The Last Kestrel

by Jill McGivering

  Afterwards she filled a metal sink with water and pummelled her clothes. She was back in civilization. The face looking back at her in the mirror was weather-beaten. Her lips were cracked and peeling, her nose and cheeks sand-scoured. While her hands worked, soaking and wringing, her mind was busy.

  She thought of Hasina and the way her thin, hard body had sagged and drained itself of life as the battered remains of her husband were lowered into the ground. She thought of Najib’s pleading eyes, large in the moonlight, as he begged her to intervene for him. She looked into the eyes in the mirror. They were uneasy. I had to tell Mack what I saw, she told herself. What he does with the information is his business.

  She opened the taps and let another layer of desert dirt splash out of her clothes. She squeezed them into folds, then felt them swell between her fingers again, plump with water. Her mother’s ring shone clean on her hand. Professional distance, she thought. It’s the only way I’m going to survive this. Don’t get involved. Don’t cross the line.

  She saw John as soon as she walked into the cookhouse. His dusty fleece stood out against the uniforms. He was sitting with three soldiers, holding forth about something, his sauce-stained knife stabbing the air for emphasis. Telling them how to fight the war, probably. She saw their tired expressions. They were listening with polite discipline, heads down, sawing at their meat and potatoes with plastic cutlery.

  He was still there after she’d gone through the hand-sanitizing drill, loaded her plastic plate with food and come back into the dining area. The soldiers looked up with relief as she approached, taking her arrival as a cue to scrape back their chairs. Only John didn’t look pleased to see her.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Look who’s here. How was desert storm?’

  The soldiers were cleaning off their places with antiseptic wipes and gathering up their debris, saying perfunctory goodbyes to John as they made their escape.

  ‘Dusty,’ she said. ‘You?’

  He gave her a supercilious look. He never used to be this pompous, she thought. He was getting worse as he aged. Maybe they both were.

  ‘Bloody hairy up in Lamesh. Filed every day. London can’t get enough.’ He pushed a buttered bread roll into his mouth and continued to speak through a churning cement-mixer of dough. ‘You filed much?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She feigned a smile. ‘Still working on a top line.’

  ‘Blimey.’ He looked smug. ‘All right for some.’

  Two young lads took their places at the far end of the trestle table and hunched over their food, shovelling it in. John looked at them, then leaned forward to Ellen, his jaws still working bread.

  ‘One more location,’ he said. ‘Then I’m done. Be glad to get out. A shit-hole, this place. Going to hell in a hand-basket.’

  She thought wearily that she should read through his pieces online. She ought to know what he’d been filing before she wrote her own article, but she wasn’t looking forward to it. This would be yet another country he’d consign to the dustbin of history, without speaking to a single Afghan.

  ‘Where’s your last stop?’ Please not Rounell in the north where she was heading. She couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Nayullah.’ He looked furtive. ‘You haven’t been, have you?’

  ‘Not into town, no. Why?’

  He looked round with exaggerated care for spies from rival papers. ‘Great story,’ he said. ‘Progress. For once.’

  ‘Good news?’ She smiled. ‘You’ll never get it into print.’

  He leaned forward, his face low over his slice of cheesecake. ‘That suicide bomb. Turns out it’s just what they needed.’ He nodded sagely. ‘It’s really turned things round.’

  She set down her knife and fork and looked at him closely. ‘Turned things round?’

  He nodded. ‘The coalition worked their nuts off trying to get a deal with the elders before the bomb. Not a sniff.’

  She thought of the shoura that Najib had mentioned as part of Major Mack’s diplomatic offensive. ‘And?’

  John’s eyes gleamed with triumph. ‘Then the bomb happened. Local women and kids blown to bits. Policemen, all local lads. It’s scared the hell out of them. Now they’ll agree to anything. Falling over themselves to inform. Anything to save their skins.’

  Ellen remembered Mack’s voice, speaking so earnestly when he talked about the impact of the suicide bomb. People need to think who’s got their interests at heart, he’d said. Who goes out of their way to help civilians, not hurt them. She blinked, considering. His words had been more prophetic than she’d realized.

  ‘The Brits are wetting themselves,’ John was saying. ‘Can’t believe their luck. Nayullah’s small but it matters. That bomb. Could be a turning point.’

  Even if it isn’t, she thought, you’ll hype it up so much in your copy, it’ll sound like one. She considered. ‘What’s your source on all this?’

  He tapped the side of his nose with his finger and looked pleased with himself. He stuck a plastic spoon into his cheesecake and brought a messy dollop to his lips. He’s already regretting telling me so much, she thought, but he’s such a big mouth, he can’t help himself. She watched him chew, the corners of his mouth sloppy with confectioner’s cream. Besides, she thought, he doesn’t really see me as competition. It doesn’t matter to a man like him what awards I’ve won. It’s only a magazine. And I’m only a woman.

  Ellen lowered her eyes and turned her attention to the stringy chicken and vegetables on her plate. Her head was buzzing. Something inside her was screaming and she longed to get away from John to think it through. As he droned on about the wonderful stories he’d filed and what Afghans really needed, she screened him out, swallowing her food and nodding. He wasn’t a man who could tell the difference between interest and endurance. Finally he scraped back his chair and got to his feet.

  ‘Fancy a smoke?’ he said.

  ‘Thanks but I’d better work.’ She tried to sound disappointed. ‘Any way of getting on the Internet here?’

  ‘Not officially,’ he said. He was already tapping a cigarette out of his packet, eager not to lose a second’s smoking time. ‘But they’ve got computers.’ He grinned down at her, fleshing out his double chin. ‘So if you bat your eyelashes and ask nicely…’

  Two actions, she thought, of which you are incapable.

  And then, thank goodness, he was gone.

  The Internet connection was frustratingly slow. Ellen had been escorted by a self-important young media officer down a flight of wooden steps into a protected area, a dimly lit operations room built out of sand-filled hessian walls. He led her to a fold-up chair and table in a corner and hovered behind her, watching every move, as she started to search and read.

  It was a secure comms area, the kind of portable field office that made her think of old Second World War films, only nowadays computers had replaced radio sets. Young men in uniform were hunched at similar desks and tables, writing reports and memos and bouncing emails to and from the provincial headquarters. Above her own table, there was an official chart with lists that showed—

  ‘Eyes forward.’ The media officer leaned over her and tapped on her computer screen to focus her attention. For heaven’s sake, she thought. I’ve seen more classified military info than you’ve had hot dinners. She nodded and smiled: Was there any chance of a cup of coffee? She’d be so grateful. He hesitated, then disappeared to make one.

  She pulled up the site for The Times and started to scroll through John’s pieces. Phil had been right. John had filed a steady stream, much of it embellished with melodramatic first-person accounts of the action he’d witnessed and hardships endured while serving at the front with ‘our boys’. Each report was illustrated by a photo by-line, taken some years ago.

  His report on the Nayullah suicide bomb was short. She could just imagine his conversation with the guys on the foreign desk – ‘no Brits killed, only Afghans, a few hundred words?’ He might regret that since he’d now decided it was such a pivotal event
.

  When she’d had enough of John’s prose, she went back to the search engine and started to browse. She wanted to find out more about the way the Taliban paid off people like Karam. They had the money. The drug trade saw to that. But she needed concrete details to flesh out her theory.

  She tried to narrow her search with a string of words about Afghanistan and dollars. It still pulled up several hundred finds. She began, at a maddeningly slow pace, to click through them, one by one. Most were useless. Pages about Afghanistan’s finance ministry, the Kabul government’s various budgets and adjustments to the scale of the international aid package. She struggled on, without knowing quite what she was looking for.

  ‘Found what you wanted?’ The young officer plonked a polystyrene cup of milky coffee on the desk beside her and peered over her shoulder. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Just checking a few facts,’ she said. ‘Nearly done.’

  He made an exaggerated point of looking at his watch.

  ‘How much more do you need?’

  ‘Half an hour?’

  He shook his head. ‘Twenty minutes max,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  She scrolled down, scanning the sites, conscious that her time was running out. The budget statements continued, followed by a raft of references to pledges at a recent conference.

  Just as she was despairing, a media article opened that made her stomach contract. She glanced round quickly to see if her media minder was watching. He had his back to her, chatting in a low voice to a colleague. She turned back to the screen.

  Its title was: ‘What price freedom?’ A clip from a newspaper in the United States. God bless that journalist, she thought. A proper piece of reporting at last. She scanned through it as fast as she could, expecting to be prised away from the computer at any moment.

  It detailed a recent development programme, implemented by the American military in Kandahar, which was using funds approved as part of the aid budget to buy the loyalty of local commanders. Sometimes this was quasi-legitimate, the article said. An agreement to site a new school or well or clinic, for example, in the spot chosen by a sympathetic local commander and to his advantage. So it might benefit his supporters or relatives more than their neighbours and serve the purpose of shoring up his local influence.

  But at other times, the piece argued, aid money was being spent on more explicit bribes. Bundles of dollars, sometimes substantial amounts, were being used to line the pockets of local men of influence and convince them to back the coalition rather than the Taliban. Did the public in the West, the reporter asked, realize how their tax-funded development money was being spent? What value did loyalty have if it were bought in this way? And didn’t this covert strategy fly in the face of international commitments to curb corruption in Afghanistan?

  An American military official was quoted, giving a standard denial. But the report ended with a Washington-based analyst. Such a strategy, he said, was perfectly plausible. Even, he argued, an effective use of funds.

  ‘The government routinely divides the enemy into three categories,’ he said. ‘Tier three is the lowest threat. That might be local people who are sympathetic to the enemy, who give food or shelter but aren’t actively involved in violence themselves. These people are typical targets of hearts and minds campaigns.

  ‘Tier one is at the other extreme. They’re hardcore militants. Fanatics who’ve been recruited and trained as fighters and are ideologues. They’re usually impossible to convert.

  ‘But that leaves the middle: tier two. Opportunists. Pragmatic local leaders who are willing to do deals for cash. Buying their support may be a good investment.’

  Karam. She sat, staring for a moment at the open page, feeling the skin along her hairline tighten, her cheeks flush. The young officer was scuttling back to her, barking some instruction to finish up now, right now, he really had to insist. He reached forward, peering over her shoulder as she quickly closed down the page and deleted the search words that had led her to it. Suddenly she felt keen to cover her tracks.

  ‘Phil?’

  With his meetings and other calls, it had taken her three attempts to catch him. Here darkness was already pressing in, turning the desert into a menacing emptiness as she peered out at it through the thick perimeter fence. In London it was late afternoon, almost the end of the working day.

  ‘Where the hell’ve you been?’ He sounded bad-tempered. ‘I thought you’d call yesterday.’ He grunted. ‘What’ve you got anyway?’

  ‘A scandal. I think they’ve used aid money to buy support from a local leader. A thug with connections to a suicide bombing. And we’re giving him taxpayers’ money to sweeten him up. A shed-load.’

  A pause. She heard the tap, tap of his pen bouncing on the surface of his desk. He exhaled heavily. ‘What evidence’ve you got?’

  She clicked her tongue. ‘I’m building a case.’

  ‘Which means what?’

  ‘I’ve seen the money.’ She was thinking quickly. ‘I think it comes from the coalition.’

  ‘Can you prove that?’

  She hesitated. Truth was: not yet. It was taking shape right in front of her – she was sure she was right – but there were still pieces missing.

  Phil was sounding impatient. ‘I need it now, Ellen. You’re out of time. Can you stand this up or not?’

  ‘Almost,’ she said. ‘There’s a man—’

  He cut in. ‘Almost isn’t good enough.’

  All I need, she thought, is one strong interview that confirms it. That ties the loose ends together. Even off the record, if that’s all I can get. Phil’s heavy breathing reached towards her down the line.

  ‘You’ve got a backup, Ellen? Tell me you’ve got a backup.’

  ‘One more day. That’s all I need. Twenty-four hours.’

  The second phone on his desk started to ring, echoing down the line like an alarm. He cursed them both.

  ‘Phil. Have I ever let you down?’

  He grunted. ‘Twenty-four hours. But it’d better be good.’

  A dull click as the receiver went down. She stood for a moment, looking at the pale stars emerging from the gloom, and wondering how on earth she was going to deliver this time.

  The officious media minder intercepted her as she walked back to the tent. He looked angry, tapping his watch.

  ‘Nine o’clock,’ he said. ‘Briefing.’ He turned on his heel before she had a chance to reply. ‘Hurry.’

  She was ushered into a cramped bunker room. A strip light buzzed overhead. A white board was mounted on a bare wall. It was clearly a reception room for outsiders, stripped of any sensitive information. Three officers, including the Base Commander, got up from the central table and shook her hand. Smiles all round and jokey pleasantries. The famous Ellen Thomas, they said. They were honoured. The Commander claimed he always read her pieces. While they effused, a minion ran about behind them, making coffee.

  One of them, a youngster with bloodshot eyes, had just come down from Rounell where he’d been based for the last three months. He’d be travelling back up with her tomorrow, they said. First thing. She saw the exhaustion in his face. A man, she thought, who desperately needed an evening to himself. A few hours to think about nothing. Hot food, a long shower, and a chance to sleep. Instead he was being rolled out by his boss to meet the media.

  When the general chat subsided, the Commander turned to the fatigued young man and prompted him to begin. He cleared his throat.

  ‘I’d like to give a short presentation about the operation in Rounell,’ he began. He clicked through a series of computer graphics, projected onto the white board. He came across as nervous, embarrassed in front of his commanding officer. He faltered and repeated himself.

  The presentation stretched on. A succession of facts and figures about Rounell, read off laboriously, line by line, from the screen. A geographical explanation of the surrounding area, with details of the indigenous communities. The Commander nodded encouragement.

 
; Ellen sat, watching politely, but didn’t hear a word. Her mind was miles away, processing and calculating. She started with Major Mack. He was unusually smart. She knew that. He was in a different league from most of the soldiers she met, even amongst commanding officers. He struck her as an individual, with strong principles and a mind of his own. Someone willing to take controversial decisions and risk operating outside the chain of command. Exactly the sort of person the military might select for a special operation. It seemed perfectly plausible to her that he’d been given the authority to identify tier-two leaders and quietly strike deals with them. Her heartbeat accelerated. The more she thought about it, the more it rang true. Given his passion for the safety of his boys, she could see that any strategy that cut corners and protected soldiers from danger would be something he could justify to himself.

  The young officer turned to address her. ‘Any questions so far?’

  She shook her head and smiled. ‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s perfectly clear.’

  The Commander looked pleased. The young officer, heartened, clicked on a new chapter. Rounell: The Scale of the Challenge.

  ‘Strategic objectives,’ he said, and started to read out a screen of bullet points. Next he moved onto an evaluation of progress on key objectives, including establishing power lines and digging wells. More bullet points. Ellen faded him out.

  If the money came from the military, she thought, why had Najib been sent to hand it over? Why such secrecy? She felt suddenly sick. Major Mack says I must leave. She remembered the panic in Najib’s eyes. But why? I did everything he asked.

  If Najib had just been following orders, why had he been so afraid? Why hadn’t he explained that to her and defended himself? And why had Mack decided to get rid of him so abruptly? She took hold of the edge of the table to steady herself. In the background, the intoning voice faltered, uncertain, and came to a halt. The Commander gave hearty thanks, then turned to her.