Jog On Fat Barry (13 page)

“Afghanistan,” I said.

Madden grimaced.

“I fucking hate Afghanistan,” he said.

“We leave in an hour. They’re running it out of Pakistan.”

“Fucking hate Pakistan too,” Madden added. “I hate Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. I fucking hate all the
stans
.”

“How many targets?” Pencil asked.

“Just one,” I said.

Madden and Pencil glanced at me again.

“It’s a second attempt,” I said. “Yank team didn’t come back.”

Madden poured the tea, he added milk and sugar and sat down at the table. The same thoughts as always started running through our heads: no stone left unturned, no loose ends, and no regrets.

The city of Jalalabad lies in the shadow of the Hindu Kush Mountains, about 120 km east of Kabul in Nangarhar Province. The Pakistani border lies some seventy kilometres further east. The Pave Hawk was heading northwest through the Khyber Pass. We were flying low-level and it was pitch black. The only thing stopping us from crashing into mountains was the Forward Looking Infrared System. Madden glanced at his watch, it had just gone 3:00 a.m.

Our drop zone was a small town five clicks west of Jalalabad called Bagrami. We had been told a truck and a guide would be waiting for us, and from there, our target would be a ten-minute drive away at Abu Khabab, one of three training camps in the Duranta camp complex. We’d been sitting in the helicopter without speaking, hoping the information we were given turned out to be reliable. If it played out that way, we’d be back at base camp knocking back Heinekens in about two hours. It was a simple enough op: all we had to do was locate, verify, and eliminate. Of course, the problem with Arabs was that they all tended to look alike. They all had those matching beards, pakols, lunges, and chapans, and because of that, identifying targets correctly could be difficult and protracted. At least, that’s the way it was for most teams. But it wasn’t that way for us. We had a tried-and-tested system that simply did not fail. The gunner radioed the drop was two minutes away and Pencil looked up from the paperback he was reading.

“What does
stan
, like in Paki
stan
, mean?” he asked.

“It’s a suffix,” I said. “It means a place where one
stays
.”

Something was moving across the stony ground. It might have been a scorpion or a beetle, but to the peacock it was just something to eat. The bird darted forward, then shot sideways, its body twisting through the air before landing a few meters away from where it left the ground. Madden lowered his rifle. The shot had been completely silent. He held up his left hand; showed me a thumb. He pointed at three squat looking buildings that were 150 meters in front of us. I surveyed the ground between and wondered if there might be landmines. Everything was swimming in a sea of green through the night vision goggles.

Forty minutes earlier, Jawid had sped us away from the drop zone. It was Jawid who betrayed the SEAL team. We knew it the moment we set eyes on him. He said there wouldn’t be any dogs or peacocks, but we knew there would be, and I had to remove one of his thumbs and two fingers before he’d admit to his treachery. He blubbered there was a peacock and a dog before admitting he’d been working both sides. The SEAL team should’ve seen it but they didn’t. When Pencil shot Jawid behind the ear, the bullet blew off a chunk of his skull. Blood splattered the windscreen. Madden took the wheel and, after two clicks, we abandoned the truck and set off on foot.

Madden killed the peacock but we still had to wait. The minutes slowly ticked by. Then Pencil appeared carrying a hooded dog across his shoulders. The dog was big and mangy, and both its front and hind legs were bound together. Pencil dropped the dog on the ground and squatted beside it. He grabbed one of its hind legs, severed a tendon with his knife and then pulled the hood off. The terrified dog was baying, but the duct tape wrapped around its snout muffled the cries. Pencil released the binds holding its feet. The dog stood up on its three usable legs and started to hobble toward the three buildings. Pencil shot a smile at Madden and me.

“Pack animal: pack mentality,” he whispered.

“And dogs always return to vomit,” Madden whispered back.

If anyone had been expecting us, no signs of it were ever shown. The wounded dog had lurched and wobbled its way across open ground before scratching at the door of one of the buildings and we followed the same route. Had there been landmines, the dog would’ve set them off. Madden kicked the dog out of the way and then lobbed a flashbang in through the door. We shut our eyes and covered our ears as the grenade exploded. When we charged in, Johnny Turk was stumbling about inside a large room: nine men and a young boy momentarily blinded by 1,000,000 candles and deafened by 180 decibels.

Pencil and me quickly herded everyone into a corner. Madden picked five of the men at random. He told them to stand against the wall and casually unfolded a photocopied photograph of our target. He shot the first man without saying a word. He showed a second man the photocopy and asked where the man was. But before the second man could answer, Madden shot him too. He thrust the photocopy into the hands of a third man and repeated his question. The young boy began to cry. Madden counted off ten seconds before shooting the third man. He then thrust the photocopy into the hands of a fourth man. The fourth man acted just as the third had, he stared at the photocopy but said nothing. Madden waited ten seconds; then shot the fourth man. He thrust the photocopy into the hands of the fifth man. The fifth man acted no differently: just stood there gazing at our target. The seconds ticked by slowly, one all the way to eleven. And we knew then that we had a problem. Up until Abu Khabab the target had always been identified before the fifth man was killed. This was different. I looked at Pencil, Pencil looked at Madden, and Madden looked at me.

“Who the fucking hell
is
this bloke anyway?” Madden asked.

What is it that inspires one man to follow another? Is it the content of their character? Or could it be the philosophy that they champion? Maybe one is inseparable from the other. Take Martin Luther King. King was a Baptist minister who dreamt about a colourblind society, and he marched to a mountaintop in search of that freedom. King and his followers were beaten, humiliated, and many lost their lives. But they walked on regardless and forged a path that brought King’s dream of racial equality that bit closer. King was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Honour. And all that cost him was his life. He was assassinated outside a motel room in 1968. King was thirty-nine years old. A bill creating a U.S. federal holiday to honour King was established by Ronald Reagan and was signed in the White House Rose Garden on November 2nd 1983. It became officially observed in all fifty states on January 19th 1993.

Some ten years after the assassination of King, 913 members of the People’s Temple cult committed suicide or were murdered following instructions from the evangelist preacher Jim Jones. They drank cyanide-laced grape Flavour Aid, had forced cyanide injections, or died by gunfire at the settlement in Jonestown, in the Republic of Guyana, on the northern coast of South America. The Peoples Temple had moved to Guyana from San Francisco following investigations into the church for tax evasion. Two hundred and seventy-six of the 913 were children, and Jones, who claimed to be the incarnation of Jesus, was the 914th member to die. It was 1978. Jones was forty-seven years old. He did not win a Nobel Peace Prize, nor was he a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honour. And no official holiday celebrates his birth. Charismatic authority is a powerful force, coming, as it does, with its very own deceptive rhyme and reason. Show me anyone who wants to tell you otherwise, and I’ll show you a fucking liar.

Pencil laughed and said, “It’s a bit like the end of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. You know, that bit where they’re trapped in a building surrounded on all sides and heavily outnumbered. Except there are three of us: not two. And there’s no ammunition-laden donkey tethered to a post either.”

Even though Madden had shot the fifth man, the four still alive continued to play dumb, so Madden shot them too. The boy was the last one to look at the photocopy. He motioned for Madden to follow him. The boy then stood in the doorway and pointed at another building. While we were surveying the area, the boy took off. Madden watched the boy run. Pencil raised his gun to shoot.

“Leave it,” Madden said, gently pushing down the barrel.

The boy ran wild. The boy ran free. And it was mesmerizing to watch him race across the sand. It was as if the three of us were running right alongside him: as if the three of us were caught up in the hopes of that boy and the dreams of a nation.

Of course, the boy had been lying, and we knew as much, but we flashbang-walloped into the building he pointed out all the same. Moments later we were pinned down. Rag-heads were arriving by the dozen. They must have found what was left of Jawid in the truck, or maybe the boy had told them. Whatever the reason, we were surrounded like fish in a barrel. Our only hope was to sequester a vehicle and put as much distance as possible between them and us because the Pave Hawk would never risk a pick-up otherwise.

Pencil was whistling “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” as he bolted out the door, but his brains got splattered across the wall before he took his third step. No stone had been left unturned, however. Marlene and the baby would be well looked after. Money enough had been put aside to see to that. She was also up for two-thirds of his shares in DogEatDog. The remaining third would go to Lionel, the man who ran the boys’ home that Pencil had grown up in, and who had also been the closest thing to a father Pencil ever knew.

When Madden and me charged at the heart of incoming gunfire, the blokes with beards broke ranks. Fuck knows how but somehow we managed to get to a truck: a battered old Toyota HiLux that started up first time. Then we were speeding away with bullets whizzing past us from all directions. That was when Madden made a noise he’d never made before. It was like air seeping out of a bicycle tire. His blood splattered the dash.