Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

‘A fine bloody mess you’ve put us into, Foxy. Idiot.’

There were more shots and two came near. Water spouted in front of the dinghy. Badger groped behind him, didn’t turn. He found Foxy’s hand, took hold of it, squeezed the Glock into the palm and told Foxy he could help. He could either shoot back or he could use his hands to propel them. They had reached a fair speed now, and there must have been a suspicion, in Badger’s mind, of hope. He thought his aim would take them close to the mud spit where the bird had been and across or around it. Then they’d hit the shallow water and wade through it, get over the open ground and reach the inflatable and the bergens, andThat was a lifetime ahead. There were no shots from behind him in the dinghy, but that didn’t bother Badger and he thought Foxy would have enough nous, experience, to shoot when required to.

He knew it would not be long before organisation was regained behind him. He stamped his feet to get a better grip but the water was up to his chest and the bed below him was mud.

‘It’ll be bad, bloody, Foxy, when they get it together. How did you get me into this? Don’t sulk on me.’

He could see the spit, and it wouldn’t be long before they were organised.

With boots, fists and the butt of his rifle, Mansoor drove his Basij peasants out of the barracks and onto the quay.

It mocked him. He was an officer of the al-Quds Brigade, a veteran of undercover operations in occupied Iraq. He had been wounded in the service of the Islamic Republic and bore the scars of it. Neither his rank nor his experience could alter the enormity of what he saw. It laughed at him. It was a length of rope with untidily cut strands that hung from the lamp-post. It was well lit and the wind stirred it a metre above his head. There was more than a slashed rope to mock him. The pier, away to the side where the dinghy should have been moored, jeered at him, too.

Lashing furiously around him, Mansoor created a fear of himself that was greater than the fear brought by the grenades. He beat his authority into them, and broke off only once. He had gone into the communications room, made the link, sucked in the air to give himself courage and reported that a prisoner had escaped, that his barracks was under attack from a special-forces unit that had now retreated towards the Iraqi frontier. He and his men had beaten off the assault but the prisoner, believed a casualty, had been taken. He had cut the link and gone back outside. His eyes wept and his hearing was damaged, but the scale of the catastrophe inflicted on him ensured that Mansoor regained control. It could not have been otherwise: if he sank into a corner and shivered, he would be hanged as a traitor.

He punched hard, kicked hard, hit his men hard with the rifle butt. His voice was hoarse from bellowing, and he rasped instructions.

The jeep had come forward and he had to swing the wheel because the driver cowered from him. When the vehicle faced out into the lagoon, and the headlights were on full beam, he could see the low outline of the dinghy and a slight wake drifting from it. The outline was visible on the extreme edge of the light thrown by the vehicle.

The shooting was ragged. The Basij, as Mansoor knew, could not have hit a factory door with rifle fire at a hundred paces. There were the Austrian-made Steyr sniper rifles, which had been purchased by the IRGC, and the copy of the Chinese long-range weapon that was in turn a copy of the Russian Dragunov – the Iranian military called it the Nakhjir – but Mansoor had no marksman’s weapon in the small armoury. He had only the short-range assault rifles. They emptied a magazine each in the direction of the dinghy. He snatched at one, took it from a guard. He had seen how the resistance inside Iraq fired when at the edge of accuracy. He wedged himself against the lamp-post. There was no optical aid to the rifle sight, only the forward needle and the rear V for him to aim through. He did a calculation and set the sight’s range at two hundred metres. Squinting, Mansoor could see the dinghy. He thought a naked arm was draped over the side and made furrows in the water, adding to the wake, but he couldn’t see the man who propelled it away.

He twisted the lever, went from automatic fire to single shots. It would have been a difficult shot with a Steyr or a Nakhjir; with an assault rifle it would be worse than difficult.

He had not fired seriously on a range, watched by an expert instructor, since before he had been sent to Iraq. He struggled to remember old lessons of grip and posture, the settling of weight. His breathing slowed, and he began to squeeze the trigger bar. Old memories died hard. He could recapture, with extreme concentration, everything he had been taught on the range used by the al-Quds elite outside Ahvaz… but Mansoor was no longer a member of that elite, the special forces. His body was damaged, he had not slept and his temper was torn.

Single shots, three.

The first was short, the second wide – no more than two metres wide and two metres short – and the target was a dark, low, hazed shape. He had to squint to see it with any clarity. He believed that the third shot bucked the shape of the dinghy and that it reared a little.

More orders, more blows and kicks. He put his men into the two jeeps. Their lights speared off past the barracks as they headed down the track towards the elevated path of the bund line flanking the lagoon. He reckoned he had scored a hit, that the jeeps would take him past their flight line, that he would block them…

It was the town that had shaped Len Gibbons, made him the man he was – not the man the neighbours saw on a weekend morning when they walked their dogs, pushed prams or promenaded on the cul-de-sac off the railway line between Motspur Park and Epsom.

He sat in his pension room, on Alfstrasse, with the lights off and the curtains open. He had worked the small easy chair close to the window. The drunks had dispersed and the late-evening stallholders had cleared up and gone. He had used this lodging house on recommendation from a secretary in Bonn when he had travelled north to the town, on the business of Antelope, and had usually been in this room, with the same pictures hung over new but similar wallpaper, the same chest and wardrobe, but a more modern chair. He would have looked out over the same view, the same towers on the great church.

To the neighbours in the cul-de-sac – all of whom knew Catherine well and expected to speak to her if she was out at the front, gardening, or unloading the ecobags she took to the supermarket – he would have seemed a remote sort of man, distant, with little conversation, but harmless. He might have been washing an unspectacular Japanese car, using an electric-powered mower on the small patch of grass beside the path, or retouching the paintwork. He passed the time of day with them, and would smile at their dogs or their children. His conversation would range over the state of the weather, the reliability of the trains into London, and the price of fuel… What did he do? They were accountants, salesmen, teachers, hospital staff, widows who stayed at home and retail workers. Him? Some dreary job in London. It was never quite explained whether that meant Work and Pensions or Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but that was enough to satisfy them, and reason for him to be away on an early train on Monday and back late on Friday. Most would have thought it ‘sad’ that ‘old Gibbons’ slaved away at the expense of leisure and entertainment, and most would have felt sympathy for Catherine who existed alongside such a dull man with so limited a horizon. His suits were grey, unremarkable and bought from a chain, and his ties were those given him at Christmas. What did they know, the neighbours and the casual friends of his wife? They knew nothing. Neither did the mass of those going to work each day in the Towers have a more comprehensive profile of him. Some had made hobbies of archaeology or bell-ringing or whist, or did convoluted jigsaw puzzles, and thought themselves fulfilled. Len Gibbons successfully lived a local lie. Well hidden from view, there was a restless energy in him that a few recognised and some utilised. Now it contemplated, without qualm, the killing of an enemy. The Schlutup Fuck-up, in this town, had marked, moulded and fashioned him: he was a man in the shadows, but possessed of a ruthless determination.