The Reluctant Hero (31 page)

And, at her table, a mother wailing in grief.

*

Beg’s world was filled with many twists and torments. His ear was now heavily anaesthetized, yet still gave forth frequent shrill cries of distress, but that alone wasn’t sufficient to account for his pain. It was more than the ear; mostly it was the agony of humiliation. As much as he screamed at others and demanded that they leap back in time in order to carry out his instructions more quickly, he knew there could be no hiding place from the responsibility for this fiasco. The humiliation would follow him for all eternity, or at least as long as men were meant to have two ears. There was only one way to prevent others from sniggering behind his back, and that was to terrify them, to leave no one in any doubt as to the terrible consequences that lay in wait for any man unwise enough to be caught sneering at Amir Beg. They might remember, but they would never dare mock.

So he threw everything into the hunt for Harry. The Briton would become the first victim of a new purge, an example for others to fear, and of how no one could flout Amir Beg for long. The rules of this new game were simple; no hold barred, no arm untwisted, no room unransacked, no life left alone. The search for Harry allowed neither respite nor reservation.

They didn’t catch him at the Fat Chance, didn’t even sniff his presence or catch the faint, lingering hint of a Western woman’s perfume. That didn’t prevent Beg’s men from turning the place over, breaking chairs, ripping down curtains, smashing bottles – at least, those
they didn’t steal. They kicked and cudgelled into pieces every single computer monitor they found, then they beat up the doctor, and slapped around Bektour’s mother. But they didn’t hang around too long. They had many more lives to ruin before Amir Beg would be satisfied.

Bektour led them through back streets, constantly glancing over his shoulder, pausing at every corner, until they came to a car park behind a block of crumbling dwellings. He stopped beside an ancient and dust-smeared Lada – Harry reckoned it must have been at least fifteen years old – and bent down beside the front wing, reaching beneath it. When he stood up, he had keys in his hand. ‘Belongs to a friend of mine,’ he explained, ‘part of our group. He won’t mind, not if I return it with a tank full of petrol.’

‘And windscreen wipers,’ Harry added. There were none.

‘He takes them off, to protect them from the frost. And to stop them being stolen, of course.’ Bektour unlocked the vehicle. Martha and Harry climbed in the back, and Bektour reversed it out.

‘Could do with new shocks, too,’ Harry muttered, but only to himself. He was scarcely in a position to be fastidious. The back seat was filled with clutter, the marginal paraphernalia of a young man’s world – CDs, a woollen hat, road maps, a cheap plastic anorak, an ice scraper, a rucksack filled with overused gym gear.
Without asking, Harry grabbed the hat and placed it tenderly on his head so that the dressing couldn’t be seen. He also clambered into the anorak, stret2ching it across his uniform. So long as no one looked too closely, it provided a reasonable disguise. Then he opened the map, stared at it, trying to make sense of the ribbons of road that led from the city.

‘So what’s the plan?’ Martha asked as they passed a police car screaming its way in the opposite direction.

Harry looked up. There was a hard glint in his eye. It was the only answer she would get. Harry went back to poring over the map.

Bektour drove through the streets, not quickly, cursing at each clumsy gear change, trying not to attract attention. Every street seemed to have some security presence, men with weapons at the ready, peering suspiciously through car windows. Harry raised a prayer of thanks for the filthy windows, but as they joined a line of vehicles waiting to cross an intersection a militiaman, an AK-47 in the crook of his arm, began prowling between the lines of traffic, bending low, peering inside the cars. Every step was bringing him closer, and not even the dirt would prevent him seeing them. Bektour moaned, froze, Harry felt sick, as though his stomach had been hollowed out. Martha smiled. The militiaman smiled back, moved on.

‘Seems I have my uses, after all,’ she whispered as the line of vehicles began to move again.

After only a few hundred yards, the traffic once more
began to slow. Ahead it had stopped completely, gleaming brake lights suddenly spreading along the road. ‘It’s the underpass by the university,’ Bektour muttered, ‘they must be checking every car.’ Quickly, before they were held tight in the jam, he swung the wheel and turned aside.

‘We’ve got to get out of the city,’ Harry said.

Bektour nodded.

‘And then?’ Martha asked.

‘The mountains,’ Harry whispered, his voice almost lost beneath the grumble of the old exhaust. ‘There’s no other way.’

Soon they were driving through an industrial estate full of workshops and warehouses. It had seen better times. Many of the facilities were closed, even those that bore foreign names. Gates were padlocked, windows broken, metalwork rusting, pallets overturned, yards covered in old snow. The only facility they passed that appeared to be thriving was a Germanowned cigarette factory. But the roads through the estate were mercifully empty, not a police car in sight.

On the far side, Bektour turned a corner and the metalled road surface came to a sudden end. The car began to roll along a pot-holed track.

‘Lock your doors,’ he instructed solemnly, as he fastened his own. ‘This is what we call the Kremlin. We don’t really want to be here.’

The state of the buildings on all sides was pitiful.

‘It’s an illegal settlement,’ Bektour continued, weaving
his way along the track. ‘It’s so violent here that even Karabayev hasn’t dared try to bulldoze it. There’d be blood running in the gutters – if there were any gutters. Anyway, it provides cheap labour to the factories. Easier to turn a blind eye. That’s what you can do when you’re setting up the eternal empire. Leave everything for tomorrow.’

The track meandered through an extraordinary confection of huts, hovels, shacks and assorted ill-defined constructions that someone called home. All were of only one storey. Some were ancient, built with walls of thick mud with cracks as large as a man’s wrist running from their window openings; others were built more stoutly, from industrial brick, often set like forts behind walls or barriers that had been thrown together from corrugated iron or plywood.

‘Reminds me of Fort Apache,’ Martha whispered, ‘after the Indians arrived.’

The most prolific building material seemed to be tattered sheets of plastic, in hues of black, blue and garish yellow. Many windows had no glass and were filled with cardboard, and there was no indication of any communal facilities, no running water, no drainage, not even a shop. The only sign of a power supply appeared to be an illicit electricity cable that had escaped from an abandoned warehouse and snaked away through the community in a tangle of wires. The tracks and alleyways that branched off in many directions were built of nothing more than frozen mud, on which seemed to
live little but rubbish and yapping dogs. Absurdly, most of the better, brick-built houses sprouted satellite dishes on their roofs and had securely locked metal gates on their outside walls. There was a hierarchy, even here.

There were a few people about, who cast suspicious scowls at this unknown vehicle. Strangers clearly weren’t welcome here, or safe. They passed two young women, arm in arm, who despite the conditions were dressed in bright clothes and high heels, heading off for what Harry assumed must be the nearest bus stop or taxi rank and a night shift in the city centre. A pack of young children scampered across the track in front of them, some barefooted even on the frozen mud. They stopped as they saw the car bouncing over the potholes. Suddenly stones rained down upon the Lada’s roof and windscreen, before the children disappeared, taunting, up an alleyway. Every inch of this place seemed to hold a sense of menace.

‘Why are we here?’ Martha asked, a little frightened.

‘You don’t find any policemen in the Kremlin,’ Bektour replied. ‘Anyone in a uniform here disappears faster than free cigarettes.’

Harry tugged the anorak more tightly around him. It was bright red; he was mortified to discover it bore the logo of Manchester United. He’d always been an Arsenal man.

‘And this way we can avoid the roadblocks,’ Bektour continued. ‘I can take you on. To the mountains.’

‘We need supplies,’ Harry said. ‘Anything that will keep us warm. Food. Better clothing.’

‘That won’t be easy,’ Bektour replied. ‘We’ll find nothing here.’

‘Do what you can, whatever you can,’ responded Harry.

They continued weaving their way slowly along the lanes of the Kremlin. Harry hadn’t seen anything as dismal and threatening as this since West Africa, yet, eventually, with a thump of gratitude from the front axle, they left the heart of this other world and climbed back onto a ribbon of concrete, a road that led them out through the outskirts of the community. Here there were signs of more productive lives – a vehicle-repair shop, with mechanics in oiled clothes crawling beneath broken cars, a small mosque set back behind a high brick wall, a scrap metal yard, its rusting waste spilling out onto the road, and, a hundred yards ahead, its small window protected by a metal grille, a shop.

‘Let’s stop here,’ Bektour suggested. ‘Get what we can.’

‘Whatever we can,’ Harry said, unnecessarily, his voice betraying an edge of concern.

Bektour pulled off the concrete roadway and parked beneath the branches of a bare oak tree. Martha thrust all her remaining currency into his hand. ‘Food, clothes, anything to keep us dry and warm,’ Harry repeated, his words a hollow echo. The shop appeared pitifully small.

The afternoon light was beginning to fade as Bektour disappeared inside. Harry and Martha sat back, in silence, nursing their anxieties, which was why they failed to notice the group of young men approaching the car from the rear until the moment they were deafened by a fierce pummelling on the roof, and by that time it was too late. The driver’s door was wrenched open – Bektour had forgotten to lock it – and a jeering face forced its way inside. Harry couldn’t understand what was said but knew it screamed of trouble. The face belonged to a scruffy youth whose front tooth was broken, whose cheek bore a vivid recent scar and whose eyes were fixed hungrily on Martha, molesting her. Other faces were pressed to the windows, threatening worse. Five of them. Too many for Harry.

‘Harry?’ Martha cried in alarm, but all he could do was squeeze her hand.

Suddenly there was a shout from outside. The thug was already clambering over the front seat, but as he heard the cry he stiffened, stopped, then ducked back in alarm, his head banging fiercely against the door pillar. Then he was outside once more, his hand clamped over his forehead trying to staunch a flow of fresh blood, not looking back, running in the footsteps of the others as they fled towards the heart of the Kremlin. For, a short distance down the road, their boots pounding on the roadway as they drew closer, were two heavily armed policemen.

When she saw them, Martha clutched at Harry’s
hand ever tighter. ‘No, it’s not possible. Is God asleep?’ she whimpered in despair.

The two policemen had slowed, clearly having no intention of pursuing the men into the depths of the Kremlin, but they would inspect the car, ask questions, ones that could barely be understood, let alone answered. Harry’s disguise would be discovered, they would be undone. They had been saved, only to be hurled down from a still greater height. If this was any example of a divine sense of humour, Harry decided it was uncommonly dark.

That was the point when Bektour emerged from the shop. He was carrying a small bag of purchases, and he was shouting. Harry could make out only fragments of what was being said. Bektour was hurling abuse after the retreating thugs, then conversing in a quieter voice with the policemen. Harry thought he heard mention of a sister and her boyfriend. Bektour was trying to head them off.

‘I think you’d better kiss me,’ Harry said to Martha.

As the two officers approached, they found Martha and Harry in each other’s arms. Bektour made some comment, the policemen began laughing, exchanging ribaldry as Bektour threw his purchases into the front seat.

‘
Spasibo! Spasibo!
Thank you. I think we’ve overstayed our welcome here,’ Bektour called out to the officers, waving his gratitude. And, trying not to appear in too great a hurry, he started the car and
pulled away. The policemen waved back. Only then did Martha and Harry tear themselves apart.

‘Show a little more enthusiasm next time, dammit,’ she said. She sat back and sighed, smoothing down her coat as the policemen disappeared from sight.

They drove on in silence. Then Harry stretched forward to the front seat and took the bag of provisions.

‘That’s all they had,’ Bektour said in pre-emptive apology. ‘It was such a small place. Little more than a cigarette kiosk.’

Inside the flimsy plastic bag were several bars of chocolate, three cigarette lighters, and a large bag of hazelnuts. But no clothing. Harry struggled not to betray his distress. All they had to face the task of escaping across some of the highest mountains in the world was the contents of this plastic bag, the clothes they wore and the gym kit from a teenager’s rucksack. It wasn’t enough. He looked up to the mountains that lay ahead. The skies had cleared and the sinking sun had begun to set the tops of the peaks ablaze, yet the brilliance of the passing colour only served to emphasize how enduringly grey and forbidding the rest of the countryside remained. The night would be ferociously cold.

They drove for a few more miles, leaving the lights of the city behind them, climbing gently, the windows misting, but the road grew steadily poorer, more narrow, the way increasingly choked by snow. Eventually the car
began sliding, its wheels scrabbling for grip, not finding enough. It became apparent they could go no further.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bektour said.

Harry laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘Bektour, such words are pointless. You’ve been as fine a friend as a man could ever hope to have. And all for a stranger.’