The goon, the one he had identified as Mansoor – who had the rank of an officer and was in charge of security, obviously – was on his feet, out of the chair quick enough for it to have toppled behind him, and there were yelled instructions coming into Foxy’s earphones. The guard was to be called out, weapons drawn from the armoury, the sergeant to be found, a patrol prepared. The pressure of the hand on his shoulder eased, a gradual weakening of the force.
He thought that Badger regarded him as old and second class.
The officer had stopped yelling and now stood rooted in front of the fallen chair. His binoculars were at his eyes and he traversed up and down from the bund line to the reed beds and on to the far end of the open ground. The lenses would have covered – with each sweep – the apparently snagged mess of dead reeds in which the microphone was hidden. They would have gone over the water under which the cable was sunk, across the sand where it was buried and travelled on to the heaps of dried leaves that the wind would seem to have whipped together. In the lenses’ view would be the shoulders of the gillie suits, and the tops of the headgear, and perhaps the hands caked with mud, and the optics that had scrim netting round them and were tilted down so that the sun didn’t hit the glass. It was a test.
A good one.
Instinct told Foxy to duck his head further, chin against chest, fill his face with mud and lower the headgear the last half-inch that was possible. Not to look . . . not to dare to see whether the glasses had moved on from the points that could identify him and Badger.
They did. He watched and the glasses scanned where the microphone was, the cable was buried and where they were . . . He wriggled. Couldn’t help himself.
It started as a moan, had gained in pitch and was now a scream.
He had to twist his pelvis, lift his hips and backside three inches, get the bottle under his crotch and feel the relief.
The voice in his face had a harder edge. ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’
‘I was pissing.’
‘Couldn’t you wait?’
‘No.’
‘Not the best moment, under close observation, an alert. Tie a bloody knot in it.’
Not the best moment. The scream had raised the birds in panic flight, disturbing them more than the explosion had. He shifted the bottle so that he could cap it, then pushed it back under himself, using a knee to get it down by his boots. They were still wet from the insertion march, but manageable – wet boots and socks were the least of the problem.
Not the best moment because of the screams, now behind them, and the sight of troops jogging along the bund line. Could have been a half-dozen and the officer was on the low pier that jutted out into the lagoon, waving directions.
He had had to use the bottle.
Men were coming close and frightened little voices edged nearer. Carefully, minimum movement, Foxy raised a forefinger and eased one of the earpieces back. He had, now, the officer in his left ear and the noises off to the right, stumbling, curses and whimpers, in the other.
He could see the troops on top of the bund line. Most had rifles and two had machine-pistols.
The woman had come out and used her stick to take her weight as she made her way from the door to where the officer stood. She asked if a mine had exploded and was told that it was more likely an artillery shell, maybe 105mm calibre. She asked if pilgrims had detonated it – he heard the quaver in her voice and assumed it was concern, not the severity of her illness. The officer said it was more likely to have been thieves – there were dumps in the marshes from the old war and this one might have been stockpiled Iraqi munitions, perhaps for the artillery pieces of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. She knew of the abandoned dumps . . . He sent her away, but with courtesy, and urged that the children be kept inside: all the family should be at the back of their house, not by the front windows. That made sense to Foxy Foulkes, familiar enough with the ways of the world in Iran, or in Iraq, to comprehend why an educated woman and her young children should stay away from their windows and not see what . . . There had been enough of it in Iraq when he had served there, and the ammunition technical officers had spoken of it.
They said that the main targets for looters were the copper wires from telephone cables and the casings from artillery shells. If the shells were live they would reckon to know where the detonator was, belt it away with a sledge and free the casing. The casings made good money in the souk, and if a few entrepreneurs didn’t make it to the market, God would take care of their families. The ATOs said they saw too many broken bodies – limbs left up trees, guts smeared on walls – when the sledge hammer had hit the wrong part of the shell. The casings could be brass or chromate steel or anodysed aluminium. A primer and a propellant of black powder were inside the casing; at the tip, the warhead might have held high explosive or mustard gas.
The next scream was closer and the hushing increasingly desperate of those around the casualty. They might have been stampeding animals as they ran. Foxy had lost sight of the soldiers who had come along the bund line, and he realised that the fugitives were driven by a cordon of guns towards the reed bank that protected him and the young ’un, the open ground and the water either side of the raised mud on which they had their hide. Some luck, the way the dice came down. Foxy thought his freedom depended on the young ’un’s skills. Might be more than his freedom: might be his life. The skills were those of concealment.
What Badger had done with the scrape in the mud and the camouflage covering it, the mud on what little of their skin might be visible, the weaving of dead foliage into the gillie suits and the headgear might be good enough to save him – and might not. It had been painstaking. At the time, before dawn, Foxy had thought it exhibitionist shit, pernickety little movements that tested the weight and colour of individual fronds before discarding them or threading them into the suits. If the work was not done carefully enough, there would be a rifle barrel against the nape of his neck. His bergen was on his right side and the other on Badger’s left. He himself lay on the spotter ’scope and its small tripod.
The first of them, in flight, broke through the wall of the reed bed.
They stopped dead in their tracks.
They wouldn’t have known where they were running to. They had lost cover, were in a cul-de-sac as far as flight went, boxed in.
The stomach wall of the one who had screamed was split open and his T-shirt was dragged up. He seemed to be trying to hold in his intestines with his crossed forearms. Another man had hold of his elbow and tried to support him, but scarlet fluid was running onto his trousers. Two more carried a dead man, who hung like a rag doll in their grip. Another, with ashen cheeks, hopped forward in their wake, holding upright a teenage boy in a long bright shirt. It was bloodstained from navel to knee. He had to hop because his left leg had been taken off immediately below the knee.
They would have seen the open ground, and the water, and they would have heard – those not screaming or moaning – the pursuit behind them in the reed bed, and might have seen, across the lagoon, the officer waving his little force forward, and heard the bawled orders. They crumpled, all of them, into the mud.
Soldiers came through the reeds, and hope died.
One walked so close that his foot must have come down on the young ’un’s bergen. It was a dust-smeared boot and would have sagged as it stepped on the lower half of the rucksack, but the rifle was aimed at the gang, cowering, and the next step missed Badger’s feet.
He took little breaths, just the barest amount of air, while ants or small spiders half drowned in the sweat on his face. He endured the irritations. He had forgotten, almost, that Badger was beside him. He didn’t hear any breathing or feel any movement, but he heard the officer’s shout across the water. He couldn’t see him now but imagined that he cupped his hands in front of his mouth to give the order.
Foxy gagged. He had heard the order. It would have been faint to the soldiers, but it was loud and clear to Foxy.
&
nbsp; He tried to swallow but there was no moisture in his throat. Worse, vomit seemed to creep up to the back of his mouth. Foxy had been with the army in Northern Ireland, in the bad days, when feelings had run high with the military, and he had been with the interrogators at the Basra airport complex when tempers were lost, but he had never heard an order given by a uniformed man such as the one that drifted over the still waters of the lagoon and was crystal sharp in his ear.
They were shot one by one.
It wasn’t a killing where an automatic weapon was aimed in their general direction. Foxy couldn’t see it but assumed that the sergeant – a short man with a machine pistol, in a tunic a size too small for him – had done the shooting. Single shots. A stench of cordite. A whimper from some, a curse from others, quiet from a few. Under any circumstances would Foxy have intervened? No. They could have been raping grandmothers, pushing down hooded prisoners onto soft drink bottles so that the neck penetrated, and he would have stayed silent.
The corpses were dragged away.
He heard the slither of the bodies on wet ground, then the cracking of reed stems as they were pulled through denser concentrations. Later, when those sounds ended, he heard the far-away splashes of burial in water, and wondered if they had found stones to weight them. They would have been Arabs, most likely from Iraq. They had come across the border because this was more likely to be virgin ground for the collectors of shell cases. Their crime was to have crossed the frontier, and what had made it a capital offence was that they had strayed into a most sensitive part of the restricted zone.
It was a dangerous thought, one he had not entertained during his four-month posting to the interrogation team. It risked sapping his commitment. What in God’s name had he and his comrades been doing there? What were they doing there now?
What had they been doing there in days gone by when British squaddies had patrolled, Yanks had driven by in their armour-plated carriers, the foot-soldier was pleased to get a ten-dollar bill for putting the roadside bomb in place, and some damn man – who had glasses, good-features, a fine-looking wife who was dying and kids who were frightened – had laboured at a bench, making the bombs that took the lives in this place, which stank of donkey, dog, fly and human shit? The rant rioted in his mind. What were they doing there? The answer: would need a cleverer man than Foxy. He could have praised Badger for making the scrape, constructing the hide, saving them, but he didn’t.
Perhaps he was too preoccupied to hand out praise. He would have given his left testicle bollock for the chance to hold on to Ellie, cling to her – would have given the whole handful of his tackle for the chance to hold her and be loved. Fractionally, beside him, Badger shifted, his arms moved and then his elbow dug sharply into Foxy’s ribcage. He passed Foxy a flapjack. Foxy ate the flapjack, then said, wiping crumbs, ‘Life’s cheap, worth nothing, especially an Arab’s. Iranians would see it like shooting a diseased dog. Don’t expect there to be a court of human rights getting steamed up about it.’
Badger said nothing. They should have been bonded by the experience, but Foxy realised that neither would offer anything to the other.
The officer was back on his chair and his glasses were at his chest. The ducks and waders were again on the water, and the officer had his float out, watching it. The woman had come out from the house with her mother, who carried the washing basket, and the kids had their plastic toys. The guards had resumed their watch from the shade of the palm trees. Hard to believe it had happened, that anything had happened. He thought he and Badger would not have been so fortunate. It would not have been quick: interrogation, torture, slow execution – and not by a bullet. He had no idea what he was doing there, then and now, what was his business.
He would have liked to talk about Ellie, but the man beside him had no interest in her.
The washing was pegged out in the sunshine and the children played. The officer caught two small fish, which he unhooked and threw back. Nothing was said and nothing was learned.
Then the shivers started, rustling the old fronds that covered them, and he couldn’t help himself – so nearly dead, and so damned isolated.
‘The marsh area is one of the great wonders of the world. It is a unique and precious place. We’re doing everything we can to protect your homes, keep you safe, and to maintain the habitat of many centuries . . .’
The crowd had more than doubled, might have trebled. Abigail Jones was at the broken gate. She had put a scarf over her hair and still wore the loose cool robe. She had a bag, a local craftwork effort, slung on her shoulder and in it were her communications, her medical pack and her pistol, with two spare magazines, three flash grenades and a purse with some money. She had reflected that the bag contained all that the modern young woman needed if she was promenading in sunny Iraq . . . Different from what would be in the bags of the girls she had been at school with or shared benches with in college lecture rooms. She’d have said that the comms, the pack with the dressings and morphine syringes were the most important items – not the weapons because she had Harding behind her: the M-16 would be slung across his chest, his thumb would be on the safety, his finger on the trigger guard, and there would be a bullet in the breach.
‘. . . We’re trying to let the whole world know how beautiful, and how important, are the marshlands where you live. We want to establish the extent of the wildlife that has survived the war with Iran, the persecution by Saddam and now the drought. We need to say with accuracy what birds are here and what animals. We don’t want to interfere in any way with your lives. The whole world knows of the hospitality of the madan people, but we ask that you leave us to count the birds and other creatures.’
If they believed that shit they’d believe anything. They didn’t. They were close to her. There was no hostility in the eyes, but the sort of deadened dullness that came from poverty, hardship, and the sense that an opportunity had presented itself. Two vehicles, good for stripping; radios, binoculars and telescopes that would fetch useful money in the souk at al-Amara; weapons that would augment those filched from previous conflicts fought out in the marshes – she had heard that old Turkish rifles retrieved after the battle of al-Qurna, December 1914 and British-issued Lee Enfields were still seen on a tribesman’s shoulder. There were also food, medical supplies and money. Little whistles of breath came between Harding’s teeth, his way when he was tense. He would have known she was talking shit and convincing none of them, but she had started and would finish, and her Arabic was fair enough for her to be understood.
‘. . . We ask you, please, to leave us so that the birds and the creatures are not disturbed and we can count and observe them. Later, when we have finished, we will reward your co-operation generously. We’re doing this for you.’
She thought she had sounded so hollow.
They gazed back at her. They might decide that she and her guards were weak and rush the gate, might decide that they could shift around the fence – down in many places – infiltrate and overwhelm, or they might conclude it best to wait till darkness, not many hours away. The eyes stripped her. She had – like everyone who did a Baghdad posting – read the works of the explorers, mostly British from a half-century or a century before, who lauded the culture of the madan men and the lifestyle of many millennia. They would kill her, steal from her body – maybe rape her after death – and blood lust would determine that the bodies of Corky, Shagger, Hamfist and Harding were mutilated. It wasn’t political, nothing to do with the offensive intrusion of a foreign army. It was all about the economic necessity of survival, requiring items of value to be taken to the souk at al-Amara, even Basra, and flogged off so that a new widescreen television could be bought with the generator to power it.
She smiled to the front and said, in English from the side of her mouth, ‘Not an overwhelming response. I’m getting nowhere.’
‘It wasn’t my shout, ma’am.’
It had been Abigail Jones’s decision to seek out the abandoned exploration
site, and the more reliable maps showed no settlements near to it. There had been no alternative. Actually, she didn’t know Harding’s given name, and knew less about him than she did about any of the rest of her detail. She had never learned what military units he had been with – airborne, armour, marines, military police? He stayed apart from the banter of the others, but when he spoke it was worth her while to hear him out. All that was personal about Harding – who had been with Proeliator Security for eight years – was in his wallet, a photograph of a woman: a frail face under sparse grey hair, not his mother but the aunt who had brought him up in abject penury somewhere in the Midwest. She thought that, when this was over, he’d hit the Russian whores in the Dubai hotels. He was the smartest of the team, immaculate each day in his fatigues, and careful. She liked that, valued it.
‘I don’t see this as sustainable.’
‘When they’re hungry enough, ma’am, or thirsty, they’ll come. Could be tomorrow or the day after, could be tonight or in half an hour. We’d have to drop a hell of a number of them to win.’
‘Not what we’re here for – it would be a disaster. Don’t even think about it.’
She kept the smile fixed, but none of them stepped a half-pace back, and nobody answered her. If they’d heard Harding’s voice, recognised him as American, he might not be killed but sold on. There were chickens in cages in the souk, waiting to be sold and slaughtered, goats and sheep that were worth good money. They’d get a better price for the American than they would for Corky, Shagger and Hamfist. She turned to Harding. ‘Talk to me.’
‘It’ll be hard to stay here, ma’am, but here is within an acceptable distance of our people. Further back, wherever that’s possible, is not acceptable. Already they’re hung out, rags in the wind. I don’t see an option, hard as it is staying our ground.’
A Deniable Death Page 17
