The Vengeance Man (6 page)

"And you, Nusret; may you and Yusif go in peace."

"Never, not while I have the blood debt to pay." He waved the bag of sovereigns. "To my vengeance, Ingleezi!"

"To your
Intiquam
, Ali," I echoed dully.

"C'mon el Awrens," shouted Sal above the noise of the blades.  "Save it for the movie." Checking his precious ammunition box from Hasak was safe, he gave the air crew a thumbs up, and the engine note increased.  

I never saw them again. The rotors started up, and they receded below. My last sight was of two crazy, dusty Kurdish thugs, waving wildly from a battered, sand coloured Landrover.  Ali's lips were silently shouting the Arabic, "
Intiquam
- Revenge !  Revenge!" as he waved the bag of gold furiously about his head.

Then they were gone, and I was alone with my filthy kit,
Steyr
carbine and the radio. The dust and sand moved in erratic patterns on the floor of the cabin  as the vibration moved them slowly around. My stomach churned. I was sure blood was still leaking from my gut.

"Intiquam," I repeated,   'Intiquam."

Sal and the Captain stared at me.  They looked anxious.   The Gendarmerie guards stared too,  then clutched their rifles, watching the brown hills rushing past below.   Once I caught them glancing at me, then look at each other.

My head ached.  A vision of  the charnel house in the Hasak comcen popped into my mind and I tried to sleep. All the way back to Diyarbakir Air Base I dozed uncomfortably, avoiding the images of a limp bundle of rags that had been an innocent little ten year old goatherd, and the swell of burst intestines and brains splashed like a butcher's yard in the comcen at Hasak, while visions of jet fighters, Mahmut al Mufarzait's throat gouting blood and mushrooming bursts of mortar bombs wrestled with the pains in my gut and the suspicion that my arse was leaking onto the little canvas seat. Nusret's voice was shouting, 'Revenge!' in my head. Silly. Blood feuds. Bloody Kurds; primitive, bloodthirsty...  always blood...

Awash in dreams of blood, I finally slipped into an exhausted and uneasy sleep.

My last memory was of noise and hot stink of burnt kerosene exhaust as the tarmac came up to me, and of Sal shouting, "Hey, you guys, get a stretcher.
Leave that goddam box.
..can't you see my buddy's sick...?"

I don’t remember anything after that.

London

It was another six months before I really came round in the sense of being back in the real world again.

That half a year transformed me from a young man with the world at his feet to a man in his mid thirties, with bugger all future.  I never realised that such a short time could make such a big change.

Diyarbakir was the start of it.  By the time the helicopter landed I was in serious trouble and had to be helped to the Medical Centre. Wellington said that a soldier should be blessed with a good digestion. Well, I wasn't. 

Doubled in agony over the bowl, and feeling weak and dizzy, I finally let the griping misery of the last few weeks take over. The next thing I knew, I was in the American medical centre in Inçirlik Air Force base lying in a strangely tranquil glow of contentment while an anxious black US Air Force doctor told me that I'd got amoebic
dysentery
and half my guts were trying to escape by the quickest way they knew – at least, that’s what it felt like sometimes. I knew I'd had the squitters - everyone gets them - and I'd been popping Lomotil and God knows what else for weeks: well over the proper dosage, too. But I’d had no choice.

The doctor's face grew grave as he told me that I'd got a nasty form of jaundice as well, and he wasn't sure about my kidneys. All those Lomotil and anti-squitter pills hadn't done me any good at all.  Under the influence of the pre-med I didn't care about anything,  and the drips and aeroplane flights and hushed hospitals seemed to float by in a haze, interspersed with flashes of reality as they flew me back to London. Northolt, I think. Christ, I must have been important.

I remember Tony Bell, my boss of the Special Ops Teams, coming to visit me in the London hospital. He seemed relieved to see me conscious and lucid. He'd brought Sheila, his PA, with him, and I remember her smiling embarrassed at me over her owl-like reading glasses as she scribbled away at her pad like the conscientious lady she was.

I remembered the last time I'd really seen Sheila Sykes. She'd been taking those glasses off, which were the very last thing she still had on, as I recalled, and turning her bedroom light down;  but it was as if it had all taken place between two other people. It was difficult to reconcile Sheila the secretary with my memory of Sheila.  Plump, giggly memory Sheila in bed was like some film I'd once seen long, long ago.  I couldn't raise even a grin for her as I struggled through my report. She avoided my eye.

Tony heard me out and told me something about taking a rest, and not worrying about my job, which, of course  made me worry about my job, but only until they left and the nurses came round with the happy pills. Then I slept and didn't give a damn. I did a lot of that for the first month.

I remember the first time that I went down alone for a proper bath and saw myself in a full length mirror. A skinny yellow creature, all ribs and staring blue eyes ringed with black looked back. I could hardly believe the evidence of that mirror. Later the specialist told me about the dysentery and the jaundice, and their effects, and I understood better why I looked as I did.   One doctor told me I'd got a hydatid cyst, whatever that was. Apparently it's picked up from Kurd
i
sh goat droppings or something. I didn't care.

There followed months of convalescence, of resting, of physiotherapy and the gym. All the time I struggled to throw off my dreadful lassitude and build myself back to the standard required of a Special Ops Officer. And for the first time I noticed the grey hairs emerging in my temples and secretly realised that I might no longer meet the physical standards.

It was about this time  that the delegation came to see me from MOD.  It consisted of a couple of clever and insincere young civil servants and, of all things, a lugubrious old major from the Royal Military Police.  The whole group was minded by an anxious young staff captain from the Army Legal Branch. They were all in plain clothes and we sat around  in the recreation room on our own, drinking coffee while they took notes on briefcases on their knees.  I didn't think much of it to start with.  They admitted to being some kind of inquiry, and the captain actually cautioned me.  That should have woken me up but somehow, none of it mattered.  Everyone was being very nice to me, and pushing soothing phrases like, 'Of course it's just a formality..' The RMP major did  most of the questioning, with occasional interjections from the civil servants.

It was only when they started to question me about the Landrover that I realized just what it was all about. These  jokers were an official Board of Inquiry investigating me for giving away one of Her Majesty's Landrovers and a lot more besides.  Of course that wasn't the real reason. 
Apparently t
he Kurdish operation I had been sent on hadn't exactly been a blinding success.
News to me. I’d got their bloody Iranian comcen material, hadn’t I?
But there’s been some fuss in the paper
, according to them
. The story had leaked out.
The Whitehall Mafia had decided to play the man not the ball: I could see it plainly. I could just hear the slimy bastards trying to put the spin on it: "Well, Minister, I'm afraid that the individual that was sent cocked it up rather.  That's the trouble with these SAS chaps...  not a lot between the ears... Bit of a blunt instrument,
really
.... Why, he even gave away Government Property to unauthorized personnel... grave diplomatic repercussions…
We’ve issued a formal denial
… However, you can reassure Number Ten that we are taking appropriate action in his case."

Even this didn't really alarm  me too much.  I didn't  really think that any of it could stick. Anyway, I knew that the Regiment would look after me.  The SAS looks after its own. The business dragged on for a couple of months and  at one point someone actually came round  to see me and told me that I should be relieved because no formal charges were being brought against me and that the whole thing was being hushed up.  I didn't care: it all seemed such a load of balls.

I was wrong.

I had my thirty fourth birthday during those months. I was back in a London clinic, having a relapse at the time. I remember it was then that I told the doctor about the dreams. Ever since the first night in the hospital at Inçirlik I had been having nightmares. Night after night, the horror of the shambles in the Hasak comcen and the guillotine-like gush of fountaining arterial blood fountained into the air as Jamal took his revenge with on the bared throat of the wretched Mahmut Tarfiq.

The doctor was very understanding. I don't know what the MOD had told him about me, but he obviously knew a lot more than he was letting on. It seemed that the nurses had been worried too, as I shouted and thrashed around in my sleep. They all reassured me, and a couple of days later a tame trick-cyclist appeared. As an advertisement for the British Medical profession, he was a disaster.

He affected sandals, a dry laid-back, laconic manner that would have been a wow in a California commune and a peculiarly penetrating brand of BO.  He also affected a silly little beard and a pony tail, and I instantly took  a deep dislike to him and his works.  He looked like a stereotype caricature of a psychiatrist, and once when I pointed this out to him he neighed his silly laugh, and said, "Well, we all have our specialist uniforms, don't we? It's all to do with recognition patterns.   But I expect you soldier boys understand that better than most, eh? Eh?"

One of the nurses told me that Hepw
orth (
“Call me Gary – everyone does….” ) was supposed to be one of the best in the business. Well, as far as I was concerned, as any form of therapist he was both obvious and useless. I didn't need counselling by malodorous bloody civilians prying into my private life.  Anyway, the dreams I had been having weren't that disabling. They were the price you pay for seeing bad things. I'll bet car accident victims could tell a tale or two about bad dreams, too, and no-one thinks that they're going nuts. Even policemen get flashbacks.  Mind you, nowadays coppers all seem to want to claim a million pounds compensation for seeing bad sights on a council estate
. W
hat did they expect to see when they joined the police force, for Christ's sake: social workers with clip boards?  Anyway, I didn't need counselling about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from bullshitting trendy fakes like Doctor Eric Hepworth.  (“Oooh, you mustn’t call him Doctor….he’s
Mister
Hepworth….!”)

I spent a fair amount of time convincing our budding Sigmund Freud that I wasn't completely loony. It wasn't too difficult. He asked me lots of obvious bloody stupid questions about my childhood and if I felt ‘emotionally detached from events in my life’. Stuff like that. Hepworth saw me every other day for a month: he liked to talk. On the intervening days I think I mugged up on every article in the British Journal of Psychiatric Practice for the previous  ten years. I had the run of the place and could sit quietly in the small clinical library without anyone bothering me or checking what I read. By the time I was through in there and on the internet, I'll bet I knew more about R. D. Laing and abreactive stress responses than Hepworth.  That reading, and a clear remembrance of all I had been so painstakingly been taught on the interrogation course years ago, made conning Hepworth a pleasure. I began to string him along, being careful not to use the jargon.

He loved it. ‘You have the potential for great violence’ he told me once. I told him of course I did – that’s what the SAS does. Yes, but was I adjusted to the realities of life?  I told him that as far as I was concerned I was adjusted to the realities of my life. He liked that. Asked me all about violence. I told him that I was adjusted to the reality of violence a damn sight better than he was. He loved it. ‘Did I think of myself as being psychopathic?’ I told him that he should see some of the other Special forces guys I’ve known..  I could show him some real psychos. He laughed and  rubbed his hands and said how interesting it all was. Arsehole. But I had to string him along.

He was more excited by my new, evolving, bright and balanced persona, and what it would mean to him, than by my dreams which never really went away. He was really strong on motivation, I remember;
why
did I do things? Did I feel emotion? How did I fell about my childhood? Did I feel that I was a detached personality? Did I like children? What did I feel when I had shot people?  I wanted to tell him about the
Iranian
in the Hasak comcen and the snivelling little
goat boy
, tears of terror rolling down his cheeks - but I couldn’t. Anyway, I didn’t know if Mr bloody Hepworth was cleared for that kind of stuff. I kept quiet. But I couldn't afford to get a bad bill of health from a little creep like Hepworth, so my great 'recovery' was a source of well-balanced mutual congratulation The creepy little sod actually wanted to write a paper about  me and my remarkable adjustment to potential PTSD - or so he said.

In our last session he actually said to me, ‘You know, you are a very dangerous man.’ Quick as a flash, I cracked back at him, ‘I know….that’s why we get recruited for 22 SAS.’ He liked that. Roared with laughter and went off.

The last I saw of the great Mr Hepworth - he hated being called 'Doc' - was him patting a nurse's rump.  They hated him because he patronised them like mindless little girls, and when they complained, he airily justified it on the grounds that it was 'unrepressed normal behaviour... and anyway, they should take it as a compliment.' I told them to give him a smack to teach him a lesson, or scream sexual
harassment
, but of course, nobody did anything about Hepworth.  He had more hang-ups than I had, I reckoned; but from then on I kept my trap shut about the bad dreams. I needed him.   To this day a penetrating smell of B.O. on the Tube makes me think of psychiatry and Doctor Mr Eric bloody Hepworth.

I came back from the final piece of my convalescence, a month in the West Indies using my saved up pay and leave, feeling better and more relaxed than I had for years. My tan covered the last traces of yellow, and my gauntness had faded, although I was never going to be selected for the Belorussian ladies shot putt team.

Although I had undoubtedly become quieter - morose even - since the Kurdistan experience, and the vivid dreams still scored their silent horror movies in my head, I reckon I presented a balanced, if more introverted, figure by the time I returned. I had made a deliberate point of staying away from girls until I was better, but now, with a week to kill in London I reckoned I owed myself a few calls just to put my float back into the water, so to speak.

I called Vicky.   Vicky Barnes and I had been good friends about four years back. In fact, we'd been such good friends that in my last year in MOD,  we'd moved in together and shared a flat. She was small and dark, with startling blue eyes and a sense of fun that never flagged. That was when I was moving around a lot and a cosy little
pied à terre
in Putney with Vicky Barnes to come home to had seemed like a good idea. Vicky had indicated that it was an
admirable
idea, and why didn't we arrange things more permanently? 

But I was too young to settle down.  I laughed, and avoided the issue. I kept on avoiding it for that whole year, and when I got posted, I managed to fudge the issue still further. Then the first Special Ops  job had come up, I'd had to go to Belize for six months, Vicky's firm offered her a lease on a flat nearer the City, and we drifted apart.  I'd seen her lots of times since then. The last time was ... Good God! I suddenly realised that I hadn't seen Vicky for nearly two years.