The Corporal's Wife (2013) (61 page)

The satellite equipment the guys had taken in, their firearms and the trauma bag were across the border and would not be returned. He assumed that they were now the property of a nameless major in the Revolutionary Guards Corps, and had not been passed up the chain to intelligence for a propaganda airing. Neither would he hear more of the major on the Turkish side, Emre Terim, who commanded the garrison in the town of
Dogubeyazit
, and had a fractious relationship with an elderly, expert smuggler . . . Christ, life inside Ceauçescu Towers teetered on the brink of boredom, the edge of futility. He did his work, knew no other way of earning a living.

The young man had refilled the barrow and pushed it back into view. The sun caught again at something on his waist. It was clipped to his belt.

‘What is it? His site-entrance pass?’

She took a monocular from her handbag. He didn’t think it was standard gear for a two-day seminar at the University of Warwick, and she was unlikely to be heading on an evening plane to the foothills of Ararat or monitoring a caravan of well-loaded horses. More likely, she and her husband had found an interest in bird watching – perhaps thrushes and larks made them more of an item. She looked through it, squinted, adjusted the focus. She was, he thought, unable to admit the need for spectacles.

‘Well, it’s an ID, and it’s in one of the pouches. The lanyard that usually hangs round the neck is wrapped round the belt.’

‘That all?’

‘Have a look for yourself.’

They might have been strangers, trying to pretend that a casual impulse had brought them to this point, parked against a kerb, with a view of a building site, and had never made love on a wide bed with hail beating on the windows, perhaps close to where Noah had grounded his Ark. He took the spyglass, pressed it to his eye and fiddled for focus.

Dunc Whitcombe had good vision. The quality of the lens dragged him forward. A length of the lanyard dangled. He read:
Military Care Facility, USAF
. He looked at the card in the pouch. A foreman or the site manager was talking to Zach Becket. The pouch rested against his thigh. He saw a face shrouded in a black hood that hid the hair, mouth and cheeks. The Farsi writing, at that distance, was beyond him. A window opened: he looked through it and saw again the face that had been upside-down, blood-wreathed, frozen. The window was slammed shut.

The older man moved and Zach Becket pushed his wheelbarrow, spilled a little of the load and was gone.

He said, ‘We shouldn’t have come. We intruded on his life, changed it, and went to the limit of what was justifiable.’

‘Beyond.’

‘At the time it seemed important.’

He pulled away, and drove fast. He reckoned he would carry for a long time the image of a young man with healed holes in his body, the scars of grenade fragments, and the face of a woman, precious, strapped to his belt. Her hand slipped from her lap to rest on the hand that held the wheel. He thought the responsibility was shared, and wondered if he were shamed, whether he deserved to know of them.

‘Why not?’ She kissed his cheek.

They would be back in time to check that the small auditorium had been bug-swept, that the drinks, biscuits and pencils were in place. At the hotel breakfast Tadeuz Fenton had been on good form. He had been wearing a coral-pink shirt with an MCC tie and a limp linen jacket.

Dunc, driving easily, let the assumed lines of the speech play in his mind. There would be stuff about ‘war’: ‘We don’t fight to lose, we fight to win.’ There would be grunts of support from the men and women in his audience. ‘We don’t play around with niceties, and we let those who cross us understand the meaning of real combat.’ That would gain a sprinkling of claps.

No mention, of course, of a young man humping cement with ugly wounds on his body, or the corpse of a young woman, disembowelled, coming down a hillside on a horse’s back, or a cairn of stones that rats, eventually, would tunnel into . . . or of a noose in the yard at Evin, high over the northern sector of the city, or of the death – detail unknown – of an army officer, a high-value target . . . never had heard anything of a corporal, a driver, who had been taken to a whorehouse. ‘We play tough and we punch above our weight. We’re loyal to our allies and hard on those who stand against us. People in many countries will sleep better at night for our, and your, efforts and dedication.’ That would be rewarded with enthusiastic applause.

‘Thanks. It’s a shit job, and I know no other,’ Dunc said.

About the Author

Gerald Seymour exploded onto the literary scene in 1978 with the massive bestseller Harry’s Game. The first major thriller to tackle the modern troubles in Northern Ireland, it was described by Frederick Forsyth as like ‘nothing else I have ever read’ and it changed the landscape of the British thriller forever.

Gerald Seymour was a reporter at ITN for fifteen years. He covered events in Vietnam, Borneo, Aden, the Munich Olympics, Israel and Northern Ireland.

Also by Gerald Seymour and published by Hodder & Stoughton

THE OUTSIDERS

A DENIABLE DEATH

THE DEALER AND THE DEAD

THE COLLABORATOR

TIME BOMB

THE WALKING DEAD

RAT RUN

THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER

TRAITOR’S KISS

THE UNTOUCHABLE

HOLDING THE ZERO

A LINE IN THE SAND

THE WAITING TIME

KILLING GROUND

THE HEART OF DANGER

THE FIGHTING MAN

THE JOURNEYMAN TAILOR

CONDITION BLACK

HOME RUN

AT CLOSE QUARTERS

A SONG IN THE MORNING

FIELD OF BLOOD

IN HONOUR BOUND

ARCHANGEL

THE CONTRACT

RED FOX

KINGFISHER

THE GLORY BOYS

HARRY’S GAME