The Reluctant Hero (36 page)

It might have been different. He had been a brilliant soldier, an inspiring politician, a man who could have made a real difference, and perhaps he already had, in many ways, but there could have been so much more –
would
have been more, if Julia had survived, or Martha. It shouldn’t have finished like this. He’d already won
so many honours, more than any man of his age, yet they meant nothing now, for it was all going to come to an end, here, in this frozen waste of Central Asia. And no one would even know about it. No more medals for Harry Jones, not even posthumously. They didn’t hand out medals for failure.

Random images collided inside his exhausted mind. And he remembered Martha’s medal, tucked away in his top pocket. Her gift, from the Battle of Berlin. He pulled it out. It was made of dull brass that glistened as he turned it.
Za Bzyteey Berleena. For Defeating Berlin.
It had on it a red star and oak leaves, dangling from a begrimed ribbon of red, black and gold stripes.

And the ribbon had a pin. A sixty-something-year-old pin, manufactured in some Siberian gulag and rusted to match, yet nonetheless a pin. A pin . . . He was armed once more! He hauled himself to his feet, reached yet again for the tangle of cables and pipes, his fingers closing on one of the hydraulic hoses. He forced the point of the pin into it, and pushed. And pushed, and pushed still more.

He felt it move. Only a fraction, a little like those butterfly wings on the mountainside, but it was enough. He pulled the pin out of the casing, and escaping behind it came the faintest mist. The second pipe took longer, offered more resistance, perhaps the pin had been blunted, but he got through that, too. Slowly, the access tunnel with its cabling and pipes was filling with a fine mist, tiny droplets, of hydraulic fluid.

He knew he hadn’t much time, Sydykov would be back very soon; it might already be too late. He snapped the cover into place, reattached the soundproofing that hid it, swiftly checked that he had left no sign of his presence. Then he returned the medal to his pocket. ‘Thank you, Martha. Now just a little bit more of your magic, please?’

He stuck his head out of the compartment. He could see signs of movement, a head bobbing through the jungle of moraine left by the avalanche. He jumped down to the snow, and within seconds was gone.

He only just made it back to the cover of the boulders before Sydykov and his men reappeared, like bathers emerging from a sea. Four of them were carrying Martha. They had made a perfunctory search around the body for Harry, but found no sign. The situation was clear, he had been buried beneath the mountainside, and no one would find his body until they came to clear the road after the spring melt, and even then they would find only what the wolves had left. Beg would have to make do with just one trophy. Martha. They threw her into the back of the helicopter with as little grace as a sack of coal.

Harry watched, transfixed. The sound of the engines grew louder, the rotor blades turned faster, drifting snow blew into a storm as cautiously, hesitantly, the Hind lifted into the air. A hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred feet into the air.

The puncture holes were minute, but the hydraulic
system in the Hind operated at extreme pressure. It was slowly losing that pressure, not so much yet that the alarm was activated, but enough to make the craft a little more cumbersome to handle, as if things weren’t bad enough in these conditions, at such high altitudes, towards the limits of the Hind’s service ceiling, which made the controls sluggish and unresponsive, difficult to read. That’s why the pilots didn’t notice, at first – that, and the fact they had so few flying hours up here that they couldn’t tell the difference between altitude sickness and a bad curry. There were so many things to take care of – updraughts, downdraughts, ice on the blades, the viz shot to crap. Didn’t help that they were packed behind with all these bodies. It was normal for the craft to wallow like a mother pig. Things would be better when they got up a little airspeed.

It is when a helicopter is travelling at its slowest that it is most vulnerable. The controls don’t respond so well, it is more difficult to fly, more unstable. So the pilots noticed nothing out of the ordinary until the hydraulic alarm started to scream at them. The senior pilot’s first instinct was to drop the nose, put on power and throw his craft away from the mountainside. Yet, inevitably, as he grabbed anxiously at his sticks, he over-controlled and over-torqued massively. This would, perhaps, have been no more than a momentary discomfort, had it not been for the hydraulics. As the pilot demanded more of his systems, the hydraulic fluid was pushed around at still greater pressure,
which meant that more of it escaped – and that made the craft still more difficult to handle, which meant the pilot demanded ever more of his systems . . .

It was like an inexperienced driver trying to control his first skid on ice, except this was several hundred feet above the ground. As Harry watched, the Hind began to pirouette and stumble through the sky, lurching forward, up, aft, as the pilot yanked at his controls in ever-growing panic. He might still have been able to stick the Hind on the ground, but he never got the chance. The fine mist of hydraulic fluid was floating around the engine and gearbox. It was highly inflammable, and they were exceedingly hot. The Hind blew up with terrifying explosive anger. Harry threw himself behind the boulders as a firestorm of hot gases and debris shot across the valley. He was burying his head in the snow when there was a second explosion as the Hind hit the ground. By the time he looked up again, he could see nothing but flames.

High above the scene the second Hind circled, inspected, hovered in indecision then flew away.

It seemed forever before Harry could approach the scene. The fire burned with an extraordinary ferocity and there were several more minor explosions, yet contrary to his first impressions, not everything was in flames. The explosion had scattered chunks of wreckage across a wide area, and as soon as it became safe, he began a methodical search. What he found in many places sickened him; pieces of charred and torn wreckage, not just of
the machine, but of those on board. The explosions had shown no mercy. He had to try to find Martha, but there was nothing, except for a single sleeve of her bright green jacket that seemed almost spotless and unsoiled, as if it had just come from her wardrobe. It was all that was left of Martha Riley, except the memories. He took the sleeve and dropped it into her funeral pyre.

A little further away he found one of the soldiers. He had been blown clear of the fire, was relatively undamaged. Harry stripped him down to his shorts, and dressed himself in the winter kit the soldier had been wearing.

The last thing he tried on was the boots. The boots! Even in the stolen socks they slipped on remarkably easily. His feet were still screaming, but this time in relief. He sat in the snow, tied up the laces, stood, stamped, jumped, tested them.

Then, in those boots, Harry walked all the way to Afghanistan.

It took Harry almost three weeks to find his way home. The journey wasn’t without incident, much of Afghanistan was still a place of hazard for any Westerner, but nothing compared to what had gone before. The world around him seemed to have changed as he travelled in from Heathrow Airport; people with their heads down, eyes fixed on the ground, making sure their feet were still there, their jobs and homes, too. The middle of an economic meltdown wasn’t the best time to fuss with other people’s problems. But he’d changed, too. He was a different man from the one who had left with Roddy Bowles, and Sid Proffit, Malik, and Martha. He felt as though he was viewing everything at a distance; nothing was quite in focus. Harry hadn’t known what he’d find when at last he arrived back in London; he’d hardly expected marching bands, but on all sides he was met with a damp blanket of indifference and incredulity.

There were his friends, of course, but like everyone else they were distracted, many assuming he had been away on a protracted holiday. Some even expressed
envy, until they saw him and caught sight of his face. A Harley Street plastic surgeon had tidied it up and was even talking about growing him a new ear on the back of some genetically modified mouse, but in the meantime he changed his hair style to hide the worst effects. He had also lost weight, too much and too quickly, and there were shadows around his eyes that spoke of turmoil and made people feel uncomfortable. In any event they had other, more pressing distractions than events that had taken place in a country they had never heard of; the month of January had been the wettest on record, many rivers were flooding once again, despite last year’s assurances, and Big Ben had suddenly stopped. No more chimes. It was taken as an omen. Harry spent two days on his return, hitting his phone, digging up apathy, getting nowhere. Yet it was the Establishment, rather than any individuals, that upset him most. It seemed as if no one in a position of authority wanted to know, as though they had better things to do. When he tried to report Martha’s death to the office of the Westminster coroner, it was made clear that they weren’t about to become involved in a problem on the darker side of the planet when there wasn’t even a body. They suggested the police. So Harry phoned Scotland Yard, spent a considerable time on the phone explaining the situation, and they sent an inspector, but he was clearly sceptical and kept insisting that the Yard couldn’t sort out political problems. He also repeatedly failed to spell Ta’argistan correctly as he sat taking notes.

‘Strange, sir, but the authorities in –’ he searched for the name yet again – ‘
that country
say they know nothing about the matter,’ he declared, closing his notebook in a decisive gesture. ‘But rest assured, we’ll look into it.’

Harry did not rest assured. The Chief Whip wasn’t around, away burying his mother amidst claims that the local hospital was riddled with a super-bug, so Harry tried to phone the Foreign Secretary, but his call was returned by one of the junior ministers. ‘Of course I’ll put a few ferrets down the rabbit hole, Harry,’ the minister said, ‘as soon as I get back from my next junket. A week of sweating my way up the Zambezi, can you believe it? Those buggers Stanley and Livingstone have got a lot to answer for.’

Harry grew increasingly exasperated. He was work-ing on too short a fuse, he would be the first to admit it; he was a long way off recovering from his ordeal, even physically, let alone with what was tearing at him inside. Yet the Establishment seemed concerned with little more than ticking boxes on lists, not taking him seriously. So his spirits lifted when, one afternoon, there was a knock on the door of his parliamentary office in Portcullis House and a man introduced himself as Superintendent Ron Richards. He was not in uniform but it seemed, at last, that the Yard was giving the matter more weight.

‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, Mr Jones, but I’ve been an admirer of yours since you were a minister in the Home Office. I was only a sergeant then.’

‘Then you have grown, Superintendent, while I . . .’
Harry spread his hands and indicated his room with an expression of mock despair. His ministerial office had been ten times the size.

‘Why bother with an office, when you have the entire world.’

‘Thank you. Will you have tea, coffee?’

‘Something stronger, perhaps? This is an informal visit, Mr Jones, off the record, if you don’t mind.’

‘Then you’d better sit down, Ron, and call me Harry,’ he said, reaching for the Scotch.

They sank the first mouthful, then the policeman chewed his lip. ‘It’s like this. The Ta’argis aren’t being very helpful. So far as they are concerned, nothing happened, and if it did, it must be down to you.’

Harry sighed, sensing where this was going. His ear began to throb once more.

‘It’s a delicate one. You can understand that, can’t you, Mr Jones?’

‘Harry,’ he insisted, but the superintendent was clearly feeling ill at ease.

‘It seems some journalists are trying to stand up a story that there might have been . . .’ Richards cleared his throat. ‘A lovers’ quarrel. Forgive me, but you and Mrs Riley, were you . . . close?’

‘She died in my fucking arms!’ He found it difficult to contain his anger at the implication.

‘OK, but do you have any proof of your allegations?’

‘Apart from a couple of broken ribs, multiple lacerations and no bloody ear, you mean?’

‘Yes, apart from that,’ Richards responded, holding his ground.

‘I can’t believe this. You’re doubting my word? Accusing
me
?’

The superintendent leaned forward in his chair, making the distance between them less formal. ‘I’m trying to show you what you’re up against, Harry.’

Harry closed his eyes, fighting to suppress the surge of outrage that was swamping him. ‘She was murdered, for pity’s sake. You trying to tell me that doesn’t matter?’

‘What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s a swine of a job investigating an alleged offence in a country on another continent when there’s not a shred of physical evidence. Not even a body.’ The superintendent sipped his whisky. ‘The Ta’argis have sent me a copy of her visa. It’s fully stamped. Date and time in, same on the way out. They say she left the country, voluntarily and in fine shape.’

‘Then ask Sid Proffit, for God’s sake.’

‘Oh, I intend to.’

But, of course, Sid would be able to prove nothing, either, merely that he saw Martha leaving the plane. ‘Look, I’ve got her credit cards and IDs,’ Harry said, diving into the drawer of his desk. ‘How am I sup-posed to have got hold of those?’

‘How, indeed. They prove only that
you
were with her, Harry, not the Ta’argis. Just digs you in deeper.’

‘Damn it, Ron, what the hell am I supposed to do?’ Harry demanded, thumping the desk in exasperation.

‘Wait till something else turns up. There’s not enough here to go on.’

‘Martha Riley won’t be turning up!’ His head was pounding, his heart, too.

‘Harry, take it from me, nothing’s going to happen here in a hurry.’