The goon, the officer, had finally stood. He took a last cigarette and tossed the empty pack onto the ground beside the quay. He stretched and walked to the far end of the short pier, but hardly looked right or left. His eye line stayed with the bird. Now it was upright and seemed to test the ground and the debris under its feet. It stamped a little and eased the weight from one leg to the other. Then its head lifted, its neck straightened and it croaked, a harsh sound. The wings opened and flapped.
‘Go on, you bastard. Get yourself up and away.’
It subsided again.
‘Whether he’s there or not,’ Badger muttered, ‘I reckon in an hour I can go and get it.’
‘You got eyes, young ’un?’
‘Yes.’
‘See anything with them, or are they crap?’
Badger bridled. ‘I can see better than you.’
There was a silence, and self-satisfaction on Foxy’s face. The silence meant there was something he should have seen but had not.
Badger backed off. He was not prepared to beg for an explanation. He bit his lip and looked again. The bird hopped twice, then came down heavily. The goon was most of the way through the last cigarette and kicked the packet along the edge of the quay. For the first time in that long day he did not seem totally engrossed in the bird. The woman – the mother of the Engineer’s wife – came out through the front door with a glass in her hand, went to the goon and gave it to him. They talked. The children might have had a meal or a story, might have watched the TV. They had been lively when they had come home from school in the middle of the day – one had played with a ball, the other a skipping-rope.
The shadows lengthened
The heat of the day dissipated.
His throat was dry.
Foxy was now fully alert and used his glasses to rake over the bird, the house and the goon. His view slid between the pier where the dinghy was tied, and the barracks and the bund line beyond.
‘Where all this began . . . I said that in an hour it’ll be dark enough for me to get forward and bring back the microphone and the wire. Are we arguing?’
‘Heard you the first time,’ Foxy said.
Many hours dead, one more to kill, then the journey to the extraction point.
He was breathing hard.
He threw down the cigarette, stamped on it.
There had been months of boredom in Mansoor’s recent life, weeks of tedium that had seemed to drift on with neither high spots nor low moments, merely ordinariness. He had to stifle the panting. Tension gripped him.
He could not show it.
His back turned now to the lagoon, as the light fell and shadows stretched far behind him, he walked with a clipped, slow step – as if he had no further interest in what he had turned away from – towards the door of the house. He took the mother back her glass, then called to the kids. One was playing football with two of the guards and the other had a toy pram. He took them inside and tried to suppress any hint of authority in his voice that might frighten them; he gave no appearance of uttering an order.
With the children inside, he told their grandmother to keep them there, to wait two or three minutes and then to close the door. He thought her a strong woman – anyone of her age would have lived through the battles in either Susangerd, Ahvaz or Khorramshahr and would not have survived if prone to panic: they had been vicious battles with few prisoners taken – women had been killed, women had been raped. She should close the door, bolt it, move the children to the back of the house, but leave the radio or TV on in the front and not draw those curtains.
He walked now across the dirt, saw the cigarette packet, picked it up and headed for the barracks. He did not speak to the two guards who were still sitting in the shade of the trees. He would not have trusted either to act out the relaxed and typical scene – its tedium – if he had spoken to them of a security alert. They would have run round like headless chickens. He kept to the tree line where the shadows were thickest and would go to the barracks by the side entrance. He would not be seen and would give no warning to a watcher.
The bird had moved, had stood.
The cable had been pulled up and had made a loop. He would not have seen it unless his glasses had been on the bird. The loop had raised a length of black-coated metal, which he estimated at between thirty and forty centimetres long.
Mansoor had been in Iraq. He had been there during the difficult days when the troops of the Great Satan had attempted to load maximum pressure on the resistance and on the al-Quds teams sent to guide and advise. He and his colleagues had been lectured that they must always be vigilant against surveillance: no use of mobile telephones, no meetings with sensitive personnel outside buildings where they could be identified by the drones in the skies – the precaution of changing meeting points so that patterns were not established and bugs installed – and he did not think his eyes had deceived him. He had seen a loop of wire and a length of tube, and they were among the dead leaves on the mud spit. How long had the debris been wedged there? Two or three days, no more. Had there been, three or four days before, a sufficient storm to flush out those leaves and dump them high and dry? There had not.
He went into the barracks and woke the men who were sleeping, tossed those who played cards from their chairs and switched off the television. He told the armourer what he wanted and how many rounds of ammunition should be issued to each man. The light was slipping and the high lamp on the post by the barracks, where it ran alongside the far end to the quay, had lit. Evening was coming, and he had only glimpsed the loop and the tube. He did not feel confident enough to demand reinforcements from Ahvaz, and did not wish to hand over the matter to a more senior officer.
He could hear, down the corridor, the chains rattling as the rifles – Type 56 assault weapons, made in the People’s Republic of China – were freed from the armoury’s racks.
‘Do I take a Glock?’
‘You won’t need one.’
‘It’ll be out of your weapon’s range.’
‘I won’t be behind you.’
Badger spat, ‘ “Won’t be behind you!” Great. I seem to remember I half carried you here.’
Calm, authority, a voice used to being heard, not contradicted: ‘You won’t need a Glock. And I won’t be behind you.’
‘I don’t understand what shit you are coming with.’
‘It’s about the quality of the eyes.’
‘Mine are as good as any – all the tests show it.’
‘It’s what you didn’t see, young ’un, when the bird moved.’
‘The bird moved, didn’t take off, settled. Perhaps, last light, it’ll get a frog and—’
‘You saw nothing. You don’t need the Glock and I’m not behind you. You’re not as good as you thought you were.’
‘Which means?’
‘I’m going forward – and I’ll decide when – and I’ll retrieve the microphone and the cable. Clear?’
‘It’s my job.’ The calm fazed Badger, made him uncomfortable – always difficult to argue when a man refused to be riled. He wondered if the older man was capable of getting across the clear ground, through the reed beds, then wading fifty yards and doing the reverse trip. Badger reckoned, when they came out, he would be carrying two bergens and likely have Foxy hooked on his back. ‘I’m going.’
‘I make that decision.’
‘No. I do that sort of thing. It’s for me to do.’
‘I’m going to tell you two things, and do me the courtesy of closing your mouth and listening. If I could square it with any last vestige of professionalism that I have, I’d get you to load up the bergens – now – and we’d sneak out. We’d leave in place the microphone and the cable. They’re found and the balloon goes up. The effect of that is that calls are made and they end up in Lübeck, having been processed through every floor of the Ministry of Information and Security. He will be pulled out, meaning that everything we did was for fuck-all of nothing, and he can make some more of his little toys. H
earing me?’
‘That they’ll find the gear within the next twenty-four hours? A big ask.’
‘You don’t know what to look for – and you’re blind. It’s already been found.’
He might have been punched in the crotch. Badger folded. He could still see the bird and it could not have been famished sufficiently to go hunt another frog for itself, and the feathers on its back were pink from the last of the sun that would be down, buried, in the next fifteen minutes. Changeover time coming. The flies would have been exhausted after bombing the scrim net for all the daylight hours and the mosquitoes would have rested and would be hungry for flesh and would be coming out, hunting. He stank. His stomach was bloated from the tablets, could hardly make wind, and precious little of his body was free of the bites and the scabs had bloody grown and the sores oozed. He looked for the goon and couldn’t see him, then for the cable and couldn’t find it.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have said it.’
‘If they know about it, why you? Why is it your job?’
The shadows were on them and he couldn’t see Foxy’s face. He thought he heard a sob, not a choke, but something softer, sadder.
Foxy said, ‘It’ll take me a while, young ’un, to think through what I want to tell you.’
‘I’m the one who’s supposed to have all the answers,’ Abigail Jones said.
Corky was beside her. ‘Why haven’t they come? That it, miss?’
‘It’ll do.’
‘They have kit in front of them and can’t retrieve it till dark. Would that fit?’
‘Snugly, Corky. Hard, though, isn’t it? More than us, they want out. We want it badly, they want it more. A whole day to wait.’ It was unusual for her to muse in public, wear frustration on her sleeve. Normally she bottled such feelings, which might have been partly why she lived alone, when based in London, in her two-bedroomed maisonette. It cost her a fortune, and it would have been useful to have a guy living there, on her terms, to chip in with the expenses. She didn’t know one she could allow to copy her front-door key, and have access to her space. A man who had been a senior clerk in the old Bank of Iraq now looked after the incidental finances of the station in the Green Zone. He had supplied her with the dollar bills she had given to the sheikh. He also did invoices for food, fuel, clothing, and could switch handwriting patterns effortlessly. At the end of the tour she would take a bucketload of cash to a respected dealer in gold and precious stones and buy items of quality but not enough to attract the attention of a Customs nerd. She’d be wearing them, looking expensive, when she came back through Heathrow, and would sell the stuff on in London. That way, Abigail Jones could afford a maisonette with a view over the river. She’d learned the methods on her first trip to the Gulf and on the posting to Bosnia.
It was coming up on her fast, the bug-out from Baghdad. Soon enough there would be the round of parties – her people, Agency staffers, the embassy, hand-chosen Iraqi army officers and intelligence men, and a general mêlée of multi-national spooks. The best part would be the knowledge, shared in a tight circle, of the ‘taking down’ of an Engineer. It would be a pleasure to know he was dead, and that she had played her part in it. There would be an office car from Heathrow to her home, and she would sign the docket and have the driver lift the bags to the front door, then fish out her keys and step inside her home, alone. She wondered if that evening, when they hit the Basra road, Highway 6, there might be a swap of mobile numbers, done in the lead Pajero, if he would be there – giggles about where it had been last time and . . .
Corky said, ‘Because their gear is forward they need darkness to get it back. Shouldn’t be long.’
‘I have to say it, Corky – I’d have been tempted to ditch the stuff, and we’d have been out of here seven or eight hours ago, if they’d made good time.’
The crowd had gone, drifting away in the wake of the dust cloud from the big BMW in which the sheikh rode. There would have been what Corky called ‘dickers’ who watched them, but for now the wads of banknotes had bought emptiness round the perimeter. The light on her communications kit hadn’t flashed. No message from London, no acknowledgement and nothing to tell her that a hit was on course. Nothing from ahead, from beyond a horizon of dirt and soft-coloured reeds.
They had spent their day cleansing the building they’d used. Now it was as they had found it, every fag end picked up and bagged. The vehicles were loaded with the sleeping bags and mosquito nets, the spotter ’scope for bird-watching, the spare weaponry and ammunition. She had done the rounds and was satisfied. She had paused in the doorway of the room where he had slept and seen a smooth part of the concrete flooring where the dust had been swept away by the motion of his hips. She regretted nothing.
‘Only thing, miss, that’s worse than ditching gear and leaving it behind is doing that to a comrade, your mate.’
‘I think I understand that, Corky.’
‘You don’t, young ’un, interrupt or contradict me.’
Badger reckoned he was composed now, ready. ‘Heard you.’
‘You’ll watch my back and I’ll retrieve the stuff.’
Badger didn’t interrupt, or contradict.
‘I’ll go in about fifteen minutes when the light’s gone. It’s not acceptable to leave the gear, so we won’t. We get the stuff and leave the hide covered. We have to hope it’ll stay that way long enough. The goon’s watched the bird all day. He’ll have seen the cable and now he’s gone back to where his guys are. His own people are poor quality, but I doubt he is. You saw the limp, which means he’s been injured – I’d imagine it was a combat wound. He may act with his own people or, more likely, he’ll have sent for decent back-up from down the road. When it’s dark, I’m going.’
Badger lay on his stomach and listened. The sun tipped the tops of the reed beds in the west, and the skies over the palm trees across the lagoon and the house, where nothing moved and few lights showed.
‘When I come back to you, I may be coming fast, and we don’t fuck about, young ’un. We’re going for speed and distance, and I’m thinking that the first quarter of a mile is the critical bit. We manage that and use the comms. We try to find, without bloody drowning, the extraction point. That’s what’s going to happen.’
Still no contradiction, no interruption.
‘I’ll go forward to retrieve the stuff because I don’t know what’ll be waiting there. When I don’t know, I won’t ask anyone else to do what I should be doing. In case there are any misunderstandings between us, young ’un, don’t ever forget that I’m in charge. I lead and I decide. You don’t. Before you ask, my memory of the plug from the cable into the microphone is that it’s a straight socket, not robust. Giving the cable a yank will do the business and they’ll come apart – surprised the pigs didn’t manage it. I’m going, and you’ll have everything, the bergens and the rest, ready for a fast break-out.’
‘You’re not capable of it.’
‘I’m going forward – it’s the burden of leading.’
‘Because getting a cable and a microphone back from fifty yards is dangerous? That’s rubbish.’
‘It’s dangerous – which you’d know if you had eyes. And—’
‘And what?’
There was a pause.
‘It’s better that I do it.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Foxy – you’ve got a wife, a home, respect. Love.’
‘Wrong.’
‘My home’s police quarters, a dump. I’m a squatter. I don’t have a woman.’
‘You have Alpha Juliet and something might just—’
‘You have a wife – a wife. A home and a wife. Why—’
‘Try this proverb by John Heywood. He wrote it in 1546, which was the last year in the life of Henry the Eighth. “An old fool is the worst kind of fool – as in, he’s marrying a woman fifty years his junior.” Actually only eighteen years, but I’m the worst kind of fool.’
‘Wha
t’re you saying, Foxy?’ Badger cursed himself. He knew what Foxy meant and should have buttoned his lip.
A quaver in the voice. ‘There’s an ex-policeman who transferred a few years back to Ministry of Defence security at Bath. He told me. The guy she’s with is in Accounts. All of Naval Procurement knows, and probably most of Accounts, but I was one of the last. She’s shagging him. You want some more, young ’un? My wife isn’t likely to be at home, sitting in front of the TV with a supermarket meal for one, yearning for me to be home. She’s more likely to be in my bed, drinking my cellar dry with her legs spread. It hurts more than anything I’ve known. I pretend, I talk about her, and it’s all lies.’
‘You didn’t have to tell me, Foxy.’
‘They watch me at work, people who know I’m married to her and who’ve seen her picture. I know I’m drawn, pale, and they snigger that it’s because I’m getting it night after night. But they’re not from Naval Procurement – they know. It’ll be their daily soap-opera episode. She goes to Bassett – you know what I mean? Wootton Bassett. She sees them bring the soldiers back from Afghanistan, up the High Street, and uses it to taunt me. These are “heroes”, and I’m the old fool who gives lectures and is half buried in the bloody past. I think they have sex when she’s claiming to be sick and doesn’t go to work. She goes through Bassett on the way home. It’s like she thinks you’re not worthwhile unless you’ve earned a Bassett job for yourself. Don’t ever forget it. No fool like an old fool. I think that’s enough, young ’un.’
‘You didn’t have to.’
‘I’m grateful to you for listening.’
The light had slipped some more.
The binoculars no longer showed him the bird, and the dim lights on the far side of the lagoon only outlined the walls of the house. The big lamp, the high one in front of the barracks, had come on, but there seemed to be no movement. Badger wondered if that indicated the guards’ mealtime. He didn’t know whether he had missed things he should have noted, or whether Foxy had lost his marbles through heat and dehydration. No one, before, had confided in him like that. He felt uncomfortable. They would get to Kuwait City together, then split and be in different rows in the aircraft. They’d head for the Green Channel separately, and cars would take them in opposite directions. He thought also there was an evens chance that he’d be going into the water to get Foxy back. No one, before, had ever talked to him with such raw unhappiness.
A Deniable Death Page 31
