The Outsiders (50 page)

From the man’s own mouth, he had learned that he was riddled with suspicion of those closest to him, whom he paid for protection. He was probably fearful of Pavel Ivanov and reluctant to trust him. He had faith only in the loyalty of a stranger dog. He gazed at them, the hard man and the hard dog.

He went inside, left the Major’s drink on a shelf and downed his own. He would call the Major when the first course was ready. He felt lightened, a burden put down, and had regained his composure.

‘Why don’t you?’ Jonno was hanging over Sparky. ‘How much longer?’

The rifle was at Sparky’s shoulder, cocked. His finger toyed between the lip of the guard and the bar of the trigger. The safety was off.

‘When he’s full face you wait for the side. When it’s the side of the head, you wait for the full face.’

The sight was at Sparky’s eye. The finger did not shift to the trigger.

‘Have you chickened out?’

The hands still shook, and the breath came fast. Jonno didn’t know how the hands could be steadied or the breathing controlled. He sensed, now, that the finger would not slide on to the bar and squeeze, that the aim would not lock.

‘It’s what we’re here for.’

Posie had come back up and talked them through the phone call. She had listed in a peculiarly flat voice what they should do and what arrangements were in place. Jonno imagined a team hovering at the edges of the picture, in deep shadows but watching them and waiting for them. He rooted for Sparky, Posie and himself.

‘It’s what has to be done.’ His temper was rising. ‘Are you going to or not?’ He reached forward. ‘If you can’t, then . . .’ The finger stayed off the trigger bar and the barrel tip wavered. Jonno thrust out his hands. ‘. . . I’ll do it.’

He had hold of the barrel beyond the sight where the gas vents were. It was smooth there and hard to get a grip.

The barrel came up.

Sparky clung to his weapon.

Jonno tugged. The motion tilted the chair on to two legs, then one. It fell over and Sparky went with it, holding the Dragunov. Jonno collapsed on top of him and their faces were together, the curve of the sight gouging their cheeks.

Posie gasped.

Jonno knew he should have wrested it clear at the first attempt. To struggle with a loaded rifle, entangled in chair legs, was dumb. He could see the outline of Sparky’s face and little else. Posie had snatched his shirt and was heaving at him. Jonno had never been in a serious fight as an adult but he had set himself up against a guy who’d done a paratrooper’s training, jumped out of aircraft and had been in the cells at Feltham. He also had the Dragunov.

Posie still had hold of his shirt and now grasped a handful of his hair to get him off.

He let go.

She pulled him half upright, still on his knees with Sparky splayed below him. It was enough for him to see that the chance had gone. The target had walked back to the villa and voices carried faintly in the night air. The dog was back at the bone.

He was hit. The rifle stock came up and punched into his face. He was stunned and reeled back. The blow was repeated but the second stroke did more damage. His head jerked and blood went down his throat. Jonno had thought he would take the weapon – cocked, loaded – peer through the sight, line up the shot, pull the trigger. Then? There was a cloud. In his mind he had reached the moment when the trigger went slack and the recoil thudded into his shoulder. He coughed on the blood.

His eyes had watered.

Jonno was hit again.

Like an old fight, gore on the ring’s canvas. But the referee let it go on, and there was no one to throw in the towel. He had no defence and his head took the force of it.

He dropped to his hands and knees, reached the door and pulled himself up on the jamb. His mind was dulled and the strength had drained out of him. Posie straightened the chair, then reached down, lifted Sparky, hands under his armpits, and worked him back to the chair. He was gripping the rifle, but then put it down roughly, clattering, on the table. Posie laid her hands on his shoulders and stood behind him. They looked out together on to the garden. Other than the dog it was empty . . . except maybe for ghosts: a man who couldn’t scream because a gag was in his mouth as he was carried towards the chipper, and a man who didn’t struggle as he was lifted towards a chain saw.

She had taken the call. The man had spoken of a window of opportunity. There was a curfew on the opened window. The man had given a time when the window would close.

Jonno asked, ‘Do we go now?’

She shook her head.

‘What to do?’

She pointed to the door. His head throbbed and his jaw hurt. When his tongue touched his front teeth they wobbled. The blood in his mouth tasted foul. Her hands came off Sparky’s shoulders. The man’s head tilted to follow her as she edged away, and Jonno sensed his desperation at being left, losing her. She pushed him on to the landing.

‘You were so stupid, Jonno . . .’

‘. . . God, what a fool you were.’

‘You think he’s still capable?’

‘You weren’t bright: hectoring doesn’t do it.’

‘How long?’

‘There’s an hour, maybe an hour and a quarter. He’ll do it.’

Any other day, Posie pushed paper, tapped a keyboard, wrote odd paragraphs of copy and dreamed about a sunshine holiday. She thought about lunch, worried about her hair and wondered how to reduce her credit-card bill. The matter of steeling a man to kill was some distance away from her usual preoccupations. This confidence was new to her. She would make it happen. The others would be off the plane by now and heading into London. She could have said, almost, that she should be grateful to Snapper for patronising her, and Loy, who had, perversely, freed her. And there had been Xavier, the functionary from a superior world of intelligence gathering, who had not deigned to speak a word to her. To any of the three she was detritus. The best thing she had done was to walk away from them at Departures. The next best thing was pulling Jonno off the marksman’s back and frogmarching him to the door.

Power embraced her. She gloried in it. ‘You were stupid to think you could shame him into doing it.’

‘He won’t do it.’

‘Go away. You’ll hear the shot. When the shot’s fired, we’ll go, like the man said, through the window before it’s closed. Anyway, there’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘It’s ridiculous to think you could just take a rifle, hold it correctly, aim it properly, check the sights and line it up. Pull the trigger? You? You’d have missed.’

Jonno went down the stairs, and Posie sidled back into the darkness of the attic. She let her fingers rest on Sparky’s shoulders and worked at the cord-tight muscles. The weapon’s magazine rattled on the table, which told her his fingers still shook. He was trapped in his past.

‘It’s high stakes to kill an officer, whether he’s one of theirs or yours.’

They had dominated Sparky’s world. There had been ‘officers’ in Social Services: they had controlled the care orders that put him in foster homes; more of them had denied the child the right to meet, or know, his blood parents. They had decreed where he lived and what schools he went to.

‘All hell breaks loose when it’s an officer.’

The fingers worked at his shoulders and had started loosening the muscles . . . There were court officers, probation officers and prison officers. If one was struck – the equivalent of a killing in combat – the storm squad would come. The beating would be beyond sight of the cameras and would leave no marks.

‘In the Vietnam war, and the first time down in the Gulf, the Americans fragged officers – that’s dropping a fragmentation grenade beside an officer when he was asleep, if he was too keen to get the guys out into the jungle or the dunes. They wanted to stay alive – armies are made up of survivors, not heroes. The guy who does the courier run or who cleans the latrine or cooks, he’s easy to kill. A big officer is on a different level. Understand?’

She didn’t answer. Her fingers kneaded the muscles, softening them.

Patsy had tried to do the same but had been governed by the sympathy cult, like he was an animal with a thorn in its paw. There had been officers in his parachute battalion, a Sunray who had backed him and whom he would have followed halfway to Hell. There were officers on the other side, but they were Arabs and Pashtuns. They didn’t have badges of rank and could only be identified by the ‘Greenfly’ pictures, which came from the intelligence people. Their officers were vermin and didn’t have the same weight as his own officers. The man on the lawn with the dog had proper rank. Her fingers stayed on his shoulders.

‘It would be wickedness.’

Sparky had not known about
wickedness
before he’d come to the gardens. The target had the status and presence of a senior man. Sparky had been on parades and in the combat units when a big man had arrived to inspect or be briefed. They did not need to swagger or shout. They were usually quiet and didn’t wave their arms about. They might not be tall or imposing, but those around them clung to their words. The villa owner had cash and a fine home, but was rubbish.

‘You don’t want to hear what I tell you. Believe me. Killing with this rifle is wickedness.’

She kept at the work. She had soft fingers, but he thought her breathing had quickened. He thought she didn’t hear him, had no wish to. She manipulated, was better at it than Jonno, who had been the shoulder for him.

‘It’s addictive – you might as well be on coke or brown. A sniper’s no different from a teenager high on pills. A sniper’s set apart from others because he has the ‘‘power’’. So many go after it, and think afterwards they’ll just drop it on the carpet beside the bed, like the book they’re reading. Doesn’t happen. We get to think we can live with it, switch it on and off. We can do the bit where we look through the sight and see the man who has authority or is lowest on the ladder, the cook or the shit-hole digger, or the dicker whose role in the war is to sit under a tree and hold his kerchief to his face when the patrol goes by and pretend to sneeze. We can see them all – and we think then that we can get on the big freedom bird, fly home and it’s all forgotten. You know what they do on the way back, Posie?’

Her fingers stayed at his shoulders and the movements were not harder or softer.

‘They stop in Cyprus for what they call ‘‘decompression’’. Cold drinks, sport, films, air-conditioning. They’re given thirty-six hours. Six months of killing, and watching mates get put in bags for shipping out, and the boys get a day and a half of a good time. The powers-that-be do that, in their wisdom, because it might stop a few beating shite out of their women or breaking up the local pub. Back home they don’t understand, don’t care, about the business of killing. It’s in us all, the hunger for the power it brings, and it breeds wickedness. Believe me? It’s dressed up. Killing in Afghanistan secures our way of life in the UK. It’s fine. It’s duty, it’s in the service of our country. Not to worry, guys, because it’s all legal. Posie, it is wickedness. Go down that route, and you’ll never be the same person. You want that?’

Easier for him if she’d answered. She did not.

‘I don’t talk about this. I hide it, try to forget it. But it’s back. The guys I work with don’t know it – no reason they should. You’ve given it life.’

Simple when the boy, Jonno, had harassed him and roused his temper to breaking point.

‘I promise you, Posie, once done, it’s never undone.’

He could see the garden, where the dog sat patiently, waiting for the target to come back into the night air. Perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps he would cheat them – Posie and Jonno – and stay inside until the time they had to quit or face a closed window. He didn’t know if he could fight her for long enough.

‘They’re sort of vague, Boss. Nobody I could find offered any sensible explanation.’

‘Is the pilot drunk?’

‘If he is, they’re not admitting to it.’ Kenny was back from his second failure at fact-finding.

‘Is the fucking plane falling apart?’

‘The best I can get, Boss, is that the delay is for “operational reasons”.’

‘You can see it from here.’ She gestured extravagantly towards the windows. The aircraft in BA livery was on the apron and the steps were in place. There was no fuel tanker beside it, no platform for an engineer to climb on and no one in white overalls hurrying up and down the steps with a toolbox. ‘Looks fine, and we’re stuck.’

Dottie said drily, ‘Makes you feel like one of those apes, Boss, marooned here – perhaps for ever.’

Normally Dottie could lighten her mood. Not tonight. She sat in the lounge, Dottie on her left and Kenny on her right.

Winnie Monks said, ‘Sort of sums it up. A total fucking foul-up. Sorry and all that, guys.’

‘I think we’ll manage one more cigarette, Izzy.’

‘One more, Myrtle, a slow one, and then we’re on our way.’

Dismissed, Jonno slipped out into the night.

He had lost the stomach to fight her. He could have sat in the kitchen and listened to Spanish radio music, or in the lounge and watched the TV, maybe found some football.