Dead Centre (2 page)

Worst of all, he fancied Mong’s wife, and didn’t mind letting him know. BB had few scruples when it came to horizontal tabbing. He was plenty stupid enough to try it on with her. He’d tried it in the past, before Mong was on the scene, but Tracy soon cottoned on that he wouldn’t be giving her what she needed.

Of course, BB wasn’t the only one who fancied her. We all did. She was a good-looking girl. She had the kind of smile that belonged on an infant-school teacher. Everything about her was close to perfect – the way her dark hair brushed her shoulders, the way she dressed. We called her Racy Tracy, but it wasn’t really true.

For everyone apart from BB she was off-limits. She was somebody else’s wife. And that somebody was a mate.

This new fight had been brewing since the moment we’d met up a week ago in the UK. BB hadn’t seen Mong for a couple of years, but got stuck straight in with the same old banter: ‘Any time she needs a real man, just give her my number.’ And he hadn’t stopped there.

I gave Mong a prod. ‘You all right, mate?’

‘Yeah.’ He lifted his head, held a finger to each nostril and blew out a stream of sand and snot. He nodded at the waves pounding in ten metres away. ‘I suppose I’d better get cleaned up.’

His accent was West Country, borderline pointy-head. It didn’t fit with how he looked. Mong was a big unit; he could have been a poster boy for the World Wrestling Federation. He was tall and thickset, with crinkly dark blond hair. He never went to the gym or lifted weights, but still shat muscle. It was how he was made.

He really did have a huge arse. Each cheek was plenty big enough for those hands. From behind, with his kit off, he looked like a crime scene. After a few beers at a party, he’d drop his trousers and work his muscles so it looked like they were shuffling cards. His biggest pick-up line was ‘Stick or twist?’ There was still a bit of the Royal Marine in him, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. Any excuse, any piss-up, those lads couldn’t wait to get their kit off.

With BB it was a totally different story. To keep his bulk he had to hit the weights non-stop and take supplements by the fistful. His day sack was filled with protein powder.

3

MONG BEGAN TO ease himself up. There wasn’t a mark on him.

‘He’s full of shit, Mong. You know that, don’t you?’

He grabbed a fistful of sand and let it run through his fingers. ‘He still gets to me. After all these fucking years.’

‘What did he say this time?’

Mong looked away. He blinked hard, like he had sand in his eyes. ‘He came out with the wedding-photo thing. The cunt. He said I’d better keep checking.’

When BB targeted a married woman, it wasn’t about shagging her, or even liking her. It was about conquering her, and having one up on her husband. When he was pissed once he told me that every time he was in the new conquest’s home he always asked to see the wedding photograph. As soon as he was alone, he’d ease it out of the frame, grab a pen and write ‘J was here’ halfway down the front of the bride’s dress. If he was in a bit of a rush, he’d just scrawl it on the back, like a dog cocking his leg to mark his territory. If it was all going tits up, he’d say to her, ‘Go and look at your wedding pic.’

That hadn’t happened to Tracy. She was a Hereford girl who’d hung around with Regiment guys from the time she was seventeen. She and her sister had been trying to snag one for years. Why not? They got a house out of it, and a well-paid husband who was away for most of the year. For girls like Tracy, it was life as per normal, but with cash and security. She wasn’t mercenary, just realistic. And it meant that once she’d got Mong, she wouldn’t rock the boat. Apart from anything else, she really did love him.

‘Fuck him. You know Tracy wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. How long have you two been together?’

‘Six years.’

‘So look on the bright side, you twat. You could have ended up with Jan. Fucking nightmare. You’d be changing the wedding photo every month – it’d look like an autograph book.’

He wiped sand out of his eyes and started to laugh.

Jan was the nightmare version of her sister. Tracy’s only failing was naïvety. While Jan’s head was full of shit, Tracy’s had room for nothing but fairies and happy endings. Before she met Mong she’d thought that meant she had to get her kit off every time she thought she’d found true love. It took her a while to realize she was just getting fucked and left to fend for herself.

Jan was a bit more cold and calculating. She knew she’d get turned over at frequent intervals until she stumbled across somebody stupid enough to take her on. Tracy had always been faithful to Mong. She didn’t belong in the Hereford meat market. But Jan had thought she could handle it; she thought she could keep moving from one man to the next unscathed.

I looked over at the NGO tents, a sea of smart blue and orange canvas hooked up to brand new generators.

BB had disappeared into ours, and the white Land Cruiser crowd had gone back to doing whatever they did. Not that they’d been much help. The NGO thing had always seemed to me to be about looking good rather than doing good. BB had missed his vocation.

4

MONG CLAMBERED TO his feet and wandered to the water’s edge. I dropped my pacifier and joined him. ‘You’re a lucky bastard. You know that?’

He hesitated for a moment, then gave me a quick nod. He didn’t take his eyes off the scum that swirled across the sand in front of us.

‘I remember half of B Squadron telling you to steer clear of Tracy – but only because they wanted to have a crack at her themselves. They didn’t see what you saw in her. She’s in love, mate. And that’s with you, not with any other fucker. Just you.’ I pointed a finger at him like it was a bollocking.

‘You’ve got each other, that’s all that matters. Fuck BB, fuck ’em all. Just think how many of us’ve messed that up – BB included. They’re jealous of you two. We all are.’

He nodded again.

‘Why don’t you just pack up and fuck off out of Hereford? Why stay?’ In the film version of Mong and Tracy’s life that played in my mind, they would have packed up and gone to live where nobody knew them as soon as he’d left the Regiment. Like Shrek, but without the swamp.

Mong put up with a load of shit from BB, but a whole lot more of it was dealt behind his back. He was too big and fearsome for anyone else to say it to his face.

He shrugged. ‘Tracy wants to be near her mum and sister. She’s a family girl.’

I felt the corners of my mouth twitch into a smile. ‘No wonder they all think you’re soft in the head.’

He wasn’t. They were forgetting what he did for a living. And they mistook kindness for weakness. The stupid fucker was still sending cash to a woman he bumped into when he was in the Marines. He was at the checkout in Tesco one Saturday with three of his mates, each hefting a box of Stella, ready to watch the rugby. She was ahead of them, moaning that she couldn’t afford to buy nappies – one of the oldest cons in the book, but Mong was suckered. He paid for all the beer, paid for the Pampers too, and hadn’t stopped since. The baby had to be about twelve years old by now, and he was still sending her money.

Mong always had been a sucker when it came to kids. He was godfather to enough of them to make a football team. He and Tracy still hadn’t had kids of their own, and I was pretty sure that hurt. But it wasn’t something he spoke about, so I’d never asked.

Mong waded through the plastic bags and bottles and into the sea. ‘Nick?’ he shouted, over the roar of the surf.

‘I’m not washing your back.’

‘If anything happens to me – if I get dropped – you’ll look after her, won’t you?’

He made a bit of a meal of splashing his face in the water to avoid eye-to-eye. I knew it was difficult for him to be this emotional. Fucking hell, he wasn’t the only one.

‘Nothing’s going to happen, is it? Unless you spend too much time in your paddling pool with that lot …’ About twenty metres in front of Mong another three bloated bodies bobbed among the shit coming in on the waves. I nodded in their direction. ‘Otherwise the only thing that could go wrong on this job is that cunt ODing on protein powder.’

He didn’t laugh. He wasn’t in that kind of mood. ‘Everything’s good at home. I mean really. But the good stuff never lasts that long for me. You know what I mean?’

He got swiped by a tumbling body as he came out of the surf. He stepped aside with the deftness of a wing forward dodging a tackle. His clothes clung to him like a second skin. ‘Keep her safe, yeah?’

‘I already told you, mate, of course I will. But it’s not as if I’m going to have to.’

He gave his eyes another wipe as we walked back towards the tents.

I glanced across at him and was rewarded with a sheepish grin. ‘Fucking sand.’

5

OUR TENT WAS a four-man job we could stand up in, a minging old grey canvas thing that stuck out like a sore thumb among the Gucci Gore-Tex affairs with blow-up frames the NGOs lived in.

BB sat on an aluminium Lacon box that contained fresh supplies of food and bottled water. It had looked lonely outside somebody else’s bivvy doing jack-shit that morning so we’d decided to give it a home. We needed something to sit on and keep our kit off the ground.

BB didn’t look up as we came through the flaps. He was stuffing some padding up his nose. Mong headed straight past him to his corner and peeled off his wet kit. The hubbub of French, German, American and Spanish voices in the background even subdued the chug of the generators. The NGO crews were holding a biggest-bollocks contest to see who was doing the most caring.

I brushed the crap from my cargoes, kicked off my boots and fell onto my camp cot. I’d leave the two cage-fighters to sort themselves out. We were due to set off in about three hours. We’d get the job done and then fuck off back home.

I watched the hi-tech campsite at work through our tent flaps.
Star Trek
had finally met
Carry on Camping
. Relief warriors wearing one badge or another rushed about and spoke urgently into radios, ordering somebody somewhere to do something.

I listened to the groan of aircraft overhead. Food and water were being flown in, only some of which would get where it was needed. There were already complaints that 30 per cent of the food and shelter equipment coming into the airport had been confiscated by the military as import duty. Yesterday we’d seen soldiers selling 20-kilo bags of rice – with UN stamped all over them – to the begging locals. Then the gangs demanded their cut before it could travel down the road. Even the pirates who worked the straits between Sumatra, Thailand and Malaysia were looking for their slice now there was fuck-all left to rape and pillage at sea.

Camp Hope – I had no idea who’d given it the name but they had a sense of humour – was to the south of Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and the largest city of Aceh Province. It was right at the north-western tip of Indonesia. Until 26 December last year, the only people with any interest in the place – apart from its 250,000 population – were oil companies and the Aceh separatist fighters.

Then the Indian Ocean earthquake struck about 150 miles off the coast and this part of the world was literally turned upside down. Banda Aceh was the closest major city to the earthquake’s epicentre. So far, they reckoned on about 160,000 deaths in the area, and they were braced for more in the weeks to come, once the rubble started to be cleared and the sea brought more bodies back to land. Cholera would soon be spreading like wildfire, along with the contamination caused by the yellow and green shit leaking from the drums that came in on every tide.

To make things worse, the area had been at war since the mid-1970s. Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, the Free Aceh Movement, was trying to force Indonesia to accept an independent Islamic state. Aceh had a higher proportion of Muslims than other areas of the country, and had been allowed to introduce Sharia law in 2001, but GAM wanted a lot more than just religious control. They wanted the revenue from the province’s rich oil and gas deposits, most of which went straight to the central coffers – no doubt with a few
rupiah
s skimmed off the top.

Major disaster or not, the Indonesian military didn’t like us coming in. They didn’t like foreigners at the best of times, but this last week, in the wake of the tsunami, they’d had no option. Now they were re-exerting their authority. They were starting to restrict our movements, scared our supplies would go to GAM. They wanted to keep the fuckers starving, and didn’t give a shit if everyone else was too.

6

AN ARGUMENT ERUPTED outside between an American and a German who sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a wedgie. It was over what group was going to get the military permit to travel to some remote village with aid.

Over the years, I’d seen NGOs running around in places like Africa and I never really liked what I saw. It seemed to me that they were businesses, at the end of the day, and these two sounded like they were busy competing for a slice of the disaster pie. The locals didn’t just need food and shelter. They needed protection from this fucking lot.

The MONGOs – My Own NGO – could be even worse. They were the guys who thought they could get things sorted more cheaply and effectively than the real aid workers. Most of them arrived under their own steam. Tourist visa in hand – if there was anyone around to issue one – they rented a vehicle, bunged on an ID sticker and, bingo, they were in business.

I’d Googled ‘tsunami’ and ‘donation’ just before we left and got over sixty thousand referrals to MONGO websites, all brand new. Some of them, of course, were scams for cash.

Individual aid work was trendy in the UK, Scandinavia and Australia. And in the US, the tax authorities were granting exemption to an average of eighty-three new charities a day. More than 150,000 had been registered so far – and these were just the lads who’d bothered to go through the system. The only reason I knew all this was because Mong, BB and I had gone that route.

Aid 4 Tsunami. That was us. We carried accreditation to prove it; we’d printed it ourselves. It wasn’t the most original name for a charity, but it would do. There were far worse out here. And it was as well funded as any other MONGO.