Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

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.’

She turned her head away, swallowed hard.

Shagger said, ‘It’s down to you, miss. What are our rules of engagement?’

She attempted authority, didn’t know how good a fist she made of it. ‘We can fire in defence of our own persons. We can fire, also, in defence of those working with us, assuming that the threat comes from inside the territory we are currently operating in. What we cannot do is to fire live rounds into Iranian ground. Under no circumstances do we shoot, to kill or wound, across the border. What I’m saying is that he has first to reach wherever we establish the border to be and if they – in hot pursuit – cross that line, real or imaginary, we can blast the shit out of them. Conclusion: there can be no Iranian casualties, at our hand, on Iranian territory. Understood?’

She thought she would crumple in the heat. She could have found some shade by the body of either Pajero, but then she could not have watched the ground where the man came, careful, following a zigzag path. She could not have been inside, with the engine and the air-con on, because she would have ceded control. They nodded, no enthusiasm. She might have lost them.

‘The one you say is an officer, coming forward, talk me through it.’

Hamfist, towering over her: ‘He’s following Badger’s trail, miss, like a tracking hound does when it has a scent.’

‘Where is Badger?’

Shagger: ‘Out in front of the officer, miss, and coming.’

She saw nothing: nothing with her own eyes and nothing with the aid of the binoculars. The haze seemed to ripple on the ground and it hurt her to look. She saw nothing except the man who advanced, taking his time, patient.

‘I can’t see anything.’

Harding: ‘If he’s as good as he’s talked up to be, you won’t.’

Corky: ‘If you see him from here, miss, he’s as good as dead.’

Around him there were occasional stunted heaps of dirt and he hoped he made another of them. He saw a broad-winged shadow pass lazily in front of him and lifted his eyes, not his head: an eagle turned on a wide circle. He knew eagles from Scotland, and kites and buzzards, big birds of prey but slighter than eagles, from Wales. He didn’t think its vision would be impaired by the haze coming off the mud now that the mist was gone. He thought the bird’s sight would be perfect, and that it would have noted him and therefore had made a pass above him. It had in effect checked him out and moved on. If the man following him had had an eagle’s eye, and its vantage-point, it would have been over long before. Badger kept to the routine he’d set, and stayed motionless for the count to a hundred, moved for the next hundred, and tried to merge with the heaps and humps. He found more often now that he lost track of how far he had counted, and had to start again. The weight of Foxy grew, as if the man had weights fastened to him.

‘I reckon I have to see where we are, Foxy. If I don’t, way I feel, I could go off course.’

He had worked himself around one of the heaps and stopped when it was behind him. There was another to his left, level with his hip. He had Foxy across his back. His legs were slack between Badger’s, and his head was draped on his shoulder. His arms were tucked down over Badger’s chest and wedged there. He thought the two heaps, augmented by the bulging gillie suit, would appear to be one larger hump that had been dumped by storms, erosion and, once, by a water channel. He started, very slowly, to turn his head.

‘Were we right, Foxy? Don’t they say, in combat, you have to believe in the cause and that God walks alongside you – just war, and all that? What d’you think, Foxy? Is He alongside us? Don’t you understand that I need an answer, and you’re the only fucker right now that can give me one?’

He shifted his head, changed his eyeline, half-inch by half-inch. A small bird, pretty plumage, pecked in the mud not a foot from his face. The sun beat down, and the heat chiselled him. His eyes ached from the brightness. The man tracked him: the officer, Mansoor, came slow and steady after him. The rifle was in his hands and could go quickly to the shoulder. For Badger, to grab for the Glock would make a convulsion of movement, and the game would be over.

‘She’s a good-looking woman, and she’s a lump in her brain. Likely it’ll be today she hears whether anything can happen or she’s being sent home to tick off the days. Also likely, this’ll be the day her husband’s hit – what they called interdiction, and I was too ignorant to understand. Were we right, Foxy, to widow her and kill him? Are you going to tell me, Foxy?’

The man was still about a hundred yards behind Badger. He had veered off to the right, straightened, then taken another half-dozen short paces. Now he had stopped. He searched the ground, unhurried, and traversed. The rifle was raised. The officer, Mansoor, took a stance with his legs a little apart, his boots steady. He aimed and peered through the V sight. He had the needle steady on a target, and fired. One shot, and the songbird fled. Badger understood.

‘It’s us that did it. We take responsibility. It’s not those people up in the north. Not the Boss, the Cousin, the Friend or the Major – and not the Jones woman and the guys with her. We did it, like we were faithful servants – did as we were told, touched forelocks, didn’t bitch. Couldn’t have happened without me putting the audio in place and without you hearing their talk. Can we live with that, Foxy?’