The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (6 page)

The woman didn’t catch the name. What was it? ‘Erwell?’ She looked hard back down the highway. ‘It’s impossible for you to be here. The roads have been closed for three days. Entirely closed. Where did you sleep? And food? What about food and water? You have only one bag?’

For the first time Ford realized what a mess he must appear: his trousers worn and dirty, his boots white with dust. Unshaven with sweat sticking his shirt to his shoulders; he stank, he knew this.

‘I was supposed to be back this morning. There will be people looking for me. If you drop me at the next town, I can make arrangements from there. Everything I had was in my car.’

The driver and the woman looked at each other, and the man began to drive. Ford leaned into the wind, his eyes half-closed, cat-like. The woman watched Ford in the rear-view mirror and appeared unconvinced by his story. At the driver’s suggestion she offered him water and bread. They had nothing else, she said. There was nothing to share. Ford’s feet knocked against bottles, soft packets wrapped in a supermarket bag. Cheese, he thought. Meat. Exploring with his boot. They had food.

‘What happened to you?’ The woman indicated the cuts on his face and hands.

‘An accident, not so long ago. A car accident.’ He closed his eyes to prevent more questions.

Sleep bore down on him so that he heard only pieces of what she was saying. They were journalists, Susanna Heida and Gerhard Grüner. The three days of one-way traffic meant trouble. ‘After Israel,’ Heida swept her hand out, ‘look, after Egypt, Libya, anything is possible. The Iranians have taken over the western oil-fields and no one has stopped them. The Kurds attempt to declare an independent territory. Everybody wants something. Everything is in collapse. We passed refugees all the way from Semdinli.’ She looked to Ford, expecting him to understand. ‘The military have closed the villages, blocked the roads. These people are trapped. There have been attacks over the border in both Iran and Iraq. First it was the Shabak and Yizidi, now it’s more mainstream Kurd. Iraq is inside out. It’s crazy.’ To really see what was going on they needed to be in Iraq, she said, but everything, everywhere, was now closed. The borders were impassable.

Ford gave in to the hum of tyres on the tarmac, the hot wind, and slept sitting forward, eyes three-quarter closed.

The journalists stopped at the station forecourt to let Ford clamber out of the jeep. As she said goodbye the woman looked him over again, the calculation clear in her expression that although he wasn’t the journalist she’d first mistaken him for, he looked mightily familiar.

‘Rowell?’ she said. ‘Horwell? What was your name?’

A crowd obliterated the open bays in front of the station. The road, monitored by armed soldiers, remained passable. Behind the coach station rose the slim stone minarets and the gold-ribbed dome of a mosque, behind that, five miles north, smoke guttered up from a refinery. An eggy stink clotted the air and stuck in his throat. His thanks came out dry.

Determined to be gone, Ford kept his head down as he straightened the straps on his backpack. With a final hasty goodbye he walked round the back of the vehicle, then slipped immediately into the crowd. His relief at escaping the journalists was tempered with alarm at being back among so many people after a week of near absolute solitude. Even as he entered the crowd he felt separate and distinct, in no way part of them.

Once inside he watched over men’s shoulders as the jeep inched out of the forecourt. A bus, however slow and meandering, remained his best option.

He bought a bottle of water, paid with an American dollar, and washed himself over a corner basin in a small mirrorless room. The heat made him dizzy and the water caused the small cuts in his face and hands to begin to spot and bleed. He changed his clothes, found a place to sit at the back of the waiting room and when he settled he caught his reflection in the mirrored side of a soft-drink dispenser. The plastic compressed his face, which appeared in any case longer; his cheekbones so pronounced that it took a short moment to recognize himself. Used to shorter hair, a fatter face, the change fascinated him. With a beard, his skin dark from the sun, abraded and cut, his eyes sharper, a little harrowed, he could pass by people who knew him and be ignored.

While he waited he kept his eye on the soldiers and security guards, the men at the small booths selling halva, cashew nuts, and Coca-Cola, men in couples loitering within the bus station, and the loners stalking the darkened bays. Soldiers armed with rifles minded the entrances. Across the aisle two others slumbered arm in arm, one man’s head rested against the other man’s shoulder. The floor crammed with civilians who slept head to toe. Men in drab suits with their arms wrapped about their luggage.

Now bored, Ford sat forward with his chin on his hands and decided to steer away from the border and the coast and head further inland. He would find a small hotel, a hostel, a pension. He would keep away from the larger hotels and bars, the cafés that catered to westerners, the tea houses and public thoroughfares. He would sleep and wait, and while he waited he could be certain that anyone searching for Sutler would push forward and lose momentum.

For most of the evening Ford sat with his head in his hands, miserable with the cold. A child slept beside him on a heap of gathered coats while her mother kept watch. These pauses and delays tested his nerve. Wherever there were refugees there would be police and security forces, roadblocks and checks, and they needed to be avoided.

At midnight the electricity failed, and in the darkness broken by the tiny lights of soldiers’ cigarettes, he at last felt secure.

In this silence he concerned himself with the attack, and consciously dismissed every thought of Kiprowski. At Camp Liberty the threat of such an attack had sat with them through every moment, awake, asleep, so he now felt a kind of deflation, commingled with relief and alarm. Relief that this had happened, it was over:
and what were the chances of it happening a second time?
And alarm at how the event remained unresolved. He couldn’t easily dismiss his concern about Kiprowski.
Think of something else now. Wipe him from your mind
. But as he consciously sought less troubling thoughts, his skin prickled in memory of the heat riding over him, bullying him in one hot complex shove, a mess of hands shunting him head over heels so fast and with such force that it stripped the boots off his feet. Surely: if he had survived, then so had Kiprowski. Not thinking of Kiprowski, of course, was thinking of Kiprowski.
There he is, like that man there, or him, or him
.

He missed being Sutler, and halfway through the night believed himself in transit, heading to, not from the desert of Al-Muthanna and Camp Liberty. The call from Paul Geezler. A five-twenty red-eye from Bonn to Düsseldorf that opened twenty-eight hours of transit flights and slow connections. Geezler wanted him deployed as soon as possible.
Think Vietnam, think Da Nang
. The Massive would transform HOSCO, and Ford, travelling under his own name, slipped into Sutler.

Wide awake, Ford could remember the exact moment he received Geezler’s call, and could recall himself, phone in hand, at the window of his small apartment overlooking a street on which nothing moved: the hotel rooms and apartments set above hardware shops, the boutiques and cafés dark and shuttered; the streets leathery wet, the greyness of the view, the ashen un-black sky suggesting a city set on a river.

Up to this point Ford had worked on small schemes, contract by contract: car parks for mini-malls; refits of East German factories; signs for autobahns; ground clearance in Croatia for the Corps of Engineers. All small. Ford knew that Geezler liked him. He knew he had the man’s attention. And this was that promised opportunity.
It won’t come again. I’m serious. You don’t need expertise in business, what you need are people who can do, in one instant, exactly what you ask of them. Are you that man? Are you ready for change?

The first buses were scheduled to leave at six, all of them heading west or north-west.

The call to prayer came as a dislocated wail amplified through small speakers. Men knelt where they’d slept and bowed in prayer. Women shrank to the sides of the room, minding children, luggage, and themselves. Except for Ford and the soldiers, only one other passenger remained seated, and they looked at each other across the rows of empty benches. The young man, unprepared for the cold, wore open sandals, loose tan shorts, and a navy-blue sweater. He sat with a paperback open on his lap. Occasionally he looked up and scanned the room, his expression dulled by reading, and Ford wondered why such a boy – surely a tourist, a student – would be so close to a war zone.

Ford: Atlas

thekills.co.uk/johnjacobford

2.4

Susanna Heida and Gerhard Grüner ate a small breakfast in their room, although neither was hungry. Grüner cut the feta with a pocket knife then sized up the blocks. Bored with him, Heida switched on the television.

The room stank of a zoo-like mustiness. Outside, suitcases and packages lined the stairwell and hallway.

Grüner sat naked at the table and read from his computer screen. A tissue spread out with olives, feta, bruised tomatoes, and bread beside the laptop and an open map of Turkey. Relatives of the hotel staff had paid to have their belongings stored in the empty rooms, and once these rooms had filled up they’d started using the public areas. This was his theory. The hotel would be more secure than their homes, he said, and it was true, the hotel was protected by armed guards. He’d seen this before, in Pakistan, although in Pakistan there was more money and these people had weapons like you wouldn’t believe, and bodyguards, ex-SAS, who slept in the corridors. Grüner had a good idea about what was going on.

Heida nodded, conceding to his experience. Crazy. The whole thing. Yes, crazy. There were small fires in the street. People cooking in family groups. People keeping themselves warm, waiting to see what would happen. She switched her attention from the window to the television, clicked through channels and watched the signal jump.

Grüner checked RSS downloads for the current news. ‘It looks the same,’ he said. ‘The border is closed.’ He pushed food into his mouth, his attention taken by the computer, the slow download, the erratic link. ‘We need to keep moving. They’re siphoning gasoline from the cars. The military is running out of fuel. Agri, Van, Hakkari, Siirt, Kurtalan, Mardin.’ He plotted an area on the map, point to point. ‘The only transport now is north and north-east. These towns are all closed. If we can’t get visas by Friday then we’re in trouble. We can’t go back and we can’t go forward. We should have stayed where we were.’

Heida nodded and Grüner nodded back, mouth full. ‘There’s no news about the visas. There’s a message from yesterday saying the border will remain closed.’ He glanced up, lips greasy with oil. ‘The only flight into Baghdad is from Düsseldorf. That’s it. Everything else is military.’

‘What about Damascus? If we go to Damascus or to Haleb, maybe there’s something from there, a convoy or something?’

‘There’s nothing. That’s it. And anyway, by the time we get there it will be too late.’

Evidence again of Grüner’s fatalism. Heida cruised through the channels looking for news. ‘Crazy,’ she said, ‘it’s just crazy.’ Grüner set the computer aside, stuffed the last of the food into his mouth, and, chewing, reached for her buttocks.

Indifference, this was the word she wanted. This was what she felt about the people outside, about their visas, and about Grüner, especially Grüner, too tall, ungainly, with his fat mouth and busy hands. And there, without warning, appeared the face of the man they’d dropped at the bus station. Heida gasped.

Misreading the signal Grüner pulled her down to his lap. She shoved him away, regained her balance, and pointed to the television. She watched his expression change from hurt to open-jawed amazement.

‘It’s Howell.’ The name came to her, clear and correct. ‘He said his name was Howell.’ She placed her hand on the screen below Ford’s face and pointed out the name Stephen Lawrence Sutler. ‘Now we can leave.’

Within moments they were searching for clothes. His scattered carelessly about the floor, hers folded one item on another.

2.5

At the last moment Parson asked if he could interview Pakosta and Clark, the contractors arrested alongside Paul Howell. If possible he wanted to speak with both men at the same time, as one man’s memory might prompt the other. He wanted an idea of Sutler’s intentions prior to the event. If the man was running with a plan, something set in order, there would be a thread to discover, a trace at the very least.

Parson sat outside a row of uniform grey unit offices while he waited for the response to his request. The security wing, manned by contracted non-combatants, was uncomfortably quiet. The furniture, doors, and partitions marked with stickers:
HOSCO, Hampton Roads, Virginia, USA. Manufactured with Pride
.

Bothered that he knew the facts but couldn’t see under the skin of them, he figured through Sutler’s last morning. A collection of dockets and transport passes provided no detail about the events of that morning. Within thirty-five minutes of Stephen Lawrence Sutler’s arrival at Southern-CIPA, the offices had come under attack, and Sutler had walked from the devastation through a compound heavy with dust and open gunfire, leaving one man in pieces. His flight, from its outset, unnatural, contrary to instinct. Parson couldn’t see how any man could so thoroughly vanish unless he was vulnerable, foolish, naive, or halfway gone to start with. People like Sutler rarely managed to disappear unless accident or foul play played some part.

These buildings, provided by HOSCO, were little more than seaside trailers. Flimsy frames and fire-retardant material. Nothing much of anything.

Clark and Pakosta were held under military supervision, dressed in standard orange overalls, and confined to a small, temporary cell. They answered questions about the weekend prior to Sutler’s disappearance, and admitted with a little discomfort that Paul Howell, as Deputy Administrator for Project Finance, had paid them to accompany him on a visit to the Royal Palm Hotel in Bahrain. Whenever Howell needed to leave Iraq on his own business he took a group with him, partly for security, and partly to make an impression. Under this simple fact lay the itch of another story. ‘Once or twice,’ Pakosta explained, ‘that’s all it was.’ On these trips the men were provided with military uniforms. ‘As far as we knew this wasn’t a problem. He told us to wear them.’ There were gifts involved. Watches, whisky, cash.