Rat Run

Chapter Nineteen

He no longer pulled against her grip. He could have struck out, could have broken free. Malachy did not struggle and he could feel her fingers clenched in the sleeve of his coat. If he had thought it necessary, but he did not, he could have swiped at her face with his other hand.

He allowed her to hold him and controlled his breathing. He thought she would believe that he had given up on the struggle, unequal, against her. It was three, four minutes since they had heard three shots fired. She would not have known it but all of his studied concentration was on the memory of where the gunfire had come from. One shot would have been hard for him to make the equations of the direction but three were sufficient. In his mind, as he relaxed his arm and let it sag for her, a line was drawn to his right. He estimated that the shots had been fired at a little more than a quarter of a mile from him, and perhaps three hundred yards back from where the soft sand marked the end of the dunes and the scrub, the start of tire drop to the beach. He reckoned that he lulled her.

'I'm not blaming you,' she said, a small voice against the wind. 'You have to see, Malachy, the big picture. It's beyond you now. Don't think, after what you've done and where you've been, that I'm not sympathizing. But – and I've told you – you have to let it go. The big picture is supreme.'

He knew it. There was a slackening in her fingers' grip. He thought that what she had said – no blame, her sympathy – was utterly and clearly genuine. The darkness seemed to Malachy to have come fast, sun sunk, clouds heavier, and he could see only the outline of her face, but he had felt on his skin little sharp pants of breath as she had spoken of the big picture's supremacy.

'You have to bottle it down, swallow it. Hear me…

You've done more than anyone could have asked of you. I only know the bones of your history, Malachy, but I am telling you that no one could have done more to get back what you've lost. If you say that you don't know what happened in that shit place, in Iraq, I am believing you. Already you have the right to walk tall – God, that sounds crap. Now, forget what's personal and see the wider scape… You're not a fool, Malachy, you're not a selfish man.'

One of her hands now rested on his sleeve. The fingers had straightened out and were no longer deep in the material. It would have hurt him to hit her. He could make out the upper point of the dune crest behind him but the gully beside it was lost. Locked in his memory, he had the imagined line that would take him to a point – where a weapon had fired three single shots – where Ricky Capel was. He had no doubt of it: Ricky Capel was at the extremity of the line in his mind. She lifted his arm, and he let her, and her lips brushed the skin at the wrist, then she lowered his arm. He made no resistance.

She said with gentleness, 'I'm out of Prague. There was a guy but it's long ago. Do you think you could get down there, Malachy, to Prague – God, I'm doing the running. Can't you help me? – and see me there?

Walk around a bit, eat a bit, sleep a bit. I'd said to myself, after tonight, that I'd go my way and you'd go yours. Doesn't have to be like that. I'm saying I'd like it, Malachy, if you came down to Prague… '

Maybe there was a wetness behind her spectacles, in her eyes. She had them off. He saw the dull white of her handkerchief and he sensed she wiped hard at her eyes and then her head turned away from him as if, even in darkness, she did not care to show her emotion.

He was gone, away. He had not needed to hit her.

He rolled, fast, clear of her, was on his knees, then pushed himself upright, stamped his shoes for grip and sand spat from under them. He threw the pistol behind him, towards her.

He was into the gully that cut past the crest of the dune.

He heard her. 'Damn you, you bastard! For God's sake, it's not about you. It's for hundreds of people.

You bastard, Malachy Kitchen. Didn't you hear what I said? The big picture?'

Up the gully, on to a path that was narrow enough for the thorn to catch his coat, Malachy ran.

'I found nothing.'

Ricky stumbled back and down into the sheltered hollow, then tripped on his own feet. Falling, arm out, he caught at a branch and tightened his fist, then squealed because he had hold of thorns. The pencil beam of the small torch approached him.

'You got the light, Dean. Don't know what I'm looking for – but I found nothing.'

He heard a murmur but could not make out what he was told. His ears rang, still, with the blast of the weapon's discharge – like he was goddamn deaf. The beam came close, then wavered and fell on the depth of the scrub. Bloodstains were on the ground below the canopy of leaves. From blundering in the thorn-bushes, Ricky's face and arms were scratched, his coat and the waterproof trousers ripped. The gun had been fired beside his face, inches from his ears. It had been so fast. Last thing he had heard was a twig, dry, breaking, and there had been the convulsion of movement beside him, then the hammer of the gun, and he had been heaved to his feet by a hand on his collar – not able to make out the command given him. Had not known what he looked for, had found nothing. He gazed down at the blood, then the torch's beam veered away.

'Who was he? What did you see?'

No answer was given him that he could under stand. What was said was a whisper to him.

'No point staying quiet – you woke the damn dead.'

His hand was grabbed. For a moment he recoiled, then realized it. The grip on his hand was iron tight.

The panic was in him and he was about to lash out, because fear made fury, when he felt the smooth shape of the handle against his fingers. He clamped on it, took the weight of the radio in his hand.

'Right, you tell me, where is he?'

Again the whisper.

'Haven't you got it? I can't hear nothing.'

He stood and shivered, and the shape moved around him as if he checked the ground for anything they had left there. The light came close again, a dull, narrow beam, and it showed the crushed grass, then shone on the barrel tip of the weapon, then started to move off. Ricky had to run two, three strides to catch the man. The radio's case banged against his knee and he swore, then raised his free arm and took hold of the shoulder in front of him.

'It wasn't bloody clever – I don't do mouthing off but it was not clever to fire that bloody gun. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a frightened man, but you could have brought all hell down on us, and that is not clever. Who was it creeping up on us? Did you see him? I'm asking, and I've the right to ask, what-'

He heard, in the clamour at his ears, a hiss of breath through teeth – as if he was shushed, like he was a kid talking out of turn. They were on a path and they climbed and the beam lit a jolting patch of ground in front of each of Dean's steps and the torch was held low down. If he had not held on to Dean's shoulder he would have spilled off the path and fallen into the scrub. For a moment the beam lifted and found a strip of torn cloth and there they had to push their way, him first and Ricky following, between thorns. He had pain, but the fear was worse.

When had Ricky Capel last known fear worse than pain? Couldn't bloody remember it. He saw the face.

The face was on the pavement and the street light fell on it. He thought the face followed him, the face from Bevin Close – and now it tracked him… Three shots fired. Blood on the ground. No body. Not a scream and not a whimper. He thought the face laughed at him. Bad fear stalked Ricky Capel, like the face did.

He clung to the shoulder, hung on to it as a blind man would. Never before, not as a child had he felt bad fear… and he thought the man came after him, dripped blood and followed him. He strained to listen for the footfall behind him but in his ears was only the ring, the clamour, of the gunshots.

'I screwed up,' Polly said. 'I screwed up big.' She sat hunched, her chin on her knees and the phone pressed to her face. 'I can't believe it, how pathetic I was.'

The darkness enveloped her, clung round her. He'd answered her call, now Gaunt's silence echoed back at her.

'I gave him the party line. I called it the big picture.

What I'm saying, Freddie, is that I thought he'd accepted it. You know, his little concerns outweighed by the needs of the masses. He didn't argue. Three shots were fired somewhere out in this bloody place -

God knows where – but I'd given him the instruction.

No intervention. Sit, watch and report. He listened, seemed to swallow what I gave him, then quit on me.

I don't know where he is… Freddie, it is so damn dark here you can't see the end of your nose, and I don't know what he's going to do. I'd given him a gun

– pretty damn stupid, you don't have to tell me – but he chucked it back at me, like he wouldn't be needing it. What's in his mind? I just don't know.'

She was the daughter of schoolteachers. It had been drilled into Polly Wilkins that to admit failure, own up to error, won its own rewards in heaven. Most colleagues who had shared desks with her at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, she thought, would have wormed, wriggled, from admission of failure and error. The response in her ear was a long, measured sigh – she reckoned it not of anger but the sadness of disappointment.

'I will, of course, do what I can to give due warning of any pickup. I have to say that a lift off the beach will not be fun. It's a foul evening and it's not changing…

What's worst, Freddie, I miss him. It was sort of good having him here. What I realize, he's not missing me, just dumped me, a bloody used fag carton… I don't know where it's going… Nothing much else to say.'

'I won't be here myself, but calls to this number will be routed to the necessary people… Thank you, Wilco.'

He knew what she meant. Frederick Gaunt could empathize, knew what it felt to be a bloody used fag carton and dumped. He rang off, pressed the button that deactivated the phone's scrambler. He sensed that Gloria hovered behind him and thought her mouth would be slack with astonishment. It was, he believed, a defining moment of his adult life: I won't be here myself. He could have reflected on other such moments of importance that had fashioned his career and domestic existence – a loveless marriage, the bitter process of divorce, children taught to reject him, the first night of utter loneliness in an old man's bach-elor apartment – the initial occasion when the WMD report had been smartly returned to his desk for re-appraisal, the meeting when he had been lectured on the requirement of politicians to find meat and not scrag ends in the Iraqi desert, the summons to an office on an upper floor, the averted eyes and barked voice telling him that Albania was his new area of interest, the last session in the pub with his old team before they were scattered to the winds. He could have reflected on any of them and could have claimed each of them as a defining moment. Top of the heap, and he knew it, was telling pretty little Polly, frozen half to death on a God-awful beach, that calls to this number will be routed through to the necessary people.

He heard her clear her throat, a brief cough, to demand his attention.

'Did you mean that?'

He said peevishly, turning to face her, 'If I said it, Gloria, I expect that I meant it.'

Her face was wreathed in bewilderment. She stuttered, 'It's coming to an end… It's the last hours…

It's what you've worked for.'

'And it is not, my dear, in my hands.'

'You owe it to Polly to be here.'

'I owe very little, not even pocket change, to anyone.'

Lines creased her forehead and mouth. 'But the threat… What about the threat?'

He stared into the confusion of her eyes. 'Someone else's problem now. Polly's problem, a crisis committee's problem, but I fancy not mine… I have, Gloria, carried the problem of the bloody threat too damn long – it's been a lifetime of carrying it. Cold War threat, Irish threat, Iraq threat, al-Qaeda. threat.

You name i t… Don't you understand that the threat has buckled me? Every day, every night, the threat is on my shoulders. Well, not any more.'

'I never thought I'd hear it, not from you.'

He grimaced, then shrugged. He saw her turn on her low heels and she clattered out. The door was slammed, which would not have been accidental. He went to the wardrobe against the wall, slipped off his jacket, unbuttoned his waistcoat and loosened his tie.

The man, Malachy Kitchen, was without corporate baggage and was not answerable to a crisis committee, or to the 'party line' peddled by Polly

'Wilco' Wilkins. Gaunt dragged his laces undone and kicked off his shoes, dropped his waistcoat on to them, unhooked the braces and let his trousers fall. He opened the wardrobe's doors and took out a hanger – which carried the name of a Singapore hotel from where he had appropriated it a dozen years before – and put his suit on it. He took another hanger, from the Inter-Continental in Helsinki, for his shirt. He remembered what the old lady had said, as he had taken tea with her, of a man who did not boast and did not go after trophies, who faced challenges, each of them harder than the last, to claw back his self-respect, and she had said, If you ever see him, you give him my love, and he remembered what Bill, who had the rippled muscles of Special Forces training and who arrogantly wore a shapeless cabled sweater, had demanded of Wilco: And tell her to keep old White Feather clear – not that he sounds like a hero – right out of it. He realized he rooted more for the man, the free spirit, than for the big picture – and it was better he was gone, and soon. From an old rucksack on the wardrobe floor, he took a shirt, trousers and sweater – all caked in dried mud – boots and a rainproof coat that had over-trousers folded into an inner pocket.

He dressed, hitched the rucksack on to his shoulder and went out through the darkened outer office, past Gloria's cleared desk – and past the phones from which Polly Wilkins's next message would be routed to the crisis folk. Gaunt had the look of a jobbing gardener on his way to an allotment plot as he made his way to the lift, and he imagined the pleasure ahead of him and did not know, or care, of chaos left behind him.

Oskar left behind him the ducks, his true friends, safe in the darkness from predators.

He crawled on the track. He had set himself a target that he must reach and the pain that had overcome the shock of numbness was alive in the three wounds on his body, but he welcomed it. If there had been no pain, only exhaustion and weakness, he would have felt a clinging urge to settle in the mud and reeds beside the pond and sleep, and if he slept he would not achieve his target… First he had lain in the scrub and had heard voices and crashing movement around him but a thin torchlight had not pierced the depths of the thorn bushes that had been his immediate refuge.

They had gone. They had blundered away, and then he had moved. Sometimes he had been on his stomach, but a few times he had been able to stand, sway, stagger, and he had known that when he was on his feet he lost more blood, and with each step the pain was more acute.

He thought the pain was his penance. He thought the blood he lost was contaminated by an old atrocity.

He thought he deserved the pain for the evil done by a man whose blood he shared. He thought he had cleansed himself by breaking the light set in place by the strangers who had come and threatened paradise.

Oskar had no clarity of thought because the pain destroyed it.

He had told the ducks, in a reedy, bubbling whisper, that he would not be back.

Now he did not have the strength to stand, to walk.

He might have the strength, if God were with him, to crawl part of the way to his target on his knees and elbows, but first he would wriggle on his stomach and lever himself forward. He prayed that the strength, little of it left, would last him.

Above him the wind sighed and the rain spattered down and he writhed on the path, made slow, agonizing progress, and left behind a trail of poisoned blood.

Ahead was a distant light, his target if his strength lasted.

He sat on the bench in the cell. His belt and shoe laces had been taken from Timo Rahman. He sat because if he had stood and paced the cell he would have had to hold up his trousers or let them slump to his ankles. A light, protected by wire mesh, beamed down at him from the ceiling.

The cell stank of old faeces, urine and vomit. It was cold, bitterly so, because the high, barred window was open to the wind and rain dripped from its aperture on to the prisoner on the bench bed.

He was offered no respect, no deference.

His lawyer had sat beside him in the interview room. He had been shown a preliminary report from a police doctor that listed his wife's injuries on half of a single sheet of paper. The lawyer, German, gross and expensive, had read the report first and Timo had seen him wince. He had known then that the man – on his payroll for nine years – would have little stomach for a fight in his defence, and had not challenged the right of Konig to put his questions… only three of them. Had Timo Rahman, himself, attacked his wife?

If he had not, himself, attacked her, had he authorized the scraping-off of skin from her body? If he had not, himself, authorized the attack, did he know who was responsible for the assault? He had been told that his housekeeper and chauffeur were in custody and would subsequently be interviewed, and that their statements would be matched with his. He had not answered any of the three questions. If they had given him the respect that was due, he would have expected Johan Konig and the woman officer with him to demonstrate frustration, but the coldness he had seen at his home was still alive in their faces, and the contempt. His lawyer had fled the interview room after leaving him little hope of bail.

Isolation settled on him. Timo Rahman did not think of the island, or of the man he had been paid to ship across the water, or of Ricky Capel who, he now realized, had lied to him, a lie he had taken in, a lie that would destroy him. He thought of wolves.

In his mind were the wolves that came down, long ago, from the mountains. Emaciated, foul-breathed, bare to the skin at the haunches and tail from mange, and they circled a failing fire. Corralled inside the fence were goats with kids and ewes with lambs. He sat with his father beside the fire and darkness masked the high ground above the village near Shkodra. Across his knee, held tight, was a loaded single-barrel shotgun, and his father had an old German rifle, and they could hear the wolves and smell them. When the wolves were closest and the smell was bad, when they were boldest from the hunger pangs of winter, the wolves came right up against the fence and then his father would hurl at them the branch from the fire that burned brightest and they would scatter, but they would return.

Always a dog wolf led.

There had been a year when the high snows had lasted into spring and beyond the time that the kids and lambs were born, and starvation had been the enemy of the wolf pack. The pack leader had not been driven back by fire. His father had shot it, as it prepared to launch at the fence, with his Gewehr 98

Mauser rifle, and it had fallen dead with a head wound. The goats and ewes, the kids and lambs had stampeded and screamed with fear. His father had gripped his arm, had pointed to the downed pack-leader, face alive with excitement. Father and son they had watched. First the wolves had fled to the darkness, then had been emboldened, had circled in the shadows and scurried forward – many targets, but his father had not fired. The wolves had torn apart th( carcass of their pack leader, had fought to eat, rip swallow, savage it. Timo, the boy, had watched power gone and when nothing was left on the ground beyond the fence – not a bone or a meat scrap, no fur not a morsel of skin – the wolves had retreated to the night's safety.

He had never forgotten the sight and sounds of the destruction of a fallen pack leader.

That evening they would be circling. Wolves would be abroad, would be coming near to a mansion in the Blankenese suburb, would be edging closer to casinoe and shops, bars and brothels in the Reeperbahn would be marching on more casinos and more shops more bars and more brothels in the Steindamm. He had done it himself. He, a leader of a wolf pack, had buried Germans and put Russians into the trunks of cars. Word would have spread. If it were tax evasion or the corruption of local officials, living from the rewards of vice or sex-trade trafficking, or involvement with an Islamic group for which he was investigated, then his lawyer would have fought, tooth and claw, to win his freedom. But he was investigated for the peeling of live skin from his wife's body. Who would stand by him? Who would believe he could return to a pre-eminence of power? He saw wolves. Wolves were on a cell-block landing when he returned from exercise in the yard. Wolves moved into casinos and shops, bars and brothels. He seemed to feel the heat of wolves' breath and the smell of it – because he had believed a lie. And they edged nearer and their teeth were bared.

Timo Rahman screamed.

He was not heard. The cell's walls closed around him.

A Europol advisory landed on Tony Johnson's desk.

He had his coat on and was preparing himself for the evening struggle on a commuter train when the clerk brought it to him. It already had a half-dozen sets of initials on it but – what else to expect in this perfect bloody world? – it would end with him and he was to field it… His eyes scanned the single page, and he gasped, shook, and flicked it into his in-tray for the next morning's attention. Then he punched the air.

For a detective sergeant with a reputation, deserved, for carrying equally weighted chips on each of his shoulders and for spreading contagious gloomy defeatism wherever he walked, his stride down the corridor was emphatic with cheerful energy. That morning he had repeated his refrain at the weekly meeting of colleagues to hack at current problems that drugs and organized crime, and their effect on the great mass of the capital city's punters, were on the back-burner, ignored and victim to the swollen resources pushed at the War on Terror. At the ground-floor lobby, swiping his card, he blew a kiss at the lady on Reception, and saw the shock wobble on the face of the duty guard beside her.

He went out through the swing doors and on to the street, imagined he heard the guard's question, 'God, what's the matter with that miserable beggar?' and imagined he heard the lady's answer, 'Must be that he's got hot flushes, or he's on a bloody good promise, or it's the lottery.' What he could have told them was that a Europol advisory had reached his desk and stated that police in Hamburg had arrested the Albanian national, Timo Rahman, on charges of grievous bodily harm and wounding, and that officers on the case urgently requested co-operation from European colleagues on all links between Rahman and criminal organizations for immediate investigation while Rahman was in custody, and vulnerable

… What he could also have told them, on the reception desk, was that he had contributed – damned if he knew the detail of how – to the life of an untouchable going into the gutter.

On the pavement he turned heads as he laughed to himself like a maniac. 'You done us proud, Malachy. I hope you've a drink in your hand because that's what you deserve. You've done us proper proud – I hope it's a damn great drink and then another.'

Malachy had rainwater in his eyes, ears, nose, had it weighing down the clothes on his back and his legs.

He quartered ground, was inland from the highest dunes. He moved, alternately slow and fast. When he went slowly it was to listen, because he could see so little, and then he shook his head hard. His fingers went into his ears to gouge out the wet, but he heard only the wind's bluster and the pattering of the rain.

When he went fast, he held to what he believed was the line towards the source of the gunfire and often he thought he had lost it and that his instinct failed him.

Going fast, on a track, his shoes, with their worn tread, slid from under him.

He fell, went down. The breath squeezed out of his chest and his hands flailed. When they hit the mud it was not tackiness they found, but something slicked, wet, but not like mud. Malachy felt the surface of the path, realized its smoothness – as if mud had been pressed flat by a solid weight and then the slick had been left. He could not see more than the outline of his hands but there was darkness on his palms. He believed that it was blood and that the mud had been smoothed by a man's body. He thought, where he was, a wounded man had rested, then crawled forward. But Malachy did not follow the trail, and he tried again to find his line.

He came to the pond. A little of the reflection of the water shone back at him through the reeds. He saw, as a silhouette, the shape of the viewing platform where he had put his shoulder against a support post… In a crash of noise, and he froze, ducks fled – splashed, beat their wings, screamed – and he could smell the body of the old man, as he had done at the platform.

Malachy had warned her that it was a crime to involve others and risk hurting them. She had involved the old man, had picked at his isolation with honey words and pleading eyes, and he had been shot and crawled towards a refuge. She had rounded on him – what did he think she had done with him, if not involve him? He had said: I'll pick up my own pieces. He would. She – sweet girl, warm girl with a taste of sadness – did not own him; nor did those who controlled her.

In his mind, he adjusted the line.

He came to a hollow. He found a plastic bag caught on thorns and near it a Cellophane packet that would have held a shop-bought sandwich. Maybe it was because the cloud weakened in its density and a trickle of the moon's light came through, but small shapes gleamed and then their brightness died. He picked up three discarded cartridge cases. On his hands, on his knees, feeling with his fingers, he found the trail they had used and the indents in the mud.

Later, Malachy came to the first marker: a strip of cloth tied to a branch.

He wanted to stand bare-faced in front of a mirror with brilliant light shining on his skin and coming back from his eyes. He wanted, as he had not done for a year and a half, to examine that face and those eyes, to search for a truth and know himself again. He would not know himself until he had hounded down Ricky Capel on the beach ahead where the sea stampeded the waves… Then, not before, he would learn if he was a coward, and the word beat in his head as he went forward and looked for the next marker.

19 May 2004

The old man walking towards the sandbags at the gate was hazed by the high sun.

On sentry duty with machine-gun, Baz had called for Sergeant McQueen to come, double bloody quick time, to Bravo's gate.

The old man came slowly on the raised road from the village, hobbled forward and used a stick in his right hand to ease his weight.

Scanning him with binoculars, Hamish McQueen had called for the major to get, soonest, from the operations bunker to the gate.

The old man was alone, wizened, and an SA 80 assault rifle dangled from his left hand and against his thigh, half hidden by his robe.

'Do I slot him, sir?' Baz asked, and his eye was against the sight of the machine-gun, his finger flexed on the trigger's guard.

'I don't think so, no.'

It was for the major, the commanding officer of Bravo company, a moment of extreme inconvenience. His place was in the bunker where his clerks had for him a mountain of paper. He watched the old man and the rifle he carried through the binoculars' growing clarity. In two hours he was due to welcome to Bravo the advance force of the infantry unit that would relieve them after their six-month tour of duty. Like a hole in his skull, he needed the distraction of an old man coming to their main gate… He had laid down that the relieving force would not find justification for even a damned small complaint at the state of the camp left for them. The old man carried a weapon that was not used by the ragtag fighters in his area of responsibility

– they had the AK47 and its variants – but had against his leg a rifle that was exclusively used by British soldiers, the SA 80. He checked that his interpreter was behind him, saw Faisal leaning against the back of the sandbags, smoking.

The major prided himself that he was blessed with a nose for danger. For the last week he had cut back on the company's patrolling, had reduced it to force protection – guaranteeing the security of Bravo's perimeter – and had withdrawn any troop movements from the village. He had dreaded losing a Jock for nothing in the last hours of th deployment, wanted all of them on the flight home to Briz Norton. He sensed no danger.

On his belt was a service pistol, and he unclipped the holster's flap. He told Baz, the machine-gunner, to cove him, and asked that Hamish McQueen be at his side. He waved for the interpreter to follow him. He walked down the entry road to Bravo's gates, then strode briskly along the road to meet the old man.

He ducked his head, smiled, and introduced himself through his interpreter. The old man transferred the rifle ponderously to his other hand, juggled it with his stick and gave his name. He shook the major's fist with a good but bony grip, then gave him the rifle. On its stock was the reference number in white paint. He knew it. Every man in the unit bloody knew it. A lost high-velocity weapon's reference number had been dinned into the heads of every Jock, NCO and officer who had been tasked for house searches since the late-afternoon patrol of 13 January – its recovery had been an unfulfilled priority. He gave it to his sergeant for checking and making safe.

The interpreter murmured in his ear, 'The gentleman, Mahmoud al-Ajouti, has heard that the British persons are going back to their country and thought it correct this weapon be returned… It is his apology that it has not been done before.'

'Please tell Mr al-Ajouti that I am grateful.'

He remembered, with the clarity of yesterday and not of three months before, what he had seen that day and what he had been told, and the gist of what he had said: 'Put him somewhere in isolation where he can't infect anyone else…

I don't know how you'd ever get shot of it, being called a coward

… I can't imagine there's any way back.' The man had been sitting on a chair outside the command bunker, head hangdog, expressionless, silent. He had heard, from the vine, that the man had been shipped home, but his failing was talked of, still, in every mess and barrack room used by the battalion.

'Would you ask Mr al-Ajouti in what circumstances the rifle came into his possession?'

What he was told, through the hesitant voice of the interpreter, first confused the major, then rocked him.

'The soldiers came up the street where Mr al-Ajouti lives above his place of business, a bakery shop. They knew, everybody in the street knew, that an ambush was prepared, was ready, for the next soldiers, the next patrol, to come on the street. His son, his son is called Tariq. He had brought heavy stones, football-sized stones, into the home above the shop and had a window open enough to throw them down.

Mr al-Ajouti did not know of the stones and he was in the back of his home with his wife and his younger children.

Tariq is the eldest of his children. He does not think blame should be given to his son, Tariq, because all of the older children in the village are encouraged by men of the Mehdi army, followers of the imam, to hate soldiers – he regrets that. A soldier stopped outside Mr al-Ajouti's shop. His son told him afterwards, that is how he knows it, the soldier was lying on the ground, and his son, that is Tariq, threw down a stone and it hit the soldier's neck, which was not protected by the edge of his helmet. The stone, the size of a football, stunned the soldier – that is, he was made unconscious. It was just after a grenade had been fired into the wall near the window where Tariq was. His son – Mr al-Ajouti, at the back, did not know this at that time – went down the stairs and opened the door of the shop. He took the rifle and took the stone back into the shop. The rifle, it was hidden under his bed, and the stones he took to the yard at the rear where they had come from, from a wall that had fallen. For sixteen weeks the rifle was under his bed, because his son was frightened of having taken it, and was frightened of giving it to the Mehdi army. Yesterday, Mr al-Ajouti's wife found the rifle. Yesterday he questioned his son. Yesterday he found the truth, is certain it is the truth, of how the rifle came to his son's room, and of how the soldier was made senseless. He begs forgiveness for his son. He is ashamed for what his son did. He begs it is not spoken of in the village, his returning the rifle. If it is spoken, his life will be taken by the Mehdi army. He hopes it is enough that he has returned the rifle, that his son will not be punished. Later, children came. They took the soldier's helmet and the coat against bullets. It is the flak-jacket. Mr al Ajouti apologizes for the action of his son. He wishes you well on your return to Britain, to your families.'

The major said curtly, 'I am grateful to Mr al-Ajouti, and I can assure him that his son will not be punished, and that the taking of the rifle will not be spoken of.'

From his hip pocket, the major took a wad of dinar notes, probably the equivalent of what was put over the counter in a village bakery in a week, and pressed them into the bone-ribbed hand. The old man bobbed his gratitude, then turned, then started out on the raised road to return to the village, his bakery shop, and his home.

The major strode towards the sandbags, the machine-gun and the gate. His words snapped from the side of his mouth:

'I think, Faisal, it is a matter that is dead, buried. If you were to speak of it you would betray the trust placed in you by the British army, and your employment would cease.

Understood? Hamish, it is a business best forgotten. I think your role, and mine, in the affair concerning allegations made against Mal Kitchen, would not now sustain close examination. Yes, best forgotten.'

'Forgotten, sir, already forgotten.'

'Found on wasteground, hidden there, handed in by a local who was unable to give an exact location – that'll fit the paperwork… No medals for digging up the past.'

'None, sir. I'll see the word goes round, found on wasteground.'

They walked back through the gate. Bravo's major returned to his bunker and the preparations for withdrawal.

He had names but no identity. He had been Anwar Maghroub, born into affluence in a suburb of Alexandria, but the character of the child was lost.

The voice behind him beat at the back of his head.

'What I'm telling you, Dean, and true – I'll be so damn bloody pleased to be finished with this. If you'd told me, anyone had, a month ago that I'd be flogging myself through this place, cold like I've never known it and hungry, I'd have told them to go jump.'

He had also been Sami, a student of engineering, with a girl and with friends who understood the rigour of sacrifice, but the personality of the pupil had gone.

'A month ago, I wouldn't have thought I could do this, go through it and still be on my feet – wouldn't have been able to, not without having a friend with me, and it's because I'm tough. It's what makes me a leader. Others come to me and know that I'll lead them. Lazy sods, all of them, and feeding off me. They feed off my brains and my energy.'

He had been Abu Khaled, conspirator and activist in the Organization, who had studied and learned the lessons of success in attack and failure in security, but that man's mind was outdated and finished with.

'Because of you, what I've learned from you, I am telling you that things are going to be different when I'm back, up and running – damn different. No passengers in my team and no bloodsuckers. Slim and lean, that's what you are, and that's what I'm going to be, and ahead of the game. In my crowd, they'll have one chance and if it's blown then they're out, out on their bloody arses. Best thing that ever happened to me was meeting up with you, and that's

God's truth. I'm surrounded by passengers and suckers, but not for long. They'll scream, but I won't be listening.'

He had been Dean, goalkeeper for a team he had not heard of, who listened without response to the ramblings of an idiot, but the character, personality, mind of that fantasy had never existed.

'I've got my cousins, three of them, giving me grief.

I've got old Percy, who's all disrespect, and what I know is that he loathes me. I've got Mikey and Sharon, that's my parents, and they live bloody well off my back. I've got Joanne and Wayne, he's only a kid and doesn't know better, but she's got the hump with me… and there's a bloody great crowd like a spider web. They all live off me

… I'm telling you, there's changes coming. I like a lot about you, but I like most that you go alone. I reckon it's class to go alone. You and me, it's good we're together.'

He was, now, Milan Draskic who held a Slovenian passport and was a co-ordinator and sent to erase failures of security and to drive home success in attack, but he had not yet learned to live inside the thoughts and skin of that man, and- They had come past the five marker cloths he had left on branches. He stopped dead, and gazed forward – not at the whitecaps and the surf, not at the horizon – and the idiot cannoned into him. He saw, at the top of the dune in front of him, the three legs of his tripod, but not the flashlamp.

'What's up?'

He said, quietly, with his hand shielding his voice, that the flashlamp, as he had left it, was gone from the tripod.

'What's that mean?'

He said, his words protected from the wind, that he had built the tripod in daylight so that it would be secure, fastened the flashlamp to it and aimed its face to the sea. He had lashed it in place by daylight so that its beam would be steady when it was used. He heard the first sliver of the idiot's panic.

'Well, you didn't tie it tight enough, did you? Got to bloody find it, haven't you? Didn't allow for the bloody gale, did you?'

He sank down into the softness of the sand and felt with his hands and the grains ran through his fingers, but the flashlamp was not at the base of his tripod's stakes.

'Got to be there, hasn't it? Got to be. Can't have bloody walked off, can it?'

The idiot was beside him, on his knees, and his hands were sweeping at the sand, and the idiot squealed.

'Cut my bloody self on glass. It wasn't the wind -

Christ, it wasn't – that shifted it.'

His fingers found the flashlamp, buried, and they ran over shards from its face, and touched the broken end of the bulb where it went into the socket.

The panic became more shrill. 'No light! How the fuck are they going to find us? Out in this shit-heap, how they going to get to us? What'll guide them? You fucked up, putting the light up and leaving it, fucked up big-time. No light, how they going to bring the boat in?'

He had only the pencil torch and a beam with a range of only a few metres.

'It's all round us. Don't know where. The old jerk you shot. The guy who came over the fence, and I lied about him. All round us, and we don't know how close… Can't bloody see them… Watching us

…

How we going to get off of here? You know it and I know it, they're watching us and round us… maybe close enough to bloody touch us. What we going to do?'

He pulled the radio set over the sand, slipped the clasp on the case, opened it, threw the switch, reached out and dragged the idiot close. He felt the shaking fear – and he listened. He heard only the set's static whine and the wind's buffeting.

'You are taking a hell of a chance, Dad. A chance with me in the dinghy, with my boy, with the boat, with yourself. You know that, Dad. And now you're saying they've no light. Going in with that dinghy, it's going to be six shades of hell. I reckon it's one run, that's all. I can't be stooging there, not in that surf.

They'll have to be out in the water, deep enough so I don't snag the outboard, and have to be ready. How am I going to find them if there's no light? Is the money that good? Have you thought, Dad, of just turning round and getting on home?'

What Harry Rogers knew, as he listened to the carp of his son, was that he required two fathoms minimum of draught under the keel of the Anneliese Royal, and twelve feet of water would put him a minimum of four hundred yards from the beach. The dinghy would need three feet of water and it would not come closer than a hundred yards from the beach

… The trawler and the dinghy would both be bucking in swell. The low clouds and the rain's mist would screw his view of the TG15 buoy and the Accumer Ee light and he needed both to get in near. He reckoned he was three hours from getting far enough to the island to launch the dinghy, and the chart in the wheelhouse showed him sunken wrecks, sunken obstructions, and supposedly cleared areas of dumped explosives. There were gas pipes and telephone lines under them, and if they snagged one of those bastards by going off course, they were screwed.

They were on the northern edge of a section marked as Submarine Exercise Area, not that – in these sea conditions – a periscope would be slotting up. The boat yawed, fell into troughs and climbed waves, and his grandson was again retching at the bucket.

Harry said, 'I thought about it, yes, ditching them – but that's not my way. I'll use my light, keep it on you while you're taking the dinghy in, and they'll have to shift themselves and come to you… That's what I told them. Can't do better… You want to hear me say it? I'll say it – I would not dare to ditch Ricky Capel, and that's more important than the fact that I gave my word.'

He was close enough to hear them.

Malachy thought it the perfect battleground.

He had been drawn to the right place, alone, to stand and fight, unseen by any witness. He felt a great calm, and peace, and he thought a road ended here and that he was within sight of a pyramid's summit.

He rested his fingers on the dog-tags at his throat.