A Deniable Death (58 page)

There were X-rays in a pouch in the consultant’s hand and he spoke quietly to the gatekeeper, who nodded. Neither gave evidence of what was said, and he waved for them to follow him inside.

They crossed the waiting room shakily, did not know what awaited them.

Presence and courage radiated from her, as they had on the previous evening. In his experience, talking to patients was more difficult than performing complicated surgery on them, and he had been told that his manner was not always satisfactory: he should curb brusqueness when the news was bad and elation when it was good. He was tired and had slept poorly. Lili would have fled to her mother, taken their daughter with her, would have poured into her parent’s ear a litany of his craven acceptance of a call to old loyalties. She might come back to him, might see that his affluence would not easily be replaced on a divorcee’s circuit, if he made a call and grovelled – he accepted that their lives were altered, that a crack had appeared that would not easily be repaired. She might not come back.

They intruded into his life.

If they had not come to Lübeck, he would have slept well and been against the warmth of his wife’s body. He would have been woken by his daughter climbing across him . . . but he had woken cold. She looked into his face. He indicated the chairs, but they stood in front of him, silently demanding his answer.

He said, ‘There is much to talk of and I ask you not to interrupt me but to listen carefully to what I say. I have identified a glioblastoma, grade two, which is confirmation of what you have already been told by your consultants at home. The tumour is close to what we call an “eloquent” area . . .’

Having intruded into his life they had derailed it. He held up the scan images. ‘I want to show you what we have learned.’

‘Time to go. Hit the road, guys.’

She thought she sounded authoritative and that her voice had a crisp bite. The light was up. Dawn slipped into day. Abigail Jones’s last birthday had been her thirty-third, which should have marked her out as being at the peak of her powers. She did not believe the crap about veterans’ experience outweighing youth’s innovations. All she had worked at now hung precariously on that day’s events. She couldn’t escape it. The sun was low, bright on her face. It threw grotesque shadows.

Those shadows were edging nearer to her. She couldn’t say how fast they advanced with each minute, but at first light they had started to form, nudging through the broken gate to the compound. They were now well up the track towards her, and if she didn’t take control, get the show on the road, they would be tripping against her feet. Hard for her to see the men because the sun was behind them, but there would be a hundred, perhaps more. Nor could she see what weapons they carried. Some of the money she had paid out to the old bastard, the sheikh, would have been distributed but more would have gone into his own biscuit tin, and a suggestion would have been made that there’d be more where it had come from. She heard the sound of the big engines behind her. It would be about bluff, always was. Either the sea would part or it would not. If it did they would be fine, dandy, and on their way. If it did not, they’d be swamped and drowned. The Boys would have sorted it out for themselves: Corky in the first Pajero with Harding riding shotgun, and she would be with Hamfist, close behind – like up against the fender. Shagger would be alongside Hamfist, and they’d try to do it with gas, and if not, it would have to be live rounds – and if it was live rounds, her career was mired and she would be gone.

She’d had no communication with Badger, had tried enough times for a link. He was not switched on, maybe had not the time, or inclination, to talk. Maybe he’d been taken . . . and was dead. Her obligation was to be at the extraction location. If she held her hand above her eyes, down almost to the bridge of her nose – where her freckles were thickest – and squinted hard, she could see a wall of men, not soldiers or police but marsh men, the
madan
, from the cradle of civilisation. Ninety years before – she had read it in the digests preparing her for service in Iraq – they had been described by the British military as ‘treacherous and deceitful’. They lived in the shelter of the marshes from which they ‘looted and murdered indiscriminately’, and the last invader to have taught them a degree of discipline had been Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, eight centuries back. They would be formidable but bluff. An appearance of unshakeable will and unstoppable force might win through. She did no more pep talks. If they went into the crowd and broke legs, tossed bodies, crushed teenagers, and fired gas, but did not break through, they would be torn limb from limb, like the security people trapped by a mob in Fallujah. They were all good at the wheel, her Boys, but she was happy, in difficult times, to have Hamfist driving. The first Pajero was level with her.

She couldn’t speak to Harding because his head was encased in his gas mask and he had canisters across his lap. Corky’s gas mask was on his forehead, and the engine was revved. She hitched her loose skirt, climbed up and into the back seat of the second Pajero, Hamfist’s. Whatever the outcome, she would have diplomatic immunity, but they would not: the immunity once enjoyed by men working for private security contractors had long since been withdrawn. They might face big problems. Not her. Had she said, then, that the issue was ridiculous and given an instruction for a route across the sand onto Highway 6 and the road south to Basra – and safety – she would have been ignored. Abigail would have lost her credibility. She sat in the back, with hardware around her and had her pistol on her lap, cocked. She hooked the straps of the mask into place.

They surged.

Would the waters part? Would the fucking Israelites stay dry or get soaked? Time to get an answer.

Corky threw some, and Shagger did, then zapped up the windows. Harding and Hamfist had thumbs down hard on the horns. Inside the armour plate and the blast-resistant glass, she could hear the thud of the grenades letting out the gas clouds, the thundercrack of the flash-and-blast ones, the banshee bellow of the horns. She held the pistol tight. Some scattered in front of Harding, but others were thrown sideways. Hamfist’s went over something that might have been a leg, a stomach or backbone. If Harding stopped, or Hamfist, they would be ripped apart, cut into small pieces, and the men would lose their balls. Fuck alone knew what they would do to her. Her own people lived among the Lancashire county set where they hunted, shot and regarded themselves as affluent country heroes. They always preached that a driver should never swerve to avoid wildlife on the road, or for a domestic cat or dog, but should go straight through it and so retain control. Harding did, and Hamfist. They were through the gas clouds, the crowd was thinner, and they hit the barricade.

It would have been built during the night. Old wire, rusted and sharp – good for getting up against the axles and snagging them – some collapsed fencing and a couple of oil drums. That was the first. The road was raised and the banks fell away and the local Clausewitz would have thought it good for blocking the milch-cow run. They went through it. The wire sprang up and thrashed the windows. Hamfist nearly stalled, which gave the young bloods the chance to get close and their fists were against the windows. Abigail saw the faces and the hate: she knew what would be done to the Boys and didn’t care to think what would be done to her. They were through the first block.

The second was more of an art form. The first would slow them, but the second would stop them, and then they were fucked. She hung on to the back of the seat in front. A gang of twenty or thirty were either side of the second block, and had axes, hammers, spades and firearms. Maybe the worst thing would be fire. They could be burned out. If they were stopped and the engine was lit, they would have to come out, as rats did when smoke was pumped down their hole.

Harding swerved. In the lead Pajero, he would have used all his strength to swing the wheel. The vehicle swayed, made like it would overturn, and went down the bank. About six foot down, Abigail reckoned. She thought they were going over when Hamfist followed. Went down on two wheels, then crunched back onto four, and the Boys were shrieking, as if it was a victory moment. They bounced on the dirt below the road and went through what would have been a disused irrigation channel. The wheels took traction again. She had no idea how many injured they had left behind. They bumped back onto the road, where the bank was less steep, and stripped off the masks. She didn’t like triumphalism, but it was as if she’d loosed her dogs.

A half-mile down the track, astride it, was the sheikh’s big car. The man himself was sitting on a collapsible chair beside the road. The kid with him held an umbrella above his head to shade him from the sun. Corky went straight on, did not swerve out of the impact. He hit the BMW 7 series a full power blow in front of the left side wheel and sent it off the road. The track ahead was clear. She wondered where they stood, as regards the time and the Golden Hour.

She uncocked the pistol, put it back into her inner pocket.

Quiet, a little stunned at the violence she had unleashed, Abigail said, ‘That was burning bridges, and no going back over them.’

Hamfist answered, ‘It was called for, miss.’

They drove hard, and she didn’t know what they would find. She made a link with the operations people at the Basra air base and promised co-ordinates. It had been necessary, but ugly . . . and it might be that everything she had started had turned to ugly. They went, trailing sand, towards the extraction point – could go nowhere else.

It was ground he could handle and Badger made good progress through the reeds. The stems were close set, but he had the skills to insinuate himself, and Foxy, between them. He took each step carefully, tested the weight and kept his boots off the dry, brittle fronds. It was an illusion of success, and he knew it.

Ahead, already, light filtered through – not from above but from the front. Following this line, he would come within the next several minutes to the edge of the reeds. They thinned fast and the sunlight came into them. It was the same when he looked to the sides. The reed beds, and the soggy mud in which they thrived, were a fool’s sanctuary, Badger knew . . . He could hear them around and in front of him.

He thought they had boxed him, two at each side and the officer, Mansoor, and the others behind him. There were shouts from the officer. He had regained control and had them organised as he wanted. More were out ahead. He heard the answering calls from the guards and the orders from the officer. Badger was at the limits of his endurance, on the edge of what he was capable of doing, bent by a burden and exhausted. But his mind worked. He realised he was being herded towards the guns, same as the pheasants.

He went on. He told Foxy why he pushed forward towards the ever sparser reeds where the light shone brighter. ‘Better that way, Foxy, on our feet and going towards where we belong . . . Better to be moving than on our backs when they close round us, us looking up at them, scared, and them pissing on us. Better going forward, Foxy.’

He heard other noises, clumsier and heavier, and couldn’t place them. He was bent low, found it easier to get a right boot in front of a left boot if his spine was tilted forward. It seemed to spread the weight better.

They were closer behind and the reeds were thinner ahead and the sun came on brighter and the near dark of the thickest part of the beds was gone. He couldn’t control the depth of his tread and the mud between the stalks of the reeds left perfect indentations, as good as any scenes-of-crime officer would want. The mud was uniform. He couldn’t find wider stretches of deeper water, to his knees or his thighs where he could go to hide the trail. Neither was there a way through where the ground had dried out. Screwed, yes. They had his trail now. Their calls to one another were growing in excitement and he thought them louder to give each other confidence. The shouts of the officer were more frequent as if he, too, sensed an end game was near. Twice more he had heard louder sounds of surging movement, and had heard also a snort of breath. He thought that among the guards there must be one perhaps more obese than the others, winded from his efforts and . . .

He heard the men coming nearer to him, driving him towards the voices at the front. They would have their best marksmen at the front. Badger wouldn’t be able, when he was flushed out of the reed beds, to run, weave and duck. With the bergens dumped, he could manage a crabbed trot, barely faster than when the paras did forced speed marches on the Brecons with eighty pounds of kit on their backs.

‘Foxy, what do you weigh? Must be a hundred and fifty pounds. Don’t worry, I’m not dumping you.’ Important to say it. Foxy wondering whether he was going to be ditched and left to face them again.

‘We’re going out through the front of these reeds, Foxy, and it’ll be breaking cover. I don’t know what we’ll find, except there’s guys out there in a cordon line waiting for us. I’ve got the Glock, and a full magazine in it, but I don’t know how far we’ll be from the extraction place, and whether we’ll get any help from them. The border’s ahead but I don’t know how far.’

He couldn’t hide and they had his bootprints to follow. The camouflage of the gillie suit was wrong for the reeds – good for sand and dried dirt. They were close to coming out of the cover and the light around him was more brilliant. Maybe it was that time the squaddies talked about, when they said they thought of their mothers and fathers, the girls they’d been with and babies they might have made. The bloody flies had found him and were striving to break into the headpiece. Maybe it was the time when squaddies decided whether they wanted Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones to play them into church – and maybe it was the time when squaddies became angry and wouldn’t accept the obvious. In half a dozen paces he would be out of the reeds and guns would face him.