Eating Crow (27 page)

W
e heard a shout of “Get down!” and did as we were told, throwing ourselves belly forward onto the cool bare earth. There was a flash and a bang and a rush of white smoke as the doors fell in, so that a little pale daylight reached into the barn, only to be snuffed out again by a rush of men in black jumpsuits and bulbous night-vision goggles, pointing rifles at the shadows and shouting at us. I put my hands over my head and pushed my nose into the dirt.

Lying next to me on the floor, Ellen shouted, “There are no gunmen in here, only hostages!,” like she’d done this before. And again: “Only hostages, only hostages!” But the chaos still had a distance to run. The men surrounded us, filling out the space with their barrels and their barked commands. Just as I was easing into the noise and motion around me, there was a shout of “Above you!” A thick volley of ear-punching rifle shots bashed the air, chased into the echo by a series of thuds onto the barn floor, each one marked by squeals from a few of my companions. Slowly, as the noise died away, I opened my eyes. Lying on the floor in front of me was a fat wood pigeon, the place where its head should be a bloody, awkward stump. The floor was dressed with dead birds.

There was an embarrassed silence. Ellen stood up. “Well, guys, now that you’ve shot out the local wildlife, would you like to rescue us or shall we just stay here and pluck them?”

I pulled myself unsteadily to my knees and then upward onto my feet. The man in front of me stared down at the floor through his goggles and nudged the pigeon with the heavy toe of his heavy black boot, as if checking it no longer posed a threat.

“Believe me, it’s dead,” I said, inheriting a certain portion of Ellen’s clumsy sarcasm. The man looked up at me quizzically, his goggles still in place. Now he pulled them off and, in one smooth action, the black cotton balaclava that lay beneath them. I stared at him, as if unexpectedly spotting my reflection across a room and finding the familiar face hard to place.

“Stefan?”

He frowned and looked around the barn shiftily, like a man meeting an unmourned ex-girlfriend at a party. He looked at everything except me. “Hello, Marc.”

“I can’t believe it. You’re here. Rescuing—”

“It’s what I do. It’s what I’m paid for.”

“Did you know I was—”

“No, I wasn’t told. Just another contract. Count them, gentlemen. There should be sixteen hostages.” He slipped his rifle high onto his shoulder.

“I mean, it’s amazing to see you.”

“Check for injuries. Then load up.”

“Everybody’s fine, Stefan. Nobody’s hurt. We’re just… it’s great to see you. Really.”

Ellen was at my shoulder now, breathless and excited. “This is him? This is the guy?”

“Yeah, my old mate Stefan. Er, Stefan Langley, meet—”

“—Ellen Petersen,
Time
, great to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you. Well, we all have. Haven’t we?” She extended a hand for him to shake, but he looked at it and then at me.

He said, “You’re the man who eats humble pie for a living?”

I smiled encouragingly. “Humble pie, crow. Take your pick.”

He looked down at the ground and kicked the dead bird a few inches further toward me. “Sink your teeth into that, then,” he said, and turned and walked back toward the shattered doors.

I stared at the bird. “It’s a pigeon!” I shouted after him.

He muttered, “Fucking foodies,” and walked out into the daylight like he owned it.

Ellen scribbled something in her notebook. “I sense a certain hostility,” she said.

“It’s been a while,” I said. “He’s probably just surprised to see me. I know I’m surprised to see him.”

Waiting outside in the clearing, their engines marking time, were three gray armored personnel carriers. The hostages were being loaded into the back of them, but I knew I couldn’t just sit there with the herd, playing passenger. I grabbed a front seat next to Stefan in the lead vehicle. As I was pulling the door closed, Ellen yanked it open.

“Room for one more?” she said, slipping in next to me without waiting for an answer.

Stefan opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it, and clenched his skinny jaw tight in the way he used to do when we were kids. He revved the engine, shoved the truck into gear, and shouted, “Seat belts. It may be a rough ride.”

We moved off at high speed down the track through the woods, the carriers bucking and jumping over ruts and rocks as if nothing could unsteady them.

I said, “Is it dangerous?”

“The greatest risk is friendly fire,” he said coldly. “Which reminds me …” He picked up a heavy radio from a compartment in the door. “We’re rolling,” he barked into the mouthpiece, and there was a crackle of message in reply.

“So we’re okay?” I asked.

“They’re
all okay,” he said, nodding backward to the people sitting behind us, necks craned forward to look over our shoulders like kids trying to catch a first glimpse of the sea. “Of course, there’s always the chance that someone might want to shoot
you.”
He gave me a sarcastic smile which ended as quickly as it had begun.

“You saw my apology about you and Gaby and stuff, then,” I said.

He didn’t reply. Beside me Ellen was scribbling in her notebook, her whole body stiffening with the effort of getting our conversation down as the truck bounced along the road.

“I did mean it, you know. What I said, about what I did to you. I meant every word.”

Still nothing. He shifted his hands a little further apart on the steering wheel to increase his grip as we turned downhill on a narrow rutted lane through pine trees. Something roared low overhead and I crouched down in the cab to hide from the noise. Some way off we heard the boom and stutter of bombs exploding. I flinched. Ellen sat bolt upright. Stefan screwed up his eyes slightly as if trying to keep the sun out of them.

“Are we safe?”

“We will be.”

We drove in uncompanionable silence for a minute or two. I had another go. “I mean, I would have said sorry to you in person if I’d known where to find you, but—”

“Did you think about what would happen?”

“I …”

“Did you consider what would happen to me when that was broadcast?”

“Well, I …”

“It’s a good question, Marc. Did you think about what would happen to Stefan when that apology was broadcast?”

“Shut up, Ellen.”

“Did you for a moment think about how my mates would react when you broadcast every sodding detail of my sodding humiliation on global television and my picture appeared on-screen?”

“Well…”

“Did you?”

“God, Stefan. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I just thought—”

“What did you think? You didn’t think, did you?”

“Did you think, Marc?”

“Ellen, please!”

The vehicle shook violently as if punched in the nose. My ears popped and the windscreen filled with a savage blast of light.

“What the …?”

“Mortar,” Stefan said. We had drawn to a halt. The road ahead was fractured by a deep crater latticed with shattered tree trunks. He picked up the radio and checked that everybody behind us was all right and then sat tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. We heard something whistle overhead and explode in the woods a few yards to our right. Again he didn’t move.

“They’re trying to locate us,” Stefan said.

“Shouldn’t we get off the road, then?”

He lifted his hands off the steering wheel. “You want to drive?”

“No, mate. No. It’s just …” Another explosion, further back on the road behind us.

“Everybody who knows me saw that apology of yours.”

“Maybe we could talk about this later when—”

“No. Let’s talk about it now.” I heard a rush of air and a fourth mortar exploded, this time on the road in front of us.

“Stefan!”

“Let’s talk about you humiliating me in front of everybody I know.”

“Stefan, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

“Oh sure, you’re sorry. Now you’re sorry. Now you think you’re going to die you’re bloody sorry. But at the time the only person you thought about was you…” I stared nervously at the trees around us, expecting bullets to spray from them at any moment. So
this
is how it actually ends: here on this blasted track with this man shouting at me and my stomach still empty. Thank you, Max. Thanks so much for setting Ellen up with this distraction; for reintroducing me to my boyhood friend the mercenary, a man who wants to assassinate my character before the mortars are given the chance to finish the job.

“We really should get off the road, shouldn’t we?”

“Actually, Stefan, I think Marc’s right.”

He stared unblinking at Ellen as we listened in silence to the siren whir of another incoming mortar. “Fine,” he said. “Off-road.” He picked up the radio and barked an order. There was another blast to our side and we turned into the woods so that we were battering downhill through the trees, crashing through saplings, barreling over logs, and cutting through clearings toward whatever lay at the bottom. Involuntarily both Ellen and I shrieked. We let out a “Whoooooaaaaah!” that came from deeper and deeper inside our stomachs until it resonated with the growl of the overworked engine cranking out the power beneath our seats. At the bottom of the wooded hill we went headfirst into a deep gully and then up again and over a ridge. Then we broke through the tree line and emerged back onto a road running into open pastureland. Stefan spun the steering wheel and we steadied on the road, the other vehicles swiftly falling into line behind us.

We would be safe now, he said quietly, like a man who has known unsafe and can tell the difference. He told us that combat zones were a “patchwork of risk,” particularly scrappy little combat zones like this one; a few mortars up in the hills, a sniper or two in the gorge, but nothing on the plain. The plain was the best place to be in a scrappy little war. I said “Oh!” and “Yes?” and “Really?” at what seemed like the right moments.

And suddenly I felt fourteen years old again. I was back in a suburban garden watching him dance slowly, his hands on some poor girl’s ass and his trousers tented with lustful ambition. He was the man again, and I was the boy-child who needed rescuing. Out of my depth. Begging for help.

I said, “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“Rescuing me. You like having to lord it over me.”

“I’m doing my job.”

“Sure you are. Playing the big man. You always had to play the big man.”

Stefan jabbed one finger at me. “Do you know the problem with you, Basset? Do you want to know the problem?”

“Go on. Tell me. What’s my problem?”

“You’re obsessed with the past. That’s your problem. You think it’s more bloody important than the present.” He leaned forward to talk across me to Ellen. “Has he bored the tits off you yet about his dad?”

“Well, he
has
mentioned—”

“I bet he has. Every time we went out for a drink, he’d have two pints and that would be it. Dad this, Dad that.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it? Isn’t it? You know what I thought when I heard you’d got the UN job? I thought: Perfect. Now he can wallow in the past. Now he can be paid to talk about his bloody dad.”

“I don’t wallow in the past.”

“Yes you do. You luxuriate in it, mate. Shall I tell you the difference between you and me, pal? Shall I? Here it is: I live with my past; you live off it.”

“Interesting point, Marc. Do you think you live off your past?”

“Leave it out.”

We drove in silence now, all the way to the border and across the river and down to Zugdidi, where the air base was sodden with activity, its approach roads choking with tanks and armored personnel carriers all heading back the way we had come. Helicopters flew low overhead toward the Abkhazian hills, and in the distance, we could hear again the sound of mortar fire and gunshots. My war was progressing well, apparently.

Caucasia Oil and Gas had employed a team of doctors and nurses to look after the hostages, and when we parked they descended upon us, throwing unneeded blankets over our shoulders and offering us cups of hot sweet tea we didn’t want. It was a few seconds before I realized Stefan was walking away without saying good-bye. I called after him.

“Stefan!”

He stopped but did not turn to look at me.

“I meant what I said, you know.” He did not move. “I really am sorry.”

He stayed there, his back to me, as if trying to remember where he was going, and then he began walking. He did riot look back.

I found Cathy sitting by herself on the front seat of an old Soviet-era ambulance, all curves and dulled, dented chrome, parked up against one of the buildings. She was watching the parade of military vehicles passing before her as though it were for her benefit. I tapped my fingers against the window to get her attention and she wound it down.

“Where’s Max?”

She bit her bottom lip and shook her head.