A Deniable Death

Chapter 17

He had sent the message, then, again, switched off the kit. He had no wish to be burdened with an inquest.

He went into the water. The gillie suit billowed out and the cool settled on his legs and stomach. He had done what he hoped was sufficient to protect the Glock and the four magazines he had taken from the bergens, and had sealed them in the plastic bags that the Meals-Ready-To-Eat had been packaged in. The gas grenades and smoke were in other bags and all were knotted tight. The moon did not now have far to fall and sent a spear of light across the lagoon. There was a place, near the far quay, where it merged with another, duller, strip. The silver and lustreless gold met and sliced through each other, near to the quay and about midway between the house and the barracks. The moonlight was stronger and uninterrupted, but the high lamp’s was broken by the shadow, always spiralling, of the shape suspended from a rope.

Badger left behind him, on the far side of the clear ground, the bergens and the craft, ready and inflated.

He went into the water beside the wrecked carcass of the bird; the rats had left nothing worth returning for. He waded the first few paces and was soon up to his chest in water, the weapons, ammunition and grenades under the surface and deep in the suit’s poachers’ pouches. He had tried to evaluate what was ahead of him. Wasted effort. It mattered little. There might be a company of infantry, equipped with modern gear, all fed, watered, rested and alert, dug in with slit trenches and sandbagged sangars between the quay and the high lamp from which Foxy was suspended. He was on the move because he was obligated. It was no big decision for him. To retire, do nothing, to turn his back on Foxy – rotating in the light breeze from the rope – he didn’t consider it.

He came to the mud spit, lay on his stomach and used his elbows and knees to propel himself over the open ground, past the small mess of leaves, branches and dirt that he had used as the hiding place for the microphone. He allowed himself a brief thought that it had been well done. The arrival of the bird, the beautiful leggy creature that had so entranced the goon officer, had probably fucked them. If the goon’s attention had not been on it, where he must have seen something – a flash of light off the gear or a kink in the cable – they would have been out, clear, and gone… He went down again into the water. Ducks came from the dark to his left, were spooked by him and stampeded across the water, struggling for lift-off. The noise seemed loud enough to rouse the dead. But they were up, away, the ripples subsided, and the dented silver and old gold lines of the reflections calmed.

The bed of the lagoon seemed firmer. It might have been an old waterway, and the bottom was settled, weathered down. While he was within his depth he made good progress. Badger had no idea whether he would be able to wade or have to swim. The natural light was good and he could see well. Of course, he could also be seen. He moved steadily and left a wake behind him.

Badger would have appeared, had he been seen while he waded or swam, as detritus that floated on gentle currents. He kept away from the lines of light thrown by the moon and the lamp. Through the scrim netting of the headpiece he looked hard for the guards, their positions, their readiness. One was near the house, close to the front entrance, and illuminated by the security lights; in his view was the short pier to which the dinghy was tied. Another was sitting on a plastic chair by the entrance to the barracks, rigid and upright. His head was still, as if in shock, and he was heavy-built. Badger thought he was the one who had kicked Foxy’s head as they’d pulled him across the dirt. He hadn’t seen the goon emerge from the building. Another guard was further to the right from the barracks, close to the raised bund line that bordered the lagoon.

Police lectures on surveillance in siege situations emphasised that the numbers of hostage-takers must be logged. Why? Because the Germans had screwed up big during the Munich Olympics, and a lesson learned from mistakes of thirty-nine years before were still valid. The point was that German police on the walkway in front of the Israeli team house in the athletes’ village had seen the Palestinians in doorways and windows, and politicians had gone inside the house, but no proper count had been made of how many guys were there with their assault rifles. The rescue plan was based on the premise that there were four armed men – but when the helicopters brought the athletes and their Arab captors to the military airbase where the shoot-out would happen it was realised that there weren’t four targets to neutralise but eight. A recipe for a screw-up. Badger had counted three guards outside, which meant there were five more inside and the goon. Important. Strategies played in his mind… The first dawn light would come soon.

An otter swam alongside him – ten or a dozen feet away – for a half-minute and showed no fear of him, but then dived and he saw it once more, fifty or sixty yards away. After it dived the second time he didn’t see it again. Coots skirted him but didn’t bluster away. It was good that he could walk on the bottom… Badger imagined there had been trade through here a century before, and a crossing point at the frontier for pilgrims and traders, smugglers and traffickers. That was why the quay had been built, but then the waterline would have been a yard higher, lapping near the top of the structure.

The light on the water was brighter, the silver and gold mixed. He moved more slowly. He now tested each step so that he didn’t slip and splash. If the level was up to his lower chest, he crouched in the water and only his headgear would have been visible. He could see Foxy clearly. The free leg was bent at the knee, askew at the hip and seemed to wobble, as if with spasms of life, and the blood had dried on the wounds.

It was what he might have called – like the retrieval of the microphone and the cable – the ‘rules of the trade’. It was not about emotion. He would never have said he was ‘fond’ of the old bastard, that he had enjoyed Foxy’s company.

He went under. No warning. Took a step and plunged. The water was in his nose, his throat and his ears. He couldn’t thrash, daren’t. Darkness was around him and the cool of the water was on his face. He went down further, the weight of the suit dragging him. Pain built in his chest, and he tried to come up.

There was light. He gasped and trod water. None of the guards had moved or shouted… Foxy turned on the rope.

‘When, miss?’

‘When we have some light,’ Abigail Jones answered Shagger.

It was the third time he had asked the question and been rewarded with the same answer. It was with increasing concern that Harding, Hamfist, Corky and he had watched the crowd of young men growing at the gate. Five minutes before, Corky had revved up the lead Pajero and gone onto full beam; the headlights had lit the crowd. It was predetermined that Corky would drive the front vehicle, Hamfist the second. Both had plotted how they would get through because there seemed to be junk – wood pallets, an old refrigerator, some rusted oil drums – blocking in the road.

‘Thank you, miss. We’re ready when you want it.’

‘Nice to know,’ she said evenly. Brutally, they had no more cash to shell out. They didn’t have a hundred dollars between them, and might have needed a thousand to get shot of the place. ‘Not yet, but soon.’

She swivelled, turned away. She thought it was too early. Here, they were boxed in but had the freedom to go for a break-out, could drive hard and straight. To hell with what they hit – a barricade or a host of shouting men – but if they were too early at the extraction point they would be stuck on a raised road with nowhere to go except back because in front was the border.

A bleep on the machine in her inside pocket. It was repeated. She hauled up her robe, flashing ankles, knees and thighs, had a hand in the pocket and the machine out. More bleeps and she was all thumbs and almost cut the connection. The screen showed the message: Gone forward to get Foxy, then pushing for home. Nothing else. She had gone back to ‘Transmit’, had powered in the necessary codes that did the scrambling and been rewarded with the ongoing whine that said the recipient of her call had switched off. She had stood in the darkness and howled in frustration – like a hyena or a wolf. Was she any more of a lunatic for howling than her Jones Boys? Unlikely. They’d have understood. They wore their T-shirts, with the band’s logo, and were a brotherhood. They’d have known why Badger had sent the message, then refused to accept any call that might query it. They’d be rooting for him. And Abigail? There had been a depth in the eyes, a sort of abyss and going far… She said she hoped they would go, come hell or high water, in an hour, and it would be a few minutes before dawn. Shagger left her. She would be under the gun and care of Corky while he went back to the Pajeros to tell Harding and Hamfist that they wouldn’t move for at least an hour.

If they made it out – if – they would disperse that evening, dawn the next morning at the latest. She doubted that ever in her life again would she recapture moments such as being with Badger; fighting off the marsh people at the oil-exploration compound; negotiating with the sheikh; running agents across a frontier, knowing them to be condemned by their greed; and seeing the two figures move off towards a hostile frontier; to have been responsible and to have waited too long outside the Golden Hour for their return. It wouldn’t happen again. There would be a junior at Basra, sent down from Baghdad, who would collect the gear and spill out the advances on salaries for spending money. Another guy would be there from the security outfit, and the Jones Boys’ T-shirts would go into a bin as first stop on a journey to the incinerator. Then they’d split. She had lived with them for many months, most of a year, and there would be a brisk, embarrassed handshake, a little formal. Then she’d be gone. It didn’t matter if it were with Badger and Foxy, or if she was alone. They’d be on another flight to Qatar and then a shuttle to the Gulf. Hamfist would go to his room with six-packs and drink himself insensible in private. Corky would shop for rubbish and send parcels, costing a fortune in postal charges, to the woman in Colchester with the eleven-year-old son and the woman in Darlington with the five-year-old daughter. Shagger would walk on the beach and look at the sea, ring his bank to check out what he was worth, eat fast food and spend as little as he could. Harding would be in a six-star hotel, in a room with the curtains drawn against the sun. He would sit on the carpet in a corner and shiver. They did not, any of them, do ethics; they did the job. She would miss them, would never fill the hole they’d leave for her. In common, they were all rootless, playing at soldiers, refusing the advance of age. They were counterfeit… She loved all of them.

Shagger was back. ‘All done, miss.’

‘In an hour go for a broke, and find what we can.’

‘Whatever you say, miss.’

‘It’s a shit world, Shagger.’

‘Same as before, miss. Whatever you say.’

They would have to fight their way out to get to the extraction point. She made a further call, had the connection and voiced fears.

They sat, fully dressed, on the bed.

The Engineer said, ‘He seemed an honest man.’

His wife said, ‘A decent man.’

‘A man to be trusted.’

‘Without arrogance. He did not treat us merely as customers.’

‘I was rude to him and will apologise. Tomorrow will be the start of the future, and we may believe again.’

‘How will we sleep, waiting for a verdict?’

‘We are in God’s hands.’

‘Always… It is a long night.’ A smile, rueful and almost brave. ‘For the children it is tomorrow and soon, for them, it will be the time we go to see him, to be told.’

‘You should eat.’

The man from the embassy had brought them back to the hotel in Lindenstrasse, near to the Hauptbahnhof. He had seen them to their room. His eyes had roved over the interior and he’d glanced dismissively at their luggage, at what she had unpacked. Then he had gone to the window, flicked back the curtains, examined the vista and drawn the curtains again. He had remarked that they should not stand there with a light on behind them and look out. The Engineer’s wife knew nothing of security matters: Why? she asked. He had rolled his eyes at the Engineer, as if he expected him to educate his wife. They should not leave the hotel during the night, should not be out of the room unless a matter of urgency demanded it: a fire alarm ringing. They should not answer the telephone or make any calls. Then he had left them. He would have been, the Engineer believed, from VEVAK, a man used to exercising authority. Most would have been fearful of him. The Engineer dealt with such men most weeks of his working year. He was called the Kalashnikov, the Nobel, and doubted that a bureaucrat from VEVAK had ever been so praised.

He said, ‘I will make a proposition, Naghmeh, if you will listen to it.’

‘We will go home,’ she said. ‘We will finish this and go home.’

‘You will not listen – not now, not ever?’

‘If the physician, tomorrow, tells us he is not a miracle worker, we start for home in the afternoon. Should he be blessed with the skills, we will stay for the operation. I will convalesce, and we will go home the first day he allows me to travel. I will hear nothing else.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘We will go home, whatever time is left to me. To our children, our family, our work.’

‘Yes.’

‘I will not listen to any proposition other than that I can go home tomorrow or when it is permitted.’

A church clock chimed, the sound muffled by the double glazing of the window and the drawn curtain. He was sure he could have picked up the telephone and in his halting English, asked the reception desk to patch him through to the American consulate, likely to be in Hamburg, or the British. He could have made his pitch… but he lacked the courage, facing her across the bed, to make the proposition. He smoothed the bed, and saw her wince. He switched off the bedside light, lay back on the bed and held her.

Neither would sleep that night.

He was at the side of the quay.

It had been hard not to splutter and cough up water. The rope sang, almost a moan, as it twisted under the strain of the weight.

The dousing under the water and the struggle to regain the surface had cleared Badger’s head, purging the exhaustion. He was alive to what he would do. First, he had moved, slow steps, on the bed of the channel, which was littered with stones, broken concrete and ironwork, to the outer end of the pier. He had ducked his head, keeping his mouth and nostrils above the water, and had loosened the knot that held the dinghy to a prop supporting the pier’s planks. He had laid the bag with the Glock and the magazines on the single wood seat. He had worked his way along the length of the pier, under it, then had been against the side wall, made of rotting timbers and concrete blocks. He had allowed himself brief glimpses over the edge, had raised his head high enough to catch snapshots. The three guards hadn’t moved. Foxy hung from the lamp-post and turned in the slight breeze. He did not see the goon or any more guns.

Ahead, there was silence. Behind him, he heard the night sounds of the birds, their splashes in the water, and the incessant frogs’ croak. He coiled himself. His hands went down into the pouches and took out the plastic bags. He prayed that the water had not saturated the grenades.

A post held the timbers in place and had been sawn off some inches above the top of the quay. The high lamp left a small space of dense shadow beside the post. He stacked them there: the grenades and the short-blade knife. He coiled himself tighter, his hands on the top of the quay. He would be fifteen or twenty feet from where Foxy hung, forty-five or fifty from the guard who sat by the door into the barracks. That would be the closest weapon to him, and there were two others within two hundred feet that had a killing range of more than a thousand feet. Behind the entrance to the barracks men would have rifles close by. Badger recalled what military people had told him. On the Brecon mountains, in Wales, he had been with paratroops; in the heather, gorse and bracken of Woodbury Common, south Devon, he had been with marine commandos. He had done surveillance on them to challenge his own skills. He had won their respect and they had talked to him late at night in their bivouacs. They were attack troops and he was a croppie, a voyeur, who should not get involved. The message paras and marines preached – rare for them to agree on something – was that an assault would always achieve short-term aims if launched at ruthless speed, with the devastating factor of surprise. It had hardly seemed appropriate to a guy who made his living by moving with a stealth that did not disturb wild creatures attuned to danger.

‘What are you?’ Badger murmured. ‘Foxy, you’re a stupid bastard.’

He loosed the spring. He had bent his knees, straightened them and, in the same movement, had heaved himself up with his arms. His knees landed hard on the quay. Water cascaded off him, and more sloshed in his boots. He tried to run fast, straight, but his movement would have been that of a shambling bear and he was huge and wide-bodied in the gillie suit. He threw the first of the grenades, the ‘flash and bang’, which did the stun job, and saw it fly forward as the guard fell back in his tilted chair, then pitched sideways. He had dropped his weapon. There was bright light, white, and with it came the deafening noise that ripped through his headpiece, under the scrim. He reached the door, and the guard was on his side, clutching his head. Badger threw two more flash-and-bangs into the hallway, and followed them with two gas ones. If they’d done their job they would have deafened, blinded, induced vomiting and put up a smokescreen that men would hardly want to charge through. Another, gas, went towards the guard who had sat close to the house. He hurled two more flash-and-bangs in the direction of the man beyond the barracks towards the elevated bund line. He himself had some protection from the scrim that dripped water and covered his face. Enough? He didn’t know – would find out soon.

He kicked the weapon away from the guard at his feet, who was trembling, and heard volleys of screaming – in terror – from inside the barracks. He turned his back and ran – shambled – towards the lamp.

‘You know what you are, Foxy? I’ll tell you. An idiot.’

The hands hung a foot, or a foot and a half, off the ground, the head level with Badger’s waist. Foxy was a bigger man than himself. Not even on tiptoe could Badger reach the rope knotted to Foxy’s ankle. Nothing to step on so he jumped. He caught the leg. He had the knife in his hand and sawed hard at the rope.

He didn’t know how long he had – seconds, not minutes. The gas inside the barracks would be good, but the one he had thrown towards the guard by the house would drift and thin, and the blindness from the flash would be short-lived. Seconds left, and he had no free hand to throw more grenades. He saw the rope fray.

There was shouting – might have been the goon, the officer, or one of the older guards.

They fell. He was on top of Foxy, and Foxy’s body took the weight of his fall, but the wind went from his lungs and he had to gasp. ‘Bloody idiot, you are. Nothing else.’ Almost slapped Foxy’s face. Badger tossed the last grenades: a smoke one towards the barracks, one flash-and-bang in the direction of the house and the other towards the last guard who had been outside. He hoisted Foxy onto his shoulder in the fireman’s lift and staggered.

Badger couldn’t run. He managed a crabbed trot, but not in the straight line that would have gone direct to the pier.

It seemed to him that he went slowly, and his back was exposed. He didn’t weave because he sought to break a rifleman’s aim but because of the weight of the man – the idiot. And Foxy was a stupid bastard. He expected to hear the drawl put him down, counter him with contempt, but heard only the shouting behind. He went down the pier.

He dumped Foxy. He dropped his shoulder and let Foxy fall into the dinghy. The impact shook the craft and water splashed into it as it rolled. He pushed it away from the pier and went into the water, which was at his waist, reached across, snatched the Glock that was under Foxy’s back and pulled it out. He had the twine at the front end of the dinghy in his hand and struck out, best foot forward. He couldn’t have said how long it was till he was beyond the flood of light from the high lamp, when the first shots were fired at him, not aimed but a wild volley on automatic. Then he was out of his depth and used the side of the dinghy to support himself, kicking with his legs and paddling with his hand.

‘A fine bloody mess you’ve put us into, Foxy. Idiot.’

There were more shots and two came near. Water spouted in front of the dinghy. Badger groped behind him, didn’t turn. He found Foxy’s hand, took hold of it, squeezed the Glock into the palm and told Foxy he could help. He could either shoot back or he could use his hands to propel them. They had reached a fair speed now, and there must have been a suspicion, in Badger’s mind, of hope. He thought his aim would take them close to the mud spit where the bird had been and across or around it. Then they’d hit the shallow water and wade through it, get over the open ground and reach the inflatable and the bergens, andThat was a lifetime ahead. There were no shots from behind him in the dinghy, but that didn’t bother Badger and he thought Foxy would have enough nous, experience, to shoot when required to.

He knew it would not be long before organisation was regained behind him. He stamped his feet to get a better grip but the water was up to his chest and the bed below him was mud.

‘It’ll be bad, bloody, Foxy, when they get it together. How did you get me into this? Don’t sulk on me.’

He could see the spit, and it wouldn’t be long before they were organised.

With boots, fists and the butt of his rifle, Mansoor drove his Basij peasants out of the barracks and onto the quay.

It mocked him. He was an officer of the al-Quds Brigade, a veteran of undercover operations in occupied Iraq. He had been wounded in the service of the Islamic Republic and bore the scars of it. Neither his rank nor his experience could alter the enormity of what he saw. It laughed at him. It was a length of rope with untidily cut strands that hung from the lamp-post. It was well lit and the wind stirred it a metre above his head. There was more than a slashed rope to mock him. The pier, away to the side where the dinghy should have been moored, jeered at him, too.

Lashing furiously around him, Mansoor created a fear of himself that was greater than the fear brought by the grenades. He beat his authority into them, and broke off only once. He had gone into the communications room, made the link, sucked in the air to give himself courage and reported that a prisoner had escaped, that his barracks was under attack from a special-forces unit that had now retreated towards the Iraqi frontier. He and his men had beaten off the assault but the prisoner, believed a casualty, had been taken. He had cut the link and gone back outside. His eyes wept and his hearing was damaged, but the scale of the catastrophe inflicted on him ensured that Mansoor regained control. It could not have been otherwise: if he sank into a corner and shivered, he would be hanged as a traitor.

He punched hard, kicked hard, hit his men hard with the rifle butt. His voice was hoarse from bellowing, and he rasped instructions.

The jeep had come forward and he had to swing the wheel because the driver cowered from him. When the vehicle faced out into the lagoon, and the headlights were on full beam, he could see the low outline of the dinghy and a slight wake drifting from it. The outline was visible on the extreme edge of the light thrown by the vehicle.

The shooting was ragged. The Basij, as Mansoor knew, could not have hit a factory door with rifle fire at a hundred paces. There were the Austrian-made Steyr sniper rifles, which had been purchased by the IRGC, and the copy of the Chinese long-range weapon that was in turn a copy of the Russian Dragunov – the Iranian military called it the Nakhjir – but Mansoor had no marksman’s weapon in the small armoury. He had only the short-range assault rifles. They emptied a magazine each in the direction of the dinghy. He snatched at one, took it from a guard. He had seen how the resistance inside Iraq fired when at the edge of accuracy. He wedged himself against the lamp-post. There was no optical aid to the rifle sight, only the forward needle and the rear V for him to aim through. He did a calculation and set the sight’s range at two hundred metres. Squinting, Mansoor could see the dinghy. He thought a naked arm was draped over the side and made furrows in the water, adding to the wake, but he couldn’t see the man who propelled it away.

He twisted the lever, went from automatic fire to single shots. It would have been a difficult shot with a Steyr or a Nakhjir; with an assault rifle it would be worse than difficult.

He had not fired seriously on a range, watched by an expert instructor, since before he had been sent to Iraq. He struggled to remember old lessons of grip and posture, the settling of weight. His breathing slowed, and he began to squeeze the trigger bar. Old memories died hard. He could recapture, with extreme concentration, everything he had been taught on the range used by the al-Quds elite outside Ahvaz… but Mansoor was no longer a member of that elite, the special forces. His body was damaged, he had not slept and his temper was torn.

Single shots, three.

The first was short, the second wide – no more than two metres wide and two metres short – and the target was a dark, low, hazed shape. He had to squint to see it with any clarity. He believed that the third shot bucked the shape of the dinghy and that it reared a little.

More orders, more blows and kicks. He put his men into the two jeeps. Their lights speared off past the barracks as they headed down the track towards the elevated path of the bund line flanking the lagoon. He reckoned he had scored a hit, that the jeeps would take him past their flight line, that he would block them…

It was the town that had shaped Len Gibbons, made him the man he was – not the man the neighbours saw on a weekend morning when they walked their dogs, pushed prams or promenaded on the cul-de-sac off the railway line between Motspur Park and Epsom.

He sat in his pension room, on Alfstrasse, with the lights off and the curtains open. He had worked the small easy chair close to the window. The drunks had dispersed and the late-evening stallholders had cleared up and gone. He had used this lodging house on recommendation from a secretary in Bonn when he had travelled north to the town, on the business of Antelope, and had usually been in this room, with the same pictures hung over new but similar wallpaper, the same chest and wardrobe, but a more modern chair. He would have looked out over the same view, the same towers on the great church.

To the neighbours in the cul-de-sac – all of whom knew Catherine well and expected to speak to her if she was out at the front, gardening, or unloading the ecobags she took to the supermarket – he would have seemed a remote sort of man, distant, with little conversation, but harmless. He might have been washing an unspectacular Japanese car, using an electric-powered mower on the small patch of grass beside the path, or retouching the paintwork. He passed the time of day with them, and would smile at their dogs or their children. His conversation would range over the state of the weather, the reliability of the trains into London, and the price of fuel… What did he do? They were accountants, salesmen, teachers, hospital staff, widows who stayed at home and retail workers. Him? Some dreary job in London. It was never quite explained whether that meant Work and Pensions or Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but that was enough to satisfy them, and reason for him to be away on an early train on Monday and back late on Friday. Most would have thought it ‘sad’ that ‘old Gibbons’ slaved away at the expense of leisure and entertainment, and most would have felt sympathy for Catherine who existed alongside such a dull man with so limited a horizon. His suits were grey, unremarkable and bought from a chain, and his ties were those given him at Christmas. What did they know, the neighbours and the casual friends of his wife? They knew nothing. Neither did the mass of those going to work each day in the Towers have a more comprehensive profile of him. Some had made hobbies of archaeology or bell-ringing or whist, or did convoluted jigsaw puzzles, and thought themselves fulfilled. Len Gibbons successfully lived a local lie. Well hidden from view, there was a restless energy in him that a few recognised and some utilised. Now it contemplated, without qualm, the killing of an enemy. The Schlutup Fuck-up, in this town, had marked, moulded and fashioned him: he was a man in the shadows, but possessed of a ruthless determination.

He sat in the chair, listened to the great clocks of Lubeck. He did not think of the prevailing weather, or commuter train timetables, the cost of petrol, or holidays. He did not think of how Catherine would be that evening or whether his son and daughter prospered at their different colleges. He considered, instead, all that had been done to guarantee the death of a man. He thought enough was in place.

Had they known the work of Len Gibbons, his neighbours might have wondered if conscience afflicted him, if that night – in the certain knowledge of what would happen later in the morning, at his own hand, removed but culpable – he would find sleep hard to come by. The neighbours did not know the man living at the mock-Tudor semi-detached home in a safe corner of suburban South London. Any thought of conscience had been gouged out of him when he had worked in this town, listened to the chimes and handled Antelope. No second thoughts, hesitation. What mattered was not the snuffing out of a life but the effectiveness of his work, and the satisfaction that would come from a job well done. There had been brave words in the damp heap overlooking a Scottish sea loch, but they had been for the benefit of the outsiders. The big picture was wiped, and the little picture was paramount: it showed a man, with his wife, coming across a pavement on the campus of the university’s medical school, and another man closed on him. It was the limit of the picture, and he was not troubled by it. He could have slept had he cared to. The Marienkirche was a principal church in Lubeck, rebuilt with extraordinary dedication and skill after the war. The great bells, shattered and lit by a single candle, that had plummeted down from the spires, were off the main body of the nave. They had been there when he had come to Lubeck thirty years before and they would still be there. They were supposed to grip the visitor by the throat and condemn the atrocity of violence. Gibbons didn’t care what would happen later that morning. Neither would the crews of the Wellington and Stirling bombers – who had made the firestorm, brought down the bells and filled mass graves – have been troubled.

He sat alone and watched the skyline – and his phone, with the encryption software, bleeped. Not Sarah – asleep, no doubt, on a fold-away bed – but the Cousin. He glanced at the little screen: something about exfiltration in hand. He cleared it. Infiltration and exfiltration were history. The job had moved on. For a moment, Gibbons tried to remember the faces of the two men, but could not and gave up: they were from the past, not the present, and did not affect the future.

He smiled to himself. He had decided where he would be in the morning, when the strike went home.

Low voices alerted him. He didn’t understand the speech, but thought it was Russian.

There was a light knock on the door. He came off the bed, slipped on his trousers, went to the door and opened it. The synagogue’s caretaker shuffled away. Framed in the doorway, a man gave a warm smile and had a large old leather bag hanging from his shoulder. A hand was offered. He took it. He had never met the man, and offered a formal greeting that betrayed nothing.

The man spoke in their own tongue, used the word that in their language meant ‘engineer’ and smiled again. He had a light, tuneful voice.

The transport would be outside at seven that morning, in four hours. Gabbi nodded. There would be the two of them, for the wheels and the hit – not five, not ten or twenty-five. A sneer curled the man’s lip: it told Gabbi that this one – from Berlin Station – had had no dealings with the unit in the Dubai business. He was shown a photograph, taken in poor light, and it was explained that the woman was the Engineer’s wife. The shirt-sleeved man was the neuro-consultant. In the foreground of the picture there was a car with a rear door open. He was told the registration number and make, that only one security man was used for the escort. He looked hard at the photograph and saw the face, eyes, the shape of the spectacles, the cut of the hair and the clothing, and memorised it. His hand never touched the photograph, and when the man’s fingers held it, Gabbi made out the fine texture of the latex gloves he wore. It was assumed that the entry of the Engineer, his back to the street, would be a difficult interception, but when he left, it would be an easier shot, into the face and stomach. Then the man shrugged, as if he had realised he should not presume to lecture an expert in techniques. On the likely schedule, he would be on the return sailing of the ferry in late morning. He had faith in the arrangements woven around him and did not query them.

Gabbi was asked if he was comfortable. He said he was. Did he need to know more about the target, why the target was identified? He did not. Was he satisfied with the arrangements in place? He was.

Anything he needed would be brought to him. Gabbi said he had found a book of drawings by a girl who had been a witness inside the camp at Theresienstadt and had survived. He said he had had family there who had not lived. He did not say it was his wife’s grandparents who had been incarcerated in the camp and had died of starvation.

The bag was opened. A package in greaseproof paper, held together with thick elastic bands, was handed to him, with similar gloves. He knew the Beretta 92S, and a little grin flicked at his mouth when he was told that this particular weapon, and the ammunition it was loaded with, had been sold to the Egyptian armed forces: a small matter, but likely to cause confusion in an investigation. There were two magazines, eighteen bullets in all, and he would use two. It was wrapped again, and put on the table beside the bed.

The man reached forward, gripped Gabbi’s shoulders and gave him a light brush kiss on each cheek. Then he was gone and the door closed on him. Gabbi heard the slither of the caretaker’s slippers, then the thud of the outer door being shut. He went back to bed and hoped to catch more sleep.

His shoulder was shaken gently. The pilot, Eddie, jack-knifed up on the cot bed. His co-pilot hovered above him. ‘Thought you’d like to know that we’re fuelled, armed, all the checks done, ready to press the tit and lift. And likely we may be lifting.’

‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

‘You were sleeping like a baby – would have been a crime.’

‘Fuck you.’ The pilot rubbed the sleep from his eyes. ‘What we got?’

‘Could go around first light. As we thought. A covert team up on the frontier, and maybe there’s casualties coming with them. The other bird is getting herself to speed. We go together.’

He could hear the rotors of both birds turning over, and the ground-crew people would be crawling over the Black Hawks. It would likely be the last mission of interest that Eddie flew before the draw-down sucked him in. Then he might go home, or might be packed off with his guys and his machine to Afghanistan. He’d like to finish well. He tightened his boots.

‘Oh, and Eddie…’

‘What?’

‘We don’t exist, and any flight we make is classified as never happening. It’s likely the mullah-men will be powerfully angry if we do get called out and are up close on their ground.’

‘Fuck them.’

The birds’ engines sounded sweet and the windows shook. If an exfiltration needed a helicopter lift-out, they’d be in trouble, deep stuff, and it would be close run. It was good of the guys to let him sleep and recharge. Might have been their own survival instincts that had allowed it. Spooks, the pilot reckoned, were mad – not people you’d take home to your mother – and he’d go as far as he could to save them.

Badger hissed, ‘How you put yourself in this place, Foxy, I don’t know.’

The dinghy was holed: a bullet had pierced the metal hull about an inch below the waterline.

It went down a few yards short of the mud spit, where the water was up to Badger’s waist. He had time to hoist Foxy onto his shoulder, as he had before. The skin, against the stubble on his own face, was wet, clammy and seemed white in the darkness, as if there were night-lights under it – like the ones used in nurseries and hospital wards. He went over the spit and past the heap he had made of dead foliage then slipped back into the water.

‘Don’t ask me how I’m doing. Actually, I’m doing fine. Just don’t bother to ask.’

He could hear the jeeps’ engines on the bund line away from him, but he would have been masked by the reed beds. It was as well that he was. He could stand upright, which was best with the weight he carried. The level dropped and lapped at his knees, the birds thrashed for take-off and he plodded on, the mud under his boots clinging to them. He was taking deep breaths, struggling to suck the air deeper into his lungs. His legs were leaden. He had not begun: Badger was only at his start line. He came out of the water and was on the open ground. He went by the carcass of the bird, unrecognisable now as a creature of beauty. Badger didn’t do bird-watching, he wasn’t eco-obsessed, but he had learned to respect nature when he was in hides and when he hiked, testing himself, in Scotland or in the Brecons of Wales. He knew the range of the small songbirds that would come from the heather and bracken to filch crumbs, and the predator hobbies, peregrines and eagles; he knew also the divers on the lochs. There had been a poem drilled into them by a teacher about a bird a seaman had shot with a bolt. He was cursed for it, his mates too. That was what Foxy had done; he had killed the ibis, made it into rats’ food.

‘Shouldn’t have done it, Foxy. Look what it’s done to us, with you killing it… You could say something, Foxy, not play bloody miserable.’

He went as fast as he could, and his boots went into the side of the scrape where the hide had been. He lurched out of it, and Foxy’s weight shifted on his shoulder. Badger gasped and swore softly. It had been a sizeable piece of his life, important, and might be memorable, a bit of ground two yards square that had held them both, and the bergens, for hours, days and nights. He would remember it. Badger couldn’t have said then how long his life expectancy was, but the image of the scrape, the net and the camouflage, the smell of the bags, the piss bottles, Foxy’s body and breath, and Badger’s own would stay with him until the last. That might be when a firing squad was given the order or in a far distant bed in whatever home was then his. He went by the scrape and it was behind him. He would never see it again, but he wouldn’t forget it, ever.

‘Good riddance, Foxy, eh? How you doing? We’re getting there.. .’

He staggered a bit going down the slight slope. He came to the bergens and the little inflatable. For a moment, he considered whether to tip Foxy into the inflatable along with the bergens. Only a moment. There were reeds off to his left and behind them the clear space used to bury the poor bastards who had come scavenging, and then – across more water – the elevated track. He could see the lights of the two jeeps. They were going slowly but making progress, and there would be a place ahead of them where they could swing to their right and either drive over mud, or trudge to get across the route Badger intended to take to the extraction point.

‘I reckon you’re better with me, Foxy. The bergens can get the ride.’

He didn’t hear agreement or criticism. It was best to have Foxy on his shoulder – if there was a crisis, anything near to catastrophe, Badger didn’t want to be crouched over the inflatable, heaving his man onto his shoulder. He cantered into the water, which splashed up round his ankles, into his boots, and up the hem of the gillie suit. The weight was fierce on his shoulder. There was a string at the front end of the inflatable and he had it in his free hand. The other steadied Foxy, was on his buttocks and had a grip there. Foxy’s head bounced on the back of Badger’s hip, and his knees were over Badger’s heart. The feet kicked his stomach with each step.

‘Not going to be fun, Foxy, the next bit – and it’d be good if you helped yourself a bit. Know what I mean?’

He went deeper into the water. The level rose. He realised that Foxy’s head, upside-down, would go under. He didn’t break his step and the mud gave him a useful grip. He twisted Foxy a bit so that his head lay on the side of the inflatable. They went further out, and he could follow the path of the two jeeps’ lights, bouncing. He thought they were now on a rough track that, maybe, hadn’t been used for many years – the longer the better – and was crumbling. They were moving slowly. If he was ahead of them, for all his burdens, when they swung and came after him, he reckoned he had a chance – slim but a chance – of reaching the extraction point. If they were in front blocking him, and the dawn light came up, he didn’t feel inclined to make any bets on himself coming through, not the chance of a cat in hell. He had seen Foxy’s body, and had heard his screams, and the two encouraged him to keep going forward. His breath sang from his mouth and each step was harder, the burden heavier.

‘Don’t get it into your head, Foxy, that I’m doing this for love of you.’

He was out of his depth. His feet flapped and had nothing to grip against. The weight of the bergens steadied the inflatable, which had to take most of his own weight, and Foxy’s. It didn’t seem possible to Badger that he should tip the bergens into the water and rid himself of them: instructors always talked about the requirement of bringing back kit and in Stores they grumbled if it wasn’t accounted for. It was an obligation to return it after an operation. Requirements and obligations were part of the bible he worked to.

The lights of the jeeps were harder to see. Important? Yes. It told him that dawn was coming, not there yet but not far away. If they blocked him when the dawn had spread its light, it had all been for nothing. He thrashed his feet, and attempted to paddle with his free hand, and they went forward. If they were blocked… Who was listening? Maybe some pigs were, an otter, the birds, but the men in the jeeps wouldn’t hear him.

Badger said sharply, ‘Not for love of you, Foxy, no. I don’t even like you. And you’re a fucking passenger hitching a ride.’

Twice they went under. Twice he choked and cleared his throat, then spat out the marsh water. But he kept the pace. Had to.