William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

He continued on his way, heading for his taxi, thinking about Wang for a moment, the last man he’d killed. Strange, that, he thought: he had no idea exactly how many people he’d killed in his life — thirty-five to forty, perhaps? It all started in 1982 with the Falklands War when he knocked out that bunker at Mount Longdon. He had been an eighteen-year-old paratrooper firing a Milan wire-guided missile, steering it right into the sandbagged sangar on the hillside. When he went to look after the battle all the dead were laid out in a row, like on parade — he looked for all the burnt and mashed-up ones and counted five.

Then he’d killed a Provo in a car on the outskirts of Deny but three other Paras had opened fire that night so they had to share the kill. It wasn’t until he joined the SAS and went through Hereford that the tally began to climb. Gulf War I, after the Victor Two fire-fight when the prisoners ran off — he slotted three. Then in Afghanistan, in 2001—his last operation — at the fort, Qala-I-Jangi. He lost count at Qala, all those rioting Taliban prisoners down below and our guys up on the battlements. Terry Eltherington had been there also. Shooting fish in a barrel, Terry had said. Jonjo could see his big, stupid, smiling face, chucking him ammo. Prisoners running around in the big overgrown courtyard, all the guys up on the battlements blasting away — SAS, SBS, the Yanks, the Afghans. Incredible. They just laced the whole courtyard, hosed it. He must have got a dozen or so, just picking them off as they ran around.

He opened the cab door and sat down behind the wheel, still computing. Christ — then there were all the jobs when he left the forces and joined the Risk Averse Group, one of the biggest private security companies. God knows how many Jacky-bandits he’d slotted on the Jordan — Baghdad run when he was a PSC — six? Ten? Then the five freelance jobs — he’d started counting again, properly — and there was always the money in the bank to confirm the number. He had no idea who’d found him, who called him up, sent him the details, no idea who paid him, no idea who the victims were and no idea why they were victims. Solid, professional, efficient, discreet — he was damn fucking good. Wang was number six and it would have been perfect if bastard Kindred hadn’t blundered in with his briefcase…His hand went reflexively to his new star-scab. Got rid of ‘L-for-Loser’—got pissed, sloshed a bit of vodka on the wound and the tip of a hot knife had done the rest. Kindred had made a neat job messy — so now he would find Kindred, hand him over for interrogation, and then make sure that his last moments on planet Earth were very memorable.

His mobile rang.

“Hello?”

“Jonjo, it’s Candy.”

Candy was the woman who lived next door. Divorcee, big woman, managed one of those flat-pack stores in Newham. Nice enough, friendly, looked after The Dog when he was busy.

“Yeah, Candy, what is it? I’m working, darling.”

“I don’t think The Dog’s very well. He’s been sick all over your carpet.”

Jonjo felt his chest fill with air.

“I think we need to take him to the vet…Jonjo? Hello?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Jonjo said, his mouth dry. He started the engine.

ADAM WAS FLYING ABOVE a dense cloudfield of supercooled cumulus, high over Arizona, the grey packed clouds stretching to the horizon. A cloud desert. Somehow he was both piloting the plane and at the same time supervising the dry-ice dispenser in the rear. Running beneath the wings of the plane were plastic tubes with small, lipped vents set in them at regular intervals. The plane dipped to one side and descended close to the cobbled surface of the cloudfield, flying a few feet above its gently shifting mass. What time of day was it? In the rear of the plane Adam flipped the switch on the high-pressure pump and tiny granules of frozen silver iodide, like fine sand, began to stream from the plastic vents on to the clouds below. The plane flew a course of a long oval, ten miles long and two miles wide, like a giant racecourse, the trajectory of its passage and the dusting of silver iodide revealed by a wide deepening trench appearing almost immediately in the cloud surface as the frozen ice crystals coalesced into water droplets. Down below the clouds, standing in a dry arroyo in the Arizona desert, Adam lifted his face to the sky as the first fat drops of the rain that he had made hit his brow and cheeks.

♦

Adam woke. He felt cold, although the sun was shining, and he had horrible nausea. He eased himself out of his sleeping bag, crawled a few feet away and vomited. Concussion, he thought, wiping his mouth and spitting: I must be still, be quiet, drink lots of water.

He hauled himself back into his sleeping bag and lay there, shivering, now growing conscious of aches beginning to make themselves felt about his body. Curiously, his head wasn’t sore but his balls hurt and so did his back and, worst of the lot, his left thigh and left shoulder were competing for first place in the throbbing-pain stakes. He remembered the dream, vividly, it was one of his recurring ones, but one he hadn’t had in months. Why was he dreaming about his old life when his new one was so immediately and dolorously present? He shed his sleeping bag again and checked out his body. He had a long thin bruise on his thigh — a lurid purple-blue — the skin only slightly broken, and on his left shoulder was a clear gash: his dirty, greasy shirt was slightly ripped at the shoulder and the rip was fringed with dried blood. He remembered — both injuries caused by that Mhouse-woman wielding his entrenching tool. He touched his forehead gently, feeling the gridiron of scabs, crusty under his exploring fingertips. He wondered what he looked like — a terrorist bomb casualty? A survivor from a car crash? Or a destitute, homeless person, victim of a brutal mugging?…

Back under his bush, he found himself recalling the dream. He had never seeded clouds from a plane — that was why they had built the cloud chamber. Plane trials and tests were too erratic, too easily disproved — that was why Marshall McVay himself had funded the building of the Yuma Cloud Chamber. They made their clouds, cooled them to the required temperature, then seeded them with dry ice or frozen silver iodide or salt or water droplets and measured the precipitation down below. All very straightforward and controlled.

He forced his thoughts to change — he had to stop thinking about his past, his old job, it was making him even more depressed — concentrating instead on the events of the previous night. He remembered the Mhouse-person bringing him clothes. He was still wearing her beige-grey, camouflage, mid-shin cargo pants and he could see the flip-flops a couple of yards away where he had kicked them off. And then the journey from the Shaftesbury Estate to Chelsea became patchy, something of a vague, troubled dream: buildings passing, car headlights and tail lights glaring, talking to Mhouse, her small cat face staring back at him, her body twisted round over the front passenger seat…Who was driving? He remembered her showing him her name, tattooed on the inside of her right forearm: ‘MHOUSE LY-ON’. What kind of name was that? ‘Mhouse’ pronounced ‘Mouse’, clearly. And then he had helped her over the fence of the triangle — a skinny little thing, with a pretty, snub-nosed, thin-eyed face. Yes…And then she had attacked him.

Why had she attacked him with such sudden violence? She had punched him and then kneed him in the balls — he winced at the pain-memory — then she laid about him with the entrenching tool. Why, for Christ’s sake? Christ — John Christ, of course, the unlikely answer came to him. Go to the Church of John Christ in Southwark, she had said, his fiendish Samaritan, they’ll help you.