A man with an angular face and a weary voice had greeted him. He seemed to have the organisation in hand and had told him, ‘I understand people call you ‘Badger’. If you have no particular hostility to the name then that’s what we’ll use. If you don’t know somebody’s name and title – and you don’t know mine – what would you call them?’
He’d said that if he didn’t know the name of a man who ran a show he’d refer to him as ‘boss’.
‘Oh, I’d like that… and over there, that’s Foxy. I don’t think anyone else will need identifying. Foxy and Badger. Very good. We’ll talk a bit when we get there, but in the mean time I’d be grateful for your patience.’
They had been led by ground crew towards the Lear jet, its engines ticking over and the steps down. All bizarre, but Danny ‘Badger’ Baxter was not one to be fazed by lack of information. The flight was smooth, they were above the clouds and…
He had shown his documentation at the gate, and the RAF police hadn’t jotted down any of the details listed on his Box ID. He’d been told to park his wheels in a space outside the perimeter fence, like no one wanted to acknowledge that he had ever been here. Then he’d been taken in a minibus to a prefabricated departure annex. He was half dead on his feet, had left Builth before five, reached the airbase a half-hour before dawn and hadn’t spoken to either of the other men waiting for the flight call. He had almost been asleep when the boss had spoken to him.
When he’d left home to take up the work in Wales, locked the door of his bed-sit in the hostel the police used in Bristol, he had been wearing clothes that could either be described as rugged or vagrant’s gear, but he had clean socks and underpants that probably stifled most of the smell; he looked ragged, and felt out of sorts because of it. He’d noted that the other two had eyed him as if they expected dog-shit on his shoes and fleas in his clothing. He was unshaven and hadn’t run a comb through his hair.
It was a black-painted American aircraft, with no markings that he’d seen. The pilot spoke with a drawl and dispensed minimal information. How long would they be up? Wasn’t told. What was the flight’s destination? Wasn’t told. Would there be in-flight coffee and a bacon sarnie? Wasn’t told. The boss sat in the front seats, and across the aisle from him there was a heavy-set guy, who also had an American twang but a more civilised one than the pilot’s. There wasn’t a girl with a coffee jug or anything to eat. The remaining passenger, Foxy, had what Baxter reckoned was a death pallor, and there were nicks on his throat, from shaving; one had transferred blood to the collar of his clean shirt. He wore a blazer, and the tie knotted at the collar might have been a military one; his hair was neatly cut and brushed, his slacks had knife creases and his shoes were polished. Badger didn’t own a blazer, had precious few shirts that were smart enough for a tie, and the only one of those easily at hand in the hostel would have been black – for funerals. The man had looked exhausted in the departure area, out on his feet, and by the time they had been up a half-hour a gentle rhythmic snoring was coming from Foxy’s den. Badger knew about foxes, had often enough lain up in hides at the edge of woodland to watch a remote house. The foxes, cubs and adults, would come close to him and scratch for worms or sniff around him. He was fond of them.
There weren’t many that Danny Baxter was fond of. His father and mother lived in the shadow of the nuclear-warhead factory at Burghfield, near Reading, in Berkshire, had a bungalow there and a second-hand vehicle business. He reckoned the location, close to Armageddonville, meant they’d picked up a property cheap to live in and work from. He saw them no more than twice a year and there was nothing of his work he could talk about and nothing of their lives that he was much interested in.
No one at the hostel would have cared that he was being ferried – destination unknown – in an executive jet, and probably by now his regular oppo, the faithful Ged, would be heading east to Leeds in Yorkshire where he was based. He would be thinking more about how much of his gear he could get into the washing-machine than about where Badger was going.
No woman to care… There had been Fran – ‘Frances’ to her developer father who owned the harbour-side flat overlooking the water in the Bristol dockland. She’d been a third-year student, history of art, at the university and might have found him exciting, might have craved a bit of rough. They’d been together a bit more than six months but it was never going to last. No row, no flying plates: he’d left a note for her one day, propped on her pillow, which had an epic view over the water. Keep safe, have happy times, and best luck, Badger. He’d loaded up his big Bergen and a little rucksack, all he owned in the world, closed the door, locked it, put his keys through the letterbox and tripped down the stairs to the little van, nondescript, that he used, and driven out of her life to the hostel. A bloody awful exchange, but the time had arrived when she might have thought him right for moulding to her style or chucking out. He had done it in his own time and at his moment of choosing.
About the only thing that owned Danny ‘Badger’ Baxter was the job. It ruled him. It exerted enough of a pull that he wasn’t concerned that no one had told him where they were going, when or why.
The man in front – Foxy – still snored.
He was woken by the steepness of the descent. They had come through the cloud, and there was a cross-wind, but the pilot flew as if he had the controls of a fighter aircraft. The lights for belt-fastening were late coming on, and Joe Foulkes was jolted forward in his seat, damn near catapulting into the back of the one immediately in front – the man sitting in it had introduced himself as Gibbons. He’d only given his name to Foxy, not to the fellow in the back who looked like a tramp waiting for a night shelter to open. He hadn’t spoken to Ellie that morning – hadn’t wanted to from the prefabricated lounge. He hadn’t had the bottle to explain he was on a magical mystery journey to God alone knew where and wouldn’t be home that night. If he had made the call, explained he would be absent again, he would have listened to the inflections in her voice, whether she seemed to regret it, whether she was indifferent or unable to disguise a riffle of anticipation because he would be away. But he had sent a text: Tied up workwise/called away/will ring when possible/luv massive Foxy. One had come back before they’d boarded: Shame – missing you. Love, Elliexxx. His phone was off now, would stay that way till whatever, wherever, whenever had been done.
He assumed he was to give a lecture. What else did he know? He knew that the greeter from Six might be the man of the moment and in charge, but he was shit-scared, halfway to terrified, of flying – Foxy could see the way the fists held the arms of the seat and the face was white. He knew that his best instincts were usually the first ones, and he had formed an immediate dislike of Badger, but that could be managed: his own age and seniority would determine they were not equals. He would have rank on the younger man, whose appearance was simply inappropriate and It was the sort of landing an aircraft might have made on a carrier’s deck: abrupt, short on the taxi, jerking to a stop. The big sign over a distant terminus was just recognisable as ‘Prestwick’, and a helicopter was waiting close by on an empty desert of wet concrete. Its rotors idled, then picked up speed as the Lear’s engines were shut down. The pilots came out of their cockpit door, and the main man – the one who’d have had battlefield wings over Kuwait or out of Da Nang – spoke briefly to the American passenger. He didn’t make eye contact with any of the others. Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes had several failings but idiocy was not among them. The helicopter, like the Lear, was black-painted, he could see no flight-designation markings, and they were a hell of a way from the tower and the Prestwick buildings, out of sight and out of mind. He reckoned this was a flight that had never taken place.
They came on to the apron and scurried for the chopper. The rotors blew rain into their faces, and a crewman gave them a hand up into the hatch door. They strapped the harnesses into place. The military canvas bucket seats and the frames hurt Foxy’s thighs. It was years since he had been in the close confines of a helicopter’s cabin, with the noise growing until the ear baffles were passed to them – hadn’t been in a helicopter since leaving the base at Basra after a four-month tour seven years back. A shitty place, horrible and…
A man who might have been Middle Eastern stared at him warily and didn’t respond to Foxy’s cautious smile: short, dark-haired, swarthy and stinking of cigarettes; the Six man, Gibbons, had tried to take the fellow’s hand but it had stayed buried in a pocket. The other, taller and pale-skinned, with curly blond hair, lolling comfortably and chewing gum, was late thirties or early forties – Foxy recognised the military uniform of mufti: a double-breasted navy suit with a prominent stripe, black ankle boots and a waxed jacket that might have been useful out on a moor. The eyes seemed distant and didn’t focus on trivia, such as what Foxy wore, Badger’s messy hair or the white knuckles of the Six man. They lifted sharply.
They were in cloud, buffeted by winds, and the pilot made no effort to get below the weather, above or round it. They rocked and shook, and Foxy wondered if the intelligence officer might throw up. He played games in his mind. A business heavy in secrecy and international flavours: it reeked of deniability. He supposed that at Six, if they planned a deniable operation, they dusted down a cardboard file that would have been written in the fifties or sixties and dictated a quiet, remote location suitable for briefings, lectures and… The Mull of Kintyre helicopter crash had taken the lives of police and intelligence officers from Northern Ireland who were heading for a meeting at a garrison camp close to Inverness; the various arms had needed to be brought to neutral territory if jealousies and conceits were not to stymie co-operation. Perhaps tensions and stress points were yet to be revealed. Foxy almost chuckled.
The beast seemed to stumble through the cloud. Then – it might have been thirty minutes after take-off – light flooded through the small porthole windows, and rain distorted the view, but Foxy made out the shape of a castle keep in grey stone that matched the cloud. There was more grey from the breaking waves in a bay, and from the stones on a geometrically curved beach. Back from the sand and shingle, a field was half flooded, and behind it a grand house, on three floors, with a portico. Could they not have booked a house in south-west London – or anywhere north of the capital but closer? It spoke of delusions. They were down, but the engines were not killed.
He was last out of the hatch and the crewman steadied him as he jumped clear. The others were ahead and hurried between the puddles towards the main entrance where the rendering was chipped.
Out in front, moving easily and light-footed, was Badger. The American and the foreigner kept pace with him. Foxy felt the rotors’ pressure blasting him from behind and staggered as the beast, anonymous and black, rose again and headed back over the bay. Gibbons was beside him.
‘Why this place?’ Foxy might have nudged a hint of sarcasm into his tone. The outside of the edifice seemed to drip water from roof gullies and guttering, and he expected that half as much again would be falling through the ceilings into the salons and bedrooms. He held tightly to his bag and thanked the Lord he always packed more socks, smalls and shirts than he anticipated needing. All of them had overnight bags except Badger, who likely stank and would be higher by the evening.
‘Not down to me. He who pays the piper calls the tune – know what I mean?’
He blinked in the rain. ‘I don’t.’
‘All in good time, Foxy – if you don’t mind the familiarity. It’s always best if names are in short supply. Our esteemed colleague from the Agency is paying the piper. The Americans are doing the logistics, which means their bucket of dollars is deeper than our biscuit tin of sterling. It’s the sort of place that appeals to them.’
‘And people live here – survive here?’
‘There is a life form in the Inner Hebrides that probably needs to huddle for comfort in the kitchen. I’m assured we won’t be disturbed by the family. Truth is, for this one the piper needs quite a bit of paying because it’s not the sort of thing – Monday through Friday – we usually do. Let’s get out of this bloody weather.’
They went in through the high double doors, but no warmth greeted them. Foxy had good eyes and a good memory, and his power of observation in poor light was excellent: he noted the washing-up bowl in the centre of the tiled floor, the portrait of a villainous-looking kilted warrior above the first bend in the stairs, the faded pattern on the couch, that the paint was off all the doors, the smell of dogs and overcooked vegetables, an older man in earnest conversation with the American and a woman with bent shoulders, a thick sweater and a bob of silver hair. The rain beat on the door behind them, water dripped into the washing-up bowl and Badger sat on the bottom stair, showing no interest in anything around him. Foxy noted all of it.
The voice of the greeter was soft in his ear: ‘Their grandson was Scots Guards in Iraq, attached to Special Forces, didn’t survive the tour. They’d want to help and, as I said, the Americans have a deep bucket. Improvised explosive device, on the al-Kut road. You’re going to hear a bit about improvised explosive devices, but I’m getting ahead of myself.’
Foxy said vacuously, ‘I have some experience, but this should be interesting…’
The man laughed without mirth, and Foxy couldn’t see what had been funny about his remark – about anything to do with improvised explosive devices.
When the Engineer worked in his laboratory, or was on the factory floor checking the craftsmanship of the machine-tool work, he could escape from the enormity of the crisis that had settled on him. It was like the snowclouds that built up over the mountains beyond Tehran when winter came. When he played with the children he could briefly think himself free. When he walked on the track in front of his home and watched the birds hovering, swirling and wafting, there were moments when the load seemed to slip away. When he was at his bench, working on the use of more ceramic material to replace metal parts and negate the majority of the portable detectors… When he was out on the long straight tracks that had been bulldozed beyond the camp into wilderness and studied the capability of his radio messages to beat the electronics deployed against him, he sometimes forgot… The moments never lasted. There was laughter, rarely, and there were smiles, sometimes, and there were those times that the work was successful beyond dreams – counter-measures failed, detonation was precise and a target was destroyed in testing – but every time the cloud formed again, and the pleasure of achievement was wiped out. He could see the ever-growing weakness in his wife, the depth of her tiredness, and could watch the bravery with which she put on a show of normality. She was dying, and the process would each day be faster, the end nearer.
He could not acknowledge it to her, but he realised his fingers were clumsier and his thoughts more muddled. He suffered. He couldn’t picture a future if – when – she was taken. Only once had he called in the debts owed him by the revolution of 1979 when the Ayatollah had left Paris and flown back to his people. He had been nine years old and had watched the television with his father, who taught mathematics in Susangerd, as the Imam Khomeini had come slowly down the aircraft’s steps.
He had been three years older, and had wept when his father had dragged him back into their home: he had been about to join the child volunteers who would be given the ‘key to Paradise’ in exchange for clearing the minefields laid by the Iraqi enemy, making safe passage for the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia. His father had locked him into a room and not permitted him to leave the house for a week. He had gone back to school and there had been many empty places in the classroom. It had been said that when they had ran across mined ground they were killed by the explosions, their body parts scattered, that rats and foxes had come to eat pieces of their flesh. It had also been said that on the third day of the clearance operation the children, his friends from school, had been told to wrap themselves in rugs and roll across the dirt so that their bodies stayed together, were easier to collect after the line had moved forward.
He resented not having a plastic key to Paradise. He did not believe the lie of foreigners that a half-million had been imported, at a discount rate for bulk, from a Taiwan factory.
He had been twenty-two years old, a second-year student of electronic engineering at the Shahid Chamran University in Ahvaz, when his father had died. The martyr Mostafa Chamran, educated in the United States and with a PhD in electrical engineering, had fallen on the front line and was revered as a leader and a fighter. There had been many around him to whom Rashid could look for inspiration, living and dead. He was the regime’s child and its servant, and he had gone where he was directed, to university in Europe and to the camps in his country where his talents could be most useful on workbenches. This once he had called in the debt.
In the afternoon he would be on the road that led away from Ahvaz towards Behbahan. A new shipment of American-made dual-tone multi-frequency equipment had come via the round-about route of Kuala Lumpur, then Jakarta, and he would test it for long-distance detonations. The Americans, almost, had gone from Iraq, but it was the Engineer’s duty to prepare the devices that would destroy any military advance into Iran by their troops. He would be late home, but her mother was there – the message had come by courier the evening before.
Neither he nor his wife ever used a mobile telephone. In fact, the Engineer never spoke on any telephone. No voice trace of Rashid Armajan existed. Others communicated for him from his workshop, and he used encrypted email links. Messages of importance were brought by courier from the al-Quds Brigade garrison camp outside Ahvaz. One had come the previous evening.
He and Naghmeh should be prepared to leave within the week. Final arrangements were being confirmed. He was not forgotten, was honoured. The state and the revolution recognised him. At his workbench, out of sight of others, he prayed in gratitude. Was there anything another doctor, a superior consultant, could offer? Would a long journey weaken her further and bring on the end? But the courier had brought a message that gave hope. He saw death on Internet screens and from recordings on mobile phones. The killings were caused by his own skills. He lost no sleep over that knowledge, but had not slept well since the Tehran doctors’ verdict when he had seen the bleakness in their eyes. Now hope, small, existed.
They would be in God’s care.
‘Before we concentrate on the individual who has brought us together today, who and where he is, there’s something I’d like you both to respond to. First you, Foxy. In your long surveillance career, what was your most satisfying achievement?’
It was, of course, a trick question, and it was not unique to Len Gibbons. He’d heard it put twice during his thirty-five years at Six, in seminars when individuals were being evaluated. The answer usually revealed much about the subject.
They were sitting in a horseshoe on hard chairs, and no notes were taken, but away to the side a board was balanced against the back of an armchair, covered with a drape. He sat at the extreme left, and had introduced himself as ‘Len’. The American was ‘the Cousin’ and the Israeli, from Unit 504 of Military Intelligence, was ‘the Friend’. There was Foxy and there was Badger, and between them the tall, handsome, suited man, ‘the Major’. There had been time for them to go to allocated rooms, have a tepid wash, meet a pack of Jack Russells and spaniels, and drink instant coffee from petrol-station mugs.
Then Gibbons had shepherded them into what might have been a ballroom – no water came through this ceiling – where the main furniture was cloaked in dust-sheets, but at the far end, to the left of a huge, unlit fireplace, there was a small table with a vase of flowers on it and a silver-framed photograph of a young face smiling above a Guardsman’s ceremonial tunic. Gibbons thought it appropriate, and would refer to it. He had set out the chairs while the others were on the first floor – had borrowed enough from the dining room. He had gone to the sister service across the river, the Box, the anti-terrorist command and the Branch. The Box had come up with Badger, and Special Branch had said that Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes was the only one worth considering.
It was a good question because it gave a man enough rope either to climb to a higher level, or to hang himself. He saw Foxy – a capable man with a number of successes behind him – stiffen. Well, he would be evaluating the audience of Gibbons, the Cousin and the Friend, and wondering what Badger’s take on it would be. Gibbons knew the record of Foxy Foulkes: a policeman of thirty-three years, a nine-year spell with Special Branch, four months in Basra, and a further seven years of lecturing in the arts of covert rural surveillance. He was a man who expected to be listened to and was.
Foxy’s tongue flipped over his lips to moisten them. Gibbons saw that. The tie was straightened, which bought another few seconds, then a cough to clear the throat. The man was dependent on his instinct.
Foxy said, in a good clear voice, as if they were his students, ‘Satisfying, yes? Interesting one. There’ve been a few – more than a few. Could be when I was with the Branch and we were doing the business on two Iranian attaches on a Manchester visit they’d made twice before. Our stake-out was on a golf course and there was snow on the ground. I had a youngster with me, didn’t know his arse from his elbow, and we came in close enough to see the drops on their noses when they did their contact – a Muslim kid working in the club’s kitchens. We did the approach so that not a flake of snow was disturbed within the arc of their vision… Yes, that was a pretty good one… And early in my time with West Yorkshire we had a budding PIRA cell on our patch. The Irish were clever by then and knew the procedures. They had a meeting and stood out in the middle of a football pitch. There was no way we could get close enough with a directional microphone. I had the answer. I picked the lock of the groundsman’s hut, took out the line marker after filling it with the white stuff and went right round them, then did the goal areas. By the time they were used to me I pushed the marker right up the halfway line and they actually apologised for being in my way and stepped aside. They’d been swapping phone numbers, so we had those and bust them up. And another. I did a hide in County Tyrone, up by the village of Cappagh, which was difficult country, populated with very difficult and very suspicious people. The hide was in a hedgerow and looked into a cattle barn where a Barrett. 50-calibre was hidden. We thought it needed the human touch, not a remote camera. I’d dug the hide out and the first afternoon a sheep got caught in the hedge not fifteen yards from me. The farmer, a committed Provo, considered reliable enough to have responsibility for the weapon, came up to free the ewe. He walked right over my hide and his wellington boots would have been less than two feet from my face in the camouflage headgear. It was an exceptional hide and we were able to report when the weapon was moved, but the military weren’t fast enough and lost its tail. Anyway, they were three of the best.’
Did the man expect a ripple of applause? He might have done and, if so, was disappointed. The Cousin gazed at the ceiling, the Friend at the floor. The Major had been paring his nails but now reached down to the case resting against his ankles and started to ferret in it. Len Gibbons wished fervently that Sarah was there, with her competence and reassurance. It was ridiculous that the players should have been carted up to this pile of old stone, but the Cousin must have felt this to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for baronial glory, and the Friend had demanded remote anonymity. He thought the old couple would be rattling around in another wing, and had learned that a divorced daughter lived with them. She would have been the mother of the officer killed by a roadside bomb, and he wondered what delicacies would be provided at the lunch break. Time to ask the other man the question designed to disrobe, expose.
‘Thank you, Foxy – very comprehensive. So, Badger, what in your professional career are the achievements that give you most satisfaction?’
The man looked straight at him, unwavering eyes, direct and challenging. ‘None, boss, and I don’t send hero-grams to myself.’
Silence. Len Gibbons realised he’d win nothing more from the younger man, no point in demanding it, and he thought Badger had played with Foxy’s ego, tossed it up into the air, let it fall on the bare patch of carpet and ground a heel on it. The veteran had laid out the depth of his experience, put it in a showcase so that the rookie boy was bound to fall short. Each had done well and, like two dogs, they’d circled each other, hitched up a back leg and pissed on the available lamp-posts. He wondered how they would do together.
Gibbons said, ‘A difficult moment now confronts us. We will soon enter realms of great secrecy. You will have seen its quality – the secrecy, this place, your journey here. You both come with your praises sung, but after we begin the briefing process it’s too late for one of you to say, ‘I don’t think I really want to pull the shirt on for this game.’ Put crudely, you either piss now or get off the pot. Are you in, gentlemen, or out? Foxy, first – are you staying or going?’
‘You’ve put me in a difficult position. I don’t know what you’re asking of me. I’m a married man, the wrong side of fifty. I’d have appreciated the chance to talk to my wife but… I’m staying.’
‘And you, Badger?’
‘I go where I’m sent.’ Again there was a spark in the young buck’s face and a short, wintry grin.
Gibbons said, ‘It starts now with a young woman, call-sign Echo Foxtrot, and those are the initials of Eternal Flame, which some colleagues call her because the Eternal Flame never goes out. It’s a little joke – a joke because it’s so inappropriate in her case. She’s out a great deal more often than is usually sensible. Step by step, gentlemen, but we’ll start with her and she’ll lead us to the meat. So, Echo Foxtrot…’
For her and for the guys with her, known to her inner circle – those entrusted with life-and-death confidences – as the Jones Boys, it was a half-hour of maximum danger. They had been at the roadside, in the shade of some trees, in excess of thirty minutes. Their two SUVs, Pajeros from Mitsubishi’s factories in Japan, were battered and abused. They looked like heaps of sand-scarred, rusted crap but the armour-plated chassis, doors and windows were hidden from any but the most persistent observer. The vehicles were off the road but the engines murmured, and their weapons were armed.
She stood nearest to the road and the dust from lorries’ wheels and pick-ups flew on to her burqah. The Yank was Harding and the Irishman Corky. They were close to her, khaffiyeh s draped round their faces and covering their hair. They had on dirty jeans, and jackets weighed down with grenades and gas in the inside pockets; each had a pistol at the hip, held in by his belt. In the Pajeros, with heavier firepower on the empty front passenger seats, were Shagger, the Welshman, and the Scot they called Hamfist. They were employees of Proeliator Security, a private military contracting company, and were paid to be bodyguards to Abigail Jones, a Six girl.
Without them – and their show of grudging loyalty – she would have earned the title ‘Eternal Flame’, the one that never goes out. She was far from her secure base in Baghdad’s Green Zone, or the premises at the Basra airport complex, because she trusted, with a degree of fatalistic humour, the Jones Boys’ dedication, the quality of their noses and their understanding of when stupidity overtook duty. She did not deal with them on a need-to-know basis but talked each move through with them so that Hamfist, Shagger, Corky and Harding were privy to the secrets of the Six operation that had now run for some two years – ever since an unexploded device had been recovered and subjected to analysis for the uniqueness of a man’s deoxyribonucleic-acid deposits. She had been permitted two four-month extensions of her posting, almost unique, but she hoped to see the operation to its conclusion, to have a part in its death. The Jones Boys would be on the ground as long as she was. It was a commercial relationship that had become family, but they called her ‘miss’ or ‘ma’am’ and took no liberties of familiarity. Each time, though, that she went out and they hit the road, she took care to explain where they went, and why. Now it was to meet an informant.
He hadn’t shown.
There should have been, approaching through the mirage mist of the road, a motor scooter with an old man astride it. The heat would have distorted their first view of him from perhaps a mile down the straight highway; and as it had cleared they would have known him by the matted grey beard. Many months before, the informant had gone through the marshes and along the berms crossing them, with the papers in his pocket to identify himself as a resident of the Ahvaz Arab community on the far side of the frontier. The scooter had been left well hidden and he had walked, waded where there was still water in the lagoons, and had cut old reed fronds to make a broom for sweeping. He had cleaned a road and a pavement, pocketing cigarette butts strewn behind a man who smoked as stress gripped him.
A few days before, the relative by marriage of the ‘cleaner’ had travelled as a pillion passenger on the same scooter with two baskets of dates. He had had similar identification papers – forged but good enough to pass a check by Iranian police, border guards, even men of an al-Quds Brigade detachment posted for the security of a valued man. He had asked vague questions in a coffee shop, had had gossip answers, and had overheard enough of a conversation to win the glowing smile of Abigail Jones, Echo Foxtrot. A fistful of dollars had been paid to the informants for the retrieval of the used cigarette filters and for a snatch of talk. She thought it most likely that either the informant and his relative had decided they had made enough money for their needs, had been intercepted and robbed, had unwisely shown a glimpse of riches in a coffee house, or had boasted and been heard by any of the myriad Ali Babas who lived in what was left of the marsh wilderness.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘But it was good while it lasted. Enough?’
Harding’s eyes raked the road. ‘Has to be, ma’am.’
Corky, wilting in the heat of over a hundred degrees, said, ‘Too long, miss, that we’ve been here.’
‘Shit… So, the heroes coming from home will have it all to do for themselves, without a local hand to steady them. No, guys, don’t tell me this is lunatic. They’ll have to go in there and do the business on their own. Shit…’
She walked to the lead Pajero. The two vehicles pulled off the dirt and on to the road, accelerating fast.
Five miles down the road, towards Basra city, they saw a huddle of men and a police car. An ambulance was coming towards them. They would not slacken their speed, and their faces were covered, to hide the pale Caucasian features, as were the automatic weapons, loaded and with the safetys off. Easy to see: a small scooter on the sand beside the tarmacadam, a body with its head covered but new shoes exposed. They would have cost in the city what a man survived on in the marshes for a month. A second body was covered, except for the head with its grey beard.
Corky, beside Shagger, said quietly, ‘So they got greedy and were bumped. My thinking, ma’am, they were lucky. If the bastards of the VEVAK had picked them up, then to get robbed and shot would have seemed a blessing. The shoes will be gone before they get put in the ambulance, won’t go to waste – but you had your money’s worth out of them.’
She did not respond. Under her codename, Echo Foxtrot, she had her satphone out of her bag and was tapping out the numbers.
Badger listened as the call was wound up. ‘No, I’m not suggesting there’s anything else that can be done. I appreciate we’re not talking about a flat tyre or an empty tank. I accept also your assurance that neither party would have been where hostiles could lift them. Paid too much – pretty ironic if you try to buy a man and end up going over the top of his avarice quotient. But it is still possible to go forward with this? It’s a setback but not terminal – we are still on course? I value the reassurance… You will, of course, be given travel itineraries as soon as… Thank you… Stay safe, please.’
It was not possible, as Badger saw it, to conceal rank disappointment. It was in the Boss’s voice as he spoke softly into the receiver. They had all watched him: they were the sort of men, himself and Foxy, the Cousin, the Friend and the Major, who made an art form of studying weakness, setbacks. Badger, briefly, let his imagination wander to the big map on the board propped on the easy chair that the Major had unveiled before uttering that first sentence: ‘… changed the outcome of a war from a triumphant…’ That contact: a remote, clipped accent somewhere along Highway 6, between al-Amara and Basra, probably near the town of al-Qurnah – all marked on the map and linked by a ribbon of red – where the Tigris and the Euphrates met, fuelled his understanding of the heat, the hatred and the sheer danger of the place. The Boss sat very still and seemed to ponder. Then he shook his head, as if to clear his mind, and pocketed the phone.
He said, ‘I can promise you, gentlemen, that in this matter you will not get half-truths and evasions from me. In the business that confronts us, we had a hope of local resources, but no longer. So, it is in our hands alone, which is probably a disappointment but perhaps a blessing. I apologise, Major, for the interruption… Please.. .’
They were no longer fighting cocks, Badger reflected, not pirouetting or prancing in rivals’ faces. Linkage with a faraway place had rendered that sort of pride second-rate. On the map he could see the road, the line of an international border, the symbols of lakes and marshlands and… The Major breathed in hard, as if his mood also was altered. Before the call, he had started by saying that improvised explosive devices had changed the outcome of a war from a triumphant and victorious mission accomplished to something that was close to mirroring ignominious retreat. Then the phone had trilled in the Boss’s suit pocket, and the Major had stood silent while the call was answered. The frown had set in his forehead and he had scratched the back of his neck.
‘Back to where I began… The improvised explosive device is the weapon that has snatched victory from the coalition and replaced it with a very fair imitation of defeat. It’s a poor man’s weapon, deadlier and more influential than the famed Kalashnikov rifle. I would like to quote from Kipling:
‘A scrimmage in a border station – A canter down some dark defile Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail. The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride Shot like a rabbit in a ride.’
‘Written more than a century ago, I suggest that the “education” was heftily expensive, and that ten rupees in the bazaar at Jalalabad or Peshawar bought something pretty cheap. Nothing has changed. We take the modern ten-rupee jezail – that’s a long-barrelled flintlock or matchlock rifle – extremely seriously. How seriously?
‘Between 2008 and next year, the United States defence family will spend in excess of thirty billion dollars – yes, you heard me – on all aspects of research to negate the effectiveness of these devices, from scanners, to detectors, and into the world of vehicles that can survive an attack. I said, “in excess of thirty billion dollars”, and the principal parts of such a weapon can be bought for five or ten dollars in any Iraqi souk. More sophisticated parts are brought into the Middle East from American factories. It’s a bewildering, crazy world. The most sensitive devices deployed in Iraq were to beat our strategy of putting a convoy inside an electronic counter-measures bubble that has a safety range of around a hundred metres. The enemy developed the technology of sitting off maybe a kilometre away and using combinations of passive infra-red and telemetry modules, and even such simple kit as car-key zappers, household alarms, the workings from inside a cheap wristwatch bought off a pavement stall. Right now, in Iran, they’re ahead of the counter-measures. The roadside bombs, often deployed in a daisy-chain configuration – that’s half a dozen devices linked over a couple of hundred metres – or in fake rocks made of papier-mache or replacement kerb stones, create fear among troops. For every fatality, they knock down four, five, six wounded. They destroy morale and drive our armies into overhead flights by helicopter or overland drives in a truck with plate armour sides. Then along came the EFP, the explosive force projectile, which costs next to nothing to build and can destroy a main battle tank worth ten million sterling. The EFPs crushed us, and-’
The Cousin said, ‘I know all this. I don’t need a high-school lecture.’
The Friend said, ‘We have experience of this. It is taught in military kindergarten.’
The Major’s eyes narrowed. ‘It’s gratifying that some of you are so well informed. Is anyone not familiar with EFPs? Anyone?’
Foxy said he had served in southern Iraq, and shrugged, and the Boss smiled limply as if to show he was up to speed.
Badger said, ‘I’ve never heard of an EFP, and if you think I should know – and it’ll be important when you get around to explaining this business – then I’m all ears.’
‘Thank you, Badger. Does anyone want to go and make coffee or walk in the rain? No?’ He paused. He was a handsome man and would have fitted in on Horse Guards, or anywhere else in full dress uniform. Danny ‘Badger’ Baxter understood. There had been a time when he’d been on a week of stags watching a remote parked caravan where a nutcase guy was thought to be building a device to use against a supermarket chain. When the guy was picked up, the bomb-disposal people had moved in. Above the suit, the laundered shirt and the smart tie Badger had recognised the bleak, worn gaze. Maybe the Boss, the Cousin and the Friend didn’t know about the people who did bomb disposal and made things safe. To be different was Badger’s thing.
‘Right, then I’ll continue. The EFP involves a shaped charge, and we call that the Munroe effect. Charles E. Munroe, an American, worked out the theory of the shaped charge a hundred and twenty years ago while stationed at the Rhode Island base where they had a naval torpedo station. Jozsef Misnay and Hubert Schardian made refinements as they developed anti-tank weapons for the Wehrmacht in the 1940s. There is a metal tube, with a shallow copper bowl, factory-machined, at one end, and behind it explosives – perhaps military or perhaps triacetone triperoxide – a detonator, a trigger apparatus and a method of sending the signal for firing. The copper becomes a molten slug, travelling at a thousand yards per second, and will penetrate the armour of a tank, a personnel carrier, pretty much any vehicle on wheels or tracks. The EFPs are deployed at predictable choke points – where a road goes from four lanes to two, where there’s a bridge, an elevated highway or repair work. The devices have been tested thoroughly across the frontier and inside Iran. The range of the radio signals will have been determined, and “dickers” will have been used on the Iraq side to watch the procedures used by the coalition and to report back on them. Several times the convoy will have gone by, not knowing it was under electronic surveillance, and the results sent back across the frontier. They’re in no hurry. They have endless patience. They test and experiment and don’t move until they’re satisfied. Still with me?’
What could they say? The Boss nodded. The Cousin and the Friend forced a smile. Foxy shrugged. Badger said sharply, ‘With you.’
The Major said, ‘And I’m coming to the core. This is a peasant’s weapon. I repeat, it’s a peasant’s weapon to deploy, to activate, to see it kill and mutilate. But it is not a peasant who builds the electronics that run ahead of the counter-measures, or who oversees the factory where the shallow copper dish is milled to high standards. The view is peddled by the Pentagon and the MoD that the bomb-maker is a low-life rag-head who deals in very basic science concepts. Such assessments are dangerous, misleading and wrong. A small number of clever, innovative men is capable of wrong-footing us so consistently that the body-bags keep going home, and the injured with wounds they’ll carry to their graves. This particular individual – Rashid Armajan – is a man whose professionalism I would have, reluctantly, to respect. We know him also by the title given him by his employers and on the base where he works. He is the Engineer. Because I have looked at these people I feel free to offer a stereotypical image of him with some confidence. His family would be of huge importance to him. Alongside that we can say that religion is a major motivation, along with a profound love of his country. He’s a perfectionist, and with that comes personal egotism. He believes himself the best. Religion and nationalism give him the right to butcher the troops of the Great Satan and the Little Satan – anyone on the wrong side of God’s will. I’m not exaggerating if I say that this one individual is responsible in no small degree for the foul-up that is the coalition campaign in Iraq… and don’t forget how many casualties, killed and wounded, were caused by roadside bombs. We call an enemy a Bravo. Rashid Armajan is a big, bad Bravo, and we should take every opportunity to locate him and-’
The clap of the Boss’s hands cut off the Major in mid-sentence.
Badger had been concentrating and hadn’t anticipated the interruption. Then, as if satisfied that he had eye contact with the Major, the Boss softened. ‘Thank you very much, Major, for that comprehensive and thorough study of our target. It’s time for a break, and a sandwich.’
A frown settled on Badger’s forehead, and he thought vaguely that part of an agenda had slipped by him, as if it flowed through a separate channel. His mind moved on because he had seen TV clips of the hospitals, clinics and rehabilitation centres where the amputees were taken, and of men struggling to hop along a corridor of parallel supports. He thought that after the sandwich he would be told what the mission was and what was expected of him.
She told her mother what had been agreed.
The children were at school and would not be home for two hours; her husband had been driven at dawn to the laboratory workbench. In darker moments, she would have said she competed with soldering irons, circuit boards, little silver detonators, alarm devices and… Mansoor, who oversaw the security at their home, had seen her husband taken away and the escort car that had followed, and would now be in his room in the barracks. She walked with a stick, held in her right fist, and her mother supported her left arm. She did not care that the sun was high and burned her face. Perspiration dribbled under the loose black robe and the scarf was tight round her head; she could feel, inside the material and pressed against the bone, the size of the growth.
She said her husband refused to accept the verdict of the doctors in Tehran.
Her mother walked with her, would not interrupt.
She said that her husband had demanded of senior officials that she be allowed to leave the country and visit a more advanced centre of medicine, that funds be made available for such a journey and that arrangements be made for her to travel.
They walked past the lagoon in front of their home. Birds flew low over the water and skimmed the tips of the reeds. The light played on the ripples where fish fed at the surface. She said that her work with the mine-clearance programme was not finished, and that if she was snatched away the deadly beasts would continue to take lives and maim children… She told her mother that Rashid could barely contemplate life without her. She urged her mother, now in her sixty-fifth year, to look after the children if… Then she smiled and declared she had faith in the consultant she would see.
Where? She did not know.
When? She had not been told.
Her mother cried softly, and the wife of the bomb-maker – who organised the clearing of old minefields for which there were no charts – tried to hold her smile. It had to be soon, she said, that the arrangements were made because she did not believe she had much time. She was in God’s hands. And with her would be her husband, the only man she had loved, a good man.
She thought the ibis the most beautiful bird that flew over the reeds as it turned towards the raised island beyond them. To Naghmeh, it was frail and vulnerable, so delicate, and she scanned the skies for the eagles that swooped on the ibis.
In his experience, men who had been at risk of assassination for months or years became careless.
When they first believed themselves important enough to be targets of their enemy, they would slink in the shadows, but few could sustain the effort. Also, when the target was away from his base and the familiar streets where the safe-houses were, he would consider himself untouchable and go to cafes or restaurants if he were flush with his organisation’s cash. He would sleep with his mistress in a hotel, hire a car and… To bring his mistress from Sidon in Lebanon and fly her on a budget airline to Malta International and have her share his double room in a waterfront hotel in Sliema was careless.
The man was not a fighter but a strategist and a tactician, and some in the higher echelons of Unit 504, intelligence gathering, believed he was among the principal architects of the hidden tunnels and underground strong points from which a blood-letting had been wreaked on the Israeli Defence Force among the bare, harsh hills in the south of Lebanon where the common border was. A target did not have to be a fighter. To be a strategist or a tactician was cause enough for a file to be lifted down and put into the tray of High Priority when an asset told of an extra-marital affair, the name of a mistress and her travel bookings. Few informants were governed by ideology and principle; many were alert to good payment.
The target would have left the girl in bed. She would have screwed him until he’d wondered whether he was close to a coronary. Then he would have pushed her off, showered and walked to the Internet cafe. There, he would have finalised a meeting with a colleague now based in Tunis and another in Rome, and walked back to the hotel.
When Unit 504 went to war it was not with a straitened budget.
An aircraft loitered outside Maltese air space and held together the facets of the operation. The controller in the air was in communication with the slight young man who stood near to the taxi rank in front of the hotel, like any other hopeful stud waiting for his girl. At the end of the esplanade a motorcycle engine was ticking over, the rider helmeted, with a second helmet on his lap. Along the coast – two or three kilometres – a high-powered launch was moored as a concrete jetty. Further out to sea, on the edge of the radar horizon, a merchant ship registered in the port of Haifa was on course for a rendezvous. On occasion, the unit used a mobile phone loaded with enough military explosive to destroy the side of a man’s head when he answered a call, or they might have built a bomb into the headrest of the driver’s seat in a car, or put one under the nearside front wheel. They might attack with a commando squad of up to eight men, or there would be a single assassin with a short range ‘Barak’ SP-21 short recoil-operated and locked-breech pistol with fifteen 9mm rounds in the magazine; only two would be used. The target came close.
He was careless enough not to see the young man, wearing a nondescript grey T-shirt, lightweight windcheater and faded jeans, ease away from the lamp-post and wave to somebody down the road, behind his target, who did not look over his shoulder so did not see that no one was there. Carelessness killed.
Two shots to the head, one through an eye socket and one into the brain via the canal behind the ear as the target stiffened, went rigid, then sagged to the ground.
The target was in death spasms. Tourists and hotel staff ran up, then stood, petrified, as the blood came close to their feet. The young man was gone, and the motorcycle – stolen three days earlier – powered away. In the marina a launch revved its engines.
The older men who had planned the killing believed that a message was given when a body bled on a pavement, and that such a message was always worth sending.
‘You’re good?’ the Friend asked.
‘Fine, thank you,’ Foxy answered. ‘Looking forward, though, to finding out what’s asked of me.’
‘We wouldn’t be in this circus ring if it wasn’t considered important.’
‘It’d be more respectful if a man of my experience was brought inside the loop rather faster than this.’
Foxy had done enough buffet lunches to be able to balance a glass of mineral water and a plate of sandwiches. The Friend smiled with ice in his eyes. He’d met Israeli counter-terrorist officials at Special Branch meetings, with suicide bombers on the day’s agenda, and had thought them unemotional, uncommunicative, untrusting and, above all, arrogant. He’d heard it said by a Branch veteran that the answer was to get them into a bar and force drink down their throats until they pissed their pants without knowing it. Then they might behave as human beings, as colleagues.
‘You’ll hear soon enough. When you need to know, you’ll know.’
‘If I don’t like what I hear it’ll be goodbye and I’ll be at the bus stop, waiting for transport home.’
‘With a broken leg, perhaps a broken neck – whatever needs to be broken to prevent you walking out of here. Walking out – you lost the chance hours ago. Does the rain stop? Do they grow rice here? You’ll know soon enough and then, I guarantee, you’ll be frightened – and so will your young colleague.’
‘He’s not a colleague – I know damn-all about him.’
‘You will. You’ll learn everything about him. Everything. And be frightened together. Fear is good. It bonds men and makes them effective. I think we’ll go on, and then you’ll understand why we’re in this shit-heap, and what’s required of you. Be brave, Foxy.’
Never before had he been spoken to by a foreign-agency officer as if he were of similar importance to a drinks waiter. His shoulder was smacked, water spilled from the glass, and the Israeli smiled coldly. He must have flinched, and he thought Badger would have seen him take that step back. They were led again into the briefing room. He believed the Friend. He didn’t want to, but he believed that the time for quitting was long past, and that fear would be justified.