On our final day we drive to the Black Mountains, then walk for most of the day, paying close attention to one of H’s maps. In the afternoon we stop at a remote and beautiful spot by a small waterfall, sheltered by a steep crag. I wonder how we’ll get back before nightfall, because it’ll be dark in a couple of hours and we’re miles from anywhere. Over a tin of sardines, H is telling me about a Regimental reunion in Oman years after the war, where he was invited by the sultan to a huge bash with the other members of A Squadron. The sultan chartered a giant C-130 Hercules to fly them all in to Muscat. Then the subject changes unexpectedly.
‘Do you really want this op in Afghanistan?’ asks H. The wind is ruffling his hair as he looks at me, and the chatty tone has gone out of his voice.
‘Of course I do,’ I say, but as I speak the words I realise this is not the whole truth.
‘I need you to think about it,’ he says. ‘I need you to be 100 per cent convinced that you want it. If you have the slightest doubt, you need to face up to it and find the answer.’
I’m about to reply, but he cuts short my attempt by putting the map between us and pointing to a location several miles away.
‘Here,’ he says. ‘I want you to spend the night here. There’s an old shelter on this bluff that’ll keep the wind off you. I need you to meditate on all this. Find out your doubt and work through it – before you go to sleep, if you wake up in the night, and when you get up in the morning. Take the Bergen. There’s a sleeping bag in it. You can meet me back at the starting point at 0900 hours. Then you get cleaned up, we have lunch in the pub, and you can drive home.’
This is a surprise. The SAS is telling me to meditate on a mountaintop. I accept the suggestion, and we plot my return route, which is a direct bearing back to the spot where we’ve parked, so that if anything goes wrong he knows I’ll be somewhere along the line. He folds the map and pats it against my chest, then stands up. It’ll be dark before he’s back at the car.
‘Are you alright to get back?’ I ask, regretting the question as soon as I speak.
‘I was in the SAS, you know.’ He sets off at a jog without looking back.
A couple of hours later the moon is just rising in the east and I’m at the shelter, a ruined shepherd’s bothy half open to the sky. There’s a waterproof groundsheet in the Bergen, H’s own sleeping bag and a small emergency strobe. I settle in behind the stones and there’s nothing else to do but follow his advice. The hills and ridges sink into darkness and there’s no sound but the airy whisper of the wind against my ears.
I’m wondering who, if I had the choice, I could ask for advice on all this. I think suddenly of the story told in the Bhagavad Gita of the princely warrior Arjuna, doubting whether he should go to battle because he knows there are friends and members of his own family who he’s likely to meet. He turns to Krishna for advice, who reminds him that life and death are unimportant things and that righteous action is the key to life. No one, says Krishna, can get to grips with your fate except yourself, which is why it’s no good imitating the life of another. There’s a harsh solace to this counsel, it occurs to me now, for anyone troubled by questions of fate, choice and action.
I turn in, but my mind is see-sawing between past and future. H is right to suspect that I have doubts, and they’re coming at me like demons now. I’m not so much worried about the dangers ahead. Planning and training and common sense go a long way towards dealing with the obvious dangers. I’m actually looking forward to going back to Afghanistan. My doubt is whether I can carry my secret with me, which I can’t tell Seethrough or even H, and this already feels like a betrayal. No one but the Baroness knows about Orpheus or the fact that he needs to come in, or whether, in the jargon of the Network, he’s still a good householder or has become a lost sheep and will have to be eliminated.
I can’t sleep, not properly, anyway. It’s 3 a.m. I crawl out of the sleeping bag and pace around. There’s a half-moon above me and the clouds are sweeping in luminous silence across the sky, and through the tears in their fabric I catch glimpses of the stars.
Fear is a catalyst of strange thoughts, I realise.
In daily life you are swept along by events which prevent you from going too deeply into things. But now that the ordinary momentum of the world has been stripped away, my doubt is laid bare. I want to know if I am making the right choice, but I can’t be sure whether I have made a choice at all, or whether it has chosen me. When a man reaches a crossroads, it’s fair to suppose that the decision he takes is a free one. It’s what we’d all like to believe. But you can argue that his choice, so-called, is no more than the outcome of everything that has gone before, like a mathematical equation which, however complex, really only has one answer. All of a man’s experience of life is part of that equation, embracing all his hopes, dreams and prejudices, his wishes and convictions, his most tender longings, bitterest grievances, and all the dark machinery of his fears. All invisibly influence his choice, like a secret committee voting behind its leader’s back. Perhaps even the future itself exerts an influence, reaching back beneath the scheme of things. Then, when this formula of near-infinite complexity is at last resolved, and his decision, in which he has really had no say, rises like a balloon into the world of his conscious thoughts, the man will declare: I have made my choice freely and am responsible for it.
But that’s not the point. Any propagandist, magician or behavioural scientist can tell you a man has much less choice than he’d like to believe. The interesting question is whether a man who knows he isn’t free lives a different kind of life from the one who imagines he is. And if it is different, how is it different?
I can’t hold the thought long enough to calculate the answer. I’m cold and tired and shivering now, and it’s time to get some rest.
7
Even today I am reluctant to go into the details, and the knowledge that the players and the protocols have all changed since then does nothing to ease the task. It’s true I want things to be told, but to abandon the habit of secrecy on which your life and that of others has at times depended is like pulling shrapnel from a wound. It may seem like the necessary thing to do, but the act sometimes risks killing the victim. It does feel like a kind of death, a relinquishment of something that’s been part of my survival, and which year after year I’ve managed to conceal.
His code name is Orpheus, and his real name is Emmanuel, but I’ve known him personally as Manny since before the beginning of all this. Fate had thrown us together in the Pakistani town of Peshawar, not far from the Afghan border, in the late 1980s, and our lives have been linked ever since.
We meet one evening in the restaurant of the notorious Green’s Hotel, a favourite haunt of the many misfits and adventurers drawn by the lure of the secret and dangerous war in Afghanistan under Soviet occupation. We’re starved for company and like each other at once. Manny’s been hiking in Chitral in his summer holiday from university and has made his way to Peshawar, as have I, in the hope of joining a mujaheddin group who’ll take him across the border into Afghanistan itself. At twenty-three, he’s only a year older than me but has a worldly confidence that I admire and enjoy. He’s been awarded a short-service commission by the army, which pays his way through university, after which he’s set his sights on a cavalry regiment. I’m toying with the idea of Sandhurst myself in a year’s time, so I soak up everything he tells me about his plans. We share a fascination with Afghanistan, and the chance to get closer to the conflict is irresistible to both of us.