Dwayne was back-marker. Sometimes on the march Cammy would murmur the words and anthem notes of a hymn. That night he was quiet. Ulrike was immediately ahead of him, then Mikki. Pieter was behind Mikki . . . Pieter’s chest was bad and he had a hacking cough that he tried, with no great success, to stifle. That evening, Cammy had spoken to them all before they had started out, and had caught Mikki’s eye as he finished, and had been rewarded with the usual heavy grin, and the mock melancholy.
On the west side of Kiev were the tower block apartments built in the communist era, where Mikki started life. He had military experience, had been in the army and had done front line tours of fighting with the separatists in the east. Hated Russians, had tried to kill them, had tried harder to avoid them killing him, loathed them. The chance had come to fight Russians again and he had joined the black flags. Knew little of Islam, cared for it less, but had an opportunity to do them damage. He was an ordnance expert, did clever booby traps and could get on a workbench and manufacture the improvised bombs for the roadside. Never spoke of parents, had not been married, didn’t claim to have fathered any kids, would deny he had ever loved before joining the brothers. “The Boss” was what he called Cammy. “The Madonna” was his name for Ulrike. Probably, among them, he had found his only worthwhile home.
They had left the deserted building as soon as darkness came, had not felt happy there, none of them, and Tomas was mightily missed though not talked of. They were heading north and veering a little east. They had no night-sight gear and Stanislau as front-marker had noted a vehicle parked up and abandoned on the reverse slope of an incline. If anything confused them, needed checking for explosives, then Mikki was called up. They were pressing on and needed ground covered . . . Mikki had an accented growl and his big phrase, often repeated, was Life is short. Live it. He liked to talk about a “bender”, a few days of excess alcohol in a five-star place, Muscat or Kuwait, but better if it were Beirut, room service and booze, had that dream for “one day”. Mikki was disciplined most times, was safe hands, and all of them trusted him, and his stories of fighting Russians were sexed with diabolical killings and the awesome fate of their wounded and his eyes would be bright in the telling.
He told his Boss he would look at it. His Madonna, whom he adored; stopped, unhooked her rucksack. Stanislau crouched at the front, and Dwayne at the back faced away and peered out into the darkness. Cammy was checking a bootlace. None of them would actually see it, know what Mikki had done that detonated it. Might have been a trip-wire, might have been a pressure plate. The flash and the blast of scalding air, then the thunder roll, the scouring dirt and grit and the singing of the shrapnel, then the scream.
Mikki lost both legs. Taken clean off immediately below his knees. He had not even reached the vehicle, a desert warhorse, a Toyota pick-up. Mikki screamed into the night and none of them, at first, dared move. Then Ulrike did: she had the limited medical know-how none of the rest of them had learned. She called it . . . two legs gone, blood pumping, and the bitter observation that there would be no Chinook coming in for a “casevac”. Pieter yelled at her that she should not go closer for fear of a cluster of the fucking things. Dwayne cocked his rifle. They’d look to Cammy to give them authority. He nodded and Dwayne would have seen the movement of his head.
Good luck to Mikki, and a kindness done him. One shot, one bullet to crack open his forehead and to strangle the screams.
They agreed that to bury him would require a heavy pickaxe to break up parched ground, and there were no stones to make a cairn, and the chance of a few rocks – what they could forage, holding off rats or wild dogs – was minimal. Pieter had gone to him and hooked out his wallet. Empty – no address to which a “sympathy note” could be sent if ever they reached a place where there was paper, an envelope, stamps and a postbox.
Paused, held their silence, allowed their thoughts to run free. No tears but a promise given. Cammy allowed a couple of minutes that followed the crack of the single shot, then said what was needed. Life is short. Live it. They were on the move.
The line closed up. They had no gap, no sign of a place where a tooth had just been extracted. Another brother gone.
Washing up dirty plates, used coffee mugs, glasses from which juice had been drunk, Farouk reflected that the schedule was now far advanced.
He stood, suds and warm water dripping from his hands, at the hub of a considerable organisation, and knew it: he believed the self-given name, Wolfboy, was well earned. He would do his full shift that evening, and the next day he might arrive an hour or two hours later than he was expected, but the internet café owner knew him as a good worker, loyal and conscientious, and would excuse him, would not quiz him as to where he had been. He expected to be there when the news broke. His assumption was that it would take an hour, minimum, for the full detail of the attack to be carried on news programmes, and by then – God willing – he would be back in Leeds and would be helping to make coffee, to serve cake, and to give guidance to anyone who found it difficult working with a computer.
He had put much of it in place. The schedule was prepared for the following morning. A ferry would have docked in the night, and the weapon would be brought by the couriers to Grantham in Lincolnshire. Also arriving there would be a young man, British, white-skinned and a veteran fighter . . . That man was the star of the Wolfboy firmament. Farouk could easily find kids who would not be fearful of martyrdom, who might have a great enough love of their religion to seek to paint their names in its legends. What he could not have summoned up in Leeds, in Dewsbury, in the terraced streets of Bradford, or even from Luton, was a fighter who had the skill necessary for the attack, who had the anger to carry it out.
He did not know the man’s name, nor had he seen a photograph of him.
The front area of the café, beyond the kitchen where he worked, heaved with the music of the near East, with voices raised in laughter and debate, and money filled the till. It was a good place for him to work, and strangers came and went each day and only a few of them had business with him. He thought the building was probably watched but it was swept regularly and he believed no bugs were planted, and no informers were among the regulars, and he trusted that his own communications were secure. He would see the man, watch him from a distance, would see him slip into the vehicle, and already the package – opened and readied – would be behind the driving seat. He would have liked the opportunity to grip the fighter’s hand, even hug him or brush-kiss his cheeks . . . that would not happen. He was assured the man was militarily able, and no longer had a love for life, and had chosen the target himself. More mugs and plates were brought to him.
Excitement gripped him. He thought himself privileged that a man of his reputation would be dependent on the quality of Farouk’s planning, might even thank him. A fierce and shivering excitement. Farouk was a believer but did not think he could ever match this man’s anger, as described to him . . . And in less than the span of a day it would be over and he would be back here, the sink filled, and the music playing.
As if he were still the child he had been, Cammy walked the length of the nave, and climbed steps, and peered at outer doors, and remembered.
There was the great chair, the cathedra, which had been used by archbishops for 800 years. Once he had parked his own butt on it and had heard a squeal of annoyance from an attendant, and had run. He gazed at the ancient worn Petworth marble.
At the Trinity Chapel he looked at the tomb of Archbishop Simon who had doubled as finance boss to the king of his day, and who the mob had captured, then hacked off his head; all of him buried here, except his head which was on the north side of the Thames estuary.
Paused at the resting place of the Black Prince, Edward, victor against superior numbers of French troops at Crécy, aged sixteen, and in the front line at the heaviest of the hand-to-hand combat, and ten years later at Poitiers, a hero, and dead in middle age and lying in splendour in a tomb topped by a carved likeness of him in ful
l armour, his double-hand fighting sword on his hip. Against the odds, succeeding far from home, recognised and honoured.
Images, romanticised, of the mediaeval combat had stayed with Cammy. By the tomb were the prince’s coat of arms, among them the feathers and the message of Ich Dien, taken from the shield of John of Bohemia, totally blind, who had ridden, his knights around him, towards the English formation at Crécy, and had been killed.
Kings were here, and cardinals, and archbishops, and the dead were honoured . . . Cammy had passed the old wooden doors that led to the famed cloisters, through which four kinghts had stormed. Archbishop Thomas, expecting them and too proud to flee, had been at prayer. He paused, in front of the altar, stood on the stone slab on which the knights would have pirouetted before raising their swords and slashing the clergyman to death . . . The king had wanted it done, the king’s wish was executed, the king had not stood by his knights, had disowned them. Cammy imagined the shouting and the yelling, and the chaos of the moment, and slipped away, overwhelmed by the hugeness of the place where once he had owned a stake.
Plaques on the walls commemorated men fallen in combat in Zulu wars, in India and on the Western Front, in North Africa, and regiments raised from men recruited in Kent’s villages and small towns . . . This was where he had been as a boy and where a greater part of his character had been formed. Where the nobility of combat, his interpretation of it, was carved.
He still had time to lose . . . He thought no one had noticed him, no one watched him. He needed to be here to suck in the strength he would require for his final attack; he thought he would be talked of here, and remembered.
“Jonas Merrick?”
He confirmed it.
“How is it in London?”
He said it was raining in London.
“You called my office. They took some time finding me. They reached me on the beach. I’m calling you from the beach. You want to know where my beach is?”
Did not give a toss where the beach was. Where this American army officer, attached to intelligence gathering, was probably drinking beer with his mates and likely had some nurses with them. He said he would be fascinated to learn where the beach was.
“It is the Al-Farkiah beach, Mr Merrick. We have a section of it to ourselves, and I reckon it Qatar’s best. It’s dark here now but we have a bit of a fire going and the barbecue is stoking up nicely, and . . . I’m told you want to know about an ‘aural footprint’, that right?”
He had bided his time, had not hurried the man. An aural footprint on a hymn singer was his point of interest.
The officer said, in a laconic voice, “We could always fuck them with our technology, Mr Merrick. The gadgets that we could put into the field against them made it, sort of, an unequal contest. That’s good, because these are bad bastards and we had no sympathy for them. The purpose was to get locations on them from tapping into mobiles and radios – I’m talking about front line – and then we could better hit them from the air, get the air force in with heavy ordnance or blast them with the Hellfires from drones. You remember one of our pilots described hitting retreating Iraqi transport, ‘like a turkey shoot’? Well, nothing much has changed. Kind of unequal. Anyway . . . the material you’re talking about was close to two years ago, could be longer. Our gear was a long way forward, and we reckoned we had struck lucky. There was an officer we were tracking – one of the old Saddam boys and a capable man – and he was right for taking down, but a cunning guy and making plenty of effort to stay alive. He and his people had a tactic that we had not cottoned on to at the beginning. They would only do radio and mobile communications just before they moved. You got me, sir?”
He sat in his partitioned area and felt as if he had been transported far from the river and from Thames House; imagined himself in a desert, or beside a fetid waterway, or among arid concrete buildings or in an alley stinking of mules and goats. Felt the place, and smelt it.
“The Iraqi guy was called Ruhan, a major. He was interesting to us because he seemed to operate primarily with units of foreign fighters. Other times the team I was with was aiming to get inside the security procedures of their paper-pushers running the finance side of the war, and their real bad guys, the ones with knives. This stretch in time we were going after effective fighting teams. He was one we chased a fair amount, but had no positive result. Had a favourite gang . . . what I mean is that when there was a job that needed doing, beyond the general run of the mill troopers, they’d send for this officer and he would bring up his people. Seemed to get things done. They had come off a message and the operator at their end of the radio, the Iraqi, had left the set powered up for a few seconds at the end of the transmission. Brief, tantalising, but clear. With me?”
Jonas said he was.
“Sir I don’t know my religious anthems. If my grandparents, up in north Wisconsin, had heard the tracks they would have known the title, the verse, and the writer’s name. There was no doubt, though, that it was a hymn that was being sung. One guy with a good voice. I reckon we had three or four lines. Called others in to hear it because it was just extraordinary what we were hearing . . . I mean, in downtown Raqqa, a guy would have been in serious trouble – know what I mean by ‘serious’? – for that sort of music. We reckoned these people – this voice in particular – were of the highest quality as fighters and that they believed themselves to be untouchable. Can I add something?”
He could. Jonas listened. He rarely interrupted source material, allowed a story to be told in its own way, in its own time.
“I said, ‘the highest quality as fighters’. Most of what they get in are just fodder for our fire-power, but a few of them are dedicated and professional. Fortunately, sir, only a few. The Iraqi officer had an overview of their operations, but on the ground they were led by an English boy. Kami al-Britani, that seemed to be a name that came through. We didn’t get him . . . Truth to tell, Mr Merrick, he was not the biggest target for us because he hadn’t sliced the throats of any aid workers, not that we knew of. Now, I’ve lost touch with the state of ground operations in Syria. I don’t know whether this guy, the one with the choir voice – must have been taught to sing that heavy stuff – was taken down in an air strike, or went into the cages. You know what happened to him, sir?”
Jonas told the American that it was believed this individual was on his way home, might already be back on his home territory. The line went quiet. He heard voices in the background, and light laughter, and then a hiss for them to be quiet.
The American said, “That sort of guy, sir, if he’s headed back to where he started out from will be nursing a powerful anger. We made sure they did not have an easy ride. They were hit every way we could pummel them: bombs, missiles, artillery, Special Forces raids. They had a tough time. They will not be coming home to get work in a factory, or drive a car or fade into the background or peddle dope. They want to give something back, and with interest. You need to take him down, and quick, and forget the niceties. Kill him, Mr Merrick. Right, sir, if that’s all, please excuse me. The burgers are about ready. Nice to have spoken to you, sir, and good luck.”
“He was rather lovely, Cameron. Am I allowed to say that?”
Tristram said she was. Izzy didn’t remark on it.
“You have a class full of ten-year-olds, and they pitch up at the start of the Christmas term and you really don’t know what they’ll be like. You don’t know who is going to become a pain, who is just negative, no ambition to better himself, herself, and who will be the leader. Always one kid, usually a boy, and it’s like a herd of any animals and the rest will follow, go the way he takes them. I rather liked him.”
They’d had to wait for her to get back to her flat. A living-room and a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen, and a very small balcony that was home to a few pot plants. An austere interior, and evidence of a life with few excitements. They had not given her warning, preferred to bounce her, a better route towards frankness, both Tristram and Izzy had b
een taught.
“If I had little Cameron on my side then the class was usually quite manageable. I suppose I paid him too much attention, but you don’t get a star coming through your hands every day. He had a beautiful voice . . . not disciplined, and untrained of course. I tried to get a school choir going, hard work, but when I persuaded him to sing then others flocked to follow. For nearly a year I based the choir around him. Most of the boys would have reckoned that singing was too effeminate for them, but I had Cameron on my side. Not for very long . . . he was too talented to stay at the level. I had a friend who worked with the cathedral’s choir, we sang together, indifferently, but she helped with the proper choir, the best.
“Look at it this way. Every cathedral has to have a very competent set of choristers. Think how many there are – then consider the pressure on the cathedral authorities to provide, year in and year out, the best . . . And Canterbury Cathedral is the headquarters of Church of England plc. It is a massive undertaking, it hosts prestige visitors pretty near every day of the week, and it cannot be second rate. I told my friend about this boy, little Cameron Jilkes. The cathedral has scouts, looking for voices, the same as any football team does. I suppose I can say this now, can I? A tough family. A brother in gaol, a sister who was killed in a car crash. A mother working all hours God gave. A father who was long gone. And there is this child with an exceptional voice. I put him up for audition . . . Expected that I would have to cajole him, offer bribes of some sort but I was wrong. Took it in his stride and there was a scholarship built into the agreement. There’s a school that provides the academic side. He sailed in there . . . in case you think – sorry, I didn’t catch your names – that I am too gushing, there could be a darker side. While he was still with us, an older boy picked on Cameron because he received free school meals, was disadvantaged as we call it now. The boy had a go at him one lunchtime and Cameron was eating and he didn’t react. Finished his lunch, then took the fork off his plate and went to where this boy was sitting and came behind him, and held the fork against his tormentor’s throat. It was a dramatic moment. It could have ended with the emergency services. The older boy stumbled through an apology and the assault was never again mentioned.
The Crocodile Hunter Page 17
