A Deniable Death

Chapter 19

Badger had changed the outline of his body. There was open ground ahead of him. Once there had been lagoons and channels, but the water flow had been blocked off and the sun had baked the mud during four or five years of drought. The eco-system in place since the marshlands had been claimed as civilisation’s cradle was wrecked. If a river source, or a filled canal, was left untouched, the marshes survived; if they were all dammed, the reeds died and the water evaporated, the ground dried and life failed. Behind him, the reed bed had taken a last hold in what would have been, once, a wide, deep channel. Now he faced a gradual incline that stretched to the far distance. Where there had once been channels that must have been far outside Badger’s depth, there was now a tacky damp surface below a fragile crust. He couldn’t see where they had come in, but off to the side – too far away to be of help – there was a shimmer that might have been water. He thought himself near the approach route, but not close enough to recognise its landmarks.

He had no cover other than the low wisps of mist that were being steadily burned off. There were indentations in the ground, little scratched paths where water had once run, and stumps of reeds, broken off six inches above the mud. The stems and leaves were long rotted, and there was the ribcage of a boat, overturned and half buried, not protruding more than a few inches. There were, too, slight tumps where silt had once gathered and perhaps the current had been forced to gouge a way to the right or left. The sun was higher, clear of the horizon, and the heat built. He knew in which direction he must go, and remembered a single strand of old wire he must reach. On his own, he might have used his skills to cross the open ground. He would have reached the horizon and found the wire, part buried.

Badger had changed the outline of his body. In doing so he could no longer hug the ground, make it his friend.

With the screaming of the guard gored by the pig, the yells of the others and the shouts of the officer bringing chaos, Badger had taken Foxy off his shoulder – but had not rested. The beast had gone, had careered away and found sanctuary from its enemy in the wafting blocks of ground mist. Badger had not taken the time to rest his shoulder but had hitched the suit up, and heaved Foxy’s body onto his back, then drawn the arms forward until they fell over his stomach and the head rested on his neck. He had let the gillie suit drop over two of them. ‘It’s going to be hot in there for you, Foxy, a steam bath, but it’s the way it is. Nothing I can do about it.’

He was bringing Foxy back. He had said he would, and there had been no complaint from the old bastard. He couldn’t see behind him, and to twist his head might dislodge Foxy. In front of him was a short horizon – much less distance visible than when he had stood at the edge of the reeds – he knew he must trust in his ability.

He could hear shouts still but the screams were fainter. He would crawl for the time it took him to count to a hundred. He would stay statue still for the time it took to count to another hundred. He was on his stomach, legs splayed. His knees took some of the weight as he edged forward but his elbows took more.

‘The problem, Foxy, is that I don’t know whether one of them has us, whether the rifle’s up, whether it’s a game they’re playing. I don’t know what’s behind and I’ve not much idea what’s in front. I just have to go forward. You up for it?’

He thought it right to tell Foxy what he was doing and why.

‘They could have a gun sight on your arse, Foxy, and mine, and we won’t know it.’

Badger went on as best he could, his knees and elbows scraping the ground. He moved and counted, then lay, barely daring to breathe, and counted again, and he thought Foxy stayed quiet and still and Badger could not have asked more of him… and when the next problem came in his mind, a realisation, he did not share it, like Foxy deserved a reward… the next problem was their feet and their boots. Badger’s boots and Foxy’s feet. He did not know whether they stuck out from under the hem of the gillie suit: might just be that a heap of mud or an accumulation of silt, whatever the appearance his gillie suit left for the searching eye, was spoiled, blasted apart, by the sight of a pair of boots and a pair of feet stuck out from under it, and not possible for him to know the answer.

He reckoned he had done a hundred yards from the reed bed out onto the open ground, and reckoned there might be a thousand to cover. Then he’d have to hope he found the single strand of rusty barbed wire.

His skills would count for something, but luck might count for more. They said – smug, complacent beggars – that luck had to be earned. Men with towering self-esteem didn’t accept that luck played a part in success. He was going forward again and he didn’t know how much of a trail he had left, where it was wet or where it had dried out, and didn’t know whether his camouflage was good or useless or how many were looking for him. He had gone past the boat and was level with a buffalo’s white ribs. Immediately in front of him there was a small raised patch of sand that might offer slight cover. The sun climbed above him, and the heat grew.

He didn’t know if a rifle was aimed, whether the adjustment to the sights had been made, whether a safety was off, whether a trigger was squeezed, whether a bullet would kill or wound… He went forward.

He could have treated it as mutiny. If it was mutiny, he was entitled, as an officer of the al-Quds Brigade, to shoot them. Then the proper course of action, if his orders were repeatedly disobeyed, was to report it to his superiors and the guards would face military courts and punishment. But Mansoor did not treat it as mutiny.

Three times he had demanded that these Basij kids – peasants from the fields and the back streets of Ahvaz where there was no education – should form the line and advance with him. Three times not one had moved. It was their NCO who had been gored, raked from groin to upper chest by a tusk. Had it been one of them, a teenager, the NCO might have known how to talk to them, used a language they understood, and they would have followed him. Mansoor, an officer from an elite unit they feared, did not possess such skills. They were crouched around their man. None would leave him. It would not be possible to carry him back to where the jeeps had stalled: the wound was too deep. They held his hands, and there were sobs. His screams had sunk to the moan of the dying.

Mansoor had left them.

First, he had walked along the edge of the reeds. He had found, easily, the cloven-hoofed tracks of the boar. It had run away at its maximum speed, throwing up mud. He had found, after a more thorough search, the route the man had taken from the reeds and forward across open ground. He had seen him going like a stack of hay towards the reeds, upright, carrying the man Mansoor had interrogated and killed, and dragging the little blown-up boat with the military backpacks.

He could see, where there was still a sheen of damp on the ground, the marks where elbows, knees or boots had pushed the man forward. There were places, beyond the mud, where he could find no trace of a track. Then there would be brittle crusts of baked dirt where the surface had been broken and he could pick it up again. How the body was carried, he didn’t know. In his mind, Mansoor was certain that it had not been left in the reed beds. The man in the camouflage clothing would not have come through the water of the lagoon to the barracks, then thrown flash and gas grenades and taken down his comrade only to leave him, when pursuit closed on them, to the rats and pigs. The man carried his comrade and was in front of him. He watched.

He had an impression that the man was using what tactics of evasion were open to him, not going in a straight line, but cutting from one side to another, breaking any pattern of movement. Mansoor tried to imagine what he would have done. He went back to the days before the shrapnel injury had crippled him, thought of how he would have attempted flight across open ground, with the positive of a sniper’s costume and the negative of a burden. He had come away from the reeds, and the anger had left him with the tiredness and the sense of abject failure. It was as if a new contest had started.

New and fresh, without past history, the game would be played out to the death.

He did not know if his thoughts had logic. He had taken himself away from his job as security man to the Engineer, away from his father and from his wife. He thought he walked alone, that the slate was clean. He searched the dirt ahead for the fugitive. He no longer cared whether success would absolve past failure. Near Mosul, he had been shown a parcel of desert, without features, and had been told that an American sniper and his spotter were there, and had killed an hour before. He and many others had raked the sand with their eyes and the aid of lenses and had not found him. The marksman had killed again as the dusk settled. But then there had been no track to follow.

Mansoor went warily, roved backwards and forwards, found a trail, lost it and found it again. He was distracted. As the heat built, the haze grew and the mist went. A bird flew across him, went from his left to his right. He stopped, moved not a muscle. A smile softened him. The ibis went far to his right, towards where there was still water, an old irrigation canal with a bund line beyond it. He knew this territory, had made it his business to learn it since his posting to the Engineer’s home. He knew where trucks that had gone off the bund had slid down, where there was a burned T-74 main battle tank, and where a border watchtower was toppled. The bird headed for the water and his eyeline followed it. Small splashes of white caught his eye, and he lost the bird.

Where the ground was highest, three or four metres above where he stood, almost a kilometre away, there were two white vehicles, four-wheel drive. He knew where the man, with his comrade, his brother, headed to.

He remembered the bird: its grace, and its death.

Where he was, the ground was dried, dust, and it was easy for him to hold the man’s line but then it petered out. He lost it beside a buffalo’s bones. He started, again, to search for it. If the man reached the white vehicles, Mansoor had lost.

‘Did you see the fucking bird?’ She had her binoculars locked over her eyes.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Harding said.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the African Sacred Ibis, miss,’ Corky told her. ‘Logged, of course, for our eco-study of flora and fauna.’

‘It’s pretty,’ she said, then lapsed back into quiet.

She could hardly stand. The Boys were a few paces behind her at the Pajeros. The track petered out here and the only way they could go was back. They didn’t like it when she swore – she thought it interfered with their image of themselves as protecting a maid in peril, that sort of shit. When she was tired or a fair bit pissed off, she swore and blasphemed, trying to break the image they had of her. It usually screwed up.

‘They’re endangered, the ibis. We used to see them down by Basra,’ Shagger told her.

Abigail Jones thought it wrong that she should slouch or lean against a wheel hub, and out of the question that she should climb inside and get comfortable – ask to be woken if anything showed. ‘Anything’ did show. A single man was out of a reed bed, a wavering line of soft green in the light and heat. He wore combat fatigues, and when her eyes could get decent focus she fancied there were rank flashes on his shoulders and dark stains on the front of his tunic.

‘What am I watching?’ she asked.

Hamfist said, ‘When I was with the battalion we used to patrol up past al-Amara, then go east to the border because it was a rat-run for arms shipments, as important as the one down here. There’s a Revolutionary Guard camp at Mehran, a big training site, and a transit for hardware resupply. If we were close to the border they’d come out and eye us. We might wave, and shout something to spark a contact but they never responded. That’s their uniform, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and they’re serious. They don’t do fun on a Friday night. He’s looking for him.’

She turned her head away, swallowed hard.

Shagger said, ‘It’s down to you, miss. What are our rules of engagement?’

She attempted authority, didn’t know how good a fist she made of it. ‘We can fire in defence of our own persons. We can fire, also, in defence of those working with us, assuming that the threat comes from inside the territory we are currently operating in. What we cannot do is to fire live rounds into Iranian ground. Under no circumstances do we shoot, to kill or wound, across the border. What I’m saying is that he has first to reach wherever we establish the border to be and if they – in hot pursuit – cross that line, real or imaginary, we can blast the shit out of them. Conclusion: there can be no Iranian casualties, at our hand, on Iranian territory. Understood?’

She thought she would crumple in the heat. She could have found some shade by the body of either Pajero, but then she could not have watched the ground where the man came, careful, following a zigzag path. She could not have been inside, with the engine and the air-con on, because she would have ceded control. They nodded, no enthusiasm. She might have lost them.

‘The one you say is an officer, coming forward, talk me through it.’

Hamfist, towering over her: ‘He’s following Badger’s trail, miss, like a tracking hound does when it has a scent.’

‘Where is Badger?’

Shagger: ‘Out in front of the officer, miss, and coming.’

She saw nothing: nothing with her own eyes and nothing with the aid of the binoculars. The haze seemed to ripple on the ground and it hurt her to look. She saw nothing except the man who advanced, taking his time, patient.

‘I can’t see anything.’

Harding: ‘If he’s as good as he’s talked up to be, you won’t.’

Corky: ‘If you see him from here, miss, he’s as good as dead.’

Around him there were occasional stunted heaps of dirt and he hoped he made another of them. He saw a broad-winged shadow pass lazily in front of him and lifted his eyes, not his head: an eagle turned on a wide circle. He knew eagles from Scotland, and kites and buzzards, big birds of prey but slighter than eagles, from Wales. He didn’t think its vision would be impaired by the haze coming off the mud now that the mist was gone. He thought the bird’s sight would be perfect, and that it would have noted him and therefore had made a pass above him. It had in effect checked him out and moved on. If the man following him had had an eagle’s eye, and its vantage-point, it would have been over long before. Badger kept to the routine he’d set, and stayed motionless for the count to a hundred, moved for the next hundred, and tried to merge with the heaps and humps. He found more often now that he lost track of how far he had counted, and had to start again. The weight of Foxy grew, as if the man had weights fastened to him.

‘I reckon I have to see where we are, Foxy. If I don’t, way I feel, I could go off course.’

He had worked himself around one of the heaps and stopped when it was behind him. There was another to his left, level with his hip. He had Foxy across his back. His legs were slack between Badger’s, and his head was draped on his shoulder. His arms were tucked down over Badger’s chest and wedged there. He thought the two heaps, augmented by the bulging gillie suit, would appear to be one larger hump that had been dumped by storms, erosion and, once, by a water channel. He started, very slowly, to turn his head.

‘Were we right, Foxy? Don’t they say, in combat, you have to believe in the cause and that God walks alongside you – just war, and all that? What d’you think, Foxy? Is He alongside us? Don’t you understand that I need an answer, and you’re the only fucker right now that can give me one?’

He shifted his head, changed his eyeline, half-inch by half-inch. A small bird, pretty plumage, pecked in the mud not a foot from his face. The sun beat down, and the heat chiselled him. His eyes ached from the brightness. The man tracked him: the officer, Mansoor, came slow and steady after him. The rifle was in his hands and could go quickly to the shoulder. For Badger, to grab for the Glock would make a convulsion of movement, and the game would be over.

‘She’s a good-looking woman, and she’s a lump in her brain. Likely it’ll be today she hears whether anything can happen or she’s being sent home to tick off the days. Also likely, this’ll be the day her husband’s hit – what they called interdiction, and I was too ignorant to understand. Were we right, Foxy, to widow her and kill him? Are you going to tell me, Foxy?’

The man was still about a hundred yards behind Badger. He had veered off to the right, straightened, then taken another half-dozen short paces. Now he had stopped. He searched the ground, unhurried, and traversed. The rifle was raised. The officer, Mansoor, took a stance with his legs a little apart, his boots steady. He aimed and peered through the V sight. He had the needle steady on a target, and fired. One shot, and the songbird fled. Badger understood.

‘It’s us that did it. We take responsibility. It’s not those people up in the north. Not the Boss, the Cousin, the Friend or the Major – and not the Jones woman and the guys with her. We did it, like we were faithful servants – did as we were told, touched forelocks, didn’t bitch. Couldn’t have happened without me putting the audio in place and without you hearing their talk. Can we live with that, Foxy?’

A second shot was fired. The impact, the dirt spatter, was further from Badger. Two shots fired and two heaps of earth hit. Perhaps the man had similar torments of exhaustion, the injury in his leg ached and he wanted out. Anger built in him, and frustration. That was good for Badger, because a cold-minded man was a more formidable opponent. He talked softly and Foxy’s ear was an inch from his mouth.

‘Different when you look into their faces, right? When you see them playing with the kids, doing everyday life.’

If he had been alone, Badger would have backed his chance of crossing the open ground as better than even odds. But it was not only himself. There was a quaver in his voice now, annoyance. ‘What are we doing here, Foxy? What are we doing on their ground? What were we ever doing in this God-forsaken fucking place? Please, Foxy, I have to be told.’

Another shot was fired. He saw the flash as the cartridge case was ejected. The report echoed away from him. He didn’t think the man would turn, head away, lose all heart, but he did believe that the firing of three shots showed frustration and anger, which would destroy concentration. Badger moved his head, lost sight of the man. He saw two white shapes on a horizon. They were minimally small. He wondered if it was there that the wire strand lay and if the burned tank was to his right, and the trucks that had skidded off the bund line into stagnant water, and the fallen watchtower. He needed an answer from Foxy but was denied it. He started to move again, and the silence was back, no wind blew and no cloud protected him. The heat haze was his friend.

‘Us coming here, it wasn’t in my name. Us walking in here – tanks, bombs, guns – that wasn’t in my name. Up in the north, should I have thrown it back in their faces? I’m a policeman, Foxy, not a fucking soldier… Give me an answer that works, please.’

He thought he heard Foxy, thought the clipped, nasal voice told him about casualties and rehabilitation clinics, about the coffins coming in shiny hearses up a High Street in the blazing sun or when there was snow piled at the kerbs, or when rain drizzled to reflect the misery. It told him about the ‘national interest’… He could only hope that the haze would hide him.

‘They’re waiting for us, Foxy, the girl and the guys are.’

Corky gestured ahead, past the expanse of open ground and past the solitary man who tracked his target. She refocused the lenses. The binoculars found them.

Abigail Jones saw a jeep and two lorries. They were short of where the first two vehicles had lost traction in the sand. She wouldn’t have seen it with the naked eye, but the glasses pulled the scene into her face. A cluster of men stood around a casualty, but the new troops who had reached that point didn’t stop to help, merely paused long enough to be given the general direction of the flight and pursuit. She could pick out different uniforms, good camouflage patterns and a different scale of weaponry. She recognised three RPG-7 launchers, and a machine gun. She turned to Corky, raised an eyebrow.

‘That’s IRGC, miss, Revolutionary Guards, not the riff-raff. But you knew that, miss.’

Her name was called, Shagger’s voice, behind her. She swung on her feet. He pointed away, down the track they had used. In the far distance the sunlight blazed off the windscreen of the BMW saloon they had tipped off the track into shallow water. Dust billowed. There were three or four pick-ups, crudely painted in olive green, and a Land Rover among them. Two of the pick-ups had machine guns fastened to cross-bars behind the drivers’ cabs. Her lips must have pursed, and maybe she cursed quietly. Shagger had an answer for her.

‘That’s Iraqi Army, likely from al-Qurnah – and that’s heavy fire-power they’re carrying. We’re between a rock and a hard place, miss, or a lump hammer and an anvil.’

She said that the Black Hawks were in the air, which meant little. She was shivering, couldn’t halt the tremors, and no longer had certainties.

A truth had come to Mansoor. The quiet allowed his thoughts to collect. Truth won through against his exhaustion and hunger, the heat of the high sun, and he realised the enormity of his failure. He saw the Engineer, whom he had been ordered to protect, leave home with his wife to go abroad in secrecy and on a journey where, if his arrangements were known, he would be vulnerable to attack. He saw, also, the man in camouflage who had been dragged from the water and had resisted interrogation. He could not justify his failure to alert senior officials immediately after the capture. Who would understand his motives? He doubted that, in the length and breadth of Ahvaz or from one end to the other of the garrison camp, he could have rooted out one man prepared to say that his actions had been reasonable, given the pressures he faced.

He was like the dog that searched for a rabbit’s scent. Had it, held it, lost it and searched again for it. He could not see him. The fierce light mocked him. Often he would have sworn an oath on the Book that he saw movement in the heaps and humps of dirt that stretched away from him. Three more times he fired and heard only the report of the bullet.

The man he hunted had destroyed him. He might as well have exposed himself and urinated on Mansoor’s boots. The heat of the day had come and the shimmer of the ground made a greater confusion. He sank to his knees. For a minute, no more than two, he had lost the trail. Here the ground was dry dust and he had to search for a place – no larger than a piastre – where the crust was broken. He followed a new line and went closer, imperceptibly, to a raised spur on which two heavy white vehicles waited. He saw a woman there, whose skirt moved in the wind, and men, all with the same T-shirt decoration, stood around her.

They pointed beyond him, and when he turned and saw the extended cordon line approaching, he knew little time was left him.

‘You have been most patient.’ The consultant leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, and peered into the face of his patient. ‘A few of those who consult me are able to match your patience, but not many. I have explained in detail the size of the tumour, where it is located, what it is adjacent to and the importance of those areas in terms of speech, mobility and quality of life. You have listened and not interrupted. For that I am grateful. You will appreciate that it is my duty to take you through these matters. Now I can conclude.’

He smiled. It was the first time he had allowed any signal of his professional opinion to be on display. He saw her jaw drop.

‘I would use what we call the gamma knife – more simply, that is surgical radiotherapy – to extract the problem area under general anaesthetic. It is a technique that we have used with good results in Germany.’

Her husband had caught her arm and seemed to crumple in the shoulders.

‘Nothing is foolproof and nothing is guaranteed. Success is based on skill and experience. Enough to say that we feel optimistic of a good outcome. When I was called out of here, while I was explaining our diagnosis, it was to hear the opinions of others to whom I had given access to the scans. Their opinions, broadly, matched mine. We can do the operation. The alternative is that you will be dead within two months.’

Why did he persist? Easier, by far, to say that surgery was no longer an option and tell the patient to go home and spend her remaining days with her family. He could not have been gainsaid. But there was about her something magnificent that had captivated him. He had thought her husband a rat-faced bastard, and a regime man, but the man’s face was wet with tears.

‘We would start the necessary pre-operative examinations tomorrow, and I believe I could have access to surgery time, at the university medical centre, in Hamburg-Eppendorf, within a week.’

Had this been a German woman, she would probably have reached out her hands, held his cheeks and kissed him. It happened often. This woman’s expression remained stoic and her fingers stayed clasped on her lap. He thought her beautiful. She might have been the price of his marriage and have cost him a place in the upper echelon of Lubeck society. Others now would be sitting in his waiting room, showing, perhaps, less fortitude.

‘If you ring my receptionist this afternoon she will advise you of a schedule. We will need details of how the account will be settled and will give you a breakdown of costs. In the meantime, you should hope the weather clears so that you can enjoy the old quarter of the city, but do not tax yourself too greatly. I will see you to your car.’

He stood. The man – an Engineer who made bombs that killed and mutilated troops far from their homes – blubbered like a child, but she was composed.

The tide was sliding away and the beach showed a damp ribbon of sand. He stood where it was dry and could see miles along the coast line… as he had that day. It was where the border had run from alongside the Dassower See, and its shore, then cut across the peninsula at its narrow point, leaving Priwall in the west, Rosenhagen and Potenitz in the east. It had come down from the sand dunes, now a nature reserve: Naturschutzgebiet – Betreten verboten. Then, the wire, the minefields and barricades had crossed the beach and gone far out into the waters of the Lubeckerbucht. It had been an early-summer day, with a brisk wind but clean sunshine.

The pastor had brought him.

The Lutheran priest had worn jeans, an open-necked checked shirt and heavy sandals, while the youthful Len Gibbons had dressed in grey slacks, lightweight brogues and a sports jacket of quiet herringbone. It had been the pastor’s invitation. He wants to see you once more, see the man he works for whom he trusts. His friend’s cousin is a border guard and it is arranged, but you must give no signal, and you will see him only very briefly, but it will be, for him, as if you touched hands. They had walked on the beach and had gone towards the fence, where it dropped down into the dirty Baltic water. A watchtower overlooked that section, and a patrol boat was out in the Bight. It had been a naturist’s beach, and they had gone among the flapping bosoms and shrivelled members of elderly males and had seen the guards, behind the fence or up in the towers, clicking their cameras; there had been a joke about porn stocks in the guards’ camp being low. They were the only clothed people on their side of the wire.

On the far side, every man was uniformed and armed, big dogs had howled at them, and Gibbons had seen him. Maybe for a half-minute, and at a distance of some three hundred yards, a young, slight-built figure had come from the gorse behind the dunes and walked towards the sea with a guard. Antelope had stopped close to the waterline, and gazed towards the barriers, then turned away. Gibbons and the pastor had gone back through the naturists and the young SIS officer had felt bonded with his asset, more trusting.

Two months later, the message had come through that new courier arrangements were required and Gibbons, to his desk chief, had spoken up on behalf of the asset’s request. Contacts had been supplied. Three at least, because of Gibbons’s naivete and his superiors’ lack of due diligence, were dead, and their lives would have ended unpleasantly. The experience had made Len Gibbons – surviving by fingernail grip – fight as he had been fought. He had been taught, in a front-of-the-class seat, the value of ruthless application of his government’s policy. No sentiment intruded into his professional life, no qualms were permitted. Morality? He wouldn’t have known how to spell it.

So cold. Near his feet there was an old, pockmarked railway sleeper, with heavy chains nailed to it. It would have been a tiny part of the underwater system with which the East German state had sought to defend itself. Pathetic people, wiped from history… Eleven summers before Len Gibbons had come here, a teenage international swimmer from the east, Axel Mitbauer – 400-metres freestyle – had gone into the water up the coast, having anointed his body with petroleum jelly, and had swum fifteen and a half miles before reaching a bobbing buoy in the Lubeck Bight. Gibbons always took that story as proof of the superiority of his country, his creed, his calling. He still felt it as strongly as he had when he had last been on this beach those years before. He had never worn patriotism on his sleeve, but it was warming to be on a winner’s team.

The wind whipped him. Pretty shells crunched under his feet. He looked at his wristwatch. It might already have happened, or would be about to happen. He thought it time to start the journey home. He had done well. It was a triumph and would be recognised as such by the few inside the loop. Good to have been at this place of failure when a success was acted out.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur Lubeck 24.11.2011 09.12 Police report fatal shooting on the campus of the university medical school.

The Cousin heard it on a news flash on the local station – he had tuned in on his car radio for that purpose. ‘That’s my boy,’ he murmured. He ignored the No Smoking sign in the car, lit a cigarillo and drove a little faster down the wide highway. He felt good – like after the best sex or a decent dinner – and he’d stay with the station for updated news.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Lubeck 24.11.2011 09.29 Eyewitnesses at the university medical school of the UNESCO heritage city of Lubeck report two dead and one injured in a gun attack outside the neuro-surgery unit of the teaching hospital. A confirmed fatality is Steffen Weber, a consultant at the hospital, who was shot on the building’s steps. An unidentified gunman fled from the scene of the attack. Police have now cordoned off the hospital grounds.

The swap had been done, vehicles switched – the clothing and the weapon would go back to Berlin for disposal – and the Friend drove carefully within the speed limit towards the ferry port on the road to Travemunde. He knew these people, had had experience of them for more than thirty years of his working life. He had been on the periphery of the teams that had gone into Beirut for the revenge killings after the Munich Olympiad, and those hitting targets in North Africa, Rome, Paris, London and Damascus. He would have said he could read the feelings of the trigger men, whether they fired pistols at close range or detonated bombs remotely. This one was extraordinary. The man beside him was quiet, relaxed and had yawned a couple of times. He showed no sign of having spent a bad night on a cot bed in an outer office at a local synagogue. It was on the radio, made a news flash and interrupted an item about the preparations for the Christmas fair and the hope of a boost to the city’s economy.

‘They have not spoken of him yet.’

‘They will. Give them time.’

Deutsche Presse-Agentur Lubeck. 24.11.2011 09.43 A Lubeck police spokesperson said that Steffen Weber, consultant in neuro-surgery, was pronounced dead at the scene after being shot on the steps into the building where he had his office. Also killed, she said, was a foreign national, as yet unnamed, and a driver from the Iranian embassy in Berlin was wounded – but with no life-threatening injuries. The unidentified gunman is believed to have escaped from the hospital grounds in a commercial black Nissan van driven by an accomplice.

She sat on a hard chair in a corridor. Her husband’s body and that of the consultant were beyond swing doors. Twice she had tried to breach them and twice she had been gently, but firmly, refused entry. No one spoke to her. If she spoke to them, her language was not understood. Many hurried past and the swing doors flapped open for them, but not for her. There were policemen, doctors in gowns, nurses. She was not offered tea, coffee or water. She was forgotten. A woman came past her, escorted by uniformed men and bureaucrats in suits. She was blonde, expensive and boot-faced. Naghmeh assumed her to be the wife of the man who had tried, and failed, to shield her husband. Her head hurt, where her hair had been wrenched and there was blood on her face and hands, but no one seemed to see it.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur Lubeck, 24.11.2011 09.58 A police spokesperson has confirmed that the fatalities following a shooting in the grounds of the university medical school were a neuro-surgery expert, Steffen Weber, married with one child, and a foreign national, believed to be an Iranian male, who was escorting his wife from the building following a consultation with Dr Weber. An Iranian embassy driver was shot twice as he attempted to block the gunman’s escape. Across the street at the time of the shooting was twenty-three-year-old Manfred Hartung, a student: ‘The two men and the woman came down the steps from the doors. They were smiling and radiant, laughing. The driver of the waiting car opened the back door for the lady, and a short man, young, wearing workman’s overalls, laid a shovel on the pavement and stepped forward. I saw he held a handgun. He aimed at the man who held the woman’s arm, but the other attempted to put his body in the line of fire. The gunman shot four times. Two bullets hit the one I now know to have been a doctor, and when he fell, two more were fired at the man who was with the woman. The first put that man onto the steps and the woman fell over him, but the gunman pulled back her hair with one hand, placed his weapon against the man’s forehead and fired again. The driver put himself in the way of the gunman and was shot at close range. It was very fast, like a film, and I doubt it lasted more than fifteen seconds. It was an assassination. The gunman did not run but walked at a brisk pace up the road and a van drove him away.’

The talk was of cuts, small neat slashes to the budget on which his empire depended. The director general had Human Resources, Finance, Overseas Stations and Purchasing in his office and they nit-picked around costs and outgoings. Fiefdoms were defended and.. . He had the text on the television screen that was on the wall behind his department managers. The politicians demanded savings but were wary of the power he exercised. If he were to leak that the nation’s security was threatened by penny-pinching, the Westminster crowd would capitulate. He played the game, went through the processes. Something would be offered, but not much. They were on the matter of foreign travel – business class or cattle truck – and he read the text reporting an incident in a distant town in northern Germany. It was enough for him to collate the sums: three plus three made six.

Take the bastard down, Len, he had said, and the head had ducked in understanding. Gibbons, always described as ‘a safe pair of hands’, had delivered and might get a minor gong out of it for long service, but not much more, and there would be no meeting in this office with congratulations bouncing off the walls and no pumped handshake. It was deniable, and would be kept that way, but he felt a frisson of excitement and his blood flowed faster. Matter closed, business completed. He switched off the television screen. A good outcome.

‘Miss, are we fucked?’

Not a question that Abigail Jones needed to answer. Pretty bloody clear. She strained to hear better. Sounds filtered in her ears. There was the light wind that ruffled her hair, the fullness of her skirt, the scarf at her throat, and sang a little against the radio antennae on the Pajeros. Harding had a hacking cough. Hamfist had the habit, when tension rose, of slapping the palm of his hand across the stock of his weapon and making a rhythm of it. Corky kicked stones he found on the bund line. Some went off in ricochets and a few cannoned against the bulletproofed sides of the Pajeros. Shagger sang a hymn, barely audible – it would have been one he’d learned as a kid in chapel, in Welsh.

Hamfist asked again: ‘Are we fucked, miss? If we are, what can we do about it? Put it this way, miss, I’m not going into the hands of the crowd in front or the crowd behind. No chance, miss.’

Abigail Jones thought of all the women in the SIS, those who did power-walking up and down the corridors, jogged in the midday break, were shagged by line managers and desk chiefs to get up the ladder faster, contributed at seminars and think-tanks, and wanted responsibility. They would sweat for it and spread their legs to be given it. She hadn’t sought it and it had landed in her lap. ‘Where are you, girls, when you’re needed to share the load?’ More important: where was Badger? Prime importance: where was the chopper?

‘Nearly fucked, but still a little slack to wind in.’

She listened for the Black Hawk, but didn’t hear it. She knew it was coming, was airborne and had the co-ordinates. She knew also that the crew would have flown special forces, done difficult stuff, was experienced in extraction, but it had not, yet, showed.

‘Minimal slack, but a bit. You meant that, Hamfist, about not going into a cage?’

She didn’t know where he was, how far forward. Didn’t know how far he had to come. The Iranians, described by her guys as IRGC, were in a cordon line and coming through. They were some four hundred yards from her, her Boys and the two Pajeros. They had good firepower – her team couldn’t match the hardware – and came steadily towards the single man in the olive green, with the officer’s flashes, who tracked Badger.

Of Badger, there was neither sight nor sound. She had powerful binoculars, and the Boys did. They also had trained eyes for watching ground and the subtle changes movement made. Abigail had not seen him. Neither had Shagger, Corky, Hamfist nor Harding, who had the best eyes of them all. It was as though he had disappeared, burrowed into the ground and gone. The cordon line came to the officer. She couldn’t know what was said but saw the little cameo played out: authority gone, rank lost, humiliation on show. He was spoken to – the line had stopped – and his head didn’t lift. He might have mumbled an answer. A more senior officer’s hand thrashed across his face, and there would have been a drawn pistol in it. Her lenses showed the grey, or white, flashes of teeth falling, then the blood drops. He was hit again, was on his knees and kicked. How would it have been in her own crowd? If she failed to bring Badger home, and Foxy, if they were paraded on state television – dead or alive – and if a government had to squirm out apologies, how would it be? Not kicked, not losing teeth, not pistol-whipped, but out on her neck, erased from memory. She’d be – to those who knew – a cult figure of ridicule and hate. Perhaps better to be kicked.

‘Miss, their cage isn’t for me.’ Hamfist said it distantly, as if – each minute – her importance counted a little less.

She looked into their faces. Harding’s was impassive, told her nothing. Corky wouldn’t meet her gaze. Shagger murmured that goddamn hymn.

‘Could we go across country?’ It wasn’t rhetorical: she didn’t know the answer.

There was a chorus, but clearest was Harding: ‘We can’t, ma’am. Go down, get round the firepower in front of us and trek into Iranian territory. Go right or left and we hit water. We wouldn’t do a half-mile and they’d take the vehicles out with the weaponry they have. It would be a shooting war and not on ground of our choosing.. . and it does nothing for the reason we’re here – for the guys, Badger and Foxy. If you’ve looked behind you, ma’am, the outlook is worse.’

Behind was the hard place, the anvil.

The elevated track on which they had come was blocked by the Iraqi vehicles. The mounted machine guns had men behind them, and she could see the layers of belt ammunition, lit by sunlight. They were. 5 calibre weapons and the Pajeros would not be able to go down into the dirt and survive that sort of attack. They were around two hundred yards behind her and the Boys. Local people, local troops, loathed the private security contractors. They might have had a decent relationship with their mentors in the American or British Army, but the private soldiers – not answerable to civilian or military law – were detested. A single shot was fired, from a rifle. She ducked, then focused. An officer in a swagger pose, legs apart and barrel chest pushed forward, stood in front of the Land Rover’s bonnet, held an AK and had it pointed to the sun. A warning. Near to the officer, gesticulating, was the sheik who had lost a BMW top-of-the-range saloon.

She turned. Looked the other way. To the front. The IRGC men and their officer were closer now, and the beaten, kicked man lay in the mud far in their rear. The first shot was answered. She heard the crack of a bullet going high… between a rock and a hard place, a lump hammer and an anvil.

She searched the ground and couldn’t see him.

Two forces and two shots. She had nothing sensible to say and left her Boys hanging on her silence. If they were taken she would have a fair chance of not growing old in either the Evin gaol of Tehran or the Abu Ghraib lock-up in Baghdad. The Boys might have a poor chance of ever smelling fresh air again, particularly if an Engineer had gone into a gutter and bled his life away, and especially if tribesmen from a marsh village had been killed in the break-out with the Pajeros.

She searched again, every damn stone, every rotted reed stalk, a buffalo’s white bones and a frame for a boat encased in mud. She saw a movement and thought it was a rabbit. The lump hammer and the anvil came closer – maybe less than a hundred metres to each side of them. She heard the scrape as one of her Boys armed his weapon.

‘For fuck’s sake, miss, what now?’

It was because they had come back for him, for Badger. It was because Badger had gone to get Foxy. She could have screamed it. All bloody sentiment, the crap about going the extra yard to retrieve a colleague, obligations in a world she didn’t inhabit. She sucked in her breath and would scream that the bloody hole they found themselves in was their fault. Blame should not be levelled at her. She bit it down, clamped her teeth on her tongue, felt blood on her lips – and heard them.

The big blades were spinning pretty circles and the two came, dark and fast, with the profile of killer dogs over the last of the bund lines. There were no pylons here and no phone wires slung from poles. The Black Hawks could have been twenty feet above the ground, could not have been more than forty. She had no more strength and her knees buckled. She could see, when the Black Hawks were above them, the faces of the cockpit crew, then the hatch gunners. They slowed and banked a little, then hovered and she saw that one had taken a position towards the anvil and the other faced the lump hammer. In addition to the firepower from the hatches there were rockets on pods slung forward below the stubbed wings. The rock had stopped and the hard place stayed static.

Abigail Jones was trembling and could barely stand upright under the down-draughts. She cupped her hands and screamed his name.

Futile.

The Boys took a cue from her. They all screamed, five feeble voices against the thunder of the engines. She had no link to the pilot but she could see him clearly through the shield of the cockpit. He pointed to his wristwatch and tapped it hard, like this was no fairground joyride and time was precious. The rotors kicked up dust.

The dirt and sand swirled round them and it was in her mouth and nose, flattening her loose clothing against her torso and legs. The Boys were spewing, coughing, and there was a curtain round them of sand, dirt, debris, stones that scoured their faces. The curtain was dense enough for her not to see, any longer, the lump hammer or the anvil. She lost her view of the rock and the hard place. She was choking and her screams had died.

He came through the curtain.

She didn’t know where from. He was low, bent, and shuffled. The down-blast of the blades rocked him. It was Shagger who reached him first – ten paces from her and now clear of the curtain – then Harding, who dragged off the headpiece. He was huge in the gillie suit and seemed to understand little. His eyes were glazed and without recognition. First, Abigail Jones saw the bare white feet trailing from the bottom of the suit, then the head that lolled on Badger’s chest. Corky had her, no ceremony, and one Black Hawk came down. The skids bounced once, and the other flew cover above. Corky had hold of her collar and his other hand was between her legs and she felt herself airborne, thrown high and forward. The gunner’s gloved hand yanked her into the interior. Badger came next, and it was a struggle for the crew to get him up. He neither helped nor resisted them. Hamfist followed, then the rest… and they climbed, steeply. Her guts dropped lower than her knees. Before they pulled away – flew for safety – the two gunners had a moment of fun: they shot up the Pajeros until the flames started and black smoke spiralled. They went out fast.

Shagger shouted in her ear, competed with the engine power, ‘He won’t let go of him. He has Foxy.’

Harding yelled in her other ear, ‘Cold, dead, been gone for hours, but he’s not loosing him.’

She said, with a wonderment, ‘All that time, through all that, carrying him, already dead, with what was chasing him – it’s incredible… a miracle.’

A gunner – had the name ‘Dwayne Schultz’ stamped on his jacket – passed her a headset and she heard the pilot. They were to overfly Basra and go direct to Kuwait City. She shrugged, not her decision. She twisted in the seat and could see back up the fuselage and past the gunner’s squatting body. Badger wore the suit and his hands were wrapped across his chest. Through the open flap she could see Foxy’s head and arms, a little of his shoulders; she could see also some of the wounds on his body. The responsibility weighed on her, and the cost.

‘Good to have you back with us, Badger. To have both of you…’