The Corporal's Wife (2013) (41 page)

They would be delivered to men of influence in the police and Customs who manned road blocks, and to the remote garrisons of the border patrols who were based some sixty kilometres to the north-west. Each envelope had been checked, and if they were delivered to the right men, in the right place and at the right time, he could be almost certain that the packages would have safe passage and free transit but . . .

It was a bad night. Not the weather. Any trader operating on the border with Turkey was comfortable with torrential rain, blizzards and gales across the high ground. He liked certainties. Trafficking demanded that schedules be met and material despatched on time, with due warning. The difficulty was in the town, on the main roads out of Khvoy that led to the frontier, and on the side roads. The men who created problems were strangers, from the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They had been deployed from Tabriz, with armoured cars and helicopters that flew high. He could predict with certainty that they would be flying again at dawn, however low the cloud base. Why? Terrorists were hunted. The difficulty was considerable for him, but could be managed.

There were, of course, other traders in Khvoy. Not all of them dealt with packages. There was a cousin by marriage, to whom he had spoken briefly that afternoon, who handled the more stressful ferrying of refugees out of Iran, had links with a foreign power and a contract for the next day. He was nervous. It was easier to buy co-operation for the transit of packages than for the movement of people, but the arrival of the Republican Guard Corps taxed both men. Whom to pay? No idea.

That night, Tadeuz Fenton would stay late. The next morning, he would arrive early. There had been the conference call, then a brief leg stretch in the street, with Sara Rogers left behind to guard phones and screens, and a gobbled curry at the new place in Tyers Street, alone. Then the new development had confronted him, sent up from the communications people. Back to the phone and the secure line.

‘Bad, PK? I’d say worse than that. They stole the transport of a New Zealand couple, beat the lad up, and left them without wheels in the arse-end of nowhere. Trouble is, the couple trekked to a police post and a description of the vehicle is circulating far and wide. You thought it was bad before? Bloody hell, we’re in a whole new league now. One mercy. This time tomorrow we’ll know where we stand. Advice? Get yourself a drink and hope that the next we hear is from Dunc or Mandy at their pick-up place. I’ll call you.’

Dunc stirred in the bed. He saw her in the doorway, back-lit by the last of the fire that had burned down in the living-room grate. She was wearing her dressing-gown. He pushed himself up on an elbow. She seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain whether to come on forward or turn her back on him.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘I think so.’ He would have described her tone as laconic.

‘The world not fallen in?’

‘Nobody’s told me if it has.’

Dunc eased himself higher. She was leaning against the door jamb. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘I’m cold.’

Well, you will be cold, Mandy Ross, wandering about the place at two o’clock in the morning with the central heating off and the fire more or less out.

‘Would you like me to put the heating back on?’

‘Not really.’

Did she want him to make up the fire? It was his responsibility to do that, along with his kitchen duties, sweeping the floor in the living room and hoovering the rugs. She did not.

There were blankets on the top shelf in each bedroom. Could she not reach them? Could he do it for her? She had no need of another blanket.

It figured. He had been divorced long enough to forget the little he had known or
thought
he’d known of a woman’s mind. Oh, God . . . He eased aside the bedclothes and made room. The curse of the Vauxhall Cross Social Club struck again. Always a disaster.

She shrugged off the robe and wriggled close to him. He was middle-aged and it was unlikely that any of the women in the outer office had stuck photographs of Dunc Whitcombe on the inside of their locker. Her hands were on his chest and pushed up his T-shirt. It would be about the fear. The Vauxhall Cross Social Club was built on a foundation of fear, stress and anxiety.

What sort of catch was Dunc Whitcombe? A pretty awful one.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I just thought, Why not?’

‘Frightened?’

‘Yes.’

The fear was for
them
, and the danger into which they had been thrown.

They drank water, ate bread, a cheese triangle each and half an apple. Farideh nibbled hers. Zach and she had gone out into the darkness briefly in opposite directions, and the guys had checked their weapons again. The snow had melted off her shoulders, the blanket had been shaken, and the two sleeping-bags the guys had used were stowed inside.

It was the last thing they did. They called it the trauma bag. The curtains were drawn inside the wagon and the light was on. They checked the contents. A belt pack went to Wally. It was done like a Saturday-morning supermarket shop, ticking off a list: tourniquet, burn dressings, steri-strip, bandages, syringes, needles, flexi-splint. Zach listened. He had first aid, plenty to do on a building site, and thought what he knew was pitiful. They had the rifles, the grenades were shared out and the ammunition was in the magazines, then slotted. Zach was offered a pistol – SIG Sauer P226. Shook his head.

Mikey said, ‘We were in Iraq, Gulf One. An old hack was going to be embedded with us, couldn’t carry all his gear, was past it, must have been a friend of the boss. He was offered, night before the push, a Browning pistol. He took it and slung it on his webbing. He said to us that he’d been a young star in Vietnam, early days there. He’d been flown up to a Yank outpost at the top of a hill close to the Cambodian border. They had crap local troops with them, and the North Vietnamese unit in the area was a crack outfit. He was given an M16, an automatic rifle, in case they were hit in the night. He declined it. The officer asked him what he’d do if they had gooks hitting the parapet – ‘‘Hold up your passport, shout that you’re British so they don’t shoot you, and don’t chop your balls off and don’t put your eyes out?’’ The hack told us he was shamed. He took a rifle and a sack of fragmentation grenades, and said he’d feed the belt for the corporal on the heavy machine-gun. No white flag is going up from us.’

Zach reached for the pistol. It had gone. She had it.

Ralph showed her the basic workings. Zach said he would take grenades, smoke and flash-bang. Did they want him to drive?

Later, not yet. Ralph would drive. Mikey would do shotgun and navigate, with a map across his lap, and Wally would be on the bench seat between them. The side windows were opened wide, and Wally would be able to use them to cover Ralph’s side. Zach and the woman were like the kids, a fucking nuisance; they would be in the back and would not speak unless spoken to. They should be on the floor where there was protection from the cupboards and drawers and more blankets. He might have tapped Ralph’s shoulder and tried to win him as a friend, the one who might most easily talk to him. But none of them had any interest in him; he would be rebuffed, his pride dented. He said nothing.

One pistol between him and her, some grenades and the trauma pack. She had taken the pistol and they had each looked into her face and nodded, like she was almost a part of them. The engine kicked into life. The lights of the town were ahead and the wipers took the snow off the windscreen. They bumped away down the track.

The lights of Khvoy beckoned them.

Chapter 14

The first indication was when they came up a hill: the wagon tilted on the angle of the slope and the engine stalled. Zach heard it, felt it. But the wheels took them over the crest and the engine kicked in again.

Wally swore. Ralph rapped on the dial with his knuckle. Mikey hissed through his teeth.

They went on down. It was a track of ruts and potholes. The prints of tractor wheels were clear on it, and there were goats and sheep, two different groups. They went parallel to the main road. They had gone round the north end of the lake and it was behind them now, shielded by rolling hills. The snow hadn’t settled and the rain was steady. Kids were minding the sheep and Zach had heard their shouts. They had waved a greeting and their dogs had raced after the wagon with a death wish, but none was hit. He had seen other children and youths with goats but they were further from the track. There had been a group of buildings, but no telephone line had led to it, or an electricity cable, but a low hut would have housed a generator. There was a well head and more dogs had chased them. An old man had sat on a chair at the front and smoked his cigarette. Zach didn’t know whether the New Zealanders would have reached enough civilisation yet to denounce them. He thought it unlikely, here, that the buildings would have a mobile phone signal or that the farm families needed one.

They were on the reverse side of the slope and would drop another two hundred yards, then level off. There was a bridge ahead with rough planks over a small stream, then another rise in the track to be climbed. The last of the fuel would be dribbling into the bottom of the tank and they wouldn’t clear the hill.

Going west from the lake and bypassing Marand was the easy option. Now they went north and were within sight of the road linking Shahpur, behind them, to Khvoy. No signs, but the estimate would be another ten or fifteen kilometres, no more . . . but time drifted. The tracks had been hard to identify, harder to stick with, and twice they had found themselves at a dead end, once in a quarry – exhausted – and once at a compound in front of a deserted farm building where the roof had collapsed. Then they had backtracked. They had rarely been faster than fifteen miles, twenty-five kilometres, an hour. Zach’s mind jerked through the equations.

The weather was good for them, small mercy. They had heard helicopters, which had flitted into view over the main drag, then been lost in the cloud ceiling. The helicopters’ problems with visibility were helpful, but the road near to them and away to their left was hard: they had seen road blocks on it, light armoured trucks, patrols of jeeps and open-top lorries. The rain was a friend: it would have dulled the fierce colour of the wagon and made its shape indistinct. The sodden track and water-filled holes ensured that they left no trail of dust. The hands on his watch moved relentlessly. Better to have taken it off, slapped it against a cupboard door and stopped it. They had calculated the time with care.

They came over the plank bridge, which rocked under them. A man was squatting low beside it, smoking and holding an umbrella over him with his free hand. He was old and wizened, the skin loose over his face. All of it was about enemies. A defection achieved through a honey trap was about gaining an advantage over an enemy; the smuggling of the defector’s wife was to achieve a more complete advantage. Zach – and the guys who would ‘rather be’ anywhere but here – was on that track to advance the cause of besting ‘the enemy’. Was the enemy squatting under that umbrella beside the track now reeling back because he was drenched in the rainwater that had collected in the trough at the extremity of the planks? He raised his head and saw the old man try to wipe the water off his face and out of his beard. He saw not an enemy but an old man soaked by the water their tyres had chucked over him. Had Ralph noticed him? Maybe not. Would Ralph have slowed if he had seen him? Probably not.

The schedule was the key.

At that moment, with the rain sluicing on the windscreen and side windows, they held to it.

They couldn’t reach the square in Khvoy, designated for their pick-up, too early – it was dangerous to loiter. Suicide to be conspicuous.

They couldn’t get to the square after the time given them. The Israeli had smacked his fist into the palm of his hand to emphasise it. The transport would not wait for them. A one-off opportunity – it wasn’t a bus stop with another coming soon.

So, they had drawn up the schedule, their Bible, and . . . Ralph began the climb.

They had enough time. Ralph changed gear and the camper went on up and did about half of the slope. More coughs, more shakes – and silence.

There was no swearing, no belting of the dial and no hissing. Farideh, beside him, took second place. First place was for a girl from New Zealand. Zach knew her name from the postcards she’d left with her love scrawled on them. She was Beth Skelton and took prime position on the rostrum. Her boyfriend, Joey, had a bloody face, might need his chin wiring and to visit a dentist. He had thought the girl had thrown in the towel.

You’ll look after our wagon?
He would try to.

. . . and I believe you, there’s something you should know
. What should he know?

We filled up with fuel in Tabriz . . . Only one thing wrong.
What was wrong?

The fuel gauge . . .

He’d nodded, he’d switched on the engine. Like a fish going after a fly. He’d thought he’d been all sweet reason, and won her honesty. What else would a country girl, from South Island, tough and resourceful, do as payback? In her head she would have seen the boy’s face and the violence of the blow.

Farideh took her cue from the guys and stared at him. His shit was on their boots: what solution could he offer? It was too far for them to walk into the centre of the town for the pick-up. They had to have fuel. Mikey picked up the binoculars from between his feet, scanned with them then passed them to Zach.