Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

A wave of indignation rolled across the room and over the General.

‘ You are the commander!’ Brad said. ‘ You are in charge! These are questions you should be able to answer! If you won’t answer, you shouldn’t be sitting in that chair!’

The General glared at him.

‘When was the door opened?’ Brad asked again, getting his voice under control.

‘General,’ the familiar voice of Michael Baring intoned, ‘on behalf of the entire press corps I have to ask that you bear in mind that everyone here is sympathetic to the difficulty of your position, and there is no question of an inquisition, but at the same time, with representatives of the world’s media here it would seem to me, and I believe to my colleagues that—’

Brad interrupted and shouted at the General, ‘Why don’t you answer?’

‘If I could continue,’ Baring continued.

‘Be quiet!’ someone told him.

‘Nothing will be served by a shouting match,’ the General said. ‘We will investigate this entire matter and I can assure you that we will try with every means at our disposal to ensure that such an incident is never repeated.’

The focus of interest now switched to the planned investigation. The General had no idea what he was going to do about that and he spent the next five minutes improvising. They asked him what kind of pressure he would exert to have the killer handed over and he had no answer. They asked him if he planned to resign and he expressed incredulity. They asked him if new orders regarding APC inspections had been issued and he refused to respond on the grounds that he couldn’t talk about operational details.

Then, with his own and his organisation’s reputation in tatters, he stood up and said, ‘Please excuse me. I have another appointment.’

There was a competing narrative that challenged the French officer’s account. A contingent of British troops had arrived at the place where the APC was surrounded. They advanced along the road and the Rebels gave ground, allowing them to reach the vehicle. The commander of the British unit climbed up onto the APC and spoke to the occupants, including the minister, through the hatch on the roof. When a larger French force arrived, the British were ordered to leave. According to this account, the door at the back of the APC was still closed when the British withdrew, which meant it must have been opened after the French arrived.

The French, it was believed, had tried to reason with the Rebels. The door at the back of the vehicle had been opened as a confidence-building gesture, as part of a negotiation – a negotiation that ended in the minister’s death.

‘They should have known better!’ someone said as a crowd made its way across the car park of the PTT building after the press conference.

Brad looked round abruptly to see who had spoken. There were three correspondents. He didn’t recognise them. They wore stylish kit and there was a sort of collective self-confidence about them that struck Brad as being almost repellent.

It was bitterly cold. When Brad turned to look at the men he felt a sharp blast of frigid air on the side of his neck. One of the men looked at him with an expression that was inquisitive at first and then challenging. Brad guessed this was the man who thought the French should have known better.

Brad didn’t fully understand the sudden fury that engulfed him. He turned away again and walked quickly to his car. When he started the engine he jerked the steering wheel so that the tyres screeched. He had to make a U-turn to drive back into the city. Once he was headed in the right direction, he accelerated, but almost immediately he slowed down again. The road was potholed, and the ice and snow above the portholes made the surface even more treacherous. There were men and women labouring over the snow on either side pulling sledges. He didn’t want to skid into the crowd.

Looking ahead at the bleak winter landscape he thought about a tropical evening eighteen months before.

Wikram was in his mid-twenties, shrewd and popular. He wore his hair in short spiky cords, truncated dreadlocks. He dressed well – linen suits, shirts immaculately pressed – and he spoke with a public school accent. His mother was Sinhalese and lived in Colombo in a rather fine house that was not quite a mansion. His father was Tamil and lived in London.

It was Wikram’s idea to pursue the possibility of an interview near Kalpitiya with the reclusive leader of the Tamil Tigers.

‘Are you really going to put him at risk?’ someone asked Brad before he and Wikram set off. ‘Are you really going to put him at risk just so that you can get a good story?’

But Wikram wanted to do it.

They left Colombo in the early afternoon in Wikram’s many times made-over 1964 Zephyr. The seats were big, the suspension industrial-strength. At the first checkpoint leaving the city, the soldiers waved them on; they sailed through the checkpoints after that. They took turns to drive. Along the highway, lorries and buses spilled black smoke into the air, and in the fields boys rode oxen. On the outskirts of towns there were tree-shaded terraces amid the poverty of thatched huts and the polluted urgency of the road.

Before the Puttalam checkpoint they swung off the main road and travelled on the causeway over the salt flats at the south of the lagoon. It was just after three when they reached Palakudawa. They parked behind a coffee shop near the police station. Inside the coffee shop they ordered string hoppers, vegetables and Coke.

After eating, they drank tea and smoked.

Shortly before six, a man about Wikram’s age came into the coffee shop and sat down at their table. He spoke to Wikram in Sinhala and Wikram handed over the keys of his car. The man stood up, and Wikram said, ‘We are to follow him.’

There was a piece of waste ground on which half a dozen trucks were parked. Their escort led them to the back of one of the trucks, which was covered in brown canvas. He said something short and sharp and the canvas flap opened. The man indicated to Brad with a hand signal that he should climb in.

Two men were sitting beneath the canvas. The back of the truck was dark, and smelled of earth and sweat. Wikram climbed in after Brad. One of the men pointed to a spot directly behind the driving cabin where there were sacks on the floor. Brad and Wikram stepped forward and sat on the sacks, facing towards the back. Their guards sat on the other side of them.

They could not see out. The truck began moving and they drove for fifteen minutes before stopping. The guards lit cigarettes but made no move to go outside. No one spoke. They sat like that for an hour. A stream of air entered the stuffy enclosure through a vent behind Brad’s head. He breathed in. The air smelled of Palmyra bark. Then the truck started again. It was almost completely dark now. They drove for another half an hour and when the truck stopped and began a complicated set of manoeuvres, Brad sensed that they were near the sea.

They sat in silence, this time for five minutes, until there was a soft tapping at the back of the truck. One of the guards opened the flap. They had reversed onto the edge of a short jetty. At the end of the jetty Brad made out the silhouette of a fishing boat.

They climbed down from the truck and walked along the jetty.

The journey across the lagoon lasted forty minutes. There were no lights on the boat. They could see very little, no silhouette of land on either side after they cast off from the jetty. There was no moon.

The skipper sat on a plastic chair in the wheelhouse and peered up at the stars from time to time. Brad watched him. It was hard to tell his age. He could have been thirty or fifty. He wore a longee and a dark T-shirt, and didn’t acknowledge his passengers when they came on board.