A Deniable Death (59 page)

‘There may be good ground for us and there may not. I just don’t know. I’m saying, Foxy, that we aren’t taken – not prisoners, no. You up for that? Whatever I shoot, there’ll be two rounds left.’

He heard the crashing and breaking of stems, and didn’t understand it.

‘That’s one for you and one for me. You know what, Foxy? We could get a Bassett job for this. Be good, wouldn’t it? But I’m not lying down and rolling over yet. We’re going to give it a go. You up for it?’

The scream was close. A man cried out, first in fear, then in terror, then in shock, and last, in pain. Badger was at the edge of the reeds. The scream cut his ears, louder and shriller than any of Foxy’s had been. He saw the boar break from the reed bed, blood on its tusks. The men in front of him, who had had their rifles ready and had seemed alert to their main prey, were now running to the edge of the reeds and Badger’s right. He understood. A huge thing. Maybe twenty stone of it, maybe more. As big as the one that had sniffed him in the hide and had had a short blade up its nostril. He understood that the guards at the back, behind him, had driven the beast before them, as they’d driven Badger, but a guy on the flank of the box had been in the way of the boar’s flight. Not a clever option – he might have had his bowels and intestines ripped out of his stomach wall by the tusks. He screamed again, and, likely, they had no morphine. It ran, and shots were fired at it, would have been well wide. The guy kept screaming, and the boys he slept with, served with, went to him. It gave Badger a chance. He went where the boar had, on dried dirt towards the next raised berm.

Chapter 19

Badger had changed the outline of his body. There was open ground ahead of him. Once there had been lagoons and channels, but the water flow had been blocked off and the sun had baked the mud during four or five years of drought. The eco-system in place since the marshlands had been claimed as civilisation’s cradle was wrecked. If a river source, or a filled canal, was left untouched, the marshes survived; if they were all dammed, the reeds died and the water evaporated, the ground dried and life failed. Behind him, the reed bed had taken a last hold in what would have been, once, a wide, deep channel. Now he faced a gradual incline that stretched to the far distance. Where there had once been channels that must have been far outside Badger’s depth, there was now a tacky damp surface below a fragile crust. He couldn’t see where they had come in, but off to the side – too far away to be of help – there was a shimmer that might have been water. He thought himself near the approach route, but not close enough to recognise its landmarks.

He had no cover other than the low wisps of mist that were being steadily burned off. There were indentations in the ground, little scratched paths where water had once run, and stumps of reeds, broken off six inches above the mud. The stems and leaves were long rotted, and there was the ribcage of a boat, overturned and half buried, not protruding more than a few inches. There were, too, slight tumps where silt had once gathered and perhaps the current had been forced to gouge a way to the right or left. The sun was higher, clear of the horizon, and the heat built. He knew in which direction he must go, and remembered a single strand of old wire he must reach. On his own, he might have used his skills to cross the open ground. He would have reached the horizon and found the wire, part buried.

Badger had changed the outline of his body. In doing so he could no longer hug the ground, make it his friend.

With the screaming of the guard gored by the pig, the yells of the others and the shouts of the officer bringing chaos, Badger had taken Foxy off his shoulder – but had not rested. The beast had gone, had careered away and found sanctuary from its enemy in the wafting blocks of ground mist. Badger had not taken the time to rest his shoulder but had hitched the suit up, and heaved Foxy’s body onto his back, then drawn the arms forward until they fell over his stomach and the head rested on his neck. He had let the gillie suit drop over two of them. ‘It’s going to be hot in there for you, Foxy, a steam bath, but it’s the way it is. Nothing I can do about it.’

He was bringing Foxy back. He had said he would, and there had been no complaint from the old bastard. He couldn’t see behind him, and to twist his head might dislodge Foxy. In front of him was a short horizon – much less distance visible than when he had stood at the edge of the reeds – he knew he must trust in his ability.

He could hear shouts still but the screams were fainter. He would crawl for the time it took him to count to a hundred. He would stay statue still for the time it took to count to another hundred. He was on his stomach, legs splayed. His knees took some of the weight as he edged forward but his elbows took more.

‘The problem, Foxy, is that I don’t know whether one of them has us, whether the rifle’s up, whether it’s a game they’re playing. I don’t know what’s behind and I’ve not much idea what’s in front. I just have to go forward. You up for it?’

He thought it right to tell Foxy what he was doing and why.

‘They could have a gun sight on your arse, Foxy, and mine, and we won’t know it.’

Badger went on as best he could, his knees and elbows scraping the ground. He moved and counted, then lay, barely daring to breathe, and counted again, and he thought Foxy stayed quiet and still and Badger could not have asked more of him . . . and when the next problem came in his mind, a realisation, he did not share it, like Foxy deserved a reward . . . the next problem was their feet and their boots. Badger’s boots and Foxy’s feet. He did not know whether they stuck out from under the hem of the gillie suit: might just be that a heap of mud or an accumulation of silt, whatever the appearance his gillie suit left for the searching eye, was spoiled, blasted apart, by the sight of a pair of boots and a pair of feet stuck out from under it, and not possible for him to know the answer.

He reckoned he had done a hundred yards from the reed bed out onto the open ground, and reckoned there might be a thousand to cover. Then he’d have to hope he found the single strand of rusty barbed wire.

His skills would count for something, but luck might count for more. They said – smug, complacent beggars – that luck had to be earned. Men with towering self-esteem didn’t accept that luck played a part in success. He was going forward again and he didn’t know how much of a trail he had left, where it was wet or where it had dried out, and didn’t know whether his camouflage was good or useless or how many were looking for him. He had gone past the boat and was level with a buffalo’s white ribs. Immediately in front of him there was a small raised patch of sand that might offer slight cover. The sun climbed above him, and the heat grew.

He didn’t know if a rifle was aimed, whether the adjustment to the sights had been made, whether a safety was off, whether a trigger was squeezed, whether a bullet would kill or wound . . . He went forward.

He could have treated it as mutiny. If it was mutiny, he was entitled, as an officer of the al-Quds Brigade, to shoot them. Then the proper course of action, if his orders were repeatedly disobeyed, was to report it to his superiors and the guards would face military courts and punishment. But Mansoor did not treat it as mutiny.

Three times he had demanded that these Basij kids – peasants from the fields and the back streets of Ahvaz where there was no education – should form the line and advance with him. Three times not one had moved. It was their NCO who had been gored, raked from groin to upper chest by a tusk. Had it been one of them, a teenager, the NCO might have known how to talk to them, used a language they understood, and they would have followed him. Mansoor, an officer from an élite unit they feared, did not possess such skills. They were crouched around their man. None would leave him. It would not be possible to carry him back to where the jeeps had stalled: the wound was too deep. They held his hands, and there were sobs. His screams had sunk to the moan of the dying.

Mansoor had left them.

First, he had walked along the edge of the reeds. He had found, easily, the cloven-hoofed tracks of the boar. It had run away at its maximum speed, throwing up mud. He had found, after a more thorough search, the route the man had taken from the reeds and forward across open ground. He had seen him going like a stack of hay towards the reeds, upright, carrying the man Mansoor had interrogated and killed, and dragging the little blown-up boat with the military backpacks.

He could see, where there was still a sheen of damp on the ground, the marks where elbows, knees or boots had pushed the man forward. There were places, beyond the mud, where he could find no trace of a track. Then there would be brittle crusts of baked dirt where the surface had been broken and he could pick it up again. How the body was carried, he didn’t know. In his mind, Mansoor was certain that it had not been left in the reed beds. The man in the camouflage clothing would not have come through the water of the lagoon to the barracks, then thrown flash and gas grenades and taken down his comrade only to leave him, when pursuit closed on them, to the rats and pigs. The man carried his comrade and was in front of him. He watched.

He had an impression that the man was using what tactics of evasion were open to him, not going in a straight line, but cutting from one side to another, breaking any pattern of movement. Mansoor tried to imagine what he would have done. He went back to the days before the shrapnel injury had crippled him, thought of how he would have attempted flight across open ground, with the positive of a sniper’s costume and the negative of a burden. He had come away from the reeds, and the anger had left him with the tiredness and the sense of abject failure. It was as if a new contest had started.

New and fresh, without past history, the game would be played out to the death.

He did not know if his thoughts had logic. He had taken himself away from his job as security man to the Engineer, away from his father and from his wife. He thought he walked alone, that the slate was clean. He searched the dirt ahead for the fugitive. He no longer cared whether success would absolve past failure. Near Mosul, he had been shown a parcel of desert, without features, and had been told that an American sniper and his spotter were there, and had killed an hour before. He and many others had raked the sand with their eyes and the aid of lenses and had not found him. The marksman had killed again as the dusk settled. But then there had been no track to follow.

Mansoor went warily, roved backwards and forwards, found a trail, lost it and found it again. He was distracted. As the heat built, the haze grew and the mist went. A bird flew across him, went from his left to his right. He stopped, moved not a muscle. A smile softened him. The ibis went far to his right, towards where there was still water, an old irrigation canal with a bund line beyond it. He knew this territory, had made it his business to learn it since his posting to the Engineer’s home. He knew where trucks that had gone off the bund had slid down, where there was a burned T-74 main battle tank, and where a border watchtower was toppled. The bird headed for the water and his eyeline followed it. Small splashes of white caught his eye, and he lost the bird.

Where the ground was highest, three or four metres above where he stood, almost a kilometre away, there were two white vehicles, four-wheel drive. He knew where the man, with his comrade, his brother, headed to.

He remembered the bird: its grace, and its death.

Where he was, the ground was dried, dust, and it was easy for him to hold the man’s line but then it petered out. He lost it beside a buffalo’s bones. He started, again, to search for it. If the man reached the white vehicles, Mansoor had lost.

‘Did you see the fucking bird?’ She had her binoculars locked over her eyes.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Harding said.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the African Sacred Ibis, miss,’ Corky told her. ‘Logged, of course, for our eco-study of flora and fauna.’

‘It’s pretty,’ she said, then lapsed back into quiet.

She could hardly stand. The Boys were a few paces behind her at the Pajeros. The track petered out here and the only way they could go was back. They didn’t like it when she swore – she thought it interfered with their image of themselves as protecting a maid in peril, that sort of shit. When she was tired or a fair bit pissed off, she swore and blasphemed, trying to break the image they had of her. It usually screwed up.

‘They’re endangered, the ibis. We used to see them down by Basra,’ Shagger told her.

Abigail Jones thought it wrong that she should slouch or lean against a wheel hub, and out of the question that she should climb inside and get comfortable – ask to be woken if anything showed. ‘Anything’ did show. A single man was out of a reed bed, a wavering line of soft green in the light and heat. He wore combat fatigues, and when her eyes could get decent focus she fancied there were rank flashes on his shoulders and dark stains on the front of his tunic.

‘What am I watching?’ she asked.

Hamfist said, ‘When I was with the battalion we used to patrol up past al-Amara, then go east to the border because it was a rat-run for arms shipments, as important as the one down here. There’s a Revolutionary Guard camp at Mehran, a big training site, and a transit for hardware resupply. If we were close to the border they’d come out and eye us. We might wave, and shout something to spark a contact but they never responded. That’s their uniform, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and they’re serious. They don’t do fun on a Friday night. He’s looking for him.’