The Corporal's Wife (2013) (33 page)

Mikey had a good voice, soft, and Zach had to lean towards him to be sure of understanding what he said. Ralph scratched his armpit. Wally was emptying cartridges from his pistol and letting them clatter in the palm of a hand.

‘I don’t like the idea of turning up at a town on the wrong side of the border, meeting up with the Six people, and telling them we got it wrong. “At one stage she did want to come with us. No, her feelings of camaraderie did not last and she went walk-about.” Go down a bomb. It’s a big effort, involves too many people, has a grand budget, and even some cash left over for us – the idiots in a bad place at a bad time. I don’t think we’d be welcomed. We’d be failures, and failures don’t get work. If you want to wait for brown envelopes, or negotiate about the kids with your ex, or sit in a waiting room with a sample bottle, we let her go.’

Zach said, ‘If she ran it’s because she didn’t think we’d manage the business. If she’s going to be taken, and killed, she’d want it on her own terms, not holed up with us. That’s how I think she is.’

Mikey peered into his face. ‘Speak when you’re spoken to, answer when you’re questioned. We’re being paid to bring her out. I don’t intend to go back empty-handed. How we move on from here, I don’t know. We will, and she’ll be with us. We’ll find her.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Zach snapped. ‘She could have gone miles!’

‘I doubt it.’ Mikey couldn’t suppress the note of triumph in his voice.

He walked two paces past Zach, then crouched. He picked up the heel of a boot, medium height, black.

‘I doubt it. And I doubt she’s reached as far as she might have wanted. In this world you get what you pay for, and likely those boots were pretty rather than functional, so it broke. She goes with us, like it or not, because that’s what we’re paid to do. Let’s find her.’

The shores of Lake Urmia, vast, flat mud and crystal salt, were to the west, and all that moved in the low light were the flamingos, the shorter-legged pelicans and some ducks. Ralph went south and took a machine pistol. Wally went south-east and would be next in the arc to Ralph; he had a pistol. Mikey said he would work along the shore, then pointed to the north-east – that would be the area for Zach to search. They split, fanned out, were walking away from the van, when Zach heard Mikey arm a weapon. He stopped, turned. ‘I don’t have anything.’

‘If you don’t know how to handle it, you’re better without. Might shoot your toe off.’

‘What happens if . . . ?’

‘Good question. What happens if you get bounced?’

‘What do I do?’

‘Call for your mum to come and get you.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘I met a padre in Kabul last time. A bit of a literary man. Had a good voice. There had been a bad story about some contractors, Canadians who were taken out of a convoy, three of them, and they were all in bits when the corpses were recovered. The padre did a Kipling poem for me, written a hundred years back and nothing changes:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
,

And the women come out to cut up what remains
,

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
,

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

‘What was your question?’

‘What do I do?’

‘When the Soviets were there, if a unit was trapped on the ground and couldn’t be reached or if a chopper was downed and couldn’t be extracted, they’d shoot up their own people. Kinder that way.’

‘And . . .’

‘You run to me and I’ll do the business. It’s a shit world out there, and an innocent walks naked. Go and find her.’

His last birthday had been his forty-ninth. Most days, not that he showed it, age was a burden to Michael Wilson. A decade before, he had been a corporal in the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. Might have made sergeant with full responsibility for a platoon, or gone on to the company job, but he had declined and walked away. Twenty years in the Regiment had ended a decade before. A lieutenant, seventeen months out of the Royal Military Academy, had told Mikey, in the hearing of the squaddies up the A6 highway north of Basra, that his patrol briefing lacked a ‘clear mission statement’. He had put in his resignation, wouldn’t be talked out of it, and become a civilian, a life he barely knew. He’d signed up, on the rebound, for Contego Security.

It was a staple of Mikey’s life that, right or wrong, he never changed his mind or backtracked on a decision.

His wife was Megs, his home a modern semi in Aldershot, and he had two children. Soldiers with a settled domestic life, money in the bank and kids who put up ‘Welcome Home’ banners were short on the ground. Most of the contractor’s men were drifters or guys with a love of the fantasy and glamour that were supposed to go arm in arm with being a hired gun.

His qualities were recognised and invariably he was the team leader. He bossed former officers and once-senior NCOs. It meant nothing to him that for this trip Contego had put him above both ranks. He had been given this job, and the command, because the top man in the Ealing High Street office had developed total trust in him and reckoned Mikey had the rare ability to make decisions on the hoof. But why had he accepted this mission, a dose of lunacy, when he had family and more than most to lose? One fear existed in the mind of Mikey Wilson. The boss would ring, offer an assignment in a bad place, escorting crap people, with the chance of difficult opposition, high risk, and one day he might say, ‘Sorry and all that, and thanks for thinking of me, but there’s the wife and the kids, and I’m not as young . . .’ Might be told that his attitude was reasonable, that when something else turned up he’d be at the top of the queue. Might
not
have another call. Might be murmured in west London that he was ‘past it’, living off the old days, was history. There was something else.

Sometimes he winced. There were days when he hadn’t eaten properly and the cramps came hard in his gut; a couple of times there’d been a trace of blood in his stools. He hadn’t been to the doctor, which would be, likely, a visit of last resort. There had been a quiet word in the right ear in Ealing and a sort of promise extracted that Megs would be ‘looked after’: nothing on paper, but on trust.

Mikey didn’t do panic. On the convoy runs with Contego in Iraq and Afghanistan, he’d been in some of the worse fire-fights, when they had looked to be on their own, abandoned, and he had created calm and brought people through. What hurt? More than that, what pissed him off? It was the attitude of the ‘regulars’, the regiments who had the big numbers and the big kit and looked on him and his type as dirt – jealousy, perhaps, over what went into a contractor’s bank. His attitude, forged in the recent conflicts, was that when he was in trouble it was for him to work a way out of it.

Looked difficult that morning.

They hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains at the sides, or try to cover the windscreen. The light had come from behind the hills and had extra strength from the snow on the top ridges. They woke together, close and entwined – any movement from either would have disturbed the other.

The camper van was a miracle. It was a VW model, had survived thirty-six years since it had rolled off a production line at the factory in Emden, west Germany. It was the T-2 type, had a 1.8-litre engine, had done at least a quarter of a million miles, but the engine had been kept alive with love and care. Only the mattress in the pull-down double bed had needed replacing. It was called ‘Alex’, had that name sign written on the driver’s door. The current owners, who saw themselves as custodians of the old girl, were the fifteenth to take charge of her, and the name had changed pretty much with each new driver. They were Joey Farrow and Beth Skelton, and the camper was nine years older than them.

They slept naked, as they always did, and would probably continue to until their relationship was formalised at St Mungo’s Union Church on Killarney Street, the best-known in Alexandra, which was in Central Otago and far down on South Island. They were coming to the end of what for them was their epic journey away from the claustrophobia of home and family. They had done this great voyage of discovery in the certain knowledge that soon they would be shackled by finance, kids and responsibilities. The opportunity wouldn’t come again. They had picked up Alex in Baku, Azerbaijan, after a couple of months spent teaching in an English-language school. From there they had headed across the frontier into Iran, and had driven south a thousand kilometres to the Gulf of Oman, then turned north and crossed the Zagros mountains. They were now on the shores of Lake Urmia, and would take in views of the last migrating birds. Eventually they would drive Alex into Turkey and would hang around in Diyarbakir or Van till another couple pitched up and they sold her on. Joey and Beth were of farm stock. Their families owned land; they grew stone fruit, and grapes for the wine industry; when they went up the aisle at St Mungo’s they would bring together two slabs of industry, a necessity of modern commerce. Before that day . . .

Near to home there was an albatross colony, and another of penguins. Here they could see, as the light cleaned the shoreline and the huge salted flats, pelican and flamingo. It was why they had turned off the beaten track, something New Zealand-born kids were practised at, and bumped over tussock grass until they had found the sheltered space in front of a small rock escarpment. The wall behind them was crusted with salt, and the early light caught the formations and made it flash, like jewels.

A hand came out of the bed and rubbed at the condensation on the window. They had been an item since their early days at Dunstan High School. They had sucked up the pleasures of a hard year of travel, had absorbed the Middle East, the cradle of the great religions, and had gorged on the history and monuments of Iran. They had been almost overwhelmed by the kindness shown them, such as when Beth’s molar had cracked and a dentist had opened his surgery on a holiday to treat her. The sun would shine on them for another day.

It was a languid waking.

The binoculars and the camera with the big lens were within reach, the pelicans and flamingos in sight. They thought the flamingos were the more precious of the two. On their return home, they’d expect to be asked to offer the bird pictures to local museums and wildlife groups, and would treasure sharing their experiences. She was across him and peering through the window. He was laughing, then grappling her.

‘You going to do the breakfast, girl, or am I?’

‘I will.’

A kiss, and Beth Skelton crawled out of the bed. She was, her mother said it, as tough as an old boot. She opened the door, and the cold came in. She pulled a face and leaned further out, assimilating the emptiness and silence. She grabbed the toilet roll beside the door and bolted.

He stretched, yawned and followed. He was a big man, played rugby in the back row, could manage the days of farm work. Now he tidied the bed, stowed it and waited for her to come back.

It would be another good day – the skies were clear.

His mouth felt like a monkey’s armpit. It didn’t happen often to Dunc Whitcombe. He sat up suddenly and his toes hit the low table. The glasses on it rattled, and the bottles wobbled. He was still in the living area. It wasn’t often that he missed a night’s sleep, never made it to bed. It could only happen when there was a sharp-end night at the Desk and matters that seemed important were reaching a decision.

What had been said? He struggled to remember. His memory was usually considered excellent: tonnage coming out of the refinery at Abadan, age and biographical history of any mechanical engineer labouring on warhead development at the Technical University, the lifestyle of Zach Becket. The maps were still on the table and he couldn’t have said whether or not they had been disturbed. The man had sat in a deep leather chair and the empty bottles were thickest in front of it, with a full ashtray. They couldn’t have evicted him because he was their landlord.

The man had lounged far back in the chair. ‘You are doing business with the Jews? They drive a hard bargain, too hard for me. I am five thousand dollars per person, but they will not pay more than two thousand, and want bigger discount for more than two travellers. I was asked by your embassy man, from Ankara, only for the accommodation. Why does anyone come here without hiking clothes, if not to meet people from the other side?’

No answer given, other than a weak repetition of the archaeology story. A hand had waved it away.

‘I am from Istanbul. I understand you to be people of discretion. I am a Kurd first and a Turk second, but my family was based in Istanbul. We traded across the Dardanelles – cigarettes, precious stones, narcotics, unemployed men, children and whores. It was a good life and a good trade, but too good. The world arrived in Istanbul. We had established “arrangements” with the local authority, expensive but manageable. Then came the Americans, the British and the Germans. Their law enforcement and their Special services came. I was targeted. It interfered with my business so I moved.’

The sofa stood alongside the chair where he had sat, heavy leather and noisy when an occupant shifted. Mandy Ross had been there, still was. Her head was back and her mouth open. Her pyjama top had ridden up and her midriff was exposed. Had the Turk seen her in that posture? Would she have cared if he had?