‘It’s just those black and white stripes. They reminded me of something. When we get to the top, I’ll tell you.’ And to deflect his curiosity, I asked, ‘Boots okay?’
‘Sure and all.’ He looked down at his new green-and-grey Goretex ankle-length trainers and turned his feet in and out to show them off.
‘We’re all set, then.’ I locked the car and pocketed the key. ‘Let’s go.’
My small day-sack contained a minimum of kit: our picnic lunch, a water bottle, two waterproofs and a sweater for each of us, plus a spare pair of socks for Tim. The whole thing can’t have weighed more than ten pounds, yet as soon as we started up the steep track alongside the wood, it began to feel full of lead. Jesus! I thought. Oh for the days when I used to
run
up here with a load of bricks in my Bergen.
For a while Tim didn’t notice that I was labouring. He was excited by the climb and skipped on ahead. I liked the athletic way he moved, and laughed to myself when he turned round to shout and tell me to hurry up. But soon I was sweating and panting too much to see the funny side of anything, and I had to call a halt.
‘Take it easy,’ I called, sitting against a bank. ‘Let’s be like the tortoise, slow but sure.’
‘Dad,’ said Tim, looking up at me, ‘how old are you?’
‘Ninety-nine.’ I pretended to be offended. ‘And mind your own business.’ Then I laughed, and said, ‘No – I’m nearly forty.’
‘That’s not very old.’
‘Old enough. Four times what you are.’
Still he was looking at me. ‘But you look nearly as old as Gramp. Your hair’s going grey.’
‘Thanks! That’s because I’ve had a hard life. Wait till we get a bit higher, and I’ll tell you a few things about it.’
‘Why’s your face so yellow?’
‘Must be the African sun.’
So began a strange but rewarding climb. Somehow I’d gained Tim’s full attention and got him hanging on my words. So, every time we slowly climbed a few hundred feet, I’d call a halt and tell another story about SAS operations – in Libya, Colombia, the Gulf, Ulster. Without planning it, I found I was working backwards through my career, and when we reached the obelisk, about halfway to the summit, I’d got to the point of explaining about SAS selection courses, and how I’d been over this very route hundreds of times, first training for my own selection, then training others.
We sat down by the obelisk, which is a memorial to Tommy Jones, a boy who got lost in the mist trying to cross the hill from one farm to another, and never reached home.
‘It was twenty-nine days before anyone knew what had become of him,’ I said. ‘Then they found him curled up in this hollow, where the pillar is now.’
‘Was he asleep?’
‘No, no. He was dead. He’d died of exposure that first night. That’s why you mustn’t ever go into the hills without a compass.’
Tim listened intently as I told the story. Then, looking round, he asked, ‘Why aren’t there any trees up here?’
‘It’s too high, and too cold. The higher you go, the colder it gets. Also, there’s hardly any soil.’ I scuffed at the grass with the toe of my boot and showed him that rock lay just beneath the roots. Then on an impulse I asked, ‘D’you remember your mum?’
He shook his head. ‘Not really. Gran’s got a picture of her, that’s all.’ After a pause, he said, ‘Dad – why did she die?’
‘I know
how
she died. She was killed by a terrorist bomb, out shopping in Belfast, in the city centre. But as to why – that’s a difficult question.’
‘Was it because you were in the army?’
‘No, no. They wouldn’t have known your mum was married to a soldier. She wasn’t a target. The bomb went off prematurely. It was an own-goal. The bomber was killed, along with five innocent civilians.’
‘Was it because we’re Prots, then?’
‘It was a bit to do with religion, yes. I’m afraid there’s always going to be some people who hate other people, just because of what they believe in. The bomber was a Catholic, but he wasn’t targeting your mother specially.’
To change the subject I waved around us, and said, ‘You might not believe it, but I know every rock, every bend on this path. Every yard of it holds a memory for me. Right here, by this big slab, a guy sat on an adder and got bitten in the backside. Over there, a fellow called Richard came off his quad bike and broke his leg. Now, look at that!’
Across a valley a group of eight men had appeared, walking hard in single file up a ridge, silhouetted against the cloud. They were wearing DPMs, and from their fast pace and strained attitude – leaning forward to take the weight of their Bergens – I could tell they were under pressure, hurrying to reach an RV inside the time limit.
‘Just what I was telling you,’ I said. ‘Those guys are training for selection.’
‘Where are they going?’
‘They’ve probably got to get round a set course in a given time, calling at check-points as they go.’
The sight almost made me feel young again. Yet no amount of fresh air and fine scenery could banish the knowledge that I was in lousy shape – and not just short of breath, but afflicted by a deep, leaden heaviness all over my body, and a feeling that I wanted to throw up, even though there was nothing to get rid of. Already I’d twice thought I was going to have to call off our ascent, but somehow, each time, I’d got going again.
I looked down at Tim and saw he was thinking. I couldn’t help comparing him with my own ten-year-old self. At his age I was constantly fighting to defend myself against school bullies. Most days they’d pick on someone, and provoke him so the fight took place on the way out of school, where all the other kids were lined up to watch. Tim never mentioned fights; besides Kath’s looks, he’d evidently inherited her calm temperament, and that pleased me.
Presently, he asked, ‘Dad – it’s wrong to kill people, isn’t it?’
‘In peacetime, yes. But in war it’s different. You sometimes have to kill the bad guys, to stop them killing you.’
‘But people are still getting killed at home. There isn’t a war on now.’
‘Well, in a way there is. There was then, anyway.’
I felt his next question coming.
‘How many people have you killed, Dad?’
‘Not many at all.’
‘How many, though?’
‘I’d have to make a count. I’ve never tried to work it out. Often in a battle, if one of the enemy gets dropped, you can’t tell who’s done it. Guys go down, but there’s so much noise and confusion you don’t know where the bullets have come from. You haven’t got time to worry. All you know is, it’s going to be them or you. Let’s go on a bit while I think.’
Still Tim was staring at me curiously. Then he asked, ‘Are you a colonel, or what?’
‘A colonel!’ I laughed. ‘Heavens no. A colonel’s a rupert.’
‘What’s a rupert?’
‘An officer. I’m a
warrant
officer, a sergeant-major. It’s people like me who run the show.’
‘What do ruperts do, then?’
‘Make a lot of noise and sign forms.’
‘I’ve got a friend called Rupert. Does that mean his father’s a colonel?’
‘Oh no. It’s only an army word – a kind of slang. A rupert’s any officer, from a second lieutenant to a general.’
Suddenly I spotted movement in the valley beneath us. Two RAF Tornados were heading almost straight for us. Their dappled camouflage made them hard to pick out against the variegated background. They’d slipped round a shoulder of the mountain in a tight turn, below our level, and were climbing hard in our direction.
‘Look out!’ I shouted. ‘This is going to be noisy. Cover your ears!’
I was just in time. If we hadn’t been prepared, the jets would have given us a bad fright. Even with hands clasped to our heads we were rocked by the thunderclap of their engines as they roared past, with fire blazing from the tails as their re-heats blasted them upwards and over the ridge.
For a moment Tim was shaken, but he recovered immediately and said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’
‘Be a pilot? Well, if you could hack it, at least you’d see some action. The fast-jet boys are always the ones who get deployed.’
We talked about the G-forces the pilots would be experiencing – how, if you pull five G, you can hardly lift your hands off your knees, your head weighs the equivalent of fifty pounds, and all your blood tries to run down to your feet, so that only the special suit you’re wearing prevents you passing out.
By then the clouds were thinning and breaking, and I pointed out various landmarks as they came into sight. At last we skirted Cribben and moved out on to the short, dry grass that sloped gently up to the summit. I almost said, ‘Race you to the top,’ but I knew I couldn’t accelerate to save my life. Tim was ahead anyway, so I just called, ‘On you go. I’ll see you up there.’
Five minutes later we were sitting in bright sunshine on top of the mountain, where the trig stone used to stand, with a 360-degree panorama spread out below us. I felt a little flutter of elation at having reached the highest point and seeing all the familiar landmarks, even if it was for the last time.
‘Chicken or BLT?’ I said, breaking out the sandwiches.
‘What’s BLT?’
‘Bacon, lettuce and tomato, with mayonnaise.’
‘Chicken, please.’
‘There you go.’ I handed him the packet, along with a can of Coke. ‘Get that down you, and I’ll tell you about the witch doctor.’
‘What’s a witch doctor?’
‘Someone who puts spells on you.’
‘Why does he do it, though?’
‘Well – for money. He’s like a combination of doctor and magician. People pay him to cure them of diseases and suchlike.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘I expect they are all different. But the one we saw was tall and thin.’
‘Like Rasputin?’
‘Let’s see.’ I was thrown for a moment, because that was the name we’d given one of the Russian mercenaries we came across in Kamanga. Then I said, ‘The mad monk, you mean?’
‘In
Anastasia
.’
‘Oh,
that
one. No, not like him. For one thing our witch doctor was black, and for another he didn’t have a beard.’
The boy was staring at me, full of curiosity. ‘Were you scared of him, Dad?’
‘Not at first. I thought he was a phoney. But later, yes. I did get
very
scared, with all the things that happened. Come on, now, eat your lunch, and I’ll tell you.’
TWO
Every day for the past couple of weeks the sun had grown slightly hotter, until at noon the temperature had started to hit the low nineties. But the nights were still quite chilly, and now once again, as full darkness closed in, the air was cooling quickly.
As if reacting to a command, several of the lads moved closer to the fire, all at the same moment, dragging their seats forward so that the steel ammunition boxes grated over the beaten earth. We’d made the fire in typical Kamangan fashion, with branches of dead mopane wood pointing inwards like the spokes of a cartwheel, so that all you had to do to stoke the blaze from time to time was to push a piece inwards towards the hub. Mopane, we’d soon discovered, was an ideal fuel. The sticks burned so steadily that they’d smoulder all night, but you could make them flare up again into a hot fire when you revived them in the morning.
Above us, the leaves of two big mahogany trees shivered as a breeze ran through them, and all around in the bush crickets were sounding off a continuous, zinging buzz. From the edge of the village, a hundred metres away, came bursts of laughter and chat as the locals brewed up supper, separated from us only by a grass stockade they’d built in a pathetic attempt to deter elephants from raiding their little stores of maize.
I looked round the circle of familiar faces. Including myself, there were eight of us, all with low-mow haircuts. One of the traditions in the Regiment is that nobody need have a squaddie’s traditional short back-and-sides. Recently, it was true, one or two officious individuals had crept up through ranks and gone about fining people anything from £50 to £100 for looking unkempt. But that was exceptional. It was also ridiculous, because one of the SAS’s skills has always been to blend in with the local population. Here in Africa there was no chance of that, and for this trip to a hot and bug-ridden country everyone had opted for crew-cuts, so the guys had a vaguely American appearance.
The glow of the flames was softening their complexions, even Whinger Watson’s. The ruddy light seemed to iron some of the wrinkles out of his face; certainly it disguised the grey bristles in his Mexican-type moustache. Like me, he was heading for forty, and had that strained, heavily lined appearance which SAS guys tend to get from repeatedly pushing themselves to their physical limits, and also from the mental stress of working and playing hard; but now he looked ten years younger. He and I were so much the senior members of the party that we spent a lot of time together, and tended to compare notes about the younger guys, almost as if they were apprentices in our trade.