The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  Gord led the charge.

  He turned once, fast. They were stumbling and careering after him. He saw Jorge . . . The Street Boy had the wheelbarrow . . . He saw Zeppo and Harpo and Groucho . . . Eff and Vee and Zed . . . Alex with the dog . . . It was stuck. The left wheel was blocked by a fire-scorched rock and a twisted tree root. He killed the firing lever and the flame died and the oil dribbled short. He had the cart clear.

  He ran through the smoke, and through the burned undergrowth and he heard the stampede flight coming after him.

  Gord shouted, ‘Move it. They’ll be behind . . . follow us. We’ve scattered them, they’ll regroup, follow us . . . Hurry, hurry . . .’

  Gord ran, driving the cart forward, until his lungs sobbed for rest.

  He could not run. His hip would not allow him to run. The Canadian had the machine gun hooked under his arm and took the weight on his bent elbow, and he levered himself forward on the stick. He went through the settling smoke. He saw the soldier’s face and it was the body of the soldier that was burned, and it was a young face. He had seen before the faces, in death, of young men that were unmarked except in terror. The ground around him was a carpet of guttering fire and it seemed that it was the cones from the high fir trees of the forest that burned the longest. He saw a soldier who seemed stuck with adhesive to a tree trunk, as if he had cannoned into the trunk and then the fire had caught them together and held them. He could no longer hear them ahead of him. He could not run and they were too far ahead of him. He was beyond the fire and the smoke was behind him. He knew what he would do. He lurched forward, went further, followed the thin wheel marks of the cart and the wide tread of the wheelbarrow, because he was not yet satisfied that he had found the place he looked for. He did not hear so well now, and it was worse after the gunfire, but he had heard clear enough what Gord had shouted . . . The enemy was scattered, would regroup, would follow . . . He could not run, and what Gord had said had seemed damn plain enough.

  There was a place where two rocks were close together, big rocks, more than his own height, good granite rocks.

  He went through the gap between the rocks and he sank down on his knees. It was a heaven to take the weight from his hip. He chucked the stick behind him, and he extended the bipod legs from underneath the barrel of the machine gun. The rocks gave him good cover and he had taken a position that gave him a fine view down the descent of the hillside and back towards the smoke and the small fires. He hooked the belts and bullets, ball and tracer, off his body and loaded the weapon. It would have been better if he had had the Street Boy with him to feed the belt, but he thought that he could manage alone.

  He waited for the troops that had scattered to regroup and then to follow.

  The Canadian thought of the Legion Club. He wondered what they would hear, Dave and Bill and Duggie and Hamish. He would have liked to have sat in the bar, been served lager beer by the steward, one last time. One last time he would have liked to have sat under the reproduction paintings of the Lancaster bomber and the Hurricane fighter. One last time he would have liked to have looked into the cabinets that held the old campaign medals and the faded ribbons. One last time he would have liked to have played cribbage with Dave and Bill and Duggie and Hamish.

  He saw the first of the soldiers coming up the slope. He squinted down the barrel, over the V sight and the needle sight . . . Gord needed the time . . . He would have liked to have told Dave and Bill and Duggie and Hamish about the Englishman with the flame thrower, and about the young woman with the dog, and about . . . There were three of them now, coming slow. The butt of the machine gun was hard against his shoulder and his finger was tight on the trigger, as it had been when the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa had closed the Falaise Gap, 21st August in 1944. Of course, they would get round behind him, but not goddamn yet.

  The Canadian fired.

  It would be good if Miriam gave his medals to the secretary of the Legion Club so that they went into the cabinets on the wall, so that Dave and Bill and Duggie and Hamish could see them. There was the red streak of the tracer, one bullet in four.

  They were still running. They were still gasping. They kept the pace.

  Away behind was the clatter of the heavy machine gun.

  The firing was faint, distant. The firing was short bursts, as the instructors taught on the range. Disciplined short bursts, not panic firing.

  They were together. Gord looked at them, into their faces. He had run with the cart. He had not stopped, he had not checked. He had run for his life. He rounded on them.

  ‘Didn’t you watch for him?’

  Jorge said, ‘We were all fighting, Gord, it was not just you that was fighting.’

  ‘Didn’t you help him?’

  Alex said, ‘It is the pain of all of us, Gord, we are all responsible.’

  He took the handles of the cart and heaved it forward, away from the diminishing sound of the short bursts of the heavy machine gun.

  She came in through the front door of her flat, and she hung her anorak on the hook behind the door. She walked to the answerphone. She put it to Play.

  She went into the kitchen. She hated to cook for herself. She was taking margarine from the fridge and a sliced loaf and a square of cheese.

  ‘. . . Hello, my good friend, I’ll be quite bereft when I lose your microchip conversation . . . It’s confused down there. There’s been an action, there are casualties, there’s a follow-up sweep . . . My fellow’s done rather well to have extracted that much . . . It may be all over, but then it might not . . . Can’t tell you what I don’t know . . . Don’t you dare quote me, but I’m rather rooting for your man . . .’

  There was a tomato in the fridge, shrunken like an old face. A cheese and tomato and diet margarine sandwich would be Cathy Parker’s tea and dinner. She was cutting the tomato.

  ‘. . . Fuck, a machine . . . Aren’t you there? I was with Gord yesterday. A bad corner of Guatemala . . . It’s his message . . . It’s desperate for him. He needs wings. The Cubans brought him in, they have to bring him out. You’re to fix it. Date is 27. Time is 0500 local. Place is 1509 stroke 9052. Christ, I don’t know how you do that, get him out. Repeat, 27 hyphen 5 hyphen 1509 stroke 9052 . . .’

  She heard the distorted thunder and then the call was cut.

  She wrote it, 27-5-1509/9052.

  She left the tomato and the cheese and the packet of margarine and the sliced loaf on the kitchen table. She left her front door wide open. She ran for the stairs.

  They brought three stretchers from the forest to the cleared place where the helicopters had landed.

  Behind the stretcher parties two soldiers dragged a body.

  It had come over the radio that a gringo had been killed in the action.

  He could just see the legs of the body that was pulled heavy through the long grass from the trees, and the big boots.

  There was the fit. It slotted. The beacon signal was way ahead of where they had landed, six miles and might have been more. It made sense to Tom from what he had heard of the briefing by Kramer. Two hours of time had been won. Brown, Gordon Benjamin, would have been looking to win time. He knew they had used the fire and there had been the panic shouts on the radio, but then the fire had gone. It made sense that the flame thrower had been suppressed. But the guy had had a machine gun, and he had had grenades. Brown, Gordon Benjamin, would have stayed back. It had been all over their radio as they had circled. Alpha section joining what was left of Bravo section, then Delta section, then Charlie section. Then 1 platoon linking to 3 platoon and hooked up with the sections of 2 platoon. A shit of a firefight, running two hours, down below the tree canopy, played over the radio to them. One machine gun, and as many grenades as one man could have carried, and first a platoon tied down, and then three platoons held up. And all the time Arturo had been screaming for them to get him flanked, blow the bastard away. He wondered if he would recognize him. From the briefing, it fitted.

  There was the boyish smile
on Arturo’s face and Tom tried to stay cold.

  The briefing said that Gord would not have quit.

  Tom followed Arturo towards the soldiers who dragged the body.

  The briefing said that Gordon Benjamin Brown would have hung around.

  They came to the body. The soldiers dropped the ankles of the body and stood back as if they feared their commander. Tom saw Arturo rock. He saw the smile wiped. He came to Arturo’s shoulder and he looked down into the long grass, down through the blue and the gold of the wild flowers. A big man and an old man. A man who had lived his life. The body had been hit by many rounds of automatic fire, and it was scarred by the erratic pattern of grenade fragments. There was bright-green grass in the snow colour of the body’s hair. He had never before seen living the man who was now the body, not when he had been pulled from the desert and into the Land Rover, not when he had shaken the hand and been helped into the casevac bird. The right hand of the body was locked in a closed claw fist and Arturo bent and prised it open and the folded cloth badge fell out from the grip, and Tom saw the badge that might have been worn on a veteran’s blazer.

  Tom stayed cold.

  Just the once Arturo had rocked. He didn’t swear and he didn’t curse and he didn’t stamp.

  Arturo said quietly, ‘Let’s go flying again . . .’

  Can’t we do it?’

  ‘Most certainly we cannot.’

  ‘We have people in Belize, could put a helicopter in.’

  ‘And start a war, no . . .’

  Cathy Parker blazed, ‘They’ve bugger all else to do . . .’

  He had been about to go home. There was a nice little beat on the Wylye waiting for Percy Martins when he drove down to Wiltshire in the morning, and he needed the evening to prepare his flies and wax his lines. He had been into his coat when the front desk had rung upstairs, and he had said he would be there directly. She might have run all the way from Battersea, and across the bridge. He took her arm and manoeuvred her out through the swing door. They stood on the pavement.

  ‘What would you have me do? Would you care to give me a pair of your knickers? Shall I send them recorded delivery to RAF, Belize City? Should they tie them to the radio aerial of a Lynx filled with desperadoes from the Special Air Service? Should we invade Guatemalan sovereign airspace and commence the War of Cathy’s Knickers? . . . We will do what he asked us to do, and that, young lady, is a hell of a way over the top.’

  He hailed a taxi.

  Was the cabbie a complete fool? Didn’t every cabbie in London know the new north London address of Cuba’s delegation, moved from Belgravia back in the last year over the rotten matter of shortage of funds? He thought her a quite lovely young woman. He reckoned that if she had been in Belize, with or without her knickers, she’d have hijacked a bloody Lynx and God protect the sentry who tried to stop her. Quite lovely, and rather loving . . . He knew what they called him on the fifth floor, he had heard it through the door, the little creeps from their redbrick colleges called him That Pompous Shit . . . He would not be pompous with Cathy Parker who was quite lovely, not be a shit with Cathy Parker who was rather loving. He felt a little younger, as young as he had been when he had presented a marksman’s rifle to the former Prime Minister, and talked through the sniping of a Palestinian in the fastness of the Beqa’a valley of east Lebanon. And he would feel younger, too, when the word seeped down the antiseptic and plastic-coated corridors of Vauxhall Bridge Road that Percy Martins had tweaked the Yankee nose, prised open a Guatemalan gin trap, snatched back a rather useful young man.

  He turned to her. Direct. ‘Would I like him?’

  She tried to smile. ‘He’s not easy.’

  ‘What would I talk to him about?’

  ‘He doesn’t have small talk.’

  ‘Him and me, train carriage, King’s Cross to Edinburgh?’

  ‘You’d need a good book, or a sack of newspapers. Wouldn’t open his mouth.’

  Trying harder. ‘Could I take him fishing, take him to Twickenham?’

  ‘If he went fishing it would be on his own. He reckons team sports are for inadequate people.’

  ‘Hobbies . . . ? Is he a covert French polisher? Is he a dab hand oboist?’

  It was a truer smile, but sad. ‘Actually, there’s nothing.’

  ‘Forgive me, my dear, but what the hell was the basis of your relationship, if that’s not overly impertinent?’

  ‘Danger. The common bond was risk to life, limb, all that rubbish. I always felt so safe when he was watching for me. What did we talk about? Not a lot. Well, we talked technical, the job, personal security.’ Her fingers pummelled a small linen handkerchief. ‘He’s not very good at talking, not very good at impressing strangers nor very interested.’

  ‘So, when the danger ran out and he seemed rather boring, you ditched . . .’

  ‘Something like that. I suppose he was useful when it suited me, useless when it didn’t.’

  ‘I think, my dear, old Rudyard captured it . . .

  ‘I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer, The publican ’e up an’ sez “We serve no redcoats here.”

  The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,

  I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:

  Oh, it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”; But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins,” when the band begins to play—

  The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,

  Oh, it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins,” when the band begins to play.’

  ‘. . . Most would say that I have absolutely no understanding of the human race, but that prejudice is not entirely accurate. Well, let’s not look only at the dark side.’

  They stopped. It was an unlovely street. Peeling facade, not enough paint on the windows’ woodwork, and the brass identification plaque needed polish and elbow effort. No, it had not been his intention, but she seemed to be faster to her purse than he was to his wallet.

  She paid off the taxi.

  He gave her a name.

  ‘That’s the man you want. Hidden away in the Military Attaché’s office, lowly title, but he’s the intelligence guru . . . No, no, I don’t come in, no. Sorry, but it’s up to you.’ He had his hand across his face. It went with the job, knowing which window, above the Italian restaurant down the far side of the street, housed the remote Five camera that surveyed the Cubans’ doorstep. He walked away from the camera. No bit of a woman had ever made waves to save Percy Martins’ neck, and no bloody woman ever would. Better to let her have her head, but he could not imagine that even the Cubans would be so stupid as to fly into a roused hornet’s nest in Guatemala. No, not even the dumb Cubans . . . But kinder to let her have her head.

  The coming engine drone, she heard the approach of the helicopter.

  She heard it and they all heard it. The helicopter was homing in on them from behind.

  She was at the back and they had all stopped and they had all turned. All of their faces turned to her, shock and anger and despair, looking past her towards the sound of the helicopter . . . Bloody men, useless . . . They had just crossed a river. When it had been raining they would not have been able to make the crossing, but the water had gone down. They were all soaked to their waists and steaming in the day heat. She had crossed the river with Gord, helped him to get the cart across, and then gone back to help the Street Boy with the wheelbarrow. After the battle he was quiet, after the Canadian had gone it was as if the spirit had gone from Gord. He seemed, now, to sag in despair.

  Bloody men. He had said he could not think. He had said he was too tired to think. Idiot bloody men.

  She saw it on the faces of all of them, shock and anger and despair, as the helicopter quartered the airspace above them, closed in on them. Stupid bloody men . . .

  She elbowed her way past them. She stood in front of them. The dog sat at her leg.

  Alex snapped, ‘Look.’

  She took off
her quilted coat. She took off her sweater and dropped it beside the quilted coat. She took off the once white T-shirt and it fell onto her sweater and the quilted coat.

  ‘Idiots, look.’

  She unlaced her boots and kicked them off. She bent and unpeeled her socks and threw them down. She unfastened the belt of her jeans and dragged down the zip and pulled the jeans off her thighs and shins. She looked them hard in the eyes. They were rooted. She pushed down her pants and wriggled them from her ankles.

  ‘Fools, look . . .’

  She stood naked in front of them.

  ‘. . . And I am clean, and one of you is not.’

  Only the sound of the approach of the helicopter.

  She pointed to Gord. It was the order. The machine gun off his shoulder, the belt ammunition off his chest, the camouflage tunic off his body, and the shirt and the vest. The boots off him and the trousers and the socks, and the pants. She saw the pale of his body and the sores of the insect bites and the scars of the thorn scratches and the bare flatness of his stomach.

  ‘Clean . . .’ She pointed to Jorge. ‘You, strip . . .’ She fixed on the Street Boy. ‘You, get on with it . . .’ To the Indians. ‘You and you and you. Best you can, help each other . . .’

  And the one that Gord called Zeppo, and the one that Gord called Harpo. She looked into the face of the one that Gord called Groucho. She saw the pleading. All of them doing as they were told, bloody men. The clothes piling, the weapons heaped. The helicopter banked over them. She had the strength and she knew what she would find. She walked amongst them and some blushed and some turned away. Bloody Gord understood, and about bloody time that he understood . . .

  The man that Gord called Groucho was the last.

  Trembling hands at his coat buttons. Flickering fingers at his trousers.

  The men had moved around him. They stood naked in a circle around Groucho. There was no escape for him. The shape protruded on his belly underneath his vest. She willed herself to watch. She felt the blow of the light wind on her breasts and the warmth of the sun on her stomach. The tears ran on Groucho’s face. His trousers fell to his knees. The helicopter hovered over them. He pulled the vest so slowly up to his armpits. It was exposed. The thin strap, lying across an old appendix scar, had made a cruel weal against his skin. The strap held a small black painted box that was the size of a packet of cigarettes.