Jason Elliot: The Network

‘Let’s go on, then,’ says the colonel. ‘On the morning of 9 February the facility is breached by persons unknown whose intention, you purport, is to kidnap Gemayel.’

Purport? My left eye protests as the muscles try to open in surprise. ‘Persons unknown’ is a commando team with explosives and automatic weapons, the ammunition for which is later shown to be Israeli. They didn’t come for a tea party, I want to say. Unless they were planning to have one in a corridor of a prison facility filled with smoke from the plastic explosive they’d used to blow Gemayel’s door off its hinges while their screaming victim was being dragged out by his hair. Purport?

‘Let me ask: at the time when the facility was breached, what were your actions on in the event of a security failure? After the cessation of hostilities on 7 February were they not to issue a verbal challenge to any intruder? And did you issue a verbal challenge to the intruder?’

‘I can’t answer that question, sir.’ Because it’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.

‘You did not.’

Of course I fucking did not. When a man points an automatic weapon at you, you don’t engage him in conversation.

‘You shot and killed him instead. You fired eight rounds from your weapon into him.’ The colonel takes a sip of coffee. ‘There are some people – I’m not saying I’m one of them – who are still unhappy about that. There’s a family in Tel Aviv without a father, and there are people who want to know more about your motives that morning.’

Motives? He’s pushing all my buttons now. My motives were to save my own life and prevent my prisoner from being kidnapped. There has never been any doubt about this – until now. I’ve relived the scene often enough. Relived the trauma, relived the debriefs, relived the guilt, relived the questions that cannot be answered.

The assault team hadn’t expected to be challenged. They had planned for the guards at the entrance to the facility, who were disarmed and held at gunpoint at the outset of the raid, but not for two extra armed officers inside, who should have been quartered on the other side of the compound. I had slept in my office in my clothes after a late night of writing up reports, and across the corridor my best friend and fellow E2 had done the same. The first we knew of the raid was when the door to Gemayel’s cell was blown open with charges to the hinges and locks. I tripped the emergency lighting and ran with my weapon to the prisoners’ rooms, where the air was thick with shouts and smoke.

It didn’t look like a tea party. I raised my Browning towards the figure in black who was dragging Gemayel out of his room. His weapon came up as he saw me, but for reasons I will never know he hesitated, allowing me in his second of doubt to fire. I kept firing until he went down. His partner returned a long burst from an automatic weapon from beyond him and I was forced back into cover. My friend and 2i/c had come out of his room before me and received a rifle butt in his face before he could reach his weapon. He was taken with Gemayel, and had never been found. At our debrief all the facility personnel signed extra secrecy clauses and the event was sealed up tighter than radioactive waste.

End of story, Colonel, I want to say. Don’t drag me back there now. Because this wasn’t the kind of conflict I signed up for in any case. Not for the frenzied slaughter by American jets of the retreating Iraqis at the Mutla Gap, not for the fuel-air bombs that sucked the lungs and eyes out of their victims, or the conscripts bulldozed alive into their trenches, or the depleted uranium that’s poisoned the desert for a thousand years, and not for the disappearance of my best friend. Don’t drag me back to that.

‘I have to tell you,’ the colonel continues, ‘there are those who think you might have got just a bit too friendly with your prisoner. They think you might have struck a deal with him. Did you strike a deal with him, Taverner?’

It’s an abhorrent suggestion, but it’s getting me where it hurts. It is so perversely twisted a suggestion that I’m wondering if an equally twisted deal has been struck in which I’m the scapegoat, and am filled with misery at this possibility. I can’t think about it now. But the colonel isn’t letting up.

‘What did you agree? Agree to defend him? Fight off his kidnappers? Kill a Jew or two? Or were you just going to ask them to go away back to Israel? Because if it’s found to be that, you’re looking at an increase in sentence for Racial Aggravation, Section 240. That is unless you’re charged with Unlawful Killing, Section 42, which carries up to a life sentence. Do you want to talk about it now, sort it out? Or do you want to play the hero and go to prison? You will go to prison. Do you want to go to prison?’

‘I can’t…’ Just breathe. ‘I can’t answer…’ Breathe. ‘That question. Sir.’

My eyes are closed now. From another room comes the scraping sound of someone getting up from his chair. It’s the Face and he’s back to escort me to my place against the wall.

‘Nice chat with the colonel?’ I hear him ask. ‘Oh dear, was he a bit hard on you? Speaking strictly personally, it sounds to me like you’re fucked. Right, hats on, everybody.’

And I’m back against the wall with the pillowcase over my head now, wondering if there really is an Israeli unit claiming its pound of flesh for the accidental death of one of its commandos. The colonel’s report will set the tone for everything that follows, and I’m not co-operating. But it’s too much effort now to think this through. My mind is grinding to a halt like a film that’s being slowed down, and it’s frame by frame now.

‘Shall we try a bit of white noise on him, Billy?’

I shudder in anticipation, and not being able to see amplifies my fear.

‘Put it right by his ear and turn it on.’

I hear their bodies drawing near and wonder how I’ll cope. Then I hear a strange sonorous whine by my ear and realise after a few seconds that it’s Billy, whistling a tuneless rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’.

‘That’s torture, that is,’ says the Face, and they both burst into heartless guffawing.

I am falling asleep. My legs buckle several times, but Billy is always there to offer his own special encouragement. Twice I collapse, but he’s there to pick me up and remind me, in his own way, that I’m messing him around and he’s not fucking having any more of this shit from me. The pillowcase comes off again and I look up at him out of one eye. He towers over me and seems monstrously large. I doubt if I will take much more. My body does not co-operate any longer. Billy hauls me into the chair, and the colonel is waiting patiently for me. I no longer care whether he is really a colonel or not. Something has gone badly wrong but I don’t know what. They can’t treat me like this.

‘Let’s talk about Afghanistan,’ he says, turning a few pages in the file. Someone has given him a brief and accurate history of my two years with the Trust in Kabul, and I wonder who. I make a note that I must find out how, then wonder if I really care. He asks me who I met there, and he lists names I have never heard, over and over again. Some of them are Arab names, some Afghan. He asks in turn whether I met them, and whether, to use his stupid expression, I ‘went native’ in the course of my time in Afghanistan. Whether I met Abdullah Salafi in Kabul. Ahmad Popalzai in Kandahar. Khalil Razzaq in Herat. Someone else in Jalalabad. He describes their crimes, of which I lose track because I’m not hearing much of what he’s saying any more.

And I’m not hearing him because I’ve found what I wanted now. I’m walking across the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen, in the region of the Shibar Pass, on the high slopes above Bamiyan, where the light dispels all the ugliness of the world and cuts into the soul with a clarity I’ve never seen anywhere else. We’re walking because our vehicle has finally given up and there’s no radio contact with Kabul because of the mountains. We can’t walk out through Bamiyan because there’s fighting there and Salahuddin my driver is a Hazara and the Taliban will kill him. We head for Hajigak to the south instead and hope for the best, living off a few strips of Afghan bread for three days. Then, on the fourth day, Salahuddin quietly produces something from his bag which surprises all three of us because we thought there was no more food. He unwraps a roast chicken from what looks like a bundle of rags.