She handed him a silver tray with the cocktail shaker, ice bucket, vodka, gin, vermouth, lemon and two martini glasses. Nick smiled gratefully as she took his handkerchief, dipped into the ice bucket and set about cleaning the graze on his cheek.
‘I’m not sure that’s too hygienic,’ whispered Nick. ‘You know people are pretty paranoid since Covid.’
‘Don’t worry,’ La Contessa murmured into his ear as she worked. ‘We have had our vaccinations and, besides, the only people drinking martinis in here are you and me and anything you could give me I would have caught a long time ago. There, that’s much better.’
She stepped back to admire her handiwork with the Band-Aid as Baxter rose up on his hind legs and scratched at Nick’s leg. He kept doing so until Nick finally relented, bent down and allowed the beagle to sniff the dressing. After several anxious seconds, Baxter eventually passed it as satisfactory. He then padded over to the rug by the bookcase, which provided a better vantage point of the whole room than the one by the fireplace, circled around after his tail several times and, sufficiently coiled, collapsed down and promptly went to sleep.
‘Now where were we?’ said Nick over the sound of the ice rattling in the cocktail shaker as he agitated it vigorously. ‘Oh, that’s right, Iraq. Armand, I believe you were about to tell us of your experiences.’
The French Ambassador was standing in front of the open verandah doors with his back to the group as Patricia refilled his Champagne flute. He nodded as she finished pouring and turned back to face the other guests, who were sitting or standing in a semi-circle around the soft furniture, facing him. He was clearly resigned to having to tell his story. Outside, boats were still sounding their horns and the sound of thousands of voices celebrating New Year’s Eve could be heard across the water. The mood outside was in stark contrast to the sombre tone that dropped over the guests like a shroud now they’d returned from the temporary distraction of the fireworks.
‘That is correct, Monsieur Nick. I was with a small, select team of the Légion étrangère in Iraq in April 2003. As you know it is a unit made up from foreign nationals who do not swear allegiance to France but to the Legion itself. As an officer, I am French, but my men came from many different countries – Chad, Djibouti, the Republic of Congo,’ said Armand by way of introduction. ‘The thing that they had in common was that they were very tough men. As my wife has already said, this was not an ordinary mission.’
‘I’ll say it wasn’t,’ interrupted Sir Aiden angrily. ‘It’s a lot of bulldust. That’s what it is. I don’t know what your game is, sir, but I do not believe you are helping matters by spinning these untruths to an already upset and clearly troubled audience.’
‘Sir Aiden!’ said La Contessa. ‘That really is very rude. I think you should apologise to the ambassador immediately.’
‘I will do no such thing,’ exploded the Governor-General. ‘He should be apologising to all of us. I served alongside members of the French Foreign Legion in the first Gulf War and I have a great deal of respect for them. But what this man is saying is clearly untrue.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ asked Karen, sitting beside him.
‘I mean that in 2003 the French Foreign Legion was nowhere near Iraq. Legionnaires were stationed in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom and the War on Terror, but they were not in Iraq,’ said Sir Aiden decisively. ‘Which means everything he says is absolute, gold-plated, copper-bottomed boll—’
‘You are correct, Sir Aiden,’ interrupted Armand smoothly, apparently unruffled by the accusation of being a liar. ‘Officially that is. Surely you, of all people, know that governments often ask their elite troops to sometimes move clandestinely in their best interests?’
‘Of course, but I would surely have known if French forces were operating in our territory,’ said Sir Aiden. ‘The potential for a green-on-green friendly fire incident would have been too great.’
‘Unless we were chasing something for our government that your government was also seeking,’ said the French Ambassador. ‘Something no one was admitting to their allies that they knew about.’
‘I think I can end this part of the debate,’ said Monaro, ‘if you can take my word?’
‘You are the Prime Minister of Australia; I think we have to take your word,’ said Sir Aiden, nodding his acquiescence. ‘Unquestioningly.’
‘Very good,’ said Monaro. ‘I was aware of Armand’s unit operating in the forward areas where we were in Iraq in 2003. They were not the only undeclared and freelance groups roaming around the Iraqi badlands at that time; there were people from Blackwater Security and other mercenaries or private security forces. It was the wild west, a free-for-all. After the incident that Armand is about to describe to you, he came and sought me out, unofficially of course, and we have been friends ever since.’
‘Quite so,’ said Armand, nodding to the Prime Minister. ‘On this day my team was tasked with seeking out a subgroup of the Iranian-backed Hashd al-Sha’abi, also known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, which was operating out of a school deep in enemy territory. We drove through the night, skirting around Iraqi patrols and checkpoints, before finally reaching the school at dawn.’
Everyone in the room was transfixed, transported by his vivid description of the rugged rocky desert and the golden early sunlight chasing away the chill night air and illuminating the smoking school building with its blue, pockmarked walls and empty windows. Armand’s eyes stared unseeing into the middle distance, the smell of the charred building and whatever lay within it still fresh in his nostrils.
‘We fanned out, following the perimeter. There was no movement anywhere. I deployed men to the rear and then led the way in through the front doors,’ he said, before pausing sadly. ‘When we got there, it was too late. There had been a shooting match and there were several dead men. There were suicide vests, bomb-making materials, explosives. Clearly they were intending to cause chaos. If we had arrived first we would have shot them too. Whoever had got there before us had stepped in and undoubtedly saved many, many innocent civilian and allied troop lives. But . . .’
‘But what?’ asked La Contessa. ‘You sound concerned but surely this was a good thing?’
‘But a couple of them were just boys,’ said Armand sadly. ‘Teenagers. Older boys I know, but still boys. I am still haunted by the memory of that killing ground. The bodies . . .’
‘I think I need to remind you Armand that the average age of a Spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain was just 20,’ said Sir Aiden matter-of-factly. ‘The youngest pilots were just 18. The truth is we have been sending boys into battle for centuries. The Iraqis were no different – they recruited boys, young men, for suicide missions for the same reason as RAF Fighter Command put them into cockpits and sent them up to face far greater numbers of Luftwaffe aircraft: young men believe they are invincible. I imagine the fact that a couple of them were older boys would have been very hard to verify when they were shooting back.’
‘That is awfully sad,’ said La Contessa. ‘Stories like this make me despair for humanity.’
‘What was also very telling about this mission was what we did not find,’ continued Armand. ‘Clearly those who got there before us found the very thing that we were looking for.’
The group sitting around the table was silent, waiting for him to go on.
‘There were empty wooden crates, smashed open, and the contents were gone,’ said Armand. ‘We were too late.’
‘What was it?’ asked La Contessa. ‘What was it that you were trying to find? Who got there before you and killed those boys? What did they take?’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’ said Armand, looking directly at Prime Minister Robert Monaro.
CHAPTER 16
The Reckoning
‘What was it?’ La Contessa asked Monaro. ‘What on earth could be worth so much destruction?’
‘Prime Minister, may I caution you that this matter has been buried and forgot
ten for years,’ warned Sir Aiden. ‘I would counsel you that it may not be in anyone’s best interest to bring it up again. Certainly not now.’
‘I’m sorry, Aiden: two of my dearest friends and colleagues are lying dead because of what happened all those years ago,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘This matter has been hidden for long enough. And now is definitely the right time for it to finally be brought into the open.’
‘No, Robert, you don’t have to do this,’ said Karen, putting her hand on top of his and looking imploringly into his eyes. ‘You have so much to lose.’
At the opposite end of the table, two bright red dots flared on Patricia’s cheeks at the overt display of affection and concern. La Contessa quickly got to her feet, walked around the table and rested a supportive hand on her friend’s shoulder. Patricia briefly laid her cheek on La Contessa’s hand, closing her eyes, before rallying and straightening up to look down the table at her husband again.
‘This has been hanging over my head, our heads, for too long,’ said Monaro. ‘I can see that now. It’s been a mistake to try and hide it all these years. I’m glad finally to get it out in the open and to hell with the consequences. You have already heard what Alex, Charlie and I went through to get to the school. We arrived at dusk and waited for the sun to set and the prayers to finish before reconnoitring the perimeter.’
Monaro paused and took a sip of the wine in front of him before carrying on. His audience sat in rapt anticipation.
‘Charlie went left with the Para Minimi light machine gun and Alex went right. I was primed to go in through the front door once they were in defilade and ready to catch those inside in a crossfire. I managed to get a look through the crack of the door and Armand’s description is right: they were a few men preparing for jihad. We couldn’t tell their ages but there were a couple of instructors who were clearly senior, psyching the others up for their suicide missions the next morning. We had to stop them. Alex and Charlie told me they were in position through the radio headsets and we . . .’
The Prime Minister stopped, looking down at the white linen tablecloth, the scene replaying in his memory, his face a mask of grief and shame. Silence stretched across the room.
‘Even though they were terrorists intent on killing innocent people, we had to be better than them. Otherwise what is the point of it all? I had to give them a chance,’ Monaro said. ‘I stepped into the room and shouted for them to put down their weapons and put their hands up. The last part in Arabic. As one, they jumped for their AK-47s and started firing. I dropped to the floor, shooting, and Alex and Charlie cut them down.’
The guests at the table shifted uncomfortably at the revelation. The Foreign Minister’s face was white, possibly with the responsibility of already knowing what had happened. Charlotte looked across to Brett for support, only to be met by the bland, shrouded countenance he used when his emotions were under duress. Taylor looked as if she might faint again.
‘Afterwards,’ Monaro said eventually, ‘we went into the room to take the explosives. No point leaving them for the next fundamentalist to pick up and carry on where the others left off.’
‘It was a job that had to be done,’ Sir Aiden said quietly. ‘Taking those lives saved the lives of countless innocent civilians and many, many of your colleagues.’
‘That’s what we tell ourselves,’ Monaro said, his face drawn. ‘When we lie awake at night. Reliving the screams, the groans.’
Again he stopped, lost in thought. Patricia watched her husband anxiously from the other end of the table. Her face was tense with stress. Eventually he carried on. ‘Anyway, we pulled out two crates of explosives and loaded them onto the LRPV to blow up in the desert and went back for the third, which was in the same small room at the back of the main hall. Although it looked the same, it wouldn’t budge. At first we thought it had been fixed to the floor and was some kind of booby trap. Alex checked it out with the electronic stethoscope and declared it safe. We ripped open the wooden planks and inside —’
‘You found the weapons of mass destruction,’ declared Taylor, unexpectedly joining the conversation. ‘Clever you.’
‘No, but we found the thing every government and freelance agency – including Armand and his undercover Legionnaires – was looking for,’ said Monaro. ‘Saddam’s gold.’
‘I thought that was a myth,’ said Nick, taking quick stock of the room. Hayden and Brett, sitting next to one another, did not seem as surprised at the revelation as their partners opposite them. ‘Saddam Hussein’s secret stash of Iraqi gold, moved out of the Republican Palace to fund his life in exile. No one ever found it.’
‘No one else ever found it, because we did,’ said Monaro simply. ‘It was no myth. It was bloody heavy. We had to carry each bar individually to the vehicle and then line the floor with them to distribute the weight evenly. By the time we had got it all on board, the Land Rover was right down on its suspension, the tyres almost touching the wheel arches, and I was worried we would break the back of the vehicle or get bogged in the sand. We jettisoned every bit of unnecessary kit, dropped the explosives down a well and decided to make a straight run back to the Al Asad Airbase, where it could be flown immediately back to Australia. Only . . .’
‘Only,’ said Nick, ‘it didn’t quite work out like that.’
‘Exactly,’ said Monaro, giving the Governor-General a hard look. ‘When we got back, after a nerve-racking drive and several skirmishes, I reported in to my commanding officer, who told me to take the gold back into the desert and bury it where no one would ever find it. And then to file a report on the whole operation, which never saw the light of day.’
‘It was too politically sensitive at the time,’ said Sir Aiden.
‘Bloody hell, Aiden,’ said Brett. ‘You knew about it all along and swept it under the carpet?’
‘Every man and his dog was looking for that gold and news of it would have sent them into a frenzy. Politically working out how to divide up the spoils of war and knowing what to do with the money was fraught. The simplest thing was to bury it, literally.’
‘So that’s what we did,’ said Monaro. ‘Sir Aiden buried the report and Charlie, Alex and I took the gold out and buried it in the desert. We have kept the secret all these years until the blackmail note threatened to expose it and I called you all here tonight. But now both Charlie and Alex are dead and we seem to be no closer to unmasking the blackmailer or the killer.’
‘Goodness!’ declared La Contessa in a voice that made everyone start. ‘Where’s Baxter?’
Nick rose quickly to his feet and said: ‘I will go and look for him, my Siena cynophilist.’
‘What’s a cynophilist?’ asked Taylor as he walked out of the double doors onto the verandah in search of the errant beagle. ‘It sounds like something I should take.’
‘It means dog lover,’ said Charlotte. ‘People who are canophiles.’
‘I love dogs,’ chipped in Brett, trying to lighten the increasingly sombre mood among the guests at the table. ‘But I couldn’t eat a whole one.’
La Contessa scowled at him.
Outside, Nick relied on his instincts to track Baxter and, instead of heading down towards the tree where Charlie’s Smurf-blue body was lying among the leaves, he turned left and headed along the side of the house and around to the front. He skirted along the side of the gravel turning circle, padding silently on the grass in the moonlight, and followed the drive up to a large double garage on the left, opposite the guard house.
Nick peered in through a dusty window on the side of the garage and saw, illuminated in the moonlight, a large black metal cage that someone had begun the process of slowly dismantling with a circular saw that now lay on the floor. Nick vaguely recalled seeing an evening bulletin showing the Arabian oryx arriving in that cage shortly after Monaro took office. The ends of the bars where they had been cut glittered in the moonlight.
Next to the cage was a black MGB Roadster, the later rubber bumper model, with the b
onnet open. An old towel lay over the wing with tools and what looked like part of the twin Weber carburettor sitting on it. There was a ride-on lawn mower, a leaf blower and other gardening tools, but no sign of Baxter. Nick skirted around the rear of the garage, past a new Jamie Oliver pizza oven raised on metal legs with a stack of dried hardwood underneath, and an outdoor toilet that was clearly used by the Australian Border Force guards. As Nick came along the far side of the garage towards the main gate he heard a familiar laugh coming from the guard room opposite. He darted over the gravel drive and ducked low along the wall before chancing a peep through the window. Detective Inspector Cleaver was sitting at the main guard table in his large white underpants, his wet clothes wafting gently in front of a fan, with a good-sized glass of beer held firmly in his hand. Several members of the Australian Border Force security detail were chuckling heartily at whatever anecdote he was regaling them with. The Detective Inspector was clearly enjoying himself. Baxter sat at his side, wagging his tail as the police officer absently scratched his head. Nick returned to the front of the guard house and let himself in the main door.
‘Nicholas, dear boy!’ said Detective Inspector Cleaver when he stepped into the room. ‘Do come in and meet my old chum, Sergeant Will Evans.’
The most senior of the Australian Border Force officers rose up from his seat at the table and shook Nick’s hand before introducing the others. Nick nodded a good evening to each of them but before he could speak, Cleaver continued, ‘Will and I were stationed in Kings Cross together in the good old, bad old days, when I first came over from Scotland Yard. Licensing, armed hold-up squad, dodgy doings and terrific fun. Turns out I needn’t have bothered with all that 007 skulduggery across the harbour, or should I say in the harbour, and through the bushes. I could have strolled up to the jolly old gate and Will here would have let me in.’
‘Not officially, boss,’ said Will. ‘But unofficially you’re always welcome, of course. Although it is a funny old night. Here we are confined to barracks and some strange noises and odd goings on happening inside. I don’t like it.’
The Dying Diplomats Club Page 13
