The Gone-Away World

Chapter Six

THE ONLY PROBLEM concerns wheels. I was barely even aware of it, but Go Away Bombs have wheels on them. This is because each one is the size of a smallish car. We don’t fire them as much as drop them, out of cargo planes. The wheels have been sitting in a crate in an airfield somewhere west of here for two months. They have gotten hot, and cold, and sandy, and dry, and then hot again. They are no longer the proud wheels we once knew. They are wonky. The technicians fit them to the bombs, and the bombs sit askew on them and don’t roll in the smooth, oiled fashion the deployment crews were led to expect. They have to winch the bombs up into position. Fortunately, when the time comes to drop them, gravity will be to our advantage. The most advanced weapons in the history of warfare will be bobbled into the sky over the target like a bunch of elderly shopping trolleys being tossed into a river.

That’s the one thing which slows down the attack. It slows it down by about a half hour. A little while later the first plane signals “Payload delivered” and our forward spotters relay the hit back to us via a digital feed. It is rather dull. The enemy outpost is situated in a shattered township. The bomb drops out of the sky and activates. There is no explosion, no ripple of pressure through the earth. A sort of viscous absence blooms. The enemy emplacements are erased, and air flows into the space, bringing dust. A perfect, smooth crater replaces the main square and the south-western quarter of the town, and two or three hourglass buildings which were leaning on each other are suddenly deprived of support and fall over. They do this slowly and without fuss. And that’s it. It’s a bit unsatisfying. In Blue Sector there’s a mild tremor because the excision there runs deep and releases a little tectonic pressure. Five hundred kilometres away we create a waterfall and a lake where a bubble of Professor Derek’s genius transects a river, taking out at the same time a bridge and two enemy special operations units proficient in torture (just like ours).

We sit back and wait for the next round of orders and the proud consequences of our strength. We have flexed big bold political muscles. We have stripped off on the international beach and showed pumped legs and crushing arms. We are totally the Big Dog. And all around the world, right now, people are saying “What the hell?” Analysts are being asked questions and speculating and talking hogwash. In Jarndice the news will break from the Junior Library outward in a circular wave, and then it will spread through mobile telephones and email and each of these individual missives will produce ripples of its own, so that shortly the courtyards will be filled with bothered, jubilant, appalled students thronging and wondering. Only we know what has happened.

We are still telling ourselves this, feeling a bit superior and waiting for the order to do some more demonstrative world-editing, when our very own Green Sector vanishes from the map. Our men just aren’t there any more. The satellite image shows our emplacements wobbling and vanishing like a sandcastle being washed away by the tide. On channel seven (this is our channel seven, not the news channel) there is a nightmare. The spotter above that doomed little town where Tobemory Trent tourniqueted my arm and stopped me from bleeding out is now half a spotter, or possibly two thirds of one. His face is almost all there, but when he falls forward, you can see that he has been deprived of his left ear and the outermost inch of his head, and also his arm and hip. It’s impossible to tell from looking at the screen whether he is still alive, or whether his body is just juddering by way of spooky reflex. Next to him is his partner, the sniper, who is most definitely alive, although that seems to be a temporary situation. The enemy has vanished the man’s lower limbs but not the rest of him, and he is bleeding out. It does not look painless and humane, which I had somehow assumed it might be. It sounds a lot like every other kind of dying I have observed since coming here. Finally, because no one objects, I switch off the screen. The silence is almost worse than the noise.

George Copsen droops in his chair. When Richard P. Purvis goes to help him, General Copsen shrugs him off, then resumes his hunched position. From behind, I can see his shoulders clench and shudder, as if he has a fever.

A few moments later we learn that the same thing is happening everywhere. Not just in the Elective Theatre: everywhere. In cities. In countries far away and countries just around the corner. Somehow, without warning (although surely quite a lot of people somewhere knew this was possible, they just didn’t see fit to share or were too proud to credit it) this nice little bush war has gone global. People are deploying weapons (weapons like ours) at the strategic level, which means missiles with intercontinental reach. The upside is that no one is using nukes or germs. The downside is that our supersecret weapon turns out to be absolutely the best beloved new toy of just about every advanced nation on Earth. Major cities are getting to look like Swiss cheeses, and the Swiss have developed a sort of ray gun based on the same principle and zapped everything they can reach to the east so the Russians know not to come at them. For reasons I have never understood, the Swiss still think the Russians are going to sweep down on the European fold and devour their babies. On this basis they have erased a corridor of populous farmland and a few lakes, just to show they really mean it. The Russians have responded by removing a piece of China they never much cared for, and everyone is now perforating the map so that it is getting to be a bit like a sheet of stamps. Serious commentators (people with no vested interest in war) are going on air live asking that this stop, right now, because there seems to be some danger of the world flying apart or falling in, so much of it has been vanished in the rush to show that everyone is the Big Dog.

George Copsen’s command chair is dark grey, and it rests on a little raised platform. It has a remote control for all the TV screens built into the arm. It is the precise focus of every image in the room. The man sitting in it can turn his head, even shake it, and still see what is happening in stereoscopic widescreen. The speakers are set up for him too, so when he shuts his eyes, as he is doing now, it doesn’t make it much better. We watch Trinidad sparkle and fold away into nothing. It is unclear why anyone has a beef with Trinidad, but the beef is well and truly settled. George Copsen murmurs something like “oh” although it might be “no.”

We wait for orders, and it takes us a while to realise that we have been forgotten. The Elective Theatre has been closed down. There’s absolutely no point fighting a proxy war when you’re fighting a real one. This whole area was selected as a battleground because it was absolutely pointless. It just had people in it. The only reasons to fight here were social and political, nebulous things which for the moment do not matter. We are an army in the wrong place. No one cares to talk to us. They are busy fighting a real war with unreal weapons and wiping one another from the face of the Earth. It’s a dream of power. Point, speak, and the thing which vexes you is unmade. It must be intoxicating; certainly, the men and women in houses of government around the world are hooked on it and reeling like drunkards.

From time to time we offer General Copsen food or drink, and once Richard P. Purvis suggests that he should address the men. The general does not respond. He does not drink the water on his left side, or eat any of the peanuts on his right. He sits, wrapped around himself, and every so often a little noise comes off him, a plaintive mew. He twitches. When I stand directly in front of him, I can see that he is not in fact curled into a foetal ball, but rather his eyes are fixed on the displays in front of him. I turn them back on. They are mostly blank, except for the one which shows this room. We all stand and look at ourselves on TV. This is me, watching me watching myself. This is my left hand waving. This is my right hand waving. This is me standing on one leg. George Copsen fumbles with his remote control, and we disappear.

Everyone in the room has a brief moment when they believe this is actually what has happened: that we too have been made to Go Away. Then we look at one another somewhat sheepishly and realise that he has simply turned the screens off again.

It is at this point that Riley Tench makes a very bad call. It’s probably his duty, but it’s the wrong thing to do. He tries to relieve the general. He stands in a suitably official pose, sort of manly in an asexual and impersonal way, conveying gravitas and regret, and according to whatever section of whatever rule, he informs his commanding officer that he, Riley Tench, has adjudged him, George Copsen, to be unfit to command by reason of psychological stress and collapse, and he, Riley Tench, for the good of the unit and by the power vested in him for this purpose, hereby assumes that role with due thought given to the gravity of the act and understanding that it may be later seen as mutiny by the assessing authority. Will George Copsen, General, accept that he is relieved in line with the protocols appertaining?

There is a longish moment of stillness and then George Copsen shoots him in the head. Riley Tench goes all over three monitors and Richard P. Purvis, who was standing in a kind of neutral way off to one side, quite possibly thinking that he wouldn’t have chosen this moment to relieve his master.

And indeed, the general is not relieved. He’s totally bugfuck homicidal and periodically catatonic, and that’s the guy who’s at the helm right now and will remain there until such time as we receive countervailing orders, amen.

FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, or thereabours, we get a break. Not much happens. We have time to wash Riley Tench off our uniforms and then we have more time with no particular activity to occupy it. George Copsen ambles around telling grunts that the situation “will soon be resolved.” This is probably supposed to be reassuring, but it isn’t; it scares the bejesus out of everyone. The general’s face is unshaven and pudgy, and shiny with old sweat. He looks as if he ought to be wearing a red flannel shirt and carrying a half-empty bottle of hooch. Every so often he goes and sits on a chair outside his tent and sort of zones out, glassy and slack.

I sit on my bed. I look at my letters, because they remind me of home and this has always helped before. Then I find the Evangelist’s zombie letter, a frame of paper with nothing left in the middle, and I realise that home may no longer exist. I stare through the hole into space.

Gonzo wanders in and looks pretty freaked, and we drink some illicit (but excellent) special forces alcohol until Leah appears in my tent and sits down with her head resting on my chest, which makes me feel powerfully alpha male–ish. Gonzo looks a bit nervous and confused, and we all expect her bleeper to go off at any moment, but in fact no one is bringing in wounded right now because people are mostly either uninjured or non-existent. A few have had walls fall on them as a result of excisions, and some have broken limbs and cuts from the normal course of life when a whole bunch of armed men live in a smallish space and get bored and angry. For a few days everyone just coasts. This is post-traumatic stress, of course, but we don’t call it that. We don’t really give it a name or realise that we are doing it. Time spreads out and we see the world through a tunnel of grey. Our voices echo down it, so any serious conversation is impossible. We’re in a kind of winterish Eden: not a place of innocence but exhaustion.

On the seventh day Gonzo takes matters in hand. He gathers his guys, sends them off to engage in certain necessary tasks and gets his project under way. The hero of a hundred secret battles rolls up his trouser legs and makes flapjacks.

It’s a very strange thing seeing lethal men and women put aside the dagger of stealth and take up the spatula of home cooking; it wakes the sense of incongruity which has been slowly drugged insensible by months in this foreign place. Quite a lot of people come out to watch. Gonzo nods genially and goes back to treading the oats and the sugar. (This much flapjack cannot be stirred; you have to get right in there and churn it with your feet. Gonzo has established a footbath—legbath—at the entrance to his kitchen area. It is staffed by Egon and a pretty female nurse I do not recognise, but whose eyes do not leave Gonzo even as she labours over Annie the Ox’s toes. For obvious reasons, anyone who joins the mixing party must have hygienic feet. The idea of hygienic feet suddenly appeals very much to all of us, so a queue is forming.) Someone in the crowd asks whether these will be covert flapjacks, and Gonzo says no, they will be ordinary flapjacks, but adds that it takes persons of courage and unusual skill to make flapjacks at a time like this. That gets a laugh. His mother’s scowl flits across his face, and I can see her shaking her head, intangible hands reaching to restrain him. No, schveetie, too much sugar, people will vomit. But Gonzo, now as then, knows that the flapjack is a thing of desire rather than nutrition, and must taste like manna rather than a horse’s nosebag. He does not stop with the sugar, and Ma Lubitsch huffs proudly and begins her three-point turn.

Most people in this situation would reckon to make a fair quantity of flapjacks, then a bunch more, until there were enough, but Gonzo is not most people, and in any case is working to an agenda which demands spectacle. He needs to cook these things all at once, in front of his troops (and we will all be his troops, if he can bring this off). The camp cooking facilities did at one time include a monster oven capable of doing this, but its gas supply was exhausted by a massive grill last month, and replacement cylinders have yet to arrive. Gonzo knew this when he chose to make flapjacks. It is part of the message he wants to send: we are still an army, and we will function like one; not everything which is not simple is actually hard; even hard things can be done fast; even things which seem impossible turn out to be doable. We will survive.

So Gonzo turns to the crowd (the smell of sugary oats has permeated tents and huts and fortified holes and guard turrets, and rumours of clean feet have gone even further, so there is now a crowd standing in curious contemplation of a bunch of commandos knee-deep and shoeless in pilfered oats and sugar) and sees two guys he is particularly looking for. He peers into the throng exactly where they aren’t (Ma Lubitsch playing hide-and-seek: dear me, zese old eyes of mine, I shall never find zem) and innocently asks if anyone knows where to find Sergeant Duggan and Sergeant Crisp. No one says anything.

“Hell,” says Gonzo, big dumb ox, chewing his lip and scratching, “I could really use some help.” And he goes back to his stirring.

This puts everyone at their ease. This is not going to be some kind of weird oatsy inquisition. There will be no auto des flapjaques. This young man is not looking for scapegoats but for fellow flapjackers.

Sergeant Engineer Crisp and Sergeant Engineer Duggan don’t say anything. That’s partly because they’re still kinda fuzzy on who they are; neither of them has spoken for three days, since the rest of their unit, over in Green Sector, vanished in the first retaliatory strike. Now, though, this seems to be holding up the show, and people nudge them.

That’s you, mate. Man needs your help.

Oh, yes, right you are!

Score one to Gonzo: the crowd feels it has an interest in this project. The sergeants are shunted forward and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl—not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell—and certainly de Gaulle never did. But Gonzo Lubitsch does, and he does it as if a whole long line of commanders were standing at his shoulder, urging him on.

“Gentlemen,” says Gonzo softly, “holidays are over. I need an oven, and I need one in about twenty minutes, or these fine flapjacks will go to waste and that is not happening.”

And something about this statement and the voice in which he says it makes it clear that it is simply true. One way or another, this thing will get done. Under a layer of grime and horror, these two are soldiers, and more, they are productive, can-do sorts of people. Rustily but with a gratitude which is not so far short of worship, they say “Yes, sir” and are about their business.

Having a task makes them part of Gonzo’s new aristocracy, and very shortly there are people offering to help them out, and people clustering around Gonzo giving helpful advice, cooking tips, recipe suggestions and all manner of assistance. Gonzo starts giving orders of a more general nature, because (clearly) we will need somewhere to eat the flapjacks and somewhere to expel them later when nature takes its course, and the mess tents have been torn to shreds and the latrines are starting to get a bit funky through lack of attention, and these things need to be remedied. George Copsen is sitting under a sunshade outside the remains of his tent. He has shown no inclination to issue orders of substance since before he shot Riley Tench. Possibly it is his intention that no one should officially take over from him, so that his forces cannot be redeployed. Possibly this affable, lethal catatonia is a shield between us and the command structure. Possibly he is just broken. I half expect him to wander over to inspect Gonzo’s flapjacks, but he doesn’t. He has even stopped saying “Carry on” and “Soldier” as people pass. Through the sunshade the Addeh Katir sun is burning his face. His forehead is peeling.

Crisp and Duggan and their gang return with the fuelless oven, and after some discussion and bitching and debate (in which they are gradually joined by a couple of mechanics, an ordnance technician and the quartermaster) they come to a decision. They submit plans to Gonzo and he listens, and the entire crowd listens with him, and finally he judges the plan acceptable and pleasingly insane, and sends them off to make it so. At this point he turns to the rest of the crowd and booms at them to form lines and prepare to divide the several cubic metres of flapjack into trays and cake tins and what all else. This he does in a way which suggests that they have been waiting for his order, and they are somewhat surprised to find that he is correct. Quite rapidly military discipline asserts itself, and by the time the engineers return and build a flapjack furnace, out of the old oven and a collection of flame-throwers all cobbled together to heat the radiator plates, there is a vast pile of random metalware filled and ready to cook, and shortly thereafter the furnace is fired up and does not explode.

Flapjacks happen.

ON WEDNESDAY we heal a gaping rift in international relations (at least locally) which feels pretty good. Baptiste Vasille (of the Joint Operational Task Force for Addeh Katir, and notionally an enemy) walks into camp, hands in the air, with a whole bunch of his men and announces that he has absolutely no intention of fighting us any more because our bit of the war has gone from absurd to actively silly. Vasille had no problem with absurd, but silly is something he won’t stick at any price. He has had no communication from his masters and is reasonably confident that we haven’t either. For all he knows, we few represent the entire surviving population of the planet, and he refuses (in a very French way) to be a bloody idiot about this and court the annihilation of the species over instructions which patently have nothing to do with today. Is that a cigarette? Baptiste Vasille will swear his eternal soul to our service for a cigarette. He has two hundred soldiers who would do more than that. For tobacco products, they will march on hell and put out the fire with their own blood. Of course they will. They are French. And Lebanese. And a couple of them are African. But no Belgians! Hah! . . . Nom de dieu! Flapjacks? Blood of Christ . . . Gonzo is a genius. He is almost French. Where should Vasille sign his name? Is there wine? Well, you can’t have everything. Still, Vasille has some brandy. Only thirty cases, but still . . . You know that bitch? The German? She’s gone mad. Completely. Psychotic. Perhaps she always was. And she has her own little war going on, and a nemesis. Like Greek. Vasille knew a Greek girl once, in Thessalonika. She was special. A contortionist, hein? Those were the days. It was last summer, actually . . . How time flies. Does anyone have a lighter? Kemner. That’s the bitch. Not the Greek girl, of course. The German. Vasille quite likes Germans, under normal circumstances. His brother married one. Nice girl. Never could get her in the sack though, too prissy. She (the German, Kemner, a fiend from hell, salope . . . Mordieu, what a horrible thought! Who’d pay for that? Well, Kumar, of course, but other than him?) was the commander of the Addeh Defensive Initiative, yes? Bunch of crooks! Thieving weasel nations all in a row, and the Belgians at the heart of it, no doubt! Dealing with opium lords, dealing with mafias and mobski and triads and bastards and even Erwin Kumar, sure as milk. Yes, milk! Kumar is a stoat and a sexual deviant, and not in a good French way, but also he is a drug smuggler on an international scale, with the backing of the merde CIA from A-merde-ica. Of course, because they are the Cocaine Intelligence Agency, hah! Or was it the Russians? The Kokainum whateverthehell KGB stands for? Jesus, in the name of mercy . . .

Someone finally lights Vasille’s fag. He holds it to his mouth as if he will devour it, then raises it like the head of a defeated enemy, and his men (and a couple of women) set up a roar of approval. The French have arrived, and it is a good thing, because they are different, and if nothing else was killing us, boredom was doing the trick.

Things are thus solidly ticking over on Thursday at about five in the afternoon, which is, as near as anyone can tell, when the world as we know it comes to an end. We had imagined, in so far as we had thought about this at all, that it had already taken place. We were wrong.

The guy’s name is Foyle or Doyle, and he’s got grit. His ribs are all bound up from some kind of blunt-force trauma, like maybe being exploded across the room, but he’s out here lifting and hauling with the rest of us. We are building a reservoir, although it looks more like a beaver dam. A small river runs down from the hills and past the rear of our encampment, and where it hooks around a batch of harder rock, we are slowing it down. There will be a small lake, constantly filled at one side and constantly emptied at the other. Gonzo has decreed we should not be dependent on resources we cannot control. He is considering moving the base entire, but there are several thousand men here, and much of the equipment is not designed to be moved without air support. Air support is something we no longer have. Foyle (or Doyle) was a mechanic back home, and he thinks he could rig together a couple of the big trucks for this task, maybe one of the bridging tanks. He is telling me because I am Gonzo’s Friend. Gonzo has many friends—Jim and Sally and Samuel P.—and they are also my friends, Leah’s friends. But there is only one Friend here. The guy who can pledge Gonzo’s word on his own. The guy who can anticipate him, who backs him, without whom he would occasionally trip over some human weakness or unseen glitch. Gonzo’s practical side. His lesser half.

So Doyle, who goes by the alias of Foyle, but whose name (it now seems to me, as I consider his tags and my memory more closely) may actually be Tucker, is holding a long wooden stake against his chest, sort of under his chin like a violin. He is wrapping some twine around it and another stake resting against it, so that the two stakes together will make a giant V, and combined with the other stakes also configured in this shape will form the basis of a flexible breakwater, or water trap. The water will flow through them, they will accrue grunge and grime, and gradually they will become an obstacle, and this obstacle will generate a small pool. Tucker Foyle (I’m reasonably sure, now, that this is his name) grins and twines and doesn’t stop yapping the while. And then something happens which is very strange and bad.

A streak of dapple and light scuds across the open space where we are working, and for a frozen instant we are at war.

Eyeblink: sunny day, men working, calm and business-like.

Eyeblink: darkness and screaming; the smell of guns and bloody execution; something zings by, a howling wasp. A werewasp. It passes me and alights on Tucker Foyle.

Eyeblink: sunny day, men hesitating, rubbing their eyes. Combat flashback probably. Unmanly, perhaps. Not dangerous. A slow, humble recognition—we all had it. We laugh, reassured, we turn to one another to share the gag. Laughter evinces control. Mammals ho! We’re conquering the world. No shadows. Just us.

Tucker Foyle slides slowly forward onto his spar. He has a bullet wound on his back, at the shoulder. This in itself would not be a terrible thing, but the impact has driven him onto the wooden spike resting under his chin. Tucker has been impaled. He is not dead. He will not die for several minutes, but die he will, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Dapple again. It comes from the same direction, and this time I can see it, rushing in across the compound, and with it the sound of incoming fire. It is a stripe of darkness, perhaps four metres deep and twenty or thirty long. All around me there is moderately ordinary life. Within the shadow, it’s hell. Men duck or fling themselves flat, or die where they stand. When it has passed, they pick themselves up, emerge from cover and are afraid.

The shadow embraces us, and the world shifts. My nose gets it first: the scent of the nameless town where I was blown up. The air is filled with vaporised blood and the smell of people losing bladder control, and the rich stink of weapons fire and diesel. This is a battlefield smell. I’m already on the ground, which is good, because more wasps are buzzing by. I can feel the imprint of their passage. They come from one edge of the dapple, and they vanish at the other. From within it’s hard to see out. There’s fog and smoke and a lot of shouting and screaming—far too much for this little space. This is a portion of somewhere else, laid over here, except that it is unmistakably this place. I have not been transported anywhere. The world has changed around me.

Out of the fog stumbles a dying soldier. He’s not wearing any uniform I recognise. It’s a sort of hotchpotch of US WWII and British WWI, with just a dash of Vietnam and Gallipoli. Green trousers with braces to hold them up, but the braces are off his shoulders and he’s wearing not a shirt but some kind of skivvies. He’s got a helmet, but it’s the wrong shape for this war, and made of steel. Must be from one of the mercenary outfits, but it can’t be Vasille’s—the Frenchman’s men are better equipped. In any case, I can’t ask this guy. He’s been shot in the mouth. He stumbles away again, and disappears.

And then the war is gone, flickered away. I can see it rolling on through the camp. As it passes over our makeshift lake, the water fills with bodies and turns into a thick red jelly. The shadow passes on. The jelly stays, slick and dark and rotten. It breaks up sluggishly as fresh water piles onto it, undulating itself to pieces—but not fast enough, and the lake floods a bit before the bloody mess floats away down-stream. An unidentifiable part of someone washes up against my leg. Absurdly, Tucker Foyle is unscathed. He has not been hit. He is still dying over there. This makes me angry. And then I hear behind me a low moan of awe and fear—not a single voice, but the combination of many. More is coming; I turn to stare it down.

The sky is black from one side to the other. The sun is hidden. A wave is breaking over us, a great black wall of this awful stuff. From within, the sounds of mayhem. This is not war. It is a caricature, an idea of war. A nightmare. The wave does not fall. I turn my face upward to see the top. Looking back down, I see that it still has not reached the camp. It is huge. It breaks. Shadow envelops us and we are smothered in war.

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.

Egon loads me into the RV and yells to Jim that we’re going to have to get somewhere so he can treat people, and I realise that almost everyone is hurt in one way or another: Jim is sporting a gash along his side and Annie has her arm in a makeshift splint, and Egon Schlender himself has some hastily stitched holes on the left side of his face. It’s not surprising; it seems as if the air itself has started shooting at us. I look at Leah, please God—but she is only scraped and bruised and extremely pissed off and afraid. She checks my thigh and zaps me with a local, then there is a bright flash as she removes the spike. I can’t feel the pain, exactly, but I am very aware that something alien is being dragged out of my leg bone, and not all the nerves are entirely asleep. She touches one on the way out and I say something manly, like ow or mother. She superglues me together (this is what superglue is actually for) and wraps the whole thing up with a bit of someone’s dress shirt. I love her even more.

Gonzo leads us out into the countryside, and the farther we get from the camp, the less severe the fighting is. We drive on, and it’s misty and cool and the wheels thrum beneath us and the sound of the engine and the road is tranquil. We stop, and people change places to get some rest, and Leah collapses onto my shoulder and falls asleep like a child. I hand my looted compass to Annie the Ox and she stares at me as if I have done a magic trick, then grins. “Well, damn,” says Annie the Ox, nodding. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” And she ruffles my hair. We move on. Sooner or later, someone will have to say “What the fuck was that?” But that time is not yet; by mutual consent, we’re just leaving it alone for a while. Gonzo doesn’t take a break; he’s too wired.

When we slow for the second time, it is because Annie has seen something at the side of the road, drawn our collective attention to it. We brake and stop, and watchful Jim Hepsobah stands by, but there is no one here. We all saw, from a distance, a family walking single file. From close to, we see only stunted trees and broken earth and fog. We heard them, even caught a whiff of sweat and bandages on the wind, but they are gone now, and perhaps they never existed.

The next time it is Jim Hepsobah who spots them, a column of our guys disconsolately trudging westwards. They are gone before he can slow down, tricks of the light.

A bit later, soldiers appear as we pause to assist a lone woman with a baby, who turns out to be a slender boy with a bundle of rags, swaying his hips in a ludicrous counterfeit. He scampers away into the forest, shouting abuse, and there are bullets. The whole thing is petty, a moment of shock and almost of irritation. Someone is shooting at us. It’s so rude. We shoot back until they stop. We move on.

Then a jeep draws alongside, very fast. A slender figure in fatigues, shivering with cold, eyes fixed on the road ahead and the horizon, sits alone at the wheel. Annie looks at Jim and Jim makes a frantic gesture and Annie and (perforce) Gonzo pick up the pace. Sally Culpepper has blood on her elegant eyebrows and she obviously didn’t manage to grab a coat before she lit out. She won’t answer when Jim calls her and for the longest time she seems to think we’re like the ghosts at the roadside, and finally Jim steps from the machine-gun platform into the jeep next to her and she all but kills him, razor bowie whipping round in a blur. Jim does the smart thing, puts the outside of his arm up and takes the hit there, and Sally wrenches back and jolts and comes back to us, and Jim puts his arms around her as she drives, ignoring the gash on his arm as if it were a mosquito bite. Maybe it is. Maybe Jim Hepsobah is wearing chain mail under there. On the other hand, he’s bleeding. Maybe Ronnie Cheung’s hot iron filings and rough concrete blocks have made Jim Hepsobah immune to minor injuries. Or maybe it’s just Jim Hepsobah, because he’s in love, and isn’t this exactly what I would do for Leah? Sally slows to a more manageable pace and I clamber up into the gun nest and we head on, silent, down the long dark road. I get to be a hero for a while. Then it’s someone else’s turn, and I go back down into the car, and Leah uses me as a pillow.

We speed on through the gathering night. Leah wakes and doesn’t speak. I know she’s awake because her breathing has changed, but her eyes are closed and she doesn’t draw away from my shoulder, which is about the only good thing going on. Later, she asks where we’re going. Gonzo glances at me. “Copsen ordered withdrawal,” Gonzo says, and I look right back at him and say “Yes, he did,” and Gonzo knows that I am lying. I’m not sure if he loves me or hates me for saving us all from a heroic (pointless) last stand. He knows that it was a necessary lie, but it is not something he would have done. Leah gets her answer from Jim Hepsobah.

Our destination is Corvid’s Field, which is the name given by all the foreign forces in the Elective Theatre to the small flat strip of green grass and cracked runway which serves as the UN’s gesture in the direction of Addeh Katir. The local name is long and musical and relates to a legend about monsters and magic and (probably somewhat later) Buddha. It has too many consonants and a precise intonation which of all of us—as far as I know, including Vasille’s men—only Jim Hepsobah can get close to. He has an ear for melody.

“Twenty years ago, at least,” says Jim Hepsobah, after a kind of drawing-in-your-memory pause, “there was a guy flew a small plane out of Corvid’s Field. Back then it was still called Bravo Strip by anyone who didn’t call it by the Katiri name, and people just about still came here as tourists. Guy’s name was Bob Castle, but he played a decent game of chess and everyone who knew him called him Rook, which is the other word for a castle in chess.” He glances back to make sure he’s telling her something she already knows. Leah nods confirmation.

“So Castle—Rook—decided that was a pretty cool handle, and he painted a big black bird on his tail fin and changed his call sign, and he went right on flying his charters and taking backpackers on little pleasure hops and filling in the off-season with some more grey-area kind of stuff like medical supplies which may or may not have had a legitimate source. Those grey-area cargos he got from a local fixer called Harry Manjil, an Anglo-Chinese Katiri with messed-up legs. Maybe polio or something. Not sure. He was a little weasel geezer who could make you laugh in about a second and a half, and have your fillings out while you were doing it. And Harry had a gorgeous wife, about twenty years old, called Yvette, and Harry and Yvette and Rook used to spend every Friday night hanging out and playing mah-jongg with whatever girl Rook was dating, and drinking cheap hooch from Harry’s still.” Jim Hepsobah turns halfway in his seat, and glances around to be sure everyone is paying attention. He frowns.

“Rook never made a move on Yvette, and Yvette never made a move on Rook. It just wasn’t a thing. I say this because people immediately think there’s a whole loooove triangle aspect to this story, and that pisses me off, because you can get three people in a room without someone screwing someone else’s spouse, and because these were good people and honourable people and this isn’t that kind of weak-ass story. Are we clear?”

“No triangle,” says Leah. “Gotcha.”

“So one night Yvette comes to Rook in a fluster and she says Harry’s gone, just gone, and she doesn’t know where he is, and she thinks maybe he got taken by bandits or maybe someone he was doing business with wasn’t into the right kind of business. And she thinks she knows where Harry was going and will Rook fly her around there so she can look down from on high and see if she can see anything? Like his car. Or him. Or something. Please? So . . . Rook says no. He says absolutely no. He tells her, go home. Harry will be back. But we are not going flying low over some criminal sonsabitches who are doing criminal sonsabitches-type business with Harry, because they will get nervous and shoot him, and us. And Yvette goes home. And Rook gets himself in his plane and he goes up and he looks for Harry himself, because he thinks Yvette is absolutely right.

“He takes himself a big old automatic rifle for personal security, and a couple of grenades for added personal security, and he goes out towards the mountains, which is where criminal sonsabitches mostly do business in this region. He goes out and he flies over a camp and he sees Harry’s jeep all shot up, and he drops one of his grenades on the tents down below, because his friend is dead down there. Now, he knows what will happen next, but he’s an emotional guy, this Rook, and he does what he thinks is the right thing. And the leader of these folk down on the ground is a huge bastard, a man called Nand. He comes out and he shoots Rook through the floor of the plane. Just plain lucky, or unlucky, or he just puts so many shells in the air that one of ’em has to do something, because Rook is flying so low. Rook knows he’s all done, and he brings the plane around one last time. On the ground Nand is cursing him and shooting at him and blowing bits off the wings. He shoots up the cockpit pretty good. Rook takes a few more, but he keeps that plane level and going in a straight line, right towards this evil sonuvabitch who killed his friend. Gets so close he’s staring Nand right in the eye. And then he pulls the pin on the second grenade and the plane comes down on the camp in a hail of fire. So Rook kills the ogre.

“But the thing is, Harry wasn’t dead at all. He’d had his car stolen right out from under him, and a bunch of arseholes had ripped him off and tried to kill him, but he was fast and smart and he ducked away into the jungle. Maybe they would have gone after him, but Rook arrived about that time, and they got busy.

“So Harry was footsore, but he was alive. He came home to Yvette just like Rook had said he would. So when Harry made it rich, he bought up the strip and got people around to calling it Corvid’s Field, because a rook is a kind of corvid, maybe the only good kind. Little headstone for a friend. And then Harry and Yvette packed up and went away and no one ever saw them again.” Jim Hepsobah smiles a sad little smile. Leah sniffs.

“But . . . the local people, the Katiri farmers and traders and the pirates from Lake Addeh, they liked Rook too. And they say the birds of Corvid’s Field fly around the strip each dusk, and they fly in formation like a little single-engine plane, and that’s the spirit of Bob Castle, the Rook, watching over Corvid’s Field and enjoying the sunset. And woe betide the man who steps out of line there, because Rook may not have any grenades left, but he still has a rifle and he’s a mean shot.” Jim Hepsobah grins like a Viking, and you can pretty much smell the aviation fuel and the cheap flyboy cigars, and you can hear Nand the bandit screaming as he sees those burning fragments coming down on him from the sky.

Leah asks if that’s a true story, meaning “How much of it is a true story?” which makes me think of the Evangelist, and that, in turn, reminds me that Corvid’s Field is the UN airfield Elisabeth was writing about for her newspaper, and is she still there? Did she go home? Is she alive? And I realise that Elisabeth does not know about Leah, and that Leah does not know about Elisabeth, and then that there is no reason why they should, because Elisabeth and I have never been other than friends and training partners.

Jim Hepsobah is about to answer Leah’s question when the road in front of us explodes and the windscreen stars and shatters, and we are hurled not forward, but back, as Gonzo stamps on the accelerator and takes us around and alongside the crater, gunning the engine to make it over the rubble by the side of the road, and controlling the slewing and skidding as we leave the asphalt or tarmac or clay or whatever it is they use here. Ronnie Cheung’s tactical driving course takes over, and everyone tries to throw the enemy, weaving in and out like a school of fish confusing a tuna. (It’s hard to think of tuna as predators, because we eat them as sushi, but if you’re on Mr. Bluefin’s dinner list, he’s as mean a sucker as you could ever know, and he is fast and damn hungry.) There are only four vehicles and one of them’s a tank, so the effect is muted, but Mr. Bluefin in this case is a lousy shot, or more likely he’s never seen coordinated tactical driving before. He shoots at where we are and he needs to be shooting at where we’re going to be. He misses. We leave him behind.

Twenty minutes later: three figures beside a barricade of wood and rubble. Gonzo barely slows. He flicks his headlights to full, and I catch a glimpse of a couple of guys with an RPG (they are not aiming it at us, they just have one, like they’re having tea and grenades) and a third figure in shredded coveralls. This third person, apart from the others, is tall and too thin, and wears an orange prisoner-suit and a gasmask. The gasmask is very strange because it makes the person in it look as if they have no head. The person waves, arms crossing and uncrossing. “Stop” the orange person is saying, or “Help” or possibly “Slow down so we can kill you and steal your car.” And then they’re gone—Gonzo has taken us over the middle of the barricade, and they haven’t shot at us. Does that mean they weren’t part of the outfit who blew up the road? Or does it mean that they were, but they don’t fancy a real fight? I have no idea. I ask Gonzo, but he’s fighting to control the car. He’s had enough of this crap, and he’s got the thing up to about sixty, which isn’t bad on a road made of clay and asphalt patched with sheep shit. We leave the waving creepy person behind, and Gonzo keeps that speed up until we arrive at Corvid’s Field.

THE UN FLAG is still flying over the control tower, sad and bleached. A couple of guys in blue helmets stand at the gates, covering us with their sidearms. The walls have been shot up some, and there’s a dirty smear along one side of the tower where some kind of explosive has gone off and the tower has been patched but not repainted. Otherwise, they seem to have got lucky, although from this angle it’s not possible to see the whole field. And on the runway (Sing hosanna!) there is a pair of elderly but serviceable cargo planes. They have no windows and the seating will not be comfortable, but between them, if we are permitted to use them, we can evacuate everyone.

One of the blue helmets walks out towards us, cautious. He’s a brave little guy, probably Puerto Rican on secondment. It takes some chutzpah to leave your own gate and walk up to an armoured column—even one as ragtag as ours—and tell them to behave or face the consequences of your displeasure. That is what he is coming to do, and he knows—and he knows that we know—that those consequences are basically him being extremely stern and maybe his commander giving us a sound talking-to. Or, I realise, a blonde civilian with a too-long face coming out and stamping her foot—but Elisabeth is nowhere to be seen. I hope she has already gone home.

“Who the hell are you?” the UN guy wants to know.

“We’re a travelling circus,” Gonzo says acidly. “I’m the bearded lady and these here”—he points to Jim Hepsobah and Sally and me—“are my clowns.” The UN guy doesn’t think much of that.

“Fine,” he says. “Take me to the ringmaster.” And Gonzo says that’s him too.

“Turn around,” the UN guy says. “There’s an armed camp maybe six or seven hours that way. They can help you better than we can.”

“We need evac,” Gonzo replies, “and so do you.”

“Turn around,” the UN guy says again. Gonzo looks thunderous and pissed off, and he’s about to share his feelings when the gate opens and the other UN guy waves us in. Our guy looks pretty disgusted and steps out of the way. Gonzo throws him a little grin and we all cruise merrily past him, through the gates, and the last we see of him is a single figure trudging slowly back to his position. We don’t pay him much attention, though, because by this time we realise how badly we have been fucked. We realise this because once everyone is inside the compound and outside their vehicles, soldiers who are emphatically not with the UN step out from the low buildings of Corvid’s Field and point their guns at us, and unlike George Copsen’s bastard squad at Jarndice, they don’t bother to tell us we are prisoners, because that sort of speaks for itself. And after patting us down and disarming us quite thoroughly, they take us to their leader. Vasille makes a face: merde.

Ruth Kemner.

She has taken the small departures hall for her own. It is a high room with narrow vertical windows in frosted glass intended to let the light through but not the glare. There’s a beaten-up luggage carousel by the door and a bar on one side, but the main event is at the far end under the sign saying Embarquement and the same in a variety of languages. Men stand in precise parade-ground formation, port arms. A moth-eaten red carpet has been layed out in strips across the floor, and a few rostra have been shoved together to make a dais. As in a place where a monarch sits—which is where the whole thing goes absolutely to the bad.

Ruth Kemner is sitting on a throne. It is not a very special throne, as these things go. It is the control chair of an assault helicopter welded to a metal frame, the whole thing draped over with a leopard skin which might have come from an actual leopard, but probably didn’t. The setup looks like some seventies movie in which warrior women, played by bathing beauties, capture and threaten to execute a group of male castaways, before melting blissfully into the arms of the square-jawed and plucky chaps, who stand for no sapphic nonsense and know that every good girl wants a firm hand. It’s ludicrous.

That’s probably why she has added the two severed heads to the uprights of the throne. They lend her an undeniable air of not screwing around. Her eyes look completely ordinary, which is what eyes do, but the face in which they rest, the network of small muscles which are used, voluntarily and otherwise, to produce expressions and communicate mood, is broadcasting that she’s dangerously psychotic. She sits forward, and she turns her head slowly so we can see that someone has taken a knife to her. They have attempted to open her throat, but they have failed, and there is a cut along her jaw which must have been painful and bloody, but which is now nicely stitched up. The surgeon has also put the lower half of her ear back, but it’s not looking too hopeful. As she looks at us, her face is in precisely the same position as head number 2, and the resemblance is uncanny. Unless Ruth Kemner has a sister, she’s gone and murdered someone who looks very like her, and used that person as part of the furnishings. It hardly matters which. Kemner has, as advertised, gone batshit. And from the old newspaper stand at the far end of the room her flunky brings out a muffled, furious figure, thrashing and bucking and roaring for a fair shot, or possibly for justice and freedom, and when they whip off his hood, we are all able to recognise Ben Carsville. If that scar is his work, it says a great deal for the unvarnished power of idiocy. It also explains why Kemner isn’t dead, and foreshadows a very bad ending to the story of the most handsome soldier in the Elective Theatre.

Carsville sets his jaw and glances at the throne situation and the heads, and he obviously takes in the movie thing too, because he makes some off-colour joke. Ben Carsville, of course, is exactly the kind of man who would be able to win the heart of a libidinously frustrated Amazon queen. Unfortunately, Kemner isn’t some busty trollop with a power complex. She was a respectable kind of mercenary soldier (“non-governmental military consultant”) at the bloodier end of the spectrum. What she is now, after the things which have happened since George Copsen’s red telephone rang and signalled the commencement of non-conventional hostilities in the new era, is less certain.

She looks at Ben Carsville with a chilly curiosity. Whatever sassy opening he used hasn’t immediately had its effect. She doesn’t slap him in an affronted yet alluring way; she doesn’t stare moodily into his eyes. She regards him with a kind of scientific interest, as if he were a new species ready for vivisection. She nods at her thugs. They pick Carsville up with a lot of “hur hur hur” and Kemner leads us all out around the back of the departures hall.

When you walk a prisoner at gunpoint, there is one thing you do not do. You do not poke him with your gun barrel. Every second you spend in physical contact with your prisoner is a second he is aware of the disposition of your body, and is close enough to attack you—assuming he knows where the gun is—before you can pull the trigger. Olympic athletes leaving the starting blocks are too slow to fire a gun in the time it takes a trained soldier to push the barrel to one side once he knows where it is. A gun is a weapon of medium distance, not close combat. So you don’t give him the chance to map out the situation, you don’t let him feel how relaxed or how tense you are and you never, ever shove him with your weapon, because if you are a fraction off centre, and he allows the barrel to pivot him, you have just put the business end of your gun right past him and he can bite your nose off or use your gun to shoot the man in front or any number of other things which are not conducive to good penal discipline.

Kemner’s men are good. They keep a fluid yet constant distance between us, they do not allow us to communicate and they do not rise to baits like stumbling, slight increases or decreases in speed or comments about their hair. They imagine, therefore, that they have communicated nothing to us about themselves beyond that they are in the position to kill us all, and have no intention of reversing roles. They are mistaken. The way they have deployed is extremely revealing. Our guards are moving in a mild curve behind us, so that we are caught in the focus of their field of fire if they should choose to gun us down—so much is to be expected. Around them, however, are other men whose eyes are turned outward. They watch the hills and the trees around, and they carry long guns. They are looking out, but also at everything which is not immediately within their sphere of control. In the control tower there is a sniper. These men are not pro forma. They are paying attention in a way which is unique to people who have recently been attacked and expect to be attacked again. And they are expecting attack not just from outside, but from within the bounds of Corvid’s Field, which by rights should be their safe zone. Their fingers rest close to their triggers, and they are intense and even a bit twitchy. In other words, someone has given them a serious case of the willies. That information is worth something, but it slips away as we come in view of our destination, and my stomach lurches and all the hairs on my neck tingle as if there were a spider walking over my lips.

Corvid’s Field has been hit by a Go Away Bomb. This place was not supposed to be a target—at least, it wasn’t one of our targets—but on the other hand, what is supposed to be a target and what actually gets blown up (or Gone Away) are movable feasts in war. Beside the runway, concealed from the approach road by the bulk of the tower building, the ground slopes away in a smooth line, as if excavated in a single go by a very big, curved shovel. A large section of forest and a fragment of a wooden outhouse have disappeared, along with the latter half of a cargo plane. The plane has rolled back a bit, or been pushed, so that it’s now a sort of open corridor out over the excision, which unlike all the ones I have seen in testing is not empty. Bubbling up from the centre there is water, or something looking very much like it: a silvery, frictionless fluid filled with bubbles. Little waves roll out from the middle, and a fine spume drifts over the surface, making crazy shapes like giants and gurning faces.

It smells wrong. A lake like this should send out a rich, warm scent of water. Even if it’s a burst pipe or (less appetising) a sundered septic tank, there should be a strong smell to go with it. Looking at Kemner, I wonder about aviation fuel or chemical waste—it would suit her new persona very well to have a tame lake of fire behind her throne room—but there’s not a whiff of either. There is no smell of anything at all—and yet there’s a great quantity of whatever it is, bubbling away in front of us. Has the excision uncovered a well of naturally distilled water? Or saline? In the centre of the lake the surface heaves, a glassy bubble pushing up and then bursting to send a column of the stuff up twenty feet into the sky. Is Addeh Katir geothermically active? I have no idea. It was not included in the briefings we were given when we arrived. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t be. But a bad feeling is creeping up on me, above and beyond the obvious dread associated with the business of being in the hands of a grade-one loon; a sense of Oh shit. It is visceral and possibly—in the most literal sense—existential. I am worried about existence.

Kemner gestures, and Carsville appears in the aisle of the truncated cargo plane. He is blindfolded, but his arms and legs are free. Piranha, I decide. She has found a breeding population of piranha, and she intends to feed us to them. Do they have piranha here? I have no idea. I know piranha are by origin South American, but on the other hand it would be quite like the imperial Brits in their day to have imported a few to add local colour. What ho, Sergeant Daliwal, how are the fish today? Pukka, are they? Had enough goat? I swear, if I never eat goat again . . . The Italians eat it, you know, but they’ll eat anything if it’s got enough garlic. Can’t fight, though, can they? Quality of man, Sergeant Daliwal, is what it’s all about. Your lot know that. Why they signed up with us, of course. What’s that? Anand lost another finger? Chap’s careless. They’re piranha, not bloody whelks. It occurs to me that the man is probably an ancestor of Dr. Fortismeer. He is exactly the sort of person who would feel that a mountainous Eden was incomplete without ugly, ravenous fish in an ornamental lake. Eat burglars, more fun than a haha! Aha, ahaha ha! Hah? Sort of a test project, y’see; if it goes well, we’ll have a few more! Hah! Like to see the natives swim the moat then! Eh, Sergeant Daliwal, eh? ’Scusing your presence, of course, good man . . .

Again, the possibility was not covered in my briefings. It will almost certainly have been in Gonzo’s, if it happened, but now is not the moment to ask. Kemner’s head flunky appears in the plane behind Carsville, and shoves him over the lip of the plane into the lake. Pirates again, I’m thinking, but of a very different kind. Plank-walking? Join or die, perhaps. Carsville shouts, flips and lands arse first and submerges. A second later, he is bolt upright, on his feet, sputtering, then he falls over. He is about thirty feet away, maybe a little more, and this time when he comes up, he flails wildly, striking the water. The piranha theory gains currency in my mind, but I don’t believe it. My existential fear is in full flood. This is a wrong thing. It is an antithing. It has the quality of not. I am coming to believe, because I can see familiar debris, because of the shape of the excision and what might be the rear end of a delivery-system rocket shadowed in the centre of the lake, that this water is fallout from a Go Away Bomb. This stuff I am looking at is somehow not stuff I should ever see with my eyes. That would mean that Go Away Bombs are not clean and perfect after all, and that the wanton messing we have done with the basic level of the universe is not, after all, completely free and without consequence.

And then a hand reaches up out of the water and grabs Carsville by the shoulder. He falls backwards, under the surface, which heaves and billows as the struggle begins in earnest.

Ben Carsville fights for his life. He may be an arsehole—I may have had to hit him in the jaw to save his men from a gas attack—but he’s not a coward (whatever that means in the real world). Nor is he a pushover. He surges up, and roars, and pummels at the person in the lake with him. This is a new Carsville, animated and furious, and actually quite impressive. He goes under, and comes up belly first, and he seems afraid, despairing and beaten. His opponent has him in an arm-lock, and is gradually ripping the joint apart. Carsville shouts and dives beneath the surface, reappears having somehow reversed the hold. He grins fiercely, then loses his grip. His opponent springs back, throws punches which start out scientific and grow more desperate. The two men flail at one another, cling together, grapple and throttle. They are well matched. Kemner has selected her executioner (or is it another prisoner?) with ominous appropriateness. It seems that neither one can defeat the other. Is that a draw? Or will she have them both impaled? Then finally, for a moment, the two men square off, eye to eye and mano-a-mano, and one of them lifts the other up, down, and holds his head below the surface.

This is the life of Benedict Anthony Carsville, as it flashes before his eyes. Most likely, as he struggles he is thinking about the toughness of his opponent’s jacket, the strength of his arms. Possibly, as some men do in battle, he is worrying with terrible intensity about things like the smell of cows in the rain and the answer to last week’s crossword. Be that as it may, this is what ought to go through his head:

He does not remember being born. No one does. Some people will tell you that they do. There are hypnotists who can help you recall it. They can also help you remember your time in the army of Rome, your life as an alien being in a far-off galaxy and what it was like to be a garden snail during the Renaissance. These recollections should be treated with the utmost caution.

He remembers his mother’s orange trousers. They were made of stretchy velvet. She wore them the whole time. He remembers her hair, which was dyed, and the fact that it made him sick when he sucked it. He remembers his father, who had only one arm, and he remembers playing football with a balloon. The balloon took a very long time to do anything, so the game was a continuous exercise in frustration and delight.

He remembers the day they came and covered the playground in special rubberised tiles, so that it would be safer. They dug up the grass and the mud and replaced them with a scientifically proven composite which would reduce the chances of broken bones and scuffs. He watched the large, bored men going to and fro with rolls of underlay and stacks of special tiles. They laughed and stopped for tea, which was awful because he wanted to go on the swing. They fitted a governing device to the swing so that it couldn’t go beyond a certain angle. He never really liked the playground after that, because it was just like being indoors. It smelled wrong. It was even and controlled. He waited for the new flooring to weather and split like the decking at his uncle’s house, but it didn’t. His father told him it was biologically and chemically inert, and he wanted to know what a “nert” was. His father thought this was funny.

He remembers kissing Lisa Crusky. She tasted in the main of snot, because they were only nine. There was an aftertaste of girl, which he wasn’t sure was very nice. He remembers kissing her brother, Niall Crusky, and being beaten for it. He did not understand why, and actually still doesn’t. Niall Crusky tasted exactly like Lisa, except without the tangerine ChapStick and the snot. After that day Lloyd Carsville insisted that his son wear grown-up clothes, in grey and blue. Benedict was the best-dressed, most uncomfortable child in school. As he got older, though, it started to look good on him, and he established that there were advantages to this. Girls—girls had soft parts boys did not, and he had discovered he was interested in those areas—became most aware of Ben Carsville’s angel face and suited, conscious cool.

He was good at games. He was good at football, at hockey, at shooting and tennis and everything else. Everyone agreed he was a handsome lad, and always so well dressed. He was hot-tempered too, quick to pick a quarrel and quick to make friends. He was like a damned Greek, his uncle Frederick said, kind of admiring. Uncle Frederick worked with a lot of Greeks in the olive oil business. Most people found this funny and joked about the Mob. Uncle Frederick explained patiently that the Mafia was Italian and that in any case he actually did import olive oil. Someone had to.

He remembers his first great seduction; not his first time having sex (oh, yes, he remembers that, but it was unexpectedly drab) but his first conquest. It was on his nineteenth birthday. Gabrielle Vasseli was madly in love with him. Ben was madly in love with her older sister Tita, who was twenty-six. Gabrielle arrived in her sister’s car, and Ben focused the full force of his charm on Tita for a few seconds as he held the door.

“Thank you, Miss Vasseli,” Ben Carsville said. “Are you sure you won’t come in as well?”

Tita Vasseli looked at him and Ben Carsville saw in her eyes, in the flicker of amazement and the involuntary swallow, that she was going to say yes. Ben was the rarest of things, a genuinely beautiful man. Good-looking men are commonplace, and beautiful woman are not rare. Male beauty, capable of overcoming the stigma attached to it and undeniable, is one in many hundreds of thousands. Tita Vasseli wanted to possess this boy, to bathe in him, wash herself in him and have some of it rub off. At the very least, she wanted to bone him as he had never been boned before. She moistened her lips and sought a way to put this

to him.

Gabrielle wrapped her arm around Ben Carsville’s waist.

Tita Vasseli hated her baby sister for a full ten seconds. Then she recovered herself and felt a certain relief.

Ben Carsville didn’t mind. He knew what he knew. If he never saw Tita Vasseli again, he would know it for ever. The answer was yes. He seduced Gabrielle in the meantime. Tita Vasseli went home, spent a few days trying to concentrate and finally admitted to herself that she was a spluttering kettle of sexual frustration liable to boil over, melt the kitchen counter, fry the ring main and short out the neighbourhood. Weighing the consequences, she coolly decided that the only way to deal with this situation in an adult fashion was to go full steam ahead with her first plan vis-à-vis Ben Carsville, id est the boning. She made the call. When Gabrielle caught Tita and Ben in bed together a month later, the wailing rattled the ceiling and the gnashing of teeth was ghastly to behold. Tita was abject but also quite pleased. Later that day she showed Ben something so obscene he almost passed out.

He enlisted out of boredom, and because, in his entire life, he’d never found anyone who could say no and make it stick. (Ben Carsville’s life was not like Gonzo’s: Gonzo was charming, and his relentless forward momentum made him irresistible. But he knew doubt. Ben Carsville did not. He knew only that from the day they covered his playground, the earth beneath his feet was smooth, conquered, featureless.)

In the service someone knocked out one of Ben Carsville’s front teeth, and he had to have it replaced. He got a fine, elegant scar under one eye from a brawl over who jogged whose elbow at the bar. He was run ragged, reached the end of his physical capacity and then discovered more within himself. He glowed. And then it all sort of smoothed out. No war, no problem. Just more slow promotion—endless, inevitable, upward progress. He watched war movies because it was the only combat around. He watched Apocalypse Now two hundred and fifty times. He applied for and received duty as a peacekeeper in Africa. It was fine. The bad guys shot at him—but he was in a tank and wearing protective gear. Anyway, they never hit him. Once, out of curiosity, he stopped his armoured car and got out, walked into a fire zone, and took out a machine-gun emplacement by blowing it up with a grenade. He got a medal for bravery under fire, but in truth he had been neither.

He remembers coming to Addeh Katir. He remembers the sense of hope as he landed, the plane swinging out over green canopies of forests, over mountains like shattered glass and endless interconnected lakes. He remembers the people, open, suspicious and angry, abandoned and proud. This, at last, was a place which could say no in a great voice, and mean it. He fell in love.

Addeh Katir took three days to break Ben Carsville on its wheel. It wasn’t remotely interested in his good looks. By the time he arrived, the Katiris had been living with Erwin Kumar and his bandit police and his foreign backers for more than a decade, and they were sick of it. Some of them—shepherds, probably, because Ben Carsville had ordered a mini-ovicide around Red Gate—took up arms and shot at his men. They fired bullets and arrows and darts and pebbles. Ben Carsville’s command lost three men to pebbles in his first week. They were hit in the throat. The fourth one got lucky: he was hit in the eye and lost binocular vision, but didn’t actually expire immediately. The unit medic patched him up, but while he was waiting for transport back to the main HQ it transpired the pebble was coated in resin from a vilely poisonous tree. Private Hengist started to scream. He screamed for seven hours until finally his lungs collapsed and he died. (Shepherds are the natural enemies of wolves and hunting cats. Like wolves and hunting cats, and like sheep, they are not interested in the Geneva Conventions or the Biological Weapons Treaty. They have a job to do, and they do it. Shepherds do not need to read Clausewitz to understand about total war, because they live with it all the time.)

Ben Carsville didn’t care any more that Addeh Katir was a beautiful place. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this, ever given him any cause to believe the world contained no-win situations. He didn’t care that Addeh Katir’s people were vibrant and noble, traders and musicians and historians, with a gentle traditional religion and a powerful sense of community. He just wanted to be who he had always thought he was. He wanted to be bigger, stronger, more debonair, more dashing. It didn’t really matter whether he was good at his job as long as he looked right. He was living in the war zone now, and he got his silk dressing gown out and he marched up and down his fence to show how in control he was and how he did not give a damn. He exhorted his men to greater efforts in personal grooming, tried to get them to understand that there were no chance encounters, only actions and reactions. They followed him for a while down this strange road. If his luck had been transferable, perhaps they would have followed him to hell. But Ben Carsville’s luck was an intensely selective, individual thing. His unearthly beauty was dulled by dirt and anguish, but somehow it still worked. Snipers turned aside from him. They picked those nearby instead. When Ben Carsville walked his ramparts with a cigar, bullets zinged through the air to his right or left in case he was talking to someone. He could stand where he liked and do as he pleased. The other side was not interested in his death, but in his ruin. His reality began to diverge from everyone else’s in marked, dangerous ways. Then he got punched out, taken down and disgraced by Gonzo Lubitsch and his smart-mouthed arsehole friends.

He remembers the plunge into Ruth Kemner’s lake. He remembers the warm, sweet water and the strange sense of coming unstuck. He remembers going to climb out, and the ghastly, stomach-churning feeling of a hand dragging him down into the mud. An enemy. A monster. He struck out, found his target. He struck again, shook the water from his eyes and saw his man. He remembers being horrified, but he honestly does not remember why. It was important but not relevant. The man was inimical. The man was trying to take his life. He didn’t need to know more. This was the moment where he would be what he wanted to be. He lunged: instinct, pure and bleak and hot.

Ben Carsville is fighting for his life, giving everything he has. He tries so hard. We watch, and we wonder if we will be next. The lake churns. Blood and bubbles. A figure staggers upright. I look. I do not know whether this is what I expected or not, and I don’t know whether it is good or bad.

Ben Carsville spits blood and snot, coughs and marches back up the bank. Behind him, something man-like bobs in the water. Something dead and a bit sad. Carsville looks great, all cinematic and damp, and somehow more Carsville now than he ever was before. He glances at Kemner and starts to laugh. He sits down on the shore and cackles, and they come and wrap a towel around him, and leave him there. Apparently, he has walked the plank successfully.

They take us back inside and lock us up in what was, at one stage, the secure liquor locker for the airport bar. We are still handcuffed, so all they have to do is run a thick wire-cord rope between our hands and padlock it to the pins in the wall, and we’re pretty securely detained. They slam the door like matinee villains and make a point of chortling as they walk away.

Gonzo looks at me, and I look at Gonzo. We were standing at the front, closest to the action, and so it’s possible that no one else saw what we saw. If they didn’t see it, they won’t believe that we did. I’m not sure I do either. But for a moment, that moment when Ben Carsville stood eye to eye with his opponent, before he took him down and choked his mouth with the stuff in that unlikely lake, it looked as if that opponent was also Ben Carsville.

CHAINED to a wall by an implacable enemy. Situation: v. bad, even horrible. Special forces guys are trained for horrible situations, of course, and specifically for situations involving capture and terrible torture. They are schooled in resource. They are taught to be tough and ready. Nurses don’t get that kind of training, but Leah seems to be managing pretty well; Egon isn’t, so he’s sort of hanging by his arms and weeping, and no one can pick him up or hold him and tell him it’s okay, and in any case that would be a lie. Whatever happens when you get thrown into the lake, it clearly is bad. Ben Carsville isn’t in here with us. He’s outside with Kemner, a fully paid-up member of her jolly monster squad. Maybe the lake is just a huge pit of nasty brainwashing, psychosis-inducing gunk. Maybe it’s a consequence of the Go Away Bombs and Professor Derek’s genius-dumbarse physics. Whatever it is, Kemner wants to put us in it, one by one, and will enjoy putting us in it, and she is a crazy lady with a collection of human heads on her office furniture. This is enough for us to know that we need to escape.

The trouble is that although special forces guys are prepared for this, that essentially means keeping a positive mental attitude, being ready to take your chance when it comes and knowing how to resist torture for an extra half-hour of the really bad stuff. It does not make you able to walk through walls or bend solid steel with the power of your naked brain. Nor does it necessarily give you the ability to see the obvious, because it sort of concentrates you on a win/lose mind-set where winning is frustrating the other guy and losing is giving in to pain and injury. They can get their hands in front of them easily—just step through the cuffs, because they’re yogi flexible—but then what?

Which is why this moment belongs to me. There is a very unsubtle, easy way to get loose from this prison. For all that he knows it’s there, because he went to the same class I did on counter-restraint, it isn’t the kind of thing Gonzo is liable to come up with. Gonzo is one of nature’s winners, and this kind of victory is what you might call pyrrhic. It’s not something you can ask Leah to do, and it’s not something which would necessarily work for Jim Hepsobah or some of those other guys, because they’ve spent so much time bulking up and turning their hands into lethal weapons. It probably would work for Sally Culpepper, but it would also make her useless if we need a sniper somewhere down the line. So it’s a perfect plan for me. The thing is that although it is easy, it isn’t going to be any fun. And so I take a few breaths before I do it, and I send up, for the first time, a sort of prayer, although it’s rather hazy around the edges.

Most people, when they pray, have a notion of where the words are going. They have in mind God the Bearded, God the Robed, God the Absent Father sitting on a cloud going through his postbag. My prayer is in a blank envelope, left sitting at a bus stop. Anyone who is interested can pick it up and open it. Anyone, in fact, who wants to be God—to me, at least—can slip their thumb between the flap and the body of the envelope and crack the seal, and discover my one, solemn wish: Dear Lord, I want to go home. All they have to do, to get into my personal pantheon, is deliver the appropriate miracle. In the meantime, though, I’m working on the basis that the letter will sit there and get brushed off the back of the bench and into the gutter, and then a rainstorm will wash it into the sewer system where it will get sodden and mouldy, and the ink will fade and the paper turn to sludge, and my prayer will just fade away unread, as they mostly seem to. So I rest my left hand against the wall, thumb outwards. Then I stretch as far away from it as I possibly can. And then I hurl myself hard against it, the bone of my hip crunching against the small ones which make up my hand. This hurts, but nothing breaks. It takes a few minutes and several repetitions of the operation, during which everyone turns to stare at me in absolute horror, before something substantial snaps and I am able (after a few seconds of vomiting) to pull my broken hand out of the cuff and remove myself from the rope.

The pain is transcendentally awful. The sickly knowledge that I did this to myself amplifies it, makes it special. It rebounds off the understanding that I cannot stop, that I must go on, or suffer more of the same. Belatedly, I remember that there is a set of internal chi gong exercises which can be used (in advance, of course) to deaden pain. They are called the Nine Little Nurses, which Master Wu always found vaguely erotic, so that, when he explained them, there was a kind of wistful, naughty expression on his face, suggesting that in his younger years he knew at least three of them very well indeed. Not that there are actual nurses. Apart from Leah and Egon. I consider the possibility that Leah and Egon are illusions I created, moments ago, to help me through the pain, and then realise that I have been standing there, lightly holding my hand while everyone hopes like hell I don’t scream or pass out, for a minute and a half, and that I am in the grip of some kind of weird psychological fugue, and it’s time to shake it and go.

I shake it, and look over at Jim Hepsobah, who has a kind of placid energy about him which I figure I can usefully borrow about now. I take the quiet of Jim; a rugged, mountainous refuge of the heart. The fog sort of clears, or at least I can move again.

There is now only the door to deal with. It’s not much of a door. It is intended to keep people out of the booze, not to keep anyone prisoner inside. (The pain from my hand is moderately appalling. I cling to the sense of Jim Hepsobah in my mind, and I review the mountain I have envisaged to symbolise him. It has streams. Cold, clear streams. I dip my hand in one, and clothe myself in Hepsobahish strength. Hepsobahian? Hepsobahic? Or would there be a contraction? Hepsoban? Part of me carries on with this important line of reasoning, and I let it, because while it’s doing that it can’t feel the pain. So.) If I had a hairpin, and I knew anything about locks, I could probably crack us out. I could, in time, kick the thing open, although the noise would almost certainly bring unwanted company. I contemplate the possibilities until I realise that Leah is trying to attract my attention with a growing urgency and, rather unfairly, exasperation. I go over to her.

“Turn the handle!” she says, and I open my mouth to object that no one would fail to lock the door, and then just to be sure, I go over there and turn the handle. The door opens.

Not that unfairly, then. To my Hepsobahian strength, I add Leahian (there’s another one ending in h; disaster!) perspicacity. Perspicaciousness. Ow, ow, ow. I look back at Leah. She grins fiercely, encouraging and imploring all at once, and I fall just a little bit more in love with her, then step out into the next room, which is the back of the airport bar. Around the corner I can hear someone mixing a cocktail. If it’s a martini, he is butchering it. Barbarian. (Meaning “one who is bearded,” and curiously not in origin pejorative. The Romans knew that people with beards could be sharp as a gladius, they just liked to distinguish smoothly shaven from hirsute . . . That sounds pornographic, doesn’t it? Shaven? Yes, indeed. Mmm.)

I clamp down on my thoughts and extend Leah’s smarts towards the cocktailista in the bar. By the sound of his footsteps, it is a man. Almost before I look, I know that it is Carsville, the new, dangerous Carsville, with added suave. I peer at him around the edge of the doorway. He has his back to me and he’s brutalising a cheap shaker, James Bond style, making the wateriest martini this airport has ever seen. His face is unmarked, and he doesn’t move like a guy who just fought for his life. No twinges, no hesitations, no gasps. He finishes his mix, and pours it out, spilling a fair bit. Then I lunge down behind the wall as he hops on the bar, briefly turning my way, and swivels on his backside as if this were some expensive penthouse in the city. I’m in no danger of discovery. His attention is all for who’s watching: Hey there, my name’s Ben. Hi, ladies . . . There are no ladies. They are in his head. (Shaven, no doubt. Ow, ow, ow. Hepsobah. The mountain has forests, and bears. Big, powerful animals. Slumbering. Waiting. Yes.) He ambles away towards Kemner and the others at the far end of the room. Halfway down, two of Kemner’s men are on guard. Still nervous, even here. The willies, yes. I duck down again, watching the drips of ice-water martini splatter onto the floor.

And then I realise that someone has opened my prayer envelope, and taken at least partial steps to help me out. Praise unto Ben Carsville, idiot and monster, for he is an angel of the Lord—even unawares. At eye level with me now, lying beside the cash register, there is a hammer. It briefly occurs to me to wonder whether this is for remonstrating with surly customers or correcting defects in the till, but even to me that is not the important thing. The important thing is that if I can get to it and get back out again without being spotted, it will be a useful study aid in my newly chosen specialist field of getting-the-fuck-out-of-here-ology. I crawl on my knees and my right hand along under the bar towards the hammer. Every shuffle makes a noise like a fire bell ringing and I can’t imagine they don’t hear, and every jolt sends a bright blue spike into my left eye, which for some reason is feeling the pain from my hand. I reach the hammer, and then I make an error of curiosity and open the fridge. Nine pairs of eyes stare back at me. The fridge stinks. Kemner is keeping her heads here so that she always has one ready to go on the throne. In the meantime, they rest on paper plates. UN soldiers, maybe a civilian doctor. I manage not to throw up, and close the fridge door softly. I find myself staring into my own eyes, reflected in the mirrored refrigerator. I look like hell, which is to be expected. I look like one of the poor bastards inside. Although there is a little mote in the surface of the fridge, a dint, which makes funny shapes if I move myself around it. And then I am not alone, which is a major shocker.

The face is above me, and it isn’t really a face. It is a gasmask. It is poking through a hole in the ceiling. It isn’t visible to the bad guys at the far end of the room because the bar has a canopy of stretched plastic with “KatiriCola” branded across it in probably actionable letters. The un-face sprouts from a pair of shoulders in an orange prisoner’s jumpsuit, and in fact the wearer has the hood up as well. I am being spied on by an orange person! Orange-headed spies! I seem to recall a song about a man with an orange head. Sadly, I cannot remember the tune. I hum, very quietly so that Kemner’s people do not come over and kill me. Laa dee dumm . . . Ow, ow, ow. The orange person—it is a male person, I can see stubble on his neck, and I can smell him—manages to convey a look of alarm, which is pretty good going for someone with no facial features. It must be posture. Good old mammalian body language, functioning upside down. Still, I stop humming. The Leah and the Hepsobah parts of me are pretty sure this is not a good moment to be doing that. The person behind the mask considers me, and I look at his lenses and feel that I’m not getting the best of the arrangement. (Then again, there’s a tiny crust of blood where the mask meets the hood, and when he moves, it is stiffly; he’s injured. Perhaps I’d rather not see what is underneath, after all.)

I stare at the orange head. Is it considering betraying me? Should I take steps to eliminate it? But no. This is Kemner’s secret foe, the sneaky one they’re all worrying about. Oh. Oh yes. The waving crazy person by the roadside—the one who wanted us not to come here. At least he isn’t saying he told us so. Isn’t saying anything, actually, silent orange waving upside down gasmask person. We look at one another. I hum, but only in my head. I smell him again, and this time I smell blood and something sweet. Gangrene then. The orange person looks at my nauseous expression and nods. Dying soon.

After a moment the orange person traces with one gloved hand on the ceiling. Semicircle. Zigzag. He speaks in hieroglyphs. I understand nothing. Semicircle. Zigzag. A plan of attack? A clock. A pretty flower? He is Zorro. Yes. That’s it! Zorro has come. The fox, with his mighty sword and whip, to smite the evildoers . . . Z for Zorro. I think about it. Ah. Semicircle. Zigzag. Not Z. U, N. He is a soldier. He was a prisoner. He will fight, because she keeps his friends in a drinks fridge.

Kemner has an orange enemy, or at least an orange not-friend. Which means that I have an orange maybe-friend. I wonder whether the face beneath the mask winked at me. It seems possible. I am tempted to get up and peer through the eyeholes. And then the figure shows me both hands (how it holds on up there is a mystery, perhaps it has orange friends? Or it is using its legs. Maybe it has long, orange toes. Ew.) and taps one wrist to indicate time, and then holds up both hands again, fingers spread. Ten. Ten minutes? Ten seconds? Ten o’clock? But if so, is that Zulu or local? The orange person slithers back up into the loft or the air duct or whatever it is up there, and I am alone with the hammer, and I realise that I can hear someone coming over to the bar. I have stared at the orange person for too long. Now I have to go fast, as if I weren’t injured. Perhaps that was the point? Fast like a greyhound! Any time now. Yes. Right now.

And finally, because my internal Jim Hepsobah takes direct action, I move. It is agony like nothing else. My wrist is fine. Broken, but painless. My eye, which has nothing wrong with it, really hurts. Ow, ow, ow. It is made entirely of blue fire and my hand feels sort of muzzy as I round the corner to the lock-up. I have skittered, pell-mell, across the floor of the bar and around the corner, using the broken limb as if it weren’t, and feeling the grating of bones and the general badness and not caring. And then I hand the hammer over to Jim Hepsobah (Gonzo looks hurt), who rips off his shirt to muffle the noise and proceeds to beat the rope out of the wall in about a minute. Everyone is free now, albeit unarmed and handcuffed. I explain about the orange person. Ten? Ten what? Gonzo thinks minutes. Tobemory Trent puts Egon down, and he and Leah set my hand as best they can and put it in a sling made from my shirt. Leah’s fingers are warm on my chest, and I make her put her palm over my eye. It helps. A brief council of war is convened, during which everyone takes turns to hold Egon, because he is shaking and needs to be loved, and we are leaving no one behind, not physically and not spiritually, because we are who we are and that is how we’re going to stay. Tobemory Trent moves around smashing handcuffs.

Assets: one wire-cord rope. One hammer. Two metal spikes. One irritated but unarmed SpecOps unit. Three medical specialists, a rearechelon officer, assorted grunts with basic skills like driving, small-scale construction and stabbing people. Gonzo gestures to the wall. He holds a spike against it, and Jim Hepsobah swings. Stone falls away. And again, and again . . . A little light shows through. This room was not intended to be secure. He gestures to Sally Culpepper to wedge the door with the other spike. She does so immediately. And now things are happening very fast. Gonzo peers through the hole and is satisfied. He and Jim demolish a low, narrow stretch, and we crawl out one by one, finding ourselves behind some crates and other junk.

Gonzo is not there when I arrive, hopalong style, but as Egon is passed through, he reappears carrying a recently deceased bad guy over one shoulder and a rifle in his free hand. The first thing he drops on the ground, the second he passes not to Jim but to Sally, and he dons the undersized jacket and looted helmet of the dead man, and saunters away again. He vanishes around the corner, and I can hear him hailing someone, making a genuinely friendly noise. Gonzo likes everyone. He would really prefer that this person immediately see his point of view. He knows that won’t happen, and so he grins affably (I know he does, though I cannot see) and hugs his new pal, and somewhere in the hug the surprised hugee discovers that he cannot breathe, cannot shout, and is now totally in the power of this strange man, and then he knows nothing more. In this situation, because Gonzo is pressed for time and can’t afford any mistakes, the hugee will not awaken. Gonzo tosses the next uniform to one of his guys, a weird, plump little man called Sam who suffers from emotional (if not physical) priapism. Sam is a hound dog. He’d make a pass at a shop dummy. He shrugs into his borrowed clothes and vanishes after Gonzo, silent and serious, knife tucked away behind his forearm. Sam on business. Veeery scary. There is a muffled slicing noise, and Sam returns. There’s no blood on his uniform, and none on that of the man he has killed. There is blood on his knife. What has he done? Something clever. Something vile. He drops the corpse, jolly, ever-so-slightly fat Sam, because even heavy training can’t entirely defeat biology, and Sam is basically a fat man. The dead guy’s mouth opens, and leaks.

“Back of the throat,” Sam says, and Jim Hepsobah calls him a show-boat. Sam shrugs. “Target of opportunity,” he replies, and is gone again.

Eight minutes, give or take. Remaining issues: the sniper in the control tower. Evade or remove? Both are difficult. Summit conference behind the crates. Limited time before we are discovered.

At ten minutes on the dot, a grimy figure in orange tosses the sniper through the gaping windows of the tower and vanishes again. The sniper falls silently to the ground and hits, hard. He bounces, although it would be more correct to say that his body bounces, because he lands on his head and leaves most of it on the concrete. A few seconds later a plume of black smoke boils out of the tower. Kemner’s guys come streaming out of the departures hall, and she runs out behind them yelling “Stop,” which they don’t. They run towards the tower to extinguish the blaze, so about ten of them are right next to it when it blows up. A second or so later several outbuildings and the remaining planes go up too. Corvid’s Field gets loud and hot. I look around for dark clouds and dapple, but this is the ordinary sort of hell, man-made and reliable. Almost cosy. Kemner, with her remaining guys all around her, screams curses. Something screams back, bullets and rage, and the orange person emerges from a hangar and charges towards her, one leg twisted up and bullets going all over.

Kemner sees him. She doesn’t do the sensible thing, or even the sane thing. She starts screaming and yelling and shooting, and runs towards him. They both get hit. Neither of them cares. Bloodspray and anger. They are doing their own personal, totally deranged High Noon. This is a very private thing. We leave them to it.

Gonzo grabs me by the neck and hurls me out into the road, and Sam the Killer and Jim Hepsobah lead us fast and low to the vehicle depot. Gonzo has Egon on his shoulders now, and he’s running as fast as I am. Leah struggles along, but I cannot carry her. I am not Gonzo. My hand is broken. I drag her as fast as I dare and pray she will forgive me for not being bigger and stronger.

We reach the depot and we get our stuff. We run away. Kemner and the crazy orange person can have their last battle. We’ve had ours, and it’s over now. It’s not bold or heroic, but it’s how you stay alive.

WE DRIVE for hours, just heading away. The orange person helped us considerably, but also blew up our way home on the runway. I hum, out loud, because Ruth Kemner is not coming to find me any more. Leah finds her medical kit and shoots me full of something nice. The sound of it all is still in our heads (don’t mention heads) and the smell is in our noses. I watch the world go past outside, and realise where we are going. Gonzo is taking us to Shangri-La. Defensible. Perhaps even safe. But Addeh Katir is not the way it was. The whole landscape is grimmer and greyer, as if someone has dusted it with iron filings. There are buzzards and vultures in the sky, and even crows. The trees are dead. The sheep, most definitely, are dead; they have in fact been spread liberally around the place. Half of one gazes reproachfully from the roadside, mouth open in a despairing final “baaaa.” The road is busted up. And by this time I have begun to realise that Professor Derek, like many other brilliant men before him, is a fucking idiot of the first water. The beauty of the Go Away Bomb was always supposed to be that it was clean—but this has the feeling of fallout. It has the feeling of aftermath. And it definitely feels like the kind of thing Professor Derek was adamant could not happen.

We ride through the grimy day. Occasionally we see people, or things which might be people, but they hide and we don’t stop. Every so often we hear gunfire and explosions. Flashes of curiously bright colours, out of place, appear and disappear: Day-Glo green and gymnasium yellow flicker from around corners half a mile away, and then something goes whump or kKRrrssst, and then it’s quiet. There’s something familiar about those colours. We drive on. No one tries to kill us. We are in the eye of the storm, somehow. More glints among the trees, very unnatural pink. Far away, the sound of engines.

The road is gradually ceasing to be worthy of the name. A week ago it was a halfway decent piece of infrastructure, now it looks as if hailstones the size of footballs have been falling on it, and there are deep cracks and miniature ravines running through it. By the time we reach the mountains, it has given up and we’re following a riverbed. The RVs and the jeep make more noise than we want them to, and the tank won’t quite straddle the stream and either the left or the right caterpillar is constantly in the water, churning away and making a rut. We make Vasille drive at the back of the little convoy. The stream bed leads us around the back of the mesa (that’s probably not what it is, or what it’s called, but it’s close enough that I’ve started thinking of it in that way and maybe that’s a cowboy movie reference; maybe we’re the gang running from the law) and it doesn’t go conveniently up the mountain, it runs from a deep pool at the foot of a waterfall. There’s a goat track which does go up the mountain. At least Vasille claims it’s a goat track. There are nearly three times as many species of sheep as goats in this area, so the odds are against him. The point is that it’s a path, of sorts, and there is a musty cave behind the waterfall just big enough to hide the RVs. The tank we leave in the open; it has a nifty anti-theft device now attached to a largish bomb. Vasille is not someone who gets caught the same way twice.

We climb. Slowly. Fearfully. We shoot at shadows, and once someone from down in the valley fires on us, and we all scurry for cover, and I think of Butch and Sundance, but nothing else happens. We hide for about half an hour anyway.

Halfway up, we come over a crest, all secret and seriously covert, and there are sheep. Not dead, but alive and not alone. There are shepherds too, armed and dangerous, Katiris from one army or another doing exactly what we are doing: running like hell from the most mad part of the world and looking for a place which is less mad. And here they are, and here we are, and there’s lots of fear and guns and not much in the way of an exit strategy.

The tallest of them is also the leader, and he has a big, big handgun pointed at us, a Magnum or some other macho thing, and his friends all have AKs, probably Chinese AK-03s, basically the 74 model which everyone thinks of as an AK-47, plus a bottle opener and some extra seals to make them work better in the monsoon season. And this, right here, is a total goatfuck in the making, a big old mess of about-to-be-dead people. Gonzo and Jim Hepsobah are ready to go—they’re doing casualty estimates in their heads—and Eagle Culpepper has recovered her functionality if not her sanity and is lined up on the leader, and every one of them is ready to shoot right back at us. We’re staring into the eyes of universal casualties. It is entirely possible that we will be able to tell who wins the fight which is about to happen only by timing who dies last.

“Hugwughugwug!” says their boss man angrily, waving his gun around like it’s a sceptre, although of course he actually asks us something perfectly sensible, he just asks it in his own language, which none of us can speak. His voice is liquid and lambent and beautiful. This does not alter the fact that he is very pissed off and upset. “Hug! Hugwug, hug wug wuggah ughug? Huuuugwuggah!” This last comes out a bit shrill as Leah slowly puts her shotgun on the ground in front of her. This is such a sensible thing to do that no one shoots anyone, mostly out of shock, and then we all continue not to shoot one another because it seems there may, possibly, be a way out of this. She walks slowly, prettily, across the gap between us and them, shunting a more-than-usually-suicidal sheep out of the way with her knee, which gets a big laugh. The Katiris do not stop pointing their guns at us, but nor does any one of them specifically cover her either. Leah walks until she’s right in front of the leader, and his Desert Eagle is pointed at us over her shoulder. She leaves her hands by her sides, palms out, so as not to give anyone any mistaken impressions about subtle and terrifying gong fu, and she kisses him lightly on his right cheek, then on his left. As gestures go, it’s unambiguous: let’s all be friends. Then she turns her back and walks off to one side, and sits down on a rock, and looks at us all like we’re being a bunch of total arseholes, which we are. This is also unambiguous, but it takes longer to work out because it runs counter to what you might charitably call the prevailing logic of the situation.

Leaderboy gets it slightly before Gonzo does, or maybe he just isn’t a great card player, and he smiles cartoonishly, and very slowly and clearly holsters his gun and bows in Leah’s direction, waits for her nod, and goes to sit with her. At this point there’s a kind of general acknowledgement that no one wants to get annihilated here today, and a lot of weapons are lowered and put away and people embrace cautiously and laugh a bit and one of their soldiers even has a little cry. We say “Hooray” to them and they say “Hugwugwughug” to us, and we try to copy them and get it wrong, and everyone finds this enormously amusing, until one of the sheep wanders over to the left of where we’re all leaping around and laughing and explodes with considerable emphasis, and we realise that we are doing all our hugwughugging on the edge of a minefield. At that point the whole business of whether we are allies or sort of neutral goes by the wayside, and we all fall into line and carefully tread in one another’s footsteps while Gonzo, on his knees, pokes down into the soil with Sam’s knife, and leads us through.

By the time we reach Shangri-La—us and the Katiris, both—we are thirsty and hungry, which is good because before we were just surviving—we didn’t know about hungry any more. The castle is a ruin. Cracked walls and bullet holes. The long balcony is shattered and tumbled down, and the rolling meadows are a scrub. Fires are burning somewhere down in the valley. At the far end of the courtyard there’s a row of tyre tracks—not ours. Someone has been here. Maybe is here. But they came here to hide, and they are not Ruth Kemner. In fact, I have an inkling who it must be. A Honda Civic with Day-Glo green paint and a whale-tail is parked just poking out from behind an outhouse. Day-Glo—like the flashes we have been seeing since we escaped from Corvid’s Field. There’s a pink Mitsubishi Evo against one wall. And off to one side, like a boarding school matron with her girls around her, the nose of a maroon Rolls-Royce. I think . . . I think we were invited to come here; even escorted. And so I walk to the main entrance and reach for the big, solid doors.

Which open, in advance of me, to reveal a glittering wall of knife blades and slender pirate-monks, and behind them a row of ceramic Glocks, and in the very centre of the scene a small, bearded figure with a glint of fire in his eye and a cutlass in either hand. He looks at us, and the Katiri shepherds behind us, and after a moment he smiles, thank God, and drops his hands, and the pirate-monks do the same, and he steps back and away and behind him we can see his few, fleabitten, terrified refugees, and their families, and their animals. And as he smiles, some trick of the light reveals him to me, shows me how his face would look unshaven, and I recognise my old friend Freeman ibn Solomon, peripatetic ambassador to student debating clubs and cancan artist extraordinaire. He smiles.

“Welcome,” says Zaher Bey.