I Am Pilgrim(253)

Obviously, he had remembered it, and the moment I heard the gunshot I knew what he had done: with his hands cuffed behind his back, he had stumbled or crawled deeper into the passage and sat down next to the weapon. He had worked his hands down over his buttocks, picked up the pistol, manoeuvred it between his thighs, lowered his face so that the barrel was almost in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He probably knew the old song too:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains And go to your god like a soldier.

Cumali realized as soon as I did what the gunshot meant, and she started to run for the ruins. I grabbed her, but I was so weak she shrugged it off. It was only the urgency of my voice that made her stop.

‘Listen!’ I yelled. ‘When they come, tell them that you knew nothing. Say that in the end you saved my life, tell them about the man you shot. Say that you set me free, that you betrayed your brother. Tell them anything! I’m the only one who knows – and I won’t be here.’

She looked at me, confused. ‘Why are you doing it?’ she demanded. ‘Why would you do this for a Muslim woman?’

‘I’m not doing it for you!’ I replied. ‘I’m doing it for the boy – he deserves a mother.’

I grabbed the roof of the boat’s cabin and started to haul myself aboard. Cumali ran for the tunnel, but I knew it was a forlorn mission. Her brother was a muj, he had brought down three Soviet Hind gunships: he wouldn’t have missed.





Chapter Forty-five


CLUTCHING THE CAPTAIN’S chair, fighting the fever and pain, I edged the small craft away from the jetty and headed into open water. I swung south, hugging the shore, and ran with the throttle wide open, travelling fast.

The wind had veered round, blowing hard against the tide, and the bow ploughed through the steep swell, sending up sheets of spray and making the old engine howl. The journey might have finished me, but I forced myself to close the pain out and used my one good shoulder to keep the wheel on a course that was straight and true. Finally, I came round a headland, entered a long stretch of water sheltered from the wind and felt confident enough to lash the wheel off and let the boat take care of itself.

I went below and started to search. In a for’ard closet I found an old backpack and used it to hold the SIG and the ammunition still in my pockets. Next to it, wrapped in a sailbag, I found a heavy waterproof shroud already fitted with lead weights. There was no logic to it, but I was in a distressed state and I didn’t feel like travelling with my own burial sheet. I opened the window, threw it out and watched it bob and sink in the foaming wake.

Under a rear bench seat, I found what I was looking for: the vessel’s first-aid kit. It was probably twenty years old, but it had never been opened and it was surprisingly well equipped.

I took it back to the wheelhouse and used swabs to clean my smashed foot and a pair of scissors to remove the burnt flesh from where the bullet had entered my shoulder. I opened a bottle of antiseptic, eighteen years past its use-by date, and poured it on the wounds. It still worked – shit, did it work – I howled in pain and remained just conscious enough to be thankful that nobody could hear me.

So it was, with my wounds bound with yellowing bandages, reeking of antiseptic and equipped with a crutch adapted from an oar, that I finally saw the section of coast I was looking for. On the last breath of day, a long way south and a storm rolling in, I turned the wheel and passed between the clashing rocks that sheltered a secluded fishing village. The first squalls of rain meant that the jetty was deserted, and I drew up next to it unobserved.

I brought the small craft in by her stern, kept the motor running and tied her off tight to a bollard. I jammed the other oar through the spokes of the wheel to lock it in position and threw the backpack and makeshift crutch on to the jetty. With the engine straining to take the boat back to sea, the mooring line was pulled tight, and I used it for support as I crawled up next to the crutch. Armed with a knife I had found on board, I slashed the mooring line and watched the boat launch itself towards the darkness of the clashing rocks. Even if it managed to make it through the channel, the surrounding coast was so rugged I knew it would be thrown ashore and smashed to pieces before dawn.

I slung the backpack over my shoulder and settled myself on to my crutch. Looking like a soldier returning from some distant war, I made my way past two shuttered cafés and into the backstreets of a tiny town I barely remembered.





Chapter Forty-six


THE CURTAINS WERE drawn in the mean houses and the street lights were few and far between. In the gathering darkness, I made my way down a narrow street and – just when I was worrying that I had made a wrong turn – I saw a communal water fountain.