A Deniable Death (46 page)

The pilot, his side-kick and the gunners looked up from their reading matter and sat taller in their chairs. They peered through the open window and could see the helicopters, floodlit, on the apron, fuelled and armed.

The old woman, the mother of the Engineer’s wife, had shown them the way. When Foxy was dragged off the quayside, kicks were aimed at him. He was cursed and spat at.

All his senses reacted. He could feel pain from the kicks and the wetness of spit. He could smell the sweat on their bodies and the food they had eaten on their breath, and he could hear them. Not easy to understand because they used the vernacular of country people from the south, and he thought they’d have been recruited from farms and villages, not a major town. He was dragged. They had stripped the gillie suit off him and he was left with his underpants, socks and his one boot. The rope was still below his armpits and across his chest, burning the skin. He was on his back and more of the flesh was stripped raw on his buttocks and the back of his thighs. He reckoned the heel without the boot bled from the sharp stones embedded in the ground. They thought he was a spy. They didn’t know if he was alone. Some said he was because no attempt had been made to rescue him or to shoot at them as the boat had closed on him – they argued about it. He could measure the excitement of those who had taken him. Was he American, British, or a pale-skinned Iraqi – a Sunni bastard from Baghdad or a Kurd from the north? That was also an area of debate. The goon, Mansoor, strutted beside him. Foxy was bumped along the dirt track away from the house and he saw the old crow woman, in her black, framed in the window, watching. His eyes met hers and he read hatred. He felt a growing numbness to the pain.

It wouldn’t last. He had seen men who had been taken.

The rope was tight on his chest and seared him. He had seen men taken in the Province, had stayed on in the hide and used his encrypted communications to guide in the arrest team. He had had image-intensifiers if it was dark and early on a winter’s morning, or binoculars if it was summer and already dawn. All of those taken had been experienced men, well practised in the techniques of resistance. All would have regained composure within a half-minute of the door being flattened, the kids starting to bawl, the dog kicked into the kitchen by troops and the woman scratching at the faces under the helmets. All – by the time they were brought out of the door into the fresh air, frosted or already warm – were calm and their composure came from the knowledge that they might endure a kicking or a slapping, but not much worse, then go into the cages at the Maze and mark time until freedom came. He had not seen one Provo plead and weep – they’d had no cause to: they were not about to be killed or to undergo severe torture. They might have done at the start, in the old days when the war was coming up to speed and when ‘robust methods’ had brought PIRA to its knees, but a halt had been called long before Foxy’s time. And he had watched once from a distant ditch, in the Somerset hills west of Taunton, the Quantocks, when an animal-rights activist had been taken from a cottage at dawn: he had burned a laboratory to the ground and driven the scientists working there close to suicide, but he had seemed to think little of going into custody. He had not been about to go through any hoop, and had known it.

It would be the goon’s finest hour. What every security man dreamed of.

Foxy’s head bobbed, rolled, and the back of his skull found stones to bounce off; some of the chips were razor-edged and slashed him. He could be thankful that the pain, for now, was numbed. He had done time with the interrogation unit at the Basra base. He had seen Iraqis brought in from the cells of the Joint Forward Intelligence Team – a separate camp within a camp, not answerable to local commanders: those men had known fear, and had cowered. They had had the scars to show what had been done to them. Foxy had sat at bare tables alongside the men and women who organised the inflicting of pain. He had been opposite prisoners who shivered and mumbled answers that he had had to strain to hear, then dutifully translated. It could, of course, be justified. The men under interrogation knew the inner secrets of the enemy’s principal campaign weapon: the improvised explosive device. They might know who made them, who trafficked them, who laid them, and their answers could – a big word,
could
, often used by the team – save the life of a nineteen-year-old rifleman, a teenage driver’s limb, or a lance corporal’s sight. People said, from far away in the safety of London, that torture did not provide truth. Foxy would have said they were wrong. He would have claimed that, delivered as an art form and from manuals, it made a man cough. He was not given the freedom of the team’s mess, but they couldn’t operate without his language skills so he had been tolerated, given an occasional beer and told that information extracted and translated had led to the finding and defusing of a weapon, or a raid on a safe-house, or the interception of a courier.

He knew that pain worked miracles.

So Foxy understood what was coming to him. When his head twisted, lolled, he could see the barracks, and the light shone down from the street-lamp and fell on the door. The rope went loose and the goon called for a rag to be brought. A guard ran inside. Foxy kept his eyes closed. There were Escape and Evasion people at the base and they said eye contact was bad, that being a sack of potatoes was best. They did the SERE courses, and talked of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. Few people listened closely because the lectures seemed to add to a nightmare – as they had when men talked in the canteens about what to do if PIRA took them.

Foxy’s head was lifted and a hand tried to get into his hair for grip but could not, so grasped his ear, lifted, and the cloth covered his eyes. It was yanked tight and the knot hurt at the back. His ear was let go and his head hit the dirt. Then the rope bit again under his arms and he was dragged some more.

They went onto concrete. He rocked on a step after the top of his head had cannoned into the raised bit – that provoked laughter. There were no more kicks, and he thought that already he was less cause for amusement. There was a fucking cat that lived two doors down from his home, and it liked to come into his garden, pull down songbirds and disable them. Then it would walk away, interest waned . . . He was pulled down a corridor, then to the left. A door was unlocked. Predictable that they’d have a lock-up: for a criminal, a miscreant on a discipline charge or a foreign-born agent who was deniable.

He lay on the floor and the concrete was cool. He waited for the pain to start, and wondered how long, in Lübeck, they would need him to resist, and how long he could last. A match was scraped and he smelt cigarette smoke. It came close to him, closer, past his head and over his chest. The agony was on his stomach as the lit cigarette touched. Foxy screamed.

‘He’s switched the damn thing off,’ she said.

‘Well, he would, miss,’ Corky said.

It was the fourth time she had tried, the fourth time she had been answered by a crackle of static. The weight lay on her shoulders. She would carry the glory of success and bear the burden of failure. It was a problem with these wretched deniables that the responsibilities were not shared. There was much that Abigail Jones now regretted. She had agreed that he should stay in place, watch and learn, and not come out. Not shared, because there was no bank of bureaucrats in an open-plan office who all owned a piece of the operation. She had it on her own. She could talk only with her bodyguards – not her mentors or her think-tank: none of them had a degree from Warwick in politics, economics and modern history, or Six’s training on grappling with the ‘consequences of actions’ or ‘cutting and running on the Iran-Iraq border’. Had the problem concerned single-parent fatherhood from a distance, Hamfist might have contributed, and Corky if it had been regeneration of Provo heartlands (West Belfast). Shagger was big on the economics of hill farming, and Harding on trailer-park life.

It had been sharp of Corky, close to insolence.

She was curt, as if her control was ebbing: ‘What does that mean, exactly what?’

They could play dumb, be on the edge. ‘He would switch off, wouldn’t he, miss?’

‘Why? It’s hardly professional.’

They had a fire in the scorched oil drum, and there was enough timber from the buildings to keep it burning. They were sitting around it, and she reckoned that the crowd would be back at the gate in the morning, and that the bribe chucked at the sheikh hadn’t a long life. There was a grunt, almost derision, and she reckoned it was Shagger’s. Was any of it professional? Any of it?

She said, ‘It’s unprofessional to switch off communications. Is that an area of debate?’

Hamfist was quiet, reflective: ‘His partner’s been taken, miss, and if he’d left the radio on, the chance is you’d have ordered him out.’

Shagger had a good voice, might have been to the standard a choir wanted: ‘He’ll go when there’s nothing else he can do. Won’t be before he has to. He’d think, miss, the most unprofessional thing he could do is to turn his back on a mate, go before it’s time.’

From Hamfist: ‘He’d have to live with it the rest of his days. And it would track him every hour of every night.’

She snapped, with bitterness: ‘But there’s nothing he can do.’

From Harding: ‘It’s like keeping a vigil, and it’s what a man owes to another. First light, ma’am, he’ll come. Forget about Badger, think about Foxy. Badger’ll be good, but Foxy’ll have it bad. How much time is needed in that German town? How much is that time going to cost him? The time Foxy buys’ll come expensive. You with me, ma’am?’

She felt small, shrunken. They’d swamped her irritation at a radio being switched off and turned her attention, four-square, to the man with the trimmed moustache and the clipped voice, who was beyond reach and in need of prayers. The flames played on her face, and she shuddered.

Chapter 15

He said nothing.

The questions came in Farsi and Arabic, in halting English and Pashto. English was always the last of the series.

He answered to none.

Who was he? What was his name? When the bedlam of languages had been used, and he’d answered none, he was beaten.

The goon did not use any special weapon: there was no hardwood truncheon, no lead-tipped baton, no leather-coated whip. The instrument was a length of builder’s wood. Nothing refined.

His underpants had been taken off him. They stank. He thought they would be soiled. His boot, also, had been dragged off, but his socks had been left. They, too, stank, and were sodden and tight on his feet. He could see. The blindfold had been removed. The room had no window and a light burned in a ceiling recess, covered by a wire-mesh grille that soaked up some of the bulb’s power so the room was in shadow. Two guards stood by the door. He reckoned they’d have been Basij, conscripted, part-time warriors and the lowest of the low – Home Guard stuff. They had automatic rifles that they held warily. There was a ring on the wall, and a rope was tied to it. The far end was lashed to his right ankle. He was no threat to them, and had no chance of escape. He couldn’t have risen to his feet, bullocked past the goon, incapacitated or disarmed the two guards, opened the door and charged off down the corridor. Even so, the guards were tense, and armed. He couldn’t have done anything because his arms had been pulled behind his back, and his wrists were bound together with farmers’ twine, the knot tight enough to restrict blood flow.

He didn’t answer, and couldn’t protect himself.

When he was beaten, if he tried to wriggle away, get onto his side, face the wall and present his spine, his head or his upper arm was grabbed. He was pulled back and turned, with a boot, onto his back, his privates and lower stomach targets for the wood. Twice more he had been burned.

Who was he? What was his name?

There was blood on his face from the cuts on his cheeks below the eye sockets and from his nose – already broken, he thought – and from the split on his upper lip. He didn’t answer, although he could have done.
I am a detective sergeant of the Metropolitan Police Service and currently attached to Box 500
. His name was
Joseph Foulkes, born 8 April 1960, married first to Liz and second to Ellie, two kids the first time round
.

It would have been hard to answer, though: bits of his teeth lay on the concrete floor and his tongue had swollen to double its size. Had he given his name, it was likely that more of his teeth pieces would have worked loose and had to be spat clear.

He said nothing. Defiance was natural to him. So far – cigarettes stubbed on his stomach, blows from the wood and kicks – he could absorb it. Bloody pain was manageable. It wouldn’t last long. The defiance was melded with sheer obstinacy. He was of the age when kids had gone to see black-and-white films, had read close-print books and knew of Odette Hallowes, and Yeo-Thomas, who was the White Rabbit, and of Violette Szabo. He was of the age when he had passed judgement on naval personnel captured in the Shatt al-Arab waterway who had seemed to thank the bastards of the Revolutionary Guard Corps for the humiliations and mock-executions and had almost apologised for navigation cock-ups. The stories of childhood had stayed with him. The memory of news bulletins, and older men’s disgust, was sharp. He told the goon nothing.

There was a table in the room. There had been a moment when the blindfold had been stripped off and he had seen a clean notepad on the table, with two pencils. The top page was blank. The bastard expected to fill it when he, Foxy, did the canary bit. The page stayed blank. It was his target to keep it so.