The Corporal's Wife (2013) (16 page)

‘Yes, Rollo.’

‘Why would the Agency care in the Amiri case? They’d had him for the best part of two years, had probably extracted all there was to squeeze out. Your man, Petroc, still has much to tell you. You need him to co-operate. You have to get the woman quickly before the net goes over her, before they’ve reacted to your man’s disappearance. Move fast and with commitment.’

‘The team’s in the air.’

‘A bizarre attribute, of many men in the trade: they believe they’re tough, hardened by the world in which they work, when in fact they’re as soft as maidenhair fern. Your initial reaction might have been to ship him down to the Gürtel district of Vienna, shove him through the door for half an hour and get him back to work, but, as I remember, he made a mess of that down in the Gulf. To open him up, Petroc, you’ll have done the right thing . . . but it’s a high-risk gamble.’

‘A career-defining gamble.’

‘Of course, in old Hector’s time it would have been
de rigueur
.’

‘Hector would probably have driven down Enghelab Avenue in the turret of a Churchill tank and picked her up. I’m grateful for your time, Rollo. Now go back to bed.’

‘Not sleeping well because one of our males hasn’t been seen for too long.’

‘Let’s hope he shows up.’ He cut the call, and wondered where they were, how far into their journey – and why they had taken his shilling.

‘Look this way – that’s it. A smile would help.’

He had been drinking a last glass of juice before bed, and had learned a card game from Auntie. Before that he had been working on the diary they’d asked for, where he had been with the brigadier, whom they had met and when. He had enjoyed the cards and the juice. The red-haired one, Nobby, was taking the picture and the flash went. He hadn’t registered the camera, but had managed the smile.

‘Thanks. One for my souvenir gallery.’

Nobby nodded at him, then was gone. They were all correct, but there was no friendship from PK, no warmth from Auntie or Father William. Nobby was the only one who smiled with him.

Auntie said it was time for bed.

They had told him that the process had begun. That evening, he had believed it. He sorted the deck of cards and slipped them back into the pack. He finished his juice. He hadn’t been outside today. He had stood at the windows and looked out at the vineyards that climbed the hill and slipped away below the house, the men and women who cut and stacked the grapes. There was a church, and a great river beyond the houses further down the valley. He had seen cargo being pulled up the river on barges, and the afternoon had been bright with crisp sunshine. The light had fallen on the ruined walls of a castle. Once, emboldened, he had gone through the kitchen to the back door, passing the woman who cooked and cleaned for them, but the door had been locked and there was no key.

Once, he had stood, almost defiant, at the front door and waited: he tried to test them, make them fashion an excuse. They hadn’t bothered. For five minutes more he had stared at the inside of the door, then Auntie had come for him, taken his arm and brought him back to the table. There had been two holsters, empty, on the back of the kitchen door. Nobby wasn’t armed, nor Auntie, but Sidney carried a weapon in his belt, tucked against his hip, and Father William wore a lightweight windcheater and the right pocket sagged.

Auntie led him and Father William followed. The woman and Sidney were clearing the last of the kitchen surfaces. They went up the stairs. The door was open. His bedroom was at the far end of the corridor. He could see through the door and PK was hunched at a table. The photograph that had just been taken was on the laptop screen in front of him. He thought he looked relaxed, calm, and there was almost a smile at the corner of his mouth. PK turned the screen away.

Farideh was on the wall behind the laptop. It was the picture from his wallet, huge. Would she come? Or would she refuse, turn her back on them? He didn’t know. There were maps to either side of her picture, and aerial views of that corner of central Tehran.

PK called, ‘Big day tomorrow, Mehrak. You’ll need a clear head. Sleep well.’ His toe nudged the door. Sight of the laptop was lost and his wife’s picture.

A little push from behind him, and Father William spoke: ‘As the boss said, a big day, Mehrak, so get some sleep.’

He went through the door, which was closed after him. His bed was made, neat lines, and the pillows plumped. The key turned in the lock. He didn’t know if he could believe them.

They were out of
I
ncirlik.

Dunc and Mandy had gone. Dunc had hugged him, almost clung to him. Mandy had shaken his hand. The farewell had been in a transit area, a murmur of ‘Good luck.’ There had been Americans in the room where he and the guys had waited. It seemed they were civilians – in jeans, sweatshirts and anoraks; some had ponytails and others’ heads were shaven. They were louder than the air-force people at Ramstein. When they had headed for the stand, Zach had seen rows of transport aircraft and clusters of floodlit fighter bombers.

Mikey had sidled near to him. ‘Don’t gawp – they’re Agency, reckon they’re top shit. Don’t ever bend your fucking knee to them.’

The aircraft was two-engine, propeller. When they were up the American pilot had said his name was Dwight, and that the aircraft was a Cessna 406 Caravan; they would be at an altitude of 24,000 feet and have a cruising speed of 230 miles per hour. The route was over Turkish territory for as long as possible, then a fast run over the northern mountains of Iraq, across its air space and down at Sulaymaniyah, which was Kurdish. The pilot had said that, if they bust a gut with the old bird, he hoped to be down before first light.

There was a thunderstorm but the pilot didn’t divert to go round it: he went straight through the middle and Zach didn’t know how life could be worse. At that moment his destination took second place to the turbulence.

The price was bouncing higher as the wheels of the lead truck rolled over the rough track. The convoy’s speed was governed by the cumbersome progress of the first vehicle in the column. The pick-ups behind had gathered at a water-hole, where caravans, camel traders and narcotics transporters waited for the armoured truck to lead them across the frontier. Two of the twenty-five remaining packets of that load would be given as currency to the warlord who had invested in the sheets of tempered steel welded into place. They covered most of the bodywork and most of the windscreen of the vehicle charged with battering a path through concrete walls, or coils of barbed wire, and bridging the ditches scooped out by earth-moving plants and fighting off the Iranian Army or Iranian border patrols. There could be heavy fighting and two machine-guns were mounted on that vehicle – once a long-wheel-base Land Rover of a British unit, abandoned in a sand drift seven years earlier and lovingly restored, with 178,000 miles on the clock, and going well.

It needed to go well. The convoy leader, the nephew of the warlord who had taken the two packages from that one pick-up and had an armful of similar parcels, had chosen a section of the frontier where the Iranian authorities had erected the wall and wire but had not dug a ditch. A heavy iron triangle was attached to the bonnet, with the blunt, scarred point facing ahead. The spike would break through the concrete blocks, then snag the wire. If a patrol was watching that sector and had the firepower to stall the Land Rover, blood would flow. And blood would flow, too, if an Iranian force intervened and found itself outgunned.

The frontier was a merciless place, and the hike in price of each two-kilo package guaranteed that charity was banished there. And men died because a package now valued at five thousand American dollars would increase hugely once the frontier was breached. The same package, out of Afghanistan and into Iran, had a marked-up price on it of eight thousand American dollars.

Far away, in offices staffed by personnel of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the border of desert dirt between Afghanistan and Iran was called the ‘entrance gate’ for the outside world’s heroin. A hundred tonnes of the drug, uncut and undiluted, came across the sand each year. Casualties among Iranian troops and police were the highest of any nation in the fight against narco-trafficking. But statistics carried little weight at an hour before midnight when the spike hit the wall. Tumbler wires triggered klaxons and sirens, an automatic weapon started up, flares were launched. A rocket-propelled grenade, surplus stock left behind by the Red Army, silenced the guard’s machine gun, and an American-surplus Browning belt-fed weapon, issued to the Afghan National Army and sold on, quietened rifle fire from a dune’s ridge.

They went through intact and and would drive another dozen kilometres to the rendezvous. There, more vehicles waited. Heroin went into Iran and was replaced with electrical goods, television sets, laptops, cigarettes and anything else on which the Afghan administration would charge duty if it travelled along a road policed by Customs or was airfreighted into Kabul.

Within an hour, the heroin was moving deep into south Khorasan and towards Birjand, and the armoured Land Rover was heading for another clash on the way back to the Nimroz area.

The early duty was Father William’s. He was in the secure room, with the phones, the boss’s laptop, the poster-sized picture of the woman, the maps and the TV set that had the relay wired in.

The image on the screen was pin-sharp. The curtains were not tightly drawn in the Iranian’s room and the dawn lit his face. The cigarette in his mouth threw a shadow on his chin. They talked, he, Nobby and Auntie. Sidney included himself when he could. They discussed the man they called the corporal.
Not settled
and
Not responding
and
Unwilling to make the final break
and
The matter of the wife: a last throw and a hell of a dangerous one
. Father William believed it a good way to prise open a man’s mind; he watched the screen, saw the regular pulling on the cigarette and seemed to read defiance in the face. Worse, the man seemed to regard himself as a prisoner.

He was Father William in his family, on the street where he lived in the south-west suburb of London and at Vauxhall Cross. He was Father William because of the white hair that jutted off his scalp. His daughters had given him the name:

‘You are old Father William,’ the young man said,

‘And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head
–

Do you think at your age it is right?’

He had been white-haired as a young man when he had started with SIS, in the Century House days, as a pool driver, then occasional security escort and courier of confidential documents. He had no academic qualifications but was better read than most around and above him. He had understood the ‘red, red rose’ Sidney had brought from the Iranian embassy’s garden and was irritated that the older man, who bordered on a spiv, had known his poetry.

His wife was a legal executive in a Twickenham office and his daughters worked in a Central London shop; Father William might reflect that none of them had noticed his absence. When did they need him? They took an old-fashioned family holiday each year in the north-west of Scotland where they viewed sea otters, occasional whales or dolphins, and read books in front of log fires. He did the driving. He was pleased to have come to Austria. A long-gone uncle had been here – perhaps he’d have a chance to go to the town called Judenberg where the young squaddie had been sixty-eight years before. Most recently Father William had watched over two Libyan air-force officers, pilots of fast jets, who had defected to Malta, then been shipped to a rented house in Wiltshire. They had been easy. He thought he had been chosen for this assignment for no better reason than that he was available.

A cigarette was stubbed out. Another was lit.

Father William knew his Burns, and more than the favoured first verse of the ‘red, red rose’, and recited then, to himself, the second:

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in love am I;

And I will love thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the seas gang dry.

It made no sense. He imagined an arranged marriage, a match made by those in influence and the elders of families. A chauffeur-cum-security guard of low rank was handed a girl of uncommon prettiness, yet went to a whorehouse.

The picture had gone. The close-up photograph of the corporal had been sent on its way. It would now be in the hands of the messenger. He thought of the speed with which they had reacted to the situation, and the panicked pace of events.

Putting men across that frontier: was it an act of folly? Perhaps. And was it Father William’s job to speak up about it? Perhaps not.

He watched the man, thought no good could come of him.

There were Americans at Sulaymaniyah, on a crisp bright early morning, who drove them by Humvee from the airport, where the formalities were ignored. Zach would have said, if asked, that he believed the Americans were out of Iraq; but they were still in Kurdish Iraq, in the extreme north-east, and Sulaymaniyah. An American passed an envelope to Mikey, who tore open the flap, glanced inside and handed it to Zach. He had the picture of the woman, and now the photograph of her husband. He was embedded in a world he didn’t know.