Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

He might have been punched in the crotch. Badger folded. He could still see the bird and it could not have been famished sufficiently to go hunt another frog for itself, and the feathers on its back were pink from the last of the sun that would be down, buried, in the next fifteen minutes. Changeover time coming. The flies would have been exhausted after bombing the scrim net for all the daylight hours and the mosquitoes would have rested and would be hungry for flesh and would be coming out, hunting. He stank. His stomach was bloated from the tablets, could hardly make wind, and precious little of his body was free of the bites and the scabs had bloody grown and the sores oozed. He looked for the goon and couldn’t see him, then for the cable and couldn’t find it.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have said it.’

‘If they know about it, why you? Why is it your job?’

The shadows were on them and he couldn’t see Foxy’s face. He thought he heard a sob, not a choke, but something softer, sadder.

Foxy said, ‘It’ll take me a while, young ’un, to think through what I want to tell you.’

‘I’m the one who’s supposed to have all the answers,’ Abigail Jones said.

Corky was beside her. ‘Why haven’t they come? That it, miss?’

‘It’ll do.’

‘They have kit in front of them and can’t retrieve it till dark. Would that fit?’

‘Snugly, Corky. Hard, though, isn’t it? More than us, they want out. We want it badly, they want it more. A whole day to wait.’ It was unusual for her to muse in public, wear frustration on her sleeve. Normally she bottled such feelings, which might have been partly why she lived alone, when based in London, in her two-bedroomed maisonette. It cost her a fortune, and it would have been useful to have a guy living there, on her terms, to chip in with the expenses. She didn’t know one she could allow to copy her front-door key, and have access to her space. A man who had been a senior clerk in the old Bank of Iraq now looked after the incidental finances of the station in the Green Zone. He had supplied her with the dollar bills she had given to the sheikh. He also did invoices for food, fuel, clothing, and could switch handwriting patterns effortlessly. At the end of the tour she would take a bucketload of cash to a respected dealer in gold and precious stones and buy items of quality but not enough to attract the attention of a Customs nerd. She’d be wearing them, looking expensive, when she came back through Heathrow, and would sell the stuff on in London. That way, Abigail Jones could afford a maisonette with a view over the river. She’d learned the methods on her first trip to the Gulf and on the posting to Bosnia.

It was coming up on her fast, the bug-out from Baghdad. Soon enough there would be the round of parties – her people, Agency staffers, the embassy, hand-chosen Iraqi army officers and intelligence men, and a general melee of multi-national spooks. The best part would be the knowledge, shared in a tight circle, of the ‘taking down’ of an Engineer. It would be a pleasure to know he was dead, and that she had played her part in it. There would be an office car from Heathrow to her home, and she would sign the docket and have the driver lift the bags to the front door, then fish out her keys and step inside her home, alone. She wondered if that evening, when they hit the Basra road, Highway 6, there might be a swap of mobile numbers, done in the lead Pajero, if he would be there – giggles about where it had been last time and…

Corky said, ‘Because their gear is forward they need darkness to get it back. Shouldn’t be long.’

‘I have to say it, Corky – I’d have been tempted to ditch the stuff, and we’d have been out of here seven or eight hours ago, if they’d made good time.’

The crowd had gone, drifting away in the wake of the dust cloud from the big BMW in which the sheikh rode. There would have been what Corky called ‘dickers’ who watched them, but for now the wads of banknotes had bought emptiness round the perimeter. The light on her communications kit hadn’t flashed. No message from London, no acknowledgement and nothing to tell her that a hit was on course. Nothing from ahead, from beyond a horizon of dirt and soft-coloured reeds.

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.’