by Paul Torday
‘Goodnight,’ I said again.
‘Goodnight,’ she replied, then shut the door softly behind her.
Nine
The next morning, after breakfast, Adeena asked me whether she could phone her brother in Kabul, to make sure that he was safe. I referred the matter to Horace.
‘Of course, sir. There is a telephone in the library. Lord Hartlepool suggested you might like to ride while you were here. If that would suit, I can call the groom and arrange for some horses to be saddled up and brought around to the stable yard.’
The idea pleased Adeena. As she hurried off to make her telephone call, a thought struck me.
I said to Horace, ‘Is there another line I can use?’
‘Of course, sir. There’s one in the estate office, if you will come with me. All the phones have ten lines. Just press any button that isn’t lit.’
I found the phone and made my call. It was to my bank. It had just been an impulse, because I felt certain I knew what the answer would be. I was wrong. Someone had transferred the sum of ten thousand pounds into my account.
Why had Aseeb done that? I had felt sure that the moment I kicked Kevin, I had sacrificed my pay-off. In fact, I had also felt a little better about myself, knowing that I had not taken the money after all. But Aseeb had paid anyway. It wasn’t a good feeling. Whoever this man was, it would now look as if I was on his payroll. I returned to the breakfast room, trying to think through the implications of this, but before I could reach any conclusions Adeena came back.
‘Did you speak to your brother?’
‘Yes, after a while I found him. He is well, thank God.’
‘You didn’t say where you were, I hope?’
‘I don’t know where I am, Richard. Only that it is in England, somewhere very nice.’
We went down to the stable yard and met the groom, who was leading out two horses. Adeena mounted her horse as if she had been doing it all her life. The groom told us where we could find a bridle path that would take us in a wide loop past the home farm and through the fields, then into the woods on the far side of the lake. He said we would be back to the house in time for lunch.
It was another soft autumn day. We jogged slowly along past stone farm buildings, then along through fields of barley stubble, and round into the woods. As we rode among the trees a golden light filtered through the branches and I felt a great sense of well-being. After living a semi-nocturnal life in London for so long, the unaccustomed fresh air and exercise were doing me good. But it was more than that. I was enjoying being with Adeena in a way that, a day ago, I would not have imagined possible. I was riding behind her and found myself admiring the straight-backed, elegant way she sat upon the horse.
I paid for this loss of concentration a moment later. As I nudged my horse to jump over a fallen tree trunk, it sensed my inattention and decided to jump it as if it were taking the last fence at the Grand National. I fell off, slowly, and landed upside down with a gentle bump in a huge cushion of fallen leaves. Gentle or not, the fall reminded me of the cracked rib and bruises that Kevin had inflicted on me. My horse gave me a look, then wandered down the track. Adeena stopped, and dismounted, leading her horse back to me.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. She was smiling down at me.
‘I’ll live.’
‘I thought all English gentlemen could ride? Is that not so?’
‘I was in the infantry, not the cavalry,’ I said, sitting up and rubbing my back. Adeena laughed. She bent down to give me a hand.
‘You look so funny, lying there on the ground.’
I was almost overwhelmed by an impulse to pull her down beside me. Then I remembered that was exactly what I had decided I was not going to do. I climbed to my feet and brushed the dead leaves from my clothes.
We found my horse cropping grass in a clearing. It did not object to being remounted and we rode back through the woods towards the house. As we approached I saw an old Land Rover parked by the front steps. I hoped it had nothing to do with us.
After riding the horses around to the stable yard and handing them over to the groom we walked back through the house into the hall. There was a stranger standing there, a man of about my own height, quite red-faced and with bright blue eyes. There was something familiar about him. As we entered, he came forward and said, ‘Good morning.’
‘Hello.’
‘You don’t remember me. I’m Eck Chetwode Talbot. We met at Freddy Meadowes’ in Oxfordshire a day or two ago.’
‘Oh yes, of course. I’m Richard Gaunt. And this is … Adeena.’
‘I am Mrs Gaunt,’ said Adeena in a formal voice.
‘Delighted to meet you,’ replied Eck. ‘I’m sorry to drop in on you like this. You know I tried telephoning you after we met, but there was no answer. Then when we got home last night I rang Horace to find out if Ed was expected home this autumn. I should explain I’m an old friend and a neighbour. Horace mentioned that you were staying. I thought I’d look in and say hello.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Nice to meet you again.’
I wondered what he could possibly want. I should have recognised him but his appearance here at Hartlepool Hall was so unexpected.
‘I must go upstairs and change,’ said Adeena.
‘We’ve been out riding,’ I explained to Eck. ‘I fell off.’
As Adeena walked away and started up the stairs Eck asked, ‘Adeena … where is she from?’
‘Afghanistan.’
He seemed surprised.
‘Really – she looks quite European: a very striking girl. Congratulations. Have you been married long?’
‘Not long,’ I replied. I waited for him to get to the point and explain why he was here. Instead he asked another question.
‘Were you in the army in Afghanistan? Is that how you met?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, I was in the Middle East, but mostly in Iraq. I did one tour in Helmand.’
‘What did you do in Iraq?’ asked Eck.
‘I was with the Special Forces Support Group. We were providing support to Task Force Black.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Eck. He gave me a look, as if seeing me for the first time. ‘I’ve heard about that operation. They killed a lot of insurgents, didn’t they?’
‘We took a few people off the street. You were in the army yourself?’
‘I came out some years ago. I was in Afghanistan briefly – that’s why I was surprised when you told me your wife was Afghan. She doesn’t look much like the ones I met.’
I knew I ought to have offered him a drink, or invited him to stay for lunch. That would have been the civilised, good-mannered thing to do. But I didn’t. This person was clearly going to ask me about Aseeb. That was why he was here. Now I remembered our conversation at Freddy’s house and the way he had looked at me when I mentioned the name: as if a large snake had just entered the room. Then he would ask me again how I had met Adeena: a lot of questions I didn’t want to answer.
‘Last time we met you said you’d been staying with a man called Aseeb.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘I don’t know him. We sort of bumped into one another.’
Eck tried another tack.
‘Maybe it’s not the same person,’ he said. Then he described Aseeb down to the last detail of his almond-scented hair lotion.
‘It sounds like the spitting image of the man I met,’ I admitted. ‘But he called himself Mr Khan.’
‘But you used the name Aseeb when we last met.’
‘I heard someone call him that, yes.’
‘Well,’ said Eck, ‘if it is the same man, I can tell you that I met him just over a year ago and he is extremely dangerous. I found out – it doesn’t matter how exactly – that he was laundering cash for the Taliban.’
I remembered Freddy saying that Eck used to work in the City. Maybe that was how he had come across Aseeb.
‘Really?’ I said, try
ing not to sound too concerned.
‘Yes, really. The security services would be very interested if they knew he was back in the country. He could be involved in worse things than money laundering.’
I already knew that Aseeb was bad news. This was confirmation of the worst sort.
‘You need to tell someone about him,’ said Eck. ‘You need to tell someone right now.’
‘Tell who?’ I asked.
‘I used to know someone in the army called Nick Davies. He works for the security services now. He had a particular interest in Aseeb at the time I came across him. You should ring him and tell him what you know. Aseeb is a very dangerous man. They nearly got him last time he was in the country. If he has come back here, he’s taking a big risk, so there must be a reason why he’s here, and it’s probably not a good one.’
I was in a difficult position. If I involved the police or the security services, I would have to go through the whole embarrassing story of my ‘marriage’ to Adeena. And what would happen to her? I was very vague about immigration law, which seemed to change every week. I felt sure they would decide my marriage to Adeena was a sham, and try to deport her. Only a day ago I had been wondering how best to separate myself from her as quickly as possible. Turning her in to the immigration service, or the security services, would certainly do the trick. And yet now I found the idea difficult to contemplate. I wished I had never met Eck. I wished he had not come here and bothered me with his questions and his unwelcome information.
‘Give me your friend’s name and number,’ I said. ‘I’ll get in touch with him.’
‘You should do it soon.’
Eck took his diary out of his pocket, wrote something on a page at the back, then tore it out and gave it to me. I read the name ‘Nick Davies’, and a mobile phone number. I put the paper in my pocket. As I did so I saw Adeena coming back down the stairs. She had changed. I turned and smiled at her then turned back to Eck. He was holding up a mobile phone, gazing at it.
‘Just missed a call from my wife Harriet,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Anyway, so nice to have met you again; and you too, Mrs Gaunt.’
Adeena gave the faintest nod of her head in acknowledgement, and Eck left. We heard the sound of the Land Rover coughing into life, then the crunch of the wheels on the gravel. Only when the sound had faded did Adeena speak again.
‘I did not like that man. Who is he?’
‘Someone I met for about five minutes last weekend. He was staying with another friend of mine.’
‘Why was he here?’
I hesitated.
‘He wanted to find out when Ed Hartlepool – the owner of this house – was going to return.’
‘Well, I hope we do not meet him again.’
Adeena’s mood had changed once more and her face had hardened.
‘Let’s have some lunch,’ I said. She shook her head. The carefree happiness of the morning had vanished to be replaced by a suspicious gloom.
Ten
Eck’s reaction to the name ‘Task Force Black’ was not the first time I had seen such a response. To most people, it then meant nothing, but to a few, those who had experienced or knew something of the world of special operations in the Middle East, the name meant a lot.
In autumn 2004, the Coalition forces were losing the war in Iraq, the war that everyone had said was over. Ground had been taken, but was not being held. Coalition forces were pinned down in a few semi-secure spots: the palace at Basra, the International Zone in Baghdad, various fortified bases across the country where mortar shells and rockets landed almost daily. The cost of maintaining the ‘peace’ was horrendous: half a billion dollars in cash was being shipped into Iraq via Baghdad Airport every month to pay contractors and the burgeoning private armies, and to pay off politicians and tribal elders. The result was supposed to be a safe, peaceful country that was moving towards a bright and democratic future. It wasn’t working.
Each week civilian deaths mounted alongside a steady stream of Coalition casualties, and by the time I arrived in Baghdad in January 2005, they were running at a thousand a month. By the time I left later that year, the Coalition and its Iraqi allies were bringing so much peace and security to the people of Iraq that the monthly civilian death toll had trebled. People were being killed at a faster rate than Saddam had ever achieved. Nearly as many civilians were dying every month as were killed in the Troubles in Northern Ireland over twenty years. That was before the ‘surge’, when central Iraq was swamped by American troops for a while.
‘Task Force Black’ was about gathering intelligence and disrupting the insurgents. Our job was to provide support, but the line between support and direct action was often blurred. The job of the task force was to go after the insurgents where they lived, find and shut down the bomb factories, take the gunmen off the streets.
The targets changed from week to week. Sometimes we had to go into the narrow alleys of Sadr City after Shia followers of Muqtadr al-Sadr. Sometimes we cordoned off the Thieves Market in Tahrir Square while the special forces went looking for fedayeen gunmen, or the ex-army officers who now called themselves Ansar al-Sunna and the insurgents and AQ foreign fighters embedded with them.
At night we returned to the Green Park compound. The Green Park people didn’t mix with us or talk to us except when they had to. They were mostly Iraqis, but there were other nationalities too: a lot of Americans; a few Israelis; South Africans. We were just there for bed and breakfast. All the same, we couldn’t help finding out some things about our new neighbours.
Green Park was not just another Private Military Company. There were contractors whose job it was to act as ‘bullet-stoppers’ for visiting VIPs; others who provided security for the oilfields and pipelines, so that at least a trickle of oil made it from Iraq’s vast oilfields as far as Basra and the oil terminals. Others made sure the generals and colonels in the Green Zone received their filter coffee and their choice of premium beers whenever they briefed journalists in the Babylon Hotel.
Green Park did none of these things. We knew they were there to screen prisoners before sending them up the line for further interrogation. We never knew what their mission was in its entirety, but it appeared to be the ultimate outsourcing operation. It seemed as if it was there to do the work that governments couldn’t admit to approving or even knowing about. No doubt their work was just a line in someone’s defence estimate, under the heading ‘Intelligence Gathering’ or ‘Security Services’, but sometimes the Green Park teams went out in their old Toyotas and took people off the streets. Then they processed them. That meant: finding out what they knew.
For the first few weeks our own missions could still broadly be described as cordon support: daylight patrols, keeping the streets safe or manning checkpoints around the edges of the Green Zone. But once we had become more familiar with the city, things began to change.
There was a pinboard in one of the rooms at the Mission Support Station. On it were the photographs of men the special forces wanted to get hold of: bomb makers, people who organised the gunmen or who planned the roadside ambushes. Sometimes these photographs were razor sharp, taken with high-resolution cameras from one of the helicopters that thudded overhead day and night. Sometimes they were blurred, like an image snatched by a mobile phone. Sometimes there were no photographs, just names typed on a piece of paper. Lines connected these images to words, intended to suggest relationships: tribal, religious or business. These were the task force ‘targets’.
Our job, when we were not providing support for other task force teams, was to help collect some of these people. It was a strange and very scary time for all of us. Sometimes we drove into al-Amariyah or even worse parts of the Red Zone. At other times we worked the checkpoints to see what might be caught in the net.
I will never forget that day at the checkpoint in Yafa Street. Although it was nearly summer it was for once a relatively cloudy morning. The sky was grey and heavy. A song crackled from a loudspeaker hung from a n
earby streetlamp. It continued playing all through the incident, and its haunting melody stayed with me for a long time. One of the first things I did afterwards was to go and ask a startled shopkeeper, unharmed by the blast, who the singer was. I even wrote down the name he gave me, as if I planned to listen to the song again.
We had been letting the Iraqi police and the US Marines do the talking, coming forward to take a look if the soldiers at the barrier stopped someone who might be of interest. A watermelon seller was trying to do some business with the people in the queue of cars and trucks. I was talking to an American soldier about fifty yards back, one eye on the checkpoint, when I saw a slender boy of about sixteen come around the corner of the street. When he saw the checkpoint, a big smile came over his face, visible even from that distance. That was good thinking: smile at the nice soldiers, smile at the nice people with guns. As he approached the line of vehicles, I noticed his odd shape underneath his dishdasha. He was spindly at the top and what I could see of his legs looked spindly too, yet around the middle he was as plump as a partridge. I started to run forward, shouting, ‘Down! Everybody get down!’
Whether the boy activated the vest bomb because he heard my shout, or more likely because he reckoned he had got as close as he ever would, I do not know, but he blew himself up. Bombers like cloudy days. The low pressure encourages the force of the blast to go sideways rather than straight up into the air, causing maximum damage on the ground. The force of the blast shattered the cluster of vehicles around the checkpoint and shredded the human beings standing around them. I was sent flying backwards, landing heavily but otherwise uninjured apart from a temporary deafness. The vehicles had erupted in flame as their fuel tanks detonated. Something round and gory and horrible rolled towards me, covered in red pulp. It came to a stop by my feet and I made myself look at it. It was the remains of a watermelon.
Sixteen people died instantly in that single attack, and there were many more casualties. There were ten such vest bomb attacks around the city that day. The next night we joined up with the special forces teams and went after the men who had organised the attacks. We were given three targets. We found none of them, but we brought back some people for ‘processing’ by Green Park to see whether we could improve our information. That was when I learned what else went on in our compound.
