35

Herbert Reston was born at the back-end of the 1960s, making him old enough to feel that, somewhere along the line, science had promised him a jetpack.

His would be silver and would look like dual scuba tanks. It would have a bright-red button on the grip, and it would be on his back with thick leather straps right now, allowing even a big man like himself to lift off from Märta’s upstairs balcony and scare the crows from the sky as he jetted toward Louise’s subdelegation office. He would use the red tail-lights on the highway below to direct his flight path.

But he isn’t in the air like an Avenger. Instead, he’s stuck in traffic. And if that isn’t bad enough, he’s had to listen to Clip Maxwell apologise. Because his blogger is out of contact, and they fear the worst.

‘So you have nothing useful to tell me,’ Herb says, calculating the time to the office with traffic, and hating the results.

‘The Iraqi air force,’ Clip says, ‘is going to start a ground assault on ISIL positions and weapons depots at nine o’clock tonight. That is in … about fifteen minutes.’

‘You know this how?’ Herb asks.

‘We paid for it from someone inside the ministry. There’s no way to get them back here tonight, assuming they can even come. I’m sorry.’

‘We need a helicopter,’ Herb says.

‘The area’s too hot, Herb. No one would be crazy enough to even think about taking off. No one can get to the mountain in this sort of maelstrom. I know six private security companies in Iraq, all with lift, and they’re all grounding their people during this. Everyone’s grounded until the assault is over. It would be madness to fly in Ninawa today. Everyone is sitting this one out.’

‘Not everyone,’ Herb says, and hangs up.

He honks the horn.

Horns honk back.

When his phone rings again, he answers it, hoping it is Märta or Tigger. But it is, instead, Farrah, Louise’s assistant.

‘Mr Herbert, I have Louise here for you. You were trying to reach her?’

‘How are you hanging in there, Farrah?’

For the first time since he’s known her, he hears a faint tremble in her throat as she speaks.

‘It is very hard for us, Mr Herbert. Our families—’ She does not finish whatever she was planning to say.

‘It’s not over, Farrah. There’s hope yet.’

‘I don’t know, Mr Herbert. We thought that maybe Iraq could be a democracy. The national staff here … with the NGOs. What’s wrong with us? Why can we not find peace among ourselves? Why do we always fail?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with you, Farrah.’

‘Maybe we are being punished.’

‘You’re not.’

‘We are so very tired, Mr Herbert. It feels like the world is caving in around us, and no one will dig us out or know we were ever here.’

‘Farrah, let me just say this. Iraq has been here since the dawn of history. And things are bad. And you’re right, they’re gonna be bad for a long time. But someday people will need to look back and know there have always been people like you trying to fight the good fight and in the right way. I learned that from my civil rights movement. Yours is the real jihad, Farrah. So keep struggling, keep your faith, and, if you can, keep your sense of humor.’

Herb cannot know what Farrah is thinking or doing in the silence that follows. She is too composed. He does not, however, interrupt her. When she does speak, she says, ‘It was nice talking with you, Mr Herbert. I’ll pass you over to Louise now.’

He hears a click, followed by Louise’s voice.

‘What’s happening?’ she asks directly.

‘I don’t know,’ Herb says. ‘It’s eight-forty in the morning. I should be getting a call, and no one’s calling. No messages — nothing. I can’t reach Tigger. I can’t reach Märta.’

‘Tigger probably has his hands full,’ Louise says, ‘and it’s likely that Märta is still on the phone. Do you have any reason to think something might have gone wrong?’

The traffic moves. Unconcerned with obeying protocol any longer, he angles his 4×4 onto the shoulder of the road, forcing half his vehicle into the desert itself. It is bumpy at fifty kilometres an hour. Still, it is faster than before.

‘I don’t know anything,’ Herb says, not mentioning the missing blogger. ‘Either way, we need to prep the helicopter, and we should prepare to pick them up.’

‘We’ve heard rumours of a possible offensive today,’ Louise says. ‘If it’s true, there will be mass casualties. I need that helicopter for non-combatants.’

She knows this will irritate Herb, but there are reasons that the ICRC is here. She wants to be helpful, but the rules were explained to Märta in clear terms, and Louise will not rush in where there is no agreement between the parties. ‘We’re not a hostage-rescue outfit, Herb. I will make AirOps available to you, but only once you’ve secured an agreement and we can contact the different parties. And I hate to ask the obvious, but if they drove there, why not drive back?’

‘There’s no time,’ he says.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not a rumour. The military is going to start striking targets in twenty minutes. And seeing as ISIL is entrenching in Kurdistan to solidify their positions in Syria, I strongly suspect that they are going to hide in highly populated civilian areas to neutralise government air superiority. And there is no route back that doesn’t pass through a city. Which means Tal Afar, at the very least. That town is cursed.’

‘What if they sheltered in place?’

‘In a terrorist holding cell, among devil worshippers?’

‘It’s not ideal, I admit,’ Louise says, ‘but it might be better than being on the open road. And I don’t think they’re devil worshippers. I think people keep calling them that because it’s fun to say—’

‘Louise,’ he interrupts, ‘I understand you have your policies and your laws and your rules, and I like policies and laws and rules, but please be prepared to get off the ground the second that confirmation comes through. Promise me that?’

‘If they left at five in the morning for a run that takes eight hours, and you knew there’d be an assault, it sounds like you deliberately put me in an impossible situation, Herb.’

‘We didn’t know about the offensive until after we’d made contact. It’s all unfolding, Louise. All I can do is try and get my people out safely. That is my job.’

‘I’ll have it fuelled,’ says Louise unenthusiastically, ‘and I’ll make sure Spaz is ready. I’ll even bend the rules and let you fly along, but only because we have a signed memorandum of understanding with the IRSG, not because it’s a special favour. You give me confirmation, and you can go get them. But do not put the International Committee of the Red Cross in a political pinch, Herb. I don’t want us kicked out of Iraq.’

‘I don’t know what kind of condition they’ll all be in.’

‘The helicopter has a team. I have a woman who’s a top-notch emergency medic from Colombia. Go make the deal, Herb. Until then, there’s nothing we can do.’

Benton can hear his captors talking outside the door, but he does not understand what they are saying. They are arguing. The argument sounds heated, but it is hard to tell with Arabs. He has found it too easy to misunderstand them in the past. He was in a minor car accident in Cairo off Tahrir Square in a taxi once. They pulled over, and he thought the other driver was going to murder his own. ‘No, no,’ explained the taxi driver after their altercation ended and both had pulled away. ‘He was being honest with me. He was sharing his emotions. It was OK. It was respectful. You cannot trust people who do not share their emotions.’

More voices are added to the drama beyond the door. All the voices are male. Some mumble; others shout.

On his back, gripping his wound, he gazes at the yellow sea of light spread over the ceiling through the slats on the wall. It is the same mustard-yellow light that comes through his bedroom in Fowey through the window that faces south toward the English Channel and northern France.

The door opens. It is Abu Moe, who sat behind him in the Land Cruiser on the way here. For no helpful reason, he delivers a half-hearted kick to Benton’s foot, and the pain from the gunshot is renewed.

‘We go,’ says the man, with the diction of a Neanderthal.Knowing what is next, Benton is not quite ready to go.

‘My grandfather,’ Benton says for no good reason, ‘died at the battle of the Canal du Nord, 28 September 1918, springing out of a trench to charge a machine gun. Part of the Hundred Days’ Offensive, they called it. Thirty thousand dead in that battle. You bastards think the West doesn’t have the resolve to outlast you? Only one utterly ignorant of history could think that. You know nothing about us. You think we’re soft? If anything, we’re too hard,’ he says, his face barely off the mattress, his hands locked around his wound, trying to keep the bleeding under control. ‘And the reason you’re ignorant is that you don’t translate books. You starve your own minds. That’s why you’re eating yourselves alive.’

Thomas Benton is pulled up and pushed out of the same door that Adar, Jamal, and Arwood were all led through earlier. Beyond that door is a second and smaller room, and then he is led outside into a wide-open courtyard of some kind. The sunlight is a poison, and his chest constricts. He is drowning in the light. Even the dry air gives no quarter. Like thousands before him, to be sure, Benton knows he is being brought to his execution.

It feels medieval here, but the structure must be more recent than that. They’re too far east, and the architecture is wrong. Byzantine? Ottoman maybe? Not British, anyway. Not recent enough for that.

Benton raises his eyes and looks at the fortress: one empire washing over another, taking over what it’s abandoned, repeating its errors, learning nothing.

Fort Sinister.

He is pushed onto the ground, and blood flows again from his nose: proof there’s even more to lose.

Instinctively, he curls into a foetal position, like an animal waiting for recovery or death. Neither comes quickly, though, and he is instead pulled to his feet by another man and punched in the kidney.

Benton vomits. He is sixty-three years old. He is overweight. He is without strength or will or water.

There is the door — the one that leads inside the approaching tower. It will be a dark place. He will be placed on a chair. A machete will be placed against the back of his neck. His captors will spout politico-religious garbage, and then they will hack his head off. He will not die on the first stroke. He knows. He has seen it before.

That soldier as beautiful as a Greek statue — was he a sniper who had shot pregnant women? Or was he only a twenty-two-year-old boy of the most gentle disposition, scared and sad and lonely? He, too, was blindfolded. He, too, had only been in a world of sound and feeling.

They hacked him to death. He screamed while he could. He died in terrible pain, to the sounds of others’ joy. It was the worst kind of death. Benton watched it all. There was no stopping it.

He wrote a report. It was edited down. It wasn’t really new anymore, his editor said, so it wasn’t really news, was it?

The surge of fear reawakens him. ‘No!’ he yells, and tries to resist. He tries to pull back and not go through the door. This isn’t what it was like in the car with the hood on his head. They weren’t going to shoot him in the car, but they will kill him here. And his companions have been shot. He is the last one left alive, and it makes sense. A journalist for a Western newspaper, a British newspaper, he has the highest status of the four of them. They will kill him slowest. He — not any of the others — is a political trophy. It is his head that will be hacked from his body and placed on a stick.

If he is lucky, they will shoot him right now. In the chest. He’ll know he’s been shot; the bullet will enter through the front of his chest, and his eyes will see the flash. Maybe his body will register the pain, so there will be time to acknowledge the end.

That is the best death he can hope for now, the one he wants. There is nothing else to want.

‘I’m not going in there! Outside. Right here! I want to die here!’

But in he goes. There is no resisting it — in through the outer door into a room much like the antechamber he left moments ago, and toward another steel door. This one is opened by two Stooges with rifles, who take him from the first guards and chuck him inside the room where they’ll kill him soon.

Benton’s fails to notice the step leading down, and, missing it, falls forward. He thrusts out his hands to cushion the fall, but he is weak, and his arms fail him.

On his chest, cloaked in the last light he’ll know, he stares into the dirt.

That is when he feels hands touching him. He is powerless against them. There is no protest left to lodge.

The sounds that come from above, however, are not guttural and foreign. They are familiar and soft.

He has heard those sounds before.

‘Thomas Reginald Benton,’ a voice says. ‘Open your eyes.’

Benton turns his head and rests his cheek in the dust. The face of Arwood Hobbes is smiling warmly at him. It is the smile Arwood gave to the boy in the minefield. It is the smile he gave to Adar in the truck. It is the smile he gave to the girl in the green dress who died in his arms. And it is only now that Benton understands why they responded to Arwood as they did, because that is precisely how he feels now.

‘Arwood.’

‘Hey, buddy,’ he says. ‘You look like you could use some good news.’

Benton turns his eyes in the direction that Arwood’s pointing. There are two figures there — both Arab. One of them is still very much a child; the other, a young man with an injured leg.

‘They’re alive, too?’

‘Like I said, we’re the luckiest.’