by McNab, Andy
‘When did you visit Saudi?’ Boss Weeks asked.
Asma could tell he badly wanted to know the answer but was trying not to sound too keen. She added a note of polite restraint as she translated the question.
‘I studied at university there before returning to my homeland. With my qualifications I could have stayed in Saudi Arabia or travelled anywhere in the world, but I wanted to come back to my home and work for the good of my people.’
Asma looked hard at Boss Weeks, willing him to make an appropriately cordial response.
He said lamely: ‘That was jolly good of you.’
‘Your action shows great commitment and love for your people and they must surely benefit greatly,’ she said. The son looked pleased. Jean nodded her approval. The two women often despaired at the diplomatic incompetence of the officers.
They discussed the needs of the village and what the British Army could realistically supply. They talked about electrical generators and wells and walls around the school yard. Two old men in spotless robes brought everyone more tea. They offered a plate of round, flat savoury bread. Asma took a piece. The very smell of it, the way it sat in her hand, reminded her of her mother’s kitchen.
The elder son took this opportunity to speak directly to Asma. He had piercing blue eyes and sharp features. The younger son looked plumper-faced and spoilt.
‘May I ask how you, a woman of fine Afghan features and good Pashtun breeding, came to speak both our language and English so perfectly?’
Asma looked down at the carpet, studying its tiny loops and intricate colours. She knew it could take a woman a year or more to make a carpet like this.
‘My family left Afghanistan when I was young,’ she said. ‘And of course we spoke Pashtu at home. I spoke English at school.’
She thought of that home. A grey flat made of grey concrete in a grey block under grey skies. Did it ever stop raining over their patch of east London? Was it ever anything but grey?
Impulsively she told him: ‘Now I have returned to Afghanistan I do not understand why my father took us away.’
He looked pleased by this.
‘Where is your tribal homeland?’ he asked. But Asma knew better than to answer this question. Tribal complications ran deep and vengeance and anger could leap across generations and geography. They could even cross this boiling plain and somehow arrive in a wet, grey concrete flat in London.
‘I should not come to your house and talk about myself,’ she said shyly, ‘when there is so much to discuss about the future of this area.’
The man nodded. ‘Nevertheless, your position is an interesting one. Do you see yourself as Afghan? As English? As Pashtun?’
‘What’s he saying?’ Boss Weeks asked.
‘He’s talking about the school wall,’ she lied. To the tribesman she said: ‘Allah chose to offer my family refuge in Britain during difficult times and for that I thank Allah and Britain.’
It was a reply she had prepared long ago for any Pashtun who asked her that difficult question. But none had before now.
‘And do you really believe,’ the son pursued, ‘that by working for the British Army you are working in the best interests of the Pashtun people? There is a lot of work to be done here but an army which comes to fight can’t do that work. Or is it that after living so long in England you don’t care about the Pashtun people?’
His words were confrontational but his tone was gentle.
Her cheeks began to burn.
‘What did he say?’ Boss Weeks was getting more impatient.
At last she said: ‘He asked if the British Army would really be prepared to build a wall around the school.’
‘He seems to be speaking to you about this wall with some intensity . . .’
She shrugged.
They debated the likelihood of a mortar attack on the school and whether a wall would really help prevent this. They learned that only a few weeks ago women and girls had been killed at a village school not far away.
‘I hope it was rebuilt,’ the engineer said. ‘In the UK we support the education of women.’
Asma thought of her own education in east London. That had been grey too. She had gone to the same grey, concrete place as hundreds of other teenagers in grey uniforms and the last thing on anybody’s mind had been their education. The idea that women and girls might die for the right to this education would have seemed amazing there.
Jean and Major Willingham were now locked in a discussion with the head tribesman which brought all other conversation around the carpet to a halt.
‘What’s he saying?’ Weeks hissed.
‘They’re discussing the Taliban,’ Asma said.
The tribesman said they had heard about a training base near the Helmand River. He named an area. Asma recognized the name at once from her interrogation of the two detainees.
‘In fact,’ said the tribesman, ‘we have reason to believe that our brothers in this area are sheltering many fighters. And we must remember that our brothers may not have been given a choice.’
‘And the focus of this activity? Exactly where is it?’ the major demanded.
Jean translated this as: ‘Some indication of the exact location would be extremely interesting and helpful to our understanding of this situation, if you would be kind enough to share this information.’
The tribesman looked at his elder son.
‘Asad?’
Asad said he wasn’t sure exactly which compound it was. He once again named the area.
‘Could you be more precise?’ Major Willingham urged.
But Asad shook his head.
‘We would very much like to welcome you here again. By then we will perhaps have found the answer for you.’
Asma had a feeling that he wanted to discuss with his family whether to disclose the compound’s location, but the OC looked pleased enough.
‘That would be extremely helpful.’
Asma translated: ‘We thank you for your generosity and understand that you have the interests of Afghanistan and its future and those of the Pashtun people at heart.’
The tribesmen smiled and the meeting ended amicably. It seemed to Asma that the good-looking soldier, in his position by the door, had remained motionless throughout. She saw him, very quietly and unobtrusively, radio the men outside. She watched Jean grin at him as she passed and his face broke into a smile in return.
When they emerged into the sunlight the Vectors were waiting. Soldiers appeared as though they had materialized from cracks in the dry walls and climbed aboard.
‘No doubt about it. Someone fancies you,’ Jean muttered to Asma.
‘He’s got really amazing eyes. They’re so blue I had to keep looking at the carpet in case they burned a hole in me.’
Jean gave her a sideways glance. ‘His eyes look an ordinary sort of grey to me.’
Asma looked confused.
‘I’m not talking about that tribesman, for heaven’s sake,’ Jean said.
Asma blinked.
‘Duh. I mean Second Lieutenant Weeks. He just couldn’t stop staring at you. And when you were chatting away to Ol’ Blue Eyes he was getting really agitated.’
‘Don’t talk daft!’
‘I swear it.’
‘What about you then? You kept looking at someone all through the meeting.’
‘Did I? Who?’
‘That soldier over by the door.’
Jean giggled.
‘And you gave him a sexy smile on the way out. And you were looking at him in the cookhouse the other night, too.’
‘Well . . . he’s nice to look at . . .’
‘Are you blushing? I reckon you are!’
‘I reckon I might be too . . .’
They did their best to look serious again when the officers climbed in beside them.
‘Well,’ Major Willingham said as the Vectors set off through the dust. ‘Do we trust them? Or are they just trying to use the British Army to fight some local feud ag
ainst whoever lives in that compound?’
The engineer pulled a face.
‘Whatever their motive, it’s not greed. They’re not asking for the earth, just a school wall.’
‘But that elder son. He’s educated. He’s spent a few years in Saudi; he could so easily have come under the influence of . . .’
Boss Weeks nodded: ‘I think his history’s highly suspicious. I found that man highly suspicious. I mean, possibly dangerous.’ Then he coloured and added: ‘Although of course I’m not used to dealing with these people.’
‘Well let’s ask someone who is,’ the major said. ‘What did our interpreters make of them?’
Jean said: ‘If Asad was Saudi-educated he will have come back with new ideas. That may be good, because he can handle concepts like oil exploration. And it may be bad.’
‘There’s a danger,’ Asma continued, ‘that he’ll have come back wahabi – that is, with no respect for the old tribal customs. If you’re wahabi then you regard a lot of the local practices as no more than superstition. So when Arab fighters, and other insurgents, get here and stamp all over the local traditions and run amok with their weapons, he might think that’s cool. Or he might think he’s promoting Pashtun interests.’
‘Very interesting,’ Major Willingham said. ‘I saw you having a conversation with the son. How dangerous do you think he is?’
Jean watched her carefully. They all waited for Asma’s answer.
‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘my instinct is quite strong on this one. I think we should trust this family.’
Chapter Fifteen
‘YOU’VE GOT SOME CALLS TO MAKE.’
Dave had been summoned over to the ops room. Jenny . . . His stomach lurched. Something’s happened to her.
‘Is it my wife, sir?’
‘No, nothing like that. It’s about the two men you lost. Rifleman Jordan is doing well in Selly Oak but he’s made repeated requests to talk to you about the incident. And Rifleman Buckle . . .’
‘Yes?’ Was the 2 i/c preparing him for bad news? His enquiries about Steve had always met with the same noncommittal response. Now Dave felt his heart thump.
The 2 i/c said: ‘Rifleman Buckle would also like a word with you.’
‘So he’s well enough to talk now!’ Dave’s heart was still pumping hard but it was feeding relief to all the tiny, faraway capillaries that had drained as he braced himself for the worst.
He was handed the phone and, after being passed along a chain of medical personnel, he heard a voice he recognized.
‘Dave, is that you, mate?’
The voice was airless, as though its owner was wearing too tight a uniform. But it was unmistakably Steve Buckle.
‘Good to hear you, mate! I’ve been asking to speak to you every day but they wouldn’t let me.’
‘Not fucking surprised,’ Steve said. ‘They didn’t want your language upsetting me, you old heap of shit.’
Dave laughed not because it was funny but because no dying man could speak that way and it meant Steve was going to live. Beneath his laugh, though, he felt uneasy. He’d been mates with Steve, but, even as a mate, Steve had never called his platoon sergeant a heap of shit.
‘How are you?’ Dave asked.
‘Terrible.’
‘All over?’
‘All over, mate. Broken a bunch of ribs and an arm and I’ve got a shitload of bruising and I’m every colour of the rainbow.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
Dave proceeded cautiously. ‘You’ve been lying there a long time for a bloke who’s only got bruising.’
‘Bit of shrapnel in the arm, broken rib . . . let’s see, was there something else?’
Dave felt his lungs tighten, then his gut.
‘How’s the leg?’ he asked.
‘My legs are all right, mate.’
‘Does your head hurt?’
‘Yep.’
So that was why no one had been allowed to speak to Steve.
‘Only because I need a beer,’ Steve added. ‘What sort of country is this, where no one can drink a beer?’
‘Well, what country is it?’ Dave asked. ‘Go on, you tell me.’
‘Can’t remember the name . . .’
‘Can you think straight?’
‘Since when could I think straight?’
‘Do you remember anything about the accident?’
‘The last thing I remember we had our stuff ready and we were getting in the Vector to go somewhere . . .’
Steve’s voice petered out.
‘Who was in the Vector with you?’
‘Everyone!’
‘Name them if you can, Steve. Go on. Name all the lads in 1 Section.’
Dave hoped his questions weren’t causing Steve anguish but he had to know. He had to know if the IED had blown away a piece of Steve Buckle’s mind.
‘Well. There’s you . . .’
‘I’m not in 1 Section, am I?’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘Not really. What do I do?’
‘Ummm . . . who am I talking to?’
Oh shit.
‘I’m Dave. Your sergeant. So you’d better look sharpish.’
‘Oh, yeah. Dave. Yeah.’
‘Now tell me what’s wrong with you apart from shrapnel in your arm and bruising.’
‘Um . . . I keep falling asleep.’
‘That’s the morphine.’
‘I’m falling asleep now. The doc’s here, want to speak to him?’
‘Yeah, all right, Steve. Listen, you need a lot of rest so just relax. That’s an order. Have you spoken to Leanne yet?’
But Steve wasn’t there any more.
Dave was aware that people in the ops room had been listening to him. Major Willingham was at a desk nearby and so was the 2 i/c. The OC’s laptop blinked and people seemed to be on the radio or working on documents or shuffling papers around but it was all a pretence. The note of alarm he could not edit from his voice had somehow placed the ops room on alert.
He avoided everyone’s eye. A new, crisp voice crackled on the phone now.
‘Rob Webb speaking. I’m the doctor monitoring Rifleman Buckle.’
‘Dave Henley, Buckle’s platoon sergeant. So is it the morphine or has he got head injuries?’
‘Probably still traumatized. It’s hard for us to do detailed assessments here: we just have to get him well enough to ship him off to England, but we’ve had a bit of trouble stabilizing him.’
‘He started off sounding like Steve . . . and then I realized he wasn’t really there.’
‘Sometimes he is. For brief periods. That’s why we’re still hoping his head injuries won’t cause a long-term problem.’
‘Does he actually know he’s lost a leg?’
The doctor’s reply, when it came, was careful. ‘Well, he has been told.’
‘Has he taken it in?’
‘His nervous system’s telling him it’s still there and it hurts a lot. He’s chosen not to look.’
‘Christ . . . Has he spoken to his wife?’
‘Actually, that’s what I wanted to ask you. Now you’ve talked to him, what do you think?’
‘Well . . .’ Dave said. ‘I know Leanne’s desperate to be in touch. But if she hears him like that then it could make things worse. Has he asked to phone her?’
‘He hasn’t remembered he’s married yet. But he remembered you were his sergeant.’
‘Christ.’
‘That’s soldiers for you. He asked to speak to you by name. I heard him forget who you were towards the end of the conversation, but he certainly knew at the beginning.’
‘I don’t reckon he should speak to Leanne.’
‘He’s good for thirty seconds, maybe.’
‘But he’s not going to say any of the things Leanne will want to hear.’ When do any of us say the things they want to hear?
