Mansoor had left them.
First, he had walked along the edge of the reeds. He had found, easily, the cloven-hoofed tracks of the boar. It had run away at its maximum speed, throwing up mud. He had found, after a more thorough search, the route the man had taken from the reeds and forward across open ground. He had seen him going like a stack of hay towards the reeds, upright, carrying the man Mansoor had interrogated and killed, and dragging the little blown-up boat with the military backpacks.
He could see, where there was still a sheen of damp on the ground, the marks where elbows, knees or boots had pushed the man forward. There were places, beyond the mud, where he could find no trace of a track. Then there would be brittle crusts of baked dirt where the surface had been broken and he could pick it up again. How the body was carried, he didn’t know. In his mind, Mansoor was certain that it had not been left in the reed beds. The man in the camouflage clothing would not have come through the water of the lagoon to the barracks, then thrown flash and gas grenades and taken down his comrade only to leave him, when pursuit closed on them, to the rats and pigs. The man carried his comrade and was in front of him. He watched.
He had an impression that the man was using what tactics of evasion were open to him, not going in a straight line, but cutting from one side to another, breaking any pattern of movement. Mansoor tried to imagine what he would have done. He went back to the days before the shrapnel injury had crippled him, thought of how he would have attempted flight across open ground, with the positive of a sniper’s costume and the negative of a burden. He had come away from the reeds, and the anger had left him with the tiredness and the sense of abject failure. It was as if a new contest had started.
New and fresh, without past history, the game would be played out to the death.
He did not know if his thoughts had logic. He had taken himself away from his job as security man to the Engineer, away from his father and from his wife. He thought he walked alone, that the slate was clean. He searched the dirt ahead for the fugitive. He no longer cared whether success would absolve past failure. Near Mosul, he had been shown a parcel of desert, without features, and had been told that an American sniper and his spotter were there, and had killed an hour before. He and many others had raked the sand with their eyes and the aid of lenses and had not found him. The marksman had killed again as the dusk settled. But then there had been no track to follow.
Mansoor went warily, roved backwards and forwards, found a trail, lost it and found it again. He was distracted. As the heat built, the haze grew and the mist went. A bird flew across him, went from his left to his right. He stopped, moved not a muscle. A smile softened him. The ibis went far to his right, towards where there was still water, an old irrigation canal with a bund line beyond it. He knew this territory, had made it his business to learn it since his posting to the Engineer’s home. He knew where trucks that had gone off the bund had slid down, where there was a burned T-74 main battle tank, and where a border watchtower was toppled. The bird headed for the water and his eyeline followed it. Small splashes of white caught his eye, and he lost the bird.
Where the ground was highest, three or four metres above where he stood, almost a kilometre away, there were two white vehicles, four-wheel drive. He knew where the man, with his comrade, his brother, headed to.
He remembered the bird: its grace, and its death.
Where he was, the ground was dried, dust, and it was easy for him to hold the man’s line but then it petered out. He lost it beside a buffalo’s bones. He started, again, to search for it. If the man reached the white vehicles, Mansoor had lost.
‘Did you see the fucking bird?’ She had her binoculars locked over her eyes.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Harding said.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the African Sacred Ibis, miss,’ Corky told her. ‘Logged, of course, for our eco-study of flora and fauna.’
‘It’s pretty,’ she said, then lapsed back into quiet.
She could hardly stand. The Boys were a few paces behind her at the Pajeros. The track petered out here and the only way they could go was back. They didn’t like it when she swore – she thought it interfered with their image of themselves as protecting a maid in peril, that sort of shit. When she was tired or a fair bit pissed off, she swore and blasphemed, trying to break the image they had of her. It usually screwed up.
‘They’re endangered, the ibis. We used to see them down by Basra,’ Shagger told her.
Abigail Jones thought it wrong that she should slouch or lean against a wheel hub, and out of the question that she should climb inside and get comfortable – ask to be woken if anything showed. ‘Anything’ did show. A single man was out of a reed bed, a wavering line of soft green in the light and heat. He wore combat fatigues, and when her eyes could get decent focus she fancied there were rank flashes on his shoulders and dark stains on the front of his tunic.
‘What am I watching?’ she asked.
Hamfist said, ‘When I was with the battalion we used to patrol up past al-Amara, then go east to the border because it was a rat-run for arms shipments, as important as the one down here. There’s a Revolutionary Guard camp at Mehran, a big training site, and a transit for hardware resupply. If we were close to the border they’d come out and eye us. We might wave, and shout something to spark a contact but they never responded. That’s their uniform, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and they’re serious. They don’t do fun on a Friday night. He’s looking for him.’
She turned her head away, swallowed hard.
Shagger said, ‘It’s down to you, miss. What are our rules of engagement?’
She attempted authority, didn’t know how good a fist she made of it. ‘We can fire in defence of our own persons. We can fire, also, in defence of those working with us, assuming that the threat comes from inside the territory we are currently operating in. What we cannot do is to fire live rounds into Iranian ground. Under no circumstances do we shoot, to kill or wound, across the border. What I’m saying is that he has first to reach wherever we establish the border to be and if they – in hot pursuit – cross that line, real or imaginary, we can blast the shit out of them. Conclusion: there can be no Iranian casualties, at our hand, on Iranian territory. Understood?’
She thought she would crumple in the heat. She could have found some shade by the body of either Pajero, but then she could not have watched the ground where the man came, careful, following a zigzag path. She could not have been inside, with the engine and the air-con on, because she would have ceded control. They nodded, no enthusiasm. She might have lost them.
‘The one you say is an officer, coming forward, talk me through it.’
Hamfist, towering over her: ‘He’s following Badger’s trail, miss, like a tracking hound does when it has a scent.’
‘Where is Badger?’
Shagger: ‘Out in front of the officer, miss, and coming.’
She saw nothing: nothing with her own eyes and nothing with the aid of the binoculars. The haze seemed to ripple on the ground and it hurt her to look. She saw nothing except the man who advanced, taking his time, patient.
‘I can’t see anything.’
Harding: ‘If he’s as good as he’s talked up to be, you won’t.’
Corky: ‘If you see him from here, miss, he’s as good as dead.’
Around him there were occasional stunted heaps of dirt and he hoped he made another of them. He saw a broad-winged shadow pass lazily in front of him and lifted his eyes, not his head: an eagle turned on a wide circle. He knew eagles from Scotland, and kites and buzzards, big birds of prey but slighter than eagles, from Wales. He didn’t think its vision would be impaired by the haze coming off the mud now that the mist was gone. He thought the bird’s sight would be perfect, and that it would have noted him and therefore had made a pass above him. It had in effect checked him out and moved on. If the man following him had had an eagle’s eye, and its vantage-point, it would have been ove
r long before. Badger kept to the routine he’d set, and stayed motionless for the count to a hundred, moved for the next hundred, and tried to merge with the heaps and humps. He found more often now that he lost track of how far he had counted, and had to start again. The weight of Foxy grew, as if the man had weights fastened to him.
‘I reckon I have to see where we are, Foxy. If I don’t, way I feel, I could go off course.’
He had worked himself around one of the heaps and stopped when it was behind him. There was another to his left, level with his hip. He had Foxy across his back. His legs were slack between Badger’s, and his head was draped on his shoulder. His arms were tucked down over Badger’s chest and wedged there. He thought the two heaps, augmented by the bulging gillie suit, would appear to be one larger hump that had been dumped by storms, erosion and, once, by a water channel. He started, very slowly, to turn his head.
‘Were we right, Foxy? Don’t they say, in combat, you have to believe in the cause and that God walks alongside you – just war, and all that? What d’you think, Foxy? Is He alongside us? Don’t you understand that I need an answer, and you’re the only fucker right now that can give me one?’
He shifted his head, changed his eyeline, half-inch by half-inch. A small bird, pretty plumage, pecked in the mud not a foot from his face. The sun beat down, and the heat chiselled him. His eyes ached from the brightness. The man tracked him: the officer, Mansoor, came slow and steady after him. The rifle was in his hands and could go quickly to the shoulder. For Badger, to grab for the Glock would make a convulsion of movement, and the game would be over.
‘She’s a good-looking woman, and she’s a lump in her brain. Likely it’ll be today she hears whether anything can happen or she’s being sent home to tick off the days. Also likely, this’ll be the day her husband’s hit – what they called interdiction, and I was too ignorant to understand. Were we right, Foxy, to widow her and kill him? Are you going to tell me, Foxy?’
The man was still about a hundred yards behind Badger. He had veered off to the right, straightened, then taken another half-dozen short paces. Now he had stopped. He searched the ground, unhurried, and traversed. The rifle was raised. The officer, Mansoor, took a stance with his legs a little apart, his boots steady. He aimed and peered through the V sight. He had the needle steady on a target, and fired. One shot, and the songbird fled. Badger understood.
‘It’s us that did it. We take responsibility. It’s not those people up in the north. Not the Boss, the Cousin, the Friend or the Major – and not the Jones woman and the guys with her. We did it, like we were faithful servants – did as we were told, touched forelocks, didn’t bitch. Couldn’t have happened without me putting the audio in place and without you hearing their talk. Can we live with that, Foxy?’
A second shot was fired. The impact, the dirt spatter, was further from Badger. Two shots fired and two heaps of earth hit. Perhaps the man had similar torments of exhaustion, the injury in his leg ached and he wanted out. Anger built in him, and frustration. That was good for Badger, because a cold-minded man was a more formidable opponent. He talked softly and Foxy’s ear was an inch from his mouth.
‘Different when you look into their faces, right? When you see them playing with the kids, doing everyday life.’
If he had been alone, Badger would have backed his chance of crossing the open ground as better than even odds. But it was not only himself. There was a quaver in his voice now, annoyance. ‘What are we doing here, Foxy? What are we doing on their ground? What were we ever doing in this God-forsaken fucking place? Please, Foxy, I have to be told.’
Another shot was fired. He saw the flash as the cartridge case was ejected. The report echoed away from him. He didn’t think the man would turn, head away, lose all heart, but he did believe that the firing of three shots showed frustration and anger, which would destroy concentration. Badger moved his head, lost sight of the man. He saw two white shapes on a horizon. They were minimally small. He wondered if it was there that the wire strand lay and if the burned tank was to his right, and the trucks that had skidded off the bund line into stagnant water, and the fallen watchtower. He needed an answer from Foxy but was denied it. He started to move again, and the silence was back, no wind blew and no cloud protected him. The heat haze was his friend.
‘Us coming here, it wasn’t in my name. Us walking in here – tanks, bombs, guns – that wasn’t in my name. Up in the north, should I have thrown it back in their faces? I’m a policeman, Foxy, not a fucking soldier . . . Give me an answer that works, please.’
He thought he heard Foxy, thought the clipped, nasal voice told him about casualties and rehabilitation clinics, about the coffins coming in shiny hearses up a High Street in the blazing sun or when there was snow piled at the kerbs, or when rain drizzled to reflect the misery. It told him about the ‘national interest’ . . . He could only hope that the haze would hide him.
‘They’re waiting for us, Foxy, the girl and the guys are.’
Corky gestured ahead, past the expanse of open ground and past the solitary man who tracked his target. She refocused the lenses. The binoculars found them.
Abigail Jones saw a jeep and two lorries. They were short of where the first two vehicles had lost traction in the sand. She wouldn’t have seen it with the naked eye, but the glasses pulled the scene into her face. A cluster of men stood around a casualty, but the new troops who had reached that point didn’t stop to help, merely paused long enough to be given the general direction of the flight and pursuit. She could pick out different uniforms, good camouflage patterns and a different scale of weaponry. She recognised three RPG-7 launchers, and a machine gun. She turned to Corky, raised an eyebrow.
‘That’s IRGC, miss, Revolutionary Guards, not the riff-raff. But you knew that, miss.’
Her name was called, Shagger’s voice, behind her. She swung on her feet. He pointed away, down the track they had used. In the far distance the sunlight blazed off the windscreen of the BMW saloon they had tipped off the track into shallow water. Dust billowed. There were three or four pick-ups, crudely painted in olive green, and a Land Rover among them. Two of the pick-ups had machine guns fastened to cross-bars behind the drivers’ cabs. Her lips must have pursed, and maybe she cursed quietly. Shagger had an answer for her.
‘That’s Iraqi Army, likely from al-Qurnah – and that’s heavy fire-power they’re carrying. We’re between a rock and a hard place, miss, or a lump hammer and an anvil.’
She said that the Black Hawks were in the air, which meant little. She was shivering, couldn’t halt the tremors, and no longer had certainties.
A truth had come to Mansoor. The quiet allowed his thoughts to collect. Truth won through against his exhaustion and hunger, the heat of the high sun, and he realised the enormity of his failure. He saw the Engineer, whom he had been ordered to protect, leave home with his wife to go abroad in secrecy and on a journey where, if his arrangements were known, he would be vulnerable to attack. He saw, also, the man in camouflage who had been dragged from the water and had resisted interrogation. He could not justify his failure to alert senior officials immediately after the capture. Who would understand his motives? He doubted that, in the length and breadth of Ahvaz or from one end to the other of the garrison camp, he could have rooted out one man prepared to say that his actions had been reasonable, given the pressures he faced.
He was like the dog that searched for a rabbit’s scent. Had it, held it, lost it and searched again for it. He could not see him. The fierce light mocked him. Often he would have sworn an oath on the Book that he saw movement in the heaps and humps of dirt that stretched away from him. Three more times he fired and heard only the report of the bullet.
The man he hunted had destroyed him. He might as well have exposed himself and urinated on Mansoor’s boots. The heat of the day had come and the shimmer of the ground made a greater confusion. He sank to his knees. For a minute, no more than two, he had lost the trail. Here the ground
was dry dust and he had to search for a place – no larger than a piastre – where the crust was broken. He followed a new line and went closer, imperceptibly, to a raised spur on which two heavy white vehicles waited. He saw a woman there, whose skirt moved in the wind, and men, all with the same T-shirt decoration, stood around her.
They pointed beyond him, and when he turned and saw the extended cordon line approaching, he knew little time was left him.
‘You have been most patient.’ The consultant leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, and peered into the face of his patient. ‘A few of those who consult me are able to match your patience, but not many. I have explained in detail the size of the tumour, where it is located, what it is adjacent to and the importance of those areas in terms of speech, mobility and quality of life. You have listened and not interrupted. For that I am grateful. You will appreciate that it is my duty to take you through these matters. Now I can conclude.’
He smiled. It was the first time he had allowed any signal of his professional opinion to be on display. He saw her jaw drop.
‘I would use what we call the gamma knife – more simply, that is surgical radiotherapy – to extract the problem area under general anaesthetic. It is a technique that we have used with good results in Germany.’
Her husband had caught her arm and seemed to crumple in the shoulders.
‘Nothing is foolproof and nothing is guaranteed. Success is based on skill and experience. Enough to say that we feel optimistic of a good outcome. When I was called out of here, while I was explaining our diagnosis, it was to hear the opinions of others to whom I had given access to the scans. Their opinions, broadly, matched mine. We can do the operation. The alternative is that you will be dead within two months.’
A Deniable Death Page 45
