Tremble (56 page)

Since arriving by landing craft near Port San Carlos a day ago his life had veered between the strange tedium of waiting in very uncomfortable places and rushing into combat—a flurry of flying bullets, screaming commands, and plunging bayonets. It had been nothing like they had
described at training camp; then again, what was the point of trying to convey a realistic picture, he thought dreamily, it would be like recounting the loss of virginity—an entirely different experience for each individual.

He had discovered several interesting things when pushed to extremes: firstly, that he found killing exhilarating; and secondly, it was far more difficult to shoot a man dead than he had assumed. Even riddled with bullets they still kept running at you stupidly, as if they hadn’t yet realized it was all over. The third thing was the indescribable stench of hand-to-hand combat. The smell of terror mixed in with shit, piss, blood, and steaming entrails combined with the smell of damp, dirty clothing. It was so foul Clive was forced to breathe through his mouth to exorcise the taste that clung to his nostrils.

He touched the
kukri
—the eighteen-inch curved Gurkha fighting knife—on his belt. He’d had to use it to finish off a soldier at the last Argentine bunker after plunging his bayonet into the sleeping teenager. He touched the blade for good luck. It was a bad habit he’d got into. His officer in command—an irritating public schoolboy who was barely older than himself and already a proven coward in combat—glared at him for making a noise. The enemy—an Argentine machine-gun post—was barely a hundred meters away. But despite radioed commands to advance, the platoon had done nothing but crouch in the ditch for the last two hours.

Wilfred Owen’s poem rattled around Clive’s brain. He had remembered it suddenly on coming across his first corpse—a young guardsman, not
more than nineteen, stretched out as if in sleep, his face wax-white, his lips pulled back as if in dream. Only the open mouth of his wound, obscene against the stained snow, gave him away—the back half of his head was missing. Clive had stared at the body, marveling at how empty it looked. Was that death—the skin discarded by the soul? The squadron had pushed on before he had time to think about it. But the kid’s face kept floating back to him at odd moments. He looked like someone Clive might have picked up if they had met in civvies at some bar in a back street of Soho. In another time, in another kind of struggle.

The boy might have been a younger version of himself: closet poetry reader, overt narcissist, likes to live a little dangerously, fucks men but falls in love with women. Would that be his epitaph? Don’t think too much, Clive, don’t. Too much thought and you’re a goner.

Not that he didn’t expect to survive. He’d known since he was a kid that he was lucky—touched by the angels, his mother used to say—shimmering with a kind of handsome ease that made others instantly jealous. Fate kept him safe. Maybe that was why he sought out risk—to test the gods. He liked to push his luck. When he was ten he’d had a sledding accident; his best friend had broken a leg but Clive had got away with barely a scratch. At twenty, a car accident—the driver was killed, the passenger behind him paralyzed for life, but Clive had emerged from the wreck with a bruised cheek and whiplash. In Northern Ireland he’d been driving behind a car that was ambushed, avoiding death by a matter of seconds. The luck of a fallen angel walking unscathed through a collapsing world.

He shifted his weight now, feeling around with one frozen foot for a ledge to lift himself out of the slush. Apart from the commanding officer three other soldiers squatted in the ditch with him: Cedric, a heavy Welshman in his thirties with a wicked sense of humor, who shared Clive’s dislike for their officer; a young cockney who appeared to have stumbled into the army without much understanding of how he’d got there; and a seasoned sergeant who’d seen operations both in the Middle East and West Africa—a man of few words and much action. Clive had followed him through several advances already, trusting his aptitude far more than that of the bristling CO.

Cedric was busy checking his weapons over and over, the young cockney kept untying and retying his bootlaces—a reaction to shock, Clive guessed—while the sergeant glared at the commanding officer as
if he was thinking of saving the Argentines the effort of killing him and was about to do it himself. It promised to be a long night.

The bat flew quickly, propelled by the glacial wind that came off the choppy waters of the South Atlantic and rushed inland. It was flying over San Carlos water, known as “bomb alley.” Impervious to the icy temperatures the animal was in its element, dipping low as it glided over the mountainous waves and through their spray. Its fur stood on end over every part of its body, the wings of skin stretched out to scoop up each gush of air.

A Harrier jet zoomed past. The vortices trailing off each wing momentarily knocked the bat off course, transforming its path into a crazy zigzag.

It flew over HMS
Antelope
. Below, the crew ran across the deck like crazy ants, scrabbling to fire antiaircraft missiles at the Argentine fighters that were screeching down like angry wasps. One missile hit the water and exploded prematurely, sending a spray of shrapnel and sea up like a sudden tornado. Indifferent, the bat soared through it.

The animal was excited now; for the first time in thirty-seven years the reason for its existence had been reignited, and the calling that had played through the creature for centuries drummed wildly in its blood. It existed for one destination only—the battlefield.

It hovered in midair above a discarded buoy covered by several sea lions huddling together for warmth. The bat shook off the sea spray that had stuck to its hair and wings. Sensing the creature’s presence, the sea lions took fright and dived off the buoy like panicked shipwreck survivors. Drawn by the streaks of light and the roar of distant guns the bat flew on toward the island, hazy memories of other battles, the thunder of fire and flame, pulsing through its brain.

Juan Martinez pushed his night-sight goggles up to his forehead, swore then spat. He hadn’t seen a British soldier for over an hour and yet the tracer bullets continued. He couldn’t tell whether they had spotted the machine-gun post dug into the side of the mountain or not. What was
this crazy war for anyway, he wondered, a fucking PR operation for a dictator. A bogey man whose thugs came in the middle of the night to steal people. Was he now one of Galtieri’s hooligans?

Although he didn’t agree with the regime, he wanted order, but when they had dragged away the long-haired primary schoolteacher in his village he had begun to have doubts. The newspapers were screaming that inflation was over 600 percent and many of the farmers were suffering, really suffering. Still he’d got out. To here. This shitty piece of nothing. Three weeks he’d been on the island—two weeks occupying the territory and putting up with the resentful English residents, and one week of fierce fighting—and he was beginning to think that maybe the Brits should have this miserable piece of land after all. It was too cold, and too far away to serve Argentina. What had General Galtieri been thinking? That it would make some great holiday destination, the next Club Med perhaps? Fucking stupid. Almost as ridiculous as squatting in a tent for four days wrapped in state-of-the-art U.S.-issued parkas. It was a travesty; they were better prepared for the weather than combat. He felt like some extra in a B-grade war movie waiting for the director to yell
Action
! He was eighteen years old and only joined up because his older brother was already in the army and had boasted of all the opportunities—the good uniform, opportunities for promotion, travel, women—everything Juan had dreamed of back in Cordoba. He knew that if he didn’t get out he would end up just a cattle hand like his father.

But there was another reason why he couldn’t stay in the village. He was a lover of men. At least he thought he was a lover of men. He didn’t know for sure; he just knew that when he looked at women he didn’t feel the way he should. They didn’t get him hard, not like men did.

Sweet Mary, Mother of Christ, he prayed, protect me now and I promise I will be a transformed man when I get home. He only knew of one man in the village who was like that. The unhappy goat herder had been so ridiculed and persecuted that one day after church they found him hanging from a beam in his hut, his body already a week old. That wasn’t going to happen to him, that wasn’t going to happen to Juan Martinez.

Juan unzipped his parka and, with fingers that were trembling with the cold despite woollen gloves, he rolled himself a cigarette and lit up. No, he was going to get himself some help, he was going to change.
He’d find some girl he could at least talk to and pretend. Maybe he’d even marry. He was going to change, for Jesus and God.

But being in the army, now that was different. Back at the base, Juan had loved the packed-in bunks, the proximity of all those bodies, the maleness, the camaraderie and joking around, the way the young soldiers would walk around naked, showing off but never admitting it, almost as if they knew. They’d even made jokes about sucking each other off it was so fucking lonely. The comment had made Juan instantly hard just imagining it. It was dangerous. He had to watch himself all the time, play tougher than the rest, be more macho. But he was good, the best actor he knew.

He touched the seeping scratch that ran across one cheekbone—his first war wound from a bayonet five days ago in hand-to-hand combat. He’d killed a Scots Guard with his own bayonet one night. The fight had made him a hero and had instantly secured his reputation as
un hombre con huevos
. Homosexual, Juan Martinez? Not him.

So where were the pale-skinned
ingéles
hiding now? Peering out again at the bleak horizon dotted with the gnarled skeletons of burned-out shrubs, he wondered how long it would be before the next wave of soldiers wielding bayonets, their backs crisscrossed with ammunition, swooped out of the dark, their faces smeared with camouflage cream. At first Juan had thought they were Gurkhas because they were so fucking short. But after seeing the blue eyes rolling back on the soldier he’d killed, he knew they were
gringos
. Boys like themselves, just better trained.

Behind him, the lights of Stanley still burned like some floating fairy satellite. For a moment Juan wished he was back home in the village, at his mother’s, a mug of strong chocolate warming his hands while the women muttered their endless mantra of births, marriages, infidelities and deaths.
Remember my son Juan, killed in battle like a true hero, God rest his soul.
The premonition of his mother, dressed in black, whispering into the ear of Julietta, the oldest widow of the village, made him shiver. Butting out his cigarette he promptly dismissed it from his mind. Stupid superstition. He was going to live. He was going to go home, help with the calving for one more season, then he would hitch a ride to Buenos Aires and make some money in the nightclubs as a bouncer like his cousin Enrico.

“Get down, you idiot,” one of his companions hissed as an RAF army
helicopter flew over, its search-beam traveling across the battlefield like a great white eye. The soldiers fired off a couple of rounds of ammunition before it flew off, swaying dramatically like an overburdened bumblebee.

“
Adios, gringos.
May you rot in hell.”

“Hey, Dario, when are we gonna get out of this shit-hole?”

“When I get orders. Until then you have my permission to continue to compose love letters to that sweet-arsed mother of yours.”

“Fuck you,” Juan responded affectionately.