Children of War

by Martin Walker

  ‘Who’s we?’ the Brigadier snapped.

  ‘Our American ally,’ said Bruno, closing the phone. Nancy grinned at him as she sent the two photos.

  *

  Bruno took his rifle from the locked box in his Land Rover and left the vehicle at the last bend in the single-track road before Le Pavillon came into view, perhaps five hundred metres away. He approached the jeep and then called Gaston to tell him, and heard there was still no sign of the black Toyota.

  ‘Le Pavillon isn’t easy for strangers to find,’ Bruno said. ‘We are now on foot. Marcel and Raymond will set an ambush from the treeline, as close as we can get to you. They’ll be to your east. I know the country so I’ll be on open ground to your south, trying to get them in a crossfire.’

  ‘Got it. I’ll call you and them when I see the Toyota. Make sure your phone’s on vibrate.’

  Bruno heard an echo of Gaston’s voice from the small radio clipped to Marcel’s collar. The security men had their own communications link.

  ‘Are you OK with the plan?’ he asked Marcel.

  Marcel nodded. ‘The Brigadier said rules of engagement are open, just save the kid and leave at least one wounded prisoner to interrogate. We’d better let them out of their vehicle first. We don’t want to leave one of them inside with the boy.’

  ‘The driver stayed inside at the café, so maybe they’ll leave him with the car.’

  ‘If so, I’ll take him out first, then immobilize the vehicle.’

  ‘What if they have run-flat tyres?’

  ‘This is a twelve point seven calibre,’ he said, patting his heavy rifle. ‘It’ll blow the wheel hubs off.’

  A crackle from Marcel’s radio told them the Toyota was in sight, advancing slowly from the west.

  ‘Showtime,’ said Marcel, and trotted along the treeline, Raymond following.

  ‘So I come with you?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘I’d prefer you to stay in the Land Rover. We might need to give chase and it’s the best cross-country vehicle. If you have time when you’re chasing, pick me up.’

  She nodded and he took the PAMAS handgun she held out him, made sure the safety was on and stuck it into the belly pocket of his tracksuit. Rifle in hand he headed, crouching, onto the plateau. He picked up some dirt from the ground as he trotted, spat onto it and rubbed it into his cheeks and brow. He kept moving north towards Le Pavillon and west toward the Toyota. It was still out of sight, visible only to Gaston in the pigeon tower.

  The plateau’s ground was uneven. There were folds and small hillocks and he headed toward the furthest north of these and ducked behind it. He was perhaps two hundred metres from Le Pavillon when his phone vibrated. It was Gaston to say he had Bruno in view. The Toyota was heading at crawling pace over the rough ground toward Le Pavillon and was no more than a hundred yards to Bruno’s ten o’clock. Gaston added that Marcel had the Toyota in his sights.

  ‘Keep this line open.’ Bruno said, and peered carefully around the side of the hillock.

  ‘It’s stopped,’ Gaston said.

  ‘I see it,’ Bruno said. Apparently confident that it had not been spotted, the Toyota began moving again slowly. There was a driver and one man in the front, another man in the rear, who suddenly opened his door and stood, feet still inside the car, his right arm wrapped around the bars of the luggage rack, his gun pointing at Le Pavillon.

  Suddenly everything happened at once. The Toyota revved its engine and surged forward, stopping just to one side of the arch that formed the entry. The passenger door opened and a man jumped out. Looking bulky, as though wearing a rucksack under his jacket, he sprayed bullets from his assault gun at Le Pavillon as he ran. The sniper rifle crashed and the windows of the Toyota shattered The man leaning out of the Toyota began firing at the pigeon tower and Bruno sighted carefully and fired once, then a second time, and saw him slump.

  The sniper fired again and the Toyota sagged, a front wheel collapsing. Gaston was firing from the pigeon tower and Bruno switched his aim to the bulky man who was running toward the courtyard. He fired twice without success and then the man jerked and spun at Bruno’s third shot. But he limped on and ducked inside the arch, careless of the gunfire.

  The gate seemed to disintegrate as a large explosion took place and Le Pavillon disappeared in an eruption of flame and black smoke.

  A suicide bomber, Bruno realized, cursing. He should have thought of that. He began running toward the Toyota, shouting into his phone for Gaston as he ran. There was no reply. He pulled the handgun from his belly pocket as he reached the Toyota, partly sheltered from the blast by the stone wall around the building but with loose stones strewn across its roof and hood.

  Carefully, he peered under the car, the gap narrowed because the sniper had destroyed one of the front wheels. The man he had shot was slumped on the earth beside the Toyota, not moving and no weapon in his hands. The driver had been blown off his seat by the heavy sniper’s bullet and his body was crumpled in the foot well of the passenger side. There was not much left of his head and the whole interior of the Toyota seemed to have been sprayed with blood. He could hear Pierre screaming from inside the vehicle.

  Bruno opened the rear door, scooped out Pierre from where he lay on the floor behind the front seats. Quickly he examined his limbs and Pierre stopped his shrieking and began sucking in great gulps of air that turned into sobs. None of the blood on the child seemed to be his own. Bruno held him tight against his chest, trying to murmur words of comfort, and suddenly Nancy was there with the Land Rover. He handed the child to her and told her to take the boy back to the jeep and then come back.

  He checked the man sprawled half in, half out of the Toyota. He’d been hit twice in the shoulder but was still alive. His gun was on the ground out of reach, a large stone on top of the breech. It was too heavy for Bruno to move, so he thought the wounded man would be unlikely to free it.

  Bruno tried Gaston again but still got no reply. The smoke was clearing and the pigeon tower’s roof and the window where Gaston had been on watch had both gone. He crept into the courtyard and saw complete devastation. The front wall and roof of Le Pavillon had disappeared and the courtyard was a mass of stones and roof tiles. What was left of the house was burning fiercely. A crater close to where the main door had been was all that remained of the suicide bomber.

  Bruno half-ran, half-jumped across to the pigeon tower, picking his way between the loose stones that covered the steps. He clambered up to where Gaston had been. Gaston was slumped below the window, unconscious, with blood on his face and his limbs slack. But he had a pulse. Bruno slung him over his shoulder and carried him down to the courtyard, staggering under the weight and the obstacle course beneath his feet, and out to the Toyota. Nancy was coming back in the Land Rover, followed by the jeep with the driver and the other two security men aboard.

  They loaded Gaston into the back seat of the Land Rover and the wounded terrorist into the rear.

  ‘The kid can go on your lap in the front seat,’ Nancy told Bruno. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Just one moment,’ he said, and turned to Marcel. ‘We’ll take them to the medical centre in St Denis. Can you stay here, see if there’s any trace of Robert and report in to the Brigadier? And ask him to tell the pompiers to hold off until we can clear away the Toyota and the weapons.’

  Marcel nodded dully, his eyes on Gaston in the back seat.

  ‘If only I’d thought, I could have stopped that bloody Toyota long before it got close enough …’

  ‘Then we’d have lost the kid,’ Nancy said. ‘Pull yourself together, man, we’ve got to get your guy to a doctor.’

  Pierre shocked and silent in his arms, Bruno jumped in beside her as she let in the clutch and bounced away over the rough ground to the track. A thick plume of dark smoke was rising and drifting slowly to the east, visible for miles. Bruno called Yveline to see if she could spare any Gendarmes to keep curious locals from driving up to see the source of the explosion and the smoke.
Then he called Karim to say Pierre was safe.

  He was trying to call the medical centre to warn them he was bringing two gunshot wounds when Nancy said, ‘Don’t.’

  Bruno glanced at her in surprise.

  ‘Brigadier’s orders. We’re taking them to the château. The French army have a better-equipped medical team there, with more experience of gunshot wounds. And it’s secure.’

  Bruno closed his phone with a sigh. ‘He can’t keep an explosion like that secret. If only I’d thought …’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said Nancy. ‘I didn’t think of a suicide bomber either. And the little boy is fine.’

  Bruno looked down at the child now sleeping in his arms. As soon as they’d delivered the wounded men to the medical team at the château he would drive Pierre home to his parents. Perhaps he’d better try to clean him up first.

  As Nancy turned into the lane that led to the château, Bruno’s phone rang. It was Yveline. The white Peugeot had been spotted at the Intermarché car park. The driver was under arrest and had been taken to the Gendarmerie. In the car was a receipt from a filling station just outside Cahors for a full tank of petrol and an extra five litres plus a plastic can. He’d paid cash but the car’s carte grise showed it was registered to the welfare department of the Toulouse mosque.

  16

  The story broke the next day, in a wire report from Agence France-Presse in Kabul. Quoting NATO sources, it said simply that in a dramatic coup for French intelligence, the expert terrorist bomb-maker known as the Engineer had been found by French troops in Afghanistan in the course of a special operation and was now in French custody.

  This was followed within minutes by Associated Press, datelined Washington, which said that U.S. officials were liaising with the French authorities over his fate. Reuters from London, in a story titled ‘The most wanted man in the world’, then reported that the Engineer had been secretly smuggled out of Afghanistan in a French military plane and was now being held in an unknown location in France.

  Within minutes, United Press International was quoting senators and congressmen in Washington demanding that the Engineer be delivered to American custody. One senator called him ‘a mass murderer of American boys’. Then Deutsche Presse-Agentur filed a story from Berlin that a European arrest warrant would be sent to the French government, asserting that the Engineer had been responsible for the deaths of at least four German soldiers, and requiring him to stand trial in Germany.

  Soon the official spokesmen and politicians were all over the TV screens, and the press secretary of the European Union’s commissioner for external relations launched a new angle. In response to a question from a reporter from Holland’s De Telegraaf, he agreed that it would be against European law for any suspect to be handed over to American jurisdiction if there were any prospect of the death penalty.

  The newspaper’s headline was: ‘Europe to Washington: Thou Shalt Not Kill’. Asked to comment, the official spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department retorted, ‘In that case, we’ll settle for life in Guantanamo.’

  Bruno followed the gathering media storm closely. A regional paper, Le Républicain Lorrain, close to the German frontier, gave the next new lead. They ran it as an exclusive on their website edition, not waiting for the next day’s newspaper. They quoted a returning French soldier that an Afghan in French uniform had been huddled, drugged and weeping, aboard his plane from Dushanbe. The soldier complained that he had lost part of his leave since their flight had unexpectedly landed at Évreux for unspecified security reasons. There had then been a special flight to Bordeaux for the Afghan.

  Bruno decided not to answer several calls from Philippe Delaron, the local correspondent for Sud Ouest. Philippe was no fool. He knew that something unusual was under way at the château. Furniture and food had been delivered, military helicopters were coming and going and soldiers were guarding the gates. He also knew that Bruno had been viciously attacked at the collège in St Denis and would probably soon learn that the Muslim teacher, Momu, had taken a sudden leave of absence and disappeared, along with his Muslim wife. And Gendarmes had turned Philippe away when he’d tried take a picture of the ruins of Le Pavillon and get more details of the mysterious propane gas explosion which had supposedly caused it.

  ‘I don’t think we have long, sir, before the media knows that the Engineer is here and that he has something to do with Momu,’ Bruno said.

  Bruno and Nancy were in the Brigadier’s office, sipping some of their host’s Bowmore malt whisky. They were looking in something close to disbelief over the transcripts of that day’s session with Sami. He had identified over sixty photographs, remembered precisely where and when he had seen them and how often.

  When Nancy brought out a map and asked him how he had got from the Toulouse mosque to Afghanistan without a passport, Sami had recounted his journey step by step, starting with a long car ride to Germany, a charter flight full of Turkish families going back to Ankara and another charter flight to Abu Dhabi. Finally a rusty merchant ship, flying Liberian colours, had taken him and his companions to the Pakistani port of Karachi. He remembered addresses, names of the couriers who had met his Toulouse group and handed them on to the next stage. He was proving to be an extraordinary source, and he took obvious pride in pleasing Nancy in being able to answer her questions.

  ‘I’d like to check these reports about his skills at electronics,’ Nancy said. ‘Can we learn how he turns cellphones into detonators? We can get it on video, send it to your guys in Paris and mine in Washington. I’d like to know if he was building these IEDs from scratch or just assembling them to order.’

  Bruno made a note. Florence’s computer club had a box full of broken electronics awaiting repair. One of the Brigadier’s staff was drawing up a chronology of Sami’s Afghan sojourn. His memory was uncanny. He remembered names, dates, times and places and cheerfully recounted them all. He rattled off radio frequencies and mobile phone numbers for remotely controlled bombs, and remembered the addresses on the packaging in which they had arrived. He recalled email addresses and credit card numbers he had heard being used. He seemed to have forgotten nothing he had seen or heard.

  ‘We knew this media fuss would happen,’ replied the Brigadier calmly. ‘That’s why we are here in the château, sealed off and guarded. The media may speculate but all inquiries must be made to the Interior Ministry in Paris.’

  ‘The White House press corps won’t swallow that,’ Nancy retorted.

  The Brigadier looked at her patiently. ‘Is not our work here of considerable importance?’

  ‘You know it is,’ she replied. ‘This is the best intelligence out of Afghanistan I’ve ever seen. We’ve got teams back at Fort Meade correlating Sami’s names and dates to all the SIGINT in the databases. We’re getting voice prints, cellphone numbers, emails, connecting all manner of dots. It’s a gold mine.’

  ‘So our priority is to continue our work and not permit the media to distract us. Anybody who matters in Washington and Paris knows the value of what we are gleaning here. In the meantime our press officials will give full but empty answers to the media hordes; that is what they are paid to do.’

  ‘Washington doesn’t quite work like that.’

  ‘In that case, my dear Nancy, you have my profound sympathies. Paris, thank heavens, does work like that.’

  *

  Bruno knew that St Denis worked in a different way altogether, but even he was startled by the text message he received later that day from Gilles at Paris Match. He went straight to the Brigadier to warn him that the storm was about to break over their heads.

  ‘Fabiola told me full story about Sami, Pavillon, chateau,’ Gilles had texted. ‘She insists Sami innocent victim and unfit to stand trial. On my way to St Denis. Will you call me or do I run the story?’

  ‘I assume he’s going to run the story anyway whether you call him or not,’ said the Brigadier, once Nancy had been summoned to join them.

  ‘Probably,�
�� said Bruno. ‘I can try asking him to hold off, but Fabiola would just go to Philippe Delaron at Sud Ouest. And remember, Sami is officially her patient. I’m surprised she hasn’t turned up already, demanding to see him.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a way we can make this work for us,’ Nancy interjected. ‘We tell the truth. Sami is autistic, long since declared legally unfit to take care of himself. These jihadis viciously used this poor, pathetic boy, even whipped him to build bombs. Let’s spin this against the bastards.’

  Bruno felt instantly that Nancy was right. The strategic objective was not simply to penetrate al-Qaeda, and not even to break open the network of European jihadis that funnelled young Muslims to the Taliban. These were simply tactical goals that did not address the fundamental issue of politics, religion and public opinion. The crucial task was to force a separation between the jihadists and the millions of peaceful Muslims all across Europe, by exposing their ruthless and cynical treatment of someone like Sami.

  ‘It’s a question of how we build the narrative. If we spin this right, we can make Sami into a hero,’ Nancy went on.

  ‘If we are going to build this story around Sami, it might help to offer some media access,’ Bruno said. ‘I’m thinking of photos of Sami playing with Balzac, some photos of the whipping scars on his back. Maybe Paris Match is the best vehicle for it.’

  ‘If we offer them an exclusive, we can keep some control of the story,’ the Brigadier said, thoughtfully.

  *

  The other two members of the medical tribunal arrived later that day. Under French tradition, a medical tribunal that seeks to establish the mental competence of someone charged with a serious crime consists of a psychologist, a psychoanalyst and a practising psychiatrist. Pascal Deutz, deputy head of the prison psychiatric service, fulfilled the last of the three roles. The psychologist was Bernard Weill, an eminent professor from Paris who had also taught in London and Chicago. In his sixties, Weill had a fringe of bushy white hair above his ears and the back of his neck, but his scalp was bald and suntanned. Bruno was surprised that someone whose life was spent probing the unconscious minds of unhappy people could look so cheerful. Weill’s dark eyes twinkled and his round face broke into frequent smiles. Bruno liked him at once.