by Andy McNab
The heat was already too intense to take the direct route, so I skirted the blaze until I could get a clear view of the front of the house. My bomber jacket, the radio and Harry’s daysack were still where I’d left them, but he was no longer lying on the gravel driveway.
I raised a hand above my eyes, palm outwards, so that I could focus more clearly. One of the big picture windows that looked out over the sundeck had imploded and its shutters hung off their hinges. I reckoned its twin was about to go too.
A few shards of glass still clung to the frame as the fire raged inside. The dove-grey paint blistered on the clapboard. The canvas smouldered on the steamer chairs, and the decking beneath them was starting to crackle. I couldn’t see any sign of the Gucci hurricane lantern.
I moved closer, until the heat on my bare skin let me know that enough was enough, and the charred body I could now see lying beneath the smashed pane confirmed what I’d already begun to suspect. Somehow Harry had managed to drag his broken body onto the deck, sparked up the nickel-plated lantern and launched it through the double glazing like a missile.
I gathered up my bomber and the gear he’d left behind and legged it to the Merc. When the municipal fire brigade turned up, I didn’t want to be here to make them cups of tea.
11
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire
Sunday, 14 June
15.30 hrs
Father Martyn lived in a stone-built cottage on the Welsh border, between Hay-on-Wye and Abergavenny. The front of it was covered with flowery shit and his door was always open to the left-footers in the Regiment, plus one or two others who weren’t fully paid-up members of his club.
Me and God had had a few close calls, but we still weren’t on first-name terms. That didn’t seem to matter to Father Mart. He’d always been part of the Regiment’s furniture, the secret sounding board for people who needed to get stuff off their chest. I’d gone to see him after Snakebite’s death in Baghdad, and I needed to see him again now.
I’d been back from Sweden for more than a month, and I was still having difficulty shifting Harry’s image from the screen inside my head. It wasn’t as if it was the first time I’d seen a corpse, or what fire could do to a man’s skin. I’d witnessed more charred bodies on ops than I could count. Flashbacks were a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, but I didn’t do PTSD. I probably wasn’t smart enough. I just kept seeing the look on Harry’s face when he said there wouldn’t be any more missions.
‘Cut away’ was the advice I’d given him when he’d lost it with Koureh, because cutting away had been my answer to every problem as far back as I could remember. I’d done it after a mate of mine fell off a factory roof when we were playing soldiers on my seventh birthday. Maybe I’d even done it before that, when my stepfather lost it with my mum and she turned up at the breakfast table wearing sun-gigs.
But cutting away didn’t always work.
I told Father Mart as much as I needed him to know about Harry’s death over a brew at his kitchen table.
He had his wise face on beneath the beard. ‘And?’
‘And I guess I feel responsible in some way. I’m not sure he would have come if I hadn’t persuaded him …’
‘Trevor and Harold were also close, weren’t they?’
I nodded.
‘Does Trevor feel the same?’
I hesitated for a moment. ‘Not sure. But he must feel something. He’s looking after Harry’s boy.’
Father Mart sat and listened at times like this, maybe put a hand on your shoulder, looked you straight in the eye, said a few very simple words and somehow made you feel a whole lot better than you had done when you came into the room. Right now he leaned back and steepled his fingers. ‘It sounds to me as though Harold knew you’d beat yourself up. And this was his way of trying to tell you not to.
‘He knew the risks. He could have said no, when you asked him to come. But he didn’t, did he? And it was his own decision to sacrifice himself to keep you both safe.’
He placed his palms flat on the table and leaned towards me. ‘If it had been you on the gravel instead of Harold, would you have come to the same decision?’
I didn’t have to think too hard about that one. ‘Sure. It’s a straight numbers game, isn’t it? One down, the rest stay standing.’
Father Mart’s right forefinger came off the table and jerked towards me, like he was about to accuse the woman next door of being a witch. ‘Exactly!’
I’d thought these guys were supposed to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
‘So, if it had been you instead of Harold, would you have wanted him to feel this bad?’
‘No.’
‘Then why are you?’
I racked my brain for an answer.
‘In your own time.’ He waved at my brew. ‘Please, drink your tea.’
Father Mart never stood in judgement, even when a stewards’ enquiry didn’t go his way. He never pretended to have the answer to the mysteries of the universe. And he hadn’t tried to become the dad I’d never had, or any of that shit. He wasn’t in the business of miracle cures either. He concentrated instead on reminding dickheads like me what was what, and hoped they’d get the message.
PART TWO
1
East Grinstead, West Sussex
Monday, 23 January 2012
23.15 hrs
I flew in on the late-evening easyJet from Zürich and took a cab from the Gatwick South Terminal rank to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer.
The Catholic Church didn’t advertise its garaging facilities, but Father Mart had mentioned a mate with an empty lock-up when I’d needed to get to the French Alps at warp speed in March last year and was trying to find a place to drop my dark blue Porsche 911.
I had only seen Father Gerard for about ten minutes at that point, before I’d had to leg it, but knew immediately that he was my kind of priest. I wasn’t surprised. Father Mart chose his racing mates wisely.
I expected the wagon to be up on bricks after all this time, but it was sitting outside the rectory with a warm engine and a very smiley Father Gerard in the driving seat. He bounced out to say hello, and took me on a guided tour of the bodywork, in case I hadn’t spotted the showroom shine. ‘I took her for a little spin, after you called to let me know you were on your way …’
Judging by the sparkle in his eye, that little white lie was going to cost Father Gerard a few Hail Marys. I was prepared to bet good money that his flock had sought spiritual comfort on a regular basis at Lingfield and Plumpton, and that he’d have needed the Porsche to help him spread God’s word as far afield as Ascot and Cheltenham too.
As I swapped places with him, he told me that Father Mart sent his blessings, and needed me to drop by his cottage.
I asked when. He gave me a slightly pained expression. ‘Tomorrow morning, Nick. If you could manage it …’
2
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire
Tuesday, 24 January
11.17 hrs
Father Mart wasn’t on my speed dial. He didn’t need to be. His job was to be around whenever he was needed to do God stuff. But I had dropped by once every few years to say hello. It didn’t seem to matter whether the gap between visits was months or years, the welcome was always the same.
Sure enough, he was standing on his doorstep to greet me, as if I’d only nipped down to the corner shop to replenish his stock of Yorkshire Tea five minutes ago. But when I’d parked alongside his mud-streaked Land Rover and walked up the path I could see he was far from happy. His handshake was as warm as ever, but his gaze was troubled and the skin was taut across his temples.
We went through the usual rituals, and I took the piss about his beard having turned white enough for him to take a part-time job as a Tesco’s Santa if business got slow. Then, as soon as he’d fixed us both a brew and motioned me towards my usual chair at the table opposite his Rayburn, he started to let me know what was on his mind.
‘It’s Trevor. He n
eeds your help.’
It was clear from his tone and uncharacteristically brisk delivery that Trev wasn’t simply going to bimble along to Father Mart’s kitchen and share our plate of Hobnobs.
‘When?’
‘As soon as possible.’
‘Where?’
‘He’s calling later. He’ll let us know.’
I necked some of my brew and munched a biscuit. ‘Any other clues?’
‘Things aren’t good at Credenhill.’
‘Trev doesn’t have anything to do with Credenhill any more. As far as I know. He left the Regiment about twenty seconds after I did.’
‘He does now. There was an accident. An incident. Call it what you will. In the CQB Rooms. One of the lads took a bullet.’
I shrugged. ‘Sad. But not a first.’
The Counter Terrorist Team refined their covert entry and hostage rescue techniques in the Close Quarter Battle Rooms – which meant live firing as well as showing off your favourite moves from the martial-arts catalogue. These places had targets and rubber-coated walls to absorb the rounds, and could be adapted to cater for almost any scenario – fast rope, heli drop, you name it.
It wasn’t somewhere you just minced around in designer headphones and a pair of orange Oakleys, loosing off a few shots with a Desert Eagle to impress the chicks. We trained and trained and trained there, with flashbangs and all sorts of shit, in every conceivable environment. We’d be in blindingly bright light one minute and total darkness the next, and a lot of the time the ‘enemy’ was shooting back.
I’d been on the team the day Prince Charles and Princess Di came by for a demo and one of the lads accidentally set fire to her hair. Ever since the Gulf, the Big Dogs had given themselves hernias trying to stuff the Special Forces genie back into the bottle. But that was easier said than done. The invitations for day visits, dinners in the mess with sports personalities and benefactors – even the media – still muddied the waters.
At the same time, all serving members of the Special Air Service now fell under the thirty-year rule, and you couldn’t even mention their presence in hi-vis conflicts without having your bollocks chopped off. I’d heard that the new director of Special Forces, Major General Steele, was so determined to reinstate the invisibility cloak that he’d threatened to do the operation personally, with a rusty razor blade.
Father Mart didn’t seem sure when Trev’s call would come through, so I scribbled my iPhone number on his notepad and said I’d head down to Hereford and see if they had a vacant room at the Green Dragon, maybe knock on Trev’s front door.
That was when I knew this thing was really serious. He gripped my arm with surprising force and told me that Trevor wasn’t at home, and not to go anywhere near Hereford for the time being – at least, not until he had had a chance to put me in the picture.
We were outside, admiring the pattern of frost on his potting shed, when his phone rang. Father Mart dashed back into the house and picked up. Steve Jobs hadn’t changed his life: he still put his trust in Bakelite and circular dials. And God, of course, but they probably contacted each other direct.
He emerged about thirty seconds later. Trev obviously hadn’t been in the mood for a chat. ‘The Bolthole. Tomorrow at fifteen hundred. He said you’d know what that meant.’
‘Nothing else? Should I be wearing a red carnation?’
At last, a wry little smile flitted across his face. ‘He said you should wait there until he decides it’s safe to make contact. And don’t bring your Porsche, or your telephone.’
I couldn’t stop myself laughing. ‘My telephone?’
3
The Bolthole had probably saved our lives, back in the day. I visualized the route I’d take to get there as Father Mart rustled up whatever was in the oven. I was a lot better at sorting myself out in advance, these days, than I had been then.
Trev and I had done a lot of our training for Winter Selection in the Black Mountains. The idea had been to sharpen up our endurance, stamina and determination, and while we were running uphill and downhill in clear weather, we felt quite pleased with ourselves. When the weather closed in it was a different story. The day-trippers stayed in the pub and we were in the shit.
It got seriously cold eight hundred metres up in the Brecon Beacons, and you could easily freeze to death lower down when the wind blew. We’d all heard the stories of the lads who’d lost their way when the snow started to fall, then got exhausted, bogged down or injured, and never made it back. Legend had it that one of them was frozen so stiff the rescue crew used him as a sledge to get back down the mountain.
We’d made a shitload of stupid mistakes, and taking off that morning in combats, T-shirts and thin waterproof tops was right at the top of the list. The mist closed in as we summited Waun Fach and the blizzard quickly followed. It wasn’t long before we knew we were in trouble.
My watch hadn’t had a temperature gauge, but my fingers and toes told me it was getting way below zero. One of the first signs of hypothermia was mental confusion, but some would say that was what we’d been suffering from in the first place. The only sane thing we’d done was pack bivvi bags, rations and a hexy stove in our Bergens.
Somehow we managed to make our way down, trying to get out of the killer wind, and stumbled upon a cave. We had no idea where.
It wasn’t until the following afternoon that the conditions cleared enough for us to get our bearings. Trev had originally nicknamed our refuge the Elephant’s Arsehole, because of the shape and colour of the stones that flanked it, and because it was large enough inside to shelter a couple of idiots, but I guess he couldn’t bring himself to say that to a priest.
‘A penny for your thoughts, as my mother used to say …’
I looked up from the plate of lasagne he’d put in front of me. I’d almost forgotten he was there. ‘Sorry. Miles away.’
‘No apologies necessary. It’s always good to see you smile.’ He was smiling too, but I could still see the tension behind his eyes.
‘Don’t worry about Trev. He hates surprises, but there’s no one in our game who can deal with them better than he can.’ I told him a couple of silly stories about us getting into scrapes in Colombia and Trev taking charge.
He gave a chuckle. ‘And what about you, Nicholas?’
It wasn’t the question itself that caught me off-guard, but the fact that only one other person in my life ever used all three syllables in my name, and she was the woman I’d left behind in Russia thirty-six hours ago.
Anna hadn’t come to Domodedovo airport on Sunday to wave me goodbye. We’d agreed that if I was going to carry on being a bullet magnet, it would be better for her and our five-month-old son to stay well away from the target area. And, besides, neither of us had wanted to prolong the agony.
Cutting away was never going to be easy. I’d seen them safely tucked into their gated community on the Moscow margins, given them both the warmest hug that I’d ever given another human being, picked up my grab bag and got into the cab.
I’d left some stuff there, partly because I’d always liked travelling light, and partly because it helped convince me that I wouldn’t be gone for ever. I still wanted to be with her and our son, but we both knew they’d always be safer when I wasn’t around. Her words still echoed in my head: I don’t think you pick fights, Nicholas. But they sure pick you … You were the kid who always got into fights at school and didn’t know why …
I heard myself starting to leak the story to Father Mart as the wind rose outside and began to chuck the odd fistful of hail against the windows. ‘You remember the blonde one from Abba?’
‘With or without the beard?’
‘Funny. The one with the cheekbones and the sad smile. That’s Anna. We met in Tehran. At an arms fair. She was an investigative journalist. The campaigning kind. Working for a Russian indie. She wanted to make the world a better place. Then she joined Russia Today and went out to Libya to cover the uprising.
‘As soon as sh
e got pregnant, everything changed. And when our son was born, we could no longer ignore the fact that a dad in my line of work is a bit of a liability …’
‘Does your son have a name?’
‘Nicholayevich. But I think she’ll probably shorten it to Nicholai. Except when she loses it with him.’
That wry smile reappeared from somewhere beneath the Father Christmas face fuzz. ‘As a tribute to Count Tolstoy, of course.’
‘You’re not wrong.’ I felt myself smile too. ‘She started me on Anna Karenina, then had me reading War and Peace. Even the Peace bit. And going to art galleries and concerts and shit …’
My leak had become a bit of a flood. I paused for a moment and looked at him, embarrassed. ‘Any minute now you’ll have me on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories.’ I picked up my glass of water. ‘And I can’t even blame the Communion wine …’
His eyes sparkled. ‘We’ll have you in that confessional yet, my boy.’
Much later, I got my head down on Father Mart’s sofa and thought some more about what I’d left behind. I didn’t care about the things, but I did care a lot about the people. That was a new one on me. It was also one of the reasons I’d had to leave.
4
Father Mart’s lean-to was filled with the same kind of crap that real people had in their garages, only more of it, but he somehow managed to find room in there for my motor as well. I stuck my head out of his Land Rover as he pulled down the door. ‘I’ll try to bring the Popemobile back in one piece. Fingers crossed.’
He came alongside the driver’s window and I gripped his hand. ‘And if you need any help taking the Porsche for a spin, Father Gerard’s your man.’
