I get about fifteen miles on the single-track road round the mountains when the engine starts to misfire. I glance at the instruments; half a tank of fuel, no warning lights.
"Oh, no," I groan. "Come on, baby, come on, don't let me down; come on, come on." I tap the car's dashboard gently, encouragingly. "Come on now, come on…"
I'm heading up a slight hill into a stretch of road through a Forestry Commission plantation when the engine does a passable impression of me in the morning, coughing and spluttering and not quite firing on all cylinders. Then it dies completely.
I coast quickly to a stop in a passing place. "Oh, Christ… Shit!" I yell, slamming the dashboard, then feeling stupid.
The rain makes machine-gun noises on the roof.
I try starting the engine but there's just another bout of coughing from under the bonnet.
I release the bonnet-catch, put my coat back on, take up the sopping umbrella and get out.
The engine makes little metallic, creaking, tinking noises. Steam wisps up as raindrops hit the exhaust manifold. I test the plug leads and look for something obvious like a loose wire. It doesn't appear to be anything obvious. (I don't think I've heard of anybody in a situation like this ever finding it was something obvious.) I hear an engine and look round the side of the raised bonnet to see a car heading in the same direction as me. I don't know whether to try and wave them down or not. I settle for just looking pleadingly at the approaching car; it's one guy in a beaten-up Micra.
He flashes his lights and pulls in ahead of me.
"Hi," I say as he opens the door and gets out, pulling on an anorak and shoving a deerstalker hat on. He's red-haired, bearded. "It just stopped." I tell him. "I've got fuel but it just cut out. Could be the rain, I suppose…" My voice trails off as I suddenly think, Christ, it might be him. It might be Andy; this could be him, disguised, come for me.
What am I doing? Why didn't I get round to the boot and get out the fucking tyre-iron the instant the car stopped? Why aren't I carrying a baseball bat, a can of mace, anything? I stare at the guy, thinking, Is it him, is it? He's the right height, the right build. I stare at his cheek and his red beard, trying to see a join, trying to see glue.
"Aye," he says, stuffing his hands in his anorak pockets and glancing down the road. "Ye goat any WD40, pal?" He nods at the engine. "Looks like yon bit there could do with some."
I'm staring at him, my heart pounding. There's a weird roaring noise in my head and I can hardly hear him over it. His voice sounds different but he was always good at accents. My belly feels like a solid chunk of ice and my legs like they're about to buckle and give way. I'm still staring at the guy. Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ. I'd run but my legs won't work and he was always faster than me anyway.
He frowns at me and I feel like I've got tunnel vision; all I can see is his face, his eyes, his eyes, just the right colour, just the right look… Then he changes somehow, seems to straighten and relax, and in a voice I recognise says, "Ah. Very perceptive, Cameron."
I don't see what he hits me with; just his arm swinging round at me, quick and blurring as a striking snake. The blow lands above my right ear and fells me, sends me folding down in a galaxy of flickering stars and a huge growling swell of noise as if I'm falling through the air towards a great waterfall. I twist as I fall and hit the engine, but it doesn't hurt, and I slide off it and down and fall towards the puddles and the road and I hit the road but I don't feel that either.
Oh God help me here on the island of the dead with the cries of the tormented, here with the angel of death and the acrid stench of excrement and carrion taking me back in the darkness and the pale fawn light to the place I never wanted to go back to, the man-made earthly black hell and the human scrapyard kilometres long. Here down amongst the dead men, midst-ways with the torn-souled and their wild, inhuman screams; here with the ferryman, the boatman, my eyes covered and my brains scrambled, here with this prince of death, this prophet of reprisal, this jealous, vengeful, unforgiving son of our bastard commonwealth of greed; help me help me help me…
My head hurts like buggery; my hearing feels… blurred. That's not the right word but it is. Eyes shut. They were shut with something earlier, shut by something, but not any more, at least I don't think so; I sense light beyond my eyelids. I'm lying on my side on something hard and cold and gritty. I'm cold, and my hands and feet are tied, or taped. I shiver uncontrollably, scraping my cheek across the chill, granular floor. Bad taste in mouth. The air smells sharp and I can hear…
I can hear the dead men, hear their flayed souls, wailing on the wind to no ear save mine and no understanding at all. The view behind my eyelids goes from pink to red then purple into black, and is suffused with a rumbling shift into a terrible, tearing roaring noise, shaking the ground, filling the air, pounding my bones, dark going dark, black stinking hell o mum o dad o no no please don't take me back there
And I'm there, in the one place I've hidden from myself; not that cold day by the hole in the ice or the other day in the sunlit woods near the hole in the hill — days deniable because I was then not yet the me I have become — but just eighteen months ago; the time of my failure and my simple, shaming incapacity to reap and work the obvious power of what I was observing; the place that exposed my incompetence, my hopeless inability to witness.
Because I was there, I was part of it, just a year and a half ago, after months and months of badgering, cajoling and entreating Sir Andrew he finally let me go when the deadline was up and the trucks and tracks and tanks were about to roll I got my wish, I got to go, I was given the chance to do my stuff and show what I was made of, to be a genuine front-line journalist, a rootin-tootin-tokin-tipplin God-bijayzuz gonzo war correspondent, bringing the blessed Saint Hunter's manic subjectivity to the ultimate in scarifying human edge-work: modern warfare.
And forgetting the fact the drinks were few and far between and that the whole media-managed event was so unsportingly one-sided and mostly happened far away from any journos, tendance gonzoid or not, when it came to it — and it did come to it, I did have my chance, it was put right there in front of me practically screaming at me to fucking write something — I couldn't do it; couldn't hack it as a hack; I just stood there, awestruck, horrorstruck, absorbing the ghastly force of it with my inadequate and unprepared private humanity, not my public professional persona, not my skill, not the face I had laboured to prepare to face the sea of faces that is the world.
And so I was humbled, scaled, down-sized.
I stood on the sunless desert, beneath a sky black from horizon to horizon, a rolling, heavy sulphurous sky made solid and soiled, packed with the thick, stinking effluence squeezed erupting from the earth's invaded bowels, and in that darkness at noon, that planned, deliberated disaster, with the bale-fire light of the burning wells flickering in the distance with a dirty, guttering flame, I was reduced to a numb, dumb realisation of our unboundedly resourceful talent for bloody hatred and mad waste, but stripped of the means to describe and present that knowledge.
I crouched on the tar-black grainy stickiness of the plundered sands, within scorching distance of one of the wrecked wells, watching the way the fractured black metal stub in the centre of the crater gouted a compressed froth of oil and gas in quick, shuddering, instantly dispersing bursts and bubbles of brown-black spray into the furious, screaming tower of flame above; a filthy hundred-metre Cypress of fire, shaking the ground like a never-ending earthquake and bellowing madly in a strident jet-engine shriek, shuddering my bones and jarring my teeth and making my eyes tremble in their sockets.