The Fighting Man (1993) (30 page)

The senior officer was a tall man with dishevelled hair and he wore a silk dressing gown that was open to his body and the singlet and underpants, and his boots were unlaced. Perhaps he had been about to take a shower when the first mortar bomb had exploded, or perhaps he had been changing before his dinner. The senior officer, alone, ignored the stream of men who went under the cover of the rifle and machine-gun barrels to the football pitch, and walked to the shadow darkness where Gord crouched beside Groucho. The senior officer stood in front of them. His shape was thrown forward across them by the flame light. A neatly trimmed moustache, and half-glasses that were askew. Gord thought the man had dignity.

Groucho’s hesitant question, and the senior officer replied, curt, ‘Yes, I speak English.’

Gord pushed himself upright. ‘The surrender is unconditional, do you understand, sir?’

‘My men refuse to fight . . . you are a mercenary?’

‘I asked you, sir, if you understood?’

‘My men refuse to face the fire . . . you are an agent of your government?’

‘Do you understand, sir, the terms of surrender?’

The senior officer stared at him. He would have seen the hollowed eyes of tiredness and the caved cheeks of exhaustion, and the stubble on the cheeks and the black oil smears.

‘I understand them.’

More shooting from the town, a long burst of automatic fire. Gord snapped the orders at Groucho. Men were to guard the prisoners, to escort the medical orderlies, to break into the armoury, to gather together food supplies.

They walked down from the camp and past the guardhouse at the gate. They went through the old streets where the windows were shuttered, the doors closed, they went through the old streets where the
Ladinos
lived. The Fireman and the Academic pulled the cart that carried the flame thrower and the wheels squealed over the cobbles and the wheelbarrow was pushed behind them by the Street Boy, and the Archaeologist was beside him.

The crowd pressed around him. He heard the murmur of a name. Women in bright-coloured blouses, girls in brilliant-red skirts, men with hope alive in their faces, pushing against him, touching his clothes and his body. The name was Gaspar, and the murmur had become a shout. He saw Jorge, beyond the crowd, near the swinging body of an officer, who stared down at him from the church steps. He shouted to Jorge that he should make his speech, draw in his recruits. The crowd grew around him, groping to feel him, calling the name of Gaspar. He saw Zeppo, swaying helpless in the crush, carried along, and could not read his face. He shouted to Zeppo that he should make his way, fastest, to the camp, help with the sorting of supplies. He told Groucho that he wanted to move by midnight, that Groucho should escort the prisoners from the hotel and the senior officer back to the camp. He was Gaspar, he was the spirit of the legend. The blood ran in him. The tiredness and the exhaustion were gone from him. Men reached to grasp his hand, women lifted their small children so they could gaze into his face. He stood near to a wall and the sound of the name beat in his ear. In an entry behind him the Fireman was helped by the Academic to refill the tubes of the flame thrower. There was the smell, acrid, of the thick oil and the hiss, sharp, of the air cylinder. The name was a ferment around him. A button was pulled from his tunic, as if it were a token, and fell to the ground, and men and women and children scrabbled for the prize . . .

The Archaeologist tugged at his sleeve, pushed back an old man without teeth. Foul breath and the whined call of ‘Gaspar’.

‘You have to sleep, Gord.’

‘We don’t have the time to sleep.’

‘You can’t do it all yourself.’

‘When I don’t, no-one else does.’

‘That’s arrogance, Gord . . .’

He had a full head of hair, almost white now.

He wore a well-cut toothbrush of a moustache.

Percy Martins was finely built for his years. He could easily have carried for himself the grip bag and the tackle box and the sleeve for the rods. One of the old guard from front desk trailed Martins along the corridor, bearing his burden.

A day’s fishing, midweek, was not unusual now for him.

Two young men, their jackets already discarded in their offices, ducked their heads to him, and right that they should show some bloody respect. A young woman, carrying a wrapped sandwich and a closed polystyrene coffee beaker, glowered at him, would have been of the new intake that was provincial and force-fed with education, but stepped out of his way.

He clumped into his outer office, past the bat who was now his secretary, not for long . . . unlocked the door of his small room and smiled sweetly as the man stacked his bag and his box and his rods in the corner.

His secretary brought through the signal, passed on by North American Desk.

. . . Bloody people in Washington. Bloody Americans.

Too much shit taken from the Americans, too much rolling over like a whipped cur, tail across the privates . . .

He reached for his telephone, dialled the internal number of North American Desk.

‘. . . You’re level with me. Five had a name, right? We helped Five, right? No Further Action, right? Thank you . . .’

Percy Martins would have considered himself armourplated if it came to inter-departmental argument. He was one of the few remaining of the former men of the Secret Intelligence Service. He had survived, comfortably, the weeding-out process of the new Director General. He had, now, no specific designation, no stated responsibility. He occupied an office that was flanked by Personnel (Records) and Expenditure (In House), on the fourth floor of the new building by Vauxhall Bridge; if he craned from his window, pressed his nose against the glass that could not be opened, he could just see the river. Bits and pieces came his way, things no-one else could pigeonhole, but not too many.

There had been so many who had been cleared out with the move. A scandal. Too many for the formality of even the briefest leaving parties. An utter scandal. Good men, more than twenty years’ service in, and let go on a Friday afternoon with a brown envelope on internal delivery issuing them with fifty pounds of vouchers for the Army and Navy store. Not even a clock, not any more, not even a sherry decanter. Not for ‘Sniper’ Martins, oh, no, not yet . . . The young men and women, with their
good
degrees, eyed him in the corridors with suspicion and yet with envy because his achievement was still talked of, grudgingly. A marksman in the Beqa’a valley of the Lebanon, controlled by Percy Martins. The shooting of a Palestinian assassin, organized by Percy Martins. The presence in a former Prime Minister’s attic loft of a high-powered rifle, de-activated by Royal Ordnance, presented by Percy Martins. More than any of these Johnny wimps of today would achieve, a killing in the Beqa’a . . . The in-tray caught his eye, what the secretary bat had left there. He riffled the sheets of paper. There was his four-page digest, unrequested and written from his own initiative, on the need for closer monitoring of the nuclear warhead stockpile held in the Ukraine, his suggestion for a field agent to be put in; scrawled across the top sheet was ‘Better Left to Satellite Photography’, and then the spider initials of the head of Europe (East/Former USSR) Desk. Intolerable . . . Three stapled pages submitted to Near East (Iran) Desk, detailing the need to aid and arm and control from the sovereign base in Cyprus the Iranian dissidents operating inside mullah-land; ‘Thanks for your interest, will come back to you if relevant’. Disgraceful . . . Accounts wished to see him, personally; his expenses. Bloody cheek . . . The Deputy Director General regretted a full diary prevented the fixing of a meeting; a hands-on and meaningful future. Bastard . . . His position was secure, so
they
attempted death by a thousand cuts. Not his intention to make it easy for them.

He walked out to his secretary. He chewed on a peppermint, spoke through it. ‘Over at Five there’s a creep called Hobbes, I want to see him, soonest . . .’

‘I have just had, Brennard, one of the most opinionated, self-satisfied, under-achieving creatures from Six in this office, not just lecturing me but pissing down at me from on high. I didn’t like it. Why am I covered in this piss . . . ? Because you, in your wisdom, wrote “No Further Action” on the matter of Brown, Gordon Benjamin. Brown, Gordon Benjamin, I think you called him “a total fool”, is currently leading a rebellion in Guatemala that could, if successful, destabilize the region. Ten out of nine for judgement, eh . . . and we just have a series of platitudes to tell us about him.’

‘What do we want . . . ?’

‘Not what we want, the Americans want this
total fool
dead in his tracks. We probably wouldn’t mind helping them . . . Trouble is that Brown, Gordon Benjamin, is our man and we know nothing of him. Am I getting there?’

‘What should I do, Mr Hobbes?’

‘I remember that before promotion out of the nursery, you used to run to Mother.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘Very little is. Get Parker on it.’

It was down by the bridge outside Nebaj that the front of the column met the flotsam refugees from Playa Grande. They came off a track that idled beside the river and Gord saw them as they stumbled and trudged clear of the trees. Children and women and older men, they meant little to him because he was still giving out the orders. Sometimes the orders had been given through Jorge, and sometimes when he could not find Jorge then he cracked those orders himself and left Groucho to translate for him. The orders covered the organization of the march, and who would go faster and scout ahead, and where in the column the machine guns should be carried, and where the food should be, and where the mortars, and where the medical supplies.

He snapped the orders, because he had already been overruled by Harpo. Gord had said that women and children from Nebaj should not accompany the men recruited by Jorge’s speech from the church steps. Women and children from Nebaj would accompany the men, Harpo had said, because otherwise the men would not march. They were a winding column at the bridge, a flickering of torch lights in the darkness of early morning. He had not slept. He was moving forward, hurrying to gain the head of the column, when he saw the debris people of Playa Grande. He was surrounded by what had become his personal guard of the Fireman and the Academic and the Archaeologist and the Street Boy. When he had talked with Jorge, to choose the route of the march, Jorge had stayed silent and it had been Gord’s stabbing finger that had decided on the climb into the 9000 foot-high Cuchumatanes; he was too tired to care that he humbled the leader. He was moving forward, and always there was the obsession drive for speed. The rain was carried into his face by the wind that blustered between the trees by the bridge. His uniform was clinging to his body and he had no warmth left in his arms and chest and legs. The cart was dragged behind him, and the wheelbarrow was pushed behind the cart. He saw her . . . She was at the back of the group. A torch beam found her face then lost it, then found her again. A shrunken man leaned on her right arm, her left arm supported against her shoulder a sleeping child. The dog would have smelled him. The dog bounded forward. The dog’s tongue licked the grimness from his face. She came to him, and she let go of the man and she reached forward and with strength she dragged the dog back from him, as if the dog should not show affection to him.

‘So you took Nebaj?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how many did you kill?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Because you took Playa Grande, the village is now destroyed. Is that what you wanted for Nebaj?’

‘I needed Nebaj.’

‘Oh, “
I
” . . .’ she mimicked him. ‘Yes, “
I
” burned Nebaj, wonderful. “
I
” killed the conscript soldiers. “
I
” didn’t care what happened to those left behind when my precious back was turned . . .’

Gord said softly, ‘What happened to you?’

Her voice rose. ‘Is that important? Is it bloody important that we were hunted by that army? Roadblocks, you know about blocks? It is hardly important that we have run, hidden, been in terror, run again, eaten bloody roots, berries . . . We buried a child, the child died of bloody hypothermia. We dug a grave with our hands, with our fingers. I wouldn’t expect a bloody hero to find that important . . .’

‘You should join the march.’

‘Of course . . . Yes,
sir
. Right, bloody
sir
. Reporting for women’s work . . . Look after the casualties, no medicines. Patch up the wounded, no bandages. Minister to the bloody ego of the men. Why not,
sir
?’

‘You will please yourself.’

‘Don’t you understand, you bloody stupid pig-headed conceited man . . . Stop, before it is too late.’

‘It is too late.’

He was moving forward, away from her, and the wheels clanked in their ritual behind him.

She shouted, ‘Before you destroy everything.’

He muttered into the wind, into the rain. ‘We have to go on.’

The sentry at the gate saluted Colonel Arturo. His staff stood for him as he bustled into his office.