The Last Kestrel

2

The C-130 was a whale of an aircraft. It rattled and groaned as it flew them over the desert towards the base. The vibrations trembled through her bones as she sat, strapped in place against the aircraft’s outer shell, against a climbing frame of military webbing. The army-issue earplugs had moulded themselves to the inside of her ears, but the noise was still deafening. Too loud to breathe.

All along the edge of the aircraft and down its central spine, sharing a running canvas seat, young soldiers were dozing, their heads lolling forward against their chests. They were solid and thick limbed, prickling with kit, guns upright between their thighs. The low military lights in the ceiling were painting them a ghoulish underwater green, sickly as corpses. She looked down the row of faces. They were hard jawed with sharp haircuts, their skin slackened by sleep, iPods in their ears. The more wars she covered, the younger they got. It was airless. Her muscles were tense with apprehension. She shifted her weight, wiped her forehead.

The two young air crew at the rear unbuckled their lap-belts, clipped on safety lines and started to move round the aircraft, signalling to each other, positioning loads and preparing for landing. The lumbering transport plane slid to one side, then dropped.

She thought of the desert below, endlessly flat and barren and peppered with stones. It would be black there now but when she closed her eyes, she saw it as she remembered it, in daylight, a scarred land, the colour of grey-brown nothingness, a land flayed to its skeleton. Jagged ridges of mountains rising, sharp with shadows and the contours of vast bite marks gouged out of the earth. The only signs of human life were the occasional stick figures of boys, herding goats, and the square compounds of weatherworn houses, their mud walls rubbed smooth like wave-lapped sandcastles, surviving in the middle of all this lifelessness. The only shade was cast by the broad silhouette of the aircraft, running along beneath them, darkening the earth below.

There was a mechanical shudder as the back of the aircraft cranked open, showing dirty night sky. The smell of dust filled her nostrils as it rushed in, coating everything like softly falling brown snow. They were almost down.

As they landed, the dirt rose in clouds, filling the air with fine sand. She ran down the back ramp in sequence, clumsy with the weight of the rucksack on her back and the beetle-case of her flak jacket, into the hot scour of the blast from the aircraft. She followed the dark shape of the young soldier ahead of her, through the swirling sandstorm, over shifting pebbles, to the wire fence that signalled the outer edge of the base.

A young sergeant with a clipboard led her through the warren of structures. Past the NAAFI store where knots of soldiers were sitting idly at Formica tables on a wooden porch, nursing cups of bad coffee. Past the deserted cookhouse and the giant tents, with their male and female ablution blocks, to a small accommodation tent where they’d found her a berth. He unzipped the heavy canvas outer flap and held it for her as she ducked through, her back aching from the rucksack and the cramped journey.

‘Scoff from seven to eight tomorrow,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll find the cookhouse?’

The tent was dark. She ran a torch beam along the row of green canvas camp beds to find the only one without bedding, and dropped her rucksack by it. Dark sleeping-bag caterpillars lay on most of the others. She looked quickly over the spaces between the beds, at the sand-coloured clothes-tidies hanging down from the ceiling, neatly piled with socks and shirts and books. At the rows of flip-flops, trainers and army boots tucked below. The camp bed next to hers, against the end wall, had a leaning cork board, crammed with snapshots of party groups, young women with arms round each other’s shoulders, sticking out tongues, pulling faces, raising bottles of beer to the camera. They were framed by a mess of greetings cards of cartoon bears and kittens and dogs and a giant cut-out heart, emblazoned with the words: Luv ya loads!

The washing line that ran across the back of the tent was strewn with stiffly dried pink and green towels and camouflage trousers. She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, aware of the heaviness in her limbs. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the army, she thought, looking round. Far too soft. And far too rebellious.

The night air was heavy with stale sweat, overlaid with the perfume of cheap talcum powder and soft with female breathing. The sudden roar of an aircraft engine cut through from outside. She listened, trying to identify it as the sound peaked, then faded away into the night. She nodded to herself. Despite all the discomfort and danger, war zones made her feel more fully alive than any other place she knew.

She dug out her towel and wash-bag and lit a path by torch to the ablution block, where she showered off the dust in a stainless-steel cubicle, punching the valve repeatedly for spurts of lukewarm water to rinse herself off. Army life. She looked at herself in the mirror as she towelled herself dry, taking in the slackness of her skin. One of these days, she thought, I’ll be too old for this. But not quite yet.

Her cot would be stiff and uncomfortable, she knew. But she was exhausted. She’d sleep.

At breakfast the next day, she sat at the end of a trestle table in the cookhouse, absorbing the clatter and chat of the soldiers around her and sawing with a plastic knife at a piece of bacon in a mess of cooling baked beans. Printed notices were stuck to the inner wall of the tent with tape. ‘Your Mother doesn’t work here. Clean up after yourself.’ Beneath it was a list of ‘Rules of the Cookhouse’ in smaller print. She thought of Jalil, wondering if he’d eaten here, what he’d made of life with the British army. It was still hard to believe she’d never see him again.

‘Ellen?’

She looked up.

‘Heard you were coming. You just in?’

John from The Times. She feigned a smile. He was already threading his thick legs through the gap between the chair and the table, dropping his plastic tray onto the table top. It was piled with food.

He looked smug, appraising her instinctively like a circling, sniffing dog.

‘How long you here for?’ His breath smelt sour with hunger. He tore open his plastic sachet of a napkin and plastic cutlery and fell on his breakfast, a mingling mush of hash browns, scrambled eggs, sausages and bacon.

‘A week or so,’ she said. He’d put on weight. He was starting to look middle-aged. She wondered if he were thinking the same about her. They were both the wrong side of forty. The hair at his temples was flecked with grey. The start of a double chin was showing in the slackness of his jaw. ‘You?’

He was breaking a bread roll in his broad fingers, smearing it liberally with half-melted butter, inserting a sausage. His nose and cheekbones were pink with sunburn, his lips chapped.

‘Same. Off to Lamesh today. If there’s a place on the helo.’ He started to chew, spilling breadcrumbs.

Helo. Just say helicopter, for pity’s sake. John was one of those self-important war correspondents who thought they were really soldiers.

‘Saw you were in Iraq last month.’ He was stuffing the bread and sausage into his mouth. ‘You get up to the north?’

She shook her head. ‘Just Basra. You?’

‘All over.’ He swilled down a paper cup of orange juice. ‘Bloody hairy.’

She ripped open a plastic portion of margarine and spread it on a round of toast, the plastic knife grating like a washboard. ‘How’s it been here?’

He spoke and chewed at the same time, swallowing his food in gulps as if he expected to be summoned to breaking news at any moment. ‘Pretty good.’ He nodded at her. ‘Lots of bang-bang.’

‘Anyone else around?’

‘A newbie from the Mail. Left now.’

‘Jeremy something?’

He screwed up his face, not much interested. ‘Don’t remember. And some young kid from a regional. Doing puff pieces on Our Boys.’

They sat in silence for a few minutes, chewing. He was a windbag but he was experienced. He was also a sharp operator and she didn’t trust him an inch.

‘Heard about Nayullah?’ He scraped his fork round his plate, scooping up beans.

She nodded. She’d read the agency reports. Nayullah was a town on the new front line that had been out of bounds until recently. Now the army was trying to establish a presence there. It had just been shaken by its first suicide bomb.

He shovelled in another forkful of beans, staining his lips orange. ‘Took out a few ANP. What a shower they are. But civilians, mostly. Women and children.’

The Afghan police. She’d done stories on them in Kabul. Poorly trained new recruits without kit or ethics. She’d heard they’d been the target. The bomb had exploded in the market, a day or two before Jalil died.

‘Did you get down there?’

He nodded. ‘That afternoon. Not pretty.’ He shrugged. ‘Hard to get a picture they could use.’

‘Any idea who it was?’

He wiped off his tray with a crust and crammed it into his mouth. She waited until he could speak.

‘Not much left to ID. Locals, not foreigners, they say. Young lads.’ He drained the last of his tea and licked his lips, his eyes darting round the soldiers as they queued to sterilize their hands or emerged with trays of food and settled to eat. He’s looking for someone else, she thought, so he can trade up from me.

‘Food’s not bad,’ he said, ‘considering.’

She swished the tea round her paper cup and considered the Nayullah bomb.

‘What do you make of it?’

He ignored her. A thought was crossing his face, crumpling his forehead into a frown. ‘This new offensive. They letting you join it?’

She shrugged, trying not to give anything away. ‘Don’t know yet.’

‘I’ve done it anyway,’ he said quickly. ‘Sent London a piece yesterday.’

He was comforting himself. He pushed away his tray with a lordly gesture and sat back. ‘Major Mack. The Commander. You met him? Decent guy. Old school.’

She tried to steer him back to her question. ‘So what about the Nayullah bomb? A reaction?’

He nodded. ‘Know how much the army’s pouring into this? They’re knocking the Taliban off ground they’ve held for years. So, question is,’ he brandished a finger at her, ‘why aren’t the rag-heads putting up a better fight?’

‘And?’

He shrugged. ‘They can’t. Haven’t got the numbers. Or the kit. But they can sure as hell slow things up. Roadside bombs. Suicide attacks. Shoot and scoot. Then disappear back into the woodwork.’

She nodded, drank her coffee. The fact he was telling her this meant he must have filed on it already. Two soldiers pulled out chairs and joined their table.

‘Could drag on like that for years. Thirty years’ time, I reckon, we’ll still be dug in here.’ He pushed back his own chair, tore off a disinfectant wipe from the plastic canister on the table and ran it over the table top in front of him. She did the same. ‘The Brits, I mean,’ he said. ‘God help me, hope I’m out by then.’

They picked up their trays and walked to the dustbins outside to dump the lot.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘bugger all to do round here. Coming for a smoke?’

She sat beside him on the slatted bench in the smoking area, a secluded corner set apart from the accommodation tents. The soldiers had knocked up a rough trellis and hung it with camouflage netting for shade. A grumpy-looking soldier was installed in one corner, an ankle resting on the opposite knee, smoking silently and keeping himself to himself.

John offered her a cigarette and, when she refused, scratched a match and lit up in a rush of sulphur.

‘That’s new, isn’t it?’ He was pointing at the gold band on her wedding finger. His eyes were keen. ‘You got lucky?’

She turned the ring on her finger. ‘My mother’s.’ It felt odd. She didn’t usually wear it but, when she travelled alone, it didn’t hurt to look married. ‘She died a few years ago.’ She looked down at it, thinking of her mother. She’d had the same long fingers, a warm, strong hand to hold. ‘There’s a matching engagement ring. My sister’s got that.’

John was laughing. ‘Thought it was a turn-up,’ he said. ‘Always had you down as a die-hard spinster.’

The soldier opposite was looking at them. She wondered what he was thinking. He glanced away again, stony-faced.

‘Maybe you’ll bag yourself a nice soldier boy.’ John was amusing himself, sniggering into his fug of smoke. ‘You’re in the right place for it.’

She turned to look at his slack-skinned face and managed to smile. Ten years ago, she would have told him to shut up, she had plenty of men in her life. Ten years ago, that was true. Nowadays she was alone and used to it and, anyway, she couldn’t be bothered to argue. John wasn’t worth it. He was on his third wife already.

He leaned back and drew on his cigarette. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘what’s your angle?’

‘The usual.’ She shrugged. ‘Life on the front line.’

He nodded, eyes on her face, not looking convinced. ‘It’s a shit hole,’ he said. He leant towards her, lowered his voice. ‘One of the world’s greatest.’

He drew on his cigarette. The smoke rose into the thick, hot air.

‘Corrupt as hell, this country,’ he said. He rubbed his fingers together to indicate money-grubbing. ‘Can’t trust them.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know so.’ He tipped back his head and exhaled lazily. ‘Even the uniforms say so. Off the record. Ask Major Mack.’

She wondered how many Afghans John actually knew. He was a master of the hack’s instant guide.

‘Modern democracy, here?’ he said. ‘All bollocks. They’re stuck in the Stone Age.’

The soldier opposite them reached forward to the sand-filled mortar shell that served as an ashtray and stubbed out his cigarette. It splayed into sparks and died. Without acknowledging either of them, he heaved himself to his feet, all bulk and swagger, and left. A pause.

The morning sat slow and still on their shoulders. The muffled whine of a radio or television drifted through to them from the nearest tent. Beyond the open metal fence, past the parked container trucks and military vehicles, miles of desert lay shimmering in the gathering heat. There’s nothing here to sustain life, she thought. No water, no natural shelter, no food. It’s utterly desolate. This is an artificial world, built from nothing in the middle of nowhere. The Afghans must think we’re crazy.

‘It’s like we’ve learnt nothing.’ Next to her, John’s one-sided conversation had reignited. ‘Two centuries spilling blood, trying to civilize this godforsaken land, and here we are, back again.’

She stayed silent, waiting for him to finish. John was a man who liked to talk, not listen. Especially in conversation with a woman.

‘Of course it matters.’ He drew on his cigarette, snorted, exhaled skywards in a stream of smoke. ‘Regional security. India. Pakistan. Securing the borders. All that crap. But these guys we’re bankrolling? Money down the toilet.’

He coughed, spat into the sand at his feet.

‘All at it. Stuffing their pockets,’ he said. ‘Bloody narco-state.’

She sat quietly while he cleared his throat and started to smoke again. The heat was gathering. Already her skin was desiccating, scrubbed raw by the fine sand which invaded everything.

‘Do a patrol of police stations if you can. Great story.’

She smiled to herself. That meant he’d already exhausted it.

‘Used syringes everywhere. Beards sitting around in dirty vests. Half of them stoned. God help us. And they’re the good guys.’

She seized her chance to cut in. ‘Heard one of the translators got killed,’ she said. She tried to keep her tone light. ‘Guy called Jalil. You come across him?’

He stuck out his lip, shook his head. ‘Heard something about that. Ambushed, wasn’t he?’

‘Was he?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s what I heard. Last week? Didn’t file. Two Brits died around then. In a Snatch. That was big. You see that one?’

He paused, thinking it over, then turned to her, his eyes shrewd. ‘Why’re you asking about the Afghan anyway?’

‘No reason.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Just wondered.’

He stubbed out his cigarette, stretched, sighed. The fumes of dying ash mingled with the smell of his sweat. ‘Drugs,’ he said, ‘betcha. He must’ve been on the take.’ He got to his feet. ‘Or unlucky. Wrong time, wrong place.’

He coughed, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. His eyes were sunken. The putt of helicopter blades came to them softly from a distance, strengthening as they listened. They peered up into the sun-bleached sky. ‘Chinook,’ he said.

The throb of the blades was steadily building. She got up too to get under canvas before it came in low and whipped up a frenzy of sand.

‘Dying for a drink.’ He looked at her. ‘You didn’t by any chance…?’

‘Booze? ’Fraid not.’

He tutted, sighed. ‘Well, not long to go.’

They walked back together to the main drag, their boots clattering on the plastic military decking underfoot. As they separated, he pointed a stout finger at her, all fake bonhomie. ‘I’m moving off again this afternoon. But you keep safe. Hear me?’

She nodded, shook his outstretched hand. ‘I always keep out of trouble,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘Yeah. Right. Like hell you do.’

She stood for a moment, watching him walk away. The thick set of his shoulders showed just the beginnings of a stoop. Anything happened to me, she thought, he’d be licking his chops in the rush to file. And then probably spell my name wrong. She turned down between the rows of tents towards her own, thinking of the vodka stashed away in her second shampoo bottle.

Inside the darkened tent, she sat on the edge of her cot and listened to the breathing of the women sleeping around her, overlaid with the stutter of the air conditioning. The joys of shift work. She closed her eyes and let herself think.

John was wrong about Jalil. He wouldn’t have been mixed up in drugs or on the take. She was sure of that. If he’d been a less principled young man, heaven knows, he’d be alive and well now and far away from Helmand. She ran her hands heavily down her face. There was no escaping it. Whoever pulled the trigger, it was her fault he’d ended up in Helmand at the wrong end of a gun.

Jalil had come to her at the guesthouse in Kabul on the final afternoon of her last visit. They had worked together as usual for a fortnight, companionable but businesslike, sharing long days of dusty travel, conducting interviews in airless rooms across the capital and in hot, fly-thick shacks beyond it. They’d endured running sweat and toxic smells and sat together on filthy floors, sipping chai and nibbling on plates of stale sweetmeats and pastry that were barely edible but necessary to consume for the sake of politeness.

Now, on the final day of that visit, she had her story and had withdrawn to write. She was sitting in relative comfort at the desk in her room at the guesthouse, with pots of tea and good food to order and the luxury of empty hours ahead of her. She’d need them. Phil, her editor back in London, was already pushing her for copy, complaining she’d taken too long. He usually gave her a decent amount of time to research each story. A week–or even two, sometimes. But he expected a lot in return. Six- or seven-thousand-word pieces that broke new ground and were carefully crafted. Now she had the facts but she needed to focus on writing and rewriting until she had a news-feature that even Phil would consider strong enough to print.

It was at this point, when she was halfway through her second draft, that she was interrupted by a hesitant tapping at her door. She opened it to find Jalil, looking out of place amongst the kitsch foreign decor and rich fittings of the hallway.

‘Come in,’ she said, without thinking. Of course he wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be proper. Instead he stayed hovering there on the public side of the threshold with growing awkwardness. She sighed to herself and signalled to him to wait while she went back to her laptop and reluctantly turned it off. The story had just been coming together. Now her flow of thought was lost and she was irritated.

They sat together in the parched garden on wicker chairs with stained cotton cushions. She tried to press him to accept a drink–tea or fresh juice–and he politely refused. He was struggling, she could see, under a great weight of embarrassment. Her attempts to lighten the atmosphere by chatting to him only prolonged the awkwardness. Finally she fell silent and they sat, side by side, looking out at the darting birds and the startlingly bright colours of the flowerbeds, and she waited until he was ready to speak.

‘It is only a loaning,’ he said. ‘I will pay back everything. More than everything. Interests as well.’ He spoke carefully into the still heat of the garden, his voice stilted as if he’d practised his speech many times. ‘We will make a proper agreement. I will pay you this much in this year and this much in the next. Like this. Very proper.’

He had the offer of a place at Pennsylvania State University to study engineering, he said. He’d applied there because the distant cousin of a friend of the family lived nearby.

‘All the living is no problem for me,’ he said. ‘I can sleep anywhere. They have some bedroom with their sons. That’s enough for me. And I can eat with them at night-time. Cheap food. Afghan food.’ He twisted and untwisted his fingers in his lap, still unable to look her in the face.

Once he had his degree, he could get a good job, he said. Then he would have enough money to support his mother and sister and pay for his little brother to attend a good school.

‘Everything I will pay back,’ he said again. ‘This loaning is for the fees.’ A hint of pleading had entered his voice. ‘The fees are very costly in United States. So much of money.’ He tailed off. The quietness rushed in and smothered them both.

She tried to think how to phrase a reply. As she was finally about to open her mouth to try, he spoke again.

‘Some of this money’, he said, ‘my relatives can give me. And from friends of my mother. Men who knew my father also. But not all.’

He hesitated. ‘I need still more money. Maybe two, three thousand US dollars.’ He was staring at his feet, his long toes, flecked with dark hairs, at the edge of his sandals. ‘It is so much of money. I know. It dishonours me to ask. But it is just…’ He broke off as if his English were failing him. ‘This is a very difficult matter…’

He left the phrase hanging. A cat, its pregnant belly hanging low, ran across the grass in front of them. It was a mangy thing, flea-bitten and feral. They watched together as it crouched in the flowerbed, hunting.

She had been asked for money several times in her career by people she had grown to know well. People from developing countries who had no one else to ask. It was always for something significant. For a major operation for an elderly parent or for schooling for a child. She was a journalist, she told herself. An outsider who travelled, observed, reported and then moved on. She had to stay separate, to be objective. Don’t interfere. Don’t cross the line.

‘I’d love to,’ she said. She too was staring at his toes, at the neat square cut of his nails. ‘Really. But I just can’t. I am sorry. Perhaps I could—’

‘Of course.’ He interrupted her at once, nodding and waving his hand as if to bat away the awkwardness between them. ‘I’m sorry. Please. Forgive me.’

Suddenly they were both on their feet, making hasty, nervous movements and hiding their shame with a flurry of meaningless arrangements, confirming what time the car would take her to the airport the next morning and discussing the final settlement of the driver’s bill.

Afterwards she had gone back to her room, ordered a fresh pot of chai sabz and a plate of Afghan bread and jam and immersed herself in her story. It was only later, when her friend at The New York Times emailed to tell her about his death in Helmand, that she stopped, shaken, and really thought back. By giving up work with journalists and instead signing a contract to go into conflict zones and translate for the military, he was risking his life. Suddenly it became clear to her why he’d done it. He’d been desperate for the money so he could escape.