by Andy McNab
The main house was a whole lot grander than anything I’d been used to. It was tucked into a crescent of oak, hornbeam and Scots pine, with a sweeping view across the greenest of rolling green fields to the eastern shore of Bassenthwaite Lake.
We weren’t talking Downton Abbey here, but we’d stayed over in the converted stable block during the planning phase, and could have had a couple of bedroom suites each.
Yet more stone outbuildings and what now looked like an oak-framed boathouse completed the fairy-tale set-up. Harry, Trev and I had run around the estate for an hour every morning before our full English, and never reached the boundary wall.
I parked the Skoda alongside a Range Rover and a very shiny Maserati, and told it not to be embarrassed. I probably needn’t have bothered. It had spent its whole life doing God’s work.
I didn’t expect an immediate answer when I lifted and dropped the gleaming brass knocker on the Chastains’ front door. It would take them a while to tab all the way to the hall. I gave them ten and was about to repeat the process when I heard footsteps on the gravel from the direction of the lake.
The colonel and his wife appeared in the kind of well-used country kit that had seen some proper action on the peaks and fells, not just in the Regent Street boutique window. Their immaculately sculpted hair was greyer than when I’d last seen them, and it was impossible to miss the sadness in their eyes, but they were still Mr and Mrs Charisma.
I kicked straight into apology mode but Chastain held up a hand before I’d got halfway. ‘Sergeant Stone, a pleasure to see you as always. My assistant said you’d called. What a pity you couldn’t join us for breakfast.’
They ushered me into their well-upholstered world of gilt-framed military portraits, Afghan rugs and antique clocks. A regimental snare drum, which had been converted into a table, perched next to a wing chair beside an open fire. A bronze cast of a giant hand, dulled by age, index finger outstretched, stood in one corner of the living room.
Chastain followed my eyeline. ‘It was chopped off one of Saddam’s statues. Or so the guy claimed when I picked it up in Basra souk.’ He came as close to smiling as I guessed he could manage, these days. ‘I suspect he had a team of people knocking them out by the dozen in a sweat shop round the corner.’
Mrs Chastain laughed dutifully, then escaped to the kitchen. She reappeared briefly with a teapot, cups, saucers, milk and homemade flapjacks on a tray that matched the drum. ‘I’ll leave you gentlemen to chat. The chores won’t look after themselves, alas.’ She hovered for a moment. ‘How very nice of you to visit, Nick. Guy would have appreciated it enormously. And we do too.’
She was in the kind of pain I guessed even sertraline couldn’t soothe, so there was something desperately touching about her attempts to fortify herself behind a wall of politeness.
When she’d gone, Chastain busied himself with the brew. ‘I’m afraid Guy’s death has rather ripped the heart out of her.’ He waved a hand around the room. ‘And out of this old place too. He and I were hardly ever here for more than five minutes at a time, of course, but, my God, it’s empty without him.’
‘I read the citation. He was incredibly …’ I searched for the right word, and didn’t necessarily find it. ‘Brave.’
‘Yes, Nick. He was.’ He stopped messing around with the crockery and fixed me with some serious eye to eye. ‘But that won’t stop me missing him.’
I didn’t have a clue how to deal with this. When Chastain had been my OC, death in action had been part of the deal. We’d met it with dignity or black humour, depending on the circumstances and on who was in the room. He’d never been short of the right things to say when the occasion demanded, and his presence alone reassured those around him that, though we might be in the shit, he was the man to dig us out. Now his defences were down, and he was just a grieving dad.
I knew this was the point I should have waffled on about heroism and selflessness, then maybe gone on to fill some more silence by talking about the statue. I probably would have done if Mrs Chastain had stuck around. But the colonel knew the form, and I’d always found it easier to fight on for live people rather than dead ones.
He handed over my brew and offered me a flapjack. I gave it a munch, mostly so I could leave a decent interval before I spoke again.
‘I dropped in to pay my respects, but also to see if you had any int about the fuck-up in the CQB Rooms. I’m trying to find a way of digging Sam Callard out of the shit.’
I hoped he might seize the opportunity of shifting back into OC mode, and he did.
‘A dreadful mess. I don’t know all the details, I’m afraid, but I’m sure that damn fool Steele is devoting a disproportionate amount of time and energy to keeping whatever happened under wraps instead of taking the bull by the horns and doing something useful.’
He clearly wasn’t Steele’s number-one fan, but that was probably because the general had achieved both the rank and the job that Chastain would have killed for. Whatever, I decided not to share my suspicions about DSF’s recent activities.
‘I was hoping you might have some … insights … Perhaps even be able to help get the lad off the hook. Couldn’t we get a shrink involved? I think those two were far more deeply affected by Chris’s death, then Guy’s, than they were able to admit.’
The fire had come back into Chastain’s eyes. ‘I couldn’t agree more. Steele and the stiff-upper-lip brigade don’t buy into combat stress. They seem intent on returning us all to the Dark Ages. I half expect them to start shooting troopers at dawn again, or dispatching them down the mines with LMF labels round their necks.’
LMF might have stood for ‘Lazy Mother Fucker’ now, but back in the Second World War it had meant ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’. I never got too exercised about that. The attitude he’d described was always going to be a part of the establishment mind-set.
He sat forward in his chair. ‘Have you got a minute? There’s something I’d like to show you.’
2
The boathouse was a stone-based, oak-framed building. It was no longer the glorified garden shed that I remembered from the days of the Sweden briefing, where a bloke could escape for the afternoon with a tin of varnish, some sandpaper and a couple of paint brushes. It had been converted into the kind of quality accommodation you’d be looking for from a five-star holiday let.
Wide wooden steps led down to a sundeck and a jetty, which ran about ten metres into the lake and ended with something that looked like a small mandarin temple on stilts.
Not for the first time, Chastain read my mind. ‘It was Guy’s idea. When he was about fourteen he told us he needed somewhere his parents wouldn’t be able to breathe down his neck twenty-four/seven.’ He allowed the sadness to flicker across his face in a way that I guessed he tried not to when he was being the strong one. ‘The trials and tribulations of being a much-loved only child …’
He steered me round to the lakeside entrance and brought out a nice big bunch of keys.
The interior was part boy-heaven and part shrine to this boy’s over-achievement. A homemade catapult sat on a shelf alongside a bowl of conkers and four or five gleaming silver cups. A Scalextric set the size of Brands Hatch ran along one wall. Posters of Michelle Pfeiffer and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were pinned to a corkboard. Dark blue painted oars with gold lettering were suspended above a pair of shiny blue caps with the kind of tassels I’d only ever seen on pole dancers in a Hong Kong nightclub.
A framed reproduction of Kipling’s poem ‘For All We Have and Are’ took pride of place beside Guy’s citation and medal. I remembered the Kipling. Chastain had screwed it to the wall of his office at the Lines, and tried to make us memorize it. He’d quoted it in his team talk before we infiltrated Iraq, like he was auditioning for a part in a Shakespeare epic.
‘What stands if Freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?’
I reckoned most of us agreed with the first bit, but had a bit of a question mark over the next. The colone
l had been chuffed to fuck when he delivered the final couplet, nodding in my direction across the mess:
‘There is nothing left today
But steel and fire and stone.’
He’d ended his speech with a big, beaming grin, and ‘But I’m sure you gentlemen will agree that if the Stone bit turns out to be the case, we’re in worse trouble than we thought …’
I took a closer look at the citation, and the medal above it. ‘Shit … That’s not the real one, is it?’
Chastain nodded. ‘Damn fool spot to keep it, given its value. We’ll hand it over to the Imperial War Museum at some point, of course, depending on what happens about the statue. But Marcia wanted it to be here for a while, since we have no body to bury, no ashes to spread. Some days she just sits with it, gazing out across the lake, remembering the times we now realize we rather took for granted.’
I reckoned she was so far into the happy pills that she couldn’t tell which way was up, but I didn’t tell him that. I gave him a rueful smile instead. ‘I’m sure my mum would have done the same. Just without the conkers and the boathouse. We didn’t have much call for that sort of thing on our estate.’
He seized the chance to retreat behind half-witted banter. ‘I thought Bermondsey was heaving with places like this. Where else did all those pirates live?’
‘Mostly down the market or the betting shop.’ I scanned the shelves and walls and comfortable furniture. ‘But none of us would have turned up our noses at somewhere like this. It must have been like growing up in the world’s nicest toy shop.’
He disappeared for a moment into his own personal time-warp. ‘I often wonder whether he might have preferred having a dad around, instead of an impatient stranger who was too busy imposing his idea of justice and truth on Johnny Foreigner to play hide and seek or throw a rugby ball around.’
‘You were there when it counted.’
‘Kind of you to say that.’ He paused. ‘You never had kids, did you, Nick?’
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him about Anna and Nicholai, and to share one or two of the things I’d had on my mind recently, but I shook my head. ‘I guess I might have done if I’d had a boathouse like this.’
He lifted the VC display off the wall and polished the glass with his sleeve. As if he needed to. ‘We all used to take the piss out of tea and medals, didn’t we, back in the day? Now I find that this little piece of Chinese bronze and its crimson ribbon mean a great deal to me. A very great deal indeed. But I’m afraid it doesn’t buy me any favours in the corridors of power.’
He fixed me with those cool blue eyes.
‘So, short of taking the law into one’s own hands, we have little choice other than to watch the court-martial machinery grinding its way to some no doubt undignified and clandestine conclusion.’
I met his level gaze, and tried to work out whether he’d just said what I thought he’d just said. ‘You always used to tell us that a little choice is better than no choice at all …’
For a split second his expression reminded me of the one Koureh had used in the Baghdad interrogation centre when he brought out a new set of pliers. ‘That has certainly been my mantra.’
He put back the medal and attempted to recapture his old maverick charm. ‘But on this occasion you’ll understand why I couldn’t possibly comment.’
He switched his attention to a point beyond the temple, where a strengthening breeze had begun to interfere with the mirrored surface of the water. I wanted to ask him about the Crvena Davo and Boris and the Invisible Man, but I knew the conversation was over.
I asked him to thank Mrs C for the brew and told him I’d see myself out.
3
Rannoch Moor, Glencoe
Saturday, 4 February
15.00 hrs
By the time they’d chucked me my sand-coloured beret, Al Gillespie was already a legend in the Regiment. Not only did he have the world’s biggest moustache, but he’d somehow managed to get his hands on a Stinger in the Falklands, almost before anyone else knew they’d been invented, and took out an Argentine Pucará operating from a makeshift grass strip at Goose Green.
He’d started his own security outfit – mostly BGing and keeping an eye on North Sea oil rigs – when he left Hereford, and invited me to join him. There had been quite a few times over the years that followed when I wished I had. He was the most modest man I knew, and one of the smartest. He might have looked like a walrus on happy pills, but he had a mind like a steel trap.
Alasdair Gillespie Security was now known as AGS. We called it SAG and took the piss out of him mercilessly for it, but I was pretty sure he’d have the last laugh. AGS didn’t operate on anywhere near the same scale as Kroll or Astra, but its portfolio included a number of specialist services including hostile-environment training for the international news media and testing the security of a whole heap of government installations.
He hadn’t yet realized his dream of becoming Monarch of the Glen, but he did have a nice little place at the foot of a hill just south of Mallaig, with a magic view of the Isle of Skye. And as he dragged visitors across the heather, pointing his thumb-stick at a mountain stream sparkling in the sunlight one minute, then at a storm front darkening the Cuillin Ridge the next, he’d bellow, ‘Who could ask for more?’ He’d mean it too.
To get there I took the road through Glencoe.
I wasn’t easily spooked, but this place did it to me every time. It wasn’t simply the starkness of the winter landscape, the feeling of isolation, or the way the mist advanced up the valley that got to me – I knew plenty of places like that.
The sound of the wind was sadder than a piper’s lament, and even before I’d stumbled on the memorial and got interested in its history, I knew that something really bad had happened here.
On 2 February 1692, during the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion, a hundred and twenty men under the command of Captain Robert Campbell arrived on the doorstep of Alasdair MacIain, the Twelfth Chief of Glencoe. The Campbells already had a big reputation for slotting their rivals and nicking their lands, but the MacIains offered them food, drink, lodgings and the best Highland hospitality for the next ten days.
On the order of the king, the killing began at oh five hundred on the eleventh. The chief was shot as he got out of bed. His wife was stripped and abused and died of exposure the following day. Houses were torched. Thirty-eight men, women and children were murdered. Of those who tried to escape across the mountains, at least forty more didn’t make it.
The government went into cover-up mode. No one was ever brought to trial. But worse still, as far as the locals were concerned, the massacre was ‘murder under trust’. The Highland Jocks got as pissed off as the Arabs did if they were hosed down by people they’d invited round for dinner.
The Gillespies belonged to Clan Campbell, whose motto was ‘Never forget’. We liked to remind Al of that from time to time. But you had to choose the right moment. He didn’t always see the funny side of it.
4
The snow-capped peaks of the Three Sisters scraped the sky to my left. I hung a right as I approached Loch Leven and drove uphill, towards the outward-bound centre Al often used when his lads were taking men and women in suits on leadership courses, or teaching Swedish TV journalists how to avoid being slotted by rocket-propelled grenades.
I parked the Skoda next to an AGS minibus and went into the reception area of a building that looked like it had been carved out of a chunk of granite, then lined with tartan. A girl with red hair and a beaming smile told me I was in luck. Today’s team-building exercise was taking place at the boulder garden, not too far upriver.
Half an hour’s tab took me to a campsite beside a stretch of swirling rapids, randomly sprinkled with rocks, where two groups of seven in stern-rigged inflatables were paddling like crazy to stop themselves being tossed into the icy melt-water. The side of the valley rose behind them, vividly striped with green and rusty red, then topped with white.
/> While his sidekicks ran around on the bank in matching orange Helly Hansen gear, Big Al stood on a medium-size meteorite in an olive green parka and a kilt, waving his thumb-stick at them, like he was conducting the Last Night of the Proms. His ’tache had expanded into the kind of beard that any polar explorer would have killed for.
After ten minutes of this, I began a slow handclap.
Al turned, IDed his audience and roared, ‘Who invited you, Stoner? Didn’t you read the sign? It said “No Fucking Sassenachs”!’
I moved over to the bank. ‘There was another sign right next to it saying “No Fucking Campbells”, so it looks like we’re both in the shit.’
The rafters reached a strainer – a narrow rock corridor where the stream flowed faster and dropped four or five feet before cascading across the boulder garden. The paddle captains yelled urgent commands as they battled with the surging currents.
‘Dig! Dig! Dig!’
Both crews did their best to jump to it, but I could see that some of them were starting to wish they’d stayed behind their desks, within easy reach of the coffee machine.
Al leaped off his granite podium and came over to thump me in between the shoulder-blades. ‘Great to see you, Nick. We heard a nasty rumour you’d defected.’
I thumped him right back, but before I could say anything, the second raft cartwheeled against a stone pillar on the far side of the staircase, then broached. It bucked and reared and banged an anxious dark-haired girl into the froth. She flailed around for a moment and then disappeared. Her helmet bobbed back into view almost immediately, but she didn’t.
