The big four to which H referred are name, rank, serial number and date of birth. But since they seem to know this and more, I see no reason to speak. Even were I to confirm my identity, I don’t know how it would help him, since I haven’t been in the army for nine years and service law is inapplicable to me as a civilian.
‘Ah,’ he exclaims, as if my silence itself has given him the answer he requires. ‘
Nemo me impune lacessit
. Good show at Tumbledown, but I suppose that’s before your time.’
The colonel knows my regimental motto and its battle honours, which suggests a level of personal knowledge, or research, which makes me uncomfortable. One of the files is a familiar red colour, and I wonder if it’s my 108, record of service from my stint with the Green Team. I dread to think. He’s probably got eyewitness statements from the Thursday nights in Abbots and a menu from the Roast Seagull Chinese restaurant in Ashford.
He purses his lips pensively.
‘Are you going to co-operate, Taverner? We won’t need long if you are. I expect you’d like to get home, as would I. What’s your answer?’
His apparent sincerity is like a lifeline towards which I’m tempted to reach. I must assume it is all part of his plan, although what the overall purpose is I can’t yet guess. I’m almost disappointed at the ridiculousness of the charade – the semblance of a military interrogation, as if the trappings and manners of an authority to which I once bowed will intimidate me into compliance. I am wondering who has concocted this infantile scheme when the colonel speaks again.
‘In case you think you’re not in the army any more, you
are
.’ He looks directly at me, without expression, then down again. ‘I have here your additional duties commitment document, dated 17 March. That is your signature, isn’t it?’ He holds up a piece of paper that appears to confirm this. But I haven’t signed any such document and my mind is starting to turn in tighter circles now. The only document I put my signature to a month ago is the paperwork handed to me by Seethrough at Vauxhall Cross, which I took to be the Official Secrets Act. But now I begin to wonder if I’ve been deceived, which is, I remind myself, the prerogative of the service to which Seethrough so proudly belongs. I must escape from this anxiety or at least find a way to regulate it. It is time to give voice to my chosen mantra, as recommended by H.
‘I can’t answer that question. Sir.’ To speak brings relief.
‘Ah. So you
do
talk.’
And now I recall Seethrough’s joke at the moment I was about to look over the pages. More draconian than before, he’d said, or something like it. I’d thought it strange at the time: you only sign Section 5 of the OSA once, because it’s for life. Was his joke to distract me from looking too closely at the pages? Is it possible that I’ve been tricked into signing a document that makes me accountable under military law? Is it possible that everything that has preceded this moment has been a set-up? That the op in Afghanistan is no more than a ploy? Or have I been tricked into thinking that I’ve been tricked? Doubt is stalking me now. But perhaps that is the colonel’s job: to feed my doubt.
‘Always read the small print, isn’t that what they say?’ He says this almost to himself.
I tilt my head back to get a better look at him from under the swelling ridge of my eyebrow. Would he bother, I’m wondering now, with such a throwaway line if he didn’t mean it?
He drives home his attack. ‘In that case, I must caution you under Section 52 of the Armed Forces Act, “whereby a charge may be heard summarily if the accused is an officer below the rank of lieutenant colonel, and if the accused is subject to service law”. Which you
are
, Taverner. Offences that may be dealt with at a summary hearing include any offence under Section 13, Contravention to Standing Orders, Section 30, Allowing Unlawful Release of Prisoners, and Section 42, Criminal Conduct. I remind you also that a court martial has jurisdiction to try any service offence under Section 328, Giving False Answer During Enlistment in a Regular Force. And in case you want to drag things out in the hope that someone’s going to swoop from the heavens to rescue you, I remind you also that any review of custody may be postponed if the person in service custody is being questioned and the commanding officer is satisfied that an interruption of the question would prejudice the investigation. In your case, the first review of your custody here will be in ninety-six hours. Are you with me, Taverner? Ninety-six hours can be a long time.’
Now, for the first time, I am beginning to feel uncertain as to the true purpose of our encounter. It is paradoxical that this unextraordinary-looking man with his precise gestures and his even tones evokes more distress in me than any of the threats of violence from his more theatrical subordinates. But that is the interrogator’s art. I have seen a few of them. The best never have to lay a finger on their charges to bring about a state of total compliance, a fact of which I am now reminded.
The colonel looks down at the file again, as if disappointed. His lips are pursed and he’s nodding to himself. I wonder how much of the material is genuine, or whether the pages really belong to someone else’s file. I recognise the interrogator’s ‘file and dossier approach’, used to convince a prisoner that everything about him is known and recorded.
‘Allow me to take you back nine years to Kuwait.’ He has my attention, such as I can summon. ‘You were detailed with confinement of Cat 1 PW number,’ he looks down, ‘LBN428571, better known as Elias Rashid Gemayel, were you not? I know, you can’t answer the question. So let me answer it for you. You’re E2 ops officer with the Joint Forward Interrogation Team tasked with assessing said internee’s IP and drafting relevant TIRs. Coming back to you?’
‘I can’t answer that question.’
‘Can’t answer it,
sir
.’
I have forgotten the army’s obsession with acronyms and abbreviations. It’s another language. E2 is my function as an extra-regimentally employed officer with the JFIT, IP is the prisoner’s intelligence potential, and a tactical interrogation report is what an ops officer, on occasion, is tasked to write up after an interrogation has taken place.
‘Would you like to describe for me your relationship with Gemayel? You gave him a high co-operation level, low potential intelligence rating. Which is strange, don’t you think? Did you imagine all the effort that went into finding him was just for fun?’ He allows himself a pause, during which he takes a sip of coffee. ‘You liked him, didn’t you?
Your
words, not mine,’ he remonstrates, as if I’ve challenged him on the point.
There had been no reason to dislike him. He had been scooped up in Kuwait City by 14 Int after a tip-off. It was near the end of hostilities, and he’d been brought to the EPW facility for priority processing. We’d rained so much high explosive onto the length and breadth of Iraq that the war was about to end with spectacular speed, and technically Gemayel hadn’t been an enemy prisoner of war at all. He was later classed as a civilian internee and given private but secure quarters. Despite the circumstances, our sessions were friendly. Gemayel was a Lebanese Arab, whose mother had been Christian before her marriage. He was pushing fifty, an educated and cultured man with a sense of humour. He claimed to have been visiting relatives in the city when the war had started, and I had no reason to doubt his story. In the course of our interviews we’d talked about Lebanese food and wine, and the literary outputs of Gibran and Naimy. But a week after his arrival his interviews were taken over by a team from a newly formed unit I’d never even heard of. They wore civilian clothes and concealed sidearms, and their treatment of him grew too harsh for my liking. As E2 and translator I was obliged to be present, and after several days of seeing him manhandled and deprived of food I protested that under the definitions of the Geneva Convention his treatment was inhumane. I’d brought him cigarettes in his room and urged him to tell his interrogators what they needed to know. He’d always dismissed my suggestions with a mirthless laugh, claiming they would never give up. They will come for me, he said. I never understood what he’d meant. But this should all be ancient history, I’m thinking. This was all cleared up years ago.
‘Let’s go on, then,’ says the colonel. ‘On the morning of 9 February the facility is breached by persons unknown whose intention, you purport, is to kidnap Gemayel.’
Purport?
My left eye protests as the muscles try to open in surprise. ‘Persons unknown’ is a commando team with explosives and automatic weapons, the ammunition for which is later shown to be Israeli. They didn’t come for a tea party, I want to say. Unless they were planning to have one in a corridor of a prison facility filled with smoke from the plastic explosive they’d used to blow Gemayel’s door off its hinges while their screaming victim was being dragged out by his hair. Purport?
‘Let me ask: at the time when the facility was breached, what were your actions on in the event of a security failure? After the cessation of hostilities on 7 February were they not to issue a verbal challenge to any intruder? And
did
you issue a verbal challenge to the intruder?’
‘I can’t answer that question, sir.’ Because it’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.
‘You did not.’
Of course I fucking did not. When a man points an automatic weapon at you, you don’t engage him in conversation.
‘You shot and killed him instead. You fired eight rounds from your weapon into him.’ The colonel takes a sip of coffee. ‘There are some people – I’m not saying I’m one of them – who are still unhappy about that. There’s a family in Tel Aviv without a father, and there are people who want to know more about your motives that morning.’
Motives?
He’s pushing all my buttons now. My motives were to save my own life and prevent my prisoner from being kidnapped. There has never been any doubt about this – until now. I’ve relived the scene often enough. Relived the trauma, relived the debriefs, relived the guilt, relived the questions that cannot be answered.
The assault team hadn’t expected to be challenged. They had planned for the guards at the entrance to the facility, who were disarmed and held at gunpoint at the outset of the raid, but not for two extra armed officers inside, who should have been quartered on the other side of the compound. I had slept in my office in my clothes after a late night of writing up reports, and across the corridor my best friend and fellow E2 had done the same. The first we knew of the raid was when the door to Gemayel’s cell was blown open with charges to the hinges and locks. I tripped the emergency lighting and ran with my weapon to the prisoners’ rooms, where the air was thick with shouts and smoke.
It didn’t look like a tea party. I raised my Browning towards the figure in black who was dragging Gemayel out of his room. His weapon came up as he saw me, but for reasons I will never know he hesitated, allowing me in his second of doubt to fire. I kept firing until he went down. His partner returned a long burst from an automatic weapon from beyond him and I was forced back into cover. My friend and 2i/c had come out of his room before me and received a rifle butt in his face before he could reach his weapon. He was taken with Gemayel, and had never been found. At our debrief all the facility personnel signed extra secrecy clauses and the event was sealed up tighter than radioactive waste.
End of story, Colonel, I want to say. Don’t drag me back there now. Because this wasn’t the kind of conflict I signed up for in any case. Not for the frenzied slaughter by American jets of the retreating Iraqis at the Mutla Gap, not for the fuel-air bombs that sucked the lungs and eyes out of their victims, or the conscripts bulldozed alive into their trenches, or the depleted uranium that’s poisoned the desert for a thousand years, and not for the disappearance of my best friend. Don’t drag me back to that.
‘I have to tell you,’ the colonel continues, ‘there are those who think you might have got just a bit too friendly with your prisoner. They think you might have struck a deal with him. Did you strike a deal with him, Taverner?’
It’s an abhorrent suggestion, but it’s getting me where it hurts. It is so perversely twisted a suggestion that I’m wondering if an equally twisted deal has been struck in which I’m the scapegoat, and am filled with misery at this possibility. I can’t think about it now. But the colonel isn’t letting up.
‘What did you agree? Agree to defend him? Fight off his kidnappers? Kill a Jew or two? Or were you just going to ask them to go away back to Israel? Because if it’s found to be that, you’re looking at an increase in sentence for Racial Aggravation, Section 240. That is unless you’re charged with Unlawful Killing, Section 42, which carries up to a life sentence. Do you want to talk about it now, sort it out? Or do you want to play the hero and go to prison? You
will
go to prison. Do you want to go to prison?’
‘I can’t …’
Just breathe
. ‘I can’t answer …’
Breathe
. ‘That question. Sir.’
My eyes are closed now. From another room comes the scraping sound of someone getting up from his chair. It’s the Face and he’s back to escort me to my place against the wall.
‘Nice chat with the colonel?’ I hear him ask. ‘Oh dear, was he a bit hard on you? Speaking strictly personally, it sounds to me like you’re
fucked
. Right, hats on, everybody.’
And I’m back against the wall with the pillowcase over my head now, wondering if there really is an Israeli unit claiming its pound of flesh for the accidental death of one of its commandos. The colonel’s report will set the tone for everything that follows, and I’m not co-operating. But it’s too much effort now to think this through. My mind is grinding to a halt like a film that’s being slowed down, and it’s frame by frame now.