The Corporal's Wife (2013) (51 page)

‘What am I to you?’

He said, easing himself off her, ‘Nothing. How could you be anything to me? Let’s move, together.’

She took the torch, wedged it into her mouth, undid the ice-coated lace and pushed off her right trainer. Then she peeled off the sock and aimed the beam at her heel. The blister had broken and bled. It covered the back of her heel. The cold air relieved the pain a little. She had been behind him as they had come up the long, gradual slope, slipping, slithering, and he hadn’t seen the anguish on her face or her awkward gait. The soldier behind her, Ralph, hadn’t had a torch. He knelt beside her and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. It was crumpled and muddy. He took water from his rucksack and doused the handkerchief.

He said, ‘I was angry because I thought you’d faked the injury and therefore made it easier for me to leave you. I wouldn’t have done that.’

He cleaned the blister, tried to be gentle, but the pain was sharp. They did civil-defence drill twice a year at the insurance company, and had lectures each month in first aid. There would have been horror in the training sessions if an open wound had been treated with a filthy cloth. She struggled, but he held her foot firmly. Then he folded the handkerchief into a strip and smoothed it so that it would act as a membrane. He started to undress – the same as in the wagon: successive layers came off, and last his vest. He was shivering as he flicked it off his shoulders and over his head, then dressed again, everything except the vest. He ripped it and made a bandage. The handkerchief would be the cushion, and the vest would hold it secure. He took the trainer, the light of the torch ebbing, and eased it onto her foot, over the protection he had made for her heel, then tied the lace.

She stood and let her weight settle on that foot.

He said, ‘I’m still angry. You should have told me.’

‘They don’t want me.’

‘I want you,’ he said. ‘And I’m taking you.’

They set off, following the prints into the wind and darkness.

The light, high and bouncing, alerted them. The doors of the two vehicles close to them opened quietly and cigarettes were thrown down.

For most of the wait, Dunc had stayed in the car but Mandy had paced, smoked and talked, but she had been with him when the light had appeared. A wobbling, waving star was likely to be a hurricane lamp. While she was smoking she had learned much. On returning to the car she had been pensive and had shared little. Dunc thought that most of what she had picked up would have flattened her morale. But he would hear it at first hand. They had agreed on that.

There should have been a line of mules, but there were just two. There should also have been half a dozen handlers, and perhaps another half-dozen with weapons.

The big team had been stood down when the warning had come of the failed pick-up. Had a caravan of foreigners arrived, there would have been a throng to meet them, but word had spread and the crowd had thinned.

Two men leading the mules, two more walking with them, two as an escort, with assault rifles angled on their shoulders. When they came to the junction in front of the old cattle building, the mule men and the guards were greeted, with brushed-cheek kisses, fierce handshakes and back-slapping. A vehicle’s headlights came on.

Dunc didn’t need to show Mandy what he saw. He was invariably short of emotion, the legacy of the divorce and of having been, for most of his career, categorised as an ‘eternal flame’ –
never goes out
. The sight of them rocked him. He was not one of those service officers who patrolled hostile borders and welcomed home the agents, men and women, from the far side, then took them for a drink, bled them, then sent them back and lost no sleep. Mandy had learned what these two were. The older man, of the Baha’ faith, would perhaps have faced execution if he had been taken. The activist would probably have hanged if he’d been caught in the escape bid. In the glare of the headlights they looked gaunt and terrorised.

They came off the mules and winced. The headlights were off but the lamp gave enough. Each fumbled at his waist, unbuckled his belt and dropped his trousers. He saw a pair of spindly thighs and a pair of stocky, hairy ones. Two vests were pulled clear, rolled up and made into padding. Dunc witnessed the sores from the makeshift saddles. The men waddled, legs apart, towards the vehicles.

The younger man stopped in front of Dunc. Was he American? he asked. Dunc said he was British, from London. Why was he there? Dunc said he was a
rapporteur
with Amnesty International – good enough, reasonable. He asked how it had been, coming over.

He was told: ‘It was hell. The weather was impossible. We had snow and high wind, then sleet and rain. We went a long way on foot, with no lights. You walk on tracks, among rocks, without lights, and you fall, but you cannot cry out. There are patrols across the whole of the plain on the far side of the border. It is a big security alert. The guides said it was worse than they had known in the whole of this year. There was a chance we were to go with other people but they did not come to Khvoy. We waited for them, too long, but they never came. The security is for them. Because we were small, and they were not with us, we were able to get through. It is very dangerous. Three times we had to lie in the snow, and if one had coughed we would have been finished – they were so close. The guides are good. They risk their lives for us, and for the rewards they get. I think we were very lucky with our guides.’

If they had not had guides?

He snorted, as if the question was posed by a fool. ‘Impossible. I was at the university, a student of mathematics. I do numbers. Without guides, to cross, the chance of success is one in one thousand. The troops hunt, it is said, for gangsters and terrorists and want a kill. Does your work, sir, in Amnesty, give you an interest in gangsters, terrorists?’

‘I have a general interest in the border. Good luck.’

Dunc walked back to Mandy.

The young man called to him, ‘It is very difficult up there. I would not be confident you will see your friends, the gangsters and terrorists, come through. Good luck to you.’

The boy, Egid, talked late with his horses and into the small hours. Packages coming through that night were delayed. They would be brought onto the plateau and towards the border the following evening. Vehicles waited for them, their schedules disrupted, in Dogubeyazit. There would be more vehicles, privately owned cars, and the massive lorries that hauled twenty-tonne loads and trailers. They were backed up on the far west coast of Turkey and waited for the ferries to mainland Europe. At the distribution hubs in Sarajevo, Bucharest, Munich and Rotterdam, more vehicles would be inconvenienced. Packages from faraway Afghanistan that contained the new bullion of the age would be late on delivery.

He couldn’t hear his own voice, or the horses, or his father’s words. Instead, they were written on paper. They would go the next evening. Often he stayed late with the horses and would be there in the summer when the mosquitoes floated on the wind, and in the winter when the snow bruised the ground and the animals needed rough coats to survive. They would always come from the shelter of the lean-to when they saw him or when he clapped his hands.

He didn’t use heroin. Few of the men who brought the resin from Afghanistan, forceing their way across the frontier into Iran, used narcotics. Had he wished to, Egid’s father, Khebat, would have beaten him. The men who controlled the trade, at the centre of the trafficking, despised addiction, the same in Asia as in Europe. Egid’s longing was for the horses that went high on remote ground where the trucks of the Iranian and Turkish military couldn’t reach. But his father had communicated to him that there was excessive activity on the far side of the frontier. Units combed the plateau on foot and were at a high state of vigilance. He knew his father trusted his ability to evade enemies, with his allies, the horses. They could hear and scent danger.

The trade was brisk, the customers’ appetite undimmed. The next evening he would be high on the bare hills in the darkness: for one night the trade could be interrupted and the delays absorbed, but not for two. His bond with his animals was unique. He knew it, and treasured the relationship he had with them. He had no other friends, and his family couldn’t match the love he had for them. It would be a slow night but he didn’t feel the cold and the animals kept close around him.

He drove hard. The night hours slipped by. The road was empty, and when he closed on slow-moving lorries he flashed his headlights and they pulled over for him to overtake. A brigadier who had worked in south Lebanon, Syria and during difficult days inside Iraq could get into a car with a screw-driver, wire it and drive it away. It took a couple of minutes, and he could have dealt with an immobiliser inside five. He hadn’t wanted a high-range BMW or Mercedes because either would have belonged to a man of status who could demand a faster, more efficient reaction. A few hundred metres from his home, he had taken the car. Behind him, the radio would be playing and the lights on. The idiots would sit in their surveillance car with their ashtray overflowing.

They had arrived safely, her text had told him.

He knew where men might try to cross, and at their last meeting to discuss the flights there had been accurate maps for them to understand the area. They had talked about that part of the border and its vulnerability.

He thought that was where she would be taken. Just to see her as a speck in the distance or close up and beside him – as she had been when the blanket had slipped off – was the best he could hope for. It was a diversion. He was broken. In the present harsh economic times, the regime would look for traitors, for the corrupt, as a diversion from the miseries of daily life. Where better to search? The car, a Peugeot, had been well maintained, and he drove it fast.

‘Brigadier Joyberi will speak for me.’

The security officer drove and they were alone in the car. They would take the A4 toll road, then the E58, and be over the border using the A6 toll. Hossein wanted to be clear of Austrian territory.

The man blathered: ‘I am very close to Brigadier Joyberi. I have been with him for many years.’

As a security officer responsible for a large delegation of his own nationals working at the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna, Hossein was primed to deal with traitors.

‘It was very frightening to be kidnapped in that way. I can’t say exactly when I was drugged, whether it was when I ate something or if it was put in my coffee or mixed with the juice. When the drug wore off, I was handcuffed and put on a military aircraft. Most of the time I was hooded.’

The only anxiety Hossein entertained was that, one day, he might be careless: an act of treachery might be displayed in front of him and he would miss the obvious. A man might smell of alcohol; he might be exhausted at work after frequent late nights; he might have a wife who complained to another that she and the children hardly saw him in the evenings; he might take leave and fly to an expensive resort on the Black Sea or the Mediterranean. A man might come into his embassy office earlier in the morning than colleagues and have access to files. There were always signs. And the greatest anxiety came from the certain knowledge that, for missing signs of treachery, he would fall under the spotlight of investigation, his own loyalty scrutinised. With this man, on a matter of innocence or guilt, he had no doubts.

‘First Cyprus. Then a small aircraft took me to a military base in Austria, up the river. I was their prisoner, but strong. It was a torture of exhaustion, lights, and always questions as to where I had been with Brigadier Joyberi. I told them nothing. I resisted.’

But on the matter of innocence or guilt, regardless of an opinion he had formed, he gave no indication. His task now was to deliver the man to those who would make the ultimate decisions on how to use him. He allowed him to talk and permitted himself little hisses of apparent sympathy.

‘At the first opportunity I evaded them. They took me to see a ruined fortress, with history connected to Great Britain, and I ran. You know what followed. It was my first opportunity and I had deceived them . . . I fear for my wife.’

They crossed the border without checks. He took a route over the river to the south of Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, where he came for discreet meetings involving senior figures of the VEVAK who would not wish their presence in Europe to be noticed. He headed for Stefanik airport, where a plane waited. Hossein could always make arrangements speedily.

‘The British said they would bring my wife out of Tehran. She is a fine woman, well known to Brigadier Joyberi. He was at our wedding. She is devoted to our revolution. She, too, has been kidnapped, and I will stand up for her. She is loyal, as I am.’

Hossein would not be flying with the traitor, condemned from his own mouth by his own blatant deceit. Two more junior officers, from the Iranian delegation to the Slovakian tourist fair, would accompany him and they would, no doubt, during a long journey, hear the same dirge of lies. The aircraft would not be of the executive standard provided by the agents of the Little Satan but a two-engine, propeller-powered light aircraft.

‘I love Iran. I am the devoted servant of the revolution and was kidnapped . . .’

Petroc led the cleaning of the safe house and had allocated areas for each of the others to work through. He would do the living room, where the debriefs had taken place; Sidney and Anneliese had responsibility for the kitchen and the toilets. The babysitters were given bedrooms and the vehicle. They worked late, the lights blazed and the village below them slept.