When the building was quiet, and the street beyond the hotel's yard, the television was off and he had sunk, exhausted but dressed, on to the narrow bed, Ramzi came. 'You all right, friend? Of course you. are, why wouldn't you be? We move on tomorrow to where…Well, you know. It's a nice place you're going to, pretty, and close to…You are all right, aren't you?'
'See the TV at lunchtime — the news? More bloody trouble, more heartache, more bombs in Iraq — you see it? If they hadn't screwed up in the Tora Bora, none of it would be going on now. I told them then, but they didn't want to know. Those days in Afghanistan were a window of opportunity, but they didn't snatch it — and, Christ, they're paying a price. I told them…'
The stool at the left end of the bar was George Marriot's. Only a brave man, or a total idiot, among the regulars would have claimed it on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday evening, when Gorgeous George stomped down from his home and came to the pub in the village that was half a dozen miles north of Luton. On GG's nights, even if the darts team was at full strength and playing at home, or the golf team had been lowering a few after a competition, and the bar heaved, that stool was never taken. It was his, where he drank whisky chasers and pints of ale.
'They had two choices, the Yanks had, didn't they? At Tora Bora, they could have left it to us, that's the Northern Alliance people who'd hired me, or they could have done the whole damn thing themselves. He was there, you see, Osama was. He was all ready for picking off. My people and me, we could have done it — maybe even the Yanks on their own could have. Osama was bottled up. What did the Yanks do? Well, worst of two worlds. We had to wait while they took their time and lifted a block force in. Too long hanging about and Osama broke the trap. Typical Yanks. We were all itching to go, but the Yanks wouldn't have it, not till they were ready. Yank trouble was that they wouldn't take casualties. And Osama was long gone by the time they'd put their act together. If we'd had him then, God, wouldn't life be different?'
Some in the pub, particularly any with the misfortune to be within earshot of the stool, thought of Gorgeous George as sad; to others he was a 'loony'; to most he was the Rose and Crown's resident five-star bore. Many would have claimed to know by heart the story of the failed Tora Bora operation, and the net through which Osama bin Laden had slipped to safety across the Pakistan border — and he had been a freelancer and a bounty-hunter, the CIA had loved him, the British spooks had called him a genius of a guerrilla fighter, and he'd been up the mountains with his tribesmen within a spit of Osama, but the Yanks hadn't let him do the business until they'd put their own men, Special Forces and 101st Airborne Division troops, into the block position.
'Fierce country you see. Mountain precipices that were razor sharp. Total cover so's you couldn't see the Al Qaeda fighters till you were damn near standing on them. Worse than anything we'd had in Oman. My people, me — and I wasn't a spring chicken, was forty-seven then — we could have hacked it, but we had to wait for the Yanks…You know the 101st Airborne? Well, they couldn't handle the ground. They couldn't walk in there like we did. Had to have the CH-47 choppers lift them in when they finally moved. Where's the surprise with that? It was criminal letting Osama get clear. I said to a colonel of the 101st that we were up for it, my tribesmen and me — wouldn't have it. Had to be Yanks that got the big man's head. So what happened? Nobody got him. The Yanks told us that if we moved before they gave the say-so they'd bomb us. At that time, I'm telling you, we weren't more than a day's hike from the cave where Osama was holed up. Bloody wicked, and look at the consequences.'
No one in the saloon bar of the Rose and Crown believed a word of it. The tales dripped over the regulars' heads — all a fantasy, of course, but harmless. The general opinion was, most likely, he'd not been south of Bognor Regis. He was humoured, and he did no harm other than bend ears, was as much a part of the fabric as the horse brasses on the walls.
'Everything that happens today, these kids blowing themselves up — the suicide people — it comes from me and my tribesmen not being allowed forward in the Tora Bora. I doubt Osama was more than four miles from us — a day's hike in that country, if you're fit. We'd have cut his head off. It would have been close-quarters fighting, rock to rock, enemy at fifteen paces, but we'd've had him and sawn off his head. You kill a snake by cutting off its head…Suppose I'd better be gone, or Sister will be fretting.'
He slid off the stool and braced his weight on the surgical sticks. The crowd parted for him and he hobbled out. When GG, or Gorgeous George, or George Marriot, had first arrived in the village, moved in with his sister in the last cottage on the Hexton Road, come to the pub and taken the stool, they'd seen how badly he walked. Even with the aid of the sticks, his progress was painful to watch. Many had offered to drive him home and been ferociously refused. It would take him the best part of an hour, in the moon's light or in rain, defiantly edging along the road with his sticks, to reach his sister and the little two-bedroom cottage, with roses on the wall, that was their home.
Always, when he stood in the door, the landlord would shout across the bar crowd, 'Safe home, GG. See you next week.'
'Would you like to take a chair, Banksy?'
But David Banks was wary. To be called in on successive evenings by the REMF, his inspector, broke the pattern of life in protection. He shook his head, didn't care if that wasn't the polite response. And he wouldn't be calling the inspector by his given name, Phil, which was usual. He stood by the door and was trying to puzzle out why, late on a Friday evening and Delta just coming off a hotel run with a Principal, the Rear Echelon Mother Fucker didn't have a home of his own to go to.
'Please yourself, Banksy. You remember our little chat last night?' He lied, but casually, 'Vaguely, sir.'
'Then I'll refresh your memory. I asked you if the atmosphere was good on Delta. You said it was fine. You went on that if I wasn't satisfied with that answer I should ask around, speak to the others. You remember that?'
'I do now, sir.'
'Well, I did just that.' There was the earnestness that was well practised in a veteran of policy meetings. It itched correctness. 'Banksy, I value esprit in a team.'
'Don't we all, sir?'
'A close team works well, Banksy. A divided team does not.'
'Sir, you won't find me arguing with you.'
He was, at heart, a country boy, from the border farmlands where the counties of Somerset and Wiltshire joined. The spring of his childhood had been happiness, and every summer evening and every day of the school holidays he had ridden with his father in the tractor's or the combine's cab.
'Right, I'll spell it out from what I can tell. I understand that Delta is not working well — and, most certainly, is divided.'
He said quietly, but with flint hardness, 'I'd say you've been listening to gossip, sir, ill-informed gossip.'