THE WALKING DEAD
Gerald Seymour
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BANTAM PRESS
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Published 2007 by Bantam Press
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Copyright © Gerald Seymour 2007
The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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ISBN 9780593057544 (cased)
ISBN 9780593057551 (tpb)
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For James
PROLOGUE
To Whom it may Concern:
In the event of my death or incapacity, will the finder of this Diary please facilitate its safe delivery to my sister:
Miss Enid Darke, 40 Victoria Street, Bermondsey, London, England.
Many thanks.
Signed: Cecil Darke.
14 September 1936
Well, this is the start. The top of the first blank page. It will not be a literary work because I do not have the intelligence or education for that, but it will be a record–I hope–of my journey. I am going to fight on a foreign field, and I cannot say how many days or weeks or months I will be filling this notebook, or where this journey will lead me.
If the handwriting is poor–and this is a personal testament so, should I survive, it will not be read by any other living soul, except Enid–that is because the train is rocking on the track, and I have little room in which to write as we are all packed tight in our carriage, as tight as sardines in a tin.
I am twenty-one years old, and my clean new passport lists my occupation as 'bank clerk'. I am thinking of the shock and confusion on the face of my supervisor, Mr Rammage, when I handed in my resignation last Friday, with immediate effect. So predictable, his reaction. Said sternly, 'Why are you leaving us, Darke?' To go abroad, Mr Rammage. 'Oh, going off on a holiday, are we? Don't expect that your desk will be waiting for you. Don't think I'll be holding your place vacant for you–plenty of likely lads to take your position. For employment, these are difficult times, and to walk out on work with prospects and security is–frankly–extraordinarily stupid.' I understand, Mr Rammage. And then, with sarcasm: 'And are you prepared, Darke, to enlighten me as to where–abroad–you intend to travel to?' To Spain, Mr Rammage. 'That is not extraordinarily stupid, that is deluded idiocy. To get involved in that war, Communists and Fascists viciously massacring each other–a war that is none of your business and where you have no cause to be a part–is simple lunacy. I don't believe you have any military experience…' There will be people who will teach me what I need to learn. 'I was, Darke, at the Somme and at Passchendaele. It's not like they say, those who sit behind the lines. It is a thousand times worse. To fight modern warfare is beyond imagination. God, please, watch over you…Now, clear your desk and be gone.' I cleared my desk, and I was gone, and I swear there was a tear in Mr Rammage's eyes.
Neither Dad nor Mum came to Victoria to see me off, but Enid did. She gave me this notebook and she had had my name stamped in gold on its cover–that was very sweet and loving of her–and with it was a half of a hob loaf and a quarter of cheese. We kissed, and when the train left I leaned through the window and waved back to her. Then the packet boat to Calais, then to Paris by train.
In two days we were at the Gare d'Austerlitz, and were marshalled on to Train No. 77, which they call the Train of Volunteers. We went south through the afternoon, evening and night, and we left France after Perpignan. Now we are on the line to Barcelona. The mountains of the Pyrenees are behind us. I have spent one pound, three shillings and fourpence in Paris, and have but two pounds ten shillings in my wallet. Yet, because of where I go and why, I feel myself a rich man.
I have started out in my Sunday suit, best shirt, cap, and raincoat, with my boots all shined up, but now I feel overdressed, so I have taken off cap and tie and loosened the stud on my collar. The stubble is thick on my chin–which would horrify Mr Rammage.
I believe that I am the youngest of the volunteers in this carriage, and I am the only Briton. There is a German, Karl, who speaks a little English, but none of the others do. lam grateful to Karl: without his help I would not be able to communicate with my fellow travellers. They are from Germany and Italy. They are all, through Karl, interested to know about me because I am different from them. They are refugees from their own countries because they are members of the CF–sorry, the Communist Party–and at best they would be locked up by the Fascist regimes in Berlin and Rome. At worst they would be executed. From them, there is surprise that 1 am not a member of the CPGB, and they say that I have a home to go back to, but they do not, and they are bewildered that I am coming to Spain to fight alongside them.
They have called me 'the idealist', which is flattering. They tell me that it is time Fascism was fought, and that the battlefield is Spain, where democracy must survive or face annihilation all over Europe. Did I know that? I must have or I would still be at my desk with Mr Rammage peering over my shoulder and criticizing untidiness in my ledgers. I suppose I knew it was important to travel to this war and play my part, but to be told that I am 'the idealist' brings a little glow of pride to my chest. I have told them that Mr Rammage, last Friday, said this conflict was none of my business, and each in turn has shaken my hand and congratulated me for understanding that it was the duty of all principled men to come to Spain and fight for freedom. I feel humble to be with these men, and humble also that I know so little of politics. But I have not told them that beside my 'idealism' as a warrior against Fascism, and the need to drive back the barbarians of militarism, there was another factor in my joining up. I craved adventure…I look to find excitement and be a better man for it.
There is no food on the train, but a man comes round with buckets of water for us to drink from, and the queues to reach the lavatories take an age, but in this company the hardships do not seem to matter.
We are now, Karl says, an hour out from Barcelona. I have never before been abroad, and my father has never been out of London, except for annual excursions to the coast at Ramsgate. In London it was cold and wet: autumn was starting. Here, the sun beats on the train windows, and we are slowly cooking because we are squashed so close. .. I have
stopped writing for a few minutes to just stare out. There are fields that are yellow and dry, with horses and carts in them, and women are bringing in the last of the harvest. There are only women working. As we go by, they stop their work, stand straight and raise a clenched fist in salute to us–and all the men, in all the carriages, shout back at the top of their voices, in Spanish, 'They shall not pass.' Already, just from sitting in the train, I know that that is the slogan of those I will fight with. It brings a shiver to me–'They shall not pass'–not of fear, but of pride.
Chapter 1
Thursday, Day 1
It was as if he had been brought to a camel market. All of his life since he had gained the first clouded images of memory, he had stood and watched such markets. And now they were thirteen hundred kilometres behind him, separated from him by the wilderness of the Kingdom's deserts and by the knife-edge crests of the Asir mountains. There, between the mountains and the shining sea, was the village that was his home.
The beasts of burden–camels, hobbled at the ankle, and mules lined up, standing listlessly, tethered to a rope running between two posts–were well respected by the travelling Bedouin and the itinerant merchants who came to buy. In the extremities of the desert's temperatures, brutal heat by day and chill air at night, or on the passes through the mountains that led to the Yemen border, a tribesman or trader would suffer death by dehydration or exposure if he had bought unwisely at the market. It was the skill of those men that their experience guided them towards paying only for animals in which they could place total trust. The new wealth of the Kingdom, in the cities beyond the mountains where there were wide highways and the oil wells with their networks of pipes, had not penetrated the Asir mountains. He came from the part of the Kingdom that had not shared the affluence of the petroleum deposits, and where old ways still continued. Where he had lived, there remained a use for animals that could be trained to fulfil a given purpose, and such animals were chosen and haggled over in the markets.
A good beast was prized and the arguments over its value could last from early morning sunrise to dusk when the market closed. The best beast would see the bidding for its ownership disputed.
Thirteen hundred kilometres distant, Ibrahim Hussein's home was an hour's walk from the town of Jizan by camel or astride a mule, and a five-minute drive in his father's Mercedes saloon. The house was beyond the view of the Corniche and the Old Souk. But from an upper window, from the bedroom that his sisters shared, the highest turrets of the Ottoman Fort could be seen. It was inside the compound of the Interior Police barracks, but he did not believe there was a tagged file about him on their computers. Behind the fort, nestling on low ground alongside the compound's walls, was the market where camels and mules were brought for sale. He was near to completing the twenty-first year of his life, and if his ambition was fulfilled he would not reach his next birthday.
There were a dozen of them. They sat where they could find shade, against the rear wall of a single-storey building constructed of concrete blocks and roofed with corrugated-iron sheeting. Ibrahim had his back against the concrete, and the others made a small, tight circle facing him. With his youth and inexperience, he had never travelled outside the Kingdom; he could not have said where the rest had started their journey, but some were darker than him, some had sharper features and some had a more sallow, pale skin. They had all been told that they were not to talk among each other, most certainly not to ask for names, but Ibrahim assumed that most came from Yemen and. Egypt, Syria and Pakistan. He was not stupid and had good powers of deduction. Two sat awkwardly, shifting continually to be more comfortable. He thought them from Europe, unused to squatting where there was no cushion. The instruction not to talk had been given with curt authority, and they all sat with their heads bowed. Common to them all, the bright light of their Faith burned in their eyes.
In front of Ibrahim, but distanced from the group by a few paces, four men stood in a huddle–the potential buyers. At first, as if the market had opened in the relative cool of the early morning, the four had minutely examined each in the group, remarking on them. But that was long past. Now, they talked quietly, but their attention was on the sandscape on the far side of the building. Behind them, two pickups were painted with light and dark yellow camouflage markings. The front cab roof had been cut out of both, and a machine-gun was mounted above the windscreen.
Ibrahim had expected that each of them would be welcomed, that they would pray together. But they had been ordered to sit still and hold their silence.
He saw the men react and, for the first time, smile in anticipation. They were all dressed in drab olive uniforms and their faces were masked by the folds of the khuffiyehs wrapped round their heads. Pistols hung from webbing belts in holsters. He heard a vehicle approaching, its engine straining in the sand where there was no track.
He thought it was the vehicle they had waited for, and that the business of the market could now begin.
Beyond the concrete building, it stopped. The men went to meet it. He heard laughter and shouted greetings.
Ibrahim, and all of those sitting in the faint shade of the wall, was in the state of the living dead. He was between being a young man with a future, two years into his studies in medicine, and a martyr who would be greeted and shown a place at God's table. He knew of the rewards offered to the shahidas because they had been listed to him at the mosque in Habalah by the imam, who had been his gatekeeper, his recruiter, who had made possible the start of his journey to Paradise.
The man they had waited for was tall and erect and seemed to carry no spare weight on his body. He moved loosely on his feet. His boots were coated with sand, as was the uniform he wore with its intricate camouflage patterns. More sand clung to the straps that came down from his shoulders to his belt. Grenades were festooned from them, and an assault rifle hung from his right shoulder rocking against the pouches on his chest that held spare magazines. The sand caked his balaclava into which slits had been crudely cut. The eyes, fierce and unwavering in the intensity of their stare, fastened on the group, never left them. Ibrahim felt their force bead on his body, and tried to give himself courage. He clasped his hands tightly together, hoping that the shake in his fingers would not be seen. He felt as naked as if a surgeon's knife had cut him open.
A strangely shrill and high-pitched voice–Ibrahim did not recognize the Arabic dialect that was spoken–ordered the group to stand. They did. As he pushed himself upright, he felt the stiffness in his knees. He tried to stand tall. The man moved away from the group, waved aside the other men, and placed himself some fifty paces from the building.
A second order was given. In turn, the living dead were to walk towards him, stop, turn, walk back, then sit. His finger jabbed towards one of those whom Ibrahim believed to have come from Europe.
They were pointed to. They walked forward, stopped, turned, went back and sat. Some hurried, some dawdled, some moved hesitantly, some tried to throw back their shoulders and stride, and some shuffled. Ibrahim's turn came, the last but one. He did not know what was expected of him.
Perhaps he was too deeply exhausted. Perhaps the ache in his legs and hips dulled his thoughts. He started, drifting over the dirt, not feeling the roughness of stones and debris under the soles of his trainers. He walked as if he sought only to be closer to his God, and he could not help the smile that came easily to his lips. He did not know how he should walk, or what the man with the mask of sand-crusted black material, with the twin gems of his eyes, wanted from him. He came close enough to the man to scent the old sweat beneath the tunic, and the smile held. The sun, blisteringly hot, beat on him as he turned. He went back to the shade.
He was about to sink down against the building's wall, when the shout arrowed into his back.
'You! Do not join them. Sit apart from them.'
He watched one young man get to his feet and move slowly from the wall, confusion settling on the immature mouth, then des
pair. He thought the young man believed himself rejected. He faced the four older men. Deference was written on their faces. He gestured with his filthy calloused hand towards the hunched-down group. He believed he had found the youth he wanted.
He observed from a distance. The rest of the group was split into four parts. Three would go to Mosul in the north, two to Ar-Ramadi, one to Baquba, and five to Baghdad. Each one, wherever he was taken, would spend between one and three days in transit, then one more day in briefing for his target. The next day they would be in a car weighted down with explosives, or a lorry or be on foot with a belt or waistcoat against their stomach or chest under a full flowing robe. Within a week, at most, all would be dead and the remains of their corpses would be scattered against the walls and roofs of houses and office blocks, on the pillars of flyovers and in the courtyards where policemen gathered to be recruited or to draw their pay. The names of some would be known later from videos broadcast on websites, and the names of others would be lost in eternity. The enemy called them 'suicide-bombers' and feared their dedication. For himself and his fellow fighters, they were useful tactical weaponry, valued for the exactness with which a chosen target could be destroyed.
He was listened to, as he should have been. It was said now by those who reported to the resistance clandestinely, while holding down positions of importance in the regime of the collaborators, that no photograph of him existed but that already a price lay on his head–dead or alive–of a million American dollars, that he was identified in files only by the name he had given himself. He was the Scorpion.
His attention roved between the future and the present. The future was the enormity of the mission on which he was now embarking, and it would take him to a continent that was beyond his previous experience; the message had come from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, from old men who were fugitives. The present was the open expanse of sand grit, where the only mark of human habitation was the single-storey building of concrete blocks, which was thirty kilometres from the mid-point of the road that ran for nine hours of driving between the Saudi desert communities of Hafr Al-Batin, to the south-east, and Arar, which was north-west; where he sat, ate and talked he was not more than a kilometre from the border.