Nothing Sacred

by David Thorne

  Gabe picks up the bottle, looks at the label, but he is not reading it; he is three years and five thousand miles away on a dusty mountainside.

  He looks at me, says, ‘You sure you want to hear this?’

  ‘I’m a big boy.’

  Gabe shakes his head in irritation at my flippancy. ‘Never told anyone before. Nobody outside the army.’

  ‘I think I have a right,’ I say. ‘After what just happened.’

  Gabe is still looking at me, his eyes empty. He nods. ‘Fair enough. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  I nod Gabe to go on and he puts the bottle down, takes a breath as if he is about to leap from a dangerous position, and resumes his story.

  It was about six days in when it happened, six days spent shadowing 7 Platoon who seemed to know the area so well it was as if they had spent a lifetime on the mountain trails, had been born in its shadow. Apparently innocuous piles of rocks and junctions of paths had particular names, after colleagues who had lost their lives there: Cooper’s Crossing, Fox’s Hole; Dizzy’s End. Gallows humour, though any humour there had been in that platoon had died months ago.

  They had been patrolling a high trail, only a few hundred metres beneath the summit, at the point where the tangle of holly trees gave way to cedars so large and ancient they seemed to pre-date the arrival of man; laid lengthways, their trunks would be taller than two men. Gabe was walking with a lance corporal named Creek who, of all the jaded 7 Platoon, was the only soldier who had retained any trace of humanity, perhaps because he was a late arrival, flown in to take the place of a fallen colleague. He was a short, slight man who still greeted the everyday horrors of life at Lucifer with an intelligent cynicism; he stood apart from his fellow soldiers and was treated by them with disdain and suspicion. Gabe believed that he feared them.

  The 7 Platoon leader was up front, setting a hard pace, when a rigged grenade went off by the side of the trail, a sharp crack throwing up a shower of black dirt, which blotted out the tree-dappled sunshine for a moment. Even before the dirt fell back down to earth, they could hear the screams of the platoon leader; the grenade had shredded his legs and given him serious groin injuries, torn open an artery. But his screams were soon overlaid by the sound of incoming fire, AK rounds zipping through the air and ripping the bark off the holly trees, spitting up dirt where they fell short. Both platoons hit the ground and rolled off the trail to lower ground, looking for cover from holly trees and cedar tree logs left behind by long ago lumber companies; the weight of incoming fire was so great that they could do nothing but lie there and wait for it to lessen.

  ‘It was like, above our heads, there was a ceiling of bullets and noise. Anyone put their heads up, they were going to die,’ says Gabe, a trace of sadness in his voice. ‘Nothing to do. Nothing.’

  But 7 Platoon had been in this position before. Besides, the injured man was their platoon leader and a man they respected, even loved. In this foreign land of shifting rules and unfathomable morality, he was all they had to rely on.

  As his colleagues put up covering fire, shooting above their heads from where they lay without taking any kind of aim, one soldier crawled up to the screaming platoon leader and stuck syringes of morphine into his neck, using first the platoon leader’s and then his own, the soldier’s battle-dress soon slick with bright arterial blood. He shook his head helplessly as he administered to his superior officer, knowing that there was nothing to be done, that he was bleeding so fast that he would be dead in minutes and that he was powerless to do anything except keep him comfortable. As the platoon leader’s life ebbed away, the incoming fire died down until there was silence, broken only by the soldier whispering to his platoon leader, ‘It’ll be all right, it’s nothing,’ hushing him as his screams turned to whimpers and he slowly and quietly died on a shaded trail on a mountain in a faraway country he probably had not even heard of five years ago.

  ‘You could feel it immediately,’ says Gabe. ‘Like a change in the weather. Nothing was said, but this, killing their platoon leader, this was it. Gloves off, blood up.’

  It had been a classic insurgency ambush, fast and unexpected and unanswerable. They had picked off the commanding officer and that had been enough of a victory for them, more than enough, a huge tactical coup. By this time helicopters were in the air and zeroing in on the platoons’ position, a surveillance plane flying three thousand feet above. The insurgents wanted to put as much distance between themselves and the dead platoon leader as they could, and fast.

  Still, normally the helicopters would have finished the insurgents off as they ran, firing on them from above in a display so destructive and awesome, Gabe says, it seemed as unequivocal as God’s vengeance. But the brass had had enough of pointless tit-for-tat killing; they wanted warm bodies, something that could answer questions, could be paraded in front of the TV cameras and used as propaganda.

  Without a word, 7 Platoon left Gabe and his newly arrived soldiers and headed off down trails they had spent six months patrolling, guided by the surveillance plane turning lazy circles above, so high in the blue sky it was out of sight. Even if they’d wanted to follow, Gabe said, half a year of life at Lucifer had honed the Rifles platoon to a level of fitness that his soldiers couldn’t hope to match, their fury adding another adrenal kick to their pace. Gabe left half of his platoon to carry down the body of the dead officer; he took the rest and headed off in the direction of the departed 7 Platoon.

  ‘We got to the village ten, twelve minutes after the other platoon,’ says Gabe. ‘The insurgents had headed there, didn’t even realise there was a plane up above watching them. Led us to their front door.’

  When Gabe and his soldiers reached the village, it was like a ghost town, every door and window shuttered, like Dodge after a gunslinger had walked into town. The 7 Platoon soldiers were dispersed, sitting or lying or crouched against walls, some smoking impassively, some drinking water, some weeping with their hands splayed over the faces in grief for their dead leader. Nobody spoke. Gabe walked to the house where the insurgents had been seen to go to, looked in the door, saw a row of untidy bodies, small streams of blood on the dirt floor, the dozy buzz of flies within the hot gloom: the aftermath of a slaughter.

  ‘The place was so quiet, the whole village,’ says Gabe, clumsily pouring a splash of whisky. ‘Just us, the bodies, couple of goats bleating. I spoke to one of the soldiers, asked them what had happened. Told me they’d cornered them, got into an exchange of fire.’ He lifts his glass and gazes at it but does not drink. ‘Thing was, none of the dead men had any weapons.’

  Strangely, Gabe does not seem particularly concerned by this detail. He imagines that they dropped their weapons off at a cache, threw them down a well, got rid of anything that could incriminate them as insurgent fighters before they reached the village. Whatever, these men were, beyond doubt, the same men who less than an hour before had killed 7 Platoon’s beloved leader. They had had it coming, armed or not. This was war and Gabe was a pragmatist: he accepted what had happened without question. I do not know what this says about my friend; do not want to think about it. Perhaps, like Gabe says, it just is what it is.

  But once the choppers had arrived and left, and the platoons had regrouped and the dust had settled, there was one soldier who could not accept the fact of the insurgents’ slaughter with such equanimity. Creek, the recently arrived lance corporal, regarded what had happened as a war crime. If you ask me, he had a point.

  ‘Wouldn’t shut up about it,’ said Gabe. ‘No, he didn’t say anything to his platoon; he wasn’t crazy. But he kept coming to see me, asked me what I was going to do about it. Told me I could not let it drop, I had a responsibility. Mr Geneva fucking Convention.’

  Gabe looks at me and there is a challenge in his eyes, as if he is daring me to agree with Creek, take Gabe to task for not having immediately condemned the Rifle platoon’s actions. I do not respond. I have experienced nothing approaching what Gabe has had to go through; I am
not arrogant enough to believe my opinion counts for anything. Gabe takes my silence as it is meant, nods to himself, continues.

  ‘I told him to leave it. I was the officer in charge. It was my responsibility to look after my men, to instil discipline, to keep them safe. I told him to keep quiet, that it wasn’t worth it. Told him they’d make sure his career was over if he said anything.’ He sighs, deeply, a shudder in it. ‘They rotated out two days later and I forgot about Creek, about that damned 7 Platoon. Three months later I come back from Lucifer and one of the first things I hear is that Creek is dead, shot through the head by a British bullet.’

  Creek had been shot while out on routine patrol. But despite being killed by a British bullet, his death had been ascribed to enemy action. So many British weapons had been taken by the insurgents it was assumed that this was the explanation; no shadow of suspicion ever fell on the other members of his platoon. Nobody ever suspected he had been killed by his own.

  ‘I told him to keep it quiet,’ says Gabe, his eyes on the table and his voice, which since a child I have rarely heard so much as waver from its precise and cold delivery, is barely a whisper. ‘I didn’t help. Refused to. And he was right, of course he was right.’ Gabe shakes his head slowly at the table, still unable to reconcile himself with what he had done, what he had not done. ‘I was his commanding officer.’ He looks up suddenly, his eyes tortured with grief. ‘My fault. Hundred per cent. On me.’

  Massacring a dozen insurgents in cold blood, Gabe could live with. But not the premeditated murder of a soldier who he had liked, respected, and let down when in a position of power, a position to make a difference. He had started to investigate, asked questions, lobbied officers higher up the chain of command to conduct a proper inquest into the shooting of Lance Corporal Creek. He’d had, Gabe says, some success. Then he had walked past an IED disguised as a lump of camel shit and the next thing he knew he was in Germany and he was missing a leg and he would never see active service again.

  ‘Ever wondered what creates monsters?’ says Gabe, holding his glass up to his face. ‘Six months at Forward Operating Base Lucifer. That’s what.’ He downs his drink and blinks slowly, shuttering those blue-ice eyes, and I have never seen anybody look so desolate.

  16

  THAT OUR SOCIETY no longer executes its citizens for misdemeanours is something that I believe is to our collective credit; as a lawyer I do not accept that justice is served at the end of a rope. But as I sit in the waiting area of Galley Wood high security prison, the idea of incarceration does not seem much more humane.

  Galley Wood was constructed in the late nineteenth century when criminology was in its infancy and earnest reformers were looking for alternatives to execution, finding rational solutions for monstrous acts. It is a Victorian building that has been added to and added to but which retains its solid and baleful façade. Back then, prison was intended to be as abhorrent as possible, a deterrent every bit as effective as hanging – a hell on earth. I wonder how much more tolerable it is today.

  I entered through a visitors’ entrance, rather than the main white metal gates that prisoners pass through on their way to years of captivity. I had my photograph and fingerprints taken, was patted down, my briefcase opened and examined, and a spaniel dog was brought over to check that my shoes contained no drugs or other contraband. The other visitors had been through this procedure before, probably on many occasions, and submitted to it in sullen silence; just one more petty humiliation in their joyless lives.

  Now I am sitting on a hard green plastic chair that is fixed to the wall of the waiting area, watching a woman in a tracksuit tell a child to shut the fuck up, this is the last time. It was the last time the time before, and the time before that. She has four children with her, their ages ranging from about three to fifteen, and she has a stunned expression on her face as if her present situation has occurred overnight, rather than being the gradual accumulation of hundreds of poor decisions. There are old and young people waiting to visit prisoners, men, women and children, their skin yellow and sickly under the tube lighting. But they all share a quiet anger – at the prisoners they are about to visit, at themselves, at the world in general. A prison is a terrible, dehumanising place, for prisoner, visitor and guard alike.

  It is three days since Gabe and I were forced off the road and had guns placed against our heads. It has taken this long to arrange a visit to see Connor Blake, to get the paperwork organised. He is on remand, which made things easier. Had he been serving a custodial sentence, getting access to him would have been near impossible. Now I am waiting to see him. I have no idea what to expect.

  As I wait I think back to that night with Gabe, the memory compromised by the amount of Scotch we had drunk and, I now suspect, the shock I was suffering at what had happened to us. Still, I remember enough to know that Gabe is in trouble every bit as deep as mine.

  Gabe might have recovered from the wounds he suffered out in Afghanistan, but the guilt at what had happened to Lance Corporal Creek still troubled him months after his release from Selly Oak hospital. He had made phone calls, contacted members of his old platoon and any soldiers he could find connected with the Rifles; he had lobbied superior officers to reopen Creek’s inquest, cajoled, finessed, threatened.

  ‘Course,’ Gabe had said, ‘nobody wanted to know. Why would they? I had no proof, no grounds at all to get it reopened. They just thought I’d lost it, another PTSD loony.’

  It turned out that nearly all of the soldiers of the Rifles platoon had left the service. They had followed the path of many ex-soldiers in search of the adrenalin rush the army could provide, coupled with the kind of salary it could not, and gone freelance for private security companies.

  ‘Mercenaries,’ I said.

  ‘It’s where the money is nowadays,’ said Gabe. ‘Britain, the US, they go into countries to liberate them, then lose the stomach for the fight. All the western companies committed to infrastructure work, building motorways, oil exploration, suddenly they need protection from the pissed-off locals. You know how much an ex-sergeant can get a day out in Iraq?’

  ‘Don’t they need, I don’t know, some kind of licence?’

  Gabe laughed. ‘Giving them away like pizza menus. Another thing ex-soldiers like. Fuck-all oversight. They can run around shooting whoever they want, nobody says a word.’

  I imagined the veterans of the Rifles, unleashing their brand of savagery across the world with nobody to apply the brakes.

  ‘Turns out this wasn’t enough for them,’ said Gabe. ‘Bunch of them got together to create a company – Global Armour. Already won some lucrative contracts. Been out in South Sudan for six months.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  Gabe shrugged. ‘Christ knows. Whatever they want, I expect. Anyway, doesn’t matter. They’re back now.’

  ‘The guy at the tennis court?’

  Gabe nodded. ‘He’s one of them. Horrible shit called Banyan. Proper little killer.’

  ‘And the other night? The shooting?’

  Gabe smiled, swirled his Scotch as he thought back to their misjudged attempt at intimidation. ‘Yeah, that was them. Thought they could scare off a cripple. Should have seen their faces when I went after them.’ He laughed at the memory.

  It was now full dark and the events of that afternoon seemed something that had happened in the distant past, separated from the here and now by drink and exhaustion. I frowned, my mind working slowly through the fog of alcohol as I tried to piece it all together, cause and effect. ‘It’s not a bit… drastic? What they’re doing?’

  Gabe shrugged. ‘Private security companies run on reputations. All they’ve got to trade on. If you’ve got a reputation for shooting your own kind, you’re dead in the water.’

  ‘So you really think that was them?’ I said. ‘Earlier?’

  Gabe nodded slowly. ‘The way they got us out of the car – fast, aggressive – it was good work.’

  ‘Could be,’ I said. ‘Still thin
k it was Blake.’

  ‘One way to find out,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’ Go and see him. Not something I wanted to do. ‘So, what’s next?’ I said to Gabe.

  ‘That guy you met the other day. Shaved head. Major Strauss. He was my superior officer and he’s on the case. We’re going to nail them. It’s going to happen.’ He drank the remains of his glass, pushed it away from him. ‘It’s going to happen.’

  The room where I am waiting for Blake has walls of drably painted brick. There is a window high up and I am sitting at a table, an empty chair on the other side. The rules have been explained to me and my almost empty briefcase examined again; I know that I must not give anything to the prisoner or offer to bring anything in for the prisoner or pass on messages from proscribed persons to the prisoner or knowingly provide information to the prisoner that could result in harm to any other prisoner.

  The room has two doors on opposite walls and there is a rattle in the lock of the door facing me, the door I did not come in through. The door opens and a man is walked in, a guard holding him by the arm, high up under his armpit.

  ‘Connor Blake,’ says the guard, and he says it with a curl of disgust as if the name has tasted bad inside his mouth. He lets go of Blake and looks at the hand he was holding him by and I half expect him to wipe it on his shirt.

  ‘We’ll be outside. If you need us. Hammer on the door.’ The guard gives Blake the stare as if to warn him to be on his best behaviour but Blake does not respond, does not meet his eye. He appears to be in his own world, unaware. The guard turns and walks to the door, pauses in the doorway, takes a last look at Blake and then shakes his head and closes the door behind him. Now it is only me and Blake, him standing and me sitting, and for a moment there is silence as I look at the man who I believe has been at the root of the recent evil I have experienced.