The Corporal's Wife (2013) (15 page)

They climbed and the four engines moaned. The air inside the cabin seemed to sing, and when they levelled out the same sergeant brought plastic beakers of coffee and candy, a thick, toffee-like substance. Music started up on the speakers, country-and-western.

This leg of the journey was 1,500 miles, the American had said, and would take a bit more than four hours, if they weren’t troubled by head winds, or speeded up by gales behind them. Zach had never been in an aircraft remotely similar.

It wasn’t the only thing new in his life. He had heard them out, Dunc and Mandy. Mandy was beside him, and Dunc had a canvas seat on the other side of the guys. Dunc still wore the suit in which he had come to the building site. His shoes had been worked on during the wait at Northolt, a machine in Ramstein had done a fine job and now they shone dully. He had met Mandy at Northolt, with the guys. She was alert and aloof, and he thought she wanted to erase any sign of her femininity. She wore a pair of black trousers, with a matching jacket and a white blouse. Her hair was cut short. Dunc’s talk had taken place in the half-light on the site, and she had reinforced the message in a corner of the waiting area at Northolt.

He had said: ‘It’s a matter that we in the Service regard as exceptionally important, and we’re bending over backwards to make it work, but I would be derelict in my duty if I didn’t emphasise that the risks involved are very real. You’re entitled to turn round, finish your shift . . .’

She had said, ‘You have to be up for it. We’re providing you with the protection we hope is adequate. We’ve asked you because it’s not appropriate, in our current political climate, to put in those who work for government. Same reason as the shooters aren’t from Hereford or Poole but the private sector. Take a deep breath, Zach, and either go through the gate when the flight’s called or make for the exit. You won’t get another chance to choose.’

Neither Dunc nor Mandy had asked why he hadn’t walked. Maybe they weren’t interested. He couldn’t have said why he was there. Justification would come later, he was confident.

The aircraft had long levelled out. There were blinds down over the portholes. It was black-painted, a big beast, and there was a sweet, even rhythm to the engines. The cabin lights were dimmed and the music was soothing. He didn’t sleep, and neither did Mandy, but the shooters did.

They hadn’t welcomed him, but neither had they been hostile. He’d sensed they had eyed, weighed and evaluated him – not unlike when he had first come onto the site, the boss’s boy, and the rule had been run over him. They were his escort and the introductions had been cool: they were Ralph, Wally and Mikey. He thought Mikey, the eldest, ran the team.

The bags had been delivered to the aircraft at Northolt when they were in their seats. They had been carried into the cabin by two Military Police and dumped in a forward stowage area. They had not been opened until they were at Ramstein, with time to kill. The items had been ticked off against a handwritten list on a single sheet, and the shooters handled the stuff with care. Mikey had done the ticking, Wally the sharing out, and Ralph had bagged the items so that each man would have what he needed. For each, 1 SIG Sauer P226 pistol and three magazines, empty, plus 100 rounds. And for each, 1H&K G36K assault rifle and three magazines, empty, plus 200 rounds of ammunition in sealed cardboard boxes. And, also, for each, six smoke grenades, and six ‘flash-and-bang’ grenades. There was a personal medical kit for each, including Zach. He had been shown a tourniquet and bandages, antibiotics and paracetamol, and had stuffed them into his rucksack with his socks, one half-decent shirt, his best jeans, underwear, T-shirts and a thick sweater. A ‘trauma bag’ went to Wally, and the satphone was left with Mikey. None of the weapons was armed and the American, who called himself a ‘loadmaster’, had them all up forward and isolated from them. They had all been given maps, and there was the photograph. Zach had that. It was in a cellophane sleeve.

She looked straight out at him. The eyes in the picture were unwavering and lanced his. She was Farideh, which meant ‘unique’, ‘precious’ or ‘delightful’. Her eyes had challenged him. He couldn’t imagine that, having seen her face, he would turn his back on her. The image was head and shoulders, shot in a street, and was blurred. She had made no attempt to pose. Mandy had told him it had come from the wallet of a defector, who would fail to deliver unless he was reunited with his wife. There was magnetism in the eyes, and he had thought it the more powerful because she had made no effort to please the man behind the viewfinder.

They had given him a map with a red cross on a building, and a satellite photograph of a street, with parked cars, people on the pavements, buses and vans, shop fronts and a doorway circled in the same red ink. Dunc had said, ‘We asked him where his home was, where his wife would be, and he told us the district in the centre of Tehran, the street, number and floor, which side of the staircase, and we thought, Oh, that’s easy. Aren’t we lucky she’s not living under the Supreme Leader’s bed or in al-Qods country, but somewhere nice and easy for extraction like a street in the middle of Tehran?’

He had studied the map and tried to recall where he had been on his one visit, two weeks, and a kaleidoscope’s images had competed.

He hadn’t asked about their firepower, why they thought it was needed. He didn’t know the route in or the route out. The transport churned through the skies, and he realised that Mandy was asleep, her head on his shoulder. He would have liked to root in his rucksack for the picture of Farideh, but that would have woken the intelligence officer and embarrassed her. Zach sat still. He was bewildered by his lack of reaction. He thought he should have been trembling, with surging adrenalin, or wanting to piss himself, and demand answers to a dozen questions, but there was none of that. He was calm and noted that the guys didn’t fidget or lick their lips. They took it in their stride and he copied them.

He realised he didn’t need the picture in his hand because it was sharp in his mind. He had no sense of time or distance, only that the journey had started and that its end was obscure. Her eyes questioned him.

Short of a hundred metres from the window on the first floor of the block, to the right and easy to see from her viewpoint, Jamali sold hardware, every gauge of screw, bolt and washer. A little more than fifty metres to the left, by the street-light, Ali was famed in the neighbourhood for his ability to get failed refrigerators, cookers and washing-machines working again. Farideh was at the window. She couldn’t sleep.

The street was almost empty, and the pavements too.

The men were in shadow, but they smoked and their cigarettes glowed when they dragged on them. There was a back entrance into the block, between a warehouse where a store in the next street kept furniture before shifting it to the showroom, and a prefabricated building in which a businessman stored paint. She assumed that if men were watching, from two sides, at the front of the block, there were more at the back.

She had draped a blanket over her shoulders and held it tight around her. The men outside Jamali’s and Ali’s doors might have glimpsed her skin or her nightdress. Farideh had nowhere to run to, no passport and no money.

She had been told that her husband had fled and was believed to have betrayed his country. It made no sense to her. At no time, in her hearing, had Mehrak uttered even mild criticism of the regime: he had never complained of Iran’s economic difficulties, the unemployment that stopped his brother working, or the foreign sanctions that punished his government. He hadn’t mocked the corruption of the élite. He had been in Iraq and south Lebanon, war zones, for his country, had worked day and night in the service of Brigadier Reza Joyberi. He had never complained or criticised.

She smiled, hidden, and shivered because the window was poorly fitted and let in the cold. She was not complicit in anything her husband had done. She didn’t know where he had gone or on what business. She would have run away if Johnny or the Captain had wanted it. She watched the pricks of light from their cigarettes, wondering if one had binoculars focused on her and could see her hair, her throat, the shape of her body. She understood nothing. Her brother-in-law had come with his mother early that evening to accuse her – but she didn’t know what crime she had committed. The men from the MOIS had been to their home, too, and had interrogated them. Her brother-in-law had the marks of a fist on his cheek, and a bruised eye. They blamed her. No neighbour had offered sympathy or comfort, and all would have been questioned that day. Her father had telephoned, and there had been a crackle on the line, which was usually of good quality. She had sensed his fear.

Mehrak’s family supported the regime, didn’t question its actions. Not one family on Farideh’s staircase would have voted against the Supreme Leader’s candidate for the presidency. Her own father and mother were unquestioning in support of the regime. All, in differing ways, would have felt disgraced by the arrival of the MOIS on their doorstep.

Easy for Farideh to be brave when she had been in the room with Johnny above the repair yard where Highness and Excellency toiled, and when they had made love, seeming to know somehow that their time together would be brutally short. Easy for Farideh to be puffed with courage when she had worn the
chador
and the veil, and rode pillion on the Captain’s scooter, her wedding ring visible, him in uniform, with medal ribbons. No little bastard of the chastity squad would have tried to stop a hero of the military driving his wife out of the city. Easy to be brave. Kourosh had given her nothing and was a mistake.

She stayed at the window far into the night, the lights switched off. They kept their vigil, and so did she. Fear gnawed at her, and she didn’t know what she could do, or where her future lay.

He couldn’t have said whether Rollo Hawkins welcomed the call or not. It was past midnight in the Cantabrians and he’d spent a hard day in his garden, then hours on the viewing hill – rewarded with an adult female and an immature male in good view.

Petroc explained the development, of earthquake proportions, and asked for his thoughts. He had his feet on the sofa, a whisky in his hand, and the house was quiet. He listened to the dry, unemotional voice, sometimes broken by fierce coughing.

‘So many times a woman is at the heart of it, pushes a man over the edge – am I allowed vulgarity? Your uncle liked it – a life turned upside down because of an itch on the foreskin. They might be intelligent men, who have risen high, or cattle drovers, but the urge rules them. We had Oleg Lyalin, in the Soviet times. He had a mistress, a colleague’s wife, and would lose her if he was shipped home. Vitaly Yurchenko was a big catch for the Agency when he defected, but he was infatuated with the wife of a fellow diplomat at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. She turned him down. It was the end of his imagined romance with her and with the Agency. He walked out on them, went home. Yuri Nosenko came to the Agency because while he was a senior KGB officer he’d run up too big a bill on prostitutes and couldn’t fiddle his expenses enough to clear his account. He was another disaster who couldn’t keep his hands off bar maids. Or we could get contemporary – Thank you, dear, so kind.’

Petroc imagined that his small, elderly wife, cocooned in a dressing-gown, had brought him a mug of tea.

‘Wonderful. Where was I? Contemporary. The Russians recently slapped a twenty-five-year sentence on a Colonel Potayev, a senior intelligence officer, hard labour and all the trimmings, except it was
in absentia
. He’s now living in Virginia with his wife. He didn’t slip away until he knew she and their two kids were safely there. For him, it all ended happily, but it doesn’t for everyone. Let’s talk about an Iranian. Am I boring you?’

‘Keep going, Rollo.’

‘You’ll know the story, but it’s worth repeating. The case of Shahram Amiri who defected from his job in health and safety, Iranian nuclear. He toured classified installations giving advice on the dangers of the materials, access everywhere. He was important enough for the Agency to flip him out of a pilgrimage in Saudi, then offer him five million dollars and a new life. Very good – what could go wrong? Pretty much everything – the wife and the small boy. The wife was supposed to be brought out of Iran by the Agency, with the child. Maybe they left the detail of it too long, maybe they thought they could set him up with a blonde. He couldn’t live without his wife and kid, and the pressure on him would have built. Back at home, the regime hassled her, searched her, called her in for rough interrogation. No way she was getting on a plane for the USA and a share of the millions. She was stuck at home, suffering, as was her extended family. He was responsible. He didn’t, of course, ring her direct. Might have tried a cousin on the other side of Tehran, and the cousin called another cousin. Word came back that she was in serious trouble, might be going to gaol or worse. What price then the five million bucks? He turned his back on his new friends and went home. He was pictured in Tehran with a bouquet of flowers, his wife was beaming and he was holding his child high. The spinners did a cock-and-bull story about him being drugged by the Americans on his
hajj
and kidnapped. A few dumb people down in the bazaar might have bought that, but not the people who mattered. He was reportedly hospitalised after the early interrogations, reportedly tried in a closed court when he could stand up again. Reportedly he’ll hang, may already be dead. Petroc, the story of Shahram Amiri shows what happens if a family isn’t moved fast. There’s one difference between your case and his. Ready?’