Gerald Seymour: A Deniable Death

They were off the Beulah to Abergwesyn road and overlooked a track that led down to a farm that had a field with a half-dozen fixed-site mobile homes, holiday caravans. Three that week were taken by eight Muslim kids from north Luton. That day there had been physical-endurance stuff, filling big rucksacks with stones and cantering up steep fields, scattering the sheep, and they’d done jerks like they had a physical-education pamphlet around. They must be thick. The farmer who owned the caravans had a nephew in the Birmingham Police and had rung in to report his guests’ behaviour.. . Always the way with town people, believed that the countryside had no eyes. They could have run round the streets of north Luton and not been noticed.

It had been a good stag for Badger and Ged. The hide was close to two hundred yards from the caravans, up the hill on the far side of the valley. They’d crawled into the gorse from where the sheep had grazed in summer and tunnelled through it – it was a useful hide because none of the outer foliage was disturbed. Both wore issue gillie suits that broke up the lines of their bodies, and similar headgear. Badger had made his own, and when Ged was assigned to him he’d told the man, four years older than himself, that what he’d concocted was crap and had made him a new one. The others on the team were astonished that the ‘arrogant bastard’ had done something for someone else, and the new camouflage headgear was best grade. Their faces, beneath the scrim netting that hung over their eyes, mouths and noses, were smeared with cream in green and black slashes, and the ’scope’s lens had more scrim over it… The bloody rain dripped on them.

It had been a good stag – good enough to justify the damp and the hunger: they’d eaten only a muesli bar each over a fifteen-hour period and drunk minimum water. Badger had identified the natural leader among the Muslim kids – bad not having the audio working, but the ’scope lens was enough to sort out the men from the boys. There was one to whom the others seemed to respond: he gave the instructions, didn’t do the runs up the hill with a weighted rucksack. He was a tall man, wore hiking boots, jeans and a heavy anorak; he didn’t have the trademark beard of a jihadist or the close-cropped skull. He wore thick rimless spectacles and might have been a library supervisor or a junior accountant – could have been anything – which meant he had worked on his anonymity with the help of a razor.

Badger wasn’t armed and Ged had a disabling spray canister on his belt under the gillie suit; the power of the ’scope’s Leica lens, and the 500-ml one on the camera, meant they didn’t have to be closer. There was support at the pick-up point, with Glocks and H amp;Ks, but that was down on the road and in a lay-by closer to Beulah than Abergwesyn. The kids from Luton would have been fired up with holy-war stuff, and the discovery of a covert team watching them would have bred – no argument – angst, and from angst came violence, and from violence came a knife and a bared throat when a victim’s head was yanked back. The lenses they had been issued with meant they could stay a decent distance back, up the hillside, and do their business and… It was useful intelligence they had gained, and they had high-quality pictures and the number-plates of a Transit van that would be picked up when it was back on the road. Then it would be urban surveillance, and the guy with the rimless spectacles would be flagged for major attention. They’d each used a plastic bag, tinfoil and three bottles. Ged was wriggling to get them into the Bergen.

The leader guy and one of the others had been outside a caravan, had stood and shivered – the ’scope’s night-vision attachment had shown this to Badger – and must have talked, something serious and not to be shared. Badger and Ged had identified a lieutenant, more trusted than the others, and could match up the night-vision image with the pictures taken in daylight so that he, too, could be marked out for extra attention. There was a scenario: in it, the leader and his right-hand guy did the speeches, talked of the sacrifice and might even have chatted up the prospect of the famous Seventy-two – the virgins waiting for a dismembered suicide warrior behind the gates into Paradise. Then they slid away and left the bastard dosed up with fervour to walk on to a train or a bus or into a shopping mall. Leaders and lieutenants did not do explosive vests wrapped round their own chests. The rest of the group would be fodder for the tailor who made the vests and wove into them the pouches for the ball bearings, screws, tacks and razor slivers, but they’d likely be rendered harmless if the top man and his bag-carrier were taken down at the knees.

Lights burned now in two of the caravans and the booking with the farmer was until the following day. He reckoned the lads would be gone at first light. There’d be one surveillance vehicle facing down into Builth, another towards Abergwesyn and a biker was floating.

They left the way they had come, and not even the farmer who had made the first call and who had worked that hillside with his dogs and sheep would have seen a sign of their approach or their departure, or noticed anything disturbed in the gorse.

In the back office of the police station, where local priorities were listed on a poster as combating anti-social driving and curbing speeding on the Llanwrtyd Wells road beyond Beulah, the staff had all gone home. They did the debrief and the pictures were downloaded on to a laptop and…

‘There was a message for you, Badger.’ The team was run by a an officer from the Box and he’d looked pleased to have the clear-cut portraits of the guy in the rimless glasses. The tails were waiting to track them back into Luton where the van had been hired. ‘A call for you.’

He was looking for a shower, and a meal to warm his guts, and his bed in the small hotel where they were billeted – and where they were thought to be from a flood-prevention unit. He took the piece of paper from the hand offering it and shoved it into his smock’s inner pocket.

‘I’d read it if I were you, Badger, and I’d call them.’

He hadn’t taken it out again. ‘Actually, boss, I’ve done a bloody long stag – and a pretty good one for results. A wash, food and bed are my priorities. Who called?’

‘I’m not your fucking answer-phone, young man. A guy from Six, actually. From the dirty-raincoat crowd south of the river. Maybe he wants to take you off our hands. I’d say that work from Six would suit anyone with as high an opinion of themselves as you, because it would be exacting and likely tax a genius. We’ll miss you. Do me a favour? Just ring him.’

He called the number, and it was answered. He said who he was and that he was replying to the call. He’d expected to be told why he’d been singled out, but heard a monotonously flat voice tell him where he should be and when. There were no plaudits, just brusque business. He said, into the phone, ‘If it’s a job for croppies, I like to work with my mate as oppo. He’s Ged…’ The suggestion was ignored. The voice repeated where he should be the next day, and at what time.

Others around him drank gin, but Joe Foulkes stayed with the tonic. He had been invited to spend a full day with the battalion’s Recce Troop, then stay the night in the officers’ mess. He always enjoyed time spent with any of the Parachute Regiment’s specialist units, found them receptive to the experience he had accumulated in a career of covert surveillance in UK conditions, through the four seasons, in rural and urban locations. They’d enjoyed his anecdotes over the meal… it had been a good day.

The man who called him gave no name but instead offered the Box’s poste restante number, a code good enough to tell him the Secret Intelligence Service had sought him out. After a surprisingly brief exchange of pleasantries – barely civil – he was told he should be at Northolt main gate, the guardroom, no later than 07.30 hours. He had started to explain that the call had reached him at the mess of the Parachute Regiment, 2nd Battalion, which was – didn’t the man know? – in Colchester, a hell of hike from the other side of London that would mean a bloody awful early rising, but his destination was repeated and the time at which he was expected. Then the call was terminated. He had not taken offence, and was more than interested that Six wanted his knowledge first hand.