I Am Pilgrim (37 page)

The officer closest to them – a lieutenant by the name of Pete Keating – didn’t bother consulting with his commanding officer, a captain standing several hundred yards away, a man who most of the

squad considered if not downright dangerous, at least a fool. Keating ordered everybody back and flung a cordon round the entire village – something they should have done the moment they set down

but which the captain hadn’t thought necessary.

‘What are the towel-heads gonna do – try and walk down the mountain?’ he had asked. ‘If they’re in

there, we’ll give ’em a chance to surrender. Just yell out, “Hey, fellas – it’s washday and we’ve got the machine,”’ he had said, confirming to his men just what a racist fool he was.

Keating had tried again to convince him to surround the village, was refused and sent the men in

cautiously. Now he was trying desperately to pick up the pieces. He dispatched four men to check on

the two privates – not that he held out any hope – and the rest he deployed in two sweeping arcs to secure the village finally.

Three hundred yards away, the Saracen was running fast, body-swerving, keeping count of every

step – heading for the village well and a steep slope which led to a barely discernible path and, beyond it, the freedom of the mountains.

Had Keating been less decisive and delayed by a minute, the Saracen would have escaped the cordon. But the lieutenant, fine soldier that he was, didn’t hesitate and almost within sight of the path, the Saracen had to throw himself behind the well to avoid four approaching infantrymen.

Now he was trapped inside the iron circle and he knew that the young soldiers were giving the world its best chance of avoiding the catastrophe that had been so long in the making. He crouched

and darted for a low rubble wall. He made it unseen and was back in the streets, where one false step, one misremembered wire, would cost him his life.

The soldiers were moving slowly, checking every building, detonating the IEDs as they found them, advancing in ever-tightening circles. The Saracen sprinted down a curving lane, through an old goat shed, and then had to beat a rapid retreat as he almost stumbled on top of more soldiers. He backtracked past the headman’s house and into a rubble-strewn alley.

In his panicked state, it was a bad mistake: the path ahead was blocked by a pile of masonry. There

was no way back: the encircling troops were so close behind that he could hear their personal communication devices. He unslung his AK-47 – better to die like a
muj
than forced to kneel like a dog – and looked to heaven for guidance.

He got it: the rooftops. If he could only get on to them, there were none of his booby traps up there so he would be able to move much faster. He gambled everything on it – racing towards the approaching troops, trying to get to a stone water cistern before they rounded a bend and saw him.

He reached the cistern, springing on to the flat top and using it as a stepping stone to scramble on to the roof of the old mosque. Moments later, as he lay flat, trying to control his gasping breath, the soldiers passed below. Then they stopped, trying to pick up the noise of anyone moving among the

houses ahead.

There wasn’t a sound, the silence so deep on the mountaintop that Lieutenant Keating – on the outskirts of the village and commanding his men by radio – started to wonder if the village was deserted. Maybe the place had been booby-trapped years ago by the departing
muj
. But why would they do that? The only people likely to reoccupy the houses were poor Afghan families or itinerant

goat herders. No, the more likely explanation was that they had stumbled on some target of high value and the hostiles were lying low, watching. As a consequence, the silence was about the most dangerous thing Keating had heard and he spoke quietly to his squad on the radio. ‘Slowly,’ he said.

‘Take it slow.’

The Saracen forced himself to stay frozen for a slow count of seven. He took off his soft leather

sandals and, in his thick woollen socks, darted silently across the old mud tiles. He jumped one narrow alley, nearly plunged through a hole where the tiles had collapsed and threw himself behind a low parapet. That was when he saw his chance.

Peering through a small gap in the masonry, invisible to the Australians’ night-vision goggles, he

registered soldiers coming down three separate alleys. That was the tightening noose he had to either bend or break if he was going to escape. He put his sandals back on, dug his chin so hard into the masonry it started to bleed, pressed the assault rifle tight into his shoulder and thanked Allah it was fitted with a flash suppressor and a silencer.

A lesser combatant, a man who had never been a guerilla, would have shot to kill. But the Saracen knew his business well – on average it takes seven men to treat and evacuate a badly wounded soldier.

The dead need nobody.

He chose one target in each of the three different alleys. If he hadn’t had a silencer, they would hear the first shot and duck for cover; if it hadn’t been for the flash suppressor they would see his position and rip him and the parapet to shreds with automatic fire.

He fired. The troops didn’t even hear the three tiny pops through their static. One got it in the thigh

– he was as good as dead unless they got a tourniquet on him. One took it in the throat, and there was probably nothing anyone could do for him. And the last had his forearm shattered, which was good

enough for a lot of pain. All three went down screaming, their comrades diving for defensive positions, everybody trying to take each other ’s back.

Good troops, disciplined troops – and these were very good troops indeed, despite their captain –

will do anything for their wounded. In the chaos of trying to help their downed comrades and locate

the enemy, amid the darkness and terror of a firefight, groups of them were forced to scramble from

piles of rubble to gaping doorways.

From behind the parapet the Saracen watched the circle bend – and then crack. It wasn’t much and it

probably wouldn’t last long but maybe it would be enough. He didn’t crouch – he just rolled down the sloping roof, his backpack and rifle clutched to his chest, and went over the falls. He watched the wall of a building flying by – Allah help him if he broke his leg – twisted in mid-air and crash-landed on his hip. The pain almost swamped him, but he got to his feet and ran. This was no time for an old
muj
to whimper or limp: he was a veteran of the most cruel war in decades and he wasn’t going to cry like some Christian now.

He sprinted for the one twisting alley that would lead him through the broken cordon, momentarily

out of sight of a clutch of soldiers thanks to the leaning facade of a ruined house. If the soldiers moved ten feet either way …

He made it through the noose. He passed a crescent moon he’d scratched on a wooden door, hoped

to God he remembered well, and started to count. He ran twenty-five paces forward, took three left,

successfully skirted a buried mine and saw the safety of the mountains directly in front.

From behind, he heard a soldier yelling at his comrades to hit the ground. He fully expected to hear the deafening rattle of carbines and lose all control of his legs as the bullets hit his exposed back and severed his spine. Instead, the soldier had found a trip wire leading to two grenades hidden in a pile of old oil drums. As his comrades hunkered down, the soldier jerked the wire.

The grenades exploded and, in their brilliant flash, Lieutenant Keating – running forward to try to

reseal the cordon – saw the Saracen outside the noose, sprinting for the safety of a group of tumbled-down walls. Keating fell to one knee, slammed the stock of his carbine into his shoulder and fired. He had been trained by Special Forces, so he knew what he was doing: he bracketed three rounds in each

burst and panned left to right and back again fast.

A few inches either way – one lucky shot even – and everything would have been different. But that

wasn’t in the stars that night – high-velocity rounds blasted stone and dirt all around the Saracen but none put him down. Keating cursed the night-vision goggles and the inevitable disconnect between eye and trigger. The Saracen, of course, thanked the hand of God.

He rounded a corner of three wrecked walls while in full flight, jagged left, swerved hard right and, still clutching his backpack and rifle, slid and tumbled down a steep slope and into the all-embracing darkness of a rock-strewn gully.

A young Australian officer had glimpsed him in the flash of a grenade for a fraction of a second.

That was the only time the Saracen was ever seen by either civilian or military authorities. Until I met him, of course.

Chapter Forty

THE AUSTRALIANS DIDN’T pursue the Saracen, which was a mistake, but their mission was to find the three kidnapped civilians, not to chase a lone insurgent. As it turned out, though, in a night dogged by bad luck, there was one piece of overwhelming good fortune: because it was the Australian captain who had taken the round in the thigh, it meant that Lieutenant Keating was in command.

He was only twenty-six years old but he had already done one tour in the ’Ghan, so even at that age

his face was full of years. He came from a little town called Cunnamulla – it’s mostly wheat country that far out west, on the edge of what Australians call the never-never, so hot that the locals claimed a pervert was a man who preferred women to beer – but some of the neighbours ran a few sheep so Keating knew from an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease what quicklime was used for.

That was why, when they finally made it into the kitchen and he saw the two discarded bags lying on

the floor, he felt as if the ground was shifting under his feet. Quicklime was totally alien to that part of the world, and why would anyone have gone to the trouble of carrying it in? Not kidnappers, surely.

He still believed the IEDs indicated that a high-value asset was being protected in the village, but he was no longer certain it was still alive. He immediately told his men to get their flashlights out and start looking for a grave or burial pit.

First they found the charred remains of the stone storage house, and it was while Keating was trying to work out what that meant that an urgent shout rang out.

It was one of the young grunts. Not bothering with his communication headset or correct procedure, he yelled to his mates: ‘I’ve found it – bring me a shovel.’

Keating heard, and he and several of his men came running – carefully because of the threat of unexploded IEDs – to the area behind the headman’s house. One look at the freshly turned soil – deep and wide enough to contain God-knows-what, traces of lime scattered around – and Keating was in no

mood for taking any chances.

‘Get back now! Everybody deploy to the LZ. Move!’

One of the sergeants – like all the others, no idea what was going on – turned to Keating. ‘What about searching the remaining houses, boss? Might be more hostiles.’

Keating shook his head. The elaborate IEDs and the fact that nobody had tried to nail the squad made him certain that the village’s only occupant had disappeared into the night. ‘No, Sarge –

whatever it is, I think we’ve found it.’

At the landing zone – the wounded being treated, the squad’s lone medic trying to get an IV into the captain’s arm – Keating immediately used the secure communications network to put a call through to

their base.

The Medevac choppers were already on their way to uplift the wounded, and the base operator, two

hundred miles away in an air-conditioned blockhouse, assumed the officer was calling to hurry them

up and that pretty soon he’d start whining about how they were on the front line
and all they needed
was some goddamn support
. Just like they always did.

But Keating cut through the guy’s bored update on the choppers and told him they needed a hazchem unit on the mountainside
right now
. Being the army – of course – that started a host of questions, requests for authorization and confusion about the chain of command. Keating knew it could go on for hours, so he yelled at the hapless operator: ‘We may have been exposed – are you

listening? For all I know it’s nuclear. Certainly something serious.’

Like the operator, Keating’s men – including the barely conscious captain – were stunned. For a moment even the rising wind seemed to be swallowed by the silence. Then the operator started speaking fast, telling him to hold on while he opened a host of channels so that Keating could go through the chain of command as fast as possible.

Keating hung up – he knew that losing the connection would galvanize them into even more hurried action: in the army – as in life – sometimes you had to create a crisis in order to get people’s attention. He didn’t believe it was nuclear, but his intuition told him they had stumbled on to something evil and he didn’t know any other way to convey the urgency. He’d already decided he was

going to get his ass busted for overreacting, but what else could he do?

While the staff officers back at base spun into a whirlwind of activity, what none of them realized

was that, if the captain hadn’t been shot, if Keating had grown up somewhere other than in the Australian west, had he not known the look and use of quicklime – if it hadn’t been for these things and a whole lot more – the team of men in spacesuits equipped with their inflatable silver dome and