Hari clearly didn’t think it was. ‘For a man who has become a target and who no longer knows who he may trust, you are either brave or very foolish,’ he said. ‘Will you seek help from the IMB perhaps? Or do you prefer to put your faith in this man O’Halloran whom you have met only once at a hospital in Bangladesh?’
‘Look,’ Coburn said, ‘get yourself more mixed up in this than you already are, and it’s not going to do your local reputation any good, is it?’
‘While you are a guest at my village it is not your place to say what is good or what is bad for my reputation. I will decide. But first, provided the Pishan has not yet berthed in Singapore, I shall learn more about this man who sets his trap for you.’
‘He didn’t set it by himself,’ Coburn said. ‘He was only on board to identify me and show those guys in the lighter who they were supposed to be shooting at.’
‘His men are of no consequence. Like those he employs to help him in Bangladesh, they will have been no more than hired guns. From your own experience in Iraq, you know that wherever in the world you go today such people are easy to find. You have only to look around this village to see how easy.’ Hari stubbed out his cigarette and got to his feet. ‘Please to leave everything in my hands. In the meantime you and Miss Cameron must excuse me. I have much to do. There are bullet holes in the launches to repair, and since we use a lot of fuel last night our supplies run low so I must send for more.’ He smiled again at Heather before he went to the door. ‘Life is full of interesting surprises, is it not?’
For Coburn the biggest surprise was the Frenchman’s calm acceptance of the situation. He’d asked few questions and hadn’t even bothered to find out the true reason for Heather being here.
When he’d gone she asked why it was Hari wouldn’t call her by her first name.
‘Hari fancies himself as a gentleman pirate. It’s part of his act.’
‘It’s a better one than yours. I don’t think he’s ever believed I’m your girlfriend. Why would he when you’re always more interested in discussing things with him than you are with me?’ She snapped down the lid of her medical kit. ‘I didn’t know you’d been in Iraq. How long were you there?’
‘Nine months,’ Coburn said. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘You’re doing it again. If you don’t want to talk to me about it, I’ll go and see to my other patients. If your bruise hurts take some Panadol. I’ll leave a box in the bathroom for you.’
In an attempt to get rid of the cotton wool in his head, as soon as she’d gone he swallowed four of the tablets, hoping they’d help to clear his mind, but over the course of the afternoon discovered that the best remedy was to go and sit out on the jetty where, if he closed his eyes and dangled his feet in the water, he was almost able to forget Iraq and even stop himself from thinking about last night.
By evening he was feeling a good deal better and was pleased when Heather returned to the hut from wherever she’d been or from whatever she’d been doing.
She seemed preoccupied with something, inspecting his bruise before she asked if he’d eaten anything yet.
‘I’m OK,’ Coburn said. ‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I’m not either. Indiri made me dinner. I think it was to thank me for fixing up her husband.’
‘How’s her English?’
‘About the same as the shipyard workers.’ She went to fetch herself a glass of water before coming to sit down facing him across the table. ‘I wasn’t telling the truth,’ she said. ‘I already knew you’d been in Iraq.’
‘Who told you?’
She smiled. ‘I’m a nice girl. I don’t go out with men I don’t know — especially someone who has a job like yours. You don’t really think I’d have got on that plane in Chittagong with you without doing some checking, do you?’
‘Answer the question. How did you find out?’
‘The same way I found out you were nearly court-martialled by the British Army for something you did there.’
It wasn’t hard for him to guess how she’d got hold of the information. With a fairy godfather like hers, obtaining a copy of his IMB file would have been as easy as making another of her phone calls, he thought. One call and she could have had what she wanted by the next day.
‘I wasn’t trying to pry,’ she said, ‘not in the way you think.’
‘You don’t know what I think.’ He tried to make up his mind. ‘You really want to know about Iraq, do you?’
She nodded. ‘I sleep in a bed right next to yours every night, but even when you do talk to me you never say anything about yourself.’
To make it sound as though he didn’t care, he kept it brief. ‘Remember those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?’ he said.
‘The ones that weren’t there?’
‘Fourteen months after the Americans went into Iraq they decided that the reason they hadn’t found any was because they had the wrong people searching for them. I’d just come off a nuclear hazard course, so the British decided to lend them me.’
She sipped at her water. ‘But you couldn’t find any either.’
‘I didn’t spend that much time looking. Half the places we went to were under the control of Sunni insurgents, so we were too busy keeping out of trouble. Everything was booby-trapped — shops, rubbish bins, doorways, parked cars. You couldn’t even stop to pick up the bodies of women and children that had been left rotting in the streets because of IEDs that had been hidden under them, or inside them.’
‘What are IEDs?’
‘Improvised explosive devices. It was a couple of those that caught me out.’
‘Oh.’ Her expression changed. ‘I didn’t realize you were injured there.’
‘I wasn’t. I was with a bunch of Americans driving through a town call Baqubah about thirty miles north of Baghdad. We were in two Nyala RG31s — they’re armoured troop carriers. It was the kind of day when you just knew you were going to run out of luck. It was as hot as hell and we were heading down the west side of town when the driver of the carrier ahead of us had to get past a dead horse that was lying in the gutter on one side of the street and a burned out pickup truck on the other. It didn’t look dangerous and I didn’t think too much about it until I saw a woman standing behind a wall with a radio transmitter in her hand.’
‘And it was a trap?’
Coburn nodded. ‘The horse and the pickup had both been rigged. I had just enough time to see the woman press a button before the explosion blew the leading RG31 to bits. There were four guys in it who died, and a twenty-year-old girl from Boston.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I was the first one out of our carrier, so I was the one who shot the woman. I shot her four times. Big mistake.’
‘I don’t see why. Anyone would’ve done the same.’
‘Not if they were smart, they wouldn’t. It was exactly what the Sunnis wanted. They’d set up cameras all along the street so they had great video footage of what I did. You can guess how it looked and sounded on tape — defenceless mother of two executed in cold blood by British soldier. The whole thing was screened on TV right across the country on the same night.’ He paused. ‘Are you happy now?’
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. ‘Was the idea of a court-martial just to satisfy the Iraqi Government?’
‘Pretty much. I got locked up for a month until the press had forgotten about what happened, then I got a discharge and was sent home.’
‘Is that why you took the job with the IMB — because that meant you could lose yourself in a place like this? Was that the reason?’
‘Sort of. I’d met Armstrong a couple of times in Baghdad. He was out there for a while running the IMB office in the Green Zone. When I got back to England he gave me a ring and asked if I’d be interested in working for him. I didn’t have anything else to do, so it sounded like a good idea at the time.’