A Loyal Spy (17 page)

‘Mum says that the faculty is threatening to have you evicted.’

‘Really?’

His father didn’t seem much concerned. ‘She’s worried,’ Jonah said.

‘They can’t evict me. The nest’s too big to move and besides we have a TV crew now. I’m a celebrity. I’m invulnerable, for now at least.’

The coffee boiled and he filled two cups.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Drink that.’

The coffee was thick, black and gritty, which is how he had always drunk it. They stared at each other over the rims of their cups. It was time to do his mother’s bidding.

‘How are you?’ Jonah asked.

His father pulled a face. ‘It’s happening gradually: a misplaced word here and there. Memories slip away. I forget people’s faces. I get my students to wear name tags. I’ve got one for you in a drawer somewhere. Under your name it says
son
– you’ll know when it’s time to start wearing it. We’ll be able to get to know each other all over again every time.’

‘Mum says you’ve stopped coming home.’

‘Someone needs to keep an eye on the nest. I have a camp bed here. It’s not uncomfortable.’

‘Mum wants you to come home.’

‘Your mother has an aversion to events that are out of her control.’

‘She’s worried about you.’

‘Lots of people are worried about me. They like to tell me how worried they are. I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t join them.’

‘I promised I’d try, Dad.’

‘Well done. You tried. Now, drink your coffee.’ He took a packet of cigarettes out of the drawer. ‘Smoke?’

‘No thanks.’

‘I’ve taken it up,’ his father said. ‘After all, why not?’

It had been six months since his father had been diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s, six months in which to contemplate the inevitability of his physical and mental decline. There was nothing good to say about Alzheimer’s.

‘Are you still staying in that place on Black Prince Road?’ his father asked.

‘Yes,’ Jonah replied.

‘Have you got yourself a girlfriend?’

‘No.’

‘You can’t always live in the past,’ his father told him gently. ‘It’s just memories. You’ve got to look to the future. That’s what I’m doing.’

‘I’ll try, Dad.’

Jonah looked at his watch. It was time that he left. He had to drive back up to London and pack for the flight to Afghanistan. He set his coffee cup down on its saucer.

‘Shall I walk you out?’ his father asked.

‘I’d like that.’

His father accompanied Jonah down the corridor and through the glasshouses, to the great hall and beyond it the main entrance. It was a long walk. Jonah reflected that they hadn’t always made each other’s lives easy. He was an irritating and difficult son. His father could be short-tempered. But that was all gone now, there was no more competition. Alzheimer’s had rubbed it away, leaving them with just this moment. They paused on the steps and embraced clumsily. It had stopped raining, and the lawns sparkled with droplets of water.

‘I’m glad that we had time to get to know each other,’ his father told him.

It was only later, when he was on his own, that he realised that his father had said goodbye. He was lying on his back, with his backpack as a pillow, staring at the ceiling of a hangar at RAF Brize Norton, when it came to him. It had been almost matter-of-fact, as if the issue had already been decided and he had been aware of it as an outcome for some time – a sad and precious parting.

For hours, while he waited for the plane, he turned the thought over in his mind.

December 2001–January 2002

Jonah corkscrewed into Kandahar by night with a cargo of freshly captured prisoners, the plane’s descent near vertical to deter Stinger missile attack. They hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud, and bounced down the rutted runway towards the darkened terminal building, while the cargo ramp descended and airmen in insect-like goggles and flak jackets pulled the manacled and hooded ­prisoners to their feet. Jonah tightened the straps on his backpack and tapped the magazine on his rifle to check that it was secure.

The plane spun on its axis at the end of the runway and military policemen swarmed out of the icy darkness with red-lensed torches. An airman yelled, ‘
Move!’
,
and the ragged line of prisoners stumbled down the ramp, their breath escaping in clouds through the burlap sacks over their heads. Everyone was screaming – MPs, prisoners, airmen – the stream of commands and ­obscenities inaudible as the spinning plane’s engines roared in preparation for take-off.

Jonah followed the line of prisoners across the tarmac and through a sheet-metal door, into a barbed-wire enclosure lit up with stadium lights and overlooked by watchtowers manned by armed MPs. The prisoners were hurled into sandbag pin-downs where MPs in surgical gloves cut away their rags with scissors. A huge MP flashed his torch in Jonah’s face and demanded that he identify himself.

‘Jonah. OGA attached,’ Jonah shouted back at him, supplying the words that he had been given. OGA –
Other Government Agency
– CIA nomenclature.

‘You are now in a combat zone,’ the MP yelled. ‘You will keep the magazine in your rifle at all times. You will never leave your rifle more than an arm’s length from you. You will engage any target that threatens you. Is that clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘This way.’ The MP led him down an abattoir-like tent tunnel past a line of naked prisoners and a doctor who was screening them, his gloved hands moving across their skin and probing their mouths. They hurried through a cloud of lice powder and past piles of rubber-soled shoes, blankets and brightly coloured jumpsuits. At the end of the tent a couple of FBI agents with cameras and flashguns were waiting expectantly for the first of the processed prisoners. The MP led Jonah past them, out of the tent and past a row of smoking oil barrels giving off the sweet, sickly scent of burning human excrement. They went through another sheet-metal door into a mud-walled compound with eight large tents, each one surrounded by concertina wire. They skirted the row of tents, stepping between the stumps of apple trees, and exited through another door.

The MP walked over to the first of a huddle of olive-drab tents, tapped on the pole and stuck his head inside the flap.

‘Got the OGA for Silent Bob here, sir.’

‘Send him in,’ someone called.

The MP stepped back and held the flap open for Jonah. ‘In you go, sir.’

Inside, a group of army interrogators and analysts, bundled up in flannel shirts and winter parkas, sat in camp chairs tapping away at laptops or lying sprawled on cot beds. One of them, wearing a sergeant’s stripes, looked up from a sheaf of papers and said, ‘You’re OGA Jonah?’

‘That’s me.’

‘You’re late.’

Jonah recognised the type: hard working and fiercely proud, trying to hold together his team in the bleakest conditions. And every day getting walked all over by outside agencies – it was no wonder he resented the intrusion.

‘I’m here now,’ Jonah told him in a neutral tone.

‘Tired?’

‘Not particularly,’ Jonah replied, though in truth he was exhausted by a trip that had brought him from Rhein-Mein US Air Force base in Germany via Incirlik in Turkey and a former Soviet air force base in Uzbekistan to Bagram airbase on the outskirts of Kabul, where they had picked up the consignment of prisoners, and now, finally, Kandahar. He was determined not to show it. ‘I’d like to see the prisoner immediately.’

‘Let’s do it, then. Nakamura, take him to the Joint Interrogation Facility, and you there, Heaney, go and fetch Silent Bob from the cages.’

A young Japanese American with a crew cut looked up from his laptop and gave a quick nod, while behind him a tall and skinny white man rolled off his cot with a groan and stuck his bare feet in a pair of boots.

‘This way, sir,’ said the soldier named Nakamura, pulling a woollen cap down over his ears. He led Jonah from the tent past a ramshackle collection of bomb-damaged buildings towards a large metal gate at the entrance to a walled compound. The gate was topped with barbed wire and was marked with a spray-painted sign that said
NO ENTRY
. There were guard towers manned by MPs with machine guns and the area beyond the gate was lit up with stadium lighting.

An MP opened the gate and waved them in.

‘Welcome to the Rock,’ Nakamura said.

Inside, they walked down a passage between the outer tin wall and an inner mud wall that was fifteen feet high and decorated with a mural with the silhouettes of the Twin Towers superimposed on an image of the Pentagon. Underneath were the words
WE WILL NEVER FORGET
.

Nakamura led him past murals of the New York Police Department and Fire Department shields, and through a beaten metal door into a high-walled compound with a set of six round tents in two rows surrounded by barbed wire. Each tent had a piece of cardboard above its entrance with a number from 1 to 6 written on it. At the end of the compound, between the rows of tents, there was a fire burning in a halved oil barrel. A huddle of interrogators and MPs were standing around it, feeding cardboard into the fire. They looked up as Jonah approached.

‘You’re the guy here to see Silent Bob?’ asked one of the interrogators.

‘You think he’s going to talk to you?’ added another.

‘Maybe,’ Jonah replied.

‘You better watch him real close,’ said one of the MPs, ‘he bites. He just about took one of Lopez’s ears off.’

‘Here he comes,’ said another.

The door at the far end of the compound clattered open and a prisoner in a blue jumpsuit, handcuffs and leg irons was hauled through it and forced to race with baby steps by an MP on each arm. His head was covered in a sandbag and steam rose out of the pointy ends like devil’s horns. Nakamura pointed to the nearest tent and the MPs took the prisoner inside.

‘You want me in there with you?’ Nakamura asked.

‘No, I’m fine, thanks,’ Jonah replied. He felt excitement rising in him like a wave and rubbed his face in an involuntary spasm.

The MPs emerged. ‘Do your best,’ one of them said.

Jonah ducked through the flap. There was a propane tank in the corner with a coil that spurted flame and a huge MP standing to one side with a wooden baton. The prisoner was sitting on a camp chair, still wearing his hood. Opposite him was a second chair. Jonah sat in it. The first thing that he noticed was the smell – a sharp, animal reek – rising off the prisoner, and then his stillness. The hands lightly cupped in his lap, his knuckles covered in scabs. He struggled to remember,
was Nor ever this still?

‘Shall I remove the hood, sir?’ the MP asked.

Jonah nodded.

The MP stepped forward and with a flourish pulled off the sandbag.

Jonah stifled a gasp. He barely recognised him. Nor’s face was a death mask, a skull-like landscape of ridges and flint-like points with the skin stretched taut across them. His neck was ­impossibly thin and his shaven head was covered in faded, yellowing bruises. His lips were cracked and purple from the cold, and strings of frozen snot hung from his nostrils. Looking at him, with his head hanging and his hands and feet in chains, Jonah was filled with shame at seeing his friend so degraded.

‘Can you take off the cuffs?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ the MP told him firmly.

Nor lifted his head and accused Jonah with his hard and cavernous eyes.

‘I came as quickly as I could,’ Jonah said, and in doing so acknowledged that there was never going to be an end to his sense of responsibility. From the schoolyard to the parade square, from the Home Counties to the North-West Frontier, Jonah had been his keeper and his mentor. ‘You have to talk to me,’ he told Nor, ‘if you want to get out of here.’

Nor closed his eyes and tipped his head back, exposing the tiny purple veins in his eyelids, displaying a sort of weary fatalism.

‘If you don’t talk to me they’ll send you to Guantanamo. Once you’re there you won’t get out.’

Nor opened his eyes, lowered his head and spoke in a voice that was barely a whisper: ‘As for the unbelievers, their works are like a mirage in the desert. The thirsty traveller thinks it is water, but when he comes near he finds that it is nothing.’

Jonah recognised it as coming from the Koran’s twenty-fourth sura, al-Nur, the Light. ‘I’m here to offer you a deal.’

Nor raised his head again and studied Jonah. ‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘You’re an errand boy.’

‘Yeah, and you’re Mr Kurtz. Fuck you.’

Jonah woke to the crackle of machine-gun fire in the darkness. Men were tumbling out of the camp beds around him and reaching for their boots, rifles and combat gear. After a couple of minutes of frantic fumbling someone shouted ‘Let’s move’ and suddenly they were running – a scattering of adrenalin-filled shadows – towards the terminal building.

They took cover with a group of marines beside a burned-out snack bar in the baggage reclaim area and listened for an hour or so to the sound of incoming machine-gun fire on the perimeter and the pop and crash of outgoing mortar fire. Rumours swirled like dust – the enemy were in the wire; there were suicide bombers at the gate.

Gradually the fire grew more sporadic and eventually Jonah relaxed. He engaged the safety catch of his rifle.

Beside him Nakamura said, ‘I heard you got Silent Bob to speak?’

‘Yes,’ Jonah replied.

‘In English?’

‘Yes.’

Nakamura was incredulous. ‘You know him?’

‘We were at school together,’ Jonah admitted. Though what he meant was that they were the best of friends: they collected spiders in jam jars in surburbia and fed them with insects; they sprinted from arrow-slit to arrow-slit in Crusader castles in Lebanon; they built traps and hides; and they perfected their battlefield death throes. Nor was best at dramatically dying – no surprises there!

‘Nobody tells us anything,’ Nakamura complained. ‘How we’re supposed to get any usable intelligence out of these people is beyond me.’ He took off his helmet and lit a cigarette. He stared at the burning tip. ‘My mother says these will kill me. That’s funny in this place.’