Baghlan Boy Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

  The Book Guild Ltd

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  Copyright © 2020 Michael Crowley

  The right of Michael Crowley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from 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.

  This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.

  ISBN 978 1913913 021

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  For Polly

  ‘…tears he wept for his foiled journey home.’

  The Odyssey

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Part Two

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Part Three

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Baghlan Province, Afghanistan, September 2002

  Eleven-year-old Farood squatted by a stream, his eyes fixed on a green warbler. He delved into a pocket for the crumbs he’d been saving for the bird. One rock closer and the bird would be in diving reach of the boy. It called – a warning rippling through the air – and the wind began to brush off the foothills behind him, dusting his eyelids, but he refused to blink. His right eye was lazy after an accident with a stick whilst playing with his older brother when he was five. He tasted the dust on his tongue, glanced at his father striding from the edge of the village below him. The warbler had vanished.

  A blessing was said over handfuls of rice, three eggs and two small flatbreads. The last of the smoke loitered inside the main chamber of the four-room earthen house.

  ‘He’s been talking to the birds again.’ His elder brother teased him.

  ‘I’m going to catch that bird and then mother will make a jar for it.’

  ‘You’re too slow, Spider. You couldn’t catch a hen.’ Karam offered his palm as a target for his younger brother.

  Their mother tugged at Farood’s shoulder. ‘Eat your meals.’

  Turn the globe either way and you were having a light snack on the go. Here it was a meal, a meal for five people. Hunger in Baghlan was like the wind, the dryness and the invasions.

  ‘Karam loves a girl.’ Farood’s presence alone was a provocation to the eighteen-year-old.

  ‘Shut up, Spider.’

  ‘He wants to marry her.’

  The woodpile in the next room was almost gone. Winter was moving down the valley behind September dust storms. Fuel for hot meals could not be paid for. A wedding could never be talked about.

  ‘We had a thousand sheep when I was a boy. Across two hills. We would round them up on horses. The house was full of people and food.’

  Before the Russians. Their father is tall, even for a Pashtun. Farood gazed at the sweep of his god-like arms as he gave most of the food to his sons. They believed his strength came from some elixir within him, from his race. They ask him to tell them about when he rode in the buzkashi, of the horses tearing at each other’s necks. Two-year-old Yashfa tried to touch the griddle, but her mother seized her back to her lap. Outside from within the dust whorls, faint snaps of Taliban rifle fire were heard in the village. It was autumn and the Taliban were making their way to the foothills. War was a background sound, like radio on a city street; it varied with the seasons, came and went with the movement of birds and the appearance of tulips. The family talked about other villagers, of the behaviour of their children, of the possibility of rain. The wind fluttered the red curtain entrance and Farood suddenly noticed the fern green warbler again, turning its bill like a key. He crept towards it, taking some bread from his mouth and flicking it across the dirt. His father called to him, but he stood his ground. We’ll see how slow I am. The bird and the boy froze. A man appeared alongside the sheep pen. Older than his father and taller, enveloped by a deep blue khet. Across his chest hung an ammunition belt, on his shoulder he carried a PK variant machine gun. Farood and his bird were invisible to him. He disappeared through the village. Then a second younger man carrying an AK47 assault rifle, pitted and weathered, behind him a third, no more than eighteen. He carried a Lee Enfield rifle date-stamped ‘1915’.

  ‘Have you seen the Americans?’

  Farood shook his head at the fighter, whose eyes targeted his father.

  ‘Who is in there?’ the fighter demanded.

  ‘My wife, my child – a small girl,’ answered Farood’s father.

  ‘Soon he will have to come with us. Allahu Akbar.’

  He strode off to catch up with his comrades. The bird had gone once more. Farood closed his lips around a boiled egg as the softened cracks of rifles salvaged from old invaders began to pierce the wind once more. There were more fighters on the slopes, but no sound of the return – the impossible rapidity of American gunfire. The fat-tailed sheep would have to remain penned until tomorrow, or the day after.

  Their mother washed her husband’s winter shalwar in a trough on the street; Farood poured water into another trough for the sheep whilst Karam herded strays with a staff and their father sang to Yashfa, his Russian-made sniper rifle across his knees. He used sheep fat for gun oil, but it was as true as the day his brother took it from a Russian prisoner. When the Taliban move on, they will shoot a bird for the pot. Yashfa ambled from the house to watch her younger brother.

  *

  Twenty-five thousand feet above, a drone was circling. It had been hovering in the area for nearly an hour, its presence requested by marines who hadn’t fired a round all morning. Now the sandstorm had left them looking for ghosts. The sands of Nevada were still; it was early morning and the sun had been up for an hour. The drone’s operator was Major Catherine Lake. Lake used to be a fighter pilot, the second female Afro-American fighter pilot in history. Now she was a drone jockey. The pilot of an MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft system from a desk seven miles outside Las Vegas at Nellis Air Force Base. Her husband was pleased she’d been grounded, as was her new co-pilot, sensor
operator Ryan Marshall, but she wasn’t. Her maternal instincts hadn’t registered yet and she missed being airborne. Of course, g-force, ejector seats and a host of other technical reasons prevented her from flying, but she didn’t feel pregnant. She wondered if those instincts would ever make a show, whether the military had drilled them away. Less than four months in a cockpit, but a termination was out of the question so here she was, at a desk in a camouflaged trailer approaching the end of a seven-hour night shift, pretending to fly something on a television screen whose journey had already been programmed for her. Lake watched the drone’s nose roll across the biscuit-coloured folds of the earth. Where are they? The enemy hid inside creases and crevices of brown paper, occasionally glowing on her flat-screen microscope. Lake and Marshall were being dry cleaned from every angle by revolving fans. A marine captain yapped at Lake out of the silo speakers.

  ‘Well, there must be some fucker down there because someone is fucking shooting at us.’

  The drone’s synthetic aperture radar, handy for looking through haze, had been removed last month to preserve fuel – or, as Lake saw it, to lengthen her shift. Marshall switched to infra-red.

  ‘I found them for you, Captain.’

  ‘That’s excellent, Major. Now would you mind fucking shooting them for me?’

  Lake pressed a button and, after a two-second satellite delay, her last 114 Hellfire missile made its way to Farood’s house, fusing it with the sandstorm. The little red glows on her screen were stubbed out and her shift was almost over. She began to return her drone to Forward Operating Base Delaram and half-way through its journey she was relieved by the day shift.

  At home in her quarters her husband was still asleep, until the sound of her keys landing on the hall table woke him. She stood at the end of the bed in the semi-darkness; he offered his hand. Lake moved closer and he gently placed the flat of his hand on her belly.

  ‘Has she moved today?’ he asked.

  Part One

  One

  Lancashire, England, October 2011

  Senior Officer Robertson was sitting in his wing office looking down the fifty-metre length of D wing. The office was at the top of a hexagon from where he could see every cell door. It was quiet time: that long-awaited mid-morning pause after cleaning and before feeding time. The half dozen lads privileged to be cleaners were lounging under the light and sound of the wing television, watching a music channel and working their way through a loaf of toast. A new lad, not yet assimilated to the group and its hierarchy, was standing alone at a window, gazing out across the grassed concourse at the centre of the prison, his mop and bucket idle. Robertson was into his fifties but still very much in shape. He had strong, weathered features, was barrel-chested and, with his white sleeves always rolled, bore the appearance of a naval captain as much as a prison officer. He was never anything else other than calm, which annoyed everyone, especially other officers. Beside him sat Scully, a relatively new officer who fitted in well with his colleagues, having started in the job burned out. He was balding, youthful and glum, and within weeks began to say how the job was affecting his relationship. Not to be accused of too much world-weariness, Scully was now defiantly growing a moustache for charity.

  Robertson took the briefest of phone calls before responding to Scully’s beseeching glance. ‘C wing are moving four lads over here,’ announced Robertson.

  ‘Why do they always send the shite to us?’ asked Scully.

  ‘They can’t leave them on reception wing. The place is filling up with rioters, some of them from London, most of whom won’t cope.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll learn something, sir.’

  ‘Isn’t that why we’re all here?’

  That was Robertson all over, thought Scully. He liked to take lads on, straighten them out, never tired of it. If it meant talking to them in the middle of the night, spinning their pads three times a week or even rolling around on the floor with them. Robertson made the job harder than it needed to be. Prisoners didn’t want officers in their face, asking them to think about their past, their future; they were taking a break right now and wanted to be left alone. The given logic among officers was that prisoners have a season when they will change and if this wasn’t it, there was nothing you could do. Most of the cons knew how to run a wing as well as, if not better than, a lot of officers, and people like Robertson always wanted to disturb the natural order, like by giving the Afghan a cleaning job when he’d only been here five minutes.

  Scully looked down the wing and shook his head. ‘You let the fucker have a slice of toast and he gives it to the ducks.’

  It was forbidden to feed the birds; the scraps only brought the rats. Birds came to the prison grounds in numbers. Gulls scavenged and fought with jackdaws, oystercatchers guarded the flower beds where they nested, ducks sidled up to arrow loop windows and gates. Some smaller birds strayed into the glass-domed wings. Soon they were beating their backs against the roof for the skies and not all of them made it to the Out. Prisoners would whip them with rigid wet towels twisted into staves, leave them on the landing for cleaners to sweep up. Farood was trying to get some crust to a pied wagtail dipping behind the ducks. It was too slow.

  Scully dropped a file from an exaggerated height. ‘Do you know what I was thinking, sir?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Maybe we should get the lads to update their own files.’

  ‘Might be easier to read. Lock up the cleaners, shall we?’

  Robertson marched out of the office with authority, like a referee onto a playing field, like the former soldier he was. The huddle under the television stood up and swallowed as he passed them.

  ‘Behind your doors now, lads.’

  Farood smiled blithely at Robertson. He smiled, the senior officer thought, whilst other prisoners grinned, usually because they had got away with something. The Afghan lad was tall, sinuous, his features sharp, always pointing at those that spoke to him.

  ‘Farood, don’t feed the birds. There’s no need to.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t give them much.’

  ‘How are you finding the wing?’

  ‘Okay, boss.’

  And all the time smiling. How could anyone wear that expression in his situation, wondered Robertson. Maybe he didn’t have the words. Who would have the words after being sentenced to thirty years at the age of nineteen? Robertson tried to recall another lad who’d been sentenced to that. He couldn’t.

  ‘Farood, I want you to go to the kitchens and fetch the dinner trolley.’

  ‘You’ll have to show me.’

  ‘It’s alright, Barker will go with you.’

  ‘Okay, thank you, boss.’

  His courtesy was unsettling. It felt antiquated. Robertson wondered if the lad really was nineteen; he looked older. Not just taller and fuller than most others, but more cognisant of something.

  Lads drifted back leisurely from education or other regime activities. Movement was an opportunity to catch up with other prisoners in one way or another, to get some air time. The sun was making a valiant last effort in north Lancashire and a few officers had responded by sporting dark glasses. Prisoners walked in small groups, hands down the front of their burgundy jogging bottoms. No one’s hair was longer than a number one razor. Robertson studied the D wing traffic; Miss Nichols (Officer Nipples to Scully) ticked down a list as they passed the gate. Prisoners in cells on the balcony went to their doors; downstairs lads positioned themselves in the dinner queue.

  Michael Atherton made his entrance into the wing without announcement, lingering outside the wing office, surveying the amphitheatre. He had the hardest of ivory and grey eyes, and they sought nothing in particular, merely the starting pistol of a reciprocal glance. Atherton was twenty. In a few months, he would be graduating from the young offender institution to a less frenetic adult establishment where he was sure to make an impressio
n. He wasn’t big, but he was solid, rigid and ready to snap. His north Manchester stare found two new lads moving into a double pad, unloading a plastic bag each of photos, letters and shower gels. SO Robertson was busy exchanging pleasantries at the dinner counter as Atherton got into range of their voices. They were not Scousers, so there would be no comeback from elsewhere. Walking straight into their pad, he picked up a shower gel.

  ‘Got any burn?’

  It was on. They had to crack him now or hand over the Golden Virginia. Atherton awarded them the dignity of handing the packet over rather than just picking it up, but he left with no promises in his wake.

  It was feeding time. Mooching behind the counter in whites were Scully on apples and sweetcorn; Barker, replete with appetising tattoos, on shepherd’s pie; Kelly, who had been sacked more than once from every job in every young offender institution in England, on beans; and Farood, poised over the critical basin of oven chips. The queue staggered by without dialogue. Nobody attempted to ingratiate themselves with the dinner lads. That wasn’t how anyone got what they wanted here, inmate or staff. Farood had learned early on that people were your enemy before anything else. When someone did utter something, usually about not wanting an apple or preferring white to brown bread, it was Kelly who switched on his rage.

  ‘The next fucker who says anything, is getting these beans over their wig.’

  Kelly wasn’t a fighter, really. He didn’t like fighting in the way Atherton did – ‘straighteners’ in the showers – he didn’t do that. But he was violent and he went to extremes. The police believed he was insane, and up until moving onto D wing he’d been on twenty-four bang-up, eating in his pad. Robertson’s solution was to let him loose in the kitchen.

  A heavyweight Asian lad with a braided skullcap moved belligerently up the queue. Officer Scully attempted to lighten the atmosphere a little. ‘Eh, what do you call an Asian lad on basic? A Tellyban!’