The Gone-Away World (30 page)

There is a whistle, and then a crack. And then another. A noise like a ricochet goes over my head, and there's a wallop of sound like a truck going by and we're all on the ground. The earth shakes. A hundred metres away, by the makeshift oven, a man dies (he's our pizza chef, named Jimmy Balene, although as of now no one is going to eat those pizzas because it is impossible to tell where the tomato paste ends and Jimmy's brain begins). Mud starts to fly everywhere. The attack is here, and there are people dying, but there's no enemy, just darkness, confusion and people getting dead. It's as if this were weather. Thursday's forecast: light cloud, drizzle until three, then showers of subsonic lead and howitzer shells, fog of war, lightening up later when a high-pressure zone pushes down from Green Sector, bringing mustard gas and mortars. Some hand-to-hand in isolated areas. Friday: fine, with incendiaries. This is impossible, and we cannot fight it. We can only run.

I find I have a duty. Soldiers like these do not run. It has been trained out of them. In any case, cut off from reinforcements, they have no clear idea of where to run to. They will hold in the face of this, and they will die. Unless someone tells them not to. Gonzo is de facto running this place, and that is fine. Gonzo, by acclamation, can build ovens and dig latrines. But he cannot order the retreat. Only one man can do that. Concurrent with this realisation, I begin moving towards the shabby little tent inside the compound where George Copsen sits in his mild homicidal catatonia, waiting for someone to try to relieve him, waiting for his masters to tell him to evacuate Addeh Katir, or maybe just for God to come by and tell him it's okay. In normal circumstances it's a brisk walk from where we are to General Copsen's chair. Under fire—even idiotic, unaimed fire—it is a very long way. There is a lead rain falling, horizontal and impersonal—forty-five-calibre precipitation. All around there are screaming soldiers with impossible injuries who seem unable to expire.

Lieutenant Ben Carsville, over by the showers, has mounted a stack of spare parts and is shaking his fist, and for no good reason he is still alive. And then I realise: this makes sense to Carsville. It's where he has always lived. This is like sunshine to the part of him which is batshit insane. The injured are scattered at semi-regular intervals around the place so that the howling they set up is audible wherever you go. And still there is no enemy, just this crazed, inimical storm. Something whines past my head, and I swat at it, realising a moment later that it was a ricochet. I fall on my stomach and crawl in the approved fashion (no knees on the ground, move using forearms and feet) to cover, although cover is impossible because the assault seems to come from everywhere. I am making good progress. In maybe an hour, at this rate, I will get where I am going. New plan. (People are shouting. Somewhere a scream reaches the precise pitch which makes your gut churn and all the hairs on your neck come up. Someone else is yelling “enemy” and maybe something else, but I cannot make it out. I'm not even sure it's a man.)

As I crawl, the whole thing breaks down into little cameos: flashes of clarity and survival and death. I scramble half-upright and break into a low, fearful trot, searching for friends, even for familiar enemies, anyone I have ever met apart from the Magnificent Carsville, who brushes past me and is now charging into the fog with a kitchen knife strapped to the end of an assault rifle as a bayonet. He seems oblivious to the fact that it will come off the first time he uses it, slip down the barrel without doing the target much harm and the tape will impede the action of his gun and cause it to explode in his stupid, handsome face. Of course he's oblivious to these things. They do not happen to screen idols. Carsville vanishes, and almost immediately there is a vast detonation in the fog—but it is not him, alas, for he weaves out again, cheering himself on, yawping about medals and glory and at last a real fight.

I have never seen anything less real in my life. I stub my foot on something, and it turns out to be a dead man I have never met. He looks like a prop: corpse number 8, gutshot, eyes open, almost peaceful. Also available: 9, eyes closed, limbs crusader-style; 10, head wound, bandaged. In his hand is the key to a jeep. I grab it, and his muscles are slack because he has only just died, perhaps when I trod on him. The jeep will make me a target, but it will also make me faster. Where is it? He had the keys in his hand, so he was close. Must have been. I look around. There. It was parked next to a tent, and the tent got shot up and is now actually draped over the top of the jeep, concealing it. (Napoléon used to ask his soldiers: “Are you lucky?” Yes,
mon Empereur,
I am, and let me remain so.) I take the jeep, and put my foot all the way down. It lurches, seems about to stall, then fires up and we roar away. I suppress the urge to pat it on the flank like a loyal horse.
Swoosh.
I career through fires and over corpses (I hope they are corpses). Twice I have to swerve to avoid a stream of sourceless gunfire. Then I arrive.

George Copsen sits where he always sits. He wears the same plastic smile. In his hands is his service sidearm. Very little has changed about him, except that he is dead. He has ended his own life quite neatly, efficiently and somehow gently, as if apologising for making a mess. There is actually not very much mess, all things considered. He is still warm, but sort of like coffee from an hour ago, rather than in any way which might suggest that he lingers. He smells of pepper. I look at him and back across the compound. Carsville has rounded up a small squad of men so scared they will actually believe he has a clue what he is doing, and they are charging at shadows, and occasionally one of them spins and loses half or two thirds of his face, and the others roar with rage and charge after the shooter. Perhaps because he is making their lives so much easier, the enemy snipers do not hit Carsville. If there are any; it feels more as if the bullets are ambient, drifting on the wind like pollen.

I look at the recently vacated shell of George Copsen. I know what he should be saying. I close my eyes the better to hear him say it. I wait, for a count of three. The general looks grave. He stands, just so, and clasps the back of his chair. Time to bug out, he tells me. We don't know what's happening and we can't defend against it. How bad are we hit so far? Maybe 40 per cent, sir. And getting worse. The general growls. We'll be lucky to get out of this with twenty, he says. Get your friend. Pass the word. Run. Scatter. Live off the land, go native, get across the border. Survive. Do not die, soldier, and that's an order. None of you. No more. Understand?

“Yes, sir!” I say loudly, Carsville-style. “I understand, sir! Immediately, sir!” And having delivered this order, the general staggers and stares at me, because he has been shot neatly in the head. He says no more, but sinks back into his chair and dies a hero. I take his gun, and I get back in the jeep and drive like hell.

The thing we were not trained for, the thing which no one back home ever gave any serious thought to, is losing. It was never expected we might be overrun. There is a drill for it, which we never rehearsed, and the drill is shit. It requires functioning infrastructure, alert and well-commanded troops. The drill is a drill made up by someone who expected to win, everywhere. I ignore the drill. Instead, I tell every soldier I meet that George Copsen has ordered the bug out. He has not invoked the plan. The plan is over. He says to flee, and do it now. Most of them just look at me blankly. It is assumed there will be artillery cover and planes. These things belong to the enemy now, although I still do not know who that is. I stop the jeep at the comms tent and record a message: “All units evacuate.” It is the best I can do. I tell them to break singly or in groups, make for high ground and cover, radio one another if they find a safe place. I order them to live. I put the message on repeat, and listen as it booms out of the speakers around the base. Then I go back outside, to look for Gonzo and to find Leah.

Pale, fake-looking smoke curls around the tents in wisps, muffles the shouts and obscures the way. I skid the jeep between two empty sheds, thinking I ought to recognise them but I do not, and roar abruptly into a different kind of war. From one side of the road to the other, new landscape of destruction. Mortar shells are falling here, or maybe grenades. The shells whistle in like doodlebugs in old movies, hit the ground and wait a split second before going off. This is war with a sense of its own drama. It is phoney. (Shrapnel gouges a hole in the side of the jeep.) It is bloody dangerous. I duck down low over the dash and discover a compass in the footwell. Compasses are not standard issue, so thank God for the dead man and his grandmother, who sent him her husband's old compass from whatever war he was in. Thank you, Goody Hullabaloo, I'm sorry I trod on your boy, sorry he got shot and I did not. I career around a huge crater, then pile on the speed and ram the jeep through a barricade and into the eastern quarter of the camp. The mortars stop, as if turned off at the switch.

I drive on. There is a wrongness in the calm. I get the giggles, my own laughter very loud in my ears. I wonder if I have gone deaf from the mortars, if the only sound I can physically still hear is my own voice. I rev the engine, listen to the roar. It's very loud. And then, at last, there are enemies. If I had needed confirmation that this is not just any war, I have it now. The enemy are not men. They are shadows. They are a vision of the Other Side, made real.

The shadows are everywhere. They emerge from smoke, blend into one another, fade and reappear. I see eyes, hear breathing. I hear harsh words in an enemy language (it is no language I can recognise, perhaps not a real language at all, just the sound made by
foes
), and the clack of bolts being drawn back and weapons cocked, and then a hail of bullets tears the jeep apart and I am hiding behind it and holding my utterly ineffectual pistol and expecting, finally (very finally), to get shot.

I do not get shot. The jeep gets shot, again and again. Ronnie Cheung would shake his head and declare it
totally and irredeemably buggered in the back passage, boy, and do not tell me that there is no other place in which something can be buggered, because I am an old and evil man and if I say that there are further and more filthy ways to bugger something then you believe it and pray I do not explain myself, is that clear?
and I hear them approach.

They are careful. They are unhurried. In a moment they will find me. They move hopscotch style, one passing the other, each spending a beat covering, then skittering forward. I know this because I hear their feet on the earth:
clickclack
and then
clickerclackershuffle,
which is the noise they make crossing over behind one another. It is possible that I will be spared if I am unarmed, but my hand will not let go of the gun, because it is also possible that I will be slaughtered if I am unarmed. The jeep creaks as one of them climbs onto it, and his knife whispers from his side. So this will be how it happens. I see a shadow against the sky, and the shadow looks down. I am uncovered. It comes for me.

Jim Hepsobah, from nowhere, opens up with a fifty-cal. How he got here, how they found me, is a mystery, except that this is a main road and they must travel down it to get out, just as I must, but what brought them here and now is a thing I will contemplate for evermore. He is standing on the weapons platform of the RV in which Leah and I rode to our date. Beside Jim's RV, Baptiste Vasille is in a small tank, and he and the bony bloke from my stretcher days are squabbling over whether it is better or worse than a French TV-9, although this does not stop them from filling the air with genuinely friendly fire and clearing a passage to me. A few years ago this rescue would have been illegal. Using a fifty-calibre weapon against a human target was forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, which meant that if you wanted to kill a guy with a fifty-cal weapon (such as, for example, a Barrett sniper rifle, now standard for marine and commando sharpshooters) you had to shoot his car and make it explode, because that was a perfectly respectable method of execution, whereas just blowing his head off was a war crime. This charming example of old world chivalry was struck off the books when I was at Jarndice—its demise was indeed one of the things I protested against, and about which George Lourdes Copsen (deceased) questioned me in detail as I sat in an electric chair. Now I am delighted to feel the air throb with uncivilised fifty-cals, because without them I would be dead.

Shadowmen wilt and dive for cover. Annie the Ox is driving Jim's RV, and Gonzo has the second. Leah is riding shotgun with an actual shotgun clasped tightly in her hands. She picks off a couple of bad guys on the outside and snarls at them, and I swear for a moment that she has angel's wings. My lover. My furious, lethal woman. One of us should be dangerous. I am so proud it's her.

Egon Schlender leaps out and hauls me up and I realise at this time that I have been wounded, and I look down at my leg. For a moment I am weirdly hopeful, but once again I have not been shot. There is a slender spike sticking out of me, and by the feel of the nasty, audible grating which proceeds from it and buzzes up to my hip and down to my knee, and fizzes against my teeth, the damned thing is lodged in the bone. This bastard object is standard issue to men of Gonzo's profession. It is made of a ceramic material which is not readily detected by X-ray, and four or five of them can be strapped around the upper leg of the average man of action and thrown at targets of opportunity. They fly straight and will pierce some armour, because the sharp tip penetrates Kevlar weave and the blade edge cuts through the individual threads rather than trying to penetrate a mass of them as a bullet does. Unscrupulous individuals minded towards civilian wetwork rather than combat have been known to poison the blood grooves, but since I am still alive it is a reasonable guess that this is not the case with the one currently occupying pride of place in my thigh.