A Deniable Death

Chapter 6

The dawn was coming up, and the niggle prospered.

The geography of the location dominated, as it always did when cameras or microphones were involved. Distances were crucial. A light wind in the night had rustled the reeds. Barely audible to the ear, they rattled – almost clattered – against each other when heard through the earphones.

Foxy whispered, ‘The sound quality isn’t good enough. I’m here for conversations, maybe half a sentence. The audio’s beam is having to travel through the reeds and that’s dominating any talk by the front of the house and the door inside. I didn’t set the parameters of this caper. I’m the poor bastard that has to get here – wade, paddle, damn near swim. I didn’t choose the ground.’

‘Did I hear that right? ‘‘Wade, paddle, damn near swim’’? You were on your backside, floating and being dragged along.’

The sun was a gold sliver peeping up, far away, above a flat horizon that was unbroken by trees or high ground, only by the reed beds that moved endlessly with the wind’s force.

‘What I’m saying is that where we are now is unsustainable. More important, where the mike’s placed is-’

‘By me, of course.’

‘By you, yes. Where you placed the mike isn’t good enough. If that’s the best you can do we might as well load up, turn round and walk out.’

‘Quit?’

‘I came here to do a job, not for my health. I see little point in staying if I can’t do the work.’

‘So I have to go forward and move the mike?’

‘About right.’

‘And how close do you suggest I go – the front door, into the kitchen?’

Foxy could have stood up, stamped and shouted, but he didn’t. One thing, verbally, to clip Badger’s ears for his rudeness, but another to break the rules of thirty years’ practice. Badger ought to show him respect for his accumulated knowledge. ‘You should get the mike into a position where its beam doesn’t cross a bed of reeds, so screening its access to the front of the house. Simple enough. You up for it, or do I have to do it?’

A shrug from Badger, sour little beggar. The sound was too poor for Foxy to identify more than occasional words. The one who fished had come by the house after darkness and spoken to a soldier, or trooper, or Guards Corps man, but the words had been muffled by the reeds’ movement. The same man had again come into the magnified vision of the image-intensifier, and the night-sight had shown him talking to the target. Both had smoked and their speech had been distorted.

In a half-hour, the house and the low quay in front would be bathed in low sunshine and movement would be dangerous, or stupid.

They had good cover where they were. Off to the right, which was south, there was a bund line that bypassed the shallow island where the mike had been placed by the young ’un the previous evening. It marked a boundary to the lagoon onto which the target’s house faced and came to the main shoreline on the far side of the buildings he’d identified as a barracks compound. The bund line was too far away for the mike to be set, but might make a better route onto the island.

More argument? Not then. Rolling away from him, Badger let his hands slide over his suit and checked it, involuntary and instinctive, then his headpiece. He put more mud on his hands and wrists and was gone.

What else had they bickered over?

The Meals Ready to Eat. One chicken and one beef, both with rice, and he had wanted the chicken. So had Badger. Foxy had insisted, had had the chicken.

The stags… He’d had to sleep, had been dead on his feet, but when the young’ un did the watch Foxy had been woken five times. Hard to get to sleep in the scrape, but he’d been woken five times, and five times could hear sweet fuck-all because of the motion of the reeds. He had let Badger know he needed sleep, not the sound of a reed hitting another reed and a thousand more doing the same.

Using the bags had been a point of conflict. Badger had said they should carry them out. Foxy wanted to bury them. They had a dozen, enough for a little cache of excrement, and a couple of bottles to go with them. He hadn’t done it for years, been a croppie in a hide, having to bag and bottle. He could lecture on it, could make men’s faces fall at the thought of the bag and doing the business a couple of feet from an oppo. The bags were in a hole and covered over, but whether they’d be carried out was not yet settled.

They had stripped in the night, and that had made for more tension. Their gillie suits and the clothes under them were soaked. Their boots were sodden. Badger had lain on his back and wriggled out of his gear. His skin was white, had no cream or mud on it. It was too many years since Foxy had bared all in front of strangers, except in the changing rooms at the gym where he did work-outs. Inhibitions, which he would not have entertained ten years before, had stressed him. When he had slid off his boots, wrung out his socks, then pulled off his trousers, he had turned away from Badger – and criticised: ‘You’re stark bollock naked – what happens if we have to bug out fast?’ He had heard the sharp breath and had known he was held in contempt, not given the respect he deserved. The boots had dried partially, the socks mostly, but the gillie suits were still sodden and heavy.

The light came on fast.

Foxy remembered that from his weeks in the interrogation centre. It came on fast in a surge and the shadows were shortening. He looked with his glasses for movement in the reed beds or ripples. He searched for Badger. He saw the target, in a vest and pyjama trousers, sandals on his feet, come out and drag on the morning’s first cigarette, then go back inside. A car came, the Mercedes saloon that had brought the target home the previous evening. It parked and the driver stretched, spat, then lounged. He saw two sentries on plastic chairs under the low trees but they stood, reluctantly, when the officer came by them. The children appeared in nightshirts and chased each other. One fell and seemed to graze a knee – there was wailing, which he heard on the headset. Everything he saw he noted in his log, and on the first page was his sketched map of the location.

The sound failed. There had been, quite piercing, the crying of the child above the reeds’ motion, then silence. There was water in front of him beyond the reed beds, which were at the edge of the ground they had reached, and then there was the last island, lower and more exposed, without cover, then more reeds, denser than the others, and the lagoon in front of the house and the barracks. He had keen eyes. Ellie had told him his eyesight was above average. She liked to say, in company, that he could see a flea move on a carpet. Ellie’s job at Naval Procurement kept her out of the house too long for her to hoover up any fleas. He ached for her, always had and always would. He’d never ached for his first wife, Liz, who might still be a radiologist in Yorkshire, he didn’t know, with the two daughters, who’d been barely civil the last time he had gone up from London for a birthday… A uniform, out of sight of the house, stood on the bank of the lagoon and urinated into the water.

Foxy brought the lenses off him and was traversing towards the house when he saw what seemed a snagged mess of dead reeds caught on a little promontory. There were two others out in the water, moving languidly with the flow, but the one on the promontory, which stretched out to form a mud spit, was anchored. He hadn’t seen it before, and assumed that the wind, more powerful in the night, had dislodged it from the foot of the reeds.

His shoulder was tapped, and he started, half turned.

Foxy Foulkes’s reactions weren’t failing: his sight was good, and his hearing, and he would have claimed that his awareness was as sharp as it had been at any time in his life since he had been awarded his own Blue Book for passing out as a qualified CROP man. He had not seen or heard him.

‘Come on.’

‘Where to?’

‘The mike’s out in front. It’s another fifty, sixty metres forward. We don’t have that length of cable.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘You want to hear anything? We go forward. See that kind of island? It isn’t one. We get to the far end of it on the bund line, and we can hook up. You’ll have no interference there. We have to move now. Come on.’

‘There’s not cover there,’ he said sharply, almost out loud.

‘Then we make some.’

Foxy bit his lip and didn’t say what he thought. It was too close. No cover. What the hell was he doing there? He didn’t say anything.. . Thought plenty, though. Thought about the ground on which they would lie up and where he would have a decent link with the microphone, where the beam would be clear of obstruction, and about the sun’s climb, the spreading light, the soldiers who were drifting from the barracks building and the faint smell of cooking. He was there because he couldn’t have refused. The young ’un, Badger, had challenged him, and he thought one argument was settled: the shit would be left buried with the bottles.

He crawled away to get his gear together as Badger reeled in the cable.

If he looked for the target, and the target’s home, he could see the weapons, and far out in front of him was the island-shaped platform on which there was little cover.

What to say? Nothing.

The Engineer had gone early. The sun had been barely up, and the heat haze had not yet formed when he had kissed his wife and waved briskly to Mansoor. The Mercedes had pulled away, and the day had begun.

A few months ago, before his new-found interest, Mansoor would have started on the many texts available to him on the types and maintenance of weaponry available to the al-Quds Brigade. He would have taken books on military tactics, particularly those describing the fighting methods of the Iraqi resistance, the Afghan Taliban, Hezbollah and the North Vietnamese from the library of his headquarters at the camp outside Ahvaz. In his convalescence he had read everything available on the methods used to defeat the American military, the forces of the Great Satan and its ally, the Little Satan. He knew what had been done in Falujah, Helmand and Beirut, where the marines had been bombed, and at the plateau of Khe Sanh. Then he had nurtured his new interest.

It did not make him less alert.

He would have said that his sense for danger or threat was greater than if he had been sitting in the shade with his head buried in a book or pamphlet. He knew about the battle of the marshes, the battle for Susangerd, the battle for Khorramshah and the battle for Abadan, and each move that had been made in the Karbala offensives, which were legend in the history of the Guards Corps. He had done that work, and had found a new focus.

He sat on a plastic chair in front of the Engineer’s house – where the sentry would have been at night – and looked out in front of him. He had good binoculars.

His own wife, Golshan – flower garden – had told him, when she was angry and bold enough to speak directly to him, that he had come back from Iraq and the hospital a changed man, embittered. She worked long hours at the Crate Camp Garrison, and came home late on the bus to her room in his parents’ house. He rarely saw her, so she had had no chance to learn of his obsession. He sat with his binoculars on his chest and waited for the movement of the birds.

He looked for the African Sacred Ibis. He could have seen it in East Africa, South Africa, Taiwan or on wetlands on the east coast of Australia, but he had never watched it fly low over the marshes in front of the house. They were there, he had read, but they were endangered and near extinct. It would be a cause for celebration if he were to see one, and even more so if a pair came close.

He had not yet seen it on this stretch of marshland. Naghmeh had told him she had watched one drift over the lagoon, but it had gone when he had come from his office. He watched, waited, and would break away only for coffee in the barracks, and his salad sandwich. Otherwise he would keep the vigil. He had his rifle across his knees and could tell himself – in true honesty – that he was conscientious in his work. He believed that the Engineer had told them so at the camp.

There were days when he thought he had seen one, neck extended, legs tucked up and powered by wide wings, far away over the reeds. Each time his excitement had surged as the speck had come closer, until he could see it was a slow-flapping heron. He looked also for the predator. Mansoor, the security officer, indulged himself with his search for the Sacred Ibis, but he was also on constant watch for the threat, for danger. The White-tailed Eagle had been up that morning, the hen, but he had not seen it now for an hour. The eagle had no equal, would swoop and kill the gentle bird.

If the Sacred Ibis came, if his hope was fulfilled, it would likely come low across the reeds, and he watched them closely. There were ducks and coots, and an otter. He thought them his allies. If the threat was alive, the waterbirds would panic and the otter would dive, telling him of a killer’s approach…

The visitors arrived. Three cars had brought them from Ahvaz, Susangerd and Dezful. They would have gathered in Ahvaz and come in convoy into the border zone, which was under military control, and to which access was restricted.

He went to check the papers, to satisfy himself. He would get two of his men to move a table under the trees, set chairs round it and carry over a tray of glasses and a jug of juice. He would put more cushions on the chair for Naghmeh, whose pain was worse this week. Then, when the meeting had started, he would come back to sit and search for the ibis among the reeds.

Foxy listened. The sound was good – clear and clean. The technicians he had met on courses and field trials swore that this version of the shotgun directional microphone yielded quality results at three hundred metres, and he estimated it was now secreted no more than 240 metres from the front of the target house. He was using around a hundred metres of cable, sunken, from the microphone to where he lay.

No way he would say it. The position was good, the voices were crystal. He would have claimed they were exposed and at risk from being so close to the target’s zone, and to the bastard who sat and tracked across the lagoon area, seeming to search it. The sounds of visitors and greetings were boosted by the walls and windows of the building behind where a table and chairs had been set, and bounced back.

He realised the skill Badger had shown to get forward to the lie-up, and more to go along the mud strand and place the microphone in the heart of what seemed to be snagged-up debris. He was so damn good – but Foxy wouldn’t say it. Where they were had been dead ground to the view from their night-time position, and a track of sorts led off the bund line to the right. There were more reeds nearer to where he was – on his stomach; the bergens were hidden there and Badger slept there. Foxy needed to have a view of the target house. The weak point with covert listening gear, the technicians always said, was keeping the power going, having battery strength and replacement when recharging wasn’t an option. What they used had Output Impedance of 600 ohms and a frequency range of 50Hz-10kHz and an S/N ratio of 40 dB plus, and he’d thought Badger hadn’t understood any of the specifications. But he had done well to get them there.

He reflected: two kilometres across a hostile frontier, they were alone, exposed. He also reflected that the chance of success was minimal. He knew about the landmines sown in this area by the Iraqis during the war three decades earlier – the woman had a fine voice that commanded attention.

Naghmeh, the Engineer’s wife, was at the centre of the table and around her was her committee. She talked of a village: ‘The new well that was dug fourteen years ago was not deep enough and the water it reaches is inadequate. The answer is for the village to go back to the old well, but that is where the mines were laid. They are not mines against tanks and personnel carriers, but against people. They are the Belgian-made PRB M35 and the NR417. Also put there were the Italian SB33 and VS50, and there are the jumping American mines, the M16 A1 and the Bulgarian PSM 1. If – if – it is possible, I will go to Ahvaz with you to demand funds for the clearance programme. It is owed to the village, which should have decent water. I will go myself.’

Across the table from her, a man and a woman, representatives of a village to the east and a half-kilometre outside the border’s restricted zone, wept quietly.

She spoke of the farmers: ‘You have good sheep, of the best quality, and good goats, but the good land where your flocks and herds should graze is denied you by the mines. You have there the Yugoslav-manufactured PMA 3, which is primarily of plastic and rubber casing. It resists the pressure of flails to detonate it, but tilts on a foot’s weight and explodes. It does not kill but takes a leg or a foot, or a manhood. The shepherd and the goatherd cannot use those fields, and cannot put their beasts onto them. You have waited too long. Too many of your families are crippled, and your children cannot be out of your sight. I will go to Susangerd and not leave until I have the guarantee of action. I can be formidable.’

The peasant farmers, who lived on a poverty breadline, wrung their hands and lacked the courage to look into her eyes.

She talked to the man and his wife, who had spent their own savings and their extended family’s money, to buy a building and develop it as a hotel because they were near to a route used by the pilgrims going towards Karbala and Najaf – the shrine of Ali ibn Abi Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet, where each of the minarets was covered with forty thousand gold tiles. The side of the bund line that led to the border and crossed it, the tracks through the marshes on military roads constructed by the old enemy were mined, and the devices came from Bulgaria, Israel and China. The minefields were not marked and no charts existed to show their placement. The Iraqis who had put them in the ground did not care and the pilgrims would not walk or ride on a narrow track but spread across the elevated ground. Enough had been killed or crippled for no more to come. ‘I will go to Tehran if I have to. Where there is oil there is mine clearance. When the drillers and pipe-layers have to come in, the ground is cleaned. Not only are people and animals killed but the potential wealth of the area is blighted. I will demand that something is done so that pilgrims can use that route and stay at your hotel. I will burn their ears, I promise.’

The couple choked back tears, and the woman let her hand rest lightly on Naghmeh’s.

She turned to two younger women who wore headscarves but not veils. They would have come from a city and had education to go with their intelligence – as she had. ‘I have complained frequently, and will continue to do so, against the corruption that afflicts the mine-clearance work. I will not tolerate it. Corruption is a stain on the Islamic state. We cannot get the clearance teams without bribing officials first – or giving them “bonuses”. Then, when a contractor is appointed, has paid for that privilege, he cannot operate without further theft by officials. I will see whoever I have to see, and sit on their doorstep for however long I have to sit there.’

Her voice was quieter as if the effort of talking through the morning had exhausted her. She sucked in her breath and felt the pain. The silence was broken by a sob from the slighter of the younger women.

She could endure pain and extreme tiredness. She slapped her hand on the table. ‘Now, where is our action campaign? Let us consider where we can advance.’

They all knew of her illness, and that the diagnosis was terminal. They also knew that she was due to travel abroad to consult with a foreign specialist, and that her life hung by a thread. She had their love and respect. Naghmeh could have made a short speech about her condition, telling them of her certainty that they would carry on with the work of mine clearance regardless of whether or not she drove the programme. She did not. None would have believed her.

She thought few of them reckoned there would be another meeting such as this, outside her home in the warmth beside the lagoon where the birds roamed. She faced the water. It jarred that the security officer blocked part of her view, and that his weapon was displayed. .. The pain throbbed, a drum beating in her skull.

They did the charade and logged birds; some species they could name but most they could not. The spotter ’scope, used by Shagger, stood high on a tripod, and Abigail was beside him with binoculars. The sun was high enough for the heat mist to have formed.

Where they were, the marsh waters were blocked and the ground around the raised walls, bulldozed to safeguard the oil-drilling site against flooding, was bare and cracked. There were precious few birds, endangered or common, to look for and she thought they might have to resort to throwing down bread if they were to get a decent entry into the log.

They were watched, mostly by kids, but there were adults, too, men. When the first half-dozen kids had turned up, seemingly materialising from open ground without warning, and the first couple of men, Shagger had murmured, ‘Had to happen, miss, like it was written down on a tablet. Two sets of wheels and us, no escort, and out here, putting up the tripod and the telescope. Always was going to create interest… and the chance of acquisition. I don’t know how long we can sweat it out.’

She had said, ‘By now they’ll be in place and will – I hope – have their eyeball.’

The sun beat down and she sweated. They were, predictably, the main attraction. She could have hoped that the area around the devastated drilling site had been abandoned by the marsh people – that the war and the draining by the dictator, followed by persecution and uncontrolled flooding, then four years of brutal drought, had driven them away. That would have been optimistic. Harding and Hamfist were sleeping, and Corky sat by the broken gate, his face half hidden by his wraparounds, the weapon lying on his legs. By the end of the day it would come to giving out sweets and they would be wrapped in five-dollar bills. Here, co-operation was bought with a high-velocity bullet and blood in the dirt, or by shelling out bribes. Might be why she detested the place and was counting the days till she was out of it – when this piece of work was finished, wrapped up. There might now be forty at the gate.

They stood and watched. She thought they had a degree of patience unmatched anywhere she had been by any peoples she had known. They stood in the harsh light without water or food. Their entertainment was herself, Shagger and Corky, blocking the easy way into the compound with his rifle. She did not think them hostile yet, merely inquisitive. Later, they might resort to showing pictures, blown up on the photocopier, of a bustard, a bittern or a darter. If they were lucky they had another day in place. If Fortune smiled, it might be three days. Out ahead the mist settled on a horizon of flat earth and reed beds, and far away there was water – where he was. She could remember each cadence of her voice: ‘What did you do that for?’

And the answer had been that God only knew, an evasion. She did not, would not, make a habit of crouching over a strange man to check the extent of bruising and finding her hands, fingertips, running over a flat stomach and going lower, then grabbing one of his hands and dragging it behind her so that it was under her T-shirt and on her skin. Difficult for Abigail Jones to know why she had made a pitch for this quiet, sometimes taciturn, sometimes mocking man who had walked into her life. It had been a compulsion. Regretted? Shit, no.

She had not met the guy in Basra, Six, Baghdad or her last London posting who did the business for her. There had not been a lawyer, a banker or an army man who had interested her. The last had been a teacher, mathematics for fourteen-year-olds, in a Lambeth comprehensive. She’d almost lived with him – three nights or four a week. He’d had no money and no prospects, but was fun and intense. He had jacked in the job, put the pension-scheme payments on hold and sold almost everything he owned, then gone to teach – mathematics or anything – in up-country northern Cambodia. He was Peter. He’d asked her, take it or leave it, if she wanted to come with him, but that would have meant resignation and a bust career.

There hadn’t been another guy since, not in London and not here. .. none of which answered her question. On top of a sleeping-bag in a ruined concrete office building with shell holes to view the stars and glass carpeting the floor, why had she hitched up her robe and lowered herself onto him? She didn’t know. She could still taste him, or imagined it. No regrets, none. What was best, he hadn’t thanked her. He hadn’t assumed he was going into harm’s way with the dawn, and this was a little boost to courage that might have flagged. He hadn’t even seemed surprised, but had been deep in her and had said nothing. It had been good… no regrets. He wasn’t out of her mind – and was beyond the haze on the horizon. She wore a moulded earpiece that doubled as a microphone, and the transmitter/receiver was on her belt. It was her link to them, and she wouldn’t anticipate the code message coming through unless their mission was complete and successful, or they needed to abort fast.

She didn’t expect Shagger – or Hamfist, Corky or Harding – to remark on what had happened in the derelict building that night, but she wouldn’t object to his operational input. He had the experience, which gave his comments value. He was the wrong side of forty, with a little weight gathering across his belt, and he came from the extreme south west of the principality. His parents had slaved through his childhood on a subsistence hill farm, breeding sheep, White Welsh Mountain ewes. He’d gone into the army on leaving the grammar school, joined a para battalion, whereupon his father had ditched his pride and gone bankrupt. Shagger had fought in Africa and the Balkans, done time in Ireland, had been in Afghanistan in 2001 and had left the army the next year, a sergeant. He was one of the drain who had quit to make big money with the private military contractors. He knew about every yard and feature of the road from Baghdad airport to the Green Zone, but he had never quite raised sufficient funds for his goal. He intended, one day, to have the cash in the bank to buy back that farm in the Preseli hills. With each contract he took, Shagger learned more. He gave advice only when it was asked for, and she never rejected it.

She said, ‘They’re fine for the moment. Nothing hostile.’

‘They can see guns and it’s daylight, miss. They’ll chance nothing till it’s dark. They thieve, miss. Always have.’

‘To pull back is a last option.’

‘It’s the worst option, miss. Here, at least, we might be inside the Golden Hour, or on the edge of it. We have to sweat it out.’

‘Would they know about the Golden Hour?’

‘They know that back-up’s guaranteed. Act of faith to them. Where they are, they’d need the faith.’

Badger listened as Foxy murmured translations and interpretations: ‘He’s the security man, the chief. Has a limp so he’s been hurt somewhere. If he was hurt in an accident, it would have been on their roads. If he’s a military casualty it would likely have happened inside Iraq or up in Lebanon. He’s mumbling, doesn’t know what to say, except that she should have faith in God.’

A benchmark of the work of a croppie, as Badger knew it, was to have binocular or ’scope vision, camera lenses or a directional shotgun microphone aimed at a target, eavesdropping, watching, noting, and be able to strip away the armour with which people tried to shield themselves if they expected to be observed. Few did. Not many understood the qualities he brought to his work, and the capabilities of the gear. It was a basic intrusion and he didn’t care. His life was spent watching men and women, noting small private happiness, tension and moments of pleasure. He was a voyeur: he might have been standing on a street in darkness and gazing at the gaps in bathroom curtains as a target prepared to wash, or looking into lit homes and seeing bitter domestic arguments. He might have been watching a killer burn a victim’s clothing, the sharing of the cash, the arming of a group on their way to a hit, a man weeping or a guard fumbling for words to a terminal patient. The gear enabled croppies to peer inside minds and souls. It didn’t bother him. It was his work.

‘She says her committee don’t believe they can carry on without her. The mine programme will fold if she isn’t there. She’s the icon figure who demands action – she repeats that. He nods, doesn’t answer, only says something about belief in God.’

They had developed the hide through the morning. It was as good as anything Badger could remember. Normal: go in at night and do the construction stuff under cover of darkness, be cosy and covert when the light came. Abnormal: to burrow out the scrape and cover it, do the work in the sun’s glare, and have a man with security responsibilities sitting in a chair two hundred yards away. Something to be proud of. He had called the tune, and Foxy had stayed with the earphones clamped on, hadn’t acknowledged that the work was well done – was brilliant. They were on the extremity of the reeds where they were thin, and had taken over a narrow strip of the bare ground, the dried-out mud. He had worked a shallow dip for them no more than fifteen inches deep, and had made a rim wall of the soil. All of it was covered with debris he had painstakingly collected further into the reeds, the same dead fronds that hid the microphone on the mud spit. More fronds masked the cable where it came up out of the water and ran across the mud towards them. A work of art, a collector’s piece. Often the guard raised his binoculars and scanned. Then Badger had been statue still on his stomach, and the gillie suit was embedded with more reeds… There’d been no praise. He thought of Alpha Juliet. Difficult not to think of her. Impossible to imagine why she had done it, but he was glad she had.

‘He’s called Mansoor – that’s what she calls him. He says he hopes God will watch over her. She says her committee depends too much on her. She says it’s time to go and prepare the children’s food for when they come back from school. I think he’s near to tears. Right, she’s gone, and…’

He was no longer listening. Fran had been good enough to run for a few months, but he’d left and she wouldn’t have cried. There had been two girls while he was still at school, and he’d shagged one while her parents were out at the supermarket, every Friday evening, for a month, the other in the woods near the nuke-weapons factory at Burghfield… And a woman PC called Brenda, who ran the organisation side of the team that did surveillance on the gypsy camp where the tinkers who did the country-house burglaries up and down the Thames-valley corridor came from. Nothing important to him. She had been, Alpha Juliet – and there was no one to tell him why she was locked into his mind.

He wasn’t handsome, had fuck-all talk. He felt the warmth of her, and the moistness… He couldn’t have said that any woman before had mattered in his life. The heat burgeoned and his throat was crisp, dried. His eyes ached from the glare of the water, and the man sat in front of the house, the rifle across his legs. Badger’s head turned slowly as he watched, through his glasses, the reed beds, the spit where the microphone was disguised and the open ground into which he had scraped the hide. They were pressed hard together, his hip into the slack part of Foxy’s stomach wall, and Foxy’s hip bone sharp against his thigh.

Foxy whispered, ‘It surprised me, how well my Farsi’s lasted.. .’

If the man was fishing for a compliment, Badger wouldn’t take the bait. He answered, ‘It’s what you’re here for – what you’re paid for.’

‘You know why we’re here?’

‘Are you going to tell me?’

‘We’re here because they – the spooks – don’t have an asset to put in here. They would have wanted a local, some guy who could wander around and chat in the coffee house or the garage and talk to the goon guards. They don’t have one. So it’s us. There isn’t a turned Iranian they could put in and trust, and there isn’t a lieutenant of the Republican Guard, who thought Saddam was the bee’s bollocks, or a slimy little sod from the Ba’ath Party they can rely on. They’ve reached down to the bottom of the barrel, and it’s us they’ve pulled out. It’s crazy, daft, idiotic.’

‘You volunteered so stop whining.’ So close together, like lovers, that the words barely needed articulation. Badger’s murmur in Foxy’s ear, and the two camouflage head kits were almost meshed.

Foxy’s response: ‘We’re the end of the road for them or the barrel’s scrapings, whichever. And they’ll feel good. They ’ve done something – put two arseholes, daft idiots, into harm’s way. It’ll go on the papers they write and they’ll get congratulated. What chance is there that the target will walk out of his front door and shout in Farsi I can understand and no fancy dialect, to the bloody sky, “Heh, anyone there? If you are, and you’re upset about the growth in my wife’s head, you need to know I’m off in the morning to Vienna, Rome, Kiev, Stockholm, any place where there’s someone with good knife skills. Hear that?” We’ll see him go, perhaps. Where to? We’ll see farewells, tears et cetera. Where are they headed? We’ve no chance.’

‘You could have refused.’

‘And they’d have let me walk away? Grow up, young ’un. They’d have made sure it haunted me the rest of my days. No more work. Considered “unsuitable”, branded “lack of commitment”. You’re held by the short and curlies. Didn’t the lady tell you? Or wasn’t she talking too much?’

‘Best you shut your mouth.’

‘But they can have their lunch and their gin, and can congratulate themselves that they tried, were audacious, and when we crawl out of here and get back, don’t expect a load of back-slapping and gratitude. They won’t remember your name. It has no chance.’

Badger murmured, ‘Saying that because you’re scared shitless? Or do you mean it – “no chance”?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think you’re crap. Try it again. I know you’re crap.’

He thought Foxy was close to hitting him, and they both lay motionless. Badger watched as the security man roved the area with his glasses. He didn’t know if Foxy had spoken the truth – that they had no chance, were small pawns and served other agendas.

‘I will do it, subject to satisfactory arrangements.’

He was asked what arrangements would have to be satisfactory.

The consultant had gone out of the building and loitered in front of the cafe. He was not overheard. He had dialled the number given him, had been held at the embassy’s switchboard for perhaps a half-minute, which he thought excessive, and when the call was answered he received no apology.

‘The patient must have a name. There must be a date of arrival and-’

He was interrupted. The life of the hospital and the medical school flowed past him; the rain fell and snow threatened. There was often snow when the Christmas market began in Lubeck, in the square in front of the Rathaus and beside the Marienkirche. Then it was prettier and the traders coined cash. He was not, of course, a Christian but his wife went to services most Sundays and took their daughter, and on special saints’ days he would attend with them. The patient would arrive as soon as it could be arranged, and the name would be given him when he saw the patient. Did anything else need to be ‘satisfactory’?

‘What would be the method of payment? These are expensive procedures. We require guarantees, money lodged in escrow, a banker’s draft, a credit card or-’

A hardening of a faraway distorted voice. Had he forgotten who he was? What he owed? Did greed govern him?

‘I’m not talking about myself. There are technicians, scans, X-rays. Assume that surgery is a possibility. Then you have theatre, and intensive care.’ His temper was shortening. ‘The patient cannot have that type of intervention, hours of it, then be put out into a winter’s night.’

He would be told about financial arrangements when the timing and date of the patient’s journey to north Germany were known.

The call ended. He pocketed his phone, went inside the building and sucked in a long breath. He wrapped a smile of confidence and competence around his face and greeted his first patient of the day.

His wife waved to him. From his car, he watched her go. All the sentries and security guards knew her. If they hadn’t, there would have been bedlam at his stopping so close to the main gates and inside the concrete teeth placed to prevent access to a car bomber. Gabbi watched her and, for a moment, almost unseen, his lips moved in to kiss her. She swung the stick in front of her legs and went to the guard who controlled the pedestrians’ entrance. With her free hand, she would have gestured towards the ID in the plastic pouch that hung from her neck. All the sentries and guards would greet her – they saw her coming and going, swinging the white stick and getting to work or heading home, as if there were no impediment in her life. He shared her with many. He left the ministry building and took a route from the city to the south.

There was a complex at Giv’at Herzl that had a small-arms firing range, soundproofed, at the rear.

Those who used the range, as many women as men, were from the National Dignitary Protection Unit and the Secret Service, and there were soldiers who did bodyguard duties for senior military staff. The instructors knew most of the client base. Some fired at circle targets, others used life-sized figures. Gabbi had asked for a figure, a head wrapped in a keffiyeh. He did the fast slide of the pistol from a waist holster, then the double-tap shots for the head. They did not consider chest shots, or those aimed at the stomach, to be of any value. The instructors taught that bullets should be aimed at the skull. That day, his weapon was the Baby Eagle, the Jericho 941F, with a nine-shot magazine, manufactured inside the country. The instructors would never have been told of the role he played in the affairs of Israel – would not have expected or wanted it. They had seen the clients come and go, and could make judgements on the work the shooters did, what they trained for. Gabbi used a different technique on the range from that employed by protection or those who hoped to be close enough to take down a suicide bomber. They fired in screened booths, and only the instructors would have seen Gabbi with his back to the target shape, then producing the weapon from under his lightweight coat, spinning, whipping the pistol up, aiming, steadying it, holding it cleanly, doing the squeeze – and it was double-tap. The instructors would tell him, each time he fired twice, where his bullets had struck.

They had nothing to teach Gabbi.

He would not have claimed his skills were too great for him to need practice. Sweat ran on him, clogging at the edges of the ear baffles. He was a man apart and did not laugh with others and had no friends there, but he had the instructors’ respect.

It was somewhere to go, somewhere to pass the time while he waited for the call – and he never tired of the cordite whiff or the rippling recoil through his wrists, forearms and elbows, and the kick of the Baby Eagle.

The instructors could have made a judgement on his work because he always fired at the head, was only interested in head hits that would drop a man dead.

Others would not have coped with the waiting, but Gabbi could.. . Later, after a wasted day, he would be at the ministry’s gate, watching for the woman, pretty, with the white stick, and would pick up Leah. All the shots he had fired had been at the head, and all would have killed.

Time to think, time to reflect and time to brood. Len Gibbons waited and the phones stayed silent.

Other officers in the Towers, with time on their hands, would have been with Sarah in the single room allocated him at the Club. Not Len Gibbons and not Sarah.

She had made fresh coffee, and brought with it a plate of biscuits. He owed his wife, Catherine, too much – not that it made a jot of difference in Sarah’s case as she rebuffed all advances from whichever direction and had done since a captain in the Life Guards had dumped her in favour of a girl from the Intelligence Corps – that had been after the first banns were read. He was hugely in debt to Catherine, and doubted he would ever pay it off. He was – to everyone who knew him in the Towers – Len Gibbons. When he was young, and Catherine was his new wife and the world had seemed at his feet, he could have anticipated that, within a few years, he would be Leonard Gibbons and on a fast track to the higher ranks. His career had come to a juddering halt and the scars were still on his back. But for that impact, he might have climbed to great things, and had not. By a thread, by a fingernail, he had survived – damaged – a professional debacle and she had stood by him when the scale of his failure had made him nearly suicidal. With her encouragement, he had hung on, and had known that on his record was the condemnation of what had been codenamed Antelope, that the best he could hope for was to be labelled ‘diligent’ or, worse, ‘conscientious’. The debt ran wider than his wife: it permeated the building from which he worked. He could, therefore, be given any bag of excrement and the safety of his hands would ensure that the job was done.

If he set his mind to it, he still had good recall of that bloody border, the watchtowers, the dogs and the guns.

He called through the door that the coffee was excellent, and thanked her for the biscuits. His phone stayed silent and he waited.

The Engineer explained to the brigadier the first principles of the bombs he had made, which were now stockpiled and kept in underground storage. They would use ‘low explosives’ and he spoke of TATP’s contents: triacetone triperoxide had minimal scent, emitted no vapours, and would go undetected by even the best-trained sniffer dogs. He told the brigadier – who sat stern, rapt, not interrupting, as if he recognised the privilege of access to a man of renown – about the blast effects of the larger-scale bombs he worked on. There was, first, the ‘positive phase’, when the windows of buildings adjacent to the bomb were blown in, then the ‘negative phase’, when the debris and glass shards were airborne and dragged out again to refill the vacuum created by the blast. Calm, emotionless, he told the officer – who would have responsibility for the defence of the province if the troops of the Great Satan were unwise enough to invade the Islamic Republic with ground forces – of the effects of explosives detonating: ‘blast lung’ injuries from the thrust into the ears, nose and throat; more injuries from the high-velocity impact of the ball bearings incorporated into the bomb and the glass splinters raining down on a street or flying inside buildings. Further injuries, as soldiers of the enemy were thrown across a street and careered into buildings or cars, their brains bouncing against the inner wall of their skulls.

With a dry smile, he indicated a photograph on the wall of an American soldier’s helmet: an arrow pointed out of a ventilation hole in its side. He said that such openings provided a conduit that concentrated blast into the hole, like the driving in of a nail. He spoke, too, of the medium-term damage to troops’ psychology, if they had been exposed to situations where bombs were widespread, particularly if there had been casualties in their unit: a large number of enemy combatants in the Iraq war had gone home with post-traumatic stress disorder, as sick as if they had been severely wounded, and would not return. The brigadier grimaced as the Engineer finished and told him that he – almost alone – was responsible for the defeat of the coalition inside Iraq. His weapons had destroyed the will and resolve of the enemy. He had smiled and shrugged. Many this year had come to his office, had sat where the brigadier sat, and congratulated him on his achievement.

What news was there of the war in Afghanistan? Did it affect his work? the brigadier asked.

He said it was a low priority, that the devices used by the resistance were simpler than those employed in Iraq… They had been taught, had been supplied with chemicals and explosives, and he had written papers, but he kept them at arms’ distance. It was Iraq that had mattered, where the true victory had been won.

Then they drank sweet tea – with cardamom, saffron, rose water and liberally spooned sugar – from small glasses, and smoked.

The brigadier raised it. He had heard of the illness of the Engineer’s wife, and was privy to plans for sending her abroad for consultation and, hopefully, treatment. They talked about suitcases, what sort and size would be best for the journey. The brigadier had recently been in Damascus with new baggage and could offer advice.

When the tray had been cleared, the Engineer spoke to the brigadier of the theory of roadside thermobaric bombs, the ability of fuel-air explosions to devastate, and their potential inside trucks and saloon cars that could be driven by a ‘martyr’ into the doorway of a building. There, the blast would be confined and enhanced. He was working on that, on miniaturisation of the circuit boards for the explosive formed projectile, on extending the range of passive infrared beams and… He yawned, then flushed, embarrassed. He apologised.

He was told he had nothing to apologise for.

He said, confiding, that it was difficult to focus on his work.

He was asked if he knew an itinerary.

He hoped to hear that day, or the next, when he would travel with his wife.

It had simmered, but had been below boiling.

The spat stayed with them, but was carried along on whispers, almost soundless, and the voices played like soft winds on the front of their camouflaged headpieces.

Foxy said he needed water. Badger said he had drunk his ration for the morning.

Foxy said the biscuits tasted foul. Badger said he thought they were good.

Foxy said they should move to their right, maybe forty paces, and be deep in the reeds for greater protection. Badger said it was important they had an eyeball on the property and could ping the target.

Foxy had looked at his watch and wondered, barely aloud, what his Ellie was doing at that moment. He had started to relate how they had met and- Badger had cut him off, said he wasn’t interested.

Foxy hissed, ‘Are you contrary for the sake of it? You think I want to be here with you – the fuck I do – the most difficult, awkward oppo ever given me? I make a remark about my wife and you’re not interested.’

‘Correct. I’m not interested in your wife.’

‘Who’s special. Who I miss. Who I-’

‘Not interested.’

And Badger, as usual, spoke the truth. He wasn’t interested in Foxy’s wife and didn’t want to talk about her. He was interested in the one-storey house of concrete blocks, the big front windows, which were open, the door, ajar, the chairs and table outside in the shade. And he was interested in the guard, who sometimes sat on a chair and sometimes walked, sometimes coughed and spat, sometimes smoked, and who had now started to fish with a short rod, worms and a float. He watched the boat that was tied near the little concrete pier. He saw the wife, who was dying and walked with a stick, and the children who were chided by an older woman when they screamed too loudly and too close to their mother… If he and Foxy didn’t talk, they didn’t argue.

He knew that the long, motionless hours played havoc with Foxy’s knee and hip joints, but couldn’t bring himself to sympathise. Hours passed and the sun cooked them. He thought how vulnerable they were, vulnerable enough for him to bloody near wet himself… He would never again volunteer, never again shove his hand up.

The explosion burst in Badger’s ears.