A Deniable Death (19 page)

More argument? Not then. Rolling away from him, Badger let his hands slide over his suit and checked it, involuntary and instinctive, then his headpiece. He put more mud on his hands and wrists and was gone.

What else had they bickered over?

The Meals Ready to Eat. One chicken and one beef, both with rice, and he had wanted the chicken. So had Badger. Foxy had insisted, had had the chicken.

The stags . . . He’d had to sleep, had been dead on his feet, but when the young’ un did the watch Foxy had been woken five times. Hard to get to sleep in the scrape, but he’d been woken five times, and five times could hear sweet fuck-all because of the motion of the reeds. He had let Badger know he needed sleep, not the sound of a reed hitting another reed and a thousand more doing the same.

Using the bags had been a point of conflict. Badger had said they should carry them out. Foxy wanted to bury them. They had a dozen, enough for a little cache of excrement, and a couple of bottles to go with them. He hadn’t done it for years, been a croppie in a hide, having to bag and bottle. He could lecture on it, could make men’s faces fall at the thought of the bag and doing the business a couple of feet from an oppo. The bags were in a hole and covered over, but whether they’d be carried out was not yet settled.

They had stripped in the night, and that had made for more tension. Their gillie suits and the clothes under them were soaked. Their boots were sodden. Badger had lain on his back and wriggled out of his gear. His skin was white, had no cream or mud on it. It was too many years since Foxy had bared all in front of strangers, except in the changing rooms at the gym where he did work-outs. Inhibitions, which he would not have entertained ten years before, had stressed him. When he had slid off his boots, wrung out his socks, then pulled off his trousers, he had turned away from Badger – and criticised: ‘You’re stark bollock naked – what happens if we have to bug out fast?’ He had heard the sharp breath and had known he was held in contempt, not given the respect he deserved. The boots had dried partially, the socks mostly, but the gillie suits were still sodden and heavy.

The light came on fast.

Foxy remembered that from his weeks in the interrogation centre. It came on fast in a surge and the shadows were shortening. He looked with his glasses for movement in the reed beds or ripples. He searched for Badger. He saw the target, in a vest and pyjama trousers, sandals on his feet, come out and drag on the morning’s first cigarette, then go back inside. A car came, the Mercedes saloon that had brought the target home the previous evening. It parked and the driver stretched, spat, then lounged. He saw two sentries on plastic chairs under the low trees but they stood, reluctantly, when the officer came by them. The children appeared in nightshirts and chased each other. One fell and seemed to graze a knee – there was wailing, which he heard on the headset. Everything he saw he noted in his log, and on the first page was his sketched map of the location.

The sound failed. There had been, quite piercing, the crying of the child above the reeds’ motion, then silence. There was water in front of him beyond the reed beds, which were at the edge of the ground they had reached, and then there was the last island, lower and more exposed, without cover, then more reeds, denser than the others, and the lagoon in front of the house and the barracks. He had keen eyes. Ellie had told him his eyesight was above average. She liked to say, in company, that he could see a flea move on a carpet. Ellie’s job at Naval Procurement kept her out of the house too long for her to hoover up any fleas. He ached for her, always had and always would. He’d never ached for his first wife, Liz, who might still be a radiologist in Yorkshire, he didn’t know, with the two daughters, who’d been barely civil the last time he had gone up from London for a birthday . . . A uniform, out of sight of the house, stood on the bank of the lagoon and urinated into the water.

Foxy brought the lenses off him and was traversing towards the house when he saw what seemed a snagged mess of dead reeds caught on a little promontory. There were two others out in the water, moving languidly with the flow, but the one on the promontory, which stretched out to form a mud spit, was anchored. He hadn’t seen it before, and assumed that the wind, more powerful in the night, had dislodged it from the foot of the reeds.

His shoulder was tapped, and he started, half turned.

Foxy Foulkes’s reactions weren’t failing: his sight was good, and his hearing, and he would have claimed that his awareness was as sharp as it had been at any time in his life since he had been awarded his own Blue Book for passing out as a qualified CROP man. He had not seen or heard him.

‘Come on.’

‘Where to?’

‘The mike’s out in front. It’s another fifty, sixty metres forward. We don’t have that length of cable.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘You want to hear anything? We go forward. See that kind of island? It isn’t one. We get to the far end of it on the bund line, and we can hook up. You’ll have no interference there. We have to move
now
. Come on.’

‘There’s not cover there,’ he said sharply, almost out loud.

‘Then we make some.’

Foxy bit his lip and didn’t say what he thought. It was too close. No cover. What the hell was he doing there? He didn’t say anything . . . Thought plenty, though. Thought about the ground on which they would lie up and where he would have a decent link with the microphone, where the beam would be clear of obstruction, and about the sun’s climb, the spreading light, the soldiers who were drifting from the barracks building and the faint smell of cooking. He was there because he couldn’t have refused. The young ’un, Badger, had challenged him, and he thought one argument was settled: the shit would be left buried with the bottles.

He crawled away to get his gear together as Badger reeled in the cable.

If he looked for the target, and the target’s home, he could see the weapons, and far out in front of him was the island-shaped platform on which there was little cover.

What to say? Nothing.

The Engineer had gone early. The sun had been barely up, and the heat haze had not yet formed when he had kissed his wife and waved briskly to Mansoor. The Mercedes had pulled away, and the day had begun.

A few months ago, before his new-found interest, Mansoor would have started on the many texts available to him on the types and maintenance of weaponry available to the al-Quds Brigade. He would have taken books on military tactics, particularly those describing the fighting methods of the Iraqi resistance, the Afghan Taliban, Hezbollah and the North Vietnamese from the library of his headquarters at the camp outside Ahvaz. In his convalescence he had read everything available on the methods used to defeat the American military, the forces of the Great Satan and its ally, the Little Satan. He knew what had been done in Falujah, Helmand and Beirut, where the marines had been bombed, and at the plateau of Khe Sanh. Then he had nurtured his new interest.

It did not make him less alert.

He would have said that his sense for danger or threat was greater than if he had been sitting in the shade with his head buried in a book or pamphlet. He knew about the battle of the marshes, the battle for Susangerd, the battle for Khorramshah and the battle for Abadan, and each move that had been made in the Karbala offensives, which were legend in the history of the Guards Corps. He had done that work, and had found a new focus.

He sat on a plastic chair in front of the Engineer’s house – where the sentry would have been at night – and looked out in front of him. He had good binoculars.

His own wife, Golshan –
flower garden
– had told him, when she was angry and bold enough to speak directly to him, that he had come back from Iraq and the hospital a changed man, embittered. She worked long hours at the Crate Camp Garrison, and came home late on the bus to her room in his parents’ house. He rarely saw her, so she had had no chance to learn of his obsession. He sat with his binoculars on his chest and waited for the movement of the birds.

He looked for the African Sacred Ibis. He could have seen it in East Africa, South Africa, Taiwan or on wetlands on the east coast of Australia, but he had never watched it fly low over the marshes in front of the house. They were there, he had read, but they were endangered and near extinct. It would be a cause for celebration if he were to see one, and even more so if a pair came close.

He had not yet seen it on this stretch of marshland. Naghmeh had told him she had watched one drift over the lagoon, but it had gone when he had come from his office. He watched, waited, and would break away only for coffee in the barracks, and his salad sandwich. Otherwise he would keep the vigil. He had his rifle across his knees and could tell himself – in true honesty – that he was conscientious in his work. He believed that the Engineer had told them so at the camp.

There were days when he thought he had seen one, neck extended, legs tucked up and powered by wide wings, far away over the reeds. Each time his excitement had surged as the speck had come closer, until he could see it was a slow-flapping heron. He looked also for the predator. Mansoor, the security officer, indulged himself with his search for the Sacred Ibis, but he was also on constant watch for the threat, for danger. The White-tailed Eagle had been up that morning, the hen, but he had not seen it now for an hour. The eagle had no equal, would swoop and kill the gentle bird.

If the Sacred Ibis came, if his hope was fulfilled, it would likely come low across the reeds, and he watched them closely. There were ducks and coots, and an otter. He thought them his allies. If the threat was alive, the waterbirds would panic and the otter would dive, telling him of a killer’s approach . . .

The visitors arrived. Three cars had brought them from Ahvaz, Susangerd and Dezful. They would have gathered in Ahvaz and come in convoy into the border zone, which was under military control, and to which access was restricted.

He went to check the papers, to satisfy himself. He would get two of his men to move a table under the trees, set chairs round it and carry over a tray of glasses and a jug of juice. He would put more cushions on the chair for Naghmeh, whose pain was worse this week. Then, when the meeting had started, he would come back to sit and search for the ibis among the reeds.

Foxy listened. The sound was good – clear and clean. The technicians he had met on courses and field trials swore that this version of the shotgun directional microphone yielded quality results at three hundred metres, and he estimated it was now secreted no more than 240 metres from the front of the target house. He was using around a hundred metres of cable, sunken, from the microphone to where he lay.

No way he would say it. The position was good, the voices were crystal. He would have claimed they were exposed and at risk from being so close to the target’s zone, and to the bastard who sat and tracked across the lagoon area, seeming to search it. The sounds of visitors and greetings were boosted by the walls and windows of the building behind where a table and chairs had been set, and bounced back.

He realised the skill Badger had shown to get forward to the lie-up, and more to go along the mud strand and place the microphone in the heart of what seemed to be snagged-up debris. He was so damn good – but Foxy wouldn’t say it. Where they were had been dead ground to the view from their night-time position, and a track of sorts led off the bund line to the right. There were more reeds nearer to where he was – on his stomach; the bergens were hidden there and Badger slept there. Foxy needed to have a view of the target house. The weak point with covert listening gear, the technicians always said, was keeping the power going, having battery strength and replacement when recharging wasn’t an option. What they used had Output Impedance of 600 ohms and a frequency range of 50Hz–10kHz and an S/N ratio of 40 dB plus, and he’d thought Badger hadn’t understood any of the specifications. But he had done well to get them there.

He reflected: two kilometres across a hostile frontier, they were alone, exposed. He also reflected that the chance of success was minimal. He knew about the landmines sown in this area by the Iraqis during the war three decades earlier – the woman had a fine voice that commanded attention.

Naghmeh, the Engineer’s wife, was at the centre of the table and around her was her committee. She talked of a village: ‘The new well that was dug fourteen years ago was not deep enough and the water it reaches is inadequate. The answer is for the village to go back to the old well, but that is where the mines were laid. They are not mines against tanks and personnel carriers, but against people. They are the Belgian-made PRB M35 and the NR417. Also put there were the Italian SB33 and VS50, and there are the jumping American mines, the M16 A1 and the Bulgarian PSM 1. If –
if
– it is possible, I will go to Ahvaz with you to demand funds for the clearance programme. It is owed to the village, which should have decent water. I will go myself.’

Across the table from her, a man and a woman, representatives of a village to the east and a half-kilometre outside the border’s restricted zone, wept quietly.

She spoke of the farmers: ‘You have good sheep, of the best quality, and good goats, but the good land where your flocks and herds should graze is denied you by the mines. You have there the Yugoslav-manufactured PMA 3, which is primarily of plastic and rubber casing. It resists the pressure of flails to detonate it, but tilts on a foot’s weight and explodes. It does not kill but takes a leg or a foot, or a manhood. The shepherd and the goatherd cannot use those fields, and cannot put their beasts onto them. You have waited too long. Too many of your families are crippled, and your children cannot be out of your sight. I will go to Susangerd and not leave until I have the guarantee of action. I can be formidable.’