I go to my bookshelf, pull out an English translation and race to the thirteenth chapter, called Thunder. The fortieth verse, or aya, is a short one: ‘Whether We let you glimpse in some measure the scourge with which We threaten them, or cause you to die before we smite them, your mission is only to give warning: it is for Us to do the reckoning.’
There’s no need to look for any more clues. The reference to a warning is confirmation enough of the message. The question now is how to interpret it and, if necessary, respond. It’s strange news to get and I’m annoyed with myself for being hungover and slow. I regret my mind isn’t feeling sharper and that the whole significance of the message isn’t coming to me more quickly. The only thing I know for sure about the message is that it’s been sent by someone who knows enough of my background to be confident that I’ll figure out how to decipher it, and then how to interpret it. Whoever sent it also knows how to find me.
There’s a another sudden knock at the door, which has an effect similar to a powerful electric shock. I yank open the door with a scowl. There’s a different man standing on the doorstep, this time wearing a fake Barbour, jeans and trainers.
‘I’ve told your friend I’m a Muslim,’ I say gruffly.
The man’s eyebrows go up and down and he let outs a gravelly chuckle.
‘Well, in that case, As-salaamu aleikum.’ His voice is low, even and has a rasping quality as if something rough is being continually ground down in his throat. I frown at him. I’ve never met an Arabic-speaking Jehovah’s Witness and wonder if they’ve sent for a specialist to check my theology. He’s going to get a run for his money.
‘Wa aleikum as-salaam.’ I return the greeting out of reflex and look at him more closely. His frame is lighter than the other man’s, and the lines on his cheeks suggest leanness. He has short sandy-coloured hair, a neat moustache like an ex-soldier’s and looks a youthful fifty. His eyes have a watchful and mischievious sparkle. But he has no documents or bag. Before I can think of anything else to say, he speaks again.
‘Ana rafiq min landan.’ I am a friend from London. He speaks Ministry of Defence Arabic. ‘I parked down the road,’ he adds, gesturing with a thumb over his shoulder. Then it sinks in.
It’s Seethrough’s man from the Regiment. The SAS has arrived.
‘Oh, Christ. Sorry. Come in.’
He smiles and his eyes dart watchfully over the hallway as he steps inside. ‘It’s H- by the way. Friends call me H.’ The handshake is firm. ‘Late night?’ he asks with a knowing look.
‘Something like that.’
‘We’d better have some coffee.’
‘I’ve just made some.’
‘Good man.’
He sniffs the air as we go into the kitchen, puts his coat neatly over the back of a chair and sits at the table. The room’s a mess. I’m embarrassed and surreptitiously cover the ashtray in the sink with a plate as I rinse a pair of cups. I ask where he’s driven from this morning.
‘Hereford.’ That figures. Hereford is home to the Regimental HQ of 22 SAS.
I’m about to ask whether he lives there, but he answers first.
‘Settled down after I left the Regiment ten years ago, give or take.’
‘Marry a local girl?’
‘The whole nine yards. Wife, kids, cats, dogs.’
‘What have you been doing since?’
‘The security and protection circuit – rigs and pipelines, mostly. Some BGing once in a while. Sorry – bodyguarding. And the occasional special request.’
‘Isn’t it all a bit dull after the SAS?’
‘Better than sitting around in a damp hole all day.’
This is modest, coming from a member of the most elite special forces regiment in the world.
‘There’s a company that helps the blokes who want to stay active – the ones who don’t become postmen, mostly.’
‘Remind me not to tangle with the postman.’ I sit down opposite him and pour the coffee. His eyes fall on the dark red and blue bands of my watchstrap.
‘Regimental flash?’
‘Scots Guards.’
‘Alright for some.’ He grins. ‘When did you pack it in?
‘After the Gulf. Granby, wasn’t it? Stupid name for a war,’ I say. I know that military code names are chosen by computer and run alphabetically, but still.
‘Stupid war, if you think about it.’ He blows thoughtfully on his coffee. I like his irreverence.
‘Regiment did well out of it,’ I say.
‘The usual balls-up,’ he says, dismissing this. ‘Typical Regiment story. A lot of guys spread out all over the world in different theatres, and then up comes a deployment like the Gulf.’ His fingers trace a phantom squadron gathering across the tabletop. ‘All of a sudden every one of them wants a piece of the action, and a lot of jostling goes on. You get guys who’ve been training for something else doing the wrong job, and the right guys getting bumped down the line.’
‘What did London tell you?’ I ask.
‘I only get a phone call from the liaison officer with the where and when. Sounds like they’re going to leave the details to us. We’ve got a month. Should be plenty of time.’
This is a very low-key approach, and unlike anything I’ve encountered in the military. I also find it hard to reconcile the softly spoken almost boyish manner of the man in front of me with the more sensational tales told popularly about the Regiment.
‘I don’t suppose you were on the balcony at Prince’s Gate, were you?’ I’m joking, but every soldier knows how many thousands of men have claimed they were part of the spectacular hostage rescue at the Iranian embassy in London twenty years earlier.
‘No, not on the balcony,’ he says in a thoughtful tone. ‘Anyway, the blokes on the balcony were only there for the TV cameras.’
Good answer. I ask how long he’s been in the Regiment.
‘I’m a twenty-fourer.’ He chuckles. ‘Boy soldier.’ He’s served in every major theatre where the SAS has deployed. Aden, Borneo, Oman, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq, Bosnia and, between training some other military units in far-off places and what he calls ‘extra-curricular stuff’, a dozen other countries.
‘I’m surprised you haven’t thought of a literary career,’ I say. ‘Wasn’t it your CO who started the trend?’
He shrugs cynically. ‘DLB was a good soldier. Anyway, it’s his memoirs they’ll be reading in ten years, not the other bloke’s.’
He’s loyal too, I’m thinking to myself, to his former Regimental commanding officer, Peter de la Billiere. By the sound of it he doesn’t care much for the celebrity authors the Regiment has also produced over the past few years. Then I remember what Seethrough told me the day before.
‘What’s a Mirbat vet?’ I ask.
‘I am, for starters,’ he says.
‘Then what’s a Mirbat?’
‘Mirbat? That’s the name of the town. On the Omani coast. Operation Storm.’ His eyes light up. ‘The Regiment’s golden hour. Have you got an atlas?’
A vet, it now dawns on me, is obviously a veteran, but I’ve been thinking a Mirbat is some kind of animal, not the site of a battle. Feeling very ignorant, I fetch the atlas from the sitting room, where I’ve left it. We push our cups aside and a few moments later our fingers are trailing southwards across the Arabian peninsula. I’ve forgotten how strategically placed Oman is, with its north-eastern tip pointing into Iran across the narrowest stretch of the Persian Gulf. H’s finger comes to rest on the coastline not far east of the border with Yemen.
‘We were down south, here, in Salalah. And there,’ he says, pointing to a long mountainous shadow running east to west, ‘was where the Adoo were, up on the Jebel.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘We weren’t. Officially. Too secret at the time. No one back home knew we were out there. But look.’ He points to the map again. ‘Everything coming in and out of the Gulf has to run through the Straits of Hormuz. Imagine if we’d lost it.’ He smiles and then does a comic caricature of an officer. ‘We couldn’t very well let them have our oil, could we?’ Then as if he regrets making light of the subject, adds, ‘That wasn’t the point at the time. We were British. We knew we’d win.’