A Deniable Death

Chapter 8

Foxy pinged her… He thought the temperature inside the gillie suit was in excess of 50 degrees centigrade – more than 130 Fahrenheit. He could have drunk water until his belly distended, but would not. They had carried in the water. Water, where they were, was more important than anything other than the audio-capture gear. They could survive on little food, concentrates with high protein, and minimal sleep. If the water was exhausted they would suffer dehydration, which meant muscle and stomach cramps, headaches, weakness, dizziness and heavy sweating.

Foxy had heard, on his Basra tour, that the body could lose a quart of moisture through sweat per hour. He lay still. Ping was croppie talk for having a close view of a target. Could have been eyeball, which was general for all police agencies on surveillance duties, but the guys who bagged the shit, bottled the piss and were an elite talked of pinging a target… It was the talk that kept Foxy alert. Good to think of himself as ‘elite’. He deserved it.

She moved slowly in the sunshine at the front of the house. Her man was Tango One and she was Tango Two. Foxy reckoned her more important to their endeavour than the husband, and more likely to cough up the evidence of a destination. When she was outside, or when she was inside the room with the open window and he could see her shadow move or an interior light lit her, he eased the controls, lifted the volume and struggled for greater clarity in his earphones. He believed it was from her that he would break the damn thing, then get on the move, retrieve the gear and head for the extraction point. After this, Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes – not breaking any confidences, of course, and not spitting too much phlegm into the face of the Official Secrets Act – would be a big man, a valued man, a man in demand. ‘Elite’: he deserved that title, had done since the days he’d lain in the hide on the hill above the farm near Cappagh in County Tyrone and been there long enough to feed the warning that the Barrett 50 calibre was on the move. Guys from Intelligence, and special forces, had called his stake-out ‘epic’, and the battalion adjutant, the unit that had fouled up the cordon and missed the damn thing when it was moved, had made a personal apology, saying that ‘such outstanding surveillance was short-changed’. This was beyond any category he had before been involved in.

The young ’un slept beside him.

There was more washing going out, more pegs slotting on the line, children’s stuff and her husband’s clothing. She would not, of course, hang out her intimate clothing where it could be seen by the guards from the barracks. Her mother followed her and carried the plastic basket with the shirts, shorts, socks, the kids’ dresses, towels and washing-up cloths. He had the binoculars on her, 10?50, but didn’t use the spotter ’scope. The visuals were of small interest compared to the audio system – wouldn’t have said it into Badger’s ear, but the microphone was well placed on the mud spit and well camouflaged. The gear was good and the sound quality was fine but their language was difficult for him because they didn’t speak, mother and daughter, in the classical but in the vernacular. He understood each time she wanted another peg, that the small boy’s shirt had not washed well, and that the girl had torn a skirt playing outside. He had to believe that the clue would be given him.

The young ’un slept. It was unequal. Badger could sleep for the full three hours while Foxy was on stag. When Foxy slept, Badger would elbow him if there was conversation on the patio. He had been woken when the Engineer had come from the house at dawn and paced at the water’s edge, enjoying his cigarette and talking about football scores with two of the guards. He had been woken again when the car had come and the goon, Mansoor, had repeated the warning about keeping clear of the centre of Ahvaz, then asked about the Engineer’s day. He had seen the shrug and heard a remark about ‘meetings, all the day is meetings’. And a question was asked about the suitcase, but he had not caught the reply and had assumed that the wife approved of it. Then he had been allowed to sleep again. Twice he had received the elbow and been told that he was snoring. Foxy, as routine, dug his fist into Badger’s hip each half-hour to wake him and then lie that he was talking or grunting in his sleep. If Foxy couldn’t crash out for three hours, he was damned if Badger would sleep without interruption.

Yes, it would be good. There would be nods and winks, hints-offered, but the secrecy governing where he had been and why would be preserved. He would be introduced as the man who had gone into opposition territory, who had lain up in circumstances of quite extraordinary privation, had witnessed mass murder and delivered, had won through. He would talk about the skills and disciplines needed to achieve aims and ping targets. Who did he have with him, or was he alone? He might be asked that. He’d had a greenhorn, something of a sherpa, there – basically – to hump the gear. He’d enjoy that, and would be feted. Ellie would be proud and… The washing was out on the line and hung limp; there was no wind. There were more flies than before.

The flies had been bad the previous evening, had disappeared during darkness and been replaced by mosquitoes. Now, in the full glare of the sun, the mosquitoes had gone and the flies were back – big bastards. They droned and probed at the scrim mesh on the camouflage headgear and they were on the mud-caked skin of his hands. He thought it remarkable that they didn’t wake Badger, that he could sleep through their persistence. In the night, Badger had taken the shit bags and piss bottles out of the hide, wriggled on his stomach into the reed bed, dug a little pit – on the water line – buried the bags and emptied the bottles. Without the bags the flies should have been less interested. Didn’t work that way. They’d come on in swarms and searched for routes through the scrim into his ears, mouth and nose, settling on his hands. He felt the prick as they bit, but he couldn’t anoint himself with repellent: it would provide an alien scent.

She had the line filled with washing. Ellie often asked him to empty the washing-machine and put their things on a line when she was in a hurry for work and doing her makeup or running late. It was usual for him to iron his shirts and her blouses. He had learned to iron after he’d gone to London, leaving Liz in the north with the children, and did it well: Ellie was sometimes too busy with overtime at Naval Procurement to get home early and iron. Quite often, Foxy cooked the dinner.

He thought she’d have been a fine-looking woman if the illness hadn’t ravaged her. She was quite tall, not dwarfed by her husband. The lenses showed her figure when she moved and the robe was pressed against her body. She would have seemed handsome from fifty or seventy-five yards, with a strong nose, good cheekbones and a chin that gave off authority… Different when he watched her through ten times magnification. Harsher lines, a greater stoop in the shoulders and the wince at the mouth when she turned or reached up with the clothing or a peg. He sensed a steeled determination to complete the basic task. He watched her. It was what he did well.

Abigail Jones had not met Len Gibbons. She imagined, because he was ‘old school’ that he would have moved to a temporary billet, a London club or a camp bed wherever he had set up his operations centre, and that he paced, even chain-smoked, while he waited for a telephone call.

It would have been three years ago, just before she was shipped out to Iraq when she was coming to the end of her London duty, that she had been leaving the canteen area, and the older woman with her, whom she’d known from the Balkans, had stage-whispered a choice morsel about the man standing, seeming elderly and vacant, at the counter, then moving his tray.

The telephone would not have rung because she had sent no message. There was to be no radio traffic, and no satphone communication other than to transmit information categorised ‘critical’. She had nothing important to report.

The woman, Jennifer, famed for indiscretion, had been in Belgrade while Abigail worked in the Sarajevo embassy and they’d become friends, distant, when sharing escape weekends on Croatian beaches. ‘When you get down to Baghdad, darling, don’t eff it up like that one did in his youth. In this hateful place they like to deal in one-chance-only scenarios. A good man, a nice man, and they said he was really capable. He was advanced, given responsibilities. Such a sad story. Never recovered fully, like blight in an apple orchard, and it was thirty years ago.’ Gossip was forbidden, mortal sin. Abigail had asked what the man had done and where he had done it. Jennifer had chuckled and declined to expand on her story – except to tell her that the man was Len Gibbons, left for ever like a bit of driftwood, high and dry, when the tide slipped out. They had parted, gone off in different lifts to different floors, and she had forgotten about the tale until, six years later, she had been told Len Gibbons would field her reports when there was news worth imparting.

He was hardly going to want to know that she had lain in the sand, swaddled in a mosquito net, with her firearm on the ground beside her, fastened by a lanyard to her wrist. He was hardly going to be concerned that she had barely slept, and that Corky and Harding, Hamfist and Shagger would have slept less, that those she proudly called the Jones Boys had used two flares and a thunder flash and had maintained a perimeter of sorts. There hadn’t been a charge but a creeping infiltration, the creaking of stressed wire as the fences, already sagging, had been flattened. The flares had stopped them, had held them in the shadow at the edge of the light pool. The thunder flash had scattered them, driven them back. Hamfist was the one who knew most of this sector and he’d claimed to read the madan mind. ‘You can give the feckers – ’scuse, miss – a flash and a flare and we’ll be OK. If it gets to us chucking about the lead we’ll have to quit.’ The flares and the flash had stabilised it during the night and, first light, Corky had urged her to get the treasury open. ‘We can’t shoot them all, miss, or it’ll be worse than Bloody Sunday. We should try to buy them. Do it like an auction – start small and haggle like it’s the bazaar. They’re all Ali Babas, miss, and don’t forget it.’

She could picture him: she’d seen him once in the canteen and a couple more times when he’d been near her as she’d come off a bus near to the Towers’ entrance. There had been a weighted look to him, that of a man burdened: she’d define that as pallor in the complexion, straggling hair, a shuffle walk, clothing that was a little too loose and, above all, wariness, a sense of being left outside any loop that existed. Jennifer had spoken of ‘one chance only’. It was where Abigail was now. The one chance to make it work – so she could justify rare interest in Len Gibbons, who waited for her call.

She had taken twenty five-dollar bills from her money belt, which she wore against the skin at her waist. And almost, taking the notes out and peeling them off the wad, she had giggled – but to herself. It had made a dent in his skin: she had not taken off her money belt when she had been over and across him. The buckle had gouged his flesh.. . Regret nothing. He had not seemed to notice that it had pressed into his flat, muscled stomach. She had gone down to the gate, Shagger yawning behind her, and Corky halfway between them and the vehicles. Hamfist and Harding had been near enough to the Pajeros to start them, and fast. She had called forward the twenty men she thought seemed oldest and had put, into each of the palms offered her, a five-dollar bill. Her own ancestors, a century before, might have given out beads or anything shiny… She’d closed each fist on the note. It had humiliated her, the crudeness. Then she had tried to persuade them to head home, get back to the huts built of reeds and the floating island shared with the water buffalo that gave them dung to use as their staple fuel for heating and the high-definition TV. Five dollars was meagre. None of them had shifted.

It had been Len Gibbons’s turn, three decades earlier – if Jennifer’s rumour was to be believed – to have ‘one chance only’ and to ‘eff it up’. She thought she was now presented with a copper-bottomed opportunity to join his team. The crowd at the gate, in the half-day that had passed from her handing out the trifles, had doubled. The threat when the next belt of darkness came was, likely, twice as great. She couldn’t get the boys to drive her back to al-Qurnah and try to rustle up rooms at the one building in the town, beside the big river and adjacent to the dead tree claimed as the ‘Tree of Life’. One of the Shia zealot movements had control of that building. The alternative was to leave the site, drive onto a berm or a bund and park there where they were visible for ten miles or more. She couldn’t call up a friendly UK platoon and have them do their security because the Brits were now in Afghanistan, and the marines, the Fort Bragg guys, too, had switched wars, had quit their last combat with a chorus of ‘Fucking good riddance to a motherfucking place.’ There was nowhere else to be. It was her ‘one chance only’ and she assumed that Len Gibbons, far away, doodling, would understand.

She asked the boys how much they reckoned she should shell out.

She went back inside, and hitched up her robe – did the act of a Basra tart – offloaded an additional two hundred and fifty American dollars and split the notes ten times. Twenty-five dollars each, and a demand for some action.

It was a weak hand, the worst.

This time she had Corky on her right and Hamfist on her left. Again she called out the oldest men, with those who wore clothing of the best material, and pleaded for the space they needed to monitor the wildlife successfully. Corky had said they could not be further back and do their job. Hamfist had said that any guy at the sharp end had to believe in the honesty of the people in support. She handed out money, repeated the pleading and went back towards the building.

She was a tough girl. Abigail Jones, convent-school educated, red-brick university, only took the bus in grim weather and ran to work most days in London along the Embankment, and home again. She could sleep on shit-laced concrete, hike and trek – and could almost have wept. There were more coming and none were leaving, and some now had rifles. In these parts any man with balls had access to a rifle.

Harding asked, ‘How long do you think we have until we lift them out?’

She shrugged.

Shagger asked, ‘What do we do, miss, when this crowd start coming?’

‘Let me think about it, and give me some fucking space.’

There were two Black Hawks on the apron in the sun. One of the crews was in an annex where a room offered bunk beds and thick enough window blinds to blot out the ferocity of the sun’s glare. They would be wearing ear baffles so that the roar of the aircon systems wouldn’t keep them awake. The second crew, four personnel, was in the annex rest room and sprawled in easy chairs. They were in the dog days of the empire, and the final evacuation from the one-time colony was mere weeks away so little more than skeleton forces remained. The buildings they occupied were tired, the paint scuffed, and would not receive renovation. Inevitably they had caught the mood of ‘drawdown’, and had taped in their lockers at the Baghdad base a pencil picture of a snake divided into segments, one for each day they would serve on that posting. Most were now filled in and only part of the tail remained.

That crew who were awake, supposedly ready to kick themselves out of the chairs into the open-top jeep and have the bird airborne within three minutes of the bell going, found this assignment littered with unanswered questions. The four-blade twin-engine helicopter, with a lift classified as ‘medium’, was the workhorse of the American military, and carried stores – Meals Ready to Eat, the chemicals for latrines, home-town hacks looking for stories that didn’t exist – and also flew special-forces units. It was reliable, flew like a dream, caused little hassle and less grief. But the American military effort was now scaled down, the troops reduced to spit-and-polish bull-shit in camps, so the guys in the two crews were generally just bored shitless. Each bird, each crew, could lift an additional eleven troops with full combat gear. They were on standby, but they didn’t know when they would be called out or whom they would pick up; they had not been given an exact extraction point. New, out of the Sikorsky factories, the Black Hawk had set their taxpayers back, minimally, $14 million. It was expensive hardware that sat on the tarmacadam outside the annex, and the ‘ready’ crew waited to be told something.

No one came.

Normally when special forces were involved – infiltration and exfiltration – herds of liaison men and women hovered, their cell phones ringing and their comms busy. There were none.

The pilot, Eddie, read a comic book and his co-pilot, Tristram, turned the pages of a Bible, the Old Testament. A side gunner, Dwayne – trained to use a 7.62 calibre machine gun – studied a puzzle book, and Federico, who had the weapon on the starboard side of the cabin, was deep in an aviation engineering magazine. They were not disturbed.

Any other time they had done the lifts for special forces there had been a presence alongside, checking every few minutes that their flight plans were ready and understood, that they knew where all the pylons with slack electricity cables were and which they could fly under, and that the fire power of Hellfires and machine-gun belts had been tested. They’d even demand a check on the fuel loads in the tanks. No one bothered them.

All they had been told was that a phone call would come through on the green handset, and a voice would give co-ordinates to an area approximately sixty kilometres away. That distance, going east, would put them hard against the Iran border.

They read, killed time, waited.

Badger had her in his glasses. Then, alerted, he swung them round, went through a full 90-degree arc with them, and picked up the bulldozer.

The big plant vehicle, with a bucket on the front, had come from behind the barracks and now powered along the bund line to the right. He fancied he understood. Past midday, with the sun at full strength, the smell was sweeter, more foul, and had seemed over the last hour to hang in the air close to him. The one they called the goon, Mansoor, hung onto the outer handles of the cab.

Badger had been up and awake most of the night, and had allowed the older man to sleep from the time that the house lights had gone out until dawn, had let him sleep through for six hours before waking him and starting the routine of three hours on and three hours off. He had let him sleep except when the snores came on too fierce.

In the first light, grey and almost chill, with the sun not yet peeping up from a horizon of reed tops and water expanses, Badger had crawled out of the hide, taken care to rearrange the cover of dead reeds, then had moved away and scouted the bare ground, on his stomach. He had been in the reeds and had seen where a spur came off the bund line and towards where they had made the hide. Then he had reached the open water beyond and the little light flecked the bodies in the water. Already they were swollen, gross – the smell had been building and had not dissipated in the cool of night. Now, in the middle of the day, he imagined the corpses would be even more distended. He understood that men had been tasked to retrieve and bury them.

At dawn he had seen the bodies floating with clouds of insects over them, and in the middle of the day he saw the bulldozer. He didn’t need to see much else. In this little corner of the world, far from anything he had experienced before, men could be shot dead, dumped and the evidence buried. The bulldozer went from his view and the sound drifted and was fainter… It was, after a fashion, what they did to their own. What would they do to those who intruded on their space and affairs, broke the boundaries of the borders and spied – he had read about spies. In the last war spies had been hanged in London, electrocuted in the USA, marched to the gallows in Syria, with a placard round the neck denouncing Israeli espionage, and to an execution chamber at the Sugamo prison in Tokyo: Richard Sorge, Communist agent, spying against Japan on behalf of Russian Intelligence, who denied all knowledge of him… denied all knowledge. It had a ring to it. Almost, in that heat, a shiver convulsed him. Fear? Apprehension? He put it down to the sweat running in the small of his back, where the fingers of Alpha Juliet had been. Denied all knowledge: up in Scotland, with the theatre of that house and the bay with the waves crashing, the cold, the rain and the howl of the pipes, denial had seemed unimportant.

He had the flies and the smell, the sun flaring up off the water, dazzling him, and a mirage haze.

She came back out. His hand hovered, ready to shake Foxy awake.

Her mother followed her, but held back in the shade at the front of the house. Badger thought her beautiful, regal yet doomed. Through the glasses he could see the effort it took for her to walk from the patio to the water’s edge, then little flecks of colour on the ground close to her feet: a flowerbed. Badger swore. She had made a flowerbed, and weeks before there would have been vivid colours in it. There was, against the house, a tap, and over the patio a discarded hose pipe. He thought it reasonable that the tap had not been turned on and the hosepipe aimed at the flowers – maybe his mother’s favourite, geraniums – since her diagnosis. An ex-infantry soldier he had worked with had once said that shock spread in a life much as a hand grenade rolled, bounced and slid erratically across the floor in a bunker or a slit trench. It would have been like that when the news was given them. He thought it would have seemed a waste of time and energy to continue watering the flowers.

She captured him.

She sat alone in front of the water and close to the pier. The children were not back from school, the mother was inside the house and the goon was with the bulldozer. The guards would not approach her. Badger would have woken Foxy, given him a hard nudge in the ribcage – where it might hurt – if anyone had come close to her and talked.

She watched the birds. Did she know that men scavenging for artillery-piece casings had been shot – he assumed for being inside a restricted, sensitive zone – then dumped, were being retrieved now by a bulldozer to be clawed into a pit? Did she know that that was the price of keeping security tight around her? Her work was mine clearance. For Badger the world played at riddles.

What would happen to her?

He had not worked in Northern Ireland. He was too young, and the war there had lapsed to a ceasefire by the time he was trained and operational. He had come across enough who knew the Province. A paratrooper, off the hills above Brecon when Badger had been with them on exercise, had talked of doing back-up protection for handlers when they met with potential Provo informers – touts – in the shadows of pub car parks, in the empty darkened spaces of beauty spots. It always bloody rained, they said, when the proposition of betrayal was put, the approach made. Some, the paratrooper had said, spat it out, some hesitated, and some came on board – bloody ran up the gangplank… Then – this was the rub – they had to go back and tell the wife they were changing sides and taking the Queen’s shilling. He hadn’t forgotten that conversation long into a night. If her husband accepted the offer made, and she came through surgery, they would face a new life, and convalescence in an English seaside town or a suburb of any city in the United States. First, how would the man respond to interdiction, approach? Badger couldn’t say, couldn’t imagine it. But he was sure Mr Gibbons, the Boss, had his finger on the pulse of it.

There was, he decided, something totally elegant about the woman. Something utterly dignified. He would have been hard put to explain his thoughts.

She gazed out over the water. He watched her through the glasses, ten times magnification, and there were moments when he believed she looked straight at him, must see him. The heat in the suit sapped him and he fought to maintain his concentration. He had to make his water last – and in his ears were the sounds of the ripples against the pier’s supports and the scrape of the dinghy against the planks. He reckoned, couldn’t be certain at two hundred metres plus, that tears ran down her face.

Badger could not, in truth, take his eyes from her. He didn’t know how her husband, assuming a surgeon could work a miracle, would respond to the approach.

They had done more war games at the camp. Through the morning there had been a theoretical headquarters-command scenario of an American invasion pushing in from Iraqi territory on a front south of al-Qurnah and north of Basra. The Engineer’s role had been to describe the new generation of explosive formed projectiles, their deployment, and effect against the enemy’s armour, and the forces of any ‘poodles’ that the Great Satan could whip into line. They had not stopped for lunch, but took a break for coffee.

When would he be away?

Again, he found himself alongside the brigadier who had responsibility for this sector.

He grimaced. He had the suitcase, and they awaited final confirmation of the itinerary… very soon.

After the refreshment stop, they would move on to the area of counter-attack, and the Engineer had prepared a paper on the value of deflecting armoured convoys to specified roads where the bombs could be more effective and more concentrated. He would speak of the value of choke points into which armour would be drawn. He would quote the disproportionate success of the defenders of a Croatian city, two decades before, who had ambushed main battle tanks, hit the first in the convoy simultaneously with the last and then, at leisure, destroyed the wallowing beasts that could not manoeuvre. He would say this could be done by civilian fighters if they had only rudimentary skills in warfare. He would tell his audience of the effect that the explosive devices – manufactured under his direction with minimal metal parts, instead incorporating plastics, ceramics and moulded glass – had on units’ morale, and give them, as a rallying cry, the conclusion that one casualty, without a leg or an arm, needed four men to bring him back from the explosion and a helicopter to fly him to the rear. Ultimately when one man hobbled down the main street of his home town and the civilians living there watched him, sympathising, support for the war would drain away. ‘Let them come, let them face us, let them know the smell of defeat,’ he would finish.

He was not an easy public speaker, and he tried to memorise what he would say and how he would deliver it, but the brigadier broke into his thoughts. Did his wife approve of the case?

She had not looked at it, had refused to open it, would not discuss with him what clothing she should take – whatever destination was chosen for them. She had sat in her chair in the kitchen for much of the evening after the children had gone to bed, when he had told them more about Prince Korshid and his brothers: the time he had gone to the bottom of the deep well and had found there a girl of unmatched beauty. On her lap was the head of a deav, a serpent, that snored foully. The prince would rescue the girl, but that was for the next evening. He did not say that tension cut the mood in his home, or confide that she had thrown back at him the riposte: ‘If God says it will happen it will happen. Do you attempt to obstruct God’s will with temporary relief? Better to die quietly, with love and in peace, than to chase a few more days of life. Are we justified in fighting it?’ Her mother had watched them, silent, and he had not answered but had gone to tell the story to the children.

‘My wife thought it a very fine case.’

‘Her morale? Her attitude?’

‘Very positive. She is focused on getting treatment she needs for recovery, and is most grateful to those who give her the chance of it.’

It was rare for the Engineer to talk on personal matters with a senior officer of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. He knew this man’s importance in areas of military responsibility, and also because the papers regarding Naghmeh’s illness would have needed his initialled acceptance. Just as this officer procured for him the most sophisticated and recent electronic equipment from the USA, reaching him via Dubai’s container port, so he had the power to arrange the funding of such a journey and subsequent medical attention.

‘You are important to us, brother.’

Others, in uniform, stood patiently behind the brigadier, waiting for an opportunity to speak with him, but he waved them away. It was a short, clipped movement but unmistakable.

‘I know much about you, brother.’

‘Of course. I accept that.’

‘You live by the water, close to the border.’

‘It was the home my wife chose, before the diagnosis, and a place of rare beauty, near to a command post. It is very peaceful, and-’

‘May I offer advice, brother?’

‘Of course. I would be honoured to receive it.’

Which was the truth. Advice would not be given lightly, or be ignored when offered by a man of such seniority.

Blunt words, the veneer of concern stripped off. ‘You cannot return there.’

‘I am sorry, did I misunderstand you? It is where my wife is-’

A searing interruption. ‘Whether your wife is alive or dead, whether she is happy there, whether she likes to view the water and count mosquitoes is, brother, not of importance. A man of your value should be better protected. You will not go back there.’

This brigadier had been in place for some four months. The Engineer did not know him well. He could not argue, remonstrate or dispute. If she survived, she would be devastated. It was unthinkable that he should challenge a decision by so senior an officer.

‘Of course.’

A wintry smile. ‘I would suggest that if the Americans invade you go to the deepest hole you can find that a fox has dug and settle in it. Hide for as long as you can, and emerge when you have a new identity. If the Americans come, the shockwave will likely bring down the regime of the Islamic Republic. Revolution will rule. Do you watch CNN, brother? You do not. You are good, patriotic and disciplined. I watch CNN and I see the demonstrations in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Mashhad. We attack the websites and the mobile-phone links, but we cannot prevent the images escaping our borders. We can hang people, abuse them and lock them away, but when revolt has taken hold it cannot be reversed. There is an expression, ‘a house of cards’, and I fear that is what we will be. We conceive martyrs, we shoot at unarmed crowds but we do not cow the masses. When their time comes, when our authority is fractured, they will rise up, as the crowds did in the last days of the imperial family. The officials serving the Peacock Throne were shot by firing squad, butchered with knives or hanged in the Evin gaol. If our regime collapses and I am still here, I imagine I will be led out to the nearest streetlight and a rope will be thrown up. I will be hanged, as will most of us gathered here today. We appear invulnerable but strength is often illusory. You, brother – maybe you would be on the streetlight beside me. If the Americans come, brother, how many will face the prospect of a rope over the arm of a streetlamp and will trade information to save their neck from being stretched? What better piece of information to give up than the identity of the man who designed the bombs that crippled the Great Satan’s war effort inside Iraq? An American said once, of Serbs who were hunted and accused of atrocities, ‘You can run but you cannot hide.’ It was a popular phrase. It frightened men, intimidated them. You would be named, I would be named and most of the men in this room would be named.

‘There is, of course, a solution to the problem of regime collapse and vengeance turned on former influential people. I can go abroad. I am authorised to fly to Damascus. Under deep cover I can travel to Dubai or Abu Dhabi. The American consulate in Dubai is in the World Trade Center, and the embassy in Abu Dhabi is located between Airport Road and Coast Street. They would not, if I walked in cold off the street, treat me like a friend, but they would show me respect, and I would avoid the rope suspended from the streetlamp. If you were to take a similar course when you go abroad, you also would be safe from the rope. Could you do that, brother, to save your neck?’

He saw that a trap yawned in front of him.

First there had seemed to be sympathy, then there had been honesty and, last, conspiracy. He was not one of them. He did not wear uniform, and was inside no inner circle. They were military men and he was a scientist in the field of miniaturised electronics. They used him. A trip wire might have lain across his path. If he had snagged it he would have gone into the prepared pit.

The Engineer said, ‘I am completely devoted to the Islamic Republic, its leaders and its future.’

He was rewarded with a smile, slow but broadening.

He went on, ‘I am devoted to my God, my country and my work.’

‘I hope your journey is fruitful, brother. We will be waiting to welcome you home and pray God for the best outcome.’

The brigadier was gone from his side. He realised he had been taunted, also that he had been warned against making unwise contacts outside Iran. He could not remember when, before, he had felt such keen anger towards a senior officer of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They mocked and threatened him. While they strutted on parade grounds, lined up their men across wide streets, then ordered baton charges or the firing of live rounds to disperse crowds who protested that an election had been stolen, he – the Engineer, Rashid Armajan – had been creating the weapons that defeated an enemy that was a super-power. He could not tell the brigadier to go fuck his own mother because that man had to initial the final authorisation for the journey in search of a consultant. He felt blood on his lip, and realised how hard he had bitten it, how much pain he had absorbed. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and hoped no stain remained.

They were called into the next session, and the brigadier did not catch his eye as they went back into the operations area.

Badger had rested, but not slept. He had eaten some biscuit and drunk sparingly, had defecated into a bag and urinated into a bottle. He had done all of that within six inches of Foxy, without disturbing the leaves spread over the hide. He had thought more about the woman in the plastic chair across the expanse of water than he had about Alpha Juliet.

She was still there. She might have moved, or not, in the three hours he had had his eyes squeezed shut while the sun was still crystal bright.

Her children were close to her. Their toys were out. He thought the kids more subdued, less raucous, than the previous day. Once, the girl fell and screamed and her mother did not move, but the old lady came out, waddled to the child, swept her up and cuddled her.

The smell hung rancid between them, around them, with no wind to drift it.

‘Anything happened? Anything said?’

A slight shake of Foxy’s head, insufficient to rustle the dead stuff over him.

‘Nothing?’

The slightest nod.

The flies crowded above them and surged on his hands as Badger lifted his binoculars and adjusted the focus so that he could see the mess of reed leaves and stems where the microphone lay, then sweep on from the bund line to the barracks and a few of the soldiers playing basketball, then across the palm trees. He saw the head goon sprawled on a sunbed, and picked up the house and the kids, then the old lady who banged dust from rugs. He went by the flowerbed, abandoned, and reached the chair.

It annoyed Badger that he had twice asked the question and not been answered, annoyed him that he had felt it necessary to make bare, semi-civilised talk – like it was a weakness in him. He had ticks on his legs – could have been three bites or four. If he scratched hard, broke the surface and drew blood, the itch would be worse. They had to be endured. He would not fidget, give Foxy the pleasure of seeing his discomfort.

He wasn’t proud of himself. He didn’t ask, just pulled the headset from under Foxy’s head covering. To achieve that he needed to get his fingers across Foxy’s face, touch his cheeks, then go up to the crown and drag forward the arch linking the earpieces. His wrist was gripped.

‘On induction courses, do they teach wet-behind-the-ears recruits, rookies, that courtesies matter?’

He had a hold on the headset.

‘If they don’t, they should run one for beginners in basic manners. Fucking ask.’

He didn’t. A stand-off moment. Badger had hold of the headset and Foxy had hold of his wrist. Three seconds, five, ten. Badger let go and Foxy let go, and managed to choreograph it so that neither was the outright winner nor loser. He was given the headset and slotted it under his camouflage covering with small, slow movements. He thought he had lost high ground, which seemed – hard up against his oppo – to matter. What also mattered was his own inadequacy. He could watch the front of the house across the lagoon, and track the movement of the wife, her mother, the kids, the officer and the other guards, but if she spoke, and he was the one on stag, he must break into Foxy’s rest time. It hurt him that he was reliant on the older man, hurt more than the tick bites bothered him.

She was very still.

There were birds on the water in front of her and they fed, ducking and diving. An otter swam close to the main wall of the reeds: the first he had seen that day. He knew otters from the islands off the west coast of Scotland. Only a glimpse, and then it dipped, showing an arched back and a stubby tail.

He didn’t think she watched the birds or had seen the otter. On his earlier watch, a pair of pigs had crossed in front of him, would have swum over the sunk cable from the microphone, with just their snouts above the water.

The light had changed and was no longer on her face, but the sun’s force was now more to her left side and her cheeks were not in its glare. Badger couldn’t say whether there were still tears. Maybe earlier she had looked too closely into the sun’s reflection from the lagoon and her eyes had watered. A woman who ran a mine-clearance campaign might be made of stern material – or might weep in private because of what had happened to her, to her man and her children. He didn’t know.

Foxy farted. The foul smell hung around them, the residue of the last Meal Ready to Eat they had shared – beef in some congealed liquid. If someone had walked over them, he or she might have thought they’d picked up pig shit on a boot.

He reflected: there was no other way to do the job that the Boss, Mr Gibbons, had set them. They had to be there, marooned and… He watched her.

She was not the woman of a drugs-dealer he had once kept pinged, day after day, while she lounged in a summer garden close to her pool, wearing not much on a rare warm week, and she was not one of the women from the tinkers’ camp who had pegged out washing, lounged and smoked while the men planned thieving, and she was not the woman with the mousy hair and pale face, mistress to the man whose wife was under the patio extension and who would be led away, handcuffed, as the digger moved in. He had pinged many women who were consorts of a target and had not felt any of them were special or worth interest.

The Engineer’s wife dominated any thoughts of Alpha Juliet. An instructor on the last week before Badger had been awarded his Blue Book, certifying his surveillance competence, had told the group that thinking of sex, stripping down women, doing business with them, was excellent for holding the concentration needed in a hide when paint drying might have seemed interesting. He had said that far and away the best shagging he’d had in his life was when he’d been lying on his belly, enveloped in a gillie suit, with nothing happening. It would have been good to remember Alpha Juliet – a fine, strong girl who didn’t blather, didn’t seem in search of commitment and seemed to have chosen him for better reasons than that she had gone without for a week: unfathomable – but he couldn’t remember Alpha Juliet now. He stared through the glasses at the woman, and because he kept the focus on everything familiar about her, he knew which crow’s feet were deepening at her eyes. Her breathing seemed harder, and her mouth would twist when the pain dug.

‘You’ll call me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Because without me you’re worse than useless.’

He didn’t answer.

Foxy went on, ‘And keep watch all round.’

A point of principle: he didn’t react and kept the glasses on her. He didn’t take orders from the older man.

‘Why are you only watching her?’

No response. He held the focus. Her hands were very still, and he thought she had a serenity.

‘You gone soft on her, young ’un? Unprofessional if you have.’

Badger held his silence.

‘If you’ve gone gentle on her, just remember who she is. She’s the wife of Rashid Armajan, bad bastard, bomb-maker and enemy. She shares his bed and, before she went sick, used to spread her legs for the guy who spent his days planning the next generation of nasties to kill our boys inside Iraq. I feel nothing for her. She would have kept a nice tidy household for him, left him with no worries in his life other than working out the best way to blow up, mutilate and kill coalition troops. He was pretty good at it. Forgotten what the man said? ‘A small number of clever and innovative men is capable of wrong-footing us so consistently that the body-bags keep going home, and the injured with wounds they’ll carry to their graves… We call an enemy a Bravo. Rashid Armajan is a big bad Bravo.’ That’s what the man said. She’s that man’s woman and what she has in her head is immaterial to me. It matters that, because of what’s in her head, he’ll travel away from here. Nothing less, nothing more. In case you’ve forgotten it, young ’un, the ceremonies at Wootton Bassett when the dead come home didn’t start with Afghanistan killed-in-action troops. They started with Iraq. We couldn’t stay in Iraq because of the bombs, his bombs, bombs turned out on a production line to the Engineer’s blueprint. My Ellie calls them heroes, the soldiers brought through that town. It’s fantastic, such an honour to those soldiers, to have thousands line a street in respect. Only, sad thing, they don’t see it. They’re in the box. A good number of them were put there by that man and his talent for bomb-making. Because of him, all that the rest of us can do is stand on the pavement and give them respect, which is something but not much. A good number of the first heroes who came through were victims of explosions, his bloody bombs. And maybe by now his gear’s in Afghanistan, I don’t know. So, I have no love for him, and I’m not going soft for her. My Ellie talks about Wootton Bassett and the heroes… Are you getting my drift?’

A crisp whisper. ‘So much of an enemy that we’re going to turn him.’

Surprise, a murmur. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘It’s interdiction.’

‘So, it’s interdiction. Yes.’

‘I checked it with the Boss. It’s their way – spook jargon – of describing an approach. “Interdiction” is “approach”. They hope to turn him.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘They’re going to turn him, Mr Gibbons said – like it’s a defection.’

Foxy muttered, ‘Time for my sleep. Wake me when there’s something you can’t do.’

She had fine features and she sat so still. Her back was straight in the chair and she gazed ahead. Almost, her eye line was on him. Nobody came to her, she had no one to talk to, and Foxy slept. The wind had gained strength and he heard its rustle in the reeds.