The Knives Read online

  Now, in the mess at lights-out, when he studied his men stretched out in their vests and combats, Metallica bleeding from their Walkman headphones, he felt some kind of conservative instinct he thought he could call parental.

  He trod his cigarette into the mud and banged his fist on the glacis plate. ‘Right then, you’s. Tie a knot in it.’

  It was midday and five miles further on when Blaylock saw another checkpoint coming into view, markedly different from the last. Here was a barrier and sentry post, a guard-hut of nailed logs and planks with a clear plastic roof. Earth was banked at one side of the road, the bank of a stream ran opposite, the effect being to narrow the passage ahead.

  Blaylock frowned to see significantly more bodies milling around the hut, too, more than a dozen men – surely surplus to requirements? They were dark-skinned, dark-browed, many bearded and with chequered keffiyah wrapped around heads, shrouding faces. Some wore fatigues, camouflage trousers and jackets, others were in loose khaki pants, embroidered waistcoats, banded turbans. Several appeared to be nursing assault rifles, others yet more hefty weaponry.

  This was not regular Bosnian army. In wash-ups the liaison officers had spoken of ‘irregular forces’, mercenaries – mujahedin. Blaylock knew in his gut that he was looking at them now.

  ‘Bloody hell, boss, Ali Baba and the forty thieves …’ Cookie’s vision of the road ahead from his driving seat, magnified ten times by the Warrior’s powerful raven sight, far outran Blaylock’s.

  As the Warriors slowed up to stop thirty feet before the checkpoint, one of the guards hefted his weapon to his shoulder.

  ‘Geezer’s got an armed RPG there, boss.’

  Blaylock swallowed, hoisted himself out and clambered down the slope of the Warrior’s glacis plate, trying to execute the move with assurance. Tamara hastened along beside him, her eyes notably wide. They passed a large muscular African man, staring at them from his perch on the grassy bank beside a heavy machine gun on a tripod. He wore a bullet belt draped across his chest, and a machete stood propped against one of his fatigue-clad legs. That knife troubled Blaylock – it was a spade-like blade of dull silver, maybe fifteen inches long, surely intended for the slaughter of beasts.

  As he drew near, a handful of guardsmen jostled forward in the manner of confrontation. One, with prominent teeth, close-cut dark curls and the gaunt mien of East Africa, came furthermost, shouting irately. ‘Kuffar’ was the word burning through the air.

  Tamara looked anxious. ‘I can’t … what he’s saying?’

  Blaylock, keeping eyes front, touched her arm lightly. Another man shouldered forward – bearded, eyes very blue, cheeks pockmarked under an Afghan hat of reddish felt. Blaylock extended a hand. But it only hung there, met by a stare, until he withdrew it.

  ‘My name is Captain Blaylock. United Nations protection force.’

  Tamara began to translate. The Afghan put out a flat peremptory palm in her direction and shook his head at Blaylock.

  ‘Her, no, she not speak, she go.’

  Blaylock looked steadily into his translator’s eyes as he addressed her. ‘Go back to the Warrior, Tamara, it’s okay.’

  As Tamara trooped away Blaylock turned again to the Afghan. ‘We have to pass through here, my friend. Get on our way, yes?’

  His antagonist again shook his head and took a hand from his rifle to wave it disdainfully at the retreating Tamara. ‘On your way, yes.’

  ‘You have no right to stop the UN. We’re not part of this conflict, all we do here is observe and carry aid.’

  ‘All you do. Yes.’

  Just as Blaylock began to fear his words would merely be volleyed back at him, the Afghan made a more expansive gesture in the direction of the guard-hut. ‘This, you see? This is ours. You no go as you want. You go back. This is ours.’

  ‘Yours? You are Bosnians, are you?’

  ‘We are Muslim.’

  Now the Afghan made a beckoning gesture of sorts, clapped his hands, and his fellows began to draw closer. Two who had sat on a mound of earth rose and sauntered over as well. As the Afghan continued to clap Blaylock realised with a start that he was being treated to sarcastic mock applause. And now he was confronted by a cordon of men, bristling with bullet belts and knives worn at the waist.

  ‘Crusaders, uh? Crusaders! They come!’

  Blaylock’s pistol was holstered inside his flak jacket. He fought the urge to reach and feel it. ‘Our mission’, he said, ‘is peacekeeping.’

  ‘No fight?’

  ‘No, no fight! Peacekeepers!’

  ‘You too late! Too late!’ The Afghan prodded a finger at Blaylock’s epaulette. ‘You look, you look, uh?’ He mimed the bewildered shaking of a head. ‘Where is peace? Where? You don’t fight, what good are you?’

  Blaylock ransacked his brain for some bridge-building language. ‘Why we are here … is to deal justly. You will deal justly with us, no? In Islam all men are brothers, right?’

  ‘You know Islam?’ He gestured sharply between them. ‘You tell me what is Islam? You not my brother. These are my brothers. You, you deal with Croat, with Serb. Killers of Muslim!’

  One of the Afghan’s comrades stepped forward suddenly, shouting and gesticulating with a pointed finger to the skies. Blaylock could feel his heartbeat, could sense movement behind him, and wanted not to turn, and yet turned. And so he saw the muscular African man coming at him, machete held loosely at his side. As Blaylock went to reach into his flak jacket the mujahid hefted up the huge knife and thrust it under Blaylock’s chin to within an inch of his Adam’s apple.

  He felt an injection of dread, dosing down like melting ice from his scalp to the soles of his feet.

  In the same moment he heard a heavy clunk and a hydraulic siren-sound, and saw past the African’s head to where Bravo Zero’s gun turret was traversing with stunning speed into position to fire.

  Meeting the African’s gaze as he had been trained, seeing nothing there but dispassion, Blaylock was conscious of motion all around, the sounds of rifles being slipped from shoulders and cocked, then the sight of men scampering onto the facing banks on either side of the Warrior.

  As the blood hammered in Blaylock’s temples his mind raced to compute, to conjure a proper leadership decision, the correct procedure to rescue a man at sea, the man being himself.

  Kill them all, God will know his own.

  ‘Alright, cut it out, man, cut it out, cool it, yeah?’ A young man was shouting as he came toward Blaylock from the bank, also bearded and turbanned and in camouflage, yet his accent was of the South Pennines, and the hand gesture he was making seemed to signal an end to the skirmish. Glancing to the African, Blaylock could tell the big man had seen something meaningful behind him. His machete was lowered, though his dispassionate gaze stayed in place.

  ‘Sufficient unto the day …’ Blaylock heard himself mutter. He turned to face the Afghan, who glowered at him. Never give an order that can’t be obeyed, he thought, and stepping back he saluted smartly. ‘Another time. We’ll meet again, I trust.’

  Then he turned and felt his feet moving under him, his guts tightly clenched. In motion he gestured to the Warriors to start the business of turning round as best they cumbersomely could. At his back he heard dissent, jeers, and a rising chant, ‘Allāhu Akbar!’

  ‘Fuck me,’ Trev offered, as they rumbled back down the trail to Vitez. ‘That was a moment, eh, boss?’

  ‘Yep. Focuses the mind, doesn’t it?’

  Blaylock, though, could not quite hear his own voice. He placed a Marlboro absently between his lips, bit into the butt, then removed it and tossed it away. His body’s alarm mode had receded, the panic rush from the adrenals had slowly turned course and been transformed, somehow, to a belated and low-burning rage.

  He retrieved his notebook and smoothed out his tracing-paper map with an unsteady hand. He extended his pencil lines to Fazlići and there drew a circle; followed, on reflection, by a star; then, encircling it like a safe harbour, a
crescent moon.

  Then fury surged in him again and he scored it out with hard strokes.

  ‘Another time …’? Yeah right. Fuck me. It had been, he knew, a poor riposte. Were there to come ‘another time’ then, no doubt, he would have to do better.

  PART I

  1

  Howay you slack bastard. Up and at ’em. Fight the losing battle. So Blaylock’s inner voice drove him on.

  London at sunrise wore a lacklustre look. The weather was turning, autumn insinuating – the greyness of air and sky he saw as the city’s natural state, slowly retaking hold over the careworn streets of Kennington. Wearing shorts, tee-shirt and the disregard for cold that he took as his birthright, Blaylock pounded the pavement and the pavement pounded him back. Alice in Chains raged into his ear from the iPod Nano affixed to his right bicep.

  He was thinking, again, of the ludicrous levels of fitness to which Sandhurst had raised him twenty years before – tabbing twenty miles up a hillside, thirty-kilo Bergen on his back. It was a laugh, a short one, at his expense. All that had been a stiff ascent to a peak with nowhere to go: a hard-won accumulation of physical capital that he had spent, steadily, ever since resigning his commission. These morning runs were a rear-guard action, a Maginot defence against the gravity of time. Still, the wish to be again that lean and focused force going forward, parting the air in his wake – Blaylock felt it keenly.

  Yesterday had been a bad day at the office, and another unpromising one lay in the offing. The whole week, in truth, looked like trouble. But he clung to his conviction that to put in a good shift on a bad day was a virtue that repaid itself tenfold. Whenever he said this to his colleagues they smiled and nodded, as if they would follow him into the thick of any fight. Somehow, though, whenever he glanced back over his shoulder, he didn’t see them there.

  He looked behind him now – looking for the other running man he knew to be close at his heels, the dependable presence, his reliable rival. And there was that man, in his black tracksuit, looking plenty lean and focused and air-parting, albeit twenty yards short of Blaylock.

  That’s right, kidder. You stay in your lane.

  Blaylock ran on through gates and into his circuit of Kennington Park, upping a gear to dart by a young blonde swaying languidly down the path, still in summer clothes, wand-like from behind. As he did so he witnessed a conjuror’s trick – a stunning trompe l’œil – for from the front she was bulgingly pregnant, to the point of capsizing.

  September baby. You’ll have a clever one. Just like my September boy. Too bloody clever …

  Exiting the park and heading up Kennington Road he lengthened his stride. It wasn’t a race – he was daft to think so. Yet the thought did persist. Some streak was driving him to outrun his fellow jogger yards behind – shake him off, leave him in the dust – if only to change the given, rock the guy’s apparent complacency.

  And so Blaylock accelerated, hitting the pavement harder, past the yellow-brick Peabody Estate, past Toni’s Caff and the shabby corner-shop cluster, past the fine Georgian white-stucco terrace, the squat pub, the unloved low-rise flats, doorsteps where bagged rubbish aggregated.

  A throb in his calves was on the cusp of outright painful. He could feel, could hear, his rival behind, pacing himself like a solid middle-distance man, as if poised at the shoulder for the toll of the bell.

  Abruptly Blaylock eased down, having reached the short promenade of local shops – Colin’s Furniture, Ranjiv’s Chemist, Dev’s Corner News. He jogged over to Dev’s show-bin of the daily newspapers in their grid behind a scuffed clear plastic flap.

  My sacrificial altar, my daily pound of flesh.

  The tabloids all proclaimed versions of the same thing: ‘SYLVIE: TOP COP COVER-UP?’ All ran with the same now-familiar photo of the victim, the sunny fair-haired sixth-former in her heartbreaking school pullover and tie. Blaylock, father of two daughters, couldn’t stand to see it any more. But the summer’s banner news story wasn’t going away, and the papers had found grounds to revive its pain. ‘Every day brings reminders,’ Sylvie’s father said. ‘We’re haunted.’

  One bright day in April Kevin Clail, twenty-eight, had struck Sylvie Jordan, sixteen, with a half-brick then dragged her unconscious body into parkland where he had raped her and stabbed her to death, and where her body was later found by a group of younger children from her school. A woman who saw Clail hasten from the park had helped police to find him, as had CCTV. Police had further found that a DNA sample from Sylvie’s skin ‘strongly supported’ a match to her killer.

  As for what else might constitute justice, the papers all seemed to support a case that someone in the Metropolitan Police – even its Commissioner, Sir James Bannerman – ought to pay with their job. For on that day in April Kevin Clail ought already to have been in prison: five years before, he was accused of raping another sixth-former, arrested, released on bail, then removed from enquiries due to ‘lack of evidence’. Bannerman was now making clear that the force would refer itself to its own Directorate of Standards. For the time being, though, the Commissioner stood arraigned in the court of public opinion.

  Blaylock flicked on through the tabloid pages until he saw: ‘Hate Preacher’s Home is His Castle!’ This story, too, was illustrated by a familiar photo: the dark-eyed, gently amused visage of Ziad al-Kasser, former nightclub doorman, lately fiery leader of prayers at a north London mosque, believed by the British state to have ‘non-provable terror links’. A refugee from Syria who cried persecution by Ba’athists, he had been refused asylum but granted ‘exceptional leave to remain’, and remain he had, however fierily he preached against the British state; for British judges had upheld his human right to make his home in England, for fear of persecution should he return to Syria.

  Today’s report concerned some who disagreed with al-Kasser sufficiently to gather and chant at the foot of his driveway. These people were also pictured, their incensed pink faces frozen in mid-shout, unmistakably the ‘Free Briton Brigade’ – a white working-class group seemingly composed of football hooligans at a loose end plus others who spent most of their lives in pubs, now making a decent fist of fomenting disorder on the streets of various English towns and cities.

  The FBB’s protest had prompted Mr al-Kasser to petition police about the distress caused to the second Mrs al-Kasser and their five children. At the High Court the FBB had argued for their rights to free speech and assembly; but the judge had ruled that they conduct any future protests at least five hundred yards away. ‘The law is an arse’, was the comment of the FBB’s main spokesman, one Gary Wardell.

  Blaylock had to smile. The law was complex, it weighed in the balance vying reasoned wishes and ideas of the public good. Today it favoured the Hate Preacher. On another day, maybe not.

  Belatedly he saw a reference in the story to ‘the error-prone and volatile Home Secretary’ and he decided he’d seen enough.

  He made a cursory paddle through the broadsheets, Left and Right, where he found similar material reported but in polysyllabic words: ‘… rends in the fabric of society’, ‘… the precarious balance between security and liberty’, ‘… rhetoric bordering on racism’. Chancing on a column that hotly defended Ziad al-Kasser as a benighted man of faith, Blaylock looked to the heavens for strength – and observed his fellow jogger, at ease over the road, gazing into the middle distance, idly stretching his calves like some aged thoroughbred. There was something smug about this black-clad man – of his own age but taller, leaner, with a better head of hair and so much less sullied by sweat.

  A stream of cars was drawing near down the road between the two men. Mischief seized Blaylock: he tossed aside the Guardian, turned and took to his heels, off the main drag and down a side street leading into a social housing estate. At his back he heard scraping tyres, angry honks, crunching footfalls. The chase was on.

  He hurtled across the car parking spaces and ducked down a cramped concrete-bollard alleyway into Falstaff Court. Bombing along,
he exulted in his prank. Childish, for sure – but weren’t grown men, too, still keen on games? And now, at last, he could feel sweat on his brow, his heart properly thumping in its cage. His calves were straining but he didn’t care. Exiting Falstaff Court he could hear gaining strides at his back but still he ploughed on, darting across a road ahead and directly down a narrow, secluded residential street, taking the first available left, increasingly sure he had lost his pursuer.

  As he rounded another corner he heard a jarring shatter of glass.

  Within twenty paces he had clear sight of the evidence on the road ahead – a shower of diamonds glinting on the deteriorated asphalt, and the hooded, bent young man rummaging in the backseat of the Volkswagen Polo through its smashed window.

  ‘Oi!’ Blaylock shouted as he ran nearer.

  The youth emerged in full, a wrecking bar protruding from his hoodie sleeve, held firm in his right hand.

  ‘What’ve you done that for?’ Blaylock shouted louder as he pulled up, sounding preposterous even to himself.

  The youth was affronted. ‘Fuck off out of it, man,’ he spat, then the swathed arm drew back and swiped. Blaylock recoiled to evade the blow, bounced on his heels and threw an instinctive left jab that caught the youth’s chin such that he reeled and toppled onto his backside. Blaylock darted in to plant a foot on the youth’s forearm, feeling some old instincts to be dependably present and correct.

  Then from nowhere he felt a rugby tackle piling into his side, stealing his breath, and he hit the asphalt heavily with weight atop him.

  Mayday. Contact.

  Even as he tussled on the deck he could hear reinforcements coming. Abruptly the writhing weight was yanked off him, and as he clambered back to his feet he saw that black-clad Andy Grieve had the second youth very forcibly restrained.