Authors: Simon Conway
It was like travelling back in time. Nothing had changed. A bed as narrow as a coffin and posters on the ceiling because the walls were floor-to-ceiling bookcases arranged with a librarian’s care. His father called it the submariner’s cabin. The last time he lay here was in the immediate aftermath of the break-up of a relationship. Then as now his life had seemed in ruins.
He rolled over and looked under the bed. His 2000 AD collection remained there in cardboard boxes, each individual comic stored in a clear plastic sleeve. Once upon a time he had imagined himself as Johnny Alpha, the
mutant bounty hunter who tracked down his own kind across an apocalyptic landscape. It was funny really, when you thought about it. He rolled back. Above him there was a ledge and wedged between Milan Kundera and Hanif Kureishi a bundle of letters, communications from his mother during his first year at Oxford.
And the list: the archaeology of a failed romance.
As he was leaving, after she’d told him their relationship was over, his GP fiancée had handed him a piece of paper. He remembered going out to the car and sitting and reading the contents. It was a list of who he was. It was more than just a parting shot; she’d clearly been working on it for weeks if not months. It was a compilation of difficult truths in ink, pencil and fluorescent marker. As badly written as her prescriptions. It had been folded and unfolded. It had clearly been scrunched up and then flattened out at some stage. There was a translucent smudge of olive oil and several burgundy wine-rings.
It said:
Who are YOU?
Alien
mask-wearing/stealth-loving
Angry idealist
good in bed
Autistic spectrum
Mama’s boy
warmonger
JANISSARY
thief
SPY
His first act had been to neatly fold back the bottom line before tearing it off, carefully removing the word SPY.
Never advertise the fact of what you are. Always clear up after yourself
. He imagined how much that would have annoyed her. He hadn’t been angry with her. The list was difficult to argue with. He took it as a measure of her frustration and despair. It was a variant of a question that she had asked him throughout their short engagement. Who are you? What are you? Why do you do what you do?
He remembered one stolen afternoon together in the Print and Drawings Room of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and in response to an innocent question he’d explained to her that the Janissaries were Christian boys captured by the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century, forcibly converted to Islam and trained to be soldiers in the Sultan’s army, at that time the greatest army in the world. They were neither freemen nor ordinary slaves. They were supervised twenty-four hours a day, indoctrinated and subjected to severe discipline. They were prohibited from taking up any skill other than war. As a consequence they were ferocious and utterly loyal.
‘They had no choice about it,’ he told her. ‘They had fought to erase their own civilisation. They had nowhere else to turn to.’
She had waited until that evening before ambushing him. ‘Is that how you see yourself, as a Janissary?’
‘I am what I am by choice,’ he’d replied.
‘You wish!’
She hadn’t mentioned it again, though she’d clearly saved it up for the List.
On the subject of the Iraq war she had always been forthright: ‘You’re an apologist for Blair.’
He wasn’t that. After all, he’d been there – he’d flown into Baghdad in April 2003 expecting it to be an Aladdin’s cave of documents with evidence of WMDs and links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. In the days following he’d sat in living rooms with agents who confessed they had no idea where the stuff was. These were the same sources that, before the war, had been telling anyone who cared to listen that WMD could be launched inside forty-five minutes. They’d have said anything to be rid of Saddam. He felt that endless to-and-fro over whether the public had been lied to about the threat in the build-up to the Iraq war served as a kind of smokescreen for a wider and more fundamental failing, the sheer incompetence of the endeavour.
‘I don’t mind that we did it,’ Ed had told her. ‘I mind that we did it so badly. Nobody gave a thought to how the country would stand up to invasion or what would come after. They didn’t understand Iraq’s tribal and social structures or its religious divide. I don’t think Blair even knew the difference between a Shi’ite and a Sunni when we went in. He was the guy that put the New into New Labour. It was all about the future. Nobody was interested in history or past mistakes. They didn’t read history books. They really thought that things could only get better. We charged into Basra with no thought for the consequences and to make our lives easy we handed control of the city over to a bunch of Iranian-backed death-squads who went to work on the populace with electric cable and power drills.’
‘So why didn’t you do something about it?’ she yelled.
‘What could I do?’
She sneered. ‘You’re pathetic.’
It would be the same in Helmand in 2006. Another failure. A too eager government and the usual gaggle of over-ambitious generals had convinced themselves that a British contingent could deploy down there in soft-skinned vehicles on a operation in which not a shot would be fired. No one gave any thought to the skill with which the Mujahideen had used roadside bombs to disrupt Soviet armoured convoys down there in the eighties. No one imagined a repeat of that. No one gave a thought to what happened the last time a British army went down there. A thousand British and Indian troops slaughtered at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880. Nobody outside of a university in Britain remembered that. But they did in Helmand. They might not have the Internet or TV or much schooling but they did have oral history. Tales they told themselves. Mostly about how they beat the invaders or died trying. Resistance was in their psyche and their folklore. They even had their own Joan of Arc. At Maiwand a young woman named Malalai had ripped off her veil and used it as a standard to lead the Pashtuns to victory, shouting out: ‘If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, by God someone is saving you as a token of shame.’
You couldn’t beat people who believed that kind of hokum.
He remembered sitting in the car outside the house that he was no longer welcome in. He’d folded the List up and driven the car east, back to his roots in Whitechapel, the immigrant enclave that had first propelled him out into the
world. He remembered thinking that he was ashamed of spying, of how little good it had done. It was a kind of drug, similar to heroin in its effects, a fetish that attracted violence and criminality. The realisation had come to him suddenly, here on this bed, as if it had been waiting for the chance to find him alone. He’d suppressed it and got on with his job. But now there was nothing to hold it at bay.
It wasn’t just that his life felt like a succession of lies, it was that he felt like he was lost in a maze, a hall of mirrors, and the faces that stared back at him were distorted beyond all recognition.
17. On tenterhooks
The Gulberg cellar reeked of blood with a sly background whiff of piss and shit. The hanging man’s veins were pumping out blood faster than a halal chicken, as if they were in a hurry to be rid of it.
Noman took a long and unsatisfying drag on his cigarette and tried to remember the first time he realised that blood had a smell. There had been so much of it over the years, buckets full of it, bathtubs even. It was difficult to remember. He felt sure that it would have been in a space much like this one, either a cell or a basement, or in the “fingernail factory”, the ISI’s purpose-built interrogation facility in Islamabad. Khan would have been there of course, shepherding him through the first weeks of his induction in the methods of intelligence gathering. Khan had been so keen to show him the ropes. Somebody else would have been inflicting the damage of course. Khan didn’t like to get his hands dirty. Noman did remember Khan telling him to pay attention to the particulars of anatomy and painting: ‘You must find within yourself the knowledge, assurance and dexterity of a surgeon but also the boldness, imagination and daring of a baroque painter.
’
Eager to please, he had learned the names of muscles, organs, bones and veins. He had surfed the internet for paintings. He had learned to wield the blade and the baton with both care and abandon.
Badchodiyaan!
It was all bullshit. Torture wasn’t an art or a science. Just because there were swags of blood on the wall it didn’t make him Caravaggio. He was a mechanic salvaging scraps in a wrecker’s yard.
As ever in the aftermath of an interrogation, Noman felt a wearying sense of disappointment. Every torture victim was initially fascinating and unique. It was a ritual as febrile as courtship. You ingested a life. It filled you with information, some of it useful. But the violence wore through the uniqueness so quickly. Soon the victim’s will was gone and all that was left was finite flesh with its dumb obedience to physics – cut deeply enough and this comes off, whack hard enough and that ruptures.
It was always a let down.
Noman stubbed out the Flake on the victim’s skin. There was barely a response, just a soft and plaintive sigh. The man had resigned himself to death.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Noman told him, whispering in his ear. ‘I love you and I will shortly send you to Paradise.’
This much Noman knew. The victim’s name was Ghazan. He was a battlefield medic trained by the infidel Americans in the eighties, back when they were doing their utmost to turf the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Heady times. Back then anybody could set themselves up as freedom fighter, Mujahideen groups sprouted like mushrooms. They’d put a
Kalashnikov
in your hands and point you at the border. The Russians had gunned them down in droves, of course, hence the need for medics.
For the last few years Ghazan had made his living puttering around the tribal areas on a motorbike, providing first aid to sick and wounded Taliban fighters in their mountain hideouts. In return he’d been offered food and lodging and occasionally a few rupees. In 2008 he had come to the attention of Baitullah Mehsud, the black-bearded head of the feared and powerful Mehsud clan and leader of the newly formed
Tehrik-i-Taliban
, the Pakistani Taliban. Ghazan’s
training as a medic held great personal appeal to Baitullah, who was afflicted with diabetes and peripheral arterial disease in his legs. Deemed trustworthy, Ghazan had become his personal physician and remained so until just before Baitullah’s death in a drone strike in August 2009. The recent rapid increase in the tempo of drone strikes and several close shaves with Hellfire missiles had forced Ghazan to park-up his bike and curtail his activities. For the last two months he’d been holed up in the South Waziristan market town of Wana. It was there that he had come to Noman’s attention. Noman arranged to have Ghazan watched and followed and when he next made an attempt to leave the town he’d had him detained at a police checkpoint and brought here, in the boot of a car, to the basement of Tariq’s parents’ house in Lahore.
On the subject of the House of War and its elusive, shadowy leader Abu Dukhan, Ghazan had little to reveal. He claimed that he had no direct experience of the man or the organization. He had never treated any of its fighters and had no knowledge of the group’s whereabouts. Like others in Baitullah’s circle he had heard whispers of an
itami
device being prepared in the mountains, but he had not been privy to any secret conversations. Under interrogation he had revealed one interesting piece of information though. It was said that a mullah, who had fought and lost his leg at the Battle of Jalalabad had officiated at the wedding
Nikah
of Abu Dukhan’s youngest son to a local girl in Bajaur Agency.
Noman felt the first flicker of excitement at the news, a stirring of the loins. After weeks of fruitless searching he had finally uncovered a clue. It wasn’t much, he knew that, more than ten thousand fighters had been involved in the disastrous assault on Jalalabad and one-legged mullahs were ten-a-penny in the tribal areas but it was a start. It demonstrated that Abu Dukhan wasn’t infallible. He hadn’t entirely erased his tracks.
He realised that while he had been standing there thinking, Ghazan had bled out. The man was dead and there was no point lingering. He banged on the door to be let out.
‘Clear up the mess,’ he told Raja Mahfouz, once the door was opened. ‘Dump the body in a ditch.’
He climbed the stairs to the waiting widow.
#
Throughout the arid parts of the earth almost everyone sees Paradise as an oasis. Was that what Ghazan had been thinking of there at the end, a lush garden in the desert? For most of Noman’s army colleagues the image of Paradise was the military cantonment with its clean, neatly signposted streets gleaming with antique artillery pieces. But when Noman dreamt of Paradise. He dreamt of a world rid of people. Everything engulfed in brilliant, cleansing fire.
He had slept, woken, fucked and now lay limbs akimbo, spread-eagled like a starfish beside the widow. He’d forgotten that sex could do this, cause total dissolution, cast him into the void of his dreams and then reel him back out again, scourged.
The widow was so gloriously unhinged, a study in Stockholm syndrome. He’d shared with her his belief that Ghazan would lead him to the House of War and then he’d described the act of torture in all its colourful detail and what he’d mistaken at first for horror and agitation had turned out to be feverish arousal – during the telling she had developed the glazed, hilarious expression of an Abu
Ghraib guard. A little girl caught in a dirty act. He’d winked like an over-friendly uncle and told her what he was going to do to Khan once he proved that he had betrayed his country.
He felt like he’d died and been reborn. He felt as blissfully content as an alley cat. Nothing would now stop him from finding the House of War. But then, as abrupt as a dawn raid, a question came needling into his brain. What if he found them? What then? He doubted that he’d be satisfied with breaking up the group, killing its members and confiscating their bomb-making materials. Stripping Abu Dukhan of his anonymity in a basement cell didn’t hold any particular appeal. So what was it that he wanted from the House of War?