‘He was cold, trying to focus, but wasn’t doing it well because he was too tired.’
She had driven, and Willet had navigated. In her small car they had bumped up a dark forest track on a shale and chipstone surface, weaving amongst the ruts, following the crude painted arrows in the headlights. It had been a good drive down from London until they’d turned off the main road and onto the forest track. Willet had folded away the map. She had snapped twice that she was damn certain she was going to get Resources to pay for a car wash, but he’d sensed – and it was new – a staccato excitement in Ms Manning. He’d wondered if plain little Carol had been to a place like this on a Security Service training course and found fulfilment. Willet himself had not sploshed around on Survival in deep wet woodland for more months than he cared to remember. The rain had come on more heavily, was sluicing over the windscreen, when the lights had found the blurred image of the little camp of tents.
‘I had a small group here then, merchant-bank people,’ Dogsy said. ‘I told Peake I’d give him as much time as I could, but he’d have to muck in with them, get into line in the queue.’
The rain had eased since they’d arrived at the tent camp. There was a small square of canvas over a low, smoking fire. A London-based insurance company, a corporate giant, had sent five men and four women out into the woods, into Dogsy’s care, to learn self-esteem, self-help, self-control. On a spit of stripped hazel over the fire was a skinned rabbit, and Willet thought that it wouldn’t be much short of midnight before the bloody thing was heated through, half cooked, and ready for eating. They’d done abseiling over a torrential river gorge before finding the rabbit in a snare they’d set the day before. Line managers and regional directors, bright-eyed and sharp, they took it all as serious fun, as the people from the bank would have done. The fact that Willet was from the MoD, and Ms Manning was out of the Security Service, hadn’t fazed Dogsy, and the two new arrivals were sat down in the circle round the fire as if they hadn’t any rights to privacy.
‘What interested me, I reckoned that the young ’uns from the bank would welcome a fellow sufferer. They made the effort but Peake didn’t let them close… They didn’t take to him, and he rejected them. If you know what I mean, they rated him as just a wannabe.
He was trying too hard. He didn’t laugh, didn’t joke, like that was beneath him… I’ve seen that sort before. When I came out of the marines and transferred into the Regiment, I was put on the recruit-induction programme. Most of the recruits were too bottled-up, the type that fail. It’s a character problem. A few like that get through, but you know the way they’ll go. If they slip into the Regiment then, at first, they think they’re going to save the world. Saving the world means killing. Killing gets to be a habit, makes a man lonely, isolated. Killing becomes addictive, can’t be given up.’
The rain pattered on the small awning over the fire. The young people, sodden wet and mud-spattered, watched, listened. Willet understood why Gus Peake had not let them near. They would be going back to baths and champagne, client investments and pension funds; they would be thinking of themselves as the fucking chosen ones. Dogsy Jennings, ex-Marine, ex-instructor in the Regiment, played to his bloody gallery. Willet thought that the chosen children, the money crunchers, would return to their City world, complacent and important, and laugh for a month at what they’d heard around the bloody smoking fire, and believe they’d fucking well achieved something in getting wet for three days and eating rare rabbit.
‘What did he learn from you?’ Willet asked, without grace.
‘Escape and Evasion. That’s what old Bill said he needed – Billings, that is, a good mate – but what I told him might just have been a waste of time, mine and his.’
‘You’re ahead of me,’ Ms Manning said quietly.
‘If you’ve set out to save the world, gone on a killing spree, then you may hang around too long. If you’re around too long, you lose sight of the way back, you don’t get the chance to escape and evade. He’s gone walking in northern Iraq, right?’
Ms Manning said, ‘There’s a revolt, a tribal uprising. I suppose the target is the city of Kirkuk. The Iraqi Fifth Army is based there.’
There was a whinny of general laughter from the group around them. That would have made their bloody evening, and the week ahead when they were back at their desks, God’s fucking chosen children, and playing with investment figures and exchange rates on their bloody screens before heading down to the wine bar.
‘Then I have to hope he knows when to quit,’ Dogsy said. He was a big man, with long gorilla arms and a well-trimmed moustache. A top-of-the-range Land-Rover was parked behind the tents – Willet could have wept because in his imagination the exhausted Gus Peake sat around the same damp fire and heard the patronizing bastard talk Escape and Evasion, and heard the same laughter ripple from his audience. ‘Do you know how long he’s been in combat?’
There was a flicker in Ms Manning’s voice. She said crisply, ‘Maybe a week, or a few days more.’
‘It has to be a stampede for that sort of thing to work… He’ll be killing every day. The killing would be so frequent that he loses count – how many, how often – and he won’t be in a structure where anyone orders him to stop, quit. He’ll be a changed man. Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him – might not, when they meet him and see him, want to know him. He’ll be a new man, and it may not be a pleasant sight.
He didn’t tell me what he did, his old life.’
‘He was a transport manager…’
It was like a joke to those around the fire. Willet hated them. The giggles wafted across him.
‘… in a provincial haulage company,’ Ms Manning persisted.
A ponderous smile played at Dogsy Jennings’ face. ‘There’s your answer. Should he come back, he’s hardly going to be able to slip his feet under the desk and start again to move lorries about, like nothing’s happened. He’ll have taken a dozen men’s lives, if he’s any good. If he’s brilliant as a marksman, it could be twenty men’s lives, thirty. Any jerk who’s arrogant enough to think he can change the world won’t just switch off after one dose of it, he’ll have to find more causes, more bloody crusades. I read men. It’s my job to get under the bullshit of human nature. I didn’t like him.’
‘Didn’t you? Why not?’ The sneer rasped in her voice.
‘I didn’t like him, Miss, because that sort craves to belong. Got me? Whatever the motivation, he can’t belong out there, and if he gets back he can’t belong here. I did my best with Escape and Evasion because that’s what old Bill asked of me – but any road I didn’t like him. I don’t like men who go looking to be bloody heroes.’
‘What about loyalty, important things like freedom, heritage? What about sacrifice?’
Willet saw Dogsy’s wink. The circle chuckled. The smoke eddied across the rabbit’s carcass. Ms Manning pushed herself up then rubbed the damp off her backside and Willet saw the anger in her face.
‘Come on, Ken,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave these creeps to their silly bloody games.’
He followed after her, past the tents and the Land-Rover and back towards the track where her car was parked. He hadn’t thought it could happen, that her emotional commitment could be made to Peake and his rifle. Dogsy Jennings’ words seared in his mind. ‘He won’t be in a structure where anybody orders him to stop, quit… Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him… He can’t belong out there and, if he gets back, he can’t belong here.’ He thought she’d been magnificent, and he’d tell her.
She reached the car. Her eyes blazed at him, and she spat her words. ‘When you write this up, do me a favour, leave out all that pompous crap about survival chances. Spare me that shit.’