Chapter 4

A wall of heat hit them. Badger saw Foxy recoil from it. It seemed to suck the energy out of his own chest, his lungs – and he had walked only a few paces. The sun’s light smacked upwards from the expanse of concrete, its force mocking the effectiveness of his sunglasses. Everything that was beyond a hundred metres away was distorted and bounced like a mirage. He could barely make out the distant terminal buildings, but the flags topping them hung limp. Foxy seemed to stagger – as if the wall not only surrounded him but punched hard.

Badger heard him: ‘Fucking place, fucking weather. By the by, here, you’re Badger and I’m Foxy. I don’t want any mucking with proper names. Enough on our plates without chucking identification around. To whom it may concern, and us, those are our names… Nothing fucking changes.’

A fuel truck drove slowly towards their helicopter and a Humvee had parked on the far side of the cockpit – it would be for the crew. There were two Pajeros in front of them. A woman stood tall in front of one, scratching at her loose robe. She wore a head scarf close round her hair and Badger thought it was against the sun, not for modesty. There were two men in each vehicle; the windows were up and the engines were turning over, which meant they had air-conditioning.

Badger assumed Foxy was talking to him, not to himself: ‘Nothing changes except the flags… My place was about a quarter of a mile the far side of the terminal. Any time after about seven in the morning and before five in the afternoon you could hardly walk that quarter-mile without dehydration. You’d need a couple of litres straight down, and if you walked it before seven and after five you had to wear a flak jacket and helmet and be listening for the mortar’s whistle, or there were rockets incoming. I loathed it then and I loathe it now.’

Badger said, ‘Nobody cares, Foxy.’ He had stamped on the moan. Not the first, and it wouldn’t be the last. During the long relay of their journeys, he had felt no inclination to humour the man. He’d seen Foxy crumple, as if the wind was squeezed out of him, when the request for permission to call home was curtly refused; he’d had to make do with a text of about five lines, and show it to Gibbons before he sent it. A poignant moment: Badger had been close by when the message was punched out and the mobile switched off. The Boss had taken it and put it, with Badger’s, into a plastic bag, which he had pocketed. There was no one that Badger would have called. He had had his boots in the car and been able to bag them, but Foxy had only been carrying a pair of heavy trainers, which would not have been waterproof. Badger should have been sympathetic about it, but was not, and should have been grateful that Foxy had negotiated the fee with the Boss at the eleventh hour but he had not thanked the older man for winning payment over and above their salaries.

There had been the flight to Kuwait City, where they’d been met by a corporal, American, from a logistics unit, who had escorted them out of the civilian area to a military annex. They had spent three hours in a departure hut with air-conditioning chilling them and had been offered upright chairs. Foxy had sat in one with his back straight, but Badger had made a space on the floor, wedged his bag against the wall, lain down with his head on the bag and slept. Later, the same corporal had driven them in a minibus to the pad where the helicopter waited. There had been machine-gunners on the cabin doors, weapons armed, and they’d done contour flying, hugged the dirt, woven and come up where there were cables slung between pylons, but otherwise kept low. Badger had never been in a war zone, too young for the Northern Ireland experience, and he noticed that Foxy stared straight ahead, looking ill at ease.

Roads with occasional cars and ancient lorries. Homes were single-storey and surrounded by dumped vehicles and giant refrigerators. Kids waved, women ignored them and men looked away. Goats and thin sheep stampeded. A checkpoint where the Iraqi flag – red, white and black – fluttered briefly as the helicopter drove draught across it, and there were local soldiers or policemen. The gunner cleared phlegm from his throat and spat.

The sand stretched away until it reached green corridors that would have been vegetation alongside rivers. They went up one of the beds and were over mud and exposed wrecks. It was like the life had been taken from a waterway. They had not been issued with headphones and were given no commentary on the route, the security scene, the duration… nothing. Might have been junk and on the way to a refuse pit. They had come fast over a perimeter fence, and the huge scale of the base, the empire it had become, was exposed: a place built to survive for ever. As far as he could see, there were prefabricated constructions, hangars and maintenance bays, blast walls and stores warehouses. They had hovered, then the skids had touched and the heat wall had clutched them. When his feet had hit the concrete, Badger had wiped a handkerchief across his face. His body under the loose T-shirt was wet, but Foxy still wore his blazer and tie.

Foxy led; Badger let him.

They walked, him three paces behind, towards the woman and the vehicles.

He heard Foxy mutter, ‘Could have opened his door – could have damn well stepped out to meet us.’

‘Yes,’ Badger said, barely audible. He was not used to meeting Six officers and didn’t know what to expect.

‘He’d better be bloody good, as good as he’s arrogant.’

‘Can’t argue with that.’

‘Do they think we’re temporary staff for the kitchens, washing up or- Him not being here to meet us is just bloody ungracious. Discourteous prat. Christ, this bloody sun… I won’t be quick to forget Alpha Juliet’s breach of manners, and I expect your backing when I take him to task.’

They were close to her. Her hands were on her hips and she swayed a little on the balls of her feet. Badger thought she had control, and could have described it as authority. There was a wildness about her appearance that appealed, a raffishness, and he made that judgement in spite of the full robe, the trainers that peeped out below it, the headscarf and the dark glasses.

‘Welcome here, gentlemen, and thanks very much for making yourselves available. I’m Abigail.’

Badger was alongside Foxy, and said softly, ‘So that makes you Alpha?’

‘Alpha Juliet, correct.’

‘I’m Badger, and he’s Foxy.’ He grinned. ‘We’re the sweepings off the floor.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Badger – and good to meet you, Foxy.’ She’d shaken Badger’s hand first, briefly, then took the older man’s. Badger saw the confusion and near embarrassment in Foxy. The cussed old thing would be wondering how far his voice had carried in the stillness once the helicopter’s rotors had shut down. There was something about her mouth that was mischievous and he’d have bet that behind the glasses there was a sparkle – might be fun, amusement or even contempt. Before he had gone off to work for the Box, and he’d been a croppie with his local force, a judge had been under threat during an organised-crime trial. He was wanted off the case and violence was in the air so the surveillance team was holed up for days at the back of the property on the edge of a Cotswold village. The judge had a younger wife with a flash of cheekiness in her smile and she’d brought them, in the hide, at the start of the second week of observing fuck-all, a tray of tea and shortbread. She’d had that gravel growl in her voice, sort of husky and deep. She hadn’t cared that she might have blown the exercise. The voice had said old money. It had been raining and Badger and his oppo were well into their stag, cold and wet and… Old money, good breeding and the rule of instincts. It was the only time he’d ever climbed out of a hide in his gillie suit, pushed back his camouflage headpiece, sipped a mug of tea, dunked a biscuit, offered thanks and told a woman to ‘bugger off out of it’.

Foxy said, ‘Good of you to meet us, Abigail. Appreciated.’

She took them to the vehicles.

Foxy said, ‘We’d like a chance for a wash, maybe something to eat – light, a salad – then some sleep and-’

‘Could be a problem, the bit about sleep.’

‘We’re very tired. I have to say, Abigail, that we haven’t been treated well since being dragged into this mission. The briefings have been general in the extreme, all detail excluded. What’s called for now is rest, then a comprehensive evaluation of the ground, the equipment, back-up and the time scales – that’s after we’re satisfactorily acclimatised and-’

‘Sorry and all that, but those scales are pared down to the quick. I can do you the shower and some cam-clothing. Everything else is on the hoof.’

Maybe it was his tiredness, maybe the heat or the weight of the blazer, but Foxy barked, ‘It seems pretty much of a shambles to me, and we deserve better. The man in UK – Gibbons, he called himself – who put this together, he warrants lynching. It screams wishful thinking and incompetence.’

She had the door of the back Pajero open for him. Foxy seemed to huff, then slid on to a back seat strewn with weaponry, magazines and vests.

She said, like it was no big deal, ‘I put it together, it’s my shout. If it fouls up and you lose your head, it’ll be my neck on the block for decapitation. It’s the best I can do.’

The door was slammed on Foxy. With a thumb she gestured for Badger to follow her to the lead vehicle. He had to burrow for a space on the back seat. When she was in and the doors were shut, they were driven away. He didn’t catch her eye, didn’t see the point in trying, and kept silent. Best to stay silent as he couldn’t picture where the road led or who it led him to.

The Engineer’s car had diverted in the city of Ahvaz, off the route that was shortest, quickest, to the camp. It had crossed the Karun river and gone to the principal clinic in the town where his wife’s medication awaited collection. But the painkillers were not on the usual shelf and the man administering the pharmacy had not come to work that day. The woman who replaced him was unfamiliar with the stock held in storage, and there was a delay. By the time the plastic bottles containing the pills and capsules were in his hand, he had lost the first half-hour of an appointment awaiting him when he reached his workplace.

Not his driver’s fault that they were late, but the man – his driver for nine years, loyal and fully aware of the importance of Rashid Armajan to the al-Quds Brigade – went now for a back-street cut-through to get them onto the main highway out of the city. They were away from the wider boulevards and the big concrete housing blocks, the post office and the railway station were behind them, and the homes were smaller, more roughly constructed. Cyclists, men on scooters, women walking with children and carrying water cans from or to the standpipes blocked and slowed them. The driver blasted the horn.

Rashid knew Ahvaz, had spent three years at the university in the city, but this was a district he had not been in, and the size of the Mercedes in the narrow streets made it an alien object. He warranted, as a senior man, tinted windows and blinds that covered the back windscreen: none of those who peered resentfully into the back of the car could have seen him, but the Engineer could see them, and when the Mercedes nudged the rump of a donkey or made children skip and women stumble aside. They would have known from the car that its passenger was esteemed by the regime.

At a crossroads, three policemen stood warily by an open jeep, holding carbines. Another was behind the wheel and had the engine running, fumes spilling out of the exhaust. The Mercedes braked sharply and the Engineer was jolted forward. Some of the papers he was trying to read spilled onto the floor by his shoes. Through the front window there was a brief exchange between the driver and the police sergeant, who pointed away from the direct route the driver was headed on. His arm made the sweep gesture of a long diversion. The Engineer could not hear them above the noise in the street, but the driver shook his head vigorously, as if rejecting advice, and the sergeant shrugged. The window powered up, and they went over the crossroads.

He asked what had been said.

The driver did not turn, was concentrating and weaving through obstructions. They were on the route to the gaol, the most direct way out of the city. There was a demonstration at the gaol, and they must pass it. To have taken the diversion would have added twenty minutes to the journey, and they were late.

A high-ranking official would be waiting for them, but the Engineer had been instructed never to use a mobile phone. There were satellites above that trawled for calls, did voice recognition and located the source of calls and their destinations. Mobile phones were the enemy of a man seeking discretion. The Engineer did not know of any specific threat to his life but the security officials had emphasised to him that anonymity was his best protection. The official who had come to see him from Shiraz would have to kick his heels and sip coffee or juice and… Why would there be a demonstration at the gaol?

The police had not said.

It was an Arab quarter they had been through. The street widened and they were edging clear of the alleyways. He reckoned his driver had done well to ignore the sergeant’s directions. The gaol’s wall was ahead and there was a rumble in front of them, like tyres on an uneven surface, but muffled because the windows were up and the air-conditioning was on. They came round the corner.

A crowd enveloped them.

He saw the faces through the windscreen. Arab faces, not Iranian. Ahvaz was the city of Arabs, and the Sepidar gaol was their prison.

It was as if the car was not seen and the mass of chanting, shouting men had their backs to the bonnet. The driver edged forward, and ahead the yellow-painted arms of two construction cranes jerked upwards. The men suspended from them kicked in their desperation but the arms rose until they were raised high enough for all the crowd to see them. A line of policemen, with riot shields and helmets, made a cordon between the crowd and the cranes, which were mounted on the flat beds of lorries: the gaol’s gates were behind. The driver was able to go forward, slowly. The hanging was outside the gates, in public view, so the condemned were rapists, narcotics smugglers or robbers, and would be Arabs. The movement of the legs, had slowed, and the nooses had tightened. Rashid Armajan had never before witnessed a public hanging. He tried to bury his attention in the papers on his lap – but sneaked another glance at the bodies. The spasms had ceased now, and they spiralled on the ropes.

His driver murmured that they had been ‘scum’ and it was good what had happened to them. They were Arabs… The crowd, having watched the deaths noisily, seemed to the Engineer to be at a loss as to how to respond. Until some noticed the Mercedes.

He was an influential individual, a Persian, or he would not have had a big Mercedes with blackened windows, so he was a target. A fist beat on the bonnet, another on the front passenger window, then more on the other windows. Within seconds faces and bodies obscured the sky, the hanged men and the raised arms of the cranes. Faces pressed against the glass, and there was darkness. He could not see the papers in his lap. Hatred boiled around him. There were enough of them to lift the car, then let it fall and lift it again, higher. One more heave and they might tip it over. If the Mercedes overturned, he was dead- A gas canister exploded above the car and the crowd. The faces contorted in loathing as the white gas spread.

It came in through the air ducts of the Mercedes. His driver had spat on his handkerchief and held it as close to his eyes as he could while leaving himself a view of the open area in front of him. The crowd had melted away. Sandals lay crazily on the tarmacadam, with some shopping bags. A separated child howled. The crane arms were still high, the bodies still turned, and the gas dissipated.

He had never before witnessed an execution – but then, the Engineer had never made the journey over the frontier to Highway 6 and taken up a position to watch a convoy pass and the lethal force of his work. He had seen it only on the video screens of hand-held cameras and phones. He had never been close to death, never near the explosions, as he had been when the cranes’ arms had been hoisted. He had never known how the soldiers of the Great Satan – or the Little Satan, also called the Poodle – were when they spilled out of their vehicles, or were lifted clear by medical teams, or were brought out as charred, unrecognisable shapes. He did not know if they screamed, or thrashed what limbs were left to them, or lay supine on stretchers, with their faces covered.

The windows were down. The gas was blown out of the interior and the driver swerved. A police officer shouted instructions as to which road they should take. The crowd had retreated to the edge of the square in front of the gaol, and the bodies would soon be lowered. Rashid Armajan would have said then, if asked, that the deaths of and injuries to soldiers in Iraq, foreigners or Crusaders, were matters for those in greater authority than himself, that his responsibility lay with the electronics on the circuit boards he manufactured. Some said, to his face, that he had done more to drive the Americans and the British from Iraq’s cities and deserts than any other individual. He could feel pride in that accolade. They drove on, and left the gaol wall behind them.

He hoped that day to hear when he and Naghmeh would travel to visit a better-qualified consultant. Quite soon, breaking onto the main road and with the car speeding, he had forgotten the faces pressed to the glass. His mind was on his meeting – and when he would be told of his departure date. He felt calmer, the gas was gone, the windows were again sealed, and the little tremor of fear was lost.

She had left them to shower, and the Jones Boys had a bundle of kit for them. An officer who was more junior than herself, based at the Basra airport complex as Six’s representative, had made himself scarce – run like a scared rabbit. With cause. Neither the junior, billeted on sufferance with the Americans and rarely allowed within the Agency’s wire-protected compound, nor the seniors in the Green Zone attached to the UK’s embassy, nor the team at the airport in Camp Cropper would have wanted to be contaminated by Abigail Jones’s mission. There would have been no volunteers to step outside the protection of diplomatic status that Six personnel enjoyed in this lice-blown, donkey-shit country. But it was her shout, and Abigail Jones would see the thing through. She understood the pitfalls of deniability and would live with them; most would not. The junior wanted nothing to do with them and had scooted as they’d pulled up in the Pajeros.

She called in, was connected to a Len Gibbons. She had taken the incomers to the shower room and shown them how it worked. The older one, Foxy, had waited for her to get out before even starting to unbutton his shirt. Not the young one. Badger was stripped down in seconds – muscled back, a close waist and clean-lined buttocks – and had gone into the shower, turned on the water and looked at her. There was soap but he didn’t reach for it, and she’d seen all of him. There was a store room off the office area and Hamfist was in it with Corky and a heap of clothing, all the kit they might need and the dinghy, everything, if they could carry it.

Badger hadn’t spoken. Foxy had talked for both of them, but she had seen the light in the young man’s eyes, and amusement. He’d looked clean into her, through her.

On the link the voice was curt, clipped, as if Gibbons disbelieved manufacturers’ claims on scrambled protection. She said that the younger one, Badger, seemed fit and was likely competent, but that Foxy looked on the edge of capability for where they were going.

‘You have to imagine the problem we had in locating covert rural observation post experience, along with decent Farsi. Doesn’t grow on trees. For CROP, I had a half-dozen to choose from, but Foxy’s the best qualified. For the Farsi aspect, there were no alternatives. It was him or we were into the business of an interpreter listening and translating, then having that fed to the rear, or of putting in someone like yourself, Alpha Juliet, who has the language but no experience of sitting in hides. You are, anyway, ruled out because you’re on the inside. They’re ignorant, they’re capable and, most of all, deniable. They’ll do because they have to. Time is not with us.’

She told him when they were leaving, and at what hour each morning and evening she hoped to make contact with him – if she had anything to report.

His response was sharp over the distorts on the link. ‘Not “if” but “when”. Please understand that a lot hangs on this.’

The call was cut. She looked through the door, not as a voyeur but to learn. The older man was in the shower now and the screen was misted so he was only an outline. The younger one was towelling himself hard, full frontal. He did not turn away from her. Not brazen, though. She saw that the soap was still in the bowl, seemed dry like it hadn’t been used. She would have lathered herself from toe to scalp. She wondered how well, in London, it was understood what was asked of these two men, who already displayed raised hackles when confronting each other. In London, in an office that had been set up away from the Towers, would they have the slightest comprehension of the resourcefulness required? Easy enough to flick across files, draw out names and proposition in such a way as to make it near bloody impossible to back out with self-respect intact. They would have been skewered, those two, and… Her mind moved on. Did she have the slightest comprehension of how it would be to lie up in a hide while the clocks ticked, the hours dribbled by and they were beyond a frontier, out of reach of back-up?

Abigail Jones, career intelligence officer, was not certain she did. She called, loudly, for Harding and Shagger to get the vehicles ready, then to Hamfist and Corky to hurry with the kit. Foxy had hung his clothing on two wire hangers, except for his underwear, which he dropped into a paper bag. He put his wallet into his blazer pocket – he glanced wistfully at a photo – with his wristwatch, a fistful of loose change and his wedding ring. His shoes slotted into the bag, then went into his overnight grip. The younger one threw his clothing, wallet and watch into a plastic sack. All their possessions were secured in a steel locker. They trooped, the two of them, with towels round their waists, into the storeroom.

It was a long drive across bastard country. Nobody in their right mind would want to be on that road when darkness had come.

Where they were going, they might as well send a telegraph by Western Union if they took a lift in a helicopter.

The sun was sinking when they pulled away from the base. She thought the older man was steeled for a fight about lack of sleep so she put him in Harding’s Pajero and let the younger man, Badger, ride with her. They were her eyes and ears. Without them the mission was doomed. With them it had a chance – not great, but a chance. They wore camouflage fatigues and Foxy had borrowed a pair of boots, and they had a bergen of food, water, medicines, whatever. A second bergen held the binoculars, the audio probe and directional microphone, the cameras, the batteries that everything needed, the radio, the sleeping bags, the scrim sheets, gillie suits – God alone knew how they’d get it off the ground and shift it on foot – and a shovel with a collapsible handle. They had flags, Iraqi pennants, on the front off-side wings.

When they were past the forward sentries, and the perimeter lights were drifting away, Hamfist armed his weapon. The rattle tore into Abigail’s ears, and she thought that, beside her, Badger flinched. There were two handguns in the bergen with their supplies, ammunition for four magazines, flash grenades and gas. He’d looked at them carefully, then deliberately shaken his head. Was he firearms trained? He’d answered, almost apologetic, that he was not. She cocked her own weapon, a Browning 9mm pistol, and checked again, with her hand, that the rifle was on its clips along the bottom of the bench seat in the back behind her ankles.

She had done what was demanded of her, and a little more – and had no fucking idea if any of it was sufficient.

They hit the road and Shagger said they’d burn some rubber. They went north, and the sunlight, low, bathed her. If she couldn’t comprehend what it would be like in the marshes over the border, who else could?

‘Are you all right, Mr Gibbons?’

It must have been three-quarters of an hour since he had spoken with Abigail Jones on the link, and he had sat through that time with his chin on his hands, staring across the room at the map with the lines marking the rivers, the route of Highway 6, the edges of the marshes, the larger islands and the canals. The strongest line was the border with Iran, and his focus had been the cross in black marker ink that located the household of Rashid Armajan, the Engineer, a bomb-maker of great skill.

His head jerked up. She had allowed him his chance to reflect, had twice put fresh tea beside him, but neither mug had been touched nor the biscuit. She would have thought his mood had lasted long enough. He twisted to face her. ‘Thank you, I’m fine, Sarah.’ He grimaced. ‘What do we say at these moments?’

‘We say, Mr Gibbons, “on a wing and a prayer”.’

‘A dodgy wing and a big prayer.’

She turned to the window. The rain ran hard on it and seemed set in for the afternoon. He drained the lukewarm mug, then crunched the biscuit. He clicked on the memory of his phone and called the Cousin first, then the Friend.

The American told him that all was in place. ‘Whatever we can give you, Len, we will, but at day’s end your guys have to deliver.’

The Friend said his people waited to be told of developments. ‘We’re ready to go, but we need the ticket filled out, and that’s for your people. At our end, we can run.’

Len Gibbons did not doubt what he was told, that the Friend could produce a killer.

Gabbi asked, ‘Don’t you have others?’

The man did not take offence at the challenge. ‘There is a file. Read it.’

‘Do you not have others?’ It was not a complaint, more with amusement that he was asked again so soon.

‘Do you want a state secret revealed? Do you wish to know how many competing operations are in discussion, development? Do you have to be told who has influenza, a hernia, who has a pregnant partner about to give birth? Do you concern yourself with who is tired, who might have lost the faith? The file is thin, but will thicken.’

He opened it. In the unit there were still older men, conservative, who preferred to use paper rather than rely exclusively on the electronic screen. The file contained four sheets of A4 – no photograph, no street map. He had driven in from his home, had dropped Leah at the defence ministry; they had talked about the coming public holiday, whether to go to the beach – not about choosing targets or killing them at close quarters – and why the refrigerator failed to achieve its maximum chill range. There was a concert at the end of the week, at the Mann Auditorium, and the Israeli Philharmonic would be playing Beethoven. They’d talked of that, and he had left her at the gate, seen the greetings of the sentries as she flashed a card at them and started to walk with her stick swinging in front of her. Many in the ministry, her section, would have wanted to bed her: only a few tiny fragments of the rocket’s casing had blinded her and she was not scarred, her skin without flaws. Many times on his travels Gabbi could have called whores into his hotel rooms. He had not. He believed she had not. The file had a name, a cursory biography, a map of a border area and an Internet digest on ‘brain tumours for beginners’, dummy-style. The last sheet told him that the wife of the target was believed to be about to travel abroad for final efforts at treatment.

His smile never carried humour. A finger stabbed at the map and found a point fractionally on the Iranian side of the border with Iraq. ‘I’m pleased to read this. I thought you wanted me to go there. How soon would I travel, wherever I travel to?’

‘There are surveillance people who go close today or tomorrow to watch the house and try to learn. Perhaps it will happen, perhaps not. If word comes, there’ll be a stampede.’

‘And you are giving it to me?’ He shrugged. He might go to a sales conference and he might not; he might be heading for a marketing seminar and might not; he might be called into a research-and-development brains trust and might not; he might be sent to shoot a man at close range but might not. He had been present at the killing of Moughniyeh in Damascus, of Majzoub in Beirut; he had been in Gaza, and in Turkey for a Syrian. That morning he had gone through the debrief and had told it factually, without remorse or triumphalism. He had reported that the pistol issued to him kicked to the left when fired. He had sat with the unit’s psychologist, and they had talked of the programme the Philharmonic were offering at the Mann. The report the psychologist would write might have been dug from the records: it would be the same in essence as that produced after his return from Damascus, Beirut, Gaza City, Istanbul… He changed little and was not scarred by his work.

‘Stay close.’

‘Of course.’ He finished the glass of water offered him, and stood. He had heard it said that the man behind the desk, elderly, a little obese, bald and almost haggard, had been a junior on the planning team for the incursion into Tunis when the life of Khalil al-Wazir, who rejoiced in the title of Abu Jihad – Father of the Holy War – was taken, and the blueprint of the operation was taught to recruits as a model. Gabbi would not have considered flippancy with this man, who had much blood on his hands. It was the end of a long day: the dusk fell on the city, throwing shadows on the buildings. The last of the sunlight blistered on the sea beyond the empty beach. ‘Call me.’

‘We hope to hear soon. The Americans bring the money, the British bring the idea and the location. We bring you. It’s a good arrangement, and gives us currency for the future, which is leverage. I do not know, no apologies, where you will go.’

‘I have, my darling Lili, a problem.’ He had been in Hamburg that day. He had operated. After seven hours in theatre – the patient was a prince from Riyadh who might, if he survived, buy a new wing for the neuro-surgery section – the consultant drove slowly and carefully home. He had been, unusually, complimented by the Chefarzt for the skill and precision of his work, but he could not be sure that the beast was fully extracted or whether enough remained to grow again beyond the most delicate reach of his knife. He had done his best and been praised. ‘It is from Iran, from my past, and it pinions me.’

He came off the autobahn and turned for Lubeck. His pleasure at the praise was diluted. What he might say to his wife, after he had read a story to his daughter, as they sat at dinner and she poured wine, served the food she had cooked and told him of her day played on his mind. When he interrupted her, she would hear him out with a frown and an ugly twist at her mouth. Then she would snap, ‘Tell them to go to hell. Put the phone down on them. Reject them out of hand. If they persist then call the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz. It’s what they’re there for, to deal with foreign threats. They’re in the book. Are you intimidated by those people? Are you, Steffen? They’re no part of your life.’ She could not understand. He would not know how to explain to Lili – a little thicker on the hips since childbirth, and fuller in the bosom, with the first grey hairs that needed the salon’s attention, dressed from the best of the shops in the Konigstrasse – the power and reach of the al-Quds Brigade and what could be done to the elderly couple who had fostered and mentored him. They would end the meal shouting, and doors would be slammed and the little girl would be crying on the stairs. No one who had not lived there would understand.

He came off the big traffic circle and headed for Rockstrasse. Sleet was in the air, and there might be snow before morning.

She might throw at him, ‘Are you not prepared to stand up to these people, tell them to go fuck…’

He owned a fine villa. Much of the old part of Lubeck had been devastated by British bombers in the spring of 1942, but the grand properties beyond the Burgtorbrucke had survived untouched. He was proud to have been able to buy a home on this street. It was an accolade to his work and endeavour. The light was on in the porch to welcome him, and the sleet flew in lines across it.

He would say nothing. She would not understand. Neither would her father, nor counter-intelligence officers. He thought himself alone, isolated.

He parked his car, went inside and told Lili of the praise heaped on him. He read the story to Magda, sat at the dinner table, complimented Lili on the cooking and asked about her day. He said nothing of the cloud hanging over him.

He had been dozing, might have been snoring gently, when the first shot hit the Pajero.

He was thrown forward, bounced off the back of the front passenger seat, then cannoned into the door. More shots followed.

Badger had woken fast. Since they had been on the big drag, which she had said was Highway 6, she had opened her window, unclipped the rifle and let it rest on her lap. The guy called Hamfist had a weapon peeping out into the growing darkness. He was awake. There were men milling in the road, lit by the Pajero’s headlights and probably half blinded by them. One crawled and seemed to scream up into the night. He might have had a broken leg.

‘What the fuck…’ Badger murmured, for want of something sharper.

The road was clearing and the girl was shooting, Hamfist too. He heard her say it was thieves, and that Harding had hit one with his front fender. Corky might have winged another. They had gone straight over one of the tyres left in the road to slow vehicles down.

He could see the lights of the first Pajero, where Foxy was, then the flash and the screaming moving light – it would have been about a hundred metres in front. The light went past the front of that vehicle and carried on across black open ground. There must have been a berm or a dune because it exploded. Shagger swore and called it an RPG round. Hamfist matched the obscenity. They’d gone off the road into a ditch and Badger’s elbow was driven sharply into his ribcage.

He thought they bucked over the sand and scrub for about a quarter of a mile. Then the wheel was wrenched again and they tilted, climbed and ground up onto the road. For a few seconds the two vehicles were side by side, stationary. The Six lady didn’t speak, but there was a fast exchange between Harding and Shagger in a military patois. Badger deciphered enough to learn that thieves had put tyres on the road to slow vehicles, then stop them to rob the passengers of valuables and cargo. One thief had been run down, another had been shot. Around thirty bullets had been fired at the two Pajeros, and one rocket-propelled grenade.

Was it par for the course? Badger didn’t ask. Neither Harding nor Shagger reckoned their tyres had been damaged.

Now she spoke: ‘Can we, please, move off and get the hell out?’

They went on in darkness.

Mostly the road was clear, but a few times men emerge would from the dark, dragging along a pack-beast, and a few times great lorries drove towards them and made a chicken-game challenge. There were dull lights at a shack that seemed to serve food but had no customers, and there was a police road-block, but the Pajeros had their pennants up and were waved through without having to slow. Badger reckoned they wouldn’t have slowed anyway, would have kept going and might have started shooting again.

They’d come into a town. She whispered that it was the Garden of Eden and Badger hadn’t any idea what she meant, but again the windows were down and the guns readied. They crossed a bridge, and there was enough light for him to make out a sluggish, stinking flow of water. It looked a crap place, and he didn’t see an orchard with apples, any naked girls or a fellow with a fig leaf for modesty. Out of the town, the bridge behind them and the road emptying again, they were on a track and the front Pajero threw up a dust storm they had to drive through. There was enough moon for the surface to be visible without the vehicles’ headlights.

Badger closed his eyes, clamped them tight, and the pain lessened in his ribs and arm.

The end of a road, at a broken gate that had posts set into a sagging wire fence: through the gate there were heaps of discarded, rusted piping that went nowhere. He realised it meant oil and that it had been bombed. He’d carried his bergen, the fullest and heaviest, and had made certain he accepted none of the Jones Boys’ offers to help. There was a single-storey concrete building with little compartment rooms that were filthy, shrapnel-spattered, looted. He’d taken one, and Foxy had been next door – but there were no doors. There was pain, though.

Badger was on the sleeping bag spread on the concrete floor. He didn’t realise she was there. He could hear a constant drone of mosquitoes in flight but they had not bothered with him yet. There was no light, but the subdued sound of a radio playing soft jazz, maybe New Orleans – he’d have had to strain his ears to hear it better.

Staying still on the bag killed some of the pain. She was standing over him. ‘Are you bad or good, hurt or in one piece?’

He blinked, tried to make her out in the darkness, couldn’t. The movement he made in reacting to her voice hurt his ribs and he bit his lip. ‘Thanks for asking. I’m fine.’

‘Are you injured?’

‘Bruised.’

‘Does that mean “wrecked”?’

‘No.’

‘I have to ask.’

‘I’ve answered.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘What for?’ Badger shifted to face her. He had told the truth, and he would go on.

‘Because I want to.’

He heard authority in her voice and doubted there was a future in argument.

‘I want to know what state you’ll be in when you go forward.’

‘I won’t be a passenger – not alongside him.’

‘Open your shirt.’

He did. He could smell her breath and sweat – no deodorant. Excellent, professional. In this sort of place, Badger reckoned, you wouldn’t know when you might have to burrow into a hole while the bad guys went by, and the smell of toothpaste or deodorant was the worst giveaway. Now he rated her higher than he had just on the evidence of her skill through the ambush, shooting well and fast, leaving the driver to do the driving and Hamfist to put down the main suppressive fire. He had the buttons on the camouflage top loose and rucked up the lightweight khaki T-shirt. He wouldn’t show that it had hurt. She didn’t use a torch but moved her fingertips across his skin, paused when he winced. Her face was close to his and the darkness was around them. A guy did a trumpet solo on the jazz that was playing, and he had to lift his arm so that she could get more easily onto the place where the elbow had hurt his ribs. He couldn’t see her eyes, but her breath was on his face. The pain seemed to go.

She eased across him, slipped a leg over his hip and her fingers played on his skin.

Foxy Foulkes was dreaming. He had forgotten the name of the hotel and which junction he had come off at, and had forgotten the number of the motorway. He had forgotten, too, what the room had looked like, its decor, and what was in the chilled mini-bar. He had not forgotten, over seven years, that a lift had been offered from the training course for Greater Manchester Police, that she had been in the force’s computing team and was going to a seminar in London. He was going south. She had put her hand on his thigh, and music had played. He’d wrenched the wheel at the junction, and they’d checked in without baggage. Both had been half stripped before they used the little key to open the fridge and take out a half-bottle of fizzy stuff. It was a hell of a good dream, him with Ellie, now his wife.

His blazer was on the floor, in the dream, and his trousers and underpants, her clothes scattered over them. It was passionate, even frenzied, at the start, but the second time had been calmer and quieter. He’d told her they were soul-mates, and in the dream they did it a third time – nearly bloody killed him – and she’d sighed… He had dozed, and then thought he was dreaming, but he was awake.

He heard a grunt through the wall and struggled to find Ellie. Then he sat up, listening. Bloody hell, were they at it?

Abigail Jones asked herself, ‘What did you do that for?’ And answered, ‘God only knows.’ She could have talked through a hundred reasons, or ten, and could have decided that none made sense. She used a tiny beam from a pocket torch to guide herself down the corridor, past the open doorway into the older man’s room, and came into the big area where the gear was. She let the beam rove around. Shagger and Corky were on their sides, on the bags, and seemed to be asleep. Hamfist was hunkered against a wall, facing the outer doorway. He had an AK assault job, with two magazines taped, on his lap. He reached towards the small CD/DVD player to cut the music, but she waved a hand and he let it play on. Harding, the American, would be sitting on the building’s outside step, with an image-intensifier sight on his weapon, watching the broken gate and the parked Pajeros.

A burr in the accent, and a whisper: ‘They all right, ma’am?’

‘They’re fine.’

‘They know what they’re into, ma’am?’

‘Probably as much as is good for them.’ The torch was switched off and the jazz lulled them. She sat, cross-legged, with her weight against a loaded bergen.

‘Rather them than me, ma’am.’

‘A fertile imagination isn’t called for… Foulkes – Foxy – told me what he regretted most was that I’d taken his wallet off him. He’d got a photo of his wife in it, and wouldn’t have it with him. Maybe other aspects bothered him, but that was all he let on.’

‘I don’t have a picture of the wife, the ex, or the kids. I sent them money for new bikes last Christmas, didn’t hear back. Doubt there’d be any tears if an RPG aimed straighter, except that the money would stop.’

‘The younger one, Badger, reckoned I was good. Why? Because I hadn’t used toothpaste or soap today or yesterday. His story – the best of the South Africans when they were fighting Cubans in Angola had their teeth falling out. Why? Because they were the most dedicated covert-skills guys in the bush, and toothpaste is like soap – the scent lingers. No soap, no toothpaste, no cigarettes, no alcohol, no curries and nothing spicy. I suppose it was a little lecture in how serious the work is, the way that scent and smell last. I may just have been too damn idle to use toothpaste and soap. Oh, and armpit spray would be an appointment at Abu Ghraib. I learned that this evening.’

She asked herself again, ‘What did you do that for?’ And answered, ‘God only knows.’

They were in grey light. Grey sky before the sun came up above a berm on the left side of the track, to the east of them. Grey water, brackish and stagnant in the centre of a lagoon, and grey mud with dark cracks that showed how far the marshes had been drained artificially, then flooded, then drained again by the dams upstream and evaporation; drought from lack of rain. The reed banks, also, had no colour – that would come with the morning.

Two Pajero jeeps, low on their chassis from the armour plate fitted to the doors and engine casings, the added layers of reinforcement underneath, kicked up dust trails as they took a raised track between what had once been lakes, and went east. No radio on in either vehicle, and no conversation: the briefings were finished and had been reiterated over sips of bottled water before they had loaded up.

They drove along an old bund line, packed dirt and mud thrown up three decades before in the early months of the war with Iran, by bulldozers and earth-moving gear, for the convoys of Iraqi tanks to traverse the marshlands and reach the border for the drive towards Susangerd and Ahvaz. The four employees of Proeliator Security, the officer of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service and the two deniables had no interest in the history of the terrain they crossed.

There was no talk of them being in the lost Garden of Eden, or having passed alongside the Tree of Life in al-Qurnah during the night, or that they were where the Great Flood had occurred and the Ark had grounded. They did not observe that they were in the ‘cradle of civilisation’ where cultures had emerged five millennia before, and where a people, the Madan, had existed among the marshes since before history. Neither did they consider drainage, dam building nor drought. But they had gone by two tiny encampments, shanties with corrugated-iron roofing and other buildings in the traditional style of woven reeds, the mudhifs; children and dogs had chased after them but the thump of generators had not penetrated the thickened windows of the Pajeros. All of the buildings had been adorned with satellite dishes. The armies of the Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs had been here, and the Mongol hordes. British infantry had fought a battle close by ninety-seven years ago, and had struggled in the same heat that would rise later in the day. The marshes had been places of refuge for malcontents, rebels, insurgents, smugglers and thieves. There would never be, nor ever had been, allies here for a stranger.

Ahead, the grey landscape took on light colours – red in the sky, green in the reed banks, mud brown in the water – and dust coated the vehicles. Pigs and otters took cover and birds flew away from the intruders. They could no longer see the derricks of the oil platforms – discarded, damaged, awaiting new investment in the Majnoon fields, but ahead was a horizon.

The vehicles stopped. The dust settled. In the few seconds that it hung, obscuring any view of where they’d halted, two men pitched out, then the woman, and two more men, festooned with weapons, pulled the bergens clear and the small inflatable boat. No hugs, no exhortations about the importance of a mission across a frontier, just a brisk cuff from her on their shoulders, and a nod from the two armed men. The two slid down the bund line onto cracked mud and into crackling dead reeds. The others were back in the vehicles and the wheels spun, forward to the limit of the track’s width, then reversing, and they were gone.

The dust clouds thinned.

Who might have seen that the Pajeros were lighter by two men and two bergens? No one.

The silence fell around them, a lonely quiet, intense and frightening, as it had always been for strangers who came unannounced and unwanted into the marshes.

Загрузка...