‘What the hell are you-’
‘Wake up.’ As normal, when Badger used his elbow to dig into Foxy’s ribs, he held the palm of his hand across the older man’s mouth, loose but a reminder.
‘Where am-’
‘In the hide in the marshes in Iran. What more do you need to know? Could give you the co-ordinates, except you bloody dropped the
The voice whistled back, almost shrill, between the teeth: ‘I was saying, before you fucking interrupted, “Where am I looking?” That was my question.’
‘You don’t have to look anywhere. Just listen.’
The headset was already off Badger’s ears. He tried to pass it to Foxy. Foxy muttered that he needed a piss, always did when he woke up. Badger told him to wait. The cable was caught in the front of Badger’s gillie suit, had fastened itself among the material strips sewn into it and the dried-out reeds. You couldn’t pull a cable tight and hope it would free itself, and it was underneath Badger. They were in darkness, hip against hip, elbows locked and legs bloody nearly entwined. Their movements had roused the mosquitoes, and there were convulsions under the covering that shielded them. The cable wouldn’t come free. Insults were swapped.
‘Be careful, you clumsy bastard.’
‘Use your fingers!’
‘How did you snag it?’
‘If you stayed bloody still I could free it.’
Badger laid down his night-sight kit. It was the hour before dawn. His fingers felt for the tangle in the cable. Foxy had his head down, grappled for and found the headset and put it over his ears. God alone knew how, but the cable’s snag was near Badger’s groin, and Foxy’s head was halfway there. Time for a laugh? Foxy’s head had moved to a comfort zone below Badger’s ribcage. His fingers were under Foxy’s chin and tugged gently. Twice Foxy gulped, then the cable came free.
He would be told, and didn’t ask. To ask would demonstrate dependence on the older man. Nor would he get, now, a running commentary from Foxy.
He settled again as best he could. Difficult while Foxy used the bottle. There was no relief from the mosquitoes and when they crossed the moon, almost full, they seemed dense enough to throw a shadow. They had both been out of the hide during the night, and Badger had buried more plastic bags. He had gone as far as the wall of reeds to their right, where it bordered the open ground, and done exercises there, had moved his limbs and stretched his back. Foxy had gone further, almost as far as the mound of mud, but had stopped short of the bulldozer tracks. He could go further than Foxy. Anytime Foxy left the hide, the translation of remarks passed at the house was zero.
It was the time of morning that medics said was when people died – and well known to police crime squads as the best time to hit front doors, break them down and get up the stairs before weapons, narcotics or documents could be hidden. The target had emerged from the front door and started to pace.
She had joined him. He would have been well on with his first cigarette, a white glow in the dull greened wash of the night-sight lens. He wore cotton boxer shorts and a vest, and she had a shawl across the shoulders of her nightdress and was barefoot; he had put on sandals. The guard using the plastic chair by the pier had already scrambled away when he’d appeared, before she’d come – and Badger had woken Foxy.
It was going to be soon.
They had logged the carrying into the house of the new suitcase – black, with no motif that would stand out on a carousel. She had greeted him and her voice had been easy, clear, in his ears. He dreaded most that one dawn or evening, that day or the next, the black Mercedes would come, the driver would go to the door, bring out the case and lift it into the boot. The targets would climb into the back seats, the engine would rev, the goon – the officer – and the guards would straighten, the old lady would wave from the door, the kids at her knee, and the car would go. Where? Which airport, connecting with what flight? It was what he dreaded most.
The Engineer talked and his wife listened. He smoked, then threw the stub into the water. He walked with his hand under her arm and she had the stick to support her. There was no fat on the man, and Badger could see her contours, breasts, waist and hips, because a light wind was off the water. He would have had a better view, through the night-sight, if the moon had been smaller or had gone down over the horizon.
He dreaded most that he and Foxy would lie in the scrape with the bags and the bottles, their food; the bergens, the ticks, mosquitoes and flies, and the microphone would not pick up a remark on the destination. To have gone through this and not heard it… It was more than he could have endured.
They walked, and Badger watched.
He described the man, his arrogance and authority, and what the brigadier had said to him.
He explained his confusion. He asked her opinion: was he teased, tested? Mocked? Was it possible the Islamic Republic was a house built of cards and could be blown away?
He supported her and she followed his slow steps but was heavier on her stick.
Did they regard him with such contempt that he needed threats on the danger to him of defection? Was the regime’s strength so fragile? He did not know, and there was no other person alive with whom he would have shared thoughts so heretical.
Why had it been said? Why did they doubt his patriotism and loyalty, the faith that governed him?
Why?
When he had nothing more to say, she dug in her bare heels, spread her toes in the dirt and twisted him to face her. The light came up off the water and bathed her. Ducks’ splashes made ripples.
‘It is unthinkable. You will see this Guard Corps officer today. You will not bow in front of him. You will stand your full height, and you will tell him his words are fit only for the tip where the city’s trash is dumped. The thought of you betraying the nation is rubbish, and you will tell him so.’
‘I will tell him, to his face.’
‘It is rubbish because you would not leave me.’
‘No.’
‘Do they think that I, whether I am destined to live or to die, would go with you? It is inconceivable.’
‘I shall tell him.’
‘I would not go with you because I would not abandon my children. If I live a week, a month, a year or go my full span, I would not leave them. I would leave you before I would leave my children.’
‘He said also that, because of my work, I would be hunted down and hanged if the regime should fall.’
‘Is it more important what might happen to you than what will happen to me?’
She had shamed him and he lapsed into silence. He sensed that now she felt the chill of the night: she was shivering. He put his arm around her shoulders and started to lead her back to the house. He could feel her bones. Everything in his life revolved around the regime of the Islamic Republic that had come to power when he was nine years old. He had been to their schools; he had listened to their mullahs as a teenager; he had walked behind his father’s coffin as a procession wound towards the cemetery. His father’s life had been given in a minefield in defence of a child of the regime, and his mother had died of wounds received from shrapnel in the air attacks on Susangerd. He had struggled for the best results at university – electrical engineering – in Ahvaz, and for thirteen years had laboured over the workbench in the camp. He had made the devices, done what was asked of him, and now he was teased, taunted. It was as if the suspicion of treason was laid at his door. She had hard bones now and they were angled against his hand. The weight seemed, each day, to drip a little more from her. He had only once been outside Iran.
He thought of that journey more often now, where he had been and whom he had met.
His journey had been to the Hungarian capital, Budapest, the course at the University of Technology and Sciences had lasted two years, and he had learned areas of electronic engineering that had served him well at his workbench. He could remember his fear at the levels of drug-taking and binge-drinking, the rampant sexual appetites of the students. As a defence against corruption, contamination, he had wrapped himself in work… and there had been a girl.
She was in his mind more often now because each time he touched his wife, Naghmeh, he felt the sharpness of her bones and believed her life was slipping away. He had little faith in a foreign consultant. Romance was gone. Lust and love were strained to breaking point. There had been a girl in Budapest, who had never aged because she was locked in his mind as she was then. It had been the one time in his life that he had felt weak. He had yearned for her, and had been a virgin, experiencing new longings. She was Maria, from Austria, studying industrial psychology. On some occasions he had sat, in great boldness, beside her for lunch in the canteen. They had been to films on the campus and had held hands, and they had gone once to hear a pianist play Chopin. She had come to his room one evening in April, when the days lengthened, flowers bloomed and spring burst. He knew her as a good Catholic, and that she drank alcohol. Her parents were divorced, and she would work after her degree, she hoped, in the Swarovski glass factory as part of the workers’ support programme. She had come to his room in the students’ hostel: her blouse had been low-cut, her skirt short, and he could smell the schnapps on her breath, and her perfume. She had reached up from his narrow bed, caught his arms and tried to pull him down. He had slapped her face hard. She had left him, face pale except where his fingers had met her cheek and a nail had scratched her nose. He had never seen Maria Ohldorf after that day and he had the picture of her face, frozen, in his mind, her shock and bewilderment. She had been pretty, and he had yearned to hold her, but had not dared. He thought often of her now as the weight slipped off his wife’s bones.
He saw, on the edge of the shadows, Mansoor watching him. They went inside.
The Engineer cursed himself for thinking it – but she would not be saved. It was the stuff of dreams, false dawns. Sharp in his mind was the defiance, the extremes of rudeness, that he had hurled at the medical team in Tehran: almost the implication that they were peasants and ill-qualified. If he had listened, then had brought Naghmeh back to her children, there might have been a calm, loving parting, not preceded by a journey of desperation. But arrangements were made and could not now be cancelled.
The moon had gone, but first light was not yet on the horizon, above the far reeds and the water behind them.
Foxy eased off the headset, then pushed it across the little space to Badger. He expected to be asked what he had heard. No question came.
Had he been asked, he would have whispered, airily, that he had heard nothing of importance. It always threw interrogators waiting for an interpreter’s translation of a suspect’s fifty-word statement when a digest of around five words came back. He would not have said that the talk was of ‘defection’, rejected, and ‘abandoning family’, out of the question. He could have added that the Engineer and his wife spoke quality educated Farsi to each other. He could have latched onto a discussion, brief, that the Engineer would himself be a target if the regime failed and his association with the Revolutionary Guards Corps became general knowledge. He could have finished with an assessment, from the Engineer’s voice pitch and the wife’s, how their morale stood, and he would have assessed that her nerves were near breaking point and she was depressed. He said none of it.
It annoyed him that the query did not come – annoyed him enough him to hiss, ‘Not interested? Don’t you want to know?’
‘If there was anything I needed to know you’d have told me.’
‘I thought you’d want to hear their talk.’
‘Only if I need to know it.’
The headset was taken. He felt the strength of the young ’un beside him, little bastard, eased over and broke wind again. The bloody flies were swarming over the scrim of his headgear.
Would they come to blows? Foxy reckoned there was a chance of it. He closed his eyes, thought about sleep, and more about Ellie. He wondered where she was and what she was doing. He could have drunk a two-litre bottle of water straight down, but it was rationed, a discipline that couldn’t be broken. They had the water they had brought in – the greatest weight factor in the bergens was water. Only thinking of Ellie could clear his mind of the need for more water than was allowed. He rinsed some in his mouth, then swallowed it but eked it out. He couldn’t think when he had last disliked a man – loathed or detested one – as much as he disliked Badger, and he thought it mutual. It was probably inevitable that they would fight. The quiet closed round them.
It was the last hour before the grey smears appeared on the horizon in the east. They were all exhausted and needed sleep. None of them would get it.
It was the crisis time. The Jones Boys had usurped her. She didn’t give the orders, didn’t open her mouth and make suggestions – she did as she was told. The extent of the crisis yawed ahead of her.
Each of them – Hamfist, Corky, Shagger and Harding – wore their T-shirts: they had gone into their bags, dug them out, stripped off what they already had on and had done a fast change. The extent of the crisis brought them together, made them a team, and a team needed a uniform: from a uniform came strength. They were paid to protect her, so they would. She had passed control to them. She knew them like the callouses on her hands, the virtues and weaknesses of each man, but she could not have said who among the four would emerge as the leader. None had. Interesting to her, because the sharing of their responsibilities showed – her opinion – stunning trust. But they were trained as fighting men, when trust was implicit, and now they were fighting.
She thought it medieval. Abigail Jones had childhood memories of traipsing around castles, mostly motte-and bailey, in the Welsh Marches – Ludlow, Caus, Wigmore, some that were shoulder-high ruins and others that were towering relics – and her father, the barrister, had lectured on battles, sieges, the storm tactics of attackers and desperate defenders, and she had imagined men-at-arms running from one battlement to another to stem the latest thrust, knowing that if the line was broken, the wall fell, they were gone, throats slit. Shagger had the vehicles, Harding had the door of the building, and Abigail tagged along with Corky or Hamfist.
They chased shadows caught in the beams of the big torches. It was not the ultimate attack, but probes – and if they found weakness they would come on, do it big-time. A mob always knew how to sniff out weakness, and she thought a crowd of men from out of the marshes – gassed, bombed, their habitat drained and their buffalo dead – would know how to scavenge for weakness, would be bloody near gold-medal standard at it. At first the shadows had kept back, hugged the no man’s land between light and dark.
They were bold now, and the crisis had come.
They must defend the building alongside which the Pajeros were parked, and try to keep clear the approach ground between them and the broken perimeter fence. In front of them was the familiar track to the dragged-back gates, but behind them, inside the compound, was darkness.
The first blow was from Harding. His weapon was his M-16 Armalite rifle’s stock. Two had come, light-footed and silent, from the shadows, and were a moment away from getting inside the building where the gear was, the water and rations, some of the ammunition and enough of the grenades. Abigail, chasing after Corky, had seen them and Corky had shouted the warning.
It was the crisis because Harding hit one in the testicles with the stock of his rifle, then struck the second across the face. A double-tap, of sorts – one movement, two casualties. The first went down and was retching at Harding’s feet, might have thrown up on his boots, and the second was reeling back, clutching his mouth. Blood was easing out between his fingers, and she fancied he might have spat away a tooth. The first act of physical violence was the start point of the crisis.
She had ceded control.
It would have been the grossest impertinence for her to shout, ‘Don’t shoot! For fuck’s sake, don’t use live rounds.’ A killing would be a disaster. A wounding and hospitalisation would be a catastrophe.
Bruising, missing teeth, abrasions were manageable.
Knives were shown at them when a larger group, six or seven, ran towards the vehicles from different directions – the nearest thing to co-ordination. If the first strike of a knife had hit, and one of them had gone down, they would have been dead – all of them. Dead meant Harding never getting back to see the aunt who had reared him in the trailer camp and never again getting value for money from the Russian whores in Dubai. Dead for Corky was a telegram to a housing estate in west Belfast, being opened by old people he had not seen in twenty years, and two kids who would not have a father. Dead in Shagger’s world was a farm never bought and reoccupied by an elderly couple, pedigree sheep never grazing the fields that looked onto mountains. Dead was Hamfist’s divorced wife getting a large cheque from Proeliator Security and maybe going as far as digging out a photo of him and putting it on the sideboard for a week. And, dead was Alpha Juliet – surrogate mother of the Jones Boys – never again looking into the face of Badger, deciphering nothing, learning less, and seeing in the eyes a message of self-sufficiency and reliance on no one. It had captured her… And dead was having the smelly rag-heads crawl all over her and likely shag her carcass. There were knives in the torch beams that might have been used to gut a good-size carp or skin a dead buffalo calf, or to slash the reeds from which their homes were built.
The alternative to being dead was to quit.
If they quit, they left behind Badger and Foxy, and a mission that had taken months to put together was aborted. She remembered the sergeant who had explained, shyly, that his work was routine, quite boring – he’d spent three and half hours on his knees while he dismantled a device left in a shallow hole near Highway 6, made it safe and gave the forensic people the chance to trace a DNA sample and to find the date-seller and the road-sweeper. She wouldn’t quit.
Hands were on her. She smelt sour breath and felt long nails catch the waist of her robe, then the pressure pushing her downwards. Beside her a knife flickered in Shagger’s beam, and might have been about to close on Hamfist’s chest. Corky came. He had an iron bar. It might have been used once to support barbed-wire defences. Corky was from an estate where knowledge of street fighting came at about the same time as primary school and first communion. He lashed around him. There were groans, a scream. The hands were off Abigail. There were no faces, only hands, and some had their own blood on them. Three knives were lined up. They were at the edge of Shagger’s torch light. She recognised it. They were together to feed each other the courage to charge forward, and the knives were raised boldly. If one of her Boys was down, it was over.
More had gathered behind the knives. They would swamp the Boys and her – there were so few of them, four guys and their ma’am, because the wisdom said that the fewer bodies on the ground, the greater the chances of going in and out without being identified. She hadn’t argued with the wisdom – and the knives’ blades flashed. She didn’t know which, but either Corky or Harding threw the first gas grenade and it rolled among them. The smoke burst from the canister and enveloped them. They were pale figures caught in a white cloud and they seemed to dance as they choked. Another grenade was thrown and the cloud thickened. It was harder to see them, but easy to hear the choking and the coughs.
They took their casualties with them, five who were helped towards the gate.
She knew what she had to do. Her head ached, and the gas was in her eyes, making them water with needle pains.
Abigail walked away from her Boys, following the gaggle of men, towards the gate. She reached it and shouted, in good Arabic, what she wanted. She had resumed her role of authority.
She sat down in the dirt and folded her legs in the middle of the track. She waited for them to do as she had instructed. It was a gamble – as was the whole goddamn thing. She waited, and soon dawn would come.
When would he know? Mansoor asked him. And caught him flustered, having had to duck back into the house because there were papers he had been reading early that morning and he had forgotten to replace them in his briefcase. Know what?
Mansoor said it slowly, as if he talked with a demented man. When would he know the date on which he travelled, and when would he know where he travelled to?
The door of the Mercedes was held open for him and he threw the briefcase towards the far side of the seat. He said he would know that day – he had been promised.
A radio had been switched on in the house.
The security officer had fine hearing. He realised that the wife, Naghmeh, had not packed the new suitcase. He had been roused by a sentry in the night, and had gone half dressed from his room alongside the communal dormitory of the barracks. He had seen them – washed in moonlight – walking beside the water. He understood that the two were, almost, crushed. He had thought in the night that the wound on his leg was healed, and that the muscles and tendons that had been ruptured were knitting well. He had pondered, watching them walk together, that the time would come soon when he could apply for service with the al-Quds again, in Lebanon. It was an honour to be chosen to protect a man of the Engineer’s prominence, and it could not have been said that he was careless with the responsibility, but it did not extend him. He was asked by the driver what the situation was that morning in central Ahvaz.
A news bulletin came on the radio.
He could answer. His father had telephoned that morning. The hanging of the terrorist the previous day had gone well. There had been militia and Guard Corps personnel on the streets; no live rounds or gas had been fired; the crowds had dispersed quietly after only one charge with batons. His father had said that the hanging had been witnessed by the family of a bystander who had died when the bomb the youth had placed had exploded; the mother had spat at the condemned as he was lifted, trembling, onto a chair with the noose round his neck and the hood over his face. The father of the bystander would himself have kicked away the chair if he had not been restrained. His father loved to watch the hangings… His father had said that the streets were calm. He said it was safe to take the quicker route through the centre of the city.
He was surprised. The question had shocked him. Never before had his charge, Rashid Armajan, made such a query. It had been asked from beside the open rear door of the car, as if an afterthought: ‘Do you believe it possible that the regime governing us is, in fact, similar to a house built of playing cards that can be blown down, destroyed?’
The security officer, a true believer, gagged and must have betrayed his shock.
The Engineer was sharper: ‘Could the regime collapse? Is internal dissent, external aggression – combined – enough to break us?’
He sensed a trap. The question was close to treason. Men, and women, were hanged for treason. Did the question test his loyalty? Was he doubted?
‘Can the regime be swept away? Are we merely temporary? Are we like the Fascists and the Communists, the Ba’athists, the apartheid oppression in South Africa and the…?’
He stuttered it: ‘The regime is strong, is a rock. Those who denounce it and look to betray it will fail. There are spies everywhere, and danger. Vigilance must be rigorous. I tell you, should I find myself confronting such an enemy, he would know pain the like of which he has never experienced before. We are strong.’
‘Thank you. You are a good friend.’ The Engineer sank heavily into the car, swung in his legs and the driver closed the door after him.
Mansoor pondered. He could – and most probably should – report such a conversation. Who would be believed? Himself, a junior functionary, or a man who was feted by the high command of the al-Quds Brigade and who was about to travel abroad on the state’s funding? Could he, by implication, accuse such a man of treason? The car turned a corner beside the barracks and disappeared, dust billowing behind it. Always it was necessary, if denouncing a man of prominence, to be certain. He was prepared to dither.
It would have been the wife’s mother who had the radio loud because she was partially deaf, had been afflicted since the enemy’s artillery had pounded Ahvaz.
He went to his chair in the shade and sat down with his binoculars. He wondered if this would be the day when the Sacred Ibis came over the reeds fringing the lagoon and settled on the exposed mud spit.
Foxy whispered brusquely, ‘The radio knocked out the long conversation at the car. Before it was switched on he said he would be told today the “when” and the “where”. That’s about it. For me it’ll be some sleep.’
Soon he would start to snore.
Badger felt alone. He had lost count of how many hours, days and nights it had been since they were scooped from their lives and taken north to the house facing out over the bay. The hours, days and nights since he had met the girl, Alpha Juliet, had merged too. He had taken the headset. Most of what it picked up was the babble of the radio. The heat inside his suit climbed, the sweat ran and he felt the weakness that lack of exercise produced. Those people at the house with the ruins of a castle and the pipes’ wail were too distant: he could no longer put faces to them. Time dripped, the images blurred. .. He couldn’t bloody remember them.
‘The carvery is always good value,’ Gibbons said, ‘and the fish is usually passable.’ He played host to the Cousin, the Friend and the Major. It had been Sarah’s idea. She had suggested it that morning, had made the phone calls with the invitations, had booked the table and appeared to believe he needed respite from sitting in the inner office, contemplating the wilting flowers, the pictures on the wall and the silence of the telephone. It had been sleeting in central London when he had walked from the office to the club.
A bottle of red was brought, a bottle of white and a small jug of water.
He smiled, a little deprecating. ‘Always the hardest time for us, the waiting. We’re all from that neck of the woods… I often think that others who are parked at their desks in our place and write those analysis pieces have little idea of the strains placed on us by our work in the front line… very little idea.’
Sarah had bundled a wad of cash into his hand, the implication being that she would lose it somewhere in the budget – elastic bands, highlighters, paper clips. In the club’s restaurant, rarely used by him because of its expense, she had reserved a corner table where they could speak and be free of eavesdropping.
The Cousin remarked, ‘There are people in Langley who drive up the Beltway before it’s light for half the year, look at a screen all day, and it’s dark when they’re back in the car and off home. They tell the little woman, ‘It’s been a hell of day, sweetie, just one hell of a day.’ They have no idea, and less concern, about the pressures we’re under when we’re running sharp-end stuff… But I take comfort from the feeling in my water that we’ve gotten close to the serious time. I’ll start with the white, Len, thank you.’
The Friend said, ‘I don’t intend to badmouth my own people, but Israel has the world’s highest proportion of jealous bastards who think they know better than the man of experience. We have awards that would fill a wall for interference and shit-chucking. What we do is difficult and stressful and you can piss against the wind for all the appreciation you’ll pick up. The red would suit me as a kick-off, Len, and I’m grateful for the invitation.’
The Major grimaced, smiled. ‘I can remember a day when I’d been out on those open-sewer streets of Basra from dawn till dusk and I’d killed five IEDs. Each was complex and would have been shipped in from that bloody production line across the border, and one was for me and complicated. There were bad guys on a roof, watching to see how I went about it – hoping also to see the big flash and hear the bang. I went back to the mess. Believe it, please. There was a colonel in there – using the Basra Palace, Saddam’s old watering-hole – for a farewell bash. He and his guests had put on their fancy-dress outfits and their gongs for smart dining. Flopped in a chair, feet on the table, beer bought me, and this bloody colonel wants to know why I haven’t washed, shaved, changed before entering the mess. Didn’t understand there was a life outside the limit of the air-conditioning system. I told him to fuck off – took my brigadier in Baghdad a week to smooth the waters. People have no idea about the real world. I’ll start with the white and then try the red. Thanks, Len.’
They ordered, drank and ate. Another bottle of red was required, but the water lasted. In a vacuum of information, responsibilities were reiterated and guarantees given. Coffee was accepted, but no brandy – an indication of work taken seriously.
The Major said, ‘I just want to put it on the record in this rather select company… People, these days, are pretty squeamish about what they call ‘extra-judicial’ interdiction. I think it an excellent way of dealing with an extant difficulty. Identify, locate and…’ He slapped a broad hand – with chunky fingers that seemed to lack the sensitivity necessary for the dismantling of improvised explosive devices – on the table. The cups rattled in the saucers, the unused cutlery banged against the glasses, and he’d done a passable imitation of a shot being fired, and another. Then the Major wiped his mouth with his napkin, and dropped it as though business had been done and procedures agreed.
The Friend used a toothpick. ‘We have a mantra that we neither confirm nor deny, and are consistent with it. It can, however, be let slip through many channels that the target was in trouble with his own people for fucking the wife of a man more influential, or for fabricating his expense accounts. That confuses the general public of many nations – but not the associates of the target. They know, they fear… The greatest source of the fear is that their small corner, that most secretive part of an organisation where they exist, will be penetrated… But we have to wait.’
He smiled and let slip a small belch, then meticulously folded his napkin and smoothed it.
The Cousin gazed around him wistfully, as if a small chance existed that, in a gentleman’s club, he might be permitted to smoke a cigar. ‘A Hellfire, if aimed accurately and carrying a punch of eight kilos of metal-augmented charge, can do a fair bit of ‘extra-judicial’. We don’t have – at this moment – a judge and jury sitting in north Waziristan, in the Haraz mountains of Yemen or in the sand round Kandahar, so what we do there has to benefit from lack of contact with a courthouse. I hear no great wail of protest. Go back two decades and a Canadian citizen was taken down, Gerald Bull, shot by – of course – persons unknown while earning big moolah for building the gun that was going to fire chemicals and biological out of Iraq and into Israel. Did the Canadians shout and yell? Deafening silence. The furore of the hand-wringers lasts a week at maximum – and it keeps the motherfuckers looking over their shoulders. There is only one law in this business. Don’t get caught. It’s a good one to remember. It has legs and has lasted years. A grand meal, Len.’
The Major and the Friend agreed. Gibbons raised an arm to motion for the waiter and his bill, then reached into an inner pocket for his fattened wallet. He said, ‘It’s not the easy time. When we have – and I’m confident we will – the direction to head in, it will all get easier. You’ve met the two men who are up front, know pretty much the same as I do about them. What I would like to say, though, the officer we have in support of them is first rate. Very dedicated. Yes – at the risk of landing hard on my arse – I’m very confident.’
The Cousin said, ‘And you’d know about that, Len, as I hear it. You’d know about landing hard on your arse.’
The Friend said – and would have read the filtered reports reaching foreign agencies, ‘Dogs a man, doesn’t it, when he has to be lifted out of the shit?’
Gibbons offered no denials. ‘Didn’t like it, but lessons were learned.’
The Major, not privy to secrets of the trade and historic foul-ups, pushed back his chair and made ready to stand. ‘I see, looking out onto the street, that nothing of the weather improves, sleet gone to snow. Hard to have a decent sight of them, in the mind, in the heat. It’s merciless, the heat is. Brutal. Anyway, what interests me are your good words on the officer on the ground who directs all this, and your confidence.’
On her haunches, Abigail Jones sat alone. Behind her, fifteen yards back, was Corky.
He accepted, they all did, that she had taken control again, and would call the moves.
Somewhere under the robe she wore – now mud-stained and dusty – was the holster that hugged her waist. The pistol was in it and there was a slit at the side of the garment that her fist could be shoved into if she needed the thing. She had tucked her gas mask behind her backside so it was close to hand but not visible.
She had called for a leader to be sent. The rag-heads always liked – at a time of confrontation – to have a meeting, a conference; then they would hector and bluster, give themselves the opportunity to preen and usually to walk out. A meeting, at a time of substantial dispute, was the way they usually went. She sat in the dirt in the centre of the gateway and waited for a leader to come.
Corky could see, from the tilt of her head, that her eyeline was down. Her focus point would have been about half of the distance between where she sat and the line of men facing her. One had a scarf, bloodstained, across his face, and another could only stand with the help of two others; one had weeping abrasions on his shin where the bar had been used on him, and another tucked his wrist between his shirt’s buttonholes and had a broken collar-bone. There were others who might have fractured ribs or dried blood on their scalps, but no shots had been fired and that was a miracle. He thought they had done well.
His rifle was slung across his chest and he had two magazines, filled, taped together. His flak vest was over his Jones Boys shirt, and the gas mask was hooked to his waist. If any of them had run at her, he would have dropped them.
Behind him was Shagger; Harding and Hamfist were at the Pajeros. Pretty feckin’ ridiculous but they still had the tripod up, the spotting ’scope mounted on it. The identification pictures were on the ground, held in place by a quarter of a mud brick: by now Corky might have been able to spot a Marbled Duck. He might have known the difference between a Ferruginous Duck and a White-headed Duck, and definitely he could have said which was a Basra Reed-warbler and which a Black-tailed Godwit. He had a sunhat on, camouflage type, while Shagger and Harding wore the Proeliator Security caps with the big peaks; Hamfist’s was from a pizza-delivery service in the east of Scotland. She wore nothing on her head other than a wispy scarf. Her body threw off no shadow because the sun was above her.
She waited. It was all bluff.
Harding’s take on it was that had it been American spooks a close-support airstrike would have been called in during the night, and Black Hawks would have come to lift them out. Shagger had said that if the mission had been run by any of the other Six officers from Baghdad they’d have called a taxi and quit.
She sat very still. Corky couldn’t see her face but thought of her as serene, so calm.
The heat made him wobble on his feet, the shimmer came up from the sand and the faces in front of him distorted. There was pain in his eyes behind the wraparounds, he craved a drink, and his concentration was going. Harding must have seen him rock.
The drawling voice was in his ear: ‘Go get yourself a drink.’
‘What about her?’
‘Go close to her, break the mood she’s set, you’ll get bawled out.’
‘I reckon.’
Harding murmured, ‘She’s remarkable.’
Corky did it side of mouth. ‘No one like her, an ace lady… You have any idea how long this needs spinning out?’
‘Beginning to think it’s closing down on us. Don’t reckon, up front, they have much more time. I saw how much water they took and it’s the heat… I don’t think they have a heap of time.’
He moved his hand and felt the coil.
It had been a better morning. The Engineer had gone. The goon, the officer, had driven his jeep away and might have gone to a village nearby to shop or to a town. The wife had not come out and the children had been taken to school by the older woman, in uniforms and with heavy rucksacks. The head of the guard who sat in the plastic chair with the rifle across his legs was lolling back. Badger had moved, at a slow crawl, to the reed beds. It was the first time either had moved in daylight, and it was incredible – like a liberation – simply to stand and stretch, arch and flex. He could move more than he could in darkness and was freer because he could see what his boots landed on.
There was the rhythm of Foxy’s breathing beside him. He was asleep. Badger’s hand had slipped underneath the folds of his gillie suit and rubbed – not scratched – one of the many tick scabs on his hip. The hand had come out and reached for the water bottle and he had felt the smooth, cold line of the coil.
He couldn’t drink the water that lapped the bottom of the reed stems, but he could scoop it up in his hands, strip down to his boots and socks and wash himself. He saw the pocked skin of the ticks’ bites and had prised others off his body, working as carefully as the contortion allowed to see that none of the bloody things was close to his backside. He was cooler and cleaner, a rare joy… It was the bottled water that would kill them: Badger reckoned there was enough for that day and one more, but he felt better for the wash, almost human. He had gone back on his stomach, doing the crawl that took him from the line of the reeds across the open ground. Then he had insinuated himself under the cover of the fronds, burrowed forward until his head and his shoulders were level with Foxy’s and taken over the headset.
He flinched, drew his hand sharply back. The touch told him this was not wood, plastic or rubber. The coil might have been six inches across, but could have been as much as nine. It filled the gap between his body and Foxy’s, was level with their hips. He thought his touch on it had been merely the gentlest brush. Foxy slept. Badger knew what he had touched. He had not seen it, but the texture against his fingertips was evidence enough.
Foxy had gone into the reeds with the collapsible shovel, had defecated, urinated, and buried the plastic bag and bottle. Badger had not known whether he had stripped down to his boots and socks or whether he had just wiped water under his armpits and in his groin. His breath had stunk when he came back. Badger’s would have too, but the smell of their breath would have matched the general stench of the marsh and the trapped water of the lagoon. Foxy had been careful coming back, had taken an age, but had smoothed the dirt behind him and scattered more dead stuff, leaving it haphazardly put down – had done a good job. Together they had made an inventory of the water remaining: three bottles, and it should have been seven or eight in that temperature. After the exchange of the headset, Foxy had taken the watch and Badger had slept.
It could only be a snake. Badger had seen snakes in zoos when he was a kid, and there were snakes on the warmest days up in the Brecons that he had known about when stalking paratroops on exercise. There were also snakes in gaps in the heather and on flat stones, which he had seen when edging close to red deer in the Scottish hills, testing himself against their eyesight, hearing and the quality of their nostrils. Anyone who knew had told him that snakes were most dangerous when disturbed suddenly from deep sleep. Then they lashed out. He twisted his head, a considered, slow movement, and looked down into the darkened gap between his body and Foxy’s. They were both in the scraped hole and across the top of it was scrim net, camouflaged and lightweight. Reed fronds were on top of the netting, and some light seeped through. The snake filled the space between their bodies, and it was coiled tight. Its tail was towards him and he couldn’t see the bastard’s head, where the fangs would be.
It had been another hand-over with nothing to be said, and Badger could listen to the breeze in the reed tops, and the charges of birds across the lagoon. Up to the moment when he had slipped his hand down in the hope that his fingers could massage some relief from the irritation of the scabs, he had been desperate for water. But the rules were that water should only be drunk when both were awake and the watch changed. He thought Foxy slept easily, head averted, breathing regular and with a light snoring in the throat.
It was important to him that Foxy slept easily. If he was restless, he might pitch over, roll onto the snake and panic it. It would have slithered into the place it now had, between their legs, and settled itself. If Foxy’s arse landed on it, it would retaliate, it might go right and it might go left. It might go for Foxy’s hand or arm, or try to bite through the suit and the lightweight trousers, or the leg below the suit and above the socks. It might launch itself at Badger. He lay so still, barely daring to breathe, and reckoned the head, with the fangs and poison sacs, was against Foxy but less than a foot from himself. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so bollock naked with fear.
And remembered… Talk in the Pajero, not from Alpha Juliet but from the Welsh guy. All said with the lazy casualness that veterans use to frighten the guts out of rookies. ‘Couple of years ago they was overrun with snakes. The marshes shrank and there was only a quarter of the water there had been. The snakes were disorientated and came into the villages, like they were looking for people and beasts. You watch out for snakes, bad bastards. The main one to watch for is the arbid. It’s bigger than our Welsh viper, goes to about four foot in length. If you see it, you’ll know it, and I hope you never see it. Thick body, black mostly but with red on it. I don’t know about an adult, but I was told its bite kills a kiddie in around twenty minutes. Do we have serums? Sorry, no.’
Could remember it now, word for word. There was a knife in his bergen, but not on his belt. Badger tried to work out how much of an effort it would be to wriggle his body to where he could get down into one of the pouches and extract the knife, but didn’t have a clear view of it. His mind seemed closed down, not functioning for solutions. Shagger had talked some more about the mosquito problem, the tick problem, the foot-rot problem. He had gone through the list of problems as the Pajero had driven north, and one had seemed much like another – until now.
How to wake Foxy? Not easy. How to wake him and not have him thrashing around? He checked ahead and there was no movement at the house.
He imagined the prick of the fangs. He would lash at the fucking thing, but it would be faster and would hit him again in the wrist – where the veins were – and the poison would start to flow… Maybe the morphine they carried would kill him. Couldn’t have him standing up on the clear patch of mud, two hundred yards across the water from the target house, using what strength he had left to rip off the suit and his underclothing, because the pain of the venom was unsustainable, and howling…
He didn’t know what to do. With his head tilted, he could see the coil.
Foxy didn’t seem to move, but his voice was clear, soft, conversational: ‘Is this, young ’un, what you’re looking for?’
His hand came out and was close to Badger’s. His hips rolled and his arse shifted. His legs twisted inside the suit and his body tipped. Badger tried to stop him, to arrest the movement, and hissed for him not to move, but was ignored. Foxy rolled onto the snake. His weight pitched onto it.
‘Is this, young ’un, what you needed to find?’