The Network

by Jason Elliot

  He sighs.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You’re upset. Let’s go to the Phat Phuk. Good Vietnamese scoff. It’s just up here.’ He searches my face for a signal of assent and, as he knows he eventually will, finds it.

  True to his apparent concern, Seethrough does have my leg looked at. He arranges for a car to take me the next day to a surgeon in Wimpole Street, who’s unimpressed by my do-it-yourself repairs. A sour look comes over his face as he peers at my attempt at stitches through an illuminated magnifying glass. Then he deadens the leg with an injection and a stout serious-looking Polish girl fastens a surgical mask to his face. My ragged black stitches are pulled gently free from the enclosing skin and replaced with neat loops of biodegradable suture that doesn’t need removing. I lie on my stomach and feel nothing, thinking of the steady eyes of the guardian of the Mahdi’s shrine.

  ‘It feels much better when it’s done with anaesthetic,’ I tell the surgeon.

  An hour later I’m limping to Regent’s Park and marvelling at its greenness. After the dust and desiccation of Khartoum, it’s so much easier to understand why the Islamic vision of paradise is a verdant place with running streams and fountains. I sit for a while on a bench beside the main avenue and watch people passing. They seem extraordinarily preoccupied and utterly unaware of the luxury of their surroundings.

  Later I walk along the shady paths by the ponds and through the rose garden and back to the Outer Circle, where I’ve parked Gerhardt. I have not paid attention to the time and there’s a ticket on the windscreen. England is unreal to me again.

  At home, nothing seems to have changed, although my private world has gone through indescribable tumult over the past few weeks. I mow the lawn and clear the pond of leaves, and count my fish to see if they’re all there. I write up a long report for Seethrough on everything that’s happened in Khartoum, and send it as an encrypted email via the Firm’s server.

  I call Jameela at her home for three days in a row but there’s no answer. Then, on the fourth, she picks up. Her faint voice carries on it a flood of memories. She was released without harm after twelve hours. But I have a burning question.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, in answer to it, ‘it was real. All of it.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She weeps.

  I don’t know either. I want to ask when we’ll see each other again, but the question sticks in my throat and the result is a long and agonising silence in which each impulse to speak is superseded by its opposite. Neither of us knows what to say. There is only a silent knowing which we both instinctively feel is undermined by words; it’s the very thing we detected in each other when we first met and which took us both by surprise with its intensity. Even at this distance from each other we are in its grasp again.

  I call H too, and he invites me to his home to catch up. I drive there the following day. It’s sunny and H is in his garden on a ladder, picking caterpillars from the leaves on his rear porch.

  ‘They’re eating my wisteria,’ he says, ‘but I don’t like to kill the little buggers.’ I help him gather them up and put them in a box which he’s planning to empty in a neighbouring field.

  He doesn’t like the look of my limp, so a long walk isn’t part of our plans.

  ‘Thought we could put in an hour’s target practice,’ he says. ‘Good for morale. We’ve got permission to use the drive-in range, so we don’t have to creep around any quarries.’

  It’s not far. Eight miles from the bridge at Hereford we reach a village where there’s an ancient church with an illustrious history. I half expect to see a works access only sign of the kind that usually indicates a secret government facility, but there’s nothing of the kind. We turn off the main road opposite the church, and drive almost a mile along a country lane barely wide enough for two cars. At an unremarkable crossroads H turns along the way he knows. We pass a derelict-looking farm and suddenly there are high chain-link fences on both sides of the road, beyond which any view is obscured by thick twenty-foot-high deciduous hedges. Poking above them are some high-frequency antenna arrays resembling rotary washing lines, the kind used for long-range agent communication, but there’s not much else to betray a special forces training camp.

  We turn in opposite a cluster of low buildings. H slows the car, puts his window down and waves to the man emerging from the security post, who smiles as he recognises him.

  ‘Alright, H——?’ calls a thick Scottish voice. ‘Nae seen you fra while.’

  ‘You know how it is,’ says H, and tells him we’ll be about an hour.

  ‘Nae grief, mate,’ comes the reply.

  We pass a small car park with a fleet of scruffy identical vehicles which look as though they’re used for training. A helicopter with no registration markings sits in a neighbouring field. To our left, a quarter of a mile away, rises a wooded slope which H calls Gibbie’s Hill, where he fondly recalls catching wild eels to eat on an E & E exercise. We drive towards it across some innocent-looking open land, past some equally innocent-looking buildings, and then some slightly less innocent-looking ones. These, H says, are former ammunition storage facilities, protected by mounded blast-protecting revetment walls and once linked by rail when the site was used as a hideaway for government munitions. The Regiment calls them bunkers. H points out the bunker with the mocked-up interior of a house where he used to practise hostage rescue scenarios. One of the rooms contains a comfy sofa where, despite the bullet holes, H says he used to sleep when it got too late to go home.

  At the foot of the hill the road loops around and we pull up at the entrance to what at first looks like a small open-air stadium.

  It’s a hundred and fifty feet square, with steep grassy banks on three sides, which rise to about thirty feet. The whole area is fenced off and guarded with a barrier on its open side, which faces south so that no one has to shoot into the sun. Vehicle drills of the kind we’ve earlier practised are carried out within the central enclosure, but H doesn’t want me to risk aggravating my leg, so we work on grouping and then snap shooting with the Brownings. Then, because H can’t resist the opportunity, we practise shooting from a moving vehicle, which is as noisy as it is exhilarating. And as he rightly suggests, good for morale.

  We drive back in the afternoon. As we reach the village near his home I offer him a drink at his local. But he seldom goes there any more, he says. He used to when he first moved to the area years ago, he says, but that was before the SAS became such a big deal. He stopped going to the pub not long after the Prince’s Gate hostage rescue, when people who heard he was in the Regiment would treat him disturbingly, like a kind of god.

  The thing I like about H is that he prefers to be invisible. I can’t really picture him, after all this is over, going public and giving lectures to the local British Legion in pubs around Hereford and Leominster. Nothing makes him stand out in either habit or appearance, unless you count the small knife that always hangs from the back of his belt or the length of opaque plastic that he carries in his wallet, which can be put to so many different uses.

  The few Regiment men I’ve met all share this quality. They are the last ones you would identify as members of the most feared military unit in the world. They are all exceptionally fit, and exertion comes easily to them. They enjoy order and precision in physical tasks, and prefer action to theory, which makes them wary of pretence or self-importance and suspicious of men who wear moleskin trousers. They take solace in beauty of the kind not found in art galleries but in the mist that hovers over a bend in a river at dawn. They rarely smoke, but tend to drink more than most. Much more, in fact. They love the quiet life of the English country village until the next operation in a country that most of us have never heard of. It’s true they keep strange things in their garages, but they get points on their driving licences like anyone else.

  So H cooks us an early dinner instead, and afterwards produces a bottle of whisky, which we broach in front of the fire that he
lights in his living room. We get on to stories about people H has met who claim to be members of the Regiment. His favourite is the time he gets into conversation with a former soldier who’s just delivered a lecture to a gathering of security experts and claims to have been in the SAS for years. H invites him for a friendly drink, over which the man reveals, confidentially of course, that he’s a former member of the Regiment’s F Squadron. There’s no need, on this occasion, to make a call to the security cell at the Regimental HQ to check on him, because the SAS has never had an F Squadron.

  Stories about the more stubborn Walter Mitty types sometimes reach Mars and Minerva, the Regiment’s newsletter. H finds me a copy. It’s mostly titbits of news and reunions. There’s a mention of the sophistication and expense of the security features incorporated in the double fence around the new camp at Credenhill. There are letters from former members and their wives, details of the Regimental Association’s benevolent fund, and obituaries. Members can even buy wine with the Regiment’s insignia on the label. It’s as interesting as a village parish magazine. Nothing could be further from the sensationalism of all the books with flaming daggers on their fronts, which now seem so absurd to me.

  ‘It’s weird,’ I say.

  ‘What’s weird?’

  ‘It’s just that in films when they have to train someone for a special op, they take him off to a huge underground secret base.’

  ‘You mean one with those doors that swish open like they do in Star Trek?’

  ‘Exactly. And a thing that X-rays you and scans your eyeball. You don’t see them saving caterpillars or sitting on the floor in somebody’s living room with a dog asleep on a chair.’

  H looks affectionately at his terrier Jeffrey, who occupies the largest chair in the room, and tugs on his sleeping chin.

  ‘Welcome to the real world,’ he says.

  On the way home, Gerhardt has difficulty pulling away from a crossroads, and I realise I’ve forgotten to top up the transmission fluid. I stop at a garage and it occurs to me, as I burn my hand on the cylinder head in the attempt to remove the transmission fluid dipstick, that it’s time to call in the favour from Gemayel before I leave.

  It’s also time to see the Baroness. I arrange it in the usual way, but she’s not at the club and a note is waiting for me instead, indicating that I come to her home. I’m not expecting to be followed but take time for a careful dry-cleaning before reaching her front door. She buzzes me in. I feel my calf aching where the stitches have yet to heal as I walk up the stairs to the second floor.

  The curtains are half-drawn as if she hasn’t had the strength to open them fully. She’s visibly more frail and I can’t help thinking that the end of an era is near. She uses a hand to steady herself against the furniture as she walks across the room, but stubbornly insists on preparing a pot of tea on her own and not letting me help.

  I tell her about Khartoum, my illegal escape, and about my feelings for Jameela.

  ‘It does happen sometimes.’ She smiles. Her teacup tilts imperfectly on the saucer as she returns it. Then her expression grows more grave and I can tell she has something on her mind.

  ‘I have some news,’ she says. ‘It’s not what you would call good.’

  I’m imagining it’s something personal, so it’s a shock when she refers to the operation we’re planning in Afghanistan.

  ‘It is only a whisper, but it’s been suggested that some parties would prefer the operation to fail.’

  ‘To fail? Who could want it to fail? Is this Macavity’s idea?’

  She shakes her head and frowns.

  ‘Elsewhere. There’s no reason Macavity should know. The contrary.’ She lets out a wistful sigh. ‘Have you considered the possibility of the missiles being allowed to fall into the wrong hands in order to be turned against us? To permit such a catastrophe may even be desirable to some. Imagine,’ she smiles darkly, ‘a new crusade. It would reach across the world and drag on for a generation.’

  ‘That sounds dangerously like a conspiracy,’ I tell her.

  ‘What is coherent at a more organised level may be incomprehensible at a lesser one. If it is true, as I fear it may be, we must hope that the plan is uncovered along the way. The Network has always been a counterweight to the abuse of power, but it cannot change the weaknesses of human nature.’ She sighs again, then looks up at me. ‘You must be especially vigilant. When will you leave?’

  ‘Soon. In a week or so.’

  ‘Well,’ she sighs, ‘I have passed on what I could.’

  I’m not certain what she’s referring to, but I sense that it’s more than simply the news she’s given me. It’s her habit to assign more than one meaning to the things she says, but now it’s as if a mask is dropping from her, and she’s preparing to relinquish the role she’s steadfastly played all these years. I have the feeling she knows that, before long, loneliness and infirmity will rob her of all the worldly authority and guile her character has accumulated over a lifetime, and that now she must relinquish it voluntarily, shedding herself of its burden to allow her life to at last become simple and unencumbered.

  ‘You will remember,’ she says quietly, ‘that the great art is always to find an activity which serves a practical visible purpose but which serves your hidden purpose as well.’

  ‘You have taught me that and much more,’ I say.

  ‘Context …’ she begins, but then coughs harshly. ‘Context is everything. I’m a little under par,’ she says. ‘Will you forgive me if I don’t see you out?’

  ‘I’ll see you as soon as I’m back from Afghanistan.’

  ‘When you’re both back.’ She means Manny, which I’m glad for.

  ‘Yes, both of us will come and see you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  As I cross the road from her front door I look up to see her standing at a window. She’s waving. But it’s not a modern wave, where the hand flaps from side to side like a metronome. Her arm is upheld but remains still, and her hand rotates with only a slight and stately motion about her wrist. Then her gaze rises towards the sky, and it looks as though she’s holding up an antique ornament towards the light, tilting it back and forth experimentally, as if to glimpse across its surface some tarnished hieroglyph which she alone can decipher.

  It’s a Sunday when the call comes.

  ‘Why not come round for tea?’ asks H in his characteristically gritty voice. It sounds an odd request until I remember it’s the expression we’ve agreed on for our order to move. I make sure the letters I’ve prepared are left neatly on my desk, together with instructions for my sister in case she’s the one who ends up having to deliver them.

  Then I go for a short walk, because it’s the last I’ll see of this damp and peaceful world which my countrymen take so blissfully for granted. As I walk, I hear three sounds. One is the whispering of a light wind in the nearby trees, which at moments seems like a conversation between the leaves. The second is a succession of calls between a pair of wood pigeons. The last is a distant cyclical pealing from a church somewhere. The notes descend in an eight-bell octave, but grow confused as the notes begin to sound out of sequence. Soon they become a sonorous tangle, the last note sounding after the first and the others steadily more disordered, until gradually they begin to rearrange themselves. Then, in the manner of a knot that magically unravels itself, the octave regains its proper sequence and the scale is finally resolved and returns to its original harmony. After which there is only silence.

  At dawn H and I fly to London in the Puma and are escorted to our final briefing at Vauxhall Cross. We surrender our mobile phones to security and are met once again by Stella, who leads us wordlessly to an upper floor.

  Seethrough is waiting for us with what looks like a pair of shopping bags, which contain our personal hiking boots. We scrutinise them in turn but can’t see where the heels have been opened and resealed to accommodate the tiny satellite transmitters that will keep track of our precise locations. The transmitters ar
e almost identical to the kind covertly installed on ships and aircraft sold to allied forces around the world. Seethrough reminds us that they can also be used to designate a target or any other site that requires attention.

  Then we move line by line through our operational plans, basically an actions-on list, or what we’ll do in the event of various mishaps. Seethrough plays the role of ops officer, questioning us like a quizmaster and making sure in the process that we all agree, to the extent that things allow, on what happens and when.

  He confirms that H’s kit list, which consists of things that we can’t easily explain to curious immigration officials, has been approved. Some items will be picked up at the British consulate in Peshawar, and the rest in Afghanistan through one of the few remaining foreign embassies that still function in Kabul, the identity of which we undertake never to reveal. The only exotic item we actually carry ourselves is our new codes, which are a more personal matter. They’re stored on stamp-sized memory cards and easily concealed.

  Then there’s what Seethrough calls last orders, and we hand over the sealed copies of our wills. Nothing in his manner suggests to me he’s aware that the operation will be deliberately threatened. It’s obvious he doesn’t know of any means by which our plans might be compromised, but is conforming faithfully to a well-established chain of command, the tainted origins of which lie far beyond our mutual reach.

  No other place I know smells like Peshawar. The city is wrapped in smells like an Oriental tramp in an old coat from which he can’t be parted. There are three main layers to these smells, and infinite lesser ones, the proportions of which depend on your luck, or lack of it.

  The first is the smell of the land itself, an ancient alliance of fragrances that probably hasn’t altered since the Buddha, Alexander, Chengiz Khan, Mahmoud the Great and Marco Polo passed through the city in turn. It’s the one that reaches around you as you step from the featureless atmosphere of the plane. It’s a warm smell, humid, sensual and faintly exotic. It comes from the mixture of dust, eternally recycled by wind and rain, and tropical vegetation, the fragrance of which suggests deep green canopies of untamed foliage on an immense scale.