The Corporal's Wife (2013) (57 page)

The descent into Turkish territory, using the tracks left by shepherds, led to the lorries waiting in an industrial estate outside
Dogubeyazit
. This was the most dangerous port. In other circumstances, the transfer would have been postponed until the security alert along the frontier had been stood down. But timetables existed for feeding the habit of addicts in Western Europe.

Those who came with the mules and met them with the horses were in contact by mobile phone and talked in code to each other. The exchange was fast. The two groups did not take tea, and both would hurry to be off the plateau while the military was there.

The packages were loaded into the panniers across the backs of the horses. Gossip had been exchanged: the hanging of a dealer in Tabriz, a gun battle further down the Tehran road in which Guard Corps had been killed . . . a barrel protruding from a mass of stones and madness in the fog – a man carrying a woman in the middle of the valley. They had in common, the hard men who smuggled across this frontier, a love of the boy who couldn’t speak and couldn’t hear. He was revered. It was rare for them to harbour sentiment.

Another stage of that journey had begun. The boy led the horses, which moved with care.

Zach held the ID card tightly. The plane had long gone and the quiet was total. The crows had left them – would have gone to search and feed beyond the hills. He thought that if he shifted his grip, she would fall to the ground, and he didn’t rate his chances of lifting her again.

Zach sleep-walked. Rocks scraped his shins and his trouser legs were blood-stained. She had begun to wriggle in his arms and he struggled to control her, but knew he would fail. He wondered if she would scratch his face again.

She said, ‘Do you believe, Zach?’

‘Do I believe we can reach the border where the flags are? I must.’

‘I’ve always believed.’

‘If we don’t believe, we should sit down and wait for them to come. You have to think of “sunlit uplands”.’

‘What’s that?’

‘For you and me, it would be our finest hour.’

‘I don’t understand. I know about believing.’

‘There was a speech by a leader, the “finest hour” speech. It was when defeat seemed certain and people had to be kicked into believing. The leader said, “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into bright, sunlit uplands.” It was about our freedom as a people. I steal it.’

‘Is this a “sunlit upland”, where we are?’

‘It’s where the sun shines on that ridge. We go past there, that rock outcrop, or we fall—’

‘Never raise our hands.’

‘Fight them. He said, “We will fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” A teacher read that to us. The words didn’t mean anything then. They do now.’

‘We go to the end, Zach.’

‘To the sunlit upland. We have the grenades, Foxtrot, and the pistol.’

‘And we believe.’

He said, ‘We believe.’

But Zach didn’t. The sunshine bathed the upper limits of the valley and the ridge. It made bright patterns on the stones and diamonds sparkled among the scree. There were rocks ahead, with deep shadows. That was where he had seen, once, a flash of light – as from a broken bottle or the lens on the scope of a sight . . . They went on. He thought people didn’t look for their God until they faced the end of life. They didn’t hark back to speeches until their fingernails were scraping the bottom of an empty bucket. He had a strong grip on her leg and she hung on him. Her warmth thawed his body, and the card with her picture was tight in his hand. He didn’t know how they would get past the heap of stone and rock.

Only once did he break into a run. The brigadier had come to the flagpole, a pine trunk from which the bark had been stripped. Above him there had been the tricolour of green, white and red with the symbol of the revolution and the woven words, overlapping and in a tulips shape, ‘There is no God but Allah’. The flag had been outstretched in the wind. It had been designed thirty-three years ago, and he had faced it on many parade grounds at rigid attention. He didn’t look up at it, but by the pole he stood at his full height, no cover and ran.

He was a military man. He wove. He didn’t know if, at that moment, a rifle barrel traversed and a fore sight locked onto the small of his back, or whether a finger eased from a guard and onto a trigger. He ran at his greatest speed and in a zigzag without pattern. The shot never came. His anxiety had been unfounded. He found a rough track, stamped down by horses’ hoofs, and passed an old wall of broken sandbags. Many had rotted and the sand spilled out. There were cigarette ends and he supposed it a place where smugglers paused, smoked and studied the ground ahead.

A decade or two before, the ditch had been excavated by men with pickaxes but the sun had crumbled the sides, and the ice beneath the snow had done more damage. He leaped across it.

There was a strand of barbed wire. It might have tripped him if he hadn’t seen it. It was rusty and the posts that had once held it up were flattened. He skipped over it. All that he knew was behind him, as was the wife of his driver from whose shoulders a blanket had slipped. Purged. A lifetime finished with. His leading boot stamped on a rock. The jolt went up through his ankle and into his knee. He was free of their vengeance. The past lost, the future beckoned. The local authorities would pass him respectfully into the hands of the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, the Turkish intelligence organisation, who would be rid of him as soon as possible, and the Agency in America would take delivery of him. He would be flown to the United States, his wife would join him, his boy would be schooled there and, after many months of debriefing, he would go to a university. Perhaps in California he would teach international relations . . . but that was far in the future.

He reached the second flagpole, made of prepared and treated wood. The red flag of Turkey fluttered there. He was at the peak of a ridge. The sun beat down on him. Stretched below him was a great plain, dun brown, with curls of smoke from small homes. He saw the mighty Ararat.

The brigadier slowed, straightened his tunic, flicked dirt from his trousers and straightened his forage cap. He began to walk down the hill, using a trail made by hoofs. Soldiers appeared. If he had looked for them he might have seen them, but had not. They wore the uniforms of a NATO country and carried American weapons. Nothing was said. Some closed around him; others sank back to their concealed positions. He set the pace, not them. He was no one’s prisoner and the future gaped open for him. He was only surprised that he hadn’t heard gunfire behind him, but maybe the woman and the man had surrendered and were taken. He was safe from her denunciation.

Vehicles were parked in an old quarry below, some civilian and some military. A knot of men and a woman waited for him.

‘He wears the insignia of a full brigadier general and has medal ribbons for combat service. The flash on his arm is that of the al-Qods.’ Imre Terim, major of mechanised infantry, had his binoculars raised. His brow was knitted in concentration. Then he gave a sudden smile. ‘Tell me, do tourists who come here to search for archaeological treasures from the time of Noah know about the al-Qods and its position inside the Islamic Republic?’

Gazing at the mud on his shoes, Dunc Whitcombe declined to respond. He leaned against the bonnet of their vehicle and was a few feet behind the soldier. There were three jeeps and a lorry, and men had gone up the hillside, scrambling like rock monkeys, and disappeared from view near the summit of the ridge. The major hadn’t spoken to them and hadn’t shared his flask of coffee, or the bread and cheese his driver had given him.

‘A man of that rank and position, travelling alone, has not made a mistake in his map reading. You understand me? There are reports, only reports, not confirmed, that troops and border patrols are searching for terrorist fugitives attempting to leave that country, a paradise on earth. Do experts in archaeology know about ‘terrorist fugitives’, madam? Do they also fit into your study of prehistoric myth?’

The buttons on her blouse front were not fastened correctly, which she hadn’t realised till the major had driven into the quarry. Her hair was a shambles and her stomach growled. She had her mobile in her bag and wouldn’t use it until the news was confirmed. She remembered the men on the long flight out of Germany and into the USAF base, that they had been taciturn and uncommunicative. She had thought then that had she scalpelled into the motivation of each she would have found no sense of noble heroics but of necessity: a sort of modern press-gang recruitment, regular-army drop-outs who had gone to a private contractor. She remembered too, the boy Dunc had brought south from the building site. She and Dunc might be consigned to hell-fire for what they had done. Now she didn’t answer. Better to stay silent than to extend the irrelevance of the lie. She was a changed woman, had done her Rubicon thing – ‘Why not?’ – and regretted nothing. Should she? Not the time to indulge in a conscience-scouring exercise. Later . . . Not now.

It was a sudden movement, but the major took the binoculars from his neck and handed them to her. She fiddled with the focus, then murmured to Dunc, ‘It has to be him. Only five of that rank in that formation. Can’t see all of his face, but it looks right from the pictures. That has to be Reza Joyberi. In flight.’

Mandy passed him the binoculars. Dunc beaded on the face and features. The brigadier came down easily and, by his bearing, with authority. From his screen, high in Vauxhall Cross, Dunc had thought himself close-up to – the jargon phrase – high-value targets: they were brigadiers of the IRGC, generals of the navy and air force, mullahs, intelligence officers and negotiators at the United Nations in New York and Vienna. He had never seen an HVT in the flesh before. He gaped.

He’d talked about them, had never seen one. The man, assumed to be the defector’s boss, didn’t seem to notice the soldiers who escorted him, and came without effort the last few feet of the slope below the ridge. ‘Yes, done a runner, Mandy. He’ll have the dogs of Hades after him.’

A salute to the major, crisp.

Flawless English, a correct accent. ‘I am Brigadier Joyberi, al-Qods. I seek political asylum. I wish to be passed to your own agencies and then to the Americans. I think they will welcome me. Please, make the contacts.’

The major reached out his hand. The brigadier pushed his own forward so that they might seal the greeting with a handshake, but the major twisted his to the side, then pointed to the holster on the brigadier’s belt. A pistol was removed, given to the major, who passed it to a sergeant. It was cleared, the round in the breech ejected and the magazine taken out. With a gesture of his head, the major indicated his jeep. The sergeant handed the pistol and its ammunition to a corporal, then led the brigadier to the passenger seat.

Dunc Whitcombe thought a ranking Iranian officer had made an error of judgement in assuming his authority would rule the responses of a Turkish major. He stared up the hill, Mandy Ross beside him.

He heard a shot. Far away. Muffled, but a shot. She stiffened. Their hands touched, clenched, loosed. A long way off, a shot, from another world.

Zach walked forward, like a robot. In front of them was the confusion of rocks and stones, cracks, gullies, places where the sun beat down, and the shadowed areas. A soldier, festooned in webbing and gear, had stood up and seemed to be laughing in contempt of them. Another had poked up his head, and there had been movement, indistinct in the dark.

The first soldier had called to him to put her down. There was a platoon here who had not had the pleasuring of a woman for weeks. If he put her down – they wanted to get on with it – they could line up and—

She fired. The weapon was beside his ear, she had barely aimed, and he was deafened.

A first shot, which missed.

The laughter had stopped.

Zach doubted she had ever fired a live round before. He hadn’t. It was different from when he and the guys had been in the builders’ van, driving past the roadblock chicane, and the soldiers had come out of the dark and Wally had fired on them.
Different
. All the faces were gone. Rifle barrels jutted out. He saw each one.

Zach let his knees fold and went down. They might have taken cover from the slight rut of the path that the horses had made – eighteen inches, or less. Might have been twelve. She was fighting him. He tried to cover her, but her knees and elbows jabbed him and then she used the pistol barrel to smack his face aside.

Automatic fire spattered around them.

Earth was thrown up, fragments of rock splintered, and he heard the whine of ricochets. He couldn’t get lower. Zach realised he was lying on soil, stones and dampness. He was no longer protecting her. Like a rejection.

She fired twice more. Free of him, her elbows taking the strain, the pistol held in two small fists, she aimed. The range? Twenty or thirty yards. She had fired three times. He screamed in her ear: ‘How many shots left?’ She showed him four fingers, a thumb and one finger. The bullets fired at them pecked close. A few were short, others long, cracking above them. Law of fucking averages. Not long. She had six shots left.

How could he throw when he was lying down? The new dilemma. How to chuck one of the fucking cans? He had talked of ‘shall never surrender’ and about ‘sunlit uplands’, but she had six shots left and there was continuous fire around them. The law of averages said that their luck would run out, and he didn’t know how to throw when he was prone on his gut. So he had to bloody well learn. He didn’t know whether it was smoke or flash-bang, but did the pin, heaved his arm back and threw.