Chapter 14: Ramliyya: October 15: p.m.
Like a fucking fishing holiday in hell, thought Goss. There was no bloody limit to the amount of time you could spend dangling your rod, catching bugger all. And meanwhile, Satan had turned the sodding heating up and confiscated all the booze.
Though he had only been there two days, Goss was impatient for the catch Easterby wanted him to make. Only two days, but that was long enough. Christ, Ramliyya was a God-awful place! At noon the sky and horizon were indistinguishable, both smudged by the heat to a dirty yellow. You couldn’t even make out the hills to the east of the coastal plain, veiled, like the Ramli women, in a thick, black haze. And the sand, the wretched sand! It wasn’t like sand he had ever known—more like slime. If you got it on your fingers, you couldn’t wipe the sodding stuff off. The stifling air was acrid with its salty smell.
He hadn’t stopped sweating since he had stepped off the plane. Only when he sat in his office with the AC full on did the sodden sweat patches make any effort to dry out of his shirt. But as soon as he had to go inside the hangars or out onto the tarmac, they reformed larger than ever.
Easterby had arranged for him to replace the chief stores officer at the airbase next to the airport at Madinat Al-Aasima on temporary assignment, while the regular incumbent was recalled to Britain. But that hadn’t gone down well with the British Defence Systems boys working the airbase. Some bloody secret his mission now was! The Colonel might just as well have announced in the company newsletter that he was sending a spook to watch the storesmen, for they had given him a wide berth since his arrival, restricting their conversation to the bare minimum. And Sergeant Phil Goss wouldn’t forget their bloody welcome when the time came to pounce on a few of these flabby army dropouts. This lot of pussies hadn’t a clue what they were in for.
Sitting in his office, Goss glanced at his watch for the hundredth time that day. He was short on ideas and long on frustration. Nearly 5:30 p.m. The late shift was over. Time to take the company bus back to the compound, where he could look forward to another night holed up in his Portakabin doing bugger all, without so much as a bloody shandy to drink. He cleared some papers from the top of his desk, then came a knock on the door. It opened immediately without waiting for a reply.
‘All right, Chief?’ asked a Brummie voice.
‘What do you want, son?’ Goss snarled back. If they thought the cold-shoulder treatment would send him snivelling back to England, they’d picked the wrong man to fuck with.
‘The lads sent me over,’ the young man explained. ‘Wanted to know if you fancy coming over for a couple of jars later?’
Goss stared hard at the young lad, his ginger moustache quivering with overripe irritation.
‘All right, sunshine. I’ll have a few jars with you lot. It’s about time we got a few things sorted, like.’
Sensing that he had enlisted his first recruit, Goss commandeered the young lad, Johnson’s, ear for the duration of the walk to the bus and the journey back to the British Defence Systems (BDS) camp.
Goss knew that men like himself smelt of army authority even in forty degree heat, and he made sure that Johnson was quick to recall the scent of a sergeant’s stripes. Forget about the officers—senior NCOs were the true gods worshipped by the men; they were father and brother, comrade and enemy, punisher and provider all rolled into one.
Back at the compound Johnson led Goss straight to a shack near the dining hall. The makeshift bar had its name, The Happy Sandman, daubed over the door in pub-style lettering. The inside was a passable imitation of the sort of boozer back home that had plastic oak beams and ran cheap lager promotions. At the end of the room, Goss admired a proper counter with English beer mats, schooners racked on an overhead shelf and a draught pump.
There were eight other men sitting or standing around the counter, most of whom Goss recognized as storesmen from the earlier shift.
The bar looked on in silence while Johnson explained the intricacies of the drinks menu to the newcomer—homebrewed beer or the moonshine, siddiqi. Goss chose the latter while Johnson paid the barman; the rest of the customers feigned interest in an interminable news update on CNN.
Goss swigged the vile-tasting siddiqi, grateful for the sharp hit from the alcohol, while Johnson sensed a duty to introduce the sergeant-turned-head-of-stores to the regulars of The Happy Sandman. The men questioned Goss about his army days; Goss answered them mainly in grunts, evaluating them one by one while he drained the rest of his glass and told the barman to line them up again.
He had a tame lot here, like. Most of the guys looked too young—first-wave rejects from the forces, no doubt. But at the corner of the bar stood a grizzled balding Scot that Goss recognized as a bulldog of his own breed. Yea, old Scotty over there was where the battle would be won or lost—for there could only be one Sultan of Ramliyya. Either the old git would submit to Goss’s authority, or one of them would end up outside picking broken glass from his face.
Catching Goss’s eye, Scotty nodded to the barman and began to stride slowly round the counter towards the newcomer. The other men edged imperceptibly away while Goss stayed firm, leaning one chunky pink elbow on the counter and keeping his eyes trained on Old Jock. Goss trusted himself to look the part; for he’d played this game many times before in other bars, in other places.
When Scotty reached him, Goss put his glass calmly on the counter and waited, both hands at the ready. But Scotty ignored his posturing, nodding to the barman instead. The barman rustled around in a cupboard, found whatever he was looking for, then thumped a bottle on top of the counter, next to Goss’s glass: Johnnie Walker Black Label.
‘Ever drink this stuff, pal?’ Scotty asked.
‘Any day you want, any number you want,’ Goss replied, the muscles in his jaw stiffening.
Scotty carried on unimpressed.
‘I’ll put it a different way for you, Mr Chief Storesman: do you know how much this wee bottle would cost you in downtown Madina, assuming of course you knew where to look for it?’
This kind of smart-arse, those-in-the-know questioning made Goss’s pink cheeks flush an angry red. Time to cut the bravado and get straight down to business.
‘I suppose you’re going to fucking tell us, like?’ he scowled.
Scotty’s face was still impassive and methodical.
‘Twenty Ramli riyals,’ he droned on, articulating every syllable laboriously. ‘Or one hundred and twenty-one quid sterling to you, Sergeant.’
Goss shrugged, still an expletive or two short of the provocation he was looking for.
‘That means a case of twelve of these wee fellas would cost you over fourteen hundred quid, though you’d probably get a discount for quantity,’ said Scotty, absorbed in the detail of his own thinking. ‘Now supposing a fella, could get his hands on two hundred cases of wee Johnny here, and deliver them to a certain Ramli friend of his acquaintance—do you know what sort of cash he’d be looking at then?’
‘Go on,’ said Goss less aggressively. This was getting interesting.
‘Allowing our Ramli friend to take his cut, a fella would be looking to collect about two hundred and fifty thousand sterling, cash in hand.’
Goss took a large swig of his drink, eyes opening wide with greed, as if the cash were sitting there on the counter in front of him.
Scotty seemed to be encouraged.
‘The trouble for our wee friend,’ he continued, ‘would be the pay-offs. The three Ramli customs guys would want ten grand each, and the Paki loaders and drivers would take a couple of grand between them. Then, there’s the cost of the material at source in the UK. That’d be at least forty odd grand. Still, after all these costs, our wee friend would be left with over one hundred and eighty grand. Not bad, eh, Sergeant?’
Goss gulped his drink silently, staring at Scotty intently. His eyes were doing the agreeing.
‘Aye. But our friend’s not finished yet. He’s got more pay-offs to make, Sergeant. There are sev
en other friends, plus the Chief to worry about. So with all of them taking even money, our friend gets out his calculator and works out that each friend puts just over twenty grand in his pocket. Now would you be interested in making any friends like that, Sergeant Goss?’
Goss took another large slug of siddiqi and coke. The firewater was as powerful and as vile as anything he had ever tasted. He thought of Easterby and the pathetic four grand a month pro rata the Colonel had agreed to pay him for his spying. Fuck Easterby! He’d take the easy money while it was there. Besides, the Colonel still owed Sergeant Goss a big pay out for services rendered in days gone by. And if Easterby had a slippery memory, then Goss reckoned he was entitled to help himself.
‘I’m in lads,’ he roared, slamming his glass down on the counter. ‘But I want forty for myself.’
Even the CNN newsreader seemed to fall silent. Those who had not pulled back from the bar did so now. Scotty also put his glass down, wiping his drinking hand on the back of his trousers.
‘You’re a greedy bastard,’ he hissed, pale blue eyes fixed on Goss.
‘Take it or leave it,’ Goss replied, voice even, chest puffed out. Then, in an explosion of fury,
‘But just you fuckers remember who’s Chief around here. I take the rap if your games get found out, so I take the biggest cut. Has anybody got a problem with that, like?’
He hammered his right fist onto the counter and stared at each man in turn. Last of all his eyes rested on Scotty. They eyeballed each other steadily while CNN flashed up as succession of hotel ads, but the punch Goss was waiting for never came. Scotty had lost his momentum, and with it, his chance.
‘OK then, Sergeant,’ Scotty conceded eventually, “have it your own way. Flight comes on Sunday morning. But if you’re playing Mr Big Chief, you can arrange payments and delivery.’
‘Deal,’ grunted Goss, leaning an elbow back on the counter.
‘Barman!’ he shouted, ‘drinks all round on me.’
Goss sipped in contentment while the atmosphere slowly changed from confrontation to collaboration. Goss reckoned he was going to like Ramliyya after all. The lads had got a bloody first-rate scam going, and they had just found the leader they hadn’t realized they needed up till now. But this was only the beginning. Once he’d learnt the tricks, like, he would tell the boys nice and casual about his real mission in Ramliyya—Easterby’s little witch-hunt. And when this spineless lot of shits understood that Sergeant Goss could put the finger on any one of them whenever he liked—might even have to find a scapegoat to keep Easterby happy—then everything would be running nice and feudal how he liked it, with Phil Goss the Lord of the Manor and a platoon of docile serfs. And like a good lord, he would work the peasants’ cut of the spoils progressively lower, till they were begging him to take almost all the hundred and eighty thousand on every shipment. Fuck Easterby, fuck BDS, and fuck the bloody ragheads! He’d soon show the lot of them who the real Sultan of Ramliyya was!