ever, as they gazed into each other’s eyes and held hands across the table. It was as if they belonged in the place, and the people who ran it – from Jalalabad – welcomed them with an enthusiasm that lifted the soul. All the time he had sat there he had waited for her to push the door wide and come in, panting, then hang on his neck to whisper apologies and murmur some excuse. She’d have kissed his lips and he’d have kissed hers and… He had studied the menu as a break from watching the door – not that he needed to because he knew it by heart. He hadn’t ordered food for one, hadn’t even ordered a drink. He hadn’t believed she wouldn’t come.
To the left of the photograph was the door to his room, a flimsy dressing-gown – Mac’s – hanging on it. She would have complained loudly, in a jumble of Italian and English, if she had seen the smears on the coverlet, because it was his and her bed when she slipped into his little home. Only one room, only one window overlooking an overgrown back garden, then another row of houses, chimneys and greyness. The rain had fallen more heavily as the evening had gone by and now it was spattering the window panes. They had made love on that bed, sometimes fast, sometimes noisy, sometimes slow and quiet. They had first been on it after their second meeting… not long then, maybe twenty minutes, until she’d said she had ‘to get back’, and had wandered over his threadbare carpet, retrieving the scattered, sodden clothes, and had refused to let him walk her to her front door. It had been the happiest two months in the life of Eddie Deacon… He lay on his bed and hated the world.
He’d left the restaurant after three hours because his was the only table with a spare place and two couples were waiting. The owners had seemed to sympathise, but had made clear that his love life was his concern and their priority was to seat one of the waiting couples. He had shambled out, and for a while he hadn’t noticed that the rain was persistent, driving. The misery had eaten into him. Nobody who knew him, who saw him with Mac, could believe that Eddie Deacon had landed a girl like her. Dear old Eddie, ‘steady Eddie’, one of thousands who drifted along and didn’t stand out, who was better than bloody ordinary but who didn’t bother to be exceptional, had a girl on his arm who was dramatic, impressive, head-turning… and a bloody good shag. He had shuffled home and the rain had dribbled down his face, and he’d been within a hair’s breadth of being knocked over crossing a road because hadn’t seen the van coming. He hadn’t known such love or such unhappiness.
On that bed, her still astride him and him still inside her, his sweat running with hers, her hair in his face, his lips brushing the cherrystone nipples, two evenings ago, they had fixed the rendezvous time and place. Always, in the two months since the park-bench meeting beside the Serpentine, she had been on time for their meetings. There were magazines on the floor, dropped haphazardly or chucked, Espresso and Oggi, fashion magazines and home-refurbishment magazines, a pile of her textbooks, dictionaries and notepads. He liked it best when she wore the dressing-gown, nothing else, and sat cross-legged on the bed, close to him, and they worked on her English – he liked every damn thing about her. It was the first and only time she had failed to turn up.
He didn’t have an address for her, only a sight of a street corner, no mobile number. It hadn’t mattered before because she was always where she said she would be… He thought a disaster must have struck her, couldn’t think of anything else. It hurt Eddie so much that Mac wasn’t there… and he realised how little he knew of her, how much had been kept from him. Questions deflected. Subjects changed. He could have bloody well wept. She was smiling at him from the photograph, the dressing-gown hanging loose on the hook… Damned if he’d lose her.
He stood by the hut. The sun teetered at the top of the treeline, and was in his eyes. It was hard for him to see. Behind the open door of the hut, at his back, he heard crackling radio connections. He had a little Spanish, picked up on three visits here, so if he had strained and concentrated he would have had definitive answers to the two outstanding questions: how many were kicking and how many were not? He stared out over the trees and thought he heard the first sounds of a Huey’s engine and the gentle chop of the rotors. When the bird landed and they spilled out he would know for sure how many were kicking and how many were not. He would know, also, whether the advice he had given to the captain was sound or horseshit. He lit another cigarette – he’d worked through the best part of a carton since the team had been lifted on to the plateau and set down in the clearing close to the hut.
His name was called. ‘They are coming, Lukas. Two minutes, and they will be down.’
He raised a hand in acknowledgement and ash fell from his cigarette on to his boot.
In the middle of the plateau, a soldier in combat gear took something from his webbing belt, arced an arm back, then tossed whatever it was. When it landed bright orange smoke burst from it, climbed and was shifted by the light wind, masking the sun. The noise of the helicopter was louder. He heard, behind him, the exodus from the hut and the communications. The captain reached him, took the cigarette from between his fingers, dragged hard on it twice, then replaced it. The captain was Pablo – probably a good man, probably an honest one. He couldn’t have said how many of the others, those who had gone into the jungle or manned the communications nets, were good and honest. Too often a call was made, satphone, mobile or landline, or a message sent, and the storm squad found only a ‘dry house’, which had been used to hold some wretch but from which he had been shifted out. Pablo had gone past him and was yelling orders. Soldiers came off their asses and carried folded stretchers towards the orange smoke. He told himself it meant nothing. It was standard operating procedure.
The Huey came in low, doing a contour run over the canopy.
Pablo stopped, turned, shouted: ‘Are you coming forward, Lukas, or staying back?’
He indicated, two hands up, that he was standing his ground. He dropped the cigarette, ground it out under his boot and lit another. He was not in an army so didn’t wear a uniform. He had on a heavy wool blue shirt that was buttoned at the cuffs and kept him warm enough against the chill at this time of year and at this height above sea level. His trousers were heavy-duty corduroy, dun-coloured. His boots were not military but of the brown leather used by hikers, and hitched to one shoulder was a rucksack that held his spare socks, underclothes, washbag and the notepad laptop.
The Huey made the approach. Usual for it to do a circle of a touch-down point, give the flier a chance to check the ground, but it came straight in.
If the bird came straight in, and was dropping the last few feet over the dispersed orange smoke, it didn’t mean his advice had been wrong. He gave the advice as best he could and sometimes the corks popped and sometimes the bottles stayed in their boxes. His advice, offered to the captain, given what he knew, given the location where the poor bastards were held and the near impossibility of maintaining secrecy, had been to make the strike. The Huey landed heavily on the skids, bounced and settled.
The light hit the bird’s camouflage-painted bodywork and he had a good view inside the door, which was slid back. The hatch machine-gunner jumped down and went up to his thighs in the long grass, which made more room for the soldiers with the stretchers to pass them inside. Three were handed up. If, at that moment, it was a disappointment to him that three were needed, he didn’t show it. His feelings of disappointment or elation, his thoughts, were not for sharing. They wouldn’t be FARC guys, wounded enemy, on the stretchers: they’d have been tipped out. Two of the stretchers were lifted down, the orderlies holding drips high above them, the bearers hurrying as best they could. A doctor in a pristine uniform was between the stretchers and examining the occupants on the move. The wounded would be stabilised, then casevaced: it was the way things were done.
He saw the third stretcher lifted down, no drip. The body-bag rolled on the canvas as it was lowered.
The doctor came past him. ‘They were spotted when they were almost on target, but it gave away the critical last thirty seconds. It’s what it depends on – success, failure. I think, Lukas, it’s neither… I hope to save them.’
He didn’t look into the faces of the two men, just glanced and saw the long, wispy beards and hair, the blood of bullet wounds on filthy clothing, and the grimaces because they were in shock and the morphine had not yet taken effect. Three men now emerged from the Huey and they were helped down, then led away bent low from the spinning rotors. They looked weak and near to collapse. He did the equation. Intelligence had reported six hostages – a French tourist who was an irresponsible idiot, a Canadian water-purification-plant engineer whose light aircraft had come down three years earlier, a judge who had been kidnapped eighteen months back, two local politicians who had been snatched four and a half years ago, and a missionary who was said to have Peruvian papers. One dead, two wounded, three unharmed was a good return.
Two soldiers were walking wounded. Five bodies were dumped from the hatch; they’d be FARC guys. A Chinook was coming in now. Would have been called up when the ‘Contact’ report had come in over the communications. A monster with a double rotor system and a full medical team. It was a good return – he’d seen the missionary walking towards him, and had seen him also, politely, shake off a hand that tried to support him. It was all because of the missionary. It was not for the tourist or the engineer or the judge or the local-government people; they could have been forgotten and left to rot. If it had been Special Forces, Americans, on the ground, the
