Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

The African Sacred Ibis was snagged by the cable. He let go of it and the bird rose a foot off its perch. The cable tautened. The ibis croaked, and the claws on its feet came against Foxy’s hands and ripped at them. The flesh tore. The beak came back at him, was used as a spear. He grasped the cable again and the bird hung from his arm.

Foxy lashed out with his free hand. It didn’t matter to him that the bird was endangered, that its presence was a jewel in the eco-system of the marshes. He struck out, used full force. He couldn’t see it beyond the vague shapes of the wings as they beat at him but he recalled a long, slender neck – he had seen it when the bird had flown in, and while it had cleaned the feathers on its chest. He knew that his target was the neck, and the blow was hard.

He was Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes: he had taken on the full might of an African Sacred Ibis, worshipped as a deity in the civilisation of the Pyramids and pharaohs, and had broken its neck.

It hung from his hand. There were no reflexes, no shuddering death throes. Foxy had killed it. It hung from the entanglement of the cable. It had seemed large when the wings had beaten, the feet slashed and the beak stabbed, but now it was shrivelled.

He heard only the lapping of water, maybe against the reeds behind him or away to his right. He heard rippling. Maybe the wind had risen with the darkness. He tried to pull the cable free but it gouged against his palm and the limp carcass prevented him tugging it free. Foxy knelt on the mud spit. He could hear his heart, his breathing and the rippling of water, but could see nothing except the patch of white, the wing feathers and the back of the bird. He started to disentangle the corpse from the cable. It would have realised it couldn’t lift off and had sat still, hoping that the approaching beast would somehow avoid it. Only at the last, when the cable around its left leg and body had tightened, squeezing air out of it, had it reacted.

Foxy didn’t know how long it had been since he had left the hide, not even how long he had been on his knees on the mud spit. A degree of tenderness held him as he slackened the cable and started to free the bird’s body. He found the microphone wedged among the reeds and branches Badger had used to give it stability. When he had freed the bird he laid it down and put reed fronds over it. He took a deep breath, and slipped the microphone into the poacher’s pouch inside the gillie suit. Then he began to coil the loose cable.

He didn’t know why, then, the frogs’ croaking was silenced, but he could hear the water rippling.

‘Did you think it would be like this?’

‘I did not,’ the Engineer answered.

A shuttle bus had brought them from Hamburg airport, and they had been dumped with their bags on the pavement outside the Hauptbahnhof. The rush-hour crowds surged past and towards them. His experience of a European main-line terminus had been in Budapest as a student in his early twenties. He knew crowds from Tehran, but there he had command of language and the status of chauffeur-driven transport; Naghmeh flinched away from the press of people around her.

He had seen her gaze, mouth slack and eyes wide, at the prostitutes outside the station and under the street-lights, waists exposed in the cold, skirts barely covering their upper thighs, their faces painted. He had said nothing; neither had she. They had come inside the high arched building and loud music had greeted them. He had known it was Beethoven. She had asked why they played it so loudly in the station.

‘It keeps away the drug addicts – I read that. Users of heroin do not like such music,’ he had said.

‘Why do they allow those people on the streets in a public place?’

He had studied the board, searched for the train going to Lubeck. She leaned on his arm, needing its support. He said it was the way matters were handled in Germany, France, Spain and Britain. She had snorted.

Had he known it would be like this?

He did not lie: he had not.

‘Do they have no respect for us?’

‘I cannot argue with them. We are here. We will take the train to Lubeck. At Lubeck we will go to the hotel. I can do no more. Would you have me rant at the embassy, call the ministry or the commanding officer of the al-Quds? Would you have me complain?’

She looked into his face but could not meet his eyes, which were locked on the departures board. ‘We should not have come.’

He said what platform the train would leave from and started towards the steps going down to it, pulling their bag.

‘Did you hear me? We should have stayed where our own God is.’

He told her how long it would be before the train left for Lubeck. It was heresy to suggest they might turn back, and they went slowly down the steps.

He had started on the return.

Impossible to go quietly now. Each stride forward taxed him to his limits. He gathered in the cable and looped it on an arm. Badger would maybe have to pull him the last few yards into the depths of the reed bed, and he might need, there, to flop and rest. Before he accepted any help, or rest, though, he would get there. He had a stubborn pride.

The light came on.

He was too exhausted, his mind dulled, to realise in the first seconds what the light that trapped him meant.

No panic, not in the first moments after the beam caught him. For Foxy, it was a time of innocence. To him it lasted an age but it would not have been longer than five seconds. Then the panic broke, and he started to thrash. He was up to his groin in water and the weight of the gillie suit tugged him down. He had one boot for a good grip in the mud and one foot with a sock that slithered and gave no purchase. He flailed his arms as if that would help him to go forward, but the mud had trapped him as effectively as the beam. There was shouting from close by, near to the source of the light, and answering calls from away to the right, where the bund line was.

The beam closed on him, and he heard the splash of paddles, then the guttural cough of an outboard. Foxy understood. A craft had been paddled towards him, then allowed to drift closer. If he could reach the reed beds there was a chance… He dragged his knees up, one after the other, tried to stamp, but the water held him, the gillie suit dragging, and the mud oozed deep beneath his feet. Foxy had done time in the Province, had been on attachment to 3 Brigade, Armagh City, in the ditches, the winter hides, and camouflaged in thick summer scrub, sometimes with an oppo beside him, sometimes reliant for his safety on back-up that would be ‘down the road’. There was fatalism in all of those who did the work that the guys supposedly watching their backs would never react in time if they showed out. He wrestled with the suit, hitched it high and was able to get his fist into the poacher pouch. His hand locked on the microphone. He dragged it clear and dropped it. He felt it knock lightly against his knee, then his ankle. The bootless foot trod it into the slime.

The beam of the light was off him. He splashed, heaved, charged and thought each step the last he was capable of. The light raked the reed beds, then passed over the open ground and the hide. Nothing there. He didn’t see Badger, crouched, holding the Glock locked in both fists for a steady aim. Neither did he see Badger in the throwing position to arc smoke or gas in his direction and towards the boat. He saw only a scurrying pair of coots, then a drake stampeding clear.

He dropped the cable.

His feet tangled with it, then he was beyond it, one more step. The light swept off the open space and across where the hide was, tracked over the water and locked on him. Two shots were fired.

In the Province, it had been taken as read that a croppie who had shown out to PIRA would be captured, tortured for information on his work, call-signs and targets, then trussed, blindfolded and put in the back of a van. It was assumed that the last sound they’d hear would be the scrape of metal on metal when a handgun was cocked, and that death would be ‘a bit of a bloody relief’ after what had gone before. That had been drunk talk, subdued and slurred. No bastard would find the microphone, and the cable had gone down. He’d lost sight of it.