Foxy went forward. No call for farewells: no last handshakes, no clenched fists punching against shoulders. He crawled to his right, leaving the mass of dried fronds behind him, and used his fingertips to guide him. He reached ahead to check for obstructions, anything that would break as he went over it.
The moon would be up later. Now it was not much more than a silvery wedge behind the mist that came up off the lagoon. It was the best time to be on the move, and the creatures in the water helped him: the frogs, the birds, and the pigs that had moved on and were almost up against the raised bund line that divided the lagoon beyond the beds. Croaks, splashes and grunts broke the quiet, and he felt good with the noises around him – not that the goon or the guards, who were more than two hundred yards away, could have heard the crack of a twig breaking.
He went into the reeds, and wriggled on elbows, stomach and knees. He felt a great stiffness in every joint. He had assumed it would be hard to get his muscles supple again after the hours in the hide, but hadn’t imagined it would be this bad. He had never done such a long stint in a cramped lie-up before. It would make good copy in a lecture hall, with the same old curtains drawn as before: ‘Sorry and all that, guys, but I’m not at liberty to tell you which corner of the world I was in – enough to say it was hot and the donkey shit smelt recent enough. I hadn’t moved more than a handful of yards before every muscle had seized and…’ Couldn’t say where, but his audience would be total pillocks if they didn’t understand he’d been behind enemy lines, alone, and going forward. Ellie was forgotten, and Badger, as was a monologue that had demeaned him. He thought about faces in grey light stretching away from him in an auditorium. A spotlight was on him and the men and women in the audience – from an infantry unit, a logistics regiment, the cavalry or the intelligence family – would listen to what he had to say. There would be no when or why but they would finish up with a good idea of what it was like to lie in a hide in the thick fabric of a gillie suit. At the end, there might be a little hint of what it had all been for: ‘You won’t, of course, expect me to break the Official Secrets Act, but out in that dismal wasteland, where the sun shines and we’ve had few thanks for the sacrifices made, we lived with the curse of the IED, that wretched little package at the side of the road, in the body of a dead dog, behind a kerbstone, and always cleverly made. Let’s just say that one man who made the damn things is now pushing up the daisies. Thank you all for your attention.’ He’d smile a little, and take a step back from the lectern, and they’d have learned about the privations of being a croppie. He would expect a brief moment of stunned silence. Then a colonel or a brigadier would stand and lead an ovation.
He was where the reeds thinned and there was open water ahead. He didn’t know – hadn’t asked Badger – how deep the water was, or how far he had to get from the hide to the mud spit. Most of the time he had held the binoculars in front of his face and the magnification had foreshortened the distance to the concealed microphone. The water lapped in his boots and saturated his socks. So damn tired because they had finished the drinking water some twenty-two hours before and his body had no more moisture to lose in sweat. His mouth and throat felt like sandpaper, and his muscles were slow, unresponsive. He was wading. He made each step forward with huge effort, which became greater with each step he took. He could see the back of the bird ahead, a slight blob of soft colour. If, then, Foxy could have found the cable, he would have yanked it.
He would have ditched the old discipline that said all gear should be brought out. He would have dragged at the cable, broken the connection and abandoned the microphone. The bird would have flown, spooked by the commotion. He would, too, have made some excuse about having the microphone on the way back, stumbling and dropping it. But he didn’t have the cable in his hand.
Foxy would not turn around, retrace his steps through the glue that the mud made, and return to the hide – acknowledge failure, exhaustion, fragility – and ask Badger to do the job. He couldn’t. He had opened his mouth and blurted stuff, made a fool, big-time, of himself. He struggled to get the boots moving again and the water level was past his waist. His stomach growled for food and his throat choked for water. He had weakened enough to spill the story of his marriage, then weakened further and done a volunteer. Now the mud was above his ankles and the gillie suit was a lead weight. The smell of the mud was in his face and he thought he was making more noise than the pigs when they had stampeded. Coots ran from him on the water surface and took flight, screaming.
Far in front of him, past the outline of the mud spit – his target – was the house with its security lamps, and away from it the old lamp-post on the quayside in front of the barracks. When he rested and was quiet, he could hear a radio playing softly in the barracks. It had been folly to say he would do it. He was bloody near marooned, unable to move.
He took another step. Abruptly he was in open water and the reed beds were behind him.
Foxy realised he should have discussed with Badger how best to approach the spit where the microphone was. He should have worked his way further to the right and nearer to the bund line where he would have avoided the deeper water. But he hadn’t – he had been too proud.
Another step, and he lost his left boot.
He could have screamed, but took another step.
The church was a fine building of weathered red brick. Len Gibbons had walked down the hill from the old border-crossing point, past homes with gardens scoured by frost and a snow shower. He had hugged shadows and felt that the journey to Schlutup was a demonstration of indulgence and weakness. He remembered it so clearly. Sometimes Len Gibbons would meet the part-time pastor, status never quite defined, inside the church, and sometimes outside. They would talk close to the old lifeboat, preserved and mounted on wood blocks above gravel, and the renovated clock, with gold-plated hour symbols and hands, would chime. The church of St Andrew had seemed a safe, reliable, trustworthy place to meet, and the pastor had seemed a man of integrity… The young Len Gibbons had seen an opportunity for advancement and had wanted to trust. He went into the churchyard and passed ancient headstones. There were lights inside, a final blaze of organ music. He had wanted to believe, and urged his seniors to accept his judgements. Many said later that it was against their better judgement that they had acquiesced, and had shifted the blame for the catastrophe to the slight shoulders of the young Len Gibbons. But an asset in the telephone exchange at Wismar was of prime importance. An old lesson had been learned; great danger hounded intelligence officers if they believed only what they wished to believe.
The clock struck the hour, the doors opened and light flooded out. The music was finished but voices came through the doorway, clear and bright.
He could not have said why he was there, why he had driven out from Lubeck to the place that had altered his working life and reconstructed his values. At first, the pastor had been able to travel into and out of the German Democratic Republic. Stories had been planted of elderly parents living behind the Curtain and to the south of Schwerin, and passes being issued by an official who was a long-standing friend of the family. The pastor had brought back printouts of the numbers called by units of the Soviet Army, Air Force and Navy. Useful? It had hardly mattered. The presence of the agent, Antelope, in such a sensitive position, was important.
He watched the doorway, and the first of that evening’s congregation emerged and stood for a moment on the step, their breath vivid in the cold. They shivered but did not break off their conversations.
There had not been sufficient rigour applied to the asset and the story he had told. The pastor had announced, one May day, that he would no longer be able to travel back and forth into the East, as the official had been transferred. Was it possible that the asset, Antelope, could deliver his stolen material to a courier regarded as honest and reliable by the spy masters? Over the following five months, three couriers were identified, then names and addresses given for the pastor to pass them to the asset.
The man came out of the church in a small group, talking earnestly. Gibbons stayed back, let no light fall on his face. The silhouette of his body was masked by the trunks of the plane trees. Then, the man had always shaved closely and his hair had been cropped short. Now he wore an old coat against the evening chill, and his hair was in a ponytail held by an elastic band. His beard grew randomly across his face. The last he had heard of the man, still recognisable, was that he had started a sentence of six years’ imprisonment at Hamburg’s Fuhlsbuttel gaol. The end of the first week of October was Republic Day in the East. On that day the decision to arrest a pastor had been taken after joint consultation between British and German intelligence officers: the British in Bonn had gone cap in hand to their ally and grovelled on the failure of an operation that had cost the freedom, perhaps the lives, of four couriers. The information had been unwillingly accepted that Antelope was a sting operation conducted by the Stasi from Berlin, that a treacherous telephone operator in Wismar had never existed. Maybe the gullibility of Gibbons’s seniors had saved his own skin. Others would have gone with him to the guillotine had he been too heavily punished for the capital crime of naivete. He had survived by a thread, but was an altered man.
He did not spring forward to greet the man: How the devil are you? Looking well, considering. In work, or dependent on hand-outs? Do you still believe in the clapped-out empire that faded to dust overnight? Was it all worth men’s lives, the ones you condemned to years in cells or for hanging? He watched the man, once a pastor, go out through the gate, and those around him laughed at something he said… All so long ago, but relevant to Len Gibbons.
That night, he had met the man, had walked away with a package in his hand, then lit a cigarette, which was the signal. German police, plain clothes, had come forward and snapped on the handcuffs. He had killed, in his soul, any last trace of humanity. He no longer believed in mercy. Now, a servant of the Service, he obeyed orders. It was why he had been chosen. All agencies in this field of work needed men like Len Gibbons.
He turned on his heel and went back to the car park where he had left the VW.
Foxy reached the mud spit. He had fallen once. The booted foot had tripped against the one that wore only a sock and he’d gone down into the water where it was shallow. His head would have gone under if his hands hadn’t found the bottom, but water – foul-tasting – splashed onto his face.
He was there. Foxy sucked in air. There was a flap in his face, desperate. The bird’s wings beat, but it failed to launch itself. There was no one for Foxy to ask what the fuck was happening. He had no idea why the bird just flapped its wings hopelessly. He might have figured it out if his mind had been clearer.
It gave a croak, like a death rattle, and he had his hand up, protecting his eyes from the wings. The cable whipped against his cheek. His fingers found it and ran along its length, then collided with the bird’s body. It went into spasms of action, then was still. The beak hit him.
The African Sacred Ibis was snagged by the cable. He let go of it and the bird rose a foot off its perch. The cable tautened. The ibis croaked, and the claws on its feet came against Foxy’s hands and ripped at them. The flesh tore. The beak came back at him, was used as a spear. He grasped the cable again and the bird hung from his arm.
Foxy lashed out with his free hand. It didn’t matter to him that the bird was endangered, that its presence was a jewel in the eco-system of the marshes. He struck out, used full force. He couldn’t see it beyond the vague shapes of the wings as they beat at him but he recalled a long, slender neck – he had seen it when the bird had flown in, and while it had cleaned the feathers on its chest. He knew that his target was the neck, and the blow was hard.
He was Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes: he had taken on the full might of an African Sacred Ibis, worshipped as a deity in the civilisation of the Pyramids and pharaohs, and had broken its neck.
It hung from his hand. There were no reflexes, no shuddering death throes. Foxy had killed it. It hung from the entanglement of the cable. It had seemed large when the wings had beaten, the feet slashed and the beak stabbed, but now it was shrivelled.
He heard only the lapping of water, maybe against the reeds behind him or away to his right. He heard rippling. Maybe the wind had risen with the darkness. He tried to pull the cable free but it gouged against his palm and the limp carcass prevented him tugging it free. Foxy knelt on the mud spit. He could hear his heart, his breathing and the rippling of water, but could see nothing except the patch of white, the wing feathers and the back of the bird. He started to disentangle the corpse from the cable. It would have realised it couldn’t lift off and had sat still, hoping that the approaching beast would somehow avoid it. Only at the last, when the cable around its left leg and body had tightened, squeezing air out of it, had it reacted.
Foxy didn’t know how long it had been since he had left the hide, not even how long he had been on his knees on the mud spit. A degree of tenderness held him as he slackened the cable and started to free the bird’s body. He found the microphone wedged among the reeds and branches Badger had used to give it stability. When he had freed the bird he laid it down and put reed fronds over it. He took a deep breath, and slipped the microphone into the poacher’s pouch inside the gillie suit. Then he began to coil the loose cable.
He didn’t know why, then, the frogs’ croaking was silenced, but he could hear the water rippling.
‘Did you think it would be like this?’
‘I did not,’ the Engineer answered.
A shuttle bus had brought them from Hamburg airport, and they had been dumped with their bags on the pavement outside the Hauptbahnhof. The rush-hour crowds surged past and towards them. His experience of a European main-line terminus had been in Budapest as a student in his early twenties. He knew crowds from Tehran, but there he had command of language and the status of chauffeur-driven transport; Naghmeh flinched away from the press of people around her.
He had seen her gaze, mouth slack and eyes wide, at the prostitutes outside the station and under the street-lights, waists exposed in the cold, skirts barely covering their upper thighs, their faces painted. He had said nothing; neither had she. They had come inside the high arched building and loud music had greeted them. He had known it was Beethoven. She had asked why they played it so loudly in the station.
‘It keeps away the drug addicts – I read that. Users of heroin do not like such music,’ he had said.
‘Why do they allow those people on the streets in a public place?’
He had studied the board, searched for the train going to Lubeck. She leaned on his arm, needing its support. He said it was the way matters were handled in Germany, France, Spain and Britain. She had snorted.
Had he known it would be like this?
He did not lie: he had not.
‘Do they have no respect for us?’
‘I cannot argue with them. We are here. We will take the train to Lubeck. At Lubeck we will go to the hotel. I can do no more. Would you have me rant at the embassy, call the ministry or the commanding officer of the al-Quds? Would you have me complain?’
She looked into his face but could not meet his eyes, which were locked on the departures board. ‘We should not have come.’
He said what platform the train would leave from and started towards the steps going down to it, pulling their bag.
‘Did you hear me? We should have stayed where our own God is.’
He told her how long it would be before the train left for Lubeck. It was heresy to suggest they might turn back, and they went slowly down the steps.
He had started on the return.
Impossible to go quietly now. Each stride forward taxed him to his limits. He gathered in the cable and looped it on an arm. Badger would maybe have to pull him the last few yards into the depths of the reed bed, and he might need, there, to flop and rest. Before he accepted any help, or rest, though, he would get there. He had a stubborn pride.
The light came on.
He was too exhausted, his mind dulled, to realise in the first seconds what the light that trapped him meant.
No panic, not in the first moments after the beam caught him. For Foxy, it was a time of innocence. To him it lasted an age but it would not have been longer than five seconds. Then the panic broke, and he started to thrash. He was up to his groin in water and the weight of the gillie suit tugged him down. He had one boot for a good grip in the mud and one foot with a sock that slithered and gave no purchase. He flailed his arms as if that would help him to go forward, but the mud had trapped him as effectively as the beam. There was shouting from close by, near to the source of the light, and answering calls from away to the right, where the bund line was.
The beam closed on him, and he heard the splash of paddles, then the guttural cough of an outboard. Foxy understood. A craft had been paddled towards him, then allowed to drift closer. If he could reach the reed beds there was a chance… He dragged his knees up, one after the other, tried to stamp, but the water held him, the gillie suit dragging, and the mud oozed deep beneath his feet. Foxy had done time in the Province, had been on attachment to 3 Brigade, Armagh City, in the ditches, the winter hides, and camouflaged in thick summer scrub, sometimes with an oppo beside him, sometimes reliant for his safety on back-up that would be ‘down the road’. There was fatalism in all of those who did the work that the guys supposedly watching their backs would never react in time if they showed out. He wrestled with the suit, hitched it high and was able to get his fist into the poacher pouch. His hand locked on the microphone. He dragged it clear and dropped it. He felt it knock lightly against his knee, then his ankle. The bootless foot trod it into the slime.
The beam of the light was off him. He splashed, heaved, charged and thought each step the last he was capable of. The light raked the reed beds, then passed over the open ground and the hide. Nothing there. He didn’t see Badger, crouched, holding the Glock locked in both fists for a steady aim. Neither did he see Badger in the throwing position to arc smoke or gas in his direction and towards the boat. He saw only a scurrying pair of coots, then a drake stampeding clear.
He dropped the cable.
His feet tangled with it, then he was beyond it, one more step. The light swept off the open space and across where the hide was, tracked over the water and locked on him. Two shots were fired.
In the Province, it had been taken as read that a croppie who had shown out to PIRA would be captured, tortured for information on his work, call-signs and targets, then trussed, blindfolded and put in the back of a van. It was assumed that the last sound they’d hear would be the scrape of metal on metal when a handgun was cocked, and that death would be ‘a bit of a bloody relief’ after what had gone before. That had been drunk talk, subdued and slurred. No bastard would find the microphone, and the cable had gone down. He’d lost sight of it.
Where was Badger, and where was the fucking cavalry?
Two more shots fired. Could have been from a rifle or carbine, but not a pistol. The light lit him well. The bullets were aimed close enough to him for a spatter of the lagoon water to come up and into his face. The engine had power and the light surged closer. He heard the shouting more clearly.
He should keep still. The voice was shrill and he sensed that adrenalin surged. It would be the goon, the fucking officer, who sat in the chair and watched the birds. Wrong: watched one bird. He took a deep breath and flopped down into the water. It came over his stomach, then his shoulders. His head went under and the foul stuff was in his nose, mouth and ears. He tried to push himself away and the light was over him.
Foxy used his hands on the mud and pushed the cable aside. He felt the air forcing itself free of his chest. It was lodged in his throat and he knew he couldn’t hold it longer – and didn’t have to.
A hand clenched hard into the gillie suit. It had been pathetic: he would have been, when he reckoned he had dived, no more than a foot below the water’s surface, moving at the pace of a bloody great slug and kicking off a trail of mud. The hands had him, heaved him up, and his head was clear of the water. He heard laughter – not of humour but of contempt – and the breath spurted from his mouth. Then he cried out because he couldn’t replace it fast enough and panted.
The light blinded him. He couldn’t see who held him, who laughed at him. The laughter was killed, and the shout was of real anger – as if he had inflicted pain – the reprisal a blow to the side of his head. He didn’t know what had aroused the anger and stifled the laughter.
A rope was looped under his arms and across his chest, then drawn tight, with a jerk that squeezed more breath from his lungs. The pain pinched, and another hand had caught at the neck of the suit. The engine pitch rose and the boat gathered speed. He was dragged through the water. If his head had not been held up by the fist he would have been swamped and gone under.
He wondered where Badger was, what he had seen.
The engine noise softened. He felt his feet, one in the boot and one in the sock, scrape over the mud. The engine was cut and the big light went out but a torch was in his face and he squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t know how much time was needed, but thought it would be many hours.
The rope was used to pull Foxy over the quayside and onto the ground. He was on his stomach, but a boot went into his ribcage and pushed him over. He rolled on his side and came to rest on his back, like a fish hauled by anglers into a boat, then left to gasp on the deck. There was a jabber of voices around him and rifle barrels close to his face.
Many hours were needed, and Foxy didn’t know if he could give them, in Lubeck, enough time.
He sat in his office.
To those around him, who worked late in the treatment rooms at the university’s medical school, he was Steffen Weber. To himself he was Soheil, in Farsi, the ‘star’.
He did not need to ask. He had seen three patients that day and conducted lengthy examinations of their conditions. One he could help, with surgery, but two had conditions beyond his skill. He would deliver verdicts, positive and negative, the next afternoon. He had seen the patients, been in and out of the office and had gone past the desk his secretary used. She had left no note on his own desk to tell him: Your wife rang and requested you call her. She will be at home.
He had not telephoned her.
He could have; she could have; neither had.
What should he do? He did nothing. He did not call his home and tell her he was sorry for their argument, that he loved her, and their daughter, that nothing should be allowed to come between them. He did not ask her if she had had a good day, did not apologise for being late that evening. The consultant, a man revered in his circles, did not lift the telephone on his desk. She could have rung, spoken of her love for him and her gratitude for him working his fingers to the bone to buy their home, that kitchen, that life for her, and she might have said she accepted his judgement on what he could do and what he could not avoid. She, too, had done nothing.
Around him he felt a growing tension among his assistants, as if they believed him responsible for a situation in which an unidentified patient had obtained an appointment without the prior submission of X-rays and scans. It insulted them.
He could not respond.
As the hours of the day had gone by, his temper had shortened. The last of his patients – the forty-nine-year-old senior officer from the fire station in one of the Baltic coast towns north of the city – had been clearly beyond help, but the visit to the consultant, with his wife, would have marked a closure point from which the patient could prepare for death. The man should have been treated with courtesy, sympathy and understanding. The examination had been short, almost brusque, and the patient had been told that the consultant could offer a final verdict the next day but he should not hold his breath. He had noted that a nurse had stared into his face as the couple had left, showing rank hostility. The distrust proved widespread among his staff. The next target for a vicious response was a mild-mannered clerk from the fees office. There was a hesitant rap on his door. He waved the man in. ‘Yes?’
‘You have a patient visiting you tonight, Doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Facilities were originally booked for next Monday morning, but have now changed?’
‘How does this concern your office?’
‘The patient as yet has no name, address or-’
‘Correct.’
‘We have no record, Doctor, of how the account will be settled. We have no debit-card number, no banker’s order.’
‘No.’
‘Please, Doctor, how will the account be settled?’
‘I have no idea. We will wait and see. Now, fuck off out of my room.’
The clerk did so.
He saw Foxy on the quay and the guns pointing down at him. There were torches and a flashlight on Foxy, and the picture in the view-finder of the image-intensifier was pale green, washed out at the fringes and burned through on the focus point. Badger watched.
What could he have done? Could he have intervened? Might he have saved Foxy? He slapped it from his mind. Badger thought it indulgence to consider what he might, could, should have done. He had done nothing. It would have been dishonest to claim he’d liked Foxy, been fond of him, even that he’d acquired a degree of respect for him. He was not dishonest, never had been. To a fault, Badger spoke it like it was. He couldn’t have said it was anything other than gut-wrenching to see, through the lens’s soft focus, the man he’d shared the hide with – had slept alongside, had eaten, defecated and urinated next to, and from whom he’d been given the big confession of life with a woman who shagged around.
On the quay they were searching Foxy, had the suit pulled up, his legs, arms and chest exposed. Then hands seemed to go down into Foxy’s underpants and scrabble there for anything hidden. The boots came at him to pitch him over, and they did his backside, searched in there. He couldn’t have done anything because he had seen little of Foxy being taken – he’d been on the far edge of the clear ground, away from the hide, and had the bergens beside the small craft, with the air cylinder used to inflate it. He’d reckoned that he’d pull and Foxy would ride. He hadn’t seen the light come on, and had become aware of the crisis only after the shots were fired. Then he had scrambled, leopard crawl, and seen the scale of it. There had been a light on the boat and more lights along the raised bund line out to the right. They would have had automatic weapons, assault rifles, with an accurate killing range of four hundred yards, and he’d had a Glock with an effective hit chance of thirty yards. He had seen, with the image-intensifier, Foxy ditch the microphone and the cable.
Badger thought they were like kids up early on Christmas morning. The goon strutted around his prisoner, and the older woman had come out of the house.
He went to work. The cable came easily. He drew it out of the hide and pulled it up from the slight trench in which it was buried. The main length came sparkling from the lagoon water and made a little wave, which was sufficient to draw in the bird’s carcass. It was dead and he didn’t know how it had died.
The old woman came close to Foxy, who was near naked now, on his back and exposed. She gave a keening cry and lashed out with a foot. Badger saw Foxy’s head jolt. She managed one more kick before she was pulled off him. Two guards escorted her back to the house. He felt sick. He went on with the work. He coiled the cable, walked across the open space and down a shallow slope, hidden from the lagoon, and stowed it in the bergen that was in the inflatable. From the other, Badger took out his own Glock and the spare magazines, the gas and flash grenades. He didn’t know what he would do with them. If Foxy had had a Glock, grenades and the gas it was unlikely he’d have made it back from the mud spit.
When there was no more to be done, he sat down. With the image-intensifier, he had a poor view of the quay, the buildings along it, the lights and the cluster of men standing over the stretched-out shape. He reflected on the scale of the catastrophe. A word kept coming into his mind: deniable. He saw a bruised face, bloodied, one or both eyes closed, the broken look of a man without hope, and a voice in monotone denounced a mission of espionage. Hardly, not at all, deniable. Time to tell the news.
He had the communications, made the link, said it like it was. Didn’t expect a coherent answer from Alpha Juliet and didn’t get one. Silence hung. After a few seconds he thought the connection had already been open too long.
Her voice, strained: what did he intend to do?
Badger said, ‘Hang around, while I have darkness cover. See what happens, what shows. Not come out till I have to.’
They would be on stand-by for an extraction, but on their side of the border. The shit was in the fan, she told him grimly – unnecessarily.
‘Plenty of it,’ Badger said, and cut the link.
They read their stuff.
When the door of the ready-room opened, the co-pilot, Tristram, did not look up from the Old Testament. Dwayne allowed his puzzle book to drop into his lap and chewed his pencil stub. The side gunner, Federico, was deep in Aerospace amp; Engineering magazine, but shifted his feet without taking his eyes off the pages to allow the pilot to go to the door where a communications technician handed him the scrambled receiver-transmitter.
When he came back in, no more than a minute later, Federico again swung his legs to give the pilot, Eddie, space to pass. Dwayne and Tristram did not look up but waited.
The pilot said, ‘We can go at any time from now. If we go it’ll be into a hostile environment and close up against the border. There are two guys up there and right now it’s a bad time for them. It’ll be us that goes in for extraction – if that’s the call – and the others do top cover. It won’t be a night for sleeping.’
The pilot, his side-kick and the gunners looked up from their reading matter and sat taller in their chairs. They peered through the open window and could see the helicopters, floodlit, on the apron, fuelled and armed.
The old woman, the mother of the Engineer’s wife, had shown them the way. When Foxy was dragged off the quayside, kicks were aimed at him. He was cursed and spat at.
All his senses reacted. He could feel pain from the kicks and the wetness of spit. He could smell the sweat on their bodies and the food they had eaten on their breath, and he could hear them. Not easy to understand because they used the vernacular of country people from the south, and he thought they’d have been recruited from farms and villages, not a major town. He was dragged. They had stripped the gillie suit off him and he was left with his underpants, socks and his one boot. The rope was still below his armpits and across his chest, burning the skin. He was on his back and more of the flesh was stripped raw on his buttocks and the back of his thighs. He reckoned the heel without the boot bled from the sharp stones embedded in the ground. They thought he was a spy. They didn’t know if he was alone. Some said he was because no attempt had been made to rescue him or to shoot at them as the boat had closed on him – they argued about it. He could measure the excitement of those who had taken him. Was he American, British, or a pale-skinned Iraqi – a Sunni bastard from Baghdad or a Kurd from the north? That was also an area of debate. The goon, Mansoor, strutted beside him. Foxy was bumped along the dirt track away from the house and he saw the old crow woman, in her black, framed in the window, watching. His eyes met hers and he read hatred. He felt a growing numbness to the pain.
It wouldn’t last. He had seen men who had been taken.
The rope was tight on his chest and seared him. He had seen men taken in the Province, had stayed on in the hide and used his encrypted communications to guide in the arrest team. He had had image-intensifiers if it was dark and early on a winter’s morning, or binoculars if it was summer and already dawn. All of those taken had been experienced men, well practised in the techniques of resistance. All would have regained composure within a half-minute of the door being flattened, the kids starting to bawl, the dog kicked into the kitchen by troops and the woman scratching at the faces under the helmets. All – by the time they were brought out of the door into the fresh air, frosted or already warm – were calm and their composure came from the knowledge that they might endure a kicking or a slapping, but not much worse, then go into the cages at the Maze and mark time until freedom came. He had not seen one Provo plead and weep – they’d had no cause to: they were not about to be killed or to undergo severe torture. They might have done at the start, in the old days when the war was coming up to speed and when ‘robust methods’ had brought PIRA to its knees, but a halt had been called long before Foxy’s time. And he had watched once from a distant ditch, in the Somerset hills west of Taunton, the Quantocks, when an animal-rights activist had been taken from a cottage at dawn: he had burned a laboratory to the ground and driven the scientists working there close to suicide, but he had seemed to think little of going into custody. He had not been about to go through any hoop, and had known it.
It would be the goon’s finest hour. What every security man dreamed of.
Foxy’s head bobbed, rolled, and the back of his skull found stones to bounce off; some of the chips were razor-edged and slashed him. He could be thankful that the pain, for now, was numbed. He had done time with the interrogation unit at the Basra base. He had seen Iraqis brought in from the cells of the Joint Forward Intelligence Team – a separate camp within a camp, not answerable to local commanders: those men had known fear, and had cowered. They had had the scars to show what had been done to them. Foxy had sat at bare tables alongside the men and women who organised the inflicting of pain. He had been opposite prisoners who shivered and mumbled answers that he had had to strain to hear, then dutifully translated. It could, of course, be justified. The men under interrogation knew the inner secrets of the enemy’s principal campaign weapon: the improvised explosive device. They might know who made them, who trafficked them, who laid them, and their answers could – a big word, could, often used by the team – save the life of a nineteen-year-old rifleman, a teenage driver’s limb, or a lance corporal’s sight. People said, from far away in the safety of London, that torture did not provide truth. Foxy would have said they were wrong. He would have claimed that, delivered as an art form and from manuals, it made a man cough. He was not given the freedom of the team’s mess, but they couldn’t operate without his language skills so he had been tolerated, given an occasional beer and told that information extracted and translated had led to the finding and defusing of a weapon, or a raid on a safe-house, or the interception of a courier.
He knew that pain worked miracles.
So Foxy understood what was coming to him. When his head twisted, lolled, he could see the barracks, and the light shone down from the street-lamp and fell on the door. The rope went loose and the goon called for a rag to be brought. A guard ran inside. Foxy kept his eyes closed. There were Escape and Evasion people at the base and they said eye contact was bad, that being a sack of potatoes was best. They did the SERE courses, and talked of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. Few people listened closely because the lectures seemed to add to a nightmare – as they had when men talked in the canteens about what to do if PIRA took them.
Foxy’s head was lifted and a hand tried to get into his hair for grip but could not, so grasped his ear, lifted, and the cloth covered his eyes. It was yanked tight and the knot hurt at the back. His ear was let go and his head hit the dirt. Then the rope bit again under his arms and he was dragged some more.
They went onto concrete. He rocked on a step after the top of his head had cannoned into the raised bit – that provoked laughter. There were no more kicks, and he thought that already he was less cause for amusement. There was a fucking cat that lived two doors down from his home, and it liked to come into his garden, pull down songbirds and disable them. Then it would walk away, interest waned… He was pulled down a corridor, then to the left. A door was unlocked. Predictable that they’d have a lock-up: for a criminal, a miscreant on a discipline charge or a foreign-born agent who was deniable.
He lay on the floor and the concrete was cool. He waited for the pain to start, and wondered how long, in Lubeck, they would need him to resist, and how long he could last. A match was scraped and he smelt cigarette smoke. It came close to him, closer, past his head and over his chest. The agony was on his stomach as the lit cigarette touched. Foxy screamed.
‘He’s switched the damn thing off,’ she said.
‘Well, he would, miss,’ Corky said.
It was the fourth time she had tried, the fourth time she had been answered by a crackle of static. The weight lay on her shoulders. She would carry the glory of success and bear the burden of failure. It was a problem with these wretched deniables that the responsibilities were not shared. There was much that Abigail Jones now regretted. She had agreed that he should stay in place, watch and learn, and not come out. Not shared, because there was no bank of bureaucrats in an open-plan office who all owned a piece of the operation. She had it on her own. She could talk only with her bodyguards – not her mentors or her think-tank: none of them had a degree from Warwick in politics, economics and modern history, or Six’s training on grappling with the ‘consequences of actions’ or ‘cutting and running on the Iran-Iraq border’. Had the problem concerned single-parent fatherhood from a distance, Hamfist might have contributed, and Corky if it had been regeneration of Provo heartlands (West Belfast). Shagger was big on the economics of hill farming, and Harding on trailer-park life.
It had been sharp of Corky, close to insolence.
She was curt, as if her control was ebbing: ‘What does that mean, exactly what?’
They could play dumb, be on the edge. ‘He would switch off, wouldn’t he, miss?’
‘Why? It’s hardly professional.’
They had a fire in the scorched oil drum, and there was enough timber from the buildings to keep it burning. They were sitting around it, and she reckoned that the crowd would be back at the gate in the morning, and that the bribe chucked at the sheikh hadn’t a long life. There was a grunt, almost derision, and she reckoned it was Shagger’s. Was any of it professional? Any of it?
She said, ‘It’s unprofessional to switch off communications. Is that an area of debate?’
Hamfist was quiet, reflective: ‘His partner’s been taken, miss, and if he’d left the radio on, the chance is you’d have ordered him out.’
Shagger had a good voice, might have been to the standard a choir wanted: ‘He’ll go when there’s nothing else he can do. Won’t be before he has to. He’d think, miss, the most unprofessional thing he could do is to turn his back on a mate, go before it’s time.’
From Hamfist: ‘He’d have to live with it the rest of his days. And it would track him every hour of every night.’
She snapped, with bitterness: ‘But there’s nothing he can do.’
From Harding: ‘It’s like keeping a vigil, and it’s what a man owes to another. First light, ma’am, he’ll come. Forget about Badger, think about Foxy. Badger’ll be good, but Foxy’ll have it bad. How much time is needed in that German town? How much is that time going to cost him? The time Foxy buys’ll come expensive. You with me, ma’am?’
She felt small, shrunken. They’d swamped her irritation at a radio being switched off and turned her attention, four-square, to the man with the trimmed moustache and the clipped voice, who was beyond reach and in need of prayers. The flames played on her face, and she shuddered.