(2005) Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  It was a slow-moving trail. Eighteen months from start to end. At first the journey took the poppy seeds to market for haggling and argument, then buying. As opium, the product travelled in caravans of lorries, camel trains or in pouches on mules, north out of Afghanistan. It reached the old Spice Route, half a millennium old, and in Dushanbe, Samarkand or Bokhara Customs men, warlords and politicians took more cuts. The price was beginning to ratchet.

  Then, on to Turkey, the nexus point of the trade, where the laboratories waited to render opium into raw heroin. Ten kilograms of opium made one kilogram of heroin. More cuts, more profits to be taken from the farmers' labour. Turkey was only a staging point, not a place of consumption.

  Europe was the target. Each year, the craving for and addiction of Europeans to heroin demanded a supply of an estimated eighty tonnes. Turkish gangs took it on. Across the Bosphorus or by ferry over the Black Sea and a landing in mainland Europe. Up into the war-ravaged Balkans and more division of the product made in Belgrade or Sarajevo, and the price kept climbing as more men took their share of the profits. When wads of dollar bills were passed, the lorries drove unsearched through international boundaries. On into the Netherlands and Germany.

  The trail led to the United Kingdom, the biggest consumer of heroin inside the European Union.

  Expenses soared. Wealth was being made that the humble, illiterate farmer in Afghanistan could not comprehend - but the men bringing the trail to its end had made evaluations of risk against profit. The risk was a prison sentence of twenty-five years in a maximum-security gaol, but the profit was huge.

  Only a few had the skill to stay ahead of the ever more sophisticated techniques of law enforcement set against them. By ferry, tunnel, car or coach in the bags of pensioner tourists who saw no wrong in making easy money, inside the cargoes of lorries, and by boat to unsuspected landing points where vigilance had slipped, the freight landed.

  A man had paid up and housed what he had

  bought in a warehouse or a lock-up garage. He was a baron and remote from the process of the street. He sold split portions of what he had purchased to a network of regular suppliers; he was hands-off, crucial to the process but distancing himself as far as he could from risk, while retaining as much as he could of the profit.

  The supplier further diluted the purity of the heroin with flour, chalk or washing powder, made more divisions and traded with dealers, the street gangs who controlled a small area of territory in a country town, a provincial city or in the capital. The supplier took his share.

  The dealers sold on the street, but only after further dilution. They were the last in line and their cash rewards were as meagre as those of the mountain farmers. The dealers had the addicts begging them for wraps - tonnage reduced down to a single gram, enough for a day's hit. No cash, no sale. Without money the addict was shut out as a customer.

  Thieving, begging, mugging, stealing were the only ways the addict could feed the need.

  On a housing estate in south-east London, the trail marked out for one little share of Afghanistan's poppy harvest came to an end.

  Malachy knew her life story, and more. He had been led into each cranny of her existence. He sat opposite Mrs Mildred Johnson and drank tea poured through a strainer that caught most of the leaves, a present from a distant relative on her wedding day. He ate ham and cucumber sandwiches, her late husband's favourite filling for his lunch when he'd driven a double-decker bus in London.

  Not expected to talk, only to listen, he occasionally nodded and tried to be attentive. He knew her life story because the same mixture of anecdote and memory was served up each fortnight, but he never showed signs of boredom or irritation at the repetition. He would be there for two hours. She had a small carriage clock with a tinkling chime - a present from her nephew, Tony - and at four o'clock on the first and third Thursday in the month the knock would come on the wall, and at six o'clock, without ceremony, and always the refusal that he should wash up the cups, saucers and plates, when the hour was struck, he would be told that it was time for her to dress to go out to bingo. He was then dismissed.

  He knew she was seventy-four. She had been

  widowed twelve years back after thirty-nine years of marriage. Her husband, Phil, had left no money and she survived on the state's meagre generosity. Her elder brother, Graham, and her sister-in-law, Hettie, were dead. Her only living relative was her nephew, Graham and Hettie's son, Tony - something

  important in the police', and she'd snort.

  He thought she must spend the first three hours of each day scrubbing, cleaning, dusting her one-bedroomed flat. It was spotless. If a crumb from a sandwich fell from his mouth, Malachy was always careful, immediately, to pick it off his trousers so that it should not fall to the carpet.

  Her first married home, when she was a school-dinner lady, had been in a terrace that had been demolished to make way for the Amersham. She, Phil and the budgerigar had moved into the first block to be completed thirty-two years ago. After his death she had been transferred to block nine, level three, flat fourteen. However bad it became, she said each fortnight, she was not leaving the Amersham. She had stayed on, refusing to cut and run, while all her friends and long-time neighbours had either died or left.

  The nephew, Tony - and she did a good imitation of the whip of his voice - had alternately nagged and pleaded with her to quit, even to come and live with his family. She had refused . . . She liked to tell that story. Tony had paid for the grille gate: three hundred pounds, even though the fire people at the council had warned that a locked grille gate made a potential death-trap for the elderly. She was staying on.

  To entertain Malachy to tea, and he reckoned it one of the reasons he was asked on those two Thursdays a month, she wore every item of jewellery she

  possessed. Her fingers were ablaze with rings, her wrists with bracelets, her throat with chains and a Christian cross, and he thought that if she had been able to plug into the lobes more than a single pair of earrings she would have. He assumed they were kept in a box under her bed for just these occasions. She would not have worn them outside because she was street-wise. She had told him: she never took money with her that she did not need to spend when she went to the outdoor market stalls. She only went to the bingo on a Thursday night with Dawn, from flat fifteen. She read the weekly paper, and sometimes over tea with Malachy she would recite the reporting on the most violent crime on the Amersham. He had been listening again to the story of the last coach outing of the Pensioners' Association to Brighton, four months ago, when she changed her tack abruptly:

  'You want to know what Tony says you are?'

  'I don't think it's important/ He shrugged but he could feel the cold at his back and his hand shook. The last tepid tea slopped on to his lap.

  'Tony says you're a loser. He's cruel, Tony is. What Tony says is that you're a loser, Malachy, and a failure.'

  'I expect in his job he has to make evaluations -

  probably the right judgement most of the time,'

  Malachy said quietly, simply He had not spoken to Tony, the nephew, since the first day. He had kept his distance, had stayed behind his locked door.

  'What happened in your life to bring you down here? Must have been something awful. You don't belong with us. Something awful, worse, an earthquake.' She seemed to struggle for the words, and the abrasive independence that was her hallmark

  wavered. 'Tony says you're a waste of space and I'm not to spend time with you . . . Was it something I couldn't understand, like a catastrophe?'

  He said, 'It's nobody's business but mine. I . . . '

  The clock chimed. He did not wait for the final stroke of six. He was up, out of his chair, and scurrying for the door. He didn't thank her for the tea or the sandwiches. He thought he would be dissected with Dawn that evening at the bingo - and when the next knock came on the common wall, on a Thursday, he would ignore it. He closed her front door behind him, fastened the gate and ran next door to
his own refuge.

  With the lock turned, the chain across and the bolt up, he sat on the floor and the darkness blanketed him. He did not know that, outside on the walkways and in the alleys, shadows gathered and searched for the price of a wrap of brown to feed a needle.

  'I can't come, Millie. I got the flu, pain where I didn't know pain was. I'm sorry.'

  Dawn was tall, would once have been beautiful. She had the ebony skin of wet coal, was from Nigeria, and cleaned Whitehall offices. Perhaps her generosity was used, or perhaps Mildred Johnson truly regarded her as a friend - but never as an equal. Her one son was in the merchant marine, a deck-hand for a Panamanian-registered company, and he never came home. Dawn minded her neighbour, and was occasionally thanked for it.

  She was in her dressing gown. 'I tell you, just to come from my bed, get myself to the door and your door, that was agony. I mean it.'

  They went to the Tenants' Association evenings and on the Pensioners' Association outings and sat beside each other at the Senior Citizens' Christmas Lunch.

  They were together on shopping trips and at the East Street stall market. She was with Millie on one Sunday a month when they went on the bus to the cemetery where Phil's ashes were buried. Together, once a week at the Cypriot cafe, they splashed out on pie and chips and milky tea. Dawn was always there if Millie was ill and cared for her. She had been told that everything in the box under Millie's bed was left in the will to her, not the nephew's stuck-up woman. She saw annoyance spread on the slight face below her own.

  'Well, that's it, then.'

  Dawn croaked, 'I'm sorry, Millie, but I'm really sick.

  I'm going back to bed. I can't help it.'

  'I didn't say you could.'

  'Get the man, him ...' Dawn gestured feebly to the next door on the level three walkway. 'Get him to walk you - or don't go.'

  The door was closed on her, and the grille gate. She staggered back into flat fifteen, slumped back on to her bed and the pains surged.

  12 January 2004

  The sign on the lightweight door said: knock - then Wait to be admitted. But every room in Battalion Headquarters was part of the fiefdom of Fergal. As adjutant he had free run. He pushed open the door. There was no electricity from the main supply that day because 'bad guys'

  had dropped a pylon, and the stand-by generators were barely able to match HQ's requirements. No air-conditioning was permitted and the wall of heat hit him.

  Inside, he could detect the scent used sparingly by the sergeant, pretty little plump Cherie, and, stronger, the body smell of the new man.

  'Morning, Cherie - and morning to you, Mal. How's things in Spooksville?' Fergal had a drawl to his voice, knew it made him sound as if he was perpetually taking the piss - and didn't care, because an adjutant cared damn all for anything other than the welfare of his colonel, codeword Sunray. 'Not too bombarded, I hope, with this GFH's problems. Sorry, Mai, I was forgetting you were new with us - GFH, God Forsaken Hole.'

  He leered at the sergeant. In the officers' mess, there was a sweepstake on when she would first get herself shagged; it was held by a lieutenant who ran the battalion's transport and he'd decreed that her probably outsize knickers, as a minimum, would be required as proof- the prize now stood at thirty-nine pounds sterling. The way she looked, with the glow on her cheeks and the sweat stains on her tunic blouse, Fergal didn't think it would be long before there was a claimant... A girl always looked good with a damn great Browning 9mm hanging in a holster on her hips. But his business was with the captain, her companion, who was not that new - had been with them for four months.

  'Yes, Mai, Sunray would like you up at Bravo.'

  'If you didn't know it, I've actually a fair bit to be getting on with right here.'

  'Are you not hearing me too well?' He heard Cherie's snigger. 'I said that Sunray wanted you up at Bravo. It's not for discussion, it's what he'd like.'

  The battalion in which Fergal was adjutant recruited other ranks from the tenements of Glasgow and the housing estates of Cumbernauld. The fathers or uncles of many had served two decades earlier. The officers, those with good prospects of advancement, came from the landed estates of the west Highlands. They were a family, a brotherhood. The feeling of being part of a clan, with a regimental history of skirmishes, bloody defences, heroic advances and battles, stretched back for three centuries. Their museum was packed with trophies from the campaigns of Marlborough, the epic of Waterloo, colonial garrisoning, the foothills between Jalalabad and Peshawar on the North West Frontier, the kops of South Africa, the fields of Passchendaele and the hedgerows of Normandy, then Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, the Aden Protectorate, and endless dreary little towns in Northern Ireland. Soon, when the booty had been crated up, museum space would have to be found for souvenirs of the Iraqi desert. The battalion had heritage and tradition, and its family strength recognized the danger of allowing strangers to infiltrate its ranks.

  Outsiders were not wanted.

  'If you're not too busy, Mal...' the sneer was rich in Fergal's voice '.. . Sunray would like you up at Bravo tomorrow.'

  Alongside the battalion's headquarters building, separated by its sandbag blast walls and its coils of razor wire, was the Portakabin occupied by the Intelligence Corps personnel assigned to them - the sergeant, Cherie, and the captain, Mai, as he was called in the mess. Put bluntly, and it was Fergal's right as adjutant to be direct, the Intelligence Corps captain was a cuckoo. He didn't fit, was not part of the family or a member of the brotherhood. The battalion had its own intelligence officer, Rory, a good man. They did not need the stranger, who knew nothing of the history, tradition, heritage that would see them through - if God was kind - the six-month posting to Iraq. The man didn't mix well, didn't share their culture.

  'We've a resupply convoy going up at oh-six hundred hours local tomorrow. You can go with them. What have you got on your plate at the moment?'

  The answer was crisply put, as if the captain, Mal, accepted the unconcealed hostility shown to an intruder.

  There was a rattle of information on pipeline sabotage, clusters of incidents where the crude-oil supply from the wells was disrupted on routes through the battalion's area of responsibility, profiles of suspected 'bad guys', and the man never looked up from his screen as he spoke.

  'What does that add up to?'

  'That we don't have the resources to guard the pipes, that they can be blown up virtually at will, that the oil supply is persistently vulnerable, that we're charging around and getting nowhere. I have to have more time because I haven't yet sorted a pattern of attacks - who's doing it? Identities, safe-houses. Whether they're Iraqis or from over the Iran border, I don't know ... That's what's on my plate. My opinion, at the moment, we're wasting our time.'

  Two nights before, in Sunray's office, the same statement had been made, and not appreciated. After the captain, Mai, had gone, Sunray had told his adjutant, 'I won't have that defeatist crap. Christ, I'm under enough pressure from Brigade on these damn pipes ... I want answers from him, not just excuses for ignorance. Aren't answers what we have the right to expect from the Intelligence Corps? If he can't do better then perhaps we should get him doing something useful, away from that wretched little screen. Work on it, Fergal.' He had: something useful was at Bravo Company, eighty miles up the road, and Sunray had concurred. What the battalion could do without, when Brigade was breathing hard on them, was to be told they were wasting their time. It was probably true, but it shouldn't have been said by an interloper.

  'Up at Bravo, an elder was murdered, drive-by shooting.'

  'I know.'

  'He was a good friend of ours and—'

  'Shot because he was a good friend. We like to peddle this hearts-and-minds stuff, delude ourselves the majority love us and are grateful for liberation, that the opposition is only a minority and mostly from over the border. He was killed because of his association with us - that's a death sentence.'

  Icily : 'If you don't mind allowing me
to finish, Mal. ..

  Thank you. We're going to show the flag up there, have an arrest sweep. We have to react. You're a local-language speaker so you'll do the initial screening and interrogation, see who should be passed down the line.'

  'Be happy to - if your Jocks haven't beaten them all half insensible.'

  'That is fucking outrageous, an insult.'

  'Please yourself.'

  The adjutant was at the door. He knew the answer to what he'd say, knew what training the Intelligence Corps people had - pretty little plump Cherie couldn't hit a main battle tank at twenty-five yards with her Browning 9mm, and the quartermaster who took her on shooting practice wedged his knee between her thighs to keep her steady and held her arms out rigid, but she still missed the biggest target they could knock up. He put the question: 'You're trained on combat weapons and patrol procedures? You should be if you're going up to Buffalo Bill territory, Bravo's ground . . . Of course you are.'

  He knew she was not back yet, and it made him fidget. Malachy was aware of all of the night sounds of the Amersham, every noise from the plaza at the back. He should first have heard the clatter of Dawn's flat shoes and the shuffle of Mildred Johnson's feet, then the screech of the grille gate, the front door opening and shutting, the blast of the TV through the common wall.

  She had disrupted what little peace he owned. He could not have told her how much he appreciated the two sessions a month of tea and sandwiches and listening to her talk, and now he sensed the relationship was broken, past repair. He still sat on the floor, wrapped by the darkness that was barely reached by the plaza's lights. Her prying had brought back the pain of memory, not to be escaped from.

  He could see it: a child lost in his imagination, succouring fantasies, playing solitary games around the married quarters at Tidworth, Catterick, Larkhall or Colchester .. . Father was the Northern Ireland expert and always there; mother, a deserter from a nursing career, full-time unpaid organizer of other ranks' wives clubs and counsellor of teenage brides on credit-card debt and trying to keep together a hopeless partnership. Walter and Araminta Kitchen had been too consumed with the job and the good deeds to notice that their lone child was isolated. He remembered coming into the kitchen with homework, arithmetic that he couldn't do, unaware that his father had learned that afternoon he was not sailing with the Task Force to the South Atlantic, and getting a volley of abuse over a gin glass for thinking homework counted in the scale of things, and running. Sent to boarding-school in Somerset. Short visits from his mother, and an aloof one from his father to see the school play. Worst day ever at school was his father's visit a year after his retirement as brigadier, with full dress and medals, to inspect the Combined Cadet Force. Not an unhappy childhood, compared to what some at the school put up with, but remote from love.