A Deniable Death (42 page)

They had spent their day cleansing the building they’d used. Now it was as they had found it, every fag end picked up and bagged. The vehicles were loaded with the sleeping bags and mosquito nets, the spotter ’scope for bird-watching, the spare weaponry and ammunition. She had done the rounds and was satisfied. She had paused in the doorway of the room where he had slept and seen a smooth part of the concrete flooring where the dust had been swept away by the motion of his hips. She regretted nothing.

‘Only thing, miss, that’s worse than ditching gear and leaving it behind is doing that to a comrade, your mate.’

‘I think I understand that, Corky.’

‘You don’t, young ’un, interrupt or contradict me.’

Badger reckoned he was composed now, ready. ‘Heard you.’

‘You’ll watch my back and I’ll retrieve the stuff.’

Badger didn’t interrupt, or contradict.

‘I’ll go in about fifteen minutes when the light’s gone. It’s not acceptable to leave the gear, so we won’t. We get the stuff and leave the hide covered. We have to hope it’ll stay that way long enough. The goon’s watched the bird all day. He’ll have seen the cable and now he’s gone back to where his guys are. His own people are poor quality, but I doubt he is. You saw the limp, which means he’s been injured – I’d imagine it was a combat wound. He may act with his own people or, more likely, he’ll have sent for decent back-up from down the road. When it’s dark, I’m going.’

Badger lay on his stomach and listened. The sun tipped the tops of the reed beds in the west, and the skies over the palm trees across the lagoon and the house, where nothing moved and few lights showed.

‘When I come back to you, I may be coming fast, and we don’t fuck about, young ’un. We’re going for speed and distance, and I’m thinking that the first quarter of a mile is the critical bit. We manage that and use the comms. We try to find, without bloody drowning, the extraction point. That’s what’s going to happen.’

Still no contradiction, no interruption.

‘I’ll go forward to retrieve the stuff because I don’t know what’ll be waiting there. When I don’t know, I won’t ask anyone else to do what I should be doing. In case there are any misunderstandings between us, young ’un, don’t ever forget that I’m in charge. I lead and I decide. You don’t. Before you ask, my memory of the plug from the cable into the microphone is that it’s a straight socket, not robust. Giving the cable a yank will do the business and they’ll come apart – surprised the pigs didn’t manage it. I’m going, and you’ll have everything, the bergens and the rest, ready for a fast break-out.’

‘You’re not capable of it.’

‘I’m going forward – it’s the burden of leading.’

‘Because getting a cable and a microphone back from fifty yards is dangerous? That’s rubbish.’

‘It’s dangerous – which you’d know if you had eyes. And—’

‘And what?’

There was a pause.

‘It’s better that I do it.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Foxy – you’ve got a wife, a home, respect. Love.’

‘Wrong.’

‘My home’s police quarters, a dump. I’m a squatter. I don’t have a woman.’

‘You have Alpha Juliet and something might just—’

‘You have a wife – a
wife
. A home and a wife. Why—’

‘Try this proverb by John Heywood. He wrote it in 1546, which was the last year in the life of Henry the Eighth. “An old fool is the worst kind of fool – as in, he’s marrying a woman fifty years his junior.” Actually only eighteen years, but I’m the worst kind of fool.’

‘What’re you saying, Foxy?’ Badger cursed himself. He knew what Foxy meant and should have buttoned his lip.

A quaver in the voice. ‘There’s an ex-policeman who transferred a few years back to Ministry of Defence security at Bath. He told me. The guy she’s with is in Accounts. All of Naval Procurement knows, and probably most of Accounts, but I was one of the last. She’s shagging him. You want some more, young ’un? My wife isn’t likely to be at home, sitting in front of the TV with a supermarket meal for one, yearning for me to be home. She’s more likely to be in my bed, drinking my cellar dry with her legs spread. It hurts more than anything I’ve known. I pretend, I talk about her, and it’s all lies.’

‘You didn’t have to tell me, Foxy.’

‘They watch me at work, people who know I’m married to her and who’ve seen her picture. I know I’m drawn, pale, and they snigger that it’s because I’m getting it night after night. But they’re not from Naval Procurement – they know. It’ll be their daily soap-opera episode. She goes to Bassett – you know what I mean? Wootton Bassett. She sees them bring the soldiers back from Afghanistan, up the High Street, and uses it to taunt me. These are “heroes”, and I’m the old fool who gives lectures and is half buried in the bloody past. I think they have sex when she’s claiming to be sick and doesn’t go to work. She goes through Bassett on the way home. It’s like she thinks you’re not worthwhile unless you’ve earned a Bassett job for yourself. Don’t ever forget it. No fool like an old fool. I think that’s enough, young ’un.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘I’m grateful to you for listening.’

The light had slipped some more.

The binoculars no longer showed him the bird, and the dim lights on the far side of the lagoon only outlined the walls of the house. The big lamp, the high one in front of the barracks, had come on, but there seemed to be no movement. Badger wondered if that indicated the guards’ mealtime. He didn’t know whether he had missed things he should have noted, or whether Foxy had lost his marbles through heat and dehydration. No one, before, had confided in him like that. He felt uncomfortable. They would get to Kuwait City together, then split and be in different rows in the aircraft. They’d head for the Green Channel separately, and cars would take them in opposite directions. He thought also there was an evens chance that he’d be going into the water to get Foxy back. No one, before, had ever talked to him with such raw unhappiness.

He wriggled over to lie on his side, his back to Foxy, and started to search in the bergen beside him for what he might need when Foxy went to get the microphone and the cable.

They had reached Frankfurt. There was fog over Hamburg and the airport there was closed temporarily, but would reopen within two hours.

She was exhausted. They sat on the silent stationary aircraft, with a full cabin of other passengers, and waited for the announcement that the pilot would soon be starting up the engines. They were now on their fourth leg. Ahvaz to Tehran. Tehran to Vienna with the national carrier. Vienna to Munich with the Austrian airline. Munich to Hamburg. She was tense and quiet. There was little the Engineer could do to comfort her, and old inhibitions died hard in him: he thought it would be ‘unseemly’ if he held her hand, with every seat occupied and a feeling that he was watched. Paranoia – what else? She was dressed as he had never seen her before. She had been given, in the toilets off the VIP lounge at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International, different clothes to wear, which she had protested she had never seen before. Now she sat in a skirt that reached a little below her knee, a thick cotton blouse and a solid jacket of deep green silk. It had been suggested that she no longer needed to wear a headscarf. They had Czech passports. She had whispered hoarsely, ‘Do I have to renounce my nationality, of which I am proud, and my religion, to which I am devoted?’ He had said, hesitantly, that concerned officials in the ministry considered she would attract less attention if she was not an obvious Iranian citizen. ‘Is attracting attention so important? Are we ashamed of ourselves?’

Now her breathing was forced. He rang the bell above his seat, and when the stewardess came, he asked for water for his wife. It was brought, without grace.

Through the porthole windows, the Engineer saw that lights glistened on the apron and that rain spattered down. He looked at his wristwatch and made the calculations. He said that by now, at home, it would be dark. She swallowed hard and said she hoped the children were in bed and would sleep well and . . . There was little to talk of that could be, in any way, appropriate. His only previous flight abroad had been as the student who went to Budapest. She held on her lap a briefcase that contained a full digest of her medical history with X-rays and printouts of scans. Abruptly, the music cut and a woman’s voice boomed. To ribald cheering, the plane shook as the engines ignited.

‘I think it is an hour to Hamburg. We take the local train to the centre of the city, then the faster one to Lübeck.’

They were good boys, peasants, but not trained like the men of the al-Quds Brigade.

He had drilled into them three times what they should do, where each would be. They were from the ranks of the Basij and they looked at him with the sort of awe that was predictable in simple youths who found themselves under the command of a war veteran of an élite force.

They sat on the floor of the main communal area in the barracks and asked no questions but seemed to absorb what he told them.

‘It was always the duty of the defenders of the state’s frontiers to be on constant alert to prevent incursions from spies, terrorists, criminals, anyone who sought to undermine and betray the revolution of the imam. Perhaps, tonight, such a risk exists from our enemies, but we are ready.’ He dropped his voice, a trick he had learned many years earlier when he had been attached to Hezbollah, in the Lebanese Beka’a Valley, from a Syrian intelligence officer. ‘I could delay, do nothing, send for help from Ahvaz, and the senior men there would know I had no faith in you, that I did not think the Basij capable of confronting the spies, the terrorists, the criminals. If the threat is there, we will destroy it, and in the morning we will send for help from Ahvaz.’

He had made a plan, on the table using sand from a fire bucket and coloured sheets of cardboard, that showed the house, the quayside and the pier, the lagoon, the barracks and the bund line that ran along the southern edge of the water. He used grass where the reeds should be and blue card for the water. He had been through the plan three times. He thought his wife, working on the computer at the al-Quds camp, would hear him praised.

It was a simple plan, and he thought it a good one. The boys listened intently and held tight to their rifles.

The landfall was lost behind them, taken into the mist.

The ferry carried long-distance lorries and their trailers and was en-route from the Swedish port of Trelleborg, to the south of Malmö. It would reach its destination, Travemünde, after a 16.00 departure to sail across the Baltic, at 23.00 hours. It had been a close-run thing, but a representative in the Swedish capital had achieved, in eight hours, what had been asked of him. A passport had come from an embassy safe, and Gabbi’s photograph put in place. He was Greek Cypriot, living in Norway and working in the haulage industry. He was a driver’s mate for a shipment of bulk timber. To have created the passport, the biography and gained the necessary seat in the cab was a triumph for the representative, and the driver’s mate had a foot-passenger ticket to return on the ferry the following morning or on the additional sailing in the late afternoon. He would not have said it himself, but the representative, who had met him at Malmö’s airport, Sturup International, had told him that no other intelligence-gathering agency in the world could have put together such a package so quickly. They liked cargo ferries, from which cars and holidaymakers, passengers not connected with long-distance business, were barred. Customs and Immigration checks, and those for embarkation, were bare formalities and the representative had said it was a perfect route.

Gulls wheeled over him.

He stood at the rail, in fading light, and watched the long, straight line of the boat’s wake. He shivered, sucked in air and used his tradecraft. He wore a long-peaked baseball cap, a scarf covering his mouth, and gloves, and would spend the entire sailing on deck, not inside where it would be noticed if he kept on the cap, scarf and gloves – and on deck no cameras would record him. The wind was brutal and there was sleet in the air, but he stayed at the rail.

The men were in place where he had positioned them. He was ready. Mansoor’s last action was to take out from a shed behind the barracks a small inflatable dinghy capable of carrying four men.

He did not have night-vision – such equipment was kept by combat forces – but he had good eyes, and the moon would be up soon. He had good ears too.

He watched and listened. He did not know what he might see or hear, but he felt confident. If he saw and heard nothing, if he had imagined the loop of wire and the tubing on which the bird sat, then he had not called out a platoon from Ahvaz and could not be ridiculed.

The dark had come and sounds rippled from the lagoon, from the birds and frogs and the pair of pigs, and he believed – concentrating his gaze into the darkness – that the Sacred Ibis, a bird revered for three millennia, had not moved. It was the key.

He stood in the middle of the road and gave his memories full rein.

The road – once the northern trunk route from old West German territory to the German Democratic Republic – ran between Lübeck and Schwerin. East and West had met here, separated by a white line that had been painted across the tarmac. It was natural that Len Gibbons should come to the village that straddled the road and was called Schlutup.