iranian territory with casualties. The contractors’ families, with a cut-off using Contego Security, had been generously rewarded but the details were kept sparse and the impression had been given that the deaths had occurred inside Afghanistan. The Becket parents had been proud to hear that their wayward son had shown exemplary courage for the good of his country. Their reward was a sudden flush of government-funded contracts: a chapel of rest as a new annexe at a local hospital, an extension to a public library, a state-of-the-art sports hall at a comprehensive school. The father would take back the son. It would be whispered that a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time situation had seen Zach caught in a firestorm in an eastern suburb of Naples and hit twice in a rival gangs’ shoot-out. His recovery had been good. Sara Rogers, with her considerable skills, had made the financial arrangements and charmed the family.

Where the holes had healed, indentations remained. One was on the chest, near to the heart, and the other lower down, below the lungs and ribcage. A longer scar was at the small of the back and would have come from a grenade fragment: Dunc wondered how that had been explained away – did the Neapolitans use hand grenades?

They would be there for a few minutes only, and would be back in time to greet guests, have the fruit juice and fizzy water on the tables, with biscuits and sharpened pencils, before Tadeuz Fenton gave the opening address. It had been Mandy Ross’s idea that they divert here, to where a library extension would house IT equipment. He’d thought she seemed well.

Life, as Dunc Whitcombe had learned, was full of surprises. Her husband had met her at Heathrow, with their son, and Dunc hadn’t known she’d sent them a message of her arrival time. Probably for the best, but still dispiriting. She hadn’t looked back, just slipped an arm through the man’s and the other round the child’s shoulders. The next day – at Vauxhall Cross – he’d found she’d been transferred to a desk more directly linked to the Gulf states. In corridors they nodded, at meetings they bobbed their heads in recognition. He made sure, and she did, that they didn’t find themselves alone together, where memories might intrude . . . For the best.

The rule had been broken that morning when he had driven and she had navigated. The past, and Ararat, had been off limits – but Dunc Whitcombe had possession of the rotted log: it was on the floor under his desk and he was bloody well keeping it. The cleaners who ran the machines round the carpet were under orders, pain of death, not to touch it. He and Mandy had not covered anything personal but had talked about the weather, the government and television programmes. The operation to bring the woman from Tehran was not much referred to and the circle of need-to-know’ had held tight.

The sunlight caught the man’s waist, reflected off plastic and flashed at them. He dropped the window and could see him better. A barrowload of concrete was delivered, the empty barrow taken away.

Petroc was back in the Gulf. The flight of the corporal was not a matter for debate or inquest. Dunc had met one of the babysitters when an Afghan warlord had been offered an asylum package with his brood. He’d had a shock of white hair, and the talk had been anodyne, covering holidays: the man had said there was a superb wine-growing hillside on the west side of the Danube – he had been there in the autumn. Dunc had made the connection. Good wines, ruined castles and views to die for: the man had said it was somewhere worth returning to . . . But it was all put to bed and Dunc didn’t know what had happened in the safe house: it was kept behind a ‘firewall’.

Those who had been in Austria would not have known, afterwards, what had been done on the road from Tehran to Tabriz. Neither would they have heard about a deaf-mute boy who had led horses with drugs in their panniers, or the corpse of a woman who had fallen on a grenade, or the badly wounded young man volunteered by the Service. He knew about it, and Mandy Ross did. A minimum had been shared with Tadeuz Fenton and Sara Rogers – enough to justify the spilling of a thousand dollars as funeral expenses. He’d thought it best, on consideration, that the anecdotes were not chewed over, and the business kept local.