The Perfect Soldier

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Sure. Just a shame he never listened.’

  Christianne staggered again in the darkness, falling heavily, and when McFaul helped her up she was crying.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Merde …’ She rubbed her knee.

  ‘What happened?’

  She looked at him a moment then shook her head, turning round and beginning to hobble back towards the party, the distant pulse of Tamla Motown in the warm darkness. McFaul caught her up.

  ‘Listen …’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. That was out of order. Comes from getting shitfaced.’

  She stopped and looked at him again, her upturned face level with McFaul’s chin.

  ‘Tell me it stops hurting,’ she said quietly. ‘Please tell me that.’

  McFaul bent his head, putting his arm round her.

  ‘It does,’ he said, ‘believe me.’

  ‘You know that? For sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘I do.’

  ‘So after …’ she touched the scars on his lower face, ‘how long did it take?’

  McFaul said nothing for a while.

  ‘Getting blown up’s nothing,’ he said at last. ‘Getting blown up’s easy. I’d settle for that any day.’

  ‘You would?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘That’s doctors and hospitals. Easy pain. It’s the other sort fucks you up.’

  ‘Comment?’ Christianne’s eyes were wide now.

  McFaul shrugged. Since he’d left the Falklands he’d done his best to wall it all away. Gill. The marriage. The night he’d nearly killed her. Putting your trust in anyone else could be the worst investment you’d ever make. Yet without it, you were nothing. Explain that, he thought, stroking the girl’s hair, thinking about Jordan again, back in the schoolhouse, the big leak-proof body bag safely folded into the freezer chest. He hadn’t yet bothered to mention it to Bennie and if they were shipping out tomorrow there’d be no point.

  Christianne had her arms round him now, eager for more comfort. He bent his head, his mouth to her ear, telling her what she wanted to hear, that no pain lasted for ever, that the deepest wounds would heal. She nodded, grateful, and they’d started walking again when McFaul saw a flash on the horizon, way out in the darkness. For a moment he thought it was lightning. Then it happened again and again, the boom of the big guns rolling across the city towards them, not mortars this time but artillery, big field pieces, the real thing. For a moment McFaul did nothing, transfixed, then he was running, his arms round the girl, back towards the MSF house as the first shells landed and the ground began to shake beneath their feet.

  Todd Llewelyn was at home in Bayswater when he got the call he’d been expecting. The night editor at the Sunday Mirror had been a colleague from way back when both men were subs on the old London Evening News. The Mirror man, as ever, was in a rush.

  ‘We got a tip today about a Lloyd’s bloke,’ he said. ‘Giles Jordan. Anything to do with you?’

  Llewelyn took his time, reaching for the remote control, turning down the volume on the television.

  ‘Who?’ he said at last.

  ‘Giles Jordan. He’s an underwriter. His syndicate’s gone bust and there’s word he’s lost his nipper, too. Blown up somewhere. That sound about right?’

  ‘Could be.’ Llewelyn yawned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re supposed to be doing some film for People’s. With this bloke’s missus. In darkest Africa. True or false?’

  Llewelyn’s smile widened.

  ‘True,’ he said, ‘and exclusive, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yeah, but only on telly. Nothing to stop us taking first dip, is there? Lloyd’s man loses all?’

  Llewelyn thought about the headline for a moment or two. He’d have preferred something a little less tabloid but he was in no position to quibble.

  He glanced at his watch. The weekend was still five days away.

  ‘Is this for Sunday?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Why don’t you hold off? Until we get back?’

  There was a brief silence on the phone. Then the night editor came back. He sounded suspicious.

  ‘What are you offering?’

  Llewelyn shrugged.

  ‘Photos. Quotes from the locals. Nice colour piece.’

  ‘And who writes it?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘But what about People’s?’

  Llewelyn reached for the remote control again, switching channels.

  ‘They’ll love it.’ He smiled again. ‘Should get the punters nicely tuned in.’

  Molly Jordan didn’t find the note until nearly midnight. The interview abandoned, she’d let Robbie Cunningham drive her home. He’d been kindness itself, apologising for the distress they’d caused her, telling her that Llewelyn had been way over the top. In her heart she agreed with him but the decision to do the wretched thing had been hers in the first place and the fault – if there was a fault – was therefore her own. Put yourself in a position like that, she told herself, and you should expect the odd bruise.

  At the cottage, she’d insisted on making Robbie tea before he drove back to London and he’d stayed for nearly an hour. The more she got to know him, the more she liked him and when he asked at the end whether she still wanted to go to Africa, she hesitated.

  ‘Will you be coming?’ she’d asked at length.

  ‘Yes. For sure.’

  ‘And will he … will it be like that again?’

  ‘No,’ Robbie had shaken his head, ‘definitely not.’

  She’d nodded, trusting him, telling him again how important it was for her to get there, and after he’d gone she’d telephoned Alice, Patrick’s wife, and driven over to Frinton. With the daylight fading, and no sign of Giles, the last place she wanted to be was the cottage.

  She was back by ten, surprised to find the lights off. She knocked a couple of times at the door before fumbling for her keys and letting herself in. She went from room to room, looking for Giles, calling his name. He must have been back. She knew that. There was a dirty teacup in the washing-up bowl and the kettle on the Aga was still warm. She plugged in the electric fire and tried to concentrate on the television news, waiting for his return. Maybe he’s gone to the pub, she thought. Maybe, like me, he needs company.

  By midnight he still hadn’t come back and for the first time it occurred to her to have a proper look in the bedroom. She found the note at once. It was tucked beneath her pillow, sealed in a white envelope, handwritten in blue biro.

  ‘My darling,’ it read, ‘I’ve gone away for a little while. Better for both of us, I think. I’ll be strong later, I promise. Love me always. Giles.’

  She read it twice, numb again. Then she went downstairs, lifting the telephone twice, wanting to call for help, Alice, Patrick, anyone, but both times she couldn’t bring herself to make the call. Only by chance, switching on the television again, did the obvious begin to dawn on her. The weather girl was standing in front of a map of the British Isles. Whirly circles were speeding in from the Atlantic. Heavy weather was forecast for the Channel Approaches. By tomorrow, it would be raining.

  The car keys were on the kitchen table. Molly left the hall light on, locking the front door behind her. She drove as fast as she dared, taking the shortcut through the back lanes. The gates to the parking lot at the marina were open. She ran down the steps to the boardwalk, praying that he’d found some other answer, some other escape, but when she finally made it to the seaward end of the pontoon, she knew that she’d been right. Giles’s mooring was empty. Molly Jay had gone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On the fourth day of the siege of Muengo, the rebel guns fell silent. McFaul was asleep, sprawled on a borrowed airbed in the Red Cross bunker. He’d been dreaming of the Falklands again, the first time he’d been out there, part of the Task Force in 1982. He’d been attached to 45 Commando, yomping west from San Carlos Water, searching ahead of the long line of sodden marines. Then, as now, his business had been min
e clearance. And then, as now, his real fear had been enemy shelling. The Argies had shipped in some pretty effective kit: batteries of 105-mm guns and a handful of the big 155-mm pieces which could hurl a shell sixteen miles. Trudging ever closer to Stanley, McFaul had become an expert on the signature of each of these weapons, the distant boom of the field gun, the shriek of the incoming shell, and the terrible moment before impact when the air was sucked away and you clawed at the tussock and covered your head and shut your eyes and lay in the tightest ball imaginable, waiting for oblivion.

  McFaul grunted and drew his knees up to his chin, tensing himself for the blast. Nothing happened.

  ‘Andy … viens …’

  He opened one eye. François was standing over him in the gloom, gesturing in the direction of the big HF radio. Four days’ growth of beard made him look faintly piratical. McFaul blinked. His wrist watch read 06.21. Outside, the shelling appeared to have stopped. He got to his feet, stepping over the long hump of Bennie’s body, following François to his table in the corner.

  A pair of headphones lay beside a foolscap pad. François told him to put them on. McFaul did so, sitting down, refusing the proffered glass of water. There was a crackle of static on the headphones then a voice he recognised, the distinctive West Country drawl. Ken Middleton was the guy who’d sent him out here in the first place, the guy to whom he’d more or less pledged the rest of his working life.

  ‘Ken,’ he said, ‘where are you?’

  ‘Devizes. Listen. Guy I’ve been talking to in Luanda says there’s another ceasefire brewing.’

  McFaul glanced up at François. Through a second pair of headphones, the Swiss was monitoring the conversation. Now, he qualified the news about the ceasefire with a shrug and the faintest smile. Middleton was talking about evacuation plans. He wanted McFaul’s team out as soon as possible. Plus, if possible, the equipment.

  ‘You get that?’ he asked briskly, adding the obligatory ‘Over’.

  McFaul grunted an affirmative, imagining Middleton in the brand-new office he occupied on a windy trading estate in deepest Wiltshire. Global Clearance was Middleton’s brainchild, a non-profit-making organisation dedicated to emptying the Third World of mines. A passionate man, with a deep contempt for the big commercial de-mining outfits, he’d even registered Global as a charity. Lives and limbs, he was always saying. Not fucking profits.

  Now he was talking about Mozambique. Evidently he’d laid hands on a bucketful of EEC money. How did McFaul feel about transferring to the other side of Africa? McFaul rubbed his eyes. Half of him was still sheltering in a rock sangar beneath the shadow of Two Sisters. He could almost smell the peat where Argie shells had set the stuff on fire.

  ‘There’s a lot to do,’ he muttered.

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘I meant here.’

  ‘Angola?’

  ‘Muengo.’ He paused. ‘We could kill a little time in Luanda then get back in. This lot won’t last for ever.’

  ‘There’s a war on, Andy. The place is under fucking siege. Be realistic, mate. A time and a place. Know what I mean?’

  McFaul smiled, warmed as ever by the rough candour of the man. With Middleton, what you saw was what you got. He’d never met anyone so committed, so enthusiastic, so determined, yet so utterly unsentimental. It was one of the qualities that explained the extraordinary reach of Global Clearance. From a standing start, this charity of Ken’s was now organising mine clearance programmes in seven countries, all of them staffed by ex-sappers like McFaul. For the last three years, Middleton had asked him to go to some of the worst places on earth. And not once had he dreamed of saying no.

  François was on one of the handsets now, talking in French. He reached for the pad and scribbled a note for McFaul. The word ‘surrender’ was underlined twice. McFaul told Middleton to hang on for a moment, turning to François.

  ‘The government boys have surrendered?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But that’s the bid?’

  ‘That’s what Katilo’s after.’ He nodded. ‘Bien sûr.’

  McFaul thought about the news. The radio wasn’t the place you discussed the latest political developments. He could hear Middleton repeating himself. He glanced at François, then bent to the set again.

  ‘I want you and Bennie out,’ Middleton was saying. ‘Thanks for the telex, by the way. James Jordan. The boy sounded a pillock.’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘Shame. Listen, we’ll talk again tonight if I can get any action out of Portishead. And say thanks to that nice French guy. Tell him there’s a job waiting for him.’

  He hooted with laughter, then there was a click on the line and a sign-off from the British Telecom radio-operator at Portishead. François was back on the Motorola, the speaker pressed to his ear. At length he put the radio down. He’d been up most of the night and he looked exhausted.

  ‘They’re going to talk at noon,’ he said. ‘Should be OK until then.’

  Outside, half an hour later, McFaul went on foot to the schoolhouse. A pall of smoke hung over the city. In the still, windless air it smelled of rotting garbage and burning rubber. The place was deserted, no movement of any kind. The wide main street was newly cratered, and a handsome building on the corner opposite the cathedral plaza was still smouldering from a direct hit. McFaul paused on the kerbside for a moment, looking at it. A year ago, according to Domingos, it had been a branch of the Banco Naçional, Muengo’s tiny stake in the fantasy world of credit transfers and deposit accounts. Now, it was just another glimpse of the way the country was really going: gaping window frames, fire-blackened walls and piles of fallen masonry in the street beneath. The direct hit had punched a ragged hole where the main entrance had once been, and McFaul could see movement inside, something stirring. At length, a youth appeared, an Angolan, no more than fifteen. He was wearing a pair of yellow shorts and a back-to-front baseball cap and he had a pink lampshade in his mouth. One leg was missing below the knee and he steadied himself on his crutches for a second or two, acknowledging McFaul with a cheerful wave, before tap-tapping off down the street. McFaul watched until he rounded the corner and disappeared. The sound of Angola, he thought. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  At the schoolhouse, mercifully, there was no visible damage. The nearest shell seemed to have fallen several hundred yards away and as McFaul circled the little one-storey building he marvelled yet again at the extraordinary lottery that life under shellfire became. Some places you were lucky. Some places you were dead. Simple as that.

  At the main entrance, belatedly, McFaul realised that the door had been forced. They’d left it locked. He was sure about it. Now it hung open, boot marks on the lower planking, the wood around the keyhole splintered. He stepped carefully inside, checking first for booby-traps or some kind of ambush. Rebel troops might already have penetrated the city. Getting blown away by some grinning UNITA adolescent was a less than attractive prospect. The corridor that ran the length of the schoolhouse was empty, but the door to the classroom where they’d slept had also been forced. McFaul checked quickly, the obvious things, boxes of spare batteries, the portable Eskie they used in the field, but he found nothing missing. Only when he went through to the storeroom next door did he realise what had happened.

  The smell hit him at once, the stench of the hospital, the sweet cheesiness of decaying human flesh. He swallowed hard, stepping across the tiny room. The big chest freezer lay open, the lid propped against the wall. Inside, the food and the beer had gone, and the body bag that he and Christianne had brought over from the hospital now lay at the bottom of the freezer in a shallow puddle of nameless fluids. The bag had been sliced open, presumably to check its contents, and McFaul found himself looking at what remained of James Jordan. His upper body had swollen, like an inflated balloon, one arm sticking out almost vertically through the rent in the heavy plastic. Where the blast of the mine had shredded his belly and groin, the torn loops of viscera were already a treacly black colour, spil
ling out of the bag, while the surrounding flesh had begun to turn green. Worst of all was the boy’s head, the short blond hair plastered against the skull, one eye missing completely, the other hanging down over the wreckage of his nose.

  McFaul turned away, revolted, closing the lid on the freezer. Back in the bunker, over the last four days, he’d done the calculations. The gennie would have run for forty-eight hours, keeping the freezer going. With the stuff inside frozen solid, another couple of days should have made little difference. What he hadn’t anticipated was this: some passing intruder, taking his chance in the bombardment, forcing his way in, desperate for food. McFaul stooped to the cupboard behind the door, looking for the fuel he’d need to start the generator again. He’d no idea whether refreezing the body would help at all but in truth he didn’t much care. What he’d just seen, the grotesque parcel of rotting flesh at the bottom of the freezer, was an affront, an obscenity, and any gesture seemed worthwhile. The boy, after all, had been human. Even James Jordan deserved better than this.

  McFaul opened the cupboard and looked inside. Four days ago, there’d been six 20-litre jerrycans, neatly stored side by side. Four had contained diesel, two petrol. Together, the cache represented the sum total of Global’s reserves, all they had left for the Land Rover and the gennie. Now, though, the cupboard was empty.

  Molly Jordan was still dozing when the pilot of the big Sabena 747 announced the final descent into Luanda. She felt the light touch of Robbie Cunningham’s hand on her arm and she opened her eyes, forcing a smile. The young Terra Sancta press officer occupied the middle of the three seats. Beyond him, beside the aisle, she could see Todd Llewelyn finishing the last of his breakfast. For some reason, he’d decided to wear jeans and a denim jacket and it didn’t suit him at all. The stuff was off-the-peg, brand new, the fit at least a size too small.

  ‘Coffee?’

  Robbie was offering her his own cup. She shook her head, saying she wasn’t hungry. The last time they’d eaten was late last night, somewhere over the Sahara. Afterwards, before the stop at Kinshasa, she’d watched some film or other. Both events had left no impression whatsoever, bits of a life that was beginning to seem totally unreal. She’d delayed flying out as long as she could, desperate for word from Giles. Every morning, she’d scanned the papers and listened to the radio news bulletins, dreading news of the Molly Jay. Whenever the postman was due, she’d find herself haunting the bedroom with the view of the road, half-expecting a letter or even a postcard, some indication that he’d made a safe landfall. She’d even toyed with contacting the coastguards, asking for clues to his whereabouts. But when nothing happened – no letter, no phone call, no knocks at the door – she’d finally had to accept that he’d meant what he said in the note. He needed a little space, a week or so to sort himself out. By the time she got back from Africa, he’d doubtless have returned.