Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

The voice in his face had a harder edge. ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’

‘I was pissing.’

‘Couldn’t you wait?’

‘No.’

‘Not the best moment, under close observation, an alert. Tie a bloody knot in it.’

Not the best moment. The scream had raised the birds in panic flight, disturbing them more than the explosion had. He shifted the bottle so that he could cap it, then pushed it back under himself, using a knee to get it down by his boots. They were still wet from the insertion march, but manageable – wet boots and socks were the least of the problem.

Not the best moment because of the screams, now behind them, and the sight of troops jogging along the bund line. Could have been a half-dozen and the officer was on the low pier that jutted out into the lagoon, waving directions.

He had had to use the bottle.

Men were coming close and frightened little voices edged nearer. Carefully, minimum movement, Foxy raised a forefinger and eased one of the earpieces back. He had, now, the officer in his left ear and the noises off to the right, stumbling, curses and whimpers, in the other.

He could see the troops on top of the bund line. Most had rifles and two had machine-pistols.

The woman had come out and used her stick to take her weight as she made her way from the door to where the officer stood. She asked if a mine had exploded and was told that it was more likely an artillery shell, maybe 105mm calibre. She asked if pilgrims had detonated it – he heard the quaver in her voice and assumed it was concern, not the severity of her illness. The officer said it was more likely to have been thieves – there were dumps in the marshes from the old war and this one might have been stockpiled Iraqi munitions, perhaps for the artillery pieces of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. She knew of the abandoned dumps… He sent her away, but with courtesy, and urged that the children be kept inside: all the family should be at the back of their house, not by the front windows. That made sense to Foxy Foulkes, familiar enough with the ways of the world in Iran, or in Iraq, to comprehend why an educated woman and her young children should stay away from their windows and not see what… There had been enough of it in Iraq when he had served there, and the ammunition technical officers had spoken of it.

They said that the main targets for looters were the copper wires from telephone cables and the casings from artillery shells. If the shells were live they would reckon to know where the detonator was, belt it away with a sledge and free the casing. The casings made good money in the souk, and if a few entrepreneurs didn’t make it to the market, God would take care of their families. The ATOs said they saw too many broken bodies – limbs left up trees, guts smeared on walls – when the sledge hammer had hit the wrong part of the shell. The casings could be brass or chromate steel or anodysed aluminium. A primer and a propellant of black powder were inside the casing; at the tip, the warhead might have held high explosive or mustard gas.

The next scream was closer and the hushing increasingly desperate of those around the casualty. They might have been stampeding animals as they ran. Foxy had lost sight of the soldiers who had come along the bund line, and he realised that the fugitives were driven by a cordon of guns towards the reed bank that protected him and the young ’un, the open ground and the water either side of the raised mud on which they had their hide. Some luck, the way the dice came down. Foxy thought his freedom depended on the young ’un’s skills. Might be more than his freedom: might be his life. The skills were those of concealment.

What Badger had done with the scrape in the mud and the camouflage covering it, the mud on what little of their skin might be visible, the weaving of dead foliage into the gillie suits and the headgear might be good enough to save him – and might not. It had been painstaking. At the time, before dawn, Foxy had thought it exhibitionist shit, pernickety little movements that tested the weight and colour of individual fronds before discarding them or threading them into the suits. If the work was not done carefully enough, there would be a rifle barrel against the nape of his neck. His bergen was on his right side and the other on Badger’s left. He himself lay on the spotter ’scope and its small tripod.

The first of them, in flight, broke through the wall of the reed bed.

They stopped dead in their tracks.

They wouldn’t have known where they were running to. They had lost cover, were in a cul-de-sac as far as flight went, boxed in.

The stomach wall of the one who had screamed was split open and his T-shirt was dragged up. He seemed to be trying to hold in his intestines with his crossed forearms. Another man had hold of his elbow and tried to support him, but scarlet fluid was running onto his trousers. Two more carried a dead man, who hung like a rag doll in their grip. Another, with ashen cheeks, hopped forward in their wake, holding upright a teenage boy in a long bright shirt. It was bloodstained from navel to knee. He had to hop because his left leg had been taken off immediately below the knee.

They would have seen the open ground, and the water, and they would have heard – those not screaming or moaning – the pursuit behind them in the reed bed, and might have seen, across the lagoon, the officer waving his little force forward, and heard the bawled orders. They crumpled, all of them, into the mud.

Soldiers came through the reeds, and hope died.

One walked so close that his foot must have come down on the young ’un’s bergen. It was a dust-smeared boot and would have sagged as it stepped on the lower half of the rucksack, but the rifle was aimed at the gang, cowering, and the next step missed Badger’s feet.

He took little breaths, just the barest amount of air, while ants or small spiders half drowned in the sweat on his face. He endured the irritations. He had forgotten, almost, that Badger was beside him. He didn’t hear any breathing or feel any movement, but he heard the officer’s shout across the water. He couldn’t see him now but imagined that he cupped his hands in front of his mouth to give the order.

Foxy gagged. He had heard the order. It would have been faint to the soldiers, but it was loud and clear to Foxy.

He tried to swallow but there was no moisture in his throat. Worse, vomit seemed to creep up to the back of his mouth. Foxy had been with the army in Northern Ireland, in the bad days, when feelings had run high with the military, and he had been with the interrogators at the Basra airport complex when tempers were lost, but he had never heard an order given by a uniformed man such as the one that drifted over the still waters of the lagoon and was crystal sharp in his ear.

They were shot one by one.

It wasn’t a killing where an automatic weapon was aimed in their general direction. Foxy couldn’t see it but assumed that the sergeant – a short man with a machine pistol, in a tunic a size too small for him – had done the shooting. Single shots. A stench of cordite. A whimper from some, a curse from others, quiet from a few. Under any circumstances would Foxy have intervened? No. They could have been raping grandmothers, pushing down hooded prisoners onto soft drink bottles so that the neck penetrated, and he would have stayed silent.

The corpses were dragged away.

He heard the slither of the bodies on wet ground, then the cracking of reed stems as they were pulled through denser concentrations. Later, when those sounds ended, he heard the far-away splashes of burial in water, and wondered if they had found stones to weight them. They would have been Arabs, most likely from Iraq. They had come across the border because this was more likely to be virgin ground for the collectors of shell cases. Their crime was to have crossed the frontier, and what had made it a capital offence was that they had strayed into a most sensitive part of the restricted zone.