'If you're going to shoot a man, take his life — do something you've never done before — you have to believe that your cause is good, that his is evil. We talk about indoctrinated scum-bags and fanatics, and put horns on them, scales and tails. We're in cars and canteens, hotel foyers and restaurant kitchens, and we talk about us being right and them being wrong, us being brave and them being cowards and we think that having doubt is weakness. To be weak is to be useless. If you pause, the half-second, and lose sight of scum-bags and fanatics and cowards, the shot hasn't been fired and the street is full of casualties. To doubt is unacceptable…I doubted. I spoke the heresy, said that it was perfectly possible for a suicide-bomber to be brave and principled. If the world hadn't caved in then, I would have added, "But wrong." The caveat was never said. I lost the respect and trust of my team, and didn't fight hard enough to get it back. There you have it — I'm bumped and I'm going and I regret nothing.'
'Are you running away from making that judgement?'
'You could say that — going where I don't have to make the judgement, ever.' The silence hung round him, and he thought he'd screwed their evening, but she poured him more coffee.
Many thoughts jangled in Dickie Naylor's head as he oversaw the digging of the grave. He needn't have. He had waved a flashlight and chosen a place a dozen steps behind the Nissen hut, but his men had gone to it, had rejected it, had pointed out politely that there would be concrete foundations skirting the building, and they wouldn't be able to go deep. They had moved further away, in an opposite direction, and the chosen place was where the weeks of rain had made the ground soft in the angle between the last surviving runway and the old aircraft stand. They had told him, again politely, that they did not need the flashlight. They were two indistinct shadowy figures. They grunted with the effort of their work, and talked quietly between themselves, as if he were not present.
He could have spewed up, bent, and coughed bile from his belly. A man had died under the excess of inflicted pain. His men, he believed, would go back to their island without a second thought.
Did the ghosts hear the two men, both in the pit — only their shoulders now visible in the half-light thrown down by a quarter-moon — hear them as they watched? The ghosts would have been of the young. There was a stone beside where the old camp gate had been, where the woman had walked her dogs and not known that what was done was in her name, and they'd gone past it fast, but he had seen the faded print of names carved there, and had not thought of them. Perhaps a bomb, a five-thousand-pound grotesque canister, had exploded as it was loaded into the undercarriage of a Lancaster. Perhaps an aircraft, cruelly damaged by the flak artillery on the way back from its target, had not been able to set down its wheels, belly-flopped and caught fire. Perhaps a pilot, navigator or rear-gunner, shattered by the stress of a never-ending tour, had drawn a Webley pistol from the armoury, walked to the trees and put the barrel into his mouth.
He thought the ghosts watched as dirty work was done under the cloak of darkness. Would they have approved? Naylor had been told long ago, by a one-time squadron leader who had transferred in the peace years to the Service, that the crews were always briefed on the military importance of targets, never told of the civilians who would be in the cellars when the bombs fell and the firestorms were lit. Had they cared about the civilians, now called 'collateral damage'? Would they have said, 'I just obey orders,' as he had? Would the ghosts have said that the firestorms were justified in the interest of ultimate victory, as he had?
'You happy with that, Xavier?'
'Very happy, Donald.'
'It's a nice job we've done.'
'The best that was possible.'
They came out of the pit, helping each other clear of it. He thought it meant about as much to them as digging down to a blocked sewer drain, and gulped again to hold back the bile. They left him. Naylor shivered. They tramped away, were lost to him. He thought of the American. When he had last seen him, the man who'd usurped Dickie Naylor was sitting in his chair, impassive like a sphinx, the body at his feet, wrapped in old, tossed-away plastic agricultural sacks. His phone rang.
He saw the lit screen, saw the number that called him, put it back unanswered in his pocket.
They brought the body, labouring under its weight, and tipped it into the pit. An animal would have been buried with greater dignity. They heaved sections of concrete on top, then refilled the pit with earth, relaid the turf and smacked it down with the spade, then carried away the rotting plywood on which the excess earth lay and scattered it among the growing pea plants.
'Done nicely, Donald.'
'Done a treat, Xavier.'
'I think we'll make good time.'
'No problem. Clear roads, and we'll have a decent run.'
