Private London jm-2 Page 2

  It took a couple of tugs. I turned to look at the young woman next to me who was effortlessly undoing hers, her attention never wavering from the e-book she was reading.

  I had let Hannah Shapiro have the window seat and she had pulled the blind down, which had suited me just fine. A little bit of turbulence had been predicted and the fasten-seat-belt sign had lit up. I had got mine on a lot quicker than it took to get it off. Luckily the threatened turbulence hadn’t arrived!

  I craned my head to look at the book that Hannah was engrossed in. ‘What are you reading?’ I asked her.

  She didn’t look up. ‘The Beautiful and the Damned,’ she said.

  ‘Tender is the Night is my favourite novel,’ I said.

  She looked up then, surprised. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. And I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘That a big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.’

  There was a slight crack in the corner of her mouth. It might even have been a smile.

  ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Tender is the Night – my mother’s favourite book.’

  ‘Are you going to miss her?’

  ‘I already do. She died, Mister Carter.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. I was a child.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I grew up.’

  I decided not to press the point – Hannah clearly didn’t want to talk about it. Looking at her it seemed to me that whatever had happened it hadn’t been so long ago. She might have been nineteen but she still looked like a child to me.

  ‘Losing a parent is never easy,’ I said gently. ‘No matter how old you are.’

  ‘Are your parents alive, Mister Carter?’

  ‘My father died a few years back. My mother is still with us, thank God.’

  She looked at me unblinking for a moment, as if searching for something in my eyes.

  ‘You should thank God indeed. You must cherish her, Mister Carter,’ she said finally. ‘There is nothing in life more precious than your mother.’

  ‘I do,’ I said, feeling a little guilty. I hadn’t spoken to my mother in over a week.

  Hannah nodded as if my answer satisfied her.

  ‘It was cancer,’ she said quietly. ‘There was nothing they could do.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

  She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t anybody’s fault, was it?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘My father is a scientist, did you know? Extremely rich. Extremely clever. He couldn’t do anything, either.’

  I nodded. She was right. Death just came at you sometimes. Sideways, from behind, head-on like a high speed train. And whichever way it came at you there was nothing you could do about it. I knew that better than most.

  ‘My father gave Mom a first-edition copy of Tender is the Night on their twentieth wedding anniversary. She treasured it like it was the most valuable thing in the world to her.’

  ‘Maybe it was…’ I paused for a moment. ‘After you, I should imagine.’

  And got a smile this time. A sad one, though.

  ‘When she went it was like the light had gone out of the world, Mister Carter. All the warmth.’

  ‘Call me Dan, please.’

  Hannah didn’t seem to be listening, lost in her own memories. ‘I feel sometimes that I’m still walking in the shadows, waiting for dawn,’ she said.

  I thought of my mother and my dear departed dad and I knew how she felt. ‘The dawn does come,’ I said. ‘Eventually it always does come.’

  ‘Hope is the feathered thing.’

  ‘Emily Dickinson.’

  ‘You are a man full of surprises, Mister Carter.’

  I let the mister ride and held my hand out. ‘It’s Dan, remember?’ I said.

  ‘I certainly do,’ she replied, shaking my hand and meeting my eyes this time and holding the grin. I smiled back at her myself. I was ahead of schedule.

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you my dad was a scientist,’ she said.

  ‘That’s okay. I know how to keep a secret. Kind of goes with the job.’

  ‘I guess so. I didn’t know they had private detectives in England. I thought it was all bobbies and police boxes.’

  ‘And some of us.’

  ‘Are you ex-police?’

  ‘Royal Military Police. Redcaps, we call them.’

  ‘You served overseas, then?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Like Jack Morgan?’

  ‘Jack was in Afghanistan. I was in Iraq.’

  ‘So what made you leave the military?’

  I looked at Hannah for a moment or two before replying.

  ‘It’s too long a story for this flight,’ I said. She seemed to accept that and returned to her novel.

  I closed my eyes and leaned back, the memory of that day flashing into my mind as clearly as though it had been yesterday.

  The pain every bit as fresh. Remembering.

  I didn’t know it at the time but it turned out that Hannah and I had a lot more in common than I thought.

  Chapter 7

  9 April 2003. Baghdad City, Iraq.

  There were four of us in the jeep that afternoon.

  Three men, one woman. One mission accomplished. Operation Telic. Signed, sealed, delivered. The end of the war.

  At least, it felt like that. We were on our way to check into some reported post-conflict celebrations that were maybe getting a little rowdy. We couldn’t blame the boys – and had no intention of any strong-arm stuff. Enough people had been hurt as it was. Enough bodies sent home to be buried way before their time.

  You couldn’t blame the lads for having a drink or two. Letting off a little steam. If you couldn’t celebrate today – then when could you?

  The sun was shining as it had been every day since I’d started this tour of duty. But even that seemed different somehow. A brighter, cleaner, excoriating light. I knew that was nonsense but it felt that way.

  The excitement in the air was certainly palpable. I hadn’t felt anything like it since I’d been a very small child and my whole street had turned out for a party to celebrate the Queen’s silver jubilee. That had been a hot, glorious day too.

  The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote some lines: ‘The world is charged with the wonder of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.’

  Well, God’s grandeur wasn’t evident around us then, truth to tell. We were in a particularly devastated area on the western outskirts of the city. Blown-up buildings left, right and centre, their roofs and top floors shattered and cracked like a scattering of ruined teeth. The scars of incendiary bombs and smoke and ash and wreckage strewn all around.

  The city had been literally smashed apart. But what was in the air that day was hope. Hope – maybe that was what God’s grandeur really was all along. Because without hope what do you have? The three other people in the jeep with me all had fixed grins on their faces.

  In the front passenger seat was Captain Richard Smith. He was in his thirties, a husband, a father, my superior officer and a man I would have followed into the very fires of hell. And sometimes in the last few weeks it had felt as though that was just where we’d been.

  Beside him at the wheel was Lance Corporal Lee Martin, in his twenties. An irrepressible practical joker, a man who never had a bad word to say about anyone and would give you the last pound in his pocket.

  Sitting by me in the back was my fellow sergeant, Anne Jones. Cropped blonde hair, could drink pretty much any man in the unit under the table and beat most of them at arm wrestling – but had a secret passion for the romantic novels of Catherine Cookson. I’d caught her reading a copy of The Cinder Path one day and she had threatened to cut off my manhood with a rusty knife if I told anyone about it.

  Each one of us had a smile on our faces as we bumped along the uneven track through the bomb-blasted area. And it wasn’t just to do with the sun beating down and the banter and jokes as though we were on our way to a barbecue. It was do with the sense of achievement. A sense of closure.

  Had I been consulted I would have said that I was against us ever coming to Iraq in the first place, but it wasn’t my place to say so and I was certainly never asked for an opinion. I was in the service. I did what I was told. That was what being in the army meant.

  What felt so good that day was knowing that it was all over. Finally. There would be a clean-up operation for sure, but the armies had done their part. The weapons of mass destruction would be found now. No one had any real doubt about that – not on our side, at least.

  The combined forces of mainly American and British troops had brought down a despotic regime. Justice was going to be seen to be done, finally, for the long-suffering people of this blighted land.

  I looked across to my right where Sergeant Jones was flicking through some photos she had taken on a small digital camera. She paused at one photo and zoomed in a little. The huge twelve-metre-high statue of Saddam Hussein, erected in 2002 as a celebration of his sixty-fifth birthday, being pulled down by US troops in Baghdad’s Firdus Square.

  She had photographed it as it was being broadcast live on the TV of a small coffee bar, the set on the wall dwarfing the counter it was mounted behind. She had caught the statue mid-descent and the image was surprisingly clear.

  An iconic picture. Countless hundreds like it no doubt flying round the world news, the World Wide Web. It was one of those moments in time, I thought, when everything changes. The Berlin Wall coming down. Armstrong walking on the moon. Kennedy being shot.

  The fact that it had happened right across from the Palestine
Hotel where the world’s reporters had been stationed didn’t even occur to us at the time, or the fact that there didn’t seem to be huge numbers there celebrating the fact.

  US tanks circled the area, and rightly so: sniper fire had already stopped Marine Lieutenant Tim McLaughlin from raising an American flag the first time he had tried to do it. The war might have been over but not all the combatants knew that yet. Corporal Jones closed the camera and smiled again, shielding her eyes as she looked up at the sun.

  9 April 2003, the day everything changed.

  ‘It’s going to be another scorcher,’ Anne said, surprising no one, as the jeep bounced in the road and the landmine buried beneath it detonated and exploded in a white-hot burst of pain and light and death.

  Chapter 8

  I felt as if I had been put in a sack and kicked around the locker room by the full linebacker defensive of the Miami Rangers.

  I could feel the harsh sand clogging my nostrils, the flayed skin of my cheeks hot. My head throbbed like the worst hangover imaginable.

  My eyes were screwed shut and I couldn’t bring myself to open them. I didn’t dare. I was terrified of what I might see. I could hear a low moaning sound like that of a whimpering animal and it took me a moment or two to realise that it was me who was making the noise.

  I blew out a deep, ragged breath and finally opened my eyes.

  The sunlight skewered them. Searing needles of pain stabbing into them. I closed them again till the pain receded.

  I waited a few moments, breathing deeply, and then, shielding my eyes with my hand, I opened them again.

  I was lying on my side by a burnt-out old Volvo estate that I remembered passing before the road bomb had exploded underneath us. I put my arm across my forehead to shield my eyes further from the blinding light. My whole body protested against the slightest movement. Nothing felt broken, though, as I rolled onto my hip and looked across the street.

  Some fifteen feet away the hulk of our jeep was pouring thick black smoke into the blue sky like a distress signal being sent way too late.

  Certainly far too late for the young driver. His right hand stretched towards me as though begging for help. His eyes lifeless as a fly crawled across his face.

  Further out in the road lay Sergeant Jones. Only moments ago she had been celebrating the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Now she was as motionless as the toppled dictator’s statue. Her neck twisted at an impossible angle. Dead on the streets, killed by the same regime she herself had played a part in overthrowing. Dead before the new era she had wanted for the troubled country had even begun.

  I dragged the back of my sleeve across my eyes and squinted into the sun again as I scanned back and forth around the jeep. There was no sign of my CO.

  I levered myself clumsily up on one knee, wincing as the pain spiked through me again. My body was going to be black and blue with bruises, I guessed. But at least I was alive. Miraculously – I was still alive.

  I took a breath and stood up. I regretted it immediately. Gasping in agony as my ankle gave way. I fell sideways – part instinct, part simply collapsing – at the same time as the shot rang out. A single sharp crack.

  A fraction of a second later the bullet slapped into my left arm, hitting it just below the shoulder. Spinning me round and dropping me back to the ground like a tenpin nicked on a split.

  I winced and clamped a hand to the wound. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Standard procedure to keep a man behind to pick off the loose pieces the bomb hadn’t dealt with, and to take pleasure in their explosive handiwork.

  ‘Keep down, Carter!’ shouted my CO from somewhere behind the ruined jeep. ‘The shooter’s in the building behind that Volvo,’ he added somewhat unnecessarily. I held my hand to my wounded arm – I already had that particular intel. I snapped open the holster on my belt and drew out my service revolver.

  ‘Just stay where you are,’ Richard Smith called out again. ‘He’s got you in his sights.’

  ‘Sir!’ I shouted back and craned my head up to see over the top of the vehicle.

  Another bullet thudded heavily into the metal of the car and I dropped down to the ground again. Captain Smith fired a shot back at the sniper – he was in a covered position in a burnt-out shell of a house.

  Always listen to your commanding officer – don’t think about it, just do what he says. Pretty much summed up what they’d drummed into us at boot camp before I’d specialised with the RMP. Stay where you are, he’d said. Certainly seemed like good advice just then.

  Until Sergeant Anne Jones moved her head.

  Chapter 9

  I rolled onto my side again and hoisted myself up.

  Stretching out my good arm, I pushed the revolver over the top of the wrecked Volvo and fired a shot in the general direction of the insurgent sniper.

  For God’s sake, didn’t these people know the war was over?

  An immediate hail of bullets rocked the Volvo. I was glad that whoever it was that had me locked in his sights wasn’t carrying a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher.

  ‘What in the name of holy Christ are you up to, Carter?’ my CO bellowed.

  ‘Anne, sir,’ I replied. ‘I saw her move.’

  ‘Shit!’

  There was no response for a moment or two. ‘We can’t leave her here, sir.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, sergeant. He’s at ten o’clock to you, first-storey window, right-hand side. On three I am going to come out shooting. When I get to Sergeant Jones, cover me. One, two, three…’

  A quick succession of shots rang out as he burst from around the side of the shattered jeep, pistol held in both hands as he crabbed across towards the fallen sergeant. His shots peppering the wall and windows of the sniper’s building.

  I groaned as I stood up, rested my arms on the roof of the Volvo and steadied my aim. Captain Smith reached Sergeant Jones, dropped his pistol and bent down to pick her up.

  There was a movement in the window that I was aiming at and I squeezed the trigger. The shot was returned – I squeezed again three or four times and caught sight of some more movement. Had I hit him?

  ‘Clear,’ Captain Smith shouted behind me.

  I was about to lower my gun when the sunlight glinted on the barrel of a weapon that had just appeared in the window again. It jerked upwards and I guessed the shooter was reloading.

  Without thinking too much about it, I stumbled round the remains of the Volvo and limped as fast as I could towards the building, ignoring the shouts from my CO behind me.

  Counting off in my mind the seconds it would take to reload whatever weapon the sniper had, 1 half-stumbled and fell over the entrance step into the building. I replaced the cartridge clip in my own pistol and held it steady, pointing up the staircase as I rose to one knee and then stood up.

  I leaned against the wall, keeping the pistol as steady as I could manage with a wounded arm. A trickle of sweat ran from my forehead and into one eye. I dragged the sleeve of my shirt across my eyes again as quickly as I could.

  The house, like most of this area on the outskirts of the city, had been hit by heavy mortar fire. The walls were smoke-damaged, any surviving furniture had long since been looted and the staircase in front of me tilted dangerously.

  Moving forward, I kept the gun raised at shoulder level, double-gripped and straight out. I climbed each step slowly, aware of the unsteadiness of my left ankle but not conscious of pain any more.

  I leaned against the right-hand wall to make myself less of a target. I held my breath as I inched upwards.

  I was on the fifth step, about two-thirds of the way up the stairs, when the surface beneath my right ankle gave way. My leg dropped through the shattered wood as my body crashed sideways, my arms flung out to try and keep my balance, my pistol banging against the side of the wall as I slumped against it.

  Another trickle of sweat ran into my eye and I looked up to see the muzzle of a rifle aimed square at my face.

  Chapter 10

  The air was loud with gunfire.

  A bullet slammed into my thigh, knocking me backwards, my right leg wrenched out of the damaged staircase as I tumbled down the stairs to land on the concrete floor. Captain Smith stood in the doorway, his automatic rifle blazing away.

  Moments later the body of the Iraqi insurgent crashed down the stairs to land beside me, his head slapping against the hard floor. He didn’t cry out. He was dead.