The Fighting Man (1993) Read online

  The Fighting Man

  Gerald Seymour

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 1993 by HarperCollins Publishers

  This digital edition first published in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Gerald Seymour 1993

  Foreword copyright © Mark Urban 2013

  The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Book ISBN 978 1 444 76027 9

  eBook ISBN 978 1 444 76028 6

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To Gillian, Nicholas and James

  Contents

  Introduction by Mark Urban

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Have You Read . . . ?

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  Introduction by Mark Urban

  There are a good many things about the hero of this volume that may at first strike the average reader as improbable. And I am not referring to the odd coincidence of his sharing a name with someone who became prime minister after Gerald Seymour wrote it!

  No, the issues surrounding this Gordon Brown are more to do with why on earth would someone who had been an SAS officer really engage in such a dangerous, hopeless mission, without pay and with every chance of ending up in an unmarked grave? Aren’t the people in Britain’s Special Forces supposed to be brighter than that, more stable?

  Well, I have never served in the SAS or SBS (its Royal Marine sister unit) but I do know quite a few people who have. These men have poured out a lot of anecdotes to me over the years, helping me to write a couple of factual books about these normally secretive units. Let me give you a few details of real men that might offer some insight into the fictional Gord Brown.

  Soldier A, driven by the pursuit of excellence to the point where he felt even the SAS could not satisfy his standards, resigned and disappeared. Contemplating suicide, he was eventually found and helped after a police search.

  Soldier B, like Gerald’s hero, served in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, where he fell foul of the hierarchy, being ‘RTU’ed’ or Returned to Unit. The SAS is full is highly competitive alpha males – and a posting there often ends unhappily, with recriminations.

  My last real-life case, Soldier C, had left the forces and was working with me and a BBC team covering a revolution. Several times he confided in me his sympathy for the rebels, his conviction that they needed better training and leadership, as well as the fact that he would consider coming back, on his own, to help them once our assignment was over.

  Scanning the news archives, you will find a number of examples of former British Special Forces soldiers who turned up in odd places, helping mount coups or train resistance fighters. Many had hired themselves out as mercenaries, some had ideological reasons. However it is fair to say that what unites characters like these is a relish for action and adventure, ‘the refusal’, in the words of one SAS friend, ‘to respect boundaries’.

  As Gerald transports his hero into action, he highlights this essential truth, writing, ‘he would have admitted it, couldn’t have hidden it, the excitement consumed him’. Gord Brown was dealing with a surge of excitement that had welled up, ‘as it always did whenever he flew forward to combat’.

  Passing the selection tests for the Special Forces requires enormous drive, stamina and focus – so much so that you can argue that most of those who get through are not ‘balanced’ people to start with. The experience of soldiering in this rarified and dangerous atmosphere leaves some of them addicted to risk.

  Add these factors together and you understand some of the reasons why many of these men meet untimely deaths. There are those who have perished doing extreme sports, others in obscure foreign conflicts, and some who cannot deal with their inner demons anymore end up taking their own lives.

  They are often solitary characters too – leaving a trail of broken marriages, estranged friendships and lost jobs in their trail. Many find that life after Hereford or Poole is a series of disappointments. This isn’t a destiny that unites all of these onetime warriors, of course, many of whom go on to live fulfilling lives, but it does seem to consume a surprising number of them.

  These were the sorts of characters that Gerald and I discussed when he was writing THE FIGHTING MAN. Gerald is the sort of writer who insists on authenticity, whether that concerns the flight performance of the Antonov An-2 biplane or the feel of Guatemala City’s shanties.

  The result is a compelling thriller and an excellently plotted page-turner. But it is also a vivid study of a fighting man, one of those who ran out of road with the SAS, and hazarded his life on an apparently hopeless mission in a far-off land.

  Mark Urban

  London, 21 April 2013

  Prologue

  He saw the cockroach scurry across the tiled floor, and ignored it.

  His father saw the cockroach and swiped at it with his stick and cursed because the creature had found the cover of a chair.

  He sat at the table and turned the pages of the morning’s newspaper. He heard his father’s hacked cough and then the shuffle of the shoes on the tiles and the beat of the stick that supported him. The cockroach had reached the angle of the tiled floor and the walls and headed for the safety of the divan bed. The bed was not made yet, and the floor was not washed down, and the walls of the room were scarred with damp and the paint had flaked. It was a room that no woman cared for, home for a father and his son. Behind his shoulder there was a grunt from his father and then the closing of the inner door and then the slamming of the heavier outer door. At the same time each morning his father grunted and went out through the doors and there would be the awkward footfall of the injured leg down the staircase that led to the street.

  He rolled the newspaper tight enough to make it a weapon. He went catlike across the room. He never spoke of the cockroaches in the room to his father. With a sudden movement, he pulled the divan bed away from the wall. It was as if he believed that to have spoken of the cockroaches would have seemed to be a criticism of his father. They floundered, their security taken from them. He would never criticize his father, not after the life that he had lived, not after the suffering he had endured. He beat the cockroaches with the rolled newspaper until they were pulped and smeared on the tiles. Their home was a two-bedroomed apartment in the Campeche quarter at the south end of the Old City, with a kitchenette annexe behind a curtain off the day room where he
slept, and a shower and lavatory on the landing beyond the outer door. He pushed the bed back against the wall; the ant columns would dispose of the broken cockroaches.

  He unrolled the newspaper, threw it back on the table so that it hid the used cups and the dirtied plates. There were bloodstains across the speech of the minister that celebrated the harvest of cut sugar cane.

  He went to the window.

  They were waiting for his father at the café. They were the other old men, the exiles. They sat where they always sat in the mid-morning to await the arrival of his father. They were at two tables pushed together and in the centre was an empty plastic chair that was ready for him. He saw the fat stomachs and the muscleless arms and the bald heads that were discoloured by the sun. They would be counting through their money so that each had enough for two cups of thin coffee and a packet of cigarettes. They were the dreamers.

  His father would have stopped and talked in the ground-floor hallway with Marta, nearly blind and a little deaf, who guarded the staircase with fierce devotion, and who pinned each morning to the chest of her black dress the medal she had been given as recompense for her husband’s death in the revolution. He wrinkled his nostrils at the stench of the gasoline fumes. The street outside their apartment now carried all the traffic from the wider parallel route that was closed to permit the slow rebuilding of a sewer. He saw his father come onto the pavement and wave his stick as a farewell behind him. The noise of the street flooded through the open window. It was that morning of the week when he collected up their shirts and vests and underpants and socks and washed them, scrubbing clean the threadbare cotton.

  His father was about to negotiate a crossing of the street. They were standing for him, the men around the tables of the coffee house, because he was their leader. He smiled, as he smiled each morning when he saw them stand as straight as their backs would allow to greet his father. Old men’s dreams. He turned away. The washing was in a basket beside the chest in which the two Makarov pistols were locked, along with his father’s camouflage uniform and the boots that still carried the long-ago-gathered mud. He heard the screaming of the traffic horn.

  He was drawn to the window. He stumbled the last three strides. He stared down into the street.

  His father was in the middle of the road. It was as if his father was marooned on an island in a river, and waved his stick at the bus that careered towards him. He understood. His father had needed the stick for three years now to take the weight from an arthritis-ridden knee. The driver had lost control of the bus, one of those shipped in from Hungary many years before.

  He heard the warning shouts of the men from the coffee house and then only the blare of the bus horn.

  He ran.

  He bundled open the inner door of the apartment and the outer door. He charged down the two flights of the staircase. He bullocked past old Marta who knew nothing. The sunlight of the pavement caught at his face. There was the crash as the bus came to rest having scraped two parked cars. He saw his father.

  He would have thought his father a big man, but the impact of the bus wheel had shrivelled him. His father lay in the road near the rubbish-filled gutter, so small and so still.

  The face was whitening with the pallor of coming death, the breath was short spurts. There seemed to be no pain. He knelt by his father and slipped his arms under the knees and around the shoulders. Some of those who had waited at the tables were yelling at him that his father should not be moved, and he heard and ignored the call that one had been sent to find a telephone to ring for an ambulance. Down the street he saw that others were prising open the door of the bus driver’s cab. He carried his father, so small and so still and so lightweight, across the street and across the pavement. The crowd opened for him. When he glanced back he saw the boots and fists raining on the driver of the bus.

  Up the staircase, his father’s feet hitting the unpainted ironwork of the stair rail. Through the opened outer door, and through the inner door, and across the day room and through the door of the room where his father slept.

  They came behind him in silence, the cronies of his father. He laid his father on the tousled sheets of the bed. He crouched by the bed and held his father’s hand.

  It was the room of a life gone by.

  On the wall above the bed was a picture in colour, taken from a magazine, that showed the stern jowl face of Leonid Brezhnev. It was the room in which his father had wept into his hands after hearing on the radio of the death of the Party. On the table beside the bed was a photograph in a cardboard mount with a facing of yellowed cellophane of a group of men in combat fatigues and carrying automatic rifles. It was the room in which his father had spread the maps that were torn at the creases, and planned the return to his homeland. On the chest beside the open window was the black and white sketch drawing, framed in dulled silver, of a woman large with middle age who carried a girl child astride her hip and who held the hand of a young teenage boy. It was the room in which his father made a display of flowers each year in a water-filled jam jar for a fast-dug grave beyond the defence ditches of a faraway village.

  He heard the wail cry of the approaching ambulance locked in traffic.

  It was where it ended. It was where the life of a fighter slipped. It was where an exile had dragged out the last years of betrayal. It was where the dreams alone ruled. The breathing was regular now and the eyes rolled slowly as if to find the source of comfort that held his bony hand. They were behind him, the old men who had fled with his father when the gunships had destroyed the village, and quiet as if they dared not break the spell of peace as a son held a father’s hand. The feet of the ambulancemen clattered on the flooring. He didn’t look over his shoulder, he shook his head. None of them, the old men, had the courage to intervene. It was the slipping of power, the exchange of authority, command ebbing from father to son. He heard the voices behind him tell the ambulancemen that they were not needed, that the victim of a road accident was beyond help. They were only foreigners, it was not important to the ambulancemen whether they left with their stretcher empty.

  The words were few.

  ‘You must go back . . .’

  There was phlegm at his father’s lips.

  ‘. . . before it is too late you must go back . . .’

  He took a dirtied handkerchief from his pocket.

  ‘. . . you must take back what was taken from us . . .’

  He wiped the mess from his father’s mouth.

  ‘. . . fight fire with fire . . .’

  He held tight to the hand.

  ‘. . . it is dead here, finished. You must go back and they will follow you because you are my son. The masses will follow you . . .’

  He sensed the supreme effort.

  ‘. . . you will need a fighting man. Without a man who knows how to fight them you will have no possibility, none. Take a man to be close to you who can fight, a man who understands the mind of our enemy. Make them cry for mercy as you march through the villages and towns and cities, and give them nothing . . .’

  He heard the failing whisper.

  ‘. . . I will watch for you. Fire with fire . . . Take a fighting man . . .’

  After the silence, gently as he would have touched a girl’s body, Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez closed the lids of his father’s eyes. He stood upright. It was what they had dreamed about, all of the old men who followed his father into exile. He was twenty-three years old. He turned to face them. There was the authority in his voice.

  ‘I will go back. It is what my father wanted. I am the son of my father. The masses will follow me as they followed my father. I will return.’

  He could see it in them, in the shift and hesitation of their eyes. They had been too long in exile, ten years less a month, too long dreaming of a return across the sea to the village in the triangle of the mountains. He was the son of his father. They were fat, nervous, without spine. They pleaded to be led, to find again their youth. He stood beside the bed on which his dead fat
her lay. None had the courage to tell him that time had moved and that the past was spent. They looked into the certainty of his features.

  ‘I will go back.’

  1

  They might as well have brought the taste, smell, of the dead fish into the bar with them.

  The taste, smell, was as strong as when they had reached the bar a little more than two hours earlier. The draught from the poorly fitted windows and the beer swilling in their mouths had failed to remove it. The atmosphere of dead fish was around them and through them. If there had been other customers in the bar then the landlord might have suggested, only suggested, that they should go and wash up first and change from their work clothes. He’d kept his peace because they were his only drinkers on a foul night. The rain was in from the west, sometimes merging with hail when the wind strengthened. The rain, and sometimes the hail, and always the wind hit at the windows and wet rivers ran down the wallpaper below them to the newspapers that were folded to catch the damp. There was supposed to be a man coming in to fix the window frames and replace the rotten wood, the landlord would say each evening as he bent to place the newspapers on the floor, and he’d been saying that since last winter. They were both of them on their fifth pint of beer, extra strong, high alcohol content, and the bigger of the two men took a whisky chaser with each of his pints. They weren’t loud drunk. They were miserable drunk. They had come straight from the cages of the salmon farm across on the far side of the loch. They had been out on the heaving walkways round the cages, working with flashlights, sometimes bothering to use the safety harnesses and sometimes not, and they had come to the bar with their trousers wringing wet where the sea water came in above their boots, and with their hands still slimed with the fish scales. The scales, the bright life gone from them, had peeled onto the table where they sat close to the fire and they left them, dull and opaque, flotsam amongst the stained beer mats. The problem was double bad. There was the increase in the lice, immature and adult, that fastened to the bodies of the caged fish. And there was the effect of the chemicals that they poured into the pens to kill the lice and which stressed the fish to death. Too many dead fish sliding into the dead hole at the bottom of each cage. Too great a number of wasted fish, too much wasted money, too many wasted hours. They didn’t have to chew on the consequences of having so many fish dragged by the suction tube out of the dead holes below the cages. It was bloody damn obvious . . . The farm was up for sale, the owners who had once thought it was a pretty little investment to finance a salmon farm in the Highlands and Islands had lost their patience and nerve. No buyer in sight, the market saturated. The business was going down the dead hole as fast as the young farmed salmon that could not take the predatory lice and the stressing chemicals.