A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  Gabbi did not have a living soul in whom to confide. Had he been dependent on company – his wife’s, the regulars in a bar, even others making up the numbers on the team – it would have been noted and the information tapped into his file. Any form of dependency, alcohol, bought sex or company, would have been noted and he would have been sliding fast out of the unit’s building, down the steps, across the car park, past the sentries and into the street. It would have ended.

  It would end one day. It was not a pensionable activity. Long before old age caught up with him, he would be gone from the unit. There was no ‘former employees association’, no reunions on the eve of public holidays, no gossip opportunities with veteran campaigners. It would end when exhaustion dulled his effectiveness, and the psychologist would call it ‘burn-out’. He would be gone, and might get a job in a bank, or sell property, or just waste his days on the beach. His work for the state of Israel would be complete, and his pension earned.

  He had sat on a bench and watched the sea, had had a book open on his knee but had watched the sails beyond the surf, the fitness joggers and dog walkers, the young soldiers who had their rifles hitched across their backs. He knew the case histories of the great failures of the unit’s work – he knew more about the failures than the successes. He could talk through, if he had to, the minute by minute intricacies of Lillehammer in Norway: wrong man shot dead, the team captured by local police – catastrophic. Could relate the disaster of the botched poisoning of Khaled Mashal in Amman: a toxic substance, lethal, squirted into the ear, but the unit’s people being held in police cells and their government having to deliver the antidote that would save the bastard’s life – humiliating. A wry smile, because the killing of the state’s enemies could be complex. But he did not make judgements, and the file he had been shown would carry the same importance as that of the man, buried the previous day in Beirut, who had stood outside a Maltese hotel. It was always best when he stood in front, blocked the path, looked into the face.

  He headed for home and would reach it only a few minutes before she was due back. It was a day like many. The shadows fell, the sun dipped on a far horizon, and he would wait, as he did so often, for his pager to bleep or his phone to ring.

  At last light they had their view.

  Foxy was beside him.

  It seemed so ordinary, so close and yet so remote. He could not have said, without hesitating, what he had expected.

  ‘You all right, Foxy?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Just that you sound clapped out.’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And don’t bloody patronise me.’

  The evening cool didn’t penetrate the gillie suit. The hood was like a heated wet towel on his head, and his hair would be flat and wet under it. Not only ordinary, but dreary and cheap, the sight gave out no atmosphere of danger, or of a place where an enemy of importance was bedded in. An enemy. A target, like any other. Could have been organised crime, or a serial-rapist inquiry, or a training camp for the rucksack guys or the vest ladies. Just a target, and the only difference was that the Golden Hour would be a fine-run thing, if push came to shove.

  They had come past a herd of water buffalo that had gone on grazing while half immersed, and there had been no herdsmen with them. They had seen small columns of smoke to the left, the north, and once there had been voices, kids’, and the sounds of distant life carried across the marsh. He had dragged the inflatable, with Foxy and Foxy’s bergen, and if he hadn’t they would still have been back at the wire. They had gone slowly and twice he had been up to his chest in the water. Once he had gone out of his depth and had had to cling to the side of the craft and grip Foxy’s sleeve. There was a narrow strip, going north to south, of land and they had come onto it. He had gone forward and dared to stand beside the sole tree there. He had gazed out and seen enough, then gone back for Foxy and found that the inflatable had been folded away and was tucked into the top of a bergen. They were together, on their stomachs. The tree was beside Foxy and they had a view that went through slow-waving reeds, then across water and over the brow of an island that was some eight or ten feet above the waterline. A lake stretched away, perhaps three hundred yards across and then there was a steep bank, palm trees and buildings.

  To the right there was a group of huts, put together crudely with concrete blocks. Badger had his glasses on them, the start of his traverse, going south to north. There were men in uniform at the huts with infantry weapons. They wandered and smoked, sat and talked, hugging the shade. He scanned to his left and followed two children who kicked a ball without co-ordination. One of the soldiers joined them and squeals of delight carried to him. Tracking further left brought him to the mooring in front of the house where a uniformed man squatted and fished. The lenses picked up a little red dot on the water, a float. There was a block-house building behind the man, and its front was in shade, but Badger could make out a woman sitting in shadow. She was on a hard-backed chair and held a stick. The bright colours close to her were a child’s plastic tractor and a tricycle. He thought where they were now was safe, a decent distance from the target zone. In the last light, a vehicle’s headlights lit the dullness, and the man who was fishing reeled in his line, stowed the rod on the bank and hurried towards the single-storey house. The kids abandoned their game and ran to the woman on the chair. She pushed herself upright with the help of the stick. Where they were was safe, and useless. He didn’t have to ask Foxy’s opinion on it. It was useless because it was too far back, and they would have been voyeurs there, wasting their time.

  ‘We have to do it now.’

  ‘You asking or telling me?’ A snarled whisper.

  Badger said he was ‘telling’. He was rummaging in a bergen for the audio-direction stuff and a spool of fine-coated cable when the car pulled up and they saw him.

  Quite a good-looking guy, hurrying from the car to the woman and hugging her.

  It couldn’t be left to the morning. It would be hard in the darkness but he had to hack it, get closer to the guns and where the kids played and the woman had sat. He watched them and they had their backs to him. They went inside . . . a good-looking guy.

  Chapter 6

  The dawn was coming up, and the niggle prospered.

  The geography of the location dominated, as it always did when cameras or microphones were involved. Distances were crucial. A light wind in the night had rustled the reeds. Barely audible to the ear, they rattled – almost clattered – against each other when heard through the earphones.

  Foxy whispered, ‘The sound quality isn’t good enough. I’m here for conversations, maybe half a sentence. The audio’s beam is having to travel through the reeds and that’s dominating any talk by the front of the house and the door inside. I didn’t set the parameters of this caper. I’m the poor bastard that has to get here – wade, paddle, damn near swim. I didn’t choose the ground.’

  ‘Did I hear that right? ‘‘Wade, paddle, damn near swim’’? You were on your backside, floating and being dragged along.’

  The sun was a gold sliver peeping up, far away, above a flat horizon that was unbroken by trees or high ground, only by the reed beds that moved endlessly with the wind’s force.

  ‘What I’m saying is that where we are now is unsustainable. More important, where the mike’s placed is—’

  ‘By me, of course.’

  ‘By you, yes. Where you placed the mike isn’t good enough. If that’s the best you can do we might as well load up, turn round and walk out.’

  ‘Quit?’

  ‘I came here to do a job, not for my health. I see little point in staying if I can’t do the work.’

  ‘So I have to go forward and move the mike?’

  ‘About right.’

  ‘And how close do you suggest I go – the front door, into the kitchen?’

  Foxy could have stood up, stamped and shouted, but he didn’t. One thing, verbally, to clip Badger’
s ears for his rudeness, but another to break the rules of thirty years’ practice. Badger ought to show him respect for his accumulated knowledge. ‘You should get the mike into a position where its beam doesn’t cross a bed of reeds, so screening its access to the front of the house. Simple enough. You up for it, or do I have to do it?’

  A shrug from Badger, sour little beggar. The sound was too poor for Foxy to identify more than occasional words. The one who fished had come by the house after darkness and spoken to a soldier, or trooper, or Guards Corps man, but the words had been muffled by the reeds’ movement. The same man had again come into the magnified vision of the image-intensifier, and the night-sight had shown him talking to the target. Both had smoked and their speech had been distorted.

  In a half-hour, the house and the low quay in front would be bathed in low sunshine and movement would be dangerous, or stupid.

  They had good cover where they were. Off to the right, which was south, there was a bund line that bypassed the shallow island where the mike had been placed by the young ’un the previous evening. It marked a boundary to the lagoon onto which the target’s house faced and came to the main shoreline on the far side of the buildings he’d identified as a barracks compound. The bund line was too far away for the mike to be set, but might make a better route onto the island.

  More argument? Not then. Rolling away from him, Badger let his hands slide over his suit and checked it, involuntary and instinctive, then his headpiece. He put more mud on his hands and wrists and was gone.

  What else had they bickered over?

  The Meals Ready to Eat. One chicken and one beef, both with rice, and he had wanted the chicken. So had Badger. Foxy had insisted, had had the chicken.

  The stags . . . He’d had to sleep, had been dead on his feet, but when the young’ un did the watch Foxy had been woken five times. Hard to get to sleep in the scrape, but he’d been woken five times, and five times could hear sweet fuck-all because of the motion of the reeds. He had let Badger know he needed sleep, not the sound of a reed hitting another reed and a thousand more doing the same.

  Using the bags had been a point of conflict. Badger had said they should carry them out. Foxy wanted to bury them. They had a dozen, enough for a little cache of excrement, and a couple of bottles to go with them. He hadn’t done it for years, been a croppie in a hide, having to bag and bottle. He could lecture on it, could make men’s faces fall at the thought of the bag and doing the business a couple of feet from an oppo. The bags were in a hole and covered over, but whether they’d be carried out was not yet settled.

  They had stripped in the night, and that had made for more tension. Their gillie suits and the clothes under them were soaked. Their boots were sodden. Badger had lain on his back and wriggled out of his gear. His skin was white, had no cream or mud on it. It was too many years since Foxy had bared all in front of strangers, except in the changing rooms at the gym where he did work-outs. Inhibitions, which he would not have entertained ten years before, had stressed him. When he had slid off his boots, wrung out his socks, then pulled off his trousers, he had turned away from Badger – and criticised: ‘You’re stark bollock naked – what happens if we have to bug out fast?’ He had heard the sharp breath and had known he was held in contempt, not given the respect he deserved. The boots had dried partially, the socks mostly, but the gillie suits were still sodden and heavy.

  The light came on fast.

  Foxy remembered that from his weeks in the interrogation centre. It came on fast in a surge and the shadows were shortening. He looked with his glasses for movement in the reed beds or ripples. He searched for Badger. He saw the target, in a vest and pyjama trousers, sandals on his feet, come out and drag on the morning’s first cigarette, then go back inside. A car came, the Mercedes saloon that had brought the target home the previous evening. It parked and the driver stretched, spat, then lounged. He saw two sentries on plastic chairs under the low trees but they stood, reluctantly, when the officer came by them. The children appeared in nightshirts and chased each other. One fell and seemed to graze a knee – there was wailing, which he heard on the headset. Everything he saw he noted in his log, and on the first page was his sketched map of the location.

  The sound failed. There had been, quite piercing, the crying of the child above the reeds’ motion, then silence. There was water in front of him beyond the reed beds, which were at the edge of the ground they had reached, and then there was the last island, lower and more exposed, without cover, then more reeds, denser than the others, and the lagoon in front of the house and the barracks. He had keen eyes. Ellie had told him his eyesight was above average. She liked to say, in company, that he could see a flea move on a carpet. Ellie’s job at Naval Procurement kept her out of the house too long for her to hoover up any fleas. He ached for her, always had and always would. He’d never ached for his first wife, Liz, who might still be a radiologist in Yorkshire, he didn’t know, with the two daughters, who’d been barely civil the last time he had gone up from London for a birthday . . . A uniform, out of sight of the house, stood on the bank of the lagoon and urinated into the water.

  Foxy brought the lenses off him and was traversing towards the house when he saw what seemed a snagged mess of dead reeds caught on a little promontory. There were two others out in the water, moving languidly with the flow, but the one on the promontory, which stretched out to form a mud spit, was anchored. He hadn’t seen it before, and assumed that the wind, more powerful in the night, had dislodged it from the foot of the reeds.

  His shoulder was tapped, and he started, half turned.

  Foxy Foulkes’s reactions weren’t failing: his sight was good, and his hearing, and he would have claimed that his awareness was as sharp as it had been at any time in his life since he had been awarded his own Blue Book for passing out as a qualified CROP man. He had not seen or heard him.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘The mike’s out in front. It’s another fifty, sixty metres forward. We don’t have that length of cable.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘You want to hear anything? We go forward. See that kind of island? It isn’t one. We get to the far end of it on the bund line, and we can hook up. You’ll have no interference there. We have to move now. Come on.’

  ‘There’s not cover there,’ he said sharply, almost out loud.

  ‘Then we make some.’

  Foxy bit his lip and didn’t say what he thought. It was too close. No cover. What the hell was he doing there? He didn’t say anything . . . Thought plenty, though. Thought about the ground on which they would lie up and where he would have a decent link with the microphone, where the beam would be clear of obstruction, and about the sun’s climb, the spreading light, the soldiers who were drifting from the barracks building and the faint smell of cooking. He was there because he couldn’t have refused. The young ’un, Badger, had challenged him, and he thought one argument was settled: the shit would be left buried with the bottles.

  He crawled away to get his gear together as Badger reeled in the cable.

  If he looked for the target, and the target’s home, he could see the weapons, and far out in front of him was the island-shaped platform on which there was little cover.

  What to say? Nothing.

  The Engineer had gone early. The sun had been barely up, and the heat haze had not yet formed when he had kissed his wife and waved briskly to Mansoor. The Mercedes had pulled away, and the day had begun.

  A few months ago, before his new-found interest, Mansoor would have started on the many texts available to him on the types and maintenance of weaponry available to the al-Quds Brigade. He would have taken books on military tactics, particularly those describing the fighting methods of the Iraqi resistance, the Afghan Taliban, Hezbollah and the North Vietnamese from the library of his headquarters at the camp outside Ahvaz. In his convalescence he had read everything available on the methods used to defeat the America
n military, the forces of the Great Satan and its ally, the Little Satan. He knew what had been done in Falujah, Helmand and Beirut, where the marines had been bombed, and at the plateau of Khe Sanh. Then he had nurtured his new interest.

  It did not make him less alert.

  He would have said that his sense for danger or threat was greater than if he had been sitting in the shade with his head buried in a book or pamphlet. He knew about the battle of the marshes, the battle for Susangerd, the battle for Khorramshah and the battle for Abadan, and each move that had been made in the Karbala offensives, which were legend in the history of the Guards Corps. He had done that work, and had found a new focus.

  He sat on a plastic chair in front of the Engineer’s house – where the sentry would have been at night – and looked out in front of him. He had good binoculars.

  His own wife, Golshan – flower garden – had told him, when she was angry and bold enough to speak directly to him, that he had come back from Iraq and the hospital a changed man, embittered. She worked long hours at the Crate Camp Garrison, and came home late on the bus to her room in his parents’ house. He rarely saw her, so she had had no chance to learn of his obsession. He sat with his binoculars on his chest and waited for the movement of the birds.

  He looked for the African Sacred Ibis. He could have seen it in East Africa, South Africa, Taiwan or on wetlands on the east coast of Australia, but he had never watched it fly low over the marshes in front of the house. They were there, he had read, but they were endangered and near extinct. It would be a cause for celebration if he were to see one, and even more so if a pair came close.

  He had not yet seen it on this stretch of marshland. Naghmeh had told him she had watched one drift over the lagoon, but it had gone when he had come from his office. He watched, waited, and would break away only for coffee in the barracks, and his salad sandwich. Otherwise he would keep the vigil. He had his rifle across his knees and could tell himself – in true honesty – that he was conscientious in his work. He believed that the Engineer had told them so at the camp.