Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Kershaw was growling at him down the white phone, the local one which he used for any outgoing calls. He said something about being in someone else’s shoes and the Sergeant realised he needed to go and burn his boots, and the rest of his Tigerman outfit, before Arno tripped over them. That was next on his list. He had been helpful and available for what felt like sixty hours, and now he had to look out for his own position. He would put it all in a dustbin and set the whole lot on fire, then throw the armour plates into the sea. Why had he put the stele on the disposable part of the uniform? Never going to wear it again, of course, never really expected to get shot, and that was just the backplate, the front one would still do, though that didn’t matter because he would never need it. He was going round in circles. Sleep would be good. A necessity, actually.

He wondered where the boy was. He would call him next, this all made that acceptable. Call him and ask him to come and help. He needed company.

‘—fucking journalists now, too,’ Kershaw said, and then there was a soft, piercing purr. The Sergeant looked around, and then realised what it was and that he had been waiting for it.

‘I’m going to have to call you back, Jed,’ he said gently.

‘Like fuck you are, Lester!’

‘It’s the red phone.’ And with a certain satisfaction — my government trumps your government — he hung up.

‘This is the phone which must not ring,’ the Consul had told him. ‘It’s the phone you keep an eye on in the joyful expectation that you will never actually see it do anything. If it does, by the way, if it actually rings, my general advice would be to seek cover under something and refuse to come out until it’s over. I’m not joking. I see that you think I am, but I’m not. You being a military man and so on I realise that you won’t listen to anything so craven, but in the interest of our shared humanity, conniving old sod to real man: don’t answer the bloody phone. By the time it rings, the situation is fucked up beyond all retrieval, anyway.’

‘Has it ever rung?’

‘I was in Iraq for a while. The one there never bloody stopped. People forever picking it up. IED in Fallujah, phone rings. British contractor taken by insurgents in Basra, phone rings. Please advise. Well, what do you say? Should have had a better bloody plan in the first place. Should have done what we said we were doing in Afghanistan and left Iraq alone. Should have given our troops the right gear and sent half a million more of them. Should have admitted we were doing Empire at the behest of the Family Bush and built an Iron Frame the way we did for India. A proper infrastructure. A decade or so of that and people actually do think you might be all right. In the end. Conduct oneself with a bit of dignity and don’t let the local staff get murdered. Avoid the sexual torture of prisoners, that’s always a good one. Make good on promises regarding amnesties and suchlike. It’s slow. It’s not bloody nation-building, it’s generation-building, and it takes decades, not months. But they don’t want to hear that, they want a magic solution involving the having and eating of cakes, and any talk of a zero-sum game is heresy. So as I say: let the sodding thing wail like a banshee, have a snifter, and await results. But if you must, the answer protocol is that you give your name and shove your thumb on the plate there. Biometric, they say, and unbeatable. My wife read in the Telegraph that you can defeat the system with a bag of jelly sweets. However, be that as it may.’

‘Lester Ferris,’ the Sergeant said now, thumb pressing down unnecessarily hard, and a nasal woman told him to hold, then connected him to a conference call between people with KCBs. They were not politicians. They were serious people who did serious work.

The conversation was staccato and fragmentary because of the lag between continents, which was multiplied by the number of participants. Everyone was British and most were male, although from time to time a softly spoken schoolmistress broke in and made very intelligent, salient remarks which pushed the discussion along wiser, more cogent lines. Finally she addressed him directly.

‘Lester Ferris?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Hello, Lester. I take it you’re having a pretty tense day over there.’

He could see a helicopter through the window, circling like a nervous buzzard. The Black Fleet had blown up a landside installation, linking itself with an industrial quantity of opium. Kershaw had mentioned journalists. Crap. He hadn’t thought of that. They would have set out from bases in Bangkok and Sana’a the moment the footage went public. Some of them before. They’d be here now, and in numbers. More strangers, more eyes to avoid, more questions to trip over. Meanwhile he was talking to half of Whitehall — half of Whitehall was waiting for him to reply.

And the whole thing was about him, in a funny hat.

‘Yes, ma’am. We tend to like it calmer in Brighton House.’

‘“We”?’

‘I was instructed that the house is always plural, ma’am. Even when there’s just me.’

She laughed. ‘I’m sure you were. I’m Africa,’ she added, and he wondered for one vertiginous moment whether that was actually her name. No: she was responsible for Africa. Africa was her job, her title, and her domain. Short for Middle East and North Africa (and associated territories). Insofar as anyone in Britain was responsible for Mancreu, she was, which probably meant she’d lost a card game with Asia. He waited. She hadn’t spoken to him just to pass the time of day.

‘The question is, Lester, whether we should send someone. A lot of someones. Or let the Americans and the rest of NatProMan deal with it their way.’

Well, actually, the British contingent would clear it up pretty quickly. Lots of missing items from the armoury and the Sergeant himself injured in rather obviously relevant ways, and so on. If it got out, there’d be an almighty stink. Her problem. He waited a bit longer, then answered.

‘I’d say no, ma’am.’

‘Think you can handle it?’

‘No, ma’am. Absolutely not.’

That seemed to please her. ‘Then what is your thinking?’

He took a breath to acknowledge that he didn’t know and found himself saying forcefully, ‘I think it’s a bloody mess. But at this point it’s not a British mess. We’re bystanders. The people still quite like us and we’re helping them set up elsewhere so we’re not the villains. If NatProMan can’t take care of itself, that’s a problem for the organisation. Mancreu very specifically isn’t British soil any more, which is why it’s just me in the first place. The whole island is supposed to explode soon, anyway. But if you were to send, say, an investigation team and a lot of diplomats and so on, then that would sort of acknowledge that we care what happens here and feel responsible. And since the world press is, I gather, coming here in rather a big way and a lot of things which aren’t supposed to happen at all happen here on a daily basis, I’d suggest it’s better you be able to say “Well, we only had one chap there, and he’s a bit washed up, Afghan veteran, good man gone a bit lardy and unreliable, but gosh, it’s all everyone else’s fault.” Ma’am. You might even want a ringing denunciation up your sleeve, just in case.’

She snorted. ‘Well done, Lester.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

‘My instinct is to stay away. So in your on-the-spot opinion, if I let this ride, will I hate the outcome more than I would hate the outcome of my getting my hands dirty?’

‘In my on-the-spot opinion, I wish I wasn’t involved,’ he told her, with perfect truthfulness.

‘Then you are officially ordered not to be, and I am officially declaring this someone else’s problem. Stay out of trouble and don’t talk to the press except to say that you can’t talk to them. If they talk to you, nod and smile and say you can’t say anything and then — and this is very important — don’t. Not even to be polite. I’ll send you a form of words. If you have to, get it out and read it to them. They’ll know what that means.’