A Deniable Death

Chapter 18

A wind had risen. It came from the south, perhaps the south-west, and ruffled the water Badger waded through. It was a warm, vigorous wind. It flapped the tips of the reeds off to his left. The bed below him was uneven. Sometimes his boots found a grip and then he was able to lurch forward faster with the inflatable and the weight over his shoulder. He used the craft’s rim for buoyancy when the bed fell away under him. The wind helped to drive him on.

Little white crests were now whipped up and water splashed over the sides. He fancied that the bergens shifted because they were floating in the bilge. The wind brought the sounds closer of the two jeeps’ engines. If the wind, steadily strengthening, had been from the north, or the north-east, he might not have heard them straining in low gear on the the bund line that was little more than loose-packed sand. Had he not heard them and been able to plot their position, he might have slowed and clung to the rim of the inflatable, let his legs dangle in the water.

The engine noise drove him forward. If the jeeps could get past him, then swing to their right and come from his left, his route to the extraction point was blocked. Rest was not possible. Badger could not have said when, if ever, he had felt so tired, so hungry and thirsty. He thought once, very briefly, of pictures he had seen on television screens: refugees on the move pushing prams laden with possessions or carrying little suitcases, or the skeletal figures of men gazing at an eyewitness from the far side of a barbed-wire fence. Mostly his mind was blank, as if the screen had been switched off, and the matter of the moment was getting the next secure hold for his right boot on the mud, then following it with the left. Crisis was when the right boot, or the left, slipped and pitched him forward, Foxy’s weight dragging him down. Triumph was when the left boot, or the right, had good grip and he seemed to surge. It was like the flight of a wild animal. Maybe a deer, isolated on Bodmin moor with hounds closing, would have understood what drove Badger on.

He wasted breath on speaking aloud. ‘Don’t help me. Don’t do anything. You’re Foxy, the big man. Leave it to me. I’m the boy, there to do fetching and carrying, the one who has to graft. You’re the top beggar, Foxy, right? Please yourself. Leave it to the boy.’

It might have been clever of Badger to strip off the gillie suit and go on in his pants, socks and boots, but he could not. It was about his culture: he had to bring back two bergens, a gillie suit, headgear and Foxy. Badger no more considered ditching the suit than leaving either bergen to float on the water, or dropping Foxy in the hope of increasing the possibility of his own survival.

‘Do I like you, Foxy? No. What did I get? I had the short straw. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some shitface had written the wrong stuff in my file, and the computer chucked me up. You don’t deserve me, Foxy. There are some God-awful people who do my job, guys I wouldn’t take water off or a biscuit, guys who are crap. They’re the ones who should have been here, watching over you. See if any of them would have lifted you up and kept going with you. You’re a lucky bastard – say it, Foxy, say, ‘I’m a lucky bastard.’ Better, shout it. Foxy, shout, ‘I’m a lucky bastard to have Badger with me. I didn’t hear you.’

The whipped reeds sang in his ears and he heard the splash of the small waves he breasted, the little thuds when the inflatable bounced on the crests, and – clearest – the jeep engines.

He fell.

He tumbled forward and was buried below the surface. For a moment the great weight kept him down. He struggled to draw in his knees, bend them, then raise his body. His head broke the surface.

Water fell off him. Algae and weed were in his face. He understood. The bed sloped upwards. He had tripped because it was no longer flat. The water was at his knees, not his waist or chest. He was in the shallows. He still had Foxy on his back and he was left with one free arm to drag the inflatable. It grounded, then came free again. When it grounded the second time it took a greater effort to free it. He could see the headlights and hear the engines better. He could also see ahead.

The first minutes of dawn made grey and indistinct shapes: might have been raised ground, another bund line or another bed of high reeds. He had gone before on instinct, taken the direction he thought was the most direct path to the extraction point. The light had washed through pastel shades and no clarity. The jeeps were ahead of him, and they swung. The headlights didn’t reach him, but if they kept their course they would stay ahead. He crested a slight slope.

In the last minutes of the old night, Badger would have seen nothing ahead of him. The first minutes of the dawn, and the new day, showed him an outline of the ground ahead. He tried to remember, and failed. He couldn’t remember the ground between the hide in front of the house and the half-sunken strand of barbed wire that was the border. Close to it was the toppled watchtower. He could recall the burned-out tank and its broken tracks, could picture where the trucks had gone down off a bund line and into the water, contaminating it with old engine oil. He could remember and picture what was on the far side of the border, between the line marked by the rusted wire strand and where the Pajeros had brought them, but couldn’t recall what they had crossed, skirted, waded through to get close to the target location.

He went over ‘bare-arsed ground’, no cover, and broke the laws that were carved on the tablets of the croppies. He did Shape, Silhouette and Sound, because the inflatable scraped on the dried mud and broke across reed stumps, and Space because he was bunched with the inflatable, which was more of a sledge than a water craft. He didn’t do Shine – he’d broken every other law – but they hadn’t been teaching ‘flight for life’ when they had made the laws of covert surveillance. He went on. Badger thought that within a few minutes, three or four, they would be across his route out and a line of them would be confronting him. They would have the first of the low sunshine on him – easy shooting, clear.

‘Didn’t think of that, did you, Foxy? Didn’t reckon on the trouble I’d have getting you clear, did you? All right for you up there – but I’m bloody nearly on my knees. I’m suffering, Foxy. Have you nothing – anything – to say?’

Moments returned, filtered in his memory. There had been buffalo in the water, and a settlement – too small for a village – with concrete-block buildings and TV dishes. They had made a wide detour, but that had been daylight and this was dawn.

Different noises. Engines revved. It was the sound there had been on the roads north of Bristol during the winter before last. Ice on the roads, snowdrifts on the verges, too much for the gritting trucks to cope with. Badger was in the southeast of Iraq, in the marshlands where the temperature would soon top 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and he remembered the ice and wind-chill of a West Country winter. Tyres spinning, no traction. The racing and shrieking of the engines, the snow, ice and refrozen slush spitting out behind the wheels. Badger understood. The headlights, to his left, were static. No snow, no ice, but drifts of fine sand that would have come in on the winds and caught the top of a bund line. They were loose enough, and deep enough, to block the axles and spin the wheels.

The light grew. So little time was left to him. They would abandon their jeeps and run.

The inflatable split and air hissed from it. Badger had Foxy on his shoulder. He heaved on the thin rope and went forward, pulling the bergens. The raised area he had gone over would have blocked off the ground from the water, and might have given – in a long-ago war – tanks the chance to manoeuvre in battle formation over what had been marshland. He had no cover, and the light was coming. Badger did not know whether he would be ahead of them and their line or too far in front of them for rifle fire to be accurate.

Dead in the mind now, only a wild creature’s demand to survive, but the weight on his shoulder, and what he was pulling, meant he couldn’t raise his speed. Away to his right, the east, the sky lightened.

‘Fuck you, Foxy.’

The jeeps would go no further.

Mansoor yelled, lifting his voice over the screaming of the engines. At first he could not be heard and the men sat tight, the sand spewing back to coat the windscreen of the second jeep. He hammered the butt of his rifle on the dashboard, and was heard. He yelled to them to kill the engines.

Silence fell. The officer of the al-Quds Brigade could not have said when he had last slept or eaten. His recall of the night went back no further than the frenzy with which he had struck his prisoner. He had hit, kicked, used his fists and had not backed off. Fear overwhelmed him now. He could look into the darkness and towards where he believed the fugitive was. Beyond the black of the night – with the moonlight long gone – and away to the east he saw a sliver of morning light, lines of subtle colours that ranged through deep grey and soft gunmetal, to silver and the narrowest strip of gold.

He had his men out of the jeeps. He strained to see movement in front, and cursed. There would be on the road between the small settlement and Ahvaz, reached through villages of farmers and minefield amputees, a convoy of at least one black saloon, filled with intelligence officers of the Brigade, and two trucks of fighting men. He could not consider how it would be for him if the car and the trucks arrived and he had no prisoner. He strained and saw nothing. He gazed at the darkness, blasphemed, and was alone.

‘Why were you here? Why did you come to this place? Why could you not have gone to another sector? Why here? Why mine?’

He thought himself destroyed. He could imagine the faces of the men who would have sat in the car at the front of the convoy. They would show him no sympathy, no understanding. His father in the gallows shed at the gaol showed no sympathy or understanding when a condemned man was led in to stand beside the stool on which he would be perched. Neither did he show it when a man was brought out through the gates and placed under the crane’s arm. He did not know of one officer in the Brigade who would offer understanding. Despair washed around him – and the shout was in his ear.

A guard, from the Basij, pointed. All of them followed his finger – and saw nothing. The guard was a peasant, one of a line of subsistence farmers. Perhaps he had been sent out to sit on the hillsides north of Ahvaz and watch the sheep, be certain the lambs did not stray. The guard called that he could see a man, carrying another and dragging a load.

They ran towards the dawn, in a chaotic stampede, but Mansoor, with his damaged leg, could not keep pace with the younger, fitter men and bellowed that they should slow, go only at his speed. He sucked in air, filled his lungs, went as fast as his leg would carry him. They were off the bund line and on flat baked ground. The strip of gold widened below the silver.

He saw the man. Why had he come? He was alone, carrying the body on his shoulder and dragging what seemed like a khaki litter behind him. He moved at snail speed. For a moment, Mansoor believed fortune favoured him. Then he looked ahead of the man and saw the reed bed that stretched in front of him. He saw also that the first light of day had made a mist shimmer in it.

The distance to the target was some three hundred yards, and the light was poor and- He demanded rapid-fire bursts on automatic – but they were men of the Basij, not of the Brigade.

He had no cover. His goal was the reed bed where, perhaps, an old watercourse had run and enough seepage had survived the drainage programme.

Badger couldn’t see beyond it, didn’t know how wide it was, but was aware of the mist. It crept towards him, and meandered among the clumps of reeds, some thick, others collapsed: it was a refuge and a goal.

He heard the crack of bullets going above him. They thudded into the hard mud and made dirt puffs. Two shook him – they would have struck the bergens on the holed inflatable. Some were close but more were high and wide, or short and no threat to him. They gave him incentive. A paratrooper, a sergeant, had said to him on the Brecons, ‘I tell you, kiddo, nothing gets you moving better than live rounds when they’re headed at you. They clear the bowels and get you up to pace.’ He seemed now – with the whine overhead and the patter into the mud – not to feel Foxy’s weight over his shoulder, or the pain of his palm, which was raw where the rope attached to the inflatable chafed. With the light came the flies, but the shooting kept Badger going, and there were distant shouts.

He remembered nothing of this place.

He could have been here before or not. He had no recall of the berm he had come across and the bund line to his left, or the dried-out plateau and scant reeds in front of him. All croppies hoovered information. From anywhere and any source, information was gold dust. It might come from a lecture hall or a chance encounter, but all of it had value and should be squirrelled into storage. A driver had taken a team of them, in a police wagon, out onto the Pennine moors for a CROP on what might have been a jihadist training camp. He’d talked of his time in the United Nations police force in Croatia; there had been a story of a breakout from a besieged town and the likely result of failure was being massacred by their enemy. Those Croats had tried to go across country the fifteen or so miles to the nearest haven, and some had been captured – slaughtered – because they had ended up going in circles, all sense of direction lost. They were so weak from lack of sleep and food that they had doubled back on themselves and, two days later, had been where they’d started out. Not a story that was easy to forget. Badger remembered the trite laughter among his fellow croppies. Now he had no compass, but he had the growing light in the east. He, too, was clapped out from exhaustion and hunger.

He would get to the cover of the reeds and the low mist and would push through. He wouldn’t see the Pajeros in front of him but the house, the kids playing with a football, the barracks and the lamp-post from which a fraying rope hung. It was a nightmare. He shouted, ‘We going right, Foxy? You’ll tell me if we’re wrong? Least you can do, stuck up there, is tell me if I’m off course.’

There seemed to be an answering yell, but not from Foxy.

Badger twisted his head. He could see over the skin of Foxy’s buttocks. The officer limped among his guys, ranting at them. The shooting stopped and he made a line of them, then brought them forward.

‘Foxy, is there any excuse for dumping the inflatable and one of the bergens?’

The line of guys, with their officer, was around two hundred yards from him, and more shots were fired, but wide. He had fifty yards to go until he reached the reeds, but the mist came towards him – might last thirty minutes, but every other morning it had burned off quickly. Might be too quick for him.

‘There’s the one with mostly clothing, not that we’ve used it, some of the kit and the last of the grenades. The other’s where communications is. There’s not much in it either. What you reckon, Foxy?’

More yelling from the officer, and they veered away from the direct line, turned a sharp angle and went into the reeds. Nine men with their officer. The foliage swallowed them. They would have seen, from where their jeeps had stopped in loose sand and they had elevation, how far the reeds went, and would have judged they could make their cordon line on the far side.

‘I’m going to dump both bergens, Foxy. Goes against the grain, hurts, but at least it’s all sanitised. Don’t bloody critise me.’

Badger hit the reeds. They lacked the life of the beds beside the hide and were diseased, stunted. He could hear, to his left, shouts and dried stems breaking. He thought – so far – that a fragile curtain of morning mist might have saved him. Useless things now played in his mind. There had been big estates above the Thames, outside Reading, and kids he had known had earned cash from beating: they had been paid to drive reared birds, most of which could barely fly, into the cordon where the guns were. When they came out of the cover they were blasted. He was down on his knees and still carried Foxy, didn’t allow him to slide off his shoulder. He dragged at some broken reeds and made a shallow pile of them over the two bergens. He had, now, only the pistol, the magazine already in it and one more, and he had short-range communications that would link with Alpha Juliet. Everything else that should have been brought home and returned to Stores was in the two bergens. It hurt him to abandon them. Badger pushed himself up and turned his back on them. He began to thread through the stems. The light was growing.

‘Worst thing I’ve ever done, Foxy, is dumping that kit. What I do reckon, though, is that she’ll be at the extraction place. We have to get there. She won’t ditch us like I ditched the bergens. She’s the sort of girl who’ll be there. She’s great. Foxy, all that shit you told me about your woman, about your Ellie, I’ve forgotten it. I’m going to get you to where Alpha Juliet is, Foxy. That all right?’

He went carefully, and the light grew. He could do a better pace without the backpacks to pull, but he knew the cordon line would be in front of him, and the guns. Who knew where he was? No bastard did. Who cared where he was? Alpha Juliet might. No other bastard would. He was deniable. No reason for any bastard to know or care.

Gone2work. A cryptic text to Len Gibbons had shown up on his mobile. It was as if one of the last pieces of the jigsaw had slotted together. Not the final one, but one of the most important.

He was not a grandstander. He didn’t expect a seat where he could sit and watch the deed done. It was still dark on a late November morning at the leisure resort of Travemunde, up the river and north of Lubeck, facing into the Baltic. The text had been sent by the Cousin. The message told Gibbons that the consultant had left home, had arrived at the university and gone into the block where his offices were. Good enough. It seemed to indicate that no security alert had been launched.

Further up the floodlit quay, out towards the groyne on which the lighthouse flashed, there were piers on wood piles and cormorants gathered on the hand rails – black, with long necks, big beaks and the lungs to give them diving time when they hunted. They had been perched on those hand rails when he had been here thirty-something years before. Then there had been a winter morning when he had waited for the first ferry to return across the river from the village of Priwall and bring with it the workers who had jobs at Travemunde or Lubeck. He had last been here a few weeks before the collapse of the Antelope operation. It was, for Len Gibbons, almost a pilgrimage and he might have brought flowers with him if a kiosk had been open. Had he done so, it would have been because he cared to remember the lives that had been lost because of his trust in a man he had met once and so briefly and seen once from a distance. To make this journey, come here and wait in the bone-piercing cold, with the wind snapping off the sea, was of greater significance to him than when he had loitered outside the church of St Andrew and watched the man who had been a pastor.

The ferry came towards him. As he remembered it, there was a cafe on the far side of the river. He would buy himself a hot breakfast – eggs, sausage, a heated pastry and coffee. He was savouring the thought when the phone bleeped again.

Both arrived, all in place. Warm congrats, your favourite Cousin.

He read it twice, then deleted it. Not quite the final piece, but so close.

He had believed in confusion and a complex chain of command, had dared to hope that the terse message, passed through many links in a chain, reporting the capture of Foulkes did not mean that a protective net would be tossed over the target. The Engineer and his wife were now at the consulting rooms and the building was not flooded with detectives and armed uniforms. By a miracle, word from that distant corner of Iran had not seeped out, A cargo ship, monstrous in the dark, passed in front of the ferry.

He shivered, from the cold, nerves. He could absorb the Baltic’s November chill. Len Gibbons had done time as maternity cover in Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, and a decade earlier he had been the second man in Stockholm. Had it not been for the Schlutup Fuck-up he would never have been sent as a fill-in to the former Soviet satellite, and if he had gone to Sweden it would have been as the station officer. The boat laden with containers had passed, the ferry had come in and the ramp was down. He walked on board, as he had done three decades before. Then he had left the pastor on the quay. Now he stood with a few hardy spirits on the deck.

The ramp was raised, and he felt the shudder of the engines below his feet. His mobile bleeped again. His ‘Friend’ was in place.

Len Gibbons switched off the phone, opened its back section and removed the chip. He dropped the phone first into the white wake of the water that was pushed aside by the ferry’s passage, then the chip. It floated for a fraction of a second, then was swamped. He had broken all contact with the conspiracy. In a minute they were at the Priwall ramp.

He felt calm, comfortable, and satisfied with a job well done. He had brought them together and they would face each other within the hour. He had no doubt that the assassin in the pay of a semi-friendly government would show the necessary skills and take the life of an engineer who served a semi-hostile state.

Late that afternoon he would drop off his hire car, fly from Hamburg to Brussels, take the last Eurostar connection into London, then a bus to the Haymarket. He would climb the stairs of what would be, probably, a deserted building, but Sarah would be there, and he’d give her the present he would buy before leaving Lubeck. Perhaps she’d blush a little, and murmur something about his ‘thoughtfulness’. The office would be cleared and ready for them to move out. She would have known the outcome of the operation by listening to any news bulletin, and he might invite her for sherry in his club’s bar. Then they would go their separate ways.

The following morning he would leave his train at Vauxhall and walk to the Towers. It would be well known that a prominent Iranian weapons scientist had been ‘taken down’ in the German city of Lubeck the previous day – it would have been broadcast widely and reported in the newspapers. A minimal minority would find the opportunity, out of sight, to press his hand. Only later would rumour and gossip spread: he would then be a noted man, respected. He chuckled.

He came off the ferry at the side of the ramp. The cars sped past and threw up the puddles’ water. He went to the cafe for his hot breakfast.

It was right that he had made the pilgrimage.

The Cousin, too, had no more use for a mobile phone. The main part, not the inner brain, was tossed casually into the back of a corporation rubbish cart as it cleaned streets before the rush-hour began; the brain was wrapped in the paper bag that had contained the pastry he had bought from a stall by the Muhlenbrucke. He dropped it into a bin in the park off the Wallstrasse. He felt bullish.

Like Gibbons and their Friend, the Cousin expected to stay in the city for the next hour, no longer. There was nothing he could do in that time, and his connections were now broken. He would then drive south, fast, to Hannover. He would leave his hire car there and pay his bill – false name and cards – and a military driver would take him far to the southwest, towards Kaiserslautern. By late evening he would be on a military flight out of the Ramstein USAF base. Those who disapproved of extra-judicial killing would not know about it, and those who did not would pump his hand and slap his back.

He was in the park, and shared a bench with a derelict guy. He bought the man coffee from a stall and a pastry with a custard centre. The derelict had few teeth and bobbed his head in gratitude. The Cousin felt no need to communicate any more than his general sense of well-being. It was not every day there was a chance to waste the bastards who had done the damage in Iraq, and were in the process of getting devices into Afghanistan. Christmas was coming early.

The images in his mind were of bombs detonating in those far-off places. He had forgotten them since he had left the rendezvous city of London. As if why they were in Lubeck, and what they were doing, had no relation to the deserts and mountains where the young guys were sent. As if he, the Friend and Gibbons had lost sight of the reasons and been buried in the detail of it. He laughed, and the derelict cackled with him. The Agency man came from small-town Alabama where there were good fire-and-brimstone preachers. Ten years earlier he had visited an elderly uncle; it had been the fourth Sunday after the planes had been flown into the Twin Towers. He could not remember where the text had come from, which Old Testament chapter, but the preacher that morning had said, ‘ “If I whet my glittering sword and my hand take hold on Judgment, I will render Vengeance on my enemies and will reward them that hate me.” ’ Fine stuff. Allelujahs to go with it, and plenty.

The rain had started to patter on his shoulders. There were, of course, the two guys who had gone forward, identified the destination and hit trouble, but an alarm had not been raised and the hit was in place. The target faced Judgment, was adjacent to Vengeance. The two guys were blanked out of his mind, deniable, and he laughed again, then walked away, leaving the derelict with the last of his pastry. He would have time for a quick walk around Lubeck, the renovated historic buildings, before driving away.

He laughed because he thought vengeance a fine rich dish, best served as a surprise.

He sat in the van, and did not smoke or drink take-out coffee. Instead he read. Gabbi’s choice was to be among favourites.

Just as his driver, who had brought him the weapon during the night, did not know his name, so Gabbi would have been kept in ignorance of the driver’s – except that his wallet had been flipped open, a euro note extracted, and he had seen the plastic-fronted pouch inside it with the ID that would take the man, in the name of Amnon Katz, into the car park of the Embassy of Israel, 14193 Berlin. Little escaped Gabbi. Probably, when he was back in Tel Aviv tomorrow, and had his debriefing, the day after tomorrow, he would mention that the embassy’s man had not satisfactorily hidden his identity or troubled to disguise his workplace.

He thought the man with him, Amnon Katz, squirmed too often in his seat. Maybe the people who should have escorted him were on holiday or had made excuses. After the chaotic affair of the Emirates killing, intelligence-gathering officers had sought to distance themselves from the work of his unit. He had Amnon Katz, who had been calmer in the night and had spoken coherently. Perhaps he had not slept. Perhaps he had a knotted stomach. Perhaps he had doubts, now that he was up against the place where a man would be killed. They had a view of the steps leading up to the main door of the block and of the lit windows on the first floor. A saloon car was parked at the kerb. The top of a man’s scalp showed above the driver’s seat headrest. There was no other security in sight. He coughed hard, cleared his throat. He had not drunk any coffee because it would be unprofessional to be stuck outside on a cold pavement and need to piss. He could feel the weapon lodged in his trouser belt, under the overalls. He reached to open the van’s passenger door.

The man, Amnon Katz, gave him his hand. For encouragement? Gabbi ignored it.

He closed the door quietly behind him and went to the back of the van. He took out a road-cleaning brush and a couple of bin liners, and smiled ruefully. He would be fucked if there were no leaves to collect and no rubbish to sweep up. He had a shovel and thick, industrial gloves.

He did not look behind him but walked towards the parked car and the steps. The wind blew harshly down the road in the centre of the teaching-hospital complex and buffeted his face. His baseball cap was well down over his eyes and a scarf closely wrapped at his mouth. The cameras would be rewarded with little. And the van? He heard its engine start. It reversed, and would be driven away. Somewhere behind him, watching him, was the stubbily built man with the old face, the bright eyes of youth and the coldness at the mouth who had met him off the ferry. Gabbi trusted that man, and regarded him as a friend. He was the one who would take him away when it was done.

He began to sweep the gutter – slush from the salt put down, a few leaves, some soil washed off the frozen shrub beds. He went slowly, had no wish to be close to the saloon car in front of him. He had seen his target go inside, with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, but the target’s back had been to him and he had seen little of the face. The condition of the wife, and the verdict she would be given, did not concern him. Each time Gabbi pushed the broom, he could feel, against his belly, the stock of the pistol – and now his mind was closed.

They sat very still, and close. The Engineer did not speak and neither did his wife, Naghmeh.

They were in the waiting room. The door to the office was shut but they heard his voice and thought he made telephone calls. Men in loose-fitting, unbuttoned white coats crossed the waiting room, knocked and went inside, then nurses in starched white trousers and figure-hugging white jackets. There was a woman at a desk close to the door, a gatekeeper. She did not make eye contact with either of them but kept her face bent over her screen. Soft music played from high speakers. There were magazines but they did not read them. They had nothing to talk about. His wife would not have wished to hear about the progress he was making in extending the range of electronics that could transmit the signal to the receiver fitted in the device, and do it from further outside the bubble that protected the enemy’s convoys from remote detonations. He had no interest now in which block of land beside which length of raised road leading to which village would be granted the necessary funding for a mine-clearance team to begin work.

Their lives were on hold and they barely dared to breathe. Neither could read the faces of those who went into the consultant’s room or left it. He could not be pessimistic or optimistic, and she could do no more than hold his hand.

It was sudden.

The door opened. He was shirt-sleeved, but with a tie in his collar, well shaven and looked to have slept. His face gave no clue. The Engineer had heard it said that an accused could always tell, from the moment he was brought back into the courtroom and confronted the judge, whether he would hang or take the bus home to rejoin his family. He felt his wife’s hand stiffen in his. She clung to him and their fingers locked.

There were X-rays in a pouch in the consultant’s hand and he spoke quietly to the gatekeeper, who nodded. Neither gave evidence of what was said, and he waved for them to follow him inside.

They crossed the waiting room shakily, did not know what awaited them.

Presence and courage radiated from her, as they had on the previous evening. In his experience, talking to patients was more difficult than performing complicated surgery on them, and he had been told that his manner was not always satisfactory: he should curb brusqueness when the news was bad and elation when it was good. He was tired and had slept poorly. Lili would have fled to her mother, taken their daughter with her, would have poured into her parent’s ear a litany of his craven acceptance of a call to old loyalties. She might come back to him, might see that his affluence would not easily be replaced on a divorcee’s circuit, if he made a call and grovelled – he accepted that their lives were altered, that a crack had appeared that would not easily be repaired. She might not come back.

They intruded into his life.

If they had not come to Lubeck, he would have slept well and been against the warmth of his wife’s body. He would have been woken by his daughter climbing across him… but he had woken cold. She looked into his face. He indicated the chairs, but they stood in front of him, silently demanding his answer.

He said, ‘There is much to talk of and I ask you not to interrupt me but to listen carefully to what I say. I have identified a glioblastoma, grade two, which is confirmation of what you have already been told by your consultants at home. The tumour is close to what we call an “eloquent” area…’

Having intruded into his life they had derailed it. He held up the scan images. ‘I want to show you what we have learned.’

‘Time to go. Hit the road, guys.’

She thought she sounded authoritative and that her voice had a crisp bite. The light was up. Dawn slipped into day. Abigail Jones’s last birthday had been her thirty-third, which should have marked her out as being at the peak of her powers. She did not believe the crap about veterans’ experience outweighing youth’s innovations. All she had worked at now hung precariously on that day’s events. She couldn’t escape it. The sun was low, bright on her face. It threw grotesque shadows.

Those shadows were edging nearer to her. She couldn’t say how fast they advanced with each minute, but at first light they had started to form, nudging through the broken gate to the compound. They were now well up the track towards her, and if she didn’t take control, get the show on the road, they would be tripping against her feet. Hard for her to see the men because the sun was behind them, but there would be a hundred, perhaps more. Nor could she see what weapons they carried. Some of the money she had paid out to the old bastard, the sheikh, would have been distributed but more would have gone into his own biscuit tin, and a suggestion would have been made that there’d be more where it had come from. She heard the sound of the big engines behind her. It would be about bluff, always was. Either the sea would part or it would not. If it did they would be fine, dandy, and on their way. If it did not, they’d be swamped and drowned. The Boys would have sorted it out for themselves: Corky in the first Pajero with Harding riding shotgun, and she would be with Hamfist, close behind – like up against the fender. Shagger would be alongside Hamfist, and they’d try to do it with gas, and if not, it would have to be live rounds – and if it was live rounds, her career was mired and she would be gone.

She’d had no communication with Badger, had tried enough times for a link. He was not switched on, maybe had not the time, or inclination, to talk. Maybe he’d been taken… and was dead. Her obligation was to be at the extraction location. If she held her hand above her eyes, down almost to the bridge of her nose – where her freckles were thickest – and squinted hard, she could see a wall of men, not soldiers or police but marsh men, the madan, from the cradle of civilisation. Ninety years before – she had read it in the digests preparing her for service in Iraq – they had been described by the British military as ‘treacherous and deceitful’. They lived in the shelter of the marshes from which they ‘looted and murdered indiscriminately’, and the last invader to have taught them a degree of discipline had been Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, eight centuries back. They would be formidable but bluff. An appearance of unshakeable will and unstoppable force might win through. She did no more pep talks. If they went into the crowd and broke legs, tossed bodies, crushed teenagers, and fired gas, but did not break through, they would be torn limb from limb, like the security people trapped by a mob in Fallujah. They were all good at the wheel, her Boys, but she was happy, in difficult times, to have Hamfist driving. The first Pajero was level with her.

She couldn’t speak to Harding because his head was encased in his gas mask and he had canisters across his lap. Corky’s gas mask was on his forehead, and the engine was revved. She hitched her loose skirt, climbed up and into the back seat of the second Pajero, Hamfist’s. Whatever the outcome, she would have diplomatic immunity, but they would not: the immunity once enjoyed by men working for private security contractors had long since been withdrawn. They might face big problems. Not her. Had she said, then, that the issue was ridiculous and given an instruction for a route across the sand onto Highway 6 and the road south to Basra – and safety – she would have been ignored. Abigail would have lost her credibility. She sat in the back, with hardware around her and had her pistol on her lap, cocked. She hooked the straps of the mask into place.

They surged.

Would the waters part? Would the fucking Israelites stay dry or get soaked? Time to get an answer.

Corky threw some, and Shagger did, then zapped up the windows. Harding and Hamfist had thumbs down hard on the horns. Inside the armour plate and the blast-resistant glass, she could hear the thud of the grenades letting out the gas clouds, the thundercrack of the flash-and-blast ones, the banshee bellow of the horns. She held the pistol tight. Some scattered in front of Harding, but others were thrown sideways. Hamfist’s went over something that might have been a leg, a stomach or backbone. If Harding stopped, or Hamfist, they would be ripped apart, cut into small pieces, and the men would lose their balls. Fuck alone knew what they would do to her. Her own people lived among the Lancashire county set where they hunted, shot and regarded themselves as affluent country heroes. They always preached that a driver should never swerve to avoid wildlife on the road, or for a domestic cat or dog, but should go straight through it and so retain control. Harding did, and Hamfist. They were through the gas clouds, the crowd was thinner, and they hit the barricade.

It would have been built during the night. Old wire, rusted and sharp – good for getting up against the axles and snagging them – some collapsed fencing and a couple of oil drums. That was the first. The road was raised and the banks fell away and the local Clausewitz would have thought it good for blocking the milch-cow run. They went through it. The wire sprang up and thrashed the windows. Hamfist nearly stalled, which gave the young bloods the chance to get close and their fists were against the windows. Abigail saw the faces and the hate: she knew what would be done to the Boys and didn’t care to think what would be done to her. They were through the first block.

The second was more of an art form. The first would slow them, but the second would stop them, and then they were fucked. She hung on to the back of the seat in front. A gang of twenty or thirty were either side of the second block, and had axes, hammers, spades and firearms. Maybe the worst thing would be fire. They could be burned out. If they were stopped and the engine was lit, they would have to come out, as rats did when smoke was pumped down their hole.

Harding swerved. In the lead Pajero, he would have used all his strength to swing the wheel. The vehicle swayed, made like it would overturn, and went down the bank. About six foot down, Abigail reckoned. She thought they were going over when Hamfist followed. Went down on two wheels, then crunched back onto four, and the Boys were shrieking, as if it was a victory moment. They bounced on the dirt below the road and went through what would have been a disused irrigation channel. The wheels took traction again. She had no idea how many injured they had left behind. They bumped back onto the road, where the bank was less steep, and stripped off the masks. She didn’t like triumphalism, but it was as if she’d loosed her dogs.

A half-mile down the track, astride it, was the sheikh’s big car. The man himself was sitting on a collapsible chair beside the road. The kid with him held an umbrella above his head to shade him from the sun. Corky went straight on, did not swerve out of the impact. He hit the BMW 7 series a full power blow in front of the left side wheel and sent it off the road. The track ahead was clear. She wondered where they stood, as regards the time and the Golden Hour.

She uncocked the pistol, put it back into her inner pocket.

Quiet, a little stunned at the violence she had unleashed, Abigail said, ‘That was burning bridges, and no going back over them.’

Hamfist answered, ‘It was called for, miss.’

They drove hard, and she didn’t know what they would find. She made a link with the operations people at the Basra air base and promised co-ordinates. It had been necessary, but ugly… and it might be that everything she had started had turned to ugly. They went, trailing sand, towards the extraction point – could go nowhere else.

It was ground he could handle and Badger made good progress through the reeds. The stems were close set, but he had the skills to insinuate himself, and Foxy, between them. He took each step carefully, tested the weight and kept his boots off the dry, brittle fronds. It was an illusion of success, and he knew it.

Ahead, already, light filtered through – not from above but from the front. Following this line, he would come within the next several minutes to the edge of the reeds. They thinned fast and the sunlight came into them. It was the same when he looked to the sides. The reed beds, and the soggy mud in which they thrived, were a fool’s sanctuary, Badger knew… He could hear them around and in front of him.

He thought they had boxed him, two at each side and the officer, Mansoor, and the others behind him. There were shouts from the officer. He had regained control and had them organised as he wanted. More were out ahead. He heard the answering calls from the guards and the orders from the officer. Badger was at the limits of his endurance, on the edge of what he was capable of doing, bent by a burden and exhausted. But his mind worked. He realised he was being herded towards the guns, same as the pheasants.

He went on. He told Foxy why he pushed forward towards the ever sparser reeds where the light shone brighter. ‘Better that way, Foxy, on our feet and going towards where we belong… Better to be moving than on our backs when they close round us, us looking up at them, scared, and them pissing on us. Better going forward, Foxy.’

He heard other noises, clumsier and heavier, and couldn’t place them. He was bent low, found it easier to get a right boot in front of a left boot if his spine was tilted forward. It seemed to spread the weight better.

They were closer behind and the reeds were thinner ahead and the sun came on brighter and the near dark of the thickest part of the beds was gone. He couldn’t control the depth of his tread and the mud between the stalks of the reeds left perfect indentations, as good as any scenes-of-crime officer would want. The mud was uniform. He couldn’t find wider stretches of deeper water, to his knees or his thighs where he could go to hide the trail. Neither was there a way through where the ground had dried out. Screwed, yes. They had his trail now. Their calls to one another were growing in excitement and he thought them louder to give each other confidence. The shouts of the officer were more frequent as if he, too, sensed an end game was near. Twice more he had heard louder sounds of surging movement, and had heard also a snort of breath. He thought that among the guards there must be one perhaps more obese than the others, winded from his efforts and…

He heard the men coming nearer to him, driving him towards the voices at the front. They would have their best marksmen at the front. Badger wouldn’t be able, when he was flushed out of the reed beds, to run, weave and duck. With the bergens dumped, he could manage a crabbed trot, barely faster than when the paras did forced speed marches on the Brecons with eighty pounds of kit on their backs.

‘Foxy, what do you weigh? Must be a hundred and fifty pounds. Don’t worry, I’m not dumping you.’ Important to say it. Foxy wondering whether he was going to be ditched and left to face them again.

‘We’re going out through the front of these reeds, Foxy, and it’ll be breaking cover. I don’t know what we’ll find, except there’s guys out there in a cordon line waiting for us. I’ve got the Glock, and a full magazine in it, but I don’t know how far we’ll be from the extraction place, and whether we’ll get any help from them. The border’s ahead but I don’t know how far.’

He couldn’t hide and they had his bootprints to follow. The camouflage of the gillie suit was wrong for the reeds – good for sand and dried dirt. They were close to coming out of the cover and the light around him was more brilliant. Maybe it was that time the squaddies talked about, when they said they thought of their mothers and fathers, the girls they’d been with and babies they might have made. The bloody flies had found him and were striving to break into the headpiece. Maybe it was the time when squaddies decided whether they wanted Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones to play them into church – and maybe it was the time when squaddies became angry and wouldn’t accept the obvious. In half a dozen paces he would be out of the reeds and guns would face him.

‘There may be good ground for us and there may not. I just don’t know. I’m saying, Foxy, that we aren’t taken – not prisoners, no. You up for that? Whatever I shoot, there’ll be two rounds left.’

He heard the crashing and breaking of stems, and didn’t understand it.

‘That’s one for you and one for me. You know what, Foxy? We could get a Bassett job for this. Be good, wouldn’t it? But I’m not lying down and rolling over yet. We’re going to give it a go. You up for it?’

The scream was close. A man cried out, first in fear, then in terror, then in shock, and last, in pain. Badger was at the edge of the reeds. The scream cut his ears, louder and shriller than any of Foxy’s had been. He saw the boar break from the reed bed, blood on its tusks. The men in front of him, who had had their rifles ready and had seemed alert to their main prey, were now running to the edge of the reeds and Badger’s right. He understood. A huge thing. Maybe twenty stone of it, maybe more. As big as the one that had sniffed him in the hide and had had a short blade up its nostril. He understood that the guards at the back, behind him, had driven the beast before them, as they’d driven Badger, but a guy on the flank of the box had been in the way of the boar’s flight. Not a clever option – he might have had his bowels and intestines ripped out of his stomach wall by the tusks. He screamed again, and, likely, they had no morphine. It ran, and shots were fired at it, would have been well wide. The guy kept screaming, and the boys he slept with, served with, went to him. It gave Badger a chance. He went where the boar had, on dried dirt towards the next raised berm.