It had been a clipped and quick conversation, enough time to register what she presumed was the character of the man, and he had known what he had wanted and she had been determined on what best suited her. She had asked: “He is coming, you seem to know that, and he’s been identified and is close?” His answer: “Not seen, nothing positive, but it is what I expect.” And her next question: “And that is enough for you?” And his answer, after a thoughtful pause, “It’s what I have.”
She watched for him, and tiredness engulfed her. She struggled to stay awake, and the darkness outside stayed thick and she saw no movement.
Her final question: “How long will he be here?”
His answer, “Not long, just passing through.”
“Going where?”
“Cannot answer that, not at liberty to.”
Her eyelids became heavy and her breathing was soft and regular, and the view from the window faded.
He drove the van slowly, steadily, observed the speed limits though the route took him on side roads and away from dual carriageways. Wolfboy avoided, he believed, the vehicle registration cameras. At times he seemed to crawl but he thought it necessary to travel within the law.
His own city, Leeds, was now behind him and he had been around the outskirts of Dewsbury. He knew of homes in that community, now quiet and dark, where there would be an understated wave of triumph passing between activists, hidden, when the news was broadcast the next day. It would interrupt TV programmes, what they called “breaking news”. If he had taken a direct route then he could have done the journey in under two hours, but he would take longer and would travel through the Peak District National Park on lonely narrow roads. He wanted to be at his destination by nine in the morning so it would be necessary for him to find a lay-by and rest up. He had gone so early from the makeshift garage where the conversion had been fashioned because the guys who had worked on the vehicle’s armour-plating were trusted men, but were frightened men. He imagined by now, with him gone and Upper Heaton and Upper Hopton on his satnav phone screen, they would be scrubbing down the garage interior, working at it with bleach and scalding water and using a yard brush to clean the floor. They had helped, but not willingly, and arms had been twisted, and warnings given as to the fate of “touts”. And a teenage boy, wearing Wolfboy’s visored helmet, would be driving the scooter back to the internet café; that too would have been well cleaned, and the boy would be wearing a pair of thick, mass-produced gloves. A police car went by . . .
A moment of panic. Wide, staring eyes. His foot frozen on the pedal. Waiting for the indicator to wink at him and a uniformed arm to emerge from a window and wave him down. One of them advancing, cautious but threatening in the bulk of the yellow coat worn over the stab vest, and a torch beam in his face. Another hand close to a truncheon or a Taser weapon. Would he survive? Would he be able to resist the persistence of hostile questioning in a police cell? Would he betray all those who . . .? But the police car was disappearing into the distance and had not slowed. Heart beating faster, Wolfboy drove on.
Vigilance is paramount. You may just have a ripple to identify, like a fly lands on still water. Not a splash, nothing easy. Updates please. Jonas pressed Send.
Dominic and Babs talked quietly in the front, mostly in the shorthand of their jobs, about overtime rates and kit issue and duty rosters, and when was the next training day for marksmanship assessment . . . Only the last seemed to concern them, and that would have been vital in their lives, Jonas assumed. Keep missing with the aimed shots and it would be the fast heave-out, and disappointment, and a glamour zone removed. Or they listened to their music – one ear for communications and one for jazz or hip-hop. The dog was comfortable. Jonas stroked its head every few minutes. He believed it a transitory friendship, and one that suited them both, but there would come a time when the little beggar decided that it wanted home, and its breakfast, and a crap and a pee, and the relationship would end. The dog suited him. There were times enough in caravan parks in the west country when – to please Vera – he could be everybody’s chum and so helpful: plenty of advice on other sites, on tow-bar maintenance, on the best rates for gas cylinders. Then, time to pack up and go home and those who had thought him a new friend would find him cutting and uninterested. It was the common ground that sealed his relationship with the dog. He had plans for it, seemed to see the action playing out. He tapped his pocket, felt the angular shape, was satisfied.
Tristram came back into the front room.
He closed the door behind him, made more noise than he’d wanted, and there was the sound of a toilet flushing at the far end of the hall. She cursed. He groped his way across the dark room and flopped into the chair by the window and landed in her lap.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” he snapped.
Izzy whispered, “I did not think, Tristram, that when I applied to join our glorious monarch’s Security Service that an important factor would be the ability to control the bladder flow of a fellow officer while engaged in covert observation duties. That was not on my list. I thought intellect, ability to sponge up facts fast, to make human judgements, would all be top ranked. You?”
“Thought I would strut around, walk tall. Feel I was part of something special.”
“For fuck’s sake, not be in the élite! Most overworked word in the English language and I only slap it on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Kazakhstan Presidential Protection Battalion, and the Democratic Congo parachute regiment . . .”
“This hardly fits the bill.”
“Just heard from the Wise Old Bird. Needs our ‘vigilance’. Back on the crocodile stuff, looking for ripples . . . Can I ask you something, Tristram?”
“Please.”
“Do you have a girlfriend right now?”
“Is that a chat-up line?”
“It’s not.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend right now. That good enough? I did, and I’d put my application in and I was going for a first interview the next day, and I told her that I’d got this appointment. Of course she asked where, who with, what was involved. I said to her that I couldn’t say. That was the instruction, not to tell parents, wives, girlfriends or boyfriends. I didn’t tell her. I thought the job more important than her – she walked out, kept walking. Not seen her since, nor heard from her . . . so, no girlfriend.”
“It was not a chat-up line.”
“Heavy stuff, Izzy. And you?”
“Haven’t.”
“Feeling a bit isolated?”
“You could say that.”
The psychologists would have emphasised the dangers of inter-office romance. The induction courses warned of the loneliness of the work that pushed officers, under stress, into relationships. They were both staring out of the window, through the glass that was clear now that the rain storm had passed, and the house was quiet. He thought of the intrusion into the family’s lives, down to using the downstairs toilet without asking. Could have shouted up the stairs that it was about “defence of the kingdom”, keeping innocent people alive, or “the greater good of the greatest number, and cheap at the price of a few human rights violations”. Both watched the house across the road, no new lights had come on, no shadows moved; there were no ripples in the water. Tristram knew what his future would be, doubted that it differed from Izzy’s.
He kissed her gently on the fullness of her cheek.
And she kissed him . . . and both would have understood where that led.
They broke apart but were still close and kept watching the target house. Tried to maintain “vigilance”, as demanded of them. Looked for any slight motion in the water.
Chicken wire divided the cemetery from his mum’s garden, and the hedge of untrimmed conifers had grown through it, bent it and had broken it. He knew there was a gap where the wire could be lifted and a body could crawl under it. If they were there, then they could be in the kitchen, their feet under the table and their weapons across their thighs,
or they could be in the sitting-room, near the doors that opened into the garden, or they could be in a van parked in the street in front. Or they could be in the kitchen and the sitting-room and in a van outside; they could be mob-handed and waiting.
Cammy had stood over the graves and felt the anger rip. When the last of the brothers were gone he had wept, had allowed tears to swell his eyes, and the promises had stacked up but not how to honour them. That had been Benghazi . . .
. . . a rubbish town. Parts of it as damaged as Aleppo or Raqqa or Kobane or Deir Ezzor. He had reached the city – no money, no food, no water – travelling courtesy of a tanker driver whose job was to clear cesspits, then take the tanker into the desert, squirt its contents, then go back for more. He had ridden into the city with the stink of the vehicle permeating him, and had been dumped, and had walked for no more than a quarter of an hour. And had been picked up. “Picked up” in Benghazi meant captured – blindfolds, wrists tied, face down in a pick-up. At first they might have seen him as worth something as ransom, or as a spy, or simply as useless shit, but had taken him to a leader. Had fallen on his feet, a black flag leader, an emir with control of a sector of the city. Cammy had said where he had come from, had told the guy where he had fought, had seen the cloud of doubt, suspicion, clear. Had told the guy his name. This emir was Egyptian, spoke perfect English, had a brain, and had smiled, a little awe. “You are Kami al-Britani?” He had said he was. “You are the Kami al-Britani who punched the hole in the defence line at As Sukhnah on the Deir Ezzor road, that was you?”
A stalled attack, he and his brothers sent for. A coordination with two suiciders each in an armoured vehicle. The defenders had been Syrian government. Cammy and his brothers had not hung around to watch the show when the black flags had come into the salient and gone through the gap but it would have been bad for the boys who had taken Assad’s pound, 500 to the US dollar. He was hugged, was a celebrity . . . Did he want to fight in Libya, would Benghazi be a new home? Spoke briefly, vaguely, of a promise . . . Was there for four days and was aware that, while he was fed and resting, messages were sent, and answers returned. Arrangements were made. They seemed disappointed that he would not be staying with them. There were scrawny Arab kids there and a couple of Chechens and a Russian deserter who kept a grenade attached to his shirt and swore he would pull the pin if there was any danger of capture and repatriation to Kremlin territory: they were not going to be his brothers. He had been sent on his way and a driver set him down at the Educational Hospital on the south side of the port city of Sirte, and a cargo tramper would give him a berth if he came on board in secret, at night. He carried money, and contact details for the French city of Marseilles – five days’ sailing. The emir and his people knew him to be a “walking dead” and might have thought it a waste of a fighting man’s talent, but accepted that a promise had been made, had shrugged, had told him he would be remembered in their prayers. That had been the start of his effort to fulfil the terms of the promise. This was a diversion but he was near the end.
He felt the stiffening wind drying his body.
Noted that a moon now showed through the surging cloud ceiling.
Stood motionless, listened, heard nothing. Would not hurry would wait until he was satisfied and beyond the hedge was the small back garden and beyond the garden was the little patio and the kitchen door, and alongside the door were the French windows opening out from the living-room. Felt good now, at peace, and his mum would hug him. He would wait a few more minutes, then move and find the place where the wire lifted in the depths of the hedge.
Only a brief diversion, then Cammy would again be on his way and would have his mum’s money in his pocket and would start his last journey, where his promise would be kept, where people would be waiting for him.
Clothes straightened, buttons fastened. Neither Baz nor Mags did romantic kisses afterwards, but he gave her backside a smack. They were up and off the lower bunk because the engine pitch below them had changed and through the porthole they had seen that the ferry had started to manoeuvre, and in the far distance they could see the ribbon of lights at the port. No more talk of this being – yet again – a critical moment in the process of bringing an RPG-7 launcher and six projectiles into the country of their birth, their lives, their reluctant income tax payments when such had seemed unavoidable, into the country that would have believed it owned their loyalty. Done all that, been there, and both would have been bloody idiots to have doubted that the next few minutes would be hairy, arse-pucker time. He was straightening his hair, she was applying lipstick when the cabins erupted . . . Passengers were told that they were near to docking, were called to their vehicles. A matter-of-fact announcement boomed around them.
“You good, girl?”
“Course I’m fucking good – what else?”
They left the cabin, headed for the staircase that led steeply down to the vehicle deck, and immediately ahead of them would be the UK checks for passports and customs, and they could not know how it would be for them.
“Keep smiling, girl.”
“Course I’m fucking smiling – what else?”
He held her hand as they waited at the tail of the queue above the staircase: another old couple coming back from a holiday.
He passed the rose bush. Came to the kitchen door, where he would have dumped his first tricycle and his first bicycle, and they’d have weathered in the rain and the wind. It was through the kitchen door that he had gone with his mum when he was first awarded the place at the college, wearing his new, laundered secondhand uniform. Had gone out of the back door and then had hurried around the side to where his half-brother waited in the car, engine going. Mum had not wanted him seen by the whole of the cul-de-sac in his new uniform, with his hair cut in the style they wanted it. His mum had thought it would seem ostentatious if he were paraded in their road, off to a school – with a scholarship taking care of the money – that no other parent nearby could even dream of.
The door needed paint and putty. There was enough thin light for him to see the bare wood around the glass, and the stains where it was rotten and needed chiselling out. His half-brother would have done it had he been there. He grasped the handle . . .
There were guys in the Amn al-Kharji part of the security units who were supposed to teach basic self-preservation as the black flag scene crumbled and men were drifting away, not deserting but looking for new combat theatres. They had not used him, but this guy had joined them and they’d escorted him into Barghuz, had him among them for two days and always kept Ulrike as far away from him as they could manage. He had been well wised up and had spoken of phone monitoring, about properties that would have had electronic beams around them or low-set tumbler wires, about bug mikes fastened in trees or against walls, and cameras. The whole lot of it . . . Cammy had crossed the rear garden, gone along the fence that was askew – probably had useless wet-rot posts – and every few paces had paused and listened some more. The guy from the Amn al-Kharji had liked to show off how well briefed he was – had a story from the UK: two Irish approach the remote house of a man on a death list and set off the electronics and show up on a screen, white shadows, two cops inside with weapons because an attack is expected. They see the pair of them coming forward but still well down the garden. The cops arm their weapons, metal scraping on metal, but do it slowly and quietly, but the Irish leg it, had heard it. They were caught weeks later and in their car was an old person’s hearing aid, what you’d need in a care home to follow the soaps on the TV . . . Cammy had no hearing aid, but he had patience.
The kitchen was in darkness but he could see that the door into the hall was open and the ceiling light was on. No sound of a radio or a TV. He eased his strength against the door handle but it held firm . . . remembered. By his foot was the food box, went out each week for clearing with the bins. The key was always underneath. Bent, groped, found it. Cammy straightened, found a smile coming on to his face . . . would be hugged, and she
might cry a bit and he’d do the charm and the love – and would get her to cook, and get her to clear out her purse so that he could be on his way as dawn broke. He had the key in the lock.
The tramper he had boarded in the Libyan port had sailed west up the Mediterranean then had put in at the docks of Marseilles, and immigration procedures were crap and he had gone ashore on a deck-hand’s papers and had a contact to make. Had expected a bigger welcome there, recognition of who he was, what he brought to the table, and to the level of anger he felt and the target he had chosen, and to hear of the promise he had made. The response had seemed distant. Like they regarded him as merely one more in a queue, and it had taken time, and messages had been exchanged between the Marseilles cell and those back in the old war zone. It had been sorted . . . he had been hidden away in a housing project known as La Savine: narcotics sales were done there and gang warfare was rife and the police stayed away. The ones who had housed him had seemed reluctant to wave him on his way and he might have had a career extension as a gun for hire. Money was in his pocket, and some documents that might pass inspection if the light was poor, and he was to head to Bordeaux where he would receive instructions for the next stage of the journey. Had bought his ticket at the station, had it in his breast pocket, had the cash in his zipped-up hip pocket and a photo of his mum . . . had been greeted, a long lost friend, by a man with outstretched arms – never seen him before – laughed about it and didn’t feel the slightest pressure on his backside. Caught like a sucker, and he was Kami al-Britani, and a cheapskate gang from north Africa had done him over. By the time he had realised they were well clear and the bustle of the terminus flowed around him. His hip pocket had been cut open and hung loose. He had his rail ticket and the phone number for the contact in Bordeaux. He had cursed silently, and boarded the train – had only his promise to cling to.
The Crocodile Hunter Page 30
