The Night Manager (51 page)

So Jonathan had retreated into his own thoughts. He had long been aware that he was one of those people who are condemned to think concurrently rather than consecutively. For instance, he was comparing the greens of the jungle with the greens of Ireland and reckoning that the jungle beat Ireland into a cocked hat. He was remembering how in army helicopters the ethic had been to sit on your steel helmet in case the bad guys on the ground decided they would shoot your balls off. And how this time he had no helmet--just jeans and sneakers and very unprotected balls. And how as soon as he had entered a helicopter in those days, he had felt the prickle of combat start to work in him as he sent a last goodbye to Isabelle and hugged his rifle to his cheek. And how helicopters, because they scared him, had always been places of philosophical reflection of the corniest kind for him, such as: I am on my life's journey, I am in the womb but heading for the grave.

Such as: God, if you get me out of this alive, I'm yours for--well, life. Such as: Peace is bondage, war is freedom, which was a notion that shamed him every time it took him over, and had him casting round for somebody to punish--such as Dicky Roper, his tempter. And he was thinking that whatever he had come for, he was now approaching it, and Jed would not be earned, or worth earning, and Sophie would not be appeased, till he had found it, because his search was for-and-on-behalf-of both of them.

He stole a look at Roper, sitting across the aisle with his head back and his sleep mask on, and it occurred to him that until recently their relationship had been of a rather formal kind--health, passports, company structures, menus, Dan and so on--and that if they had been German they would still be calling one another She. But that now, with action in the air and the same women in common. Jed and Sophie, a bond of mutual dependence was forming between them. And that Roper was aware of this also--even if he didn't know the full reason--hence the little extra confidences, glances and asides.

And that he had never seen anybody riding into a battle zone in a sleep mask.

He stole a look at Langbourne, seated behind Roper reading his way through a lengthy contract, and he was impressed, as he had been in Curaçao. by the way Langbourne sprang to life as soon as he caught the whiff of cordite. He would not say he liked Langbourne the better for it, but he was gratified to discover that there was something on earth apart from women that was capable of rousing him from his supine state--even if it was only the advanced techniques of human butchery.

"Now, Thomas, don't you let Mr. Roper fall into any bad company," Meg had warned from the steps of her plane as the men humped their luggage to the waiting helicopter. "You know what they say about Panama: it's Casablanca without the heroes, isn't that so, Mr. Roper? So don't you-all go being heroes, now. Nobody appreciates it. Enjoy your day, Lord Langbourne. Thomas, it's been a pleasure having you aboard. Mr. Roper, that was not a seemly embrace."

They were climbing. As they climbed, the sierra climbed with them until they entered bumpy cloud. The helicopter didn't like cloud, and it didn't like the altitude, and its engine was wheezing and braying like a bad-tempered old horse. Jonathan put on his plastic earmuffs and was rewarded with the howl of a dentist's drill instead. The air in the cabin turned from ice-cold to intolerable. They lurched over a coxcomb of snowcaps and flipped downward like a sycamore seed until they were flying over a pattern of small islands, each with its half-dozen shanties and red tracks. Then sea again. Then another island, coming at them so fast and low that Jonathan was convinced that the clustered masts of the fishing boats were about to smash the helicopter to pieces or send it cartwheeling down the beach on its rotaries.

Now they are splitting the earth in two, sea one side, jungle the other. Above the jungle, the blue hills. Above the hills, white puffs of gun smoke. And underneath them roll the ordered ranks of slow white waves between tongues of dazzling green land. The helicopter banks tightly as if dodging unfriendly fire. Square banana groves like paddy fields merge with the sodden moorland of Armagh. The pilot is following a sanded yellow road leading to the broken-down farmhouse where the close observer blew two men's faces off and made himself the toast of his regiment. They enter a jungle valley; green walls envelop them as Jonathan is overcome by a dreadful need of sleep. They are climbing up the hillside, shelf by shelf, over farms, horses, villages, living people. Turn back; this is high enough. But they don't. They continue until zero is upon them and life below untraceable. To crash here, even in a big plane, is to have the jungle close over you before you hit the ground.

"They seem to prefer the Pacific side," Rooke had explained in Curaçao, eight hours and a lifetime ago, speaking over the house telephone from room 22. "Caribbean side's too easy for the radar boys to track. But once you're in the jungle it makes no difference anyway, because you won't exist. The head trainer calls himself Emmanuel."

"It isn't even a letter on the map," Rooke had said. "The place is called Cerro Fabrega, but Roper prefers to call it Faberge."

Roper had taken off his sleep mask and was looking at his watch as if checking the airline's punctuality. They were in free-fall over zero. The red-and-white posts of a helicopter pad were sucking them downward into the well of a dark forest.

Armed men in battle gear were staring up at them.

If they take you with them it will be because they daren't trust you out of their sight, Rooke had said prophetically.

And so indeed had Roper explained before going aboard the Lombardy. He won't trust me in an empty henhouse until my signing hand has signed me off.

The pilot cut his engines. A squat Hispanic man in jungle uniform trotted forward to receive them. Beyond him, Jonathan saw six well-camouflaged bunkers, guarded by men in pairs who must have had orders not to leave the shadow of the trees.

"Hullo, Manny," Roper shouted as he hopped cheerfully onto the tarmac. "Starving. You remember Sandy? What's for lunch?"

They processed cautiously down the jungle path, Roper leading and the stubby colonel chattering to him as they went, turning to him with all his thick body at once, lifting his cupped hands to grapple him each time he made a point. Close behind them walked Langbourne, who had slipped into a low-kneed jungle march; then came the training staff. Jonathan recognised the two loose-limbed Englishmen who had appeared at Meister's calling themselves Forbes and Lubbock and known to Roper as the Brussels boys. Then came two look-alike Americans with gingery hair, deep in converse with a flaxen man called Olaf.

After them came Frisky and two Frenchmen he evidently knew from other lives. And behind Frisky came Jonathan and Tabby and a boy called Fernandez, with a scarred face and only two fingers on one hand. If we were in Ireland, I'd reckon you were bomb disposal, thought Jonathan. The scream of birds was deafening. The heat scalded them each time they entered sunlight.

"We are in most steep country of Panama, please," said Fernandez in a soft enthusiastic voice. "Nobody can walk this place. We have three-thousand-meter-high, very steep hill, all jungle, no road, no path. Terebeno farmers come, they burn tree, grow plantain one time, go away. No terror."

"Great," said Jonathan politely.

A moment's confusion, which Tabby was for once quicker than Jonathan to solve. "Soil, Ferdie," he corrected him kindly. "Not terra. Soil. The soil is too thin."

"Terebeno farmers very sad people, Mr. Thomas. Once they fight everybody. Now they must marry to tribe they do not like."

Jonathan made sympathetic noises.

"We say we are prospector, Mr. Thomas, sir. We say we look oil. We say we look gold. We say we look huaca, gold frog, gold eagle, gold tiger. We are peaceful people here, Mr. Thomas." Great laughter, in which Jonathan obligingly took part.

From beyond the jungle wall Jonathan heard a burst of machine gun fire, followed by the dry smack of a grenade. Then a moment's silence before the babel of the jungle returned.

That's how it used to be in Ireland, he remembered: after a bang, the old noises held their breath until it was safe to speak again. The vegetation closed over them, and he was in the tunnel at Crystal. Trumpet-shaped white flowers, dragonflies and yellow butterflies brushed against him. He remembered a morning when Jed wore a yellow blouse and touched him with her eyes.

He was returned to time present by a detachment of troops jogging past him down the hill at light-infantry speed, sweating under the weight of shoulder-held rocket launchers, rockets and machetes. Their leader was a boy with dead blue eyes and a bushwhacker's hat. But the eyes of his Spanish Indian troops were fixed in angry pain on the way ahead, so that all Jonathan knew of them as they scurried past was the praying exhaustion of their camouflage-dappled faces and the crosses round their necks and the smell of sweat and mud-soaked uniforms.

They entered alpine cool, and Jonathan was transferred to the forests above Miirren, headed for the foot of the Lobhorn for a one-day climb. He felt intensely happy. The jungle is another homecoming. The path led beside steaming rapids; the sky was overcast. As they crossed a dried riverbed, the veteran of many assault courses glimpsed ropes, trip wires, shell cases and netting, blackened pampas and blast marks on the tree trunks. They scrambled up a slope between grass and rock, reached a brow and looked down. The camp that lay below them was at first glance deserted. Fire smoke rose from the cookhouse chimney, to the sound of plaintive Spanish singing.

All able-bodied men are in the jungle. Only the cooks, cadre and men on the sick list have leave to stay behind.

"Under Noriega, many paramilitary was being trained here," Fernandez was saying in his methodical way, when Jonathan tuned back to him. "Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Americano, Colombia. Spanish people, Indian people, all was trained here very good. To fight Ortega. To fight Castro. To fight many bad people."

It was not till they walked down the slope and entered the camp that Jonathan realised that Faberge was a madhouse.

A commanding officer's lookout point dominated the camp, and it was backed by a triangular white wall daubed with slogans.

Below it stood a ring of cinder-block houses, each with its function painted in obscene figures on the door: the cookhouse with a topless female cook, the bathhouse with its naked bathers, the clinic with its bloody bodies, the schoolhouse for technical instruction and political enlightenment, the tiger house, the snake house, the monkey house, the aviary and, on a small rise, the chapel house, its walls illuminated with a bulbous Virgin and Child watched over by jungle fighters with Kalashnikovs. Painted effigies stood waist-high among the houses, staring with truculent eyes down the concrete paths: a fat-bellied merchant in tricorn hat, blue tailcoat and ruff; a rouged fine lady of Madrid in her mantilla; an Indian peasant girl with bare breasts, her head turned in fear, eyes and mouth open, as she frantically works the handle of a mystic well. And protruding from the windows and fake chimneys of the houses, flesh-pink plaster arms, feet and frenzied faces, blood-spattered like the severed limbs of victims cut down while trying to escape.

But the maddest part of Faberge was not the wall daubings or the voodoo statues, not the magic words of Indian dialect sprinkled between Spanish slogans or the rush-roofed Crazy Horse Saloon with its barstools and jukebox, and naked girls cavorting on the walls. It was the living zoo. It was the demented mountain tiger crammed beside a chunk of rotting meat in a cage barely his own size. It was the tethered bucks and crated jungle cats. It was the parakeets, eagles, cranes, kites and vultures in their filthy aviary, beating their clipped wings and raging at the dying of the light. It was the despairing monkeys mute in their cages and the rows of green ammunition boxes covered with wire mesh, each box containing a separate species of snake so that jungle fighters could learn the difference between friend and foe.

"Colonel Emmanuel love very much animal," Fernandez explained as he showed his guests to their quarters. "To fight we must be children of the jungle, Mr. Thomas."

The windows of their hut were also barred.

It is mess night at Faberge, miniatures to be worn. The regimental guest of honour is Mr. Richard Onslow Roper, our patron, colonel in chief, comrade in arms and love. All heads are turned to him, and to the no-longer-languid lordling seated at his side.

They are thirty strong, they are eating chicken and rice and drinking Coca-Cola. Candles in jars, not Paul de Lamarie candlesticks, light their faces down the table. It is as if the twentieth century has emptied its garbage truck of leftover warriors and vanished causes into a camp called Faberge: American veterans sickened first by war and then by peace; Russian Spetsnaz, trained to guard a country that disappeared while their backs were turned; Frenchmen who still hated de Gaulle for giving away North Africa; the Israeli boy who had known nothing but war, and the Swiss boy who had known nothing but peace; the Englishmen in search of military nobility because their generation somehow missed the fun (if only we could have had a British Vietnam!); the huddle of introspective Germans torn between the guilt of war and its allure. And Colonel Emmanuel, who according to Tabby had fought every dirty war from Cuba to Salvador to Guatemala to Nicaragua and points between in order to please the hated Yanqui: well, now Emmanuel would balance the score a little!

And Roper himself--who had summoned this ghostly legion to the feast--floated over it like some presiding genius, now commandant, now impresario, now sceptic, now fairy godfather.

"The Mooj?" Roper repeats amid laughter, picking up on something Langbourne has said about the success of American Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. "The Mujahedin? Brave as lions, mad as hatters!" When Roper talks about war, his voice is at its calmest and the pronouns reappear. "They'd pop out of the ground in front of Sov tanks, bang away with ten-year-old Armalites and watch their bullets bounce off 'em like hailstones. Peashooters against lasers, they didn't care. Americans took one look at 'em and said: Mooj need Stingers. So Washington finagles Stingers to 'em. And the Mooj go crazy. Take out the Sovs' tanks, shoot down their combat helicopters. Now what? I'II tell you what! The Sovs have pulled out, no more Sovs, and the Mooj have got Stingers and are rarin' to go. So everyone else wants Stingers because the Mooj have got 'em. When we had bows and arrows we were apes with bows and arrows. Now we're apes with multiple warheads. Know why Bush went to war against Saddam?"