She needed to speak to him. Herself, she might be the weakest link. Among the heat and sweat and in the motion of the train, Zeinab shivered. She pressed the keys.
Sleeping, but a phone ringing. Still clinging to the dream but its focus slipping.
Norm Clarke shouting, ‘Check the fucking tyre. Front fucking tyre. New tyre. Check it. Fucking puncture. A puncture, not what that fucking half-eyed cripple says.’
Bawling loud enough to push his voice over the volume of the chain-saw and the motion of it blowing aside the hair above his privates, and his eyes aware of the fine drill bit inserted in the head of the power unit. A moment of hesitation . . . saw that, and the blade wavered and the drill was pulled a yard back.
‘Go check the fucking tyre . . . okay, not new, retread, check it. The blind bastard, could he change a tyre in half an hour? All I fucking do for you, and you treat me . . .’
Would have been the fury in his voice that pulled them back. The cough of the saw as it was switched off, and the whine dying, and soft voices, and someone sent to look at his van. His mum – the real mum who did not figure in the life of Phil Williams or Norm Clarke – used to say that it was always sensible to store something for a rainy day. Torrential rain, flooded roads, rivers rising, that sort of day, and there had been a puncture and he’d not mentioned it because it was only a nail gone through and there was a chap he did drops-offs for who ran a used tyre market, and they’d put a new one on, had not seemed a big deal, and it was just enough for a drink, or three, that he’d paid for the tyre. If the saw or the drill had touched him he would have been yelling the phone numbers of SC&O10. They stood back from him. He felt the cold on his body. Cigarettes were lit. Bazzer must have lined up something to say but he was told to shut his mouth. If they were not happy with the tyre then they might take off his testicles and might drill through an eyeball, but most likely they’d just throttle him with a rope or beat his skull in with a bar, then wrap him in the plastic and pick up a couple of decent spades. They’d drive out to Savernake, the forest, fifteen miles away. Pretty much anywhere was good for digging a hole and losing him, and the plastic would keep the smell down and would prevent the foxes digging him up. None of these boys would split on the others: look at the ceiling, mouth a ‘no comment’, keep doing it. Might not be found, not for months, or years, not before a whole lot of rainy days had spoiled his mum’s washing . . . One of their phones was ringing . . . Yes, his van had a new retread tyre, left side, front, passenger.
And the phone kept ringing . . . No one said, not one of them, that they were sorry. The ropes were untied, his hands needed rubbing to restore circulation. He picked up his clothing, dressed without help, shaking, trembling, would take days to overcome the trauma . . . managed it. Lost it . . .
The same room of the same club. Wearing a wire, and not going to be searched, and the loot was being divided for different markets and the cash was being heaped in separate piles for the share-out. The heavy team had come in, bashing down doors, bringing firearms. No handcuffs for Norm Clarke but a warm congratulation. The last word had been from Bazzer, before they’d been led to the wagons.
‘I told you, you didn’t listen. My nose can see a cop.’
His sleep was broken, his dream over.
Not Phil Williams and not Norm Clarke, but Andy Knight – who might have made a mistake already and might not, but who would make a mistake, as clear as day follows night, and had twice evaded the penalty for a mistake. Reached for it while it pealed, lifted it and flicked the button.
‘Andy?’
‘Me, hi.’
‘You good?’
‘Better for hearing you – was dreaming, a horrible dream, won’t bore you. Thanks for waking me. Really brilliant to hear you. Missing you, Zed. Where are you?’
‘Oh, you know, just, just . . . Just that I wanted to hear your voice.’
A few words, nothing special, and the call ended. He understood loneliness, thought she was learning it – and thought about mistakes and where they’d lead. The first light of day came through the window, rose over the roofs and the chimneys.
Chapter 8
‘Say it again . . . Don’t recollect the name.’
Andy Knight knew the sergeant, but the sergeant did not know him. He had come off a slow, stopping train running down the coast of the Exe estuary – the station served the Commando Training Centre. Pegs had rung him, suggested that he might do a half-day there on his way to the ferry, and that she’d fix the welcome party. There would not have been much trading in the deal: someone would brief him on the ‘weapon of choice’ but his cover name would apply and what he did and who he worked for was off limits. He had left his car farther down the line, a couple of stations back, so the registration would not be listed at the barracks.
‘I was here, but it’s not important.’
‘I believe you, but reluctantly. I was told you were one of us and needed a refresher. Don’t recall the name we’ve been given . . . also went on the website, looked up the name. Doesn’t tally.’
‘Life’s rich tapestry, moved on.’
‘Which tells me things I needn’t know. Right, let’s go to work.’
The sergeant, as Andy Knight remembered him, was rarely amused, but managed a dry grin, raised an eyebrow. Who he had with him would likely tease him most of the day. He thought little had changed. The same buildings, some newly painted and some looked tired, and the same mess-rooms and the same cramped parade ground where he had not been the best, nor the worst. He assumed that a mass of the new intake were away out on the moor or up on the common, on exercise or doing ball-crunching cross-country running or were out on ‘stealth and survival’. The place had a strange quiet to it.
A quiet and a familiarity, and Andy Knight felt a homecoming.
It was said of the Marine recruits who were shipped in here – raw eighteen- and nineteeen- and twenty-year-olds – that most came from car-crash backgrounds, and domestic circumstances described as ‘difficult’, and few had ever before been confronted with ‘standards’ to be reached. The barracks – some of it modern and some of it out of date – became a home for so many. Gave them a sense of family: the first time. He disliked thinking about his previous life, before becoming a Level One, reckoned it an indulgence that endangered him, tried to erase memories, attitudes, from his thoughts. Reflected briefly that his own childhood had not been a motor vehicle accident, that he had been brought up in a distant and dignified and gently loving atmosphere, and they had all been at the front gate of a semi-detached property to wave him off when the taxi had driven him away to the station. What was true was the feeling of belonging, had come at Lympstone. This same sergeant had lectured them, first day or second: ‘It’s more than just a green beret, it’s a state of mind’, and: ‘First to understand, first to adapt and respond, and first to overcome’. They had taught him those aims, drummed into him the need to be inquisitive and adventurous, and that being ‘close to, near to, success, is inadequate’. He had loved it, might have been made for him. When he had left, he had gone into one of the Commandos, had been thought well of, had been a standout for the speciality tasking of a marksman, a sniper, and was thinking with only minimal apprehension of a deployment in the dog-days of the Afghan commitment.
The sergeant walking briskly beside him might not now have the fitness required for the 30-mile trek. Might not be able to stand at the bar in his Mess all night, and down them and walk in a straight line back to his billet, but was the man – Andy would have said – that you would most want watching your back when on patrol in the maize fields of Helmand, or where he was going. A man who would protect you, no fuss and no drama, in any darkened alley, round any bad corner. No one would be at his back in the alleyway with no lighting, and no one would be watching for him round every bad corner. Somewhere, far down the road and sitting on a radio would be some protection but unlikely to be able to preserve his life if he cracked the mould, made the mistake. They came to a do
orway, paused at it. There was an old catchphrase that the Marines’ sergeants used to trot out to the kids with ‘crusader’ tendencies, looking to make a name for themselves in a fire-fight: ‘heroes make poor leaders’. He was no hero, neither had Norm Clarke been, and the title did not apply to Phil Williams, nor could he have said that what he had done, where he had been, had changed the situation of the world around him, nor what he would do where he was going. He’d walked reasonably well but the sergeant – gimlet-eyed in the old days and probably still blessed – would have noted the disability, seen the almost, not quite, hidden limp.
‘Where I’m to drop you off.’
‘Thanks.
‘They’ll ring me when they’re ready to chuck you out.’
‘One thing, can I ask one thing?’
‘Ask, I’ll try.’
Andy did, said what he wanted before leaving them. Funny old thing to ask for. Nobody now watched his back but then he had left the family.
Zeinab stepped off the train, trailed her bag. She walked at a good pace down the length of the platform, across the concourse, had seen the signs for the escalators to the Underground. The boys, all of whom had known Dewsbury, would have walked those steps . . . She had been ten at school and the day barely started, then older kids talking, hushed, fearfully, of explosions in London. Later, at home, her parents had watched the big television, and the boys had been referred to as ‘idiots, lunatics, fools’ but she had thought that was for her to hear and did not know what had passed for real inside their minds . . . Did they pause at the top of the steps? Did they hug, kiss, shrug under the weight of the rucksacks, mouth a prayer? Or did they just keep walking towards the Underground? It was likely that they had walked past her home, on the same pavement with the cracks and the weeds at her front gate, on their way to the Merkazi . . . Teenagers, five years younger than she was now, who had gone to Syria and had no known graves . . . and they had been her cousins. They were owed her loyalty, and her stomach ached from hunger, and she glanced at her watch, and reckoned she had the time, and went to a fast-food counter.
Humiliated, could not immediately pay for it. Had not enough money in her purse to buy the two buns she had chosen and the latte, and her teeth ground in anger. Cash she had been given was in her passport, zipped securely in her bag. People behind were pushing her, trying to buy and still catch their train. Confused and panic fuelling embarassment. She was groping in the pockets of her jeans and finding screwed-up paper handkerchiefs, and her ticket, and there was £3.78 in her purse and she needed £7.08, and she heard behind her a man’s voice, accent smart and southern and English: Oh, for fuck’s sake . . . Then . . . Take it out of this, please. A note was on the counter, pushed towards the girl. Zeinab flushed. The till was rung, the coffee was capped, the buns were bagged. Embarassment soared. She was a nuisance, in the way, and the inconvenience could be bought by the man for £7.08, and he was ordering a croissant and a regular cappuccino. Her package was in front of her, pushed towards her, she stammered gratitude but was ignored . . . she flared.
Anger soared. The feeling was sharp as a nail. She was an obstruction, ethnic, easy to buy out, patronised. It was not about a belief in the caliphate, and not about the Gardens of Paradise. She was third-Class or fourth. A dreary little creature who stood in a queue and did not have enough to pay for what she wanted. She snatched up her bag, turned on her heel and strode away. The two buns and the coffee left behind. She heard it clearly: Stroppy little cow, that’s thanks for you. And kept walking, had now regained the route of the boys who had all known Dewsbury, and her street.
Fury engulfed her. She had been told what station she was to head for, and by what line. She wondered how long each of the three of them who had taken a train had waited for the lights to spear out of the tunnel and the clanking carriages come to a halt. They would have had anger, fury, and the fourth – later – would have found his train cancelled and gone up into the fresh summer air and have looked for a crowded bus at that rush-hour time, and she thought him the bravest of all of them . . . She wondered where Andy Knight was, bit her lip, tried to slide him out of her thoughts. She stood on the packed train and it rocked on uneven tracks . . . She would fight them; uttered a single silent prayer that she would have the chance . . . somewhere on this stretch of tunnel one of them had pressed a button, had gone to his God, was at peace. She was not.
Karym’s phone went. His brother.
The project was quiet. The few with outside work were gone, some women had left with their shopping bags to spend the money filtered to them through the tentacles of La Castellane’s nightly trading – guarding money and weapons and hashish, getting a percentage of the profits from dealing and enforcing which paid well, watching the perimeter of the project which was rewarded less generously. Late morning and a brittle sunshine and the wind scouring the ground and bending the few surviving trees in what had once been proud landscaping. The police and the forensic technicians had pulled out, and the burned car had been hoisted on to a flat-bed and taken away. The smell still hung close to where the fire had been, but that was from the tyres, not the burning flesh. School would soon be finished and the young kids would spill back into the project, and the older ones who still bothered to attend the big lycée down the road towards the city. Karym was owed some respect because of the blood-line to his brother: had his brother not owned his stairwell business then Karym, with his weakened arm, would have been a pitiful creature, hounded and bullied. As long as his brother lived, he had protection . . . He would talk to him again, to Hamid, about his wish for them to go together into the hills, where the scrub was dense, and place some bottles and some cans on a rock, and have an AK-47 with two filled magazines, and fire them at Battle Sight Zero range, close enough for him to hit and feel the sucking of pride in his chest, and have his ears ring with the sound of it. He would not beg, would request, and would hope . . . he had no girl or the chance of one, had no rifle or the opportunity to fire one. He would ask his brother.
He answered. Karym was told what his brother wanted. He agreed, of course.
Karym did not ask about a session in the mountains, with the rifle: another occasion. He was told at what time that afternoon he should do the run. It was part of what was regular in Karym’s life. Every four or five days, he took the satchel from his brother and rode on his small Peugeot scooter out of the project and along the back roads, not the main highway, to St Exupéry, to a Credit Union branch. He would bank the cash, receive a chit, lodge it, and within a few hours his brother would have transferred it electronically out of that branch and away into the cyber world of lost money. The cash was usually measured in tens of thousands of euros. Sometimes he went alone and sometimes he would have an escort of kids, his age, riding close to him on their scooters . . . about the only time that Karym felt important. It was said that stocks were low in the project, that a new shipment was coming that afternoon. The events of the previous evening were gone from his thoughts, and the smells, and very soon – within hours – the place would await the next bout of theatre, to which the community was addicted.
He wandered and the wind was on his face . . . He saw her. She walked heavily. She carried a shopping bag. He could not see her face because of the shadows thrown by the sunlight. He thought it likely that his brother, through an intermediary – an imam or a school teacher or a social worker – would send her money. Her son’s funeral would be the next day and there would be a good attendance from the project, and some flowers. Karym did not think that she would have seen the brilliance of the flames from the torched car or that the smell would have reached her windows. It was the way of the place, and she would accept it . . . A nice morning, and little in his life changed and he did not wish for anything to alter that. He went to buy a cake. There was one area of change that bothered him, was unfamiliar. His brother had been across the city, had ridden his Ducati Monster down to the centre of Marseille and through it and out on the far side; had gone to a meeti
ng with a man of prominence, otherwise would not have bothered, and Karym did not know why. He was unsettled when he did not know the immediate future, even on a pleasant morning.
‘Can a woman fire it, shoot with it easily?’ Andy Knight’s question.
‘No problem – should there be?’ A corporal’s answer.
‘The shape of it, the recoil, whatever?’
‘A woman can shoot with it, period.’
He was off the main armoury. He had been told that most of the weapons that had been captured on active service had now been shipped out, but the guys who ran the place had managed to squirrel away some prize parts of the original collection, and reasons had been given that satisfied those above, enough to square a circle. At his feet were half a dozen AK-47s from Serb factories and Iraqi-made, an Egyptian version, one from a Chinese factory, and what was laughed at as a museum piece, five decades old from a Soviet era production line and picked up in prime working order from an Afghan fire-fight. He was alone with the corporal, and a Do Not Disturb note was pinned to the outer door. The corporal, long past his retirement date and it would have required a flame-thrower to shift him from this cramped area, was a veteran of most of the recent conflicts where the UK had pitched up.
‘I thought I needed to know.’
‘Look at the Kurd battles, Mosul and Raqqa. There were women enough on the front parapets, and most had crap AKs from Iraqi stocks, or Syrian, and they were efficient, brave . . . some say they are harder.’
‘Explain.’
‘What sort of stereotype do you want? All of them . . . ‘‘deadlier than the male’’, or ‘‘hell hath no fury’’, any more? Go into a safe house at four in the morning and the blokes are likely to be sleeping off the booze or still high on hash, not the women: see the woman, shoot her, what they taught us.’
‘And the AK is a good weapon for a woman?’
Battle Sight Zero Page 20
