Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2)

by Giles O'Bryen

  The men by the pickup had cover from TJ’s rifle, but were taking crossfire from our positions at either end of the clearing instead. They didn’t stand a chance. The wood-stack popped and spat and flame-light snaked over the clearing, as if Beelzebub himself had turned up to claim his kin. Then I remembered the man who’d run first. He’d scrambled for safety behind the wood-stack and probably got away before it went up. Less than twenty seconds since TJ had fired his first shot. . .

  I sprinted up into the woods behind the clearing. It was a plantation, the conifers arrayed in straight lines and not much growing away from the fringes. I quickly made two hundred yards, then stopped and listened. More gunshots: Zeb and Ollie rounding up the latecomers. The Bura pickup coughed into silence. The stench of burnt petrol streamed up between the black columns of the trees. I ran another two hundred, now angling away to the left, then stopped again and listened to the wind whirring through the high branches. I checked my watch: 01:53. I ran on and reached the escarpment half a minute later.

  The tree canopy was looser up here, and the low moonlight threw branch shadows on the sheer face of the granite ridge ahead of me. Between the rock wall and the first line of trees was a fringe of bracken and bramble that looked like the perfect place to hide from a pursuer. Browning in hand, I followed the line of the escarpment, keeping a little way into the forest where the going was easier. A steady stream of chaff blew off the bracken, catching the moonlight like flecks of ash from a bonfire. I studied the undergrowth for signs of movement, but saw only bouncing hoops of bramble, blackthorn bushes shuddering in the wind. After thirty yards, a fox cantered up from the woods. It paused and looked my way, then sloped off into the undergrowth. I jogged to the point where it had disappeared and peered into the darkness. When I turned round, TJ was watching me from five yards away.

  ‘You fucked up again there, Jimmy Palatine. I don’t trust you.’

  His eyes had the flat stare of a cobra pinning its prey.

  ‘I got the Bura up here for you,’ I said. ‘I could’ve been killed. Was that what you wanted?’

  ‘You for telling tales, Jimmy, like they taught you in slime school?’

  ‘I told you, no.’

  I looked off along the escarpment in an effort to communicate to TJ that I didn’t think this conversation amounted to much.

  ‘Your sort always find something.’

  ‘I’m part of this, TJ. I killed the one who shot Azza, right?’

  ‘You keeping tabs on me?’

  ‘No.’

  I was beginning to see how badly this might end. We were alone, in Serb militia territory. And, QED, Captain Palatine was inclined to get lost.

  ‘One of them ran this way,’ I said. ‘I came after him. Why would I do that if I was spying on you?’

  His gaze did not waver.

  ‘He’s holed up somewhere round here. The longer we leave it to get after him. . .’ I shrugged.

  ‘Down there.’

  He pointed diagonally across the wooded slope. I looked through the fanned ranks of tree trunks and their counterpointing network of shadows. It felt as if I were being ushered into some elaborate exercise in perspective: step into those receding triangles of moonlight, and you traverse them for all eternity.

  ‘Don’t fucking think, Jimmy. Walk.’

  I stepped past him and the springy crust of pine needles seemed to propel me down the slope. The darkness opened ahead of me and closed in behind. I counted the trees, ten, fifteen, twenty. . . I could not hear TJ behind me, but knew he was there. Then I saw what looked like some pale, fleshy fungus sprouting from a tree at waist height. TJ walked past me, past the tree, spun round. The noise of the wind receded and I heard a grunting, gurgling sound. I moved to the side and stepped closer. Not a fungus but hands. . . The hands of the man I’d been pursuing, arms stretched round the tree at his back and zip-tied by the wrists. His head was pressed tight to the bark, held there by a cord lashed round his throat.

  ‘Left his mates to die and legged it, just like the cunts at the farmhouse.’

  The man was in shock, his eyes unfocused. One of his knees was slightly cocked and the bottom half of the trouser leg was dark with blood. TJ went up and unzipped the bound man’s jacket, then pulled out his knife and sliced through his T-shirt. The man snorted sharply and a strand of drool swayed from his lips.

  TJ shone a flashlight on his shaven torso and I saw the tattoo of the dead man, leaning backwards, a knife in his chest. The Bura’s lean belly pumped in and out, and the tattoo of the corpse writhed in time with his panic-stricken breaths.

  ‘See how bad he wants it, Jimmy?’ TJ said. ‘He’s fucking gagging for it. You going to give it to him?’ He lined up the tip of his knife with the wound in the ribs of the tattoo corpse and pressed. ‘Just here is where he wants it to go.’

  He stepped back and gestured at me to take over. It wasn’t how I wanted to prove myself. It wasn’t heroic or brave. It wasn’t just or dignified. Neither passionate nor dispassionate. It was thick with ulterior motive and slippery with hidden meaning. It was confused and devious. It lacked integrity. I did not understand why it was happening, nor what its consequences would be. And yet the hand that drew the honed steel blade was dry and calm, and I did not shirk the Bura chief’s eyes as I stepped up to face him.

  I put my knife where TJ’s had been and leaned in on the hilt and felt the give as the blade pierced the cartilage and entered the muscular chambers of his heart. The grip pulsed in my palm as he gave up his life to me, and I felt a thrill so strong and cold that I sometimes long to feel it again, and often pray fervently that I never will.

  Even as his body convulsed, I did not avert my eyes from his gaze. Whatever TJ said, he did not want it. He was not fucking gagging for it. He’d done bad things in his life, and now he was frightened and lonely, just like the boy I had killed in the loft thirty-six hours ago.

  Are they all like this? Is this how I will be?

  If you study the photo TJ took at the moment when I pulled my knife from the Bura chief’s heart, you see it in my eyes, too. Fear. Loneliness. Nothing else.

  9

  After the clean, cold mountain air, my apartment in Skopje was cramped and filthy hot and I festered in it. You rescued a girl from certain death, I kept telling myself. I didn’t feel like a hero, but a man in a dark cell reaching for a chink of kindly light from a barred window. I was haunted by memories of my forty-eight hours with TJ’s unit, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be rid of them. A soldier who could put such things from his mind was irrevocably one of us. After the night in the woods with the Bura, Ollie’s words seemed less like an accolade and more like a curse.

  Clean your kit, I ordered myself. Feed yourself. Write a report for Hillson.

  Colonel Andy Hillson was my CO, a career intelligence officer with whom I had a lopsided relationship: I liked him for his well-meaning sincerity, while he detested me for an arrogant clever clogs (this from a mathematician with a PhD in an excessively abstract branch of formal logic). In consequence, I was always being friendly and trying not to cause him trouble, while he was always trying to take me down a peg or two – an objective for which this report would provide plenty of ammunition. I keyed in the formulaic officialese, taking care to incorporate the face-losing lie concocted by TJ – that I had become detached from my SAS escorts and made it back across the border into Macedonia without them. Reviewing the few paragraphs that would go on the record, I was dismayed. The gap between the bland assertion, mission accomplished, and the churning, feverish violence which made up the actual truth was like the disconnect between a supermarket display of shrink-wrapped meat and the squeals and gore of the slaughterhouse. How much bloody mayhem lay bagged up and buried beneath the sanitary circumlocutions of the official reports that occupied so many miles of shelf-space in the annals of war?

  I was supposed to file my report in time for a four o’clock debrief at the Army Intelligence office – three desks in the stuffy bas
ement of the British Consulate a few minutes’ walk from my apartment. Then a message came through that the meeting was postponed until the following day. This was a familiar pattern: on past evidence, the debrief would be postponed several more times, then I’d be summoned back to London for a bout of mutual frowning. Until they decided what to do with me next, I was in limbo.

  I pulled on a tracksuit and went out for a run. I hadn’t gone fifty yards before having to swerve into the road to avoid a detachment of pie-eyed KFOR outside the Bar Vodno – big, slab-sided Dutch soldiers who had reached that stage of inebriation where anything on two legs must be addressed – either amorously or aggressively, depending on gender. I heard their spluttering jeers and turned to see one of them jogging after me, chest puffed out, arms flapping, knees splayed. The joker of the pack, and how his comrades roared.

  I was in the mood for a fight, and came within an ace of burying my fist in the comedy corporal’s gut. But, fortunately for everyone, I brought myself to heel in time and ran on – only to cannon into a knot of KVM huddled round the menu of a restaurant that, according to an indignant Maria, had only recently elected to describe itself as French.

  KFOR was NATO’s Kosovo Force and the KVM was the Kosovo Verification Mission, a team of official EU observers there to oversee Serbian compliance with an agreement which the Serbs hadn’t in fact agreed to, let alone signed. In recognition of the high likelihood that they would get themselves into trouble on one of their forays into Kosovo, these observers were shadowed by a 1,500-strong NATO force tasked with performing a timely rescue. Meanwhile, their predecessors from the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) were still hanging around in Skopje, composing their debriefs and taking ersatz girlfriends to dine in ersatz French restaurants before being summoned home.

  And that was how Skopje was in those days. When the concerned world rides to the rescue, it must first divide itself into a panoply of overlapping military and bureaucratic units, each with its own acronym, its own command structure, its own mission statement, and its own sense of its own importance. These executors of concerted international action jockeyed for desk space in Skopje’s modest administrative centres, then set about their grand endeavours by issuing unfulfillable contracts to the commercial operations that scurried in their wake: contracts for transport and logistics, catering, accommodation, legal and translation services, administrative assistance. . . Lines of authority zigzagged across this landscape of officially sanctioned chaos, contradicting each other wherever they met and causing fist fights at one end and diplomatic incidents at the other.

  I don’t say these things are easy, but some sense that the right hand even knew that the left hand existed would have been helpful. And I haven’t yet mentioned the countless special-interest NGOs – nor (of course) the unknown number of infiltrators like myself, representatives of organisations which preferred to remain invisible. The list went on and on and on, and then on some more, and the foreigners poured into Skopje, bringing their strange tastes and habits, their burly, well-fed arrogance, their astonishing wealth, and – most baffling of all – their uniforms, a babel of sartorial hieroglyphs which signified, to the un-uniformed, nothing more precise than that those who sported them had the power to take a life or, in the case of the bureaucrats, to ruin one.

  I ran on until I came to the UNHCR mission. The sight of the drab building with the densely braided line of refugees camped outside brought a horrible flush of unease. This is where I should have brought the girl, queue or no queue. Why hadn’t I? The house where I’d left her. . . What was it? The home of someone who helped the priest? Why had I not yet called Father Daniel to find out if the girl had made it back to the orphanage?

  Because I was terribly afraid she had not. I sprinted back to the apartment. Shopkeepers watched me askance, arms folded. Who does he think he is? I didn’t know who I thought I was, but Sergeant TJ Farah had a photo of me sliding a blade between the ribs of a man tied to a tree in a dark wood. What kind of man would do that kind of thing? The kind who kills a boy with a punch to the throat. That kind. Self-pity welled in my throat. I hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. I’d wanted to prove myself, that was all. I’d rescued a girl from certain death and carried her to safety. So why were these recriminations manoeuvring in my head like a cohort of leathery-faced military police?

  Back in my apartment, I stomped around hunting for the phone I’d taken from the eviscerated woman in the farmhouse. I’d hidden it – from myself, because of the grim way it had come into my possession. It was ten minutes before I found it – pushed to the back of the top shelf above the stove, behind a row of empty storage tins. That I couldn’t remember putting it there was a measure of how distracted I’d become, how hemmed in by bad memories and a nebulous sense of dread. I found Father Daniel in the call list and pressed the green button, but after a few rings I got his answerphone. I left a message. The girl who ran away – I dropped her off at seventy-seven Syrna Street yesterday morning, as agreed. I need to know if she got back to you.

  I thumbed through the entries in the call list on the dead woman’s phone: female friends, Theresa, Alana, Safina; her doctor; a long call to the UNHCR in Skopje. Maybe she’d been helping Father Daniel with the business of transferring children into their care. I scrolled to the UNHCR number and pressed call.

  ‘I need to find out if the UNHCR has a house in Syrna Street where refugees stay,’ I said to the woman who answered.

  ‘Please say again. My English is not so good.’

  I repeated the question.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I am only just arriving in Skopje. I will ask. Wait please.’

  I waited. She came back on the line and said she didn’t think so, but why did I want to know? I hung up and tried the refuge landline. It rang out.

  I sat down and found that my hands were trembling. The eggs and toast I’d had for breakfast liquefied in my gut. How could you be fit enough to run half a mile flat out and then feel like this fifteen minutes later? The heat from my hand was making the dried blood on the cellphone case tacky. I dropped it on the table. The chink of kindly light was fading. I was falling apart. I stumbled to my bed and slept.

  It was six when I woke. I felt as if I’d fought my way free of a fever. I was possessed by a desperate thirst, and when I hauled myself to the kitchen tap and drank three glasses of water, the thirst was replaced by hunger. I changed out of the rumpled tracksuit and went down to the café.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ Maria declared, seating me at a table by the counter at the rear. ‘We have a saying here in Macedonia: we say, you look like you have seen a ghost.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Maria,’ I said, a touch disappointed that the local vernacular couldn’t furnish anything more original. ‘It’s just that I’m starving.’

  ‘You will have to wait,’ she said gleefully. ‘The usual?’

  She shouted the order into the kitchen, then juggled two bread rolls onto a plate and plonked them down in front of me. ‘Eat this bread so you do not die before the food comes.’

  I did so, and she brought me a dish of olives and cubes of salty goat’s cheese to keep me alive some more. It was good to sit at the little formica-topped table with the gentle hubbub of human conviviality for company. To Maria’s disappointment, I was the only foreign newcomer who had taken to patronising her establishment; but in any case the place was full. Most of the customers were men having something to eat or drink on their way back from work, and there was a whiff of naughtiness in the air – everyone knew they should really be at home, which made the bottle of beer and the plate of kofta even more delicious. At the table next to me were four old men – bus or lorry drivers, judging by their humped backs and hooped arms. They were wheedling and joshing each other in turn, their conversation a series of elaborate insults whose crescendo was a triumphant thump on the arm and an eruption of crackly laughter.

  Over by the window were two young women wearing pale grey cardigans
embroidered with the logo of the Coincasa Italian department store. They were leaning close to each other to whisper, then pulling back and looking quickly around them, their eyes bright with mischief. One of them saw me watching and a lengthy confabulation ensued, interspersed with several fits of giggles hidden behind a token hand.

  I felt like an alien in this enclave of normality, a tolerable intrusion; but it was reassuring to find that such places still existed – that, outside my head at least, life went on as it always had. Maria must have taken pity on me, for my food arrived inside five minutes: three skewers of chicken, rice, stewed tomato and aubergine, and a heap of salad, along with a carafe of oily purple wine. I ate quickly. A plate of honey and pistachio pastries followed, then sweet, grainy coffee. Finally, with the early evening rush over, Maria sat down opposite me and poured herself a glass of wine.

  ‘You look better, James. But not happy, no. What happened to the girl?’

  I shrugged. ‘She’s on her way back to the refuge in Kosovo. At least, I hope she is.’

  ‘Poor kid. Why she run away?’

  ‘I don’t really know. There are terrible things happening out there, Maria.’

  ‘War is coming. So now the bad people come out to play.’

  She sighed and summoned one of her children to bring her cigarettes. The boy came running over to our table. Maria lit up while the boy, who must have been about the age of the girl I’d rescued, grinned at me.

  ‘You have gun, mister?’

  Maria directed a brisk volley of orders, which the boy ignored.

  ‘I see gun?’

  Maria aimed a blow at his backside. He dodged it and scampered off.