‘They’ve cut it back, it’s not the same.’
‘Did you do a run with a twenty-kilo pack, two and a half klicks in twelve minutes?’
‘We did that.’
‘Anyway, I did Claustrophobia, the Tower, the Boot, Isolation and Stamina, and I came out top in my class.’
‘They give you a medal?’
‘The training counted for something, and should be respected.’
Badger said, ‘Assuming it’s not the wrong dialect, and not the wrong tribe, and you can manage what you’re here for, what’s being said?’
They lapsed into quiet, and watched. The Mercedes pulled up, left the dust cloud to fragment behind it.
The driver was out snappily, came round the front of the car and opened the door for the Engineer. They had been together enough years for them to do small-talk on journeys: football teams that the Engineer had never seen and films he would never go to, but he valued the conversations. His own door was opened and he was handed the bag that held his laptop and the papers he had worked on. He stood, arched his back and stretched out the stiffness from the journey. The driver opened the boot and lifted out the new suitcase, carried it to the door, then bobbed his head dutifully, and was in his car, driving away.
Mansoor came to him. ‘I think your wife is resting, and that her mother is with the children and their books.’
Mansoor’s voice was breathy, hoarse, as if he had shouted and strained his throat. He demonstrated the wheels on the new case, ran them on the concrete of the patio in front of the door, showed how they went in all directions and grimaced. He asked what, that day, had happened, and was told men had been close, in the marshes, thieves, but they had been intercepted efficiently. How was his wife? he asked. Good, but tired.
He could smoke in his car but not in his house; he could smoke in his office and in meetings, but not in the presence of his children. She dictated the rules. He could not say how long remained for her – a month more, or the duration of his life. He did not know how long the rules she had laid down would exist.
There were two pigs in the water, near to a reed bed and close to the spit that came off the open ground some two hundred metres from their pier. He watched them, a full-grown boar and a young sow, emerge from the reeds and sink themselves into the water, only nostrils and eyes above the surface. Huge creatures, they moved effortlessly and with grace.
Mansoor told him that, before the thieves came, he had been watching for the African Sacred Ibis, but had not seen one. After the thieves had been intercepted, he had fished but had not caught a carp worth keeping, large enough to eat.
The Engineer had no interest in the bird, had less than no interest in the fishing. He did not share his cigarettes but smoked and walked to the limit of the small pier where the dinghy was tied. He was glad that Naghmeh was resting, that she had not been at the door to greet him and see the new case with the special wheels. Him bringing the case home marked a moment of virtual finality: when it was filled and they left, the road ahead might fork in two directions. They would head for recovery or death. There was no middle way.
Mansoor interrupted his quiet. He did not wish, of course, to intrude in private matters, but when was it likely they would travel? The Engineer said, distant and distracted, that the final arrangements were being put in place, but soon. Soon. They agreed it was a fine suitcase
Mansoor hovered behind him.
What did he have to say?
The voice was still throaty, as if there had been crisis and shouting here. The Engineer was told he should not permit his driver to take him through Ahvaz the following morning. There would be another hanging at the prison – a terrorist of the Ahvaz cells, an Arab. ‘He confessed his crime, placing a bomb near the headquarters of the police, and named associates. The sentence of death by hanging will be enforced. Another was with him. He did not aid the interrogators and committed suicide. I am told there will be powerful emotions in the city tomorrow, and after the last experience . . . There have been too many bombs from Arab terrorists. The penalty must be exacted. You should keep out of the city.’
He nodded, watching the pigs swim and feed. When the cigarette was finished he threw it down and watched it gutter in the water. He went back to his house to find his children and show his wife the suitcase he had bought for their journey.
Foxy whispered, ‘Try this for a bedtime story to make you feel good. The advice is to keep clear of the centre of Ahvaz tomorrow because they’re hanging a terrorist – sorry, probably a joker that we or the Yanks shoved funds at so he’s a freedom fighter. The Arabs reckon they’re third-class citizens in the blessed Islamic Republic and risk their necks trying to blast the mullahs. Anyway, he’s going to be strung up and it’s likely to make people angry. That tells me the local good guys are infiltrated, compromised, have snitches and touts in their cells, and aren’t secure. That’s why you and I are here. There was another who would have been sharing the gallows tomorrow but he topped himself. When the goon speaks to the boss it’s good, educated Farsi, and I can follow it.’
‘Have you anything else to say?’
‘Like an apology?’
‘For bitching, then sulking,’ Badger teased coldly. ‘You ready to say sorry?’
‘No.’
The house was bathed in light from fittings screwed to the top of the walls. It fell on the patio and across the track to spread over the pier, where the dinghy was tied, and the water. The Engineer sat on the plastic chair and smoked. He could have lived inside the camp of the al-Quds Brigade, in a fine bungalow near to the commandant’s residence, or had an apartment overlooking the Karun river near to the Hotel Fajr Grand. He might have been accommodated in a government-owned villa near to the Ahvaz airport, but he lived here. Her choice. It had been her decision that, when the Americans began to crowd onto their aircraft and head for home, taking with them the body-bags, so many of which he had filled, they should make their home near to the water, the marshes and old civilisations that captivated her, and where she was close to her life’s passion: the clearance of land mines. She had supervised the renovation of the building, had bullied architects and pleaded with builders, had created the world she wanted . . . and the pain had come. There was moonlight on the far water, the reeds and a spit of mud, beyond the throw of the security lights, and he saw the ripples, the movement of the birds and confusion where pigs browsed. He heard the racking cough of a sentry. He had thought he understood it, but he could not, now, imagine the future.
Chapter 8
Foxy pinged her . . . He thought the temperature inside the gillie suit was in excess of 50 degrees centigrade – more than 130 Fahrenheit. He could have drunk water until his belly distended, but would not. They had carried in the water. Water, where they were, was more important than anything other than the audio-capture gear. They could survive on little food, concentrates with high protein, and minimal sleep. If the water was exhausted they would suffer dehydration, which meant muscle and stomach cramps, headaches, weakness, dizziness and heavy sweating.
Foxy had heard, on his Basra tour, that the body could lose a quart of moisture through sweat per hour. He lay still. Ping was croppie talk for having a close view of a target. Could have been eyeball, which was general for all police agencies on surveillance duties, but the guys who bagged the shit, bottled the piss and were an élite talked of pinging a target . . . It was the talk that kept Foxy alert. Good to think of himself as ‘élite’. He deserved it.
She moved slowly in the sunshine at the front of the house. Her man was Tango One and she was Tango Two. Foxy reckoned her more important to their endeavour than the husband, and more likely to cough up the evidence of a destination. When she was outside, or when she was inside the room with the open window and he could see her shadow move or an interior light lit her, he eased the controls, lifted the volume and struggled for greater clarity in his earphones. He believed it was from her that he would break the damn thing, then get on the move, ret
rieve the gear and head for the extraction point. After this, Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes – not breaking any confidences, of course, and not spitting too much phlegm into the face of the Official Secrets Act – would be a big man, a valued man, a man in demand. ‘Elite’: he deserved that title, had done since the days he’d lain in the hide on the hill above the farm near Cappagh in County Tyrone and been there long enough to feed the warning that the Barrett 50 calibre was on the move. Guys from Intelligence, and special forces, had called his stake-out ‘epic’, and the battalion adjutant, the unit that had fouled up the cordon and missed the damn thing when it was moved, had made a personal apology, saying that ‘such outstanding surveillance was short-changed’. This was beyond any category he had before been involved in.
The young ’un slept beside him.
There was more washing going out, more pegs slotting on the line, children’s stuff and her husband’s clothing. She would not, of course, hang out her intimate clothing where it could be seen by the guards from the barracks. Her mother followed her and carried the plastic basket with the shirts, shorts, socks, the kids’ dresses, towels and washing-up cloths. He had the binoculars on her, 10×50, but didn’t use the spotter ’scope. The visuals were of small interest compared to the audio system – wouldn’t have said it into Badger’s ear, but the microphone was well placed on the mud spit and well camouflaged. The gear was good and the sound quality was fine but their language was difficult for him because they didn’t speak, mother and daughter, in the classical but in the vernacular. He understood each time she wanted another peg, that the small boy’s shirt had not washed well, and that the girl had torn a skirt playing outside. He had to believe that the clue would be given him.
The young ’un slept. It was unequal. Badger could sleep for the full three hours while Foxy was on stag. When Foxy slept, Badger would elbow him if there was conversation on the patio. He had been woken when the Engineer had come from the house at dawn and paced at the water’s edge, enjoying his cigarette and talking about football scores with two of the guards. He had been woken again when the car had come and the goon, Mansoor, had repeated the warning about keeping clear of the centre of Ahvaz, then asked about the Engineer’s day. He had seen the shrug and heard a remark about ‘meetings, all the day is meetings’. And a question was asked about the suitcase, but he had not caught the reply and had assumed that the wife approved of it. Then he had been allowed to sleep again. Twice he had received the elbow and been told that he was snoring. Foxy, as routine, dug his fist into Badger’s hip each half-hour to wake him and then lie that he was talking or grunting in his sleep. If Foxy couldn’t crash out for three hours, he was damned if Badger would sleep without interruption.
Yes, it would be good. There would be nods and winks, hints-offered, but the secrecy governing where he had been and why would be preserved. He would be introduced as the man who had gone into opposition territory, who had lain up in circumstances of quite extraordinary privation, had witnessed mass murder and delivered, had won through. He would talk about the skills and disciplines needed to achieve aims and ping targets. Who did he have with him, or was he alone? He might be asked that. He’d had a greenhorn, something of a sherpa, there – basically – to hump the gear. He’d enjoy that, and would be fêted. Ellie would be proud and . . . The washing was out on the line and hung limp; there was no wind. There were more flies than before.
The flies had been bad the previous evening, had disappeared during darkness and been replaced by mosquitoes. Now, in the full glare of the sun, the mosquitoes had gone and the flies were back – big bastards. They droned and probed at the scrim mesh on the camouflage headgear and they were on the mud-caked skin of his hands. He thought it remarkable that they didn’t wake Badger, that he could sleep through their persistence. In the night, Badger had taken the shit bags and piss bottles out of the hide, wriggled on his stomach into the reed bed, dug a little pit – on the water line – buried the bags and emptied the bottles. Without the bags the flies should have been less interested. Didn’t work that way. They’d come on in swarms and searched for routes through the scrim into his ears, mouth and nose, settling on his hands. He felt the prick as they bit, but he couldn’t anoint himself with repellent: it would provide an alien scent.
She had the line filled with washing. Ellie often asked him to empty the washing-machine and put their things on a line when she was in a hurry for work and doing her makeup or running late. It was usual for him to iron his shirts and her blouses. He had learned to iron after he’d gone to London, leaving Liz in the north with the children, and did it well: Ellie was sometimes too busy with overtime at Naval Procurement to get home early and iron. Quite often, Foxy cooked the dinner.
He thought she’d have been a fine-looking woman if the illness hadn’t ravaged her. She was quite tall, not dwarfed by her husband. The lenses showed her figure when she moved and the robe was pressed against her body. She would have seemed handsome from fifty or seventy-five yards, with a strong nose, good cheekbones and a chin that gave off authority . . . Different when he watched her through ten times magnification. Harsher lines, a greater stoop in the shoulders and the wince at the mouth when she turned or reached up with the clothing or a peg. He sensed a steeled determination to complete the basic task. He watched her. It was what he did well.
Abigail Jones had not met Len Gibbons. She imagined, because he was ‘old school’ that he would have moved to a temporary billet, a London club or a camp bed wherever he had set up his operations centre, and that he paced, even chain-smoked, while he waited for a telephone call.
It would have been three years ago, just before she was shipped out to Iraq when she was coming to the end of her London duty, that she had been leaving the canteen area, and the older woman with her, whom she’d known from the Balkans, had stage-whispered a choice morsel about the man standing, seeming elderly and vacant, at the counter, then moving his tray.
The telephone would not have rung because she had sent no message. There was to be no radio traffic, and no satphone communication other than to transmit information categorised ‘critical’. She had nothing important to report.
The woman, Jennifer, famed for indiscretion, had been in Belgrade while Abigail worked in the Sarajevo embassy and they’d become friends, distant, when sharing escape weekends on Croatian beaches. ‘When you get down to Baghdad, darling, don’t eff it up like that one did in his youth. In this hateful place they like to deal in one-chance-only scenarios. A good man, a nice man, and they said he was really capable. He was advanced, given responsibilities. Such a sad story. Never recovered fully, like blight in an apple orchard, and it was thirty years ago.’ Gossip was forbidden, mortal sin. Abigail had asked what the man had done and where he had done it. Jennifer had chuckled and declined to expand on her story – except to tell her that the man was Len Gibbons, left for ever like a bit of driftwood, high and dry, when the tide slipped out. They had parted, gone off in different lifts to different floors, and she had forgotten about the tale until, six years later, she had been told Len Gibbons would field her reports when there was news worth imparting.
He was hardly going to want to know that she had lain in the sand, swaddled in a mosquito net, with her firearm on the ground beside her, fastened by a lanyard to her wrist. He was hardly going to be concerned that she had barely slept, and that Corky and Harding, Hamfist and Shagger would have slept less, that those she proudly called the Jones Boys had used two flares and a thunder flash and had maintained a perimeter of sorts. There hadn’t been a charge but a creeping infiltration, the creaking of stressed wire as the fences, already sagging, had been flattened. The flares had stopped them, had held them in the shadow at the edge of the light pool. The thunder flash had scattered them, driven them back. Hamfist was the one who knew most of this sector and he’d claimed to read the madan mind. ‘You can give the feckers – ’scuse, miss – a flash and a flare and we’ll be OK. If it gets to us chucking about the lead we’ll hav
e to quit.’ The flares and the flash had stabilised it during the night and, first light, Corky had urged her to get the treasury open. ‘We can’t shoot them all, miss, or it’ll be worse than Bloody Sunday. We should try to buy them. Do it like an auction – start small and haggle like it’s the bazaar. They’re all Ali Babas, miss, and don’t forget it.’
She could picture him: she’d seen him once in the canteen and a couple more times when he’d been near her as she’d come off a bus near to the Towers’ entrance. There had been a weighted look to him, that of a man burdened: she’d define that as pallor in the complexion, straggling hair, a shuffle walk, clothing that was a little too loose and, above all, wariness, a sense of being left outside any loop that existed. Jennifer had spoken of ‘one chance only’. It was where Abigail was now. The one chance to make it work – so she could justify rare interest in Len Gibbons, who waited for her call.
She had taken twenty five-dollar bills from her money belt, which she wore against the skin at her waist. And almost, taking the notes out and peeling them off the wad, she had giggled – but to herself. It had made a dent in his skin: she had not taken off her money belt when she had been over and across him. The buckle had gouged his flesh . . . Regret nothing. He had not seemed to notice that it had pressed into his flat, muscled stomach. She had gone down to the gate, Shagger yawning behind her, and Corky halfway between them and the vehicles. Hamfist and Harding had been near enough to the Pajeros to start them, and fast. She had called forward the twenty men she thought seemed oldest and had put, into each of the palms offered her, a five-dollar bill. Her own ancestors, a century before, might have given out beads or anything shiny . . . She’d closed each fist on the note. It had humiliated her, the crudeness. Then she had tried to persuade them to head home, get back to the huts built of reeds and the floating island shared with the water buffalo that gave them dung to use as their staple fuel for heating and the high-definition TV. Five dollars was meagre. None of them had shifted.
A Deniable Death Page 19
