Aggressor

3
Two hours later, everybody was stuffed full of chicken, steak, prawns and Toohey’s. Silky sat with Julie and Hazel on the settee; conversation flowed like they’d known each other all their lives. Alan sorted out a DVD for the kids, who were flaked out on cushions on the floor. He threw it in and, maybe sensing Charlie and I could do with some private time, sat down to watch it with them.
‘Why don’t you jump any more?’
Charlie was standing with me by the jug of coffee on the sideboard. We weren’t ready for it yet; we were both still on cans. ‘Wasn’t fair to Hazel. Her nerves were bad enough as it was.’
Silky joined us with three empty cups. She nodded at the gallery as she poured. ‘Charlie, you were in the army?’
‘Yes.’
‘You haven’t changed, have you? Look at you!’
Charlie smiled at the picture of his son. ‘I’ve put on a few wrinkles since then – and lost a bit of hair.’
I shot a glance at Hazel. She was smiling at Charlie for being so kind. Silky poured their coffees and went back to the other two, completely oblivious.
Charlie held up his can to me in a toast. ‘The good old days.’ We touched tins and he took a swig. ‘What about Silky? Any plans?’
‘Nah, I’m just letting her sleep with me till I find somebody better.’
He frowned at my bad joke. ‘You’re a knobber then. She seems a really good girl. Make the best of it while you can, lad.’ He looked at the sofa then back at me. ‘So, you want to come and watch the sun go down, or what?’
He couldn’t have made it more obvious he had something he wanted to talk about if he’d tried. He lifted two new cans and I followed him out onto the veranda.
He leaned on the rail. A couple of hundred metres away, a group of horses kicked up dust in the paddock.
Charlie sat on a bench and motioned me to a swing seat opposite. Whatever was on his mind, he didn’t seem ready to talk about it yet. My eyes followed his to the horse grazing on its own in a corner.
‘You know what, Charlie? You were the one that I picked. I never told you that, did I?’
The training major always gave just one piece of advice to the newly badged troopers. ‘When you get to your squadron, shut up, look and listen. Then pick one man you think is the ideal SAS soldier. Don’t let him know you’ve picked him, but watch and learn. There will be times on operations when you don’t know how to act or react. That’s when you ask yourself what your man would do.’
Charlie had started out as the one I picked, but he very quickly became even more important to me than that. In my mind, I awarded him the highest accolade one soldier could ever give another. I could honestly say that I would have followed him anywhere.
He took another swig and rested his can on the rail. ‘I know, lad. I used to see you watching me. You learn much?’
‘I think I did. In fact I thought about you on the last day of that Waco job. Do I deck the bloke or not? I know I made the right decision.’
‘I’m not sure everybody at Waco did.’ Charlie turned his head to look at me. ‘Remember that young lad from DERA, the gas man? He killed himself a year later.’
I hadn’t heard. I’d left the Regiment by then. ‘His name was Anthony. He was all right.’
He sat back in his chair. ‘Good men, f*cked over by the system. It’s nothing new.’ He picked up his beer with a trembling hand, as if the emotion of the moment was getting the better of him. ‘You know, I fell for it when I was a lad. I really did believe all that shite about Queen and country. We were the good guys, they were the bad guys. It took me thirty-seven years playing soldiers to realize what a load of old bollocks it was. Maybe you got there sooner? That why you got out?’
Charlie wouldn’t know what I’d done after I left, and he would never ask. He knew that if I wanted him to know, I’d tell him.
‘Sort of.’
He looked back at the solitary horse in the corner of the field. ‘Did you know I was in the troop when my boy was on foot patrol in Derry?’
I nodded. A couple of guys had had sons in the green army, and all of them had been operating over the water at the same time.
He gave a little self-mocking laugh. ‘I used to kid myself that every PIRA guy we dropped meant one less who could take a pop at my boy. Kind of felt I was looking out for him. But we weren’t doing the job full throttle, were we? We were only dropping the ASUs [active service units] that Thatcher and Major thought would hold up the peace process.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘We were actually protecting Adams and McGuinness so they could have secret talks with our “We do not deal with terrorists” governments. Seemed there were good baddies and bad baddies, something I hadn’t really thought of before.’
I shrugged. No-one had ever officially admitted it, but we had all known what was going on. Eliminate the ones who were objecting to any sort of progress, then hope the rest were going to fall in behind our guys, Adams and McGuinness. ‘Maybe it worked. We’ve got a sort of peace.’
‘Whatever. Only thing that mattered was, all the time I was running around working was time I didn’t have to sit and worry about Steven.’
He gazed at the horse, lost for a moment in a world of his own. ‘And afterwards . . . after he was killed . . . I didn’t care how they did it, just so long as they kept me busy.’
I lifted the can. ‘Must have been grim, mate.’ I hesitated. ‘I’ve kind of been there myself . . .’ I tailed off again, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to say next. In any case, Charlie was giving me that slightly challenging look you see in the eyes of the bereaved when people say, ‘I know exactly how you must be feeling,’ and they have no f*cking idea. I shrugged. ‘She wasn’t my own, but f*ck, it felt like she was. If it had hurt any more, I couldn’t have taken it.’
Charlie shifted in his seat. ‘Who was she? Stepdaughter?’
‘Kev Brown’s kid – he was in Eight Troop, remember?’
Charlie tried to, but couldn’t.
‘He and Marsha had made me guardian in their will.’
‘Oh yeah, I heard about that. Shit, I had no idea it was you who’d stepped in.’ His voice dropped. ‘So what happened to her?’
‘She got killed two years ago in London.’ I stared down at the can. ‘She was fifteen. I took her back home to the States and buried her, then, well, I buried myself, a bit like you.’
Charlie nodded slowly. ‘Then you just wake up one day and wonder what the f*ck it’s all about . . .’
‘Something like that. I always used to pretend I didn’t give a f*ck, but, well, you know, I loved her. Losing her f*cked me up big-time. Next thing I knew, I was sitting at the wheel of a combi with long hair and a wrist full of these things.’ I jiggled the friendship bracelets.
Charlie smiled. ‘I guess everybody deals with it the best way they can. Know what Julie bought me for Christmas? Slippers. F*cking slippers! Ever since Steven died, that’s how she and her mother want things to be. They want to live in a bubble. Everything nice and fluffy, and Steven’s a happy face in a photograph. That’s what this place is all about. It’s Hazel’s own self-contained eco-climate, like a f*cking Eden Project for happier times.’
He took another swig of beer and looked me square in the eye. ‘Coming here was the worst thing I could have done, lad. Far too much time on my hands. People look at me and think I have a slice of paradise, but it’s driving me f*cking mad. If you keep moving, keep doing, there’s no time left to think. But now I spend half the day thinking about him. It’s that same old feeling I had over the water, that I should have been there, should have been looking after him. I know there was nothing I could have done, but that doesn’t stop you thinking it, does it?’
He gave me a rueful smile as he nodded over towards the paddock. ‘You see that one in the corner, the bay? He was a stallion once. In his prime he covered three or four mares a day, and spent the rest of the time kicking down stable doors. He doesn’t get to use his gear at all these days. Too knackered. Only difference between him and me is that instead of eating grass and shitting all day, I’m pruning the f*cking gum trees and watching the sun set. You know the best thing I could do for him?’ His jaw tightened. ‘Put a f*cking gun to his head and put him out of his misery.’
I chanced a smile. ‘Or buy him slippers, mate.’
‘Yeah, or buy him slippers. But some guys do it for themselves, don’t they? Guys like Anthony. I used to think they were copping out, taking the coward’s way, but I’m not so sure any more. Maybe they’re the smart ones.’
I didn’t know where he was going with this, and I didn’t get the chance to find out. Julie pushed the door open and hurried from the house, a child’s hand gripped in each of hers. She had a horrified look on her face, completely at odds with the bright tone in her voice. ‘That was a silly film – come on, let’s go. It’s bedtime anyway.’ Something not very good had happened inside, and she was trying to make light of it. She shepherded them down the steps just as her mother appeared in the doorway. Hazel looked distraught.
Charlie got up and took a couple of steps towards her, then jerked his head at me to go and check.
I pulled open the screen door and went in. Silky and Alan were standing in front of the television. This was no kids’ DVD; the screen was filled with jerky, urgent images. I heard screams and the rattle of automatic gunfire.
Silky turned to me. ‘It’s near Russia somewhere. A siege. They’re shooting children.’
The picture cut to soldiers trying to make entry into a big square concrete office block. The rolling captions announced that terrorists were holding an estimated three hundred people hostage. The town of Kazbegi was in the north of Georgia, on the border with Russia. Many of the hostages were thought to be women and children.
I watched as a small group of soldiers fired their AKs wildly into the windows and others tried to make entry with sledgehammers.
The camera shifted to an armoured vehicle ramming into a door. Screams filled the TV’s speakers.
Women and children tumbled out of the building, only to be caught in vicious crossfire. Black smoke billowed through broken glass. Elsewhere, I could see panic-stricken faces pressed against the panes.
Soldiers gesticulated wildly to get them to stand aside, but it wasn’t happening. They were frozen to the spot.
The picture cut again to a reporter hiding behind an armoured vehicle, her pretty dark eyes wide as saucers as she extracted and processed information from the chaos. All around her, what looked like half the army was popping up and firing pistols and assault rifles. I was watching a gangf*ck, Georgian style.
As two attack helicopters rattled overhead, she shouted into her microphone, in an Eastern European accent with an American twang, that the building was a regional government office; a census was being conducted and that was why there were so many people inside. The attack was thought to be an Islamist militant group protesting against the Caspian pipeline. F*ck knows how CNN had got someone there so quick, but they had. The breaking news caption now put the death toll at thirty.
Silky held her hands to her face. ‘Oh my God, those poor kids!’
A soldier ran across the screen. Cradled in his arms was the limp body of a child, his clothing charred and smouldering.
There was an explosion inside the building. The camera shuddered as a rapid flash hit the windows on the first floor. Glass blew out, then smoke billowed from the holes.
I could hear a series of shouted orders, but the chaos continued. Usual story; more chiefs than Indians.
A couple of soldiers who had successfully made entry jumped back out of a ground-floor window, one of them with flames dancing on his uniform.
The camera zoomed in on a fleet of ambulances coming down a road, some civilian, some military. The two helicopters still rattled overhead.
Two blood-covered women dashed from the building, gathering up whatever dazed and bloodied children they could as they ran.
There was another prolonged and totally indiscriminate exchange of gunfire as the camera zoomed in on two kids jumping from a first-floor window to escape the flames.
Hazel hit the remote and the TV died. ‘Enough. Not in my house.’