Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

Badger heard him.

The scream – Foxy’s – was a knife cut in the darkness. Before, there had been the dulled sounds of the frogs, the coots and the ducks, and of the pair of pigs that still rooted in the edges of the reed bed. There were sprints by water birds and territory scuffles, but Foxy’s scream was a slicing wire, and another followed it.

He sat very still and very tense.

Badger would go when he had to. Then he would switch on his communications and make a last staccato call. He would give an ‘expected time of arrival’ at the extraction point, but not yet.

He expected that the dawn would come, the sun would poke up, announcing one more stinking hot day, and he would see – in the magnification of his binoculars – the arrival of military transport, lorries and jeeps. Soldiers, not these crap guys but trained men, would spill out and the search would begin, with cordon lines and others sent forward at the sides to give cover fire. Then it would be right for him to quit. He might also see, before he slipped into the water behind him and the forest thickness of the reeds, them taking Foxy away. He might be on a stretcher or might be dragged. If he was upright, his head would be slumped and a cloth bound around it. The blood, the cuts and bruises would be easy to see, even at that distance. He would have done what he could, stayed to the limits of obligation, and he would track back towards the extraction point. He was confident he would be ahead of the follow-up force – and two things were certain.

Two? Just two.

First: no bright young spark from the Prudential Insurance sales team was going to write a life policy for Foxy. A slow smile played on Badger’s face. There had been a funeral for a CROP technique instructor, young, killed by stomach cancer, before Badger’s time but still talked of. When the coffin had been carried out of a packed church to go to the crematorium, a crackly recording of Gracie Fields doing her hit song, ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’, had played and the whole congregation had begun to clap. Many were weeping buckets, and they’d kept the nearby pub open till past midnight. It was said to have been the best funeral moment ever. Badger always smiled when he thought of it – he wondered if Foxy had been there.

Second: an operation was unravelling and its security had been breached. There would be Cancel flashes and Abort instructions. Humour was good for squaddies and croppies, fire teams and ambulance people, but outsiders – other than the psychiatrists – reckoned it offensive and loutish. They understood fuck-all.

The scream came once more.

Fainter, with a blunter cutting edge. That would not mean that the pain was less: it was a sign that his strength was down, and the fight was draining.

He had no protection now from the mosquitoes. The clear ground where the hide had been made was around four foot above the water level. Badger’s place now was on the reverse slope from where the hide had been and his boots were just clear of the water. His body was on the incline and only his head, covered in camouflage scrim net, broke the top line. He had the binoculars with him and the night-sight. One of the bergens was against his boots and the thin rope, holding the small inflatable, with the second bergen in it, was round his ankle. He was ready to go, but not before the time came.

Badger remembered when he’d been a young police officer and they’d escorted ambulances into Accident and Emergency with knife and gun victims. He would see men and women sitting on plastic chairs in the corridors and know that behind doors or screens a life was ebbing; they were there to express solidarity, a sort of love and friendship. He would stay as long as he could. Badger could picture them now: they had politeness and dignity, and seemed grateful to him for his concern. There was often a bit of a choke in his throat when he slipped away to resume his duty, and went out of their lives. It was an obligation to stay – here and at the Royal Bristol Infirmary or the Royal United in Bath.

When he left, the location of the hide would have been cleansed. He had used reed fronds to brush around where the hide had been, smoothing out boot and handprints, then scattered the reeds they’d used for cover. He’d gone over the footfall into the reed beds, the clear ground that led over the rim where he was now and down to the water. The microphone was buried in mud and the length of the cable had been retrieved. The bird’s carcass was beached in front of him.

There was nothing more he could do.

It had gone well – well enough for the spats between himself and Foxy to have been dismissed – and now it was worse than anything imaginable. Foxy taken. He would talk, of course he would. The screams he had heard said that Foxy would talk. In a week’s time, or two weeks, Badger would be in his room at the police hostel and the TV would be on in the corner, half hidden behind a hillock of kit, and he would hear the voice, and look up, and Foxy’s face would be on the screen. He would hear Foxy’s confession in a flat, rehearsed voice, and would remember the screams. The screams said he would talk.

Didn’t like him, did he? Never had – not that, now, it mattered much.

Foxy could barely see. The swelling under and above his eyes had almost closed off his vision. Difficult for him to hear anything because his ears had been beaten and sound was dulled. But he was lucid and could analyse the pain. The cigarettes were worst. The beatings were repetitive and taking their toll of him. What had made him scream was when the cigarettes scorched his skin. Each time it was done he had wet himself. They were the worst because his eyes could pick up the flash of the match and his nose could smell the smoke and he could make out the descent of the hand that held the cigarette. He had started to scream before the fag’s tip had touched him.

An image came into his mind, was clear, then hazed and faded. It was of a small, cramped-up guy who had been brought to speak to them in the base outside Basra. He had been an expert on SERE, American. He wore US combat fatigues and had a flash on his left arm. It showed a shield and a double-bladed military knife, vertical, that cut two lengths of barbed wire. The man said, in a deliberate, far South accent, that the symbol was of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape through the wire barricades of the enemy’s gaols and territory. He had gestured towards the shield, and his right lower arm and hand had been missing, replaced with a multi-purpose hook.

None of the Brits had come into the lecture hall if they were off-duty; the only ones there were happy enough to have a minor diversion from their work. The others, who were resting or in the canteen, hadn’t thought it worth their time. Foxy had been at the back of the small lecture hall and had listened, half awake; like most of them he had not rated it likely that he would face a situation where he needed to know how to Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape. The start was clear: the man, the shield insignia, the hook, and the introduction by a British officer, and the story of how a man, now in his mid-fifties and therefore a veteran, had lost an arm three decades earlier and learned enough lessons from it to have been kept on in the military well past all normal retirement dates.

The next part of the memory was hazy. Something about being the number-two flier in an F-4 Phantom and hit by surface-to-air near Hanoi, limping back and getting close to the DMZ, then having to bale out, and being captured with a broken arm and escaping before the local medics had fixed the damage. He’d been with the air-force pilot, walking and getting gangrene, then the pilot, using a sliver of glass from a broken bottle, washed in a stream, had amputated at the wrist. They had come through.