The Network - Jason Elliot [11]
The colonel looks down at the file again, as if disappointed. His lips are pursed and he’s nodding to himself. I wonder how much of the material is genuine, or whether the pages really belong to someone else’s file. I recognise the interrogator’s ‘file and dossier approach’, used to convince a prisoner that everything about him is known and recorded.
‘Allow me to take you back nine years to Kuwait.’ He has my attention, such as I can summon. ‘You were detailed with confinement of Cat 1 PW number,’ he looks down, ‘LBN428571, better known as Elias Rashid Gemayel, were you not? I know, you can’t answer the question. So let me answer it for you. You’re E2 ops officer with the Joint Forward Interrogation Team tasked with assessing said internee’s IP and drafting relevant TIRs. Coming back to you?’
‘I can’t answer that question.’
‘Can’t answer it, sir.’
I have forgotten the army’s obsession with acronyms and abbreviations. It’s another language. E2 is my function as an extra-regimentally employed officer with the JFIT, IP is the prisoner’s intelligence potential, and a tactical interrogation report is what an ops officer, on occasion, is tasked to write up after an interrogation has taken place.
‘Would you like to describe for me your relationship with Gemayel? You gave him a high co-operation level, low potential intelligence rating. Which is strange, don’t you think? Did you imagine all the effort that went into finding him was just for fun?’ He allows himself a pause, during which he takes a sip of coffee. ‘You liked him, didn’t you? Your words, not mine,’ he remonstrates, as if I’ve challenged him on the point.
There had been no reason to dislike him. He had been scooped up in Kuwait City by 14 Int after a tip-off. It was near the end of hostilities, and he’d been brought to the EPW facility for priority processing. We’d rained so much high explosive onto the length and breadth of Iraq that the war was about to end with spectacular speed, and technically Gemayel hadn’t been an enemy prisoner of war at all. He was later classed as a civilian internee and given private but secure quarters. Despite the circumstances, our sessions were friendly. Gemayel was a Lebanese Arab, whose mother had been Christian before her marriage. He was pushing fifty, an educated and cultured man with a sense of humour. He claimed to have been visiting relatives in the city when the war had started, and I had no reason to doubt his story. In the course of our interviews we’d talked about Lebanese food and wine, and the literary outputs of Gibran and Naimy. But a week after his arrival his interviews were taken over by a team from a newly formed unit I’d never even heard of. They wore civilian clothes and concealed sidearms, and their treatment of him grew too harsh for my liking. As E2 and translator I was obliged to be present, and after several days of seeing him manhandled and deprived of food I protested that under the definitions of the Geneva Convention his treatment was inhumane. I’d brought him cigarettes in his room and urged him to tell his interrogators what they needed to know. He’d always dismissed my suggestions with a mirthless laugh, claiming they would never give up. They will come for me, he said. I never understood what he’d meant. But this should all be ancient history, I’m thinking. This was all cleared up years ago.
‘Let’s go on, then,’ says the colonel. ‘On the morning of 9 February the facility is breached by persons unknown whose intention, you purport, is to kidnap Gemayel.’
Purport? My left eye protests as the muscles try to open in surprise. ‘Persons unknown’ is a commando team with explosives and automatic weapons, the ammunition for which is later shown to be Israeli. They didn’t come for a tea party, I want to say. Unless they were planning to have one in a corridor of a prison facility filled with smoke from the plastic explosive they’d used to