Gerald Seymour: A Deniable Death

There weren’t many that Danny Baxter was fond of. His father and mother lived in the shadow of the nuclear-warhead factory at Burghfield, near Reading, in Berkshire, had a bungalow there and a second-hand vehicle business. He reckoned the location, close to Armageddonville, meant they’d picked up a property cheap to live in and work from. He saw them no more than twice a year and there was nothing of his work he could talk about and nothing of their lives that he was much interested in.

No one at the hostel would have cared that he was being ferried – destination unknown – in an executive jet, and probably by now his regular oppo, the faithful Ged, would be heading east to Leeds in Yorkshire where he was based. He would be thinking more about how much of his gear he could get into the washing-machine than about where Badger was going.

No woman to care… There had been Fran – ‘Frances’ to her developer father who owned the harbour-side flat overlooking the water in the Bristol dockland. She’d been a third-year student, history of art, at the university and might have found him exciting, might have craved a bit of rough. They’d been together a bit more than six months but it was never going to last. No row, no flying plates: he’d left a note for her one day, propped on her pillow, which had an epic view over the water. Keep safe, have happy times, and best luck, Badger. He’d loaded up his big Bergen and a little rucksack, all he owned in the world, closed the door, locked it, put his keys through the letterbox and tripped down the stairs to the little van, nondescript, that he used, and driven out of her life to the hostel. A bloody awful exchange, but the time had arrived when she might have thought him right for moulding to her style or chucking out. He had done it in his own time and at his moment of choosing.

About the only thing that owned Danny ‘Badger’ Baxter was the job. It ruled him. It exerted enough of a pull that he wasn’t concerned that no one had told him where they were going, when or why.

The man in front – Foxy – still snored.

He was woken by the steepness of the descent. They had come through the cloud, and there was a cross-wind, but the pilot flew as if he had the controls of a fighter aircraft. The lights for belt-fastening were late coming on, and Joe Foulkes was jolted forward in his seat, damn near catapulting into the back of the one immediately in front – the man sitting in it had introduced himself as Gibbons. He’d only given his name to Foxy, not to the fellow in the back who looked like a tramp waiting for a night shelter to open. He hadn’t spoken to Ellie that morning – hadn’t wanted to from the prefabricated lounge. He hadn’t had the bottle to explain he was on a magical mystery journey to God alone knew where and wouldn’t be home that night. If he had made the call, explained he would be absent again, he would have listened to the inflections in her voice, whether she seemed to regret it, whether she was indifferent or unable to disguise a riffle of anticipation because he would be away. But he had sent a text: Tied up workwise/called away/will ring when possible/luv massive Foxy. One had come back before they’d boarded: Shame – missing you. Love, Elliexxx. His phone was off now, would stay that way till whatever, wherever, whenever had been done.

He assumed he was to give a lecture. What else did he know? He knew that the greeter from Six might be the man of the moment and in charge, but he was shit-scared, halfway to terrified, of flying – Foxy could see the way the fists held the arms of the seat and the face was white. He knew that his best instincts were usually the first ones, and he had formed an immediate dislike of Badger, but that could be managed: his own age and seniority would determine they were not equals. He would have rank on the younger man, whose appearance was simply inappropriate and It was the sort of landing an aircraft might have made on a carrier’s deck: abrupt, short on the taxi, jerking to a stop. The big sign over a distant terminus was just recognisable as ‘Prestwick’, and a helicopter was waiting close by on an empty desert of wet concrete. Its rotors idled, then picked up speed as the Lear’s engines were shut down. The pilots came out of their cockpit door, and the main man – the one who’d have had battlefield wings over Kuwait or out of Da Nang – spoke briefly to the American passenger. He didn’t make eye contact with any of the others. Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes had several failings but idiocy was not among them. The helicopter, like the Lear, was black-painted, he could see no flight-designation markings, and they were a hell of a way from the tower and the Prestwick buildings, out of sight and out of mind. He reckoned this was a flight that had never taken place.

They came on to the apron and scurried for the chopper. The rotors blew rain into their faces, and a crewman gave them a hand up into the hatch door. They strapped the harnesses into place. The military canvas bucket seats and the frames hurt Foxy’s thighs. It was years since he had been in the close confines of a helicopter’s cabin, with the noise growing until the ear baffles were passed to them – hadn’t been in a helicopter since leaving the base at Basra after a four-month tour seven years back. A shitty place, horrible and…

A man who might have been Middle Eastern stared at him warily and didn’t respond to Foxy’s cautious smile: short, dark-haired, swarthy and stinking of cigarettes; the Six man, Gibbons, had tried to take the fellow’s hand but it had stayed buried in a pocket. The other, taller and pale-skinned, with curly blond hair, lolling comfortably and chewing gum, was late thirties or early forties – Foxy recognised the military uniform of mufti: a double-breasted navy suit with a prominent stripe, black ankle boots and a waxed jacket that might have been useful out on a moor. The eyes seemed distant and didn’t focus on trivia, such as what Foxy wore, Badger’s messy hair or the white knuckles of the Six man. They lifted sharply.

They were in cloud, buffeted by winds, and the pilot made no effort to get below the weather, above or round it. They rocked and shook, and Foxy wondered if the intelligence officer might throw up. He played games in his mind. A business heavy in secrecy and international flavours: it reeked of deniability. He supposed that at Six, if they planned a deniable operation, they dusted down a cardboard file that would have been written in the fifties or sixties and dictated a quiet, remote location suitable for briefings, lectures and… The Mull of Kintyre helicopter crash had taken the lives of police and intelligence officers from Northern Ireland who were heading for a meeting at a garrison camp close to Inverness; the various arms had needed to be brought to neutral territory if jealousies and conceits were not to stymie co-operation. Perhaps tensions and stress points were yet to be revealed. Foxy almost chuckled.

The beast seemed to stumble through the cloud. Then – it might have been thirty minutes after take-off – light flooded through the small porthole windows, and rain distorted the view, but Foxy made out the shape of a castle keep in grey stone that matched the cloud. There was more grey from the breaking waves in a bay, and from the stones on a geometrically curved beach. Back from the sand and shingle, a field was half flooded, and behind it a grand house, on three floors, with a portico. Could they not have booked a house in south-west London – or anywhere north of the capital but closer? It spoke of delusions. They were down, but the engines were not killed.

He was last out of the hatch and the crewman steadied him as he jumped clear. The others were ahead and hurried between the puddles towards the main entrance where the rendering was chipped.