‘Boss, you’d better get down here,’ Alex called, from beside him.
‘Did we get him?’ Monteith shouted.
‘You really need to see this.’
Jonah rolled over on to his back. Alex was standing with his rifle hanging loosely from its sling. ‘This is so fucked,’ he said, and slumped to the ground.
Monteith hurried down the slope. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘Go and look for yourself,’ Jonah said, bitterly.
Monteith shouldered his way into the crowd and returned a few minutes later, ashen faced. He strode back and forth, kicking up dust.
‘What are we going to do?’ Jonah asked.
‘We’re fucked,’ Alex said.
‘No we’re not,’ Monteith snarled. ‘There’s nothing to tie us to this.’
Jonah looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know exactly what I mean.’
Vultures wheeled above the smoke. The ambush site was scorched and streaked with ash, and a bonfire burned in a crater. The boys squatted singly and in small groups, staring passively at the flames. The wreckage of the vehicles had been pushed off the road and into the gorge. The bodies were blackened sticks on the fire. Soon there would be nothing to recover.
‘What do we do about Nor?’ Jonah asked.
‘You finish him,’ Monteith said. ‘Find him and kill him.’
‘OK,’ Jonah said. He stood up.
Alex glanced up at him. ‘You want me to come?’
Jonah shook his head.
‘You think you’ll find him?’ Alex asked.
‘I’ll find him.’
‘We’ll be waiting for you in Peshawar,’ said Monteith.
It took him less than a week. It was easier than he had imagined. There was nothing surreptitious about it. He checked into the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad and simply waited. Three days later an Afghan carrying a Kalashnikov approached him across the hotel’s neatly clipped lawn and invited him casually to drive out of town.
The highway east of Jalalabad was littered with boulders and the man steered carefully around them. They overtook gaudily decorated trucks and lines of trudging camels, their breath condensing in the bitter cold. Soon it began to rain. There were no wipers and the man reached through the window with a rag to wipe the misting windscreen. An hour later, he stopped the car beside a slope of shale.
‘Go that way,’ he said, pointing to a rough track that led up a ravine.
Jonah set off on foot up the mountain, hunched, with his collar turned up against the wind and sleet, and only his anger to propel him forward. After a further hour he had climbed above the cloud layer and the moon shone down on the road ahead. He walked past a frozen waterfall.
Without warning, a man stepped out from behind a rock up ahead. It was Nor. He appeared to be unarmed.
They faced each other by moonlight. Nor saw Jonah’s face, metallic in the moonlight, with an expression wild enough to raise a warning in him, but instead of fleeing he set his face hard against his former friend and said insolently, ‘What’s your problem, Jonah? You betrayed me. I betrayed you. What can be fairer that that?’
Maddened, Jonah smashed his forehead into Nor’s face. Nor’s nose split like a ripe fruit and he fell to the ground. All Jonah’s tolerance, his forbearance in the face of years of careless insults – beginning with Nor’s jibes about Jonah’s never-to-be-fulfilled desire to be white, his houseboy manners, his emotional inadequacy, the sneering asides about his wife, all of it culminating in the betrayal in the Kabul River Gorge – was turned outward in pent-up fury. He was going to kill him. He struck Nor with wild, lashing blows. ‘
Die!
’ he yelled. He dragged him down the slope to an ice-covered pool. He flung him on to it and the surface splintered and cracked. He waded into the icy water and began to pummel Nor with his fists. Nor’s face was covered in mud and blood. Jonah went on pummelling him until Nor’s misshapen head slid under, leaving only a trail of bubbles breaking the surface.
Then he trudged back down the mountain filled with a murderer’s remorse and flagged down the first car that passed. It was an ancient white Lada, driving back down from Kabul to Peshawar. Jonah pushed a wad of dollars into the Pashtun driver’s hands and curled up on the back seat, shivering.
Hours later, safely back in Green’s Hotel in Peshawar, with his hands shaking uncontrollably, he poured himself a whisky and gulped it down; then another and another and another.
The next morning Jonah met with the other Guides in the courtyard of Green’s Hotel and told them that Nor was dead. All loose ends were tied. There was no reason for anyone to know about their involvement in the death of the CIA agent Jim Kiernan. Crisis averted. Monteith and the Department in the clear. And that was what Jonah believed until the muzzle of a gun was placed against the back of his neck beside the open pit of a diamond mine in Sierra Leone and he turned to find himself face to face with his oldest friend and bitterest foe.
July 2001
They came for Jonah in the night, in the darkest hour, when the insects produced a roaring wall of sound. There were four of them, RUF fighters in raggedy T-shirts and flip-flops. They stormed into the hut on a wave of cane hooch and Jonah rose to meet them, swinging his fists like jackhammers. He knocked two of them flat before a rifle butt crashed into the side of his head. He felt a tremendous shock. The next moment his knees failed and he was falling, his head smacking the ground with a thump. The dirt floor in front of him receded to a great distance. He blacked out.
When he came round, he found that he had been dragged out of the hut and into the forest. There were men standing over him, poking him in his chest and abdomen with the barrels of their guns. Behind them the stars glittered and the sound of the insects pulsed in waves. A voice that seemed familiar, but which he struggled to recognise, said, ‘Now it’s your turn.’
His turn for what?
A man wearing a Tupac T-shirt slung his AK over his shoulder, straddled Jonah and bound his hands with a cable tie, tightening it so that the plastic sliced into the flesh of his wrists. The pain brought him an insight – he was in Africa. But why? He hardly ever went to Africa. He didn’t speak any of the languages. The man slapped him across the face a couple of times.
The familiar voice said, ‘Bring him.’
He was lifted to his feet and pushed and pulled along a narrow path through the forest. He stumbled in the darkness and fell several times. Each time the men kicked him and pummelled him with their rifle stocks before lifting him to his feet and pushing and pulling him along.
At some point he decided that he must be dreaming. He wasn’t in the jungle at all. In fact, it turned out that he was being carried off the rugby pitch with a concussion. There were boys either side of him gripping him by his arms and legs and his shirt and shorts. It took a whole line-up to lift him. They were sloshing through the mud towards the touchline. The sky was a cloudless, cobalt blue. He was pleased to see that Nor was there, running alongside him, shouting words of encouragement through his gumshield. Nor was the most recent addition to the first fifteen, the new scrum half, lithe and fast. Jonah was the number eight, the anchor of the scrum.
Back in the dream, the path opened out into a large sandy clearing lit by the stars. At the centre of the clearing was a massive tree stump with a broad, flat surface. Its shadow reached across the clearing like a fist. They dragged him to the stump and kicked his feet out from behind him, so that he fell to his knees like a supplicant before an altar. They lifted his hands and placed them on its scarred surface.
Nor squatted before him, with the sweat on his face glistening in the starlight, and placed his hands over Jonah’s.
‘Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them,’ Nor said, quietly at first, then angrily, then shouting, ‘Lie in wait for them and seize them!’
It was difficult to understand him with the gumshield in his mouth. And he was talking in Arabic. In those days, the sword verses were Nor’s favourite bit of the Koran, possibly the only bit he knew. He’d growl them at the opposing scrum. He was nicknamed the Saracen.
‘A limb for a limb,’ a voice said, in his dream. He felt its searing breath on his face.
‘Who’s limb?’ Jonah wondered.
‘In revenge there is life.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The bogeyman’s here.’
Jonah’s eyes were drawn to the treeline. A man stepped out of the shadows at the forest’s edge. He was naked and smeared with ash. He had a bandana tied around his shaven skull and a machete in his hand.
‘He’s come to take your hands …’
Jonah began to struggle, but the men had him pinned down, their arms hooked through his elbows. His hands were numb, all the blood drained out. The bogeyman approached.
Nor lifted his hands off Jonah’s and the men tightened their grip on his forearms. His fingers poked out like sticks. The bogeyman raised his machete, swinging it in a great arc. The starlight glinted blue on the nicked blade.
Nor’s eyes shone.
He hit the fast-reverse button: it was moments before the concussion. The scrum was holding. Jonah was dug in and low against the ground, with a string of pain from his heels to his thighs. The ball was in the thicket of feet in front of him. Looking back through his legs, he saw Nor just behind him, impossibly low, as if he were on starter’s blocks, waiting for the ball.
Nor’s eye shone.
Go on, Chewy
…
Jonah heaved.
Yes
…
Jonah imagined the wet crunch of the blade on flesh and bone and his severed hands flopping on to the grass. He saw himself as the limbless beggar from the football match, pleading with his coat-hanger claws.
Go on
…
He bared his teeth and gave up his thoughts. He swung to the right and bit off an ear. The man screamed.
The blade came slicing down and Jonah surged upwards and to the side and the screaming man on his right tumbled forward on to the stump and into the path of the falling machete. His skull split like a melon. Jonah’s forehead connected with the jaw of the man on his left. Teeth flew. Then he was on his feet, swaying and snorting like an enraged bear. He spat the lump of gristle in his mouth on to the ground. Things leapt in and out of focus. He looked from right to left: Nor was squatting, very still, on the balls of his feet; one man was hunched over the stump; another was spreadeagled on his back; a third man, the one in the Tupac T-shirt, was stumbling in the direction of the treeline and the bogeyman was on his knees crawling after him. The killing was not done. With his bound hands Jonah tugged the machete out of the man’s head. He took five steps, sloshing through the mud. He counted them, one after the other. Focus came and went. The bogeyman rolled into a ball, like a frightened millipede. Jonah thought
you’re dead.
He brought up the blade and swung it down and brought it up and swung it down.
‘
Stop!
’ A shout.
He staggered backwards, staring wildly.
There was a loud
crack
and he wondered for a moment whether he’d been shot. Missed. Nor would not miss again. He closed his eyes, giving himself to the coming bullet. Nothing. He opened his eyes. Nor was standing with the stock of the Kalashnikov fitted to his shoulder, his eyes narrow as slits and his tongue thrust deep into his cheek; his finger tightening on the trigger for a second time.
Crack.
He shot the remaining fighter just a couple of steps short of the treeline. Then he turned to Jonah, pointing the rifle at him.
‘I’ll shoot you dead.’
Jonah exhaled, staggering back and forth. His head was thumping like a hammer. He sank to his knees. ‘I don’t have it in me to take you on.’
Nor acknowledged Jonah’s response with a quick nod of the head and walked among the wounded, dispatching them, one at a time, with the barrel pressed to each forehead before gently squeezing the trigger.
Then he turned to Jonah, pointing the rifle at him again. ‘Tell Monteith to beware the sky.’
A moment’s pause.
The sky?
‘Why?’
‘A whirlwind is coming, Jonah,’ Nor said softly. ‘When it has passed nothing will ever be the same.’ Then he ejected the cartridge, cleared the breech and threw the rifle to the ground. ‘You’d better run for your life.’
Jonah staggered into the jungle. Soon afterwards he heard the hammering of automatic-weapons fire.
A storm came. He couldn’t see more than a couple of steps ahead. In the darkness, there was no boundary between land and sky. Rain poured down from the canopy and rushed along the forest floor. He was stumbling along a path that had become a torrent of water. There were crashing sounds all around that he was convinced were trees falling. He kept moving forward. Leaves and vines whipped him. Thorns ripped at his face and clothes. The ground gave way and abruptly he was tumbling in a mudslide. He slammed into a tree. He folded around it. He was numb and cold; only the cuts on his face felt real.
A family of charcoal burners found him in the wake of the storm. He was unconscious and still clinging to the tree, his fingers gripping the bark. They had to prise them off, one by one, before cutting off the plastic cuffs. He was too large to carry, so they made a sled from fertiliser bags and dragged him through the forest to their camp.
When he woke up he was on the sandy floor of a tent, lying wrapped in blankets. There was a fire burning beside him. The logs were crackling, sparks falling on the ground.
One of the charcoal burners was leaning over him. ‘Who are you?’
He almost laughed. It was such a great excuse to be an amnesiac, to be reborn. Unfortunately, he remembered everything.
‘The cat’s out of the bag,’ he said.
‘You have a fever,’ the man said.
And a splitting headache.
With Nor dead there had been some hope of keeping the assassination of Kiernan a secret and avoiding a vengeful American response; with Nor alive there was no such hope. They would always live with the fear that Nor would talk. And he would talk, Jonah was sure of that. The only possible reason Nor hadn’t done it in the last two years was because he was keeping it up his sleeve, ready to produce it with a flourish for maximum, catastrophic effect.