A Deniable Death

Chapter 10

There was a low chuckle, no humour.

The clenched hand, three or four inches in front of Badger’s face, obliterated his view of the house. He couldn’t speak. He waited, in that moment, for Foxy’s backside to heave up in the air, the gillie suit to convulse, a scream, and then for the body to heave away and the snake’s- The chuckle became laughter.

The fist, under his eyes, opened.

The dirt was caked in the palm. Badger realised that what bound the mud, stopped it disintegrating as dust, was old blood. He thought the head was an inch long, the neck a further inch.

He couldn’t have said how long it had been since the snake was decapitated – might have been an hour or done in the night, the carcass kept for the joke to be played. The lustre had gone from the wound at the neck and the tissue had whitened. He saw, protruding from the snake’s mouth, open in death, the right fang. It would have been attempting to defend itself when it had died, and it was frozen in that last act of attempted survival. He tried to drag his face away from it, but the headset’s cable trapped him.

Foxy, deliberately, let it slip.

The snake’s head came to rest on Badger’s hands where they held the binoculars, and he felt his temper go into free-fall.

Foxy said, ‘You see, young ’un, you’re so full of cock that you needed pegging down a notch, maybe four or five. I meet too many kids who reckon they’re special and have achieved fuck-all that impresses me. I reckon then that it’s as good a time as any to peg them.’

He had never hit a man, or a child when he was at school. In the police, in the years before he had gone into surveillance, he had never operated in a public-order environment when the order was given to display the batons and break up a crowd. People in the section house, and those on the team, would have called it ‘red-mist time’, but he’d despised that type of violence. If the psychiatrist who had an overview of them and saw the croppies once a year had known he was liable to the mist, the fast breathing and the burn in his brain then, likely, he would have been pulled out of the job and sent home. Might have been told to find a dark room, lie down and stay there till his head went cold.

‘You were right for pegging, young ’un, because you have bullshit coming out of your mouth, ears and nose. When I get back I’m going to tell my Ellie about you, and we’ll have a good laugh. Her, me and a bottle. I’ll tell her what I did for a guy who thought he knew every answer to every question. Would you have wet your pants or shat in them? I’d like to know so I can tell my Ellie. You went into the reeds, down to the waterline, and I could see your boot treads when I went, where you squatted and where you washed. Some of the time you were about a yard away from where this creature was. It was asleep, and I’ll bet big money you never saw it.’

They did unarmed combat training in the team, and there was talk that they might – soon – be issued with Glock pistols. Arming them was a divisive issue among the croppies, but there was anxiety that a jihadist, in search of the key to Paradise and the beauty pageant of virgins awaiting him, might get a strop if he realised he was under observation, come after the officer and put him – the image fitted – in the orange jumpsuit, then do the video. If there was a chance to go for suicide and the virgins, or the Central Criminal Court and thirty years banged up in Belmarsh or Long Lartin, it was likely he’d go for short-term freedom at the expense of the officer’s life… But Daniel ‘Badger’ Baxter was not classified as violent, knew little about self-defence and was more likely to back off, sneak away. He felt it come to boiling point. He had about forgotten what he was there for and the purpose of the headset on his scalp.

‘It was there – where you bloody nearly stepped on it, and that’s from footmarks – and I had my old man out and was about to pee when I saw it. I took the knife out of my pocket, made sure my shadow didn’t fall on it and did it first time. I can tell you it was one hell of a strike. The little fellow never knew what hit him. One minute he’s dreaming of eating a rat and the next he’s short of a head. One stab, straight down, a bit of sawing and the head’s off. You didn’t tell me whether you wet your trousers or shat them. I’ve a good mind, young ’un, an innovative one, and I reckoned the atmosphere in our little love nest was a bit too solemn, needed lightening up.’

They said that the two basics of managing building anger were to count to ten – or fifty or a hundred – and breathe in slowly. His fist was clenched. He was not certain what sort of blow he could land in the confined space. More of a gesture, but a good one. Worth it.

‘So get off your high horse, young ’un, and stay off it. Hang around me and learn, think yourself lucky and-’

Something of a right jab. The punch only had some nine inches to travel. It would have been, if it had landed square on the cheek or on the forehead, little more than a slap, but it caught the end of Foxy’s nose, and had enough force in it to make the older man jolt. There was a moment of shock in his eyes.

The blood came, not much, a run from the left nostril through the moustache, now ragged and untrimmed, to the upper lip.

Nothing was said.

He didn’t know what he could have said.

Badger’s father sold second-hand cars… not top-of-the-range but the sort that boys bought when they had their first job and that girls shelled out for when they worked at the Royal Berkshire Hospital and there was no bus route to bring them in. Paul Baxter did tight margins, bought cheap and sold cheap, was nearly honest and kept a couple of good mechanics working for him in the repair shop round the back of the show room. There was a warranty of sorts but difficult to enforce. Most of the cars stayed on the road long enough for his father not to be embarrassed by the sale, but a few did not. He never apologised and never explained – never said how sorry he was that the carburettor had blown up on the motorway, and never explained that a nine-year-old carburettor in that model of Fiat was a driving disaster.

Like father, like son. Badger didn’t apologise for hitting Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes across the nose and making it bleed, and didn’t explain that the heat and the dehydration were wrecking him, destroying him and that snakes were bad news for him.

He had his binoculars up.

If they had been in England, and it had been witnessed, there would have been a disciplinary hearing and a kangaroo court. Foxy would have been censured for the jape with the snake and Badger would have been suspended on full pay, pending further inquiries, for striking a fellow officer. It was, actually, quite a good joke with the snake.

They settled and the silence nestled on them. A good joke, yes, but he wouldn’t say so, and Foxy wouldn’t tell him he was ‘sorry, and out of order, no offence meant’.

There would be another flashpoint. Badger did not gamble, but he rated it as a banker that they would explode again. No voices were on the headset and the thirst scratched his throat. They wouldn’t allow themselves another drink for an hour, minimum. The sweat took more moisture from his body, and the house seemed to sway in the binocular lenses. The lagoon shimmered, and his eyes hurt. He had to grind his fingernails into his palm to hold some, any, concentration.

There was washing barely moving on the line, and a guard asleep. An otter swam by languidly, and time was running out for them. He didn’t know what would cause the next explosion of temper.

Hamfist had come forward.

She hadn’t moved, still sat cross-legged. He had brought a bottle of tepid water and put it down beside her hip. He’d seen that her gaze didn’t confront the crowd but was on the ground a little ahead of her. The crowd had just done prayers, had swung away from the gate and taken a line to the east. The stand-off began again.

They reckoned – him, Shagger, Corky and Harding – that she had, temporarily, calmed the crowd. For all the broken heads and probably broken bones, the men seemed comatose. Might have been the heat. He’d had a company commander, up Highway 6 at al-Amara, who daily blessed the heat of the day and thanked the good Lord for any temperature above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit because it drained hostile energy out of the young bucks. The crowd had no shade. Neither did she.

He stood tall. If it had not been for the alcohol he’d have been promoted above his last substantive rank, corporal, could have made it up to platoon sergeant. The drink did him and there had, often enough, been that regretful look from officers when they’d busted him down. He denied to himself that he had a problem with drink: Hamfist had heard it said, and clung to it leech-like, that an alcoholic was a man who couldn’t remember the last day on which he hadn’t had a drink. It was yesterday, and the day before. If they had charged at her suddenly, he was confident of the quick reaction that would have dropped them on the dirt track before they were halfway. If the weapon on the strap across his chest had jammed, he had grenades – gas, blast and fragmentation – and a pistol. If the weapons had jammed and the grenades had malfunctioned, he would have used his hands and boots to protect her.

They would have had to take his life before they reached her. The other Boys were the same.

He was thirty-one years old, and his thirty-second birthday would come round in eleven days. She knew the date. Shagger, Corky and Harding didn’t. She had known the previous year, his thirty-first, and he hadn’t broadcast it but it would have been in the file she’d have flipped through before he’d joined her protection detail. God knew where she’d bought it. It was wrapped up in smart paper, and there was a little card on it, Hamfist, Happy Day, Best, AJ, and inside was a crumbling cake, with fruit and orange rind and sliced almonds in circles on the top. The best Dundee cake he’d ever eaten, for all it was damaged in transit. There had been nothing from his wife. He’d not shared the cake but had eked it out and made it last into a seventh week.

He understood what she had done and how she hoped to extricate them, her decision to use the site where there had once been oil-drilling exploration teams. Her decision, too, that they were close enough to the surveillance boys, and inside the Golden Hour of protection. Her decision, now, to sit in the dirt, exposed to the sun, face the crowd and wait. If it came to fighting, they wouldn’t survive another night.

Hamfist couldn’t know whether she had called right or wrong. If a leader came, she might have called right, and if there was no leader and only darkness, she had called wrong. It was a big call, and it would matter for the men up front. The hours drifted, and time passed. The sun had started to tilt and he no longer stood astride his own shadow – it had begun to nudge out towards his left side, and the soft shape of his body on the dirt was broken by the rifle’s barrel.

Not for him to say that they walked a line, a high wire, and that maybe they headed for disaster… not for him to say that.

She didn’t drink the water he had brought her. She sat and never moved.

They started up the engines every two hours. One Black Hawk crew would go through the procedures while the other rested, and an hour later it would be reversed.

Each had a pair of General Electric T700-GE-70 turbo shafts and each manufactured a power of 1890 h.p. While the pilot and his colleague sat up front and did their checks, the cabin guys did the look-over on the M240 machine guns. They were ready, and each hour a few of the men and women not yet due to return to the States – or to be shipped to Kabul – would stand in little huddles in what shade they could find to watch. Before the draw-down was well advanced, it would have been possible for the Black Hawks, with their unmarked black fuselages that were the signature of special-forces operations – the covert stuff – to be parked out of sight where only a chosen few maintenance technicians had access. Times had changed. The end-of-empire days dictated that a hefty chunk of the base was now in the hands of local forces and only an area inside a contracted perimeter remained for the Americans. Clerks, typists, cooks, marines off duty from security rosters would watch the exhausts spew fumes, feel the draught of the rotors and dream.

Inside every American compound life was now stultifyingly dull. No fire fights, no patrols, no finds of arms caches, and no bodies to be photographed They stayed behind the blast walls and saw nothing of the country but its skies, blue and merciless. They pumped iron, played basketball and smoked what they could find. The helicopters broke the monotony and intrigued them. On immediate stand-by. Prepared for a mission. Cloaked in secrecy. They attracted attention. When the cabin doors were pulled right back, medical gear and stacked gurneys were visible.

Tristram closed down the engines and Eddie did the calls as the switches were flipped. Dwayne wrapped a tea towel round the breech of his machine gun and the rounds in the belt, then secured it with tape. Federico aped him.

For those on the ground, the rubber-neckers, the attraction was that they might see – a final time – the birds take off and fly low over walls and fences, then across the desert and go into actual mother-fuck combat. The suppression fire of the machine guns would be called for, and there’d be blood on the cabin floor, lives at risk and

… It was a dream, and good enough for the voyeurs. In draw-down days, excitement was sparse.

They jumped down, boots hitting the tarmacadam of the apron. A few pocket cameras were pointed at them, but their shades were good enough protection.

Tristram said, ‘I got the whole lot of charts and the software fed for the Iran frontier.’

Eddie said, ‘Up to the frontier, not over it.’

‘I have that. The far side of the frontier and they’re on their own. Not negotiable.’

‘Wherever they’re coming from, how far over the frontier, they have to get this side of it. For us to go over there is classified as an act of war. Into Iran, and when we land back I’m up for court martial, bet your life, and castration. No one will believe the navigation screwed me.’

‘But it would be good to fly a last time.’

His voice dropped: ‘Problem is, if we get called they’re in deep shit out there. At the edge of survival. For the sake of those guys, I half hope we don’t get to fly a last time.’

‘I don’t want state secrets, but are you any further forward?’ She had come into central London carrying a plastic bag filled with clean clothing.

‘Can’t say.’ Len Gibbons’s shrug was expressive. ‘Honestly, my love, I don’t know.’

They were in the same coffee shop across Haymarket from his office, and she had already shown him the shirts she had brought on the train. Pity there were no shoes – the only pair he had with him were damp from so much rain and sleet, and now from the sprinkle of snow.

‘Just trying to plan. Audrey said there’s a meeting at the garden centre, advice on how to protect shrubs in winter. It’s next Monday. I didn’t want to accept her invite if you’d just come home that evening. Is it likely?’

He grimaced. ‘In the dark and I haven’t a candle. Be on the safe side, and go.’

They had been through much, had walked those routes together, and he’d valued her as a crutch when the world had caved around his shoulders. Her hand had come across the table to rest on his fist. Her rings were witness to the commitment they had made to each other before marriage and before the career setback. He would not have survived it without her, and he had often speculated which dreary branch of government he would now figure in if he had allowed himself to walk away from Six: Work and Pensions, Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, Education and Sciences?

She had a habit of lowering her voice until it dripped conspiracy. ‘Is it a big one?’

‘By my standards.’

‘People on the ground, at the sharp end, in danger?’

‘I carry the responsibility.’

She looked far into his eyes. ‘Is it like the old days… when you were young, tilting at windmills, the world yours, and me running to keep up? Like that?’

They might have been alone on a Suffolk beach, in a Scottish forest or on a Welsh hillside, and only honesty counted. Len Gibbons said, ‘I can hide it pretty well, but I’ve not felt such excitement in thirty years. I’m alive with it. I’ll go to the end of any road in front of me to see this one through and make it work. Three decades of sneers and titters, I’ve lived with… This sort of makes it worthwhile. All those bastards who put me down, I think I’m going to walk all over them. I feel blessed to be a part of it… Is it going to happen? God’s truth, I don’t know. I’m willing it to… Just have to believe it will.’

She smiled, would have tried to offer encouragement. ‘It’ll be all right, Len.’

‘If it’s not, and goes public, they’ll crucify me at the Towers. .. but it’ll be worse for those at the sharp end, on the ground.’

He lifted her hand, kissed it, passed her another bag, the dirty bundle, and was gone out of the door. The snow had eased, but the sleet drove hard. They were never out of his mind, those for whom he carried responsibility – and the man he targeted.

It was the end of his day. The Engineer stood in the anteroom outside the brigadier’s office and the secretary gave him the fat envelope, telling him it contained his travel documents. He opened the envelope, glanced at the top sheet and said the itinerary would exhaust his wife. She shrugged. She reached down for the big envelope at her feet and said these were the X-ray and scan results requested from Tehran. She unlocked a drawer. From another envelope she took two passports, both bearing the crest of the Czech Republic. Finally from a plastic pouch she took a mass of euro banknotes and ostentatiously counted out a thousand in different denominations.

He read her attitude. Were there no better calls for foreign currency? Was there not a medical framework inside the Islamic Republic superior to any other? Why was so much deference shown to him?

The items went into his briefcase. She rang through, then indicated cursorily with her hand that he should go inside the office. He was greeted. Did he have everything? Was he satisfied? He did and he was.

He wondered whether this ranking officer knew of the questions put to him by a colleague and whether a crude trap had been set for him, or whether the regime was indeed a house of cards. But, that early evening, he was not to be tested and tricked.

‘Come back to us soon and safe with the best news of Naghmeh… I would like you to consider who you are, and therefore understand the esteem in which we hold you. You are, to us, our Nobel or our Kalashnikov, even our Oppenheimer. You are the father of the bomb in the road… Do you know of a town in England, Rashid, that stops when the coffins come through, or of the crowds that line the bridges of the Highway of Heroes in Canada? Do you know of the communities in the United States that come to a silent halt when a local soldier is brought back? You sapped their will to fight, Rashid. You broke their commitment. When the time is judged correct your devices will be shipped to Afghanistan and the sophistication of the war raised. Afghanistan will be fertile ground for you. We will not tolerate the Great Satan’s military – or the Little Satan’s – against our borders. Our prayers go with you.’

He was kissed on each cheek and went out of the door. He hurried to the parking area and looked for his driver. He could not telephone her, never did, so he could not tell her what was in place until he was back at his home.

Stomach runs had arrived, one of the many strains of ‘Basra belly’. It was early evening and the air was cooler, but without a wind, so the smell in the hide was foul. It had come on fast.

Bowel movements were not a chosen subject for conversation among croppies. Nor likely to be, Foxy would have said, among astronauts. How moonwalkers or surveillance men did their business was not big on the talk agenda among colleagues. One minute Badger had been lying beside him, on his rest time, and the next he had been squirming to turn over, and the top of the hide’s camouflage, above the scrim net, had jumped. He had scrabbled for the plastic bags.

Not a smell for living with. Foxy – relief writ large – was more constipated than the other way. There was nothing he could have done – had he wanted – to help. Diarrhoea was part and parcel of a croppie’s job. Foxy did not know how much was in Badger’s trousers, how much in the bag and how much had spilled onto the earth of the hide. Badger was wiping hard, almost furiously. They had with them tubes of sanitary jelly that cleaned hands and that was next on Badger’s list. Then the pills. They hadn’t spoken since the punch was thrown.

On the headset there was only the crackled voice of a radio announcer and music. He watched the front of the house and waited for the car to come, for the children to run out and the target, the Tango, to get home. Strange old life he lived… Because of RIPA, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the trade of law-enforcement surveillance was watched, eagle-eyed, for abuses. Couldn’t call a bad guy a ‘target’ in a briefing because it might come up in the legal process, and to name the accused, in court, as a ‘target’ was likely to be prejudicial. He watched for the target and the target’s wife, and wondered whether she was resting or filling the suitcase that had been brought for her. The goon, the officer, had been on his chair as the sun had started to dip. He’d had the binoculars on his chest and seemed to use them to watch birds. Maybe birds were his turn-on… There was nothing for him to listen to but his nose was filled with the smell.

Badger did not apologise.

Perhaps it was not appropriate to apologise for diarrhoea. Maybe Foxy would have done if he’d had any other oppo. No apology… and no wind to freshen the air. Possible to go in reasonable secrecy from the hide after darkness came, but that was more than an hour away. Badger had swallowed Imodium, which would, sort of, plug him. Probably taken enough to stop Niagara in full flow. He hadn’t asked what the correct dose should be. Foxy watched the goon, and couldn’t get the stink out of his nose. When darkness dropped, Badger could move, with his bags, whatever was soiled and the collapsible entrenching shovel, to dig the pit.

The pig came, the sow. He knew stories about pigs, had heard them from the base medic, an orthopaedic specialist, who had talked about them after he’d put an interpreter back together – the man had been out in the marshes with a patrol when he was charged; a thigh bone had been broken and a knee smashed. When the big beast came out of the reed bed to the right of him and Badger and moved purposefully over the open ground, grunting, Foxy thought they faced a problem.

The problem worsened: the boar followed the sow.

Badger swore.

The sow led. Old teats hung slack from her underbelly and the mud glistened on her, was caught among the whiskers at her mouth. The boar had big bollocks and – more important – tusks jutting from the lower jaw. Badger thought the sow looked dumb, hungry, inquisitive, but that the boar was menacing. He could see why: at each side of his mouth, where the cheeks were, there were twin welts – the skin was broken and there were weepy patches. Badger realised that the tusks were in-growing and pierced the flesh, which would have been enough to make the brute mean.

They came closer, were within twenty feet.

They stopped. Now they were wary. Badger thought the sow might be the more cautious. The little eyes gleamed bright, tracking towards them.

In the last years, Badger had had birds come and perch on him, little songbirds, blackbirds and pigeons, and once a snipe had walked on elegant legs across his hands. Rabbits had played a few feet in front of him, and a fox had been over his back, jumping to clear it, as if his spine was a fallen log. Mice and rats had used his gillie suit for warmth. His ability to blend into nature made him good at what he did, as good as any – better than the old idiot beside him. A rat, heavy with the young it was carrying, had made a friend of him, enough for him to worry that he might be playing midwife when its time came. He could be still, and didn’t know how still Foxy could stay.

There were flies round him.

Badger could accept rats, mice and birds sharing his space but the flies fazed him during the day, and the mosquitoes were worse in the evenings. All irrelevant. The sow mattered most. Badger thought that if she backed away, or lost interest, the boar would tuck along. Her interest was aroused but she did not yet seem to feel threatened. The boar’s size was intimidating: he would have been more than a yard to the shoulder and the tusks were four or five inches long – the creature must live with perpetual discomfort.

Foxy had wriggled a little, making enough noise to raise the sow’s ears. He murmured, ‘I’ve a pepper spray.’

Badger thought he read it better. He had four plastic bags, all partially filled, one pair of fetid underpants and a body that stank. He flicked his eyes away. The kids had come out of the house with the old lady, and the goon was out of his chair. There was, far away, dust rising between the trees, where the road was, and guards were coming out of the barracks, rifles loose on straps across their backs and chests. The wife came, leaning on her stick. Foxy passed Badger the pepper spray, then clasped the headset tighter against his skull, tiny movements; he would have been straining to hear any remark made. Badger’s own movement was to take the penknife from his belt and unclasp it; the blade was only two inches long but he thought it enough, and preferred it to the spray.

He saw the car, the Mercedes saloon. It was driven past the barracks and veered towards the house.

At that distance, the cries of the children were faint but clear. Their excitement carried.

He might as well have laid a trail of aniseed, grain or swill. The sow came forward. Badger could not stand up, clear away the scrim and the camouflage, get hold of the plastic bags, chuck them out and wave a deodorant spray to replace the smell of his shit with lemon fragrance. He thought, now, the pig knew he was there.

She was beside the edge of the scrape, where the scrim and the dead leaves covered his bergen. She was two feet, perhaps a few inches more, from him. She pawed the ground. The boar followed.

The target came out of the car and his driver carried his briefcase. The children were around him, and he lifted the little girl. The goon faced out across the water, and the open space that flanked the reed bed would have been in his view. It was the wife who saw the pigs and pointed at them. The boar was pushing at the shoulder of the sow, trying to come close. Badger saw the eyes and each whisker, each bristle, the sharp broken end of a tusk. The boar panted…

Now the boar led. He had pushed aside the sow. He drove down with his nose. The scrim snagged on a tusk. The snout pushed. The beast might weigh a hundred kilos, a hundred and fifty. It routed in the scrim for the bags and… Badger had the knife.

The boar’s weight pressed down on him, and he used his left hand to hold the scrim tight, then jabbed the knife blade upwards and hit what felt like thick rubber or a leather wad. Blood spurted from the space between the nostrils. The pig reared back. The scrim ripped, the foliage fell away, and he let out a scream of pain, loud and shrill, parading that he was hurt. Maybe the boar didn’t know what had made the pain, who had hurt him. He ran across the mud of the open ground, heading for the lagoon. The sow followed, seeming reluctant and confused.

They hit the water.

In front of the house, everyone watched.

The sow and the boar lumbered at speed towards deep water until only their heads remained visible. They seemed to make for the end of the mud spit where Badger had built the platform, with foliage washed away from the reed bed, where the microphone was mounted. In front of the house, they turned away as if the spectacle was over and Badger chose that moment to congratulate himself. The pigs swam towards the spit.

Foxy’s head jerked forward. His turn to swear. The cable to the headset had tautened. The boar broke the surface close to the mud spit, kicked, rolled and tried to throw off an impediment. The cable was pulled up from the mud in front of the hide. Badger saw it rise in the water. There was a final convulsion and the cable from Foxy’s headset went slack…

There were gravel pits out to the west of Reading and alongside the motorway. The teenage Danny Baxter had known them as well as any heron did. It was to one of them that he had taken his dad’s accountant and brought him close to an otter’s holt. The man had never seen the creature up close and was thrilled enough to become a referee of status when Danny had gone for the police job. Anglers patronised the gravel pits. Once, from the hide he’d made for himself, he had watched a bent, straining rod, a tight line and huge swirls from the depths. It had gone on for twenty minutes or more until the line had floated back, loose, nothing to hold it. The guy hadn’t known he was watched, had sworn, kicked out and sent his stool and a rucksack into the water. It would have been a big pike that had snapped his line. Danny had seen it.

Now the line was exposed on the mud spit and floated on the water’s surface. He saw where it ran up the spit and went into the mess of foliage where the microphone was.

It hurt to speak to Foxy, but he had to know. It was like he took a backward step. One question. ‘Does it work?’

A nod, as if he were an interruption to concentration, therefore a goddamn nuisance. Then, ‘Yes, but couldn’t you have done a half-decent job with the cable? Bit bloody obvious, young ’un, because you didn’t bury it properly.’

It was. The cable was a dark line across yellow mud, then a black thread over the water. If the goon, the officer, went back to his chair and used his binoculars to look again for the birds, the otters or the pigs, he must see, had to, the cable on the mud and where it floated. He thought he’d done well in concealing it and better than that in getting rid of the pigs, but his efforts had been ignored.

Everyone except the security man was now inside the house, and the light was failing. They had nothing. His throat hurt from lack of water. The irritation of the tick scabs and mosquito bites was acute, and the plastic bags were by his knees. The quiet came and – almost forgotten because of the sow and the boar – the smell returned. Time was running out, their covert rural observation post was near to compromised, and they had nothing to report.

There had been a re-evaluation, he was told. When he had been called to the unit’s offices, he had brought his bag.

He was taken by one of their drivers to the airport.

It had been decided Gabbi should fly that evening to Europe. A neurosurgeon at Tel Aviv’s Assuta Hospital – the most expensive and discreet in the country – had been asked, late, to advise. The medical opinion was that several European capitals had capacity beyond the best in Tehran, that a consultation at any one of a dozen locations might take little longer than the time needed for an examination, consideration and the decision to operate or not. It was explained that the couple could, within a dozen hours – twenty-four at most – be back at whichever airport they had flown into and looking for a flight home. The unit planned on the basis that information on a destination would be fed to them, and any who were privy to the surveillance mission mounted from the south-eastern Iraqi marshlands and harboured doubts did not share them.

He did not know whether Leah had worked on this last stage of preparation. She had been normal in bed the previous night, and over a light breakfast, then had left on the bus. He had planned a gym work-out, and the phone had rung: the call to come in, and the instruction that he should bring a bag. She might have known, she might not.

He would go to Rome. He had collected his passport: the Republic of Ireland was the flavour of that month. The days of big operations, he had been told, were over. There would never again be deployed as many as had gone down to the Gulf with tennis recquets and wigs. Nor did they look for the spectacular of the exploding headrest on a car seat, the detonating mobile phone when held against an enemy’s face, or the poison squirting into an ear. One bullet, two maximum, was the day’s order.

On arrival in Rome, he would be booked into an airport hotel, within sight of the terminals, and the call would come to send him forward or bring him home. He was not one to complain about the vagueness of the plans. He accepted what was put before him. If Leah had known, her kiss that morning as she went to work would have been no different.

They would not hold the El Al flight for him if he was late: to delay take-off could only draw attention to him. The car went fast on the airport road. A poem was in his mind:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!

He was the servant of the state, and did not doubt what the state asked of him.

Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, As home his footsteps he hath turn’d, From wandering on a foreign strand?

He would not challenge what was asked of him, and did not believe he could look into a face, see life and humanity, and hesitate. He liked the poetry of Walter Scott, but most of all he loved ‘Patriotism’, and he had faith. He did not query where the road took him.

When he’d boarded he would have forgotten the poem and would be engrossed in a business magazine.

The arrangements were in place.

It was a black-tie evening.

The consultant had used his authority to make the booking for scan facilities and X-ray without the usual requirement of a patient’s name. It had, predictably, been queried. He had snapped back that there was more to medicine than filling in forms, and had seen a long-serving assistant wilt. He did not feel able to tell his staff that an unidentified Iranian, with the co-operation of the Berlin embassy and the likely support of an intelligence agency, suffering potentially terminal illness, was to be inflicted on them, so he had blustered and been unnaturally rude. His status at the university medical school was such that no complaint would be lodged.

Her parents would mind Magda for the evening. The black-tie occasion was a celebration of a local politician’s birthday, an influential woman from the ruling party with the ability to dispense patronage. He and Lili would be with the great and the good of the city. In such company, his given name was Steffen and his family name was that of his wife. He was Steffen Weber, and soon there would be a prefix to his name, the title ‘Professor’. He changed in the bedroom. Lili was at her dressing-table and sat in her underwear to apply her cosmetics. He could have said that until the last week he had been successfully absorbed into the German dream – the downturn in the economy seemed not to affect him – but he had brought the mood home.

If he had talked to her, it would have been a burden shared. He had not. He carried it alone. Easiest would be to look the patient in the face – he did it often enough – assume a look of principled sympathy, and say it straight: ‘I am so sorry, there is nothing I can do. I regret that the question of surgery does not arise.’ Those patients hurried away, and he had a cup of coffee, then carried on with his day. That evening in the Rathaus, there would be good food, fine wine and a string quintet. He would be among the elite and accepted… He sensed a shadow hung over him.

Dust trailed behind the big car. Abigail Jones had heard all four of her Boys arm their weapons.

It was a defining moment. The crowd ahead parted, the car was driven through it and came to stop in front of her – had to, or the BMW 7 Series would have gone right over her, squashing the life from her body. The driver braked with a certain flamboyance, and the tyres scattered dirt, some falling on her. It was about appearances and postures, and she took her time. She did not stand until the man had emerged from the darkened interior. It was a start, a good one. She had demanded that a leader come and he had. He was gross at the waist, wore a bulging thobe, long but cut like a white nightshirt, a ghutra on his head, chequered cloth with woven ropes to hold it in place, and sandals. He carried a mobile phone in one hand, his beads in the other. An assault rifle hung from a shoulder, and over the shirt he had a well-cut and discreetly patterned sports jacket that would have come from a London tailor, or from Paris. What else for Abigail to learn? He used a potent eau-de-Cologne. He had brought a youth with him, perhaps a son or nephew, who carried a briefcase – and two men for security, along with the driver.

As he approached her, she stood. Did it easily – did not betray exhaustion, dehydration or stiffness. It was Corky who had read it. The Irishman scurried forward with two old packing cases from the buildings. He put them down as if they were good-quality chairs, and used his sleeve to wipe them… The defining moment. She knew it, and her Boys. It was down to her skills as to whether they stayed or whether they were hoofed and in the process lost the mass of their gear. If they were hoofed, the guys up ahead were beyond reach.

She smiled – always did that well. Seemed to show frankness and honesty.

She called him ‘Sheikh’ and invited him to sit.

It was over water.

‘You’ve had a drink.’

Only the quality of the microphone and its cable link were more important to them than water.

‘I haven’t.’

The light was sinking. Badger had been out of the hide and had gathered more dead fronds from inside the reed beds. He had waited until a rare cloud was over the last of the sun’s brilliance, then had scattered pieces over the cable. He could not affect, without going far out into the water, the part of the cable that floated. Why not wade out? Too knackered. Badger had never known such tiredness. He could hike in bad weather, trek on moss and bog, and lose sleep. He didn’t have the strength he’d needed those hours before when he’d scraped out the hide, moved the surplus earth into the reed bed, then gone out into the lagoon – his gillie suit absorbing water, weighing enough, almost, to drag him down – and built up the flotsam on the mud spit to hide the microphone.

‘We’re not due to have a drink for three-quarters of an hour – forty-three minutes, actually.’

‘Don’t make accusations, young ’un, that you can’t prove.’

He came back, groped his way into the hide, and the cloud was now off the sun. One last beam of gold light penetrated the scrim, and he’d seen the glisten at Foxy’s mouth, the dribble on his cheek.

The diarrhoea had weakened Badger. He had come back to the hide, crawling, feeling faint, worse shape than he’d known, and the job of hiding the cable only half complete. The exchange was in cutting whispers, neither voice raised.

‘You’ve been at the water. It’s on your bloody face.’

‘You can’t prove it.’

‘We’ve enough for today, enough for tomorrow. We’re supposed, in this heat, to drink seven or eight litres a day each. If we have a litre and a half each, we’re lucky. It’s despicable to steal water.’

‘Shut your mouth, young ’un, before I shut it for you.’

He did so – but intended it to be temporary. He went into his bergen and brought out the bottle. He held it up and squinted at the level. It was about halfway down – he hadn’t marked it. There was no indent on the plastic where his thumbnail had gouged a line. Had it been spit on Foxy’s cheek? He reckoned not. His own throat was too dry for saliva, and he was dehydrated enough for there to be no sweat coming off him. If he’d tried to spit he would have scarred the skin in a parched mouth. Badger was sure. He pushed the bottle at Foxy, right up to his face. ‘You want to drink, help yourself.’

‘Don’t bloody play with me, young ’un.’

‘Go on, drink it all. Have yours and mine.’

‘Watch it.’

‘Finish this bottle and start the last. Swig your way through that too.’

‘You’re pushing me, young ’un.’

‘And when it’s all gone, we can fuck off out of it… if that’s what you want.’

The scrim netting that held together the head covering he wore was gripped. ‘You’re shit, young ’un. When this is over I’ll tell the world what shit you were here – tell all Gibbons’s crowd. Tell them everywhere I get to take a seminar. I’ll wreck you.’

Badger thought he was right, but the light had gone and he wouldn’t know. Apologise? No. Might he have been wrong? No – and there was no worse crime than taking rationed water… The security lights came on outside the house. The goon paced, and the children came out to kick a ball.

Foxy said, ‘My misfortune was to be teamed with a kiddie who was so ignorant, and had so little comprehension of the English language as to be at moron level. Know what “moron” is, young ’un, or is that too big a word for you?’

Again, he couldn’t help himself: Badger did the short-arm jab.

The head was twisted so the blow cracked into the right side of the headset. It fell apart.

Foxy said, ‘Not just a moron, but an ignorant one.’

The woman came out and Badger saw her through the glasses, a misted figure against the background lights. The children still played with the ball. She looked proud, he thought, and brave. She had dignity. He watched and admired her. She stood alone, leaned on her stick and didn’t speak to the goon. He wondered how it would be for her: a sea change in her life, when it hung in the balance, was in a medical man’s hands. He couldn’t say how it would be for her if the approach was made and her man was turned… and he couldn’t shift further from Foxy. It was as if he were anchored to the man.