Gerald Seymour - Home Run

He could not pray because the pain diverted his mind. He wondered how that speaker had prayed while the fingernails were ripped off, while his spine was damaged.

"Mr Furniss, you are a gentleman. This should not be happening to you, Mr Furniss. This is the treatment that is proper for the 'hypocrite' scum. It does not have to happen for you, Mr Furniss. Help me, help yourself. Why were you travelling? Who were you meeting? So very simple, Mr Furniss."

In truth, Mattie did not think that at that moment he could have spoken the names. The names were gone. There was only pain in his mind. The light was in his face. The pain soared when he tried to turn his head away from the light and away from the face of the investigator. The investigator sat on a stool not more than four feet from Mattie's cracked, dry lips. He thought the pain was good. He thought that the pain squeezed out of his mind the names of his agents. He could smell the cigarettes of the guards. They seemed to smoke continuously.

Abruptly the investigator flicked his fingers. He slid off his stool, and went to the table and began to push his notepads into his case.

To Mattie, the expression of the investigator was neither that of annoyance nor was it of pleasure. A job of work done.

"Mr Furniss, there is tomorrow, and after tomorrow there is another day, and after that day there is another. Each day is worse for you. For obstinacy you will pay a high price."

"No, Mother, there is no crisis, it's just that Mattie is a little overdue… I am not prepared to discuss Mattie's work with you, Mother… There is no need for you to come, Mother.

You cannot come anyway because you would be missing your bridge on Friday. I am perfectly alright, Mother… I'm sorry, but I really am much too busy to have you come here.

If there was something wrong then I would have the girls here. The girls are not here… Mother, I really do not want to have you come to stay… Will you listen to me, I don't want you here, I don't want anyone here… I am not crying, Mother, I am just trying to get on with my life."

She put the telephone down.

She thought that she had been miserably rude. She turned back to the minutes of the previous evening's meeting of the Conservation Society.

She tried not to think where he was, how he was, her Mattie.

At Century they would not be expecting a fuss from Harriet Furniss. It would have been, she thought, in Mattie's file that his wife was psychologically sound. It would have been noted that her two children had been born in Tehran because she hadn't thought it necessary to come home for the births, and there had never been trouble from her when they were in the Gulf, nor when they were in Ankara on short stay. It would have been entered in the file that she was a good sort, and did well on the Embassy circuit, the right stuff to be a Desk Head's consort.

Even so, to go these last days without a call from anyone at Century was very, very hard.

"April One to April Five, April One to April Five… "

"April Five to April One… "

" O K, Keeper, your location… The occupier is listed as Mr Brian Venables, Christ knows what Tango One is there for… Venables works, middle rank, for Thames Water."

"Understood."

"When do you want relief?"

"Bill, I'm going nowhere… don't argue, Bill, you'll have to burn me off him… In my locker, Bill, there's a battery razor and some socks, I wouldn't mind them."

"What about the others?"

"We'll want back-up at dawn. We're all staying… Bill, Token says that in her locker she has a change of kit in a green plastic bag."

"Sweet dreams, champions. April One to April Five, out."

The gale from the rotor blades flattened the robes of the Mullah against his chest, buried the material into the crotch valley between his legs. With one hand he clung to the brilliant white onion shape of his turban, with the other he steadied the spectacles on his nose. There wasafull loadfor the helicopter. There was a Divisional Commander and two staff officers, there were casualties, and there was the Mullah and his bodyguards. The light was up on the landing zone, harsh and clear, and it would be several hours later and when the sun had climbed that the pastel haze would settle over the battlefield. By then the sentences would have been carried out.

They lifted off. It was a French helicopter, and new, and mounts had been welded on at the open doorways to take heavy machine guns. To avoid ground-to-air missiles from their enemy the helicopter pilot flew low over the rear area of the battlefield. It was a killing zone to the east of the Iraqi town of Basra, much fought over. The Mullah, strapped in his canvas seat, his back against the hull, was a young man in anguish. There had been that morning, as the red sun had slipped above the flat horizon, an artillery barrage. Some of the worst of the casualties were on the deck of the helicopter, their stretchers against his feet, and medical orderlies holding drips, but the casualties were only those who had been hit close to the landing zone, the fortunate few. When he twisted his head the Mullah could see through the dust-smeared portholes of the helicopter, and when he looked straight ahead he could see past the torso of the machine-gunner in the open doorway. They hugged the flat and featureless ground. He saw the old trench lines that had been disputed four, five, six years before, where that dawn's shells had burst. He saw the angular dead, and he saw the stricken faces of the wounded and he saw the stretcher parties running towards them. He could see the tanks hull down, sheltered in revetments, that would stay hull down until there were spare parts.

Nothing grew upon this battlefield. Where there had been fields there were now just the patterns of the armour tracks.

Where there had been trees there were now only the shell-broken stumps. Where there had been marsh weed there was now only a yellow mat because the weed had been sprayed with herbicides to kill potential cover for an enemy. The helicopter scurried over a rear camp, tents and bomb-proof bunkers, and it flew sufficiently low for the Mullah to see the faces of the troops who squatted on the ground and stared up.

They were the same faces that he had seen further forward at the front the night before. The sullen gaze that had greeted his speech of exhortation. Pressed troops, afraid to ask with their voices, bold enough to demand with their eyes: where is the air support, where are the tank parts, where is the victory, when is the end?

That same morning he had sat in judgment of fifteen recruits who had held back in the last assault on enemy lines. Young men, eyes downcast, denounced in monotone by their officers and sentenced by the Mullah to field execution. There could be no tolerating cowardice.

The Mullah had won his spurs in the service of the Imam as one of the investigators of the coup attempted by air force officers of the Nouzeh barracks at Hamadan. He had seen the tears and the pleading of the pilots, and he had not been diverted.

He had achieved good results, satisfactory enough results for him to be chosen above many to unravel the plot woven around the Great Satan's attempt to fly a commando force into the country for the release of prisoners from the Nest of Spies. So many traitors to be found, and he had found so many. He had found those who would have driven the lorries, and those who would have made the airbase available, and those who had switched off the defensive radar. For himself, he thought the plan of the Great Satan was an absurd plan, bound to fail.

The Mullah was a devotee of the Revolution, a child of the ferocity of the Revolution. He knew no other way.

When they were out of range of the Iraqi ground-to-air missiles, the helicopter climbed. It would fly first to a field hospital. After that, with two further stops for refuelling, the helicopter would fly on to Tabriz. At the front, close to the artillery exchanges, he had slept badly. On the way to Tabriz he dozed fitfully, and the straggling thoughts in his mind were of a man known as Dolphin.