The security officer, a true believer, gagged and must have betrayed his shock.
The Engineer was sharper: ‘Could the regime collapse? Is internal dissent, external aggression – combined – enough to break us?’
He sensed a trap. The question was close to treason. Men, and women, were hanged for treason. Did the question test his loyalty? Was he doubted?
‘Can the regime be swept away? Are we merely temporary? Are we like the Fascists and the Communists, the Ba’athists, the apartheid oppression in South Africa and the . . .?’
He stuttered it: ‘The regime is strong, is a rock. Those who denounce it and look to betray it will fail. There are spies everywhere, and danger. Vigilance must be rigorous. I tell you, should I find myself confronting such an enemy, he would know pain the like of which he has never experienced before. We are strong.’
‘Thank you. You are a good friend.’ The Engineer sank heavily into the car, swung in his legs and the driver closed the door after him.
Mansoor pondered. He could – and most probably should – report such a conversation. Who would be believed? Himself, a junior functionary, or a man who was fêted by the high command of the al-Quds Brigade and who was about to travel abroad on the state’s funding? Could he, by implication, accuse such a man of treason? The car turned a corner beside the barracks and disappeared, dust billowing behind it. Always it was necessary, if denouncing a man of prominence, to be certain. He was prepared to dither.
It would have been the wife’s mother who had the radio loud because she was partially deaf, had been afflicted since the enemy’s artillery had pounded Ahvaz.
He went to his chair in the shade and sat down with his binoculars. He wondered if this would be the day when the Sacred Ibis came over the reeds fringing the lagoon and settled on the exposed mud spit.
Foxy whispered brusquely, ‘The radio knocked out the long conversation at the car. Before it was switched on he said he would be told today the “when” and the “where”. That’s about it. For me it’ll be some sleep.’
Soon he would start to snore.
Badger felt alone. He had lost count of how many hours, days and nights it had been since they were scooped from their lives and taken north to the house facing out over the bay. The hours, days and nights since he had met the girl, Alpha Juliet, had merged too. He had taken the headset. Most of what it picked up was the babble of the radio. The heat inside his suit climbed, the sweat ran and he felt the weakness that lack of exercise produced. Those people at the house with the ruins of a castle and the pipes’ wail were too distant: he could no longer put faces to them. Time dripped, the images blurred . . . He couldn’t bloody remember them.
‘The carvery is always good value,’ Gibbons said, ‘and the fish is usually passable.’ He played host to the Cousin, the Friend and the Major. It had been Sarah’s idea. She had suggested it that morning, had made the phone calls with the invitations, had booked the table and appeared to believe he needed respite from sitting in the inner office, contemplating the wilting flowers, the pictures on the wall and the silence of the telephone. It had been sleeting in central London when he had walked from the office to the club.
A bottle of red was brought, a bottle of white and a small jug of water.
He smiled, a little deprecating. ‘Always the hardest time for us, the waiting. We’re all from that neck of the woods . . . I often think that others who are parked at their desks in our place and write those analysis pieces have little idea of the strains placed on us by our work in the front line . . . very little idea.’
Sarah had bundled a wad of cash into his hand, the implication being that she would lose it somewhere in the budget – elastic bands, highlighters, paper clips. In the club’s restaurant, rarely used by him because of its expense, she had reserved a corner table where they could speak and be free of eavesdropping.
The Cousin remarked, ‘There are people in Langley who drive up the Beltway before it’s light for half the year, look at a screen all day, and it’s dark when they’re back in the car and off home. They tell the little woman, ‘It’s been a hell of day, sweetie, just one hell of a day.’ They have no idea, and less concern, about the pressures we’re under when we’re running sharp-end stuff . . . But I take comfort from the feeling in my water that we’ve gotten close to the serious time. I’ll start with the white, Len, thank you.’
The Friend said, ‘I don’t intend to badmouth my own people, but Israel has the world’s highest proportion of jealous bastards who think they know better than the man of experience. We have awards that would fill a wall for interference and shit-chucking. What we do is difficult and stressful and you can piss against the wind for all the appreciation you’ll pick up. The red would suit me as a kick-off, Len, and I’m grateful for the invitation.’
The Major grimaced, smiled. ‘I can remember a day when I’d been out on those open-sewer streets of Basra from dawn till dusk and I’d killed five IEDs. Each was complex and would have been shipped in from that bloody production line across the border, and one was for me and complicated. There were bad guys on a roof, watching to see how I went about it – hoping also to see the big flash and hear the bang. I went back to the mess. Believe it, please. There was a colonel in there – using the Basra Palace, Saddam’s old watering-hole – for a farewell bash. He and his guests had put on their fancy-dress outfits and their gongs for smart dining. Flopped in a chair, feet on the table, beer bought me, and this bloody colonel wants to know why I haven’t washed, shaved, changed before entering the mess. Didn’t understand there was a life outside the limit of the air-conditioning system. I told him to fuck off – took my brigadier in Baghdad a week to smooth the waters. People have no idea about the real world. I’ll start with the white and then try the red. Thanks, Len.’
They ordered, drank and ate. Another bottle of red was required, but the water lasted. In a vacuum of information, responsibilities were reiterated and guarantees given. Coffee was accepted, but no brandy – an indication of work taken seriously.
The Major said, ‘I just want to put it on the record in this rather select company . . . People, these days, are pretty squeamish about what they call ‘extra-judicial’ interdiction. I think it an excellent way of dealing with an extant difficulty. Identify, locate and . . .’ He slapped a broad hand – with chunky fingers that seemed to lack the sensitivity necessary for the dismantling of improvised explosive devices – on the table. The cups rattled in the saucers, the unused cutlery banged against the glasses, and he’d done a passable imitation of a shot being fired, and another. Then the Major wiped his mouth with his napkin, and dropped it as though business had been done and procedures agreed.
The Friend used a toothpick. ‘We have a mantra that we neither confirm nor deny, and are consistent with it. It can, however, be let slip through many channels that the target was in trouble with his own people for fucking the wife of a man more influential, or for fabricating his expense accounts. That confuses the general public of many nations – but not the associates of the target. They know, they fear . . . The greatest source of the fear is that their small corner, that most secretive part of an organisation where they exist, will be penetrated . . . But we have to wait.’
He smiled and let slip a small belch, then meticulously folded his napkin and smoothed it.
The Cousin gazed around him wistfully, as if a small chance existed that, in a gentleman’s club, he might be permitted to smoke a cigar. ‘A Hellfire, if aimed accurately and carrying a punch of eight kilos of metal-augmented charge, can do a fair bit of ‘extra-judicial’. We don’t have – at this moment – a judge and jury sitting in north Waziristan, in the Haraz mountains of Yemen or in the sand round Kandahar, so what we do there has to benefit from lack of contact with a courthouse. I hear no great wail of protest. Go back two decades and a Canadian citizen was taken down, Gerald Bull, shot by – of course – persons unknown while earning big moolah for building the gun that was going to fire chemicals and biolog
ical out of Iraq and into Israel. Did the Canadians shout and yell? Deafening silence. The furore of the hand-wringers lasts a week at maximum – and it keeps the motherfuckers looking over their shoulders. There is only one law in this business. Don’t get caught. It’s a good one to remember. It has legs and has lasted years. A grand meal, Len.’
The Major and the Friend agreed. Gibbons raised an arm to motion for the waiter and his bill, then reached into an inner pocket for his fattened wallet. He said, ‘It’s not the easy time. When we have – and I’m confident we will – the direction to head in, it will all get easier. You’ve met the two men who are up front, know pretty much the same as I do about them. What I would like to say, though, the officer we have in support of them is first rate. Very dedicated. Yes – at the risk of landing hard on my arse – I’m very confident.’
The Cousin said, ‘And you’d know about that, Len, as I hear it. You’d know about landing hard on your arse.’
The Friend said – and would have read the filtered reports reaching foreign agencies, ‘Dogs a man, doesn’t it, when he has to be lifted out of the shit?’
Gibbons offered no denials. ‘Didn’t like it, but lessons were learned.’
The Major, not privy to secrets of the trade and historic foul-ups, pushed back his chair and made ready to stand. ‘I see, looking out onto the street, that nothing of the weather improves, sleet gone to snow. Hard to have a decent sight of them, in the mind, in the heat. It’s merciless, the heat is. Brutal. Anyway, what interests me are your good words on the officer on the ground who directs all this, and your confidence.’
On her haunches, Abigail Jones sat alone. Behind her, fifteen yards back, was Corky.
He accepted, they all did, that she had taken control again, and would call the moves.
Somewhere under the robe she wore – now mud-stained and dusty – was the holster that hugged her waist. The pistol was in it and there was a slit at the side of the garment that her fist could be shoved into if she needed the thing. She had tucked her gas mask behind her backside so it was close to hand but not visible.
She had called for a leader to be sent. The rag-heads always liked – at a time of confrontation – to have a meeting, a conference; then they would hector and bluster, give themselves the opportunity to preen and usually to walk out. A meeting, at a time of substantial dispute, was the way they usually went. She sat in the dirt in the centre of the gateway and waited for a leader to come.
Corky could see, from the tilt of her head, that her eyeline was down. Her focus point would have been about half of the distance between where she sat and the line of men facing her. One had a scarf, bloodstained, across his face, and another could only stand with the help of two others; one had weeping abrasions on his shin where the bar had been used on him, and another tucked his wrist between his shirt’s buttonholes and had a broken collar-bone. There were others who might have fractured ribs or dried blood on their scalps, but no shots had been fired and that was a miracle. He thought they had done well.
His rifle was slung across his chest and he had two magazines, filled, taped together. His flak vest was over his Jones Boys shirt, and the gas mask was hooked to his waist. If any of them had run at her, he would have dropped them.
Behind him was Shagger; Harding and Hamfist were at the Pajeros. Pretty feckin’ ridiculous but they still had the tripod up, the spotting ’scope mounted on it. The identification pictures were on the ground, held in place by a quarter of a mud brick: by now Corky might have been able to spot a Marbled Duck. He might have known the difference between a Ferruginous Duck and a White-headed Duck, and definitely he could have said which was a Basra Reed-warbler and which a Black-tailed Godwit. He had a sunhat on, camouflage type, while Shagger and Harding wore the Proeliator Security caps with the big peaks; Hamfist’s was from a pizza-delivery service in the east of Scotland. She wore nothing on her head other than a wispy scarf. Her body threw off no shadow because the sun was above her.
She waited. It was all bluff.
Harding’s take on it was that had it been American spooks a close-support airstrike would have been called in during the night, and Black Hawks would have come to lift them out. Shagger had said that if the mission had been run by any of the other Six officers from Baghdad they’d have called a taxi and quit.
She sat very still. Corky couldn’t see her face but thought of her as serene, so calm.
The heat made him wobble on his feet, the shimmer came up from the sand and the faces in front of him distorted. There was pain in his eyes behind the wraparounds, he craved a drink, and his concentration was going. Harding must have seen him rock.
The drawling voice was in his ear: ‘Go get yourself a drink.’
‘What about her?’
‘Go close to her, break the mood she’s set, you’ll get bawled out.’
‘I reckon.’
Harding murmured, ‘She’s remarkable.’
Corky did it side of mouth. ‘No one like her, an ace lady . . . You have any idea how long this needs spinning out?’
‘Beginning to think it’s closing down on us. Don’t reckon, up front, they have much more time. I saw how much water they took and it’s the heat . . . I don’t think they have a heap of time.’
He moved his hand and felt the coil.
It had been a better morning. The Engineer had gone. The goon, the officer, had driven his jeep away and might have gone to a village nearby to shop or to a town. The wife had not come out and the children had been taken to school by the older woman, in uniforms and with heavy rucksacks. The head of the guard who sat in the plastic chair with the rifle across his legs was lolling back. Badger had moved, at a slow crawl, to the reed beds. It was the first time either had moved in daylight, and it was incredible – like a liberation – simply to stand and stretch, arch and flex. He could move more than he could in darkness and was freer because he could see what his boots landed on.
There was the rhythm of Foxy’s breathing beside him. He was asleep. Badger’s hand had slipped underneath the folds of his gillie suit and rubbed – not scratched – one of the many tick scabs on his hip. The hand had come out and reached for the water bottle and he had felt the smooth, cold line of the coil.
He couldn’t drink the water that lapped the bottom of the reed stems, but he could scoop it up in his hands, strip down to his boots and socks and wash himself. He saw the pocked skin of the ticks’ bites and had prised others off his body, working as carefully as the contortion allowed to see that none of the bloody things was close to his backside. He was cooler and cleaner, a rare joy . . . It was the bottled water that would kill them: Badger reckoned there was enough for that day and one more, but he felt better for the wash, almost human. He had gone back on his stomach, doing the crawl that took him from the line of the reeds across the open ground. Then he had insinuated himself under the cover of the fronds, burrowed forward until his head and his shoulders were level with Foxy’s and taken over the headset.
He flinched, drew his hand sharply back. The touch told him this was not wood, plastic or rubber. The coil might have been six inches across, but could have been as much as nine. It filled the gap between his body and Foxy’s, was level with their hips. He thought his touch on it had been merely the gentlest brush. Foxy slept. Badger knew what he had touched. He had not seen it, but the texture against his fingertips was evidence enough.
Foxy had gone into the reeds with the collapsible shovel, had defecated, urinated, and buried the plastic bag and bottle. Badger had not known whether he had stripped down to his boots and socks or whether he had just wiped water under his armpits and in his groin. His breath had stunk when he came back. Badger’s would have too, but the smell of their breath would have matched the general stench of the marsh and the trapped water of the lagoon. Foxy had been careful coming back, had taken an age, but had smoothed the dirt behind him and scattered more dead stuff, leaving it haphazardly put down – had done a good job. Together they had
made an inventory of the water remaining: three bottles, and it should have been seven or eight in that temperature. After the exchange of the headset, Foxy had taken the watch and Badger had slept.
It could only be a snake. Badger had seen snakes in zoos when he was a kid, and there were snakes on the warmest days up in the Brecons that he had known about when stalking paratroops on exercise. There were also snakes in gaps in the heather and on flat stones, which he had seen when edging close to red deer in the Scottish hills, testing himself against their eyesight, hearing and the quality of their nostrils. Anyone who knew had told him that snakes were most dangerous when disturbed suddenly from deep sleep. Then they lashed out. He twisted his head, a considered, slow movement, and looked down into the darkened gap between his body and Foxy’s. They were both in the scraped hole and across the top of it was scrim net, camouflaged and lightweight. Reed fronds were on top of the netting, and some light seeped through. The snake filled the space between their bodies, and it was coiled tight. Its tail was towards him and he couldn’t see the bastard’s head, where the fangs would be.
It had been another hand-over with nothing to be said, and Badger could listen to the breeze in the reed tops, and the charges of birds across the lagoon. Up to the moment when he had slipped his hand down in the hope that his fingers could massage some relief from the irritation of the scabs, he had been desperate for water. But the rules were that water should only be drunk when both were awake and the watch changed. He thought Foxy slept easily, head averted, breathing regular and with a light snoring in the throat.
It was important to him that Foxy slept easily. If he was restless, he might pitch over, roll onto the snake and panic it. It would have slithered into the place it now had, between their legs, and settled itself. If Foxy’s arse landed on it, it would retaliate, it might go right and it might go left. It might go for Foxy’s hand or arm, or try to bite through the suit and the lightweight trousers, or the leg below the suit and above the socks. It might launch itself at Badger. He lay so still, barely daring to breathe, and reckoned the head, with the fangs and poison sacs, was against Foxy but less than a foot from himself. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so bollock naked with fear.
A Deniable Death Page 23
