They walked, and Badger watched.
He described the man, his arrogance and authority, and what the brigadier had said to him.
He explained his confusion. He asked her opinion: was he teased, tested? Mocked? Was it possible the Islamic Republic was a house built of cards and could be blown away?
He supported her and she followed his slow steps but was heavier on her stick.
Did they regard him with such contempt that he needed threats on the danger to him of defection? Was the regime’s strength so fragile? He did not know, and there was no other person alive with whom he would have shared thoughts so heretical.
Why had it been said? Why did they doubt his patriotism and loyalty, the faith that governed him?
Why?
When he had nothing more to say, she dug in her bare heels, spread her toes in the dirt and twisted him to face her. The light came up off the water and bathed her. Ducks’ splashes made ripples.
‘It is unthinkable. You will see this Guard Corps officer today. You will not bow in front of him. You will stand your full height, and you will tell him his words are fit only for the tip where the city’s trash is dumped. The thought of you betraying the nation is rubbish, and you will tell him so.’
‘I will tell him, to his face.’
‘It is rubbish because you would not leave me.’
‘No.’
‘Do they think that I, whether I am destined to live or to die, would go with you? It is inconceivable.’
‘I shall tell him.’
‘I would not go with you because I would not abandon my children. If I live a week, a month, a year or go my full span, I would not leave them. I would leave you before I would leave my children.’
‘He said also that, because of my work, I would be hunted down and hanged if the regime should fall.’
‘Is it more important what might happen to you than what will happen to me?’
She had shamed him and he lapsed into silence. He sensed that now she felt the chill of the night: she was shivering. He put his arm around her shoulders and started to lead her back to the house. He could feel her bones. Everything in his life revolved around the regime of the Islamic Republic that had come to power when he was nine years old. He had been to their schools; he had listened to their mullahs as a teenager; he had walked behind his father’s coffin as a procession wound towards the cemetery. His father’s life had been given in a minefield in defence of a child of the regime, and his mother had died of wounds received from shrapnel in the air attacks on Susangerd. He had struggled for the best results at university – electrical engineering – in Ahvaz, and for thirteen years had laboured over the workbench in the camp. He had made the devices, done what was asked of him, and now he was teased, taunted. It was as if the suspicion of treason was laid at his door. She had hard bones now and they were angled against his hand. The weight seemed, each day, to drip a little more from her. He had only once been outside Iran.
He thought of that journey more often now, where he had been and whom he had met.
His journey had been to the Hungarian capital, Budapest, the course at the University of Technology and Sciences had lasted two years, and he had learned areas of electronic engineering that had served him well at his workbench. He could remember his fear at the levels of drug-taking and binge-drinking, the rampant sexual appetites of the students. As a defence against corruption, contamination, he had wrapped himself in work . . . and there had been a girl.
She was in his mind more often now because each time he touched his wife, Naghmeh, he felt the sharpness of her bones and believed her life was slipping away. He had little faith in a foreign consultant. Romance was gone. Lust and love were strained to breaking point. There had been a girl in Budapest, who had never aged because she was locked in his mind as she was then. It had been the one time in his life that he had felt weak. He had yearned for her, and had been a virgin, experiencing new longings. She was Maria, from Austria, studying industrial psychology. On some occasions he had sat, in great boldness, beside her for lunch in the canteen. They had been to films on the campus and had held hands, and they had gone once to hear a pianist play Chopin. She had come to his room one evening in April, when the days lengthened, flowers bloomed and spring burst. He knew her as a good Catholic, and that she drank alcohol. Her parents were divorced, and she would work after her degree, she hoped, in the Swarovski glass factory as part of the workers’ support programme. She had come to his room in the students’ hostel: her blouse had been low-cut, her skirt short, and he could smell the schnapps on her breath, and her perfume. She had reached up from his narrow bed, caught his arms and tried to pull him down. He had slapped her face hard. She had left him, face pale except where his fingers had met her cheek and a nail had scratched her nose. He had never seen Maria Ohldorf after that day and he had the picture of her face, frozen, in his mind, her shock and bewilderment. She had been pretty, and he had yearned to hold her, but had not dared. He thought often of her now as the weight slipped off his wife’s bones.
He saw, on the edge of the shadows, Mansoor watching him. They went inside.
The Engineer cursed himself for thinking it – but she would not be saved. It was the stuff of dreams, false dawns. Sharp in his mind was the defiance, the extremes of rudeness, that he had hurled at the medical team in Tehran: almost the implication that they were peasants and ill-qualified. If he had listened, then had brought Naghmeh back to her children, there might have been a calm, loving parting, not preceded by a journey of desperation. But arrangements were made and could not now be cancelled.
The moon had gone, but first light was not yet on the horizon, above the far reeds and the water behind them.
Foxy eased off the headset, then pushed it across the little space to Badger. He expected to be asked what he had heard. No question came.
Had he been asked, he would have whispered, airily, that he had heard nothing of importance. It always threw interrogators waiting for an interpreter’s translation of a suspect’s fifty-word statement when a digest of around five words came back. He would not have said that the talk was of ‘defection’, rejected, and ‘abandoning family’, out of the question. He could have added that the Engineer and his wife spoke quality educated Farsi to each other. He could have latched onto a discussion, brief, that the Engineer would himself be a target if the regime failed and his association with the Revolutionary Guards Corps became general knowledge. He could have finished with an assessment, from the Engineer’s voice pitch and the wife’s, how their morale stood, and he would have assessed that her nerves were near breaking point and she was depressed. He said none of it.
It annoyed him that the query did not come – annoyed him enough him to hiss, ‘Not interested? Don’t you want to know?’
‘If there was anything I needed to know you’d have told me.’
‘I thought you’d want to hear their talk.’
‘Only if I need to know it.’
The headset was taken. He felt the strength of the young ’un beside him, little bastard, eased over and broke wind again. The bloody flies were swarming over the scrim of his headgear.
Would they come to blows? Foxy reckoned there was a chance of it. He closed his eyes, thought about sleep, and more about Ellie. He wondered where she was and what she was doing. He could have drunk a two-litre bottle of water straight down, but it was rationed, a discipline that couldn’t be broken. They had the water they had brought in – the greatest weight factor in the bergens was water. Only thinking of Ellie could clear his mind of the need for more water than was allowed. He rinsed some in his mouth, then swallowed it but eked it out. He couldn’t think when he had last disliked a man – loathed or detested one – as much as he disliked Badger, and he thought it mutual. It was probably inevitable that they would fight. The quiet closed round them.
It was the last hour before the grey smears appeared on the horizon in the east. They were all exhausted and needed sleep. N
one of them would get it.
It was the crisis time. The Jones Boys had usurped her. She didn’t give the orders, didn’t open her mouth and make suggestions – she did as she was told. The extent of the crisis yawed ahead of her.
Each of them – Hamfist, Corky, Shagger and Harding – wore their T-shirts: they had gone into their bags, dug them out, stripped off what they already had on and had done a fast change. The extent of the crisis brought them together, made them a team, and a team needed a uniform: from a uniform came strength. They were paid to protect her, so they would. She had passed control to them. She knew them like the callouses on her hands, the virtues and weaknesses of each man, but she could not have said who among the four would emerge as the leader. None had. Interesting to her, because the sharing of their responsibilities showed – her opinion – stunning trust. But they were trained as fighting men, when trust was implicit, and now they were fighting.
She thought it medieval. Abigail Jones had childhood memories of traipsing around castles, mostly motte-and bailey, in the Welsh Marches – Ludlow, Caus, Wigmore, some that were shoulder-high ruins and others that were towering relics – and her father, the barrister, had lectured on battles, sieges, the storm tactics of attackers and desperate defenders, and she had imagined men-at-arms running from one battlement to another to stem the latest thrust, knowing that if the line was broken, the wall fell, they were gone, throats slit. Shagger had the vehicles, Harding had the door of the building, and Abigail tagged along with Corky or Hamfist.
They chased shadows caught in the beams of the big torches. It was not the ultimate attack, but probes – and if they found weakness they would come on, do it big-time. A mob always knew how to sniff out weakness, and she thought a crowd of men from out of the marshes – gassed, bombed, their habitat drained and their buffalo dead – would know how to scavenge for weakness, would be bloody near gold-medal standard at it. At first the shadows had kept back, hugged the no man’s land between light and dark.
They were bold now, and the crisis had come.
They must defend the building alongside which the Pajeros were parked, and try to keep clear the approach ground between them and the broken perimeter fence. In front of them was the familiar track to the dragged-back gates, but behind them, inside the compound, was darkness.
The first blow was from Harding. His weapon was his M-16 Armalite rifle’s stock. Two had come, light-footed and silent, from the shadows, and were a moment away from getting inside the building where the gear was, the water and rations, some of the ammunition and enough of the grenades. Abigail, chasing after Corky, had seen them and Corky had shouted the warning.
It was the crisis because Harding hit one in the testicles with the stock of his rifle, then struck the second across the face. A double-tap, of sorts – one movement, two casualties. The first went down and was retching at Harding’s feet, might have thrown up on his boots, and the second was reeling back, clutching his mouth. Blood was easing out between his fingers, and she fancied he might have spat away a tooth. The first act of physical violence was the start point of the crisis.
She had ceded control.
It would have been the grossest impertinence for her to shout, ‘Don’t shoot! For fuck’s sake, don’t use live rounds.’ A killing would be a disaster. A wounding and hospitalisation would be a catastrophe.
Bruising, missing teeth, abrasions were manageable.
Knives were shown at them when a larger group, six or seven, ran towards the vehicles from different directions – the nearest thing to co-ordination. If the first strike of a knife had hit, and one of them had gone down, they would have been dead – all of them. Dead meant Harding never getting back to see the aunt who had reared him in the trailer camp and never again getting value for money from the Russian whores in Dubai. Dead for Corky was a telegram to a housing estate in west Belfast, being opened by old people he had not seen in twenty years, and two kids who would not have a father. Dead in Shagger’s world was a farm never bought and reoccupied by an elderly couple, pedigree sheep never grazing the fields that looked onto mountains. Dead was Hamfist’s divorced wife getting a large cheque from Proeliator Security and maybe going as far as digging out a photo of him and putting it on the sideboard for a week. And, dead was Alpha Juliet – surrogate mother of the Jones Boys – never again looking into the face of Badger, deciphering nothing, learning less, and seeing in the eyes a message of self-sufficiency and reliance on no one. It had captured her . . . And dead was having the smelly rag-heads crawl all over her and likely shag her carcass. There were knives in the torch beams that might have been used to gut a good-size carp or skin a dead buffalo calf, or to slash the reeds from which their homes were built.
The alternative to being dead was to quit.
If they quit, they left behind Badger and Foxy, and a mission that had taken months to put together was aborted. She remembered the sergeant who had explained, shyly, that his work was routine, quite boring – he’d spent three and half hours on his knees while he dismantled a device left in a shallow hole near Highway 6, made it safe and gave the forensic people the chance to trace a DNA sample and to find the date-seller and the road-sweeper. She wouldn’t quit.
Hands were on her. She smelt sour breath and felt long nails catch the waist of her robe, then the pressure pushing her downwards. Beside her a knife flickered in Shagger’s beam, and might have been about to close on Hamfist’s chest. Corky came. He had an iron bar. It might have been used once to support barbed-wire defences. Corky was from an estate where knowledge of street fighting came at about the same time as primary school and first communion. He lashed around him. There were groans, a scream. The hands were off Abigail. There were no faces, only hands, and some had their own blood on them. Three knives were lined up. They were at the edge of Shagger’s torch light. She recognised it. They were together to feed each other the courage to charge forward, and the knives were raised boldly. If one of her Boys was down, it was over.
More had gathered behind the knives. They would swamp the Boys and her – there were so few of them, four guys and their ma’am, because the wisdom said that the fewer bodies on the ground, the greater the chances of going in and out without being identified. She hadn’t argued with the wisdom – and the knives’ blades flashed. She didn’t know which, but either Corky or Harding threw the first gas grenade and it rolled among them. The smoke burst from the canister and enveloped them. They were pale figures caught in a white cloud and they seemed to dance as they choked. Another grenade was thrown and the cloud thickened. It was harder to see them, but easy to hear the choking and the coughs.
They took their casualties with them, five who were helped towards the gate.
She knew what she had to do. Her head ached, and the gas was in her eyes, making them water with needle pains.
Abigail walked away from her Boys, following the gaggle of men, towards the gate. She reached it and shouted, in good Arabic, what she wanted. She had resumed her role of authority.
She sat down in the dirt and folded her legs in the middle of the track. She waited for them to do as she had instructed. It was a gamble – as was the whole goddamn thing. She waited, and soon dawn would come.
When would he know? Mansoor asked him. And caught him flustered, having had to duck back into the house because there were papers he had been reading early that morning and he had forgotten to replace them in his briefcase. Know what?
Mansoor said it slowly, as if he talked with a demented man. When would he know the date on which he travelled, and when would he know where he travelled to?
The door of the Mercedes was held open for him and he threw the briefcase towards the far side of the seat. He said he would know that day – he had been promised.
A radio had been switched on in the house.
The security officer had fine hearing. He realised that the wife, Naghmeh, had not packed the new suitcase. He had been roused by a sentry in the night, and had gone half dress
ed from his room alongside the communal dormitory of the barracks. He had seen them – washed in moonlight – walking beside the water. He understood that the two were, almost, crushed. He had thought in the night that the wound on his leg was healed, and that the muscles and tendons that had been ruptured were knitting well. He had pondered, watching them walk together, that the time would come soon when he could apply for service with the al-Quds again, in Lebanon. It was an honour to be chosen to protect a man of the Engineer’s prominence, and it could not have been said that he was careless with the responsibility, but it did not extend him. He was asked by the driver what the situation was that morning in central Ahvaz.
A news bulletin came on the radio.
He could answer. His father had telephoned that morning. The hanging of the terrorist the previous day had gone well. There had been militia and Guard Corps personnel on the streets; no live rounds or gas had been fired; the crowds had dispersed quietly after only one charge with batons. His father had said that the hanging had been witnessed by the family of a bystander who had died when the bomb the youth had placed had exploded; the mother had spat at the condemned as he was lifted, trembling, onto a chair with the noose round his neck and the hood over his face. The father of the bystander would himself have kicked away the chair if he had not been restrained. His father loved to watch the hangings . . . His father had said that the streets were calm. He said it was safe to take the quicker route through the centre of the city.
He was surprised. The question had shocked him. Never before had his charge, Rashid Armajan, made such a query. It had been asked from beside the open rear door of the car, as if an afterthought: ‘Do you believe it possible that the regime governing us is, in fact, similar to a house built of playing cards that can be blown down, destroyed?’
A Deniable Death Page 22
