From the centre of the room, Miss Hall exhaled a sigh of exasperation. ‘You are quite safe. Mrs Mallory left hours ago. Her retinue and their canine charges are long gone.’
‘Hours ago?’ Peterson frowned. He hefted the burden of Rodriguez on his shoulder. ‘That can’t be right.’
‘You were in the canvas labyrinth for longer than you suppose, Captain. That was Mrs Mallory’s doing. She wanted to take her time over the chastisement of your commander. You are quite safe to go outside and return to your camp. The immediate danger has passed.’
Hunter saw that there was a sort of door over in the remote wall of the marquee to the rear of where Miss Hall was sitting. Narrow chinks of daylight defined it subtly in a tall rectangle in the pervading gloom. Out there, dawn had come. He pointed the exit out to Peterson without a word and, cautiously, they began to edge towards it. Miss Hall indulged her exasperated sigh again.
‘Come here, Captain Hunter,’ she said.
Even with Peterson’s assault rifle in his right hand, he thought it wise to obey her. As he got close to her, he began to smell the odour she gave off. It was sour and sharp, like rancid butter, he thought. The closer he got, the stronger it became. It was not like rancid butter. It was worse. It was like some rich, buttery cake spoiled by the intensity of heat and damp. It was all he could do not to retch. He had to overcome revulsion to get close.
‘No, Captain,’ she said with a yellow smile. ‘You are right. I was never pretty. Take off your tunic.’
It was only when he did so that he realised his left arm was hanging, throbbing at his side. The adrenaline that had enabled him to help dress the Major’s wounds was entirely spent. He struggled out of his battle dress and saw that his arm, from elbow to wrist, was a suppurating mess of swelling and puncture wounds. The flesh was yellow and puffy and the pain from the bite intensifying all the time. He did not think they had any penicillin back at their makeshift camp. They had no antibiotics. The bite, he knew, was infectious.
There were scarves of silk and satin coiled under Miss Hall’s whey-coloured double chin. She unwound one of these. ‘Give me your arm.’
With effort, Hunter did so. He was very close to her. She wrapped the lower half of his extended limb in satin. She muttered something in a language he knew he had never heard spoken before. She closed her eyes and opened them
again and expelled a plump, fetid breath. ‘There,’ she said. She let the scarf slip, sticky with blood and puss, to the floor. ‘You have proof that I am more good than bad, Captain Hunter. My scarf is ruined. But your arm will be fully recovered in an hour or so.’
He examined his arm. The limb looked ripe for amputation and the pain had not receded in the slightest. ‘A whole hour?’ he said.
Her expression became petulant. ‘Yes. I cannot work miracles.’
Hunter looked back towards where Peterson patiently bore the weight of their commander.
‘I can do nothing for Major Rodriguez. Even if I could, I would not dare undo what Mrs Mallory has done. She is much more bad than good, you see. I would not wish to cross her.’
‘Then thank you. I’m grateful for what you have done.’
Hunter made to leave and then hesitated.
‘Yes?’
‘There were some tourists in this region a few weeks ago.’
‘So?’
‘They vanished.’
Miss Hall shifted on her throne. ‘Your travellers were food for her dogs. No more. As I have told you, Mrs Mallory is much more bad than good.’
There was no sign of their men in the compound grounds in the daylight beyond the marquee. There was no sign of them either when they got back to their camp in the ravine two miles to the north. They made the most comfortable bed they could for Rodriguez in the tent that had been their command post. Hunter thought about their plan of attack. He thought about their shared embrace of comradeship. It wasn’t twenty-four hours since their airy philosophising about
cocaine cartels and their impact in the world, and the moral implications of armed forces opposing them. As Peterson busied himself brewing coffee, Hunter thought about the letter he had written his new wife in the event that he might not return from battle. The more he thought it over, the less anything of what he had just experienced had to do with soldiering. He had known tenacious enemies in the field, but he had never before fought men who could not be killed. Of all things, it reminded him of
Beowulf
, of the sorcery of the epic poem he’d read in translation, of the contents of the slim volume signed by Seamus Heaney occupying a treasured spot on his bookshelf back at home. His arm had stopped hurting, he realised. He rubbed it, knowing it had healed and that the power used to heal it confounded nature.
‘What happened to us?’ he said to Peterson, when Peterson proffered a mug of coffee from the pot he’d just brewed.
‘I don’t know,’ Peterson said, on the ground, on his haunches, staring at nothing. He was like that for so long that Hunter thought he would offer nothing more. Then he said, ‘Hypnotic suggestion might have been a part of it.’
Hunter glanced briefly towards the little tent. ‘What hypnotist possesses the power to make you consume your own hands?’
Peterson grimaced and he turned and looked Hunter full in the face. ‘I’m as clueless as you are, pal. I’ve had guys I’ve rated very seriously tell me they’ve been up close and personal with UFOs.’
‘We all have,’ Hunter said.
‘Unless we were set up, unless it was some kind of Pentagon-inspired behavioural experiment, then I honestly haven’t a fucking clue.’
Hunter blinked up towards the blue sky. The birds were very loud. It was a vivid day, even beautiful, depending on your frame of mind. ‘Rodriguez is going to die, isn’t he?’
‘We haven’t the drugs to treat him even if we had the know-how,’ Peterson said. ‘This is an operation so covert we don’t have any comms equipment at all. The plan is to walk back to a base over the border in Brazil. It’s fifty miles, give or take. He’s running a high fever. I checked on him just now. Both wounds are infected, unsurprisingly, given how they were inflicted. We don’t even know how much blood he lost. I’d estimate more than he could afford to. So, yeah, I’d say the Major’s chances of survival are slim.’
‘Unless we carry him down to Magdalena,’ Hunter said, ‘which is what we should have done in the first place.’
It meant blowing their non-existent cover. It meant compromising themselves completely and exposing their failed mission to an always curious world. But what Peterson thought of the suggestion, Hunter never discovered, because at that moment, Major Rodriguez emerged from unconsciousness and cried out aloud to them.
The air in the small tent was suffocating, gangrenous. Rodriguez was sweating and shivering and porcelain pale. They had cleaned the blood from his face. They had bound his wrists to his thighs for fear that he might raise them and, unprepared for it, see the damage done.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, when they entered the tent and squatted at his side. ‘I cannot feel my hands. I cannot feel them at all.’
‘What do you remember, Sir?’ Peterson said, gently. He trickled water into the Major’s mouth from the bottle taken from his belt.
Rodriguez swallowed water and laughed. ‘A dream,’ he said. ‘An hallucination. I happened on two witches conferring and one of them cursed me. She cursed us all. She did so in a Coptic dialect so ancient I only half understood it. But most of it I got.’
‘I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t,’ Hunter said. ‘With languages, Sir, you have a prodigious gift.’
‘I can’t feel my hands, Captain Hunter. Why is that?’
‘It’s just the morphine, Major. It’s numbness only. Tell us about the curse.’
Rodriguez frowned, recollecting. His breath was coming only in shallow gasps. It was an effort for him. He was not wholly aware. That was a blessing. He was unaware in the cramped tent of the rising stink of his own corruption. ‘She said I would not sit at the piano and help teach my daughter to play again. She said you, Peterson, would avoid the sea or pay for the pleasure it gives you with your life.’
‘And me?’
‘That was most curious of all, Captain Hunter. She said that your progeny would commune with the dead. And your progeny would be afflicted with the gift of prophecy.’
‘Afflicted with a gift?’
‘Her words, Captain,’ Rodriguez said. He smiled. The effort was enormous. ‘Not my clumsy translation, I assure you. I merely repeat the contradictory riddle of the sorceress.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And just a dream,’ Rodriguez said. ‘Just a bad dream I had.’ The smile vanished from his face. ‘I was safe when the current was strong,’ he cried out. ‘I was safe!’ He closed his eyes and the breath left him. A moment later, he died.
‘I’m going into Magdalena,’ Hunter said, over the corpse. ‘I’m going to kill the bitch responsible for this abomination.’
‘You don’t know she’s there,’ Peterson said.
‘Oh, she’s there,’ Hunter said. ‘She’s the hostess, remember? And I’m sure she resides in some comfort.’
‘First, we bury our dead comrade,’ Peterson said. ‘We do it properly, with full decorum. It’s the least he deserves.’
Hunter put a hand on Peterson’s shoulder and squeezed.
He felt ashamed. His haste was undignified. ‘Of course it is,’ he said. ‘Of course it is. Forgive me. I forgot myself.’
They buried the Major deep in soft ground above and away from the ravine. Peterson erected a rough cross and they fired a volley over him. They observed a respectful silence and then returned to the camp. There were plentiful rations, now everyone but the two officers was dead. There were, too, plentiful arms and spare ammunition sufficient to defy a besieging army. But there was only one task that Hunter felt required urgent accomplishment. He looked at his watch. But his watch had stopped – he supposed in the black maze of the marquee, in an experience he could now barely credit. He asked Peterson the time. But Peterson’s watch had stopped too. He suspected both instruments had ceased to function at the same moment. No matter. He looked at the sky. He reckoned on four hours before sunset. In some ways, it had already been an industrious day. Before it ended, he intended to give it further, far greater significance. Before setting out, he asked Peterson would he await his return. The Canadian nodded. Until nightfall, he said, maybe a little beyond. And Hunter nodded back. He did not honestly think you could say fairer than that.
It was after dark when he returned. The camp was struck, everything combustible burned, everything else buried. They marched the distance over two days through dense forest to the departure point in Brazil with barely a word spoken between them. They crossed the border without acknowledgement. There was nothing much to say. Each man had to deal with his own rationale regarding their shared experience. They were greeted at the base in Brazil with indifference. No one there knew about the specifics of their mission and no one seemed to care. This was a blessing where Hunter was concerned, he knew. A large
part of him wanted to scream and bellow about the ordeal he had undergone. Despite all the thorough and sometimes brutal training he had endured, he had no context for it. But he remained composed. He avoided Peterson altogether. And he suspected Peterson avoided him.
He thought sanity might return with the eventual touching down of the Hercules he was aboard at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire a week later. He watched the pattern of green English fields and hedgerows and sought comfort from their familiarity. He watched the shadow of the aircraft undulate over the familiar ground. He saw the silver sparkle of a stream meander gently through sunlit pasture. And none of it brought a shred of consolation.
He broke down at the debrief with Colonel Baxter. Baxter seemed to interpret this as a delayed show of grief for his dead comrades. Peterson, evidently, had been more composed and cleverer, giving his own account, a few days earlier. Baxter had it on his desk. They had stumbled into a compound run not by a cartel, but by members of a religious cult. Its members had been territorial, hostile and very heavily armed. Their mission had fallen victim to faulty intelligence (that part at least was true, Hunter thought). Their manpower was totally inadequate to the circumstances. The odds had been overwhelming. They would have needed armoured vehicles and at least another two full-strength companies of infantry support to have won the fight. In Washington and London and in Ottawa, the main aim now was to keep the whole matter out of public scrutiny. In a curious way, Baxter said, its failure had cemented the success of the mission. Intelligence was being pooled on cult activity on a global basis, something the Americans had been pushing for since their own embarrassing failure with the Branch Davidian in Texas.
‘It’s something they’ve actually been lobbying for since the
Jonestown Massacre twenty-odd years ago,’ Baxter said, ‘so they’re pleased about that. And it’s precisely this sort of cooperation involved in covering up mistakes like the one just made in Bolivia that makes the special relationship seem so very special. You’ve been through an ordeal, Captain. But if it’s any consolation to you, it was worth the end result.’
Irony might have been beyond the British Army. But Hunter discovered it was an organisation capable of tact and compassion. At some level, there was an unspoken appreciation of the trauma he had suffered. He was given a month’s leave. Then he was given a six-month secondment to a training establishment on the North Devon coast only a forty-minute commute by car from where he and Lillian had set up home. Human beings are resilient creatures and Mark Hunter was a particularly resilient example of the breed. He began to recover from what had happened to him. Denial was never a part of his strategy for coping. But gradually, because the events had been so removed from his normality, he began to perceive them almost as experiences that had been undergone by somebody else. This diminished them in his mind. The events themselves became vague and dreamlike. He could recall them only through an effort of will he was either unable, or profoundly unwilling, to indulge. And that pretty much amounted to the same thing.