Foxy knew the sound of an artillery shell exploding. There had only been a slight squirm of the young ’un’s body but it was enough to show him Badger was ignorant of weapons’ detonations. It gave him pleasure. He twisted his head slowly, cranked his neck round far enough to see the smoke pall, first stationary, then climbing into the clear blue of the sky.
It was off to the right, near to the raised bund line. It rose, spread and began to lose shape. Silence fell.
He felt, now, a heavy pressure on his shoulder – as if a hand was spread wide and forced down. He could move only his head, not his upper body. Badger had hold of him. His pleasure at Badger’s initial reaction had dissipated. He couldn’t move, was treated like a passenger who wouldn’t know how to react in a crisis and needed to be held still. What did the man think he was going to do – jump up, yell and bloody run? He couldn’t free himself of the hand, but could manoeuvre his head, tilt his neck and look to the front. There was shouting.
The goon, the one he had identified as Mansoor – who had the rank of an officer and was in charge of security, obviously – was on his feet, out of the chair quick enough for it to have toppled behind him, and there were yelled instructions coming into Foxy’s earphones. The guard was to be called out, weapons drawn from the armoury, the sergeant to be found, a patrol prepared. The pressure of the hand on his shoulder eased, a gradual weakening of the force.
He thought that Badger regarded him as old and second class.
The officer had stopped yelling and now stood rooted in front of the fallen chair. His binoculars were at his eyes and he traversed up and down from the bund line to the reed beds and on to the far end of the open ground. The lenses would have covered – with each sweep – the apparently snagged mess of dead reeds in which the microphone was hidden. They would have gone over the water under which the cable was sunk, across the sand where it was buried and travelled on to the heaps of dried leaves that the wind would seem to have whipped together. In the lenses’ view would be the shoulders of the gillie suits, and the tops of the headgear, and perhaps the hands caked with mud, and the optics that had scrim netting round them and were tilted down so that the sun didn’t hit the glass. It was a test.
A good one.
Instinct told Foxy to duck his head further, chin against chest, fill his face with mud and lower the headgear the last half-inch that was possible. Not to look… not to dare to see whether the glasses had moved on from the points that could identify him and Badger.
They did. He watched and the glasses scanned where the microphone was, the cable was buried and where they were… He wriggled. Couldn’t help himself.
It started as a moan, had gained in pitch and was now a scream.
He had to twist his pelvis, lift his hips and backside three inches, get the bottle under his crotch and feel the relief.
The voice in his face had a harder edge. ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’
‘I was pissing.’
‘Couldn’t you wait?’
‘No.’
‘Not the best moment, under close observation, an alert. Tie a bloody knot in it.’
Not the best moment. The scream had raised the birds in panic flight, disturbing them more than the explosion had. He shifted the bottle so that he could cap it, then pushed it back under himself, using a knee to get it down by his boots. They were still wet from the insertion march, but manageable – wet boots and socks were the least of the problem.
Not the best moment because of the screams, now behind them, and the sight of troops jogging along the bund line. Could have been a half-dozen and the officer was on the low pier that jutted out into the lagoon, waving directions.
He had had to use the bottle.
Men were coming close and frightened little voices edged nearer. Carefully, minimum movement, Foxy raised a forefinger and eased one of the earpieces back. He had, now, the officer in his left ear and the noises off to the right, stumbling, curses and whimpers, in the other.
He could see the troops on top of the bund line. Most had rifles and two had machine-pistols.
The woman had come out and used her stick to take her weight as she made her way from the door to where the officer stood. She asked if a mine had exploded and was told that it was more likely an artillery shell, maybe 105mm calibre. She asked if pilgrims had detonated it – he heard the quaver in her voice and assumed it was concern, not the severity of her illness. The officer said it was more likely to have been thieves – there were dumps in the marshes from the old war and this one might have been stockpiled Iraqi munitions, perhaps for the artillery pieces of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. She knew of the abandoned dumps… He sent her away, but with courtesy, and urged that the children be kept inside: all the family should be at the back of their house, not by the front windows. That made sense to Foxy Foulkes, familiar enough with the ways of the world in Iran, or in Iraq, to comprehend why an educated woman and her young children should stay away from their windows and not see what… There had been enough of it in Iraq when he had served there, and the ammunition technical officers had spoken of it.
They said that the main targets for looters were the copper wires from telephone cables and the casings from artillery shells. If the shells were live they would reckon to know where the detonator was, belt it away with a sledge and free the casing. The casings made good money in the souk, and if a few entrepreneurs didn’t make it to the market, God would take care of their families. The ATOs said they saw too many broken bodies – limbs left up trees, guts smeared on walls – when the sledge hammer had hit the wrong part of the shell. The casings could be brass or chromate steel or anodysed aluminium. A primer and a propellant of black powder were inside the casing; at the tip, the warhead might have held high explosive or mustard gas.
The next scream was closer and the hushing increasingly desperate of those around the casualty. They might have been stampeding animals as they ran. Foxy had lost sight of the soldiers who had come along the bund line, and he realised that the fugitives were driven by a cordon of guns towards the reed bank that protected him and the young ’un, the open ground and the water either side of the raised mud on which they had their hide. Some luck, the way the dice came down. Foxy thought his freedom depended on the young ’un’s skills. Might be more than his freedom: might be his life. The skills were those of concealment.
What Badger had done with the scrape in the mud and the camouflage covering it, the mud on what little of their skin might be visible, the weaving of dead foliage into the gillie suits and the headgear might be good enough to save him – and might not. It had been painstaking. At the time, before dawn, Foxy had thought it exhibitionist shit, pernickety little movements that tested the weight and colour of individual fronds before discarding them or threading them into the suits. If the work was not done carefully enough, there would be a rifle barrel against the nape of his neck. His bergen was on his right side and the other on Badger’s left. He himself lay on the spotter ’scope and its small tripod.
The first of them, in flight, broke through the wall of the reed bed.
They stopped dead in their tracks.
They wouldn’t have known where they were running to. They had lost cover, were in a cul-de-sac as far as flight went, boxed in.
The stomach wall of the one who had screamed was split open and his T-shirt was dragged up. He seemed to be trying to hold in his intestines with his crossed forearms. Another man had hold of his elbow and tried to support him, but scarlet fluid was running onto his trousers. Two more carried a dead man, who hung like a rag doll in their grip. Another, with ashen cheeks, hopped forward in their wake, holding upright a teenage boy in a long bright shirt. It was bloodstained from navel to knee. He had to hop because his left leg had been taken off immediately below the knee.
They would have seen the open ground, and the water, and they would have heard – those not screaming or moaning – the pursuit behind them in the reed bed, and might have seen, across the lagoon, the officer waving his little force forward, and heard the bawled orders. They crumpled, all of them, into the mud.
Soldiers came through the reeds, and hope died.
One walked so close that his foot must have come down on the young ’un’s bergen. It was a dust-smeared boot and would have sagged as it stepped on the lower half of the rucksack, but the rifle was aimed at the gang, cowering, and the next step missed Badger’s feet.
He took little breaths, just the barest amount of air, while ants or small spiders half drowned in the sweat on his face. He endured the irritations. He had forgotten, almost, that Badger was beside him. He didn’t hear any breathing or feel any movement, but he heard the officer’s shout across the water. He couldn’t see him now but imagined that he cupped his hands in front of his mouth to give the order.
Foxy gagged. He had heard the order. It would have been faint to the soldiers, but it was loud and clear to Foxy.
He tried to swallow but there was no moisture in his throat. Worse, vomit seemed to creep up to the back of his mouth. Foxy had been with the army in Northern Ireland, in the bad days, when feelings had run high with the military, and he had been with the interrogators at the Basra airport complex when tempers were lost, but he had never heard an order given by a uniformed man such as the one that drifted over the still waters of the lagoon and was crystal sharp in his ear.
They were shot one by one.
It wasn’t a killing where an automatic weapon was aimed in their general direction. Foxy couldn’t see it but assumed that the sergeant – a short man with a machine pistol, in a tunic a size too small for him – had done the shooting. Single shots. A stench of cordite. A whimper from some, a curse from others, quiet from a few. Under any circumstances would Foxy have intervened? No. They could have been raping grandmothers, pushing down hooded prisoners onto soft drink bottles so that the neck penetrated, and he would have stayed silent.
The corpses were dragged away.
He heard the slither of the bodies on wet ground, then the cracking of reed stems as they were pulled through denser concentrations. Later, when those sounds ended, he heard the far-away splashes of burial in water, and wondered if they had found stones to weight them. They would have been Arabs, most likely from Iraq. They had come across the border because this was more likely to be virgin ground for the collectors of shell cases. Their crime was to have crossed the frontier, and what had made it a capital offence was that they had strayed into a most sensitive part of the restricted zone.
It was a dangerous thought, one he had not entertained during his four-month posting to the interrogation team. It risked sapping his commitment. What in God’s name had he and his comrades been doing there? What were they doing there now?
What had they been doing there in days gone by when British squaddies had patrolled, Yanks had driven by in their armour-plated carriers, the foot-soldier was pleased to get a ten-dollar bill for putting the roadside bomb in place, and some damn man – who had glasses, good-features, a fine-looking wife who was dying and kids who were frightened – had laboured at a bench, making the bombs that took the lives in this place, which stank of donkey, dog, fly and human shit? The rant rioted in his mind. What were they doing there? The answer: would need a cleverer man than Foxy. He could have praised Badger for making the scrape, constructing the hide, saving them, but he didn’t.
Perhaps he was too preoccupied to hand out praise. He would have given his left testicle bollock for the chance to hold on to Ellie, cling to her – would have given the whole handful of his tackle for the chance to hold her and be loved. Fractionally, beside him, Badger shifted, his arms moved and then his elbow dug sharply into Foxy’s ribcage. He passed Foxy a flapjack. Foxy ate the flapjack, then said, wiping crumbs, ‘Life’s cheap, worth nothing, especially an Arab’s. Iranians would see it like shooting a diseased dog. Don’t expect there to be a court of human rights getting steamed up about it.’
Badger said nothing. They should have been bonded by the experience, but Foxy realised that neither would offer anything to the other.
The officer was back on his chair and his glasses were at his chest. The ducks and waders were again on the water, and the officer had his float out, watching it. The woman had come out from the house with her mother, who carried the washing basket, and the kids had their plastic toys. The guards had resumed their watch from the shade of the palm trees. Hard to believe it had happened, that anything had happened. He thought he and Badger would not have been so fortunate. It would not have been quick: interrogation, torture, slow execution – and not by a bullet. He had no idea what he was doing there, then and now, what was his business.
He would have liked to talk about Ellie, but the man beside him had no interest in her.
The washing was pegged out in the sunshine and the children played. The officer caught two small fish, which he unhooked and threw back. Nothing was said and nothing was learned.
Then the shivers started, rustling the old fronds that covered them, and he couldn’t help himself – so nearly dead, and so damned isolated.
‘The marsh area is one of the great wonders of the world. It is a unique and precious place. We’re doing everything we can to protect your homes, keep you safe, and to maintain the habitat of many centuries…’
The crowd had more than doubled, might have trebled. Abigail Jones was at the broken gate. She had put a scarf over her hair and still wore the loose cool robe. She had a bag, a local craftwork effort, slung on her shoulder and in it were her communications, her medical pack and her pistol, with two spare magazines, three flash grenades and a purse with some money. She had reflected that the bag contained all that the modern young woman needed if she was promenading in sunny Iraq… Different from what would be in the bags of the girls she had been at school with or shared benches with in college lecture rooms. She’d have said that the comms, the pack with the dressings and morphine syringes were the most important items – not the weapons because she had Harding behind her: the M-16 would be slung across his chest, his thumb would be on the safety, his finger on the trigger guard, and there would be a bullet in the breach.
‘… We’re trying to let the whole world know how beautiful, and how important, are the marshlands where you live. We want to establish the extent of the wildlife that has survived the war with Iran, the persecution by Saddam and now the drought. We need to say with accuracy what birds are here and what animals. We don’t want to interfere in any way with your lives. The whole world knows of the hospitality of the madan people, but we ask that you leave us to count the birds and other creatures.’
If they believed that shit they’d believe anything. They didn’t. They were close to her. There was no hostility in the eyes, but the sort of deadened dullness that came from poverty, hardship, and the sense that an opportunity had presented itself. Two vehicles, good for stripping; radios, binoculars and telescopes that would fetch useful money in the souk at al-Amara; weapons that would augment those filched from previous conflicts fought out in the marshes – she had heard that old Turkish rifles retrieved after the battle of al-Qurna, December 1914 and British-issued Lee Enfields were still seen on a tribesman’s shoulder. There were also food, medical supplies and money. Little whistles of breath came between Harding’s teeth, his way when he was tense. He would have known she was talking shit and convincing none of them, but she had started and would finish, and her Arabic was fair enough for her to be understood.
‘… We ask you, please, to leave us so that the birds and the creatures are not disturbed and we can count and observe them. Later, when we have finished, we will reward your co-operation generously. We’re doing this for you.’
She thought she had sounded so hollow.
They gazed back at her. They might decide that she and her guards were weak and rush the gate, might decide that they could shift around the fence – down in many places – infiltrate and overwhelm, or they might conclude it best to wait till darkness, not many hours away. The eyes stripped her. She had – like everyone who did a Baghdad posting – read the works of the explorers, mostly British from a half-century or a century before, who lauded the culture of the madan men and the lifestyle of many millennia. They would kill her, steal from her body – maybe rape her after death – and blood lust would determine that the bodies of Corky, Shagger, Hamfist and Harding were mutilated. It wasn’t political, nothing to do with the offensive intrusion of a foreign army. It was all about the economic necessity of survival, requiring items of value to be taken to the souk at al-Amara, even Basra, and flogged off so that a new widescreen television could be bought with the generator to power it.
She smiled to the front and said, in English from the side of her mouth, ‘Not an overwhelming response. I’m getting nowhere.’
‘It wasn’t my shout, ma’am.’
It had been Abigail Jones’s decision to seek out the abandoned exploration site, and the more reliable maps showed no settlements near to it. There had been no alternative. Actually, she didn’t know Harding’s given name, and knew less about him than she did about any of the rest of her detail. She had never learned what military units he had been with – airborne, armour, marines, military police? He stayed apart from the banter of the others, but when he spoke it was worth her while to hear him out. All that was personal about Harding – who had been with Proeliator Security for eight years – was in his wallet, a photograph of a woman: a frail face under sparse grey hair, not his mother but the aunt who had brought him up in abject penury somewhere in the Midwest. She thought that, when this was over, he’d hit the Russian whores in the Dubai hotels. He was the smartest of the team, immaculate each day in his fatigues, and careful. She liked that, valued it.
‘I don’t see this as sustainable.’
‘When they’re hungry enough, ma’am, or thirsty, they’ll come. Could be tomorrow or the day after, could be tonight or in half an hour. We’d have to drop a hell of a number of them to win.’
‘Not what we’re here for – it would be a disaster. Don’t even think about it.’
She kept the smile fixed, but none of them stepped a half-pace back, and nobody answered her. If they’d heard Harding’s voice, recognised him as American, he might not be killed but sold on. There were chickens in cages in the souk, waiting to be sold and slaughtered, goats and sheep that were worth good money. They’d get a better price for the American than they would for Corky, Shagger and Hamfist. She turned to Harding. ‘Talk to me.’
‘It’ll be hard to stay here, ma’am, but here is within an acceptable distance of our people. Further back, wherever that’s possible, is not acceptable. Already they’re hung out, rags in the wind. I don’t see an option, hard as it is staying our ground.’
‘I hear you.’
‘My opinion, ma’am, it’s not possible – and the other guys would say it – to leave them out there beyond help. Wouldn’t be able to hold my head high again.’
‘Then we’ll hack it. Somehow. Thank you.’
They might be lucky and they might not. They might have time, the angels singing with them, and they might not. She bit her lip.
‘Have I spoken out of turn, ma’am?’
She shook her head. He had spoken with politeness, respect, but had given a clear message – rags in the wind – and two men far forward couldn’t be left, after guarantees had been given. She had little sense of honour, obligation, when she gave the Service’s word, but her men would have believed in necessary trust, and she had felt the younger man against her body, inside it.
‘Hack it and sweat it out.’ She walked away from the gate, and considered how many dollars to feed out now, how many later.
The consultant phoned Berlin. He leaned back in his chair and gazed through the window at the sleet spattering the glass. He gave the switchboard the name and was asked his own.
‘My name is Steffen. I am calling from Lubeck.’
The connection was made. He didn’t waste time on pleasantries. He began with the costs, in euros. There was the fee for his own time, for the clinic nurses, for the scanner, and the fee for X-rays, for the staff operating the scanner and the radiology team. He continued with the potential sums required if the examination showed that a stereo-tactic was possible and that an operation had a chance of success, then added, ‘You should have no anxiety that we would conduct the procedure merely to gain the payments when we have no hope of a favourable outcome. We have a long waiting list. We only take a patient into theatre when there are grounds for optimism.’
The numbers were in front of him and bounced in his eyes. A consultation and examination – and a verdict that denied hope – would cost thousands of euros. Surgery, then close supervision in intensive care and a further period of convalescence would add up to tens of thousands. He said that debit cards could be used, in advance, but not credit cards or cheques; a money order taken out on a German bank would be acceptable.
Were discounts available to the Islamic Republic? He said that his own remuneration might be subject to a realistic adjustment, but all other fees were non-negotiable. He had made provisional reservations for facilities on the following Monday.
The fees were agreed.
He finished, ‘Such a reservation will attract comment because, as yet, the patient has no identity. I am not interested in the patient’s name, but would be grateful for one that matches a passport and the medical records brought from Tehran. I would suggest a name is furnished as quickly as possible, or suspicion will be aroused. We are talking about an initial appointment for nine in the morning, Monday.’ He allowed a whiff of sarcasm. ‘I trust that finding a name for the patient will not prove too great a problem.’
The consultant rang off. He had pushed to the limits, but he had won nothing, and danced to their tune.
In his office, Len Gibbons moved paper round his desk, sent it in clockwise circles, the other way, then north, south, east and west. The phone did not ring. The sheets were the contents of two files, cardboard and downloaded from the computer. The phone did not ring because there was – obviously – nothing to report from that far-away front line, nothing of significance. It was the life of intelligence officers, such as Len Gibbons, who handled men and women who were sent across borders and were at the extremities of survival, that the phone only rang when matters reached breaking point. He liked to have paper on his desk and regarded the screen as a poor substitute. Through the door, which was open, he could see Sarah was at her desk, typing briskly, not in the style of his own battering two fingers. She would be busying herself with the detail of the accounts for the operation – wise, sensible, and mind-destructively dull. Nor had there been contact from the Towers.
The paper he moved anti-clockwise was headlined Joseph Paul Foulkes. It wasn’t the first time he had read the resume of a biography, or the tenth, and wouldn’t be the last. Foxy to his friends – not many of them. Aged 51, brought up in West Yorkshire, grammar-school educated, joining the local Police at eighteen marrying Liz (Elizabeth Joyce Routledge), a hospital worker, fathering two daughters, and specialising with the force in the elite Covert Rural Observation Post unit. Noticed. Advised that a careerenhancing move would be a transfer to the Metropolitan Police and Special Branch, then sent to Northern Ireland and given commendations for his work in dangerous country. A flair for languages. Courses at a language laboratory in Whitechapel, one on one, then six months of cramming in the culture aspects at the School of Oriental and African Studies, then Bristol University, and the military’s Beaconsfield camp, culminating in a useful knowledge of Farsi, the principal tongue of the Iranian diplomats based in the capital. Where they met contacts – woodlands, parked cars, remote country hotels, restaurants and lorry drivers’ cafes – he used the shotgun microphones or the larger parabolic versions and listened. Twice he had provided evidence leading to conviction and imprisonment. The marriage had not survived. Posted to Basra, Nov 03-Feb 04 for work with Intelligence and Interrogation, utilising his language skills in Farsi. Second wife was Ellie (Eleanor Daphne Wilson), now aged 33, employed by Naval Procurement in Bath. Remains a serving police officer, with good reputation, running CROP skills courses. Summary: Reliable, self-opinionated, wealth of experience. Gibbons would say that Foxy Foulkes was as good as any spewed up by the computers – he was what he had, and almost as old as himself.
Gibbons could not imagine, or have survived, the privations of where he had despatched the man.
No call came through from the Towers. No colleague rang in to offer moral support. He was isolated. He could have contaminated others so they had, effectively, consigned him to the leper colony. He had the funds, the contacts, the links, and was cast adrift. If it all fouled up it would be deniable in the Towers, and a whisper would be passed that ‘A junior official overreached himself, exceeded his powers, acted with no authorisation’. The great and the good would wash their hands of him. And if it succeeded?
The paper manoeuvred clockwise was headed Daniel George Baxter. It said he did not have friends, was generally known as Badger, and was 28 years old. He had been brought up by his parents, Paul and Debbie Baxter, on the outskirts of Reading. His father sold second-hand cars and his mother took care of the books; they lived at Burghfield close to the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Schooled at a comprehensive and regarded as an under-achiever; criticised in school-leaving report as a non-contributor. Accepted into the Thames Valley Police in 2001 and initial reports described him as quiet, resourceful and utterly dependable. What had changed? Gibbons could almost have recited it – he’d read it often enough. One referee had been a doctor, an obsessional ‘birder’, who treated Baxter’s parents. Baxter had taken him to flooded gravel pits west of Reading where he had led him, on his stomach, closer than he’d imagined possible to the perch from which a kingfisher dived; he had raved about the mind-set and calm of the applicant. A second referee had been a local accountant who prepared the business’s final tax papers, and whom Baxter had taken to the Kennet where they had sat through a summer evening watching a female otter with her cubs, feeding and playing; he had written of the young man’s patience and dedication. Had been taken into the force CROP unit at 22, extraordinarily young, after three years as an undistinguished beat constable. Had found his vocation: court evidence for a narcotics ‘untouchable’ at Wantage, and the principal surveillance on a tinkers’ site at Windsor, doubling as a thieves’ kitchen. Had been drafted into the West Country regional office of the Box. Reported to have the highest standards of professionalism. Not academic, not particularly intelligent, but an operator of genuine class. Almost teetotal, does not smoke. No known hobbies but holidays are spent hiking, alone, in the west of Scotland.
If they won through – him on the back of Foxy and Badger, in co-operation with the Cousin and the Friend – he would be able to go back to the Towers, to a place dedicated to ‘need to know’. Word would have seeped through the cracks in the walls and he would be the star of the moment. Few would know what he had done, what had been gained, only that a triumph lay at the Service’s feet. For many years, almost the totality of his career, a catastrophe in the terms of intelligence gathering had dogged him. Triumph, wherever it was to be found, would help to wipe away dim memories of the watchtowers, fences and deceits of the trade… but it would be on the backs of those two men, Foxy and Badger.
He was skilled at judging others, gutting their files, and could assess himself: he still suffered from a cruelty in the youth of his career, seemed to make a virtue of dullness and reliability, and kept his passions covert from work colleagues. He had the chance, now, to walk tall in the corridors of the Towers and take what he thought was his rightful place on the benches of those with influence… if two men performed, if luck favoured them, and if the dice rolled well, if
…
The telephone didn’t ring, and he moved the papers until they seemed to have little meaning. Then he looked at the pictures Sarah had pasted on the walls, and an outline of a face gazed down at him. It had no eyes, nose or mouth and was an enemy… He couldn’t imagine where they were, Foxy and Badger, or how they were.
She was in front of him, inside the bakery, waiting to be served. He and Beryl were next in the queue, and he must have banged her elbow with the sleeve that held the two parts of the pole that carried the standard of his Royal British Legion branch. She turned, and he recognised her. She smiled, and he sensed that Beryl didn’t understand.
‘Hello,’ Doug Bentley said. ‘So, you’re back again.’
‘I come to quite a few,’ she answered, and gave a little shrug. ‘Afterwards I get some bread here.’
It had been a big turn-out that day. He and Beryl had done their usual thing. One bus from their own village into Swindon, then the 12 from Swindon to Wootton Bassett. They had met friends – the new colleagues they had come to know from their journeys to the town… too many of those journeys.
He did not think it impertinent to ask: ‘Are you often here, in the town?’
She said, ‘Only when they’re bringing the heroes through. It’s so moving, so emotional. I come when I can. I always see you.’
He had his position, with his standard, in the line and opposite the war memorial. He was well placed each time and faced the relatives who had brought flowers, usually roses from the florist behind the library. ‘I wouldn’t miss it,’ Doug Bentley said. ‘It’s a responsibility I’ve been given by our branch to be here. The way I see it, I’d be letting them down, those coming through, if I wasn’t here, if I just reckoned to be too busy. It’s a responsibility and a privilege.’
‘You’re right.’
The customer at the counter had paid, picked up the paper bag with chocolate caramel slices and now eased out of her way. She asked for a loaf and he took a step forward. Beryl was fidgeting in her purse for coins. It had been a big turn-out because of the work the serviceman had done in Afghanistan. Ammunition technical officer – explosive ordnance disposal – down on hands and knees, defusing roadside bombs. Many photographs of him, young, a sergeant, had been held up by relatives, and posters with messages of love and admiration. So many of those who came through Wootton Bassett had been cut down by the bombs, and this man had lost his life in trying to make the wretched things safe. In his own military service – Pay Corps, National Service, never out of the UK – Doug Bentley had never come across any officer or NCO who would have attracted the level of support that the bomb men had when the bell tolled in the High Street, the hearse came up the incline and the funeral director walked with his top hat off and his staff in his hand. When the relatives had had their chance to put the flowers on the roof and touch the shiny black bodywork, that day, there had been rivulets of rain running down through the flowers, and tears cascading down faces. Doug Bentley had had his head lowered in respect and his eye had been on the black ribbon at the top of the pole above his standard. He did not know why good men, so loved and held in such regard, needed to chance their lives in defusing dangerous devices out in the middle of deserts, and in ditches beside fields.
She paid. She faced him and smiled. ‘I’ve changed my hair. Fancy you recognising me.’
He’d known her because of the chain round her neck and the name in gold letters hanging above her blouse, resting on the skin where the cleavage started.
He lied, with a grin: ‘I’m good with faces – and good with names, Ellie.’ He didn’t say he recognised her because the buttons of her blouse, worn under an open winter coat, were out of order, as if they had been fastened in a hurry.
She was gone, and the shop’s doorbell rang as she closed the door behind her. He asked for a loaf, a cob.
His wife’s voice grated in his ear: ‘She’s been shagging again, hasn’t she? It’s that tart you spoke to in the summer. A woman can always tell. She’s wearing a wedding ring, so it’s a boyfriend she’s been shagging, and she’ll have a husband who’s being two-timed and is too pathetic to know it.’
‘Can you not, Foxy – for fuck’s sake – stop your hand moving?’
‘I’m trying.’
‘Can’t you try harder?’
Rare for Badger to criticise, and rare for him to be with an oppo he hadn’t chosen, doing continuous stags with only faint chances of a doze, not proper sleep. Last time it had been like a holiday-camp talent contest, except that Ged hadn’t been stripped down to a bikini. He had chosen his oppo after going to the line manager and complaining they’d shown out because George had coughed in a bush and they’d had to bloody run: George was dumped; feet didn’t touch the ground. He would have preferred a rookie with him now, someone who had no knowledge of the tradecraft of covert rural work, who would take orders and do as he was instructed, and who had been there only to listen for Farsi talk. Badger had good hearing, and the shake of the hand beside him was an increasing irritation, like a dripping tap. They’d had the confession about the language.
‘I can’t stop it.’
‘You’re tired, I’m tired. You’re hungry and thirsty, so am I. You’re stressed, I’m stressed. You’re shaking, I’m not.’
‘I’m doing my best.’
‘Not good enough. Try biting it.’
The confession had been the final issue. He could almost take the shake of Foxy’s hand, with the rustle of the dead fronds. It was what he had said to Badger that had made a tipping point. He’d hidden it, and now he’d trotted it out.
A car, with a military escort riding inside the cab, had pulled up at the front of the house. A man had climbed out, then gone to the back and opened a rear door. He had extracted a bouquet of flowers, massive and colourful, then gone towards the officer, Mansoor. They had spoken, the man had been taken to the door and the wife had come out. She had accepted the flowers, and the car had driven away. Badger had seen in the glasses that she had had to fight to control her tears.
‘What happened?’ he’d asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Isn’t it working? Is the gear down?’
‘Gear’s great.’
‘Why don’t you know?’
‘It’s the language.’
The children were out again, and the officer had gone back to fishing, no bites, and smoking. Badger could see the flowers inside, through the open window. Hadn’t anyone known? Not the Boss, the American, the Israeli, or fucking Foulkes himself? Had they known and kept quiet? In the confession the star word had been dialect. There were dialects in Farsi. Tribes had dialects, regions had dialects, the north and south had dialects, as did the east and west. There was the vernacular and there was the classical. Foxy had classical, but the vernacular was what the troops spoke and the officer spoke. In the confession it was stated that half of what came through the earphones was ‘rough translation’ and half was accurate. How had Foulkes managed with the interrogation team? He hadn’t enough of the language to grasp the nuances that betrayed a man’s lie. The diplomats he had tracked out of London, who had talked with young militants in students’ unions, were educated and spoke classical. What could he not understand? He hadn’t understood what the officer said to the man who brought the flowers, or most of what the Engineer had said to his wife, but he had been fine on the meeting she’d taken because that had been formal.
The hands shook.
They were together, hip against hip, shoulder against shoulder, two plastic bags by their knees and four bottles of urine. They might not even understand the mention of a destination, if they were lucky enough to hear one.
Badger said, ‘You’re useless, full of shit.’
‘You’re arrogant, full of conceit and piss. You – you wouldn’t even have scraped through in my day.’
‘I passed out well.’
‘My day it was a proper test. Your day, Health and fucking Safety killed the hard bits. You wouldn’t have come through.’
He was drawn in – shouldn’t have been. ‘I was top rated in marks.’
‘Did you do the claustrophobia one, buried in a box with a pencil-wide air vent, in darkness, silence, and last thing you hear is the instructors walking away? Left for half an hour. You do that?’
‘They’d scaled it back, wasn’t permitted.’
‘Send you up the Fire Brigade Tower, did they? The vertigo test. No restraint harness and lean over the edge of the tower’s top to read the number-plate of a car parked right under you. How were you at that?’
‘As you well know, it had been banned.’
‘Dump you in a car boot, did they? Drive you over rough ground, bouncing, bashing? The boot opens and there’s a German Shepherd looking to make a meal of you. Was that tough?’
‘It had been ditched.’
‘And isolation. What about water and a biscuit pack, driven to the far end of an airport fence, dropped off and told to sit against it, never lose contact with it. There’s a car parked two hundred yards away and you have to log everything that happens to it, moves near it. The hazard lights might flash at midnight, a guy walks past in mid-morning. You’re there as many as sixty hours, and you miss anything, you’ve failed. How did you do?’
‘They’ve cut it back, it’s not the same.’
‘Did you do a run with a twenty-kilo pack, two and a half klicks in twelve minutes?’
‘We did that.’
‘Anyway, I did Claustrophobia, the Tower, the Boot, Isolation and Stamina, and I came out top in my class.’
‘They give you a medal?’
‘The training counted for something, and should be respected.’
Badger said, ‘Assuming it’s not the wrong dialect, and not the wrong tribe, and you can manage what you’re here for, what’s being said?’
They lapsed into quiet, and watched. The Mercedes pulled up, left the dust cloud to fragment behind it.
The driver was out snappily, came round the front of the car and opened the door for the Engineer. They had been together enough years for them to do small-talk on journeys: football teams that the Engineer had never seen and films he would never go to, but he valued the conversations. His own door was opened and he was handed the bag that held his laptop and the papers he had worked on. He stood, arched his back and stretched out the stiffness from the journey. The driver opened the boot and lifted out the new suitcase, carried it to the door, then bobbed his head dutifully, and was in his car, driving away.
Mansoor came to him. ‘I think your wife is resting, and that her mother is with the children and their books.’
Mansoor’s voice was breathy, hoarse, as if he had shouted and strained his throat. He demonstrated the wheels on the new case, ran them on the concrete of the patio in front of the door, showed how they went in all directions and grimaced. He asked what, that day, had happened, and was told men had been close, in the marshes, thieves, but they had been intercepted efficiently. How was his wife? he asked. Good, but tired.
He could smoke in his car but not in his house; he could smoke in his office and in meetings, but not in the presence of his children. She dictated the rules. He could not say how long remained for her – a month more, or the duration of his life. He did not know how long the rules she had laid down would exist.
There were two pigs in the water, near to a reed bed and close to the spit that came off the open ground some two hundred metres from their pier. He watched them, a full-grown boar and a young sow, emerge from the reeds and sink themselves into the water, only nostrils and eyes above the surface. Huge creatures, they moved effortlessly and with grace.
Mansoor told him that, before the thieves came, he had been watching for the African Sacred Ibis, but had not seen one. After the thieves had been intercepted, he had fished but had not caught a carp worth keeping, large enough to eat.
The Engineer had no interest in the bird, had less than no interest in the fishing. He did not share his cigarettes but smoked and walked to the limit of the small pier where the dinghy was tied. He was glad that Naghmeh was resting, that she had not been at the door to greet him and see the new case with the special wheels. Him bringing the case home marked a moment of virtual finality: when it was filled and they left, the road ahead might fork in two directions. They would head for recovery or death. There was no middle way.
Mansoor interrupted his quiet. He did not wish, of course, to intrude in private matters, but when was it likely they would travel? The Engineer said, distant and distracted, that the final arrangements were being put in place, but soon. Soon. They agreed it was a fine suitcase
Mansoor hovered behind him.
What did he have to say?
The voice was still throaty, as if there had been crisis and shouting here. The Engineer was told he should not permit his driver to take him through Ahvaz the following morning. There would be another hanging at the prison – a terrorist of the Ahvaz cells, an Arab. ‘He confessed his crime, placing a bomb near the headquarters of the police, and named associates. The sentence of death by hanging will be enforced. Another was with him. He did not aid the interrogators and committed suicide. I am told there will be powerful emotions in the city tomorrow, and after the last experience… There have been too many bombs from Arab terrorists. The penalty must be exacted. You should keep out of the city.’
He nodded, watching the pigs swim and feed. When the cigarette was finished he threw it down and watched it gutter in the water. He went back to his house to find his children and show his wife the suitcase he had bought for their journey.
Foxy whispered, ‘Try this for a bedtime story to make you feel good. The advice is to keep clear of the centre of Ahvaz tomorrow because they’re hanging a terrorist – sorry, probably a joker that we or the Yanks shoved funds at so he’s a freedom fighter. The Arabs reckon they’re third-class citizens in the blessed Islamic Republic and risk their necks trying to blast the mullahs. Anyway, he’s going to be strung up and it’s likely to make people angry. That tells me the local good guys are infiltrated, compromised, have snitches and touts in their cells, and aren’t secure. That’s why you and I are here. There was another who would have been sharing the gallows tomorrow but he topped himself. When the goon speaks to the boss it’s good, educated Farsi, and I can follow it.’
‘Have you anything else to say?’
‘Like an apology?’
‘For bitching, then sulking,’ Badger teased coldly. ‘You ready to say sorry?’
‘No.’
The house was bathed in light from fittings screwed to the top of the walls. It fell on the patio and across the track to spread over the pier, where the dinghy was tied, and the water. The Engineer sat on the plastic chair and smoked. He could have lived inside the camp of the al-Quds Brigade, in a fine bungalow near to the commandant’s residence, or had an apartment overlooking the Karun river near to the Hotel Fajr Grand. He might have been accommodated in a government-owned villa near to the Ahvaz airport, but he lived here. Her choice. It had been her decision that, when the Americans began to crowd onto their aircraft and head for home, taking with them the body-bags, so many of which he had filled, they should make their home near to the water, the marshes and old civilisations that captivated her, and where she was close to her life’s passion: the clearance of land mines. She had supervised the renovation of the building, had bullied architects and pleaded with builders, had created the world she wanted… and the pain had come. There was moonlight on the far water, the reeds and a spit of mud, beyond the throw of the security lights, and he saw the ripples, the movement of the birds and confusion where pigs browsed. He heard the racking cough of a sentry. He had thought he understood it, but he could not, now, imagine the future.