The Reluctant Hero

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For pity’s sake, why?’

  ‘Many reasons. But mostly because of Martha.’

  ‘I don’t really know what happened to Martha.’

  ‘No, of course you don’t. But you should have asked,’ Harry replied, disappearing into the night.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When he returned home later that evening, Harry shared what he had discovered with Zac. For a while, they both sat silently, staring at the fire in Harry’s hearth, chasing the consequences. They both knew where it would lead.

  ‘I thought your policeman friend warned you not to take things into your own hands,’ Zac said eventually.

  ‘And not to park on yellow lines,’ muttered Harry. ‘Anyway, we’re talking Roddy Bowles. The creep doesn’t count.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘Even so what, Zac? I hate it when you go all enigmatic on me. You’re an American, for God’s sake.’

  ‘You’re going to see this through, aren’t you?’ ‘Of course. To the end.’

  ‘Me, too.’

  Harry turned to look at his friend. ‘Look, Zac, I think I know—’

  ‘Shuddup, Harry.’

  ‘What?’

  When Zac turned from the fire his eyes had regained some inner spark. The body was weak, but the will was still overpowering. ‘For this one time in your life, Harry, shut the fuck up and listen. Listen hard. We do this together. And we do it my way.’

  ‘What way is that, Zac?’ Harry asked softly, although he already knew.

  ‘The way you would do it, if you were in my shoes.’

  Harry poured them both another drink. And then he listened.

  Dictatorships never depend upon just one man. They rely on a System, which is built of many parts. Take one part away, destroy it, and the entire System may become unstable and begin to fall apart. Karabayev knew that, he was a master at playing the Ta’argi system, which was why he had risen so high and survived so long. Power abhors a vacuum, and he had learned it was better not to create one.

  Yet when he was shown the evidence, he felt he had no choice. He looked out from his office with its sweeping views of Ashkek, and his instincts slowly hardened. Ashkek was his city – oh, there were some cities in Ta’argistan less loyal, and one or two he hadn’t dared enter for several years, but this was his place and he refused to be made a fool of in his own home. Yet on his desk, in the folder in front of him, was the evidence that Amir Beg was trying to do precisely that.

  Karabayev had been told that the American who had been caught screwing his wife had been dealt with, as he had ordered. Amir Beg had given his word on that, just as he had recounted how the Englishman who had caused so much trouble over the matter was also dead, buried somewhere up in the mountains. So how was it, asked the President, that he was holding a photograph of the two of them, posing for the camera, shaking hands, smiling, almost jeering as it seemed to Karabayev, and standing in front of the British House of Commons with a time code on the photograph bearing last week’s date?

  Not that Karabayev believed in the implicit integrity of photo-graphs, they could so easily be faked, he’d seen to that himself for one or two of the show trials he’d needed to arrange while on his way up. A thought even flitted through his mind that the photographs of the American with his wife might not have been what they purported to be, but such thoughts were quickly pushed aside by the other item in the folder. A computer printout of a bank statement, one of Amir Beg’s, from a foreign account. The existence of the account didn’t trouble Karabayev, they all had such arrangements, a pension plan for those who lived long enough to enjoy such things, although he was shocked to see that Amir Beg was receiving a higher kickback from one of the Ashkek casinos than was he. Even that could be taken in his stride and easily corrected, but what couldn’t be so lightly dealt with was the evidence in the bank details of Amir Beg’s deliberate treachery.

  Karabayev had long known of Beg’s envy and had sensed the lack of loyalty, but evidence had been hard to find. Yet here it was, staring at him. The seducer and his friend were still alive, and it was Amir Beg’s doing.

  He couldn’t drag himself away from the photograph. His eyes kept coming back to the jeering face of the American, imagining it sweating above his wife’s own, and his anger grew to a point where it overpowered his caution. He wouldn’t be mocked, and neither would he be betrayed. He wasn’t only the President, he was also a man, and he was as mad as hell.

  He summoned Amir Beg, and when he arrived at the Presidential Palace a little later he was met by the Presidential Guard, but instead of receiving the usual salute he was bundled into the back of a car and driven straight to the prison. At first he struggled, then he threatened, but as he was dragged towards the Extreme Punishment Wing he began instead to plead. He was pleading ever more fervently as they dragged him up his own scaffold and placed the rope around his neck. He kept demanding to know why, what was the reason, but no one bothered to reply. Had this sort of thing ever needed a reason?

  Karabayev had long wondered about Beg’s private life, and particularly his sexuality. Beg had never married. He had never been found with his trousers round his ankles, yet none of the inevitable rumours this conduct inspired had gained any lasting life. He was a loner, not as other men, and Karabayev had come to the conclusion that Beg’s time in the gulag had crippled more than simply his hands. Yet when, later in the day, he saw the new photographs that landed on his desk, the President laughed. They showed Beg with an unmistakable bulge beneath his trousers. At last Karabayev had discovered what turned the poisonous little runt on.

  A damned good hanging.

  It was afternoon, around the time the English have tea, Harry said, but Zac was having none of that. No tea, no cake, he insisted, in language that was characteristically colourful. In any event Zac’s appetite had all but disappeared and it was beginning to become apparent on his shrinking frame. So they made do with one drink. A martini. Zac chewed the olive very slowly, as though it was rarest caviar.

  They reminisced, about good times and the good people they had known. Zac even talked about P.J., and it was as if she were still there, beside him. Eventually, laughing gently after yet another story, he ran his finger around the bottom of his glass, checking that the final drop had gone. ‘Guess it’s time for a bit of weeding, old friend.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you just this once, Zac. Are you sure?’

  ‘You know, P.J. put that exact damned question to me just before we got married. I went ahead and did it, anyway,’ he replied, putting down his glass and rising stiffly from his chair.

  Hervé d’Arbois was punctilious for a Frenchman and arrived only seven minutes late. Harry was there to greet him at the door. D’Arbois was in town only briefly, but had been tempted to delay his departure a couple of hours by Harry’s offer of dinner at the Special Forces Club, a venue he knew only by reputation, and by the enticing suggestion that Harry was at last in a position to close the chapter on Zac Kravitz. They sat at a quiet corner in the dining room studying the menu.

  ‘If you’re tempted by the Dover sole I’d recommend having it grilled with nothing but a little butter and lemon. The béarnaise sauce is . . .’ Harry shrugged apologetically. ‘I think there’s been an outbreak of Turks in the kitchen. But we could wash it down with a bottle of Chablis. A grand cru. Protected by a stout glass bottle and a thousand years of tradition. They can’t screw that up.’

  ‘My dear Harry, it seems I am in your hands.’ The Frenchman bowed gracefully, sitting beneath a portrait of Charles de Gaulle.

  ‘Did you ever meet him, Hervé?’ Harry asked as the waiter delivered their first course.

  ‘Naturally. Many times. The first after my unit returned from Algeria. I was barely eighteen.’

  ‘You didn’t resent what he did, giving Algeria its independence? After so much blood had been shed for it?’

  ‘Unlike you, I suspect, my friend, I have always regarded myself as
more of an administrator than a politician. There are some things that must be. You accept them and move on.’ He dipped his fork into a shell of crab meat. ‘In any event, and without being too indelicate, most of the blood that was shed was theirs.’

  ‘You’ve come to an age where you can be phil1osophical about such things.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s so much a matter of age as of attitude and experience. We have both been soldiers, Harry. We know that sometimes there are no easy answers. That’s one of the reasons why, if you will forgive me saying so, I have never been tempted by a career in politics.’

  ‘I take your point. How’s the crab, by the way?’

  ‘Very English.’

  ‘You should have joined me with the potted shrimp,’ Harry said, digging his fork into the tub of brown crustaceans submerged in solidified melted butter.

  The Frenchman laughed. ‘Even your persuasive powers backed by an entire case of the finest burgundy couldn’t bring me to that, my friend.’ He raised his glass, while Harry inspected something unpleasant that was dangling from the end of his fork.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Harry said, abandoning his starter and reaching for his own glass. ‘Poor bloody shrimps. Why do we have to drown them in congealed butter?’

  ‘We all suffer for our traditions.’

  ‘Yet when you French call them crevettes they become a thing of beauty. Except . . .’ He paused. ‘Isn’t that what you called them in Algeria? Those you threw out of the helicopters a thousand feet above the Mediterranean?’

  ‘You know what it’s like in war, Harry. Sometimes you have to take a short cut. And there was never a shortage of Arabs, no matter how many we tried to teach to fly.’

  Harry seemed to recall that many of them had been weighed down with concrete. He was tempted to suggest it was a strange type of flying lesson, but the waiter was back, removing dishes. Harry moved on.

  ‘Hervé, I promised you an update on Zac.’

  ‘Ah, the exceptional Mr Kravitz.’

  ‘He and I want to thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘If you hadn’t mentioned him to me, I don’t think Zac would have got out of Ta’argistan alive.’

  ‘I am happy to have been of help.’

  ‘I don’t know whether you keep up to date with what’s going on in Ta’argistan?’

  ‘I must admit, I am a little out of touch . . .’

  ‘Chaos. Confusion. There’s talk of an attempted coup. Apparently Karabayev’s strung up his righthand man, Amir Beg. Did you know that?’

  ‘As I said, I am a little out of touch,’ d’Arbois repeated. As a holding position, it left a lot to be desired.

  Harry sipped at his wine, his eyes fixed on the other man. ‘I wonder if it had anything to do with the quarter of a million dollars I sent Amir Beg.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I sent him a quarter of a million dollars.’

  ‘From your own account?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it appears you have wasted your money, my dear Harry.’

  ‘I don’t think so. There are ways to get rid of bastards you hate without throwing them out of helicopters, you know.’

  ‘You set him up?’ d’Arbois gasped.

  ‘Precisely. That amount of money paid into his account was bound to look like a bribe to anyone who discovered it. And it’s so damned difficult to keep your account details secret when you’re taking kickbacks from as many people as Amir Beg.’

  The Frenchman began spluttering, incredulous. ‘You send that sort of money to all the people you hate?’

  ‘Can’t afford to. This endless bloody recession’s kicked the hell out of me, too. But if I’d sent any less, I don’t think Karabayev would have jumped to conclusions. A quarter of a million’s about the going rate, don’t you think? For jumping to conclusions?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ d’Arbois protested, laughing, spreading his hands in bemusement and reaching for his glass.

  ‘All that confusion at the top. It’s bound to play merry hell with the uranium-mines project.’

  The glass stopped halfway to the Frenchman’s mouth. ‘What project is that?’

  ‘Don’t you know? I think I’ve pieced it together. Zac heard rumours about it, then Roddy Bowles filled in a few more bits of the picture. It’s a fascinating one. I’m sure you’ll be interested.’

  ‘I’m sure I shall.’

  ‘You see, Hervé, the Soviets turned out to be very poor house guests in Ta’argistan. When at last they drove away, they left all their radioactive rubbish behind. Mineshafts full of the stuff, and none of it properly stored. So there’s been an international project to help the Ta’argis clean it up, funded by Western governments under their foreignaid programmes. And while their engineers were knocking around the old uranium mines, they stumbled across something else. A mountain range full of a mineral called heleonite. Very rare up to this point, but apparently it’s going to transform our lives. It’s the new silicon, reckoned to be the next really big thing in computer chips. It’ll transform Ta’argistan, too. Better than oil. That stuff’s going to make the country, or whoever’s in charge, richer than Croesus.’ He paused. ‘Hervé, you’re spilling your wine.’

  The glass was suspended halfway between the table and his mouth. The Frenchman had been sitting as if carved from stone. ‘Your tale, it’s too distracting, Harry,’ he said, slowly lowering his glass.

  ‘So, naturally, everyone wants a piece of the action, the inside track,’ Harry continued. ‘Who can make Karabayev smile, and who can get him to sign, that’s the name of the game. Whoever gets their hands on his most sensitive parts first will have found the key to everlasting prosperity. Except, of course, the man’s an animal. Instinct, rather than intellect. Distrusts every-one, even Ta’argis, but particularly foreigners. Hide of a rhinoceros but deep down exceedingly tempera-mental.’

  An expression of amusement brushed around the Frenchman’s lips. ‘I find it’s a common quality amongst politicians.’

  Harry lowered his head, accepting the point. ‘And this whole enterprise is like a long-distance race, every-body bunching on the bend before they get to the home straight, putting their best foot forward. And trying to trip up the competition. Which brings me to Zac.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Mr Kravitz. I was wondering.’

  ‘He was set up, you see.’

  ‘Rather like you set up Amir Beg?’

  ‘Very much so. Except Zac was accused of sleeping with the President’s wife, and by doing so humiliating the President. Doesn’t get more basic than that, does it? No way back from there. But it wasn’t the wife getting screwed, you see, Hervé, it was the Americans. With a background like Zac’s, Karabayev’s never going to believe he’s not working for the CIA or some other bunch of cowboys in Washington, no matter how hard they’ve tried to wash their hands of him. Coming into the home straight, the Americans have fallen flat on their face, giving everyone else a huge advantage.’

  ‘It’s an exciting theory, Harry,’ d’Arbois said, ‘but who would do such a thing?’

  ‘Almost anyone. The stakes are too high to be squeamish.’

  ‘But who, specifically?’

  ‘Zac doesn’t know.’

  ‘A pity – for your theory,’ the Frenchman suggested, flattening a wrinkle in the starched tablecloth with the palm of his hand.

  ‘Yes, I guess that’s right. But let me pursue it. You see, there’s one huge flaw in this get-stinking-rich scheme. It all depends on Karabayev staying in place. Otherwise . . .’

  ‘Of course. There is nothing. And you think he’s in danger?’

  ‘You won’t have heard this, Hervé, not being close to the scene, but I reckon getting rid of Beg was a huge risk. Opens up all sorts of intrigue. And there is an opposition movement, I met some of them while I was there. In fact, I’ve been helping them, sorting out a little funding.’

  ‘Democracy?’ D’Arbois couldn’t hide the disdain that strayed
into his voice.

  ‘I know, a bloody terrible idea, but so is Karabayev and Beg. He cut off my ear, you know. Even put a noose around my neck. That gives me attitude.’

  ‘I saw your wound, I was trying discreetly to ignore—’

  ‘They also killed a friend of mine. A rather extraordinary woman called Martha Riley.’

  ‘Then I am very sorry for your loss. But it confirms the dangers of playing with places like Ta’argistan. Leave it alone, Harry. Don’t try to play God.’

  ‘There’s another way of looking at it, Hervé, that what happened to Amir Beg suggests the dangers of playing with me,’ Harry said, very quietly. ‘Or with Zac. He’s an unforgiving bastard, that man.’

  ‘He’s fortunate to have you as a friend. As, I hope, am I. But you will forgive me.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘My train, you understand?’

  ‘You haven’t had your fish.’

  ‘My soul may wait for eternity, sadly my train will not,’ he said with an engaging smile, playing on words.

  ‘Come on then. My car will take you, it’s waiting outside.’ They rose, Harry hurriedly signed his club account as d’Arbois collected his coat. A black Mercedes was parked in the road, the engine running. The two men walked down the steps of the club together, knotting their scarves.

  ‘You know, Hervé, I have dreams about my time in Ta’argistan. I still have that bloody rope around my neck, and Martha dying in my arms. I can’t break free of it.’

  ‘But you saved an old friend.’

  ‘You’re right. And it was you who brought us together. I’ll never forget that.’

  They climbed into the back of the car, and the Mercedes set off through the back streets and rat runs.

  ‘Yes, it was you who brought us together, wasn’t it, Hervé?’ Harry said, picking up their conversation. ‘And that’s what got me thinking. Because if Zac was set up, then so was I.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Was that it, Hervé? You and your business pals, wanting a little extra leverage? Screw the Americans through Zac, then go one better and screw the British through me? Leaving the field clear for – well, whoever’s bought you for the moment.’