by Andy McNab
Without moving his head Jamal glanced left, observing his comrades, in their identical Multicam parkas, their gaze dutifully fixed straight ahead, dead eyes that had witnessed several lifetimes’ worth of terror in five short months. Knowing what was coming should have helped them prepare, but this was different. This was on a scale they hadn’t seen before, and never before done to girls who might have been the same age as his own dear sister Adila, to be slain by their fathers.
He touched the space above his left ear and felt the lens, no bigger than the one in a phone camera, and noticed the cable to the recorder tense slightly under his headgear as he turned slowly towards the assembled audience. They were all males, men and boys as young as eight: fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, all forced here on the pretext of witnessing justice being done, allegedly in the name of Allah, but in reality to be left in no doubt that Abukhan’s rule of terror in this district was now absolute, and that any disobedience would be met with the same penalty, keeping prisoners having been deemed a waste of precious resources.
In front of the gathering Abukhan paced up and down, blade in hand, addressing them in a low voice about the curse the girls had cast upon them, on their families, on the community, and how Allah was angry with them and demanded justice. Occasionally he looked at Jamal and the others, to check that they were being attentive. Once Jamal would willingly have taken a bullet for him, gladly given up his life. Not any more.
He turned his gaze back to the girls. Face exactly where you want the lens to point, fix your eyes so they’re looking straight ahead and only move your head when you want the camera to move. If you need to look down for some reason, keep your head up. Always think about where the lens is pointing. Those were Emma’s instructions, the video in exchange for his escape. And, above all, when it happens, don’t look away. She was a journalist, interested only in the truth. He admired her calm, fearless focus; he wouldn’t let her down. You’ll be a hero for this, she had promised him. Your family will be proud.
They had met five months ago. He had just crossed into Syria driving an aid truck and had pulled over to wait for the rest of the convoy. Emma Warner had strode up, opened the door of the cab and got in.
‘What you doing?’
‘I can pay for a tank of diesel,’ she said.
He didn’t want her on board, didn’t feel comfortable with a woman in the cab, but they were already short of cash and the Kurdish guide seemed okay with it. She was small, in her late twenties, olive-skinned with jet-black hair, and dressed like a local in a hijab, with a loose, long-sleeved, ankle-length dress. She seemed to blend right in among all the Kurds and Syrians. She spoke to the guide in Kurdish and to the others in Arabic, but when she addressed Jamal her English was posh, like a news reader’s.
When she looked at him, he felt she could see right through him, as if she was saying, You’ve never been here, have you? You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. And she was right: he didn’t.
Sixty kilometres inside Syria, they had a flat. He got the wheel off but there was no spare. The other trucks in the convoy wouldn’t wait as it was already dark so the Kurdish guide went off with the wheel, hitching a ride on a pick-up going back towards the border.
While they waited she fired questions at him, to which he just shrugged.
‘Okay, if you won’t talk to me, how about we have sex?’
He blushed deeply. He was a virgin.
‘Sorry if I’ve embarrassed you,’ she said, ‘but in this place you’ve got to take what you can when you can because tomorrow …’
She made a faint ‘pkkh’ sound and an exploding gesture with her hands.
He was relieved when they dropped her off in Ar-Raqqah, because she was starting to sap his resolve. ‘Thanks for the ride,’ she said, as she got down. ‘Nice knowing you. Try not to die too soon.’
He watched her melt into the dawn crowd. He had never met a woman like her before – but, then, he hadn’t met many women at all.
The second time was yesterday, right here in Aleppo. She was unrecognizable in a burka and niqab and he wouldn’t have spotted her at all, except that her eyes locked on his – just for a second, but that was enough. Women here kept their eyes averted from men, and fighters especially, for fear of getting hit or arrested, so even that fleeting glance was a surprise. He was at a stall, buying water and cigarettes with two others from his platoon, his AK dangling from its leather strap.
She came towards him, eyes lowered now, and as she passed she brushed him with her elbow. Why? To show that she wasn’t afraid? Was she mad? To be in this quarter of Aleppo, with all that was happening? She should have known he could order her to stop, then take her straight to the commander and certain death. Did she trust him not to? He turned away from his comrades to light a cigarette and watched her. After a hundred metres she glanced round to see if he was looking. He made an excuse to the others and followed her, keeping his distance. After they had gone a couple of hundred metres he realized she was heading too close to where the brothers were billeted. There were few people on the streets and it was unusual for a woman to be walking alone. She stuck out. He speeded up and went past her.
‘You follow,’ he whispered. Keeping a good distance in front, he led her several blocks to a deserted shoe shop and into the back room where they could be alone and not seen. As soon as they were inside he turned on her, furious.
‘You’re crazy. How did you know I wouldn’t arrest you?’ He pointed at his armband. ‘Or worse.’
He could see only her eyes above the niqab but could tell she was grinning.
‘I took a chance. I remembered you were a nice boy. Besides, I didn’t ask you to follow me.’
She unpinned the niqab. Her face was thinner than before, which made her blazing eyes seem all the larger. She peered at him. ‘You look tired, Jamal. Had enough of the killing yet?’
He looked away, his face heating up.
She kept her gaze on him, her expression grim. ‘Is it true about those girls?’
He had already crossed one line and was about to cross another. He nodded. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘Are you part of it?’
‘We’ve been ordered to watch. Everyone has.’
He felt her peering at him, through him, just as before. She could see exactly what he was thinking, knew that he wanted out.
‘Help me get inside. I want to see it for myself.’
‘That’s impossible. There’s no women allowed.’
‘You’re willing to watch those girls die and for no one outside here to know the truth?’
He didn’t answer. She started to take off the burka.
‘What are you doing?’
She grinned. ‘The burka is the journalist’s friend. You can hide all kinds of shit under here.’
From a small goatskin bag she produced the device, no bigger than a packet of cigarettes, with a coil of transparent cable that widened slightly at the end.
‘See this?’ She showed him the end of the cable. ‘There’s a lens in there.’ She held up the body of the camera. ‘It can record up to two hours. Here – take it.’
He stepped back. All videoing of beheadings was forbidden now. It deterred recruits. He could turn her over to Abukhan. She must know that.
But her eyes were insistent. ‘Do this for me and I’ll get you out. There’s a driver with the Red Crescent. He knows a way to the border that avoids all the patrols. Yes or no? It could save your life.’
Or be the end of it, he thought. He shrugged, then nodded. She embraced him. ‘When you get home you’ll be a hero.’
Now there was complete silence except for the wind. None of the men spoke. The girls were all still, except for their trembling. Jamal was ready. He would not flinch, he would not look away, because Emma’s camera was his way out of this hell. All he had to do now was wait, how long he didn’t know, because Abukhan liked to draw out these proceedings and maximize the agony.
Holding the machete in fr
ont of him, Abukhan approached the gathering of men, elders of the community, parents. Two of the platoon who were positioned nearest raised their AKs in their direction. Abukhan approached one with a long grey beard, held out the machete. At first the old man shrank back but the others either side held him and pushed him forward. There was no choice. He took the machete, which shook violently in his grip. Jamal’s heart was pounding so hard he was sure the others would hear it, but he kept his gaze fixed on the old man as he was led to the first of the girls.
Abukhan reached down and pulled roughly at her veil until her head was exposed. The girl’s face was wet with tears, her mouth open as if emitting a silent scream. She looked no more than fifteen. Jamal’s whole body was shaking with a mixture of rage and fear but he tensed himself to focus on what he had to do. The old man seemed to stumble. Abukhan gripped him and at the same time kicked the girl so she sank to the ground, then he held her there under his boot as he signalled to the old man to lift the blade. Jamal closed his eyes as it fell.
9
09.00
Home Office, Marsham Street, Westminster
Sarah Garvey sat at her desk, eking out her last few hours in the job she loved. She was exhausted. After leaving her Surrey constituency, where she had scraped back in with a reduced majority, but a majority nonetheless, and having thanked her team for all their efforts, she had sped back to Whitehall with a blue-light escort to deal with the last pressing matters of state.
She had hoped the big freeze that had settled over the country would dampen the unrest. Not a bit of it. She glanced down the long list of level-four incidents, the ones deemed grave enough for the home secretary to be briefed on: twenty-eight in just one night. There had been a time when just one level-four had prompted a COBRA meeting. Not any more. She tossed the dossier back into the in-tray and smiled grimly. Good luck with that, Vernon Rolt.
Much more interesting to her was the MI5 report on the latest wave of British Muslims to have returned from Syria and Iraq, who were now incarcerated in various jails around the country. As far as most of the press and many of her colleagues were concerned, the best thing for them was to bang them up and throw away the key. She wasn’t so sure. Some of those men had come home with a very different view of jihad; several had potentially good intelligence – if they could be debriefed before it went stale. She weighed the report in her hand. It wasn’t supposed to leave the office. She dropped it into her bag.
Juliet, her PA, put her head round the door. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Yes, fuck off!’ She pulled off her glasses and rubbed her face. She’d noticed lately that it was taking longer to spring back into position. She sighed. ‘Sorry.’
Juliet was well used to her boss’s outbursts, which were usually rapidly followed by an apology. ‘I completely understand, ma’am. We’re all gutted.’
‘Not as gutted as I am, I assure you. Just leave me in peace for a bit, while I clear up this last bit of sick.’
‘The MI5 DG is on his way over.’
‘To pay his last respects, I assume.’ She pulled open a drawer and found a mirror. ‘Yup, rigor mortis has set in.’
Her previously dark brown hair had greyed faster in the last two months than even she had thought possible. That’s all I’ve got to show for it, she thought. Witch hair and bags under my eyes the size of bloody holdalls.
‘And Henry wants to pop in.’
Garvey growled. He was her insubordinate but annoyingly capable intern, a constant thorn in her side. ‘Well, tell him he can definitely fuck off.’
Juliet quietly closed the door.
As soon as she had heard that Rolt was being parachuted into a safe seat, she’d known she was for the chop. He had made it a condition of his standing for Parliament that if he got in he’d have her job, not that the prime minister had had the guts to warn her. He had left the Westminster rumour mill to do it for him. The irony was that, without Rolt on board, they would now have been in opposition. Part of her would actually have preferred that: she hated compromise. In fact, it was a wonder she had got this far – she was so stubborn. Of course, if she were a man she’d have been called ‘determined’. When she confronted him about it, the PM was, as always, grovellingly profuse in his apologies. Watching him squirm was only minor compensation.
‘You know, Sarah, that I’ve always held you in the highest regard,’ he had told her, to which she couldn’t resist answering, ‘And you know, Geoff, that I’ve always found you much too slippery to hold at all.’
He had laughed politely, as he always did at her jibes, no matter how accurate they were. Laughter was his ‘iron dome’, the protective shield with which he deflected many an incoming barb. She knew that underneath the glibness he respected her honesty, even if he couldn’t begin to match it.
‘Compromise is the lubricant of government,’ he liked to remind everyone around him, as if this was justification for weakness and vacillation.
Garvey eyed the whisky decanter, then the clock, then the decanter again. Nine forty-five: too early? She took a deep breath and turned back to the papers on her desk, but they were a blur. She considered her legacy. In the four years she had been in this chair, the country had nearly torn itself apart, polarized by Islamist terror and extreme-right-wing reprisals. And now the man who some believed had fanned the flames of the conflagration was about to take her place. She laughed to herself. The hardest part of the job? Realizing how little real power came with it.
Her gaze swerved back to the decanter. Maybe … But then came a familiar soft knock on the door. She sighed. ‘All right, Henry, if you must.’
He entered, glided across the room, slid into the chair on her left and flipped open his iPad. He seemed especially animated that morning and she knew why. ‘You’re looking very smart today. Is that a new suit?’
He flushed. She always found something to needle him about.
‘So what’s the big occasion?’ She gazed at him questioningly. They had never bonded. She had sensed quite early on that he didn’t like women much, and she wasn’t too keen on spoiled rich boys, gay or straight. He had made no secret of the fact that he was looking forward to having a man about the office.
‘You’ve seen the footage?’
‘What footage?’
He pursed his lips. ‘I emailed you the link.’
She hadn’t seen any footage. She had a habit of deleting Henry’s numerous emails unopened. His lack of a social life meant he was horribly well up on the minutiae of events.
He prodded and swiped the iPad, waiting for it to boot up. ‘I must warn you, it’s pretty hardcore.’
She snorted. Patronizing little shit.
Being home secretary had given her brass balls. Nothing fazed her now. He should have known better but he was a recent arrival, foisted on her by Number Ten as a favour to his father, a party donor. His sense of entitlement infuriated her, but not as much as his apparently inexhaustible appetite for hard work, which made it harder for her to persecute him.
‘I have to say, I’ve never seen anything like this in all my—’
She cut him off. ‘In all your nine months in Whitehall.’ It was probably longer but not by much. ‘Well, let’s get on with it. Where are we, exactly?’
‘Chapeltown. It’s in Leeds.’
‘Ah, the Ripper’s old stamping ground.’
Henry frowned. ‘I thought that was Whitechapel.’
‘The Yorkshire Ripper.’
The footage was shot from several storeys up. A shaven-headed white man, heavily tattooed and wearing only a T-shirt and underpants, was being manhandled by a group of men with dark hair and long robes, chanting.
‘What are they saying?’
‘There’s a lot of “Allahu Akhbar” and “Death to the kuffar”, and the occasional “Kill the cunt” for a little local colour.’
‘And do they?’
‘What?’
‘Kill him?’
Henry twisted his mouth sl
ightly, as if chewing something unpleasant. ‘He’s in ICU at Leeds Infirmary. He’s not expected to live. Practically the whole of Yorkshire’s in lockdown in anticipation.’
‘And why am I looking at this?’
‘I thought you’d like to issue a condemnation. As part of your valedictory message …’
There was something loathsome about his righteous disapproval that irritated her profoundly, even when they weren’t in disagreement. If the last months of public disorder had taught her anything, it was that the moral high ground became harder to defend as it shrank under them. He waited for the video to boot up, then passed it across.
‘What provoked it?’
‘He was accused of firebombing a madrasah, but there’s no hard evidence.’
Fuck it. She snapped the iPad shut and pushed it back at him. ‘Give it to your new boss as a welcome gift. I’m sure it’s much more up his street. In fact, tell him it’s my leaving present to him, thanking him for all he’s done to make this country such a shit place to be anything but a white male … Never mind.’ She felt her pulse throbbing again in her temple. The consultant had given her repeated warnings about her blood pressure and she had forgotten to pick up her beta-blockers. She breathed out heavily and leaned back in her chair. ‘Anything else?’
‘Another letter from your friend Adila.’ He held it in the air between thumb and forefinger as if it was a soiled nappy. His weary tone made her want to reach across and poke his eyes out. She snatched it from him. It had been opened – no doubt he had already digested its contents.
Dear Right Honourable Member Ms Garvey.
It was probably the eighth or ninth communication she had received from her. There was something poignantly charming about an actual letter, on paper, written by a teenager in the twenty-first century. In the sea of misery that was currently her working life, Adila’s thoughtful letters were a small but welcome ray of light.
Please may I say that this is a sad day for me knowing that you are no longer to be our home secretary but I will hope that you may continue to show us the same wonderful attention that you have as our MP.
