Chapter Forty-four

THE TIDE HAD been surging higher and, entirely by accident, it helped me. I limped and staggered across the sun-baked sand, heading for the wooden jetty, and had no choice but to pass through the encroaching water.

When I was ankle deep, the sudden coldness of it calmed the pain in both my foot and mind. I stood for a long minute, allowing it to cool the fever and letting the salt sting and cleanse the open wounds.

With a clearer mind, I reached the jetty, grabbed a handrail and made my way to where Cumali was waiting. She had brought the little cruiser in stern first and had the motor idling. I hadn’t told her – we hadn’t talked about anything – but her journey was at an end. I was heading off alone, and I knew that what lay ahead of me was hard enough, especially in my condition, and I was anxious to start.

That was when we heard the gunshot.

We turned, looked at the Theatre of Death and I realized what I had overlooked, the mistake that I would wonder about for the rest of my life. Did I do it deliberately?

Certainly when I left the ruins I was exhausted, I could barely walk and I had to make the urgent call to Washington. Of course I had taken every precaution by unloading the weapons and keeping the clips. But that was all in my conscious mind. In a far deeper place, did I know that there was another weapon? One that was fully loaded – my own Beretta, the gun which the Albanians had taken from me at the fall of masonry and discarded next to my smashed cellphone? Did I leave it there for the Saracen to use on himself – and, if so, why?

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.