by F. G. Cottam
‘It’s a giant cockroach.’
‘That’s what those limos looked like,’ Gaul said. ‘Black and glossy and I swear to you as ugly as the Palmetto bugs we have back home.’
Hunter joined Rodriguez and Peterson for lunch before they formulated their plan of attack. They pooled their food, as was the custom. This was a ritual that always delivered two things. The first was a chance to share the excellent field rations enjoyed by the Americans and Canadians. The second, less appetising, was the ridicule his own piss-poor British Army rations always attracted when offered in exchange.
A fragment of poetry kept repeating in Hunter’s mind the way a catchy song lyric will. He thought it must have been prompted by Peterson’s earlier jibe about tea and medals. He assumed this because it was Rupert Brooke and it was a couplet from the poem about the Old Vicarage at Grantchester. But it wasn’t the obvious lines, the famous ones that ended the work on a note of English pastoral wistfulness. Instead, it was:
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
It was odd. Brooke was not a poet Hunter had ever enjoyed. He could not remember last having read him. But the lines were his and there was something sinister about their rhythmic insistence as they reverberated in his head.
Rodriguez tore open a foil pack with his teeth, tipped the contents dubiously into a mug of hot water and began slowly to stir. Hunter recognised the familiar, largely chemical smell of what was optimistically termed lamb casserole. Rodriguez watched it bubble and churn in his mug. Then he looked up at Hunter. ‘How did you fare with Gaul?’
‘Okay. He was informative enough. Don’t think he’d want me as his point man.’
‘Oh?’
‘He made a comment about my vocabulary. I think he’s got me down as a bullshit artist. It could be counter-productive when we go in if your men all think that way.’
‘I speak nine languages,’ Rodriguez said.
‘I was told seven.’
‘Then your intelligence is out of date, Captain. My point is simply that this accomplishment doesn’t undermine me in the minds of the men.’
‘I’m skilled at crochet,’ Peterson said. He belched. ‘Very skilled. Doesn’t necessarily mean I interfere with little girls.’
‘I don’t know how you eat this shit, Hunter,’ Rodriguez said, slopping out his libellously labelled lamb casserole. He reached for the satchel of charts and maps on the ground beside him. ‘Let’s get down to business, gentlemen. We attack at 2100 hours. Full darkness will have been on us for an hour. We will brief the men at 1700 hours. We need to know what we are about.’
The three men stood and walked the short distance to the small camouflage-covered tent erected as a command centre. In there, over an improvised table, they would iron out every exact permutation.
Hunter did not know why he had allowed himself to become preoccupied by such extraneous details as cult tattoos, the odour of decay and the silent attack dog. All of them had been trained to subdue dogs. And the nature and calibre of the weapons they carried and their physical numbers were far more important considerations than the physical characteristics of the men guarding their objective. Still, he felt a growing sense of strangeness. Still, the Brooke couplet echoed and sang maddeningly in his head. He snatched at a sinew of orchid vine trailing down the side of the ravine, crushed it between his hands and sniffed his sticky palms as though the sharp, savage odour of the plant sap could clear his mind and exorcise his thoughts.
After the briefing, on full bellies, Rodriguez and Peterson did what all the men not on sentry patrol were doing and went off to enjoy a couple of hours’ sleep. Hunter unpacked his sleeping bag, unrolled his foam undersheet and found a fairly flat spot intent on doing the same. But he could not sleep. The Brooke couplet had receded, finally, in his mind. But his mind could discover no rest. Instead, it was filled with thoughts of Lillian, his new wife. He did not think about or speculate upon their future together. On the eve of combat, he was too superstitious a soldier for that. He did not believe in throwing down the gauntlet to fate. Instead, as the men from Louisiana and Arkansas snored cradling their rifles around him, as exotic birds shrieked in the forest canopy on remote tree limbs above, Mark Hunter thought about what he regarded as the miracle of his marriage to the beautiful woman he loved.
He had met her one evening fourteen months earlier at an event staged at Hatchard’s bookshop on Piccadilly. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney had been there to give a reading. He had queued patiently to exchange a word with the great man and have his hardback first edition signed. He was leaning against a wall, grinning at the signature with the book opened in front of him, when she turned among the press of people and spoke to him clear of the surrounding chatter.
‘You’re a lover of poetry?’
‘Yes. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.’
She had green, feline eyes and straight, light-brown hair that buckled and splashed heavily around her shoulders. She was very composed, with her wine glass held high in front of her. He thought it the composure that gave her such strong physical impact, though she was very slender and not particularly tall.
‘You don’t look like a poetry fan.’
‘Oh? What do they look like? Generally.’
‘Not like a soldier of fortune. Not like someone involved in espionage. Not carrying an intriguing facial scar. In short, not at all like you.’ She raised an eyebrow and sipped from her drink. ‘Look around.’
They were lit by hot lights above them, surrounded by the spangle of book spines on heaving shelves. The shop was very crowded and most of the men there were red-faced, tweedy, bucolic. The scar under his cheekbone was a shrapnel graze. He thought that perhaps she was here from the publishing company, or the company that owned the bookshop, to look after their star guest. If so, she seemed a very svelte and polished sort of security presence. Lucky old Seamus Heaney.
‘Look, I’m not a crank or anything,’ Hunter said. ‘I like poetry. I can even quote it, should the need for proof arise.’
She appraised him some more. He could not read her expression at all. She wore a red wool coat, unbuttoned. It was early spring outside on the street but very hot in the crowded space they shared. The heat seemed of no concern to her. She cocked her head and looked at the book in his hands and then plucked it from his grip. ‘Beowulf,’ she said. ‘This isn’t Heaney’s poetry.’
‘It’s his translation.’
‘It’s the story of a monster. My name is Lillian.’
‘It’s the story of the quest to kill a monster. Three monsters. I’m Mark.’ An incredulous thought occurred to him. ‘Are you chatting me up?’
She handed him back his copy of Beowulf and sipped more wine. ‘You are the most attractive man in the room. You might be the most attractive man I’ve ever met. That will depend. Tell me about yourself, Mark. Don’t lie. I will know straight away if you do.’
Afterwards they went for a drink in Covent Garden, where she had a flat. She worked in publishing. But she had been at the Heaney reading purely as a fan. Her book had been signed also. It was the Collected Poems. It had been safely tucked back in her shoulder bag by the time of their Hatchard’s confrontation.
‘What kind of poetry do you like?’
‘Modern,’ he said. ‘Anything I really like is from Manley Hopkins on.’
She laughed. ‘You seem entirely too good to be true.’
‘I can assure you I’m not.’
‘You must think me very brazen. I’m not usually like that. I’ve wasted the past two years on a relationship that wasn’t worth my time. This was a discovery made only a few days ago. It’s left me feeling somewhat angry and aggressive. I’m not usually quite so forthright. And I’m not so pathetic as to think relationships with men define a woman. But I saw you and I saw that you were alone and I didn’t want you just to slip away.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘What do you do?’
Th
eir table in the pub seated only two and they occupied an isolated corner. Mindful of her earlier warning, he told her. She listened. Once again, he found that he could not read her expression. He thought that she was very beautiful. She was the more so the more he studied her. It was not an effect of make-up or of style. It was uncontrived and she seemed hardly conscious of it, though he knew she must be. When he had finished telling her about his life, she smiled and finished her drink and asked him to walk her home. On her doorstep, he kissed her. She dropped a hand on to his shoulder and the touch of her thrilled through him with a force that was almost convulsive.
‘What would you like to do now?’
‘Take you to bed?’
‘I mean, would you like us to see one another again?’
‘Oh, God. That was so crass. I’m so sorry, Lillian.’
She fished for her keys in her bag. ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘There’s no harm in optimism. The glass half full and all that.’
He laughed with relief. ‘What would you like me to do?’
She had found her keys. She lifted her eyes from them to him. She flicked the veils of heavy hair away from her face, revealing her expression fully. ‘I’d like you to court me, Mark. I would like that very much.’
He walked down Catherine Street to the north side of Waterloo Bridge and took the turn of descending steps to the Embankment. He looked along the gentle sweep to the right of the Thames towards the Houses of Parliament. He would walk the route back to the barracks and his hard mattress and coarse woollen blanket and sleep. There was a light spring fog over the river and the lamps strung along the Embankment were pearly in the rising mist. He was billeted at Chelsea Barracks for a two-day session of seminars. He had seen the details of the Heaney reading in a London free-sheet left by someone on the table he chose at random for lunch in the officers’ canteen. He had set down his tray and seen the listing. He had gone to Hatchard’s really on a whim. Already he regarded his having met his future wife as a sort of miracle. Nothing up to the point of his deployment in Bolivia would shake Mark Hunter’s faith in that grateful conviction.
Now, sleepless in the ravine, he went to get his pack and took from it some paper and a pen. There was an unfamiliar duty he had forgotten to perform and he needed to carry out. He had to write a letter to Lillian that might be his last. It was a new responsibility and it was onerous but he had no choice. She had the right to final words from him should he not survive the coming encounter. He would keep the tone light. He had misgivings about this operation, an uneasiness he could not have articulated to himself, let alone to her. He would not be dishonest in what he wrote. One discovered lie and he believed he would lose her. That was her promise. That was the standard she set. He would not truly have dared to lie to her. She was too precious a prize for him to think of risking the loss. But there was enough honest comedy in the circumstances to allow him some cheer in the writing. And he did not believe he was going to be killed or injured in the contact to come. No soldier really ever does. It’s always what happens in a fight to someone else. Hunter wrote with brevity and good cheer, signed his note with a kiss and folded the paper into an envelope he licked shut and put back into his pack. Much had recently changed in his life and the change was greatly for the better. But he was experienced at what he was about to do and he entertained no false modesty concerning his formidable ability to do it.
There was only so much information the men could absorb about their mission. The boys of the South were soldiers steeled for action. They were not repositories of words. They were not lovers of rhetoric. There were only so many times a weapon could be stripped and cleaned and loaded. There were only so many equipment checks a man could make on the tools on which he depended in action for survival. Fifteen minutes before their moment of departure, Hunter, Rodriguez and Peterson gathered in their little canvas command post with nothing else physically to do before setting off on the mile-long route to combat. Rodriguez took out a metal flask, unscrewed the stopper and poured them each an inch of something potent. Hunter sniffed the liquor. It was tequila. They raised their glasses and drained them.
‘I’m wondering about you, Hunter,’ Rodriguez said. ‘I like to know the men I fight alongside. When you’re not doing what you’re ordered to, what do you choose to do? What’s the passion in your other life?’
Hunter wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He was silent for a moment. ‘Back at home, my wife and I light a log fire in the evening.’
‘It’s summer,’ Peterson said. ‘Even in England, it’s summer now.’
‘You don’t live in the West Country, Captain. We light a fire. And the logs take. And the room fills with the warm scent of pine resin. And I brush my wife’s hair as she sits between my knees on the rug in front of me. And I greatly cherish that ritual.’
Rodriguez smiled and nodded.
‘That’s fucking tragic,’ Peterson said. ‘It’s my understanding you’ve only been married a few weeks.’
‘Not tragic,’ Rodriguez said. He shrugged. ‘Though somewhat English, perhaps.’
Hunter looked at Peterson. ‘And you don’t know what it is that makes my wife’s hair require the brushing.’ He turned to Rodriguez. ‘You, Major?’
‘I’m teaching my daughter piano,’ Rodriguez said. ‘I treasure that time we spend together, side by side on our stools at the keyboard. She has a real and precious gift.’
‘Jesus,’ Peterson said to Rodriguez. ‘Is there no end to what you can do?’
Rodriguez smiled. He looked apprehensive, even sad, though such feelings were relative, Hunter told himself. ‘What about you, Peterson?’
‘I like to read,’ Peterson said. ‘When I’m not behind the butt of an assault rifle, drawing a bead on anything with a pulse, believe it or not, I like to read. I like to walk in open country. And I like to paint. No country on God’s earth like mine for a watercolour painter.’
‘What kind of stuff do you read?’ the major asked. He sounded genuinely interested.
‘Melville. Conrad. I like stories about the sea.’
‘And the crocheting?’ Hunter said.
‘I lied about the crocheting,’ Peterson said. ‘I’m not the Renaissance man I claim to be.’
Under canvas, in darkness, Rodriguez and Hunter laughed. Peterson laughed with them. When the laughter stopped, the three soldiers embraced one another.
‘This is a stroll in the park, gentlemen,’ Rodriguez said.
But in that, the major was wrong.
Chapter Three
They breached the compound perimeter at two opposing points and fanned out rapidly, making for the building at the centre, eagerly intent on killing anyone they confronted. Momentum was all with strike troops and every man of them knew it. You went forward. You did not ever take a backward step. Your progress was relentless and murderous and it did not falter until the target was seized and secured. Your very survival depended upon this impetus. The smell of cordite quickly filled the air. Rounds were fired in short, disciplined, staccato bursts by the troops to Hunter’s left and right. The return fire it provoked was wild and uncontrolled, promiscuous as the compound’s defenders spent a magazine with every burst they triggered. Hunter was aware of bullets zipping by him in the darkness, of their deadly weight and wasted velocity. He heard a mag clatter to the ground forty feet beyond where he progressed in a crouch and aimed a burst of fire in that direction, hitting something solid and provoking a grunt of surprise or pain. He was hit himself then, a hundred and forty pounds of attack dog slamming into him, putting him on the ground, winding him and attempting to bite out his throat. He raised his forearm and the dog clamped a jaw of bristling teeth around the limb and began to toss its head and tear. It made no sound. Its eyes were a dull, sightless crimson. The arm it held was Hunter’s left. He took his fighting knife from its scabbard on his right thigh and plunged it to the hilt into the neck of the dog. The animal merely tightened the clench of its jaw on Hunter’s arm and he felt
the skin puncture deeply and heard his own tendons start to strain and rip. There was a volley of automatic rifle fire, incredibly loud, right over him. The dog slumped and Hunter squirmed from underneath it. Gaul had been wrong. The animal stank like death itself. The blast of its breath in Hunter’s face had been the reek of a charnel house.
Peterson was over him, helping him to his feet. ‘None of this is right,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
Peterson was panting, sweaty. Over the cam cream it was smeared with his face was already filthy from the smoke of stun grenades and powder burn. ‘They’re taking rounds,’ he said. ‘But they’re not dying, Captain.’
As if to prove the point, on the ground, the dead Rottweiler twitched and shuddered like a beast stirred and summoned. Its guts lay glistening, spread where Peterson’s heavy calibre shot had spilled them. Hunter stared, incredulous and revolted. The twitching animal began to pull itself free of its own gore. Its eyes opened with a ruby glimmer.
‘Come on,’ Peterson said.
They approached the marquee. It was canvas, black and oily and taut. And it was the vaunting size, Hunter saw, of a cathedral. Guidelines as thick as tow ropes tethered it to metal stanchions pulverised deep into the ground but still proud above the earth to about the height of a man. They could discover no entrance. The firefight all around them was chaotic now. The resistance was impossibly stubborn. Momentum had been lost and, with it, the pattern of attack. There was no knowing enemy from friend. Behind him, as he looked in horror and something like awe at the massive structure in front of him, Hunter could tell from the grunts and screams that the conflict had descended into close-quarter duels fought hand to hand.
They had commanded eight men. They had possessed company strength in total of eleven. It was nowhere near enough. He wondered how many now were left alive. He judged they were no more than three or four minutes into their disastrously misconceived assault.
