Her parents would mind Magda for the evening. The black-tie occasion was a celebration of a local politician’s birthday, an influential woman from the ruling party with the ability to dispense patronage. He and Lili would be with the great and the good of the city. In such company, his given name was Steffen and his family name was that of his wife. He was Steffen Weber, and soon there would be a prefix to his name, the title ‘Professor’. He changed in the bedroom. Lili was at her dressing-table and sat in her underwear to apply her cosmetics. He could have said that until the last week he had been successfully absorbed into the German dream – the downturn in the economy seemed not to affect him – but he had brought the mood home.
If he had talked to her, it would have been a burden shared. He had not. He carried it alone. Easiest would be to look the patient in the face – he did it often enough – assume a look of principled sympathy, and say it straight: ‘I am so sorry, there is nothing I can do. I regret that the question of surgery does not arise.’ Those patients hurried away, and he had a cup of coffee, then carried on with his day. That evening in the Rathaus, there would be good food, fine wine and a string quintet. He would be among the élite and accepted . . . He sensed a shadow hung over him.
Dust trailed behind the big car. Abigail Jones had heard all four of her Boys arm their weapons.
It was a defining moment. The crowd ahead parted, the car was driven through it and came to stop in front of her – had to, or the BMW 7 Series would have gone right over her, squashing the life from her body. The driver braked with a certain flamboyance, and the tyres scattered dirt, some falling on her. It was about appearances and postures, and she took her time. She did not stand until the man had emerged from the darkened interior. It was a start, a good one. She had demanded that a leader come and he had. He was gross at the waist, wore a bulging thobe, long but cut like a white nightshirt, a ghutra on his head, chequered cloth with woven ropes to hold it in place, and sandals. He carried a mobile phone in one hand, his beads in the other. An assault rifle hung from a shoulder, and over the shirt he had a well-cut and discreetly patterned sports jacket that would have come from a London tailor, or from Paris. What else for Abigail to learn? He used a potent eau-de-Cologne. He had brought a youth with him, perhaps a son or nephew, who carried a briefcase – and two men for security, along with the driver.
As he approached her, she stood. Did it easily – did not betray exhaustion, dehydration or stiffness. It was Corky who had read it. The Irishman scurried forward with two old packing cases from the buildings. He put them down as if they were good-quality chairs, and used his sleeve to wipe them . . . The defining moment. She knew it, and her Boys. It was down to her skills as to whether they stayed or whether they were hoofed and in the process lost the mass of their gear. If they were hoofed, the guys up ahead were beyond reach.
She smiled – always did that well. Seemed to show frankness and honesty.
She called him ‘Sheikh’ and invited him to sit.
It was over water.
‘You’ve had a drink.’
Only the quality of the microphone and its cable link were more important to them than water.
‘I haven’t.’
The light was sinking. Badger had been out of the hide and had gathered more dead fronds from inside the reed beds. He had waited until a rare cloud was over the last of the sun’s brilliance, then had scattered pieces over the cable. He could not affect, without going far out into the water, the part of the cable that floated. Why not wade out? Too knackered. Badger had never known such tiredness. He could hike in bad weather, trek on moss and bog, and lose sleep. He didn’t have the strength he’d needed those hours before when he’d scraped out the hide, moved the surplus earth into the reed bed, then gone out into the lagoon – his gillie suit absorbing water, weighing enough, almost, to drag him down – and built up the flotsam on the mud spit to hide the microphone.
‘We’re not due to have a drink for three-quarters of an hour – forty-three minutes, actually.’
‘Don’t make accusations, young ’un, that you can’t prove.’
He came back, groped his way into the hide, and the cloud was now off the sun. One last beam of gold light penetrated the scrim, and he’d seen the glisten at Foxy’s mouth, the dribble on his cheek.
The diarrhoea had weakened Badger. He had come back to the hide, crawling, feeling faint, worse shape than he’d known, and the job of hiding the cable only half complete. The exchange was in cutting whispers, neither voice raised.
‘You’ve been at the water. It’s on your bloody face.’
‘You can’t prove it.’
‘We’ve enough for today, enough for tomorrow. We’re supposed, in this heat, to drink seven or eight litres a day each. If we have a litre and a half each, we’re lucky. It’s despicable to steal water.’
‘Shut your mouth, young ’un, before I shut it for you.’
He did so – but intended it to be temporary. He went into his bergen and brought out the bottle. He held it up and squinted at the level. It was about halfway down – he hadn’t marked it. There was no indent on the plastic where his thumbnail had gouged a line. Had it been spit on Foxy’s cheek? He reckoned not. His own throat was too dry for saliva, and he was dehydrated enough for there to be no sweat coming off him. If he’d tried to spit he would have scarred the skin in a parched mouth. Badger was sure. He pushed the bottle at Foxy, right up to his face. ‘You want to drink, help yourself.’
‘Don’t bloody play with me, young ’un.’
‘Go on, drink it all. Have yours and mine.’
‘Watch it.’
‘Finish this bottle and start the last. Swig your way through that too.’
‘You’re pushing me, young ’un.’
‘And when it’s all gone, we can fuck off out of it . . . if that’s what you want.’
The scrim netting that held together the head covering he wore was gripped. ‘You’re shit, young ’un. When this is over I’ll tell the world what shit you were here – tell all Gibbons’s crowd. Tell them everywhere I get to take a seminar. I’ll wreck you.’
Badger thought he was right, but the light had gone and he wouldn’t know. Apologise? No. Might he have been wrong? No – and there was no worse crime than taking rationed water . . . The security lights came on outside the house. The goon paced, and the children came out to kick a ball.
Foxy said, ‘My misfortune was to be teamed with a kiddie who was so ignorant, and had so little comprehension of the English language as to be at moron level. Know what “moron” is, young ’un, or is that too big a word for you?’
Again, he couldn’t help himself: Badger did the short-arm jab.
The head was twisted so the blow cracked into the right side of the headset. It fell apart.
Foxy said, ‘Not just a moron, but an ignorant one.’
The woman came out and Badger saw her through the glasses, a misted figure against the background lights. The children still played with the ball. She looked proud, he thought, and brave. She had dignity. He watched and admired her. She stood alone, leaned on her stick and didn’t speak to the goon. He wondered how it would be for her: a sea change in her life, when it hung in the balance, was in a medical man’s hands. He couldn’t say how it would be for her if the approach was made and her man was turned . . . and he couldn’t shift further from Foxy. It was as if he were anchored to the man.
Chapter 11
They had drunk water, two mouthfuls each, and it had been Foxy’s turn to finish the bottle. He had held it longingly to his mouth and sucked the final drops. One bottle remained. The silence wouldn’t last through the night.
The moon climbed. Foxy, Badger realised, was exhausted and close to breaking point. He couldn’t sleep. Not until the house lights were put out and conversations were stilled would Foxy pass over the headset and close his eyes. The anger each felt for the other was raw, of course. Badger was labelled a moron and ignorant, and Foxy was accused of b
eing the cheat who stole water.
The light had gone; the moon was on the climb. The target, the Engineer, was out, smoked and walked, but he was alone.
There were birds in the water ahead, splashing, and Badger thought that once he heard the convulsion of a pig and wondered if the wound he had made in the nostril was infected.
He sensed Foxy would break the silence first, felt him to be increasingly restless. It was worse to be branded a cheat than to be called an idiot without education. Was he certain that the water level had been lower than it should have been? ‘Certain’: a big word. Foxy could not move from the hide and go into the reed bed to crap or piss. It was two full days since the new suitcase had gone inside the main door. It would not have been bought to be shoved into a corner but because travel was imminent. There would be – if fortune favoured them – one remark, half a sentence, or a throwaway comment.
He didn’t think Foxy could last much more than the night and another half-day, and didn’t reckon he himself had the strength to go on past the end of the following day . . . He hadn’t seen Foxy’s skin. He assumed it would be the same as his own, mottled with tick scabs and mosquito bites. Not possible to lie still because the itching was so great, and the flies came for their ears, noses and mouths, could burrow under the scrim net. Never again would Badger complain about a Welsh hillside: rain, a low mist, night frost, a view of a farmhouse with a field for campers would be paradise – if there ever was an again. He had twice punched a fellow officer, another croppie, and had allowed himself to be niggled by rank and personality. If it were ever revealed by his oppo that twice he had thrown punches, and had accused a colleague of cheating and stealing, there would not be an again.
The thought jagged his mind. What did a croppie do with himself after he was booted out for gross misconduct? For assault? For screwing up in the field and going unprofessional? He’d go to work for a local authority, tailing disability-benefit guys who did half-marathons and played golf twice a week after limping down to collect the hand-out dosh . . . He’d be on the phone, burning the ears of former policemen who ran PI firms and found evidence of marital infidelity, or did in-house security on companies that were leaking petty cash and equipment . . . He would have nowhere to go that was anything like satisfactory to him. Would he jack it in? He wouldn’t grovel. He’d lose his job before—
Foxy broke. There was a trace of a whine: ‘There was no call to hit me . . .’
Badger gave him nothing.
‘. . . and no call to make that accusation.’
Badger thought Foxy had broken because, having barely moved since the hide was made, he would not be able to get out and do the legging back to the extraction point.
‘I’ve tried to do a good job in extraordinarily difficult conditions and . . .’
Worth thinking about. The retreat from the hide – because the mission was fucked and the target had been driven away, or was complete because the information had been radioed out – was well worth consideration. A repetition in his mind of what he dreaded most: the car came, the new suitcase was loaded, and there might be a label on it they could not – with a ’scope or binoculars – read, and the Engineer and his wife, the goon, the wife’s mother and the kids didn’t say where they were going. To have done this for nothing would be the humiliation of his life, and he would stand accused of misconduct and professional failure because Foxy would nail him. Badger would make no apology, would not help in going to the extraction point in exchange for two punches being forgotten, and a cheating call being wiped off a slate.
‘. . . and I’ve had no co-operation from you, no support, no comradeship.’
Badger watched the Engineer. Could have been his fourth cigarette. He was still alone and walking, no longer in silhouette from the lights behind him, thrown from the house, but moving away from the little pier where the dinghy was tied. He passed an old iron crane that in daylight seemed rust-coated – it was beside the water and might have dated back to a time when the water was the main highway – and went on towards the duller lights that fringed the area round the barracks. He was heading for the bund line to the right.
‘Of course, I shouldn’t have expected more from you. Too easy for you newcomers. And “too easy” makes for arrogance, and arrogance makes a kid useless. What did I say you were?’
Badger raked the shore with the binoculars, which were good for watching the house, but had the night-sight ready for when the Engineer was walking towards the raised track of the bund line. He could have scripted the line that would follow.
It did. ‘I said you were moronic and ignorant. I had that right, double time.’
Hours of building resentment were over; a dike had been breached. Foxy had the verbal shits, Badger thought. He himself felt calmer and was not about to hit him again. It was likely that the water had been drunk out of hours.
‘Did I say without good cause that you’re moronic and ignorant? Are you fool enough to think that?’
His head was nine inches from Foxy’s. Their shoulders touched, and their hips. Their smell mingled. The compulsion to scratch the scabs on his stomach was worse now, and the mosquitoes swarmed. If they made it out, reached the extraction point, loaded up the Pajeros, and ‘Foxy’ Foulkes – pompous, old-world – did not put in a career-killer report on him, his life would resume alongside Ged in hides, sodden ditches and damp hedgerows. He would tell the stories with relish. He followed the Engineer with his binoculars, then laid them down and took up the night-sight. The moon climbed higher and the birds were noisier on the water.
‘How much of a moron? Enough of a moron to buy the shit they gave you?’
The goon, the officer, was out of the barracks and walking towards the house. The flash of a cigarette lighter burned out the night-vision image. He watched the security officer, used the binoculars. He felt tension coming in his shoulders, a tightening in his gut, and was confused.
‘You bought it and believed it. They must have pissed themselves – Gibbons, the Yank and the Jew – laughing at you because of your ignorance. Back of the classroom, were you? Put your hand up, did you? “Please, sir, what’s interdiction?” They gave you a bucket of shit, and you swallowed it. Want to know what “interdiction” means? Want to know that it doesn’t mean an “approach” and turning an enemy? Want to know what you’ve signed up for, young ’un?’
All the muscles had stiffened, and his stomach had knotted. Cold had settled on the back of his neck and he held his breath.
‘You volunteered for a spook-sponsored stake-out on what is bloody near enemy territory without the finesse of a war declaration. The target for surveillance is the man who makes the bombs that kill our boys, and he’s right for interdiction, and you think that means some sort of cosy approach, a buttering-up in the hope the bastard will fall into our arms? You’ve all this shit about sitting in the countryside, wildlife around you, joys of bloody nature, and maybe you get to have a little cry because a deer’s snagged on barbed wire, a rabbit’s choking in a snare or a fucking rat has a thorn in its pad. A wanking dreamer, that’s what you are . . . The military use of the word “interdiction” is about taking down with the use of fire power. It’s the destruction of the enemy’s potential to fight. How does it relate to this guy, the Engineer, builder of bombs? “Interdiction” for him means that he’s killed. It’s why I’m here, and why you’re here . . . Difficult when you’re ignorant, maybe a moron, to know what’s real. He’s for killing, taking down, and you’re a part of the process, a big part.’
It was as though he had been hit in the stomach. But he held onto the binoculars and could see the goon near to the house speaking to a guard, an arm pointed away towards the bund line.
‘In your education, the little of it you had, did they tell you about killing? We use fancy words. We harvest fish, cull deer. When we bomb a village and get the wrong target, that’s not a screw-up but collateral damage. It’s bollocks, intended to soften actuality. He’s going to be killed. D
idn’t you know that, smartarse?’
The officer was striding out of the light, going at pace . . .
He could have been sick. It was that sort of blow that he’d taken, the one that made a man double up, then heaved the puke into his throat. He didn’t know, now, how he could have swallowed what he’d been told. He almost cringed.
Foxy warmed, would have sensed he’d hit home. ‘It’s deniable. We finger the man. They move in a hit team because we’ve told them where to look. He’s stabbed or strangled, poisoned or shot, and you’re a part of it. Does that put you, young ’un, outside your comfort zone?’
He had the binoculars down and held the night-sight hard at his face. His eyeline took his head away from Foxy’s mouth, but the voice dripped on, and there was triumph in it. ‘Don’t think it bothers me, young ’un, because I’m an old bastard and there’s not much can happen to me. Different for you. Your age, that stage in a career when you reckon you’re the dog’s bollocks. Instead you might just be in shit. An integral part in an extra-judicial killing, which is at least accessory to murder. You’re a part of it and your defence is that you didn’t know what interdiction meant. Reckon they’ll be queuing up to believe you? Extra-judicial is what you’re into.’
He came level with him. For Mansoor, with the muscle wastage in his leg from the wound, it was a struggle to catch the Engineer.
A Deniable Death Page 26
