A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  Police lectures on surveillance in siege situations emphasised that the numbers of hostage-takers must be logged. Why? Because the Germans had screwed up big during the Munich Olympics, and a lesson learned from mistakes of thirty-nine years before were still valid. The point was that German police on the walkway in front of the Israeli team house in the athletes’ village had seen the Palestinians in doorways and windows, and politicians had gone inside the house, but no proper count had been made of how many guys were there with their assault rifles. The rescue plan was based on the premise that there were four armed men – but when the helicopters brought the athletes and their Arab captors to the military airbase where the shoot-out would happen it was realised that there weren’t four targets to neutralise but eight. A recipe for a screw-up. Badger had counted three guards outside, which meant there were five more inside and the goon. Important. Strategies played in his mind . . . The first dawn light would come soon.

  An otter swam alongside him – ten or a dozen feet away – for a half-minute and showed no fear of him, but then dived and he saw it once more, fifty or sixty yards away. After it dived the second time he didn’t see it again. Coots skirted him but didn’t bluster away. It was good that he could walk on the bottom . . . Badger imagined there had been trade through here a century before, and a crossing point at the frontier for pilgrims and traders, smugglers and traffickers. That was why the quay had been built, but then the waterline would have been a yard higher, lapping near the top of the structure.

  The light on the water was brighter, the silver and gold mixed. He moved more slowly. He now tested each step so that he didn’t slip and splash. If the level was up to his lower chest, he crouched in the water and only his headgear would have been visible. He could see Foxy clearly. The free leg was bent at the knee, askew at the hip and seemed to wobble, as if with spasms of life, and the blood had dried on the wounds.

  It was what he might have called – like the retrieval of the microphone and the cable – the ‘rules of the trade’. It was not about emotion. He would never have said he was ‘fond’ of the old bastard, that he had enjoyed Foxy’s company.

  He went under. No warning. Took a step and plunged. The water was in his nose, his throat and his ears. He couldn’t thrash, daren’t. Darkness was around him and the cool of the water was on his face. He went down further, the weight of the suit dragging him. Pain built in his chest, and he tried to come up.

  There was light. He gasped and trod water. None of the guards had moved or shouted . . . Foxy turned on the rope.

  ‘When, miss?’

  ‘When we have some light,’ Abigail Jones answered Shagger.

  It was the third time he had asked the question and been rewarded with the same answer. It was with increasing concern that Harding, Hamfist, Corky and he had watched the crowd of young men growing at the gate. Five minutes before, Corky had revved up the lead Pajero and gone onto full beam; the headlights had lit the crowd. It was predetermined that Corky would drive the front vehicle, Hamfist the second. Both had plotted how they would get through because there seemed to be junk – wood pallets, an old refrigerator, some rusted oil drums – blocking in the road.

  ‘Thank you, miss. We’re ready when you want it.’

  ‘Nice to know,’ she said evenly. Brutally, they had no more cash to shell out. They didn’t have a hundred dollars between them, and might have needed a thousand to get shot of the place. ‘Not yet, but soon.’

  She swivelled, turned away. She thought it was too early. Here, they were boxed in but had the freedom to go for a break-out, could drive hard and straight. To hell with what they hit – a barricade or a host of shouting men – but if they were too early at the extraction point they would be stuck on a raised road with nowhere to go except back because in front was the border.

  A bleep on the machine in her inside pocket. It was repeated. She hauled up her robe, flashing ankles, knees and thighs, had a hand in the pocket and the machine out. More bleeps and she was all thumbs and almost cut the connection. The screen showed the message: Gone forward to get Foxy, then pushing for home. Nothing else. She had gone back to ‘Transmit’, had powered in the necessary codes that did the scrambling and been rewarded with the ongoing whine that said the recipient of her call had switched off. She had stood in the darkness and howled in frustration – like a hyena or a wolf. Was she any more of a lunatic for howling than her Jones Boys? Unlikely. They’d have understood. They wore their T-shirts, with the band’s logo, and were a brotherhood. They’d have known why Badger had sent the message, then refused to accept any call that might query it. They’d be rooting for him. And Abigail? There had been a depth in the eyes, a sort of abyss and going far . . . She said she hoped they would go, come hell or high water, in an hour, and it would be a few minutes before dawn. Shagger left her. She would be under the gun and care of Corky while he went back to the Pajeros to tell Harding and Hamfist that they wouldn’t move for at least an hour.

  If they made it out – if – they would disperse that evening, dawn the next morning at the latest. She doubted that ever in her life again would she recapture moments such as being with Badger; fighting off the marsh people at the oil-exploration compound; negotiating with the sheikh; running agents across a frontier, knowing them to be condemned by their greed; and seeing the two figures move off towards a hostile frontier; to have been responsible and to have waited too long outside the Golden Hour for their return. It wouldn’t happen again. There would be a junior at Basra, sent down from Baghdad, who would collect the gear and spill out the advances on salaries for spending money. Another guy would be there from the security outfit, and the Jones Boys’ T-shirts would go into a bin as first stop on a journey to the incinerator. Then they’d split. She had lived with them for many months, most of a year, and there would be a brisk, embarrassed handshake, a little formal. Then she’d be gone. It didn’t matter if it were with Badger and Foxy, or if she was alone. They’d be on another flight to Qatar and then a shuttle to the Gulf. Hamfist would go to his room with six-packs and drink himself insensible in private. Corky would shop for rubbish and send parcels, costing a fortune in postal charges, to the woman in Colchester with the eleven-year-old son and the woman in Darlington with the five-year-old daughter. Shagger would walk on the beach and look at the sea, ring his bank to check out what he was worth, eat fast food and spend as little as he could. Harding would be in a six-star hotel, in a room with the curtains drawn against the sun. He would sit on the carpet in a corner and shiver. They did not, any of them, do ethics; they did the job. She would miss them, would never fill the hole they’d leave for her. In common, they were all rootless, playing at soldiers, refusing the advance of age. They were counterfeit . . . She loved all of them.

  Shagger was back. ‘All done, miss.’

  ‘In an hour go for a broke, and find what we can.’

  ‘Whatever you say, miss.’

  ‘It’s a shit world, Shagger.’

  ‘Same as before, miss. Whatever you say.’

  They would have to fight their way out to get to the extraction point. She made a further call, had the connection and voiced fears.

  They sat, fully dressed, on the bed.

  The Engineer said, ‘He seemed an honest man.’

  His wife said, ‘A decent man.’

  ‘A man to be trusted.’

  ‘Without arrogance. He did not treat us merely as customers.’

  ‘I was rude to him and will apologise. Tomorrow will be the start of the future, and we may believe again.’

  ‘How will we sleep, waiting for a verdict?’

  ‘We are in God’s hands.’

  ‘Always . . . It is a long night.’ A smile, rueful and almost brave. ‘For the children it is tomorrow and soon, for them, it will be the time we go to see him, to be told.’

  ‘You should eat.’

  The man from the embassy had brought them back to the hotel in Lindenstrasse, near to the Hauptbahnhof. He had see
n them to their room. His eyes had roved over the interior and he’d glanced dismissively at their luggage, at what she had unpacked. Then he had gone to the window, flicked back the curtains, examined the vista and drawn the curtains again. He had remarked that they should not stand there with a light on behind them and look out. The Engineer’s wife knew nothing of security matters: Why? she asked. He had rolled his eyes at the Engineer, as if he expected him to educate his wife. They should not leave the hotel during the night, should not be out of the room unless a matter of urgency demanded it: a fire alarm ringing. They should not answer the telephone or make any calls. Then he had left them. He would have been, the Engineer believed, from VEVAK, a man used to exercising authority. Most would have been fearful of him. The Engineer dealt with such men most weeks of his working year. He was called the Kalashnikov, the Nobel, and doubted that a bureaucrat from VEVAK had ever been so praised.

  He said, ‘I will make a proposition, Naghmeh, if you will listen to it.’

  ‘We will go home,’ she said. ‘We will finish this and go home.’

  ‘You will not listen – not now, not ever?’

  ‘If the physician, tomorrow, tells us he is not a miracle worker, we start for home in the afternoon. Should he be blessed with the skills, we will stay for the operation. I will convalesce, and we will go home the first day he allows me to travel. I will hear nothing else.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘We will go home, whatever time is left to me. To our children, our family, our work.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will not listen to any proposition other than that I can go home tomorrow or when it is permitted.’

  A church clock chimed, the sound muffled by the double glazing of the window and the drawn curtain. He was sure he could have picked up the telephone and in his halting English, asked the reception desk to patch him through to the American consulate, likely to be in Hamburg, or the British. He could have made his pitch . . . but he lacked the courage, facing her across the bed, to make the proposition. He smoothed the bed, and saw her wince. He switched off the bedside light, lay back on the bed and held her.

  Neither would sleep that night.

  He was at the side of the quay.

  It had been hard not to splutter and cough up water. The rope sang, almost a moan, as it twisted under the strain of the weight.

  The dousing under the water and the struggle to regain the surface had cleared Badger’s head, purging the exhaustion. He was alive to what he would do. First, he had moved, slow steps, on the bed of the channel, which was littered with stones, broken concrete and ironwork, to the outer end of the pier. He had ducked his head, keeping his mouth and nostrils above the water, and had loosened the knot that held the dinghy to a prop supporting the pier’s planks. He had laid the bag with the Glock and the magazines on the single wood seat. He had worked his way along the length of the pier, under it, then had been against the side wall, made of rotting timbers and concrete blocks. He had allowed himself brief glimpses over the edge, had raised his head high enough to catch snapshots. The three guards hadn’t moved. Foxy hung from the lamp-post and turned in the slight breeze. He did not see the goon or any more guns.

  Ahead, there was silence. Behind him, he heard the night sounds of the birds, their splashes in the water, and the incessant frogs’ croak. He coiled himself. His hands went down into the pouches and took out the plastic bags. He prayed that the water had not saturated the grenades.

  A post held the timbers in place and had been sawn off some inches above the top of the quay. The high lamp left a small space of dense shadow beside the post. He stacked them there: the grenades and the short-blade knife. He coiled himself tighter, his hands on the top of the quay. He would be fifteen or twenty feet from where Foxy hung, forty-five or fifty from the guard who sat by the door into the barracks. That would be the closest weapon to him, and there were two others within two hundred feet that had a killing range of more than a thousand feet. Behind the entrance to the barracks men would have rifles close by. Badger recalled what military people had told him. On the Brecon mountains, in Wales, he had been with paratroops; in the heather, gorse and bracken of Woodbury Common, south Devon, he had been with marine commandos. He had done surveillance on them to challenge his own skills. He had won their respect and they had talked to him late at night in their bivouacs. They were attack troops and he was a croppie, a voyeur, who should not get involved. The message paras and marines preached – rare for them to agree on something – was that an assault would always achieve short-term aims if launched at ruthless speed, with the devastating factor of surprise. It had hardly seemed appropriate to a guy who made his living by moving with a stealth that did not disturb wild creatures attuned to danger.

  ‘What are you?’ Badger murmured. ‘Foxy, you’re a stupid bastard.’

  He loosed the spring. He had bent his knees, straightened them and, in the same movement, had heaved himself up with his arms. His knees landed hard on the quay. Water cascaded off him, and more sloshed in his boots. He tried to run fast, straight, but his movement would have been that of a shambling bear and he was huge and wide-bodied in the gillie suit. He threw the first of the grenades, the ‘flash and bang’, which did the stun job, and saw it fly forward as the guard fell back in his tilted chair, then pitched sideways. He had dropped his weapon. There was bright light, white, and with it came the deafening noise that ripped through his headpiece, under the scrim. He reached the door, and the guard was on his side, clutching his head. Badger threw two more flash-and-bangs into the hallway, and followed them with two gas ones. If they’d done their job they would have deafened, blinded, induced vomiting and put up a smokescreen that men would hardly want to charge through. Another, gas, went towards the guard who had sat close to the house. He hurled two more flash-and-bangs in the direction of the man beyond the barracks towards the elevated bund line. He himself had some protection from the scrim that dripped water and covered his face. Enough? He didn’t know – would find out soon.

  He kicked the weapon away from the guard at his feet, who was trembling, and heard volleys of screaming – in terror – from inside the barracks. He turned his back and ran – shambled – towards the lamp.

  ‘You know what you are, Foxy? I’ll tell you. An idiot.’

  The hands hung a foot, or a foot and a half, off the ground, the head level with Badger’s waist. Foxy was a bigger man than himself. Not even on tiptoe could Badger reach the rope knotted to Foxy’s ankle. Nothing to step on so he jumped. He caught the leg. He had the knife in his hand and sawed hard at the rope.

  He didn’t know how long he had – seconds, not minutes. The gas inside the barracks would be good, but the one he had thrown towards the guard by the house would drift and thin, and the blindness from the flash would be short-lived. Seconds left, and he had no free hand to throw more grenades. He saw the rope fray.

  There was shouting – might have been the goon, the officer, or one of the older guards.

  They fell. He was on top of Foxy, and Foxy’s body took the weight of his fall, but the wind went from his lungs and he had to gasp. ‘Bloody idiot, you are. Nothing else.’ Almost slapped Foxy’s face. Badger tossed the last grenades: a smoke one towards the barracks, one flash-and-bang in the direction of the house and the other towards the last guard who had been outside. He hoisted Foxy onto his shoulder in the fireman’s lift and staggered.

  Badger couldn’t run. He managed a crabbed trot, but not in the straight line that would have gone direct to the pier.

  It seemed to him that he went slowly, and his back was exposed. He didn’t weave because he sought to break a rifleman’s aim but because of the weight of the man – the idiot. And Foxy was a stupid bastard. He expected to hear the drawl put him down, counter him with contempt, but heard only the shouting behind. He went down the pier.

  He dumped Foxy. He dropped his shoulder and let Foxy fall into the dinghy. The impact shook the craft and water splashe
d into it as it rolled. He pushed it away from the pier and went into the water, which was at his waist, reached across, snatched the Glock that was under Foxy’s back and pulled it out. He had the twine at the front end of the dinghy in his hand and struck out, best foot forward. He couldn’t have said how long it was till he was beyond the flood of light from the high lamp, when the first shots were fired at him, not aimed but a wild volley on automatic. Then he was out of his depth and used the side of the dinghy to support himself, kicking with his legs and paddling with his hand.

  ‘A fine bloody mess you’ve put us into, Foxy. Idiot.’

  There were more shots and two came near. Water spouted in front of the dinghy. Badger groped behind him, didn’t turn. He found Foxy’s hand, took hold of it, squeezed the Glock into the palm and told Foxy he could help. He could either shoot back or he could use his hands to propel them. They had reached a fair speed now, and there must have been a suspicion, in Badger’s mind, of hope. He thought his aim would take them close to the mud spit where the bird had been and across or around it. Then they’d hit the shallow water and wade through it, get over the open ground and reach the inflatable and the bergens, and— That was a lifetime ahead. There were no shots from behind him in the dinghy, but that didn’t bother Badger and he thought Foxy would have enough nous, experience, to shoot when required to.

  He knew it would not be long before organisation was regained behind him. He stamped his feet to get a better grip but the water was up to his chest and the bed below him was mud.