Ghosts - 05 (13 page)

“Roger that, Manilla Hotel. POPOV35 is rolling in.”

Milton threw his rifle down and sprinted for the village.

What happened next was unclear and, in the years that had passed since then, he had dreamt it so many times and in so many different ways that it was difficult to separate the truth from his fevered imaginings of it. He was running, as fast as he could, losing his footing in the deep sand and tumbling down the slope to the desert below, his boots scrambling for purchase and his hands sinking into the sand and dust and then he was up again and running hard. The Hog was a couple of miles away now, the engines louder even though the pilot had throttled back so that he could take his time. Milton ran, his boots sinking into the sand, the effort of freeing them so that he could take another step making his thighs and his calves burn. Sweat poured from his face as if it were a squeezed sponge. He made the outskirts of the village and screamed out that they needed to get away, to run, an old crone who was emptying out a pot of dirty water looking at him with alarm but staying right where she was. He ignored her, aiming for the madrasa. He was a hundred yards away and he yelled out his warning again. The Iraqis heard him, stumbling up to their feet and reaching for their rifles before they registered the noise of the jet, realised what it portended, and ran.

Milton ran past them in the opposite direction.

The children had stopped playing now. They were looking at him in confusion. Their ball rolled gently in the wind, bumping up against the side of the yard fence. One of the boys had trotted over to get it and he was closest to Milton. He was five or six.

Milton would always remember his big, brown eyes.

He screamed at them in Arabic to run.

The confusion on the boy’s face would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Too late.

Much, much too late.

Milton looked up at the pale underbelly of the Hog as it boomed overhead, a thousand yards above; the wing pylons were empty. It had dropped its bomb three hundred yards earlier and now half a ton of high explosives fell in a neat and graceful and perfectly judged parabola that terminated at the launcher. Milton couldn’t remembered what came first: the blinding flash of white light or the roar that deafened him. The blast picked him up and tossed him back twenty feet in the direction that he had arrived. The scorching hot pressure wave rolled over him, and then the wave of debris: the remains of the wooden huts, shards of metal from the launcher, the storm of grit and pebbles. He had been dropped on his back and as he opened his eyes he thought that he must have been blinded. The swirling cloud of black fumes was parted by the wind, revealing the same perfectly clear sky overhead. Debris was still falling from the sky around him. Pieces of cloth fluttered down, soaked in blood. The mushroom cloud unfurled overhead. He could smell the explosives. He could smell burning flesh. He rolled and pushed himself onto his knees. A wave of pain swept over him and he had to fight to prevent himself from fainting. He looked around: no launcher, no huts, no madrasa. No children. He looked away to his right, to the skidded splashes of red across the dun brown, and to the ribbons of bloodied flesh that had been strung from the branches of a nearby, newly leafless tree, as if left there to dry in the sun. He looked down at his chest. His shirt was bloodied. He dabbed his fingers down the centre of his sternum, further down his ribcage, to the start of his belly. He felt the rough edge of the shrapnel that had lodged just above his navel.

He didn’t remember very much of what had happened after that. Pope said later that he and the others in the Unit had been disturbed by the approach of the Hog and had seen him running into the village. They saw the bomb detonate and had found him on the lip of a deep crater where the launcher and the madrasa had been. He was slipping in and out of consciousness. They dragged him away. The explosion had painted the sky with a column of smoke fifteen hundred feet high and they knew that if any Iraqi units were nearby they would be sent to investigate. Pope carried him back to the Land Rover and they drove for ten miles until they found an abandoned shack where they had stopped. They had radioed for emergency medivac on their way out of the village but there had been ground-to-air activity and the rotor-heads were proceeding cautiously; they preferred to wait until darkness. None of the other men in the patrol thought Milton would make it. He was delirious and remembered nothing. Pope tended the wound as best he could. He told him afterwards that he was sure that he would bleed out, that there was nothing he could do to stop it, but, he had stayed with him, pressing a compress around the shrapnel until his hands were covered in Milton’s blood and, somehow, he had staunched the flow. An American army Blackhawk was sent to exfiltrate them, guided in by a tactical beacon, and it delivered Milton to the forward operating base in Saudi. He was in theatre almost as soon as the wheels touched down.

It was trite to say that Pope had saved Milton’s life. He had, though; that much was unquestionable. There had been times in the years that followed when Milton had wished that he hadn’t, that he had left him to die in the smoking ruins of the village, because that would have meant that none of what followed would ever have happened. No Group. No Control. No blood on his conscience. Recently, he had started to feel different. He had found the Rooms and the Steps and he felt, for the first time in as long as he could remember, that he had hope. Not the hope of atonement, perhaps, but the chance of a little peace.

Milton thought of Pope in the basement of Shcherbatov’s dacha. He was done for unless he went after him. Milton tried to live his life by the Steps. They had saved his life, he was quite sure about that, and he believed that if he observed them faithfully, they would keep him safe.

The Eighth Step injuncted him to make a list of the people that he had harmed.

The Ninth Step required him to make amends to all of them.

He couldn’t make amends to the people who he had harmed through his work for the Group: one hundred and thirty nine of them were already dead. He chose to interpret those two Steps to mean that he should use his skills to help others. That was how he would make things right. Tonight, as he walked through the busy streets of Hong Kong, the monsoon rains starting to fall again, he knew that he had no choice but to do whatever it took to help his friend, even if doing so would lead to his own death.

He was alright with that.

MILTON GRABBED a couple of hours of sleep, rose quietly at seven and worked out in the hotel gym for a couple of hours before getting breakfast. It was just before eleven when he returned to the room. Anna was dressed and writing an email; she logged off and closed her laptop as he came inside.

“Letting the colonel know I’m still here?”

“Where have you been?”

“The gym,” he said. “I like to run. It helps me focus.”

“And last night?”

“Never mind.”

“I’m afraid I do…”

“Are you ready to go?”

She dropped it as a lost cause and said that she was ready. They found a taxi in the rank outside and Milton asked the driver to take them to Nathan Road. The rain had continued to fall overnight and through the early morning and, even though the temperature was much less oppressive than it would have been during the summer months, it was still warm enough to render the city’s streets cloyingly humid. The driver followed Kimberley Road and then Nathan Road; when they emerged it was midday and the dampness seemed to wash over them. Anna was wearing a loose dress and sandals. Milton had on the suit that the Russians had bought for him together with one of the white t-shirts. He felt the wash of sweat in the small of his back within moments. He raised the umbrella that the hotel concierge had given him and covered them both as they made their way across the sidewalk and into the café.

Calling the place Chungking Mansion was misleading. That made it sound grand and opulent and it most certainly was not that. It
was
large, though: a sprawling collection of shops, takeaways, restaurants and hundreds of hostels with everything from two to twenty rooms spread over five 17-storey tower blocks. Five thousand people lived here, with another ten thousand coming to visit every day. Interpol countries were legally obliged to register foreign nationals when they checked in to hotels but that requirement was flouted here. The hostels could claim that they were distinct from hotels and, in many ways, they were. There were small businesses with a couple of rooms to large dormitories with a dozen beds to more traditionally arranged establishments with single rooms and shared bathrooms. They were cheap, occasionally cheerful, and you got what you paid for in all of them: a night’s sleep, if you were lucky, and not much else besides.

It was a sprawling place, choked with crowds. If you were going to submerge yourself anywhere in Hong Kong you would do it here. You could just sink into the sprawl of humanity. You could do everything you needed to do without ever having to leave.

Milton crossed the traffic with Anna behind him, parted a way through the crowd that had gathered outside the garish entrance and went inside. It was a confusing place, crowded corridors branching off in all directions. Chinese lanterns were suspended from the ceilings and the stall holders crammed in beneath them hawked electronic goods, clothes, DVDs, cell phones and foods for every possible ethnicity. It was a high-rise souk, rammed full of people, especially so with the rain outside: they passed petty traders, asylum seekers, itinerant workers, small-time entrepreneurs, tourists, and the unavoidable gamut of sex workers and substance abusers. Conversations merged into an incessant yammer so that when Anna spoke to him he had to raise his voice to answer. There was a small arcade near the door, the machines adding their own electronic babble to the cacophony, a clatter of coins as a lucky punter lined up three cherries; the screech of metal as a key-cutter copied a key; the bubble and hiss of hot oil as fries were lowered into a fryer; an argument between a money changer and his customer; talk radio hosts vying with broadcasts of Muslim prayer meetings and shows playing western music. The air carried the odour of hundreds of damp and sweaty bodies, the tang of sweet-and-sour sauce from a fast-food joint, the heady sweetness of decomposing trash.

Milton pressed through the crowd, bumping against a pair of pasty-skinned backpackers with bewildered expressions on their faces, and found his way to a uniformed guard with an elevated position, his elbows resting on the balustrade of a flight of stairs that led up to the first floor.

The Russians had provided them with the name of the hostel where they believed Beatrix had been staying. “Do you know the Golden Guest House?” he asked the man.

The man shrugged.

“It’s a hostel.”

The man shrugged again, the corner of his mouth curling up in a suggestive smile.

“Here,” Anna said, pressing a ten dollar note into his hand.

He folded the note once, then twice, and slipped it into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Other side of building,” he said. He gave them directions and left them to find it.

THE HOSTEL was on the third floor at the end of a maze of windowless corridors that Milton found intensely claustrophobic. He had completely lost his sense of direction and, the deeper they penetrated the warren of rooms, the more vulnerable he felt. An ambush here would be difficult to escape. The Golden Guest House was announced by a painted sign and the open door beneath gave onto a tiny lobby with a bored looking man behind the desk. It was hot and sticky. A broken desk fan sat impotently on a low table between two battered sofas, yellowed stuffing leaking out between rents in the leather that looked like they had been torn open at the point of a knife. The man behind the desk was small and sallow faced, eating a piece of greasy chicken with his fingers as he watched American wrestling. He barely looked up as Milton and Anna entered.

“I’m looking for a woman,” Milton said.

“We all look for woman,” the man said with a lewd smirk at Anna.

“A friend of mine. I think she’s staying here.”

“Can’t talk about guest. Confidential.”

Milton had a photograph of Beatrix that the Russians had provided. It was old, from before the time of the hit on Shcherbatov, and she was dressed in what Milton thought was a police uniform. The likeness was good from what he could remember but it was nearly ten years out of date; time would have aged her, surely, not to mention the changes she would have effected herself. He laid it flat on the counter and left a hundred dollar bill on top of it. The clerk sucked the grease from his fingers and then wiped them on his shirt, pocketed the bill and turned the photograph around so that he could look at it properly. He put a finger up his nostril and turned it around absently. “I don’t know. Maybe I know her, maybe I don’t. Hard to be sure.”

Milton dropped another hundred on the counter and, as the man reached for it, Milton caught his hand and squeezed.

“Ow!” he said. “That hurts!”

“You take me to her room now, alright?”

Milton knew taekwondo and all of the pressure points. His thumb was pushing on the nerve, sending exquisite bolts of pain up the arm. The man winced and thought better of trying to inveigle another hundred out of him. “Okay, I show.”

Milton smiled politely and released the man’s hand.

He led them through a narrow corridor to a tiny box of a room with a single bed, a suitcase propped against the wall and an old-fashioned cathode ray portable television set resting atop a rickety dresser. The A/C unit above the bed gurgled and expectorated a trail of moisture that had stained the wall. There were no windows and, although there was a bathroom, it was only just big enough for the toilet with the result that the shower head was directly overhead.

“How long has she been here?”

“Don’t know. Six month, seven month, maybe more.”

“On her own?”

“Yes.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“No. No speak with guests.”