The Network (16 page)
‘You arse,’ he says grimly. ‘You just shot my bloody windows out.’
It’s our final week of training. It changes pace and lasts longer. At dawn every day we drive to different deserted places for further shooting practice. The time I’m allowed to aim and fire decreases at each session. Then when H is satisfied that I’m shooting accurately enough, he gets me to sprint thirty yards to the firing position, which makes steadying the pistol more difficult. He wants the weapon to become an extension of my hand, he explains. He shows me a quick-draw technique and lets me keep the Browning in the spare room to practise. I need to be able to draw and fire in my sleep, he says.
Rain or shine, we run everywhere. Sometimes H sets the pace, his rhythm as steady as a mountaineer’s and indifferent to gradient or temperature, and at others he lets me lead, muttering encouragement when the going gets more challenging. He drags me up the cruel slope of Hay Bluff, and we run to the far end of the long plateau called the Cat’s Back, and then along the neighbouring plateau towards Lord Hereford’s Knob. We tackle the lung-searing flanks of Pen-y-Fan and Cribyn in freezing rain. He pushes me beyond my habitual reach but just short of despair.
In the afternoons we work on personal security issues relating to journeys: assessing threats and risks, keeping in touch and keeping to plans, access and escape, emergency routines, and the importance of pre-established safe havens and RV points. We talk through trusted methods of anti-surveillance when on foot: crossing open spaces, doubling back on a pretext and using a friend to observe one’s movements from afar.
On self-defence, things simplify. Everything I’ve seen in films is bollocks, he says. The key thing is making the decision between fight or flight, and sticking to it. Flight is self-explanatory. Fighting is to decide that one will make use of anything and everything possible to defeat or disable an attacker. The hand, knee, elbow and head can all be put to lethal effect, providing they are used quickly and accurately and with complete conviction. Improvised weapons are nearly endless. A newspaper, pen or mobile phone can be used in a deadly manner, and any number of household substances can be used to inflict damage: pepper will temporarily blind when blown from the hand into an attacker’s eyes; bleach will choke; hot water will scald. Queensbury Rules do not apply.
We devote a session to mine recognition, which is my territory, so for a few hours I hold forth on the perverse technology of anti-personnel mines, and the lethal design refinements of the PFM ‘butterfly’ mine designed by the Soviets for Afghanistan, the PMN and its successors, and the almost undetectable Chinese-made Type 72.
Much of the next day is devoted to explosives in general, the improvised versions manufactured by people who can’t afford jets or tanks, and the devious and unlikely ways in which they can be set off. H mentions the high explosive that comes in the form of an adhesive roll that can be swiftly stuck to a door frame like a deadly strip of Sellotape before being detonated. The technique belongs to the Regiment’s curriculum on methods of entry, though we agree that blowing a door from its housing with plastic explosive is usually a last resort.
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.
Part Three
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.
Green’s is a dismal hotel. It’s gloomy, run-down, inefficient and, worst of all, has no alcohol licence. The Pakistani staff all know that the majority of the guests are not there for love of the hotel, but have fallen in some way under the spell cast by Afghanistan, which beckons from beyond the tribal territories some fifty miles distant. They do not share our enthusiasm for Afghanistan or its people, and make no secret of the fact they think we’re misguided. We take a morbid pleasure in their cynicism, and it’s in keeping with this spirit of defiance that Manny has smuggled a bottle of duty-free whisky into his room.
That same night we stay up drinking, and by dawn we’re planning our trip ‘inside’ together. It’s reckless and dangerous, but we reason that two heads are better than one because anything might happen once we’re inside a war zone and it seems wiser to combine our talents. There’s no way to communicate with the outside world once we’re actually in Afghanistan, and we exchange addresses at home in case one of us has to pass on bad news to the other’s family.
For a week we explore together, diving into the noise and anarchy of the bazaars in the old part of the town, where we buy Afghan clothes in preparation for our first journey into war. We make friends with a Pashtun tribesman who lives in the tribal territories near the border with Afghanistan, and travel with him to a few of the wild frontier settlements where the law has scarcely ever reached and where guns and drugs can be bought like sweets at a tuck shop. At Darra we try out a selection of a gunsmith’s wares, and the locals are duly impressed by Manny’s marksmanship. An old man, hearing we are from England, tells us the story of the charismatic faqir of Ipi, known as Mirza Ahmed Khan to the Pashtuns, who fifty years earlier led a guerrilla-style jihad against the British presence in the region. Forty thousand troops were sent to the wilds of Waziristan to hunt him down, but failed to find him in a campaign lasting more than a decade.
Then comes the news we’ve both been waiting for. A mujaheddin group agrees to smuggle us into Afghanistan to its regional headquarters in Logar province, not far south of the capital Kabul, and a few days later we settle our bills at the hotel and send our final letters home. At dawn the next day we’re moving towards the ragged purple profile of the mountains that mark the border, where we join a party of a dozen armed mujaheddin leading a small convoy of horses laden with arms and supplies.
We walk day and night, moving from village to village, sleeping in caves and on mountainsides, and are quickly immersed in all the hazards and romance of life with our guerrilla hosts. We share our first taste of warfare. Distantly at first, in the form of long, sonorous rumbles of artillery barrages laid down miles away, and in the fleeting sight of Soviet jet fighters glinting like silver arrows against the cobalt Afghan sky. And then more closely, when the village in which we’ve slept is inexplicably struck by two bombs, and in the chaos of the aftermath we catch sight of the limp and broken bodies of several villagers killed by the blasts, and the war becomes suddenly real for us.