He was perched on his stool at the left end of the bar, and his surgical sticks were propped between his legs. George Marriot's audience migrated between the bar and the dartboard. The golf team was back after victory on a sodden course, and the darts team were throwing. The crush at the bar suited him well.
'Didn't I? Well, for an Ali Baba — that's a thief, operating on the road, turning over aid convoys — there might only be a thousand dollars in it. Hardly worth the effort. I'd a team of more than a dozen to keep sniffing and interested after the Tora Bora. Did I tell you about the Tora Bora? Don't remember. Well, another time…I've this team to keep happy, damn good trackers and the best fighters anywhere, and the way to keep them happiest was to go up into the foothills of Ghazni Province, maybe up into the mountains, and go after the Taliban. Hard bastards, but I respected them — they'd have had my head off my shoulders soon as spit at me, if they'd had the chance. Yes, I respected them as quality opposition. For a big Taliban man, one of the old regime who'd been close to Mullah Omar, I was looking at a bounty — alive or for a head, ears and fingers for taking the prints off — at twenty-five thousand minimum. The Yanks, fair play to them, weren't cheapskates and they paid on the nail. They weren't easy to get, the big Taliban men, took days of tracking, weeks of hunting through the caves, and when they were cornered they fought like rats in a sack…Did I ever tell you how I got that grenade stuff in my leg, Russian made HE-42 with a hundred and eighteen grams of high explosive, did I?'
How many times had the story been told? One day — God, it would not be a pretty sight — the landlord swore he'd tell GG to drop his trousers, right there in the bar, and show the damn scars. One day…No, no, it would be cruel — no scars there to show. They listened politely and tolerantly, carried their pints away from the bar counter, left the story for the next customers, and talked their golf and darts, their business and families.
'Myself, I'd never ask a man under my command to do something, go somewhere that I wasn't prepared to do or go. I led into this cave. Knew it was used because the earth at the front was all scuffed. Went in with my torch, and the beam caught his eyes, like a damn cat's, and my finger was off the guard and on to the trigger bar but the grenade came bouncing at me. I stayed those seconds too long, gave him the whole magazine, thirty rounds of ball, then chucked myself down, but not fast enough and not far enough away. My boys, they carried me back down but not before they'd taken off his head, his ears and his fingers. The man I'd killed was a big man, a proper Taliban field commander. He was a man like me, a true fighter, not one of those who'd get some daft kid — a suicide-bomber — to do the work for him, hide behind a kid. He'd have heard me and the boys come to the cave, and wouldn't have thought of surrender, knew he was going to die but tried damn hard to take me with him. Have to respect that sort of man…The Yanks did, gave me thirty-two thousand five hundred dollars for his head and his bits. But I was finished, too bloody wrecked to go back up the mountains after the hospital.'
He was asked, a snigger from an accountant who queued for service, whether he'd worn the same shirt when he was in Afghanistan. Frayed cuffs and collar, the colour gone from it. He heard the laughter ripple round him. He was told that the shirt, it might be clean on that evening, looked worn enough to have done time on his back in Ghazni Province. Did he know that a sale — with bargains at giveaway prices — was staged that weekend in the town down the road? Another piped up, said he should have left the shirt up the mountain. The ripple of laughter was a gale. Had his sister sewn up the shrapnel holes in the shirt and washed out the bloodstains? He should treat himself to a new shirt, not leave thirty-two thousand five hundred dollars untouched in a biscuit tin under his bed.
George Marriot sensed, and it was new to him, that gentle mocking had gone nasty was ridicule. His hand came off his glass and his fingers touched his collar, felt the loose, worn cotton, and he saw the threads that hung apart at his cuffs. He let his sticks take his weight, left his unfinished drink on the counter, dropped his head and pushed forward towards the door. He heard a protest it was only a joke.
He elbowed the door open.
'Safe home, GG, see you next week,' the landlord called to his back…then, quieter, 'Shouldn't take the piss, just because he's soft in the head.'
The door swung shut behind him.
The two men ran heavily towards the helicopter's open side hatch, their heads ducked below the thrash of the rotor blades. Each carried small cheap bags of clothing, but between them they shared the weight of the Bergen rucksack in which their work kit was stowed.
The hand of the loadmaster reached down and helped up Xavier Boniface, then Donald Clydesdale.
Old thrills surged in each of them, and old habits came naturally. The loadmaster was waved away. They dropped into the bucket seats, slotted the shoulder harnesses across their bodies, fastened the clamps.
'You all right, Xavier?'
'Fine, Donald.'
'It'll be good to see Mr Naylor.'
'A gentleman. It'll be fine to see him.'
The helicopter lifted and yawed in the face of the wind. The engine pitch strove for power and suffocated their voices, then each closed his eyes and they were oblivious to the tossed and thudding flight as they climbed.
They were veterans of campaigns from the end of empire. As young lads in the marines, 45 Commando, they had been assigned in the Protectorate of Aden — forty years before — to guard the life of an officer in the RAF's Special Investigation Branch. They had taken him, Sterling submachine-guns loaded and cocked, most days from his Khormaksar billet across the causeway to Sheikh Othman, then past the roundabout where the concrete block and sandbagged Mansoura picket tower stood, and they had huddled with him between them in a Saracen armoured personnel carrier for the run to the fort where prisoners were held. At first, the initial couple of weeks, they had lounged around the fort's yard, and the officer had been inside the interrogation cells with captured men from the National Liberation Front. Each evening he had emerged in a state of growing frustration: he couldn't get the time of day from his prisoners, and most certainly no intelligence.
Now, inside the helicopter, bucking in the wind and leaving the island's coast behind them, neither could have said which had made the suggestion to the officer, but made it had been: 'With respect, sir, why are you pussyfooting around? There's lives at stake, right? Don't you think, sir, it's time to take the gloves off?' Perhaps it was both of them who had made the offer. They had gone with their officer into the cells the next morning. At first it had been fists and boots, then they had learned a little more of the trade, and water buckets, lights and noise had been employed. Intelligence had been extracted from choking throats, from mouths without teeth. Only the intelligence produced by pain had been written down by the officer — where a safe-house was, where an ambush site was planned, where an 81mm mortar was hidden or a blindicide rocket, where an arms cache was buried. They'd left on the same evacuation flight, one of the last from Khormaksar, as their officer. After touchdown — and he'd kept his new wife waiting a half-hour beyond the arrival doors — he'd taken them to the bar and bought them two doubles each, might have been three, and had promised to be in touch if the need for their skills arose again. The officer, of course, had been Mr Naylor. That had been the start.