Ghosts - 05 (12 page)

No, he decided.

He could not.

He crossed the room quietly, removed the dressing gown and slid between the cool sheets of the other bed. He closed his eyes, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning and the exhalations of her breath.

MILTON COULDN’T SLEEP. His mind was turning this way and that and there was nothing that he could do to settle it. He got up and made his way quietly across the room to the chair where he had piled his clothes. He took them into the bathroom and dressed, took one of the keycards from the writing desk, left the room and took the elevator down to the lobby. There was a small business centre just away from the main desk with a couple of Macs, a fax machine and a printer. One of the computers was occupied and so Milton sat down next to the other one, opened the web browser and navigated to Google. He found the information he wanted, closed the browser down, cleared the history and went outside. It was still hot and humid, steam issuing from air vents and from the grates in the street. There was a taxi rank next to the hotel and he nodded to the driver of the one at the front of the queue; he nudged his car forwards and Milton got inside.

“Where to, sir?”

“Connaught Road West,” Milton said. “Sai Ying Pun.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was midnight. Milton had not been particularly surprised that there was an English speaking meeting, even at this hour. Hong Kong was a twenty-four hour city, after all, and being a drunk was a twenty-four hour problem. It was a closed meeting, which meant that only those in the fellowship were able to attend, and its title was Humble in HK. Milton had not been to a meeting for weeks and he knew that he made himself more vulnerable to the dream every extra day he missed. That, in turn, made him more vulnerable to the temptation of taking a first drink and everything he had learned in the months he had spent in the Rooms, all the way through South America and in San Francisco, made one thing perfectly clear: he would not stop at the first drink.

Connaught Road was a flyover that passed through an unlovely area of town in the Central district. Tall office buildings were to the left and a stretch of park was to the right. The driver exited the flyover and looped back around so that he could get to the maze of roads that ran beneath it. Po Fung Mansion was a three storey building with a shuttered takeaway on the ground floor. It was constructed from concrete and its walls were adorned with air conditioning units, a metal balustrade that prevented a drop from the first floor balcony and a collection of unhealthy looking pot plants. Traffic hummed across the flyover and the three-lane road beneath it. It was busy, smokey and noisy, and the three young men loitering outside the entrance to the nearby bar glared dolefully at Milton as he stepped out of the car. He paid the man and the taxi drove off. The men kept looking; Milton ignored them. He saw the familiar sign blowing in the breeze, attached with a piece of string to the door handle: two blue As, within a triangle, within a circle.

He crossed the street, opened the door and went up to the third floor. The meeting had just started: the secretary had welcomed the group and was about to lead them in the Serenity Prayer. He smiled at Milton and indicated an empty seat in the front row. Milton felt self-conscious as he picked his way towards it and sat down gratefully.

The secretary recited the prayer: “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

He continued with the familiar preamble and introduced the member who had been asked to read from the Big Book. Milton closed his eyes and listened, gratefully aware that the tension and worry was seeping out of him.

The reader finished and closed the book.

“Do we have any new members tonight?” the secretary asked.

No-one raised their hand.

“Any visitors?”

There was no point in staying silent; they all knew he was fresh at the meeting. “My name is John and I’m an alcoholic,” he said. “I’m from London.”

The others returned the greeting, welcoming him.

The secretary introduced the speaker. The man’s name was Chuck. He was corpulent: he dressed in a white shirt and beige trousers and he talked in a lazy American drawl. He didn’t discuss his background in depth, but Milton gathered that he was stationed in the city on behalf of an American corporation. His story was about the things he had done as a younger man; he did not specify exactly what they were, fencing around the subject even in light of the injunction that members should not fear honesty, but it was obvious that something had happened with his family and that it still caused him great shame. Milton closed his eyes again and allowed the man’s words to wash over him. The precise content of the story was not important (it involved a series of domestic faults that this man had to regret) and it could not have been more different to the bloody crimes that that haunted Milton’s dreams. The point of a good share was to find the similarities and not the differences, and Milton understood the man’s disgrace, his insecurity, and the fear that he would never be able to atone for his sins. Those were the universal similarities that bonded all of them together; the details didn’t matter.

Chuck finished and the secretary opened the floor. There was a long pause and, smiling, the secretary turned to Milton. “How about our visitor?” he said. “Care to share back?”

Milton cleared his throat. “Thank you for your share,” he said. The man acknowledged him with a duck of his head and, for a moment, Milton wondered whether he had said enough. He remembered the advice of his first sponsor, the man who had taken him under his wing at the first meeting he had attended in London: you had to share, he had advised him. It was the only way to draw the sting of the toxic thoughts that would inevitably lead to drink. The others were waiting to see if he was going to continue; he cleared his throat and went on. “I’m not from Hong Kong. Just here on business, stopping for a couple of days and then moving on, but I really needed a meeting tonight. I’m very grateful to have found it.”

“And we’re glad you did too,” said the secretary.

“I don’t really know what I want to talk about. I suppose it is partly about gratitude. I’m grateful to you for being here, I’m grateful to the fellowship for giving me the tools that I need to quieten my mind and I’m grateful that my life has been returned to me. I have a lot of things in my past to regret and this has been the only thing I have ever found that gives me peace. Saying that, I haven’t been to a meeting for days. It’s the longest I’ve been without one throughout my sobriety and I don’t mind admitting that it has shown me that I’m very far from being cured. I’ve been struggling with memories from my past and with the temptation to drink so that I can forget them. I couldn’t sleep tonight and I was close to going into the hotel bar and ordering a gin. If this meeting hadn’t been here, maybe that’s what I would have done. But it was, and I didn’t, and after listening to your story I know that I won’t drink, at least not tonight. Day by day, right? That’s what we say. We just take it a day at a time.” He paused again. He felt better, the stress that had twisted in his shoulders dissipating with every word. “Well,” he said. “That’s it. Thank you. I think that’s what I wanted to say.”

It was one in the morning when the meeting finished and the others explained that they usually went for noodles at a late night restaurant that was around the corner. Milton thanked them for the offer but politely declined. He wanted to have a little time to himself. The hotel was on the other side of the island.

He decided that he would walk.

HIS THOUGHTS reached back; years ago, although it still felt like yesterday. He would usually do anything to think of something else because the memory was the foundation for the dream. As he walked along the harbour front he allowed himself to remember.

Milton and Pope were in the middle of the desert. It was blisteringly hot, the air quivering so that it looked as if they were gazing through the water in an aquarium, and he could still remember the woozy dizziness of being broiled in the sun for so long. It was Iraq, at the start of the invasion, and their eight-man SAS patrol was deep behind Saddam’s lines. There was some suggestion that the madman was readying his army to fling scuds tipped with nerve gas into Israel and the patrol’s instructions were to set up observation posts, find the launchers and disable them.

A Chinook had dropped them and a second patrol, together with their Land Rovers and eighty-pound Bergens, into the desert between Baghdad and northwestern Iraq. They had been given a wide swathe of territory to patrol. They found one launcher within the first three days; they had killed the crew, slapped a pound of plastique on the fuel tank and blown the equipment to high heaven. They ranged north after that, travelling at night and hiding out during the day, and eventually they had picked up the scent of another crew.

They had tracked them to a village fifty clicks east of Al Qa’im. It was a small settlement dependent on goat herding, just a collection of huts set around a tiny madrasa. The soldiers were elite, Republican Guard, and they were smart. Their launcher was an old Soviet R-11 and they had driven it right into the middle of the settlement, parking next to the school and obscuring the vehicle beneath a camo net. The thinking was obvious: if they were discovered, surely the Americans would think twice about launching a missile into the middle of a civilian area, much less at a target that was next to a school?

They had found an escarpment five hundred feet to the west of the village and settled in to reconnoitre. They would wait where they were until either one of two things had happened: either the launcher abandoned its hiding place and moved out, in which case they would take it down with a LAW missile once it was out of range of the village, or, if it stayed where it was, they would wait until sunset to go in and take out the crew. Those options, as far as Milton was concerned, were the only ones that would remove the risk of civilian casualties.

He used the HF radio to send an update to command and then settled down to wait.

He watched the village through the scope of his rifle. Further away, just visible on the fuzzy hills in the distance, he could see the battered old 4x4s that had transported the goat herders to their animals and the indistinct shape of the men and their goats. Closer, within the village, the crew of the launcher had set up a canvas screen and were dozing beneath it, sheltering from the sun. He breathed slow and easy, placing each member of the crew in the middle of the reticule one after the other. Five hundred yards was nothing. He would have been able to slot one or maybe even two of them before they even knew what was going on, but it would be neater at night, and he did not want to frighten the children. He nudged the scope away from them, observing the women as they went to and from the small river that ran through the centre of the settlement, carrying buckets of water back to their huts. He nudged it to the right, watching the five youngsters in the madrasa. They had been allowed outside to play and run off some steam. They had a yard, bordered by a low chickenwire fence, and they were kicking a football about. Milton watched them for a while. A couple of the boys were wearing football strips, Barcelona and Manchester United, and the cheap plastic ball that they were kicking around jerked and swerved in the gentle breeze. If they knew what the scud launcher was, and the danger it represented, they did not display it in their behaviour. They were just kids having fun. The light sound of their laughter carried up to Milton on that same wind; innocent, oblivious to the chaos that was gathering on the borders of their country that would, within days, obliterate everything in its way in a mad dash to Baghdad.

Pope and the others were out of sight on the other side of the escarpment. They had raised their own small sun screen and were sheltering beneath it. Milton felt the sweat on his back, on the back of his legs, on his scalp. He felt the wooziness in his head and reached down for his jerrycan; the water was warm but he gulped down two mouthfuls, closing his eyes to savour the sensation before replacing the cap and putting it back in the Bergen. The small amount that was left had to last him all day. He scrubbed the sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand and stared through the scope again.

He knew the sound the instant he heard it. A low, rumbling groan, still ten miles out. He put down his rifle and grabbed his field glasses, scanning the haze where the mountains met the deep blue of the sky. The engine grew louder and he swung left and right until he saw it: a black dot that was coming in low and fast. He centred the dot in the glasses and watched it, hoping that it was something other than what he knew it to be. The jet was a little more than a thousand feet up, running fast, and, as it neared and separated from out of the haze, he started to make out the details: the stubby nose; the weapons pylons on the wings bristling with missiles and the big, onion-shaped bombs; the greedy air intakes three quarters of the way down the fuselage; the wide, split fins of the tail. Milton knew exactly what it was and why it was here: an A-10 Warthog, a tank buster, sent to take out the launcher.

He fumbled for the radio, opened the channel to command and reported that he had a visual of an incoming jet, repeating that the target they had discovered was surrounded by civilians and that the jet needed to abort. There was a delay, and then static, and then, through the hiss and pop, the forward air controller told him to stand down. Milton cursed at her and opened a wide channel, identifying himself and hailing the pilot.

There was the squawk of more static and then the pilot’s voice, enveloped by the sound of his engines: “Manilla Hotel, this is POPOV35. I’ve got a canal that runs north/south. There’s a small village, and there’s a launcher under camo in the middle.”

He hadn’t heard Milton or had been told to ignore him.

Forward air control responded: “Roger that POPOV35. Clear to engage.”