A Deniable Death (31 page)

The Major and the Friend agreed. Gibbons raised an arm to motion for the waiter and his bill, then reached into an inner pocket for his fattened wallet. He said, ‘It’s not the easy time. When we have – and I’m confident we will – the direction to head in, it will all get easier. You’ve met the two men who are up front, know pretty much the same as I do about them. What I would like to say, though, the officer we have in support of them is first rate. Very dedicated. Yes – at the risk of landing hard on my arse – I’m very confident.’

The Cousin said, ‘And you’d know about that, Len, as I hear it. You’d know about landing hard on your arse.’

The Friend said – and would have read the filtered reports reaching foreign agencies, ‘Dogs a man, doesn’t it, when he has to be lifted out of the shit?’

Gibbons offered no denials. ‘Didn’t like it, but lessons were learned.’

The Major, not privy to secrets of the trade and historic foul-ups, pushed back his chair and made ready to stand. ‘I see, looking out onto the street, that nothing of the weather improves, sleet gone to snow. Hard to have a decent sight of them, in the mind, in the heat. It’s merciless, the heat is. Brutal. Anyway, what interests me are your good words on the officer on the ground who directs all this, and your confidence.’

On her haunches, Abigail Jones sat alone. Behind her, fifteen yards back, was Corky.

He accepted, they all did, that she had taken control again, and would call the moves.

Somewhere under the robe she wore – now mud-stained and dusty – was the holster that hugged her waist. The pistol was in it and there was a slit at the side of the garment that her fist could be shoved into if she needed the thing. She had tucked her gas mask behind her backside so it was close to hand but not visible.

She had called for a leader to be sent. The rag-heads always liked – at a time of confrontation – to have a meeting, a conference; then they would hector and bluster, give themselves the opportunity to preen and usually to walk out. A meeting, at a time of substantial dispute, was the way they usually went. She sat in the dirt in the centre of the gateway and waited for a leader to come.

Corky could see, from the tilt of her head, that her eyeline was down. Her focus point would have been about half of the distance between where she sat and the line of men facing her. One had a scarf, bloodstained, across his face, and another could only stand with the help of two others; one had weeping abrasions on his shin where the bar had been used on him, and another tucked his wrist between his shirt’s buttonholes and had a broken collar-bone. There were others who might have fractured ribs or dried blood on their scalps, but no shots had been fired and that was a miracle. He thought they had done well.

His rifle was slung across his chest and he had two magazines, filled, taped together. His flak vest was over his Jones Boys shirt, and the gas mask was hooked to his waist. If any of them had run at her, he would have dropped them.

Behind him was Shagger; Harding and Hamfist were at the Pajeros. Pretty feckin’ ridiculous but they still had the tripod up, the spotting ’scope mounted on it. The identification pictures were on the ground, held in place by a quarter of a mud brick: by now Corky might have been able to spot a Marbled Duck. He might have known the difference between a Ferruginous Duck and a White-headed Duck, and definitely he could have said which was a Basra Reed-warbler and which a Black-tailed Godwit. He had a sunhat on, camouflage type, while Shagger and Harding wore the Proeliator Security caps with the big peaks; Hamfist’s was from a pizza-delivery service in the east of Scotland. She wore nothing on her head other than a wispy scarf. Her body threw off no shadow because the sun was above her.

She waited. It was all bluff.

Harding’s take on it was that had it been American spooks a close-support airstrike would have been called in during the night, and Black Hawks would have come to lift them out. Shagger had said that if the mission had been run by any of the other Six officers from Baghdad they’d have called a taxi and quit.

She sat very still. Corky couldn’t see her face but thought of her as serene, so calm.

The heat made him wobble on his feet, the shimmer came up from the sand and the faces in front of him distorted. There was pain in his eyes behind the wraparounds, he craved a drink, and his concentration was going. Harding must have seen him rock.

The drawling voice was in his ear: ‘Go get yourself a drink.’

‘What about her?’

‘Go close to her, break the mood she’s set, you’ll get bawled out.’

‘I reckon.’

Harding murmured, ‘She’s remarkable.’

Corky did it side of mouth. ‘No one like her, an ace lady . . . You have any idea how long this needs spinning out?’

‘Beginning to think it’s closing down on us. Don’t reckon, up front, they have much more time. I saw how much water they took and it’s the heat . . . I don’t think they have a heap of time.’

He moved his hand and felt the coil.

It had been a better morning. The Engineer had gone. The goon, the officer, had driven his jeep away and might have gone to a village nearby to shop or to a town. The wife had not come out and the children had been taken to school by the older woman, in uniforms and with heavy rucksacks. The head of the guard who sat in the plastic chair with the rifle across his legs was lolling back. Badger had moved, at a slow crawl, to the reed beds. It was the first time either had moved in daylight, and it was incredible – like a liberation – simply to stand and stretch, arch and flex. He could move more than he could in darkness and was freer because he could see what his boots landed on.

There was the rhythm of Foxy’s breathing beside him. He was asleep. Badger’s hand had slipped underneath the folds of his gillie suit and rubbed – not scratched – one of the many tick scabs on his hip. The hand had come out and reached for the water bottle and he had felt the smooth, cold line of the coil.

He couldn’t drink the water that lapped the bottom of the reed stems, but he could scoop it up in his hands, strip down to his boots and socks and wash himself. He saw the pocked skin of the ticks’ bites and had prised others off his body, working as carefully as the contortion allowed to see that none of the bloody things was close to his backside. He was cooler and cleaner, a rare joy . . . It was the bottled water that would kill them: Badger reckoned there was enough for that day and one more, but he felt better for the wash, almost human. He had gone back on his stomach, doing the crawl that took him from the line of the reeds across the open ground. Then he had insinuated himself under the cover of the fronds, burrowed forward until his head and his shoulders were level with Foxy’s and taken over the headset.

He flinched, drew his hand sharply back. The touch told him this was not wood, plastic or rubber. The coil might have been six inches across, but could have been as much as nine. It filled the gap between his body and Foxy’s, was level with their hips. He thought his touch on it had been merely the gentlest brush. Foxy slept. Badger knew what he had touched. He had not seen it, but the texture against his fingertips was evidence enough.

Foxy had gone into the reeds with the collapsible shovel, had defecated, urinated, and buried the plastic bag and bottle. Badger had not known whether he had stripped down to his boots and socks or whether he had just wiped water under his armpits and in his groin. His breath had stunk when he came back. Badger’s would have too, but the smell of their breath would have matched the general stench of the marsh and the trapped water of the lagoon. Foxy had been careful coming back, had taken an age, but had smoothed the dirt behind him and scattered more dead stuff, leaving it haphazardly put down – had done a good job. Together they had made an inventory of the water remaining: three bottles, and it should have been seven or eight in that temperature. After the exchange of the headset, Foxy had taken the watch and Badger had slept.

It could only be a snake. Badger had seen snakes in zoos when he was a kid, and there were snakes on the warmest days up in the Brecons that he had known about when stalking paratroops on exercise. There were also snakes in gaps in the heather and on flat stones, which he had seen when edging close to red deer in the Scottish hills, testing himself against their eyesight, hearing and the quality of their nostrils. Anyone who knew had told him that snakes were most dangerous when disturbed suddenly from deep sleep. Then they lashed out. He twisted his head, a considered, slow movement, and looked down into the darkened gap between his body and Foxy’s. They were both in the scraped hole and across the top of it was scrim net, camouflaged and lightweight. Reed fronds were on top of the netting, and some light seeped through. The snake filled the space between their bodies, and it was coiled tight. Its tail was towards him and he couldn’t see the bastard’s head, where the fangs would be.

It had been another hand-over with nothing to be said, and Badger could listen to the breeze in the reed tops, and the charges of birds across the lagoon. Up to the moment when he had slipped his hand down in the hope that his fingers could massage some relief from the irritation of the scabs, he had been desperate for water. But the rules were that water should only be drunk when both were awake and the watch changed. He thought Foxy slept easily, head averted, breathing regular and with a light snoring in the throat.

It was important to him that Foxy slept easily. If he was restless, he might pitch over, roll onto the snake and panic it. It would have slithered into the place it now had, between their legs, and settled itself. If Foxy’s arse landed on it, it would retaliate, it might go right and it might go left. It might go for Foxy’s hand or arm, or try to bite through the suit and the lightweight trousers, or the leg below the suit and above the socks. It might launch itself at Badger. He lay so still, barely daring to breathe, and reckoned the head, with the fangs and poison sacs, was against Foxy but less than a foot from himself. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so bollock naked with fear.

And remembered . . . Talk in the Pajero, not from Alpha Juliet but from the Welsh guy. All said with the lazy casualness that veterans use to frighten the guts out of rookies. ‘Couple of years ago they was overrun with snakes. The marshes shrank and there was only a quarter of the water there had been. The snakes were disorientated and came into the villages, like they were looking for people and beasts. You watch out for snakes, bad bastards. The main one to watch for is the arbid. It’s bigger than our Welsh viper, goes to about four foot in length. If you see it, you’ll know it, and I hope you never see it. Thick body, black mostly but with red on it. I don’t know about an adult, but I was told its bite kills a kiddie in around twenty minutes. Do we have serums? Sorry, no.’

Could remember it now, word for word. There was a knife in his bergen, but not on his belt. Badger tried to work out how much of an effort it would be to wriggle his body to where he could get down into one of the pouches and extract the knife, but didn’t have a clear view of it. His mind seemed closed down, not functioning for solutions. Shagger had talked some more about the mosquito problem, the tick problem, the foot-rot problem. He had gone through the list of problems as the Pajero had driven north, and one had seemed much like another – until now.

How to wake Foxy? Not easy. How to wake him and not have him thrashing around? He checked ahead and there was no movement at the house.

He imagined the prick of the fangs. He would lash at the fucking thing, but it would be faster and would hit him again in the wrist – where the veins were – and the poison would start to flow . . . Maybe the morphine they carried would kill him. Couldn’t have him standing up on the clear patch of mud, two hundred yards across the water from the target house, using what strength he had left to rip off the suit and his underclothing, because the pain of the venom was unsustainable, and howling . . .

He didn’t know what to do. With his head tilted, he could see the coil.

Foxy didn’t seem to move, but his voice was clear, soft, conversational: ‘Is this, young ’un, what you’re looking for?’

His hand came out and was close to Badger’s. His hips rolled and his arse shifted. His legs twisted inside the suit and his body tipped. Badger tried to stop him, to arrest the movement, and hissed for him not to move, but was ignored. Foxy rolled onto the snake. His weight pitched onto it.

‘Is this, young ’un, what you needed to find?’

Chapter 10

There was a low chuckle, no humour.

The clenched hand, three or four inches in front of Badger’s face, obliterated his view of the house. He couldn’t speak. He waited, in that moment, for Foxy’s backside to heave up in the air, the gillie suit to convulse, a scream, and then for the body to heave away and the snake’s— The chuckle became laughter.

The fist, under his eyes, opened.

The dirt was caked in the palm. Badger realised that what bound the mud, stopped it disintegrating as dust, was old blood. He thought the head was an inch long, the neck a further inch.

He couldn’t have said how long it had been since the snake was decapitated – might have been an hour or done in the night, the carcass kept for the joke to be played. The lustre had gone from the wound at the neck and the tissue had whitened. He saw, protruding from the snake’s mouth, open in death, the right fang. It would have been attempting to defend itself when it had died, and it was frozen in that last act of attempted survival. He tried to drag his face away from it, but the headset’s cable trapped him.